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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Peter Schiff is the Chief Economist and Global Strategist at Euro Pacific Capital. In this conversation, we discuss the history of money, the macro economy, the current signs of an impending crisis, why he is so bullish on gold, what his concerns around Bitcoin are, and then Peter confirms that Bitcoin is scarce and that it can't be censored or seized. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well. Skrt skrt. Wanna know who has the best URL? Crypto.com.

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:33Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:15Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:29Speaker 01

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

• 3:55Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I finally have the man, the myth, the legend, Peter Schiff. He is, uh, he is here and ready to, uh, explain everything about gold, Bitcoin, and why he has, uh, heavy bags. But, uh, thanks so much. In all seriousness, thanks for coming on and, uh, doing this, Peter.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Uh, sure, Pom. Thanks for inviting me on.

• 4:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So, look, before we get into, I think, what everyone actually wants to hear, let's go through your background because as I've talked to folks, I don't think most people outside of the hardcore gold community really know what you've done and kind of how you've built a number of these businesses. So, just kind of where'd your career start? And let's kind of go through step by step how you got to today.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Well, I just got my start in the investment industry. After I got out of college, I kind of got into futures and options and was working in those markets, kind of just as a retail broker. And early on, I kind of realized that there was a lot of gambling involved there. And, you know, the brokers were making money, which was great for me. But it was hard to make money for the clients consistently because, you know, by the time you finished charging them a commission, if they kept on trading, you could potentially beat the markets, but it was hard to overcome the vig of the commission. So, I didn't stay in commodities that long. And then I got into the stock market. I started working at Lehman Brothers for a while. And I was kind of disillusioned there. I didn't really

• 5:20Speaker 02

  like the, you know, the strategies or the management. Again, I thought it was more focused on the firm and not as much on the retail client. And I really wanted to build my business based on, you know, doing what I thought was right for the client in the long run. And I thought, you know, that would ultimately benefit me more than some of the shortcuts that I saw brokers taking back at Lehman. And so, I kind of started my own firm. And I bought a small broker dealer that really didn't have any clients that some guy had, you know, set up in Florida. And I bought it and renamed it Euro Pacific Capital. And that was back in about 1996, 1997. And so, at that time, the US stock market was going

• 6:03Speaker 02

  through the dot com bubble. And so, what I really started to do at that time with my clients was start warning about that bubble and encouraging people to take profits or get out of the NASDAQ and get out of the dot coms. And of course, I was a few years too early on that because as I was telling people to sell these stocks, they kept going up. But I was confident. confident that this was a bubble and that it would end badly and so I was buying people you know the stocks that I thought would do well in the aftermath of that bubble popping you know everybody wanted new economy and so I was buying old economy you know I was buying you know gold stocks but I was buying oil stocks I mean oil was under twenty dollars a barrel no one wanted it I was buying in Russia

• 6:48Speaker 02

  I was buying in Kazakhstan you know then I was buying utilities in New Zealand Australia I was buying stuff in Hong Kong and some emerging markets and nobody wanted that stuff and um so it was going down but when the dot com bubble popped in two thousand and you know I had been forecasting a ninety percent drop in the NASDAQ and you know it dropped eighty percent so it didn't quite hit ninety but pretty pretty close uh but when that happened uh that's when all my stuff turned you know the dollar had been at you know very high uh during that dot com era when we had budget surpluses and people were saying oh we're gonna pay off the national debt we have surpluses as far as the eye could see and I knew that was a bunch of nonsense so

• 7:30Speaker 02

  when the dollar peaked and it went on about an eight year decline and it hit an all time record low by two thousand and eight you know we made a tremendous amount of money in the foreign stocks the emerging markets and gold stocks um that kind of that party ended in two thousand and eight ironically with the financial crisis which was something that I then began to forecast for years because once the dot com bubble popped and the Fed slashed rates to one percent I I began warning about a much bigger bubble that the Fed was inflating in the housing market and how this was gonna be all even more damaging than the the the dot dot com bubble that they inflated and I even wrote a book about it called Crash Proof How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse

• 8:13Speaker 02

  I wrote most of that book in two thousand and five it was finished by early oh six and it finally was published in early oh seven when it came out uh and you know it was pretty prescient as far as the timing um and then you know the dot com bubble popped uh we had the collapse of the mortgage market along the way I helped set up a hedge fund uh that shorted the subprime market in two thousand and and six and that Paid off big in a big way in two thousand and seven for us. Um, but you know, I all of a sudden then I got some notoriety because I had been going on CNBC and Bloomberg and Fox Business and CNBC, CNN, pretty much every week for about two or three years from like two thousand and five through two thousand and eight, I was like a regular guest.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  And I was the one guy that was saying this is a bubble, this is a faulty economy, housing prices are going to crash, the stock market is going to go down, we're headed for this huge recession, the banks are a mess, you know, they're a disaster, Fanny and Freddie are going to go bankrupt. I was saying this stuff and everybody was laughing at me, but they kept inviting me back on because, you know, I guess they, they, they enjoyed it or it was good ratings. Um, but then when everything that I had been forecasting came true, uh, people started to notice me, I started to get, you know, following on the internet, somebody made a montage of a bunch of my, uh, interviews, uh, my, and, and they called it Peter Schiff was right. And that ended up getting a couple of million views back when a couple of million views was a lot of views, uh, for a YouTube video.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  It's not as big a deal anymore, but back then, two thousand and nine, it was a lot, it was a lot of views. And, and so, you know, I, I wrote a few more books, you know, I got more popular, but then interestingly enough, uh, the, the mainstream media kind of forgot about me, you know, they, they stopped inviting me on. And so I lost a lot of that, uh, access that I had, but I developed my own access, uh, through the internet, you know, I had a fail campaign for a senate in Connecticut in two thousand and ten. Uh, I had a radio show that I did daily, uh, two hours a day for a few years that I eventually stopped doing because I just didn't have the time to do it and I started doing the podcast, uh, Peter Schiff Show Podcast where I just record those, you know, usually a couple of weeks, you know, when I have time to do them.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Uh, but you know, I've got a pretty good following, uh, on the internet now and, you know, on social media, uh, but my main business is asset management, so I grew Euro Pacific Capital, I eventually started Schiff Gold, which was Euro Pacific Precious Metals that became Schiff Gold. I partnered up with some guys in Canada, we started, uh, Euro Pacific. Canada, which has been renamed Echelon Global Partners. I started EuroPacific Asset Management, which is now operating here in Puerto Rico, which is where I live. I started EuroPacific Bank, which is also relocated here in Puerto Rico. And so those two businesses are running out of Puerto Rico, the asset management company and the bank. And so mainly, you know, in the investment advisor business.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  But, you know, I still, you know, do a lot on social media to try to advocate for what I believe in, which is free market capitalism, liberty of government, sound money. And, you know, I'm a critic of politicians on both sides of the aisle because it seems that nobody is doing it right.

• 11:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, I got a lot of questions. You've done a whole bunch of questions in your life. Where did the name EuroPacific come from?

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Well, you know, when I named a company that, I was focusing on a lot of these foreign stocks. So I wanted to have kind of like a, you know, an international sound. I was on the Pacific, I was on the West Coast. And so it just seemed like, you know, the Euro, the Euro currency was just, you know, starting. And it was like Euro seemed like a popular word. So I just came up with Euro, EuroPacific Capital as the name of the company.

• 12:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then, you know, seeing that you were able to kind of call out the tech bubble, maybe you didn't tie it perfectly, but for the most part said, hey, this is overheated. And then again, kind of late 2000s. What were some of the signals that you saw that really kind of either identified those bubbles or were the main drivers as to why you thought, hey, you know, right now is not a great time and we're likely to go down and from an economy standpoint in the short term?

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the tech bubble, I mean, that one to me was very obvious. I mean, the valuations that were being assigned to these companies. I mean, I remember Yahoo at the time was, I used to use this as an example to my prospects and clients. The value of Yahoo alone, that one company was worth more than every company in New Zealand as a country. Like you could buy the entire New Zealand stock market and it would be cheaper than buying Yahoo. And to me, that seemed like, look, I could buy this whole country, or I could buy Yahoo. And so, you know, and I looked at a lot of these companies that were making no profits, and I couldn't see how they would ever make a profit. But, you know, most people didn't care. I mean, it was just all a bubble, and I was able to see that attitude.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  And so the same thing happened during the real estate bubble. As I was watching people buy houses and flip houses, and I was a renter, I was even subleasing some space to mortgage brokers that I could see firsthand how they were, you know, dumbing up applications, and they were, you know, basically fraudulently changing people's incomes and things like that, and to try to get them to qualify to get a mortgage refinanced. And I could see the insanity going on. I was in Southern California, and so real estate prices were going up a lot. And I knew the Fed was behind both bubbles, because I could, you know, see the monetary policy that was being pursued at the time. And, you know, I'm a student of history. I know how central banks inflate bubbles,

• 13:58Speaker 02

  and I know what happens when they pop. But, you know, one thing I wanted to mention, this is an interesting anecdote. We talked about EuroPacific Capital. So when I named the company EuroPacific Capital, my tagline was, "There's always a bull market somewhere," because there's always a bull market somewhere. And I did that because at the time I did it, you know, early on, you know, the US was not doing well, and all these foreign markets were. And so that was my tagline. And then I did an interview with Jim Cramer way back when. This is before he even had a show, and he interviewed me. And he liked my tagline, so he stole it from me. Because he didn't start using it until after he interviewed me, and we were on my website, and he saw, you know,

• 14:42Speaker 02

  because there's always a bull market somewhere, and they basically just took it and adopted it for himself. But I had it first.

• 14:48Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so when you Look at these bubbles, um, in terms of kind of how your outlook on the market is, would you consider yourself like a perma bear? Or are there times where you're also saying, hey, look, you know, things are very undervalued and we're about to enter a bull market? You kind of start preaching the, uh, the, the long argument of markets as well?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, people kind of look at me as a perma bear, but I'm, you know, I'm really not. Cause if you look at what I was saying, like what, when I was bearish on the US stock market, uh, during the, the, the dot com bubble, and I was right about that. The market, the market collapsed, not quite as much as I expected, but that was because the Fed did more than I expected. I didn't expect the Fed to take rates to 1%, but when they did, right? I became bullish on the US stock market, 2001, 2002 timeframe. But I didn't recommend that anybody invest in it. I said, look, the Fed is printing all this money, so they're going to reflate stock prices, but it's also going to cause the dollar to go down.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  And so it's better to invest internationally, buy foreign stocks, buy commodities, buy gold. And that advice, uh, was, was very prescient because we made a lot more money during those years, 2003, 2004, 2005, by being long global equities instead of US equities. I was not telling people to short US stocks. I just thought we'd have better returns in foreign stocks and gold stocks. And I was right about that. Where the US market surprised me was its recent outperformance. The outperformance maybe in 2013, 14, 15, during those years. Because when I was forecasting the bursting of the housing bubble and, uh, you know,

• 16:33Speaker 02

  the, the great recession that would follow, the financial crisis, I assumed that the world would figure it out after that and that we would have a, a bigger relative bear market in US assets relative to foreign assets. I thought the dollar would continue to, to lose value, uh, but that didn't happen because, you know, you had this big rally in the dollar and everybody, uh, became even more convinced that the US was, you know, in great shape. They believed the Fed, they Believe Ben Bernanke when he was out there saying we're going to normalize interest rates. We're going to shrink our balance sheet. Everybody believed him. I mean, I knew that he was lying, but the markets believed him. And so you had this rush back into US assets and US stocks out ended up outperforming for a number of years.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  But but I still think that I'm ultimately going to be proven right on this forecast. Because all these years that we were able to kick the can down the road. The real fundamentals of the US economy have gotten much worse. The US economy today is in much worse shape than it was in oh eight or nineteen ninety nine. And the crisis that we're heading towards is going to be far greater than what we experienced in two thousand and eight. And and rather than the dollar rallying as a result of the crisis, I think the dollar is going to be the crisis. And then, you know, the bonds, US Treasury bonds, I think it's going to be a currency crisis and a sovereign debt crisis. You know, whether or not, you know, the stock market collapses relative, you know, in dollar terms is hard to say.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  I think it's going to go down, but I think the real declines are going to be measured relative to gold or other assets that you can own. Because when the Fed creates a lot of money and money loses value. And you're trying to measure stock prices in terms of a dollar that's also losing value. It's a it's a moving target, you know. So I I I'm telling people to buy things that I think are going to go up more than the US stock market when the dollar goes down.

