This Is Why People Are So in Love With Gold

The price of gold is basically at record highs. But what is it about gold that people love so much? Why have people always craved a metal that has no real industrial uses? And what does owning or wearing gold represent? On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Maksud Agadjani, the founder of TraxNYC, a jewelry store based in NYC's Diamond District. You may recognize Maksud from the movie Uncut Gems, where he played a character similar to himself, working in the fast-moving world of precious metals, rare stones, and flashy jewelry. We talked to him about the persistent demand for gold and why people are so into it right now. Read more: Gold’s Price Surge Drives Narcos Into Illegal Mining in the AmazonOdd Lots is coming to Washington, DC! Get your tickets here. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  But according to recruiters, advisors and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 1:39Tracy Alloway?

  Hey there, Odd Lots listeners. It's Tracy Alloway.

• 1:42Joe Weisenthal?

  And Joe Weisenthal.

• 1:43Tracy Alloway?

  We are very excited to announce that Odd Lots is going to Washington.

• 1:48Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right. For the first time, we are going to do a live public Odd Lots recording in our nation's Capitol. That's going to be March 12th in Washington DC at the Miracle Theater. And guests will be announced in the coming days, but in the meantime, you can find a ticket link at Bloomberg.com/oddlots.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news.

• 2:27Joe Weisenthal?

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

• 2:32Tracy Alloway?

  And I'm Tracy Alloway.

• 2:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Tracy, uh, gold has had a really good year.

• 2:36Tracy Alloway?

  Here's a question. Here's a question. One of the last times we talked about gold, you made fun of me for being a gold bug. Are you going to start this episode out by doing the same thing?

• 2:47Joe Weisenthal?

  No, you're completely vindicated. Gold has done really well over the long term, over the last several years. It's been one of the best performing assets. It's stable. I take back everything I ever implied negatively about gold.

• 3:00Tracy Alloway?

  You're gonna be nice to the gold bugs now?

• 3:02Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 3:02Tracy Alloway?

  All right. Um, I will say-

• 3:04Joe Weisenthal?

  But it's not, look, the chart's great.

• 3:06Tracy Alloway?

  I will say, I'm sort of an accidental gold bug. It has not been a conscious choice to accumulate, but it has turned out really well. So gold keeps hitting record after record. Uh, as we're recording this, I think it's at 2,600 an ounce.

• 3:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, 2,649. It had gotten as high as 2,800 almost in October, but it's been, I mean, it's the last couple of years have been phenomenal.

• 3:28Tracy Alloway?

  That's crazy. And the other really interesting thing is like, it started going up even as the Federal Reserve was raising rates, which is something that you don't normally see. Like normally gold has that inverse relationship to rates, that negative correlation.

• 3:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 3:44Tracy Alloway?

  And I guess the demand has just been so strong that it doesn't really matter this time around.

• 3:49Joe Weisenthal?

  Can I say something? So you bring up the sort of Fed connection, et cetera. And so I want to learn more about gold, but I don't really have much interest in just talking to like another gold macro guy because I don't know what they say. They always sell the same story. It's like inflation and currency debasement and all that. Maybe that's all true, but I sort of like, I want to talk gold, but I just like, I sort of felt going into this conversation that we can't just talk to someone who's just, you know, gonna tell the same story they could have told about gold every single day for the last 20 years.

• 4:22Tracy Alloway?

  I think it's a very valid feeling to have. There is something like physical about gold. Obviously it's shiny. It's fun to hold, even like silver. You can have fun stacking those coins.

• 4:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 4:34Tracy Alloway?

  As I know personally. So it makes sense to talk to someone who's in the physical market.

• 4:38Joe Weisenthal?

  We're going to talk about what's going on in the gold market, but actually get into why people love gold so much and why people want to be covered.

• 4:46Tracy Alloway?

  And why right now?

• 4:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Why right now? Why people want to accumulate gold, have it in their saves, have it on their person, et cetera. We really do have the perfect guest. We are going to be speaking with Maxud Agajani. Max Agajani. He is the founder of Trax NYC, New York City based jewelry dealer. And listeners might know, we actually had him on the podcast once in early 2020. And listeners might know him if they ever saw the movie Uncut Gems, one of my favorite movies of the last few years, because he actually was in the movie. He played, I guess, kind of himself to some extent in the movie. I think the character's name was Yossi, in the diamond district, in the gold district in Manhattan. And we're going to talk all this gold with Max, Maxud, AKA Yossi.

• 5:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me for a second time.

• 5:36Joe Weisenthal?

  What's your life been like the last four years? How did that all change your life?

• 5:40Speaker 04

  Um, Odd Lots? How did that?

• 5:44Speaker 04

  It's only been up from there.

• 5:46Joe Weisenthal?

  And that little movie that you appeared in.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  The movie did good. Odd Lots did good. Other podcasts did good. And all the social media also did really good for me.

• 5:56Tracy Alloway?

  Here's an important question. Did you bring me the diamond encrusted Furby?

• 6:00Speaker 04

  I did not.

• 6:00Tracy Alloway?

  That's all I want out of life.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  In all reality, it wasn't even diamonds in that thing. It was made out of brass.

• 6:05Tracy Alloway?

  I know.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  It's movie magic.

• 6:07Tracy Alloway?

  Honestly, I would take the brass version too, but.

• 6:09Speaker 04

  It might not be good for your skin, but.

• 6:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, really? What does brass do to your skin?

• 6:13Tracy Alloway?

  It turns it green.

• 6:14Speaker 04

  She got it. She knows it.

• 6:15Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. All women know this, the big difference between gold and brass.

• 6:20Joe Weisenthal?

  So other than the fact that gold doesn't turn your skin green, what do people, what, like, what is it that people love about gold? Why do people, why do people buy gold from you?

