The Pomp Podcast - Peter Schiff, Chief Economist and Global Strategist at Euro Pacific Capital: Bitcoin Scarcity and Why Censorship is Futile

Episode Date: October 27, 2019

Peter Schiff is the Chief Economist and Global Strategist at Euro Pacific Capital. In this conversation, Peter and Anthony Pompliano discuss the history of money, the macro economy, the current signs of an impending crisis, why he's so bullish on gold, what his concerns around Bitcoin are, and Peter confirms that Bitcoin is scarce, and that it can't be censored or seized. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO.COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Peter Schiff is the chief economist and global strategist at Euro Pacific Capital. In this conversation, we discuss the history of money, the macro economy, the current signs of an pending crisis, why he is so bullish on gold, what his concerns around Bitcoin are. And then Peter confirms that Bitcoin is scarce and that it can't be censored or seized. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you do as well. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right. Crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal. Mother f***ing mass

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All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

All right, guys, bang, bang. I finally have the man, the myth, the legend, Peter Schiff. He is here and ready to explain everything about gold, Bitcoin and why he has heavy bags. But thanks so much in all seriousness. Thanks for coming on and doing this, Peter. Sure, Pom. Thanks for inviting me on. Yeah. So look, before we get into, I think, what everyone actually wants to hear, let's go through your background. Because as I've talked to folks, I don't think most people outside of the hardcore gold community really know what you've done and kind of how you've

built a number of these businesses. So just kind of where'd your career start? And let's kind of go through step by step how you got to today? Well, I just got my start in the investment industry. After I got out of college, I kind of got into futures and options and was working in those markets kind of just as a retail broker. And early on, I kind of realized that there was a lot of gambling involved there. And, you know, the brokers were making money, which was great for me, but it was hard to make money for the clients consistently because, you know, by the time you finish charging him a commission, if they kept on trading, you could potentially beat the markets, but it was hard to overcome the vig of the commission. So I didn't stay in commodities

that long. And then I got into the stock market. I started working at Lehman Brothers for a while and I was kind of disillusioned there. I didn't really like the, you know, the strategies or the management. Again, I thought it was more focused on the firm and not as much on the retail client that I really wanted to build my business based on, you know, doing what I thought was right for the client in the long run. And I thought, you know, that would ultimately benefit me more than some of the shortcuts that I saw brokers taking back at Lehman. And so I kind of started my own firm and I bought a small broker dealer that really didn't have any clients that some guy had set up in Florida. And I bought it and renamed it Europe Pacific Capital. And that was back in

about 1996-1997. And so at that time, the US stock market was going through the dot-com bubble. And so what I really started to do at that time with my clients was start warning about that bubble and encouraging people to take profits or get out of the NASDAQ and get out of the dot-coms. And of course, I was a few years too early on that because as I was telling people to sell these stocks, they kept going up. But I was confident that this was a bubble and that it would end badly. And so I was buying people, you know, the stocks that I thought would do well in the aftermath of that bubble popping. You know, everybody wanted a new economy. And so I was buying an old economy. You know, I was buying, you know, gold stocks, but I was buying oil stocks.

I mean, oil was under $20 a barrel. No one wanted it. I was buying in Russia. I was buying in Kazakhstan. You know, then I was buying utilities in New Zealand, Australia. I was buying stuff in Hong Kong and some emerging markets and nobody wanted that stuff. And so it was going down. But when the dotcom bubble popped in 2000 and, you know, I had been forecasting a 90 percent drop in the Nasdaq and, you know, it dropped 80 percent. So it didn't quite hit 90, but pretty, pretty close. But when that happened, that's when all my stuff turned. You know, The dollar had been very high during that dotcom era when we had budget surpluses and people were saying, oh, we're going to pay off the national debt. We have surpluses as far as the eye can see. And I knew that was a bunch of nonsense.

So when the dollar peaked and it went on about an eight year decline and it hit an all time record low by 2008, you know, we made a tremendous amount of money in the foreign stocks, emerging markets and gold stocks. That kind of that party ended in 2008, ironically, with the financial crisis, which was something that I then began to forecast for years. Because once the dotcom bubble popped and the Fed slashed rates to one percent, I began warning about a much bigger bubble that the Fed was inflating in the housing market and how this was going to be all even more damaging than the dotcom bubble that they inflated. And I even wrote a book about it called Crash Proof, How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse. I wrote most of that book in 2005. It was finished by early 06. And it finally was published in early 07 when it came out. And, you know, it was pretty pressy in as far as the timing.

And then, you know, the dot-com bubble popped. We had the collapse of the mortgage market. Along the way, I helped set up a hedge fund that shorted the subprime market in 2006. And that that paid off big in a big way in 2007 for us. But, you know, I all of a sudden then I got some notoriety because I had been going on CNBC and Bloomberg and Fox Business and CNBC, CNN pretty much every week for about two or three years from 2005 through 2008. I was like a regular guest and I was the one guy that was saying this is a bubble. This is a phony economy. Housing prices are going to crash. The stock market is going to go down. We're headed for this huge recession. The banks are a mess. You know, they're a disaster. Fannie and Freddie are going to go bankrupt.

I was saying this stuff and everybody was laughing at me, but they kept inviting me back on because, you know, I guess they they enjoyed it or it was good ratings. But then when everything that I had been forecasting came true, people started to notice me. I started to get, you know, following on the internet. Somebody made a montage of a bunch of my interviews and they called it Peter Schiff was right. And that ended up getting a couple of million views back when a couple of million views was a lot of views for a YouTube video. It's not as big a deal anymore, but back then in 2009, it was a lot, it was a lot of views. And so, you know, I wrote a few more books, you know, I got more popular, but then interestingly enough the the mainstream media kind of forgot about me you know they stopped inviting me on and so i lost a

lot of that access that i had but i developed my own access uh through the internet you know i had a failed campaign for a senate in connecticut in 2010. i had a radio show that i did daily two hours a day for a few years that i eventually stopped doing because i just didn't have the time to do it and i started doing the podcast a peter schiff show podcast where i just record those you usually a couple of weeks, you know, when I have time to do them. But, you know, I've got a pretty good following on the Internet now and, you know, on social media. But my main business is asset management. So I grew Europe Pacific Capital. I eventually started Shift Gold, which was Europe Pacific Precious Metals that became Shift Gold. I partnered up with some guys in Canada. We started

Europe Pacific Canada, which has been renamed Echelon Global Partners. I started Europe Pacific asset management which uh is now operating here in puerto rico which is where i live i started euro pacific bank which is also relocated here in puerto rico and so those two businesses are running out of puerto rico uh the asset management company in the bank and and so mainly i'm you know in in the investment advisor business but you know i still you know do a lot on social media to try to advocate for what i believe in which is free market capitalism limited government, sound money. And, you know, I'm a critic of politicians on both sides of the aisle because it seems that nobody is doing it right. All right. I got a lot of questions. You've

done a whole bunch of life. Where did the name Euro Pacific come from? Well, you know, when I named a company that I was focusing on a lot of these foreign stocks. So I wanted to have kind of like a you know an international sound i was on the pacific i was on the west coast um and so it just seemed like you know the euro the euro currency was just you know starting and it was like euro seemed like a popular word so i just came up with euro euro pacific capital as as the name of the company got it and then um you know it seemed that you uh were able to kind of call out the the tech bubble um maybe you didn't time it perfectly but but for the most part said hey is overheated and then again uh kind of late 2000s what were some of the signals that um you saw that

really kind of either identified those bubbles or were the the main drivers as to why you thought um hey you know right now is not a great time and we're likely to go down and from an economy standpoint in the short term well the tech bugable i mean that one to me was very obvious i mean the the valuations that were being assigned to these companies i mean i remember yahoo at the time was i used to use this as an example to my prospects and clients the value of yahoo alone that one company was worth more than every company in new zealand as a country like you could buy the entire new zealand stock market and it would be cheaper than buying yahoo and to me that seemed like look i could buy this whole country or i could buy yahoo and so you know and i looked at a lot of

these companies that were making no profits and i couldn't see how they would ever make a profit it. But, you know, most people didn't care. I mean, it was just all a bubble. And I was able to see that attitude. And so the same thing happened during the real estate bubble as I was watching people buy houses and flip houses. And I was a renter. I was even subleasing some space to mortgage brokers. And I could see firsthand how they were, you know, you know, dumbing up applications and they were basically fraudulently changing people's incomes and things like that and to try to get them to qualify to get a mortgage refinanced. And I can see the insanity going on.

I was in Southern California, and so real estate prices were going up a lot. And I knew the Fed was behind both bubbles because I could, you know, see the monetary policy that was being pursued at the time. And, you know, I'm a student of history. I know how central banks inflate bubbles, and I know what happens when they pop. But, you know, one thing I wanted to mention, just as an interesting anecdote, we talked about europe city capital so when i named the company europe city capital my tagline was there's always a bull market somewhere because there's always a bull market somewhere

and i did that because at the time i did it you know early on you know the us was not doing well and all these foreign markets were and so that was my tagline and then i i did a an interview with jim cramer uh way back when this is before he even had a show and he interviewed me and he liked my tagline so he stole it from me because he didn't start using it until after he interviewed me and we were on my website and he saw you know because there's always a bull market somewhere and they basically just took it and adopted it for himself but but i had it first all right so what when you look at these bubbles um in terms of kind of how your outlook on the market is would you consider yourself like a perma bear or are there times where you're also saying hey look

you know things are very undervalued and we're about to enter a bull market you kind of um start preaching the uh the long argument um of markets as well yeah you know people kind of look at me as a perma bear but i'm you know i'm really not because if you look at what i was saying like what when i was bearish on the u.s stock market uh during the dot-com bubble and i was right about that the market the market collapsed not quite as much as i expected but that was because the fed did more than i expected i didn't expect the fed to take rates to one percent but when they did right i became bullish on the u.s stock market 2001 2002 time frame but i didn't recommend that anybody invested it i said look the fed is printing all this money

so they're going to reflate stock prices but it's also going to cause the dollar to go down and so it's better to invest internationally buy foreign stocks buy commodities buy gold and that advice uh was was very prescient because we made a lot more money during those years 2003 2004 2005 by being long global equities instead of u.s equities i was not telling people to short u.s stocks i just thought we'd have better returns in foreign stocks and gold stocks and i was right about that where the u.s market surprised me was its recent outperformance the outperformance maybe in 2013 14 15 during those years because when i was forecasting the bursting of the housing bubble and uh you know the great recession that would follow with the financial crisis i assumed that

the world would figure it out after that and that we would have a bigger relative bear market in u.s assets relative to foreign assets i thought the dollar would continue to lose value uh but that didn't happen because you know you had this big rally in the dollar and everybody uh became even more convinced that the us was you know in great shape they believed the fed they believed ben bernanke when he was out there saying we're going to normalize interest rates we're going to shrink our balance sheet everybody believed him i mean i knew that he was lying but the markets believed him and so you had this rush back into u.s assets and u.s stocks ended up outperforming for a number of years but but i still think that i'm ultimately going to be proven right on this forecast because

