No Living Investor Has Seen A Time Like This Before | Lawrence Lepard

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Lawrence Lepard (0:59)

Look, Bernanke printed 3 trillion, Powell traded 5 or 6, and that's why the name of the book, The Big Print. I mean, the next one is going to be 7, 8, 10, 12 I mean, they'll have to do it. So, and that's just math. I mean, that's not really a political argument. It's more kind of a mathematically driven argument.

And I don't think the world has really woken up to this. A point I would make is that, you know, we, no investor in our lifetimes has seen this set of conditions. I mean, the last time we had a sovereign debt crisis was World War I.

Adam Taggart (1:39)

Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Very excited to be sitting down today to talk about money with the author of The Big Print himself, Larry Lepard. Larry, thanks so much for joining us.

Lawrence Lepard (1:52)

Good to be with you, Adam. I always enjoy our conversations.

Adam Taggart (1:55)

Me too.

Lawrence, I really very much appreciate you sitting down with us in general, but specifically because as we can see here, you're on the road. You've been man in high demand at a number of sound money and precious metals related conferences. How's that all going?

Lawrence Lepard (2:11)

That's going great. I mean, yeah, I'm between 2 p.m. conferences.

Once a year, every year, there's a Beaver Creek Precious Metals Conference and then a Denver Gold Conference. It's actually held in Colorado Springs. And this brings together probably the top 100 gold mining companies in the world. And so you get to meet management one-on-one. So it's something that happens every year and it's very important. I'm still managing a gold stock fund. So it's a really important set of events for me. I'm in between the two. You do the first week in Beaver Creek, you do the second week at Colorado Springs. So I'm sitting in my hotel room pre the second week.

Adam Taggart (2:47)

Okay. Well, again, I appreciate you making the time, giving that busy schedule. And I'm just curious because I talked to a lot of folks like you, Lawrence, who have been to these conferences year after year. I have not yet made the short list to be invited to these. And I've always been curious just what the dynamic is like. I just saw some photos on X last night. I think it was Ronnie Stifurli posting them and it was a dinner. I believe you were at it. Graham Williams was at it and Ronnie and a bunch of others.

What's it like there? Is it a more intimate scenario? Well, I don't know.

Lawrence Lepard (3:20)

You probably got three, four hundred companies and you probably got 2,000 investors. I think you could probably make the list pretty easily. They generally, they're actually paid for, the conferences are paid for by the companies. And what you need to do on the investor side is kind of be a qualified investor that buys these things. And of course, since I have a couple of hundred million dollars under management focused on this area, I obviously make the list. But there are just wealthy individuals who make the list because they're owning a lot of gold stocks. So if you're a gold stock investor, you can sign up and they do vet you a little bit. You want to make sure you're serious and so forth. But yeah, it's a nice vibe. I mean, there are two distinct camps. I mean, the people who run these mining companies are different than the investors, right?

We've got mining engineers and geologists and people who are used to breaking rocks. And then we've got financial types. We're trying to figure out what the numbers mean. So it's two different sets of people.