Motley Fool Money - Motley Fool Money: 08.23.2013

Episode Date: August 23, 2013

ESPN's Nate Silver, Rick Harrison of Pawn Stars, and our own in-house Las Vegas expert gives us his take on gold. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Welcome to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. This week, it's two of our favorite interviews. Later in the show, it's Rick Harrison, star of the hit TV show Pond Stars. But we kick things off with Nate Silver, formerly of the New York Times, now with ESPN. We talked about his book, The Signal and the Noise, why so many predictions fail, but some don't. Nate, thanks for being here. Yeah, thank you, Chris. The rare in-studio guest on Motley Fool Money. I love it. Early in your book, you write, we have a problem, we love to make predictions, and we're

not very good at it. Why is that? Why are we bad at making predictions? Well, I think maybe the first question is why do we enjoy making predictions so much? And I think it has to do with we have all these things that are uncertain in our lives. When we feel that if only we could predict them, then we exert more control over our lives. Everything would be great. Right.

Yeah. which stocks are going to increase by 50% over the next five years, and you'd have a very nice life eventually. But the problem is that we aren't as good at using all this information that's out there as we think we are. So what happens in prediction is you have data, information, juxtapose against human judgment, right? And often things go wrong when you have kind of hard facts and kind of our human intuitions collide together. And so the book considers cases where there have been people who have achieved success-making prediction, but also cases where you see widespread failures, like the failures that led to the financial crisis,

for example, the failures of political pundits on TV, where if you go back and look at the McLaughlin Group, for example, which they'll have their authors come on at the end of the show. It's the end of every hour. Yeah, go around, give me a prediction. Go around, give me a prediction. So actually, I went and looked, and I took a while, right, but I went through the transcripts and wrote down all their predictions and then went back

and evaluated how they had done, right? And they got exactly half right, so they were as good as flipping a coin and know better. But part of it is, you know, there's a demand for expertise, I think. There's a man for someone to come on TV or radio and play the role of the expert. But it doesn't have very much to do with the actual accuracy.

of their information sometimes. It's more like, you know, how do they sound on TV or how crisply presented is their idea? And whether it's factual or not is maybe less important, especially, it shouldn't be less important, but often is less emphasized, I think. One of the things that you also write about is that there's no such thing as true objectivity,

that these predictions are always going to have some level of bias or subject to. productivity. Is that something you can solve for in polling? Can you solve for bias? Is that where sort of the margin of error comes in when we're looking at polls? Well, so there are some polls that can poll 100,000 people, but they're still kind of aiming at the wrong target, where they have bad algorithms that they're using. So, for example, there are polls that don't call people who have cell phones, which is now about a third of the American population and people who rely on their cell, excuse me, who people who

who only have cell phones and don't have landlines, right? And those people tend to be younger, more urban, more democratic-leaning, more minorities. They have different characteristics that make them vote differently. And if you exclude that one-third of the population, then you could survey the other couple hundred million Americans, right, who do have landlines, and you still would have a biased sample in that respect. So people think, oh, you just kind of collect more and more data and more and more information, and you'll get better and better.

But you reach a limit that is far, far short of perfection if you're doing the wrong process. And that's often what you see, not just in polling, but in a lot of types of prediction where people keep collecting more and more information. But if you have a bad model, if you give a computer program, bad instructions, you wind up with garbage in, garbage out. And computers can't spin straw into gold. You say that weather forecasters and gamblers are success stories when it comes to predictions. Yes. How so? So, well, the difference with weather forecasters and gamblers is that they're both used to thinking in terms of probabilities.

So you see on the Weather Channel that there's a 20% chance of rain, for example. Some people get very frustrated with that because they're like, why can't these guys tell me exactly what's going to happen? And the reason is that, well, they can't, but neither can anyone else. They know they can't, and that helps to make them better. Weather forecasts, they're considered a joke by some people, and that used to be kind of true that really they would miss the high temperature by an average of seven degrees, right, a couple days in advance, but now that error's been cut in half. And for something like hurricanes, where if you have a hurricane sitting right now in the

Gulf of Mexico, three days before landfall, they can pinpoint on average the landfall location, 72 hours in advance by about 100 miles, which means you can evacuate, say, the size tip of Alabama or Mississippi or a certain part of Florida, not with guaranteed success, but where it's prudent and saves lives to evacuate. 20 or 25 years ago, you couldn't do that at all, where literally if you had a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, it was equally likely as far as they knew to hit Tallahassee, Florida, and Houston, Texas. So the whole kind of crescent of the Gulf Coast was in play.

