I've been given more than one opportunity to go to Oregon and meet with Todd Hoffman Of "Gold Rush: Alaska" but so far I have resisted. I don't think he and I would get along since he is a devout christian. We do share a belief that the US dollar is garbage and doomed to fail eventually. 

I can tell you one thing, he sells very little of the gold they dig up and pays his crew from the proceeds of his previous aircraft industry and the profits from the Discovery Channel.

All of the gold you might have seen being mined is his personal property.  He recently took over a hundred pounds on a flight from Alaska to Oregon and had a great bit of difficulty placing it in the overhead storage.

Just saying, do you guys think I should give in and go meet him?

Why not?

The reason I have resisted thus far is because the expenses for the trip would outweigh what my host can claim as a business expense and I just get the feeling he and I would not really get along all that well. But taking a trip could be fun and might even be profitable.

why would you go see him?

There are actually a couple reasons why I might. My boss and best friend and I have done some work for a local Oregon company owner. Turns out the company owners family is close friends with the Hoffmans. From that connection my boss became acquainted with the Hoffmans and became friends with Todd. Todd is also an amateur venture capitalist and is funding one of my boss's projects which I worked on as long as I could and produced some good proof of concept circuits but don't have the computing power and software to reproduce the complexity of an iPhone design.

Also he is a rich guy with lots of expensive toys and I have never had a rich friend in my entire life.

I have a couple of ideas I would like funded through prototype development. Prototyping something is the most expensive part of any product.  Once you prove the concept, mass production can commence. But until that point everything has to be custom fabricated and that costs a fortune. Why I haven't made any progress on my pet projects.