#605: Peter Schiff on Inflation, Bitcoin, Gold, and Billionaire Status

Peter Schiff is the Chief Economist and Global Strategist at Euro Pacific Capital. In this conversation, we discuss inflation, monetary policy, gold, bitcoin, taxes, and becoming a billionaire. ======================= Revolut is a finance app in the US and UK, that say they're the simplest way to access crypto. Sign up today at Revolut.com/pomp and make 3 card transactions to get $15, which you can exchange for any tokens Revolut supports. As usual, when you move your money from fiat to crypto your capital is at risk. See T&C's for details. Revolut is a financial technology company. Banking services provided by Metropolitan Commercial Bank, Member FDIC. Cryptocurrency services provided directly by Paxos Trust Company, LLC. ======================= Whether you're an experienced crypto trader or just starting out, Kraken has the tools to help you achieve financial freedom. With the new Kraken app, you can easily buy and sell over 60 of the most popular cryptocurrencies in just a few minutes. Featuring a sleek new design and an easy-to-use interface, you can now take your crypto portfolio with you on the go, 24/7. Visit kraken.com/pomp to learn more or search "kraken" in the app store. ======================= With over $1B AUM, Amber Group is a world-leading crypto finance platform helping institutions and individual investors to buy and sell cryptocurrency, earn yield, manage risk and access liquidity. Amber App new users only - earn 16% APR on BTC, ETH and USD stablecoins! Click on the link to sign up now: https://www.ambergroup.io/?utm_source=10508 =======================

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Peter Schiff is the Chief Economist and Global Strategist at EuroPacific Capital. In this conversation, we discuss inflation, monetary policy, gold, Bitcoin, taxes, and becoming a billionaire. I really enjoyed this conversation with Peter, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Revolut. Let's go back to the basics for a second. That's why I've partnered with Revolut, a finance app in the US and the UK that say they're the simplest way to access crypto. They're putting their money where their mouth is, too. You can

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  sign up and make three card transactions today and you'll get $15. Yep, 15 bucks. What can you do with the $15? You can buy Bitcoin or any of the other things that Revolut has on their platform. They're crypto-enabled, they've got stocks, they've got everything else. These guys have made it dumb easy to get some skin in the game. As usual, when you move your money from fiat to crypto, your capital's at risk, but sign up now through revolut.com/pomp to get that $15 reward and put them to the test. Again, revolut.com/pomp to get the $15 reward. Revolut.com/pomp. Next up is Kraken. For the last 10 years, Kraken has been one of the best platforms for trading crypto online. Now with the new Kraken app, it's easier than ever to buy

• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

  and sell Bitcoin and over 60 of the most popular cryptocurrencies on the go 24/7. You can simply download the Kraken app, connect your bank account, and start investing for as little as $10. Just a minute is all it takes to get started. I've had the Kraken CEO Jesse on the podcast before. They're big, big, big-time supporters of Bitcoin developers, and I generally think they just get it. With the new Kraken app, you'll have your portfolio in your pocket wherever you go. You monitor your investments, track winners and losers, keep tabs on your favorite projects, or view the most traded cryptocurrencies of the day. It's got all the features you need with none of the complexity. It's a simpler way to invest in crypto. Visit kraken.com/pomp now to learn more or search Kraken in the app store.

• 2:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Kraken.com/pomp or search Kraken in the app store. Kraken.com/pomp. Last but not least are my friends at Amber Group. With low yields and looming risk of inflation around the world, it's no question crypto is the alternative. With Amber App, you can easily earn high yields on your crypto assets. Amber App is an all-in-one crypto finance app designed to help you earn, swap, trade, and invest in crypto. You can earn interest instantly simply by depositing assets to your wallet, and you receive daily interest payouts. This means earning interest 24/7 with no lockup. You can also customize fixed term investments between 1 and 360 days to enjoy higher yields with flexible redemptions. Right now, the returns for new users of the yields

• 2:58Anthony Pompliano?

  on various assets is very high. Go check it out. Whether you're a long-term holder or trading on market moves on Amber App, you can earn interest on your own terms and do more with your crypto. Go click on the link in the description to check it out and let me know what you think. AmberGroup.io or click on the link in the description. All right, let's get into this episode with Peter. This one was hilarious. I hope you guys enjoy it.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:44Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Bang, bang, we're back and we got Peter Schiff with us. This is about to be fun. My brothers have never met Peter before, so this is going to be their first, uh, uh, interaction with Peter. I met his son, though. Yeah, they did meet his son, Spencer, uh, when he was here in Miami. Uh, Peter's one of the smartest guys I know about the economy, what's wrong with the economy, uh, what's going well in the economy and, uh, and what people should do about it. Mine is, we disagree on one specific thing, which is what is sound money? We'll get into that. Uh, let's bring Peter up. Let's see if we can get him here. And, uh, Peter, what's going on, man?

• 4:22Speaker 02

  I'm trying to get into some better lighting. I could, can you hear me?

• 4:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Peter, can you hear us?

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I can hear you.

• 4:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Can you hear me?

• 4:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Yeah, you're a little low, they're gonna turn-

• 4:31Speaker 02

  I mean, I see that I'm in the shade here. Like, like I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm like, you know, one of those guys speaking, you know, you can't see my face because I'm divulging some secrets and I'm embarrassed about it, you know?

• 4:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, you got no secrets. Alright, let's jump right into this thing.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  I'm trying to see where I can, where I can move the computer. If I put it in the little desk. Yeah, I'm in a hotel.

• 4:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, there you go, there you go.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  You know what? So I gotta figure out where I can put this, where I can put the, the computer.

• 4:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright.

• 5:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Ah, there you go!

• 5:06Speaker 02

  I, I gotta find something that I can set the computer on.

• 5:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Just hold it, just hold it. We're only gonna go for 45 minutes.

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Look, there's a table over there by the, by the couch. Hold on a second.

• 5:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, alright. We'll wait. We're not live or anything. We're not waiting for you. Alright, are you gonna do construction right now?

• 5:25Speaker 02

  I know, I mean, I'm in Switzerland. I'm in a hotel.

• 5:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh my god, that's a nice ass hotel you got going on there.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Well, we're here for a month, so it's-

• 5:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, alright, alright. Are we good now?

• 5:37Speaker 02

  No, hold on.

• 5:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Make sure you have pants on. We don't want you to have, not have pants on or anything.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  No, I got pants. They're short pants though, but they're pants-

• 5:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, you're here, you-

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Alright, hold on.

• 5:50Anthony Pompliano?

