How can gold protect states?
What would happen if states restored gold and silver as money?
In this episode, we sit down with Utah State Representative Ken Ivory to unpack the growing Sound Money Movement—from legal tender laws to gold-backed reserves and transactional gold.
Watch the full video now for a comprehensive examination of the risks of rising federal debt, the erosion of purchasing power, and why states may play a pivotal role in reshaping the future of money in America.
Follow Monetary Metals on X: @Monetary_Metals
Follow Representative Ivory on X: @KenIvoryUT
Additional Resources
The Utah House of Representatives: Ken Ivory
Transcript
Monetary Metals:
Welcome back to the Gold Exchange Podcast. My name is Ben Nadelstein. I’m honored to be joined by Representative Ken Ivory. He’s in the Utah State House Representative District 39. And Ken joins us today to talk about all things sound money. Ken, welcome to the show.
Representative Ken Ivory:
Hey Ben, it’s great to be with you. I sure enjoy what you do.
Monetary Metals:
Ken, I want to start off with a question. A lot of people know about the federal government, the federal debt, the federal spending, but I want to start just on the state level. What is it that states are doing when it comes to sound money? And specifically, what is Utah doing when it comes to sound money?
Representative Ivory:
You know, that’s a great question, Ben. Most people don’t realize, and when I bring it up, it just shocks them that Article 1, Section 10 of the United States Constitution addresses states directly, and it says, “No state shall make anything but gold and silver, legal tender, and payment of debt.” And I mean that is a mandate, a directive to states that say you shall not use anything but gold and silver as legal tender and payment of debt.
In 2011, it was my first legislative session. I was the original sponsor of the bill to make gold and silver legal tender in Utah. And I had some other things. I was a freshman legislator and I had a big load I was trying to take on. And so a good friend of mine, my office mate, he carried the bill. Brad Galves, wonderful, beautiful man. And sadly after that, we passed the bill and worked it through, and then sadly he passed away after that.
But I kind of then became the leader of all things gold and silver legislation in Utah. And so we just kept working, we worked on it for years. And you know, we ran into, as you’ve seen, people that said gold bug and tinfoil hat and all that sort of thing. Finally in 2024, we passed a bill that allowed our treasurer to invest up to 10% of our rainy day fund in gold. And we got that bill passed and started to invest.
We didn’t get to the full 10% because gold was going up too fast, but we did buy $110 million of gold between December of 2024 and July of 2025, and that $110 million is now worth about $200 million in gold. And so we’re starting to get more believers. And then last year we passed House Bill 306 that we passed overwhelmingly—first state in the nation to pass transactional gold. And sadly it got vetoed. And you know, running into some of that misinformation and disinformation that gets out.
But fortunately, Florida, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri all passed transactional gold and their governors stood up and had massive large bill signings and leaned into this effort. And you know, Ben, it makes sense, right? We’ve got people that can’t afford to buy houses, they can’t afford the cost of living. But if you price things in gold, houses are more affordable than they’ve ever been. You know, bread, milk, eggs, gasoline—priced in gold over the last 25 years, the price is down 50 to 100% or more priced in gold.
But in dollars, things are getting away from us. And so states have the opportunity and I would say the constitutional mandate to protect our people and give them the option to transact in the money of the constitution.
Monetary Metals:
And how did you first get into gold and silver? Most people walking around day-to-day never think about gold and silver at all. How did you become so knowledgeable and also so passionate about constitutional money? In this case, gold and silver.
Representative Ivory:
Oh goodness, Ben, that’s a really good question. I carry this around in my pocket. I’ve got a 1787 silver dollar that was minted by Spain. But that was the dollar of the Constitution that they were talking about, because it didn’t matter who stamped their logo or imprimatur on the coin—if it was 371 and a quarter grains of pure silver, that was a dollar until 1971. And the way I got into it, my first job out of college, I was working for the mayor of the city of Osaka in Japan.
I was in the international relations department. My first job out of college, right? And I show up and they said, “Hey, we’re so glad to have you here, but just so you know, we’re looking to China because you broke the basic law of economics. You’re supposed to produce more than you consume. Invest the difference in additional production capacity. You’re deficit spending.” And history tells us you’re done. So we’re looking to China. Here’s their hundred-year plan in Japanese.
Read that and you’ll know what we’re on about. And I read this hundred-year plan, China’s hundred-year plan, and it basically says war with the US is inevitable. It won’t be kinetic, right? It’s not going to be bombs and bullets. It’s going to be economic and legal and environmental and political.
We’re going to corner the market on rare earth elements. I had no idea what that was. And then they said, we’re going to dethrone the dollar as the world reserve currency. And man, what a wakeup call. And so from that time, fresh out of college in 1989 until now, I just kept following—your deficit spending, history tells us you’re done, we’re going to dethrone the dollar.
