The Joe Rogan Experience - #1002 - Peter Schiff

Episode Date: August 23, 2017

Peter Schiff is an American businessman, investment broker, author and financial commentator. Schiff is CEO and chief global strategist of Euro Pacific Capital Inc. He also hosts his own podcast called "The Peter Schiff Podcast" available on Spotify and at SchiffRadio.com

5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Boom, and we're live. Peter Schiff, how are you, sir? I am good, I am good. Thanks for having me back. Thanks for coming back. Yeah, it's been three years. It has been a while. And you've grown a lot. I'm so impressed with what's happened to your podcast, your popularity. Well, thanks, man. Thank you.

Hopefully a little of that trickles down to me. I'm sure it will. You look good, dude. You look healthy. You look vibrant. Well, you know, I got a little bit of a beard going. I've been living in Puerto Rico. Yeah. We were talking about that off air. Tell me about that. Like what, what prompted that decision? Well, you know, I live in Connecticut and unlike Southern California, where you are fortunate enough to still live. I lived here for a long time, years and years ago. But we have seasons. And one of them is winter.

And it tends to be very long. And it normally kind of moves into the fall and the spring a bit. And so I had been thinking for years about kind of splitting my time between Florida and Connecticut. Because I love New England in the summer. It's beautiful this time of year. And I like the beginning of fall, you know, when the leaves are still on the trees and it's not that cold and it's pretty. And, you know, spring is nice, too. But I can forget all the winter. So I was going to move to Florida until I found out about Puerto Rico. And I found out about this,

actually, because I read an article interviewing John Paulson. Who's John Paulson? John Paulson, billionaire, hedge fund guy, made a lot more money than me, shorting subprime. I did the same trade. I just didn't make as much money as he did because I didn't start out with nearly as much money. But in any event, he made a lot of money shorting subprime, and he's a hedge fund guy. And he was investing down in Puerto Rico. And I was like, oh, what's he doing?

What's going on down there? And I found out and I never known this, that Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory, Americans who live in Puerto Rico don't have to pay federal income taxes on the money they earn from Puerto Rico, which would include any of your capital gains on your investments. And I'm like, wait a minute. I mean, all I have to do is move to Puerto Rico. I don't have to pay any federal income taxes because anybody can move there. You don't need a work visa. You pick up and move there. It's just like moving to another state. And so the minute you move there, you don't have to pay federal income taxes. But Puerto Rico has its own taxes. So you have to pay the Puerto Rico taxes instead. And up until recently, I mean, Puerto Rico's income tax, I think, tops out at 30 percent.

It's still cheaper than the U.S. and there's no state income tax. That's all you've got, right, is the 30 percent. But a few years ago, Puerto Rico got smart and they said, well, how do we attract businessmen, entrepreneurs to move to Puerto Rico if they're not already here? Well, let's just drop that income tax down. And so they basically created these two laws, Act 20 and Act 22. And Act 22 is for individuals. And it says, hey, if you move to Puerto Rico, you have zero capital gains tax on any capital gains, and you have zero taxes on any interest and dividends that you earn locally. And then they passed another act, which was Act 20, and they said, hey, if you open up a business here, you have a company, you're going to pay a 4% corporate tax to Puerto Rico, and then you can pass on all the profits and dividends to

yourself tax-free. No tax in Puerto Rico, no tax in the United States. And that's a great deal. That seems to be worth a tremendous amount of money it is i mean it depends on but you you effectively double your income by moving there practically i mean so because you're not you know you're not you know splitting your income with the government right and and and so i i checked it out when i heard out about for heard about because first it's like puerto rico do i you know do i really want to live there? I'm thinking West Side Story. I don't know much about Puerto Rico. But it's beautiful. I mean, I live in a town called Dorado Beach. And it's very, very nice, the weather and just the tropical location. And there's a lot of good people there. A lot of people have been moving there. Obviously, I'm not the first person to take advantage of this. And so

there are a lot of people that have come from California to get out of California taxes or the Northeast, the Midwest. Plus, when you come from the Midwest or the Northeast, you also help yourself get out of the cold weather. California, it's pretty much all a tax thing. I mean, no one's leaving Southern California other than really taxes because you've got such great weather here. But we enjoy living there. My wife enjoys it. She's met a lot of people. I've met a lot of people. And, you know, the crazy thing is, you know, you have this movement now in Puerto Rico where they want to become a state, which is ridiculous because if they became a state, all the problems they have would be that much worse because Puerto Rico is in trouble today,

despite the fact that you don't have to pay federal income taxes there. I mean, what happened was the Puerto Rican government, which was very socialist, they borrowed a lot of money and they spent a lot of money to get elected. And, you know, a lot of people in Puerto Rico work for the government and a lot of people are on welfare food stamps and stuff like that. But big government is what destroyed the Puerto Rican economy and they borrowed a lot of people are on welfare food stamps and stuff like that. But big government is what destroyed the Puerto Rican economy. And they borrowed a lot of money. But if on top of that, Puerto Rican residents that actually had jobs had to pay the federal income tax. You know, it's not just the federal income tax that doesn't apply down there.

It's the Obamacare tax. You know, people wanted Obamacare repealed. If you move to Puerto Rico, you've repealed it for yourself because the taxes don't apply down there. They don't even have to pay the federal gas tax. So without all those taxes, they're still in trouble. So can you imagine how much worse it would be if they had all these taxes, if all of a sudden the IRS descended on Puerto Rico like an infestation of mosquitoes? It'd be worse than the Zika virus down there to have the IRS. But there's people, they've told a lot of people, hey, if we become a state,

you'll get more welfare. Oh, so vote to become a state. But what Puerto Rico, the last thing they need is more incentives to be on welfare. They need freedom. They need less government. They need to default on a lot of this debt. And a lot of the people that own the bonds, unfortunately, have to lose some money. But I think that as more and more people move to Puerto Rico, I've got two businesses down there now. I'm hiring people.

I'm renting space. I bought a lot of property down there. You know, more and more people like me, as people come to Puerto Rico, the economy is going to improve. It's going to get better. But if they become a state, they're going to destroy all that potential. They have to exploit the fact that Puerto Rico can offer such a great advantage to a businessman, somebody who wants to create a company, employ people, provide goods and services. They can do it in Puerto Rico on a much favorable basis relative to anywhere in the continental United States. So this is a recent thing for you. How long have you been down there for? Well, I moved my asset management company. So I have a company called Europe Pacific Asset

Management. And I moved that company from Southern California. I was based in Newport Beach with that business. And I moved it to San Juan, I think in 2013. And then I moved it to Dorado. So I have my office there. And I moved all my portfolio managers. They all moved from California to Puerto Rico. That's got to be a tough sell. You know, they love it down there. But was it difficult to convince people to pack up, which essentially another country. It's not really, but it kind of is. Yeah, it's America, but yeah, technically it's not.

Is it like Guam, like that kind of a situation? Yeah, well, it's the same status, but I've never been to Guam. But, I mean, you do feel, it does feel a little bit like a foreign country because English is the second language. Everybody is speaking Spanish. So in a way, you know, but you look around, it's all the same restaurants. It's all the same stores. So it's American in a big sense. Like chain stores?

Is that what you mean? Yeah, all the malls, you know, all the same malls. So there's a lot of not really expats because they're actually still in America. Yeah, you do not renounce your citizenship when you move to Puerto Rico. You do not have to pay an exit tax. You still travel on a U.S. passport. Everybody that lives there is an American. So it's like a sweeter deal than moving to Hawaii.

Well, Hawaii, you got high taxes. You're still paying federal income taxes. But you're in paradise. Plus you're paying the state income taxes in Hawaii. But my guys wanted to move there because it basically almost meant that their income was going to double, like, pretty much overnight because they can participate in these tax breaks. But, you know, my one of my guys is married, has some kids and, you know, they really like it. My single employees have a few young guys, you know, you know, good, working out, you know, young portfolio managers. But they quickly got Puerto Rican girlfriends.

You know, if you've got a job down there, that's a big plus because most of the Puerto Rican guys, and not if you know this, but I think five of the Miss Universes have gone to Puerto Rico. I mean, it's a small little island country, but they've got some beautiful women down there in Puerto Rico. It sounds like you're a salesperson for Puerto Rico. Peter Schiff, you got some sort of a deal going on down there? I should. I've sent so many people down there. A lot of people have moved there because of me. I run into people all the time. They see me on the beach,

at the pool. Hey, you're the reason that I'm here, because they heard about it. But look, it's a good deal, and I would love to see Puerto Rico succeed as a mecca of free market capitalism. Right now, it's a poster child for the failures of socialism because it's the socialists that killed Puerto Rico, just like they're killing a lot of major cities in the United States. But if we get more entrepreneurs, more business people coming to Puerto Rico, that is what Puerto Rico needs.

They don't need to be a state. They don't need the IRS. They don't need more government. They don't need more government. They need the opposite of that. So you learn in Spanish or are you just sort of sticking around Americans? Well, I mean, they're all Americans. They're all Americans. But, I mean, I speak English.

I mean, I took high school Spanish. So, you know, if I go through a drive-through, you know, I got to try to use my Spanish because a lot of times they don't speak. And no one, if you talk to someone from the police or the fire department, none of those guys speak any English. But most of the younger people, they've learned English. And where I live, it's everybody speaks English. I mean, nobody addresses me. Once I get out of the gates of the rich, you know, rich Carlton, you know, I go out into, you know, into a movie theater there. You know, they're speaking Spanish.

And if I say, do you speak English? Then they'll talk. But where I live, everybody addresses everybody in English. So in that respect, you're still there. So you live in like a gated area that's a part of the Rich Carlton? Yeah, it's a gated community, but it's very large. We have a lot of golf courses. I think three or four golf courses.

We're on the beach and there's a lot of different places to live. Is there any resentment from the locals? Not that I can feel. I mean, because I I mean, I know some of the locals could feel, hey, these guys are coming in here and they're not paying a lot of taxes, but I pay a lot of taxes as a, just a raw number. It's not a big percentage of what I earn, but it's a big number relative to what other people might be paying. But, you know, I'm doing all, I'm hiring people. As I said, I rented office space. I mean, I bought a house. I bought a condo. I might be paying. But, you know, I'm doing all, I'm hiring people. As I said, I rented office space. I mean, I bought a house.

I bought a condo. I'm going out. So, I mean, they benefit. They like having, if you like having people doing stuff. And so I don't see it at all. Now, if it becomes a state status, if it changes status, will you move? I don't know. We'll see.

I might have to. I mean, it won't be nearly as lucrative. See, here's going to be the problem if they ever became a state. See, people that live there pay a 30% income tax now. Not people like me, but the people that were already there. So kind of like in California, you have 10%, 13% income tax. But imagine if you had to pay a 30% local tax and the federal income tax on top of that. I mean, they have a 13% sales tax now.

They have a higher sales tax. If they became a state, they would be by far the highest taxed state in the United States. It would be a disaster. Right now, they have the lowest taxes in the United States. So why would you want to go from having the lowest taxes to having the highest taxes? It would be suicide to become a state. Yeah, so they would have their local taxes, And then on top of that, they would have federal taxes. So the local taxes are fairly high in terms of like a local state tax.

Yes, much higher. Right. But then on top of that, they don't have federal taxes. Right. And you know, the other thing is Puerto Rico has a lot of debt. I mentioned that. Right. But on a per capita basis, they actually have a lot less debt than America does. I mean, your share of the national debt is much bigger than the average Puerto Rican share of the Puerto Rico debt. Because when you live in California, not only are you responsible for the state's debt, you're responsible for the national debt. The people in Puerto Rico are not responsible for the national debt.

So if they actually became a state, they would be in worse shape than they are now. They would actually have more debt. So it's like it'd be like buying a ticket on the Titanic after you've already you know, it hit the iceberg. You still want to buy tickets. So hopefully this is all a bunch of politics and it won't become it won't become a state. And it'll just continue. You know, they'll default on a lot of this debt. Hopefully they'll privatize a lot of things uh they'll shrink the government and more and more people

like me will come and start creating businesses and hiring people and you know five ten years from now maybe it'll be the wealthiest part of the united states so correct me if i'm wrong but the two possibilities are it becomes a state and they get more welfare. They get more, essentially more aid, more money, or it stays where it is and more people like you have an incentive to go there. And then entrepreneurs open up businesses and then there's more opportunities. And then the general wealth of the island grows and then it helps people just by virtue of more profit. Yeah, you got it. Becoming a state just means a bigger welfare state. It means a greater incentive not to work and a bigger punishment if you work because the taxes on people that work will go sky high.

You know, so that's going to be a huge problem. You know, so the appeal of being a state is that so many people don't work. is that so many people don't work. But one thing that we could do to help Puerto Rico is get rid of the minimum wage because they're stuck with our minimum wage, which is a disaster because the average income, the average wage in Puerto Rico is about half of what it is in the United States.

And so the minimum wage of $7.25 is like having a minimum wage of $15 an hour. And if you're one of those people that likes a $15 minimum wage, look at how high the unemployment is down there because people can't get jobs at these wages. You know, the best example, too, of America destroying one of its possessions with the minimum wage was American Samoa. I don't know if you ever read this, but a few years ago, Congress applied the minimum wage to all the

territories, our minimum wage, which included American Samoa. And in American Samoa, the biggest employers on the island were these tuna canners. And so, you know, Chicken of the Sea or Star Kissed. And so all these people worked in these factories canning the tuna, and they worked in American Samoa. Well, when the minimum wage was passed, it made the island uncompetitive. And so the tuna factories closed down and fired everybody. And then, so all of a sudden,

there was like 30% unemployment. The island went into a massive depression and they still haven't come out of it. I mean, we destroyed them. We destroyed all their jobs. And the, you know, the American Samoa didn't want the minimum wage, but, you know, American politicians don't give a damn.

And all they care about is feeling good about themselves, not about the consequences of what they do. And so they impose that minimum wage, and it was like declaring war. Well, it had a lot of damage in Puerto Rico, just not as much as it did in American Samoa. But if we can get rid of that minimum wage in Puerto Rico, then there'd be a lot more employment opportunities for younger unskilled people. They'd have the opportunity to, you know, climb up the job ladder to get some skills so they can earn more money in the future. But right now they're just permanently unemployed because of that. So we could get rid of the minimum wage. Also, there's the Jones Act, which is really, really hurts Puerto Rico. And what that Jones Act says is that any ship that's going to America, they can't stop in Puerto Rico, drop a few things off, and then continue on to the United States. They have to go all the way to the United States, unload their cargo that's going to Puerto Rico, put it on a U.S. flagship with a U.S. crew, and then send it back to Puerto Rico.

And it costs a fortune. U.S. crew and then send it back to Puerto Rico, and it costs a fortune, right? So that's one of the reasons that their tourism is not that competitive there, because all the other Caribbean islands can get cheap stuff dropped off on boats, but, you know, we have to wait for stuff to come on a Jones Act boat, and so it... What was the incentive to pass the Jones Act? It's for the unions, the Maritime Union, the Merchant Marine, to try to... because, you know, American ships are uncompetitive. Like, if you ever go on a cruise, I don't know if you go on a cruise, but none of these cruise ships are flagged in the United States, and none of the crews are American. That's because if you had to use an American crew with our laws, nobody could afford to cruise. It would be too expensive. The only way that you can have a cruise line that anybody can afford to travel on is if you flag it in some other country.

Well, so because the wages are just off the charts. But that Jones Act means if people in Puerto Rico, you know, whatever they're going to buy, whatever they're going to consume in order to bring it to that island, you know, they're going to have to bring it on a U.S. flagship. Now, that's a problem for Hawaii, too. But the people in Hawaii are much richer, on average, than the people in Puerto Rico. So the poorer you are, the more you're affected by higher food costs or higher costs of everything. So you have a lot of these liberal politicians. They refuse to get rid of these laws. But that would very much help Puerto Rico, just more free markets, because they have no control over that federal minimum wage or that Jones Act. So you don't think there should be any minimum wage at all?

No, no. No, none. So someone working for a dollar an hour doesn't bother you? Well, I mean, it's better than working for zero. I mean, people think that they want to impose their morals and say, well, it's not right for somebody to work for a dollar an hour. Well, you know, people make rational decisions. Right. And so if somebody is accepting a dollar an hour and that must mean that nobody offer them a dollar fifty.

Nobody offer them two dollars. I mean, this is a competitive market. I mean, I know you have an employee over here. I mean, could you pay this guy a dollar an hour? Would he work for you? I don't think so. Yeah, because he could get more. Right, but he's educated

and skilled and he's an actual audio engineer. Of course. Right, but it's very difficult for people to get that sort of an education, particularly in, is Puerto Rico thought of as a third world environment? No, it's not. It's not third world, but let's say some kid came in here that had no experience whatsoever, but he wanted to learn.

He wanted to just get you coffee and just sit around and be around you. He's not that productive. Yeah, they use interns, right? A lot of radio stations do that, and they don't pay them anything. I know, that's zero dollars an hour. I can't do that. But maybe you pay them five dollars an hour, whatever it is. But people are going to accept a job that's the best one they can get. And so if somebody is working for a dollar an hour or two dollars an hour, by default, I know that they couldn't find a higher job than that. And the reason is because they don't have a lot of skills. But if you don't have a lot of skills, the best thing you can do is get a job so you can get some skills. That's where you learn skills. You get

more skills. You know, there are people that pay to get skills, right? If you go to school, you actually have to pay tuition. If I'm getting paid a dollar an hour while I learn something that has value, that's better. You have people now borrowing money to learn a skill. People graduate college and they're in debt. That's a weird argument, right? Because you're assuming that they're going to get a skill. I mean, they might just be handling packages and picking them up and moving to another location or digging a hole.

