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It's more than just a ticket. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua, and today on the show, I want to talk to you about when something that is completely innocuous, completely harmless was banned in an ostensibly free western country.

And what's more is I want to talk to you with proven history when not only was this banned, but it was banned for very clearly ulterior motives. It was banned by the government so that the government could steal from its own citizens. What was banned? Gold coins. Gold bullion.

Did you know that for just over 40 years in the United States, from about 1933 to 1974, it was illegal for you to own something as simple and innocuous as a gold coin? Did you know that you could not own gold bullion, legally speaking, in the United States for that four decade period?

And if you did own it, your assets, your gold coins, your gold bullion, or your gold certificates could be, and in some cases were, seized and kept by the US government. If you didn't know it, don't be too hard on yourself. I remember distinctly that I was quite literally a financial planner, literally a certified financial planner.

And one day I think somebody said to me and made a claim that it was illegal to own gold coins as short of a time ago as 50 years ago in the United States. And I said, "Illegal to own a gold coin? Come on, that's ridiculous." And I started doing my research and I found out that they were right.

Today I want to share with you the history of Executive Order 6102. And there are a couple of other follow on pieces of legislation, but this is usually talked about as Executive Order 6102, which will go over for you the truth of what I have just stated. We're going to go over the history.

I'm going to explain to you what happened because I think in today's world it's important for you and me to understand that what has happened before can and perhaps will happen again. As I record this on Tuesday, March 1, 2022, there are several very current cases of governments using financial laws in ways that might make us uncomfortable.

We've talked recently about the government of Canada authorizing Canadian banks, brokerage companies, insurance companies, and other financial institutions to unilaterally freeze the assets of anybody suspected of having been involved with the Freedom Convoy protest. This was done under so-called Emergency Measures Act, which never did wind up getting voted on fully by both houses of the Canadian Parliament.

And I showed how this is a very worrying example of modern financial debanking, de-financialization, which is a trend that I'm very concerned about. And what was worse is that particular system was being done with no judicial oversight, and the institutions were guaranteed immunity from any kind of civil liability that they might incur from the actions of freezing or confiscating the assets of people suspected to be involved with the protests.

Now, I don't think that particular event was the end of the world as we know it, but I thought it was a good example of what can happen. In addition, another very current example that we see happening right now is we see governments all around the world, very notably governments in Western Europe and the United States and many other countries as well, seeking to freeze the assets of Russians, both specifically the Russian government, Russian government officials, the so-called Russian oligarchs, as well as just ordinary, common, everyday Russians getting bundled up with it.

Now, these are some examples that sometimes you look at, and ethically, it's harder to figure out what's going on. For example, very few people are shedding tears when the news comes along that Vladimir Putin or the Russian oligarchs have had their assets frozen. Currently, that's not a big concern for many people from an ethical perspective.

They say, "Listen, if you're going to go and invade your neighbor, we're going to take your money and we're going to freeze it and shut it all down." I think it's not as simple as that. I think there are more important ethical considerations in terms of making Russians themselves suffer.

I get very concerned about any action that's going to affect those who are not in government. Clearly, these current sets of sanctions and restrictions are already affecting the lives of individual ordinary Russian citizens. In some way, it's an act of war. Basically, the goal of these sanctions is to destabilize the country so that the population will rise up and ideally, in the mind of many of those advancing it, murder their president.

Of course, they would say, "Well, let's go ahead and do it in a democratic sense. Let's overthrow him and bring someone else in." They're going for regime change. Now, time will tell. It remains to be seen what will happen. We'll be talking a good bit about the Ukraine and Russia situation in the days to come.

The point is that, ethically speaking, very few people have any kind of reservation or qualms about seeing the assets of the Russian leaders and Russian government seized, frozen, and seeing them cut off from the banking system, etc., because of their evil invasion of their neighbor. The Canadian situation is one in which many people would also say, "Well, hey, look, these guys are breaking the law.

They're making life unlivable for us in Ottawa. We got to get them out." Going after their money is the way to do it. Again, I have significant concerns, which I've expressed about this, but a lot of people feel that way. One of the interesting things about Executive Order 6102 and the true history of what happened in the United States is nobody except the government was being hurt by the hoarding, quote-unquote, what they alleged, using their words, of gold.

As you'll see as I go into the actual history, the US government stole money directly from its citizens and seized the assets of its citizens exclusively to maintain power. We will go over their alleged reasoning and you can judge for yourself the ethics of it, but let's begin with the actual history.

I'm going to be reading to you the Wikipedia entry for Executive Order 6102. Executive Order 6102 is an executive order signed on April 5, 1933 by US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He's always all of our favorite presidents, right? Quote, "Forbidding the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates within the continental United States," close quote.

The executive order was made under the authority of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, as amended by the Emergency Banking Act in March 1933. The limitation on gold ownership in the United States was repealed after President Gerald Ford signed a bill legalizing private ownership of gold coins, bars, and certificates by an act of Congress, codified in publication L.

93373, which went into effect December 31, 1974. Rationale. The stated reason for the order was that hard times had caused "hoarding of gold, stalling economic growth, and worsening the Depression as the US was then using the gold standard for its currency." On April 6, 1933, the New York Times wrote, under the headline "Hoarding of Gold," quote, "The executive order issued by the President yesterday amplifies and particularizes his earlier warnings against hoarding." On March 6, taking advantage of a wartime statute that had not been repealed, he issued Presidential Proclamation 2039 that forbade the hoarding of gold or silver coin or bullion or currency under penalty of $10,000 and/or up to 5 to 10 years imprisonment.

The main rationale behind the order was actually to remove the constraint on the Federal Reserve preventing it from increasing the money supply during the Depression. The Federal Reserve Act 1913 required 40% gold backing of Federal Reserve notes that were issued. By the late 1920s, the Federal Reserve had almost reached the limit of allowable credit in the form of Federal Reserve demand notes, which could be backed by the gold in its possession.

Now let me interrupt the article here to clarify. I've just read you under the section marked Rationale from the Wikipedia article. But remember that what they did was use, first of all, an authority that was made law under the World War I situation. So the President at that time, President Franklin Roosevelt, used an act, a piece of legislation that was signed in 1917 under the previous World War I.

Note, of course, that at this time we were in the Great Depression in the United States. This is prior to World War II. But this particular law had never been repealed. And the lesson that I, reason I'm emphasizing this is, this is why I get so concerned and why I publicly talk about any kind of issue that involves some expansion of government authority, especially something that doesn't have a clear sunset clause.

So in Canada, for example, we now see that there is a clear precedent for the Canadian Prime Minister to authorize institutions to go after people who are protesting in the streets without ever actually following through the legally required parliamentary debate, legally required parliamentary approval, etc. The recent situation in Canada was done under the Emergency Measures Act, which was updated from the War, what was it, the War Protection Act or something like that, something related to Emergency War Measures Act, something like that before.

And the idea here is you see how legislators use whatever legislation they can find on the books to authorize their actions. Now, what was the actual thing that was happening? Well, people were saving money. They were in the middle of a Great Depression. They understood the value of their money and they wanted to save their money.

