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May 7, 2023 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:47:12

Keith Weiner

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	Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPo.
	And I know I always say I'm excited about this big special guest.
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	Enjoy.
	Keith, I think of all the podcast guests I've had, I don't think I've dicked one around quite so much as I've messed you around.
	Your people have been trying to arrange this for ages, and I've been so used to this.
	And you're like a big CEO.
	I know CEOs aren't used to this kind of stuff, so can I apologise?
	No worries.
	So, when did we last do a podcast together?
	It was about two years ago, wasn't it?
	Or maybe before the crisis?
	It feels like about two years, yeah.
	Yeah.
	And before we talk about monetary metals, just remind people who don't know about your history.
	Tell us a bit about yourself.
	So, I was your classic computer nerd in high school.
	Went off to major in computer science.
	Dropped out like so many did because I wanted to go build a software company like Many of my heroes before me built a software company, sold it to Nortel Networks.
	We were the last acquisition Nortel ever did before they declared bankruptcy, and acquisition closed in August of 2008.
	So I'm sitting there with cash, this was my, you know, net worth in life, and started to study economics and markets to figure out how to protect myself through that crazy financial crisis, eventually coming to gold, eventually getting a PhD from something called the New Austrian School, not accredited.
	I would not be able to get a job with this as a credential, but the work was real.
	Decided I wanted my next venture to be part of the solution rather than just another software company.
	Founded Monetary Metals, and the idea is that if you pay interest on gold, that's what we do, we pay interest, that that makes it profitable for people to move towards the gold standard, which is really the guiding light and the vision of this whole thing.
	Yeah.
	OK, so in a moment I'm going to ask you to explain more about how it works, because I need to know exactly how, because I'm going to recommend you to my viewers and listeners, your product.
	But I want them to know, apart from everything else, that all this is kosher and it really does work.
	It's not some crazy Ponzi scheme or whatever.
	But before we go there, can I ask you, do you come from money?
	Or were you just kind of a poor person who just happened to have the tech skills?
	And how does it work?
	You know, I think that's one of those differences that, you know, across the pond here in America.
	I'm, you know, I grew up in an ordinary middle class, you know, background.
	Both of my parents were college educated, but certainly not money.
	You know, we have food on the table, but not any of the things that one would call riches, certainly.
	Um, you know, I worked a job in college.
	Um, you know, I drove a crappy, since the time I went to college, I don't know, eight or nine-year-old car.
	Um, and, um, you know, my parents were not in business, so there was certainly no, uh, you know, business coaching or business advice, you know, there.
	My parents wanted me to be a doctor.
	My brother is a doctor, he's a surgeon.
	Um, I was the, uh, black sheep, as they were, dropping out, which, you know, made them feel really awful.
	and did my own thing and created my own way in the world. - Did you get a lot of grief from your family?
	Did they say things like, "Keith, you need to settle down "and get a regular job like your medical brother?" - You know, so my dad passed away actually when I was my senior year in high school, but they were very supportive, and my mom still was very supportive She wanted the best for me, so there wasn't any kind of like, you'll never amount to anything, you're just a loser, college, you know.
	There wasn't anything like that, but there was a Keith, you know, I'm concerned.
	You know, maybe you should go back and finish your degree.
	It's much easier in life if you have a degree.
	You're not doing things the easy way.
	You make it hard on yourself.
	And that sort of calmed down, I think, probably only really when I sold diamondware, you know, for an eight-figure sum.
	That's when I finally, like, okay, this worked.
	And, you know, actually, my mom was very happy for me.
	There wasn't any, you know, shot in for it.
	There wasn't anything like that in my family.
	So, hang on, I'm trying to work out an 8 figure sum, so that means upwards of 10 million.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, anybody can Google it, Nortel announced the value of the transaction, it's still there on the internet.
	That's good.
	I'm really happy, because some of the figures that have made money in tech, Bill Gates, for example, or even Elon Musk, They come from families which have had, you know, they were always part of the, what I call the predator class, the evil that, well, I mean, yeah, yeah, evil, the evil class that really, that runs the world.
	And it's always nice to see a kind of ordinary Joe, like me, although I lack the tech skills, just sort of climbing up the ladder and getting onto the, you know, having some clout.
	They don't make it easy, and of course, the higher the tax rate goes, the harder it is to accumulate anything.
	Ironically, you know, if you wanted to petrify society and lock in those who are already rich, you should have a lot of regulation and a lot of tax, because no new upstart can ever really, you know, hit escape velocity.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Exactly.
	They sort of pull up the ladder, don't they, so that nobody can climb up, ever.
	Well, I was going to say, and it's our fellow, I wasn't exactly, you know, plebe, you know, parents, college, graduated, whatever you want to call that.
	America's a different sort of class structure than the UK, but, you know, it's all the voters in the rank and file of the plebes and the middle class that vote for this stuff.
	They think that they're making it more fair, sock it to the rich with the taxes, and it's actually the up-and-comer they're really getting.
	We much have tax shelters and trusts and offshore and all kinds of different structures that don't really make any sense, you know, until you get to a certain level of, you know, call it $50 or $100 million.
	It doesn't make any sense to set up a trust, you know, and do all those things.
	It's expensive.
	There's a lot of brain damage involved.
	You know, it makes it harder for you to get at your money.
	You're working through a trustee.
	You know, who would do that for a few hundred thousand dollars or a few million dollars?
	And now you're one of them.
	Do you feel like a kind of poacher turned gay?
	I mean, you must rub shoulders with these people.
	What are they like?
	I've met a lot of central bankers.
	I've met a lot of legislators.
	I've certainly met my share of super, super, super wealthy people.
	In a lot of ways, they're the same as everybody else.
	You know, it's the old expression, when they're cut, they bleed.
	Yeah.
	But in some ways, there's definitely a different mode of thinking.
	Some of them, especially the ones born to it, have a sense of entitlement and privilege, which is, you know, a little bit disgusting.
	And a lot of them are, you know, demonstrate, especially the self-made ones, you know, you can see why they got there.
	And, you know, there's that old thought experiment that if you took away everybody's money, Made everybody naked, standing here, and give everybody 20 years.
	Most of the ones who are rich today would be rich again, and most of those that are poor today would be poor again.
	And you can see, you know, their lower time preference, which means they're more willing to invest, more willing to take a risk, more willing to use their judgment to say, this is going to work, this isn't going to work, willing to delay gratification.
	You can see a lot of those behaviors that are certainly less common amongst, you know, people who didn't even make it.
	That said, I do want to say something about this.
	And it's something people have asked me privately, but I don't think I've ever said this on like a recording.
	Sometimes the difference between an entrepreneur who really made it and an entrepreneur who, you know, went bankrupt is a little bit of timing.
	I look at my own deal, right, and, you know, as the entrepreneur, of course, you want to get the deal done yesterday, but it doesn't work that way.
	The timing and the pacing is controlled by the acquirer.
	And so in my case, they said, you know, so we have the technology.
	They were talking about licensing it.
	We helped one of the groups within their CTO office.
	CTO office at Nortel had 1,400 people, to put this in perspective.
	So a group within the CTO office was like, yeah, we like the technology.
	Can you help us integrate it?
	And if it works, we'll go to market and we'll license your stuff.
	That was our big break as a little company.
	We get through all of that, and I got on a call that I thought was a business conversation.
	There's a bunch of new people there, and this guy who I didn't know said, well, you know, instead of licensing the tech, why don't we just buy the company?
	Hey, Keith, it's your company for sale.
	It was, like, very flip, very, like, sort of cavalier.
	And I said, okay, we can have that conversation.
	I'm going to introduce you to, his name was Price Pascal, my investment banker, and I'm going to step to the side and let you guys have that conversation.
	And so that was, like, November, December 2007.
	First real conversation occurred right after the New Year, in January of 2008.
	And it was eight months, you know, eight and a half months from the time we were really talking in earnest.
	And your schedule is governed by things like lawyers, summer vacations.
	You know regulatory flying trial in since Northell's a Canadian company.
	We had a defense contract in the u.s.
	So there's regulations or something called CFIUS that you have to file for and you know all these You know high-stakes phone calls and and if anything goes wrong, you know new deals off and now we were profitable We would have made it if the deal had cratered, but there's a lot of cases where that deal You know, but we would have lost a lot of money and a lot of momentum.
	I think we spent $300,000 plus just in legal fees, audit fees, all this kind of stuff, and a huge loss of momentum.
	I didn't have the van wants to do anything other than be in their tractor beams.
	So if the deal had failed, that would have been a huge setback at the very least.
	And so I'm very conscious that the world, certainly in America, really glorifies and celebrates the entrepreneur who gets to that level, right?
	And all too often can have a bit of contempt, oh, you know, you loser, for the guy who didn't.
	And the difference between the two could come down to the timing of lawyer summer vacations.
	So in the case of our deal, As a matter of historical record, we were the last acquisition Northell ever did.
	They spiraled into bankruptcy almost immediately thereafter.
	The timing, as I look at how the deal closed, the mergers and acquisitions group was in Richardson, Texas.
	Headquarters was in Ottawa, Canada.
	And so the day that the acquisition closed, a couple of the people from headquarters in Ottawa flew down and we had a private party and then the next day began integration.
	Months later, one of those guys said that he'd run into the CTO and so he went to work in the morning and had a flight at like 1 p.m.
	and Arizona being three hours behind, it was easy to do that for him.
	So he said he ran into the CTO That morning, and this guy's a very happy-go-lucky, picture your typical Canadian.
	Hey, how's it going, eh?
	You know, with that accent.
	He's got the toque on and everything, just very stereotypical Canadian.
	But very happy-go-lucky, very sort of friendly guy.
	And he said the CTO said something very unusual that morning that was an indication things weren't good.
	And the CTO said, um, really, really bad.
	And it's about to get horrendously worse.
	And the CTO stalked off.
	Normally CTO, I met him once, but he's a very talkative, high-energy guy, really smart guy, just super passionate about what he does.
	That was, you know, atypical.
	So headquarters knew that morning that it was hitting the fan.
	But I think, and I can't, I'll never work out the exact timing of this.
