Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Peter Schiff: BITCOIN BUBBLE! (#121)

Episode Date: February 27, 2021

According to @PeterSchiff, the only valid reason to buy Bitcoin is thinking the bubble will get much bigger before it bursts. Most #Bitcoin buyers don't know it's a bubble so they will never sell. But since most who do will be unable to tell when it's popped, they're also unlikely to get out with a profit. Learn more from Peter Schiff: https://www.schiffradio.com/ @PeterSchiff Invest with Peter Schiff: https://europacificfunds.com/ https://schiffgold.com/ Watch my interviews about crypto and bitcoing: with Michael Saylor for the "bitcoin bull case": https://youtu.be/9w0VSQtVnI8?sub_confirmation=1 https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 And with Cory (Swan) Klippsten making the case against bitcoin. https://youtu.be/jZi5ovigXaU?sub_confirmation=1 Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating And please join my mailing list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 📝 🎥 🎥 Watch my most popular videos🎥 🎥 Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize winner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMuqyAvX7Wo?sub_confirmation=1 Jill Tarter https://youtu.be/O9K9OBd3vHk?sub_confirmation=1 Sara Seager Venus LIfe: https://youtu.be/QPsEDoOTU6k?sub_confirmation=1 Noam Chomsky: https://youtu.be/Iaz6JIxDh6Y?sub_confirmation=1 Sabine Hossenfelder: https://youtu.be/V6dMM2-X6nk?sub_confirmation=1 Sarah Scoles: https://youtu.be/apVKobWigMw Stephen Wolfram: https://youtu.be/nSAemRxzmXM 🏄‍♂️ Find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔥 Find me on Instagram at https://instagram.com/DrBrianKeating 📖 Buy my book LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE: http://amzn.to/2sa5UpA 🔔 Subscribe for more great content https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 ✍️Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 📧Join my mailing list: http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php 👪Join my Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/losingthenobelprize 🎙️Please subscribe, rate, and review the INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/into-the-impossible/id1169885840?mt=2 🎙️Listen on all other platforms: https://wavve.link/into A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I want to first, before we go too deep into Bitcoin versus gold versus precious commodities, I know you've had a lot of encounters with the notions of the purpose of wealth. I want to ask you, there's a famous line in, I think it's Wall Street, Part 1, where Charlie Sheen asked Michael Douglas, you know, how many yachts can you water ski behind? I want to ask you, you've been incredibly successful. What is the purpose of wealth to you, Peter Schiff? Well, I think from a society perspective, because obviously on an individual basis, I mean, it's pretty obvious what the benefits of wealth are, right?

I mean, we all want to be wealthy, you know, because, you know, we want to live a better life. And the more wealth we have, you know, the more things that we can enjoy in life that aren't free. I mean, some things in life are free, but a lot of stuff isn't. But I think from the benefit of society, like how do I benefit from somebody else's wealth? That is really the question. And is wealth something that we should fear? Because the way the left spins it, wealth is a bad thing if you don't have it. And somehow when somebody has wealth, it's because they're hogging it or they're taking wealth from you, that you're somehow poorer because somebody else is richer.

And nothing can be further from the truth. because first of all, wealth is created. Nobody just takes wealth. I mean, unless you're a thief and you steal something, but as far as most entrepreneurs, they have to create the wealth. It wasn't there until they created. It's not like there's all this wealth

and we just grab a piece of it. People have to create it. And the wealth is created by doing things, engaging in activity that benefits mankind because it's the productive capacity that is coming from that wealth. So wealth in factories and plant and equipment, all the things that you create and things that you invent

that would constitute your wealth. You made that wealth by improving the lives of other people in order to get it. And the fact that you now have wealth, you can continue to use that wealth for the benefit of humanity. even if that's not your goal, your goal is just to accumulate more wealth. The only way you can do that is by enriching everybody else because that's how you benefit

from your wealth. You make it available. You invest. You grow the economy and you fund other people's businesses if you're no longer funding your own. So the creation of wealth is often demonized, but on a personal level, speaking, you know, you en masse great wealth. I sometimes think you've got kids that are very devoted to you.

and, you know, they tease you and I follow Spencer and they become influencers. And, you know, we live on, as Woody Allen said, do I want to live on through my works? No, I want to live on in my apartment. So, like, given that, what do you want to do with this massive wealth and army? You have a shift army that's out there and it's growing every day. And I count myself in the legions, although we're going to do a little battle with some of the hodlers as we go on. But tell me, what is your goal? Like you can't water ski behind two yachts, you can't live to 3,000 years old.

What do you personally? Well, first of all, yachts are not the greatest for water skiing anyway. You want a smaller boat. You know, they can go faster. I guess you could wake surf on a yacht if it has a big enough wake. Obviously, you know, I am accumulating wealth. The goal is, you know, just so, you know, for me to have it or for me to be able to spend some the money and lead money to my children or their children.

But I recognize that my activities are benefiting others. I mean, if I didn't have any value to offer others, I would never have accumulated anything at all. That's the whole beauty of it. And that's the point where you don't want to try to tax wealth or destroy wealth. Wealth is really the seed corn that makes the economy grow. And you look at all these socialist countries where they've attacked. or redistributed wealth, they end up impoverishing everybody. You know, they don't just make the

wealthy poor. They make everybody poor. And you lose all of the benefits. So, I mean, that's why, you know, the inheritance tax is one of the worst taxes out there that should be, you know, abolish the estate tax. It should be zero. You don't want to try to destroy wealth that is accumulated. You want to allow that wealth to continue. And, you know, a lot of these people, these billionaires, they have so much more wealth than they could possibly spend. I mean, all of this wealth is not, you know, the yachts that they're water skiing behind. I mean, most of that wealth is used to continue to grow the economy and invest in productive efforts. Some of it is used to fund charitable giving or all sorts of things that could not happen absent that wealth. One thing I want to

point out, too, because I know we're going to talk about Bitcoin later. Bitcoin ain't wealth. I mean, a lot of people, you know, look at, oh, I'm getting, look at all the wealth that we've created in Bitcoin. no wealth has actually been created in Bitcoin because Bitcoin itself doesn't do anything, it doesn't produce anything. Now, there are people who are wealthier today because they own Bitcoin, but the Bitcoin themselves isn't adding. I mean, if all the Bitcoin's vanished tomorrow, the world would be no worse off because they were missing. I mean, it's not like, you know, oh, no, we don't have those Bitcoin now. I mean, yes, the individuals who used to own them would be upset that they no longer had them. But a lot of people

who are hodeling, and you mentioned the hoddlers, right, they have all this so-called wealth on paper. Yeah, it's on paper, right? If you haven't sold any of your bitcoins, you haven't actually converted your bitcoins to wealth. But the only way you can do that, right, if you want to get actual wealth and you want to sell your Bitcoin, somebody has to buy it from you. So really what's happening is their wealth gets transfer to you. You get their wealth and they get your Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is a mechanism for transferring wealth from the people who own it to the people who want Bitcoin and they're willing to exchange their wealth for Bitcoin. But the Bitcoins themselves aren't any wealth. And eventually I think the bubble pops. Today it hit 50,000.

So it's a new milestone in the life of the bubble. But at some point, all the air comes out. and all that paper wealth, well, you know, vanishes. Yeah, so, you know, you're meeting me for the first time, and it's asymmetric warfare because I've known you for so long. I've fallen to you for so long. But I'm a physicist. I'm an astrophysicist. I studied the origin of the universe.

And one of my heroes is Galileo Galilee. And yesterday would have been his 457th birthday. So he's about 400 years old than you. So happy birthday to him. But I wanted to, you know, the first question I was going to ask you yesterday, but I'm going to ask it to you anyway. He has written some of the most valuable books in the human history by virtue of the work that he put in to understand the cosmos and specifically

physics. But he also had a very small book, which is actually the rarest of all his books, published in 1600. And that book is called the, it's basically about a slide rule. And back then, that was the iPhone of the generation. Very few people had slide rules, but it allowed you to do calculations even faster than the abacus that I'm sure you and I both use. But this slide rule, he goes through all the different things you can use it for, you can measure triangles, you can do linked proportions, you can make copies of things. But one thing you could do is currency conversion. And I want to just read a very quick passage, if you'll indulge me, from this book. He talks about leaving behind what we can do. Let us say we want to convert 180 gold scooty into Venetian

dukats. To do this, to do this, the only thing we need to know beforehand when we don't know the exact rate of the two currencies, is how much each is worth when exchange for a third currency. soldy, for instance. So he goes to this whole thing. And I'm going to shake this guy because he died pretty poor. He didn't have that much money. He had a bunch of illegitimate kids and ex-wives and mistresses that he had to support. So he had to be a business.

I call it Galileo Incorporated. But I want to shake him. If I could go back in time and say, forget this calculation in the slide rule. Save one of these books because this book will be worth a trillion scooty because the scooty is worth nothing now. I mean, you can get one kind of as a showpiece. but I want to ask you What was a Scooty? What was a Scootie made of? A Scootie was like either

is some, you know, maybe a piece of copper or some semi- I mean, it'd have to have some kind of value even as a collectible. I mean, how many could there still be if they were that old? I mean, how many of them could be around? Sure, for sure. But the books, there's only, there's only 46 of these books that are still

in town. Yeah, the books are probably even more rare if they've survived the elements. I mean, somebody would have had to gone out of their way to preserve it for it to somebody around. Yeah. So when you look at somebody like Isaac Newton, another astronomer and physicist, he spent most of his time, you might not know this, but he was the master of the mint in the United Kingdom.

And one of his jobs was figuring out ways to torture counterfeiters. But he's the one who came up with the idea of the fluted edge on the edge of a coin to prevent counterfeiting, debasing, and influxia. Yeah. Yeah. So, and that actually had ripple effects. It allowed the Jews that were living in England to no longer be under suspicion. suspicion of coin clipping, et cetera.

Yeah, and you know, when the United States mint decided to counterfeit the dimes and the quarters and the half dollars, it continued that tradition of having those ridges, even though there was nothing left to clip because they took all the silver out and they just took a bunch of copper and, you know, cladded in nickel. But then they made it look like the old silver coins by putting the ridges on. And so to me, that was, you know, a pure counterfeit because it was saying, hey, here's a quarter, even though there's not a quarter of a dollar in here, because a dollar was defined as a weight of silver, and there was no silver in there. So it was a complete counterfeit coin. Yeah, that's right. And it's funny that we call it a quarter, a quarter of what? It was a quarter of a ounce of silver, and you can't get any silver in any of these pieces of... Well, it was a quarter of a dollar, yeah, but the dollar was defined by... That's what a dollar was. It was actually a measure of...

of a weight of gold or silver. And that was actually legally spelled out in the coinage act. It was 1792 where they said, you know, how do you define a dollar? It's so much gold and so much silver. And so when I think about that, you know, there's all this talk about in blockchain that the value of blockchain, we'll get to blockchain specifically later on, but is in so-called proof of work. So how much and how much computation went into the production mining of a Bitcoin?

And again, we'll get into Bitcoin specifically. But I want to first take a mutual maybe enemy of people that are on the Bitcoin side and on the gold standard side of the gold side, as you and I are, but against Fiat. And I want to ask a question, when I look at a piece of paper that has, in God we trust, it has pictures of dead presidents on it, and it's backed by some measure of work. In the case of the U.S. dollar, it's backed by nine U.S. carrier battle groups that cost trillions of dollars. to put together. Like, that took a lot of work to do that. Well, that's not really. I mean, obviously, I mean, the U.S. dollar isn't technically at this point, or let's not call it the U.S. dollar, because that's not really what it is, but they're Federal Reserve notes. And, and even though they're not actually notes because a note is a promise to pay, and at one point,

Federal Reserve notes did promise to pay dollars. They no longer promised to pay anything. You know, my father once labeled them as Greeney's. That's what he called them in his book, the biggest con. And by the way, he was a big fan. of Galileo because my father and Galileo both went to jail, not even though that they didn't do anything wrong, but they still went to jail. But the greedies, as my dad called them, they're not backed by anything, but what they have that makes them viable and work as money, or you mean it is that number one, they are legal tender. So, you know, everybody accepts them. The government requires that taxes be paid in, you know, greenies. And every American who doesn't want to go to jail,

like has to accumulate this currency in order to give it to the government. So, you know, my dad used to say if the government said, we're going to, you know, you have to pay your taxes in peach pits. And that's all we'll accept. then all of a sudden we'd all be accumulating peach pits because we would need them in order to pay our taxes. So there is a need for dollars because that's how you pay your taxes. But then beyond that, you have this long tradition where we're using dollars. I mean, we've all grown up with dollars. Everything we buy is priced in dollars. We have some idea of what we think a dollar is worth in terms of various products. Our salaries are in dollars. Our rents are in dollars.

policies are in dollars. You know, everything that we do is dollarized. And so we have that tradition. And then we have confidence that I've used dollars all my life. I've always been able to buy things with dollars. I always will be able to. I recognize that there's some inflation and that over time certain things are going to require more dollars. But, you know, the dollar is going to lose that value slowly. In a meanwhile, I can invest my money. I can try to beat inflation. But, So you have all that tradition. Bitcoin doesn't have any of that. It's like a fiat digital currency, but with no history of being used for anything,

nothing being priced in it, no contracts, no bonds, no insurance, no sovereign says, I want my taxes paid in Bitcoin. And, you know, it's not used in anything. It's not a commodity like gold or silver or any other commodity that is used. It's not an asset that throws off dividends or income or rent. I mean, it's nothing. But if people want to buy it, then, you know, yes, there is some artificially created limit to the supply. And there's no limit to the demand.