• 6:29Speaker 04

  Well, gold is for people who have money to burn, right? You know, if you're, you could go back thousands of years. If you're an Egyptian pharaoh and you're not starving, you have plenty of labor and grain and. Land and property, what don't you have? Well, I guess I want to get make a gold casket, a gold esophagus, so to speak. And maybe some peasant might find some in the field. And I'll give him the grain he needs and he'll give me the gold. So it accumulates with people who are not struggling. And that turns it into a status symbol, you know?

• 7:03Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, I remember you actually wrote a really good piece about the history of gold and how it was sort of intermingled with power. And this idea that, you know, like you needed a big military, basically, to go out and get gold. And you needed a lot of labor to dig it up. And so it became very much associated with power.

• 7:21Joe Weisenthal?

  It's like a proof of work, right? If you can, like in even in the Bitcoin sense. Also, you know, one thing Tracy, you know, Max mentioned, the pharaohs. Gold doesn't tarnish, right? So it's like historically, going back thousands of years, it was associated with the gods. Just like one commodity that is truly immortal in a way that most things that we find on earth are.

• 7:42Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, I have a really dumb question, though. When gold is hitting records like it is right now, do you see more or less demand for jewelry?

• 7:50Speaker 04

  I mean, it's kind of stable, to be honest. You know, when I started my business in 2004, gold was about $300 an ounce. Now it's 2,500, 2,600 fluctuating over there. I've watched it the whole way. It's increase in price does have a little bit of effect on a demand, but not that much. But, you know, at some point, people can't afford what they want. Back in 2004, you could stack yourself with gold. 14 karat at $12 a gram or whatever it was. It was a great time to really stack gold. But now your dollar doesn't go so far and you can't really have as much as you'd like.

• 8:27Joe Weisenthal?

  But on the other hand, in 2004, if you bought $100 worth of gold, you had $100 worth of gold. In 2025, if you buy $100 worth of gold, you still have $100 worth of gold. So in a way, no, for real, like if you want to like convert your dollars into something else, it does the same job at 2649 as it does at 300.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, listen, until the guy that bought it in 2004 walks through the door and his $100 worth of gold looks like a bigger pile than your $100 worth of gold. But whatever, you know, money's a game. Gold is one way to play it. It's a safe way to play it. I love it because I have a jewelry store full of gold chains. And gold jewelry and as the price goes up, what I can't sell, I melt and I still make my money back. And that's a fantastic aspect of it and it never let me down. And I don't think it ever let anybody in history down. So you can't really go wrong with it. You might not be the biggest winner like you are with the cryptos.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  Or whatever it is, somebody who bought, you know, a pizza pie for 15 or 20 Bitcoin back in 2011. And now could have been a billionaire or whatever.

• 9:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 9:33Speaker 04

  It might not do that, but it'll keep you safe and sound and happy.

• 9:37Tracy Alloway?

  Do you feel competition with the crypto market?

• 9:40Speaker 04

  I mean, I don't want gold to go up, you know, that doesn't do anything for me. I know it will eventually, but um yeah, crypto had a major impact. Who knows if crypto would never, if Satoshi Nakamoto. Never bothered to do whatever he was doing or whatever that was. What would the gold be right now? If it wasn't trillions of dollars, literally inside of crazy cryptos?

• 10:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, could be up more. What uh, what are people into these days?

• 10:08Speaker 04

  What are people into these days?

• 10:10Joe Weisenthal?

  When they come into your store, what do they like? How much is it like the crazy diamond encrusted Furbies that Tracy didn't get today?

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 10:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Versus just wanting a nice tasteful chain versus what? What's, what's?

• 10:21Speaker 04

  I mean, listen, everybody, everybody has their own little need, you know, they want, they want to give a gift for a girl. So they might want to be able to buy a tennis bracelet. Okay, they have a girlfriend or they have a side chick or they have a baby mama. I don't know what their situation is, but you gotta buy her something. All right, so you gotta go and you gotta buy, it could be a tennis bracelet that'll be with diamonds.

• 10:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Will they tell you if it's for the side chick? Will they say that like, by the way, this is for the side chick?

• 10:48Speaker 04

  Um, I could usually tell what's going on.

• 10:51Tracy Alloway?

  Is the bracelet for the side chick smaller than the one for the wife?

• 10:55Speaker 04

  You know, that's a varies from customer to customer. Put it that way.

• 11:00Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, can I ask the basic question, though? Why do you think gold prices have been going up?

• 11:05Speaker 04

  Well, listen, I mean, you know, we gotta do the math, all right? It's one thing I learned since the last time I was here to today. A lot of people, maybe they might be in a beautiful building like we are now or in a professional field, but they're not doing the mathematics here at all, all right? Thirty-six trillion dollars in debt, one trillion dollars in interest. You got China buying it up like crazy, so I hear, central banks, this, that. If you look into numbers, you're gonna find out what's really going on. And it's like the Wizard of Oz out there. You really don't want to look behind the curtain here because I don't know what you're gonna find there and how this is all gonna come to a head as things get turbulent.

• 11:47Speaker 04

  You know, when in the new administration or what have you, whatever you want to call it, and cryptos and quantum computing and robots and this and that. I don't really know how it's all gonna play out. But I know that if anything happens, I have my safe, my combination to my safe, my security system and my physical assets that I can rely on. So that's what it is for me. I don't know.

• 12:12Tracy Alloway?

  I feel like there is a tension there, though, because like if I imagine myself coming into a jewelry store and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna buy a gold chain because, you know, it's a safe store of value and things are uncertain right now. Like, that's okay, but on the other hand, I'm buying like something that's pretty frivolous, right? It's like, it's a gold chain. What am I really gonna do with it?

