“Time Is Running Out!” Peter Schiff on Buying Bitcoin, Dumping Gold, & Getting Rich!

Inflation is the number one economic problem, and it's going to get a lot worse as this crisis unfolds. Under capitalism, the banks would be allowed to fail. I'm betting that the Fed is going to continue to behave as recklessly in the future as it has in the past. Government wants to keep people poor. Once I can get somebody addicted to government money, I've got their vote for life. Freedom is freedom from government. It means you're left alone. You're free to make your own choices. What's something today that nobody is listening to? Well, Peter, thank you so much for having us today. We really appreciate it. You're an economist, stockbroker, predicted the great financial crisis, and when I first found you, it was in 2011 or 2012 when you posted the Occupy Wall Street video, the I Am the 1% where you went into the dragon's den, so to speak, and debated people for 2 hours. And what I was most surprised about was how contentious some of the people were and how angry they were at the entire situation. So, what do you think they were angry about, and do you feel like it was misdirected? Well, I mean, if you remember those days, the whole point of the protest was the financial crisis, the bailouts. People were losing homes or losing their their home equity, and a lot of people were angered, particularly by the bailouts, because they saw Wall Street really getting the blame for the crisis, but then getting bailed out. So, that nobody was actually held accountable. Nobody was losing any money or, you know, nobody went to jail. So, people were angry, but the whole purpose of my visit was to redirect that anger where it belonged. Because the protesters shouldn't be upset with Wall Street for accepting the bailout. I mean, who wouldn't accept the bailout? They should be angry at the government for offering the bailouts in the first place. That was something that shouldn't have been done. There was no real constitutional authority for those programs. And, you know, a lot of people may have rightly, partially, or even totally, you know, in their in their minds, blamed Wall Street. And so, why should they get a bailout? Why should it be heads they win, tails taxpayers lose? Yeah. You know, if you make a bad bet, you should have to deal with the consequences. After all, when they were making a lot of money, they kept the profits. Therefore, if there's a loss, they should be responsible to pay that loss. Now, they didn't keep all the profits. They they paid taxes, but the bailouts really dwarfed what they what they paid in taxes. So, I just wanted people to understand that what was happening and what was upsetting them was not capitalism. That under capitalism, the banks would be allowed to fail. There would be no bailouts. In fact, if we had capitalism, the financial crisis wouldn't have happened. The conditions that led to the insolvency of many banks would never have developed if we had a free market, if we had capitalism. It was only government interference in the banking sector, in the housing and mortgage sector, that laid the foundation and made that crisis inevitable. Do you feel like any of them made any strong arguments that maybe caused you to reconsider some of your points? No. I mean, uh you know, I mean, there were no real strong arguments. There was just some emotion. There were a lot of socialists there that really didn't understand capitalism or or the free market. And and so, I was, you know, trying my best to educate them. I don't know if I got any converts that were actually there that day at Zuccotti Park, but I do know for a fact that I managed to persuade a lot of people who watched uh any one of a number of the versions that made it on the YouTube, because there have been, you know, well over 10 million views. Just, you know, the one on my channel alone has about 5 and 1/2 million, but I didn't even put it up until maybe 5 to 7 years after it happened. A lot of people still reach out to me to this day. I mean, I get emails from people who found that Occupy Wall Street video, and they're just letting me know how it changed their lives, how it maybe put them on the right path to do more research, but how they were very left-wing, very socialist-oriented before they watched the Occupy Wall Street. But now, as a result of having watched it and maybe some other uh research that that video caused them to do, they've completely flipped. And now they're 180, and now they're free market, libertarian, pro-capitalism. So, it did work in that respect, even if I didn't convince, you know, the 100 people that were crowded around me. I may have influenced thousands or tens of thousands of people uh who weren't there that day, but who saw the encounter on on YouTube. I remember I saw that video for the first time when I was in high school, and that was a very transformative time for me, Thanks. because I was trying Well, Oh, yeah, there we go. Because I was trying to like develop my own opinions and see like, okay, am I more pro-free market? Am I more pro-free government intervention? And I think that you explained it in such a simple way. And also, fortunately for you, unfortunately for people maybe looking for the middle of the road thing, you were talking to people, they seemed very uneducated. So, it like made your point come across extremely clearly. So, I learned a lot about the, you know, the free market from that. What would you say you learned from that experience? Yeah, there was certainly human nature. was a big con- contrast that a lot of people pointed out. If you look at the comments on YouTube, uh because it it a lot of it wasn't just what I was saying, but all the foolish things that the people in the audience were saying. And they were very arrogant, too, in their opinions. Like, you know, they were there to, you know, to tell me all the things that I didn't know. And it was also interesting that, you know, I was there representing the 1%. You know, they're oh, we're the 99% as if that gives them some type of virtuous position, because they represent the majority, or at least they purport to speak for the majority. And so, I was there representing the minority, you know, the 1% versus the 99%, but trying to persuade them why the 99% really owes a debt of gratitude to the 1%. That their lives would be demonstrably worse off if it wasn't for the benefits that they get from the 1%. And maybe it's not the people who are in the 1% may not have started out in the 1%, but they ended up there because they were able to create so much value for the 99%. You know, they create all the goods and services that the 99% consume and and take for granted that all these goods and services are available. Sure, you have to pay for them, but you're happy to pay for them because your life is much better with these products than without them. You know, some people may be may regret the fact that they don't get them for free, that they have to pay, but in countries where you get stuff for free, you get nothing, because there's nothing there. There's nothing produced. There needs to be an incentive to go out of your way to create uh and produce goods and services for other people. And capitalism provides that incentive. And though the people that create and own the capital benefit more than any individual consumer in society, the 99%, but collectively, the 99% benefit far more from the work and the efforts and the ingenuity uh of the 1% than the 1% themselves. Now, one of your arguments during that was that you could see it coming and that you predicted the great financial crisis. And one of your quotes back then was that nobody listened to you. What's something today that nobody is listening to? Well, basically the same thing, because the same problems that I correctly observed in the years leading up to the '08 financial crisis, they're they're here today. It's the same problems created by the same source. Only the scale is larger. The coming collapse, financial crisis, is much greater than what we went through in '08-'09. Uh but the same people who couldn't see it coming back then are oblivious to it now. And they're going to have the same reaction. Just like in 2008, people were saying, oh, well, you know, nobody could have seen this coming. This just totally came out of left field. Black swan, 100-year flood, right? Don't blame anybody for not knowing that this crazy thing was going to happen. Of course, ignoring all the people, myself included, who did see it coming, because it was predictable. It was not a black swan. Uh it was a garden variety swan, if you understand, you know, what to look for. Uh and so, we have another gigantic white swan that they can't see uh that's looming. That's much bigger, cuz it's not just going to be a garden variety financial crisis, like we had in '08. It's going to be a sovereign debt crisis. It's not just subprime uh mortgage borrowers that can't pay back what they borrowed. It's the US government that can't pay what it borrowed. It's going to be a currency crisis, because when the US government can't pay, the Fed prints, and that is going to turn the inflation problem into a potentially hyperinflation problem, but certainly a much bigger inflation problem than the large inflation problem we have right now. And inflation is the number one economic problem in the country, and it's going to get a lot worse as this crisis unfolds. I think for a lot of people, their main concern today is housing prices. What are your thoughts on the current state of the housing market, and do you feel like there's the potential for a housing market collapse? Well, the government has totally screwed up the housing market. Uh prices for homes have been, you know, artificially high for decades because of government subsidies. The government guarantees mortgages and because of that mortgages get made on much uh looser terms and get extended to far less credit-worthy borrowers than would be the case in a free market. In a free market, down payments might be 20% but with the government, people could buy with nothing down or or 3% or very low down payments. In a free market, banks would be a lot more concerned about the ability to pay. But once the government guarantees the mortgage, no one cares if the if the homeowner can pay cuz if he doesn't pay, the government will. So this has caused a lot of excess credit to be pushed into single-family housing, condos people have bought homes that otherwise might have rented and so more um owner-occupied housing has been built than might otherwise have been built. We might have had more multi-family, more apartments but the government through subsidies s- kind of pushed everybody into home ownership and pushed up the price of homes to the point that people were really stretching to borrow a lot of money to buy homes that they really couldn't afford. And so the market has been screwed up for a long time but what really happened during COVID to screw it up to an even greater degree was that by slashing interest rates to zero and keeping them there mortgage rates went down into the twos Mhm. and lots of people refinanced and now have these rates, super low rates that will never really exist again locked up. People have maybe 28 years left, 25 years left on these mortgages, fixed-rate mortgages and they're never leaving these homes because that means giving up that mortgage which is probably their their greatest asset but also the banks' greatest liability. One of the reasons that the banking sector is in worse shape now than it was in '07, '08 is because back then they lost money on defaulting mortgages. So the mortgages that didn't default, they were fine. Mhm. It was only when the borrowers defaulted where it was a problem and that that was a big problem for a lot of banks. But today, it's not about default. It's about every single mortgage that the bank owns cuz it's losing money on even the good mortgages because they're underwater. They They have a mortgage that pays them 3 or 4%. But the Fed funds rate is over 5%. understanding with some of those loans, banks flip them. So if they issued a loan at 3%, they're only holding onto it for a few months and if some banks hold onto them Somebody owns that mortgage and is underwater and is taking a loss but banks still own a lot of mortgage debt, a lot of mortgage-backed securities, a lot of treasury debt. All that is underwater. I mean they're these banks are all insolvent including the big two big to fail banks but the government lets them pretend they're not by not having to mark to market these massive losses because they they hide under the assumption that they're going to hold these investments to maturity, these mortgages and these bonds but they may not have that luxury if their customers need their money for whatever reason, they're not going to have it cuz they've lost it in the bond market. But the other part of your question, so you have all of these homeowners now that have locked in these low mortgages they're not moving. That means those houses are really off the market and if you want to buy a house now, there's not a lot of inventory and there's not a lot of new construction because it costs a lot to build with rising material costs rising labor costs and so people are stuck. Home prices are not falling which they normally would with a big rise in interest rates like we've seen. Mortgage rates have gone from 3% to 8%. You would expect a big drop in home prices but that hasn't happened because the homes are just not for sale. So who should buy a home today? Although you know what, before we go into that, we got to do some quick math because the less money your business spends, the more money you get to keep. But with higher expenses on materials, labor, distribution and borrowing, everything is costing more. So to reduce these costs and headaches, smart businesses are upgrading to our sponsor, NetSuite by Oracle. NetSuite is the number one cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, inventory and HR into one platform and one source of truth. With NetSuite, you reduce IT costs because it lives in the cloud with no hardware required and you can access it from anywhere. So simply put, you cut the cost of maintaining multiple systems because with NetSuite, you have one unified business management suite. 