Navigating Financial Chaos: Are You Ready?

Are you prepared for financial, maybe ruin, or maybe worried about the future financially?

Have you ever, do you have a plan for how to navigate, especially if, well, we have a reprieve right now with Trump, but what if the

Democrats get back in power and decide to start debanking people again? Do you have a plan for that?

That's gonna be coming up right now on The Rap Report. One, two, three. Welcome to The Rap Report with your host,

Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity and the

Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport, the executive director of Striving for Eternity and the

Christian podcast community of which this podcast is a proud member. We are here to give you biblical interpretations and applications, and well, in this case, for the

Christian life, we're gonna talk some application with someone named James Hunter.

He is with Alps Precious Metals Group. I met him over a year ago at the first Fight Laugh Feast that I went to, and we met, we talked for,

I'm gonna guess probably about an hour on a whole lot of topics. Not all dealing with precious metals and finances, but he has a wealth of knowledge on a lot of topics.

But today, we're gonna focus on, basically on finances. Who he works for, the company he has is

Alps Precious Metals Group. You can find it at alpspmg .com.

That stands for Alps, so the A -L -P -S. And then

Precious Metals Group is the P -M -G, just so you know. So, we'll mention that throughout.

So, James, welcome to The Wrap Report. Great to be here. Very kind to have you,

Andrew. So, for folks who don't know you, maybe there were a couple people that weren't at that Fight Laugh Feast.

I mean, it was a pretty big conference, but maybe there's a few. Introduce yourself. Let folks know a little bit about you.

How did you become a Christian? And then, how did you start out with getting into this you know, area of helping people with their finances?

Sure. Okay, well, first of all, saved by the grace of God at Calvary and then

Christ's resurrection from the dead ascension to the right hand of the Father. Born in 1963, baptized as an infant, as a

Presbyterian. Really began to feel a know of the omnipresence of the

Lord when I was seven years old at a Christmas Eve service in Birmingham, Alabama.

Where I also felt unquestionably a calling to the ministry. I just remember that evening, listening to my minister and give the

Christmas Eve sermon and thinking, I think I'm going to do what he's doing one day.

I think God wants me to do that. And that is, while I'm not formally ordained,

I have been ordained as a lay minister, a deacon, a number of things.

Majored in religion, I've studied for, done a great deal of apprentice type studying for the ministry.

And I'm now an elder at a church plant here in Pensacola, Florida, where I'm based called

Ascension Church of Florida, of Pensacola, excuse me. And we are a reformed evangelical church.

So what does that mean? If you cut it through together, Presbyterian and Episcopalian, that's what you get.

I have been, I would definitely call myself a descendant of J .C.

Ryle, if you're familiar with him. And essentially he was given the moniker, a

Presbyterian with a prayer book. And that's pretty much what I am.

And the church we started about coming up on 20 months ago, as the most potpourri gathering of Christian brothers and sisters.

I mean, we've got a Presbyterian, Episcopalian, that's a fourth, fifth generation Southern Baptist, two or three non -denominational families.

I know Methodist, it's literally all over the entire spectrum. And there was the founder of the

Reformed Episcopal Church way back in the late 19th century was a guy named

George David Cummings. And he felt like that if it was done right, that the union of evangelical

Christendom could happen under the biblically faithful and grounded expression of the faith in Episcopalian, not necessarily the governance, but certainly the worship.

So that's the reader's digest there. And thanks be to God for his kindness and saving me.

You just need a dispensationalist in there to have the full gamut of potpourri. Maybe the Southern Baptist is, so, you know.

There you go, there you go, absolutely. So essentially you're saying your church is what heaven will look like, huh?

Well, yes, absolutely. Everyone will stop fighting and just get along.

Crazy idea. On the business side, because this has been somewhat of a chaotic journey, that God has put me on.

One of the things that one needs to do, well, I've been blessed to have a wife and children, and how do you support them?

And as I majored in religion and graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis in 1985, the general plan at the time was

I'm gonna go straight to seminary. But by the time I graduated, I'd actually bothered to really read the

Bible. I had learned, read St. Augustine, John Kelvin, Martin Luther, and a number of other of the

Christian theologians. And even though Rhodes is unquestionably a post -liberal, post -heretical place, sadly, you did read these guys.

And in reading them, I was like, well, what am I gonna do now? Because I can't go to these seminaries. I didn't know enough about the continuing churches because you had just begun to have the explosion.

Episcopal Church had destroyed the prayer book in 1979. The president, usually the

Episcopalians, say over the last 150, 200 years, have been the point of the spear.

If you look at the Oxford Movement of the late, excuse me, the mid -19th century, that's where all the stuff really starts beginning to come manifest in the open church.