• 18:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And so wait, before we get to kind of the impending crisis and some of the things that you think people should be doing. What's up with the Senate run? I didn't know that. What was the thought process there?

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Well, you know, there really wasn't much of a thought process into it. I got drafted into it because, you know, as I got popular in two thousand and nine and I kind of developed an online following. A lot of people wanted me to run for Senate. And one of the reasons was that Christopher Dodd was the incumbent Democratic Senator from Connecticut. And he was one of the big defenders of Fannie and Freddie. He was saying how solvent solvent they were and how they were in great shape. At the same time he was saying that, I was saying they were insolvent and going bankrupt. So it seemed like a good contrast, you know, the guy that defended Fannie and. said they were great versus the guy that called them out and said they were gonna go bankrupt. And but and so people wanted me to run for senate to run against Dodd.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  But anyway, what ended up happening was Dodd decided not to run for reelection. And so he wasn't even a factor. But the minute Dodd dropped out, right, all of a sudden, other Republicans came in. And so it screwed up my chances. If Dodd had stayed in, I don't think Linda McMahon would come into the race. Because what made Linda McMahon think she could win was the fact that Dodd was stepping down. And that was an open seat. And so this guy Dick Blumenthal was coming in to have been Attorney General. And and and so and Linda spent fifty million dollars in the primary. Or in the no, she spent thirty million in the primary, fifty million total. But she spent thirty million against me. I only spent three and a half million. And a million of that was my money, a little over a million.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  The rest of it, two and a half million, I got from donations, you know, mostly small donations around the country. But she spent so much money that I, you know, and she got a lot more media than I did, free media. A lot of the media in Connecticut decided not to cover me. You know, and and the interesting was in the polls, all the polls, like even going into the election. I was polling at like three percent, four percent. I got twenty-three percent of the vote. Linda got, you know, like forty-five and then or fifty. And then there was another guy that got, you know, about the same as me, maybe a little more. This guy Rob Simmons, who had been a congressman for twenty years in Connecticut. He was a he was the establishment Republican.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  And then Linda kind of stole my fire as the outsider business person. But, you know, a lot of people were telling me that the reason they didn't vote for me is because they didn't think I had a chance because I was so low in the polls. But I actually got twenty-three percent of the vote. And so, you know, it's possible that, you know, had the polls been more accurate, people might have been a little bit more encouraged. And, you know, there was only one debate. We had one debate early on. And I I won that debate. Every newspaper said I won that debate. And after that debate, Linda refused to have any more debates. So I lost the opportunity to debate Linda McMahon. Because after the first one, that not that many people saw, she refused to debate me again. So I, you know.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Oh, thi- this is the other worst part about thi- this is what the Republicans did to me in Connecticut. So, we went to the convention in Connecticut, and you know, you have to get nominated. And every year, except my year, the nominees are allowed to give a speech, right, to the convention. Hey, this is who I am, this is why you should nominate me. So Linda McMahon lobbied, and she got them to change that, so that nobody was allowed to give a speech. Because she didn't want people to hear me talk, she knows I'm a good speaker. So, they changed it so that you could just submit a five-minute video. So instead of addressing the convention, we were only allowed to submit a five-minute video.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  So Linda's video played first, she had her five-minute video, then Rob Simmons' video played, and then when it came to play my video, the video equipment broke, and so my video didn't play. So, not only did I not get to address the convention, I didn't even get to play my video. Coincidentally, it happened to break down just in time for my video. And then I ended up, you know, just barely missing. I didn't quite get enough votes, because Linda had her people out there, you know, spreading rumors about me to try to make sure I didn't get enough votes to get on a ballot. So then I had to spend another 150 grand, and I became the first person in Connecticut to ever partition this way onto a nationwide ballot. And I ended up getting on the ballot in the Republican nomination that year.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  But again, it was a complete waste of money, because, you know, I ended up, I didn't go anywhere. That was kind of the end of my political career.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  It started, though, with Ron Paul. I was an economic advisor to his presidential campaign in 2008. And he was the only guy that was running in '08 that was critical of the Fed and that understood the bubble, you know. Yeah, for sure. And so, let's talk a little bit, you're a huge proponent of gold, and obviously have the asset management business, etc. Maybe talk to us just kind of about your philosophy. Around asset management and personal finance. And then how you look at something like gold and how that fits into into that portfolio construction. Yeah, well, you know, I look at gold as money. And and so it's if you want to just have some dry powder.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  If you want to have liquidity, rather than just considering, well, I can keep dollars or I can keep euros or I could keep yen. What about gold? I mean, gold is the real deal. Gold is actual money. All these currencies are are money substitutes. Of course, when they were legitimate currencies, they were backed by gold. And it was the gold backing that gave them their value. But once governments went off the gold standard, you know, then they became fiat. And and so they're, you know, they don't have any any real value. They they have, you know, market value and they have the value of being legal tender. They have the value that, you know, they're used as a medium of exchange and that they're accepted in payment of taxes and stuff like that. But they don't have the real value that gold has.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  And so if you really want to just not invest in stocks because you think they're expensive or not invest in bonds or not invest in real estate, you want to just keep some savings. I think gold is a much better vehicle to save than any of these fiat currencies. And if you go back over time, that is the case. Now, if you can get a high enough interest on your fiat currency, that interest may be able to confiscate confiscate you or compensate you for the loss of purchasing power that you're going to get on an annual basis because they keep printing more money. But now, when you have interest rates so low, I mean, most people don't get any interest at all. I mean, you've got negative interest rates in some cases. So the argument for holding gold, even over Swiss francs now, right?

• 25:12Speaker 02

  Where you have negative rates, has never been stronger. So that's, you know, I tell you, if you're going to, you know, you want to keep some dry powder, you should buy gold. But, you know, I think gold is underpriced, though, given how much money has been created over the last decade or two and how much more money is going to be created to try to keep these bubbles from deflating. The price of gold should be much higher and it would be much higher. If more people understood this, then and over time, they're going to figure it out and the price is going to go much higher. But in the meantime, people who figured it out early should be loading up. But I think the real profit potential, if you want to make a lot of money off the increase in the price of gold, not just preserve your wealth, the gold stocks,

• 25:55Speaker 02

  I think are a incredible opportunity. I think there's a lot of small stocks that are going to go up 10x, 20x, 50x, maybe even 100x by the end of this bull market. And so for the speculators who really want to try to, you know, strike it rich, you know, in the gold rush, they should be looking at gold mining stocks. I, you know, we, we have separately managed accounts of mining stocks. And we also have a gold fund, the EuroPacific Gold Fund, EPGFX is the symbol on my gold fund. And yes, it's speculative. I mean, most of the money we manage is not in gold stocks. It's a more conservative dividend paying foreign stocks. But for the people who really want to bet big that I'm right on gold, if I am right, that's going to be the big payoff. Like I, you know, I did the subprime short

• 26:36Speaker 02

  and we made good money shorting the subprime market. I think the payoff on long gold stocks is actually going to be bigger than the subprime short.

• 26:45Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your take on Bitcoin? I know that you're a huge detractor. Give us kind of high level philosophically, what's, why are you so bearish on it?

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you know, the Fed created the dot com bubble, the Fed created the housing bubble, and the Fed created the Bitcoin bubble. You know, maybe not exactly the same way, but I think Bitcoin started out as kind of a reaction to all the monetary policy mistakes that the Fed had made. And people were looking out for an alternative. And Bitcoin came on the scene. And, you know, initially, you know, there was a libertarian community, a hard money community that was playing around with it. You know, I found out about it early on. And, you know, just kind of dismissed it. Because my initial read on it was, well, what's to stop somebody else from coming up with another cryptocurrency, which of

• 27:38Speaker 02

  course, nothing did. There's thousands of them now. And I didn't see the intrinsic value in it. But I also didn't see that the bubble I mean, I really didn't think it would grow to the scale that it did. Otherwise, I could have thrown some money at it as a flyer. But I initially kind of dismissed it because of the properties that it didn't have, right? And, and of course, then, you know, when it, it all of a sudden, it came on the scene and went up to a thousand. And I remember where that happened and all of a sudden, you know, people started talking about it. And, um, you know, they mentioned it on CNBC and it was there. And I think what really kind of breathed life into it is once gold kind of peaked out uh, at nineteen hundred and silver peaked out on at fifty.

• 28:22Speaker 02

  You had this, this bear market that went on in the precious metals, pretty vicious, you know, a correction for a number of years and that frustrated a lot of, you know, people that would be buying gold and silver. And all of a sudden, they saw Bitcoin kind of going up and gold and silver were going down. And I think that created some initial demand, but all of a sudden they took on, you know, uh, these bubble characteristics, I, you know, then it pulled back, you know, it got back down to two hundred, you know, three hundred, it stayed there for a couple of years. And I, and I actually, you know, thought about, you know, maybe I should buy some just to, you know, just as a, as a speculation. But I just couldn't convince myself to pay two or three hundred dollars for something that I didn't want to buy at twenty dollars. Uh, you know, fundamentally, I didn't see any difference in it.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  And, and then, you know, the bubble really went crazy when it went up to twenty thousand. And that's when I think the whole mania peaked and you had everybody buying it. People were calling me up, wanting to buy it. I had clients calling me up when Bitcoin was fifteen thousand or wanting to put their whole IRAs into Bitcoin. I mean, nobody ever called me to buy any Bitcoin until that point. I mean, I, I talked about it and I said, I, you know, I didn't think it was going to work as money and I still don't think it's going to work as money. But the bubble, it really was a frenzy and, you know, and I talk to people now who are kind of in Bitcoin and just kind of committed to it, like all into it mentally, they own a bunch of it. They, it, it, it, to me, it's exactly like when I was talking to people about real estate

• 29:48Speaker 02

  in 2005 and 2006. My house is never going to go down. It's always going to go up. You're a fool for renting. You know, you're wasting your money. I mean, people were completely into this. They thought there was no way that real estate could go down. And the same stuff, you know, I, I talked to people till I was blue in the face about the dot com stocks that ultimately, you know, a lot of them, most of them went bankrupt. But I remember the attitudes that people had about their favorite dot com stock. Even if they acknowledged that other stocks could collapse, the ones that they owned were never going to go down. I mean, so people have a certain attitude that they assume when they're trapped in the bubble and how it influences their behavior and their way of thinking.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  And I see all of those characteristics, maybe even stronger when it comes to the people who are in Bitcoin. But I just think this is another big bubble. It's gonna pop. Personally, I think the high is in for this bubble. I think that spike up to 20,000 at the end of 2017, around the launch of the Bitcoin futures and all that hysteria, I think that was it. And I think now it's a question of the air coming out. Uh, you know, we have these sucker rallies, you know, bull markets, the bear markets fall a slope of hope. You know, you have rallies, people get excited, oh, it's going to 20,000, it's going to 50,000.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  But I think the smart money is just trying to get out, you know, and I think it's at this point, you know, you, you don't want to be the bag holder, you know?

• 31:16Anthony Pompliano?

