Canadian Entrepreneurship & Saving Democracy

[00:00:00] Calan Breckon: Today’s episode is sponsored by Kit, Formerly known as ConvertKit, the email marketing platform for creators. I’ve been using Kit for years because I found that it is the most efficient and easy to use out of all the email service providers. Kit simplifies your email marketing by combining powerful automations with an easy to use interface. I love the Visual Automations builder because I am a very visual person and it really helps me to organize all of my automations in a very simple, simple and easy way. And let’s face it, Automations is a must have in order to succeed in any business today. Kit also integrates with all of your favorite ecommerce platforms, lead generation services and much more. The best part about Kit is that it runs on a sliding scale for payment so that you can get started for free while you learn all about Kit systems and how to grow your email list. So to get started today for free, head on over to calanbreckon.com/kit or just click the link in the show notes. Now let’s get on to today’s episode.

Welcome to the Business Gay podcast where we talk about all things business, marketing and entrepreneurship. I’m your host Calan Breckon and on today’s episode I have the founder and the CEO of CITIZN, Murray Simser. Murray is a serial tech entrepreneur whose software has been used by millions of people around the world. His latest venture is the AI company CITIZN and its flagship product HumanityGPT and DemocracyGPT powered by a global societally owned network. As the foundation of CITIZN, Murray invented societal networks and the capitalist philosophy of societalism which delivers the same investor returns without the social inequality which is being submitted to economics academic journals soon. Murray led the worldwide commercialization efforts of many well known technologies at Microsoft and at several Silicon Valley startups, some of which he founded. His CRM company, eAssist, was venture backed by intel and is used by millions of people around the world. eAssist won Best Startup in 2000 and powers some of the world’s largest corporations, including the Government of Canada’s Service Canada. Murray’s passion is helping young and young at heart entrepreneurs learn and become our next generation of innovators. This was a phenomenal conversation I had with Murray about Canada’s entrepreneur ecosystem and the future of democracy. So let’s jump in.

Hey Murray, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. I’m really excited to have you. How are you doing today?

[00:02:30] Murray Simser: I have never been better Calan, how about you?

[00:02:32] Calan Breckon: I am doing really well. It’s been a couple of really good weeks here. So today we are going to be jumping in and talking about the Canadian ecosystem for entrepreneurs. I’m really excited because you are very well versed person. So let’s start off with.

Okay, I have many thoughts about this that I know you do as well. But I want to start off with what are we getting wrong when it comes to supporting our startups in Canada?

[00:03:02] Murray Simser: First, Calan, thanks for having me on. I’m always delighted to be on these shows and especially when I’m invited to talk about entrepreneurship, which as you know, has become my hobby horse lately. And I’ve because I’ve observed quite a few changes in the sort of what I’ll call the entrepreneurial platform of Canada.

And there’s a couple of macro things that I have a little bit of expertise in because this is not the first time I’ve had this problem. In the late 90s when I set up a company with former colleagues of mine, we had to leave Canada and go to the States and set it up. And the reason for that was pretty simple. The quantity of innovation capital that was available to entrepreneurs was near zero.

You could get bank loans if you were a great corporation that had lots of money they could factor or secure. But otherwise innovation capital, meaning risk capital on companies that are not yet quote unquote going concerns. Not in the, not in the accounting term, but in the sense that the business is functional. You’re not able today, in the same way that we were not able then to attract capital that will fund companies that require a long pre revenue period. Okay. And that has consequences for the downstream value of the entire entrepreneurship platform in Canada. Because if you don’t fund exclusively moonshots in your venture funds, for instance, then the returns are much less, perhaps a third and more likely that your fund will just stagnate. And so I think we’ve got an innovation platform that has good intentions in Canada. So that’s the first point. But I think that the vehiculation of those intentions is lost in translation. Okay. There’s this concept called sort of power law venture capital, if you want to think about it like that. But what it basically means is you’re only betting on moonshots. Okay. And if you don’t bet on moonshots, and by moonshots I mean the VC is nervous to write the check. But it’s a really big opportunity and it’s plausible to get it done. Doesn’t mean it’s not high risk. In Canada we have near none of this, what we have a ton of in Canada on The contrary, and these are the good basic units that we can work with is we have lots of what I’ll call initial capital like incorporate your company, set up your corporations. You got law firms that’ll give you a few free hours, you’ve got governments that will give you shred credits. You got all this sort of super early stuff is there but the moment you want to raise any significant capital, and by that I’m talking about above a million bucks, okay? Something that only accredited investors or qualified investors will get involved in. There are no funds that will invest in a high risk giant, potentially giant cost to get it to success Time Corporation. And as a consequence the number of rims or blackberries that we’re going to create in this country is near zero. And we’re seeing that. So the things that we’re getting right was that we have the ambition, we have the drive. But once more, that entire effort since the year 2000 to correct the problem I’m describing has led to more bureaucracy and more associations and more nonsense in the ecosystem that is innovation and less innovation. Okay, the number of companies that are great and world beating that are coming out of this country is tending towards zero. But the number of middle style potential players like restaurant back ends and logistics, last mile and networking companies all wrapped in an AI wrapper, they can raise 4 or 5, 10 million bucks.