	I picture one day if there's a heaven and I get in, You know, there'll be a bar there, and I'll have a chance to meet all these folks, and over a beer, be able to say, now, you just tell me, what did you know this morning?
	But I suspect that they knew at headquarters that morning that everything was blowing up, and they must have had some really big meeting, and that's why the CTO was out of sorts.
	But they neglected to pick up the phone and call the Richardson Group, which was a couple hours behind in time zone as well.
	And just to basically say, call the deals off, that phone call could have been hours after our deal closed.
	I don't know.
	But what I do know is I had at least one meeting in Richardson.
	So that was a nine-story building, and the top floor was the M&A group, Richardson Acquisitions.
	So I was there for a meeting, and in the lobby there, it was a pretty big floor and a pretty big building, between myself and my investment banker and my advisor, there were at least three other companies that either I or those folks knew personally.
	And, well, what are you guys doing here?
	Well, not a lot to say.
	What do you mean, undisclosed?
	Nobody was allowed to say why they were there, because it's all under NDA, Nortel's a public company, you don't talk about pending acquisitions, obviously.
	Of those deals, of the four of us in that cohort, and there may have been others that I don't know about, obviously, that wouldn't have been there at that moment for me waiting in the lobby, one of those deals closed and two of them didn't.
	So, you know, and I don't know how close their timing was, assuming they were part of our cohort.
	They could have been plus or minus a few days or a few weeks.
	And so, you know, that's the dividing line sometimes.
	There is a, you know, you think you work hard and you think you're really smart.
	You think you have a great product, an idea.
	You know, we had 13 patents and all this stuff.
	And it comes down to, you know, they didn't pick up the phone and call Richardson until after they had wired the money and closed their deal.
	It comes down to time zones, a two-hour time gap.
	Yeah, and there were so many things that could have delayed the deal for weeks.
	The CFIUS filing, right?
	They didn't wait.
	And it was very unusual.
	Their law firm said after this big meeting with the program director at the military agency, we don't, you know, the guy was very passionate on the call.
	He basically said, okay, I get it.
	He said, I just have one question.
	I'm sitting on the edge of my seat, biting my fingernails at the quick, you know, just one question.
	And I said, what's that?
	And he said, is Keith going to do well out of this deal personally?
	And they said, yeah, you could say that.
	He said, okay, I'm good.
	So after that, the lawyer for Nortel said, well, we obviously, you know, we have to go through the paperwork drill, and you do the filing, and they have to, whatever, 30 or 60 days to object.
	He said, the lawyer actually said, we recommend going forward.
	We don't anticipate any difficulties there.
	And, which is unusual, normally they want to dot every I, cross every T. Yeah, yeah, yeah, lawyers.
	And, um, they actually, you know, recommended, now that never became a problem, but if that had, if that, if they had to do the full 30 day process on that, or 60 day process, the deal wouldn't have closed.
	I might not be here right now.
	No.
	So it's very humbling.
	You weren't just on the last chopper out of Saigon.
	You were clinging to the skid of the chopper.
	Right, exactly.
	Yeah, yeah.
	You must have spent every day since just pinching yourself and wondering what you've done right to get this blessed good fortune.
	I mean, all the other things I've said were true.
	I think we had a really brilliant idea.
	I think I certainly worked really, really hard.
	I put together a hell of a team.
	They're smart people.
	The technology was very cool.
	It was 3D spatial audio for voice communication.
	And it was ahead of its time now.
	You see Meta, Apple, Dolby, other companies are working on similar technologies.
	A lot of the cases, I know the folks that are involved, and they knew me at the time, and saw demos of what I was doing.
	And so, all the other elements were there.
	It's not a roulette wheel, where all the plebs walk into the casino, give it a spin, and one lucky guy is now ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, now you're made man.
	You have to have all the other elements, but the difference between the guy who is in the headlines and the guy who didn't get there can sometimes be, you know, something very prosaic and very capricious like that.
	But do you get the impression that it's a bit like Hollywood, that nobody knows anything?
	I'll give you an example of this.
	I have a family member who is in tech and who's been a very successful tech entrepreneur.
	And I remember a few years ago, he went out to California to see all the big companies that specialise in putting money into tech companies.
	And he had a really, really good product.
	I mean, really, really good.
	And he's done very well out of it since.
	But these companies were turning him down right, left and centre.
	And we're talking about companies which went on to put gazillions into that Sam Bankman Freed
	You know I mean they lost they lost so much money on that and and they couldn't see I mean I think even I could have seen that Sam Bankman Freed's operation was stank to high heaven and yet these these guys who were supposed to be the smartest you know they've all got their degrees from Stanford haven't they and they're all they're all super switched on and they they fell for this.
	There is definitely a hurting behavior you know in the venture investing world I think a lot of those guys are very smart.
	I think they recognize the elements.
	Of course, investing in early-stage companies, especially the really early stages, is a bit of a crapshoot.
	The ones that are most promising go nowhere.
	The ones that come out of nowhere, you're like, who the hell are those guys?
	Where did that come from?
	Um, but I think what the Sandbankman Freeds managed to do, what the Elizabeth Holmeses of Theranos, um, you know, managed to do is to get some of the right people on board very early, and they have this, this pedigree and this sense of this imprimatur, this sense of, um, you know, we have all the smart people in the room, we're doing everything right, look who's on board, um, and um,
	that lulls a lot of people, that substitutes for due diligence.
	Right?
	Because if you did...
	And the video came out of Sam Bankman-Freed on a diligence call with some VC firm, and they're asking him questions, like, "Where are your financials?" and whatever.
	He's playing a video game while he's on the call.
	And this video came out, right?
	And on the other side, they're like, this kid's brilliant, we should back him to the ends of the earth, put money in, and he is completely just blowing off the whole conversation, not taking it seriously at all, playing Call of Duty or whatever it was that he was playing.
	And, um, you know, obviously that's hugely embarrassing to the people that put the money in.
	So that pedigree, you know, served in lieu of any real due diligence.
	Well, if these guys are on board, I'll be on board.
	And, um, And like, you know, Ayn Rand coined, I think, a great term for that, which is second-handedness.
	Instead of doing their own due diligence, like, oh, well, those guys must have done their due diligence.
	And if everyone's looking around thinking someone else did it, then nobody did it.
	And that's just laziness.
	It's, it's, they call it social proof, but, you know, it's not, it's not a, not a good way to do business.
	And we get burned for it.
	You mentioned Elizabeth Holmes, the Theranos thing, that it was a complete con, she invented this product that was going to revolutionise taking blood and actually it was just a kind of, it didn't exist, the technology.
	That whole story made me happy because so many of the people that I think are really not good people piled into that, didn't they?
	They were early stage investors and they must have lost a fortune on that.
	Yeah, a lot of people did and, you know, the only thing I can say is I don't look for the schadenfreude moment.
	I'd rather celebrate the genuine successes, which unfortunately are relatively rare and few because the regulators and the taxonators and everything just conspires to make it really hard.
	But there are good guys out there and Oh, are there?
	Please tell me there are, because, you know, the way I... I'm looking at the world now, Keith, and I'm thinking it is... OK, well, let's give the Sam Bankman Freed operation as an example.
	The regulators clearly not only did not do their job, I mean, they actively looked the other way.
	In fact, they were probably in on the whole thing, weren't they?
	I don't know how we are protected legally from that, but...
	It seems to me that the whole system, the actual presidential administration was in on this con trick, you know, with their money laundering scheme with Ukraine and so on.
	So I'm going to say something very controversial and provocative, but I hope it goes over the right way.
	Regulation is always sold on grounds that's going to protect the public.
	You know, whether it's landlord-tenant regulation or medical regulation or securities regulation or whatever, it's always sold and we're going to protect the little guy.
	And always, that's not what it does.
	What it does is it protects the crony incumbents.
	It protects the corrupt corporations that sort of comprise the oligarchy.
	And what the regulators are doing is they're going after the good guys and making it more difficult, more expensive, adding friction to their business models, slowing them down.
	And so when you see the genuine bad guys, And so before all these was obviously made off and any other, you know, the regulators are always asleep at the switch.
	That's not really their job, you know, as it works in the real world to find, to detect those actual bad guys who have the right pedigrees, who do the right regulatory filings, have the right lawyers and the right friends in Washington and all that.
	The regulators are busy harassing a million Um, you know, anonymous, unknown entrepreneurs usually at an early stage before they make a famous celebrity cause.
	When somebody gets big enough, you know, look at Elon Musk.
	And there's a mixed guy.
	Clearly has a lot of talent and a lot of ability as an entrepreneur, no question about it.
	But, you know, he committed very obvious securities fraud.
	He said, for purposes of getting his share price up.
	That we're entertaining right now.
	We're about to do a deal to take the company private.
	There's an unnamed private buyer that's going to buy it at whatever umpteen dollars a share, which is a lot higher than the market price at that time.
	The board was actually forced to come out and say, well, actually that's not true.
	If that were true, we, the board, would have had to have been involved in the conversations long before now.
	Our CEO basically just lied to the public.
	That's called securities fraud.
	If anybody else does that, let's go to prison.
	But, you know, because it's Elon Musk, the SEC says, well, you have to have a minder looking over your tweets and not letting you tweet, you know, without your minder clicking the approve button or whatever.
	And, you know, so that's how regulation works.
	So we're agreed.
	It's one rule for them, another rule for us.
	Despite the fact that journalists like I used to be, when I believed in the narrative, we'd write pieces like about, you know, everyone's equal before the law and one of the great The great benefits of living in America or the UK is that we have these checks and balances and these legal systems that protect us and occasionally you get some reasonably rich person being made an example of but generally they get away
	We believe in the system, we've been persuaded to believe in the system, but we know, you know and I know, that the system is completely bent and it's designed to screw us over, designed to stop people like you.
	You were just really lucky, obviously Tam did as well.
	So have you, since we last talked about this, because I know you were fairly pessimistic last time, but What have you learned in the last two years about the world that has encouraged you that things are going to get better?
	Not much, I imagine.
	I mean, if there's a sign for encouragement, it's that more people are becoming aware.
	And obviously, I keep my focus on the monetary problem.
	I mean, sort of creeping collapse of the rule of law.
