Silver’s 146% Run Why the 'Perfect Storm' Is Just Beginning | Alan Hibbard

We're talking to Alan Hibbert today. Um Allan runs a YouTube channel that has a little over 800,000 subscribers called Gold Silver. And we're going to be talking about sound money, gold, silver, and the current state of our fiat dollar. Um I've been alarmed by our dollar for quite some time now. I've noticed that we've lost about 50% of its purchasing power in the last 5 years, which means that inflation is going up and we are buying less and less with a dollar. and I wanted to learn more. And so Allan has been studying gold and silver for seven or eight years at least. Uh and he we're gonna go into a lot. So if you like money, if you like how where money comes from, where value comes from, I think this is going to be a really fun conversation. Um I even saw like last week Ray Dallio, who runs Bridgewater, it's a major hedge fund. He was on CNBC and he said that the global financial system is resetting and he was advising that he was going into 25% gold in his portfolio. And to see one of the mainstream financial experts say that is the equivalent of shouting it from the rooftops. These guys are so polished that they can't uh they have to look smooth every time they say it. And so to hear Ray Dalio even talk about going 25% into gold was just alarming to me. So, we're going to get into that. And if you've not been paying attention to what's been going on with the price of silver and gold, you're going to find out more. If you have been, we're going into some of the latest details and why this is kind of the perfect storm of or three perfect storms of both the industrial demand for silver, the geopolitical climate that we're in, and how America is not really being liked by a lot of other countries right now, and then also our debt situation and what we're going to do about that. So, I hope you really enjoyed it. It was a fascinating conversation. and Allan is so cool and smart. Um, thank you for watching on the Austin and Matt podcast. Please like and subscribe if you haven't. We're still growing and it's for people like you that we get to keep doing this and chasing our interests. So, thank you very much. All right, onto the show. I think it's a banger to talk about like where because silver just made a run like it's never made last year. Do you think silver goes bigger this year? I do. I do. So last year, silver did 146% in a year, which is kind of crazy. So it was under 30 an ounce to start and finish the year over 70, 72, something like that. So 146% is amazing. Um, and if you look at what precious metals bull markets are like, so both gold and silver, they accelerate towards the end, which is kind of the opposite of how stocks, any company, any centralized entity, it's kind of the opposite how they work. So if you think of a startup in the early stages of a startup, they have big gains. Like they can do a,000x in a year, right? Because when you have like no income, it's pretty easy to, you know, multiply it by a lot. But then if you think about like Amazon or Apple or any of these companies as they get bigger and bigger and bigger their growth shrinks over time and they can still grow obviously um but the biggest moves come in the beginning. Precious metals are the opposite. They move a little bit and then a little bit more and then a little bit more and then they move bigger and bigger and then they have a huge big year at the end. So if you look at the 1970s in the last year of the bull market 1979 the price of gold doubled and the price of silver went up 6x or maybe 7x in a year. Yeah. So I think we're going to get to something like that and we've got maybe another year or two in the bull run. It's really hard to tell. It depends on a lot of things that happen in the world. But I I don't think 146% is the top for silver. I think we could see 200% 300% something like that in a year. Yeah. In 2026. Um and with gold, gold did about 64% last year. It's, you know, flirting with 5,000 an ounce right now, but it easily could do 70% in a year, 80% a year. If there's some crazy um black swan event, I mean, it it could double in a year. I mean, it could go to 9,000 in a year. Um I don't think it will, but it could. and I don't want it to because that means something in the world is very very wrong. Well, that's one of the things about this that I've seen is that these are I think that the reason that it goes parabolic later is because it's a self-reinforcing mechanism where you usually retreat into metals because you think things are going poorly and so when it goes up you have more confidence that things are going poorly and so you're less likely to sell and so versus maybe a stock or something you're like oh it can get overvalued or whatever and so let's take profits. When gold and silver are going up, that means everything else is probably going very very badly. And so it becomes this life raft that no one wants to get off of, which constrains sell orders and parabolically shoots the price up. It's it's it's psychologically a different asset. It is absolutely psychologically a different asset. You're right. Um in Mike Maloney's book, he mentions that precious metals are a gifen good. So normally when something is, if you look at economics, when something's more expensive, we want less of it. Like if beef is really expensive, we're like, "Oh, maybe I'll buy chicken this week." You know, you kind of trade off. But, uh, gold and silver are kind of the opposite. They're a gifting good. So, as they get more expensive, people are like, "Wait a minute. Now I want it now. Now that it's so valuable and like I have proof, now I got to buy it." And it's very strange. It's a weird psychological phenomenon, but yeah, people chase that price way up to the top. How long have you been in the bullion market? How long have you been doing this? The bullion market. Oh, man. It's hard. It's hard to say. So, I guess formally seven years, I guess I would say. So, seven years ago to the month, actually, it was January of 2019. Um, that's when I met Mike Maloney and started working with him on his book. We did that four or five years together and then I've been on the YouTube channel for another two years and change. So, so yeah, about seven years. What got you into it? Oh, how far back do we want to go? Okay, I'll say 20 20 years ago when I was 17 and I guess it was I guess it was when I turned 18, but uh I read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki and it changed changed my life. Changed my life. It really did. Like my life was going one direction and I read that book and I said, "Okay, I'm doing a completely different thing." Wait, just if I remember that book, he basically said, "Get debt, right? Go into debt because they inflate debt away. So rich guys have debt." That was his like big insight, right? Yeah, that's one of them. I would I wouldn't I wouldn't I don't know if that's the main for I went into massive debt after reading that. I'm hoping I didn't misread the book cuz I got two million in debt. So yeah, don't tell me opposite, dude. Yeah. For anyone who hasn't read that book, that's not the primary takeaway. Yeah. Right. The the the main takeaway is he Robert Kiasaki, he says that he basically had two dads growing up. His real biological father and then like his friend's dad. Um, and one his his biological father was a poor dad because he basically followed the mainstream advice. He went to school, he got a job, he, you know, paid his taxes. He was a d W2 wage earner and he never became rich. He was basically a poor guy live effectively living paycheck to paycheck. But his rich dad, you know, did everything differently. He figured out the tax laws. He used debt intelligently rather than just like having a car loan, a student loan, a mortgage, all those kinds of things. intelligent use of debt and uh was an entrepreneur. He owned assets, cash flow assets, real estate, all those things. So basically when I read that I thought, "Oh man, there's so much I don't know about money." And the path that I was on previously was to be an engineer. Like I loved math and science. I taught myself how to program. Um my my high school, my senior class voted me first to work at NASA. It give you a sense of like where my brain was at and how people saw me. And when I read that book, I just said, "Oh man, it doesn't matter if I'm an engineer or if I, you know, invent things or if I go to outer space or whatever. None of that stuff matters if I don't manage my money well." And I'm like poor. So in my brain, my 17, 18year-old brain, I said, "Okay, I'm going to go figure out money so I can put that part of my life on autopilot, and then I'm going to go back to like math and science things." It's been 20 years. I'm still doing the like put my money on autopilot thing and I've just gone so far down the rabbit hole of like what is gold? What is silver? What is the dollar? Is there such a thing as passive income? What is value? Hidden secrets of value. What is Bitcoin? What is all this crypto stuff? Um, is there a way to just put money on autopilot so that you don't have to think about it and you can sort of make money while you sleep in a way that isn't risky where you don't have to like, you know, check the news every day and constantly refresh whatever it is. Um, and so yeah, that's how I got to where I am now. And uh, just want to share what I've learned with everyone I possibly can. You guys are how you have over 800,000 subs. I mean, you guys are big. It's big. Yeah. Mike's been running the YouTube channel 15 years or something, maybe close to 20. He's had the Gold Silver Company 20 years and and he's been doing YouTube almost that whole time. And yeah, he's got the the big hit, Hidden Secrets of Money. Um 10 episodes and I think all of them have over a million views each of them. The the most popular one has 10 million views. Um and so yeah, so over that time we've we've accumulated 870,000 subscribers. Dang. So hoping to hit a million this year, but that'll be a grind. Yeah. Hit the gold button. That's right. Yeah. The the plaque. How often are you guys posting? Like how do you do I mean I love all the videos. So like what's the cadence? And are you full-time kind of YouTubing? Like that's the that's the main sort of outlet. Yeah, I'm full-time on on YouTube. So I I eat, sleep, and breathe. What content are we going to put on the channel? And then we repurpose it for other things. We repurpose it into shorts, which are also on YouTube, but also other platforms, and turn that into emails and blog posts and that kind of stuff. Um, so yeah, I'm full-time. We post twice a week, just like Tuesday, Thursday, sometimes Tuesday, Friday. Um, yeah, just anytime there's a a big market event, we try to post. And if there isn't anything big happening, I fall back on evergreen content where it's like, what are some basic principles that people should know? How does it relate to gold and silver? And then then put that out. So yeah, about twice a week and seems to be working. Yeah. Right on. And shorts every day. Twice a week, long form, shorts every day. Shorts are random. Okay. Shorts are random. Yeah, shorts are random. So, not not necessarily a strict cadence with that. And it makes sense now that you explain you have a science background. When I was watching how you frame everything in entropy, I would love to hear a brief framing of how you see money and entropy. Okay. So, yeah, looking at it. So, there's a quote by Nicola Tesla that I really like. If you want to understand the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration. And I love that. And it's like if you want to understand interpersonal dynamic psychology, if you want to understand outer space, money, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration. So I've loved that quote for a long time. So that's what I used while trying to figure out money. And basically I realized that like the core problem of money, like if money is a solution to a problem, the question is, well, what's the problem that you're really solving? And the problem is you have surplus energy. We could think of it as surplus time, but really it's energy because you can have time if you're like in a coma or if you're in prison or if you know if you're a vegetable in a hospital bed. I mean there's all kinds of ways of having time without the ability to exert energy intentionally. So really what you have is energy. That's what you have. Would you say it's also labor in a way? Might be more in the specific market sense. It's labor. If you channel your energy into labor, sure. And it could be like blue collar, white collar, it could be anything, right? You could be like designing websites. You could be digging ditches. Yeah. You have So you have energy and you can channel it intelligently because you're a conscious being. And so the problem you have is you have surplus energy. It's like you don't you don't need to be hunting 24 hours a day in order to survive. Like you know we have grocery stores. So I mean you can like hunt in that capacity for like 30 minutes and use the rest of your time however you want. And you don't want that energy to go to waste. Like it's it's awesome if you can somehow bottle it or put it into something like you could buy extra food and put in the fridge and then hopefully that food doesn't spoil. You can also put it into other things, microphones, computers, cell phones. But like you want you want to keep that optionality so that you can do cool things and enjoy leisure or even be more productive in the future, you know, during times you want to be productive. So, if there's nothing specific you want right now, like a food, like food or a microphone or whatever, you want a general purpose place of storing your energy. That's called money. That's what money is. And so, if you realize, I'm just trying to store my surplus energy. So, if I spend all day, you know, doing something productive, I want to somehow bottle it so I can take it into the future. So maybe 10 years from now, I can unleash that energy and have somebody else work all day for me. And who know, maybe I'm going to want them to mow my lawn or make me a pizza. I don't know what I'm going to want 10 years from now. But if if I have the right technology, if I have the right money, I can do that. I can trade my energy now into something useful, wait as long as I want, and then unload it, release it. So that's what money is. Well, it sounds like you're trying to preserve optionality. Yes. which when I read the book anti-fragile by Nasim Talib, he he kind of says optionality is your best bet. If you preserve optionality, you keep the you keep as many futures open as you can so that whenever the black swans come, you can choose which direction you go. So good money actually preserves your optionality for you to be able to spend it later hopefully in any direction that you need to. Exactly. Okay. Precisely. That's a great way to think about it. Yep. Optionality. That that sounds awesome. That's what I wish my money did. