petership thank you for for doing this so when did you personally first start
buying gold physical gold well you know ironically the first time i bought gold
was when i got bar mitzvah that's how this was when i was 13 years old wow and
you know so this is in the 70s when the you know the original gold bull market
right and so i got my bar mitzvah money and because of my father um i you know i
bought gold and i ended up selling it coincidentally near the highs in 1980
because that's because gold went from 35 an ounce in 1970 to 850 1980 so in the
middle of that run i took my bar mitzvah money because i probably got bar
mitzvah in 1975 76 and i got took my bar mitzvah money and i bought gold and
then i sold it to buy my first car which i was a senior in high school what kind
of car it was an mgb convertible nice yeah so uh although it broke down all the
time and and i didn't i bought it it was a stick shift i didn't even know how to
drive a stick but i wanted that car so i had to figure it out as i was going
along so i happened to get out of gold you know near the highs because then gold
went into a 20 year bear market right from 1980 when gold hit 800 it was you
know bottomed out at 250 in 2000 1999 2000 but that's about when i started
recommending it so i i got into the brokerage business in the 1990s and i was a
stockbroker um and but i you know i also wanted my clients to own gold i didn't
i wasn't in the gold business at the time but i believed that everybody should
have you know some of their portfolio in gold and so that's when i started
recommending it and so it's outperformed by a pretty big margin uh you know the
s&p 500 dow jones you know going back to the beginning of this century right
2000 2001 if you were to price the dow in terms of gold it's down about 70 and
and it's against gold yeah i mean so there's an illusion that oh you know we
have all this prosperity because in the year 2000 the dow was about 10 000 and
now it's almost 50 000 right so that's a big gain when you price it in dollars
that have lost a lot of their purchasing power but when you price it in gold and
realize that hey gold was 300 back then and now it's 4 300 right the gold gold
it you it took i think 45 um ounces of gold to buy the dow and i forget what it
is now maybe 16 or 13 you know it's you can buy a lot more of the dow now than
you could back then so what that shows you is that the gain in the stock market
is inflation it's not real value that's been created in the market we've just
destroyed the value of the currency that we use to price things in right and so
you need more dollars to buy stocks but you don't need more gold you could buy
stocks with a lot less gold because gold is real money government can't just
create gold they can't create inflation and and create gold out of thin air like
they do uh federal reserve notes paper dollars you know originally the dollar in
1792 uh was defined as a weight of gold i mean that's really what the dollar was
it was a specific quantity of gold or silver and you know for a long time you
know till 1913 when we got to federal reserve we were pretty much just using
gold and silver as money and even when the federal reserve was created all the
federal reserve notes were redeemable and lawful money and gold and and gold was
money up until 1971 and even though americans couldn't uh you know redeem their
federal reserve notes which we call dollars they couldn't redeem them for gold
foreign foreign governments could and foreign governments held a lot of gold as
dollars as a reserve but they did that because they knew that those dollars were
not only backed by gold but convertible on demand into gold and so you know we
were on a gold standard even through the dollar up until 1971 but once you know
once we defaulted and the u.s government you know reneged on its commitments to
pay to pay gold for its notes that's when the real inflation started that's when
we really started printing a lot of money and that's why you had the big price
increases of the 1970s uh you know it and it wasn't you know the arabs that were
just you know uh jacking up their oil prices because oil went from three dollars
a barrel to forty dollars a barrel but it wasn't that oil was getting more
expensive it's just that we used to pay for our oil with gold and we started
paying for it with paper but all that money we printed it you know in the 60s
you know for the war on poverty the great society the vietnam war we ran these
big deficits which you know were small by today's standards but they were big
back then and they were financed with inflation and we saw the consequences in
the 1970s and we may have had a real dollar crisis because the dollar lost about
two-thirds of its value during that decade against other currencies like the
swiss franc the euro the japanese yen but when reagan came in and you know we
had volcker in 1980 and interest rates went up to 20 percent and we really had
some substantial uh reforms in our tax system and we created a lot more
confidence in our economy we kind of stopped the dollars decline at that point
um but now i think we're on the verge of a much bigger crisis because i think
that this time around it's not going to be the u.s going off the gold standard
it's going to be the world going off the dollar standard and you really have to
understand the degree to which the u.s has used the dollar and its reserve
status as a crutch and our entire way of life as americans has been supported by
the by the idea that we could just create dollars out of thin air and then use
those dollars to buy what the rest of the world produces right we have these
huge trade deficits now um you know in fact you know donald trump used to talk
about the trade deficits a lot um as being the problem they're a consequence of
the problem they're not the problem per se but what enables these huge trade
deficits we have over a trillion dollar a year trade deficit is the world is
willing to accept the money that we print for the goods that they produce and
you know when you produce goods you need a lot of resources you need land labor
capital you need factories you need supply chains you need raw materials you
need workers energy right and we you know you don't need anything just to create
money out of thin air right the fed just you know add zeros right on a on a
computer and so we're able to create dollars that the world wants and we get all
their stuff we didn't have to produce it then the world takes the dollars that
they earn from us and they buy stocks they buy real estate they buy our bonds
and so as a result our asset prices have gone up and goods prices have stayed
down and interest rates have been relatively low because we're able to borrow
what the rest of the world saves even though we don't save very much ourselves
and we don't produce very much uh you know we get the benefit of of of all these
goods uh that are coming in and we get all the foreign savings that are
financing our our spending and i think all of that is about to change i think
that you know when donald trump talked about liberation day ironically it was
the rest of the world that is going to be liberated from the burden of having to
support the u.s economy when trump says that the world has been screwing us over
and ripping us off he's got it backwards we've been screwing them over because
we've we've been getting their stuff and all we do is export our inflation they
get our paper we get things that make our lives better and and and they get our
ious and then you know they use our ious to buy up our financial assets uh but i
think this is all changing and i think what we're seeing now in the price of
gold where it's finally broken out of its uh consolidation because after gold
went from 300 250 300 to 1900 right that was a 10-year move uh it went sideways
from 19 from 2011 to 2024 and it really broke out at the beginning of last year
and uh it's more than doubled since then silver is finally broken out silver had
a double top at around 50 from 1980 to 2011 and it just broke out this year gold
you know broke out last year uh but now you're seeing this movement out of
dollars foreign central banks have been huge buyers of gold because they've been
moving away from the dollar they've been divesting themselves of dollars and
buying gold instead well 2026 is likely to be the that some companies will find
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roasted it's america's coffee what do we know about who's buying it which
central banks well the major central banks other than you know the the west you
know you're talking about in in russia and india and uh china and even smaller
ones you know poland or various countries uh are are buying are buying gold and
they're buying gold because they want to get out of dollars and in fact you know
one of the things that that happened to really cause um this to happen in a
bigger way was when when biden was president and he sanctioned russia and in
sanctioning them they basically took away a lot of their dollar reserves that
they had entrusted in dollars and we basically pulled the rug out from under
them we sent a message to the rest of the world that you could be next yeah that
you know if you hold your reserves in dollars you're vulnerable if you do
reliable store value yeah i mean it wouldn't even a store value but but as a
reserve asset and and so that was a political impetus but the real reason for
getting out of the dollar is that we're going to destroy its value we have these
runaway uh deficit spending that is the source of all the inflation that we have
it's the fed monetizing the debt that the government is creating a lot of people
don't know what inflation is they just think it's prices going up because that's
what the governments tell them or some economists tell them but prices going up
are a consequence of inflation they're not inflation inflation is an expansion
of the supply of money and credit and when you expand money you expand credit
