Why Buy Gold and Silver Now? 5 Reasons Investors Should Know

- This is the Rich Dad Radio Show, the good news and bad news about money. Here's Robert Kiyosaki. - Hello, hello, hello, Robert Kiyosaki, the Rich Dad Radio Show, the good news and bad news about money. Today, we have a very, very important show, like all our shows are important, but we also have a very important guest. His name is Rick Rule, and when Rick Rule speaks, I listen, because he and I are the more senior citizens left. In this industry, and you know, Rick, every time he speaks of gold or resources or uranium or copper, silver, I listen. It's called commodities. And since you and I are the senior citizens, like to go, why we do it? And I think the why today is we'll get, hopefully, people motivated to make some changes if they haven't started investing in precious metals or commodities. Anyway, welcome to the program. - Welcome, Rick. And I just wanna say, really, I'm happy to have you on the show. And one thing I love about you is, you are a wealth of information and not just resources, but a lot of things. And people are gonna wanna listen to this show many, many times, 'cause I know there's gonna be a ton of information, but you're also an investor, and you've also got your own portfolio. And you're a real, we talk about real teachers and fake teachers. You're a real teacher, 'cause you're doing what it is you're talking about. And we so appreciate that. - Flattery will get you everywhere, young lady. - Thank you. I try, I try. - So, so, Rick, I wanna give you a little bit of my background, actually our background, 'cause I started getting into silver when I was like 1964, when I saw that copper tinge go around the dime. So I bought my first precious metal at 10 cents, you know, 'cause I started changing the copper, the copper dimes in for real dimes. Then I was buying quarters, and then half dollars. And I still have that bag until my mother spent it. And then I was flying in Vietnam, in '72, you know, the year Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. And I flew behind enemy lines in Vietnam to a gold mine. I was reading the maps, you know, as a helicopter pilot. And I said, "Oh, they have gold here." And so I went behind enemy lines to talk to this gold dealer. It was a little tiny Vietnamese woman with red teeth. And I said, she wanted, I think, I think it was a 50 bucks, approximately, gold, and floated from 35 to 50 after Nixon took it. Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. I tried to get a discount. You don't do that, you know? I know you're laughing at that one. You get a discount from a gold dealer? That's not, not heard of. And she told me this one word, spot. Kepasa, what is spot? But ever since then, and then I went over to Hong Kong. I bought my first Krugerrand. This is an important point for many people to understand about silver and gold. I bought that Krugerrand. I bought my first Krugerrand in Hong Kong in 1974. I had to smuggle it in. And I want you guys to hear this, 'cause Rick wouldn't understand where I'm going with this thing. You know, they made me smuggle it in 'cause it was confiscated, I think, in '33 or something. And today, because of what Nixon did and the Fed and all this stuff, and I think that's why the why is, why you'd better start buying some gold and silver, or uranium or copper, getting into things that, what Jim Rickards called things that last. So with that, and one more thing is that Kim and I own no equities. We're about 95% private. So we don't own ETFs and all that stuff. We own the gold mine. So we took, Kim and I purchased, secured a gold mine in China, the biggest gold mine in China. And they confiscated it. That's like they took, that's like Roosevelt took the gold. - I think you had a similar experience in California, Rick. - Yeah, we could do a whole show on political risk. So there's more to gold and silver than just what the moving average is and all that stuff. And the last thing is then we found a gold mine in Argentina and then Kim and I sold it to Yamana. So we don't have public shares, we have private. With that said, I hope I've teased your mind as to why the heck Kim and I are fanatical, gold, silver, and today a little bit of Bitcoin, simply because I don't trust the Fed. I don't trust the treasury and I don't trust the government. So Rick, welcome to the show. - Have at it, Rick. - Yeah, I mean, you've summed it up very well. I think perhaps given your history, we do need to do a little how. I wouldn't suggest that anybody who's listening to this, this commandeer helicopter fly behind enemy lines and try and do a private transaction with the gold dealer with, you know, Bethel-stained teeth, nor normally is it good practice to attempt to buy a gold mine in a country that has even more fascist communist leanings than our own. - Good point. - I actually like public shares because if I make a mistake, which is not uncommon, I can address it very quickly with a quick click of a mouse, painfully. Painfully, but quickly, but let's get back to your question as to why. Precious