So if demand keeps going up and nobody wants to sell, the price can go up until nobody wants to buy. And then people want to sell and the price crashes. So when is that going to happen? I mean, I don't know. Obviously, I'm not that smart. Well, I think, you know, there's been a value. And I pointed out to some of my friends are. like, why are you having Peter on, you know, he's been wrong? They send you, they copy your tweets.

You know, you should feel pretty happy. You know, I always feel like if somebody's stalking you, Peter, you know, you should feel pretty good. People really care about you. But, but, you know, it's like relentless. People, oh, no, no, no, no. But all, all they're saying is, I'm wrong because the price of Bitcoin is going up. Look, I do admit that I didn't think Bitcoin would hit 50,000. Although I said it was possible, I doubted it would happen. And so it happened, right? But, I mean, I've never said that the price of Bitcoin couldn't go up. I mean, if people are dumb enough to pay $50,000, maybe someone will be dumb enough to pay $100,000. I don't know.

I don't know how stupid people are going to be. I mean, I'm tired of, you know, I generally overestimate the intelligence of people. So, yeah, but I'm not wrong if the price goes up. But if you actually see Bitcoin actually being used. used as a medium of exchange. Then you can try to say, hey, look, you're wrong. Look, here, whole societies have adopted Bitcoin. That's their medium of exchange. That's their currency. They don't use euros. They don't use dollars. They're all using Bitcoin. Show me where that's happening. In fact, I think fewer merchants except Bitcoin now than did a few years ago.

It was a novelty in like 2017. I mean, the novelty wore off because it doesn't work. And then they reinvented it as digital gold. They said, okay, you don't really have to use it as a currency, it's just going to be digital gold. Well, it's nothing like gold. It's got, it's got nothing in common with gold. It's, it's no more digital gold than if you have a digital house. I mean, you can't do anything with a digital house that you can do with a real house. You can't do anything with digital gold that you can do with real gold. So this is just a pipe dream. And sure, people have gotten rich. Could I have made a lot of money personally, had I bought a bunch of Bitcoin when I first heard about it and wrote it all the way up?

sold it today at 50,000 or any time. It sold it at 30,000 or 10th. Yeah, of course. But, you know, there are a lot of other things that went way up that I didn't buy. There are some things that went way up that I did buy. So at least I didn't miss out on every opportunity. You know, you got to pick your pitches that you want to swing at. But, you know, I didn't swing at Bitcoin, I guess, you know, but I still think that most people who are in Bitcoin who are making fun of me, at the end of the day, I'm going to have the last laugh. Because it's like you're at a big poker table, and you got a bunch of people that don't know how to play poker,

but for some reason they got lucky and they got a bunch of chips and they want to make fun of me because I got a smaller stack. But if I know I'm a better player than them, I mean, they can laugh all they want, knowing that at the end of the day, I'm going home with all their money, you know, and they're just going to bust out of the game. And so I think a lot of these guys, you know, laugh now,

you know, go ahead, make all the fun of me all you want. I don't care, you know, because I'm going to have the last laugh and I'm going to have the money. I asked this. Yeah, I had Michael Saylor on. You guys have had your battles online. I've had him on the podcast. I've invitations to the Winkle Wies and other people. And, you know, I always like to do what's called in the military.

My friends and relatives in the military tell me is kind of this red team approach. Because I think at the end of the day, you know, people might not like you or people might not like Michael. But the bottom line is I care about my listeners. I care about my audience. I care about my students. And I'm serious because what I want to do is have this adversarial approach. And then as scientists, most of my audience are scientifically friendly, if not necessarily scientists or engineers, but they can evaluate, you know, which argument sounds better.

Maybe hedging bets I've had on Jim Simons, one of the most successful people in hedge fund history, who's the backer of the Simon's Observatory that I co-run. And this, you know, approaches work well for me. asked, you know, give me the straw man case for gold to Michael Saylor and give me the steelman approach. And I want to ask you, do you see things in Bitcoin, first of all, do you see a value in it? Besides a perception, I agree with you, it's failed as a currency. But by the way, there's millions of other, literally millions of other Bitcoins that, you know,

could potentially be used as currency. But nobody's really saying currency is, you know, just because it has that in its name, that's what it's for. I mean, no one ever envisioned it would be used for smart contracts. And that's something I want to get into later. But the first question I really want to ask you is a deeper question. Again, a philosophical question. When we have the overall thing is that we're all trying to protect ourselves, our families, our countries, against the perils of hyperinflation, collapse, destruction of wealth.

Because destruction of wealth is destruction of work. And I can't think of anything worse than destroying, you know, it's basically enslavement of the human spirit. it. So I want to ask you, don't you think that eventually, if hyperinflation took over, don't you think another country would be the sort of canary in the coal mine, not necessarily America? In other words, we have so much, you know, hegemonic control over the world and even beyond financial, militarily, et cetera, we're kind of the country that people look to philosophically. So I'm ask you, would there be another canary in the coal mine that would alert us, hey, we should have some hedge against inflation, just speaking generally.

Well, you don't even need a canary in a coal mine. I mean, you need a hedge against inflation. I mean, a lot of things have worked as hedges. I mean, people have owned real estate, people who own stocks. I mean, people own real things. Because inflation erodes away the value of paper claims. It doesn't erode away the value of real wealth. So the people who have to worry about inflation are people who own bonds, people who have

you know, cash value in an insurance policy, people who have a fixed annuity, people living on fixed income from a pension, right? That's where inflation really gets you. And then, of course, you know, wage earners because wages typically lag other prices when there's inflation. And so, you know, your standard of living is eroding away. And so, you know, we all need hedges against inflation. Now, hyperinflation is a very rare circumstance, which can completely wipe out your paper claims. And I mean, do I think people should have a hedge against that? Well, you don't have to hedge against that specifically because once you're hedged against inflation, well, you're hedged against hyperinflation too, right? So it's just, it's obviously it's more important

to have the hedge. The question is, is Bitcoin a hedge against hyperinflation? I don't think so. I don't think it's a hedge against any inflation. I mean, you can say maybe it's a hedge against stupidity. I mean, if people are still stupid, maybe they'll buy it or greedy. I mean, I think it's a combination of ignorance and greed that really drives the Bitcoin price. But the reason that gold, right, and everybody wants to compare gold to Bitcoin, even though they're nothing in common. Michael calls it digital gold bars sitting in cyberspace. Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, Michael is a professional Bitcoin shill at this point. I mean, he's all over the place. I mean, that's why I came on your podcast to kind of debunk some of the nonsense.

that he was selling on here. But look, he's trying to get people to buy what he owns. I mean, obviously, because that's the only way to get Bitcoin to go up is if somebody else buys it. Because you can't do anything, whether you can't use it for anything. There's no natural buyer. But this gets me into why is gold a hedge against inflation? Well, when you own gold, you own a commodity. You own a metal, right?

You own the most useful, the most valuable metal in the periodic table. right now inflation makes all commodity prices go up right so if if there's a lot of inflation wheat's going to go up corn's going to go up oil's going to go up right now am i going to buy a bunch of wheat am i going to buy a bunch of oil where am i going to put it right i mean it's very hard even if those are the things i need let's say i need to use a lot of oil i don't let's say i don't use gold i'm not a a jeweler, I don't make jewelry, I don't make, you know, semiconductors. I don't actually need gold. Maybe I don't even wear jewelry.

I need wheat, right, because I eat bread or I need oil because I drive my car. But I'm not going to store the oil because, I mean, where am I going to put it? But if I store the gold, right, and gold goes up in price along with oil and along with wheat, I can take that gold and I can exchange it either directly or indirectly, and then I I can use that to buy my wheat or my oil because there is somebody out there that needs that gold because they have to make jewelry because that's their business or they need to conduct electricity or they're making crowns for dentistry or they're doing something in aerospace or whatever it is that needs gold. So it's a good that can rise in value relative to other goods

that is easy for me to store because I have to get out of paper, right? Oh my God, there's all this inflation. I got to get rid of my paper. How are I going to store? store my purchasing power. Well, over the centuries, gold has been a very convenient way to store your purchasing power because it's a real good that's very, you know, it's, you can get a lot of value in a small space. Every ounce of gold is the same as every other ounce. So it's, you know, it's easy to use as a mean of exchange. Now, people say, well, why can't I use Bitcoin for that? Well, Bitcoin, unlike gold, has no actual use. So there is no guarantee that anybody is going to want your Bitcoin in the future, even though they may want it now to speculate on it, you don't

know. And there are historic relationships. I can take a look at 100-year, thousand-year charts up there around. Gold versus wheat, gold versus corn, gold versus copper, gold versus all sorts of things, to have some idea of a relationship that you can expect over time. There is no such relationship between Bitcoin and anything. I mean, nobody knows, oh, you know, what's the proper price of this in Bitcoin. I mean, there is none. There's nothing. Of course, Michael would push back as he did. And I pushed him on all the, believe me, I never give anybody a free pass. I'm always a, I think a gentleman, Peter. I want to reach conciliance, but not necessarily just to feel kumbaya, let's all get along. But I said to Michael,

I said, look, you know, just saying that something has interconvertibility and so forth, look at Isaac Newton. He invested in the South Sea bubble, which was like a real estate Ponzi scheme. He invested in other things. As I said, he was very convinced that you could turn base metals into gold and thereby debasing it. And Michael replied, well, first of all, you know, as Warren Buffett said, most of the gold, ever mind, all we seem to do is dig it up and then put it underground and then have some guys with guns sitting in front of it. And whereas, you know, he's not a big Bitcoin, you know, Hodler either, Warren Buffett. But the point is that people pay, you know, what they think something is worth. And my question to you is, isn't this of a different character? I remember you very presciently,

Peter, in the late 90s, first with the dot-com bubble, and then in the early 2000s with the real estate bubble, you were very prescient, you called it, you were dead on. Peter Schiff was right. I'll link to that video sometime in the YouTube description. However, those bubbles, as they were, lasted a mere two years at maximum. If you claim, as you did in 2013, you Spencer retweeted today at a tweet from you back in 2013 or something. It's cute to see you guys on Twitter engaging in such fun. But anyway, he's reached a Bitcoin's like 61 or 100 or whatever it was. And I just want to ask you, how many bubbles from your study as a historian of monetary knowledge as you are as a scholar? What bubble has lasted 13 years or more at this point and not just gone up and survived

bull and bear markets, by the way? Well, first of all, the housing bubble lasted a lot longer than that. It really got started in the mid-1990s, along with the NASDAQ bubble. So Greenspan started inflating two bubbles in stocks and real estate in the 90s. It's just that when the stock market bubble popped, the air kind of left that bubble and went into the real estate bubble. And so it kind of kept going up until 2005. It really didn't blow up until 2007, but it kind of peaked in 2000. So it really was about a 10-year bubble with home prices going up much faster than they normally did. So it's just that it got really crazy in those last few years, right? I mean, that's when it really went to the main ecstatic stage. So if you ought to count the early years of Bitcoin when it was just like, you know, people were gambling with their lunch money. It was just kind of a, you know, you had some libertarians, you know, that had 100 bucks worth, you know, people use what, what, how many did they use to buy that pizza? You know, 100, you know, whatever it was.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So when people were just fooling around with, you know, play money, I don't really count that. Yeah, Bitcoin really came on the stage when it ran up to a thousand, right? That was what, in 20, what was that, 2014 or something like that? And then it shot up. All of a sudden, people, what the hell? is this. And then, you know, it spent the next few years kind of going back down. It went down to

$2,300. And then it really didn't start catching real attention until 2017 when all of a sudden it went up to $20,000. So really, that was the first year where all of a sudden a lot of people looked at it. And that's when people started putting real money in it. I mean, not just, you know, play money, right? They couldn't care less if they lost, right? they were starting to put real money in. People were like taking out loans, using their credit cards, taking out mortgages, and they started, you know, buying Bitcoin. So really it started in a big way in 2017. So it had 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020. So you have four real years of this bubble where a lot of people are putting a lot of money in it. I mean, real serious money. So, you know,

is that a long time in the history of bubbles? I mean, probably not. I don't know about every bubble that's existed over the course of time. But I think this one is pretty unique. I mean, I got to give it to the big whales that have orchestrated this thing. It's a great marketing campaign. And now they're even trying to sucker in. I mean, they got Michael Saylor and somehow they got Elon Musk to bite on it. And of course, I've been saying, look, he's in a bubble all on his own. And so maybe he doesn't want to throw pins that bubbles in general and he's maybe trying to, you know, tie his bubble to the Bitcoin bubble. I don't know.

But we'll see how many more CEOs, you know, can be enticed into doing something as crazy is, you know, buying Bitcoin on their balance sheet. I mean, I was listening to Saylor, I mean, talking about, you know, we have to hedge our cash. I mean, you don't hedge something with something riskier than what you're hedging. I mean, your hedge can't be, I mean, you have to take something that has less. volatile. I mean, if you really are worried about the dollar going down, you can certainly own Swiss francs or other currencies if you think the dollar is going to go down. There's not nearly as much volatility there. But if you think all fiat currencies are going to go down and you're

really worried about inflation, well, then you could put gold on your balance sheet if that's what you're worried about. But it makes no sense to buy Bitcoin. I mean, you might as well just buy back your own stock as buy Bitcoin. I mean, I mean, or I think Bitcoin is far riskier than any corporation. So it just makes no sense. Nobody who's worried about two or three percent a year inflation is going to buy Bitcoin that could collapse, you know, 2 percent in five minutes. I mean, it can go down 20, 30, 50 percent, you know, easily, you know, in a week.

