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Cuckoo for cryptocurrency
1.2k Plays1 year ago
Paris Marx of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast joins Duncan Kinney to explore Danielle Smith's obsession with cryptocurrency and taking Alberta out of the Canada Pension Plan.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:00
Speaker
We bought this warmer with this coin. Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host Duncan Kinney, recording today here in Emskochiwiskeigen, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territory on the banks of the mighty Kasiskisaw, the North Saskatchewan River.
00:00:29
Speaker
Joining us today is Paris Marks, host of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast and a fellow traveler on the Harbinger Media Network.
Alberta and Newfoundland Politics
00:00:37
Speaker
Paris, welcome to the pod. Thanks so much for inviting me. Happy to chat about Alberta and cryptocurrency and your fantastic premier.
00:00:48
Speaker
She certainly is a special little egg, especially when it comes to what we're going to talk about today. You're in Newfoundland, right? Now you get to dip your toe into crazy town Alberta politics. I have to admit, I am not keeping up with local politics in Newfoundland. Did they compare at all?
00:01:10
Speaker
Probably not completely like Newfoundland has its own set of problems, but I would say Alberta politics isn't as distant as you might think because, you know, there's a ton of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians who head out West and who work in Alberta and live there sometimes as well. Um, so we certainly, you know, still get shades of everything that goes on out there. We still hear about a lot of it because a lot of people in Newfoundland have family out there.
00:01:39
Speaker
So yeah, you know, it's distant, but not as distant as you might think. Fair enough. But I just, I live in it. I'm surrounded by it. It's the water I swim in, but I feel like, like just the general regular insanity of Alberta politics is I just don't know if it's replicated
Skepticism Towards Cryptocurrency
00:01:56
Speaker
anywhere else. Like it's not like, it's like Newfoundland politics is just not like Alberta politics. Like at least tell me I got that right.
00:02:02
Speaker
No, it, it's still quite different. And, you know, there was something like around, when was that? I think the federal election, the last federal election, a lot of Albertans were like really mad at Newfoundland or like the Atlantic provinces, cause we had voted liberal. Um, and they're obviously conservative. Um, yeah, I don't know. There's some, there's some weird stuff. We're both oil provinces, of course. You know, Newfoundland, very dependent on offshore oil, uh, on like the tar sands, but yeah.
00:02:33
Speaker
Fair enough. I know over on your podcast, you've done a lot of great interviews and reporting on crypto, and I think it's important for us to be upfront about our biases about this subject. I am what you would charitably call a crypto skeptic. What are your general feelings on cryptocurrency as a product, as an asset class, as whatever the fuck it gets defined as?
00:02:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's no secret that I'm a strong opponent of crypto. And, you know, ever since all of the excitement kind of blew up back in what I guess it was 2020 now, and especially through 2021. Yeah, I spent quite a bit of time on my podcast talking to critics to explain why it was not all
00:03:20
Speaker
that was being promised by people who I think you can rightfully say were looking to profit off of getting people into really scammy tech products rather than really trying to upend the world or governance or empower people or any of that kind of bullshit that was surrounding a lot of these discussions. So does cryptocurrency or Bitcoin, does it provide anything of value to society?
Cryptocurrency's Environmental and Societal Impact
00:03:48
Speaker
I would say no. And I think that kind of skeptical perspective, that kind of opposition to crypto has really been legitimized since the crash started happening in November of 2021.
00:04:04
Speaker
You know the prices of many major cryptocurrencies have significantly declined since then but along with that is a lot of the kind of projects and companies that were associated with crypto have also imploded during that time and that has meant that a lot of people who really bought into these promises who thought they were going to
00:04:24
Speaker
make a lot of money, if not upend like governance structures and stuff like that, have really lost a lot, have been hit hard by this downturn in the crypto ecosystem. And they were kind of led into it by a bunch of scammers and liars who were looking to take advantage of them. So we have this thing that doesn't provide any value to society, but tell me it doesn't catastrophically harm the environment. You can at least tell me that, right?
00:04:53
Speaker
No, unfortunately not. You know, I think that there have been some like minor improvements on that front. You know, Ethereum moved its kind of, I don't know how you'd properly describe it. Basically, the way that it mines tokens has been changed so that it's less environmentally harmful, they say. You know, but Bitcoin is still the big elephant in the room here, and that has not changed. It's still used what's called a proof of work, you know, algorithm or whatever.
00:05:20
Speaker
And that is incredibly energy intensive and that still continues to operate that way. And as a result, a lot of mines have popped up in places and then they cause their own environmental harms. They use a lot of energy. And for what? There's no real tangible benefit that's coming of it other than some people really speculating on some digital products.
00:05:45
Speaker
And certainly some big whales as they're called wealthy people who own a lot of bitcoin have still been able to make off with some profits during this kind of boom period that went on and certainly venture capitalists that funded some of these crypto tokens and projects and nfts and all this kind of garbage.