And recently there have been a plethora of funds that have come onto the scene and they have used their sort of focus on what I’ll call minority groups as the main pitch to their sort of investors is what they end up with. They end up with the money, but the money comes from the government. The money comes from associations that are directed by the government to give them cash. And the resulting investment thesis is low risk taking, therefore not creating anything for those minority categories that are being put on the scene. And so to me, I think we can solve this with a very simple solution. We need capital that will invest in very large opportunity companies that require long runways to get to break even. And that these investors should do it at scale so as to distribute the risk. Only one of them has to pay off, cover the whole thing and get 100x. All right, but nobody in Canada understands this math.

The best guy that I saw was Mr. Lau who invested in Wattpad. He wrote an article about it about a month ago and he was crystal clear on the mathematics and we still can’t get it through our head. So I’m going to stop there.

[00:08:00] Calan Breckon: So yeah, because that’s a. There’s A lot to unpack there. I, I wanted to dive a little bit more into these moonshots. And, and I see this as well. As a Canadian, as an entrepreneur, we, we are very risk averse in Canada. And so I wanted to know why aren’t we good at doing these moonshots in Canada? What is it about the mentality? Is it the ecosystem? Is it just we don’t have enough investors? What do you think is that key piece that we’re not good at doing the moonshots?

[00:08:32] Murray Simser: I think it boils down to the way the economy is fundamentally structured, okay? Depending on who you ask, the government, meaning, you know how GDP is. C +I +G + the difference between export and import imports, that equals Y. Well, G in Canada represents upward of 65% of the entire economy, okay? That’s the problem. And because we have G that is orders of magnitude bigger than business investment and consumer spending and we have more or less a wash in terms of exports and imports, you have to ask yourself, is G the best place for a country to put money into? Why do I ask that question? Because C, I and G and the difference between exports and imports all have what is called a different multiplier effect on the economy. Okay? And by multiplier effect, I mean by every dollar that you put into C, I or G returns so much at the end of its life, okay? You eventually end up with nothing and that’s the end of its contribution. Well, it turns out C gives this much. Okay? I gives even more, and G gives this much. Any questions?

[00:09:44] Calan Breckon: Interesting, Interesting.

[00:09:46] Calan Breckon: So if you were in charge, I want to ask, if you were in charge, what are two things that you would change or implement to better support the Canadian and entrepreneurship ecosystem?

[00:10:00] Murray Simser: Yeah. Believe it or not, my number one thing is not cap gains changes, okay? So this should. Because the truth is, entrepreneurs don’t give a rat about that, okay? If they’re able to access capital, okay? And it’s reasonably priced and it’s available. But the fact of the matter is, when you combine all these things together, capital gains really matters. Because what it does is sends a signal that entrepreneurship is, forget it, Ville in a given country. And then that scares entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs live on a knife edge, okay? As you know, and so do I, there are times where your corporation is obviously going to fail. And it’s only the sheer will of the founder of the entrepreneur or whoever’s backing them that keeps it together. Together, okay? If you take that small capacity for somebody to see through very difficult times away, you take away Their hope, you take away their belief, you smack them in the face and say you need to pay more tax. And although it doesn’t sound like there’s a direct mathematical relationship between the two, humans aren’t rational, okay? Economics tells us this. They’re irrational actors at the best of time and they’ll just not do it. So that’s the first thing we got to do, is we’ve got to understand that the way we speak to our society, our politicians, our banks, our big elites, if you want to call them that, people like you who are podcasting, people on the news, people anywhere on the Internet, what they say matters to the number of businesses that are going to start and the number of businesses that are going to sustain over the long period of time through difficult stuff. Okay, that’s number one. So it’s, we got to fix that. But if I were really in charge, let’s say I had a ministry and I was in charge of innovation, I would immediately carve off $20 billion and I would take that money and I would create a fund that invests only in moonshots, okay, and give them money up to $5 million in seed capital, okay? Nothing bigger than that. All below that, all pre revenue, all gigantic moonshots with high risk, but giant growth. And I would make that money available directly, not through intermediaries like the CBCA or all of these entrepreneurial associations that basically are not really fit to solve the problem that we’re talking about. We saw that recently when they were talking about it in the space. They’re more interested in sort of administrative structures than they are in the fundamental problem that exists in society. And it’s not their fault, okay? None of them are entrepreneurs. They’re doing the best they can with the structures they have. But real entrepreneurs don’t care.

Or to put it more plainly, it pisses us off, okay, to watch these people twiddling their thumbs and not doing anything but spending millions of dollars on events and publishing and all the rest of the crap that they do. But in the end, we have a dramatically lowering venture profile in the country. We have less investment, we have no foreign directed investment into startups.