all these years that we were able to kick the can down the road the real fundamentals of the u.s economy have gotten much worse the u.s economy today is in much worse shape than it was in 08 or 1999 and the crisis that we're heading towards is going to be far greater than what we experienced in 2008 and and rather than the dollar rallying as a result of the crisis i think the dollar is going to be the crisis and then you know bonds u.s treasury bonds i think it's going to be a currency crisis and a sovereign debt crisis you know whether or not you know the stock market uh collapses relative you know in dollar terms it's hard to say i think it's going to go down but i think the real declines are going to be measured relative to gold or other assets that

you can own because when the fed creates a lot of money and money loses value and you're trying to measure stock prices in terms of a dollar that's also losing value it's a moving target you know so i i i'm telling people to buy things that i think are going to go up more than the u.s stock market when the dollar goes down got it and so wait before we get to kind of the impending crisis and some of the things that you think people should be doing uh what's up with the senate run i didn't know that what was the thought process there well you know there really wasn't much of a thought process into it i got drafted into it because you know as i got popular in 2009 and i kind of developed an online following a lot of people wanted me to run for senate and

one of the reasons was that christopher dodd was the incumbent democratic senator from connecticut and he was one of the big defenders of fannie and freddie he was saying how solvent solvent they were and how they were in great shape at the same time he was saying that i was saying they were insolvent and going bankrupt so it seemed like a good contrast you know the guy that defended fannie and said they were great uh versus the guy that called them out and said they were going to go bankrupt and but and so people wanted me to run for senate to run against dodd but anyway what ended up happening was dodd decided not to run for re-election and so he wasn't even a factor but the minute dodd dropped out right all of a sudden other republicans came in and so it screwed

up my chances if dodd had stayed in i don't think lynda mcmahon would come into the race because what made lynda mcmahon think she could win was the fact that dodd was stepping down and that was an open seat and so this guy dick blumenthal was coming in to have been attorney general and and so and lynda spent 50 million dollars in the primary or in the no she spent 30 million in the primary 50 million total but she spent 30 million against me i only spent three and a half million uh and a million of that was my money a little over a million the rest of it two and a half million i got from donations you know it's mostly small donations around the country but she spent so much money that i you know and she got a lot more media than i did free media

a lot of the media in connecticut decided not to cover me uh you know and the interesting was in the polls all the polls like even going into the election i was polling at like three percent four percent i got 23 of the vote linda got you know uh like 45 and then or 50 and then there was another guy that got you know about the same as me maybe a little more this guy rob simmons who had been a congressman for 20 years in connecticut he was a he was the establishment republican and then linda kind of stole my fire as the outsider business person but you know a lot of people were telling me that the reason they didn't vote for me is because they didn't think i had a chance because i was so low in the polls but i actually got 23 of the vote and so you know

it's possible that you know had the polls been more accurate people might have been a little bit more encouraged and you know there was only one debate we had one debate early on and i i won that debate every newspaper said i won that debate and after that debate linda refused to have any more debate so i lost the opportunity to debate linda mcmahon because after the first one that not that many people saw she refused to debate me again so i you know you went to debate yeah oh this is this is the other worst part about this is what the republicans did to me in in connecticut so we went to the convention in connecticut and you know you have to get nominated and every year except my year the nominees are allowed to give a speech right to the convention hey this is who

i am this is why you should nominate me so lynda mcmahon lobbied and she got them to change that so that nobody was allowed to give a speech because she didn't want people to hear me talk she knows i'm a good speaker so they changed it so that you could just submit a five minute video so instead of addressing the convention we were only allowed to submit a five minute video so linda's video played first she had her five minute video then rob simmons video played and And then when it came to play my video, the video equipment broke. And so my video didn't play. So not only did I not get to address the convention, I didn't even get to play my video.

Coincidentally, it happened to break down just in time for my video. And then I ended up, you know, just barely missing. I didn't quite get enough votes because Linda had her people out there, you know, spreading rumors about me to try to make sure I didn't get enough votes to get on a ballot. So then I had to spend another $150,000, and I became the first person in Connecticut to ever petition his way onto a nationwide ballot. And I ended up getting on the ballot in the Republican nomination that year. But again, it was a complete waste of money because I ended up – I didn't go anywhere. And that was kind of the end of my political career. It kind of started, though, with Ron Paul.

I was an economic advisor to his presidential campaign in 2008. and he was the only guy that was running in 08 that was critical of the Fed and that understood the bubble. Yeah, for sure. And so let's talk a little bit, you're a huge proponent of gold and obviously have the asset management business, et cetera. Maybe talk to us just kind of about your philosophy around asset management and personal finance, and then how you look at something like gold and how that fits into that portfolio construction. Yeah, well, I look at gold has money and and so it's if you want to just have some dry powder if you want to have liquidity rather than just considering well i can keep dollars or i can keep euros or i can keep yen

what about gold i mean gold is the real deal gold is actual money all these currencies are are money substitutes of course when they were legitimate currencies they were backed by gold and it was the gold backing that gave them their value but once governments went off the gold standard uh you know then they became fiat and and so they're you know they don't have uh any any real value they they have you know market value uh and they have the value of being legal tender and they have the value that uh you know they're used as a medium of exchange and that they're uh accepted in payment of taxes and stuff like that but they don't have the real value that gold has and so if you really want to just not invest in stocks because you think they're expensive or

not invest in bonds or not invest in real estate you want to just keep some savings i think gold is a much better vehicle to save than any of these fiat currencies and if you go back over time that is the case now if you can get a high enough interest on your fiat currency that interest may be able to confiscate confiscate you or compensate you for the loss of purchasing power that you're going to get on an annual basis because they keep printing more money but now when you have interest rates so low i mean most people don't get any interest at all i mean you've got negative interest rates in some cases so the argument for holding gold even over swiss francs now right where you have negative rates has never been stronger so that's you know i think they're

gonna you know you want to keep some uh dry powder you should buy gold uh but you know i think gold is underpriced though given how much money has been created over the last decade or two and how much more money is going to be created to try to keep these bubbles from deflating the price of gold should be much higher and it would be much higher if more people understood this and over time they're going to figure it out and the price is going to go much higher but in the meantime people who figure it out early should be loading up but i think the real profit potential if you want to make a lot of money off the increase in the price of gold not just preserve your wealth the gold stocks i think are a incredible opportunity i think there's a lot of small

stocks that are going to go up 10x 20x 50x maybe even 100x uh by the end of this bull market and so for the speculators who really want to try to you know strike it rich you know in the gold rush they should be looking at gold mining stocks i you know we we have a separately managed accounts of mining stocks uh and we also have a gold fund the europe pacific gold fund ep gfx is the symbol on my gold fund and yes it's speculative i mean most of the money we manage is not in gold stocks it's a more conservative dividend paying foreign stocks but for the people who really want to bet big that i'm right on gold if i am right that's going to be the big payoff like i you know i did the subprime short and we make good money uh shorting the subprime market i think the payoff

on long gold stocks is actually going to be bigger than the subprime short what's your take on bitcoin i know that you're a huge detractor um give us kind of high level philosophically what's why are you so bearish on yeah well you know the fed created the dot-com bubble the fed created the housing bubble and the fed created the bitcoin bubble you know maybe not exactly the same way but i think bitcoin started out as kind of a reaction to all the monetary policy mistakes that the fed had made and people were looking out for an alternative uh and bitcoin came on the scene and you know initially uh you know there was a libertarian community a hard money community that was playing around with it you know i found out about it early on um and you know just kind of

dismissed it uh because my initial read on it was well what's to stop somebody else from coming up with another cryptocurrency which of course nothing did there's thousands of them now and i didn't see the intrinsic value in it but i also didn't see that the bubble potential i mean i really didn't think it would grow to the scale that it did otherwise i could have thrown some money at it as a flyer but i initially kind of dismissed it because of the properties that it didn't have right uh and and of course then you know when it all of a sudden it came on the scene and went up to a thousand and i remember where that happened and all of a sudden you know people started talking about it and um you know they mentioned it on cnbc and it was there and i think

what really kind of breathed life into it is once gold kind of peaked out uh at 1900 and silver peaked out on at 50 you had this this bear market that went on in the precious metals pretty vicious you know uh correction for a number of years and that frustrated a lot of you know people that would be buying gold and silver and all of a sudden they saw bitcoin kind of going up and gold and silver were going down and i think that created uh some initial demand but all of a sudden they took on you know uh these bubble characteristics i you know they didn't pull back you know it got back down to 200 you know 300 it stayed there for a couple of years and i and i actually you know thought about you know maybe i should buy some just you know just as a

as a speculation but i just couldn't convince myself to pay two or three hundred dollars for something that i didn't want to buy at twenty dollars uh you know fundamentally i didn't see any difference in it and and then you know the bubble really went crazy when it went up to 20 000 and that's when i think the whole mania peaked and you had everybody buying it people were calling me up wanting to buy it i had clients calling me up when bitcoin was 15 000 or wanting to put their whole iras into bitcoin i mean nobody ever called me to buy any bitcoin until that point i mean i talked about it and i said i you know i didn't think it was going to work as money and i still don't think it's going to work as money. But the bubble, it really was a frenzy. And, you know,

when I talk to people now who are kind of in Bitcoin and just kind of committed to it, like all into it mentally, they own a bunch of it. To me, it's exactly like when I was talking to people about real estate in 2005 and 2006. My house is never going to go down. It's always going to go up. You're a fool for renting. You know, you're wasting your money. I mean, People were completely into this. They thought there was no way their real estate could go down. And the same stuff, you know, I talked to people until I was blue in the face about the dot-com stocks that ultimately, you know, a lot of them, most of them went bankrupt. But I remember the attitudes that people had about their favorite dot-com stock.

Even if they acknowledged that other stocks could collapse, the ones that they owned were never going to go down. I mean, so people have a certain attitude that they assume when they're trapped in the bubble and how it influences their behavior and their way of thinking. And I see all of those characteristics, maybe even stronger when it comes to the people who are in Bitcoin. But I just think this is another big bubble. It's going to pop. Personally, I think the high is in for this bubble. I think that spike up to 20,000 at the end of 2017 around the launch of the Bitcoin futures and all that hysteria. I think that was it. And I think now it's a question of the air coming out. You know, we have these sucker rallies, you know, bull markets, the bear markets fall a slope of hope.

