Last updated on December 1, 2022
Jeremy Cordon joins the podcast to discuss his Goldback creation. These gold-imbued currency notes are worth upwards of 1/1000 a troy ounce and are already circulating (and being used) for point-of-sale transactions.
Content Highlights
- Goldbacks seek to solve one of the challenges of using gold as a currency of exchange: the lack of small denominations that can be used in point-of-sale transactions (2:57);
- A single goldback is worth 1/1000 of a troy ounce of gold, or about $4 at current rates. The notes are imbued with physical gold through a microtechnology process and serialized (5:06);
- Goldbacks trade at a premium to physical gold because of the engineering and artistic labor that goes into their production — and demand, as supply has historically been limited (8:54)
- Goldbacks as a disaster hedge (12:48);
- Background on the guest and how he came to create goldbacks (16:57);
- The limitations of cryptocurrencies when it comes to creating a gold-backed currency, through the guest’s own experience (21:35);
- The legality of creating gold-backed currency (24:12);
- Between $8 million and $12 million-worth of goldbacks are currently in circulation, but goldback.com is a wholesaler (26:48);
- The guest’s investing strategy and the concept of gold-backed leases as a way to profit from the goldback trend (30:57).
More on Jeremy Cordon
- Website: Goldback.com;
- LinkedIn page;
- YouTube channel;
- Instagram: @Goldback.
Disclaimer: The host does not own goldbacks, holds no particular view on goldbacks, and does not benefit from the sale of goldbacks.
Transcript
Nathaniel E. Baker
here with Jeremy Cordon of gold back the founder of this company, I believe out in Utah. Thank you so much for joining me contrarian investor podcast today. Thanks for having me. Yeah, great to have you on. And we’re here to talk about this concept of gold backs. And I have I have a bunch of questions here about this, you build this on your website as “the world’s first physical, interchangeable gold money that is designed to accommodate even small transactions.” So in your own words, tell me about this, and what it’s supposed to do and how it all works.
Jeremy Cordon
You know, a lot of a lot of folks that I’ve interacted with over the years, they want to go back to the gold standard, or they lament the loss of the gold standard. And if you were to take a critical look at that, if you go back to Roman times, with or even 100 years ago, the gold standard wasn’t radically different. So for example, the Romans, if you wanted to buy bread, or you know, a dozen eggs or whatever, you weren’t using gold, you know, you you were using something else, I mean, you’re using the widow’s mite, right, you know, you’re using like a little bronze or copper coin, right, to buy your really small things. You know, maybe silver would be the right coin to use for buying a wedding feasts worth of bread, and then a gold coin. I mean, that’s your, that’s your grain shipment from Egypt. Right? That’s it, that’s a lot more, that’s a lot more valuable. And there were small gold coins, but they were really, really, really small and they’re still valuable. You know, you look at like the the 10th ounce gold coins a day. They’re like, about 200 bucks, you know, so it’s not a small transaction. Yeah, even Fast Forward 100 years ago, and you still didn’t have a gold standard, you had a tri metal system, with the government forced pegging three industrial metals together, you know, so it’s 100 copper pennies as a silver dollar 20 silver dollars as a gold piece, if anybody melts anything down, because there’s industrial demand outside the monetary system for those metals, you’ll be hung. You know, so you hit the 70s. And, you know, even with all the inflation and the spending, the Vietnam War and everything else, or how long is the society? Do you want all of your copper to be inside your coinage? You know, if you have 10s of 1000s of industrial uses for silver, for how long do you want all the silver coins being worn out in people’s pockets and not in solar panels, or in medicine, or in you know, film, or you name it? Gold’s a little special, we only use about 10% of gold that’s mined for industrial purposes. The other 90% is jewelry, and, you know, gold bars and investments. So what makes the gold back special, is a single gold back to 1000s of an ounce of gold. It’s worth almost four bucks. And that’s your that’s your small purchase. That’s your cup of coffee. That’s your loaf of bread. That’s your dozen eggs. That’s a small transaction. And gold has never ever, ever in 1000s of years been good, or those small transactions ever. Always needed copper, you’ve always needed silver.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Right? So how does this work? So that is literally just a thin sheet of gold that you guys have manufactured there? Is that what that is?