At that time, that's what gold was. Gold was money. Federal Reserve notes at that time depended upon the fact that gold was money in order to have their validity. And the Federal Reserve was trying to make sure that its notes were widely accepted, but they had to be constrained.

And so the government could not spend as much money, could not borrow as much money as they wanted. They couldn't issue as many notes because they were required to have gold at a 40% ratio. They were required to have at least 40% of their Federal Reserve notes value on hand as gold, gold money, gold dollars.

And so they're finding their ability to print money, finance all of their things constrained by the fact that US citizens are holding gold. So what should they do? Well, let's just tell the citizens they can't hold gold. Brilliant. Let's take away their money and tell them they can't hold gold.

Then we'll take the gold. We'll now have it in a Federal Reserve vault. Then we can print more dollars. It's wonderful. And we'll just tell our citizens that they have to cough up their gold bullion or their gold coins, or we're going to penalize them a massive penalty. More on that in a moment or we're going to imprison them for up to five or 10 years.

Remember at this time also that gold coins were standard forms of money in the same way that today, a hundred dollar Federal Reserve note is a standard form of money. Gold coins were at that time a standard form of money. A $20 gold piece was issued, created by the US Mint and was commonly used in circulation.

So when the government came out with this and said, we're going to fine you or we're going to jail you if you keep your gold coins, they were telling people you can't keep the $20 gold piece that we minted and distributed two years ago. By the way, point of interest, what was a $10,000 fine like?

Well, if we go to an inflation calculator using all of the standard inflation measurements, the consumer price index, and we go back and see what was the value of a $10,000 fine in 1933. In 2022 dollars, it was $216,267. Since that time, almost basically 90 years ago when this law was passed, there's been a cumulative rate of inflation of 2,062.7%, which a lot of it is related to exactly what we're talking about here.

So they wanted to remove the constraint on the Federal Reserve from increasing the money supply by banning the ownership of gold coins. Now pay attention because as we get to the end of this show, after I go over the history, I'm going to talk to you about how you can protect yourself from this.

I'm going to talk to you also about a brand new course that I'm launching that's giving modern equivalents to this, but let's continue through the history. Effects. Executive Order 6102 required all persons to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, all but a small amount of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates owned by them to the Federal Reserve in exchange for $20.67 per troy ounce.

By the way, let me interrupt the article. Let's do a quick inflation calculation of $20.67. That would be in 1933. Today, that would be $447 per ounce. That would be the equivalent rate. Interestingly, today's spot price of gold, again March 1, 2022, is $1,945 per ounce. The Executive Order required all persons to deliver on or before May 1, 1933, all but a small amount of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates owned by them to the Federal Reserve in exchange for $20.67 per troy ounce.

Under the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, as amended by the recently passed Emergency Banking Act of March 9, 1933, a violation of the order was punishable by fine up to $10,000 (equivalent in today's world of more than $200,000) up to 10 years in prison or both. The order specifically exempted "customary use in industry, profession, or art"—a provision that covered artists, jewelers, scientists, sign makers, etc.

The order also permitted any person to own up to $100 in gold coins, a face value equivalent to 5 troy ounces (160 grams) of gold valued at approximately $10,000 in 2020. So let me clarify. Again, you could keep 5 gold coins. Remember, at that time, there was a provision for you to have a standard piece of money, so you could keep up to 5 of your standard $20 gold pieces of US dollars at that time.

If we do the inflation calculation, it's more or less $10,000. Ironically, we see then that gold at a price of just under $2,000 an ounce would be similar to today. Basically, you could have about 5 ounces of gold or $10,000 in modern coins. So it's important that you understand this to understand how the actual confiscation occurred.

There was an exemption. You could say, "Hey, you could have $10,000." And it's up to you to judge whether or not you consider $10,000 to be a lot of money or a little bit of money when it comes to your life savings. The same paragraph also exempted "gold coins having recognized special value to collectors of rare and unusual coins, which protected recognized gold coin collectors from legal seizure and likely melting." The price of gold from the Treasury for international transactions was then raised by the Gold Reserve Act to $35 an ounce, equivalent to $700 in 2020.

The resulting profit that the government realized funded the Exchange Stabilization Fund established by the 1934 Gold Reserve Act. I interrupt the article to clarify. They gave you as a citizen $20.67 per ounce for your gold. Then, shortly thereafter, as soon as everyone had put in all of their gold coins and submitted them to the central treasury, they revalued the dollar and they raised it.

They raised the price of gold from $20 to $35 an ounce. Not quite halving, but pretty much almost half. Basically, stealing half of your money. If you had kept your ounce of gold valued at just over $20 and simply waited a few months in the international marketplace, you could have then received $35 for your previous $20 worth of gold.

So a direct stealing of value from the American people in order to fund the Exchange Stabilization Fund. Continuing with the article. The regulations prescribed in the Executive Order were modified by Executive Order 6111 on April 20, 1933, both of which were ultimately revoked and superseded by Executive Orders 6260 and 6261 on August 28 and 29, 1933, respectively.

Executive Order 6102 also led to the extreme rarity of the 1933 double-legal gold coin. The order caused all gold coin production to cease and all 1933 minted coins to be destroyed. About 20 illegal coins were stolen, leading to an outstanding U.S. Secret Service warrant for arrest and confiscation of the coin.

Illegalized surviving coins sold for over $7.5 million in 2002, making it one of the most valuable coins in the world. So the question is, well, was anybody prosecuted? Did anybody have their gold taken? Did anybody do time in prison? Let's answer that question. The truth is actually worse than you might think because, while there weren't a lot of prosecutions, the legal basis for prosecution was actually confirmed by the U.S.

Supreme Court. Prosecutions. Numerous individuals and companies were prosecuted relating to Roosevelt's Executive Order 6102. The prosecutions took place under the subsequent Executive Orders 6111, 6260, 6261, and the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. There was a need to strengthen Executive Order 6102 as the one prosecution under the order was ruled invalid by federal judge John M.

Woolsey on the grounds that the order was signed by the President, instead of the Secretary of Treasury, as required. The circumstances of the case were that a New York attorney named Frederick Barber Campbell had one deposit at Chase National Bank of over 5,000 troy ounces of gold. When Campbell attempted to withdraw the gold, Chase refused, and Campbell sued Chase.

A federal prosecutor then indicted Campbell on the following day, September 27, 1933, for failing to surrender his gold. Ultimately, the prosecution of Campbell failed, but the authority of the federal government to seize gold was upheld, and Campbell's gold was confiscated. By the way, pay careful attention to these examples, because in hearing the examples of what has happened in the past, you will be enlightened as to some of the methodology that you can use to protect yourself in the future.

The case was caused for the Roosevelt administration to issue a new order under the signature of the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Executive Orders 6260-6261 related to the seizure of gold and the prosecution of gold hoarders. A few months later, Congress passed the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which ratified Roosevelt's orders.

A new set of Treasury regulations was issued, providing civil penalties of confiscation of all gold and imposition of fines equal to double the value of the gold seized. Did you hear that? A new set of Treasury regulations was issued, providing civil penalties of confiscation of all gold and imposition of fines equal to double the value of the gold seized.

