Peter Schiff：黄金与 Bitcoin、市场崩盘、美元危机及更多 | TG Podcast

Dude, it's an absolute pleasure to meet you. Thanks for coming on the show. Shout out to TJR for connecting us. And look, Peter, I don't know—

Who are you again?

Okay, so I was just about to say, I am Thread Guy, Mr. Peter. And I was going to say—

But what's your actual name? What do you go by? What do people call you?

Michael. They call me Thread Guy on Twitter, but my name is Michael.

All right. So, what do you want me to call you? Michael or Mike?

Michael. You can do whatever you prefer, but Michael's cool with me. Can I call you Peter? Pete? Peter, what do you prefer?

Peter, I guess.

Okay. I was going to say, I guess you could call me Mr. Schiff because you're so young, but you—

Mr. Schiff? Is that Professor Schiff?

Call me Peter. Call me Peter. I was going to open with Pete, but I wasn't sure how that was going to fly. But dude, welcome to the show. I was going to open by assuming you're not super familiar with me, and I'm going to tell you that this show—

I'm not.

This show that we run is a crypto show. We come here, we talk about crypto, we talk about Bitcoin, we talk about on-chain, and—

You just waste all your time talking crypto.

And what I'm going to say, Peter, is that as much as I would love to come and fight with you about Bitcoin, which seems to be something you like to do often—you tweet about it a lot—I know deep down you have a soft spot in your heart for Bitcoin. This is sort of your victory lap that's happening right now.

We don't spend that much time talking about gold, and we definitely don't spend a ton of time talking about this impending financial crisis that you are warning about. So, yeah, man, I'm excited to have you on the stream.

All right. Well, let's go. Let's get this done.

This is where I want to start. I was doing a bunch of research on you over the last couple of days, and I was watching all of these old YouTube clips. I'm watching you pretty much forecast and hit every major trade over the last couple of decades. I'm watching you in 2006 and 2007 on Fox and CNBC warning about an impending financial crisis, and they're laughing at you.

I watched this interview you did on CNBC. I think gold was $1,200, and you're in this screaming match. They're like, “Peter, when are you going to admit that you're wrong?” And you're like, “No, $5,000. Gold's going to $5,000. It's going to $5,000.” They're cutting you off. They're audibly laughing at you.

It's funny to see how that aged. To start, what is it that you think the crypto crowd specifically has gotten wrong about gold?

They've gotten a lot wrong about gold, but I think a lot of it has to do with their justification of Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't actually have any intrinsic value. Nobody can do anything with a Bitcoin, right? You can't make anything out of it. If you have Bitcoin, you can't do anything with it. You can give it to somebody else, but they can't do anything with it either. They can just give it to somebody else.

They assume that gold is the same way—that gold is just some kind of worthless rock that doesn't really have any use, and that it has value because we perceive that it has value. Therefore, if gold can be worthless and have value, why can't Bitcoin?

What they miss is that gold does have value. It has a lot of value. That's why gold worked as money: it was such a valuable commodity that it was highly sought after. But what made it work as money better than other valuable commodities were the properties that Bitcoin copied.

Bitcoin copied gold's fungibility, its durability, its divisibility, and its portability—all the things that made gold better money than cattle or all sorts of commodities that were used. Bitcoin did a good job of copying all that. But what it doesn't have is the basic value of gold, the precious metal. Without that, nothing else really matters.

If gold didn't have any value, the fact that you could divide it wouldn't matter. You'd be dividing nothing. But because gold is something, it's something very valuable. It is the most useful metal on the periodic table. The only reason that gold isn't used a lot more frequently is because it's so expensive, and it's very expensive because it's very scarce.

Gold is used where other substitutes are not going to work. It's used in a lot of things. Obviously, the most obvious use is jewelry. You can make jewelry out of other metals, but a lot of people like to have gold jewelry, and that's the biggest use.

It's also used in consumer electronics, aerospace, medicine, and dentistry. There are a lot of uses for gold. Another use for gold is money, because gold can be a store of value. Unlike a lot of other commodities, gold doesn't decay. If you store gold, it doesn't lose any of its properties over time.

If you had a ship that went down in the ocean 500 years ago, and you could salvage that ship and there was a treasure chest, the only thing that might be left would be the gold coins. They would look exactly the way they looked 500 years ago, when the ship sank. All that value is preserved.

That's why gold is a store of value: the value of gold can be stored over time, and the gold can be used in the future by whoever needs it. But nobody needs Bitcoin in the present, so nobody's going to need it in the future. It can't be a store of value if it doesn't have any value to store.

I understand that it has a lot of very interesting properties, but so do a lot of other cryptos. Bitcoin isn't the only crypto. There are thousands or tens of thousands of these things out there. They all have very interesting properties, but none of them have any real value.

The fact that there are so many of them, and there's no limit to how many can be created, means I don't see how there's even any scarcity in these things. It's been a big bubble. People who bought Bitcoin and other tokens early on, when I didn't, have gotten incredibly wealthy because they got in early and were able to cash out.

But those gains are going to come at the expense of the people who have been buying in over the last several years. They've enabled the people who got in early to cash out rich. They're going to end up being the bag holders.

That's how the dynamic works. The people who get in early and get out make a lot of money, and all of those profits come at the expense of the losses of a much greater population of people who get in late and never get out, or get out with a small fraction of what they put in. That's what I think is coming in crypto.

Okay. You describe a lot of the positive characteristics of Bitcoin. I think deep down you actually relate with Bitcoin a lot, but I do want to ask you this question, and then I want to get into some of the doomer thesis stuff.

What do you think you got wrong about Bitcoin around 2017, when you were posting that it was going to go to zero, and now it's gotten to where it is?

I still think it is eventually going to zero, so I don't think I got that wrong. What I did get wrong was underestimating the gullibility of the public to buy it, or maybe the marketing savvy of those who were promoting it.

I do concede that the people who got into Bitcoin and marketed it and promoted it did a great job of selling the story and getting people to buy what they wanted to get rid of. That was the key to Bitcoin. Some people got in early—I guess you call them the OGs or the whales—and they had a bunch of Bitcoin.

They developed the market out of nothing. They got people to want to buy Bitcoin and bid up the price so they could sell it. It's just a gigantic pump and dump. I think a lot of the dumping has been going on over the last several years.

I think particularly after the launch of the Bitcoin ETFs, and then after the election of Donald Trump, the crypto industry really helped put Trump in office for the specific purpose of pumping up Bitcoin and crypto so they would be able to cash out.

A lot of people have been able to cash out a lot of profits since Trump was elected, and that's one of the reasons why Bitcoin really isn't going anywhere. It had the original run-up above $100,000, but since then it's really been going sideways.

If you measure it in terms of gold, it's been going way down. Bitcoin is off about 30% since its peak, priced in gold—priced in real money. It's still down. It got up to $126,000, and now it's around $108,000. It's in a decent correction in dollars, but it's in a pretty big bear market in gold.

I will say that even since the interviews I watched of yours, in the old days, you were very consistent in pricing things denominated against gold, which I will give you credit for.

But look, we spend a lot of time talking about Bitcoin on the stream. We don't spend a lot of time talking about gold on the stream, and that's where I want to focus right now.

Can you set the stage for my audience, and especially the younger viewers, on why gold has had its best-performing year to date since, I believe, 1979, and what exactly is happening right now to fuel that?

Yeah. First of all, if you have an audience that has a lot of crypto, my advice would be to buy some gold and buy some silver. You know, I have a company. We probably should have used the other backdrop, but, yeah, Shift Gold, right? Go to shiftgold.com. And we actually make it very easy to check out and use Bitcoin as a payment means because we work with BitPay, and they make it easy to convert your Bitcoin at point of sale to the dollars that you would need to buy some gold or silver.