Jeremy Cordon
No. So it’s not like a foil. What we have is we have a like a really specific polymer that goes through a vacuum deposition process. So we’re talking micro technology is the same technology that puts gold into your cell phone, or your laptop or your car on microchips. So it goes into a chamber that’s a vacuum. And then the polymer gets bombarded with a very specific amounts of gold. And then it gets sealed in with another layer of polymer. So it’s like a gold sandwich. But everything that you can see on a gold bag is gold. So all the gold parts of the gold back, you’re actually looking at gold. And more importantly,
Nathaniel E. Baker
I could take that apart and transform that into actual physical gold again.
Jeremy Cordon
I mean, you could you could melt it down. I think you would lose value doing that just I mean, you could melt down your car and get your steel back. But you know, it’s more useful in this form. One because you have exactly 1/1000 of an ounce. And that’s a lot more useful than a BB who, who knows what it’s made out of or what the purity is. You also have it serialized so gold backs have never been counterfeited. It’s just a very useful bartering tool. I suppose.
Nathaniel E. Baker
You created this in 2019. And but you still face the problem of circulating these things and getting mass adoption for them. So where are you in that process?
Jeremy Cordon
You know why it’s hard to know how many people circulate them? Because once we, you know, once we sell them, we don’t know what people do with them, but we do know is that hundreds of businesses have signed up to advertise themselves as accepting gold backs as payment. Back, you know, initially, I was hoping that about 10%, five to 10% of businesses would be willing to accept callbacks as payment in lieu of cash. And we’re finding that it’s closer to 30 to 50%. of small business owners are willing to take payment and gold in the form of callbacks,
Nathaniel E. Baker
presumably, because it keeps prices more constant. Is that the benefit?
Jeremy Cordon
Because people are looking for choices, they’re looking for an alternative choice to you know, this cashless society that other people want. Right, right. And it’s
Nathaniel E. Baker
not, there’s no blockchain stuff here. There’s nothing, there’s no tokens, there’s
Jeremy Cordon
not, if I hand you, if I hand you a gold back, the transactions over that’s the whole thing. There’s no There’s no password, there’s no 30 digital wallet, there’s no internet supporting it, there’s no exiting into cash on a on an exchange with your social security number later, it’s, it’s been described as a superior form of cash, right? It’s a combination between Gold Coins and Cash, I guess understood. And there’s no digit like there’s so there’s not any way that I can, I can transfer somebody, or put that into an account, or trade off of it or do anything like that. You could. So there, there are gold bank accounts, one business in particular Alpine gold, they’re a vaulting service, and they will halt gold backs, free of charge. And they liquidate them at a zero spread. And people that have been you know, buying gold backs. Now, we launched the $2 price point in 2019. And today, you know, they’re closer, the average price is a lot closer to $4.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Okay, so this this trade I presumably freely going back to, and they started off at $2 Is that how much of that is tied to the price of gold. And how much of that is due to its own intrinsic whatever,
Jeremy Cordon
you know what it’s it’s both the gold has gone up. So there’s that. The other thing backing the gold back, though, is the fact that it takes labor, make it you know, you’re looking at about a team of 40 different people putting gold back together. So there’s a that that manufacturing premium stays with the gold back just like it would with a car, okay, now it costs a certain amount to turn the raw materials into the thing. So and then outside of that you have demand, we’ve been very reluctant to market gold back too aggressively. Because when we do it tends to wipe out our supply. Okay. And so we’ve been very timid, I guess, putting gold backs out there, because every gold back that we can produce can be sold. And in pretty short order. But there’s hundreds of businesses that advertise themselves as accepting it, we have people coming back and telling me or telling us that people have spent gold backs all over the world. Yeah, you know, because, again, it’s, it’s a barter transaction, right? You know, people can do that as much as they want. So individuals can do that. And you know, even with businesses that aren’t necessarily advertising themselves as doing it, you know, I mean, you think if you’re in Israel at a garage sale, and you pull out something like this, and it’s shiny, and it’s gold, and it’s beautiful, and somebody wants it, they’ll they’ll trade you something for it, right now is just just as good as bartering with gold. Other than that, it’s in a very beautiful format, and it’s small denomination. So you’re not handing them a $200 tiny gold coin that they better hope is real, you know, it’s a much lower risk. And again, gold backs have never been counterfeited, and it’s
Nathaniel E. Baker
worth four bucks. So presumably, I would have to give a change in the local fiat currency or whatever.