00:06:03
Speaker
They were able to make money because what would happen is they would buy in when the price was low before it was launched to the public and then it would immediately take off you know the prices of these of these crypto tokens and NFTs when the projects were initially launched and so then the VCs and the investors would sell out at that moment and then basically kind of what what is.
00:06:26
Speaker
term to rug pull, they would basically take everyone's money and the value of these NFTs and tokens and stuff would end up crashing down the line. And they'd basically just be kind of robbing the pockets of people who they scammed into it.
00:06:40
Speaker
Yeah, so it doesn't have any real use case. It does not provide anything of value. It has catastrophic effects on the environment and climate change. We're talking about the electricity consumption of entire countries that is equal to the amount of worldwide energy that goes towards mining Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Volatility and Cultural Artifacts
00:06:54
Speaker
And then there is also the real harm that it does to people because it is a fucking scam. I think Nouriel Rabini, the Dr. Doom guy, whatever.
00:07:02
Speaker
was quoted I think last week as saying like 99% of crypto is a scam. Yeah, he's probably underestimating it. Yeah, something like 99.91% of crypto is a scam. Exactly, but not the stuff being pushed by Pierre Polyev and Danielle Smith.
00:07:21
Speaker
No, no, that's actually cool and good. So yeah, so crypto is very popular. We can see it start to penetrate into political culture up here in Canada. The leader of the opposition and the putative next prime minister of this fucking country is a crypto guy, Pierre Poliev. We had the very famous case of the Bitcoin shawarma where Pierre Poliev went to a shawarma shop in London, Ontario.
00:07:43
Speaker
and Screech in his very weird voice that I still don't, I can't place what the fuck he sounds like, about how he bought a shawarma. Let's just take a minute to listen to that right now, because it's a very strange cultural artifact. We're going to buy this shawarma with this Bitcoin. You ready? Hold on, I'm just creating an invoice. He's creating me an invoice right now. Listen. Make sure to include the tip in there as well.
00:08:12
Speaker
All right. All right. Send. Send. Send. Done. I got it. You got the payment. All right. We did it. Come on over here. Come on, guys. We did it. We bought the shawarma with Bitcoin.
00:08:31
Speaker
We bought the shawarma with Bitcoin. Can you imagine if I walked into a store, you know, I wanted to get a shawarma or a wrap or something. And like when I paid with my MasterCard or something, everyone started cheering and was like, Oh my God, the payment went through. I can't believe it.
00:08:52
Speaker
It's incredible. Truly a feat, an amazing feat of technology. Paris, what do you think has happened to the price of Bitcoin since this happened? This happened in, by the way, less than a year ago. This was March 2022 that this happened. What do you think has happened to the price of Bitcoin since Pierre bought his famous Schwarma? Oh, yeah. It has continued to slide. It was already sliding at that point and it has crashed even further.
00:09:15
Speaker
Well, he was that was like near peak. I think it peaked at like sixty six or sixty seven grand. A Bitcoin, I think, American USD, a Bitcoin was what it peaked in. Seventy something in November twenty twenty. Yeah. And he bought it at fifty nine, nearly sixty. So fifty nine, nearly sixty thousand dollars. So like quite quite close to the peak.
00:09:34
Speaker
As of recording right now, we're at around $30,000 of Bitcoin, so half, it's half. We're talking about... If he was to buy that Bitcoin, if he was to buy that schwarman today, he would have to have double the amount of Bitcoin to buy it, which is something that you actually really like and want to happen when your stable value, your stable thing that you want to use to exchange for value and buy goods and services with, you just want it to wildly fluctuate in price over the course of six to nine months.
Major Crypto Collapses and Implications
00:10:02
Speaker
Absolutely. That's exactly what you want from a currency that you depend on, that you pay taxes in, that you buy things in. It just needs to fluctuate all over the place that makes it fun.
00:10:19
Speaker
the price of Bitcoin didn't just happen in isolation. There was a couple of large scale crises that happened over the course of between July all the way up to November of last year where we saw a massive collapse in the price of crypto. I don't know how much detail we want to get into this, but what can you tell us about the collapse of Celsius as a crypto institution?
00:10:46
Speaker
Yeah, Celsius is one of a number of companies that has kind of collapsed companies and tokens and whatever you want to call them over the past number of months. Celsius is one, a major one. There was, of course, the Terra and Luna collapse, which some people might remember an algorithmic stable coin and the token it was tied to.
00:11:05
Speaker
You know, there's three arrows capital that went down as well. And with each of those that collapsed, there was kind of a contagion that happened where they took down other smaller projects and companies and exchanges and what have you. And, you know, obviously, every single time that happened, there were a lot of people who had money or, you know, who had crypto in these, you know, companies and they lost a lot of money and that hurt them really hard.
