In this episode, Peter Schiff talks about why he decided to move to Puerto Rico, why it's a great place to live, and why you should consider making the move there. He also talks about the tax benefits that come with moving there, and how you can potentially double your income in less than a year. Peter Schiff is a Wall Street Journal best-selling author, hedge fund manager, and former hedge fund trader. He is a regular contributor to CNBC and the Wall Street Transcript, and is one of the most well-known financial journalists in the world. He's also a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Forbes, and the Financial Times, and has been featured on CNN, NPR, and NPR. Peter also hosts the popular Financial Times podcast The Financial Times and is the host of the popular financial podcast FiveThirtyEight, where he covers the latest financial news and takes your calls and texts about the latest happenings in the stock market. Peter is a great friend of mine, and I'm sure you'll agree that he's been a pleasure to have on the podcast. . Thank you so much for coming back after a long break. I really appreciate it. I hope you enjoy this episode and look forward to having him back soon! - Peter Schiff Tweet me if you have a question or would like to have him on the show on your podcast! or any other podcast you'd like him to come on the pod? or suggest a new episode of his next episode? Timestamps: 5: 5:00 - What's your favorite part of the show? 6:30 - What is your favorite piece of music? 7:00- What do you like about Puerto Rico? 8: What are you looking for? 9:15 - Puerto Rico's most expensive meal? 11:40 - How do you want to move there? 12:00 13:30 14:30- What s your favorite restaurant? 15: What is the best thing about Puerto Rican cuisine? 16:20 - How much money you're going to get in your life? 17:15- What are your favorite place to eat? 18:40- What kind of food you like in Puerto Rico?? 19:20- What does Puerto Rico is the most expensive place in the USA? 21:40 22:20 23:10 - What s the best place to get out of your job?
00:00:37.000Well, you know, I live in Connecticut, and unlike Southern California, where you are fortunate enough to still live, I lived here for a long time, years and years ago.
00:00:46.000But we have seasons, and one of them is winter, and it tends to be very long, and it normally kind of moves into the fall and the spring a bit.
00:00:55.000And so I had been thinking for years about kind of splitting my time between Florida and Connecticut, because I love...
00:01:46.000And I found out, and I had never known this, that Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory, Americans who live in Puerto Rico don't have to pay federal income taxes on the money they earn from Puerto Rico, which would include any of your capital gains on your investments.
00:02:16.000You don't have to pay federal income taxes, but Puerto Rico has its own taxes, so you have to pay the Puerto Rico taxes instead.
00:02:22.000And up until recently, I mean, Puerto Rico's income tax, I think, tops out at 30%.
00:02:27.000It's still cheaper than the U.S., and there's no state income tax.
00:02:31.000That's all you've got, right, is the 30%.
00:02:33.000But a few years ago, Puerto Rico got smart, and they said, well, how do we attract...
00:02:41.000Well, let's just drop that income tax down.
00:02:45.000And so they basically created these two laws, Act 20 and Act 22. And Act 22 is for individuals.
00:02:51.000And it says, hey, if you move to Puerto Rico, you have zero capital gains tax on any capital gains, and you have zero taxes on any interest and dividends that you earn locally.
00:03:02.000And then they passed another act, which was Act 20, and they said, hey, if you open up a business here, you have a company, you're going to pay a 4% corporate tax to Puerto Rico, and then you can pass on all the profits in dividends to yourself tax-free.
00:03:16.000No tax in Puerto Rico, no tax in the United States.
00:03:48.000I mean, I live in a town called Dorado Beach, and, you know, it's very, very nice, the weather and just the tropical location, and there's a lot of good people there.
00:04:00.000A lot of people have been moving there.
00:04:01.000Obviously, I'm not the first person to take advantage of this, and so there are a lot of people that have come from California to get out of, you know, California taxes, or the Northeast, the Midwest, you know.
00:04:12.000Plus, when you come from the Midwest or the Northeast, you also help yourself get out of the cold weather.
00:04:17.000California, it's pretty much all a tax thing.
00:04:20.000I mean, no one's leaving Southern California other than really taxes, because you've got such great weather here.
00:04:31.000And the crazy thing is, you have this movement now in Puerto Rico where they want to become a state.
00:04:37.000Which is ridiculous, because if they became a state, all the problems they have would be that much worse, because Puerto Rico is in trouble today, despite the fact that you don't have to pay federal income taxes there.
00:04:48.000I mean, what happened was the Puerto Rican government, which was very socialist, they borrowed a lot of money, and they spent a lot of money to get elected, and a lot of people in Puerto Rico work for the government, and a lot of people are on welfare, food stamps, and stuff like that.
00:05:03.000But big government is what destroyed the Puerto Rican economy, and they borrowed a lot of money.
00:05:08.000But if on top of that, Puerto Rican residents that actually had jobs had to pay the federal income tax, you know, it's not just the federal income tax that doesn't apply down there.
00:05:18.000You know, people wanted Obamacare repealed.
00:05:19.000If you moved to Puerto Rico, you've repealed it for yourself, because the taxes don't apply down there.
00:05:24.000They don't even have to pay the federal gas tax.
00:05:27.000Without all those taxes, they're still in trouble.
00:05:29.000So can you imagine how much worse it would be if they had all these taxes, if all of a sudden the IRS descended on Puerto Rico like an infestation of mosquitoes?
00:05:38.000It'd be worse than the Zika virus down there to have the IRS. But there's people, they've told a lot of people, hey, if we become a state, you'll get more welfare.
00:06:18.000But if they become a state, they're going to destroy all that potential.
00:06:21.000They have to exploit the fact that Puerto Rico can offer such a great advantage to a businessman, somebody who wants to create a company, employ people, provide goods and services.
00:06:33.000They can do it in Puerto Rico on a much favorable basis relative to anywhere in the continental United States.
00:08:00.000Yeah, plus you're paying the state income taxes in Hawaii.
00:08:04.000But, you know, my guys wanted to move there because it basically almost meant that their income was going to double, like, pretty much overnight because they can participate in these tax breaks.
00:08:12.000But, you know, one of my guys is married, has some kids, and, you know, they really like it.
00:08:18.000My single employees, I have a few young guys, you know, Good shape, working out, young portfolio managers, but they quickly got Puerto Rican girlfriends.
00:08:28.000If you've got a job down there, that's a big plus, because most of the Puerto Rican guys, and not if you know this, but I think five of the Miss Universes have gone to Puerto Rico.
00:08:38.000I mean, it's a small little island country, but they got some beautiful women down there in Puerto Rico.
00:08:43.000It sounds like you're a salesperson from Puerto Rico.
00:08:45.000Peter Schiff, you got some sort of a deal going on down there?
00:08:53.000They see me on the beach, at the pool.
00:08:54.000Hey, you're the reason that I'm here, because they heard about it.
00:08:57.000But look, it's a good deal, and I would love to see Puerto Rico succeed as a mecca of free market capitalism.
00:09:06.000Right now, it's a poster child for the failures of socialism, because it's the socialists that killed Puerto Rico, just like they're killing a lot of major cities in the United States.
00:09:15.000But if we get more entrepreneurs, more business people coming to Puerto Rico, that is what Puerto Rico needs.
00:10:25.000I mean, because, I mean, I know some of the locals could feel, hey, these guys are coming in here, and they're not paying a lot of taxes, but...
00:10:32.000I pay a lot of taxes as just a raw number.
00:10:35.000It's not a big percentage of what I earn, but it's a big number relative to what other people might be paying.
00:13:07.000Or it stays where it is and more people like you have an incentive to go there and then entrepreneurs open up businesses and then there's more opportunities and then the general wealth of the island grows and then it helps people just by virtue of more profit.
00:13:37.000The appeal of being a state is that so many people don't work.
00:13:41.000But one thing that we could do to help Puerto Rico is get rid of the minimum wage because they're stuck with our minimum wage, which is a disaster because the average income, the average wage in Puerto Rico is about half of what it is in the United States.
00:13:54.000And so the minimum wage of $7.25 is like having a minimum wage of $15 an hour.
00:13:59.000And if you're one of those people that likes a $15 minimum wage, look at how high the unemployment is down there.
00:14:04.000Because people can't get jobs at these wages.
00:14:10.000You know, the best example, too, of America destroying one of its possessions with the minimum wage was American Samoa.
00:14:17.000I don't know if you ever read this, but a few years ago, Congress applied the minimum wage to all the territories, our minimum wage, which included American Samoa.
00:14:26.000And in American Samoa, The biggest employers on the island were these tuna canners.
00:14:32.000And so, you know, Chicken of the Sea or Starchist.
00:14:35.000And so all these people worked in these factories canning the tuna.
00:14:47.000And so the tuna factories closed down and fired everybody.
00:14:50.000And then, so all of a sudden there was like 30% unemployment, the island went into a massive depression, and they still haven't come out of it.
00:15:01.000American Samoa didn't want the minimum wage, but, you know, American politicians don't give a damn, and all they care about is feeling good about themselves, not about the consequences of what they do.
00:15:10.000And so they, you know, they imposed that minimum wage, and it was like declaring war.
00:15:14.000Well, it had a lot of damage in Puerto Rico, just not as much as it did in American Samoa.
00:15:19.000But if we can get rid of that minimum wage in Puerto Rico, then there'd be a lot more employment opportunities for younger, unskilled people.
00:15:26.000They'd have the opportunity to, you know, climb up the job ladder to get some skills so they can earn We're good to go.
00:15:59.000With a U.S. crew, and then send it back to Puerto Rico, and it cost a fortune.
00:16:04.000So that's one of the reasons that their tourism is not that competitive there, because all the other Caribbean islands can get cheap stuff dropped off on boats, but we have to wait for stuff to come on a Jones Act boat.
00:16:18.000What was the incentive to pass the Jones Act?
00:16:21.000It's for the unions, the maritime union, the merchant marine, to try to, because, you know, American ships are uncompetitive.
00:16:27.000Like, if you ever go on a cruise, I don't know if you go on a cruise, but none of these cruise ships are flagged in the United States, and none of the crews are American.
