I didn't opt into this.
Nobody alive opted into the system
that we're in right now.
It's been a de facto ubiquitous system
wherein they've used that monopoly on violence
that was once needed to protect us against us.
And the moment that they changed that script
and they started using that monopoly on violence
against the people instead of for the people,
their legitimacy was gone.
And that's kind of where I think the state started
and where it's gone and where I hope it's going
is to a model on a much more rational standard
wherein the state becomes more like a service provider
that provides the services that the people actually want.
And for me, that would be namely the protection
of my physical safety and property rights,
something that in most major North American cities
is not a very strong presence right now.
Your property rights are virtually non-existent.
Your physical safety is up to anybody's guess.
And those are the things that they're actually
supposed to be providing.
And instead, we have painted sidewalks
and every other form of DEI nonsense
and whatever other things that the government felt
were a good idea to be spending the money that they steal on.
And I think and hope that the future will bring us
to a place where the governments are much smaller
and that they're competitive.
We've got supposedly free healthcare in Canada.
It's very much not free and doesn't really work
very well at all.
But if you wanted to live in a country
that confiscates enough resources from its citizens
to provide healthcare to the whole of its citizens,
you would have the choice to do that.
But I think the reality will show that in a scenario
like that, the free market will vastly outperform
anything the government can do.
And so a country that is operating a lot more
like I'm suggesting where they provide a bare minimum
of services, namely the physical safety and property rates,
and allow literally everything else,
including hospitals, including roads and schools,
to be built by the private sector,
I believe that kind of a country will vastly outperform
the ones with the central planning.
And that's just incredibly well supported
by the outcomes of the 20th century
and all of the collectivism and the disastrous planning
that has happened throughout that century.
So that's where I think we're going.
["The Bitcoin Podcast"]
Greetings and salutations, my fellow clubs.
My name is Walker, and this is The Bitcoin Podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 879266,
and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk,
where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin
and whatever else comes up.
And today, that guest is Dave Bradley.
Dave founded the world's first physical Bitcoin store in 2013
and is the co-founder of Bull Bitcoin.
This was a great rip today,
and I know you are gonna love it.
But before we dive in,
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And if you find this show valuable,
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Without further ado,
let's get into this Bitcoin Talk with Dave Bradley.
["The Bitcoin Podcast"]
Dave, welcome.
Thanks for coming on this show,
The Bitcoin Podcast.
It's good to have you here.
How's that?
You're in Canada, right?
I am, yeah.
I'm in Calgary, which is technically still part of Canada.
Are there plans for that to change in the near future?
Yeah, absolutely.
There's a large and growing separatist movement in Alberta.
We get the extreme short end of the stick
when it comes to our nation
and the financial side of the nation.
And there's not really much of a benefit to us
other than having a great hockey team
to be part of Canada at this point.
Calgary is one of the...
I mean, Canada is obviously very energy rich in general.
Calgary is more so.
Am I correct in that?
Yeah, we're sort of like the white-collar energy capital
of Canada, you could say.
Okay.
Yeah, I mean, so basically you guys get...
You're producing the energy for most of the country
without really reaping many of the benefits,
especially because you've got folks in the...
Not in Calgary who are controlling your money supply
and deciding the price of that energy, I suppose.
So it's not really exactly a winning combo for you guys.
Yeah, it's gotten to the point,
and this is true in a lot of areas of society
where the money that they print
is not only being not spent here
and it's not only being wasted,
it's actively being spent against us.
And so there are massive efforts set up
by a bunch of people with very specific vested interests
to make sure that it is harder for Alberta to sell its oil.
So we've had three major pipeline projects
going in East, West, and South,
either canceled or not started recently
over the last 10 or so years, in large part,
because there's this sort of phony environmentalist lobby
that has been funded mostly by Warren Buffett
due to his interest in the trains.
Every barrel of oil that we pump in Alberta
that can't go in a pipeline goes on a train
and he makes money off of that.
So these special interest groups have used their influence
to twist the arm of government
and create a situation where the government
is actively restricting the economy here
even while they're asking us to pay for
the pet projects of the entire country.
So it's very out of whack at this point,
and more and more people are realizing that,
it's becoming a more and more realistic idea
that Alberta sovereignty could be coming around the corner.
And I think that's the direction the whole world is moving.
I think that's when we talked earlier,
something that we wanna talk about is like,
what is the nation state?
And I think the idea of what a nation state
brings to the world and what it brings to its people
is drastically different than what it was
when it was created.
And I think it's outlived its usefulness
in its current form.
So I think we're gonna be in a world where,
20 years from now, instead of having like 300 countries,
we're gonna have 5,000 countries.
I'm actually very much of the same opinion.
That's at least my, let's say my hopeful case
is a move towards more localism,
more decentralization of governance.
And I think that the model of the nation state
starts to change.
And I definitely wanna tap into that with you here
because I think that's kind of just a fascinating rabbit hole
to go down.
One thing I wanted to comment on too
is just because you mentioned Buffett
and some of these kind of pseudo environmentalist movements
that are purportedly blocking whatever it might be,
a pipeline or whatever for environmental reasons.
But then you follow the money
and you realize who's funding these movements
and it's, oh no, this is because some incredibly
insanely wealthy person has an interest
in not having that built.
It has nothing at all to do with the environment.
That's a, just a red herring.
But they can wave that, you know,
you're gonna destroy the planet flag
and everybody just clams up.
The war and Buffett to the world get what they want.
I mean, it's the same.
I think one of the reasons Buffett has been super vocal
against Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining.
I think Buffett controls a lot of the,
or has controlling interest in a lot of the natural gas
peaker plants throughout Texas, things like that.
We're another thing, it's like that is inarguably, quote,
worse for the environment than Bitcoin mining.
But you can make enough of a clamor
and get the right lobbyists on your side
and get fund the right environmental groups
and make Bitcoin mining look like the devil.
And that way you get to keep running your super inefficient
but useful natural gas peaker plants.
They're not inherently bad.
It's just that now we have a much better solution
for that load balancing and demand response.
But I just always find it so interesting.
And you go back to like the anti-nuclear movement
and you realize that that,
or even like the recycling movement,
like these were all propaganda campaigns
created by the big oil companies.
Like oil didn't want nuclear,
oil wanted to be able to make as much profit as possible
in all the plastic products they could make
from petroleum bases.
And so they created the reduce, reuse, recycle campaigns.
They created the green party and the anti-nuclear campaigns.
And it's like, God, it's all just propaganda.
And once you start going down that rabbit hole,
you just start to realize, huh?
So it turns out just most of the things
that people take as gospel truth,
maybe not most, a lot of the things.
Let me not be too extreme.
A lot of the things people take as gospel truth
that they've made a huge part of their own personality
are just lies sold to you by the corporatocracy.
And I think that's a hard pill for folks to swallow,
unfortunately.
Yeah, it goes back to the question
we were kind of discussing earlier
about the legitimacy of the state, right?
And what all of these problems that we're describing are,
are the state misusing its monopoly on violence
to do things that really are outside of the mandate
of what anybody has ever agreed to
in any form of social contract.
In most places in the world, like most of our ancestors
who opted in to citizenship
in different places in the world,
that came with a social contract,
namely that the state would provide
the protection of physical safety and property rights
in exchange for the taxes
or whatever the requirements for citizenship were.
And that very basic mandate, which should still be at the core
of what the state is supposed to provide,
property rights and safety,
really has been expanded upon to such a drastic extent
that it's left itself open to every kind of
sort of special interest twisting.
So, all of these powers that the state has
to stop pipelines, to arrest nuclear development,
these kinds of things, all rests ultimately
at the end of the day on their monopoly on violence.
And so they've now expanded the use
of that monopoly on violence to all of these very,
very great things that seem like they need to be done.
There's a quote from a book called
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
that I would recommend everybody read.
It's about a lunar colony trying to get independence from Earth
and paraphrasing roughly the quote
as something along the lines of like,
that which I for your most are the sober,
well-intentioned actions of men giving to the government
the power to do something that really seems
like it needs to be done.
And it's kind of just a slippery slope.
You know, it all stems back to this really kind of insidious
concept that has been built into our society right now
of collectivism that is often expressed with this term
that now that I've identified it,
it just makes my skin crawl when I hear it.
And that's the term we.
Like we should do something about this.
We should blank, blank, blank.
And people usually use this term to identify
some ill in society and they don't mean we,
meaning you and I or us and them,
should go and solve this issue.
What they actually mean is that a special group of people
who have been designated to wield this monopoly on violence
should confiscate my resources to do the thing
that they think needs to be done.
And that at the end of the day is where I don't think
the state and the concept of the modern state
has any legitimacy left.
Because we didn't agree to that.
And there's no reason that they would have the right
to my resources and to decide how those resources are spent.
And so ever since I've noticed that,
like you still, it's common in lexicon.
We should do something.
We should blank, blank, blank.
And it just, it's the spookiest, most innocuous sounding
expression of such an evil idea of collectivism
is the idea that you think somebody should rob me
to do something else.
You think somebody should exert violence on me
to get my resources, to do whatever that thing
that you're intending to do is.