So that's a case where there have been very tangible, practical improvements, and it's because the weather forecasters knew that if we can think probabilistically and say, here's what we know and here's what we don't, despite having more and more powerful computers, then you can start to make progress. We're trying to close that gap between what we think we know and what we really know. If you can work on both ends of that, and the book tries that. It says, well, first of all, let's admit that some things are going to be very hard to predict. Predicting the direction the American economy more than a couple months advance is intrinsically a very hard problem. On the other hand, we can do some things to be more, more data.

ad-driven and make us better and smarter. And so we up our skill level at the same time. We're a little bit more humble and modest about what we're likely to accomplish realistically. You're listening to Motley Full Money talking with Nate Silver. His new book is The Signal and the Noise, why so many predictions fail, but some don't. Let's stick with the economy because the conventional wisdom is that the stock market is a leading indicator. And right now we're at about a four-year high for the stock market. Does that, in your mind, predict a faster recovery for the economy overall? So what's interesting is that I think investors and kind of economists have different biases.

So I've gone back and looked at cases where you had. So right now, for example, the forecasts of GDP are quite bearish, where people still think it's going to chug along at 1.8 percent or 2.2.1%. So it's been rare historically when you had a very bullish market. and a bearish GDP forecast. And what happens is actually you do tend to beat the GDP forecast when the market's going up as much as it has. Investors seem to be – I think one good thing about investors is that they don't have

to worry about being politically correct. Whereas if you're making a prediction where you have reputation on the line more than money, your incentives are different. You might not want to stick out too much, right? It might be easier to say, well, the economy is. been bad for a long time, so I can stay more in consensus by saying it's going to continue to be bad, right? And of course, investors have their own issues with kind of believing maybe too much in the sentiment sometimes. But there is a lot of power and having a lot of

independent information coming together. The kind of 90% of time I say that markets are functioning well, they can be a beautiful thing. And of course, there's either 10% of time where you have bubbles and you have panics and you have kind of collectively very irrational behavior. But taking on the whole, there is macroeconomic information as far as I've found in the S&P 500 in the Dow. Why do you think more people didn't predict the financial crisis that we saw in 2008? Why didn't more people see that coming? Well, part of it is you had a number of dominoes unfolding, and I think this is almost

kind of more of the kind of Teleb Black Swan type argument, right? But where I think people don't realize how the risks in different parts of the economy are correlated with one another. So you think, okay, so this is the whole problem behind, for example, the rating agencies thought, well, we're going to take all these different mortgages and bundle them together and repackage them. And, you know, by the miracle diversification, we'll take a bunch of kind of B plus, you know, be rated crab. And there'll be AAA. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right? Because they assume that what happens to like a carpenter in Cleveland and a dentist in Denver are independent from one other, right?

But of course, if you have a housing bubble that bursts and everyone is facing the same conditions, then the risks are hugely correlated. And so the whole structure blows up. And they defaulted at race that were literally hundreds of times what was expected. And then you further leverage that with the fact that in addition to just having the actual effects of people having mortgages underwater, itself, I mean, just the sheer volume of betting, side-bending on the housing market was astounding. For every actual dollar that exchanged hands with someone buying or selling a home, there were about $50 worth of side bets.

And so instead of being a severe but localized problem that became a global problem. Coming up, more with Nate Silver. Stay right here. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. The title of your book is The Signal and the Noise. When it comes to the stock market, what do you think is that? the noise that the average investor would be wise to just tune out? Well, I think a lot of the day-to-day fluctuations, right, where if you look at the stock

market over intervals of 10 years or 15 or 20 years, it does display certain types of predictable behavior, right? Where if the PE ratios get too high, it's been a pretty reliable predictor of a market that will achieve below average growth or even maybe a favorite to decline over the long term. But over the short run, it's a bit different where I think, you know, when Alan Greenspan described the market as being irrationally exuberant, right, if you had invested your money at that time and had the hindsight or the foresight to sell right at the peak of the NASDAQ bubble, you would still have made three or four times your money back.

