Gold, Hard Assets & the Financial Rise of Texas

0:04Hey, good morning.

0:05Trevor Hall: Happy Friday, everybody. Welcome in to this long-form episode here on Mining Stock Daily. Today, I'm joined by Tarek Saab of Texas Precious Metals and Yall Street. And we get into the unconventional professional background of Tarek, how those experiences shaped his approach to building Texas Precious Metals, and what really differentiates the business in a competitive precious metals market today. We also look into the bigger picture of Texas and why this state could quickly become or emerge as a new center, not only of precious metals capital formation, but of global finance and business. Before we get to Tarek, I'd like to quickly thank Beastless Silver, Antegra Resources, Revival Gold and Equinox Gold for their continued support of mining stock daily.

0:55Trevor Hall: It's their support that helps us continue to bring you these conversations every trading day. And I also want to quickly mention Terra Hutton. They help mining and exploration companies communicate complex projects more clearly through interactive 3D presentations, videos, and investor-ready visuals. A project can have strong geology, an experienced team, and significant potential, but much of its value is hidden underground, and it's difficult for investors to understand. Terra Hutton brings geography, geology, drilling, and infrastructure together in one clear visual experience, making the invisible investable.

1:37Trevor Hall: So if you're involved in a mining company and want to make your project easier for investors to understand, take a look at Terra Hutton and what they offer. You can go visit them at terahutton.io. All right, let's jump into my conversation with Tarek Sub. All right, everybody, welcome into this week's long-form episode. If you are following the physical markets of precious metals, some of you may have realized there's a little bit of a new player in town with Texas precious metals. So I'm happy to welcome in CEO of Texas Precious Metals and from Yall Street, Mr. Tarek Saab. Tarek, it's really good to have you on.

2:17Trevor Hall: You know, it's what a time to be in the precious metals market, wheeling and dealing the physical. How have you been? I've been great. Nice to be with you here, Trevor. Thank you for having me. Yeah, you've kind of been, it seems like, on a whirlwind tour here, finding yourself with some new faces, new commentaries, but in a market that's been around for obviously decades and generations here. You know, you don't have the usual resume. Most people in the physical trade typically hold. And when you are running one of the largest precious metals businesses in the country, you were an electrical engineer prior to this, huh?

2:59Yeah. Yeah. Very unique story. I'm Lebanese, hence my name being a little unique. And we grew up pretty poor in New Bedford, Massachusetts. And when you're Lebanese, you either become an engineer or a doctor. And I went the engineering route and started my career with Texas Instruments. That was my first foray into Texas and was very fortunate to have that role, spent the first five years of my career there. And I think in many ways really set me up well to run an organization of this size because TI does a great job educating and developing their young executives. And I had the good fortune of traveling all over the world and interacting with a lot of different cultures.

3:45And that served me well as we built up the company over the years. Yeah.

3:49Trevor Hall: Were your parents immigrants from Lebanon or was it prior generation? My dad came over in the 1970s after the war and my mom is second generation Portuguese. So we grew up sort of like in an immigrant community. Yeah, yeah. Do you feel that being a child of immigrants lends to a little bit more of that, you know, work hard, do whatever it takes to succeed, maybe you take on a little bit more risks just because you do understand what the feeling of being poor really is like in your surroundings? Do you think that lends a hand to entrepreneurship? I definitely think so. And I think the experiences that you have in your childhood live with you and stick with you the rest of your life.

4:48And, you know, my earliest experiences were connected to this challenge of survival. I just remember constantly not having enough money and you having to wait for the next paycheck to come in to go to the grocery store or, you know, my dad getting laid off or my mom getting laid off. or the car breaks down and we have to walk to school. And you're constantly living on the edge of, are we going to make it or not? And what that does to you is it, you know, it creates these survival instincts and this sense of urgency and this desire to succeed and the need for security and a drive that, I mean, you can really go one of two directions.

5:34Either you have the drive and you find your way out of there or, you know, you get sucked into the vortex of living in these lower income communities. You fall into drugs and, you know, a lot of other bad things. A lot of the people that I grew up in my neighborhood never, never got out of the neighborhood. And, you know, so I think for me, it was very helpful. I think everybody's situation is a little bit different. I happen to have really solid parents, educated parents who found themselves in an unfortunate situation. And so drove education, made incredible sacrifices so that their children could get a high quality education.

6:16And that played a huge role for me. Yeah, there's no doubt about it. It's a great question. It's the first time I think in all of these podcasts I've ever been asked that question. But it really is true. you know, the closer that you are to not making it, it really does incite, you know, a will to survive. Yeah.

6:39Trevor Hall: Well, and the reason I asked that because, you know, listening to some of your prior interviews and you and I had a quick conversation a couple of weeks ago leading up to this official interview. Um, I found your, your background very much relatable because I too, although I'd never felt like we were poor, I now looking back, knowing that there was a moment or a span of time in my youth where my parents were definitely struggling. And I can remember like, now that I'm like can you know kind of reflect i now know like i knew the time was hard when they served served my brother and i popcorn for dinner you know it was popcorn and some carrot and celery sticks and i didn't really think about that at the time you know but looking back it's like man And I know like there was like this transition, you know, my parents lost the farm in 89.

