250205 Chris & Brett Oland and Nikolas Morianos

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Well, good evening, everybody.

(00:25):
It's Chris here from the Whistle Stop Cafe in Mirror, Alberta, and I am also, as you
can see from my shirt, I'm the Chris in the Chris and Kerry Show.
So tonight we have a couple of guests on with us to talk about something very important.
Gold.
Gold and finances.
Now, why in the world would a burger flipper from Mirror, Alberta want to be talking to

(00:52):
a banker and a gold guy?
Well, if you haven't noticed, the price of gold has been climbing steadily lately.
I think as of today, it was like four thousand one hundred ish Canadian dollars per ounce.
That's a lot of money.

(01:12):
Something else that happened is our Canadian dollar has hit a twenty one year low.
I think it's sitting somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty eight cents US per Canadian dollar.
Now those are just numbers, of course, and money doesn't really exist anyway, does it?

(01:34):
But even though it may not really exist, it's still what we use to go and buy our groceries
and pay our utility bills and those types of things.
So if our dollar is falling and the price of gold is climbing and the price of everything
around us is going up, do we have a problem?

(01:55):
Have we seen this anywhere else in the world?
The answer is yes, we have.
There are many countries in which these things have started to happen and it doesn't seem
to end well for any of them if something doesn't change to reverse course.
We're at a real tough spot in Canada right now because we have a we don't have a federal

(02:20):
government.
I mean, we have a federal government, but we don't have parliament.
We can't have any robust debate over policy or legislation that's going to be made to
our benefit.
We have an outgoing prime minister and an incoming potential prime minister that we're
not we never voted for, who has some policies that are downright scary.

(02:43):
And the stability of our country and our economy seems to be quite lacking.
And I mean, of course it is our dollars plummeted and gold is rising.
So the only way we can fix problems like these or at least insulate ourselves from the consequences
of those problems is to become educated as to what's going on and how these things work.

(03:06):
Another thing I want to talk about is how what what these guys are doing promoting financial
independence, financial sovereignty, I guess you could say, has helped me.
It literally allowed me to stay in my house.
So we're going to talk about that as well.
So without further ado, I'm going to bring on Nick and Brett.

(03:33):
Nick is the what is your title?
Nick, it's the it said chief administrative officer.
It's like I used to do a lot of sales.
I used to do that kind of stuff.
But now I am basically legal compliance privacy.
But I mean, I know the ins and outs of our industry and our business.

(03:54):
And yeah, but that's what it is.
It's chief administrative officer of Silver Bowl.
OK, and Brett is the CEO of Bow Valley Credit Unit, and I'm sure if you've been paying any
attention to Alberta or what's going on in the news in the last two years, you would
have seen Brett in many interviews, articles.
You've written a few columns.

(04:15):
You've been really active in the last little while.
So good for you on that.
And welcome.
Thank you for taking time out of your busy days to talk to me about some of these things.
So my first question, I guess, would be for for Brett or the first topic.
Both Valley Credit Union has kind of stood out from other banks in that you guys believe

(04:40):
in backing up deposits with physical gold.
Is that kind of the gist of the difference between you and other banks?
Yeah, that's a big part of it.
There's three distinctive factors that sort of have really we've stood out on in the last
little while.

(05:02):
Firstly being we never forced any of our staff to get vaccinated.
We felt that that was a decision that was up to everybody's individual decision with
your physician.
And we didn't force that.
And it was forced upon every OSCE regulated person that worked for financial institutions

(05:27):
that were regulated by the OSCE.
So that's effectively all your big banks, your RBC, your UMOS, your Midwestern banks,
all those had forced their staff to get vaccinated.
So that's one difference.
The second difference is we never frozen the accounts during the trucker convoy during

(05:49):
the emergency act.
And third, it's a big piece that we're known for is our propensity towards gold and silver.
And really that started with we saw what was happening with the COVID.

(06:11):
And then we saw that we were effectively locked in our homes, weren't allowed to be productive
with products and services, and then we showered with cash.
And we knew that that was going to be massively inflationary.
And effectively we wanted to be able to protect not only our members, but also our organization

(06:35):
against what we saw was a normal proposal.
We continue to see a massive amount of inflation coming down the pipe.
And so we're continuing to beat on that drum.
And that's a lot where we've been into Silver Grid Gold.
We're quite a unique organization.

(06:56):
Normally financial institutions are going to be attached, but we have a different mandate.
We wanted to be able to help our members and we think silver and gold, other precious metals
are one of the best ways to be able to protect the financial being, especially in a very
inflationary environment.

(07:16):
I'm getting a couple of comments there that your mic sounds a little bit muffled.
It wasn't too bad on my end, but it might just be, yeah, that might be a little bit
better.
So what I'm getting there, Brett, is you and Bow Valley, you seem to believe in individual
choice and individual decision.
And I guess you could call that personal sovereignty.

(07:38):
And that kind of has become part of the business model at Bow Valley Credit Union.
Is that an accurate statement?
Yeah, no, it's an accurate statement.
And personal liberty is a big value of ours as an organization.
And frankly, we don't care where you are on the political spectrum or any spectrum for

(08:03):
that case.
And it's basically we are chosen to be an organization that's trying to keep all of
that out of our organization.
And we frankly have no business in knowing where people stand, for example, politically.
That's not what we do.
We are here as a financial institution to provide a financial service, maybe give some

(08:27):
economic advice.
And that's about it.
And that's all we want to be.
So you're in the business of banking and you're not interested in pushing anybody else's ideologies
on your customers.
That's fantastic because today we see a lot of big companies using their clout as economic
superpowers in order to advance ideologies that many of us don't believe in.

(08:48):
So, Nick, where does Silver Gold Bull fit in on all of this?
Because I see frequently, Bull Valley Credit Union and Silver Gold Bull are involved in
a lot of the same things.
You guys are kind of seem to be aligned business minded a little bit.
What exactly is it that you guys are aligned with or how do you work together?

(09:11):
Particularly us with BVCU, they're just there, obviously they're the proponents of gold and
silver, et cetera, which is, you know, I was right up our alley.
They're also just awesome people.
So that's kind of cool.
Like, I mean, I don't really do much of this.

(09:31):
I was saying to you, Chris, just before we started that, you know, Silver Gold Bull and
the partners that started it are not particularly public people.
But you know, I'll do it to make, you know, for the opportunity to make Brett squirm a
little bit.
Truthfully, there was kind of a moment in time where in terms of us working together,

(09:58):
my partners and I, we have to be careful with what we do.
You know, again, we're apolitical as well.
I think the majority of our customers are conservative, libertarian, pretty self-explanatory
that way.
But, you know, we do have now, you know, a majority shareholder that's Fortune 500 based
in the States, you know, those kinds of things.
We have to be a little bit careful, but we do feel a responsibility.

(10:20):
We're Albertans, we're Canadians, sometimes maybe more in that order than other.
And, you know, we do feel as though we've been blessed.
We've grown a large company.
We've attained success.
I think we've done it the right way and the honest way.
And I think our customers would attest to that.

(10:41):
And so as a consequence, we have taken more opportunities to support different causes,
whether that's with our presence or sponsorship.
You know, the Tucker Carlson thing was an example.
And really, there's just been a number of things and things that are actually, you know,
up and coming, which BBCU and Silver Gold Bull, you know, I mean, we're careful with

(11:04):
it and I think we're tactful in the way that we go about this, but we really enjoy each
other's company.
I think we're a great complement for one another.
And we both believe in a lot of the same things, be it, you know, with regards to freedom or,
you know, like financial sovereignty, as it were, we are aligned.
And so I think we make a great team that way.

(11:27):
Awesome.
I'm just going to ask, I know I see Bonnie in the comments there.
Bonnie, if you don't mind, can you please put up the links to Silver Gold Bull and to
Bull Valley Credit Union so people can check them out while we're talking about this stuff
regarding Silver Gold Bull?
What exactly, for those that haven't already Googled you, what exactly do you guys do?

(11:49):
Yeah, so we are the largest dealer in physical precious metals in Canada, one of the largest
in North America.
We started in 2009 in the back of a restaurant.
So I mean, Chris, the story should resonate for you.
We started in the back of Griller's Steakhouse in the Walking Eagle Hotel in Rocky Mountain

(12:14):
House, Alberta.
And fast forward a number of years, here we are, we do about a billion in sales annually.
And we are pretty much vertically integrated and we don't mint ourselves, but our now sort
of parent code does a lot.
They're the largest distributor of precious metals in the world.

(12:35):
But ourselves, we sell physical precious metals, so coins, bars, rounds, we do the RSP program
and supply all the metal to that in the country.
We do fully allocated segregated storage.
And as you're going to hear, we also offer a sort of a fractional gold and silver sales
platform which BBCU is leveraging for their e-metals.

(12:59):
So we kind of do it all.
If it's gold and silver related, the collateralization too.
So if you want to take a loan against gold or silver and it's in our storage program,
then that's possible as well.
So we really pretty much anything to do with gold and silver, we do it as long as it's
not paper.
It's not a copy paper.
There is a phrase out there.
It's the, I call it the golden rule.

(13:20):
And so does my friend Dennis.
It goes, he who has the gold rules.
Yeah.
So you both obviously believe in the importance of holding physical assets, physical metals.
Brett, how does that work into banking and why did you guys choose as an organization
to pursue a physically backed model for your banking?

(13:42):
It's important to note that we do have a hundred percent deposit guarantee.
That's guaranteed by our regulator, the current deposit guarantee corporation.
So that is a protection from your nominal value of your money.

(14:03):
So what I mean about nominal value is basically digits on the screen.
So if you have a hundred dollars in your bank account, it's guaranteed no matter what happens
in the world, you're always going to have that hundred dollars in your account.
But what it doesn't do is protect you against inflation and actual products and services
being basically withered away.

(14:25):
And I think it's pretty safe to say that we've seen a lot of that over the last three, four,
five years.
That tomato in the grocery store used to be a buck.
Now it's five.
And so that's basically the real value of your purchasing power declining.
And so frankly, in my mind, I feel it's a fiduciary duty of us as a financial institution,

(14:48):
especially a credit union, to help people recognize that and protect their products
and services that they're going to buy in the future from inflation proofing.
And so the big difference between us and as far as I know, it's the first in Canada, is
that we have a store of value in gold and silver.