I mean, you can't buy that and say it's a hedge. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous. So, and I mentioned that to Michael, and he said, well, you know, things, things are, you know, behave properly until all of a sudden they don't. And the example that he gave is like, you know, you're on a, you're on, you know, you're on a plane. And, you know, he's a pilot, you know, like I am of small planes. And the plane is going down. And you don't ask the, you know, when they give you the oxygen mass, you don't say like, oh, does it have like the proper ratio of nitrogen, the carbon dioxide?

In other words, like, in a certain sense, because it has survived certain bare and both cycles back in, 2017, 2018, and all the way down last year, and because it survived things like threats of regulation and so forth, which, by the way, you point out all the time that the U.S. government basically confiscated gold, made it a crime to have gold. And I asked him, well, what's to prevent that from happening with Bitcoin or just like my friend Phil Greenspun is in the clubhouse as well, actually invited me to Clubhouse. Thank you, Phil. It'll be on the stage later. But he said, you know, they called it a windfall profits tax, and they do that now and other things, too. So, So what's to prevent them for doing it from gold if it does go up again or Bitcoin?

And, you know, his response is basically like, well, you can either put the life mask, life vest on or you can't. And my takeaway was, well, of course it doesn't have a thousand-year track record. And, you know, he would point out, well, you know, they used to use giant blocks of stone as currency as well and as stores of value. We don't do that or grain. So nowadays, there are alternatives that, like my friend, He told me about he's also on Clubhouse.

And he said, like, there's contracts. There's escrow. There are things that blockchain can do. And I think, you know, the concern that I get from my audience is that you conflate all blockchain with Bitcoin or vice versa. So, I mean, would you dispute the fact that things like Ethereum and others, they have ability to act as like escrow, time valued contracts? They can serve a purpose.

I mean, can you hand me escrow? No, you can't hand me an escrow. I mean, whether or not these cryptocurrencies, is conserves some type of purpose doesn't necessarily equate to what owning one of them or a fraction of one of them may be worth. So I have no idea. Those are two totally separate questions. But getting back to really what I think you were trying to ask me, I think that Sailor's example actually contradicts what he's trying to say. Because he says, hey, the plane is going down and I'm handing you some oxygen. are you going to start arguing about whether that oxygen is, you know, is pure enough or is it going to work, right?

You're just going to, you know, put it on. Well, I think that argues for gold because, you know, you know gold is going to survive inflation, hyperinflation. It's been doing that for thousands of years. You don't know that with Bitcoin. I mean, to try to say Bitcoin's been tested and it's survived, it hasn't been around long enough for you to come back and say, yeah, it's survived. I mean, I think that Bitcoin in the next recession, if we have a lot of inflation, I think a lot of people, a lot of millennials, are going to have to sell their Bitcoin. I mean, a lot of people have been holding on their Bitcoin and they haven't sold it. And this last recession, you know, maybe, you know, they would have.

Had we not had all this free money from the government. In fact, a lot of that money ended up going into crypto probably. but I think you have a lot of people who have Bitcoin and nothing else. And when times get rough and they need money and all they got is Bitcoin, now you start to see a lot of these holders, hoddlers maybe reluctantly trying to sell because they need money for food, they need money for rent if they're still paying rent or they need money for energy or whatever it is. And so there's going to be a lot of people selling. And there may not be people who want to buy. And that is the problem is that the market could just evaporate. I mean,

you don't have any buyers. The price crashes. I mean, there is no natural Bitcoin buyer, like there's a natural buyer for most commodities or a natural buyer for other assets that have income that you can ascribe a value to. I mean, if a stock is overpriced, there may be a certain price where the value investors will see the value as measured by its earnings and its dividends and they'll buy it if the price is right. Same thing with real estate. But and commodities, I mean, if the commodity price is cheap enough, I mean, people will start accumulating the inventory if they need it. I mean, if gold got cheap enough, you know, people who need gold would just start building up in inventories. They use it for later. I mean, people just buy it. And so there's going to

be changes. But if all of a sudden, Bitcoin is dropping and nobody now wants to buy it because it's falling and it doesn't, you know, it looks like it's going to keep dropping. There is no natural buyer. So it seems like if in that example, you want to play it safe, you go with gold, right? If you're a gambler, I mean, because Bitcoin is never been used as a currency. He's trying to, sailors say, well, other currencies have failed. That's true. But Bitcoin has never even succeeded. So, I mean, so how's it going to fail? I mean, people say to me, well, Peter, you can't use gold to buy a cup of coffee because I said, look, you can't use Bitcoin. Well, you don't use it today, but gold was a medium of exchange. It was money. It was never a currency. Currencies were backed by gold.

Currencies are money substitute. Gold is the real thing. Gold function as a currency, as a money, as a medium of exchange for thousands of years. Just because we're not using it now, doesn't mean it hasn't proven that it can be used. Bitcoin has never been used by any society. And so to say that it will one day is nothing but pure speculation. I don't think people are saying that anymore. I agree with you, Peter, but I don't think people are saying that they're saying it's no longer, it could be used potentially theoretically. I think you can get a vending machine, the guy bought a pizza, whatever. I agree 100%.

But they're saying it's a store of value. Okay, but here's the thing. So if it's never going to be used as a currency, then what the hell value does it have that you're storing? See, when I'm storing my gold, right, when I'm not using my gold, when I'm melting down my gold and I have it in a bar, I am storing that metal because somebody in the future is going to need that metal. I mean, and who knows? I mean, if we end up, you know, with more technology, we end up, you know, with spaceships. I mean, who knows? The demand for gold will probably be a lot greater in the future. We'll probably come up with all kinds of applications for gold. And so when I have this bar of gold, I am storing that metal. Gold never decays.

It doesn't tarnish. The gold is going to be just as good in a thousand years as it is today. And so that's what I'm storing. I'm storing all the things that people can do with gold. Because people keep telling me, oh, gold has no value. Which is such pure nonsense. I mean, I've never heard so much nonsense except the stuff that crypto people say. But let me finish my question.

So when I'm storing my goal, I'm storing the ability of somebody to use the gold in the future, even if it's never used as money as a mean of exchange, I'm storing the metal for the use as a metal. What are you storing when you stash away your bitcoins, your Satoshi's, you got your Satoshi's on, you know, whatever. What exactly are you storing for the future? Right. So I guess I want to ask you the same question about the Gutenberg Bible.

The last one that ever sold was sold in like the mid-80s to like, I think Sony Corporation or Fuji Corporation or something like a corporation. It's now the biggest asset on the balance sheets of this particular company, back when they thought, you know, Japan would eat the world for lunch. So what is the value of the Gutenberg Bible? It's got some paper. All right. All right.

How many Gutenberg Bibles are there? Well, there's only, there are pages. And actually, a page of the Gutenberg Bible sells for $100,000. Complete copies, 40, under 40. Under 100. So it's a collector's. item. It's something that's very rare that not a lot of people have. And so when you have it, you have something unique that a lot of other people may want to possess. That's the way humans are.

We like to have rare things in a way to flaunt our wealth, to kind of show people, show off how much money we have, right? I mean, this is actually in a safe in this company's basement that's never All right. Well, they know because look, they know it's a rare item, right? It's a real thing that will have value. And yes, I mean, obviously, you know, an expensive painting, you know, is worth a lot more than the canvas and the wood, right? If it's a rare, you know, painting, you know, from, you know, an artist who died, you know, four or five hundred years ago, even some of the ones that are still alive, their paintings are very valuable. But even Pokemon cards. Right. But if what you're arguing is that Bitcoin is that Bitcoin is, you're arguing is that Bitcoin is, you know, is going to be value because collectors are going to want to show off their Bitcoin? No, no, no. There's 21 million of those things. They're never going to be scarce. It's a conserved quantity.

And in physics, conserved quantities have the property of symmetry under either time translation or other properties. And so he makes the point that you can travel, you can transfer it at the speed of light. So imagine. But what? It's nothing. I mean, yes, if you got nothing, you can transfer at the speed of light. Who cares?

Well, for example, there are actually digital art. works that are only available on the blockchain, actually computer-generated art that sell for a good amount of money. And so there are things- Sounds like a bubble there, too. Well, it could be. But the point that he's trying to make is imagine if you had Elon's ear and you said, Elon, buy this gold. It's better for it.

How long would it take to take his treasury in dollars and convert it to bricks of gold, which we then have to secure, and which then would be inflating at two or three percent a year as mining costs as mining takes place? Yeah, that's another ridiculous statement he made that there's too much inflation when it comes to gold. I mean, a 2% increase per year is fine. I mean, gold has been money, again, for thousands of years with that natural weight of inflation. and because of the growth in the population, and because of the efficiencies that come over time as we develop more efficient ways to produce things, even though the supply of gold increases every year, it increases more slowly than the supply of stuff that we buy with gold. So gold still gains its value despite a relatively low rate of inflation that's relatively dependent. So I think when he was saying that, oh, this is, I can't have gold because there's too much gold being mine.

I mean, that's all a bunch of nonsense. But I wanted to get back on your collector thing because, look, if you think about a Bitcoin, right, what is a Bitcoin? It's 21 million Satoshes or 100 million Satoshes, right? So there's 2.1 quadrillion Satoshes. So if all you're trying to do is have a Bitcoin in a collection, you're only just need a If the only reason you want a Bitcoin is to show it off in your wallet, hey, look, check out my Bitcoin. You know, a Satoshi is, that's all you need. I mean, there's so many of these things.

They're never going to be to the point where they're so scarce that somebody is going to feel special because they own one. And that even assumes that Bitcoin is still valuable because the only way Bitcoin has any even use is because all these miners are out there spending all this money. keeping this network going. If the price of Bitcoin collapses, the miners are all gone. So what good is your Bitcoin if you can't do anything with it because there's no way to transact it because all the miners have stopped and they don't want to waste all this money creating electricity to validate your transfer when the prices crash. So I mean, and then you got, I mean, talk about, you know, trying to, you know, create, make gold artificially. I mean, what's going to happen in 10 years, let alone 50 or 100 years with quantum computing or, I mean, people could look back at what we think is, you know, top technology.

I mean, maybe grammar school kids, you know, in the future could hack a Bitcoin. They look at it like, what is this a joke? You know, I don't know. I mean, we think that it's all cutting edge technology. No, I actually said that. I mean, but what do we know? I mean, there's nothing about Bitcoin that couldn't have been invented in the early 90s or whatever. Even earlier before that, it's cryptography.

And back then, instead of 256 bits, you know, hash and so forth, you'd use 56 bits or 64 bits or whatever. So yeah, it would be a little bit slower. And we only had, you know, 56K modems back then. But he makes the point in the interview with me that, you know, like this is not only, it's not like another form of Pokemon card. This is like for a digital generation. These are people that, like right now on the cash app, on the swipe app, stripe app, you can do all sorts of transactions. you can buy it, you can change it into gold, GLD, at least. You could buy Euro-Pacific, you could buy Euro-Pacific funds with it.

Oh, you can't? Yeah, you can. You can convert it to dollars. You have to, yeah, but you can do that with anything. I mean, long before there was Bitcoin. No, no. Well, long before there was Bitcoin, because I, you know, I owned a broker-dealer. Yeah.

And we always, we issued, we gave our clients if they wanted them debit cards, right? And the debit card would be attached. to their brokerage account. So let's say you had a brokerage account, and all you had was common stocks, and you had no, you had no cash, right? You just said common stocks. If you put the stocks in a margin account, right,

you could just take that debit card and just start buying stuff. And it's like, well, I'm using my IBM to buy a pair of socks. Well, technically, no, because the guy that's selling you the socks is getting dollars. What we're doing is I'm giving you a loan against your IBM. And if you don't pay it back, we sell the IBM to get, you know,

because we advance the dollars. But that's all that's happening with Bitcoin. People are able to use Bitcoin if they own it. There are all kinds of convenient ways where you can sell it quickly to get dollars or euros or some other currency. And then you're using that other currency to buy the things that you want. You know, because outside of a handful of people who may want your Bitcoin. And in that case, it's more like a.

a barter transaction where, hey, you know, you want to buy this from me. I want Bitcoin because I'm a hoddler, so I'll barter you the Bitcoin. I mean, people aren't using it, you know, as money where they're just taking it and then spending it. If you just want the Bitcoin because you want to own it, it's really barter. You're going backwards to barter economy where Bitcoin is like another good that you would barter. It's not an intermediary because the person actually wants the Bitcoin. You know, when, you know, when, you know, when you buy something from somebody with dollars, that guy doesn't want your dollars. He wants what he can buy with the dollar.

Sure, same with the gold. Well, it depends. But if it's a jeweler, he needs the goal, right? But if somebody just says, hey, I want Bitcoin, and I'll take it in exchange for some product, that's barter, right? Bitcoin is the end. So it's not acting as money. It's acting as a good that you're exchanging.

But nobody is using Bitcoin as money. And it's way too expensive to use it as money now. I mean, if you want to buy something, like if Elon Musk actually started selling Teslas and accepting Bitcoin. Which he will. Yeah. Well, assuming it actually ever happens. Yes, you could buy a $50,000 car economically with Bitcoin as a payer. Although I don't know what they do.