Jeremy Cordon
Yeah, probably, I mean, we might we might go smaller someday. The problem with that that we’re running into is if we go much thinner than a single gold back that they’ll start to become transparent. So it’s like you’ll see the gold, but it’ll be more like a window than a gold back. And, you know, the ones are already produced kind of at a loss, or breakeven. So you know, going smaller, right now is cost prohibitive.
Nathaniel E. Baker
So you guys make money by by producing these things, and circulating them and then selling them selling them.
Jeremy Cordon
We don’t make any money on circulation once they belong to an individual. We’re not you know, Visa I don’t I don’t know what these are being used for unless somebody tells me Sure. And then there’s five different denominations, right? So we have a one, a 510 25. This is a 50 right here, okay. It has 50 times as much gold as the one its value is 50 times higher than the one
Nathaniel E. Baker
how much of this is based also on I mean, obviously we know about the perils of fiat currency And you may have done some research on this, I imagine you have on the longest lasting fiat currency, which I believe is the British pound. And even there, like the record is not very good for how long these things have have lasted. So is it partly a bet on that on fiat currency needing to be replaced at some point, or
Jeremy Cordon
I’m just offering another alternative, I guess, you know, I don’t have to make a prediction on Fia, you know, fee. It’s track history is what it is. If people don’t want to participate in fiat currency, they don’t have a lot of other choices right now. Right? They can do cryptocurrency I bought cryptocurrency. I think the problem that we’re running into with cryptocurrency is that it’s a bit volatile and speculative. You know, and every cryptocurrency has a limited amount of how much can exist, but what’s the limit on how many cryptocurrencies there can be? You know, what I’m saying? So it’s, and that’s not a that’s not a dog on a dig at cryptocurrency, it’s just, you want to have lots of different alternatives out there. And this is just another niche that we’re filling.
Nathaniel E. Baker
So there’s no there’s also no type of argument as a disaster hedge is when you know, if there if there’s some kind of your the grid goes down, or war or something like that, where you have no access to cash, and what are
Jeremy Cordon
what are your dollars worth in a war, or an EMP scenario?
Nathaniel E. Baker
Whatever somebody’s willing to sell their goods for, I guess,
Jeremy Cordon
okay, and maybe maybe that’ll work for you for a while, historically, you know, looking at fiat currencies in kind of these collapse scenarios, they’ll work for like the first couple of weeks. Yeah. And then you know, people are playing musical chairs and they want out, right? And then people start bartering. You know, they they’ll use, you know, food or freeze dried food or, you know, bullets, you know, they’ll they’ll start bartering with other things. And then at that point, what do you want if you want to barter with you know, the wrong caliber bullet or the you know, the not gluten free freeze dried food they can’t eat or cook or prepare? Or they don’t trust because it could be bad or, you know, so this just gives people more choices. You know, where you have a fungible currency made out of gold that’s never been counterfeited? You know, a lot of people have been working in precious metals for years and years. The reason why they buy one ounce gold coins is just in case. Yeah. And you can ask, you say, well, just in case of what, yeah, what do you think’s gonna happen? Oh, you know, Yellowstone could go off. But you know, the communists can invade the, they can set off an EMP, you know, they’re, there’s some horrible thing that can happen, where just in case my money all my cash in my bank isn’t an asset to me anymore. Okay, great. So now, the next step is you have a one ounce gold coin that’s worth $2,000 that can’t easily be authenticated, and is extremely valuable, more so than most transactions you would make. Or even look at Silver. I love silver. I own a lot of silver. If somebody that I didn’t know, tried to barter with me, in a crisis scenario was silver, and I didn’t have an authenticator. How can you trust that silver? Knowing how many counterfeits there are? And there’s nothing against silver, it’s just, it’s it’s an issue. It’s an issue that’s present given you know, how much, you know, fraud there is, you know, and we have a gold back, which again, is smaller. It’s the lowest denomination is the cheapest gold product you’re ever gonna find probably as the gold back where it’s fungible, is non counterfeit double. And it’s designed to be useful for small transactions. And that’s, you know, so yeah, we have a lot of preppers buying gold backs, too.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Wow. Very interesting. All right. Cool. Jeremy Corden, I want to take a quick break, and come back and ask you some more questions how you came to create this thing? In the first place. Yeah. But before we do that, I want to take a quick break, and hear from our sponsors. And if you don’t want to hear this, actually, if you’re a premium subscriber, you’re not going to get the break. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t Don’t touch the dial. Okay, welcome back, everybody here with Jeremy Corbyn of gold back. Jeremy, this is the section of the show where we ask our guests to tell us a little bit more about himself, in this instance, how you came about this, this part, I guess, this idea, and how you then translate it into an actual business. And as well as we can go back a little further, just like your origin stories, how you gotten interested in investing in the first place. So yeah, go ahead, and let’s talk about that.