Nobody wants to come and the people who are here want to leave. So where am I going to raise my money for CITIZN in the next round? Okay? I’m lucky that I have now gotten into most of the first rounds of this company, but if I’m going to raise something in the order of what I’m talking, because mine is a three year Runway before I even get my first dollar. Nobody funds that in Canada. So guess what? I’m likely moving the company to the States. Yeah. And the States will have me happily. They love entrepreneurs in the United States. I’ll be moving right down to Texas and Austin and I will enjoy myself to the high heavens.

[00:13:29] Calan Breckon: So I want to dive in a little bit deeper to this kind of, for lack of a better word, the free money that you would just be like, here’s the money. Go do the thing.

[00:13:38] Murray Simser: It’s not free.

[00:13:39] Calan Breckon: Well, it’s not free.

[00:13:40] Murray Simser: You have to earn it.

[00:13:41] Calan Breckon: But there is a piece of that, that being on the entrepreneur side of this, especially a young entrepreneur in Canada, the ecosystem that I see that exists is a lot of money that gets given to organizations or places that they think they’re doing well because they’re providing resources. They love providing you resources and mentorship and these other things that they think you need to succeed. And I’m like, just give me some fucking money so that I can do the job and pay myself.

[00:14:13] Murray Simser: They don’t have any money. And that’s the problem, okay? What they have is a job that they’ve made through their association, all right? And that job is 100, 150 grand a year to keep that job going. Why?

So you got to ask yourself the question. Some of these association heads, quarter million three hundred thousand. Like, for what?

Okay? And that kind of money could do a lot better spread across five startups than making somebody’s picture on an association’s marketing campaign every three weeks to show them off and prepare their next. This is not entrepreneurship. If you go to Silicon Valley and you go meet venture capital investors, they don’t have giant, expensive $150 per square foot offices, okay? This is Silicon Valley. I’m talking about the greatest of all. They’re efficient, they’re lean. They don’t have any bullshit like that. And they’re not interested in these gigantic associations that do nothing. Okay? What they’re interested in is funneling capital into something that’s going to get a great return so that that return can then res. Recycle into the economy and create greater people. Every dollar that goes into our innovation space in Canada does not return anywhere close to the amount of money that the same dollar being invested in, say, an innovation place in the United States or even European countries, okay? This is.

This is. I mean, this is classic 101 stuff. But the reason nobody wants to talk about it is because if they do, then they will be seen as wanting. They’ve had a great Run up here. Okay. A bunch of Canadians who never did anything in their life entrepreneurial, talking about technology like it’s the second coming. None of them have worked in it. None of them have done, or most of them. And the ones who have, have done small beer stuff. They call themselves a founder. But it’s not a significant impact in any way, shape or form to the world. The environment, the innovation platform, they certainly don’t have enough money to give back. And so this is where I think we fall down, is that we like to pat each other on the backs and the head and say, oh, that’s such a good job. Oh, it’s a great association. Let’s take a picture together. Do you ever notice the marketing on these associations, those picture banners? It’s all the same company. They’re all marketing, they’re all sponsoring each other. This stuff starts to look really cheap at the end of the day. And so for a guy like me who’s built software that’s affected millions of people and done more than that through other people’s software, like at Microsoft Teams, as a for instance, we bought that. I was on the team that bought Ray Ozzy’s company. We integrated that and made that kind of company my own software. It runs Service Canada. Okay. The whole country’s used my software and many others. But that kind of talk is seen as bragging in this country. Here’s the second piece we need to fix in Canada. Okay. Self promotion is seen as a disease in this country. Who does he think he is? Okay. Well, you know me, Callan, Okay? I am precisely what I seem to be. That’s what’s different about me. I don’t have a face. I am what I am. And what I am is seriously unimpressed with the state of things here. And it’s not everybody, by the way. There are some that are doing really terrific work trying to fix this problem, but the lion’s share are just trying to get government money so that their organizations can be funded.

[00:17:43] Calan Breckon: Yeah.

[00:17:44] Murray Simser: And no innovation, it doesn’t matter. They’d rather promulgate. They’d rather propagate themselves into the world rather than the people they’re supposed to represent.

[00:17:53] Calan Breckon: Yeah.

[00:17:53] Murray Simser: And you know that that also applies to politics and a variety of other areas. So, you know.

[00:17:59] Calan Breckon: Yeah. So we’re going to dive into the right stuff in a little bit. But before we do that, I wanted to touch a little bit on back on this. Investors in Canada, like people who have the capability, who have the financing, who have the money, who could not Be, you know, the $20 billion fund, but on their individual level, make those differences. Why do you think that they are still so timid and afraid? Maybe speaking more of the angel investors in doing those moonshots, just being like, hey, I got the 25k, here you go. Assuming it’s going to get written off, but hoping that maybe it could go to the moon.

