PBD - Patrick Bet-David - Will Bitcoin Replace Gold? w/ Peter Schiff | PBD Podcast

April 10, 2024 - PBD - Patrick Bet-David

02:09:02

Will Bitcoin Replace Gold? w/ Peter Schiff | PBD Podcast | Ep. 393

Patrick Bet-David, Tom Ellsworth, and Brandon Aceto are joined by Peter Schiff. Peter David Schiff is an American stockbroker, financial commentator, and radio personality. He co-founded Echelon Wealth Partners in Canada. He is involved in other financial services companies including Euro Pacific Asset Management, as an independent investment advisor, and Schiff Gold.. Protect yourself against Central Bank control with - American Hartford Gold: https://bit.ly/3QzMjHd Learn more about American Hartford Gold: Text "PBD" to 65532 or call 866-939-6984! Purchase tickets to PBD Podcast LIVE! w/ Tulsi Gabbard on April 25th: https://bit.ly/3VmuaRm Connect one-on-one with the right expert for you on Minnect: https://bit.ly/3MC9IXE Connect with Patrick Bet-David on Minnect: https://bit.ly/3OoiGIC Connect with Tom Ellsworth on Minnect: https://bit.ly/3UgJjmR Connect with Brandon Aceto on Minnect: https://bit.ly/4aNtEjT Connect with Rob Garguilo on Minnect: https://bit.ly/426IG0R Purchase Patrick's new book "Choose Your Enemies Wisely": https://bit.ly/41bTtGD Register to win a Valuetainment Boss Set (valued at over $350): https://bit.ly/41PrSLW Get best-in-class business advice with Bet-David Consulting: https://bit.ly/40oUafz Visit VT.com for the latest news and insights from the world of politics, business and entertainment: https://bit.ly/472R3Mz Visit Valuetainment University for the best courses online for entrepreneurs: https://bit.ly/47gKVA0 Text “PODCAST” to 310-340-1132 to get the latest updates in real-time! Get PBD's Intro Song "Sweet Victory" by R-Mean: https://bit.ly/3T6HPdY SUBSCRIBE TO: @VALUETAINMENT @vtsoscast @ValuetainmentComedy @bizdocpodcast @theunusualsuspectspodcast Want to be clear on your next 5 business moves? https://bit.ly/3Qzrj3m Join the channel to get exclusive access to perks: https://bit.ly/3Q9rSQL Download the podcasts on all your favorite platforms https://bit.ly/3sFAW4N Patrick Bet-David is the founder and CEO of Valuetainment Media. He is the author of the #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller “Your Next Five Moves” (Simon & Schuster) and a father of 2 boys and 2 girls. He currently resides in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

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Time	Text
	Did you ever think you would make it?
	I feel on some second taste, sweet victory.
	I know this life meant for me.
	Why would you pet on Goliath when we got beta?
	Value payment, giving values contagious.
	This world of entrepreneurs, we can't no value to hate it.
	How do you run, homie?
	Look what I become.
	I'm the one.
	Yeah, he's at some kind of a conference.
	Anyways, folks, episode 393 with the one and only Peter Schiff, known as one of the biggest advocates of Bitcoin worldwide.
	Everybody knows him.
	He just goes around every day trying to get people to buy Bitcoin more.
	He's not a fan of gold at all for whatever reason.
	We can't get him to support gold.
	But obviously, if you know who he is, it's the complete opposite story here.
	He is a renowned investor, stockbroker, former bank owner, political candidate, known for his accurate predictions of the 2008 crisis, financial crisis from 2007 to 2009.
	He was pretty much spot on on everything he talked about.
	And some of the questions I want to ask him today is the fact that how similar it is, how different it is.
	Is it more unpredictable today because of the amount of quantitative easing and tightening we've done and the manipulation by Fed and all these other things where it's tougher to predict?
	We'll talk about that today.
	And then aside from that, Schiff is a staunch advocate for gold as a store of value.
	And he has run for United States Senate, amplifying his views on fiscal policy.
	He's a very notable critic of Bitcoin, very notable critic of Bitcoin and emerging financial technologies.
	He's maintaining his skepticism about his long-term view.
	We're going to see if we can get him to be a little bit more positive today.
	You know, a little bit of a less doomsday, more optimism, you know, more future looks bright.
	But the man is a New York Times best-selling author, The Real Crash, I believe he wrote, and just somebody that a lot of people pay attention to.
	He's fair and he is very bold about his beliefs and he's got conviction.
	You got to respect it.
	So with that being said, Peter, it's great to have you on the podcast.
	Patrick, nice to finally be here in your beautiful studio.
	Thanks for inviting me.
	But, you know, I'm not a critic of technology.
	I embrace technology.
	So don't confuse me.
	I'm bashing it, though.
	No, I'm not.
	I never bash technology.
	Like, I'm sitting here saying we're doing this with technology.
	This would be very hard to do if we were like a biblical technology.
	Of course, this is, look, this, this is real technology.
	We're making progress, Peter.
	This is good.
	We're making some progress.
	By the way, to respect, can you go like this, please?
	Is that gold, what you have on?
	Everything is gold.
	Like full-on gold.
	Well, I wore some of this jewelry, especially for you.
	Now, this bracelet, this is actually pure 24-karat gold.
	Get out of here.
	It's sick.
	Yeah, there's about four ounces of gold in there.
	It's made by a company called Minet.
	And so this is all gold.
	It's probably about $12,000 worth of gold.
	But the bracelet probably sells for around $14,000 because they only mark it up a little bit, but it's pure gold.
	The same thing are these cufflings.
	See, these are all 24-karat gold couplings.
	This is a 24-karat gold Minet ring.
	Now, did she buy it or you bought it?
	And you said, babe, this is the one I buy.
	No, I actually have another wedding ring that's made of platinum, but I sometimes wear this one.
	So I switched it up just so I could show you.
	Now, this also, I'm wearing my Rolex date just day date, which is the president.
	This is $25,000.
	Now, it's $45,000.
	No, it's 18-karat gold.
	Okay.
	Right.
	So the gold, there's about five or six ounces of actual gold in here because it's alloy.
	But, you know, you wouldn't melt this down for the gold because the watch is too valuable.
	But you could melt down the Minet Jewelry.
	I mean, I mean, a year from now, maybe six months from now, the gold in this jewelry will be worth more than the current price of the jewelry.
	But the point of all this gold that I'm wearing is gold is a real metal.
	Gold has actually uses.
	They made this Rolex out of gold for a reason, right?
	It's not they didn't make it out of tin.
	They didn't make it out of copper.
	Gold has properties that are highly valuable that are very unique to gold.
	And that's what gives gold the value.
	I mean, gold is used in electronics.
	It's used in medicine, in dentistry, in aerospace.
	It is the most useful metal on the periodic table.
	The problem is it's very scarce.
	There's not a lot of it, and so it's very valuable.
	But what, you know, our forebears discovered a long, long time ago, thousands of years ago, is that it makes great money.
	And so, like, unlike other commodities, gold is ideal for money.
	And that is the case.
	In fact, I think that we are in the process of remonetizing gold right now.
	I think foreign central banks are preparing for that.
	That's why they've been major buyers of gold the last year or two.
	They are trying to replace their dollars with gold.
	And I think the world is going back toward a gold standard.
	You think so?
	This is a good thing.
	Yes.
	You think we're going back to the gold standard?
	We have to.
	It's the only thing that works.
	I mean, you can't have a monetary system without money.
	We have a fiat-based system right now that's based on nothing.
	That's why we have so much inflation.
	Look, we're doing this interview today.
	We got the CPI numbers that came out earlier this morning, which is the government's whitewashed version of inflation.
	And the March number came out at up 0.4, which matched the up 0.4 from February.
	You annualize those two months.
	You're looking at 5% inflation.
	We're headed in the wrong direction.
	We're not going down towards two.
	In fact, the next three percentage point moves in the CPI will more likely be up to eight than down to two.
	Yet everybody is trying to figure out when the Fed is going to cut rates next.
	That's not the question.
	The question is, why cut it all?
	Why did they stop hiking?
	Interest rates are still too low.
	Monetary conditions are too easy.
	They're not tight.
	That's why we have this surge in inflation.
	The only way that you can rein in inflation with tighter money is if you stop the borrowing and stop the spending.
	But government spending is at record highs.
	Deficits are at record highs.
	Consumer household debt is at record highs.
	Credit card debt is at record highs.
	Everybody keeps borrowing and spending despite the higher interest rates, which shows you they haven't been hiked enough.
	Meanwhile, manufacturing is in a recession.
	It's been in one for years.
	We're not producing stuff.
	We're just printing money and spending it.
	Our trade deficits are at record highs.
	So the inflation problem is getting worse, not better.
	The real reason the Fed stopped hiking rates was not because it won the inflation fight, because it realized if it kept fighting, it was going to cause a financial crisis that already started a little over a year ago when some of the banks started to fail because of all the bonds, mortgage-backed securities, treasuries that they own, you know, for years when Americans were refinancing their mortgages down at 3%.
	And everybody said this is great for Americans because they have these low mortgages.
	I was warning for years that this would cause a financial crisis when interest rates eventually rose because the banks were going to be stuck with all this underwater paper.
	We basically have a completely insolvent banking system right now, thanks to 10 years of 0% rates.
	And when the Fed kept interest rates so low, it encouraged a massive increase in government spending.
	The government is spending like $7 trillion a year and financing about $3 trillion of it with borrowing.
	And so everybody is leveraged up to the hilt because the Fed kept rates so low for so long.
	Now it can't raise them because raising them to an appropriate level would pretty much bankrupt the nation.
	So instead, it's pretending that it's won the inflation fight and that it can cut rates.
	The markets haven't figured out where we are.
	We are on the precipice of a much greater economic crisis than the one we had in 08.
	Yeah.
	I mean, you know, obviously a lot of the things you just talked about will go through to address.
	You caused a lot of different questions for me, Rob.
	I don't know if you hear static.
	I hear a lot of static on my end.
	Do you guys hear any or no?
	Do you hear static, Tom, or no?
	Okay, I hear it on my end, so maybe we can check on that.
	But some of the things I wanted to talk to you about on today's podcast, and I'm sure Brandon Aseto, who's with us, national security background, bachelor's in national security, master's in national security, been with us.
	He's got his own content channel as well.
	Then Tom over here with us, background, you know, he's done a bunch of different things, probably exited and sold, raised money for $2 billion plus dollars in the last 30 years.
	Silicon Valley type of a guy came in.
	We did great things together.
	We'll talk stuff about Bitcoin, gold, and collectible cards.
	We'll talk about that interest rates, deflation and inflation.
	The idea of going back to gold standard, what would that look like?
	What would need to happen to go there?
	Does it need to be doomsday before we go there?
	Will BRICS go to a gold standard?
	They keep threatening that that may be taking place.
	How different of an effect is today's war with Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Hamas on the world economy than others we've had in the past before.
	Oil prices are moving a little bit, which is kind of interesting seeing what's going on there.
	What will the effects of that be?
	The way we're going right now, is it more of a Japan direction we're going?
	Are we more going to what Japan did when you're talking about 0% interest rate over 10 years?
	Japan did that, I think, for 17 years.
	The first time they raised their rates was a week ago or something, or two weeks ago, if I'm not mistaken.
	Japan just did that.
	They have a big inflation problem in Japan, too.
	Yeah, so we'll talk about that.
	And then women in workforce, you said something about the fact that women in workforce kind of hurt the economy because they raised the prices in home.
	I didn't say that.
	That's how the media spun what I said, but we can talk about that.
	Yeah, we'll talk about that as well.
	And then the difference between Bernanke and Powell, and again, a bunch of other stories.
	But before we get into it, let's first go to our sponsors.
	I thought it was very appropriate to have American Hartford Gold be the sponsor of the podcast today.
	Go ahead, Rob.
	So, look, I've been in the financial industry since 9-11, the day before 9-11, and I've owned stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, crypto, gold, you name it, I've owned it.
	But the one thing that's very important part of my portfolio all these years is gold.
	I love having a percentage of my net worth in gold that I have access to in case of many different things.
	That's why we chose to work with our new sponsor, American Hartford Gold.
	If you have retirement funds that you cannot afford to lose, American Hartford Gold will ship physical gold or silver directly to your door.
	Also, if you have retirement funds that you can't afford to lose, now is the time to call American Hartford Gold, a precious metal dealer you can trust.
	They have the finest products, amazing customer service, and a buyback commitment.
	They've earned a five-star rating from thousands of reviews and an A plus from the Better Business Bureau.
	Tell them I sent you, and they'll send you up to $5,000 worth of free silver on your first order.
	So click on a link in the description or call 866-939-6984.
	Again, 866-939-6984.
	So a few things.
	Obviously, we'll put the link below as well.
	I have something in here in this case that I'll show you throughout the podcast.
	I'll show it to you when we get to it.
	I want to know which of these three you would want to have.
	So we'll cover that.
	But a couple of things here.
	So, Peter, for the audience that doesn't know you, for the audience that doesn't know you, I started off with Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, my background, and I know your background.
	I think it was with Lehman's in the 90s.
	Take a minute or two and share a little bit about your background on how you got into the financial industry.
	Well, I pretty much have been in it all my life ever since I got out of college.
	You know, I went to UC Berkeley in the 1980s, and my first job was actually in commodities and commodity options.
	I didn't stay in that too long because, you know, too many people were losing money.
	It's very difficult to make money in options.
	And so I got a job at Shearson, Lehman American Express, and I was working for a division of the company that was called Lehman Brothers.
	I think because Shearson had bought Lehman, and then American Express ultimately bought him.
	But I was there, and I wasn't too happy in that environment either.
	I was kind of like a square peg in a round hole.
	And so I decided to start my own broker dealer.
	And I did that in the early to mid-1990s.
	And I bought a company.
	Basically, it was just a shell company.
	It didn't really have any customers, but it was a nickel BD, $5,000 broker dealer.