Jeremy Cordon
Okay, great. Um, where would you like me to start?
Nathaniel E. Baker
Well, how’d you get interested in this in investing in general, the first place like,
Jeremy Cordon
you know, for precious metals in particular. I had come off serving a mission. I was 21 years old. And I got wrapped up with the the Ron Paul campaign of 2011. I guess that kind of dates me. But you know, I was I was a delegate for Ron Paul and I grabbed just about all the content I could on things that he He talked about and one of them was sound money. And I thought that was absolutely fascinating. So that’s what got me interested in precious metals. I guess. When I was still in college, I had the opportunity of doing an internship for a group called the Libertas Institute. And Connor Boyacky writes the Tuttle twins. And then he’s also got as the it’s the Libertas Institute. So I worked there. And that’s where I met my business partner, Larry. Okay, who drafted the legal tender act in Utah. Okay, so that’s, that’s how I met Larry. And I became really interested in his business, I blog about it online. And he ended up getting a lot of traction from those blogs. And I offered to be his first full time employee, I took a pretty big pay decrease. But my wife, let me do it. Because I was super interested in precious metals. I’d grabbed everything I could was in college on reading on the site about metal. So I was able to kind of build a background, I guess, in precious metals that way. That’s how I got into the space.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Very interesting. But it sounds like you also came up across the limitations of precious metals as a currency of exchange, right, as a form of exchange.
Jeremy Cordon
Yeah. And that that was kind of the point of the legal tender Act that was passed in 2011. It was, was really designed to, I think, what Larry thought was that once we passed a law that allowed gold and silver to use money, that there were all these people in the wings, that would just start doing it. When that didn’t happen, we realize that there are some real issues with people using clients. You know, one of them is that they’re not fungible, you know, they can be counterfeited, and you lose on spreads. So we built up a business that was called you up Ma. Now, it’s called Alpine gold, which is still around. And the model that we came up with, for this first business that we did together, was we wanted people to be able to evolve gold and silver coins, to buy them and to not have to deal with spreads. So if you bought $5,000, with a silver and it went up 10%, you could sell it for $5,500. And the only thing that you’d have to pay is a membership fee and some vaulting fees. So you know, you’re paying a few bucks a month, but then you’re not losing if you’re going in and out of precious metals all the time. We thought that that was a huge barrier for people using metals. And that business still exists. You know, there’s still people that you know, Vault there, I think, I think they I think they have over like $100 million worth of gold and silver now that are vaulted it outline gold. And they’d been around for about 10 years. The next thing that I did is a cryptocurrency. And I thought that maybe people if they could break down gold a little bit more, and get it a little bit smaller, that they would use it as money more, right. And this was back in 2018, that we started this, it was a business called kontrick. And what I heard over and over again, going to events was if you don’t hold it, you don’t own it. And if you have a digital form of gold, and we don’t trust you, because even if we did trust you, the government can roll into your vault with tanks and take all the gold and then all our tokens are worth nothing. I heard some variation of that over 100 times, which was frustrating because I was trying to market this crypto company. There’s wasn’t the trust there. You know, people probably wouldn’t trust the gold standard again, because if you have a piece of paper saying you have gold somewhere, and you don’t trust the people who are vaulting the gold, you know, I mean, it’s better to just say you’re not backing it with anything. You know, it’s like, hey, at least we’re being honest here with each other. Right? You know, I mean, don’t pretend there’s gold there. And now they’re not the gold there again. But no, I was doing that crypto company. And that is around the time that I met Valorum alarm was the manufacturing company for gold back. And back then they made I guess I shouldn’t December, but they kind of made these novelty products. But you know, this is like the kind of stuff that they would make. I was fascinated with the technology itself. I thought holy cow, you guys have gotten gold into really small increments, and you made it really pretty. And, you know, I was so infatuated with what they’re doing that I ended up helping them raise all sorts of money for their business. And after that they trusted me enough that they were pursuing other things that they could possibly do. And it was around that time. You know, Adam Trexler, the president of the Lorem he approached me said hey, I want to do something else with you guys. Or something with you in particular because you’ve you know, been helping me. I had this dream and in this dream people were using kind of these Willy Wonka tickets and they were buying stuff Like it was money they were they were like buying, like food at a farmers market. And they were getting change in this, you know, and I woke up and I thought, oh my gosh, these things are just money, they can have different increments, the whole thing can just be gold, you know, the whole thing can just be gold. And that was kind of the nexus for starting gold back.
