With silver, it’s a bit different. You can. As though you can punch it. It’s like a man whose hands are tied behind his back and you can punch him in the face and he can’t fight. The vast majority of gold comes as a primary metal. Nobody would mine gold if its price was below the cost of production. But people will continue mining forcefully continue mining silver as a byproduct, even if its market price is below the cost of production. Hey guys, Rafi here from the End Game Investor. And today I have a special guest named Oren Elbaz.

He lives in Israel just like I do, and he is one of, I think fewer than a hundred people in Israel who understands money. And he understands it to a level that he gets the idea that all of corruption and all of the corruption of society, all of the insane problems we’re seeing now start with the money. And I completely agree with him on that. We have our differences, but they’re all cosmetic and they’re all technical about why the gold to silver ratio is what it is. He has ideas, I have my ideas. But in the end, we all agree, or we both agree.

Cool. Amalo Pligue that we’re going to somewhere around 15 to 1 gold to silver in the end game, which is why Orin is a silver stacker. Oren’s YouTube channel is the Silver Hermit. There will be a link in the description below for those who want to check it out. His videos are in English. I think you do a few in Hebrew, but mainly English Channel, right? No, this is strictly an English channel. Strictly an English channel. Oren, tell us what you think. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.

I want to say, regarding the. The gold to silver ratio, of course, as you mentioned, there’s the philosophical, even religious aspect of it. You know, in times of corruption, we don’t appreciate sound money. And I think it works both way. Both ways. I think fiat currency corrupts the soul and the corrupt soul pro promotes fiat currency. It works both ways. But when it comes specifically to a gold to silver ratio, which is so high, as we’re seeing today, it’s something which is extremely unusual. A go to silver ratio of close to 100 is something we’ve probably seen only four times during the 20th century.

And if you look further back in time, you see that the entire phenomenon of a gold to silver ratio of above 20 is even. It’s even more rare. You don’t. You never see it before the end of the 19th century. So this entire idea, this entire notion of a gold to silver ratio of above 20, it’s a 20th century phenomenon. So in trying to understand why this happened, like my intuition was that since it happened around the time started happening around the time that humanity discovered fossil fuels and invented the internal combustion engines. Of course, these technologies allow us to mine more efficiently.

They allow us to transport ore, to process or also to drain water from deep mines. It allows us to dig deeper. So the assumption was that this very high gold to silver ratio somehow has to do with technology. So I’m looking at the gold to silver ratio now. You said it only happened 100 to 1 or higher four times in history. So I’m sharing screen here. This is from Gold Charts R Us. And we see sort here it says it’s not exact, but it’s pretty close. Once we’re at 100 to 1 and that’s right after the devaluation of gold from 21 to 35.

All right, I think it was once here. It doesn’t show here. So once here, which is for a few weeks, it went above 100 over here in 1940, 1941. I’m not sure exactly why that was. Probably had something to do with World War II is my assumption. I haven’t worked it out exactly why that happened. And once here, around 1985 or so. And then this is Covid, this is the lockdowns. And this is now so four or five times, something like that. And we see Here, here’s the 15 to 1, 15, 16 to 1, something around there.

And it go. It’s like there’s an imaginary line here, right that, that from 1720, even way before that. This only goes back to 1720. And there’s an imaginary line here that these three spikes down seem to touch that imaginary line. And it doesn’t really go below that. So each time this is a 15 to 1 ratio. This is 1919, 1920, get into World War I. I think the cause of that was the inflation of World War I was, was hurting confidence in the gold derivative of the. And here was 1968 at the Fall of the London Gold Pool.

And here was 1980 at the Silver Hunt Brothers, whatever you want to call it. That was when Fiat was still a baby, full Fiat was still a baby and it almost died here. And since then we’ve been going up and now we’re at 100 again. So yes, you’re right, only four to five times in history and only in recent history. And every one of those times was Pretty nuts, yes. Now, different charts will look slightly different because, you know, some charts take the annual average and some charts show you, you know, the exact daily, daily price action.