  So let, let's go through kind of first from a macro standpoint, right? I'm going to put Bitcoin and gold in the same bucket for the moment. I know you don't want to agree to that, but let's just put it in the same bucket and say the macro environment that we're in today, um, there's a lot to be concerned about, right? I think there's a lot of what I'll call kind of alarm bells going on. And earlier we're talking about kind of the funding crisis around the currency crisis, the sovereign debt, bonds, etc. First, let's just talk about why you think people should be looking at this bucket, whether it's gold, bitcoin, whatever it is, due to that macro environment. And then we can get into, you know, talking through the differences between bitcoin and gold.

• 32:00Anthony Pompliano?

  But just from a macro standpoint, like, what are the signals that you're seeing that has you kind of ringing those alarm bells and saying, hey, people should be paying attention again?

• 32:08Speaker 02

  Well, you know, when you get to a point now where you've got negative interest rates, right? You know that we're kind of at the end of the rope here. Because what these central banks have been doing, in order to avoid the political pain of having to address economic imbalances, having to cut government spending, right? Having to allow debt to be restructured and investors to lose money. They keep kicking the can down the road by lowering and lowering interest rates. But the biggest problem in the global economy is that interest rates are too low. That is the problem. That's not the solution. That is the problem. And the longer they keep raised and the lower they keep them, the bigger the problem gets.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  It's that, you know, but every time they get a new, basically, you know, injection of cheaper money, they, you know, there's like a high, right? All of a sudden, you know, oh, it's like, if you're an individual and you're broke, you've run up a bunch of credit card debt and you're about to go bankrupt. And all of a sudden, somebody sends you another credit card with, you know, another $10,000 limit. Oh, great, now I can go out. And all of a sudden, you go out and start spending money again because you got another credit card. Well, all that means is that you're going to end up with even more debt than you had before. Your problems haven't been solved. You've just been able to kick them the can down the road because now you can go deeper into debt. But ultimately, you end up with even bigger problem than when you had before because now you owe even more money. And so this is what the central banks are doing. We have too much debt.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  And whenever that debt becomes a problem, like it did in 2008, they just, well, we need even more debt. We need to have an even bigger bubble. And now we don't have to deal with the problems of this. Smaller bubble. And so they keep lowering interest rates. But as they do that, they're interfering with the real economy. What the real economy wants is higher interest rates. They want more savings, more capital investment, less spending, less speculation. Uh, we need to have a restructuring. And as the, the central banks resist that, we're just getting, the economy is getting sicker, right? It's like if you're, you know, you're high on drugs and every time you stop taking drugs and now you start going through withdrawal, they just give you more drugs.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  So, you know, the drugs never get out of your system and you, you know, you never, you know, you never cure your habit because you keep taking drugs every time the effect starts to wear off. But at some point, right, they keep lowering rates, lowering rates, lowering rates. And now they get to zero and now they still want to lower rates. And they don't realize that the lower rates, the problem. It's like I've used the analogy to a, a medieval, uh, you know, barbers, doctors, whatever they used to call them, uh, with bloodletting, right? They'd have a patient who was sick and the solution is, oh, oh, we need to take some blood out. We need to bleed them. Let's get leeches and take, you know, and then they take blood out and then the, the patient gets sicker. And it's, well, I guess we didn't take out enough blood. Let's take out some more. And so I guess eventually you take out enough blood and the, and the patient dies.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  They don't realize that the problem, that, that their cure is actually making the patient sicker. And that's what the central banks are doing. When they cut rates and they print money, they're actually making the underlying economy sicker, even though it doesn't look sicker because they're just measuring, you know, the spending that goes on and they're ignoring the debt that's behind it. So I think we're at the point now where we're going to overdose on all this printing. I think that when this bubble pops, when the US economy goes back into recession, the amount of money that they're going to have to print, right? I, is gonna, is gonna crash the dollar. I think inflation, which, you know, the way the government measures it is even, you know, running at 2%, a little over 2%. The way they measure it, which is not very accurate by design.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  But I think that inflation rate is going to continue to head higher, 3%, 4%, 5%. And people are going to lose confidence in holding on to dollars. Because if the inflation rate is 4% or 5% compounding, and you're getting 0% interest or whatever on your dollars, you know, that's a one-way ticket to a disaster. And people are going to want to cast that in. They're going to want to jump that ship before it sinks. And where are they going to go? Right? I mean, it's going to be a currency crisis. And I think inflation is going to break out all around the world. And, you know, a lot of these central banks have been hiding behind low inflation. They've been saying, oh, inflation is not high enough. We need more inflation. And that's been the justification for this monetary policy. But, you know, low inflation is not a problem.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  I mean, zero inflation is better than low inflation. And falling prices are better than prices that are rising slightly. But the central banks are pretending that we can't have economic growth unless prices rise by 2% a year or more, which is a bunch of self-serving nonsense. But at some point, the inflation is going to be high enough that they can no longer, you know, pretend that the problem is there's not enough inflation. And now they're forced to raise rates. But that's what it hits the fan. Because now the debt bubble pops. And now you have to pay the piper. And I think, you know, the country that's got the biggest tab is going to be the United States. Because we've basically benefited the most from this monetary system, this fiat-based system, because we're the center of it.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  We're the reserve currency. And Americans have been able to live beyond their means more than any other nation. We've been able to consume without producing. We've been able to borrow without savings. And we've built an entire economy based on the perpetuation of this continuing, that we can run trade deficits forever and budget deficits forever, and keep having low interest rates and consumer prices that aren't going up. And when that whole thing changes, there's a whole monetary crisis. And, you know, I think that the only way out of the monetary crisis is for central banks to go back to gold. I mean, I think the United States convinced the world. After the Second World War, to abandon the gold standard and to adopt the dollar standard,

• 38:01Speaker 02

  mainly because the dollar was not only backed by gold, but convertible into gold. And we had all the gold. We were the most powerful economy. We had the biggest trade surpluses. We were the biggest creditor nation. And so the world trusted us. And then we screwed them over and, you know, we basically defaulted on our promise in 1971. And we've been on this fiat system ever since. I think the only thing that will work is for the world to go back to gold, right? Some people think, well, you know, the dollar is never going to lose its reserve status. Because, you know, what currency is the world going to go to? They're not going to take the euro. They're not going to take the yen. I agree. Those are not viable alternatives. But what is the most viable alternative is that the world simply goes back to what the reserve was prior to the dollar, and that was gold.

• 38:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Why do you think that they can't just continue to print money and manipulate the economy? Like, what stops them from just forever kicking the can down the road? Even though structurally, you know, I agree with you that it's absolute insanity. Like, what stops them from just doing it forever?

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Well, you know, nothing that can't go on forever will, right? Just like the housing bubble didn't go on forever, the dot com bubble. This bubble won't go on forever because what is allowing it to happen is, you know, pretending that it's all temporary, right? When the Fed did QE, the secret to it not producing a crisis was the Fed telling everybody this is temporary. This is an emergency, and when the emergency is over, we're going to reverse the process and normalize interest rates and shrink our balance sheet. Rates are not going to be down here. And so the markets believed that this was temporary. And the Fed always says, look, if inflation ever rears up, you know, we can fight it really easy, right?

• 39:43Speaker 02

  We can just jack up interest rates, which is a lie. They can't do that, and they won't do that. But as long as the markets believe that the Fed has this under control, that they can shrink their balance sheet, they can normalize rates, they can fight inflation, well, then maybe it goes on. But at some point, the Fed is going to have to put up or shut up because inflation is going to pick up. Up, right? And they're not gonna be able to fight it. In fact, the economy started to turn down. And now, what did the Fed do? The Fed called off rate hikes. They've now cut rates twice. They're about to cut them again. They've stopped shrinking their balance sheet. They're now back to quantitative easing. They're not admitting that it's QE, but they're actually expanding their balance sheet faster now than they were when they were doing QE.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  So, of course, they're doing QE. So, the Fed has already basically caught all his pants down. And I don't think it's gonna take much more. And, of course, if Donald Trump isn't re-elected, if we get one of these socialists, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and they want Medicare for all and free healthcare and all this stuff, I mean, that's gonna blow the bank. I mean, you're gonna be talking about three to four trillion dollar a year deficits. These are impossible to finance. I mean, we're already having a problem financing the deficits. That's why the Fed is back doing QE. There's just not enough private demand for all the debt that the government is selling.

• 41:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's your take in terms of the presidential election? As we're facing this kind of macro situation, does anybody have a solid plan? Or are they all completely out? No one understands it?

• 41:16Speaker 02

  No, no, no one has a plan. I mean, no one's even talking about the debt. And you watch these Democratic debates, there's never even a question on the debt. Nobody, no one even mentions that. And, you know, so I guess it's probably not even gonna be an issue in the campaign, right? Even though Donald Trump is the biggest deficit spender ever, or he's bigger than Obama, it's not even gonna be called, you know, as an issue. But, no, everybody has a plan to make government bigger. You know, they want more government. Like, look at these idiots. You know, an easy example is the college student loan crisis. I mean, one of the things that all these Democrats wanna talk about is how we have this huge student loan problem, and we need to forgive the loans and make college free. But all these Democrats don't understand

• 42:00Speaker 02

  that the only reason we have a student loan problem is because of the government. The only reason that there are student loans is because of the government. Without the government, there would be no student loans. The government made the loans. The government guaranteed the loans. And before the government guaranteed student loans... College wasn't expensive. You didn't need to borrow money to go to college. Before the government started that loan program, people either their parents paid for college, or they had summer jobs, like my dad, and they worked their way through college. It wasn't hard to do, right? But now it's impossible to do because the government has made college so expensive because of the moral hazards associated with student loans. But now, instead of, you know, getting government out of education, so the cost can go down, they want to make it free, so the cost will be even higher, right?

• 42:45Speaker 02

  So they have no clue. All these socialists, they look at these problems that were caused by socialist programs that have been mixed into a capitalist economy, and instead of recognizing that it's the socialism that's been mixed in with capitalism, that's the problem, they want to blame it on capitalism, and they want even more socialism. Which again, it's like the same thing the central banks do. They keep interest rates artificially low, they screw up the economy, and then they think, "Oh, we just need to make interest rates even lower. We have to print even more money." And now they screw up the economy even more, and so the solution is, "Let's do more of the same."

• 43:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So, if President Peter Schiff ever happened, what would you do? Like, what is the ideal solution? You hit on a little bit of it already, but like, what's the perfect plan?

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Well, look, you know, there is no perfect plan, right? I mean, it's, you know, we're gonna have to have a severe recession if we're ever going to, you know, build a viable economy, right? Trump campaigned about making America great again. You know, I would love to make America great again, but I recognize that the road to greatness is a very bumpy road. And so, if we do all the right stuff, you know, it's gonna be difficult initially for a lot of people. Just like, you know, I mentioned the drugs analogy. You know, if you're a drug addict and you want to kick the habit, and you're gonna go to rehab, I mean, rehab is, you know, it's not like going to Club Med. I mean, it's not, it's not fun. That's why it's hard for people to go there. But if you do it, and you do the right thing, you can improve your life. So, we have to go on a monetary rehab.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Americans have to stop spending and buying stuff. We have to start saving again. We have to start making capital investments. We have to start dismantling a lot of the government. You know, we have to start getting rid of agencies and departments, making government much, much smaller. We need to return a lot of government workers to the private sector so they can work productively. And we've got to repeal a lot of these labor laws, minimum wage laws, and occupational licensing laws, and all these discrimination laws that drive up the cost of employment, you know, because we're going to need to put people to work productively. It'd be great if we can get rid of the income tax and the social security tax. We could do that if we really shrink government. But I don't think there's any way out of this that includes paying

• 44:56Speaker 02

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

• 45:41Speaker 02

  know, we can achieve tremendous prosperity. You know, but what they're selling us now is just snake oil. It's just socialism.