Nathaniel E. Baker
And now that the legal hurdles here, obviously not anybody can just create a currency or can they in Utah? How does that work? You mentioned this, this this law.
Jeremy Cordon
So state law, so I’ll go back to operate state level laws in every state that gold backs exist, the state law in Utah authorizes gold and silver, as legal tender, and because gold backs are 24 karat gold, there are 24 karat gold product, they’ve already been authorized by the state. No one’s just made a as convenient as a currency as we did. So we very much followed state law and making the Utah goal back. And then as Larry and the rest of the legal team looked, we’re able to find many laws and other states that allow go back to be used there as well. But not all other states. There are some states that charge sales tax on gold that we shy away from, you know, so we don’t we don’t really want to be there. But we are operating off state level laws, not federal law.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Okay. But you still have a you’ve received reports against that, that this is being used in other states,
Jeremy Cordon
people can barter with gold products anywhere in the world, that is not prohibited, of course. So like, for example, let’s say the state of Hawaii, Hawaii has a sales tax on gold. If somebody brought their own gold back to Hawaii, and did a barter transaction with their gold backs in Hawaii, how would that be any different legally than bartering with a bag of rice or a chocolate bar or a gold coin? Right. What we don’t do in Hawaii is we don’t support that behavior with a network of advertised businesses and Hawaii that will accept callbacks. We only do that in states that have an official goal back series. Understood. Okay. So there is a difference in terms of how we behave based off those state laws.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Understood. Okay. What so what is the breakdown pretty much as far as states that charge sales tax versus those Ankole that versus those that don’t?
Jeremy Cordon
You know, I want to say there’s like, there’s fewer now than there used to be, I want to say there’s somewhere between eight and 12 states. Okay, still charge sales tax. I know Tennessee just dropped theirs. Okay. It’s not it’s not like a blue state Red State thing. Okay, oddly enough, right. Yeah,
Nathaniel E. Baker
I thought everything was nowadays.
Jeremy Cordon
And there’s red states and blue states that charge sales tax.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Yeah. And how much is circulating out there? Like, how much have you created and how much of it is out there?
Jeremy Cordon
That’s a really good question. I’d have to look at the latest numbers. But there there are millions, millions of gold backs. I want to say that it’s gonna be in the ballpark between eight and 12 million gold backs.
Nathaniel E. Baker
So you’ve created eight and 12. Somewhere in there million gold backs and sold those.
Jeremy Cordon
Yeah, so we can actually sell everything we can produce. We can’t produce gold backs fast enough to meet the current market demand.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Who are these buyers? Are they just individuals are they are they go back
Jeremy Cordon
as a wholesaler, I thought that gold back would be a really great thing for the precious metal space in general. What I’ve heard is that a lot of the market, especially for numismatics, and precious metals is aging out a little bit. Younger generations aren’t as excited by precious metals as the older ones are. What gold bank has done for the precious metal space is that 75% of people that own gold backs are brand new to precious metals. And a lot of them are very young, our age demographic or core demographic is between the ages of 20 and 40. So it’s pushing a lot of fresh blood into the precious metal space. And then these people are you know, going on to learn more things and get interested in numismatics and other forms of bullion. You know, we’ve been dramatically growing the size of the precious metal space over the past few years when that’s I think I think that’s my metals dealers are interested in gold back itself as a wholesaler so go back directly to any individual i I only sell gold backs to businesses I say so if you’re looking at you know money metals or bullion max or finest known or defy the grid or Alpine gold we have a list of businesses on gold backed.com where you can see who sells gold backs who’s retailing gold backs
Nathaniel E. Baker
oh I see so you have to go to those if you wanted to buy it wouldn’t be able
Jeremy Cordon
to buy right yeah you don’t you don’t go right to go back.com To buy direct we’re not we’re not a direct to consumer business.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Okay, understood. Understood. So these so your clients then are like he said wholesalers
Jeremy Cordon
Yeah, they’re all their distributors, okay metals distributors,
Nathaniel E. Baker
any like jewelry stores or anything like that any of these