You have $100,000 worth of gold. They're going to seize your gold and impose fines of $200,000 that you now have to pay. With, of course, money that you have to earn from working, which of course in today's world you pay income taxes on, and then you pay your fines and/or other assets that you have to cash in to pay your fines.

Continuing, prosecutions of US citizens and non-citizens followed the new orders with a few notable cases. Gus Farber, a diamond and jewelry merchant from San Francisco, was prosecuted for the sale of 13 $20 gold coins without a license. Secret Service agents discovered the sale with the help of the buyer.

Farber, his father, and 12 others were arrested in four American cities after a sting operation conducted by the Secret Service. The arrests took place simultaneously in New York and three California cities, San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. Morris Anilic was arrested in New York with $5,000 in US and foreign gold coins.

Dan Levin and Edward Friedman of San Jose were arrested with $15,000 in gold. Sam Nankin was arrested in Oakland. In San Francisco, nine men were arrested on charges of hoarding gold. In all, $24,000 in gold was seized by Secret Service agents during the operation. David Baraban and his son Jacob owned a refining company.

The Barabans' license to deal in unmelted scrap gold was revoked, and so the Barabans operated their refining business under a license issued to a "mini-sarch." The Barabans admitted that "mini-sarch" had nothing to do with the business and that she had obtained the license so that the Barabans could continue to deal in gold.

The Barabans had a cigar box full of gold-filled scrap jewelry visible in one of the showcases. Government agents raided the Barabans' business and found another hidden box of US and foreign gold coins. The coins were seized, and Baraban was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. Louis Rufino was one individual indicted on three counts purporting to violations of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1917, which restricted trade with countries hostile to the United States.

Eventually, Rufino appealed the conviction to the Circuit Court of Appeals, 9th District in 1940. However, the judgment of the lower courts was upheld based on the Barabans' executive orders and the Gold Reserve Act of 1934. Rufino, a resident of Sutter Creek in California gold country, was convicted of possessing 78 ounces of gold and was sentenced to six months in jail, paid a $500 fine, and had his gold seized.

Foreigners also had gold confiscated and were forced to accept paper money for their gold. The Ubersee Finance Corporation, a Swiss banking company, had $1,250,000 in gold coins for business use. The Ubersee Finance Corporation entrusted the gold to an American firm for safekeeping, and the Swiss were shocked to find that their gold was confiscated.

The Swiss made appeals, but they were denied. They were entitled to paper money, but not their gold. The Swiss company would have lost 40% of their gold's value if they had tried to buy the same amount of gold with the paper money they received in exchange for their confiscated gold.

Another type of de facto gold seizure occurred as a result of the various executive orders involving bonds, gold certificates, and private contracts. Private contracts, or bonds that were written in terms of gold, were to be paid in paper currency instead of gold, although all of the contracts and the bonds proclaimed that they were payable in gold, and at least one, the Fourth Liberty Bond, was a federal instrument.

The plaintiffs in all cases received paper money instead of gold, despite the contract's terms. The contracts and the bonds were written precisely to avoid currency debasement by requiring payment in gold coin. The paper money, which was redeemable in gold, was instead irredeemable based on Nortz v. United States. The consolidated gold clause cases were the following, Perry v.

United States, U.S. v. Bankers Trust Company, Norman v. Baltimore and Ohio R. Company, Nortz v. United States. The Supreme Court upheld all seizures as "constitutional," with Justices James Clark McReynolds, Willis Van Deventer, George Sutherland, and Pierce Butler dissenting. The four justices were labeled the "four horsemen" by the compliant press, as their conservative views were in opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal, supported by the press.

Sound familiar? You have a populist president who comes in with massive support, says "I'm going to solve your problems," passes some of the most wide-ranging sets of legislation in American history, but the press is cheering him on. And because the press is cheering him on, then anybody who stands for things like constitutional right to privacy or the right to be safe in your person's papers and effects, or the right to not be stolen up by the U.S.

government, well, very quickly, those four justices were labeled the "four horsemen" by the compliant press, as their conservative views were in opposition to Roosevelt's New Deal, which was supported by the press. So the examples, I think, are important to see. Because you can see in the examples of the cases listed here how the government seeks to enforce what it does.

Number one, if there is previous evidence or a paper trail related to your ownership of the gold, such as here the attorney, Frederick Campbell, who had deposited at the bank 5,000 troy ounces, well now there's a formal paper trail saying "here is my 5,000 troy ounces." And so he goes to withdraw his gold, most likely because the government is passing a law saying they're going to seize his gold, and Chase refuses to give them the gold.

The bank refuses to return the money. Why? Well, because the bank is scared of the government. The bank receives its license to exist and make money because of the government. And so it's basically an arm of the government. A lot of people get mad when I say "all financial representatives are unpaid spies of the U.S.

government." And it's the same all around the world in many countries. It's just a statement of fact as far as I can see it, that bankers are charged, legally speaking, to spy for the U.S. government, to watch out for things like money laundering. I used to be one, meaning I used to be a financial advisor.

Every single year we sit down and we give classes on money laundering, and it's required in order for the company to stay out of legal trouble with the government. Well in this case, of course, the banker is observing what's happening, and the bank refuses to abide by the terms of its depository relationship and instead enforces the gold seizure from the U.S.

government. So Campbell gets angry and he sues the bank for breach of contract. And what do they do? The federal prosecutor, clearly informed by the bank, then indicts Campbell on the following day for failing to surrender his gold. So that's the first thing, his paper trail. Second thing relating to it is always a sting operation.

You have to remember that many, many people gain their sense of superiority. People love to inform on the neighbors that they don't like. Now you can have a very unified population. If there is an issue where there's a unified population of people that see the world in the same way, then of course they'll stand together and support one another.

But if you don't have a unified population, you have one segment of the population that sees the other segment of the population is not doing the right thing, then they quickly inform on one another. So think about places where there's, I don't know, people make fake vaccine cards. Well, all your friends that are anti-vaccine, they'll stand with you.

All your friends that are pro-vaccine will inform on you because they see what you're doing as an evil wrong. With taxes, you see this. The IRS will pay whistleblowers, whistleblowers, people who inform about tax cheats, they will pay them a significant portion, I think it's almost half of the amount of money seized from the company or from the individual that is prosecuted for tax evasion.

Probably one of the most famous cases for this over the last few years is from the Swiss banker who went to the IRS and took lots of private information from, he was working for UBS, and ultimately he earned over a hundred million dollars by informing on UBS. He served a couple years, I think two and a half years in prison for fraud after a fraud conspiracy conviction, but the IRS paid him over a hundred million dollars for informing on UBS for tax evasion.

And they ultimately succeeded in pressing their case. And so this is one of the things that happens all the time. It happens on a public basis with companies. If a company is engaging in some kind of tax evasion, then the IRS takes informants on that. It also happens with any private individual, right?

You evade your taxes, you tell your girlfriend about the fact that you don't do it, then you dump her and she gets angry and disappears. Or your ex-wife informs on the fact that you don't pay taxes. And then any money that's seized, that person, the informant, will be eligible for a significant portion of it.