• 45:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think in terms of that default situation? Like, what does that look like, right? If we actually did say, okay, we're just going to kind of bite the bullet and we're going to default, like, what happens in that scenario?

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, the bondholders don't get back, you know, 100 cents on the dollar. But the important thing to recognize is, we're defaulting no matter what, right? Because honest repayment is impossible, right? It is impossible to repay the debt, right? And so the only question is, how do we default on it? Do we do it the honest way, which is the way I think it should be done, or are we going to do it the dishonest way, which is the way it's Probably gonna be done and that's through inflation, right? You just print money, right? So you don't default on your obligations. You print up all the money and you give everybody the money they're owed. But what happens under that scenario is the money doesn't buy very much. So the creditors lose out either way. Either they don't get back all of their dollars

• 46:44Speaker 02

  or they get back all their dollars, but they don't get back their purchasing power. And under my scenario of an honest default, I think the creditors will end up better off. I think they'll actually have more purchasing power if they get paid 20 cents on the dollar, you know, whatever. Versus inflation where they maybe get 2 cents on the dollar, right? We have high inflation. So, you know, my scenario would be better. And it would be much better for the economy because the worst thing for the economy is to destroy the currency. I mean, that's much worse than defaulting on debt.

• 47:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think we're headed there? Like, is the currency screwed either way?

• 47:19Speaker 02

  Look, the currency's going down. The only question is, you know, is it gonna go to zero or how close is it gonna get? But the dollar is going down. I mean, all fiat currencies are gonna go down. I mean, they're designed to go down. In fact, if you listen to what these central bankers are saying, they want their currency to lose 2% of its value every year. Well, after 50 years, that's almost everything, right? So, you know, if you lose 2% of your value every year, I mean, you're, you know, you're going way down. But, you know, the thing is, if the, if the central bankers are telling you they want the currency to lose 2%, it's gonna lose a lot more than that. Because not too long ago, the central bankers were promising price stability. They weren't saying that they wanted prices to go up 2% a year. They said their goal was to have stable prices.

• 48:04Speaker 02

  Well, when their goal was stable prices, we still had rising prices. So now that their goal is rising prices, imagine how much faster prices are gonna rise when their goal was to make them rise. So, you know, they're gonna way overshoot this, this so-called 2% number. So, we know that these currencies are gonna go down. They're gonna go way down. And the question is, how fast and do you go down with the ship? Or do you do something about it? Do you abandon ship? And that's what I've done, right? I mean, I've gotten off the Titanic and I'm in a, in a lifeboat. Now, I think people who are coming to this conclusion, but who are going into Bitcoin, see, I think they're jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I, I think that fiat cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin could end up zeroing out long before the dollar does. Or close, close to it. So, let's talk-

• 48:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk about gold and Bitcoin, right? As this macro situation plays out, your belief is that we would return back to like a gold standard? Or are we gonna walk around with gold coins in our pocket? Like, what do you actually think would be the solution and how gold plays into that?

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Well, gold just needs to be the reserve that anchors currency. So just like central banks now have reserves of foreign exchange, most central banks also have gold as a portion of their reserves. They just need to increase the gold component of those reserves and then fix their currency to the price of gold at some convertible rate. I mean, so, you know, when we were on a gold standard, it didn't mean that you had to walk around with gold coins, although some people did. But we still had paper money, except the paper money was backed by gold, right? You can get the gold if you wanted to, but you can also transact in the paper. And, you know, today with the, you know, the internet and digital, I mean, you can transact in gold digitally. It's not hard to do.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  I mean, you take a company like Goldmoney, that I'm associated with, and, you know, you can have a Goldmoney account, but I can transfer, you know, any amount of gold from my account to anybody else's account. I don't have to even give them a whole ounce. I can give them a gram of gold, right? So I can, I can, you know, pay for a small transaction instantly and transfer ownership of gold. So people don't have to walk around with gold in order to be on a gold standard. You just have to have gold that's backing up the transactions. You have to have gold as, you know, a monetary reference. Because the reason that we have gold is because gold replaced barter. And what barter is, is, you know, you're exchanging one product of value for another product of value.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Gold or money was an invention that improved commerce because it was the commodity that could be accepted in exchange for all commodities so that, you know, if I was a chairmaker and I wanted to buy a steak, I didn't have to find a butcher who wanted one of my chairs, right? And that could take forever. But I know, hey, I can give the butcher gold because he can use gold to buy whatever he wants. Everybody will accept gold as the one commodity that is the most liquid of all commodities. So it became money. So that you have to have, money has to be an actual commodity. It just can't be something that's made up out of thin air. It has to actually be. A good that has value because that's what you're doing. When you're buying and selling something and you're paying in gold,

• 51:23Speaker 02

  you're paying in real value. You're getting goods or services of value and you're paying with it, with something of value. That's the problem with Bitcoin. If I'm transacting for Bitcoin, I'm giving somebody value, either goods or services, and they're giving me nothing. They're giving me digital nothing. They're not giving me anything that I can use. You know, I keep challenging the Bitcoin people because they keep telling me that, you know, gold has no uses and Bitcoin does. It's the opposite. Gold has all sorts of uses. Bitcoin has none. I mean, you could use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange. It's not a great medium of exchange, but you can use it. But you have to have an alternative use, right? I mean, because let's say the price of Bitcoin just collapses. Because people, you know, it's all about what people believe.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  If people think it's going to be worth something, they're willing to buy it. Uh, but there's nothing that would prevent it from imploding because all of a sudden people stop believing it's going to go up and they no longer want to buy it. That can't happen with gold. Because even if, even if investors decided they didn't want any gold, for whatever reason, I don't think they would decide that. But let's say the price of gold crashed. And let's say it went down to $500 an ounce from 1500. It's, I don't think it's going to happen, but let's say that happened. Because investors just stopped believing in it. Well, there would be tremendous demand from industry, from jewelry, to buy up that gold. I mean, you know, there's, there's a lot of uses for gold. People would look at that, oh my God, there's a sale on gold. It'll be loaded up, I can buy some, I can, you know, get some gold.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  And, you know, there's a lot of, um, areas where gold would be used, but it's too expensive. So they use copper or some other metal that isn't as good, but doesn't cost as much. But as the price of gold comes down, uh, more people will decide to use gold instead of, uh, lesser metals. And of course, nobody's going to mine gold at $500 because it costs a hell of a lot more than that to mine it. So there's no more supply coming on the market. And eventually the price would come back up because there's real demand. But in Bitcoin, there is no real buyer for Bitcoin. There is no user of Bitcoin. It's all speculation. So if speculators no longer want to buy Because now they think it's going down and not going up, then the thing implodes and it's all over.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  And so because of that, I mean, you can't store any real value in Bitcoin, because any day you wake up, it could be gone. Because it's all an illusion. It's all just on paper.

• 53:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but but so let's let's go through that, though, right? I think that um there is an argument that many, many other assets that you own outside of currencies have now become digital. And you can make the exact same argument that tomorrow you could wake up and they're gone, but that doesn't mean that they don't have value.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  Well, what do you mean? Give me an example.

• 54:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, let's take, for example, um a music file. Let's take uh US dollars, right?

• 54:09Speaker 02

  Well, all right, let's let's take a music file, first of all. So first of all, a music file. The value that I get from a music file is I can play the music and I can listen to it. And that can entertain me. I can sing along to it. I can dance to it. I can create atmosphere for, you know, a romantic dinner or for a party. So there's a use to that file. And of course, if the file gets destroyed, I mean, how much is the file? A dollar? You know, it's not, there's not a lot of monetary value there, but there is actual use to me, right? That it's Bitcoin, I can't do anything with Bitcoin. I can't, it can't entertain me. It can't, it's not atmosphere, right? It doesn't do anything. It's not an actual asset like a music.

• 54:53Anthony Pompliano?

  You can definitely do something with it, right? Because you can do, you can do.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  You can, you can, other than, other than exchange it to somebody else. You have to come up with a use case. I know I can give it to somebody. I can transfer it to somebody else if they want it. But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about if I was sitting alone, right? In my house with my Bitcoin. What can I do with it? I can listen to the music. I can enjoy the music. What can I do with my Bitcoin?

• 55:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, so there's a couple of different things that you can do. One is you can store your wealth in Bitcoin. So it can hold on, hold on, you can store wealth, you can you can transact. You also, did you know that you could actually put a message onto the Bitcoin blockchain? You could write an immutable message?

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Okay, so you're saying that the value of Bitcoin is, it's like I can send a message? Well, I can send a message on WhatsApp, I can send it, and that costs me nothing. Why would I have to buy an expensive Bitcoin to send a message when I can send a message for free on WhatsApp? I mean, it seems like a very expensive messaging service if you're saying that I can use Bitcoin to send a message.

• 55:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm not arguing that that's what gives it value, but I'm saying that there's multiple...

• 56:02Speaker 02

  That's what you came up with, because when you said I can transact it, that doesn't count. And saying it should store a value doesn't count either as a use.

• 56:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Why doesn't it count?

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Because storing value is not the use. The use is what you can do with it. Like, the reason I store value in gold, right? The reason you say gold is a store of value is because if I have an ounce of gold today, there are a lot of things that that gold can be used for. It can be made into jewelry, it can be put into, you know, electronics, it can be made and used in dentistry, there's all sorts of things that it can be used for. If I don't, if I take that gold and store it for 100 years, you can still use it for those things 100 years from now. So the value of that gold is preserved because gold doesn't decay, it doesn't rot, right? It stays exactly the same. So everything I can do with my gold today, that value is stored for the future. Well, I can't do anything with Bitcoin today.

• 56:58Speaker 02

  So if I can't do anything with it today, it doesn't have any value that I can store into the future. When you talk about a store of value for Bitcoin, yes, people that bought Bitcoin years and years ago for 10 cents, a dollar, $100, they have more money now if they want to cash out. That's not a store of value. What that means is what they bought went up in market value because somebody else now wants to buy it and is willing to pay more. So they have a speculative gain on that asset. It didn't store any value because there was no value, but there is a perception, and so you had an increase and you have the opportunity to sell at a profit, just like there were people who bought dot-com stocks and they had the opportunity to sell for profit, even

• 57:42Speaker 02

  though the underlying companies had no real value because they lost money and they had no prospect of ever making money. But that didn't stop people on gambling on them, and so they did. And so people gambled on Bitcoin, and if they're smart, they can cash out and they have a profitable gamble. But the people who are buying what they're selling are the bag holders, because now they're going to ride the thing down, because there was never any value there to begin with. It was just a perception. And as soon as that perception changes, as soon as people no longer believe the price is going to keep going up, then there's no reason for anybody to own it, and then the price implodes.

• 58:18Anthony Pompliano?

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• 59:42Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:00:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Part of this is Bitcoin is more scarce and sounder money than gold, no?

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  No, I mean, A, I mean, it's scarce in that, okay, yes, in theory, there's only 21 million Bitcoins, right? And assuming that, you know,

• 1:00:31Anthony Pompliano?

  That makes it more scarce than gold, right?

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  Well, look, scarce, look, you know, I could, Peter, original Peter Schiff art is more scarce than gold. What, what, what is that worth? I mean, there are a lot of things that are scarce that don't necessarily have value. They have to be scarce and they have to have use and be valuable, right? Because scarcity doesn't mean anything if nobody wants it, right? Because if you have, and if nobody wants any Bitcoin, the fact there's 21 million of them, you know, that's 21 million too many if nobody wants it. But I'll, even if you agree that no supercomputer or quantum computer is going to be able to, you know, crack this and counterfeit the Bitcoins, and even if you forget about all the forks and the Bitcoin cash and the Bitcoin gold and the, what a Bitcoin this, the Bitcoin that, even if you just want to focus just on Bitcoin and say,

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  okay, there's 21 million of them.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  There are 3,000 other cryptocurrencies that already exist

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  that have properties that are very similar to Bitcoin. Some have properties that are actually better than Bitcoin when it comes to transactions. And, and, and so, since Bitcoin doesn't offer anything that's unique that other cryptocurrencies don't have or can't improve upon, then what, why does anybody think the scarcity matters? You know, when, when Bitcoin first started, right? And, and, and they were people trying to get me into it. The whole idea was that this was money. This was a medium of exchange. This is, you could buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin. Nobody was talking about, oh, it's digital gold. The value was that it was, it was great as a medium of exchange.