Got my first law job and when we went to law school, got a law job in Vegas and then Salt Lake. And I just kept tracking it. I just kept noticing DC at the congressional level, the presidential level—debt and deficit just kept growing out of control. And I could see the exponential curve that my children were going to inherit this tsunami of exponential growing debt.
And now my grandchildren. And I just decided that we’re never going to solve that in Washington. It’s got to be the states stepping up, banding together, protecting the people that are their neighbors. And here we are. So in 2010, I got elected for the first time, and 15 years later, I’ve been working on this non-stop ever since.
Monetary Metals:
And I do want to talk about a little bit of the global nature of currencies because many people inside the United States maybe haven’t traveled or they don’t know as much about some of these other countries. So when we need to sell $15 trillion worth of treasuries, obviously at a certain point some of those treasuries are assets internally, domestically sold, but also some are sold externally. Are you worried that over time the amount of external or foreign treasury buyers is actually going to decrease and this could be a problem for the US?
Representative Ivory:
Man, you’re singing my song, Ben. In fact, we just passed a bill to create a dashboard that looks at federal fiscal risk to Utah. So Utah and every single state—their number one source of revenue to every single state in the nation is federally transferred funds, right? It’s almost 30% of our $30 billion budget is federally sourced funds.
And so you look at $39 trillion in debt, hundreds of trillions in unfunded obligations for Medicare, Social Security, those sorts of things. And one-third of that $39 trillion has to be rolled over within the next 12 months and half of it in the next two years. And like you said, China quit buying treasuries in 2014. You can see the charts that they’ve just been net sellers. Japan is in a really difficult situation and their bond yields are now rising to all-time highs and that money is going to be pulled home.
And so who buys that debt? And if you look at a chart of the M2 money supply, you look at a chart of the national debt or of the interest payments on the debt, it’s an exponential curve that matches the price of gold. And I don’t pretend to be an investment advisor or particularly smart on investment matters, but I can see a very high correlation curve. And if you think the national debt’s going to keep going up, the money supply is going to keep going up, chances are pretty good the price of gold’s going to keep going up as well.
Monetary Metals:
And talk to me a little bit about what states can do to wean themselves off the federal government. And if a state is thinking, well, listen, our number one import right now is federal tax dollars as support, how do we realistically get ourselves away from that without taking away this life support mechanism?
Representative Ivory:
Yeah, great question. And so after we passed House Bill 348 in 2024—that was the one that allowed us to invest the 10% of the rainy day fund in gold—we put together a precious metal study group that our treasurer, Marlo Oaks, led. I mean, we’re blessed. We’ve got, I think, the best treasurer in the nation. And he led this precious metal study group that, Ben, get this—we had the vice chair of the Federal Reserve, Randy Quarles.
We had the CFO of Amex and Citigroup, Gary Kittenden. Kevin Freeman, you may know, wrote the book Pirate Money and has the Economic War Room show, and he had done some consulting for the state. I mean, this is a world-class study group. And out of that came the recommendation for this transactional gold bill that we did last year in 306 and that other states are doing.
But we had some other recommendations that came out of that as well. Our number one export in Utah is gold. Our number one import is also gold because we’ve got all the refineries. And so next waves—in fact, we had some bills ready and got into the Senate—payment of taxes in gold by our mining industry and eventually others. Inflation insurance kind of ideas where we take a small percentage of all the things that we buy and take a small surcharge and set that aside as an emergency fund.
Kind of like Joseph in Egypt, right? You set aside the corn in the seven plentiful years so that you can buy the things that are essential to government. And then this transactional bill that we passed this year— we’re starting to see Singapore stockpiling gold. You’ve got obviously the BRICS now looking at a gold-backed currency and a lot of things are moving that direction, and we want to make sure that we’re ahead of the curve, that we’ve got payment mechanisms.
In 2024, Ben, the US Senate unanimously passed a resolution—which like never happens in Washington—that said that debt is the number one threat to national security and that Europe and China are developing alternate payment mechanisms to weaken the dollar. And now we’re seeing that. And so I think it would be government malpractice for states not to go back to the Constitution, Article One, Section 10—no state shall make anything but gold and silver legal tender—and give our citizens options. Let them vote with their feet. Let them vote with their dollars.
Do you want to preserve the purchasing power of your earnings and savings or do you want to keep transacting in dollars that are being devalued? It’s an important time. It’s an important time for states to step up. And the emperor has no clothes. We see where this is going and we’re not going to let that fiscal earthquake crash on our people.