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Well, I mean it depends on your circumstances and and where the home is located but for a lot of people and this has been the case for a long time uh renting is a better option. Now another thing that the government has done too to push people into home ownership which has helped screw up the market is the tax consequence. They The government gives you a tax write-off. If you buy a home, you can deduct your mortgage interest but you can't deduct your rent if you rent a home. I mean some sometimes there's a a renter's credit, some local governments give that but there's much bigger government subsidies for buying a home rather than renting. And so that's caused people who might otherwise have been better off renting to buy instead because they're taking into account the tax benefits. But in the real economy, they should be renting but in the economy created by government they end up buying. But you know, that distorts the market and it and it and it leads to a less optimal decision because it's all based on on taxation. A lot of people don't itemize their deductions now, they take a standard deduction. And so it doesn't matter that the mortgage interest is tax deductible, they don't get the deduction. You know, depending on again your circumstances, a lot of people are better off renting. A lot of people who own homes, the only reason they're they're better off staying where they are is because their mortgage rate is so low. Their mortgage rate may be so low that if they sold their home and rented, their rent would be higher than what their current mortgage is. Now they are stuck with maintenance, insurance, taxes, all these costs are going up. So it's not like the cost of homeownership isn't rising with inflation, it is making it even harder for people to buy a home today because not only do you have to pay these inflated prices and then borrow at, you know, 7, 8% but you have to pay insurance costs that have basically doubled over the last few years. You have to pay much higher maintenance costs. You have to pay higher local property taxes. I mean everything related to buying a home is a lot more expensive. And of course, if you don't buy a home, if you rent, rents have gone way up and there's no end in sight. They're going to keep on rising. What you explained has been exactly my experience. I bought a home a couple of years ago and I got like a 2.8% rate and if I were to get that same loan, well, a different loan but at its the same price of the house, it would be about 80% more. And so I have no incentive whatsoever to sell this house. Probably going to hold onto it forever and I know if I could pay off the home, I wouldn't do it because I can get 5% in a in a bank and a Why would you Why would you take any money that you have and pay off a sub-3% mortgage? Plus you get the tax write-off potentially for that mortgage. So it the real effective cost is probably below two. Why would you do that when yeah, you could take that exact same money, put it in the bank, get 5% and then use that to pay your mortgage and have money left over. Or you could do something more productive than a 5% investment. You could buy, you know, dividend-paying stocks. Let's say the ones that we, you know, manage in our portfolios. A lot of dividend-paying stocks are paying 7, 8, 9, 10%. Plus, you know, the stocks could appreciate over time. They probably will. So, you know, instead of taking that money and paying off your mortgage, you know, buy other assets. Worst case scenario, you could always rent out the house because you could probably charge in rent more than you're paying in in mortgage. And so let your tenant pay your mortgage for you and keep the difference. Now, of course, you do have to pay property taxes, maintenance, insurance, but you know, you can build all that into the rent. So then what are your predictions for the future of the housing market as someone who's looking and exploring maybe buying another house? It's hard for me to even justify because I've only really seen when I have been in the market really low rates. When I see now my monthly payment would be, I'm like, this is crazy. money on rents. It just doesn't financially make sense. look, you look like a young guy, or I mean you are a young guy. I mean are you married? Do you have kids? I'm not married. I don't have kids. do you need a house for? What do I need another house? Or any house. Why don't you just rent? Well, because I got a 2.874% so and it appreciated so it Right. That was, you know, that was a a government subsidy. You never should have even got a rate that low, right? The Fed gave you that gift. Um but generally when you're young and have, you know, no real roots anywhere, you don't know where you you may end up settling down, if you may settle down, who you're going to marry, how many kids you're going to have, if you're going to have kids. Uh those are a lot of things that are important when it comes to, you know, planning roots and and buying a home. But one of the benefits about of being young and being single is you can kind of play it by ear. You can go wherever the wind blows you. And why do you want to be tied down to a home? Sure, you can sell your home at a gain right now, but the market could change. You people somebody could buy a house today and it's down. And it could take you months, maybe years to sell a house unless you're really willing to move the price down. Whereas if you're young, I mean if you're single and you're renting, I mean you can get out of a lease very easily. You know, you get a job offer in another city, you know, you meet a girl in another city, another country and you can go, right? So it's like renting has a lot of perks when you know, you're single. And then you don't need a lot of space. I mean, you know, you don't have the wife and kids, you know, maybe do you have a pet? No, I have I rent out four four rooms. You rent out all of the Oh, so So it was it was an investment. Yeah. So you're renting Yeah. You bought it as an investment. So you could rent out your room and then you could leave and go where you want and just keep it as a That's a little bit different when you're talking about it as a investment vehicle. investment. And people have done that, you know, sometimes college kids, you know, their parents, well, let's buy a place and you can get some roommates and we'll make a little bit of money. But there are a lot of people that were pressed into homeownership by overzealous realtors who make a big commission and then the idea that, oh yeah, I'm going to get rich owning a home. Realtors kind of perverted the American dream into homeownership. Like that's the American dream, buy a home and get rich as if the home makes you rich. Well, I think for a lot of people that that's their only means of saving. Is that when you look back like who stored it's a forced savings account No, it's not a forced savings account. A house depletes your savings. It's a money pit. Houses are expensive. You know, how much money I spend on this house? How much money I spend on my Connecticut house? It's crazy the amount of money that a house costs you. Now, people get bailed out because I think, oh, the house appreciates. Not always. It's inflation really. I mean that's that's that's doing it. Uh and all that's happening is your the land is keeping pace. But houses don't I mean even if somebody tells you, oh, here's this house that I sold for a million dollars and I bought it whatever 10, 20 years ago for $500,000. If you think about all the money they put into that house over that period of time, they may not have made any money. You know, a lot of the houses too that were bought back then, if you don't redo the kitchens, redo the bathroom, put on a new roof, you know, your audio visual systems are all obsolete, the wiring, I mean a lot of stuff has to be brought up to date in order to sell it for the million dollars. A lot of money was spent. I mean a lot of these houses too, if they weren't updated over the years, they're considered a teardown. What does that mean a teardown? People say, well, my house is Teardown means a house that was once brand new and had a lot of value now has zero value. It's going to be torn down. The only thing that has value is the land itself. The house is worthless. Well, I think a lot of people make the argument and they backdate it and they say, well, over the last 60 years housing prices have appreciated, you know, after inflation 1 to 3% and if I'm not saving any money anyway, but I'm forced to pay down the mortgage after those 30 years, I have money sitting here. It doesn't mean it's a better investment than the S&P Yeah, I mean if you're so reckless and like the only way I'm going to save if I have a mortgage I have to pay down. But, you know, you could take the money. I used to tell people during the housing bubble days, look, just, you know, if you can rent for cheaper then rent and take all the money you save and invest it. You know, open up a brokerage account, invest the money. Don't just spend it out. Don't just, you know, buy a fancier car or take more vacations with the money you save by renting. Invest that money, right? In in an actual investment. You know, but inflation too is actually been higher than the CPI. So when people say housing's done two or three percent more than inflation, that's because we're not really counting all the inflation. So it's it's actually been higher. But, you know, if you look at what's happened to the dollar, you know, ever since we've had the Fed, when the Fed came in in 1913, you only needed $20 to buy an ounce of gold. Now you need almost $2,400 to buy an ounce of gold. So over that 100, you know, plus years, the dollar's lost almost, you know, 99 and a half percent of its value. You know, I mean so everything is going to cost 20 times more when the dollar is 99% less valuable. You know, so in terms of gold, houses, you know, may not be any more expensive than they were 100 years ago as far as how much gold you need to buy them. Although, you know, now we're building bigger houses than we built back then, more square feet, you know, more bathrooms, uh stuff like that. So there's more that goes into them than than did back then. see housing prices going down? Uh in some markets I think they will go down even in nominal terms, but I think that there's going to be so much inflation that's going to continue to be created, it's going to be difficult to see a meaningful reduction in nominal housing prices. But in in real terms, right? In terms again, in terms of an ounce of gold, how many ounces will you need to buy the average home? There I think you can see a crash uh in home prices. And I think you might be able to see the decline by just comparing the price of a house to what you pay for groceries, what you pay for electricity, what you you know, there you might see, gee, the house is actually a lot cheaper now compared to my grocery bill. Um but it doesn't mean that it's actually Sure. gone down. Yeah. And when you're talking about investing the difference in the stock market, how do you feel about stock prices? Because I believe the S&P just hit an all-time high. At least when I was on my way here, we hit a brand new record. Yeah, stocks and especially US stocks are I think overvalued. So no, I would not just take the money I saved by renting and just buying overpriced stocks as opposed to overpriced real estate. So I think you have to be a lot more selective in the names that you invest in. And if you, you know, you you can't do your own homework then hire somebody who could do it for you like me or my company, Euro Pacific Asset Management. I mean we find a lot of the values outside the US, the compelling um stocks that we could buy at attractive prices, get good yields. But I also think that there's a major dollar decline coming, potential dollar crisis. And so I want to be invested abroad. I want to be invested in countries that I think will uh have currencies that will rise in relation to the dollar. And I want to invest in companies that can thrive in an environment where the US consumer is broke and no longer buying stuff. So I think one of the arguments against that and one of the things that's constantly surprised me is the Federal Reserve's resiliency to go through and keep the stock market high in a sense. And every time I think, here it comes, here we go, the Federal Reserve will step in, they bail everybody out, they inject a lot of money into the economy. I think COVID was a great example of that where everything shut down and the Fed just went nuts. Yeah, you know, you really have a very cozy, unhealthy relationship between the Fed, the government and Wall Street. It's just one big club, revolving door of personnel. Yeah. And the Fed through its policy has really engendered to build an asset-based economic model where the wealth effect is very important to driving consumption confidence. And so the Fed feels that they need to keep the stock market up because if the stock market crashes, everybody's poorer who owns stocks, so they spend less. Now we're in a recession, people lose their jobs. So the Fed kind of thinks, well, what's good for Wall Street is good for the economy. And of course, that works great for Wall Street, you know, and so and it again, it's the same the same economists that work at the government work work for Wall Street. They go they go back and forth, right? They're all they're the same people, they're all buddies. And of course, some of the biggest donors are, you know, Wall Street bankers. You look at the people who write the big checks, not only just