You know, you have rallies. People get excited. Oh, it's going to 20,000. It's going to 50,000. But I think the smart money is just trying to get out, you know, and I think it's at this point, you know, you don't want to be the bad holder, you know. So let's go through kind of first from a macro standpoint, right? I'm going to put Bitcoin and gold in the same bucket for the moment. I know you don't want to agree to that, but let's just put it in the same bucket and say the macro environment that we're in today, there's a lot to be concerned about, right? I think there's a lot of what I'll call kind of warm bells going off. And earlier, we're talking about kind of the funding crisis around the currency crisis, the sovereign debt, bonds, etc. First, let's just talk about why you think people should be looking at this bucket, whether it's gold, Bitcoin, whatever it is, due to that macro environment.

And then we can get into, you know, talking through the differences between Bitcoin and gold. But just from a macro standpoint, like what are the signals that you're seeing that has you kind of ringing those alarm bells and saying, hey, people should be paying attention again? Well, you know, when you get to a point now where you've got negative interest rates, right, you know that we're kind of at the end of the rope here. Because what these central banks have been doing in order to avoid the political pain of having to address economic imbalances, having to cut government spending, right, having to allow debt to be restructured and investors to lose money, they keep kicking the can down the road by lowering and lowering interest rates. But the biggest problem in the global economy is that interest rates are too low. That is the problem. That's not the solution. That is the problem. And the longer they keep rates and the lower they keep them, the bigger the problem gets. It's that, you know, but every time they get a new basic injection of cheaper money, you know, there's like a high.

Right. All of a sudden, you know, oh, it's like if you're an individual and you're you're broke, you've run up a bunch of credit card debt and you're about to go bankrupt. And all of a sudden, somebody sends you another credit card with another $10,000 limit. Oh, great. Now I can go out. And all of a sudden, you go out and start spending money again because you got another credit card. Well, all that means is that you're going to end up with even more debt than you had before. Your problems haven't been solved. You've just been able to kick them to can down the road because now you can go deeper into debt.

But ultimately, you end up with an even bigger problem than when you had before because now you owe even more money. And so this is what the central banks are doing. we have too much debt and whenever uh that debt becomes a problem like it did in 2008 they just swole we need even more debt we need to have an even bigger bubble and now we don't have to deal with the problems of of this smaller bubble and so they keep lowering interest rates but as they do that they're interfering with the real economy what the real economy wants is higher interest rates. They want more savings, more capital investment, less spending, less speculation. We need to have a restructuring. And as the central banks resist that, we're just getting

the economy is getting sicker. Right. It's like if you're you know, you're high on drugs and every time you stop taking drugs and now you start going through withdrawal, they just give you more drugs. So, you know, the drugs never get out of your system and you know, you never you know, you never cure your habit because you keep taking drugs every time the effect starts to wear off but at some point right they keep lowering rates lowering rates lowering rates and now they get to zero and now they still want to lower rates and they don't realize that the lower rates the problem it's like i've used the analogy to a medieval uh you know barbers doctors whatever they used to call them uh with bloodletting right they'd have a patient who was sick and the solution is oh oh

we need to take some blood out. We need to bleed them. Let's get leeches and take, you know, and then they take blood out and then the patient gets sicker. And as well, I guess we didn't take out enough blood. Let's take out some more. And so I guess eventually you take out enough blood and the patient dies. They don't realize that the problem that their cure is actually making the patient sicker. And that's what the central banks are doing when they cut rates and they print money. They're actually making the underlying economy sicker, even though it doesn't look sicker because they're just measuring, you know, the spending that goes on and they're ignoring the debt that's behind it. So I think we're at the point now where we're going to overdose on

all this printing. I think that when this bubble pops, when the U.S. economy goes back into recession, the amount of money that they're going to have to print, right, is going to crash the dollar. I think inflation, which, you know, the way the government measures it is even, you know, running at two percent a little over two percent the way they measure it which is not very accurate by design but i think that inflation rate is going to continue to head higher three percent four percent five percent and people are going to lose confidence in holding on to dollars because if the inflation rate is four or five percent compounding and you're getting zero percent interest or one whatever on your dollars uh you know that's a one-way ticket to a disaster and people are going

want to cash that in. They're going to want to jump that ship before it sinks. And where are they going to go? Right. I mean, it's going to be a currency crisis. And I think inflation is going to break out all around the world. And, you know, a lot of these central banks have been hiding behind low inflation. They've been saying, oh, inflation is not high enough. We need more inflation. And that's been a justification for this monetary policy. But, you know, low inflation is not a problem. I mean, zero inflation is better than low inflation and falling prices are better than prices that are rising slightly but the central banks are pretending that we can't have economic growth unless prices rise by two percent a year or more which is a bunch of self-serving

nonsense but at some point the inflation is going to be high enough that they can no longer uh you know pretend that the problem is there's not enough inflation and now they're forced to raise rates but that's what it hits the fan because now the debt bubble pops and now you have to pay the piper and i think you know the country that's got the biggest tab is going to be the united states because we've basically benefited the most from this monetary system this fiat based system because we're the center of it we're the reserve currency and americans have been able to live beyond their means more than any other nation we've been able to consume without producing we've been able to borrow without savings and we've built an entire economy based on the

perpetuation of of this uh continuing that we can run trade deficits forever and budget that's forever and keep having low interest rates and consumer prices that that aren't going up and when that whole thing changes there's a whole monetary crisis and you know i think that the only way out of the monetary crisis is for uh central banks to go back to gold i mean i think the united states convinced the world uh after the second world war uh to abandon the gold standard and to adopt the dollar standard uh mainly because the dollar was not only backed by gold but convertible into gold and we had all the gold we were the most powerful economy we had the biggest trade surpluses we were the biggest creditor nation and so the world trusted us and then we

screwed them over and you know we we basically defaulted on our promise in 1971 and we've been on this fiat system ever since i think the only thing that will work is for the world to go back to gold right some people think well you know the dollar is never going to lose its reserve status because you know what currency is the world going to go to they're not going to take the euro they're not going to take the yen i agree those are not viable alternatives but what is the most viable alternative is that the world simply goes back to what the uh reserve was prior to the dollar and that was gold got it why do you think that they can't just continue to print money and manipulate the economy like what stops them from just forever kicking the can down the road even

though structurally you know i agree with you that that it's absolute insanity like what stops them from just doing it forever well you know nothing that can't go on forever will right just like the housing bubble didn't go on forever the dot-com bubble this bubble won't go on forever because what is allowing it to happen is you know pretending that it's all temporary right when when the fed did chewy the secret to it not producing a crisis was the fed telling everybody this is temporary this is an emergency and when the emergency is over we're going to reverse process but reverse the process and normalize you know interest rates and shrink our balance sheet rates are not going to be down here and so the markets believed that this was temporary

and the fed always says look if inflation ever rears up you know we can fight it really easy right we can just jack up interest rates which is a lie they can't do that and they won't do that but as long as the markets believe that the fed has this under control that they can shrink their balance sheet they can normalize rates they can fight inflation well then maybe it goes on but at some point uh the the fed is going to have to put up or shut up because inflation is going to pick up right and they're not going to be able to fight it in fact the economy started to turn down and now what did the fed do the fed called off rate hikes they've now cut rates twice they're about to cut them again they've stopped shrinking their balance sheet they're now back

to quantitative easing they're not admitting that it's qe but they're actually expanding their balance sheet faster now than they were when they were doing qe so of course they're doing qe so the fed is already basically caught with his pants down and i don't think it's going to take much more and of course if donald trump isn't re-elected if we get one of these socialists Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and they want Medicare for all and free health care and all this stuff. I mean, that's going to blow the bank. I mean, you're going to be talking about three to four trillion dollar a year deficits. These are impossible to finance. I mean, we're already having a problem financing the deficits. That's why the Fed is back doing QE. There's just not

enough private demand for all the debt that the government is selling. What's your take in terms of uh the presidential election as um you know we're facing this kind of macro situation uh does anybody have a solid plan or or are they all just completely no one understands it no no no one has a plan i mean you know what was even talking about the debt and you watch these democratic debates there's never even a question on the debt nobody no one even mentions that and you know so i guess it's probably not even going to be an issue in the campaign right even though donald trump is the biggest deficit spender ever he's bigger than obama uh it's not even to be called in you know as an issue but no everybody has a plan to make government bigger uh you know they want more

government like look at these idiots you know an easy example is the college student loan crisis i mean one of the things that all these democrats want to talk about is how we have this huge student loan problem and we need to forgive the loans and make college free but all these democrats don't understand that the only reason we have a student loan problem is because of the government the only reason that there are student loans is because of the government without the government there would be no student loans the government made the loans the government guaranteed the loans and before the government guaranteed student loans college wasn't expensive you didn't need to borrow money to go to college before the government started that loan program

people either their parents paid for college or they had summer jobs like my dad and they worked their way through college it wasn't hard to do right but now it's impossible to do because the government has made college so expensive because of the moral hazards associated with student loans but now instead of you know getting government out of education so the cost can go down they want to make it free so the cost will be even higher right so they they have no clue all these socialists they look at these problems that were caused by socialist programs that have been mixed into a capitalist economy. And instead of recognizing that it's the socialism that's been mixed in with capitalism, that's the problem. They want to blame it on capitalism and they want even more

socialism, which, again, it's like the same thing the central banks do. They keep interest rates artificially low. They screw up the economy. And then they think, oh, we just need to make interest rates even lower. We have to print even more money. And now they screw up the economy even more. And so the solution is let's do more of the same. So if President Peter Schiff ever happened what would you do like what is the solution you hit on a little bit of it already but like what's the the perfect plan well look you know there is no perfect plan right i mean it's you know we we we're gonna have to have a severe recession if we're ever going to uh you know build a a viable economy right trump campaigned about making america great again

you know i would love to make america great again but i recognize that the road to greatness is is a very bumpy road and and so if we do all the right stuff you know it's going to be difficult initially for a lot of people just like you know i mentioned the drugs in our analogy you know if you're a drug addict and you want to kick the habit and you're going to go to rehab i mean rehab is you know it's not like going to club med i mean it's not it's not fun that's why it's hard for people to go there but if you do it and you do the right thing you can improve your life so we have to go on a monetary rehab americans have to stop spending and buying stuff we have to start saving again we have to start uh making capital investments we have to start

dismantling a lot of the government uh you know we have to start getting rid of agencies and departments making government much much smaller we need to return a lot of government workers to the private sector so they can work productively and we've got to repeal a lot of these labor laws minimum wage laws and occupational licensing laws and all these discrimination laws that drive up the cost of employment uh you know because we're going to need to put people to work productively it'd be great if we can get rid of the income tax and the social security tax we can do that if we really shrink government but i don't think there's any way out of this that includes paying off the debt so we have to default on a lot of the debt i mean just like you

know argentina or other countries that have taken on too much debt america has to recognize we have too much debt we can't pay it off and we have to restructure it and it's not just the creditors who are going to take a haircut. We need to say the same thing to people who are expecting Social Security and Medicare. You're just not going to get what you were promised. You know, you're going to get less than you were promised. We need to find ways of phasing these programs out and means testing them on the way out. But, you know, we have to restore the freedom and the liberty that, you know, a century of big government has destroyed. We have to make America what it used to be, which is a bastion of free market capitalism, individual liberty, sound money.