Monetary Metals:
And I do like this idea that, hey, it’s just choice. You can think the dollar is the strongest currency, it’s not going anywhere, you’re not worried about any of these fiscal issues—but at least give people the choice to use gold or the choice to use the dollar. And if they choose the dollar, so be it. But right now, it feels like there are some impediments to using gold. Can you talk about what you think those impediments are at the moment?
Representative Ivory:
Yeah, sure. In fact, in our study group, we actually had a pretty robust debate and disagreement over whether the dollar is in trouble or not. And we kind of split on that. But regardless of whether you think the dollar is in trouble or not, people deserve options. People deserve freedom in how they want to transact and store the value of their earnings and savings.
And one of the impediments you bring up is when Nixon temporarily took the United States off the gold standard—because France sent a battleship loaded with pallets of dollars saying we want the gold—and they kind of got quite alarmed at that and temporarily took us off the gold standard in August of 1971. And after that the IRS, on its own—Ben, I mean not Congress, not a law, not any of that—the IRS code just said, “Oh, we’re now going to start taxing gold and silver as collectibles, the highest taxable rate.”
And we think that’s ripe for change. In fact, we’ve got states now working on lobbying and resolutions to support some of the efforts that would eliminate federal capital gains tax on gold and silver used as money. I know President Trump recently said that he’s a gold guy, so maybe we’ll get some light at the end of the capital gains tax tunnel.
Monetary Metals:
I want to now ask you about some of these specific laws when it comes to the states. Obviously, we’ve seen Texas do some of these laws, Florida do some of these laws, Utah do some of these laws. What are some of the things on your road map that you would be interested in seeing Utah passing in terms of gold legislation?
Representative Ivory:
Yeah, I mean some of the things that we’ve already done is making gold and silver legal tender, recognizing that in state law, and many states are now doing that. This step to allow investment in gold—I think we were the first state to do that. I think Wyoming is the only other state that has invested a little bit of money into gold.
But when you think of a rainy day fund investment, our treasurer did a model portfolio, went back to 2000, and did a simulation allocating 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% to gold along with the traditional rainy day fund investments, and it makes the performance of the portfolio better. Even a small percentage, because you get that countercyclical effect with gold versus other investments—so even for investment performance, but let alone to hedge risk and have it as insurance.
So I think that investment is critical. The step that we’re taking now on transactional gold—we spoke before that you had Professor Campbell Harvey on and the work that he’s doing is phenomenal, and by the way your podcast on that was excellent, I shared that with a lot of people. The work that he’s doing to look at the framework for transactional gold is critical.
So now in fact I took some of my committee members out during the session. We went to a really excellent ice cream store here and I said, “Hey, can I pay with gold?” And without missing a beat the young man said, “Yeah, of course,” and he would have taken a gold coin. But I whipped out an app—I’ve got the Glint app—and paid him $53.96 in gold.
That hasn’t been possible until now. You can buy a soda pop, you can buy an automobile, you can buy a house instantly with gold being transactional. I think states really moving on that, and then payment of tax in gold, inflation insurance, internal hedging and arbitrage with gold—I think there’s a lot of opportunities for states to really move the needle on these things, and as more and more states come together, the federal government has to take notice and eliminate that capital gains tax.
Monetary Metals:
And talk to me a bit about the power of the state versus the federal government. Most people when they say there’s some issue whether it’s taxation or debt, they just look immediately upwards to the federal government and say please fix this. But maybe they don’t focus on the state level. Talk to me about the power of this kind of federalism where the states have some powers versus the government has some powers at the federal level. Where does federalism fit in here?
Representative Ivory:
Absolutely. I mean, it’s right at the heart of this. First three words of the Constitution, right? We the People. That wasn’t just a nice way to start the document. It goes back to the Declaration when they said deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. The people are sovereign. They’re the boss in this government. And the people divided their power between two governments.
And in Federalist 51, it says they delegated few and defined powers to the national government and they’re written down in the Constitution. Everything else is reserved to the states or to the people. And so the federal government has just very, very few things. But we’ve not been on the wall watching. And it’s almost like now, Ben, we have a football field that has no lines on it.
You go out to play the game and you’ve got the two teams and you look down—no lines on the field anywhere, because we don’t know the jurisdictional lines, what’s out of bounds, what the goal line is. But the states actually have that numerous and indefinite power. Chief Justice John Roberts in a recent case said states are separate and independent sovereigns.
Sometimes they have to act like it. And so the role for states to step up—particularly in health, safety, and welfare—with inflation out of control, we’re the only effective check to the federal government that, sadly, is spending like a drunken sailor. I mean, addicted to overspending. It’s time for an intervention. And it really is the states that have the power and the duty to do that.
