2199 FBF: One Nation Under Gold, The Big Money, The Great Depression by James Ledbetter of Inc Magazine, Reuters, TIME & The Village Voice

Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday. Your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has hand picked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy.

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Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to the Creating Wealth show, episode number 857. This is your host, Jason Hartman. And I want to thank you so much for joining me today. We are going to do the intro portion with one of our investment counselors, Carrie, who's back on the show. And I promise I'm going to let her talk this time.

Thanks, Jason.

You got to do some talking. Okay, so I'm gonna shut up.

I'll butt in.

Just butt in. You know, you gotta just take control and see, Carrie, you're too nice. That's the thing. You're too polite. And our guest today will be James Ledbetter. He is the editor of Inc. Magazine, He's a contributor for Reuters, Time magazine and the Village Voice. And the guy's just got a great history. He's author of a couple of books. His most recent one is One Nation Under Gold. And you might be thinking, well, you know, go. Why are you talking about gold, Jason? This is a real estate show. I'm telling you folks, even though I am completely not a gold bug, you've heard my story. I'm. I don't want to say I'm like anti gold. I'm just not pro gold, okay? I'm kind of neutral. I think that most of these investments, precious metals, stocks, pretty much everything except income property and your own business are pretty darn lame because they're not multi dimensional. And income property is the most historically proven asset class in the world because it's a multi dimensional asset class. But I think you'll find the interview with James, who is by the way, not a gold bug either. He's acting as a journalist when he wrote the book. And I think you'll find it to be interesting because you know, it's historically, it's a big deal. It's an important commodity and an important form of money. So Carrie, welcome back. So we want to jump in. You've been doing a really nice job of cataloging all of these questions we're getting from our AirPod contest. You can win some Apple AirPods if you go to Jason hartman.com contest. We're giving those away. I, as a podcast listener, you will love this product. If you don't have these AirPods yet, there's like a six week wait for them. They are phenomenal. I love this product. It's probably the best product Apple's done in five years or so. So we're giving some of those away and we'll wrap up the contest real soon and announce the winner. But as you have been entering the contest, you've been posting some great questions and comments which we're going to endeavor to address on the show. So Kerry, one of our show guests and longtime client who just got up between he and his wife sue to their 20 home Fannie Mae Freddie Mac limit, they've now got 20 properties. That is Captain Gary Pinkerton who has been on the show before. He has a question here in your document. Why don't you tell us what his question is and that's going to lead segue very well into related topic. Go ahead.

One of the largest risks to investing success is not doing a good deal with a bad person. So the challenge Gary's had is finding is determining in the good times when everyone's making the money who the actual bad people are. They show themselves when they when as Warren Buffett says, the tide goes out. So his question was, what have we found are the telling signs that we can highlight to find a bad person?

That's a, that's a great question, Carrie. And you know, I have long said I would rather be in a B market. Like, you know, not the best real estate market. I'm talking geographically, like not the best city. But I'd rather have an A team in a B market in a B city than the other way around, a B team in an A market because the team is the most important thing thing. This whole thing lives or dies on the quality of, you know, not only the properties, but the provider, the local market specialists that we pick. And that's why, that's why we're not doing deals in foreign countries. I mean, I don't want to say we never will. I just haven't found one that works. You know, we're not doing this crappy stuff in these third world developing countries where there's no regulation and you have no recourse whatsoever. And there's just a lot of promoters promoting a lot of crap out there. But, but even in the US there's a lot of crooks. And what happens, like Gary's comment about the tide going out is when the money is just flowing like crazy and the market is crazy. That's when screening becomes a big thing. I remember when I was 20 years old and I was taking real estate classes at Century 21's corporate office in Anaheim, California, and Dennis McKenzie, who was the author of several of the real estate books, was just this great teacher.

Talked about that. He said, in a booming market, your biggest job is screening. You know, it's screening the people you're dealing with because every flake comes out of the woodwork. You know, in, in a, in a recessionary time when it's a. More of a buyer's market than a seller's market, then you know, only the strong survive. Okay. And that. Well, not completely. Sometimes the weak survive too, and the unethical. But mostly, you know, so screening is the big job. And Carrie, that is what you do?