So I was really kind of that man without a country. So what am

I going to do? Well, my grandfather was a physician in Boston, but he loved talking about Wall Street markets, stock markets, et cetera.

And the combination of culture, government, fiscal policy, and stock markets was always fascinating.

So I ended up getting an MBA from Auburn University in Alabama, which is usually known as Sports University USA.

However, it is also the home of the Ludwig von Mises Austrian Economics Institute.

And as a result, I had a number of professors that were free market, Austrian econ, and one element of that is the grounding in physical gold to keep governments honest.

So starting in the late 80s, I have that understanding. But then my first job was

I got into the institutional fixed income business, which means if you ever read the book,

Bonfire of the Vanities, that was a Tom Wolfe book. It's about the bond guys of the 80s were called the quote, unquote, masters of the universe.

And it's a fascinating book. So Tom Wolfe's stuff is all really good. They're really engaging reads.

But the bond guys were the quote, unquote, masters of the universe. And there was so much money that was being put into fixed income at the time.

That's where that came from. So I was a bond guy, and I'll do a real fast forward here.

So I ended up working for the institutional division of Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers in the 90s.

This is before Lehman blew up. Then in starting in 05,

I started a small structured credit hedge fund with a friend of mine who was also a

Christian brother. Both of us were of the opinion that you cannot have credit trade where it was trading in the mid 2000s without it was an accident waiting to happen.

Have you ever seen the film, The Big Short? No, and my audience is not surprised in the least.

When you mentioned me and anything in movies, pop culture, sports, I'm clueless. Okay, well,

The Big Short was a film that was basically telling you what happened during the 2008 meltdown.

And essentially, the characters in there are short the credit markets, and that's why they make a bunch of money.

Well, we were also. Now, we were small potatoes compared to those guys, but we still had some very excellent years during 08, 09.

But the denouement was watching institutions, and there are five of them,

Bank of America, Citibank, J .P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs. Literally, if they had to play by the rules that everybody else had to play by, and Lehman was one of them, every last one of them would be out of business.

He would not have Jamie Dimon running around on G5 airplanes and addressing the, he would have been just like the, again,

I'm gonna do another movie reference, Trading Plates with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, which was a comedy.

But at the end of it, the bad guys, the Duke and Duke commodity brokers think they have inside information, but they've got it backwards.

So they blow up the firm, and they get a margin call. At the end of the film, they say, well, boys, margin call, and they go, you know perfectly well, we don't have $394 million in cash, to which this guy running the thing says, well, seize all assets of Duke and Duke and sell their seats, which is what should have happened to J .P.

Morgan, Bank of America, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs, but it didn't happen.

That's when they came up with the term too big to fail, right? Correct, and if you go back and actually do the math and do the, like what would have actually happened if they had done what everybody else does, that runs in the rocks as a corporation, the

United States wouldn't have fallen apart. They would have, but the United States wouldn't have.

And that's how they scared everybody to death and scared all the congressmen that don't understand what's going on.

And the next thing you know, they're alive and firms like ours, which did the right thing, suddenly we can't get credit lines.

We can't, oh, you're too small. You don't count anymore. It was surreal.

It was truly surreal. The bad guys are still around and the guys that did the right thing can't get credit.

So that led me to really looking hard at, okay, they have stitched this thing together.

And what are we now? 16 years into it? 16 years sounds like a long time and maybe it'll always work.

Maybe they really will have gotten away with it. But I just know, I don't, you know, scripturally, you can go a long, long time.

I can be, it can get general grace for a long time, but eventually it's, you don't get away with stuff that you shouldn't get away with.

And all the great stories of human history, it ends up going, the guys that did the wrong thing, the

Pied Piper eventually comes for the bill. And so my view was, all right, well, what are you supposed to do?

How can an individual, how can a family, and let's go further, especially for Christians, how can

Christians do something to protect themselves against the next time this happens, and oh, by the way, the laws have changed because we're not gonna get a bail out this time.

We're gonna get a bail in. And you say, well, what in the world is a bail in? The one thing to reference would be the country of Cyprus in 2013.

In that year, Cyprus, there were two main banks in Cyprus.

Their number one asset was Greek treasury bonds. Okay, and treasuries are supposed to not ever default.

Well, except in Greece's case, they didn't have the money to pay them. So all these banks are in structural default.

They are insolvent. So what did they do? They said, we cannot pay our depositors because our assets have gone to 40 cents in the dollar.

So they went to the ECB and said, we need you to bail us out. And at the time, it was pretty much dominated by the

Germans, and still probably is. And the Germans said, no, we're not going to do that.

So the Cypriot bank said, well, what are we supposed to do? Because we're gonna blow up. And they said, we tell you what you're gonna do.