	I'm aware of it, obviously.
	Occasionally I'll write a piece about something like that on my blog, but I'm really focused on the money problem.
	And that's the problem that monetary metals is trying to solve.
	I founded a nonprofit called the Gold Standard Institute to help people understand that problem.
	And there's certainly many millions of people that are screaming about the monetary problem, which was not the case, certainly not before 2008, and I think even after.
	I mean, there was an increase in the number of people who saw it, but nothing like what we see now, so I have some hope there.
	My theory of these things is that so long as the masses are not only complacent, but actually actively complicit, Why do we have all this regulation and all this tax?
	The people are demanding it.
	If you stood up and said, vote for me for office, I'm going to repeal all this regulation and cut all these taxes and cut all this spending, they'd call you a fascist and you'd never be electable as dog catcher, let alone prime minister or something like that.
	So as long as the people are demanding it, of course, the system will never change.
	It only grows in one direction.
	But when And, you know, at least speaking in America, there's been a number of, you know, extremely unjust regimes.
	Let's just take slavery, alcohol prohibition, and Jim Crow.
	And now I think it's happening with marijuana prohibition.
	When enough people get angry enough, and it takes anger as an emotion, not a regret over statistic.
	If people are thinking that the problem is consumer prices are rising, what they call inflation, Then they say, oh yeah, do you remember when gasoline and petrol was 29 cents a gallon?
	I was a really young kid.
	I think I remember seeing a sign that said 29 cents once.
	It's a nostalgia play.
	And of course, wages were $3,000 a year when gasoline was 29 cents a gallon.
	And so it's a really weak argument because First of all, nostalgia only goes so far and then you finish your beer and you go back to work.
	And secondly, people only really care about the difference between how fast their wage is going up and how fast consumer prices are going up.
	And they only complain about that spread, that difference between the two.
	But if people realize that the fundamental problem with the monetary system is it's a counterfeiting operation.
	They're calling this credit.
	But they call it borrowing without means or intent to repay.
	Of course, any private actor does that.
	That's not called borrowing.
	That's called fraud.
	And you go to prison for that.
	But that's how the government and how the central bank operates.
	Whether it's the Bank of England, the ECB, you know, the Fed.
	That is the root of it.
	And very open.
	I mean, it's not a hidden conspiracy.
	It's not.
	And yet, at the same time, most people Still, I think, look at those two words, federal and reserve, and they think, well, this is a government institution which is responsible, which is, I mean, you're constantly reading in the papers what the head of the Fed says, you know, his economic forecast and stuff, and how he's trying to control inflation or whatever.
	He's presented as this respectable authority figure who has our best interests at heart.
	I mean, how many people know... Give me your take on the Federal Reserve.
	Just give us a bit of history, what you know about it.
	So, unfortunately, in America, they made a dog's dinner of money from the very founding.
	So, you know, back in 1790 they created the Bank of the United States, which was our first central bank.
	And it didn't have all the arms of the vampire squid that the modern Fed that we know and love so much had.
	But it was definitely a crony organization, partly owned by the government, partly private.
	The private interest that wanted it lent the government the money for the government to buy its own shares.
	What an incredible deal.
	I create this thing, I want you to be a shareholder, and I lend you the money so you can be a shareholder in my enterprise.
	And no normal business dealing would that ever fly.
	And 1792, they created the Coinage Act, which unfortunately fixed the value of silver against gold, which you can't do that.
	I mean, that's, you know, they have a slightly different market value than the legal value.
	So the gold goes into hiding because it was undervalued as money.
	The silver comes out into circulation because it was overvalued as money.
	And then they flipped that in the other direction in 1834, and then the silver goes into world markets and the gold comes out.
	You needed an act of Congress to open a bank.
	Everything else was a free market in this country at that time.
	You could open a restaurant, you could open a farm, open a factory, a shipbuilding yard, whatever.
	But for a bank you needed an act of Congress.
	Then, you know, later, they made it easier, but banks were always regulated, always needed a charter, and as a condition to get that charter, you had to agree to do something totally unsound, like stuff yourself to the gills with state government bonds to get a state charter.
	And the states in those days would default all the time on these things.
	And then people would point at it and say, look, it's those wildcat bankers.
	No, it was the regulation.
	So after the Civil War, they demonetized silver in the U.S.
	It's called the Crime of 1873.
	The simmering resentment of which led to the election of 1896.
	William Jennings Bryan famously said, do not crucify the farmer in this country on the cross of gold.
	Doesn't win the election.
	McKinley, an establishment figure, wins.
	But William Jennings Bryan doesn't go away.
	He resurfaces in the Woodrow Wilson administration.
	what is that, 17 years later or something.
	And he's the instrumental guy who pushes and makes the Federal Reserve Act go into law Christmas Eve in 1913.
	And it was basically partly it was revenge, and partly it was we need some relief from the deflation that by demonetizing all the silver.
	So all the farmers and craftspeople had debts denominated in dollars, which meant either silver or gold.
	You demonetize silver, the value of what the money they held at home, which was silver, is rapidly falling at that point.
	The debt is now in hard gold, which is going up in value relative to the silver they hold anyway, and you're just squeezing them.
	So they wanted some relief.
	They couldn't get it by going back to bimetallism.
	They get the Fed.
	And the Fed is created.
	It wasn't at that time to somehow manage unemployment and consumer price index.
	That's contemporaneous issues for us now.
	That's very anachronistic to look at.
	What were they saying in 1913?
	1913, they said, there's a business cycle intrinsic to the free market.
	Not true.
	They were creating it with non-Central Bank rubbish that they were doing, but we're going to smooth out the business cycle by creating the Fed.
	The Fed immediately begins buying government bonds, which it was not authorized to do, retroactively legalized in the 1930s, and trying to manipulate the interest rate by doing so, setting in motion a business cycle the likes of which never had been seen.
	Great Depression coming out of the Depression.
	The interest rate eventually shoots the moon from 1947 to 1981, hits a level that nobody could have ever imagined.
	And so the Fed exacerbated the cycle and increased the, you know, by orders of magnitude.
	And today everybody takes for granted, well, of course, you have to have a central bank.
	I'm not in the Overton window.
	I'm completely not acceptable in polite company for simply saying we shouldn't have a central planner.
	The Soviets learned this.
	They tried to centrally plan wheat and grain.
	Which is a really simple thing.
	You need the right soil that's been producing for centuries.
	You need sunlight and rain, and you put the seeds in the ground, and you wait, and the crops come up, and then you harvest it.
	And they couldn't even... and it has an annual cycle, obviously.
	They couldn't centrally plan that, and millions and millions of Soviet citizens died of malnutrition.
	Today, we think we can centrally plan credit, which isn't simple, has a cycle that even the proponents admit can be decades.
	And, um...
	You know, and we laugh at the Soviets for how naive and stupid they were and incompetent for trying to essentially plant corn.
	Do we know who actually owns the Fed?
	I mean, I know the names of some of the central bankers who went in that closed carriage to Jekyll Island so that nobody would know they were having this secret meeting.
	But who owns it now?
	Who are the beneficiaries of this money printing scheme?
	I think it's your classic crony You know, fascist in the sense of Mussolini, of government and business colluding.
	And of course, who are they colluding against?
	It's everyone else.
	Nominally, the big banks, you know, J.P.
	Morgan and others, own, quote-unquote, some shares.
	It's a government agency.
	It functions as a government agency.
	Its board is appointed by the President and ratified by the Senate.
	They have shares and they get a 6% dividend on the paid-in 1912 value of those shares.
	Which is, you know, given the amount of inflation we've had since then, the amount of dividend they get is totally trivial of whatever the paid-in capital was back in those days.
	But they have a great deal of influence over monetary policy.
	The real profiteering doesn't come from the fact that whatever the Fed pays them in dividend.
	It comes from the fact that if you can control monetary policy, or at least you know what they're going to do next, then you can place your bets.
	You know, place your trades accordingly, and that can front and run the Fed.
	That's the real, the real game.
	It's like people are complaining.
	So it's insider trading, basically?
	Yeah, except it's not, you know, insider trading is, you know, public companies, if you know something that the public doesn't, you're not allowed to trade.
	I'd like to go back to a word which I think was used by Bastiat, spoliation.
	So when you have the ability to, you know, inflict harm on the economy, And you know what you're going to do, or you know what your cronies are going to do before it happens, then you can place your trade based on whatever harm is about to come.
	And I remember, Chris started thinking about this when Bill Clinton was in office, and they came out with some announcement that they were going to do something to the, they were going to fix the prices of all the drugs, and take away all the pharmaceutical companies' profits.
	And it came out that before that announcement had hit, You know, Hillary, I think, and any number of our Congress people had shorted the pharmaceutical industry.
	And then they came out with this announcement.
	You know, insider trading is when you trade based on what you know.
	Spoliation is when you trade based on what the government can do.
	And so then they beat up, the pharmaceutical industry lost 30% of their market cap within a day of that announcement, and they let it languish for a while.
	Those people covered their short positions, and I think in some cases went long, and then they let the whole thing blow over, and the market caps recovered to where they had been.
	That is just, I think it needs a different word, and I like Bastiat's word of spoliation, that they're creating spoils, and then they're helping themselves to the spoils that they created.
	That would explain why Nancy Pelosi, a woman of no obvious talent, is worth how many?
	I mean, they all end up being worth millions, don't they, these congressmen?
	Isn't that the interesting thing?
	Public servants.
	And I was about to get back to what's the real game.
	There are people who complain that congresspeople are paid too much, and look at what it's costing the taxpayer.
	No, no, no.
	Whatever they get a salary, and I don't think it's $400,000, but let's just use that as an example.
	That's nothing.
	The real game is what they can do in terms of spoliation and obviously in terms of bribery.
	There's no such thing as an anonymous Swiss account today for Americans, but I'm sure there's a million and one ways if you're a crony corporation and you want to pay a bribe to a family member of the President or the Speaker of the House or something like that.
	There's a way of paying them.
	There must be.
	And that's the real game, the salary's nothing.
	And they all end up with tens of millions of dollars, and you're like, how did you get that money?
	You're a public servant, getting a salary that we can all see on record as, you know, public record.