I wanted to get the numbers right, so I went to irs.gov. It's not 40%. And they have a section here on what happens to a claim for an informant award, a whistleblower. And it says the amount of the award will be at least 15%, but not more than 30% of collected proceeds in cases in which the service determines that the information submitted substantially contributed to the service's detection and recovery of tax.

So somewhere between 15 to 30% of the amount collected by the IRS. And they have a handy number here, report suspected tax fraud. So remember that there's always informants. In this case, the Secret Service ran a sting operation using informants to seize the gold and the assets of the farmers and their business.

The trading company coming along, what do they do? Well, they require a license to deal in unmelted scrap gold. Licensing systems, the same basic problem. And so they have a license, but the license is issued to somebody else, and they admit that she's just their licensee, they're charged, all their money is seized, etc.

And then of course, you have the Swiss bank, excuse me, the Swiss company, Swiss bank, which had $1.25 million in gold coins on deposit in the United States for their business use. And then they just find that their gold was confiscated. So sucks to be you for counting on the United States of America in 1933 to actually protect your money.

That was dumb. And you shouldn't have done that. And this is basically the same thing that you see all over the world. Right? Imagine today that you have some money abroad, you have to be very careful because put money in Canada, or any significant money in Canada, it sucks to be you.

Canadian government has a reputation of doing this. And so you want to be very thoughtful who you trust your money to, and you want to pay attention to see what kinds of changes are happening in their laws. So we can learn from these events. Let's continue. Subsequent events and abrogation.

The Gold Reserve Act of 1934 made gold clauses unenforceable and authorized the president to establish the gold value of the dollar by proclamation. Isn't it wonderful? Right? Let's take away previous legislation that had, that used the power of gold to restrain government. And let's create a new piece of legislation that allows the president, the government, to establish the gold value by proclamation.

Immediately following its passage, Roosevelt changed the statutory price of gold from $20.67 to $35 per ounce, thereby devaluing the US dollar, which was based on gold. That price remained in effect until August 15, 1971, when President Richard Nixon announced that the US would no longer convert dollars to gold at a fixed value, thus abandoning the gold standard for foreign exchange.

See the Nixon shock articles. By the way, I consider that also to be one of the most beautifully recorded historical examples of proven deception. Deception isn't strong enough. I'll write cheating. Deception, I guess, is the best thing. By the US government. I don't want to get too off topic to dive much into that, but let me just tell you a quick moment of what actually happened in that.

I'll read here from an article called "Vox Populi, Vox Suckers," published back in the early 2000s by recently deceased economist Gary North. He wrote this, "Immediately after the devaluation of the pound," this is two years later, in November 1967, the British government devalued the pound. "The Chancellor of the Exchequer had of course sworn that this was not being contemplated.

A few weeks before this event, I, he being Gary North, I attended the first international gold conference in history. It was sponsored by Harry Schultz. The hard money newsletter publisher was held in Los Angeles. Rush Dooney paid my admission. I wrote it up in a report dated November 17, 1967, the coming credit crunch.

Immediately after the devaluation of the pound, gold began to rise. In 1968, the US and European central banks imposed a two-tier gold market. Central banks could buy gold from the US at $35, but agreed not to sell gold to the public at this price. Gold's free market price began to move up by a few dollars above $35.

Still, the outflow of gold from the Treasury continued. So, on August 15, 1971, Nixon closed the gold window. The Secretary of the Treasury, John Connolly, had sworn to the media for weeks that no such move was being contemplated. I shall never forget his press conference on August 16. He admitted openly that he had lied.

"If I had told the truth, there would immediately have been a rush by foreign central banks to buy our gold." The press nodded dutifully and nobody in the mainstream media complained. Price controls. Nixon also froze all domestic prices that day. No discussion, no democracy, just one-man rule. Within days, the United States Chamber of Commerce backed this move against freedom.

So did the National Association of Manufacturers. Normally, a gallon of gasoline sold for over $0.35 in Southern California, but there was a gasoline price war that week. You could buy gasoline for about $0.22, a loss leader. Those stations got locked in. A lot of them went bankrupt over the next two years.

That was when the shift to convenience store gas stations began. Profits on the sale of candy, packaged foods, and sodas marked the end of the "service station" era. Ian had predicted this move in a 1970 article in the Whole Earth Catalog. I had told readers to buy US silver coins.

In 1970, I bought British gold sovereigns for $10 each, $40 an ounce. Let's go back and I'm going to skip the article. Let me go back or any more of that and go back because the point is that the games didn't end when it became legal to buy gold.

They implemented that price fix until 1971 and it was still illegal during the Nixon shock. It was still illegal for anybody to own gold coins until 1974. Continuing the article, the private ownership of gold certificates was legalized in 1964 and they can be openly owned by collectors but are not redeemable in gold.

The limitation on gold ownership in the United States was repealed after President Gerald Ford signed a bill to "permit United States citizens to purchase, hold, sell, or otherwise deal with gold in the United States or abroad" with an act of Congress codified in publication L. 93373 which went into effect December 31, 1974.

However, PL 93373 did not repeal the Gold Repeal Joint Resolution which banned any contract that specified payment in a fixed amount of money as gold or a fixed amount of gold. That is, contracts remained unenforceable if they used gold monetarily rather than as a commodity of trade. However, an act enacted on October 28, 1977 amended the 1933 joint resolution to make it clear that parties could again include so-called gold clauses in contracts made after 1977.

I'm going to go on and talk about similar laws in other countries and then come back to the hoax of safe deposit box seizures. Similar laws in other countries. In Poland, a similar regulation was issued on November 7, 1919 which forced citizens to sell their gold and silver to the state.

A month later, it was extended until January 31, 1920. In Australia, Part IV of the Banking Act 1959 allows the Commonwealth government to seize private citizens' gold in return for paper money where the Governor General is satisfied that it is expedient so to do, for the protection of the currency or of the public credit of the Commonwealth.

On January 30, 1976, the operation of that part of the Act was suspended. United Kingdom introduced the Gold Trade Ban Law at 1966 (Exchange Control Act 1947). It became illegal for UK residents to continue to hold more than four gold coins dated after 1817 or to buy any gold coins unless they obtained collector license from Bank of England.

The reasoning was to prevent people from hoarding the gold while the cost of living and inflation increase. This Act was recalled in 1971. So we can see that while of course I will always be hardest on the United States being a natural born US citizen, it's not purely a US phenomenon.

Any government around the world that thinks it's in their best interest to seize their citizens' gold has historically done this. Now I don't expect, we'll go to the hoax in just a moment, but I don't expect this to happen again in the future because basically nobody owns gold anymore.

Could they do it? Sure, but I don't think it would make a difference. Today, if the US government banned gold coins, almost nobody would count. There would be a tiny percentage of us, people like me, who are 5% of the population, who would be bent out of shape about it.

There would be probably 20 or 30% of people that would be worried about this. What does this mean? But they don't own gold coins. And then most people would say, well, hey, they said it's bad people hoarding gold. Can you believe that they're hoarding gold? But it wouldn't make a big deal.

