Gold Just Dethroned The US Treasury — And Tether Out-Bought Every Central Bank | Sound

00:00  Cold open
00:14  Welcome — the fortune tellers were right
01:34  Gold overtakes Treasuries — first time in US history
02:00  850 tons bought this year alone
03:00  Why treasuries are just debt with a promise
05:09  How long can they keep the game going?
06:00  China, Poland, Turkey, India — the sovereign buyers
06:40  THE UNTOLD STORY: Tether bought 100 tons
09:00  Why stablecoins have to hold gold
10:50  India & Canada tax gold — what it really means
12:15  What the average household should do
13:00  JPMorgan holds $4,900 by year-end
15:00  Sound Principle: Owning your freedom
17:00  Two types of entrepreneurs — which one are you?
20:00  The million-dollar month that destroyed a friend
23:00  Success will destroy you if you're not disciplined
28:00  Time freedom vs money freedom
36:00  Zach's stone sheep hunt — real freedom
37:00  Runway: gold, silver, oil, land
39:00  Zach's takeaway: watch what they do, not what they say
41:30  Outro

Hashtag Wall (~20)

#SoundMoney #SoundMoneyPodcast #Gold #GoldPrice #Silver #PreciousMetals #CentralBanks #USTreasury #ReserveCurrency #Tether #USDT #Stablecoins #DeDollarization #GoldStandard #Macro #Inflation #HardMoney #Entrepreneurship #Freedom #JoshAnderson

Buzzsprout Description (trimmed)

Gold just overtook US Treasuries as the world's #1 reserve asset for the first time since 1996 — 27% vs 22%, confirmed by the ECB on June 2. And the biggest gold buyer of 2025 wasn't a country. It was Tether. The stablecoin now holds ~148 tons, more than Australia, UAE, Qatar, and South Korea combined.

Josh and Zack break down what nobody in the media is talking about — why the digital dollar is quietly buying physical gold, and what the little guy should do about it. Then: the culmination of 10 weeks of business principles — how to own your freedom without letting success destroy you.

Sound Money Wallet → https://soundmoneywallet.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Introducing Zach Davis. It's Josh Anderson with the Sound Money Podcast.

SPEAKER_02 0:14

Hello, welcome to this week's episode of the Sound Money Sound Principal Podcast. Josh Anderson here with Zach Davis getting ready today. Zach, how are you today?

SPEAKER_01 0:21

I'm good. Hey everybody. Good to be with you.

SPEAKER_02 0:24

It is a great day to be with the listeners and to be together for a few minutes as we dive into some pretty awesome topics. I think I'm I'm pretty excited about both of these things we're going to talk about today, Zach, mostly because uh we've been on the gold and silver side, we've been saying this was going to happen for a couple of years. Um, I mean, kind of like we're prophets. I don't know, but maybe not profit. I don't know how to go that far. Uh but you know, we've been reading the tea leaves for a long time, and we saw today coming uh several years ago. It just took a little a little bit longer than we thought, but it was an inevitable thing. So I'm excited about our topic around gold and silver today. And likewise, um, kind of want to have a culmination of the last about 10 weeks. We've been talking about uh some business principles that kind of they all built on each other and kind of gonna have a little bit of a recap today and uh share some of the maybe some experiences that we've had around around that business principle. So I'm excited for today, Zach. And I want to jump kind of right in uh to the lead today for gold and silver. You know, I got a grin because, like I said, we've we've known today's coming for a long time. And it's crazy. It's crazy. And so I just want to jump right in, right? Um, hey, if you've been listening to us for the last five years on different platforms, you know that we've said that gold was going to overtake treasuries one day as the reserve currency of the world. It was inevitable. And this past week, first time ever in the United States history since we started issuing bonds, that gold actually overtook treasuries. Uh, now 20 per 27 of all global central bank reserves are in gold, not in treasuries. 20 up from 20 before, that's 850 tons bought just this year alone by central banks, surpassing the U.S. Treasury for the first time, and now making the U.S. Treasuries Act the number two reserve currency in the world, no longer the number one reserve currency. Uh, what are your thoughts about about? I mean, we we've been saying this is gonna happen for a long time. What do you what are your thoughts around um gold overtaking and surpassing U.S. Treasuries for the first time ever as reserve currency of central banks?