00:16:34.000That's because if you had to use an American crew with our laws, nobody could afford to cruise.
00:16:41.000The only way that you can have a cruise line that anybody can afford to travel on is if you flag it in some other country.
00:16:48.000Well, because the wages are just off the charts.
00:16:51.000But that Jones Act means if people in Puerto Rico, whatever they're going to buy, whatever they're going to consume, in order to bring it to that island, they're going to have to bring it on a U.S. flagship.
00:17:02.000Now, that's a problem for Hawaii, too.
00:17:04.000But the people in Hawaii are much richer, on average, than the people in Puerto Rico.
00:17:11.000The more you're affected by higher food costs or higher, you know, costs of everything.
00:17:15.000So it's, you know, you have a lot of these, you know, liberal politicians, they refuse to get rid of these laws, but that would very much help Puerto Rico, just more free markets, because they have no control over that federal minimum wage or that Jones Act.
00:17:27.000So you don't think there should be any minimum wage at all?
00:17:31.000So someone working for a dollar an hour doesn't bother you?
00:17:34.000Well, I mean, it's better than working for zero.
00:17:36.000I mean, people think that, you know, they want to impose their morals and say, well, it's not right for somebody to work for a dollar an hour.
00:17:45.000Well, you know, people make rational decisions, right?
00:17:48.000And so if somebody is accepting a dollar an hour, and that must mean that nobody offered them a dollar fifty, nobody offered them two dollars.
00:18:35.000But maybe you pay them five dollars an hour, whatever it is.
00:18:38.000But people are going to accept a job that's the best one they can get.
00:18:42.000And so if somebody is working for a dollar an hour or two dollars an hour, by default, I know that they couldn't find a higher job than that.
00:18:50.000And the reason is because they don't have a lot of skills.
00:18:52.000But if you don't have a lot of skills, The best thing you can do is get a job so you can get some skills.
00:19:16.000Because you're assuming that they're going to get a skill.
00:19:18.000I mean, they might just be handling packages and picking them up and moving to another location or digging a hole or...
00:19:23.000Well, even that's like, show up on time, be responsible.
00:19:27.000So discipline, show that you can work.
00:19:29.000Yeah, there's a lot of stuff that you learn when you have a job.
00:19:31.000But the problem with the minimum wage is that the minimum wage basically hurts the very people that it's intended to help.
00:19:39.000Because the minimum wage basically says, if you are a worker, If you cannot convince an employer to pay you $7.25 or $10 an hour, whatever the minimum wage is, then you cannot accept that job.
00:20:19.000And there's a minimum wage of $10 an hour and somebody comes to me and they can deliver $5 an hour worth of productivity, meaning if I hire that person that will benefit me by $5 an hour, I'm not going to pay them $10 an hour because then I lose $5 an hour.
00:20:34.000The only way I'm going to hire somebody who's going to give me $5 an hour worth of productivity is if I can hire them for less than $5 an hour so I can make a profit.
00:21:11.000We didn't always have a minimum wage in the United States.
00:21:14.000I mean, this is a creation of government.
00:21:17.000But the initial minimum wages, if you want to actually go to the origins of minimum wage in the United States, it was about trying to We're good to go.
00:21:47.000The person who's offering the best job is not exploiting them.
00:21:51.000And if you're denied an opportunity, I mean, there are a lot of people, oh, great, you know, they're going to get the minimum wage up to $15 an hour.
00:21:58.000Well, what good is it being unemployed at $15 an hour?
00:22:01.000It's better to be employed at $5 an hour than unemployed at $15 because being unemployed means you make nothing.
00:22:08.000Where a devil's advocate would be that if you can't afford to pay someone $15 an hour, then you probably shouldn't have employees in the first place.
00:22:14.000Your business doesn't function that well.
00:22:17.000No, because there are plenty of jobs where you have entry-level positions.
00:22:22.000I mean, if you think that there should be no entry-level jobs...
00:22:25.000I mean, go back to the days of full-service gas stations, right?
00:22:30.000Back in the day when you didn't have to pump your own gas.
00:22:33.000Still the case in New Jersey and a few other states.
00:22:35.000Yeah, New Jersey, you know, they mandate it, but you still don't get the level of service.
00:22:39.000I mean, if you pulled into a gas station 40 years ago, not only did they pump your gas, but they checked under your hood, they checked your tires, they washed your windows.
00:22:51.000You know, they did all sorts of things, you know, with your car.
00:22:59.000It was the minimum wage that eliminated almost all those jobs.
00:23:01.000It's the minimum wage that is the reason that we have, you know, people so much self-serve.
00:23:06.000But what happened, a lot of these people, these kids that worked in filling stations, became mechanics, because all these filling stations had a mechanic there, and they learned auto mechanics, and a lot of them went on to own We're good to go.
00:23:49.000I worked in a shoe store selling shoes.
00:25:16.000Now, there's always going to be some people that, yeah, there's going to be somebody who will make a little bit more because of the minimum wage.
00:26:08.000Yes, you're not going to be able to support a family on those jobs, but before you even get a family, you can have that job.
00:26:14.000And then maybe, you know, five or ten years later, you'll work your way up the ladder, you'll get a skill, and then you can support a family.
00:26:20.000But nobody is supposed to be able to support a family.
00:26:23.000And if you try to tell an employer, hey, you've got to pay your fry cook enough money to support a family, you can't do that.
00:26:29.000There's not enough productivity cooking french fries.
00:26:31.000You can't support a family if all you can do is cook a french fry.
00:26:35.000You need to learn how to do something else before you can support a family.
00:26:39.000And you can't put that on the employer.
00:26:41.000Now, when you say that Singapore has a higher average income and no minimum wage, is that because there's a shitload of billionaires that have moved to Singapore because they don't have a minimum wage and because they're going to exploit lower class people or people that don't make much money?
00:26:58.000The millionaires and billionaires are really not even affected by the minimum wage.
00:27:02.000What you'd have to look at is the rate of unemployment in Singapore, which is tiny.
00:27:04.000Right, but do they have good tax rates in Singapore?
00:27:06.000Do they have good incentives for very rich people to move there, and doesn't that jack up the minimum wage, or not the minimum wage, rather, the average income?
00:27:13.000Yeah, well, the fact that you have entrepreneurs that are succeeding in Singapore because they have small government and low taxes means that there's a lot of competition for workers.
00:27:22.000And so that's what bids up wages, right?
00:27:52.000We're laughing, but there are a lot of people.
00:27:54.000Look, there are a lot of people that earn more money because they're good to look at.
00:27:57.000There are plenty of people that have paid more.
00:27:59.000They go to Puerto Rico and they win Miss Universe.
00:28:01.000Right, but even people hire receptionists or people hire people in certain positions because they look good and they get paid a little extra for that because that's added value to the customer experience and things like that.
00:28:11.000But most of us can't live off of our looks.
00:28:15.000But it's all a function of your productivity.
00:28:17.000You want to earn more, you have to produce more.
00:28:20.000The government just can't mandate that people pay you more than you're worth as far as the productivity that you can deliver, because you're just not going to have a job.
00:28:30.000Obviously, I'm not a financial wizard like you are.
00:28:32.000When you start talking about people making more money for their looks, that would be a hot-button topic in America, and people would get...
00:30:04.000If two people, if I want to hire somebody and the way they look, I believe, is going to help me earn more money because I think that having a more attractive person in a particular business position is going to somehow lead to greater sales.
00:30:16.000I mean, that's really the only reason that you're going to pay somebody more money if they look good.
00:30:20.000I go on Fox Television or CNBC. It's not an accident that all these women interviewing me are pretty hot.
00:30:42.000Because probably lots of homely girls that are applying for these jobs are not getting hired.
00:30:46.000No, I agree with you 100%, but there's a fascinating thing that's going on today where competition is thought to be in somehow, some way, shape, or form a negative thing.
00:30:55.000And that this kind of competition, whether it's even capitalism itself is criticized, right?
00:31:01.000Like there's a lot of people today that are in favor of socialism.
00:31:04.000That's one of the reasons why Bernie Sanders was so attractive.
00:31:06.000It's because like, hey, you people that are not winning this crazy competition out there, that don't have any desire, We're going to even out this playing field, and those people that are out there kicking ass and taking names, we're going to take some of that money, and we're going to just give it to everybody else.
00:31:19.000Yeah, that is the appeal of socialism, because it appeals to the lowest common denominator.
00:31:24.000Not only does it appeal to ignorance, but it appeals to greed, because it's an envy, like, oh, this person has so much more than me, and it's not fair.
00:31:31.000But here's the beauty of competition, because this is why we want competition.
00:31:47.000We want products and services that enhance our lives.
00:31:51.000And the way we get the best products with the highest quality that deliver the most value at the lowest price is to have lots of competition.
00:32:00.000All kinds of people competing for my business.
00:32:13.000And, you know, there was no competition.
00:32:15.000Let's say you wanted a phone in the Soviet Union in the 1960s.
00:32:19.000Well, you went on a waiting list, and maybe three or four years later, if you were lucky enough, you had the right connections, somebody gave you this big, fat, black phone, you know, and you had one phone, and it was very expensive.
00:32:30.000You know, that's phones under control.
00:32:46.000And if I had to buy any government phone that they were going to put in my place?
00:32:49.000So we all, to say that competition isn't good, all the things that we value wouldn't exist if people weren't competing with one another.
00:32:56.000Well, I'm a big believer in competition, but one of the weird arguments that's happening now is that competition is bad, and it's a very blinders argument.
00:33:05.000And I saw you battle against that argument with Occupy Wall Street when you went down to the park and talked to those people.
00:33:12.000That's how I heard a lot of these very aggressive, very passionate people with a limited amount of understanding about capitalism itself.
00:33:23.000But they were there, which was weird, right?
00:33:25.000They're there, they have signs, they're screaming, they're yelling, they're angry, but yet, there's very little understanding about the system that they're rallying against.
00:33:33.000Yeah, well, one of the reasons I went there, and if you haven't seen it, there are plenty of YouTube videos of it, there's one that's like two and a half hours, right?
