Bitcoin is a Joke Escaping Communism is Not | Peter Spina of GoldSeek | Rafi Farber

My dad’s dad was an entrepreneur. He was a capitalist. So the communists confiscated his businesses. They actually confiscated their house. They came into, and they lived in a small town, not a big house by any means. They came in and said, this house now belongs to the state. And you know what? We’re going to cut it in half and we’re going to put another family in here. And if you want to stay in the other half of the house, you got to pay the state rent. Hey guys, Raffia from the Endgame Investor. I got with me on the line Peter Spina of goldseek.com and silverseek.com. Don’t pay attention to the years in the background over there.

It’s actually older than the background says it got updated background. Peter’s been in the golden silver committee since 1995. President of those two, those two websites. And they’ve been around before Kitco apparently, which is a very familiar name in the business. So Peter, how are you doing today? Where are you right now? And why, how did you get into gold and silver? Why the mid nineties? It wasn’t really popular back then. Like what entered your head? Like, oh, I’m going to sell metals. Hi, Raffia. Well, thank you for having me on. Yeah. I started this site as a teenager. I’m interested in my backgrounds in computer science. So I have, I had an early app. Awesome opportunity to actually looking back at it now to get on the internet when the internet was still text based before the first images were kind of coming through and so on.

So I, I got access to the internet. I had a really unengaged and I was really interested in gold and silver, other, other interests as well. So I started three websites, one of them being on the golden silver space. It was called the golden page back then. And it was just to cover the golden silver markets and my interest, not just in the physical markets, but also the mining stocks, junior stocks. So back then I was subscribing. Well, I wasn’t, I was my father subscription to the gold newsletter, which Brian Lundin is continuing on now. He was still writing it back then. Jim Blanchard was author back then. So I was introduced to South African gold stocks, which they were really focusing back then on, which had some incredible numbers.

And if you go back actually to the seventies and eighties, some of those South African gold stocks were paying, I think like 40, 50% dividend yield, some incredible numbers at the height of the gold market. Really? But, but yeah, the nineties, when, when was this? Well, so in the back in the mid nineties, you know, there was a company called Randgold, which got split up into Randgold resources and another Randgold, which eventually got bought out. And now it’s a G. O. D. Now, Barrick actually got a, got through a lot of series of acquisitions, but there were some, you know, some really interesting gold stories down in South Africa. They’re very cheap. But now looking back at it, it actually wasn’t the best opportunities because South Africa has gone through some very difficult times.

And, you know, that’s been actually very, not a great opportunity in government will do with, do for you if the people that are going into government aren’t very good at it. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, it’s destroyed the mining sector. They used to be the number one producing a gold country in the world. I think it was around a thousand tons back in 1980 at the peak of the gold price. And I don’t know what they’re down to a few hundred tons a year. It’s, it’s just, it’s collapsed on them. And it’s a difficult situation. But for me, I, I, I was interested in precious metals. As of my parents’ background, they escaped the Czechoslovakian communist system.

So they left. Well, they both escaped it and came to United States eventually. What year did they leave? So my dad was in 68 when the Soviet invasion happened in August, the Prague spring, he had an opportunity to leave the country because they had liberalized and loud. Socialism with a human face, they called it is still socialism, another version of socialism, both a little more freedom to speak and travel. So he went to Rome and then the Warsaw Pact countries came in. So, you know, they came in and wiped out that attempt to gain more freedom. And then my mom, a year later, they made up a story about a funeral they had in New York and the communists agreed to let them go on the condition.

They can only take one piece of luggage each and pretty much leave everything behind. So they did that and found a new start in United States in America, which they’ve absolutely had a thing growing up. It was just, you know, this, this is the dream, you know, we’ve came to a country, it was just the ability to express yourself, to say things without fear, to be able to get employed where you want to go. Like my dad’s dad was an entrepreneur, he was a capitalist. So the communists confiscated his businesses, they actually confiscated their house. They came into and they lived in a small town, not a big house, by any means, they came in and said, this house now belongs to the state.

And you know what, we’re going to cut it in half and we’re going to put another family in here. And if you want to stay in the other half of the house, you got to pay the state rent. That’s pretty cool. It’s evil. So they came into the house, went through their personal belongings, says this is ours now, the state’s blah, blah. So if you’re worried about the government going into your house and insisting that your house is their house and going through all your stuff and all your closets and everything that you have in there, well, then you might want to get a dirty man safe. This interview is brought to you by that safe, which it looks like a giant beer can.

