(upbeat music) - So welcome to our next spotlight. And we're pretty selective about who we have on spotlights for those of you who follow us regularly. And today we're really excited to have Tony Artabern. He is the CEO of Wise Wolf Gold and Silver Exchange. And I think that's a really important topic for us to understand, particularly in these economic times. And as you can tell, if you just glance at him briefly, he also was a world champion power lifter. I don't know. How long's it been, Tony? Are you still working out on a regular basis? - I do. I own a 24-hour gym, a small gym in Southern Missouri here, just south of my shop here in Branson. So I'm still in the business. I mean, I'm still in the gym. I'm still doing that. I was wondering if you met like my physique or is it just look like I'm kind of not all there, but I'm kind of crazy that I would put myself. - No, it's definitely those arms of yours. I don't look like it these days, but I had a history in my 20s, which is a long time ago of being a competitive bodybuilder, which is not the same as a power lifter, obviously. But it's something to stay after ongoing. And he also was a US Army paratrooper. So we could talk about those things for a long time, but I think probably what's most valuable for our viewership today is to talk about, let's start with inflation and what you call the hijacking of the monetary system by the elites, which I don't personally believe they're elite. I think they're dark forces, but that's another conversation. - We agree. - Good, good, good. We're on the same page in the 19th century. So why don't you just start riffing on that for a minute, if you will? - Well, I mean, this is a long history. I mean, those who control the money supply, control the outcome of most things in our life and in the human story. It's something that Mayor Armstrong Rothschild said in the 19th century about the British politics. He said, I don't care who sits on the British throne. The person who controls the British empire is the person who controls the British money supply and I control the British money supply, as he said in his quote. And this is something, you know, all through history. I mean, I'm speaking of the Rothschilds. They believe that they stem from the line of Nimrod, which, you know, going back into biblical times. And I actually, when I was a young soldier in Iraq, the first year of Operation Iraqi Freedom, which by the way, it used to be Operation Iraqi Liberation to somebody pointed out that it spelled oil to Ari Fleischer, but I got to see what it was. - That's ironic and yet not. - Yeah, that's a little tidbits. That was, you know, part of my life as a soldier. And we can talk a little bit about that if you want. But I stood at the, what was supposed to be the ruins of Nimrod's palace and supposedly like the remnants of Tower of Babel. So I mean, that kind of history, that's how far this stuff goes back when you're talking about, you can call them overlords, whatever they see themselves as like farmers in kind of a way, like, and we're, you know, cattle and they're better, they have their own religion, their own set of morals and standards and everything else is just meant for us, you know, that we're not supposed to know. But it really, you know, modern finance is built on a lie. And the more that you dig into it, the more you see it's a magic trick. You know, I mean, ironically, I've always called it economic alchemy because that's what they're doing. They're just sleight of hand. And it's one of the reasons like you go back to the beginning of the United States and the founding fathers made sure that in the Constitution, because they had experienced, and they knew they had a history of what happens when you have a paper fiat currency. They had something called the continental and, you know, they inflated it, you know, try to pay for the war. And then the saying was as worthless as a continental. And so they knew that in order to have real credit and real standing economically, you'd have to have sound money. And sound money has always been, and throughout history has been gold or silver by a metallic system. So the founding fathers put that in the Constitution and Alexander Hamilton set the ratio for 16 ounces of silver, make one ounce of gold, set it at, you know, $20 an ounce for gold and one dollar an ounce for silver. And that's how it was, you know, for the first 133 years or some of our history, and really after the beginning of the 19th century, you see that we have no inflation. So if you went to see George Washington's inaugural, you know, you bought a pair of shoes or a pair of clothes, that same pair of clothes or shoes or whatever you put together, your ensemble would cost the same in 1902. So if you understand that, that inflation is not part of our history, it's part of our modern, it's just part of the modern narrative and you're supposed to accept it, is we had a dollar as good as gold. As a matter of fact, you had, you know, there's so much of our history that gets overlooked and, you know, like you have the allegory of the Wizard of Oz. One of the reasons why that yellow brick road is the gold standard and the emerald palace is supposed to represent the grain back and you know, that's where the wizard lives. And, you know, the, in the book, and Elfrank Baum's book, Dorothy clicks her silver slippers to go home, not her ruby slippers. And it was an allegory of the gold standard and William Jennings Bryan is supposed to be the cowardly lion. If you know, William Jennings Bryan was a congressman and ran for president and had that famous speech at the end of the 19th century, the cross of gold, where farmers, because they had the Comstock load of silver, they thought that it would really help people if they increase the money supply in silver dollars, you know? So make all this, like, they called it free silver. It's like free the silver to expand the money supply. It was less than the burden on the farmers who had these debts and the currency was so strong that those, it's just, you couldn't inflate your way out of it. And that's, it was a populist movement. And I think they had a lot of merit to discuss that. And that was one way to look at, you know, helping the common person as far as getting out of debt. And so I don't really have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is what happened on Jekyll Island on November 22nd, 1910, when, you know, the ruling class in a conspiracy set in motion, what we now know is the Federal Reserve. And you have done this. - I was hoping you were going to get there. This is our third iteration of the Federal Reserve, I believe, right? - Yes, the third, well, it's the third central bank of the United States. And Andrew Jackson killed the second one. He actually wanted that on his tombstone. I killed the bank. He said they were a den of vipers and thieves. He was going to route them out. And so that was-- - I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I believe that JFK actually signed a bill prior to his demise that he was attempting to do away with the Federal Reserve as well. And then he very quickly was taken out. And that's another topic, but-- - Sure, yeah, there was his executive order on skipping silver as a monetary medal. I think there was a lot of pressure to debase the currency. And I've always thought it was a gesture of arrogance that they put him on the last silver coin. That's what my personal opinion, they put his face on the last silver coin, ironically, and then they debase the currency after that. So 1964 was the last year that we ran silver in our half dollars, quarters and dimes or dollars. And we