And that is, okay, I buy gold and the market tanks okay and gold now skyrockets in value what what do i do with it like i can't go to the store and give them a bar of gold i'm not going to shave any gold off that kind of thing so and that probably is a conflation of investing versus actually a currency maybe you can uh dance around that a little bit talk talk to us about how that is a misconception

Gold is considered the world currency, right? It's been a currency for over 3,000 years.

So it does have a role as a currency.

You're literally, when you buy gold, you're swapping one currency for another, and then you swap it back.

And what you're trying to do is get more of the currency that you initially used and swap it back.

From an investment standpoint, did exactly what you just said during the financial crisis.

So let's go back to 2008.

What do I need to ask you that you could shed light on that I haven't probably asked you because I don't understand your business nearly as well as you do?

And I guess for our investors, before you really go into that question, can you explain what you mean by counterparty risk?

Sure.

Counterparty risk is owning something where there's another thing, another party, another something that can actually have an adverse impact on the asset.

So let's take just any stock, a widget stock.

And the counterparty risks are a number of things.

It could be mismanagement by the CEO.

It could be a downturn in the economy in general.

I think one of the mysteries about that is what good is, I mean, if they're in a crisis situation, how are they gonna use that gold to get themselves out of that crisis situation? I mean, can you just go out on the street and offer it as currency? Or if you were in, I guess, even a kidnap situation, uh could it be used as uh as collateral for getting you out of those situations

David, curious to know, what is the biggest mindset shift a real estate investor needs to make to stop just building wealth and start truly defending it,

if you will? No, that's a great point.

I mean, I'm sure most of your listeners are thinking What am I going to buy next? How do I raise capital? How do I finance it? How do I reduce my taxes? Those are all great questions.

But what I hope one question that I can help with is how do I protect my wealth? And what gold does, it acts as a portfolio of protection, whether it's inflation, whether it's geopolitical risk.

whether it's the overall economy, the dollar, take your pick.

Gold is something that can help protect.

But most importantly, I think it's a diversification tool.

What is the most common vulnerability you see in typical real estate portfolios today?

From your perspective, what's the structural gap that most healthcare CFOs and executives aren't accounting for in their portfolios?

I think the gap leads to risk and what most healthcare CFOs and the executives that work with the endowments, they underestimate the concentration of risk and they kind of disguise it a little bit with what they call diversification.

But really, on paper, if they own equities and bonds, when the day's over with, that's still tied to the same system.

So when you see liquidity tighten or confidence break, like we saw in 2008 and then again in 2020, that correlation that just is one.

So those assets individually basically are tied to one another and they move with one another.

So the gap right there is really the absence of a counterweight such as gold.

And because some of these portfolios lack assets that sit outside of that stock and bond financial system, what physical gold can do is actually provide them with a little bit of insurance to make sure that when those traditional types of portfolios come under pressure, It's not as critical when you own something like gold in there.

What are the most common blind spots you see when high-income healthcare professionals come to Blanchard for the first time?