If you want to put beer in there, you can. It probably won’t be so good. Maybe some wine you could age underground, but I don’t really recommend putting wine or putting your gold and silver coins together with wine. It might be a good recipe. You could try it out if you have like, you know, more than one dirty man safe. But here it is. You have here the little cap here and you put this thing underground and you have here the tiny little beer can not tiny. I measured it the big size, the dirty old man safe, the biggest size that they have. It can fit about a million dollars worth of gold in it. I don’t recommend putting a million dollars worth of gold in dirty man safe.

I recommend it as a safety measure. Put some of your metals in, diversify, spread it around and you’ll be able to sleep better. Please use the code ENDGAME10 for 10% off at checkout and you’ll support this channel while supporting yourself. And if the government comes in your house, they won’t find it. Remember, use the code ENDGAME10 at checkout. And if you use the link in the description below, you’ll get an extra 10 free coin holders, plastic coin holders you can put in your dirty man safe to store your coins or whatever else you want to put in there that’s shaped like a coin. And now back to the interview with Peter Spina. My dad, I was marked.

He wasn’t allowed to go to university, so he had no opportunities. This was in the 60s in Czechoslovakia? Yeah, in the 50s. The communist era, you know, the communist, it’s not, I think it was the idealism was to be a communist system. It was a socialist system, but these brutal socialists, they were really, it was the worst was in the 50s here from what family members tell me. And then it got a little better in the 60s and 70s and so on. So yeah, he had no hope, you know, there was no reason to stay here. He couldn’t go to university. The opportunity, there’s nothing here really left. So yeah, they escaped. They came to the United States.

They got a fresh start. Nobody helped them. You know, they were able to just have the opportunity to work and keep most of their income and they were very big savers and they actually retired at a young age relative to a lot of their peers. And America, it was, you know, for them, it was a dream. Although now in the last 10, 15, 20 years, they’ve become quite concerned seeing a lot of the trends have been developing in the United States. Yeah, you can no longer, you said, you can no longer say anything you want without fear of repercussions. Sometimes you’ll say something and you know, you’ll be either fired or, or marked in some way or ostracized or locked down or whatever.

And we’ve been through that. It’s getting worse. Absolutely. And you know, so I, you asked where am I now? So I moved out of the United States. It’s been over a decade. I, I spent a couple of years in Canada where I met my wife and then we came over here in 2015 and have been here ever since. And one thing that I really enjoy about being here in Prague in the Czech Republic is that, that population, those who’ve been maybe, I would say maybe 40 to 50 plus year olds, they’ve been through that difficult period and they understand what it means to have open discussions, freedom of speech, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, and you don’t feel those restrictions here.

You can have for the most part, a pretty normal conversation going back to United States now. Yeah. You got to be careful. You got to be, you have to be so sensitive to everything. And it’s a really, you know, it’s very unfortunate because people are living more and more in that fear. As a kid, I remember in 1986, I came here, I was very young, didn’t really understand much, but as a kid, I remember we flew into Germany, we crossed the border into Czech, then Czechoslovakia. And as a kid, I just, I felt the fear. It was just, I was scared, you know, the police state was, they were harassing us obviously, cause we were visiting, but it was just, everyone was spying, you know, every 10th person was spying on one another.

So it was that element of fear. And it is scary to see that, you know, the difference as a kid leaving that system coming to Germany in the United States, I was like, wow, I feel free. And now you see the flip happening, where you have to be careful what you say, you’re scared what to say. I mean, in the West here, not so much, all those changing. But so yeah, I’ve been here for over, for about a decade. And I really do love the elements of freedom, I feel that are being lost in the West. And obviously, United States is a big country. I grew up in Colorado, and it was a lot more disconnecting, maybe from the East Coast politics, it was a small population back then.