00:11:35
Speaker
And then all leading up to the biggest collapse that we've seen so far in the crypto space, the collapse of the second largest crypto exchange in the world, FTX. We do not have time to go over all of the insane details of this story, but what sticks out to you from the collapse of FTX?
00:11:53
Speaker
Oh man, where to start with this one, uh, other than, you know, Kevin O'Leary was intimately involved in all of this as a big spokesperson, um, for FTX, uh, you know, our, our, our home dragon, uh, you know, who, who's kind of gone south to embarrass us all.
00:12:09
Speaker
I think the biggest thing that kind of stands out to me, and that's not one of the more sensational kind of headline grabbing aspects of this, is that all of these, as I was just saying, all of these companies and tokens and things were collapsing, were going under, NFTs were significantly declining in value and all these sorts of things.
00:12:32
Speaker
And one of the narratives that was going around, you know, FTX was the second largest crypto exchange before it collapsed. Binance is the first. And one of the things that people were saying was, you know, Binance is offshore. It's really shady. You can't totally trust it. But FTX, you know, you can trust this company.
00:12:51
Speaker
You can put your crypto with it. It has a really nice clean interface that looks trustworthy. It is held by this guy, Sam Bankman Fried, who was getting all this positive press who talked about how he was an effective altruist and really believed in giving back his money and blah, blah, blah. And so the narrative around it was like, this is, obviously there's a lot of turbulence in the crypto space. There's a lot of things that you can't depend on.
00:13:17
Speaker
But FTX, you can depend on this company. And then it just was totally obliterated within the span of a few days. And once again, people lost billions of dollars when this happened. And you can read the stories that some people have talked about online or told journalists or whatever. And some of these things are really harrowing. One that sticks with me is this guy who really believed what
00:13:45
Speaker
FTX and these crypto companies were saying that you could put your money with them and you'd get these really high rates of return on it because, you know, interest rates were kind of low when a lot of this stuff was happening. We all know that savings accounts have been basically useless for over a decade because the rates of interest are so low on them. And so he was like, you know, this is something that I can use to get bigger returns on my money. And so he put a lot of his mother's savings in it and then it all collapsed and he never told her.
00:14:14
Speaker
And one of the things that he wrote was like, you know, he's dealing with like intense anxiety and like, you know, just trying to deal with this and trying to hope that he can get this money back before like his mom actually asks for some of this money. And like, that's just one story of many, like, you know, when the Terra Luna collapse happened, I know I'm going on, I'll stop talking in a second. But like, when that happened, a lot of Terra Luna was bought and sold in South Korea.
00:14:41
Speaker
because the guy who started that company and those tokens was South Korean. And it was like, you know, this is again, you're South Korean, you should buy from the South Korean guy. You can depend on him. Um, and once that happened, the searches for a specific site in Seoul that is known to be a place that people go to commit suicide, like just jumped on Google. Right. Um, and like a lot of people were.
00:15:07
Speaker
lost a lot of money. And then this was kind of what they turned to. They kind of lost hope in everything. And so I think, you know, it just gives you perspective that when these things happen, like it's good to see the crypto industry being hurt and being discredited. But that has also come at the cost of a lot of people not only losing a lot of money, but suffering like a lot of hardship in their lives.
00:15:29
Speaker
I mean, FTX, you're right. FTX was sold as the safe, stable, the crypto exchange that your mom could put money into kind of thing. And that Kevin O'Leary was the forefront of this. They hired a whole bunch of celebrities to push it. And even though it was set up in the Bahamas, it was like, oh, there was Americans running it. It was sold as this thing. And then it collapses. And we learned that FTX didn't have an accounting department.
00:15:55
Speaker
The guy that they brought in who specializes in taking over troubled fucking companies that go into bankruptcy, he showed up and he was the guy who oversaw the liquidation of Enron after that fucking fraud in the early 2000s. Quote, never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.
00:16:15
Speaker
Like, I think this is a fucking scam. It was a huge fucking scam and it fell apart in like, like you said, three fucking days. And we get Mr. Wonderful fucking Kevin O'Leary eating shit, but also real human effects as well.
00:16:33
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. When that new CEO went and testified before the US House in the United States, one of the things
Alberta's Crypto Enthusiasm
00:16:40
Speaker
he even said was that FTX, this massive multi-billion dollar exchange, was using QuickBooks for its accounting, this kind of small business software. It's just a joke. I don't know. It's so ridiculous.
