We are live. Jim Hunter, welcome to the Thank God for Bitcoin podcast.
Jordan, thank you so much for having me. It's a real honor.
All right. Again, you have been a good friend. We met each other at church,
and then you've since gone on to help start a church. So why don't you introduce yourself
for those who aren't familiar with who you are and what you do?
Sure. Jim Hunter, I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. I grew up in a Christian home. I grew up kind of Episcopalian because my mom was born and raised Episcopalian. Both sets of my grandparents were Episcopalian, and then my dad was Presbyterian.
As I've said to you and many others, if there's such a thing as a high Presbyterian church, that was my home church.
I was baptized there.
I was confirmed there.
And I was actually married there.
And the name of the church is Independent Presbyterian in Birmingham.
Tragically, it's gone the way of the woke world, and it's a disaster, truly tragically.
But if one was to go to the church, you would swear it was built in the 16th century with three or four stories high in terms of the ceiling of the church, the stained glass windows, the pipe organ.
Absolutely beautiful.
I had a call to ministry when I was seven years old.
I majored in religion at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee.
I thought I was going to go straight to seminary, but by the time I graduated in mid-85,
the woke tears among the wheat was already obvious.
And at that point, I'm like, well, what am I going to do?
I didn't know enough about the continuing movements of the Episcopal Church.
I knew the PCA, because the PCA flagship church, Briarwood, is in Birmingham.
However, if you went back and talked to those particular guys at the time, they would tell you things like, well, we're really four-point Calvinists.
They were—and I'm not saying that to be ugly.
I'm just saying that's how they viewed the world.
And it was very much of a Billy Graham's got it right in kind of the every Sunday is an altar call Billy Graham crusade.
Well, that to me, relative to historical Reformed Presbyterian Episcopalian faith, just wasn't the same thing.
So I wasn't really attracted there.
And that ended up leading to kind of what is, quote unquote, the continuing Episcopal Church.
I got involved with a small traditional Episcopal church in Point Clear, Alabama in 1988 when I was getting my MBA at Auburn University.
So, wait, how did I go from going to seminary to MBA?
Well, because I wasn't sure, all right, well, what flight path should I be on?
Because I don't, I mean, I'm not okay with women elders.
I'm not okay with all the things that were going on.
So I figured, well, until I could find a flight path forward, the other thing God put in me was a love of economics.
And we didn't have a minor program at Rhodes, but if we had had one, I would have minored in econ.
So I was like, all right, well, I'm going to, until the dust settles, the smoke clears, I'm going to go get the MBA.
and then I can at least underwrite myself if I need to do something with a continuing church.
So because my parents had moved to Point Clear, that's how I got to know the continuing Episcopal Church.
That got me involved with the 39 Articles of Religion, which I didn't know about until that time,
the old prayer book, 1928 and prior, because I then learned what a travesty the 1979 Book of
Common Prayer was. It essentially bulldozed the entire, well, Christian history of the Episcopal
Church. Jim, do me a favor, because we have a lot of people who do not know any of this history. So
maybe give like a five-minute intro to the Episcopal Church, and then you can kind of
define some of the 39 articles. So all the Episcopal Church is, is the Church of England
in the United States. Episcopal means a bishop, a bishopric of bishops, that sort of thing.
And so that's all it is. But if you look at the, what were the grounding documents of the Church
of England, what's typically thought of today is, oh, well, Episcopalians are kind of like
diet Catholics, Catholic lights, the Catholic Church without the Pope, and that sort of,
which is a fair assessment of what, if you go to a typical Episcopal church today, even
those that are quote-unquote traditional, what you'll end up finding is what would be
termed an Anglo-Catholic church, which is, it really does seem like a, it looks, feels,
sounds, everything about it is like a quote-unquote traditional Catholic church, with the exception
of Mary, well, actually in some of them there are some Mariology, et cetera. But the actual
Protestant grounding of the whole Church of England was not about Henry VIII. It was about
Thomas Cranmer, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury, who had traveled to the continent
at the end of Henry's reign, beginning of Edward VI reign. And he talks to Luther. He figures out
what's going on, he comes back to England as a changed man. And Edward, so he worked with the
young Edward VI, and that's where the 39 Articles of Religion come from. If you read those, which
are 100 years older than the Westminster Confession, there's no doubt the Westminster
Divide are looking at the 39 Articles going, okay, well, we need to expand here, expand there,
you know, et cetera. But that's where it all comes from. And up to really the mid-19th century,
turn up the 19th to the 20th, it is the Church of England or the Anglican communion around the world,
which it's not a coincidence that the King James Bible,
the Church of England, is the Bible and the church
that follows the empire around the world,
the empire upon which the sun never sets.
And so, you know, that's—
but by the time you get to the late 19th century,
some listeners may be familiar with J.C. Ryle.
John Charles Ryle, one of the great Protestant
Church of England bishops. He was a bishop of Liverpool. Today, by Anglo-Catholics,
he's degraded as a Presbyterian with a prayer book, and that's pretty much what I am,
is a Presbyterian with a prayer book, because I think the beauty, the incredible power of what
was written in the Book of Common Prayer, which did go all over the world, and the succinctness
of the 39 articles, which are hammering on the errors of the Catholic Church,
but they don't do things like go so far as call the Pope the Antichrist
or really get bulldozer-ish as Westminster and arguably the 1689 London Confession does as well.
But that's the general background.
John J.C. Ryle, if you have not read him, if you're a listener,
you should read this guy.
You would swear he wrote the stuff he wrote last week.
Unless you pick up here or there a timing giveaway,
you really would think he wrote it very recently.
But that is, in general, that's where God has put my heart.
That's what needs to be recreated.
I was in the CREC for a long time because I thought that was the flight path.
yes, I departed the CREC,
but in terms of that's not an ugly departure,
it's a, I love all these guys,
it's just God's called me a different direction.
Yeah, and again, there's so much more
we can say on that front,
but I mean, just the Episcopalian Church,
there's many people throughout the history
of the United States
who've been part of the Episcopalian Church,
many names that people would recognize
even if they wouldn't affiliate them with the church.
So yeah, so good on you.
Glad there's people trying to recover the good that's there and reject a lot of the insanity that's come to dominate it.
But let's go from talking about that, which would be an incredible episode.
Maybe we do that sometime in the future.
We want to talk about gold.
So obviously, let me just take a peek here.
Let's see.
Do you have the spot price of gold?
It looks like $4,344 as of the time of this recording.
So this is obviously a little different
than things were about six months ago, a year ago, Jim.
Things have gotten kind of crazy in gold world.
So I'm sure this is not surprising to you.