  You're, you're here, you got, uh, my two brothers, uh, Joe and John, who you may be able to see here in a second or not, we'll see. Uh, let, let's start with what are the problems in the economy, right? You, you have been one of the most vocal voices in terms of the manipulation of the markets and the Fed's actions. Walk us through kind of your understanding of what the hell is going on and what they're doing that, uh, you think is a mistake.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, everything they're doing is a mistake. I mean, there's a lot of problems with the economy. And the reason the economy has so many problems is because the government has made so many mistakes. But what we're experiencing now is just the consequences of all the can kicking. See, whenever the government creates a problem, they don't want to deal with the problem because that's politically too dangerous. All they care about is kicking the can down the road so that it's somebody else's problem after the next election. Well, all we've done is catch up to the can. You know, and every time we catch up to it, it's bigger. There's been, there's more problems than it had before. And so that's what we're experiencing now in the economy.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Because when COVID happened, we really gave the can a big, big kick. Because COVID really exposed a lot of the problems in the economy in, in an even bigger way. But again, rather than dealing with those problems, just like we failed to deal with them after the housing bubble popped, or we failed to deal with them after the dot com bubble popped. Uh, we again, made the same mistake, which is we printed more money. We lowered interest rates, right? We, and we gave everybody more money to spend so they can buy more products that they didn't make with money they didn't earn, all in order to keep this whole house of cards from falling apart. But it is going to fall apart.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  It is impossible for the government to do this indefinitely because the amount of money they have to print eventually uh becomes fatal to the value of the dollar.

• 7:50Anthony Pompliano?

  So what do you think, Peter? What, what do you think? What do you think happens at the end? Right? So fast forward, whatever long it takes, whether it's two years or 200 years, what does the end look like? And are there historical examples that you point to in terms of this is likely to be what it actually looks like when uh, uh, when kind of the end happens or they can't keep this up?

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it isn't going to happen in 200 years. I mean, if it takes 200 years, I'm wrong, right? I mean, there's no way it's going to last for 200. There's no way it's going to last for 20. Can it last for two? I suppose it could last for two. Uh, but it may not. I mean, I, it's, it surprises me that it's 2021 and we haven't had a bigger crisis yet in that we've been able to get away with a lot more money printing and much larger deficits than Peter Schiff a decade ago, uh, you know, would have uh imagined. So like if we were doing this interview in 2011 instead of

• 8:52Speaker 02

  2021 and you told me how big the national debt was going to be, how large the budget deficits would be, how much money we would be printing. Uh, you know, I would have said, yeah, you know, we're going to have a crisis, you know, before that could get that big. And so I would have been wrong about that.

• 9:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so what do you think happens at the end though? What at the very end, what happens? Does the dollar lose global reserve status? Does it go into hyperinflation? Like, what do you think happens?

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, first of all, it depends on how you define hyperinflation. I mean, are you talking, you know, Weimar Republic, Zimbabwe, you know, stuff like that, or, you know, countries that have had high rates of inflation, but maybe not, you know, like where they completely destroyed the currency, where you're talking about, you know, trillions to buy a cup of coffee. Uh, you know, we're gonna have very, very high inflation uh, at a, at a minimum. And I'm talking about worse than the 1970s. That may not constitute hyperinflation, but it's gonna be pretty bad. I do think that the dollar's days as the reserve currency are over. I kind of have a hard time imagining a final scenario

• 10:05Speaker 02

  where the dollar retains reserve currency status. So I do think it's going to lose that status. You know, where I'm not sure when the date is. I was, I meant to look that up, but we're almost at 50 years since we went off the gold standard in 1971. And the dollar should have been rejected at that time as the reserve currency, because the only reason it was the reserve currency was because it was backed by gold. And, you know, a lot of people now try to say that, you know, they're talking about the debt ceiling and, you know, we can't default on our debts and America has never defaulted. That's not true. 1971 was a default. We promised all of our creditors to repay them in gold for their Federal Reserve notes and for their US Treasuries.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  And then we defaulted and said, we promised to give you gold and now we're going to give you nothing. And, and so the dollar should have lost its reserve status then, but it didn't. The dollar got marked down, but it, it, it didn't get, you know, it held on to that status so I think the next move is for the world to totally reject the dollar and and to go back to the monetary system that existed before the dollar which was gold as the primary reserve rather than than than US dollars

• 11:20Anthony Pompliano?

  all right hold on hold on don't get don't get into the gold stuff yeah we we're gonna do that in a second what do you think inflation is right now so the main number for CPI was 5% what do you think inflation is are they right?

• 11:32Speaker 02

  well first of all inflation is the expansion of the money supply that's the actual definition and so money supply is growing what 20% a year 30% a year it's really really big now as far as

• 11:45Speaker 02

  what is the actual increase in the cost of living the consumer prices which is what most people think about when you talk about inflation well the way the government measures it using the CPI if you annualize you know the first half or the first five months of this year I think we're running at about 8% a year increase in the cost of living but I don't think that accurately reflects what's really happening with prices because I don't think the consumer price index really captures the true extent to which prices are going up so my guess would be that right now we have annual inflation probably between 10 and 15% right now that's what Americans are experiencing

• 12:28Speaker 02

  as far as their cost of living which certainly rivals or exceeds the worst of the 1970s so we've already got that the thing is the Fed and the government is telling us and everybody is telling us this that it's all transitory that this is all just related to the reopening of the economy and so we don't have to worry about it but that's not why we have this the the prices are going up because of what the government did in response to covid not because of covid not because of the reopening it's because of all the money printing it's because of all the deficit spending yes the fact that we're not producing a much as much stuff is part of the problem a lot of people aren't working and so they didn't make stuff

• 13:12Speaker 02

  But the problem is, as we made less stuff, we printed more money. That was a huge mistake. We should have printed less money. The Fed should have drained liquidity as the economy contracted, not added it. They just threw gasoline on the fire. So deflation is going to get much, much worse. What people are experiencing now, the only way this is transitory is that we're transitioning to much higher inflation.

• 13:38Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So if we're now at 10 to 15%, what do you think is likely, if they continue on the path that they're on, they continue to print trillions, they continue to keep interest rates low, when you say much higher, is that a 25%, 30%, 50%? Like, is there a way for you to kind of identify what you actually think we could get to in the near term, in terms of the continuation of their policies?

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Well, look, I mean, we can continue with 15 to 20% inflation for a number of years. And if you think about what that means, that means like the Dow Jones has to go up 15, 20% just to stay even, right? Your house has to go up 15 to 20%. And that's actually happening right now. I mean, if you look at real estate prices, you know, around the country, I mean, they're really going up. I mean, even more so in Puerto Rico, it's more like they're going up 15, 20% a month. But I mean, all around the country, you're seeing this. But it's also consumer good prices that are going up. I mean, I get emails all the time. People share with me the announcements

• 14:45Speaker 02

  of price increases that they're getting, either from their company where it's their employer, kind of letting all the employees know, you know, how much prices are going up, or they're just sending me their consumers and they've gotten notices from various companies that they buy from, letting them know what the price increases are. And they're huge. You know, I've never seen price increases this much. And it's not like we're just making up what we lost during the pandemic. These are huge increases from where the prices were before the pandemic started.