00:16:55
Speaker
all of the stories that have come out about this like there's there's another story as well that they literally had a group chat called like wire fraud or something like that and it was like guys like you need to be a bit more like secretive than this you need to be a bit better you can't be so obvious that like you're committing crimes yeah the people at Goldman Sachs are not not creating fucking group chats on slack called wire yeah exactly being a little more circumspect you know
00:17:21
Speaker
But okay, so we've kind of walked through the broad strokes of the crypto story after a while, for the time being. But here in Alberta, Alberta was really setting itself up as the most crypto-friendly government in Canada. The regime here, formerly under Kenny, Kenny at the time,
00:17:46
Speaker
was they were putting out positive signals about crypto. When we had cabinet ministers tweeting out that it was good news that FTX was setting up an office in Calgary, we had the government passing bills here that offered relief from legislative and regulatory requirements for crypto and blockchain companies in what they called a regulatory sandbox. You didn't have to follow the rules if you were just doing new and innovative stuff. This is literally like
00:18:17
Speaker
The Financial Innovation Act is what they fucking called it. They had spokespeople from the Canadian Blockchain Consortium putting out press releases or showing up in government press releases saying that this bill was a game changer. Jason Kenney was very excited about the announcement that FTX was purchasing a Calgary-based crypto company whose stupid name I can't even remember. Again, tweeting it out. Obviously, the fucking deal fell through when FTX collapsed.
00:18:46
Speaker
Conservatives, broadly speaking, especially the libertarian wing of the conservative party, which apparently there was a lot of here in the government of Alberta, they seem to be a big fan of crypto. It seems to be linked to this libertarian urge to be free from the evil of central banks. Governments, why do you think conservative activists and conservatives and libertarians get caught up in the church of crypto?
00:19:15
Speaker
Yeah, it's a load of bullshit, really. Like, we should start by saying that. And part of the reason I think that the Alberta government was so interested in it was, you know, obviously they need to show that they are diversifying in some way, right? Even though Jason Kenney came to power and basically cut a lot of the incentives and stuff that were aimed at economic diversification in Alberta to refocus on the oil industry.
00:19:40
Speaker
And so I think crypto comes along and it offers like the prospect of this kind of.
00:19:47
Speaker
Sector that they can promote that is basically bullshit that is highly highly speculative But allows them to say like look we are investing in this technology of the future We are going to locate it in Alberta we're gonna create all these jobs and so people who aren't really like clued into The reality of the crypto industry especially at this moment when they were promoting it. It looks like you know
00:20:13
Speaker
Kenny's government at the time was actually doing the work of diversifying the economy, growing the tech industry, and these sorts of things, especially at a moment when this particular industry, the values of cryptocurrencies were soaring, right? And it looked like people were making a lot of money in all of this. And so you can see why they go after it. And then that's also linked to, as you're saying,
00:20:41
Speaker
the broader kind of ideological project that's attached to it, right? The idea is that cryptocurrency is not just a speculative asset where you can make some money, but it's a way to create a whole other currency system and financial system that is divorced from the control of government.
00:20:58
Speaker
And so if you are opposed to government if you want to promote kind of the individual taking power then this is the way to do it and you're going to like completely upend the power of the state by Encouraging this technology and now these kinds of promises have been made about digital technologies in the internet ever since they were first created and it's never actually played out as You know these narratives these libertarian narrative suggests they always empower corporate
00:21:25
Speaker
Corporations and it to some degrees governments, but they're presented as the opposite. And so yeah, it's just a kind of libertarian fever dream that ultimately ends up, you know, being profitable for a lot of the very kind of people who tend to benefit from, you know, libertarian projects, right, the capitalists at the end of the day.
00:21:47
Speaker
If there's one thing that Daniel Smith loves, it's a libertarian fever dream. Not only did Per Poliev have this kind of midlife conversion to the church of cryptocurrency, but so did Daniel Smith. She has written about how she started investing in the space in 2016. She has spoken about how she owns Ethereum. Unfortunately, we don't have the exact details of her crypto holdings yet. MLAs in Alberta do have to disclose their investments.
00:22:15
Speaker
And she was elected, I think, back in November. So in the next few months, we should have those details, but we don't have them yet. But if you want to get a sense of Danielle Smith's deep, abiding interest in crypto, I have a clip for you from April 20th, 2022, from her show on the far-right news site, The Western Standard.
00:22:34
Speaker
where she is and I shit you not here, essentially just reading directly and riffing off of a zero hedge article. She, she prefaces all of this by saying like this article says it's the author is Tyler Durden, but she has to tell her audience. She has to explain to her audience that look like Tyler Durden is not the author's real name. We don't know who the other is. It's, but, but she still goes and spends like 15, 20 minutes, like just reading off of this and riffing off of this, this zero hedge article. But here, here's the clip.
00:23:03
Speaker
This is more than an asset. It is a spiritual philosophy because I think that's what we're looking for is some kind of counter to this government knows best that they can step in and interfere in every aspect of your life. Seemingly with impunity is there some other counter to that?
00:23:25
Speaker
And so there you go, right? Like that's exactly what you were fucking talking about where you have these, these kind of useful idiot libertarians who believe that crypto is, is this, you know, somehow is going to produce freedom from government, freedom from central banks. And, you know, it's over and above money. Cause like she's talked about how she's lost money in it. Um, it's really about like, it's, it's about the political project of crypto almost more than the money part of it. Right.