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  Well, when it failed to do that, when it really didn't function well as a medium of exchange, then they came up with this alternative store that is digital gold that, well, nobody's actually going to use it for anything. They're just going to store it like they store gold. Because gold isn't used for anything is a bunch of nonsense because gold is used for a lot of things. Gold is not worthless. Gold has a lot of value. That's why people own it. That's why it's being stored. So, but Bitcoin, yes, when they created Bitcoin, it was designed to mimic gold. It was a counterfeit of gold, right? They make, they represented like a gold colored coin, even though it has no color, it has no substance. You mine Bitcoin, even though you don't mine it, you solve a math problem.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  So they tried to make it out like they were creating gold out of nothing, which, you know, but they're not. You're not creating gold. You don't have any actual gold. That's why it's the ultimate fool's gold.

• 1:03:02Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so we'll agree to disagree on that last statement, but I think we at least establish that Bitcoin is more scarce than gold. But to your point, it's only important if there is demand for that scarce asset, right? So I think that from a structural standpoint, that's correct.

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  Well, how much gold, when you say there's 20, it's scarce than gold, there's only 21 million. I mean, but gold is not expressed in millions. I mean, are there 21 million ounces of gold in the world? I don't think so. That's a lot. I think that's a lot of ounces. But so you're talking about, you have to break, you know, gold down. I mean, all the gold in the world that's ever been mined would fit inside an Olympic sized swimming pool. So that seems pretty scarce to me, although, you know, I mean, I think if you, in order to maintain the Bitcoin network, right? Because Bitcoin is not just the Bitcoins, because Bitcoin is nothing without all these computers all over the world that are required to, you know, operate the system and all the energy that is required to be expended

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  in order to perpetuate the system. So, you know, when you throw all that together, I mean, you know, there's a lot more of that than there is gold.

• 1:04:11Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we'll agree to disagree. In terms of sound money, right? Why do you think Bitcoin is not sound money?

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  Well, because money by definition needs to be a commodity, right? And Bitcoin is not. Bitcoin doesn't have any value in another stuff.

• 1:04:29Anthony Pompliano?

  The CFTC says that.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  It's a commodity. Well, they're just trying to define it for regulatory purposes. But it's not a commodity like soybeans are a commodity, or like oil is a commodity, or like copper is a commodity. It's not used. I mean, for all other commodities, there's actual demand for the commodity. It's used, right? If it's food, it's consumed. If it's metal, it's fashioned into something. But Bitcoin is not used by anybody for anything. So it is not technically a commodity, even if the CFC wants to define it as a commodity so it can regulate it. And so it can, you know, apply that to it. But it's not really a commodity, just because the government wants to claim it is.

• 1:05:10Speaker 02

  Um, you know, I mean, to me, it's more like a fiat currency if it's used as a medium of exchange. Because fiat currency has no value either, right? It's just a piece of paper fundamentally. And ultimately, all fiat currencies historically have gone to zero. Uh, and so, you know, and so I think the same thing would happen to the fiat currencies that exist today. It's just taking, you know, longer for it to happen. Uh, but to me, Bitcoin is more of a fiat currency, right? Because a currency is not money. A currency is a substitute for money. You could use currency instead of money, but it's not money, right? Because money is a specific type of commodity. A currency is a medium of exchange, but that doesn't make it money.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  Just because we use these words interchangeably now, doesn't mean that that's what they are. Just like the definition of inflation is an expansion of the supply of money. It's not prices going up, but we now, you know, redefine inflation to mean something that it doesn't mean. Uh, the same thing with money and currency. You know, when you look at a Federal Reserve note that you have in your hand, it's currency, right? It's a note. The money was the dollars, the gold that used to back it up. Because the original Federal Reserve notes set on them, promised to pay, will pay to the bearer on demand, you know, $10 of gold, or, you know, $20 of gold. So there was actual gold, that was the money, right? That was legally what money was, was gold.

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  And but people used substitutes like currency, it, it, it, because it was easier to transact, right? Rather than taking your gold around, you left your gold in a vault with a blacksmith or with a bank, and you took a bank note and you transacted in a money substitute, not the money itself. But You know, if you had a penny, if you had a nickel, that was money, right? It was money because it was metal. The copper was money, the nickel was money. It was a unit of money, right? But the paper bills were substitutes for money because they were easier to transact it. And so to me, that's what Bitcoin is like. It's like a fiat currency to the extent that you could use it as a medium of exchange. But nobody really uses it as a medium of exchange, the way they use dollars or euros. They just kind of speculated.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  People buy Bitcoin and they hope the price goes up, you know? And that's why they own it, because they think they're going to get rich. I mean, most people today who own Bitcoin have delusions of hundred thousand and million dollars of Bitcoin. That's why they don't want to sell. That's why they're hodling, right? Forever, because they're going to get rich. Well, you know, one of these days, you know, somebody's going to want to move out of their parents' basement, and they're going to have to sell some Bitcoin.

• 1:07:43Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, hold on, we got, there's a bunch of stuff in there. First of all, are you arguing that the only real money is something that is metal?

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  No. I mean, look, salt was money. In fact, the word salary comes from salt. I mean, the Romans paid their soldiers in salt. Cigarettes served as money. GIs after World War II. Because money is a commodity that is being exchanged for other commodities, right? That's what it is. Cattle has been used as money. So all sorts of things could be money. It's just that gold is a much better money, right? It works a lot better. And legally, in the United States, what's money is gold and silver, really, because that's what's in the Constitution, legally as legal tender. But any commodity could be money. It's just, you know, if it's, if people use it as a medium of exchange. But gold is just a better form of money than other commodities that have served as money. Look, the Indians used wampum.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  Seashells have been money, right? But pieces of paper are not money. They are substitutes for money.

• 1:08:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Right? The paper itself doesn't have any actual value. It's not used for anything. Seashells were used for things. They adorned themselves with them. They made necklaces out of them. No, you know, people aren't making necklaces out of dollar bills.

• 1:08:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Can you see a world where...

• 1:09:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Digital commodities or digital assets can serve as money? Or do you think?

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:49Speaker 02

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

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  They have a monopoly on creating fiat currency out of thin air. And they, all these governments, like, they run big deficits and they want people using their money. They don't want people being able to escape their system. And also, they have all sorts of surveillance now on everybody. All these governments now have draconian confiscatory levels of taxes. And the way they keep everybody compliant with these high taxes is because they have records of what everybody's spending their money on. But the minute, if you can actually get outside their surveillance, if you can transact in money where they, where you're more anonymous, then that's a threat to big government. And, you know, and I watch these hearings, you know, you know, where they've

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  Think this is terrible Libra or some other currencies or any cryptocurrencies because they help citizens evade a government oversight. That's a good thing. You know, we want to be able to evade government oversight. We want to make it hard for the government to tax us and to regulate us. That's what keeps us free. You know, the government always wants to claim that, oh, it's about terrorism. It's about, no, it's not. You know, there's old sayings about, you know, people who give up, who give up some liberty in order to achieve security, right? Deserve neither liberty nor security and they'll end up losing them both. I don't care if there's some terrorist activity out there.

• 1:11:49Speaker 02

  I'm not going to give up my freedoms just to potentially have less terrorism because then you have to, the threat is from the government. And, and so, but the government, you know, the government doesn't want us using real money. They don't want us escaping their, their, their system. They want us all staying in their system so they can tax us through inflation, so they can regulate us. And so we, we, we have less ability to resist their tyranny and their power.

• 1:12:13Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. How high do you think Bitcoin can go? If you really believe it's going to zero and it's not going to be valuable, right? And you don't think that it can be money. You, you said that there's delusions of it going to these really high numbers. Like, what do you think happens?

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  Well, look, look, anything can happen, right? I mean, if, if, if, if people decide not to sell Bitcoin, right? If everybody that owns it decides, you know, that they're not going to sell and then people try to buy and there's no, there's no supply, the price could go up, right? And, and look, you know, it went up to 20,000, right? Does that mean it can't go to 50,000? It can't go to 100,000? I mean, it's possible. I just think that the odds of that happening are, are, are low. I mean, it's not impossible. Uh, but it could happen. But no matter how high it goes, it's ultimately going to crash. So that, that, that I'm confident of. But can the bubble get even bigger?

• 1:13:08Speaker 02

  Sure, it could. But, you know, I would rather bet, rather than buying Bitcoin at $8,500 and thinking, oh, maybe it's going to go to 85,000. I make 10 times my money. Just buy some silver at 18. I mean, that probably has a better chance of going up tenfold, I think, than Bitcoin. And it doesn't have any chance of going to zero. In fact, I don't think there's that much downside at silver. Where there's a lot of downside. Of course, the same thing applies to gold. So, and then gold stocks. I mean, if you really want to gamble on the breakdown of the fiat monetary system. I think that, you know, you're better off in mining, gold mining stocks than in Bitcoin. And in fact, I don't even think Bitcoin is really a bet against the dollar or the euro or any of the fiat currencies. I really think it's a bet against gold.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  I think that Bitcoin is going to do better if gold really gets weak. If for some reason the price of gold really starts to fall, that I think is probably more bullish for Bitcoin. Then if we get weakness in the dollar, if we get strength in the price of gold, I think that's ultimately a negative for Bitcoin. Because I think that, you know, to the extent that real gold makes a comeback and more people want to buy real gold, I think that will dampen the enthusiasm for Bitcoin and other alternatives to gold.

• 1:14:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you think it's a bet against gold, right? Wouldn't they, in your opinion, benefit from some of the same macro events and forces?

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  Well, not really. I think that if you look at the way Bitcoin is being positioned and being marketed, you know, particularly if you look at the drop gold campaign, you know, but just in general that, hey, it's a digital gold that's going to eat into gold's market share. This is what I hear all the big guys, the Winkleville and all the other people. It's like, they take a look at what gold's market cap is. Hey, if Bitcoin can capture X percent of gold, this is what it's worth. So it's all about taking market share away from gold and proving that it's better than gold. And so to that, to the extent that gold is succeeding, then there's less of an argument that we need an alternative to gold. But I think if gold is, can be shown as, hey, gold is going down and Bitcoin is going up. Look, see, gold, you know, Bitcoin is working better.

• 1:15:15Speaker 02

  So I think that helps drive the narrative that, oh, Bitcoin is a new gold. And I think that's what helped drive it for those years where gold was in that bear market correction. And a lot of people were getting frustrated that gold was going down and they saw Bitcoin going up. And people just, you know, jumped on that. On that train. And I, and I, and I think, you know, I think if you try to guess the correlation, although I'm not sure, you know, you know, if Bitcoin, if you look at it on a daily basis and look at the price of gold versus the price of Bitcoin, you know, you know, if it's, you know, how the correlation is on any given day, you know, you know, whether it's correlated in a positive or a negative way. Because obviously, you know, most of the time Bitcoin was going up because it started so low, you know, it started at pennies 10 years ago. And it kept going up

• 1:15:58Speaker 02

  and up and up and up and up until, you know, we peaked out in, you know, at 20,000. But maybe even since then, you know, how it's acted since then, if someone has, you know, correlated it to gold on a, on a daily basis.

• 1:16:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, as you, as you kind of think through this, like, what do you think about Libra and the private enterprises trying to create a version of a digital currency, right? Is that something that you think, you spoke a little bit earlier about how the government wanted to happen, but that impact gold prices, how does that impact Bitcoin in your opinion?