I mean, you know, how quickly. because the price changes very quickly. So, you know, it would be very hard. I mean, obviously you can't price the Texelah in Bitcoin. You have to price it in dollars and allow somebody to pay in Bitcoin based on the exchange rate at that moment in time. But assuming he could do that, okay. But if you want to buy a sandwich with Bitcoin, the cost of buying the sandwich today is too expensive. But if people actually started to use Bitcoin on a much larger scale,

scale, the cost of those transactions would skyrocket. I mean, it's the most inefficient thing to use as a medium exchange, which is why so many people say, well, we're not going to use it as a medium of exchange. We're just going to use it as a store of value, which gets back to my question that you really couldn't answer. If Bitcoin isn't a digital currency, then what the hell are you storing when you own it? And you can't tell me that it's a collectible and that you're creating a valuable collection that people are going to like, oh my God, you've got a brand, you've got a Bitcoin from year from 2021. Bitcoin, wow, that's beautiful.

I mean, that's never going to happen. No, of course not. But I think that the point is that it's this proof of work argument that in order to have it, in order to mine a coin or transfer or attack or undermine, literally undermining a Bitcoin, you must put in a certain amount of computational energy, which takes. Yes. And I get that. because they're trying to compare that to gold, because obviously gold just can't be created.

It needs to be mined, and it takes a lot of work to mine gold. And so all the value of that work is in that coin. But the idea that work in and of itself means value is a flawed concept. I mean, there are some Keynesians that believe in this for these government job programs. But the reason that gold has value is not because. a lot of labor was required to mine it out of the ground. It's because after you've expended all that labor and all that other resources, you now have a metal that can be used for something. It's like if I hired people to dig ditches, right, these are government-type jobs, and then I hired other

people to fill the ditches back up, right? And they spend all day digging ditches and filling them back up. There's a lot of work involved. But have they created any value? No, they've created nothing. I don't have anything at the end of the day that I didn't have at the beginning of the day. Right. So all that work was done. And maybe they can prove that they did the work. Maybe they have photographs of the big ditch that they dug before they filled it back up with dirt. And they can prove to me that they did all this work. Fine. But they created no value. That is the problem with Bitcoin, yes, it requires a lot of work to make one. And unfortunately, that's a lot of waste. We're wasting all kinds of resources. A lot of energy is being squandered to produce nothing.

You know, there's no value there. Yes, somebody is buying it. But if we didn't use all that energy to produce a Bitcoin, we could have used that energy to do something else. And so what you have to look at is what is society giving up because we decided to make all these Bitcoin, right? what could we have had that we don't have? And what other goods are more expensive? Because the energy to create them was more expensive because we wasted so much of it on Bitcoin. Now, I know to the people who own the Bitcoin and bought them a lot cheaper and who are able to sell, they don't think it's a waste from their perspective. Just like the people who I paid to dig ditches and fill them back up again, from their perspective, these jobs weren't a waste because they got a paycheck. But from society's perspective, and the taxpayers, who foot the bill, it's a complete waste, because we got nothing as a result of the work. And at the end of the day, we're getting nothing from all this energy and labor we're wasting making these bitcoins. And he's saying is that, you know, this has a special appeal.

Maybe it'd say it's a, you know, it's a greater delusion, a massive delusion. At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows, and they were all free. The truth is our sin.

It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100 NX files may cause excitement, loss of sleep, and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV, stream now, pay never. I want to refer people to go to the Brian Keating, Dr. Brian Keating, YouTube channel, and go to Peter's channel. Subscribe to his channel, find him on Twitter, find him on Instagram.

I love the Instagram updates that you give every so often, Peter. Thanks for signing up for that. That's been really fun for me to follow along with. You're kind of an inspiration. You have a huge YouTube following. Okay, yeah, Phil, go ahead now. Could Bitcoin get a lift from wealth taxes? Let's say President Harris puts in a 3% annual wealth tax

and people want to, you know, quietly move money out of the U.S. or from another country with a wealth tax. So could that be the enduring value of Bitcoin as a way of moving money away from wealth taxation? And secondly, what did you think about the crypto anonymous guys posting? You know, the bit short inside crypto's doomsday machine in which he said that fraud and Heather Limited was the main source of the high value of Bitcoin. Bitcoin right now. So those are my two questions. The first question, at least with respect to the U.S., is it's a tax on your global wealth. So if you move your Bitcoins abroad, yet you still own them, then you're still going to have to pay the tax. And I think that, you know, Bitcoin is not

bad anonymous. I mean, in fact, the bitcoins, in order to, you know, get Wall Street on board, in order to get the bigger money, the pensions, the hedge funds on board, they really have to concede. Oh, no, it's not for drug dealers and money launders. Oh, no, it's easy to trace. I mean, you know, nobody would want to use Bitcoin to hide things because, you know, there's such a big digital footprint here. And I do think that more regulation is going to come on to Bitcoin. I mean, no question about it. I mean, just, you know, this is what government does. They regulate stuff. And, you know, I'm in the banking industry and brokerage and I see all the crazy regulations. And I know even more of them are coming down the pipe for Bitcoin. that is going to make it even more expensive to transact in it than it already is.

But if anything, you know, if there is a wealth tax, then people who have Bitcoin might have to sell some of their Bitcoin to pay their tax on their Bitcoin. And so it could easily be a catalyst for some of the hodlers, the big whales that have never sold any Bitcoin. They might have to start selling. Just remember, you have to market to market every year and then pay a tax on what the paper value,

value is. And so what would happen if a lot of this Bitcoin that has never been for sale, all of a sudden, it has to be sold. I mean, the same thing would happen to people who own big concentrations like Elon Musk. They start taxing him on his Tesla. Well, he has to start selling a bunch of Tesla to get the money to pay that tax. And so, you know, a lot of things could come up for sale. So I don't think that Bitcoin is a hedge for that. Look, Bitcoin is going to go up as long as more people are buying it. And I think what attracts people to it now, especially some of the bigger people, is, hey, if I have a, if I'm a big person with a lot of influence, if I buy my Bitcoin and then tell everybody I bought it after the fact and then come up with all kinds of pie in the sky

promises about what I might do in the future, I can immediately make my own purchase, you know, on paper be a profit. I can pump it and hold it because if I'm just, judged by the unrealized paper game, which a lot of times you want to credit that. Oh, look, you know, look at how much I have. Look, if everybody that owns Bitcoin, if every single person that owned it agreed not to sell it, no matter what the price was, Bitcoin can go to a million, right? But would it mean anything if you had a million dollars worth of Bitcoin that you never could use for anything, that you could never sell? No, what difference is? It's all a delusion because then one guy decides, hey, I want to sell one, is Sto Titochi. And the whole market.

market crashes. But it's easy with this type of market to just buy it and then tell everybody you own it and then get the price to go up and now you look like some kind of genius. You got all this profit. But you know what? So far, and I haven't seen the market today. Last I checked before we did this, Tesla was down almost another 2%, which means that even though Bitcoin had gone from like 35,000 to 50,000 since Tesla announced they bought it. Elon Musk announced they bought it for Tesla, Tesla stock had dropped about 7% while the market was hitting new highs. So so far, Tesla shareholders have not been rewarded by this decision. Even though the Bitcoin on paper have gone up. But the key is, you know, what would happen if Musk tried to sell that

Bitcoin? Now, of course, he would never say in advance, I'm going to get rid of my Bitcoin. He's not that dumb. He's going to sell all his Bitcoin before he lets anybody know. But somebody would have to buy that Bitcoin. That might be a big order. I mean, it's one thing to buy one and a half billion dollars with a Bitcoin. But I think it's a whole other story to try to get rid of it. As far as Tether is concerned, look, I don't know. I mean, I've always been suspicious that, you know, tether was not 100% backed by dollars, that they were doing some fractional reserve. I mean, that they were issuing more Tethers than they had actual dollars. And then later on, I think they came out and admitted, yeah, you know, it's 70 or 80%. I forget the ratio.

that they say they have. But I even doubt that. I mean, do they really have $30 billion in a bank somewhere behind, you know, because if you look at the supply of tethers, I mean, they're really up there. I mean, I wouldn't want to keep all that money in tether. I mean, because I mean, but people have it. The whole thing seems too risky because what is the upside of tether? It's never going to be worth more than a dollar, right? What is the downside? It crashes. because they're counterfeit. So it's like I wouldn't want to keep much money in tether given the huge downside and the limited upside.

And if a lot of people actually sold their Bitcoin and all they got is tether, they might have got nothing. They might be holding onto a dream. So I don't know. You know, the guy they created it, you know, lives a few houses down for me. You know, Rock Pierce. I think he's the one that got it started. But I mean, I've never really had a discussion with him about it.

And I don't think he's involved in it anymore. So I don't know that he knows what's going on. But, you know, I think tether is part of it. My guess is that they did, you know, inflate the tether supply strategically. When Bitcoin starts selling off, they start printing tethers and buying them. And so it's almost like a central bank intervening in the market and just like, because if they issue tethers, the company, tether, what is it? What's a company called that issues them? Ted or let you know, I don't know, but they could just print them up, right?

I don't know who's auditing them. Have they really been honest audits? But yeah, I mean, I think that that is part of the problem. I'm sure, you know, where there's smoke, there's fire. There's probably truths. I know they're being investigated. So, but, you know, obviously just because they're being investigated doesn't mean that there's, there's anything there.

But we'll see. But my guess, knowing, you know, what's going on with the whole crypto industry and all of the shilling and all the pump and dump that I see anyway. And again, so many things that people in Bitcoin community say, so much stuff is so completely absurd. You know, they have to tell so many lies in order to pump Bitcoin. When you're lying and you're not being honest, then, you know, you have to call into question everything that's being done. You know, I mean, I don't tell lies. When I'm trying to tell people why I think they should invest a certain way, you know, why they should maybe buy gold or silver or foreign stocks.

I'm not lying to them to get them. I'm telling them honest opinions. But I see so many people out there that I know are telling bold-faced lies about, not just about Bitcoin, but about gold or all sorts of things in order to get people to buy Bitcoin. Great. Thank you, Peter. We have a question now for my friend Rockwell Shaw, who is one of my leading indicators. He tells me and informs me about all sorts of things going on in the world of blockchain.

I've learned a lot from you. Rockwell, are you there ready to ask Peter Schiff a question or comment? I believe you're a very smart person. So please don't. I can hear the collective screams of all the Bitcoin bulls and the audience wishing that they could say something. Every time they hear a logical fallacy or something that's not quite a bit correct. So, for example, in the discussion we talk about how. you can't buy anything with Bitcoin.

But in fact, you can buy many things with Bitcoin, right? You can Google tons and tons of Lits. You can go on overstock.com, you can buy many things of Bitcoin. Yeah. Okay. I'll stop you right there because, look, a lot of people, a lot of people think that I'm, you know, lying or being a hypocrite because they say, hey, you can buy gold and shift gold with Bitcoin. And you can't.

What you can do, right? And this is part of the marketing. And most of the things that you can buy with Bitcoin. Bitcoin, this is how it works, right? Because we signed up with a company called BitPay back in 2014. We first signed up mid-2014. And what that enabled us to do was put something on our website that was like Bitcoin accepted, right? But what happens is when somebody has Bitcoin and they want to buy something from Shift Gold, BitPay acts as an intermediary. And what happens is the Bitcoins goes from the customer of Shift Gold to BitPay. BitPay turns around and sells those

Bitcoin into the market, gets dollars, and then pays those dollars to shift gold, and then Schiff Gold sends the gold to the customer. So you're not buying anything with Bitcoin. You are selling your Bitcoin in order to get dollars to then buy something. Well, you can do that with any asset. You can sell any asset to get money to buy another asset. So that is the fallacy of it. My point was you can't take your Bitcoin and go to shift gold and say, hey, Peter, I want to buy an ounce of gold. How much is it in Bitcoin? And I'm going to send you the Bitcoin and that'll cover the transaction.

We don't do that. We can't do that. We only mark up our gold like 1 or 2%. There would be no way for me to be able to do a transaction. And by the time I actually got the Bitcoin, it can be worth less than the gold I sold you. And so we can't do business in Bitcoin. It's impossible. So, my question to you is this, as you point to gold in 35, a little bit above $500 in 2018 equation of adjusted dollars.

If I then sold that same gold in 2003, 70 years later, I would have roughly lost, held on to an asset for 70 years and actually lost money. well yeah but the problem with with your time period is you're picking a a peak and a trough over an extended period of time and you're assuming you're assuming that no gold was purchased during that seven-year period that like you bought all of your goal because if you go to you know where where the price of gold was at a certain point um you know and then you measure it and you're picking you're picking points if you you you're you're you bought gold, let's say in 1930 or 1920 or 1930, and you held that gold today and you just looked at it today, you know, I think it's actually beaten the Dow Jones, but if you count dividends, it hasn't.

