If you layer retail, buying the traditional gold, buying on the central bank, buying a tripling or a quadrupling of the gold price is by no means out of the question. Hi everybody. Welcome back to Paradigm Press’s YouTube channel. My name is Sean Ring. I’m the editor of the Rood Awakening and I have the pleasure once again to speak with a man who needs no introduction. Rick rule. But I will give him one anyway. So you may or may not know this. Rick began his career in 1974. Great year, because I was born that year in the securities business, has been involved in it ever since.

He’s known for his expertise in a plethora of sectors, including agriculture, alternative energy, and of course what we’re going to talk about today, precious metals and mining. In 1990, Rick founded the business now known as Sprott US holdings, merging it into Sprott in 2011. He has since retired. That was in 2021 and left the board of directors in 2023. But he still sprouts largest shareholder. And he celebrated his retirement by founding a new bank, battle bank, and dealing with the Federal Reserve, which he oddly speaks pretty highly of. Rick is also actively engaged in private placement markets through originating and participating in loads of debt and equity transactions.

Rick Roll, how are you today, sir? Sean, I’m the better for being on with you. As you note, I failed retirement completely. I’m very happy about that. And I enjoy conversations like this reaching the broader paradigm audience. Thank you very much for that. I’m glad you’re great. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you and I just want to jump right in because I often watch your YouTube videos and I love sprouting. Spreadsheet University. I’m sorry, pardon me, the rural university that you’ve put up great videos. But one thing that caught my eye, we know gold is traded around 2300 right about now.

You made a rather big call a couple of weeks ago and I’m just wondering, you said gold, it’s not far fetched for it to double or triple from here. Is that still your position? And I’m just wondering why. If it is, yeah. I mean, you know, I don’t want to generate a clickbait headline for $2 investing or any of these morons, but I don’t own gold myself as a speculator or a trader. I don’t own gold because it might go from 2200 us to 2400 US or something like that. I own gold because I’m afraid of the deterioration of the purchasing power of the US dollar and I’m afraid that that sets up an investment paradigm like we saw in the 1970s or like we saw in the decade 2000 to 2010.

Let’s do history. In the 1970s, the gold price. Well, let’s look differently. The purchasing power of the US dollar in the decade of the 1970s fell by 80%. But gold’s response wasn’t proportionate. Gold went from an admittedly price controlled $35 an ounce to $850 an ounce. That’s not a double. So quite a few bagger. Let’s be more realistic now in the decade 2000 to 2010. At the beginning of the decade, nobody cared about gold. Agora could only sell technology subscriptions. Right? But the writing was on the wall. With regards to a weakening us dollar, the gold price in that decade 2000 to 2010 went from $250 an ounce to $1,900 an ounce, a sevenfold increase.

Now, let me give you a different statistic. The market share of precious metals and precious metals related securities in the US market, which is 23% of the world’s savings and investment assets, is less than one half of 1%. Which is to say that less than one half of 1% of the total value of savings and investment assets in the United States market are involved in precious metals or precious metal securities. The four decade mean market share of precious metals is 2%. If demand for precious metals and precious metals investments, if the precious metals narrative didn’t go crazy, didn’t do a 1970s, but rather just reverted to the four decade mean, demand for the stuff would quadruple in the largest savings and investment market in the world.

That is precisely what I think is going to happen. Another statistic while we’re at it. Well, no, let’s not do that. Let’s leave it alone. That’s my case. My case is that there are a lot of reasons to own precious metals. I’m not suggesting, like the doom and gloom guys do, that the end of the dollar is upon us, or that US treasury securities are going to be unmarketable. I’m old, bald, fat, rich. I don’t need to make claims like that. All I’m saying is that demand is going to return to mean. And it’s important to note, Sean, to put this in context, the move that we’ve seen in gold in the last two and a half years, from $1,800 an ounce to wherever it is today, 23, 24, 20% move, something like that, it’s occurred without retail buying.