Well, even that's like show up on time, be responsible. So discipline, show that you can work. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that you learn when you have a job. But the problem with the minimum wage is that the minimum wage basically hurts the very people that it's intended to help. Because the minimum wage basically says if you are a worker, if you cannot convince an employer to pay you $7.25 or $10 an hour, whatever the minimum wage is, then you cannot accept that job. See, it doesn't hurt the employer. It hurts the employee because it limits his options. It limits his ability to sell his labor for the highest price that he can get. And it limits his access to the job market. It's that you can't get on that ladder. You remove the lower rungs. And so I can't climb up because of

this arbitrary minimum wage. Because when you pass a minimum wage, you're not going to force an employer. If I'm an employer and there's a minimum wage of $10 an hour and somebody comes to me and they can deliver $5 an hour worth of productivity, meaning if I hire that person that will benefit me by $5 an hour, I'm not going to pay them $10 an hour because then I lose $5 an hour. The only way I'm going to hire somebody who's going to give me $5 an hour worth of productivity is if I can buy them, if I can, you know, hire them for less than $5 an hour so I can make a profit. So it just it's just like a floor. It's like if you cannot deliver enough productivity of whatever that minimum wage is, then you

can't get a job. And so it's basically making it illegal for people to work. It is the stupidest law that anybody has ever conceived. It should be obliterated. I mean, there are some countries like Singapore does not have a minimum wage. And, you know, the average income in Singapore is higher than it is here per capita. There's a lot more millionaires there. I mean, people have no problem. We didn't always have a minimum wage in the United States. I mean, this is a creation of government. And, you know, but the initial minimum wages, if you want to actually go to the origins of minimum wage in the United

States, it was about trying to prevent employers from hiring the Chinese or hiring blacks. They were trying to force the minimum wage as a way to create unemployment. It wasn't there wasn't a a good motivation. But yes, when they try to sell it to the voters, oh, this is all about we don't want people to be exploited. But, you know, it's not exploitation. If people voluntarily accept a job because it's the best job they can find, the person who's offering the best job is not exploiting them. They're giving them an opportunity. And if you're denied an opportunity, I mean, there are a lot of people, oh, great, you know, they're going to get the minimum wage up to $15 an hour. Well,

what good is it being unemployed at $15 an hour? It's better to be employed at $5 an hour than unemployed at $15 because being unemployed means's better to be employed at $5 an hour than unemployed at $15 because being unemployed means you make nothing, right? Where a devil's advocate would be that if you can't afford to pay someone $15 an hour, then you probably shouldn't have employees in the first place. Your business doesn't function that well. No, there are plenty of- Does that make sense?

No, because there are plenty of jobs where you have entry-level positions. I mean, if you think that there should be no entry-level jobs, I mean, you go back to the days of full-service gas stations, right? Back in the day when you didn't have to pump your own gas. Still the case in New Jersey and a few other states. Yeah, New Jersey, they mandate it, but you still don't get the level of service. I mean, if you pulled into a gas station 40 years ago, not only did they pump your gas, but they checked under your hood.

They checked your tires. You know, they washed your windows. You know, they did all sorts of things, you know, with your car. They didn't make very much money. They lived off of tips, by and large. It was the minimum wage that eliminated almost all those jobs. It's the minimum wage that is the reason that we have, you know, people sell so much self-serve. But what happened, a lot of these people,

these kids that worked in filling stations became mechanics because all these filling stations had a mechanic there. And they learned auto mechanics and a lot of them went on to own their own gas stations. But of course, a lot of them just this was their work experience that formed the basis for the rest of their life. A lot of young kids had these jobs, summer jobs. And so there's nothing wrong with entry level employment. There's nothing wrong with people learning the responsibility of having a job, of showing up, of customer service, of sales. I mean, my first jobs were all sales. I was selling subscriptions door to door. I was telephone sales of the Z Channel in California. I sold I was selling subscriptions door to door. I was telephone sales of the Z Channel in California. I sold, I was knocking on doors, selling cable television. I worked in a

shoe store selling shoes. I mean- You're a hustler. But you were talking about you as a young man, right? Yes, as a kid. A lot of people think of the minimum wage as applied to adults, adults that have to take care of children, that have to put a roof over their head and food on the table. And you're saying that they shouldn't be having those jobs. Well, by the time you are an adult with kids, you should have accumulated the skills to earn a lot more than a minimum wage. See, that's the argument when people say, hey, you can't afford a family. You can't support a family on the minimum wage. Of course, you shouldn't even be trying to support a family.

If you can only earn the minimum wage, you shouldn't even be trying to support a family. If you can only earn the minimum wage, you shouldn't have a family. You should realize, hey, I can't afford a family yet. Let me acquire the skills before I start fathering children and getting married. Let me make sure I can support myself. I mean, a lot of people who are having the minimum wage, they're living at home. They don't need to pay the rent. They're living rent-free. What they need is a job. They need maybe gas money, get some money so I can take a girl out on a date. But I got to get some work experience. I got to get out there. I got to know what it's like to work. I got to see, you know, I got to live in the real world. And that's what used to happen. You don't have all these summer jobs anymore. Kids don't have the opportunity because the minimum

wage has already priced them out. A lot of older people now are taking those jobs. And so the employment opportunities aren't there. But when you just raise the minimum wage, all you're doing is raising the bar where you can get your job. You're not helping people. Now, there's always going to be some people that, yeah, there's going to be somebody who will make a little bit more because of the minimum wage. There's going to be those people. There's going to be some winners. But you're going to have lots of people that make nothing because of the minimum wage. And then, of course, because you're driving up the cost of labor, prices are going up. And so who is affected the most by higher prices? Poorer people, people who are working on minimum wage.

And not only that, you end up with less quality. I mean, you know, I hate it when, you know, I call up a company and I'm just in voicemail hell and I'm going from when I would like a real person to deal with. But, you know, with a minimum wage, those jobs don't exist. There's so many jobs that have been automated out of existence. Or if not automated, shipped overseas where there isn't any minimum wage. That too. I mean, that too. Yeah. You end up if you actually get a real person, they're in India. Right. Right. But we have all these people in America who aren't working. Why can't they do those jobs? Yes. You're not going to be able to support a family on those jobs. But before you even get a family, you can have that job. And then maybe, you know, five or 10 years later, you'll work your way up the ladder. You'll get a skill. Then you can support a family. But nobody is supposed to be able to support a family. And if you try to tell an employer, hey, you got to pay your fry cook enough money to support a family, you can't do that.

There's not enough productivity cooking French fries. You can't support a family if all you can do is cook a French fry. You need to learn how to do something else before you can support a family. And you can't put that on the employer. Now, when you say that Singapore has a higher average income, and no minimum wage, is that because there's a shitload of billionaires that have moved to Singapore because they don't have a minimum wage and because they can exploit lower class people

or people that don't make much money? The millionaires and billionaires are really not even affected by the minimum wage. What you'd have to look at is the rate of unemployment in Singapore, which is tiny. Do they have good tax rates in Singapore? They do, yes. Do they have good incentives for very rich people to move there? And doesn't that jack up the minimum wage, or not the minimum wage, rather the average income? Yeah, well, the fact that you have entrepreneurs that are succeeding in Singapore because they

have small government and low taxes means that there's a lot of competition for workers. And so that's what bids up wages, right? Competition. I mean, I've got no problem with a vibrant market bidding up wages. You just don't want the government to try to artificially force wages above their productivity. Right. Because it's ultimately your productivity that determines your wages. You mentioned that your employee here, he adds a lot of value because of his knowledge, because of his personal-

Plus he's good to look at. Look at him. He's handsome. Well, that doesn't help me. That's what you say. We're laughing, but there are a lot of people. Look, there are a lot of people that earn more money because they're good to look at. There are plenty of people that have paid more.

They go to Puerto Rico and they win Miss Universe. Right, but even people hire receptionists or people hire people in certain positions because they look good and they get paid a little extra for that because that's added value to the customer experience and things like that. But most of us can't live off of our looks. We got to have something else. But it's all a function of your productivity. You want to earn more, you have to produce more. The government just can't mandate that people pay you more than you're worth as far as the productivity that you can deliver because you're just not going to have a job. You're making a ton of sense.

And obviously, I'm not a financial wizard like you are. When you start talking about people making more money for their looks, that would be a hot-button topic in America, and people would get very upset about it. And people would say that that's a sexist viewpoint and you're objectifying these women that you have working these positions what would you say to that like a secretary or someone who's a receptionist who's super hot like that you're you're objectifying this woman well you know there are a lot of men and women men get hired for their looks too i mean it's not just a one-way street jamie it's like you said but um look you know people make the most of what they got right i mean people say hey it's not fair why should this well it's like you said. But look, you know, people make the most of what they got, right?

I mean, people say, hey, it's not fair. Why should this attractive woman— Well, it's unfair to the unattractive people. But the unattractive person could be really smart. Maybe she ends up making more money. What if they're dumb and ugly? Well, look, you know, not everybody wins the lottery in life. That's the problem, right?

But look— But isn't that the problem with socialism and the idea of we should even out the playing field? Yes. I mean, the idea that— And you're a competition guy. Right. But, you know, a famous Democrat, John Kennedy, said that life isn't fair. Oh, that guy.

He's living in a different era. But it's not fair. Right. I mean, he's just trying to bang a lot of chicks. And you can't you know, you can't dwell on the things that you don't have. Hey, I wish I could have been born better looking. I could have been born taller. You know, you've got to make the most.

It's like playing poker. You've got a hand. Play it. You can have the worst hand and you can win the pot. Right. So, you know, obviously, is it easier to win the hand if you got four aces? Right. But you know what? If you're a bad player, you'll win nothing because everybody's going to drop. Right. And so even getting the best hand doesn't necessarily mean you're going to play it right. But, you know, it's not. I mean, if two people, if I want to hire somebody and the way they look, I believe is going to help me earn more money because I think that having a more attractive person in a particular business position

is going to somehow lead to greater sales. I mean, that's really the only reason that you're going to pay somebody more money if they look good. I go on Fox Television or CNBC. It's not an accident that all these women interviewing me are pretty hot. Right. I mean, unattractive women could read the news and ask me questions just as good as they can, but they're hoping and they're betting that more guys like us are going to tune in to watch a hot chick interview me than a homely one. And they're probably right, right? Because probably lots of homely girls that are applying for these jobs are not getting hired no I agree with you 100%

but there's a fascinating thing that's going on today where competition is thought to be in somehow some way shape or form a negative thing and that this kind of competition whether it's even capitalism itself is criticized right like there's a lot of people today that are in favor of socialism that's one of the reasons why Bernie Sanders was so attractive is because like, hey, you people that are not winning this crazy competition out there that don't have any desire, we're going to even out this playing field. And those people that are out there kicking ass and taking names, we're going to take some of that money and we're going to just give it to everybody else.

Yeah, that is the appeal of socialism because it appeals to the lowest common denominator, not only does it appeal to ignorance, but it appeals to greed because it's an envy like, oh, this person has so much more than me and it's not fair. But here's the beauty of competition, because this is why we want competition. We all want stuff. Right. And and so I want people competing to sell me stuff. Right. I want to have as much as I can as far as consumer goods. That's what we all want. We want products and services that enhance our lives. And the way we get the best products, right, with the highest quality that deliver the most value at the lowest price is to have lots of competition, all kinds of people competing for my business. Hey, I've got

some money to spend. Oh, buy my product, buy my product. Competition is what makes sure that I get the best thing, right? You go back to the old Soviet Union and, you know, there was no competition. Let's say you wanted a phone in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Well, you went on a waiting list and maybe three or four years later, if you were lucky enough enough you had the right connections somebody gave you this big fat black phone you know and and you had one phone and it was very expensive you know that's that's phones under under capitalism look at the phones we have i got a phone and i i could take movies with it it's a it's a computer it's a camera i i used it to get here with its gps i mean you think i would have a phone like this if the government

was had a monopoly on phones? Absolutely not. And if I had to buy any government phone that they were going to put in my place? So to say that competition isn't good, all the things that we value wouldn't exist if people weren't competing with one another. No, well, I'm a big believer in competition.

But one of the weird arguments that's happening now is that competition is bad. And it's a very blinders argument. And I saw you battle against that argument when you were with Occupy Wall Street, when you went down to the park and talked to those people. That's how I've heard a lot of these very aggressive, very passionate people with a limited amount of understanding about capitalism itself. Yeah, they had no understanding.

It's hilarious. And it was a wonderful exposing. But they were there, which was weird, right? Well, they were in the room. They're there. They have signs. They're screaming. They're yelling.

They're angry. But yet, there's very little understanding about the system that they're rallying against. Yeah, well, one of the reasons I went there, and if you haven't seen it, there are plenty of YouTube videos of it. There's one that's like two and a half hours. That's the whole, I talked until we ran out of power, right? I've seen them all. I've seen about 10 videos of you talking to these people but somebody just recently resurrected it made a copy of it and got another two and a half million views just a few months ago so i know people are watching it but you know i went down there because i sympathized with the

fact that people are upset and and that i know that the economy is not as productive as it should be. I know there's a lot of people that don't have jobs that should have jobs. I think that we should have a much more vibrant economy. We should have a much higher standard of living. There should be a lot more opportunity. But it's not because we don't have enough government. It's because we have too much. And it's the problems that we had on Wall Street were not a function of capitalism, but a function of the government's failure to allow capitalism. And the reason that I was predicting the 2008 financial crisis and they were calling me Dr. Doom, the reason I knew about the housing bubble in advance and I was able to see the financial crisis coming was because I understood the dynamics at play. I understood how the government, how the Federal Reserve, how their policies were working to inflate these bubbles. And I understood the moral hazards and the consequences of what was

going on. And so when I went down to Zuccotti Park, the point I was trying to make, and not even so much the people that were protesting, but to the people who I knew would watch the interaction all around the world, was to make the point that you were right to be upset, but you're venting your anger in the wrong direction. They're venting their anger at people like you, people who are successful, the quote-unquote 1%. The 1% capitalism. And I was saying, look, it's the Federal Reserve that is the source of your problems. It's Congress. It's the White House. It's not the financial district in New York City. I mean, the free market, people in the free market are there to help you, right? Anyone that has a business, all they're trying to do is win your business as a customer. They're competing to get you to buy things. And anything that you buy,

right, if you choose to buy something, if I buy something for 20 bucks, I must value what I'm buying more than 20 bucks or I wouldn't make the exchange. So to the extent that there's a business out there trying to convince me to buy something that I value more than money, that's not going to hurt me. The problem is government. Government has power. Government has brute force. The government can force me to do things that I don't want to do. The government can make my life worse. A private business is just going to make my life better.

Because if they're not going to make my life better, I don't do business with them. But the government is a different story. They can pass laws. They can pass taxes. They can pass regulations. And as it so happens, the laws and regulations that they're passing are making people's lives worse. And, you know, the problem wasn't that big banks failed. The problem was that they got bailed out.

Don't blame the banks for accepting the bailout. I mean, what would you do if someone offered to bail you out? Yeah, you'd take the money. The problem is that they got bailed out. Don't blame the banks for accepting the bailout. I mean, what would you do if someone offered to bail you out? Yeah, you'd take the money. The problem is the government. The government shouldn't have had the power to bail them out in the first place. So the real enemy is government and the power that government has. We have to take that power away from government. And when you take power away from government, you create freedom. Right. That's what freedom is. It's absence of government. Now, when you say the Federal Reserve and Congress are the real issue, what is their incentive to be that issue? What is their incentive to not allow the market to thrive and to, like you're saying, that they're the reason why there aren't more opportunities and there aren't more people working?

What do they have to gain? politicians doing politicians have power right um they want they want to get elected and they want all the perks that come with elected office uh most people that are in government live pretty good lives there's a reason to do it right it's not that they want to serve the people and help the people they want personal benefit yeah i mean that's all that's all the nonsense, right? They all pretend that they're public servants, but that's the spiel, right? They're acting. They're playing a part. That's a means to an end. They want the power. They want the perks that come with elected office. And so obviously, in order to get elected, you got to get the votes,

you got to get the contributions. And so they're not making policy that's good economics. All they're trying to do is get elected and get donations. And so they have a vested interest in helping the people that give them money. And people are always trying to buy special perks from government, a tax break know regulate my competitor instead of me or put this guy out of business and of course a lot of people just vote for something for free that was the power of bernie sanders i'll give you free stuff right vote for me and there are a lot of people who don't know any better and they're just going to vote for whoever promises the most free stuff but free stuff isn't free it's very expensive but what it really amounts to is theft i mean the

liberals say vote for me and i'm going to steal from somebody else and give you what I take because the government doesn't have anything. The government doesn't have, you know, if they're going to promise something, they have to take it from somebody else. They don't have anything. Government doesn't produce. Government just redistributes what other people produce. So there's always a cost. But whenever the government does that, when they tax the productive people to give money to nonproductive people, they increase the incentive not to produce and they decrease the incentive to produce. So all this redistribution of wealth just means that there's a lot less wealth to redistribute and everybody ends up poor. If the politicians stayed out of it, then you'd have a lot more wealth and everybody would be better off. But that's not, you know, the politics of it are the things that are good economics are bad politics. Like take health care.

Why couldn't the Republicans repeal Obamacare? Because Obamacare is terrible economics. But here's the problem. How is it terrible economics? We were going to get into this the last time you were here. We got sidetracked. What is terrible about it? Well, I mean, we could spend the whole show on why it's bad economics.

But, you know, there's a belief out there that government is somehow going to be a more efficient provider of health care than the free market, which is just not true. Right. I mean, health care is a service, right? Just like food, just like true, right? I mean, healthcare is a service, right? Just like food, just like shelter, just like clothing. And the free market can provide it better and cheaper than government. I mean, that's just always the case. Some people like it as a service, though, that becomes a part of what the government offers you along with, you know, when you pay your taxes, they fix the roads, they hire the police, things along those lines. They would like healthcare to be along that line as well, just like it is in the UK and in Canada and a few other places. And in some ways, those systems are better than the system we have now, but they're not better

than the system we used to have or better than the system that we could have if it was a pure free market. But there's two things you got got. You've got health care, and then you've got the health insurance. Let's look at those two industries separately. Because the reason that people buy health insurance is in case, well, if I get really sick, I can't afford the bills. Just like people buy car insurance. When you buy car insurance, you know that you still have to pay for gas. You know, you don't expect your car insurance policy to cover the cost of gas. It doesn't cover the cost of new tires. It doesn't cover the cost of a new spark plugs or

your routine maintenance. The reason you buy auto insurance is, hey, what if I get into a wreck and I total my car? I don't have the cash to buy a new one. So people buy insurance because they're insuring against something that's probably not going to happen, right? When you buy your auto insurance, the anticipation is that you never put in a claim and you're happy to never put into a claim. And the insurance company obviously doesn't want you to put in a claim. They're hoping that they collect the premiums. And the way auto insurance works is because most people don't put in a claim because they don't get into an accident, the insurance company has the money to pay the people who do get in an accident, right?