right that bids up prices and so as a result of inflation prices go up right the
root of the word inflate means to expand right prices don't expand they go up
they go down and if you get an old dictionary get an old webster's dictionary
even as even as late as the 80s and you look up inflation that's exactly what it
says an expansion of the money supply right but the government kind of redefined
inflation because if you define it properly well it's pretty obvious who causes
it right right so good boy but anyone increasing the money supply right but if
you change the definition to rising prices now the public blames whoever it is
that's raising the prices right that that's where it's coming from and so the
government is able to blame the private sector whether it's corporations or
workers uh for prices going up when they're simply raising prices in response to
inflation and of course sometimes inflation just doesn't just cause prices to go
up it prevents them from going down see in a free market economy in a capitalist
economy the natural tendency for prices is to go down right if you look at the
cpi in 1900 because of efficiencies yes if you look at the cpi in 1900 and you
look at it in 1800 it was down by 50 percent so for a hundred years in america
prices went down and during that time we had the industrial revolution right we
had we had the most rapid period of economic growth in the history of america
which was after the civil war and into the early 1900s all the time prices were
coming down today the federal reserve says that we need to have two percent
inflation right prices have to go up two percent a year why i mean why does the
cost of living have to go up why can't it go down or at least remain the same
and and what is the answer to that what's their rationale for that well they
have a bunch of bs explanations and it's all to justify the fact that the
government wants inflation it's not that it's good for us the government needs
it it's you know it's the way the government you know raises revenue and and
repudiates its debts but they have a couple of things that they say one of the
things they say is well if prices are we're going down nobody would buy anything
right people would just be constantly waiting for lower prices and so nobody
would buy and that's the number one reason they say that prices have to go up
and that's all no one would buy if prices were going down yeah that's how
ridiculous it is because everyone be waiting for the bottom to buy a new
dishwasher supposedly supposedly but of course we all have cell phones if that
were the case nobody would ever buy a cell phone or a television set or a
computer right prices go down but also like if i'm hungry am i going to wait a
year to eat because i think the food is going to be two percent cheaper if you
don't have a dryer are you going to wait a year no first time right you buy
things they forget that there is a value to having something today versus having
to wait right the only reason amazon is based on that idea yes the only reason
that you don't buy something now because you want to lower prices because you
can't afford it and so you're hoping that the price will go down and then you'll
be able to buy it which is what the free market does so it's nonsense to say
that you know we're not going to buy you know i mean would it be a disaster if
food got cheaper if health care got cheaper if energy got cheaper if clothing
got cheaper if everything you needed was less expensive why does the fed have to
prevent that from happening why is that such a horrible thing are you i'm not
questioning your knowledge which is obvious it's on display but is that actually
their rationale oh yeah it is i'm not making that's so deranged that i have
trouble believing you know i know that's how stupid they think we are and then
the other thing we can't we need inflation because we can't let prices of
services and consumer goods get too low because people won't buy them yeah
people will stop buying we'll sit on our hands indefinitely waiting for a better
deal like you know and the fed the federal reserve says oh yeah they believe
that then the other thing they think is that businesses can't make money if
prices aren't rising which is also not true they actually make more money when
prices are falling because what's important for a business is not the price that
they charge no it's the spread between what they paid and what they sell it for
exactly it's the margin and if prices are falling right even i know that yes
that's because you didn't go and get a degree in economics at a u.s university
then you wouldn't know anything you would have been brainwashed this is what
they teach they but they actually say that yes businesses don't make money
unless the prices keep rising they don't really but the reality is you actually
make more money when prices are going down because you sell more you have more
volume restaurant owner right now a steak is 80 bucks it cost 80 bucks the
restaurant ate it last night it's not even a high-tone restaurant yeah because
meat is so expensive right now yeah look and they're making less money because
who can pay 80 bucks for a steak yes if you have any common sense you can't be
an economist at the federal reserve or or or for the u.s government so they
don't understand so they but the government wants to create inflation they
create inflation and so quantitative easing right which was the term they
introduced after the 2008 financial crisis that's just the euphemism for
inflation what is quantitative easing the government the federal reserve prints
money and buys government debt right monetizing debt that's pure inflation they
didn't like they don't like to call inflation inflation because you know the
public doesn't like inflation so they called it quantitative easing but we
created a lot of inflation um following the 2008 financial crisis and a lot of
that inflation ended up going into financial assets but if it wasn't for all the
inflation the government created prices would have come down following the 2000
can you be more specific when you say that inflation went into assets what is
that what does that well stocks so the money like so we create money we create
credit but where does it go right and if it goes into the stock market if it
goes into the real estate market it's bidding up those asset prices right right
and so no a lot of to hold dollars like you want to put it into something right
but people don't look at asset prices rising and they don't they don't they
don't they don't think that's a bad thing because people think that they're
getting richer because prices are going up but it's really distorting the
economy uh you you don't want prices to go up because we print a lot of money
you want stock prices to go up because the companies are inherently more
valuable because they're generating more earnings and their stock price is
higher because they're worth more because they're earning more you don't want
just the price to go up uh because there's so much cash that's that's bidding it
up but that's really what's been happening and that's why when you look at
prices from the terms of gold you can see that real prices are falling but i
wanted to get to why we had this big spike in inflation uh under biden uh so
when we got covid in in in 2020 the government basically implemented the most
inflationary combination of monetary and fiscal policy i'd ever seen and i i
called it out on my podcast at the time when everybody was swearing oh deflation
and i was like look this is massive inflation that's coming um so when covid hit
we shut down the economy we told people don't go to work stay at home don't
produce anything but then we said but don't stop shopping so everyone's going to
get a bunch of money we had the paycheck protection we had these enhanced
unemployment benefits we ran massive deficits the fed printed money like crazy
right we doubled the fed's balance sheet for like four trillion to eight
trillion right everybody stayed home and and got money to spend so we had all
this money to spend but we weren't making anything and and so i knew that the
consequence of that was going to be soaring prices now inflation right the
expansion of my supply always acts with a lag right if i create a bunch of money
today you're not going to see it tomorrow you know at the supermarket or you
know at walmart there's a little bit of time it could take six months it could
take a year before you really start to see the effect of all that inflation in
retail prices so what happened was if you look at the cpi in the final year of
the trump presidency the last three or four months it really started to shoot up
and it continued for the first few months of the biden presidency before biden's
policies that ever come into effect before the first stimulus check was put in
the mail and that inflation continued so all the the cpi was up 9.1 percent
during um um biden's first year his first term that was all trump and on on
trump and and and and the congress under trump because all the money that was
created that resulted in those price increases was created before biden got into
office had trump been re-elected it would have been the same thing right we
would have had just as high a move in cpi had trump won right so it's not
because we elected biden right that it was already baked in the cake and the
main reason that trump didn't get re-elected whether or not you'd want to think
it was rigged or not the main reason was that trump got elected promising to
make things better and at the end of his first term they were worse because all
trump really did was continue the failed policies of of obama yeah and and so he
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tucker code tucker 35 off i mean we he government continued to get bigger under
trump deficits continue to get bigger we continue to print more money we didn't
have the real structural reforms that we needed to make america great again we