The move that we have seen has been fueled by central bank buying and the central banks have bought gold for a very different reason. Yes, they understand that the arithmetic of the US treasury is lousy, but they’ve really bought it because of the weaponization of the US dollar by the US government. If you layer retail buying the traditional gold buying on the central bank, buying a tripling or a quadrupling of the gold price is by no means out of the question. Am I saying that gold is going to go to $9,000 by the next long weekend? Of course not.

What I’m trying to say is that any prudent investment strategy incorporates precious metals, particularly now where we have gone through four decades, where one didn’t need to own precious metals and ownership is at historic lows. Well, it’s funny that you mention that because I had a good conversation last night when I believe our mutual friend Doug French, and Doug said I’d be getting dressed up for this gold party for decades. And finally people are showing up and this is great, but as you rightly say, central banks have been buying gold because especially the Chinese, the Iranian, the Russians, they don’t want to deal in dollars, they don’t want old dollars, especially with talk of confiscation of russian assets.

But you rightly say retail hasn’t really jumped in yet. What do you think? Do you think it’s bitcoin or they just haven’t looked up? I mean, obviously people are hurting in the wallet. That’s why Biden is having a bit of trouble. We’ll get to that later. But why havent they showed up yet? Do you have any idea why? Because I certainly dont, Mike. Bitcoin and gold are both floating abstractions in terms of the universe of savings and investment alternatives. The best estimate of the present value of the global savings and investment asset market is about $800 trillion.

The market cap of bitcoin is what, a trillion? Gold is a bit more than that. I mean, the truth is that they are both, even collectively, a pimple on an elephant’s behind. It might be that they compete for some speculators, but the truth is that the anti gold is the US ten year treasury. And I think that gold is out of favor because we’ve been through a period, 1982 to 2022, 40 years, that were the most benign economic climate in human history. The baby boomers were working and saving and spending. The US dollar, for better or for worse, enjoyed global hegemony.

So if you were a us dollar based saver, the wind was in your sails. The interest rates, with some notable exceptions, fell for 40 years. And governments, when the markets didn’t cooperate, counterfeited they engaged in quantitative easing. So you had all kinds of liquidity. Stuff doesn’t get better than that. And when stuff can’t get better, it doesn’t. I would suggest to you the beginning in 2022, we saw the beginnings of a sea change. Interest rates couldn’t go lower and so they didn’t. Governments had to rein in quantitative easing because there was the beginnings of an investor revolt.

Inflation, which had been very tame for 40 years despite a lot of pent up pressures, became substantially less tame. Now let’s look at the arithmetic that will cause people to change their minds just as they changed their minds in the decade of the seventies. Sean, you weren’t around, or at least cognitive in the decade of the seventies, but let’s do a little history lesson. Beginning in 1967, the writing was on the wall for the deterioration of the purchasing power of the US dollar. We fought the war in Vietnam, which of course we lost, and we fought the war on poverty, which of course we lost.

The consequence of that, in american parlance, and by the way, the european experience was worse. The consequence of that is that we had unsustainable public expenditure and unsustainable public debt. We couldn’t raise taxes because people don’t want to pay. They want somebody else to pay. So we were left with the circumstance that we had to devalue the purchasing power of the currency that the debt was denominated in. We did that through inflation. The purchasing power of the US dollar declined by more than 80% through the decade of the seventies. But surprisingly, in the beginning part of the decade, although the writing was on the wall, nobody cared.

When they deregulated gold, of course, it had to pop up. And there was the wild rightest press, Doug Casey, people like that that wrote books that sold a million copies, but nobody cared. It wasn’t really until people had suffered through 1967 to 1973 or 1974 and watched the purchasing power of their paychecks and savings decline by seven or 8%. Compounded, they came to understand that inflation wasn’t just something taught in an economics class. When they saw the price at the pump that they paid for gasoline go from twenty cents a gallon. Yes, I was there, to a dollar a gallon when they saw the price of a loaf of bread go from fifteen cents to forty five cents, when they saw McDonald’s hamburgers go from five for a dollar to $0.60 each.