[00:18:38] Calan Breckon: Why do you think that?

[00:18:39] Murray Simser: I think the first thing’s a bit of an education part, right? It’s. You nailed it. They’re not.

Okay, if I give you the math for power law or what Alan Lau called play it safe capital versus moonshot capital, I mean, that’s what he called the two things, and they’re basically the same thesis. Because it’s venture money, right? Why would you do moonshot if you could play it safe? Now, this comes down to a cultural and character driver more than anything else. We’re just not used to it here. And because over time, anybody who’s popped their head up and become a, what I call power law investor that says, you know, I’ll bet on 10, one will pay off, it’ll work, the whole portfolio is good.

We haven’t seen too many of those succeed in Canada, okay? And where we have had early stage capital from the government, the government has chosen to invest in absolute crap, okay? And by virtue of the fact that the whenever the government. So I said, I’ll put a $20 billion fund if I was the minister, but I wouldn’t be hiring who they hired to do it. I wouldn’t ask the associations or incubators or a bunch of these other program places that you and I talk about all the time. I wouldn’t give them the money to do it. And that’s what they did. And so every example in Canadian history where early stage capital has been given out in the manner I’m speaking of, it doesn’t mean it’s given out willy nilly. There’s serious due diligence, that’s done. But if you don’t know what you’re doing and what you’re looking for in due diligence, then you’re going to invest in stupid shit that you understand rather than things that are moonshots.

And I use the term moonshot for a reason, okay? Everybody thought Elon Musk was an absolute nutcase with SpaceX. You go back and you watch YouTube videos about people laughing at him, okay? I mean, it might as well be people laughing at Noah, because this guy’s going to save us. And that’s the point that’s what innovation is. If it’s not scaring you, if you don’t understand it, then maybe you should invest it.

[00:20:41] Calan Breckon: Yeah.

[00:20:43] Murray Simser: And I think that’s what it boils down to. But when you get all of these Deloitte, Boston McKinsey types that come out, or ex lawyers or ex accountants, they always go to what they know in the final analysis. And most of these people won’t take a risk to save their life. Okay? Look at them on panels, look at them in podcasts. You think anybody has my energy or crazy or cuckoo? They all look like they came out of the same mill machine. Okay. And it’s boring.

[00:21:13] Calan Breckon: Yeah.

[00:21:13] Murray Simser: This is why we have the problem we have, because people like me are Persona non grata in this country, and I’d rather enjoy being that person.

[00:21:22] Calan Breckon: It’s the. It’s the. It’s the contrarians who, I think, who have been the revolutionaries in the world, who have gotten things done, who were. Everybody thought they were crazy until they aren’t crazy, and that’s it.

[00:21:33] Murray Simser: I mean, Steve Jobs had the best ad in history. Here’s to the crazy ones. Okay. You know that commercial from, I believe, 97 when it was just saving the company? Think different.

I think everybody ought to go listen to that three or four times. And the actual words in it are basically the formula that we just discussed. Okay? You don’t need a math degree or be a venture capital specialist to understand that. If you under. If you’re an accountant and you understand what I’m talking about, then that needs to be on the short list, okay? Especially if you don’t understand it, but there’s a credible person at the other end. Okay? Then you bring in experts to help you validate whether or not that person is, in point of fact, making grand claims that are possible. They don’t do that either. What they do is bring in their buddies and their friends that are also B players that have no entrepreneurial experience. They wouldn’t know a good from a bad entrepreneur to save their lives.

And when you don’t have that level of.

I think the right word is discrimination, okay? And I choose that on purpose to make people freak out, okay? You need to discriminate between good and bad entrepreneurs. And I promise you, it has nothing to do with color of skin or sexuality or anything else that might be used as discrimination. Money does not discriminate, Especially in the Valley. You could come in with purple hair and they’ll give you 10 million bucks. Okay? But your idea has to be worth it. Do you Know how many people walk around in Silicon Valley driving Lamborghinis that wear jogging pants all day long? Okay, like we invented weird.

Yeah, weird. In Canada, everybody here looks at it and, and looks down their nose at it.

[00:23:26] Calan Breckon: Very status quo.

[00:23:27] Murray Simser: The only reason is pure and utter jealousy that they’re not doing it. So what do they do instead? They fight against anybody who is crazy. Anybody who has a real shot at innovation and creation. Okay. Which if you’re normal, you won’t do.

[00:23:44] Calan Breckon: No, you have to be crazy to be an entrepreneur. I know that. Full on. I am definitely a little cuckoo bananas. So we’ve been doing a really good job of outlining kind of the ecosystem and talking about a lot of the negatives. Let’s flip the script a little bit because you did mention that there are good things that you see. There are good things. So what are some of those things that we are getting right here in the entrepreneur ecosystem in Canada?