	At the time, it wasn't even FINRA.
	It was the NASD.
	It was before they switched over to FINRA.
	So I bought that BDE, renamed it Euro Pacific Capital, and I built it up over the years.
	And I, you know, worked there ever since.
	I actually sold the BD a few years ago, part of my move to Puerto Rico.
	And my two main businesses now are Euro-Pacific Asset Management.
	And Euro-Pacific Asset Management isn't a broker dealer.
	We're a registered investment advisor.
	So we manage money.
	I manage portfolios on a fee-only basis, not on a commission basis.
	And I also run a family of mutual funds, the Euro-Pacific funds, which you could buy directly from us at the website Europac.com, or you can buy my funds no load at any discount broker.
	I have an emerging market fund, a gold fund, a foreign dividend payers fund, a foreign value fund, and a foreign bond fund.
	And then another business I started in about 2011, 12 is Shift Gold.
	I actually started it as Euro Pacific Precious Metals.
	It became Shift Gold.
	About five or six years ago, I sold the company to Gold Money, and I just recently bought it back.
	And Gold Money also, the guy that runs Gold Money also started Minet, which is where I got all this gold jewelry.
	So that's how I got involved with the NAE.
	But I love their jewelry.
	Matter of fact, my wife has a lot more of it than I do.
	But I bought Gold Money.
	I mean, I bought Shift Gold back.
	So now I have Shift Gold and I have Euro Pacific Asset Management are my two main businesses.
	I had a bank for about 10 years.
	That's a whole nother story.
	The government basically took it away from me as a result of the media falsely accusing it of, you know, they accused me of using my bank to help organize criminals launder money and evade taxes.
	I sued the media company in Australia for defamation and I won a judgment there.
	It turned out that not only did they have no evidence that any criminals use my bank, in fact, they couldn't name one.
	We asked them in court, can you name one person that has even used the bank to evade taxes, let alone launder money or commit crimes?
	They didn't have a single customer.
	Who was behind it?
	Who was behind it?
	I don't know.
	I think it was a political smear.
	Was it close to when you ran or no?
	No, no, no.
	This is a few years ago.
	I think the Australian government was trying to get more regulations, more AML regulations on Australian companies.
	And so they tried to pretend that all these Australian companies that were doing business with me were doing business with a shady company.
	But I didn't do anything shady.
	We did everything by the books.
	My bank had 65 employees.
	30 of them were in compliance.
	I only had one person in marketing.
	And in fact, when we sued the company and I got all their evidence from Discovery, what they didn't destroy, I found out that they actually misrepresented or outright lied about everything they had.
	Every former employee they talked to, every customer, every referral agent, everybody said that my bank had the strictest compliance of any bank they knew, that we asked so many questions that other banks didn't ask, that it took four to six weeks to open up an account.
	So they had all this information, yet they lied to their audience.
	They lied in print and pretended that my bank didn't do any due diligence, that we were just waving through criminals.
	They accused me of having all these criminals as customers.
	We didn't have any of those criminals as customers.
	The whole story was made up by the media.
	What really bothers me is that one of the reporters, this Charlotte Grieve, she won award for best journalist of the year for the 60 Minutes broadcast that was removed from the internet because it was defamatory.
	Get out of here.
	And they won't retract the award.
	And, you know, this is interesting.
	After I won the lawsuit, the media company found out that I was going to put up the unedited interview that they did with me for 60 minutes because it took me two years to get it.
	They wouldn't give it to me.
	I had to get it in the trial through discovery.
	And so they went to court to get an injunction to prevent me from publicizing the unedited interview because they only wanted people to see the way they edited it to make me look guilty when the actual interview showed I was innocent.
	So they went to court and they tried to stop me.
	And they told the judge that the public has no right to know the inner workings of a broadcaster.
	And they ended up withdrawing their case.
	And I won because the judge said, do you really want me to rule?
	Because it could be very embarrassing to your journalists and harm their careers if you forced me to rule.
	And I wish you would have ruled.
	They ended up dropping it.
	But look, the whole, it's called Nine Entertainment in Australia.
	And nothing they do.
	I'm sure that what happened with me is typical.
	It's all fake news.
	You can't believe anything.
	This guy, Nick McKenzie, is considered the greatest journalist in Australia.
	He's a complete fraud.
	And Wikipedia, when I sued and I won this judgment, the Wikipedia editors won't even allow it on his page.
	The media, yeah, that guy.
	The media is whitewashing his reputation.
	He's an outright liar.
	And you know, when they did the interview too, right, they contacted me and they said, hey, we want to interview you about gold and inflation and the economy.
	And I agree to the interview.
	And the minute I sat down, they're asking me about my bank.
	And they're making false accusations about my bank and all these criminals who supposedly have accounts.
	And I'm like, you know, so they entrapped me.
	They induced me by fraud.
	And then they edited the whole thing.
	And the article, which a judge ruled the article wasn't defamatory.
	They had an article in The Age.
	And then the New York Times wrote a story follow-up, but they had an article in The Age and the 60 Minutes broadcast.
	And the judge said the broadcast was defamatory, but the article was not.
	That was a bad ruling.
	I didn't appeal it because I ended up winning a judgment against the age anyway.
	I'm going to sue them again for injurious falsehood.
	But there's at least 40 to 50 false statements in that article.
	Maybe they're not defamatory, but they were lies.
	And, you know, what was so frustrating is for two years, they pretended that they can prove their allegations were true, despite the fact that they knew they were false.
	I actually won seven consecutive judgments in a row.
	They kept coming up with these BS defenses, and then the judge kept throwing them out and ordering them to pay my costs.
	I mean, they just dragged it out of the bank.
	I followed the story.
	I thought they ended up paying you 360, a third of what you use for legal fees.
	But I want to give you a bunch of people who are not going to be able to do that.
	But I lost the bank.
	My bank was worth tens of millions of dollars.
	I got nothing.
	That's the part about that.
	Here's the worst part.
	They took over my bank.
	It was 100% reserve bank.
	We had no debt, no loans.
	I had millions of dollars in cash above what the deposits were.
	They took over the bank 21 months ago, almost 22 months ago.
	And over that period of time, nobody has gotten their money out.
	Not a single person.
	One of the customers just killed himself because he's of the financial condition he's in because he hasn't been able to get his money.
	Meanwhile, in the year before the government took over my bank, 75% of the customers got their money back.
	I sent back over $200 million.
	No problem.
	I mean, no other bank could have withstood that kind of run, but we were 100% reserve bank, so I was able to do it.
	But nobody would have yanked their money out of there if it wasn't for all these false allegations.
	And the minute the allegations came out, I lost my deal with American Express that I had to issue cards all around the world.
	I had just got that.
	I lost a lot of important corresponding banking relationships.
	I lost my account with the Federal Reserve.
	I mean, one domino after another because people were afraid to do business with me because I thought I was banking them up.
	Very annoying.
	You know, they destroyed my business.
	Very annoying.
	And again, so for the people that didn't know your background, you've been around, you've done a lot of things, lots of experience in finance.
	I want to get into this.
	I want to get into his shoes, okay, and get your take on this.
	Peter Schiff, this is a story from a week ago.
	Peter Schiff warns a far more devastating outcome than 2008 global financial crisis as he slams Jerome Powell's misguided optimism.
	Peter Schiff warns that rising gold prices should prompt the Fed to raise interest rates if it truly follows data stating if the Fed really was data dependent, the rising gold prices would cause it to raise interest rates.
	Can you break this down on what you meant on this statement here?
	Yeah, well, rates are too low.
	I mean, gold is telling you that.
	Gold is breaking out to new highs.
	To the average person, can you break down what you mean by that?
	Gold is telling you rates are too low.
	Average person listens to this and says, what do you mean by that, Peter?
	Well, you buy gold as an alternative to U.S. dollars or U.S. Treasuries.
	Foreign central banks are selling their dollars and buying gold.
	And why are they doing that?
	They're foregoing the interest that they could otherwise earn on treasuries to own a non-interest-bearing asset like gold.
	Well, the main reason to do that is if you believe inflation is going to be higher than that interest rate, that means you have a negative yield and you're going to lose purchasing power if you stay in dollars or in treasuries.
	And so they are selling and they are buying gold.
	Look, the price of gold in the 1970s went from $35 an ounce to over $800, right?
	That's not a coincidence that that happened during the year or the decade of all this inflation.
	And what gold is doing.
	Also when we got off gold standard.
	Right, but that let us print a bunch of money.
	But it wasn't gold that was going up.
	It was the dollar that was going down.
	Like, for example, oil prices in 1970 were about $3 a barrel.
	In 1980, they were $30 a barrel.
	But the difference was in 1970, we paid in gold.
	In 1980, we paid in paper.
	And so it wasn't that the oil price was going up.
	It's the money that we were using to buy oil was losing value.
	And so we had to pay more dollars to buy the same barrel of oil.
	I mean, that's why you mentioned women working.
	This was my comment on women in the workforce.
	The main reason that so many women entered the workforce during the 1970s was inflation eroded away the value of their husbands' paychecks.
	And so because inflation caused the husband's paycheck to lose so much purchasing power, his wife had to get a job to make up the difference.
	Now, part of it was also rising taxes.
	There was a lot of bracket creep during the 70s where inflation pushed people into higher brackets.
	It's not like, oh, women were just all liberated and all wanted to work.
	They were liberated when they didn't have to work.
	They got forced to work because it was the only way to pay the bills.
	Now, the comment I made more recently is that that's how we basically got through that time period.
	We had a spare laborer.
	We had somebody who could come off the bench onto the field and help out.
	And that's how families were able to survive because they now had a second breadwinner.
	But now you don't have that because most families, the husband and wife, already work.
	So what are people doing now?
	How are people surviving this inflation?
	Well, look at the jobs reports that we get every month.
	We have all these jobs that are being created, 200,000, 300,000.
	What they don't tell you is these are all part-time jobs.
	We are net losing full-time jobs, and they're going to people who already have jobs.
	So people are working second and third jobs.
	Moonlighting is at an all-time high in America because that's the only way that people can pay the rent or put food on the table.
	People don't want these jobs.
	The creation of these jobs is not a good sign.
	It's a bad sign.
	It's not a sign of a strong labor market.
	It's a weak labor market.
	In a strong labor market, you can make it on one job.
	In a weak labor market, you need two or three jobs.
	And that's what's going on.
	Tom.
	You know, the Fred data, Fred, and I'm speaking of St. Louis, you know, has been out over the last couple of months showing the increase in second jobs.
	And they only show it around like 5.5%, 6%.
	But when I dive into it, they're really talking about W-2 jobs that they can identify as a full-time position.
	They're not talking about like a 1099, like you're driving Uber or Lyft with the family car.
	So it's very interesting that the data is backing up exactly what you say when you look around and you see what people are doing.
	They're having to supplement the house with basically hustling second and third jobs that they don't normally want to do.
	And the other way they're doing it is with debt.
	People are taking on a debt.
	I mean, even though credit card interest rates are at an all-time high, you would think, okay, people will borrow less because it's so expensive.
	No, they're borrowing more.
	$1.1 trillion now, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, and so that's what's also helping the spending is that people just borrow and spend if they can't earn enough.
	Can I ask you just to rewind just a second?
	What we were looking at was where you said of a far more devastating outcome, and I appreciate everything you've said underlying it.
	What does that outcome look like to the average person that's listening?
	What would that more devastating outlook look like?
	We saw in the 08-09, the market crashed, housing prices went down, unemployment skyrocketed.
	Those are the things that people could see, feel, and touch.
	When you say more devastating outcome than 08, what does that look like?
	We have to appreciate the fact that really, in earnest, it started in 2001, 2002, after the dot-com bubble burst, right?
	That's when the Fed first lowered rates to 1%.
	I mean, Greenspend made a lot of policy errors in the 90s as well.
	And that's kind of why the stock market bubble got as big as it did.
	But the policies really went to the sublime in 01 and 02 with the rate cuts that gave way to the housing bubble, which led to the 08 financial crisis.
	But every time the Fed creates a misallocation of resources, malinvestment bubble, every time it pops, instead of allowing the market to fully correct for all the mistakes that were made in the past, right?
	The recession, as far as the business cycle goes, this boom-bust cycle, the boom is where the mistakes are made.
	The bust is where they get corrected.
	And you have to allow the market to do its job.
	But in the short run, that's painful because people lose their jobs, they lose money, and the voters don't like that.
	So there's always political pressure on the government, the Fed to try to fight a recession when the recession is the cure.
	So fighting it simply makes the disease worse.
	But what they do is they keep creating more inflation, and it's kicking the can down the road and postponing the inevitable pain.
	But every time they do that, they make the underlying problem worse and therefore the ultimate pain to resolve it worse.
	And so my point is we are now at the final crossroads where the Fed has to pick the lesser of two evils.
	So on the one hand, it can fight the inflation that it created with QE and all this, the expansion of its balance sheet.
	It can fight the inflation.
	But to do that means interest rates have to go much higher than they already are.
	They have to go high enough to force massive cuts in spending on the government level and on the household level.
	But our whole economy is based on spending right now.
	It's a bubble.
	And so they have to create a massive recession.
	It's not that recessions are necessary to fight inflation.
	It's just that what's necessary to fight inflation will also cause a recession because of the underlying nature of the economy.
	And this recession, which will have a housing market crash, a stock market crash, will result in a wave of defaults and failures.
	There can't be any bailouts like we did in 08.
	So when a bank fails, they can't bail it out.
	They have to let it fail.
	And they have to allow the depositors to lose money.
	There's no money to bail out the depositors.
	They have to lose.
	The government has to tell people on Social Security and Medicare, we just don't have the money to make the payments.
	We're not talking about making cuts for people in the future.
	The checks we're sending out right now, we don't have enough money.
	We got to make those smaller.
	Social Security, the trust funds, so-called trust funds, are already selling treasuries right now.
	Social Security already takes in less than it puts out.
	It's insolvent.