But the reason I think that gold is having its best year since the 1970s is because I think we're going through a period that's similar to the 1970s. Not just that we have stagflation, which we do, but I think we are at the early stages of a major reset of the global monetary order.

That's what happened in the 1970s when Nixon took the US off the gold standard, because up until 1971, the dollar was as good as gold. It was not only backed by gold but redeemable in gold. And so the world's monetary system was really based on gold. Even though it was based on the dollar, the dollar was gold.

So instead of the Bank of France having a bunch of gold—it had gold, too, but it had dollars—those dollars counted as gold because you could take your dollars and pick up your gold whenever you wanted. They were like a claim check for gold.

And so when we defaulted, that really changed the order, because now foreign central banks had just our paper as a reserve asset. They didn't have our gold. We told them, “You can't have the gold. It's ours. You can't have it.” We basically defaulted on our IOUs.

That was a major change, and you saw a major devaluation of the dollar. The dollar lost about two-thirds of its value against other currencies, but it lost a lot more than that relative to gold, because gold went from $35 in the late 1960s to $850 by 1980.

All prices went way up. Oil prices were $3 a barrel; they went to $40. But it wasn't really that oil went up. It was that the dollar went down. We were villainizing the OPEC countries for jacking up oil prices, but we were the villains because we tried to pay them in paper instead of gold.

They basically said, “Well, if you're just going to pay paper, then we need a lot more of it.” If you're not going to pay us gold for our oil, if you're just going to give us pieces of paper, then we need more, because the dollar wasn't worth as much when it wasn't backed by gold.

It was a big change. And I think what's happening now is the next phase, where the world now goes off the dollar standard. They should have gone off it in the 1970s, but they didn't. They kept it. They devalued the dollar, but they kept using it. We were down, but we weren't out.

Now I think the world has had enough of our budget deficits and our trade deficits and our sanctions and our tariffs and all the things that we're doing. I think the world is walking away.

What's been happening over the last couple of years is central banks have been quietly divesting of dollars and replacing dollars with gold. I think what the world is doing is going back to using gold as the primary reserve asset.

Not necessarily a gold standard. I don't think the euro is going to be a convertible currency into gold, but I think central banks will hold primarily gold—not US dollars, euros, or pounds. I think gold will be the main asset that central banks hold to maintain the value of their currencies.

This is a major change, mainly for the United States. It's not as big a deal for everybody else, but for the US, it is a huge game changer, because it means that we can't keep living beyond our means anymore. We can't keep printing money and then using it to buy stuff we didn't produce and borrow what we didn't save.

It means that the cost of living is going to go up dramatically in the US. The cost of borrowing money is going to go up a lot, and asset prices are going to come down.

Certainly in real terms, what happens in nominal terms is hard to say, but in real terms, priced in gold, we're going to continue to see a major decline in the value of US stocks and US real estate.

That's been going on since 1999. The Dow Jones, despite going up fourfold in dollars, is down better than 70% in gold. And those are real dollars. So assets are losing value, but that's going to continue and accelerate as the world really officially moves off the dollar standard and back to the gold standard.

To sort of piggyback off of this, I think the biggest topic I want to cover with you, Peter, is this prediction for an impending financial crisis.

I was watching you on Fox News a week ago, maybe two weeks ago, and you were basically giving this thesis on an impending financial crash that, I'm paraphrasing, would make 2008 pale in comparison.

Yeah, I might have said “a Sunday school picnic” or something like that.

I think something like that. Peter, I'll tell you what, I was six in 2008, so I wasn't even conscious of what was going on. I think a lot of my audience is in a similar spot.

So you're the same age as my older son.

Okay. I've been told by the chat that he is a Bitcoin maxi, or at one time was.

No, he was a Bitcoin maxi at one point. Yeah.

We could come back to that at a later time. But my real question for you is, what does that even mean? How does it happen? What does it look like? What are the signs that it's coming?

I guess we'll get to what do we do after, but what does making 2008 look like a Sunday picnic in comparison literally and practically mean?

Well, 2008 was a debt crisis that really started in the mortgage market and then expanded to the counterparties who held the mortgages and insured the mortgages.

But the US government was able to provide bailouts and stimulus, which really made the crisis at that time a lot less dramatic than it otherwise would have been. Had we not had the bailouts, it would have been a lot worse.

That would have been the correct thing to have done for the long run. We would be in better shape today had we taken more pain back in 2008. But we kicked the can down the road by doing the bailouts.

But the crisis that's coming is one from which there cannot be a government bailout. That's because I'm not predicting a crisis in mortgages or subprime mortgages, but in US Treasury bonds. It is a sovereign debt crisis.

It's not that people lose confidence in the ability of some overleveraged homeowner to pay back their adjustable-rate mortgage or whatever. It's about the world losing confidence in the US government's ability to pay back its sovereign debt.

I'm not talking about an outright default, which is still certainly a possibility. In fact, default is better than what I think is going to happen.

It's not so much that people are going to be worried that we're going to default, although they should worry about that. They're more going to be worried about what the dollar is going to be worth when they get paid back.

If it looks like the only way we can pay our debts is by printing money—and it certainly looks like that—I mean, if you look at what Donald Trump is saying, we need to slash interest rates even though inflation is rising. What does that mean? We're going to create inflation.

We want low interest rates even though those low interest rates won't compensate lenders for what they're losing to inflation or a decline in the value of the dollar.

There's going to be a run on Treasuries. People—the world—is not going to want to buy Treasuries. The world is not going to want to own US dollars.

So it's a sovereign debt and a currency crisis, which is a financial crisis, but it's a financial crisis on a whole other level because it's the risk-free asset that's all of a sudden blowing up.

That has great implications all across credit markets. But if people don't want dollars and they don't want Treasuries, then the US government can't bail anybody out.

The Fed can't bail anybody out because the reason the government was able to bail out in 2008 was that the Fed was able to substitute dollars or Treasuries for bad mortgages. That was all the TARP program.

The US government was going to take on all the bad debt and replace it with its own debt, which was much better and higher quality. People had confidence in Treasury bonds. They're losing confidence in them now.

So if we have a dollar crisis and the dollar is tanking and inflation is exploding, what can the government do? Nothing. They can't print more money and hand it out like they did in 2008, because that will just fuel the inflation fire.

That will make the dollar fall faster. That will make long-term interest rates rise even higher.

We're in a situation where nothing that they've used in the past will work. And now they're really caught between a rock and a hard place, because the only real solution is the one that they've resisted all of these decades.

They resisted it because it's too painful.

But because we resisted it for so long, it's going to be much more painful to deal with it now or in the near future than it would have been had we dealt with it in the past. So, you can't bail out when the subject of the bailout is what nobody wants.

Can you explain 2025? Let's fast-forward a year into the future. What is practically happening when this starts to go? What does it look like? What is the first sign that things have broken?

Well, I think what's happening with gold, which almost hit $4,400 last week before a sharp correction back down near $4,000, is that you're still talking about $4,000 gold. It's double what it was two years ago.

But let's backtrack a bit. When we got to a point in 1980 where the world was getting rid of the dollar and losing confidence in the U.S., what did we do? What did Paul Volcker do to try to re-instill some confidence? He let interest rates go up to 20% for short-term rates.

Whoa.

And so we told people, “Okay, you don't want to hold the dollar. We'll pay you 20% interest to hold our dollars.” I was like, “Whoa, okay, that's a pretty good deal. You're going to give me 20%.” The highest inflation ever got was really around 10%, 11%, or 12%, so 20% was a pretty good return.

At the same time, Ronald Reagan came in with some major reforms and slashed taxes to create more economic growth. Government's the problem; capitalism is the solution. He really changed the dynamic that existed under the Nixon-Ford years and the Johnson and Kennedy era. These were all big-government guys. Even the Republicans were big-government Keynesian Rockefeller Republicans.