At that point, it doesn't matter how good
of an intention you have or whether or not the thing
that you want done actually really needs to be done.
Because the start of the logic of the whole thing
starts with violent confiscation of resources.
And where it gets really interesting,
because I think that's such a good point about
just the misuse of we.
And it is such a slippery slip.
Cause it starts out with, well,
we should help these people in need.
And that's something that, okay, well,
that seems like a nice thing that we can all get behind.
And then it starts with, well,
we should make sure that things are distributed
more equitably, right?
And then it's, well, we should actually go fight
this war halfway around the world.
And so then it just, it goes further and further though
when you start to realize that, again,
this idea of collectivism, it's really,
I think it's so incredibly insidious
because it's not just, again,
the collectivism is almost, it gives it too nice of a name.
Like it's really kind of this collective abdication
of responsibility.
And not just an ab, it's an abdication on the part of some
and then a removal of sovereignty, responsibility,
agency, whatever you want to call it,
from those who say, no, I don't wanna be part
of your collective, this hive mind that you're creating.
No, I just wanna take care of myself and my family
and my community and I'm good with that.
But you can't have that, right?
You need everyone to buy in.
And then the nice thing is that if you're the state,
as you said, you have the monopoly
on the legal use of violence.
And I think that that's, let's screw it,
let's just dive right into this
because now I'm getting worked up on it.
How do you define the state?
And how do you think about this?
Because I think this is something that a lot of people,
when they hear the term, the state,
they don't exactly know, like, okay, well,
what are we just talking about?
Are we just talking about the government?
Are we, why are we using these different words?
Like people just get really hung up, I think, on terms.
And so I think it's important to kind of lay these things out.
So people understand, here's what we're talking about.
And how is that separate from you as the individual?
Yeah, so the state is an entity
that goes back quite far in human existence,
but not for most of human existence.
You know, most of human existence,
we would have been hunter-gatherers.
We would have been nomadic, had very few resources
to gather and keep over a long period of time.
You know, there were no technologies to store food.
There was virtually no technology
that could create anything lasting
that needed to be, you know, protected.
And I think it was really pretty much
with the invention of agriculture
that the ability to form capital was first created.
You know, there was the ability to put time
into something other than yourself.
You can put time into your surroundings,
your space, your land.
And then that now yields a greater result for you
at some point in the future.
And as soon as that was possible,
somebody else figured, hey, I can just take that.
You know, I got a bigger stick.
I can take the root vegetables that this person has grown
and confiscate that capital for myself.
And so the state was formed in response
to those kinds of threats,
the most basic threats to our person and our property.
And really all the state is,
is a group of people who've banded together
to form that monopoly on violence
with the goal of, you know, prosecuting their own interests.
And so in the case for most of human history,
wherein, you know, the state has been mostly
all about aggregating resources in real time
to create a concentration of that monopoly on violence.
So for most of human history, it was like,
if you had the most tanks or the biggest army
or the most warships or whatever,
your country was the safest.
And we kind of hit the limit on that,
on how big of a magnitude you can grow violence to
with the invention of the nuke,
because a country that has two nukes
is functionally pretty much as safe as a country
that has a thousand.
So there isn't really like a benefit
to scaling up the resources that go into the creation
of the creation and control of technology for violence.
Like there once was for most of human history.
And so because of the fact that we've reached that peak,
the logic behind the use of violence is changing.
And that is, I think, fundamental to what we've talked about
before about the fact that there's gonna be
a lot more small nations in the world,
because you no longer need the greatest concentration
of resources to have a safe nation.
We have all these other structures
that keep a nation safe.
There are many countries in the world
that have no military spending and are still safe.
And on the flip side, you have countries
where they've taken the opposite decision.
And instead of, as in previous days,
spending in real time resources that you actually have,
they've invented this new technology called Fiat,
which allows them to spend the resources of the future
on the wars of today.
And so in those two ways,
the state has diverged from its original purpose, right?
It's no longer really fulfilling that need
to concentrate as much resources as possible
to keep us safe, because that needs not there anymore.
And in fact, it started to branch out
into all these other areas that like that quote said,
really seem like they need doing.
And that's where I think the state
has lost its concept of legitimacy.
I had a friend ask me on Twitter a couple of days ago,
she had seen this video talking about how
the legal structure for Canada
and what it was all based upon
and the secession from Great Britain and all this stuff
that the legal structure was actually not sound.
And that from a legal standpoint,
it would be possible to actually challenge
the existence of Canada.
And asking me what I thought about that.
And that's very interesting, that may be true,
but the fundamental piece that comes even before that
is whether or not, like if this was properly legal,
if they did all the right paperwork,
why would that give them the right to create this?
I didn't opt into this.
Nobody alive opted into the system
that we're in right now.
It's been a de facto, you know, ubiquitous system
wherein they've used that monopoly on violence
that was once needed to protect us against us.
And the moment that they changed that script
and they started using that monopoly on violence
against the people instead of for the people,
their legitimacy was gone.
And that's kind of where I think the state started
and where it's gone and where I hope it's going
is to a model on a much more rational standard
wherein the state becomes more like a service provider
that provides the services
that the people actually want.
And for me, that would be, namely,
the protection of my physical safety and property rights,
something that in most major North American cities
is not a very strong presence right now.
Like your property rights are virtually non-existent,
your physical safety is up to anybody's guess.
And those are the things that they're actually
supposed to be providing.
And instead, we have painted sidewalks
and every other form of DEI nonsense
and whatever other things that the government felt
were a good idea to be spending the money that they steal on.
And I think and hope that the future will bring us
to a place where the governments are much smaller
and that they're competitive.
And so if we've got supposedly free healthcare in Canada,
it's very much not free
and doesn't really work very well at all.
But if you wanted to live in a country
that confiscates enough resources from its citizens
to provide healthcare to the whole of its citizens,
you would have the choice to do that.
But I think the reality will show
that in a scenario like that,
the free market will vastly outperform
anything the government can do.
And so a country that is operating a lot more
like I'm suggesting where they provide
a bare minimum of services,
namely the physical safety and property rights,
and allow literally everything else,
including hospitals, including roads and schools,
to be built by the private sector,
I believe that kind of a country will vastly outperform
the ones with the central planning.
And that's just incredibly well supported
by the outcomes of the 20th century
and all of the collectivism and the disastrous planning
that has happened throughout that century.
So that's where I think we're going.
Now, I think it's such an important point to drill home,
just kind of the purpose of the state,
which to paraphrase you and then also just throw in
kind of a chunk of Bastiat,
because I believe like his very short book,
which I believe everyone should read,
The Law is really an excellent one.
And one of the things that he says is,
the purpose of the state is to enforce the law,
I'm paraphrasing it, but the purpose of the law
is to organize for the collective defense of private property,
collective defense of private property.
Now, he argues also that the state has been perverted,
whereby instead of the people, the state,
who are organizing for the collective defense
of your private property against plunderers,
like you said, somebody coming to steal your grain,
your root vegetables, whatever it is,
the fruits of your labor that you created
on your private property,
the state itself then becomes the plunderer.
And that is where I think that that's the switch that flips,
where the state is, I mean,
the state cannot be a productive institution, full stop.
Like the state doesn't create anything,
everything that it has only exists
because it was taken.
Often, and now the further along in this,
bloated, kleptocratic state end game that we go,
the more of that theft that occurs.
But I think that's such an,
people tend to think it's like,
oh, well, the government should do this.
And it's like, the government should do it with what?
The government doesn't just have anything.
I mean, they have the power of the printing press,
but that doesn't create any value.
The government doesn't create value.
The government should exist to serve its citizens.
I find it so hilarious when,
incredibly politicians that have gotten rich
through insider trading and lobbying buyouts,
talk about being public servants.
It's like, give me a fricking break.
You're not serving anyone except yourself
in your own interests, and that's clear by your actions.
And so I really, I'm hopeful that we're in a bit
of a phase shift right now, a bit of a kind of,
a shifting of the paradigms around what people
are willing to put up with.
Because eventually, and you see this throughout history,
a state pushes too far and encroaches too much.
Usually it also happens during a time of the state
being basically insolvent and printing a ton of money
and prices going wild and people not being able
to put food in the table.
Typically that happens for long enough.
And people say, nope, I'm done with this.
In the case of the French,
they, things got very nasty very fast.
And that, but that didn't just happen in a vacuum.
That happened because the state was printing the assenia,
like crazy, devaluing it, with confiscated church lands.
That's what they were using to back it initially.
Then they started just printing more and more and more
and the value went to nothing.
And then people couldn't put food in the table.
And it turns out when people can't afford
to feed their families,
they don't put up with that for very long.
I don't remember who said this.
There's another great quote that's like,
like every stable society is like nine missed meals away
from a revolution, something to that effect.
And as it's, it's pretty true.
People, people don't like not being able
to feed their families.
But I'm curious, you know, as we're at this point right now
where the state is so powerful,
it has accumulated such a massive bloat.
It is so predatory and kleptocratic and it's just massive.
It's seemingly ubiquitous.
Like how do we get to a point?
Like, is the only way with, with just, you know,
basically revolution popping up everywhere?