	And are you with me that the financial system is on the verge of collapse?
	Yeah, I mean, it had its hiccup in Black Monday of 1987, the solution for which is more money printing and push the interest rate down.
	It had its moment with long-term capital management collapse in, was that 1998, I think.
	It certainly had a big moment in 2001, an even bigger moment in 2008.
	I'm not sure the magnitude of it, but certainly a very big moment with the beginning of the onset of COVID in 2020.
	And the solution is always the same, which is paper over it.
	Just flood the system with more liquidity.
	And the underlying crisis, which is paper over and therefore not visible to most people, just gets worse and worse and worse.
	And so I would say I don't necessarily think collapse is imminent, but things are churning underneath and getting worse.
	Yeah.
	So now cutting to the chase, this is obviously, we can agree, I think, good for gold.
	It's the antidote, right?
	I mean, if they're cheating and you don't want to be, you know, if this is a mugs game and you don't want to be a mug, well gold is the way to opt out.
	And that's why gold is completely unloved and, you know, the price is sitting here at $2,000.
	And in most other currencies, it's either at new all-time highs or, you know, within a hair's breadth of it.
	Yeah.
	First of all, why has gold been so unloved for so long?
	Because its price has been, as you suggest, lower than it ought to be.
	Well, I'm saying that given how unloved it is, look at how high the price is.
	But, you know, there's an argument in the gold community about manipulation, and most people think that manipulation is a very obvious sort of fraud where the banks are just selling gold they don't have.
	And I don't think that's generally how the system works.
	When people commit that kind of fraud, then they become Bernie Madoff and eventually become too criminal to ignore.
	And then they go to prison or Sam Bankman-Fried.
	The real manipulation starts in nursery rhymes.
	Actually, nursery rhymes still celebrate gold, but maybe kindergarten and all through public school.
	And every bit of public information, go to Google.
	Go to Google Images and type in money.
	And what you get, maybe in the UK you see notes with pound notes, but in the US you see dollar bills.
	And nowhere do you see gold coins.
	So the propaganda that gold is this, you know, that's not the money you're looking for here, you know, Jedi mind trick kind of thing.
	That's what, you know, turns people off to it.
	It's derided, it's dismissed, it's sneered at by everybody of any mainstream pretensions.
	And, you know, a lot of people will pay heed to that.
	And, of course, the gold industry, this is partially a self-inflicted wound.
	The way the gold industry speaks in terms of dark, conspiratorial tones, gold's gonna be $50,000 by tomorrow morning, they've been saying that since I've been following it in 08, certainly doesn't help that they put their own tarnish on gold as well.
	And gold always was a mainstream thing.
	It should be a mainstream thing again, and I think that's It's kind of the point of this whole thing.
	Yes, so I've obviously been interested in gold for quite some time for the reasons we've hinted at.
	And what I know is that paper gold is a really bad idea, right?
	Paper gold is just essentially worthless.
	Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different things people mean by that.
	But I think at the very least, everybody needs to know who the counterparty is.
	And, you know, if the counterparty is a bank, you have that banking system exposure.
	And if your purpose of owning gold was to avoid banking system exposure, then why would you drop out of the frying pan into the other frying pan?
	It doesn't make any sense.
	Yeah.
	But at the same time, historically, people You know, had gold at a custodian because having it at home, you can't insure it at home.
	So you're waiting for a fire, flood, home invasion.
	You know, if you live in a flat on the third floor, then anybody with a drywall knife in your neighbor's apartment can cut a hole and get into yours.
	So, you know, having a significant part of your net worth uninsurable at home in the desk drawer, probably not that smart a thing to do either.
	No.
	And then if you store gold in a vault, You're paying a fee aren't you to?
	That's the problem.
	That's right, which is kind of annoying That's right as well.
	I was gonna say so if gold's going up at 20% a year Then most people don't really fret with waltz fees, which are three quarters of a percent per year or something like that But if the price of gold is kind of going sideways which for a very long time in US dollar terms certainly did then that gets very old and And now that's obviously the softball pitch.
	What is my job?
	I was that we pay interest on gold no storage fees So isn't it better to get 3% interest than to pay step, you know 0.75 percent and fees.
	Yeah, let's let a compound.
	So it's okay On one of the many phone calls I had with one of your assistants trying to set up this this podcast and I again I apologize for dicking around so for so long.
	It wasn't deliberate.
	I said look The last time I spoke to Keith, I only really half understood how it's possible for him to pay interest on gold when nobody else has ever worked out how to do it.
	And I said, please can you explain how it works?
	And he explained to me And it was a bit like when I was at my prep school and I was really crap at maths and I think we were doing algebra or something and one day I sat with my maths teacher after class and he explained it to me and suddenly a light bulb went off in my head.
	I understand it!
	And I had that moment.
	So what I'm hoping you can do now is recreate for viewers and listeners that moment and explain how the hell Are you able to pay interest on this thing which doesn't pay interest?
	I was going to say, historically, of course, for thousands of years it did.
	What we're doing isn't new at all.
	It's new in the current economic environment.
	Post-1930s, everything has been essentially a pure paper world.
	And so people have forgotten about gold, and we're just going back and saying, okay, well, before 1933, this is how the world worked.
	If you, you know, a loan, a bond was denominated in gold.
	And then after 1933, not so much.
	So I gave a talk at the Harvard Club in New York some years ago, and they had all this memorabilia on the wall.
	I took a picture.
	They had an old gold bond certificate from 1905 or 1906 or something like that.
	I just snapped a picture of it, went in, gave my talk.
	The cameras on these phones are so high resolution, you can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in and read everything.
	So I've published this picture, which I snapped multiple times in different articles and whatever, and right on there it says it's payable in the gold coin.
	It was the, you know, the Liberty, I believe, at the time, specified in the contract right on the certificate.
	Three and a half percent payable in this gold coin.
	They didn't want banknotes to repay this.
	So all of that destroyed by President Roosevelt in 1933.
	Long since buried and forgotten, gold is not thought of in finance today.
	Finance means borrowing dollars, or in some cases sterling or euros.
	And all we're doing is we're going back to, let's use gold to finance productive enterprise.
	It's not as FTX had its, you know, so-called yield product, Celsius, which may or may not have been a criminal fraud.
	I don't know if there's criminal charges yet, but it was certainly a self-referential, you know, they're borrowing your crypto in order to do what?
	Raise funds to buy more crypto.
	So as long as it's an ascending spiral of prices always going up, everybody appears to be making money.
	That's the great thing about Ponzi, what feels great about Ponzi schemes.
	On the way up, everyone's making money.
	And then when it turns, you know, what everybody thought was collateral all disappears, it all evaporates, and it's not sustainable.
	But what the world runs on, if there's going to be a civilization anyways, is production.
	And production needs finance.
	If you're anything bigger than a one-person workshop or a family farm, You know, you can't just dismiss it and say, oh well, invest equity capital in it.
	You know, I like to use the example, and there's an analogy to what we do with gold leasing.
	So, suppose you have an oil pipeline, and the pipeline runs a hundred miles from wherever the well is to wherever the, you know, the big depot where the, you know, ships and trucks are offloading the oil.
	So, it's a hundred mile pipeline.
	There's always, no matter how fast or slow the oil is flowing through the pipeline, there's always a certain amount of volume of oil contained in the pipe.
	And not to revisit unpleasant flashbacks of maths in grammar school, but the amount of oil contained in that pipe is given by a very simple formula, which is the length of the pipe times the diameter of the pipe times pi.
	Pi d is the area, and then length will give you the volume.
	If it's oil, I don't know on a 100 mile pipe how much oil that is, whether you need finance or not for that.
	But in the case of gold, gold is $2,000 an ounce.
	You need to finance that.
	So if you're a jewelry manufacturer, every day let's say you're buying a kilogram bar of 99.99% pure gold.
	And, you know, you're doing all kinds of things to it.
	You're mixing it with some silver and copper to make 14 karat or whatever.
	You're squashing it under rollers.
	You're cutting out little pieces.
	You're bending those pieces.
	You're welding them with more gold solder.
	You're polishing it.
	You're putting little prongs on it and whatever.
	So let's say there's a two-week process.
	Every day you buy a fresh kilo bar of gold and that goes into step one of your process.
	At the same time, what had been in step one of your process goes to step two, and so on through the steps of your manufacturing process, and that takes two weeks.
	So, to make the math easy, there's 14 kilos of gold that's in the business, like oil in the pipeline.
	At the end, you're selling a kilo worth of, let's say, rings.
	You're selling a kilo worth of rings every day, you're buying a kilo worth of raw gold every day, but there's 14 kilos contained in the business at all times.
	Now, because gold is so expensive, right, so a kilo is 32 ounces, roughly.
	So, what is that, $64,000 a kilo, times 14, so what is that, 640, you know, it's a million dollars-ish, something like that.
	You could, it's okay, you borrow a million dollars, that, you know, you buy the gold inventory.
	The problem is, what if the gold price drops?
	Yeah.
	So then you have to hedge, which means you're borrowing a million and a quarter, a million to go into the inventory, a quarter million to go into a futures brokerage account in Chicago, and then you're shorting gold futures to fix the problem of what if the price goes down, creating other problems, which is now you're playing with leverage, and if creating other problems, which is now you're playing with leverage, and if you don't know what you're doing, you can end up blowing up that trade and losing a lot So we come along and say, we will lease the gold to you.
	We will happily own all that gold that's your work in progress, your inventory, and we'll charge you a pretty low lease rate for it.
	And so it's financing a productive business.
	This business makes money by buying raw gold, Um, adding value to it, turning it into rings and rings sell for much higher than the gold value in them.
	Let's say there's a 30% markup.
	It costs you 10%, so you're making a 20% margin by, you know, classic value-add manufacturing operation.
	So because you're adding 20% per turn, you're doing, what, 25 turns a year, you know, you're happy to pay 4% or 5% interest for the finance that you need to enable this.
	So that's what we do.
	We lease gold out to, you know, businesses that are obliged to have gold either as inventory.
	So take the jeweler's shop.