00:33:41.000That's the whole, I talked until we ran out of power, right?
00:34:19.000And the problems that we had on Wall Street were not a function of capitalism, but a function of the government's failure to allow capitalism.
00:34:27.000And the reason that I was predicting the 2008 financial crisis, and they were calling me Dr. Doom, the reason I knew about the housing bubble in advance and I was able to see the financial crisis coming was because I understood the dynamics at play.
00:34:40.000I understood how the government, how the Federal Reserve How their policies were working to inflate these bubbles, and I understood the moral hazards and the consequences of what was going on.
00:34:49.000And so when I went down to Zuccotti Park, the point I was trying to make, and not even so much to the people that were protesting, but to the people who I knew would watch the interaction all around the world, was to make the point that you are right to be upset, but you're venting your anger in the wrong direction.
00:35:06.000They're venting their anger at people like you.
00:35:08.000People who are successful, the quote-unquote 1%.
00:35:32.000They're competing to get you to buy things.
00:35:35.000And anything that you buy, right, if you choose to buy something, if I buy something for 20 bucks, I must value what I'm buying more than 20 bucks or I wouldn't make the exchange.
00:35:44.000So to the extent that there's a business out there trying to convince me to buy something that I value more than money, that's not going to hurt me.
00:39:27.000Well, I mean, we can spend the whole show on why it's bad economics, but, you know, there's a belief out there that government is somehow going to be a more efficient provider of health care than the free market, which is just not true, right?
00:39:41.000I mean, health care is a service, right?
00:39:45.000Just like food, just like shelter, just like clothing.
00:39:48.000And the free market can provide it better and cheaper than government.
00:39:53.000Some people like it as a service, though, that becomes a part of what the government offers you, along with, you know, when you pay your taxes, they fix the roads, they hire the police, things along those lines.
00:40:03.000They would like healthcare to be along that line as well, just like it is in the UK and in Canada and a few other places.
00:40:10.000Yeah, and, you know, in some ways, those systems are better than the system we have now, but they're not better than the system we used to have or better than the system that we could have if it was a pure free market.
00:40:22.000You know, but there's two things you got, right?
00:40:24.000You've got health care, and then you've got the health insurance.
00:40:27.000Let's look at those two industries separately, because the reason that people buy health insurance, right, is in case, well, if I get really sick, I can't afford the bills, right?
00:40:38.000Just like, you know, people buy car insurance, right?
00:40:41.000When you buy car insurance, you know that you still have to pay for gas.
00:40:45.000You know, you don't expect your car insurance policy to cover the cost of gas.
00:40:49.000It doesn't cover the cost of new tires.
00:40:51.000It doesn't cover the cost of new spark plugs or your routine maintenance.
00:40:56.000The reason you buy auto insurance is, hey, what if I get into a wreck and I total my car?
00:41:01.000I don't have the cash to buy a new one.
00:41:03.000So people buy insurance because they're insuring against something that's probably not going to happen.
00:41:09.000When you buy your auto insurance, The anticipation is that you never put in a claim.
00:41:14.000And you're happy to never put into a claim.
00:41:16.000And the insurance company obviously doesn't want you to put in a claim.
00:41:19.000They're hoping that they collect the premiums.
00:41:21.000And the way auto insurance works is because most people don't put in a claim, because they don't get into an accident, the insurance company has the money to pay the people who do get in an accident.
00:41:47.000If I give them health insurance instead of cash, it's tax-free.
00:41:51.000So a lot of people all of a sudden wanted health insurance instead of cash because they didn't have to pay tax on health insurance.
00:41:58.000And now more and more people started to want their health insurance to cover the equivalent of more gas in my car or a flat tire.
00:42:07.000And the minute you try to pay for your routine medical cost with a third-party payer through health insurance, you have these spiraling out of control costs.
00:42:18.000You know, because if you pulled up to a gas station and didn't actually pay for the gas, you just like put your insurance card into the pump and they didn't even have prices.
00:42:29.000Because when you go to the doctor, you don't even know what things cost.
00:43:01.000You shouldn't use your health insurance every time you go to the doctor.
00:43:04.000And if we got people to pay for their health insurance the way they pay for their auto insurance or their life insurance, if we separate health insurance from employment, health insurance will be much cheaper.
00:43:16.000You know, it's the government that married the two.
00:43:24.000Fix the tax code, and people, you know, you don't lose your auto insurance when you lose your job.
00:43:29.000But the other important thing, and here's why Obamacare doesn't work.
00:43:33.000See, the thesis of Obamacare was, hey, Let's make it so that insurance companies can't discriminate against people that have a pre-existing condition, right?
00:43:43.000So they can't charge people more money just because they happen to be sick, right?
00:44:53.000The point is this, that if auto insurance was not compulsory, and you can just decide whether or not you wanted it...
00:45:01.000If there was a law that said that insurance companies couldn't discriminate, nobody would buy it because you would just wait until after you had an accident.
00:45:07.000Right, but the problem is not just that.
00:45:09.000The reason why auto insurance is a bad example is because you're going to hit my car and you're going to do damage to me.
00:45:13.000If you have no insurance on your car, I'm not going to run into you on the street and collide with my body and hurt you.
00:45:20.000And somehow or another, I don't have health insurance and so you get injured from me.
00:45:25.000Don't you think that's a different argument?
00:45:26.000Well, rather than even make that argument, let's just go to fire insurance because there's only one person involved, me.
00:45:32.000Would I buy fire insurance if I can go to an insurance company after my house already burns down and buy the policy for the same price?
00:45:40.000So the reason that people buy fire insurance policies before their house burns down is because they know that nobody will sell them a policy after it burns down.
00:46:32.000One, the penalties were too low, right?
00:46:34.000Because the penalty for not buying insurance is so cheap that it's cheaper to not buy insurance, pay the penalty, and then wait till you get sick to buy the insurance.
00:46:42.000That's why the insurance companies are losing all this money, and that's why premiums are skyrocketing, because nobody wants to buy, because the penalties were too low.
00:46:52.000But politically, everybody likes the idea that insurance companies can't discriminate based on preseason.
00:46:58.000So what the Republicans tried to do was have their cake and eat it too.
00:47:01.000They said to the voters, we're going to keep the ban on pre-existing conditions, but we're going to get rid of the mandates.
00:47:08.000We're going to get rid of the penalties.
00:47:12.000The real problem was the penalties were too low.
00:47:16.000They needed to jack those penalties up because so many people were paying the penalty and not buying the insurance.
00:47:22.000But the reality is we need a free market insurance because the Republicans want to say, you should be able to buy the type of coverage that you want.
00:47:29.000You should be able to buy the kind of insurance, which is true.
00:47:31.000But then insurance companies have to be able to deny you coverage if they don't want to cover you.
00:47:35.000They have to be able to charge you more if you're already sick.
00:47:39.000I mean, the only way to have inexpensive insurance It's for the insurance companies to discriminate and to charge people more money if they're already sick.
00:47:48.000And it's because of that, that's why healthy people buy policies, because they know, hey, let me buy it now while I'm healthy.
00:47:55.000Because if I happen to get sick, that's going to be a lot more expensive.
00:47:58.000So what the government is trying to do is just trying to destroy the market for health insurance.
00:48:02.000Meanwhile, the costs are skyrocketing.
00:48:24.000If you needed catastrophic insurance, it was inexpensive.
00:48:27.000If you had to go to the doctor, it wasn't expensive.
00:48:30.000You know, people didn't even worry about it because there was quality care And it was, you know, at a low cost.
00:48:36.000And with all the advancements that we've had in medicine, with all the technology, with all the drugs that are here, healthcare should be cheaper today than it was in the 1940s and 1950s on a real basis.
00:48:50.000You know, and I hear all the time people make the argument, well, the reason that healthcare is more expensive is because it's more complicated now, because we do all these things that we didn't do.
00:49:00.000Well, If that was true, then why isn't my cell phone today more expensive than a cell phone 10 or 20 years ago?
00:49:45.000My first computer that I had in college was an Apple IIe.
00:49:49.000And that computer, and I got a dot matrix printer, and I had a floppy disk, and my dad spent almost $5,000 on it in 1981. And all it was was a glorified word processor, right?
00:50:00.000So obviously the power in this computer is so much greater than the one that I had in that Apple IIe, yet it's less expensive, even forgetting about adjusting for inflation.
00:50:10.000It's actually cheaper in actual dollars, despite the fact that it's more complicated.
00:50:16.000And my point is that Just because something is more complicated doesn't mean it's going to be more expensive.
00:50:24.000All of the new technology should be bringing down the cost of medicine.
00:50:28.000The reason it's not is because of government's involvement.
00:50:32.000Because if government was involved in the computer industry the same way it's involved in healthcare, then we would see skyrocketing computer prices.
00:50:39.000Okay, so now why does the government...
00:50:42.000You're saying that the government wants to...
00:51:06.000But also, why do the insurance companies?
00:51:07.000Because there are massive subsidies for insurance companies, right?
00:51:11.000If I can get the government to require people to buy my product, then I don't have to offer a good product, right?
00:51:16.000I mean, wouldn't you like the government to require everybody to listen to the Joe Rogan podcast if that was mandatory?
00:51:21.000No, people would be super furious at me.
00:51:23.000I like to keep it exactly the way it is.
00:51:25.000But there are a lot of businesses, rather than having to win...
00:51:29.000Well, maybe if you had a lousy podcast that nobody listened to, you'd want the government to say, hey, too many people are listening to Joe Rogan.
00:51:35.000Force them to listen to my podcast instead.
00:51:37.000So, you know, you have these big healthcare companies or insurance companies that want something from government.
00:51:42.000They want the government to mandate people buy their product or to protect them from competition.
00:52:00.000We need more competition, but government is protecting companies from having to compete with one another so they don't have to do as good a job.
00:52:07.000But Obama was already in office, right, when he was trying to do this?
00:52:10.000What was the incentive for trying to pass this once he's already in office?
00:52:14.000Well, A, he wants to get re-elected, which he did.