Or is there, is there a peaceful path to, let's say,
deescalating the state's monopoly on violence
and taking some of that power back?
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Yeah.
First of all, the bassiat, the law,
I had a copy within arms reach until a couple days ago
and I lent it to somebody, but I've been watching
the the Tuttle Twins with my son
and started with season one
and one of the first episodes is about bassiat
and that long essay or short book, The Law,
which is like, there's nothing in there
that's surprising to Bitcoiners
who've been ranting about this stuff for a long time,
but it is given when it was written
and the state of political philosophy in the world
is pretty incredible.
And it's a must read, I would say,
it's like two hours long on YouTube
if you wanna listen to the whole thing, I think.
So that's great.
In terms of the state,
like there will be, I think, some natural,
natural nonviolent solutions
to the role of the large scale nation state.
The book, The Starving Individual,
that I'm stealing a lot of my bits from here,
actually predicted that Canada
would be the first large scale nation state to crumble.
And they said it would be because Alberta would separate,
followed by Quebec,
which is a pretty crazy thing to predict in the mid-90s.
There was no Alberta separatist movement here
in the mid-90s,
but like many other things,
they correctly predicted that, I think.
And I think just the logic is shifting.
We don't need the federal government of Canada
to physically protect us
from the rest of the world here in Alberta.
And because of that,
the logic around our participation in the country
is drastically different.
And so all the money that we send
to the rest of the country
is really wasted from our perspective.
We don't get anything back from that,
other than a small amount of cultural significance
that really doesn't ring true here at all.
And so I think we're gonna see some of the large nation states,
hopefully Canada being one of the first ones
that will break up in the very near future
in a nonviolent way.
Not all of them will go that way.
And I think a lot of the very big ones
will probably end up in some form of violent insurrection
before they're done.
Because the political class,
the special people who have granted themselves
the power to print money
and protect that with their monopoly on violence,
these people are not just gonna give up that power.
There's a lot of very twisted people in the global elites
who will do virtually anything to maintain that power.
And as we've seen through COVID
and the just broad sweeping injustices
that are still going on in the world right now,
even in what would have been otherwise considered
civilized Western nations even a few years ago
are now locking people up for tweets.
And it's gotten to such a point that,
yeah, I think the people are being pushed too far.
That's one thing that I think for a long time
they did a very good job with
is knowing how far they could push.
And my own personal homemade conspiracy theory
is about the paper straws.
Because you had this,
and this is like six months pre-COVID or something too,
so you had this eight year old video of a turtle
with a straw stuck up its nose, go viral,
and then out of the blue,
every bar and restaurant in the world
has switched to paper straws.
And it's like, where did they even get the paper straws?
Why was there a massive supply chain of paper straws
available for everywhere in the world?
That's suspicious.
But also, it's just very obvious
that you can't make straws on a paper.
Everybody who's used straws or paper can tell you that.
And so the idea that this was gonna be a viable solution,
like it seems, even though we live in a very stupid world,
it seems too stupid to be real to me.
And so I believe that there's a chance
that the paper straws may have been a test
of like how much really stupid shit will people swallow
in the name of virtue signaling?
Cause all those people are like,
oh, I'm saving the turtles,
sucking up chunks of paper.
And the fact that that came right before COVID
leads me to the conclusion
that it could have been something like,
oh yeah, they're buying it.
They're using the paper straws.
They're just, they're eating the paper.
Let's try the Chinese virus thing next.
And I think that is where they actually went over the line
and they went further than the temperament
of the population would allow.
And although it was really horrible in a lot of ways
that we all went through that,
the bright side is that a very large percentage
of the population in North America
has been woken up by that mistreatment by the government.
And I've been reaching out a lot
to the sort of like freedom communities
in Alberta and Calgary and Canada.
And they tend to mirror and cross over a bunch
with the Bitcoin community and the conservative party
and stuff like that.
But there is sort of like a larger group of people
who mostly what they have in common is the fact
that they've identified that the massive overreach
of government power is a huge issue
that is massively negatively impacting the lives of everyone.
And so the reason that I've been talking to those people
is because I think that Bitcoin is the solution, obviously.
And so back to the original question of like a draught,
like a winding down of this monopoly on violence
without the need to overwhelm that monopoly on violence
with further violence, I think it's definitely possible.
There's an angle we're in, and this is the end game,
this is where it all ends, I think,
is that the state has to pay people to commit this violence.
And we've seen in some places like Venezuela
where the state lost its ability to print money.
Basically, nobody would accept the money.
And so their goons, the police and the military,
the people who they pay to inflict the violence
in order to maintain the monopoly on violence
would no longer accept their worthless boulevards.
And luckily for them, there was a harder form of money
that was readily available that they could switch to
and start paying the military in,
which is to this day still being done,
and they're paying them in US dollars.
And so that's just a scenario where harder money
naturally pushes out software money,
and if it fulfills all the other needs
of the population as money,
the population will inevitably choose the harder money.
And that's where we're headed in the long term
is that I think most of us see that eventually
sort of a Bitcoin standard or a hyper-Bitcoinization
is somewhat inevitable.
And during the process of that,
we're gonna go through that crisis in every single country.
The state paid thugs will have to be paid in Bitcoin
at some point, and there will be no way around that.
And therein, I think, lies the possibility
to diffuse the situation somewhat
because once they're having to be paid in Bitcoin,
the government will have one of two choices.
They will either spend like their house is on fire,
which is what they do all the time,
and very quickly run out of whatever Bitcoin they have
without the ability to print it and replenish it,
or they'll have to be more measured
in their spending on that infrastructure for violence.
And spending less money on governments
being able to hurt people seems like
a massive positive for the world.
And so I think we're gonna get a mix.
We're gonna get some places where violent revolution
is the only solution.
I'm hoping it's not gonna be here,
but I think a lot of places we do have the opportunity
to diffuse this just by bankrupting them, essentially.
It's a hopeful thought, and just kind of on that note,
in terms of hyper-Bitcoinization and what that looks like,
because I think that people have very different ideas,
at least this is what I've seen when they talk
about hyper-Bitcoinization.
Like for a lot of people,
that just means Bitcoin's price is mooning.
For other people, that means there is no more fiat.
For other people, it means, well, Bitcoin is the, you know,
de facto global reserve currency, but fiat still exists.
I'm just curious what, like in your personal opinion,
what does hyper-Bitcoinization look like?
I could see that happening in a few stages.
I think ultimately progressing to the next stages of money,
becoming a medium of exchange
and a unit of account are very important.
But I think the store value part is what's gonna really drive
home the end game.
And I think what we're gonna probably see over the next,
you know, 10, 20 years is a Balkanization,
not only of the nation states of the world,
but of the currencies of the world too.
So we'll probably see more small countries
with their own currencies,
and that will probably also lead to the failure
of most currencies.
And I think we're already starting to see it
with a bunch of countries in the world, you know,
like we've talked about Venezuela's and Bobway.
You've got Argentina that's always been on the brink
for a long time.
Lebanon has basically gone off the cliff.
And I think there's a number of these countries
where the only thing that's really sustaining them
is their ability to print money.
And at a certain point, they inevitably lose
that ability to print money
because they reach a state of hyperinflation.
And when that happens, just like what happened
in Venezuela, everyone will get their own choices
and the wisdom of the crowd will essentially choose
the new form of money.
And there may be dictates that say,
now we're on the US dollar officially from the government,
but the government won't really get to decide that anymore.
And people will just end up using whatever works best
as a form of money for them.
And I think in the short term,
that's gonna lead to a lot more countries
using the US dollar as their form of money
because it's the most widely accepted form of money
in the world.
And it is harder from a strict monetary based perspective
than most of these other countries
that are printing a greater percentage.
And so I think we're gonna end up in that direction
at first, but ultimately, the problem is that
governments are addicted to this, right?
All that will be happening as these countries shift away
from their own currencies to the US dollar
is they're essentially giving the US
to outsource their inflation to those countries as well
as to their own citizens.
And so they're losing their ability to print and spend,
but they're actually increasing the US's ability
to print and spend.
And unless governments give that up someday,
the end result will be an inevitable death of fiat
wherein no further fiat is really possible, right?
Because of the trust that is supposed to underlie
that declaration of currency, which is what fiat is,
having been so thoroughly eroded, right?
But I think what we'll probably see is kind of like
a multi-stage devolution wherein some people
like Michael Saylor, the status Bitcoiners of the world
will convince the United States government eventually
that they need to start holding some Bitcoin reserves.
And there will probably be other central banks
around the world who start to mix Bitcoin
into the reserves of their central banks.
And the countries that do that, much like if a country
were to do that with gold, will inevitably increase
the health of their currency, right?
The currency goes from being backed by nothing
and happy words to being backed by the single strongest asset
in the world, that's a big difference.
But the problem is that at the end of the day,
there's only so many Bitcoin.
And so that temptation to further print more fiat
on top of the Bitcoin reserves and dilute whatever Bitcoin
are there will always be there.
And whoever's in charge in any country in the world,
eventually will take that decision of,
you know what, just for now, this is an emergency,
we need the money, we're gonna print.
And that absolutely ravenous appetite
that the state has for consumption of resources
is not gonna go away, they're not gonna stop spending.