(15:13):
And I can describe that a little bit, but it also, you need the ability to have a medium
exchange to basically spend the money into the actual economy.
So the store of value piece is really important, especially at Silver Gold Bull because they
do all the storage, they have the security in place, they have the insurance in place,

(15:37):
they have the policies and procedures in place to be able to properly store that metals.
And if you know a little bit about precious metals is the premiums are a lot lower on
1,000 ounce bars than they are, say, on a one ounce gold coin.
And so part of the challenge is maybe there's some people that can afford a one ounce coin

(16:00):
out there, but there's not a whole lot of people that can afford a thousand ounce bar.
And so the premiums are much higher on that smaller amount than they are on that thousand
ounce bar.
So basically what we've done in partnership with Silver Gold Bull is tokenize that thousand
ounce bar into, so you own a fraction up to a hundredth of an ounce of that thousand

(16:22):
ounce bar of Gold in a store of value.
So it's really accessible to a lot of people.
Today maybe a hundredth of an ounce of Gold would be $36 or something like that, which
is really reasonable for people.
But whereas an ounce of Gold would be, like you said, $4,100 Canadian.

(16:43):
So we're allowing for the ability for you to store your wealth in precious metals, but
easily transition over to fiat currency.
And so you can effectively hold your value in Gold and Silver, transfer it across to
Bovalli Credit Union and buy a cup of coffee if you wanted to.
And it happens very seamlessly at very low premiums and it's really accessible to a lot

(17:08):
of the population.
So that would be the program that I was kind of alluding to before, where you can still
own your Gold, but you can back, like basically, this is layman's terms, you're backing credit
notes, which becomes your currency with Gold that you have and you're just storing it somewhere

(17:31):
where people can't go and take it.
Yeah, effectively and with an e-metals account, having Gold and Silver in your e-metals account,
your money is backed by Gold or Silver.
Now up until, oh, I don't know, about 20 years ago, Canada even backed some of their currency
with Gold.

(17:51):
And at one time, I think we backed most of it with Gold.
And it seems like economies all over the world have kind of shifted from that model, including
the United States.
There's been people that kind of sounded the alarm about that saying that that was not
a good idea that we move to a completely economy backed currency.

(18:11):
Now what's either of your thought on that?
We see entire nations divesting away from Gold.
What kind of consequence could that mean for their economy or their currency in the event
of tough times?

(18:31):
Well, the early 70s and the fall of Bretton Woods and the moving off of the Gold standard
and to the fiat system that we have now, there's probably an argument.
Rather than being an absolutist and just saying, oh, it was completely stupid.

(18:53):
In hindsight, yeah, it probably was.
But that's probably more of a function of human nature than it is that it just could
never work.
It's just that we want to spend our money on the most absurd things.
If you're looking right now, just today, for instance, as they're going through that USAID

(19:14):
program that they're just rolling down in the States and the literal trillions of dollars
that are getting spent on like, I don't want to be controversial, but like obscene story
times for kids in other countries where they're teaching them all this crazy ideology and
stuff like that's what happens when you have cheap money.

(19:34):
You could go all the way upstream and say, if you fix cheap money, you probably fix a
lot of the world's problems.
So coming back to it practically, going off the Gold standard created flexibility in the
global economy.
Everybody having the Gold moving around, little bit cumbersome, but ultimately it gives you

(19:55):
a true measure of the wealth of the country and the security of their currency.
Not having it gets us where we are now.
A corollary to that would be to say, okay, well, Canada doesn't even have any Gold in
its treasury, but United States has 8,000 tons, allegedly.
But let's just say for argument's sake, they do.
Germany has tons.

(20:15):
The UK, that's interesting right now because of what's going on with the LBMA and you're
seeing a lot of stuff about it getting drained.
But most Western countries always had Gold and the global South, so that's China, Russia,
Vietnam, Thailand, et cetera, all these other countries in the BRICS nations are accumulating

(20:36):
like crazy.
So where that puts those countries, I mean, I think number one, that's insulating those
countries against what the US has been doing, which is leveraging the SWIFT system, the
global payment system that they run as a weapon in a sanctions regime that they've been running.
So they've probably pushed too far.

(20:57):
They've pushed a lot of countries into trying to insulate themselves from being a victim
of that, but that will only bolster those countries, their balance sheets, not necessarily
their currency per se, but it really will steady the country and it could create an
incredible opportunity for them down the road in something that we might talk about a little

(21:19):
bit later.
In Canada, where we don't have any Gold in the treasury, I believe they did it because
they thought it would create more flexibility for them.
It is really stupid for a country as rich as ours to just hold a portion of their treasury
in Gold as opposed to just buying 10 years or shorter term treasuries, American treasuries

(21:47):
for their foreign reserves.
It doesn't make any sense.
I mean, I don't know why they would be so binary.
It would be all or nothing.
The one thing we do have in Canada is we have an abundance of Gold in the ground.
And I think that that's something that I have no insight into whether Pierre or Pauliyev,
if he becomes prime minister, which he should, will do anything about.
He does seem like a hard money person to some extent, but I do think there's an opportunity

(22:11):
to rectify this and relatively quickly if they were smart about it, because not having
Gold, I believe, is going to end up being a problem if countries end up remonetizing
their Gold holdings and what we would call mark to marketing it.

(22:32):
Most of them are holding it on their balance sheets at like 20 bucks, 50 bucks an ounce,
a hundred some bucks an ounce.
They've never revalued their Gold.
If the US, for instance, revalued their Gold right now, they'd be talking about, you know,
at present value, it'd be somewhere in the neighborhood of, you know, probably about
a trillion dollars at $10,000 Gold, probably looking at something closer to like 10 trillion

(22:54):
or sorry, three trillion dollars, which wouldn't fix their debt because that's not the intention,
but it would clean up a lot of their balance sheet issues and give them a lot more room
to borrow or do whatever they might need to.
So I think there is a missed opportunity there in Canada for sure.
It's probably important to note, Chris, that it is right in the Federal Reserve Act that

(23:16):
they can do this.
They can revalue the Gold that's sitting on the Fed's balance sheet, which is something
that they've done before and people have just forgotten about.
Well Gold's been an interesting story even in our recent history.

(23:36):
I mean, in the United States, at one point, they wouldn't let citizens own more than
X amount of Gold and they just kind of, they drew it all back to the government, you know,
and when I hear about things like that or read them, and I haven't looked too much
into it, but it kind of makes me wonder, has there been a movement, maybe even globally,

(23:58):
to prevent people from being financially sovereign?
We look at other countries and they go through tough times and the government just says,
okay, well, we're taking 10% of your money out of your bank account and there's nothing
you can say about it.
We're just taking it because we need to pay down our debt.
So that tells me that oftentimes we might think we own these things, but only to find

(24:21):
out later through extraordinary things like that, that we didn't really own it in the
first place.
So Brett, bringing this back to an individual thing, what is an individual person's benefit
to doing business with Bow Valley?
Yeah, well, I just want to touch on that one point there and you talk about coming in and

(24:43):
confiscating 10% of your savings or something like that.
That's effectively what inflation is doing.
They just don't need your permission to do it.
They just go in the background and print currency.
So now, specifically with the e-metals account, you can take every red cent, even though I
don't recommend this, but you could take every red cent of savings and put it in e-metals

(25:08):
account, keep it stored in gold and silver, and then basically just pay your bills as
you go.
And so just what world do we live in, but maybe your bills are $500 a month or something
like that.
You could just transfer your savings over from silver and gold and put it into a checking
or savings account at Bow Valley Credit Union and basically use it to pay bills, pay off

(25:32):
your credit card, pay you utilities, get a bit of cash out, whatever you want to do with
that.
And so it really, in my mind, we're getting a little bit more macro here with this, but
I think that's what Trump is suggesting when he says he wants everybody to continue to

(25:54):
be in the world reserve currency in US dollars.
And so I don't think necessarily he cares too much about whether you use it as a medium
exchange like buying goods and services, but he wants to plunk as many people as he can
into using the US dollar so he could effectively devalue the US dollar and spread the inflation

(26:16):
around the world and spread the problem of inflation around the world is effectively
what I think he's trying to do.
Yeah, inflation.
I mean, the last new truck I bought, now I always bought nice trucks, but the last brand
new truck I bought cost me 72,000.

(26:36):
The equivalent truck now is about 145,000.
That's a pretty big difference.
And really, I mean, we're not talking about that much more value of a truck.
And you could even bring it, you could bring it back to something smaller like, oh, what's
a good example, a Subway sandwich.
I mean, 10 years ago, I think about 10 years ago, I was livid when a Subway sandwich went

(27:01):
over $10 and now they're 16, 17.
Our money is worth much less than it used to be.
And I think people have this misconception that things are getting more expensive.
That sandwich isn't really much more expensive than it used to be.
It's just what we're using to purchase it isn't worth as much, right?

(27:22):
That's fair.
Yeah.
Well, and you see it in the price of precious metals.
So from a year ago, the price of gold has gone up 40%, over 40%.
So if you translate that into currency, effectively, don't think of it as the value of gold going

(27:43):
up.
Think of it as your currency getting devalued by 40% in the last year.
Look at silver.
Just look at silver.
It's frustrating.
Makes you want to pull your hair out, gives you grace.
But effectively, we're at almost all time highs.

(28:04):
We're maybe $3 off all time highs in Canadian dollars.
And meanwhile, we are, what are we, we're $17 off of all time highs in US dollars.
We're nowhere close in US dollars, but in Canadian dollars, we're right there.
That is entirely our currency being devalued before us.

(28:25):
So yeah, effectively, all those examples are perfect.
I only use it just because it's kind of like this asset hasn't moved and yet the value
in Canadian dollars has gone up just because Muppets run our country and have crushed the
value of our dollar.
Yeah.
That's what I believe in Alberta sovereignty, 100%.