	So the government has to tell government pensioners we can't make the pensions because we're broke.
	We actually have about a $3 trillion a year deficit right now, maybe closer to four.
	I mean, even if they massively increase taxes on the middle class, I don't think there's enough they could do it.
	So they have to make these deep cuts to government spending.
	And of course, that's going to be very problematic for people who were counting on Social Security or who lost their savings in the bank.
	In fact, if the Fed really fights inflation, we probably can't pay the interest on the national debt because right now we're spending about a trillion dollars a year on interest on the national debt.
	If the Fed, let's say, raised interest rates to where they need to be, given the short-term nature of the debt, within a few years, we could be spending $3 or $4 trillion on interest on the debt, which can consume 100% of tax revenue.
	And of course, we can't cut Social Security, cut Medicare, right, and pay the Chinese 100 cents on the dollar.
	I mean, that's just not going to fly.
	So we would have to default.
	We would have to tell our creditors, we can't pay you what we owe you.
	Well, maybe we'll pay you some discounted rate.
	So all these difficult things are going to have to happen if the Fed really does what it needs to do.
	But politically, that's like a non-starter to force all those tough choices on the politicians.
	So the other choice they have is, okay, we're just going to allow inflation to keep continuing.
	Now, they can't say that.
	They have to pretend that, oh, we've done enough, it's coming back down.
	But they've really conceded the war because they know that fighting it will do too much collateral damage.
	So we're going to have runaway inflation.
	Inflation is going to keep getting worse.
	Ultimately, that's going to destroy the dollar's role as the reserve currency.
	And people are going to see the value of their Social Security benefits eroded anyway.
	The bondholders are not going to get paid.
	They're going to get inflated away.
	So the real losses that inflation is going to impose on all the government creditors, including people that own dollars, but all government creditors are going to suffer more through inflation than they would through devaluation or depression, whatever we would have if we defaulted.
	But the politicians would rather create the inflation because the pain and the damage will be pushed to the future a little bit.
	And they can always point the finger at somebody else.
	The government always blames inflation on the private sector.
	They blame it on greedy businesses.
	They blame it on Putin.
	They blame it on everybody but themselves.
	But there's only one source of inflation, and that's the government.
	And it's the government plus the Federal Reserve, you know, working in tandem with the government.
	Peter, let me ask you this.
	And this question goes to everybody.
	But how different, specifically you, Peter, how different is, you know, typically it's like, well, if we print $6 trillion of money, the price of gold is going to go to the roof.
	We're like, oh, that makes sense.
	Rob, can you pull up the history of price of gold?
	You know, what do you call it?
	The link I just sent you, right?
	When you pull this up, you'll notice, okay, gold prices are super high right now.
	Okay.
	Where are they at?
	$2,300.
	It's still less than what it was in 1981.
	Well, that's inflation adjusted.
	But what I'm saying is not just a $2,600 was in 1981 versus today, you know, it is what it is, right?
	$2,400, $2,300.
	Okay.
	So, well, if we keep printing, shouldn't the non-duplicatable assets continue to grow?
	In my mind, gold, with all the amount of money we printed, should be at $6,000, should be at $5,000.
	Well, it will be.
	Now, when you go back and look at that chart, obviously in 1980, gold got overextended, right?
	As markets often do, right?
	Gold went from $35 up to $850 or so.
	And then, no, then it pulled back down.
	But it never went anywhere near the $35 where it started.
	And it did bottom out in 2000, 200 and change.
	That's when the Bank of England sold most of their gold, like right on that low, right?
	They got rid of a lot of their gold.
	But since then, then the gold went on a run from under $400 up to $1,900 in 2011.
	So it had a big, big move.
	And now, it's just been going sideways for about 10 years.
	So why aren't any of these things triggering it?
	No, it's triggering it now.
	I think we're at the beginning of another sharp lineup, just like that one.
	That's going to take the price of gold probably $10,000 to $20,000 an ounce.
	So you're going to see it.
	It's just that, you know, it's not linear.
	It went sideways for a while.
	You know, a lot of the inflation went into the financial markets.
	Why do you think that the stock market went up so much in America?
	Inflation did that.
	It wasn't the real productivity of U.S. companies.
	It was inflation moving into the financial markets.
	It went into the stock market, went into the bond market, went into the real estate market.
	Now it's moving into the real economy and it's moving into gold.
	And so you're going to see a much bigger move in the price of gold.
	Rob, can you pull up the – so actually, if you can do me a favor, put that right next to – I don't know, put S&P 500, okay?
	Put a history of SP 500, history of SP 500.
	And let's see what they're right there.
	If you can click on that and click on something that shows you right there, the Investopedia.
	And let's look at how SP 500 has done return.
	Maybe this is just telling you a history, like what it's about.
	Go back and put return in the title.
	Okay, so then go to history right there.
	Well, it shows like in a chart what it looks like.
	No, it shows it like that.
	Maybe go to price of Bitcoin, history of price of Bitcoin.
	What does that have to do with anything?
	The reason why I'm showing you this is, again, I'm really, and you got to realize, we just did an American Hartford gold sponsorship.
	So it's not like you're in an environment where, right there.
	So what's that?
	Is that Bitcoin?
	2010, 9 cents.
	Okay.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Then it goes to $26.90, $123.
	$12.38 in 2014, drops down to $50.
	Then it goes to $350,000, $900, then it goes to $20,000.
	That's what, December of 2018, drops to 10K, goes up to 69, drops to 18K, goes back up to 74.
	If you compare it now, go to 2010 with gold, go to 2010 with gold, and 2010 with gold.
	So it was 1678 to what?
	2,300.
	Even if you look at this with the stock market and gold and Bitcoin, it's getting hammered against other things.
	Why is that?
	Gold is.
	Well, gold isn't getting hammered.
	In fact, if you compare gold, I know to the Dow, probably the SP too, but since the year 2000, right, over the last 24 years, gold is beating the SP.
	But that's an unfair comparison, though.
	Well, it's just this millennium, this century.
	But you know, over the last two and a half years, gold has been beating Bitcoin.
	Bitcoin is down over 20% in the last two and a half years relative to gold.
	In fact, Bitcoin, even though it made a new high in dollars in the aftermath of these NFTs, I mean the ETFs, it didn't make a new high in terms of gold.
	And so Bitcoin has already started and has been in a bear market in gold for two and a half years.
	And so we'll see.
	But, you know, I mean, again, I think Bitcoin is just, you know, forget about Bitcoin then.
	Go to average price of a home in America 1981.
	Because this is when gold was at 2,600.
	No, no, 1981.
	Yeah, that's when it was.
	No, that's when gold got to about 800 was the peak in 1980, 81, 800.
	That chart right there showed 2,600.
	Okay, let's.
	I mean, I don't know what is this.
	Is this like inflation adjusted in today's dollar?
	Go back to the chart with gold, Rob.
	So what is this?
	Is this go to 80?
	Yeah, they must be putting it in today's dollars to adjust for inflation.
	That wasn't the nominal price.
	So do gold nominal price 1981.
	Gold nominal price 1981.
	Gold prices.
	Okay, let's look at that right there.
	Well, that can't be a chart of gold.
	That's not gold.
	Okay, Rob, go to 1981 home price.
	Oh, that was just the year, 1981.
	That was the chart one-year chart.
	Just go long-term gold chart, like long-term historic gold chart.
	You'll see it.
	Long-term gold chart.
	Is that good?
	Go to that one right there.
	Go to the second one.
	Let's see what the second one looks like.
	Yeah, there you go.
	Okay, so go to 80.
	Well, you got to get more years.
	Go down to the 10.
	Go to the bottom and increase the 10.
	No, make it like all-time or 30.
	You have to make it a longer time.
	What is that?
	All data?
	There's it.
	1980.
	That little spike right there.
	Go to 81 as well.
	That's right there.
	800.
	800.
	Okay, so let's go from 80.
	I mean, look at that chart.
	But that's not really a chart of gold going up.
	That's a chart of the dollar going down.
	You know, when the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the price of gold was $20 an ounce.
	Now it's moved up over 100-fold from 20 to 2,300.
	That means the U.S. dollar has lost better than 99%.
	Don't disagree with me.
	But let me point this out.
	The price of the dollar, the price of gold was $20 an ounce in 1800.
	And so 13 years later, when they started the Federal Reserve, the dollar was, it was still $20.
	The price had remained the same.
	So the dollar had preserved its value from the birth of the Republic until the creation of the Federal Reserve.
	It was the money printing that destroyed the value of the dollar.
	This is what I'm trying to find out.
	And I need your help to understand this better.
	Average price of home, 1981, Rob.
	Just Google, $68,900.
	Okay.
	What is the average price of home today?
	Oh, I don't know, $400,000.
	Okay, average price of home in 2024.
	2024, let's see what comes up.
	$400,000.
	That was right.
	It was a good guess.
	Yeah, very good guess.
	And how much was it back then?
	$69,000 to $400,000.
	No, no, how much was it in the beginning?
	You said $69,000.
	$69,000 in what year?
	$89.
	$81.
	Oh, okay, $81.
	All right.
	So $60, and that was when gold was at the peak.
	$800.
	So divided by $800,000, that was 8.6 ounces of gold.
	So actually, houses were pretty cheap because it was $81,000.
	No, $81,000 divided by $800,000 is like 100 ounces of gold.
	Excuse me.
	So today, if you take 100 times 2,350, that's 235,000.
	So yeah, right now.
	It's down by $160,000.
	Houses are cheaper today because gold was at an extreme price point there.
	But yeah, houses are a little bit less expensive.
	But in gold, they're less expensive.
	Again, the point I'm trying to make is when it comes down to finances and dollars, everybody can't.
	No, no, no, they're more expensive.
	Excuse me.
	They're more because it takes, what did I say?
	It's $400,000.
	It'd be around $2,000,000 divided by $2,350.
	You need 170 ounces of gold to buy a house.
	Whereas in 1980, it was only 100.
	So houses have gone up.
	But one of the reasons that the houses have gone up is because the government has subsidized them with artificially low interest rates.
	But also, the houses they make today are, you know, the average house probably got more square feet, probably has more bathrooms.
	I agree.
	But why isn't the price of gold catching up to stock market, to houses, to Bitcoin?
	It's getting crushed on every single measurable thing we can look at.
	It's not crushed if you just go back to 2000.
	It's been beating a lot of those assets.
	But it's now starting to accelerate.
	It just broke out.
	So we can have this discussion a year from now, and maybe gold is $5,000 an ounce or higher, and then it won't be getting crushed, right?
	Because gold is going to catch up and move to where it needs to be.
	The reason gold has been underpriced for so long is people don't perceive the nature of this problem.
	They think everything is okay.
	And so it's mispriced.
	So there are a lot of assets that get mispriced, right?
	Because as Warren Buffett said, in the short run, it's a voting machine.
	In the long run, it's a weighing machine.
	Let me show you this.
	I got questions for you.
	So here, we got a kilo of gold, right?
	What does a kilo of gold go for today?
	Oh, I don't know.
	How many ounces is it a kilo?
	I forget.
	What is it?
	Gold ounces.
	So this is 2.2 pounds is a kilo.
	So that's a kilo of gold, right?
	So this is right now $77,000, right?
	All right.
	So you're giving that to me?
	No, I'm not.
	It's a prop.
	It's a profit.
	You can really hurt somebody with this with the weight of it, right?
	I know.
	You should see how much my bracelet weighs.
	It's like I get a workout with this thing.
	So that right there.
	Hand me your bracelet for a second.
	Well, I guess I got to take the clip off.
	It takes a while to keep it secure.
	Is it this?
	No, it's not this.
	Yeah, so I don't know what that sound came from.
	So I don't know if I touched anything or not, but okay.
	So you have this here, which is kilo of gold, right?
	You got these collectible cards, one of ones.
	Each of these are between a million dollars to, I don't know, half a million dollars to a million dollar cards.
	All these, each of these, yes.
	What kind of cards are those?
	So one of them, you got Joe Burrows one of one, National Treasures, RPA, you know, with its jersey and its sign.
	This one is a 1932 Beirut, 33 Gaudi Beirut, PSA 8.
	And this is one of Zion's biggest cards.
	It's 105, PSA 9, BGS9.
	So each of these are between half a million dollars to a million dollars.
	So you have a choice.
	You got a million dollars of gold.
	You have a million dollars of collectible cards.
	But you got a million dollars of Bitcoin on this phone when you carry.
	Do you see the argument on how they sell Bitcoin transferable?
	If you had a choice between a million dollars between the Bitcoin and your wallet, the gold or the collectible cards, what do you choose?
	Well, I don't know that much about the collectible card market.
	I figure that the spreads are probably pretty wide there, and the market is very dependent on the collector demand.
	I mean, whether there are people who want to buy those cards or not, I mean, it's a unique market.
	I have a good friend of mine in Puerto Rico has made a ton of money on cards.
	Now he's in jerseys.
	He's buying the jerseys of the players.
	But look, I don't know that market.
	So I would just take the gold.
	I mean, the gold is pretty stable.
	I think the price is going a lot higher, very liquid.
	I don't have to worry about a lot of different factors that might impact the value of those collectible cards.
	But I would take those cards over the Bitcoin.
	You would take cards over the Bitcoin card.
	Well, I don't think the Bitcoin has any real value at all.
	I think it's just a speculative mania.
	I mean, sure, there are fools out there who will buy Bitcoin, who don't understand that it has no value.
	And as long as there's a supply of greater fools, the fools that bought earlier can sell out to a greater fool who buys later.
	But, you know, this is a.
	Do you think Michael Saylor and BlackRock, they're fools?
	This is a blockchain letter, you know, like a chain letter only with a blockchain.
	It's a digital Ponzi or a pyramid.
	Do I think Michael Saylor is foolish?
	I don't know why Michael Saylor does what he does.
	I mean, obviously, he levered up his balance sheet to buy a bunch of Bitcoin.