didn't have to make a silver dollar since the 1930s. But that's the last time we put silver in him. And then the world took notice. And JFK certainly did sign that executive order. He also had the silver certificates printed directly from the treasury bypassing the Federal Reserve. And Jim Mars pointed out that there was only two presidents in history that ever did that. One was JFK and the other was Lincoln and they were both shot in the head in public. And that's what Jim Mars is. - Exactly, exactly. - Observed. So yeah, along with making everyone else angry, JFK made the Fed angry. You know, and Jerry Griffin called it the creature from Jekyll Island. It certainly is, it's a creature. And so you have to look, you know, I was kind of giving you a brief history of, the currency was so strong, it's hard to manipulate. So what you have to do is you have to sit something on top of that and have a complete control of the money supply. And that's what the Federal Reserve is. It's not federal and it's not a reserve. It's international banking consortium that's private. You don't own it, I don't own it and it's unconstitutional. I mean, if the constitution says the only Congress can coin money and it has to be gold and silver, show me the amendment where a banking cartel has control of the money supply. I mean, I think this is, I don't know. Nobody's really ever challenged it that much, but I do think that it's something that's not supposed to be part of our modern landscape. - Well, I think you're absolutely correct. And, you know, what bears up an eye and you obviously know, and yet maybe a lot of our viewers don't know because it's been kept very quiet and very hidden from us. Is that, isn't it true that the Federal Reserve operates apart from and beyond the government? I mean, there's really no, they run themselves. Isn't that true? - Yes. Yeah, I mean, without, there's some token oversight, you know, the President appoints the head of the Federal Reserve for, you know, Jerome Powell's now there, but that's just window dressing, you know, because you really don't know who owns the Fed. I mean, G. Edward Griffin looked into this and like I said, with the creature of Jekyll Island, and it's a lot of research, but it's still very murky on how it operates. But we know what the business model is and that is to control the money supply. So it got put into effect on Christmas Eve, 1913 and following that, we had World War I. You know, the debt of the US went from $1 billion to $5 billion in a matter of a couple of years. And of course, you know, there was the Roaring 20s, but you have the Great Depression. And Ben Bernanke, the former head of the Federal Reserve, said that the Great Depression was their fault and they wouldn't do it again. So I thought that was funny that he's on record saying that. And of course, they are doing it again. They're doing it again on a massive scale. You know, we go a trillion dollars in debt in this country every hundred days. It took us 200 years to do that the first time. And that has everything to do with the fact that instead of having any fiscal sanity or responsibility, we don't have any, there are currencies tied to nothing since 1971 when Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard. They literally just make new currency to expand and pay for the welfare and warfare state. That's why you see, and it makes people who are like, why can they give hundreds of billions to Ukraine, but only $750 to people that are affected by the hurricane in North Carolina. - That's a really good question. - Well, because they don't care about you. They know that the empire and whatever, you know, was at stake for the military industrial complex or the ruling class, is they serve their own ends. It's their own piggy bank and it has nothing to do with you or paying your taxes or anything. This isn't about revenue anymore. Even when I was a kid, the Republicans ran on, you know, balancing the budget. Who does that anymore? I mean, it's out the window because it's gotten so insane. And really just since 1971, when it exposed, the rest of the world knew that we started debasing the coinage, you know, they took the silver out, which is a big, that's a big tell, you know, when that's what all great empires, they rise on sound money and economic nationalism and they decline on currency debasement and things like free trade policies. So this is something that we were signaling and as a matter of fact, President De Gaulle of France in 1967 sent his warships over to pick up the gold. They were turning those dollars back into gold, it was $35 an ounce and that's what had been set up at Breton Woods in 1944 as the new economic world order. We were supposed to abide by that. We broke the agreement. So all of those dollars that were hanging out there could no longer be converted into gold in 1971 and that you had massive inflation in the '70s. At the end of the '70s, you know, they had interest rates going into the teens. You guys didn't know this. You wanted to buy a home. It's 13, 14% on a mortgage. They did that to contract the money supply because it had gotten so out of hand. That was the Nixon shock and Jimmy Carter called it "Malays." So, I mean, really, just all of these-- - Let me just ask your opinion, 'cause you're obviously a well-known knowledge. What do you have a speculation or an idea of what happened with Nixon? Because there's some reports that Nixon was a good guy and then there's other reports where he really wasn't and then obviously he got taken out for way less than what's happening in that office today. Why did, what was the pressure put upon him in your experience or in your knowledge of taking us off the gold standard in '71? - That's a great question because I did a show on this recently. Nixon's one of my favorite subjects. Not because I like his politics so much, but his personal life and things that he fought through, I think are interesting and you're right. It's an anomaly. He's the only president to ever resign. And like, who took him out? Like, why was the press activated that way and then never activated for anybody else again? Like, what did he do? - Wait, so you're saying Biden didn't resign? (laughing) - Maybe as Dummy did, I don't know, maybe it's-- - I'm sorry, there's so much to talk about here. Anyway-- - Oh, I know, it's fine. Yeah, Nixon's an interesting figure and like I said, I think what was happening was the, in the 1960s, you had an economist named Robert Trifen and there's this thing in the precious metals or economics where they call it Trifen's dilemma. And one other thing, he was testifying before Congress and they were trying to figure out like, what happens when you stock all these central banks around the world because you're the world's reserve currency? What happens if you lose the world's reserve currency status and all those dollars are repatriated back home? So that's, you know, that would crash, you know, the dollar. And I think what, you know, with guns and butter and Vietnam, what LBJ called it, the great society on the Mekong, you know, like we, the Cold War, the space race, everything, we expanded the money supply without actually accounting for the fact that every dollar is to be backed by gold. And so you see that in 1965, all the precious metals comes out of the coinage, world takes notice and we started going on all these adventures, we have Vietnam, all this is ramping up the space race. I think the rest of the world that you talk about De Gaulle sending the warships over, they knew, right? They know like, oh, we gotta repatriate these dollars and get our gold, it's $35 an ounce. I don't know that Nixon