And that would be expected because the stocks, stocks are a productive asset. gold is just a commodity. But what you compare gold to is paper dollars. So if I had an ounce of gold, you know, in 1920 or 1930, whatever year you're picking, and I put that in the ground, and somebody else took paper dollars and put those in the ground, who preserved their value better, the person who has gold or the person who has paper? Obviously, the person who has gold. I mean, gold was $20 an ounce in 1920. It's almost $2,000 an ounce. now. So if I took a $20 bill and buried it in the ground, you know, 100 years ago, you know, I still have $20. What can I buy? But if I buried an ounce of gold in the ground 100 years ago,

I have an ounce of gold, which is now $2,000. It's 100 times the paper one. So, Peter, since 2003, the price of gold today is intrinsic value versus speculation. Are you telling me that since 2003, 6x more useful, 6x more use? What percentage would you ascribe is the intrinsic value of the $1,800? Well, first of all, in 2003, gold was just coming off of a 20-year bare market. So I would argue that in 2003, the price of gold was cheap. It was very undervalued. And so it really shouldn't have been that low to begin with.

with. But number two, you can look at the current cost of mining gold, and the price of gold today is not that much higher than the cost of mining it. So there isn't some enormous amount of profit to be earned by mining gold. So if gold were really overvalued, there would be this huge incentive for people to try to explore for it and mine it because there'd be this big profit. And that's not the case. I mean, gold really doesn't reflect much of a premium for the big mining companies. I mean, it's better now than it was a few years ago. But I think if you look at the money supply that existed back then of dollars and the money supply that exists today and not only the money supply that exists today, but the potential future money supply, given the trajectory of

our deficits and the course that we're on, I would actually argue that I think gold may be even more undervalued at 2000 than it was at three or four hundred. given the circumstances that exist today. Because what gold is really measuring is the value of the dollar. I mean, how many dollars do you need to buy an ounce of gold? And not just how many that you need today, but how many might you need in the future? And so people are voting to store their future purchasing power in gold rather than storing it in dollars. But, you know, the idea that the only value of gold comes from speculators is nonsense.

That's not where the value comes from. I mean, speculators are speculating on what the future value of gold would be based on the people who need it and what they're going to be willing to pay. If there was no actual use for gold, right, if gold was like Bitcoin, if you couldn't make a watch out of gold, right, if you couldn't do anything with gold, if you couldn't conduct rectericity, with gold. If it had absolutely no use, then you could argue that its value comes purely from speculation. But when that's not the case, when you're talking about the single most valuable metal on the periodic table, a metal that can do things that no other metal can do, and therefore,

you know, people need it for certain applications, it has value. He wants to make a bet, Peter. Yeah, I don't like to make bets on Bitcoin because, you know, anything is possible. He doesn't want to make a bat rock, sorry. If you're going to bet on the price of going up, I can see that the price of Bitcoin might go up. Yeah. I just, you know, I just don't want to own any. That's my bet. People keep saying, why don't you bet me this? Look, I have a big bet on Bitcoin. I own none of it, right? People say, well, just buy a little bit of the hedge. It's not a hedge. I don't care. I'm so confident it's going to be worthless that it's, I don't even want to have 1% of my net worth in it. I don't want to waste 1% of my net worth

on Bitcoin. I'll gamble on something else. Yeah, you're a you're a toddler. You're a throw out for dear life. When I think about you and I think about the things that you've called, first of all, I see you as a, I want to talk again philosophical. Let's get off Bitcoin for a little bit. You know, thinking about when you have these risks in life. And I want to know, because you're a businessman you own and have founded, you know, things.

Really, I feel that you are a self-made man. Your dad obviously cast a huge shadow on your life. I'm self-made in terms of money. My dad didn't give me any money. He gave me knowledge. So that helped, obviously, a lot of mental capital. But he didn't, he died penniless. So I didn't inherit anything from him.

And he didn't give me any money during life. I mean, he gave me a little bit, you know, he paid for college. You know, he helped me with that. You know, he helped raise me. Yeah, yeah. So he raised me. It's not like he abandoned me. He was a father.

He helped support me. But, you know, once I went out on my own and I got my first job, I, you know, I never, I never went home for any money. I mean, whatever money I had, I earned. Right. I want to ask you, you know, when you look at his life and obviously he casts this big influence on you and fathers play this role, mothers play this role. Later in if you'll spare a few more minutes coming up, I ask you the questions. I ask all my guests when they come on the end of the Impossible podcast. But a lot of them are about legacy. And before I ask you about your legacy, what you want to bequeath to, you know, the future biological and ideological errors that you will certainly possess, I want to ask you if you resent your dad. I'm sorry to ask it in that way, but he could have had this life where he was with you, with his grandchildren, which you have a few, and your brother, who's another amazing individual. I'll ask you, do you ever resent the fact that he took this stance and maybe just recapitulate really quickly

his principles, what he did, why he was thrown in jail, and how he was basically tortured? Yeah, you know, I mean, it's not so much that I resent it. I mean, I feel bad about it. I feel even more bad for him on a lot of the things that he missed out on while he was fighting this fight against the government. But he was a man of deep conviction and he fought for the things that he believed in to the exclusion of a lot of other things that a lot of other people may have placed as a priority. I mean, his own personal comfort, his own family. I mean, my father worked very, very hard. I mean, he spent, you know, every day, he worked weekends. He never took a vacation.

And even though he didn't pay taxes, I mean, he didn't do anything. I mean, he didn't, I mean, he took a few vacations. But he drove an old car, you know, he lived in an apartment. He never had any of the trappings of wealth or anything. And that wasn't, you know, what he was trying to do. He was fighting for a cause. And so, you know, I mean, he did what he wanted to do. touched a lot of people. He influenced a lot of people. A lot of people today, you know,

email me about my father. I meet them and they tell me how he influenced them. So I think he built a legacy. I mean, my children don't really know him. I mean, but they will be able to get to know him from his books. He does have, you know, I still maintain his website, pay no income tax.com. there's a lot of his radio show he did a online radio show so I mean he can still speak to my children that way and so my children can get to hear him I mean maybe his personality doesn't come out as much

he was great with kids and he was a you know did magic and he was a great he played a guitar and he sang and he danced I mean he had you know he was a great guy but you know his life got consumed like, you know, like Ahab, you know, in a whale, you know, he just, you know, was on this mission. How do you resist that? How do you reason? Because, you know, in some sense, I think we're all, you know, our parents, children. How do you resist that temptation either, you know, what do you do to avoid the pitfalls that your father had gone? I mean, well, look, I mean, I saw how my father lived his life. And that wasn't the life that I wanted to live.

You know, I wanted, I wanted, you know, a lot of stuff that my dad didn't have, not just material stuff, but I wanted to have more time for personal things. And so, but I still wanted to, you know, carry the torch in the message of limited government and the constitution and sound money. So I took a lot of the economics that I learned from my dad. And I, and I brought that to a greater audience than he did. you know, a lot more people, you know, know me than knew my dad. And so I, you know, achieved a degree of notoriety that exceeds what he had. But, you know, I didn't pay the price personally. I mean, I'm paying my taxes, although now I'm not paying that much because I live in Puerto Rico. So, you know, and so this is, you know, I'm playing within the IRS rules instead of

trying to play by the Constitution and force the government to obey the law. You know, by the way, I said I didn't get anything from my dad. Look, this ring here was my dad's. And he wore this ring all the time. He had another one, which I don't know what happened to, but I have this ring. And it's made of gold. So that's, you know, you can't give your kids a Bitcoin ring. But, you know, I almost lost this ring.

I was swimming in the beach out front of my house, my condo. and I went into actually I was on the sand and I took my my seven-year-old and I he was doing something with my five-year-old out of he was throwing sand at her so I picked him up and I walked out I threw him into the ocean and when I threw him I had been swimming and my ring just went flying off my finger I guess and it went to the bottom of the ocean and I was like shit I spent like a couple hours with some friends we're trying to find it we're sifting around the sand and I can't find it so as I thought I lost the ring but then I I I I I I put something on this Facebook page, an Act 2022 group, and someone said, hey, call up the ring finders. There's a couple of them in Puerto Rico. So there's a website, ring finders. So I found this guy in San Juan, and I told him where I lost the rig. I was, no problem, I'll find it. And he came with an underwater metal detector, went into the ocean, and within five minutes, he found the ring. Yeah. Buried under the sand in the ocean. Yeah, I had that experience. So it was there for a day, but I got it back. But yeah, and I have a few other things.

I have some artwork that was my dad's. I have some other possessions that he had that remind me of my dad that, you know, I'm glad that I have them. How do you manage your time? You speak at all these things before COVID and even now with your podcast, shift report, shift radio. You have all your businesses. How do you do? Because I suffer from that, Peter. I have not a master level of wealth or success.

But with my kids and my wife, you know, and I think like every time I say yes to do something, I'm telling a two-year-old, no, I'm not going to be there for whatever. So you have got young kids, you've got grown kids, and you have a wife. How do you balance your time and do all the things you do and know what to say no to? Because you must say no a lot, although you didn't say no to this. Maybe you should have in retrospect. Yeah, well, my grown kid is only 18, so he still has a lot of growing. Obviously, a lot of mental growing since he's into Bitcoin.

But, and again, the primary motivation, you know, they said, this guy had Sailor on. So I watched your Sailor interview. And I was like, God, this guy's off the deep end. And it's not that he's not an intelligent guy. I mean, I'm sure Sailor has a higher IQ than I do. I mean, the guy is, I'm not saying he's a dummy. He obviously can't be. But he's got some kind of screw loose or it's all BS. I mean, that's so, see, I never know. When I hear somebody talking like this about Bitcoin, I don't know. People should have to be hooked up to lie detectors when they're talking about Bitcoin. Because I have no problem. I mean, I'll, you know, I'll, you know, I'll, I'll, you know, I'll do a debate with some Bitcoin guy, and I'll have a lie detector on. And I mean, I'm completely

honest. But you get somebody a Bitcoin guy, because everybody says, oh, Peter, you know, he's not objective, right, because he sells gold. I mean, first of all, gold is a small part of my business. And I can't move the price of gold. No matter what I say, gold market is so big and so liquid, I cannot move the price of gold. If I said, hey, I put all of my networks in to gold. I'm going to put every dollar I have into gold every day. I mean, it's not going to change the price of gold. But they give these Bitcoin guys a complete pass when they have an entire business built around Bitcoin. They have all their life savings in Bitcoin. And then they come on there and talk about how great Bitcoin is and how everybody should buy it. It's going to the

moon. And nobody questions their objectivity. You know, when they used to let me on CNBC, which I haven't been on for years. And at this point, I wouldn't even go on if they invited me. But when they were inviting me on, whenever I came on and talked about gold, somebody I would say, oh, bullshit, you're just saying that. You're just trying to sell gold. You know, you're just, you know, talking. They always accused me of having a bias, which I did it. I tell, I encourage people to buy gold because I think they should. And by the way, I'm not selling my own gold. I'm not selling any of my gold. I'm not having an intermediate. But I see on CNBC every single day, all throughout the day, one guest after another, touting Bitcoin because

they're from the Bitcoin industry, right? And their whole life is based on Bitcoin going up. And they spew all kinds of nonsense. And not once have I ever heard anybody say, oh, come on. I mean, are you just saying, I mean, you come on, you're so biased. I mean, what else are you going to say? No one ever does that. And in fact, the other thing that's funny is what I used to come on CNBC and talk about inflation or potential hyperinflation or, you know, the dollar being debased or their Federal Reserve. But I had all that stuff I was saying. And then I would say, oh, you should buy gold. Oh, that's crazy. That's nonsense. That's never going to happen. Yet everybody that goes on to Tau Bitcoin, they can say all the stuff that I used to say. And they never get any flack.

It's, oh, okay. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, that sounds reasonable. So if you think people should buy gold, you're not able to go on CNBC and tell people why, I guess don't make fun of you. But as long as you're touting Bitcoin, you can say whatever you want. And nobody is going to question you. At the same time, because everyone on CNBC, they're all bullish on the stock market. They love the Fed. They love Fiat money. But they also love Bitcoin.

They want everyone in their audience. You know, it's funny to make. And then I see Grayscale, their biggest advertiser, advertising kind of thinking, okay, well, that makes sense now. I mean, obviously, they want that ad money to keep on flowing. And so how does Grace Gale get the money to buy all these ads from all the people dubbing up to buy into the trust? So they don't want anybody to come on to say, oh, maybe Bitcoin's, you know, maybe it's going to crash.

Maybe these guys are not being honest. So that's where you have all the bias. The bias is not me. I'm not biased against Bitcoin. It's all these other people that their entire life depend on Bitcoin who are biased in favor of it. I'm just being objective. But Peter, you know what they say,

that Richard Feynman and greatest physicists, some say of the 20th century, he said the first principle is you must not fool yourself. And the second principle is you're the easiest person to fool. In other words, we all have confirmation bias. We all have some cost policy because we're human beings. Even scientists. You know, oh, you're a scientist?

Let's listen to the scientist. No, I'm like, don't listen to me. Because a scientist, Peter, is the least likely person to trust other scientists. That's what our job is, trust you and to not listen to experts. As Richard Feynman said, you know, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. I want to ask you, you know, thinking back, whenever I see Bitcoin, the funniest thing to me is that they always show it as a gold coin. It kind of like undermines its own. That's part of the fraud. I mean, that's why you mine Bitcoin's, right? You don't actually

mine them. You solve a mathematical problem, right? How was that mining? Yeah. But they wanted to make, believe that this is alchemy. This is the fraud. That's why I call it. fool's gold is because they're representing it as if it were gold. And yes, Bitcoin replicated a lot of the properties that gold has that made it a better form of money than cattle or salt or, you know, or or wheat or anything else, you know, whatever could have been used as money. And so Bitcoin replicated those qualities, but it doesn't represent the actual underlying value of gold without which none of the other properties would have mattered. Divide. nothing doesn't matter, right? The fact that, you know, it's fungible or immutable,

whatever these things are ultimately doesn't matter if you don't have anything. It matters to gold because you have a real gold. You have a valuable nettle. So, you know, so the whole thing is a fraud. But if you're talking about confirmation bias, it's all on the bitcoins. Because their confirmation bias is the price. I'm wrong because the price went up. Even though I never said that the price couldn't go up. I just said that it won't stay up. Now, yes, I did not realize it would go up this much from the beginning. And maybe a lot of people who did buy it originally didn't think it would go this high. Maybe some of them did. But obviously, a lot of people bought Bitcoin and sold it at 200 or 1,000. They don't have anything. They thought that was high. They got out. So I don't know.