And at this point in time, we are very far gone from the gold standard. We're very far gone from any widespread ownership of gold, etc. Central banks do still own gold. I think you should own some gold. I think that gold still has an important place. But we are not in the same world we were 100 years ago because gold ownership today is not widespread.

It was at that time. Remember, gold was money. Contracts were denominated in gold. The US dollar was tied to gold. All of that is now in the past. The US dollar now has no value based upon any other instrument. It's a pure fiat currency that we use because it is widely accepted and the right floats freely.

You can go in freely today, buy gold coins. They have, of course, implemented and maintained lots of significant reporting requirements. If you go and you buy gold, it's subject to currency transaction reports, etc. They get filed. But it's not illegal for you to do and you can you can engage in it.

So I don't expect these laws in the future because gold, I don't think they would get much bang for the buck. And when a government does this, it does risk some kind of opprobrium from its citizenry. And so it needs to be worth it in order for the governing agents to maintain and to maintain their power and accomplish their stated goals.

But the question remains, what could they do this with in the future? Again, we'll get to that in a moment. Let's go back to the hoax of safe deposit box seizures. This is important to talk about because if you're going to talk about this, you need to get your history right.

I'm doing my very best to be accurate with anything that I say. But there is an Internet hoax that says that somehow the IRS was going in and opening people's safety deposit boxes. Now, we know from some of the cases cited that if you did have safety deposit boxes, they weren't necessarily safe.

But the Internet hoax does exaggerate what actually happened. It wouldn't surprise me if this particular hoax had been true, but it's not true. So you think, as we read about it, you think about whether or not this would surprise you if this had actually happened. But remember, it did not.

Hoax of safe deposit box seizures. According to a hoax, Roosevelt ordered all safe deposit boxes in the country seized and searched for gold by an official of the Internal Revenue Service. A typical example of the text of the alleged order reads, quote, "By executive order of the President of the United States, March 9, 1933, by virtue of the authority vested in me by Section 5(b) of the Act of October 6, 1917, as amended by Section 2 of the Act of March 9, 1933, in which Congress declared that a serious emergency exists, I, as President, do declare that the national emergency still exists, that the continued private hoarding of gold and silver by subjects of the United States poses a grave threat to the peace, equal justice, and well-being of the United States, and that appropriate measures must be taken immediately to protect the interests of our people.

Therefore, I hereby proclaim that such gold and silver holdings are prohibited, and that all such coin, bullion, or other possessions of gold and silver be tendered within 14 days to agents of the government for compensation at the official price and the legal tender of the government. All safe deposit boxes in banks or financial institutions have been sealed.

All sales or purchases or movements of such gold and silver are hereby prohibited. Your possession and/or safe deposit box to store them is known by the government from bank and insurance records. Therefore, your vault box must remain sealed and may only be opened in the presence of an agent of the Internal Revenue Service, by lawful order, the President of the United States.

Now, just a moment. I'll continue with the background. Remember, this is a hoax. But in what I just read, could you believe it? The most effective hoaxes are passed along widely because they are believable. That, to me, is the fundamental problem. I could easily believe that this actually was true history after I understand that Executive Order 6102 was true history.

And so, it's not a very far distance from "you're not allowed to own gold" to "we're going to seal and order the banks to seal all safe deposit boxes." So, thankfully, this was a hoax. But I don't see anything in the hoax per se that would in and of itself be unbelievable or would violate any particular aspect of the law that actually was passed.

So, they didn't do that, but I could believe that they would have done that in that measure. What I also just think about is that even the language of the hoax. Think back to what we talked about as about the Canadian situation a couple weeks ago. And just think about this language in the hoax.

"I, as President, do declare that the national emergency still exists, that the continued private hoarding of gold and silver by subjects of the United States poses a grave threat to the peace, equal justice, and well-being of the United States, and that appropriate measures must be taken immediately to protect the interests of our people." In some ways, that language sounds very much like the language of Prime Minister Trudeau in Canada a week or two ago.

Let me finish up the background of the hoax, and then we will talk about what to do about this. The first known reference to the hoax was in the book "After the Crash, Life in the New Great Depression." The fake text refers only to gold, not to silver, which was added by 1998 to internet references.

It claims to be an executive order, but its text was written to apply it to specific individuals, your possession. And so, if the text originated from the government, it would have been sent to individuals, not published as an executive order. The first paragraph starts with the actual text of executive order 6102, then edits it slightly, changing "said national emergency" to "a national emergency" and "still continues to exist" to "still exists" and then adds invented text.

The minor edits and the way that the real text and fake text are combined mid-sentence make it almost certainly an intentionally designed hoax rather than an accident. Most of the text does not appear in the actual executive order. In fact, safe deposit boxes held by individuals were not forcibly searched or seized under the order, and the few prosecutions that occurred in the 1930s for gold hoarding were executed under different statutes.

One of the few such cases occurred in 1936, when a safety deposit box containing over 10,000 troy ounces of gold belonging to Zilick Josefowicz, who was not a US citizen, was seized with a search warrant as part of a prosecution for tax evasion. The US Treasury also came into possession of a large number of safe deposit boxes due to bank failures.

During the 1930s, over 3,000 banks failed, and the contents of their safe deposit boxes were remanded to the custody of the Treasury. If no one claimed the box, it remained in the possession of the Treasury. In October 1981, there were 1,605 cardboard cartons in the basement of the Treasury, each carton containing the contents of one unclaimed safe deposit box.

I hope you can enjoy learning the lessons from that, and feel free to research or dig into the subject more your own. I find it fascinating. Here are some points that I would like to make in addition to what I've already said. 1. I hope that when you take stories or warnings or you hear conspiracy theories, I hope that you stop and consider if they are actually plausible.

One of the things that's been quite disconcerting to me over the years is I have come to believe that many stories, many predictions, many conspiracy theories, even many hoaxes are plausible based upon past experience, based upon past evidence. If I said to you today that, say, five years from now, the US government could seize your Bitcoin from you, in my opinion, that kind of prediction is plausible.

They could do it. Will they do it? We don't know, because there is a system where they have to go based upon public constraint. If Bitcoin were widely acknowledged as being useful, people liked it, people used it, then they probably couldn't get away with it. If Bitcoin were seen as a way of getting evil money to evil Russian oligarchs, getting around all of the world sanctions on the Russian economy, that changes things.

You could see so much why Bitcoin has been tarred and feathered by so many people, drug dealing, money laundering, Russian oligarchs, etc. So the point is that warnings like that, I consider them plausible. I remember years ago, I got interested in various conspiracy theories and I started studying some of the history of various theories, and I was shocked to find how much stuff actually happened.

I found that a sobering experience. It's very sobering when you learn, you know what, when people have wacky conspiracy theories, I can't just dismiss them out of hand. I need to stop, I need to look for evidence, I need to think about it and consider them, because I can go through history and I can find some really wacky stuff that has happened over the time that would be unbelievable if I didn't know it was actually true.