00:23:54
Speaker
Totally. And let's be clear, the political project is a lie.
Critique of Crypto's Libertarian Promises
00:24:00
Speaker
As so many of these right-wing narratives often are, especially when you look at more populist politicians like Danielle Smith and Pierre Poliev. They want you to believe that they're on the side of workers and all this kind of stuff, but actually the policies and the project that they are promoting
00:24:17
Speaker
is one that benefits capital at the expense of the rest of us. And the real key thing to note about this kind of libertarian ethos of cryptocurrency is that it is benefiting particular capitalists. The idea is that you take the power over money, over currency, away from the state, and then it's in control of the hands of the people.
00:24:41
Speaker
But actually what you have then is when you take that power from the state, you put it in the hands of capitalists. So you basically end up further empowering capital at the expense of everyone else. You lose the power of the state to have control over money. And, you know, we can discuss whether, you know, what the government does and the regulations that it has around currency in the central bank are actually beneficial to people. I would say they are also beneficial to capital. It's a lose-lose in many ways, right?
00:25:09
Speaker
But you know at least it's not as bad as what these people are trying to suggest and I would make one final point here right they often point to how the banking system has a lot of problems and this justifies why we need cryptocurrency and often they point to the global south as well and they'll say you know currencies in the global south are already very you know.
00:25:33
Speaker
already fluctuate a lot. They don't often have a dependable standard in a way that the Canadian dollar or the US dollar or something like that might have, where they don't move around as much and there isn't as much movement in the value of those currencies.
00:25:50
Speaker
And the reality is that yes, those things are often true, but introducing a cryptocurrency or a new technology is not going to solve those problems, right? Those are fundamentally political problems that need to be solved at the political level. The problem with our banking system is a result of how
00:26:09
Speaker
You know, it is privatized, how it's controlled by private interests, the ways that it is regulated, and we could have a public banking system that better serves the interests of the public. But these people don't want to talk about that. And then when we move to like the world scale, the reason that a lot of these global south countries have really, you know, undependable currencies where people often try to get US dollars or a euro or more stable currency like that, that doesn't fluctuate as much.
00:26:35
Speaker
is because of the international financial architecture that was created by the global north countries, by the western countries, right, to benefit themselves and allow them to extract capital from the rest of the world. And that's not going to be solved by introducing some kind of speculative cryptocurrency that just, you know, kind of makes everyone's money highly speculative and, you know, you lose control over it and hand it over to capitalists. So it's a very kind of lose-lose proposition. When we talk about cryptocurrency, it does not deliver
00:27:05
Speaker
the empowerment or the benefits that these people would claim. And there are actually ways to solve the problems that they identify, but their solutions will never work. And there's a line of thought out there. You know, I was just reading this morning about how.
00:27:18
Speaker
the promulgation of a lot of the underlying technology of cryptocurrency, who the hell Satoshi Nakamoto was anyways, still a mystery, was developed by the Western security state. And that cryptocurrency offers a very handy way for intelligence agencies to move currency around and to fund their projects without having to worry about the minimal oversight that they get from
00:27:45
Speaker
the states that they are attached to, right? So again, I don't have time to go into that one. I should send that to you, by the way. I'll put it in the show notes too.
00:27:55
Speaker
really interesting stuff, but back to Daniel Smith in Alberta. So Daniel Smith is not just a true believer and views crypto as a spiritual philosophy as well as an asset, but she, again, has big plans for crypto in Alberta. She is the premier of this province now. When she was talking this shit, when I was playing this
00:28:18
Speaker
I'll play this clip for you, but when she was talking and laying out these plans that she has for crypto in Alberta, she was the leader of a business
Alberta's Crypto Mining Plans
00:28:27
Speaker
lobbyist group. She was a former radio host and now she has real political power and you just got to listen to it because you have to kind of sit back and marvel at this woman's brain, but here we go.
00:28:42
Speaker
Given that we are going to have Bitcoin mining for at least 120 years, if somebody has any evidence to the contrary that they are going to switch, let me know. But that's my understanding. And given that it's requiring an increasing amount of power,
00:28:58
Speaker
in order to mine. And given the fact that it is very difficult to cite these mining operations as they start requiring more and more energy, it seems to me that we have the perfect model in Alberta where we can establish hubs with Bitcoin mining operations, have
00:29:14
Speaker
off-grid power generators powered by natural gas that allows us to establish our own electricity. It allows us to approve the natural gas pipeline and development that is going to power it. And it also gives us a brand new industry for us to attract all of the best and brightest minds of the world. And that to me is when we talk about diversification, isn't this exactly what we've been talking about? It's not retraining all of our energy workers how to install solar panels.
00:29:44
Speaker
It's using our traditional industries and the wealth generated from it to attract and create new industries and this marriage of this new high tech emerging world, not just on Bitcoin, but all of the attendant technologies associated with it.