just kept blowing more air into the bubble and and and so the in the the
inflation rates as measured by cpi remember the cpi is a very flawed way to
measure prices yeah in in in the 1990s they had summer price index yeah tell me
why it's flawed well so in the 1990s the government decided that the cpi was
overstating how much prices were going up now that was probably a lie but the
government said we need to recalculate it we need to figure out a better way to
measure prices so they made drastic changes to the methodology for calculating
the cpi and they've done the same thing for unemployment too the government
constantly changes how they measure oh i've noticed right so unemployment
doesn't measure how many people are unemployed no not even close i know so so in
order to see what prices are doing you pretty much have to double whatever the
government says right i mean i did a but tell us what the changes are that they
made well they introduced all kinds of substitution uh hedonics um just you know
they they make changes to the basket like i don't even know like in 2020 2013 i
just you know i did a youtube video it's a long time ago um because i remember
looking at the cpi and according to the government over a 10-year period
newspaper and magazine prices were up by 30 and i remember thinking i don't know
i think they're up more than that so i went on the internet and i and i took the
20 most popular newspapers and magazines in 2013 i looked at what the prices
were because it's just written right there on the cover it's not hard to see and
then i went and i got photographs on the internet of the exact same newspapers
and magazines from 10 years earlier and i looked at the prices and i just
compared them and the actual increase was 130 so who knows how you put 130 in
and only 30 comes out that is the magic of the cpi so you know well that's just
that's lying well yeah that's what they do i mean unemployment the way they
measure unemployment now they they used to when they measured unemployment the
official rate so when they go back and they say hey unemployment's not as bad as
it was in the 70s of course it's actually worse if we measured it the way we
measured it then because back then if you were um if you were um part-time had a
part-time job but you were looking for a full-time job you were still unemployed
and now you don't count right if you're if you're if you're you could be you can
be working one one hour a week and you're not unemployed anymore even if you
spend the rest of the week looking for work you're still not unemployed you used
to be unemployed um if you stop looking for work because you can't find a job
and you're just tired of looking you really want one uh but you're just not
looking because you're cut you're convinced there is no job for you you used to
be counted as unemployed today they say well you're discouraged we're not going
to count you so if you give up looking for work but you don't have a job you're
no longer unemployed but back in the 70s and 80s you were still unemployed so
we've basically taken so many unemployed people and we've decided that we're not
going to count them as being unemployed that's the reason that unemployment is
so low because we're not counting all these people if we still measured
unemployment now the way we did in the 70s and 80s the official unemployment
rate would be well over 10 and the inflation rate would be you know at least
double what they claim and donald trump ironically enough when donald trump ran
for office the first time he said this if you remember he kept saying don't
believe these government numbers they're fake unemployment is a lot higher right
but once he became president then he told everybody the numbers were real
because he wanted people to believe he was doing a great job and so he pointed
to the same government numbers that he said were fake when he was trying to get
elected all of a sudden they were real when he wanted to use those same fake
numbers to pretend that the economy was doing well when it wasn't doing well so
so the big beautiful bill was the worst thing that we've done under trump
because the big beautiful bill not only preserved all the deficit spending under
biden but it expanded it it made it worse right we made the deficits even worse
uh by increasing government spending and and through tax cuts and so now we're
going to have even bigger deficits and the fed is going to be monetizing those
deficits money supply you know after what does it mean to monetize a deficit it
just buys prince money and buys the bonds and in fact just last week the fed
basically said we're going back to quantitative easing without saying it because
they don't want to admit it but they announced you know they were doing
quantitative tightening right they were shrinking their balance sheet because
the balance sheet blew up uh you know after the financial crisis and then after
covet and so the fed was reducing shrinking the balance sheet and they stopped
in december just this month but now they restarted expanding it again they're
now printing money to buy up um treasuries in order to suppress interest rates
but you know the the underlying problem of the u.s economy has been for decades
now interest rates are too low right everybody says oh we need lower interest
rates we need lower interest rates we actually need higher interest rates the
reason our economy is so screwed up is because interest rates have been too low
that's why nobody saves because you know that you you don't have a return on
savings and everybody is going into debt we have record debt in the government
record debt in the corporate sector record record debt in households uh all
because the fed has kept interest rates too low and and and they've done that to
you know keep this bubble economy going in fact that's the real reason when the
fed started hiking rates the reason it stopped hiking rates wasn't because they
finished the job and they beat inflation it was because the banks started to
fail you had several banks that went under because of higher rates right which
was another thing that i i predicted just like i predicted the 2008 financial
crisis i predicted that uh the fed was set it so in the stage of another crisis
by keeping interest rates so low because the banks were loading up on low
yielding long-term mortgages and government debt and everybody thought this was
great you know people could go out and borrow buy a house and they can borrow
money at three and four percent but i was pointing out well what happens to the
lenders who own all that paper when interest rates eventually go up and they're
stuck with this long-term uh debt where they're collecting three or four percent
but they're now their their cost of funds are five percent and they're getting
killed and i said exactly what's happening with the housing market now you have
a situation where you know the fed has inflated a housing bubble bigger than the
one that popped in 2007 because they kept interest rates so low and people were
able to borrow money to bid up home prices but now that mortgage rates are not
rock bottom anymore they're still not high they're still low by historic
standards they're just not as low as they were right seven percent mortgage is
still pretty cheap um but you can't afford to buy a home at a seven percent
mortgage that was priced for a three percent mortgage and so now you have a
situation where real estate prices have to fall things around the world are
moving so fast right now it's impossible to keep up with all of the changes but
we do know that when those changes happen markets change too and nothing changes
faster than the price of precious metals gold and silver it just shifts in an
instant because it is a reaction to and against what's happening in the world so
timing is essential if you're thinking about adding precious metals and you
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it's battalion metals dot com slash alerts why haven't those prices adjusted
more quickly than they have well i mean it takes some time but i think that's a
mystery it's a mystery all of a sudden no one can buy a house but house prices
are still high yeah well you know what's happening is a lot of the people who
own their homes and have these low low mortgages uh they don't feel any pressure
to put them on the market i mean if they can get a high price they'll sell if
not they're just staying on their homes yeah it'd be be crazy like meanwhile
we're not building a lot of new homes because it's very expensive to build them
um and in fact trump has made them even more expensive with tariffs so we have
tariffs on lumber we have tariffs on on copper and steel and and all the things
that you know need to build houses plus you know we're chasing out all the
workers i think something like 20 of the people who work in construction are
illegal right so if if they're not here you know so you're driving up well
that's just bullshit right what you said is bullshit well they are got 50
million illegals in the united states and they're all being paid not all but a
lot of them are on the government subsidies yeah so maybe if you took those away
they would go to the construction trades you've got a lot of unemployed people
who could build houses yes but they're not going to take those jobs unless you
pay them higher wages i mean that's the problem so you're driving up the cost of
building homes so fewer homes are being built right regardless of what you think
of the immigration policy no but i'm just saying it's not a a potential we have
all kinds of labor problems no one can find labor but it's not because there
aren't enough people without work there are a lot of people no there are a lot
of people that should be working but the government has given them an
alternative right so they and that that is a huge problem uh that is a whole
different topic but the point is that there aren't a lot of homes being