And so eventually, even though they probably will have Bitcoin
in their reserves, they'll spend that eventually.
They once had gold in the reserves, they spent that too.
And at the end of the day, you know, they will go broke.
And their ability at least to issue fiat
on top of Bitcoin will be removed.
And so I think in the longterm, we'll be in a world
where, you know, we're using Bitcoin as the store value
to medium exchange and the unit of account
very directly for everyone in the world.
It sounds like a nice world.
It's certainly be easier to measure things
when you know what your denominator is.
That's one of the things it's like fiat is such a,
doesn't matter which fiat, like, and you're right,
yes, the US dollar is as far, relatively speaking,
as far as fiat's go, it is the prettiest horse
at the glue factory, right?
Like it's the skinniest kid at Fat Camp.
And yeah, it's, you know, it sucks, but not compared
to all the rest, right?
Just if we're speaking relatively,
but then along comes Bitcoin.
It's like, ah, this is a measuring stick
that actually stays the same.
Like it's just 21 million, right?
If you add it's like, you don't know what your denominator is
because the denominator is always changing.
You are always debasing.
And I think that that's such a, in terms of actually
being able to perform economic calculation,
it's just such a beautiful, beautiful thing.
I think we're, I think we're, well, I don't know.
A long ways off is relative.
Like I think by the time my son just turned one,
by the time he's 20, you know, 21 can legally drink in the US.
So two decades from now, I think the world
is gonna look vastly, vastly different.
And I'm very hopeful that it's a positive shift
in that vastly different.
And I think that it will be, I think if it were not
for the existence of Bitcoin,
I would be not so hopeful about that whatsoever.
But Bitcoin does exist, thankfully.
And so I am quite hopeful.
But I'm curious, so is your kind of thesis
that the first movers who do, in terms of nation states,
that do adopt some sort of a Bitcoin standard,
a strategic Bitcoin reserve, whatever you wanna call it,
that they will prolong the life of their fiat,
but that eventually the temptation to still
print more of their fiat than they have
relative to their reserves is too great.
Nobody can avoid pressing that burr button.
And they will eventually end themselves basically.
But maybe they prolong their life a little bit longer.
Is that kind of your thesis there?
Yeah, they'll just have a bit more resource to spend.
And there's like, if a government wanted
to compete with Bitcoin,
the path to do that would be very simple, right?
The gold standard would be a really competitive currency
to Bitcoin, a currency on the gold standard,
backed by provable reserves of gold,
would compete pretty well with Bitcoin,
especially if the gold and the total number of units
of the currency were auditable.
That would be a very strong competitor.
And so a country that has even a small portion
of its central bank reserves in Bitcoin
is immediately a much greater competitor
to Bitcoin itself than all of these worthless fiat
of the world.
But ultimately, like I said,
like it's gonna come down to that greed
and that insatiable avarice that the government has
for resources and they will eventually print.
If you let someone print the money that you use,
they will print it.
And that's just a virtual certainty.
And all that that Bitcoin will do
is give them a bit more resources
to stretch out their time and power.
And so I think that's probably something
we're gonna see fairly soon too,
because if you've got all these countries
that are essentially giving up their ability
to print money to spend money,
they're used to being able to shore up
their fiscal irresponsibility with monetary policy.
And when they give away that power
and move to something like the US dollar,
they're not getting rid of that power.
They're just outsourcing that to someone else.
And so if you're in a decision-making role
and you're looking at what currency
do we wanna use as a country,
it should be a fairly sober moment
when looking at the failure of your own current currency
to say that printing money has caused this problem.
And I don't think just giving the ability
to print the money that we use to somebody else
is gonna make us any better, right?
It takes the incentive away from the country in question,
but it doesn't actually solve the problem.
And so eventually, it's just one more logical step
for these people making these sorts of decisions
to say, okay, well, if we're giving up this power
that we've had, why would we give it to somebody else?
Why don't we pick a currency that no one can print?
And therein we'll lie, Bitcoin.
And I kind of expect we're gonna see some countries
in the next 10 or so years go to a full Bitcoin standard.
And that would be, it could be directly using Bitcoin,
but more likely it would be a form of fiat
that was either fully or partially backed by Bitcoin.
And the inevitable outcome of that, I think,
will be fraction reserve dilution of the Bitcoin pool.
And anyway, you look at it,
the state is a hungry beast that will not stop eating.
And so if the Bitcoin are there, they will spend them
one way or the other.
And eventually that's where we bankrupt them
is once they spend all of the money
that they can no longer replace.
Do you think that Bitcoin, like in a hyper Bitcoinized world,
the state in whatever form it has is more accountable
to, you know, is there more of a check
on its insatiable appetite?
Or I mean, is the state in its current form,
which is so bloated, so massive, so just utterly,
I wanna say incompetent,
but there's also a lot of things that they do
with great competence,
like being able to confiscate your money
or fund foreign wars or whatever else it might be.
So they're not fully incompetent,
they're just incompetent when it comes to actually
serving their purpose,
which is to organize for the collective defense
of private property.
But does this, can this current version of the state
exist in a hyper Bitcoinized world?
Or is that where we get into, you know,
what you said, going from 300 and some countries
to, you know, 5,000 countries,
basically adding an order of magnitude
to the number of quote states that we see?
Yeah, I think just like the math doesn't add up
for the current version of the state
to continue to exist, right?
Like it can only exist because they can pay for it.
And the first thing that will change
is when you can no longer pay for those things,
the incentives of this massive group of people
who essentially their existence
sort of circles around the state,
those people will start to find new jobs inevitably,
they'll need to.
And once the incentives are no longer there
to continue to increase the size
and the power of the state,
then inevitably it'll start going in the opposite direction
and that, you know, change to a much greater number
of small countries, I think will come with market forces
that make competition between nation states
much more possible.
You know, we're living in a world,
especially that's another blunder that they made
with COVID is driving everyone to work from home
has made us a lot less tied to our nation state
than we were before the need to work from a specific place
was a core part of how people decide where they live.
And that's really changed.
And I think that's gonna open up some doors to a world
where nation states have to compete
for citizens like they were customers.
And they have to provide a better service
at a better price or people will move somewhere else.
Have you read Snow Crash by the chance?
It's just, it's making me think of that.
And actually Bellagie's had a tweet
as he talks often about the idea of the network state
and how this current model of the state that we have,
which is very geographically driven
is really so antiquated to your exact point
because people are no longer geographically tied
in terms of where their income comes from.
And so this model of, well, you're within our border,
you know, so you're making your money here,
even if you're not, that just doesn't work anymore.
And I'm thinking of in terms of kind of citizenship
as a service, that's kind of one of the central themes
within Snow Crash is, and I won't give any spoilers
for people who have not read it, but I highly recommend it.
It's also where the term metaverse was first coined
and invented, it's a fantastic book.
But the idea that, you know, you've got like,
like Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong,
for example, in Snow Crash, where it's like,
they provide the best citizenship experience.
They keep you the safest, they have the best services for you.
So you want to be a citizen of Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong,
but, you know, each state is basically,
he describes it in very like corporate franchise kind of ways.
But it just, it made me think of that.
And I think that there's a,
he offers a fairly dark vision
for what that might look like as I think kind of a warning,
but there are parts of it where you're like,
that actually doesn't sound so bad,
at least where you have more competition
for your tax dollars, for your service fees,
basically to the state.
And you can only get that by providing value.
But right now it seems as though, especially with various
exit taxes, inheritance taxes, things like that,
things that really just try to cripple people
from being able to either take their money elsewhere
or give their money to their descendants.
They really seem to disincentivize
any sort of ability to choose, right?
Is that your feeling as well?
Yeah, exactly.
And there will be a battle over citizens
and states will get a lot meaner than they are now
in terms of grabbing the resources of people
who are trying to leave at some point.
Like I said, these people that are in charge
who have this monopoly on violence
will do virtually anything to keep it.
They will kill untold numbers of people.
They will remove our freedoms,
remove our freedoms of speech,
remove our freedoms of assembly,
and really break every natural law known to man
in order to maintain their balance of power.
And like you said, Snow Crash, it's kind of a dark vision.
I think we'll have some dark stuff happening in the world
in different places.
And some of that will come down to how great
the cultural respect for the rule of law is
in certain areas and how much respect is built in
culturally for your fellow man,
places where people are likely to respect their neighbors
and take care of their neighbors will probably
fare a lot better than places where life is cheap
and the next short-term dollar or whatever
the next looting that you can do is the way of life.
I think those places will have a much rougher time.
It's funny, I had a friend, another well-known Bitcoiner
probably four or five years ago,
I was having a similar rant and I started describing
how I thought the world was gonna look in like 10, 15 years
and he's like, oh, you're just describing Snow Crash.
I was like, oh, awesome, I've never read that.
So I went and read it and it's like, yeah,
that's pretty much it.
Like it's pretty bang on in the sense that
there will be a lot more chaos in the world
when free markets are what determine the size
and makeup of the nation state rather than just
the incumbency on the control over violence
being the driver towards how states exist.
And as we break up all the different states in the world,
many of those states will then break up.