And so, you know, in the book I quote from the economist Fisher Black, and that's kind of where my 90 percent, 10 percent conception comes in. Because normally it's a healthy strategy in life to pay some attention to what your neighbors are doing and to say, well, you know, it's probably not the case that if everyone else thinks this is a good idea, that my theory is better than theirs, right? And if everyone else thinks these CDOs are safe, then, you know, who am I to say differently? But there is that 10% of the time where that herd mentality kind of leads us off a cliff. And I think it's just kind of the price that we pay for having markets where people are reacting to one another, right? The benefits to aggregate information are sometimes compromised to people lose their independence. And one thing you worry about a little bit now, right, is kind of is that people become so efficient.

Some of the banks at kind of developing their algorithms and so forth that there's kind of no more almost species diversity as much, right? And so everyone's kind of doing the same thing. And if one fund goes down, then a whole bunch might as well. So it's a little bit frightening. It's also a little bit frightening, by the way, just how many trades are being made, right? There's some notion that, well, the market's becoming more efficient. Well, if the market's efficient, then you wouldn't have very much reason to trade. But the volume, just the volume of shares that change hands is increasing very, very quickly.

So now the average share of common stock is traded once every six months, and it was once every six years back in the 50s and 60s. So it really has become an investment now where you buy stocks to trade them and not to hold them, and that changes the climate, I think, quite a bit. I was going to say, it seems like with so much more information available to so many more investors, individual investors, and, of course, institutional investors, fund managers, et cetera, It would seem like in some ways it's harder than ever for an investor to have any kind of edge in terms of predicting where a stock price is going to go. Well, maybe that's true, but it makes it easier for people to think they have an edge,

right? So in the book, and this is going to come from a different kind of historical era, but I talk about what happened when you had the printing press invented, and all of a sudden there were books when there weren't really any books before and people had a lot more information exponentially more than they had a generation earlier. And the first thing that people did is kind of read books that proselytized different religious ideas. And so you had, you know, hundreds of years of holy war in Europe, right?

Where it's like, well, now there's way more information than I can get a handle on myself. So I have to pick and choose what I read and people, I think, forget that, you know, the subset of information that you come across is not the only information. in the world, but you become devoted into it and believe deeply into it. And that's kind of why you have people willing to make so many bets, I think, in the market, and the volumes are increasing so much, is that as people kind of cherry-pick, whether consciously or not, what information they look at, and they assume that because they're in possession of it,

because they read that this information is especially worthwhile, and often it's not. So you're saying the specious and incorrect information that's available, widely available on the Internet today, that was going on in Gutenberg's time, as well? Yeah, you see this precedent where, look, you know, people eventually get better at processing information, right? But the volume of information we have in the world today is astounding, right?

Where we're generating, I don't know the figure offhand, but it's quintillions of bytes of data each day, right? Where it would take, you know, all of humanity, all seven billion people, hundreds of lifetimes to go through it, right? And so there's kind of this signal to noise ratio, I would say you call it, is becoming, is waning because you have more information than you have useful information. A lot of it's just kind of crap and kind of should go in your spam folder, so to speak. But people think that every, you know, you look at CNBC or Bloomberg or you see all this data and you think, oh, there must be some real insight there. And, you know, maybe there is a little bit, but you have to sort through an awful long.

lot of hay to find that needle that might give you some extra advantage. You're listening to Motley Full Money talking with Nate Silver. His new book is The Signal and the Noise, Why So Many Predictions Fail, but some don't. I can't let you leave without asking you a couple questions about baseball because once upon a time you developed a system for forecasting baseball performance. You sold it to Baseball Perspectus. First question is, what do you think of Moneyball? The book or the Well, I, you know, or the movie. I mean, I'm just, I'm just curious because this is, you know, Billy Bean, as much as anyone, sort of is the face, at least the Hollywood face of sort of this Sabremetrix movement.