metals have moved up in price over the years for many reasons, most of them not good. It has functioned for years as a medium of exchange and a store of value. And that's important to know. Most mediums of exchange that we use are abstractions, floating abstractions. Our mutual friend, Doug Casey once said that the dollar is, an IOU, nothing. And the Euro is a, who owes you nothing. In fact, promises printed on a piece of paper. Gold isn't a promise to pay, it's payment in and of itself. It has value separate and apart from a medium of exchange, which is important to know. You mentioned trust. If you acquire gold that you are relatively certain is what it purports to be, you don't need to trust the counterparty. It isn't a promise to pay, it's payment. And when you use that, yes. - Can we explain what a counterparty is real quick? - A counterparty is the person who sold you the gold or who you sell it to. It's the other partner transaction. When you go to the grocery to buy bananas, the grocer is the counterparty. - Right, or if you lend money to your friend. - Yep. - And they'll pay it back, that's the counterparty. - Yeah, the important thing about gold and silver is that they aren't checks. Or they aren't fiat currency. They're payment in and of themselves. And in periods of time, when there are various forms of turmoil, war would be an example. And social trust is very low. Precious metals do very well. Now, my own experience has been that the global perception of geopolitical risk, which is to say war, isn't a long-term impactor on precious metals prices, unless the war impacts you. If you were a Vietnamese person, wanted to leave Vietnam, got off on a boat, gold was worth a lot more to you than Vietnamese currency. - I saw that too. They were buying the gold leaf and they were trading dollars for gold leaf. I said, why are they doing that? Because they're smarter than you, that's why. - That's right. That's right. What does move precious metals prices in my life? My lifetime has been investors and savers fears of the depreciation of their savings and investment instruments denominated in fiat currencies, but particularly even on a global basis, denominated in US dollars during periods of time when there have either been negative real interest rates or the threat of negative real interest rates, either as a consequence of low rates or high inflation or both. Gold has done very well. And when you ask about why right now, I would suggest that there are five reasons why. People need to be afraid of the maintenance of their purchasing power in conventional instruments. And why I think that gold is much, gold and silver, pardon me, are much more likely to do well than poorly. If I may, I'll list them. People often say to me, Rick, when will you sell your gold? Well, when the reasons to own it go away, the gold will go away. So I'm going to give you five reasons why I think will go up, why I think gold will increase in price. And when those reasons are satisfied, then I'll sell my gold. It's a real simple answer. So let's do them. Quantitative easing, which is a real fancy word for counterfeiting. If you issued Kiyosakis and went around and tried to spend them in Arizona or wherever you are, that would be a felony. They would plant you in a slammer. But if you were Congressman Kiyosaki, there you go, then this would be a highly popular policy, something for nothing. And you would be reelected forever. Congressman sounds good. Listen, I'd be for it. I'd be for it. I think you'd be a ball there. At any rate, it has been estimated that 30% of all the U.S. dollars in circulation have come into circulation in the last 30 months. Now, clearly this isn't to accommodate economic growth. The economy isn't 30% bigger than it was 30 months ago. There wasn't need for liquidity to manage a buoyant economy. And when you increase the supply of something without increasing its utility, of course, you depreciate the value of the existing stock. There's just no arithmetic way around this. So quantitative easing is the first reason I think why investors are concerned about the efficacy of their savings and conventional instruments. But it gets worse, of course. The next is debt and deficits. And this is arithmetic again, too. We have the dubious honor of having crossed $30 trillion in on-balance sheet liabilities. Admittedly, only $22 trillion net of counterfeiting. In other words, the Federal Reserve's balance sheet is $8 trillion. That was printed up. But let's use the $30 trillion. It's their number. But more importantly, Robert, and you and I are partly to blame, the net present value of off-balance sheet liabilities, entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, all that stuff. Not some cranky old libertarian, but rather the Congressional Budget Office suggests that the net present value off-balance sheet liabilities of the U.S. government, not state and local governments, just the federal government, is $120 trillion. That's 12 zeros, okay, after 120? I mean, it's a big, big, big number. And we propose to service that debt with a