SPEAKER_01 2:41

History repeats itself. You just you can't you can't be this irresponsible with spending as a country and as a global world, like you just can't be this irresponsible and not think that it's gonna not catch up with you sometime. I mean, it the it is the thing that everybody wanted years and years ago. It is the thing that everybody wants now because it is real money, and it's not I mean when you think about a U.S. treasury, what is the U.S. Treasury? It's just debt, and all it is is when you buy the treasuries, it's it's backed by the good faith of the government, right? Saying, hey, we're gonna pay you, but man, look at the debt they're racking up. Uh nobody has faith in in the U.S. Treasuries, nobody has faith in any of the global currencies. That should scare a few people.

SPEAKER_02 3:32

That should absolutely scare people to death that um that treasuries, first time since you know, since Nixon took the world really off the gold standard, when he took the dollar off the gold standard. Um, first time ever that gold has surpassed the treasuries in the reserve currency. And when central banks uh vote with their own dollars and say, we're gonna we're gonna spend all we're gonna store our value in gold more than treasuries, it should, like you say, Zach, it should terrify the common man and woman who unfortunately is bought into this idea of storing their value in pensions, 401ks, retirement plans, mutual funds. All those things should be a little bit terrifying today with this new switch of gold becoming the number one backed asset in the world overtaking treasuries. That I like like you say, we know that we've known it's gonna happen, but the reality is it hadn't happened. Um, but now the central banks have changed that.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

And uh well, and go ahead, and and I think and I think what's interesting about that is in the last year, you've even seen a slowdown of central banks buying gold because they they've they've been liquidating, not at a faster rate that they've been buying, but they've also been liquidating, which is all which has put some down pressure on the price, right? That's part of the reason why the price of gold has come down. But they're so broke that they're having to sell their gold to get cash to back the treasuries. That's a problem. Now, thank goodness they were smart enough previously to buy up all this gold, but it makes you wonder how long can they keep the game going? Like you have to have money to buy the gold. And if you're liquidating gold to back the treasuries, at some point that intersection crosses and you don't have the cash to buy the gold anymore. And now you're just having to liquidate.

SPEAKER_02 5:29

Yeah, and I and I uh I mean I've not seen this anywhere in the news, right? We we have we have um our investigators that work for Sound Money that scour the world to see what's going on. They're not looking at what the media says. We actually have insight into know who's buying from the U.S. mint, who's buying from the largest mines, and who's buying from the largest refiners in the world, right? We've cultivated these relationships for a decade, and so we know where the metal is moving, right? Wait. Uh and no one has talked about this, Zach. Everyone's talked about China. China's bought for 18 consecutive months, China's bought. Poland has decided, we've talked about this before, to by the end of July have 35% of their entire reserves in gold. Um, Turkey has done the same, a similar situation, right? Uh, we've talked about how India put a put a put a giant tariff on gold to slow down the buying, which by the way, they say has started the largest smuggling of gold this month that's ever been known since the pirate times, Zach. Because that's such a smuggling problem in the last two weeks in India with people trying to smuggle in gold around the tariffs. But this is what nobody's talked about. I want your take on it. Um stable coins, right? What are stable coins first, right? Um, stable coins are coins that are tethered. We usually call them tethers, they're tethered to something like the US dollar or the Chinese yen or the uh British pound, right? They're they're digital currency that are tied one-to-one to a currency. Okay, that's why it's a uh a stable coin. Here's what's crazy. I have not seen this anywhere except for our research team, um, Zach, that uh tethers, tether coins, have bought up a ridiculous amount of to the tune of a hundred tons of gold since uh in 2026. So why, Zach? Dive into this for a minute. Why are stable coins like USDT, right? Why are they buying a hundred tons of gold right now?