directly to the campaigns because those are not the big checks. It's the PACs, right? So the people that are writing the, you know, 50, $100,000 plus checks to the PACs that are working to reelect particular, you know, people they are disproportionately on Wall Street. That's not a coincidence. You know, it's not that these guys are just so patriotic that they really feel that it's important to donate to the candidate who's going to do good for the country. No, they're making an investment in those candidates, just like anything else, and they're evaluating it based on a cost-benefit. Like, how much is it going to cost me to buy this senator this congressman, and what's my return on my investment going to be? Cuz I'm not doing it out of the goodness of my heart because I'm a patriotic American. No, it's because I want the politician in office that's going to do things that make me money. So, how do you feel comfortable betting against that? Cuz don't they say don't fight the Fed? I'm not fighting the Fed. The Fed's going to keep creating inflation, so I want to own assets that will benefit from what the Fed is doing. You know, I'm betting that the Fed is going to continue to behave as recklessly in the future as it has in the past, that it's never going to learn from its mistakes, and it's going to keep repeating them. And it's going to repeat them until it basically destroys the dollar, sends the price of gold to the moon. And so, that's what I'm investing for. I'm investing for the end game because I know how the game is going to end. Most people who are playing it don't even realize the game that they're playing. Don't They don't get the rules. They've just been winning for so long, you know, they think they know how the game ends or how the game is played. They don't. Right? It's like a game of musical chairs, but they don't know the music's going to stop one day. They just think it's going to keep on playing, and and but it's going to surprise them when it stops, and you know, they're not in a chair. So, how are they playing the game? Is that mostly with tech stocks because it seems like to me the Nasdaq and the S&P are the clear winners over the last 20 years or so, and that's where a lot of people seem to be investing the bulk of their money. Yeah, I mean, they are playing the game by buying the momentum, buying whatever the crowd is buying, buying whatever is going up. And it doesn't matter what the fundamental value of the underlying business is. I mean, in some cases, it doesn't matter if the underlying businesses have any fundamental value at all, or do they even care? All that matters is what's the price, and where is it going, and how many people are buying it. Look, the price of anything can go up if people keep buying it. It's just that when they stop buying it that you have a problem. You look at cryptocurrencies, right? They have zero fundamental value. Uh so, they're probably the most speculative investment, not probably are the most speculative investment, yet people have more profit in Bitcoin if they had been in it from the early days than in anything else. But, all these things are going to ultimately collapse when inflation rears its head in a way that people realize it's it's here to stay and recognize that the Fed is all talk and no bite, you know, bark and no bite when it comes to being able to contain inflation, being able to bring it anywhere near 2%, let alone back down to 2%. Although, we'd be better off with inflation below 2%. I mean, 2% is not some holy grail that we need to shoot for, and that inflation is at 1% that that's somehow a problem that the Fed needs to solve. I mean, the only problem with 1% is that it's not zero. I'd rather have no inflation than 1%, and in fact, I'd rather have minus 1% than prices staying the same. You know, everybody wants lower prices. The lower the better. The less stuff costs, the more stuff I can buy. Even the businesses want to be able to lower prices. Because if they can lower their prices, they'll sell more stuff. And so, how do businesses try to lower prices? They try to lower their costs. And what what a businessman cares about is the margin. As long as I can sell above my cost, I'm making money, and then I can make even more money if I can ramp up the volume. But, what about Japan's argument where they've had a series of deflationary times where people are afraid to spend their money because it just becomes more valuable the next year. That's very bad logic. I mean, people aren't afraid to spend money. Maybe incentivized. If I wait a year to buy this couch, I could buy it way cheaper, and if I don't need it now, I'm going to wait. But, what are you going to sit on for the next year? On the floor? You know, it's it's an upgrade. Well, but I mean, yeah, but the question is how long do you want to sit on a shitty couch while you're waiting for the price of the couch you really want to go down? I mean, what what real experience will tell you is when it comes to consumer goods, an investment is a different situation. If you're thinking about buying an asset as an investment, and you think the price is too high, well, you're going to wait for it to come down. Right? But, when you're talking about consumer goods, which is, you know, what all this is about, people don't wait. If you're hungry, you buy food. You don't say, "Well, if I starve myself, I can get the food cheaper next week." You know, if you need clothing, you go out and buy it. If you need a new cell phone, you buy it. I mean, you know that if you just wait another year, you'll be able to get that phone for less, but you don't want to wait. You want to use the phone right now. Maybe you need the phone, or you're just tired of the phone you have. You want to get a new phone. You may not even be alive next year, right? I mean, so who knows? You can get hit by a bus, right? Waiting for the price of a phone. And we know that doesn't happen, right? Computers, TVs, they get cheaper almost every year, even now, but people still buy them. I mean, the first cell phone, you guys don't even remember the 1980s with the Gordon Gekko cell phone, which was like a huge brick. Hardly anybody bought those phones when they came out. And it's not because people didn't want them. Everybody wanted one. They were just so expensive, few people could afford them. The reason that everybody has cell phones now is because they're a lot cheaper. The first television sets that came out in the 1940s, you know, they were huge. They were big piece of furniture with a tiny like a 2-in screen, and you could only watch them for maybe two or three hours a day, and it was in black and white, and you know, it was a horrible picture. They cost as much as a car. Who bought them? Really rich people that wanted to show off that they had a TV. Now, the middle class, sure, they they they were they would like one, but they just they couldn't afford it. Um and so, when prices go down, then people buy. So, people don't wait indefinitely for prices to go down because there is a present value to having something today versus having it a year from now, two years from now. And you have And so, the economists that that believe this nonsense are forgetting about attributing a value to having something now. So, even if I know the price is going to go down, I can buy it today for $100. I can buy it a year from now for $95. Am I going to pay $5 to have it today and get to use it for the next year, rather than waiting a year? Now, in terms of that, how do you feel about the US dollar as a reserve currency, and do you feel like that's potentially threatened? It is threatened. It's not potentially threatened. I mean, it it's it There is a threat right now. The status is in jeopardy, and it's going to be lost. And you can see that in the record high price of gold. Central banks are major buyers of gold. Where are they getting the money to buy their gold? They're selling dollars. Why do they want the gold? Cuz they want to get rid of the dollars. They don't want them. They're They're reducing their dependency on the dollar. And not only did they have an economic incentive to get rid of the dollar because the dollar is going to gradually, you know, and then rapidly depreciate because of the enormity of our deficits and the money that we have to print to monetize it, but we created an added incentive, Biden did, with sanctions that were put on Russia because we didn't like what Russia did. Russia invaded the Ukraine, and we said, "Well, you know, we don't like that, and therefore, we're going to take your dollars. We're going to kick you out of the global Swift system. We're going to confiscate, you know, your treasuries." And you know, right or wrong, you know, whether you you know, agree with Putin or disagree with Putin, right? That's immaterial. Doesn't matter. All that matters is we told the world America decides whether you get to keep your dollars, whether you get to keep your treasuries, and we have to approve of your conduct. And if we don't like what you're doing, it may not have to be a war. Could be anything. This is the precedent. We don't We're going to We're going to take your dollars away from you. Well, who the hell wants to be in that position? Especially country like China, who's our biggest creditor, who's got trillions worth of our treasuries. I mean, how much anti-China rhetoric is there in the US? Look at all the tariffs that they just put on imposed today on Americans who want to buy Chinese products, right? China is vilified all the time in the media by US politicians. If I was China, I wouldn't want any US dollars. I wouldn't want any treasuries. I mean, it's only a matter of time before we sanction them and freeze their assets. How much of that is justified with China? None of it. I don't think any of it is justified. Our problems are are homemade. They're not made in China. I mean, just about everything else is, but not our problems. Our monetary our economic problems, our inflation problem, that's here. I mean, Washington is the enemy, not not Beijing. But, before we go into that, if you're building a SaaS business, achieving compliance with SOC 2, ISO 27001, or other in-demand frameworks can unlock major growth for your company and establish customer trust. However, Jack, this process is very time-intensive and can be extremely costly. This is why our sponsor Vanta automates your compliance work, getting you audit-ready quickly and saving you up to 85% of associated costs. Plus, Vanta scales with your business, helping you continuously monitor compliance, unify risk management, and streamline security reviews. Join the 7,000 global companies like Atlassian, Flow Health, and Quora that use Vanta to build trust and prove security in real time. 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Thank you so much StreamYard and back to the episode. So, do you think a lot of the issues that we hear about with China? Because I hear quite a lot of it from CNBC, from the news. Do you think that's just American propaganda to make us dislike China? Well, it's more about scapegoating China. I mean, it's not like they just want Americans to hate China, but they'd like Americans to blame China for problems that US, you know, politicians create, so it takes them off the hook, right? Everybody likes a good scapegoat, right? And so, the Chinese, you know, they make a good scapegoat, right? Uh and you know, the Chinese government, of course, is communist. Um but they're not really communist. I mean, you know, I mean, just like we're not really capitalist, but there's a lot of capitalism that happens in China, just like there's some capitalism in America. In many cases, there's more capitalism in China than there's in America. It just depends on uh the industry. But both economies are kind of a mixture between capitalism and socialism. It's just a question of the the degrees. But, you know, the Chinese have accumulated enormous surpluses trading with the United States. And that basically amounts to a giant subsidy to the United States. China has been willing to subsidize the United States. Now, they haven't necessarily done this out of the kindness of their hearts. They have accumulated a lot of our treasuries and we owe them a lot of money. But the reality is we ain't going to pay. So, you know, either we're going to default or we're going to inflate. And I think at this point the Chinese recognize this predicament and they want to diminish their holdings. So, they can cut their losses. That's going to have some profound consequences for the American standard living and not in a good way, in a bad way, because our our standard living's going to go down because so much of the stuff that we buy is going to get a lot more expensive. How fast do you think this could all unravel and how fast do you think it could all be solved? It's going to be very quick cuz that's, you know, you look at any situation where something blew up, whether it's, you know, here in Puerto Rico where I am, where we had a Puerto Rico had a debt crisis and major default. For years, it was obvious to me and it should have been obvious to everybody that Puerto Rico had no capacity to repay the money it was borrowing. But for years, nobody even cared. They just kept loaning the money anyway. And then all of a sudden, people cared and then it was a crisis. Same same thing happened, remember in Greece when they had a crisis. The problems are there hiding in plain sight. It just doesn't matter until it matters. And so, that's the same thing with the United States. It's just that it hasn't mattered for a long time, but fundamentally, it's always mattered. And and and there's going to be a catalyst which is going to result in a aha, you know, emperor has no clothes moment where everything is going to collapse quickly in a crisis. So, it can fall apart very quickly. The problems can't be solved quickly. They are solvable, but not within the, you know, the political uh situation that exists today. And even if we