budget that's in a deficit $3 trillion a year. I was taught as a young man when you're in a hole, stop digging. But that is not what's happening. Many, many, many observers, Buffett included, has said, we're not going to pay this off. We're going to reschedule it. Any creditor, and I'm a creditor, who looks at a borrower, the U.S. government, that has debts that they can't serve, they're not going to pay this off. And I'm a creditor who looks at a borrower, they can't service, and they're continuing to refinance them, becomes concerned about their principle. An investor's principle is the savings, pardon me, the maintenance of the savings in U.S. dollar-denominated securities. But it gets worse. The worst is negative real interest rates. For the first time, Robert, in your life and mine, the government has made a promise to you that they're going to keep, and I'll explain that promise. If you lend the government in the U.S. 10-year treasury, the base security in the world, the most important security in the world, they promise to pay you 2%. And they will, because they can print it. They don't have to earn it. They can print it. They promise to pay you 2% in a currency that, depending on which government agency you read, is losing its purchasing power at 6.5% a year or 7.5% a year. So, they solemnly swear to reduce your purchasing power by 4% compounded a year for 10 years. And they're not going to keep that promise. They're going to keep it for 10 years. And they will keep that promise. If you give them money now, they will give you back less later. They're guaranteeing this. And they will do it. Our mutual friend, Jim Grant, calls this return-free risk. And the whole concept of return-free risk, the whole promise that the government make you less rich if you give them money, is the real reason why people might own gold. There are two more reasons that are arithmetic too, and hopefully amuse you just as well. The first is that the market share of precious metals is the lowest that it has been in my lifetime. Let's face it, we've lived through 40 years of pretty easy economic times. You, as an apartment building owner, every five years get to refinance at a lower interest rate. The capitalized value of your rents relative to your cost of capital is certainly low. Sadly, that's over. We've learned in the last 40 years that we don't have catastrophes, so we don't need to own gold. The consequence of that is that the market share of precious metals and precious metal securities relative to other savings and investment assets in the United States is less than one-half of 1%. Less than one-half of 1% of the value of savings and investment assets in the United States is in precious metals or precious metals securities. The three-decade mean is between one-and-a-half and 2%. So if demand is low, it's less than one-half of 1%. If demand was to return to mean, not go crazy like it did in the 70s, Robert, when you learned about the gold trade. If the demand for precious metals returned to mean, demand would triple or quadruple. And there's one more that a lot of people overlook, and that is that after 40 years of really beatific economic conditions, the biggest investors in the world, the pension funds, the endowments, the insurance companies, operate on an asset skew that's roughly 60% equity, 40% debt. And that's worked well for them. The debt has been the stability. The debt has been the stable income. The debt component is a real, real, real anchor in a positive sense to the returns that they've promised their beneficiaries 20 or 30 years out. That's all different. But when you say debt, are you talking about bonds? Bonds, mortgages, yeah. You know, debt instruments. It could be bonds, mostly bonds in the case of these big, big, big institutions, but also fixed rate, long-term fixed rate mortgages. And this is really where the rubber meets the road. If you are a great big pension fund and 40% of your portfolio is giving you a negative yield compounded, the ability that you have 20 years from now to meet your pension obligations or to service a whole life policy or to fund the maintenance of the Stanford University or Harvard University or the ability of Norges Bank to look after the well-being of Norwegian citizens 20 years or 30 years from now is gone. It becomes an anchor in a pejorative sense. If you look at debt markets today, even the junk bond index where you're taking real credit risk is yielding 4.7 in a year. It's almost as though your purchasing power is deteriorating by 6.5. It's almost as though you're guaranteed losses twice, once on the instrument and once on the currency. And I believe that you're going to see fairly massive disintermediation out of bonds and debt instruments by the largest institutional investors in the world because they have to do it to fulfill their mandate. I'm not suggesting that 40% of their assets are going to go into gold. That's not going to happen. Leaving an asset class that's called disintermediation because of your fear of inflation, it is logical that some of the money that you take out of one