We've had a bunch of conversations.
And there's other people who, again,
would be surprised to hear a conversation about gold
on a Bitcoin podcast because they would assume
that we are mortal enemies
between the digital and analog realms.
And so we would love to disappoint them, the two of us,
because we did a debate together
hosted by the CrossPolitik program
out in Moscow, Idaho.
The two of us got out there
and we were debating with another guy
who was representing the traditional,
again, hilariously titled
traditional finance world,
less than a hundred years old,
but sure, it's traditional.
So we get out there
and to much of this surprise
and possible chagrin
of the entire audience,
you and I just went back and forth
defending each other the whole time.
Right.
Great.
So I wanted to have you on.
It's, you know, gold's doing super well.
And so I want to come kind of have you on here and just kind of have you make the Christian case for gold to our audience.
A lot of them, again, are already gold appreciators.
But I would love for you to kind of talk about that.
So, again, you've already mentioned how you got into economics, your interest there.
How did you come to be interested and see the value of gold?
So when I went to school between my—I started at Auburn University in their MBA program in the fall of 1987.
That was almost simultaneous with when one of the board of trustees member, John Denton, opened Auburn to the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
The only reason literally Von Mises Institute's in Auburn is because of this guy, John Denton, who was on the board for trustees.
So it's kind of, ah, you know, why in the world are these free market gold guys, you know, Austrian economics guys in Auburn, Alabama, but that's why.
And now they've built their own campus.
It's a great building, et cetera.
But as a result, I had some professors that were very friendly with the Von Mises Institute.
So that's how I learned about, oh, okay, the reason the Austrians like it is because they want free markets, and part of the whole way the free markets work is limited government.
How do you limit government?
You do not let government.
You tie the hands of government from doing what we've been doing since we got off the gold standard in August 1971, and they go absolutely hog wild and print money ex nihilo and print credit ex nihilo.
and uh uh so that's where it's introduced to this is the the the philosophical rationale for why you
want to have it um and so and that's 87 so i'm only 16 years after they had gotten off the gold
standard at that point uh i also am at school when you had the october 19th 1987 crash so that was
interesting, down 22% a day. And of course, we've never seen that low again. And part of the reason
we haven't is because of this credit creation ex nihilo. Jim, let me just interrupt you. I was
instructed, I was told, I mean, under the assumption that the stock market is never that volatile. I
mean, that's only Bitcoin volatility, 22% in one day. Oh, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, it
It certainly happens, and it can certainly happen again.
And, you know, there are all kinds of other truths you've probably been told, like, housing prices in the United States never go down.
Oh, yes, you're right.
Yeah.
I'll never forget that one, too.
So that's where I get introduced to it.
My first, I spent most of my career until the last nine years was in institutional fixed income, which means I was a bond trading and sales for Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, that side of Wall Street.
and then from 05 to 2010
I had a hedge fund
which was a structured credit hedge fund
which if you have seen
the movies The Big Short
or Margin Call
either one of those
both of them did a superb job
of actually telling you
this is what it really was like
Margin Call in particular
the boardroom scene in Margin Call
is absolutely 100% real life.
They nailed it.
And, but we were the big short,
except we weren't short mortgages.
We were short investment grade credit.
But we did very well because obviously if you were short
in those years, your fund did superbly.
But it was being in the middle of that huge conflagration
and watching how it was actually dealt with.
I mean, I had a front row seat to this
because our counterparties for our fund
were Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers,
and Bank of America,
before Bank of America and Merrill Lynch
were shotgun wedding together.
Lehman Brothers was basically,
if you want to think about it,
it was almost like a mob hit.
You know, this is a mob.
we don't want to deal with Dominic anymore, so he's gone, and they smoked them.
But if you go back and look at what should have actually come to pass,
given what are rules of capital, what are, if you're insolvent, it's too bad.
You went, you bet, and you lost, and you lose.
Well, except that's not what happened.
What happened was Goldman still exists.
J.P. Morgan still exists.
Citibank, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, all these firms still exist.
And what should have happened to them all is if you're familiar with the movie Trading Places.
This is an old movie with Eddie Murphy.
It's a comic.
That was the one that came to mind, but I was like, wait, it can't be that one.
Yes, it is that one.
Because the serious part of Trading Places is at the end, after they come out of the orange juice pits
and they say margin call boys and the two Duke brothers who have tried to illegally corner the
market with inside info, they go, you know perfectly well we don't have $394 million in cash.
So the guy says, okay, sell all assets of Duke and Duke commodity brokers and sell their seats.
The brothers go crazy and say, you can't do that. We founded this exchange. This thing is ours.
Well that what they were is what Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan were doing at the time And of course so why didn that happen
Because you've got congressmen and senators who don't know which way is up.
They sent Ben Bernanke, who works for them as the head of the Federal Reserve, and that's still true today.
The Fed works for City of London, Wall Street banks, Rothschilds, and some other.
And this isn't like tinfoil has secret inside information.
You can go look this up on the internet.
They send Bernanke in.
They send him in with Hank Paulson.
Oh, was there any conflict of interest between the fact that Hank Paulson was Treasury Secretary and he had been Goldman Sachs' CEO?
Surely not.
What a shred of, so anyway, and basically they tell the congressman, if you don't give us what we want, if you go back and you can watch the hearings, they essentially say, if you don't give us what we want, we're probably going to have tanks in the streets of New York tomorrow.
The congressmen don't know which way is up.
Then, just like they don't know which way is up now.
And they basically gave them everything they wanted.
Yeah.
All they know is that if the stock market goes apocalyptic on their watch, they're going to get voted out and blamed for it.
And so it's all self-protection.
It's horrible.
Correct.
And here's a question for you, just real quick.
So I just want to go back to what you said about you being short institutional credit.
So obviously you have guys like Steve Eisman, the whole big short crew.
These guys are digging into Michael Burry.
They're digging into mortgages and buying up mortgage-backed securities because they're
realizing this is a house of cards.
What were you seeing in institutional credit that allowed you to kind of go short and profit from what you saw?
Sure. Okay. Well, my hedge fund was myself and my partner, my Christian brother.
And both of us had come out of Wall Street.
He was institutional fixed income derivatives, and I was institutional fixed income cash.
Both of us were saying, yeah, we knew mortgages were a disaster, too.
The question was, if our firm is two guys in Fairhope, Alabama with a couple of Bloomberg screens, how are we going?
We cannot be wrong.
We can be wrong, but we're a little wrong.
We can't be a lot wrong.
In the big short film, Michael Burry, the character played by the guy who was Batman.
Christian Bale.
Yeah, Christian Bale.