Monetary Metals:
And what do you think about the fact that the federal government has been spending—there was this DOGE effort, this Department of Government Efficiency, which attempted to cut back on some spending here and there, that was in some ways abandoned for this other theme of we’ll grow our way out of the debt. How likely do you think it is that the federal government will get their house in order? And then maybe is there a more reasonable or likely path for the state governments to get their fiscal houses in order?
Representative Ivory:
Yeah. Sadly, we were all really excited when we thought, man, we’ve got this incredible innovator that’s going to go in—and it was exciting, right? They would come out with announcements—and the swamp just kind of swallowed that up. And you know, when you look at the return on investment for lobbying Congress on major legislation, there’s studies on this. I think it was a University of Kansas study. Return on investment for lobbying Congress on major legislation. Any idea how much that is? Wild guess: what would be a great ROI? You take a million dollars to lobby Congress on some major piece of legislation.
Monetary Metals:
I’m going to say 10% would be incredible.
Representative Ivory:
It’d be great, wouldn’t it? How about 22,000%?
Monetary Metals:
That’s better than gold!
Representative Ivory:
Right? I mean, it’s insane. But you put a million dollars into lobbying, $22 billion back of our money—and it’s just gotten so out of control. And so both parties have become a favor factory now with money that doesn’t even exist, right? It’s just conjured out of nowhere. It’s not even our children’s money anymore except for the fact that they’re going to be liable for it.
And whether it shakes out as monetization to the point that they simply just won’t take dollars for real molecules anymore—that’s what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz right now. Your dollars are no good here. Bring gold or the Chinese yuan. And we’re going to start seeing that more and more, that we can no longer export our inflation around the world. And they’ll say, “Bring us gold or bring us something that holds its value.”
And sadly we’re heading to that very quickly with how much debt needs to be rolled over in the next 12 to 18 months. So no, it’s very critical and I don’t see that changing from the inside—and our constitutional structure never intended it to be that way. Madison said if men were angels, we wouldn’t need government at all. But because they are, we need both internal and external checks. And the states are the external checks, the direct agents of the people. And it’s time for us to really understand our role as Chief Justice Roberts said—states are separate independent sovereigns. Sometimes they have to act like it.
Monetary Metals:
And I want to talk now about this affordability crisis—obviously more acute in certain states than others, but this affordability crisis on both the left and the right has become a talking point. Do you think the affordability crisis is simply an issue of using the wrong metric? Obviously, we talked about thinking of things priced in gold versus priced in dollars. Or do you think there is actually an underlying affordability crisis in America?
Representative Ivory:
Yeah. Another little show-and-tell piece that I carry around. This is a pre-1965 quarter, right? You look at the edge and it doesn’t have that copper stripe. In 1965, the minimum wage was a dollar and a quarter. Five of these. Today, five of these are worth about $75. That’d be a decent minimum wage, right? Instead of $7.75, you get five quarters that are real silver. You could raise a family on that. You could get by pretty well.
When Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1977, a house in Salt Lake cost $24,000 or 680 ounces of gold. Today, the same house is $600,000. That $24,000 doesn’t get you anywhere close to a down payment, right? But the 680 ounces of gold—get this—would buy you six houses today. That’s how badly our money has been devalued. The Federal Reserve says, “Oh, our target is 2% inflation.”
Well, said differently, that means Ben, we’re going to reach into your bank account and we’re going to take 2% of everything you’ve ever saved and everything you will ever save or earn. I’m not good with that. And they never do hit their 2% target, but even if they did, what that means is we’re going to take 2% of the value of your money every single year compounded.
And now we’re starting to see the effects of fiat currency—if you read a history book, it happened to Rome, it happened to Spain, happened to the Dutch, it happened to Great Britain. And the average life cycle for a fiat currency is about 75 to 80 years. Right? 1944—we’re now right about there.
Monetary Metals:
And I do want to ask you about some of these historical lessons. Maybe people will have heard “it’s not worth a continental” in discussion of the continental currency. Do you think that we’re seeing a specific pattern from history playing out now? And what is that historical pattern and what could we learn from it?
Representative Ivory:
Yeah, I wish I had one of those for show and tell. I’m trying to find one that I can have in my pocket. But that was their lived experience, right. They had been through that where they had the Revolutionary War debt, the states just started printing currency, and pretty soon one state wouldn’t accept the printed currency of the other and then no one would take it and they had a massive depression that happened.
And so when they wrote the Constitution, they weren’t just studying Rome and debasing and clipping the coins, cutting the edges in it to take little bits of silver out of it—they did read the books and they did know that from history. But man, Ben, they had lived this stuff. And so when they put in the Constitution—no state shall make anything but gold and silver, legal tender, and payment of debt.