So, but I look at it as a whole as the, the fact that throughout history it fluctuated between 1 to 12, 1 to 15, somewhere in that region which coincides with the ratio between the concentration of these two metals in the Earth’s crust. So it makes sense that the price ratio between them will be similar to their, you know, to their abundance in the Earth’s crust. And suddenly as you, as you approach the 20th century, suddenly something, you know, changes and, and there, there has to be something, something fundamental in this market must have changed. So the assumption, my assumption was that it had to do with modern machinery and the ability to extract these metals more efficiently from the ground.

But as though if you are able to extract both gold and silver more efficiently, it shouldn’t change the price ratio. If you’re extracting both metals more quickly, more efficiently, it shouldn’t affect the ratio between their prices. It might make it more wobbly, but overall it should be average about the same. Yeah. Right. So the only explanation was as though that perhaps you were able to extract silver faster than you were able to extract gold, as though the invention of modern machinery affected the silver market more than it did the gold market. That was my initial assumption.

And then I started, you know, looking at the actual numbers to see if, if they corroborate this assumption. And to my surprise, they didn’t. Because if you look at, you compare the gold and silver, I’ll give you the bottom line. The bottom line is that between 1900, the year 1900, and today, or more exact, 2024, the gold supply, the annual gold mine supply of gold went up about tenfold. And if we compare that to silver, between 1900 and 2024, the mine supply of silver went up only about five fold. So it’s the inverse of what you’d expect.

We’re mining gold a lot more compared to the old numbers than we are mining silver. So the problem here is not an artificial abundance of silver in the market. It’s not as though modern machinery has allowed us to flood the market even temporarily with silver in order to suppress its price. Compared to gold. That’s not the answer. Yeah, I don’t think it has much to do with that. I mean, where, where I lean is that it has a lot more to do with 1873 and the, the sort of, we could call it the demonetization. There’s no such thing as real demonetization of silver.

But statutorily there is. And, and once you do that, once you take the dollar off of a bimetallic standard, which there shouldn’t be a biometallics, there should be two monies. There should be silver money and gold money, and then they should float wherever they are. They shouldn’t be on the same currency. That’s crazy itself. But it’s better than what we have now. But it was still crazy. And since 1873, we see the, the ratio going higher and higher and higher because all of monetary demand is concentrated in dollars. And then debt on top of, sorry, it’s concentrated in gold and then a whole bunch of inflated debt on top of that gold supply.

And silver is only, is only going to be used when the gold derivative doesn’t work at all, but it’s going to go back to that ratio. That’s my, that’s, that’s my general theory, basically. Look, I’ve heard this theory many times and excuse me, but I don’t buy it. And I’ll tell you why. Because I think that monetary use follows price and not the other way around. I mean, like if something is precious and if something is valuable, then you’ll want to use it as money. Of course, if it’s other properties such as durability, scarcity, you know, the fact that it’s compact, all other properties support the use of money, but it also needs to be, you know, valuable.

If it’s not, if people don’t value it, eventually they won’t hoard it. They won’t eventually use it as money. So I think it works the other way around. And the government, as you said, cannot just, you know, demonetize the metal by edict, cannot just say, okay, we’re not going to use silver as money anymore, then perhaps they can prevent you from, you know, establishing contracts using silver, using silver, you know, as the basis of contracts, because they won’t enforce it, but they can’t prevent people from hoarding it and keeping it and perhaps transacting in the black market with it since they consider it still to be valuable.

So something else has to happen in the market. Before government existed or even before coins were ever minted, gold and silver were valuable to the people who mined them, who held onto them as, you know, as a commodity. So it first needs to be valuable and only then can it be declared as money. Well, declared, it just becomes, I don’t think there’s a, there is a declaration by government, that’s true, but I Don’t think there’s any point where something becomes this is money. There’s relative monies. There’s no like crown. The point is that it can’t happen the other way around.

The government can’t just declare a metal as monetary and it becomes monetary because you declared it as such. No, I agree with that. Yeah, that’s true. It first needs to be valuable and then we can talk about the question whether, whether it’s money or not. You see what I mean? Yeah, yeah. And, and if I go back to the gold to silver ratio, there’s nothing to support the idea as though silver became less valuable because it was suddenly more abundant, then people abandoned it and then it could be demonetized. I mean like if silver was, was becoming more scarce.