7:43Trevor Hall: I grew up in Nebraska, small town Nebraska. My parents lost the farm in 89. And so there was this transition where my parents had to kind of remake themselves, right? And that it wasn't just automatic. Like it probably took a lot longer to do that than I give itself credit for. And then even after they reestablished to really create some sort of like safety net. But like you, my parents were also very much education focused and probably shared many of the similar values that your parents did at the time, despite being in very different environments. And so I found your story just incredibly relatable.

8:23Trevor Hall: And even when I was a young adult, you know, not too long ago, like I remember I didn't have a job and I actually shelved books at a Barnes and Noble just to like try to make things work. You know, I just needed some income. But it does. It's like you think about the time of not having money and the environment of feeling poor, although it's after the fact. Like it does drive you to like succeed and be able to take risks, right? It does. And I think I would expound on that a little bit as you fast forward now, you know, I'm about to be 48 years old and the relationships that I have now with my employees, we have 85 employees at Texas Precious Metals.

9:17And the lens that I see those employees through and what they're going through or life events or they're about to have a baby or they're trying to buy a house, it creates, I think, a unique level of empathy for those that are just starting out. And so we do a lot at the company to help nurture and support people who are trying to make that next step. And I think a lot of that is born out of my awareness of how difficult that really is, especially today. And I think it's getting increasingly difficult as time goes on, the separation between the rich and poor, like the middle class is gone. And so it is a real struggle.

10:00And especially for Gen Z now, like trying to buy a house or, you know, trying to, you know, cultivate some savings in an environment where everything is so expensive is just a really big challenge. And so we just look at it, you know, from a company-wide standpoint that, you know, we're all in it together and we all try to help each other.

10:21Trevor Hall: Yeah. So not only you being an electrical engineer, you did a lot of work and you've expanded on your experience with Texas Instruments back in the day. I'm going to, I don't want to kind of go deep into that conversation. You did a great interview with our friend, mutual friend, Tony Greer. I'd let people go listen to that episode. you're also on the apprentice if one thing you know had to have been just kind of a whirlwind event but like you know through all this if you look back which experience maybe actually taught you the most about how to build and run a business was it you know the professional career maybe the showtime experience with the apprentice or was it more or less the values in the environment you grew up in as a child?

11:11When you grow up as a child in the environment that I did, one of the things that is the hardest to overcome is this sense of inferiority or the lack of confidence that you are good enough or capable enough to compete with the best of the best. And, you know, that I think to some degree that always lives with you. There's a little bit of a chip on your shoulder because, you know, you feel like, well, at least in my case, you feel like you're part of the lower class, you know, and Texas Instruments was an environment where I felt like I was getting the professional schooling and I was treated as an equal amongst my peers.

11:57And I was privileged to be placed in opportunities that people my age, you know, would have never had the opportunity to do most people. Like I was 25 years old giving presentations to Samsung in South Korea, you know, and that was a monumental leap for me from where I had come from. Now, what the Apprentice did for me is I had been going down this engineering track for so long, but on the Apprentice, every single week, we're doing a different task with a different Fortune 500 company. It could be Gillette Razors. It could be Chevy. It could be 7-Eleven, Norwegian Cruise Lines. And we were doing all kinds of different events from event planning to designing the cover of a cereal box to making a commercial with Norwegian Cruise Lines.

12:49And I think when I came off of The Apprentice, what I realized was I'm not stuck in this box. I'm not stuck in this narrow channel of for the rest of my career, I have to be an electrical engineer. There's a lot of different things that I can be talented at and do well if I spend the time and I apply myself. And for me, that was just like another leg of confidence that was important, I think, in the latter stages of my career that I could go out and start a company. I could create a website. I could design a logo. I could do all these different things.

13:30Trevor Hall: Yeah. So the marketing aspect, was that something you inherited and had to kind of figure out on your own? Do you find that at all? Like, do you actually enjoy the marketing side maybe more than the engineering side of business anymore? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I became an engineer because I knew that when I graduated from college, the likelihood of me getting a well-paying job to move me into the middle class was going to be higher than if I got a philosophy degree. That's, it's not because I had a huge love for electrical engineering. It's just that, you know, again, it was a survival instinct.

14:06I have always loved the arts. I, uh, I also have a degree in liberal arts, so English literature, and, uh, I do a lot of reading. I've done a lot of art, you know, throughout my life. And I love that aspect of creating and building a voice and, yeah, building a brand. One of the things that I think Texas Instruments really helped me with is, you know, I was an electrical engineer, but then I started in sales in Silicon Valley, and then I moved into product marketing. Now, product marketing is very different. It's, you know, developing the product in conjunction with your customers. and one of the greatest skill sets that you have to develop to be effective at product marketing is to listen really really well and so as i was traveling around the world i'm sitting down and listening to all these customers what are they trying to do what are the challenges that they're facing what are the obstacles you know what what do we need to overcome in order to make their experience better either supply chain wise or product development wise and that skill set when you exercise those muscles, to me, that is the foundation for what marketing is.