00:52:38.000When it comes to a politician, you don't know if they're doing stupid things because they're stupid.
00:52:42.000Or because they don't care that they're dumb.
00:52:44.000Or they don't understand the ramifications of what they're trying to propose.
00:52:48.000Well, as I said, people believe in liberal philosophy or these programs either because they're ignorant or because they have an ulterior motive, right?
00:52:57.000There are probably some politicians there that are actually dumb enough to think that this is a good idea, right?
00:53:03.000Like we talked about the minimum wage.
00:53:04.000There are some people that actually believe that it's a good thing, right?
00:53:08.000They don't know how bad it is, but they're doing it because they're thinking with their hearts and not with their heads.
00:53:14.000But there are probably some people who support the minimum wage knowing that it's bad, but they know it's good politics, or they're afraid to come out against it because that's such bad politics.
00:53:24.000So you don't know for sure if somebody is in favor of something, do they actually realize how bad it is?
00:54:46.000Now, when you're talking about Bernie Sanders...
00:54:50.000And you're talking about some of the policies that that guy was proposing and some of the idea of, you know, Robin Hooding the whole deal, taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
00:54:58.000That's extremely appealing to people, right?
00:55:01.000How do you lay it out to people in a way that they can understand that although this looks like a great idea, That this is not a good idea.
00:55:11.000And ultimately, it's not going to benefit you.
00:55:25.000Are you one percenter, you piece of shit?
00:55:27.000That's the thought process behind anybody who says anything even remotely negative about socialism, that you have to be some sort of a sellout, or you just want to keep things the way they are so that you can benefit.
00:55:40.000And it's amazing that so many people find socialism appealing, yet they'll say, oh, you know, fascism is really bad, right?
00:56:04.000And the whole idea, the whole premise of socialism is bad.
00:56:08.000The free market, being a libertarian, is all about the individual.
00:56:13.000It's about freedom and recognizing the value of the individual and their rights to pursue their own self-interest, their own happiness, the property.
00:56:23.000But in your question, how do you talk to people and get them to see How bad socialism is.
00:56:29.000I mean, first of all, I mean, look at the countries that have tried it in its extreme form, right?
00:56:35.000Whether it was like the Soviet Union or North Korea or Cuba or East Germany.
00:56:42.000You could look at examples where you had, you know, people moving in this direction, these promises of, you know, from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
00:58:27.000It's just that they recognize the unintended consequences of these programs, that the programs actually make it worse for the people that you're trying to help.
00:58:34.000But younger people who don't have as much real-world experience They don't know any better.
00:58:38.000So it's very easy to be a socialist when you're 16, 17, 18. You've never had a job.
00:59:16.000I mean, he's in hot water right now because his wife, she decided to go full-on capitalist for this small college and buy up a bunch of land, and the company went bankrupt.
00:59:29.000The college, which is essentially a company, right?
00:59:30.000But the way that you can get young people to understand, look, most people, even if they're not in the 1%, they want to get to the 1%, right?
00:59:38.000But some people would say that's not true.
00:59:40.000Some people would say, no, it's not what I want.
00:59:41.000I want to be comfortable and I want to pursue whatever my interests are.
00:59:45.000Right, but what, and again, and what are those interests?
01:00:35.000You know, so people will understand, hey, I got my first job from somebody in the 1%.
01:00:38.000Okay, you know, and now I'm in the 1% myself because, you know, I was able to gain some experience, gain some knowledge, you know.
01:00:46.000So you could talk to younger people and really show them the different, a different path.
01:00:51.000One is, you know, relying on government and thievery because that's really, you know, most people would agree that theft is wrong.
01:00:58.000If the two of us got together and beat you up, although obviously we can't, but assuming we could, we beat you up and we took your money, you would say, that's wrong.
01:01:08.000Well, if we got together and voted for a congressman to take your money, we outvoted you two to one, why is that any better?
01:01:14.000Why is it okay to steal through the ballot box, but it's not okay to do it directly?
01:01:19.000So the argument against that would be that it's not stealing, that you're just creating policies that even the playing field- No, that's stealing.
01:01:25.000People that are in the 1%, like these hedge fund dudes that have these giant houses in the Hamptons, they've accumulated massive amounts of wealth and they're using that to influence politicians and change laws.
01:01:36.000Well, they shouldn't be able to use it to influence politicians.
01:01:39.000That's why we have to take the influence away from politicians, take away that power.
01:01:45.000That doesn't mean I have the right to go steal his Maserati just because he's rich, and I don't have the right to tax him to take that Maserati either.
01:01:54.000When you believe in the free market or libertarian, you know, you're giving somebody the idea, look, you don't have to get rich by stealing what somebody else has.
01:02:26.000And so that's what we have to stamp out.
01:02:27.000We have to make sure that you can't succeed by bribing a politician.
01:02:31.000That you can't use government power to create wealth.
01:02:34.000That if you want to get wealthy, you have to be wealthy as a result of voluntary interactions with other human beings without government involvement, right?
01:02:41.000Government is there to protect my rights.
01:03:18.000I believe that human beings care enough about other human beings that if somebody really is in a dire circumstance, that private charity...
01:04:26.000Wouldn't you love to have a debate with him?
01:04:27.000Like a long-form conversation, like a three-hour podcast?
01:04:30.000You know, I wouldn't shy away from it.
01:04:32.000I mean, you know, I do know he's so old at this point that it's hard to believe that I'm going to persuade him that he's wrong, that he's going to come to his, you know, after living an entire life believing in something.
01:04:42.000Well, I'm not even necessarily saying that you would persuade him, but it would be nice to see people counter, or hear, rather, the counter to his arguments that he puts forth that are very appealing to a lot of these young people that you're talking about if you're 20 and you're not a liberal, you don't have a heart.
01:04:58.000These ideas are very pervasive in our culture, and they were thought to be the solution to the ales that we're in.
01:05:05.000They were thought to be the solutions to the problems with the bailout.
01:05:08.000Why is the government getting all this money and giving it to the banks when they could be giving it to poor people and propping up the income inequality?
01:05:29.000If you're going to bail out those banks, why not bail out the little guy?
01:05:32.000And I have a lot of sympathy for that argument.
01:05:34.000But I don't think two wrongs make a right.
01:05:37.000We shouldn't have bailed out the banks.
01:05:38.000See, the government shouldn't steal money from one person and give it to somebody else.
01:05:44.000You know, regardless of who they're giving it to.
01:05:48.000But once you create that precedent, and of course, you know, a lot of people should have been allowed to lose money in that financial crisis.
01:05:59.000And so that's a moral hazard because the government created a condition that said, hey, if you're going to speculate and do all these things, we're going to bail you out.
01:06:07.000And you have to realize that it was the government.
01:06:09.000The government was guaranteeing all those mortgages.
01:06:12.000The government was guaranteeing all those bank deposits.
01:06:15.000The government was, through Fannie and Freddie, encouraging reckless activity, encouraging Banks to make loans to people who they knew couldn't pay it back.
01:06:24.000I mean, all this was rooted in government incentives and government subsidies.
01:06:28.000If there was a pure free market, the banks would not be able to assume all that risk.
01:06:32.000But because the government had their back, then they were able to do things that the free market never would have allowed.
01:06:39.000That's why for years, while the housing bubble was going up, I was pointing this stuff out.
01:06:43.000I mean, you go and look at some of the YouTube videos.
01:06:47.000You know, for all of my appearances back then that eventually became that Peter Schiff was right video.
01:06:53.000I understood the ultimate consequences of what the government was doing.
01:06:59.000But then the bailouts just allowed the government...
01:07:02.000The government never wants to waste a crisis.
01:07:05.000They always want to use the crisis to get bigger, to get more power.
01:07:08.000We should have learned something from the 2008 financial crisis.
01:07:11.000Instead, we have repeated all the mistakes.
01:07:14.000Everything that has been done by Janet Yellen and Ben Bernanke...
01:07:18.000Since the financial crisis has actually made the U.S. economy worse.
01:07:21.000We're in much worse shape now economically, so I think the crisis that we're coming to, the next one, is going to be much worse than the one we had in 08. I'd love to get to that in a second, but what was the argument for the bailout?
01:07:36.000Well, the argument for the bailout was that the banks were just so big, right?
01:09:00.000Because all the bailouts happened in summer of 08, a lot of big ones, and the election was in November of 08, right?
01:09:08.000I remember John McCain interrupted his presidential campaign to come vote for a TARP bailout.
01:09:14.000And so politicians can't see beyond the next election.
01:09:19.000And if your horizon is that short, yes, the bailouts ease the pain, but at the cost of exacerbating the underlying disease that is the cause of the pain.
01:09:29.000So because we did all the wrong things in 08, 09, 010, instead of fixing the problems and having a healthy recovery, we had the weakest recovery in the history of recoveries.
01:09:40.000In fact, I don't even think it's a recovery because I think the average American is sicker now than he was when the recovery began.
01:11:10.000So we set ourselves up for, I think, a currency crisis, not just a financial crisis, where Where mortgages are in trouble, but where the dollar itself is collapsing, our money is collapsing, prices are skyrocketing, it's going to really hit the average American much more than just the stock market going down.
01:11:28.000When your money is going down, when the cost of living is skyrocketing, that is going to be a big problem.
01:11:37.000It's ultimately going to be a dollar crisis.
01:11:39.000And that's really, you know, like in my business, in my brokerage firm in Europe Pacific Capital, that's what I'm trying to do is help people protect their wealth by getting out of U.S. dollar assets, by investing in Singapore and Switzerland and New Zealand and Hong Kong and other countries, owning other assets, you know,
01:11:54.000to try to protect themselves from this crisis that, you know, is coming.
01:11:58.000And most people are going to get blindsided by it, just like they were by the last one.
01:12:42.000It's everybody else that's crazy that just gets caught up in it.
01:12:45.000But what's going to happen is we are going to go back at some point into another statistic recession.
01:12:52.000I mean, I think that we've kind of been in one this whole recovery because I don't think the government numbers are really that accurate.
01:12:57.000I don't think that inflation is as low as they claim, at least as measured by the consumer prices.