The Christian Bale character, he's really wrong, and he's really, really bad down.
And there's a scene in the film where the guys are like, you can't do this.
He's like, well, I'm going to get even more along.
Yeah.
Or I'm getting even more short.
He was down hundreds and a couple hundred million bucks at one point or something.
Correct.
Well, we couldn't afford to do that.
We couldn't, in a percentage basis, we never had that sort of capital under management.
But we felt like our absolute maximum downside was something like 30%.
Okay.
But we were looking at whether it was any sort of credit, because the Federal Reserve had killed interest rates to zero, 1%.
It was ridiculous.
These are not real interest rates.
These are concocted, just like they have been all this time.
And we looked at investment grade credit.
And at the time, if I had a triple A U.S. government and I sold that and bought a triple B, I was only going to get paid 30 basis points to do it.
Well, what's the normal relationship?
It's 110.
Oh, my gosh.
So it's like, this is stupidity.
I mean, unless you're talking about a robust Christian moral nation and universities that are pumping out.
But this is every vials left and right.
Yeah.
Right.
And you look on what the actual culture was and you're like 30 basis points for that swap.
Yeah.
And we've got debt out our eyeballs.
I mean, this doesn't make any sense.
So how do you instead, if you couldn't do mortgages because you can't afford being wrong, you do investment grade credit.
Because if you're 30 basis points, triple B to triple A, how bad can that get?
Can it go to parity?
maybe it was so crazy maybe it could but fortunately obviously it didn't and we we we did well yeah
but that was it was the same thing credit has been ballooned up just whether it's mortgage credit
investment grade credit uh high yield bond credit whatever the credit was it was silly because the
federal reserve had killed all yield so if i'm a japanese pension fund and i got zero percent there
I got 0% in the treasuries.
Give me any yield anywhere of any sort because I've got to pay my retirees.
Exactly.
That was a trade to be sure.
Okay.
So were you aware of Iceman?
Like, did you know him?
Or were you aware of those guys and the trade that they were putting on or not really?
Because I know there were people who knew about it who thought they were nuts.
There were other people who just never knew about it.
So kind of, you know, in your case, you said we couldn't afford to be wrong.
So maybe it just didn't fit given your risk profile and the funds under management, that kind of stuff.
Yes, we did know of him.
Okay.
And we certainly knew Michael Burry.
Yeah.
We had also known of guys that got carried out on a stretcher who were right.
You know, they were right, but they put the trade on in 04.
Yeah.
Sometimes having the wrong timing is indistinguishable from being wrong.
Correct.
That's right.
Yeah.
And so, yes, we knew of them.
Again, the wrong part was that, again, a Michael Burry with that much institutional credibility.
Now, we had institutional credibility as on the bond desk that we were on.
We did not have institutional credibility when we created a fund, a brand new fund in Fairhope, Alabama.
Sure.
That's what I mean.
Because when you go into an institutional guy and say, well, we want to compete to manage your money, he's looking at us like, wait a second, I got five guys in New York and 10 in Chicago.
Why should I, why am I going to do it with you?
Right.
Yeah.
And that's, and that's, that's, that's how we compete.
I think you said this, I think you said this, but what year did you leave New York and then move to Fairfax?
I never did.
I never went to New York.
I was always in the, I started in Mobile, Alabama, went to Birmingham at a Shearson-Lehman office.
Then I was in Atlanta for five years with Marilyn Lehman.
Okay.
When my daughter was born in 98, we moved back to Fairhope.
Yeah.
I worked for a regional firm until 05, and then I had the hedge fund 05 to 2010.
Okay.
So you guys do well on that trade.
You know, if you guys are looking like geniuses, you know, you're maybe not making Michael Burry money, but you're still doing great.
still doing great. So then, you know, was it a direct jump to, you know, go into gold,
starting Alpen and going into gold or no? It wasn't direct. The first thing that happened was
the other way we competed was to say, we are, if you come to us and ask for liquidity,
we're going to give it to you. So for instance, one of our biggest accounts was a university.
We were the only hedge fund that was up. And we were also the only hedge fund that wasn't gating
that what in the world's a gate?
A gate means I, as the head fund manager, can say,
you can't take your money out because if you do,
it'll adversely affect the fund.
So I am, quote-unquote, throwing the gates up
so you can't pull your money out.
Or other guys would say force majeure,
which is a law term saying something has happened,
force majeure, majority force, something so great
that, quote-unquote, we couldn't have anticipated,
sure therefore we're not going to give you your money back yeah so the so here comes the school
going you're the only people giving us liquidity and you're the only people that up we don't want
to take the money away from you but we have no choice yeah so we were we maxed out at about 35
million in assets under management okay by the time we get to like mid-09 we were down to four
wow we're sitting there going wait a minute we didn't do anything long we did everything we said
we were going to do. We've lost all around AUM. And then I'll give you a little vignette. In the
fourth quarter of 08, Merrill Lynch is one of our counterparties. We don't have to get too far in
the weeds about, you know, how to swap contracts work, et cetera. But suffice it to say, every
quarter there was a payment that either we owed Merrill or Merrill owed us. Well, Merrill did owe
at the end of where the book settled up at September 30.
Essentially, we're on the phone with this guy that's the payments guy at Merrill.
Long story short, he's basically asking for a day or two to send us the money he owed us.
All right?
Now, this is Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Spinner, and Smith in New York City.
The amount of money they owed us should have been in a cigar box behind some of these guys.
Yeah, in the church cushions.
Right.
You cannot be serious that y'all are, no, you owe us and you need to pay it.
And a lot of, you know, they did send us the money.
But the whole idea that we were having the conversation was crazy.
Did you guys go more short?
Well, we certainly kept the shorts we had on.
But really at that time, we were more concerned of,
are we going to be able to get the principal back to our clientele?
Sure, yeah.
So we didn't want to go too crazy.
You know, you're in no man's land.
Yeah.
If we demand the money from Merrill and close all the swaps, will they actually do it?
Right?
It was, when you hear the war stories of what was going on, it really was.
It was a wild time.
Yep.
Well, fast forward the clock about nine months into mid-09.
Mm-hmm.
Same guy from Merrill Lynch.
Now he's Merrill Lynch Bank of America.
now my partner are trying to re-raise assets under management because now we want to go long risk
because we're seeing what they're doing yeah it's like oh you're they're basically making it
there's no way they're going to let the credit market going to let they will inflate the they'll
make phony money that way the bond payments will get made so we want to be long risk now okay
Well, we go to Merrill Lynch, the swap guy, the payments guy, the same guy who was begging for more time.
And all of a sudden, we got a totally different attitude.