I think Alberta will hopefully be one of the first
sovereign states to secede from its legacy nation state.
And if that happens, I think there's actually
a fairly good chance that they're not too long after that
will be separatist movements within Alberta
because we're gonna want smaller and smaller government.
Right now we in Canada, very similar I guess
in the United States we have, if you live in a city,
you have somewhere between three and five levels
of government, if you count the sort of globalist layers
and it would be great if we had somewhere between zero and one.
And that's I think where we're inevitably going.
There's not room for this kind of bureaucracy
and waste and largesse in the government.
And that won't be something that rational people
will choose to continue to pay for.
Yeah, it is just ridiculous when you think about
all of the different layers of government
and thereby layers of taxes that we are subject to.
Because, and you start to just wonder,
like I lived in downtown Chicago for a while,
Chicago is a great city with a rich culture.
It's also a terribly, terribly run city
where you pay insanely high taxes from sales tax
to property tax to other, you know,
other local taxes, state taxes, which are very high.
And then of course, you know, federal taxes
icing on the cake there.
Not to mention just different fees
for every sort of thing you can imagine.
And, you know, people say, well, you know,
the classic trope of, well, you know,
if you don't pay your taxes, who will build the roads?
And it's like, in Chicago,
we have tolls on all the roads anyway.
Your taxes aren't being used to pay for the roads.
By the way, all of the road construction
is controlled by various, you know,
paid off people who are in deep
with the Chicago city alderman,
who then just build the roads to fail.
So there, you know, it's like, there's a joke in Chicago.
It's like, there's, you know, there's two seasons.
There's, you know, winter and construction.
Like that's all you have,
because every road is constantly needing
to be redone again and again and again,
because they're built to fail.
And it's like, it's just another example of,
you spend so much on your taxes
that you would assume that you would get something for it.
Do you have good roads?
No.
Do you have good public schools?
No, they're, they're God awful.
Like they, Chicago public schools are just an embarrassment.
They shouldn't even be called schools.
Do you have a safe, crime-free city?
Oh, God no.
It's, you know, incredibly, incredibly violent.
Do you have no homeless people?
Nope.
Tons and tons of homeless people.
And so it's, it's just like,
well then what's all this money going to?
What is it going to?
Where does it go?
If it's not doing the only things it's supposed to,
it's, it's absurd.
Yeah. It's, you know what?
At least it didn't burn down.
That's something.
Yeah, true. Although it was tried.
A lot of, one of the reasons we, thankfully we,
we moved out there and went into the boonies of Wisconsin
at the start of COVID.
Cause we could sense things were getting weird.
They were boarding up all of the ground floor windows
in our, in our condo building,
because we lived in an area where protests tended to happen
right in downtown in the loop.
And we were like, you know what?
Things are starting to get pretty weird.
They're starting to do lockdown.
Let's, we need to get out of here.
We were going to go to Wisconsin for three weeks.
We ended up staying there three years.
So that ended up working out very well actually.
But yeah, it's, there were a decent amount of fires set.
My favorite, my favorite camera store,
family owned business called central camera companies
been around for over a hundred years.
Looters burned it to the ground to protest racism, I think.
So they really, really got the point across there
that worked out super well.
But I think the family has rebuilt.
I sadly haven't been back there since then, but I digress.
But yes, we still do have fires in a, in Chicago.
They just don't spread quite as much as in areas
with poor forest management.
Yeah. They, it's very interesting cause there's a shift
that happened at some point, you know, we,
we have a big fire problem here.
Also, we've had a couple towns wiped out
in Alberta from fires and, you know,
there have been very large scale uncontrollable fires
that can be in some way attributed to arson in many cases.
You know, there's a definite incentive
for the climate alarmists to want fires.
And so they do light them specifically
to create climate alarmism.
But there's also this piece wherein the, you know,
the government pretty much can't do anything right ever.
That's one of the big, it can be a problem,
but it can also be a saving grace, right?
Like their ability to crack down on us
is limited by their severe incompetence.
And in some cases, like we have with fires,
with the forests around North America, you know,
they're, they're, they're struggling with the Cobra effect,
which is this idea that, you know,
pretty much everything that the government does
comes with a perverse incentive.
And in many cases that leads to an outcome
that is opposite or counter to what was originally proposed
or stated.
And so with the best of intentions, you know,
the, the governments of North America
have been putting out forest fires for the last,
you know, 100 some years.
And the problem with that, even though that's a good sentiment,
is you don't want the forest to burn down,
is that forest fires have always been a part
of the natural progression of the forest.
And they're one of the ways that brush inevitably
gets cleared out.
It's kind of like a self-selecting thing.
The more brush you have in a forest,
the more likely the fire is, and then it gets cleared out
and you get new growth.
And now we've gotten to this point where our forests
around North America, especially those near urban populations,
have not been allowed to burn for like 100 years.
And so there's just these massive buildups of brush
that now are ample fuel for whatever spark of arson
or anything else lights those fires.
And so in that case, you've got the government's actions
having the opposite outcome of what they have intended.
That has been rampant for a long time, right?
What we're just starting to see now are the,
either willful or just like willfully ignorant
incompetent actions of the government
actively working against the people in ways
that are so very easily identifiable.
And I think that's one of those places where they've really,
they've really gone too far.
They've pushed the limit too far.
And you see stuff like this video going around
about the LA fires where they're like,
oh yeah, we had to divert, all the water that was supposed
to be there for firefighting, we had to divert that
to the ocean to keep the temperature the same
for some endangered iguana or something like that.
And like it's reached this point of absurdity
that has gone so far that much more people
find it intolerable.
And that I think it's almost like watching a car wreck.
You know what I mean?
Like the leftists of the world are so far out to lunch
and they still don't even see it.
They think that their views are so obviously right
that anybody who might potentially challenge anything
that they want it to do, whether it's painting a sidewalk
or diverting all the water to save a lizard,
that if you're against that view
that the lizard needs to be saved,
then you're essentially Hitler.
You're the worst person that's ever lived
and that nothing that you have ever said
can be taken seriously and that we just need
to wipe you off the map as a contributor to society.
And so I think that sort of like large scale,
very obvious insanity is coming home to roost
with a lot of people.
And that's why we've seen the shift in elections
in most of the Western world wherein the sort of populist
candidates have gotten a lot more power.
And that's a whole other topic.
I don't think the populists are gonna be any better.
They're mostly just arguing over how they spend the money
that they steal, but at least in the short term,
they'll stop spending as much of the money against us,
I think, as the current iterations have been doing.
Well, let's hope so.
And I mean, I think it's one of those situations
where the pendulum always swings back, right?
And you see this throughout history
and you can see it in short periods of history as well.
I mean, the US is a great example, right?
Especially with four year election cycles,
it's just everything is a reaction
against what came before it, right?
And we're a duopoly, we're a two party system,
a Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola democracy
as my father-in-law who escaped communism
will jokingly say.
And so you're given this false illusion of choice,
this idea that, okay, this last guy did so bad
and everything's his fault.
So now, but luckily my guy's gonna win this time
and everything will be better.
And then this cycle just repeats and repeats.
And it's interesting with Trump.
He's obviously been president before.
He didn't do most of the stuff
he said he was gonna do last time.
Hopefully he does more of the things
he said he will do this time, like free Ross on day one.
And we'll see he seems to be on track
to be behind a Bitcoin strategic reserve
for the United States, which as an American,
I think would be a good thing.
I also think it's an inevitable thing.
So if it's, okay, China, Russia or the US
gets a Bitcoin strategic reserve first,
well, I'd rather that be America, personally.
I think that's also better for the world
because for all of America's faults,
it is still a truly great country
and whose economy has lifted much of the world out of poverty.
Even while its monetary system has plunged
much of the world, other parts of the world into poverty.
So I'm not excusing the monetary colonialists
at the IMF, the World Bank and the Federal Reserve
by any means, just wanted to make that very clear.
But it's gonna be interesting to see,
I mean, you guys, so Trudeau stepped down, right?
He's done so now.
He's announced his resignation.
Boy, it's really, I mean, how far Fidel Castro's son
has fallen, what a sad day.
For him, probably not for Canadians.
It's probably a pretty happy day.
Is there a vibe shift that you're feeling in Canada
with that happening?
Yeah, yes and no.
Like there was a lot of celebration
when he announced that, for sure.
But it's like, it's so far past.
Like he should have resigned years ago
by any sane metric.
And literally the government's been propped up
by one of the opposition parties
who are basically trying to stay in power
until they get their government pensions
and then they don't care.
And they've now come up with a plan
wherein they're gonna call this leadership review
and all this stuff and magically takes them past the point
where they all get their government pensions.
So.
How convenient.
Yeah, it's a pretty simple straightforward equation there.
There's a lot of divisiveness
and a lot of disagreement about facts in the world right now.
And I found this arguing with people about climate change
or COVID or whatever else is out there
that I have certain places that I go for my news
and facts and sources.
And none of those are the state run broadcasters.
And the people with the opposite opinions
have their places that they go for sources and facts.
And neither of us believe each other's sources at all.
And it creates kind of an impasse.
But the one thing that you can always go back to
is the incentives.
And when you can see somebody's incentives,
you can pretty much just follow them.