01:13:03.000So I think that the economy has actually been contracting during the years that we've been pretending it's been growing.
01:13:09.000But I do think at some point, statistically, we will go back into a technical recession where even the government admits that the economy is shrinking, right, where the GDP is negative for a couple of quarters in a row.
01:13:21.000And then what is the government going to do as a result of that?
01:13:24.000They're going to do exactly what they did before.
01:13:25.000They're going to take interest rates and bring them back to zero from wherever they are.
01:13:29.000The difference is, normally, they lower interest rates, and then by the time there's another recession, they're way back up 4%, 5%, 6%.
01:13:36.000This time, they barely got them back to 1%, and they kept them at zero for seven, eight years, which is unprecedented.
01:13:43.000And of course, the mistakes that are made are a consequence of money being too cheap, right?
01:13:48.000The reason that we had a real estate bubble, the main reason, was because Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates to 1% and left them there for about a year and a half, and then took about a year and a half to raise them back up to normal.
01:13:59.000So you had a few years of artificially low interest rates.
01:14:33.000Because, see, the dollar has been rising these past few years because everybody thought, oh, the Fed's going to normalize interest rates, the Fed's going to shrink the balance sheet, when none of this stuff happens.
01:14:43.000When the Fed goes back to another round of quantitative easing, when they got to crank up the printing presses, when they don't shrink the balance sheet, but they blow it even bigger, right?
01:14:51.000It goes to $5.5 trillion, $6.5 trillion.
01:14:53.000I think the bottom is going to drop out of the dollar.
01:14:56.000I think the dollar is going to get killed, the opposite of what happened in 2008. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, the dollar had been falling for seven years.
01:15:05.000And then when the crisis hit, it actually caused people to buy the dollar.
01:15:09.000But I think this next crisis is going to be the big sell signal for the dollar.
01:15:14.000People are going to rush out of the dollar as the Fed has to go back to more QE, as people realize that this is what I said from the beginning.
01:15:21.000This is a monetary roach motel, right?
01:15:24.000The Fed checked us in, and they ain't checking us out.
01:15:27.000There's no way to shrink the balance sheet.
01:15:30.000And when people realize that this is a permanent situation, the bottom drops out of the dollar.
01:15:34.000And then commodity prices really start to rise.
01:15:37.000Remember when oil prices went from like $20 a barrel in 2001 up to $150?
01:15:43.000That was happening because the dollar was falling.
01:15:46.000And as the dollar starts to fall, all these commodity prices are going to rise again, and now inflation is really going to pick up the way they measure it.
01:15:53.000And the government can't do anything about it.
01:15:54.000They can't raise interest rates, because if they raise interest rates, they collapse everything.
01:15:58.000All the banks that were too big to fail, they're bigger now, and it would be even worse if they failed.
01:18:09.000That's why I'm saying Puerto Rico, it would be so idiotic for Puerto Rico to want to join the union and absorb their share of that debt.
01:18:18.000Now, for the average person like myself who has zero understanding of the financial system, you listen to Trump talk about the economy booming and it's on an upward thing and unemployment is down and jobs are up.
01:18:32.000Yeah, that's what's really bothering me about Trump is the hypocrisy because when Trump was a candidate, And he got elected because, by and large, he told the truth about the phony nature of the recovery.
01:18:43.000Obama was out there talking about how great things were, and Trump was like, BS, it's not great.
01:18:48.000Oh, you're talking about low unemployment?
01:20:14.000And now they're working at McDonald's part-time because they can't live on their retirement money.
01:20:19.000And in fact, you know, When you look at the labor force participation rate that he would talk about, you know, where labor force participation is collapsing is with young people.
01:20:28.000People in their 20s and 30s can't get jobs.
01:20:30.000Meanwhile, 70- and 80-year-olds are working in record percentages, right, because they can't afford to retire and their grandkids can't get a job.
01:20:40.000about how bad the economy really was and that resonated a lot of blue-collar guys a lot of Democrats in the Midwest voted for Trump because he got it he understood there he felt their pain right like Bill Clinton and Obama was in a fantasy I mean Hillary was pretending that everything was great under Obama and people didn't want four more years of that so they voted for Trump and also you know when Trump was a candidate He talked about the stock market because,
01:21:07.000oh, the stock market was going up when Obama was president.
01:21:43.000And now he's trying to market the same crappy economy that Obama had and pretending everything is good.
01:21:49.000And I wish he would stay true to the candidate and admit, you know what, the economy is still a disaster because nothing has changed, right?
01:22:31.000I mean, and then he gets into this position, and now he's a salesman, right?
01:22:35.000Now he's trying to sell us on his axe, and everything's great, and under him everything's booming, and it's gonna keep booming, it's gonna get better, and we're gonna make America great again.
01:23:46.000I mean, I know a lot of people who have been in this circle, but they've never kind of introduced me to it, so I'm kind of, you know, I'm not really on the inside, so I can't really, you know, I don't really know.
01:23:56.000But, I mean, I voted for him, but that was...
01:26:57.000Wasn't there some sort of improvement in the stock market because people had confidence that he was going to enact these changes and he was going to make things better for businesses?
01:27:04.000Yeah, I do think that that was able to add some air to the bubble, right?
01:27:09.000And then when Trump won, all of a sudden people started thinking, hey, wait a minute, we're going to get tax cuts, we're going to get regulatory reform, we're going to get more economic growth.
01:28:50.000And what is wrong with Trump's ideas when it comes to Trumpcare?
01:28:53.000Well, first of all, those Republicans, again, are hypocrites.
01:28:56.000They only voted to repeal Obamacare because they knew Obama would veto it.
01:29:00.000So it was easy to grandstand, oh yeah, let's repeal it.
01:29:03.000And it was a good talking point to get elected.
01:29:06.000But the minute they got elected, they were too afraid to actually stand on that principle, because they didn't want to tell somebody that you can't buy insurance when you're sick for the same price as when you're healthy.
01:29:16.000Nobody wanted to take away that free lunch that had been served up by the Democrats.
01:29:21.000All the Republicans wanted to do is rebrand the free lunch.
01:29:25.000They wanted to continue to serve it, but take credit for it.
01:29:27.000They wanted to make it Trumpcare or Ryancare.
01:29:47.000The benefit was they tried to keep the ban on pre-existing conditions, which voters liked, but get rid of the taxes and mandates, which they didn't.
01:30:32.000But that's you, you're a successful guy, what about someone who's not, who's in this bad position?
01:30:37.000Look, you don't have to be that successful to be able to afford in a free market to buy yourself some coverage.
01:30:43.000The question is, what do you do with the person who made the mistake of not buying insurance when they were healthy, and now they get sick, And of course, once you're sick, you can't expect an insurance company to sell you a policy because the insurance company is trying to make money.
01:30:56.000They only sell policies to people who they don't think are going to put in claims.
01:30:59.000So you can't go to an insurance company when you're already sick and say, sell me a policy.
01:31:04.000What's in it for the insurance company?
01:31:05.000So now you've got to figure out, well, How do you take care of that person?
01:31:08.000Well, first of all, the best thing is to make sure that person buys the insurance policy while he's still healthy.
01:31:13.000So that means you don't have the ban against pre-existing conditions, and you allow insurance companies to sell inexpensive insurance that doesn't cover a sex chains operation or drug abuse.
01:31:34.000It's all this other crap that they want to mandate that makes it so expensive.
01:31:37.000But if you get a certain situation where, for whatever reason, somebody had no insurance, they have no money, and now they get cancer, well, that's what charities are for.
01:32:00.000And of course, that was before they had the income tax.
01:32:02.000You know, when the doctors didn't have to pay income taxes, and when the doctors didn't have to deal with insurance companies, they had a lot of free time to help a lot of poor people for free.
01:33:16.000They have background music on in the Starbucks.
01:33:18.000And so he asks the guy behind the counter, oh, by the way, I'm hard of hearing.
01:33:22.000Do you have this special device that I can wear while I'm in here so that while I'm in this restaurant, I can enjoy the same music as everybody else?
01:33:30.000And the guy said, well, no, we don't have that device.
01:33:32.000Well, he sued for $10,000 plus attorney's fees.
01:33:35.000And now he's suing my friend, too, because he's the landlord of where the Starbucks restaurant is.
01:35:16.000I mean, because they know that barely anybody is going to have a size 14. But I go to the big and tall store because I know they're going to have a size 14. So, you know, there are going to be certain businesses that are going to cater to...
01:35:29.000You have all these hotels and motels that have to shut down their swimming pools because they can't afford the money to have a lift so that somebody in a wheelchair can go into that swimming pool.
01:35:38.000Well, why does every single swimming pool in the country have to accommodate somebody in a wheelchair?
01:35:43.000Why can't people who have wheelchairs go on the internet and find out which hotels are catering to that particular clientele and just go there?
01:35:51.000But when you force everybody to do it, miniature golf courses are shutting down because they can't figure out how to be accessible to people in wheelchairs, even if no one in a wheelchair has ever tried to play that course.
01:36:02.000And then they end up having to shut it down because they can't, you know...
01:36:44.000So it was a beach that no one who was handicapped could ever go to, but yet they had to have all these spots there.
01:36:50.000Like, you could take that to Yosemite and say, like, hey, if you want to climb this mountain, you have to have use of your arms.
01:36:55.000We're going to have to figure out some sort of handicapped access up the top of this mountain, because otherwise it's unfair.
01:37:01.000But this is where all the government...
01:37:02.000The government thinks they're being charitable.
01:37:04.000And look, do I feel bad that people have handicaps or people...
01:37:07.000Of course, but the solution is not the Americans with Disabilities Act.
01:37:11.000And, you know, there are a lot of employers now that won't hire people with handicaps because it's now so expensive, whereas they would have done it before.
01:37:18.000You know, that's the whole thing about, you know, these anti-discrimination laws, like, you know, you can't discriminate based on gender, based on sex, based on, you know, sexual identity and all these different things.
01:37:30.000Well, because of that, there's actually more discrimination.