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well, yeah. Gold and silver should do that. Bitcoin, I would argue, does that as well. Um, we can maybe come back to that. Um, okay. Do we want to talk about entropy? It's one of those weird words. Well, I just just one note there. So, when you said gold and silver should do that, I know from having lived the last like 5 years since we all got locked in our houses that I can't buy as many jars of peanut butter with the same number of dollars that I had. So, I feel like my optionality to go buy peanut butter has gone down because I didn't buy peanut butter with it in 2020, for example. So, are you saying that the United States dollar is not money because it doesn't really preserve optionality? Yeah. Yeah. It's fake money. So, we say like, "Hey, man, can I borrow some money?" And like, we understand you're talking about dollars. Like, that's not like a weird thing. Or like, "Oh, hey babe, we can't afford that. We don't have the money." Okay, we're talking about dollars. Yeah, of course. But for a conversation like this, I would say the dollar is fake money. It's an illusion. It's a fiction. Um, and so every time we think of it as money and we call it money, we're kind of doing ourselves a disservice because we're we're tricking ourselves into behaving towards it like it's money when in reality it's not. I would call it a currency. Currencies are very good at movement. You can think of it like the difference between a house and a car. So your house is not designed to move. It's designed to stay in one place and store your valuables like your clothes, your food, yourselves, you know, your jewelry, whatever you have at home. And a house in order to be a good store of valuables, it sacrifices the ability to move around. Like you could store all your valuables in a car or in a mobile home or in an army tank. I mean, there's all kinds of things you could move that move around, but there's trade-offs there. And then on the flip side, you could have a car or a bicycle or rollerblades, whatever you want that are good for mobility, but you're not really going to be able to protect much in inside those vehicles. So, okay, what's the analogy to money or currency? The dollar is a car. Like, you should only be using the car when you're driving from A to B for a transaction. Other than that, you don't need to hold on to it. So, it's it's kind of a shame. It's unfortunate that so many people everybody every American is just sitting on a pile of dollars all the time like while they're not making a transaction because every time every moment every moment you know add up a bunch of moments all of a sudden five years goes by since co and you've lost a ton of purchasing power over all those years and so it would have been better if you converted those dollars into real money gold silver bitcoin let's say and then you waited five And then you'd be able to buy more peanut butter, like a lot more, like two times, three times, four times as many jars of peanut butter, not just the same, but like multiples more instead of, you know, a fraction less. I think that's so interesting because like you said, I mean, I don't think most people understand that when they're getting an interest rate in a savings account, someone's paying you that money because they're making more money with your money. Yeah. And so they're giving you a cut. But the only reason someone would give you 4% is because they're making at least 4% plus a little bit more. And so it's worth it for them. So, you're actually loaning your money out when you hold dollars. You're either holding with no interest and it's going down in value or someone else is paying you for it and they're only doing that because they found a better use for it. Exactly. Yes. And not to mention that if the inflation rate, the rate of inflation or the rate of new currency creation is more than 4%. And you're and you're getting 4% interest, you're still losing totally. So, like if they're creating currency at 5% a year, and it really ends up being seven or 8% a year typically. Um, so if you're not getting seven or 8% a year, you're losing. And even if you are getting seven or eight% a year, you're probably still losing because first of all, you have risk. You might not get paid, but okay, let's suppose you do. You have taxes on that. Um, and third, you also have what I think of as an energy liability, which means it's something that you have to spend your energy to monitor. You have to verify that the emails come through. You have to check your bank account to see that the autopay went. You have to respond to, oh, change your password. Oh, do the 2FA. So, you're spending all these little bits of energy that's leaking, leaking, leaking just to break even. And that's just breaking even nominally in terms of dollars. It's like it just breaks my heart knowing that like every single person has to deal with this problem and it's it's it's literally because we don't use real money. Like it's unbelievable. Yeah, that is interesting to I think if everybody realized that holding on to dollars is a loss and so maybe that it's scary to take a risk and to buy a stock or to buy gold or to buy Bitcoin or to do something with it. At least you're I mean you got to go out and play because if you don't you just sit there. also a choice and that choice is to just slowly lose and that's you're also agreeing to just slowly lose now and maybe sometimes people unfortunately subconsciously prefer that because they don't want the risk cuz like what if I lose more but or I can make more or lose more they I rather lose a little than risk it to make more or break even. Yeah, there's there is, you know, it's the double, you know. But that's the rich dad poor dad. That's what Kiasaki was saying. The poor dad didn't know. He just held on and it just whittleles you away and the rich dad took the risks. Yeah, it's true. Um Yeah, I that that says it perfectly. That's exactly it. People just get comfortable and I don't blame them. No, people get comfortable and that's the thing. It's what is that quote from Charles Mccay, the uh extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. Um he says uh men think in herds, they go mad in herds and they only regain their senses slowly and one at a time. And we all went crazy with fiat in 1971 when we abandoned the gold standard and we all just started using this fake money, dollars. It's just a piece of paper and like someone's out there printing them while you're out there working for them. It's completely unfair. And we all just play that game and pretend like it's okay. It's been 54 years and uh it's just like you just regain your senses one at a time. Either you read Rich Dad Poor Dad or you just, you know, change your career and start thinking about this really intensely or whatever it is. And then you have these aha moments where you're like, "Oh my gosh, the dollar is a total scam." But like all your friends and family still believe in the dollar and they want to work for dollars and they think in terms of dollars and how do I get 4% or 7% on my dollars? And it's like, you know, people will live their entire life just thinking that way. They won't wake up. So, what's going on here? Because I know that we've lost I mean, for me, it's 50% purchasing power on my money in the last 5 years. I know. And you can tell me it's 2% inflation, but I know that a Chipotle burrito used to cost $6 and now it's $12. And that's that's half. So, you know, I can buy half a burrito for what I used to be able to buy one for. That's a that's a huge loss of purchasing power. So, what's happening? Okay. Yeah. So the short version is currency creation. So um because the dollar is not backed by anything, it can be created out of thin air. So anytime you swipe a credit card or you borrow student loans or you take out a loan for your mortgage or a car payment or whatever, or a small business says, "Hey, let me borrow a h 100red grand for whatever." Every single loan, the currency is created out of thin air. And so basically, the bank just makes it. They just make it out of thin air every single loan. So the bank loans me $100,000 of free of money they made up and then I owe them back $100,000 plus interest. That is correct. Wait, they don't have to have the $100 before they they loan it to you. Correct. So there's there's a hu So you guys know fractional reserve lending. So a lot of times the way that's explained the way a lot of times the way that's explained is very close to correct. It's close to correct with one important caveat which which I can explain. But then co in COVID March of 2020 the Federal Reserve abolished fractional reserve lending and there is no fraction anymore. So there's no requirement. So that small that small caveat which was maybe just like an interesting nuance it now becomes like the main central thing which is kind of what I said. So, the way fractional reserve lending was explained historically or typically is like if you if you deposit $100 into the bank and there's a 10% reserve ratio, the bank has to keep 10 of those dollars and they can loan out the other 90. And then if that 90 goes into your pocket and you put that 90 in the bank, the bank would have to keep nine out of the 90 and can loan 81. And then it goes on and on and on. If the money they just made gets redeposited back into their account, they can fractionalize that now and make more money basically. Yeah. Exactly. And so that you follow that chain, you know, until an asmmptote um and then you basically can multiply the currency supply by 10. And so that's a helpful way to think about it even though it's not technically true. It doesn't technically work that way. Again, this may be like a it's broadstrokes. Yeah, generally speaking, so if you if you can wrap your head around that, that's probably helpful enough. But really, the way it works is anytime you want a loan, it's all created out of thin air. And then every two weeks, the at the end of every other Wednesday, this is just what the Federal Reserve rules are, or they were, um, the banks had to have a certain coverage ratio. So you then you could think about like oh after two weeks of currency creation unlimited they somehow have to come up with 10% or whatever the ratio is at the time to cover all the outstanding deposits if that makes sense. So it's not like Yeah. So if you So they're not limited by the deposits at the time of creation you know the $10 check in a few weeks they just get checked on and in in practice there's all these different lending markets between the banks between the Federal Reserve they can always find some currency here find it there. So they really weren't limited in that way. And like I said in 2020, they just did away with the reserve requirements. So now no bank has to have any reserves at all ever. So if you go to the bank and you want c they have to have no cash in in a branch there, there's no obligation to have ATMs. There's no obligation to have any reserves electronically. So you could go into your bank, and this been this way for five years. Uh almost six. You could go in there and they can just say, "No, we we do not have your currency. We don't have your money." No. So that could happen. So we're So we're printing a lot of money and that's what's made and so more dollars are coming into the system and that's why we're losing our purchasing power. Yes. But so silver and gold are going up because we can't print a lot more of that print. We can mine it, but we're consuming it. And basically, more dollars are being made than gold or silver. And so that's driving the price of silver and gold up. That is the simplest way to understand it. Yes. Yeah. You can't print gold and silver. You have to spend energy to create them, but you don't have to spend energy to create dollars. So what's going on with silver then on the industrial side? Yeah. So silver is a very interesting metal because it is primarily an industrial metal. So most of the silver that we mine, more than half, slightly more than half, is used in industry. It's used in consumer electronics, solar panels, mirrors. I mean, there's all like thousands and thousands of products. So, most of the silver is used in industry. We're in a situation now where all these different industries all over the world, um, green energy technologies, you know, electric vehicles, all the batteries, all these things, AI, data centers, yeah, solar panels, all this stuff. of the whole green energy revolution. They're demanding more and more and more of everything, but silver especially and we're not mining enough silver every year. So for the last 5 years, we've actually been in a structural deficit, meaning the demand for silver each year exceeds the supply. So that means in order to satisfy demand we have to eat into existing stockpiles and price is going to go up to you know reach equilibrium in supply and demand. So that's kind of the main thing that's happening in industry right now. And as that happens, people are sort of reminded that silver is also a monetary metal, right? So like I own silver, but it's not because I'm making solar panels in my basement, you know? Like it's because I think of it as money and I know it's going to allow me to buy more burritos like in the future. Uh you know, and and dollars are not going to not going to cut it. So uh so as the price of silver goes up, we talked about it being like a gifining good. um people tend to want it more and more as money. So people get interested in silver as money. So it's a very interesting metal because it has both an industrial side and a monetary side and not not many other metals are in straddle both camps. So it seems like we're in the midst of two hurricanes going on right now because geopolitically things are not going you know they're uh they're more volatile than ever. It doesn't matter whether you think what's going on is good or bad. The reality is it's more volatile, which is not helpful for a currency. We're printing currency like crazy. And on the industrial side, they're demanding more and more and more for EVs and solar and everything. And so silver is resting right in the middle of those two hurricanes. And that's why we're seeing the price go up. And you're saying we're not making enough silver every year. How much, like what's the ratio? How much are we making versus how much the world is consuming? Yeah. Um, off the top of my head, I'm pretty sure we covered we produced about 90% of what we needed. So, that other 10%. Is that is that kind of what you're looking for as a way? Yeah. Okay. Um, that other 10% is coming out of existing stockpiles. And those existing stockpiles can still last like more than a decade, but these things don't move linearly. So, it's like as pressure builds up, you start to get exponential forces in different directions. So, that that's why the price starts moving parabolic. Well, and I've seen that countries are starting to hoard it. So if it's now it was named a a critical mineral by the US back in October and then China introduced export restrictions January 1st and that's just little code for saying the governments are all saying we want silver each and so they're starting to pull back and not just share amongst each other which will create bottlenecks. Exactly. So yeah as you mentioned US critical mineral China export controls um Russia is buying silver each year like for its central bank which is interesting. Saudi Arabia bought SLV, which is kind of interesting. So, an ETF on silver, not physical silver, but an ETF. And so, I thought that was interesting. And then I learned of a rule that I think is true, but I didn't fact check in the prospectus, but someone told me that in the prospectus of SLV, if you're a major player, like the size of a country, you can actually ask for a redemption in physical, whereas like a retail investor couldn't do that. So if that's true, that's sort of that sort of tips the scales in favor of Saudi Arabia wanting physical. Maybe they just pursue it by a different path. But yes, you're absolutely right. A lot of countries want physical silver inside their borders. And that's for many reasons. Partly industrial for sure. Um but also a lot of weapons like military weapons, bombs and so forth use silver. So I mean just anything electronic. So, and you could think of computers, drones, I mean absolutely everything. So, silver is the best conductor of electricity on the periodic table. So, it's the best better than copper. Better than copper. Yeah. It's uh silver then copper then gold and then other ones that are less important. But it doesn't corrode like copper. Exactly. So, copper dissolves in salt water or water or it it oxidizes and turns green, but silver doesn't. Exactly. So you can't put that in an EV or a solar panel because it gets rained on. Exactly. Basically. So for Yeah. For a lot of applications, silver is irreplaceable. For other applications, you can