Ronald Reagan was a whole new Barry Goldwater conservative: cut government. Between Ronald Reagan and Paul Volcker, they were able to re-instill the confidence that had been lost in the dollar.

But we don't have those tools. First of all, Trump is nothing like Ronald Reagan, but whoever is going to replace Powell, including Powell, is nothing like Paul Volcker. Even if Paul Volcker were here now, he couldn't do what he did then, because we no longer have the ability to pay our creditors a high enough rate of interest to stop the bleeding in the dollar because of how much debt we have now.

Back in 1980, the national debt wasn't even $1 trillion. Now it's $38 trillion. Plus, the vast majority of the national debt was financed with long-term bonds. So even though interest rates went up to 20%, it didn't affect most of the budget because that was locked in at much lower rates and didn't mature for 10, 20, or 30 years. It wasn't a big deal.

But today, we have one-third of the national debt maturing in one year. The average maturity on the entire $38 trillion is maybe four or five years. I forget exactly, but it's very short-term. So if interest rates went up even to 10%, before too long we would be paying $4 trillion in interest on the national debt, which is impossible because we probably wouldn't even collect $4 trillion in taxes. We only collect about $5 trillion now.

We would be in such a massive recession if short-term interest rates went to 10%. There'd be so many bankruptcies, unemployment would be so high, the budget deficit would explode, and tax revenues would tank. So look, it's impossible. We can't fight inflation anymore because we die from the cure. That kills us. We can't raise interest rates, so all we end up doing is dying by inflation because we can't cure inflation.

That's where we have the risk of hyperinflation or a currency crisis, because we don't have the ability. Now, what we could do to avoid the worst-case scenario is default. That's what the U.S. government could do: say, “Look, we borrowed $40 trillion. We can't afford to pay it back, so we're not going to do it. Maybe we can give everybody 25 cents on the dollar. Maybe we can afford that, but we can't afford to make everybody whole.”

We need much higher interest rates, and that's one of the reasons we have to restructure the debt. We need higher interest rates. Interest rates have been too low for decades. That's the problem. Now the Fed wants to lower them more, and Trump wants lower interest rates. We need higher interest rates.

Trump is upset that we don't have manufacturing and that we have these big trade deficits. The only way to cure that is higher interest rates. That way, we'll stop spending and start saving, and then we could use the savings to build factories. But if we don't save money, we're not going to build factories, and we're going to have to import the stuff that foreigners produce in their factories.

The only reason we've been able to do that is because they wanted our dollars because the dollar was the reserve currency. But once the dollar loses that status, the world isn't going to sell us its stuff for our paper. We're going to have to start making stuff again, which we can't do because we don't have the ability to do it anymore.

We don't have the factories. We don't have the infrastructure. We don't have the supply chains. We don't have the trained workers. We don't have any of that stuff. We did decades ago, but it's gone now.

So, okay, just to double down on this: if you are correct about this thesis, what do we do? You and I are in different spots, right? You're an economist, you've been extremely successful, and you've been on Rogan a hundred times. You were right about gold. We're in different spots in our financial standing, I'm sure, and our careers.

What are you telling the younger, maybe middle-class generation? What do you do? Are you going to walk to the grocery store and milk is going to be $100 a gallon? What does it look like if you are correct, and what are you suggesting that people do? Is it just gold? You're in a much better spot than I am because you're young, right? You have your youth, which is probably your greatest asset.

It's also a liability, too, because you make a lot of mistakes when you're young. Not that you don't make mistakes when you're old. But the beauty of making mistakes when you're young is that you have plenty of time to recover and plenty of time to benefit from what you learn by making those mistakes.

I think one of the big mistakes that young people are making is putting a lot of money in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. The good news is that when you lose all your money, you'll learn a valuable lesson, and you're going to have lots of time to incorporate that lesson into your later years and your life and everything that you do. You'll have a lot of time to make back the money that you lose.

To be fair, they haven't been wrong about Bitcoin yet.

Being right about Bitcoin and making money in Bitcoin are two separate things, right? Yeah, I can see the price of Bitcoin.

Well, the price of Bitcoin has gone up. It's gone up a lot. But let's say at the end of the day, Bitcoin collapses and it does go to zero. Does that mean, “Yes, I was right”? It was a big Ponzi, a big pyramid. But I could have made a lot of money if I had gotten in and gotten out.

People can buy Bitcoin and be totally wrong about its actual value and what it's going to be worth in the future, but they can make money as long as other people are also wrong, buy it at a higher price, and they get out. But a lot of people are not going to get out.

Let's say somebody bought Bitcoin at $5,000 and has 20x'd their money. “Look, I was right.” Well, what if Bitcoin crashes to $1,000 and now you're down 80%? Were you right? On paper, you had a lot of profits, but you didn't take them. Then the market collapsed, you never got out, and all those paper profits are gone.

I think I've been right about Bitcoin ultimately failing and not living up to the hype.

No, but you haven't been right about Bitcoin.

I've been wrong.

I've been wrong about not buying it and taking advantage of the mania. That's the thing. I obviously could have bought Bitcoin.

Yes.

At a very low price.

And I could have sold it anywhere along the way, and I could have made a lot of money.

Now, the thing is, I've made more money not buying Bitcoin over the last three or four years and this year than I have in my other investments. But yes, had I bought Bitcoin when I first heard about it, or even within a few years of first hearing about it, I would have made more money in Bitcoin than anything I've done.

But I didn't do that. I could have done that. Obviously, with the benefit of hindsight, I should have done it. But I think most people are going to end up losing money in Bitcoin. Some people are going to make a lot of money, and a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money. I think more people will lose money than make money.

And I think the people who are buying it now are going to lose a lot of money.

Okay. If being wrong on Bitcoin is like a 1,000x or 100,000x in the last 10 years, I want to be wrong, Peter Schiff. But here’s what I really want to know.

Well, I doubt it’s going to go up 1,000x from here. It’s probably not even going to go up 10x from here.

You have been saying it for a while, though—that it’s not going up from here, to be fair. But here’s the thing, Peter: I honestly brought you here to glaze you, because this is your career victory lap right now on the gold front.

Not really. I think gold’s going a lot higher than this, so I’m not taking a victory lap yet. I don’t think we’re near the end of this game. Gold’s gone up to $4,000, but the journey’s not over.

We haven’t had the dollar crisis yet. We haven’t had a collapse in the Treasury bond market. We haven’t had the dollar collapse on foreign exchange markets relative to other currencies. A lot of things are going to happen before I take that final victory lap and basically say, “I told you so.”

So my question is, I’m pretty sure all this stuff is going to happen, including the collapse of Bitcoin. That’s another thing that is going to happen. Bitcoin may even collapse before the dollar or before the bond market, because Bitcoin could collapse at any moment. The only thing Bitcoin really has going for it now is the Trump administration. That’s really what’s propping it up.

Well, look, Bitcoin has a lot of things going for it, but what I want to ask you again, just to close on this doom-and-hyperinflation thesis, is: let’s just put gold in a vacuum. If you are right and you do get that final victory lap, and it plays out the way that you see it playing out, at what cost? What does society look like? What does the economy look like if you hit gold at $10,000, or $15,000 or $20,000?

How do you prepare for something like this? Are you advising people to just exclusively buy gold? Are you suggesting they diversify into other things? If you can’t hold dollars, what do people do?

Yeah. For people of my age—the people who have a substantial portfolio—I tell them to have some money in gold. Maybe 5%, 10%, 20% at most. Have money in gold, but I like stocks. I like dividend-producing stocks.