You're gonna bail in your depositors. So any depositor over the insured amount, it was fair game to take what they needed to recapitalize the bank and then issue quote, unquote, new bank stock, which was essentially they just took their deposit.

And the haircut ended up being, so let's say Andrew Rappaport had a $10 million euro.

Let's say your family had a restaurant business for a hundred years in Cyprus.

And you'd built up a lot of capital and take care of the family. Well, you went to sleep on Friday with $10 million in the

Cypriot bank. You woke up on Monday with 5 million and you had 5 million euros in new bank stock, which you do not want.

That is a bail in. And this is not some tin hat conspiracy theory.

All you have to do is go to the Dodd -Frank law that was passed after the crisis.

Go to Title II and look up what happens in a banking crisis.

What are the mechanisms that the Federal Reserve and the FDIC and the

Treasury have at their disposal? And you will find out that depositors in the United States are subject to bail -in.

Now, let's think about it in Christian terms. Right now, as you said in your opening comments.

Ding dong, Jehovah's Witnesses. Ding dong, Mormons. Christian, are you ready to defend the faith when false religions ring your doorbell?

Do you know what your Muslim and Jewish friends believe? You will if you get Andrew Rappaport's book,

What Do They Believe? When we witness to people, we need to present the truth, but it is very wise to know what they believe.

And you will get Andrew Rappaport's book at whatdotheybelieve .com. Right now, we've got a four -year reprieve or so.

We've got the midterms coming up. Who knows what happens with those? But let's assume we can make it at least until 2028.

But what happens if the Democrats get back in and they've got, they are loaded for bear and they're coming for vengeance.

And if they do things such as they blow the financial system up again, now they have in their books the ability to go to the deposits of banks and brokerage companies.

And oh, by the way, they also have the CUSIP numbers on the treasury bonds and bills, right?

Oh, thank the treasuries. I'm immune. Are you really? Are you really immune?

What do we know from COVID? We know from COVID that bets are off. They'll just do what they want.

So if I'm a Christian, and this is the real tragedy that I fear. God has built a church.

And let's say he started building in 2005 and they have been faithfully putting their ties towards the ministry of the church.

And God has blessed them. They've grown to 500 folks and they're trying to build a big church.

And they put $20 million in the bank and the elders of the session are like, no, no, no, we're gonna be very careful with this.

We're only gonna put it in CDs. We're only gonna put it in treasuries, et cetera. Oh, wait, 2 .0

occurs. The banks have to be recapitalized. And you got a

Democrat running the FDIC and the treasury and the Fed. And oh, oh, we need to recapitalize.

Oh, well, here's the first Baptist church of Norfolk, Virginia. And they've got $20 million in the banking system.

Well, guess what? Now you got 10. And we don't wanna hear about how terrible you have it when you still have $10 million.

I'm sorry you won't be able to build your building this year. But the banking system in the

United States is gonna need your help. And that is for folks who may think, well, that couldn't happen.

Not only have you shown that it has happened and could happen, has happened, probably will happen.

But as you're talking about this, it drew me back to,

I don't know if you remember what PayPal came out with their updated requirements or whatnot.

And they had this little thing in there that people didn't realize.

This is back in the 2020, 21 timeframe when everything was about Black Lives Matter and whatnot.

And they had a little clause in there that said, if PayPal saw that you as an individual were posting something online that they deemed offensive, they would just go into your account and deduct $1 ,500 per incident.

And myself with many others said, that's it, we're getting away from PayPal. And they quickly realized they did that.

I think it was on a Saturday that they put out the updated stats.

And by Monday, they quickly had to make it public. They don't know, we're not gonna do that. We're not gonna do this.

Because people just started in mass canceling because they actually thought they have the right to just take money right out of your account if you say something they don't like.

This is what socialists wanna do, right? This is what the socialists in China do. They have a whole scoring system where if you're not pulling the party line, you can't buy things.

They would love to do that here because it gives them ultimate control because you have to agree with them to be able to use your own money or they just have the right to take your money.

This is why I think it's so important for people to hear what you can offer folks at Alps because let's be honest,

I'm sure that a majority of people here in this audience do not have a plan for when things fall apart.

There's a lot of people who maybe have a month if that in savings.

So in cases like this, I mean, I know you've given the worst case scenario that's also possibly a likely scenario with the way what we saw in the 2020, 2024 presidential.

I can't say the Biden administration because maybe we could say the auto pen administration, but I don't know that Joe Biden knew what was going on.

But during that time, we saw the things they were willing to do and thought they have the right to do.

Right. So what would be really good is let's talk through what are some ways people could take action now, maybe in small ways.