So we weren’t as, we felt pretty free growing up in Colorado. Would you say that it’s your parents that instilled in you a connection or a love for real, real money or solid economic foundation? I mean, you’re talking about the mid 90s, when I would assume a kid your age, who’s a computer science genius, or whatever you want to call yourself, would get sucked into a dot com craze, just like people are getting sucked into a Bitcoin craze now. Very similar, but it didn’t happen to you. And I see that sort of that similar. I don’t know, I don’t think you’re anti Bitcoin, you know, I think you would believe that people can use it if they want.

But you sense a fakeness to it that I also see. And that was happening to you in the mid 90s. Maybe that’s what what attracted you to gold or something real and physical, connected to your parents experiences with communism and theft. Is that accurate? Absolutely. I mean, they came from a system where there was kind of like a two tier system that you know, it was a local currency, and then there was a black market. And if you had US dollars, and we would send that also, you know, we would send bring us dollars over to relatives when you come because then they could exchange that. And then get access actually to foreign Western goods, they had a different system here.

But anyway, yeah, they understood and also not just from themselves, but from their parents going through the different wars here, what can happen and obviously the Weimar Republic being right next door. There’s a very shared history between the Czechs and the Germans. There was a very difficult period that was through lives people live through. So they understood they saw firsthand what what can happen that you can all your your savings, everything that you’ve worked hard for can just evaporate in a paper currency thing. So the the culture, the tradition of saving in gold and what gold represents as a safety hedge and, and having a very conservative mindset. So I think that’s a big difference. A lot of people that come from a former communist country, they do have they’re very conservative.

And even to this day, you see how the debt levels are compared to Western European countries, the Eastern European countries are very, they don’t take on huge debt levels, the government as well, they’re, they’re, a lot more careful. So, you know, there’s a cultural aspect to as well. But you see that too, in Germany, and when I go to German, some of the German gold shows, there’s a huge line of individuals buying lining up to buy gold, there’s a huge physical gold holdings among the German population. So that’s a very similar mindset. If you look in Germany, though, that that country’s it’s really diving deep into authoritarianism. Now, again, I don’t think it’s the whole country, it’s it’s probably mostly, you know, West Germany, not East Germany, they had more of a communistic experience, but they’re still there, they’re going in the wrong direction.

It’s scary. Germany, it is. It’s absolutely I mean, it’s really terrifying. You see a big divide between the different belief systems, like you say, Germany is a good example, because you have the Eastern West Side, and it’s like Eastern Europe and Western Europe. It’s changing among the younger generation, because you have the cultural influences for the West, and changing opinions and attempts to change how people you know, what they believe here, a lot of influences had taken place. But yeah, definitely like the former Czech president said, the climate change agenda is just another form of global communism. So they’re very aware of what you know, totalitarian systems, what they’re capable of, and how you have to be very sensitive to handing over any of your freedoms, because like it said, once you give it up, it’s very hard to get back.

But yeah, I mean, going back just to the you know, the how I got involved with all this, I, you know, there was a deficit in the gold market at the bottom, you know, gold is $250, $300 back in the mid to late 90s. Nobody was interested. Everyone was going into this tech sector, just the dotcom bubble, and in that mania kind of feeling, which we saw back then, I think is just more amplified today in the Bitcoin side. I did find Bitcoin very interesting. I did get involved early on, I wanted to try it. I wanted to see if it was a potential new concept where you had maybe emerging of, of this payment network with currency and it had a fun ability to compete with the system.

And I spent about a year when I got here to the Czech Republic. And it’s called the Polerni Polis, it’s an Institute for crypto anarchists. So I spent a year where every day the ecosystem was you got to use Bitcoin or Litecoin to pay office rent, coffee, food, contractors and so on. So, you know, it was an attempt to really actually try to use it, which was helpful to try to understand what it was. And there was a lot of things that were happening with Bitcoin back then it got fourth, there was Bitcoin cash, there was another four years is like 2017 2018. Yeah, 1516 into 17. That was when I was really heavily into it.

And I was a lot of things that people are saying now I was saying back then, and I believe so I kind of hear myself what changed your mind. So well, then things didn’t, you know, when Bitcoin cash when it broke off, obviously, the second that Bitcoin got popular, the system, the scalability is not there. So, you know, this whole idea, this hopium that you have this lightning network, which is just a joke to take the entire the payment Bitcoin is a network is a decentralized network. And that network is unable to manage the capacity to demands and can’t compete with, you know, other networks. So they created another network that would handle all that and then bring it back to the Bitcoin network and just like this, like this isn’t working, you know, this thing doesn’t let it doesn’t scale.