• 12:31Speaker 04

  As it should be frivolous. I mean, you're not supposed to be on the edge of starvation, you know, struggling against all odds. Oh, I need shoes and a winter coat and coal for my furnace, you know?

• 12:43Tracy Alloway?

  Prioritize the gold.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're supposed to be productive, successful people in a modern world with surplus.

• 12:50Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, but when people come into your store, do they talk to you about why they're buying gold? Do they say stuff like, I'm worried about inflation?

• 12:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, some people do. I mean, there's somebody that came in, I'll never forget him. He was listening to what I was saying and he came in, this was when gold was 1850. And he was painting houses and he bought like 10 ounces. So he saved up the money, eighteen thousand, five hundred dollars or whatever it was. And he um saved up the money and he said, you know what, I'm tired of losing my money. I'm tired of spending. He bought 10 ounces of gold because of what I said. And uh you know, wherever he is now, if he held on to that gold, now it's, you know, twenty six thousand, five hundred or whatever. So he did great and he just bought ten, ten ounces of uh, you know, one ounce each bouillon bars.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  But I feel like he even got shortchanged. I think the gold price after that ridiculous pandemic with all that printing should be way higher than, than even twenty six fifty, but I'm not looking for that to happen anytime soon.

• 14:08Speaker 00

  What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Greece, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And in this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.

• 14:24Speaker 05

  We're seeing a lot of insocial players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high frequency traders and that sort of thing, and folks who service insocial clients.

• 14:33Speaker 00

  As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reese Merrick of Ripple says.

• 14:41Speaker 06

  A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some eighty year old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume, so writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 15:52Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 16:33Joe Weisenthal?

  One thing that I always liked on your Instagram page, and I'm not sure if you've done one recently, you used to do like these really fun, like sort of like, let's take a look at geopolitics and like the charts and the maps. Have you still been doing that?

• 16:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, that's not like the...

• 16:48Joe Weisenthal?

  I've found that to be very entertaining.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  Well, you guys, you guys are, you know, a little smart and stuff like that, but for the average person in the crowd, sometimes I have to do something a little bit more.

• 16:58Joe Weisenthal?

  I remember like yours, I don't know what year it was, you had like the chart of Iran and the chart, you know, and like the different like tensions in the Middle East.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  I do that on Tracks News.

• 17:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, that's the Tracks News page.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I have a little side channel where I talk about what's really going on in the world. But when it comes to my main pages, I want to, I have to make money.

• 17:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  Okay, so I have to go and I have to stick around the materials, the diamonds, the sapphires, the gold, and I have to market my jewelry to the masses in a clever way, make my money, buy more gold chains. I'm placing an order for half a million for seven kilos. Okay, of gold chains, I'm gonna flood out my shop and I'm gonna hunker down and I'm gonna wait for it all to end.

• 17:40Tracy Alloway?

  What are your security costs like now?

• 17:43Speaker 04

  Uh, well, listen, I mean, I'm in the middle of the diamond district, you know, my rent is about $50,000 a month and but I have some three spaces up, you know, in fourteen A, which is on the 13th floor, and then I have a mezzanine, and then I have a storefront, and luckily, there's, you know, police cars there and two precincts nearby. I'm next to Fox News and Rockefeller Center. So I'm in a safe place. If there's ever was a place to stash gold, this is the place to do it. So I'm gonna take advantage of that fact.

• 18:13Joe Weisenthal?

  What uh, when you, when you leave for the day, like, how big is that protocol of like, locking up everything?

• 18:18Speaker 04

  Right. Um, uh, well, my staff does it.

• 18:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  I have cameras. I see what's going on and I have, it's like a casino or a bank. If you make a proper protocol, you don't have to sit here and worry about it so much.

• 18:31Joe Weisenthal?

  When you talk about buying a half a million, seven kilos worth of gold, making a uh, a half a million dollar order, what's that, what's that like? Who are the big players in this sort of wholesale gold distribution?

• 18:42Speaker 04

  And for anybody doing the math, that's in 14 karat gold. So they get seven kilos, they're gonna be thinking this guy's uh, some's not on the up and up. Um, that's coming from different chain manufacturers.

• 18:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay.

• 18:52Speaker 04

  In Italy, sometimes could be Indonesia or somewhere else, and uh, they have factories and they source their gold, however, which way they do it. You know, I've been to some of these factories. They're beautiful factories, family run, but I like to buy my gold in gold chains. Now, if I buy uh, gold bars or grain, and I do that often as well, I do that right on the street on 47th Street with uh, several different vendors there that are really, really uh, cool people, worth the visiting and learning about.

• 19:23Tracy Alloway?

  What do higher gold prices actually do for your profit margins? Cause I imagine like, the actual manufacturing cost is probably the biggest chunk.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, they know, that's not, the manufacturing cost is not the biggest chunk. I mean, the gold, the material is the biggest that by far, and it eats away and then you have to raise your prices, but jewelry is the only industry in which you raise your prices and sales could go up.

• 19:45Tracy Alloway?

  Hmm.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  Because people uh, associate that with a higher quality. Right? You know, they'll, they'll look, if people don't know anything about it, they'll say, hey, this sapphire is 30,000, this one's 20,000, so that sapphire must be better than this one. You know, um, and that's how people think about jewelry and that's the psychology behind it. And, you know, that works in, in our favor if we're building a jewelry brand or whatever.

• 20:10Joe Weisenthal?

  So by the way, we're recording this on, uh, January 7th. Just today, uh, Mark Zuckerberg, the Meta CEO, the Facebook guy, uh, released a video and about content moderation and a number of people noticed he was wearing a $900,000 watch. His style has changed.

• 20:26Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 20:26Joe Weisenthal?