I mean, compared to gold. That’s the fact we are mining it today at a 1 to 7 ratio compared to gold. When, when in 1900 we used to, to mine it at the 1 to 15 ratio which is equivalent to the, you know, to the abundance in the ground. So we are mining, we’re mining less of it again compared to gold. We’re mining less of it and we’re using more of it industrially and we’re using. Right, correct. The price is also determined by demand. And since we are seeing physical deficits in the past few years, so you can’t argue that there’s not enough demand to justify the lower price.

So we don’t have an oversupply and we don’t have too little demand. So there’s no justification for a lower price again compared to gold. Okay, see what I mean? So there has to be another explanation as to why the price is lower. Saying that the, if it’s less valuable, people will use it less. But this is a chicken and an egg. I’m saying that it, people, people are forced to use it less and therefore it becomes less valuable. Oh, but you can’t force people to use it less. People. If there’s an alternative, if there’s an alternative, even if it’s not official money and it’s valuable, you know, it has a market value which is, which is high, they will hoard it and they will use it in the black market.

I see how that might, that might work, but I haven’t, I haven’t thought about that idea deep enough in order to reject it yet. But okay, it’s a hypothesis. So what do you got to say next? Where does, where’s your argument going? Well, it’s the same. Just a second. If, if you have any doubt about what I said, you can just think about fiat. I mean the fact that people, as though gold and silver, silver are not monetized today, they’re not officially money, and yet people are hoarding them and using them as a monetary asset, although they’re not officially money and they’re supposed to use fiat currency.

Well, it’s the same with, with silver compared to gold. In the late 19th century, it was officially demonetized. But if it was, you know, if the price was, if its value was still high, people would continue a. Hoarding it and using it in the black market, even though the government, as though told them it’s demonetized. Okay, well by demonetize, what they. I think what they mean is that you can no longer go to a mint with your silver and get dollars. That’s what they mean. And so they’re taking, so the government takes away that entire demand that for they demand all the silver and they will mint it and then it’ll turn into quarters, dimes, whatever, into the money supply.

And they say whatever, whatever you have will exchange it for this amount of money. Now when you take that demand away, the ratio goes down. But what you’re saying is even if they took that demand away, that demand would be taken up by the people with the silver, by them either privately minting coins or hoarding it themselves. And you’re saying that didn’t, that didn’t happen because that didn’t happen. That means that the value was already down. It just wasn’t realized by the market. And there was just some kind of coincidence that the. What? Not necessarily coincidence, but they came together because the government was able to get rid of silver demand as money because the demand was already waning.

Exactly. Now some people would say, oh, I don’t agree with that, but I sit. I understand what you’re saying. Okay. You know, some people would say, oh, we had huge silver discoveries back then at the same time the Comstock load, etc, and perhaps the value of silver was falling. You know, the government was only reacting to the fact that there were huge silver discoveries. But again, if you look throughout the 20th century, you see, because since the phenomenon lasted throughout the 20th century, then it couldn’t just be, you know, attributed to one single large silver discovery.

You see what I mean? Once the com, the Comstock load was depleted, you would expect to see silver remonetized if it was the source of that event. And you certainly would not expect to see a gold to silver ratio of 100 today when you don’t have any Large silver discoveries and you have a physical deficit. So I think that in order to solve this mystery, we need to look at the geology of mining of gold compared to silver. And there is a large difference between the two when it comes to their geology. Gold is an inert metal.

It doesn’t tend to form compounds with other elements. So it’s very rare, you know, in the ground. But when you find it, you find it in its, you know, usually you find it in its native form. Usually you find elemental. Elemental form, yeah, yeah, it’s concentrated veins. Whereas silver does tend to, to form a compounds with other elements. Silver is what we call a calcophile element. It means that it tends to bind with the sulfur to create an element called argentite, which is a silver sulfide. Yeah, let’s tarnish. Tarnish. Yes, exactly. It’s the same material as the tarnish that we see on our coins and, and bars, which is created due to, you know, minuscule amounts of sulfur air or on our fingers.