SPEAKER_01 7:44

Which, by the way, they have now become the single biggest buyer of gold. They are buying even more than the central banks. So if if look look, I'm not I'm not gonna die on the hill of cryptocurrencies are bad, right? Like there's there's a place for them. But you have to wonder if crypto is so awesome, why are these stable coins and why is tether buying up so much gold? Because again, they're they're doing the exact same thing that that uh the the U.S. Treasury is doing, and they're doing the exact same thing these central banks are doing. They know there's a shift, they know there's a major spending problem, and what it tells you is they don't have confidence in the U.S. Treasuries because if if they're buying gold at a one-to-one ratio to back their stable, I I mean, we call it a stable coin because it's supposedly not volatile, right? And it's tied to the US dollar. So if it's tied to the US dollar and it's so stable, why is Tether now the single largest purchaser of gold above the central banks? That tells you they don't have any confidence in the US dollar. Like it the writing is on the wall. Like they just don't they don't have any confidence.

SPEAKER_02 9:11

They don't have any confidence. When we saw when we saw what Tether was doing, right, we compete against Tether for metal, right? We so we know when we buy and we know when Tether buys. Like we we're in the space, right? Um when we started to see the amount of gold that they started to buy, we went, oh my goodness. A stable coin tied to the US dollar does not believe in the US dollar as a store of value to hedge against inflation. And they can't have inflation or they're gonna get crushed, right? So they're buying up gold. Isn't it amazing? Your original comment, history repeats itself. We used to be on the gold standard, a bunch of idiot politicians trying to line their own pockets and to rip off the rest of the world and not pay their debts to places like France and China and all these others. Took us off the gold standard. Humans by nature are going back to it through things like the stable coins, buying it in order to have the value, or places like us that sound money, going, hey, we're gonna go to sound.money and we're gonna buy gold and silver and we're gonna store it in its physical form so that we have protection. We have real financial protection. And I just think it's amazing that governments and companies can try and do all they want to deceive the American people, to cheat the American people. But there's always some really wise people in our country who go, hey, I'm not doing that. I'm not storing those green $100 bills. I'm going to store gold, just like the central banks and just like now the stable coins of the world have to do in order to keep their coin alive, they have to do it. But nobody's talking about it. Have you even seen that in the Media Zach? Anywhere? Have you seen it anywhere?

SPEAKER_01 10:54

No, I well, no, because I mean, all these countries, they want their citizens to have confidence in their in their currency. Because if the citizens lose conf look, the only reason that the currency actually works is because the citizens have confidence that the government will actually make good on the debt or the tender. And so when the citizens lose confidence, the whole thing upends. And that's when you see that's when you see these currencies crash. So all these countries are trying to tell their citizens, hey, our currency's good, the economy's great, everything's hunky-dory. But then when a country like India goes and puts a 15% tariff on any imported metal, what are they telling their citizens without telling their citizens? They're saying we have a major problem, and we don't want you spending your money outside of the country on gold. Otherwise, our currency is going to crash. Canada just did the same thing. I I think there's a tariff on on uh a tax on uh Canadians now when they buy when they buy gold.

SPEAKER_02 11:58

So it's it's ridiculous, you know, they're trying to oppress their people, and uh and thank goodness that enough people in the world now have their own eyeballs to to see that there's a better way, there is freedom out there. So I just say this, Zach. Uh last comment on the gold and silver market for the week. Um, if freedom for central banks, if freedom for stable coins comes through gold and silver, what should the average household do? Ought to be buying some. I'll be buying some. Ought to be buying some, especially in a hot inflation market, right? Where we know um we just they just came out and said inflation's 4.2 percent this year. Uh it's on a it's on a heater. Hey, no better time to own gold and silver than when um the price has been reduced and inflation is high. You're going to see a bump. Uh hey, these are simple things.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

So yeah, I think JP Morgan is still predicting $4,900 for the end of the year. So, I mean, right now, if you're if you're buying, if you're buying gold right now, you're buying like a 20% discount off of its high. And it's going to go back to its high and then some. Like it, it it just is. You can't have this much buying. You can't have things like tether doing what they're doing, central banks doing what they're doing, governments doing what they're doing, and not have immense pressure on the price of gold going up. Like it's just inevitable.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