  What do you, is there been, have you noticed a shift in general sort of public styles of people these days, maybe versus say 10 years ago of wanting to wear their wealth on their wrist or on their neck more?

• 20:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, the, uh, people are growing up, think, things are definitely changing and, uh, people are flashing a little bit more. I mean, you know, there was the era of Steve Jobs where he was the real leader and he was, uh, you know, um, the same pair of jeans and sneakers, New Balance sneakers, uh, very plain. And, you know, once he passed, um, other people are stepping out and the watch game is, I guess, something that caught, uh, Mark's eye and he's in it now and he's playing along, which is, uh, great for business. And, uh, you know, that's really what's, what's been going on and I, I think that's a great trend. A lot of people wearing different timepieces, there's way more information about them now. The, the, the market has kind of been democratized a little bit where people could look up different

• 21:22Speaker 04

  watches and find their certain styling. And this guy is stepping out, he's stepping up and he's changing his personality. Maybe he did ayahuasca, I don't really know what got into him, but, um, it's good for business. So I'm happy about it.

• 21:34Tracy Alloway?

  He definitely had a little makeover recently, you can tell. We've been talking a lot about gold, but, uh, we should talk about diamonds as well because like gold's been going up, diamond prices have been going down for a while and I imagine some of it is, you know, the pressure from lab grown diamonds, but like what's going on there?

• 21:54Speaker 04

  Well, um, the lab grown is in the market and it's weighing it down heavily because you can't tell the difference. And even I buy them sometimes and you know, the real challenge is it used to be able to sell, you know, SI2, I1, J color.

• 22:12Joe Weisenthal?

  What are these words?

• 22:13Speaker 04

  Um, these are all the gradings of the stone.

• 22:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Okay, all right, keep going.

• 22:16Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, didn't you, didn't you buy an engagement ring ever?

• 22:20Speaker 04

  You forgot earlier.

• 22:21Joe Weisenthal?

  It was a, uh, it was a, uh, family heirloom, so I never had to go to the.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  Lucky you.

• 22:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I got very lucky. I had no money in those days.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  Uh, so the lower, you know, lower grade stones, they used to play a part, but now, why would I buy a lower grade stone? Right? It's, here's a good, a decent example. Why would I buy a Honda Accord? Built from a factory when I could buy a lab grown Mercedes?

• 22:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I get that.

• 22:50Speaker 04

  Okay, you know?

• 22:52Joe Weisenthal?

  So it's really, it kills the low end.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's.

• 22:54Joe Weisenthal?

  Because if you're gonna go the low end anyway, you don't really care as much.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  But once you take out the low end, the high end is coming with it and all sorts of things are going down, but, um, a natural is still natural. Natural gems are a different story, so the.

• 23:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Natural gems are for the wife.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're for the wives and they're for a way for you to spend money, but.

• 23:11Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, my engagement ring is actually an aquamarine. It's not a diamond, but this reminds me, like, do you see other types of stones coming into fashion? Like the more natural gemstones, if maybe like the lab grown diamonds are kind of muddying that market?

• 23:26Speaker 04

  Not yet. Nobody really knows, um, uh, what to do. Okay, so the engagement, marriage, these are, you know, the highest societal matters that one can, uh, discuss and society doesn't know how to decide that there has to be some leadership. Someone has to get engaged with a sapphire to start a trend, some major celebrity or. You know, God forbid Melania gets a divorce and gets a new husband and he buys her a ruby. I think we'll see.

• 23:54Tracy Alloway?

  Well, Kate Middleton had a sapphire ring. Oh, she did? Yeah, that was a big deal.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a big deal and that's the way they do it over there. Because that was kind of Princess Diana had, I think, a sapphire. So I think that was the trend, but it never really caught on into the masses just yet. It's still diamonds.

• 24:11Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, why do things like fall in and out of fashion like that? Like, why, why do diamonds have such a hold on the engagement market still?

• 24:20Speaker 04

  That's a fantastic question. I mean, this was, you know, propagandized by De Beers at some point of time. Somebody's brainchild to be able to show commitment and it also the shoe fit. So they wore it, you know, she got a one carater. She's got a one and a half, or my husband bought me a three carater, but yours is a J color. And it's just, it's just a game for people to play and for a way to have the guy spend money.

• 24:51Tracy Alloway?

  One more diamond question, but like, how come diamonds? My impression is notoriously, if you get a giant diamond engagement ring, like, yes, okay, that's great. But if you break up or you divorce and you want to go sell it, it immediately loses a ton of value. Why is it that diamonds never really like transformed into a store of value in the same way that gold?

• 25:13Speaker 04

  It's a luxury product. Okay, listen, another example that I give most of my clients. Right, you could buy, you could go to the liquor store, you have a $60. You could buy a bottle of champagne or you could buy a bottle of Jamaican rum. Okay, so. One is going to get you way more drunk for way longer than the other. You know, champagne, half the bottle is going to fly out when you open it. Half the contents of the bottle. But Jamaican rum, you could sit under a bridge for a month and, you know, whatever. So the fact of the matter is, is one is a luxury product for celebration. And one is not. Hmm. Okay, if you really want, you know, if you're somewhere in in the Middle East or or in Asia,

• 25:57Speaker 04

  and you're getting married, you're gonna cover your wife in gold so she could feel secure about her, you know, marriage or divorce or commitment or whatever. But here in the West, you know, at the the top one percent of society or civilization or whatever it might be, it's a different trend. And you're buying something that is frivolous and luxurious. If you really want something that's gonna keep your value, give your wife a gold bar or, you know, you're not gonna see in some, you know, on Park Avenue at some major wedding hall or whatever, a wife covered in gold coins. Okay, all right, you know, like you would. Maybe one day.