asset class goes into an asset class that has a millennium long track record for protecting you against the depreciation and deterioration of the purchasing power of fiat instruments. And those five reasons for me are the why. It's all arithmetic. I don't have to get into the sort of old, hoary, gold bug narrative. It's just simple arithmetic. So FYI, this is one of the books that we came out with is Who Stole My Pension? And with Ted Sedell, he's a whistleblower on public pensions, went after UPS and United Airlines, airline. You know, I think that's wonderful. We could do a whole different show on pensions. We don't have time for it today. They're in trouble. They're in trouble, too. Think about yourself, Robert. I mean, if I were a guy that was managing a big endowment right now, I'd probably quit. The idea that the people who fund the pensions and the endowments are assuming a seven or seven and a half percent return. First of all, the assumption doesn't work. It's not going to happen. And second of all, if you're succeeding in earning a seven and a half percent return, which most of them don't, you're only treading water. And on a net present value basis, if you tread water 20 years from now, you're drowning. And people need to understand that. And people, as you have schooled for years, people need to take control of their financial present and their financial future, because the big thinkers neither will or can. And so the real why around precious metals, I think, is self-defense. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We'll come back with a part two with Rick Rule, but I want people to pay attention to this. Listen to this trend. There's more to precious metals like gold or even Bitcoin than meets the eye. There's a reason why. And it's a very big reason. And also when we come back, Rick, I'd like to talk to you more about the macro and what you see in the macro world and what you specifically are doing and what people who are watching can do as well. That'd be great. Thanks. So when we come back, we'll be more with Rick Rule. We'll talk about the macro world and why and what you can do. Welcome back. Robert Kiyosaki, the Rich Dad Radio Show. Good news and bad news about money. You can listen to the Rich Dad Radio program anytime, anywhere on iTunes, Android, and YouTube. And please leave us a review whenever you listen. And all of our programs are archived at richdadradio.com. We archive them because we don't sell anything. We just have an information education company. So if you have friends, family members, especially business associates, who need to hear this message, go to richdadradio.com. Any comments? - Yes, well, I'd love to hear, Rick, I'd love to hear your take on the macroeconomics with everything happening in the world. You've got Ukraine, you've got Russia. - Can I ask one real minor question real quick? - Go ahead, I'll come back. - As I said, you know, Rick, I told you, I don't own paper. I have nothing that's a derivative. I know I'm 90% in hard assets, gold, silver, real estate, things I control. And when I start, when I have gold, we bought the gold mine. So we owned the whole damn thing, and then we sold one. But then when I talked to other guys who are more paper asset guys, like financial planners and all that, and this was one famous guy, I won't mention his name on our air 'cause he's always on our program. He says, "You gotta buy US treasuries." And I'm going, "What?" And so with your background, with your banking background and all that, or bonds, should I say, I don't know what you call those things, I don't like them. - Mm-hmm. - What, when somebody is being told by either their financial planner or some experts say to buy bonds, treasuries, and all that, 'cause they're safer and all that, what do you say? - I think you have to segregate, first of all, when you're buying bonds, between long-term bonds and short-term bonds. The long duration bonds, the idea that you would subject yourself to negative real interest rates is stupid. You forego consumption in favor of somebody else, and you take the credit risk. And in return for that, they give you less, they give you back less money than you gave them. And this is not a force of nature. It takes Congress to do this, right? Short-term debt is something very different. It's liquidity. I have had periods of time in my life, Robert, when I had no cash, and I've had periods of time in my life when I had a lot of cash. And I was happier and slept better during periods of time when I had a lot of cash. I consider cash to be a soporific, and I like to sleep. From the point of view of a financial plan, cash, liquidity gives you the means and might give you the courage to take advantage of a circumstance where there was a liquidity shortage. Going back to 2008, late 2008, 2009, were very good investing periods for me because of the liquidity crisis. I maintained a lot of liquidity going into that, and I was able to buy assets because I had the ability. And because I had the ability, I had the courage. The consequence of that is that, ever since