And that's how insurance works. But because of the government, health insurance doesn't work that way anymore, right? Because of the government, and the government set up this system where if I hire somebody and I pay them cash, they have to pay income taxes on it. If I give them health insurance instead of cash, it's tax-free. So a lot of people all of a sudden wanted health insurance instead of cash because they didn't have to pay tax on health insurance. And now more and more people started to want their health insurance to cover the equivalent of more gas in my car or a flat tire. And the minute you try to pay for your routine medical cost with a third-party payer through health insurance, you have these spiraling out-of-control costs. Because if you pulled up to

a gas station and didn't actually pay for the gas, you just put your insurance card into the pump and they didn't even have prices. Because when you go to the doctor, you don't even know what things cost. There's no price. I mean, when you go to buy gas, everybody has the price right up there. And I look around and if one place is two cents cheaper, that's where I'm going, right? But if the gas stations didn't even bother to put the price, and they said, what do you care what the gas costs? The insurance company is paying for it, right? And that's what we have with the health care system.

Yeah, I mean, we have a system that government created where people rely on health insurance to pay for everything. Health insurance should just be for very expensive things that are probably not going to happen to you, right? I get hit by a car. I get cancer. You shouldn't use your health insurance every time you go to the doctor. buy a car. I get cancer. You shouldn't use your health insurance every time you go to the doctor. And if we got people to pay for their health insurance the way they pay for their auto insurance or their life insurance, if we separate health insurance from employment, health insurance will be much cheaper. You know, it's the government that married the two, right?

Right. And that's why people say, well, if you lose your job, you lose your health care. That's because of the government. Fix the tax code and people if you lose your job, you lose your health care. That's because the government fixed the tax code. And people, you know, you don't lose your auto insurance when you lose your job. But the other important thing, and here's why Obamacare doesn't work. See, the thesis of Obamacare was, hey, let's make it so that insurance companies can't discriminate against people that have a preexisting condition. Right. So they can't charge people more money just because they happen to be sick, right? This was one of the appeals of it.

Now, here's the problem with that. The only reason people buy insurance when they're healthy, health insurance, is because they know they can't buy it when they're sick. Like, let's say with the auto insurance. If there was a law that said that auto insurance companies couldn't discriminate based on pre-existing conditions, if you can buy the policy after your accident and get coverage for the same price as if you bought it before, nobody would buy auto insurance. You would just wait until you had an accident. But isn't auto insurance a weird argument because auto insurance is mandatory?

Like you have to have it, whereas health insurance is not mandatory. Obamacare kind of makes it mandatory, right? But you're just saying it's mandatory for the wrong aspects of insurance? That it covers the wrong things? Well, even, look, fire insurance isn't mandatory either. But auto insurance is. In certain states it is, and of course not all coverage is mandatory. Compulsory coverage. You have to have some.

Which is similar to what you're talking about with health insurance, compulsory health insurance, like for catastrophic injuries. Well, they made it, Obamacare made it compulsory. The point is this, that if auto insurance was not compulsory, right, and you can just decide whether or not you wanted it, if there was a law that said that insurance companies couldn't discriminate, nobody would buy it because you would just wait until after you had an accident. Right, but the problem is not just that.

The reason why auto insurance is a bad example is because you're going to hit my car and you're going to do damage to me. If you have no insurance on your car, I'm not going to run into you on the street and collide with my body and hurt you and somehow know that I don't have health insurance and so you get injured from me. Don't you think that's a different argument? Well, rather than even make that argument, let's just go to fire insurance because there's only one person involved, me. So I have a house. Would I buy fire insurance if I can go to an

insurance company after my house already burns down and buy the policy for the same price? So the reason that people buy fire insurance policies before their house burns down is because they know that nobody will sell them a policy after it burns down. And the insurance companies couldn't stay in business if the only people who were buying policies were people whose houses already burnt down. I agree with you. So here's what happened with Obamacare. So Obama says, we're going to make it so insurance companies can't discriminate against people who are sick. Well, the result of that is no healthy person is going to want to buy insurance. It's a waste of money. Why pay premiums when you're not sick? Wait until you get sick. And then they can't

discriminate against you because you have a pre-existing condition. Yes. So the way Obama tried to combat that was, okay, we're going to force people to buy insurance. We're going to require employers to provide it. And if you don't get it from your employer, we're going to fine you. You're going to have a penalty if you don't buy the insurance. Now, two things about that. One, the penalties were too low, right? Because the penalty for not buying insurance is so cheap that it's cheaper to not buy insurance, pay the penalty, and then wait till you get sick to buy the insurance. That's why the insurance companies are losing all this money. And that's why premiums are skyrocketing, because get sick to buy the insurance. That's why the insurance companies are losing all this money.

And that's why premiums are skyrocketing because nobody wants to buy because the penalties are too low. But politically, everybody likes the idea that insurance companies can't discriminate based on pre-existing. So what the Republicans tried to do was have their cake and eat it too. They said to the voters, we're going to keep the ban on pre-existing conditions, but we're going to get rid of the mandates. We're going to get rid of the penalties. We're going to get rid of it. You can't do that. You have to have both. The real

problem was the taxes were too, the penalties were too low. They needed to jack those penalties up because so many people were paying the penalty and not buying the insurance. But the reality is we need a free market insurance because the Republicans want to say you should be able to buy the type of coverage that you want. You should be able to buy the kind of insurance, which is true. But then insurance companies have to be able to deny you coverage if they don't want to cover you. They have to be able to charge you more if you're already sick. I mean, the only way to have inexpensive insurance is for the insurance companies to discriminate and to charge

people more money if they're already sick. And it's because of that, that's why healthy people buy policies, because they know, hey, let me buy it now while I'm healthy. Because if I happen to get sick, it's going to be a lot more expensive. So what the government is trying to do is just trying to destroy the market for health insurance. Meanwhile, the costs are skyrocketing. Insurance is getting more expensive. Health care is getting more expensive. If you go back to the days before the government was involved, health care was not a problem. It wasn't expensive. You know, in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, health care was not expensive.

People didn't worry about medical bills. They were not high. If you needed catastrophic insurance, it was inexpensive. If you had to go to the doctor, it wasn't expensive. People didn't even worry about it because there was quality care and it was at a low cost. And with all the advancements that we've had in medicine, with all the technology, with all the drugs that are here. Healthcare should be cheaper today than it was in the 1940s and 1950s on a real basis. And I hear all the time, people make the argument, well, the reason that healthcare is more expensive is because it's more complicated now,

because we do all these things that we didn't do. Well, if that were true, then why isn't my cell phone today more expensive than a cell phone 10 or 20 years ago? But wait a minute, it is. Because obviously this does. No, it is. No, it's not more expensive. No, it certainly is. It's just you get subsidized by your company.

Or they drag out the payments. If you buy a cell phone from Verizon, they're not selling you the full, like if you buy an iPhone 7, they're not selling it to you at the full rate. The full rate would be like $1,000, $1,200. Yes, but I paid $1,000 in the 1980s for my first cell phone that didn't do jack compared to what this thing. The very early days, the Gordon Gekko ones. Yeah, well, that was even more. Big old bad boys. Look, I've got this MacBook Air in front of me here.

And so this MacBook Air, obviously, this cost me like $1,200, $1,400. Right. My first computer that I had in college was an Apple IIe. And that computer, and I got a dot matrix printer, and I had a floppy disk, and my dad spent almost $5,000 on it in 1981. And all it was was a glorified word processor, right? So obviously, the power in this computer is so much greater than the one that I had in that Apple IIe, yet it's less expensive, even forgetting about adjusting for inflation. It's actually cheaper in actual dollars, despite the fact that it's more complicated. And my point is that just because something is more complicated doesn't mean it's going to be more expensive.

Healthcare today should be cheaper. All of the new technology should be bringing down the cost of medicine. The reason it's not is because of government's involvement. Because if government was involved in the computer industry the same way it's involved in health care, then we would see skyrocketing computer prices. Okay. So now why does the government – you're saying that the government wants to destroy the insurance industry? No, they don't want to destroy it. Not destroy it, but why do they want to complicate it the way they're doing it? Well, first of all, I don't think they're smart enough to destroy it on purpose.

I mean, it's just the unintended consequences. They're trying to get votes. They're trying to get elected. And, of course, you know, people want something for nothing. So, number one, you know, you get a lot of votes by promising free health care. So number one. But also, why do the insurance companies, because there are massive subsidies for insurance companies. If I can get the government to require people to buy my product, then I don't have to offer a good product. I mean, wouldn't you like the government to

require everybody to listen to the Joe Rogan podcast if that was mandatory? No. People would be super furious at me. I like to keep it exactly the way it is. But there are a lot of businesses, rather than having to win, well, maybe if you had a lousy podcast that nobody listened to, you'd want the government to say, hey, too many people are listening to Joe Rogan.

Force them to listen to my podcast instead. So you have these big healthcare companies or insurance companies that want something from government. They want the government to mandate people buy their product or to protect them from competition. You know, you can't, if you wanted to buy an insurance policy from a Japanese company or a Swiss company, you can't do it. They can't.

Some Swiss company can't come over here to California. Hell, they won't even let companies from other states sell you policies. I mean, why is that? We need more competition, but government is protecting companies from having to compete with one another so they don't have to do as good a job. But Obama was already in office, right, when he was trying to do this? What was the incentive for trying to pass this once he's already in office? Well, A, he wants to get reelected, which he did. He did get reelected. But there's a lot of political payoff.

You have to pay off the people that helped put you in office. And, you know, he wants to help other, you know, Democrats get elected, you know, and maintain that power. Did anybody ever debate this with him in this sort of a rational, pragmatic way, the way you're laying it out right now? I have no idea. You know, and you don't know, when it comes to a politician, you don't know if they're doing stupid things because they're stupid or because they don't care that they're dumb. They're just, it's just politically. Or they don't understand the ramifications of what they're trying to propose, right? Yeah, well, as I said, either that people believe in liberal philosophy or these programs, either because they're ignorant or because they have an ulterior motive, right? There are probably some politicians there that are actually dumb enough to think that

this is a good idea, right? Like we talked about the minimum wage. There are some people that actually believe that it's a good thing, right? They don't know how bad it is, but they're doing it because they're thinking with their hearts and not with their heads. But there are probably some people who support the minimum wage knowing that it's bad, but they know it's good politics, or they're afraid to come out against it because that's such bad politics. So you don't know for sure if somebody is in favor of something, do they actually realize how bad it is?

Right. And they're doing it anyway, or are they just dumb enough to actually believe it? I have to say, if you adjust for inflation, you're probably right about cell phones. So I'm thinking now, like a Motorola StarTAC. Oh, yeah. How much were those? Those were expensive. How much were they when they came out?

I think they were like $500 or $600. But if you adjust for inflation, you might be right. Yeah, and think about how much it cost to use them. I remember when I had my first... That's the big one. The roaming costs were extraordinary. But even if you didn't roam... Long distance.

Remember long distance? Yeah, my first plan, I think when I was in it, I had my first phone. And I think it was like $70, $80 a month. And I had like a half hour of talk time. Right. So if someone called me on my cell phone, I was quick because I had to quickly get off because if you went over your minutes. Right.

Now I have unlimited. Not only is it unlimited, I can talk. I can see people. I see their faces. I can talk to people in other countries for free. Well, now there's companies that are offering unlimited data too. And you didn't even have data back then. Because they're competing.

Yes. Because they're competing. Okay. It was a thousand bucks. Oh, so I'm competing. Okay. It was $1,000. Oh, so I'm wrong. Yeah. See, especially if you adjust for inflation, right? Oh, yeah.

And then quality. Because adjust for inflation of a StarTAC phone, which was a piece of shit, comparatively, it was amazing at the time. I had one. And the battery lasted like a half an hour, 45 minutes of, you know. And so a brand new iPhone is probably like $1,200. So, yeah. just for inflation, you're right. Now, when you're talking about Bernie Sanders, and you're talking about some

of the policies that that guy was proposing, and some of this, the idea of, you know, Robin Hooding, the whole deal, taking from the rich and giving to the poor, that's extremely appealing to people, right? How do you lay it out to people in a way that they can understand that although this looks like a great idea that this is not a good idea and ultimately it's not gonna benefit you it's gonna make things stagnant it's gonna make things harder for business and it's gonna make things harder for jobs a lot of people listening right now to even me saying that they're tweeting me they're getting mad mad. You fucking chill. You sell out.

You one percenter. You piece of shit. That's the thought process behind anybody who says anything even remotely negative about socialism. That you have to be some sort of a sellout or you just want to keep things the way they are so that you can benefit. And it's amazing that so many people find socialism appealing, yet they'll say, oh, you know, fascism is really bad, right? The Nazis were really bad. They don't realize that the Nazi party that stands for national socialism, that's what it was. It's national socialism. So socialism is a broader economic theory that encompasses communism and fascism. They're both forms of socialism. So, you know, it's all bad. Right. And the whole idea, the all the whole premise of socialism is bad. You know, the free market being a libertarian

is all about the individual. It's about freedom and recognizing the value of the individual and their rights to pursue their own self-interest, their own happiness, the property. But in your question, how do you talk to people and get them to see how bad socialism is? I mean, first of all, I mean, look at the countries that have tried it in its extreme form, right? Whether it was like the Soviet Union or North Korea or Cuba or East Germany, you could look at examples where you had, you know, people moving in this direction, where you had, you know, people moving in this direction, these promises of, you know, from each accord and whose ability to each accord and whose need, and it was a disaster. So it's not like we don't have a long history of failed

socialist experiments. And, you know, you can look at the countries that are the most prosperous, and those are the countries that have the least amount of socialism. I mean, obviously, you know, socialism is going to exist in a certain degree. it's hard to find any place on the earth now where there isn't some elements of socialism that have crept into the economy but the extent that countries have managed to limit the amount of socialist policies they have they have maximized the standard of living of their people so so the more, like, look at Venezuela, right? I mean, people, you know, and I... That's a good example.

And President Trump was tweeting out not too long ago, oh, you know, he's upset that they don't have enough democracy. We need more democracy. They don't need more democracy. Democracy is what got them into trouble because they voted for socialists. What they need in Venezuela is more capitalism. They need more freedom. Not just more people voting for other socialists. What they need in Venezuela is more capitalism. They need more freedom,

not just more people voting for other socialists. So the appeal of socialism, essentially the same appeal of turning Puerto Rico into a state, that you're going to get something for it. It's going to benefit the people. Yeah. I mean, people like the idea of getting something for nothing. And there is a certain, if you think of it superficially, and that's why, you know, there's an old expression, right? If you're not socialist by the time you're 20, you don't have a heart. But if you're not a conservative by the time you're 30, you don't have a brain. It's because people are caring. I mean, in general, most people care about their fellow human beings, including conservatives and libertarians. I mean, they care, too, just that a lot of liberals think that conservatives are mean because they don't support

these programs. It's not because they're mean. It's just that they recognize the unintended consequences of these programs, that the programs actually make it worse for the people that you're trying to help. But younger people who don't have as much real world experience, they don't know any better. So it's very easy to be a socialist when you're 16, 17, 18. You've never had a job. You've never run a company. You don't have much real world experience, but you're a caring human being. So I don't fault young people for being socialists. But when you get to your 30s and your 40s and you haven't grown up, to me, that's like a little kid still believing in Santa Claus, right? How come you didn't learn anything, right? Here's Bernie Sanders. He's like, you know, what is he,

70-something years old? And he thinks like a like a teenager i mean he didn't learn anything from all this life experience you know he's he didn't get any smarter well doesn't he have a bunch of houses i think bernie owns a few houses yeah i think he does and didn't his i mean one of the he's in in hot water right now because his wife yes she decided to go full-on capitalist for this small college and buy up a bunch of land, and the company went bankrupt. Yep, yep. The college, which is essentially a company, right? But the way that you can get young people to understand, look, most people, even if they're not in the 1%, they want to get to the 1%, right? But some people would say that's not true.

Some people would say, no, it's not what I want. I want to be comfortable, and I want to pursue whatever my interests are. Right. But what, and again, and what are those interests? I mean, people, maybe their art, maybe it's, you know, but they still have to eat. They still have, they still need clothes. So they just want to be comfortable. They don't necessarily want to be a one percenter. You're going to get those things better from the free market. If you're the free market is going to make you more comfortable than a government program. And if you're just trying to have a shortcut and say, look, you know, just steal some money from that rich person and give it to me. But most people even don't just want to squeak by. I mean, most people want to achieve something. They want to strive to get the most they can out

of life. And, you know, if you want to get a job, I mean, somebody has to hire you. Somebody has to have the capital. Somebody has to be able to pay you. Right. You're not going to get a job from a poor person. Right. They don't have anything to offer. They don't have capital to give you. They can't pay, you know, write a paycheck. You know, so people will understand, hey, I got my first job from somebody in the one percent. OK, you know, and now I'm in the one percent myself because, you know, I was able to gain some experience, gain some knowledge. So you could talk to younger people and really show them the different, a different path. One is relying on government and thievery because that's really – most people would agree that theft is wrong. If the two of us got together and beat you up, although obviously we can't, but assuming we could, we beat you up, and we took your money,

you would say, that's wrong, right? You can't do that. Well, if we got together and voted for a congressman to take your money, we outvoted you two to one. Why is that any better? I mean, why is it okay to steal through the ballot box, but it's not okay to do it directly? Right, so the argument against that would be that it's not stealing, that you're just creating policies that even the playing field, No, that's stealing. People that are in the 1%, like these hedge fund dudes that have these giant houses in the Hamptons, they've accumulated massive amounts of wealth, and they're using that to influence politicians and change laws and regulations.

They shouldn't be able to use it to influence politicians. That's why we have to take the influence away from politicians, take away that power. But there's a wealthy hedge fund guy. That doesn't mean I have the right to go steal his Maserati just because he's rich. And I don't have the right to tax him to take that Maserati either. It's just another form of theft. When you believe in the free market or libertarian, you know, you're giving somebody the idea, look, you don't have to get rich by stealing what somebody else has. You can do it on your own. And, you know, you can benefit from what other people have. Because the only way people get rich in a free market is by delivering services that other people value. The only exception is if you get rich through government connections.