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Maybe one day, yeah, after, you know, after the economy really takes a nosedive, then yeah, maybe. So that's the reason.

• 26:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Let's talk about watches a little more. You sell watches. I'm looking at a ninety two thousand fully iced out Skydweller Oyster Perpetual Rolex watch on your website. What's a cool watch brand these days? I mean, Rolexes are always, what are people into now? What's the hot thing in watches?

• 27:01Speaker 04

  Well, the big boys, obviously, Patek Philippe, Audemars, and Rolex. And then, if you really wanna stand out, you might get a Brigade or, you know, Cartier's or Cartier, as they like to pronounce it, is something that's also cute. But aside from that, listen, you're getting a watch not to tell the time. Let's just keep it real. Okay, you're getting a watch to have a status symbol. So they call Rolexes the new money. When you get your first real money, you get yourself a Rolex because you know it's gonna do the job.

• 27:35Joe Weisenthal?

  You've arrived.

• 27:36Speaker 04

  Yes. And then from there, you go out further and further into something that might be a little bit, you know, unknown, but amongst the community of of people in the watches, it's respected.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  And there's definitely several different brands like that and none of them come to mind at the moment. But you know, I usually rely on my friend Roman Scharf when it comes to watches. He's an expert in that field.

• 28:05Tracy Alloway?

  I used to know a big luxury watch collector in Abu Dhabi. Maybe that's unsurprising. And I never really understood the thesis of like speculating on watches, but he was big into that. He would buy and then he would trade and sell. Is that an investment thesis that you buy into or not so much?

• 28:25Speaker 04

  You know, like at my store, I feel happiest when I have a million in watches and a million in gold or something like that. Okay, so you can't ever go wrong with those assets. And they do Rolex just raised their list prices. So the prices went up on all the watches. And anybody who has a Rolex gained and anybody who didn't is gonna have to be, you know, get their dollars up even higher to get one. So you can't go wrong with some of those assets. And you go look, you know, you'll see, run into a YouTube video or something like that. Somebody who bought a Rolex straight out of the army in 1958 or 1963.

• 29:07Speaker 04

  And they bought it and they kept the box and papers and they bought it for $650. And today it's worth a quarter of a million or 150,000.

• 29:15Tracy Alloway?

  Must be nice.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of the things, if you go and buy them today and you know, you're a young person. If you're a young person listening to this, you know, a few might be. And you go and you buy a Rolex and you don't take the stickers off and you buy a limited edition and you keep it there. And then you're 65 years old. I know it seems like a long, long time from now, but that day is gonna come. And if you pull that Rolex out of that closet or out of that safe, you're gonna really be happy with what's going on. And that's, that's the nature of watches because these companies and these brands do something special for, you know, their, their timepieces and it's, and it works.

• 29:57Joe Weisenthal?

  I want to ask a sort of real meat and potatoes business question, but going back to safety and security and operations and like, you probably have to like, hiring can't be, people for your store can't be like totally trivial because you have to be able to trust them.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Et cetera. That must be a huge part of it.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  You nailed it.

• 30:15Joe Weisenthal?

  What you've seen, I was talking to my barber recently and he was saying he had a hard time hiring these days. And I said, well, what's the hard part? Is it that like, is it hard to find people who can cut hair? And he said, no.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  They're on drugs.

• 30:28Joe Weisenthal?

  That's basically what he said. He said, the hard part is basically like just finding people who are sort of normal and put together. And I'm curious, like from your perspective, like what you've seen on that front.

• 30:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, New York City is a rundown in a lot of different ways. So there's a lot of people that, I mean, you got to sort through a lot of people to find a, a good quality human being.

• 30:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 30:51Speaker 04

  Okay. A lot of them are usually going to be immigrants that are coming here from all over the world that are really looking to work and have a real work ethic, that they're expected to work. People that grow up in this society want to get high. Work is something that for them to, just an obstacle for them to overcome to, for them to enjoy themselves and binge on Netflix.

• 31:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Have you seen the desire to get high? And I mean, here in the literal sense of drug use. Has that changed a lot in the 20 years that you've had tracks and having to deal with it?

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Um, well, listen, you know, I smoke periodically and so on and so forth, but I actually, I have to make sure that I fulfill my obligations to my business. All right. Alcohol is a drug that people partake in after work or so on and so forth, but people have become abusive. And you know, it's not just the drugs, it's the theft and the overall lack of work ethic in today's society. They just don't understand it. And you know, people are doing the bare minimum where they're pretending to work or so on and so forth. And the moment you check on their work, it's, that's a, a serious problem. Luckily the AI and the robots are coming so they could finally go to Central Park and play, uh, you know, frisbee or whatever they really want to do.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  But it's it's quite tragic and those people need to be scrutinized and filtered out and you know they really don't have no any dignity or self-respect in my opinion.

• 32:20Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, am I going to be buying jewelry from a robot in the near future? Are they going to be behind the counter?

• 32:25Speaker 04

  Well, the beautiful thing is, you know what I'm saying? If jewelry jewelry is the last or one of the last few businesses that, you know, escapes the eye of Sauron, which would be like a Jeff Bezos, right? All right, Amazon, you it started out with books. Now it's paper towels. Now you could host a server now. Um, anything you can imagine, movies, TV shows, he gobbled up everything. But jewelry, I still have this little, uh, little, um, uh, you know, territory that I could expand in, and that's by the grace of God, if nothing else. So luckily jewelry is kind of those, one of those few things that's not going to have a barcode on it.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 34:05Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 34:47Tracy Alloway?

  Just going back to hiring, how do you actually find and source your employees? Do you put out an ad or is it like through word of mouth, through networking?