	He'd been selling his own shares in MicroStrategy stock, which obviously went way, they did go way up because of this position he's taken.
	I mean, ultimately, I think micro strategies goes bankrupt.
	I mean, I think that's how you think so.
	Yeah, I think eventually the Bitcoin is going to crash and the creditors are going to end up with the company.
	I mean, that's what I think is going to happen at the end of the day.
	And I think one of the reasons that he keeps buying Bitcoin with more borrowed money is to help prop up the price.
	I mean, he is one of the major buyers.
	And, you know, they just suckered in a new group of people in these ETFs who are just pure gambling.
	Because if you're buying Bitcoin on an ETF, you can't even make the argument that someone's buying it to use it as any kind of currency.
	You're simply gambling on the price because you don't even have the keys.
	You don't have custody of it.
	You're paying some Wall Street firm to hold on to your Bitcoin.
	So the people who are buying these ETFs, these are not the die-hard crypto fanatics, the Maxis, the Diamond Hand hodlers.
	These are more short-term traders who will just jump on a fad if they think they can make some money.
	And now you've got a very significant percentage of the float of Bitcoin now in these ETFs.
	But unlike the old grayscale Bitcoin Trust, where the Bitcoin went in and they didn't come out, they were trapped, which is why it traded at a 50% discount when people wanted out.
	When the speculators who bought these ETFs decide they don't want them anymore and they sell, those ETFs have to take their Bitcoin and sell them into the spot market.
	There won't be enough liquidity to absorb that selling.
	The price is going to crash.
	And what's happened in prior Bitcoin crashes is all of a sudden, the supply of Tether just increases and Tether comes in.
	People come in and use Tether to buy up a bunch of Bitcoin.
	But when these ETFs get the sell orders from their customers who decide to get out of the trade, cut and run when they're down 20 or 30% and they decide, I want out of this trade.
	And now BlackRock or all these companies have to go into the market and sell Bitcoin at the market that day to settle by the end of day in U.S. dollars.
	No Tether.
	They can't send Tether to their customers.
	I think it's going to be the biggest crash we've ever seen in Bitcoin.
	The smart money has been selling their Bitcoin to these ETFs ever since they launched.
	Brandon, what do you think?
	Young guy, what do you think about this?
	So, Peter, would you agree that over the course of history that security has been a valued commodity, just in general, like security?
	Well, mean keeping things secure, protecting yourself, protecting yourself.
	Oh, sure.
	I mean, there's a whole business in protection, right?
	People value protecting things.
	Yeah, always been valuable.
	What about transportation, ease and speed of transportation?
	Yes, of course.
	Transportation is valuable.
	So I think that's the argument for Bitcoin is that, you know, I'm of a mindset it's not something to go all in on, but it's exposure, like a 5% exposure is something that you could store safely and transport easily.
	Look, I understand that you can easily transfer Bitcoin.
	The reason it's so easy to transfer is because you're transferring nothing.
	So if I'm transferring nothing, I could do it at the speed of light.
	If you want to transfer gold, you're transferring a physical object.
	But what you can do with gold is you can tokenize it.
	I can take my gold and put it in a vault and the vault owner can tokenize it and say, hey, this token is evidence of your ownership.
	And if you send the token to somebody else, they own it.
	I can send a digital gold token across the world cheaper and faster than you can send Bitcoin.
	So you don't need Bitcoin to do that.
	And of course, there are 20,000 other cryptocurrencies.
	There's nothing special about Bitcoin other than the fact that it's called Bitcoin.
	And it was kind of the first one.
	And so you have kind of the biggest network that right now all believe that it has value.
	But there is no actual value behind that belief.
	It's just based on everybody else believing a lie.
	And the question is, how much longer will everybody believe it?
	And you don't need everybody to stop believing.
	You just need a significant percentage of the believers to change their mind.
	And then you also run out of buyers.
	In fact, one of the reasons that they got these ETFs is they were out of buyers.
	They didn't have any more buyers in the real world.
	So they had a sucker in Wall Street.
	They had to get some of the money that was invested into these ETFs.
	Do you think that's the reason?
	Yeah, of course.
	That's why all the people in Bitcoin, their full-time job is to find new buyers.
	No, I don't think that's the case.
	Because think about it.
	So the argument some people are making is actually the opposite.
	The argument they're making is that those guys got in either from, okay, let's say the reason why you're saying it is one.
	Yeah, they're trying to really promote it, so they got to go find the money.
	Okay, let's put that as one of the options.
	Two is fear of missing out.
	FOMO.
	Oh my God, let us get in before this thing goes to 250,000.
	We better get in there, right?
	Like what, you know, some of Larry thinking these guys are talking about.
	Three could be this is their way of getting in to have control over it.
	This is their way of getting in to be able to have influence over it.
	Look, Wall Street sees an easy way to make a quick buck.
	There's a bunch of fools who want to buy Bitcoin and they can charge a fee.
	Wall Street will sell the public whatever the public wants.
	They've got no morals, really.
	It's just like they'll make a buck any way they can.
	And that's what's going on.
	But the FOMO is real.
	But remember, three years ago when Bitcoin first got up near 70,000, right?
	And everybody was saying it's going to a million.
	They had the laser eyes for $100,000.
	They were buying Super Bowl ads.
	It was non-stop.
	I mean, the biggest advertisers on networks like CNBC are crypto companies.
	Non-stop advertisement.
	Then you got El Salvador getting involved in Bitcoin.
	You got the NFT market.
	You had all this hype.
	And what happened to Bitcoin?
	I agree with NFT.
	It went from almost $70,000 down to $16,000.
	The only thing that caused it to go back up was all the speculation over the ETFs and then the launch of the ETF.
	So now you've got this new thing, but it's the same old hype again.
	The same people are back on television, $1 million Bitcoin, pie-in-the-sky predictions.
	Meanwhile, it's not going anywhere.
	They're hyping up, this having, this having.
	That's another bunch of BS.
	We're getting ready for another big dump.
	It's all about pump and then dump.
	And when they pump it up, yes, they generate that fear of missing out and people get suckered into it.
	But I think, as I said, the guys that own it now in these ETFs, even though one of them has actually got HODL as the symbol, these are not hodlers.
	In fact, if you look at where the money came from to buy the Bitcoin ETFs, a lot of it actually came out of gold.
	The gold ETF saw huge redemptions in the few months following the launch of the Bitcoin ETF.
	And I think some gold people that got tired of waiting for gold to go up, did FOMO into the Bitcoin ETF.
	I think a lot of people that own gold stocks.
	That's why gold stocks were getting crushed.
	I was watching gold stocks go down about 15% after the Bitcoin ETFs were launched when gold didn't go down at all.
	It's like, why is this?
	Why are people selling off these gold stocks?
	It was probably, all right, well, let me sell my gold stock.
	I'll buy this Bitcoin ETF.
	So that money is not there forever, especially when they start to see gold really going up.
	The gold stocks, gee, maybe I shouldn't have switched.
	Maybe I need to go back.
	You know, it's going to be like a roach motel.
	Your money checks in, but it doesn't check out.
	Because when you try to sell, if enough people try to sell, the bottom is going to drop out because they have to go into the market.
	Now, actually, too, I think one of the things that's been supporting Bitcoin temporarily is a lot of hedge funds are shorting micro strategy stock and buying Bitcoin.
	So that's some of the Bitcoin buying is because of micro strategy selling.
	But when they unwind those trades, because micro strategy stock collapses, they have to buy back their micro strategy shares and now they have to sell their Bitcoin.
	So that's another big potential seller of Bitcoin is the closing out of the micro strategy shares.
	What percentage of your portfolio is gold right now?
	Well, if you count my gold stocks, it's a lot.
	I mean, I basically keep approximately 50% of my personal stock portfolio in precious metals mining stocks.
	And the other half is in more traditional, although my second largest allocation is the energy sector.
	But I have a more traditional, value-oriented dividend approach.
	It's almost all non-U.S. stocks.
	I mean, I own a few U.S. stocks, but not many.
	It's mostly foreign stocks that are in that.
	You own more foreign stocks than U.S. stocks?
	Oh, by far.
	Tell me why.
	Why is that?
	Well, one of the reasons is I want to get out of the dollar, right?
	So these foreign companies have most of their revenues that are not dollars.
	So I like that.
	And they're not priced in dollars on the exchanges.
	In general, you take a foreign company with the same earnings as a U.S. company, it trades at a lower PE and has a higher dividend.
	So U.S. stocks have a premium because people just assign a higher value to them, and I think that will change.
	Also, I have exposure to emerging markets.
	And if you look at emerging markets and you look at the history of emerging markets, they're about as cheap as they've ever been in relation to developed markets.
	But also, if you look at the U.S. market over the last 10 or 20 years, it is so outperformed the rest of the world.
	But our GDP, we're a smaller part of the world's GDP than we used to be, but our market cap is a much larger percentage.
	So our stocks are very overvalued.
	And I think we are headed for a unique currency crisis, sovereign debt crisis.
	So I want my investments to be out of harm's way.
	So I got very, I'm very worried about the U.S.
	Okay, so great.
	Fair enough with your mindset on that.
	So a question for you with this.
	A story just came out.
	The wealth of the top 1% just hit a record-breaking $44 trillion, right?
	44.6.
	This is the all-time ever, you know.
	And you've read the story, you've seen it.
	It's not something that we're not seeing.
	If you pull it up, Rob, go all the way to the bottom.
	The most important thing to see is there, right there.
	So check this out.
	So you go pre-2010, it was 15 trillion.
	So it's growing steadily.
	And in 2020, we dump a bunch of money into the market and we're printing money, right?
	Where does that money go to?
	To the wealthy, of course.
	Within three years, the net worth of the top 1% goes up 50%, okay, from 30 trillion to 44.6 trillion.
	The way we judge Peter, and this is the part, I'm 45, right?
	I don't know how old you are.
	You look great.
	I don't know how old you are.
	I'm 61.
	Okay, you're 61.
	You and Tom are in the same age, okay?
	And Brandon, you're 28, right?
	28 or 20?
	He wins.
	20, yeah, he wins for sure.
	But here's the thing, though, because sometimes people watch, they make decisions based on what you and I say.
	They'll make decisions based on what you're doing with your portfolio.
	If you were to say the last 10 years, how much has your net worth increased based on your philosophy with the way you've been investing, your net worth the last 10 years with your investments?
	Well, you know, it's hard to say.
	I mean, my investment portfolio has gone up.
	In fact, you know, the non-gold portion over that timeframe has done better.
	Now, my gold stocks did very well from 2000 to 2010, 11.
	But over the last 10 years, I have bigger winners in the other half of my portfolio than I do in the gold stocks.
	But I have a much larger portfolio also because I've earned a lot of money over the last 10 years, and most of it I didn't spend.
	And of course, I've lived for the last seven years in Puerto Rico, so I've paid no income taxes.
	So that's allowed me.
	That's a lot different.
	Yeah, yeah.
	So, but obviously, had I had all my money 10 years ago, you know, in the Magnificent Seven, I'd be a lot richer than I am today.
	And I mean, I'm rich enough, but I would have more money had I concentrated in those names.
	I did not do that.
	But, you know, when you look at this chart of that wealth, most of that wealth is all artificial.
	It's all on paper because of what we claim stocks are worth.
	But most of these Americans, if they tried to sell their stocks, the market would crash.
	So you say you have all these billionaires whose wealth is a function of the price of their stock.
	If they actually tried to sell that stock, it wouldn't be that high.
	So this is all inflation from the Fed created this.
	And a lot of this wealth is not because people really created value for the economy.
	They're just benefiting from the price level, the inflated asset price level caused by the Fed.
	And a lot of this policy, this low interest rate policy, caused a lot of malinvestments and misallocations of resources that otherwise would have lifted the living standards and the wealth of the middle class and the poor.
	But because of Fed policy, the middle class got poorer and the rich got richer, but not because They deserve to get richer.
	I mean, I've got nothing against somebody in a free market system who gets rich because that's a function of how much value they've added to society.
	They've created products, provided services that people want, that people value, and that they voluntarily buy.
	And so the wealthy entrepreneur is a hero because he's done well.
	He's taken the means of production, the resources, land, labor, and capital, and combined them in a way to add value to society.
	But the Federal Reserve rewards people simply for owning an asset and just inflating its price and now allows them to lever it up and borrow against it.
	But you know what this tells me?
	But you know what this tells me when I look at this?
	Tom, Brandon, jump in anytime on this one here, Peter, anytime.
	When I see some like this, here's what I'll say.
	I'll say, okay, next time they're about to print money, I don't agree with it.
	I think it's a terrible decision to make.
	Guess what?
	Whatever you do, go equities.
	Whatever you do.
	If you go equities, if they're printing money, the money has to go to the capitalist.
	The money is going to go to the guys who are producing business.
	Patrick, unless the dollar finally cracks.
	And if the dollar starts to fall, you want to go equities, but you want to go international equities.
	You want to go commodities.
	You want to go equities that own resources are in that state.
	What needs to happen for the dollar to crash, though?
	We keep talking about this for decades.
	62 years.
	Gold has already broken out.
	But remember, when we started this, you go back to 1971.
	Right.
	It was 360 yen of the dollar.
	Now it's about 150.
	So you could buy four Deutsche Marks with the dollar.
	Deutschmark doesn't exist anymore.
	But the Swiss franc was about 23 cents back then.
	And now it's, what, a dollar, right?
	So the dollar, the U.S. dollar has lost a lot of value since 1971 against some other fiat currencies.
	It's actually gained value against other currencies.
	But I think that we're getting ready for a major dollar decline.
	The gold breakout, I think, is going to signal it.
	Remember, the dollar loss, when gold went way up from 2001 to 2011, the dollar index went from 120 down to a record low of 70.
	So the only thing that saved the dollar was, ironically, the 08 financial crisis.
	But I think gold is telling us that the dollar is going down again.
	And this time it's going down for the count.
	You know, I think it's going to be knocked off its pedestal.