Now, what do you guys want to do?
You know, what's going to, you know.
So we explain.
And he's like, well, how many assets in our management do you have?
And we're like, time out.
We made every payment in the worst part of 08.
We never were a problem.
What difference does it make to you about how many assets?
Oh, I'm sorry.
If you've got a quarter billion, we've got nothing to do here.
Oh, my gosh.
And we're like looking at each other.
This is as rich as you can get.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, we did everything right.
We gave liquidity.
We come back to a counterparty we were never a problem to and told, sorry, you don't get to play.
Yeah, yeah.
And to this day, what do we got?
Jamie Dimon running around in private jets, being important, making big speeches.
as well as all these other guys, firms that should have been shuttered.
So basically God came out of that like, wait, this whole thing is so corrupt.
Yeah.
And I don't know anything in the Bible.
I don't know anything in history where you do the sort of things that have been done here
where the piper doesn't end up coming back for his bill.
Yep.
So that and then all of what I'd learned at Auburn all through the years, that gold was one thing that didn't.
And then if you go to our website, you'll see one of the quotes I have up there is Genesis chapter 2, verses 11 and 12.
River runs out of Eden.
The name of the first river is Passau.
It goes into the land of Havilah, and there is gold in that land.
And the gold of that land is good.
Why on earth is God telling us pre-fall about gold being in some land?
What is he doing?
Well, we find out because wisdom is better than fine gold.
We burn the dross off the silver to make you better.
Oh, okay.
It's going to become the standard.
Well, not only is it a standard for biblical truths,
it also becomes, as we know from the history of the world,
It becomes the standard for what is a unit of account,
media of exchange, and store of labor,
and store of value, and most importantly, a store of labor.
That is what gold was then, is now,
and I truly believe until the Lord returns,
it will continue to have that role.
Yeah, and this is, I have some,
I have a buddy who's also into Bitcoin,
and we have this debate,
we had this on a podcast not too long ago,
where he just basically was like talking about Bitcoin demonetizing gold.
And I'm just like, listen, I could see it happening in limited amounts.
I just don't see, you know, I just don't see it happening over like a thousand year period or something like that.
I, you know, I, yeah, I could see it happening to some degree, but I just think just given the nature of things,
I just think gold's going to be around a lot longer.
You know, it's, yeah, I just think it's going to be, it's this foolish thing.
It's this quote unquote dumb rock. And yet, you know, they're still going to be there for people all over the world.
You know, they still it's been around for, you know, thousands of years is still going to be around for a long time.
I don't see any any any chance of just going away. Absolutely.
OK, so let's kind of get into and do some of the things that, you know, when you talk to people.
So obviously, as part of this part of the reason for this podcast is to facilitate conversations about Bitcoin with a couple different audiences.
or rarely three, but we'll talk about two of them for right now. One of them is Christians who are
into Bitcoin. So we want to, you know, a lot of them who have gotten into Bitcoin and find value
in Bitcoin, they started out as gold people. Like they valued, and a lot of the reasons why they
value Bitcoin is because of these principles that they first found in gold. And they found through
Austrian economics and this kind of thing. The second group, and so those people are much more
kindred spirits, I would say, with you, just, you know, very, in a manner similar to the way that I
with you. The second group would be Christians who are not yet into Bitcoin. That's who we're
creating this podcast for. And so I would imagine that most of that same audience,
that group of people, they would also be very skeptical about the role of gold and the value
of gold because they've been gaslit by a lot of these investment firms and guys like Dave Ramsey
and, you know, Dave Austin as well.
And, you know, a lot of these other people into thinking that,
oh, gold is just some dumb rock.
You know, we should just put our money into the stock market.
It's going to give you, you know, guaranteed returns,
zero risk basically.
You know, they would see these things like this.
And so I would love for, you know, just for you to give you
kind of a wide berth here to make the case for why, you know,
why these guys are wrong and why Christians who take their faith seriously
should think differently about gold.
So you have the floor.
Okay, thanks, Jory.
But just to clarify, what's the third group?
Yeah, so the third group, and this is, again, you'll understand.
The third group are people who are into, for our audiences,
people who are into Bitcoin who are not yet Christians.
And so for them, we're trying to, quote, unquote, Jesus pill them,
show them the value proposition of Jesus
because they already get the value proposition of Bitcoin.
So continue.
All right.
So why are you and I not, quote, unquote, mortal enemies, as you said when we started?
Because we have to get to the essence of what both of these things are.
Gold and Bitcoin share the most crucial element which is I have the ability to have liquid money that is not contained within a corrupt financial system Yeah there no counter That is what they share And that is free
I don't care about dollar price.
I don't care about volatility.
I don't care about any of that in comparison to the central role they hold.
So if I can accomplish having the ability to have liquid money outside the system, well, why should I care whether it's Bitcoin or gold?
Well, there are reasons to have both of them, and I have both of them.
I have both of them because Bitcoin unquestionably is because of blockchain technology, the fact that it is absolute dead cold.
It cannot grow to any more than 21 million Bitcoin, some number.
Supply constraint, that's beautiful.
That is what is gold.
Well, there's only so much of it that's ever been mined, period.
There's only so much of it in the Earth's crust, period.
The only real supply concern you might have going forward would be mining gold on asteroids or other planets.
I mean, that's a real thing going forward.
But we're still a fair amount of ways from that where you begin to materially impact the supply.
And we don't even know, okay, well, we assume that there's gold on asteroids, but what is the cost of trying to get it off an asteroid?
It's pretty bad here.
So both of them have natural supply constraints.
That's how you handcuff politicians who don't know what supply constraint means.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
We're just trying to take away from them the ability to, like, they no longer can create as much money as they want to.
The amount of money in the system is no longer beholden to or no longer, you know, basically able to be dictated by a group of people in the same way as it can be with gold or with Bitcoin.
And, yeah, they can print all the money they want.
But since they cannot control the price of Bitcoin, buy and print it all you want.
Well, Bitcoin's going to go to $500,000.
Yep.
I mean, it's that simple.
Yep.
So there's the handcuff element of it.
The gold part of it is, well, why hasn't gold done this a long time ago?
Well, then we got to get into what are the elements of the pricing mechanism for gold.
Well, a lot of it has to do with the futures market.
Yep.
And the futures market and the gold lending market, all of this is right out of Chicago and London.
Yep.
there is hyper geopolitical government pressure and participation in those markets that have kept gold from blasting to the moon.
And can you talk about that a little bit?
What are some of those pressures and why is it that governments want to suppress the price of gold?
And what have been the mechanisms?
You mentioned the futures market, but how else do they suppress the market?