And then maybe there's people who do have a couple of months savings, bigger ways. How can people protect themselves?

How should they be thinking of their finances? Well, okay. So they're kind of levels here, right,

Andrew? If someone only has a month of savings to keep the lights on, that's a totally different story.

They really wouldn't be affected by it. They're going to be affected by just mischief in the system only because of higher inflation rates, et cetera, that sort of thing.

But they're not really at risk of their deposits being confiscated like we're talking about because any regime is not going to go out.

Those guys don't help them. What does help them is where there's material amounts of capital.

And that's where to the extent that there may be many of the listeners to the show that are, no, we have saved and we've taken care of things as far as we understand or as far as our financial advisor has told us.

Now, this is where I go to, this is where I get into Donnie Brooke with someone like, what's the fellow out of Nashville?

Dave Ramsey. Dave Ramsey, I will tell you till the cows come home that you're not supposed to be involved in physical gold.

I would love to be on a platform with Dave Ramsey anywhere, anytime and have that debate with him.

Not because I want to be ugly, but just because Dave, seriously, brother, come on.

What time period do you want to talk about? Because if you say, well, gold doesn't have an income stream.

Okay, I'll grant you and real estate held for investment doesn't either.

And there are lots of things that we could talk about where it's just, in gold's case, you have to pay a storage fee of some form.

If you keep it on your property, I've got to, if I have a gun safe,

I've got to go buy something to keep it secure. There's some way, some form where you have to pay to securitize your physical gold.

The question is, what does gold do when it really matters? And the question, and let's start with August 15th, 1971.

What happened on that day? On that day, Richard Nixon and John Connolly, who was the secretary of the treasury, said no longer will gold be exchangeable at the treasury window for dollars.

Why did they do that? Because the French had realized what a quagmire we'd gotten into in Vietnam, realized their dollar -denominated holdings were losing value.

So they wanted to trade the dollar -denominated holdings, treasuries, cash, what have you, for physical gold.

Connolly and Nixon went, oh my gosh, if they do that, and how serious were they?

They sent a destroyer into the New York Harbor to pick the stuff up. If they did that, and everybody gets the bright idea that we're gonna do that too, we're gonna be out of gold.

So they suspended those payments. At the time, gold was something on the order of about plus or minus $40 an ounce, right?

Wow. That's August 15th, 1971. In nine years, in 1980, now allowed to free float, right?

Because it's not a fixed price anymore, because it's not a fixed exchange at the treasury window. We went from $40 an ounce to $800 an ounce in nine years.

That's a 20X. And what was going on in the 1970s?

Nixon and Watergate. Nixon resigns. We look like the Keystone Cops in Vietnam.

Carter comes in, begins socialist projects left, right, and center, runaway double -digit inflation.

It takes Paul Volcker being, Jimmy Carter had to put Paul Volcker on the Federal Reserve, or the

Japanese were not going to participate in the next U .S. Treasury auction in 1980.

And ultimately, finally, was Reagan going to be elected?

All that led to a 20X rise in gold. What did stocks do during that time?

Nothing, they were down. So who was the winner? If I would, if all

I had to do, all I had to do was put five lousy percent of my net worth in gold the day they closed that gold window, 10 years later,

I protected my entire net worth with 5 % physical gold allocation.

Gold does well when things are chaotic. Now, Ramsey would have been, oh yeah,

Jim, but let's talk about what happened from 80 all the way to 2000. You had 20 years where gold did nothing but go down.

Right, Dave, that's correct. But is it conceivable? Do you have to pour concrete around your feet?

I'm buying gold and I'm never ever going to sell it. No, you don't have to do that. Gold is liquid as water. And yeah, if you get to 1980, and gold's 800, and the

Dow Jones Industrial is 800, yeah, I'm supposed to sell gold by the Dow and take my percentage of gold down to 1 % of my portfolio or something like that, right?

Okay, 20 years, we go down. And then what happens in 2001, September 11th, 2001?

The planes hit the towers in New York. Gold has fallen from $800 an ounce to 275 because of basically 20 years of downward trending interest rates, relatively stable

US government, right? Even Clinton didn't really screw anything up because they didn't really do anything, right?

But when the planes hit the towers, gold has fallen to 275 an ounce. If we then look, so I've basically given you three epic periods.

The 70s, 80 to 2000, and then 2000, basically this century.

And this century, I have seen, we have seen gold rise from 275 an ounce to now $4 ,200 an ounce.

If Dave Ramsey sitting across from me, I'm like, Dave, I'm not telling everybody to go crazy, light their hair on fire, sell everything they have and have 80 % gold.

I'm saying get at least 10 % of your net worth in physical gold.