And that is not a fault of capitalism. That is a fault of government. When you empower government to sell favors for the highest bidder, that is not an indictment of capitalism. That is socialism, right? And so that's what we have to stamp out. We have to make sure that you can't succeed by bribing a politician, that you can't use government power to create wealth, that if you want to get wealthy, you have to be wealthy as a result of voluntary interactions with other human beings without government involvement, right? Government is there to protect my rights, protect my property, protect my life from other people who might infringe upon my rights, from people who could steal it. But government is not there to give you things. It's not there to give you a job. It's not there to give you health care. You need to earn those things on your own.

And now, obviously, are there going to be people who are just born, they're just not, maybe they have deformities or they're not smart enough or they have handy some kind of and they can't fend for themselves. Yes, I recognize that. But my solution for that is not to is not to steal from some wealthy person and say and give the money to somebody who needs it. I believe in voluntary charity. I believe that human beings care enough about other human beings that if somebody really is in a dire circumstance, that private charity will take care of them. And what I do know is when you have private charity, it's very efficient. If you donate a dollar to a charity,

90 cents is going to go to the people who need money. Ideally. There's obviously some massive exceptions to that. But with the government, the government will take a dollar in taxes and only 10 cents will go to the poor people. The rest of it goes to the government bureaucracy. And the problem with government is when you have a private organization, they really want to do good, right? I mean, you have these government anti-poverty programs. They don't want to end poverty. They

want to expand poverty. They want more poverty because then their program gets bigger. Then they have more power. The last thing they want to do is end poverty because now they no longer have a job. So they're not there to try to make sure that the people who are getting the aid actually need the aid. I mean, it's different when it's private money and private charity. There you're really trying to do good instead of just perpetuate the poverty so you can grow your power base. Have you ever sat down with Bernie Sanders? No. Wouldn't you love to?

Wouldn't you love to have a debate with him? Like a long-form conversation, like a three-hour podcast? You know, I wouldn't shy away from it. I mean, I do know he's so old at this point that it's hard to believe that I'm going to persuade him that he's wrong, that he's going to come to his, you know, after living an entire life believing in something. Well, I'm not even necessarily saying that you would persuade him, but it would be nice to see people counter, or hear, rather, the counter to his arguments that he puts forth that are very appealing to a lot of these young people that you're talking about. If you're 20 and you're not a liberal, you don't have a heart.

These ideas are very pervasive in our culture, and they were thought to be the solution to the ales that we're in. They were thought to be the solutions to the ails that we're in. They were thought to be the solutions to the problems with the bailout. Why is the government getting all this money and giving it to the banks when they could be giving it to poor people and propping up the income inequality? That conversation is a very weird one. And that was a big problem, and I knew that at the beginning, because, see, I was against the bailouts, but I knew that when the government bails out banks, now you've created a precedent. Wait a minute.

If you're going to bail out those banks, why not bail out the little guy? Right. And I have a lot of sympathy for that argument. But I don't think two wrongs make a right. We shouldn't have bailed out the banks. See, the government shouldn't steal money from one person and give it to somebody else, regardless of who they're giving it to. But once you create that precedent, and of course, a lot of people should have been allowed to lose money in that financial crisis. A lot of banks should have failed. A lot of people should

have lost their jobs, and they didn't. And so that's a moral hazard, because the government created a condition that said, hey, if you're going to speculate and do all these things, you know, we're going to bail you out. And, you know, it wasn't, you have to realize that it was the government. The government was guaranteeing all those mortgages. The government was guaranteeing all those bank deposits. The government was, through Fannie and Freddie, encouraging reckless activity, encouraging banks to make loans to people who they knew couldn't pay it back. I mean, all this was rooted in government incentives and government subsidies. If there was a pure free market, the banks would not be able to assume all that risk. But because the government, you know, had their back, then they were able to do things that the free market never would have allowed.

That's why for years, you know, while the housing bubble was going up, I was pointing this stuff out. for years, you know, while the housing bubble was going up, I was pointing this stuff out. I mean, you go and, you know, look at some of the YouTube videos, you know, that I would for all my appearances back then that eventually became that Peter Schiff was right video. I understood the ultimate consequences of what the government was doing, you know, but then the bailouts just, you know, allow the government like the government never wants to waste a crisis. They always want to use the crisis to get bigger, to get more power. We should have learned something from the 2008 financial crisis. Instead, we have repeated all the mistakes, right? Everything that has been done by Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke since the financial crisis has actually made the U.S. economy worse. We're in much worse shape now economically. So I think the crisis that

we're coming to, the next one, is going to be much worse than the one we had in 08. I would love to get to that in a second, but what was the argument for the bailout? Well, the argument for the bailout was that the banks were just so big, right? They were interconnected. Too big to fail. Yeah. And that if we let them fail, it's just going to be so much worse. Right. Because it's just, you know, we got to, you know, we got to bail them out because, you know, even though it's bad, it'll be worse if we don't do it. Because people like me and maybe Jamie had money in these banks and that money would dissolve. Well, people would have lost, certainly would

the positive had lost some money. Yes, they would have. But, you know, I agree that had we not done the bailouts, it would have been worse, but it would have been healthy. It would have been a step in the right direction. You know, you know, you work out. It's, you know, like no pain, no gain. I mean, you know, like, you know, we you've got to bite the bullet on this and do what's right. Or I look at it like, you know, we were strung out on cheap money. We were like a drug addict. And had we just gone cold turkey and gone into rehab, yeah, it would have been a big downer, right? It wouldn't have been pleasant and we would have had to go through all this stuff. But at the end of the day, we could emerge healthy. Were there models that were being projected? Like, did people look at the two

possibilities, like having no bailout, and we're looking at us here nine years later, or having a bailout? Well, you know, I don't think they, if they looked at anything, it was just very short term, right? Because all these guys are politically motivated, right? An election is coming up, right? Because all the bailouts happened in summer of 08, a lot of big ones. And the election was in November of 08. Right. I remember John McCain interrupted his presidential campaign to come vote for a TARP bailout. And so politicians can't see beyond the next election. And if your horizon is that short, yes, the bailouts ease the pain.

But at the cost of exacerbating the underlying disease that is the cause of the pain. So because we did all the wrong things in 08, 09, 010, instead of fixing the problems and having a healthy recovery, we had the weakest recovery in the history of recoveries. In fact, I don't even think it's a recovery because I think the average American is sicker now than he was when the recovery began. How so? Well, you look at personal net worth has gone down. Real incomes have gone down. We've eviscerated the labor force. I mean, people have lost good paying jobs and they now have two or three low paying part time jobs. People are working longer for less. Their net worths have gone down. They're loaded up with debt. We now have record high card loans, record high credit card debt, record high student loans. The only thing we don't have is record mortgage debt. And that's because homeownership is now at a 60-year low.

But we do have rising rents. And so our standard of living is falling because we didn't do the right thing. But because we didn't do the right thing, this next crisis, as I said, is going to be so much worse. We're just going from crisis to crisis because nobody has the guts to do the right thing. Because in the short run, it means they might not get reelected, right? Nobody wants to get reelected promising, you know what? Things are bad. We've made a lot of mistakes. We're going to have to suffer through this recession. People are going to lose money. People are going to lose their jobs. But you know what? Don't worry. The free market is going to work. You'll get different jobs.

Nobody has the guts to tell the truth to the voters. Everyone wants to pretend that they've got, you know, it's like, you know, buy my miracle cure. You don't have to work out. You don't have to diet. Just rub this cream on your thighs and the cellulite is going to go away. That's what people want. They don't want to be told you got to hit the gym and you got to stop eating junk food. They want the miracle cream. That's the guy that gets the vote. So we set ourselves up for, I think, a currency crisis, not just a financial crisis where mortgages are in trouble, but where the dollar itself is collapsing. Our money is collapsing. Prices are skyrocketing. It's going to really hit the average American much more than just the stock market going down. But when your money is collapsing, prices are skyrocketing, it's going to really hit the average American much more than just the stock market going down. When your money is going down,

when the cost of living is skyrocketing, that is going to be a big problem for a lot of people. That's where we're headed. It's ultimately going to be a dollar crisis. And that's really, in my business, in my brokerage firm in Europe Pacific Capital, that's what I'm trying to do, is help people protect their wealth by getting out of U.S. dollar assets, by investing in Singapore and Switzerland and New Zealand and Hong Kong and other countries, owning other assets to try to protect themselves from this crisis that is coming. And most people are going to get blindsided by it just like they were by the last one. So what is the crisis and how exactly do you feel it's going to go down? Because I did watch some of your videos about the housing crisis from 2008. You're predicting it years in advance.

Yeah. I mean, look, you know, things always happen. You know, I see things years before they happen because I understand. You're not the only one, right? No. This is something amongst your peers and your colleagues. You guys are all discussing this. Well, I mean, there are people, most people who feel the way I do,

maybe aren't, they weren't on television saying it. They were saying it to their buddies in their own living rooms, and they were getting laughed at just like I was. I guess I used to get emails from people, hey, I've been saying, this is exactly what I've been saying, and everybody thinks I'm crazy. And it's just, they're the same one. It's everybody else that's crazy that just gets caught up in it.

But what's going to happen is we are going to go back at some point into another statistic recession. I mean, I think that we've kind of been in one this whole recovery because I don't think the government numbers are really that accurate. I don't think that inflation is as low as they claim, at least as measured by the consumer prices. So I think that the economy has actually been contracting during the years that we've been pretending it's been growing. But I do think at some point, statistically, we will go back into a technical recession where even the government admits that the economy is shrinking, right, where the GDP is negative for a couple of quarters in a row. And then what is the government going to do as a result of that?

They're going to do exactly what they did before. They're going to take interest rates and bring them back to zero from wherever they are. The difference is normally they lower interest rates. And then by the time there's another recession, they're way back up four or five, six percent. This time they barely got them back to one percent and they kept them at zero for seven, eight years, which is unprecedented. And of course, the mistakes that are made are a consequence of money being too cheap, right? The reason that we had a real estate bubble, the main reason was because Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates to 1% and left them there for about a year and a half, and then took about a year and a half to raise

them back up to normal. So you had a few years of artificially low interest rates, and that gave us this huge housing bubble. Well, we had seven, eight years of zero. I mean, the mistakes that have been made under Obama dwarfs the mistakes that were made under Bush. And these are mistakes that are a consequence of money being too cheap, of the government setting the price of money as opposed to the free market. You get too much debt. You get too much speculation. And so we've got a much bigger bubble now. And when this one pops, because it's so much bigger, right? So then all of a sudden, the Fed has to cut interest rates again.

And now what happens to the dollar? Because, see, the dollar has been rising these past few years because everybody thought, oh, the Fed's going to normalize interest rates. The Fed's going to shrink the balance sheet. When none of this stuff happens, when the Fed goes back to another round of quantitative easing, when they got to crank up the printing presses, when they don't shrink the balance sheet, but they blow it even bigger, right? It goes to five and a half trillion, six and a half trillion. I think the bottom is going to drop out of the dollar. I think the dollar is going to get killed. The opposite of what happened in 08. When the financial crisis hit in 08, the dollar had been falling for seven years. It was at an all-time record low. And then when the crisis hit, it actually caused 08, the dollar had been falling for seven years. It was at an all-time record low.

And then when the crisis hit, it actually caused people to buy the dollar. But I think this next crisis is going to be the big sell signal for the dollar. People are going to rush out of the dollar as the Fed has to go back to more QE, as people realize that this is what I said for the beginning. This is a monetary roach motel. The Fed checked us in, and they ain't checking us out. There's no way to normalize rates. There's no way to shrink the balance sheet. And when people realize that this is a permanent situation, the bottom drops out of the dollar, and then commodity prices really start to rise. Remember when oil prices went from like $20 a barrel in 19, in 2001, up to 150, right? That

was happening because the dollar was falling. And as the dollar starts to fall, all these commodity prices are going to rise again. And now inflation is really going to pick up the way they measure it. And the government can't do anything about it. They can't raise interest rates because if they raise interest rates, they collapse everything. All the banks that were too big to fail, they're bigger now, and it would be even worse if they failed. So they can't let rates go up. Because banks absorbed other banks. They got bigger. And now you have all these banks that have all these long-term loans that have low coupons on them. If interest rates go up, all these big banks are going to fail. I mean, people think rising rates are going to be good

for banks. They're going to destroy the banks. They're going to destroy the housing market. I mean, and the government. This is the biggest thing. Look at the national debt. The national debt is about $20 trillion, the bonded debt. And that, of course, that doesn't even count all the unfunded liabilities. That's just where the government has sold the bond, right, treasury bond. That's about $20 trillion. Well, what would happen if interest rates went to 10%? Well, it would cost the government $2 trillion a year just to pay the interest on that $20 trillion. We don't have anywhere close to that.

I mean, right now, interest rates are almost zero, and we're spending about $250 billion a year on interest. But if interest rates actually went up because the Fed had to fight inflation, the Treasury would have to default. They would have to tell the – we can't pay on these bonds. What are you showing me, Jamie? Is this the national debt? Oh, that's the national debt crock, yeah. Oh, God, look at it spinning. Is it at 20 trillion yet?

It's true. Oh, it's so terrible. Pretty close. Nineteen nine seven three. Look at it spinning. Oh, God. Yeah, I know. That's horrific.

But, and so, obviously the Fed has to keep interest rates low so the government can service that debt. Look at Medicare and Medicaid. Jesus Christ. What is that? Well, yeah, you can find it per capita. You add it all up. That's not even a billion.

Is that a trillion? Huh? That's not even a trillion. Which one are you looking at? Right there. What is that? No, that's $1.1 trillion. Oh, it is?

But that's the largest budget item. Those are budget items. Oh! That's the budget. Social Security. That's not the debt. That's what they're spending. Oh.

God. Look at those numbers. If you go down lower, they'll probably have all the unfunded liabilities on that page somewhere. Oh, my God. Then they break it down per capita, per taxpayer. I mean, it's enormous. But my point is that we've got an adjustable rate mortgage on that national debt. The government's got ultra-cheap money.

If interest rates spike, there's no way that the government can pay that debt. This is hypnotic. It really is terrifying. I've never seen it before. I've never seen it before either. I've seen that one in Times Square. That's why I'm saying Puerto Rico would be so idiotic for Puerto Rico to want to join the union and absorb their share of that debt. Now for the average person like myself who has zero understanding of the financial system, you listen to Trump talk about the economy booming and it's on an upward thing and unemployment is down and jobs are up. Yeah, I mean, bullshit. Yeah, that's what's really bothering me about Trump is the hypocrisy. Because when Trump was

a candidate and he got elected because by and large, he told the truth about the phony nature of the recovery. Obama was out there talking about how great things were. And Trump was like, BS, it's not great. Oh, you're talking about low unemployment? That number is bogus. The real unemployment rate is 20% or 25%. Because people stop looking for jobs and it doesn't count anymore. Yeah, people are, you know, they gave up looking so they don't have a job.

They're not counted as being unemployed. And he pointed out that all the jobs, like here, this is irony, right? So what are the byproducts of Obamacare? Obamacare said that if you have a full time worker, you have to give him health insurance, right? And full time was anyone that worked 30 hours or more. Well, employers aren't dumb. They can do math. Hey, if I if this guy is working 40 hours a week, I got to I got to give him health insurance, which is very expensive. But if he works 29 hours a week i gotta i gotta give him health insurance which is very expensive but if he works 29 hours a week i don't right so what happened employers started transitioning their workforces from full-time workers to part-time workers well what happens if i'm going to have only part-time workers i'm going to have more workers right because each one is

working fewer hours so i'm going to have to have more i have more jobs right if i have if i had 500 part-time, but now I have a thousand. I mean, if I had 500 full time employees, but now I have a thousand part time employees, that's twice as many jobs. Obama got credit for all those extra jobs. Right. As we were as we were destroying full time jobs and replacing them with two part time jobs, we got all these jobs. So Trump was honest as a candidate. These are low-paying jobs. These are crappy jobs. You know, and a lot of the people that were getting jobs were older people who don't want jobs. They were retired. And now they're working at McDonald's part-time because they can't live on their retirement money. And in fact, you know, when you look at the labor force participation rate that he would talk about, you know,

where labor force participation is collapsing is with young people. People in their 20s and 30s can't get jobs. Meanwhile, 70 and 80 year olds are working in record percentages, right, because they can't afford to retire and their grandkids can't get a job. But so Trump was telling the truth about how bad the economy really was. And that resonated. A lot of blue collar guys, a lot of Democrats in the Midwest voted for Trump because he got it. He understood their he felt their pain, right? Like Bill Clinton and Obama was in a fantasy. I mean, Hillary was pretending that everything was great under Obama and people didn't want four more years of that. So they voted for Trump. And also, you know, when Trump was a candidate, he talked about the stock market because, oh, the stock market was going up when Obama was president.

And Trump said, well, it's a bubble. Who cares about the stock market? This is a big, fat, ugly bubble. Wait till it pops. OK, he was right about that. Now he's president. What is he saying? Every time I see him, the stock market's a new record high.

This is fantastic. You know, it's all because of me. This is great. And when the jobs numbers come out, oh, this is look how low the unemployment rate is. This is the lowest it's been in 15 years. I'm doing a great job. I'm doing nothing has changed. This is the exact same economy he inherited. It's the same crappy jobs. It's the same stock market bubble. The only difference is he's not a candidate anymore. He's the president. And now he's trying to market the same crappy economy that Obama had and pretending everything is good. And I wish he would stay true to the candidate and admit, you know what? The economy is still a disaster because nothing has changed.

He was going to drain the swamp. Instead, he just poured more water in the same swamp. But to actually drain it means to really shake things up. And in a way, he's shaking things up, but not the way that's going to get meaningful change for the country. The shaking up that he's doing is not what people were voting for. We really need real substantive economic change. But the president is not able to deliver it.

