Philip Diehl on the Booming Business of Gold Coins

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

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Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:23)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:24)

Tracy, you've actually benefited a little bit from this move up in gold lately, right? You're a bit of a bullion hoarder, right?

Tracy Alloway (0:32)

I thought you were about to call me a gold bug.

Joe Weisenthal (0:35)

I know you're not a full on gold bug, but you're like gold bug adjacent, or silver bug adjacent, or something like that.

Tracy Alloway (0:41)

Let me just be clear. I have inherited my long gold position, I guess, and silver as well. So for some reason, every year for my birthday and for Christmas, my dad gives me either a gold coin or a silver coin from his personal collection. He got it in his mind that I really enjoy coins, I guess. And now I kind of do. There is something satisfying about having physical coins and sitting there, and I don't stack them on YouTube or anything, but I do like to check occasionally that they're still there, and I do get a little bit of satisfaction when I look at my little pile of gold and silver.

Joe Weisenthal (1:21)

I have to say, the one thing I don't own any physical gold, I do like the idea of owning a bunch of silver and stacking it on a table and doing a YouTube video about that. Everyone should go look at the silver stackers on YouTube. I would be scared, you could bury them somewhere out in the wilderness of Connecticut. I would be scared to hold a lot of bullion on my person, and then I would be scared to hold them in a bank because if everything goes bad, is the bank even going to be open in a safe deposit box? I like the idea in theory of having a lot of precious metal. Anyway, precious metal has been doing really well lately.

Tracy Alloway (1:58)

It has. I was just looking at a chart of gold, so it hit another record high just at mid-April, and then it came down quite a bit and now it's up again. We're almost back to that record.

Joe Weisenthal (2:12)

It's pretty extraordinary. Gold is living up to the hype because there's all this chaos and everything in the markets and in the economy and politics, and gold is up.

Tracy Alloway (2:23)

You know what I like about gold?

Joe Weisenthal (2:24)

Tell me.

Tracy Alloway (2:25)

I like the advertisements that you see on TV. The interesting thing to me is, obviously, the companies that are doing those ads are pitching an investment, but so much of the investment pitch is mixed up with cultural values.

Joe Weisenthal (2:41)

Totally.

Tracy Alloway (2:41)

So, for instance, I was watching one earlier in preparation for this episode, and they were talking about how when you're walking down inflation boulevard and global instability avenue, you really need the safety of a gold coin, which not only represents security via gold, but also the security of the United States of America. Like you get all these cultural references wrapped up in coins. 100%.

Joe Weisenthal (3:10)

And every coin has its design and it evokes all this stuff about heritage and everything. Anyway, I'm really excited because we actually do literally have the perfect guest because it touches on many things that we're interested in. It's someone who I've actually known for a while, I've talked to before, someone who we're going to talk about coins, but we're not going to talk about, well, let's just...

Tracy Alloway (3:35)

My most hated coin.

Joe Weisenthal (3:36)

Yeah, see, there's one coin that Tracy hates. So we are going to talk to Philip Diehl. He is the president of the US Money Reserve, which sells gold. He was also, I think, one of the great Mint directors in US history. He was the 35th director of the US Mint, where he, among other things, had numerous accomplishments. He was instrumental in the Sacajawea dollar, a dollar coin that was very successful, leased sold to collectors. He was behind the 50 state quarters project, which, if you remember the 90s, they made a quarter for each of the states. Turns out our producer Dash has all of the 50 state quarters, which I didn't know. And we're not going to talk about this. Although it may be relevant again with the debt ceiling come up, he was also the one that got the language in the law that, in theory, allows for the creation of a platinum coin of high denomination, which could be used to circumvent the debt ceiling. We're not going to talk about the trillion dollar coin on this episode. We are going to talk about gold coins. Philip Diehl, thrilled to have you on to talk now. Appreciate you coming on Odd Lots.