Then they came to understand that inflation wasn’t a topic taught in school. It was something that wrecked your life. And I suspect that the price inflation that people are seeing now in rents, in food, in fuel, and in particular in tax. Direct and indirect tax will cause people to understand that in the period 2022 to 2024, inflation has been much more pernicious than they’ve been led to believe. Most people, because they’ve been schooled for 40 years not to worry about inflation, they’ve been schooled to buy the dips. The thing only gets better. Look at inflation because it hasn’t been personalized yet and they’re lazy.

They look at the CPI, the consumer price index, and they say, well, inflation is manageable. It’s 2.7, like what is 2.7? But that CPI, Sean, isn’t where people live. First of all, it’s hedonistically adjusted, which means that the framers of the index assign arbitrarily the value that you get from the computer that you buy or the apartment that you live in. It isn’t mark to market. Rather, it’s adjusted hedonistically on a qualitative measure, which is to say, part, pardon my colloquial english, it’s bullshit. But worse than that, what is inconvenient doesn’t include food or fuel. Viewers could look at both you and I and determine that for both of us, food is fairly important.

We enjoy it. So an index which doesn’t include food or fuel is a very little interest to you and I. But the oddest thing about inflation, or the oddest thing about the CPI, is that it doesn’t include tax. It doesn’t include the cost of government. The largest household expense for most paradigm subscribers, I would warrant all paradigm subscribers, unless they’ve organized their life very well, is direct and indirect tax. I have conducted a thought experiment for the last five years where I have attempted, not too accurately, to look at the basket of goods and services that I personally buy and look at the deterioration of the purchasing power of my savings and my investment income.

And it seems to me like in terms of the basket of goods and services I consume, and I lump tax in knowing it’s not good and knowing it’s not a service. But I lump it in anyway. And I think that the purchasing power of my savings is deteriorating by between seven and 8% a year. That’s a problem as a headline number, but it’s a greater problem for your subscribers, who are savers. If your savers go into a, quote, riskless asset, the US ten year treasury, they get paid, what, 4.2% today? 4.3% around that, yeah. So you’re getting paid 4.3 in a currency where the purchasing power is declining by seven, which is to say that you’re losing 4.5% of your purchasing power a year, every year for ten years.

Which is to say that if you go in this riskless event, you have no risk of not losing half of your purchasing power over ten years. The government guarantee. The government promise is that if you invest in treasuries for ten years, they absolutely, positively will strip you of half your wealth. This is the first government promise I’ve heard in 71 years on earth that I have unequivocal faith in. And this is the argument for higher gold prices, just as this was the argument for higher gold prices in the decade of the seventies. But it gets better or worse, depending on your point of view.

As you say, I’ve become fairly fond of some of the lower ranking members at the Federal Reserve. I never anticipated this. I thought I’d hold them in the same regard that I hold the post office like that. But in truth, there’s some very smart and fairly nice people there. Don’t let them hear me say this. They’ll probably begin to treat me poorly. But anyway, the institutional bias in the Fed, at least represented by the lower level employees, is that they are the only arm of the US government that stands between the US dollar and catastrophe. They believe that Congress will never stop spending.

They believe that the voters will never stop demanding spending. They believe that the executive, irrespective of its Republicans or Democrats, are more interested in power than the economy, and hence have to dispense favors. And they, as an institution, would prefer not to lower the interest rate. I believe that the political pressure at the top of the Fed, the political part of the Fed, not where the rubber meets the road, the people who do the work, but rather the people who run the place, will be insurmountable to lower interest rates. And if you lower interest rates to the point where savers aren’t losing 4% of their purchasing power, but are rather losing six or 7% of their purchasing power, I think that you’re going to see massive disintermediation.