And that's the case with these government pensions
is they're just obviously staying
to get the long-term personal gain
by locking in those pensions.
And the country has basically been in limbo for,
at least a year and will be in limbo
for another six months or so
because of the fact that they're dragging this thing out.
And so we're all very, very happy to get him out of here.
The natural consequences that I would say are due
for a person who has so thoroughly eluded our country
and betrayed the citizens of this country
are very unlikely to be forthcoming.
I don't see the likelihood
that there will be criminal investigations.
There are many, many things that,
somebody posted a list of all the scandals
and backroom deals and stuff.
And there's been something like 56 different scandals
that were all big enough
that any one of them could have brought down a government.
But they've just kept chugging
and kept ignoring all the fact
that they're being transparently caught looting the country.
And we're a very polite country.
And we had our trucker protest
and that was a very polite trucker protest.
But I think the country has had enough basically.
Country's had enough of this nonsense.
And I kind of feel like we're gonna get
the same sort of thing as Trump.
We're gonna get a landslide victory for Pirapoliev,
the populist contender.
And he will probably make some immediate improvements
that make the ways that the government fucks
with our lives not as bad,
but neither Pauliev nor Trump are gonna take the steps
that actually need to be taken
to make the concept of either the United States
or Canada viable in the longterm,
because there's just too much at stake.
There's too many powers at play.
And that's sort of the weakness of democracy.
And I don't know where the quote came from,
but democracy is two wolves and a sheep
deciding what's for dinner.
Because if you ask the large group,
and in any society, you will inevitably have
a large group, more than 50% of people
who control less than 50% of the resources.
That's just mathematically inevitable.
And if you ask the large group of people
who are not as productive
and therefore don't control as many resources
as the smaller group,
should you have some of the resources
of that smaller group, they're gonna say yes.
And having them empower your special little group
to confiscate those resources with violence
and redistribute them is kind of the natural outcome
of democracy.
And without a check and balance on that redistribution,
which I'm hoping comes naturally in the form of Bitcoin,
that's sort of where every democratic government
will eventually go is the idea that,
yes, we must confiscate those resources
and spend them on these other things
that we deem more important than the priorities
of the people who own the resources.
So.
In a, because I find this kind of line of inquiry
to be really fascinating.
It's been something I've been just thinking about a lot lately
and talking with a lot of people too,
in terms of the fact that democracy is,
it's worked pretty well for a while,
but it has inherent flaws that eventually force it
to devolve into mob rule and then create chaos.
And I've talked with like, I've talked with Safine,
I've talked with Prince Philip,
hereditary prince of Serbia and Yugoslavia
who knows a thing or two about monarchy, it turns out,
about this idea of like in this,
in a hyper-Bitcoinized world
or even in a pre-hyper-Bitcoinized world,
when we have a world that is trending
toward more decentralization,
trending toward citizenship as a service,
as the state being a service provider to the citizen
who willingly voluntarily says,
yes, I want to opt in to you as my service provider
because I also have other options
and you offer the best set of benefits for the price.
Do you think that we see a move
toward these kind of like monarch CEO type characters
who are basically running a country like a company,
functioning as basically a monarch,
being the one to make executive decisions,
like the buck stops with them?
Do you think that that's what we see?
Because it seems that that's almost the natural path
and especially at a smaller scale,
if we're talking about another order of magnitude
of nations versus what we have now,
that seems like something that may be
a very viable path forward.
And again, I'm sure that democracies
also aren't gonna go away.
Ever heard that people will,
there will still be democracies,
but it seems that a lot of people right now
want their country run more like a well-oiled company
than they do like a giant charity basket
for the military industrial complex
for people who don't pay their taxes
and for the bloated kleptocrats
to get fat off of.
Yeah, I think people definitely want
their countries run more like companies.
And I've had a bunch of discussions
about different structures that can lead in this direction
because the temptation is there,
anytime you give somebody that monopoly on violence,
they can then use that for whatever their interests are
or whatever interests approach them and compromise them.
And so that's sort of the flaw
in the democratic system at its base layer,
but there's actually structures out there
and like we technically have one in Canada,
although it's not followed,
we have the different branches of government,
we have a governor general
who is essentially a representative of the British crown.
And the governor general has the power
to dissolve parliament and call an election at any time.
And this is something that going back to safety
and I've talked with him about the kingdom of Jordan
used to do, for example, wherein they'd have an elected
government, democratically elected government,
and the king really his only role would be to step in
and dissolve the government
when they were no longer serving
the best interests of the people.
And that's something like in Canada, like I described,
that like we could have really used that,
like years ago, it's been at a point
where if you had a national referendum to say,
should Trudeau be out of power,
it'd probably be 80 or 90% would vote him out at this point.
And even going back two years,
you'd probably would have gotten 60 or 70%.
And so I think that some kind of combined structure
of monarchy and representative democracy might make sense.
But the other thing that I think is important is that
the total scope of the government doesn't need to be anywhere
near what it is now, because the fact is that
if we're going back to a competitive sort of service
provider model, and most of them will start
with a bare minimum of let's provide the physical safety
and the property rights, you just don't need
a massive apparatus of government to be able to do that.
You need a small number of people with some skin in the game.
And that's wherein, you know, it might make sense
to go back to something along the lines of only landowners
can be in the government.
You need a small number of people,
hopefully with skin in the game,
who can make some very broad decisions to oversee
a bureaucracy that is funded with funds
that are entirely opt in, that are entirely voluntarily
signed up for, for people who want those services,
the physical safety and property rights.
And there's just not going to be room for much government.
And so the choice of, of who the government is
becomes a lot less important.
And that's, that's kind of an interesting phenomenon
when you think about some of the, like, like Switzerland's
a really good example where it's like, you know,
their, their authority in government is a lot more
distributed and not as strong at the, at the national level.
And there's people in Switzerland, like,
do you know who the leader of Switzerland is?
I don't.
And someone else asked me this the other day.
Yeah, no idea.
Yeah, that was their point as well.
Yeah, it's, and it's a good thing, right?
Yeah.
The fact that our world leaders are these like quasi
celebrities who like, you know, they are,
they're just giant celebrities.
That's how they live their lives.
They, they fly around acting like Leonardo DiCaprio
and that, that return to a point where the role of,
of being in the government is to serve,
I think is something that will inevitably come full circle.
And the, the status of being a serving member of the
government and being like a rock star as a result of that,
I think we'll go away.
I hope we'll go away.
I don't really, you know, I don't want anyone in charge
and I don't really want to know about them,
but I do want somebody to keep me safe.
I think that's a pretty, pretty straightforward
and basic sentiment.
You know, Liechtenstein has a very, like,
it's kind of what we're talking about here in terms of
their model of government where they,
they do have a, a const,
it's a constitutional monarchy and it's a democracy.
So the, like, like you said, the monarch has the power to,
it's a, you know, hereditary monarchy.
So you've got the, you know, reigning princes,
the head of state, and then you've got, he has, you know,
he can veto laws, he can, you know, dismiss the government,
like you said, with your, a governor general.
And, you know, he approves treaties, foreign affairs,
stuff.
Now, for context, Liechtenstein is like 40,000 people.
Like it's, it's very small, but that's like kind of a nice
size for a state, right?
Like that's, that's kind of, kind of nice.
And then they have a parliamentary democracy and you have,
you know, people are elected to the parliament by the
citizens, you know, but then they have direct democratic
rights as well.
So citizens can propose laws and vote on referendums and then
they can abolish the monarchy if they have the majority vote
in the referendum.
So you've actually got a really nice system of, of checks
and balances there.
And I find that to be fascinating.
People might say, well, oh, that's, you know, 40,000 people,
you know, that's like, you know, it's too tiny to matter,
but it's like, that's the size state that I think is actually
functional when the, when the, you know, or the size nation,
I should say, but, and thereby the state, it's like, when the
state gets too big, when the nation gets too big, you can't
possibly serve the interests of your people.
I mean, that's why the United States is 50 states and the
federal government was never supposed to be this big here.
Our founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves
if they could see what was happening.
The federal government was not meant to be this bloated
beast that ultimately had control over all these states who
can, you know, have little laws that are a little bit different,
but ultimately, you know, they're still subject to the whims
of big daddy federal government.
Like that's, that's not how it was supposed to be.
And so I think that smaller state model works.
And that's why you do have a lot of differences from state to
state in the U S, which would probably be much more distinct
and vibrant if you did not have such a massive bloated federal
government.
I'm honestly surprised Texas hasn't seceded yet.
I think they've still got it because they've got a different
constitution than the rest of the states because of their
interesting history.
And I'm still surprised.
I mean, they're energy rich.
They've got a, an attitude that says, you know, don't mess with us.
And I think it's only a matter of time if they get pushed too
far, but we'll see.
I think, I think it's going to be very interesting in the next
10 years, as you said, to see what sort of breakups, peaceful,
hopefully peaceful or otherwise we see.
And I'm, you know, what part Bitcoin plays in that in terms of
giving these new regions greater autonomy by giving them greater
purchasing power.
I think that's going to be, that game theory is going to be very
interesting to watch play out.
Yeah, definitely.