And I'm just curious what your reaction was. I used to work for a company called Baseball Perspectus, and we were doing the Bill James stuff and the Moneyball stuff. And so 10 years ago, I remember going to the winter meetings in New Orleans. and it was like a scene just out of Michael Lewis's book, where you had kind of the nerds on the one side of the lobby and the jocks in the other. They were conveniently the jocks occupied the hotel bar and were drinking a lot of whiskey, right?

And the nerds were kind of circling around trying to hand them like resumes and pronounce of PowerPoints, right? But there was a lot of tension because people thought that they were trying to take one another's jobs. But now that's just not the case at all, where these teams have figured out. The one thing about baseball is that, is that you have a scoreboard, right, where you know how well you did at the end of the day.

You start to get to the long run fairly quickly. It takes 1062 games, but so you can evaluate your decision-making processes, what work and what don't pretty fast and get better at it. And you've seen teams say, look, why am I going to let my cultural fear of a stathead prevent me from winning more ball games and making more money as a franchise? And so you've seen, you know, stats and scouts are getting along now. I talk to Billy Bean. I talk to an old scout in the book named John Sanders with the Dodgers.

And it's hard to tell apart what they're saying anymore. What they know is that, look, people who are good at finding information and evaluating information, scouts and stat geeks have a lot more in common than you might realize. Because they both have that skill to say, here is that signal from all the noise that I perceive. and here's what actually matters. And that skill is quite rare. In 2009, Time Magazine named Nate Silver, one of the world's 100 most influential people.

His new book is The Signal and the Noise, why so many predictions fail, but some don't. Nate, thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thank you. Up next, Rick Harrison from the hit TV show, Pond Stars. This is Motley Fool Money. What do you get when you mix a Las Vegas pawn shop with the History Channel?

television gold. Pond Stars is the highest rated show on the history channel and one of the highest rated shows in all of cable television. And one of the stars is Rick Harrison, the owner-operator of the world famous gold and silver pawn shop, and author of the new book, Licensed a Pond, Deals, and My Life at the Gold and Silver. Rick, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Now, your pawn shop really is a family affair. You work with your dad, you work with your son.

How did you get started in this business? When we first moved to town in 81, my dad went broken in San Diego. You know, in 1981, he sold real estate, you know, at 19% interest rates, you can't sell a lot of houses. Yeah, it wasn't going too well back then. And he'd always bought and sold gold and always wanted a pawn shop, so I figured what the hell I moved to Vegas. For people who have seen your TV show, obviously a lot of what they're seeing is the selling, people coming in to sell items.

Where does it shake out in terms of selling versus pawning? What percentage of your business at the shop is selling versus pawning? Oh, I do much more pawns than I do people selling this stuff. But there is a stigma attached to the whole pawning thing, and there's not really to selling something. So the people who pawn stuff never want to be on television, I mean, and after two and a half years of filming, I have more or less given up to even trying to get those people on television.

And for those who don't know, could you just give a thumbnail sketch explanation of what are the dynamics involved in pawning? How do the economics work? The economics are pretty simple. It's the oldest form of banking. I mean, it's literally in the Bible. You bring in a piece of merchandise to me. Say it's a wedding band. I offer you $100.

If you accept it, I give you $100. I take it in your merchandise. I put it in an envelope. I put it in my safe. And I hand you a pawn ticket. And say you come back in 30 days. You give me $115.15. I give you your merchandise Mac, and that's the end of the transaction.

Here in Nevada, the laws are that I have to hold this stuff for a minimum of 120 days. So if after 120 days you don't pick up your merchandise, it becomes mine title 100% transfers to the pawnbroker. Now I can put your wedding brand in my showcase and put it out for sale. I can scrap it. I can do whatever I want with it. Nothing goes on your credit report. sue you. I don't go out there to break your legs and get my money back. Thank you. That's the end of the transaction.

Now, one of the things that you write about in your book is that one of the ways you can track the economy is by looking at the number of pond items in your backroom that are there for more than 120 days without being picked up. So what is the gold and silver backroom indicator telling us about the current state of our economy? Oh, it sucks. I mean, don't mince words. I mean, no, I mean, I'm being 100% honest. You know, when the economy is good, it's close to a 90% redemption rate. And I'm like 75% right now.