You are going to see a massive move out of long term debt products that confiscate your wealth into savings products that are geared to protecting your wealth, be they very high grade, common equities in companies that have pricing power. That was the Warren Buffett theme in the 1970s when he did very well. Or, and I’m not suggesting it as an alternative, but gold, right, gold has done its job for a millennium. And I want to say again, when your subscribers think about a gold bull market, they think about it in apocalyptic 1970s terms, where it became the only subject of conversation.

We don’t need a return to that kind of market share. All we need is a reversion to mean. A reversion to mean drives demand fourfold. And it’s important to note that prices are set on the margin between supply and demand. If you increase demand fourfold, for the arithmetic reasons that I’ve laid out, you’re almost forced to be a gold bug. Theres so much on back there. Its funny because I just wrote an article a few weeks ago, Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal. I dont know if you saw it, its not the economy, its you.

Because inflation, I kept saying, listen, if something costs a dollar now, it suffers 10% inflation and then 5% inflation. It still costs $1.16 at the end of those years. No one cares that inflation got cut in half. That’s not the point. And I think, I think you’re absolutely correct that people are starting to look in their pocket, they got rabbit ears, you know, empty pockets, to pull it out and go, where is the wealth I’ve created? It is amazing. The other thing that I just read, funnily enough, is that Mister Trump, if he gets back into the White House, would like to have a say in what the Federal Reserve is going to sit, which I think is just incredible that they even let that leak.

As much as I. It’s funny that you mentioned that the Fed thinks they’re the last stand between us and oblivion, but man, God, hearing that a president would want power to talk about, I find that absolutely terrifying. Just terrifying. Well, I think you need to understand the nature of the, of the beast. There’s a wonderful quote, I think maybe it was a Mencken quote, that says, you understand politics by looking at the root words. Poly, of course, from the Greek for many, in this case, tick, from the English colloquial for small blood sucking insects. If you look at the process as being a community of small blood sucking insects, each trying to suck the blood from the other while defending their own blood, I think you understand the nature of politics.

It’s incredible. Those pieces just blew me away. I know you’re not an economist, you’re fond of telling me that you’re credit analysts, so I won’t go too much further down that road. But if we just get back to gold for a second, because if gold moves fourfold, then people who invested in the big and junior miners should be excited. They finally seem to have broken out of their downtrends. If you don’t have any favorites right now, that’s fine. But what do you do as an analyst to isolate the companies that you think are good? I believe I’ve heard you say that 95% of the whole sector is just garbage.

And you got to find those nuggets. Do you have any, have any hits for us to find those gold nuggets? Yeah. I want to say three things because there are three asset classes. Own gold as liquidity and as insurance. Everybody needs to own gold. Flat out gold. Don’t confuse yourself with gold stocks yet. Right. Own gold and own it as insurance. Own it and hope it doesn’t go up in price. Think about other forms of insurance, life insurance. To get paid, you got to die. Right. Think about gold in that context. Although I think it might go to 8000.

I really hope I’m wrong. So now we’ve done gold. The major gold stocks, these are investments, but there’s risk. You need to understand that these, well, they’re gold companies are also companies. They have to be efficient. Let me give your audience a sobering statistic. In the decade 2000 to 2010, an index of the largest gold and silver mining companies in the world, the XAU. Here’s their performance in the decade. The gold price went up sevenfold and the free cash flow per share of the Philadelphia Gold and silver stock index fell. The industry conspired to make less free cash flow per share after a seven fold increase in the gold price than they did before.

What that means is that if you invest in the sector, the whole sector, you’re making a mistake. You have to invest in five or six companies that do a good job of turning gold into profit. You have to invest. Not speculate, but invest. For the five or six year term, those names probably should include the best of the best. Ironically, by the way, the best of the best won’t be the best market performers. The marginal ones, the nonsense ones, will be better speculations. But for investors around the gold price theme, you want high quality companies. You want Franco Nevada, you want Wheaton precious.