Kind of like it was to me about gold confiscation and it being illegal to own gold coins. The reason I love this example so much also, let me expand this point for you, is it's hard to find something less damaging to you as an individual than a gold coin.

Almost any other seizure is not quite that way. If the government comes and seizes a bale of marijuana, we think, well, you know, at the end of the day, maybe people shouldn't be doing marijuana. After all, it's going to make them stupid and lazy, so maybe people shouldn't be smoking marijuana.

Or the government seizing a bunch of cocaine. Well, at the end of the day, that's really bad, that's, you know, destroying people. Or the government seizes a bunch of fentanyl. And you think, well, okay, they're seizing it, but I see the point. I understand the point and we're probably better off having it off the streets.

It takes a very committed person to say free markets, total liberty, etc., when you're dealing with things like that. Or you come along and you say, well, what about civil asset forfeiture? And you say, well, you know, when they seize the speedboats of those nasty drug runners, they're putting a dent in the drug ring.

Or when they seize a sports car and you go and you find the Miami Police Department logo and spray it all over some cigarette boat and you think, hey, you know, at least they got those nasty drug dealers off the street. Or if they make something illegal, then you say, prohibition, right?

We make alcohol illegal. You say, well, at least people will drink less. And so you justify those things. In the modern world, again, I've already given examples of Russia. You say, at least they can get rid of Putin, right? He's pretty evil. At least that'll be good. And after all, I'm for the Ukrainians.

But when you look at this example of banning the use of gold coins, what you see is that it is exclusively about the interests of the United States. Now, a fair-minded individual would say, well, the interest of the United States is for the flourishing of its people. So therefore, if the United States can increase its money supply and the people can improve, maybe that could get us out of the depression, right?

This is the classic argument that we all argue about. Went into the Great Depression, did the government actions help or hinder? Was it harmful or was it helpful? And we'll save that discussion for another day. But I think clearly you see here that this is backroom dealing and the only people that benefit are government representatives, government agents.

They made the most traditional thing you could ever own, right? Gold coins, we've got them back to the Romans and probably before. Thousands and thousands of years of history of people using gold coins as money. This is money. This is a product that didn't come in from overseas. This is a product that the US government made, stamping out gold coins.

And the system was intentionally designed to be a check on government excess. That's how it was designed. The original Federal Reserve Act itself was a nightmare, but it was designed to be a check on government excess. So they come in, use a time of extreme duress, extreme economic hardship and say, we're going to change all the laws and we're going to make it illegal for you to own gold because you're hoarding your money.

Think about the use of that word, right? In past pandemic, in a previous conversations, I've talked about how the difference between stockpiling and hoarding, right? And so I think there is an example of hoarding, but most of the time it's used in a pejorative sense. I remember back when we're at the beginning of the pandemic, right?

And I did, I think I did shows and I talked about when they came in and they stole a bunch of masks from a guy who had bought them and they accused him of hoarding and they did thousands of masks that he was selling to doctors on the secondary market and the FBI came in and they raided his house and they stole his masks.

I try to stick up for my principles that I didn't, it wasn't wrong. That was, that wasn't right. Talked about it on Twitter, almost, not almost. I got a great, I got a great group of listeners that understand arguing things from the basis of principle, but 80% of the response was, how could you believe this guy is price gouging people on the cost of the masks?

And you always think, well, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe, but when it's gold coins, nobody was harmed by your ownership of gold coins in any way. But the government says you're hoarding money and you're not allowed to hoard money. So we're just going to take it from you. Now, bring that to a modern context.

Think for example, about things like wealth taxes. Think about even the income tax itself. See, we're not in 1933 anymore. I don't expect any kind of, of repeat of this particular set of laws related to gold, but this same theory holds true in other ways. And you got a bunch of people with similar theories to president Roosevelt trying to build a utopia with their covetous actions.

Now, brings me to the next question. Don't think that it was better back then. There's often this sense that we have, and especially people who are politically conservative or, or sympathetic to conservatism in some way often have the sense of, well, it was better before. No, not necessarily. It wasn't necessarily better before.

Some things were better. Some things were worse. But today, some things are much better. Some things are worse. History is a mixed bag and don't fall prey to the golden era fallacy to think that, well, in 1933, they really believed in constitutional rights. Nonsense. Constitution. They, they, they affirmed everything I've just described here as constitutional.

The press cheered it on. It all happened. So what can you do? I don't know how to change a governmental system. I don't know how to do it. All I know is to say, what can we learn about how to protect ourselves? First lessons do relate to gold coins.

I think these are the least, not least important, but just the least likely again, I do for reasons stated several times. Now I don't expect this to happen again. Nobody owns gold anymore, but if you do own gold, this is why in my opinion, you buy it privately. If you're going to go through the hassle of buying gold, owning gold, storing gold, then as I've stated in Q and A shows, what I've been asked about the subject, just go that last extra step and own it privately.

It is today legal anywhere in the United States for you to walk into any, to a gold shop, a coin shop, and to do business in cash and for you to buy gold coins. You'll pay a slight premium to deal with a dealer of course. You will have some hassle factor of your having to physically go and do that.

You may want to separate your transactions into modest amounts so that there's no currency transaction reports that have to be filed on behalf of the dealer. No, no, no, no name and information required, et cetera, but it's perfectly legal to do what I have described and you can own your gold.

And at least that way, if a law were to be passed in the future, you would have less exposure, less risk. The power of gold among other things is that it's an incredibly compact traditional store of wealth with a long and storied history and it doesn't have any kind of physical trails attached.

It doesn't have any kind of registration documents required. It's just a little coin and that's really powerful, especially in times of duress when the government is passing these immoral laws like we've talked about with executive order 1602. It's really useful to have that feature. And even in the modern world, in a moment I'm going to talk about a new Bitcoin privacy, how to buy Bitcoin immediately class that I'm working on with a friend of mine that will be launching, that we have ready to launch.

But one of the things that's so fascinating about it is for all of the promises of Bitcoin, and I'm on board for all the promises of Bitcoin, gold is still better from a privacy perspective. It's just different. The fact that you could put $100,000 worth of value in gold coins in a coffee can stuck in your backyard and unless somebody passes over the top of the metal detector, most likely because they knew that you're there, it's pretty powerful.

As we get into the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency privacy stuff, you need to have a basic level of knowledge about how to do it. You don't have to be super sophisticated to buy it privately, but you do need to have a basic level of knowledge. Gold coins, it's a lot simpler.

Buy it, pay cash, take delivery, keep your mouth shut. Everybody knows you have it. That's powerful. It's as powerful today as it was in 1933. So when you're buying gold coins for your personal collection, do that. Pay cash, take delivery, keep your mouth shut. And then you'll have the power of knowing that you have an asset that you can own without anybody else necessarily knowing.

Related to that, I personally give a lot of attention to the idea of the safety deposit hoax. Again, I don't think it unreasonable to believe that the government could, in a time of duress or in a time of emergency action or something, I don't believe it unreasonable to believe that they could issue a proclamation like was issued in that hoax, meaning we're sealing all the safety deposit boxes.