He's surrounded himself with the same cronies that were around in the Bush administration. I mean, what good is going back to Bush? What is his incentive to do this in the first place? The guy's already wealthy. I mean, and then he gets into this position and now he's a salesman, right? Now he's trying to sell us on his ax and everything's great. And under him, everything's booming and it's going to keep booming. It's going to get better. And we're going to make America great again. Yeah. You know, it was a good slogan. And, you know, I mean, Trump's always been a salesman, right? He's a he's a marketer. He's he's he makes money on his brands. Right. So that's that's in his blood. That's what he does. And he obviously does it does it well because he became very successful, you know, marketing his brand. And so I think he's kind of continuing that.

But, you know, does he think about his legacy? I mean, does he want to actually make a difference? Does he does he care about posterity and how he's viewed? You know, I don't know. I mean, is he just trying to get reelected so he can be the president again? I mean, I don't know. I'd have to I've never had a conversation with him. I mean, I met him. I think I only remember meeting him one time. I was at a concert and we were sitting like on the same row. He was right next to me. It was a it was a Crosby, Steele, Nash and Young. And so I happened and he was there with his daughter. And I think it was I think it was, you know, her fiance. I don't think they were married yet, but they're married now.

So they were there. I got to say hello. And I think that's the only time I ever met him. And so it wasn't really I didn't get a chance to engage him in any kind of thoughtful conversation. I know a lot of people who know him. Right. I mean, I know a lot of people who have been in this circle, but they've never kind of introduced me to it. So I'm kind of, you know, I'm not really on the inside. So I can't really you know, I don't really know.

But I mean, I voted for him, but that was why I vote for him because I didn't want to vote for Hillary. Now, I knew it didn't matter because I lived in Connecticut. Oh, and by the way, now that I live in Puerto Rico, I can't vote anymore. But, you know, it's like, that's one of the things people say that, oh, Puerto Rico's in trouble because you can't vote. Who cares? Everyone I voted for in Connecticut lost in Congress, right? Because, you know, it doesn't matter.

They don't have congressional representation, because I'd rather have no taxes and no vote than to be able to vote for who taxes me. But I voted for him. I mean, I normally would just vote for Gary Johnson. I had voted for Gary Johnson before because this is the second time he ran. I voted for him the last time. But, you know, on the way to the polls, my wife was like, you know, we got to vote for Trump

because it was like he was like the best protest vote I could cast, I thought. I thought he was a bigger in your face to the establishment than voting for Gary Johnson was. And I and they ran a bad campaign. They really blew an opportunity to have done something with the libertarian brand for future elections. So I wasn't happy with the way that campaign ran. They had they had an opportunity there with how unpopular both candidates were. But, you know, I just felt, you know, this is the wave. And I thought Trump was going to win. You know, everybody thought that there's no way he's going to win. And, you know, I thought, well,

he might lose. I mean, I didn't think it was 100 percent guaranteed, but I thought he was more likely to win than lose because I thought other people would think the same way. I knew the economy was a lot worse than was being portrayed by the media, by the Federal Reserve, by Obama. And I thought a lot of people would, you know, would vote that way. And I knew the polls, you know, maybe not be trusted because people didn't want to tell the pollsters that they were voting for Trump because, you know, oh, what are you, a racist? You know, why you vote? But, you know, when they get in there and vote, they're going to vote, you know, their pocketbook. And, you know, Trump was offering the most the message that made sense. They knew America wasn't great. See, Hillary Clinton was like, we don't need to make America great again.

It's already great. And the average guy doesn't feel so great to me. Right. My standard of living is going down. The only thing going up is my debt. And so they voted for Trump. But I think this strategy is going to blow up. I don't like what Trump is doing. What do you think his strategy is? Well, I think he has now claimed ownership of this economy. He has put the Trump brand on this stock market bubble. So when the market goes down, when the economy tanks back into recession, it's not Obama's recession, it's Trump's. I mean, he's basically taken the bait. I think he's the fall guy. I think the Fed, everybody's going to blame it all on Trump. Like, oh, look, he inherited this great economy from

Obama, which he didn't. And now, look, it's a mess. So he should not be claiming credit yet for victories he hasn't won. He should be setting us up for this collapse that is already coming, that is not because of him. He needs to clean up the mess. And it's not just Obama's mess. It's Bush's mess. Democrats and Republicans work together to screw this economy up. And the Federal Reserve was a big part of that. And Trump, you know, criticized the Fed as a candidate. All of a sudden now, you know, he loves the Fed. Wasn't there some sort of improvement in the stock market because people had confidence that he was going to enact these changes and he was going to make things better for businesses. Yeah, I do think that that was able to add some air to the bubble, right? I think it was a big bubble. And then, you know, when Trump won, all of a sudden people started thinking,

hey, wait a minute, we're going to get tax cuts, we're going to get regulatory reform, we're going to get more economic growth. And so the market rallied on that. But I don't think that that's actually going to happen. I mean, look, they didn't repeal Obamacare. That was a big part of the optimism. It doesn't look like we're going to get substantive tax reform. The most we're going to get are tax cuts. So we're not going to get a real reform that's going to cause a lot more economic growth. We're just going to get bigger deficits.

We're going to lower taxes, but we're not going to reduce government spending. And the real sad part is no one is talking about making government smaller. Everybody wants to talk about tax cuts. Okay, well, taxes support government. So if you want lower taxes, you need a smaller government. And I want both, right? I want lower taxes, but I'm not naive enough to think I can have big government with lower taxes, because that just means bigger deficits. And deficits are a worse way to pay for government than taxes. So if you decide that you want to have big government, then you better have high taxes to pay for it. And you know who's going to bear the brunt of that?

The middle class. So if the middle class wants big government, they want lots of entitlements, then they're going to pay through the nose. But someone has to be honest and say, look, if you don't want high taxes, then we've got to shrink government. But they're talking about making government bigger. Look, Trump is talking about let's spend more money on infrastructure. Where's that money going to come from? We're going to cut taxes and spend more money on infrastructure?

We're not going to make ourselves rich by spending money on infrastructure. Now, what happened with the Republicans that voted against Obamacare and now vote against repealing Obamacare? The same people. And what is wrong with Trump's ideas when it comes to Trumpcare or whatever you want to call it? Well, first of all, those Republicans, again, are hypocrites. They only voted to repeal Obamacare because they knew Obama would veto it. Right. So it was easy to grandstand.

Oh, yes, let's repeal it. And it was a good talking point to get elected but the minute they got elected they were too afraid to actually stand on that principle because they didn't want to tell somebody that you can't buy insurance when you're sick for the same prices when you're healthy right nobody wanted to take away that free lunch that had been served up by by by the democrats all the republicans wanted to do is rebrand the free lunch they wanted to continue to serve it but take credit for it the Republicans wanted to do is rebrand the free lunch. They wanted to continue to serve it, but take credit for it, right? They wanted to make it Trumpcare

or Ryancare, right? I didn't even like this whole idea. Let's repeal and replace. But repeal, don't replace with anything. Replace it with the free market. We don't want to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with something that's almost the same. So what was the idea of replacing it in the first place? What was the benefit of it? It's all politics. The benefit was they tried to keep the ban on pre-existing conditions, which voters liked, but get rid of the taxes and mandates, which they didn't. But the two are intertwined. You can't have one without the other. So the people like the ban on pre-existing conditions because they want to know that

they're covered. If they're going in there and they have cancer, they can still get covered. Right. But then no one's going to buy coverage if they don't need it. I mean, you cannot... So what happens to those people that do have cancer and all these different diseases? Like, if we don't have universal socialist health care, how do we take care of those people? Well, there's two things that happens. One, a lot of them have to buy the insurance before they get the cancer, when they're still healthy. I mean, I don't have cancer right now.

I may get it next year, in two or three years. So I have health insurance now, right? So if I get cancer, you know, I'm covered. But that's you. You're a successful guy. What about someone who's not, who's in this bad position? Look, you don't have to be that successful to be able to afford in a free market to buy yourself some coverage.

The question is, what do you do with the person who made the mistake of not buying insurance when they were healthy, and now they get sick, and of course, once you're sick, you can't expect an insurance company to sell you a policy, because the insurance company is trying to make money. They only sell policies to people who they don't think are going to put in claims. So you can't go to an insurance company when you're already sick and say, sell me a policy. What's in it for the insurance company? Nothing. So now you've got to figure out, well, how do you take care of that person?

Well, first of all, the best thing is to make sure that person buys the insurance policy while he's still healthy. So that means you don't have the ban against pre-existing conditions, and you allow insurance companies to sell inexpensive insurance that doesn't cover a sex change operation or drug abuse. How dare you? He's transphobic. I can't believe this. If you just want to buy insurance that covers like cancer and you're 20 or 30 years old, that's cheap. It's very inexpensive.

It's all this other crap that they want to mandate that makes it so expensive. But if you get a certain situation where for whatever reason somebody had no insurance and they have no money and now they get cancer, well, that's what charities are for. People donate money, hospitals. If doctors didn't have to spend so much time on paperwork and filling out insurance forms, they would have more time to donate. I mean, years and years ago, doctors used to give a lot of their spare time. And of course, that was before they had the income tax. You know, when the doctors didn't have to pay income taxes and when the doctors didn't have to deal with insurance companies, they had a lot of free time to help a lot of poor people for free. And doctors like doing that.

Doctors get a lot of satisfaction from helping people. That's one of the reasons that so many people become doctors. It's a very rewarding occupation when you're a doctor. Yes, it is lucrative and you can make money, but doctors also enjoy helping people for free. The problem is they can't even afford to do it now because all their time is spent doing other stuff. They're also saddled down by malpractice insurance, and they also have extreme amounts of medical school debt that they have to handle. Yes, it shouldn't be that expensive to go to medical school, and it wouldn't be if it was a free market. And yes, if we had tort reform, if you couldn't sue.

Look, it's funny. I'm staying here in at a friend of mine's house. He lives in Beverly Hills. We went to high school together. But and so he's in real estate. Right. He owns a lot of property. And one of his tenants is Starbucks. Right. He has a Starbucks restaurant and they just got sued. And the person is suing him as well because he's the landlord. So this is the circumstance. And this is America. So a guy, and he's, I guess he's hard of hearing. He's not totally deaf, but he has a hearing problem. And so he goes into the Starbucks and the Starbucks is playing music, right? You know,

whatever they have background music on in the Starbucks. And so he asked the guy behind the counter, oh, by the way, I'm hard of hearing. do you have this special device that i can wear while i'm in here so that while i'm in this restaurant i can enjoy the same music as everybody else and the guy said well no we don't have that device well he sued for ten thousand dollars plus attorney's fees and now he's suing my friend too because he's the landlord of where where the starbucks restaurant is but this is amer mean, you walk... That's a hilarious lawsuit. You walk into a restaurant and you have a hearing problem, get yourself a hearing aid. Don't force the guy. But these are the regulations. These are the lawsuits. The Americans with Disabilities Act

is the most ridiculous. I mean, I remember when I, you know, in California, this is a true story. I'm not making this up. You can Google this. There was a strip club here in Southern California. And I guess their thing was they had a shower on the stage. And so the stripper would strip in the shower so you can watch her with the water. And it was there was a big pole. Right. So it was the shower was up in the air and you had to climb up the pole to get to the shower. And then you do your strippers. You'd strip. Well, the government made them shut that down. And it was because it was discriminatory against strippers in wheelchairs because there was no way for a stripper in a wheelchair to climb up the pole.

Now, I've never even seen a stripper in a wheelchair, not that I spent a lot of time in strip clubs. But this is where we are as a society, right? That we're saying, you know, if a stripper can't go on that pole, then nobody can go on that pole, right? If a stripper that's in a wheelchair can't go on that pole. Yes, right. Yeah. Not, you know, but all these laws and regulations, it's all this, everybody is suing everybody because the government creates all these phony rights.

I mean, just because I'm hard of hearing doesn't mean the whole world has to accommodate the fact that I'm hard of hearing. I mean, sometimes people will say, look, let's say I happen to have a size 14 shoe. And I have a really big foot. Does that mean that every shoe store has has to stock a size 14? Just no. I mean, because they know that barely anybody is going to have a size 14. So they don't want but I go to the big and tall store, because I know they're going to have a size 14. So you know, there are going to be certain businesses that are going to cater to, you know, people with handicaps. Like, you know, you have all these hotels and motels that have to shut down their swimming pools because they can't afford the money to have a lift so that somebody in a wheelchair can go into that swimming pool. Well, why does every single swimming pool in the country have to accommodate somebody in a wheelchair?

single swimming pool in the country have to accommodate somebody in a wheelchair? Why can't people who have wheelchairs go on the internet and find out which hotels are catering to that particular clientele and just go there? But when you force everybody to do it, they were doing miniature golf courses are shutting down because they can't figure out how to be accessible to people in wheelchairs, even if no one in a wheelchair has ever tried to play that course. And then they end up having to shut it down because they can't, you know. You know, the whole thing. I used to go to this beach here in Malibu when I was younger living here. And in order to get to the beach, you know, you had to walk down like a cliff.

It was like a dog beach, and I forget the name of it. But there was no stairs. You had to kind of walk down this cliff. But, you know, in the very front, there were like three or four handicapped parking spaces that were never filled. They were always empty. And a lot of people would have to park on PCH because the parking lot would get filled. But nobody would ever use the handicapped spots because nobody who was handicapped could possibly get down to that beach. Yet they had to have those spots there anyway.

They had to have those spots, but they didn't have to have some sort of a ramp access to the beach because that's nature. Right. But they didn't have to have some sort of a real access to the beach because that's nature, right? So it was a beach that no one and no one who is handicapped could ever go to but yet they had to have all these All these spots there like you could take that to Yosemite and say like hey if you want to climb this mountain You have to have use of your arms So we're gonna have to figure out some sort of handicapped access up the type of this mountain Yes, otherwise it's unfair But this is where all the government the government thinks they're being And look, do I feel bad that people have handicaps? Of course. But

the solution is not the Americans Disabilities Act. And, you know, there are a lot of employers now that won't hire people with handicaps because it's now so expensive, whereas they would have done it before. You know, that's the whole thing about, you know, these anti-discrimination laws, like, you know, you can't discriminate based on gender, based on sex, based on, you know, you know, sexual identity and all these different things. Well, because of that, there's actually more discrimination. You know, there are actually employers now who aren't racist at all, but who will go out of their way not to hire minorities because they're afraid of getting sued. Right. Oh, if I hire a black guy or if I hire a Hispanic or if I hire a homosexual, what if I fire that person because they're not doing a good job? They could sue me. They could say, well, you fired me because I'm gay.

Well, I've heard this argument about women in tech. I heard this argument recently because I was reading some article written by Ellen Powell. She was that woman who had that big lawsuit, sexual discrimination lawsuit. She said some article about women in tech. And someone was saying, well, see this. This is the reason why people don't want to hire women in the first place. But isn't that sort of a slippery slope? Because if she really was being sexually discriminated against, well, they shouldn't really be able to do that in the first place.

If what she's saying is true, that they create this hostile work environment for women, they shouldn't be able to necessarily just never hire women just so they can remain hostile. Does that make sense? Well, remember, if you have a business, right? Because they always sue the business. So let's say one of my male employees harasses one of my female

employees. They don't sue that one guy. They sue you. They sue the owner. So this is how it works against it. Because it's more profitable. Because the owner has all the money. Right. Right. You know, so here's what happens. So I am an owner of a business and now some woman walks in and let's say she's particularly attractive and I start thinking, okay, do I really want to have this potential lawsuit walking around my office? Do I really want, because maybe she really does get harassed, but I'm the one that's liable for that harassment.

And I can have all the policies I want, but, you know, guys are horny. I mean, we know what we're like. Don't lump me in there, sir. All right, well. How dare you. I'm sorry, continue. Employers don't want lawsuits. Right.

And so the easier you make it to sue, the less likely you're going to get a job. So if employers are looking at, I want to hire the person who's least likely to sue me. But isn't it conversely, the harder you make it to sue, the more likely people are going to get harassed? No, I mean, if somebody is harassed, then sue the person that harassed you. Don't sue the person who happened to employ him that might have had nothing to do with it. Right. So don't sue you. Sue the individual that causes whatever the issue is. Yeah, I mean, it's got to be a per- you can't just say the employer. And again, when you talk about something like discrimination, like, see, I'm Jewish, right? So maybe it's

easier if I just talk about Jews versus something else. But so let's say somebody doesn't want to hire me because I'm Jewish. I support their decision. They have a right not to like me. No one has to like Jews, and I know not everybody does. And if somebody is an anti-Semite, that's, you know, their right to be that, you know. If they want to fire me because I'm Jewish, they can do that. They don't want to hire me. You know, if somebody wants to have a restaurant and they want to put a sign that says no Jews, that's their right. Now, I think anybody that eats there, you know, I think they got a problem because, look, I'm not black.

If there was a restaurant that had a sign that said no blacks, there's no way I would eat there. Just out of principle. Of course. In fact, I think if there's somebody that doesn't like Jews, the last thing they're going to do is put that sign out there because, you know what? They want me to eat there. Even though they don't like me, they want my money. And they also don't want the blowback. And they don't want the bad public. Can you imagine? People say, well, if we don't have all these anti-discrimination laws, then restaurants aren't going to serve blacks.

You name me one, you find one restaurant in this country with the internet that put out a sign, no blacks allowed, I mean, that'd be the end of that restaurant well a lot of these laws were sort of established before the internet was the powerful force that it is today right right but we can now see a lot of the harm that these these laws have done because you go back you go back before all these anti-discrimination laws uh black teenage unemployment let's say in the 30s was lower than black teenage unemployment, let's say in the 30s, was lower than white teenage unemployment. Lower. Now, do you think we have we're more racist today than we were back then? No, we're not more racist. We're less racist. But it's all these laws that have backfired, all these, you know, you know, anti-discrimination laws. And, you know, you have this whole industry like recently,

right. You know, you have this big movement because we had the riots in Charlottesville because, you know, they want to take down these statues, these Confederate statues, as if those Confederate statues are the reason that we have poverty and unemployment and crime in African-American communities. These statues have nothing to do with that. And taking them down isn't going to change anything. But you've got these people in America that make a living off of poverty and off of race baiting that want to say, oh, the reason that you're poor, the reason that there's crime is because of racism. And the racism is because of these statues. So vote for me, give me money, and I will help you. You're a victim and I'm your solution. And they act, well, we'll just get rid of the statue. Because even if they get rid of the

statues, nothing's going to change. Now they have to get rid of something else. Don't you think that the statue for a lot of people represents racism? Like if you see a Robert E. Lee statue and then you read about what Robert E. Lee did to his own personal slaves and oversaw some of the lashings and caught slaves that were trying to escape. This is a horrible

account that I retweeted recently of some slave that was caught while he was trying to escape Robert E. Lee and Robert E. Lee oversaw them beating him and lashing him. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I mean, all of the various stories. And I know that Robert E. Lee was a very well-respected guy, even in the North. I mean, he was very, in fact, Lincoln wanted him to run the Union Army. I mean, he turned it down because he couldn't fight.