And I don't know where I would have gotten out had I bought it, right? I mean, who knows? I mean, Would I still own it if I got it? But, you know, yes, I didn't gamble on Bitcoin. And I could have. And if I had put all of my net worth into Bitcoin and I held it all until today, would I be richer? Yes, of course. But how many people did put all their net worth? I mean, if I had just put, you know, 1%, and I did it, you know, when it was 1,000 or 5,

it wouldn't even make a difference, really, to me. I mean, obviously, if I put 1% of my net worth when it was a penny, yeah, it'd make them being difference. But, you know, if I'd have done it back then, I mean, it's not. I mean, and I've bought other things. I've bought other investments over the last five years that have 10 X or 20. So I, but again, I didn't have my whole net worth in them because I diversify. Right.

And so, yeah, is there somebody that just bet it all on Bitcoin? They took a hell of a lot of risk doing that. Right. Well, I want to ask you. Yeah, about the, about getting back to the scientific. So there's a question of what is science? Like just because somebody practices the scientific method, even the great Isaac Newton, the greatest physicist history, some say, you know, he was prone to these confirmation biases, to this belief that astrology had something to teach people that you could do alchemy, that you could convert base metals into gold. But now in the 20th century, Karl Popper, famous philosopher of science, came up with what he called the demarcation hypothesis or way of ascertaining or ascertaining or saying literally what constituted science, not whether or not it's right, but whether or not something is a scientific subject or if it's metaphysics or beyond derision. So he came up with this

criteria, you probably know it. It's called falsification. So he said that like things that cannot be disproven are not scientific. In other words, something that can be proven, we don't prove things as physicists. We don't have access to mathematical proofs the way a mathematician does, but we have to make do with what is presented to us in the form of evidence. And believe me, Peter, there are a lot of people who say there are bubbles in physics. You wouldn't know this, but in string theory and the multidiversity. Actually, you tweeted today. I've responded to you. You tweeted about a parallel universe and I commend you for being aware of the most. But some say the multiverse is true that parallel universes exist in space and time and space and time.

And how do you know that that's not science? Well, other people say it can't be falsified because you can't prove that there aren't other universes. So they would say, not that it's wrong, they would say it's not scientific. It's not a proper time. You can't disprove it. Right. So what would be for you, what would either falsify, you know, the Bitcoin, what would constitute proof that Bitcoin is falsifiable and therefore not worthy of a teleological purpose as money or as a store of value?

What would constitute, you know, well, I think the fact that it has no value in and of itself is proof that it can't be a store of value because you can't store what you do not have. you know, it fails as a currency, and you've already admitted that. It doesn't work as a currency. So that's, you know, that's obvious. And so then you're left with a store of value. But if it can't ever be a currency, and that was the only supposed value it had, then what exactly are you storing? You're storing a belief. You're storing faith. I mean, that's why you have all these people in the Bitcoin. community that, you know, that don't like fiat money. And I'm glad they at least know what fiat currency is. I mean, Bitcoin, Bitcoin is basically popularized fiat. I mean, before Bitcoin,

if you heard fiat, you thought about the automobile. I mean, that was pretty much it. Fix it again. Fix it again. Yeah, yeah. But so at least they've educated people about the concept of fiat money versus real money, which is gold. But what they don't get is that Bitcoin is is also fiat, even though it's not, you know, created by a government, you know, at the end of the day, what gives fiat currency its value is confidence, its faith, it's my belief that other people will accept it in the future. If that confidence goes, then it doesn't matter what the government does. It's toast. So, and that's why no fiat currency has ever survived. They have all collapsed. they all eventually revert to their intrinsic value, which is zero.

The same thing is going to happen with Bitcoin. And it doesn't matter that you think the supply is limited. And, you know, of course, there's an unlimited supply of competitor of cryptocurrencies. And everybody wants to say, oh, they're shit coins. You know, I get a kick out of how everybody is criticizing Dogecoin. Well, the same thing applies to Bitcoin. In fact, Dogecoin is better than Bitcoin. I can make a strong case that it's superior to Bitcoin.

even though, of course, I don't recommend either one. But the fact is there is no real scarcity when you really look down it. But even if you accept the fact that there's just Bitcoin, and if all the other coins go to zero because they're worthless and Bitcoin's not, it's all about confidence. It's all about people are buying Bitcoin today because they believe somebody else will pay more for it tomorrow. That is the only reason I'm buying it. If I no longer have that belief, then I don't want it.

And if I don't want it, neither does anybody else. And since Bitcoin's intrinsic value is zero, just like Fiat paper money, it's Fiat digital money, when the confidence is lost, so is all the market value. So Bitcoin is Fiat, you know, in that sense. Gold is not. Gold is real. Gold is actual nettle that objectively has value. have different value to different people, and that's what forms a market. You know, you have a

demand curve based on people's preferences, how much they value gold versus other things, but gold has a value that can't be denied. Bitcoin's only value is the fact that it might go up. I want to take a good. Yeah, yeah, we have a lot of, you, we're only 50 followers away from 1,000. The inflation of Peter Schiff's fan base is expanding, and I take some credit for that. Peter, so I'm going to take a question from a friend of mine. They also got to follow me on Twitter and YouTube. Because right now, right now I'm not doing anything on a clubhouse. One day I might, other than this, but yeah.

I think it offers a really cool thing. It has the ability to have connection to people like you. You're a celebrity and I'm an ordinary person. But you also have no censorship. I found this out when I was at Eric Weinstein, who's an economist. He's also a physicist, et cetera. And we were over at his house. I was at his house for when I went on Bitcoin just a week ago, less than a

ago. And he broke through a million followers. And I was like, wow. And I said, you know what? Congratulations. This means you can prove that YouTube and Twitter are a million followers on what on clubhouse on clubhouse. Who has a million followers? Oh, I mean, musk. No, this is Eric Weinstein. He's a friend of mine. He's a physicist. I didn't even know there was that there's that many people even on clubhouse already. Oh yeah. There's six million or more. You have to be on invited and blah, But my point was that the reason I think it should appeal to you, Peter, is that you're probably going to have a big following. And it may even be bigger than the number of followers you have on the traditional social media networks because they do shadow ban people like you once you reach a certain level of prominence. And that proved to me when Eric broke through a million followers in the less than six months that he was being banned because he only has a quarter.

Oh, I didn't even think it's been around for that long. I thought it's been around since the start. I don't. I resisted it because I was like, do I need another social network that has my phone number? And it gives out all my information. Anyway, I want to talk to a friend who's in Nigeria, and his name is Kunli. Kunli, can you unmute?

And you have a question for Peter Schiff, Kunley? Okay. Okay, good, from Nigeria. Now, we have other questions. I'm going to take another one. I'll take this. I know that if people who are on Clubhouse, once we finish this conversation,

it's over on Clubhouse, right? It's not, like, recorded. But if somebody, like, missed the beginning, or they want to tell their friends, then they got to go to YouTube. YouTube, yeah, and I'll send you the video here. And then you can listen, yeah. You can put it on your YouTube channel.

I'll send you the video because I invented, you know, parallel streaming recording to club. I don't know if it, but I like you, yeah. That's part of the virtue of it because you can say things. It's not going to be recorded. But now you see the traditional media are going against Clubhouse saying it's, you know, it's dangerous because it's not recorded.

And the fact checkers can't check and blah, blah, blah. I think it's, I think it has a lot of, vitality until that actually happens. Okay, next stop. Somebody could record it on their own, right? So if you're a fact checker, you can have your own recording device and you can record what's happening on Clubhouse. So just because it's not being recorded by the app, doesn't mean other people can't

be reporting it on their end. That's true. That's true. So I'm going to invite someone up who's obviously impartial, and his name is Hoddle. Clearly. A little Hal Finley, do you want to come up on stage here? and I will invite you to be a, why do I keep, I have a fat finger, Peter. Well, you know, that finger screws things up. I'm hodling too. I'm just hodling my gold, right?

Hoddle, Alie, how are you, sir? Is it hoddle or hoddle? Maybe he could tell us what the actual. I don't know. Let's ask him. Hodel. How do you pronounce your name? It's a hoddle. Oh, well, you're guessing, though. You're not even sure. He has a question for you, Peter. Go ahead. Hottle. Well, you know, obviously, it's not bother. It doesn't bother me because I clearly invite. a lot of it because I tweet a lot about Bitcoin, and I know that's going to ruffle feathers. But, you know, a lot of people don't even care. It doesn't even matter what I tweet.

Usually the first response is making fun of me for Bitcoin. So it doesn't matter what I tweet about. It's these Bitcoin guys that want to, you know, I get a kick out of, you know, where they tell me to have fun staying poor. In case you know, I ain't poor. And, and, you know, I don't need any Bitcoin, even if it goes up. I mean, I'm not going to get. get poor because I don't know Bitcoin. I mean, people keep saying that Bitcoin is going to suck away all my wealth. Look, there's nothing that I own that I will trade for Bitcoin. So I got a, I got a lot of stuff. And if you want my stuff, you ain't going to get it if all you got is Bitcoin. Okay. I take that even. But go ahead.

You'll have to go to Spencer in a few years and you know, ask him for a loan. Well, yeah. Spencer, I've just got to teach him about the Fifth Commandment, Peter, to obey my father, honor thy father. Yeah, I like it how the Bitcoin community values the advice of an 18-year-old. In fact, I did a poll one time on Twitter, knowing how they were going to respond. And I was like, you know, who do you want to trust? An 18-year-old kid who's never had a job

or a 57-year-old professional has been working for 30 years, managing money, all its experience, knowing that everybody was going to say, that I said, who do you trust, experience professional the kid? And like everybody, like, I got so many votes because they thought, aha, we're going to, we're going to hack his poll, and we're all going to vote the kid, which exactly is what I wanted them to do because I knew they were going to do that.

But to show them how ridiculous it is, when you're young and experienced, you make a lot of mistakes. Maybe if I was still 18, I would have been buying Bitcoin too. That's the thing. It's when you're older, I'm not a dinosaur. I'm not some dumb boomer who doesn't get technology. What I get is bubbles. What I get is investments, money. I've been through a lot of bubbles.

I've made a lot of mistakes. I've lost a lot of money. I've made a lot of money. You know, so, you know, I have, there's some, there's value to experience. Every generation thinks they know more than the generation before them until they get older and then they realize how little they knew and that their parents weren't that dumb. Right. Now they're confronting the same problem. But you know what? I have no problem with young kids losing money in Bitcoin. It's a valuable lesson. And then when they get older and their kids want to do something dumb, they'll be able to say, listen, son, I remember. when I was your age and I got all caught up in this Bitcoin thing. Really, Bitcoin, what's that?

Oh, let me tell you. Didn't they say, Peter, don't they say that the first loss is the best loss because he got out on this. Yeah, and, you know, when you're young, you don't have a lot of money. I feel badly for older people that put their retirement money into Bitcoin. That's going to be a disaster. We have Corey Swan. Do you want to ask your question to Peter Schiff? Yeah, sure. So first off, welcome to Clubhouse. It's good to have you on here. I think it's It is light years ahead of Twitter as far as sort of keeping a sense of decorum and sort of humanity when it comes to debating topics that can get contentious. And people on opposite sides of Bitcoin debates always sort of tend toward being contentious. So I think it's great that you're here.

I think it'll be really interesting. Kudos to Brian for bringing you here and also for being probably one of the few people that would have Michael Saylor and Peter Schiff as interview. subjects with a few weeks of each other so that's pretty cool I also started what is by far so far the most active and most listened to club about Bitcoin on this platform and I'm also the CEO and founder of swanbitcoin.com which as a business model is basically the exact same thing as what you've been doing with gold for many years we just sell Bitcoin and are in time how do you sell Bitcoin can anybody just buy it why do you do that sell them

All you do is you educate about Bitcoin. We don't spend a dime on marketing. We just put out YouTube shows and podcasts and spend time on Clubhouse. Yeah, because what I actually do, like, is shift gold. I actually have to go and buy the gold from a wholesaler, and then I turn around and I sell it, you know, to the retail, you know, to the customer. But so, yeah, you're just educating people. I mean, again, from my perspective, you're indoctrinating them or brainwashing them.