Well, the blending of gold and silver, they don't have.
So, like, what is going on right this minute is, if it doesn't take much, just look at the financial literature of the last week or so, what's been one of the stories?
LBMA, London, billion banks don't have the silver to deliver versus those future contracts.
Now, typically in the past, you had a bunch of financial institutions that were all involved.
They're not going to take delivery, so it doesn't matter.
And we can move the price around with just flood the futures market with, I want to open interest this.
Well, yeah, it's going to cost the government so much, but it doesn't matter because it'll suppress the price of silver, suppress the price of gold.
And that's more important to us than whatever we might lose on a given trade.
Sure.
And does Wall Street and Chicago and London like that?
Sure, that's business.
That means, yeah, we're writing tickets left, right, and center with these crazy people from a central bank or a government.
What do we care?
We're making money on the trade.
That all works until something happens.
To me, the most important event over the last five years was the confiscation of the Russian foreign reserves.
February 2022?
Is that what that was?
I think so.
And when you do that, the whole world goes, are you seriously telling me that those guys just took $300 billion of your reserves that were in their financial system and said, sorry, you don't get to have them anymore?
Okay, well, if that's the rules of the game, then I'm going to go change what I'm doing.
I cannot trust the Western governments and their banking system.
And if I can't trust them, what can I trust?
What are the BRICS doing right now?
They are very, very focused on physical gold.
And don't take my word for it.
Go look on the internet and go look at who has been making these major purchases of gold,
certainly over the last three or four years.
But go back to the turn of the century with the dot-com stuff,
meltdown of Enron, meltdown of Worldcon, all 08.
It's the Russian central bank.
It's the Chinese central bank.
And these are huge buyers.
So why is this taking so long?
It's just been, it's taken a while for the system to actually get to the point where it's like, oh my gosh, we're actually going to have to come up with this, what we promised we had and we actually don't have it.
So that's, I think that's the major driver of silver prices right now.
It doesn't mean that we can't have a 20% sell-off.
It doesn't mean whether gold or silver.
But I would tell you that I think until you get some material, I mean really, really material change of government and government spending, deficit spending,
then the if you go back and look at the historical relationship between the price of gold
and how much credit has been created by the united states for that equilibrium to be right
yeah i wrote a piece in 2019 before all the covet insanity of of credit creation and at that time
the right number solved for X was $7,000 an ounce.
That would balance the historical relationship
between the market value of the gold
owned by the United States
and our credit issuance.
Well, now that number's larger.
So what's the equilibrium number?
It's a five-figure number.
I don't know what that five-figure number is precisely,
but that's what it would be.
so so oh my gosh i missed it at 40 what did you say 4300 300 some yeah you know if you don't own
any you need to own some now the bitcoin same thing yeah you don't own any bitcoin you need
to own some now yeah uh if you've got some sure you can then you can fiddle around with well i'm
going to wait till the old trades is 3500 and i'll buy some more i need bitcoin at 75 000 yeah
If it only if you already own it.
If you don't own it, today is the day you need to take it.
Today is great.
Okay, so talk to us because I remember one of the most shocking moments of my entire life happened sometime in the last five years, probably in the last two or three, when I found out that the United States is valuing their gold at like $40 an ounce.
Can you speak to that?
How did that happen?
How is that?
That makes no sense.
I know the United States weren't alone in doing that.
So if you can kind of unpack why that was the case and why that's still the case today.
Well, it actually was accurate, right?
Until August 1571, because it was Bretton Woods.
It was agreed upon $40 an ounce dollar price.
And that was going to be the lock-in for around the world.
Everybody could trust that price, et cetera.
Again, the United States, Nixon, August 1571 says,
we're just kidding about trading gold for dollars.
What?
You know, that's right up there with we're just going to take 300 billion of Russian foreign reserves.
Same sort of world changing.
We're in a totally different world now.
That's what happened in August of 71.
So on the books, if you look at, say, July of 71, the United States has 8,200 tons of gold at $42 an ounce.
Therefore, the asset is worth this.
Why did they never change the dollar price of how they carried it on the books?
I think there are various and sundry explanations to that.
my general explanation is
kind of the Warren Buffett
David Bonson
what's the guy in Nashville again?
Ramsey.
Yeah, Dave Ramsey.
Come on, that was a long time ago.
Yeah, sure, it's nice for historical
but let's get serious
we're in the 21st century.
We call this,
Lewis would call this
chronological snobbery
is what you're saying.
That's exactly right.
And I have asked the fight, laugh, face guys, and I'd ask anybody.
I'm not.
David Bonson is a Christian brother.
Dave Ramsey is a Christian brother.
I would love to be on a stage and debate them anywhere, anytime.
And now, of course, they're going to have, I don't know what they're going to say now.
Their advice was terrible.
Absolutely terrible.
Hey, bring your Bitcoin little brother with you, too.
What are you getting on that stage, okay?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So that's going on.
So they just decided to peg it at $40.
Okay.
And that initially, now again, you could argue that's even dubious because then you go back
to 1913, you go back to these different points where they've pegged the dollar to a certain
ratio of gold.
Even that's totally arbitrary.
Like none of that is based in reality.
It's again, it's a government or a financial institution trying to exercise a level of
control that only belongs to God, you know, in, in, in order to set a price for, you know, uh,
for purposes that basically are convenient for them. That's really what this is. But so,
so every other country though, even since 1971 has since marked their gold to market. What is the,
what is the, you know, to the market price, what is the motivation for the United States to,
to be kind of the lone outlier, or at least one of the lone outliers who have not yet valued their,
their goal to the market price.
Again, I think it's really the mindset has to get rid of it and to not elevate it to its proper position.
Sure.
And I think that's changing.
I think that Trump and Bissett are going to market to market.
Really?
Today, oh, yeah, that's a matter of time.
Yeah.
I don't know what their agenda is, but you can sort of see as they've gone forward since he got there in January of this year, they are slowly figuring out what they need to do, what's next.
And that's going to be one of the next things that happened.
Because you're going to talk about an asset that will be a trillion-dollar asset.
And if you really let it go, and imagine moving the decimal point one to the right, so it's not 4,200, it's 42,000.
All of a sudden, the U.S. has a $10 trillion asset.
Well, wait a minute.
If I've got a $10 trillion asset versus the debt pile I have, now the debt pile doesn't look so hopelessly impossible.