had politicians willing to cast votes that actually would help the country in the long run. There would be a lot of harm in the short run, right? It's it's kind of like the movie The Matrix, right? I mean, you're living a pretty good life in the Matrix, but somebody could burst your bubble by explaining the actual situation of your life. And if you want to wake up into reality, that's a rude awakening to, you know, go into the that world of, you know, that of what the world really looked like. Uh and you can't, you know, be in that pretend world. Now, a lot of people would prefer to live in the pretend world of the Matrix, but the problem is what happens if something happens to the the the Matrix breaks down and now you're you're thrust into reality, right? Uh but the voters don't want to tell or the politicians don't want to tell the voters they're in the Matrix. So, what needs to be done? We need to, you know, rebuild the industrial nation that has been destroyed over the years by taxes and regulations. We need to rebuild savings. Americans have to stop living beyond their means. They have to stop buying stuff they can't afford. They have to save their money, delay gratification. You know, people have to work, you know, productively, not just in the service sector, but we have to produce. Um you know, so and asset prices have to come down. People are going to have to lose money. Interest rates have to go up even more than they have. This is going to be very disruptive for a lot of people. And a lot of people are going to have to be told that they're not going to be able to retire, that, you know, their retirement savings are inadequate, that Social Security, Medicare are broke and you can't, you know, you're not going to get what was promised to you. Cuz government has to cut a lot of spending. And, you know, the politicians don't want to tell the voters that because the voters don't want to hear that and they're not going to vote for them. But that doesn't mean that the voters are going to get all the benefits that they have been promised. They're not going to get them. All right? They may be they may receive the the money, but the money's not going to buy very much. And that's really what counts. It doesn't matter that I get a Social Security check. What matters is can I buy food right, with my Social Security check? And the answer is no, right? Then what difference does it make? You know, and it's interesting because even my father pointed this out in his book, The Biggest Con. And this is back from the 1970s. He had published an excerpt from the Congressional Record. And this was William Proxmire who said this, who was the chairman of the Senate Committee on Money and Banking. And they were talking back then about Social Security and what to do and, you know, they ultimately raised taxes and stuff like that. But they talked about the, you know, the precarious situation of the program back then. Proxmire said, "Look, you know, at the end of the day, Social Security obligations will be paid. America, we have a printing press and we're going to use that printing press to pay these benefits. The benefits may be worthless when the recipients receive them, but they are going to be paid." And so, this is a a high-powered senator admitting that Social Security benefits may be worthless, but people are going to get them. And that's a big statement. And because and if Social Security benefits are worthless, then the dollar is worthless cuz that's what Social Security payments are. So, Proxmire was saying, "All of our money may be worthless, but, you know, we're going to keep on printing it. We're going to we're going to keep all of our commitments." What I think is much better is for the government to acknowledge that it's over-promised and can't deliver and make cuts to government spending, including restructuring the 35 trillion dollar national debt that's growing exponentially, coming in clean with our creditors that we can't pay and defaulting and, you know, offering to pay less than a hundred cents on the dollar. These are This is what we have to do. If we don't do that and we just print money instead so that we can pay everybody in full, the losses are going to be much greater. The real losses that result from inflation will dwarf the losses that would have resulted from default. So, what do you think we should do then with the people that have paid in their entire life into Social Security and maybe they're just about to receive it or maybe they got a couple more years to go before they can start receiving those benefits. That's a really tricky one. I remember learning in in US history actually back in high school of the first person ever to contribute to Social Security. Yeah, I'm a Fuller. Yeah. And how much did she pay in if you remember? Hardly. She lived to be 99. That was the most ironic thing of all is that she paid in, I think it was like some very small amount. It could be hundreds, could be like tens of dollars, but she closed it like 40,000 or something. Yes, she received back like thousands of percent of what she contributed. Yeah, that's the case with all Ponzi schemes or pyramids or chain letters. If you get in at the very beginning, you make a lot of money. The gains from the people that come in early are covered by the losses for the people who come in late, right? A lot of the people in Bitcoin are going to find this out the hard way, right? People made money in Bitcoin who got in early and that's because all these other people got in late who are going to lose money. But, you know, what I would do if I was, you know, in charge or could do it. You know, I mean, first of all, it it just reminds me of the of Animal House. You see that movie? There's a line in that movie, Otter, out of the main character, and I don't want to use the F-word, but he's like, "You effed up. You trusted us." Right? That's kind of what, you know, this makes me think of. People really effed up because they trusted the government with their retirement, and the government blew it. Right? The whole purpose, the pretext that the Roosevelt administration used when it created Social Security, which never should have been created, completely unconstitutional, was that people are not smart enough to save for their retirement, so we need the government to do it for them. And that's why initially it didn't apply to the self-employed because the government said, "Well, if you're smart enough to run your own business, well, you can save for your own retirement." But if you're just the average Joe Schmo who's got a job, well, you're too dumb to save, so the government's going to take your money by force and save it for you. Of course, the government spent every nickel of Social Security tax they collected. Right? They saved nothing. They did a worse job than anybody could have possibly done. What I would do now, right? Instead of just creating inflation and just spreading the pain kind of across the board equally without any regard to uh how it affects people. Right? Because if we just print a lot of money, we don't make any cuts to Social Security, and we just print a lot of money, Warren Buffett's Social Security is going to go down by the same amount as his secretary. So, people who really need Social Security, they're going to be hit exactly the same as people who just use their Social Security, you know, to tip uh the the the caddies at their country club. I would rather say, "Look, Social Security is bankrupt. It doesn't work. Program is over, right? We're ending it, never should have had it. We're eliminating the payroll tax for everybody. You're all off the hook. No one has to pay 15% anymore payroll tax, right? Now, we got to deal with this mess because now we have all these people who are broke, who paid these high taxes all their lives, and there's no money, right? So, what are we going to do? Well, let's develop a transitionary program. We'll qualify people based on means for now, right? So, if you're destitute and Social Security is all you got, all right, well, we'll we'll have a maybe we'll buy you an annuity. There's some way that we can get you something. You know, if you're wealthy, if you have income, if you have assets, you know, tough luck, right? You screwed up. You you you trusted us. Because, you know, if somebody's got enough money to take care of themselves, then they got to take care of themselves. Because otherwise, what you're really doing is Social Security is taxing the poor to subsidize the rich. The young and the poor are being taxed to subsidize the old and the rich. And and why if I'm a poor kid, right? Let's say I'm not going to inherit any money from my parents, right? My parents don't have a lot of money. Why should I work to pay Social Security taxes so some rich guy doesn't have to spend his money so that when he dies, his kids inherit a bunch of money that I'm not going to inherit. I mean, so if you can afford to take care of yourself, then you got to do it. And the money you paid into Social Security, well, it's gone. It was stolen by the government, right? Just think of it as another income tax because legally, that's what it is. If you actually look at the law, the Social Security tax is another income tax. Nobody is entitled to anything, you know, just because you paid the tax, you're no more entitled to your Social Security money back than your income tax back. And the money all went into the general revenue. All the money that was collected in Social Security, that was used to fight the Vietnam War, the space program, the Iraq War, uh O- Obamacare. What all all all of this it came from the same pool of money, right? So, we've got to come to terms with this and and figure out the best way to deal with it. But, the way we're going to deal with it is the worst possible way. We're just going to wipe out the value of the money, and everybody is going to suffer. So, then what do you believe should be done for people that don't make the right decisions for themselves? Do you believe in a full-blown, unmitigated, laissez-faire economy, or do you think there should still be some social programs to help those people? We were listening to Jordan Peterson recently, and he had a really interesting argument, which was an observation of a study done by the US military, which is that people with an IQ beneath 83, which is 10% of the population, they are positively counterproductive in any work environment. Well, I would say the government makes decisions that are of lower quality than your average 80 80 IQ person. So, I would lower than I I Look, I would trust individuals to make their own decisions more than I would trust a third party who doesn't bear any responsibility or consequence from those decisions, right? I think by and large people can make the right decision. I mean, after all, we trust people to vote. I mean, I mean, if you don't think that people can make the right decisions, then they shouldn't be voting, right? Because that's a decision that they shouldn't make either, right? many people don't make the right decisions, even if you lay it out. to make the right decision financially than to make the right decision politically on who to vote for. You know, so that voting is something that I'm more concerned about than people that saving for their retirement. But But, this is what This is how it should be. It's a free market. You get the benefits of your good decisions. You suffer the consequences of your bad decisions. You learn from your mistakes, right? These are These are the proper incentives, right? If you want to encourage good decisions and discourage bad decisions, you allow people to enjoy the benefits when they when they do something right and be and and the suffer the consequences when they do something wrong. And to the extent that people just make a series of bad decisions and find themselves in a destitute situation, charities are there. That's why charities exist, and I believe that humans, individuals, will take better care of their fellow human beings than government will. That individually, we are better at charity than collectively. And all you have to do is look at the numbers. You know, government-run programs, better than 90% of the cost goes to finance the government that provides the benefit. So, the government takes a dollar out of your pay, and 10 cents goes to help people, 90 cents goes to perpetuate the bureaucratic machine. Whereas in private charities, you donate a dollar, 90 cents goes to uh the people that you're trying to help, and like 10 cents goes to administer the charity. So, and and I think private charities are more concerned about helping get people out of poverty, whereas government programs are more concerned about trapping them in poverty perpetually so they never get out because they want to maintain the necessity of the program, and they want to keep the voters coming back for more. You know, once I can get somebody addicted to government money, I've got their vote for life. And so, government wants to keep people poor. The private sector doesn't want them to be poor, right? Uh it wants to help them out of poverty, not trap them in poverty. That's a really good point because I was going to say, for the sake of playing devil's advocate, a lot of people argue, and I I think somewhat rightfully so, that we do need like a social and economic fabric because if we don't have that and people go into a position of destitution, or they go into being impoverished, that affects everybody. But also, people think, "Look, if we didn't have government doing all this stuff, we'd all we'd all get to keep our money." I mean, if if you think about America from 1790 when we started really as a country, until, you know, World War II, when we really started paying the income tax. I mean, even though we got the income tax in 1913, very few people paid it until 1942, right? There was no withholding tax. Nobody had taxes taken out of their pay. That was all to fight the war. So, if you think we need an income