• 15:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you start thinking about kind of what people can do with this, right? If inflation's high, how do you think about where they can actually put capital in order to protect it? Is it something where, we all know that you're into gold, is gold the only answer? Or are there other types of assets that you think are worth folks looking into or kind of doing research on?

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Well, you know, what inflation does is it wipes out the value of paper assets. So if you have cash in the bank, inflation is bad. If you own a bond, that's even worse because people are now going to pay you your money that you loaned them, but they're going to pay it back in the future. Well, if you have inflation, money in the future is worth even less than money in the present. So the longer the duration of that bond, the more of your purchasing power you're going to lose by the time you get your money back. So you don't want to own bonds. You don't want to have cash value in things like annuities. Let's say you have an annuity and it's going to pay you a fixed return. Well, that return is going to erode away in purchasing power as a result of inflation.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  So you don't want a fixed annuity. You don't want cash value in an insurance policy. What inflation does is it transfers purchasing power from creditors to debtors. So you want to have debt that will get wiped out. But you don't want to just go out and borrow a bunch of money and, you know, buy consumer goods because you still have that debt. You don't, the consumer goods are gone. You want to buy real assets that generate income, that can service the debt in the short run and that will ultimately retire the debt in the long run as the debt is destroyed in value relative to, you know, the assets that you own. So you want to own real stuff in inflation. You want to own assets.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  And so what I own is I own a lot of stocks, a lot of common stocks, looking around the world at what you can own, you know, whether it's real estate or stocks or collectibles. I think that value oriented stocks, dividend paying stocks in countries like where I am here in Switzerland, I think there's still a lot of value in some of the Swiss stock market and, you know, other countries that I invest in. I think that relative to other assets, and I'm looking at property while I'm here, and I think residential real estate is very expensive compared to what I can buy publicly listed companies for and the dividends that I'm able to get. So I think that being an equity owner of a business in a country that

• 17:49Speaker 02

  is not nearly as screwed up as the United States, has much sounder underlying economic fundamentals, where I can see real investment value in the stocks, meaning the P E's are not too high, the dividend yields are not too low, you know, well managed companies, been around for a long time. So I like owning real stuff. I don't want to buy the bonds of these companies because inflation will destroy their value. I want to be the equity owners because the stockholders benefit when the bonds are destroyed, because that transfers purchasing power from the creditors to the equity investors. But I also want to own gold as a commodity, because what you're doing with inflation is you want to preserve your purchasing power.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  So the price of everything that I'm going to want to buy in the future is going to go up. Well, the price of gold is also going to go up because there are people who need to buy gold. Jewelers need to buy gold because they got to make jewelry. Uh, computer chip manufacturers need to buy gold because they need to conduct electricity in their chips. You know, the dental industry, the uh, uh, aerodynamics, you got all, you know, you got a space race going on right now. Well, they need, they need uh, gold to get up there. There's a lot of industries where they're going to be buying gold in the future and it's going to be more expensive, just like, you know, everything else. So I don't want to buy a bunch of oil because I got no place to put it. I don't want to buy a bunch of wheat because A, I mean, wherever I got to put that, it may not, you know, stay.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  Eventually it's going to, you know, rot and you know, uh, the, the shelf life of a lot of the things that I might want to buy in five or 10 years. I mean, I can't buy it now, but I can buy the gold now because I can get a lot of value in a small place. And in five or 10 years, when I need to buy that stuff, I can use my gold because I could trade my gold for it.

• 19:35Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, but hold on.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  It's a real commodity.

• 19:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Ho- ho- hold on though. So I got a couple of questions from a portfolio standpoint. One, what are the biggest stocks that you, like in terms of allocation of the portfolio? What are like the most popular uh, or the largest allocation you have to individual stocks? And then two, how do you think about over the last 12 months, gold's essentially flat, right? It's kind of plus or minus maybe 50 basis points uh, on, on any given day over the last few weeks. Um, is that a positive for gold or a negative for gold, given that they printed trillions of dollars? So what's the largest allocation to individual stocks? And then how do you think about gold's performance in light of all the printing?

• 20:10Speaker 02

  Well, as I said, most of my personal portfolio is in individual common stocks. My largest allocation personally to a sector is mining, precious metals mining. And that's because of how bullish I am on gold. But I also have a big weighting to energy and other natural resources, you know, basic materials. We own a lot of real estate trusts. Some of those stocks really got beaten up after the pandemic. There's a lot of value there. We own a lot of telecom. There's a lot of value in those sectors. I own a lot of pharmaceuticals, you know, a lot of different sectors and companies. You know, I have managed accounts where I build portfolios for people at Europe Pacific Asset Management.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  And, you know, we have a professionally managed portfolio of individual foreign equities. And you've probably have heard that everybody has been chasing momentum and indexing for a decade or so. It's the, it's the value stocks, the dividend yielding stocks that have kind of lagged during this bubble. So there is investment value there, not in any one stock. I mean, we like to have a diversified portfolio of companies that work together, you know. So, but as far as gold is concerned, look, gold in a short time span. And, you know, for some investors who day trade, a year may seem like an eternity. But in terms of gold, the year is not very long. And, you know, so in a shorter run like that, gold is going to simply reflect

• 21:36Speaker 02

  what people believe is going to happen to the dollar, to inflation, to interest rates at a particular point in time. And I think the reason that we haven't seen an even bigger move up in the price of gold. And you have to remember, you know, 20 years ago, when we started this decade, gold was under $300 an ounce. And now it's 1800. I mean, gold has actually beaten the S and P 500 so far during, you know, this millennia. But the reason that we're not at 3,000 or 4,000 is because the vast majority of investors do not appreciate what's happening. They, they, they see inflation picking up. They are underestimating how bad it's going to be.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  And at the moment, they believe the Fed is going to be able to prevent the inflation from becoming too big a problem. Even if it doesn't solve itself by being transitory, the Fed will raise interest rates, it'll taper its assets purchases, and that'll be enough, and the Fed's going to save us from, you know, a repeat of the 1970s or something worse. They're completely wrong. Inflation is going to be much worse than anybody thinks, you know, in the mainstream, and the Fed's going to do nothing about it. Even though inflation is going to be worse than everybody thinks, not only is the Fed not going to fight it, the Fed is going to fuel the fire. The Fed is actually going to get more aggressive in its monetary easing. It's going to expand its QE program, not taper it. It's not raising interest rates

• 23:04Speaker 02

  despite the fact that inflation is going up. And when investors finally wrap their arms around that reality, they're going to bid the price of gold through the roof.

• 23:12Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So when we start thinking about financial markets in general, we've been talking all day about people who hold no investable assets. They've been getting crushed. You know, minimum wage hasn't gone up since 2009, yet price of goods is up like 125%. If you look at things like the financial markets, it seems like bear markets are banned, you know, market corrections are outlawed. The government's going to step in every time. What would happen if they didn't? Are we so far down the road now that if the government didn't step in and actually provide monetary stimulus in these market corrections, would there be a complete unwinding of the system? Or is it something where they don't want to find out, so they just kind of keep stepping in, but maybe that actually wouldn't happen?