You want Agnico Eagle. If you can be a bit more speculative, you want the two big producers, Barrick and Newmont. And that’s probably what you want. You want five or six or seven names. If you’re prepared to work harder, I can teach you how to expand your portfolio. But most people don’t want to work harder. Most people want to play with their kids or grandkids, read books, garden. These are all really, really, really good ideas about things to do with your time. So buy the best and relax. When you come down to the junior miners, you can make an unbelievable amount of money, but you have to work way harder.

You have to have a higher tolerance for risk, and you have to be able to endure volatility. That’s not the same as risk. A junior mining index can fluctuate 15% the same way that you and I inhale and exhale. For me, that doesn’t matter. You know, it’s all background noise. I don’t care, but I’ve done it for 50 years. Most people, if they put $100,000 into a speculation and they wake up and see it down to $85,000, freak out. So people need to do some sort of self assessment. Now, when you look at the junior miners as a sector, they’re much riskier than the senior miners.

If you merged every junior mining company in the world into one company, junior Exploreco, that company, in a very good year, would lose $2 billion. In a bad year, it would lose $8 billion. So how much should you pay for this sector? Should you pay eight times losses? Twelve times losses? In a good market, 20 times losses? You get the point. If you invest in the sector, the whole sector, you will lose money. If you are willing to do the work to segregate the good from the bad and the ugly, what youll find is that 5% of the 3000 juniors listed worldwide generate such spectacular performance that they add legitimacy and sometimes luster to a sector that loses between two and $8 billion a year.

But this is a function of work. People, if they can stomach the volatility and accept the risk, can make a lot of money on juniors. What they tend to do is follow that dictum that Doug Casey used to make so much fun of. Got a hunch? Bet a bunch. I suggest to people that they own the same number of juniors. That corresponds with the number of hours per month that they want to spend studying their companies. So if you’re willing to spend 10 hours a month taking that time away from your kids, your grandkids, whatever it is you do for a living, whatever it is that you enjoy, then you can own ten stocks.

Sean, I’ve now graded over 80,000 portfolios in a service that I’ll talk to you about later. And one of the things I’ve learned is that most people own ways too many stocks. It’s common for junior mining portfolios to number between 30 and 60. It’s common for the people who own those portfolios not to know anything about the companies that they’re invested in other than the name. It’s common that they’ve forgotten some of the names, in fact, and that contributes to the poor performance of the sector and the investors. So being the juniors, for sure, if you are willing to work.

Right. Okay, well, that’s fantastic advice. If we could just kind of take a sidestep for a bit, just for a second, because we talk about gold a lot. And so silver was climbing up there, thought it was going to break through. Thirties just got hit. I think it’s just a touch under 27 the last time I looked. Is this just a breather? Is silver going to have that? Oh, there’s gold. Let’s go chase it. What do you think is in store over the next few years for silver? My experience has been that a precious metals bull market is always led by gold.

The most motivated buyer is the fear buyer and the gold buyer is a fear buyer. My experience has been that when we have a precious metals bull market, even a false start like we had in 2000 to 2006 or 1991 to 1996, the narrative is led by gold. But when the narrative is established for precious metals and the generalist investor comes in the precious metals space, silver goes crazy. It goes parabolic, it moves later in the cycle, but it moves further and it moves faster. And the most volatile stocks in the sector, both to the upside and the downside, are the silver equities.

Doug Casey again points out that the universe of silver equities, at least legitimate silver equities, is so small that when the generalist investor money comes into them, the market capitalizations literally can’t contain the money. Let me give you some outrageous examples, Sean. In the mini market, if you will, that we enjoyed in from 1990 to 1996, we underwrote silver standard, if my memory serves me right, at $0.72 with a warrant, maybe the warrant was at a buck or a buck ten. Six years later, the stock was at $45. We underwrote Pan american silver. I think at nobody wanted to be in silver when we were doing these.

The silver price per ounce was like three and a half or $4. The industry was in desolation. After six years, Pan american silver was also trading above $40. That’s the reason that you do this. You don’t use money to speculate in silver stocks that you had set aside to pay for a child’s college education. That isn’t what you do. You use money that is in an account that you can afford to lose a lot of and you use money that if you are exposed to volatility, that’s up and down 15% doesn’t cause you to sleep, to lose sleep.