had a lot of choice. So they're like, what are you gonna go and you're in the middle of a, you know, cultural revolution in the United States? You got a war abroad, there's the, you know, you open China, like you got to argue, well, that's the next year. But he has, you know, that on the list, you've got the, you know, the Soviet Union, it was still a massive empire and, so high to the Cold War, all that stuff. I think that that was a decision that was made, you know, modern monetary theory. And it's really interesting and kind of a side note, John Connolly, who was riding in the car with Kennedy the day of the assassination in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. He was a Democratic governor of Texas. That's who Nixon brought in to be the Secretary of the Treasury, who, this guy Connolly didn't really know much about, matter of fact, later he was like bankrupt and stuff, he didn't really know much about, but he had this, I think he had some handlers and people that were talking to him about, let's go on a fiat standard. And so it's interesting, you have the modern monetary theory and my friend David Knight says it's the magic money tree. And I thought that was interesting 'cause Connolly is where you get the magic bullet theory. So it's like the two things kind of coming together and he's the one that was the Secretary of the Treasury that really pushed this through going into August 15th, 1971 where we have a free-floating currency, not backed by anything, it's what you call a fiat currency. And later we'd have the petro... We could talk about that, we did have the petro dollar, that was another thing that came out of the, going off the gold standard. But I think something with Nixon, he was on a lot of the CIA operations as vice president. And I think he had a lot of run-ins with, after the Watergate break-in, which he learned after the fact that these guys, they called the plumbers to plug leaks, go out and find intelligence, and there was this illegal Howard Hughes donation that they were looking for at the Democratic National Headquarters. It's stupid because he was already winning. I mean, they should have just left everything alone. He was gonna crush it anyway. - He was kind of known to be paranoid though, wasn't he? - Yeah, I was one of his worst qualities. He was not really a person who was an extrovert. He's not really meant to do what he did. It's just, I think he liked the cerebral aspect of politics and the fighting aspect. I think he liked the challenge of it. So that's something about his strange makeup of Richard Nixon. But I think he was, ultimately, I think with Richard Helms and head of the CIA, and I think what Nixon knew about JFK, by the side note, he was in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. And I think he was placed there as kind of like a periphery. Like, I don't think he knew anything, had any knowledge of what was going on. But he was supposedly there to close a deal with Studebaker and he was part of a law firm out of New York. And if you watch Oliver Stone's movie, Nixon, he goes and meets with some donors, and I think they're supposed to represent the Hunt family in the movie, at least. I don't, in real life, I don't know that he met with anybody there other than the Studebaker people. But he had an understanding of how government worked and where the bodies are buried and other things. I think when he opened China, which was a huge move, 'cause back then, monolithic communism was supposed to be, oh, this was forever, these two things are linked, but the Chinese and the Russians were shooting at each other, and they had border disputes. It wasn't just one thing. It was in, again, a lot of that was a misconception. And so he thought, well, we could open China, we'll break them away and we can have the, they called it triangular diplomacy, where they were gonna put one against the other and try to speed up the end of the Cold War. And Nixon was complicated too. He wanted peacemaker, put on his tombstone, but you think about him as like, he opened up the white and the war in Cambodia and Laos and things and he, it's a really mixed bag. Like he pulled the troops back, but he hit, you know, more bombing in Tunis was dropped on North Vietnam than all of World War II. So this is just a strange mixed bag, but I think really just escalate into the war, bringing the troops home and all volunteer military. I think he angered somebody and I think I rid of him. I think the pressure, 'cause you look at Watergate and you're like, you really boil it down, and what was the crime? Like it's like, there's what is the issue here? And, you know, and there's an 18 and a half minute gap. And I think really what all this boils down to is that it was about something else. And I think it's about, 'cause in the tapes, and I know I'm going, this is like a long way, but you ask about it, so I have like my wheelhouse, I'm just trying to turn over, but in the tapes, you know, he keeps referring to, this is gonna open up the whole Bay of Pigs thing again. What does it have to do with Watergate or the break-ins? 'Cause Howard Hunt, you know, former CIA intelligence, who was part of, I think, Operation Mongoose and other things that were going back, you know, to overthrow Castro, was on the detail that like helped, you know, was part of the Watergate break-in and they gone after Ellsberg, you know, who leaked the Pentagon papers. So this is a long way of saying, I think he just made the CIA mad. At the end of the day, there's just a lot of evidence to show that he, there was something in his knowledge base or something that he did that made them angry. And I don't think we've had the same kind of presidency since then. Reagan did a couple of things with Star Wars and SDI and the Cold War and Gorbachev, but you don't really think of anybody doing any deals. Like Nixon was like doing major geopolitical moves with Brezhnev and Mao and, I mean, now that nobody talks to anybody, we just go to war. So it's kind of bizarre now. - Yeah, this is deep. So coming back to, you mentioned all the way back to Tower of Babel, which is a long ways back. And you also, I know that I read that you talk about the Roman goddess and how that has an echo in today's money. I'd love to hear about that from you. - Yeah, just an observation. This is one of the things that, when I decided I wanted to be an entrepreneur when I was a kid, I started just thinking about, well, if I want to obtain money, like I want to make money, what is money? You know, like, where does it come from? Why do we use it? And so the more that I looked into that history over the time, you know, this is me studying for 30 years now. There's a story about where money comes, like the word money. It actually comes from about the fourth century BC. The Romans had a temple for the goddess Juno. And they were under siege by the Gauls and which were the modern day French. And one of the evenings that, you know, they could have been attacked, a flock of geese flew over and were honking and it warned them. So they were able to fight back and repel the Gauls. They weren't able to take this temple. And so they later rechristened it after the goddess Moneta, which is the goddess of warning. And that's where then they made that temple. They made it the mint for their first, you know, precious metals, coins, their first gold coins and silver coins. And that's where you get the terms from Moneta, that's where you get the term money or mint. And that's where all that comes from. And so actually the root of the meaning of money is a warning. So I thought that was interesting. Like it, money tells you everything, like