Odd Lots - This Is Why People Are So in Love With Gold

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

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.

Hey there, Oddlots listeners. It's Tracy Alloway. And Joe Wisenthau. We are very excited to announce that Oddlots is going to Washington. That's right. For the first time, we're going to do a live public Oddlots recording in our nation's capital. That's going to be March 12th in Washington, D.C. 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 slash oddlots. Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News Hello and welcome to another episode

of the Odd Lots podcast I'm Joe Wisenthall And I'm Tracy Allaway Tracy, uh, gold has had a really good year 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? 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. You're going to be nice to the gold books now?

Yeah. All right. I'm not capitulating, but it's not, look, the charge's great. 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. As we're recording this, I think it's at 2,600.

Yeah, 2649. It had gotten as high as 2,800 almost in October, but it's been, I mean, the last couple of years have been phenomenal. 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. And I guess the demand has just been so strong that it doesn't really matter this time around. Can I say something? Mm-hmm. 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 it's just like I sort of felt going into this conversation that we can't just talk to someone who's just, you know, going to tell the same story they could have told about gold every single day for the last 20 years. 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, as I know personally. So it makes sense to talk to someone who's in the physical market. 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 in gold. And why right now? 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're going to be speaking with 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 Jems, one of my favorite movies of the last few years, because he actually was in. 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. We're going to talk all these gold with Max, Maxud, aka Yossi.

Thank you so much for coming back on Odlots. Thank you for having me for a second time. What's your life been like the last four years? How did that all change your life? Am I, do Odd Lots? How did that change? It's only been up from there. And that little movie that you appear.

And the movie did good. Odd Lots did good. Other podcasts did good. And all the social media also did really good for me. Here's an important question. Did you bring me the diamond-encrusted Furby? That's all I want out of life. In all reality, it wasn't even diamonds in that thing.

I know. It was made out of brass. I know. It's a movie magic. Honestly, I would take the brass version too. It might not be good for your skin. Oh, really? What does brass do to your skin?

It turns it green. She got it. She knows it. Yeah. All women. this the big difference between gold and brass. So other than the fact that gold doesn't turn your skin green, what do people, what is it the people love about gold? Why do people, why do people buy gold from you? 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 want to 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. 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. It's like a proof of work, right? If you can, like even in the Bitcoin sense, also, you know, one thing, Tracey, you know, Max mentioned the pharaohs. Gold doesn't tarnish, right? And so it's like historically going back thousands of years, it was associated with the gods as like one commodity that is truly immortal in a way that most things that we find on earth aren't. 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? 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 demand, but not that much. But, you know, at some point, people can't afford what they want.

in 2004, you could stack yourself with gold, 14 carrot 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. 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 gold. dollars into something else it does the same job at 2649 as it does a three yeah well listen until the guy that bought it at 2004 walks through the door and his hundred dollars worth of gold looks like

yeah a bigger pile than your hundred dollars 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 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 yeah it might not do that but it'll keep you safe and sound and happy do you feel competition with the crypto market

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 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? Yeah, could be up more. What are people into these days? what are people into these days when they come into your store

how much is it like the crazy diamond and crested ferbys that Tracy didn't get today versus just wanting a nice tasteful chain versus what's what's what's I mean listen everybody everybody has their own little need you know 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 got to buy or something All right. So you got to go and you got to buy. It could be a tennis bracelet. That will be with diamonds?

Will they tell you if it's for the side chick? Will they say that? By the way, this is for the side chick. I could usually tell what's going on. Is the bracelet for the side chick smaller than the one for the wife? You know, that varies from customer to customer. I can put it that way? Okay.

Can I ask the basic question, though? Why do you think gold prices happen going up? Well, listen, I mean, you know, we got to 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. 36 trillion dollars in that one trillion dollars in interest. You got China buying it up like crazy.

So I hear central banks this, that. If you look in the numbers, you're going to 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 going to find there and how this is all going to come to a head as things that get turbulent, you know, 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 going to 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. I feel like there is attention there, though, because like if I imagine myself coming into a jewelry store and I'm like, okay, I'm going to 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 a gold chain. What am I really going to do with it? 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? Prioritize the gold. Yeah, we're supposed to be productive, successful people in a modern world with surplus. 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? 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, $18,500 or whatever it was. And he 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, you know, wherever he is now, if he held on to that gold, now it's, you know, 26,500 or whatever.

So he did great And he just bought 10 ounces of You know one ounce each of bouillon bars 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 then even 2650 But I'm not looking for that to happen anytime soon

One thing I 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? Yeah. I mean, that's not like the...