[00:24:08] Murray Simser: Yeah. So I think that the most important thing is there are a lot of upsides to doing business here in Canada. Okay. I lived in The United States 15 years, remember, okay. New York City, Seattle, San Diego, and impermanently in San Francisco and New York. But, but the sort of thesis behind all of this stuff is that you must in the end, okay, not throw the baby out with the bathwater to protect the beautiful things about this country. Like, for instance, knowing that your employees in this country are all basically going to be able to be healthy. It’s an incredibly. You don’t think about it very much, but the number of times I’ve had people who’ve worked adjacent to the corporation, maybe not as employees, but as contractors, and they didn’t have, say, health insurance. Now all of a sudden your employees is, is. You can’t come to work because, you know, they’re really, really sick and they’ve been letting things go. We do a great job of educating. We do a great job of feeding clothing, sheltering, and providing, you know, doctoring in medicine to people. But once we get beyond sort of those basic things where entrepreneurship is concerned, we do all the wrong stuff. Okay? So it’s. And when I say we, and I mean this, all right, in, in the most gentle way possible. So to all the people in the innovation sector, listen and listen good, all right? I chose to come home and build my company, all right? I’m here, I’m doing it, despite the problems. And that’s what entrepreneurs do. We don’t really care about the problems, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t piss US off when the government and this what I’ll call pseudo government class of people that claim to be in entrepreneurship, but they’re not, okay? That’s where the issues are. Now, having said that, you asked, what do we do right here? Okay? So I think we have the best educated people. I think we have the best engineers, I think we have the best coders. I think we have all of the raw materials that we need and the connectivity of Canada, okay? And the brand of Canada and the power of that brand and the credibility that comes along with our rule of law society.

The fact that even though the government bugs me, it doesn’t mean the government’s a nefarious force, okay? It’s that. That’s a policy difference, not a qualitative evaluation of the itself or the pseudo government entities. So from a basic standpoint, we do everything, right, okay? We lack nothing, okay? Nothing, Zero. We’ve got everything. It’s the ephemeral things that we do wrong, okay? And unlike the United States, they do the basics poorly in a lot of cases, okay? Transportation, getting people around, just the inequality that exists off times just in your employees that you have in the company that you know, it’s. That’s harder in the United States, okay? Now, like, if you work for Microsoft, it’s fine. But if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re trying to get things going and you have entrepreneur employees that are across the range, you’ll have a lot of different HR problems that you would never have, okay? So remember, the platforms are similar but different, okay? So we do the basics correct. We don’t do anything that has to do with entrepreneurship. Correct. Not tax, not the. The credit system, not. Not the. The patent system. I mean, it’s. The complexity of doing business in Canada finally, is. It’s ridiculous, okay? The bureaucracy that you have to deal with is ridiculous. Our cra, for instance, is almost as big as the IRS in absolute terms. Forget per capita means. Means we have six to eight times more CRA than they have irs. And the IRS is supposed to be the big bad guy, right? So if you think about it like this, we’ve got a great platform that has been infested with bureaucrats, and that bureaucracy is taking the innovation return off of what is otherwise a terrific, beautiful and credible platform. And I remain here because of it.

But if I can’t raise that money, I’m gone. And so will the millions of dollars of spend that are going to be in this company and the billions that will come out of this company at the other End. And most important of all, Canada will lose a national champion. And I’m not alone, okay? I’m not alone. And it’s not because we don’t love this country. God knows I drove around everywhere in the States and Captain Canada stickers on the back of my car. Ask anybody. That’s the unfortunate truth. If you go to Silicon Valley, it’s basically loaded with Canadians.

[00:29:01] Calan Breckon: Yeah, brain drain. Brain drain for Canadians.

[00:29:03] Murray Simser: Real greatest people in this country is so humongous. We didn’t have this problem at the end of the 90s and the early 2000s. We’d solved it a little bit. That’s why I came back. By 2012, you know, Mars had been built and guys like Young Wu were on the case. And, you know, Raffi, all of these. This great focus on innovation. But more often than not, once those great thinkers were moved out of the way, what was left? A bunch of bureaucrats that were sort of fighting over who moved my cheese and stuff like this.

[00:29:34] Calan Breckon: So I’m kind of hearing a couple things. The first one I want to point out is Canada. We’re in this kind of spot where we’re great at safety and great at the status quo and keeping healthy people and keeping things stable. But because of that, it’s almost a trap where we also can’t get above that, but we’re also not going to fall below that to where other countries are. So we’re kind of stuck in this middle ground of like, well, it’s safe here, so let’s stay safe. Instead of operating from a place of optimism and possibility, we’re kind of more in the safety, keeping the status quo out of a little bit of fear that we could fall from this safety.