01:37:32.000You know, there are actually employers now who aren't racist at all, but who will go out of their way not to hire minorities because they're afraid of getting sued, right?
01:37:40.000Oh, if I hire a black guy or if I hire a Hispanic or if I hire a homosexual, what if I fire that person because they're not doing a good job?
01:37:51.000They could say, will you fire me because I'm gay?
01:37:52.000Well, I've heard this argument about women in tech.
01:37:55.000I heard this argument recently because I was reading some article written by Ellen Powell.
01:37:59.000She was that woman who had that big lawsuit, sexual discrimination lawsuit.
01:38:04.000She said some article about women in tech, and someone was saying, well, see this, this is the reason why people don't want to hire women in the first place.
01:38:13.000But isn't that sort of a slippery slope?
01:38:14.000Because if she really was being sexually discriminated against, well, they shouldn't really be able to do that in the first place.
01:38:20.000If what she's saying is true, that they create this hostile work environment for women, they shouldn't be able to necessarily just never hire women just so they can remain hostile.
01:38:51.000So I am an owner of a business, and now some woman walks in, and let's say she's particularly attractive, and I start thinking, okay, do I really want to have this potential lawsuit walking around my office?
01:40:38.000In fact, I think if there's somebody that doesn't like Jews, the last thing they're going to do is put that sign out there, because you know what?
01:41:39.000Like recently, you have this big movement because we had the riots in Charlottesville because they want to take down these statues, these Confederate statues, as if those Confederate statues are the reason that we have poverty and unemployment and crime in African-American communities.
01:41:54.000These statues have nothing to do with that.
01:41:55.000And taking them down isn't going to change anything.
01:41:57.000But you've got these people in America that make a living off of poverty and off of race-baiting that want to say, oh, the reason that you're poor, the reason that there's crime, is because of racism.
01:42:08.000And the racism is because of these statues.
01:42:10.000So vote for me, give me money, and I will help you.
01:42:13.000You're a victim and I'm your solution.
01:42:15.000And they act, well, we'll just get rid of the statue.
01:42:18.000Because even if they get rid of the statues, nothing's going to change.
01:42:20.000Now they have to get rid of something else.
01:42:22.000Don't you think that a statue for a lot of people represents racism?
01:42:26.000Like if you see a Robert E. Lee statue and then you read about what Robert E. Lee did to his own personal slaves and oversaw some of the lashings and caught slaves that were trying to escape.
01:42:37.000This is a horrible account that I retweeted recently.
01:42:40.000Of some slave that was caught while he was trying to escape.
01:42:44.000Robert E. Lee oversaw them beating him and lashing him.
01:42:48.000Yeah, I mean, I don't know, I mean, all of the various stories, but I know that Robert E. Lee was a very well-respected guy, even in the North.
01:43:14.000Look, if Thomas Jefferson were alive today, he would not own slaves, obviously, right?
01:43:19.000But if you or I were born in the Annabella South, if I was born in Virginia in 1750, would I feel differently about slavery than I do today?
01:44:14.000Well, a lot of them were put up in 1900, 1910, 1920. There's actually a spike in these Civil War monuments going up, and they're actually fairly cheaply made bronze statues that were cheaper to produce that were made during the Civil Rights era in direct protest to the Civil Rights era.
01:44:34.000So they put up these statues of guys like Robert E. Lee who represented slavery.
01:44:38.000The people who were leading the anti-civil rights movement were all the Democrats, right?
01:44:47.000When they passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, it was only because of Republicans that it passed.
01:44:52.000If the Republicans had voted for it in the same proportion of Democrats, it would have been defeated.
01:44:56.000But the part of the Civil Rights Act that I was against, and obviously I was a little kid then, so I was born in 1963, so I'm just looking back at it, right?
01:45:05.000That all of the anti-discrimination laws that had to do with government and the state governments, because you had a lot of institutionalized racism down south by Democrats, right?
01:45:16.000And all that was bad, and the fact that we eradicated was good.
01:45:19.000The part that was bad is the part that went into the private realm and said, if you are a private person, you can't discriminate.
01:45:28.000Because now all of a sudden the government is the thought police.
01:45:30.000Now all of a sudden every decision that everybody makes is being second-guessed.
01:45:35.000You've opened up everybody to all sorts of lawsuits, and you've gotten this blowback where businesses are afraid to hire people, not because they're racist or bigots, but because they fear a lawsuit.
01:45:46.000And so now you've increased the cost of employing people.
01:45:50.000People that are in these specialized groups.
01:45:54.000And also, I think, legally, I don't think the government constitutionally has the right to tell me...
01:45:59.000I mean, everybody knows, like, if somebody tried to tell me in my private life, you know, you need to be an equal opportunity dater, right?
01:46:15.000Even as an employee, right, if I, let's say I'm Jewish, if I say, hey, I want to work for another Jew, I just like working for Jews, and I go and I apply for jobs, and I say, you know what, I don't want to work for you, you're not Jewish, oh, you know, so I can discriminate as a worker among,
01:46:31.000and I can quit, I can go to my employer and say, you know what, I'm tired of working for a Jew, I quit.
01:46:48.000I'm sorry, let me interrupt you here, but don't you think there's a big difference between someone who makes a personal decision of where they want to work versus someone who has power over you?
01:46:57.000There's a big difference between someone who chooses, like, I don't like working for this guy because I only like working for white people.
01:47:02.000And you can decide to do that because it's your own personal choice to where to go.
01:47:06.000You're not holding any power over someone.
01:48:04.000And if they say, well, if I hire the white candidate, I'm less likely to get sued if I have to terminate him because he's not doing a good job because he can't claim.
01:48:13.000So if I make that decision based on race, it's not because I'm a racist.
01:48:16.000I'm trying to practically look at the numbers.
01:49:50.000And the thing is, though, if you're a businessman and you're making your hiring decisions based on the color of people's skin or their gender, and my competitors are making decisions based on competence, you're not going to survive.
01:50:04.000I mean, if you are going to turn down...
01:50:06.000A better quality female worker and you're going to settle for somebody who can't do the job as well because you want to hire a man, you're not going to be a successful businessman.
01:50:15.000So I have my faith in the free market that racism, there is a cost, right?
01:51:33.000They're not interested in that pursuit as much as men are.
01:51:36.000And so, you know, when you're hiring, right, when Google is hiring and they're trying to get the very best, you know, there's a much bigger pool of male applicants for those jobs.
01:51:46.000And so he's making the point that, look, you're just not going to get a lot of women In these jobs, and if you're going to just try to have more diversity, you're just going to sacrifice the quality.
01:51:57.000And, you know, I'm sure that he's right, but the interesting thing is he gets fired for expressing that opinion.
01:52:03.000Well, now, look, I mean, look, personally, see, personally, I think that Google should be able to, it's their company.
01:52:08.000I think that if they want to fire somebody, they should be able to do that.
01:52:12.000Now, if he had a contract, see, I don't know what kind of employment contract, if he's an at-will employee, you know, I think they should be able to terminate him for whatever reason, just like I think he should be able to quit.
01:52:21.000Well, they were saying he was reinforcing negative gender stereotypes.
01:52:24.000That was the main reason they publicly stated that he was being fired for.
01:52:28.000I mean, look, I think it shows you how low that we've fallen as a society, that you're allowed to express your opinion as long as it's the politically correct opinion.
01:52:41.000And I can understand, look, if they think it's going to hurt their profits, if they think the way to make money in America today is to bow down on the altar of political correctness and just pretend that things that you know are true are not true.
01:52:52.000But, you know, my principles are consistent.
01:52:55.000But I do think that they probably violated California labor law in the way they fired him.
01:53:02.000I mean, I'm an employer here in California, and I don't like it, and I would probably employ a lot more people here if they didn't have the labor law that they do.
01:53:12.000But I think it's terrible that they had to fire him, because if he had expressed the exact opposite position, it wouldn't have been a problem.
01:53:20.000It's just because he is basically saying the truth.
01:53:24.000I mean, look, Why is it that you have to pretend that men and women are exactly the same in all aspects of life, that there's no difference in our evolutionary biology, that men and women didn't necessarily evolve in different ways based on the roles that they played,
01:53:41.000you know, thousands of years ago or tens of thousands of years ago, and that there's, you know, there's something about maleness.
01:53:47.000And again, it's not like, obviously...
01:53:50.000There are exceptions to the rule, right?
01:53:51.000But in general, there's going to be certain ways that the average man is going to be different than the average woman.
01:53:59.000And maybe men, just for whatever reason, are going into programming, computer science, in greater numbers than women.
01:54:08.000You can't try to pretend that doesn't exist.
01:54:10.000Well, this has been laid out by evolutionary psychology.
01:54:13.000This is something that's been studied, because looking at human beings and the choices they make based on their gender, based on their environment, based on...
01:54:35.000But when you're looking at numbers in a job, you're looking at the totality.
01:54:40.000And so if there's only 10% women, to say, well, we need to make it 50-50 because half the world is women is ridiculous.
01:54:49.000That's like if the UFC said, listen, we need more women fighters, so we're going to fire some of the men that are way better fighters, and we're going to hire more women fighters to make a more diverse lineup, even though there's way less women interested in fighting.
01:55:03.000Because, obviously, I mean, I'm amazed that there are even any women, really, that want to be fighters.
01:55:08.000But, I mean, obviously there's going to be some.
01:55:09.000But the vast majority of women that I know, they might like watching other men fight, but the last thing they want to do is step in the ring.
01:55:53.000Yes, and then when the government comes in and just says, oh, well, the numbers are this, and now we have to fix this because this must be the result of discrimination.
01:56:03.000It's just the natural result of people acting freely.
01:56:07.000But it's also people's response to that.
01:56:09.000They almost can't have a measured objective response.
01:56:12.000Like the woman who's the CEO of YouTube said that she was very hurt by that memo and that this guy was a misogynist that created that memo.
01:56:19.000Meanwhile, she's the fucking CEO of YouTube.
01:56:40.000You know, people are going to say things that you offend, that are offensive to you.
01:56:43.000That doesn't mean they don't have a right to speak their mind.