• 1:16:30Speaker 02

  Well, look, I, I think that competition would be very healthy in, you know, in, in alternatives to what we have now. And to the extent that Libra is able to get off the ground, I think it would be a good thing. Now, I think that the government is going to regulate it and maybe regulate it out of existence. I mean, depending on how much regulation there's there. I mean, if there was no government around at all, it would be very easy for any company to come up with a cryptocurrency backed by something. It would be very inexpensive, be very easy to do. And then it would be simply about the companies having to compete for trust and confidence.

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  Because ultimately, when there is a digital currency that's backed by something, you have to have trust that the backing is good. And so you have to trust the company that is promising, that they're storing your gold or wherever it is. But I mean, we trust companies all the time. I mean, people buy an insurance policy, they buy life insurance, they trust that the insurance company is going to pay the claim when they die, right? The free market is all about trust. and counterparties and reputation is important and companies compete for reputation and once you have a reputation there is a value to that reputation and a reason to want to maintain it and so I think it would be very good if we had a lot of privately

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  issued currencies that were backed by all sorts of things and let the market decide you know what they prefer and let merchants decide what they want to accept as payment for their goods and services and let consumers decide what they want to save but the last the last thing the government wants the government doesn't want people to have a choice because what they're providing is lousy right the US dollar the euro the yen are lousy monetary substitutes because they are designed to lose value every year you want money to preserve its value especially if you're saving it for the future you want the money to have more value in the future because you're deferring your consumption you should be compensated for not having something today if you have to wait five

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  or 10 years you should have more and that's the idea of money gaining value and a positive interest rate so this would be good and you know even if liber is launched the way you know they're currently presenting it it potentially could be a good thing because there is a basket of currencies in liber right liber is going to be backed by the dollar the euro the yen the R and B you know whatever I'm not sure the exact composition but it's not going to be a fixed basket you're going to have this liber association that's going to be able to you know kind of manage the portfolio of assets which will mainly be government bonds short-term government bonds but in theory then they could look at governments that are more fiscally reckless that are running bigger deficits and printing more

• 1:19:22Speaker 02

  money and decide to reduce the reserve component of that currency or eliminate it and if another country started to be all of a sudden with sound money they were running budget surpluses and they were cutting government spending and doing things that are positive for the long-term value maybe liber could add that to the basket or you know increase its allocation and so if that if being included in that basket became important well then it would be a positive influence on governments around the world towards fiscal responsibility the reason that governments don't want that is they don't want fiscal responsibility they don't want any discipline they want to be able to keep on spending and keep on borrowing and they want the least pressure against that because that's how they they get elected

• 1:20:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So one of the questions then would be, let's say that there is a breakdown in the dollar and gold would benefit and people would flee to gold. Wouldn't the government just ban the ownership of gold like they did in the, was it the 30s?

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  Well, you know, when Roosevelt basically made it illegal for Americans to own gold, 1933, we were on a gold standard, you know, and the whole thing, everything they did was illegal, but he got away with it. But Roosevelt wanted to devalue the dollar. But in order to do that, he had to take everybody's gold because the dollar was defined legally as $20 was an ounce of gold. And so in order to devalue the dollar, he needed to get everybody's gold. So that's what he did. And as soon as he did that, he devalued the dollar and now you needed $35 to get an ounce of gold instead of 20. But in order to devalue the Federal Reserve note, because it's not even really a dollar, but let's just call it a dollar because people think it's a dollar.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  But in order to devalue the dollar today, all you have to do is print them. We're not on a gold standard. There is no value of the dollar. It doesn't have to be devalued, it just depreciates. You just debase it by creating it out of thin air. So there is no real reason for the government to seize gold the way it seized it under Roosevelt. Now, maybe the government is broke and needs money and they start seizing gold. But if they're going to seize gold, I mean, why just gold? Why not seize stocks? Why not seize foreign currency? Why not seize real estate? I mean, you're talking about the government just confiscating private wealth, private assets because it's broke. And personally, it's, I think it's easier for the government to seize your stocks and to seize your real estate than to seize your gold.

• 1:21:50Speaker 02

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

• 1:22:17Anthony Pompliano?

  It's Bitcoin for sure can't be seized, right? It's a non-seizable asset because of the cryptography and the private keys component of it. So don't you think that if the government started to seize assets, Bitcoin would be the last thing that they could get? And they would have to potentially torture you to give up the private keys, right?

• 1:22:39Speaker 02

  Well, I didn't, I didn't, there was just an article I read about they just busted this child porn ring based on following the Bitcoin trail. They were able to figure out who these guys were and who was, you know, buying stuff. And so maybe the government can't seize your Bitcoin, but they can find out the beneficial owners of these wallets. They can use tools on the internet to kind of tie you to your wallet. And it's like, okay, you know, turn this in or you're, you know, you're going to jail. I mean, if they can find you, right, you know, and they can also, they can also criminalize the use. Because it's easy, they could say, okay, no, nobody could use Bitcoin. If anybody's caught using Bitcoin, it's 20 years in jail or, you know, whatever.

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  They can, they can make the death penalty if they wanted to. But, you know, it, it, it would be easier to stop the use, I would think, than to stop. Because I can hand somebody gold in an alley and nobody knows that I did it, right? I mean, if you're, if you're transacting through the internet, you're always leaving some kind of, you know, trace that you're.

• 1:23:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Two things, so, but at least we agree that the, to have an asset that can't be seized by the government has some value, right?

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you know, if it's an asset, you're saying, but Bitcoin, you know, it's arguable whether or not it's gonna, you know, gonna have any value. But, you know, if you can say the government can't theoretically seize it, you know, because they, you know, I guess, you know, what if they just seize your cellphone and your computer?

• 1:24:06Anthony Pompliano?

  You have the private key?

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, although, I mean, you could forget the private key, right? Then, then, then, then it's gone.

• 1:24:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of course you could, but you could forget the, the password or the, the.

• 1:24:19Speaker 02

  Well, you could forget where you buried your gold, I get that, yeah, I mean, you know, I suppose.

• 1:24:24Anthony Pompliano?

  You buried, you buried your gold?

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  Some people do.

• 1:24:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Just checking, just checking. All right, so, so at least that piece. The, the other piece of this, I guess, is, to me, you talked about. Like being able to use gold for transactions, right? Like to handset somebody in the, in the dark alley, et cetera. I think we both agree that gold is not nearly as portable as like fiat currency or a digital currency, right? Doesn't necessarily mean that that's a bad thing, but just carrying around bars of gold would probably not be the most effective thing, right?

• 1:25:00Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, gold is very portable from the perspective of, you know, if you have ten thousand, fifty thousand dollars worth of gold, you know, I can carry that in my pockets, I can carry that in a small briefcase, and it wouldn't really be that big a deal. I mean, so it's, there is a lot of value concentrated. Yes, if you want, if you're talking about a hundred million dollars worth of gold, yeah, you know, that's, you know, that's gonna be, you know, cumbersome. But for most people, gold is pretty portable. I mean, that's one of the reasons that, that is, that has made such good money. It was easy to, to carry it around because a lot of value is concentrated in a small area. But, you know, the other thing that you could do with gold

• 1:25:45Speaker 02

  is, like I described, or like you do with gold money, you can have gold on deposit in a vault and I can transfer ownership of that gold to another individual. So if I wanted to send my gold to somebody in Germany, I don't have to physically send him my gold if I have it stored with a reliable third party like Goldmoney and all I do is simply send him over the internet, the ownership rights to my gold and now it transfers from me to him and that's, so it's very portable. It's just, I just sent it across the Atlantic and it happened instantaneously. I didn't have to, you know, spend any money on shipping because the gold stays in the vault. The vault might be in London, the vault might be in Hong Kong

• 1:26:28Speaker 02

  or Singapore or Dubai or, or Toronto, right? The gold hasn't moved, but I'm able to transfer ownership of that gold pretty much anywhere I want. And that, you know, that basically would, you know, deliver the same result.

• 1:26:42Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, but at least we agree that Bitcoin is more portable. So gold may, you could put it in your pocket or in a small briefcase.

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:26:48Anthony Pompliano?

  But Bitcoin.

• 1:26:49Speaker 02

  I mean, yes, one, one of the good things about Bitcoin, yes, I can have a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin and I can go through, you know, the airport sensors and nothing's gonna go off. I can get on a plane. Although I do think that. You know, I think you have to, and I'm not sure if you have to disclose or if they pass that law, but if you get on a plane now, you know how you have to say that you have, if you have more than $10,000 worth of currency, you gotta check this box, like I got $10,000 worth of currency. I'm not sure if you have to do that if you have $10,000 worth of Bitcoin.

• 1:27:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but it-

• 1:27:24Speaker 02

  Because I think there was a law or they were considering requiring that. I don't know if it passed or not, but that would mean almost anybody, right? Because if you have $10,000 worth of Bitcoin, every time you get on a plane, you know, you're carrying it with you.

• 1:27:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but I don't, but you're not technically carrying it with you, right? You're carrying the password, but that doesn't mean that you have the Bitcoin with you.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  Well, that's true, because I guess no one actually has it with you, because it doesn't really exist. But you have, yeah, you have access to it. But I know there was, they were thinking about passing that law. I don't know if it actually was enacted or not.

• 1:27:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I don't think that one got, uh, got anywhere. So at least, I appreciate you doing this, because I think that we're, we're making progress on the ideas of, you know, Bitcoin being a scarce asset, it being portable, it being resistant to seizure. One of the other elements that I think the Bitcoin community really gets excited about, and I want to hear your thoughts on, is the lack of censorship with Bitcoin, right? So the fact that it's decentralized, it can be sent to anyone in the world, and no one can stop that transaction, has a lot of value. Also, some people, that, that concerns them. But when you look at gold versus Bitcoin around censorship, how do you think about that?

• 1:28:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, look, I mean, that is obviously part of the appeal. I mean, part of the sizzle, right? Because there's no state, but part of the sizzle that's all Bitcoin is all those other attributes that, oh, yeah, you know, that these other monetary attributes that it has. But, you know, a lot of that has even been lost, because I even remember that early on, one of the big arguments in favor of Bitcoin was it was anonymous, and you could, you can get rid of, you know, bypass all the government rules, because they, they had been putting on more rules and more regulations with anti-money laundering and FAKA, and it was getting very expensive, and you have to give all kinds of financial- Information about yourself to send wires and and do all that and and I I operate a bank and I see all that regulation and all that loss of privacy.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  Uh, that we now have. In fact, I used to have my bank. We used to have the words privacy assured and we had to get rid of that. There's no private accounts anymore. You can't even offer privacy because if you do, like, nobody will do business with you. So there's no more financial privacy. And so initially, uh, part of the appeal of Bitcoin was, hey, this is a way around that. This is a way to be private. And and privacy is is a good thing. Privacy, if having privacy from government is important. The reason that government doesn't want privacy is because if they're going to be tyrannical, they want to be able to quell any kind of revolution. They want to be able to get, you know, make sure that they can maintain their hold on the economy, on on the populace. And they can do that better if there's no privacy. So once you destroy all the privacy, you make it harder for the people to rebel against tyrannical government.

• 1:30:08Speaker 02

  And so that's where we are. But Bitcoin, you know, offered that promise, hey, this, you can escape all this. But when they wanted to make Bitcoin more mainstream because they wanted institutional investors, because they needed new buyers to come in and push the price higher. The institutions needed regulatory, you know, they needed this surveillance. They needed all this regulation. They needed all this KYC and and all. And so now all of a sudden, there's all this stuff, people, you want to buy Bitcoin, you want to open up an account. You got to give your driver's license, you got to give your password, here's your utility bill. Now, you know, a lot of that privacy that initially made Bitcoin Bitcoin appealing has been lost. And now there are other coins that are supposedly, you know, private, like Monero, whatever they are, uh, but Bitcoin has kind of lost that.