• 34:55Speaker 04

  I put out an ad, I asked to whatever, you know, if anybody has somebody or I put up a post on social media. But the best way to hire, I find, is to tell somebody, hey, you're here for a one-week trial and if you do well, I'll extend that to a one-month trial and if you do well on that, a two-month trial. I'm not hiring anybody. It's like getting married to somebody at this point. I'm not marrying them until I trust them and really get to know them and see them under a different circumstances. So it's not like the corporate world, it's the diamond district. And I really scrutinize them. And I also ask the other opinions, say, how did this person do? Did this person say good?

• 35:36Speaker 04

  And once you have a good panel of people, then you can really, you know, rely on different opinions and build a good group. It's the biggest challenge, especially in the jewelry business. That's why people work with their family.

• 35:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. Is it front of shop that like, are you have the hardest time? I mean, is it the people sort of like working the counter, talking about the jewelry, showing it to them? Or is it people in the back? Is it people? What is?

• 36:00Speaker 04

  Everybody. Everybody who touches expensive materials is scary to me, you know? Somebody's picking up a casting, someone's shopping for sapphires. Are they taking a bribe? Are they picking off some stones? Are they taking a couple of grams? Are they doing some other nonsense, nefarious business? Which I've seen it all. I've had employees just take stuff off the shelf and go to the scrapper and scrap it.

• 36:25Tracy Alloway?

  Wow.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  You know, I've, you know, I walked into my shop and I see someone is wearing a chain underneath their neck. A big one underneath their shirt, but I could see it through the shirt. I'm like, listen, what is that chain? And you know, he fast talks to me. He's like, no, I'm waiting for the client. He's gonna come right back. I'm just gonna give it to him. And I'm like, I'm like, there's no

• 36:45Tracy Alloway?

  Just keeping it warm in the meantime?

• 36:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm like, there's no way this person is just looking me dead in the eyes and lying to me. I'm like, okay, turns out he was just stealing it, ready to go home with it. I mean, listen, I've been through everything you can imagine. I've had people forge my signature out of check. Um, you know, pick up double castings. All right. You go to you, you, you have to pick something up for a client. You pick up two, you get one to the client, one for yourself. I've had it all, and I've lost my faith in humanity because of it. So, you know, it's

• 37:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Humanity will fade away, but that 14 karat gold chain will be there for thousands of years. This gets back to the gold is permanent.

• 37:23Speaker 04

  Right back where we started.

• 37:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 37:25Tracy Alloway?

  Wait, so one of the most annoying things I find about shopping for jewelry, and I mean, I don't shop for jewelry that often, but when I do, um, it's like the pricing transparency.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 37:36Tracy Alloway?

  You look in the case and half the time you can't read what's written on the label because they're often handwritten, or they've stuck the label like under the ring and so you can't see it.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  That's the fun part.

• 37:48Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, I get that it's good for you.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  Sure, sure, you do.

• 37:53Tracy Alloway?

  What, what do those prices actually, A, how do those prices come about?

• 37:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 37:57Tracy Alloway?

  Like, what do they actually mean? I assume they're all negotiable. They usually are. And then B, how often are you actually changing the labels? Like, if the price of gold goes up?

• 38:06Joe Weisenthal?

  20%.

• 38:07Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, 20%. Do you have, do you have to like go and rewrite all the little price tag?

• 38:11Speaker 04

  You, yeah, you might have to. That depends on what type of store or what type of operation you're running. Or sometimes you just do the math in your head. Or sometimes you say, hey, listen, price of gold went up. And next week I might change this tag by it now, you know? So it's, uh, it is what it is. I mean, the price is based on the raw materials, uh, plus labor, you know, plus design, plus the fee that I want to make. And, um, like I said, it doesn't have a barcode on it. It's not like buying a digital camera right now where it's $4.95 on Amazon and $4.88 at Walmart. You know, and you just, oh, okay, I don't want to save this, or I don't want to do that, or whatever it might be. This is a, it still has a little bit of more of a romance to it.

• 38:53Speaker 04

  To make the purchase and learn the raw materials. And you know, if I was to tell somebody out there, if you're shopping for something, you're the client. And what do you, what should you do is the real question, okay? Let's, what should Tracy do? All right, Tracy should go walk into any jewelry store in the diamond district, look at whatever she likes, say how many carrots? How many grams? What's the price? And then walk out the door and buy nothing. Hmm. Okay, go to the next store and the next store and the next store, and then come back and say, I saw this over here, but can you do this for me over here? $18.50, I come right back. If they give you a look, or they do this, don't shop there, that's it. Don't let them pressure you to buy, and don't let them pressure you with a story and whatever it is. Because that's kind of the Venus flytrap that people use.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  They come in, they befriend you, and they use all of these crazy social tactics to, you know, get you to get something to buy. And if you really want to be sharp, you know, when I go to the diamond district and I have to buy sapphires. Right now, I have to buy a lot of sapphires for, to manufacture chains. One person's telling me this quality for $150 a carat. The other one's telling me this quality for $120, another quality is $60 a carat or something. Somebody might have had something in their safe for 45, and they're willing to let it go for 25. And you can manipulate that system if you shop around and turn the tables on them. So that's what your responsibility is.

• 40:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Actually, this raises a question that I've sort of wondered about. People talk about this. What's the advantage for you of being in the district? Because it sounds great for the customer, you walk down five different stores, especially if you're getting something fairly generic, like a ring or whatever. But you know, this is this phenomenon that happens in the economy of companies sort of agglomerating in one place. What is the reason for, why does it advantage you to be in the diamond district versus somewhere else where there isn't a neighbor?