	I think it's going to lose its status as the reserve currency.
	What's going to be replacing it, though?
	Gold.
	Gold.
	I mean, the dollar replaced gold.
	Before the dollar was the global reserve, it was gold.
	And when the dollar first became the reserve, it was because it was not only backed by gold, but redeemable in gold.
	Actually, the Federal Reserve note was an IOU for gold.
	The dollar was defined as a weight of gold.
	If you had 35 Federal Reserve notes, the government owed you an ounce of gold.
	Now, it used to be 20 until Roosevelt devalued.
	But we were on a gold standard.
	We went off the gold standard in 1971.
	And so I think what's going to happen is the world's now going to reject the dollar the way we rejected gold, and it's going to go back on the gold standard.
	And that's why all these central banks are buying gold because they want to back their currencies with gold and not dollars.
	You know what level, level, massive crisis would need to happen for us to go back to gold?
	And if we go back to gold, we have more things to worry about than gold.
	No, going back to gold is a good gold standard is a good thing.
	No one's saying it's not a good thing.
	We agree there.
	I mean, even Alan Greenspan, when he was Fed chairman in a congressional hearing, admitted that the economy did better under a gold standard than with the Federal Reserve.
	And his personal preference as Fed chairman would be to go back to a gold standard and abolish the Fed.
	But he said, but the public doesn't want that because the public wants something for nothing.
	They want a free lunch.
	See, what gold does.
	I don't even think it's the public that doesn't want that, Peter.
	Well, gold is like the chaperone at a problem, right?
	Gold keeps the politicians honest.
	On a gold standard, you can't run big deficits.
	So if politicians want to provide a program, they have to pay for it.
	They have to raise taxes that they want to raise spending.
	They don't have to do that on a fiat standard.
	So the politicians love fiat money, but the people should love gold.
	If you believe in freedom and prosperity and individual liberty and the Constitution, you want to restrain government with gold.
	You want honest money, but the politicians don't want that.
	So if we just return to gold on our own, that would be great.
	But I agree, the politicians will not go back on a gold standard until they have no alternative.
	Things are going to have to be so bad.
	Inflation is going to have to be so rampant, right?
	There's going to be crime.
	There's going to be rioting, looting, shortages.
	I mean, things are going to get bad before they finally give in, right?
	We're going to do all the wrong things until we run out of wrong things to do before we do the right thing.
	And again, it'll be when they're screwed either way, right?
	Once they realize they're not going to get re-elected no matter what they do.
	Things are so bad that they might as well do the right thing.
	So, yeah, we may not go back on a gold standard in America until things are really, really bad.
	That's unfortunate.
	But going back on a gold standard is a good thing.
	It's not a bad thing.
	I don't think anybody's arguing that if you could look back through history, having money tied to physical value is a bad thing.
	No one's going to argue that.
	No, good.
	Well, money, the definition of money is the most marketable commodity.
	So money itself is supposed to be a commodity.
	It's supposed to have its own use.
	Yeah, and once upon a time it was salt, or we get the phrase, is he worth his salt?
	Well, that's where salary comes from.
	Correct.
	Because the Roman soldiers got paid in salt.
	So we're on the same page.
	Once upon a time, you have a physical item that's tied to money.
	Money is the physical item.
	Even if it's a dollar, the Federal Notebook, got it, got it.
	What we're talking about is a couple things here.
	Cataclysmic effect in the economy.
	You're basically talking about almost like a nuclear winner is what it would take to get there.
	And the other argument, well, why didn't the Fed just keep raising interest rates and keep the government from spending?
	Wait a minute.
	The government is not, you could raise interest rates to 50%, and the government's still going to try to spend.
	It's just whether they could sell those T-bills around the world to gullible other governments.
	If the Fed was truly independent and had not monetized debt with quantitative easing, if the Fed did raise interest rates, it would force the government to cut spending.
	It would have no choice.
	The reason the government has been able to get away with this is because the Fed has made it possible.
	The Fed has been complicit in the growth of government by refusing to be the independent central bank that it should.
	It is accommodating the government and enabling the government to take on all this debt.
	But the other side, you went to consumers, consumers spending as well.
	But consumers, we all know they got these inflated dollars during the stimulus.
	Everybody, a bunch of dollars were printed, not really printed, but you know what I mean.
	The money supply was expanded because they said, okay, here's everybody's stimulus checks.
	And I think credit cards went down and touched mid 600 billion level credit cards in the United States.
	But then the consumer spent that right back up to 1.1 trillion where it is now with highest interest rates on record NP structures that are in there.
	And then when they're tapped out at Christmas, Buy Now, Pay Later was up there.
	They used that.
	And then we saw 40% delinquency rates as it took them four months, not six weeks to pay off.
	None of this credit would be available in a free market.
	It doesn't appear to be that there's a deterrent in place.
	So how do you force, because one of the things you said, and I don't disagree with it, but how do you force the consumer and government simultaneously to stop spending when they've got this complete willingness?
	How do you dissipate?
	If the Federal Reserve allowed interest rates to rise to where the market would place them, credit card lending would stop.
	The banks would not be extending the credit.
	They couldn't afford it.
	There'd just be no profit in the business.
	There's only profit because they could still borrow at 5% or 6% from the Fed and loan to consumers at 21%.
	And there's enough margin in there to eat up what they're doing.
	Make up for delinquencies and make a good business.
	If interest rates went up to 10%, 12%, they couldn't.
	And the other thing is, remember, all these banks— Can I interrupt you?
	Was that— That's the argument you made at the end of the financial crisis.
	made a prediction about credit cards that would also happen in 0809 that didn't actually happen but was it were you it would have happened but the government bailed everybody out but But you're making that same point, I'm saying.
	Well, it should.
	Look, mate, the government has undermined the financial system with its subsidies and guarantees, right?
	All the bank deposits are guaranteed by the government.
	The banks do all sorts of reckless things because of the government that they never would do in a free market.
	And artificially low interest rates are a big part of that.
	But there are other things that the government does that distort the markets and that lead to excess consumption.
	Remember, we have this phony economy that's based 70% on consumer spending.
	And consumers can only spend if they can keep borrowing.
	And so they're facilitating that.
	And one of the really dangerous things with these credit cards, and I've been talking about this, is, you know, once you have so much credit card debt that you know you can never pay it back, once you've realized that you can't pay it back, your incentive is just to keep running it up even higher because you know you're just going to go bankrupt.
	And so you might as well go out with a bang.
	So if I owe $100,000, I might as well owe $200,000.
	It's because I'm spending money that I know I'm never going to pay back, which is a moral hazard in and of itself.
	Because now I want to start buying as much stuff as I can on credit because I know after I go bankrupt, I won't be able to buy anything.
	So I might as well buy.
	Because when you go bankrupt with a credit card debt, they don't go and repossess all the stuff that you bought.
	You get to keep everything you bought, right?
	The credit card debt isn't secured by all the merchandise that you bought or the vacations that you took.
	So, you know, it's free money as far as a lot of people are concerned.
	So the moral hazard there is enormous as people are running up debt.
	And they did the same thing with student loans.
	And now it's even worse.
	I mean, the government, the reason that college is so expensive is because the government guaranteed student loans.
	You know, before the government started doing that, college was cheap.
	Even Ivy League colleges weren't that expensive.
	And they never really raised prices.
	I mean, you can go back in time.
	You know, maybe every 50 years, Harvard would raise his price a little bit or Yale would raise his price.
	But, you know, the price would be the same for decades.
	But what happened in the 1960s, late 1960s, they lowered the voting age from 21 to 18.
	Well, 18 is when you start college.
	So now all the politicians started to try to buy the votes of the students by promising government aid guaranteed student loans.
	Because like in my dad's generation, he worked at the wait.
	Let me finish.
	They lower, this is a very important point you're making.
	De Lord voting age from 1960 from 21 to 16.
	They passed the, was it what amendment lowered the voting age?
	21st Amendment?
	But they lowered the vote.
	Oh, no, they lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, right?
	And so now politicians wanted to get 18-year-olds to vote for them and they're going to college.
	So they said, hey, we're going to make it easier.
	My dad and all of his friends who didn't have a lot of money, my grandparents were lower middle class.
	So my dad worked his way through college.
	He had a summer job waiting tables, and that was common.
	People worked their way through college and then they graduated with no debt.
	Well, what the politicians told the kids is, why should you have to work over the summer?
	You're young, go to the beach, travel around Europe.
	We'll guarantee loans.
	We'll get banks to loan you money so that you can go to college.
	And then you'll pay back the loans after you graduate when you have a good job and have a high salary.
	And so the students loved it.
	They voted for the politicians who provided it.
	But the real winners were the colleges, because the minute the colleges saw that students had access, their customers, to all this government money, they started jacking up prices.
	And then as they raised prices, the government kept raising the loan limits that they would guarantee.
	And then it was just a spiral.
	And so college costs went through the roof because of government subsidies.
	Now, it's even worse because now they want to forgive the student loans.
	And so now the message they're sending to students is borrow as much as you possibly can because you're not even going to have to pay it back.
	And the colleges are like, this is fantastic.
	We could really jack our prices up now because no one gives a damn what we charge because no one's going to have to pay.
	I mean, pretty soon they might give you a free car when you enroll in a college.
	I mean, it doesn't matter because no one's going to have to pay the debt off.
	It's just going to be, so it's an even worse moral hazard.
	You know, now you see these liberal, I mean, these left-wing politicians complaining about all the student debt.
	It's their fault.
	If it wasn't for the government, college would be cheap and nobody would have borrowed any money.
	They enriched the universities.
	They enriched the bureaucracies there at the expense of the students, of their parents.
	But, you know, now they've made it work.
	But they corrupt, the government corrupts everything they get involved in.
	Peter, what made Nixon eventually sign off on this thinking this is a good idea?
	Well, never.
	First of all, he thought it was temporary.
	He really did.
	And in fact, he said that in his initial speech.
	There's two things he did that he thought was temporary.
	One is a gold standard, the other one is this.
	Well, let me tell you.
	So look, Nixon tried devaluation twice.
	So he devalued the dollar officially twice.
	And he raised the price of gold from $35 an ounce up to about $42 or whatever it is.
	It's an odd number.
	But Nixon had a real difficult choice to make.
	And unfortunately, he took the politically expedient one.
	What he could have done, because gold prices needed to rise.
	So he could have devalued the dollar officially by a much greater amount, which would have been very embarrassing for him to do.
	Or he could have allowed the economy to deflate, allowed prices to come down so that the gold price didn't have to go up.
	But a massive deflation would have been a very difficult thing, right?
	Because we had printed all this money to fight the Vietnam War, to go to the moon, the war on poverty.
	So we either needed to devalue the dollar or have deflation and a depression.
	And so Nixon didn't want to do either of those.
	And so he took the third option, which was, you know, I'm going to basically just go off the gold standard completely.
	And so he didn't have to make one of those two choices, but I think he opted for something even worse, which ushered in all the inflation.
	I mean, we had all that inflation in the 1970s for a reason.
	It's not an accident that we went off the gold standard in 71, and then we had a decade of massive inflation.
	And now we're going to have a decade of even more inflation as the world goes off the dollar standard.
	I'm still flabbergasted by this.
	Do you understand what would have happened if the laws would have stayed at 21 instead of 18?
	I would.
	You mean voting age?
	Yeah.
	Rob, can you check to see how many?
	No, it's the 26th Amendment.
	Yeah, see, I should remember my amendment.
	How many people under the age of 21 voted in the last election?
	How many people under the age of 21 voted in 2020?
	What are we talking about, Mike Sonroy?
	You'll screw up.
	But here, let me make a key point.
	When 21 was initially the voting age in most states, which is going back to 1790, right?
	You had to be 21 to vote.
	Most people only went to school until they're around 12, maybe 11 or 12.
	So by the time you're 21, you've been working for 10 years.
	Most 21-year-old men, because it was just men who were voting, they had kids, they were married, they had a family, they were in the real world, right?
	They had real-world experience.
	They had experience, you know, with government and running businesses or having jobs.
	Compare that to an 18-year-old today who's never worked a day in his life and lives with his parents.
	And so if we were going to have a voting age consistent with the voting age we had when it was 21, I mean, forgetting about gender, I mean, open it up to men and women.
	But if we were going to have a voting age where the voter had the same level of real world experience today as a 21-year-old did 200 years ago, the voting age would probably have to be in the 30s.
	And personally, I think that's where it should be.
	And I would be in favor of that even if I was 18 myself, because I wouldn't want my vote canceled out by a bunch of idiots.
	So I want people out there in the real world before they vote.
	And I would also raise the age.
	People are going to Congress at 25.
	That is much too young.
	You shouldn't be in Congress at 25, maybe 35 or 40.
	Raise those ages.
	Because again, those ages came in in a different era.
	You can't just go from your parents' house to Congress.
	I mean, there are people that are in Congress that have never worked a day in their life.
	Yeah, I'm looking at this right now.
	I'm looking at this right now, Rob.
	If you can go and see who controled Congress in 1971.
	Let's go type on who controlled Congress in 1971.
	You know who the left needs to think?
	That guy right there, Carl Albert.
	Okay.
	Democratic House Speaker.
	Can you Google who that guy is?
	Okay.
	That is one of the biggest victories for the left right there.
	Are you kidding me, this guy?
	Who is this guy?
	Let's see.
	The little giant.
	It was on American politics.
	No, the left would lower the voting age again if they could.
	This guy's 5'4 ⁇ , tall.
	Albert was affectionately known as the little giant from Little Dixie.
	Albert held the highest political office of any Oklahoman in American history.
	This is an MVP for the left.
	This guy is an MVP for the left to be able to pull something like this off and forcing Nixon to sign, thinking it's not going to be a big deal long term.
	Do you know how powerful this is?
	By the way, for me, when it comes down to voting, I take this very personally because I don't think it's about age to me with voting.
	I think it's earning the right to vote by a certain amount of behavior you do to earn the right to vote.
