➡ As tensions and uncertainties rise globally, countries are buying gold to maintain stability. This is because gold is seen as a safe asset during conflicts. Private investors and banks used to dominate the gold market, but now governments are stepping in, pushing prices up. The article also discusses how gold is not just stored but used as collateral in financial transactions, adding another layer of complexity to the global economy.

➡ The speaker appreciates a shared viewpoint and invites the listener to visit Saskatchewan, Canada, a place known for its extreme weather and large mosquitoes. They discuss potential activities like shooting or hunting, but the listener prefers not to hunt camels. The conversation ends with a promotion for a survival gear website, emphasizing the importance of being prepared.

➡ The text discusses the complexities of investing, particularly in gold, and how various factors like buying and selling costs can impact profits. It also talks about the influence of global events on market trends, emphasizing that numbers, not narratives, drive the market. The author suggests that gold prices are likely to rise due to increasing global tensions, while equity markets may decline due to a lack of stability. The text also highlights the role of the Federal Reserve in controlling money supply, which can significantly affect market trends.

➡ The market’s stability largely depends on the Federal Reserve’s actions. If the Fed stops supporting the market, it could potentially halve. However, the market could also be influenced by a practice called a carry trade, where traders profit from the difference between the future and current prices of assets. This practice has contributed to the high prices in the NASDAQ. The sustainability of the current system is questionable due to high debt levels and reliance on global trade efficiency. The potential for a significant market drop exists if something disrupts the carry trade practice.

➡ The discussion revolves around the economic and military strategies of the US and China. It suggests that the US is trying to reindustrialize to regain its manufacturing power, which is currently dominated by China. This is seen as a preparation for potential conflict, as manufacturing power is crucial for war. However, the conversation also highlights the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in future conflicts, noting that AI requires significant energy, which could lead to increased energy production and consumption.

➡ The text discusses the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education, suggesting it could significantly enhance children’s intelligence. It proposes that AI could provide access to the wisdom of great historical figures, leading to a generation of highly intelligent children. However, it also acknowledges the potential for AI to be used destructively. The text concludes by discussing the importance of mental development and understanding technology as a defense against future challenges.

➡ The speaker believes that the Republicans may lose the upcoming midterms, leading to a potential decrease in political chaos and a possible negative effect on gold prices. They also discuss the potential for conflict between the U.S. and China, which could drive up gold prices. The speaker suggests that in a crisis, American junk silver coins could be a practical currency. They also mention the importance of diversifying one’s assets, including having some in easily liquidatable equities, property, and productive assets.

➡ The text discusses the importance of diversifying assets and being geographically independent for financial security. It suggests having 25% liquidity, 25% in productive assets, 25% in equities, and 25% out of the country. The text also highlights the role of silver and gold in times of peace and war, respectively, and the increasing importance of Bitcoin for those who may need to quickly move large amounts of money. The text concludes by warning about the potential risks associated with holding large amounts of Bitcoin, including the threat of theft or physical harm.

➡ The speaker discusses the risks of owning cryptocurrency, noting that many people he knows have been hacked or robbed. He compares this to the relative safety of owning gold or equities. He also shares his experiences with preparing for crises, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, and how he made money by selling his stocks before the market crashed. He advises people to be proactive and use their intelligence to anticipate and prepare for potential problems. He ends by discussing the current trade issues and the potential for supply chain disruptions, suggesting that silence on these issues is a bad sign.

➡ The speaker expresses concern about the potential disruption of simple, often overlooked items like rubber widgets, nails, and plastic trays that are crucial to our economies and largely come from China. He warns that if cooperation between countries breaks down, it could lead to a shortage of these items, causing panic and a potential market crash. He also discusses the importance of charm and trust in leadership, and the need for individuals to take steps to make their lives less chaotic in these volatile times.

Gold is the currency of war. They don’t park tanks on vault Knox for no reason. When you see gold suddenly go up, something bad is probably underway. The only war that would count is China versus America. People say, oh, there’s going to be a cold war. There is a cold war. Oh, there’s going to be World War 3. Maybe it’s already started. There’s been a set of factors which is bringing about a head on conflict. It doesn’t seem to be a highly likely turn of events that will make everybody sit around campfire singing Kumbaya. When Britain ruled the world, it was the workshop of the world.

When Americ ruled the world, it was the workshop of the world. China is now the workshop of the world. And if you can’t build ships and you can’t make steel, you’re not going to be able to fight a war, are you? Particularly when your enemy is making it all for you. We are now in very, very, very volatile times. World War three is already happening. This is a house of cars and it is in the process of collapsing right now. You’re going to see an economic cray the likes of which we’ve never seen. Hi folks, Canadian prepper Here today on the channel we have Clem Chambers who’s a investor, the CEO of a new FN.com a columnist for Forbes and Seeking Alpha.

He’s got decades of experience in the financial markets and known for his incisive market analysis and expertise in the global financial trends. Today I’m hoping to get his insight into the relationship between gold and war and how we can financially prepare to weather the coming storm. Thanks for coming on today, my friend. And what is the relationship between war and gold? Well, if you think about it, the first question you’ve got to ask is. Well, there’s several really basic questions. One of them is what is the use case for gold? Right. And the use case for gold is a bit of jewelry, a lot of electronics, bit of dentistry, once upon a time.