And it gets clogged up, it gets expensive. And then I started hearing more the narrative that is gold, that I saw more and more the Wall Street kind of people coming into the market into the Bitcoin space and trying to promote it as this alternative to gold. And it’s like, what? No, no, no, no, no, no, I had tested that theory as well for a while, but that absolutely not. It’s a it is not gold, nothing, nothing. You know, it’s a good marketing job. So a bunch of you know, I started to question my own beliefs. And the more I questioned the more problems that came out about and I’ve seen some of what you’ve said as well.

So we’re on the same page on our beliefs here. But I believe back then there and I told Mike Maloney back, you know, about 10 years ago that I thought that Bitcoin would be like the ultimate stock, that anyone in the world that could buy it and it could turn it ultimate stock bubble. I mean, it can turn into the ultimate stock bubble because anyone in the world can buy it. There’s a limited amount of shares and you have something like, you know, new technology like Bitcoin and crypto and no one really seems to understand it. You know, even when I asked someone who buys Bitcoin, what do you own? They don’t know, you know, it’s they it’s all there’s so much marketing and and there’s such a brand value to it.

But he’s just like, come on, what this thing is worth one and a half trillion dollars. Fundamentally, it’s not being used. And again, like you said, I’m not a game set. I want to you know, if people want to come together and make something that works for themselves in an alternative to maybe the Western Union or credit cards that charge a lot to send money around them. That’s great. But it’s not working that way. And there’s a lot of issues. So yeah, there’s a ton of questions around Bitcoin and crypto. It’s amazing to see that collectively you have a three trillion dollar market cap. It’s turned into a speculative mania. I don’t see where the actual fundamental value is in all of this.

The valuations are extreme. And I just, yeah, I just hate to see all these people just get caught up in this this mania. And I’m such a contrarian, contrarian, even in the golden silver space, when I see silver really started taking off, I started to kind of like, okay, what’s you know, what’s going on? Always try to question your beliefs. So with crypto and that I really flipped my views. And I really have a lot of concerns on it. And not just on the price. I know it’s like, here’s a system where they want everyone in Bitcoin to put your financial transactions into a public database. It’s like, I don’t want that. I want privacy. You know, that’s that’s one of the key cornerstones of freedom.

I don’t want, I want every politician, every government official to have every government transaction put into a public database. That’s what’s that’s what we need to see. Yeah, that’s that’s not happening. But that is the direction we need to go in. So just one comment on Bitcoin, like it, nobody should be excited about gold. Nobody should be excited, maybe a little bit about silver because it can move faster. But but in terms of the stable money, being being excited about price movements and gold is a problem. It doesn’t make sense because it’s money. And the higher it goes, the less stable civilization becomes. If you’re going to insist that Bitcoin is money, and then you’re going to be watching and saying, Oh, what up another $1,000? Like, how is that money? When he’s stable, stable, it’s supposed to be a payment mechanism, it’s supposed to not move.

That’s the entire point. But just, just in a very basic sense, like it’s got all blockchain has all of the secondary characteristics of a good money that and all of those secondary characteristics, fungibility, divisibility, ease of transfer, even even let’s assume it was it was very cheap transfer and all those network problems weren’t there. Let’s just give Bitcoin every, every attribute that gold has that makes it secondarily a great money and make it even better. It’s still there’s nothing there. It’s, it’s, it’s not a thing. And then people come back from this like, well, why does money have to be a thing? Well, because that’s how trade starts. Like what if I if you can’t get that point, you’re missing the entire foundation of what trade and an economy actually is.

And you’re just going out to the secondary characteristics that are attached to literally absolutely nothing. And what’s what’s sad is that, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re suckering people into this with this belief that it is money, they’re, they’re promoting these ideas. And, you know, this isn’t a time when you should be protected, taking very conservative and protective measures. But people, you know, to me that we’ve been given a window here to protect yourself, you know, the system is very destabilized, like you said, a currency shouldn’t be volatile. But even the gold price being volatile, you know, volatile, that’s a reflection of the dollars issues via currencies. The Bitcoin prices is, to me, that’s just a derivative of the dollar, just another dollar derivative gambling token that people are able to steal money from one another.