[00:30:15] Murray Simser: I think you nailed it. And as I said at the beginning, a lot of this has to do with culture, right? In Canada, as you know, even though I’m a pretty reasonable person, I’m really seen as sort of an extreme person in my behavior. Okay? I don’t mean my behaviors are bad in the sense of, like, criminal or these things, but rather, I’m too loud, I’m too outspoken, I’m too opinionated. I’m not deferential enough. All this cultural nonsense that we have here, that’s sort of a holdover of an older time, okay. And I moved to the United States and the US Gave me a completely different view of the world. And so now I’m as much American as I am Canadian in my culture. And that liberates me to be something that most Canadians can’t Be okay. And you don’t get that by living in the States for two weeks. Okay? You, you’ve got a. I spent my entire professional career, from 25 years old until I was 40 in the States. So it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a way of thinking that’s dramatically different, okay? And. And it means that I am like sandpaper to a lot of these, this Bay street, the suit nonsense on Bay street, lawyers accounts, all the rest of the stuff, including these innovation types so called. Okay. They all think that I’m sort of a bridge too far in terms of my crazy, and that my ambition is just way too big for Canada. I mean, you’ve seen the deck. It’s. It’s something that’s. It’s something that is, in point of fact, one of the greatest moonshots that will ever be done. And me saying that makes people turn red and their head explodes. And then the first thing they do is they go call people say, did you hear this nutter in the States? I go talk to the best venture capitalists in the world. And they’re like, you know, dude, this is really cool. It’s too early for us, but come back in a minute, we’ll do this. Or go see our other fund over here, that’s a junior fund that does early seed stuff. Nobody ever says this is too ambitious. Who do you think you are, Murray, to be able to pull something like this? Dozens of people, even friends of mine. And then let’s go further. You know, Murray, 10% of zero is zero. And I said, yes, indeed it is.

So the sort of anytime you meet that type of person whose job it is to minimize your ambition, to sort of cut you off the knees, to make those type of inane commentary that doesn’t say anything about me. It says everything about the mentality of the people that we’re in front of. And I think on balance, that’s more or less the way people think here.

[00:32:57] Calan Breckon: Yeah. So. So I want to follow this thread. You are talking about CITIZN in essence, in. In what you’re talking about.

[00:33:04] Murray Simser: No, actually, not just CITIZN, because it was cannabis before that. It was the AI company before that. It’s all of them. CITIZN is quite apart from CITIZNs, just the latest in a long line of things that I’ve done where everybody says I’m crazy.

[00:33:17] Calan Breckon: But your crazy has paid off in the past. So let’s dive into what the current crazy is with CITIZN.

High level overview. What is it? And then we’ll go into what you’re trying to achieve with it.

[00:33:29] Murray Simser: Sure. So I’ll start with a bit of a story so that everybody understands this. And the question I like to ask people just for fun is, how’s politics working for you these days? Okay. And basically, CITIZN fixes that. Okay. Do you have any questions? Like, it’s that simple. And all of this is five years worth of work, okay. To continuously remind me that these ungrateful souls that I’m doing this don’t deserve to knock me down. And I’m going to keep going. Okay? So what does that look like? So for the past five or six years, I’ve been defining what that looks like, because at the beginning, that’s a very big ask. Okay? Reinvent democracy, reinvent capitalism. And as I started to do the research and tried to understand what was actually going on, this led me to new discoveries. And this is how discovery works. This is how innovation works. Nobody has a fully baked cake at the beginning. They got a thing that looks like a cake, but it’s a PowerPoint that looks like a cake, not a real cake. You know, Ceci ne puz en pipe, okay? You know, the famous painter, this cut, this thesis that people have that if you don’t have it on day one, it’s done. And that’s how most people are, okay? They think if you fail. Whereas the mentality of an innovator is it’s not about failing, it’s about testing, learning, rebuilding, testing, learning, rebuilding, testing. And I’ve done that five years and five prototypes, thousands of users and thousands of experts that I brought into this thing to help me rebuild it over and over and over. So that when you get on your damn phone and you use it, it’s going to achieve what I just said. And so that tangibly translates into a way of being.

Pick the greatest ambition you could find, okay? We want to colonize Mars, then work backwards and figure out how to do it. That’s it. Okay? The problem most people have here is that they never pick that grand target. They pick something that is so. Oh, it’s a problem somebody has. I’ll address it. That’s a. Yeah, it is. It’s a business, but it’s not a business that deserves venture capital.

Okay? And the problem today is that all these places are getting the capital, whereas the moonshots aren’t getting any. Any. Zero, okay? And that’s fundamentally what CITIZN aims to change. So if you come back to CITIZN now, okay, given that context, when we start to create a company like CITIZN, it’s our job to figure out how to get to that end. It’s not anybody else’s job. It’s not societies, it’s not associates with the government. It’s our job. And so that means that I needed capital to build that ambition. And it took a lot of capital. I had some very good angel investors, very wealthy people here in Canada that have backed this company with private checks, so family offices principally. And so that has enabled us to create the vision that is democracy needs to change. And the reason it needs to change is because it’s a mess. Manifestly everywhere in the world, there’s not a single academic that thinks democracy is improving. There’s not a single barometer like Economist Intelligence Unit, Edelman, any of these sort of respectable metrics that identify the sort of direction of democracy. They all say we’re on the edge of civil war in many countries and that there are less than 20 real democracies in the world. And half of those are considered flawed real democracies, okay? Not least the United States.