And governments stack it. Why do governments stack it? What’s the purpose of them stacking it for all these years? Why have they got warehouses full of it? Why do they park tanks on top of their gold reserves? Why are they worrying about gold? Things have moved on. I mean they demonetized gold pretty much since 1920 and certainly finally around the world either somewhere between 1947 and 1970. Precious Metals is not money and it’s simply not particularly good money. If you look at the history of precious metals as money, it was just necessary. But why Are they stacking it? Why would you stack it? And the answer is gold is the currency of war and it’s the currency of intergovernmental transaction.

It’s heavy transactions because everybody trusts gold and it’s a high value heavy thing. So gold is the transactional currency between governments. Well, what are they transaction in gold for when they can just send over some bills or an IOU or get their central bankers to have a chat or. Well, that doesn’t work. If you’re in war, if you’re having a big war and you want to buy some ships, they say, yeah, sailors, some gold will you in a submarine and we’ll send the ships. You know, the reason America ended up with all the gold in the world at the end of Second World War was because everybody was paying America in gold.

And what they didn’t pay America in gold to get stuff got America actually confiscated when they won. Yeah, everybody, all the countries pay in gold. And you know, there’s a lot of funny stories about, for example, the Nazis were buying tungsten for armored piercing shells off of the Portuguese in British five pound paper notes. And the Portuguese worked out after they shipped a bit of tungsten that the five pound notes were forged by the Germans. So guess what? The Germans had to pay for their tungsten in gold. So gold is for war and gold is basically the currency of bullets.

Yeah. So if you haven’t got gold and you’re not winning your war decisively and you haven’t got anybody to buy your kit for you, you got gold. And if you think that maybe, oh, it is getting a bit spicy, you do what, what your viewers do, you lay in a bit of gold and it carries on getting spicy. You’re laying a bit more, you stack it. But government stack at scale, you can put it that way. Right. And you know, when global tension goes up, hello world, is it not going up? Obviously the price of gold goes up in real terms because the use case of gold increases.

And that is what we’re seeing. So when you see gold suddenly go up, something bad is probably on the way. And when you see perhaps bitcoin going up, you’re seeing people thinking they better get out of dodge quick and they better put some of their money into some exit liquidity. So you’ve got gold and bitcoin. Gold is for war, bitcoin is for flight, for fleeing. So if you see them both go up at the same time, oh boy, have we got a problem. And at the moment you’re seeing this dialogue between gold and Bitcoin, because of all the nonsense going on.

I mean, the whole world is at each other’s throats. And the only people that weren’t. I say weren’t because they are now, was India. And now India and Pakistan are at each other’s throat, which is probably why bitcoin’s on a run right now. So if you see it from that point of view, gold makes perfect sense. But if you’re trying to imagine that we’re going to be walking down the street with a pocket full of gold coins, buying our grosses with it, I think you’ll be disappointed. That’s never going to happen. Yeah, it definitely seems that there’s a correlation between.

I guess, especially after October 7, not so much from 2022 onward, there was some moves in there, but nothing too substantial. But something after October 7th, it seems like it’s just been on this near parabolic run and now, of course, it’s seemingly retraced about 10%. The last time I checked, from the intraday high of 3500. What do you think that this is more so related to China? Because I noticed that when Trump first got in, everybody presumed that there was going to be a peace dividend. And the gold price seemingly tanked immediately, but then quickly rebounded and then just rocketed up to 3,500.

And I think some people are attributing that to tariffs. How much. Where do you allocate blame for the rise in gold price? Well, I don’t care about blame. I don’t care who’s at full. I mean, or not necessarily blame. But, you know, what is important factors? I think it’s important not to think like that. You have to think about why. Yeah. What’s the causal factor? Well, obviously it’s China, or rather it’s America versus China. I mean, you know, people say, oh, there’s going to be a cold war. There is a cold war. Oh, there’s going to be World War 3.

Maybe it’s already started. Yeah. And that’s. You should be thinking, particularly your viewers, who are very anxious about things like that. It’s like, when did it start? I mean, people always say, you know, somebody hits. Goes out of the window, hits the pavement, and they think the accident happened when the guy hits the pavement, but it isn’t. It’s when they go out the window. Right. Yeah. And maybe we’ve already gone out the window, and maybe we’re just heading for the pavement. And so why, what was the window? Well, the window is an American conflict with China.

And whether that conflict is a trade war or maybe it’s an educational war, propaganda war, trade war, or industrial war or proper land war, there’s a pyramid of foundational pyramid there and where everybody’s quite happy to have a trade war. I don’t think many people really consider that. Perhaps that’s just the layer above, the next layer down into people. And so that is terribly worrying because without a doubt there’s been a set of factors and there’s been a change of policy which is bringing about a head on conflict. And that is simply not good. It’s simply a bad thing because I think in the last 20 years people forgotten what people learned during the Second World War.