reduce the amount of silver. It's called silver thrifting where like, okay, we use X amount of silver, but maybe we can use 10% less, maybe we can use 20% less. And then, you know, the engineers have to come up with some way of doing that. Sometimes you can use a substitute metal entirely, a copper or whatever. Um, but it really it's it's so circumstance dependent. Um, sure. Yeah, but there's not easy substitutes, right? One of the other things I was reading is that with EVs and solar panels, they don't even need a lot of silver. So, like an EV might have an ounce or an ounce and a half of silver. And right now, that's like 100 150 bucks. But when an EV costs $40,000 or $50,000, that actually is a nominal thing in the car. So if silver doubles or triples in price, they'll pay it because if they don't have the silver, their factory lines stop. Like you can't make 99% of an EV is a paper weight. When you say EV, you mean like a Tesla, an electric vehicle? Yeah. And it's a paper weight. So they it's worth it more to buy the if the silver doubles or triples in price, it's not going to matter to the industrial side as much because now the Tesla cost $40,300 instead of $40,000. And that's more worth it than than trying to, you know, find a substitute or something. Yes, you're exactly right. Yeah, silver is such a tiny component in so many of these products that on a on a nominal basis, a holistic basis, the the price of the final product is so much bigger than the the price of the silver that goes into it that these companies basically have to pay. And so what we see is a lot of companies trying to negotiate uh contracts to buy their silver like either direct from mines or refineries um you know depending and that's a sign that there is a physical shortage and they want to lock in prices. They want to lock in their supply chains. And then you know you zoom out to the macro scale and we see countries doing the exact same thing. So like with China and their export controls and the US saying um you know silver is a critical mineral and these 40 different minerals are uh matter of national security and we got to work on our imports or exports or refineries and so forth and might implement price floors. This was Trump's proclamation from a couple weeks ago. So yeah, there I mean there's just not that much silver to go around and everyone is interested in it, right? All the producers, countries and so forth. So and and now retail investors as well. So I feel like there's a problem happening with the US dollar as well then because it it feels like the way my understanding of how the government gets money when the government needs to spend money as they go sell bonds at auctions every week or so. And if people don't if people want silver more than they want the dollar, it feels like they'll stop buying they'll stop trading whatever they have to get the US bonds. They'll stop taking on our debt. And if they're moving to silver as well, that also makes it harder for us to get silver. So, not only are we going to have a higher silver price we have to go get, but we're going to have less people giving us money to go get the silver. It feels like there's a spiral that can happen here. What What's the solution here? What What can fix this? From whose perspective? Like your personal my perspective? Yeah, just buy gold and silver and then just like tune out the world's hike in the woods. You don't think there's any way for gold and silver to come down in price? Well, I mean, yeah, they could, you know, this is not financial advice, you know, whatever, whatever. But I just mean, really, do you see any economic forces, any black swans, any anything? Like I guess if we stopped if we stop making EVs, if we if the economy tanks and we go into a huge recession and all of a sudden we don't need as many EVs and solar panels. I mean I know China made more solar power than all the other next 10 countries combined last year and they're going to keep doing it. But let's say they don't want to do that, right? Just let's just pretend that they don't want to do it. Is there a different technology like graphine that we can make everything out of somehow magically? That I don't know. I don't know how how well that's going to go. But here, okay, in terms of the dollar and the price of gold and silver, if you think about the price of gold and silver, or really the price of of anything, if you're measuring it in dollars per ounce, that's kind of like a ratio of dollars to ounces, kind of. It's not perfect. So in a situation where the price meaningfully and consistently falls, you know, a smaller number of dollars per ounce, you can think of that as, oh, that means people broadly the world over are expressing a preference that they'd rather hold dollars than gold or silver. And for that to be the case where most people are like, you know what, I do actually want dollars. What would have to happen? My goodness. Um, the government would have to cancel Social Security, like cancel it, you know, repeal every kind of regulation that there is on businesses, like everything. Um, you know, cancel the Department of Education and just say states, you guys do it. I mean, the federal US federal government would have to balance its budget immediately, which would mean two trillion cuts. Two trillion cuts. Yeah. minimum like immediately and then would have to cut it probably by even more than that so it could run enough of a surplus to actually start paying down the debt. That's what would have to happen or we'd have to get real growth, meaning the whole nation would have to like really genuinely innovate. And I'm not talking about like goose the GDP numbers by like printing a little bit, lowering interest rates, and kind of slushing money back and forth and then oh yeah, the GDP went up. No, like real actual growth where we build things and that in like build things that are so awesome that regular people are like, wow, what a cool new product. I would gladly give $100 for it or $600 or whatever the price point is. Like imagine some product or service that like changes your life so dramatically. It's so amazing that you want to pay for it and then eventually that gets taxed and funneled to government and like that has to happen over and over and over like real awesome things. Not just like, hey, I've got an extra 20 bucks in my pocket. I know it's going to be worthless next month. I might as well go buy a some chachki on Amazon, you know? Not that. I'm talking like something really awesome would have to happen and and it would have have it would have to happen consistently for a few years and then the government would have to be responsible and not not make more promises and expand the budget and then maybe countries are like all right we don't need so much gold we'll take dollars it's like what happened after World War II we started manufacturing automobiles we expanded the suburbs construction went up like we actually had a big boom in the economy and that is what That's real growth. That's what it that's what we need again. But but right now all the roads are built. I mean there we could we could renovate our infrastructure, but fundamentally like we don't need more a lot more houses that like we needed in the 40s and 50s and and honestly man AI seems to be going in the other direction. Like AI is so awesome but it seems to be taking away jobs for for less money. You know like you it can do a lot of things for 20 bucks a month. It's not making a new house that's worth $100,000. It's making people people's jobs obsolete. So, it's kind of going in from a GDP perspective, it might actually contract it. Yeah. I'm not I'm not totally sure about the GDP argument, but one thought I had about jobs, even before AI came around, is there will always be jobs because a job, going back to entropy, entropy is a measure of how spread out energy is. That's it. So, it's like a way of quantifying. It's it's may I never thought of it this way, but it's kind of like temperature. I mean, it's not. Anyone who's familiar is going to be like, "No, this guy's wrong." Um, just I don't know if this is helpful for people, but like temperature when it's hot, there's like energy bouncing around all over the place, and when it's cold, it's like kind of static and not moving very much. Okay, anyways, there's got to be a better way to explain entropy, but like uh yeah, if if you're like multitasking, if you're like, "Oh, I got to do the ditches. I got to make my bed. I got to go answer that phone call. I got to your you have high entropy because your energy is spread out all over the place. But if you're like focused on one thing for like a couple hours, you have low entropy. It's really organized energy that you're channeling in like one meaningful way. And a low entropy state is optionality. A low entropy state gives you options because you could do whatever you want with it. So if you think about like I think of it like my kids' room because if their room is made and clean, that's low entropy and you can do a lot of things in that room because you can pull different toys down, play with it. But when they blow the whole room up and there's everything everywhere, it's a huge state of entropy and then the room becomes less useful because everything's just kicked all over the place. Exactly. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So low entropy is a useful state. Um and one of my insights was, oh my goodness, every job that we've ever had is taking a high entropy state and making it a low entropy state. That's every job. So, like if you have a barber who cuts your hair, like your hair's all over the place. It's messy. Neaten it nice, tight, orderly. Um, you know, if you if you have someone who cleans your house, right, you're paying them to take a chaotic room and and clean it. Um, if you have somebody like building a website, it's like, all right, we have data that's all over the place. We need to create a nice organized system for it, and then we can do things with our customer information. So, you know, even a podcast, right? we have all these like random thoughts all over the place and it's like no no let's sit down in one place let's organize them let's you know organize our thoughts and hopefully they're more useful and that's a low entropy state so that's every job and so okay now you introduce new technologies like fire and the wheel and AI and whatever they will make certain jobs obsolete but they will enable more jobs And you know second law of thermodynamics is the entropy of the universe is always increasing. So the entropy of the universe is always increasing. There's always going to be rising entropy states always everywhere all the time. And so you and any person can just simply lower the entropy of anything you come into contact with. You can walk into a room and just tidy it up. You can go to a website and just make it better if you're on the back end, right? You can, you know, start a podcast. You can whatever. You can always create value for people. That's what value is. It's a low entropy state and you say here you go I'll trade you for something else I'll trade you for money which is also a low entropy state right and so there will always be jobs always always so you can always create order from chaos and AI is just a tool to help you I don't like no one should be scared of it I mean it's going to make some jobs obsolete just like you know the switchboard operators like we nobody does that because like the technology in a phone will route your call for you don't have to plug things in. So yeah, I I'm not worried about AI. I don't know what effect AI will have on GDP, you know, this year or next year or whatever. But there will always be jobs. You can always create order from chaos. And the more you start to think of like, let me just make things more orderly everywhere I go. Every company I'm a part of, every friendship I'm in, let me just try to be helpful, you're going to have a ton of value in your life. Interesting. So gold somehow is storing order. But like these metals that are organized already in their purest form with just atoms of the same type somehow magically sticking together, not being dispersed in the dirt. That is order that's been created in a way. That's how you see it. Yes. So I'm glad you asked. There's two pieces here. One piece is literal entropy. And I think that's what you're talking about. It's it is literally the case that an organized arrangement of atoms is a is a lower entropy state than if they were pulverized and dispersed, you know, all over the place. Yeah. So, it's lower entropy to be organized. That's literal entropy. There's also this figurative entropy, which is where we get into like what money is. Um, and so it's figurative entropy in the sense that you do work to like if I do some valuable work, doesn't matter if I'm like mowing someone's lawn or whatever and they pay me. Okay, now I have this money. It's it is a store of value. It's a representation that I did valuable work. It's a representation that I lowered the entropy of some system for somebody. You created order and that's what I have. And then I can go take it to someone else in the economy and I don't have to explain what I did. Like, hey, I just did this job for this guy who it doesn't matter. I just hand them the money, whether it's gold or whatever. I hand it to them and they implicitly know, oh, you did some work for somebody and it's valuable and I know how much value it's worth because I also do things for money and they're willing to take it for from me in a trade. And so that system works really well when everyone in the system has to exert the same amount of energy to get a unit of money, whether it's an ounce of gold or whatever. But the reason the dollar is such a scam is that we like us and like everyone listening, we all have to work to get a dollar. But there's some people in the economy that don't have to work. They just print it and they're doing it all the time. And they do it all the time. So you could spend you could earn like a $100,000 a year and work 50 years. That's $5 million. I could work my whole life and earn $5 million and they just push a button and they're like5 million and they just have it. So trust breaks down. It's Yes. Trust breaks down. Incentives become so crooked and backwards and it affects every aspect of society. So yeah, that's that's the crux of why the dollar is not money, why it's a total scam. and connecting that to entropy, the dollar leaks energy in that way. So if I if I work really hard to make $100 by the time I go to spend it, I'm not really getting $100 worth of benefit. Not $100 at the time I earned it, right? It's still it's still $100, right? It's going to be $100, $100, $100. But the definition of a dollar is changing. It's each dollar is worth less energy. It's worth less and less energy. So you buy less and less peanut butter, less and less burritos, less and less whatever over time. And it's because that energy is leaking out of my dollars into the other guys who are just printing it. Like they're the the energy in their dollars doesn't come out of thin air. It comes out of my pocket. So that's the scam. It's like it's like an energy um teleportation. So this just has to blow up eventually. Oh yeah, the dollar. The dollar the dollar. I mean, and we've seen it uh you know, Weimar Germany after World War I, what was the other uh Argent Venezuela, Argentina, Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe, and Trump right now is at Davos basically just trying to piss off every world leader. It seems like I'm sure he will. And I think that I mean, this is Gemini was telling me that there's a sell the dollar trade going on right now where other countries are actively standing up saying, "We don't want the US to be a world police. We're going to stop participating in the system. We don't want dollars. We don't want to buy buy anything with dollars. We don't want to hold US bonds on our balance sheets anymore. I mean, if if how