At this point, it hasn’t, I don’t see anything really fundamentally, you know, driving this except for, you know, extreme speculation and gambling. Right. It’s chasing other people’s fantasies, people chasing their their own fantasies at each other. And it’s a circle, at least with with tulips, I could say, Oh, well, for some reason, people really started liking flowers. All right. I mean, it’s weird, but I like flowers too. Sometimes, sometimes I’m willing to pay more, sometimes less. But the Bitcoin thing, I’m seeing like 10 years into the future, or 20 years into the future, somebody’s trying to explain what the hell happened here. And like, moving after a code of nothing. And then people, you know, in economics class raising their hands saying, why did they do that? And the teacher’s like, you know, I don’t I don’t really know, I can’t I can’t really explain it.

It’s just nuts. Human psychology media, and it’s it really is a good study, you know, use case is kind of like what you what you’re able to do. And you know, you got to be careful too, because I see this also when the gold market got really exciting. And the junior stocks are taking off. It’s also something a lot of people don’t understand geology, I still have a it is a really difficult subject matter. So you get a lot of these like, kind of scammers coming around, like you see in the crypto space, a lot of altcoins is like, here’s a property, it is going to do this, this and that. And you can really, you know, manipulate people into believing things that aren’t true, because they don’t have they don’t understand what’s going on.

And with crypto is such a, you know, it’s it’s a new technology. And they see all the young kids now going in it, but it’s really more more boomers. And, you know, older retail guys, I see now buying up that are getting suckered into it. And it’s actually I don’t think the institutions are buying this ETF. So from what I’ve seen is actually a lot of retail guys still chasing it. So that’s this can end really badly. Now that they pumped it up again, we saw, you know, what it can do when it if it falls very quickly, the amount of losses that can accumulate quickly and how it can trigger other problems. And then if this is, you know, if this is I think it’s actually I wrote this before, it’s like the gold price moving to record highs or the dollar moving to record lows is a warning signs like stop playing with high risk stocks and crypto and all sorts of risky bubble stuff, because that’s this is something something’s going on.

We don’t really understand yet, maybe fully what it is. And now that the Bitcoin price is trying to follow an Nvidia and these hot stocks are starting to turn over. So like, okay, that the good times this little period again that we’ve had is over. And now we have to face some difficult questions. Okay, so yeah, I pretty much agree with that. I want to switch gears here. And you know, I built myself as the endgame investor, I have a pretty short time horizon compared to other people. And yeah, I could be wrong. And if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. But I don’t I just don’t see it any other way. I don’t see this system as qualitatively different from any other inflationary system that’s ever existed.

It’s just it just has a much bigger pot to steal from. So it’s you know, there’s a lot of there’s a lot more ups and downs in the middle of that collapse that I might not see. But from what I can see, this system isn’t going to last more than more than a year or two. And yeah, I’ve said that before, and I’ve been wrong before, I could be wrong again. Maybe I just have a block. But what what what do you see, in terms of the end of this? How does how does it end? Do we end with using gold and silver coins, exchanging them for goods and services in a very basic sense? Or, or do we reestablish or do we quickly reestablish a derivative system? More honest, what happens to the banks? Like what happens to the world? What are you seeing as the end of this? Well, I mean, the power of Cibii will try to bring in a new derivative and try to maintain control with the new system, you know, replace it with something that still has it gives them more control.

So I fear that during in the moment of chaos, the people will get desperate and ask for more help from the government. And you know, they’ll, they’ll be happy, happy to use CBDC is if they give free CBDC is to them to buy some, some very expensive, now $50 burger, or whatever the heck is, you know, everything inflation, all this is people, you know, people are living paycheck to paycheck. And it’s very, very fragile. So once this thing starts to really go, it can happen quickly. And I don’t disagree like that it could happen in a year or two. Can they patch in and keep it going for several more years? I know I keep I don’t have a firm opinion when it’s going to go.

But we’re in a very risky state right now. Obviously, it’s hard to be optimistic when things have started to progress to the point where there are these issues where the whole system which is just leverage debt, leverage risk, leverage is everything is just so out of whack, everything has just been so manipulated that hasn’t get a reset. And I think the biggest risk, you know, the biggest factor out there that can change this is that we are in a state of war that the West and the East, you know, you have the war that started Ukraine a couple years ago was, was more than a proxy war. And now this accelerated the timelines of, of how the adversaries and enemies of the empire, the US empire are going to react to this.