And after the Second World War, people, countries, governments tried desperately hard to maintain peace and maintain sensible behavior and try to unpick the conflict that still remained after the Second World War. And I tried really, really hard. It took 30 years, give or take. It took to, you know, the fall of, of communism in the east. And then everybody kind of forgot what everybody was trying to avoid. And you know, the conflict is just a terrible thing. I mean if you start to look at history and, and then you start to listen to people talk and you go, when did I hear that last? It wasn’t a good time.

It didn’t end well. And that is the world that we’re living in. And of course the people in power, they’re not all crazy. They are strategic people. And they will see that tension is increasing, that danger is increasing, that volatility is increasing. And to hedge that you have to build up stability. And that stability for states in conflict is gold. So you’ve got to buy it. Now in the past it’s been private investors buying gold and investment banks going, well, who’s the, who’s dinner here? Oh well, it’s the private investors and it’s the gold mines and the gold users.

You know, we’re slice and dice, all of those guys. Yeah, we’ll push the price around. We’re in charge. When governments start buying it, they’ve got to get out of the way. They can’t muck about with governments. They can’t take the other side of a China trade and push China around when they want to buy gold. Or America or Poland, which is even. Well, not even Poland. It’s blooming obvious if you look at the media. Poland is buying gold. Well, what do you know, why would they do that? Yeah, but you can’t get in the way of Poland if they’re buying gold.

You can’t short put gold into their vault, you know, so you get out the way and up goes the price. Right. And they’re not going to go, well, we bought another 7 tons, everything’s fine now. They’re going to go, yes, let’s have a bit more, shall we have another few tons. China’s going, oh no, 147% tarry. So let’s have another 100 tons. And it’s not something that, it’s not something that they typically give away once they get it, unless you’re Canada and you give away all your gold under Trudeau. But Poland’s interesting as well because of course they’re amassing one of the largest military forces and I believe they, they might feel vulnerable being so close to the Eastern Front.

Is it? Yeah, for sure, for absolutely sure. But in a way, you see, the British sold their gold in the 80s and if you wanted to say, well, that if you’re a country and you don’t want to go to war or, or you’re pacifist minded and you don’t think you should, a country that’s floating off the, off the coast of Europe should be mucking about in foreign lands, you know, that’s, that’s 100 years out of date. You’d sell the gold because that means you can’t fight a war. I mean, you know, it’s a pacifist move, right? I’m against war, I don’t want any of that.

We’re going to be pacifists, we’re going to be neutral, sell all the gold because then we can’t fight a war. It’s a pacifist move, right? So if you were pacifist, you’d do that. It’s always a mistake to think these people are stupid. You know, they’ve probably got a good reason. From their point of view. No, not yours, but from their point of view. So if you wanted to be a peaceful country and you wanted to show that you were neutral, well, you don’t have a big arm, you don’t have a load of gold. You don’t, you know, sign up your children to join the army at 17.

You know, everything’s cool and groovy, man. But the UK has everybody else’s gold, don’t they? Well, I mean, I think most of it’s in America, but we, there are some, and, and it is vaulted up there. But again, that’s, that’s the kind of thing that happens in peacetime because you can go, oh, that’s fine. We don’t mind, it’s only, it’s only a, you know, we’ll ask for it and we get it. No worries there. It’s only when tension rises that people say, ah, yeah, I’ll go, yeah. Can you, can you get it over here, please? Yeah.

What do you mean you can’t ah, or what do you mean it takes six months or what do you mean you lent it to somebody? Well, it’s pretty serious when you have the market cap over $20 trillion now, that’s all, I guess, capital that is not being put into other things. And that’s not how, that’s, that’s not how it works. Can you explain how much all assets are what’s called rehypothecated. If I got a ton of gold, I’m not just sitting it there, I give it to a bank and I say lend that gold out as collateral to somebody that will give it back to me and pay me 3%.

So, you know, the whole of the financial world is built around taking illiquid assets. I like, like you’ve got a mortgage in your house and in the old days they get a piece of paper that said, you owe me, keep paying me, keep paying me, and they collect up a load of money and give it to your next door neighbor to buy their house and you pay back, you paying back. And all that money was slowly filtered back into, they got another mortgage worth of money to lend to somebody and off they’d go, well, Wall street comes along and said, all those pieces are paid from all those guys.

We’ll buy them off you give you a lump of cash and now you can lend it to 30 people or 300 people. So they’ve liquidized, they’ve taken that illiquid acid and made it more liquid. Now they’ve made it into a special bond, a mortgage bond, which is not as good as cash or as good as a treasury. It’s less liquid than those things. Because when you say give me cash for this, people go, oh, let me think about that for a bit. Let me get some paperwork out. So it’s not just sitting there stagnant in a vault.

It’s acting as collateral for exactly. And all has a level of liquidity attached to it. And that liquidity means that all assets are X distance away from cash, including your hat. If you wanted to turn that into whatever, however many dollars, or you send it to me for $20 or something, you know, it takes you time, right? So it’s not that liquid. And, and there’s no real price that you know for it because loads of people give you a different price. If you take a U.S. treasury, you’ll get paid like that and it’s an agreed price and no one’s going to run off with it.