constructed and there's not a lot of homes for sale because the people that own
the homes uh you know they they have such a good deal on their mortgage that
they don't of course of course and rather than even sell it you'll rent it out
because now you can rent it out and pay the mortgage and collect the rent and
you know you have a good a good spread there put on an airbnb but eventually
right people have to sell their houses for whatever reason people die people get
divorced people move houses are going to come on the market and of course
eventually people are going to lose their jobs i mean we're headed for a very
severe recession i think we've been in recession for years it's just going to
get a lot worse and a lot of the houses are going to come on the market and real
estate prices are going to go down substantially nationwide and that creates a
whole new problem because now if people lose their home equity now they may just
default on their mortgage and now in addition to sitting on all these underwater
mortgages uh banks are going to start to lose money on defaulted mortgages so
the question is who who eats the shit sandwich is it the real estate is it the
people who have real estate assets or the people seeking to buy real estate
assets yeah i mean you can't someone's going to get screwed here oh right
exactly the buyer of the seller well houses are unaffordable and people cannot
afford to buy them right so the solution is lower prices but obviously if you
already own a house and that's your main asset right the last thing you want is
lower home prices exactly and so that is the problem but the fed created that
problem by blowing up this bubble in the first place if we never had uh the
artificially low interest rates and of course the other problem was the
government guaranteeing the mortgages uh which enabled people to pay more for
homes than they otherwise could have paid right so all of these can i just ask
you a foundational question why did you've referred a couple times to uh
quantitative easing the post financial crisis interest rates at zero but that
went on for like what 15 years or something why did that go on for so long
because they were afraid to let rates go up because of all the debt that we had
they they they knew that if they let rates go up it was going to be a problem so
they kicked the can down the road and and and they kept them low but the point
is that all of the the money in housing it's not it doesn't make housing more
affordable it actually makes housing more expensive right of course whenever the
government comes in to try to help you pay for something they actually make it
more expensive if you look at all the areas where the government is involved in
a big way which would be housing uh health care education that's where prices
have gone up the most right it's because the government gets involved and and
subsidizes it you know before the government got involved in education college
was not expensive right uh if you were upper middle class uh in the 1940s 1950s
you could afford to send your kids to ivy league schools it was you know wasn't
that big a deal right if you were poor like my my uh my father grew up poor
right um he wasn't dirt poor but you know he was you know he thought he was like
upper lower lower middle but my my father father you know he had eight kids um
and you know his mother didn't have a job right so even though my grandfather
worked as a carpenter uh he had a wife who didn't have a job and he was able to
support eight kids and they had a house they had like a beach house they had a
car i mean you know they lived okay for you know uh what would be he would
consider you know upper lower class if they had a house and a beach house by
modern standards they'd be rich but they weren't back then right even having
eight kids yeah either you're amish or you're rich yeah nobody could afford
eight i mean you got to be rich to afford eight kids today and of course you
could because your wife would have a job my grandmother didn't work um and my my
grandfather came to this country without a penny he didn't even speak english he
came here at about 12 or 13 no welfare no food stamps no government housing just
nothing just show up and you know get a job where did they live in the haven in
connecticut he started we was worked he worked on building the yale bowl it's
like his first thing he did but but anyway so my father didn't have any money
for college so he got a job in the summer and that paid for all his college he
didn't graduate with any debt he worked his way through college like a lot of
his friends that was common to do back then there was no government loans there
was nobody could get a loan to go to college but because nobody can get a loan
to go to college the universities had to keep the cost down or they wouldn't
have any customers so there was a lot of free market pressure to keep tuition
down but what happened during the 1960s is the 18 year olds got the vote right
and once 18 year olds could vote politicians figured well how can we get these
kids to vote for us oh let's let's promise that they don't have to work their
way through college anymore you could just bum around europe all summer go to
woodstock and uh we'll we'll arrange loans for you you can loan money you can
borrow money and just pay it back later when you get your job and so they
started all these government guaranteed loans and then what happened the
colleges reacted to that by raising prices hey the kids have all this money
right let's raise prices and so and then they kept increasing how much the kids
could borrow and the colleges kept raising prices and then they said oh well
let's have fancy gymnasiums let's have nicer dorms nobody cared how much
anything cost because all the loans were coming in and so the government got
involved and now college cost a fortune everybody has a degree so it doesn't
even mean anything anymore and you and you and you graduate with a mortgage
right the government caused tuition prices to skyrocket the same thing with
health care may ask a question about college loans how did the lenders do in
that arrangement well the lenders did great because the government guaranteed
all the loans so the lenders didn't care if the kids could pay back the loans
didn't matter what your major was right you could major in basket weaving you
could go to a college you know where you take you know you you don't get no
reading or math i mean they didn't care because the government guaranteed every
loan and and and and and so you know in a free market you couldn't borrow all
this money because the banks would be worried about getting the money back well
why am i going to loan all this money to somebody who has no assets you know
what you know but once the government comes in then nobody cares right that's
what that's what happened so the lenders got pretty rich on this of course they
oh yeah the lenders made a fortune and the universities made a fortune because
they got to charge more for their product exactly right it's the kids that get
stuck with the bill you get all these liberal or i like to say liberal but
democrat radical left politicians that are now complaining about all the student
loan debt they're the reason it exists without the government there would be no
student loan debt colleges would be a lot less expensive uh yeah and and and
people you know would would work their way through like my dad did if they
didn't come from an affluent uh family but they did the same thing with with
health with health care i mean health insurance and and and and health care is
expensive because the government is so involved in it and even if you look at
where the government is not involved like lasik surgery prices have come down um
for those procedures because the government doesn't pay for it you know the
government and and and the reason that we all have insurance right people have
you know uh insurance for everything now and in fact what really made it bad and
trump doesn't you know the republicans want no uh uh role in repealing it is
under obamacare they said that insurance companies cannot discriminate against
people who are already sick right if you have a pre-existing condition the
insurance companies have to charge you the same as if you were completely
healthy which destroys the whole concept of insurance and makes it extremely
expensive what's not insurance at that it's not it's free health care it's like
you can't buy fire insurance after your house burns down right and if you could
nobody would buy fire insurance before it burns down no one would have a fire
extinguisher either because why yeah well it's like what if you could buy car
insurance that covered all your gas right right i mean would you you you i mean
nobody expects their auto insurance to cover their gas or their their oil
changes or their tires right you buy auto insurance in case you get a wreck and
now you have your car is totaled right you know the money health insurance is
supposed to be i got cancer i got a brain tumor you're not supposed to have
health insurance because she sprained your ankle because she had a baby or your
annual she got the flu yeah all of that stuff is supposed to be paid for out of
pocket but the reason it's not is because the government created a perverse
incentive for people to get their insurance from their employer because if your
employer gives you health insurance there's no tax if they give you money to buy
health insurance then you have to pay taxes so now everybody gets their health
insurance from their employer uh and and now they have health insurance that
pays for everything and so you know you go to a doctor sometimes and if they
tell you you need to do something ask what it costs they're like who the hell
knows nobody knows what anything costs yeah because nobody cares because
nobody's paying for it right the person that's paying for it isn't even in the
room right you have the patient the doctor and neither one of them is is you