tax, then you you must think we needed World War because without World War we never would have had an income tax. But if you think about America from 19, you know, 80 70 90-ish to um 1942, what did Americans do with all their money when they didn't have income taxes to pay, right? And they didn't have Social Security taxes. That didn't even start until the '30s, and that was 1%, and it didn't even it didn't even apply to you if you were self-employed, right? So, what did Americans do with all that money that they don't have anymore, that the government takes for them? Well, apart from just having more money for themselves, they donated to charity, right? And so, most people would think, "Hey, if you didn't have to pay any more income taxes, if you didn't have to pay any more Social Security taxes, if you got to keep pretty much everything you earned, would you be willing to voluntarily take some of that money and help out people that needed your help? Would you be willing to do that? I mean, most people Most people would do it if they had the money. The reason a lot of people don't donate to charity today is they can barely afford to support themselves, and they figure, "Why do I need to? The government's already taken 30%, 40%, 50% of my income. That's all the charity I can afford." Right? People are stuck, you know, because they the government is taking their money. Uh so, I think if we had a free market, everything would be better, and there'd be a lot more charitable giving. What are your thoughts about bankruptcy in a free market? Because couldn't you argue that getting loans discharged in bankruptcy would be counterproductive to bearing the consequences of a maybe bad decision? No, I mean, I don't think that um bankruptcy um is is a a barrier to the free market. I mean, we you know, to the extent that somebody gets themselves into a financial predicament but that there's no way out. I mean, a bankruptcy, whether it's an individual or company, is a legal way of dealing with it. Remember, when you go bankrupt, I mean, you know, you've got to lose everything with you maybe with a few minimal exceptions. But, I mean, the risk of bankruptcy is there when people enter into uh lending relationships with other people, the probability or the possibility of bankruptcy is there. And so, the the the higher that possibility, the higher the interest rate you're going to charge or you may not make a loan at all. But, I think it's it's a tool that the market can develop in the court system uh that, you know, that that could be advantageous to make um you know, the economy function better. I mean, if you knew that, all right, I I mean, if I have debts, I mean, they're going to they're going to pound me for the rest of my life and I'm never going to have any opportunity to get out of a hole that I've unfortunately found myself in. But, you know, people bear the consequences. If you go bankrupt, it's a public record. I mean, people are going to know that. People are going to take that into account uh in other business dealings that they're going to have with you. Default is part of lending. I mean, that's just going to happen. And uh so, no. I mean, I you know, but what I don't like is a government-guaranteed loan. That's what I don't like. I don't like the government saying, "If you loan money to this company or this individual, the US government will guarantee it." Why? Cuz the minute that happens, that person has an advantage. They're going to get the loan. But, somebody else is going to get denied a loan because the government's not guaranteeing it. But, that other person or government may be more creditworthy. And the whole point about loans is allocating capital. And you want allocate you want to allocate capital to its highest and best use. And that's happens in a free market. But, in when the government, you know, puts its foot on the scale and says, "Oh, this borrower is going to get a government guarantee." Well, then that borrower is going to get the money even if it's not the highest and best use of those funds. And when it comes to retirement, it seems like a lot of people are turning to Bitcoin. What do you think about that? And do you have anything good to say about Bitcoin and maybe a positive with it? I mean, first of all, if people are using retirement money to buy Bitcoin, I mean, that's an even bigger mistake. Yeah, there was a study that came out that Gen Z and Millennials predominantly were relying on cryptocurrency to fund their retirement. Yeah, well, the good news there is their retirement is a long ways off. So, they'll have plenty of time to re-earn the money that they lose in in crypto. that. But, if somebody is already at retirement age and they're putting that money into crypto, they're going to have a very short retirement. don't think there's any chance that a cryptocurrency investment today, 50 years from now, could provide a future retirement? I mean, not not a not a chance. Not a chance that's high enough that I'd I'd want to gamble on it. When you say there's no chance, I mean, you know, I mean, sure, I mean, we could be invaded by aliens. I mean, there's a chance of that. Right? I mean, I I I discount it as a viable probability, but hey, anything could happen. So, it is possible that this pyramid, Ponzi, chain letter, whatever you want to call it. I like, you know, it's a blockchain letter. Can it go on for 50 more years? Well, it's gone on for 15, but I mean, it already to me it looks like it's getting pretty top-heavy. I mean, we've basically spent the last 3 years going sideways uh with tons of money coming in, tons of advertising, tons of promotion. And they really haven't managed to get the price, you know, much higher than 60,000. We got to a little bit above 70 briefly, but I think that there's far more risk of it blowing up than of it mooning. You know, the people that are buying it and and they're talking about not just $100,000 Bitcoin, but, you know, $500,000, million dollar, multi-million dollar Bitcoin. Cathie Wood's prediction was a million dollars by 2030 is what she believes. Yeah, well, I mean, who cares what she believes or I don't even know if she believes it. I mean, she's just saying it, right? She says a lot of nonsense. I mean, people have lost a lot of money in her funds. I mean, even though the funds themselves may be higher than they were 5 years ago based on where all the money came in, you know, people have gotten clobbered by getting those funds cuz she bought all kinds of overpriced stocks when the money was flooding in. And I think that, you know, a lot of her stuff is still going to go down a lot from where it is now. But, she does have a big position in crypto-related stocks. And so, naturally, she's going to be, you know, optimistic on crypto. You know, whether it's she owns those stocks because she's optimistic on crypto or because she owns those stocks, she's optimistic on crypto. It's like, I don't know what the cart is or what the horse is. that you have a lot of gold or that you have a gold position and therefore you're pessimistic about Bitcoin because could Bitcoin threaten gold? Yeah, I mean, in theory, right? They're saying Bitcoin is digital gold. So, why do I need real gold if I can have digital gold? But, the problem is it's not digital gold. I mean, that's just BS. Right? There's you you you can't replace gold with Bitcoin in any of its actual use cases, right? I mean, I have here I mean, I'm wearing this watch, right? This watch is has gold in it, right? And this this is a I got this gold bracelet from Mené, right? mene.com, right? They can't make this bracelet with Bitcoin. You want to make this bracelet, you know, you can you need gold. Now, you can make you can make one out of silver if you don't want to have one out of gold. You can use a different metal. But, if you want a gold bracelet, you can't use Bitcoin, right? Um computer chips, there's gold in there, little bits of gold to conduct electricity. You can't put Bitcoin in the computer chip instead of gold. You know, they use gold in dentistry. Uh they use it in aerospace. Uh there's all sorts of industrial applications. In none of those applications can you substitute Bitcoin, right? It's It's not a metal, let alone a precious metal. You know, it's not even tangible. It's a string of numbers. And there's 20,000 other cryptos that you could use if you instead of uh Bitcoin. So, it's just to me um the whole thing, you know, is just a giant blockchain letter. I you know, people attribute value to Bitcoin that it doesn't have. It has a price. I mean, I don't argue with that. I mean, you can put a price on anything. I mean, look at Peloton during the pandemic. Peloton shares were 170. Now, they're three. So, was Peloton worth $170 a share? Well, that's what the price was because some idiot was willing to buy it at that price. Uh it doesn't mean the company was, you know, fundamentally worth that much. So, sure, someone could buy Bitcoin and pay $64,000 for it. Does that mean it's got $64,000 worth of value? No. It's just got that market value because somebody was willing to pay that price. you think Bitcoin is actually worth? I don't know what it's worth. It may not be worth anything. It may be worth some nominal amount. I mean, what if it's worth $100? I don't know. Maybe it is. I I don't know. At this point, it's irrelevant whether it's worth zero or $100 because if it goes to $100, it might as well go to zero for 99.9% of the people who own it, right? They're going to be effectively wiped out if Bitcoin goes to 100. Even if it goes to 1,000, right? From 60,000, right? You've lost pretty much everything. It has to be worth, you know, you know, something near the current price, which I I can't imagine what Bitcoin can possibly do that would create that much value. And for a lot of the use cases that people are coming up with, like ordinals, right? Like, hey, I created an ordinal, too. It is called the golden triumph, right? It's a picture of an arm holding up a gold bar, you know, I put it on a on an ordinal on the block Bitcoin blockchain. And you can go you can buy them at Magic Eden now. We sold out of them. There was like 50 of them. But, they're trading. You can buy an ordinal. But, you only need you can put the ordinal on on a Satoshi. That's all you need is one. There's 21 quadrillion Satoshis. I mean, there's enough for everybody in the world to have a few hundred thousand Satoshis. And so, I don't see where there's a shortage of these things. You don't need a whole Bitcoin, right? You just need a Satoshi. There's no real difference between a Satoshi and a Bitcoin other than the fact that a Bitcoin is a whole bunch of Satoshis. Now, people say, "Well, but an ounce of gold is just a whole bunch of specs of gold." Yes, but you can't do anything with a spec, right? You actually need a specific quantity. You want to make this gold Rolex, I think there's maybe 6 oz of gold in there. You can't make it with 1 oz. You need 6 oz, right? You need that specific quantity to do that job. But, I don't need any quantity of Satoshis to do any job because you can't do anything with them. All you can do is give them to somebody. And so, I don't see what's so unique about that. I mean, you do all these other cryptocurrencies, you can transfer. And look, I can use PayPal. I can use Venmo. I can use Zelle. There's all sorts of ways that I can transfer uh payment to somebody over the internet cheaply, quicker than Bitcoin. And if you really like um a digital currency, then tokenize gold. I mean, there there's there's already a bunch of these tokens out there. They you know, there'd be a lot more if it wasn't for the regulatory cost. But, all you have to do is take gold, tokenize it, and now gold can circulate as a digital payment. I can own gold and I can assign, transfer that ownership to anybody in the world instantly, practically free. And I'm just instead of sending you my gold, I'm sending you the token that signifies ownership of that gold. The gold just stays in a vault and the ownership goes from one person to another. What do you think it would take for Bitcoin to go to $100? The absence of buying. It doesn't even take a lot of selling. It just takes the absence of buying. Right? Because if people decide they don't want to buy Bitcoin anymore. And why do people want Bitcoin? The The vast majority of the buying is because people think they're going to make a lot of money buying it, right? They They They think that the price of Bitcoin is going to go up and they're going to get rich. And then they're going to sell their Bitcoin and buy a car, a boat, a house, take a vacation, buy new clothes. So, everybody who's buying Bitcoin wants to sell it at some point. They can only sell it if there's somebody else who is equally confident that from that point the price will go up. So, now they can buy a house and a car and a boat or whatever they want. But if people stop believing in the fairy tale then you run out of buyers. Now, without buyers, how do people sell to get the things they want? That they can't. So, the price will collapse. Right? So, I think it's not going to be that everybody starts selling. It's going to be that new people stop buying. And then as the price really starts to fall maybe, you know, I don't think the true believers, the hardcore Bitcoiners, they're not going to be fazed by Bitcoin going from 60,000 to 40,000. Right? They've seen that before. Been there, done that. Like, Bitcoin always comes back. That may not be the case for the people who just bought into the Bitcoin ETFs. I think they're going to be the first ones out. Right? They were the last ones in, they're going to be the first ones out. They're not long-term holders, even if they bought the one with the symbol hodl. They're They're traders, I think. I mean, if they were real Bitcoin people, they would have bought years ago. They wouldn't have waited for an ETF. They got kind of suckered into it by the hype and the promotion. And they thought they could