But anyway, that's a different. He kept the clean so far, Peter. Peter, Corey is one of the most respected people in the Bitcoin space. Go ahead, Corey. Look, I look, I mean, there are a number of people. Look, I have one of my best friends here in Puerto Rico is like so into Bitcoin. I mean, it's just like his life. He's actually an artist, but he's more, I mean, he's like, you know, most of his network. He's just a friend of mine to live here in Puerto Rico. I know a lot of Bitcoin people that live here. And this guy is very sincere. I mean, he is completely 100%. You know, he believes in it like, you know, he'll hold. total to zero. I mean, if it actually goes to zero, this guy will go all the way down. So yeah, you may be in the same situation where, you know, you completely believe everything you're saying about Bitcoin. I don't doubt there are some real sincere people that believe it. But I do think there are a number of people out there that are saying things that they know are not true,

but they're just, you know, trying to pump it up. You're talking a little bit about like, you know, credibility and motivation and things like that. But, you know, I am a pretty serious guy, you know, Chicago finance MBA and investor for me. many years, worked for Google and Microsoft and McKendee, more than Stanley. So, like, I'm a serious dude that understands Bitcoin. I see myself essentially as a Bitcoin rationalist

that my, you know, my reasons for not just believing, but actually knowing and understanding what Bitcoin is. It is so interesting because it really, it really is so similar to gold in certain ways. And, you know,

I'll even see people attacking you on threads and saying like, you know, things like, you know, gold is only valuable because people believe it's valuable. And it's like, well, no, it's not. Actually, gold became the best money that we'd ever had because of specific characteristics that gold has. It's very scarce. It has that highest off-the-flow ratio.

It has, you know, it doesn't degrade. It's divisible. That's what made it good money, but that's not what enabled it to be money, because money needs to be a commodity in and of itself. It needs to be just the most marketable, most liquid commodity. Without the inherent value of the gold itself, those other properties that made it so ideal to function as money

would not have mattered. I mean, in fact, gold was already a luxury good that people wanted before people figured out that they could use it as money. I mean, money was kind of an invention, but gold wasn't invented. Gold was discovered, but the concept of money was an invention.

that was an improvement on barter. But I think Bitcoin is a step back, because as I said, right now it's more of a barter transaction. But Bitcoin does not have the most important characteristic of gold, and that is its attributes as an actual metal. Without that, without the things that you can use gold for, it's nothing. And so Bitcoin is nothing. It doesn't matter if it's emulated, the other things. lot of people that talk about, you know, kind of the monetization of an asset and, you know, essentially the stages that you would go through as something progressed from, let's say, a

collectible and then becoming a widely used store value and then moving into kind of like a medium of exchange and eventually being a unit of account, which would be sort of like a full flesh money if it fulfilled all three of those, you know, purposes. And so I think sometimes the disconnect between, you know, people who are really into gold or even people that in, or in the fiat. Theat's great as a medium of exchange. It's awful as a store of value. Gold is awesome today as a store of value and pretty awful as a medium of exchange.

From store of value, then becoming a widely used medium of exchange and eventually, you know, a unit of account where you price, good, services in that asset, where we sometimes see a disconnect. And I'm not saying this is, you know, why you necessarily. just like Bitcoin or don't subscribe to what we do. But we even see that Bitcoin today is early in its progression to becoming a big store of value. So we believe that it being widely used as a medium of exchange or a currency is years away. And eventually call it 15, 30 years, whatever, will actually be able to price goods and services in Satotians, the smallest unit of Bitcoin. but that's decades away.

Right. Well, that's your speculation. And I guess in order to make that happen, there has to be a more efficient way to produce the energy because otherwise just the sheer cost of trying to effectuate all those transactions and validate them the amount of energy. I mean, I don't even think we have the capability, even if we didn't do anything else and devoted all of the energy on the planet

and maintaining the Bitcoin network. But obviously, you know, things could evolve in the future. but then things could evolve to completely invalidate, you know, the whole Bitcoin ecosystem. So I don't know. But to get back to what you're saying now about it's proving to be a store of value. No, it's not. Has it proven to have a price that has appreciated? Well, absolutely.

The price has gone up. But price is not value. There are very different things. In fact, I tweeted Warren Buffett's quote about price is what you pay. Value is what you get. You can store value. You can't store price. Price is arbitrary. It could function around based on supply and demand. So what Bitcoin has proven is that people will buy it at higher prices. But it's not been a store of value. I mean, people have on paper gotten rich. And some people in reality, because they've cashed out, some people have made money. But it's not storing value. You know, I mean, there, I mean, I mean, I

when you see something go, you know, Bitcoin just went from $10,000, or $10,000, it got above $10,000, and then it quickly went to $50,000. It went $5x. I mean, without hyperinflation, I mean, if we had seen, you know, all commodities go up $5x, you know, at the same time, and then you could have said, okay, well, you know, but without any kind of big increase in inflation, where other commodities maybe went up a little bit, that's the same. That's not storing value. That's a speculative asset that appreciated in price. But I don't see how you could take that speculative period of time and say, this proves that

you're storing value. I mean, because if I buy that today, you don't know. I mean, Bitcoin can go back down to 20,000 very quickly. I mean, that was the- How can you say that, you know, but how can it only count against Bitcoin that it, you know, doesn't have this durability, this legacy of this history, if in Indeed, you agree it's gone through some cycles. It's lasted longer than even, let's just say, the most recent bubble that we've experienced in a large-scale dot-com bubble.

It lasted three or four times that length of the actual bubble. Again, I discount the early periods where people were mining Bitcoin on their laptops. I'm saying 2018. I mean, it collapsed. Yeah, it really started in 2017. And so we've had four years of a roller coaster ride where Bitcoin went up to 20,000, went down to almost 3,000, then, you know, had a big rally to maybe 13, 14,000, then came back down to almost 3,000 again, and then had this meteoric rocket ship ride up to 50,000 so far. Who knows, you know, maybe it goes higher. We'll see where it ends up.

But I think there's going to be another spectacular move down. but at some point, the move down is not going to stop. It's going to crash for good. It's not going to be resurrected. At some point, it's going to be the final curtain on Bitcoin. You know, you can say, no, that's not going to happen, right? It's just going to, no matter how many times it loses 70, 80, 90 percent of its value, it's always going to come back.

You can speculate that just because it's come back a few times before, it's going to do it forever. I think that's a big gamble to take. Just as a thought exercise, just thinking about the volatility, what if we were in a world where there was no gold and then let's say gold appeared or an asteroid hit and all of a sudden there was like the same amount of above ground gold that we have today? What would the path be from zero to 12 trillion? Would it go in a straight line? Would it go straight to 12 trillion?

What the values and what was good about gold? and sort of to understand, okay, maybe I like this thing, maybe I want to buy more of it, would it basically have a volatile path to reaching it? Look, I mean, you're asking a crazed hypothetical because there's no way to just drop all the gold. I mean, are you talking about, is the gold now in the earth,

or do we now have all the gold already mined sitting in bars? Actually watching the monetization of Bitcoin in real time right now. We are not watching the monetization of anything. All we're watching is a speculative bubble in a digital token. It is not being monetized. Nowhere on the planet Earth is Bitcoin used as money.

So we haven't seen anything. When you show me a future where salaries are in Bitcoin, rents are in Bitcoin, there's a Bitcoin bond market, there are insurance policies that pay off in Bitcoin, where governments are collecting Bitcoin. Well, you show me a world or even a country that actually uses Bitcoin as money, where people are accept Bitcoin, not because they want it, but because they want to buy something else with it.

You show me that and I'll say, okay, we're seeing the beginning of money. All we have right now is a speculative digital token that people are buying and hodeling. That's it. It's no more money than Beanie Babies, right? It's the same thing. It's no more money than Toulos. Well, listen, the facts on the ground are that we are watching the monetization of Bitcoin over time. It will reduce and volatility. That's what you hope. You're not watching that. Maybe you're seeing that, but that's not what you're actually watching.

Your judgment is clouded. So it's an illusion. The trends are that volatility is reducing. No, it's not. It's still very volatile. Look, it went up to 50,000 this morning and then dropped to 40,000. thousand, I mean, within an hour. I mean, even in there, I mean, it's much more volatile than, and we just recently had a big drop. We had just, what, a few weeks ago or a month ago,

we had like a 30% drop in a couple of days. It went from, what, like 40,000 down to like 27,000, like, you know, in a day. Well, I was actually going to go back. And we should try to hit, like, one topic at a time, because now I want to go back to the energy thing. Do you believe in free markets, including a free market for energy, Peter? Yeah, I believe in free markets. I'm not trying to outlaw Bitcoin. I mean, if people want to buy it, go ahead. I'm not saying you can't.

So what is your worry if people freely choose to mine Bitcoin using computers that use energy? Do you think? Oh, no, I'm just commenting that it's a waste of resources. People are allowed to waste resources, but, you know, as a human being, you know, I mean, I try to recycle. I mean, we do all kinds of stuff here. I mean, my wife is more on it than I'm. I am, but all of our baskets, we make sure we put things, you know, so I'm trying to conserve energy.

I'm trying to do stuff like that. That's why I thought I was ironic, you know, that Tesla, you know, they get, they got $1.5 billion in environmental credits for helping to reduce, you know, the carbon because of their electric cars. And I own an electric car. I got, and I got a high, so I got two, really. But then they go ahead and they buy Bitcoin, which is squandering all sorts of electricity. So, yeah, I'm not saying it should be illegal to waste a reason. I, you know, I, I just think it's a shame that we're wasting all those resources. That's all. It's maybe, let's say, okay, hypothetical, if Bitcoin succeeds, and obviously a lot of people think it's already succeeding today, is it worth some level of expenditure to have state free money that can't be confiscated by the people with the guns and the power?

I don't think it's money. I don't think it's state free, and I don't think it can't be confiscated. I mean, it's on the internet. It lives on the internet. It's much harder to confiscate gold. I mean, if the government... The gold has been confiscated, Peter. We have...

No, actually, okay, so it wasn't confiscated. What Roosevelt did, and the reason that they did it is because he wanted to devalue the dollar. Because when Roosevelt asked Americans to turn in their gold, it was $20 at ounce. And after he got the gold, he devalued the dollar and now gold was $35. In order to do this, he had to get everybody's gold. But they didn't send troops to people's homes and shake them down for their gold. They just said, if you have any gold, bring it in, but they didn't. It was under penalty of arrest, right?

Hold on. Lots of people did not turn in their gold. That's why there's still so many gold coins around today because the ones that got turned in got melted down. So a lot of people kept their gold and nothing happened to it. In fact, nobody went to jail for not turning in their gold. So it wasn't like, you know, but if they tried to get your, Bitcoin, it'd actually be a lot easier to get your computer records and find out, oh, you know, that you have some Bitcoin.

But if the government really wanted to outlaw Bitcoin, they could do it very easily. I don't think they're doing it because they're not afraid of Bitcoin. I mean, if they actually thought there was a lot of money laundering or tax evasion going on, that would bother them. They don't think it's a threat to their monetary system, to their Fiat monetary system. If they did, they would have already shut it down. that's why I said a long time ago that even if Bitcoin succeeded, it would be a victim of its own success because the government would kill it. But I think it's going to die of natural causes. I don't think the government has to kill it because all they have to do is outlaw it.

Then you drive it into the black market. And then there's no there's no real use there. Obviously, I wish somebody had convinced me to buy it years ago because I would have bought some. But the problem is I've heard these arguments from so many people for so many years. I haven't heard anything new. But yes, I agree that the whole time I've been saying it can't work. It's not money. It's a bubble. The entire time, the price has been going up.

And I've been there before. That happened with a real estate bubble. It happened with this dot-com bubble. I've been in that position before. I've seen it all happen before. I know how the movie ends. This one is particularly frustrating, though, because of the nature of it and the type of people who are buying it.

So I think the Bitcoin bubble is more frustrating to me. than the housing bubble or dot-com bubble. And I think it's even more irrational. But I do want to address this idea that it's, you know, one, Bitcoin is transmitted over the Internet, but it's actually a ledger. And so you could turn off the Internet and people would still have copies of the ledger on, you know.

Yes, I get that aspect of it. But obviously, if people only have, if your Bitcoin is just on a piece of paper or in your mind because you've memorized the whole thing, it obviously has a lot less value to the people who want it, than if you can, you know, transmit it through the internet.

Because if they make it illegal, and, you know, I mean, it's going to be very tough to use it online when the government is, you know, seeing everything we do.

Well, actually, that's a positive thing. I think, Corey, yeah, so one thing I would say is actually the claim that it's been used for all these illegal purposes and so forth,

that's actually pales in embarrassment to the U.S. dollars use in illegal purposes in the black market. Oh, yeah. But the problem is you can't, you can't catch those. If I give somebody an envelope full $100 bills, I mean, unless you physically watch me do it, I mean, they don't know that I've done it.

But if I'm going to send you Bitcoin over the internet, I mean, there's going to be a trail. They're, you know, so, yeah, I mean. Actually protects it against being used in black markets. But yeah, but the black market is actually, that is one of the only use cases that when I first heard about it, right, way back when. The only thing that seemed to have some value to me was, you know, if it really is anonymous, even if it's pretty volatile and you lose 20 or 30 percent of the value during transactions, that's not a bad price to pay to launder your money. Because, you know, you launder your money the old-fashioned way, it costs a lot. I mean, they take, you know, 20 cents, 30 cents, 40 cents. I mean, you earn a dollar illegally and you have people launder it for you. I mean, there's not a lot, you know, a lot of it comes out in the wash. So I thought originally when I heard about Bitcoin, it was like, yeah, that would be the, you know, it's a way for me to transfer money over a long distance, not the money, but value, because I can buy some Bitcoin, send you the Bitcoin, you can sell it. And even if you lose 10, 20%, who cares, you've got this laundered transaction. Nobody can spy on you. I snuck money out of the country. So I thought that was the value of it initially. But I wasn't, you know, I wasn't going to buy it based on the fact that, I thought there was some value for, you know, people who wanted to launder money.