If we do that, you know, we can achieve tremendous prosperity. You know, but what they're selling us now is just snake oil. It's just socialism. What do you think in terms of that default situation? Like, what does that look like, right? If we actually did say, OK, we're going to we're just going to kind of bite the bullet and we're going to default. Like what happens in that scenario? Well, I mean, the bondholders don't get back, you know, 100 cents on the dollar.

but the important thing to recognize is we're defaulting no matter what right because honest repayment is impossible right it is impossible to repay the debt right and so the only question is how do we default on it do we do it the honest way which is the way i think it should be done or are we going to do it to dishonest way which is the way it's probably going to be done and that's through inflation right you just print money right so you don't default on your obligations you print up all the money and you give everybody the money they're owed but what happens under that scenario is the money doesn't buy very much so the creditors lose out either way either they don't get back all of their dollars or they get back all their dollars but they don't get back their

purchasing power and under my scenario of an honest default i think the creditors will end up better off i think they'll actually have more purchasing power if they get paid 20 cents on the dollar you know whatever versus inflation where they maybe get two cents on the dollar right we have hyperinflation so you know my scenario would be better and it would be much better for the economy because the worst thing for the economy is to destroy the currency i mean that's much worse than defaulting on debt do you think we're headed there like is the currency screwed either way look the currency is going down the only question is you know is it going to go to zero or how close is it going to get but the dollar is going down i mean all fiat currencies

are going to go down i mean they're designed to go down in fact if you listen to what these central bankers are saying they want their currency to lose two percent of its value every year well after 50 years that's almost everything right so you know if you lose two percent of your value every year i mean you're you know you're going way down but you know the thing is if this if the central bankers are telling you they want the currency to lose two percent it's going to lose a lot more than that because not too long ago the central bankers were promising price stability they weren't saying that they wanted prices to go up two percent a year they said their goal was to have stable prices well when their goal was stable prices we still had rising prices so now that

their goal is rising prices imagine how much faster prices are going to rise when their goal is to make them rise so you know they're going to way overshoot this this so-called two percent number so we know that these currencies are going to go down they're going to go way down and the question is how fast and do you go down with the ship or do you do something about it do you abandon ship and that's what i've done right i mean i've gotten off the titanic and i'm in a in a light boat now i think people who are coming to this conclusion but who are going into bitcoin see i think they're jumping out of the frying pan into the fire i mean i i think that that fiat cryptocurrencies like bitcoin could end up zeroing out long before the dollar does

or close close to it so let's talk about gold and bitcoin right as this macro situation plays out um your belief is that we would return back to like a gold standard or are we going to walk around with gold coins in our pocket like like what do you actually think would be the solution and how gold plays into that well gold just needs to be the reserve that anchors currency so uh just like central banks now have reserves of foreign exchange most central banks also have gold as a portion of their reserves they just need to increase the gold component of those reserves and then fix their currency uh to the price of gold at some convertible rate i mean so you know when we were on a gold standard it didn't mean that you had to walk around with with gold coins

although some people did but we still had paper money except the paper money was backed by gold right you can get the gold if you wanted to but you can also transact in the paper and you know today with the you know the internet and in digital i mean you can transact in gold digitally it's not hard to do i mean you take a company like gold money uh that i'm associated with and you know you can have a gold money account but i can transfer you know any amount of gold from my account to anybody else's account i don't have to even give them a whole ounce i can give them a gram of gold right so i can i can you know pay for a small transaction instantly and transfer ownership of gold so people don't have to walk around with gold in order to be on a gold standard

you just have to have gold that's backing up to transactions you have to have gold as you know a monetary reference because the reason that we have gold is because gold replaced barter and what barter is is you know you're exchanging one product of value for another product of value gold or money was an invention that improved commerce because it was the commodity that would could be accepted in exchange for all commodities so that you know if if i was a chair maker and i wanted to buy a steak i didn't have to find a butcher who wanted one of my chairs right and that could take forever but i know hey i can give the butcher gold because he can use gold to buy whatever he wants everybody will accept gold as the one commodity that is the most liquid of all

commodities so it became money so that you have to have money has to be an actual commodity it just can't be something that's made up out of thin air it has to actually be a good that has value because that's what you're doing when you're buying and selling something and you're paying in gold you're paying in real value you're getting you're getting goods or services of value and you're paying with it with with something of value that's the problem with bitcoin if i'm transacting for bitcoin i'm giving somebody value either goods or services and they're giving me nothing they're giving me digital nothing they're not giving me anything that i can use you know i keep challenging the bitcoin people because they keep telling me that you know gold has no uses

and bitcoin does it's the opposite gold has all sorts of uses bitcoin has none i mean you could use bitcoin as a medium of exchange it's not a great medium of exchange but you could use it but you have to have an alternative use right i mean because let's say the price of bitcoin just collapses because people you know it's all about what people believe if people think it's going to be worth something they're willing to buy it but there's nothing that would prevent it from imploding because all of a sudden people stop believing it's going to go up and they no longer want to buy it that can't happen with gold because even if even if investors decided they didn't want any gold for whatever reason i don't think they would decide that but let's say the price of gold

crashed and let's say it went down to 500 an ounce from 1500. it's i don't think it's going to happen but let's say that happened because investors just stopped believing in it well there would be tremendous demand from industry from jewelry to buy up that gold i mean you know there's there's a lot of uses for gold people would look at that oh my god there's a sale on gold let me load up i I can buy some I can get some gold. And, you know, there's a lot of areas where gold would be used, but it's too expensive. So they use copper or some other metal that isn't as good, but doesn't cost as much. But as the price of gold comes down, more people will decide to use gold instead of lesser metals. And, of course, nobody's going to mine gold at five hundred dollars because it costs a hell of a lot more than that to mine it.

So there's no more supply coming on the market. And eventually the price would come back up because there's real demand. that but in Bitcoin there is no real buyer for Bitcoin there is no user of Bitcoin it's all speculation so if speculators no longer want to buy it because now they think it's going down and not going up to the thing implodes and the whole it's all over and so because of that I mean you can't store any real value in Bitcoin because any day you wake up and it could be gone because it's all an illusion it's all just on paper yeah but but so let's let's go through that though right I think that there is an argument that many, many other assets that you own outside of currencies have now become digital and you can make the exact same argument that tomorrow

you can wake up and they're gone. But that doesn't mean that they don't have value. Well, what do you mean? Give me an example. Well, let's take, for example, a music file. Let's take U.S. dollars, right? uh and well all right let's let's take a music file first of all so first of all a music file the value that i get from a music file is i can play the music and i can listen to it and that

can entertain me i can sing along to it i can dance to it i can create atmosphere for you know a romantic dinner or for a party so there's a use to that file and of course if the file gets destroyed i mean how much is the file a dollar i can you know it's not there's not a lot of monetary value there but there is actual use to me right that it's a bitcoin i can't do anything with bitcoin i can't it can't entertain me it can't it's not atmosphere right it doesn't do anything it's not an actual asset like a music you can definitely do something with it right because you can do you can do two things you can other you you can't other than other than exchange it to somebody else you have to come up with a use case i know i can give it to somebody

i can transfer it to somebody else if they want it but i'm not talking about that i'm talking about if i was sitting alone right in my house with my bitcoin what can i do with it i can listen to the music i can enjoy the music what can i do with my bitcoin well so there's a couple of different things that you can do one is you can store your wealth in bitcoin so hold on hold on you can store wealth you can you transact you also did you know that you could actually put a message onto the bitcoin blockchain you could write an immutable message okay so you're saying that the value of bitcoin is i it's like i can send a message well i can send a message on whatsapp i can send it and that costs me nothing why would i have to buy an expensive bitcoin to send a message when i can

send a message for free on whatsapp i mean it seems like a very expensive messaging service if you're saying that i could use bitcoin to send a message i'm not arguing that that's what gives it value but i'm saying that there that there's multiple that's what you came up with because when you said I can, I can get, I can transact it. That doesn't count. And saying store of value doesn't count either as a use. I'm saying, because storing value is not the use. The use is what you can do with it. Like the reason I store value in gold, right? The reason you say gold is a store of value is because if I have an ounce of gold today, there are a lot of things that that gold can be used for. It can be made into jewelry. It can be put into electronics. It can be made

in used in dentistry there's all sorts of things that it can be used for if i don't if i take that gold and store it for a hundred years you can still use it for those things a hundred years from now so the value of that gold is preserved because bold doesn't decay it doesn't rot right it stays exactly the same so everything i can do with my gold today that value is stored for the future well i can't do anything with bitcoin bitcoin today so if i can't do anything with it today it doesn't have any value that i can store into the future what when you talk about a store of value for bitcoin yes people that bought bitcoin years and years ago for 10 cents a dollar a hundred dollars they have more money now if they want to cash out that's not a store

of value what that means is what they bought went up in market value because somebody else now wants to buy it and is willing to pay more so they have a speculative gain on that asset it didn't store any value because there was no value but there was there is a perception and so you had an increase and you have the opportunity to sell at a profit just like there were people who bought dot-com stocks and they had the opportunity to sell for profit even though the underlying companies had no real value because they lost money and they had no prospect of ever making money but that didn't stop people on gambling on them and so they did and so people gambled on bitcoin and And if they're smart, they can cash out and they have a profitable gamble.

But the people who are buying what they're selling are the bag holders because now they're going to ride the thing down because there was never any value there to begin with. It was just a perception. And as soon as that perception changes, as soon as people no longer believe the price is going to keep going up, then there's no reason for anybody to own it. And then the price implodes. Skrrt, skrrt. Want to know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right.