Right, right. And that’s, that’s the key. Yeah, well, we all act differently too, and we’re like, ah, that’s just over there. It’s not a part of my main family plans or anything like that. My wife’s not going to beat me over the head with a rolling pit. If this goes away. I’ll quantify it for you, Sean. I have about now 2% of my portfolio in silver stocks. And if I’m right, I’m not saying I’m right, but if I’m right, my suspicion is that five years from now, that two or 2.5% of my portfolio will be at least measured against current portfolios.

Current portfolio values, 20 or 25%. If that portfolio gets cut in half, if I’m wrong, it’s not going to change my decision as to what to have for breakfast. If I’m right, it won’t change my decision to what to have for breakfast either. But it’ll be a lot of fun just to say just yes. Right again, fantastic. I know you’re credit analyst, you’re not an economist, but you are a registered voter, I imagine. And I’m just wondering, because I’ve always been a Trump guy, I kind of, you know, I thought Joe Biden was mentally deficient in 1990 when I was in high school, and thought, thank God he’s from Delaware, he’ll never get elected.

Boy, was I wrong. But the more I look at it, the more I’m not sure it makes a difference that who wins in November, because I just don’t see Mister Trump curtailing the spending at all. And I think that’s one of our big problems. He said he won’t, like he said he won’t. Okay, good. Not that he necessarily does what he says he’s going to do, otherwise he wouldn’t be a politician. The last presidential candidate I voted for was Harry Brown. I voted for Harry with a certainty that he wouldn’t get elected. So I wasn’t doing any harm to my fellow citizens.

I was just committing an act of victimless vandalism, which amused me. I knew Harry fairly well, rest in peace, when he was alive. And being able to go into a voting booth and put an x next to my friend Harry Brown was one of the most amusing circumstances in my life. I read Mister Trump’s book, the Art of the Deal, and if you read that book, it’s very challenging to imagine the admittedly self serving, egomaniacal person who wrote that book, serving as a good president. After I read that book, I was very clear that if I ever had the opportunity to do business with him, that I wouldn’t do it.

He told me why. He doesn’t believe in win win transactions. He believes in win lose transactions, and he wants to win, which means you have to lose. I guess. I guess I like him better than Biden because Trump had a job once he met at payroll. Well, he failed at meeting some payrolls, but that’s a different question. But there is no way other than perhaps at gunpoint that I would vote for either of them. Right? Okay, fair enough. That’s fantastic, Rick. Thank you so much for that. What I’d love to, you know, I’m going to yield my time to you because I want to hear more about your wonderful bank and also that service you alluded to earlier, if you wouldn’t mind.

Well, I have three commercials, if you’ll let me give them. The first commercial is great because it’s free. If you like what I have to say about natural resources and you want to make it personal, go to ruralinvestmentmedia.com. List your natural resource stocks, and I personally will rank them one to ten. One being best, ten being worst. We follow almost 800 people, 800 companies in our database. If we don’t know about your company, we’ll say we don’t know. We’ll comment on individual issues. If those issues have value, there is no charge for this. There’s no obligation.

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It is one of the longest running natural resource investment conferences on the planet, and I personally believe it’s the best. It will occur July 7 through eleven in Boca Raton, Florida. You can either attend in person, which would be my preference, or online, if you can’t come to Boca Raton, and here’s why you should. We have great big picture thinkers, people who tell you about the world the way it is, not the way CNBC or ABC would like you to believe. It was Jim Rickards who will be familiar, of course, to paradigm readers, Daniella DeMartino Booth, who could talk about Wall street because she was in Goldman Sachs.