You see the de-dollarization in China, you see these moves are taking place to subvert the power, the imperial currency. So the only way this really does end is when another major superpower, superpowers kind of come together to call out the this excessive leverage debt system. And they know it, you know, they see our weaknesses, we’ve built weapons of mass financial destruction that can be triggered, you know, in certain ways. But now they think with them too, you know, they’re not going to get away without paying the price as well, there’s going to be pain fell. And I saw with Russia a couple years ago, they said, you know, Russia, the West was saying, well, the Russia is over, you know, they started this war, the sanctions and everything is just going to collapse.

And now the idea back then is like, yeah, okay, we’re going to take a couple difficult years of pain, and then we’re going to come out of this stronger while the rest of the world is going to have a couple years of okay, you know, it’ll be okay. And now we’ll start to pay the price for what the actions of the of sanctioning central bank money and weaponizing the dollar and Treasury debt and so on. So I think a lot of things are in process. And it’s a war that’s not just again, it’s not a proxy war. This is a monetary financial war between the West and the East. And it’s, it’s getting heated. So, boy, I don’t, I don’t see anything backing down to just getting more and more intense.

And, and I think it’s going to get to a point where something’s going to have to be done to resolve this. And, and you’re already sitting more and more discussions that the debt levels are are unmanageable, but nothing’s being done to change it in the West. So it’s just like, I don’t know, it just feels like insane to me just seems like, you know, if we really wanted to prevent a disaster, we would take some severe, painful consequences, you know, moves and reduce our spending, try to get there our financial houses in order, but nothing’s happening. It’s just going the opposite. So yeah, this is just like a reckless train now. And it just seems like it’s just about a just, just, just totally go off the rails and crash.

It doesn’t seem like anybody’s really in charge. And there are obvious puppets that are not in charge. But even the people behind them or the people behind Biden, the people behind Netanyahu, the people behind all these people that are messing everything up. I don’t know if anyone’s behind Putin or not. But there’s the problem is I don’t think there’s any one sect or one group of people that’s behind any of this. I just think we’re like, we’re pawns in a, in a, like a, in a world war between warlords who have their own petty little interests. And nobody’s, nobody’s interested in the big picture. There’s no statesman. There’s no leadership anywhere in any country. Just selfish interests and people trying to take, make as much and do as well as they can for themselves.

And, and yeah, there’s the idea that obviously, and you just see it from the US perspective, just like Doug Casey said it before, it’s a democracy is mob ruling dressed up in a sports jacket and people are just going to keep voting themselves out the treasury trying to get as much as they can while they can before it all collapses. And it just feels like that mentality. Whereas when you see like, I may be under in China and, you know, the, not that I wouldn’t want to live there or anything, but, you know, there, there are a lot more intelligent in how they’re dealing with this and they’re, they’re, they’re, they’re playing a game. And if we don’t realize what’s going on, I think, you know, there’s a real power shift taking place.

And I’ve only been to Asia once several years ago, but it’s very obvious. There’s a, this is, this is their decade, this century, this is where they’re coming up and rising and they’re hungry and they want to have the same lifestyles that we have in the West. They want to be able to just consume and let the rest of the world work at their expense. And, and obviously there’s, that’s not possible. There’s the resources aren’t out there for everyone to live like we do in the United States and in the West. There’s, there’s so many issues at play and I’m, yeah, I think this, the things are happening pretty quickly now. So individually it’s, I think from what you’re saying too, the end game is, what do you do to protect yourself and what are the best options, you know? And probably to be in a country that has a, a certain basic respect for Liberty in terms of a value in itself.

You know, there seems to be that in the Czech Republic to some level. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know how deep it goes, but if you have a, you know, an old generation that grew up under communism, that can help because they know what it’s like. I think what you’re describing here is, is, you know, war, warring interests, people who just want to, you know, vote themselves a piece of the pie from the public trough. I think that’s the kind of society that just naturally springs forth from zero interest rates for 10, 20 years. I mean, you, you, you train people to have very, very high time preference and to, to not really plan for the future because they can’t because interest rates are so low and they just want to consume.