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alternatives so you can actually take your bitcoin you can deposit it with blockfi and get paid an interest rate of six percent in return go check out blockfi.com slash pomp again blockfi.com slash pomp to sign up and start earning interest on your crypto today part of this is bitcoin is more scarce and sounder money than gold no no i mean a i mean it's scarce in that okay yes in theory there's only 21 million bitcoins right and assuming that that makes it more than gold right well look scarce look you know i could peter original Peter Schiff art is more scarce than gold. What is that worth? I mean, there are a lot of things that are scarce that don't necessarily have value. They have to be scarce and they have to have use

and be valuable. Right. Because scarcity doesn't mean anything if nobody wants it. Right. Because if you have and if nobody wants any Bitcoin, the fact there's 21 million of them, that's 21 million too many if nobody wants it. But even if you agree that no supercomputer or quantum computer is going be able to you know crack this and counterfeit the bitcoins and even if you forget about all the forks and the bitcoin cash and the bitcoin gold and the what a bitcoin this the bitcoin that even if you just want to focus just on bitcoin and say okay there's 21 million of them um there are 3 000 other cryptocurrencies that already exist um that have properties that are very similar to Bitcoin. Some have properties that are actually better than Bitcoin when it

comes to transactions. And so since Bitcoin doesn't offer anything that's unique, that other cryptocurrencies don't have or can't improve upon, then why does anybody think the scarcity matters? You know, when Bitcoin first started, right, and they were people trying to get me into it, the whole idea was that this was money this was a medium of exchange this is you could buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin nobody was talking about oh it's digital gold the value was that it was it was great as a medium of exchange well when it failed to do that when it really didn't function well as a medium of exchange then they came up with this alternative store that it's digital gold that well nobody's actually going to use it for anything they're just going to store it like

they store gold because gold isn't used for anything is a bunch of nonsense because gold is used for a lot of things. Gold is not worthless. Gold has a lot of value. That's why people own it. That's why it's being stored. So but Bitcoin, yes, when they created Bitcoin, it was designed to mimic gold. It was a counterfeit of gold. Right. They make they represent it like a gold colored coin, even though it has no color, it has no substance. You mine Bitcoin, even though you don't mine it, you solve a math problem. So they tried to make it out like they were creating gold out of nothing which you know but they're not you're not creating gold you don't have any actual gold that's why it's the ultimate fool's gold all right so we'll agree to disagree on uh

on that last statement but i think we at least established that bitcoin is more scarce than gold but to your point it's it's uh only important if there is demand for that scarce asset right so so i think that from a structural standpoint that's correct well how much gold when you say there's 20 it's scarce than gold there's only 21 million i mean but gold is not expressed in millions i mean you know are there 21 million ounces of gold in the world i don't think so that's a lot of i think that's a lot of ounces but so you're talking about you have to break you know gold down i mean all the gold in the world that's ever been mined would fit inside an olympic-sized swimming pool so that seems pretty scarce to me although you know i mean i think if you in order

to maintain the bitcoin network right because bitcoin is not just the bitcoins because bitcoin is nothing without all these computers all over the world that are required to you know operate the system and all the energy that is required to be expended in order to perpetuate the system so you know when you throw all that together i mean you know there's a lot more of that than there is gold all right we'll agree to disagree in terms of uh sound money right why do you think bitcoin is not sound money well because money by definition needs to be a commodity right and and bitcoin is not bitcoin doesn't have any value in and of itself the cftc says that it's a commodity well they're just trying to define it for regulatory purposes but it's not a commodity

like soybeans or a commodity or like oil is a commodity or like copper is a commodity it's not used i mean for all other commodities there's actual demand for the commodity it's used, right? If it's food, it's consumed. If it's metal, it's fashioned into something. But Bitcoin is not used by anybody for anything. So it is not technically a commodity, even if the TCCC wants to define it as a commodity so it can regulate it and so it can, you know, apply that to it. But it's not really a commodity just because the government wants to claim it is. You know, So, I mean, to me, it's more like a fiat currency if it's used as a medium of exchange, because fiat currency has no value either. It's just a piece of paper fundamentally. And ultimately, all fiat currencies historically have gone to zero.

And so, you know, and so I think the same thing would happen to the fiat currencies that exist today. It's just taking longer for it to happen. But to me, Bitcoin is more of a fiat currency because a currency is not money. A currency is a substitute for money. You could use currency instead of money, but it's not money, right? Because money is a specific type of commodity. A currency is a medium of exchange, but that doesn't make it money. Just because we use these words interchangeably now doesn't mean that that's what they are. Just like the definition of inflation is an expansion of the supply of money.

It's not prices going up, but we now, you know, redefine inflation to mean something that it doesn't mean. The same thing with money and currency. When you look at a Federal Reserve note that you have in your hand, it's currency, right? It's a note. The money was the dollars, the gold that used to back it up because the original Federal Reserve notes said on them, promise to pay. We'll pay to the bearer on demand, you know, $10 of gold or, you know, $20 of gold. So there was actual gold. That was the money, right?

That was legally what money was, was gold. But people used substitutes like currency because it was easier to transact, right? Rather than taking your gold around, you left your gold in a vault with a blacksmith or with a bank, and you took a banknote and you transacted in a money substitute, not the money itself. But, you know, if you had a penny, if you had a nickel, that was money, right? It was money because it was metal. The copper was money. The nickel was money. It was a unit of money, right?

But the paper bills were substitutes for money because they were easier to transact it. And so to me, that's what Bitcoin is like. It's like a fiat currency to the extent that you could use it as a medium of exchange. But nobody really uses it as a medium of exchange the way they use dollars or euros. They just kind of speculated. People buy Bitcoin and they hope the price goes up, you know, and that's why they own it, because they think they're going to get rich. I mean, most people today who own Bitcoin have delusions of $100,000, $1 million of Bitcoin. that's why they don't want to sell that's why they're huddling right forever because they're

going to get rich well you know one of these days you know somebody's going to want to move out of their parents basement they're gonna have to sell some bitcoin all right hold on we got there's a bunch of stuff in there first of all are you arguing that the only real money is something that is metal no i mean look salt was money in fact the word salary comes from salt i mean the Romans paid their soldiers in salt. Cigarettes served as money. GIs after World War II. Because money is a commodity that is being exchanged for other commodities, right? That's what it is. Cattle has been used as money. So all sorts of things could be money. It's just that gold is a much better money, right? It works a lot better. And legally in the United States,

what's money is gold and silver, really, because that's what's in the Constitution, legally as legal tender. But any commodity could be money. It's just, you know, if people use it, a medium of exchange but gold is just a better form of money than other commodities that have served as money look the indians used waffle seashells have been money right but pieces of paper are not money they are substitutes for money okay right the paper itself doesn't have any actual value it's not used for anything seashells were used for things they they adored themselves with them they made necklaces out of them no you know people are making necklaces out of dollar bills can you see a world where digital commodities or digital assets can serve as money or do you

think absolutely they they can serve as money so if somebody wants to create a digital currency and they want to back it by gold they want to back it by silver they want to back it by copper they want to back it by oil they want to back it by whatever you can even back it by you know know, intangible assets. You get back, you know, get back and buy a stock. I mean, you could securitize or digitize a lot of things and people could decide that it's going to circulate as a medium of exchange. And, you know, and if it is backed by a commodity, right, the commodity itself would be served as money. So if I was going to pay you in gold, but I was going to pay you in the digital currency that was backed by gold, the digital currency would be the money substitute,

but the gold would be the money itself, right? Just like banks before the Federal Reserve, you had private banks that used to issue their own currency that was backed by the gold they had on deposit. And those notes would circulate as money substitutes in the economy because people knew that there was actually money backing them up. And so, yeah, I mean, you could do that. The main obstacle to private enterprise today creating viable digital currencies that were backed by real money is see governments hate this. Governments don't want this. Governments want everybody using their fiat. They have a monopoly on creating fiat currency out of thin air. And all these governments like they run big deficits and they want people using their money.

They don't want people being able to escape their system. And also they have all sorts of surveillance now on everybody. All these governments now have draconian confiscatory levels of taxes. And the way they keep everybody compliant with these high taxes is because they have records of what everybody's spending their money on. But if you can actually get outside their surveillance, if you can transact in money where you're more anonymous, then that's a threat to big government. And, you know, I watch these hearings, you know, you know, where they think this is terrible Libra or some other currencies or any crypto currencies because they help citizens evade government oversight. That's a good thing. You know, we want to be able to evade government oversight. We want to make it hard for the government to tax us and to regulate us.

That's what keeps us free. You know, the government always wants to claim that, oh, it's about terrorism. It's about no, it's not. You know, there's old sayings about, you know, people who give up who give up some liberty in order to achieve security. I deserve neither liberty nor security. And they'll end up losing them both. I don't care if there's some terrorist activity out there. I'm not going to give up my freedoms just to potentially have less terrorism, because then you have to. The threat is from the government. And so but the government, you know, the government doesn't want us using real money. they don't want us escaping their their system they want us all staying in their system so they can tax us through inflation so they can regulate us and so we we have less ability to resist their

tyranny and their power all right how high do you think bitcoin can go if you really believe it's going to zero and it's not going to be valuable right and you don't think that it can be money you you said that there's delusions of it going to these really high numbers like what do you think happens? Well, look, anything can happen, right? I mean, if people decide not to sell Bitcoin, right, if everybody that owns it decides that they're not going to sell and then people try to buy and there's no supply, the price could go up, right? And look, you know, it went up to 20,000, right? Does that mean it can't go to 50,000? It can't go to 100,000? I mean, it's possible. I just think that the odds of that happening are low. I mean, it's not impossible,

but it could happen. But no matter how high it goes, it's ultimately going to crash. So that I'm confident of. But can the bubble get even bigger? Sure, it could. But, you know, I would rather bet rather than buying Bitcoin at eighty five hundred dollars and thinking, oh, maybe it's going to go to eighty five thousand. I make ten times my money. just buy some silver at 18 bucks i mean that probably has a better chance of going up tenfold i think than bitcoin and it doesn't have any chance of going to zero in fact i don't think there's that much downside at silver where there's a lot of downside of course the same thing applies to gold so and then gold stocks i mean if you really want to gamble on the breakdown of the

fiat monetary system i think that you know you're better off in in mining gold mining stocks than in Bitcoin. And in fact, I don't even think Bitcoin is really a bet against the dollar or the euro or any of the fiat currencies. I really think it's a bet against gold. I think that Bitcoin is going to do better if gold really gets weak. If for some reason the price of gold really starts to fall, that I think is probably more bullish for Bitcoin than if we get weakness in the dollar, if we get strength in the price of gold. I think that's ultimately a negative for Bitcoin, because I think that, you know, to the extent that real gold makes a comeback and more people want to buy real gold i think that will dampen the enthusiasm for for bitcoin and other

alternatives to gold why do you think it's a bet against gold right wouldn't they uh in your opinion benefit from some of the same macro events and forces well not really i i think that if you look at the way bitcoin is is being positioned and being marketed you know particularly if you look at the drop gold campaign you know but just in general that hey it's a digital gold it's going eat into gold's market share this is what i hear all the big guys that we go by and all the other people is like they take a look at what gold's market cap is and hey if bitcoin can capture x percent of gold this is what it's worth so it's all about taking market share away from gold and and proving that it's better than gold and so to that to the extent that gold is succeeding

then then there's less of an argument that we need an alternative to gold but i think if if gold is can be shown as, hey, gold is going down and Bitcoin is going up. Look, see, gold, you know, Bitcoin is working better. So I think that helps drive the narrative that, oh, Bitcoin is a new goal. And I think that's what helped drive it for those years where gold was in that bear market correction. And a lot of people were getting frustrated that gold was going down and they saw Bitcoin going up and people just, you know, jumped on that on that train. And I think, you know, I think if you try to guess the correlation, although I'm not sure, you know, you know, if If Bitcoin, if you look out on a daily basis and look at the price of gold versus the price of Bitcoin, you know, you know, if it's, you know, how the correlation is on any given day, you know, whether it's correlated in a positive or a negative way, because obviously, you know, most of the time Bitcoin was going up because it started so low.