(28:49):
And one of the things that, unfortunately, one of the things that we could never really
take control of within this confederation is our currency and the way that's managed.
No matter what we do in the West, we're always subject to the consequences of federal government
policies.
And whatever decisions they make affect our, they affect our inflation, they affect our

(29:14):
buying power on global markets, all sorts of things.
And Alberta really can't do much about it.
And we really haven't, I mean, it's been annoying, but we haven't cared too much because Alberta
has a higher, generally we have a higher income than other provinces.
We do fairly well.
We have lots of resources and things are usually pretty good here, so we don't pay too much

(29:36):
attention to it.
But I think maybe now it might be time for people to really start paying attention because
things are changing and they're changing fast.
40% in a matter of, in how long was that?
12 months, one year.
40% in one year.
Is that like looking at this from a banker's perspective, an expert on finances and world

(29:58):
markets and things, is that something to be alarmed about?
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And the thing is it compounds when, I have to be careful.
I'm not supposed to pound on Mark Kearney anymore.
And they're in the media talking about this tariff issue and basically saying, well, don't

(30:21):
worry.
Any worker that gets put out of business or a job because of tariffs or something like
that, we're going to come in and be able to backstop you.
Effectively, that's a universal basic income is what they're talking about.
And they did the same thing during COVID.
It's like, you can't work, you don't have a job, sit at home, no problem, we'll pay

(30:43):
your bills.
It's a universal banking income and very massively inflationary.
And so when you get to the point where politicians realize that they can print themselves into
positions of power, it becomes a very dangerous time for the currency specifically.

(31:03):
And to be fair, it took me so long and still I'm trying to grapple with this idea.
When you think about the evolution of everybody in the comments watching what have you, they're
at different stages in their journey of understanding sovereignty, whatever that might mean, in
this case, financial sovereignty.

(31:25):
And I was trying to figure out what the impacts of the 08 financial crisis were.
We had this remarkable crash in stocks, equities, and it's like this V-shaped recovery.
And there was all this talk about quantitative easing, quantitative easing.
You heard all the analogies about printer gold burn, whatever.

(31:48):
And we didn't really feel inflation.
It didn't really bite.
Everybody was talking about it.
It wasn't happening.
And it all clicked when COVID happened because COVID was about the nastiest combination of
things you could possibly have done from an inflationary standpoint.
You gave people all this money.

(32:08):
You put it straight into their pocket.
And at the same time, you completely crushed the supply side of all of our markets.
So you made it impossible to produce new stuff because you kept everybody at home.
Everybody was bored, had money in their pockets.
And so they were spending on camping stuff, new cars, this, that, what have you.

(32:31):
And really it took probably still to this day.
We haven't fixed any of the supply side.
The inflationary story got away from us.
And so certainly when I, the minute that I heard that the, like I have no problem shitting
on Carney.
I'm not in banking, so I'm fine to say it.
Sorry?

(32:51):
Yeah.
Anyways, when I heard these policies, I thought right away, well, here we go.
Because again, like it's one thing, QE was horrible.
I mean, it expanded the money supply enormously.
But what ended up happening is that money all got hoarded by banks and they never really
released it.
So we didn't feel it.
And then they just used it to buy up all kinds of equities, run them up in price.

(33:16):
But again, that money kind of stayed off to the side.
It wasn't really in the public.
And Brad, if you want to interject at any point, or if you disagree with anything by
all means, this is completely different.
You're saying to people, our policies, much like COVID, are going to put you out of work.
But don't worry, we're going to put money in your bank account.

(33:38):
You'll be fine.
Well, it'll be the exact same thing.
I think in this instance, people likely would be a little bit more fiscally responsible
because three years of 10 to 15% persistent inflation has, I wouldn't say it's wisen people
up, but it's put people in a bad spot.
But still, you'd have a ton of money flooding into the system and driving up the cost of

(34:02):
everything.
It's just awful.
It's so sad.
It's so foolish.
Anytime the government says, don't worry, I worry now, for sure.
But in this case, I'm not a great person with accounting or bookkeeping.

(34:22):
I get the idea.
One of the basic things is there's a ledger and whatever happens on one side, there's
a consequence on the other side.
So when the government says, okay, we're going to pay you all of this money, what's happening
on the other side of that ledger?
Because it has to come from somewhere and the government has no money.

(34:44):
So who's paying for that?
I can weigh in a little bit.
So stemming back to how is money created?
And so there's effectively two major ways that currency is created.
The one way is your more traditional way and why we saw inflation in the 70s.

(35:11):
And it was a commercial credit boom.
And so what I mean when I say that is if you go to say RBC and you want to buy a house
or something like that, you'll never hear RBC go, oh, you know what?
Darn it.
You're a really good credit score and we really want to give you this money for buying this

(35:31):
house.
But gosh darn it, we're just out of money.
They'll never say that.
They'll just go in because what they're called is a direct clear with the Bank of Canada.
What they do is they just go knock on the Bank of Canada store and say, hey, listen,
we need a line of credit.
Can you give it to us because we want to give out this loan for this mortgage?
And they go, sure.
And they give the line of credit.

(35:52):
That is effectively the creation of money.
Now think about it on the same side as the government.
It's when Christia Freeland stands up there and says, hey, you know, you got a check,
you got a check, everybody gets a check.
The money has to basically be created one of a couple of ways through the government

(36:14):
doing that.
But the main way they would do it is they actually sell Treasury bonds into the marketplace.
But part of the challenge is when you sell too many Treasury bonds into the market, basically
investors say, that's getting to be useless.
I'm concerned about default risk.
I'm going to demand more interest on those Treasury bonds.

(36:38):
And so now if nobody's buying those Treasury bonds, effectively the yield on those goes
through the roof.
So it's like, at 5%, I'm not interested in that Treasury bond.
10%, OK, yeah, that sounds good.
But that's much too expensive for governments to pay for.
So then what happens is the Bank of Canada steps in again and buys all those Treasury

(37:00):
bills and effectively monetizes the debt is what it's called.
And so inherently, again, you're spitting the money out into the economy and it's monetized
at the Bank of Canada and it's going to be inflationary.
Yeah, because it's a Ponzi scheme.
Yes, it is.
Full stop.
Like if you're creating the Treasuries and then ultimately your arms length separate

(37:26):
entity over here is the one buying them again with its own money.
It's I mean, that's a scary situation.
I don't remember where I was reading this, but one of the things that came out of COVID
was the corporate welfare was just out of control.
QE was problematic.

(37:47):
They had to be very careful of the things that they were doing because the public was
starting to get ornery about fiscal policies, etc.
And so they created a bunch of loans for large corporate entities and then they forgave the
loans, which is effectively backdoor quantitative easing again.

(38:10):
I think it will be very interesting in telling when the government does eventually change
how many of the promises can actually be maintained.
I have a feeling, you always hear that, oh, we opened the books and they were worse than
what we thought.
Oh, I think this is going to be a doozy.
This nine years, 10 years of this government is probably going to be the stuff of legend.

(38:38):
Would that be my guess?
Not much would surprise me now.
Some of the stuff coming out of the Doge reports in the United States, by the way, I don't
think it's going to be much different when we start looking into things in Canada.
Some of the things that are coming out of there is like they funded dance parties in

(39:05):
other countries.
They funded people doing research on the habits of shrimp on treadmills, like just the most
ludicrous things that you could ever imagine is where the value that I would create as
a productive citizen is going through taxation.

(39:27):
The government is taxing me and then using that money that really has value because I
made it to fund things that I have absolutely no interest in, aren't going to benefit me,
probably won't benefit humanity as a whole.
And it's like, we're not even talking about just a few thousand or a hundred thousand
or millions, we're billions and billions of dollars.

(39:47):
We've spent billions.
We have spent billions shipping money to the US to procure 155 millimeter shelves to send
over to Ukraine to blow up Russians or themselves.
And wherever you fit on that, you know, in that hot potato of a topic, it doesn't matter.

(40:10):
Like our money is going to go, like is being spent to blow up people.
And the other examples that you give are totally true.
I mean, I was just going through a lot of them today from the Doge reports and, you
know, specifically again, USAID and like hearing that the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts

(40:31):
got like they have 600, hell was it, it's like half a half a trillion dollars or something
in assets and they're getting hundreds, they got hundreds of millions of dollars through
COVID and their CEO makes 1.4 million and all these other, and they're all insiders.
It's just money laundering.

(40:52):
It's regime change, it's color revolutions, it's all this nonsense and like genuinely
eggs cost whatever 12 bucks for two dozen or 13, 14, 15 bucks for two dozen at Costco
or whatever.
People are struggling, like it's life is nuts and they might as well just put a barrel in

(41:15):
front of your house, an oil drum, put your tax dollars in it, light it on fire and keep
themselves warm while you're inside your house cold.
That's effectively what's happening right now.
And it is, it's insufferable.
Like it's so, it's so hard to comprehend.
And yet we get gaslit and told that we have to, we have to like it.

(41:37):
Yeah, yeah, of course.
And if we don't, then we're one of the classicists that they like to refer to anybody who disagrees
with them as.
Okay, so we've got some problems.
They're probably fairly, you know, they're probably more significant than problems we
may have seen in the past.
I have a feeling we're going to be going through some pretty difficult times.

(41:59):
So do either of you have any advice or any ideas for things that the average person could
do to help themselves get through an impending economic crisis?
I'll start, I guess.

(42:20):
I'm a big promoter of gold and silver, so take this with the grain of salt as well.
But I think it's getting almost critical that you own at least some precious metals.
And I don't mean go overboard and take every red cent that you have and put it into precious
metals.
A little will go a long way, but 10, 15% of your net worth into precious metals is a pretty

(42:48):
darn good start.
Don't get into any long term deposits.
So don't get into five year, 10 year deposit GIC terms.
They'll get eaten away by inflation.
Stay in the shorter term stuff, you know, year, two years maximum of GICs so you can

(43:11):
reprice it if you need to be able to do that.
Get into hard assets.
If you're able, you know, own your own property, it will go up in value.
There are risks around all these things.
Keep in mind.
And that's probably a pretty darn good start of thinking.

(43:33):
Yeah, I don't disagree.
I have no qualifications for telling people what to do with money.
I think it's like the absolute hardest thing to be confident about.
But I do believe in two overriding principles.
And one is discharge your debt to whatever extent you can get out of debt.

(43:58):
I know there's the notion of inflation, et cetera, inflating away your debt, but ultimately,
yeah, getting rid of your debt is probably a big one.
And then diversification.
So there's a notion with, you know, precious metals or whatever, you know, if if what you
did is keeping you up at night.
So if your purchase of whatever it might be gold, silver widgets, Bitcoin doesn't much

(44:25):
matter if your purchase of those particular things are keeping you up at night, you may
have an outsized position.
Your position might be too big for your comfort level.
You know, I think being calm in, you know, and strategizing the if you haven't got any,
your entry points is really important.