Yeah. So the quality of that asset goes up and the closer it gets to cash, the higher the quality of the asset. So all assets are all going around this huge machine that’s so complicated very few people even understand parts of it. And that’s what makes the mirror go round, go around and that’s what makes that gigantic complicated clock of our economy work. So, you know, people need to realize that, that there’s these vast levels of complexities going on and that simple explanations that say, oh, X, Y and Z are probably wrong. And so if this gold is being rehypothecated and people are now wanting physical delivery, what are your thoughts on the.

It seems to have fallen off the news cycle now, but the whole transfer of large amounts of gold from the London Exchange to the comex, what were your thoughts on that? Is somebody secretly buying stuff or what could that. Well, I mean, sure, there’s loads of people secretly buying it. There’s loads of governments secretly buying it. You won’t be hearing about, you know, Italy buying gold or Turkey buying gold or loads of African countries or Asian countries buying gold. For everyone you hear about, there’ll be 10 that are. That won’t want it to be known. I mean, it’s.

It. Your gold reserve in a way is an asset you don’t really want to. I mean, actually I think it was Ukraine. There was a revolution there, I can’t remember which one. And they went around to look at the gold reserve. It was gone, it wasn’t there anymore. Sort of packed it in a, in on a plane and flown off of there. So, you know, there’s all sorts of issues with assets and one of those big issues is can you secure it? And you know, they don’t park tanks on Fort Knox for no reason. Yeah. And James Bond movie is all about, you know, ruining Fort Knox.

Yeah. So you know that that is it. Gold is an asset. One of its weaknesses is securing it. Yeah. And when it comes to acquiring it is, look, if, if the proverbial hits the fan. Yeah. You’ll go online to buy gold. It won’t be there. The price will be X and you won’t be able to buy it. It’s just not there. I’ve seen that several times. Just be out of stock. Out of stock. Yeah. Yeah. So actually, if you want it the best way to acquire those kinds of assets is a little. And often you get a good price.

You get a supplier that you can trust, you make sure the price is as keen as possible, and then you buy a little bit of it every month or a little bit of it every three months or whatever you do. And however much you can afford as a part of a diversified portfolio of risk, you just DCA dollar cost average it, you just snip, snip, snip. And then when the day comes, you can’t get it because it’s just out of stock. Well, you can always sell yours if you want to, and you’ll probably get a very good price for it.

But that is the sort of thing that kind of outlines the difficulty or the next level down in investing. Who’s your counterparty? What are your costs? How can you secure it? All those things actually make a big difference. You go into a coin shop and they’ll be charging you 10% over the price. When you come to sell it, they’ll be charging 10% under the price and you just lost 20%. And even if gold goes up 5% a year or 10% a year, it’s two years worth of you hanging onto it. So the ability to buy and sell at a keen spread, for example, is absolutely vital if you’re going to take this stuff seriously.

And so how do you explain the recent pullback to 3200? And it seems as though what do you chalk up the very sharp move to 3500 to. Is that some kind of short squeeze or was that just a glimpse foreshadowing? Was there some sort of battle going on in the paper markets? Okay. There’s this big underlying thing going on in the world that unlocks a lot of stuff. Okay. Explains a lot of stuff. There’s two groups of people in this world, worthy people and lumber people. And it used to be only worthy people. And then a few number of people crept in about the 1500s and then they got more and more of them.

And nowadays the number people are the boss. The oligarchs are all number people, they’re all computer people, they’re all technology people, they’re all numbers. And the wordy people, well, they’re kind of fighting a battle against the number people because they’re getting kicked out. Yeah, the wordy people, the BS merchants are getting beaten by the number of people because numbers are more powerful than words in the end, in the same way as gravity is more powerful than faith. You know, if a priest falls out of an airplane. They’ll soon find out. So, you know, that is what you have to bear in mind when it comes to the market.

It’s the numbers, not the story. So what happened? Well, when. When Trump threw a wobbler and all his men threw a wobbler all through their toys out the pram at the same time, everybody went, oh, holy cow. Right. So there’s a little bit of narrative, but what actually happened was the money stopped going around. Everybody went, o, give me my money. I don’t want my money there. Oh, make my money safe. And then all those systems that churn through the clock of the economy, whereas. Yeah. And when that happens, the price of everything goes down. Yeah.

When stability actually, you know, gets less stable, the value of assets goes down. Yeah. And people will think, well, that’d be great. You know, my gold will go through the roof. Not in the short term. Nobody’s got any money to buy it. No one wants to buy anything. Nobody even wants to put money from one account into the other. Everybody’s sat there going, yeah, so gold went down, but all. Everything went down. All those people that might have been buying gold by. By leveraging up their bonds or their equities or whatever fancy footwork, which absolutely goes on all the time.

Watch gold and bitcoin do that at the same time, or the market do that and gold do that, or the market do that, and gold do that at the same moment. Within seconds, when some guy fat fingered the market about 10 years ago and blew $300 million of some American bank’s money, all the markets around the whole world all moved at the same time because the ends attached to the ruble is attached to oil, is attached to the London Stock Exchange, which is attached to apartments in Monaco, which is attached to the price of martinis. They’re all tied together.