	So once these rings are manufactured, they're sold to, I don't know, let's say you walk into Harrods in London, and there's a whole counter full of, now Harrods is a little bit different because I think they're all different kiosks from different vendors, but there's a whole counter, you know, full of different rings.
	And, of course, in the back, in the safe, you know, if there's one ring that you like, they have one of every size.
	And there's whatever 20 different ring sizes times 50 different SKUs.
	that could be a thousand rings that they would be obliged to have an inventory.
	That's a lot.
	So they need the finance as well, because they spent all this money to have this high street location, all the halogen lights, you know, the fancy display.
	The security.
	The security.
	All the doors.
	The attractive young lady behind the counter, all that stuff cost a lot of money.
	And the last thing you want, if somebody comes in, they actually want to buy, but you have to turn them away because you don't have their size or something.
	So they carry a lot of inventory against when you come in and you're ready to buy, they have got the product for you.
	And so they have to finance that inventory.
	So there's a lot of industries where there's gold as either work in progress or inventory.
	And we provide that finance.
	And they're happy to pay for it.
	And we demand interest in gold, not in, you know, paper currency.
	And we pay that interest to, and we take the spread, but we pay that interest to the clients.
	The other side of the business, we have two products.
	That's the leasing.
	We have the lending side, and we announced a deal.
	It's a Norwegian public company, but the mine asset is in Ethiopia.
	They've done all of the preparatory work, the drilling, the scientific analysis of how much gold do they have in the ground, and what is the shape of it, and how rich is it.
	Everything else and we're ready for a loan to pay for you know putting in the plant and they need a concrete pad to level it and You know, they need to sink a mineshaft in and all these various things.
	We lent them Denominated in gold we parcel that out as a securities offering.
	So the lease is not a securities offering It's a rental no different from renting an iPhone It's a tangible piece of property that's rented But in the case of lending, that is a loan that is a credit that's on balance sheet, we lend to them, they pay interest on it, and we're paying in- So we parcel that out as a securities offering that we call a gold bond.
	So we've issued the first gold bond since 1933, denominated in gold with principal and interest payable in gold, right there in the contract.
	This particular one is paying 19% net to the investors.
	Why?
	We think the mine asset is very solid, otherwise we wouldn't be doing it.
	We went on site for a few days, we brought a geologist consultant who we've worked with in the past on site, you know, to kick the tires, study everything, look at the drill core, you know, samples, but it's in Africa.
	And you have Africa risk.
	Yeah.
	And so 19% is, yeah, there's a risk there.
	Absolutely there is.
	And, you know, you can wave your hands and talk fast and, you know, pretend it's not there, but it is, and that's why the interest rate is what it is.
	And at the end of the day, we felt and our investors felt the deal was oversubscribed, that the 19% was an appropriate level of compensation for the risk they're taking, you know, to finance that.
	This is a public company.
	They're people who are happy to own the shares.
	We as the senior secured creditor, we get paid everything before the shareholders get paid anything.
	Right.
	So the risk is lower.
	So we're creating the asset in the middle, if you think of this conceptually as a risk-return spectrum.
	You can own gold metal, which has no risk, at least in gold terms, and no return, or even a negative return if you're paying for storing it.
	You can own equities, which is the opposite extreme.
	You don't get paid anything until all the creditors are paid, and there's all these business risks.
	We're creating options in between.
	The lease is pretty close to the physical metal.
	You own the title to it.
	It's not available to creditors in a bankruptcy or anything else.
	And the bond is somewhere farther out.
	There's a little bit more risk.
	There's a little bit...
	And obviously a higher interest rate, but it's still less than the equity.
	Is the bond you're talking about a separate product, separate from the monetary metals, where you get gold and you get paid interest on it?
	Or is that part of your scheme?
	There's two different programs that we offer.
	One is the leasing, which is developed with everybody.
	The other one is the bonds, which is accredited investors only.
	How do you become an accredited investor?
	The US SEC defines accredited.
	There's 27 different ways to be accredited.
	The most common of which is either a million dollars in net worth, not including your primary residence, or an income of $200,000 a year if you're single, $300,000 a year if you're married.
	That's really annoying, Keith.
	I can't pass that.
	We were talking earlier about the oligarchs, right, and how everything is designed It's promised to protect the plebs, but it's actually keeping the plebs down.
	It's saying all the best investment opportunities are not available to you.
	But, if you want to stay on the right... What if I like the sound of that Norwegian, of that bond thing?
	I was thinking, yeah, how do I get a piece of that?
	That's a bummer.
	Unfortunately, if you want to stay on the right side of the prison door, you know, this is the law, and you can complain about it on a podcast, but you better comply with it, or else...
	And so we're working on structures that will open that up to other investors.
	It just takes greater scale and you can do a public fund offering and things like that.
	So we're working on that new stuff.
	Just going back to the jewelers, what are other industries that might require, might need to lease gold on that scale?
	Refiners, recyclers, mints, both the jewellery retailers as well as the jewellery manufacturers, high-tech manufacturers.
	Have you ever seen gold mirrored sunglasses?
	You put the sunglasses on and they look like shiny gold, but you can see through it.
	There's a really, really fine layer of gold that's been impregnated into the plastic lens.
	And the manufacturing process is called sputtering.
	So you have this gigantic tool.
	It's like the size of a small room.
	And it requires really high voltage.
	It heats up.
	There's a vacuum chamber in there.
	It heats up the gold to something like 8,000 degrees centigrade.
	Which causes the gold to become ions, and, you know, the atoms break off and become ionized, fly through the vacuum, and impregnate themselves in the plastic, which has the opposite charge.
	And, um, so that's a sputtering manufacturing process, it's called.
	Um, and anyways, the nature of a sputtering machine is you can't consume most of the, uh, you basically put these gold bars in there called targets, and they're manufactured to very precise dimensions, but you can't consume most of the bar.
	By just the design of it, you know, you sort of make an oval race around this rectangular bar.
	You can't penetrate all the way through.
	You can't get to the corners.
	You can't get to the center of the oval.
	And so there's a lot of gold there that's not consumable.
	And so we lease the gold to, you know, to basically pay for the non-consumable part of the bar.
	Right.
	That's one type of lease we do.
	So there's, I don't know, half a dozen to a dozen different vertical industries where somebody's dealing with gold.
	In enough quantity that the financing matters.
	And you know, there's a sizable market doing this.
	This is, you know, I mean, it's a niche market as far as the big banks, but it's a pretty big market if you're a startup.
	So yes, the opportunity.
	Yeah, that's good.
	That's good.
	I get that.
	So you make a certain amount, a certain percentage on leasing the gold.
	And you pass on a proportion of that to people who buy from Bungie Metals.
	Yeah, I get that.
	You've explained it.
	Well, obviously, you ought to be able to explain it because it is your fucking job.
	I am persuaded.
	So, obviously, this doesn't protect you against the fluctuating gold price.
	I mean, if you buy a thousand dollars worth of gold and it goes down, well, that's your The principle of your capital is reduced, but you still get the interest.
	You know, that's it.
	And we don't, unlike probably any other company in the gold space, we don't really emphasize the price of gold and the fact that gold's going to go up.
	Now, economically, I view it as gold isn't going anywhere, it's the dollar that's going down and up, and mostly down, and so your principle is actually the same.
	Gold is the constant in the economic world, and the dollar can go up at times.
	So the dollar is designed to go down, that's the whole point.
	All of this bogus pseudo-theory is designed to try to justify why you want a currency that's always falling in value.
	So, if you own gold, you avoid the ravages of that loss.
	Now, the problem for the dollar world is the dollar is designed to go down, and most of the time it does, but there are short, sharp periods when the dollar has a wicked correction and reverses, and all the debtors are getting squeezed, and that's one of the things that's happening right now.
	So, you know, if you're up to your eyeballs in dollar debt and the dog's going up, you know, you could be a casualty of that.
	And so, if you buy gold right before that sharp correction, you could say you regret it because the dollar went up, and that's just when you sold your dollar.
	But I take a broader view, and I encourage people to take a broader view.
	So picture, do you remember when the Cyprus banking system collapsed?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	In 2013.
	If you had Euros in the Cyprus banking system, you basically got screwed.
	Yeah, bail-ins.
	There were several weeks where you couldn't access the Euros at all, then they said 600 Euros a day, and people were starving, unemployment hit 40% or something like that on the island.
	You know, if you had bought gold right before that crisis...
	The purpose of it wasn't that the price of gold was going to go up in Euro terms, and if I recall that historical moment and I looked at the gold price in Euros, I don't think it did.
	I think it was flat, sideways, maybe slightly down.
	But, the gold was good money, and the Euro in the Cyprus banking system ceased to be money-like at that point.
	So, if you didn't like being stuck on an island with 40% unemployment and just You know, you can just imagine the social cataclysm that would be going on there and anger, riots, who knows what was going on.
	You could just go to the harbor and pay that gold coin.
	Anybody would have been happy to take you to the mainland where the economy was doing well and you'd get a job.
	As a citizen of Europe, you get a job anywhere else.
	And so the gold was credible, the gold was not subject to default risk.
	And that's the thing with gold.
	That's what it always has done.
	It's not about its price.
	If you want to speculate to make lots of dollars or lots of pounds, I'm pretty infamous for saying that I don't think Bitcoin is money and I don't think it's sound.
	But I do say very often, Bitcoin is obviously superior at skyrocketing.
	Also crashing, but skyrocketing.
	So if you want something to speculate on to make lots of paper currency, gold isn't really very effective at that anyway.
	That's not what it does.
	It's there to be safe, not there to be a way to make big piles of paper and profits.
	Yeah.
	What about, suppose, say, if there was a major global recession, wouldn't the jewellery sector be one of the areas that's going to get hit quite hard, because this is a discretionary spending?
	In much of the world, jewelry is actually money.
	In the West, jewelry has become high art, but in a lot of places it isn't.
	But if an industry that we lease to is shrinking, then we work with them to reduce the lease balance to whatever they need to support the current level of business.
	So it's, you know, it's not a credit, it's not like you've made a loan and then hopefully their business goes good for the next 10 years until they repay the loan and if it doesn't, you take a loss.
	This is the inventory and if they don't, if they're not producing as rapidly, they don't need as much inventory, just return some of it or all of it if your business is at that point.