I think Texas is going to stay for longer than a lot of other
sort of potential breakaways in other places in the world.
There's a couple of things about the U.S. that are unique.
One is that you've got the sort of the carrot of the money printer.
Right.
And so a tremendous amount of federally printed money gets
spent in the state of Texas, just like every other state, to
appease the lawmakers who are in turn sent there to appease their
constituents.
And so it's a, it's kind of like a cascading series of bribes to
stay in the country that's very real.
Yeah.
We have an opposite.
I know, we actually, Quebec has the bribes, but we pay for the
bribes.
So we're sort of in a position wherein, you know, we're paying
for the majority of the excess spending in Eastern Canada.
And that part is a lot more untenable than the opposite version
in, in somewhere like Texas, wherein the money printing
actually probably falls to a greater impact on the middle of
the country, where probably less money per capita is being
spent. And, you know, those are, those are largely poorer areas
where people are less of asset owners and more of cash holders.
And so the inflation is really coming more out of their pockets
than out of the pockets of the people of Texas who are then
benefiting from the spending with that government printed money.
So I think that keeps Texas in the US for a while.
There certainly might be just like the massive economic benefit
that true capitalism would bring with an oil reservoir like
that, that would be something that logically would make a lot
of sense, but might be hard to actually get to.
And then the other thing is just like the cultural significance
of the United States is just much greater than really almost
any country in the world, especially to its citizens.
And so there's this very ingrained, you know, you're,
you're going to see a lot of American flags in Texas.
You do not see a lot of Canadian flags in Alberta.
And you see a lot more Alberta flags in Alberta than you see
Canadian flags.
And that's because this national identity that the United States
has is just a lot stronger and has a lot more backing it
than our Canadian one, which, you know, has gotten to be kind
of like a ridiculous meme of like, we're just, you know,
we're polite Canadians, we like maple syrup, eh?
And that really doesn't resonate with the reality.
It's not something that I think Canadians connect with in the
same way that they once did.
And on top of that, we've also got this massive, um, like
unprecedented number of immigrants.
Like if you guys, you guys have a lot of immigrants, we have,
uh, per capita drastically more.
We had in 2023, we had the largest influx of immigrants
that per capita that any country ever has had.
And so this is a large group of people who represent, you know,
even just those people who came in in 2023 were four or five
percent of the population.
And these are people who don't have that
sort of cultural link to the, the institution of Canada.
And so, you know, there's a lot of problems that come with
those immigrants, but in a lot of ways, there are very many
of them who actually do want to come here and assimilate to our
society and work hard and, and build life.
And those people who choose to do that are not naturally going
to form an attachment to Canada so much as they'll form an
attachment to the area where they're in.
And because of our large size and our small population, we've
got like very distinct cultural communities across the country.
You know, I'm heading to, I'm heading to Vancouver tomorrow,
British Columbia, and it's like, it almost feels like going
behind enemy lines there.
Like it's, you know, I, I posted in the telegram group for Vancouver.
I'm like, anybody want to get together and argue about climate change?
Because there's even the bit corners in Vancouver believe in climate change.
And so, yeah, I think we, we have a cultural identity that's a lot
more fragmented and is ripe for that kind of breakup as compared
to something like Texas, even though rationally, like if,
you know, somebody who understands the scenario of
both what the United States is and what the money printer is and what Texas is
and the benefits that they would gain from, from sovereignty,
I think it would be a very rational decision for Texas to go
independent, but they're probably going to take the short term payouts for
quite some time until, until the federal government can no
longer pay those bribes.
And yeah, it seems that those times are starting to approach faster and faster.
I mean, that's the thing about this place in the cycle that we're in is it
feels like everything's accelerating, right?
It feels like we're, again, I mean, even you just look at like
speaking from a U.S. perspective, like you look at,
measure like the, you know, the interest on the national debt, which is just
going parabolic. You know, you look at money supply, which has,
if you look at M2, it kind of like, you know, stalled for a little bit and
the, you know, the some liquidity was pulled out of the,
pulled out of the system very little relative to the massive injection that
it got during COVID. So it's a drop in the bucket and that
liquidity is about to come back in full force.
But all of this just, it seems that we're nearing this,
this end game, you know, this, this place in the fourth turning,
where, where things are about to get very funky and there's kind of just no,
there's no slowing down from here, right? There's no,
like there's no going back, you know, to, you know, use Lin Alden's meme about
fiscal dominance, you know, nothing stops this train. And I think that's
true in a lot of contexts. I'm curious just, you know, what,
as we go forward into this, I mean, we're both Bitcoiners,
obviously, we are going to tell people that probably the best way to protect
themselves from what is coming is Bitcoin, besides Bitcoin,
or in addition to Bitcoin, I should say, are there other things that you're
talking about with people in terms of just how they can best prepare themselves,
their families for what may be a chaotic period, certainly is now may get far
more chaotic. Hopefully there's going to be a nice orange light at the end of the
tunnel, but before then things could get quite dicey for a lot of folks.
So like what else in addition to Bitcoin do you kind of think about in terms of
preparing yourself, your family for this? Yeah. So I think there is a lot of
larking in the Bitcoin industry in this area, wherein, you know, a lot of people
are moving to El Salvador as a safe place for Bitcoiners.
And El Salvador, just like every other nation state, is a monopoly on violence
maintained by a select few for their own benefit. And the
pro-Bitcoin policies of today do not mean that Bitcoin will be safe for Bitcoin,
or sorry, El Salvador will be safe for Bitcoiners
a year from now, or five years from now. And if anything, it kind of feels a
little bit like a honeypot to me. You get all these rich Bitcoiners to move there,
and then all of a sudden you have 6102 everyone with prejudice,
and seize all those Bitcoins that are in the country. So
I don't think moving to a better nation state is really the solution right now,
because whatever your government is doing, the government in the state that you
move to might just start doing that next. And that layer of competition that
we're discussing that we presuppose will exist to create
a necessity for governments to treat their citizens well
does not exist yet. They haven't realized that that is the case. I mean, maybe
El Salvador has to a certain extent, and that's why they're doing what they're
doing now, but the wheels of power can change quickly.
And the Bukele could be out of power in an afternoon.
The IMF may have more hooks into him than we know.
There are a million things that could change El Salvador's
outlook on Bitcoin and make it a place that is actually
actively unsafe for Bitcoiners rather than a safe haven.
So that's one thing that I would put out there is like,
and this is a, I think it was a heavier melee quote that was like,
trust no government, even mine. So don't trust them.
No matter where you are in the world, the men with guns who
take resources are not your friend. And so moving to a different group
of men with guns is not necessarily improvement.
My view is that, and this is actually one of the benefits of
being in Canada right now, is like we're living under
what could be argued to be the dumbest government in the history of the world.
Like it's shocking how stupid, although California has given them a run
right now, it looks like, but it is entirely shocking how stupid everything
is here right now. And that is in a roundabout way a
benefit because the fact that they, you know, they
want to step on our necks as hard as they can, but they can't even tell where our
necks are because, you know, they're, they're not, they
haven't even made it to the metaphor yet. They're completely incompetent enough to
launch on everything. And so I think that's a benefit. I think
when choosing where you live, choosing a place that you understand
intimately is a very big benefit, you know. One of the reasons that I'm staying
put here in Calgary is because I have a network here, I have resources here,
I have people that I can turn to in a time of trouble or
termination, and I think sticking with those kind of things is extremely
important. Finding communities of bit corners are probably some of the most
reliable people that you can, you can lean on.
We've got an initiative here that originally,
I held a BTC session set up here called the SAT market,
wherein we have like a quarterly or, or biannual
sort of like flea market, farmers market, where we all get together and
everybody sells a bunch of stuff for bitcoin and,
you know, we get a bunch of people through for these, but the biggest benefit
is actually all the vendors meeting each other and meeting the rest of us in the
bitcoin community. And so like I have a place that I can get my meat,
every kind of meat now for, for bitcoin. I can buy beef without the
government's help or permission. And those kind of connections to your
local community I think are probably very important.
Obviously there is a, you know, it's a good idea to arm yourself in
some capacity, but there is also the shift around the logic
on violence that's taking place. And so in Canada where we're not really
allowed to have guns, being a registered gun owner
comes with a whole set of risks. Now that you're on the government's list of who
has the guns and they have done in certain circumstances, we had a
flood here in Calgary in 2015 or something like that, and there's a
small community south of Calgary called High River that surprisingly, based on
the name, got flooded very badly. And they had the RCMP in there, our,
our federal police were in there going door to door checking for people in
their homes, and they actually started confiscating people's guns based on the
gun registry because they were trying to prevent looters.
And you know this is, this is an extrajudicial confiscation of guns based
solely on a registry that is entirely mandatory to own guns in, in Canada.
And so it's important I guess to start to think about the logic of violence
and start to think about like what kind of violence might
be perpetrated against me or my family and what form might that take and how
can I avoid that. And so there's a whole bunch of different
trade-offs, you know I live in downtown Calgary, we've got crackheads
right out the door here if I were to walk outside,
and those people propose a certain degree of risk to me in some capacity,
but the risk is, is, is very different than if I had an acreage outside of the
city, which a lot of bit corners do, you know your, your safety when you
live in a remote place like that is entirely up to you.