Las Vegas was a hit a lot harder than other places. Even the tourists aren't picking their stuff up like I used to, because a lot of tourists end up planting their stuff, and I just mail it out to them. That's basically the situation with the economy right now. In Mexico, believe it or not, the government owns a lot of the pawn shops in Mexico. I mean, they own the largest pawn shop in the world in Mexico City. And it's one of their economic indicators their pawn shops are.

You're listening to Motley Full Money. Our guest is Rick Harrison, author of License to Pond, Deals, and My Life at the Golden Silver. How has the success of the TV show, Pond Stars, changed your business? I went from like having 70 to 100 people a day in the pawn shop to 4,000. So that seems like a positive trend. Yeah, it does, it's been pretty good. But are, I mean, are those people, you're getting a lot more people in the store, but are you seeing the same percentage of people who are looking to transact,

or are some of those people just tourists like, hey, I saw the TV show, I just want to say I went to the gold and silver pond, shop? I mean, it is, I mean, I am getting more transactions at my pawn counter and I'm buying more things. It's not equivalent to the increase of business. I mean, the amount of buys and pawns haven't gone 40 times, but I do a really great business and T-shirts and bobbleheads nowadays, though.

Merchandise. They love the merchandise. Oh, yeah, we're definitely merchandising back out of it, yeah. All right, let's talk about a few of the items that you've carried and that you write about in your book. One of them, the battle plans for the attack on Iwo Jima. Yes, there was a lot of people who had those prior to the invasion. No one kept them, though. You've got to remember the mindset. It's the 1940s. People didn't really think about things like that. And there was actually one guy who was a landing craft operator who kept the entire set of plans in his inside coat pocket.

for the entire war. And his son ended up selling him to me. One of the other items you write about is a pimps ring that's shaped like a king's crown. Yes. What is the story behind that? Being in the pawn business my entire life, I have seen every single walk of life. I have talked to single moms, politicians, and billionaires. So you get to know every aspect of society. And back in the day, up until like 10 years ago, every pimp had to have a crown ring. And if you also, if you read the whole book, you'll realize that pips always have to have a lot of jewelry.

When a pimp is generally arrested, he's arrested for pandering. So any cash he has on him will be confiscated for evidence. But the jewelry won't. So when he gets arrested, the jewelry is impounded. He sends someone down to pick up the jewelry, which can be taken back to the pawn shop so that they can get money for bail. And that's also why Pemps always buy their jewelry in pawn shops, because if you buy something in a pawn shop, generally the agreement is you can always pawn it back for half of what you paid for it. You're listening to Motley Full Money. Our guest is Rick Harrison, author of the new book, Licensed to Pond, Deal, and My Life at the Golden Silver.

In terms of the pawn shop, what's the best deal you've ever made? The best deal I've ever made was back in the early 90s, this is pre-internet. A lady came in with four photograves. You know, late 1800s, early 1900s photographic process. That was really expensive to do at the time. They were of American Indians. I knew they had to be worth something, but they were worth. They had no idea.

So I took a shot of here, 50 bucks for them. And I used to have to go to a library, like, once a week. There was all sorts of weird things I'd buy, and I'd have to do some research on them. Because I found out, I mean, a long time ago, if you put a story behind something, it's a lot easier to sell it, and you get a lot more money. So I go down to the library, I start looking everything up, and I find out that in the world of American photography, you have Ansel Adams, and the next one step, and the next one down is Edward Curtis.

These were all photographs by Edward Curtis, and the negatives were in the Smithsonian. Wow. And I got $20,000 for the photographs. Now, unfortunately, I have to ask you the flip side of that, which is, what's the worst deal you've ever? ever made. The worst deal I've ever made? This was like two years ago and the guy was actually filmed doing it. Wow. I bought a pair of earrings off a guy in a suit with receipts, everything. I gave him $40,000 for the earrings. The next day, the police came down and took the earrings. They were fakes? No, no, they were staked. They were stolen. And I mean, there was

when that happens, I lose every dime. Now, what's the, I got to ask, Just in watching some of your show, there's some pretty interesting items that people come in with. I'm just curious in all the years that you've been running, the gold and silver. What's the strangest item you've ever seen? The strangest item has got to be is I actually had a guy come in with a scroll. It was right around 210 years old from Japan. And it was an instruction manual. It's called a Shunga scroll.