	Yes, but I mean, doesn't that reduce your ability to pay interest if you've got fewer Yeah, absolutely it would.
	So that's one of the industries.
	I think we're in a world right now that's got the opposite.
	Maybe jewelry would be the one of all the verticals that we deal with.
	The one exception to that.
	I think we're in a world where The gold price is likely to remain robust, if not skyrocketing, certainly robust, because of the obvious problems in the paper currencies, which means that for most of the companies in the gold trade, businesses are booming.
	They're doing really well, and they need the finance.
	At the same time, the conventional sources of finance are pulling back because of Basel III, because of credit conditions, because of ESG.
	Gold is not well-loved in the mainstream world for a lot of different reasons.
	And so, they need the finance.
	If we had a lessee that was returning some gold, yeah, that would reduce the business, but then we would just go on to the next one.
	And, okay, well, the refiners are booming, and the mints, which is money demand.
	It's not jewelry, which is more consumer discretionary.
	Yes.
	I know gold people hate being asked this question and you weren't very happy answering it last time.
	But gold price, how high could it go?
	So we have a model that what it attempts to do, and also all models, what is it, Richard Feynman, somebody said all models are wrong, some models are useful.
	So with that said, we have a model that what it does is it tries to calculate, you know, there's speculators in the market, and speculators can use very great leverage with futures.
	If you back out the speculators, because they can be bullish or bearish and distort the price, if you back out the speculators, where would the metal be trading?
	And most gold people assume, oh yeah, well, thousands of dollars higher.
	No, that's not true.
	So we have a graph that we publish on our website for free every day, which is the gold, I mean, we're 60-some odd, but one of them is the gold fundamental price.
	And we're looking at this, this fundamentals.
	I haven't looked today, but as of a couple days ago, it was $2,200-ish.
	So, a couple hundred dollars above where it is now.
	That said, that's a very short-term snapshot.
	Longer term, I think, as the monetary mismanagement grows, and for a lot of reasons, I think gold is in a bull market again, or rather the dollar is in a bear market, and all the other currencies are along with the dollar.
	I'm somewhat controversial for saying all the other currencies are dollar derivatives.
	The idea that a derivative would survive the collapse of the underlying is absurd.
	All the other currencies are attached to the dollar, and even if they weren't dirtier shirts in their own right, which they are, they wouldn't survive it anyway because their value derives from the dollar.
	But the whole paper currency complex is sinking right now, and for obvious reasons, and they have to make it more unsound in order to bail out all of the consequences of the previous round of fixes.
	And, you know, you had the pension crisis in the UK last October.
	I gave a talk at a conference in New Orleans.
	It was like how to create and destroy a pension system in 17 easy steps.
	And it was nominally about what happened in the UK.
	Obviously now we have Silicon Valley Bank collapse.
	And the same thing is happening in slow motion to a lot of other community and regional banks in the U.S. certainly and probably in the rest of the world.
	So what are they going to do?
	Well, they're going to have to suspend the rule of law.
	So when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, they said what?
	Okay, if you have less than $250,000 deposit, your funds will be -- 100 percent of your funds will be available Monday morning.
	So you have no disruption.
	If you have more than that as a deposit, we'll give you the 250, and we'll give you 40 or 50% of the rest, and everything after that is going to depend on how the liquidation goes.
	But by Sunday, they said, so two days after that, they said, oh, by the way, we've taken down another bank, which is Signature Bank in New York, and by the way, all deposits of any size will be bailed out in full.
	You know, the problem is they've just suspended the rule of law.
	There's a law that says $250,000 deposit insurance, but they just decided that didn't feel expedient or convenient for them, so throw that out the window and that goes under the bus.
	And now, okay, well we'll just make everybody good.
	The problem with that is, can you count on that?
	If you're a big depositor in another bank, Is that going to be true for you if your bank fails?
	There's no way to know.
	There's people making it up as they go along.
	And if they don't like that bank, politically or whatever, or they don't like the depositors, there's a lot of rumors, I think some of them are founded, that there was another bank that had, I don't remember the name of it now, had more of a crypto orientation or had a lot of crypto exchanges as their customer, and they said, we're not giving them a bailout.
	And so it becomes very political.
	What's your social credit score?
	I don't know how all this works.
	So everyone's looking at how to protect yourself from this.
	And if you own gold sitting in a vault somewhere, or even in a lease, it's outside the banking system.
	It's outside the scope of all this.
	Yes.
	And that's why people are buying gold.
	So I think the longer term price trend continues to rise.
	Not, you know, some cataclysmic thing.
	Gold, $5,000 by tomorrow morning.
	I think that's a reckless, that's not a prediction.
	That's a sales pitch by my product for most gold dealers, but I think a generally rising trend because people are You know looking to protect themselves and this is an environment in which the need for that protection becomes clearer Yeah, yes.
	You've made gold sound less sexy, but you've been more realistic.
	Because I think the problem with cryptos, they've kind of ruined us, given us outrageous expectations of what going to the moon looks like.
	And gold bugs, as you say, have been saying for years that gold is going to go to the moon.
	That's not what gold does.
	And crypto does do that, but it also crashes.
	And so, if you think that your timing is going to be better than everyone else's timing, have at it.
	But of course, that's not the way it works.
	The average person is going to end up getting caught up in that with very few people clever enough to have picked every bottom and picked every top as well.
	Most people end up buying at the top, that's why it's the top, because that's where all the buying is.
	Most people are not buying at the bottom, that's why it's the bottom.
	So, you know, if you think that, you know, it's a mugs game, and if you think that you're smarter than all the other mugs, have at it.
	You know, it's a market, it's a relatively free market in that sense, until the regulators come and crack down on it, but the problem is most people don't end up succeeding the way they imagine they will.
	So am I right in thinking you have no crypto?
	I do not have any crypto exposure.
	So apart from your business, where are you allocating your assets?
	I have a few equities where I have a specific reason to like that particular business.
	And at the moment I think, you know, cash and particularly T-bills, you know, if you have to be in the dollar world, T-bills is a smart place to be.
	Right.
	You know, first of all, there's a decent interest rate for the first time in a long time, which I don't believe is going to last, but while it does, hold the T-bills and you don't have the default risk.
	Right.
	And what about things like property, land?
	Man, is there a reckoning coming to real estate, at least in the U.S., and I think every country has different versions of it.
	The property bubble in Australia, for example, never really abated even in 2008.
	2008 was a very brief pause in an ever exponentially rising price, whereas in the United States there was a huge drop in real estate prices.
	But today, I think we're looking at a couple of things.
	Commercial real estate is going to be a horrific bust.
	I mean, worse than most people can imagine.
	Because of post-COVID, most major employers have not been successful at forcing their staff to return to the office.
	On top of that, there's just too much retail space.
	Again, this is a U.S. thing.
	I think you have a lot less retail space per capita in the U.K. than in the U.S.
	So retail restaurant space is all way oversupplied right now.
	Office space way oversupplied.
	And then residential is very interest rate sensitive.
	of You know, there's an old saying in residential business that people are not, they don't care what the price, they buy a payment, not a price.
	So, if the interest rate goes from, what was it, under 3%, I think, even before they started hiking rates, to 6% or something now, 7%, massive increase in the cost of the payment, and therefore people can afford less house.
	So, I think house prices are due for a big correction.
	so I would not be now if you had a particular property that you were speculating on it was right on the edge of development of certain cities or growing and you thought you had a great so there's always individual opportunities where there's something that makes sense the overall market sells off and you're smarter than the average person and you know where you're going or if there's any commodity production there if it's an oil generating property and you're in a jurisdiction that lets you produce that oil.
	So the UK has plenty of natural gas.
	You're just not allowed to produce it.
	I know.
	Tell me about it.
	It drives me nuts.
	Why aren't we...
	Fracking.
	I mean, why are we putting up these horrible bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes all over our, you know, ruining the land?
	I've never heard that put in that way before.
	Bat-slicing, bird-crunching, eco-crucifixes.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	I kind of invented that phrase.
	I've sort of popularized it.
	Not well enough, clearly, because you didn't know about it.
	But, yeah.
	They just, well, they despoil the landscape to no benefit.
	And then a huge malinvestment of billions and billions of pounds sterling to put those things up.
	But this is one of the sources of what people assume inflation is monetary.
	One of the huge sources of price increases in the UK is what they did to the price of energy.
	They passed two stupid laws around 2017 to 2018.
	One of them says no more hydrofracking, which means no more domestic production of natural gas.
	The other says all the heavy industry and power plants have to switch from oil and coal to natural gas, which no longer can produce domestically.
	Then you have COVID, where international shipping is just completely hosed, and now suddenly the price of natural gas goes up 10x.
	Which means you can't produce food because natural gas is used to produce fertilizer, and fertilizer production is impaired or destroyed, and you have huge amounts of consumer prices rising, especially in food and energy, and it's not monetary.
	It's just stupid regulatory policy.
	You've got to think this can't be accidental.
	You couldn't pass policy that bad without malign intent.
	This is not just idiots making mistakes, is it?
	This is by design.
	So, my personal belief on that, I'm certainly outside my swim lane, which is the money thing, but the ideology of environmentalism is to uphold the environment as being more important and more valuable than man who lives in that environment.
	And they always sell it as a package deal.
	They always sell it on the idea, well, you wouldn't want to be drinking polluted water, would you?
	You don't want to be breathing air so sick with, you know, it's a London yellow fog of the 1890s.
	Yeah.
	Where, you know, it's an acid fog and it sickens you and kills you.
	And that's not what it's about today.
	I mean, the water's clean today.
	No one's polluting, dumping mercury in the lakes and streams.
	Today it's about reducing your carbon footprint, which means reducing your life.
	And so the ideology of it, the intellectual leaders of this absolutely intend to make people poorer.
	And ultimately to depopulate the globe, they think man is a cancer on planet Earth.
	But the voters vote for this shit!
	You talk to the average person, perhaps not your typical listener of your podcast, but you talk to the average person, they're terrified!
	So I was in London in October and November on business, and when I was going to the hotel counter for something or other, Um, I think I was checking out.