You know, it started at pennies 10 years ago and it kept going up and up and up and up and up until, you know, we peaked out in, you know, at 20,000. But maybe even since then, you know, how it's acted since then, if someone has correlated it to gold on a daily basis. And so as you as you kind of think through this, what do you think about Libra and the private enterprises trying to create a version of a digital currency? Right. Is that something that you think you spoke a little bit earlier about how the government wanted to happen, but that impact gold prices? How does that impact Bitcoin, in your opinion? look i i think that um competition would be very healthy in you know in in alternatives to what we have now and um to the extent that libra is able to get off the ground i think it would be a good thing now i think that the government is going to regulate it and maybe regulate it out

of existence i mean depending on how much regulation there's there i mean if there was no government around at all, it would be very easy for any company to come up with a cryptocurrency backed by something. It would be very inexpensive, be very easy to do. And then it would be simply about the companies having to compete for trust and confidence, because ultimately, when there is a digital currency that's backed by something, you have to have trust that the backing is good. And so you have to trust the company that is promising that they're storing your gold or wherever it is. But I mean, we trust companies all the time. I mean, people buy insurance policy, they buy life insurance. They trust that the insurance company is going to pay

the claim when they die. The free market is all about trusting counterparties and reputation is important and companies compete for reputation. And once you have a reputation, there is a value to that reputation and a reason to want to maintain it. And so I think it would be very good if we had a lot of privately issued currencies that were backed by all sorts of things and let the market decide what they prefer, let merchants decide what they want to accept as payment for their goods and services and let consumers decide what they want to save. But that's the last thing the government wants. The government doesn't want people to have a choice because what they're providing is lousy, right? The U.S. dollar, the euro, the yen are lousy monetary substitutes

because they are designed to lose value every year you want money to preserve its value especially if you're saving it for the future you want the money to have more value in the future because you're deferring your consumption you should be compensated for not having something today if you have to wait five or ten years you should have more and that's the con yeah the idea of money gaining value and a positive interest rate uh so this would be good and you know even if libra is launched the way you know they're currently presenting it it potentially could be a good thing because there is a basket of currencies in libra right libra is going to be backed by the dollar the euro the yen the r b you know whatever i'm not sure the exact competent

composition but it's not going to be a fixed basket you're going to have this libra association that's going to be able to you know kind of manage the portfolio of assets which will mainly be government bonds short-term government bonds but in theory then they could look at governments that are more fiscally reckless that are running bigger deficits and printing more money and decide to reduce the reserve component of that currency or eliminate it and if another country started to be all of a sudden with sound money they were running budget surpluses and they were cutting government spending and doing things that are positive for the long-term value maybe libra can add that to the basket or uh you know increase its allocation and so if that if being included in

that basket became important well then it would be a positive influence on governments around the world towards fiscal responsibility the reason that governments don't want that is they don't want fiscal responsibility they don't want any discipline they want to be able to keep on spending and keep on borrowing and they want the least pressure against that because that's how they they get elected so one of the questions then would be let's say that there is a breakdown in the dollar uh and gold would benefit and people would flee to gold uh wouldn't the government just ban the ownership of gold like they did uh in there was it the thirties well you know when when roosevelt basically made it illegal for americans to own gold 1933

um we were on a gold standard you know and the whole thing that everything they did was illegal but he got away with it. But Roosevelt wanted to devalue the dollar. But in order to do that, he had to take everybody's gold because the dollar was defined legally as $20 was an ounce of gold. And so in order to devalue the dollar, he needed to get everybody's gold. So that's what he did. And as soon as he did that, he devalued the dollar. And now you needed $35 to get an ounce of gold instead of 20. But in order to devalue the Federal Reserve note, because it's not even really a dollar, but let's just call it a dollar because people think it's a dollar. But in order to devalue the dollar today, all you have to do is print them. We're not on a gold standard. There

is no value of the dollar. It doesn't have to be devalued. It just depreciates. You just debase it by creating it out of thin air. So there is no real reason for the government to seize gold the way it seized it under Roosevelt. Now, maybe the government is broke and needs money and they start seizing gold but if they're going to seize gold i mean why just gold why not seize stocks why not seize foreign currency why not seize real estate i mean you're talking about the government just confiscating private wealth private assets because it's broke and personally it's i think it's easier for the government to seize your stocks and to seize your real estate than to seize your gold because they know where your stocks are they're in a brokerage account they

They have all the information. They know exactly where your money is. If you have a bank account, if you have foreign currencies. But if you have gold, they don't know where you have it. If you own it yourself and you buried it somewhere, you know, you have it in a private safe. It's much harder for the government to get your gold. And, you know, they can seize your cryptocurrencies, too. I mean, I think it'd be easier for the government to seize your Bitcoin. It's Bitcoin for sure can't be seized.

Right. It's a non-seizable asset because of the cryptography and the private keys. component of it. So don't you think that if the government started to seize assets, Bitcoin would be the last thing that they could get and they would have to essentially torture you to give up the private keys, right? Well, I didn't. There was just an article I read about they just busted this child porn ring based on following the Bitcoin trail. They were able to figure out who these guys were and who was uh you know buying stuff um and so maybe the government can't seize your bitcoin but they can find out the beneficial owners of these wallets they can use tools on the internet to kind of tie you to your wallet and it's like okay you know turn this in or

you know you're going to jail i mean if they can find you right you know and they can also they can also criminalize the use because it's easy they could say okay no band nobody could use bitcoin if anybody's caught using bitcoin it's 20 years in jail or you know whatever they can they can make the death penalty if they wanted to but you know it would be easier to stop the use i would think than to stop because i can hand somebody gold in an alley and nobody knows that i did it right i mean if you're if you're transacting through the internet you're always leaving some kind of you know trace that you're you're trying to do things so but at least we agree that the uh to have an asset that can't be seized by the government has some value right yeah i mean you

know if it's an asset you're saying but bitcoin you know it's arguable whether or not it's gonna you know gonna have any value but you know if you can say the government can't theoretically seize it you know because they you know i guess you know what if they just seized your cell phone on your computer i mean you have the private key yeah yeah although i mean you could forget the private key right then then then it's gone yeah of course you could but you could forget the uh the password or the uh the the you could forget where you buried your gold i get that yeah i mean you know i suppose you buried your gold some people do just checking just checking um all All right. So at least that piece. The other piece of this, I guess, is to me, you talked about like being able to use gold for transactions, right?

Like to handset somebody in the dark alley, et cetera. I think we both agree that gold is not nearly as portable as like fiat currency or a digital currency, right? Doesn't necessarily mean that that's a bad thing, but just carrying around bars of gold would probably not be the most effective thing, right? Well, I mean, gold is very portable from the perspective of, you know, if you have $10,000, $50,000 worth of gold, you know, I can carry that in my pockets. I can carry that in a small briefcase, and it wouldn't really be that big a deal. I mean, so there is a lot of value concentrated. Yes, if you're talking about $100 million worth of gold, yeah, you know, that's going to be cumbersome. cumbersome. But for most people, gold is pretty portable. I mean, that's one of the reasons that

that is that it's made such good money. It was easy to carry it around because a lot of value is concentrated in a small area. But, you know, the other thing that you could do with gold is like I described or like you do with gold money. You can have gold on deposit in a vault and I can transfer ownership of that gold to another individual. So if I wanted to send my gold to somebody in Germany, I don't have to physically send him my gold if I have it stored with a reliable third party like Gold Money and all I do is simply send him over the internet the ownership rights to my gold

and now it transfers from me to him and that's so it's very portable. I just sent it across the Atlantic and it happened instantaneously. I didn't have to, you know, spend any money on shipping because the gold stays in the vault. The vault might be in London. The vault might be in Hong Kong or Singapore or Dubai or Toronto. Right. The gold hasn't moved, but I'm able to transfer ownership of that gold pretty much anywhere I want. And that, you know, that basically would, you know, deliver the same result. All right. But at least we agree that Bitcoin is more portable. So gold may you could put in your pocket or in a small brief.

Yes. Yes. One of the good things about Bitcoin. Yes, I can have a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin and I can go through, you know, the airport sensors and nothing's going to go off. I can get on a plane, although I do think that, you know, I think you have to and I'm not sure if you have to disclose or if they pass that law. But if you get on a plane now, you know how you have to say that you have if you have more than $10,000 worth of currency, you've got to check this box. I got $10,000 of the currency. I'm not sure if you have to do that if you have $10,000 worth of Bitcoin. Yeah, but I think there was a law or they were considering requiring that. I don't know if it passed or not, but that would mean almost anybody. Right. Because if you have $10,000 worth of Bitcoin, every time you get on a plane, you know, you're carrying it with you.

Yeah, but I don't. But you're not technically carrying it with you. Right. You're carrying the password. But that doesn't mean that you have the Bitcoin with you. Well, that's true, because I guess no one actually has it with you because it doesn't really exist. But you have you have access to it. But I know there was they were thinking about passing that law. I don't know if it actually was enacted or not. Yeah, I don't think that one got got anywhere. So at least I appreciate you doing this, because I think that we're making progress on the ideas of, you know, Bitcoin being a scarce asset. it being portable, it being resistant to seizure. One of the other elements that I think the Bitcoin community really gets excited about, and I want to hear your thoughts on, is the lack of censorship

with Bitcoin, right? So the fact that it's decentralized, it can be sent to anyone in the world and no one can stop that transaction has a lot of value. Also, some people that that concerns them. But when you look at gold versus Bitcoin around censorship, how do you think about that yeah well look i mean that is obviously part of the appeal i mean part of the the sizzle right because there's no state but part of the sizzle that sold bitcoin is all those other attributes that oh yeah you know that these other monetary attributes that that it has uh but you know a lot of that has even been lost because i even remember that in early on one of the big arguments in favor of bitcoin was it was anonymous and no and you could you can get rid of uh you know bypass all

the government rules because they they had been putting on more rules and more regulations with anti-money laundering and facta and it was getting very expensive and you have to give all kinds of financial information about yourself to send wires and and do all that and i operate a bank and i see all that regulation and all that loss of privacy uh that we now have in fact i used to have my bank we used to have the words privacy assured and we had to get rid of that there's no private accounts anymore you can't even offer privacy because if you do like nobody will do business with you so there's no more financial privacy and so initially uh part of the appeal of bitcoin was hey this is a way around that this is a way to be private and and privacy is a good