(44:47):
You don't have to do everything all at once.
You can cost average by, for instance, you have a little bit of money.
Let's just use BBC you as an example.
So the benefit of the metals account is, as Brett was saying, your your entry point is
smaller, your premiums above spot price, the market, that floating market price are smaller

(45:08):
because you're buying a fraction of a bigger bar.
Now, you might worry at some point.
Well, what if I need that gold?
That's something that BBC you can help you with.
There are mechanisms for turning that those positions into physical metals.
But in in essence, you know, you buy a little at a time, whether it's, you know, biweekly,
monthly, what have you, or if you do come into a windfall, you can, you know, allocate

(45:33):
a certain portion of it to gold and silver.
You can buy some crypto, you can buy a few different things.
But I do believe that that Brett is on to something when he says hard assets.
There are some really, you just we don't know what's coming around the corner, whether it's
a crazy inflationary situation, a crazy deflationary situation.

(45:53):
But if you're in hard assets, at least you know, you have something tangible that's in
your hand that someone can't take away from you.
And in that respect, it'll give you a measure of comfort and stability.
And you can still have a portfolio of stocks or you can have money with a money manager
or you can do GICs and other money market products, which you know, as interest rates

(46:15):
go back down, you know, assuming they continue, which I don't know that they will, those get
a little less attractive, but you can spread your money around.
You don't have to do all one thing.
In fact, it's probably advisable not to put everything in any one basket.
I've heard that before.
Fifteen years ago, when my my my son wasn't born yet, I decided, you know what, I'm going

(46:38):
to do something responsible.
I'm going to buy this registered education savings plan.
The government's going to match a little bit.
And by the time he's ready to go to college, there's going to be some money there.
So I put in like, I think, six thousand dollars or something like that.
Fifteen years ago.
I think 15 years ago, gold was like.
Eight hundred dollars or something.
I can't remember exactly what it was.

(46:59):
It wasn't a thousand.
That registered that education savings plan today is worth sixty five hundred dollars.
That's not a lot of that's not a lot of return on a 15 year investment.
And now I start to think, OK, if I if I end and just here, just what do you call it?

(47:21):
Disclaimer here, if anyone wants financial advice, all you got to do is look what I've
done and do the complete opposite and then you'll probably do well.
But the George Stanzas thing.
Bingo.
Exactly.
I can make a good hamburger, but managing my money is not the best.
I think about people that have a considerable amount of wealth right now.
And we've always been taught, save your money, save your money, have a savings account, put

(47:43):
your money away in an R.S.P., do all these things.
Right.
But it occurred to me a little while ago that those things don't actually exist.
That's a piece of paper that says that you have these things and you're going to get
the money back someday.
Maybe when you take it out and pay a crap ton of taxes to do it.
If something ever went really, really wrong, as we've seen many times in the past, there

(48:06):
really is very little value in those.
But if you instead put some or a bunch of that in a physical asset like gold and stored
it in a vault and left it there, that seems like it might be a safer thing.
It seems like it might be.

(48:27):
I don't know if it's more responsible thing, but to me, it's a better idea.
But you can't spend that.
Or can you, Brett?
Well, there's different scenarios.
And I think generally people are on a spectrum.
So they're on the spectrum of, yeah, it's going to be a little bit inflationary, but

(48:51):
I can manage it type thing.
And then way over on the other end of the spectrum, it's going to be Mad Max world and
good luck.
But in that type of circumstance, it's like the three Bs that are basically going to prevail.
Beans, bullets, and blowjobs are going to be your currency.

(49:14):
That's not the currency that we're protecting ourselves from.
We're protecting ourselves from an inflationary environment.
Things might get a little hairy.
Governments will do what they've always done.
And if we run into problems, they're going to print.
There's precedent over thousands of years over something like this.

(49:38):
So that Mad Max scenario, good luck to you.
Gold and silver probably aren't going to do you much good.
But the thing is, what we're talking about is a scenario where it's pretty bad.
It'll protect you.
And governments will do what they inevitably do in print.

(50:01):
You could.
You can obviously, this isn't part of when you call into silver, gold, bull, it's not
like why do I buy gold and silver?
Because the end of the world, to be honest with you, I just loathe.
That is actually one of the things that our industry has done so wrong relative to Bitcoin.

(50:24):
Bitcoiners, it's going to a trillion dollars.
There's no stopping it.
It's just the most positive conversation in the world.
And God bless them for it.
But the truth of the matter is gold and silver have been money.
I mean, literal money.
Silver pre-67 coins in Canada and the United States were made up of 80% silver in Canada,

(50:49):
90% silver in the United States.
Silver was literally money.
It was right through the Roman times, ancient Greece, et cetera.
So you could, of course, from a barter standpoint.
It does exist.
I think they're what Bull Valley Credit Union is doing.
And I think ultimately what we've been toying with, this has been done before, but having

(51:10):
a storage account and potentially being able to use prepaid mastercards with a floating
balance or you can just say, I want to sell a little bit of my metal, fund my credit card.
Those are things that really just need a critical mass of people that request them.
And they're pretty easy to set up.
Like from a technology standpoint, it's not complicated.
And then yeah, effectively people can have a bank account of gold and silver.

(51:35):
But before I move forward, there was a comment from somebody.
It was from Mark German.
And he actually asked if maybe it's a bad time to buy gold because of all the inflationary
pressure on it and the fact that it's already gone up.
And if you don't mind it, I would like to address that potentially.
Yeah, Mark and to the group, there are never any guarantees with anything in life.

(52:01):
It doesn't matter what it is except what death and taxes.
But ultimately what we're seeing, yeah, there is.
What we're seeing at the moment is, and I'm really glad you kind of asked this, there's
been this pervasive conversation about the bullion banks.
So Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Scotiabar, before they imploded, et cetera, that suppress

(52:28):
the price of metals.
Now they still probably they still are effectively doing it in silver.
Silver is a complicated metal.
I love it.
I own a lot of it.
I am an insane believer in it and it's going to have its day.
It's just silver is a it's almost more of like an industrial metal with precious properties

(52:49):
now because it's used in so many different applications that there's a lot of price sensitivity
there for industry.
But again, that's just something where effectively the horses are going to be out of the barn
at some point and there's going to be no corralling them.
Gold on the other hand was suppressed for a long time because it was basically viewed
as this this thing that was supposed to be in an inverse relationship to the US dollar.

(53:15):
Dollar goes up, gold goes down, gold goes up, dollar goes down.
Well now that's not the case anymore.
Now gold and the dollar go up at the same time and it's not even a big deal.
And furthermore, I mean, for those that are familiar with the Federal Reserve in the United
States, they don't seem to care about the price of gold anymore.
And that's amazing.

(53:35):
Countries around the world, China and Russia, have obviously taken the lead.
China has been there's a lot of interesting reporting out there that China has been under
reporting their gold purchases for the last few years.
They're buying insane amounts of gold.
And again, we talked about it earlier.
All these these BRICS countries, the global south are buying as a hedge against whatever

(54:00):
might come down the road plus insulation and insurance against potential sanctions.
But it's just there is just too much central bank buying of gold.
And in all fairness, it's probably the case, it's not a guarantee, but it's probably the
case that a lot of them are starting to look at it and say, gold's going to get revalued

(54:20):
at some point.
There's just way too much of an opportunity to push the price of gold up since all the
key countries in the world hold so much of it.
And again, coming back to it, if they are in a fiscal situation, that's a problematic
moment in time, as long as there's consensus across the board with all these countries
to revalue gold, let's just say hypothetically, five thousand, six thousand, seven, ten thousand,

(54:45):
who knows?
It doesn't matter.
I'm not trying to drive FOMO.
I'm just part of a conversation.
It just seems like there's just there's kind of no stopping it.
So of course, you could buy gold and it might go down.
But I think these are things that you think of from a long term perspective.
Like we're not talking about a trade.
We're talking about the accumulation of assets.

(55:06):
Sometimes in that respect, it kind of doesn't matter.
The Canadian dollar could strengthen and it'll take some of the upside out of out of gold.
But it's just it feels like the it's kind of in that case, the horse is out of the barn.
Like gold is just doing what it wants to do.
And it's been held back for so long that it just seems to be on a slow, steady climb higher.

(55:31):
One of my friends really I asked that same question.
I was like, well, why would I want to buy gold now?
It's going up so much.
I'll just wait till it goes down.
He said, well, hold on a second.
Think of it this way.
If you have a dollar and a dollar worth of gold and a loaf of bread and the loaf of bread
is worth a dollar, they're all worth the same amount.
Now if your dollar is devalued, the gold remains the same.

(55:55):
The bread remains the same.
It costs more of the devalued dollar to buy the bread, but the same amount of gold.
If you go the other way and your dollar is worth more, you're going to buy the same amount
or more bread.
So the gold was what had the intrinsic, the bread has the intrinsic value to you.

(56:16):
The gold reflects the value.
And so if your dollar goes, I'm not doing as good of a job, but if your dollar goes
up and the gold is worth less of those dollars, it's still worth the same physical product.
You're going to still buy the same amount of stuff with that amount of gold.
You know what I'm saying?
It's that analogy of like gold has always bought a finely tailored men's suit.

(56:43):
I mean, now it's a tool, but yeah, no, I get the dollars change.
And you know, let's not forget, like obviously we are advocates for, for gold and silver
because that's the nature of what we do, but we could just as easily be having this conversation
about.
I mean, it's broad terms crypto, but you could have this conversation about Bitcoin for instance,
too.

(57:04):
And it probably should go in, you know, or could go into part of that portfolio of holdings
of alternative hard assets.
You know, it's, it could be, it could be a bunch of different things just for the benefit
of the conversation.
We just happen to know a ton about banking and gold, but, but yeah, you could substitute
other hard assets in and it's again, it's much the same.

(57:27):
Stone, uh, summed it up perfectly.
I can eat the bread and the baker of the bread has to want my gold or I get no bread.
That's kind of, that's bingo exactly it.
So that actually brings me back to something else.
And you both kind of touched on this and I really appreciate it because you don't hear
this too much from other, uh, gold and silver guys.