If you had done so the day the planes hit the towers, you are now up something like 15X.

Compare and contrast that to the stock market. Compare and contrast that to the bond market.

Gold has blown both of them away. Now you say, oh, well, wait, no,

I must be too late. It was 4 ,200. Gee whiz, I missed the boat. Well, remember that the

Dow Jones is, where is it today? 47 ,000, some gigantic number.

We're still 10X away. We've got a long way to go for gold to get matched up again with the stock market.

So, and that's just a general rule of thumb. It's always easy to say when to buy.

It's very difficult to say when to sell. But at least you have a general idea that if stocks are selling at a price that is so risk averse that you could buy gold for the same amount, that's when you turn, you tack into the wind and go, this is now a time for me to do differently.

But we are not there yet, even at $4 ,200 an ounce. And especially not there, if you look at the world situation, if you look at the, yes, as you say, again, we have a reprieve.

But when you have events like Charlie Kirk being martyred for his faith in a straightforward conversation, it tells you the other side is ready to shoot and shoot to kill.

And if they're ready to shoot to kill, we are not in a period yet where I should be short gold.

I should be long gold until something has occurred, whether that's you see it in the financial markets or whether you see it, that culture truly has become more

Christian, which it's gonna have to do if we're gonna get there. Or at the very least, the aggressiveness of the opposition has been up for a while.

Well, I see absolutely no evidence of that at all. I see retrenching, reforming the lines of the opposition.

And it's, we ain't there yet. So, I think we're gonna have to wait so that long, what is that long comment?

Simply to say, gold is something that if I'm, I don't care if I'm a tiny individual, tiny family,

I have very little. If I can just think in five or 10 % of whatever my net, if you've got more debt than you have assets, this is not a discussion, pay down the debt.

You gotta get the debt paid down to where you have clear assets. So, but I really am speaking to Christian families that can lead churches, that can build schools, that can do something that is fixing the culture.

And especially churches that are front and center in that culture war, that may have very kind -hearted, good -hearted, responsible elders who are listening.

And I'm not saying Dave, Dave, what's his name? Dave Ramsey.

Dave Ramsey, I'm not saying he's a bad guy. I just think he's terribly misinformed on this particular issue.

And the facts bear that out. There's another guy named David Bonson. A lot of guys listen to read his stuff.

I'm in the exact same place with him. I'm like, Dave, you're just wrong on this.

And so that's my hope and my prayer is that, and yeah, sure, do

I make, am I talking about, do we make our money? Yes, of course we do. But I'm just saying that how

God built me, the career he gave me, and why that led to this is why

I'm doing what I'm doing. And, you know, I mean, some things to think about with it is, it is interesting that every

Christian person I know in finance, whether you with Precious Metals, others that are financial advisors, they never seem to agree with Dave Ramsey.

You know, and he's the guy everyone goes to for financial advice and looks to, and yet all the experts go, yeah, don't listen to him.

It's, you know, so that is something where, and I know whenever we mentioned Dave Ramsey and people come in and say something in a negative way, boy, do we get lots of emails and response.

And it's like, folks, listen, it's okay, but just hear what James is saying here, because you and I talked about this a couple months ago,

I think, or a month ago. The fact that one of the things I do is, you know, my kids graduated college. I gave them a one ounce gold coin as a thing to say, hey, this is an investment.

You hold on to this because it's gonna increase in value. One of the things

I'm doing with my grandkids is, you know, I get them a quarter ounce because it's a little bit easier to do each year, but for every year, and when they turn 20, you know, they're gonna have several ounces of gold that they will, that over time is, by the time they get it, it's gonna be worth way more than the 4 ,000.

And people go, oh, well, that's a bad investment. But why? Because that's something that we have, we see it just as you've pointed out, increasing so much.

Why is holding on to a precious metal for some, like thinking that's a bad thing, when, you know, no matter what you're gonna do with your money, there's always a risk.

Some people think like there's things, there's no risk. There's always a risk. You stick it in the bank, there's a risk.

You know, and one of the things I'd like to bring out is have you bring out, you're saying, well, hey, the people that have a small amount, the government's not gonna come after them.

And so after this break, I'd like to discuss because Joe Biden, when he first got in office, made a threat to take people's pensions.

And this is something people don't think about because there may be those in the audience who are going, James, I live paycheck by paycheck.

They're not gonna come after me. I don't need to think about precious metals. I don't need to protect myself because I don't have anything.

And they don't think about all that money that maybe their company puts in or they put in in a 401k.

So let's, after this break, let's talk about how vulnerable people really could be and how people may not be aware of what could happen and how the government could take their livelihood they plan for the future and take that away because that I think is something people don't think about.