know knows what anything costs because you got some third party that's paying
the bill so the the entire system doesn't work but it's all because government
got involved right when government tries to make things more affordable it makes
them more expensive the only way to make things cheaper is to let the free
market do it right the free market is great at lowering costs and increasing
quality but the free market is blamed i mean of course we don't have anything
approaching a free market nothing resembles a free market it's a monopoly
economy it's cartel but all of this is described as a free market thereby
totally discrediting the concept of free market economics and ensuring that
we're going to get a socialist system now we don't have it anymore and it's very
unfortunate because a lot of people look at trump and they say well he is a
pro-business president and he is pro-business but he's not pro-capitalism
pro-free markets donald trump wants to micromanage the economy from the white
house like he's the ceo he wants to decide where he thinks capital should go and
direct it into industries that he that he likes or companies that he likes and
that's wrong i mean one of the big industries that he's promoting is crypto and
for me i think this is a complete waste of capital now yeah i mean if americans
want to throw their money away in a lot of these crypto companies all right i
mean it's it's unfortunate but if the government is now promoting it and pushing
money into this industry that might have gone someplace else if it was a free
market this is doing a lot of harm why is it throwing i mean you know you meet
all these people who've made hundreds of millions you meet kids who've made real
money from crypto why is it throwing it away well because where did they make it
they didn't make money in crypto because they you know produced products that we
consume or provide services that improve our lives the people who've made money
in crypto and i know a lot of them they've made money in crypto because the
crypto that they bought a long time ago went way up well how's that different
from buying gold well i'm not people i don't know a lot of people who got rich
buying gold right uh i've done really well just be honest and so have you no
what okay we've tripled our money i'm talking about i'm talking about people who
bought bitcoin for a dollar and now it's ninety thousand dollars right you're
talking about people who put okay so it's a big run-up but it's the same but
when you buy gold which i'm totally i own a gold company i'm totally for buying
gold but you're not it's not a creative act you're not making anything you're
not making anyone's life better you're not really adding to the sum total of the
economy you're not doing anything other than buying something low and holding
until it gets high right but there is a big difference i'll and i'll get to that
in a minute but the people who have made money in in crypto right it they bought
it at a very low price and now other people are buying it at a much higher price
believing that they're going to be able to do the same thing there are people
who are buying bitcoin now at you know ninety thousand dollars whatever it's out
they're buying it because they think it's going to a million they think they'll
be able to sell it at a million and of course the only reason someone's going to
buy it at a million is because they think it's going to 10 million right so it's
all this greater fool theory and so but why is it different from nvidia or any
stock so nvidia right and i i think nvidia is overpriced but nvidia is a
business that is generating income right selling its gpus and has earnings so
it's an actual viable business the question is what is that business worth i
think it's worth less than the market currently leaves but it's worth something
there's no doubt that nvidia is a valuable company that is producing things that
that people need the rationale for the trade like for the average person buying
any stock is that i will buy it lower than i will sell it well and the people at
the very end of that chain as it starts to decline get screwed well if that's
the reason look if if we buy stocks right for my our customers at europe pacific
asset management which is my my company company the most important criteria is
the current earnings and the dividends right so i'm buying companies because
they generate income to me as the owner just like if i were to buy real estate i
would look at the rental income right for sure what am i getting in rent yes
right if you just buy real estate because you think the price is going to go up
well you're a real estate speculator maybe you'll speculate right maybe you'll
be wrong but it's different from an investor who is looking at the cash flow
sure so when i buy a stock if i'm getting a seven eight nine percent dividend
right because i own that company it's paying me a dividend i don't need the
stock to go up i just get my share of the income i'm buying into a business that
is generating income now if the business grows and generates more income in
addition to my dividend yield when i go to sell the stock in the future if it's
a more valuable company that's generating more income and paying more dividends
then i can sell it at a higher price than what i paid right because the business
itself is more valuable but if you're simply buying a company it doesn't even
make any money then maybe it's losing money and you just want to bet that in the
future it might make money and you're speculating on a stock you could speculate
but it's very different from being an investor right you're you're a stock
speculator but when you buy bitcoin you're not even speculating in the sense
that bitcoin is going to earn money in the future it's never going to earn money
in the future it is a non-income producing digital asset you know it's marketed
as if it were digital gold but it's not digital gold at all it's got nothing in
common with gold gold is a valuable commodity now when you own gold when you
decide to buy some gold right what you're doing is you're storing that gold so
that somebody in the future can use it right gold is unique among commodities in
that it doesn't decay it doesn't spoil right for thousands of years you know
gold will stay the same right and if you know if a if a ship sunk 500 years ago
in the in the ocean and you can salvage that ship today if there was gold in it
it's it looks exactly the way it looked when the ship sank everything else is so
the physical properties of it are enduring and but they're not just enduring
they are important and valuable because they're needed in all sorts of
industries right and so when you are storing gold the gold that you're storing
can be used in the future not just by a jeweler who would want it you know to
make jewelry but you know to use in aerospace in consumer electronics in
medicine there are all sorts of things where you actually need gold they're
industrial applications for gold right and there are more uses for gold now than
there's ever been and in fact we're developing new uses all the time so as as we
advance as a civilization we come up with more ways that we can utilize gold and
so when you're storing that gold and you know you are you know holding it for
somebody to use in the future that's why it's a store of value but can i also
add to that i mean that's obviously true what you're saying it's even more true
for platinum which is not as prized as gold and i think the difference is that
gold does have a mystical quality to it it's been a medium of exchange for all
recorded human history all recorded i mean from the earliest rings we have refer
to gold so there's something about gold that people associate with value and
well it has value it's not that they associated well it has industrial value
okay it has but even just look just even here i have a gold bracelet that i'm
wearing i mean just having a uh a jeweler have a gold watch right like sometimes
i wear gold when i know i'm going to talk about gold but the reason people could
see that that people like it for a reason as to where it is but the reason is
not so easily explained it's not just that it's you know useful in medical
devices or in consumer electronics is there's something about it that resonates
that you know hums at a certain frequency within people and right and you're
talking god knows what that is societies that never had any interaction with
each other we're using gold even though that's kind of what i'm saying right but
we don't know why let's be honest we don't actually know what that is no but
when you look at gold and you look at the things you can do with it and the
properties that it has you know we as humans value the properties that gold but
it's just inherent it's like we always have well i would i would i would imagine
that if there's life on other planets they value gold there too you know i i i
think it's kind of a universal thing as far as the properties that gold has now
what what bitcoin did right gold wasn't the first money it was the best money
right because before we had money there was barter right we invented money but
when when there was no money and if two people wanted to trade uh with each
other you know they they they would barter so if i was a butcher and you were a
baker and you know you wanted some meat you would offer me some of your bread
right and then i would give you some meat and and and we could trade but what if
you're a vegetarian right what if you don't want meat how you know how am i
going to buy your bread if all i have is meat right so it's it was difficult
because you needed a confluence of needs but man invented money right which was
a commodity that everybody would accept as payment and so if i had money then i
could buy your bread and give you the money and then you could take that money
right and buy something else but the money also had to be something of value but
not bread which would go stale or meat that would um you know go bad the money