15:18It's being able to listen, to understand, to connect, and to problem solve. And if you can do that, and you can tell that story well, and you can assist your customers that way. I mean, ultimately, that is whenever you create a company, and you're trying to develop a value proposition, that value proposition should begin and end with solving a particular problem for your customers. and that can occur either at the local level. What is the problem? I got to drive 10 miles to get coffee. Well, I'll put up a coffee shop between here and there and I solved a problem. Now you only have to drive five miles to get your cup of coffee, you know, or whatever the problem is that you're looking to solve or the experience that you're trying to offer, it really starts there and everything builds around that.

16:05Yeah.

16:06Trevor Hall: So can you give me the timeline here? What years were you with Texas Instruments? 2001 to 2005. Okay. And then when was The Apprentice? I filmed in November of 2005 and it aired in 2006. And I mentioned this on Tony's pod, but it's really hard. This is 20 years ago, but it's hard to kind of reset our minds to what the world was like when I was actually on The Apprentice. There were no iPhones. There was no YouTube. There was no social media. It was a completely different world that actually revolved around television. And so our show was, I think, I think it was like 10 to 15 million people were watching the show every single week.

16:51It was a massive show. And, you know, we were on the cover of magazines and we were, you know, doing all of the late night talk shows. And it was, it was like becoming a celebrity overnight in a way that was very unique to the time. Today, you can be an influencer and you can kind of work your way into celebrity. At that time, that wasn't the case. You had to get a break of some kind. You either had to be an athlete or an actor or a musician to kind of break into celebrity. So what reality TV did is it kind of plucked random people like me and who had like no desire to be on television. And then all of a sudden, here we go, you know, you're now on the number one show on television.

17:37It was, it was really kind of a, um, a psychological study and, and how people react to that type of celebrity overnight, you know?

17:48Trevor Hall: Yeah. Well, I find it fascinating the timing of all of this. So we've kind of set up, you know, your youth and the environment you lived in growing up, and then obviously creating, getting a really great education, finding a really great job with Texas Instruments, and then hitting almost celebrity status on cable television. But then it kind of almost feels like it comes full circle a bit in your story, because then we see the great financial crisis. And you You talk about, and you have talked about actually moving your family to South America after the crisis and really kind of reaching a point where you felt like you had lost almost everything.

18:35Trevor Hall: I mean, and so, and you know, you're still young at the time, right? And so it just kind of shows you're, you're like living, you had lived through your own like personal professional cycle in a way. So I'm just kind of wondering what that period of change, maybe if you look back at it, taught you about risk, leverage, and preserving capital, knowing that you had gone through a full personal cycle. You know, just for context, I was with TI for five years. when you're a new graduate, you know, you're buying a car and you're buying furniture and you're, you know, trying to get yourself set up. I still had student loans at the time.

19:21So my career with TI was not one that was wildly lucrative. It's not as though, you know, I had built up a million dollar fortune in those first five years coming out of school. Um, you know, quite the contrary. And so I was still only, I had, I was 26, I was 26 or 27. Um, when I filmed The Apprentice. So I was still so young. So coming off of The Apprentice, I had this fork in the road. I could go back to TI, which for me seemed like a missed opportunity because I had all of this celebrity. I had this like window of time, this 15 minutes that I could capitalize if I ever wanted to start my own company.

20:00And I decided to do that with very limited capital. And I didn't know how to start a company. And I'm very much a don't read the instructions kind of guy, just do it and learn by doing. And, uh, and I certainly learned by doing. And so I, I launched this clothing line cause it was like the easiest thing that I could spin out in the short window of time that I had. And, uh, I traveled around the country speaking. I wrote a book and things were going really well for two years. And then the great financial crisis hit. And that was just like a sucker punch, not only for me, but for, you know, the entire country.

20:38And here I was now two years after The Apprentice. And it's like, what am I going to do? Well, I had started down this path of trying to understand what money was and how to manage money because I never grew up with money. And I was a double E, so I never took financial classes. And I was like, well, what's the bond market? What's the stock market? You know, he sounds so rudimentary and it makes me sound really ignorant, but I really knew very little about finance. And I started with one question, which was, why does the paper dollar have value? And how is it created? What is it backed by? And that question led me down this whole path to the history of money and that the money par excellence was gold.

21:27And so I started buying a little bit of gold, a little bit of silver. And during the great financial crisis, just kind of fast forwarding through the story, I started brokering this gold and silver and ended up partnering with a German guy who was moving his family down to Paraguay to do some investments and saw it as a unique opportunity. I was newly married. We had one baby. I loved to travel. And I said, you know, the country is going through this tremendous difficulty right now. Let's leave. Let's move to South America and see what opportunities are there. And while there, you know, the, the precious metals market, the subsequent year really collapsed.

22:04I found myself, you know, I'm, I'm on a cardboard box with a computer. I have$14 in my bank account in Paraguay. I don't speak Spanish. I'm on a cobblestone road and my wife walks into the room and she's like, I'm pregnant. And I always think about that moment because, you know, it's like how you respond to those situations. And as a man, just as you know I'm thinking I'm the head of the household I'm like how did I get myself into this situation I felt like everything that I was doing it was it was just like I felt like uh the world was against me like every company I started like everything after having this massive run of success with TI and Apprentice and all these highs it's like I was I was like it was like Odysseus you know to talk about something relevant here it's like every single next step was a problem.