I found that to be very entertaining. Well, you guys would. 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.

I remember like yours. I don't know what year it was. You had like the chart of Iran and the chart, you know, different like tensions in the Middle East and stuff like that. I do that on tracks news. Oh, that's the track's news page.

Yeah, yeah. I have a little side channel where I talk about what's really going on of the world. But when it comes to my main pages, I want to, I have to make money. Yeah. 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 going to flood out my shop and I'm going to hunker down and I'm going to wait for it all to end.

What are your security costs like now? Well, listen, I mean, I'm in the middle of the Diamond District. You know, my rent is about $50,000 a month. But I have three spaces up, you know, in 14A, 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 where it was a place to stash, gold, this is the place to do it. So I'm going to take advantage of that fact. What are, what do you, when you leave for the day, like, how big is that protocol of like locking up everything? Right. Well, my staff does it. Okay. 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. When you talk about buying a half a million, seven kilos worth of gold, making a half a million dollar order. What's that? What's that like?

Who are the big players in the sort of wholesale gold district? And for anybody doing the math, that's in 14-carcoc. So they're going to be thinking this guy's not on the up and up. That's coming from different chain manufacturers. Okay. In Italy, sometimes could be Indonesia or somewhere else. And 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 a beautiful factories, family run. But I like to buy my gold in gold chains. Now, if I buy gold bars or grain and I do that often as well, I do that right on the street on 47th Street with several different vendors there that are really, really cool people worth visiting and learning about. What do you higher gold prices actually do for your profit margins? Because I imagine, like, the actual manufacturing cost is probably the biggest chunk. Yeah, no, that's not, the manufacturing cost is not the biggest chunk.

I mean, the gold, the material is the biggest 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 because people associate that with a higher quality, right? You know, 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?

And that's how people think about jewelry and that's the psychology behind it. And, you know, that works in our favor if we're building a jewelry brand or whatever. So by the way, we're recording this on January 7th. Just today, Mark Zuckerberg, the meta CEO, the Facebook guy, released a video about content moderation. And a number of people noticed he was wearing a $900,000 watch. His style has changed. Yep. 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? Yeah, yeah. People are growing up. Things are definitely changing and people are flashing a little bit more. I mean, you know, there was an era of Steve Jobs where he was the real leader. And he was, you know, the same pair of jeans and sneakers, new balance sneakers, very plain. And, you know, once he passed, other people are stepping out. And the watch game is, I guess, something that caught Mark's eye.

and he's in it now and he's playing along, which is great for business. And, you know, that's really what's been going on. And I think that's a great trend. A lot of people wearing different timepieces. There's way more information about them now. The market is kind of been democratized a little bit where people could look up different 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 it's good for business. So I'm happy about it. it. He definitely had a little makeover recently. You can tell. We've been talking a lot about gold,

but 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? Well, 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 s i1 j color what are these words these are all the gradings of the stone okay right keep going so there's so didn't you didn't you buy an engagement ring ever you forgot it was a it was a family heirloom so i'd never had to go to the lucky you yeah i got very lucky i had no money in those days 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? Here's a decent example. Why would I buy a Honda Accord built from a factory when I could buy a lab grown Mercedes? Yeah, I get that. Okay, you know? So it's really, it kills the low end. Yeah, it's, because if you're going to go the low end anyway, you don't really Yeah, but once you take out the low end, the high end is coming with it, and all sorts of things are going down. But on natural is still natural. Natural gems are a different story. So the natural gems are for the wife. Yeah, they're for their wives and they're for a way for you to spend money. But 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 mark? Not yet. Nobody really knows what to do. Okay. So engagement, marriage, these are, you know, the highest societal matters that one can

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. He buys her a ruby, I think we'll see it. Well, Kate Middleton have a Sapphire. Oh, she did? Yeah. That was a big deal. 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 for now. Wait, why do things, like, fall in and out of fashion like that? Like, why do diamonds have such a hold on the engagement market still? 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 also the shoe fit. So they wore it. You know, she got a one character. She's got a one and a half. Well, my husband bought me a three-carter, but yours is 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. 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? 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. Okay? If you really want, you know, if you're somewhere in the Middle East or in Asia and you're getting married, you're going to 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 top 1% 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 going to keep your value, give your wife a gold bar or, you know, you're not going to 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. Maybe one day.