thing private having privacy from government is important the reason that government doesn't want privacy is because if they're going to be tyrannical they want to be able to quell any kind of revolution they want to be able to get you know make sure that they can maintain their hold on the economy on the populace and they can do that better if there's no privacy so once you destroy all the privacy you make it harder for the people to rebel against tyrannical government and so that's where we are but bitcoin you know offered that promise hey this you can escape all this but when they wanted to make bitcoin more mainstream because they wanted institutional investors because they needed new buyers to come in and push the price higher the institutions

needed regulatory you know they needed the surveillance they needed all this regulation They needed all this KYC. And so now all of a sudden there's all this stuff. People, you want to buy Bitcoin. You want to open up an account. You got to give your driver's license. You got to give your password. Here's your utility bill. Now, you know, a lot of that privacy that initially made Bitcoin appealing has been lost. And now there are other coins that are supposedly, you know, private, like Monero, whatever they are. But Bitcoin has kind of lost that. But it didn't stop, you know, the narrative and people from buying Bitcoin and speculating it, even as, you know, it lost some of the original, you know, justification of its appeal. Well, I think part of it is that the asset itself itself still has the pseudonymity and can be used privately. it's uh what you're talking about it's the on and off ramps that are being uh offered many of them

require the kyc and aml um uh kind of uh adherence or compatibility and that's where people are having to uh disclose their identities etc and so um if you go in through one of those on or off ramps uh from the fiat world uh it's much harder to have yeah yeah they're controlling those ramps You know, the most ironic part of it is that guy, you know, the grayscale that's doing the Bitcoin trust. It's running all these dumb gold campaigns. I mean, this guy, I mean, I can see if someone's going to buy Bitcoin. What's the point of buying it in this trust? Because you lose all the appeal because now you have a third party storing your Bitcoin.

You're actually paying a 2% per year storage fee. I mean, nobody who stores gold for you charges you that much money. I mean, if you store gold for, you know, gold storage companies typically charge maybe 25 basis points to 50 basis points a year to store your gold. And when they try to knock gold, well, gold is expensive to store. Well, if you're paying two percent to grayscale to store your Bitcoin, I mean, that's, you know, much, much more than you would pay to store gold. So you're having these expensive storage fees. You're also having to pay brokerage fees to buy and sell it because you're buying the fund. now and you've got your your your bitcoin stored with a third party i mean so that makes the least

sense to me that anybody if anybody actually wanted to buy bitcoin it makes no sense that they would buy it through an etf and or an exchange traded fund right and now they and all the bitcoiners want these etfs right they want more etfs because this one that this fund is not an etf but the reason they want etfs is because they want more demand they want the etfs to buy Bitcoin and bid up the price. But why would you buy it in an ETF? It makes no sense because you lose all the appeal of the asset by holding it in an ETF. But the whole desire is just to get more buying. So the price will go up. And so as you look out at this entire world, what do you think ends up occurring with Bitcoin and the regulation environment? So you're talking

about the ETF specifically, right? And we've seen that not get approved. How do you think this plays out given kind of the historical way that gold played out? And then also, you know, kind of the, I don't want to say the fear, but definitely the skepticism of a lot of people in the regulatory and lawmaking seats as they look at Bitcoin, like how does this play out? Yeah, well, the regulatory aspects are a serious roadblock. I mean, and I see that, look, you know, I've had lots of crypto companies over the years wanting to open up accounts with my bank, Europe Pacific Bank. I've had to turn them all down. I mean, I actually had a guy one time that sent money into his Europe Pacific account from Bitgold, which was the original name of gold money.

And I couldn't even take it because the banks were worried about it because it had the word bit. It was it came from bit gold just because it had the word bit in it, even though it wasn't a cryptocurrency. So it's like it's it's like poison, like the banks, the banking community can't touch any of this stuff because of the regulatory environment that we're in. And other companies that I'm associated with, I can feel the heat of the regulators. The minute you try to get into any crypto, I mean, you're just in the crosshairs. I mean, you're going to be bombarded. And I don't I don't see that lightening up. I mean, I just you know, the government's view feel threatened whether the threat is legitimate or not. I mean, you know, I don't believe that ultimately Bitcoin can succeed as money.

But a lot of these politicians, they don't know that they can be just as fooled. I mean, you had one of these congressmen that was in the hearing with Zuckerberg the other day who actually thought that Bitcoin potentially was a threat to replace the dollar. And to the extent that they think that that's a threat, they're going to do everything that they can to extinguish that threat. And so the regulatory force is going to is going to continue to bear down on Bitcoin and crypto and anything that has to do with it. And I'm not in favor of that. Right. I don't want any of this regulation. I mean, I think, look, these cryptocurrencies should be allowed to be there. People should be allowed to gamble on them if they want and people want to buy them. I don't think there should be fraud. Like I think some people are being defrauded into buying Bitcoin.

And I think that they might have a legal case when they lose their money. But to the extent that people are honestly exposed to it and making decisions to buy it, I don't think government should stay away and let the markets decide. And, you know, and if they fail, they fail. But, you know, that's not how the government works. The government is overregulating everything. But in particular, cryptocurrencies are getting a lot of regulation. And what I'm really afraid of, too, is when a lot of people do lose money because Bitcoin crashes and a lot of people lose money, they are going to take that as an opportunity to really step up the regulation. And, you know, this is the ultimate failure of Bitcoin is if it ends up serving the interests of government by helping to, you know, validate their fears of the free market. Oh, you see the free market. It's terrible. got people scammed into Bitcoin. And, you know, the dollar is the best. And this is, you know,

we need more regulation to protect consumers, to protect investors, you know, from this kind of fraud. And they just make government even bigger. And Bitcoin actually ends up making the dollar look good, right, by comparison, because people lose even more money there. Nah, not going to happen. Let's talk about Twitter and media. You've built a much bigger media platform that i think many people realize you've got what like quarter of a million subscribers on youtube you got a pretty big twitter account you got a podcast that does um quite a bit of downloads etc like what's your whole take on what you're trying to do with the with the media and the social media platforms yeah well you know in the scheme of things it's still

kind of low i mean i mean i have kids young kids that you know watch youtube videos that other kids are putting out they got millions and millions of views you know just kids playing with toys uh so you know my you know my little world is kind of small in fact even i bet you you've got more twitter followers than i do i don't know how did you get all those twitter followers well it's because bitcoin is better than gold obviously so yeah like i said you're the consensus trade i'm the contrarian but yeah you know i mean hopefully you know the way i am interacting with people now is through the internet you know i was in an airplane you know the other day and i I usually get recognized by somebody when I travel by plane, but I'm in a plane and I'm talking to somebody and somebody comes up to me because they said, oh, Peter Schiff, you know, I recognize your voice.

Right. So they knew I was on the plane because they heard me talking. And so people used to recognize me because they used to see me on TV. And so they recognized me because, you know, because for a while I was on all the time. And I especially when I used to walk in Manhattan, I would always get recognized several times a day because I was on all the time. And people in New York tended to know me. uh but now people are recognizing me by my voice not by the way i look but they're used to hearing my voice um so yeah but i'm this is how i'm communicating now my thoughts and my ideas uh because i'm i don't really have the mainstream media platform anymore that i used to

uh a decade ago but back then i didn't have a youtube channel i didn't have you know twitter I didn't have my podcast. So, you know, and I know like I just posted a video of a talk that I did at the Money Show and I've got over 200,000 views on it in the last week. I mean, I didn't think 200,000 people didn't watch me on CNBC. I don't even think they have a single show that has that big an audience. So in a way, more people are exposed to me now when I'm doing it myself than when I had the help of these media outlets. got it and then how do you think about twitter like like you you get on there and you go to battle every day with the with the uh bitcoiners and then you've obviously got like kind of the gold bug community that's uh that supports you and everything and get quite a bit of engagement but how do you think about it oh no you know like the last time you know i've been sick the last

week or two and some of them sitting in bed i got nothing to do so i just start going on twitter because it's entertaining um and yeah i could pick a fight i could pick a fight with you or the interesting thing is whenever i tweet something about bitcoin i mean that's when it just gets all kinds of engagement. I can do a political tweet or a gold tweet, but the ones where if I say anything negative about Bitcoin, that's when, I mean, it's like, and not only do people respond to it, I'll put out a tweet and I'll go and I'll Google my name the next day and there'll be 10 articles written by Bitcoin publications quoting my tweet. I mean, that doesn't happen when I tweet about anything else. So, I mean, so people are actually looking at

what I have to say when it comes to Bitcoin. And then, you know, a lot of times too, There's a lot of Bitcoin trolls on my Twitter because I'll tweet something that has nothing to do with Bitcoin, nothing to do with gold, and then look at the responses and all the people talking about Bitcoin. So they just like – they just come on there and they start – so I find it amusing that that happens. And so, yeah, I mean, I suppose if I didn't get any attention on the Bitcoin tweets, maybe I wouldn't tweet them. But I don't do as many as people think. I mean, people – I mean, in fact, I haven't even got a chance to tweet out about this rally, which I should. so people don't accuse me of of being silent when bitcoin goes up because i think i think i think they should sell this rally it's a sucker rally people have been uh have been

tweeting at us the entire time that we are uh we're doing this interview and they're asking if we're if we're going to record the podcast so they don't realize that we're doing it literally while this rally is going on 15 what's your take on when bitcoin is uh while you're sitting here saying it's not valuable and it just rips 15 upwards what do you what do you want to say the people what do you mean well if bitcoin just rips up 15 like that it's obviously got the volatility on the upside that's something that gold obviously never does right in terms of big movements like that like what's your kind of response to the people who say hey that that's a valuable thing that gold doesn't bring to the table the asymmetric upside well look i've never

said that bitcoin could not be used as a speculative medium i mean that's the only use that it has right you could speculate in it because you do have these big rips uh that happen right i mean but the fact that it is this volatile right is one of the things that makes it so bad as a medium of exchange the fact that you can have the currency move 10 any given hour you know makes it a very volatile uh asset and very difficult to use in transactions you can't price things in it and things like that so uh the only value it has is as something to speculate in but you know that's the same value that dot com stocks had or anything like that but ultimately it's gonna it's it's gonna it's gonna collapse i mean you know there's an old joke about you

know the can of sardines that that that i guess is bad uh but they they trade it you know people are buying and selling and but you can't eat it and i think it's you know well these sardines are for trading they're not for eating no one eats them we just trade them all right well but you know if you can't eat them what value do they have they have no value but as but people could trade them as long as they don't realize that the the sardines are rotten uh they can buy and sell them so yeah i mean look there are people in there trading this market and look i am very skeptical too about the trading i mean why bitcoin rallies i mean i think there's a lot of manipulation in this market it's not very transparent i do think that uh a lot of the rallies are engineered

by some of the big holders that are in there when they once they can get the market to sell off and once they can see that the the offers are kind of thin and they can rush in there and just get the market to move up without having to buy that much bitcoin back you know because they sell it it on the way down and they can pump the market up, they can create some enthusiasm that brings in new buyers as people say, oh, the bottom is in. We're going to zoom to twenty thousand. We're going to moon. And so they can buy just enough Bitcoin to spike it up at the right time so that new buyers can come in and now they can unload even more Bitcoin. And then the price the price goes down. So I am very skeptical of these sharp rallies. They look to me like market manipulation.