And what's unfortunate is in the modern world, a safety deposit box with a financial institution is considered to have an account. Then it comes in under all of the banking regulations. So as you're going to arrange for storage of your gold, then I think it's better to go with some form of private storage with a non-banking entity if possible.

I don't think, and you ask, "Well, how big of a deal is that?" Well, I don't think it's that big of a deal, but if you're going about it and you're going to be paying for a safety deposit box, you might consider simply transacting with a private secure storage company rather than a bank for the reasons stated.

The next lesson is diversify your holdings. I always think about that attorney. Just imagine that guy, Barb Campbell, 5,000 ounces of gold. For all we know, that may have been his life savings. I think it probably was. I wish I had more information on him and I wish I could read a book that was written about that particular case.

It would be interesting to do so. In fact, I just found, I hadn't previously clicked on the link, here's an article with more details on the case, specifically in Time Magazine, published October 9, 1933. Let me read this because it's about the details of the case and I think it'll be instructive.

"Gold Indictment #1," name of the article. "On October 11, 1932, an elderly Manhattan attorney named Frederick Barber Campbell marched into Chase National Bank followed by an armed guard trundling 13 bars of gold. Mr. Campbell had just drawn this bullion from the Federal Reserve Bank in return for gold certificates.

Each bar, worth approximately $5,000, had been cast by the U.S. Treasury and bore its stamp and number. Lawyer Campbell arranged for the Chase Bank to act as hired custodian for his bullion. On January 25, 1933, Mr. Campbell again appeared at Chase National Bank with 14 more gold bars which were stowed away in the vault with the first batch.

By gold standard reckoning, his total deposit of metal amounted to $135,000. On March 9, Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act, which empowered the President to call all gold into the Treasury, with heavy penalties for those who disobeyed his orders. At that time, $1.4 billion in gold was in circulation, most of it hoarded.

In the next 30 days, more than one-third of this was turned into the Treasury. On April 5, President Roosevelt issued an executive order requiring holders of gold to turn it into the Treasury in exchange for paper currency under penalty of 10 years' imprisonment and $10,000 fine. Department of Justice agents began visiting known hoarders who, to date, have surrendered $38,901,009 in gold.

During the same period, unknown hoarders have given up more than $300 million. Attorney General Cummings issued threat of prosecution against recalcitrants who still held $560,201,000. On August 28, President Roosevelt issued another order requiring every possessor of gold to register his holdings with the Treasury before September 18. Those who failed to do so were also to be punished by 10 years' imprisonment, $10,000 fine.

On September 16, lawyer Campbell appeared at Chase National Bank, demanded his 27 bars of gold. The bank told him that under the law it could not deliver them to him, but would have to surrender them to the government in accordance with the President's orders. On September 26, Mr. Campbell started a civil suit in Manhattan federal court to compel the bank to release his gold deposits.

In his petition, he argued that the President's orders, which prevented him from regaining his property, were unconstitutional. On September 27, after an 18-minute session, a federal grand jury in Manhattan indicted Frederick Barber Campbell for failing to register gold now valued at $200,574.34 before September 18, as required by the August 28 order.

Also imminent was a second indictment charging actual hoarding of gold in violation of the April 5 order. Thus, last week was President Roosevelt's whole gold policy started on its winding way to the Supreme Court for a major test on constitutionality. If Defendant Campbell is convicted by a jury, and the Supreme Court sustains his conviction, the Department of Justice will be on solid legal ground to move against some 30,000 citizens who have so far defied the President's gold orders.

If Defendant Campbell wins a Supreme Court appeal, the administration's whole gold program will be set at naught, and President Roosevelt will have to start all over again conserving the Treasury's gold supply. In Defendant Campbell, the government picked for this test not only the largest gold hoarder on its list, but also a respectable lawyer, whom Prosecutor Medley called "exceedingly able." Born in Brooklyn, Mr.

Campbell graduated from Harvard Law School in 1894, is a director of U.S. and British insurance companies, belongs to such swank Manhattan clubs as Union, Metropolitan (where he lives), and Century. When he filed his civil suit against the Chase Bank, he well knew he was inviting the government to prosecute.

His argument in that suit will become his defense in the criminal action. To wit, 1. Congress has no constitutional power to delegate its legislative authority over gold to the President. 2. The President is prevented by the Fifth (due process of law) Amendment to the Constitution from depriving him of his property.

The property in this case is not only the gold bars in the Chase vault, but his $65,000 paper profit, incident to the rise in gold from $20 to $31 per ounce. Mr. Campbell, who promptly pleaded not guilty to the indictment and was released on $1,000 bail because no moral turpitude was involved in the charge, was thoroughly aware of the risks he was running in this contest with the government.

If convicted, he could be disbarred, fined $10,000, imprisoned for 10 years. But he was, he intimated, making a fight for his constitutional rights and "if I have to go to jail, I don't care." And again, that was an article published in Time Magazine on October 9, 1933. So the lessons stand, the points that I had planned to make, and it's interesting to read an article from the era with more details.

The lesson is, if Mr. Campbell had diversified his holdings, and if he had moved quickly, he very likely could have kept his gold. Now I appreciate the fact that he was a man of means and a man of principle, ready to fight for the constitutionality of his ability to own his gold and not be stolen by the United States government.

Of course, he lost. His gold was confiscated. He lost his case. The Supreme Court said, "Yes, President Roosevelt can make this action," and all of the money was gone. So we can see what happens sometimes when you stay and fight, even for things that seem like an obvious win.

If the wins are against you, I mean, it's hard for me to believe if I presented the facts of that case to somebody in the modern era, I think most people would say, "Yeah, that's wrong. They shouldn't take his gold." And yet, the wins of that era were against him.

The thinking of the time was that he was doing something wrong and the president was saving the country. So it's wildly unpredictable to know what the wins of the era tomorrow are going to be. So what could he have done? Well, he could have diversified his holdings. Now, in 1933, that was not as easy as it is today.

He was a businessman doing business in New York, and the gold bars were a normal part of his settling his contracts. Again, as the story stated, he would take his gold certificates, which was a claim for gold, he would take his gold certificates to the US Treasury and he would get gold bars backing up his US gold certificates.

That was the point, was that the gold was there backing up certificates. That was the point of having a gold-backed dollar at the time. And so he was clearly doing business in the United States. But hopefully, I don't know, but what we see is that if you're depending upon any one jurisdiction to protect you, you're doing poorly.

If he had taken some of his gold and gotten in a car, gotten in a train, taken it to a bank in Canada and placed some of his gold into the vault of a Canadian bank in Toronto, very likely he would have been able to retain that gold. Very likely there was a window in which he could have done that.

He could have hired a courier. As soon as he got wind of the change coming, he could have perhaps hired a courier and said, "Please take these gold bars and take them and put them on deposit at a bank in Toronto." And that could have protected his gold. No ships, no planes necessary, just a train, a car.

He could have done it. For whatever reason, he didn't. And the lesson is it didn't work out well for him. So let's you and I be more thoughtful. I think that you should, if you're going to buy gold specifically, I think that your first, I don't know, half dozen ounces, 10,000, couple, 10, 20,000, maybe 10,000 per person, right?