So let's talk about that right after this quick break from our sponsors. And so folks, if you are considering, well, if you think about it and you're saying, well, some of these things

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Striving to make today an eternal day for the glory of God. Now, another thing is that we mentioned

Dave Ramsey, and you go, well, hey, Dave has a lot of good things to say, but is he biblical?

Maybe you want to compare what James is saying with what Dave Ramsey says, and what's our best authority?

Well, it's the scriptures. But you go, well, gee, how am I going to study these things in the scriptures?

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And so James, let's get to the fact that there's a lot of people think, as you said, hey,

I don't have to worry. I don't have much money, but the Biden administration was threatening.

I'm glad they backed off, but they were threatening to just take over people's 401ks.

And I know one individual, a pastor, that I'm friends with who got so nervous at that time, he moved his entire, well, the 401k,

I think it's the, I forget what it is for ministers, but he moved it all into Bitcoin. Now I'm not saying that he should do that.

He did quite well, because I think he did it when it was only at like 60 ,000 and now it's 90 some thousand.

So it worked out well for him, but he got nervous. So he has it where he set that up so that at any point, and his thinking was at any point where the government says, hey, we're gonna take this pension or your 401k, he could just move it right out.

Like he has it with a broker and it requires, in that case, it requires two out of three signatures.

So this pastor and his wife could just move everything out and just move the whole wallet into another wallet.

But he did that because he had the realization to realize, hey, if the government's threatening that they could just take a 401k and for a 401k to liquidate it and it's gonna take time and by then the government just takes it.

But there's other ways that people could be wise in investing and may not even think, hey, my 401k could be at risk.

Well, let's speak to that person. What kind of things can they do to protect against that sort of action?

Sure, no, absolutely. And a great, great point. And first of all, a number of listeners may have 401ks and there's not much you can do with the 401k depending on how old you are.

If you've gotten to where you're getting in the 50s and 60s where you may have some flexibility and can move it into a self -directed

IRA, then there's all sorts of solutions which we can help obviously do where you simply open an account with a physical gold and silver custodian.

Then once the account's open, you do the trade through us where you're converting dollars and the dollars will come from the sale of stocks in your 401k, bonds in your 401k.

But since you're doing a rollover, there's no tax implications for so doing. It's just simply,

I mean, it's nothing fancier than you're just doing a swap and you're saying, okay, yeah, I'm living paycheck to paycheck, but gee,

I've been working for the same, maybe I'm a teacher or a fireman or what have you.

I've worked for 25 years and all of a sudden things worth $250 ,000. Well, maybe I wanna put 25, 50 and put it in physical gold and silver.

That's when you would do that sort of a rollover. And yes, that is imperative to do and it's something we can certainly help to do.

And it's important to be, not have all your eggs in one basket, right?

Well, exactly. And again, that's what I'm saying. And when I've given the example, I'm not saying head for the hills, pour good dirt on you and get a bunch of gold sardines.

I'm saying just be smart and know that, look at historical evidence since gold was not a fixed price and was free floating.

From 1971 to the present, it's almost up 100X. It is up 100X.

Yes. Right, excuse me, not almost, it is up 100X now. That's in 50 years. What else is up 100X?

Well, Bitcoin did. You could say Apple. There's one offs here, there.

But when we compare and contrast something like gold to, you really need to compare it to aggregate indices, right?

How did it do versus global stock markets? How did it do versus global? Well, it's blown all those things away.

So, all you're doing is saying, again, I'm not trying to be a chicken with my head cut off or chicken little or whatever.

I'm just saying, why don't I do this? Because it certainly works when it matters.

And then let's talk about scriptural grounding. On our website, we have

Genesis chapter two, verses 11 and 12. And there were four rivers that ran out of Eden.

One was Pisan, and it ran through the land of Havilah. And there is gold in that land.

And the gold of that land is good. My question when I was reading it was like, wait, why is

God telling me pre -fall, pre -fall about gold in the land of Havilah?

Why does that matter? Well, perhaps it's because in the subsequent books of the

Bible, the Lord is going to use gold as the standard by which one can judge things.

Wisdom is far better than pure gold. Comparison after comparison where gold is the standard, or I'm going to burn the dross off the silver in order to make the silver, the real silver.

So he's using, he knows exactly what he's doing. He put it in the earth's crust.

It quickly became the go -to of money.

And if we define what is money, money is a unit of account. It's a medium of exchange.

Well, dollars or yen or euros can all do, all they can be, a unit of account and medium of exchange.

The question is, can they be a store of labor and a store of value?

That's the problem because if I don't have something where the supply is relatively fixed, which gold is, well,

I can do all kinds of nasty things with the supply. And suddenly my labor gets devalued, even though I still worked.