Because he was a good killer. No. I mean, that's why he was respected. Well, he was a good general. He was a war hero in the American-Mexican War. But he was a good killer. No. I mean, that's why he was respected. Well, he was a good general. He was a war hero in the American-Mexican War. But he was also a slave owner. Well, so were a lot of people. So was Thomas Jefferson.

So was George Washington. I mean, a lot of people owned slaves. Different era, though, right? Yes, of course. Look, if Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he would not own slaves, obviously, right? But if you or I were born in the Annabella South, if I was born in Virginia in 1750, would I feel

differently about slavery than I do today? There's a good chance that I would. I mean, it was the culture. Slavery had been going on for thousands of years. It's not like we invented it. So as horrific as that is to say, I think you're being very honest. I think you're being very pragmatic about the times. My point is that most people that even see a statue of Robert E. Lee don't even know who Robert E. Lee was. The average American doesn't even know who fought in the Civil War, let alone who won it. I mean, thanks to American schools, I don't think those statues

those statues have been there for, look, Martin Luther King never cared about those statues. He didn't march down and say, we've got to get rid of these statues. Well, do you know when a lot of those statues were actually put up? A lot of them were put up during the Civil Rights era. They were put up because people were fighting against all the racism. Well, a lot of them.

And so it was a reaction. Well, a lot of them were put up. A lot of them were put up in 1900, 1910, 1920. There's actually a spike. There's actually a spike in these Civil War monuments going up. And they're actually fairly cheaply made bronze statues that were cheaper to produce that were made during the Civil Rights era in direct protest to the Civil Rights era. So they put up these statues of guys like Robert E. Lee who represented slavery. And of course, what they forget, too, is the people who were leading the anti-Civil Rights movement were all the Democrats, right?

A long time ago, right? Right. Well, this is when they passed it. When they passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, it was only because of Republicans that it passed. If the Republicans had voted for it in the same proportion of Democrats, it would have been defeated. But the part of the Civil Rights Act that I was against, right? And obviously, I was a little kid then, so I was born in 1963, so I'm just looking back at it. Right. That all of the the anti-discrimination laws that had to do with government and the state governments, because you had a lot of institutionalized racism down south by Democrats. Right. And all that was bad. And the fact that we eradicated was good.

The part that was bad is the part that went into the private realm and said, if you are a private person, you can't discriminate. Because now all of a sudden the government is the thought police. Now, all of a sudden, you know, every every decision that everybody makes is being second guess. You've opened up everybody to all sorts of lawsuits and you've gotten this blowback where, you know, businesses are afraid to hire people, not because they're racist or bigots, but because they don't they fear a lawsuit. And so now you've increased the cost of employing people that are in these in these specialized groups. So I think that that was a bad thing. And also, I think legally, I don't think the government constitutionally has the right to tell me. I mean, everybody knows, like if somebody tried to tell me as in my private life, you know, you need you know, you need to be an equal opportunity dater.

All the women that you, you know, you can't just date white women. I've seen this argument. I mean, but and also, you know, even as an employee, right, if I, let's say I'm Jewish. If I say, hey, I want to work for another Jew. I just like working for Jews. And I go and I apply for jobs. And I say, you know, I don't want to work for another Jew. I just like working for Jews. And I go and I apply for jobs. And I say, you know what? I don't want to work for you.

You're not Jewish. Oh, you know. So I can discriminate as a worker among, and I can quit. I can go to my employer and say, you know what? I'm tired of working for a Jew. I quit, right? That's legal. You can't sue me for discriminating against you and going to work for my competitor.

So look, employers are, you don't lose your rights because you create a business. You don't lose your rights. I'm sorry, let me interrupt you here. But don't you think there's a big difference between someone who makes a personal decision of where they want to work versus someone who has power over you? There's a big difference between someone who chooses, like, I don't like working for this guy because I only like working for white people. And you can decide to do that because it's your own personal choice to where to go.

You're not holding any power over someone. These laws are created. They're anti-discrimination laws because you're discriminating against other people, and you can keep other people from making a living. Well, employment is all about discrimination, right? I'm trying to find the best person for the job. I can discriminate based on all sorts of factors, right? That's one way to look at it. Right.

Discrimination, but you're being discerning more than anything, right? Well, you're saying, look, you're going to discriminate based on competence, based on their background, based on their- But isn't that discrimination? I mean, that's a weird distortion of the word, though. No, it's still, discriminating just means you're kind of picky, right? Right. But you're talking about discriminating based on a factor like race or like-

You're being racist or sexist. Being discriminating- Or homoph picky, right? Right. You're talking about discriminating based on a factor like race or sexist or homophobic. No, being discriminating and racism are different things, right? Because you can discriminate based on race and not be a racist. Like, let's say somebody decides, okay, I can hire two candidates. One is white and one is black. okay, I can hire two candidates. One is white and one is black. And if they say, well, if I hire the white candidate,

I'm less likely to get sued if I have to terminate him because he's not doing a good job because he can't claim. So if I make that decision based on race, it's not because I'm a racist. I'm trying to practically look at the numbers. I'm not necessarily... But a lot of people would disagree. They would say that is a racist decision. You're assuming that black people would be more likely to sue you?

Is that statistically true? No, because you can't, if I fire somebody who's white, they can't say, you fired me because I'm white. Right. It's just never, you can't do that. Right. So, obviously, there are plenty of lawsuits for wrongful termination. I've had them myself where somebody says, you sued me because I'm black. Nobody is going to say, you sued me because I'm black nobody is gonna say you fought

you fired me so it is it is a statistic a statistic that somebody can consider but it doesn't mean that they're an actual statistic or more black people or black people rather more likely to fire for rather sue for wrong determination black person is more likely to sue for a racially based determination than somebody who's white. You know, a woman is a woman is more likely to sue because she was discriminated based on her sex. A man is not likely to say you fired me because I'm a man, but you're going to get someone saying you fired me because I'm a woman because they're a member of the, you know, of a protected class. But if somebody makes a decision, that doesn't mean that you're

anti-women if you're trying to make a rational decision. The racism is just believing that one race is inferior, just not liking somebody because they're a member of a particular... That's totally different than trying to... So you think that racial discrimination should be legal if you're thinking about the future of your business

and just hedging your bets? Well, you know what? No. I don't care. I think it should be legal no matter what. I don't want to. Look, I think people have a right. To be assholes. Yes. And the thing is, though, if you're a businessman and you're making your hiring decisions based on the color of people's skin or their gender, and my competitors are making decisions based on competence, you're not going to survive. I mean, if you are going to

turn down a better quality female worker and you're going to settle for somebody who can't do the job as well because you want to hire a man, you know, you're not going to be a successful businessman. So I have my faith in the free market that racism, there is a cost, right? When you're a racist and you want to be a racist in business, that costs you a lot of money. And I think, you know, but what happens is, you know, the government tries to take the cost away from racism. You know, they try to substitute laws and regulations. I'd rather have the market punish the racist. Let the market punish somebody who is hiring people that are not competent for the job, but he's hiring them for some ridiculous reason. Well, conversely, what did you think about the Google memo?

Because one of the things about that memo was the gentleman that was fired, what is his name? James Damore? Yeah. That's his name? Yeah. He was saying that Google was hiring people based on whether or not there are minorities and women, regardless of their competence.

Yeah, I mean... They were discriminating on, like, discriminating against straight white males to pursue people that would give them the appearance of diversity. Well, they're doing that. I mean, they're trying to be more diverse. And mainly the diversity that they're going for is they want to hire more women. Well, also more minorities. Well, that too. But I think his argument or his paper was more focused on the gender.

But what he was trying to do is point out the fact that fewer women are just in programming. I mean, they're not interested in that pursuit as much as men are. And so, you know, when you're hiring, right, when Google is hiring and they're trying to get the very best, you know, there's a much bigger pool of male applicants for those jobs. I mean, it's much more competitive. And so he's making the point that, look, you're just not going to get a lot of women in these jobs. And if you're going to just try to have more diversity, you're just going to sacrifice the quality. And, you know, I'm sure that he's right. But the interesting thing is he gets fired for expressing that opinion.

And what's ironic is he's suing. Well, now, look, I mean, look, personally, see, personally, I think that Google should be able to, it's their company. I think that if they want to fire somebody, they should be able to do that. Now, if he had a contract, see, I don't know what kind of employment contract. If he's an at-will employee, you know, I think they should be able to terminate him for whatever reason, just like I think he should be able to quit. Well, they were saying he was reinforcing negative gender stereotypes.

That was the main reason they publicly stated that he was being fired for it. I mean, look, I think it shows you how low that we've fallen as a society, that you're allowed to express your opinion as long as it's the politically correct opinion. Right. And Google is afraid of the blowback. And I can understand, look, if they think it's going to hurt their profits, if they think the way to make money in America today is to bow down on the altar of political correctness and just pretend that things that you know are true or not true. But, you know,

my principles are consistent. But I do think that they probably violated California labor law in the way they fired him. I don't like California labor law. I mean, I'm an employer here in California, and I don't like it. And I would probably employ a lot more people here if they didn't have the labor law that they do. But I'm consistent in my views. So but I think it's terrible that they had to fire him because if he had expressed the exact opposite position, it wouldn't have been a problem. Right. It's just because he is basically saying the truth. I mean, look, Right. It's just because he is basically saying the truth. I mean, look, why is it that you have to pretend that men and women are exactly the same in all aspects of life, that there's no difference in our evolutionary biology, that men and women didn't necessarily evolve in different ways based on the roles that they played, you know, thousands of years ago or tens of thousands of years ago, and that there's, you know, there's something about maleness. And again, it's not like, obviously, there are exceptions to the rule, right? But in general, the average man is going to be,

you know, there's going to be certain ways that the average man is going to be different than the average woman. And maybe men, just for whatever reason, are going into programming, computer science, in greater numbers than women. I mean, that's just going to happen. That's just nature. You can't try to pretend that doesn't exist. And it's not a good thing or a bad thing. Evolutionary psychology.

This is something that's been studied. But looking at human beings and the choices they make based on their gender, based on their environment, based on – there's a host of different factors. So to deny that does seem very weird. Yeah, and again, no one's talking about – obviously there are going to be examples that don't fit that – Of course. Because there's – but there's always outliers. But when you're looking at numbers in a job, you're looking at the totality. And so if there's only 10% women, to say, well, we need to make it 50-50 because half the world is women is ridiculous.

That's like if the UFC said, listen, we need more women fighters. So we're going to fire some of the men that are way better fighters. And we're going to hire more women fighters to make a more diverse lineup, even though there's way less women interested in fighting. I'm sure. I'm sure. Because obviously, I mean, I'm amazed that there are even any women really that want to be fighters. But I mean, obviously, there's going to be some. But the vast majority of women that I know, they might like watching other men fight. But the last thing they want to do is step in a ring. The vast majority.

Because that's mostly a masculine thing. Right. That type of violence, you know, most women, that doesn't mean there's no women that want to do that. Of course, there's going to be women. It's a good example because they're outliers. And when you're just looking at it without any discrimination, you're just looking at this pursuit and trying to figure out which genders are more likely to enter this pursuit, whether it's being a lumberjack or a minor or whatever. You could say all the factors you want. Well, maybe they're worried about discrimination of other men on the job. Maybe they're worried

about being sexually harassed. Maybe they're worried about discrimination of other men on the job. Maybe they're worried about being sexually harassed. Maybe they're worried about this. Whatever those factors are, there's a lot more women that are interested in other pursuits. Of course. Nursing and... Yes, and then when the government comes in and just says, oh, well, the numbers are this, and now we have to fix this because this must be the result of discrimination. Yeah.

When it's not. It's just the natural result of people acting freely. But it's also people's response to that. They almost can't have a measured objective response. Like the woman who's the CEO of YouTube said that she was very hurt by that memo and that this guy was a misogynist that created that memo. Meanwhile, she's the fucking CEO of YouTube. Like she is like an example of a woman that can succeed and does succeed because she does have the personality to be that kind of a person.

And also, you know, I don't like this idea when you say, you know, oh, I was offended, right? It's like, hey, you know, you don't have a right not to be offended. I mean, look, you know, you have to be a little sensitive. You have to have a thicker skin. You know, people are going to say things that you offend, that are offensive to you. That doesn't mean they don't have a right to speak their mind. You know, people, I mean, that's, you know, a lot of people now all of a sudden freedom of speech has taken a back door to my sensibilities. Right.

I don't want to be offended. Well, it's a cheap way out. It's a cheap way out to you know calm down your your offended personality or your your whatever it is about what you've done yeah and you know no one as i said earlier i mean you don't have a right not to be offended you know and there's gonna be a lot of offensive people in the world and and and the reason that you defend uh people that are being offensive is not because you're defending what they're saying you're defending your right to be offensive to other people because look there are a lot of people let's say we talked about the socialists there could be a lot of socialists that are

offended by the fact that i believe in the free market or people could be offended that i think people should have a right to be able to discriminate right so but so now if i'm not going to protect somebody else's right to free speech, then they could take away mine because I don't want the government determining, you know, what's offensive and what's not. I don't want the government saying this speech is protected in this speech isn't because the minute you go down that slippery slope, you know, the next thing you know, you know, all the libertarians are now fascists and none of us can speak. Right. And the government gets more and more power and they try to shut people up that want to criticize them. That's truly shrinking government and truly letting the marketplace of ideas decide what people do and don't do and which way they gravitate. Yeah. And as I said, I think the free market and competition will punish racists. I think their businesses will fail. I don't think they're going to succeed as well as people who are broader minded, who are

looking beyond sex and looking beyond, you know, race and just hiring based on ability and based on, you know, all those other characteristics that are that are relevant to the job performance. And to the extent that there's going to be a disparity, if there's going to be certain occupations that are mostly men and there's certain occupations that are women, it's not because of discrimination. And in fact, if you look at this nonsense about, you know, women are paid like 70 whatever cents for every man, which obviously that's not true, because if that was true, I would only hire women and pay them 77 cents a dollar. I mean, if you could actually hire women cheaper than men, I mean, I'm not, I would, why would I even, why would I ever hire a man?

I would only hire women. I've had this conversation many times with people that really believe that. They really believe in the gender pay gap. There is no gender pay gap. I mean, if you— But isn't that an amazing statistic that even the president, like when Obama was president, he was saying that in a speech knowing it was disingenuous. Yeah. He had to know.

It appeals to women to get their votes but you know if if you if you if you basically uh correct for all the job choices right so if you take a woman who's let's say 40 years old never been married man 40 years old never married basically the same educational background. And you study, you'll find that they pretty much make the same, right? It's that when you look at the choices that the typical woman makes during her career, and even if it's the same occupation, let's say they're both lawyers and they both went to the same law school. Even if they both get married, the chances are the woman took her law career and it became secondary to her children. She worked fewer hours.

She didn't travel as much. She got herself off that track and went on more of a mommy track. Because, now, do all women do that? No, but more women are likely, and they prefer that, right? They prefer. So they don't work as much. They don't volunteer to travel as much. And it's because of the choices

that they make along the way that they end up earning less money than their male counterpart. Not because somebody is just discriminating against them, because there is a competitive market. I mean, if you are a woman that is working just as hard as a man and you're sacrificing everything for your career,

and you're gonna earn the same as the guy. I mean, because it's a competitive market, especially for those higher skills. I mean, you just can't underpay people in the marketplace because somebody else will outbid you. But it's such a convenient talking point. It is. It's the lie of – it's the left. It's how you get votes. It's like, hey, you're getting paid less because you're being victimized you're being discriminated against so vote for me and i'll fix that i will force your employer to pay you money and that's you know obviously you know there's that willie sutton was one of his famous quotes was you know why do you rob banks well because that's where

the money is right so the votes are with employees much more people have jobs than create jobs, right? So if you're trying to get the votes of the employee, that's better than getting votes of employers. So a lot of people get votes by promising to force their boss to give them something. You're going to get more vacations. You're going to get more sick days. You're going to get time and a half. He's going to have to do this. Well, all that, you know, the employer doesn't give you anything.

So if he's going to give you more vacation, it's because he's going to pay you less in wages. I mean, it's all a tradeoff. I mean, when the government mandates certain benefits, all they're doing is taking your choice away to negotiate how you want to be compensated. Because ultimately, the employer is not going to pay you more than you're worth. And if you say, well, you've got to give this person, you know, these vacations or you got. OK, well, I got to pay him less money so I can give them the vacations. It's all one big compensation package. Well, it seems like it's a political thing again.

It's a thing that people do in order to get you to lean towards them more and to have people feel that this person is looking out for my needs, this person is looking out for my point of view and my perspective, and he understands the plight that women go through. Whereas Peter Schiff, he's so hardcore, you know, it is capitalistic that he doesn't even care about what women go through or discrimination. Yeah. And it's like the reality is if I didn't care about women, I wouldn't care about these laws. I understand how these laws backfire and hurt women. I understand how all these laws that are meant to do good actually do harm. And that's one of the reasons that when you find a lot of liberals, they actually think conservatives or libertarians are bad people, right? Because they say, hey, you're against this law. You must be a bad person because this law is going to help people. Well, in their mind, you are a bad person.

Right. Because otherwise, I would support the law. Right. See, when I think about most liberals, I don't think they're bad. I just think they're misunderstood. They're misinformed. They're ignorant. They don't understand. I guess they're good people, but they're going about it in a bad way. They don't understand that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I don't want to go to hell. I don't care how many good intentions you have. If I know that that road is going to hell, I'm going to try my best, you know, to build a different road. And I believe that free market capitalism is the best way to raise the standard of living of everybody, whether you're a woman, whether you're black, whether you're homosexual. It's the individual acting freely that's going to be your best hope. If you're going to empower government, and this is one of the things that I can never figure out, because people are, again, they're very suspicious of businesses and businessmen, yet they have complete trust in politicians. Disgusting.