I actually own a lot of gold stocks, too, but I own a lot of non-gold stocks all around the world that I think will deliver real, inflation-adjusted returns and be very helpful to Americans to maintain their standard of living during a major dollar devaluation, which is coming.

For a lot of young people who don’t have a lot of savings yet to invest but want to do something, I recommend that they buy some physical gold. Probably silver is easier for a lot of people who maybe have $5,000 or $10,000. Just buy some physical silver coins to hold value.

I also tell people not to go grocery shopping every week for everything. Stock up if you’ve got space. Buy things now that don’t perish and that you’re going to need in 6 months, in a year, or in 2 years. Just buy them now, because they’re going to be a lot more expensive in the future. You might as well just buy them now. It’s a pretty good investment.

Let’s say toothpaste is $5 for a tube, and in a year it’s $10. Just buy it now. When you use it a year from now, you’ve got a 100% return on your toothpaste investment, because you’re going to use the toothpaste eventually. Why not buy it now? Why keep your money in the bank and then buy the toothpaste when it’s twice the price?

The other problem is that when the dollar really starts to collapse and prices really start to rise, the government may implement price controls as a way to try to stop it from happening, just the way Nixon did. When that happens, you end up with shortages, because if it’s illegal to charge the correct price, the merchants just don’t sell the merchandise at all.

If they put price controls on toothpaste, then you go to the drugstore or the supermarket, and there’s no toothpaste on the shelves because they can’t sell it at a price low enough to comply with the law. Now it’s not a question of toothpaste being more expensive—you can’t even get it.

Of course, there might be a guy in an alley somewhere who’s selling toothpaste on the black market, and now it’s even more expensive because the guy risks going to jail for selling you illegal toothpaste. How are you going to buy that toothpaste? Maybe he’ll take a silver dime, because he’s not going to take a credit card. Then the government will know what he’s doing, that he’s breaking the law, and who knows what the jail time will be for violating these price controls.

It’s good to stock up on stuff so you don’t have to go to the black market. Have it now. Remember during COVID, people were having a hard time getting toilet paper and other things because there were supply shortages during COVID. They’ll be worse if we have price controls.

Even if we don’t have price controls, prices are going way up because the dollar is going way down. You’re going to need a lot more dollars to buy things. But if you have silver, prices will come down in terms of silver. You won’t need as much silver; you’ll be able to buy more stuff with less silver.

I know a lot of people think that’s going to be the case with Bitcoin, right? Prices are going to come down in Bitcoin, because prices have come down in Bitcoin since Bitcoin first came on the scene. Prices have come way down.

But I think Bitcoin is going to fall even in terms of dollars. If you’re relying on Bitcoin to buy stuff, you’re going to need even more Bitcoin, because I think prices will rise even more in Bitcoin than they will in dollars.

I actually think you don’t realize your toothpaste prediction was one of the greatest crypto shills I’ve ever heard in my time doing this. Here’s a question for you, Peter. I actually gained a lot of respect for you in the last couple of days watching some of your old stuff.

Well, you didn’t respect me up until 2 days ago.

I didn’t not respect you, but the crypto community kind of knows you as the angry guy who yells at the sky, right? That’s how you’re known among the Bitcoiners. Not that I am a Bitcoiner—I’m more of a crypto enthusiast.

There’s this clip that’s drilled into my brain. I think it was 2006. You’re on Fox News, predicting this financial crisis that was coming, and they were audibly laughing in your face. They were laughing out loud on the air. It was the anchor, the host, all the guests.

Yeah. Nobody saw it coming in the mainstream. Nobody saw it at the Fed, either.

My question is: how and why was everybody so oblivious to what was coming in 2008? How was it possible that everybody—smart people, very talented people—was oblivious to it?

Well, it’s groupthink. That is the dynamic. Everybody kind of thinks the same way, and they really are oblivious to anything that contradicts what they believe.

I would talk about cognitive dissonance, where they build a mental wall and nothing I say can get through because it would be so disruptive to their worldview, their way of life, and their livelihood. Nobody wanted to accept that what I was saying was true. Since nobody else was saying it, it was like, “How could it be true? How could this one guy from this small firm be right?”

All these big Harvard economists, the Federal Reserve, the big Wall Street banks, and the Council of Economic Advisers didn’t want to admit that. But I see the same type of cognitive dissonance in the Bitcoin community.

Everybody is so wedded to their belief system in Bitcoin, and they’ve committed to it. They’re all in on it, and they’re really not open to hearing anything critical. It all bounces off. Nothing that I say, nothing that I can argue to try to explain this, gets through.

It’s, “No, I’m a boomer. I’m a dinosaur. I just don’t get it.” They’ve built up these defense mechanisms. When I tell them Bitcoin’s going to crash, they laugh that off, just like people laughed off the coming financial crisis when I said banks were going to fail or Fannie and Freddie were going to go bankrupt.

And I was like, “No, that can't happen.” I'm like, “Well, that's exactly what's going to happen.”

Well, to be fair, you were saying it in 2006. It happened in 2 years, versus the Bitcoin thing we've been talking about. I mean, you've been talking about anti-Bitcoin for a decade-plus.

I was warning about the financial crisis before 2006. I started warning about it probably in 2002 or 2003. I knew what the Fed was doing with the low interest rates. I saw the problems in the housing market and the mortgage market really early.

I got more vocal then, and I got more media coverage. People focus on the fact that I was saying this stuff in 2006, and then it was 2007. But I had been talking about it years before.

Yes, the Bitcoin bubble has gone on for much longer than the housing bubble did. I've been critical of Bitcoin for longer than I was critical of mortgages and housing.

Because this bubble has gotten so big, a lot of people believe, “Well, you must be wrong this time, because look, the bubble should have popped a long time ago.” I think it was very close.

I think the Bitcoin community did a great job of suckering in Wall Street. When Wall Street came in with the ETFs, that helped extend it. MicroStrategy, with the help of Wall Street, the financings, and all the leverage—Michael was able to pump it.

Then they did a great job of getting Trump and his family indoctrinated and all in on crypto, getting them elected, having a crypto czar, and getting the whole power of the presidency behind this pump-and-dump, this pyramid.

They've done a lot to try to extend it, but they're going to run out. It cannot do this in perpetuity. Eventually, it has to implode. That's the dynamic. You can't get around it.

It's a greater-fool theory. Bitcoin itself has no intrinsic value, so its only value is as a speculative investment. But you need speculators. You need people who want to buy it, and they can only get out if more people come in.

You need an ever-increasing supply of people willing to pay a higher price than the person they bought it from. Eventually, the dynamic just falls apart. There aren't enough new buyers to keep the thing from imploding.

But that's part of the whole mantra of “never sell your Bitcoin.” HODL, right? All of this was created by the people who want to sell, but they don't want anybody else to sell, because they don't want the competition and they need new buyers.

“Buy your Bitcoin and never sell” is what they tell you. That's part of the religion of it. Meanwhile, the people who thought all that stuff up are the ones who are selling. But they have to make sure that other people don't, and they have to get more buyers to come in, because that's the only way they can get out.

Eventually, the whole thing implodes, and it may be happening already. Look at some of these crypto stocks. A lot of them are blowing up.

I pointed out today, look at the Winklevoss company, Gemini. It just came out last month, and it's already down about 60% from the high on the day it traded. Look at Donald Trump's company, Trump Media. It's down 70% from October.

They reinvented themselves as a Bitcoin treasury company, and they keep getting new 52-week lows today. Look what happened to David Bailey's company. I went to the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, and I remember when they launched this Nakamoto Bitcoin thing.

I was telling people, “This is nuts. This is a pyramid or a Ponzi.” The stock was about $30 when it came out. It's at about 70 cents.

Okay, let me ask you a question about that stock. Is it—do you recognize the irony of how often in this decade you have to say the word Bitcoin on your shows and in your posts?