(57:49):
You mentioned that, um, yeah, it's, it's good to do these things, but in a mad max scenario,
like in a pocket post-apocalyptic world or whatever, there's things that hold value that
don't have the same value right now.
Like if, if there's scarce, if food is scarce, that's more valuable than money that isn't

(58:10):
worth anything.
It's more valuable than gold.
So you know, if you want to, if you want to protect your wealth, you can buy gold, silver
and get through or precious metals, get through some weird financial times.
If you want to protect yourself, you have to be sovereign in other areas.
You have to be able to produce your own food.
You have to have medicine.
You have to be able to protect yourself.
You know, you have to be able to supply yourself with energy to get through harsh winters and

(58:34):
stuff.
So this whole idea of personal or personal sovereignty and independence, there's a lot
of other things that become very, very important, critically important in the worst of times.
And we've, we saw this in Venezuela.
We saw this in, in Russia when I was a kid.
I mean, twice in what seven years, the Russian dollar completely collapsed and nothing was

(58:56):
worth it.
It wasn't worth anything anymore.
It was so bad.
It was so bad at one point that they were buying TVs.
They would buy anything.
Like you would never think of buying a TV as a place to put your money because the bugs
in their case, the ruble was capitulating.
But I know for us super interestingly, these stories are going away.
I'm not on phones anymore, but I remember hearing stories from survivors of Weimar Germany

(59:23):
talking about how they survived because of a tin of coins.
Like it just, again, going back to it, silver content in the coins or having, you know,
gold sovereigns and things like that.
These were not rich people.
They were just people that happened to allocate some of their money into a tin.
Now if that happens, that's, you know, that we've got much bigger problems than buying,

(59:49):
you know, something like gold or silver.
But the fact that these things have happened, and I think part of the problem, you know,
I can't help but think would be the fact that we really have, we're so far removed from
hard times.
I'm no different than the rest that, you know, it is hard to fathom what would happen and
are we prepared for it?

(01:00:09):
And it isn't really that hard to be prepared, but you know, I have a few months of dry food
in the house and water filtration and things like that.
Like,
And that's where you have to be on that spectrum, right?
Like you have to be ready for every situation.
Like in 10 years from now, you could be sitting on tons of water and tons of food and tons

(01:00:33):
of bullet in your bunker.
And meanwhile, the world's going on without you.
So you almost need to think about all these scenarios.
So and frankly, if you want to sit in your bunker and that's believe where you're going
is the nuclear apocalypse.
What are you doing sitting on this podcast for you should be out prepping.
So yeah,

(01:00:53):
Well, maybe they're listening to it on earbuds while they're stocking their bunkers.
But that's a really good point.
You know, we're having this conversation about what, what can go wrong, you know, what do
we need to do?
How do we protect ourselves?
But there is another conversation and that of course is how do we prevent that from happening?
Right.
In Alberta, we've been working really hard to try and take back.

(01:01:15):
Well, Alberta, I mean, that was just in the news too, wasn't it?
We're trying to take back control over our, our, our destiny in this province by replacing
politicians.
We weren't aligned with our interests.
We've taken over, not taken over, but we've, we participated in democracy in more ways
than we usually had to try and make sure that we keep out of those scenarios where we have

(01:01:41):
to have the three B's and yeah, I mean, I probably go broke because I'd only have two
of them.
But anyway, yeah, we need to not only focus on or not focus on, we not, not only think
about the worst case scenario where things could end up if we don't fix things, we also
have to participate and become active in any way we can to make sure that we don't end

(01:02:06):
up in that situation because from a moral and ethical standpoint, there's, you know,
what we're talking about here is probably 15 or 20 or maybe 30% of people even think
about these things.
The rest are completely oblivious and I don't want them to have to go through that too.
So I believe that we have a duty to participate fully in democracy as best we can to try and
make sure that we have the best possible outcome.

(01:02:27):
And, and that's one of the things we talk about on this podcast quite frequently.
So I guess that is a good segue into another question I had.
And that is, and this is a question for both of you specifically for Brett, because I saw,
I read some nasty articles today from people that don't agree with anything to do with

(01:02:48):
freedom.
Why did you decide that it was important to you to kind of go against the status quo a
little bit and support things that you believed in, even though you knew that people would
probably try and persecute you for it?
At the end of the day, it was probably because of my kids and, and I'm a bit of a history

(01:03:10):
buff and there's the old saying that history, what is history isn't, isn't the repeat it
rhymes though.
We've seen this type of thing before.
And what's, what's really interesting is that I'm in contact with our regulators, as well

(01:03:34):
as some other people that I have good connections with that are from Eastern Europe or Africa.
And they've seen the story before they've been down the path and they've seen it progress
in their lifetimes of where they're going.
And they, it's a game of inches, especially with governments and they just take that little

(01:03:58):
bit of freedom, that little bit of freedom, that little bit of freedom.
And then one day they just flip the switch and say, you can't do anything about this.
And so when you have that knowledge in the back of your head and you see some of these
things like the Emergencies Act, the freezing bank accounts, it was obviously a political

(01:04:21):
protest in my mind and the government was shutting it down because of that.
Forcing vaccinations on people, basically taking away your freedom of choice, muzzling
people in the media and on social media platforms.
You look at that and you go, whenever something like that happens, it's usually the people

(01:04:44):
that are telling you those things to do and trying to censor your speech.
Those are the bad guys.
So the thing is, in my mind, there's no choice.
You have to do these things.
Otherwise you're just going to go into the slow march off the cliff.

(01:05:05):
So that's sort of my guiding light around a lot of this stuff.
And as we can see, as it happened over the last three, four or five years, it can happen
really quickly.
So think about the path that we were on and if nobody stepped up, these two gentlemen

(01:05:27):
on the podcast included, if nobody stepped up, where would we be?
And you just have to ask yourself that question.
Where would we be if nobody pushed back?
That's a really, really good question.
I often, I wonder that, but I'm going to try and play devil's advocate.

(01:05:47):
I don't know if I can do it with a straight face.
I'm going to try it.
But what do you mean, Brett?
We live in a free country and we're protected.
We have rights.
Nothing could go wrong here.
Why are you so worried?
I think I saw this on the Sean Newman podcast as he interviewed somebody and it was a constitutional

(01:06:11):
lawyer that basically was fighting against the government every single day of her working
life.
And it's like, she would be out of a job if the government didn't break the law against
constitutional rights.
And the government in its nature, the people that just gravitate towards it are power mongers

(01:06:37):
and they will grab every piece of power that they can.
And that's whether you like the politician or you don't.
And it just becomes more and more the case that I see.
And frankly, I'm actually blown away that people still have that perspective going through

(01:07:01):
what they've seen in the last three or four years.
It blows me away and if that doesn't wake you up, good luck to you.
Yeah, see our problem in the country is that, I think a lot of people when they think of
a constitution, they think first and foremost about the US constitution, which is enshrined.

(01:07:27):
And it's something that is a small pocket book.
It's been around for hundreds of years and there's still some tradition, a strong tradition
of if you're a constitutionalist, of like reading it in a literal sense.
We come from a British tradition.

(01:07:49):
The British constitution is more or less, it's made up of case law, it's oral almost.
The Canadian constitution is a living constitution and our charter of rights and freedoms are
also, it's a living document.
So it's subject to the circumstances and exigencies of the times, which is exactly what we lived

(01:08:17):
through with COVID, where they were able to violate those Nuremberg conventions, et cetera.
By virtue of the fact that there was a, what they felt was an emergency or a clear and
present danger to the country or some sort of pressing need to do it.

(01:08:39):
Even back to the notion of freedom, I've been exploring this in my head and again, I keep
thinking of it in the context of what's going on out on the border of Russia and Ukraine.
We're very much the same.
I don't know why we can't just be happy with what we, you know, our situation in life should

(01:09:01):
be such that we should be able to make the most of it, but we'll never be totally free.
We can't have, I don't know why you'd want to, but we can't have Chinese Air Force bases
in Canada.
We can't have Russian Air Force bases in Canada.
Why we would want to, I don't know.
But the point is we have this 800 pound gorilla to the south of us and they kind of dictate
what can and can't happen, but we can be wildly wealthy as a country in the process and have

(01:09:27):
up to a certain point, all kinds of freedoms.
We just seem to have lost touch with reality and we've let our politicians run roughshod
all over us.
And you know, in the name of this emergency or that emergency, they've taken all these
powers away from us and look at where it's got us, you know?

(01:09:47):
And I think, again, I look at a country like Ukraine, wherever you fail like that, whether
you're anti-Russia, pro-Russia, whatever, it doesn't matter.
Other people dictated what was going to happen to that country and now that country has lost
a huge amount of territory, much of its, you know, prime-aged males and they're basically

(01:10:10):
cannon fodder and pawns in the chess game.
So I think we do need to be aware of where we're at in life.
I think there is an amazing opportunity in front of us, but we do have to fight it for
about certain fundamentals.
The problem is, and I really empathize with people, like it's hard.

(01:10:32):
Most people have an employment contract and that employment contract says that you can't
do this or you can't do that because if you bring your company into disrepute, they shit
can you.
And so people have to be really, really careful.
And it's, you know, I know for us, like we didn't wake up on day one of our company and
say, well, you know, we're going to do this or we're going to do that or we're going to

(01:10:53):
change the world.
We were, you know, late twenties and we were just trying to build a company and build a
career and do something cool and hopefully leave a mark.
But where opportunity came and then some financial freedom came, we decided that where it was
appropriate as a company, but more importantly in our personal lives, we were going to make

(01:11:16):
more and more of an effort to do what other people can't do because again, they've got
employment, they're worried about losing their jobs, like real concerns, like real life stuff.
So that's what's kind of happened for us.
I wish it was a sexier story, but it's just really one of kind of feeling guilty and I

(01:11:36):
think rightfully guilty.
So doing what we can, where we can to try and effect some change.
I love that if everybody did that, we'd be in a much, much better spot.
And I like what you said about how laws are interpreted and stuff.
I think that's what you're getting at.
In the United States, that's been a raging debate over the last few decades was the concept

(01:11:58):
of originalism regarding their constitution.
And the debate is, should they be interpreting the constitution as it was originally written
and intended by the founding fathers or should they be interpreting it as like today's standards
where there's 576,000 different genders and there is no truth, it's all relative.

(01:12:21):
And right now the Supreme Court justices, I believe are majority originalists, which
is fantastic for the United States because it was that original document that built the
most free and economically powerful country on the planet.
That's what God is.
Free only.
The only free country on the planet.
Every other country in existence, the government gives you your rights and freedoms.