So when the underlying money flow is affected, they all react. And when money flow is when there’s not enough money to go around, the price of assets falls. So you’ve got that event and everyone goes, oh, yes, it’s gone. And then they do a little bit of a pivot. And then all of a sudden, gold goes. Because everyone goes, well, I think I can trade now. There’s money’s flowing again. The system’s kicked back into order. I’ve got to get out of Dodge. Up goes gold. Yeah. So now it’s coming down. But what you have to understand from.

I can tell lots of stories about why it’s going up and down, and I can make them up And I can be right half the time and wrong half the time. Yeah, but the fact is it’s the numbers. So where are the numbers? Where are the numbers pointing to right now? Like where do you think the resting place, at least for this cycle is ultimately going to take the fundamentals? Gold is formal. Okay? So gold will go down when the potential for stress, global stress falls. It will fall. Is it going to fall? Is it, it doesn’t appear that way when you have multiple fronts of conflict around the world.

So look, when I was a kid in the 70s, my father made a very sizable fortune as commodity trade. And I was 10. And you know, we, we’d drive to school and all the kids at school were, had, were potless. And this is a, this is a private school. But in comparison with my father, they did not have a pot to, you know what. Yeah, yeah. So I go to my dad, said, all right, how come, how come you, you, you do what you do and, and you know, you do so well? And he said, son.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh no, I can, I can remember he said to me, he said, son, you only got to know one thing in the markets. Which way is the market going? And as a 10 year old, I thought, it can’t be that easy. All these other dads, they don’t seem to do anything like that. Can’t be as simple as knowing which way the market’s going. But 30 years later, I realized it’s absolutely right. If you don’t know which way the market’s going, why would you be in it? If you know which way the market’s going, you’d have a position.

Right. So with gold, which way is it going? It’s going up because gold is for war and tension is going to increase. So you’re talking about the commodities, not necessarily the equities, markets. You see what again, if you. Look, I was going to move on to say that most of the things that you will see that to explain today or tomorrow is noise. Yeah. You just want the signal. Which way is the market going? Up or down? So I would say to you, which way is the equity markets going to go? Well, I mean now it appears as though perhaps.

No, no, what it appears. What do you think? Which way is it going to? I’m always bearish, so I mean, I have to say down. Yeah, it’s going down. Why would it go up? Well, it would go up if there was more stability in the world and there was people reinvesting money in various projects. Where’s that coming from? Then where’s stability going to come from? Well, it would come from peace deals being brokered and rapprochement on multiple fronts. Well, we certainly got a group of reproach monitors, haven’t we not? So where’s it going to come from? Where’s the stability going to come from? It’s going to come in either four years or the midterms, right? Possibly.

But it appears as though there’s a bipartisan push for conflict, depending on which front you look at. So I’m of the. See what I’m saying? You think it’s going down and what’s driving it down? It doesn’t seem to be a highly likely turn of events that will make everybody sit around the campfire with their, you know, with their sticks singing Kumbaya. No, I guess the market has such irrational exuberance nowadays that it seems as though, because social media has introduced a different dimension to things where, which ultimately, yes, the numbers, you know, gravity wins in the end, but it seems right now, compared to times gone by, where’s the money coming from? Where’s the money coming from? Where does the money come from? Well, of course, it would be the Fed.

It comes from the Fed. So under what circumstances do they push money in and pull money out? Well, they’ve just stopped pulling money out, which is a pretty dramatic change. And nobody really noticed and nobody said much, but they were pulling money out at billions every month for many, many years to try to get back their balance sheet to some sort of sensible level. And everybody said you should, and they agreed, and they’ve been doing that. Well, Trump came in and started throwing spanners in the works and they went, we’re going to stop pulling money out of the market.

We’re going to stop putting money out the system, we’re going to stop putting liquidity out, we’re going to stop draining the money supply because, ooh, this could get spicy. So they’ve already pivoted to make sure the money flows then. Now, of course, if something cropped up that’s going to wreck everything or risk wrecking everything, they’re going to pull the lever and start printing it. And that’s going to be interesting. Unless, of course, they get fed up with being threatened with being fired for doing what’s the right thing and say, well, we’ll give you what you asked for.

And they’re all held breakless. So you’re saying that until the, until the Fed pivots, you’re not really too bullish on the markets then? Well, they’ve pivoted and in fact the only thing that’s going to stop the market halving is the Fed. They’re the only thing standing between the market halving and it not halving. And I think they’ll try to hold it where it is. So then you are bearish then because you’re saying that they’ve stopped quantitative tightening so now it’s time to go up again. I put it a different way. You know, it’s not going to go up much, is it? But it could go down a lot, couldn’t it? So what do you want to do? You want to take the low risk outcome? Well, I mean Buffett is still in cash is the last time I checked.

Exactly. I’m not sure what I’m saying is for that. But the upside is X and the downside is much bigger nx. So you know, you would be, you better have a good reason to be long right at the moment. And if you look at all the pros and I keep reading this, I keep going, well, I’m not the only madman about they’re all in cash. Yeah. Because what they see, see what is really going on, what keeps this afloat, what makes the Mag 7 so high is something called a carry trade. Okay. Now the future price of oil or gold or the NASDAQ index is higher than today’s price.