Yeah. So this has been something that has been talked about, you know, like we could just revalue gold. Guys like Luke Groman have talked about this. You know, we could the United States could just revalue gold at $50,000 an ounce. And then all of a sudden, again, it's totally ridiculous and arbitrary. But like, again, it would it would at least conceptually on paper make their their debts not look as bad. And so that would try to buy back some credibility.
right well and i don't want to just arbitrarily revalue it but yeah but when i say let it go what
i mean is let the market actually figure out what this thing is worth yep and i think if you do that
and again go back to the do what historically has been the relationship between what the dollar
price of gold is and the amount of credit that has been issued by the united states
Let that market price clear.
And right now, I think that marketplace clears, I would guess, more along the lines of the $15,000 to $20,000 an ounce.
And that assumes no more going forward.
And I can't make that assumption based on anything.
Even with Trump, right?
I think Trump and Bissette are doing some good things.
here's why i really think they're going to let gold's price go is because they do want to do
some things that would require more government spending yeah maybe arguably in the long run
they actually are going to shut washington down um which if that actually really came to pass
then bitcoin bitcoin and gold are going to go down in dollar price right yeah i mean they're
they're gonna because it's oh they're actually financially responsible fiscally responsible
Yeah. But then you're like, all right, is this going to be allowed to happen? You know, because like if you actually drain the swamp, like some of the there's so many of these people who I mean, so many departments and so many of these different things that have just all of their incentives are to keep that thing open and for business.
even though again we all know it's it's doomed over the long term over the long haul
all right i mean this is it's best beset is an interesting figure uh for those i mean i'm guessing
most people know this but beset uh made his nickel uh helping short the helping uh george
soro short the pound so if there's somebody who if there's somebody who understands what it what's
required to basically take you know take down uh you know a a humongous you know global dominating
currency unit, uh, you know, to see the writing on the wall, uh, his, his friendliness with Bitcoin,
uh, has always fascinated me since I, since I heard about it. Um, because you just think about
like, if, if he sees this thing, uh, going down, he basically sees, you know, there's, there's no
hope for this thing. Then, you know, he, he's an interesting person. He's got institutional
knowledge that few others, you know, would have. Um, so yeah, it would be, I would imagine he'd be
long gold too. He is. He's personally long and he's an advocate for both Bitcoin and gold in
the White House. And he's the secretary of the treasury. Yeah. Yeah. So again, so these guys,
so guys like Bonson, guys like Ramsey, again, we talked about this. These are not first principles
thinkers when it comes to money and economics. They're great, brilliant guys on a whole host of
other points. They are expert system gamers. They've figured out, hey, this is the system
that's been in place for 50 years. The problem, though, is when you confuse that for having some
sort of first principles knowledge of the world over a much longer time horizon and how it's
worked for how and why it's worked the way that it's worked. And so I think this is the blind
spot that they have in the trap that they've fallen into. And by extension, they're bringing
a lot of people with them. Correct. Absolutely. So what are some of the things that you or some
of the kind of your approaches for having this conversation with people? I'm sure, again,
just like with Bitcoin, the best argument is just the price. For a lot of people, seeing its price
go up is the thing that gets their attention. But what are some of the other conversations that you
have with people to try to help them see the value proposition of gold over the long time Sure So you and I did the podcast whatever it was a debate with CrossPolitik in April in Moscow
Yep.
And prior to that, in September of 23, I did just a CrossPolitik show.
That's right.
Um, and my, uh, my point then was like, do not get spooled up about what the dollar price is of these assets.
What you're the most important thing, especially for a, uh, individual Christian, an individual Christian or individual Christian family to whom God has bequeathed a lot of, uh, material worldly wealth.
or certainly Christian churches that have giant cash balances.
All three of those entities, and they can be small.
I don't care about the size so much.
The only reason size matters is because if you're somebody
that has a material impact on the culture
and you have all of your assets sitting in the system,
you're a fool.
And I mean that not to be...
You're being a fool if you think, what happens if Trump doesn't come back?
Do you think these orcs, these Antifa orcs, are going to spend five seconds thinking about the sanctity of your cash balance at a bank?
No, they're going to figure out how to take it.
So what does gold and Bitcoin do?
It allows you to lower the risk of that sort of event occurring.
What are you talking about, Jim?
That's ridiculous.
that'll never happen. Go look at what happened in 2013 on the island of Cyprus. Cyprus is an EU
member. Their two banks were functionally insolvent because their core asset was Greek sovereign debt,
AAA rated by every rating agency, and they were trading at 30 or 40 cents on the dollar.
You know, anything about fractional reserve banking, if you have your core asset is at 30
on the dollar, you are insolvent.
Yeah.
That means you can't pay your depositors what you owe them.
They went to the ECB.
You're going to have to help us out.
The ECB, which essentially is the Germans, said, no, we're not going to do it.
Well, what are we supposed to do?
What you're going to do is you're going to bail in your depositors.
What does that mean?
That means that if it's any amount over the insured amount, which over there I think is
100,000 euros. Yeah. Any amount over the insured amount was free game for the two Cypriot banks
to go to their depositors and say, hey, depositor, you've got $10 million in euros in our bank.
Yes, the first 100,000, rest assured, that's insured. Now let's talk about the 900 and
9,900,000 euros that remain. Yeah. Long story short, the haircut for those depositors was
50%.
You woke up one day
and you lost 50%.
You were given,
you thought you had 10 million euros,
you really only had five,
and they gave you 5 million euros worth
of new bank stock.
Well, nobody wants that.
If I'm a Christian church,
that God is blessed with assets,
growing congregation,
da-da-da-da-da-da,
you're out of your mind
if you don't think
a socialist, communist, progressive government,
you don't have a target on your back.
If you're a Christian family,
if you're a Christian family that, again,
God's given you a lot of material wealth,
don't be foolish.
Get some of it off the grid by buying Bitcoin
and buying physical gold.
Push back.
Well, if they come after that,
they'll come after this too.
Okay, but did I buy you some time
time. Did I buy you some time? Because the first thing they've got to worry about is what are we
going to do about all these accounts at JP Morgan? What are we going to do about all these accounts
at Regions Bank? They're going to have bigger fish to fry first than some guy with, you know,
five million or church with $5 million worth of Bitcoin. They don't have time to fool with that
yet. They will, they'll get there. But if I've got time to move around beforehand, I've at least
on that. Yes. It's the same argument. It's the same insane people who make the argument, oh,
what is your second amendment going to do against the U S government? It's like, Hey,
go research the Vietnam war. Like Vietnam has way less guns than the South. Let's say for instance,
and like, again, the United States wasn't able to take them. They weren't able to defeat them
just because of the nature of, you know, an armed public. It's, it's not as easy to take down as,
you know, as people think that it is. And so it's a similar, similar argument for gold. Like if you,
you know, they're not going to be coming after the people with, you know, again, the average person,
$50,000 worth of gold. Like, I'm sorry, you're just, you're not even on their radar. It just
doesn't even, and like people will go to executive order 6102 and they'll be like, look, what if they
make it? It's like, listen, they were going after large institutions in like wealthy people. They
weren't going door to door, like to try to get every nickel, every golden nickel from every little,
like that. It's just crazy. All right. I think another thing that's really important that I'm,
I'm like working on, you know, articles in, uh, you know, basically a longer form piece as well
to try to help people. Cause I think like the issue behind the issue, the issue underneath
these issues is, is just like how to properly think about government. And I think the average,
the average person just has a conception of government, like a Christian conception of
government. The average Christian, when they think about government, boom, they go, they run right to
Romans 13. And they're like, listen, the government, like God has ordained the government.