No. Bitcoin is still there, right? It's still there. It has a multi-trillion-dollar market cap.

Look at how they've bought off the financial media. You can't watch CNBC. The whole—

What do you mean, bought off? Who bought off whom?

They pay. You go to CNBC, and it's all crypto. I said they should call CNBC “Crypto News Bitcoin.”

But to be fair, it's been the best-performing asset of the decade. They have a financial responsibility to their audience to talk about it, right?

No. I think their audience is going to be suing them when they lose all their money. They buy all the commercial time. Half of all these things are sponsored by crypto, yet they hardly let anybody say anything negative about Bitcoin.

You're on there every day. You're on CNBC once a week.

I'm never on CNBC—at least not in 10 years. They stopped inviting me on because I was negative on Bitcoin.

What probably happened is the Bitcoin sponsor says, “Look, we'll give you a lot of money. Just don't let Peter Schiff come on the air, because we can't have him telling the truth about Bitcoin. We're trying to get your audience to buy it.”

You actually don't realize it, but the Bitcoiners want Peter Schiff on the air, because it makes them feel more sound about their investment.

Here, I know we're coming up shortly. Here's one more thing I want to ask you. You predicted 2008, and 2008 happened. How did you trade 2008, and are there parallels you think we can draw?

I actually got killed in 2008, right? The trade that I made that made money was the subprime short, but that was in 2007. That paid off in 2007.

The rest of my portfolio—I had a lot of gold stocks, just like I do now. I had a lot of foreign stocks. They all went down. The stocks that I owned actually went down more in 2008 than the U.S. stock market.

They rebounded more in 2009, so I made back a lot of what I lost in 2008 on my stock portfolio, not counting what I made on the short side of the mortgage market. That was a totally different trade.

What I was prepared for was the dollar crisis that I thought would follow the financial crisis. If you go and look at my first book, Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse, I thought that after we got the financial crisis, the mortgage market collapsed, real estate collapsed, banks failed, and Fannie and Freddie failed, the government would print a bunch of money—which they did—and they called it quantitative easing.

I didn't know what they were going to call it. I just knew what they were going to do. I thought all that money printing would end up causing a crisis in the dollar and the bond market, and gold would go way up.

That's what I thought would happen. What I got wrong was the timing. It didn't happen. It started to happen. Gold got to $1,900, but then it fell off. The dollar started to fall, but then it rallied.

We were able to inflate an even bigger bubble than the one that popped in 2008. In fact, I've called it the everything bubble. We have a massive bubble in stocks, in real estate, in bonds, and in crypto.

The Fed was able to engineer this and kick the can down the road for a lot longer than I thought. When I wrote my most recent book, which is still 12 years old, The Real Crash: America's Coming Bankruptcy—How to Profit from the Economic Collapse, the purpose of The Real Crash was to tell people that the financial crisis crash was not the crash that I was worried about.

I warned about it, but it wasn't the real crash. The real crash was what I thought was coming in the dollar and in the bond market, which still hasn't happened. Now I think it's going to happen. I think we're very close.

Now that gold is really shooting up again, that's a pretty good warning sign. When the subprime market blew up in 2007, that told me I was right about the financial crisis, and then it hit in 2008.

I was warning about the subprime blowup years before it blew up. But when it did, everybody shrugged it off if they didn't know what it signified. The Fed said, “Don't worry about it. It's contained.”

I knew it wasn't contained. Just like people are now blowing off gold—“Oh, it's acting like a meme stock, and it's momentum”—they don't understand why gold is going up, what it means, or what it portends.

I think it's telling me that I'm right, that the world is losing confidence in the dollar, and that the dollar crisis I thought should have happened years and years ago is now close at hand.

People need to actually read that book. Everything that I wrote is going to be happening. It's just happening later than I thought it was going to happen.

Peter, I'm going to buy your book. Guaranteed, I'm going to buy your book. You say we're in the everything bubble. Do you think gold has entered bubble territory?

No, I don't think gold is a bubble. Obviously, it had a pretty big move recently, where it ran from $3,500 or $3,600 up to $4,400 very quickly, especially that last $300 or $400. Then it sold off very quickly. It had an abrupt decline.

In fact, on Tuesday, it had a 6.5% drop.

That was yesterday. That was a huge drop. But it's not even close to a bubble. I can tell you, I mentioned my gold company, SchiffGold. Business has been slow. It picked up a bit over the last couple of weeks, but over the last few years, as gold went from $2,000 to $4,000, we weren't selling that much gold.

My best year at SchiffGold was 2020, right? During COVID, people actually got worried. They wanted gold; they were worried.

How much gold did you sell in 2020?

I don't remember the dollar amount, but it was the best year that we had. People wanted gold because they were worried. But for the last couple of years, people haven't been worried. They haven't been buying gold. They've been buying Bitcoin or tech stocks.

The main buyers have been central banks, and it's not a bubble when central banks are diversifying out of dollars into gold. These are not speculative buyers, and they're not even intending to sell. They're buying gold to hold it as a reserve, so it's not even about the price for them. They just need something to back up their currency, and they no longer have confidence in the dollar. They're replacing their dollars with gold.

The public has been really absent—not just the general public, but professional investors. If you look through the entire investment landscape—public pensions, endowments, hedge funds, pension funds—I think something like 2% of all investable assets are invested in gold and gold-related equities. That would include physical gold, gold-mining stocks, and things like that. That is very low.

Based on a historic average, if this were a bubble, it would be much greater than that. If it were a bubble, the man on the street would be buying gold, but they're not.

They were lining up. I saw these pictures on Twitter. I know you saw it. They were lining up around the block buying gold.

I don't know where that footage came from or if it was real—if they were actually lining up to buy gold. Maybe they were lining up to sell their gold. That's what I've heard from a lot of smaller dealers: a lot of people are coming in to sell their old jewelry and get money.

In fact, we had a lot of people on the way up, as gold was going up—customers that had bought gold from us in the past. Remember, I've been selling gold to people since it was under $300, and silver was $4. There are a lot of people who bought gold and silver at much lower prices, and some people have been cashing out. That's the opposite of a mania: people are selling into the strength.

In fact, all last year and for a good part of this year, the gold ETF had net outflows. The gold-stock ETFs had net outflows. The public was selling gold the whole way up.

The people who own gold are afraid. If you look at gold-stock investors, they've been selling out. Every time gold goes down a little bit, they panic and get out. Even the people investing in the space have one foot out the door. Most of them don't have a lot of conviction. There's a lot more fear in the gold trade than there is greed.

Where I see nothing but greed is in Bitcoin. Bitcoiners feel they can't lose. There's no way Bitcoin is going to only $1 million; Bitcoin is going to $10 million. It's impossible that it doesn't happen. Michael Saylor says, “Mortgage your house, sell your business, put everything you own in Bitcoin, because it's a sure thing. You can't lose. It's going to $1 million. It's going to $10 million.”

A lot of people have the attitude that there's no way they can lose on Bitcoin. If you don't own Bitcoin, you're going to have fun staying poor. But if you own Bitcoin, we're going to be rich. You don't have that attitude in gold.

You kind of do. You kind of do. But here's my last question for you, Peter, because I think it's a good one to wrap on. I'll let you go. Do you think that anything positive has come out of the blockchain industry? Do you like stablecoins? Do you like smart contracts? I have a Polymarket sign in the background—the prediction market, on-chain prediction markets. Do you think any positive applications, stablecoins, or anything have come out of blockchain?

Well, look, a couple of years ago I launched, with a buddy of mine, an NFT—an ordinal—on the Bitcoin blockchain. I know about it, and we did sell it. It actually came with a print of the original, and I signed it. When you bought the ordinal, you got a signed Peter Schiff original piece of art by this guy, Market Price, who has a pretty good art following in his own right.