00:29:59
Speaker
I've mentioned before as well all the amazing carbon tech technologies that are developing that you could that you could couple on these sites with the production of natural gas powered electricity and capturing the emissions. My friends, like I think this is the answer. I think it's a way for us to just get going on keeping our energy
00:30:19
Speaker
uh our economy revved without having to constantly rely on a hostile series of decisions coming from Ottawa that keeps on putting barriers in our way. So I want you to think about it and I want you to respond to me Danielle at DanielleSmith.ca
00:30:39
Speaker
So yeah, I want you to think about it there, Paris. I'm going to have to send her an email and tell her what I think about that. I mean, my friends, I think this is the answer. I mean, she's not talking about a just transition. She's talking about a crypto transition here.
00:30:55
Speaker
You know, one thing that really stands out to me in that clip, you know, beyond the kind of just ridiculous stuff she's saying is it really does show how they see crypto as fitting into their broader ideology and kind of the petro state nature of Alberta. Right. You know, we're not going to get off oil and oil.
00:31:15
Speaker
We're not going to get off oil and gas. Rather, crypto is this technology that fits within our reliance on oil and gas, our continued reliance on oil and gas, how we're not going to stop doing that. And so instead of it being kind of a clean technology that gets us off fossil fuels, it's one that we integrate into the fossil fuel infrastructure and then have all this kind of
00:31:39
Speaker
technological abundance and wealth creation as a result of that because we're burning our beautiful, wonderful natural gas here in sweet, great Alberta. And it's just an absolute joke as the past year has shown us. But also just this idea that we're going to use this fossil fuel to mine these Bitcoins that are just a speculative asset
00:32:06
Speaker
You know, we could almost go so far to call it a Ponzi scheme. Um, but that is also incredibly inefficient and has no real use case that does anything like tangibly good for society. Um, it's just like a complete, uh, joke of a project and, you know, and, and would actively make it worse, right? I mean, totally crypto is already bad enough for the environment, but, but you drain every crappy Jack great gas well in Alberta dry and just put a crypto mine at the top of it.
00:32:35
Speaker
Like you were talking about accelerating climate change. You were talking about making it actively fucking worse again and for nothing for a fucking scam that provides no value to anyone but the rich people who already own the Bitcoins. Right. So totally. And like to be clear, they talk about.
00:32:51
Speaker
turning this into a payment system and we all buy things in Bitcoin like Polyev did at that kebab shop, right? But the reality is that the cryptocurrency financial ecosystem is far less efficient than the one that we already have. It uses much more energy to process a transaction than just using debit or Visa or MasterCard. Those are much better technologies
00:33:14
Speaker
and they're trying to replace it with something that is worse, that uses more energy. And of course, in this case, they can promote it as, oh, it's just going to burn our beautiful, wonderful green, ethical fossil fuels here in Alberta. We love our green fossil fuels here. Yeah. So I mean,
00:33:32
Speaker
Crypto is a scam. I know it's a scam. You know, it's a scam. Even Danielle Smith knows that it's a scam. She herself has been caught up in a very famous crypto scam. She has admitted to having money in and losing money in Quadriga, which was a crypto exchange that was started by someone who was based in Canada. It was determined to be a fraud and a Ponzi scheme by the Ontario Securities Commission. But like literally here is Danielle Smith in her own words on like how crypto is a scam.
00:33:59
Speaker
It's very true that there have been problems in the past with some major collapses of exchanges. As you know, I was victim of one of those with the Quadriga Exchange. Gerald Cotton apparently died of Crohn's disease when he was in India. I say apparently because they actually went through the process of trying to exhume his body to make sure he didn't fake his death because he ended up absconding.
00:34:23
Speaker
with I think $250 million worth of people's investments. So there are dangers. There's no doubt about it. There've always been, there are always going to be unscrupulous individuals anytime a new market emerges. Yeah. Uh, I think she fucking nails it there. Yeah, really though it, it is a, it is a weird, like I'm not super off on the quadriga case, but like it is a weird one, right? Like all of this money was in this exchange. Um, the guy goes to India.
00:34:53
Speaker
dies apparently.
00:34:55
Speaker
Um, his wife acts like she never knew anything about it. Uh, you know, kind of pleads ignorance. Uh, and then there's all this like missing crypto, supposedly. And there are certainly like conspiracy theories. There are people who wonder like, did this guy actually die? Or did he just disappear with like everyone's money?
Cryptocurrency Risks and Political Impact
00:35:15
Speaker
And the thing to say there is like, you know, on a broader scale, when we're talking about all the collapses of the past year and all the people who've lost money in it, you know, if you had your money,
00:35:24
Speaker
in a bank and you know the bank.
00:35:28
Speaker
had some problems, the bank lost your money, whatever, like you have insurance, like there's insurance on the bank that up to a certain amount of money, you're going to get your money back, right? You're not going to lose it all. But when you're investing in crypto, that's not the case. You do lose your money because those same, you know, protections are not in place in the crypto system as it is in the traditional banking system. And so it creates a lot of real risks.