You shall not emit bills of credit, which is what the dollar is, right? It’s a piece of paper that’s not backed by anything. And then to Congress they said Congress shall have the power to coin the money and regulate the value thereof and create a standard, a fixed standard of weights and measures. And Congress is supposed to coin the gold and the silver and it was supposed to be a fixed standard, just like a foot is 12 inches and a pound is 16 ounces.
The dollar was 371 and a quarter grains of silver and a commensurate number of grains of gold. You imagine going to the butcher and saying, “Hey, I need a pound of hamburger.” And he comes out with a thimble. Or you go to build a house and you say, “I want a 3,500 square foot house.” And when it’s done, it fits in the back of your pickup. And they say, “Oh, well, we changed what a pound is. We changed what a foot is.” We would know immediately.
But that’s what happened to the metric—the measuring stick of our labor, the measuring stick of our life that we trade for a unit of exchange. And that metric has now been changed to something that just floats with the wind. We’ve got to give people the option to get back to saying, “I’m going to trade my labor for something and a year from now or 10 years from now or a hundred years from now, I can still exchange that part of my life for the same amount of goods and services.”
Monetary Metals:
Yeah. An inflation-adjusted meter stick obviously sounds quite ridiculous, but inflation-adjusted dollars or inflation-adjusted income is part and parcel of modern language. And like you said, in Roman times, they paid a centurion soldier in gold. And if you look at what an army person is making today in the higher ranks, it might be that same level of gold. And for 5,000 years, that measuring stick of value has always been gold. Hopefully, we can get back to that soon.
Representative Ivory:
Yeah. Right. I mean, the story is you can get a toga and shoes and whatever and a night on the town. And in 1920 you’ve got the St. Gaudens coin—you get the suit and the shirt and tie and the shoes and a night on the town—and today you’ve got that $20 gold piece that’s worth about $4,700 to $4,800 today. It’s going to buy you a decent suit and the socks and the shoes. But $20—you can’t get the socks for that today.
That’s how far we’ve allowed the metric of our liberty—that portion of our life—to just be misappropriated right out from under us. And no, I mean, this gets back to the essential liberty interest that we have. Some people think it’s about investment, no gold bugs and all that. This goes to the very heart of the purpose of our Declaration and Constitution. Government exists to secure these rights. What were the rights? Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, property. Among these rights, right? But government exists to secure that, and right now it’s just being eroded right out from under us.
Monetary Metals:
Ken, I want to get into a lightning round with you. I’ll ask you questions all over the map. You can answer as short or as long as you want and you can also pass, which is I’m sure your constitutional right. So let’s start off with a nice and simple one. What is your favorite thing to do in Utah for those who are going to visit after this episode?
Representative Ivory:
Oh man, I love going into the mountains and camping and fishing and riding four-wheelers with my grandkids. I also like to smoke brisket and make ice cream. I do a really mean smoked brisket. You got to come to Utah sometime.
Monetary Metals:
Oh, that one sounds yummy. Okay, next one. We talked about Utah’s number one export and import, which was gold. What about silver? Where do you see silver in terms of its monetary standard? Of course, silver was money at some point, but in the future, where do you see silver? Is it an industrial metal? Is it a monetary metal? Is it something different entirely?
Representative Ivory:
Yeah, I mean I think it fits in both of those categories, but I think it’s essential—you know, that bimetallic standard. The good thing now is when you’ve got tokenized electronic gold, you can trade a fraction of a fraction of gold for whatever. And so I don’t know. I mean, I think silver is a great investment just because of the nature of it being tied to gold and it does have all of those industrial uses. So no, I’m a fan of both. I’m all in.
Monetary Metals:
If you had to guess, what does a federal dollar actually cost? Because a lot of people say, “Oh, the states are getting so much federal money, oh it’s fair, it’s unfair.” But at the end of the day, what do you think a federal dollar actually costs the state?
Representative Ivory:
You are good at this. That’s a question we’ve been asking for a long time. In fact, our education department, state board of education, drilled down and looked at that and our federalism commission looks at that all the time. You know, we get guidance letters, we get federal regulation, we get all of these other things that come along. In Utah, our education funding is about 8% federally sourced, but they can exert 100% control.
And so they issue a guidance letter, regulations, whatever it may be, and we’ve got to run and do all of the compliance that goes with it. So it’s hard to say an exact amount of what it costs, but my personal answer is it costs us our liberty. It costs us our freedom. Benjamin Franklin said, “Think what you do when you run in debt. You give another power over your liberty.” And 30% of our funding comes from a federal government but 100% of our liberty is tied into that amount of control.
And I think—just importantly going forward—I think the states really need to get together and work on very thoughtful transition plans because the GAO and the CBO, the Government Accountability Office and Congressional Budget Office, for decades have been saying this is unsustainable. And I can’t remember if it was Schumpeter or who made the law that that which is unsustainable will end. And it’s time for the states to get ready.