Jeremy Cordon
like there’s a few I mean, we we put the online businesses As on our site, if you include kind of like the, you know, the coin shops and things, we have over 100 dealers in the United States selling gold packs right now. Okay, my only reason why it’s not more than that is again, we’re limited with our supply. I think another? Yeah, well, we have a bottleneck, you know, I mean, every gold back that’s made, has to go through a $10 million machine. You know, that’s a, it’s not, they’re not foil, you know, I’m not, I’m not rolling these things out in my garage, you know, this is a very, very high tech product.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Okay. So I would imagine it sold at a premium then to gold, because for a number of reasons, that being one,
Jeremy Cordon
sure, if it takes 40 people to make something and it’s going through an expensive vacuum deposition process, we are adding value to it used to be that that something like this, you know, the the earlier products that valorem made, carried anywhere from like a 400 to an 800% premium. That was more normal for something like this, with the investment that we’ve been able to get in, we were able to push premiums down closer to 100%. And the one denomination is sold at a loss. So it’s a bit of a it’s a bit of a loss leader, right? So we’re actually really proud of that. I think people look at our premiums, and they say, Hey, you know, these guys are doubling their money on gold. But you know, really, almost all of that is eaten up in the manufacturing process. Sounds we are adding value to the gold, right? I mean, you wouldn’t go, you wouldn’t go to a car dealership and try to you know, negotiate a vehicle and melt. Right? Or you’re not, you’re not going to try to get a you know, a number two pencil at the value of the spot price of wood. You know, I mean, if you as soon as you add value to the material, the price goes up.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Yeah. Understood. All right. So then what about your own investing style and your own investments? Is a lot of it in precious metals? Or how do you go about distributing your own stuff.
Jeremy Cordon
So I’ll tell you something that your customers probably haven’t heard or your customers but your your people, listeners, there’s your listeners, one financial products that I use myself that you haven’t heard about is gold back lease, so you can actually buy a giant pile of gold backs. And because we need them for cycling inventory. If you go to Alpine gold, you can buy a pile of gold backs and then lease them to gold back Inc, to be used as inventory. And the returns on gold are as high as three and a half percent. So you can own gold and get a return on gold and put your gold to work for you.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Okay, what if the gold price goes down?
Jeremy Cordon
Then you’re carrying that risk? What if the gold price goes up? Now what you have is a pile of gold. But usually if you buy gold, you’re paying vaulting fees. And it’s not making more gold, it’s just kind of sitting there as a hedge. So what folks are doing is they’ll take some of their gold coins or silver coins, they’ll liquidate it. And they’ll do these gold back leases where again, prices of gold back seven nearly doubled in three years, go by this pile of gold backs. And then it’s a growing pile of gold backs because we’re using those and our cycling inventory process.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Right. Okay, cool. That’s very interesting. Alright, so you can do that. And it sounds like you do that a little bit?
Jeremy Cordon
Yeah, I’ve got some my own money in there. Because, you know, why not? You know, it’s a way to put my goal to work. Sure. You know, I also, um, you know, I’ve got, I’ve got a box of gold backs, I’ve got, you know, some silver eagles, I’m actually getting out of my gold coins, because I don’t I don’t know what I’m gonna use them for the only thing they’re good for, in my mind is turning them back into cash at some point. And that’s, you know, I’d rather have a form of gold, but I could spend, so I’m getting out of my gold coins. You know, that’s just mean, you know, that’s not, you know, maybe what everybody wants to do.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Yeah, you’re saying that these the, the physical goals, people want to get rid of it, they can, they can use it in the manufacture, they can lend lease it to gold, we convert into
Jeremy Cordon
gold backs. At that point, you don’t go back and then you’d put it into a lease and you’d start getting a return on your gold.
Nathaniel E. Baker
So it’s a growing pile of gold. Interesting. Interesting. So if somebody has gold coins, or they have gold bars or anything like that sitting around,
Jeremy Cordon
we could totally do conversions. And that those those aren’t done by gold back directly. They’re done throughout buying gold.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Okay. Okay. What about other investments they make?