how many I'm just kind of curious like how many countries would have to just dump bonds to kind of crash the US dollar on a given Tuesday or Wednesday? Yeah, that's a great question. I'm not sure I have like a nice tight answer for you, but generally we have seen that. So, like China has stopped buying treasuries and is just kind of like letting the ones they have mature and just expire. Um and so broadly speaking around the world, US treasuries used to be the number one reserve asset of foreign countries and now it's not. Uh it's gold actually. So partly partly that's because they're actively buying gold. Part of it is because the price of gold has gone up. So you multiply the two together and part of it is what you're saying is they're in some cases actively selling treasuries. in other cases just simply not buying to replenish the ones that mature. Um, and so how many would have to sell? I I don't have an answer, but we're in a very precarious position because other world leaders, they know all that. They know what we're talking about. They know this stuff. Yeah. This isn't a secret. It's not a secret. They publish the numbers. It's on websites. Yeah. And it's and it's, you know, it's not that hard to It's not that hard to figure out that all these fiat currencies are a total scam. Like when you're in a government and you have like, "Oh, we need to spend money on this new military whatever, you know, your economic adviser is like, well, why don't we just print it, boss?" It's like, "Oh, we can do that." Yeah. So, like, you learn pretty quick like you have a printing press and it's great to have it. And you know that other countries have it. And so, like you don't have to be like a formal economist as a world leader to just realize like, okay, we kind of all have this pretty good thing going. Let's not screw each other over too much. And that's the sort of delicate balance that we're in. But it can't go on forever. I mean, I don't know how it ends. I hope that it ends peacefully. I thought I thought there was guys with PhDs in modern monetary theory that said it can go on forever. And you know what? You're right. Isn't that true? That's real though, right? Of course they say that. Yeah, of course. You can get a PhD in economics and believe that the government can print forever and doesn't have to manage the debt. And you can believe that it's not stealing and you can believe that you're being altruistic. every time you print to fund a government program, you can believe that you're helping people even though you're stealing from them. You know, I kind of think that the majority of people are actually fine with any of this and they don't understand it and they don't want to understand it as long as they can lead a good life. I don't think a lot of people care and I think if they can send their kids to school, if they can get married if they want to, if they can buy a house, they can and they're not struggling to survive. I don't think they care. And I think that that's evidenced by I've told this story before that my parents when they were in college, they always tell this story about how they would go to like Wendy's or Burger and they'd buy a Whopper and it was like 29 and now a Whopper's like $7. And so if you take the inflation of a Whopper, it's 20X in 50 years. And so, you know, I don't think anybody cares if a Whopper is 29 cents or $7 as long as you can afford it. So then my next question is, well, okay, let's 20x it again. And like, let's go to Whopper being $140. And in 50 more years, if everybody's still fine and everybody's still paying their bills and nothing hurts, I'll pay $140 for a Whopper because I have the $140. But if you screw with the system too much and you inflate my dollar 50% in five years and now I'm struggling to pay my bills, everybody starts to ask questions and that's when the volatility starts to increase. And I think that's one of the main jobs of a government is to maintain the stability of a currency because that's that's we shouldn't you know 7 billion people shouldn't have to be worrying about whether their dollar is going to be worth the same next you know next week I think you know and so I think that's what's happening is it's getting out of control and they don't have any mechanisms to fix it and so that's where panic can start to set in. Yeah you're absolutely right and what we're talking about here is a complex system. So the further we go down this path the more and more volatility we get. We even we even get volatility in places that are not financial. So if you look at politics, politics are so divisive. Every four years we're swinging wildly. And that's in terms of like policy, but it's also in terms of rhetoric. And like you hear um Trump, Biden, right? They and and all the coverage of them. It's oh the best president, whatever. The worst president was the most extreme like extreme language, superlatives, right? um just like I mean when you step back it's it's really funny. Um it's also really sad but you you get volatility everywhere. So I agree with you. Most people do not care. They don't want to know. They don't want to understand this stuff. They just want to live their life. They don't want volatility. They don't want volatility. Yeah. We all want to just chill and hang out. Exactly. And part of the problem is that with with the volatility, no person, no company can guarantee that your wages will be equally volatile with the prices of the stuff you buy. So like if your wages doubled this week because bread doubled this week and then everything got cut in half because it got cut in half. I mean, obviously that's like a nightmare on your brain, but it'd be less it'd be less uh of a problem if you knew you could buy the same grocery list every week, but like when that starts changing and it's like you start to get food uncertainty, you're like, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to afford groceries this week or maybe I'm going to have to not buy that extra jar of peanut butter because like I just can't afford it. That's when it starts to really bother people. And the the incentives, this is kind of going a different direction, but it's like super super important. The incentives created by the monetary system and going off the gold standard affect every aspect of our life. So I would say that, you know, man, I don't even know where to start. It's literally everything. It's culture, it's music, it's food, it's everything. It's the the spending in schools and like cutting back on art programs, um hospital care, the amount of time you spend doing paperwork versus getting treatment. um the cost of health insurance itself. I mean it's absolutely everything in society is connected to the incentives of the monetary system. So I know that's like a bold claim but if you guys want to like unpack that or maybe follow one example we could like follow the chain. Well I agree with you in that u we were just talking about this I think yesterday where a lot of the reason why you fractionally you you fractionalize a currency is to go to war because war is very expensive and you have to pay soldiers and munitions and everything. It's actually and you just it's uh if you know firearms you say you turn money into noise. I mean you just shoot guns and then then that's gone. There goes 20 bucks. It's like gone. And so to do that at scale is very expensive. And so actually without fractionalizing a currency it's very hard to fight and so governments have to get along actually they're more incentive to get along because it'll just drain all their resources. So if they can print the money now they feel more at liberty to go to war. So even to that to your point, changing the monetary system can change an incentive structure inside of governments to be more liberal with fighting because they can afford it. It feels like psychologically the moment because you said basically it's a store of energy. Money is supposed to be a store of energy. So if I went out and I worked all day, you know, and I'm I worked my tail off and I come home and I'm tired. The amount of energy I spent is something I'm supposed to be able to hold on to. But when you start lying about that and stealing it from me or you don't even hand me something that holds any value anymore, you're disrespecting my time. And I can see how psychologically that would have a huge effect on culture because no one's disrespecting each other's time anymore. Yes. From the top. Really? Yeah. What what it causes a couple things. One, it causes people to trust each other less and they don't even realize they're doing it. It's just people live in a way where it's like I don't really I genu generally speaking don't trust strangers but they might not be even be aware of that. They just behave that way. And it's because of every time you get or receive money dollars. Okay. Currency. Mhm. Every time you get it, it's like someone is lying to you. It's like someone's lying to you. It's like they're pretending like, "Oh yeah, you did you did a bunch of work and it's worth this much." But by the time you go spend it, even if you go straight to the store, a little bit of time has elapsed. And like it might not show up immediately in prices, but like in the long term it does. And it's like I feel like I just got jipped. every it's like it's a it's operates below the level of awareness, but it's every single time you buy something, every single time you get or receive money, it's like, hey, this is what should be happening, and it's this. And you're just you're just That's right. something's off. And you can't put your finger on it over and over and over again. And it's uh and it causes you to just like not trust people as much as you otherwise would. And it's really hard to like communicate that or get people to like believe it or feel it, but I I believe it very strongly having like gone super deep on this. If you grew up in the 90s playing outside all the time and then like my I hope my siblings don't watch this, but they don't let their kids just go out and play like we used to and I'd think like guys, you know, we were running around like miles away from the house without telling anybody. It feels like the trust in society is completely eroded. You don't you don't do anything without being worried about the other guy now. Yep. That that's how I grew up, too. Just play with the kids on the on the block and it's like be home by dinner. Okay. You know, ride our bikes or whatever it is and down the street. I'm 10 houses away. And we're statistically safer today than we were back then. According to crime and everything, actually, it's safer now than it was in the 90s. But because we see things on our feeds that was in some other city, you just think that's more prevalent. But statistically, it's safer now than it ever has been. Yeah, probably. I I mean, it's probably true. Yeah. I I kind of thought this was something that people would talk about a lot for a lot of years. Like there's always been preppers and they've always been saying, you know, hoard your medals. And I always just thought this isn't going to ever come into fruition. But right now it sort of feels like it's happening. And I kind of feel like I'm I'm switching modes here where it's I'm no longer speculating about what would happen. And it's more of like when you step on a field like if you ever played sports or something, you know when like you did all this planning, but now when you're in the moment, none of that matters. You're the guy on the field. You got a job to do, but what the heck do we do? Like what do you do with 60 years of overspending? Like legitimately, I like I want to stay in the country. I'm I was born an American. My whole culture is American, you know? I can't speak a different culture. What do I do in how do how do we all survive and get along here? Yeah, it's a good question. I've had that same thought, too, where it's like I love this country as well, but it's like, man, I do not like where we're going. I don't like leadership, the policies, the taxes. It feels like it's not the same country, but But you're on the field now. Yeah, but I'm on the field and it's like I don't know. Do I switch and play a different sport? I don't, you know, it's like I could just cut, you know. So, I I don't know. So, so what do we do? I mean, there and I love what you're doing, by the way. You're telling people to use real real money and I think it's excellent. I mean, that's that's why we were honored to come down and do an interview, honestly, because this is this is above like this is above just between us. This is a higher level thinking. This is an abstract thing that reaches into everybody's lives really. Yeah. I'm a pretty missionoriented person and I once I started realizing that oh the way to put my money on autopilot is like just literally hold real money. That's it. I don't have to be an investor quote unquote. I can just be a saver and just hold real money, not fake money that are dollars. And when I realized that, I thought, "Oh my gosh, I have to tell everybody I know." Because my parents didn't know that growing up. They struggled with money. And so I I felt like a poor kid growing up because like we couldn't do things and like my friends would go on vacation or they'd have whatever nicer clothes. I'm like well how come dad like how come like shut up we don't have okay well you should have sold this dad like don't like you know but I don't you know I don't want to like Yeah. You're the adult in the room dad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And it's like, you know, then I realized like, you know, I it was like my own version of Rich Dad Poor Dad cuz like my friends parents like it just coincidentally, for whatever reason, almost all of my friends happen to be from richer families than mine. So I just on a relative basis, I felt poor. It's definitely middle class. So I don't I don't want to like oversell it here, but but like that it made an impression on me growing up. And so I thought, man, I got to just tell everybody I know. I got to tell everybody because like I don't want other kids to grow up like not being able to do fun things or because like their parents don't realize the dollar is a scam. Why don't we just tell everyone the dollar's a scam? Then we can all solve it. Um so I think so what do we do? Like what's the solution on an individual basis? It's like you know literally buy gold, silver, bitcoin except I would say in the case of bitcoin you really have to understand it. You have to do a lot of thinking a lot of research. it's it's a way steeper learning curve than gold, let's say. Um, so don't buy it until you really understand it and you actually have genuine conviction on it. Otherwise, you're just going to lose. You're going to panic sell. You're you're going to make mistakes. Um, so on an individual basis, it's learning and then once you understand, you actually buy the stuff. And if I could like wave a magic wand and like solve it on a national level, actually I don't know if it can be solved on a national level. It has to be global because there's a hu like if the US went back on the gold standard. Let's say Trump's like, "Okay, the dollar's backed by gold. Here's the here's the price. We're going to, you know, defend that price." That sounds like it would be a great thing. Like a lot of people are like calling for that. You know, we need to go back on the gold standard. That doesn't work unless every country on the planet does it as well because of what you said, the incentive to go to war. Because if you know that the United States, country A, if country A has a gold standard and the government is like handcuffed, it only has a finite budget and they're promising that they're not going to print to oblivion. If you're country B and you've got a money printer, you say, "This is our chance. We're going to print into oblivion. We're going to buy all the weapons in the world and we're going to go invade country A." And they do not have the resources to defend themselves. Totally. And that's why countries holies fight to debase their own currency. Yes. Everybody every it's such a crazy incentive that as a citizen I don't want you to debase the currency but from country to country they want to debase the currency because it improves their imports and improves their exports and it's it creates a net positive because if I can print more than the other guy then we have a little bit more powder than them. But internally if prices are going up all your people are getting disgruntled. Yeah. You can't legislate value and that's like what it boils down to. So like you can't just like with a stroke of a pen be like everyone is better off now. Like it doesn't work that way. Um but what you can do that quickly is like make a policy of we're going to steal from our citizens you know by printing money or whatever. So you can't create value instantly in that way. But you can destroy it instantly. Like you know you can drop a bomb and destroy a building way faster than you can build that building. Like it's just way easier to destroy stuff than it is to create stuff. And the problem is all the levers that the government has, they're all destruction levers. And so it's like you got to just like be like, "Look, we need you to have way fewer levers. Like like all you have is the military. We don't we're not giving you healthcare. We're not giving you education. We're not giving you a money printer. We're not giving you anything like post office. No. Get out of here." So yeah, I think if I could just like, you know, fantasize, um, it's like you got to get all the countries of the world to go onto the gold standard legitimately at the same time and have like a global peace deal where it's like if one country is caught violating the gold standard. That's like crime against humanity and the the other 199 countries just, you know, do whatever, you know, you got to specif. Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't know that that's it's not a very practical solution, but it's the only workable one I could see. It's so hard because I feel like we're living in a land of giants. Like, I'm not the president. I'm not a politician. I'm not a billionaire mogul. Like, I feel like I'm just walking around trying to survive and all these people I just don't want to get stepped on. I'm not in control of anything that they do. So, it does make but that makes me get defensive to your point. It makes you trust humanity less because you now feel like I'm going to get stepped on by all these guys that don't know me and don't care about me because I could get stepped on and now it makes me want to hoard and get my, you know, it be turns tribal almost in in a in a softer way of the word. It turns tribal. It's like, well, who can I trust and who can't I trust? It's really wild. And we're contracting as a society. We're going down in population numbers and growth is easy. When you're doubling in size every year, man, revenue covers a multitude of issues and, you know, it's easy to grow. But when you're in a contracting society, it creates what's happening right now. It creates this sort of defensive nature. It's really hard, I think, for a lot of people. It it is tough. And where I've struggled with that, I've had to find faith. Like, I've had no choice but to like find something to be a north star to believe in. And so like if things like this get bad enough for people, it's like all right, maybe it's Jesus or it's you know who God or whatever, right? Um but for me it's like all right, I've got to I've got to just find something to believe in because otherwise you do feel so powerless. And that's uh it's a terrible feeling. And I actually think that's an illusion. I think in reality our conscious selves have like infinite power. It's only like our biological selves that are limited. Like obviously I can't lift, you know, a million pounds. Um there's limitations in the physical world. But I think in terms of consciousness, I think that's an infinite set of possibilities. That's what I think. And I think all of us who are conscious, we all have that infinitess in us. The trick is remembering that or believing it if you don't or remembering it. And then if if you can keep that top of mind that oh yeah I'm a conscious creator and my thought my thought literally my thoughts are the most powerful thing in the world more powerful than bombs. If you realize your thoughts are so powerful you can just monitor them work on them study them instill better versions of of thoughts ones that are more empowering and that's how you can like be okay through all this. What does that mean pragmatically to you? It some of it sounds a little bit like manifestation, like if I think really good thoughts, I can make a bunch of things happen. And I don't know if I believe in that or not. You know, I can I can make an argument both ways if I'm on the debate team. But but what does that mean for you? Because it doesn't sound like you're saying think good thoughts and you'll make a bunch of money, but it but or maybe you are saying that. I don't know actually. I'd love to know what you what faith means to you. Okay. Um, so yeah, you just threw faith in right at the end. I know I brought it up earlier. So the manifestation thing and the thoughts I do think I mean I'm open to changing my mind, but we all just think whatever we think. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not I'm not You can change your mind whenever you want. Yeah. I'm not going to like assert that like this is, you know, um I just want to be clear about that. But what I find to be extremely compelling and consistent with all my experiences is the idea that our thoughts shape our reality. So yes, the kind of like trit example you gave of of think positive thoughts, you can make a bunch of money. Yes, that's true. However, where I think a lot of people goof up is they don't eliminate the disabling thoughts. You can think, "Oh, I'm gonna be super rich. I'm gonna be super rich. I'm gonna be super rich." But if you also have nine different thoughts in your head, like, "I grew up in a poor family. I don't deserve to be rich. Um, there's no way I could be richer than that other guy who I know and he's only like middle class." If you have all these different like competing beliefs in your subconscious, it doesn't matter if you instill one positive belief like I'm gonna be a millionaire. I'm gonna be a millionaire because all those other ones are stronger. So you have to kind of shine the light of awareness onto the hundreds, thousands of beliefs that you already have on whatever the topic is. My my health and fitness, my relationships, my finances. We all have all these thoughts, all these thoughts in our head and they've all contributed in my view to getting to wherever you are now in life. Like just that it's a pro all those thoughts you've ever had. And like some thoughts come in and they go out right away and you're like, I don't like that thought at all. And then others you like you cling to. Like it's your identity. You're like, I've always been a baseball player or like I'm a guitar player. That's who I am. And like you just hold on to that. That's fine. Great. Then you're going to be that thing. You are going to be that thing. I'm certain of it. So, and you can just let it if you ever wanted just you can just let go of it. Be like that's you know what? I'm just not that person anymore. And you've got to have like a thought. You have to have like meta thoughts, thoughts about your own thoughts. And you have to believe that it's okay to change your thoughts. You have to believe that, you know, you're not a bad person if you choose to redefine yourself. you know, you have to so there's thoughts, metath thoughts. So that's kind of what I think and then the role of faith in all that is the short way I'll explain it is like okay given all that I'm just going to trust that the universe is going to work out somehow and that's it. That's the faith. That's interesting. I've heard the I've heard the idea that you should live your life as if uh the universe has worked all the odds in your favor. Live your life as if everything is stacked in your favor. I love it because it is. And I think that that's more like that doesn't mean you have to make a million dollars. It actually means if you lose a million dollars, you'd go, "Wow, this is awesome. What am I gonna do with this?" Like everything that's actually happening to you. You You don't get to decide if it's good or bad. You're deciding what's happening to me is good. And I know that there's some like weird questions that come up with that, but fundamentally, if you can look at what's happening as in your favor, then I think you get to start seeing those those the whole world differently. Yes. Yeah. There was there was one company I don't know if it was Zappos maybe you guys have heard this but Zapos when they were hiring one of the questions they would ask in interviews is do you feel like you're a lucky person or not or like how lucky of a person do you think you are and that was like the one question that they used so like the whole interview was just like a formality blah blah blah blah and then there was like the only question that mattered which is like how how lucky of a person do you think you are and if they're like oh I'm so lucky I just like I win all everything all the time I win these like lotteryies these contests it's like all right you're hired because like we want someone who just believes that they're going to have good outcomes. Like that was like the thing. So it might not be Zappos and I could be like messing up that story. But it was like a really cool thing and I I resonated with it for sure. And people who are like, you know, I just never win anything like like who wants to be around that person? Like I'm like like okay well go go somewhere else. Yeah, Zapos was really famous. They also offered every hire like five or 10 grand to not take the job. So they wanted to make sure that people were not taking the job for money. And so they give an offer and they go, "Hey, one last thing. We'll pay you $5,000 to not take the job right now. Do you want it?" And some people would take the money and they'd take a check for five grand and walk out. But most but everyone who worked at Zapos had to turn that down. They go, "No, I don't want the five grand. I want to come work for you." Wow, that's so cool. And that was one of the things they did on the on the end of the hiring. Yeah. They paid people to not work there. And they said a people did take it. And they're like, "Honestly, that saved us so much money because we would have hired these people who really didn't want to work here. they were just in it for the job and the money and then that their performance would be less and you know they quantified it in some capacity but they said that is more worth it to us to pay you to leave if you would take that offer than to stay on. That's super cool. So they really embodied it. You know the Zappos really was known for their culture building in that way and I I definitely think that's they were the ones that were doing what you were saying too. Yeah, it's cool. It's so hard to quantify that level of metacognition that you can't really know if a person's good at it. So, it's cool to find these indicators where you see like obviously they're metacognitive. They're they're thinking thoughts about their thoughts. They're in a different plane of of problem solving. I love that. I think everybody should start thinking they're lucky. Why not? For sure. Well, we damn need to be pretty soon, so start thinking it fast. Yeah. So, so you think silver is going to have a better year this year than last year? Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to like It's just your thought on it. I just Yeah. That's my That's Well, you kind of are going to bet on it then. Well, so even if it has a mediocre year, I'm still holding my silver. Yeah. Oh, right. Right. Not all or nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's it's up into the right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And we I think I asked the question, what's going to stop this? But I don't think we had an answer. Maybe a global reset, a global recession or something maybe. Or like what's going to stop silver's demand from going? Wow. Silver's demand. Yeah. I think I indirectly answered gold's demand. It's like if the if the US like balances its budget and cuts massive budget cuts and real growth and deregulation and it's not going to happen. Silver I mean ultimately when it stops it will be a combination of things. It'll be industry peeling back. It could be it could be like uh you know t taking the foot off the gas pedal of the green energy revolution maybe AI data centers or something like that combined with probably government regulations that retail investors can't buy it. That's restrictions. Yeah. Yeah. So at the end of the bull market of the 1970s, they instituted a policy of sell orders only. So that was effective, I believe, January 21st of 1980. That was the day that silver peaked because no one was allowed to buy. 4950. Yeah. Sell orders only. Exactly. So they changed the rules. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing that'll stop this. That's an option. I think that's how it ends. I do because if you think about supply and demand like you know the the cure for high prices is high prices. So when in any in any market right if if something's quote unquote too expensive for people to buy it what that signals to entrepreneurs is hey you can make a lot of revenue if you enter this marketplace and start providing the product and so they expand the supply of whatever that thing is and then prices come down. So that's the cure for high prices is just keep prices high and that will incentivize, you know, entrepreneurs to come in. In the case of silver, you know, it still works the same way, but there's two important pieces here. Mines, silver mines, you know, they take years to get up and running. Years and years and years. So, seven to 10 years. I mean, it really depends on the country and like a whole lot of factors. But it's not like, you know, if if we need more burritos, you know, you can just like start a new stand. Yeah, you can start a burrito stand or a food truck or I mean, it's, you know, that not that hard to get up and running, but if we need more silver, it takes a long time to to to mine the silver. And there's no presidential like executive order that could solve it. It's like a president can't just say there's more, we have more silver. There's no way to do that. No, you got to dig it up. You got to dig it up. You can recycle it. So, typically what happens so silver is in like every bit of electronics. It's it's all over the place, but typically it's in such small amounts and historically the price of silver has been so low that when that thing has extended its useful life, people throw it in the garbage. At a certain price, people will start to recycle the silver. So, there is no magic price. I mean it's depends on the person and the volume of silver and all that and like whether or not you feel like recycling it versus just throwing it at you know so everyone has a different price but that's a small component that's a small component but the other thing I mentioned when I said there was two things one is it takes a long time to get a mine up and running the other thing is that most of the silver twothirds of it that we mine doesn't come from a dedicated silver mine it comes as a byproduct of some other mine like like nickel copper, zinc, gold, whatever. And it's like while you're mining those other things, like, oh, hey, here's a little bit of silver on the side, you know, might as well refine it and, you know, sell it. So, since silver is a byproduct, that makes it first of all, even more volatile in the marketplace. It's even more volatile in terms of supply and demand and price, but it also means it's even harder to just create more silver and get it to market and solve the issue of prices are too high. Because even if silver quadruples in price, that doesn't make the copper mine want to mine more copper to get more silver. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is kind of wild, right? And so, so then we get into the thing of like, okay, well, how's copper doing or zinc or all these other things? Well, okay, all these commodities have basically been for the most part in a bare market relative to stocks and real estate and all the all the sexy stuff. And like commodities have been like unloved. Like if you asked like a friend of yours, hey, do you own any copper? What the heck kind of question is that? Like it doesn't make any sense. Like even asking about gold and silver is kind of like a weird thing, but it's less weird. But if you said like, hey, do you own nickel or copper? Right. Stuff that you you know things in nickels and pennies like how is how's your palladium coming along? Yeah, exactly. Platinum palladium. Um and so yeah, no one owns these. No one as a as an investor really not a retail investor owns these things. But all these different asset classes they go in cycles booms and busts relative to each other. I don't just necessarily mean in dollar terms. Although that's true, right? Everything has bull markets and bare markets in dollar terms. But what's really interesting is when you take two different asset classes and just divide the prices together over time and you can see like an oscillation kind of like a sine wave. I mean, it's not perfect for every asset class, but you you see ups and downs. And so, one thing you can do is look at stocks compared to commodities. You know, copper, zinc, all these things. And basically, stocks have been in a bull market relative to commodities for a long time. But it's it's like that's flipping right now. We're basically going through the period where it flips. And so, I'm expecting that commodities outperform stocks for the foreseeable future. So I'm expecting the coppers and the nickels and the the uraniums and all the platinums and platiums to like outperform the stock market for years. Um so the prices of all these things go up. And so I do think that means you know the copper mines will will increase their production and then get more silver as a byproduct. But again it takes years for these incentives to play out. And like if you're a company running these mines, you have to be super conservative with your price. So if the price of silver is $95, you're not like doing your forecasts assuming like, well, if the price of silver stays at 95 and we mine this much. No, no, no. You have to assume it drops to 60 and like you have to make a really conservative projection and say like, is it worth expending, you know, $5 million worth of investment to, you know, do this? So it takes a long time. It takes a long time. So that's what ultimately will bring silver down. And I do think we'll get to a point where in different countries you'll see executive orders or things like that, the equivalent version where they'll say sell orders only. You know, people can't buy silver futures, people can't buy, you know, silver from whatever. Um, you know, any silver from uh bullion dealers has to be rerouted to industry. I think I think that really could happen. Um, I'm not certain that it will, but I think it's reasonably likely. I think it's reasonably likely that that happens eventually. You know what's interesting is like we were talking about how like Jim Kramer hasn't said anything. Like Silver had one of the hugest runs ever. And I don't listen to Jim Kramer, but you know, he's one of the mainstream guys and like all the mainstream was so quiet on Silver doing what it did last year. But then we just saw an interview yesterday with Ray Dallio on CNBC and they asked him how much of the portfolio on general should be in gold and he was like ordin like like 5 to 15% but I personally have a leaning towards 25%. And to hear Ray Dallio advise on CNBC that people should have 25% of their portfolio in gold was I didn't I didn't think we'd ever see that in my life to be totally honest that that we got this guy telling everybody that. So he, you know, this isn't something, this is something that's coming in my brain out of like niche old man coin stackers and going into mainstream where everybody's starting to see the cracks and starting to like I just can't believe he recommended 25% of your portfolio in gold. Like I think that's going to blow a lot of people's minds to hear that. Yeah, probably it will. Um, yeah, gold is this funny asset because it has such a stigma and it did have that kind of prepper um like tinge to it and it's like well if you own gold you must you must be a little loopy screw loose. Yeah. Yeah. Um that was just a stigma. I mean I guess it's fading a little bit now but yeah I'm I'm personally over it. Yeah, fair enough. But I mean like you know it's just No, we're in good company around around in this room. Yeah. I just mean it is interesting to start seeing it on mainstream where they're finally that you can't ignore it anymore. Even the run that it's having and everything that's going on, you can't they can't ignore it anymore. It's hard to find anyone who's like bullish on the dollar right now. It I don't think I've ever seen it exactly like it is right now. It's very negative everywhere all across the board. And so I'm starting to wonder, well, are we going to hit a point like in 1933 where the government just comes and takes your gold and silver? And that makes me question if I want to hold it. And then I don't I actually don't know what to do. Yeah, it's a good question. Um I don't know if we're going to get a confiscation. I feel like a a doortodoor confiscation is like virtually 0%. Like it's just not going to happen. Yeah. Um it's just not cost-effective. And like even if even if you bought gold and and you did it all the right way, which I would advocate that people do, um you buy it the right way, you know, your name's on the order form, your email address and your social security number, and maybe you have it in storage and or or maybe you stored at your house. Either way, um and so the government knows your name's attached to it. Even if they went door todoor, you could just say like, "It's not it's not here." Yeah. I had a gambling problem. Well, well, it could be it could be that or you could say like, "Oh, I have a summer home or it's at my mother-in-law's three states over or my, you know, it's not here. What are they going to break your kneecaps?" I mean, they can't that's not it's just not the door to door thing is just not going to happen. Oh, that's really good to hear that. That's actually comforting in itself. Yeah. It's just it's just no way. I think it just dries up liquidity because you can't then present it in commerce because it's illegal and so people would that maybe it just makes everybody hoard it and not not show it. And that fundamentally makes it illquid. Yeah. Yeah. Um Yeah, it could be that. So I I think man, it's so tough because in in trying to determine what is going to happen, you got to think through the incentives of the policy makers. And so if they're trying to save the dollar, they'll do almost anything. But if they if they show their desperation too much, they just lose all the credibility of whatever they're trying to do. So like I think confiscating gold or silver door too is an example of that where it's like okay that's so desperate. It's just like I don't I just don't trust you. I just don't trust you as a government to enforce any laws or really have anything. The pitchforks come out. Yeah. And and also if you think about the mindset of them and the mentality of people who own gold and silver, they're the ones with pitchforks who will actually pick them up and you know they're not you know. Yeah. So I don't think that's going to happen. But you know the government could could have an executive order and say like oh if you do have gold or silver or both or whichever one you know you got to take it to a bank and surrender it. We'll pay you current market right which is executive order 6102. and you have a certain deadline to do it and here are the fines, here are the penalties. Some people will comply, some people won't. It'll create a black market. I don't Yeah, I don't really know how you enforce it. Even if your name is on stuff. I mean I mean I'm not like telling people to break the law, but like if if there's a record of me buying an ounce of gold like four years ago and then the government says, "Okay, go you got to go sell it by, you know, the end of the month." And I don't do that, right? I don't have like a receipt that says I sold it. Even if the government came to my door and said like, "We know you didn't turn it in." I mean, I could just say, "Yeah, I sold it a couple weeks before the executive order, right?" Like, I mean, I could just say that it's untraceable. Yeah. Which is a lot of reason why people like it. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So, like I don't I'm not telling people to break the law. I'm just saying like the government knows people could do that. And so, I don't think they I I just don't think it would be that effective of a policy. They may do it anyway, but a lot of people will do what I just said. Well, a lot of people will go turn it in. So it it'll it'll have to employ the policy of turning it in. They will get some out of that and that that will maybe be effective enough. It might be. Yeah. But it would also signal we're losing control. Yeah, for sure. Like I mean even the Venezuela thing like signals we're losing control. Like what do you mean? Um like kidnapping Maduro. Yeah. Yeah. How does that signal that we're losing control? Um you Yeah. because Venezuela has a lot of gold and basically um was running a dollar and swift bypassing liquidity network with whoever wants to use it. So with any country that the US is trying to sanction, including Venezuela, they're just like, "Well, screw the US. Let's just trade gold, settle things on the side. It's untraceable. We don't have to go through the swift system." And uh so there's a combination of gold, oil, and the dollar. So, like it's it's the petro dollar, it's gold, it's he who has the gold makes the rules, right? Which is something that Trump um tweeted or truth. Did he? Yeah. Yeah. April, I want to say it was April of 2025 where he said um remember the golden rule of negotiating and success. He who has the gold makes the rules. Whoa. Yeah. He said that last April. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, yeah. So, he and there there's clips of him because like I I dig these up. Um there's clips of him saying he likes the gold standard. He wants the dollar to be backed by gold. Um Treasury Secretary Scott Ascent has said, he likes gold. Uh back when he had his fund, people might have called him a gold bug, right? So, he has said that. He also has said that he thinks a new Breton Woods system is on the horizon in the next four years, meaning the Trump term, and he wants to be a part of it. So, there's a lot of signs pointing in that direction of a new monetary system backed by gold. Trump and Bent are in favor of it. They're they're probably trying to put that together. And I think whatever negotiation, let's pretend that's happening. Whatever negotiations come out of that would not be enforceable in the slightest. If you have like a black market of gold running through Venezuela, gold and oil, and it's like bypassing the dollar, the petro dollar, the swift system, it just wouldn't work. So, my hunch was that the BRICS nations are acrewing gold. It seems like I don't know if they're actually coordinating. I mean, they did create an acronym, and that's like the first step to coordinating, but it does seem like independently they're all collecting gold and hoarding it. India, I know, has passed some laws where it's it's more expensive to export. China's buying a lot. Russia's buying a lot of gold. My guess was we hadn't been buying. And so, we just we're looking at South America. We're like, "Hey, you guys got mines? We'll we'll take those." No mines and no military. Perfect. Like, that's what we've been looking for. And so, we can kind of go confiscate some of Venezuela. I would assume Mexico is going to be next. That's just I mean if I'm just a guessing man, if we don't have gold and we need to get it, we'll just go take it from there because how are we going to participate if we haven't been collecting gold? Although I don't know how big the US gold reserves actually are. That's that's for me a murky spot still. I think for everyone it's a murky spot. I mean officially the US has 8,000 tons of gold. 8,133. Do we really? I haven't seen it. I don't know. Um I just remember when Elon said he was going to go look in Fort Knox and like live stream it on X. He never did it. That's not a that's not an Elon thing to do. So, I was a little alarmed by that. There's a lot of reasons why that wouldn't be done. I know national security and la. Yeah. So, like as a as a content creator, I have thought and everyone at our company has thought like, oh, why don't we tour a vault and like that would be a cool video. And then it's like, oh, no vault actually wants their vault to be filmed because then that's a security issue. Even if it's not a Fort Knox, even if it's just like a a smaller vault, it's a security issue for them to prove that they have the gold that they're advertising that they have. Well, maybe in a different maybe in a different sense. Maybe in a different sense, it could be a security issue. Oh, cuz if you have the doors on camera, people know security. You get like a schematic of the place. All that kind of stuff. That's the reason. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, like in all those in all those heist change every day at 3:00. You know, this guy pees at 3:05 every day. Exactly. Like think of all those heist movies where they're like, "We're going to steal a bunch of gold and then someone just lays out a map with like the air ducts and it's like, how did you get a map of That's right. It's like I did a YouTube video. We amalgamated all YouTube tours of Fort Knox and created this entire schematic." Exactly. Yeah, that's true. But we still have never seen it. So, it's a little sketchy and I don't think we're going to. And if if there's a quote unquote audit of Fort Knox, it will be a public publicity stunt. It will not be a true audit, right? So, they'll just say like, "Oh, look behind this one door right here." Right? Not like multiple places. They'll be like, "Oh, look right here. See all those bars of gold stacked up? 8,133. Check. America's got the number one count." And good news, the dollar is going to be backed by gold from now on. So, you know, or something, you know, something like Well, and the big thing about auditors that I learned in the corporate side is that if that auditor doesn't tell you the audit you want to hear, you just get a different auditor and you find the one that does audit the way that you want them to audit because it's, you know, that's that's the bigger you they have to be strong enough to be a real auditor. And if you want to be the auditors that audited Fort Knox because that'll be good for your business, well, they're gonna go, well, you know, there's nothing wrong, right? you know, and that's, you know, I'm not making any accusations, but it does seem statistically significant when you look at large companies being audited that it's they're they're they don't find much. That's the incentives, right? That's the incentives. That's the incentive. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of it's kind of like the moon landing. If you're going to if you're gonna No, I mean, really, like, if you're going to say like, you know, we're competing with the the other global superpower to like race to get to the moon and we're going to stream it on television. I mean, you can't take a risk that it like fails on live TV. Like, you have to have the goal. You have to I mean, you have to have you have to have the footage. You have to have the footage locked in. You have to know how it's going to go. Like, you just have to know. So, tell us how you really feel about I'm not saying I'm not saying that film can exist in outer space at -200°, but that has never been done. Look, look, there's all those other things, too. Like and that that by the me that by the way it doesn't mean that we didn't go. Right. No. Right. It doesn't mean we didn't go. That's right. The footage is not us going. Doesn't mean we didn't go. But the footage is not real. We could be there right now. I don't know. Who knows? Supposedly, I would guess they are. Yeah. But yeah, that's a whole different topic. That's right. But the footage is not real. You got to just No way. The footage is not real. Doesn't mean we didn't go. But the footage is like clearly propsy. Props. That's right. Yeah. Whatever. Anyways. Yeah, if they if they do make gold, like let's say you buy a bunch of gold and then the countries really need it and they force a buyback like, "Hey everybody, you're supposed to come turn it in." Yeah. It's patriotic. It's patriotic. And you obviously are like, "I don't I don't you've been lying to me for a hundred years. I don't care what you say. I have to basically hold on to it until the next until the currency reset and until a new system is until this one dies and the next one's born. So what exactly do we transact with in between then?" That that's a question I have. Yeah, that's a great question. So, a lot of times it is said that silver is for during a crisis, gold is for after. And that really has to do with the denomination or like the size. Like silver is more spendable, fungeibility of it. Um like divisibility or like yeah the yeah the smallness of it I guess. So like silver you know hundred bucks an ounce you can like spend that and you know reasonably get $100 worth of value. Um, but an ounce of gold, roughly $5,000. Not a whole lot of things where you're like, "Oh, give me $5,000 worth of peanut butter." Like, it's just like it's too much. Yeah. So, so the gold, to your point, the gold is usually saved until after a crisis and then, you know, you can sell whatever you need to buy a house in a different jurisdiction or whatever, whatever you need to do. Um, and so you could use silver in the meantime. Um, you know, you could use paper notes, like physical cash. Um, are maybe I should ask like cigarettes. What do you Yeah. Yeah. cigarettes, right? Maybe I should ask like kind of what assumptions you're thinking about in a currency. Like is there still power? Like can you swipe credit cards, debit cards? I would assume the state controls the power. They take control because the politicians don't want to actually get stabbed with pitchforks. So they're like, "Hey, make sure the lights stay on." Nationalize all utilities. Nationalize utilities because Yeah. I mean, if those all go off, I mean, it's it also hard to plan for if the power goes off because I think that's the moment when the plans go out the window and it's like if you don't have a farm and cousins with guns nearby, just good luck, you know? Yeah. If it's out for any meaningful amount of time. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Um well, tons of people plan for that. Um the the preers, um which is fine if that's the route you want to go. I mean, like, yeah, you got to look inward and say like, what kind of risks are you willing to take and deal with? Um, what are you prepared for? What do you think is just like so unlikely to happen, you're not going to worry about it? Um, versus, you know, what plan do you want to have in place just to help you sleep at night, you know? So, yeah, you just got to come up with your own thing. So, I guess what do you transact with? I mean, it can be anything. And if if there's a severe enough crisis that the world becomes fragmented, and what I mean by that is like if they close down the interstates, if it's a pandemic situation, it's like, okay, no one can drive on the interstate ac across state lines. Okay, that's one version of fragmentation. And then like locally, it could be like, well, no one's going on highways or there's a curfew at a certain time or we're not opening restaurants or whatever it is. There's all kinds of different levels of fragmentation. If things get really fragmented for whatever reason, um each individual pocket will emerge with their own economy very quickly, instantly. People will just they'll just come up with something and it could be it could be a gold or silver. May maybe silver. It's going to be a little bit of everything probably. It's going to be what? A little bit of everything. Oh yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Give me this. You give me some cigarettes. I'll give you some you know whatever, you know. Could be barter. Yep. Yeah. And it depends. And if there's no trucks uh like 18 wheelers like delivery trucks like supplying different parts of the country, you get these little regional pockets and like some will be resource rich you know near the farms and whatever and they will have very different economies than like a city you know like a New York City or whatever where you know it's it's a bunch of like you know a lot of white collar like cerebral people without Yeah. without farms this would be very very different. So I mean you could borrow your Mercedes for like dinner you know like you're just like I need to eat. So if it gets super super super bad I'm just giving you an extreme example but so what do you use? What do you barter with? It depends on the area. And so if you're really like seriously thinking about that it's just like have a bunch of different things. Just have a bunch of different things. So, like, you know, you can have a supply of food for yourself and your family, but you can have gold, silver, you can have Bitcoin, you can have cash, you know, $100 bills, $20 bills, $1 bills, whatever. Um, a whole bunch of things that might be batteries, you know, bottled water, like all, you know, all that kind of stuff. I would like to think Bitcoin could fill that gap because it's so transactable because you can break it into such small slices. Like you were saying with the gold, you don't you can't trade a whole thing of gold for a slice of bread because then you then probably the baker owes you credit and you don't want to have credit going on in with scarcity. But how do how do you see Bitcoin? Why do you like Bitcoin? Because I've heard you speak positively about it. Yeah. What do you guys think about Bitcoin? Yeah, I'm a big fan. I I've I've been looking at it for a long time. I I wish the world would switch to it, but I'm also a little scared that it might be more traceable. The traceability aspect of it is one that I'm scared of because I know that even if you try to split your Bitcoin up through different networks and hide it. I know that there's algorithms that can trace it. So, I know the government has a great way of tracing Bitcoin. I also know there are ways to like wash it through other cryptocurrencies like Monero and things like that, but it's not it's not like electricity proof. If the power goes out, it's pretty it's seems pretty useless for average, you know, for all of us really. Mhm. Hard to connect to the blockchain when there's no electricity. Yeah. Yeah. And those miners to stay up in China and you're connected internet wise. The internet has to stay up for Bitcoin to work. I've never liked the way that they people compare it to gold. I don't I don't like that idea where everyone's like, "Oh, it's the digital gold." Really? I don't think that even makes I don't think that makes sense. I don't think that there digital gold doesn't make sense to me. Oh, whoa. Okay. I I understand the aspect of scarcity and I think in that in that way it fits. But different features. It's different features. That's fascinating because I actually in my head I think the best way to understand it is digital gold. So like the the I think it's the best proxy. Yeah, I agree with you. But but here's the thing. It makes sense to people who understand gold the way that I understand gold. And that's not a lot of people not a lot of people understand gold at all. And then there's tons of people who buy gold and they own it, but I would argue they actually genuinely do not understand what they own. Yeah. Really? Really? They really don't. So, they know it's like a store of value. They know it's like real money. They know the dollar is a scam. Okay, we could agree on a lot of those things. But then you hear I say like, you know, why why is that a store of value? And they'll say things like because you can conduct electricity with it. Um it's malleable, it's portable, it's ductal, and it always will be. And so, so what you can do with it today, you can do with it in the future. And that's why it stores value. You're storing that valuable use case. And people explain it that way and they genuinely believe that and that blows my mind because that is absolutely not why you hold it. If if that were the case, you're talking about anything that's durable, what I would call durable. So you should if if that's what you think a store of value is, just having certain properties that are maintained through the future, you should almost be agnostic on which thing you own. copper, silver, a rock. Like, let me just buy a rock and I'll just let it sit there and it will still be a rock. Like, it almost shouldn't matter to you. And it's it should be very obvious. It should be, but it's not. That that's not what a store of value is. Really, what you're storing goes back to what we were talking about earlier. The value you're storing is your own energy. So, if I have to work all day and I can mine an ounce of gold just by holding that's proof that I did the work to get an ounce of gold and you know it because I'm holding it. Like that's why that that's why it's it's a proofof work asset by by holding it. You know that I did the work to get it. And the reason that gold is a store of value more so than copper or even more so than silver, more so than platinum, platium, all these other things is because gold most reliably is the hardest to create more of. So we we have a fairly good certainty that if people around the world, countries, whoever wanted to go out and mine gold and get more of it and inflate the supply by 1%. We know predictably that it's going to be harder to inflate the gold supply by 1% than to inflate the supply of anything else by 1%. Is that because of the scarcity of the mines? Like there's just not many gold mines in the ground. Yes, there's not that much gold in the ground. And it's also a function of people have been doing this a very long time. Mhm. And so there's a ton of gold above ground. There's a huge existing supply. And weirdly, almost counterintuitively, it's almost because gold isn't as useful in industry as other things. So like silver is better at certain things. It's more more conductive of electricity. And you know, for any one of gold's properties, not not 100% of them, but like for almost every use case, there's a better element or alloy or something. Not 100%. But so it's it's almost a benefit that gold isn't that useful. It's almost a good thing because it makes the most sense to hold it as money and it contributes to being money over time. So now that all the like central banks and investors have big stock piles of gold, there's if you think about you know inflating by 1% it's like numerator divided by denominator. The denominator is humongous. There's so much gold above ground right now. Whereas something like silver every time we mine it we're just like using it. Mine it, use it. Mine it, use it. So there's not that much silver above ground. And so you wouldn't really have to mine very much to inflate the supply by 1%. Like it's it's just going to happen pretty easily. It's like the 21 million Bitcoin. We're like right close to the end of Bitcoin and it's just you can't mine much more Bitcoin once you're right towards the end. Yes. And I would argue I don't know how deep down this rabbit hole you want to go, but I would argue that the arduous nature of Bitcoin, the fact that it takes more and more energy to make more of them. That is the thing that makes Bitcoin like digital gold, not the fact that there's a hard cap at 21 million. The asmtoic. Yes. Because because we could sit down and create a new cryptocurrency and say hard cap at 20 million, scarcer than Bitcoin, but like if you can just create one of them every time you hit a keystroke, that that's not money. No one's going to buy that. No one's going to pay you for one of those tokens if you can just create another one by just hitting a keystroke. It's the fact that Bitcoin takes energy to create that then means like, oh, okay, I'll pay you for a Bitcoin because I know it took you energy to make it and it it would take me energy if I wanted to make it. So, I'll just I'll pay you. I'll give you money, which is energy. And so, I think it's the arduous nature of Bitcoin that we can predictably we can predictably bet effectively that it's going to take more and more energy asmtoically to to get the next Bitcoin over time. That is the thing that makes it a store of value. And that's why I call it digital gold because gold takes more and more energy to get each next unit. Like you know the the ounce of gold we got yesterday, that was the easiest ounce of gold we could get to. Like we didn't like dig all the way to the bottom and get the hardest ounce. We got the easiest one close to the surface. But that means tomorrow's ounce it's going to be a little bit harder because we got to dig around some other rocks first and then get it. And then we go deeper and deeper. It takes more and more energy. So every time we get another ounce of gold, it's like a little bit harder than the one we just got. And it's been that way for thousands of years for the most part. Like obviously I'm oversimplifying it because you know sometimes you go out to California and 1849 and it's just like right there, oh my gosh, there's gold. Um so temporarily sometimes it is it is easy, but um for the most part it gets harder and harder and harder to mine more gold and it's harder and harder and harder to inflate the supply by any given amount like 1%. So that's what makes gold gold from an investment, you know, money perspective. And I call Bitcoin digital gold because it mimics that property of being harder and harder and harder to make another one. It reminds me of this Pokemon card that's going around right now. It's a Pikachu card and it was very, very common. And then this one guy has just started buying all of this one card and it was like five cents and then it's like 10 cents and he has thousands and thousands of this very common Pikachu card and now the card is like $200 because he has he has like 98% of the Pikachu cards of this one whatever. I don't know the whole thing but and now they're like so scarce. So he like kind of created his own scarcity with what was with with with what was a very common card that like everyone had and he's just sapped them all up. I love it. He cornered the market. He cornered the market on a random card that wasn't even a good card. It's not even a collector. He was just like, I'm going to buy all these and see what happens. It's just the price is just like it's like $300 a card now. That's cool. So, if I want to go get all these Pikachu cards, then I set my floor at $500 and I'm going to take this guy out basically. Yeah. The only thing about that like you could do that. Yeah, you could if I can afford it. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, right? And there's so there's two questions there is one is how is the US government going to pay for this taxpayer dollars? Oh, yeah. I mean, right. Which is a whole different can of worms. And then there's the other thing is if you buy all those Pikachu cards, it's like what are you going to do with them? because you could just be throwing your money away. Like silver is actually useful. Like the plan is to use the silver, but your Pikachu cards like you don't you don't want to bid higher than market price just to collect them because like at most you like you get a good feeling and then then you get a bad feeling and then then you got nothing left. Well, I just to be clear when Trump is saying he's thinking about price controls, he's not cons this isn't for private industry inside the United States that needs silver. He's just saying for the US government, just for our governmental stores or something. Or would he say any US commercial entity can only buy silver for 100? But isn't that just hurting all of our industries if he were to do that? Or is what? I don't know. Yeah. How does price does you know that how price floors work? Who has to pay that floor? Who doesn't have to pay that floor? Good question. So this was just in a proclamation. He did not iron out any of these details. Okay. Surprising with Trump. Yeah. Yeah. So it's just And it's just Yeah. So this is just talked about these are the preliminary stages. This is you know he's saying all right go go go ahead and negotiate with these other countries and if you need to you can discuss price floors. So like if they if they don't negotiate and this is so funny because like obviously other countries can read this proclamation online. So, it's like if you know that price floors are like in the negotiating toolkit and you sit down to negotiate with the United States, you say, "I'm not giving you a good deal." And you just wait for them to be like, "All right, how about a price floor?" Like you just like you just I don't I don't know what kind of negotiation mean like what it just means. But what's a price? It sounds like okay, we're going to negotiate a dollar amount higher than what the current market price is. And that's just a bad negotiation, isn't it? Maybe it's five bucks over spot. Maybe it's like a if it's securing it for the future, I guess. Like if we say we get four months of supply. Exactly. That's what it would be. And until they get a million ounces or whatever they want, then they could cut it. Exactly. There's a certain quota number of ounces, a certain timeline, a certain price. And there may be stipulations like, you know, your first million ounces has to go here and then after that we can, you know, you can split it up. It could be called bulk purchasing sort of like or or like it's like for a premium. For a premium. Well, yeah. It's like call options on something that's shooting through the roof right now. I I guess. Well, yeah. And this is part of the unfortunate situation that the United States is in, which is as the world reserve currency, it has, you know, with with Triffin's dilemma. You guys, you guys know this like um No. Oh, okay. So, so Triffin's dilemma, some guy named Triffin. Uh there's a dilemma. Shout out Triffin and dilemas and your dilemma. And and here here's what the dilemma is. So like if if you have a currency like the US dollar and it's the world reserve currency, you want it to be valuable. Okay? That way it has value obviously, but the value sometimes comes from its scarcity. You also want other countries to use it. Otherwise, it by definition won't be the reserve country, reserve currency if other countries aren't using it. So, in order for other countries to use your currency and have it in reserves and to like accept it as payment, what has to happen is other countries have to produce things and then you pay them dollars. So, you're basically just like importing stuff. And now that happens over and over and over for 50 years. And what ends up happening is all the manufacturing is done in all the other countries of the world, not yours. And the only thing you produce is dollars. And then you send them overseas. And now the entire world has dollars and you have, you know, Chinese goods and, you know, whatever. And that that's your dilemma is like you want the world to use your currency. And so you have to kind you you effectively have to sell or spend your currency, but every time you do it, it gets a little bit less valuable, a little bit less valuable, and you incentivize all the domestic manufacturing to go overseas because it can be done cheaper in other countries as opposed to spending the the reserve currency on labor and so forth. And that's the dilemma. And there's no way to resolve it. You just kind of have this balancing act that takes decades to play out. And it doesn't matter which country it is. It's it's the same set of incentives. And so now where the United States like the boat that the United States is in is like there isn't much manufacturing here. It's all done overseas including like really important things like military weapons and you know all kinds of stuff, healthcare things. And so what Trump wants to do is onshore manufacturing. He wants to incentivize a lot of manufacturing to happen in inside the United States. and he wants to make sure that our quoteunquote enemies, current or future, don't cut off our supply lines of all these critical minerals that we use in all these different industries. And so that's what he wants to do. However, he's in this tough spot of you can't just do it by magic. And the incentives are currently aligned in such a way that you know all the other countries of the world get their fair share of silver and cobalt and nickel and all these other things. So that's why Trump wants to overpay or potentially potentially overpay with price floors. Pay too much for nickel, pay too much for silver, pay too much using taxpayer dollars because spending a little bit extra on the Pokemon cards, right? Spending a little bit extra is worth it because like we need we have to eat Pokemon cards essentially. Like we need it to survive and if we don't have Pokemon cards, we get invaded. That's right. So So one one Pikachu card in every missile. Yeah. Yeah, that's the electricity. Like a bad day to be a Pokemon trainer. Yeah. So, that's the tough spot we're in. I mean, there's there's no easy way out of it. And it's just balancing all these competing forces there. There's no right or wrong way. There's no magic number. It's just these like these pressures that are building up. And uh it's like a get your popcorn ready situation. Like I I mean I feel like I'm as prepared really as I can be personally. You would also think if he's announcing price floors that other countries would start purchasing or would they start buying now because it's going to be inflationary or you know it's going to raise the price of silver and all these other minerals. So if you know that threat is coming, why not start stockpiling now before the prices all start going up? Exactly. It's like a bank run. It's like if you know everyone's going to start withdrawing their money from the bank, even just rumors that people are going to do it causes it to actually happen. And that's kind of the situation we're in with silver and other critical minerals. And it's like when it when there's rumors that the silver market is breaking, that pricing mechanisms aren't working, that governments are going to be buying, that they're going to be bidding up the prices. Just those rumors with like any amount of credibility to them, like a proclamation at whitehouse.gov like, oh yeah, these price place price place price floors. It's like, okay, I'm going to buy it all now. Yeah. Like I'm going to buy it all now. And that's why as a retail investor, you can be small and nimble and be like, I'm just going to go buy all the silver I can before countries which are slow moving. They might not make a purchase for another 12 months, even though they're thinking about this, but they don't have their meeting until April and then they have to get the approval from the whatever. Like they're just so slow. So yeah, if you know this is coming, it is it is like a runaway effect. It is it is like a bank run. Do you have a uh an opinion? Have you heard of Asian guy? Yeah. The YouTube what do you think's going on there? Do you have any hunch behind that? I think it's multiple people and whatever, but like I want to know what because Asian guy for those who haven't seen it is just this AI Asian avatar and he has a specific voice and there's just a ton of channels right now having this guy read AI developed, you know, uh, trans uh, plots or whatever around Silver. And I have thought maybe it's another country that's trying to create these runs to the rumors that you're talking about, but I don't know if you had heard anything or or what you knew. Yeah, I don't know the source of it, but it is suspicious and it seems like there's a lot of money behind it because it is well orchestrated and it is a pretty big event. Like you're saying, it's on he's on multiple channels and the videos are polished. I know like even just one person with AI can make a pretty, you know, significant video, but they're getting a lot of views. It's growing very quickly. Um, and it seems like there's a lot of oomph to it. So, it seems like there's a major player behind it and I haven't thought too much about the incentives or who might be who might be the one, but it does seem like a big player. The only thing I saw is I've been investigating them a little bit, the different channels, and I don't think they're all the same, but one of them I saw and in the description of the video at the very bottom, they messed up in that you could tell that chat GBT or Gemini was creating it because it reasked in um Hindi. Do you want me to redo this in another thing? And so it had the whole thing and then Hindi it was like I I didn't understand it, but I I paste that into gem and I'm like, what's this? And it's like, oh, it's at Hindi at the very end. an LLM is reasking do you want me to redo this with this this and this so it's like at least that one example they were speaking Hindi whoever the creator was was at least generating the the plots or the you know the transcripts of the chat in h you know from and it was doing it in English talking to the creator in Hindi and I thought that was really interesting u but it's just one channel like who knows you know what I mean I don't know how that how that would work yeah I don't know and it could be it could be an English-speaking billionaire who's hired ing like a labor farm in India to like create all these videos or Chinese I mean it could be anybody right I think it's just Gemini because we the other day remember when they raised the uh what was it the margin rates margins the margin hikes we asked Gemini if we for for some reason we got onto the trail and we end up asking Gemini like would they raise the margins on this cuz we're just thinking about our own brokerage accounts and they said yeah they've already released a memo and we realized the memo hadn't been released but Gemini already knew about it and then they announced we they announced like the next morning or that night I guess it came out wild and so it started dawning on me like Google has created an AI that is connected to the real-time internet which I don't think GPT has been connected to the real time data flow of the internet and sometimes it has answers that we don't have yet which is really interesting. Wow. Yeah. We've switched everything to Gemini because it's like all the other LLMs are scraping the internet to try and create a brain and Google is the brain. Like Google is the internet. They have all of that already and so they're just way more tight with their LLM. So we've we've swapped over to that. But anyways, didn't know what you had heard from about Asian guy. Jim. Yeah. I hadn't heard too much about it, but like I've analyzed a few of his videos um using AI off. I'm like, okay, like give me transcript. Let's go hear. Yeah. And you know, just trying to see um because there was some claim about some some legislation, some rule that was changed and then you know, 15 different implications and so forth. And what I found on on the first video I analyzed was that there were about a dozen or so truths like true things like trends that are happening that I could verify that I just know whatever wrapped around one central lie that like there was some piece of legislation that was passed quietly in the night and then boom boom boom boom boom silver is going to you know take off like a rocket and I was like wait a minute I could not find this legislation anywhere. went to like all the official government pages, did all these things, used multiple AI models to try to find it, you know, all these different I just couldn't track it down. I waited a few days, tried again in case something was posted, couldn't find it. And so there was like one central lie in the video and then like all of these related peripheral truths that like really sounded good to like create a narrative like, you know, Silver's going to the moon. Now, I agree that Silver's going to the moon, but like the the architecture of that video was really interesting to me. And then I noticed it again in a second video. And so like that's kind of the impression I get of Asian guy is like there's some sophistication. There's Yes. It's almost like someone is sitting down at at an AI at an LLM and saying like, "Okay, the goal here is to create a silverinduced panic. Give me some narrative that, you know, triggers fear and action using these, you know, five trends, but also one lie." It's like, you know, create something that sounds convincing. It's almost like someone's doing that. Obviously, I don't know. Um, and I don't know who's behind it, but that's that's as far as I've gone with the Asian Guy videos. Shoot. That makes me want to double check with you about I I keep hearing from Asian guy that the banks are very short silver because their clients for some reason. I don't know if they're holding the opposite side of a trade of some sort, but they're actually have huge short positions on on silver and Group and Bank of America being like two of the biggest. Have you looked at all are banks short silver right now? So, that is like one of the top three things that I want to research next and make a video on. So, I'm not 100% sure right now, but the primary place to go in case anyone wants to do this for themselves, and this is where I'm going to go, is you go to the CFTC, and they publish data for free. You don't need a subscription or anything. And you can look at the BPR, the bank participation report. And it does not break down individual names of banks. So you on that you wouldn't be able to see you know JP Morgan's long or short or these other ones you wouldn't be able to see that but you would be able to see net longs and net shorts and you would be able to see US banks versus non- US banks and that can be helpful for determining certain trends. So that's what I want to do next and I want to look at a long-term data series to see if the trend has changed and uh it just takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of time to do all that. So, so long story short, I've heard a ton of rumors as well. Banks are long, banks are short, they flip the side of the trade, this and that. I don't know. I wish I knew. I'm going to know pretty soon. I can't wait till you know. Yeah. Yeah. No, make some charts. I'll show you. Time stamp it. Yeah. And that's why I subscribed. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That might be a good spot to wrap, actually. Yeah. Thanks for spending time with us. Oh, my pleasure. Yeah, we've been diving deep into silver for a while and then I got hooked on your channel and I'm glad you responded to the message to chat because you're a wealth of knowledge. I can tell you've been thinking about it for a long time and so thanks for uh thanks for coming on the show. Hey, thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure on see everybody.