	Meaning, I'm okay with a 16-year-old kid voting if he paid, made $40,000 in income that year, paid, say, I don't know, $10,000 in taxes.
	You deserve to vote more than a 32-year-old that's never paid taxes.
	Yeah, well, I want the concept of somebody contributing to society that's doing something.
	We used to have those type of requirements.
	People had poll taxes, literacy tests, property taxes, all sorts of things.
	Because remember, the whole idea, we're not a democracy, we're a republic.
	Nobody has a right to vote.
	It's a privilege.
	And the whole idea is good government.
	The goal is to get good government, not everybody voting.
	And if you get better government by restricting the electorate, then that's better than having everybody vote and have bad government.
	And so, you know, if you look at the rights that you have, you know, life, liberty, happiness, property, voting is not a right.
	I mean, nobody has a right to vote, right?
	That is a privilege, and that privilege can be restricted.
	Because why do you think, you know, when you're born, one-year-olds can't vote, two-year-olds can't vote.
	If you had a right to vote, it would start at birth, right?
	And if you go to jail, you lose your right to vote.
	If you're an ex-felon, you can't vote.
	Now, they can't take away your freedom of speech.
	They can't take away your freedom of religion, right?
	Your real rights stay with you.
	You can lose privileges.
	See, the government can't take away your right, but they can take away a privilege that they've granted you.
	So voting is a privilege, and we have to give it out discriminatorily.
	We just can't let any moron vote.
	The left thinks we just want everybody to vote.
	Why?
	If everybody's going to vote for an idiot, why do we want everybody voting?
	And most of these people are voting for whoever promises the most free stuff.
	It's like an advance auction on the sale of stolen goods.
	That's what it is.
	What you see here, very interesting points.
	What you see here, Pat, think about this.
	What year was Lyndon Johnson's great society?
	64, 65.
	Yep.
	And what did he do moments after the Kennedy funeral?
	He started the Vietnam War.
	Actually, he funded it.
	He funded full escalation from cooperating and working with French advisors.
	That's what they accused Barry Goldwater, who would have been a great president if he was elected in 1964.
	They scared the electorate that he was going to escalate the war.
	And then LBJ got in and did exactly that.
	Correct, correct.
	LBJ went from cooperating with French advisors, because the French were there first, by the way, that were escalating rhetoric.
	So anyway, so here you have Great Society Certs under him, and we have the Vietnam draft.
	And one of the arguments of this bill was old enough to fight, old enough to vote.
	Yeah, and that.
	If I'm going to send you to Vietnam at age 18, shouldn't I be able to vote for the men in government that are sending me to fight?
	But you know what?
	That makes as much sense as too old to fight, too old to vote.
	Fighting and voting are completely different things.
	An 18-year-old is very qualified to fight, right?
	But not qualified to vote.
	Now, I'm against the draft, so I'm hard.
	I think the draft is unconstitutional too.
	But I recognize that 18, 19, 20-year-olds have developed physically, but they haven't developed mentally yet.
	So voting should start later.
	Look, we tell people you can't drink until you're 21.
	So I can send you off to war, but you can't have a drink, right?
	When you come back, you can't, you know, I'd rather have people drinking earlier than when they're voting.
	But the worst thing in the war on poverty was what Lyndon Johnson did with families, aid to families with dependent children.
	He started that whole program where young girls got paid if they had children without a father and destroyed all the homes.
	I mean, that's why, especially in African Americans, you have so many African-American kids growing up without fathers because if they had a father, their mother would get less welfare.
	Right, right.
	That's what I'm getting to.
	He destroyed the black family with that welfare program.
	That's what I'm getting to.
	So you have the great society, Pat.
	Then they move the voting age.
	Look at the victories for the left and look how big they're going to be.
	Yeah, here you go.
	You got to give them props.
	By the way, props to them as a strategist.
	Good for you.
	But you know what?
	This is also interesting.
	We fought two wars, a war in Vietnam and a war in poverty, and we lost both.
	Not only did we lose the Vietnam War, but poverty won the war on poverty.
	Poverty was higher when the war ended than when it began, because the very programs that they created to fight poverty created more poverty.
	That's right.
	That's how government works.
	That's right.
	By the way, they're saying that.
	This is the smallest middle class we've had in a long time.
	The rich keep getting richer.
	The poor keep getting poor.
	And these are byproducts of policies that started by this guy named Lyndon Johnson by one of the worst presidents ever.
	Tell me your thoughts on what's going on with Ukraine and Russia economically.
	I know, obviously, we can talk about it politically.
	I'm talking economically.
	What are your thoughts on that?
	The impact that's having on us today versus previous wars we've had.
	Look, I said this from the very day that that thing started, that war started.
	I said it was a mistake.
	I said it was going to last for a long time.
	It was going to be another quagmire and that we could have avoided it.
	The easiest thing to do, if we did not come to the aid of the Ukraine, right?
	If we had not provided Zelensky with the money and the weapons to fight, he wouldn't have fought.
	And he would have cut a deal with Russia, which would have been no problem for us.
	I don't believe that Putin is some kind of Adolf Hitler looking to take over Europe and that we can't appease him.
	But once we came into it, he now had the means to continue a war that he probably can't win.
	But now thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands, I'm not sure what the death toll is on both sides, but a lot of young men and women have needlessly died in a pointless war.
	I mean, they built up Zelensky as if he's some kind of George Washington and as if this is some kind of freedom fight.
	If you look at the Heritage Index of Economic Freedom before the war started, Russia ranked higher than the Ukraine.
	The Ukraine was less free than Russia.
	And it's even less free now because of the draconian laws that have been passed by Zelensky ever since this war started, which is enriching, who knows, the military-industrial complex, which is making a ton of money off of this unnecessary war, is helping to run up our budget deficits and cause even more inflation to be created.
	I'm more concerned with the needless loss of life.
	And I don't know how many more people are going to die for nothing.
	But I said at the time that this is just going to go on.
	And I think early on, I think they had like a peace deal that we sabotaged.
	I think they were going to start it.
	And we sent the head of the UK down there to talk Zelensky out of it.
	And so we created this almost like a wag the dog kind of situation.
	I mean, initially, we blamed Putin for everything bad that was happening in this country and turned him into this big boogeyman.
	And so it was a convenient scapegoat for the politicians to blame stuff on the war.
	But no, I think the whole thing is a mistake.
	I mean, not that I think Putin's this great guy that we should honor.
	Look, I mean, you got two countries that are relatively unfree, that have a lot of corruption.
	There's more corruption probably in the Ukraine than there was in Russia.
	It's no accident that some of the bribe money that Hunter Biden was taking and sharing with the big guy was coming out of Ukraine, right?
	I mean, he was doing all kinds of shady deals in the Ukraine.
	So we've got no dog in this fight.
	We shouldn't even be involved.
	Europe shouldn't be involved.
	I mean, let Russia and Ukraine figure it out.
	And the biggest problem was what we did with NATO.
	Because when the Cold War ended, we should have disbanded NATO.
	What a waste of money.
	The only reason we had NATO was because there was a Soviet Union.
	And so once the Soviet Union went away, why didn't we just say, okay, great, we don't need NATO anymore?
	Because now NATO had its own bureaucracy.
	All these people who had a vested interest in keeping NATO going.
	It's like that they say nothing, you can't, a government program lives on forever.
	We have government programs that were started 100 years ago to do something that doesn't exist anymore, but the program is still there because once you create the agency or the department, it has a life of its own.
	And so instead of dismantling NATO, we started to invite all of the former Soviet bloc countries to join NATO.
	So now NATO is getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and Russia is not a part of it.
	And we're getting all these countries into NATO to go against Russia.
	And now the Ukraine, which is right on Russia's doorstep, now, oh, now the Ukraine is going to join NATO.
	And Putin is like, well, hey, you know, I can't, you know, this is too much.
	We can't, you know.
	And so we pushed them into this.
	But we shouldn't even have NATO.
	What is the point of it?
	We're wasting all this money.
	We can't even afford it.
	We're borrowing the money to pay for NATO.
	Now, how do you feel about what's going on with Israel and Hamas and the way we're handling it today?
	Well, for you, you're a son of a, I believe, Jewish immigrant from Poland, if I'm not mistaken.
	Poland, Russia, yeah, all four of my grandparents came from Eastern Europe to the United States around 1900, around that timeframe.
	So, yeah, so I'm a second generation American, but my family is Jewish.
	And yeah, I have a lot of sympathy, not just because I'm Jewish for what's happening in Israel.
	I think Israel is in a very bad position.
	And I think Hamas put them in that position.
	And I think it is not an accident.
	Hamas, you know, Israel was getting ready to do a deal with Saudi Arabia, a peace deal.
	And I think they sabotaged that deal with this attack because this attack, and they made it so brutal.
	And, you know, I don't know if you've even seen what was done to families and children, right?
	They made it so brutal that Israel had no choice but to have an all-out response to this brutal attack that they knew would then, the media could spin that and turn Israel into the villains.
	And somehow they're, you know, the Hamas or the Palestinians are the good guys.
	And Israel now has been made to be the bad guy to, first of all, to blow up that whole deal they had with Saudi Arabia.
	But it's unfortunate that you have so many people that think that Israel, modern Israel, is worse than Nazi Germany.
	I mean, the nonsense that is out there in the media vilifying the Israelis and most of, I mean, yeah, are there some Palestinians who are innocent, good people?
	Sure, there's some of them, but there's a lot of them that would kill any Israeli they had a chance to kill.
	I mean, that's what they believe.
	I mean, they think, you know, that we're, you know, heathens or blasphemers.
	I don't know.
	I mean, they don't like Jews.
	I don't think they don't like Christians very much either, too.
	But I think Jews are higher up on the pecking order of people that they dislike to wipe out.
	You know, it's funny, too.
	They also, I think they also don't have a lot of tolerance for homosexuals.
	So they're a very intolerant group.
	You're talking about Palestinian.
	Yes, yes, yeah.
	How is that, how is that impacting the economy?
	Like, historically, you know, when you think about war, you know, when it comes down to some people saying, well, you know, there's a lot of people that want war to continue because it helps with certain military industrial complex.
	You being somebody that's run for office before, you sound like you study history, what's happened with America.
	Obviously, you've been in the financial industry for a while.
	How do you look at war?
	Is it gamified in a way to make money on the back end?
	Yeah, I mean, look, people, free people would never go to war with one another.
	Governments go to war and they have alternative motives.
	And one of them, obviously, is there is a military-industrial complex.
	War is a very profitable business if you make weapons.
	And these companies donate a lot of money to politicians to perpetuate a war so they can keep selling their overpriced weapons.
	And sometimes they'll sell weapons to both sides.
	And they don't care, right?
	I mean, they'll arm everybody, but they make a lot of money.
	This is part of the problem with the system that we have now with this big government that can do all this stuff.
	But sometimes tyrants will have wars because they don't really give a damn.
	I mean, they're just trying to expand their empire or get more territory.
	But free people don't war with each other.
	They trade with each other.
	They engage each other.
	Wars are destructive.
	There are no winners, right?
	There's just losers.
	It's just who loses the least wins the war.
	But the way Keynesians look at economics, oh, it's a stimulus.
	Oh, all this war spending is going to help the economy.
	There are a lot of people who think that we got out of the Great Depression because of all the money we spent to fight World War II.
	No, we didn't get out of the Depression until World War II ended.
	It was the end of all that military spending that caused the economic boom.
	During the war, it was very austere.
	I mean, there was a shortage of everything.
	I mean, people, you know, didn't have anything.
	And women worked.
	They actually worked during the 40s because their husbands were out fighting the war.
	And they were just, you know, all of our resources were diverted to wartime production.
	So there was very little left for consumer goods.
	But it's destructive.
	I mean, if you blow something up, I mean, that's a bad thing.
	I mean, people say, oh, we have a natural disaster.
	Oh, we just had a flood or an earthquake.
	And these buildings got destroyed.
	And that's good for the economy because we get to rebuild it.
	No, it's bad for the economy because we have to rebuild it.
	Before, we had the buildings and we could have done something else, right?
	It's the broken window fallacy of economics.
	Henry Hazlitt talked about it.
	Like if somebody throws a rock through a window, the Keynesian says, well, that's going to stimulate the economy because now I have to buy a new window and that's good for the window guy.
	Yeah.
	But if my window wasn't broken, I could have taken that money and bought a new suit of clothes.
	But now I can't buy the clothes because I had to replace my window.
	So now the tailor loses out.
	But you don't see the tailor's lost income.
	You just see the gain to the window repairman.
	So it's the seen versus the unseen.
	But at the end of the day, all I have is the same window I had before and I don't have a new suit of clothes.
	So you're always worse off when something gets destroyed.
	And war is about destruction.
	And so it should be avoided at all costs.
	That's what's particularly problematic.
	There was a peaceful solution.
	Yes, would the Ukraine had to have ceded some territory to Russia?
	Yes.
	But who killed what?
	I mean, most of them are Russian anyway.
	In the territory that they want, they all speak Russian.
	You know, they identify more with the Russians than the Ukrainians anyway.
	What difference does it make to us where the Russian border ends and the Ukrainian border begins?
	Do we care?
	But now, look at all this money.
	Look at all these people who have died.
	It's horrible.
	Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how long these last.
	Will this be another Afghanistan?
	Where are we going to go 20 years?
	This is how big the left was.
	I don't know if you saw this.
	My biggest tweet, although it's not called a tweet anymore, it's a post.
	But Zelensky spoke before a joint session of Congress.
	And this was the first, via the internet.
	It had never happened before.
	It was the first time this had ever happened.
	So we're giving him this honor.
	And so he shows up to the camera wearing his t-shirt.
	And so I see that.
	I said, gee, you know, he's talking a joint session of Congress, the United States.
	Can't he like, you know, put on a suit and tie or at least, you know, his dress uniform or something.
	I mean, a short-sleeved t-shirt.
	So I tweet out.