The original oil painting—no one ever bought that one. We still have it. We were trying to sell it for more money, and nobody bought it, so we still have the original. All of the prints got sold, and the prints had an ordinal. I called it “Golden Triumph,” and people are still reselling them on Magic Eden.

But I think the whole thing pretty much fizzled out. I never really believed in the whole NFT craze anyway. I was kind of making fun of it with “Golden Triumph” because it was just an arm holding up a gold bar, which was very in-your-face Bitcoin: gold is going to triumph over Bitcoin.

I don't know if you want to say that counts, but other than that, nothing has really happened. I remember, 10 years ago, people telling me how blockchain was going to change everything. So far, it hasn't changed anything.

Yes, some people have gotten rich hyping it up. But as far as my life, do I do anything with the blockchain? No. Is my car title on a blockchain? No. Is the title to my house? No. Am I trading stocks on it? No. None of that.

To be fair, there are a couple of examples. Polymarket predicted the election early.

But Polymarket isn't on the blockchain either. That's just on the internet.

No, but I'm saying I don't need blockchain. I can go on—

You can access it via the internet the same way you access anything online.

Right.

When the internet first came on the scene, it changed my life immediately. Even though I didn't buy any of the dot-com stocks—I thought that was a bubble, too—I used the internet. It affected my life. I didn't buy a stock in some of these companies, but I used their websites and bought their products.

The internet affected me, and Bitcoin and blockchain haven't affected me at all, other than the fact that I'm constantly talking about them because I'm arguing that they're a bubble.

You love talking.

But as far as just criticizing it, I don't use it for anything.

One thing, ironically—and I don't even know that blockchain is the best way to do it—is that the best asset to tokenize is gold.

It's funny, because when I debate people about why gold is not money, they say, “What if you want to get a cup of coffee with gold? Are you going to shave off a little scrape from your bar? How are you going to have it assayed? How are you going to buy something?”

I say, “The world was on a gold standard for thousands of years. They had no problem buying and selling things with gold when they had a lot less technology than we did. It was easy.” Today it's easier than ever, because you could have gold stored with any facility, and they can tokenize it. You can leave your gold with that custodian and carry tokens in your wallet that represent ownership of that gold.

Now you can transfer ownership through a blockchain instantly, verifiably, provably, at no cost.

Right. Just like with stablecoins. People talk about stablecoins like USDT, or Tether. They're stablecoins attached to the dollar.

Right.

Well, there's no stability in the dollar, so it's kind of an oxymoron. It's not a stablecoin; it's a depreciating coin. If you have a U.S. dollar stablecoin, you're guaranteed to lose value the longer you hold it.

Fair. And you don't even get the interest—the interest on the Treasuries that the stablecoin creators issue. They keep it. They don't even share it with the people who own the token. It's the worst way to own dollars: a non-interest-bearing token of a depreciating currency.

You might as well just have tokenized gold and have something that's stable relative to the price of gold, because that's real stability. Gold will maintain its purchasing power.

Ideally, the one thing that makes sense to put on a blockchain is gold, because it will work, and it will do all the things that Bitcoin promises but can never do. You can use tokenized gold as a medium of exchange, as a unit of account, and as a store of value.

I probably will—I’m probably going to launch my own token at some point. I'm building out a platform on SchiffGold right now—

That people will be able to buy gold?

In fact, they'll be able to buy gold. I don't want to start promoting it yet because I'm trying to get it all—

Give a quick rundown.

No, but you can buy gold at SchiffGold on an app on your phone.

We won't send you the actual gold. The gold will be stored in a vault that you own, and you'll be able to transfer ownership of that gold to other people through the app. You could use it as a medium of exchange. You can pay or be paid in gold instantly.

Instantly.

You can redeem it in physical gold, or eventually you can redeem it in a token. I'm also going to give people a debit card where, if they have $5,000 worth of gold or silver and buy something for $10, $10 worth of gold will be sold to cover the transaction. So you can use your gold as a basis of trade and commerce.

But ideally, you won't sell the gold. You'll use the gold to make the payment because the counterparty will want to get paid in gold. They'd say, "Yes, I'm going to sell you this product. I'm going to provide this service. Pay me in gold." Then you can transfer the quantity of gold instantly, at very low cost—much cheaper and much quicker than you can transfer Bitcoin.

I mean, whenever I talk about tokenized gold and a cryptocurrency backed by gold, the Bitcoin community always says, "Well, that's no good because you have to have a counterparty, right? You have counterparty risk."

Yeah.

So what? We've had counterparty risk for thousands of years. There's a company—have you heard of Brink's?

Yeah, yeah, I know what Brink's is.

Brink's has been around for 160-something years, and they're in the business of storing gold. They're a counterparty. They store your gold. They have never lost an ounce in 160 years. Nobody has lost any gold who's entrusted it to Brink's.

In free markets, companies compete for branding and credibility with the marketplace. The reason that Brink's is trusted is because nobody's ever lost any money with them, and they want to maintain that brand value. Capitalism is all about counterparties. If you have health insurance, auto insurance, or fire insurance, it's only as good as the counterparty. You've bought a policy and you rely on a counterparty to pay the claim when you submit it.

So counterparties are a part of capitalism. Just because a counterparty is required doesn't mean it doesn't work. It works beautifully. You can't just say, "Well, gold doesn't work because I need somebody to store it."

Wait, Peter. Before we get lost, I'm dying. Your company you're launching is a blockchain company. You just explained why DeFi is important and what an RWA is. That's what you're building, right? You just explained to me why DeFi matters and is cool, and why blockchain technology works with an RWA—a real-world asset tokenized on the blockchain.

It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be on a blockchain. You can do it without a blockchain, but yeah, it works with a blockchain. I don't know what the best way of doing it is. What doesn't have any value are the tokens themselves, like Bitcoin.

Yeah, but forget Bitcoin. We're talking about digital, tokenized gold on the blockchain—real-world assets. If you do that, the value of it is the gold. You're just making it easier for people to transact in gold.

Correct.

And yeah, that could work, right?

The reason I said it's ironic is that the one thing that works best on the blockchain is the one thing that Bitcoin people thought Bitcoin would replace.

Yeah, but forget Bitcoin. Dollars are still dollars, but they work better on-chain. Stablecoins are more efficient and cheaper. Merchant fees are down, it's faster, and you can move more.

I don't even know about that. I transfer cash, whether it's through Zelle, Venmo, or PayPal. It's instant and doesn't cost anything.

But if you wanted to send me $1 million right now on a Sunday, how would you do it? Not easily.

Oh, yeah. Those apps won't allow that large of a transfer.

No, no. I could send you $1 million right now for a penny—less than a penny—on a Phantom wallet on Solana, and it'll hit your account. I'm happy to receive it. You wait and vice versa. Peter, this was awesome. We just found common ground.

You're going to send me a million dollars? I'm like, "How can you just take a moment?"

This is awesome. We just found common ground. You just pitched a blockchain DeFi product to me, and I like it. I love it. I'm into it. You should come back and launch on the stream. We found common ground. You might not like Bitcoin, but you understand blockchain.

Yeah. Well, it will work with gold. Right now, the thing that people need to do is first buy the gold. Now you have that gold stored, and now you can use it in commerce.

I think the time when there's going to be more demand for tokenized gold is when inflation in the developed economies really accelerates. It's going to become difficult to deal in fiat currencies that are losing value so rapidly, and it's going to be hard to price products in a currency that loses value so rapidly.

I think more people will choose to move out of fiat into real money, and people will put themselves on a gold standard. They don't have to wait for the government to officially do it. People can live on a gold standard by using it, because you can use gold as money as efficiently as you can use any fiat currency.