Yes, yes. On a regular basis, I am constant following up with providers that we have, some from the past, some new ones, and just re screening and making sure, you know, nothing comes up. That would be a big red flag, which we found lately in one of the providers we are about to take on.

Yeah, yeah. So this. Tell us which market is this? We're going to save them by not getting sued again and not mentioning their name. But tell us about this company, this, this XYZ real estate company and where they're located.

So XYZ is located in Toledo, Ohio, and we thought they were a unique provider. They had some good, strong returns, you know, good credibility out there. And they were. You could only do cash deals though, they weren't financed. So that was one kind of, okay, unique idea that we could bring on for those cash buyers. Not your ultimate ideal buyer, but, you know, just another option. So we said, okay, let's give it a try and let's get it out there. But towards the end of just about to launch them, we were going through the routine of how do we close the investor? What's the process. We'll offer referrals for inspection reports. And right away they said, no, there's no inspection reports. They buy the turnkey property as is.

Are you freaking kidding? That's unbelievable.

You had to get your inspection report after you close the property.

Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday. Your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has hand picked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy.

And so that was a huge red flag that, you know.

Can these people actually say this crap with a straight face? I mean, you know, inspection report after you close. The whole point of an inspection is to be a good buyer and not make a mistake and do it before you close. Obviously. I mean, that seems so obvious. Right, right. But these people really, with a straight face were saying that our buyers were not allowed to do inspections before buying. They, in other words, they wanted to pull the wool over their eye. And by the way, Kerry, this is one of the things our listeners need to understand. Whenever you have someone who will only do cash deals, that should be an alert. I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying buyer. You know that old Latin phrase caveat emptor, I think is how you say it. Buyer. Let the buyer beware. Well, if it's a cash deal, the buyer needs to be more aware because when you have a lender involved in the transaction, that's sort of another check and balance, right? They're going to do an appraisal. You know, they're going to have some requirements. They're not going to protect you from everything. I mean, it's, you know, it's not your lender's job to do your home inspection. Okay. But you're going to have some, you know, additional additional safeguard there, an additional check and balance. Whereas if it's cash, it's just, you know, the Wild West. I mean, there, there's not going to be any lenders title insurance policy. So, you know, it's more possible you could have title problems. It's, you know, there's not going to be an appraisal. That and appraisers inspect properties. So it's not a home inspection. There is a major difference. But you know, the appraiser does a basic visual inspection just looking at the house. And then when they say something like this, like don't have a home inspection, you got to just instantly think, what are they hiding? It's, that's just absurd, frickin ridiculous. I'M mad.

Yeah, right, yeah. What kind of secrets do they have? And you're not going to find out as an investor out of state, you know, that's what the lender, as Jason said, the lender or the appraiser, the inspector, they're going to find that stuff out for you. And being not sight unseen, you have no idea. It's just too risky. Way too risky.

It is. It's way too risky. And I mean the fact that they would even put this in a document is beyond absurd. Okay, let's just look at this. Let's just look at this email you sent me. I got to blow up the screen because it's on voxer here. But.

Seriously, so, so it says, seriously though, this house is one of the best deals of 2017. It's absolutely stunning. Three bedroom, blah, blah, blah. And Kerry, is there anything we should share with our audience out of this image? You know the one I'm talking about, right?

Yeah, I have it in front of me. Well, it's just the language isn't up to standards for what our investors, our clients would want.

Oh, I love what they say. This is effing. Okay. The F word. A class deal. And in my opinion, we're 10,000 below market.

Right, right. Yep. That's the same one. Yeah.

So it's just, it doesn't look like s, like shit.

Yeah. So a few explicit words in there that just, it's just not up to standards. And those are the red flags that just stopped at all that we just had to halt this and pull it from a potential provider.

Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's a great point. And one of the things that I just love about you and the rest of our team, Carrie, and is that, you know, you really all take the long term view. You know, you're not, you're not like these quick buck salespeople that are certainly exist in the world, you know, and I think one of the things that might be beneficial about our company culture that makes that true is that you guys have to deal with all the problems. So, you know, because the investment counselors are the one that ones that have to follow up and when the client calls and has problems, you're doing kind of that customer service role, if you will. And, and I think that kind of ties the two together. It certainly not the most efficient thing for the business. But you know, I think, I think it's a good thing to have to put the investment counselors at stake, if you will, in, in the client's success.