I've been running fairly high cash balances, even though the cash guaranteed diminished returns in the near term on my purchasing power, I consider the negative real interest rate that I suffer to be an option premium, because the cash gives me the tools and the courage to take advantage of any future crisis in confidence or crisis in liquidity. And I actually think that a crisis, while not a certainty, is a probability. So I understand that on my cash holdings, I'm losing four or 5% a year in purchasing power. But I think the circumstance might come about in the next two or three years where the consequence of having that cash is 50, 60, or 100% returns on capital employed by deploying that cash. - So let me poke holes in my theory. Like I said, that little Vietnamese woman in '72, she wouldn't sell me the gold at a discount. I couldn't believe that. I was just asking for $5 discount, she wouldn't do it. I saw the Vietnamese running with a gold leaf, not US dollars. And then I go to Hong Kong and I buy my first Krugerrand. I still have that Krugerrand, I paid 50 bucks for it. It's in Switzerland now. But that Krugerrand is now worth approximately 1900 bucks. So I'm always saying to Kim, I want you to poke holes in my logic. I don't save cash, I save gold and silver. And if I ever need the cash, I think gold and silver are liquid. Is that erroneous or? - No, gold and silver are extremely liquid. They're one of the most liquid asset classes in the world. I'm a lender and I love lending against gold and silver, particularly gold and silver where I control rather than the borrower controlling the collateral. They're enormously liquid. I live in a circumstance that, even given the problems that we face today, is substantially more civilized, more benevolent than the young Vietnamese woman who, you know, the choices that she had in terms of her savings and her business were limited compared to the choices that you and I exhibit. Also because of the asset classes that I deploy capital into include what you would call derivatives, what I would call securities. So, having access to cash to access securities markets without having to sell my gold or silver is convenient for me. Interestingly, because as an example, I'm the largest shareholder of Sprott, a large financial services concern, which is built around gold or silver. A financial planner would tell me that I didn't need to own any gold, that my life was already leveraged to gold. But again, owning physical gold makes me sleep better. And I consider, like you do, gold and silver to be cash, good cash, but it's volatile cash. The problem breaks down with some in your audience, Robert, because if they own gold and there was a liquidity crisis and the price of gold temporarily fell, they would be less inclined to sell the gold and turn that into an asset, which they could then use to buy another asset. Many people, although they own gold, don't regard it as liquidity. They don't regard it as cash. And if they're, if let's say that their average cost in gold is $1,800 and the price falls to $1,500, the price of another asset that they want to buy fell by half, but they feel this strange compulsion not to accept a small loss in cash to take advantage of a bigger opportunity. So in that sense, psychologically, for many people, precious metals aren't cash. I don't suffer that same circumstance for me. It's good cash, it's volatile cash. I, like you, have had some precious metals for a very long time, and it's lovely to see my savings appreciate as opposed to depreciate. - Right, yeah. So the other thing that would work, 'cause we're real estate guys. - I'll get in there. - But if we need cash, we borrow money. - Understand that in the wrong set of circumstances, Robert, I hate to attract your core thesis. If the government decided that they didn't like the use that you were putting your real estate to, you would find that you didn't own it, that rather you had a conditional use permit. I'm not saying that real estate is a bad asset class. I guess I'm saying in the face of government, every asset class is bad. And by the way- - I'm just saying my cash comes from debt. - I mean, the lovely thing in real estate, from my point of view, I'm no good at it, but it's treated me well. The idea that my return on capital employed increases with inflation, while my cost of capital, which is to say my mortgage stays fixed. - Right, I love it, I love debt. - A gift from God. - I know. - Just a gift from God. - Thank you, Rick. - Okay, so you've touched on a lot of points I wanted to- - You can sign the MBA now. - A lot of points I wanted to make going back to 2008 and given the circumstances today with Ukraine and Russia and China and Taiwan, QE and inflation, and you saying that you're holding cash. A lot of people we know, and we are holding some cash. And you're talking about two to three years, there's going to be opportunities. Can you expand upon all of that? - I can't, I don't know where the opportunity will come. I mean, I really can't. My crystal ball is cracked and cloudy. I know that we've come