had to be a commodity that would hold on to its value and so that's where you
know gold came in so instead of giving you meat that you'd have to eat right
away or freeze it or something i just give you gold and you knew that that was
valuable and somebody else the candlestick maker would take gold for his
candlesticks you don't need to give him meat you don't need to give him bread so
you know and a lot of things were used as money you know throughout societies
but what what what ended up being the best money was gold and they made coins
out of it and you could easily tell you know that how much gold was in each coin
and so what kind of weight of gold you were getting in exchange for whatever it
was you you were selling and the reason gold became better money than you know
seashells or you know uh um cattle or salt you know different things that were
used you know the romans used salt as money that's where the word salary comes
from right because it was salt um but um gold had a lot of properties you know
it was very divisible it was very portable it was very durable it was fungible
it had a lot of these properties that really made it ideal to use this money and
so what what the creative of bitcoin did is he came up with a you know a digital
token that you know mimicked those properties right bitcoin it's portable it's
divisible it's fungible right it you know it can do all that stuff which is fine
but what it doesn't has have is the most important characteristic that you need
to be money and that's you have to be a valuable commodity you have to have
value intrinsic value for on on your own right there has to be a use beyond just
a medium of exchange because money needs to be a store of value it can't just be
a medium exchange or a unit account it has to be a store of value and so in
order to store value you got to have value right you can't store something that
you don't have so when you have gold gold you're storing the value of a metal
that can be used in jewelry and consumer electronics and aerospace and all this
stuff but when you're holding on the bitcoin you have nothing right i can't do
anything with bitcoin it can't be used for anything because it's just a string
of numbers like you know it's so it has no actual use sure i can give you my
bitcoin i can sell you my bitcoin but what can you do with it well you could
give it to somebody else or sell it to somebody else but the only reason anybody
wants to buy it is because they think the price is going to go up that is the
sole source of demand is i'm going to get rich if i buy this bitcoin and hodl it
and never sell it and ride out the volatility i'm going to get rich well there
was another use that was intended or at least advertised at the very beginning i
remember it vividly which was as a medium of exchange that couldn't be
controlled by governments and that was going to usher in true human freedom
where they couldn't control commerce yeah part of the promise of bitcoin when i
first learned about it was it it it was you know anonymous and private and it
allowed you to circumvent the aml laws and the kyc laws and you can transact
without the government knowing what you were doing and that was a a positive
aspect of well yeah that was the whole appeal to me which is completely lost now
that it's all in etfs and bitcoin treasury companies and all that but even
though that was appealing because it didn't have any real underlying value you
couldn't really keep a lot of money in it it was only really uh useful i think
for people who were doing something illegal because there you know if you have
to launder money because you're doing something illegal even if i end up losing
20 or 30 percent of my money in bitcoin because i accept bitcoin and by the time
i use it it's you know it's lost 30 of its value that's fine because criminals
are used to paying to launder money of course they don't mind it but if you're
if you're a law's honest person and you know i'm buying stuff i really don't you
know care if the government knows i i bought it you're not going to take that
kind of a risk um to be anonymous to be you know to transact in private and you
know i think i think it's unfortunate that we've lost all of this privacy uh
that we we once had i mean it was you know constitutional right you had a right
to privacy the whole constitution is written supposedly so yeah but not anymore
we have you know we're there's no privacy whatsoever in anymore um but um
ultimately the fact that it didn't have any real value is what is what lessened
that appeal to most people but in order to make bitcoin palatable to wall street
they actually got all this government regulation i mean can you imagine an
industry that is just asking to be regulated wants regulation i mean normally a
business industry would want as little regulation as possible they don't want
the government getting involved well they call it clarity well what they're
looking for in crypto is validation they want the regulation to validate product
in the industry so they can get people to buy it by saying the government has
blessed it so the government now endorses it the government is supporting it and
the reason that so many politicians including trump the reason that they support
bitcoin is because bitcoin supported them right people that got into bitcoin
early made so much money because so many other people got in late that they were
able to pay off a bunch of politicians and get them to support bitcoin uh they
supported this whole idea of a bitcoin strategic reserve which is really just a
bitcoin bailout fund trying to use taxpayer money to buy out bitcoin but the the
bitcoin industry was able to pay off a lot of politicians and wait because can i
just ask though uh i mean a lot of what you're saying is obviously true but i
also think you've described the the decline of the us dollar it's diminishing
purchasing power so clearly there needs to be a new global reserve currency you
don't want it to be one owned by a geopolitical rival so why wouldn't tether why
wouldn't bitcoin be the new global reserve currency well first of all gold is
money it's not currency and so there's a difference between money and currency
so currency is backed by money so when we were on a gold standard and we had
paper that was redeemable in gold the paper was currency the gold was money so
currency is like a money substitute but you can have two kinds of currency you
can have legitimate currency which is backed by real money or you can have fiat
currency which is backed by nothing and so what we have now is fiat currency and
the question is what could replace that with bitcoin um and i don't think that
that's possible because i don't think that bitcoin has any value uh beyond its
appeal that you know you know a greater fool is going to come and buy it central
banks can't hold bitcoin as a reserve against their own currency if they had to
sell it i mean the price would drop sharply you know you know you have to have
real money that's why all these central banks but under our current system you
don't have real money you have the us dollar which is real because people have
decided it's real it's a yes it's an act of faith and their faith in that is
declining because it's been used as a political weapon as you i thought so
crisply explained and so you need to replace it with something why wouldn't big
why would bitcoin be any different from the us dollar except you like start anew
well the the main difference there is you know they're both in a way fiat right
in that both bitcoin and the dollar derive their value from faith and confidence
right but bitcoin people are buying most people who are buying bitcoin are
buying bitcoin to get more dollars they they're thinking the price is going to
go way up and they'll be able to sell out and have more dollars than they
started with most people are not getting into bitcoin because they just want a
safe store of value if that was the case they would buy gold they're speculating
in it um but the central banks right these big central banks are not going to be
able to put large quantities of their dollar reserves into bitcoin uh there's
just it's not a reliable long-term store of value for them that's what they're
looking for they're looking for something to replace the dollar to back up their
currency and are they buying bitcoin no they're not buying i mean you have me el
salvador bought some bitcoin i mean you have you have some foreign governments
that have sovereign wealth funds yes where those sovereign wealth funds have
kind of bought some bitcoin etfs or maybe they bought strategy you know which
was a big mistake but because they're you know these investment managers are
under a lot of pressure just like any other manager to perform and and so a lot
of these crypto related assets went up and so there was a pressure hey i need to
put these in the portfolio uh and so you have allocations and and then the
community crypto community tries to pretend oh these governments are buying up
bitcoin they're not really buying bitcoin the managers of these sovereign wealth
funds have taken a small allocation i think that's all going to stop because
this is going to blow up uh you know the people who are putting money into
crypto now into bitcoin are going to lose a lot of money right they're they're
the exit strategy i mean that's why bitcoin hasn't gone up you know bitcoin's
real high watermark was four years ago it's down about 40 priced in gold over
the last four years so we've been distributing bitcoin from the strong hands
that bought it early the ogs the whales uh to the retail public has been buying
it at these inflated prices uh for years and eventually you know the bottom's
going to drop out of this thing so that lee i mean you're making a very i would
say i'm biased of course but you're making a pretty compelling case for gold on
a bunch of levels but one most obviously is a hedge against whatever the hell's