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Well, absolutely. Right? Again, you know, it's like a drug addict. They don't want to stop using drugs because they want to stay high. You know, maybe, maybe the reason you started doing drugs is because you have a big problem, and you didn't want to deal with the problem, so you decided to get high, so you wouldn't care about the problem. But while you were all drugged up, the problems got worse. The worst thing that could happen is the drugs wear off, and now you're confronted by the reality of your situation. So in order to, you know, delay having to deal with that, you just keep taking more and more drugs. The problem is, you know, you get addicted to it, you build up a tolerance, and there's some limit to how large you can increase the dosage without an overdose, and you

• 24:35Speaker 02

  die. And that's kind of where we are. I mean, have we got to the point where we overdose on QE and money printing and all that? But certainly, if the Fed were to stop and let interest rates rise to, you know, where the free market would put them. The stock market would crash, the housing market would crash, the economy would implode, banks would fail, much, much worse than 08, and the US government would be forced to default. I mean, it would have to default on its obligations to pay benefits like social security and Medicare. It would have to default on government pensions, on treasury bonds. I mean, all of these chickens would come home to roost. So they're not going to let that happen, right?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  The politicians at the Federal Reserve are going to do everything they can to keep blowing air into this bubble until it explodes. And when that happens, you know, the dollar, you know, implodes. Because they can keep printing money as long as the world keeps accepting it, right? They can keep giving everybody money to spend as long as the people that actually make the stuff are willing to exchange it for the money we print. Well, at some point, it doesn't, you know, they won't want it anymore. And then, you know, the music stops.

• 25:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Right now, interest rates are around 0%. You said the free market kind of interest rate, where do you think that would be? Is that 3%, 1%, 10%?

• 25:55Speaker 02

  No, no, I mean, much higher, much, much higher. I mean, interest rates are determined by supply and demand, absent the intervention, right? So if you think about the price, right? Interest rates are the price of money. So where are the supply and demand dynamics there? Well, the supply is all the people who are saving money. So think of all the Americans who are putting money in a bank, right? They're the savers. So they constitute the supply of savings that could be loaned out. What's the demand? Well, it's everybody who wants to borrow that savings. So that would be individuals who want to buy homes, who want to buy cars,

• 26:37Speaker 02

  who want to go to college, who want to buy stuff on their credit card. It would be corporations who want to buy back stock, or they want to invest to buy some new equipment. It would be the US government borrowing money to pay benefits or to build infrastructure, whatever it is. So you got everybody trying to borrow money. There's nobody saving it. So you have all this demand, you have minimal supply. Where's price going to be? Price is going to be very high.

• 27:04Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, I want to, I want to talk, hold on, I want to talk about social security. You mentioned social security, and to me, this is one of the things that people don't understand. So historically, social security, people contributed to it. They then took that money, they being the government, they took that money. They basically were able to generate a kind of low risk return. They used the return to pay out benefits later on. And the whole idea was as more and more people contributed, they would continue to take the return that they received on those investments from the government, and they would then pay that out as benefits. Today, we're in an environment, though, where people are basically contributing. They haven't been able to keep up with the rate of return that they need in order to pay for the benefits.

• 27:45Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, would you consider the social security system a Ponzi scheme at this point? Aren't they just taking new capital inflow from contributors to pay out the benefits? And they don't actually use the return of the capital invested to pay the benefits?

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it's been a Ponzi scheme since it was created. My father wrote a book, "Social Security Swindle", and he, I think the first page, he said that the social security office should build a statue of Ponzi, like, right in front of the building. Because that's how the system was devised. I mean, the politicians of the day, back in the 1930s, lied to the American public about the nature of social security. They called it insurance. You didn't pay taxes, you paid premiums. You received benefits. So they tried to, you know, market it as insurance, which was a fraud. But the way the system has always worked, from day one, is you have people who are paying in, and then you have people who are drawing out.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  And when it first started, right, you had people who had paid in for a couple of years, and then they drew benefits for 20 or 30 years, based on all the people who were paying in. The very first person who got a social security check was a woman named, like, I think it was Ima Fuller, or something like that. And she lived to be 100 years old, and she made out like a bandit. She collected like $20,000 over her life, and she contributed like 10 bucks. I don't know, whatever, some tiny amount of money. So she was a big winner, because she came into the Ponzi scheme real early. But the thing is now, you've got all these people in the baby boom that are stepping into retirement years, and they're relying on the generations that succeeded them to pay in enough

• 29:30Speaker 02

  social security taxes so that they can withdraw their benefits. There's no chance of that. In fact, right now, social security, after years of collecting more than it paid, and then using the rest to basically buy government bonds and subsidize a deficit, today, because so many Americans have left the workforce, you don't even have enough Americans paying in now to cover the benefits that are being paid. So there's already a deficit. So it's like a chain letter that's already run out of chain. And so the government is making up the difference through the Fed QE. But what's ultimately going to happen to the people on social security?

• 30:13Speaker 02

  As I said earlier, the social security benefits are going to be wiped out by inflation. The government's not going to default and tell you you're not going to get your benefits. They're going to pay you your benefits with money that doesn't buy anything. And it's basically the same difference. So social security, if you're expecting to collect any social security, and you're, you know, my age even, I'm 58, I would just completely assume that there's nothing there. Because even if you get paid, the amount of money is going to be trivial compared to what your cost of living will be at the time that you receive the benefits.

• 30:44Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, I want to have some fun with you. You ready?

• 30:47Speaker 02

  All right.

• 30:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I think I saw you tweet-

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Usually, you're not my type, but all right.

• 30:57Anthony Pompliano?

  So I think I saw you tweet this, that you're pretty sure at this point, just given the assets you have and kind of the rate of growth, you're going to be a billionaire in your lifetime, right?

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure that I will be. I mean, I'm not one yet, but I'm reasonably close.

• 31:12Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Like, how close? Like 100 million close or like, like 500?

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Closer than that. But I'm, you know, but I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, but I'm not a billion. But I mean, with, with inflation, even without hyperinflation, it's not going to take much. It's not going to take much, given what I think is going to happen. Because I'm, I'm earning more money, so I'm not not earning money and I'm investing that money in assets that I think are going to appreciate. So I do think, but you know what? What, by the time I'm a billionaire, there's going to be a lot more millionaires. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I'm not going to feel like a billionaire.

• 31:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, here's the whole thing is a millionaire used to be really hard to accomplish in the United States. Right. Now it's kind of like the bar. Everyone, that was like the American dream. Now billionaire, I think is kind of the, the new thing. You see it in culture. You see it in, uh, uh, kind of music, all that kind of stuff.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Billion is the new million, right? Now who's going to be the first trillionaire?

