THE DEATH OF THE STATE | Dave Bradley (THE Bitcoin Podcast)

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, do me a favor and subscribe to The Bitcoin Podcast wherever you're listening, and make sure to subscribe on YouTube or Rumble as well by searching at Walker America.

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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? The great thing about Bitcoin is it does not care if you're an individual or a corporation or a nation state because Bitcoin treats everyone the same.

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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. If you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast, head to

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