off a 40 year period that has been as benign as any 40 year period in human history. And I believe that some of the benefits that we saw over the last 40 years, globalization and free trade, the demographics of the baby boom, technology, but particularly declining real interest rates are over. - Yep. - And I don't know how that manifests itself. I know that as the world becomes more political, as people begin to believe that the allocation of utility in society should occur, by God, it's going to be- by government rather than by delivering utility to the customer, that the world will become more political and hence more hostile. People will come to believe that other people owe them something irrespective of the utility that they've delivered. And that's not a recipe for peace. I don't know where or how that will manifest itself. And I hope I'm wrong. I hope it doesn't manifest itself. But separate and apart from the macro, the simple, the basic, and the simple, I don't know how it manifests itself. you know, for me, we have geopolitical problems with the Russians. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk. It doesn't mean that we should rely on vilifying the Russians to solidify the political base that some people might have in the United States or to set up geopolitical blocks in the world that make people hate each other and want to shoot each other. That just feels to me to be pathologically stupid. Robert, you saw that in its rawest form earlier in your life, and there's no part of it that's good. And I'm not suggesting that we're headed towards broader military conflict. I'm only saying that in a world where assets are allocated because a group finds that they can vote themselves benefit to the detriment of another, that the ending is not happy. No. You. Get value in real estate because you deliver value for your tenants. You outcompete the guy who has apartments down the road based on price, based on location, based on amenity. Your customer is free to come to you and free to go. A taxpayer doesn't have the same freedom. You have no enforcement right to make somebody rent your house. But if a taxpayer doesn't pay tax, they come and haul him off to jail. They go to take his property. And if he resists them taking his property. They either incarcerate him or kill him. Those are very different value propositions. Which is why I want to go back to up until 1974, was it illegal for Americans to own gold? Could you explain to the people listening and what happened? Why was that? There's a wonderful economic saying, and I forget whose quote I'll steal. Good money drives bad out of circulation. Roosevelt, wanted to greatly expand the role of government in the American economy. He believed, for some reason, that the big thinkers would do a better job of healing the excesses in the economy than individual people. I'll leave that aside. He knew that given the greatly increased level of public expenditure and the inability of the citizenry to pay for it on a current basis, that anybody who could add or subtract would sell US dollars in favor of gold. He couldn't stand the competition. And so very simply, rather than try to convince the citizenry of the future of the country and the efficacy of the currency, it was more convenient for him to coerce than to convince. Remember, and I hate to sound like an anti-government kook, although I am, governments have a monopoly, Robert, on force and violence. Right. You saw that in Vietnam. If I had become angry at the North and I had commandeered a helicopter myself and flown it over there and gunshot people as a private citizen, you know, Nixon wouldn't have had any sense of humor at all, but he made you do it. And so you need to understand that at its most basic, government is about coercion. Mr. Roosevelt knew for sure that he couldn't convince people to allocate money politically away from their family to somebody else's family. And the only way that he could do it was to coerce them. Chairman Mao describing politics famously said that all political power ultimately flows from the barrel of a gun. Right. Exactly. What's the possibility of confiscation again? And, you know, like one of the things when people say, well, you shouldn't own gold because Roosevelt's going to confiscate it again, well, he's dead. But anyway, I mean, I hear that all the time. I think the I think the probability of confiscation is extremely low because there are other safer, more popular ways for them to steal from you. Negative real interest rates are popular. Yeah. Deficit spending is popular. I mean, if you look at the way the U.S. economy, what we're doing is stealing from our children and grandchildren. They can't they can't vote. They aren't here. Inflation and debt and deficits. I mean, the economy that we have now is a circumstance where we're eating our seed corn. We're stealing from the unborn. And that's extremely popular. So the powers that be don't have to steal your gold. They can sell you treasuries where you sign up voluntarily. For a guaranteed loss and you're happy about it. Why would