going to happen next like so if you're giving advice to someone you love like
i've got a hundred dollars what do i do with it i think the wise the loving
advice we put some of it in gold well everybody should have some money in gold
but so why isn't that advice ever uttered on any of the financial advice
channels um i think that's weird yeah you know because wall street has never
been uh a big promoter of gold um you know i don't mean why why doesn't you know
jp morgan tell you to buy gold why doesn't cnbc tell you to buy gold well i
don't think they have enough gold companies that advertise on cnbc i think most
of their advertisers are from the crypto industry and i think that really
corrupts the whole process really yeah i think the advertisers advertise because
they know they're going to have a lot of pro crypto content i mean they spend
the entire day on cnbc uh i've you know i haven't been on that show in over a
decade you know they're the ones that initially started calling me dr doom when
i was predicting the 2008 financial crisis so they kind of used to have me on uh
but and and it's not just me they don't really have any bitcoin critics on their
air they have they have one bitcoin promoter after another and all of the the
on-air talent all the anchors are pretty much pro bitcoin um where are they on
gold they don't even really talk about it i mean you know but you'd started this
conversation by describing the rise in the snp relative to gold i mean the fall
in the snp well that well the sp has risen but once you root it in gold because
all measures are comparative you see that it's actually fallen compared to gold
so gold is the better buy yeah but again you know so like that's just
indisputable right yes but that that that is not what they're selling on these
financial channels but they're lying then well yeah i mean you know or or they
or they don't understand it i mean there's a lot of but that's even i understand
i mean i don't know anything again because you didn't get a degree in economics
from a major that's really simple i you buy i buy two things 25 years ago which
is worth more now that's just simple right and and you know it's going to
accelerate because we're going to be printing a lot of money you know now that
the fed has really gone back to qe they haven't admitted it but it's only a
matter of time why do you say they've gone back to quantity because they're
printing money and buying treasuries so but what are interest like over the past
six months what if for those who are not paying attention tell us where interest
rates well short-term interest rates have come down right the fed has cut rates
three times and so now they have the fed funds at three and a half to three and
three quarters but the 10-year treasury has stayed around four percent it's
around four point one five percent the 30-year treasury is around three four
four point eight percent right so they haven't been able to move long-term rates
down and i think long-term rates are going to soar in this country and i think
in order to prevent long-term rates from really rising the fed is going to be
monetizing more debt printing more money creating more inflation remember we're
spending now over a trillion dollars a year just on interest on the national
debt like 1.2 1.3 trillion that's going to hit 2 trillion probably sometime next
year because almost all of the national debt is financed with treasury bills
right back when interest rates got to 20 percent in 1980 most of the national
debt was long-term so it was unaffected by the big move it only affected the new
borrowing but now right if a third of the national debt comes due in the next
year the government has to refinance that at whatever the current rate of
interest is so i think we're we're headed for this fiscal you know time bomb uh
where the the cost of servicing the debt is is skyrocketing i mean in not too
many years it could cost us more than we collect in taxes just to pay the
interest on what we've borrowed and because the the debt service costs are
exploding and the only reason they're not much higher now is because rates are
still low you know four percent is low right donald trump wants them lower you
know he wants you know zero or one percent but the reason he wants that he wants
just more inflation he wants to try to blow air into the bubble to hide the fact
that the economy is actually getting weaker so he just wants to make the bubbles
bigger by creating more inflation while at the same time claiming that he's
vanquished inflation all because energy prices have come down and energy prices
have come down in fact energy prices are as cheap as they've ever been if you
look at how many barrels of oil you can buy with an ounce of gold oil is dirt
cheap the question is how long is it going to stay this cheap i don't think it's
going to stay cheap i've been buying a lot of oil stocks now uh we've been
increasing our allocation energy because i think we're going to see a big move
up in oil price one factor you haven't mentioned is technological change so and
with gold too i mean if gold prices i don't know what the threshold for gold is
but if it gets to you know six grand an ounce or something crazy somebody's
going to figure out a better extraction technique and there's going to be a lot
more gold and prices will fall well there won't be a lot more gold because you
know the supply of gold grows pretty slowly one or two percent a year it has and
but that's a technology question yeah but you know we you know we haven't come
up with um better ways um or you know because the gold gets harder to get out of
the ground you know the the real easy gold has already been extracted right
because they've been mining gold for hundreds of years so uh you know the gold
that's still there is is more difficult to get out of the ground but there
hasn't been a major gold discovery in decades there hasn't been a lot of
investment in exploration and development so by the time the industry is able to
uh you know attract enough capital into the sector because nobody's been
interested in in gold mining right it's been it's been dead in fact crypto i
think really harmed the industry but it created a big distraction of course
where people are like well why should i buy gold i got bitcoin it's better than
gold it's gold 2.0 so the industry was really starved for cap but i'm just
saying because markets do respond to reality over time over time the price gets
high enough yes it's in seawater okay so like yeah they will yes over time and
and people will start melting down their jewelry because they need money and the
prices are higher and yes all this will happen but it's not going to stop the
price of gold look the price of gold was twenty dollars an ounce uh from 1789 to
1933 right for like 150 years it was twenty dollars an ounce and then roosevelt
devalued and got 35 but if gold can go from twenty dollars an ounce to four
thousand right where can it go from four thousand i mean it can go to a hundred
thousand you know obviously you know we can keep debasing the value of currency
you know ironically you know the one of the ways that you're going to actually
bring gold into the modern economy is through the blockchain through the
internet everybody wants to talk about you know uh stable coins right which are
basically tokenized dollars right just taking the dollar and turning it into a
token yeah right well there's no real stability in tokenizing dollars because
you've got the same inherent problem if you own a stable a dollar token
inflation is going to destroy its value it's going to you know you're going to
lose value the same way you're not in control of the congress and the fed so and
you don't even really earn interest on it at least if i have dollars i can put
them in a money market and get some interest to offset some of what i'm losing
to inflation but the ideal thing to tokenize is gold right because when you turn
gold into a token now you actually have digital gold so instead of having paper
money that's backed by gold i can have a digital token that's backed by gold as
long as the tokens continue to match one for one the physical supply of gold
that's a real system yeah well that's the second you've got more paper than
you've got assets then it's not real but you know what but it's so easily
auditable on a blockchain i mean i'm doing that and you should look into this
too i i you know i have a on shift gold i have a t gold uh which is ultimately
going to be tokenized gold i haven't launched the token yet uh but right now i'm
i'm helping people buy gold and silver that we're going to tokenize so once you
have the gold you'll have the ability to withdraw it either in a physical form
or in the form of a token but the idea of a gold-backed token the idea of t gold
is so that you can use your gold easily as a medium of exchange and you can
transact instantly uh over the internet you know somebody in the united states
can make a purchase from somebody in australia and pay them instantly with gold
you don't have to send the actual gold to australia you just send the token
which represents ownership of that gold if you have the token then the gold
belongs to you and so if i want to give you my gold i don't have to drive down
to the vault grab some of it and and bring it to you no i just send you the
token and now you own the gold just like paper money when paper used to
circulate whoever had the paper had ownership of the gold the paper currency was
title to gold and so now you could do that with a token through a block as long
as you can redeem it yeah and it's enforceable and it's auditable look when you
know what is it enforceable of course it's a legal contract it's a lot so if i
sell you a gold token and that's like an iou it's an iou for gold and i legally
contractually i'm obligated to pay you or whoever is the bearer of that token so
while you own the token the gold belongs to you but if you spend that token and