It's a good time to be a stacker, it's a good time to be using platforms like SoundOp Money. It's a good time to be buying collectible gold and silver coins. It's a good, it's a good time to be a buyer. Um, when the economy sucks and life's tough, that's when you win. Like, you know, I was just back at my at my local motorcycle dealer. I, you know, you know me, I I have an addiction. So do you. We have a way too many motorcycles. Uh but uh I always say when there's endless motorcycles on the floor, it's a great time to be a motorcycle lover, right? Because you get deals. Yep. The average person is really hurting the day. I don't care what you're doing. You can cut out something in your life and you can and you can dollar cost average, you can buy a little bit of gold and silver every month. And if you do, you will be just like the hundreds of thousands of people we've done business with now that do business with us, who send us thank you letters who say, I'm so grateful that I made the conscious decision to buy a couple hundred dollars a month. Um, it's made all the difference for me in my moment of need and uh for all our listeners, right? Those of you who are doing it every month, maybe it's with our wealth builder program, or maybe you're just buying it for somebody else. We don't care. You're going to win. You're going to win in your lifetime. And you will look back and you'll say, that was a really wise decision I made. I'm glad I wasn't like the masses. I'm glad I thought like the central banks. So probably a pretty good time then, Zach, in that vein, right? To uh to switch gears for a minute to our business principle of the week, our sound principle of the week. Um, because it ties right in. Uh at the end of the day, we've been talking about all the different ways that you can grow your business or ways that you can start a new business over the last about 10 weeks. We've shared a lot of our personal thoughts on that matter. But in that, it's probably worth taking a step back because at the end of the day, um the only reason most entrepreneurs, uh entrepreneurs fall into one of two camps for me, Zach, not three or four. They fall into one of two. Number one, they're just a true, true believer in whatever it is they they're trying to accomplish. These are typically more scientists, innovators, um, people that, you know, chemists, that these are you know, true believers, what I call them, who they're not really an entrepreneur yet, but they they believe so much in their cause or their widget or their thing that they've discovered that they become an entrepreneur because the thing that they've done or discovered wins, and they have to figure out the business side. That's one that's one segment of entrepreneurs. But the real one that happens more often than not is an entrepreneur who sets out to find freedom. Like that's as simple, as simple as it gets, right? Now, what is that freedom? That freedom might be from financial challenges, that freedom might be time, uh, freedom might be ability to to work at 10 o'clock at night, but not at eight in the morning, right? That freedom might be uh freedom to help their kids or coach their kids or to be, you know. But most entrepreneurs at the end of the day, you can boil it down to what they really, really, really are looking for is some sort of freedom. Um, you know, would you agree with that, Statement, or you disagree?

SPEAKER_01 16:50

No, I I whenever I talk to anybody that's wanting to start a business or they're looking for advice or they want to run an idea past me, you know, when I ask them why, that that usually is the answer. I'm just tired of the eight to five. I want more freedom.

SPEAKER_02 17:06

They just want they want more free. So at the end of the day, I want to jump into the sound money segment because that's what everybody's chasing. And I think we've spoken a lot to our listeners about how you can get there, right? How you can gain some freedom. I want to shift gears today, and some people may sound think this sounds crazy, but this is like really passion for you and I. Once you have some measure of success in the business venture that you're doing, what does it look like to actually own your freedom, right? Once you've got a little better financial independence, um, what does it mean to own your freedom? And what are some important tips that maybe we could give today, Zach? That for our listeners that are finding some success, for ones that haven't found it yet, but that will, um, or those that have found lots of it, what what advice might you have or experiences might you have around what does it look like to own it and then preserve it or keep it moving forward to own your freedom and continue to own it in the future? What does that look like for you?