Nobe prince. I’m sorry, Daniella DeMartino Booth, who could talk about the Fed because she was in the Fed. Yeah, that’s right. People like that. Great big picture thinkers. After you are exposed to a worldview which you wouldn’t see otherwise, we will introduce you to great natural resource portfolio managers and analysts. Not investment banking hacks that failed as technology analysts or supermarket analysts, but rather people who have for decades invested in natural resources. More importantly, we’ll introduce you to the living legends, a group of individuals who have built multibillion dollar natural resource companies, public companies, from scratch, telling you how they did it and what lessons they learned and how those lessons made them better investors.

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If you attend my conference in person or you attend my conference live or livestream, and you think for any reason that you didn’t get your money’s worth, email me, no questions asked. You get your money back. Full money back guarantee. No deductions for service charges, no b’s. You either got your money’s worth or you didn’t get your money’s worth. If you didn’t get your money’s worth, according to you, not me, you get your money’s back. No investment conference on the planet that I know of is willing to do this. Finally, of course, battle bank. Many of your subscribers will remember our last banking effort, which was called Everbank, launched in the year 2000.

We really, truly revolutionized banking. We allowed Americans to save in 22 currencies worldwide. We allowed people from around the world to have deposits that were insured and guaranteed. We did a lot of great things. We built a bank with 275,000 customers before we sold it to TIAA cref. They’ve done a good job with the banking platform, but because they have a million and a half members, mostly retired teachers, the products offered by the bank that made the bank so unique have largely been discontinued. They’re irrelevant to TIAA crefs customers, which means there’s a 275,000 person community out there that became homeless.

So we’re doing it again. We’re not going to have 15 deposit products, most of which aren’t going to pay you interest. We’re going to have one short term deposit product, a money market account. Write checks against it if you want to, but we’re going to pay you money on your deposit with us. No fees, no junk, just one straightforward product. If you want to be in certificates of deposit, longer term products, longer term deposit products. We will arrange both index CDs for you, as an example, gold index CDs or CDs in foreign currencies. You don’t need to save just in the US dollar if you don’t want to.

We also believe in a different product, that your IRA is your Iraq. Most iras around the world are receptacles for other people’s financial products. If you have an IRA with battle bank, your IRA can own rental residential real estate. You can buy a franchise. You can buy a small business. You can participate in private equity. You can buy gold. In other words, your ira is your ira. If you buy a duplex or a triplex, we would, of course, like to be considered for writing the first mortgage on it. We’d like to do that on the lending side.

This is going to amuse you. Sean. In the length and breadth of the United States, there isn’t one bank that seems to consider gold and silver to be good collateral. So if you own gold or silver or platinum and palladium in a segregated account, we will happily make a margin loan against that gold and silver. We believe that our depositors will be happy to know that their loans are collateralized by physical precious metals that we have control over. It’s the most liquid collateral on the planet. And most bank, I guess most banks can’t spell gold. The truth is, Sean, if any of your listeners are unhappy with their current banking relationships, and I would suspect that that’s 99% of your attendees, they should go to battlebank.com, get on our waiting list.

There’s 13,000 people on that waiting list now, waiting for us to get our FDIC approval so that we can open our doors and begin business. So my message is, if you’re unhappy with your current bank. We’re called battle bank because we want a battle for your business. We want to battle for better banking. Go to battlebank.com and sign up. Or when you go to rural investment media and give me your list of natural resource stocks to rank, simply write in bank. Fantastic. Well, I’m, as always, blown away by everything you have to say. And I think this was just absolute gold dust, part of the pun for our viewers.

Thank you so much, Rick. And thank you, everybody, for joining us on this fantastic chat. Rick just left us with loads of gold nuggets. And also do take Rick’s advice. Go to ruralinvestmentmedia.com, get your portfolio rigged, go to battlebank.com and get on that waiting list. And of course, if you can head to Boca Raton in July, look up the rule symposium. And if you can, if you can, sign up for the live stream. Sean, there you go. We will send the symposium right to your computer in Italy. We had attendees at our symposium last year in 33 countries around the world via livestream.

Fabulous. Thanks again, Rick. I really appreciate it. And we’ll speak soon. Sean, thank you.

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