	There was, um, an American girl was checking in, and the, uh, the clerk behind the counter was, was helping her, and the American girl was saying, what about the weather, heard about it, and the, and the girl, and it was just an innocent exchange.
	It was no political, it wasn't political at all, but she said, oh, the weather's been really fantastic, which actually is really scary if you think about it.
	And I just walked away thinking, wait a minute, We are so, and you know, the girl behind the counter was only 22 or 23, you know, early 20s for sure.
	And we are so scared of young people, especially young people who don't know their perspective.
	That good weather, i.e., you know, the weather was still holding us warm and pleasant, you know, the temperature was probably 20 degrees centigrade in London, which at that time of year was fantastic, is scary.
	She was terrified that the weather was good and the sun was shining.
	And I was walking, I just remember shaking my head, like, you can't argue with them, I can't just go create a scene, I'm not going to say anything.
	I just shook my head and walked away, like, this is what it's come to.
	And that person votes.
	And she's going to vote for the most radical, destructive green policy you can imagine.
	Because she thinks that she's saving the weather and ultimately saving the planet from some imaginary threat.
	Yes.
	That's quite a good title for a book, actually, or a polemic.
	And that person votes.
	It says it all.
	But to go to my point, my grand overarching thesis, which is, why does that girl think that way?
	It's because the entire system has been molded and shaped by these Malthusian predators who may or may not believe the Malthusian orthodoxy about scarce resources.
	Maybe some of them are crazy enough to do so.
	But they control academe.
	They control the schools.
	Children are taught this crap as routine now.
	They control the newspapers.
	And they're all pumping out the same narrative, even though it's not true.
	That's right.
	I mean, the government doles out the grants for science.
	So, if you say, I want to study, I don't know why this pops into my head, Gimli the Dwarf and Lord of the Rings.
	What's the trees have to talk about anyway?
	The consistency of squirrel droppings.
	If you want to study squirrel droppings, you're some sort of rodent poop scientist.
	You have to have a global warming spin to get the grant.
	So you're going to study how global warming has altered the consistency of squirrel droppings and how that's bad for trees or something like that.
	Oh, here you go, 500,000 pounds as a grant.
	And it's an industry, or several industries around it, Of every kind of scientist, even the ones who know that there's rubbish going on here.
	They may not know the full scope of the whole thing, but they know that in their little area, it's junk science.
	But they get along to go along, because if you stand up, and I see it in the monetary, I'll use the monetary world as an example.
	There's a lot of economists that understand central planning doesn't work.
	But if you want a job in any respectable institution as an economist, you'd better get along to go along.
	I say things that are just not politically acceptable.
	I don't get invited to the Cool Kids parties on K Street in Washington for what I say, and I know economists who do, who posture No, sir, that's not sound money.
	But everybody has to get along to go along because there's career risk.
	They can tell you what's wrong with a minimum wage, food truck regulation, rent control, but all these things, tariffs.
	But when it comes to money, suddenly they're saying that sound money is when the Fed does this and this and this and manipulate it with the levers.
	No, sir, that's not sound money.
	But everybody has to get along to go along because there's career risk.
	And I think a lot of them do realize that things were a hell of a lot warmer in the medieval period.
	They were growing wine grapes in England.
	This is historically documented.
	There's all the trade records and everything.
	And then you had a little ice age in, you know, sort of late medieval period, early renaissance period, where the Thames actually froze over.
	And that's where the May Fair came about, right?
	Because they actually had a fair on the ice on the Thames.
	And so the temperature gets a lot warmer and a lot cooler and there's all kinds of things, like the trillion ton furnace, nuclear furnace at the center of the solar system, like volcanoes, there's all sorts of things that mess with it.
	There's a lot of scientists who know this, right?
	But you'd better shut up if you want a job and you want your grant money.
	No.
	And so it's a very, you know, pernicious, corrupting, system in a lot of ways.
	I think there should be a complete separation of science and state.
	The way there's a separation in the US of church and state, and for a lot of the same reasons, there shouldn't be an official state view of any scientific issue either.
	Let private parties figure it out and be a lot more honest.
	Yeah, amen to that.
	I totally agree.
	Well, Keith, I'm really glad that you're rubbing shoulders with these I didn't exactly get what you call fuck you money.
	because now you've got what we call "fuck off money" to be...
	I mean that's the good thing, isn't it, about having what you've got?
	You can...
	you're no longer dependent on the man.
	I didn't exactly get what you'd call "fuck you money".
	I did well out of it, but I'm building another company for a lot of reasons, but in part to And if I have any influence in the world, it's funny, I asked ChatGPT, who is Keith Weiner, and he said something about influential.
	It also said he's written books, which is not true.
	I've not published a book yet.
	But if I have any influence, it's because I write and have an audience internationally.
	Certainly not because I meet a lot of evil people, which is not really the case, and certainly not if I do meet them, they're not listening to me anyway.
	But I do have an audience internationally that is tuned into this, and I've said some things that have made some people aware in a different way than they had been.
	And if I have any influence, it's that.
	And ultimately, monetary metals is really about a movement.
	It's about, how do we go to the gold standard?
	Well, we have to make it profitable to do so.
	And if something's profitable, there's this quote from Keynes, which most of the gold people would know, and it starts out by saying, there's no surer way to overthrow the capitalist order, which means overthrow civilization.
	With no capitalist order, there's no civilization.
	You just have North Korea and Cuba, just starvation and wreck and ruin.
	There's no surer way to overthrow the capitalist order than by debauching the money.
	And most people assume he's talking about inflation and printing and rising prices.
	But at the end he says, and by engaging the hidden forces of economics, which means incentives, in favor of destruction, and not one in a million can diagnose how their world is being destroyed.
	Now, if he simply meant rising prices, you'd have to conclude that he was an idiot.
	Because, you know, I think you're probably around my age, you probably remember the late 1970s, as a child, I do.
	Everybody was talking about inflation every day.
	On the nightly news, they had the misery index, which is inflation and unemployment.
	Today, everybody's talking about inflation every day.
	If Keynes thought that not one in a million would notice that prices are skyrocketing, he was a fool and a moron.
	I don't think that's what he meant.
	Separately, he talks about suppressing the interest rate and driving it to zero, which means endless bull markets.
	That's what I think he meant, that you're breaking the sacred bond between creditor and debtor, he talks about that.
	You're committing euthanasia as a rentier, he's talking about that.
	And I keep thinking about, what he's saying is if you create a perverse incentive, people will destroy their world and they won't recognize what they're doing to themselves.
	And I kept thinking about that, and that was part of the inspiration for Monetary Medals.
	Well, what if you offered the opposite incentive?
	What if you offered incentive, not for ruin, but for salvation?
	And said, okay, we have to go to the gold standard, and this is how you get there, is by making it profitable, by paying interest on gold to participate in this way.
	And to finance business not in dollars, but in gold, which is more of a constant, and therefore reduces business risk, then you can Leave the world to the gold standard by appealing to self-interest.
	And it's not a perverse incentive, but it's a rightful or righteous incentive.
	I'm sold.
	Just a couple of quick questions.
	What interest do you pay on the gold?
	Typical lease would be 2-3%.
	Um, the bonds, um, much higher, but I think there will be bonds in the 4 or 5 percent range for, you know, clean, low-risk deals in, first of all, jurisdictions with operating businesses that are profitable and all that, and, um, you know, let's say up to 19 percent for what seems like a crazy risk.
	I think we did a lot to mitigate it, but what seems like a crazy risk in a jurisdiction like in Africa, um, and everything in between.
	My investment philosophy, there was a meme once which captured my investment philosophy and it had somebody with a kind of beastie boys hat and sort of sunglasses and because that's where I am.
	I like high risk, high return and the tiny minority of things that do well for me make up for all the stuff that I've lost loads and loads of money on and it seems to Even out in the end, so I would be I would be right there with your 19% Norwegian Ethiopian Gold gold thing that sounds great.
	I'm sorry.
	I can't get in on that one um So okay, so so um and how easy is it to get in and out of?
	Your your monetary metal so you can you redeem?
	When you open an account and put gold in that's available on demand and Once you put it into a lease, the lease is a one year, it could be less but no more than one year contract.
	During that contract time you do not have the right Right.
	get out.
	If you need to get out, you can call us and we may be able to broker to find somebody else who wants to take your position.
	The bonds, each bond has its own maturity, which is published as part of the materials.
	So this particular bond is a two-year maturity bond.
	And you should assume that you're not getting out for up to potentially two years.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Blimey, but 15% is not bad.
	MR PALLADINO: In real money.
	In real money, 19%.
	So the problem with the dollar or the pound is, even if you've got some interest rate, is that it's being debased at the same time.
	I don't think it's as simple as to say, well, take the interest rate minus the inflation rate.
	I think it's a lot more complicated than that.
	But conceptually, they're debasing it.
	And that's on purpose.
	That's a feature, not a bug.
	The whole purpose of managing the dollar is to debase it.
	So if you were getting 2 or 3% on your dollar, arguably you're getting nothing because they're debasing it at least that fast.
	And maybe faster.
	So, if you're getting paid interest in gold, gold isn't debased.
	Gold is what it is.
	So say in the next two years, gold is going up at 10% per annum, and you've got a 15% return on your bond, you're actually getting 25%, I mean, relative to a fiat currency.
	Yeah?
	Is that right?
	Okay.
	Yeah, you end up with quite a lot more, and if you sell the gold at the end for fiat currency, yeah, you'd end up with a hell of a lot more fiat currency than just the interest rate because the gold price went up as well.
	Thank you.
	Well, have I asked you the right questions that are kind of potential customer?
	Because I don't want anyone watching this to go, well, he didn't give Keith a grilling and he didn't ask him what I need to know.
	Is there anything else that people should know?
	Obviously, the elephant in the room is risk.
	So, is there a risk?
	What is the risk?
	The first thing that I would say is anybody who promises you a return without risk, run.
	That's bullshit.
	If there's a return there... Well, first of all, there's risk even when there isn't a return.
	And that's the unfortunate thing with the banking system and so many other things.
	But there is risk, right?
	So, if we lease gold to Joe the jeweler, and Joe the jeweler decides to steal the gold and fly to a non-extradition country, right, that is a risk.