• 32:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Trillionaire. That's what I was going to say. The first trillionaire. That's why I say trillionaire energy. Like who, who's got the energy to be the first trainer? Bezos probably got it. So basically what you're telling me is that the stock market just goes a little bit higher. You're going to be a billionaire.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  What do you mean? No, no. Well, I'm not invested in the US stock. I got a few US stocks. I got some, I got some energy stocks in the US. That's kind of really what I got.

• 32:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Does gold have to go to for you to be a billionaire? You know, 2,500?

• 32:26Speaker 02

  But what? Gold?

• 32:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 02

  I don't know. I would guess if gold were at 5,000, I, I, that'd probably do it.

• 32:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, well, that's double. Just so we're clear. That's a pretty big number.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  I think, I think for gold to get to 5,000, it should have already gone there. I think it's going higher, but I think if gold goes to 5,000, which is what a triple? Call it that?

• 32:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  I think gold stocks will at least 10x. And so that alone would do it to me.

• 32:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you think the gold stock? Why do you think the gold stocks, the miners are going to go up so much more? Is it because they're, uh, cash flow and, and kind of, uh, income producing? And therefore people will go and buy those and, and, uh, kind of move those stocks more than gold itself?

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, you remember when you buy a gold stock? You buy all the gold that they got in the ground at reserves. Most of that gold you're getting for nothing. Because the analysts assume it's worthless because it's too expensive to mine it. But if the price of gold really goes up, much more than it costs to mine it, all of a sudden, gold that was worthless has a big value. But I also think that the value of gold stocks will rise dramatically. Once the typical portfolio manager realizes that he needs to buy them. I mean, right now, nobody buys them. And so they, you know, they're trading relatively cheap.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  I think at some point, gold stocks are going to enter a bubble. I mean, we're not even really in a true bull market yet, let alone a bubble. Uh, but I think eventually gold stocks are going to get expensive. Maybe I'll be smart enough to sell them when, when, when they do.

• 34:04Anthony Pompliano?

  All right.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  They're gonna get expensive, but also.

• 34:07Anthony Pompliano?

  By the way, Satoshi Nakamoto may be the first trillionaire, just so we're clear. Satoshi's got a shot there. I see people in the comments talking about.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Assuming he's alive or whatever.

• 34:15Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Would you say the same thing is true?

• 34:18Speaker 02

  The other thing that's gonna help make, make me that wealthy is if gold were to go up that much. I'm assuming the dollar is also going way down and I've got all these foreign stocks that I own personally. And I manage, you know, right now I manage, I forget what it is, maybe a billion and a half or something like that, where I generate fees. Well, if gold goes to 5,000, I think I'm gonna have five to 10 billion under management, maybe more. So the value of my business goes up a lot, right? If I were to sell it or something like that. So I, in that kind of world where gold is at 5,000, the dollar is falling, there's lots of inflation.

• 34:58Speaker 02

  A lot of people are sending money to me to manage and therefore, you know, my income is up, the value of my business goes up. Also Schiff Gold, you know, we're gonna be selling a lot more gold. When gold's at $5,000 an ounce, you know, it's, it's gonna be flying off the, you know, like off the shelves like hotcakes.

• 35:15Anthony Pompliano?

  How many, how many businesses do you have? Wait, you have Euro Pacific and you've got Schiff Gold? Those are the two main businesses?

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Well, I market, I sold. You know, I live in Puerto Rico now, so I kind of sold the businesses. So I do marketing for Shift Gold. I have Europe Pacific Asset Management, which that's my main business.

• 35:30Anthony Pompliano?

  All right.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  I have a bank, but

• 35:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And you have a billion, you got a billion and a half?

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Is my, and my mutual funds, right? Which is part of the asset management company.

• 35:37Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. You got a billion and a half in there right now. What do you charge on fees? You a two and 20 guy?

• 35:43Speaker 02

  No, because I don't, I don't have a hedge fund.

• 35:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  So I don't, I don't, I don't charge people those, those outrageous fees. So I just charge a management fee. Sometimes it's as high as 2% for the smaller accounts. But, you know,

• 35:57Anthony Pompliano?

  But the big boys get a discount. The big boys get a discount?

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, as you get, because the economy's a scale. But so I usually charge between 1 to 2% a year. And I bill quarterly to manage a portfolio. But so it's not 2 and 20. It's maybe 1 and 0 or, or 2 and 0 at the most. So it's a much better deal than you would get from a hedge fund. And so what, what I'm doing is really what a global macro fund would do. That's kind of the approach that I take. But I don't charge anywhere near the fees.

• 36:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're, you're making like,

• 36:29Speaker 02

  I'm my biggest client, you know? So I mean, I'm doing the same thing with my own money that I advise that people do with, with their money they send me. So.

• 36:36Anthony Pompliano?

  That's 15 to 30 million a year. You're like rich, rich. You're like, you're like,

• 36:40Speaker 02

  You know, I got employees. I'm, I don't take it all. You know, I got portfolio managers, you know, I got sales reps. So, you know, I don't keep all of it, but I keep a good chunk of it.

• 36:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I got you. Well, you're in Switzerland in a hotel that looks like my house. Like, I mean, you're,

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Well, because I live in Puerto Rico, right? I pay a 4% tax on the money I earn.

• 37:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk about taxes. That's, that's one other thing. Wait, that's why I,

• 37:04Speaker 02

  I get all this capital gains. My capital gains rate is zero.

• 37:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So talk about, talk about taxes, because I know you're big on taxes. You got Puerto Rico residence. You're doing the whole thing. Explain to everyone why you're so focused on taxes and trying to, uh, bring that tax rate as low as possible so you can keep as much income as possible.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it's not what you make, right? It's what you keep. I mean, that's, we all know that. And, um, you know, it's an American's patriotic duty to minimize their taxes, to pay the lowest tax that they could legally pay. And that's not me, that's the Supreme Court said that. So I'm being a patriotic American. And personally, I believe that any government, money the government gets, the government wastes. I think money in my hands is, is gonna do better than money in the government hands, and that applies to every American. Keep the money that you earn. But it's not just the income tax, which I think is so debilitating to the economy, it's the inflation tax. We're talking about inflation. Inflation is a tax. If you strip it of all the jargon, that's what it boils down to.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Because governments have two ways of taking money from us. They can take it through taxes, where they take physically our money, or they can take our purchasing power through inflation. They just print money, and they spend that. But that means the value of our money goes down, because prices go up. And you know, when Joe Biden campaigned on not raising taxes for anybody who earned less than 400,000, he's lying, because the biggest tax increases are hitting the people who make less than 400,000, because that's where inflation does the most damage. It goes to the people who spend most of their money. So if you're spending most of your money, and most of the lower-income people spend everything that they earn, well, they're hit hardest by the inflation tax.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  And they're getting clobbered right now. But the reason that I want to avoid the inflation tax is because, as an investor, inflation can create phony capital gains. So let's say I'm right, gold goes to 5,000, 10,000, I have gold stocks, let's say I have, you know, even 50 million of gold stocks in that scenario, that turns into a billion dollars, right? Because the gold stocks go way up, right? And now I sell, and I cash out, and the government says, oh, you've got, you know, this huge capital gains. Well, what if the same period of time, my cost of living has gone up five times? Right? So my gains are not really nearly as big as, as the nominal numbers.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  And to make it even simpler, let's just say that, you know, my stocks go up 10 times, but the cost of living goes up 10 times. So the price of everything I buy is 10 times what it used to be, and my stocks go up 10 times. I haven't made any money. I'm just even. If I sell my stocks, I can still afford to buy the same exact stock as I could buy before they 10x. But then if the government says, oh, you have a 50% capital gains tax, now I'm, I've lost half my purchasing power. I didn't make any real capital gains. I had a phony capital gains, but the government was able to tax that. So by moving to Puerto Rico, and this was one of my primary motivating factors,