SPEAKER_01 18:06

Well, I think the biggest thing is you have to you have to decide, right? Every everything that you do is a decision, and you're you're living the reality of the decisions that you made five years ago. And so if what you're living now is not what you really want, then you've got to make different decisions today so that you can have what you want in five years. And that takes discipline. That's probably one of the biggest things that that you have to figure out as an entrepreneur is discipline because nobody else is going to do it for you. Like nobody's gonna call you and get you up in the morning, nobody's gonna tell you that you have to do these tasks. So there's a lot of things that can go undone. And so if you've found a little bit of success and you're on your way, you really have to lean into it and you have to build systems around it to help you be able to keep that, but you also have to have the discipline to make the hard decisions to do the things that are going to give you what you want in the future. That's the biggest difference, I think, between people who are successful in their business endeavors and those who end up going back to a nine to five or not being successful, is they they just don't have the discipline to create the habits. Like one of the habits that you should create if you've found a little bit of that financial freedom is your spending. Like, you know, the word budget. People are like, no, I'm a I'm a business owner because I don't want to be on a budget. I just want to have unlimited funds and do whatever I want. Well, great. If you're making a ton of money and and you can do that, great. But for most people, you still need to have some discipline around what are you doing for the future? Like, will your business always be as good as it is right now? Will there always be a need for the widget you're selling or the service that you're providing? So are you put I are you having the discipline to take a percentage of your spending or the percentage of your earnings and putting it away for the long term or or investments? So are are you are you figuring out where your money is going and watching um the money coming in and going out so that you can maintain that freedom in the future? Because lots of lots of uh lots of people get into business, start businesses, they make a bunch of money, then they spend it all, and then pretty quick the business has problems. It needs an infusion of cash, and they either have to do one of two things. Either they got to go get a loan at a bank, and now guess what you lost? Freedom, or you have to go get a loan shark or a hard money lender, or you have to bring in a uh investor, a business partner, and then guess what you've lost? You've lost that freedom independence that you really wanted in the future. So I think the biggest thing is the discipline, and we just talked about it. Like I whether it's gold or whether it's I think it should be a little bit of gold, you should have a percentage of your portfolio and a percentage of whatever you're earning going into either gold or silver, but you should be disciplined enough to secure that future. And I would say this, Zach.

SPEAKER_02 21:01

Um, man, I it's a different world today. This isn't our grandpa's world, okay? In our grandfather's world, businesses lasted 40 or 50 years. Hey, I'm sorry. How many businesses do you know, Zach, that make it more than a decade anymore? Without dramatic, we've talked about that, without dramatically changing their what their what they do, how they do it. We talked before about Elon Musk and and Tesla gonna get rid of cars in the next five years. We've talked about Walkman's going away, right? Becoming digital, like things change at a rapid speed. Okay. So if you're crushing it today and you're making a bunch of money, be disciplined, like Zach's saying, because it's going to change. Uh it it will go away, it will plateau or decrease. It's just it's the evolution of all businesses today. And so, like we have many, man, we have many friends. Who have hit a home run with one of their businesses and think it'll never end. And they totally change their lifestyle. And uh they changed their lifestyle in a way that they're spending through debt vehicles or through uh through purchasing or where they put their money. They spend way more, they spend a whole bunch of money when they're making a bunch of money, but it's tied to instruments where when the sales decrease, they still have the obligations. And just as easy as it made them free, it crushes them. And we've seen this a hundred times over. It's really sad to me. Um, it's really sad. And so, what we want to see from every entrepreneur that's winning, we want to see you continue to win. So don't dramatically change your lifestyle. Don't dramatically change it, right? Can you change the car you drive? Yeah, can you change the house you live in? Yeah, but do it responsibly, preferably without debt to do that, uh, so it doesn't crush you and the sales go away. Um, can you take better vacations? Yeah. But guess what? Do what Zach said. Be disciplined about where you put the excess so it can continue to take care of you in the future. Otherwise, success will destroy you. We recently had someone we know, Zach um individual had made a bunch of money a couple years ago. One of their one of their one-month um successes was they made a million dollars in a month, right? The individual said that that was probably one of the greatest and single worst days of their life. And I know some of our listeners are saying, what are you talking about? They made a million dollars in a month. How can that be one of the worst days in their life? Well, they didn't happen to use the funds appropriately for taxes, they didn't happen to buy the right instruments that avoided paying massive tax. Um, you know, when you make big money, you got to spend it in the right areas, or the government will hammer you, like you're the little tiny nail and they're the giant sledgehammer. Uh, and and learn some hard lessons, right? And this is where, at the end of the day, make sure that that you're being wise. Don't dramatically change your lifestyle just because you're really winning today, because it may change. Zach, we've been in the network marketing space a lot in our life. We're not in it right now, but we've been in it a lot in our life. How often have we made have we've been a part of assisting in making a millionaire? Maybe a thousand? I don't even know. Two thousand? Lots, lots a lot. We've helped at least, I don't even know, several thousands in our last 25 years individuals make their first million dollars. How many of them, after making their first million dollars, go broke?

SPEAKER_01 24:48

Almost everyone. It's insane. Like so sad. It's really sad because they're not used to making the money, they're not disciplined, they don't know what to do with it. And it's like winning the lottery. How many people do you know that win the lottery and and then they're they're broke? It it happens to almost every single person that wins a lottery because money doesn't fix the problems. So yeah, it's it happens a lot.