the type of currency you have or what it's used for or the origin of it or who controls the supply of it is a warning to you. Right or wrong, right? So I think that's just something that in my head, and with what I do, it's always on my mind. And so like there's little tidbits in history. Like we have everything as a foundational. So I think this is just one of those things of where does money come from? We don't think about it as much as we should because it controls so much of our politics and our reality. And I think we're living in a weird timeline now because we have fake currency. I mean, the average lifespan of a fiat currency is 26 years history. So we've doubled that. But the only reason we've doubled it is because we're the world's reserve currency. It's so all these people around the world are using dollars. You know, 80% of all the $100 bills ever printed aren't in the United States, they're outside. Isn't that changing that the world is using this dollar? And so what's Moneta's whisper on that one? What's the warning that you see going on in the world today with regard to what's happening with the money? Well, what you have to understand is that the dollar is not money. The dollar is just currency. And they can be the same thing, money and current, like you could have circulating gold and silver notes and gold and silver coins. And if there's something that money has to have its own intrinsic value, it has to have a store of energy or something in it, it has to have beyond say so. And so if you're talking about a $100 bill, you know, that's just a government by decree note. As a matter of fact, the old notes of the United States, and you can go back to the 50s. If you look on it like a $20 bill and the left-hand corner, if you go look at it, if you ever find a bill from the 50s, it'll say this note is redeemable in lawful money. So it's saying that that's not money. It was redeemable for gold. Now you couldn't own gold as a private citizen back in the 50s, FDR made that illegal. But as a foreign citizen, you could cash in at the gold window. That was something that foreign banks and stuff could do. So it was a promise. So what you have to understand is the ruling class is going to inflate their way out of every problem. So that means if you're saving the dollars or whatever currency does your or whatever government you're under, you're gonna be losing because it will lose purchasing power, period, end of issue, and then this is an investment advice or anything, the dollar doesn't buy the same that it did 10 years ago. - What is a $100 bill worth in real value? Well, let me back up because in my latest book, God, Money and Sex, I talked about money and the idea that money, it's kind of what you're saying in different terminology, money's just an idea. It's an agreement of what we perceive to be money, but a $100 bill really isn't worth 100 anymore, right? - Well, since the beginning of the Federal Reserve being established, we've lost 99% of all purchasing power of the United States dollar. They inflated, I mean, look, there's 52 times more currency on earth today than when I was born, so I'm almost 45. So it's 52 times more currency. When you make something more ubiquitous, it loses it's a copy of a copy of a copy. And so I think what people fail to understand is that the U.S. money supply is infinite. Trillions and people just throw that number around, but a trillion seconds ago was just in time, it's 32,000 years. That's a big number. So I look at it, I look at the world, as opposed to the chart of wealth, and like where wealth is held, and you're supposed to be like $500 trillion, okay? All together, that's like currencies, stock market, sovereign wealth funds, whatever, right? Across the world, just call it half a quadrillion. So $500 trillion. The market cap of gold is 16 trillion. That's kind of weird. It's like, I think there's just a whole lot of fake things and derivatives and promises and all these other, and projected earnings and all this blue sky stuff. So I try to traffic in what is, what I can actually see, what I think is real, what's, you know, has some measurement, and that's gold and silver. And of course, I also deal in Bitcoin, which is a whole other, that's a whole other side show, but this is related because it takes work to get gold out of the ground. And it's rare, why they call it a precious metal. There's supposedly like 151,000 tons of gold that have ever been mined throughout the history of the world, it's estimated, throughout the history of the world, right? That we know of. More steel is poured in one hour on this planet than all of the gold that's ever been mined, okay? - Who owns all that? - Who owns all the gold? - Yeah. - It's spread around between central banks, private holdings, you know, a lot of it's in jewelry. You know, that's a great question. I went over this recently, it's broken up and a lot of it's central bank holdings, you know, again, private stocks and, you know, again, jewelry, things like that. But yeah, it is concentrated though, a lot with the central banksters. - So isn't that kind of a Moneta's warning as well? I mean, if the banks have the mass of gold and they're giving us meaningless slips of paper or notes, I mean, isn't there a message there of some sort? - That's the key, that's the key, right? And it's funny, back in 2009, it was a almost, it wasn't zero, but pretty close to zero of net buying by central banks. They didn't buy gold. And then after 2009, after the debacle here with the TARP funds and the Great Recession and the bailouts and, you know, too big to fail and jail and all that stuff, central banks started buying gold. It's like, oh, the United States has a problem, you know? So they're inflating their way, it's so apparent, you know? But they don't tell you that. They just start saying, we're gonna start planning. And so these, they start buying gold at a record clip. Now they're breaking all these records. But I can tell you who's not buying gold. Now the United States, now the United States Treasury doesn't buy gold. And the reason is, - Why is that? - 'Cause they're at war with it. - Hmm, talk about it. - You know, the dollar is at war with gold. - Oh, I got you. - If it buys gold, it makes the price go up. The price going up, devalued it. What you're watching when you see gold at right now, the spot price for gold is $2,616 a troy ounce. That is not a reflection of gold going up. That's a reflection of the dollar going down. - Well, I'm glad you brought that up because isn't the term inflation really deceptive because inflation is actually the deflation of the dollar, isn't it? - Well, it's, I mean, you think about expansion is like to inflate something. That inflation is the key there. That the word to inflate is to expand the money supply. Deflation would actually be a stronger dollar. It's like, you know, that's what they try to do when you raise interest rates. And that's, you know, this, by the way, we've had interest rates, they raised rates faster than any time in history, Jerome Powell did. They didn't raise them to the teens like Paul Volcker did in the late '70s, but they certainly raised them faster than any time in history because we had done some serious damage to the dollar in 2020, but really before that, you know, the last quarter of 2019, there's like $6 trillion that was created out of thin air to put into something called the repo markets. And that's a whole other, like there was a lot going on in the last quarter of 2019 going into 2020. And then after that, all the wheels came off. 80% of the dollars ever made were made in the last five years. - Yeah, I've heard that. So