22:56And what I realized in that journey was, I think about it positively now because it forced me to develop skills that I actually didn't have. So what do you do when you're in Paraguay and you don't speak the language and the average annual income is$2 ,000 a year. Do you got to support a family? I started programming. I learned how to program websites in a time when it wasn't easy to just spin up a website. I was doing some copywriting for some investment bankers. I was doing all of these different jobs that ended up being like the toolkit that I used to then start Texas Precious Metals. And through that time, through that struggle, what was beautiful about it, I think just from a relationship standpoint, is struggle brings you close together.

23:43I mean, sometimes for some people it can set them apart, for me and my wife had kind of brought us close together and, um, she believed in me, you know? And I, I just, my, my personality is one of perseverance. It's like, I'm just going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing. And that kind of circles back to the beginning of this conversation. Like it just put me back in a survival mode. It put me back into what I had experienced when I was a kid. And, um, and in hindsight, you don't, you don't feel it or you don't see it at the time. Anybody that's listening to this podcast and like going through a struggle, you don't always, you don't always get to get the perspective, you know, the 30 ,000 foot perspective that, that you will get when you look back in hindsight about how sometimes these struggles can be beneficial.

24:30And, uh, for me, I saw it as, as really beneficial. And that was the beginning of like the turnaround, you know, um, I got an office in Argentina and I hired a bunch expats and started building up, you know, the infrastructure for Texas precious metals. I partnered with a, uh, family office, uh, a large fifth generation family company in South Texas. And, um, and that was the Genesis of Texas precious metals.

24:58Trevor Hall: That is an amazing story. And I, I, you and I, I could, I'm not going to go into some of the similarities I'm kind of reflecting on my own life and happening about the same time as you roughly the same age. Maybe we'll save that for a real meal or beer sometime, Tarek. But I do want to kind of think, go back and talk about the role precious metals kind of played and really your philosophy on what is money, but also turning it into a business that you can really thrive with, which is now Texas Precious Metals. What was that aha moment to where you maybe discovered, if we just stick with gold, discovering gold, what it represents, the meaning behind it, holding something physical in your hand, and then saying, this is a solution to people's problems, and I can build a business around this.

26:03Trevor Hall: What was that moment?

26:07I think it was twofold. I think there were, there were two seminal moments for me. Um, the first was as we described like this, this education in gold. And I think what really stuck with me as I was going down this path of kind of understanding monetary history was when the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 to, to the time in which I was getting into gold dollar had depreciated 97%. And what I realized is that the mandate from the Fed was some minimal amount of inflation every year, call it 3%. And so we live in an environment where we know for a fact that the mandate is a depreciating dollar.

26:54And when we look at gold and people say, well, do you think gold is going up or gold is going down? I always say, just you got to look at the denominator. What are we measuring gold in? If we're measuring gold in dollars and we know that dollars are going to go down in value because that's the mandate from the Fed, then it stands to reason that gold is going to appreciate over time. It acts as kind of a counterbalance or a counterweight. And that was important for me just as a sort of a true north in terms of what industry I wanted to be in. the second thing for me is when i was living in the united states and i was buying precious metals what i realized is that the entire infrastructure was antiquated that we had by 2008 moved into kind of an amazon world or an e-commerce world where you'd go and you buy things online the precious metals industry had not really caught up to that for a variety of reasons number one it was kind of like an old codger industry a bunch of coin collectors from like the 80s and 90s So there wasn't a lot of talent and energy moving into the space.

27:59But there were logistical challenges with insurance and shipping product across the United States. At the time, it was U.S. Postal Service registered mail, which was slow. It would take 10 days in transit. You couldn't track it. The insurance was through U.S. Postal Service, which good luck getting insurance from the U.S. Postal Service. and in most cases, a lot of these dealers didn't even have the metal that they were selling. So you could place an order. I mailed in a check one time. I waited six months to get the metal. What does that feel like from a customer standpoint? Think about the anxiety if you're sending in a big check and you don't know if you're gonna get the metal.

28:36So it goes back to what I was saying earlier in the call. What problem are we solving? And the problem that I wanted to solve was not to try to convince more people to buy gold. my problem that I wanted to solve was the people that want to buy gold I want to eliminate their anxiety and how could we eliminate their anxiety and the way that we could eliminate their anxiety is through speed and through trust and so we started this policy like if we don't have a product in stock we don't sell it period full stop we're not going to forward sell product that we have on site we're going to guarantee shipment no later than three business days and in most cases it was one business day we give three business days for those like volatile periods um and then i partnered with ups i worked with their the medical shipping department of ups to retrofit their proactive response into a system that would work in the precious metal space so i could next day air overnight a package of monster box of silver, which weighs about 40, 50 pounds to main, and I could do it efficiently, cost effectively, and ship for free.

29:47So what I was trying to do is to take the modern understanding of what e-commerce was and apply it to the precious metals market by eliminating a lot of the barriers that were making it difficult to achieve that level of service. Since that time, there've been a lot of competitors who've come in and kind of copied what we did, but we were real pioneers. And that's why from the time that we launched the company, like we were on this vertical growth path. Now we got lucky in a few areas too. Don't get me wrong. Like Shiner, Texas, we found ourselves in 2013 in the middle of the Eagleford Shale. So this massive boom with all this mailbox money coming from people that had oil, you know, on their land, that was, that was a great tailwind for the business to help us build the infrastructure and keep growing and growing and growing.