The Congressional Budget Office, Ben, just two weeks ago get this, two weeks ago—said the Social Security trust fund will be depleted now in 5 years and a 28% reduction for the 70 million Americans on Social Security, and nobody’s talking about it. That’s pandemonium on the very near-term horizon.
Monetary Metals:
That’s probably the one deadline that the government will get to quicker than previously expected and those strings attached are quite unfortunate. Next, I want to ask you—what state, maybe other than Utah, or you can pick Utah—which state in your opinion has kind of gotten it right or had certain bills where you can say, “Wow, we should emulate that.” Give us some examples where you can say, “Yes, this is federalism at its finest.”
Representative Ivory:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So we actually developed a federalism index and a federalism policy tracker. Utah Valley University has a center for constitutional studies. And if you just search federalismindex.org, you can see all the federal actions that likely cross the state jurisdictional line and then all the state actions that are working to push back. And they’re doing a great job. So you can look at them by state, by executive, by legislative, by judicial. But as far as the states that I think are moving the right direction, I think Texas—my grandkids live there, so I’m pretty fond of Texas.
I’ve got three of my four grandkids there. Arkansas—they were actually the first one to pass and sign the transactional gold bill. Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, Idaho. There’s a lot of states that are out there really working on this. And the great thing about this, Ben, there are two important elements that are not partisan at all.
Focusing on the structure—and that’s our whole federalism commission, structure over politics, completely bipartisan—and securing people’s money so that they have a choice to preserve the value of their earnings and savings, almost entirely bipartisan. Those are things that we can all work on. Quick example: you’ve ridden a bicycle I’m sure, right? The framers described our government as two spheres—a federal sphere and a state sphere.
And right now the federal tire is so bloated it’s about to explode and the state tire is so flat it’s about to chew the rubber off the rim. And all we talk about is should Trump or Harris ride the bike and should they steer it to the left or steer it to the right, meanwhile the bike just continues to deteriorate and corrode more and more. And our job is to fix the bike and fix the balance of the tires, and we can work on that with anyone.
Monetary Metals:
I do want to ask you now, as someone who is on the inside when it comes to state government, what is the most helpful thing that people can do if they say, “Wow, this guy Ken Ivory is really smart. I want to help him out.” And then what’s something that people are missing that’s actually really difficult to get done but maybe they wouldn’t know about on the surface?
Representative Ivory:
Yeah, I love those questions. Let me take the second one first. I think what people miss is you are the boss of American government. And a lot of times we think we’re at the bottom of the totem pole. No, the people are the sovereign. That means you’re like the king. You’re the ultimate supreme authority. If you look up sovereign in the dictionary—imagine you’re the boss of something and you hardly ever show up and you don’t know your employees.
And when you need people to help, you just go out on the street and pick them at random. You don’t know anything about them, and you don’t give them the job description, and you don’t follow up to see how they’re doing. 100% of the time, that’s going to fail. And as the boss of the greatest governing enterprise in the history of the world, most of us rarely ever show up. We don’t know who our agents, our employees are.
We don’t give them the job description because we don’t really know what it is anymore. We don’t follow up to see how they’re doing. So that’s your second question. First question—I call it the three Ps. Personal, professional, persistent. When you’re trying to get something done through an agent, do you think if you just whip them harder, you’ll get them to really do that job with a good attitude? No, it’s personal, right? Please and thank you.
In fact, when I teach constitutional classes, there’s a website that we have called igovern.us. And there’s some videos and stuff there. And when I have legislators in the class, I say, “How many times do you hear thank you in your legislative service?” And they just laugh right out loud. They’re like, maybe one out of a thousand times. And we know in change management, you’ve got to give 10 attaboys to one critique, and we’re a thousand to one the other way. Please and thank you goes a long way.
The second one is—you think about getting employees to do the work that you want them to do. We give them computers, we give them training, we buy paper clips and notepads, and we try to help them be better at this job that we hire them to do for us. We don’t even think about that with the state agents that we hire. Money and manpower—can I help you prepare for the committee? Can I help you on your campaign? Can I donate money to you?
And if you do that, I recommend you give a completely odd, irregular number on a regular basis. Like $5.13 every month or $25.61 every quarter. And people would say, “Well, why do you do that?” Because it stands out and they remember you. And then the last one of the three Ps—personal, professional, persistent. That kind of speaks for itself, but I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard from people that say, “Oh, I called my representative. I sent them an email and they didn’t do anything.” Okay.