And so like, they just uncritically suck that down and don't stop for a second to think about,
wait, is, does this mean like, does this verse talk about the fact that governments can just
create whatever reality on whatever front that they want to? And because they've got this rope,
this magic blank check of Romans 13, it's just, they can just do whatever they want to. And it's
like, well, obviously not. The apostle Paul was put to death because he disobeyed the government.
And so I just think for the vast majority of Christians, they never, because they've lived
in peacetime, they've been Christians at peacetime or what they thought was peacetime. They haven't
really thought critically about like, but wait a second, where do we draw the line? And so I think
something like COVID was a very helpful exercise in helping facilitate this conversation for a whole
generation of people who hadn't had cause to think about it, or at least they didn't realize
they had cause to think about it. And I think that, again, something like, you could talk about
central bank digital currencies, even more, a lot of the things that you're talking about,
these are things, these are reasons why Christians should be thinking critically.
The scriptures do have an incredible wealth of resources for how to think about situations like
these. And we have multiple, dozens of examples of the people of God standing up against oppressive
governments and insane governments that try to make themselves gods and try to force their
citizens to treat them as all omnipotent gods. The scriptures have a bunch of examples of that,
and we have examples of how the people of God answered. And it wasn't simply to genuflect while
you quote Romans 13. So I think that this is something that the church really needs this
conversation more than ever, at least in the American context. And I think that's something
that's going to be, I'm encouraged really, again, it's just like we see the same thing with Israel,
right? Israel, the way that they woke up to reality and the way that they were really able
to see what time it was, was through pain. And so for a lot of people, it's taken the events of
COVID or it's taken the events of, it's going to take the hyperinflation or at least whatever you
want to call the inflation that we're experiencing, which is really, if you're looking to anything of
value, 15, 20%, you know, 10, 15, 20% over the last few years here, it's going to take that level
of pain to wake them up to this reality. And, you know, philosophy, as much as it pains me,
is not, you know, it's not going to be sufficient for the average person. It's going to take real
world pain. And so again, it's always does. Yeah, it's always what's required. Yeah, exactly.
Exactly. But so for, I mean, just for maybe, you know, we're coming up on an hour mark here.
So like for people who are, again, they're looking at this price. I mean, I've seen video of people
from, I think New York City and then also other places around the world, there's long lines to
the gold shop. People who are, I would imagine the vast majority of them are buying. I'm sure
you have some insane people who are selling, like they're looking at this and they're thinking,
hey, this is good news. My gold, this gold coin or these gold coins that my grandfather left me
have doubled or tripled in value.
What would be your,
what you would say to these people
beyond what you've already said?
Well, again,
do not focus on dollar price,
especially if you're a Bonson, Ramsey,
Buffett guy
and you hadn't gotten anywhere near this.
You've got to rethink
what we're really talking about.
What we're talking about is,
in Goal's case,
since the dawn of God's creation in the Garden of Eden.
This has been pointed out as something he put in the creation
that would be a standard of value
that has morphed into value all over the world
from then to this day where gold is actual money.
What do I mean when I say that?
I mean a unit of account, a unit of exchange,
but also a store of value and a store of labor.
You cannot say that about the U.S. dollar.
You can't say it about the yen.
You can't say it about the euro.
You say, what do you mean?
Why, isn't my labor stored there?
Well, no, because it gets depreciated by the fact that there is no handcuffs on these government entities to prevent flooding the supply of it.
Yeah.
Because they do something else on the debt side, and all they're trying to do is balance the supply of the credits and the debits.
Well, if I put all of my labor into a fiat currency, well, I'm going to get whatever that fiat currency does.
And we know from the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the U.S. dollar has lost 99% of its purchasing power, whereas gold has not lost its purchasing power.
Yeah. Bitcoin, the only issue I have with Bitcoin, at least right now, which doesn't mean it's always going to have that problem. You and I have talked about this, is that if I overlay Bitcoin's price performance with the NASDAQ price performance, I'm getting the same volatility statistics.
So it doesn't mean that's always going to be true.
In fact, I am hoping and wanting to see Bitcoin zig when the NASDAQ zags, especially Bitcoin hold its value when the NASDAQ goes down 25%.
That will be a great day.
But that's why I say, even for the Bitcoin maxi guy, I'm just saying, look, I'm not telling you to get out of Bitcoin.
If your volatility appetite is great, yes, you should have more of it.
Just don't have zero of gold.
And I would say to the gold now, that's silly to say zero in Bitcoin.
Because it would be irrational to say that the advent of blockchain technology and how the, what's his name?
Satoshi Neto.
Satoshi Neto, yeah.
How he designed the thing was absolutely brilliant.
And he did everything he was supposed to do to make essentially an intangible form of what gold actually is.
So why would you not want to own both of those?
And my point to the wealthy, again, I keep saying wealthy only because those guys are the most vulnerable.
Not because I care about them more.
It's I want the small family that's got five grand to put into one gold coin.
I want him to do that too.
Or even less wealth to get silver.
Have something where you're not, or small amounts, 0.0005 of a Bitcoin.
Get this stuff because you've got to do it.
For the underlying reason, it's the same irrespective of what your wealth profile has.
But for the wealthy church and for the wealthy family or individual that is Christian, open your eyes.
You are a target.
Don't act like this has never happened.
It has happened in the recent past in 2013, and it is on the books in the United States in the form of the Dodd-Frank law.
Go to Title II of Dodd-Frank.
You will see there bail-in law.
So if you are over, and you know what a lot of people are doing too.
Oh, well, I'm going to get around that.
I've got $10 million, so what I will do is I'll open 40 different CDs with 40 different banks.
To which my response is, do you seriously believe that the FDIC, if we got into the situation where they had to provide the insurance, is going to pay you on 40 accounts?
They're not going to do that.