SPEAKER_02 25:14

It happens a lot. And what I've always noticed, right, is their second million they make, they're a lot better with. Second million, much better. The first million, and we've told our stories on this podcast before. Zach and I both made way too much money at too young of age and uh lost it and got crushed, right? Government came in, IRS and state governments, and I you name it, right? Invested it in places that that seemed like they were great because other people were doing it and all it was was a hoax, right? Um we just we just want our listeners when you do win, discipline, protect it. Save it, protect it with gold and silver, protect it with real estate, protect it with oil, protect it like protect it where we've said where the central banks, the governments, and the wealthiest people in the world protect it. Don't don't put it where it could actually hurt you and uh and penalize you. And so, you know, these are and we and we thought about hey, this is a principle that we really got to get out there because um there's just too many people that get beat. They get beat by the system. The system's out to get you, and it will when you make a bunch of money if you don't take care of it. Um, Zach, what are some common traps that people need to avoid in that, right? If if somebody's made a bunch of money or they're making maybe they've maybe they've doubled their income, right? It could be you got a new job, you went from $40,000 to $80,000 a year. You went from $80,000 to $160,000. You went from $150,000 to $300,000 because you kicked butt. Right? Um What are some common traps that people need to avoid so that a lifestyle creep doesn't come in and and chase them down and just mow them down? You know, what what are some areas that people lose discipline that you typically see?

SPEAKER_01 27:05

Well, I you you mentioned a couple of them. It's lifestyle, right? People start buying brand new vehicles or they'll go upgrade their home. And now all of a sudden, um, you know, they they went from a $1,500 mortgage or $2,500 mortgage to a $5,000 mortgage or $10,000 mortgage. So the the lifestyle piece is really big. Like most people are really worried about looking rich rather than being rich. That shouldn't be your number one focus is to look rich. And that's usually what gets people. The other, the other, um, the other trap is when you start increasing your earnings and your wealth, guess what else increases that you don't expect? Your tax liability, right? You go up in tax bracket. So one of the common traps that people find is all of a sudden they make a bunch of money and then they got this big tax bill, and now they can't pay their tax bill because they spent all the money on upgrading their lifestyle, not realizing that they were gonna owe more taxes for the year because not only did they earn more money, but their tax bracket increased. So now they got to pay a higher percentage of taxes on the money that they earned. So you got to work the tax problem, right? You got to learn and work with your accountant to figure out what you should be spending your money on so that you can try to eliminate some of that tax um spending. And then one of the other ones that I see a lot is when somebody makes a pretty significant amount of money or starts making really good money, it's like I don't know how this works, but it's like they have this big red and blue flashing light on top of their head, and every single person that has a business idea finds them. And and they want to deploy your capital somewhere out there in some business idea, and you have to be really careful where you go deploy that capital. I always I always uh talk about money as little soldiers, right? When you are making money and you want to start another business or invest in another business or somebody else's business, you're sending your dollars out like soldiers. And the idea is for them to capture everybody else's soldiers and bring them home. But all too often, someone who's making for the first time really good money, some they get all these people coming to them, and everything sounds really exciting, and ever you just hit it big, you just have this rush of excitement, and you see big dollars and you see the success. And so you you look at lots of other businesses and go, oh, I can make that one win too. And you deploy that capital, and what happens is the soldiers don't bring other soldiers home, they go out and they get slaughtered. So you have to, again, protect the capital. Only, you know, one thing I've learned is I will only invest in things now that I'm passionate about and that I'm physically willing to go to work at, because that's usually what happens is you usually end up having to jump in and save it or or do the work to help it get going. So that that's probably another big trap that that I see that you really ought to be careful of is everybody else's ideas.