Right. Yeah, I mean, we know you're out there, you're coming to us and you're going to buy a property. So it's just to find you the right property. We're not just going to throw you something that, you know, year or two you're going to just come back and growling at us, you know, you're going to buy it, we know it. So we want to help you the right way.

Yeah. So we're property agnostic. We are area agnostic and we are local market specialist agnostic. I do want to make one distinction on what I said about cash deals earlier and that is that if you do a cash deal with a cash only local market specialist, that's when I want the alert sign to go up. If you do a cash deal with a local market specialist that, you know, normally fine, lets you finance the deals, okay, that's a different thing. That's not a big cause for concern. It's a little bit of one. Because just remember there's no safeguards. Like no one's going to tell you, you know, and I've done this myself, I mean, you know, I, I try to admit my own mistakes, okay, and you know, be transparent about them. I've made many of them. I have closed on properties that I purchased with cash with no insurance. No one alerted me, you know, I just wasn't used to it. I forgot about it basically. And if you don't have a lender, the lender is not going to say, hey, that's a condition of closing, right? If you're buying with cash, they're just going to close the deal for you, okay? And, and I have literally lost a few sleepless nights where I thought, oh my God, I have this property like first thing in the morning, you know, if it's an east coast property I got at 7am or 6am, I'm up because it's 9am there and I'm gonna get an insurance policy. My God, I can't believe I did that. What a screw up. Like literally if someone slipped and fell on that property or if the property burnt down that night, I'd be there. That's it. You know, I'm dead, you know, I'm just paying for it. And so that, that can happen on a cash deal, right? There's no appraisal, there's no value safeguard. So you got to be a little more concerned about is the value really there? Okay? Because there's no appraisal. Not to say that appraisals are by any means perfect. They're massively flawed. I mean, appraisers appraise properties too high and too low all the time. Okay. It's, it's not perfect by any means, but you know, it's something, right? It's an additional check. So you got to be careful on cash deals.

Well, this one particular provider that we ended up passing, they did have around $100,000 deals, you know, where lenders could take that property, but other providers might have it under 60,000, where you do have to do the cash deal and you can't get a lender to finance that. So that's one thing. Also that they were pretty higher end deals to not make it just cash, but we could have financed it.

Yeah, let me elaborate on that for you because I'm not sure people know what you mean. So on. On the really inexpensive lower end properties, a lot of times those are sold for cash just because they're sort of not worth financing sometimes for necessarily the buyer and the lender. A lot of lenders have minimum loan amounts. It's like, look, you know, they're not going to make a loan for under $50,000. So if the house is 60 and you put, you know, 25% down, well, the loan amounts way below $50,000. Okay. And it's just not worth it for them. I mean, you know, like a car loan is bigger than 50 grand a lot of times. Right. So a lot of those lower end properties are sold for cash. But again, we've talked about the myth of the forty thousand dollar house too. So that's another topic we won't go into today. But yeah, yeah, good stuff. Well, Carrie, thank you for sharing this. Gary also made a comment. Do you want to share that with our audience?

Sure.

Yeah. So Gary's comment is Jason is an educator at heart and has proven again and again that he is a principled, ethical person that maintains a consistent message. He sticks to his ten plus commandments. So many podcasts and radio show hosts blow in the direction of the individual playing to be on the show or that is sponsoring the show. Awesome content, great education, incredible person.

Gary, you're my biggest fan. I love you. Thank you. That's awesome. That's awesome. But, you know, yes, you gotta be consistent and you gotta believe in something. I think the problem, you know, I remember a long time ago, one of my early mentors, Dennis Waitley, I remember listening to his tapes. Yes, they were tapes, cassette tapes that used to, you know, become tangled and the tape used to come out of the machine and the problems we Used to have Carrie. Before your time.

Watch it.

You do remember cassette tapes, right? You're not that young.

I do, of course.

Yeah.

Boys to men.

Boys to men on cassette. Okay.

Yep.

Do you remember? I bet you don't know what an eight track tape is, though.

No, no.

You don't even know what I'm talking about.

I'm trying.

So that was like this bigger cassette tape that you would put into your car. And it was like big. It was like the size of a. An old VHS videotape, you know, or the size of a box, a book, a small book. I mean, it was ridiculous. Eight track tapes. Yeah. Yeah, I even remember those.