• 40:13Speaker 02

  they can never do that. It doesn't matter how high prices go. I don't have to pay a capital gains tax because I'm locked at zero. And that doesn't apply to just me. It's all the people that have moved here to take advantage of the same deal.

• 40:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you start to think about Bitcoin versus gold, would you ever consider, I know that you're not a fan of Bitcoin, we can get to why, but would you buy the Bitcoin mining stocks because there's cash flow?

• 40:40Speaker 02

  No.

• 40:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Why? Wait, why?

• 40:43Speaker 02

  First of all,

• 40:44Anthony Pompliano?

  It's cash flow's a business.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  First of all, let's, like, like, look, they don't mine anything.

• 40:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What are you talking about?

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Equipment there. They solve math problems. But the problem is, they use a lot of energy to solve those problems. Uh, but I wouldn't want to buy any of these things because when the price of Bitcoin crashes, these stocks are worthless because it's going to cost more to mine them than you could get for them. So no, I mean, if I, what I would be doing if I was a company, I would be selling stock to any fool who's going to buy it from me. I'd be like selling new shares, doing secondaries, you know, just trying to dump all it out there. But I don't have any shares.

• 41:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What would it take for you to buy Bitcoin? What's the one thing in the economy or any sort of, uh, financial markets that you would finally say, all right, enough is enough? I won't tell Pomp that he was right, but I'm going to go put a little Bitcoin away. I'm going to put it under the mattress, not tell anybody about it.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Well, how much, you talk about play money, like I would buy like, you know, a lottery ticket or something?

• 41:42Anthony Pompliano?

  But have you done that yet? Have you, have you even speculated a little bit? Bought even just one just for fun? I mean, you're, you're almost a billionaire. Like, one's nothing.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  I have bought a couple of lottery tickets in my life.

• 41:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, did you buy Bitcoin as a lottery ticket yet?

• 41:56Speaker 02

  No, I haven't bought any Bitcoin.

• 41:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, so you haven't bought any. What would cause you to buy some?

• 42:00Speaker 02

  People have given me some Bitcoin, or fractions of a Bitcoin, but I lost them all, as you know.

• 42:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  So.

• 42:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you didn't lose, just so we're clear, you didn't lose them.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  My son has actually bought some.

• 42:11Anthony Pompliano?

  You didn't lose the Bitcoin, you lost the password, which is user error.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  I lost access to them, right. I know where they are. I know, but I just can't, I just can't get at them.

• 42:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, holding on to the Bitcoin is an intelligence test. If you lose the password, it can't help you, right? It's like losing the password to your brokerage account. Sorry.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  I never had the password to lose. That was the problem.

• 42:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, what would it take to get you to buy one Bitcoin? Just one Bitcoin where you actually took dollars and converted it to Bitcoin? What would be the thing in the market that you would finally say, alright, I gotta do this?

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Well, look, right now, they're what, like 33,000, 34,000? I never, I wouldn't want to waste $34,000 on a Bitcoin, so, um, you know, I mean, I could buy a lot of other things with that money. I mean, I suppose if the price got cheap enough, maybe if it got back, I don't know, below a buck, maybe I could buy one.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  But the question is, you know, would I want one? See, this is the thing. I mean, if, you could say, oh, I, I talked to a lot of these Bitcoin hodlers, and they're like, oh yeah, I would want to buy so many more. Really? If it really got down that low, wouldn't that be a signal? I mean, is there a point, you know, for you? You're asking me when I would buy my Bitcoin? I mean, I don't really know, because I, I, I'm not interested in it. But the real question is, what will it take to get you to sell?

• 43:28Anthony Pompliano?

  If gold went, if gold went to $500, would you buy more? If gold went to $500?

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Well, sure.

• 43:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  But, but here's the reason why. Because gold is an actual commodity.

• 43:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it?

• 43:41Speaker 02

  And, and so, yes.

• 43:43Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a lot of fake gold. I, I want to talk to you about fake gold. I saw on the internet that there's all kinds of fake gold.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  In space. Yeah, well, so fake gold doesn't do what real gold does. I don't know if you, you know, do, you know, so.

• 43:54Anthony Pompliano?

  But how do you know?

• 43:55Speaker 02

  If fake gold doesn't have the.

• 43:56Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you know you have real gold? You like, are you a chemist? Are you, are you testing it?

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not, you know, that's part of the lies that the Bitcoin pumpers tell is that it's hard to know real gold from fake gold.

• 44:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, how do you tell?

• 44:09Speaker 02

  They've been able to tell real gold from fake gold for thousands of years, and they didn't even have any technology. They didn't even, we, it's so much easier to tell the difference between real gold and fake gold now than we were on the gold standard. So this is all a bunch of nonsense. But to answer your question, see, since gold is an actual commodity, let's say I am a jewelry manufacturer, and I, I know I got demand to make jewelry.

• 44:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Which, which by the way, is only, is less than 10% of all demand and demand for jewelry's been dropping, but go ahead.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know, I don't, I don't, I don't know who you're dating, but anyway, so if the price of gold goes down to $500, and I'm a jeweler, I'm like, whoa, I can buy a bunch of gold that I need much cheaper to make these necklaces, or these rings, or these, whatever, and so there's going to be more demand, right? If I'm, if I need gold in my computer chips, and all of a sudden the price goes down, now I can buy more gold for the same money and put them in my chips and, and save money, I'm going to buy more, right? There's, there, there's a way to rationalize that. Like, if I have a stock, I talked earlier about a stock, let's say there's a stock that I love at $10 a share, and it's got a 5% dividend yield at $10 a share.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  If the stock drops to five, and now I got, and now, you know, or it had a 5% dividend, and now it gets cut in half, and now the dividend is 10%, I get twice the dividend yield by buying it at half the price. Whatever value of the assets was there, all else being equal, I can buy those same assets for half price. When, when it comes to Bitcoin, I don't get any more when I buy Bitcoin at 10,000 than when I buy it at 30,000. Yeah, I buy, I get more Bitcoin, but I don't get any more dividends because it doesn't pay any dividends. I don't get any more rent, like I buy real estate on sale, and I can't make any more jewelry because I've got more Bitcoin, because you can't make anything with a Bitcoin, doesn't matter how many you have.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  I can have all 21 million Bitcoins, and I can't do anything. That I couldn't do with just one, doesn't matter how many you have. But the more gold you have, the more electricity you can conduct, the more jewelry you can make, whatever, all that stuff you could do. Uh, and so there is no way to know that Bitcoin is cheap because there's nothing to measure it against. So my question to you is, you think Bitcoin is going to be the new money? It's going to, you know, replace gold or replace other financial assets.