30:37But that's to answer your question. Like, I think those were the two things. One, what industry did I want to be in? And could I provide value in that industry in a way that would service the customers in a better way than they had been serviced previously?

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32:27developments and market trends, we bring you the insights that matter most to energy investors and industry watchers. You can find Going Nuclear on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at clearcommodity.net. Clear Commodity Network, digital news on the physical markets.

32:45Trevor Hall: So the gold, the physical gold industry and the retail, if that's a word to use, is that safe to say like the retail physical market? Yeah, that's how we refer to it as the retail precious metals market. Okay, great. I just didn't want to overstep or offend by any means. But gold is probably one of the hardest products in the world to differentiate, right? You can't make one ounce of gold better than somebody else's. And there's a number of competitors out there within your landscape. So when you built Texas Precious Metals, where did you decide the competitive advantage actually had to come from?

33:20Trevor Hall: Is it really the customer service, the delivery and the technology aspect of it? Is that really what it came down to? Yeah. So metals are a commodity and all of our competitors sell the exact same products. And so we looked at what we were offering and we're saying, what exactly is it that we're selling that is different than our competitors? And what I landed on is we're selling trust. That's actually what we're selling. That's the commodity that we are transacting in. And so everything that we do from the presence that we have online to how we interact with people on the phone to how we interact with them in person, it's about engendering trust.

34:04so I have always said that the name of our company is Texas Precious Metals we don't sell the precious metals we sell the Texas and what does that mean it means doing business the Texas way you know honesty integrity treating people the right way how we would want to be treated and at times that has come at a great disadvantage to us so you know I've relayed the story in the past but in 2013 you know we were just taking off and the market was exploding like the amount of metal that was getting sold was just incredible. And we couldn't get metal. And so there was a week where our entire website was just completely out of stock on metal, whereas all of our competitors were continuing to sell all of those products, making money on all those products that they didn't have in stock.

34:50Well, that hurt us in that moment. But what it did for us over the long term was whenever we did have the product in stock, people would rush to us and buy it because they knew that they were going to get it fast. And that really created an ethos for our brand that has resonated to this day. Like we're not the largest in the United States. We're one of the largest, but we're not the largest, but we have a very loyal customer base because of how we treat our customers. And that's how we have always sought to differentiate ourselves is through customer experience.

35:27Trevor Hall: So with a company like yours, where full vertical integration of the entire supply chain, I guess, is really precedent in your business model, which part of that is the most difficult to accomplish? Is it the upstream, like actually getting the product, especially during volatile times when they are in high demand? And are there opportunities to alleviate some of that congestion just for your customers. Is that an area of opportunity? I think that the most difficult aspect of our business is home delivery. That is and has always been the most difficult part of the business. Anytime I'm trading with supply chain partners, the mints, the refineries, whomever, those trades are really easy to conduct.

36:23There's never any uncertainty about whether or not a product is going to get delivered. Typically, that's Brinks or that's Loomis and we're doing tractor trailer loads. It's a well-oiled machine. We, because we are one of the largest in the world at this point, we're members of LBMA, we run a COMEX facility. We are susceptible to shortages like other companies, but we are less susceptible than 97 % of the other companies. So because we're such a big shark in the ocean, we get fed first and then everything is downstream from us. So certainly that's an issue, but less of an issue for us uniquely.

37:02The issue with getting metal to people's homes is a challenge because we are beholden to the success of whoever our partners are. That could be UPS, that could be FedEx. There have been crime rings both inside of UPS and outside of UPS that we've had to deal with with lost packages. We struggle with whenever we have signature required, sometimes a package is delivered and they don't request the signature. We have people that are in the country and packages get dropped off at the gate. So there are a lot of challenges that we have to navigate. One of the other big ones is when I got into this industry, gold was trading at$750 an ounce.

37:45gold today is almost$5 ,000 an ounce. So when you talk about putting like a gold kilo bar inside of a package that we're shipping, you know, with UPS or FedEx, today that gold kilo bar is worth almost$150 ,000. Whereas years ago, that was a call it a$30 ,000 package. Well, ensuring$150 ,000 in a single package versus 30 ,000 is a completely different challenge than that we've experienced in the past. So, you know, that could be a problem in the future. That could limit the type of products that we can sell retail if we can't get the insurance on the package because if gold doubles from here, nobody's going to insure a$300 ,000 package.

38:29So, I would say that those are some of the bigger challenges that we face, not only now, but heading into the future. Some of that is mitigated with our depository. So, So we have 40 ,000 customers in the depository that choose to store at our facility rather than take home delivery. And, you know, there are pros and cons to that. And we can get into that if you're interested. But for those that do have metal in the facility, it's easy because we don't have to ship it. It stays on site. You have immediate liquidity and it reduces some of the friction on the transactional side. Yeah.