So when you’re in a world where you used to have a flourishing set of democracies and now you don’t, you have to ask yourself why, okay? And the answer is really simple. The printing press. Remember that old days? We got, we got these lovely things out of it, okay? Books, we used to do these. Well, before this printed medium was created, there was none of this. There was the bishop and the town crier. Those were the only people that had information that got transmitted to people. And when that came along, it destroyed the church and it destroyed the country that was Christendom at the time. It was sort of like a European Union style thing back then. Pope was the big cheese and it tore it apart.

And it took 130 years of war to settle the problem. And the solution to the problem, of course was let’s create democracy. So we invented Parliament as a solution. Glorious revolution, you know, Oliver Cromwell and that creation. Parliament we take for granted. It’s always been there. Ottawa, Westminster, Washington D.C., all of that was done because of those civil wars caused by the printing press, okay? Caused by the printing press. We have a new printing press.

[00:38:24] Calan Breckon: Phones, AI, Internet.

[00:38:26] Murray Simser: Well, more specifically social media, okay? Anything that’s Internet and social media relay AI just improves the speed and the rapidity with which keeps going, okay? But this is an instrument every human being possesses, okay? This instrument is attached to you at all times. We said about eight hours a day on it each, okay? And people didn’t realize that engagement powers change in the brain identical to this and we’re going to get the exact same problems as we got 1450 when the Gutenberg Press was introduced to Europe. Okay?

Famously, everybody says, oh, the Bible was the thing that we fat. The most important thing printed back then was the king is a diddler, the Pope is a rapist.

[00:39:16] Calan Breckon: It was the witch.

[00:39:17] Murray Simser: It was the witch stabilized the world. Identical to the nonsense you see here.

[00:39:21] Calan Breckon: Yeah, 100%.

The thing that blew up was the book about witches, like the witch hunting. And that’s why the witches become. It wasn’t the information sciences and all this stuff.

It was the far right being like, witches are gonna destroy you all. And then they went on a giant witch hunt because one crazy person had the printing press to print it all and disseminate all of this misinformation, much like what is happening on social media today. So I am following this thread with you.

[00:39:49] Murray Simser: So to remediate that, we need a new institution. That’s the lesson from history. Because if you don’t have an institution to counter that, that’s credible. And so what institutions did we create? Okay, we created Parliament and Parliament created representative democracy, if you want to think about it like that. Broadly speaking, across the world, representative democracy meant that we elect people to go and talk on our behalf. Okay? That worked for 500 years until 2012, when it stopped working when this came. And it took 10 years for the full effect of it to be measured. But while our countries are being torn apart, lesser mortals are letting it fucking happen because they’re in a bureaucratic position where it’s advantageous for them to just. Okay, And I’m sorry, that’s unacceptable. If I have to be Oliver Cromwell, so bloody be it. Okay? I’ll be Oliver Cromwell. I’ll do it. And what I’ve done to be Oliver Cromwell is I made that. And that is going to instrument, not representative democracy, but direct democracy everywhere, in every democracy on earth. And it’s already begun.

[00:41:06] Calan Breckon: Can you tell us a little bit about, like, on a. On a tangible level to like the everyday listener? What does that look like to them physically or operationally?

[00:41:16] Murray Simser: I can. So physically, it looks like you have an app on your phone. Okay. That’s the simplest way to think about it. You have Facebook, you have LinkedIn, you have X, you have, I don’t know, video games, you have your fitness apps. And now you’re going to have CITIZN. Okay? Each country is one network. Okay? You’re a Canadian, you’re on the Canadian CITIZN. If you’re an American, you’re Canadian, the American CITIZN. And Never the twain shall meet, okay? This is not a place you’d have buddies all over the world and hang out and fight about French politics. You’re going to fight well about your own politics. So you and I live in Toronto, which means we have a counselor at the city level, we have an MPP at the Ontario level, and then we have an MP at federal level, okay? That’s going to be what’s here and everything that’s relevant to you using the digital twin of the government that we’ve created. And we’ve created digital twin of every government, okay? That digital twin will be used to identify signals that are important for people to participate in, okay? And it’s built exactly the same way as democracy as a. As an institution was built back in the days of democratic institutions, and it still survives today. You do realize the king could arguably refuse to sign the bill, right? And last time that happened, people get pissed off. But it doesn’t mean the power’s gone. All right? So what we did when we created Parliament is we said there’s this sort of wall between the authority and the deliberative body, okay? Because what if the deliberative body goes crazy, okay? And you say, well, it won’t. Well, it won’t now, but 500 years ago when we started this, it did, okay? Many times. And better countries collapsed under the poorly organized democracy structures than we like to admit, okay? Famously, all the post colonial countries in Africa, okay? Not exactly democracies anymore, okay?