01:56:46.000You know, people, I mean, that's, you know, a lot of people now, all of a sudden, freedom of speech is taking a back door to my sensibilities.
01:56:56.000It's a cheap way out to just say I'm offended.
01:56:58.000And then people have to sort of acquiesce and they have to figure out some sort of a way to calm down your offended personality or whatever it is about what you've done.
01:57:41.000So now, if I'm not going to protect somebody else's right to free speech, then they can take away mine.
01:57:46.000Because I don't want the government determining, you know, what's offensive and what's not.
01:57:50.000I don't want the government saying, this speech is protected and this speech isn't.
01:57:54.000Because the minute you go down that slippery slope, you know, the next thing you know, you know, all the libertarians are now fascists and none of us can speak, right?
01:58:00.000And the government gets more and more power and they try to shut people up that want to criticize them.
01:58:04.000That's truly shrinking government and truly letting the marketplace of ideas decide what people do and don't do and which way they gravitate.
01:58:14.000Yeah, and as I said, I think the free market and competition will punish racists.
01:58:50.000Women are paid like 70 whatever cents for every man, which obviously that's not true, because if that was true, I would only hire women and pay them 77 cents on a dollar.
01:59:00.000I mean, if you could actually hire women cheaper than men, I mean, why would I ever hire a man?
01:59:35.000So if you take a woman who's, let's say, 40 years old, never been married, man 40 years old, never married, basically the same educational background, you know, and you study, you'll find that they pretty much make the same, right?
01:59:47.000It's that when you look at the choices that the typical woman makes during her career, and, you know, even if it's the same occupation, let's say they're both lawyers and they both went to the same law school, even if they both get married, the chances are the woman She took her law career and it became secondary to her children.
02:00:24.000They don't volunteer to travel as much.
02:00:28.000It's because of the choices that they make along the way that they end up earning less money than their male counterpart.
02:00:33.000Not because somebody is just discriminating against them, because there is a competitive market.
02:00:38.000I mean, if you are a woman that is working just as hard as a man and you're sacrificing everything for your career, you're going to earn the same as the guy.
02:00:48.000I mean, because it's a competitive market, especially for those higher skills.
02:00:52.000I mean, you just can't underpay people in the marketplace because somebody else will outbid you.
02:00:56.000But it's such a convenient talking point.
02:01:49.000I mean, when the government mandates certain benefits, all they're doing is taking your choice away to negotiate how you want to be compensated.
02:01:56.000Because ultimately, the employer is not going to pay you more than you're worth.
02:01:59.000And if you say, well, you got to give this person, you know, these vacations, or you got, okay, well, I got to pay him less money so I can give him the vacations.
02:02:06.000It's all one big compensation package.
02:02:08.000It seems like it's a political thing again.
02:02:10.000It's a thing that people do in order to get you to lean towards them more and to have people feel that this person is looking out for my needs, this person is looking out for my point of view, my perspective, and he understands the plight that women go through.
02:02:25.000Whereas Peter Schiff, he's so hardcore, you know, he's capitalistic that he doesn't even care about what women go through.
02:02:33.000Yeah, and it's like the reality is if I didn't care about women, I wouldn't care about these laws.
02:02:37.000I understand how these laws backfire and hurt women.
02:02:40.000I understand how all these laws that are meant to do good actually do harm.
02:02:44.000And that's one of the reasons that when you find a lot of liberals, they actually think conservatives or libertarians are bad people, right?
02:02:51.000Because they say, hey, you're against this law.
02:02:54.000You must be a bad person because this law is going to help people.
02:02:56.000Well, in their mind, you are a bad person.
02:02:58.000Right, because otherwise I would support the law.
02:03:00.000See, when I think about most liberals, I don't think they're bad.
02:03:15.000I don't care how many good intentions you have.
02:03:17.000If I know that that road is going to hell, I'm going to try my best to build a different road.
02:03:22.000And I believe that free market capitalism is the best way to raise the standard of living of everybody, whether you're a woman, whether you're black, whether you're homosexual.
02:03:32.000It's the individual acting freely that's going to be your best hope.
02:03:36.000If you're going to empower government, and this is one of the things that I can never figure out, because people are, again, they're very suspicious of I mean,
02:03:55.000Just because somebody uses politics to get rich doesn't mean they're on some moral high ground.
02:04:00.000Well, even worse, this idea that if you give more of your taxes, that the government is somehow or another going to be competent with how they distribute those taxes.
02:04:09.000And that there's some going to be egalitarian.
02:04:11.000They're going to use the taxes for good.
02:04:14.000That's a very disgusting sort of an idea.
02:05:00.000You don't think they would send their kids to private schools, and they'd be a lot less expensive.
02:05:03.000And you'd have all kinds of entrepreneurs who are trying to earn money educating poor kids, just like people earn a lot of money clothing poor kids and feeding poor kids and housing them.
02:05:13.000I mean, if there's money to be made, an entrepreneur is going to come in and satisfy that desire.
02:05:17.000So you're against public education, or do you think it shouldn't be subsidized the way it is, especially colleges?
02:05:24.000Well, look, I think that government education is much too expensive and not good enough.
02:05:31.000I mean, people think that, oh, we need the government to educate.
02:05:34.000And I think, you know, education is very important.
02:05:36.000And I don't think it's so important, we just shouldn't leave it up to government.
02:05:39.000I think that the free market, just like the free market does a better job of creating computers, right, I think it'll do a better job of creating education.
02:05:47.000When people are struggling, they really like the idea that at least education is free for their children.
02:06:59.000You know, I mean, my father went to college and his parents didn't have any money because they were poor, lower middle class.
02:07:07.000But so he worked his way through college by having a summer job.
02:07:11.000And that summer job was enough to pay for everything, room, board, tuition.
02:07:14.000And all of his friends worked their way through college.
02:07:17.000Why can't Americans work their way through college today?
02:07:20.000Because the government made college so expensive because of all the loans.
02:07:24.000But what happened is the government said, hey, you don't have to have a job while you're in college.
02:07:28.000We'll just guarantee a loan, you know, and you'll just be able to borrow the money.
02:07:32.000But, you know, graduating with a bunch of debt doesn't do the kids any favors.
02:07:36.000They would have been better off, you know, having a summer job instead of, like, you know, just partying all summer or bumming their summers around Europe while they're borrowing money.
02:07:45.000Well, there's two giant issues with that.
02:07:47.000One giant issue with the debt is you're getting out of college and you're going to take a job that's probably not going to pay you a whole lot in the first place, and you're saddled down with who knows how many thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt.
02:08:00.000And then on top of that, you can't even go bankrupt and dissolve that debt.
02:08:04.000It's the one debt in this country that you're stuck with forever.
02:08:19.000Yeah, and they've been fed a lie that, well, if you don't go to college, your life is ruined.
02:08:23.000I do some of my videos on my YouTube channel, and one of the videos that I did, and I wish it got more views, and maybe it will, but I can talk about it on your show.
02:08:31.000What does the YouTube channel tell people?
02:09:28.000And the point was, and some people thought I was trying to make fun of the people, and I wasn't trying to make fun of anybody.
02:09:34.000I was trying to prove a point that this was a complete waste of time and money, that these individuals could have done these jobs without college.
02:09:41.000They could have done it right out of high school without all this debt.
02:09:44.000And that just having these degrees didn't mean anything.
02:09:54.000That's who benefits from all these college loans, not these kids who borrow $50,000 and now are emptying trash cans because they got some liberal arts degree that's meaningless.
02:10:03.000It's the universities, the college, that got to overcharge for a degree that the kid would have been better off without.
02:10:10.000And then there's also the opportunity cost.
02:10:12.000You know, you spend five or six years now in these overcrowded colleges.
02:10:15.000You know, it used to be four years, but now it's so hard to get the classes that sometimes it takes you five or six years to even graduate, and you graduate with nothing.
02:10:30.000You know, at one point, maybe one in ten people had a college degree, and then it actually meant something, because you had something that not everybody else has.
02:10:37.000But, you know, if everybody has a degree, then you've actually destroyed the value of the degree.
02:10:41.000And that's what the government has done.
02:10:42.000They've made a degree extremely expensive to get, but there's very little value.
02:10:46.000And you have all these politicians, or not politicians, maybe colleges.
02:10:50.000They'll try to say, look at how much more money people make who have college degrees versus people who don't have college degrees.
02:10:56.000And they assume that the reason for that is the college degree.
02:11:02.000Because think about the typical person who chooses to go to college.
02:11:05.000They're smarter, they're more ambitious, they're harder working.
02:11:08.000That's why they're making more money, not because they have a degree, right?
02:11:13.000So if you probably looked at two individuals from the same circumstances, maybe same high school, same demographic, they got the same GPA, they got the same, you know, SAT scores, One went to college and one didn't, and then you followed them,
02:11:29.000you might find that the guy that had the gumption to skip college is actually making more money than the guy who went to college.
02:11:35.000Maybe he started a business, maybe he gained some real world experience, and then he wasn't encumbered by a bunch of debt, right?
02:11:41.000So it's not the college degree at this point.
02:11:43.000Now, yeah, if you wanna be a doctor, sure, you gotta go to college, or you gotta go to med school, but there are a lot of things that you don't need a college degree to do, and a lot of people who are doing them have college degrees.
02:11:55.000And their success is not a function of that college degree.
02:11:58.000It's a function of the hard work that they did after they left college.
02:12:02.000Well, education is very important, but you can get a tremendous amount of education today, and this is not, you know, the 1800s.
02:12:52.000You don't have to, you know, go to a college.
02:12:56.000Some professor can have a tutorial site and he can charge like, you know, 10 bucks a month and he could give lectures and he could teach.
02:13:02.000You can learn all sorts of stuff without enriching some government bureaucracy, some college or university, and you don't have to borrow tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn what you can learn for practically nothing.
02:13:47.000Yeah, I mean, obviously, if you bought them back then, you could turn around and you can sell them today for a lot more money, right?
02:13:54.000But does that mean they're going to work?