39:05Trevor Hall: I did want to ask you, I mean, with the private ownership of gold, we've seen in the history of the U.S. that that has been banned, you know, within the last hundred years, actually, pretty much spot on. And where we're at now with the economic cycle, I know this is a loaded question here, Tarek, but I do want to ask, like, are you at all concerned about something similar ever happening with the, you know, outlawing the private ownership of precious metals and maybe that headwind that would be, you know, towards your business at all? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's been done before. Or it could happen again in the future.

39:52And I think it's more difficult on the silver side than it is on gold. Silver is a completely different beast. People that come down to our facility and see how we handle silver, like 30 ,000 ounces of silver on a pallet weighs one ton. Moving that around or the government attempting to confiscate that, they're going to have to have some massive infrastructure to confiscate silver. Gold is a little bit different. Um, the comment that I would make is that the government can take whatever they want from anyone at any time. And I don't think that we should delude ourselves into thinking that that's not possible.

40:36They can take your land. People have their land confiscated by the government all the time. And you put in a railroad or, you know, a train or whatever, they'll just take it. Um, they can take your kids, you know, in certain places. that's more severe than others. You know, we lived through COVID where they were mandating, you know, vaccines, whether you wanted them or not, and in certain areas. And so, you know, and I'm not making a political assessment. I'm just saying like what the government can and can't do, I bias towards they can do whatever they want, whenever they want, to whomever they want.

41:14And I don't know that we're ever going to totally insulate ourselves from that reality. I think the way that I approach is we just do the best that we can, um, in the environment that we're in. And, you know, I, I am an advocate for having some metal on your person at your house. You know, I, I think, you know, it's good to have a bug out bag. We, we just lived through an experience where they ran out of chicken and toilet paper at Costco, you know? So if it, if it can happen, it's probably not bad to have a little bit of stock back at home. If, if you can, if you can handle it. But we'll see what the future holds.

41:52Trevor Hall: You know, Texas Precious Metals and Y 'all Street, which I do want to kind of get into and have a better understanding of that connection here. But TPM, Y 'all Street, physical gold and silver ETFs that you've started, that's Y-S-A-U and Y-S-A-G, those ETFs. Like the business itself is, I mean, it's kind of, it feels like it's very U.S. patriotism associated, right? Like keep it into the United States. And I think there's a lot of strong reason for that to make sense. However, with those questions I just laid out, could you make the argument like, well, maybe there needs to be a little bit of diversification because we're not necessarily immune to some of those policy changes that I'm not saying will happen, but potentially could happen because it's happened before.

42:50Trevor Hall: I mean, could it be perceived as maybe something that maybe – is there a need for diversification within the business model, I guess is what I'm asking. Yeah. Great question. Um, it's interesting in 2008, when I, when I moved to South America, the, the expat wave was a really big thing. People wanting to get out of the United States and diversify in different places, uh, both buying land and New Zealand and South America and Switzerland or, uh, getting assets overseas. And one of the, the biggest, uh, boomerangs that I saw was during COVID where everybody was trying to get their metal back to the United States.

43:36And why is that? Because we just talked about the fact that, you know, the dollar continues to depreciate and, you know, our fiscal spending is out of control. There is a precedent for the government, you know, confiscating gold and assets and things of that nature. Why would we feel comfortable bringing things back to the United States? And I think the argument is that as bad as the U.S. is, everywhere else is worse. When you look at what the global response was to COVID, the lockdowns were way more severe in places like New Zealand and Australia and in South America than they were in the United States.

44:15When you look at the global currencies, all of them are actually worse than the U.S. dollar. As bad as the dollar is, it's still, you know, as they say, the cleanest dirty shirt in the laundry. And, and I think as we look at this de-globalized world that we're beginning to live in, you and I grew up in the era of globalization, right? Monoculture, Coca-Cola, you know, McDonald's, like going all over the world. And now it's like everything is, is breaking apart into these jurisdictional zones. And we experienced that pretty dramatically during the tariff issue where we couldn't bring metal from Canada into the United States.

44:59And we were starting to see these walls being put up. And for those of us that are in the United States, thinking about supply chain and how vulnerable we have been and what steps the U.S. is taking now to improve the supply chain, I think we are trying to play a role in that in whatever positive way that we can. I understand the issues. I understand all the vulnerabilities. Again, we're doing the best that we can in this environment. What I will point out to people is that when you look at global ETFs, the global ETF market, 93 % of all of the metal is held outside of the United States. Majority of it is in the UK and a fair chunk of it is in Canada.

45:44Would you rather have your metal in the United States or would you rather have it in the UK or in Canada? Are either of those two countries in a better political situation than we are here in the United States? I would say no. I would answer that in a negative. So we had to create the plumbing in the United States in the metals market just to be able to offer these products, just to be able to have the necessary APs and the bullion banks to be able to support the liquidity domestically, to be able to create an environment where we can hold metal not only in New York, but predominantly in Texas, which is a jurisdiction that we're very bullish on.

46:24So that was the genesis behind Yall Street. And where unique is that while we do have a retail footprint, we're also very active in the global capital markets. I mentioned you were members of the LBMA, we're members of CME. We are actively servicing the largest banks in the world. and it puts us in a unique position to be able to offer products that nobody else can. And these ETFs are sort of the appetizer of some other products that we're really excited about coming out in 2027.