So what was I gonna say about that? I don't know where I was going with that. Age tapes. Oh, Dennis Whiteley, he said, you've got to stand for something. If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything. And, you know, you got to have some core belief system. And that's what the 10 commandments, or as Gary said, the 10 plus, because now we actually have 20. Really help you do as an investor, they help you stand for something. You have an actual philosophy, something that's grounded. You have a real outline and a real methodology. And, you know, those are. Those are sort of your foundational principles. And you go from there. Of course, there's more to it than that, but that's your foundation. And it's, you know, it's something that I think is just. Just critical. So, Carrie, thank you so much for joining us. Let's. Before we get to our guest, let's tell people about some of the stuff we're thinking about. Okay? And I'm talking about Hawaii. Remember our messages back and forth yesterday about Hawaii?

Yes.

Yes. Okay, so.

No, I don't. Why don't you explain?

Oh, were you. Were you not in this conversation? Maybe it was just Sarah and I. I don't know. Okay.

I'm attributing it to you. I don't think you were on that chat group. It was with Sarah. So we're thinking about doing our first event in Hawaii. Yeah. Profits in paradise, maybe. We'll call it Profits in Paradise. That'd be a good name. So you know a lot of. A lot of our clients in Asia and, you know, that side of the world it'd be. And we have a lot in Hawaii who are listening. Hi, Hawaiian Aloha. Not hi, hello, aloha to our Hawaiian clients. You know, I just thought it'd be nice to go to Hawaii. We've been talking about doing that for the Venture Alliance Mastermind group. And heck, maybe we'll just do a seminar there. So stay tuned for that. You know, we might do it. We might actually do it. So keep that in mind. But in the meantime, yeah, wouldn't it be cool? Go to Jason hartman.com contest and enter to win some Apple AirPods. And let's get to our guest, James Ledbetter, editor of Inc. Magazine. And Carrie, thanks so much for joining me on the intro. Here's James.

It's my pleasure to welcome James Ledbetter to the show. He is founding editor of Slate's financial site the Big Money, former opinion editor at Reuters and editor at Inc. Magazine, Inc.com Time and the Village Voice, author of the New York Times best selling book the Great Depression, A Diary and the new book One Nation Under Gold, How One Precious Metal Has Dominated the American Imagination for Four Centuries. James, welcome. How are you?

I'm great. Thanks for having me, Jason.

My pleasure. Give us a sense of geography. Where are you located?

New York City, Manhattan.

Fantastic. So the new book is quite interesting and I just want to say to our audience to maybe start because we were talking a little bit off air about this, you are not a gold bug and you don't really have an agenda. You're a journalist, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've written this book, One Nation Under Gold, about the American obsession with this particular metal. That doesn't mean that I own it. It doesn't mean that I advocate that people own it. Also true that I am not saying people should not own it. My point is more historical, that gold, for better or worse, is written into the American DNA. It's in our Constitution. When you have the discovery of gold In California in 1848, you create all of a sudden and kind of from nothing this sense that the west coast is just as important, if not more important than East Coast. For a brief time, the San Francisco Stock Exchange becomes more valuable than the New York Stock Exchange during this period.

Globally. Suddenly this kind of quasi bankrupt former colony called the United States becomes a global center of power of finance because of gold. And that again, for better or worse, is written into who we are as a country. And you can't erase it. You can't quite at any given point make sense of it. But that's who we are and that's the thesis of my book.

Fantastic. So, you know, you write about something that I guess no one has ever really written about before. There's something that happened under the Johnson administration in the 60s. Now we all Know, you know, that Nixon finally closed the gold window in 1971. And, you know, we'll talk about that, but let's go kind of in a chronological fashion and tell us about what happened with lbj.

So Jason, let me set this up a little bit. In the post war period, you have what's globally known as the Bretton woods system.