Ultimately, I want people to be able to do e-checks from their gold account, have a debit card on it, and be able to transfer it peer-to-peer. You could carry all your gold around in your cell phone or on a debit card, however you want to have it. You can transact in tiny, tiny bits. You could pay for a cup of coffee.

Ironically, you can't buy coffee with Bitcoin because it's too expensive.

Right, right, right. But you can do it with tokenized gold.

I think all these other tokens, like Ethereum or Solana, I don't see the value in these tokens. Even if there's some value in the network, I don't see all the value in the tokens. I think all of that is speculation. That's all hype, and most of the buying or use case—all the use—is just gambling.

Speculation is the preferred term.

Well, yeah, speculating, gambling, whatever.

You speculate on gold, but continue.

No, I'm not speculating on—

Speculating. You are.

Well, I'm not a jeweler. I don't actually need gold in my business, but yeah, I hold it.

But you're speculating on the price going up.

I'm speculating on gold-mining stocks. I think gold is more of a safe-haven store of value. I would agree that I have a lot of mining stocks, and I think that is a speculation. But I think it's a very well-reasoned speculation that has been paying off, and it will pay off even greater.

I look at gold as just money, as opposed to anything else. But when they talk about all of the new adoption of Bitcoin, nobody's adopting it. People are just gambling on it. People are buying it because they're told they're going to get rich if they just buy it, and if they don't buy it, they're being told they're going to be poor.

So it's both fear and greed, right? You're greedy in that you want to get rich, but you're fearful that if you don't buy it, you're going to be poor. There's a lot of pressure on people to just buy this thing, and the pressure is coming from the people who already own it, who need to recruit new suckers to keep the thing going.

I don't see a lot of real uses for it at all. You don't go into stores and see a lot of signs about Bitcoin, "Pay with Bitcoin," or "We take your Bitcoin." No. It's even rare at a Bitcoin conference that you could use your Bitcoin.

So, I'm not going to show you altcoins, but when you do eventually launch this DeFi company on a blockchain, the tokens could be self-custodied, it's permissionless, and it's on a ledger. You're going to launch it on top of a chain. Most altcoins, I think we could agree, don't have a ton of value. But whichever chain you launch it on—whether it's Ethereum—there's a token that gets paid to the validators to secure the network.

Ultimately, I'd like the token to be chain-agnostic. I'd like people to be able to move the token on whatever chain they prefer, and I'd like it to be able to go across chains.

But yes, obviously you have to pay the gas. If you want to take your token, obviously you can also go to an exchange and trade it if I get it listed on an exchange.

Correct.

But if you just want to send your tokenized gold to somebody else's wallet, then you're going to have to have some of that token to cover the fee. If you just want to send it to another Schiff Gold customer, you don't need to put it on the chain. It's just my wallet, so you won't have to do that.

But if you withdraw your token and put it in some wallet, and I have no idea that you own it anymore or what's going on, and then you want to send it to somebody on Solana, yeah, you're going to have to have whatever it costs to make the transfer. But I don't think it's a lot.

I think there are a lot of other tokens where it’s relatively cheap. Of course, they can keep coming up with new ones that may be even cheaper and faster than the ones that are there today. I mean, you’re launching a DeFi. By the way, I would love to—we could maybe talk about it offline. We’ll talk about it. Look, there are other companies that already have gold tokens. I mean, Tether’s had Tether Gold for a long time, right?

I was surprised they didn’t know about it, because I have the URL T-Gold. I’ve always thought Tether might have had that, but I got that a long time ago for my tokenized gold.

That’s a good one.

I just haven’t tokenized it yet. But right now, if you go to t-gold.com, it just takes you to Schiff Gold.

I was on Schiff Gold earlier. Peter, here’s my last question for you, and then I’ll let you go. By the way, I love that we found some common ground. It’s honestly good to hear from you, man.

My big final question for you is off the topic of gold and Bitcoin. What do you think is the future for financial media? I come on here and do a livestream every single day. We talk on-chain, crypto, prediction markets, and emerging markets. You have your massive YouTube channel, with 700 or 800 million subscribers. You’re on Fox and CNBC every day—

I’m never on CNBC. I’m on Fox occasionally.

Occasionally. And it feels like there’s a separation between what’s happening with the Zoomers, the younger classes, and what’s happening over on Fox Business. I mean, you were being interviewed the other day, and I don’t think the host realized you could buy a dollar of gold instead of just paying $4,100 for an entire ounce, which was interesting to hear.

What do you think is the future for this financial media stuff—what I’m doing?

I think the financial media—I think, look, I think they’re going to lose a lot of credibility with their audience because I don’t think they’re getting quality information. And I think that the financial news has mainly been captured by their advertisers and by their guests. So they’re very much pushing the mainstream narrative to the exclusion of any kind of counter-perspectives.

I mean, when they used to have me on quite a bit, they at least allowed a contrarian view on the air. Even if they laughed at me and made fun of me, at least they allowed me to say my piece. They don’t even allow that anymore, right? So if you’re not going to toe the conventional line, you’re not going to get an invitation to come on. And so I think they’re doing a disservice to their audience.

Look at keeping people out of gold—it’s been a big mistake, because it’s done better than the stock market. And foreign stocks this year are crushing US stocks, but you wouldn’t really know that if you just looked at the mainstream media. I have a dividend payers fund, a foreign dividend payer fund. It’s up about 50% this year. The US stock market’s up about a quarter of that.

So the returns are now much, much better abroad, but you don’t get that information from the mainstream. I think this next dollar crisis, debt crisis, is going to really hurt the mainstream financial media quite a bit. And I think it’s going to help independent voices that have their own channels.

The problem with my YouTube channel is I’ve been suppressed for years.

What happened?

Well, that I don’t know. They labeled me as misinformation, you know. So when I do a video, it doesn’t really show up in search that much, and it never gets recommended. I have about 600,000 subscribers to my YouTube channel, and almost all my videos are watched by my existing subscribers. I get very few people who are not subscribers listening because they don’t know about it. They don’t find it. You should try a Bitcoin video with “Bitcoin” in the title and see what happens.

Yeah. Well, it’s funny because I started putting some videos on the Schiff Gold YouTube channel, which has never been shadowbanned. I did a video yesterday, and it’s got maybe close to 100,000 views in a day. The last I looked, it was like 80-something thousand in 12 hours.

So that channel, with only 30,000 subscribers, is getting as many views or more than my regular videos on my main channel with 600,000. And when I looked at it, I saw that something like 65% of the views came from people who found it on search. Whereas on my main channel, it’s like 11% of people find it on search.

My main channel is being suppressed. My little channel that’s new is not. So I’m getting 100,000 views when I have 30,000 subscribers, whereas on my main channel, I get 100,000 views off of 600,000 subscribers.

I think that people who are independent—and I’m not the only guy out there, and I’m not the only guy saying things that are similar—there are other guys out there. I think more people are going to start looking to independent sources for financial advice and not look at the mainstream media because they’re realizing they’re not getting the whole picture. They’re just getting what the advertisers want the viewers to hear, right?

And of course, all the big guests—I mean, these networks need to have people who come on from the administration. They need to have the big guests on who manage a lot of money. To appeal to those people, they have to promote whatever it is they’re promoting, and so that’s what they end up doing. Who knows? A lot of people end up using the air to pump up what they’re trying to sell. And that’s especially the case with crypto. Who would do that, Mr. Schiff?

Who would use it for that?

Look, man. I may be biased, but I think this is one of the better interviews I’ve heard from you. Thanks for coming.

You know, here’s the thing, though.