00:36:00
Speaker
And it's a relatively harmless and kind of money losing hobby when some middle-aged loser decides to get into crypto. But when that person is the premier of a province and that person can tell the crown corporation that manages
00:36:15
Speaker
the province's pension funds, what to do, it becomes a lot less harmful. Not only does Danielle Smith have a lot of power over AMCO, which is the body that manages Alberta's pension funds, but she's also angling to split Alberta from the Canada pension plan. This is a fucking long time conservative Albertan idea back to the Alberta firewall days, and it's very stupid, it's very unpopular.
00:36:42
Speaker
But she really does fucking want it. She has talked. She spoke just before Christmas this year of having a referendum like to coincide with the election on splitting from the Canada pension plan, which, you know, so one of her staff quickly fucking talked her out of because the next day she was like, never mind. But we will still have a referendum, just not not in to coincide with the election, because again, it's an incredibly unpopular idea and tying your political fortunes to that desperately unpopular idea would be a bad idea. She does still want to govern after all.
00:37:09
Speaker
Are you saying Danielle Smith has bad ideas? I'm shocked to learn that. I'm saying it's possible. Sometimes she is just making it up as she goes along. Here's where we take a hard turn into pension governance because we are talking about real fucking money here. Tens of billions of dollars of deferred workers' wages. Millions of people rely on these pensions being solvent.
00:37:38
Speaker
And some pension plans have already made investments in crypto that have gone belly up, right? Like we've seen the Ontario pension plan lose more than a hundred million on FTX. We saw the Quebec pension plan lose more than $200 million on Celsius when Celsius went belly up. And look, I know you and I are not some big brain investment banker types, but how the fuck are pension fund managers? Like some of the most conservative people on this fucking earth
00:38:07
Speaker
some of the, should be some of the most risk averse people on the fucking planet, investing in things like FTX and Celsius.
00:38:14
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's pretty clear like over the past decade or so pension plans have become a bit more risky in their investments, especially when it comes to tech investments, because of how we've seen so many, the values of so many of these companies just like explode, right? You know, you invested them as a little startup. And then because of, you know, the way that growth works in this industry, because they were all pushed to kind of become a monopoly, some of these companies really took off. And so, you know, these pension plans were like, you know, we'll, we'll take the risk in some of these companies.
00:38:43
Speaker
But even when it came to the crypto stuff, there were a lot of people sounding the alarms, saying that this was a red flag when the pension funds started saying that they were going to invest in crypto. It should have been very obvious for them to know that they shouldn't have been doing this, that they shouldn't have been putting workers' pension money on the line.
00:39:09
Speaker
to invest in these scams and these Ponzi schemes. Luckily the Canada pension plan as far as I know didn't, but yeah, it's still very
00:39:21
Speaker
But some pension plans did. Some pension funds made bad decisions on crypto without political interference. The thing about Alberta and the pension fund manager here is that it is a lot more susceptible to political interference than the Canada pension plan. Canada pension plan has said, we don't have any crypto. I should point out, I should be clear. AMCO has said that they don't own any crypto. But in Alberta, there is legislation that allows the government to issue directives to AMCO.
00:39:50
Speaker
They also appoint the board and the board must ensure that these directives are implemented in a prompt and efficient manner. And these directives aren't just theoretical. Back in 2020, I released a report detailing more than a billion dollars of risky investments made by IMCO into shitty oil and gas companies.
00:40:06
Speaker
that was connected to the Alberta Growth Mandate Directive that was put in place by the newly elected Alberta NDP in 2015. Of the 32 separate investments made under that mandate that we know about, 24 were in oil and gas. To compare that again to the federal government and the Canada Pension Plan,
00:40:25
Speaker
They cannot issue such a directive. They are simply not allowed. There is no provision in the legislation that allows the federal government to tell the Canada Pension Plan what to do. In fact, there are extraordinary safeguards to keep anything like that from ever happening. If you want to bring in legislation that changes the kind of governance of the CPPIB, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, it's harder to do that than it is to amend the constitution.
00:40:51
Speaker
Um, and so, and then here's the thing though, too, like Danielle Smith is sitting there, she loves fucking breaking norms. She fucking revels in it, right? Like the things we're seeing right now about, um, you know, prosecutorial interference, like it's, it's, uh, shit happens all the time with her. And, and again, she floated the idea of having this referendum, immediately walked it back. But
00:41:16
Speaker
Daniel Smith has spoken, again, literally within the past year, of wanting to drain every crappy gas well in Alberta in order to mine Bitcoin.