SPEAKER_02 30:20

Yeah, we're just not passionate or we're not passive of we we don't believe in passive investing very rarely, right? Mostly because the success rate of passive investing is so microscopic. It's not one in ten, it's not one in twenty, it's not one in a hundred. Like most passive investments in companies are are extremely dangerous. If you're gonna do those things, pick a country, a company you love in the SP 500 and buy stock. If you want to do that, um believe enough in something as simple as dirt or or uh or gold or silver. That's a passive investment that can win. But if it's passively investing in a fencing company or a roofing company or in um a soda shack, right, unless you're willing to jump in and do the work, it's a good chance you're gonna lose your money more often than not, right? You better be passionate about building fences. You better be gay passionate about building fences, right? It's just all and so yeah, this is great advice, Axe. That's what I was hoping you'd kind of go to on these traps, right? The the lifestyle trap, the every business is a great, a great investment. Um, when you're winning, those are the things that are gonna hit you the fastest. Uh and and typically you win when you put in lots of effort to something. That's just the reality. Now that's when you win. I just say this, Zach, in that vein too. Once you start finding some success in whatever it is, maybe you went from you were making $3,000 a month and now you're making six, right? That's success. That's massive success, right? You better stop and re-identify what freedom actually looks like for you. Right? Take the time, sit down on the piece of paper or your phone and some app and just record what does freedom actually look like, and then make sure that all the decisions you make actually make that a reality. Because usually, uh to your point, going from a $2,500 mortgage to a $5,000 mortgage usually is a lot of times opposite of the freedom goal, right? Or going from a $300 car payment or no car payment to a thousand dollar car payment, so you look cool, usually is opposite of the freedom goal. So take time to write down what freedom looks like for you. I'm interested, Zach and the officer. What does freedom actually look like for Zach Davis, right? The Zach Davis who's been in business for 25, 30 years, who's had some massive wins. I mean, we've been lucky enough to do more than have two businesses do more than a billion dollars in sales. Like, I it's pretty freaking cool, right? Uh, we've had many businesses do more than 250 million in sales, but we had two do over a billion dollars in sales. Like, so what does success look like for you? Like, what does freedom freedom look like for you?

SPEAKER_01 33:06

Uh for me, it's time. Like that's that to me, that's what the success buys me is time and the ability to make my own decisions. So I'm very careful.

SPEAKER_02 33:17

Guys, I know, so that's BS, bro. Come on. What do you mean? Like that's true. I what are the busiest people you're ever gonna be on the planet? So, what is so if you're saying freedom's time, well, walk me through it.

SPEAKER_01 33:29

What do you mean? Well, this so this is one of the big fallacies I think about entrepreneurship that people think, right? That once you own a business, that you're just gonna have all this massive time freedom. Well, you it I I get asked this question quite often. How do you find a balance? There isn't one. Like there's most people try to figure out how do I spend enough time with my spouse, my family, my career, my recreation, like in this period of time. That's not to me, that's not how it works. Balance is over a lifetime. So there, you know, I've mentioned before, there's lots of times where I, you know, I don't see my kids for four or five days because head down, we're doing stuff, right? But there's also times when I get to take my kids and we we go on a road trip and there's no end date. It's like, oh, we're probably gonna be gone three days and we end up being gone seven because we can. So that that's the freedom I for me that is worth doing all this is you you get to pick and choose when you when you want to work and when you want to have your freedom. And the debt part, like I just I've been really careful about debt. I don't like owing other people money. So to me, that freedom is I I don't live in a great big fancy house with a $10,000, $20,000 mortgage, right? It's like I all my vehicles are paid for, all my recreational toys, they're paid for. Like I don't have debt on any of those things. And so that's what that's what the business world has created for me. And that to me is freedom because the peace of mind where I know I can go to bed every night, and if something really bad happens, I got quite a bit of runway because I don't have any debt and the bank's not coming to get up to get all my stuff and kick me out of my house. That to me, that's the freedom.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

And I would agree with that statement that freedom, time freedom is not that you're not busy, that you're just that you can just uh go mow the grass all day, right? Um, but it is freedom to go do what you want. You and I just came home from a great vacation with our spouses. We took our wives to uh awesome Caribbean island, St. Vincent's spent a week, it was fabulous. Uh, but freedom of the ability to go there, financially go there, no big deal. But more importantly, to be there and still accomplish all of the business things that need to be done for the multiplicity of businesses that we own, right? Uh, but to do it from that beautiful location. That's that's freedom. The freedom that uh, hey, my good friend Zach here, he's gonna be hunting a stone sheep in August for three weeks, right? It takes three weeks to live on a mountain to hunt a stone sheep. That's the freedom we're talking about. Now, does that mean Zach's gonna have to work his butt off in July and October in all his businesses, the ones we're partners and the ones he's got on his own? Yeah. That's the freedom, right? It might mean 100-hour weeks leading up to it and 100-hour weeks after, but it means for three weeks he can go chase a stone sheep.