• 1:30:51Speaker 02

  Uh, but it didn't stop, you know, the narrative and people from buying Bitcoin and speculating it even as, you know, it lost. Some of the the the original, uh, you know, justification of its appeal. Well, I think part of it is that the asset itself itself still has the pseudonymity, um, and and can be used privately. It's, uh, what you're talking about, it's the on and off ramps that are being, uh, offered. Many of them require the.

• 1:31:17Anthony Pompliano?

  KYC and AML um kind of adherence or compatibility. And that's where people are having to disclose their identities, etc. And so if you go in through one of those on or off ramps from the fiat world, uh, it's much harder to have the publicity.

• 1:31:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're controlling those ramps. And you know, the, the, the most ironic part of it is that guy, you know, the, the grayscale that's doing the GB, the Bitcoin trust is running all these dumb gold campaigns. I mean, this guy, I mean, I can see if someone's going to buy Bitcoin, what's the point of buying it in this trust? Because you lose all the appeal because now you have a third party storing your Bitcoin. Uh, you're actually paying a 2% per year storage fee. I mean, nobody who stores gold for you charges you that much money. I mean, if you store gold for people, you know, gold storage companies typically charge maybe 25 basis points to 50 basis points a year to store your gold. Uh, and, and when, when, when they try to knock gold, well, gold is expensive to store.

• 1:32:19Speaker 02

  Well, if you're paying 2% to grayscale to store your Bitcoin, I mean, that's, you know, much, much more than you would pay to store gold. So you're having these expensive storage fees. You're also having to pay brokerage fees to buy and sell it because you're buying, uh, the, the, the fund. Now, and you've got your, your, your, your Bitcoin stored with a third party. Uh, I mean, so that makes the least sense to me that anybody, if anybody actually wanted to buy Bitcoin, it makes no sense that they would buy it through an ETF and it's or an exchange traded fund, right? And now they, and, and all the Bitcoiners want these ETFs, right? They want more ETFs because this one, this, this fund is not an ETF. But the reason they want ETFs is because they want more demand. They want the ETFs to buy Bitcoin that bid up the price.

• 1:33:03Speaker 02

  But why would you buy it in an ETF? It makes no sense because you lose all the appeal of the asset by holding it in an ETF. But the whole desire is just to get more buying, so the price will go up.

• 1:33:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And, and so as you look out at this entire world, what do you think ends up occurring with Bitcoin and the regular? environment. So you're talking about the E2B specifically, right? And we've seen that not get approved.

• 1:33:34Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think this plays out, given kind of the historical way that gold played out? And then also, you know, kind of, kind of the, I want to say the fear, but, but definitely the skepticism of a lot of people in the regulatory and, and lawmaking seats. As they look at Bitcoin, like, how, how does this play out?

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the regulatory aspects are a serious roadblock. I mean, and I see that, look, you know, I've had lots of crypto companies over the years. Wanting to open up accounts with my bank, Euro Pacific Bank. I've had to turn them all down. I mean, I actually had a guy one time. That sent money into his Euro Pacific account from Bitgold, which was the original name of, of, of gold money. And I couldn't even take it because the banks were worried about it because it had the word bit. It was, it came from Bitgold, just because it had the word bit in it, even though it wasn't a cryptocurrency. So it's like, it's, it's like poison, like the banks, the banking community can't touch any of this stuff.

• 1:34:34Speaker 02

  Because of the regulatory environment that we're in and other companies that I'm associated with, I can feel the heat of the regulators. The minute you try to get into any crypto, I mean, you're just in the crosshairs. I mean, and you're going to be bombarded. And I don't, I don't see that lightening up. I mean, I just, you know, the governments do feel threatened, whether the threat is legitimate or not. I mean, you know, I, I don't believe that ultimately Bitcoin can succeed as money. But a lot of these politicians, they don't know that. They can be just as fooled. I mean, you had one of these congressmen that was in the hearing with Zuckerberg the other day. Who actually thought that Bitcoin potentially was a threat to replace the dollar. And to the extent that they think that that's a threat, they're going to do everything that they can to extinguish that threat.

• 1:35:17Speaker 02

  And so the, the, the regulatory force is, is gonna, is gonna continue to bear down. On, on Bitcoin and crypto and anything that has to do with it. And I'm not in favor of that, right? I, I don't want any of this regulation. I mean, I think, look. These cryptocurrencies should be allowed to be there. People should be allowed to gamble on them if they want, if people want to. Buy them. I don't think there should be fraud. Like, I think some people are being defrauded into buying Bitcoin. And I think that they might have a legal case when they lose their money. But to the extent that people are honestly exposed to it and making decisions to buy it, I don't think government should stay away and let the markets decide. You know, and if they fail, they fail. But, you know, that's not how the government works. The government is over-regulating everything.

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  But in particular, cryptocurrencies are getting a lot of regulation. And what I'm really afraid of too is when a lot of people do lose money, because Bitcoin crashes and a lot of people lose money, they are going to take that as an opportunity to really step up the regulation. And, you know, this is the ultimate failure of Bitcoin is if it ends up serving the interests of government by helping to, you know, validate their fears of the free market. Oh, you see the free market, it's terrible. Got people scammed into Bitcoin and, you know, real, the dollar is the best. And this is, you know, we gotta, we need more regulation to protect consumers, to protect investors, you know, from this kind of fraud. And they just make government even bigger. And Bitcoin actually ends up making the dollar look good,

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  right, by comparison, because people lose even more money there.

• 1:36:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Nah, not gonna happen. Let's talk about Twitter and media. You've built a much bigger media platform than I think many people realize. You've got, what, like quarter of a million subscribers on YouTube? You got a pretty big Twitter account. You got a podcast that does quite a bit of downloads, etc. Like, what's your whole take on what you're trying to do with the media and the social media platforms?

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, you know, in the scheme of things, it's still kinda low. I mean, I have kids, young kids that, you know, watch YouTube videos that other kids are putting out. And they got millions and millions of views, you know, just kids playing with toys. So, you know, my little world is kinda small. In fact, even, I bet you've got more Twitter followers than I do. How'd you get all those Twitter followers?

• 1:37:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's because Bitcoin is better than gold, obviously.

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  Well, see, yeah, like I said, you're the consensus trade. I'm the contrarian.

• 1:37:42Speaker 02

  But yeah, you know, I mean, hopefully, you know, the way I am interacting with people now is through the internet. You know, I was in an airplane, you know, the other day and I, I, I usually get recognized by somebody when I travel by plane. But I'm in a plane and I, I'm, I'm talking to somebody and somebody comes up to me because they said, oh, Peter Schiff, you know, I recognize your voice. Right. So they, they, they, they knew I was on the plane because they heard me talking. And, and so people used to recognize me because they used to see me on TV and so they recognized me because, you know, because for a while I was on all the time. And I, especially when I used to walk in Manhattan, I would always get recognized several times a day because I was on all the time and people in New York tended to know me. Uh, but now people are recognizing me by my voice, not by the way I look, but they're, they're used to hearing my voice.

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  So yeah, but I'm, I'm, this is how I'm communicating now, my thoughts and my ideas. Uh, cause I'm, I, I don't really have the mainstream media platform anymore that I used to, uh, a decade ago. But back then I didn't have a YouTube channel. I didn't have, you know, Twitter. I didn't have, uh, my podcast. So, you know, and, and I know, look, I just posted a video of a talk that I did. Uh, at the money show and I've got over 200,000 views on it in the last week. I mean, I didn't think 200,000 people didn't watch me on CNBC. I don't even think they have a single show that has that big an audience. Um, you know, so in a way more people are, are, are, are exposed to me now when I'm doing it myself than when I, you know, had the help of these media outlets.

• 1:39:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And then how, how do you think about Twitter? Like, like you, you get on there and you go to battle every day with the, with the Bitcoiners. And then you've obviously got like kind of the gold bug community that's, uh, that supports you and everything and get quite a bit of engagement. But how do you think about it?

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  I don't know. You know, like the last time, you know, I've been sick the last week or two and some of them are sitting in bed. I got nothing to do. So I, I just started going on Twitter because it's entertaining. Um, and yeah, I could pick a fight. I could pick a fight with you or the interesting thing is. Whenever I tweet something about Bitcoin, I mean, that's when it just gets all kinds of engagement. I could do a political tweet or, you know, a gold tweet. You know, but the ones where if I say anything negative about Bitcoin, that's when, I mean, it's like, you know, and not only do people respond to it. I'll put out a tweet and I'll go and I'll Google my name the next day and there'll be 10 articles written. By Bitcoin Publications quoting my tweet. I mean, that doesn't happen when I tweet about anything else. So, I mean, some people are actually looking at what I have to say when it comes to Bitcoin.

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

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

• 1:40:48Anthony Pompliano?

  People have been, have been tweeting at us the entire time that we are, we're doing this interview. And they're asking if we're, if we're going to record the podcast. So they don't realize that we're doing it literally while this rally's going on. 15%. What's your take on when Bitcoin is, while you're sitting here saying it's not valuable and it just rips 15% upwards? What do you, what do you want to say to the people?

• 1:41:11Speaker 02

  What do you mean?

• 1:41:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, Bitcoin just rips up 15% like that. It's obviously got the volatility on the upside. That's something that gold obviously never does, right? In terms of big movements like that. Like, what's your kind of response to the people who say, hey, that's a valuable thing that gold doesn't bring to the table, the asymmetric upside?

• 1:41:30Speaker 02

  Well, look, I've never said that Bitcoin could not be used as a speculative medium. I mean, that's the only use that it has, right? You could speculate in it because you do have these big rips that happen, right? I mean, but the fact that it is this volatile, right? Is one of the things that makes it so bad as a medium of exchange. The fact that you can have the currency move 10% any given hour, you know, makes it a very volatile asset and very difficult to use in transactions. You can't price things in it and things like that. So the only value it has is as something to speculate in. But, you know, that's the same Value that dot com stocks had or anything like that.

• 1:42:13Speaker 02

  But ultimately, i- i- it's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna collapse. I mean, you know, there's an old joke about, you know, the can of sardines that, that, that I guess is bad. Uh, but they, they, they trade it, you know, people are buying and selling. And, but you can't eat it and, and I think it's, you know, well, these sardines are for trading. They're not for eating. No one eats them. We just trade them. All right. Well, but you know, if you can't eat them, what value do they have? They have no value, but as, but people could trade them as long as they don't realize that the, the, the sardines are rotten. Uh, they can buy and sell them. So, yeah, I mean, look, there are people in there trading this market. And look, I am very skeptical too about the trading. I mean, why Bitcoin rallies? I mean, I think there's a lot of manipulation in this market. It's not very transparent.

• 1:42:56Speaker 02

  I do think that, uh, a lot of the rallies are engineered by some of the big holders that are in there when they, once they can get the market to sell off and once they can see that the, the, the offers are kind of thin. And they can rush in there and just get the market to move up without having to buy that much Bitcoin back. You know, because they, they sell it on the way down and they can pump the market up. They can create some enthusiasm that brings in new buyers as people say, oh, the bottom is in. We're going to zoom to 20,000. We're going to moon. And so they can buy just enough Bitcoin to spike it up at the right time. So that new buyers can come in and now they can unload even more Bitcoin. And then the price, the price goes down.

• 1:43:41Speaker 02

  So I am very skeptical of these sharp rallies. They look to me like market manipulation. I mean, why is Bitcoin 10% more valuable today than it was yesterday? I mean, you know, it, it, there's no, I mean, nothing's really changed. So people, if, if, and you know, if you look at that, if I wanted to buy Bitcoin because the price went down. Hey, the price just went down. I want to buy Bitcoin. I'm going to buy it slowly. I'm going to try to buy as much as I can, right? As cheap as I can. But when I see the people rushing in and just taking all the offers and jamming the price. That doesn't look like someone's trying to buy a good price. It looks like someone, someone's trying to move the price higher. And who wants to move the price of Bitcoin higher? Somebody who wants to sell.