(01:12:46):
In the US, you're born with all rights and freedoms and the government takes certain
of them away from you.
Like you don't shoot somebody or whatever.
And in Canada, it's not like that.
One of the major blessings of this whole thing, and Nick, I kind of explained to you earlier

(01:13:07):
how I got thrown into this mess as a cafe owner, as a rough neck turned cafe owner,
but I got to become friends with a man named Brian Peckford.
He was the former premier of Newfoundland and he's the last living signatory to the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982, Constitution Act 1982.

(01:13:31):
And he is just beside himself because obviously he's an originalist regarding our constitution
that they debated and they had intentions and things like that.
And he was like, this is not what this section one was intended for.
It wasn't intended for a cold or a flu or even Ebola.
It was intended for a serious threat to national security where the country is threatened.

(01:13:55):
And that's the major difference between Canada and the United States right now.
The United States is focused on the original intention of their founding documents.
Canada, we're all over the map subject to activist liberal judges who are indentured
to the people that appointed them.
Yeah, I would also say one of the interesting things and what's going on in the States is,

(01:14:23):
it's so interesting.
Trump's probably the most polarizing person in history.
He probably isn't the best representative all the time.
It's pretty funny, but he can be boorish and churlish and all those kinds of things.
Oh, I think he's fantastic.
But yeah, yeah.
His policies on balance are quite good.

(01:14:45):
It's actually quite funny when you don't tell people whose policies they are.
You just share the policies and they're like, I love that.
And you're like, it's Trump and then the race, they like die inside.
Well, what's interesting is that whole Chevron deference ruling that they had in the US,
which I mean, I could appreciate if a lot of people hear that and they just glaze over

(01:15:05):
like what the hell is that?
But essentially that is what we have a problem with in this country.
In their case, it was the ability for Congress to pass these really vague pieces of legislation
and then all their nasty three letter agencies because of this Chevron deference that existed

(01:15:25):
where the Supreme Court gave agencies broad stroke powers to interpret legislation.
They basically got to run amok with all kinds of crazy.
Like for instance, they could pass legislation that we need to save as much water as possible.
So the EPA could then go and say, oh, well then we need low pressure showers and toilets

(01:15:52):
that only use this much water and whatever other crazy stuff they wanted and there's
no stopping them.
Well, that's gone now thanks to their Supreme Court.
Well, in Canada, we have something kind of similar where our legislature is made up of
sissies.
They don't want to rule on anything.
They don't want to do the parliamentary tradition of debating, having animated debates and then

(01:16:18):
coming to real decisions.
So everything just gets left to the courts and well, our courts have been stacked with
people with it seems in a lot of cases agendas, our Senate's no different.
So yeah, we're in a situation where this is going to take a long time for us to fix in
this country.
It's not impossible, but it is not going to be easy.

(01:16:39):
The odds are definitely stacked against us.
It's not as easy as just removing Trudeau and Carney and Freeland and Co. and just saying,
well, everything's fixed.
It's basically going to take a legacy of conservative and a real runway of conservative government
to slowly work these people out of the system.
And court is expensive too.

(01:17:00):
I didn't tell you this yet, Nick, but the legal bill for me defending my right to serve
people hamburgers, to serve people lunch was just about $350,000.
That's what it cost.
Other people, that was crowdfunded and people helped me do it, but that's what it cost me
to go through the courts and go through the process.
It was insane.

(01:17:21):
And Brett, I know that you've got something to say about those things that you saw.
No, nothing to say here.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
The difference between the US and we all talk about democracies and that we grew up in a

(01:17:42):
democracy and it's interesting that the US has even changed the language around that.
You'll see the left really push the tone around.
It's undemocratic and Trump can't do this because he's tearing down democracy.
It's actually something different.

(01:18:02):
The US is a constitutional republic.
They are not a democracy.
And so basically the long and short of what that is, is the constitution reigns supreme.
And so whatever's written on that document, they need to follow.
And where they've stumbled is all these Supreme Court judges interpretation of that constitution.

(01:18:29):
And so being as a democratic monarchy that we are in Canada, we're basically under British,
old British law is effectively what it is, where it's effectively subservient to the
crown.
And we continue to be that way today.

(01:18:49):
And so the thing is, if we wanted to push towards something that looks more like the
US, we would have to become our own constitutional republic.
Here, here.
I'm on board for that one.
But that's a whole nother conversation, which I usually have almost every day.

(01:19:12):
I want to get to something that I alluded to earlier on and it's the reason why I decided
to ask you gentlemen to join me on a podcast.
A lot of people don't know this, but well, actually people probably know this part.
Throughout the COVID era, and I don't call it a pandemic for obvious reasons, but throughout
the COVID era, it cost me a lot of money as a small business owner to stay in business.

(01:19:36):
And I'm not a good business person when it comes to emotional business decisions.
The worst decision you could ever have to make as an employer is to lay your staff off.
So when we went through all these rolling shutdowns and all these things, I heard about
there was some subsidies being offered.
I thought, you know what?

(01:19:56):
I don't want to lay all these people off.
I want to do whatever I can to pivot because that's what they told us to do.
Pivot.
I want to bring in new revenue streams, keep all these people working.
I want to hire more people, give them something to do with their day and get through this
all because we're stronger together.
So I did that.
It cost me a ton of money.
I ripped through all of my savings, equity in one of my houses, and I had to borrow a

(01:20:21):
whole bunch of money to continue on.
And yes, people helped me to get the title to my restaurant by helping me raise enough
money to put a down payment and remortgage, but I was still left with a mountain of debt
and basically my whole net worth evaporated from that.
So it was very expensive.
I ended up in a position where I used to own two houses.

(01:20:44):
I had my first house I ever bought.
It was almost paid off.
That equity disappeared into COVID right away.
I had another house that I bought when I was in the oil patch and I had a boiler company
and I needed a place with a big garage to store my equipment and a place for guys to
stay when they're coming to work on boilers and whatnot.
And so I bought this little property and then kept it as a rental when I bought the restaurant.

(01:21:07):
Long short of it is the time came when I had to pay back a bunch of money that I borrowed
to start my business in the first place.
And that was attached to the house that I was living in.
So I hummed and hawed and I drug my feet for as long as I could because I really loved
this house and I didn't want to have to sell it, but the loan was called and I had to do

(01:21:29):
it.
So I was having this conversation with a friend of mine and a week later he phones me back
and he says, I have an idea.
So what we ended up doing is we went down to Calgary and we deposited a whole bunch
of gold at Silver Gold Bull and then Bull Valley Credit Union extended a line of credit

(01:21:51):
against that gold.
And my friend bought my house and now rents it back to me as my landlord.
So that what you guys have done with the programs and services that you've created around the
idea of personal financial sovereignty and those types of things are the reason why I

(01:22:13):
still live in my house.
And I wanted to make sure that people know that because I haven't really talked about
it before, but I do want to encourage people to think about that when you're deciding who
to bank with.
Do you want to bank with a big bank who froze a single mother's bank account for donating

(01:22:34):
$40 to people who were protesting against forced vaccinations?
Or would you like to bank with a company that creates programs like this and allows people
to exercise their financial sovereignty and do things like help their friends?
For me, it's a very, very easy choice.
And I keep meaning to get down to Erdry, but I think now I'll just go to Atchison.

(01:22:59):
I'm going to move my stuff to Bull Valley because I really believe in what you guys
are doing and I think it's a great business model to focus on people being independent
of that system that has largely been against them for so long.
So yeah, I guess thanks to you guys for putting your heads together and putting that program

(01:23:23):
in place because if it wasn't there, I wouldn't have this house.
Well yeah, no, thanks for the plug.
What Chris is talking about, we call a gold collateral loan.
You can use either your stores of gold or silver and basically it works just like a
home equity line of credit.

(01:23:43):
Part of the thing is once you go down the rabbit hole of gold and silver, you never
want to sell your gold and silver.
So the ability to lend against it and still keep it in your possession and it's secured
with silver gold bull in their vaults, insured, secure, and able to lend against it and get

(01:24:09):
some fee at cash.
It's a really good value proposition in our minds just because good for you for hanging
on to your assets because I'm afraid there's a lot more people out there that don't have
a more or less of a good outcome of a story.

(01:24:31):
Yeah, and to put some color on that, first of all, needs to be said.
We have no input into what those loans are priced at, but I have the benefit of being
able to see a broad spectrum of the market.
I see stuff that most people can't see, don't see.
BBCU is like, as God is my witness, they are incredibly aggressive on pricing.

(01:24:57):
They're very, very fair.
It's almost like they're part of your community and they're worried about you.
So that has to be said, but also you're not taking an ounce of gold and collateralizing
the whole of it.
You're collateralizing a portion of it so that it contemplates the fluctuation in prices.

(01:25:18):
Now in a world where the prices continue to go up, that's like massive win because essentially
the value of the metal, if it continues to go up, it helps pay off the loan.
But in general, they're probably only doing what I think you're doing, like 50% loan to
value, maybe 75 at most, something like that.

(01:25:38):
When gold, we're doing 65 loan to value on silver because it is more volatile, we're
doing 50%.
Yeah.
But what that does is it means if gold has, let's say the markets, equities puke, stocks
fall out of bed and we have a crash, well, everything crashes.
That's inevitable.
That's a different conversation which we can have, but essentially all assets go down at

(01:26:03):
the same time just because everybody's trying to raise cash.
You don't want to be in a situation where you have to feed margin or you have to pump
money into the account.
The way that they do it, it's really secure.
It's just something that it's a nice buffer for when you need it and it's not priced at
some egregious amount.

(01:26:24):
Some of these ones that are done in the States are done at egregious percentages, like interest
rates.
So it's a really good situation and it's in a vault that's probably, if you're in Alberta
anyways, it's going to be pretty close to you.
So it's really good.
So you could actually go visit your gold if you wanted to.
Oh yeah, absolutely.

(01:26:46):
I don't have any gold to visit, but I think that'd be pretty cool.
I have this image of Sarooj McDuck diving into a pile of gold coins.
I'm sure it's not quite like that.
We charge extra for that.
If you want us to set up a, mind you, that would hurt.
And you guys are the, Bull Valley is the only institution that does that, I think.