Why did my labor get devalued? Because somebody that was controlling what represented that labor monkeyed around with it.

And then ask yourself the question, why is it that global central banks, global governments, and literally the wealthiest human beings on the face of the earth, why do they all have physical gold allocations, every last one of them?

And if you say where, if the question is asked, where has been, say over the last two or three years, where has been the push for the main demand side for gold?

Well, the minute the Western governments started threatening the

Russians that we're going to take your 300 billion of reserves, financial reserves that are in our bank, we're gonna take them.

Look at what happened to the buying of central banks to gold. It's like, oh, if they're gonna play the game that way, we're not going to keep getting exposed to US treasuries and US dollars because we can't trust them.

But I can sure trust gold. So I've got a scriptural, I can go back to the dawn of creation and there is gold.

I can look in any Christian, any Muslim, any secular, every place in the face of the earth, physical gold is always viewed as money.

Ultimately, and when I say that, I want to emphasize that I'm focusing mainly on a store of labor, that what does one want to be true?

Andrew Rappaport wants to know, hey, I scripted and I got up and I did these podcasts and it took me three hours per podcast and I did it five days a week.

You want that labor to not lose its value over time. You want to have saved that labor and you save it in a store of value, store of labor.

And gold's the only thing that you can really say that I can trust it. So let me ask you a question for some folks that you mentioned, a custodian, right?

So two things, what is that for folks who may not understand how that works?

And then what can you do? Because I want to get direct people to you and a way that they can get ahold of you is if they go to alpspmg .com,

so it stands for Alps Precious Metals Group. If you go there .com, there's a way that they can contact you,

James. But what is a custodian? And then how can you help people get set up to get some gold?

Okay, so we work with, we have a partner for U .S. residents and U .S.

corporations, U .S. based churches, et cetera. Our partners are Texas Precious Metals out of Shiner, Texas.

Why do we have partners? We have partners because we have not built our own vault here in Pensacola, Florida.

We trade gold and silver from our offices here in Pensacola, but we do not store them.

So I knew that I needed to get a partner for actual storage of physical gold and silver, but I wanted a partner that was not a government, not a bank, and not a brokerage company.

Texas Precious Metals, and you can go to them, just pull them up too. And there's a link on our website as well.

It was built by a family called the Kaspers, K -A -S -P -A -R.

The Kasper family is fascinating in that the original patriarch moved to the, was

Swiss. He was a Lutheran Christian who came to the prairie land of Texas to be a missionary and to open churches.

And he opened three churches in the late 19th century. His descendants are all

Christian, but they were not missionaries or church planters as he was. And what did they do?

Well, they got into, what do you get into if you're in the prairie land of Texas? The wire business, barbed wire, et cetera.

But then one of the, now patriarchs, was trying to figure out what else could he do with wire?

Well, long story short, they built the first shopping cart, which debuted in Houston, Texas.

And they made some money off of that. But where they really made their money is in the family has been very blessed materially and financially.

If you remember, and there's still some of them around, we used to go put a quarter or four quarters or something in the little machine on the corner of the street, which had the newspaper in it.

And when you pull the thing forward, after you put the quarters in, the newspaper was held in the little window by wire.

And the whole box had wire all in it. All that wire came out of Shiner, Texas and the

Casper Wireworks. So that's where their family capital came from.

And the current family member that is the managing director of the family office, he went to Wall Street as a young guy out of Texas A &M.

And, hey, I'm going to go do hedge funds. This is going to be great. But he gets up there right in 08, 09, watches the financial world melt down and begins to have some conversations with a gold guy.

Because maybe this might be the way we want to go. And that gold guy was a guy named

Tarek Saab, S -A -A -B. And Tarek and Jason Casper became not only business associates, but became friends.

And eventually, Jason convinced the family that this was a direction they needed to go in.

They started Texas Precious Metals Trading, which eventually led to Texas Precious Metals Depository, where they used some of the family, some of the

Casper physical plant to have a makeshift vault.

But in 2023, it's now two years old, they opened what is probably the state -of -the -art vault in the world in Shiner, Texas.

And when you click through on our website and go to theirs, you'll see there's a little video you can watch, and it just talks about what they built and what

Texas Precious Metals Depository is all about. You can't get, there is nothing in Switzerland, and I've seen them.

There's nothing in Switzerland, there's nothing in London, there's nothing that is better than what this thing is.

And so when one opens an account with, say, their

IRA, the first thing they're gonna do is you would click to us, click through to Texas Precious Metals, and you would see for IRAs the four custodians we use.

One of them is Gold Star, one is Strata, one is

Horizon, I forgot the other ones. Now, these custodian firms really only exist because Congress came up with retirement accounts, 401ks and IRAs.