I think, if I heard you correctly, inflation, if I don't get this backwards, I think you said inflation actually increases the value of the dollar versus, or deflation. - Well deflationary would be a harder dollar and inflationary would be the dollars just don't go as far. - Yeah. - But isn't, and I know I'd like to you to talk about gold and Bitcoin as well, 'cause I know that you're involved in that, aren't the gold prices controlled? I mean, really shouldn't it be higher than today compared to today? - Sure. - Oh, absolutely. And I think this has been a game that they're losing. It's something, I mean, look, after Nixon takes us off the gold standard in August 15th, 1971, interrupts an episode of Bonanza, which is ironic 'cause that's a show about people going out west to find gold. I guess I think I'm the only person ever bring that up. I thought that was funny. And that's, I think that's what the term means, like a Bonanza, like going with. Gold was $35 an ounce. And at the end of the 1970s, it's $800 an ounce. Now. - That was after it was confiscated at 1.01 during that time, wasn't it? - Well, now in 1933, FDR signs an executive order against gold hoarding, right? He makes it illegal for you to own gold. I mean, basically it's, you have to turn in your gold coins, you have to turn in your gold bullion. Some things were exempt like Dennis and like rare coin collectors and things like that. But ultimately, there wasn't any people like me. I mean, the bullion dealers are done. You know, you're not gonna, you're out of business. And that stays in effect until 1974. It was Gerald Ford who made it legal again for American stone gold. So there was, you know, people rushed into the market 'cause you can see there's something wrong with the dollar. Like it used to be $35 an ounce for gold. And when we, we decoupled it from gold, it just kind of goes off the rails. And so the end of the 70s, you have silver, at $52.50 an ounce because of the Hunt family driving up the price of physical silver. Gold hits 800, but then something happens. One, the Hunt family gets deep-stated where I think the powers that B said put these, they were exposing what was happening to the dollar by the silver, cornering the silver market. So they destroyed the wealth of the hunts. Just started calling contracts and messed up the flow and everything just came as a house of cars and just destroyed it. Gold was also put in that. I think that's when they started figuring out, like let's get the bullion houses to trade the paper gold this way. And it'll just look like the supply is bigger than it is. We'll drop the market. And that way, 'cause again, at the end of the day, the dollar would be at war with monetary metals at this point 'cause every time the monetary metal goes up, it exposes the dollar as not being as strong. That lasted through the '80s and '90s. And I mean, even when I think before I was deployed to Iraq, I bought a little bit of my first gold. I think gold was like $300 and something dollars an ounce. - Wow. - And 2003, 2002 goes in 2003. So it was cheap, you know? And that has stayed that way. So you're talking about, if you, and silver has still not reached that level, there has been an intervention in the prices of these metals. So we're only really getting, I think, a shadow of a view of what it's supposed to be, but I don't know what that number is. I just know that the dollar has been abused, based. It is, the money supply and expansion is destroyed. I mean, you look at what's really and truly, and that's why I think you have terms like, 'cause they have to be running these simulations. You get terms like the Great Reset. They know that they got to do it. I mean, because it's a worldwide debt. I mean, debt worldwide is supposedly like $350 trillion. And then like I said, the total assets are like 400, whatever, suppose a trillion dollars. That's not good debt to GDP, or actual wealth holdings and almost exceedingly entire, you know, entire estimated wealth of the planet. So there's something wrong here. I don't think we have a complete picture of gold. And I think by the end of this decade, I think what you will see is a revaluation of all commodities. I think that gold and silver will be one of them. I don't know what that number is. It might not even be relevant because we measure things in dollars. And it's because we always have, but I'm not sure that that's really how we should measure things anymore. Maybe just the price of gold versus what other other commodities, you know, an ounce of gold buys the same today as it did a hundred years ago. As far as like land, crude oil, groceries, clothes, stuff like that. It's about the same within margin of error. But the dollar doesn't, you know, it's like a gold coin, a $20 gold piece in the United States was right out of the ounce of gold. That's the way it was up until 1933 when they became illegal. And that's an ounce of gold. So $20 was basically $2,600, right? And purchasing power. And I, when I have like kids come into the shop and talk to me about it, I go, this is a $20 gold piece is a $20 bill. And these to be the same. And what happened, you know, and I kind of show them this was decoupled from this. And this still buys the same, but this doesn't. What happened, you know, and why did they do that? Well, they expanded the money supply. And the reason they can just can do that is to cover up a lot of your sins. You can hide things. It's like why you have Donald Rumsfeld going out before the American people on September 10th, 2001 and said, "Hey, we can't track $2.3 trillion." How do you lose $2.3 trillion? Well, do you know how to count for it? - That's a good question. So now that we've maybe scared a lot of the individuals who are not educated on this, let's kind of flip the script and let's talk about what some of your recommendations or what do you think is a wise move in today's world? - Well, just knowing this, the information and I would just encourage people to go out and find this for yourself. I mean, do your own research. I know, you know, the history of the U.S. dollar or what, you know, the purchasing power. And when the news tells you that inflation, we just always had inflation. That's not true. It's not part of what we're supposed to have. You're not supposed to be in an inflationary economy. You're supposed to be deflationary. As a matter of fact, you're supposed to, prices should be going down. You know, innovation makes prices go down, not up. So we're in an inversion here is what you're watching. And it's hard to get a grip on that. So instead of, if you know this information going into the closing, like the second part of this decade, just coming up, you're going to fare a lot better than most people because they just, they have normalcy bias. I mean, we all have it. I have it. Every day I wake, oh, it's, you know, today is going to be like yesterday. Well, that's something, until it's not, you know, until it's not. And I think that's what we're looking at. Worldwide, they're going to reset all commodities. All pricing, the world is de-dollarizing. It doesn't mean the dollar is going to get replaced by the Chinese you want. It's just going to get pushed out by a lot of other things. Is it just be different cross-border payment systems and all the rest? Those dollars will come home. When they're repatriated, you will lose purchasing power. The government has no sense of reality anymore, not even close. There's no more fiscal hawks. They're going to print their way out of any new crisis or war. That means that you're still going to have more debasement of the dollar. So if you're not saving dollars, that's step