now somebody else earns it because you know they provided goods or services or
you just gave them a gift now they own the gold now they don't have to come and
get it they you know they can just leave it there and just transact uh the token
i mean that's what people did if you go back to the days of a blacksmith with
your gold you would have gold and you left it with a blacksmith and he gave you
an iou and and and if the people in the town knew the local blacksmith and they
recognized his iou you know if you you could you could spend it people would
take it right because they they didn't have to go get the gold they knew the
gold was there the problem would be of course if the blacksmith you know
absconded with the gold but you know in in in capitalism and i i have this
argument all the time with these bitcoiners because they think that what i'm
doing with tokenized gold they think well you know you have to trust the third
party so you know i want to own bitcoin because i don't have to trust the third
party well of course you know if you put your bitcoin on an exchange if you own
it through an etf of course you're trusting third party um but i have no problem
with trusting third parties in capitalism because a business that has a
reputation and has a brand uh wants to maintain the value of that brand you know
i mean the insurance industry is a perfect example of trust when you buy an
insurance policy you're relying on a third party the insurance company to pay
your claim right you know if you have fire insurance insurance you're trusting
that if your house burns down the insurance company is going to pay you every
transaction required i mean i trust there's no poison in my ice cream yeah you
know every now people in bitcoin say well when i have bitcoin i don't have to
trust anybody well no you have to trust everybody you have to trust that people
still want your bitcoin despite the fact that it has no value we also have to
trust the electrical grid well that doesn't exist without it right that too but
the bigger thing is you're just trusting that the people who believe in bitcoin
who believe that nothing is something continue to believe that and continue to
have gold coins in your backyard you you have to trust fewer people all you have
to trust is human nature which is attracted to gold period well but when when
you own gold you're not trusting anything because the gold itself has value well
that's what i'm saying right so but if you have possession of physical gold you
do you're not relying on fragile systems right i mean the only risk there is
somebody could steal it from you if they find it right you could lose it right
you know if you have gold um but the the thing about tokenized gold and i i
recommend that people have both they have physical gold and and they have some
tokenized gold because the tokenized gold is the gold that you can use in
commerce you know that you could easily spend it's much more difficult if i have
bars of gold or even gold coins even as even a uh a you know one ounce gold coin
is four thousand dollars a tenth of an ounce coin is four hundred dollars right
i mean so if you want to buy something for five bucks you know how you know
let's let's go you know you can't really do it but if you have the tokenized
gold then you can easily transact you can you know buy a cup of coffee and the
barista can accept payment in gold you know the big problem though and i i want
to congratulate you too on on on battalion gold right that you yeah you set up
um because you know when i start as i mentioned when i started in this industry
in the gold industry in 2010 for over 10 years before that i was just telling
all my customers buy gold just go and buy gold right even though i didn't sell
it i thought everybody should own it and i just said go out and get it and
little did i know that people were just getting ripped off because i found out
years later people would call me up and they would say you know i i just sold
some gold you know i bought it you know it was 400 and and now i sold it at 700
and i lost money like well how'd you lose money and and then uh and i started
looking into it and i found out that when they bought gold when it was 400 they
didn't pay 400 they paid like because they they didn't get 400 worth of gold
they just paid 400 to get like 200 worth of gold because they bought it in the
form of a commemorative coin that was supposed to have value yeah they got and
and so i set up shift gold simply because i didn't want people to get ripped off
anymore because it was so it was so pervasive and it was almost because so few
people were buying gold that the only way that the gold uh industry could make
money was to overcharge and what really made me furious and i don't even want to
name names but i i had a you know is that they would go to some of the most
popular conservative talk show hosts and they would pay these guys to recommend
their gold company oh i know and the reason they would do that is because the
loyal listeners trusted the talk show home well they came to me with an offer
yeah that's how i know this i didn't understand how it worked i never thought
i've always been pro gold but i didn't realize right people were paying twice oh
the value twice the spot price the only reason it worked tucker the reason it
worked is because the people who listen to their favorite talk show host and the
guy would say here's the firm i trust this is where i buy my gold yeah because
they don't rip you off but here's where i get my gold go buy your gold there and
the the listener who is very you know loyal to the talk show host and trusts
them goes to that gold broker and just assumes they're getting a great deal hey
you know so and so wouldn't recommend this company unless they were going to
treat me right and so they didn't shop around and in fact they make it
impossible to shop around because they sell coins that nobody else has because
they're so obscure and they try to pretend that they're you know they're not
going to be confiscated or they have some kind of collectible value and it's all
bs they have no value they it's all the money when it goes into the pocket of
the salesman because these these gold salesmen work on commission and if they
sell you you know maple leaves at a one percent markup and maybe they make two
hundred dollars in gross commission and they make 30 bucks for themselves or
they can get you to put the ten thousand dollars into these ds coins and they
make two thousand dollars three thousand that's what they sell that's what i
didn't know any of this and the problem with selling gold in an honest way is
that it's a very low mark you do it you know it's a very low margin you're not
getting rich selling gold and we're not getting rich from it and our prices are
transparent you know exactly it's whatever two points above spot or something
we're not in this to get rich well where you're going to make money eventually
is on volume eventually a lot more people are going to start buying gold i mean
people just don't know enough but everything can't be a scam because then people
lose confidence in their fellow human beings in their country and it's just bad
the problem is the only companies that can afford to advertise on television are
the ones that are ripping you off i'm that that's how i figured out it was a
scam i was like how can they afford it's a commodity yeah how can they afford to
pay me just as a pitchman i'm sure they have other people though they do have
other people pitching as well how can where does this money come from and that's
how i figured yes and that's and i talked to a lot of people that i knew in the
industry and i was pointing out you are your your audience is getting ripped off
you're helping these guys steal money by promoting these companies and they're
the nicest people and they're directionally correct in their concerns they're
they love america they're worried about the softening of the dollar they know
that their politicians basically are looting the country through devaluing the
dollar that's all true so they're they're the best people they're the most
honest people and to screw them over just enraged me yes they're screwing them
over they're they're trying to do the right thing yeah they're trying to buy
gold oh i know and then they're getting ripped off now the thing is gold has
gone up so much that a lot of those people don't even realize because now they
could actually still sell their their money their gold at a gain but they would
have a much bigger gain yeah it's if they hadn't been ripped off in fact i have
a special report i remember i wrote this report people can get it you know it's
on my website on shiftgold.com but it's classic gold scams and i go over all of
the tricks all the things that gold salesmen tell you to steal your money to
convince you why you shouldn't buy you know a maple leaf or a cougar and why you
should buy this certain and they have all these tricks and and and a lot of
times too they'll even advertise for these you know they'll have a low price on
a maple leaf right that might even be lower than what i would charge right but
then when someone calls up to buy it they don't sell you that no they sell you
they upsell you into something else and they also try to con you into it by a
lot of these companies have something called like a price protection like they
say hey we'll guarantee you if the price goes down over the next 30 days we'll
we'll do it we'll we'll mark it to the lower price well we'll give you some more
or sometimes they even offer to give you free gold or free silver if you buy a
certain amount and the only reason they could do that is because they're
overcharging you by so much money it's totally right they have enough left over
or if they're if they're if they're charging you 50 percent more than the price
of gold and the price of gold goes down and they have to give you back 10 of
what they overcharge you they still made a fortune exactly