(01:27:09):
Is there anyone else that does that?
No, I don't even care if there is.
I mean, I only would want to deal with you anyway, but I think you're the only one.
Well, yeah.
And Nick mentioned our pricing and we are in the beginning of phases of this.
So the prices would go up to be able to do this just because we were trying to attract
people to be able to do this.
There are people that are more like mezzanine financers that do this sort of thing, but

(01:27:34):
they're looking for your 12, 13, 14, 15% return.
Whereas in our minds, gold, silver's pretty darn close to cash, even compared to say something
like a house.
And it makes sense for us to be able to do it at a little bit better of a price, especially

(01:27:57):
when we're big advocates for people actually owning this.
Because credit unions are different in that respect is that we're owned by our membership.
So you actually control your fate of your financial institution.
I have a board that gives oversight to the organization and to myself.

(01:28:20):
Those are voted in members through the membership, which is much different than say like TD Bank,
where a lot of the shareholders are overseas, pension funds, people that just generally
don't have any interest in Alberta or the communities that they're in.
Whereas we do.

(01:28:40):
And we live in Alberta and we're vested in Alberta and we want to see people do well
within our organization.
So two quick points.
One, Carol, you asked about how much is the minimum for silver to buy.
If you're doing it through an e-metals account, you can literally just put a couple of bucks
in if you want.
I mean, if you could buy $10 in silver, it's no big deal because you're buying fractional.

(01:29:05):
Now we've talked a lot about gold in a vault, gold in a safe, what have you, if it's with
another company.
Really, really important to say any of these metals, if it's in that e-trade account, it's
what's called allocated, but not segregated.
So you can't go in there and point to your specific fraction of silver or fraction of

(01:29:27):
gold.
Or even if you have a thousand ounces of silver, you can't go and point to a specific thousand
ounce silver bar and say, that one's mine.
But that, nevertheless, that metal is not, it's not an asset under management.
It's not on our balance sheet.
It's not a liability.
It's completely removed from anything to do with our finances.

(01:29:49):
And when you're into, pardon me, like a big storage account or like a storage account
where you buy your metals physically and then you put them in a storage account with us,
those are allocated and segregated.
So you have the benefit of allocation.
So again, not on our balance sheet, not an asset under management, no liability, no counterparty

(01:30:10):
risk.
And they're also held completely separately from anybody else's metal.
So they don't commingle.
They don't touch.
If it's gold, it's in a separate container box, secure thing.
And if it's silver, it might be in a pallet or whatever the case might be.
So just so you know.
Which is the exact opposite of a cash deposit.
If you go in and deposit a hundred thousand dollars cash in your bank, that's cash that

(01:30:33):
they can use.
I think, is it not?
Worse.
Brad, you want to explain how fractional lending works?
Sure.
Yeah.
I described a little bit around it earlier.
It's basically, it's infinite.
When have you ever heard, like I said before, RBC saying, oh, I can't do that loan.

(01:30:55):
If they run out of liquidity, they go to the Bank of Canada and if they run out of capital,
they go to the stock market and release more shares to recapitalize themselves.
And just to give you an example, there's what's called capital ratios.
And anytime you're using leverage, when I say leverage, I mean borrowing money on top

(01:31:22):
of other assets.
There's higher risk because you can definitely improve your situation, but it cuts both ways.
And so what happens is within financial institutions on Canada, they can, what's called leverage
their money up to about 23 times.

(01:31:43):
So effectively they can have this pot of money, but then they can lend it out 23 more times
on top of that.
In the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Lehman Brothers was leveraged 100 times.
So that means for every dollar that they had in the door, they lent it out 100 times.

(01:32:07):
And so when you get over leveraged like that, it's basically like you took out a loan on
your house, you have 14 credit cards and you keep on getting new credit cards to pay off
the balance of the old credit cards.
And basically that's effectively how leveraged the system was in the height of the great

(01:32:31):
financial crisis.
So effectively because we are a debt-based system, the debt needs to keep on growing.
Otherwise it collapses on itself.
And what we've seen in the last couple of years is effectively a sovereign debt crisis.
And when I say a sovereign debt crisis, I mean that the government can no longer leverage

(01:32:56):
anything else within the economy and basically they need to somehow collapse it.
And so you could do that effectively with three different ways.
You can either print the money, basically is what they're doing to basically try and
de-leverage their debt.
Or you can tell everybody in society, sorry, remember all those goodies we promised you

(01:33:20):
like old age security and Canadian pension plan and this healthcare system, that's gone.
And that's effectively the Greece model and what they did in Greece.
Or they could basically grow themselves out of this problem, which appears to be what
Trump is trying to do in the States is he's going to try and grow themselves out of this

(01:33:41):
debt problem as well as sort of cut all the fat around the sides.
Canada has gone through this type of thing before in the 90s.
But the thing is our debt to GDP is so much higher this time and it's so much more difficult
to get any predictivity in society.

(01:34:01):
I just don't think we're in a climate right now to be able to sort of grow ourselves out
of this problem.
So they pick solution number one and basically print the currency.
So it's not going to be easy for the US though.
There's a lot of mixed messages.
They definitely want to keep the reserve currency status, but it would appear as though they're

(01:34:24):
going to try and cut a lot of fat.
Like they want to cut one to $2 trillion a year in spending.
But at the same time, they're trying to onshore manufacturing, which means they can't lower
wages and that's just not going to happen.
So what they're probably going to have to do is maintain reserve currency status, which

(01:34:45):
is probably why he wants to end a lot of wars so that the sanctions can go away and people
can start to have confidence because they're at the precipice now where the BRICS system,
the BRICS pay, which won't be a retail currency.
It's a currency for inter country trade.
And 40% of that's going to be gold backed.

(01:35:07):
Apparently that part settled.
It's just the other 60% they haven't figured out.
But at any rate, his only option is to lower the value of the US dollar in order to attract
investment in the United States and grease the skids, if you will.
Like they're not going to be able to maintain a high dollar and do all that they want to

(01:35:27):
do.
So that's going to be a really interesting thing that process that the US is going through
and it's not going to be without its pain.
Yeah.
And they even if they cut $2 trillion out of the budget, which I'm skeptical that they
can even do their obligations, their big line items of obligations are Medicare.

(01:35:49):
Medicaid is about a quarter of the budget.
Defense is about a quarter of their budget.
Interest payments is a massive part of the budget, about a quarter of the budget.
What are you going to cut?
The only real line item that they can cut is the interest costs.
And so what they do is they implement a process called yield curve control and basically push

(01:36:15):
down the rates on the debt.
So if the cost of the debt is $1 trillion per year at 5%, if they basically move the
interest rate down to 1%, all of a sudden you've knocked, give or take $800Bn off of
that trillion dollar debt that they have to pay per year.

(01:36:36):
So that's probably the easiest line item they can do.
But part of the problem is that's massively inflationary.
So I agree with Nick, that's probably the only solution they have to try and get out
of this mess is devalue the dollar and decrease the interest cost.
And when we bring it back home to us as Canadians and we think about our situation, yeah, we

(01:37:02):
don't have gold as part of the treasury or whatever.
It doesn't really matter to be fair.
We have collateral.
That's what we have.
We have all of the oil, all of the gas, all of the lumber and water and minerals and whatever
in the ground, gold and silver and uranium, yeah, uranium, potash.

(01:37:24):
We have it all.
There's no reason we should be in this situation.
We have it all at our fingertips.
If we just produce it.
Yeah, exactly.
If we were responsible about it, like countries would put money here because not because we
do have gold or we don't have gold in the treasury, because we have collateral.
We could in theory have a dollar that would be able to go out and attract investment or

(01:37:49):
we would be able to borrow, et cetera.
We should be, it's just be manifestly different.
Yeah, we had other countries literally begging us for trade deals that would have tremendously
benefited the economies across the country and we couldn't get done because policy.
Well, we're at, we're over an hour and a half already and I feel like this conversation

(01:38:16):
could probably go on for days.
There's so much to unpack here.
I do want to point out.
Do you have any questions or anything that we should address for people?
I don't want to.
I'm going to go skim through there real quick while you guys are giving your final thoughts,
but I just want to point out the numbers we're talking about, a trillion dollars.
I can't even wrap my head around that.
A trillion is a thousand piles of a billion dollars, which is a thousand piles of a million

(01:38:39):
dollars, which is a thousand piles of a thousand dollars.
It's such a big number that it doesn't even exist and I can't even think of, you know
what I mean?
These are huge numbers.
Zero hedge.
Zero hedge puts something out during COVID and it was from, it's this really cool group

(01:39:01):
called Visual Capitalist, I think is what it's called.
And they just do these wicked graphics that show you, you know, just different processes.
It could be something as mundane as like how IRAs or RSPs work, but in this case, it showed
you the scale of the something like 20 trillion dollars that was just fabricated and pulled

(01:39:25):
out of, I don't know, central banks, ARSIS around the world.
And like the scale of it using hundred dollar bills on pallets was freaky.
Like it was nuts.
I don't, there's no, I mean, obviously we know, Brett knows better than anybody that,

(01:39:47):
you know, banking is just digits and you just, you know, move the decimal point, move the
decimal point.
You know, you have more money, but the visualization of a trillion, Chris, to your point, or 20
trillion dollars is preposterous.
It makes no sense.
It is banana land.
Like it was, I think I stared at this thing endlessly.

(01:40:10):
I think I know what you're talking about or it might've been something different.
If I remember correctly, it was an entire football field with hundred dollar bills stacked
50 feet up.
That was, that was a trouble.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Just insane.
Insane.
Okay.
Here's a good question.

(01:40:30):
Cindy asks, can my grandsons have metal accounts?
What's the criteria for having a metal account?
Yeah, no, they can.
That's usually what happens with younger people.
They have joint accounts with us.
And so you can open up some with your grandchildren there.

(01:40:52):
And first you open up a Bow Valley Credit Union account, then we can set you up with
an e-metals account.
And then Bob's your uncle.
Away you go.
Perfect.
Here's a good comment.
And quite true.
Although I think this is going to change.
Murray says this country is not open for business.
Yeah, we've seen that in the last couple of decades for sure.

(01:41:14):
So many really good deals for this country and the people of this country and province
being completely castrated by politicians.
Although I did see something yesterday that BC was opening up something like 18 new mines
and they want to fast track them.