SPEAKER_01 36:35

Um, yeah. And it's the it's the decision, right? Josh, I get I get to make that that decision. You get to make that decision. I don't have I don't have a boss that says, we can't take three weeks off, right? Like I get to decide that, that I'm gonna have to put in a little extra time on both ends of it to take that time off. But I get to make that decision. That's that's freedom.

SPEAKER_02 37:00

And then your second point of that was even more important to me. It's the freedom of how you deploy the resources of money so that you have more freedom. You use the term runway, right? Well, runway is just more freedom, right? It's just, hey, if things go really bad in my business, I have more runway because I have I've put in your case, I know where you put it. You put in gold and silver, you put in oil, like and in land. I know where you put it. Those are runways that are that are awesome. But I'll touch on this, right? You're the same way, you didn't mention it, but we're both freaks this way. The freedom that I'm looking for is the freedom to have some extra just extra money, capital, that when opportunity knocks again with the next opportunity that I didn't even know existed yet, when it comes and it needs capital. Guess what I have? I have the capital. Now that capital can be one of two things. It can be the money. I might have to go sell some gold or silver, I might have to go sell a piece of property, I might have to go sell some mineral rights in order to raise the capital to do the new opportunity. But more importantly, I have the time that I can carve out some time in my life to go work on the new opportunity. That is freedom to me. I know it sounds freakish, right? But that's what that's ultimate freedom for me. So that when opportunity knocks on my door of something that I think needs fixed in the world that we can do, is being able to have a little of the capital for us, it's stored in gold and silver to can easily be converted, and the time to readjust the schedule to go, I need to put 20 to 40 to 60 to 80 hours in on this a week because it's really cool. That's freedom. And uh the most free men I know in the world are the busiest men I know on the planet, but they but they make their schedule of what opportunities they want to work on and what life things they want to work on. Zach, I'll let you have the last word today on uh today's topics and uh let you finish up today.

SPEAKER_01 39:01

Yeah, I I think uh for me overall, the the main idea that I think I pulled out of the report this week is be careful of the spin. The media and the governments, and all they're gonna everybody tells you what they want you to hear, right? Have faith in the currency, all this stuff. But look at the policies. Like look at the policies that have been put in place over the last several months in these different countries. The taxes are being levied on people when they buy gold and silver, the cryptocurrency. By the way, we we didn't touch on this, but um tether is not the only one that is buying gold. I don't know how many, I don't know how many companies have reached out to us in the last year and have asked us if they would if if we would back their crypto with gold, right? So like hundreds they yeah, so what they do is more important than what they say. So I think for me, that's the theme of this week is look at what they're doing, not what they're saying, and you probably should do the same thing.

SPEAKER_02 40:11

Yeah, I would agree with that, and uh I love I love that we were a little bit of uh we're not gonna use the word profits. I guess we're gonna use the word uh fortune tellers. Fortune tellers, Zach, fortune tellers. But a few years ago, yeah, we had a big crystal ball. But a few years ago, we said, hey, there's gonna come a day, and it's not in the distant future, where gold will overtake U.S. treasuries as the asset that's being held again in the majority asset. It happened this week. It's only that gulf, that divide is only gonna get bigger as more and more gold and silver is purchased by central banks, less and less U.S. treasuries. Uh, we've talked about there's probably gonna come a day where nobody shows up to the bond sale. U.S. government is gonna print more money, they're gonna issue some bonds, and no one's gonna show up to buy them. They're buying them now because interest rates are above 4%. There's gonna come a day when nobody shows up, and then the bad the jigs up, Zach. The jigs up, and uh, you'll be grateful that you're holding gold and silver, that you're holding some assets, or that you've built a business that is uh is winning. So we appreciate you guys. You guys are awesome. Hope you have a great week, and uh, we'll see you next week here on the Sound Money Sound Principles podcast. See ya.

SPEAKER_01 41:30

All right, see you everybody.