But the point is that other metals, such as copper, lead and zinc, which are also calcul elements, they tend to appear together with silver. So I argue that, you know, in the past when you had to depend on manual labor, you were looking for gold and silver. You know, specifically you had to go find a vein which was either rich in gold or in silver. Whereas after the invention of, you know, internal combustion engines and fossil fuels, you could go after lower grade deposits which contain mainly copper or mainly lead and zinc and also residual small amounts of silver.

Today, more than 50% of the silver which comes to the market arrives as a byproduct of the mining of copper, lead and zinc. Right. Okay, so do you, do you have numbers on the percentage of the silver supply that came from primary, like people looking for silver and say, oh, here’s silver, and they add it to the silver supply. And silver as secondary, as like a chemical process breaking down these compounds and then getting the silver from the compounds. You mean before and after the, the 19th century? Yeah, like I’m assuming, let’s say in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries when it was 15 to 1 and relatively stable.

Around then most of the silver supply that was, that was being used was primary, like people digging for silver, finding it. And now most of it’s secondary. But then, but that, but that would, that now that we can get silver from all these sources that they couldn’t get back then, then we would expect the silver mine supply to accelerate faster than the gold supply. But still it isn’t. Yes, correct. It’s not that these mines, it’s not as though mining silver as a byproduct increased its supply dramatically more than it did to gold. It’s simply that the market has changed.

Instead of being a primary metal market, yes it is. It has become a byproduct market. In other words, it has become insensitive to the price. Oh, because people are going to mine it anyway, regardless of the prices. Because it’s just a bunch of garbage that they got finding something else. Yes, those copper and lead and zinc mines, they extract the silver as a byproduct and therefore they don’t get to determine the price of silver. They get. They will sell it no matter, no matter what. Because they, they may as well. Yes, their, their prime metal, you know, their, their intention is to get the copper or to get the lead or to let, to get the zinc.

They’re mining silver as the byproduct and therefore they will sell it anyway no matter what the, the current price is. And they’ll just consider it as an extra, as an extra income. And this, why this way? The silver market is insensitive to the price. As though the people there at the COMEX are relying on the fact that silver will continue flowing in. Because, you know, no matter, even though, if the price is. Okay, I get, I get it, I get it. So, so who is, who is setting the price? Why doesn’t it go to zero? Why is it where it is now? And why isn’t there a silver shortage? Why when I go to a coin shop or when I want my silver candles or my silverware, why, why can I find it easily? Why isn’t it, why isn’t there a shortage? Well, I think that the price of silver is being managed and it’s being managed because of the strange market structure which lends itself to being manipulated.

So when manipulation cause a shortage, though I can still get silver. If I have, if I, I can get as much as I want, as much money as I have, I think that eventually this manipulation will lead to a shortage. And the proof is in the pudding. We are seeing a continuous physical deficit. So the thing is that we have above ground inventories and in theory you are able to suppose that you’re manipulating the price. You are able to as though, you know, keep it as low as possible so that the flow of silver from primary mines will continue and you won’t get a shortage, but not allow it to rise any further than that.

Who has an interest in suppressing silver? Why would somebody do this? What advantage do they have to suppress it. Well, first of all, you know, there was a time in which the dollar, the US Dollar, was defined as an amount of silver. So silver is a natural enemy, just as gold is. Gold and silver are the natural enemies of the fiat dollar. So if you’re a government which issues a fiat currency, you would like to suppress the prices of both of gold and silver in order to keep them cheap compared to the fiat dollar. Yeah, but that was in the past.

Now, most of the treks above 100 to 1 have happened since the Fiat era, except for maybe two. 1933, 1941 were the first two. But since then it’s been in the FIAT era, Those, those moves above 100. So that’s after the gold or gold. Silver has anything to do with the dollar, at least statutorily. So why would, why would they manipulate silver now? I don’t think, I don’t think there’s anyone. I’m just telling you my, my main objection is I don’t think there’s anyone in the government who’s made, who is in charge of any kind of monetary anything who really understands that the dollar is still a gold derivative.