• 40:43Speaker 04

  I'll tell you right now, well, you know, maybe after work today, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna stop by a Korean casting manufacturer that... He's got some new models in of stretchy bands that have springs in them that are, you know, diamonds all around. And that's not something I could have created or invented. They're not reaching the end consumer. They're not setting their own diamonds. They're just selling casting. So they have that. Someone else might have a sapphire or emerald that I need. And there is, uh, someone else might be an incredible diamond setter. There's a casting company that is able to do big castings if I want to cast a really big piece. Okay, someone's an expert in silver. I can't hire all these people. I can't put them all under one roof.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  And if you want to be, you know, if, yeah, if I want to, if I manufacture all my jewelry and I know exactly what I'm selling and I put it in a store, I'll go to Madison Avenue or whatever. I'll go downtown. But if I really want to be able to wheel and deal and be competitive, I want to work with all of my friends that I've been doing business with for 20 years in the diamond district and use all of the resources and all the creative energy that's there. When it comes to the gems, the gold, the castings, the labor, the sizing, the engravings, the laser etchings, whatever it might be. You know, it's, it's, it's a fun place to do business.

• 42:05Tracy Alloway?

  Do you expect higher tariffs to impact you at all?

• 42:08Speaker 04

  Um, no, not really. I don't really know. I mean, I hear so many stories about these tariffs. One person's this, one person's that. Listen, uh, you know, in my experience, getting people to pay, uh, to play, isn't the, the worst thing in the world. So, you know, it, it might be more difficult on one end and then someone's got more money on the other end. And then this happens and then that happens. And there's a chain reaction to a variety of different effects. Try, try it at this point, you know? I'm tired of looking at America declining ever since I got here in 1993. Try something.

• 42:40Joe Weisenthal?

  If I open a store, I, I'm actually going back to the diamond. Sometimes Tracy and I joke around about opening up, you know, going into the businesses of the people that we speak to. Can someone new just arrive in the diamond district or would they be looked at askance? Like how like, how deep are the roots of everyone who's there?

• 42:56Speaker 04

  Pretty deep. I mean, money talks. You could establish relationships with money pretty quickly. I established mines with no money, but.

• 43:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, how'd you get, how'd you get your foothold there?

• 43:05Speaker 04

  Well, I started photographing jewelry and putting it up on eBay in two thousand four when people laughed at jewelry on the internet. So, this is when Amazon was pretty cheap to buy and I think was selling books or something at that time. So, um, I was able to start photographing jewelry and putting it up on the internet. So I would photograph it, put it up, sell it, then buy it and ship it. And I was able to feed different vendors money until they would take me serious. And I learned the industry. But, um, unless you have years and years of experience, you don't really wanna sit here and go to the diamond district and open up and do anything.

• 43:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Right.

• 43:43Speaker 04

  Right, this is, um, uh, you know, not the type of thing that you just want. It's like me saying tomorrow, well, I wanna open up, uh, you know, a dentistry, something. You know what I'm saying, like, I don't know anything about that industry. I don't know anything about carpets, I don't know anything about, you know, manufacturing or of, uh, you know, computers. It's not my field. I dedicated myself to a field. So, if anybody wants to dive into that field, your grandkid might do, might do well. But you might have a hard time with it. I don't know.

• 44:15Tracy Alloway?

  There's one other thing I wanted to ask you, which is who is actually buying? And whether you've noticed any changes there? Cause we hear stories, I mean, obviously you hear stories about like China's central bank buying lots of gold or Russia maybe. But like, do you notice it in terms of actual, like, do Chinese people come in and buy more gold lately?

• 44:35Speaker 04

  No, not here particularly, but they might be buying it from someone else. Um, yeah, I'd really love to ask my gold vendor, Kahane, um, is his name. Or Isaac is his name. Kahane is the company. And, um, you know, his father and his uncle put that together, uh, put a business together. They went separate ways and he just inherited, his father just retired when he was eighty. He um has a safe full of gold and silver and he has lots and lots of customers. Who they are, I'm not sure. There are a variety of different people, but personally, people reach out to me once in a while, a family member, you know, um, might wanna run into some cash or they just sold their business and they wanna spend a half a million bucks on gold or something like that.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  Or um, a variety of different people. It's, I haven't seen a pattern. Okay, I haven't seen a pattern and I really haven't seen a rush of it either. Right now, the game is crypto. So, it's uh, you know, that's what they're thinking about and that's what it is. I'm not a big fan of it at all. Because I've held gold my whole life. I've passed it, I've gave it, I've hid it, I've sold it, I bought it, I melted it. I've never held a Bitcoin, I've never seen one. I've heard of them and I know they're out there somewhere, but I don't wanna wake up in the morning and need my wifi password to get my, to get my money.

• 45:59Joe Weisenthal?

  How secure is your safe password? Is that just in your head? I guess you could always bust it open if you forget it, right?

• 46:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's, the security is about uh, the cameras that are pointing at it and yeah, there is a combination plus a key. But listen, you know, I don't take my trays in and out every day. I am uh, I don't do any of that, to be honest. I have managers and, and managers that manage groups of people that I trust. Some people are trustworthy, believe it or not, in this world. Few. And the example I give is like this, right? The, there's a lot of iron in the world and a lot of base metals and there's very little, but rare, but there is gold. Same thing with people. There's a lot of untrustworthy people. There's a lot of base me, base metals, there's a lot of base people and then there's a few amazing people

• 46:49Speaker 04

  that are special, just like the gold and metal is special. And the universe creates them, just like the universe creates gold. Um, you look at the periodic chart, you gotta figure out where that came from, that's up to you to decide.

• 47:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Wait, actually, one last question. In, in Uncut Gems and Adam Sandler gave the stone to Kevin Garnett to like, hold for a while for good luck. Would a jeweler, a jeweler ever do that?

• 47:12Speaker 04

  Um, yeah, anything can happen. I mean, you know, you might be doing a promotion and you might be putting diamonds on someone and

• 47:19Joe Weisenthal?