	And...
	We do everything we can to mitigate it.
	We check out Joe's background, criminal credit.
	We get to know Joe.
	We look at the business.
	It's a real business.
	We get personal guarantees.
	We get all kinds of things.
	We have a separate insurance layer at our level.
	But there's always the possibility that something happens.
	The insurance doesn't pay because they say, well, this is bad faith on the part of the owner or whatever.
	Um, and there's a risk of, of loss.
	Um, and, uh, that's, you know, I think we have good answers to that.
	We have not had any loss since, uh, we've been doing this program since, uh, 2016.
	There's not been any losses.
	Um, we're extremely careful about doing this, but there's a risk.
	And, um, but on the other hand, if you hold the gold at home, arguably there's a risk.
	And if you hold the gold in a vault, Uh, there's probably less risk, but there isn't zero there either.
	Nothing in life is certain.
	We don't know the future.
	Um, no.
	No, apart from the fact we're all gonna die.
	Right, we know that, and we know we're gonna pay taxes.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah.
	Exactly.
	Although that shouldn't be the case.
	I mean, I'd like to live in a world... The fact that that phrase has become a cliché.
	You know, the certainties in life, death and taxes.
	I can't remember who was talking about this.
	It was probably... I don't know.
	But anyway.
	We don't need taxes, do we?
	I mean, that's part of the rip-off system.
	I was going to say, as soon as I was saying that, I was very mindful.
	I hate that expression because it treats this man-made and artificial and unnecessary thing, which is taxes, the same as, you know, death is given by reality.
	We're mortal.
	And it treats them as if they're both equivalent.
	And they're not.
	And of course, you're right, it is possible to envision a society, and I don't mean some imaginary utopia, but a free market where the government just doesn't spend what it spends, spends some tiny, tiny fraction of it, and funds itself voluntarily.
	You know, if the government is simply about the police and the courts to keep the bad guys out of breaking into your house, first of all, there wouldn't be a lot of bad guys, and secondly, that would be relatively cheap to run, and thirdly, I think everybody would be happy to voluntarily I'd pay a little bit to have the police keeping the bad guys off the streets.
	And I'd love to see that world... Although, I have to say, Keith, I'm almost at the stage where I think that even the police are part of the problem.
	I wonder about a sort of, you know, a standing police force.
	Well, that gets into a whole other thing, but... Well, you need citizens' militias, I suppose, or sort of posses, even.
	You know, a sheriff and a kind of... Right.
	We need guns!
	You know, conceptually, people would contribute voluntarily to, you know, the common defense.
	Historically, they always did.
	I think they always would.
	And now we're just taxing them into ruin in, you know, formerly wealthy countries.
	Look at how wealthy Great Britain was and how much of that just created the socialist welfare, you know, state.
	One more thing.
	dragged itself down considerably from the position that had been, and America is doing it now.
	And there's still a lot of wealth left.
	It's not running out any time like tomorrow morning or anything, but that's the trend.
	One more thing.
	Do you think we're going to go through...
	You said that this isn't going to...
	You didn't think it was going to unravel any time soon, which I presumably mean...
	By which you mean this year, maybe.
	But do you think we're going to have another round of spectacular quantitative easing, kind of just like what we've never seen before?
	Well, I don't know.
	Let me clarify.
	When I say it's not going to happen, I mean there's not going to be a societal collapse into starvation and everybody's freezing in the winter.
	That's not happening this year.
	Could there be another financial crisis in the banking system?
	I think one is practically baked into the cake now.
	On our podcast, we had Danielle DiMartino Booth as a guest.
	I don't know if you know who she is, but she used to work at the Fed.
	She's now a private consultant.
	She sounds good.
	I like her already.
	Yeah, no, she's a smart person.
	So her big thesis is that they're not doing QE right now.
	And a lot of people are saying they are doing QE because they're lending to the banks.
	Basically, the banks put all these bonds that have fallen 20% in value since, let's say, August of 2020.
	And the Fed is now taking those bonds as collateral and lending to the banks, which is repo, although they're not calling it repo.
	And they're lending at 100% of what the bank paid for it, rather than what its market value currently is, which is highly unusual.
	And she argues this is not quantitative easing, and I argue, well, the names may change.
	I think they won't call it QE again, because I think QE has a bad name, bad reputation.
	So instead, they'll call it something else, but they're going to be providing liquidity, they're going to be bailing out bad things.
	If you look at junk bonds, why have junk bonds not crashed?
	Well, there's a spigot somewhere that's pumping liquidity at some ferocious rate.
	And, you know, junk bods are quite well bid, all things considered.
	So, they are absolutely doing something right now, although they're not calling it QE.
	And I think they're going to continue to do things.
	And there may be a crisis anyway, because I think commercial mortgages are all headed to default.
	And so many other things are headed to default.
	Layoffs are starting now.
	Layoffs are a lagging indicator.
	And so, yeah, I think there could be crisis, I think there could be unemployment, I think there could be more stimulus, more bailouts, all that sort of stuff is absolutely coming.
	And, you know, whether that's this year or whether it spills into 2024, you know, timing is, you know, we don't try to give trading advice, we're not trying to time it.
	We're going to say, look, this is inevitable, this is baking the cake.
	And yeah, I do see that's coming, but then they'll paper over it with more liquidity and more whatever and ultimately it's destruction.
	Destruction of capital.
	That's really what they do.
	That's one trick in their bag, and that's what it is.
	Let's consume more capital to, you know, fix the problem of having consumed capital in the previous go-round.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	How do you think it all ends?
	In the end, if we let it get that far, and I hope that monetary metals and others can help the world transition to a proper gold standard and avert this disaster.
	But if not, I wrote one of my most important articles.
	It's called, When Gold Backwardation Becomes Permanent.
	And gold backwardation is when the futures price of gold falls below the spot price.
	It's basically a sign of collapse in trust in the financial system.
	And ultimately, people taking their gold home and saying, I'm not going to play anymore, even if you offer me what you call a risk-free profit, I'm not going to play anymore.
	And then what that will look like, people will call it hyperinflation, will have nothing to do with the quantity and everything to do with gold withdrawing its bid on the dollar.
	And that will be a world of collapse of industry, collapse of food production, collapse of energy production, collapse of population.
	It will look like 426 AD, only more severe, because very few people today have any connection to the land or to farming.
	Very, very bleak scenario.
	I hope to avert that.
	Uh, you know, 2009, I started to look around.
	I said, okay, this is going to get really bad.
	I started to look around for where I might want to live to survive the zombie apocalypse.
	And I came to realize that, okay, let's suppose you find some place that's too far away from a population center.
	There's not going to be marauding gangs that'll kill you for your food.
	So you have your bunker, and you're in a remote place, and you go down to your bunker, you have a year worth of food and water, whatever.
	You come out, at the end of that, all the gang stuff will be wiped away because that's not going to be self-sustaining, obviously.
	Population will be vastly reduced.
	Your best case scenario It's like an 18th century agrarian society.
	14 hour, 6 days a week, days of backbreaking labor to produce a bare subsistence living.
	I looked at that and said, that's a young man's world.
	Even in 2009, I was, you know, past my shelf life for that kind of world.
	And where are you on God?
	On what, I'm sorry?
	plan to have the perfect 18th century agrarian life I want to try to avert that disaster rather than to plan to live through it yeah yeah well I yeah I think I'm with you on that one and and where are you on God on what I'm sorry on God I'm a I'm an objectivist so I'm not a person of faith You're Ayn Rand?
	Ayn Rand.
	It's not an issue I put front and centre, it's not something I necessarily choose to argue about, but personally, yeah, that's where I'm at.
	Well, I've really enjoyed talking to you and next time, you asked me to lunch before, next time you're over, should we have that lunch?
	Because I'd like to meet you for real this time.
	I may be in London in July.
	Oh, that's good.
	Okay.
	Well, zombie apocalypse allowing, we'll meet in July.
	Sounds good.
	Okay.
	Well, Keith, thank you.
	And I'm going to be promoting your... Well, you know, we're going to have some kind of thing where... Aren't we?
	Some relationship with the Delling Pod and monetary metals.
	I'm happy with what you've said, but I think, you know, caveat emptor, people should make up their own minds.
	But it sounds like a pretty sensible thing to me.
	I think I'm exposed to gold.
	I think anyone who's not exposed to gold at this stage is...
	making a mistake.
	That's it.
	You say, what's the risk if the price of gold drops?
	Well, obviously, yes, that can happen.
	It may very well happen by tomorrow morning.
	But what's the risk of not having any gold?
	Well, I looked today...
	Gold is $2,005 an ounce.
	What's that?
	About £1,600.
	That's the highest I can remember in a while.
	I think it's only going one way medium term.
	There it is.
	What do I know?
	I'm just a podcaster.
	Well, thank you Keith.
	So where can people find your stuff?
	Where can people find Monetary Metals?
	Tell us about your website and stuff.
	The website is monetary-metals.com.
	My Twitter is at RealKeithWiener.
	And that's where all the good content is and the graphs and all that stuff.
	And obviously we hope that people will find this exciting.
	You know, it's a mission as well as a profitable business proposition.
	But can I say I love all these calls.
	I have a tradition on this podcast, I don't know whether you've ever seen, that I'm constantly interrupted by annoying children phoning from abroad and dogs needing feeding and stuff.
	So I totally approve that.
	I admire your restraint in not answering.
	Thank you very much, Keith, for being on the podcast.
	And again, my apologies for dicking you around so much.
	I hope you enjoyed it.
	I've really enjoyed talking to you.
	Yeah, thanks for having us.
	My viewers and listeners, please continue supporting me on Patreon, Subscribestar, localsubstack, whatever the other one is.
	Buy me a coffee.
	I love it when you buy me a coffee.
	That's good.
	It's nice and easy to do.
	You can still do me on PayPal, I think.
	I don't know how to get there.
	I've even got a crypto thing which I must put up.
	No one's given me crypto because I forget to put up the address.
	But yeah, I'm looking forward to working with you, Keith, and thank you very much.
	Good luck.
	Thanks for having me.
	This was a good conversation, I think.
	Good luck.
	Bye-bye.

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