You give politicians all this power and then you trust them to use it benevolently. I mean, why aren't they just as corrupt? Just because somebody uses politics to get rich doesn't mean they're on some moral high ground. Well, even worse, this idea that if you give more of your taxes that the government is somehow or another going to be competent with how they distribute those taxes. And that there's some going to be egalitarian.

They're going to use the taxes for good. That's a very disgusting sort of an idea. It doesn't make any sense at all. Or the idea that government is going to make better decisions for you or your family than you are. I mean, the government doesn't even know you. They don't know your kids. Yet, they're going to make better decisions for you or your family than you are, right? I mean, the government doesn't even know you. They don't know your kids, yet they're going to decide what they eat

or where they go to school. No, the people that care about your kids are you, right? You care. I mean, look at these lousy schools that, unfortunately, that's why so many people vote for Bernie Sanders, is because they went to these government schools and they got a lousy education. Their teacher is a socialist.

The whole socialist system. But the parents are trapped because their taxes are already paying for these lousy schools. They're monopolies. You know, and so but if the liberals act as if, well, if we didn't have government schools, then parents wouldn't educate their kids. Of course they would. You don't think they would send their kids to private schools and they'd be a lot less expensive. And you'd have all kinds of entrepreneurs who are trying to earn money educating poor kids, just like people earn a lot of money clothing poor kids and feeding poor kids and housing them. I

mean, if there's money to be made, an entrepreneur is going to come in and satisfy that desire. So you were against public education or do you think it shouldn't be subsidized the way it is, like especially colleges? Well, look, I think that government education is much too expensive and not good enough. I mean, people think that, oh, we need the government to educate. And I think education is very important. And it's so important, we just shouldn't leave it up to government. I think that the free market, just like the free market does a better job of creating computers, right? I think it'll do a better job of creating education.

But when people are struggling, they really like the idea that at least education is free for their children. It's not free. Nothing that the government provides is free. It costs money. Where's that money coming from? Your taxes. The government has to take money. And the stuff that you get for free from the government is very expensive.

The stuff that you get from the free market that you pay for is much less expensive and it's a much higher quality. Now, you know, the problem with colleges, right, we have a lot of colleges that are not run necessarily by government. But why are they so expensive? Because the government subsidizes university tuition by either guaranteeing loans or directly providing loans to students. And this drives up the price of college. The reason that college is so expensive is because of government subsidizing the cost. So there is no free market to control the cost. You just have the government to subsidize the ever-escalating costs and providing all this money.

So now people go to college and they graduate with a mortgage without a house. That's the government that did that. But you have these liberals. They's the government that did that. But you have these liberals. They think the government is helping them. Like the liberals say, vote for me, and I'll make sure you get a loan so you can go to college. Well, the only reason they need a loan is because the college is so expensive. And why is the college so expensive? Because of the loans.

You know, I mean, my father went to college, and his parents didn't have any money because they were poor, lower middle class. But so he worked his way through college by having a summer job. And that summer job was enough to pay for everything, room, board, tuition. And all of his friends worked their way through college. Why can't Americans work their way through college today? Because the government made college so expensive because of all this, all the loans. But what happened is the government said, hey, you don't have to have a job while you're in college. We'll just guarantee a loan, and you'll just be able to borrow the money. But graduating with a bunch of debt doesn't do the kids any favors.

They would have been better off having a summer job instead of just partying all summer or bumming their summers around Europe while they're borrowing money. Well, there's two giant issues with that. One giant issue with the debt is you're getting out of college and you're going to take a job that's probably not going to pay you a whole lot in the first place, and you're saddled down with who knows how many thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt. And then on top of that, you can't even go bankrupt and dissolve that debt. It's the one debt in this country that you're stuck with forever.

It is terrible. Kids take on this debt when they're 17, 18, 19. And they're not making good decisions. No, they're terrible decisions. They're horrible decisions. Look, they don't understand. They don't know anything about money. They're too young.

Or consequences. Yeah, and they've been fed a lie that, well, if you don't go to college, your life is ruined. I do some of my videos on my channel, my YouTube channel. And, and one of the videos that I did, and I wish it got more views and maybe it will, but I can talk about on your show. What does the YouTube channel tell people? Peter Schiff, you know, Peter, yeah, my name is, uh, you know, the Schiff report, but one of the videos I did and I call it's a, is a college degree worth the cost. You decide. And I did this like four years ago down in New Orleans. And I went down the street and I was asking people who were working. I didn't talk to people who were just there to have drinks.

I worked to the people who were working on Bourbon Street. Right. They were strippers. They were bouncers. They were pedicab drivers. They were bartenders. They were taking out the trash cans. And I didn't discriminate. I asked everybody I saw. And almost everybody I talked to is on this video. I mean, very few people didn't make it. And I basically said, did you go to college? When did you graduate? Right. What was your major and how much do you owe? Right. And every single person that I talked to that was doing a menial job. And some of them had two or three degrees, right? Master's degrees. And the point was, and some people thought I was trying to make fun of the people. And I wasn't trying to make fun of anybody. I was trying to prove a point that this was a complete waste of time and money, that these individuals could have done these jobs

without college. They could have done it right out of high school without all this debt. And that just having these degrees didn't mean anything. Who benefited from these degrees? The universities that sold these overpriced degrees. They benefited. That's who benefits from all these college loans, not these kids who borrow $50,000 and now are emptying trash cans because they got some liberal arts degree that's meaningless. It's the universities, the college that got to overcharge for a degree that the kid would have been better off without. And then there's also the opportunity cost. You know, you spend five or six years now in these overcrowded colleges, you know, used to be four years, but now it's so hard to get the classes that sometimes it takes you five or six years to even graduate. And you graduate with nothing.

You've got a worthless degree. You've got politicians that are saying everybody needs to have a college degree. OK, well, if everybody has one, what's it worth? Nothing. You know, at one point, maybe one in 10 people had a college degree because and then it actually meant something because you had something that not everybody else has. But, you know, if everybody has a degree, then you've actually destroyed the value of the degree. And that's what the government has done. They've made a degree extremely expensive to get, but there's very little value. And that's what the government has done. They've made a degree extremely expensive to get, but there's very little value. And you have all these politicians,

or not politicians, maybe colleges. They'll try to say, look at how much more money people make who have college degrees versus people who don't have college degrees. And they assume that the reason for that is the college degree. Again, it's false statistics, right?

Because think about the typical person who chooses to go to college. They're smarter. They're more ambitious. They're harder working. That's why they're making more money, not because they have a degree, right? So if you probably looked at two individuals from the same circumstances, maybe same high school, same demographic, they got the same GPA, they got the same, you know, SAT scores. One went to college and one didn't, and then you followed them. You might find that the guy that had the gumption to skip college

is actually making more money than the guy who went to college. Maybe he started a business, maybe he gained some real world experience, and then he wasn't encumbered by a bunch of debt. So it's not the college degree at this point. Now, yeah, if you want to be a doctor, sure, you got to go to college or you got to go to med school. But there are a lot of things that you don't need a college degree to do. And a lot of people who are doing them have college degrees. And their success is not a function of that college degree. It's a function of the hard work that they did after they left college. Well, education is very important, but you can get a tremendous amount of education today. And this is not, you know, the 1800s.

You can get it online. Oh, yeah. You can get it through books. You can get it through audio courses. I mean, I'm not anti-education. I think people should educate themselves. You're anti-debt. And you're anti the college debt that people are settled down on.

Well, I'm anti the government saying the only way to get educated is to have a school do it. I mean, you know, there are a lot of Americans. We talked about, you know, Robert E. Lee, but you go to the founding fathers. A lot of these guys were all self-educated men. They didn't necessarily go to college. Some of them did, but a lot of them were self-educated. And believe me, back then, educating yourself was pretty hard. I mean, the only books you had were the ones that you could check out of a library.

I mean, now anybody, any kid in a poor inner city has everything at his fingertips. You could go on the internet and you can teach yourself. And in fact, professors can sell courses online. You don't have to, you know, go to a college. Some professor can have a tutorial site and he could charge like, you know, 10 bucks a month and he could give lectures and he could teach. You can learn all sorts of stuff without enriching some government bureaucracy, some college or university, and you don't have to borrow tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn what you can learn for practically nothing on the Internet.

Yeah. Speaking of the Internet, I know we've spent a lot of time here, but I can't let you leave unless I ask you this one last thing. What are your thoughts on cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin and all these different? Yeah. And I know let's talk about that. And let's, you know, hopefully we have enough time to really hash this subject out. Because I know, you know, I was on your show a few years ago and we talked about cryptocurrencies. And, you know, I was very skeptical about them then.

And I'm as skeptical about them now. But, of course, obviously, had you just bought them when I was here a few years ago. It would skyrocket. Yeah. I mean, obviously, if you bought them back then, you could turn around and you can sell them today for a lot more money. Right. So but does that mean they're going to work? Does that mean they are going to fulfill the promise that everybody believes?

Right. And what is it that people believe about Bitcoin? And, you know, they believe that it's going to be money, right? That it's going to either replace or exist alongside of the dollar, the euro, the yen, right? That people are going to use it as a medium of exchange. That's the hope. That it's going to be a store of value. And there, it's just not going to work. It is not going to happen. I know there are a lot of people that believe this and they almost believe it like a cult. Right. They believe it like a religion.

And the fact that I don't believe it, I'm just, you know, I'm either a fool. I just I'm stuck in my ways. I just don't get it. You know, and, you know, look, you know, I've seen it all before when it came to the dot coms, when it came to the real estate. And it's not that like I did a podcast again on my own, and I was trying to compare. I was looking at the Internet stocks, and I was talking. I used Pets.com as an example, and I looked at Bitcoin. And then somebody did a video critical of me trying to explain that why Bitcoin is not like Pets.com.

And I never tried to equate the two. What I was talking about was the idea when pets.com was started and people were making money because the stock went up right they thought that the business would succeed as a business that it would make a profit right now it never did it went bankrupt but people bought it early on and it went up now the fact that it went up didn't mean that they were right in their ultimate bet. It just meant that other people made the same mistake and paid an even higher price. And so you can be wrong, but still profit from being wrong as long as there are other fools who are also wrong.

And that's where I see the similarity in the cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin. If somebody bought Bitcoin a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, and it's now a lot higher, it's only higher because other people are more foolish than they were. And more people now believe something that's not going to happen. Why do you think it's not going to happen? What do you think of the restrictions? What's holding it back? All right. So people have to understand what money is and what can succeed as money, right? Because,

yes, dollars and euros and yen, intrinsically, there's no value there. It's just a piece of paper and they're created out of thin air. But that wasn't always the case. I mean, the dollar used to be backed by gold. And what gave the dollar value was the gold backing. That's why it had value, because you can go and get gold for it. You can convert it to gold. it had value because you can go and get gold for it you can convert it to gold uh but gold right the reason that gold became money and a lot of things have been money and the most the what's been money the most successful has been precious metals people have used precious metals and gold has just been uh the most precious of the metals that has served as money. But the reason that gold became money, because before we had money, it was all barter, right? That's, you know, if you made chairs and you wanted, you know, a chicken, you had to find a guy that grew chickens who wanted one of your chairs, right?

It was very inefficient barter. But everybody wanted gold, or at least wealthy people wanted gold it was a scarce item that everybody desired but the beauty of gold was that it's all the same you can melt it down you you know an ounce of gold is you know you know is the same as any other ounce of gold and people realize that wait a minute instead of me looking for a chicken guy that wants my chair, I'll just go, you know, give somebody gold. They don't need my chair. They can buy whatever they want with the gold, right? Because gold is a commodity, too.

It has value. But unlike a chair, it's uniform. You can put it in your pocket, you know, and they're all the same and you can divide it. So gold had these properties that made it money and it was a store of value. And then, you know, over time there was pricing. People could relate how much is a barrel of oil in terms of gold, how much is a bushel of wheat, and you can relate one commodity to another and understand pricing, right? Like, you know, in Roman times, you know, you could buy a toga, a nice toga for an ounce of gold, right? So a man could buy what was clothing back then for an ounce of gold. Well,

you can buy a suit of clothes today, a nice suit of clothes for an ounce of gold. So, you know, prices have kind of remained relatively constant in certain things. So now, years ago, I guess some libertarians and some other people got the idea, you know, fiat currencies are no good, which is true. They're not backed by anything. Governments keep printing them. They got quantitative easing, 0% interest rates. Gold, though, they said gold is inefficient, right? If I got an ounce of gold, I really can't use it in commerce.

I mean, I can't scrape off a little piece of it and buy a cup of coffee. I can't send it across the world and conduct an e-commerce. So they came up with, someone came up with a digital currency initially, the first one probably being Bitcoin, which was supposedly replicating all the properties of gold, only digitally, and making it better, right? So it's like, you know, you mine these Bitcoins, right? Even though there's no actual mining, you're solving these math problems. But you can have a bitcoin. I can give it to you. You can give it to me.

I can break it in half in tenths, you know, and it's divisible. It's, you know, it's portable. You know, it doesn't decay. It doesn't go away, right? And so they're saying, hey, wait a minute. We can create a digital alternative to gold and use that. People will just use this and people will just get out of dollars and they'll own Bitcoin and then we'll just use Bitcoin as money. And the idea is this is going to happen.

But it can't happen because there is no value that ultimately Bitcoin has that can be stored. Unlike gold, gold actually has properties that you can use gold for all sorts of things. People value gold for the metal. Nobody values Bitcoin for the Bitcoin. They value it because they believe that they can exchange it for something else. But their dollar doesn't really represent gold anymore. I know it doesn't. But just because the dollar is working as money with all the history of usage and the fact that the government accept dollars as taxes, it's legal tender, that you have insurance products, that you have rental agreements, that you have bonds, you have an entire global market in dollars, right? That is never going to be able to develop with Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. Ultimately, the value of a

cryptocurrency is based on the willingness of somebody else to accept it in exchange for you know for something else and you know when um bitcoin first started and people used to tell me well you know there's only 21 million bitcoins right you can't have any more than that so therefore there's some scarcity but my point was that well but what stops somebody else from creating another cryptocurrency that is identical to Bitcoin? Or maybe it's even better. Maybe it's faster. Maybe it has properties. Maybe it improves on just like we talked about cell phones earlier. Somebody makes a better cell phone. What's your what's your old Motorola phone worth today?

It's nothing. Right. So if somebody comes up with a better cryptocurrency, then what's your Bitcoin worth? But, you know, I don't think any of these, you know, you have like a thousand of them now. The market cap is about 150 billion for all these cryptocurrencies. And now there are people that are saying, look, you got to buy a bunch of them. You need a portfolio because, you know, you're not sure which one is going to win. None of them are going to win. They're all going to lose because none of them are going to work because there's no store of value. You know, people are not using bitcoins and nor will they ever use bitcoins as a real medium of exchange. People use it as a speculative asset. People buy it.

They hope it's going to go up in value. Yes. Can you sell your bitcoins and then buy something with the money? Yes. You can do that with any asset. You know, people make a big deal about the fact that my gold company, Shift Gold, we accept, we say, oh, we accept Bitcoin. We don't really accept Bitcoin, right? What we accept is dollars, but we make it easy for people to sell their Bitcoins to buy dollars by using a service called a BitPay. But they're not actually using

their Bitcoin. They're using dollars. They're selling their Bitcoin and then they're not actually using their Bitcoin. They're using dollars. They're selling their Bitcoin. And then they're trading dollars. I mean, for Bitcoin to be money. But it still ultimately works, right? It's not going to work. But I mean, that is ultimately working.

You can use your Bitcoin and you can purchase gold with the Bitcoin. No, you can sell your Bitcoin to buy dollars. And then you can use the dollars to buy. But then the Bitcoin, which meant nothing, is worth dollars. No, no. You sold it. You sold your asset. But you sold nothing to get dollars, and then you take those dollars, and you buy gold. No, you sold something.

You sold a digital currency. What is the Bitcoin then? So it's something then. Yes, but you can sell it today for value, but it might be worthless tomorrow. But right now, it's not. Because somebody will pay you for it. So it's real. It's the same thing as a share of Pets.com.

At one point, somebody would give you a lot of money for that stock, and now they'll give you nothing. It's all about perception. I mean, there's always value in gold. And I hear people telling me this, well, gold's value is subjective. No, it's not. It's objective. Gold has value because it satisfies certain desires or needs. It has properties that exist in the physical world, and there are things that you can do with

it. The only thing I can do with my Bitcoin is give it to somebody else. But I know people think, but the blockchain is so great. Maybe it is. Maybe the blockchain is a great invention, and maybe over time, a lot of assets will utilize the blockchain in transactions but it doesn't mean that just because bitcoins utilize something of value that the bitcoin itself has any value that is going to endure to the owner of that bitcoin especially you know when there's an infinite number of coins but here's something interesting because you know the idea is hey you know we need this digital gold because gold can't be used in commerce the way Bitcoin can. The irony of it is it can. Right.

There's a company and, you know, it called Gold Money, goldmoney.com. And you can go there and you can open up an account. You should everybody listen. You should go to goldmoney.com. You can do it on your cell phone, on your app. And what they do, right, is they allow you to buy gold. You can also buy silver and platinum, palladium, other things. But let's just focus on gold. You can buy gold.

They sell it to you for one half of 1% over spot. Very cheap. I've been in the gold business my whole life. I've never sold gold that cheap. You own the gold. They will have it stored for you at a Brinks vault of your choice. And you have different locations in Switzerland and Hong Kong and Singapore and Canada. You can pick where you want your gold stored.

And now you own that gold, right? It's in your digital wallet, just like you could have your cryptocurrencies in a digital wallet. But the difference is you can take delivery of that gold whenever you want it. The minimum is 10 grams of gold, which is a very small quantity. And they will mail it to you if you want it. But the purpose of it is not to have it mailed to you. You keep it in your account. Now, you can give that gold or any portion of it to anyone you want anywhere in the world for free.