one. Don't do that. You need to get into something that will hold value. So hard money like gold, silver, Bitcoin, things like that, real estate, your own business. Be very leery of the stock market and other things because a lot of those big entities are just tied to the central bank. Their relationship with their central banker is more important than profit now. This isn't your father's stock market or your grandfather's stock market or your grandma's stock. It's not any of that stuff. It's not about earnings anymore. It's about projections of what companies, supposedly are worth based on their relationship with the Federal Reserve. And it's bizarre. So it's hard to find what real value is anymore. I would just say, know what you're looking at when you're talking when somebody's talking about the dollar. That's not backed by gold. That's not backed by anything. It's an issuance of debt. JP Morgan, Bankster extraordinaire, he said that gold was money and everything else was credit. That's not true anymore. Everything else is debt. There used to be credit 'cause you had what no one's fractional reserve banking. But you know, like if you go and buy a home right now, when they create that home loan, that's new currency. That's not 'cause a bank had, you know, a half a million dollars over here and then they're gonna loan against that, right? No, they're gonna pull that out of their account and give it to you. No, they're gonna create it. They come from the central bank down and that's what gets created through the supply system and then you get new currency. When you start your credit card, same thing. New currency. With debt. With debt. Right. And that's how we live. That's what used to be the world's greatest creditor. Now we're the world's greatest debtor. We used to make things and we're the arsenal of democracy. We don't do that anymore, we consume. So it's money supply expansion and consuming, which is we're just holy away from all the principles that made us great in the first place and made the country strong. So you gotta get back to what's real and that could be whatever personal preference you have if you're trying to get ahead of this is just, what's an asset? What's a liability, you know? And fiat currency is not an asset, it's something you trade in. You gotta try to get, it's like an electric current, you know? You gotta trade, if it stops, it dies. Yeah, right. So what are your ideas about Bitcoin then? Good question. - Big fan of Bitcoin, been in the space since 2016, back when it was $400, 'cause I bought my first Bitcoin ATM, I didn't know what I was doing, I should have just bought Bitcoin, but I supplied my machines and I could have just been done by now, I just bought all the Bitcoin. But I didn't, I'm still in Bitcoin, I buy a little bit of Bitcoin every day. I think it complements precious metals, I think it has a story to tell, it's the only cryptocurrency truly that's decentralized and some people might get mad at me for saying that, but there's no owner, there's no company, there's no country, it's a network that's supported by people all around the world. And there's only 21 million Bitcoin that will, you know, herd the code that will ever be in existence. Most of the big chunk of those are gone forever. There's really only 16 million if you really wanna get technical that it will ever exist and as these, as Bitcoin gets more and more adoption and people continue to pull from the network, that's a finite thing. And the cool technology about Bitcoin and blockchain and proof of work and all that, it's like, if I wanna send you something right now, I can send you Bitcoin, it's instant, you know, and the transaction is permanent and the security on that. So like between me and you doesn't have to be a bank, it's peer to peer, you could be in Australia, you could be in Europe, you could be wherever, I could send it to wherever you are. So I love it for that reason. And I think it's helped a lot of people understand the fiat currency banking system 'cause a lot of the younger people that get in until they start to understand why Bitcoin was invented in the first place. But there still is a big question Mark over it. I mean, who invented it? What's the source of it? What's the purpose of this? And I just happen, I take a big leap here because I do study conspiracy theory of history. It's where my mind goes most of the time, but every once in a while, I'm like, "Hey, you know, the good guy's gotta do something." Everyone's, we have smart people that are on our side that want humanity to have a brighter future without these psychopathic control freaks at the top. You take a lot of power away from them with things like Bitcoin. So I'm a fan of it. And I was at the Bitcoin Conference in Nashville this year. And I was excited to see there's a lot of people there that just, you know, they had a lot of literature on the Federal Reserve and other things, I think it's great. And I just happened to, you know, and some people are like, "Well, if you're a Bitcoin guy, "you don't think gold and silver have a role. "And if you're a precious metals person, "you don't think crypto." I like both. I think they, there's plenty of room. If you look at the, like I said, look at the chart of actual wealth around the world and like, you know, there's all over here in this big chunk of hundreds of trillions in fake. And then gold has a $16 trillion market cap. Silver has a $1.4 trillion market cap in Bitcoin at 1.2. It's a tiny little, tiny little fraction. So there's plenty to go with the future being uncertain. It looks like gold, silver, Bitcoin are gonna be safe havens going into whatever turmoil. - And do you think that silver is going to increase as well? I mean, I know it has and it goes up and down. It's way, it's a lot less expensive than gold right now. Do you think that that's going to take off as well as gold? - Yeah, I'll tell you a little secret about silver. And I will, this is an exclusive Tony secret because I just, this is stuff I just look at it. I'm like, I think this is out in the open, but let's do some math. If you look at gold at 26, 16 and ounce right now, and look at silver and it's $30 and 50 cents an ounce so we're gonna divide it by. That means it takes 85 ounces of silver to make one ounce of gold in value. Now, what I told you earlier in the talk was that the founding fathers set it up as 16 to one. In history, it's been between 10 to 20 to one. Reason being is because that's reality. In the geologically, it's 17 to one estimated. So 17 ounces of silver in the ground, every one ounce of gold. So you look at this and you go, what is that? Why does that take that much silver to, let's take 85 ounces of silver to make one ounce of gold? Well, let's just do some more math here. We did, let's say that it was 16, 26, 16 divided by 16. That's $163 an ounce. That to me is more accurate. Now, I can't sell you $163 an ounce of silver. I don't have to pay that much for it. And the reason is because nobody's cornered the silver market, not since the Hunt family, that was a no-no. So nobody's done it. You could, there could be a whale come on. And if you ordered enough silver, it would shock the market because we're in a tight supply system. And that would expose a lot of these contracts and deliveries, but nobody does it, I think 'cause the Hunt's got the call and that was it. They got deep stated for that. So I would just look to history. If history is our guide, that silver has always been between 10 to 20 to one. And you're looking at gold, going to where it's going, and there's nothing changed geologically, right? Here's another tell. Like I just told you the