In this system, the dollar is fixed to gold at the price of $35 per ounce of gold. Every other major currency in the world, the franc, the deutsche mark, the yen, is fixed to the dollar. So it's all kind of tied to gold. And the bands in which these currencies can trade is very, very narrow. This works really well. It works arguably too well. The development of Western Europe and Japan in the 50s and 60s creates a system in which you have so many dollars and so many dollar denominated securities out there in the world that if they were all to be redeemed at the treasury window, where they're supposedly exchangeable at the rate of $35 an ounce, you'd have no more gold. That's a problem. That's a big problem. You can either say, hey, we're not going to exchange money, which is a disaster, or let it all come in. Another disaster. And there is really no way out of this. And so the increasingly what you find if you look through the files of Washington at this time is a kind of panic. The Johnson administration thinks it can come up with a solution which is basically, let's find gold where it has never been found before. And because it's 1965, they call it. What else would they call it? Operation Goldfinger. Right? Named after the James Bond movie that was hugely, hugely popular at the time. Operation Goldfinger. Top secret. No one has ever written about this because the documents have just become declassified as I publish My book has three components. One, let's use state of the art technology to find gold where it has never been found before. So is there gold in meteorites that hit the earth? Is there gold in seawater? Is there gold in animal brains? Is there gold in deer antlers? I mean, honestly, you can't make this stuff up. And the answer is. Well, yeah, kinda. There's some. Once the technology gets sophisticated enough to be able to measure parts per million. Parts per billion, you can find traces of gold in almost anything. In your pencil, in your hair, whatever. But when the price is fixed at $35 an ounce, it's meaningless, Right? It would cost you a gazillion dollars to get the gold out of deer handlers. So it's sort of silly. And second thing, kind of like fracking. We know that there's gold in mine X in Nevada or New Mexico or Arizona, but we've got.

The majority of it out of the ground at $35 an ounce. There's a good chance that there's more gold further down into the mine, but we can't get there using conventional explosives. What if, what if we put a nuclear bomb in the ground and blew all the gold up and leached it out? I mean, this was.

Yeah, if you're an environmentalist, you can't be a gold bug at the same time. Those are contradictory.

In the mid-60s, you know, people weren't really thinking about. By the time they actually get to experimenting with, you know. And by the way, many experiments along these lines were conducted. Finally, cooler heads prevailed. But it was a very serious line of inquiry. And the third aspect of Goldfinger was, well, can we make gold out of base metals?

Yeah, alchemy.

I mean, this is the centuries old alchemy quest. And the answer is, yes, it can be done.

The head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Glenn Seaborg, a great scientist for whom multiple elements are named after, he actually does it later in 1980, kind of trying to do something else. But you take very, very thin bismuth foil, bombard it with a particle beam, and you displace some electrons and what you're left with is, you know, a form of gold. However, and this is a big, big however. Seaboard calculates at the time that to produce gold by this method would cost approximately $1,000,000,000 per ounce. Right. So it's, it's, it's off the chart.

So it can be done. It's just not worth doing so.

Not worth.

Until, until, until the technology gets better or the price comes down.

Jason, here, I mean, here is evidence of a monetary system that has gone off the rails. The logic.

If you need to find gold this badly, then the idea of tying your monetary system to gold is clearly wrong. Something needed to happen to break ultimately happens under Nixon. It might have happened under Johnson, but it had to happen one way or another.

Okay, so what is the result of operation Goldfinger then? Basically, leave it to Nixon to close the gold window in 71.

It kind of fizzles out. Like.

Now, you could make an argument in the private sector that some of the methods that they deployed actually.

Rejuvenate the private gold industry. And by the way, by the 1980s, the otherwise dormant United States gold mining industry.

Has a Renaissance, it's fantastic. I mean, it doesn't become a world leader, but it's way, way off of the doldrums that it was in, in the 1960s. And so to some degree, Operation Goldfinger succeeds in terms of inspiring the private sector. But, but basically it all just fizzles.

But more importantly, the relationship between the dollar and gold finally breaks down in 1971. August 15, 1971. Nixon kind of quietly interrupts an episode of Bonanza on a Sunday night and says, we're gonna, we're gonna temporarily suspend the relationship between the dollar. Well, temporarily. It's been more than 50 years, so I think it's kind of permanent.

Anytime the government tells you a taxes temporarily, you know, or any, any monetary thing that that's going to benefit them, it's never temporary.