Jeremy Cordon
Or other investments, private, small private business equity. It’s kind of a high risk, high return space, you know, I mean, you can totally get burned investing in a small company. I’ve had a lot of those investments become really worthless. But you know, I’m a young guy, you know, so I can I can take these kinds of risks, I guess. A few of my other businesses have done really well. Alpine gold’s done really well. quintic didn’t do that. Well. Gold Blackstone really well, you know, so most of my wealth is in private equity, I suppose. And equity funds, there’s a difference. And private Yeah, it’s an equity and private, small private businesses understood.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Very cool. And so you’re seeing now that uptake here, you’re seeing an increased demand for these gold backs. And you think that this is something that’s going to take off, and
Jeremy Cordon
it has, again, you know, we’ve been able to sell every gold back that we can produce, there’s a huge amount of interest and excitement in the space for these gold backs. And, you know, we set up gold back as a corporation. And we’ve, we’ve done a couple of capital raises with gold back. But really, it’s as a wholesaler, we don’t have a whole lot of operating costs. You know, I mean, we have to do like the artwork on these things and manage the distribution network, but it’s been, it’s been a good business to, um, it’s not as lucrative as people might think it is. Now, I’m not making 100% of things. It’s, it’s actually a lot more comparable to being a different, you know, precious metals wholesaler, but it’s been decent.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Do you have anybody that comes, you mentioned that you have a younger demographics? getting interested in this? Have you seen any people from like, crypto kind of bailing out of crypto land and going to you because I think they would might be potentially, at
Jeremy Cordon
different times? Yes. You know, we had we had one investor in gold back, they invested about a million dollars. And they sold their Bitcoin when it was about $50,000. A Bitcoin. I was smart, I was on the downward slope, you know, and, you know, by the time we were able to liquidate it, it gone down even from there. So, you know, we’ve seen things like that, I think retailers see that a lot more like defy the grid and money metals, they’ll see people spending their cryptocurrency and buying pullbacks with them. Yeah. I don’t see that as often because, again, the people that we’re interacting with our distributors, right, so I don’t, I don’t see the end users dumping crypto and buying gold backs. But I know that there, there’s a lot of overlap in the same space of people looking for alternatives. And that’s part of why I don’t want to knock crypto, you know, I’ve I own crypto too. But they’re definitely attracting to people. They’re, they’re both attractive to people that are looking for alternatives.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Yeah, yeah. I guess the difference is that the gold backs are actually usable and Kryptos. Well, I guess the jury’s still out. It’s it’s usable, but it’s different. Yeah.
Jeremy Cordon
So if I wanted to spend a gold back across the country, you know, if I wanted to send you a gold back, it would be harder than sending you Bitcoin, right?
Nathaniel E. Baker
Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, no question. So you know,
Jeremy Cordon
I mean, a gold back, it’s, you know, if you’re in person, that’s a lot easier. You know, it’s instant. So you know, and it could be that we have a gold backed cryptocurrency one day that’s backed by gold backs. But, you know, then we gotta go over the the trust bridge again of well, how do you know, it’s really there? You know, like, I guess you have to trust words of this. Or if you don’t trust, then you can take physical delivery. And you’ll just have to deal with trusting people. So you have the convenience of kind of these, you know, long distance transactions.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Understood. Yeah. But maybe, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Okay, very cool. Wow. That’s all very fascinating. Jeremy Corbyn, thank you so much for joining the contrarian investor podcast today. Maybe in closing, if you could tell us our listeners how to find out more about you. And about your I don’t know if you are on the social media, the website gold back down calm. I’ll put all that information in the show notes as well. Yeah, no, it’s
Jeremy Cordon
yeah, it’s just go back.com. We’ve got you know, just put everything you want to find there. We’ve also got some social media, you know, we’ve got a we’ve got a Facebook page, and there’s a group on Reddit. Oh, yes. You know, there’s Instagram, YouTube. You know, we’ve got a few different places where you can knock over on Twitter or not, you know, I think I think we reserved the handle. You know, we’re thinking about trying out Twitter now that none of it’s a free speech platform.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Yeah. So well, free speech doesn’t upset Elon Musk. But yes, right.
Jeremy Cordon
Yeah. It’s the Elon Musk platform.
Nathaniel E. Baker
Yeah, so Oh, there you got right. Very cool. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jeremy. Really appreciate you coming on. Thank you all for listening. And we look forward to speaking to you again next time.