It was an instruction manual for a young girl before. her wedding night, also called a pillow book, and obviously designed to scare the living hell out of her, where everything all is exaggerated and it's correct down to the fluids. Wow. Yes. Yeah, it is definitely different. Now, are there ever times where you or members of your staff won't buy something because it's too personal, or is this a job where you just can't allow sentimentality to enter the equation? A pawnbroker with a heart is a pawnbroker out of business.

Fair enough. Yeah, so, you know, I'm not here to judge anybody or anything else like that. The way I look at it, thank God you had your mother's wedding ring so you could actually pawn it or sell it to make rent. It's much better than the other guy who didn't have anything. It's not on the street. Now, one of the things you write about in your book is learning to negotiate by watching your father negotiate. Yeah.

For our listeners out there, what's one thing we should keep in mind when we're negotiating? Okay, first off, never give the first price. I mean, why throw out there the first price? I mean, why tell someone you'll pay them $1,000 for something when you can say, how much you're going to get out of it? They say $500. I mean, the second you give the first price, you're always negotiating against yourself. The second number one rule I always have never fall in love with it.

I mean, if you have to have it, you've already lost. Always be willing to walk away from a bad deal. But I'm guessing in all the years you've been running this shop and all the items you've seen and acquired, there have got to be some items that you've fallen in love with. Yeah, I've got some really cool stuff in my office. Such as? such as I love like Bill Graham concert posters from the late 60s. Have you ever seen these things?

I mean, you've literally got to be frying on acid to read some of them. I love that kind of stuff. This is the kind of stuff in my office right now. I'm just looking around. I have illuminated books. If you don't know what those are, those used to be very popular and very expensive even over 100 years ago when they were made. All the illustrations of the book are actually hand-painted by an artist.

I collect Atomos clocks, which are really bizarre clocks that they started making in the 1930s. You never wind them. You never put a battery in them. You never pull the weights or anything. They run forever. They're the closest thing in the world for perpetual motion. They run off atmospheric pressure and temperature change actually winds the clock, and they just go forever. The clock sitting here that it still keeps decent time, and it's been running for 10 years.

You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Our guest this week is Rick Harrison. His new book is Licensed to Pond, Deals, and My Life at the Golden Silver. He's also the star of Pond Stars, which can be seen on the History Channel. Rick, before we wrap up with a round of buy, seller, hold, two questions. One, for our listeners out there who are investors, how does Rick Harrison invest his own money? A few different ways. I mean, I have my own business here. so I've got to invest a lot of my money back into that. Right now, I absolutely love silver. Really? I think, oh, yeah. As opposed to gold? More than gold?

More than gold. Well, I mean, the whole thing is gold, none of it's disappearing. It's just accumulated and then the pile gets bigger and bigger, as opposed to silver, where it seems like every other day there's a new industrial use for it. and the piles of around the world have just nothing but gotten smaller and smaller. I mean, up until in the early 80s, the U.S. government had three billion ounces in inventory. They have none now. They're a net buyer. As far as an economic play in the dollar falling, I like that.

But the fact of the matter is supply is not going to keep up with demand on all the industrial uses of silver. So the price has no way to go but up. You're listening to Motley Full Money. Our guest is Rick Harrison. The book is License. to pawn, deal steals, and my life at the golden silver. Rick, we're going to wrap up with buy, seller, hold. Let's start with the founder of PayPal recently started a $2 million fund

aimed at getting college students younger than 20 to drop out of school and start a business. You dropped out of high school. You've been very successful. So buy, sell, or hold, the value of a college education. The value of a buy. If I knew everything that I know now, I knew it a lot earlier, I'd have been a rich man a lot earlier. One of the stars of your TV show, Pond Stars, is Chumley, your employee. Buy-Seller Hold, Chumly branded merchandise.

Oh, buy, buy, buy, buy. Now, are you saying that just because you make a profit off of that, or is that really the most popular stuff? Oh, 50% of my merchandising is chump. He is a rock star. He tweets that he's going to be at a nightclub. A thousand people will show up. Women lock to him. I don't get it.