Yeah. After, you know, after the economy really takes a nose dive, then, yeah, maybe. So that's the reason. Let's talk about watches a little more. You sell watches. I'm looking at a 92. 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 water? Well, the big boys, obviously protect Philippe, Autamar, and Rolex. And then if you really want to stand out, you might get a brigade or, you know, Cardieres 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 going to do the job. You've arrived. Yes. And then from there, you go out further and further into something that might be a little bit unknown, but amongst the community of people in the watches, it's respected. And there's definitely several different brands like that,

and none of them come to mind at the moment. But I usually rely on my friend Roman Sharf when it comes to watches. He's an expert in that field. 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? 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. It's going to 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 and they bought it and they kept a box and papers and they bought it for $650.50 and today it's worth a quarter of a million or $150,000 or $60. Must be nice. Yeah, I mean, you know, a lot of the things, if you go and buy them today and 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 going to come. And if you pull that Rolex out of that closet or out of that safe, you're going to really be happy with what's going on.

And that's the nature of watches because these companies and these brands do something special for, you know, their timepieces and it's, and it works. 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, et cetera. That must be a huge part of it. I'm curious 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.

They're all on drugs. 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. 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 good quality human being.

Yeah. 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, for them to enjoy themselves and binge on Netflix. Have you seen the desire to get high, and I mean here in the literal sense of drug use, has that changed a lot into 20 years that you've had tracks and having to deal with that?

Well, listen, you know, I smoke periodically and so on and so forth, but I actually 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 or they're pretending to work or so on and so forth.

And the moment you check on their work, that's a serious problem. Luckily, the AI and the robots are coming so they can finally go to Central Park and play, you know, Frisbee or whatever they really want to do. But 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. Wait, am I going to be buying jewelry from a robot in the near future? Are they going to be behind the counter?

Well, the beautiful thing is, you know what I'm saying? If 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, it started out with books. Now it's paper towels. Now you could host a server. now anything you can imagine movies, TV shows, he gobbled up everything.

But jewelry, I still have this little, 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 one of those few things that's not going to have a barcode on it. 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? 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, too much. 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 circumstance. So it's not like the corporate world. It's a diamond district. And I really scrutinize them.

And I also ask the other opinions. How did this person do? Did this person say good? And once you have a good panel of people, then you can really 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. Yeah. Is it front of shop that, like, 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 it? 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. Wow. You know, I've 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 going to come right back. I'm just going to give it to him. And I'm like, I'm like, there's no. Just keeping it warm in the meantime.

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. You know, pick up double castings. All right.

You go to, 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 a tough one. Humanity will fade away, but that 14-carred gold chain will be there for thousands of years. Wonderful. This gets back to the gold is permanent.

Right back where we're started. 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, it's like the pricing transparency. 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. That's the fun part. Yeah. I get that it's good for you. Sure, sure.

You do? What do those prices actually? A, how do those prices come about? 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.

20%. Yeah, 20%. Do you have to go and rewrite all the little price tag? 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. in next week I might change this tag by it now you know so it's it is what it is I mean the

price is based on the raw materials plus labor you know plus design plus the fee that I want to make and like I said it doesn't have a barcode on it it's not like buying a digital camera right now where it's 495 on Amazon and 488 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 still has a little bit of more of a romance to it 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 should you do is the real question, okay? What should the Tracy do?

All right, Tracy should 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. Okay, go to the next door and the next door and then come back and say, I saw this over here, but can you do this for me over here? 1850, 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 fly trap that people use. They come in, they befriend you, and they use all these crazy social tactics to, you know, get you to get something to buy it. And if you really want to be sharp, you know, when I go to the Diamond District and I have to buy you, sapphires right now I have to buy a lot of sapphires for to manufacture chains one person's telling me this quality for a hundred and fifty dollars a carrot the other one's telling me this quality for 120 another quality is sixty dollars a care for something somebody might have had something in their safe of forty-five and they're willing to let it go for twenty-five and you can manipulate that

system if you shop around and turn the tables on them so that's what your responsibility is actually this raises a question 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'd 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? I'll tell you right now. Well, you know, maybe after work today, I'm going to go, I'm going to stop by a Korean

casting manufacturer that has got some new models in of stretchy bands that have springs in them that are 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 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.

Someone's an expert in silver. I can't hire all these people. I can't put them all under one roof. And if you want to be, you know, 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 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 it's it's a fun place to do business do you expect higher tariffs to impact you at all um not 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, you know, in my experience, getting people to pay to play isn't the worst thing in the world. So, you know, 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 it at this point. You know, I'm tired of looking at America declining ever since I got here in 1993. Try something. If I opened a store, I'm actually going back to the diamond. And sometimes Tracy and I joke around about opening up, you know, going into the businesses of the people we speak to. Can someone new just arrive in the Diamond District or would they be looked at as scantz? Like how deep are the roots of everyone who's there? Pretty deep.