	I said, doesn't the president of the Ukraine own a suit?
	Right.
	And that tweet, that's out of that.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, that was that tweet was like the most popular tweet that day.
	And it was all because of the whole left started, you know, hammering me.
	88,000 comments?
	Yeah, it was crazy.
	It was crazy.
	I mean, way more comments.
	Look, only 7.3,000 likes.
	But look at the impressions.
	It's like 20 million impressions.
	It could be the biggest tweet ever.
	And my count wasn't even, I didn't have a million followers like I did now.
	And it was like they were saying, hey, he's in a battle.
	I mean, come on, he's in a war.
	No, he wasn't.
	He was in a studio with professional lighting and makeup.
	Right.
	And so he could have put on a long sleeve shirt.
	He could have put on a dress uniform, a jacket and tie out of a little respect.
	Look, nobody has more contempt for Congress than I do.
	I've testified twice, and both times I wore a suit and tie, right?
	Because out of respect for the institutions, not the men and women who are currently there.
	I don't respect them at all, but I respect Congress.
	And so I'm going to show up dressed appropriately.
	And this guy is the head of a country.
	I don't care if he's, you know, he wears his t-shirt when he's out with his troops.
	But if you're going to address our Congress, show a little respect.
	You know, that's all.
	And it was, look, if he was actually under fire, if he was in a foxhole, like dodging missiles, okay, fine.
	Yeah, don't put on a suit.
	But if you're going to, you know, have your beard trimmed, if you're going to have professional lighting and makeup and you're all set up, if you're going to do all that, then you might as well put on a suit, right?
	What the hell?
	But the left coalesced around this, like he became their hero, right?
	This Zelensky, oh, you can't say anything bad against Zelensky.
	I mean, they crucified me.
	You should have seen all the articles that were written about me.
	It was amazing.
	I've never got so much hate on one thing than that little tweet.
	Doesn't he have a suit?
	That's all I said.
	And I love it.
	That's actually a very fair question to ask because you're representing a president, a nation, a country.
	But before the nation that you're begging for money, come in here, help me, give me money, give me that.
	You know, yourself as a very big fan of Biden and going into 2024, what do you think is going to happen this year with Trump and Biden?
	All right.
	Well, I mean, I think Trump's going to win.
	You think Trump's going to win?
	And so far, my track record is pretty good because I thought he was going to win in 2016 and I thought he was going to lose in 2020.
	So the reason I thought he was going to win in 2016 was because he tapped into a vein that I knew was sensitive.
	The government, the Obama administration, was pretending the economy was good.
	But the voters knew it wasn't, right?
	The statistics didn't tell the real story.
	Average Americans were hurting and the media and Obama were telling them that things were great.
	Trump came out and said, I feel your pain.
	Like, you know, kind of like Clinton did initially on the economy student, but he identified, even though he's rich, he identified with the common man in their plight.
	And he said, look, I know things are bad.
	I will make America great again.
	We've lost all of our productive jobs.
	I mean, you're hurting.
	And I knew that that was a winning message.
	And he was able to beat Hillary Clinton, who was basically four more years, the establishment, the status quo.
	So I thought that Trump would be able to win given the real nature of the economy.
	Because people back then were saying there's a disconnect.
	Why do the voters not realize how good the economy is?
	It's because the economy isn't good and the statistics are the disconnect, not the voters.
	Well, by 2020, Trump really hadn't delivered on his promises.
	He'd been in office for four years.
	And despite all the hype about how it was a booming economy, it really didn't improve.
	We continued to run big deficits and inflation was there.
	And so we didn't have as big a move.
	But he actually might have won.
	It's just, you know, I mean, who knows if he actually won or lost that election.
	But the way the votes ended up, the way they got counted, he lost.
	But I think this year is very similar, only worse than 2016, in that the economy is even in worse shape than it was then.
	And despite the media telling everybody how great it is and trying to wonder why it's not reflected in the polls.
	And in fact, not only is Biden the least popular president in history ever since they started doing these polls, but where he scores the lowest is on the economy.
	So if the economy is really so good, why does he score so low?
	Because he's getting, normally if you're the president, if the economy is good, the voters will give you credit, whether you deserve it or not.
	But if it's bad, they blame it on you.
	And Biden is getting the blame for the lousy economy.
	And Trump is coming in and recognizing how bad it is.
	And compared to how things were when he was president, they're a lot worse now.
	People are struggling a lot more.
	The cost of living has exploded over the last few years.
	And so they want to go back to the way it was when Trump was president.
	Now, that's not going to happen if we elect Trump, but the voters don't know that.
	They just think, well, it'll be a magic solution.
	We just put Trump in there and these problems are going to go away.
	And then they're not, but at least that's what the voters are going to hope.
	Because the one thing they're not going to want to do is vote to continue what we got.
	Because what we got is awful.
	And so they're going to vote for change.
	They're going to want to throw the bums out.
	And the leader, the head of the bums, is Biden.
	How ugly things are going to get?
	In what respect?
	Like the divisive games, all this stuff.
	How ugly things are going to get.
	The election is welcome.
	Well, you know, I mean, things seem to be getting worse and worse, the divide.
	I mean, I see that in my lives, I see people who were friends for years, don't even talk to each other anymore.
	Even though they used to be Democrat, Republican, those political differences were okay.
	I mean, they could still be friends.
	But it became so polarizing that you can't even be friends anymore.
	And it's mainly, I think it's mainly, I don't know, from the, that the left, and I don't like to call them liberal.
	And if my wife watches this, I mean, I'll make a point because she'll be happy, is that the left isn't really liberal.
	Liberal means small government.
	Liberal means the government stays out of things.
	That's where it got started.
	But Roosevelt, when the women started to vote, he basically started talking about liberal policies because the liberals were very charitable, but with their own money, not with other people's money.
	And so he started calling government welfare liberal when it wasn't.
	It's only private charity is liberal.
	Government charity is theft.
	So they're not really, they're not liberal in the classic sense.
	Like the founding fathers were all liberals, but they were for small government.
	They were for sound money and they didn't want welfare or social security or any of this stuff that is now associated with being liberal.
	But the left, Everything that they kind of do economically has to do with feelings and emotion and their heart.
	And so they look at, here's somebody that's poor.
	Oh, the government needs to solve this problem by creating a program and spending money.
	Now, if you're a conservative libertarian, you still feel for that person who's poor, but you recognize that that government program is actually going to make it worse.
	It's actually going to entrap him in poverty.
	It's going to make it so he's always poor, right?
	You see the unintended consequences of the government action, right?
	The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
	The Democrat doesn't realize that those good intentions are leading to hell, but the conservative Republican understands it.
	And so he's not in favor of these programs because he's rationalized that at the end of the day, they do harm.
	But the Democrat doesn't know that.
	He doesn't think past behind the immediate, this guy's poor and needs money, right?
	And so the Republican doesn't necessarily think the Democrat is a bad person.
	It's just that they don't understand.
	They don't get it.
	They don't get the economics.
	They're just missing the connection.
	So yes, they're just misinformed.
	They're wrong.
	But the Democrat looks at the Republican.
	He's mean.
	He's heartless.
	He doesn't want this program.
	He must be a bad guy.
	So the left will just think the right is mean and evil people.
	And the right will just think, well, the left is just misguided and misinformed.
	But now you've got it so crazy because of this new politically correct, woke ideology that has now captured the left.
	And actually, it turned it into something far worse than it's ever been and far more polarizing.
	And I think even maybe a lot of, it's splintering a lot of people on the left.
	I mean, look at like Bill Maher.
	Look at some of the stuff that he says.
	And he's a Democrat, but now he's starting to sound more libertarian on a lot of things because he's getting pushed out of that spectrum by the woke stuff.
	He'll still vote for Biden.
	He'll still vote for Biden.
	Last but not least, reverse market crash.
	What happens if Powell Q3 starts lowering interest rates and he lowers it three times?
	What happens to the market?
	Well, first of all, instead of trying to figure out when the Fed's going to cut rates, we should be asking, well, why did they stop hiking them?
	We need higher rates.
	It's obvious that we need higher rates.
	Inflation is still way above their so-called 2% target.
	And first of all, where did this 2% target come from?
	The only time they ever started talking about a 2% target is when we were below it.
	So if you go back to before the 2008 financial crisis, no Fed chairman ever talked about a target for 2% inflation.
	The only reason they started talking about a 2% target was when it was 1%.
	So they were looking for an excuse to create more inflation.
	And so they said, we need 2%.
	But the way they got that 2% number, it came out of New Zealand.
	And the New Zealand Central Bank was the first central bank to have an official inflation number.
	But it wasn't a target.
	It was a ceiling.
	The New Zealand Central Bank, by law, had to keep inflation below 2%, not at 2%, but below it.
	So 1% was fine.
	A half a percent was fine.
	If you had a half a percent inflation, it didn't mean you had to try to raise the rate to 2%.
	It just meant that you didn't have to fight the inflation because you were good, because you were below 2%.
	The idea that we need 2% inflation is a lie.
	Why?
	Why do prices have to go up 2%?
	I'd rather them go down 2%.
	Everybody wants prices to go down.
	That's how our standard living goes up.
	We can buy more things with less money.
	So the Fed made this whole thing up to justify an inflationary monetary policy.
	We can do QE.
	We can keep interest rates at zero because inflation is still below 2%.
	Forgetting about the fact that it never was, because the whole CPI is a lie anyway.
	It was always above 2%.
	But now they've created so much inflation.
	We're so far above 2% and we're never going back down there.
	We're just going higher and higher and higher.
	So we need higher interest rates.
	If the Fed actually delivers the rate cuts, it's going to throw gasoline on the inflation fire and it's going to get worse.
	And, you know, ironically, if you raise interest rates a little bit, but not enough, you actually make inflation at least worse.
	Because if I'm a businessman, I got costs.
	I got raw material costs.
	I got labor costs.
	I got rent.
	How do I recover these costs?
	Well, I've got to pass them on to the customer in higher prices.
	Well, what if I have debt?
	A lot of businesses have borrowed money.
	Well, interest rates go up.
	Well, that's another cost.
	That's part of my cost of doing business.
	I got to pass that on to my customers.
	Or what if you're a landlord and I own property, but I also have a mortgage on the property.
	And now my mortgage rate goes up because commercial real estate isn't tied up with a 30-year mortgage.
	Most of that mortgage is five, 10-year maturity, got to be refinanced.
	So I'm a landlord.
	All of a sudden, my interest costs have gone way up.
	What am I going to do?
	I've got to raise my rents.
	So rising interest rates are just part of the prices that are rising that need to be passed on to consumers.
	The Fed needs to raise rates much higher than that because they have to bend the demand curve.
	They got to stop the borrowing and stop the spending, and they got to increase savings investment.
	And we're not even close.
	So if the Fed cuts rates now, plus I think that'll really clobber the dollar and accelerate the dollar's fall, which of course pushes up commodity prices faster, pushes up the prices of all of our imports because now the dollar is lower value versus the currencies of our trading partners.
	So I think it'll be a mistake for the Fed to start cutting rates.
	So they might not do it.
	But they don't want to stop talking about it because the other thing they don't want to do is tell the markets the truth that they should be raising rates because the whole market is propped up now based on the expectation of these rate cuts.
	Like they're coming.
	They're coming.
	They're waiting for these cuts.
	They may be waiting for Godot to get these cuts.
	But the key is when are they going to hike rates?
	That's what they should be doing.
	And they need to go a lot higher because what they've done so far is completely inadequate.
	Powell keeps saying we have restrictive monetary policy.
	Gold is telling you we have loose monetary policy.
	And if you look at all the accumulation of debt, you don't have all this debt with tight money.
	All this debt is being accumulated because money is still too easy.
	So Peter, what about the other side of that, though?
	Like in a deflationary death spiral, as they call it, like in Japan or what's happening in China right now, like the arguments that prices start going down, businesses have to lower their prices and they start laying people off.
	And that's a whole difficult situation to get themselves out of like what we saw in Japan after the bubble, we are seeing in China right now.
	So what about like inflation versus deflation?
	Well, I mean, first of all, Japan is not having that.
	Japan has inflation.
	I mean, even the way they reported its inflation.
	Well, they forced it, huh?
	Well, they kept.
	Yes.
	But the idea that deflation is bad is nonsense.
	I mean, if you look at the CPI in the U.S. in 1800, and they look at it in 1900, prices were down 50% over 100 years.
	So that's 100 years of deflation.
	Yet we had the Industrial Revolution.
	The most prosperous period of time in America as far as economic growth was actually between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War.
	So during that period, we've never seen a period since where we had more economic growth than we did then.
	And so that was with falling prices.
	There's nothing wrong with prices coming down because every businessman, if I'm a businessman, I want to lower my prices because I'll sell more stuff.
	So I'm always trying to figure out how can I cut my prices?
	How can I be more efficient?
	How can I wring some costs out of this manufacturing process so that I can lower my prices and make more money?
	Because you do greater volume at a lower price.
	And as long as my margins can stay the same or improve, then everybody wins from lower prices.
	Now, sure, I'd like to just jack my prices up, but I have competition, so I can't do that.
	So how do I get people to buy from me instead of my competitor by lowering my price, not by raising my price?
	So I have to become more efficient to do that.
	So capitalism is an engine for falling prices.
	And that is good.
	The consumer wins.
	So this is all a bunch of nonsense that we need rising prices and that somehow if prices go down, it's going to be a disaster.
	I mean, think about that right now.
	Prices have gone up so much in the last two or three years.
	Wouldn't it be good if they went down?
	But the Fed is not talking about prices going down.
	They just want prices to rise more slowly.
	But that means they still go up.
	So if prices are too high right now, why do I want them to go up?
	I mean, I want them to come down.
	But that's totally off the table because what the government is really trying to do is inflate.
	Because inflation is a benefit to debtors, right?
	Inflation transfers wealth from creditors to debtors, right?
	Because you inflate away the value of the obligations.