So you have an entire society of people who just want to consume and have no interest in building for the future. And this is the kind of world we built. And, you know, when, when the monetary system collapses, it’s, it’s gonna, it’s gonna kill a lot of people. It’s going to starve a lot of people, but then the people that survive it will, you know, be telling their kids exactly what your parents told you when they escaped Czechoslovakia and made it to the United States. And we’ll hopefully, you know, grow a new stock of, of good people that can bring the next generation through in some level of sanity, we hope. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s right.

You have to kind of repeat the difficult cycle to relearn the lesson, unfortunately, because it’s gotten lost. And, and I think that’s one thing that I think is quite interesting is the influence of cheap credit policies on the culture and how people’s behavior and in this over consumption mentality that’s been fed by government overspending and federal reserve pumping these cheap rates and these bubbles is such a huge cheapening of values because people don’t appreciate their things. They over, they don’t care. You know, well, I really appreciate about my grandmother when I had the time to meet her under communism and after communism. It’s like they went through such difficult times and not just my grandmother, so many people from our grandparents generation and they really respect and appreciate a thing.

It’s almost like it’s a spiritual thing as well as to not, to not respect and appreciate your things. It’s very, it’s very bad as well to, to have this mentality. And I think that’s pretty pervasive right now. So in some ways, difficult times do help to reset those things. Not that I want anyone to go through difficult times, but maybe as you know, society and culture and the whole need, I really set in values because we’ve lost perspective in just watching the culture in the West. I just like, I don’t know. It’s something is a change. Yeah. I mean, we’ll, we’ll, we’ll spring back. It’s just a question of how much pain we have to go through because inevitably that’s what happens.

So, and the last thing I want to ask you is what can, what, what do gold seek and silver seek offer? What are you trying to accomplish? What’s, what’s your, what’s your angle here in this space? What are you trying to do? So yeah, I started it as a hobby in 1995, following the sector. Cause I got this idea that gold and silver had a, was really undervalued at the time. Cause of the dynamics in the market and that gold and silver, what they represent as honest money, I should always be supported and watching what was happening in the United States with the deficit spec and so on. It was, it was, it was quite interesting to look back in the mid nineties to see where things were at and where things are now, because things look like they were, you know, becoming problematic with trillions of dollars in debt.

And now we do that in a year. So, you know, the site was created to cover these issues. And I do think, you know, CNBC and all these other mainstream media organizations, if we’re not covering the sector, because that kind of led me to, to create a platform to allow others to submit their opinions on gold market, because they were not being allowed on CNBC. You know, it was a joke. It was a barbaric metal. They were just laughing it down, which is, you know, from a psychology perspective is always a good sign that you’re at the bottom of the market or, you know, in Bitcoin’s case where Bitcoin does everything. So buy it because it’s going to $10 million, you know, that.

What does Peter Schiff call it on CNBC crypto news? Bitcoin is still that I don’t, I don’t watch it. I don’t know. Oh, I, I turn it off. Yeah. About 20 years ago, I used to watch CNBC religiously for like 10 years. And then I just, I had to stop it. They have so many manipulations in like psychologically listen to it. And they have, you know, they switched the imagery back and forth and he use a rattlesnake audio in the background to get your instinctual fears to pay attention and stuff. There’s so, so many, sorry. Yeah. We’re all Pavlov’s dog here. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I wanted to create a platform and the gold golden page became goldseek.com in the late nineties.

And so we have a lot of different authors on there. And we’ve had had you on there as well with different interviews to get that different views out there. And, and, you know, I don’t agree with all the views on goldseek, but the idea is to have, if you have a good idea, you know, a well-established opinion, you have supporting evidence, whatever make it. And let’s, so let’s get a platform where people can share this. So that’s how the site started. It did launch right before Kiko started. I, I did, you know, I was early on with Kiko and there was a couple other sites out there from early on. So we, my interest back then was also investing in junior stocks.

So that’s where I have most of my interest is investing in really early stage, a little bit more developed stage junior companies. I’ve helped them locate capital and also just help communicate their stories to the public and help them in different ways. But the site itself is, it’s a free access site. We do have some companies that help to sponsor to cover the bills. But for me, my, my main interest in the way I end up making money or losing money is investing. And I’ve gone through a lot of few big cycles in the sector. I do have a pretty strong conviction now that this is one of the better opportunities, not the best opportunities since I’ve started watching this.