Okay, so James, I got some questions for you because I want to kind of focus this discussion as to, number one, let's. The listeners need to know why this discussion is important to them, right? So, you know, gold, I am definitely not a gold bug. I think it's a totally flawed asset class. It's one dimensional. It's, you know, I like investing in real estate, okay, Income producing real estate, that's a multidimensional, wonderful investment. But you know, gold is a good, good measuring stick. It's something that, you know, throughout history people have used as this measuring stack. And it's interesting to see the rise of all these cryptocurrencies now. And I'm sure you've probably covered that or at least, you know, looked at a little bit. And you know, where is this going? I mean, for example, just a broad question here and we can circle back to, you know, the book more specifically, but what does the future look like? Does the future look inflationary, deflationary, or is it kind of, you know, just stagnation? What are we looking at?

It's a great question. And.

People of a certain age. I'm in my 50s, I grew up in the 1970s when inflation as officially measured was kind of out of control.

Worldwide. I mean, stagflation, massive inflation. And some of this was a hangover from the Nixon shock of taking the dollar off gold. By comparison.

In the larger economies we seem to knock on wood thanks to, I think, the monetary policy of our big banks. Inflation is more or less under control. I mean, it's 2%, 3% in any given year.

But that's understated, we all know that. But it's still relatively low, right?

I mean, compared to Argentina or compared to what it was when or compared to Jimmy Carter.

Right.

Well, exactly. Well, exactly. And so under those circumstances, the desire to move to gold should be, and kind of arguably is.

Very understated. I mean, who cares, right, if we're not having massive inflation, what is the impetus to move toward gold? And yes, and yet because of the Great Recession, because of the obvious shortcomings of the current monetary system, there is always going to be a constituency that says the solution is gold, gold center. Now, I don't agree with that, but the point of writing my book, One Nation Under Gold, is to try and understand what are these people saying? What, why do they believe what they believe? And what does that have to do with our.

Our DNA, our history as a nation? What is the connection between this bit of political rhetoric and kind of who we are? That's the book that I've written.

Yeah, yeah. So the future, it sounds like you think is inflationary, right?

I do. I mean, I, in the sense that I don't believe that there's going to be any return to a gold standard. It's simply too complicated. And also.

It would be massively disruptive. Let's just think it through. If we were to, if you and I had a Deadline, tomorrow at 8:00am we have to restore the United States dollar to a gold standard. What would the valuation be like, today's market price?

An average over, I don't know, three years, five years?

I don't think you could do it with all of the credit in circulation, not just the money supply, but the credit supply. Gold would be worth like a bazillion dollars an ounce. Well, exactly.

And imagine what that would do to the global economy. So it's not really an option. And yet it remains politically a attractive, an attractive kind of glittering prize for a certain sector of mostly Republican voting population. And I find that fascinating. And again, it's, it's, it's almost uniquely American. Like if you go to France or you go to Japan, you're not going to find 20% of the population that thinks that they should have a gold standard. But in America, it's, it's, it's kind of still really attractive, even though, or maybe because it's never going to happen. And I, that that's really what drove me to write the book, One Nation Under Gold.

Yeah, very interesting. So you wrote that other book about the Great Depression. Are there any lessons? Of course there are. I mean, this is like a rhetorical question really. But you know, what lessons maybe I should say, should we learn, you know, from from what happened in the past man in.

In the Depression book. My co author, Dan Roth, who's still alive at 90 plus, it was. It was his father's diary. Fascinating. The Great Depression of diary. I really, really encourage readers to find a copy of it. His thing in that era was an insurance policy that was literally the difference between, you know, starvation.

You mean. You don't mean an actual insurance policy. You mean insurance of your own, like savings or what?

I mean an actual, actual life insurance policy in that you could cash out for money. And that is how he funded his daughter's college education. That's how he got through the lean years. Now, I'm not recommending this as a 21st century, obviously a different finance policy. I'm not. But I really encourage people to read the book the Great Depression of dire. It's fantastic. But that's how we got through in terms of the 21st century. Again, I'm not pro gold, anti gold. If people want to hold gold as part of a broader portfolio that represents less than 10% of your portfolio value, go for it. I'm in no way.

Anti gold. My point is that for better or worse, in America, gold brings with it all of this, as it were, baggage that.

We should know about if we're going to take it on either as an individual investor or as a country in terms of our currency. And. And that we really need to know what we're doing historically and that most people don't know that. And that's why I wrote the book.