46:56Trevor Hall: Oh, that's exciting. Cliffhanger there. Little carrot, little carrot dangle there. Can you help me make sense? I do want to kind of make that connection between Y 'all Street and Texas Precious Metals because it's just not terribly clear in my head how it's all connected. So Yall Street, you have these physical ETFs and gold and silver. So you have the financial side too, at the asset side. You have obviously a media business within Yall Street as well. Now you have Texas Precious Metals. Is this really in all encompassing, like is Yall Street the umbrella of the entire ecosystem here? No, Texas Precious Metals is the umbrella of the entire ecosystem.

47:40Thanks for clarifying. We have Texas Mint. We have Texas Depository. We have our international depository business. Yall Street is our asset management firm that lives within TPM. Okay. And we separated out this asset management firm because it's just really different than our core business. The people that are involved with that group, the location, our office there is in Dallas. I mentioned Yall Street because for those that aren't familiar with that expression, It is this massive migration of the finance industry moving into Texas. Texas is now the eighth largest economy in the world. We have a monster oil and gas sector.

48:20We have a burgeoning tech sector with SpaceX and Tesla and everything coming into the Austin area. And then you have JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, all moving into the Dallas region, the launch of the Texas Stock Exchange, the growth of Texas capital. So this is an area of the country that we're extremely bullish on. And this division, Yall Street Asset Management, is there to capitalize not just on offering products in the precious metal space that are unique, but making them geo-targeted mostly towards Texas to the extent that we can. because as a business jurisdiction, as a legal jurisdiction, we find this particular area more favorable than other areas of the country.

49:08Trevor Hall: Yeah, okay. So I'm glad you mentioned this because our friend Brent Johnson wrote an in-depth piece on this. It's an awesome piece. I mean, it took some time and a cup of coffee here to read it, so kudos to Brent for writing it. But it was a provocative argument, right? If the financial center of gravity leaves New York, it doesn't necessarily leave the country. It doesn't go foreign. It may actually move to Texas, into Y 'all Street. I may personally just editorialize. I do not like Y 'all Street. It sounds gimmicky and kind of a marketing, just in general. Because if you Google Y 'all Street, everything comes up about this whole financial migration to Texas.

49:57Trevor Hall: And, you know, it's a branding. It's a branding thing on a bigger scale. But for somebody like you who's actually building the financial infrastructure in Texas, how much of Y 'all Street is it branding and how much of it is a structural shift? Like a real in-time happening. It's all happening in real time. Is it more branding? Is it more maybe the state said, oh, we can move this. We can move capital here and we can sell this thing. Or is it people who actually control and have say in the capital saying, listen, maybe it's better for our capital to relocate to a place like Texas rather than staying in the typical coast?

50:39It's a great question. I mentioned to you earlier that the name of our company is Texas Precious Metals. And we don't sell the precious metals. We sell the Texas. And when we first launched the company, when we communicated that to people, what we meant was how we do business. and now that is shifting into where we do business and we see ourselves along with the Texas Stock Exchange along with Texas Cap along with many of the firms that are promoting Texas as a financial center as being a core part of what we're building in the state so yes y 'all street is a little kitschy it's cute it's you know it could um feel outdated maybe 10 years from now Certainly all those things can and may be true.

51:29But really what we're saying is we have a commitment to producing financial products that have historically lived overseas and we're re-domiciling them to Texas. That's what we're doing. And we're starting with these ETFs. Actually, I'll take it one step earlier than that. It started with our depository. Our depository is the fastest growing depository in the world, or one of them. It's certainly the largest single insured facility by Lloyd's of London in the world. We're building our third building on campus. We have, just as an example, an amount of silver that's equal to one third of the entire commodities exchange.

52:09Brent talked about this. He didn't get into the details of the numbers, but he talked about this in the report, that in order to be a financial center, you also have to trade in the commodities. Well, Texas has always been very strong in oil and gas. It is becoming a major center for precious metals. And because it's becoming a major center for precious metals, it's allowing us to offer U.S.-based ETFs and other products that we have coming down the pike, right? We are building that internal piping along with the Texas Stock Exchange to do things that had never been done before outside of New York.

52:44Trevor Hall: What would maybe take a Texas financial system to really go over that hump to potentially dominate, be an epicenter of global finance? Maybe take over something like a San Francisco or Chicago or New York. What would it take to get there? Well, in some respects, it's already happening, right? I mean, you look at NASDAQ moved their Chicago-based office down to Texas. There's NASDAQ Texas. NYSE, New York Stock Exchange, just opened NYSE Texas for listings in Texas. San Francisco, when you look at the Silicon Valley, I mean, Silicon Valley is migrating down to Texas. You have a lot of major entrepreneurs are relocating to Texas, you know, where Texas is a state with no income tax.

53:43That's a huge difference than what you see in California. And so I think it's already happening. At the end of the day, it's all about money flows. Where is the money going? Where the money goes, that is where the center of gravity lives. And what we're seeing is that money is being relocated from places like New York and London and San Francisco, and it's finding its way into Texas. And the more money that finds its way into Texas, the bigger of a financial center it will become. And, you know, that's a multi-year, multi-decade process. And as Brent, I think, accurately points out, there are challenges in Texas from the power grid to, you know, a variety of other things.