The reason I don’t follow crypto guys—and I have some crypto guys that I’d kind of like to follow—but the thing is, I don’t want it to seem like I’m endorsing crypto by following a crypto promoter. So that’s my thing. I feel like it would almost be like saying, “Yeah, buy crypto because I’m following somebody.” I don’t want to send those mixed signals.

That’s why I’ve resisted following people who are Bitcoin advocates or Bitcoin promoters, even though some of them follow me and I kind of feel like, hey, maybe I should follow back. I don’t follow a lot of people. I only have about 300 people that I follow.

What I’m basically saying when I follow somebody is, “I recommend what this person is saying. I like it. I think it’s worthwhile.” To me, it’s an endorsement when I follow somebody. If I follow an economist, I’m endorsing their economic thinking. I like what they have to say.

Even though there are crypto people who say some things that I agree with, I don’t want to endorse them, knowing that they’re telling people to buy something I don’t believe they should buy. So that’s why I have a problem.

When I went to the Bitcoin conference, I was quite impressed by the size of the conference and how many people were there. I was probably the most popular person there. Oh yeah. My booth was crowded and everybody was coming up to me.

Saylor was there, though.

Yeah, yeah. And Saylor mentioned my name twice.

How many times did you mention him on this stream?

How many times did you mention him? The only name that he mentioned in his talk, when he was telling people to mortgage their life and buy Bitcoin, was Peter. And he didn’t even call me by my last name. He just called me Peter because everybody knew who he was talking about.

Pete or Peter.

Everybody knew who he was talking about. He called me Peter, and you call him Saylor.

I probably never posed for so many selfies—not just at the venue, but walking through the hotels. Everybody wanted a picture of me. I was very popular.

The reason is that people would come up and tell me this, and these were probably more of the hardcore Bitcoiners because they were at the Bitcoin conference. They’d say, “Peter, you’re the reason I own Bitcoin.” That was the most common conversation: “I own Bitcoin because of you. I own Bitcoin because of you.”

Even though I never recommended it, even though I discouraged it, people bought it anyway. And the reason they did is they said, “You’re the guy that taught me about economics.”

I read your stuff. I followed you. You taught me about inflation and central banks, and you taught me about gold. Then I just went from gold to Bitcoin, right? So, I got them almost to Bitcoin, and then they just got to Bitcoin. But if it wasn't for me, they never would have gotten close enough to the point where they went for Bitcoin.

So everybody said, you know—and then when I went to David Bailey, I said, “David, everyone I'm talking to here is saying I'm the reason they own Bitcoin.” And he said, “I know you're the reason I own Bitcoin.”

And so, yeah, I don't know how much of this I started, but a lot of the people that I see promoting Bitcoin, I hear them saying all the things that I've been saying about gold. They just take—

That's, by the way, the irony of the whole thing: you are a Maximalist. You just don't even know it.

One day we'll get there, Peter.

Yeah. So you're—you know, there are a lot of people in the Bitcoin community who know me. The thing about it was, people thought, “Am I going to get heckled? Am I going to get received? What the hell is Peter Schiff doing here?”

No, everybody loved having me there. They were glad I was there. I didn't hear an unkind word from anybody. There were 35,000 people there. You'd have figured one person wanted to tell me off, but nobody wanted to say anything. The crypto people themselves are good people. I just think they've been misled. They've gone down the wrong path.

But these Bitcoin guys, other than Bitcoin, they're my kind of people.

All right, last question. And be honest, Peter. Don't lie to me. We've established some rapport. Don't lie to me. Do you still hold the Bitcoin from the Ordinals sale? And do you have any Bitcoin, a dollar of Bitcoin, anywhere?

Okay. So I did not keep any of the Bitcoin from the Ordinals sale. So, no.

Second part: do you have any anywhere?

Yes, because I have a wallet that I have no way of accessing that has about a third of a Bitcoin in it. I haven't had access to that wallet in years. So that doesn't really count.

Then I established a Bitcoin strategic reserve, kind of as a joke, because Trump established a Bitcoin strategic reserve. I gave out my address. In fact, initially I set up a Coinbase account and used that address, but people couldn't really see it. So I set up a hardware wallet. I bought one of these wallets. I forget the name of it.

Ledger?

Trezor. Trezor.

Yeah, Trezor.

So I bought one of those, and I moved the Bitcoin that was in my strategic reserve onto that platform. So I have a Bitcoin strategic reserve and a crypto stockpile, just like the U.S. government. And just like the U.S. government, I have not used any of my own money to acquire my stockpile or my strategic reserve. I invited people to donate.

I can probably dig up my address, and you can put it on if anybody wants to.

You're not donating. You don't need it, bro. Gold's $4,000. We're not donating.

But I have made a pledge to never actually use any of it. So the last time I looked at it—I haven't looked at it in a while—I had maybe $6,000 or $7,000 worth of Bitcoin in my strategic reserve, something like that. And I had maybe a few hundred dollars, $500 worth, of a few other altcoins, mostly Solana. I got mainly Solana in my crypto stockpile.

You did that on purpose. The crypto stockpile is on purpose. That's what people donated.

The Solana thing?

Peter, is that on purpose? The Solana thing?

I didn't buy it.

Are you doing that on purpose?

Doing what on purpose?

Solana with an A—the O. Is it on purpose?

Oh, it's Solana. I don't know. I'm not good at pronouncing stuff. I got that from my dad.

Okay. I didn't mean to call you out on it, then.

No, no, no. I'm not—

Yeah, whatever. You know what it is.

But I got some of those, whatever you call them. So I have that. But I have never actually spent any of my own money. Even the Bitcoin that I lost—that was all donated to me. I've never actually spent money buying any Bitcoin.

Okay.

And I didn't spend any money buying the Bitcoin that's in the strategic reserve. I just have it.

You know what?

I'm not using it. I'm just going to go down with the ship. I'm just going to hold that Bitcoin until it's worthless, just like all the other holders.

This is the actual last thing I'm going to say. You know what the irony of this whole thing is? The Bitcoin that you got 5 years ago that you can't access has outperformed the gold you've been holding for 35 years.

Yeah, I got it more than 5 years ago. That Bitcoin is probably about 10x from when I got it. But gold is more than 10x from when I first started buying it. I started buying gold under $300. It's over $4,000.

But yeah, had I put the money I put into gold and gold stocks 20 years ago into Bitcoin, yes, I'd be a multibillionaire, assuming I still had it all. But of course I'd be dumping it. I couldn't hold it all.

Peter.

But yeah, I'm surrounded by a lot of people who put a lot of money into Bitcoin, and now they're well off—pretty rich. Some of them are richer than me, and some of them aren't. But I think they're going to lose a lot back. A lot of them have gotten out of a good chunk of it, which is what I would recommend that people do.

Look, even if you don't want to get rid of all your Bitcoin, you've got to sell something. You've got to take some chips off the table. You've got to buy other assets, spend some of it, enjoy your winnings. Convert some of it into gold and silver, buy property, buy stocks. Don't hold it all in Bitcoin and just hope it's going to a million or $10 million, then wake up one morning and it's worthless and you've just lost it all. That's going to be a horrible feeling to have. And you can't turn back the clock.

As I said earlier, at least for the young people, you've got a lifetime to earn it back. But if you're older, your lifetime is mainly in the past, and so you don't have the years to earn it back.

Peter, you're a little bit doomer for my liking, but you are an economist. This was sick, dude. I hope you had a good time, man. Thanks for coming on.

Sure. Good luck with the channel and your new sponsors. Yeah, you too, man. Hit me up when it's launch time. Come back. You're a DeFi blockchain guy. Come back on the show in 6 months or whatever it is. If you need any advice, I'm happy to offer my self-proclaimed expertise to you.

And Peter, I'm a fan. I really enjoyed it, man.

All right. Thanks a lot for having me on.

All right, brother. Have a good one.