Okay. So you basically short the future and wait for it to fall until it reaches today. And you make about at the moment in the NASDAQQS about 10% profit out of doing that. And that injects money from buying into the market. So it’s the same with bonds, it’s called a carry trade. Right? So you take one asset and its future price is different from from today’s price and you buy one and sell the other. And over a period of months those that gap closes and you make a turn. Well, that money is, is actually phantomed out of nowhere because the banks and the traders that do it go to the government and say, oh, give me some cash, will you for this.

And basically the cashier in that casino is the government. And they go, yeah, well you made that money and fractional banking and kajing, here’s your cash. So that is a way of pulling out thin air cash into the market. Which is why people on Wall street get paid millions of dollars and fly private jets and live in mansions because they are the masters of that game that you didn’t even know existed. And that is what has pushed up the NASDAQ to these crazy prices. Because you could do it with ETFs. Yeah. So the future ETF is higher than today’s ETF.

Yeah. So you sell that one and buy that one and when the price comes together you make the difference. Yeah, but you have to. Someone will go out and buy the actual stocks. Yeah. And. And drive the price up. And, and that has been the virtuous circle, positive visual circle that has generated this amazing stock market. So the risk is something will break that. And if that was to break, it would be, you know, that would be a very, very big drop and it would cascade into government bonds, into equities, into commodities. And you started to see that happening recently and it was going, oh, bonds going up, bond yields going up, they’re going up.

But of course the Fed could just go and pull that back if it so chooses to. Is there a situation that the Fed would not be able to control or is it that’s outside of war that the Fed could not be able to like? Does it this reach a certain point where no matter what the intervention, it’s going to fail? Yeah, it’s called Turkey. Okay. It’s called South America. Can you explain that? Well, all these countries are central banks and they get called upon to, to do such wild maneuvers for their politicians and to create money because their governments are printing so much more money than they’re gaining in taxation that it creates an unsustainable dynamic.

And the question is, is the current system sustainable in America? Well, everybody says it isn’t because the debt’s too high, but how unsustainable is it? How far towards it, all the wheels coming off is it. And a lot of people say it’s imminent and actually it, I don’t know, it, it was, it was probably pretty damn sustainable, but it relies on global trade efficiency to be able to support that because America has got this great exp. Had. Probably still does have this great export product. It’s called paper. Yeah. It’s not blank paper. It’s got pictures of American presidents on it and it goes.

Would you like some of these hundred dollar bills? I’ll have some. Oh yes, have some more. Have some more. Oh, thank you. For all the goods. Oh yes. Oh, we have some of your. Still we’ve printed some more of these pieces of paper. Would you like some? Oh you would? Okay. That’s a pretty damn good export. Yeah. Some people say, oh no, no, no, that’s. Oh no, no, no, no. Money has to be hard and it’s evil to print money like that. Oh no. But ultimately having A reserve currency is a. It’s called seniorage. Yeah. It’s the ability to make money out of making money.

Which is why they don’t like bitcoin or didn’t like bitcoin because that’s private sector money. With the private sector makes the money from minting the money. Yeah. And the private sector going to, oh well, bitcoin. Now we’ll have Ethereum. Oh well I’ve got, I’ve got robot turd coin and you know, oh, I printed some of that. Would you like some? And of course that feels like from, from a, from a public sector point of view of their printing being undermined by, outcompeted by the private sector. Don’t like that. And the history of private sector money is a thing and you can look it up and it always tends to end with the government saying no, that’s illegal, stop that.

And which actually happened has already happened with crypto in many parts of the world, nearly happened in America. So all these moving parts are intermeshed and they break. They break regularly. They break every seven or eight years. So it’s not that it can’t happen. It’s a question of would it happen to the American central bank system. And in the past, up until this very, very high risk maneuvering, which is what it is, whether you think it’s good or bad is extreme. Is whether that leads onto a great result or a not so great result. And does the Fed have the wherewithal to sustain that for long? Probably not.

If it was to go pear shaped. Well, especially if the world bifurcates into two kind of orders, BRICs versus the West. One would presumably, or whoever it was, even just any conglomeration of countries that decide to do trade outside of the U.S. western transatlantic auspices, it is just China versus the U.S. that’s it. That is all there is. Yeah. Well, there’s, there’s China, there’s Iran, there’s Russia, there’s parts of Africa. There’s different countries that are on the fence in Europe. I mean but that is the. It’s headlines, it’s not reality. It does. But China, if it vanished into the sea tomorrow the, the, well, the NASDAQ will probably go up.

Yeah. The market would go down 4%. I mean it, it’s literally trivial. Yeah. What that would do. Yeah. But China with its 1.4 billion people and all the manufacturing in the world, I mean, I don’t believe America any light bulbs anymore. I guess it’s looking at it like these countries have a certain orbit Like a certain gravitational pull. And while it’s just China, it’s also arguably America who is pulling the rest of the world into their orbit, and then China, through its belt and road corridors and things of that nature, trying to pull people into their orbits.