02:13:56.000Does that mean they're going to fulfill the promise that everybody believes, right?
02:14:01.000And what is it that people believe about Bitcoin?
02:14:04.000And they believe that it's going to be money, that it's going to either replace or exist alongside of the dollar, the euro, the yen, that people are going to use it as a medium of exchange, that it's going to be a store of value, and There,
02:15:17.000But people bought it early on and it went up.
02:15:21.000Now, the fact that it went up didn't mean that they were right in their ultimate bet.
02:15:25.000It just meant that other people made the same mistake and paid an even higher price.
02:15:29.000And so you can be wrong but still profit from being wrong as long as there are other fools who are also wrong.
02:15:36.000And that's where I see the similarity in the cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin.
02:15:40.000If somebody bought Bitcoin a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, and it's now a lot higher, it's only higher because other people are more foolish than they were, and more people now believe something that's not going to happen.
02:15:53.000Why do you think it's not going to happen?
02:15:54.000What do you think of the restrictions?
02:19:57.000But just because the dollar is working as money, with all the history of usage and the fact that the government accept dollars as taxes, its legal tender, that you have Insurance products, that you have rental agreements, that you have bonds, you have an entire global market in dollars,
02:20:40.000But my point was that, well, but what stops somebody else from creating another cryptocurrency, That is identical to Bitcoin, or maybe it's even better.
02:23:19.000Maybe the blockchain is a great invention and maybe over time a lot of assets will utilize the blockchain in transactions.
02:23:27.000But it doesn't mean that just because Bitcoins utilize something of value that the Bitcoin itself has any value that is going to endure to the owner of that Bitcoin, especially, you know, when there's an infinite number of coins.
02:23:39.000But here's something interesting because, you know, The idea is, hey, you know, we need this digital gold because gold can't be used in commerce the way Bitcoin can.
02:25:00.000If you are a merchant and you want to price your product in gold, you can do that, and I can pay for the product using gold, and you can accept gold in exchange for that good or service.
02:25:12.000So it makes it so that now gold can actually work in today's modern economy through the Internet.
02:25:18.000It's now as easy for me to spend my gold.
02:25:20.000I can use my gold to buy a cup of coffee.
02:25:22.000I could use my gold to buy a car, right?
02:25:25.000And in the short run, Right, and I'll show you this card that I have.
02:25:30.000In the short run, let's assume that somebody...
02:26:11.000In the long run, I believe that we're going to go back to a gold standard.
02:26:15.000I believe, and it's not just gold money, but gold money might be the first company to do that, but there may be more that'll do it later on.
02:26:21.000But I think that government fiat money does not work.
02:27:14.000But what happens is, I can spend my gold using this card.
02:27:18.000So I can sell off, basically, just like, you know, what people are doing with BitPay, but I don't need BitPay, right?
02:27:23.000I can go to any merchant in the world that accepts MasterCard.
02:27:27.000And my gold will be sold, and the merchant will get dollars, right?
02:27:32.000So I can spend my gold now, but the merchant is actually not getting gold, he's getting dollars.
02:27:39.000But I believe in the future, the merchant's gonna want gold.
02:27:42.000Once we start to get a currency crisis, once we see the euro and the yen blowing up, people are not gonna want to sell their goods and services for paper money.
02:27:51.000They're gonna want to sell it for real money.
02:27:52.000Now, there are people who think, well, they're going to want to sell it for cryptocurrencies.
02:27:56.000I think these cryptocurrencies are going to crash before the fiat currencies.
02:28:00.000I think they're going to make fiat currencies look good, which is unfortunate, because you have a lot of good people who are putting their faith in these cryptocurrencies, and they're going to get burned.
02:28:09.000And then the government's going to say, you see, we told you the free market isn't any good.
02:28:22.000Now, I know people say, the knock that the Bitcoin people say is that, well, it's not decentralized, because somebody has to store the gold, right?
02:28:30.000But of course, because there's real value there.
02:28:51.000Or actually, even before that, it was the goldsmith who would have gold, you know, that he was storing, and he would write an IOU. And the person would say, hey, I've got gold stored at this goldsmith.
02:29:02.000That piece of paper, right, instead of going back to the goldsmith and getting your gold, you can give somebody, say, hey, look, I owe you money.
02:29:09.000Take this note because the gold is there.
02:29:11.000You can go get it whenever you want, but here's a piece of paper put in your wallet.
02:29:45.000So if I was going to give you $100 worth of gold from my gold money account to your gold money account, You're gonna now have title to that gold.
02:30:30.000You can actually price a product and get paid in gold, and you can store your gold, and a year later, two years later, you know it's going to have value.
02:30:37.000You could look at the historic value of gold.
02:30:40.000So rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, they used to have something, they called it alchemy.
02:30:45.000Hundreds of years ago, the alchemists tried to make gold out of base metal, and they couldn't do it.
02:30:50.000I look at these cryptocurrencies as modern-day alchemy.
02:30:54.000They're trying to digitally recreate gold, and they're not going to succeed.
02:34:20.000And if more and more people start opting out of that system and just start working in gold-backed money, which we know works.
02:34:27.000We don't need the government to make gold money.
02:34:29.000Gold was money long before the government came around.
02:34:31.000What the government did is when they took over money, they would debase it.
02:34:36.000That's where the term comes, because the government would make gold coins and they would stick copper in there or other metals, because they would try to create inflation.
02:34:42.000But when you had private money, it was gold.
02:36:06.000And, you know, as the price goes up, you just become more emboldened in what you believe because you're getting rewarded by the market for your mistake.
02:36:13.000But you don't think it's a mistake because you're getting rich.
02:36:21.000He should be buying these cryptocurrencies.
02:36:23.000So, you know, there's an old expression to don't confuse brains with a bull market.
02:36:27.000There's certainly a bull market in cryptocurrencies.
02:36:29.000I think it's a bubble, and I think the people who are making money, some of them are going to get lucky, right?
02:36:34.000Some people are going to cash out, and they're going to make money.
02:36:37.000But the money that people make is going to match the money that people lose, because you're going to have a lot of people who are going to come in late to the party.
02:36:44.000They're going to buy, and they're going to be left hole in the bag.
02:36:47.000Now, of course, there's going to be a lot of losses that aren't real money.
02:36:49.000Let's say somebody bought Bitcoin a few years ago, and they paid $1,000, and now it's worth $100,000.
02:36:55.000But they haven't sold, because they think it's going to $10 million.
02:36:58.000If it goes to zero, all they lost was $1,000, even though it was worth $100,000.
02:37:03.000But mentally, they lost a lot more, because they thought they had all this money.
02:37:09.000And mentally, they got used to having, oh, and it's going to be even more.
02:37:12.000So there's going to be a lot of dreams that are going to be shattered, because a lot of paper profits are going to just go to money heaven, because they're just not going to be there.
02:37:20.000But ultimately, the only real money that's going to be made is by the people who cash out.
02:37:25.000Because this is just a self-generating Ponzi scheme.
02:37:31.000And that's why I think a lot of people into the cryptocurrencies, they get so upset when somebody like me doesn't get it, because they need more people.
02:37:39.000They need more buyers to come in, to keep paying a higher price, to keep it all going.
02:37:44.000And so if somebody comes out and says, hey, the emperor has no clothes, You know, because if a lot of people decided they wanted to sell their cryptocurrencies, the price would collapse.
02:39:04.000See, gold money does all the know your customer.
02:39:06.000They know all the KYC. So when you open up a gold money account and you own physical gold, they do make sure they get your photo ID. They get all this information on you.
02:39:14.000So they're complying with government rules and regulations.
02:39:25.000I've pointed out that, yes, the one place that...
02:39:28.000Bitcoin seemed to be used as money, is in crime, right?
02:39:32.000If I was going to blackmail you and I was going to threaten to shut down your podcast unless you send me some money, I can demand payment in Bitcoin.
02:39:40.000And the reason I'm doing that is because of the anonymity.
02:39:43.000I think that, you know, I can get away with the crime.
02:39:46.000And I don't care if the Bitcoin loses 20% of its value between the time you give it to me and the time I cash it in, because criminals are used to paying to launder their money.
02:39:54.000They just want whatever they get as gravy.
02:39:56.000But, you know, if I'm a merchant, and I'm selling, like, I sell gold, right?
02:40:00.000I sell gold, and my margin in my gold business is about 1%.
02:40:03.000So, if I sell gold for $10,000, I bought it for $990, right?
02:40:38.000And the beauty of this is, too, and you can do this yourself, they have a referral program that as you refer people, you send them your own link.
02:40:45.000So once you open up your Gold Money account, you get a referral link.
02:40:48.000And now you can send it to your friend.
02:40:50.000And now if they open up an account, you get some free gold.
02:41:47.000It's in a storage facility with your name by Brinks, so you can spend it.
02:41:52.000When you put your money in a bank account, they loan it out to somebody.
02:41:55.000You know, me ask, there's government insurance, but so what?
02:41:57.000They just have to print a bunch of money.
02:41:59.000You can bank your gold We're good to go.
02:42:24.000But thanks to the internet, it is the best medium of exchange.
02:42:27.000It's because it's so easy now to do it.
02:42:29.000So you can get on, you know, you can promote it, the people that listen to the podcast.
02:42:32.000I mean, and again, there are other people that say, oh, Peter, you know, you don't like Bitcoin because you're promoting gold money.
02:42:38.000You know, if I thought Bitcoin was going to work, believe me, I'd have been all over it, right?
02:42:44.000I have a person of very high principles and standards.
02:42:48.000You know, I started selling gold long before I had a gold company.
02:42:50.000I used to tell my brokerage accounts at Europe Pacific Capital, I would tell them, look, buy some gold, and I would just send them, just go buy it.
02:42:57.000And the money that they used to buy gold was money I couldn't manage.
02:43:00.000Now, I'd make money, you know, managing money for a fee or commissions, and if people took their money and bought gold, I wasn't making any money, but I thought they should buy it because it was the right thing to do.
02:43:08.000And I got involved with gold money because I thought that they were onto something.
02:43:12.000I thought that they were doing something big.