Well, if you’re the boss of the company and your employee doesn’t do what you ask, do you just walk away from the company? We don’t have that luxury. We’re the sovereign of this country and we’re in for the duration because it’s on us. The good news is we’re responsible. The bad news is we’re responsible for what happens here, and we’ve got to be persistent. So that personal, professional, persistent—we go into all that. We have six lessons that we teach at that igovern.us, and no, people need to take responsibility, understand what it means that we’re the boss of this greatest governing enterprise in the history of the world.
Monetary Metals:
Well, Representative Ivory, I will give you a thank you for appearing on the show. So you’ll get at least one out of a thousand and hopefully some people in the comments will give you a thank you as well. Next question for you. You’ve got great kids and you’ve got great grandkids. So I’m going to give you a minute or as long as you want to brag about your kids and some of their accomplishments.
Representative Ivory:
Oh, man. So I have three daughters and one son. My son’s in Germany learning German and he’s going to be going to university in Germany—in German, right? Super super bright guy. And then my oldest daughter has one of our grandchildren. They’re here locally and she’s amazing. She’s a hair stylist and does weddings—just yeah, I mean, she’s like an artist that puts on hair and makeup for weddings. Married to a wonderful young man.
My second daughter is the one in Texas and they’re going to be up here for the summer. She’s studying to be a chef, so she’ll come up here to take cooking classes all summer, which means I get to go camping in the mountains with my grandkids and make ice cream all summer. I’ve got three granddaughters and one grandson. And my little grandson, he tells his mom, he says, “Mom, I’m grandpa’s little guy.” And they love them. I mean, grandkids are absolutely the best. And so then my youngest daughter lives pretty close to us. And she’s married.
She actually followed in my footsteps—I don’t think she meant to do that, but she went to law school, did great, and was clerking for a judge and is super bright, married to a wonderful young man. No, we’ve got a great family and man, grandkids. I got to tell you, Ben, honestly, this is why I get up every morning. This is why—because legislative work is hard. I mean, it’s enigmatically hard.
You feel like you can move the needle, but there are politics in politics and there’s no shortage of people that’ll tell you what you’re doing wrong. In fact, in my drawer right here next to me, I have a couple bags of gummy candy body parts that people have sent me to tell me what they think of me. But I get up every morning and I think my grandkids one day are going to inherit this.
And I can’t imagine the debt to continue the way it is and the money to be debased the way it is. And they’re going to say, “Grandpa, did you see this coming?” and they’re going to see this podcast and I’m going to have to say, “Yeah, I saw it coming.” And then the next question, we all know what that’s going to be, right? What did you do about it? And that keeps me going every day, Ben.
Monetary Metals:
Ken, while I still have you, I want to ask you, what’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received? It can be financial, it can be life advice. What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
Representative Ivory:
Wow, I love your questions. I had a mentor growing up that I just idolized and he said, “Never be afraid of the truth. Never be afraid of the truth.” And you just lean in and examine and research and study and as we keep doing that, that kernel of truth will be known. And that’s our path in life—to follow things that are true. I mean money—what is true money? Is it a piece of paper? Is it something enduring? And you know, this has been money from all recorded history because it’s real, it’s enduring. It preserves value. Yeah, never be afraid of the truth.
Monetary Metals:
That’s great. Next question for you. I want to talk about the Federal Reserve. Are you worried at the state level about who is chosen to be the Fed nominee? How much does that matter at the state level? What interest rates are? What Federal Reserve interest rate policy will be? How much do you think that’s going to matter going forward?
Representative Ivory:
In one way it’s going to matter a great deal and in another way it’s not going to matter at all. We’ve painted ourselves into such a corner that if we raise interest rates to try to keep inflation under control, then the CPI and the entitlement spending and all of those other things are going to get out of control—the debt’s only going to grow faster. If we monetize to keep rates low, to try to spur economic activity, we’re only going to devalue the dollar even more.
And we’re going to accelerate the world saying we’re not taking those pieces of paper for our real molecules and real labor anymore. And we’re already seeing that. So I think in a nation that exists on consent of the governed and protecting life, liberty, and property—how unusual, and this was in Judy Shelton’s wonderful book, Good as Gold—how odd is it that in this nation, control of money, the price of money, is controlled by 12 unelected, unaccountable people. That just seems completely contrary to our whole notion of consent of the government and protecting life, liberty, and property.
Monetary Metals:
What do you think is the biggest risk in 2026 and beyond, internally as well as externally? That could be the threat from China, that could be inflation, that could be debt, that could be something completely off the map like Canada invading. What do you think is the biggest threat internally and externally going forward?