00:41:26
Speaker
This is, you should be worried about this. You should be worried about Danielle Smith being in charge of this province. And you should be worried that if she fucking wins again, if she wins the election in May of this year, that like we are going to see those little tentative steps that the Alberta government took towards crypto in like kind of, you know, Pierre Poliev, Schwarmomania, like they are only going to happen more and more and more.
00:41:52
Speaker
And Paris, as the outsider to all of this, as someone who is not, blessedly does not live in Alberta, that sets a pretty bad fucking precedent, right? Like when the state starts doing shit like this, or when the state potentially could start doing something like this, like Alberta certainly loves to break a trail. And the hypotheticals on this is what I'm saying. Does that frighten you at all?
00:42:19
Speaker
Yeah, like, you know, I think that there are many reasons to want to get Danielle Smith out of the Premier's chair as quickly as possible. You know, whether it's whether it's crypto stuff, whether it's, you know, this ridiculous fake controversy she's trying to gin up over the just transition bill or whatever it is the federal government is actually calling it because I believe they're not actually calling it a just transition. You know, her what she's doing by interfering with the prosecutors and stuff on the covid cases, like, you know, there's just
00:42:49
Speaker
story after story when it comes to Danielle Smith of the kind of stuff that she's up to the kind of stuff that she's saying and then has to walk back like this is the kind of loose cannon that you don't want anywhere near the reins of power and unfortunately you know the people of Alberta are having to deal with that um you know I certainly wouldn't want to see her given uh majority power for another mandate who knows what she would do especially you know if the kind of um
00:43:16
Speaker
discussion around crypto normalizes a bit. And so it's not just seen as this thing that is kind of totally collapsed, but maybe there's an opportunity for interest in it to revive, to come back again, whatever you want to call it. And then it kind of justifies a greater investment back into this space, because unfortunately, I don't think that they're just going to completely disappear.
00:43:39
Speaker
I'm not sure what the case is with Danielle Smith, but one thing that has stood out to me is how Pierre Poliev seems to have gone quite silent on crypto, or at least I haven't noticed him saying as much about it lately since the price of it has gone down. And I know that Trudeau has really used it as a way to kind of
00:43:57
Speaker
attack him and hit him, like, you know, saying, if you had listened to Pierre Polyab, put your money into Bitcoin, like you'd have you'd have basically lost, you know, a ton of it right at the moment that he was pushing it. And I think it's a really effective, you know, attack line for Trudeau, or at least has been for a little while, it probably won't last much longer. But that shows me that, you know, were they really closely kind of aligned with crypto? Would they did they really want to
00:44:27
Speaker
grow crypto quickly, maybe that is true. But I think part of it was also just trying to appeal to the type of people who had kind of aligned themselves with crypto with this libertarian project and wanting to get them behind their kind of political campaigns as the UCP, but also the federal conservatives were trying to realign, I guess, their branding, their messaging, the types of people who they were trying to appeal to.
00:44:57
Speaker
around a moment of anger around COVID and COVID policies and measures. Crypto kind of played into this broader kind of libertarian, conservative, reactionary kind of narrative and moment when these two leaders really emerged and took power.
Conclusion and Thank You
00:45:18
Speaker
Well, I will end on with one bright spot of news, which is that in December, after the details of the FDX collapse came out, the Canada pension plan did release to the media the fact that they had abandoned any investigations, the investigations that they had started into investing in the crypto space and that they would not be investing in crypto going forward.
00:45:39
Speaker
And yeah, that's a good fucking idea. Don't do it, Canada Pension Plan. Save your money. Don't lose all of our pension money. It's a bad fucking idea. Yeah, it's not real. It's a scam. Please don't invest any Canada Pension Plan money in crypto. And they decided not to. So that's a nice little way to end it. And that's, again, another reason why Alberta should stay in the Canada Pension Plan as opposed to kind of ripping it out.
00:46:03
Speaker
Um, we've come to the end of our time here. I want to thank you so much for speaking with us, Paris. What's the best way that people can follow along with you and the work you do? It's now is the time to get your plugs in. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for the invitation. They can certainly follow me on Twitter where I'm at Paris marks. Um, they can go check out my podcast if they want to, uh, which is called tech won't save us. Yeah. You know, those are the key things, I guess.
00:46:27
Speaker
Awesome. Yes. Uh, tech will save us great podcast. It's in my rotation. It's a part of the harbinger media network. So we've got that, we got that synergy going. And, um, yeah, thanks so much for coming on folks. If you like this podcast, you'd like the conversation you just listened to. There is something you can do to help me out. Uh, you can become a recurring donor, five, $10, $15 a month, whatever you can afford. Very much appreciated. There is a link in the show notes.
00:46:51
Speaker
as well as you could just go to progress, theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card and then start the process. Jim and I would really appreciate it. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, or comments, I am very easy to get ahold of. I am on Twitter at, at Duncan Kinney. You can reach me by email at DuncanKatprogressAlberta.ca. Thank you to Jim Story for the editing. Thank you to Cosmic Family Communist for our theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.