	The world's biggest debtor.
	I mean, maybe the universe is the biggest debtor.
	I don't know if there's life on another planet.
	I doubt there's any entity that has more debt than the United States on that planet.
	But so the U.S. government owes more than anybody.
	So it has more to gain from inflation than anybody.
	So it constantly pursues inflation as a policy.
	So isn't that like a built-in thing, though, with the reserve currency that you have to be at a deficit so that you could supply the rest of the world with your currency?
	No, because we were the reserve currency in the 1960s, 1970s, most of the 1980s, and we had trade surpluses during those years.
	So we don't have to.
	Have you ever heard of Treffin's dilemma?
	What's that?
	Triffin's dilemma.
	So it's the argument that we're serving two purposes at once, where we're trying to give the rest of the world enough money for the world economy to function because it needs dollars.
	Well, they don't really, I mean, they don't really need dollars.
	What's a dollar?
	It's just a piece of paper.
	Well, it's what the rest of the world uses for everything.
	Well, they're going to stop doing that.
	But ultimately, you have to realize that those dollars represent IOUs.
	That ultimately, those dollars are spendable in America.
	And, you know, we basically get everything repossessed.
	I mean, we have been exporting our inflation.
	We're now the world's biggest debtor nation.
	As late as the 1980s, we were the world's biggest creditor nation.
	And we've dissipated that wealth.
	And now we're in hock up to our eyeballs.
	But the reality is we can't make good these IOUs because we don't have the productive capacity anymore.
	We don't have the factories.
	They used to be here.
	But because the dollar has been the reserve currency and we've been able to rely on that, we've been able to buy stuff that's manufactured in China as opposed to having to manufacture it ourselves.
	And it's a lot easier to print money than manufacture goods.
	And so we outsourced all that manufacturing to China.
	But what did we give them for their goods?
	We just gave them pieces of paper.
	But at the end of the day, when they want to buy something with that paper, there's nothing to buy except our financial assets.
	They can buy our real estate.
	They can buy our stocks.
	But then, you know, that just prices go up and inflation runs rampant because right now that money is just sitting in treasuries or something like that.
	But if the Chinese spend it and they go and they buy a house or they buy stock, they pay the American those dollars.
	Those dollars go back into our economy, beating up prices.
	And so we exported our inflation for all these years.
	It's going to come back like a tsunami.
	Well, but that's part of the reason, though.
	So if you're a Chinese citizen, obviously it's a safer bet to invest in America rather than investing in Chinese real estate where they've overbuilt by like the size of the population.
	There's that many empty houses or can't trust the stock market.
	It's hard to even get your money out of the country.
	So I guess that's the argument for why you want to be outside of China and like in the dollar.
	And it makes it, I mean, isn't the dollar sort of like oxygen to the world economy?
	No, I think it's more toxic.
	I mean, I think, you know, the world has gotten addicted to this system and they're weaning themselves off of it.
	But I think it's a major mistake.
	I think one of the reasons there's these global economic imbalances is because of the dollar being the reserve currency.
	We've basically, what's the word I'm looking for?
	But we've exploited or, you know, we've taken advantage of that position that we were in and we've run these huge deficits and allowed our economy to really change and restructure away from manufacturing to just services.
	And that is unsustainable because we can't pay for our imported goods with our services.
	We need real goods that we can export.
	I mean, some services you can provide and export, but clearly not enough.
	You need to make real stuff.
	And we can't do that.
	And we now owe so much money to so many countries.
	I mean, we're in debt to every country.
	And, you know, the countries that we owe money to are a lot poorer in most of the cases than we are.
	So, I mean, we owe a lot of money to people.
	And we can't pay.
	All we could do is go deeper and deeper into debt.
	And so the question is, how much longer can we borrow money when the lenders know we can't pay?
	And I've talked to people who say, well, we don't even have to pay the money back.
	And I would say, well, do our lenders know that?
	I mean, how is it a loan if we don't have to pay it back?
	I mean, we run the national debt the way Bernie Madoff ran his business.
	That's why I used to joke that instead of putting him in jail, we should have made him Secretary of the Treasury because he has a lot of experience in running a Ponzi scheme because that's what we're doing.
	Every time they have one of these treasury bond auctions, and there's auctions all the time now, why are we doing that?
	We're holding auctions so that we can repay the maturing debt.
	We don't have the money to repay the people who loaned it to us.
	We have to find new borrowers to lend it to us so we can pay them.
	And if we can't go deeper into debt, then we can't pay off.
	That's why whenever we get to the debt ceiling, they always say, well, if we don't raise the debt ceiling, we're going to default.
	That's an admission that it's a Ponzi scheme.
	They don't say, well, if we don't raise the debt ceiling, we'll raise taxes.
	We'll cut spending.
	We'll find a way to pay legitimately.
	They say, if we don't raise the debt ceiling, we're not going to pay back any of the people who loaned us money.
	And it's ironic because they keep saying America always pays its bills, so we have to raise the debt ceiling.
	No, we have to raise the debt ceiling because we never paid our bills.
	If we paid our bills, we wouldn't have any debt.
	The reality is, in order to keep not paying our bills, we have to raise the debt ceiling.
	And of course, we will keep raising the debt ceiling.
	That's not the key.
	The key is when do the foreigners refuse to raise the lending ceiling?
	When do they say, we're not lending you any more money?
	And I think that's coming soon at the way the cost.
	You know, right now, it's about a trillion dollars a year to pay the interest on the national debt.
	Forget about the 35 trillion in principal.
	It's a trillion a year in interest.
	So interest expenses are the third biggest line on it.
	It passed the fence.
	In another couple of years, it'll be number one.
	It'll be bigger than Social Security or Medicare.
	Passing entitlements.
	Yeah.
	And a few years after that, interest will consume 100% of government tax revenue, which means all of our taxes will go to just paying interest on the debt, not paying down the principal, just the interest.
	And they'll be the same.
	Yeah.
	And yeah, or they go up, which they should.
	Well, the crazy thing.
	And there's no money for anything else.
	The government is just a conduit to take money from the taxpayers and pay our credit.
	So obviously it can't get there.
	And the lenders know that it can't get there.
	They got to stop lend.
	That's what they're doing.
	That's why they're buying gold right now.
	They can read the writing on the wall.
	I mean, they wrote it.
	And they don't want to wait for that moment.
	They want to preempt it.
	They're getting quietly out of dollars and they're buying as much gold as they can.
	Well, why is there still massive demand, though, at all the treasury auctions?
	Because we've never had a problem selling treasuries.
	And some would argue that, well, I mean, treasuries are the preferred collateral in the world and they're collateral for pretty much any serious question.
	There is, you know, and then the argument is, you know, we're the cleanest, dirty shirt in a hamper, which I don't buy.
	I mean, I think there's, you know, there's cleaner.
	I think they're all dirty.
	That's true.
	But I think that there are a lot of governments that have better financial positions than the United States.
	And so, you know, you could buy their bonds.
	But they say, oh, the bonds, the market is not as liquid.
	It's not as big.
	Yeah, because we have so much debt.
	But I don't know what the, you know, aha, emperor has no clothes moment will be.
	But look, it always happens, right?
	I mean, I remember, you know, the subprime trade when we were short the market and when subprime started to blow up and a couple of the big lenders failed, I had expected the bonds to collapse, but they didn't.
	They stayed above par.
	And, you know, because people still hadn't figured it out.
	But when it collapsed, it only took a few days and then they went to zero.
	And, you know, I live in Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico went through a debt crisis where it basically defaulted.
	But for years and years and years, Puerto Rico was borrowing all this money.
	And it should have been obvious that they could never pay it back, but they didn't care.
	All these funds wanted to load up on Puerto Rican bonds.
	They were triple tax-free.
	They were tax-free in the U.S.
	They were tax-free in all the states.
	So all these bond funds wanted to put these Puerto Rican bonds in their portfolios.
	And they didn't really care that Puerto Rico, obviously, just doing the math, had no way of paying it back.
	But they kept borrowing and borrowing and borrowing until all of a sudden people cared.
	And then it was a crisis.
	Same thing happened in Greece.
	I mean, you can get away with it until you can.
	And the same thing is going to happen with the United States.
	It's just taking longer.
	But we're going to be able to refinance the debt until we can.
	And when we can't, then it's a crisis.
	It's not like, oh, we have time to fix it.
	If you wait for the market to do it, it's too late.
	So we should already be looking forward to that and drastically cutting spending, raising taxes, doing something to correct this imbalance.
	But no, we're going to wait until the market causes a crisis.
	And you get Greece.
	Yeah, although I think we're going to be worse.
	I mean, you know, because Greece didn't have the reserve currency.
	You know, Greece's whole economy wasn't built on this premise.
	You know, our economy would not look like this but for the reserve status of the dollar.
	Well, then Greece is a good example because it shows you without any alternatives how fast and how bad everything can get.
	Yes, it can go from everything seeming okay to a collapse.
	Look, I mean, sometimes you just look superficially.
	Like you could, you know, termites can eat the wood in a house right up to the paint.
	And you could be staring at a house that's about to collapse and you don't realize it until it collapses, right?
	And so we have a facade.
	You know, people think the economy is in good shape because everybody is spending money, but they don't look at what's really going on beneath the surface, where the money's coming from, and the sustainability of the dead and the money printing.
	But all of a sudden, it's going to be like the emperor has no clothes.
	And there's probably other people that can see it, but they don't admit it.
	They don't acknowledge it.
	But at some point, something is going to happen and it's all going to implode.
	And of course, they're going to say, oh, nobody could have seen this coming.
	It came out of left field, 100-year flood, just like they did with the 2008 financial crisis.
	Nobody could have predicted it.
	When, of course, it was easily easy to predict it.
	What was hard was predicting when, right?
	It's easy to see what's going to happen.
	You just don't know when because a lot of things could happen to intervene to extend it.
	And that's the same thing that's happening now.
	I mean, the crisis that we're going to have is obvious.
	It's more obvious than the 08 financial crisis.
	It's just taking longer for it to manifest.
	But it's going to be a lot worse as a result of how long we've kicked a can down the road.
	Because by doing that, we just allow all the problems that we need to fix to get worse.
	Got it.
	Great conversation, Peter.
	Really enjoyed it.
	Thanks for coming out.
	Is there anything you want to drive the audience to?
	Is there a website that you, anything you want them to go to?
	Is that the one, Rob?
	Well, thanks for asking.
	So that is the shift radio.
	So I do my own podcast.
	I don't have a fanciest studio.
	Although I built a big radio.
	You look like an actor in that picture.
	I can fix up.
	I got to get a standalone studio that's actually larger than this in Puerto Rico.
	And we also use it for music recording.
	But that's the Peter Schiff Show podcast.
	I do one or two, sometimes three episodes in a week.
	So you can go listen at shiftradio.com, which is what that is.
	Or you can go to my YouTube channel and listen to them there.
	I do them live now, so it's video on YouTube.
	But the important sites to remember are my asset management business.
	That's Europac.com, E-U-R-O-P-A-C.com.
	That's my Puerto Rican-based registered investment advisor.
	So if you have a brokerage account, a portfolio, we can manage it for you, get it out of overpriced U.S. assets, build a diversified portfolio of value stocks, dividend paying stocks, get you involved in the mining sector.
	You're back on the Peter Schiff show.
	For a minute, that's the Europac.com website.
	You're right, Rob.
	I mean, what are we doing, Rob?
	You can give us a call.
	You can fill out that little form, the sign up, free report and stuff, and one of the reps will get a hold of you.
	It's a fee-based model.
	We manage accounts.
	You could transfer in IRAs as well.
	I also run, if you click on funds, services, look at mutual funds.
	We have five mutual funds that I manage that you can actually buy those funds at any of the major discount brokerage firms.
	You can buy them all no load.
	And that means I'll be managing your portfolio through those funds, wherever you have them.
	And then the other website, is ShiftGold, which is my last name, shiftgold.com.
	And that's my precious metals business.
	And I recommend that everybody own some physical precious metals.
	And I regard that not as an investment, as a form of savings.
	It's an alternative to saving dollars or Euros or yen.
	It's a good store of value.
	Although right now, I think it's still unique because I think gold and silver are underpriced.
	And so I do think that there's a big repricing of those metals that's going to take place.
	So normally, gold and silver would be a store of value, but I actually think you can generate a lot of value by buying them now because I think eventually a lot more people are going to buy them, but it's going to be at much, much higher prices.
	So you can make money in gold and silver.
	You can make even more money, I think, if you're going to go into the mining sector.
	You're taking more risk, but I think you have significant upside, if I'm right.
	Because what's hurt the miners over the past 10, 20 years, the cost of mining gold has gone way up.
	Most gold stocks are making less money mining $2,000 gold than they did mining $500 gold.
	And that's because the energy costs and the labor costs and other costs have gone up so much.
	And so gold stocks have kind of been an ironic victim of inflation because inflation has driven up mining costs faster than the gold price.
	Well, I think gold is about to catch up.
	I think gold is going to soar in relation to other prices.
	And that's going to, you know, deliver a windfall to these mining companies.
	And in fact, a lot of their gold that they don't even think has value because it costs too much to extract it, all that gold is suddenly going to be very valuable because it's going to be worth digging it up because the price is going to be so much higher.
	So I think that people can make tremendous gains in the gold stocks, especially the junior miners.
	And so I have a gold, a gold fund, the Europe Pacific Gold Fund, managed by Adrian Day.
	You can buy that anywhere.
	We'll put all the links to all of that below.
	Everybody will be able to find.
	We'll put every single one of those links below.
	And I trust those guys know how to sell as good as you know how to sell when they give it a call and learn more.
	They will be available.
	Peter, thank you so much for coming out.
	Gang.
	Gang.
	Take care, everybody.
	We will do this again.
	I believe tomorrow morning we have Sage Steele here with us.
	We're going to ask her about what she thought Joe Rogan's dreams really were.
	Take care, everybody.
	Bye-bye.

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