And they have one job, and that's simply to be a third -party administrator, custodian of retirement assets.

Because the whole point was, well, we don't want people saying that they have retirement assets and they're really out there doing stuff that they're not supposed to be doing with their retirement funds.

So that's what the third -party purpose is. But if Andrew wanted to open an account, you'd say, okay,

I've got 250 ,000 of assets in my 401k, I can now roll it over.

I'm gonna open an account, say with Gold Star, you open the account, Gold Star opens the account for you.

Then you say, please face my current 401k administrator and tell them

I want $50 ,000 put into my new self -directed IRA. Once that's there, then we get the call, we put it into the gold and silver after we consult what you would like to do.

And then the gold is held at Texas Precious Metals Depository in your

IRA account. And that's something where I encourage folks, even, you know, you can start small, but get started, right?

Yes, absolutely. That's the thing, because I think a lot of people, James, they think like, oh, well, I can't,

I don't have the money for that. You don't have to put in tens of thousands of dollars to start.

You could start smaller, but it's better to get started, especially if you do something where it's reoccurring so that you're kind of offsetting as there's the ups and downs.

And so it would be good for folks to check out Alps Precious Metals, contact

James, say, hey, how can I get started with this? So, you know, go to AlpsPMG .com.

You can check them out. There's from there, there's a contact. James will get back with you, set up a time, talk about your financial situation and see how he could be of a help to you, because we need to have some diversity.

Yes, that's right. Sometimes diversity is good. Not when it comes to the way

DEI refers to it, but in your finances, it's good to have some diversity and it would be really good to add some gold to your portfolio.

Maybe good to just say, even if you're buying a little bit every month, it'll add up over time.

If you're 20 years old and you start putting just a little bit of gold aside once a month even, by the time you're looking to retire at 60, you'll probably thank

James very much for having set this up with you. And also remember silver too.

Silver is, if gold is 95 % of monetary metal, silver is probably 60 % of monetary metal, because a lot of silver gets used in a lot of other things, which actually could work very much in one's favor.

So, gee, I can't afford one ounce of gold at 4 ,200, but I can sure afford one ounce of silver at 60 bucks, right?

And so the silver is the other way to skin that cat, if you will, because, okay,

I can't get to gold, but I sure can get to silver. And the only other thing I'd add, Andrew, is that, yes, you can use

IRAs, but just remember, unfortunately, the IRA still, it's like the

Balrog in Fellowship of the Ring when he's falling down the thing, he still has one tentacle and he throws the whip and gets

Gandalf. The tentacle of the IRA being tied to the government is the only thing that,

I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying, keep in mind, there is that government tentacle and to the extent that you can get some of the assets completely away from them, that's really the best of all possible worlds.

Yeah, so folks, I do wanna encourage you again, go to alpspmg .com,

get a hold of James, see how he might be able to help you, just to offset, because look, I really do believe that we are in a reprieve right now.

I believe that the Democrats will come back into power and when these socialists do, they're not gonna take any chances of another

Trump -like figure that's gonna get in their way. And they're gonna look to do what they can.

I mean, under Barack Obama, we saw that he targeted Christians, Christian businesses and made,

I mean, I know someone, one of our supporters ended up selling his business because they just bogged him down in investigations with the

IRS that were just nonsense. But it just, it took him spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in audits.

And for the only reason was that he donated lots of his income to Christian organizations like ours.

And he ended up just selling the business instead. And so things like this, they're going to be targeting.

And I think they will look for however they can get money to pay the people that are voting for them.

And they're gonna take your money and my money. And so we have to have a plan. So go check out

Alps Precious Metals group. It's going to be something that you will,

I would say in a few decades, you'll be very thankful that you did this. So James, any last things you want to share with folks before we end the show?

Well, no, first of all, just again, I'm very gracious and grateful to you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today.

I just, we started this firm because of how

God had built me, the life he had given me, the career he had given me.

And just being as the wisdom that he gave me to make me wise as a serpent, but innocent as a dove, simply means as far as I can tell, this is one avenue.

And yes, you are diversifying. You are not a church, an individual, a family.

They're not going crazy. They're really just being wise. If there's one message, be wise.

Sadly, you have socialists with an ax to grind and loaded for bear, you have to be paying attention.

Otherwise, it could get nasty. And nasty is part of what, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

And maybe that's what's coming, but at least we can do what we can to perpetuate the

Lord's kingdom. There we go. So guys, one last time, go to Alps Precious Metals Group.

That's alpspmg .com. Go to the contact us and set up a meeting with James.

See how he might be able to help you. I think that, like I said, in a few decades, you'll thank us for suggesting that.