They don’t. I don’t think they get it. So I don’t think anyone is actively manipulating the gold price of the silver price because they want to keep the dollar under control. I think that’s totally lost on them. We know for certain that Greenspine was aware of the gold price and conducted monetary theory. So in order to keep the price of gold in check, we also know that Paul Volcker was aware of the price of gold as well and acted to suppress it. It’s documented. So I don’t think they’re that stupid. I don’t know if they fully understand precious metals the way perhaps you and I do, but they were aware that their rising price was a threat to the stability of the dollar, and they, I believe that they are acting through the large banks in order to suppress their price.

I’m not a big conspiracy theorist. There’s only one conspiracy theory that I believe in, and this is the one, okay? And if you’re asking me why is the price of gold allowed to rise more than silver, it’s because, again, the silver market, silver, lends itself to be manipulated more than gold. In order to get gold, you have to go to a specific, to a primary gold mine. And that means that if you suppress its price too much, then like any other commodity, supply falls and then you get a shortage, as you, as you alluded. And then you know it forces the manipulation to end.

But with silver, it’s a bit different. You can. As though you can punch it. It’s like a man whose hands are tied behind his back and you can punch him in the face and he can’t fight back. Currently, at least. Currently the market is insensitive to the price. So you can manipulate it to a much further, to a far larger extent then you can manipulate gold. And this is why silver is more suppressed. The price of silver is more suppressed than the price of gold. Okay, What I don’t understand is you say that other. The prices of other things can’t be manipulated long term because that would create a shortage.

If they were to, say, push the price of oil down to $30 a barrel today, there’d be an oil shortage. If you’d go to the gas station, there would be gas. You wouldn’t be like, everything would shut down because there wouldn’t be enough at that price. That happens within weeks or, or maybe, maybe even within days. Why doesn’t it happen so quickly or at all with silver? Why is this, why is it still available if it’s so manipulated? I don’t understand. It’s still available because 50% of the supply arrives as a byproduct of the mining of other metals.

But gold is all. But gold is also. Gold is also manipulated in, under that theory. Right, but there’s still, there’s no, there’s no gold shortage, Rafi. Nobody mines gold as a byproduct. Or it happens, you know, very tiny amounts of, of the market are mined as a byproduct. The vast majority of gold comes as a primary metal. Nobody would mine gold if its price was below the cost of production. But people will continue mining forcefully continue mining silver as a byproduct, even if its market price is below the cost of production, at least for a while.

Because eventually you are correct in understanding that eventually this will lead to the depletion of all the resources, of all the deposits into a shortage of silver. I think this is exactly what we are approaching today. I think the, the manipulation will only end once we get that physical shortage. Okay, so now let’s, let’s go to the future. At some point, you’re saying, you see, this is, this is, I think, your fundamental different way of thinking about this than I, than I do. I’m not used to thinking this way, but I understand what you’re saying. You’re.

You’re taking the industry itself and saying that the, the, the peculiarities of the silver industry are leading to the high gold to silver ratio. And I focus on still the monetary situation. But yes, and that’s the thing that you can’t just think about it as an economist only. You have to take all aspects of this market into account. It’s both a physical, you know, there’s the technological aspects of it and then there’s the monetary and economic aspects of it. And you have to look at it as a whole. I don’t think we might not be disagreeing.

We might just be looking at different sides of two markets that are interplaying. And I focus on one and you focus on the other. They might happen at the same time, but yes, of course. So even now, if we go into the future and the silver supplies have been depleted because of the structure of the market itself lends itself to manipulation, fine then. But in the future it’s not, it’s not going to change that, that silver is suddenly going to stop being a secondary metal. Are you saying it will change? Are you saying we’re going to be in a completely different planet where we’ve, we, we literally have to exhaust every source of silver as a secondary product and then only then will the end game happen? I, I don’t, I don’t think that’s possible.

I, that’s going to take, I think millennia. I tell you what I think. I think that once we do get a shortage and once the public becomes aware of the scarcity, the true scarcity of silver, then monetary demand, or should we say investment demand, will increase dramatically. It will de facto remonetize silver, make it money again, whether the governments acknowledge it or not. But people are going to start looking at silver as money and that’s going to change the fundamentals of silver completely. Because, because then the fact that the market lends itself to be manipulated will, will no longer be relevant.