(01:41:36):
And so if BC is doing that, they recognize the problem and maybe the rest of Canada will
hold.
Well, now they just need to get rid of that tanker ban and we'll be in business.
I saw a comment from the Premier of Quebec as well saying that, oh yeah, we'll look at
Energy East again if the conditions change a little bit.
Now when Quebec says when the conditions change, I have an idea what that means.

(01:42:00):
What an asshole.
Maybe the tide is turning a little bit.
Although I'd prefer to negotiate with Quebec as the independent Republic of Alberta myself
rather than relying on the federal government.
Here's a great comment.
And this actually is kind of a question as well.
Carol says I want it in my own safe, not anyone else's.
I get what Carol is saying.

(01:42:22):
However, like I said before, if you if you anything you have, if you can't protect it
or defend it, do you actually own it?
If you can't protect or defend your rights and your freedoms, do you actually have them?
If you can't protect your gold that's in your safe or defend against people taking it, do

(01:42:43):
you actually have it?
So how does that fit into?
But it's still a fair point.
It's totally a fair point.
You know, the majority of what we so as a company, I would say like 90 percent of what
we sell in a given year gets shipped to people like there's it's completely valid.

(01:43:04):
And even the people that have storage accounts with us, they don't store everything.
They'll have some at home.
They've just made a conscious decision because maybe they travel a lot or maybe they live
in an urban area or, you know, Chris, like like you said, you can't secure it.
The one big issue with having precious metals in your house is you cannot insure it.

(01:43:28):
You can't put it under your homeowners policy like jewelry.
You can get more coverage for.
But if it's bullion, it's a completely different story.
So that's one of the reasons why people elect to have a storage account.
There's no twisting of arms.
Like to be fair, you may hear about it in a conversation.
You may not.
It's really usually one where the client has to bring it up or, you know, there's certain

(01:43:50):
circumstances where it will be brought up.
But no, overwhelmingly, the majority of metals that we sell to people, they take physical
possession of and and quick like usually ships next business day from payment.
Yeah.
And I posted I have a tendency to do both, you know, but granted, I have access to bank
vaults so I can store it in safety deposit boxes with easy access there.

(01:44:14):
But I think you'll get to a place where you get nervous in your house and basically say,
you know what, I've got X amount of dollars.
Someone healed burglary, well-heeled burglar is is that knows you have it.

(01:44:35):
It can put you in a precarious circumstance.
Yeah, it's one of the great things about having again like I'm not some crazy Bitcoin advocate,
but it makes a lot of sense.
Like if you had to get out of Dodge quick, you know, there's a there's a strong argument
to be made by having, you know, one or two Bitcoin or some fractions of Bitcoin.

(01:44:56):
You know, you can you can keep your keywords in your head if you needed to.
You don't even have to have them on you in any way, shape or form.
And you can travel with your a portion of your wealth.
It's just about kind of knowing what the best thing for you is in your circumstances and
then doing that.
These are just options and they're just options within our corner of the world.

(01:45:19):
They're not necessarily the be all and end all of everything that the crypto keywords
that you mentioned.
I think there's going to be a lot of Bitcoin stuck out in ether land right now after the
fires in Palisades.
I wonder how many people had, you know, their their phrases stored on pieces of paper than
really a point out there anymore.

(01:45:39):
It's really a point.
That's a rough one.
That's a great question.
Does Bow Valley have branches throughout Alberta?
If so, where?
We do.
Although it isn't a limiting factor, you can pretty much do anything online or the phone
or via email.
You can open up an account online in just five minutes.
But we do have seven locations.

(01:46:01):
Our head office is in Cochrane.
We have a branch in Banff, Canmore, two in Airdrie, one in Calgary and and one in Atchison,
which is just west Edmonton there.
We are opening up two more branches this year.
We hope to have them open May 1st, one in Red Deer and one in Lake Bonavista in the
South Area Calgary.

(01:46:24):
Is there is there one on the books for Lethbridge as well?
We are thinking about that.
That would be the next branch.
Yeah.
But we're probably looking at about a year out.
So what's the criteria for putting a branch in a specific spot?
I did see a bunch of comments about when are you going to put a branch in the north?
So if people wanted a Blue Valley branch, what is how does that look like?

(01:46:47):
Yeah.
And again, you don't need a physical location to do your banking with us.
And I recognize that people like the idea of if I go into my branch, then I have a sticky
note with my money on it in the back vault.
It doesn't quite work like that.
But the criteria is we will take a look at any community.

(01:47:10):
We want it to be sustainable.
We want it to be around.
We want to be there for the members.
So we stuck some criteria.
If you have 200 members in your community, 25 million in deposits and come up with common
shares of a million dollars, we'll consider putting a branch in any location.

(01:47:31):
So because it's owned by the members, if you bring enough people together, you can do it.
And you guys have an AGM coming up right away too, don't you?
Yeah, we do on February 11th.
You can just go on our website if you're a member and you want to register.
You can see what that's all about.

(01:47:52):
And that's actually a good point.
Desjardins was a bank created in Quebec because English speaking people didn't want to give
banking services to French speaking people.
And so effectively, the French speaking people said, to heck with you, we're creating our

(01:48:15):
own financial institution.
And they did it largely in Catholic church basements.
And now they're by far the biggest cooperative in Quebec and have significant political sway
with the Quebec government.
I'm just going through the questions to see if there's anything else that's pressing.

(01:48:39):
And I think we answered most of the questions just in the natural course of the conversation.
So that worked out pretty good.
And yeah, I guess that's probably a good time where one hour and 50 minutes, which is well
over our estimated hour and a half.
So if you guys have any final thoughts, I'll let you share them now and then we'll maybe
sign off.
But I do want to point out that the comments are filled with praise and positive comments

(01:49:04):
for both you and your businesses.
So I'm hoping that the people who are thinking positive of what you're saying will consider
giving you the business.
And no, folks, I don't get anything from either of them for promoting their business.
I just believe in what they're doing.
And I like to see people that are on the right side of freedom succeed.
So that's my part in this.
Well, I think my closing thought would be number one, thank you to Chris for the invite

(01:49:28):
and to the community for being engaged, asking questions.
You know, this isn't really actually saw a comment that's like, is this an infomercial?
No, it wasn't.
It wasn't supposed to be or anything like that.
100 percent.
This is just like the way I see it.

(01:49:49):
This is just our corner of the world.
This is just what we do.
We don't do outbound calling or proselytizing or anything like that.
Like this is really, you know, we put ourselves out there and people make the conscious conscious
decision to call in.
It can be a little bit intimidating.
But by all means, if you go to silvergoldbull.ca, if you want any information, there's lots
there.

(01:50:09):
If you want to call in and talk to somebody and just ask more questions, there's no pressure.
But we'd be more than happy to help.
And for what it's worth, like I don't, you know, I don't have any skin in the the BBC
U enterprise.
I know Brett, I've gotten to know him quite well over the last number of years.
They're really honourable people.

(01:50:30):
And I know a lot of people want branches everywhere.
But I'm going to say the quiet part out loud, which is you don't want them to have branches
everywhere willy nilly.
You want them to be fiscally responsible.
And so definitely it is 100% worth it if you believe in what they're doing or you believe
in the concept, just get together with friends and make that decision.
You don't even have to move lock, stock and barrel, open an account, fund it with a little

(01:50:52):
bit and then kind of give it a try.
Even if it's just an online account, you know, in the hopes that a branch comes.
Yeah, no, no.
Thanks for that, Nick.
And thanks for the time, Chris and everybody that joined us.
Yeah, maybe it did sound a little bit like an infomercial, but the thing is we we recognize
that there's a problem out there.

(01:51:14):
I want to see as many people get through this intact as possible.
And you know, there's a bit of self interest with that as well.
Because if if the world is blowing up around me, that's no good for anybody.
If Canada's collapsing, if Alberta's collapsing, that doesn't do anybody any good.

(01:51:37):
And there's effectively nowhere in the world to run.
Yeah, Canada is where people came to be free and free of tyranny and oppression and collapsing
economies in the past.
And if we don't protect it, there's going to be nowhere left for people to go.
Quick thing question.
Brett, you've been asked a couple of times about locations outside the province and I
don't.

(01:51:57):
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah, because we're provincially regulated in Alberta, we we usually only have members
that are in Alberta or have corporations set up in Alberta.
We are working on on changing that to some degree so we can go outside of Alberta.
But I don't have a timeline on when that might be.

(01:52:22):
But the thing is that there is a bit of a back door that that we can create for you
if you're interested in gold and silver and you want to store it at Silver Gold Bull.
We can set you up with a loan, a gold collateral loan with gold or silver and effectively you
will have an account with both of the credit union through the back door that way.

(01:52:44):
So well, you know, I'm from Canada and I had a bank account in Colombia when I worked down
there because it was convenient.
So if someone is in Saskatchewan, could they still have a they could still have an Alberta
account?
Is that or do you have to live here?
Yeah, generally because of the regulations need to reside in in Alberta.

(01:53:06):
You could have a hold.
Right.
Yeah, you could have a hold.
Cool.
Yep.
So you could incorporate an Alberta and if it's a corporate thing, you just just a personal
account, you'd have to live here.
Yeah, so there's a way to do it.
Yeah, we're not associated with ATV.
I think that might have popped up at some point there.
Oh, it's Kurt.
Hi, Kurt.
Hi, Kurt.

(01:53:27):
Okay, well, I think I think that's it.
I better let you guys go.
I'm sure you got other stuff to do this evening.
So thank you again very much for joining me.
And yes, folks, this wasn't an infomercial.
I just I'm excited about things I believe in.
And this is one of the things I believe in.
And I really I really think if we just do little things like this and we make different

(01:53:48):
decisions than we did in the past, and we base those decisions on on who aligns with
our values rather than you know, what's maybe the easiest or convenient or whatever, I think
we can change things for the better.
And this is just one of those ways.
So thanks again.
Thanks everyone that stuck around for this almost two hours.

(01:54:09):
And thank you, Brett and Nick.
I hope to chat with you again very soon because there's some more stuff I want to talk about.
But until then, I wish you a good night and all the prosperity that the province has to
offer.
Thanks very much.
Bye guys.
Night guys.
There you go, folks.
I'm tired and I want to go to bed.

(01:54:30):
But there is one more thing we have to do before I sign off.
And that is the out roll.
Are you ready?
You need me to put the camera onats over your neck Katta.

(01:55:00):
Meow!

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