make some money. And that's going to be a big problem for Bitcoin, too, when the ETFs start to sell off because um you know, if you go back and look at prior Bitcoin crashes you always have a big influx of Tether. There's a lot of Tether, whether they're counterfeit Tether, we'll see. But Tether comes in and buys up Bitcoin and that puts in a bottom. But when the ETFs start to liquidate and now they have to take the Bitcoin that they own into the spot market and sell it the buyer has to pay with real dollars. They can't pay with Tether. And there may not be enough of those that want to buy Bitcoin. And so, I think that the next Bitcoin crash is going to be pretty big cuz I think it's going to start in the ETFs and it's going exacerbate the decline when you have all these market orders, sell me Bitcoin at the market, whatever the price is. No limits, just get me out by the end of the day. I have to get out. No I can't wait till tomorrow. I have to be out today. And then all of course the buyers are like, well, I'm not buying. Everybody steps away and it's a trapdoor. But so, let's say now the ETF selling drives Bitcoin down to 10,000, right? Not 20,000, not 10,000. And now you look at these charts like, wait a minute, Bitcoin just went below the previous low. It's now lower than it was 5 years ago, 6 years ago. The trend is broken. I think at some point you're going to shake the confidence of the hodlers who are being to be like, you know I I don't know if it's going to come back again. This maybe this is different. And and they're going to want to sell. And as it goes down, then you get the fear. Then you get, oh my god, I better get out before it's worthless, right? Even the diehards are like, I'm not going down with this ship. I mean, there are some people that say they're going to go down with the ship, but let's see what happens when it's actually sinking and they're, you know, up to their neck. Are they really going to, you know finish and drown? Or are they going to try to salvage something? Because, you know, there are people, too, that still bought in at much lower prices. So, they can They can still sell Bitcoin at 5,000 and make a profit. There's not that many people left anymore that that have a cost basis that low. But you know, they There are going to be some of them. Are they going to let that turn into a loss or are they going to sell? So, I I think the whole dynamic can change. Right now, everybody is very confident, very sure themselves they're all going to get rich. Everything else is a bunch of FUD. Tune it out. Guys like Peter Schiff or Warren Buffett or any person who talks sense is just a boomer who doesn't get it. You know, we're trapped in the Stone Age. I mean, I just laugh. I on online all these people, Peter Schiff is smart about so many things, but he's an idiot about Bitcoin. It's like, you know, if I'm smart about everything else, why would I be so dumb? It's like, well, if Peter only studied Bitcoin. So, you you think I haven't studied it? You don't think I haven't looked at it? They They just can't accept the fact that I'm a smart guy who has looked at it, who has studied it and just doesn't you know, believe it. I didn't drink the Kool-Aid, right? I I had a good look at it. I smelled it, right? I just didn't want to didn't want to swallow it. Now, to answer your question if people are going to look at it as an alternative to gold yes, it could be a competitive threat to gold. There's some money that went into Bitcoin, not all of it, not even the majority of it, but some of it that might have gone into gold had it not gone into Bitcoin. Now, gold is a much bigger market than Bitcoin. So, how much it might have affected the price it's hard to say. Maybe gold would be 100 or 200 dollars higher, I don't know, if there was no Bitcoin. It's not like gold would be 10,000 or 20,000, but it could be a little bit higher. I don't think at the end of the day that really matters. I mean, I think if you look at gold and Bitcoin, they more often trade in the opposite direction than in the same direction. I mean, Bitcoin is more of an anti-gold than a gold. Bitcoin is risk on, gold is more risk off. Bitcoin is speculative, gold is a safe haven store value. Um so, I really don't see them as competitors. I see I think Bitcoin competes with AMC or, you know, games you know, GameStop. You know, or a lottery or gambling on sports, right? That That's I think that's where the Bitcoin money might otherwise go if it wasn't in Bitcoin. And I feel badly, though, for the people who are buying it because they think it's a store value. They think it's an inflation hedge. They think it's digital gold. They're wrong, right? That's part of the marketing hype, right? Of Bitcoin. That's part of the the story, the sizzle that they're all they're all selling. I think I'm looking at it objectively because there are other people that are in the gold industry who are also proponents of Bitcoin. I mean, I see them. Um so, it's not like you can't be in the gold business and you can't say, hey, buy gold and Bitcoin. Look, I tell people to buy gold and stocks. And And in fact I didn't start SchiffGold until 2010. I started my broker-dealer in 2 1997, 1996. So, for about 13 or 14 years I owned my own broker-dealer. Yet I kept telling people to buy gold, not from me. I said, just go find buy it. I was trying to get people to invest with me in the stock market. I was stockbroker. And I said, but you should also have some gold. And I knew that if people went out and bought gold, they couldn't send me that money to invest in the stock market, but I still recommended it. Right? So, it's not like I only recommend gold because I sell gold. I recommend gold because I think people should own it. And the reason I ended up starting a SchiffGold was because a lot of people who were buying gold after I told them to were getting ripped off by companies who were selling them overpriced numismatics instead of bullion. And so, I set up my own company so I knew that people wouldn't get ripped off. And so, I was very consistent. I recommended it before uh I I had SchiffGold and I continued to recommend it after I started SchiffGold. So, I could recommend I could tell people, hey, put 5% of your money in Bitcoin if I believed in it. And I would have done it myself if I believed in it. You know, people tell me, oh, we think you secretly have Bitcoin. Why would I keep it a secret? Nobody who owns Bitcoin keeps it a secret. I mean, in fact, the minute you buy Bitcoin, you have to tell everybody else to buy it. That's part of the thing. It's like they're like the Hare Krishnas of the investment world. You have to like proselytize. You have to convince new people to buy it. Right? Ever have Ever go to dinner, have a Thanksgiving, some family members in Bitcoin telling everybody they got to buy Bitcoin. I've noticed that with Tesla, when you buy a Tesla, you tell everyone else that you just bought a Tesla and you convince other people to also buy a Tesla. Well, that's a little bit different. Maybe, you know, you you kind of really like your Tesla and you enjoy driving it and you're bragging about it, but you know you're not going to sell your Tesla at a profit one day. Bitcoin needs new converts. Right? The way Bitcoin goes up is people have to buy it. So, you have to convince people. Now, people will say, well, that's the same thing with every other asset. No, it's not. If I buy a dividend-paying stock, nobody else has to buy those shares. I'll collect the dividends and make plenty of money. If I buy rental property, nobody has to buy my property. I'm collecting rent. If I buy a bond, I'm collecting interest. I don't need new buyers to have a return on an investment. That's just not true. Now, yes, if if you buy uh a stock that doesn't pay any dividends you need the price to go up. But why would the price go up? Well, in theory because the earnings came up and the company eventually paid a dividend because it had earnings. But Bitcoin is never going to have any earnings. Never going to pay a dividend. Now, you can say, well neither does gold. Well, gold doesn't have to. It's a commodity. You use it for things. Just like every other commodity. Wheat, soybeans, corn, cotton. These things are all used. You can buy them and hold them and trade them. But they have an underlying use. Bitcoin does not. They People say, well, but I can give my Bitcoin to somebody else." Yes, I know that. You can give anything to somebody else. That doesn't mean it has a use because what does the person you gave it to do with it? Nothing but give it to somebody else. It's a It's a hot potato, right? And yes, you can say, "Well, but I can do it quickly." Well, there's Yes, you can transfer other things quickly, too. But one of the reasons it's so quick and inexpensive to transfer Bitcoin is because you're transferring nothing. It's a lot more expensive to transfer something than to transfer nothing. But there are 20,000 other nothings, and most of them you could transfer quicker and cheaper than you can Bitcoin. It's kind of a like a meme-y question, but I'm curious because you set you you sell gold, right? Well, Schiff Gold sells gold, right. And we don't sell our own gold. We we buy it we buy it wholesale and sell it retail. Got it. Okay, that makes sense cuz I was curious like you're like trading dollars for gold in the other direction that would be Yeah, no, no, we don't keep the dollars. I mean, I got to pay my employees, I got to pay my rent, and whatever's left over, my profit, I I invest it. I don't keep it in dollars. Mhm. I I use some of it to buy gold. I've been using a lot of it to buy gold stocks, but I also buy other things, right? I mean, I bought this house, right? I mean, I buy I don't I don't just hold on to the dollars. People say, "Oh, if Why do you want dollars? You know, what if you if you love so gold so much, why are you selling gold and taking dollars?" Right? I'm not I mean, it's a business, but I think people should own gold, but you know, it's I it doesn't mean that I I I want the dollars. That's just that that's how we sell gold. So, a question we've been asking a bunch of different guests on our podcast, and we've gotten a crazy variety of answers to this is if you're poor in the United States between the ages of 25 and 60, you have no disabilities and no dependents, is it your fault? Well, I mean, I think that if we had a freer market than the one we have today with fewer regulations and therefore more opportunity, fewer people would be poor, right? So, to a degree, the government is the reason that more people find themselves in a state of poverty than would otherwise be the case if the government stayed out and we had more freedom, which means we'd have more opportunity. Those who make it, you know, either they're just naturally uh born, you know, with more intelligence, or they just have more drive, more ambition, they're willing to work harder. Uh so, to the extent that most people succeed, it's because of their own hard work. Now, of course, some people get lucky. Some people are born uh to wealthy parents, and they inherit a lot of money, and they do nothing to earn it, right? So, that's that's life, right? Life isn't fair. Some people, you know, get dealt a good hand, and other people get dealt a lousy hand. But there are people who are dealt a lousy hand that that that win, that make the most out of that hand, and that, you know, that end up being very wealthy. And there are people that that that get a great hand, and they end up losing, right? They they they squander their money. Am I trying to say should I blame people? I mean, I'd have to look at their individual choices and their circumstances. I mean, did they just really get a bunch of bad breaks? What What did they do? How did they find themselves in their circumstances? Look at, you know, the choices that they made, how they ran their lives. Some people could have just gotten unlucky, and they just happened to be the victim of a string of unfortunate uh events. People are by and large responsible even if the government makes it harder to succeed. They don't make it impossible. And what do you think we should do about the people that do just want to be lazy, they want to like eat, sleep, play video games, work the bare minimum, and exist in their life? They need to figure out how to exist that way without compelling somebody else at gunpoint to take care of their needs. So, look, if you don't want to work, if you just want to lie around and play video games, then you figure out how to afford to do that. Well, you figure out where you're going to get your food. And you Cuz nobody Nobody owes you uh any of those things, right? You're You're on this world, uh and the rest of the people that are here don't have a duty to feed you, clothe you, house you. You have to figure out how to do all those things. Now, if it's more important to you to just lie at home and and play video games, well, then that's your priority. So, maybe you stay and live with your parents and convince them to pay your bills, right? But don't, you know, expect other people, right? Who to pay your bills for you. And of course, if you created in a world where everybody can just choose to do nothing and play video games, well, what if everybody makes that choice? Well, how we How is the world going to survive? How Where's the food going to come from if nobody wants to be a farmer cuz the farmers just want to play video games? In fact, where are the video games going to come from if nobody is going to work to produce them? If everybody just wants to sit back and play them cuz they assume somebody else is going to do it for them. So, look, we just have to get rid of all of the government interference and and and subsidies, and then people will make whatever choices they're able to make in their circumstances. So, what do you think the role of the government should be? What should a reasonable budget look like and taxes? Where's the revenue? Well, in