Because, you know, because supply will, excuse me, demand will, you know, outstrip supply to such an extent that, you know, all these, these present considerations will no longer be relevant. Okay, so here’s my question that. In 18, in, in 1873, you say, or around 1873, you say the government was able to disconnect the dollar from silver because demand had already been going down. Why this time, whenever this whole wake up happens and people say, oh look, silver, it’s money again. And then the government will have to make it money again or whatever is going to happen is going to happen, we’re going to get back 15 to 1.

Why is it that at, at that time we won’t be in 1873 again. And the, you’re saying that the demand is going to have to go back up to what it was in 1873. Even though in 1873 we, we looked like we were 15 to 1, but we weren’t. But all of a sudden we remember that silver is money, but they didn’t remember that silver was money when they were actually using it as money. I don’t understand, Sorry, I’ll explain it to you again. It has to do with the very strange and unusual market structure of silver.

Now since the market is, as we said, insensitive to the price, it’s kind of a double edged sword. It works both ways. If for some reason we get a price spike right now and investment demand, you know, because people have been conditioned to follow whatever, whatever price, you know, asset or commodity, which, whose price is rising. So they, they chase it, they fought, they follow it and they hold it also. That’s a curse word. What’s going to happen, what, what I expect to happen is that you know, there’s going to be this initial like spike in investment demand.

The price is going to spike. This is going to alert people to do to the existence of silver and then we’re going to enter into this, you know, feedback loop, this self reinforcing loop in which investment demand is growing. There’s not enough supply to answer that demand. So price has to rise. That creates more investment demand. That creates a, you know, supply becomes even tighter, the market becomes even tighter, the price goes on up and up and up and up. And the fact that the market is unable to respond to it, since the market is so insensitive to the, because we’ve been in a deficit for so long.

That’s what you’re saying? Yes. Not only because we’re, not only because we’re in a deficit, but because, you know, half of the supply, as we said, comes from mines that don’t really care about the price of silver. So they’re not going to expand their operations just because the price of silver has doubled. It doesn’t matter to them. If you look at, how could it not matter to them? What if all of a sudden they’re making more money with silver as a byproduct than they are with copper as a primary product. Yes, but think about it. The silver that you’re producing is responsible to about let’s say half, let’s say 5% of your revenue.

So if it doubles, it turns into 10 of your revenue. It’s not such a huge change. You’re not Going to, you know, triple the amount of ore that you’re moving just because of a 10 increase in your, in your, okay, 5% increase in, in your revenue. It’s, it’s not enough to justify expanding the operation. So the price of silver will need to go like tenfold before it really, you know. Okay, before, before the secondary product becomes the primary product. Okay, so here’s my question now. Three times we went to 15 to 1, right? 19, 19, 1968, 1980.

For some reason that was a floor. And for some reason the market was able to recover or re. Manipulate itself or you know, become insane again from our perspective and go back to 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100 to 1. What it, and now you’re, what you’re saying, I think is that the reason it was able to recover is that because silver is a secondary product or a byproduct, the market was able to respond with higher supplies of silver to deaden down the demand. So what my question is why, according to your thinking, hold on, let me just ask the question first and then you can answer it.

Why, according to your thinking, did we go down to 15 to 1 and then come back up three times? And why, why is this time different? Why are we going to go down to 15 to 1? What’s going to be different? And then it’s not going to go back to 100? Look, the entire phenomenon of the gold to silver ratio of above 20 relies on, you know, having no investment demand and having the market, the, the price continuously being manipulated by nefarious, you know, actors. And if you get, for instance, in 1979, a spike in investment demand, the, the manipulation almost instantly collapses and you get the ratio collapses back to, to its natural ratio.

Right? But, but since investment demand was not, you know, persistent, since the manipulators were able to take control of the market, they were able to push it back to 100. Why won’t they be able to this time or whenever now we’re going to have a shortage because back in 1979 we didn’t have a true physical shortage. It was, it was a game which was played in the futures market. It didn’t really, really come from the physical market. Now it’s coming from the physical market. Now we have a physical shortage or about to have a physical shortage.