I mean, why is Bitcoin 10 percent more valuable today than it was yesterday? I mean, you know, there's no I mean, nothing's really changed. So people and, you know, if you look at that, if I wanted to buy Bitcoin because the price went down, hey, the price just went down. I want to buy Bitcoin. I'm going to buy it slowly. I'm going to try to buy as much as I can. Right. As cheap as I can. But when I see people rushing in and just taking all the offers and jamming the price, that doesn't look like someone's trying to buy a good price. It looks like someone's trying to move the price higher.

And who wants to move the price of Bitcoin higher? Somebody who wants to sell. Somebody who wants to buy wants the price lower. They want the price to go down. If you're a buyer, you want to buy as cheap as you can. You don't want to push the price up. But if you're a seller, that's when you want a higher price. So, you know, I think these rallies are meant to sucker in new buyers.

I think the real money is still selling Bitcoin. And, you know, and until we make a new high, until we take out if we take out twenty thousand, then, you know, then then I'm wrong about that and we're going higher. But I don't think I'm wrong about the ultimate destination, no matter how high it goes. But I just don't think it's worth the bet that Bitcoin is going to make a new high. I mean, what if it makes a new high? It triples. I think you can triple your money and other things with less risk. All right. Have you ever taken fiat money and bought Bitcoin? like do you own any bitcoin other than the bitcoin that i crowdfunded for you online yeah but you know you didn't give me any bitcoin yourself you were supposed to give me a hundred

dollars worth and i never got it this might be a good time now if you want to get me in on that but other people yes you you you you said you were going to give me a hundred dollars worth of bitcoin if i gave you my wallet and i eventually figured out my wallet address and i put it up there and a bunch of people gave me bitcoin but you didn't give me any but have you ever had you ever bitcoin no no the only the only other way i got bitcoin is i did an interview a debate rather which anybody can see on on youtube on youtube it was with eric vorhees and it was sponsored by reason uh in new york and soho forum and we did a bitcoin debate and after the debate we went out to dinner uh and and during while we're at dinner eric

downloaded the app or on my phone of uh from his company with his wallet and transferred a hundred dollars worth of bitcoin to me and i transferred 50 of it back right so we could see how he could show me how quickly he can send me a hundred dollars and i can send him 50 but i i kept 50 he gave me 50 as a gift so i got that 50 and then after i got that 50 i went to a i went to a i went to like a money show or something. And I was talking to somebody and I showed him my wallet. He said, well, you need to get some other currencies. And I was selling some of my dad's books. And so he decided to pay for the books by giving me crypto. And he gave me Bitcoin cash and ether for those those two books that he bought. And so he exchanged it into my wallet. But because

he was giving me crypto i charged him extra uh than the cash right so i charged him like 50 more because of the the risk of me uh me taking crypto uh and i there were actually they've now gone down so much that you know the 50 wasn't enough i should have charged them double because my ether and my uh bitcoin cash are worth less than what i would with the with the regular price the books would have been but that was only like another 40 bucks worth right because i i charged him like or i forget or 30 bucks worth but but that's it but i've never actually i've never actually taken my own money and bought bitcoin now am i proud of that i mean i mean like obviously you know i i i i wish i had done it i mean i wish i had done it the first time i heard about it

right when i first heard about it you know it was under 20 you know and i thought it was interesting and at the time I was throwing a lot of money at a lot of stupid things and I made investments that went to zero and I had you know I could have thrown 10,000 50,000 100,000 you know I could have put that money into bitcoin and I'd be a bitcoin billionaire right now assuming I held on I mean because it's always hard to would it could have should it right I could always say you know had I bought it way back when what would I have done with it but I can tell you from history I mean I'm in general I don't sell a lot of things I mean I'm not as I'm a better buyer than I am a seller. So it's possible that I might not have sold some of those early rallies. I

might have held on. But who knows? But look, there's a lot of bubbles that I didn't participate in. I didn't buy the dot coms. I didn't buy real estate. I was renting. But I made money when the bubbles popped. And I think Bitcoin is just part of this big bubble. And I think I'm going to make a lot of money when that bubble pops. Even though I didn't make any money betting on it, I'm going to make money betting against it. All right. Before I let you go, I do rapid fire set of questions. What's the most important book you've ever read? Yeah, you know, it requires more thinking than that. You know, I don't really know. I mean, my father's books have probably had the most influence on me because my father wrote them. But that that, you know, that that

caused me to read other books. What books do you write? Well, his his biggest his economic book was the biggest con, how the government was fleecing you. And so that book came out in 1976 or something. And so it's one of the first books on economics that I read, although my father had me read The Mainspring of Human Progress. And I also read Henry Hazlitt's book, Economics in One Lesson, early on. And so that was a very influential book on me because, I mean, I read it when I was very young and then i end each podcast i let you ask me one question but before we do that we talk aliens believer or non-believer you think they're real well do i think aliens exist somewhere in the universe probably i mean do i think that any of them have visited earth probably not um but i do

i don't think that humans are the only uh intelligent life in the entire universe uh but i do think that the likelihood of there being humans or any intelligent uh life within a proximity that they could visit us um i think that's pretty slim because i i think that i think intelligent life is very very rare in the universe and it there are all it takes a really uh you know amazing confluence of of things in order to have life like us evolve and so i think we are very rare but i don't think we are are unique if you had to guess all of this speculation and uh conspiracy theories etc around ufos aliens all that kind of stuff you think it's all just bullshit or you think that there's actually some validity to it no i think most uh conspiracy theories

are are bullshit you know i mean you know i i think elvis is dead um you know i mean i think we you know we landed on the moon you know there are a lot of people you know come up with these things and they develop a life of their own. But, you know, generally the thing about conspiracies is it's very hard to actually keep a conspiracy going, you know, the people having to be silent about it. I mean, somebody is going to slip up. But, you know, I think they're, you know, they certainly have an appeal and there are a lot of people that tend to gravitate to them. And some of them obviously are in the gold community, right? And the libertarian community, there's a you know there's a fringe there uh in fact there's a lot of people that think there's

a big conspiracy to suppress the price of gold um and look you know there's no question that central bankers don't want the price of gold to go up um because i think as you know it's it's like a canary in a coal mine right when the price of gold is going up it really shows you that there's a problem um and so the central bankers don't want the miners leaving leaving the the cave when their intention is to gas everybody. But I don't think there's a grand conspiracy to suppress it. I just think it's, you know, it's undervalued because a lot of people don't understand what's going on. I think the central banks and governments have been successful in convincing people that everything is OK. And I think you have, you know, the investment community

goes along with it, you know, because it serves their interest. They make a lot of money from this game. And, you know, there's an old saying, if your livelihood depends on you not understanding something you're not going to understand it and so i think that a lot of people make a living off of this system they make a very good living and so they they don't want to you know look it in the mouth look you know they just want to perpetuate it uh and but eventually all these things come to an end and so you know the price of gold is going way up you know if if the government could suppress the price of gold they wouldn't let it rally from 300 under 300 in in 2001 to 1900 if they could have have stopped it they would have they couldn't do it had a big rally and it's going to have an even

bigger rally uh next time well one question you got for me to end this thing this is a marathon man an hour i know i can't i can't believe i had an appointment i wonder if i had a meeting and i wonder what the hell happened because i thought this was going to be over in an hour and we're almost two hours well you know when you're talking about real sound money like bitcoin this is what happens you can't leave people get mad you know they think my podcast some people think my podcasts are too long when i talk for 50 minutes to an hour so this one is this one is two hours don't worry i'll make you famous in bitcoin twitter come on but so my question is so you you posted something on twitter that you wanted to sponsor my podcast and you know you

actually offered to pay me five dollars a listener and you know i i don't i would feel guilty taking that much money from you but but um you know but i did i did agree to 50 grand a month you know because you wanted to sponsor sponsor november december so the offer is still on the table if want to if you want to sponsor my podcast you can even pay me a bit you can even pay me in bitcoin tell us how many listeners you have how many listeners you've done that thing well i don't know exactly how many i have but you know i i could find out if you're going to pay me five dollars a listener but look you could look i i know we get 50 to 100 000 people that just go to shift radio and listen to it i'm not sure how i know you know people listen to it from um you

know uh itunes and stitcher these different things but people on on on my youtube i mean my i had i did one on my youtube or my my pod my podcast within a couple weeks ago i got over a hundred thousand listeners just on youtube alone but typically i get 40 to 50 000 people that listen to it on on on youtube too but then other people copy it so you know my podcasts get you know copied and then people listen to them on other people's channels so you know so i just don't know what the the total listenership is but i think somewhere between a hundred and two hundred thousand people probably listen to each one you know and and then if one is really popular you know i could get more listeners than that but i think you know at least a hundred thousand listen

to everyone that i do uh you know between the podcast and youtube to be completely honest that's pretty impressive i gotta hand it to you if you're getting that type of uh listener base you're you're uh either saying some wild that people can't or you're saying something that people are finding about and i you know i don't have any commercials or any sponsors so you would be the first one right there's no you know i'm not you know although i do i think when people go on youtube you know before they watch it i think you know there's some commercials that run you know i don't need i think i think i opted into that so i do get a you know i do get some revenue share from some commercial a lot of times they're crypto commercials people laugh because

there's a lot of like you know cryptocurrency commercials that come on before my podcast yeah of course well of course because they know that the gold people are just lost or waiting to find bitcoin all right looking i'm taking the time to do this um i think that uh as always people are excited to hear your point of view um you know you're basically a bitcoiner without owning any bitcoin with uh with most of your views we'll just got to get you across the the final finish line there but uh i just got to get you guys across you're a gold guy i just see i just got to get the bitcoin guys into real money right they they don't like the fiat system and they want out they just they just they're just going the wrong way i just got to get them back to real money or you

know starbucks or at least you know at least on both you know at least make sure you own enough gold so if your crypto goes to zero you'll you'll be okay with your gold i'll make you a deal if i I buy a little bit of gold. Will you buy some Bitcoin? Well, I mean, there, I don't know. How much would I have to buy? Because I look at it as throwing my money away. The same amount I buy.

We'll come up with an amount. There's no reason. I don't want to throw money away. Oh, get out of here. I'd rather buy more gold. All right. Sounds good. All right.

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