• 46:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it already replaced gold, just so we're clear, it already replaced gold for people under the age of 35. Nobody owns gold under the age of 35. Go ahead.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  It hasn't replaced gold in the real world. It, it hasn't replaced gold in jewelry. It hasn't, the, the central banks still own gold as part of a monetary asset.

• 46:51Anthony Pompliano?

  They were net sellers in Q4. Go ahead.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  No, but you believe that all this stuff is going to happen to Bitcoin? And it all hinges on, you know, more adoption, you know, just like we talked about social security being a Ponzi scheme. It's kind of the same dynamic.

• 47:07Anthony Pompliano?

  You're talking, you're talking about gold, right? Gold's price only goes up if more people want gold, right? Isn't that how it works?

• 47:12Speaker 02

  If people want gold for all the properties that gold has.

• 47:15Anthony Pompliano?

  But, but it's demand based. The only reason why any asset, hold on, the only reason why any asset goes up is because it's demand based. If more people don't want Apple stock, it goes down. If more people don't want gold, it goes down. If more people don't want Bitcoin, it goes down. That's how the markets work. It's called supply and demand. I'll send you an economics 101 book.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  If people want to buy Apple products and Apple's earning a profit and paying a dividend, well, people will want to buy the stock. Now, you know, obviously in a different environment with higher interest rates, they may not be willing to pay as much for Apple stock as they're paying now. But there will be demand at some price for Apple stock. That's not the case with Bitcoin. I mean, it gold, even if you don't want to buy gold at 1800, you might want to buy it at a thousand because it may be a good deal for what you need it for. Uh, but Bitcoin is, is not a commodity and it's not an investable asset. It doesn't, it doesn't have a use and it doesn't throw off an income stream. So my, to get back to the question I'm asking you.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  You think that Bitcoin is going to continue to be adopted and more institutions are going to buy it, more people around the world are going to start using it. What if that doesn't happen, right? At some point, so let's say Bitcoin crashes to 20,000, or then 10,000, or then 5,000, right? Is there some point where you like, kind of like, alright, I was wrong, it's not catching on, the momentum has turned, I'm just going to give up on this, I'm not going to go down with the ship to zero. Is there a point where you get out?

• 48:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, what if unicorns fall from the sky, right?

• 48:50Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no.

• 48:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  That's a crazy thing.

• 48:53Anthony Pompliano?

  If it continues, if it continues to fall.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  Bitcoin going to 10,000 is not crazy. Bitcoin was at 10,000 a year ago. To say that Bitcoin can't go back to 10,000 again is ridiculous.

• 49:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you're proving my point. Hold on, hold on.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  If it does, does it change your view?

• 49:07Anthony Pompliano?

  So Bitcoin was 10,000 a year ago, and now it's at 35. And for Bitcoin to go from 35 to 10, about 70%, 75, whatever the number is, right?

• 49:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm saying.

• 49:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Hold on, that means that we would just return to prices not seen since last year. If gold fell 75%, it would be numbers from literally 30 years ago. No, it wouldn't change my mind. Here's why it wouldn't change my mind. Ready? Everything that you say about the economy, I think generally you and I agree, right? We agree that the feds lost their mind, they're manipulating markets, people are getting hurt, nobody understands that they should be investing rather than saving, all the things that you say about the economy we agree on. You and I both also agree that sound money is the solution, right? We can't have money that can just be printed at will because politicians or other folks decide that we're going to do that, or we're going to manipulate those markets. So sound money is the solution. There's two options.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  Right, but Bitcoin doesn't qualify as sound money.

• 50:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Hold on. Well, okay, well, just so we're clear, there, sound money is, the definition of sound money is that it's outside the system and no one can create more of it. And so gold and Bitcoin.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, let me, Tom, do you know the origin of the word "sound money"? Do you know where it comes from?

• 50:19Anthony Pompliano?

  It's not a spelling bee, but go ahead, tell me.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Well, so if you take a gold coin and you drop it on a hard surface, it makes a sound, as opposed to when you drop a piece of paper on a surface, it doesn't make a sound. So hard money makes a sound when you drop it. What's the sound that Bitcoin makes when you drop it?

• 50:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Peter, this is like Blockbuster saying to Netflix, "Oh, you have no value because when we drop the VHS tape on the table, it makes a sound." That's ridiculous.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  No, there's a difference. See, when I can watch a video, that still has value. Watching a video on television, I mean, on the internet-

• 50:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's do a race. All right, hold on, we're gonna settle this. Cause we gotta, we gotta go in a minute. We gotta go in a minute.

• 51:02Speaker 02

  But you can't make anything with Bitcoin.

• 51:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Here's my challenge to you. Here's my challenge to you. Ready? You wanna see what has more value? You send me a gold bar, I'll send you a Bitcoin, and we'll see who gets there first.

• 51:12Speaker 02

  No, that's irrelevant, because I can, first of all, I don't have any Bitcoin to send you.

• 51:17Anthony Pompliano?

  No, you send me the gold bar. The gold, I mean, you can put it in the mail, it'll take you seven days to get it to you.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I would be sending you something real. The reason it's so cheap to send Bitcoin is because you're sending nothing. If I'm gonna send nothing, yeah, I can send nothing real cheap. But come back to this question I'm asking you, right? Where do you throw in the towel on Bitcoin and say, "No, you're wrong, get rid of it"? I mean, if it's not 10,000, what if it goes to 1,000? If Bitcoin is at 1,000, if we're doing an interview in the future and Bitcoin is 1,000, are you gonna say, "Well, if you bought it when it was a dollar, you still have a thousand times your money"?

• 51:56Anthony Pompliano?

  No, Pete, Peter.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  So it's the best before we, or are you gonna commit you were wrong?

• 52:00Anthony Pompliano?

  The difference is that Bitcoin is going to be the global reserve currency because nobody can create more of it. And it is already becoming the digital reserve currency of that digital economy. And the whole key to this is, the reason why you're so worried about price is because gold will never be the global reserve currency ever again. It's over. We're not going back to a gold standard. But there is a much higher likelihood that we transition to a Bitcoin reward, uh, reserve status. And when that happens, the US dollar exchange value doesn't matter. Right? It doesn't matter. Because just one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin. Here, here's the problem with the gold thesis, is that they printed trillions of dollars.