So what’s that Was. Was what was doing that? John is doing that now. It’s being it. There’s attempts to try to block the creation of these corridors. There’s no attempts about that. Yeah, attempts. Look, you can look at it another way to sum up simply. When Britain ruled the world, it was the workshop of the world. When America ruled the world, it was the workshop of the world. China is now the workshop of the world. Finish the sentence. Yeah, well, okay. And that’s what Trump’s trying to change. He’s trying to change that. Right, so what, what effect does that then have on the, the dollar as the reserve currency, in your opinion? Well, if he gets it wrong, that’s it, isn’t it? Like he gets it right.

Well, you know, do you foresee a scenario where people are going to be buying yuan or buying. Yeah, why not? Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you? Well, I guess some people might think that it was still a little too unstable and unpredictable. They move their interest rates in 0.1 of a percent, you know, not in quarters like they do in the UK and the US and Europe. They’re ahead. They move their interest rates in point ones. So you’ve got to ask yourself, what is the state of play? If your country can’t make a light bulb, what’s the state of play? I absolutely agree with you about that.

I guess I’m just trying to play the devil’s advocate to try to tease out exactly what the outcome might be. But we also have to look at the fact that China is heavily dependent on countries like Russia and Iran for energy. And so the, the outcomes in those fronts. I mean, if Iran was to erupt in a conflict, that would have real effects on the Chinese economy, don’t you think? It does take up more coal. I mean, you know, there’s this desire for there to be this, you know, thumping great weakness in China. Well, the thumping great weakness is in America.

And that’s why we’re going through this particular period of perturbation, because the American government is saying, oh, no, oh God, do a handbrake turn here. We’ve really got to start moving and actually, you know, do some pretty radical moves to turn this around. They’re trying to turn it around, aren’t they? So why do you think Trump is so adamant on reindustrializing? How does that relate to this coming conflict? Well, you can’t fight a war if you can’t make ships. And so you think that that’s what this is primarily about is. Of course it is. Yeah. You’ve got, if you want to get your way, you’ve got to be able to fight a war.

And if you can’t have rare earth elements and you can’t build ships and you can’t make steel, you can’t do aluminium, you’re not going to be able to fight a war, are you? Particularly when your enemy’s making it all for you. All it’s got to do is stop. So Trump is then thinking longer term than perhaps people give him credit for, or maybe he’s trying to act in shorter term and he should be thinking about, he’s acting tactically rather strategically. And America has had a very successful strategy up until the point when the balance tilted and China took advantage of the gift of peace and support and friendship and decided that it wanted Taiwan back and it wanted to do a little bit of strutting like they always do.

These men, you know, wanted to flex a bit of muscles. But wouldn’t the reindustrial, like wouldn’t basically the short term losses incurred not only in financial but political capital sustained by Trump, wouldn’t that be a tactical. If he was just thinking tactically, he would kind of keep the train going. But it seems as though he is thinking about the future. If he’s trying to re. Industrialize to prepare for World War III with China, wouldn’t it, well, prepare to be able to. For it to not happen because you’re strong enough to be able to be a credible threat against the other side that now has got all the manufacturing power.

Remember America, inverted commas, won the Second World War because it became a basically war machine of manufacturing. It made all the stuff that won those wars. Right. Well, it hasn’t got that now, has it? Who’s got that now? China. So if you are going to want to project your power, if you’re going to actually want to be not isolationist, you are still going to want to be strutting your stuff around the Middle east and Asia and have aircraft carriers and all that good stuff. Yeah, well, you know, unless you, unless you just want to pull back and let China get on with it, then you’ve got to, you know, you’ve got to saddle up, haven’t you? And that’s what they’re trying to do.

But whether their strategy or that, I, I don’t think it’s strategic because it’s, it’s very, very violent and very big moves. It’s definitely, it’s definitely reactive to a degree. Like they’re not, they probably should have did this years ago, but it seems like this is the final hour and they’re kind of realizing what situation they’re in and they’re yeah, yeah, yeah. It should have been doing it gently 20 years ago for sure, for sure. I mean you just have to go around places to see, you know, it, it’s everywhere. And the point is, what is the solution to that dynamic? What rebalances the situation? And if you try to do it all at once, that can get you in a worse place and that is the risk.

And it’s about volatility. The certainty of slow American decline was on deck and it was just going to happen. And when your grandchildren are at college, they’ll say, oh, this shouldn’t have happened. Oh, wouldn’t it be better if it hadn’t? It would be a long process and maybe not a bad one. Right. But if you’re going to turn it around and you believe America has a God given right to rule the world, then you know, you’ve got to do something about that. And I’m not so sure that doing, trying to do it all at once is the way to go.

But that’s the route they’re taking, that they’re trying to smash the place up to, to, to start again from a sort of different level, of a different position. And, and that’s high risk. And, and really that’s what your audience is probably feeling because this is, it was high risk enough before that and now it’s gone up to another level. And you know, the level of, of volatility, of random, of risk has gone up a notch. And the question is, when’s it coming down? And you know, until it starts to come down, certain things can only rise and certain things will only fall.