America, because, you know, America was founded on certain principles, but we have governments to secure our liberties, life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness. Government is there to protect me uh and to prevent people from taking the things that I own and the things that I earned. Government is not there to steal from me. It's not there to take things away from me, but to secure my freedom and to secure my liberty. Government is not there to give me things. So, I have freedom, right? Of of speech, but the government doesn't have an obligation to provide me with a microphone and a platform or an audience, right? I can pursue happiness. If I want to go out and get an education, that's my right, but the government doesn't have to provide me with one. The government doesn't have to give me a school, give me a teacher, right? I don't have a right to those things. I have a right to seek out an education on my own. The government can't stop me from doing that, but they don't owe that to me, right? I can't force my neighbor to pay for that. I have a right to to eat. I don't have a right to food. If I'm hungry, I can't steal your food. I can't elect a politician to steal it from you. I have a right to go out and, you know, grow my own food or try to trade with farmers who grow food, uh do some work or trade something else, or I can even go to somebody and ask for a free food because I'm hungry, and maybe they'll give it to me. But I can't take it from somebody else. I can't take what I don't what doesn't belong to me, and I can't vote for a politician to steal in my behalf, right? Theft is wrong, uh no matter who does the stealing, no matter how many people vote for the thief, theft is still wrong, right? You don't change the nature of that relationship. Now, I we have decided, I think, in American society that collectively there are certain things that we're going to pay for through taxes. Police, you know, you know, on the federal level would be a military to protect all of us from foreign invasion, right? We want to have a government, we want to have, you know, embassies, and we want to have certain things that the federal government legitimately does, well, then, you know, collectively we're going to pay for them. That is not theft because the money is being used to benefit everybody equally, including the people who are taxed, whereas the way it works now is the government takes money from one person and just gives it to somebody else, right? It's not It's not used for the benefit of the of the of the nation, for the collective well-being, for the general welfare, right? Like it says in the Constitution, but it's for the specific welfare of the individual who gets the money, and it's taken from an individual who derives no benefit from that. So, what do you think the tax rate should be? Well, personally, I don't think there should be an income tax at all, so the tax rate should be zero. I don't think there should be a payroll tax, so that tax should be zero. I think the government should fund itself on indirect taxes, which is how the government funded itself until 1913. It was predominantly tariffs. Uh and so, they're fine, or you can have taxes on certain goods, taxes on alcohol, you know, tobacco. We have those taxes now, taxes on um gasoline. There are federal taxes that we have. That used to be it. That used to cover everything. The only reason we have an income tax and is because we have all these welfare programs, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, all these other government involvement, getting government in education, and all this stuff that it shouldn't even be involved in. Do you think government should enforce parking laws? Not the federal government. The local government? look, the local government could could could certainly do these things if it's a public road, public uh parking lot, then the government should, you know, be in charge. But if it's a private, if I own a piece of land, they shouldn't require me to set aside handicap spaces. I mean, I should be able to decide how I'm going to organize my private parking lot. Even if it's publicly accessible, it's private property. So, if I own a restaurant, if I own a store, I can configure my parking lot however I want. And if it means there's no place for the handicapped to park, well, then I lost out on that business, right? I mean, so it should be up to me to decide and my customers to decide, you know, how I'm going to organize my my private restaurant. But if it's a public facility, if it's a government building, then then they Yeah, then the government can decide how they want to do it. What do you think about either a flat tax or implementing a consumption tax where you're only taxed if you spend money? Well, a flat tax as a you know, a flat income tax is better than the progressive tax that we have today. I would just assume have the rate be zero, right? That's the flat rate I want, but if it was a choice between a graduated progressive tax where some people pay nothing and other people pay a lot, I would rather have a flat tax without all the deductions and all the distortions that come along with that. I think that'd be a much fairer system, a much easier system. Uh but I think the best system is to not tax income at all. Yes, a consumption tax. Consumption tax is a tariff. National sales tax, value-added tax. Those are the type of taxes that would fall on consumption. They're much better from an economic perspective. They don't discourage savings, investment, production. They tax people when they consume their wealth, not when they create their wealth. So, it's much better for economic growth. It's much better for individual liberty and freedom. You don't have to keep records. You don't have to file returns. You don't have to, you know, swear under perjury. You don't have to face audits. You know, when you pay your sales taxes, it's built into the price. Nobody really cares. I mean, yes, I pay a sales tax when I go to the store, but I don't keep records. I don't have to hire an accountant to figure out how much sales tax I owe, right? So, it's a much better way, it's a much more efficient way to fund the government. That's what I would like. And that's why the Founding Fathers made it so hard for the federal government to collect a direct tax like an income tax. They envisioned that the government federal government would only resort to those taxes in a war, like when it really needed a lot of money. But during peacetime, the framers thought that the federal government's role would be very minimal, and it wouldn't need need much revenue. And so, it could it could exist on on excise taxes. And that's what I want to go back to. I don't want to have this big, enormous, one-size-fits-all massive federal government. We're 50 states. Let the states decide. Let all this stuff happen on the state level. If a state wants to have a big government, then it can tax its residents accordingly. And if the the if the people of the state are happy paying those high taxes, they can stay there and pay them. If they don't, they can go to a state that has smaller government and lower taxes. And speaking of that, uh California implemented a $20 minimum wage for fast food workers. Do you feel like that's too low? Too low? It's hard to live in California now. I mean, Wow. Housing is expensive. No, I mean, the best minimum wage is is zero. We shouldn't have a minimum wage. And you know, we didn't always have minimum wages. You know, the the origins of the minimum wage, they they they they they basically were discriminatory. You had people who wanted to force employers not to hire the Chinese, not to hire African-Americans because they were working for lower wages than white people were were were working for. And one of the reasons was there was some, uh you know, racism to a degree at that time. But one way that you overcame racism was to work for less. So, if I was Chinese and I went to work for somebody who didn't really like the Chinese, one way I can convince you to hire me was, "Well, I'll work for less money." Right? Most people would prefer steak over hamburger. So, given the choice, you're going to buy a steak. So, why does anybody buy hamburger when they like steak better? Hamburger's cheaper. If hamburger and steak were the exact same price, nobody would buy hamburger. So, how does hamburger compete with steak? It's cheaper. So, the Chinese or African-Americans back then, in order to overcome the fact that there was some prejudice, they were like, "Look, we'll work for less." And now the the the the guy that's prejudiced is like, "Well, yeah, I I I really don't like the Chinese, but I I mean, I'm not going to pass up this money that I could get by hiring them." And so, you know, and obviously over time, as you hire more Chinese or African-Americans, your prejudices might go away as you spend more time with them and you see that they're good workers. Uh you know, you know, and then as they become more valuable to you because they've worked with you, they know your business, you start giving them raises. Otherwise, they'll quit and they'll work someplace else. But so, what happened was white people got governments to impose minimum wages to stop the hiring of the Chinese, to stop the hiring of African-Americans because now it costs nothing to discriminate. Right? If I have to say pay the same price for hamburger as steak, I'm eating steak. If I have to pay the exact same wages to hire a Chinese guy than a white guy, I'll take the white guy. Now, some people might think, "Well, that's not fair." Well, okay, well, it's better than the guy, you know, the Chinese guy being unemployed. Right? Let him get a job. But that's where the origin of the minimum wage. It was to stop people from hiring And and that's really what it does today. I mean, it's not really about racism. At this point, most people don't care if the worker is Chinese or white. I mean I mean, those prejudices, by and large, don't exist anymore. I'm not saying that there's zero prejudice today, but there's a lot less than there was 100 200 years ago. The minimum wage law just makes it very hard for uh low-skilled or marginally skilled people to find employment. It's it's not really something that burdens the employer so much as the employee. So, when you have a minimum wage, let's say California says the minimum wage is $20 an hour. What California is saying is that if you are a person and you want to get a job, you need to convince somebody to pay you $20 an hour or you can't work. Now, how am I going to convince somebody to pay me $20 an hour? Well, I have to convince them that by hiring me and paying me $20 an hour, I will deliver enough productivity to your company so that you will make more than $20 an hour. You'll pay me $20 an hour, and by employing my labor, you might have $25 an hour in revenue, and you're going to make $5 off me. But what if I don't have a lot of skill? Right? What if I don't, you know, I haven't really had any jobs in the past. I'm not that well-educated. Maybe I can only, through my own hard work, my muscle, right? What I'm willing to do. Maybe I can make you $15 an hour. Maybe I could do that. Well, you're not going to hire me and pay me 20 and lose $5 an hour. So, I'm not going to get a job. Even though I would like to have a job at $10 an hour, $12 an hour, it's better than no job at all. But the government made it illegal. That cuz that's the real minimum wage. It's zero. That's how much money you earn if you can't get a job at the legal minimum wage. You get zero. Don't you think that's going to speed up AI or robots taking over some of these jobs? I'm an employer and the government is artificially driving up the cost of wages, I am going to look for ways to substitute machines for humans. So, to the extent that I can automate, right? And that drive to automation is going to be accelerated the higher the wage cost is. Because when I have to do a cost-benefit analysis of how much, right? Is it worth the investment? Cuz I'm going to have to spend money up front to automate a business. So, what is my payback? It's the labor cost that I save. So, the higher the wages that I avoid by automating, the the quicker the payback on my investment. So, let's say wages are $10 an hour. It may not make sense for me to automate because the $10 an hour I save may not justify the upfront cost. But if you jack up my wage cost to $20 an hour, and now I run the numbers, it might be that automation is the best thing that I can do. And so then I make the investment and fire all my workers. So, yes, I mean, human beings are competing with machines, right? You know, uh and the AI is making the machines a lot smarter, and so they're a lot more competitive. And a lot of jobs are going to get eliminated that might not have been eliminated. And you know, the public, by and large, prefers human interaction. Now, that might change as the AI gets better. But I always hated One of the first things I usually do when I that they answer the phone is, "Agent, let me speak with a representative." I mean, I There's a lot of things that I can't do with our automated programs. A lot of people don't like pumping their own gas. They'd rather have somebody else pump it. But, you know, they end up saving money, and uh so they pump it themselves. And and so, but all else being equal, if there was no minimum wage, there'd be a lot more full-service gas stations. Uh but because they require such a high cost for the workers relative to the value they add, people are like, "Screw it. I'll pump my own gas." Um you know, and so there's going to be a lot of people would prefer human waiters and waitresses, but they're not going to get them because they're the government made them too expensive. So, you're stuck with self-serve and automation. I almost like the automation. We went to a sushi restaurant a few days ago in New York, and the entire thing was automated. You get there, and you press a few little buttons on a screen, and the sushi comes out on a conveyor belt. And then you press, you know, close tab. There's something nice about just There's something, you know, having a nice, entertaining, attractive waitress, you know, at you at your table. I mean, you know, as I mean, as opposed to just just pushing buttons and serving yourself, right? I mean, but if there's a big enough cost savings, I think most people would do it. You know, you don't have to tip the the the the AI like you tip the waitress. And now it's, you know, you're paying 20% of your bill extra for that human waiter or waitress. Yeah. So, like a lot of the stuff, but I think, you know, as they end up with AI and automation, and as the cost to produce a robot, a, you know, a humanoid- looking robot, like an Android, um that has a personality and laughs and smiles and is intelligent and interacts with you and has a conversation with you, then probably people will be fine with that as opposed to an actual human being. Um but but all you know, this stuff is all going to happen over time, and this is all progress that is attributable to what's left of capitalism. You know, I mean people think oh this is a bad thing because the the robots are going to take our jobs. They're freeing us up from having to do these jobs. Just like every labor-saving device. I mean the shovel, you know, took a lot of jobs of diggers. But we're all glad that we don't have to dig with our hands. You know how much it would cost to build this house if people had to dig with hands. If they if they didn't have any tools, how long how many how long would take how many slaves what I need to build this house you know because that's how they built the houses in the you know in the the Egyptians and the Romans. They had all these slaves. They don't have machines. Uh but you know machines um you know made it so that one machine does the work of 100 people, right? And it's we're not upset that 100 jobs have been destroyed. 