54:27But one thing we do have is we have a lot of space. We have a lot of people. We have great universities. We have finally the infrastructure in place to be able to support this level of growth. And so we're as bullish as we are metals, we're very bullish Texas. And that, again, to kind of go back to your question is what Yall Street and what we're doing in the capital markets really represents.

54:52Trevor Hall: So I don't want to spend the last couple of minutes here going deep down into the politics, Tarek, but I think it's pretty obvious that the politics on the coast have driven capital out of the coast and towards Texas. There is incentives to do that. I think that's pretty obvious. But I think it's also pretty reasonable to maybe state or question that the typical politics of Texas are actually very dynamic and changing and have been for the last couple election cycles. And maybe it could be because of immigration. It could be because of more people from the coast coming into Texas. And they're not necessarily the diehard, full-fledged, red-wearing Republicans, but they are bringing some of those, I guess, more liberal progressive ideas to Texas as well.

55:41Trevor Hall: And I think it's reflecting in a couple of elections there in Texas. But does it seem balanced now or is it still very much leading maybe very conservative pro-business? Could there be an opportunity to maybe nudge that political spectrum a little bit left but yet still be very pro-business, pro-yall street? Is that at all a concern of what you're seeing on the policy side? Yeah, I would split politics down the middle and separate sort of the social aspect of politics from the fiscal aspect of politics. And I, my sense -

56:38a bit more liberal. I mean, we, we look at places like Austin and, you know, in Texas, we say it's, it's a blueberry in a bowl of tomato soup, right? It's so different than, you know, the, the, the country, um, San Antonio is, leans very left. Dallas for the most part leans pretty left, especially on social issues as does Houston. The difference is that the people that are coming into the state, I think one of the primary drivers are the financial benefits of coming to the state. So you take something as simple as there being no income tax. I don't think that the trend is going to be pushing towards there becoming an income tax in Texas.

57:24I don't think that's where the political leanings will go. If you begin seeing more Democrats get elected and Texas, I think it's going to be more on the social side and less on the fiscal side. I think it's going to be very difficult for, let's say, Democrats to move the needle on what is ostensibly very pro-business, at least not in the near future. Texans are very proud of their business, and the wealthiest people in Texas and the wealthiest companies in Texas want to preserve that pro-business environment, and they put their money behind it. So So I remain bullish on certainly on the business freedoms that we have in the state.

58:08Trevor Hall: Do you have an understanding if you just kept it within the state of Texas, what kind of demand or clientele are you seeing with Texas Precious Metals that are staying? The metal stays in Texas. What part of your business stays home? Yeah, the majority of our client base is actually Texan by far. Now, we started predominantly as a regional business. before we went national. So we're going to have a bias or a footprint that leans towards Texas more than any other state. But just objectively speaking, there's more metal that's bought and sold in Texas than any other state in the United States. It is culturally an asset class that people really understand and embrace.

58:54Because when you think about how people have historically made money in Texas. It's land, it's cattle, it's oil, it's tangible things. It's hard assets. It's things that people can hold. Ammo is a currency in Texas. So people understand and appreciate it in ways that in the city, the idea or the thought of holding gold is maybe a little bit um less native to to how people are uh are accustomed so yeah yeah we have we have a strong texas footprint for sure that's correct it is just so damn hot down there it's a lot

59:37Trevor Hall: i my little brother actually lived in central texas until just recently and we'd go down and visit him and you know my nieces and nephews you know late july it's 107 degrees outside i'm like This is absolutely worse. This is awful. This is awful. It's hot. Very, very hot.

59:59Trevor Hall: Hey, before we let you go, Tarek, let us know, how can people kind of follow you? Obviously, Texas Precious Metals, but, you know, the content, the interviews you're doing, you know, what is the best way to kind of keep in touch and follow all the updates? Sure. TexMetals.com. T-E-X-M-E-T-A-L-S.com. That's our main website. and sort of a launching pad to all of our other brands. Yallstreet.com is where, and we didn't talk much about our media profile, but I've been getting a lot more active and doing interviews, but being interviewed and interviewing others. And so that's our dashboard. We just recently interviewed Michael Gentile, if you're interested in the metals and mining space, which is a fantastic interview.

1:00:43So you can check that out. And if you're interested in our ETFs, it's yallstreetetfs.com.

1:00:49Trevor Hall: Very good. And you and I actually will be hanging out this winter in Nashville for Tony Greer's conference. That's right. Which will be a very fun, good time. Can't wait for that. Tarek, thanks so much for your time. And thanks for sharing your story, really. I'm very grateful that you kind of opened up a little bit. Thank you for having me, Trevor. I've enjoyed it. Yep. All right, everybody. That's a wrap here this week on Mining Stock Daily. We'll be back Monday morning with the morning briefing. with the morning briefing. Have a wonderful weekend, everybody. We'll talk to you soon.

1:01:24Trevor Hall: The information presented should not be considered investment advice. Mining Stock Daily and its affiliates are not responsible for any loss arising from any investment decision in connection with the material presented herein. Please do your own research or speak with a licensed financial representative before making any investment decisions. Thank you.