• 1:44:25Speaker 02

  Somebody who wants to buy wants the price lower. They want the price to go down. If you're a buyer, you want to buy as cheap as you can. You don't want to push the price up. Uh, but if you're a seller, that's when you want a higher price. So, you know, I think these rallies are, are, are meant to sucker in new buyers. Uh, I think the real money is still selling Bitcoin and, and, you know, and, and, uh, you know, until we make a new high, until we take out, if we take out 20,000, then, you know, then, then I'm wrong about that and we're going higher. Uh, but I don't think I'm wrong about the ultimate, uh, de- destination, no matter how high it goes. But I, I just don't think it's worth the bet that Bitcoin is going to make a new high. I mean, what if it makes a new high, it triples? I think you can triple your money in other things with less risk.

• 1:45:07Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Have you ever taken fiat money and bought Bitcoin? Like, do you own any Bitcoin other than the Bitcoin that I crowdfunded for you online?

• 1:45:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you know, you didn't give me any Bitcoin yourself. You were supposed to give me a hundred dollars worth and I never got it. This might be a good time now, if you want to get me in on that. But other people, yes, you, you, you, you said you were going to give me a hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin if I gave you my wallet. And I eventually figured out my wallet address. And I put it up there and a bunch of people gave me Bitcoin, but you didn't give me any.

• 1:45:38Anthony Pompliano?

  But have you ever, have you ever bought Bitcoin?

• 1:45:42Speaker 02

  No, no, the only, the only other way I got Bitcoin is I did an interview, a debate rather, which anybody can see on, on YouTube. It was with Eric Voorhees and it was sponsored by Reason, uh, in New York in Soho Forum. And we did a Bitcoin debate. And after the debate, we went out to dinner. Uh, and, and during, while we're at dinner, Eric downloaded the app or on my phone of, uh, from his company, his wallet.

• 1:46:14Speaker 02

  And transferred a hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin to me. And I transferred fifty of it back, right? So we could see how he could show me how quickly he can send me a hundred dollars and I can send him fifty. But I I kept fifty. He gave me fifty as a gift. So I got that fifty. And and then after I got that fifty, I went to a I went to a I went to a like a money show or something. And I was talking to somebody and I showed him my wallet. He said, well, you need to get some other purses. And I was selling some of my dad's books. And so he decided to pay for books by giving me crypto. And he gave me Bitcoin cash and ether for those those two books that he bought. And so he exchanged it into my wallet.

• 1:46:59Speaker 02

  But because he was giving me crypto, I charged him extra than the cash, right? So I charged him like fifty percent more because of the the the risk of me uh me taking crypto. Uh and I there were actually they've now gone down so much that I you know, the fifty percent wasn't enough. I should have charged him double because the the my ether and my Bitcoin cash are worth less than what I would with the with the regular price of the books would have been. But that was only like another forty bucks worth, right? Because I I charged him like or I forget or thirty bucks worth. But but that's it. But I've never actually I've never actually taken my own money and bought Bitcoin. Now, am I proud of that?

• 1:47:42Speaker 02

  I mean, I mean, I obviously, you know, I I I I I wish I'd have done it. I mean, I wish I'd have done it the first time I heard about it, right? When I first heard about it, you know, it was under twenty dollars, you know, and I thought it was interesting. Um and a- at the time, I was throwing a lot of money at a lot of stupid things. And I I I I made investments that that went to zero and I had, you know, I I could have thrown ten thousand, fifty thousand, a hundred thousand. You know, I could have put that money into Bitcoin and I'd be a Bitcoin billionaire right now, assuming I I held on. I mean, because it's always hard to would have, could have, should have. Right? I could always say, you know, had I bought it way back when, what would I have done with it? But I can tell you from history, I mean, I I'm in general, I don't sell a lot of things. I mean, I'm not as I'm I'm a better buyer than I am a seller, you know?

• 1:48:25Speaker 02

  So it's possible that I I might not have sold some of those early rallies. I might have I might have held on. Uh, who knows? But I mean, I mean, look, there's a lot of bubbles that I didn't participate in. I didn't buy the dot coms. I didn't buy real estate. You know, I was renting. I mean, but you know, I made money when the bubbles popped. And I think Bitcoin is just part of this big bubble, and I think I'm going to make a lot of money when that bubble pops. Even though I didn't make any money betting on it, I'm going to make money betting against it.

• 1:48:53Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Before I let you go, I do rapid fire set of questions. What's the most important book you've ever read?

• 1:49:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, it requires more thinking than that, you know, I don't really know. I mean, my father's books have probably had the most influence on me because my father wrote them, but that, you know, that caused me to read other books.

• 1:49:13Anthony Pompliano?

  What books did he write?

• 1:49:15Speaker 02

  Well, well, his, his biggest, his economic book was the biggest con, How the Government Was Fleeceing You. And so that book came out in nineteen, what, seventy-six or something? Um, and so it's one of the first books on economics that I read, although my father had me read The Main Spring of Human Progress. Um, and I also read, um, uh, Henry Hazlitt's book, Economics in One Lesson, early on. And so that was a very influential book on me because I, I mean, I read it when I was very young.

• 1:49:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And then I, and each podcast, I let you ask me one question, but before we do that, we talk aliens. Believer or non-believer? You think they're real?

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  Well, do I think aliens exist somewhere in the universe? Probably. I mean, do I think that any of them have visited Earth? Probably not. Um, but I do, I don't think that humans are the only, uh, intelligent life in the entire universe. Uh, but I do think that the likelihood of there being humans or any intelligent, uh, life within a proximity that they could visit us, um, I think that's pretty slim. Because I, I think that, I think intelligent life is very, very rare in the universe. And it, it, there are, it takes a really, uh, you know, amazing confluence of, of things in order to

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

  have life like us evolve. And so I think we are very rare, but I don't think we are, are unique.

• 1:50:45Anthony Pompliano?

  If you had to guess, All of this speculation and conspiracy theories etcetera around UFOs, aliens, all that kind of stuff, you think it's all just bullshit? Or you think that there's actually some validity to it?

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

  No, I think most conspiracy theories are bullshit. You know, I mean, you know, I think Elvis is dead. You know, I mean, I think we, you know, we landed on the moon. You know, there are a lot of people, you know, come up with these things and they develop a life of their own. But, you know, generally the thing about conspiracies is it's very hard to actually keep a conspiracy going, you know, the people having to be silent about it. I mean, somebody is gonna slip up. But, you know, I think they're, you know, they certainly have an appeal and there are a lot of, you know, people that tend to gravitate to them. And some of them obviously are in the gold community, right? In the libertarian community, there's a, you know, there's a fringe there.

• 1:51:39Speaker 02

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

• 1:52:24Speaker 02

  it serves their interest. They make a lot of money from this game. And, you know, there's an old saying, if your livelihood depends on you not understanding something, you're not gonna understand it. And so I think that a lot of people make a living off of this system. They make a very good living. And so they don't wanna, you know, look it in the mouth, you know, they just wanna perpetuate it. But eventually, all these things come to an end. And so, you know, the price of gold's going way up. You know, if the government could suppress the price of gold, they wouldn't have let it rally from 300, under 300 in 2000. 1901 to 1900 if they could have stopped it they would have they they couldn't do it had a big rally and it's gonna have an even bigger rally uh next time

• 1:53:03Anthony Pompliano?

  what one question you got for me to end this thing this is a marathon man an hour

• 1:53:07Speaker 02

  no I can't I can't believe I had an appointment I wonder if I had a meeting and I wonder what the hell happened because I thought this was gonna be over in an hour and we're almost two hours

• 1:53:15Anthony Pompliano?

  well you know when you're talking about real sound money like bitcoin this what happens you can't leave

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  people get mad you know they think my podcast some people think my podcasts are too long when I talk for 50 minutes to an hour so this one is this one is two hours

• 1:53:30Anthony Pompliano?

  don't worry I'll make you famous in bitcoin twitter come on

• 1:53:33Speaker 02

  but so my question is so you you posted something on twitter that you you wanted to sponsor my podcast and you know you actually offered to pay me five dollars a listener and you know I I don't I would feel guilty taking that much money from you but but um you know but I did I did agree to 50 grand a month you know because you wanted to sponsor sponsor november december so the offer is still on the table if you want to if you want to sponsor my podcast you can even pay me you can even pay me in bitcoin

• 1:54:00Anthony Pompliano?

  tell us how many listeners you have how many listeners do you have on that thing

• 1:54:05Speaker 02

  well I don't know exactly how many I have but you know I could find out if you're gonna pay me five dollars a listener but look you could look I I I know we get 50 to 100,000 people that just go to shift radio and listen to it I'm not sure how I know you know people listen to it from um you know uh uh itunes stitcher these different things but people on on on my youtube I mean my I had I did one on my youtube when my my podcast my podcast within a couple weeks ago I got over 100,000 listeners just on youtube alone but typically I get 40 to 50,000 people that listen to it on on on youtube too but then other people copy it

• 1:54:48Speaker 02

  so you know my podcasts get you know copied and then people listen to them on other people's channels so you know so I just don't know what the the total listenership is but I think somewhere between 100 and 200,000 people probably listen to each one you know and and then if one is really popular you know I could get more listeners than that but I think you know at least 100,000 listen to everyone that I do uh you know between the podcast and youtube

• 1:55:16Anthony Pompliano?

  to to be completely honest that's pretty impressive I gotta hand it to you if you're getting that type of uh listener base you're uh either saying some wild shit that people can't

• 1:55:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Or you're saying something that people are finding about.

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  And you know, I don't have any commercials or any sponsors. So you would be the first one, right? There's no, you know, I'm not, you know, although I do, I think when people go on YouTube, you know, before they watch it, I think, you know, there's some commercials that run, you know, I don't, I think, I think I opted into that. So I do get a, you know, I do get some revenue share from some commercials. A lot of times they're crypto commercials. People laugh because there's a lot of like, you know, cryptocurrency commercials that come on before my podcast.

• 1:55:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, of course. Well, of course, because they know that the gold people are just lost or waiting to find Bitcoin. All right. Look, I'm sure you've taken the time to do this. Um, I think that, uh, as always, people are excited to hear your point of view. Um, you know, you're basically a Bitcoin or without owning any Bitcoin with, uh, with most of your views. We'll just got to get you across the, uh, the final finish line there, but, uh,

• 1:56:17Speaker 02

  Well, I just got to get you guys across. You're a gold guy. I just see, I just got to get the Bitcoin guys into real money, right? They, they don't like the fiat system and they want out. They just, they just, they're just going the wrong way. I, I just got to get them back to real money.

• 1:56:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Or, you know, Starbucks stuff?

• 1:56:33Speaker 02

  Or at least, you know, at least own both, you know, at least make sure you own enough gold. So if your crypto goes to zero, you'll, you'll be okay with your gold.

• 1:56:42Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll make you a deal. If I buy a little bit of gold, will you buy some Bitcoin?

• 1:56:46Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that, I mean, there, I don't know. Well, how much would I have to buy?

• 1:56:51Speaker 02

  Cause I look at it as throwing my money your way.

• 1:56:53Anthony Pompliano?

  The same amount I buy.

• 1:56:55Speaker 02

  What, what, oh.

• 1:56:56Anthony Pompliano?

  An amount and, uh,

• 1:56:59Speaker 02

  There's, there's, there's no reason. I don't want to throw money away.

• 1:57:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, get out of here.

• 1:57:04Speaker 02

  I'd rather, I'd rather buy more gold.

• 1:57:07Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So good. All right. Hey everyone, Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the apple, Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.