market cap. I don't think anybody else has ever brought this up, but the market cap of gold is 16 trillion. The market cap of silver is 1.4. It's right there. It's right there in the overall estimated market cap of the metals themselves. So that's not 85 to one. So something's wrong with the price of silver being this low. And I'm thankful that it is right now 'cause you can accumulate. Do you know who the largest holder, physical, private holder of a physical silver in the world is? JP Morgan. Morgan. JP Morgan Chase. Wow. You know that convicted for suppressing the price of silver? JP Morgan Chase. Now you'd ask yourself, if you owned all this silver, wouldn't you want the number to go up? Not if you wanted to get more. So they got convicted of suppressing it. Here's another example too. Military industrial complex really needs cheap silver. Do you know there's 500 ounces of silver in each tomahawk missile? No. In the industry, we call that a monster box. Like you want those big boxes, 500 ounces, you know, a one ounce coins. We call that a monster box. So they put a monster box of silver in every tomahawk missile. Now, you know there's silver in everything else too. I mean, all the solar and the motherboards, all the stuff that it has everything. You know, silver is the most thermo-conducted metal in the world. Wow. So cheap silver fuels the military industrial complex as well. Holy smokes. That is a secret. We won't edit this out of the podcast. Yeah. We'll keep this close to the best. So let me add, and I know you have some time constraints. And so I want to be respectful of that. But I would like to know a couple of things. Do you have any concern? Because Trump is now pro-Bitcoin, just fairly recently. And if I'm not mistaken, I believe Biden was talking about it needs to be regulated. So, which is not surprising. But do you do you find? And then there's a central bank digital currency that they're talking about. Do you find that those issues, Bitcoin and CBDC might come in into conflict and there might be some issues with Bitcoin in the future? I think that's a good question. Yeah, Trump has recently been, I watched his talk at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville. And he was like, he's reading it for the first time, you know? Like he's like, "And Bitcoin matched the market cap of silver." And he goes, "Wow." It looks like he's reading it for the first time, you know? And I thought that was funny. Somebody converted him on it, you know? Like he's been one of those people that, it was funny at the, my son and I used him were at the conference. And that's one of the speakers was talking about all the things that Trump had said derogatory about Bitcoin. And people started booing. And then I realized they weren't booing that Trump said that. They were booing the guy brought it up. Just thought it was bizarre. And Edward Snowden was like, "Hey, you know, he came on, he was one of the next speakers." He's like, "Please vote, but don't join a cult." And I was like, "Well, we kind of are in one." I mean, everybody just booed the guy who brought up the thing that he actually said. But yeah, and so the Trump thing is interesting because you know who worked really hard on the central bank digital currency blueprint system was Jerry Kushner, his son-in-law, you know? That was, he had close ties to some of the initial talks about this, the CBDC. So this is the problem with being a researcher and a radio guy and I know this stuff. So like my politics are weird, you know, because I'm like, I'm not able to just like join in a particular camp, I have to call out stuff and it doesn't make you a little popular. But I think that it's a mixed bag. I mean, the Democrats, I mean, they hate crypto. I mean, Elizabeth Warren, you know, the Biden administration's been, I mean, Gary Gensler, head of the SEC. They've been massively anti-crypto, anti-innovation, which is really weird, you know? You would think that they're the party for the working guy, whatever, you know? They work really, really. It's so funny. Yeah, I mean, they're the party for the little guy and I'm being facetious. But yeah, they have such an anti-crypto. That's not going to change. They've, you can like really draw the lines and like, oh, if you're pro, you know, Ukraine, war, pro, fiat current, you can kind of just put them over here on this side, just status, big banks. It's funny, the progressive left thinks that it's like gonna tax the rich and soak the rich. I'm like, the richest people in the world fund you. They love what you're doing. They love these taxes and they love it. They built the, you're a puppet for them. And it's so obvious, but guess not. Put the green new deal over there on that side too. Oh, yeah. I mean, just, I mean, the watermelon, it's green on the outside, communist red on the inside. That's what they look like. Still with the watermelon politics of it. But I think, I think either way, we got to, either way, Trump, Harris, you've got a problem with central bank digital currency folks and, you know, World Economic Forum, just been spiking the football lately. The 97% of countries are adopting CBDC. Yay, we love it. We're going to be able to stop politics. That's what it is. It's surveillance disguised as money. It's the ultimate form of control. It's real time expansion and contraction, money supply, cashless, biometrically controlled Mark of the Beast stuff. I mean, it's pure evil. The good news is, is that at the same pace that these, and the folks now that are carrying out the grand conspiracy worldwide are a lot dumber than their predecessors. I mean, they've pulled off some masterful stuff throughout history. Man, they just phoning it in now because you see like they losing the war of ideas. They might be able to, they control the printing press and they control so many of the levers of power, but they are not winning hearts and minds. And I think there's millions and millions of people waking up all the time going, I don't buy into that anymore. And they're decentralizing. As a matter of fact, the entire course of human events right now is decentralizing in the face of all these lizard people where we want to consolidate everything. So we're going against two different things, right? I mean, I mean, history is our guide. You go back to the Protestant Reformation and you know, two or fifty years later you get the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and all this stuff. It's decentralizing, folks. Technology's decentralizing it. And these, you know, again, the Klaus Schwab's of the world, they want to centralize. Well, yeah, and they want to stop the game. They already got to have their wealth and control. They want to stop the wheel. But it looks states here in the US are making golden, silver, legal, tender. This is huge moves. Oklahoma has passed a massive deregulatory crypto bill recently. I see lots of great stuff on the horizon. - I like the Costco. - I hear Costco's even selling gold now, which is-- - $200 million a month. - Wow. - And don't go to Costco to get your gold, folks. You come see me. I got better here. - Well, speaking of which, again, I'm trying to be as respectful of your time. - Well, don't worry about it. Well, I'll make it work. - Okay. Well, you're great. We're going to have to talk some more in the future because you've got your wealth of knowledge. Tell our viewers how they can see you and what exactly you can do for them and how they find you. - Well, again, I appreciate you having me on. And thanks for, yeah, thanks for the, I always forget to plug. So like as we were talking about Costco, I remember. Oh, yeah, Costco does like $200 