I can just transfer my ownership to somebody else. So now there's commerce. If you are a merchant and you want to price your product in gold, you can do that, and I can pay for the product using gold, and you can accept gold in exchange for that good or service. So it makes it so that now gold can actually work in today's modern economy through the internet. It's now as easy for me to spend my gold. I can use my gold to buy a cup of coffee. I could use my gold to buy a car, right. I could use my gold to buy a car. And in the short run, and I'll show you this card that I have,

in the short run, let's assume that somebody... Is that a gold card? And it's made of actual gold. It's made out of actual gold. Yeah, it's real gold. This is heavy. Yes, because gold is crazy. Because gold is a real element. You have a goddamn gold credit card. This is a gold master card, ladies and gentlemen. This is a gold money master card, and this is

heavy. Like, listen. Yeah, it's, I mean, compare that to just a plastic one. Oh, it's crazy. Yeah. It's like a hundred of these. Yes, that is real. Listen to this, folks. Yeah, yeah. This is fucking gold. Wow, I need one of these in my life.

Well, we'll make you one. I need one. We can get you one. Well, the idea is very appealing.. Wow, I need one of those in my life. We'll make you one. I need one. We can get you one. Well, the idea is very appealing. But let me finish this one point. So in the long run, right, I believe that we are going to go back to a gold standard. I believe, and it's not just gold money, but gold money might be the first company to do that, but there may be more that will do it later on.

But I think that government fiat money does not work. Dollars won't work. Euros won't work yen don't won't work but gold works gold has worked for thousands of years but now with the internet it works even better and so i think that gold like through gold money gold money will do to fiat currency what the fedex did to the post office what uber is doing to taxi cabs it is the markets alternative, a money that government can't create out of thin air that will hold its value over time. And now, thanks to the Internet, we can be used in commerce. But in the meantime, right, so I've got gold that is stored in my gold money account.

But let's say I go to a merchant who doesn't want gold because he doesn't know any better. He just wants to be paid in dollars. I can use this debit card, right, to buy something. Is that a debit card or a credit card? It's a debit card. It's not a debit card. It's a prepaid debit card. Yeah, but it's a debit card. You can't tell the difference, right? But what happens is I can spend my gold using this card. So I can sell off basically just like, you know, what people are doing with BitPay, but I don't need BitPay, right? I can go to any merchant in the world that accepts MasterCard, and my gold will be sold, and the merchant will get dollars.

So I can spend my gold now, but the merchant is actually not getting gold. He's getting dollars. But I believe in the future, the merchant's going to want gold. Once we start to get a currency crisis, once we see the euro and the yen blowing up, people are not going to want to sell their goods and services for paper money. They're going to want to sell it for real money. Now, there are people who think, well, they're going to want to sell it for cryptocurrencies. No, they're not. I think these cryptocurrencies are going to crash before the fiat currencies. I think they're going to make fiat currencies look good, which is unfortunate because you have a lot of good people who are putting their faith in these cryptocurrencies,

and they're going to get burned. And then the government's going to say, you see, we told you the free market isn't any good. You know, you got to trust us. You got to trust our paper money. No, I want to trust gold. I want to trust the private sector. And if I can use gold, why would I use anything else? Now, I know people say the knock that the Bitcoin people say is that, well, it's not decentralized because somebody has to store the gold, right? Whereas nobody, but of course, because there's real value there. But you know what? Brinks has been storing gold for over a hundred years and they've never lost an ounce. So look, I trust Brinks to hold my gold, but they're holding it in a way that I can spend it. You know, back in the day, right, the first currencies that existed were created by private banks, right? Not the government. And so a bank would have gold, or actually even before that, it was the goldsmith who would have

gold, you know, that he was storing and he would write an IOU and, you know, and the person would say, hey, I've got gold stored at this goldsmith. That piece of paper, right? Instead of going back to the goldsmith and getting your gold, you can give somebody, say, hey, look, I owe you money. Take this note because the gold is there. You can go get it whenever you want. But here's a piece of paper put in your wallet. It entitles you to that gold. And that piece of paper could circulate as money, not because it has value, but because it's backed up by the gold. And so eventually, private banks started issuing currency, physical paper currency that was backed by the gold that they had. Well, what we're having now with gold money is gold money is like the goldsmith. They're storing

your gold, but instead of giving the person the piece of paper that you can go back, you actually get ownership. You actually transfer. So if I was going to give you $100 worth of gold from my gold money account to your gold money account, you're going to now have title to that gold. It's changing hands. It's gone from me owning the gold in that vault to you owning that exact same gold. Now it's your gold. You can do whatever you want with it. You could take delivery of it and have it in your hand, or you can use it to buy something else. It's perfect money. It's the free market money, and we could use it costless.

I mean, it's going to be cheap. It's cheaper than MasterCard, Visa. It's a very inexpensive way for people to trade across borders. Because it doesn't matter what country you live in, gold has value in every country. You don't have to worry about the yen or the euro or the dollar. Hey, I'm in Germany. I want to sell my products. I can price them in gold. And gold is not very volatile. Gold is relatively stable over time. You can actually price a product and get paid in gold and you

can store your gold. And a year later, two years later, you know it's going to have value, right? You could look at the historic value of gold. So rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, you know, they used to have something, they called it alchemy. You know, hundreds of years ago, the alchemists tried to make gold out of base metal and they couldn't do it. I look at these cryptocurrencies as modern day alchemy. They're trying to digitally recreate gold and they're not going to succeed. They're just creating digital fiat. This is fool's gold. Yes, people have made money speculating on other people's ignorance and other people's greed, but it's going to end very badly. But I do believe that, you know, what they're doing to gold money and what the Internet is enabling is that we can have real money.

We can use gold now in a way that, you know, our forefathers never could. This is a real modern day gold standard 2.0. Gold will work better as money today than it's ever worked before. And it worked great in the past. I mean, we thrived. America was built on a gold standard. The Industrial Revolution happened on a gold standard. We produced the wealthiest country the world had ever seen on a gold standard.

We've become broke with this fiat standard. We've squandered the wealth that we created under a gold standard. But this is a way, you know, when Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971, he said it was temporary, right? Well, we don't have to wait for the government to bring us back to a gold standard. You could do it on your own, right? You can put yourself, people can now move to a gold standard. You can earn, companies can pay their employees using gold money. They can pay them in gold. People, landlords can collect rent in gold. I mean, we can have an entire society. You know, right now we're being sidetracked by this, you know, by this bubble in the cryptocurrencies.

But the people who are buying these cryptocurrencies should be buying gold. And of course, what they can do now is, you know, if you happen to have some cryptocurrencies, you can sell them. You can go to gold money. They'll take your, they'll let you convert your bitcoins or altcoins or whatever, whatever you got, you know, Ether, whatever crypto. You can go and you convert it and you can buy real money, right? And then when this bubble pops, you know, you're not left holding the bag. Because a lot of people, I think, unfortunately, are going to end up losing a lot of their real, you know, their money, their purchasing power. They could have bought gold, but instead they bought, you know, Pets.com. And they didn't realize that that's

what they were buying. I'm sold, Peter Schiff. I love the card. If you just get people to hold onto that, just put that in their hand, they'll be like, this is a real thing. And people have always complained about the loss of the gold standard. I mean, that's a long-standing complaint. You go back to the Constitution, right?

Gold is money in the Constitution. It says that no state shall make anything but gold and silver coin, legal tender, payment of debt. The federal government is only given the power to coin money. What are they coining? Gold and silver. I mean, that is the standard that we have. You know, the first time we mentioned the Civil War, the first time we ever had paper money in America was during the Civil War. And the union issued it.

But it was the greenback. It was backed by gold. And when the war ended, they stopped issuing them. But they issued it based on an emergency wartime power. It wasn't that they had the right to do it legally. They said, look, it's a war. We need to win this war. And so that's the first time we had paper money. Then it went away. It didn't come back again until 1913 with the Federal Reserve. Is it really possible that this can make a return? What can? That gold standard can actually be something that we all go off again. I am convinced that we're going back to a gold standard, but I think the free market will lead the way. Because if people start rejecting government money, right, if they start rejecting the dollar, if they reject the euro, if they reject the yen,

then what is the government going to do? I mean, the source of the government's power really is the money they spend. That's where they buy their votes and they peddle their influence. But if individuals and merchants just start saying, no, I don't want that paper money. You want to buy my products? Pay me in gold, right? You want my services? Pay me in gold. And if more and more people start opting out of that system and just start working in gold-backed money, which we know works.

We don't need the government to make gold money. Gold was money long before the government came around. What the government did is when they took over money, they would debase it. That's where the term comes. Because the government would start, they would make gold coins and they would stick copper in there or other metals because they would try to create inflation. But when you had private money, it was gold gold and so we don't need the government the problem is these cryptocurrencies they're being marketed as the private sector's alternative it's not gold is the alternative but we now have of we you know we now have the method of using gold right because i

but i have this this in my wallet right i can Yeah, I, but I can carry, if I have $100,000 worth of gold, I have $100,000 in this wallet. It's here. And I can use it to buy a pack of chewing gum. I could use it to buy a flat screen TV. I can use it to buy a car, right? So I can buy tiny things with it. I could buy expensive things with it. And here it is. I'm carrying it around. Right. And I can use it through my cell phone. I can take my cell phone and pay for stuff. And ownership of my gold will instantly transfer to a third party. And of course, if you want to gift money, if I want to give money to my kids, I can give them gold. Then they can spend it. Right. They can spend it using their debit card or they can directly spend it. So this is the real alternative. This is what these cryptocurrencies are promising to be, but they never will be. But I think a lot of people are

getting greedy. A lot of people think, oh, these things are going to be worth a million dollars a piece and, you know, pie in the sky. And it's like that greed overwhelms them and they can't think rationally, you know, and anybody that doesn't agree with them doesn't get it. And I had this, you know, the same mentality permeates every bubble. People can't think rationally. And, you know, as the price goes up, you just become more emboldened in what you believe because you're getting rewarded by the market for your mistake. But you don't think it's a mistake because you're getting rich and you're looking at people like me. Hey, look, you know, Peter, he's not buying. Look at all the money he's not making. He's a fool. He should be buying these cryptocurrencies. So, you know, there's an old expression, too. Don't confuse brains with a bull market. There's certainly a

bull market in cryptocurrencies. I think it's a bubble. And I think the people who are making money, some of them are going to get lucky, right? Some people are going to cash out and they're going to make money. But the money that people make is going to match the money that people lose because you're going to have a lot of people who are going to come in late to the party. They're going to buy and they're going to be left holding the bag. Now, of course, there's going to match the money that people lose. Because you're going to have a lot of people who are going to come in late to the party. They're going to buy, and they're going to be left holding the bag. Now, of course, there's going to be a lot of losses that aren't real money. Let's say somebody bought Bitcoin a few years ago, and they paid $1,000, and now it's worth $100,000.

But they haven't sold, because they think it's going to $10 million. If it goes to zero, all they lost was $1,000, even though it was worth $100,000. But mentally, they lost a lot more, because they thought they had all this money. And mentally, they got used to having, oh, and it's going to be even more. So there's going to be a lot of dreams that are going to be shattered, right? Because a lot of paper profits are going to just go to money heaven because they're just not going to be there. But ultimately, the only real money that's going to be made is by the people who cash out. Because this is just a self-generating Ponzi scheme. It's all about needing new people. And that's why I think a lot of people into the cryptocurrencies, they get so upset when somebody

like me doesn't get it, because they need more people. They need a bigger market. They need more buyers to come in, to keep paying a higher price, to keep it all going. And so if somebody comes out and says, hey, the emperor has no clothes, you know, because if a lot of people decided they wanted to sell their cryptocurrencies, the price would collapse. And then what would happen? I mean, what happens if Bitcoin goes from $4,000 to $1,000? How do you now make an argument that it's money? How do you console the people that bought it at $4,000 and now it's at $1,000? And then what if it goes to $100? And then what if it goes to zero? Now, you know, there was a time Bitcoin went up to $1,000 and then it went down to $200. And then it rallied. So now people are convinced,

okay, well, if it sells off, it's just going to rally back. What if it doesn't? It doesn't have to come back. It can keep on falling, especially since there's so many cryptocurrencies now that compete with Bitcoin. Right. I've said, you know, how many people search on on Yahoo versus Google? I mean, Yahoo was before Google. Or how many people are on MySpace today? Right. I mean, you know, people are on Facebook. So how do you know that that that Bitcoin isn't the the MySpace of cryptocurrencies? But again, I don't think any of these cryptocurrencies will work. But I do think they will work if they back them by gold. You can have a cryptocurrency backed by gold.

The only problem there is the government won't like that because that'll work so well that the government will shut it down. The government will go and... So that's why like... How will they shut it down? Well, they might say there's money laundering going on, you know, but that's why gold money... See, gold money does all the know your customer.

They know all the KYC. So when you open up a gold money account and you own physical gold, they do make sure they get your photo ID. They get all this information on you. So they're they're they're complying with government rules and regulations. So there's no there's no nobody's extorting money using gold money. There's no criminals. I mean, that is where and and people have argued with me. I've pointed out that, yes, the one place that Bitcoin seemed to be used as money is in crime.

If I was going to blackmail you and I was going to threaten to shut down your podcast unless you send me some money, I can demand payment in Bitcoin. And the reason I'm doing that is because of the anonymity. I think that I can get away with the crime. And I don't care if the Bitcoin loses 20 percent of its value between the time you give it to me and the time I cash it in, because criminals are used to paying to launder their money. They just want whatever they get is gravy. But, you know, if I'm a merchant and I'm selling like I sell gold, right, I sell gold and my margin in my gold business is about one percent. So if I sell gold for ten thousand dollars, my gold business is about 1%. So if I sell gold for $10,000, I bought it for $990. I have a little bit of profit.

I can't afford to do that business in Bitcoin. I mean, Bitcoin can move 2%. I've wiped out all my profit, and I've lost money. I need something that is very stable. But if I'm a criminal, just extorting money doesn't matter. So it can work for criminals, but that's where the governments can crack down on it. I've got to wrap this up. So if people wanted to get involved in this, what would be the best resource for them to get information on how to get started?

Well, they should go to the website goldmoney.com, just open up an account online. And the beauty of this is, too, and you can do this yourself, they have a referral program that as you refer people, you send them your own link. So once you open up your gold money account, you get a referral link, and now you can send it to your friend. And now if they open up an account, you get some free gold. So you actually get paid. And so as you educate people, it's kind of like a marketing, but they will compensate you in extra gold.

And so when you open up your account, they'll give you a little free gold. You get a little free gold for referring somebody i could sponsor it on this podcast you should get a little bit of free gold yes you can i mean in fact with the number of people that you have on the podcast you can get a lot of free gold this seems like you could have a big ad like our whole podcast was a big a big fake ad for free gold yeah well it's well it's really for the concepts of freedom. Gold is economic freedom, right? I mean, that's like even Alan Greenspan, that was the title of his essay, Gold and Economic Freedom. But it is. And the more people that we can move into their own personal gold standard, the more people that can save in gold. And the beauty of a gold money

account, you have your money in a bank account. What if the bank fails? This money is banked. Your gold is banked, but you own it. It's not being loaned out to anybody. It money in a bank account what if the bank fails you know this money is banked your gold is banked but you own it it's not being loaned out to anybody it's in a storage facility with your name by brinks so you can spend it when you put your money in a bank account they loan it out to somebody you know and you know me ask there's government insurance but so what they just have to print a bunch of money you're you you can bank your gold without having to put it into the banking system. There's no bail-ins that you have to worry about or bank failures. You don't have to worry about inflation.

It doesn't matter how much money the government prints. They're not mining any gold. Gold is going to maintain its value. So to the extent that you don't spend it right away, it's going to gain value between the time you deposit it or the time you earn it and the time you go to spend it. So it's a great store of value. But thanks to the Internet, it is the best medium of exchange. It's because it's so easy now to do it. So you can get out, you know, you can promote it, the people that listen to the podcast.

I mean, and again, there are other people that say, oh, Peter, you know, you don't like Bitcoin because you're promoting gold money. You know, if I thought Bitcoin was going to work, believe me, I'd have been all over it, right? I mean, I have a person of very high principles and standards. You know, I started selling gold long before I had a gold company. I used to tell my brokerage accounts at Europe Pacific Capital, I would tell them, look, buy some gold, and I would just send them, just go buy it. I didn't sell it. And the money that they used to buy gold was money I couldn't manage. Now, I make money, you know, managing money for fee or

commissions. And if people took their money and bought gold, I wasn't making any money, but I thought they should buy it because it was the right thing to do. And I got involved with gold money because I thought that they were on to something. I thought that they were doing something big. It's more than just about money. It's about a crusade to take back our freedom, which I think begins with money. Taking the power away from government is rejecting the source of that power, which is the money they spend to corrupt the economy. So to the extent that more and more people, I mean, this is the most important vote. It doesn't matter who you vote for in an election. Vote with your feet on the money. Vote away from the fiat-based system and vote in favor of gold, right? That's

the monetary system that our founders believed in. That's what was embodied in the Constitution, and that's what worked. And you get that sweet card that's made out of actual gold that makes you feel good. Yes, you can get a plastic card for free. I don't want that. But you have to pay for the gold card, but the beauty of it is, it's worth its weight in gold. So even though you have to pay for it,

you own that gold. It's worth it. Yes, because it's actual gold. You can melt it down. It feels good to have. Yes. I mean, you know. I need to have one in my life. People have to understand. Let me hold it one more gold. You can melt it down. It feels good to have. Yes. I mean, you know. I need to have one in my life. People have to understand. Here, you want to. Let me hold it one more time. Yeah. Want to hold it, Jamie?

Yeah. Feel that. Feel that. There's not that many people that have those. Yeah. Those are. Feel that? That feels legit, doesn't it?

Actually better than a black card. Way better. Way better than a black card. You're just an asshole. They actually have all the concierge. They sign up, too. You can get all those benefits, too. Oh, like you can with American Express.

Yeah, they sign you up. Reservations and stuff. Yes, they have the concierge. They have all those programs. So you don't give that stuff up. You just have real money behind your... You just have to make sure that if you throw it in a restaurant that you get it back. I like it.

Listen, we're going to come back. Next time you're here. Hopefully, this will have taken off and you can say, see, I told you. Yes. Thank you so much, man. It's always been a pleasure. Really appreciate it. Is it three hours already? Yeah, it flew by, man. We started late. It hasn't even been three hours. We're good. That was amazing.

Thank you. You have so much energy, man.