So, so the manipulation will end. And without a continuous manipulation, the ratio collapses back to its natural, to the natural value. Okay, but don’t let’s say it stays at 15 to 1 for a year, two years, three years, however long it takes for more mines to open up and mine more silver. Are you are, can’t it go back to 100 to 1 after the market responds and brings us more silver? Or do you see that happening? I, I don’t think so. Well, first of all, it takes a very long time to, you know, to find new deposits and construct a new mine.

They say at least seven years. By that time, silver is so established as money, that demand, I mean, we’re not going to see a one time spike in investment demand as we’ve seen in 1979. I think it’s going to be continuous and I think at that point investment demand, monetary demand is going to overwhelm any supply you can bring to the market to such an extent. The ratio will have to remain closer to its historical value. Right, okay. And by the way, one, one more thing. After such a prolonged manipulation, I expect it to overshoot. You can’t give me 100 to 1 ratio for, for so long without seeing it revert, you know, exceed the historic mean, falling below 1 to 15, perhaps falling to 1 to 10, 1 to 7, perhaps even lower than that.

Perhaps only for you a short period of time. But I do expect an overshoot. Well, that, that has happened in history before. We have gotten seven to one for brief periods of time and we could, and what I say about this is, yeah, it’s possible. I don’t, if it happened, I wouldn’t be like, whoa, we’re on a different planet or you know, this doesn’t make any sense. It makes sense, but only for a very short period of time. It has happened before. Would I, would, would I personally hold my silver until we get to 7 to 1 and then sell it? No, I’m going to sell, I’m going to sell gradually, probably starting at 30, I’ll sell more at 20, I’ll sell most of it at 15.

I’ll keep a little bit, you know, in case it goes to seven and then Wednesday at seven, I’m going to get rid of all of it. We’re almost done. I’ll tell you something. You know, I studied, you know, engineering. I’m an engineer. So I look at these matters differently than, you know, your average economist would look at it. Right. My head is in the clouds, your head’s on the ground. I get it. No, I’m not necessarily saying that economists can be, you know, very, yeah, they can have their feet on the ground as well. But the thing is that when I look at the silver market, I identify it as a, as Though as a system, a system which has two poles to two positions that it can be in.

It’s, it contains what I call positive feedback loops and positive feedback loops, although we use the word positive, it’s not a positive thing. They tend to be unstable. You know, self regulating system. Yeah. Homeostatic systems are negative feedback loops. This is all in biology and you know, this is what you learn in ninth grade bio. Exactly. A normal system has a negative feedback loop, whereas silver has positive feedback loops. And therefore it can only be in either of, of two states. Either in the current state in which its price is not moving at all, or in, in this insane state in which its price absolutely goes to the moon.

Right. You can see, due to its nature, strange market structure, you can’t see the price rising, you know, as though gradually in a, in a line, you won’t see it happening. And this is extremely counterintuitive. Human beings are not equipped to deal with such a market. So, so hold on, this, I have talked about this and I have my way of, I have my way of thinking about it. Right. It’s very simple. Right. When the price of oil goes up or the price of any consumable commodity goes up, people use less of it because they want to save their money.

But when the price of money itself goes up, people want more of it because they want more purchasing power. So if the price of anything else goes up, the demand goes down. If the price of money goes up, the demand goes up. And that is what makes it a positive feedback loop over any other consumable commodity. Yes. And also in silver you have the thing that it has been artificially suppressed for so long. So, you know, as though, as though you have built up energy, you know, in, in keeping it lower. So it’s as though it’s like the beach ball underwater, it wants to spring up and it’s a self reinforcing loop again, as we said.

So, you know, naturally people want to see the price rising gradually and then they can think about it and they can invest and they have the time to do that. With silver, it tends to, you know, move from nothing to everything. And it’s very instantaneous, it happens very rapidly. We’ve already seen a few, you know, just glimpses. What we’ve seen in, in 1979 and what we’ve seen in 2011 was just a glimpse, a small glimpse of what silver can really do. And I think it’s going to be, you know, absolutely crazy. This is not investment advice.