Some reasonable number. I don't have any exact science behind making up a number. But your first half dozen ounces or so should probably be held in some way, some place that you can get to them in case you need them. But if you're going to go with any serious amount of gold, then I think very likely that gold should be stored in an offshore jurisdiction, a separate country from where you live, and should be diversified if it gets to be significant amounts.

If you've got thousands of ounces, then it should certainly be diversified. Hundreds certainly should be diversified. And so you want to choose your jurisdictions carefully. I think it's interesting that they cited the example of the Swiss finance corporation that was holding its gold in the United States. For the Swiss, it was unthinkable what the Americans did at that time.

And so this is why the Swiss have had a long and storied history of banking, because they have a high respect for your rights to bank. They've always had a high respect for privacy. Now, in the last years, much of that has changed. Even interesting with the new set of Credit Suisse papers, the new leak, then maybe there will be more changes in the future.

But the point stands that a jurisdiction that culturally will respect you, and I would say importantly, a jurisdiction that has strong interest to be in your camp, is a better jurisdiction than just a random country. Those are the basic lessons on gold. Now let's pivot for a moment. What is the 21st century version of gold?

I think gold still is powerful for reasons stated. But gold has downsides. It has certain attributes. Some of those attributes make it wonderful, and some of those attributes don't make it wonderful. For example, the attribute that gold has of being physical makes it wonderful. Being owned by the possessor of it makes it wonderful.

As I stated, you can own the gold, you can take a gold bar, walk out in your backyard, dig up a couple of feet of worth of dirt, stick it down and plant a tree over it, and you're done. Your gold is going to sit there. It's not going to call out to anybody that it's there, unless you're being specifically targeted with a metal detector.

There you can engage in some more interesting ways of concealing it. There's nothing really required. It's an ordinary person's ability to take care of it and to engage in privacy. The problem is it's physical. So what if you're trying to flee from a war-torn country? Your neighbor has just invaded with tanks and bombs, and you have to flee and you need access to your money.

And all of a sudden, the global finance system is being disrupted and banks are being shuttered. And you thought you were being smart because you kept your money in a foreign bank, right? Following Joshua's internationalization advice, you kept your money in a foreign bank just across the border, a bigger country that had more reason to think that it was going to be useful for you.

Then all of a sudden, that bank is basically cut off from the world banking system. And now what do you do? This is where people have wanted for a long time some form of digital gold. And this is where in the modern age, potentially, we have that. Potentially with Bitcoin.

Now we're very early in the life cycle of Bitcoin. And I'm going to be inclusive, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin maximalists don't like it to be inclusive, but I choose to be inclusive. We're very early in the testing process of this. But early indications are that this is a very useful thing.

So could the same thing apply? Well, I think there are very good reasons for you to be concerned about future legislation that reflects things like Executive Order 6102. I think there are very good reasons for you to be concerned about that. So what do you do? Well, I think you apply the same caution and care in your ownership, your acquisition of Bitcoin or other currencies as you would to gold.

Notice at the time, from that Time article that the US government maintained a list of people who were known, what they called gold hoarders, people who owned gold. Well, similar lists are being created right now. Last year on your US tax return, the US government asked you to declare whether you owned any cryptocurrencies.

And your choice of what to put on that box was a very momentous one. It started the creation of a list, started the creation of data that can be used to prosecute you. Now, I recommend you answer it truthfully. I don't play around with people that can put me in prison.

I don't play around with people that can take away my freedom. But there is a lot you can do to protect against things getting worse. And all of it starts at the very beginning. If you had not been registered as a known gold hoarder, again, at that time it was much easier because you could just have gold, gold coins, etc.

But you had had your family collection of gold and it was not registered, insured, etc. You were pretty well safe just to sit on it. And there was an immediate profit for you. Now, I'm not sure that was the best trade because you couldn't publicly sell it for several decades.

But at least it would have been there for you. At least it would have been there able for you to do business with. So, it's an extremely valuable thing for you to have had. And I want to encourage you as you are building other assets, I want to encourage you to make sure that you purchase other assets with the same basic thing in mind.

And here I want to introduce you to my newest course. This is a joint project with Gabriel Custodiat, author of the Watchman's Guide to Privacy. Gabriel is a privacy consultant, privacy expert, and we've been working on this for a while to build a course. And it's basically the course that I wanted for me about how to buy Bitcoin privately.

The genesis of the course is exactly what I said. I was talking to Gabriel. I've become friendly with him over time. And as we've talked about different things, I've gone back and forth and I've given him some of my privacy questions, some of my privacy comments, made various suggestions to him.

And along the way I said, "Listen, here's something I'm working on. I would really like to understand how to buy Bitcoin privately." And I outlined for him the reasons, which I basically just stated. And I said, "How can I do this? Because it's more difficult than you might think.

What are the technologies? How do I do it?" We're living in a world where the Bitcoin marketplace is a mixture of different things. But to actually own Bitcoin privately, to have it, to create it privately and to own it without there being a paper trail is more challenging than I wish it were.

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Cryptocurrencies are the ultimate exit strategy for inflation, social collapse and other disasters. But only if you acquire and use them correctly, which 99% of people fail to do. In this two-part course, privacy consultant Gabriel Custodiat explains step-by-step multiple ways to legally buy Bitcoin with no attachment to personal information.

He then explains how to use it, how to protect it and how to convert it to other crypto for speculation or added privacy. The course includes everything you need to understand this process from A to Z, no prior knowledge required. As authorities crack down on cryptocurrencies, it is critical to have up-to-date, tested methods for private Bitcoin.

There is much confusion about this process. The aim of this course is to give you all of the information you need with minimal diversion, no confusing tech vocabulary, no moralizing, no hacker-level computer skills, only the focused steps to teach you how to make the most radical personal financial decision of your life.

That's the dream. That's the idea. So basically what we're doing is we are doing this in the form of a live webinar for this initial class. We have at least about four hours of content. We're going to do two live webinars with live Q&A. We've worked out the outlines and also there's a couple of bonuses.

So details of that on the course page. I'll let you check that out. But we're going to basically teach you how to do that. That's been my dream for a long time. When you look at finances, and again I'll be talking more about this in days to come and other episodes more focused, but when you look at finances, in our modern era it's almost a human right to say, "I must be able to have control of my money." And yet we're living in a system, "I must be able to do business." We're living in a system where that control has been intensely centralized.

And this is a great, great risk. Bitcoin offers the potential for us to do better. And so what we outlined in the promotion there is exactly what my dream has been. Imagine that you go across a border with nothing other than a seed phrase in your head. And you go and you find a computer and boom, you've got access to your money regardless of what's happening.

And that's money that's never been tied to you, is never connected to you, etc. But it allows you to do business and to make it and live it. So if that sounds interesting to you, I'd love you to check it out. Here's the URL you need. BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. Go to BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com now and buy access.

And we look forward to talking to you on the webinar and teaching you how to accomplish that dream. BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com. Do more together this holiday in a new Chevy. Take on more adventure in the strong and capable of the new Chevy.