you, particularly in a country with 400 million guns in private circulation, why would you take the risk of actually overtly stealing from people when they're dying to be stolen from covertly? Oh, gosh, I got I do have one final. Yes, ma'am. In your interview with George Gammon, you're talking about inflation. And this is like I want a warning to our listeners. You said it's not a big deal right now to the average person because they haven't been bitten yet. What do you mean by that? Well, what do you see coming with inflation? You know, the argument for gold and silver, Robert, is my vintage. So if he dials himself back 50 years or something, I know a pleasant, pleasant thought. Through the fifties and sixties, we had a very, very, very, very, very, very benign economic circumstance coming off of World War Two. Wonderful demographic boom, lowering interest rates, U.S. hegemony. I mean, a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful time. And then as now we had government overreach. You know, we tried the war in Vietnam. Didn't work out so well. We tried the war in poverty. We lost that one, too. And we were trying to finance guns and butter in a circumstance where the government couldn't raise tax. And the consequence of that, not surprisingly, was inflation. They devalued the currency because. Although the warning signs were all over the place in sixty eight, sixty nine, seventy, actually sixty seven, inflation was higher than the yield on the treasuries. But because people hadn't been bitten by inflation, although they noted it, they didn't fear it. It wasn't until the seventy three or seventy four when people had gone through four or five years of inflation that they were able to see that inflation was higher than the yield on the treasuries. So they were able to see that inflation was higher than the yield on the treasuries. And so they were able to see that inflation was higher than the yield on the treasuries. Where the cost of living increased substantially faster than their savings did or their salaries did when their lifestyle was actually really impacted by saving by inflation, that the specter of inflation rather than becoming interesting became terrifying. And I think we're in precisely that circumstance today. You talk to the average sort of person in the street or for that matter, the average congressman. And you say the economy is growing if it's growing at one half of one percent. The rate, the savings rate in the U.S. 10-year treasury is at two percent and the depreciation of the purchasing power is either at six and a half or seven percent. This doesn't end well. No. And the conversation to most people is academic because it hasn't hit them yet. They can be angry at the increase in gas prices. But they haven't experienced the cumulative and compounding effective inflation that we experienced in the decade of the 70s, where people over time experienced a meaningful deterioration, meaningful deterioration in their standard of living. You know, while I'm on this rant, the other thing that people don't understand, I mean, you know, when they calculate CPI inflation, it's amazing. Consumer price index. Yeah. They don't include tax. Yeah. Now, Robert, if I didn't have to pay the tax, I wouldn't have to pay the tax. I wouldn't bitch so much about the index. But the idea that the cost of government isn't one of my one of the factors in my cost of living just astonishes me. And yet there's this discussion of the CPI and inflation around the country with no discussion in the increase in income tax, property tax, excise tax, ad valorem tax, sales tax. It astonishes me. And I think the fact that we have lived through 40 benign years has led us to believe that these things are issues rather than problems. I think they're problems as well as issues. Thank you. Well, Mr. Rule, thank you very much. Thank you very much for your wisdom. We have to get you back on again. But I think you should be on Saturday Night Live as a stand-up comedian. That's really what it is. America needs to laugh a little bit. Yes, we do. I like to laugh. Congratulations on the new bank. I wish you the best on it. Thank you. Well, you'll like the bank. We invest as an example in real collateral. We take deposits from real people. We don't use derivatives except to hedge the interest rate. We don't do time spreads, meaning we don't borrow short and lend long. It's an old-fashioned bank, one that has money in it. Keep it simple. I like it. I like it. It's going to be great. Thank you, Rick. I think you're going to miss your calling. Well, please have me back and bring me back. not the best or the worst of me as you see fit. - Thank you, I really appreciate it. - Thank you, and as I said, listen, everybody listening, listen to this again and again and again, 'cause this was a ton of information and great information going forward, thanks. - Please listen to this. Governments are interested in gold and silver, so should you. Thank you, listen to the Rich Dad Radio Show. - Thank you. - This podcast is a presentation of Rich Dad Media Network. Thank you.