Interesting stuff. So tell us what's going on at Inc. Magazine.

Our businesses booming out there.

I am right now in the process of closing the September issue. Our September issue is the Inc. 500, the 500 fastest growing companies in America. It's my favorite thing to do. It's our biggest issue of the year. We come up with these great stories looking at, you know, the real engine of capitalism in the United States, which is small and growing businesses. You have to have a $2 million revenue on your third year. You have to have been in business for three years. And it's super fun, Jason. It's my absolute favorite thing to do right now. And you'll see it all in the September issue.

So I've got a question about that that really is a barometer on the economy. How are businesses doing? I mean, are they, you know, you've been doing Inc. 5005000 for many, many years. How old is that, by the way? That count?

The franchise is about 25 years old.

So for 25 years. I mean, are these companies growing faster than they were? You know, are there. They're growing particularly fast now or kind of give us the. What does that tell us?

We're at the fastest pace ever. But you put your finger on something really, really important. Important, which is this year, political uncertainty. These companies don't know what's going to happen with health care. They don't know what's going to happen with Trump. We're what, 100 quarters into economic growth. There's got to be a recession coming anytime soon. No one knows exactly when. And one of the things that we try to do is to really focus on companies who are able to grow even through this period of tremendous uncertainty. And that's. Well, you'll have to buy the September issue, but it's great stuff.

Yeah, it is just amazing to me though, how innovative these entrepreneurs are. I mean, just ideas that you, you never thought you came along supply. It's incredible.

People come up with businesses in the craziest places. Last year, you know, there's a business in having people painting in bars, right? Like you have a bachelor party or a bachelorette party, you take your 12 people out to a bar and they all paint and drink wine at the same time. I would never come up with that in a million years. Fidget spinners, you know, the craze of the year, all this people are endlessly creative. And the great thing about the United States is we have a structure for our economy where these kind of crazy ideas can become businesses almost overnight. If you were in Venezuela or if you were in France or if you were in Japan, it could take you weeks or months to start a business.

Yeah, you know, that's. It just blows my mind that politicians in the US and people in the US think the US should be more like Europe. Listen, I was born in Europe. I was there a few weeks. I was there just about a month ago. I'm going back next week. Europe is a disaster, okay? Let me just tell you, Europe is a frickin mess. And to think that you want to make the US more like Europe. You're out of your tree. Get your head examined, please. Europe sucks, okay? Now.

It'S got Europe, Europe's got great culture and, and you know. Yeah, I know. I'm sort of just in Italy myself. Yeah, no, I mean I love going there. It's, it's cool. But like what? I want to live there and, and be, be under that economy's thumb. Do you know how hard it is to get anything done in Europe? I Mean, there's like, obstacles galore. The government gets in your way, tradition gets in your way. And, and people live in monopolies.

Monopolies.

We have quasi monopolies. We have duopolies. Like, if you're in Italy, man, you're dealing with Telecom Italia. If you're in France, you're dealing with France Telecom. Like, that's it. Like, you. There are no, you know, Sprints or T Mobiles or whatever. Like, you're dealing with the. The government or recently devolved from government.

Monopoly or, or a union, okay, that is going to run your life and be on strike or you're going to have to join the union to get a job. It is pathetic. I mean, the people live in crappy little houses. They drive crappy little cars. They have crappy little stores with no selection and really high prices. I mean, it's just. There's just not enough competition. There's not a free market. It's. It's a mess. And the new French president says people should only have to work 32 hours a week. You know, you're going exactly the opposite way. You want your country to prosper, incentivize people to work. You know, it's just. It's just a joke. It's a disaster.

Yeah, well, this is a little far afield from where we started, but it is. Jason, it's great to talk to you.

Yeah, absolutely. Likewise. And give out your website and tell people where they can get the book or, you know, Inc. Obviously, everybody knows.

About it, but sure, you know, so1NationUnderGold.com a recently launched website for my book. Or just buy it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, your local bookstore. And of course, Inc. Magazine and ink.com please look for our Inc. 500 issue in September.

Fantastic. And James, I really loved hearing about Goldfinger. That was fantastic. And you make me want to watch the James Bond movie again after I read your book and then learn more about it. Pretty good. Excellent. James Ledbetter. Thanks for joining us.

Jason, it's a pleasure.

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