I don't get it whatsoever. All I know is it works. And finally, you have now got both of these things. Buy seller hold, fame and fortune. Bye. It beats the alternative? Oh, definitely, definitely. My girlfriend just thinks it's the greatest thing in the world

because every time we go to the strip or a restaurant, they go, oh, Rick, right this way. The book is licensed upon, deals, steals, and my life at the gold and silver. It is already a business bestseller on Amazon. It is a great read. Rick Harrison, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having it. Coming up, we'll get a few thoughts from our in-house expert on Las Vegas. Stay right here.

You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Welcome back to Motley Fool Money. I'm Chris Hill. joined in studio now by our in-house Las Vegas expert. He also knows the thing or two about the financial industry, Matt Coppenhefer. Thank you for being here, my friend. That's a lot of pressure. As I was saying, do you turn to the break? I'm putting some pressure on you. But, you know, that said, you're also the only, you know, the only fresh content. You know, we do the best of now and then. Fortunately, we have a lot of great interviews to choose from. These are some great

And it was great talking with Rick Harrison. But I am curious as someone from Las Vegas. First, we'll get to his shop in a second. But just the whole notion of gold and silver as investments, as commodities, obviously at the Motley Fool, we're focused on stocks. But do you ever look at commodities and gold and silver in particular and think, well, you know, there might be a short-term investment play there? Not for my portfolio.

But I don't think that they are. it's crazy to think of them as a potential addition to somebody's portfolio. The way that I think about it is as a relative value type of investment. So if I were to look at gold, I look at gold compared to other commodities, compared to the stock market, that sort of thing. And when it looks like a value compared to everything else, I think that's a reasonable time to buy it over the past few years when gold has been flying high. Just hasn't. Yeah. I mean, there's the old saying about, well, you know, you can invest in gold or you and maybe the smarter move is the picks and shovels, you know, the people who are doing that,

do you ever look at investments from that standpoint where you just think, well, look, I'm not interested in gold, but plenty of people are and someone's got to get it out of the ground. And, you know, or, you know, given your area of expertise, does it all pale in comparison to the financial industry? I don't, but there can be guys that are, there can be companies that are very good at that, so you pile the next level on top of that. And if you're really resource efficient, if a company is really good at getting the gold out of the ground without spending a lot to do it, that can be a fantastic investment. Our producer, Matt Greer, was out in Las Vegas recently. He did drive by Rick Harrison's shop and said it was a line out the door. It's incredibly popular.

The show is just fantastic to watch, but it's an incredibly popular place. So for anyone going to Las Vegas, maybe looking for other things to do if they drive by Rick Harrison shop and take, I don't want to wait in that line. I mean, you've lived there for a long time. Give me a recommendation next time I go to Las Vegas. My strategy was generally to try to avoid the strip because most people that live there, they get their fill of it every once in a while but want to kind of stay away. In terms of off-the-strip activities, I'm a big nature guy, and Red Rock is what everybody thinks about when they think Las Vegas. It's beautiful. But Mount Charleston, a little bit further out, about an hour drive from Las Vegas. Oh, man, it's amazing.

It's a very challenging trek to get up to the top of Mount Charleston, but there are a bunch of great short hikes out there. Another one is to go over by Lake Mead. There's a canyon called Bootlegger Canyon. There's also a great paved bike trail that goes 30 miles that overlooks Lake Mead. Some pretty awesome stuff to do there. You had me at Bootlegger Canyon. We've got about a minute left. Obviously, if I'm out in Las Vegas, I've got to eat somewhere.

You bet. So give me a recommendation there. I'll give you three real quick. If you're on the strip, sushi samba is in the Palazzo. If you're going to eat on the strip, you're going to spend a lot of money, but you want to get value for that money. You're going to spend a lot at sushi samba, but every time I've eaten there, it's been fantastic. Also on the strip, but in a little bit odder place in the Hawaiian marketplace, Tamba, it's an Indian restaurant. I've always had a great experience there.

The lamb skewers are incredible. And finally, off the strip, Casa de Amori, it feels like an old-time picture of Las Vegas, Italian food. It's a great experience. Matt Kauffin-Huffer, in-house Vegas expert. Thank you for being here, my friend. That is going to do it for this week. The show is mixed by Rick Engdahl. Our engineer is Steve Broido.

Our producer is Matt Creer. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. I'm