All right. Sweet. Peter, thanks for doing this. You know, these conversations have happened a lot in the past. And it always seems like the Bitcoin side and you are talking past each other. And, you know, there's many different elements of this subject that we can, you know, zero in on and have a debate about. But I'm just curious, kind of like on a more macro level, what would it take for you? to treat the people that you're engaging with as if they understood something that you do not yet

understand. What would it take in the form of a type of debate or respect for the other person or what would it take for you to treat someone as if they know something that you don't? It's basically my question. Well, I don't know. What do they know that I don't know? I mean, I don't know that they know something about money or about economics. They did know something you don't know. What would it take for that to happen? Yeah, it's sort of the falsifiability question.

I asked you earlier. I mean, look, there are, look, the gold or your hypothesis. Look, there are a lot of people that own Bitcoin that know a lot more about computers and programming and, and a lot of stuff that relates to Bitcoin that I don't know, right? I mean, they're going to, you know, I mean, if you had an exam on Bitcoin, I mean, look, I lost my Bitcoin. I mean, how much did I know?

Now, of course, the guy that set up my wallet for me, never told me about my private key, never told me my password. All he gave me was a pin. That's Eric Voorhees, who I just, you know, and he's like, oh, he knows so much about it. Hey, dude, why don't you give me my password? You know, you set up my wallet. You know, oh, you know, what I asked was, oh, I assumed you would create a different wallet. Why assume that? I had the wallet you set up for me. But so, yeah, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my, my Bitcoin are lost in, in cyberspace. by saying this, I think this illustrates a great point. And I think oftentimes, outside of this debate and, of course, within it, our hubris, our ego, our assumption that we already know

everything there is to know about a thing will keep us from actually understanding what's required to know about it in order to understand it. And I think when Peter mentions, you know, how he's interacted with the coin he was given in the past and his quote-unquote, speak about this subject. It's very clear to me that he has not taken the time to really do the work. That's because he's dismissed it. Look, I thought about it seriously when I first, look, when I first heard about it and it was, I don't know, around $10. I can't remember exactly where it was. And I was like, you know, all right, but what's to stop somebody else from coming up with another cryptocurrency?

Because back then that was it. Maybe there was light coin. I don't know if there's a couple others or maybe it was only Bitcoin. But I looked at it and I just said. said, look, this isn't going to work for all the reasons I still think it's not going to work. Then when you had that big move where Bitcoin all of a sudden went from 200 to 1,000 and people started talking about it and then it pulled back over a couple years, I actually thought about buying it. I mean, I thought about buying it, not because I thought it was going to

work, but because I was just looking at the chart and I was saying, I don't know, maybe this thing's going to have another run. I mean, I just looked at it as a technical guy. And then I was, and then that's why I said, but you know, shit, I didn't want to buy it at $10. Why the hell am I going to buy it at two or $300? That was my emotional problem back then because I had rejected it at a really, really low price. Right. And I was like, well, now I'm going to pay this much and gamble that it's going to go up. I was like, why? I mean, and so then I just, I didn't want to do it. But I still, my, my, the reason I thought about doing it back then was not because I thought it was going to work. I thought it would, I thought it could rally and then crash again. And I've never believed that it was going to work.

No matter how much I learned about it, no matter how much people told me about it, I still think they're wrong. I still think that it's never going to deliver on its promise. But what it has delivered is a big gain for anybody who bought it. And I don't know how much longer this is going to continue, you know, because it's obviously, you know, gone on for a long time. And, you know, a lot of people that initially made fun of it have actually gotten involved. And some of that because they think they can make money off it. Some of these banks that now see money like they can be made off of Bitcoin, even if they don't necessarily believe in it. They believe they can make money off it. Yeah. Well, Peter, yeah, I know you've been very gracious in

generous for your time. There's millions of questions. I recommend that you do more. Now you've got, I like to over promise and over deliver, Peter. Now you've got 1.1,000 followers on Clubhouse. I recommend that you just do this. You open it up every now and then, and then you'll get some bio, but you get some amazing conversations that really, in some cases, bring tears to my eyes, talking about God and religion on this channel. Let's go to the final questions.

I ask everybody on the Into the Impossible podcast, who honors me. I've had billionaires like yourself, Jim Simons, Peter. I'm not a billionaire yet. Peter Diamandis. All right, well, the first billion is the hardest. I'm getting closer, though. I'm getting closer.

The first billion is the heart. is take it for me. No, I don't really know that. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah. Although what I mentioned earlier, I mentioned earlier on the day, you know, that Ray Dalio, you know, was, followed me on on this. Yeah. And maybe he listens to my podcast because he followed me the day after I mentioned on my podcast, but he only follows six people and I'm the only one that's not a billionaire. So, so I'm in good, I guess I'm in good company when it comes. So hopefully, hopefully within a few years, I'll be able to be on that list of billionaires. Yeah, well, you know.

Maybe I would already be there if I bought some Bitcoin, but. Yeah, that's it. That's too easy. I'm not going to go there. But I ask all my guests to come on the end to the impossible questions. I ask these three questions. And they're kind of deep philosophical questions. We covered all the stuff.

You've been very generous. But I want to ask you the following first question, which is looking into the future when you reach the biblical age of 120 that Moses himself died at before getting into the promised land. I always point out, he left what's called an ethical will. So Alfred Nobel did the same thing. I talk about this in my book, losing the Nobel Prize. Alfred Nobel left the will because he had no wife, no children, no ex-wives,

and he gave all his money basically this prize, and it had to do with an ethical implication that you should not only do things in science for its own purpose, that you should do things for the benefit of all mankind. I want to ask you, Peter, when you reach the... age of 120 and you depart this mortal coil. What ethical wisdom, what, what wisdom, not monetary wisdom now? What are monetary bequeathments for your monetary errors? What do you want to leave the world in terms of wisdom that you've gleaned in your life? Well, you know, first of all, I hope that if I can live to 120, at some point, they will discover some way to youth in me or clone me or

do something that I could end up living even longer than that. You know, so yeah, I mean, because a lot could happen, you know, I'm not going to be 120 for a while. Yeah. So if I can make it to that age, you never know. Maybe I can make it to a thousand. So, you know, Woody ounce. There's probably a better chance of that than Bitcoin becoming money in the world. Not everything has to be about Bitcoin, though.

Don't worry. But look, like, I certainly help that I leave the world in a better place. not necessarily that I found it, but that the world is better because I was a part of it. You know, we're all here for a very short period of time and then we're gone. And so to the extent that we could do something that endures beyond our lifetime, I mean, that's rare. I mean, most people are forgotten when the last person that remembered them dies, I mean, that they interacted with.

I mean, that's what happens, I mean, to everybody, except those rare individuals. that manage to achieve something where their name and their legacy goes on. And so, yeah, I mean, I would hope that that would happen to me that people will look back on me. And I think now, I mean, now it's a lot easier because obviously there's not that many people from 1,000 years ago, 500 years ago. But 1,000 years from now, it's going to be very easy to know what we were doing back. back in the day because it's all there. I mean, all this data is not going anywhere. I mean, you want to find something from a thousand years ago.

You've got to dig it up. You're going to be an archaeologist, and you've got to find something. You can hear the voice? You can't see their face? Can you imagine? Can you imagine, like, you know, we have history classes today. And we only have, I mean, we have ancient history that's not that much, but, you know, you have modern history.

But can you imagine in a thousand years having to go to a history class, all the stuff you got to learn? because there's so much information that a thousand years of computers. Right. Although maybe by then we won't have to learn anything. We'll just upload all the data right into a chip in our heads. And so we'll just know everything, right? All this, everything that's been done will be there.

Yeah. I mean, I hope that, you know, my grandchildren or great-grandchildren will be able to say, yeah, you know, talk about their dad. And maybe even my dad too. Maybe, I mean, I think my dad could live on for the things that he did. I mean, I didn't invent anything. I mean, I'm not somebody that, you know, I didn't come up with some revolutionized invention. You know, I didn't cure any disease, you know, but I think I did help educate a lot of people. You know, I get a lot of email still today from the Occupy Wall Street video I did.

You know, it's got millions and millions. I just put it up on my channel a few years ago and I got over four million views. But it's got a lot more than that from the original reason. But, I mean, I think I've helped a lot of people evolve, you know, in their political, beliefs, you know, going from socialist to free market. And so I think, you know, that's kind of, you know, more than what I'm trying to do now as far as in my business, trying to help people preserve their wealth in, you know, from what I think is coming, a major collapse of the dollar, major inflation, potentially hyperinflation. So I think there's a lot of wealth that's going to be

lost, axed away to inflation. And so I'm trying to help people. But I mean, that's thousands of people that I'm healthy, maybe tens of thousands, but there are millions and millions of people that I can influence with knowledge, you know, and get them to understand. And so, yeah, I mean, hopefully, you know, that will, that will endure. But, you know, the problem, you know, you look back, when it comes to science, it seems that we always build upon, you know, what prior generations accomplished, right? We don't have to start from scratch, right? We don't, If you're a mathematician, if you're a physicist, you don't have to start from day one reinventing all these. Everything that was learned you've got from thousands.

But in economics, it's crazy because it's like we always, every generation starts from zero. It's like they completely forgot all the experience of their ancestors. And they just make all the same mistakes. I mean, the knowledge, you know, we're not any smarter than we were hundreds of years ago as a society. So it would be nice if that were to change because we could have tremendous progress. If the world could reject socialism once and for all and never go back, never repeat a failed experiment. You know, that would be a milestone in human achievement.

Because, you know, imagine if we could have maintained in America the same type of economic freedom that we had, you know, let's say at the end of the 19th century, if government had gotten no bigger than it was then. and we enjoyed the same amount of economic freedom. Imagine the world that we would live in today. I mean, you can't because it would be so spectacular compared to what we got now. It's funny in science.

I'll joke, Nobel Prize winner, Max Planck said, physics or science advances one funeral at a time. But even though Marx, you know, by the way, Marx was the object, one of the objects of Carl Popper's derision. So we talked earlier about falsification, hypothesis testing, astrology, and so forth. But, you know, I always point out, you know, he hated, Popper hated astrology and Marxism, dialectic materialism because he claimed they couldn't be falsified because you'd always say,

well, this time is different in Marxism, you know, we're always going to relearn these lessons again and again. And I like to point out that there's a lot more astrology columnist and astrologers in the world than astronomers. And there's a lot more Marxist than capitalist. And so I feel like Popper himself has been falsified in a sense. I'm the co-director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at UC San Diego. And we like to talk about the different laws that Arthur C. Clark said, one of which you might have heard before we opened every podcast with it.

And it's that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. The second law, or the next law, is that for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. And the third law is the only way of discovering the limits. of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. And that's how I came up with the name of the podcast. So I want to ask you, Peter, what in your life was mysterious as a 20-year-old, a 30-year-old, but makes sense to you now because you had the courage to go into the impossible? I was about to answer your question until you said, it makes sense to me now, because I was going to say women. And they didn't make sense to me then, and they still don't make sense to me. I think I may know a little bit more

about them, but there's still a bit of a mystery. But look, I mean, I don't really know beyond that. I mean, you know, my dad kind of put me on the right, you know, path early in life when it comes to economics. And so, you know, I didn't have that journey from, you know, being a socialist to discovering, you know, free markets. I've been libertarian, I and Iran, you know, all my life. So that's just been my perspective.

But look, I'm not venturing into, you know, fantasy land because that's what I think happened with Bitcoin, right? I just think it's all, you know, I'm here in reality. I'm not living in this fantasy world where I think people are there. I mean, I mean, in fact, not just fantasy. I mean, people there, you know, I mean, they're in crazy town, you know, and I'm just not going there, you know. Okay. So you can try, you can try to coax me in. You know, you had a sailor on there, and he had his analogy of an igloo.

Come on in this great igloo. And he said, Peter Schiff is out there saying, yeah, yeah, stay out of that igloo, you know. Like, you know, I think he probably had the analogy backwards or, you know. But it's that, that's crazy. That's crazy town is where they're trying to, they're trying to get people. All right, Peter. Well, I do want to thank you. You've had a great influence on me.

I don't agree, but that's okay. We can always agree to disagree. I don't agree with everything you say. I listen religiously to your podcast. I follow you. And everybody should on Twitter. Now on Clubhouse, thanks to me. I'm hurting my shoulder patting myself on the back.

Peter, I want to thank you so much for the courage you've displayed throughout the years. You've been very prescient on some things and some things you've had a challenging record on. But I do salute your courage and your honesty and your integrity to talk to people. who differ with you. And I hope this was done in a respectful manner. Peter, thank you so much. Take care. And yes, you were very polite and respectful. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. If you enjoyed this episode Into the Impossible with Professor Bryant Keating, please subscribe, comment, share, and review. Watch on YouTube, listen on iTunes, Spotify, Google Player, Stitcher.

We appreciate hearing from you and are always open to your suggestions for future episodes. For more information and to sign up for Professor Keating's mailing list go to briankeating.com. Follow Professor Keating on medium and Twitter at Dr. Brian Keating, DR. Brian Keating. For more information on the Clark Center go to imagination.ucsd.edu. Into the impossible is a of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego, in the Division of Physical Sciences. Eric Vary, Director, Ryan Keating, co-director, produced by Ryan Keating and Stuart Ballco.

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