million a month now. Which is insane. They just started selling platinum bars and people were there buying hot dogs and toilet paper and, oh, yeah, I get some precious metals. The cool thing with me is that one, I've guaranteed like we have a membership program. So I did something that the big guys don't do. I just turned it on its head. So if you call one of these companies you see on TV, they've got a bullpen of people, their call center. And if you don't have $10,000 or more, they really don't care. Okay, and even that's a low number for them. They're not looking for $10,000. They're looking for $100, they're looking for $200, they're looking to get a certain amount closed over the month and they want IRA and 401K rollovers. We do that too, but I started thinking about that 'cause the first goal that I ever bought when I mentioned it was a $300 an ounce, I got screwed over 'cause they didn't sell me the gold bullion. They gave me some collectible. I didn't know what I was doing. I was a kid, you know? And the guy, when I told him I had three grand, he was like, "Oh, whatever." Put me in some new, mismatic thing that I couldn't get out of like five, no, seven years later I tried to sell and I didn't even get all the money that I paid for it in. So it was ridiculous. So one of the reasons when I started my business, I'm like, "Hey, there's people out there "that they want to get some precious metals. "They don't know what to buy "and they don't have $10,000. "They got $100,000, they got $50,000." Whatever, you know? And so I started a program called Wolfpack 'cause the name of my business is Wise Gold and Silver. So I started Wolfpack a couple of years ago and we just passed yesterday, 1,300 members. So 1,300 people around the country buy from me automatically between 50 and $5,000 a month. So $20,50 a month all the way up to 5,000 automatic. We buy your metals, we give you a comparison shopping price on what the other bigs would have charged you and you get all kinds of cool freebies and stuff. We make it an experience for people. So every tier has its own wolf designation, so like $50 is the lone wolf. It's something to go look at. You can go to wolfpack.gold, all the stuff that you need to find about is on wolfpack.gold. And we have several websites. If you get confused, there's always a link that says join Wolfpack. But Wolfpack is a special program. It's near and dear to me because it gives the opportunity for average people. Or anybody, even if you're an advanced investor, we source all your metals for you and so you can just literally go and give us $50 and then we go turn it into something and we shop for you and we buy in bulk riffs. The more people that join, the better prices I get everybody. So I'm actually back and forth between Branson and Dallas. I have a shop in Branson, Missouri and like on the camera and we're buying stuff and that'll all go into Wolfpack. Or I'll go down to Texas and we got a shop there. Most of that stuff goes into Wolfpack to feed it. And just something to look into, especially going into, people trying to budget and we just work with people. I mean, it's easy to join, easy to cancel, easy to upgrade. I got a great team for that. We pack it all, send it all out of Branson. Had, I think I got like nine hundred five-star reviews now. It's some crazy, crazy thing. But that's the best way to get ahold of me for the business. And my website is asarterburn.news, it has my podcast, I'm exiting an upgrade as we speak. I'm doing actuallyarterburn.gold and we're gonna redo everything and put all the links there 'cause everybody asked me that. But yeah, any of those websites are sufficient to get ahold of me and I just appreciate you having me here. - And we'll put all those links down below this as well. We'll certainly share it. I think you answered this question, but you actually, if we join Wolfpack or someone joins Wolfpack, you actually send us the physical silver and gold. You don't. - Yeah, right away. Yeah. - You put it on your card and it charges. Like my team has that, it goes into an inbox, puts into a label and like we pack it. Every week I create new invoices for all the tiers. So, you know, like I said, it's 51, 25, two, 55, when it goes up to a thousand and five thousand. So each level I create all of those and then we let it set for, until prices change dramatically and we've set it again based off whatever we have in stock. But yeah, it goes to your door. So wherever you decide to get that sent to, it's almost automatic within, you know, you'll have a label within 48 hours, usually maybe less your card choice. - That's great 'cause I'm always somewhat skeptical of people who say, oh, we'll store it for you. I'll share your words. - Well, I have some good contacts for that. I had to scope that out too. Like we use a company, Dylan Gage, which is the trading floor in Dallas, and they do all their IRA storage and it's called IDS. And all this has been, you know, we've vouch, it's been for years and years, we've been with them, but I do understand. Like there's some nightmare stories coming out of precious metals, like people didn't get delivery or they use their IRAs for some and didn't, you know, you don't know what you're doing. Somebody contacted me today and sent me an invoice of a proposed thing for an IRA and I go, whoa, like they were, I mean, they were getting all these collectibles and I'm like, this is not the way you need to be stuck in metal, like this collectible stuff, man. It's a minefield. There's plenty of business to go around. We're just lean and mean. So like, even if, you know, I'm doing fine, like if somebody calls, I'm not gonna try to like put you at something that, yeah, I might make some short-term profit off of, but goodness, you know, at least I can sleep at night and some of these people get overcharged and I don't know. I come from a, I'm a paratrooper who likes books and, you know, my dad was, you know, entrepreneur extraordinaire. I mean, it's the hardest working guy ever seen in my life in the 80s. He built his own bank literally like from the ground up, had convenience stores. I just thought that was normal when I was a kid. Dad worked seven days a week and, you know, we build stuff, you know, like we're always working and I just thought that was a normal life and I saw those things he had to go through and I learned a lot about money and I learned about things and I decided, you know, I was 19 and I was going, I was a state national champion powerlifter, I said, "A world record." And I said, "Well, what do you want to do?" I said, "I'm going to go in the army." So I went and became a paratrooper because I was like, well, how am I going to eclipse dad, you know, like he's, am I going to go to work for dad, you know? He's just, he did some amazing stuff. He's just very driven and so I can't really match his speed but I do other stuff, it's kind of crazy. I do all the radio stuff and I was a paratrooper. So he looks at me and is like, okay, you know, the boy did something interesting. He like comes up to my shop, you know, he's always looking for a deal. He's pretty funny. (laughs) Why am I going to pay you for that? You know, am I going to pay you? You're going to charge me a premium? That's still the old man. - Well, you've been-- - Well, it sounds like you did great. - It sounds like you've done a great job and you've really brought a lot of value to us today and to our viewers as well and we appreciate that. Keep doing great work and hopefully we'll talk with you again soon. - I hope so. I'll be back any time. - Okay, my friend, take care. God bless. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