Representative Ivory:
Yeah, I think Abraham Lincoln nailed it, right? He said, “We’re never going to be defeated from without. If America falls, it’ll fall from within because we forget who we are.” And we forget how to—that we are in charge of this great governing enterprise and we forget how to do that job. And so it’s not hard to see the exponential curves of debt and unfunded obligations. I was just talking to some members of Congress this morning about this Social Security trust fund being depleted in five years and they’re not even talking about it.
And they say, well, they were kind of tongue in cheek but they said, “Yeah, we’ll probably get to it when there’s a month left for the actual depletion.” And at that point your solutions, your options are slim to none. So I think prepare, right? If you’re prepared, you shall not fear. And in the 2008 crisis, my father was a self-made businessman. He had car washes in Arizona and he built a number of them and did quite well for himself. And in the great financial crisis, it was the first time I’d really seen my father scared and he was just really, really worried about it.
And I asked him, I said, “So Dad, you were born in the Great Depression. That must have been hard.” Oh, it was terrible. Well, what was it like? “We’d get together as a family and we’d go out and pick and bottle peaches all day long. And then as a family, we’d go out and someone would harvest a deer and we’d all work to prepare that. And then we’d all go out to do the peas and work on these other things.” And I said, “Wow, that must have been really hard.”
And he thought for a second and he said, “You know, that was the best time of my life.” And I think when we get back to faith and family and friends and freedom, we’ll be fine. We just have to remember who we are.
Monetary Metals:
Let’s end on a positive note. Give our viewers something positive that you’re looking forward to—other than seeing the grandkids and making ice cream. Tell us some positive steps not only that the viewers can make for themselves maybe today, obviously speaking out and reaching out to their agents as we called them today. But what are some positive things in the future that we can look forward to?
Representative Ivory:
Yeah, the thing that gives me hope, Ben—well, let me tell a little story. So Utah is still 70% federally controlled land. We have some counties that have less than 3% taxable land to fund education and government services. I mean, it’s crazy. And I did a bill in 2012 that was to get more local control of our land and to try to get our land to be more taxable, and I was going around the state and teaching people about it.
And I said, “Hey, if you agree with the history of the law that we’ve talked about, take one of these little postcards and fill it out and send it to the governor.” Couple weeks later, I’m in the governor’s office and one of his deputies came up to me. He says, “Ivory, what in the world are you doing?” I said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “We’re getting inundated by these postcards.” And I said, “Inundated? What does inundated look like?” He said, “We’ve got 12 of these postcards in the last two weeks.” Inundated, right?
We have more power than we think. And if we leverage our voice just a little bit and we’re the three Ps—personal, professional, persistent—because we’re the boss of this enterprise, it doesn’t take a lot. If 12 is inundating a governor, imagine if we had 10,000 people out of three and a half million in Utah, 10,000 people in Texas, 10,000 people in a dozen and a half states that all understand what it means to be the boss and how to reach out.
I guarantee you we could do that job in five minutes a week and completely change the needle. That’s what we teach and talk about at that igovern.us website and that gives me hope. We can do this.
Monetary Metals:
So Ken Ivory, I give you the last question, which is: A, if people want to learn more and get involved, where should they go? And B, what’s a question I should be asking all future guests of the Gold Exchange Podcast?
Representative Ivory:
Oh, that’s great. First of all, let me just tell you, your founder, Keith Weiner, was one of the first people I called when we started working on this transactional gold bill and the investment bill. And bless his heart, he hopped a flight like the next day and came up and met with our treasurer and we were talking about how do we do some of these things, and he’s been a resource and we’re very, very grateful.
And as we were talking earlier, I think there may be an opportunity for the state to look into the great service that you all are providing and it’s absolutely intriguing that you can get paid gold on your gold. So going forward—remind me the question again? I got a question for your next guest. What was the first part of that?
Monetary Metals:
How can people get involved if they love Ken Ivory and they want to help?
Representative Ivory:
Yeah. So igovern.us—go to that website, log into the impact community pages. And honestly, once you learn what it means to be the boss of our governing enterprise, you can do that job in five minutes a week. As long as we work together, we band together. I haven’t met anyone that can’t break off five minutes a week to save our country. And so igovern.us, you can find me there.
I’m also on Facebook, Twitter, and whatnot. Just reach us there and keep an eye on what we’re doing because this matters, right? Your money is the embodiment of your life and your liberty and it matters that we make sure we keep that sound money. So super grateful for all the good stuff that you do. And question for your next guest—I think, kind of what you had said, not only what gives you hope, but specifically how do we execute? What is a plan to turn things around from where our nation is headed?
Monetary Metals:
Representative Ken Ivory, it couldn’t have been more of a pleasure and an honor to have you on the podcast and we’ll absolutely have to have you on again soon.
Representative Ivory:
Hey, right back at you. We’ll look forward to following up. Thanks a lot, Ben.
Monetary Metals:
Thank you.