100 people have been liberated to do something else and now I more people can afford to have homes because we don't need to monopolize so many workers to to build them. I think it's one of the arguments that the market could keep going up exponentially for the next few decades is because AI and robotics are going to increase productivity to such high amounts that right now we can't even fathom what we're able to accomplish because we haven't thought of it yet. Yeah, I mean look that's you know my son is in that camp and he's like you know very immersed in AI. He used to be a crypto guy now he really doesn't care about crypto cuz it's just AI. But yeah I mean that is something that I'm willing to concede is an outlier get out of jail free card potentially for some of these fiscal problems that I I think are about to blow up if we can get enough growth in the economy rapidly to bring down the debt to GDP levels to a manageable level by growing our way out of the problem. I just don't think that it's going to roll out that quickly. I mean things always take time. I mean look how how long it's taking. You know, we still don't have autonomous cars even at a Tesla. Right? From when they had the first Tesla. You know, my father told me that he went to the 1939 World's Fair and one of the things they had was a helicopter in every driveway. So people were going to be using helicopters instead of cars. You know, but you know, we're still we're still on the ground. We don't have flying cars. Back to the Future had flying cars in 2015, right? That's almost 10 years in the past now. That's how crazy that is. I remember going to the movies in 1985 watching Back to the Future in the theater thinking how far into the future 2015 was and that yeah we could have flying cars by then. Right? But we don't have flying cars, right? We have so um but we have drones. Things take longer than you think uh um to to really uh make the type of change that would be needed. But I can see in in certain industries uh AI having a pretty rapid effect. The question is though in a in a free market economy when workers are displaced by automation or computers, they can you know do something they can do other things. They can transition other things. But today they may not have that ability with a lot of the laws and regulations and the government may create incentives for people who are displaced by innovation instead of finding something else productive to do, they just may live off the government. And so the government may just end up printing all more money and having bigger deficits because oh it's not fair you lost your job to AI. It's not your fault. So now we just give you universal basic income or something like that. And so we don't get all the benefits of the new productivity because the worker who's freed up doesn't find something else to do. He just lives off the government which means he lives off the taxpayer which is robbing us of the benefits of uh of the productivity. Now I suppose at some point in the future to the extent that everything that we need can be created you know at almost no cost by AI, well then none of it's going to matter, right? If everybody can have everything they want and nobody has to work well then we don't we don't have these problems anymore, right? Because everything is about and economics, you know, is about how do you satisfy unlimited human desires with limited resources. Well if AI means we have unlimited resources, well then there's nothing to worry about, right? Everybody can have whatever they want and nobody has to work and nobody has to depend on government because it's all there. And maybe that's the way society will be eventually, you know, if we can create it for ourselves. But I I don't know how far off that is. What's your advice for young people today? If they want to get ahead, they're starting off from zero and they want to become wealthy and they want to be successful. Well you know you got to work hard. You got to be ambitious. You know don't accept failure, persevere. If you make a mistake, you know, just correct it, learn from it. You know, don't be afraid to fail because you know, failure is part of success. Some of the most successful people have failed many times before they succeeded. You got to take a risk. You got to believe in yourself. Uh you know, I mean it's hard. I mean not everybody can be successful. Not everybody uh can start and run their own business. A lot of people are satisfied uh with you know the ordinary just letting somebody else make all the hard choices, take all the risks and just play it safe and take a job. And you know, there's something to be said for that too. It depends on you know who you are and and what your goals are and what your ambitions are. But even though the government makes it a lot harder to succeed, it's not impossible. So you could do it, right? You can overcome any barrier. It's a big world and if there's too many rules and regulations in America, go someplace else. You know, especially if you're young, you don't have any responsibilities. Uh you don't have a family, you don't have kids. You can pick up and go wherever the wind blows. you go? If you could pick anywhere I assume you'd go back to 20 years old and you could go anywhere in the world for an opportunity, where do you feel like you get the best Puerto Rico is not bad right now given the tax breaks that you can get in Puerto Rico. You still got to deal with the local government. But you know, I mean if I wasn't an American and have even a bigger choice unless I'm willing to uh you know, relinquish my my citizenship and and get out from under it. But you know, you can go to you know, Southeast Asia, a lot of these emerging market economies. You can go into you know, like a Dubai. Uh who knows maybe we'll see what they're doing down there in Argentina. I mean it would have been a place I never would have thought about. But you got Milei in there. Some big reforms. I mean I wish him all the success. But uh who knows? I mean Argentina was the one of the wealthiest countries in the world over 100 years ago. Maybe it will be again. I mean it was Argentina was wealthy because it was free. It went broke because of big government. For the same reasons that that we're broke. Where did you get your self-sufficiency from? Because it really feels like you take complete ownership and control over your life in a way that many people don't believe they have. Well I think there's a lot of people that are like that. I mean America was about the rugged individual. I mean that's the whole concept of an American, right? You know you know, we take care of ourselves. That doesn't mean that we ignore the plight of others. But we take care of ourselves. We we're not dependent. We don't look for a handout. And you know, when when they first introduced welfare in this country in the 1930s during the depression, they called it relief, right? Because it was supposed to be temporary. But a lot of people were too proud to take it. And a lot of people who took it paid it back even though they didn't have to. They just felt wrong. It just didn't feel right. Because they knew that I didn't earn this money. But Americans don't have that. Most of them today don't have that sense of pride. Uh they couldn't give a damn, right? If the money was stolen and give it to them. They just you know, in fact that's why there's so much theft today too. And people don't care. They have no respect for private property. They just think they're entitled to stuff. Right? It's the whole the reparations mentality. I mean you society owes me something. Other other people owe me because I'm here. Because I want stuff, I deserve it. Because I'm here. Bunch of nonsense. But that that wasn't what being American was about. It was about being free. Being about left alone. I mean that's why when my grandparents came here, there was they didn't come here for welfare cuz it didn't exist. They didn't come for food stamps. They didn't come for minimum wage. We didn't have that. There were no government caseworkers that that greeted my grandparents. There was no government housing. There was no subsidized health care. People came here to be free. Free from government. That's what freedom is. Freedom is freedom from government. It means you're left alone. You're free to make your own choices and to benefit, right? From the good choices and if you make bad choices, you're going to have to be held accountable. But people came here knowing the deal. Knowing that if you succeed you you get the benefits and if you fail, you suffer the consequences. People came here anyway. By the millions, by the boatload. They came from countries all around the world that had much bigger governments. They they rejected big government in favor of small government and individual freedom. But the nation changed, you know, in those 100 years, right? The whole character of the nation has changed and it's for the worse. And I would I would really like to see uh a backlash and a return to to our roots. What do you think about Elon Musk's compensation package being revoked? Well again you know, the shareholders voted for it. And as far as I know most of them still think he's entitled to it and want him to have it. So again, it's a government interposing uh uh you know, itself where it doesn't belong. But look, the the worst thing is the government does is look at all these uh mergers that they break up. I mean every day at government hearing another this merger was blocked, that merger was blocked. I mean if companies uh believe that by coming together they can be more viable businesses. They can have synergies and they can lower their costs and then provide a more competitive product. Why doesn't the Why is the government getting involved? I mean look the most recent one it's luxury handbags or what is it? You know, two companies that make women's handbags and who cares? But the government says oh no no you know this is not going to be a monopoly nobody companies make handbags. But it's just so ridiculous that the government you know they they they steal so much money from us and then they worry about pennies. Oh we're going to protect you like from your from a bank that's charging you a fee to bounce a check. You know that but meanwhile they're taking you know 30% of your paycheck right out from under you and then they're worried about this you know the small amount of money that they claim you know you're getting ripped off in the private sector. The government needs to stay out of all this stuff. One question before we end it. We're shooting with Kevin O'Leary in a few days. Mr. Wonderful. Do you have any questions or anything we can show him of you to get his reaction to it? Any comments, questions, concerns? Well I don't know I mean I'm I'm a Shark a Shark Tank fan and you know I've watched quite a few of those episodes. I know he's the guy that always wants the royalty which is generally a pretty good deal because you don't have to deal with the expenses you just get money right off the top. You know we we own a lot of gold royalty companies for our clients and in my in my gold fund. And if he has some money that he'd like to have somebody else manage I'm ready to do it. If you want to set up an account at Euro Pacific Asset Management and and I can manage a portfolio for him in emerging markets and develop markets that will do well with a weak US dollar and if he does want to buy some gold instead of Bitcoin shift gold and by the way you can take your Bitcoin and use it to buy gold at Shift Gold because we were one of the first companies to work with BitPay. And so you can go to the Shift Gold website and BitPay will allow you to exchange your fool's gold for the real thing and then have it shipped right to your house. Thank you so much Peter. We'll link down to all of that stuff down below in the description if you guys want to check it out. It really means a lot to us you invite us into your home. We're in Puerto Rico so that's pretty cool. And until next time. Thanks. Appreciate it.