  That stressed me out so much, the thought of like, I'm just gonna hit-

• 47:22Tracy Alloway?

  The whole movie was stressful.

• 47:23Speaker 04

  It stresses me out too. Uh, living it for 20 years has been stressful as well. So, yeah, you definitely give your gold and your jewelry and your watches to different people and you hope you find them at the end of the night. Um, whether they're going to award shows.

• 47:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  Sometimes you tell them, hey, you know, one of the lines I use to prevent myself to be in that situation, my insurance company won't allow it.

• 47:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, that's smart.

• 47:43Speaker 04

  So, you know, you get, this is the jewelry business. If you, you put yourself a word game that people are not prepared for, you're prepared for it, but they're not. Oh, my insurance company, if, they'll void me if I give out my stuff.

• 47:56Tracy Alloway?

  Have insurance premiums been going up? They must be, right?

• 47:59Speaker 04

  Yes, they have. If, if you don't make any claims, they kind of leave you alone.

• 48:02Tracy Alloway?

  Hmm.

• 48:03Speaker 04

  So, you know, the insurance is like almost a break even game.

• 48:07Tracy Alloway?

  Hmm.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  Right? You know, my insurance is expensive and if you use it, it goes up. And if you don't use it, you're giving them the money and so on and so forth. But better to have it and not use it.

• 48:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Tracy Alloway?

  Does it go up in tandem with like the price of gold though?

• 48:20Speaker 04

  Um, no.

• 48:21Tracy Alloway?

  Huh.

• 48:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Maxud Agajani, Trax NYC. Thank you so much for coming on Oddline.

• 48:26Speaker 04

  Hey, thank you. You guys were, uh, thank you for giving me this golden opportunity.

• 48:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, glad to have given you your start all those, all those years ago.

• 48:35Tracy Alloway?

  We had to have at least one pun in the conversation.

• 48:38Joe Weisenthal?

  No, that was fantastic. Thank you so much. That was a lot of fun.

• 48:41Speaker 04

  Hey, my pleasure.

• 48:56Joe Weisenthal?

  That was fun, Tracy.

• 48:57Tracy Alloway?

  Uh, it's always fun talking gold jewelry with, uh, Max. And yeah, I mean-

• 49:05Tracy Alloway?

  I guess the investment thesis has borne out so far.

• 49:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Gold's done, gold's done great, but I know it was a kind of a joke, but I really do take this seriously that at any time, no matter what the price of gold is, a hundred dollars worth of gold is always a hundred dollars. And so if you, no, for real, because if you're thinking like, I have X amount of dollar value that I want to store in some other non fiat form, this is true, right?

• 49:30Tracy Alloway?

  Uh, well, I'll tell you what was interesting was the idea of like competition with the crypto market.

• 49:34Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that was really interesting.

• 49:35Tracy Alloway?

  Because it did, I mean, as he was saying, it does sound like people are kind of, you know, it's sort of an either or.

• 49:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. Two, two, especially for like the people who want to like speculate on price, right?

• 49:47Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 49:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Two other things that I thought were really interesting from that conversation. One is his description of what specifically lab grown diamonds did to the diamond industry about sort of chopping out the, the low end of the diamond market.

• 50:00Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah.

• 50:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Because it's, yeah, it makes sense. Why buy a cheap diamond or a low grade diamond when you could get a high grown lab? Like, once you've already established that you're going to get something cheap, why not get the lab grown version? And then the way that that filters through to the price overall. And I was just really interested in like his comments on hiring and how difficult that is. Like I said, I had heard the, my barber said the same thing, like just this core aspect of like hiring people who are sort of like with it, not seeking to get high per se. Interesting, interesting comments there.

• 50:33Tracy Alloway?

  I'm sorry, speaking of being a bad worker, I'm very distracted by, I looked up the diamond encrusted Furby.

• 50:40Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh yeah. So how much is that going for?

• 50:42Tracy Alloway?

  Well, so it got auctioned off by A24, the production company.

• 50:46Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:47Tracy Alloway?

  Um, and I'm trying to find how much it went for, but I can't find it at the moment. But I'm just staring at all these like animated videos of the diamond Furby.

• 50:56Joe Weisenthal?

  I might watch that movie again.

• 50:58Tracy Alloway?

  Do you want to? I found it so stressful the first time. I don't think I could.

• 51:02Joe Weisenthal?

  It was really stressful, but you know, I know how it ends now. So maybe, maybe that'll make it a little bit, uh, maybe that'll make it a little easier.

• 51:09Tracy Alloway?

  There's, uh, some people are making imitation gold Furbies. I gotta get one of those.

• 51:14Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, just get one of those.

• 51:15Tracy Alloway?

  Okay.

• 51:16Joe Weisenthal?

  The bronze one.

• 51:17Tracy Alloway?

  Shall we leave it there before I just start like narrating my online shopping?

• 51:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes, let's leave it there.

• 51:22Tracy Alloway?

  Okay. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alockway. You can follow me at Tracy Alockway.

• 51:28Joe Weisenthal?

  And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow, uh, Maxud Agajani. Check out his Instagram. It's Trax NYC. Follow our producers, Kermit Rodriguez, at Kermit Armin, Dashell Bennett, at Dashbot, and Kale Brooks, at Kale Brooks. Thank you to our producer, Moses Andam. For more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com/oddlots. We have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter. And you can, uh, chat about all of these topics 24/7 in our Discord, discord.gg/oddlots.

• 51:57Tracy Alloway?

  And if you enjoy Odd Lots, if you like it when Joe says he's gonna be nice to the gold bugs, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber, you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad-free. All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for listening.

• 52:45Speaker 01

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• 53:21Speaker 07

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