I mean, money talks. You could establish relationships with money pretty quickly. I established mines with no money, but. Yeah, how did you get your foothold there? Well, I started photographing jewelry and putting it up on eBay in 2004 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 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 chip it. And I was able to feed different vendors money until they would take me serious. And I learned the industry. But unless you have years and years of experience, you don't really want to sit here and go to the diamond industry can open up and do anything right all right this is um uh you know not the type of thing that you just want it's like me saying tomorrow well i want to 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. There's one other thing I wanted to ask you, which is who is actually buying and whether you've noticed any changes there? Because 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? No, not here particularly, but they might be buying it from someone else. I really love to ask my gold vendor, Cahan is his name, or Isaac is his name. Cahan is the company.

And his father and his uncle put that together, put a business together. They went separate ways. And he just inherited. His father just retired when he was 80. He has a safe full of gold and silver. And he has lots and lots of customers. Who they are, I'm not sure. They're a variety of different people.

But personally, people reach out to me. once in a while, a family member, you know, might want to run into some cash or they just sold their business and they want to spend a half a million bucks on gold or something like that or a variety of different people. 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, 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, you I've held gold my whole life. I've passed it.

I've gave it. I've hit 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 want to wake up in the morning and need my Wi-Fi password to get my money. 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? Yeah. I mean, the security is about the cameras that are pointed. pointing at it. 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, I don't do any of that, to be honest. I have managers 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? 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 metals. There's a lot of base people. And then there's a few amazing people that are special, just like the golden metal is special. And the universe creates them, just like the universe creates gold. You look at the periodic chart. You got to figure out where that came from. That's up to you to decide.

Wait, actually, one last question. In Uncut Gems and Adam Sandler gave the stone to Kevin Garnett to like hold for a while for good luck. Would a jeweler ever do that? Yeah, anything can happen. I mean, you know, you might be doing a promotion and you might be putting diamonds on someone and this stressed me out so much the thought of like I'm just going to hit. The whole movie was stressful. It was just me out too.

Living it for 20 years. Yeah, I bet. It's 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 where they're going to award shows. Oh, yeah, yeah. 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. Oh, that's smart. So, you know, this is the jewelry business. If 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, they'll void me if I give out my stuff. Have insurance premiums been going up?

They must be, right? Yes, they have. If you don't make any claims, they kind of leave you alone. So, you know, the insurance is like almost a break-even game. 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 or so forth. But better to have it and not use it. Yeah. Does it go up in tandem with like the price of gold, though? Um, no. Huh. Maxud Agajani, tracks NYC. Thank you so much for coming on Adla.

Hey, thank you. And you guys were, uh, thank you for giving me this golden opportunity. Yeah. Glad to have given you your start all those years. We had to have at least one pun. Yeah. In the conversation. No, that was fantastic. Thank you so much. That was a lot of fun.

That was fun, Tracy. It's always fun talking gold jewelry with Max. And yeah, I mean, I guess the investment thesis has borne out so far. Gold's done great. But I know it's kind of a joke, but I really do take this seriously that at any time, no matter what the price of gold is, $100 worth of gold is always $100. 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?

Well, I'll tell you what was interesting was the idea of like competition with the crypto market. Yeah, that was really interesting. Because it did sound, I mean, as he was saying, it does sound like people are kind of, you know, it's sort of an either or. Yeah. Two, especially for like the people who want to like speculate on price, right? 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 low end of the diamond market.

Yeah. Because 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 that 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. I'm sorry. Speaking of being a bad worker, I'm very distracted by, I looked up the diamond encrusted Furby. Oh yeah. So how much is that going for? Well, so it got auctioned off by A-24. the production company. 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. I might watch that movie again. Do you want to? I found it so stressful the first time. I don't think I could. It was really stressful. But, you know, I know how it ends now.

So maybe that'll make it a little bit easier. There's some people are making imitation gold Furbies. I got one of those. Yeah, just get one of those. Okay. The bronze one. Shall we leave it there before I just start, like, narrating my online shopping? Yes, let's leave it there.

Okay. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow up, Maxud Agagiani. Check out his Instagram.

It's Tracks, NYC. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Kermin. Dashel Bennett at Dashbot and Kilbrooks at Kail Brooks. Thank you to our producer, Moses, Andam. For more odd lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash oddlots. We have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord. Discord.g.

slash oddlots. And if you enjoy Oblots, if you like it when Joe says he's going to 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.