They're going to say, no, sir, you're a rich guy.
don't you're not in that that just betrays a lack of understanding of fdic go go do the deep dive on
that one it's not going to be there when at least it is in the way the third saying it's going to be
there um yeah and so this is man i would i would encourage you go go uh research gold again this
is something and go go get some gold like if this it is something that makes sense uh even just over
even you know if you do as like an insurance policy this is what i just tell i tell people
all the time like this this is something it makes sense to own there are because again if for no
other reason than there are still tons of people in the United States who understand and value gold
and who are going to be, you're going to be able to use it to pay for things, you know, if,
if something crazy happened. I think the, you know, due to the monetary debasement there,
you know, there's people have less and less money. And what they do have is bound up in things like
their stock portfolios are bound up within, you know, bound up within their homes. And so there's
less and less people who do have, you know, a meaningful amount of liquid resources. Uh, but I
do think that, you know, it is something that people need to take seriously. Uh, because again,
we, we live in insane times. Uh, when, when you have a treasury secretary saying things like debt
is just money we owe ourselves, uh, you know, you've gone, you have entered into the, into the,
you know, into the crazy town. So, uh, Jim really appreciate your, your time. Um, actually the one,
the one other thing I did want to push back on and just in terms of the,
the Genesis, you know, the usage of gold, the one thing,
and I didn't say this when we were talking because I, I just, I was like, ah,
or when we were had the debate,
the thing that came to me afterwards was just thinking about, so that,
the way that I look at that was not, I wasn't, I don't read Genesis.
I believe it's, is it one, what is it? One or two, two, two,
Genesis two, when it mentions that,
I don't necessarily see that as like, this is God saying, uh, you know,
that, that gold is that people should use gold. I look at that as, okay. So Moses who wrote the
Pentateuch, he's writing to a people, you know, however many thousands of years later after Genesis
happens, like he writes them and he's telling them, Hey, he's like, Hey, just so you know,
because now by that point, gold actually is like gold's used pretty much ubiquitously in that time.
And so he's just basically saying, Hey, just by virtue of a, you know, just to let you know,
like, you know, gold existed and it was back then and it was in this place. They had really good gold
here. And so it's like, and so you could argue there's some relationship between that and kind
of what you were, you were arguing. Uh, but like, I, I think that, I mean, cause again, you, I do
think God, like God created everything. And I think that God created gold to be used for this,
this purpose. Um,
I read something that there's some scientists who think that all of the gold that exists on Earth came via this asteroid.
And so that's super interesting to me too.
God literally sent an asteroid with this thing that was proven to be the best money that's existed on Earth.
And so, yeah, so that would be one thing.
But again, the broader point still stands.
I think this is a good gift, a good tool that facilitates just transactions between people, which allows societies to be built.
This is another thing I point out is that every civilization you would ever want to be part of has been founded upon scarce money at the very least.
And in all the ones you would actually want to live in, gold and silver.
And so to look at and think that we have arrived and we no longer need this dumb rock, I just think is chronological snobbery to the highest degree.
It's not knowing what time it is.
It's despising.
It's breaking the fifth commandment.
It's despising your fathers, which we know does not just apply to our physical, biological fathers.
Do not fall prey to this.
This is a danger, and I think that we would be fools
to not take seriously the history
and the way that gold has protected people
from totalitarian governments
and a whole host of other threats.
So, Jim, really appreciate you.
Grateful for your friendship and for just your time coming on the podcast Tell people where they can find more about you and ALPS and then we go from there Yeah so ALPS A as in the
European Mountain Range, that name came from our original partners, which is Liechtenstein Precious
Metals, built by two families from scratch. They purposely wanted to get out of the banking system.
They did so, and they have their own vault, their own.
All Lloyds of London insured, so it's not like that you, oh, gosh,
I put it with these guys and never saw them again.
That's not how it works.
It is fully insured.
If anything goes wrong or they do what they're not supposed to do,
Lloyds will pay you, will make you whole.
The same for United States.
Guys, my partner is Texas Precious Metals in the little town of Shiner, Texas,
It's about halfway between San Antonio and Houston.
Christian family, the Caspers, built that from scratch.
It is a state-of-the-art, probably the state-of-the-art vault in the world right now.
Trading, storage, all of that.
I was just there last week.
The value amount of gold and silver that are in our vault now is $7 billion.
So there is no size that we can't handle, institutional, family, office, or church.
And again, that's my main message is the churches have got to think about, they have to understand
how God has made them They have to understand we are in a fallen world where we have targets on our back and we got to do something about it So Alps Freshest Metals Group
So the website, www.alpspmg.com.
Or the best way to get in touch with me
is my telephone, 251-377-2197.
It really is because that's always on me.
and it's easy to have conversations and all the email back and forth.
But all that's on the website as well.
It's a very Spartan website on purpose.
We're not trying to get into competition with guys that sell gold coins on the Internet and stuff.
I can and do and beat those guys in competition, and I just don't want to set it up that way.
I think it's a very personal, especially when you're talking about a church elder board.
This is a personal conversation.
I need to have face-to-face with them or certainly a family office or individual.
But I have small accounts, too, all over the place where they bought 1,000, 2,000 silver coins.
We will do that business, too, and beat what you could do on the Internet.
So hopefully we can add value certainly to Christian brothers and sisters.
And if they're not a Christian brother or sister, we can add value to those guys too.
Sure.
Great.
And so, just real quick on that front.
So I mean you guys there are these vaults you know there a vault in Lichtenstein and there also a vault in Texas Is this something where customers can ask to take possession If they want to get their gold sent to them or something like that that still an option
Oh, absolutely.
The man of second you asked for.
Sure.
Compare and contrast, I have a million dollars worth of gold in the vault.
Sure.
Jim, we want to take it out because we built our own vault.
Fine, Al-Hai, do you want to pick it up, or do you want us to ship it to you?
Go try to get a million dollars in cash out of any bank anywhere.
They will tell you no.
And so with you guys, there's no re-hypothecation.
You guys are zero.
Zero.
We are bailment custodians, and we are paid a fee to take care of your gold and silver.
Our job is to take care of it.
We have no other job.
Yep.
All right.
Cool.
Jim, really appreciate you.
And we will chat with you hopefully sometime in the near future here.
Again, if we see gold get up to those five-figure prices that you're presuming will bring you back as a prophet and a son of a prophet.
And then, again, for the rest of the audience, go find some information from Jim and then go like, subscribe, and all the different places to help other people find these resources.
We're grateful for you.
We'll see you on the next episode of the Thank God for Bitcoin podcast.
Well, thank you so much, Jordan.
You're very kind.
And it's, as I say, a true honor to be on your program.
Well, thank you.
You got it.