There’s been a regression that happens. And so what we have to do with this CITIZN app is that we too have to become the most credible, measured voice in every polity. But that does not take away the power of the representative governments that are there because we want multiple layers of insulation.

This will gain its power from its ultimate credibility, not through authority, okay? It’s the quality of the data that is going to drive this platform to influence how representatives in Ottawa or Washington or here at Queen’s park or in Quebec City or wherever, okay? A city of Toronto here, All of these things will be informed by this data in the same way that, say, polling companies today help inform the government. But they are not the final answer, okay? They are an input. What we need is a more credible input. And we need people’s voices to be measurably heard so that they will actively participate. And most important of all, we need to get rid of this running around that everybody has to do to participate in their democracy. It’s not on your bloody phone. It doesn’t exist. We nerds from Generation X said that we invented it, you millennials copied it, and now you live on it. And Gen Z grew up on it. Yeah, let’s finish the bloody job, shall we?

[00:44:43] Calan Breckon: Okay, it’s like less than 50% of capable voters because we’re having a lot of votes across Canada these days, and they are getting very slim margins, let me tell you. Just BC alone, and that’s like almost, what, 50%? Just over, I think 50% of the population voted. But if everybody had the option to do something like that on their phone, through an app, while they’re having a coffee. While they’re having a coffee, the engagement rate would shoot through the roof, I can tell you that. And then the numbers would be something else much clearer.

[00:45:15] Murray Simser: The data is so valuable once it achieves what you just said, that this generates more money than almost any other company in history. And it shouldn’t be a nerd like me that owns that data. Okay, so to go a step further, CITIZN doesn’t just want to create a great data set, make tons of money off of it. We want the people to own the bloody thing outright and get all the proceeds that come from it. Okay? That’s power. Just like Parliament got power. So you know what we like to say. There are currently four estates that we recognize in the country, plus the newest, the Internet, the executive power, the legislative, sorry, the executive power in the order of arrival. Magna Carta. Magna Carta. The king, you know, John, he’s the executive power. The barons became the legislative power at the beginning of the Magna Carta, and that evolved into Parliament with Oliver Cromwell, okay? 1688, Glorious Revolution. We got the judiciary out of the common law, created with the Magna Carta. So that’s number two. Number three is the legislature. Number one’s the executive. Number four, media, traditional media. So this is the journalism estate in Canada, remember? The free and independent media, that’s another one. So at the end of the day, they had a job to do, too. All four of those are doing their jobs. Like, okay, so the fifth one comes along, and that is the Internet itself and all of its outcroppings, like mobile phones and apps and social media and all the rest.

When that happened, all the other estates stopped mattering, okay? And that’s exactly what happened after the printing press, 1450-1500 range, okay? When everything destabilized and you got the Protestant revolution. All the crap that went on, I poke piss off Christendom. Finish.

We need a sixth estate.

And that sixth estate has to be controlled directly by the people. It has to be owned by the people. And most importantly, it has to produce enough money that the people can enforce their will. And this platform is going to make people of Canada billionaires collectively. And they’re going to receive about a billion dollar deposit every year into an account that they can use to enforce everything they want done. And let me tell you, this is the largest single amount of money that will exist in politics in every country in the world, period. And it will finally devolve power to individual little people like you and me.

[00:47:43] Calan Breckon: Yeah, everybody’s. Wow, I could go on for hours. But you know, we’ve already, we’ve already been going on about this. Where can folks go? Where can folks go if they want to learn more about CITIZN?

[00:47:54] Murray Simser: And you, you can look me up on any Google search. You’ll find it anywhere. Murray Sims or CITIZN C I T I Z N no E. Okay, so CITIZN C I T I Z N. And you can also go to our website, CITIZN World.

And it, it. Look, you’re going to hear a lot about us in the next little while. We’re in the process of closing around now. We got a really big investor and it’s really exciting. And so you. We’re going to build this bloody thing just like Elon built those rocket ships. Okay? And sooner or later we’re going to catch a rocket ship landing and, and you’ll, you’ll have heard it first.

[00:48:31] Calan Breckon: Yeah, I’m, I’m really excited. I’ll make sure to have all this, all the links and everything to connect to you into CITIZN in the show notes. Murray, thank you so much. You’re such a wealth of knowledge. You’re such a fantastic person. I’m very, I can’t myself very privileged to know you. And thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

[00:48:46] Murray Simser: And the same thing applies to you, my friend. You’re doing great work. Keep it up. I’m delighted to join this anytime you’d like.

[00:48:52] Calan Breckon: Thanks for tuning in today. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button. And if you really enjoyed today’s episode, I would love a star rating from you. The Business Gay podcast is written, produced and edited by me, Calan Breckon. That’s it for today. Peace, love, rainbows.