I’m not an investment advisor. But If I try to analyze it as an engineer, I see, like, the most incredible investment opportunity, or at least speculation opportunity ever, simply because of this weird, you know, confluence of. Of events and circumstances that turn silver into the. Like something which is different from anything else you’ve seen in the investment or financial world, right? And it was. It was the. To close this off on a. On a spiritual idea. It was the first investment in the Torah. You know, Joseph Yosef Fatzadik, he collected all the silver, bankrupted all of Mitzrayim, and we ended up with all of it.

And that’s how we conquered Israel for the first time. And the last thing I’ll say on that is an idea that just occurred to me. Do you know how many steps there are to the Beit Hamikdash? Oh, I’m afraid I don’t recall. 15. There are 15 sheer hamalos in. In Safer Tailor. In the Book of Psalms, there’s 15 Shirhamalas. It’s literally sure hamala. It’s a song of the steps. And they would sing one shira malice every time they went up a step until they got to the beita mikdash. There’s 15 in. On the Seder night, there’s 15 steps in dayenu, right? The.

That’s the 15. It could be the 15 to 1 ratio. And the first donation that David Hamelech made to the Beit Hamikdash, he died before it was built. His son Shlomo built. It was mainly silver, right? Shlomo collected. Collected the gold, David collected the silver, and then it was brought into the Kodesh Kodashim after Shlomo finished it. Silver is the. The cap to all of this. And there was one patreon I did a few weeks ago. It was when. When Moshe. When Moshe Rabbeinu, when Moses was building the tabernacle, the Mishkan, and he was doing a cheshbon in Parashat Pekude, he was writing down everything.

And. And then he. He forgot that. That the. The. The Machazida shekel, the half shekel that everyone donated. Everyone, instead of a census, they used a half shekel because you don’t want counting people to be costless because then the government will keep counting everything and they’ll go crazy and they’ll drive all of us nuts, which is what they’re doing all the time. So if you add a price to it, if you add a half shekel of silver to every time you count the people, it’s going to cost money. And you have to make it very, very rare.

But he forgot about those half shekels because all the donations were coming in of gold and silver, of gold and all these precious stones. And then. And then the midrash says that Moshe is like, oh, my God, where is. I’m missing. I’m missing like a few shekels. Like, they’re gonna think I stole it. I don’t know what to do. He’s freaking out. And then God says, moshe, you remember about the silver? He’s like, oh, yeah, okay, the silver. And then he. And because they made hooks and he forgot to count the hooks. So it means, like, when do we know we’re at the end game? When we’re at those 15 steps, we’re at the 15 to 1 ratio.

Moses remembers that, oh, there was a bunch of silver donations. And the silver that was there the whole time is donated to Beit Hamikdash. It always comes in at the last step. Once we had 15 to 1 or maybe 7 to 1, we’ll know we’re there. Hopefully it stays there this time and we can stay on a sane footing where we’re not destroying the planet, destroying ourselves, destroying our children, destroying each other, and driving everybody crazy. Yeah, well, you know, as our listeners can. Can see, Rafi is better versed than I am in Jewish culture and Jewish traditions.

But I, too, I. I feel that there are, you know, there’s a deep meaning to everything that we’re seeing right now. And that, you know, dealing with precious metals has a lot more to do with. With just investing and economics. It has a meaning because somehow, you know, everything that we’re seeing around us, from politics and wars etc, and technology, somehow everything is connected. Money is how we communicate with each other about what exists on the planet. If we’re all. If we all have the wrong math, we’re all going to get in trouble. All right, Oren, this is really fun.

I think we went longer than I intended, but it’s. Thank you. You have a very Jewish mind. So it was fun talking to you, and I’m sure we’ll. We’ll talk again and we’ll meet up in the end game and decide which cities we want to buy and what we want to be in charge of. And hopefully we’ll make everything better. Yesterday. Yesterday we were an army with no country. Tomorrow we have to decide which country we want to buy.
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