You can't rely even 1% on the state or even the potential threat of the state
to continue to provide that safety. And this is something that we've seen in a
lot of places like the the devolution of order and the meltdown of a bunch of
countries in Africa are a good thing that we can study to see what happens
when the rule of law is basically removed and how to rural property owners
protect themselves in those kind of scenarios. And it really is,
it's not having a gun safe with, you know, you're not gonna, if, if
raiders come to your place, you're not gonna have time to get the code and like
you, you need a more robust system to protect yourselves. And I think
ultimately in, as we approach a world like snow crash that, I don't know if we'll
get all the way there, you know in snow crash there's, there's defense robots
and all this stuff that automate the protection of these franchises.
But I think we're gonna need to move in that direction to a certain extent
wherein, you know, we can, we can now leverage this change in the logic around
violence because it's actually become a lot cheaper to defend against violence
as compared to being the aggressor. And the, the, the logic on violence has
shifted more away from the, you know, the need to create the largest magnitude
of violence and more towards an efficiency of violence. And so systems that can
make it very unappealing for someone to attack you will probably be the next big
thing, you know, and it, the, the stuff that we're seeing around the world with
drones and, you know, there's a Black Mirror episode with bees, drone bees,
like I think these kinds of things that can provide a relatively low-cost
defensive form of violence are probably gonna be a priority for anybody who
wants to take their own physical safety into their own hands.
And just understanding what the trade-offs are, like for me I don't, I don't,
I don't have guns in my home, but I could, I could certainly get them very fast.
And that sort of is a trade-off in the sense that like if, if somebody's gonna
kick down my door, the very high likelihood is that it's gonna be the
government and my guns are not going to be an effective deterrent to them
kicking down the door. It might actually make my situation worse.
Whereas that kind of random, like barbarian, you know, the hordes of the
Gates-style violence, which I think will probably
increase dramatically as the, the rule of law breaks down and the,
the power of the government and the willingness of the government to,
to enforce those kind of, you know, safety and property protections that are
inherent in the rule of law, as that weakens, you know, it's, the world's not
gonna get safer as that happens. So I think it's just a matter of like,
you know, keeping your head on where all the, all the moving parts are and,
and trying to make your best choice. There might come a time when you do want
to flee to the rural areas or South America or something
like that, but right now I just, I don't think there's enough information to
evaluate any other government as being better than another one.
Yeah, I think, I think that's also a great point of why community is so
important at a local level because that is people you
can rely on and organize for your collective defense together, should it
get to that very gnarly stage of the breakdown.
One thing I would say about El Salvador is just to play devil's advocate.
It does seem that Bukele is probably, I'm not denying that he has the
monopoly on violence, undoubtedly true. His monopoly on violence was required
to take away the monopoly on violence from an extrajudicial group that was
previously had the monopoly on violence, i.e. the gangs. But one thing I would say
is it is interesting that he is really getting close to that kind of,
you know, ruler CEO type role, where yes they still have a government, but he's
also, you know, he's not just a, you know, a figurehead on the front of the
boat, like he seems to be steering the ship.
Now I will fully agree that any state with the monopoly on violence
has the potential to change very much for the worse and no longer be a place
that is as openly hospitable as they once were and can instead be openly
hostile. I hope just because I think that this,
what El Salvador is doing has at least, it has given their people a lot of hope
and I hope that that continues. I, you know, I honestly this, that the
country is probably better off with Bukele staying in power longer.
Now I don't know, you know, again, now we get back to monarchy, democracy,
you know, what's going to happen there. I don't know, I don't have a crystal
ball, I don't have the answer, but I think it's a fair point to at least
warn people that at this stage of the fiat end game,
jurisdictional arbitrage or whatever you want to call it,
may be harder to figure out than you think and what may be
looking very tempting may not always be that way. Again, I hope the case
with El Salvador turns out to be a great example of the, you know, one of the great
comeback stories of a country in history. I would, I would love, I would love to see
that, but again, you know, everything, you know, don't trust, verify, see what happens.
I'm staying in America for now. I am going to El Salvador at the end of this month again,
which I'm quite excited about mainly to get out of the cold here, but also because
there's a, there's a lot of great Bitcoiners down there. And I think that that,
that also says something that what I find interesting about El Salvador is that
with it really, as it relates to their Bitcoin kind of journey,
it's become a top down kind of directive, but it started as a bottom up movement,
which I think is really fascinating and gives me a lot of hope for the power of
Bitcoiners organizing at a local level to actually affect change at a national state level
because of the successes they've been able to display at the local level. Like
what the, the, everyone did at Bitcoin Beach is a pretty, it's a pretty spectacular story.
And it's pretty cool to see that they didn't ask for permission. They just went and did it
without the help of government, with the help of some, you know, generous Bitcoiners and with
the local population who was, you know, willing to take a risk on something. And that risk is very
much paid off for them, you know, and so that's a, that's a great success story. I love to see it.
I also just realized, Dave, we've been rolling for 90 minutes already. The time truly flew by.
Do you want to, anything else you want to leave folks with or where do you want to send people?
Feel free to plug anything you would like or send them to some, yeah, anywhere you want.
Sure. So I got a couple things to say there. So first of all, the El Salvador thing, it may end
up being that he is everything that he seems like he is, and that he is actually too good of a
competitor to the other nation states of the world. And that results in him being removed through
a government coup or an assassination or something else like that that we've seen
for people who've challenged the status quo throughout the world. And so,
yeah, that's, that's kind of like, it always just goes back to the sort of don't trust verify thing.
In terms of sending people places, I have a whole bunch of stuff to shill.
I have a conference coming up. It would be great to have you. You're invited.
June 28th and 29th here in Calgary. It's going to be a pretty great show. It's called the Bitcoin
Rodeo. Okay. I've actually, I've wanted, I think I saw, it might have been you roasting sessions there.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Continue. I just wanted to mark down the dates.
Yeah. We're, we're June 28th and 29th. We are trying to get a roast of another well-known
Bitcoiner put together for this, this event, which would be pretty fun. The last one was hilarious
and did really well. So we're trying to do that again. We are in the heart of energy
countries. So we do a bit of content crossing over with energy and freedom, but it's a very
non-technical conference. It's for normal people to figure out why Bitcoin matters more so than to
figure out how Bitcoin works. And yeah, we, this is now the fourth one that we've done,
and they just keep getting better. So I would love to have everybody out at that. We've got
early bird tickets on sale and we will be announcing our speakers very shortly on bitcoinrodeo.com.
And so you can check that out. And like I said, early bird tickets are still on the go.
I have a bunch of places people can find me. I'm, you know, I'm on Nostra, but I'm not very active
on Nostra because I just, we got to change that. Yeah. I just, it's not good enough yet. Like it
just isn't. It's like primal crashes too often. And I just get too many errors when trying to
post things on desktop, especially. But I love the idea. It's just for me as a user, it's not
there yet. And I want to like put the time in because it's a whole other like audience and
market that I think is actually more in line with me and my beliefs than the community on Twitter
at this point. But you know, there's a, the Twitter is where all the status bitcoiners are
nowadays. But I am active on Twitter. Update that primal app and give it another shot. But yeah,
yeah, your Twitter is a Bitcoin brains, right? Yeah, Bitcoin brains. I can be found on virtually
every platform as Bitcoin brains. We also have a, we have a media and events company that we run
the Bitcoin rodeo through and we have a website coinbeast.com that we're just in the process of
relaunching here. And we have a couple, a couple of different shows on the YouTube channel that we
run there as well. We've got one Ulrich runs called eyes on liberty that is a lot like your show in
the sense that it's, it's interview shows very focused on freedom, talking to different bit corners.
And then we have another one called unhypnotized, which is hosted by a woman named Heather keys.
And that one is a lot more about how Bitcoin sort of interacts. She just finished the first season,
I guess, which was a lot more about how Bitcoin interacts with the mind and how it affects people
and their choices and their brains. And then the next season she's doing is going to be all about
Bitcoin and dating and dating Bitcoiners in the fiat world, which is something that a lot of us
have struggled with. So it should be interesting content. And then as always, you have to, as
previously mentioned, my, my very good friend made X there's one sitting on the wall behind me.
I have to show his art. You should go and buy some. It's actually kind of an amateur move to
have a podcast Walker without a made X behind you. So I'm a little embarrassed now. I'm going to have
to rectify that situation. Better get one. Yeah. It's made X.arcs. No, I need to get him on here
soon as well. But before I do that, I better, I probably need to get myself one of his pieces.
I don't get my lovely wife, some of his, his earrings, which are super badass.
And she's awesome. Yeah. Well, Dave, thanks so much for joining me. And this was, this was a
pleasure. We're going to have to do this again, because I feel like we, we just started scratching
the surface here, but I appreciate you sharing your time with me. This was a blast. And yeah,
I'll, I'll check into Calgary because that would be, that'd be fun. Yeah, that'd be a good one.
I'll message you some info. Sweet. All right, man. All right.
And that's a wrap on this Bitcoin talk episode of the Bitcoin podcast.
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