• 52:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Every asset in the planet, literally, beanie babies went up in value.

• 52:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And gold didn't go up in value in the last 12 months.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:53Anthony Pompliano?

  So gold today is worth less than it was last year because it didn't even keep up with inflation. If I was holding gold, my gold didn't even keep up with inflation.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's because we have a bubble in everything. Gold is money, right? So you have a bubble, stocks are overpriced, real estate is overpriced in terms of money. Gold is not currency. Gold is actual money. Currency was backed by money. The first legitimate currency was a receipt for gold. Gold was the money that backed up the currency. That's what gave currency value was that it was backed up by gold. Now fiat currency is currency backed up by nothing. That's like what Bitcoin is. Bitcoin is backed by nothing. It has no actual value. When you say that they're not, you know, they, there's a limit to how many, there's almost 11,000 cryptocurrencies now. I mean, the supply is growing, uh, you know, like wildflower.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  There is no limit to the number of virtually identical cryptocurrencies that can be created and they keep creating them. And you think there's a limit to 21 million Bitcoin. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. It doesn't even matter how many Bitcoins there are. It matters is how many other cryptocurrencies could people buy instead of Bitcoin? Because there's nothing special about Bitcoin other than the name. And it's not even that special because you got Bitcoin Cash, you got Bitcoin Gold, you got whatever Bitcoin this Bitcoin that. I mean, what's the difference? There's really, there really is no difference when you basically, you know, take a step back and look at, and look.

• 54:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Peter.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  God, the, the odds of Bitcoin becoming the reserve asset for the world are zero. It's never going to happen. That's a fantasy.

• 54:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Peter, I love you. I just want to remind you of one fact as your friend. Cause I feel like it's important that you remember this. If you had sold your gold and bought Bitcoin in the last 12 months, or when you first heard about it, you would be a billionaire today.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  Well, there is, well, look, if I had put all of my net worth into Bitcoin when I first heard about it, yeah, I

• 54:52Anthony Pompliano?

  No, not your whole net worth, not your whole net worth, just you had replaced your gold allocation with Bitcoin allocation.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Yes, I would, I would be a billionaire if I did that when I first heard about it.

• 55:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Or in the last year, or if you did it in the last year, you'd probably still be a billionaire.

• 55:04Speaker 02

  But that applies, but that applies to a lot of people, not just me, probably applies to you. When you first heard about Bitcoin, if you put all your money in it, you'd probably be a billionaire too.

• 55:14Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I'm not talking about all your money, I'm talking about just gold. Alright, before I let you go, I appreciate you coming on while you're on vacation. Nice hotel, you got a nice shirt, hair combed, looking great. Where should we send people? What's your Twitter account? Where do you want us to send people?

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Well, you know, my Twitter account is half the size of yours, you know, you've got over a million followers now. But I know a year ago, I think I had more than you, or two years ago.

• 55:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, Bitcoin left, Bitcoin left gold in the dust and I left you in the dust.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, but you know what, I, you know, just, let's see what happens over the next few years, you know, but

• 55:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can we send them?

• 55:50Speaker 02

  You can follow me on, you can follow me on Twitter, Peter Schiff. I finally got verified, so maybe I'll do better now than I got the check mark.

• 55:59Speaker 02

  I had to get, I had to get more than 500,000 followers before they verified me.

• 56:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, you say crazy stuff on the internet, so I had to make sure that you weren't a, you know, a conspiracy theory account or something.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know.

• 56:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright, listen, thank you so much for doing this.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  The key is, people should listen to my podcast at shiftradio.com or subscribe to my YouTube channel, The Shift Report. We get a lot of listeners there. I'm even doing my podcasts from, from here in Switzerland.

• 56:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Schiff Radio is the new sponsor of the Best Business Show?

• 56:33Speaker 02

  I did the last one from Italy. We were in, we were in Lake Como over the weekend and I did my last podcast.

• 56:38Anthony Pompliano?

  You're like an international traveler, you're just like a globetrotter, jet setter, Covid's gone, Peter is off in the sky.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I know. I mean, well, people still have masks on around, so it's a little frustrating, but most people are demasked.

• 56:52Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, all right. All right, we'll catch up later. Thanks for doing this.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  Most important thing, though, is that, you know, if you got some money, hey, look, if you got some Bitcoin, you should take some profits, even if, look, you know, you got people like my kid, my son is like, I'm never gonna sell any Bitcoin. Well, look, I mean, so what good is that? You're gonna die with your Bitcoin? If you're never gonna sell them, you're never gonna make any money. I mean, at least take something off the table, sell into the rallies. You can always buy it back, you know, if you like it so much, wait for the next dip and buy that. But, you know, take some, something off the top. That's, that's some good advice. And Bitcoin is, at a minimum, Anthony, right? Bitcoin is very speculative. You got to admit that it's, this is all a speculation. It's a crapshoot, right? And if you're right,

• 57:36Speaker 02

  that Bitcoin is gonna go to a million or a billion, a little bit of Bitcoin will go a long way.

• 57:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Breaking news, breaking news. Peter, Peter Schiff just said that Bitcoin may go to a billion dollars.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  Right? So just keep a little bit of money in Bitcoin. The rest of the money, you can send it to me to manage for you, because at least you know you're not gonna lose that. You know, you're gonna get some good, solid stocks, you know, get, get some income. You can even buy Bitcoin with your dividends. You know, if you want to do that, you want to get a nice dividend portfolio, and you want to take your dividend checks that I'm sending you, and you want to waste some of that income on Bitcoin, you know, at least you're gonna get more, right? The dividends are gonna keep coming. So, you know, contact some of my reps. And I know I see some people, like in my neighborhood in Puerto Rico, because the real estate has literally gone up at least 4X since I moved there. And part of the reason is all these Bitcoin guys cashing out their Bitcoin and, and buying up houses, you know, so.

• 58:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Listen, they just want to live near you. You're, you're a wealth of knowledge. They just want to be close so that they could tell you I told you so once, uh, once everything happens. But listen.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  Well, you could already say that now. You can say I told you so, because Bitcoin is at 33,000, 34,000. But in a year or two, maybe less, I'm gonna be saying I told you so when you, because you didn't sell.

• 58:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Maybe.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  Right? I'm gonna be, I told you so. You should have sold. I mean, look at that chart, Anthony. Take a look at that Bitcoin chart and that thing could collapse. I mean, look at where you are. You're up in the stratosphere here with this massive head and shoulders top. There's no support there beneath that neckline. This thing can implode even quicker. You know, there's an old saying about markets, right? They take the stairs up and the elevator down, right? Well, Bitcoin, they didn't even take the elevator. You're just jumping right off the top of the building. You're just free falling all the way down. Elevator is going to be slow compared to how Bitcoin goes down.

• 59:25Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, all right, all right. Enjoy your vacation. We'll talk soon. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  All right, all right, Anthony.

• 59:32Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, bye, buddy.