So I think it’s one of the rare opportunities to get into something before it really starts to move. So we’ve had a gold price that’s broken to record highs, but a lot of these mining stocks and junior stocks haven’t really moved yet. So that’s what I’m really focusing right now on is the opportunities and that side of the sector. So gold and silver seek, you know, you can get the latest information, news and information on the gold sector, different opinions. And I’m also contributing to the site here and there as well. Yeah. So when a community starts coalesce around junior mining stocks, like it’s coalescing around Bitcoin now and you have all these people that are insisting that the junior gold mining stocks are like, you know, they’re going to go to like 5, 6,000, 10,000% or whatever.

That’s what we know, you know, we should probably get out. So we’re nowhere near that. Nobody likes them. Yeah, I agree with you that we’re, you got to be very careful with these things and only, and only, it lists the people that you trust and that you know. You know, God knows there’s a bunch of pump and dump in junior mining stocks. You got to know the red flags and stay away from them. And I don’t have anything to do with that. But yeah, I can’t disagree that if you know what you’re doing and you understand the companies that you’re investing in, not all of them will succeed, but the ones that do that will hit really, really big.

You nailed it there. I think the number one thing in investing in any of these companies is the management. So invest with quality, you reduce a lot of the risk because it is extremely, extremely risky sector. And it is difficult to, you know, for a company to explore and find a project and the ones who do can do very well, but it’s not an easy game. And it really is something probably for most people, it’s not really an invest, it’s not an investment, it’s a speculation. So if you want to invest and secure your wealth, you go into physical metals. And definitely, larger companies offer more safety and so on. But yeah, there’s still risk. And that’s what’s the beauty of physical is just the risk factors are just so reduced, you know, really don’t have to worry about all these other things.

So and you know, for me personally, I think the ultimate goal is to leverage the gains in the gold and silver stocks. So if you can that which hasn’t been the case, but if you can do that in this next cycle, you secure your winnings with something real, put it back into physical metals. And when the physical metals start to get in a relative basis over, you know, too pricey, then you have to find other assets to get into and let’s not get married to, you know, emotionally attached any of this stuff, because you see that with crypto, you know, you get blinded by the greed and you don’t, you know, when you should be taking profits and scaling out of position, you know, you just keep hodling or hodling or whatever they call it.

And just that’s such a beautiful, you know, you know, from a boiler room perspective, you know, just buy one, don’t sell, it’s going, you know, selling people on stuff they don’t understand it just crypto stuff just gets me just like the people, I don’t care if you buy crypto, but at least know what you’re buying and understand the extreme risks you’re getting into. And I’m not going to ever say that junior mining stocks don’t have this, you know, have a lot of risks to it too. So let’s be honest with, you know, the risks and not just the reward. Yeah, so the about hodling, I don’t know how many, how many Bitcoin people know this, but like the whole, the whole nomenclature of hodling, I think it comes from some guy in a forum or chat room who was drunk at the time and he couldn’t type.

And he’s like, oh, I’m just hodling. He meant hold. And that that specifically that drunken typing was the thing that hooked on really tells you about the quality of the people that are, that are really pushing this narrative. And it’s not that great. I mean, Sam bankman freed, I don’t want to have anything to do with anything that he’s added anything to do with with a 10 foot pole. So just leave me at it. There’s a lot you got to be very careful. I’ve, I’ve seen a lot and I I’ve helped uncover a couple a couple of crypto frauds. And, and I’ve, I think in the altcoin space, especially my gosh, that that’s just it’s a wild, wild west.

And it’s you’re just asking for it. It’s it’s it’s most of it is just scammers. Don’t touch it. All right, Peter, it was it was good talking to you. I’m glad we could likewise and not not allow any of the forces that are trying to rip communities apart. And we both know what we’re referring to. You know, so I just I felt it was important to talk to you just to just touch base and reconnect and like adults and just, you know, knowing that we disagree on certain political issues, whatever, we can just put that aside and and move forward with what we know is the truth. That’s all. Thank you for inviting me on Rafi and having been able to have a conversation.

Appreciate it. Thanks for coming. All right. Bye..

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