So you know, you make, you make your judgment and you, and you place your bets. There is a wild card this time though. Typically like you’re saying service based economies can’t fight wars, but now there’s the element of artificial intelligence. And it appears as though the United States still has a slight lead, depending on who you talk to. Of course we don’t know exactly what the Chinese have, but it seems like they’re putting a lot into that. And perhaps this re industrialization will be accompanied with a new type of automation or at Least it’s all about AI.

What are your thoughts? Yeah, what are your thoughts on AI and how that’s going to play into all this? Well, again, you’ve got to start basic principles. Yeah. AI equals energy usage. Yeah. AI is energy. The more energy you use, the more AI you have. So if you’re thinking about, we need 1 times x energy now, we’re going to need 5x, we’re going to need 10x, we’re going to need 100x. Okay? Because there’s no second place. Everyone has to remember that in AI there’s no second place. So every blooming country has to absolutely boil the ocean to keep up with AI.

Otherwise. That’s an interesting way of looking at it. No, literally. Literally. If you think crypto makes the world hot, it’s nothing in comparison what A is going to do. And they’re going to burn all the coal, all the wood, all the nuclear energy, all the gas, all the oil. They’re going to boil the oceans because AI is heat. Actually, it is literally heat. Because those things that make AI are computer chips that are like short circuits. They may as well be a space heater. And they generate so much heat, you can hear those data centers away, miles away.

They just a roaring beast of heat and energy usage. And there’s no second place. You can’t have too much. You just cannot. So what’s going to happen? They’re going to run hell for leather, for energy, for making as much of it as possible, and they’re going to pump it all into the AI to be smarter than their adversary. Is this going to be primarily for its weaponization or is. Yeah, sure, maybe authoritarian control? Well, I mean, probably not. Yeah, if you read your George Orwell properly. Yeah, yeah. It’s not, it’s not the. It’s not the proletariat that gets any problems, it’s the people that work for the government that get the problems.

They’re the ones that get executed, they’re the ones that get watched, they’re the ones that are monitored all the time. It’s not your proletariat. They get left to get up to whatever they get up to. And so if you’re looking at totalitarians, if you keep a low profile, keep your nose clean, they’re not bothered with you. But the bad news is this AI is going to absolutely turn energy uses upside down. Maybe that’d be good news. But the good news side of it, there will just be such vast energy production that that’s going to spark all sorts of other things.

And AI is such a powerful tool. It’s not just the ability to fly 47 drones and kill everybody across the bunker. It’s the ability to enhance people’s intelligence. And it actually, literally enhance their minds. And it will produce a cohort of brilliant children in the next 10 to 15 years. There will be like 20% of the children will be genius level because they will be educated by AI And AI is just a repository of all human wisdom and knowledge. And they’ll be let loose on that. There won’t be some teacher teaching 30 kids what they want to teach them out of a book that they were given when they went to teach a training course.

It will be their ability to speak to Albert Einstein or the Buddha or Marx, Aurelius or Napoleon or the guy invented antibiotics or Isaac Newton. And they’ll be able to sit there and just, you know, talk with the best teachers of all time. And that’s going to cause, create a, A, a cohort of brilliant, enlightened children. And, you know, at the end of the, at the end of the day, the key to what your people are trying to do and the key to our futures is to elevate ourselves. And you go down the gym two hours a day and elevate your body, and, you know, these kids are going to be spending three hours a day elevating their minds.

And do you think that’s going to be a stabilizing or a destabilizing force? Massively stabilizing. You think it’s going to be stabilized? That’s the hope. That’s the road of hope. The race to AI to compete in the militarization of it. Wouldn’t that actually increase instability, especially if there was. Well, yeah, sure. I mean, it will be a foot race between Armageddon and Utopia, for sure. You know, there’ll be all these children being brilliantly educated and there’ll be all these lunatics trying to blow everybody up. And I mean, you know, that’ll be the two. That’ll be the fork in the road.

It’s, it’s who gets to the, to the final and gets to the finish line first. And I think there’s a pretty good chance it will be the brilliant young children that will get there first because they’re only 10 years away now. And I think it will take a bit longer. I mean, AI would make those children obsolete pretty quickly. No, no, no, no. AI doesn’t exist without humanity, and humanity won’t be existing without AI So you don’t, you’re Not a proponent of the AGI as becoming sentient in the parabolic rise in intelligence. Well, through recursive learning.

And I’ve done a bit of AI in my time. I tend to do these things really early. So I’ve been and gone on that. What happens is if AI starts teaching itself, it goes down rabbit holes and goes mad. You think so? And you can check the literature for that. Yeah. Humans poke stuff and then it learns off the humans, and then the humans learn off the AI and everybody’s neurons gets expanded. Of course this is an optimistic point of view, but I think you should try it yourself. If you use AI and ask it all your hardest questions, all the things that no one ever explained to you more than me, and you do that for, I don’t know, a month, at the end of it you’ll go, go, my brain got expanded because as your, your mental plasticity develops, as you get older, it gets narrower and narrower and narrower and you talk to yourself and you have less to say.

But if you actually, that assumes that the, that assumes that there is no sensory modalities through which it’s collecting information. Right. So like you have Teslas out there in the world acquiring information through all of these sensors. That’s like new information. That is, I agree with you if it’s not going to that place because the human doesn’t tell it to. Right. But what I’m saying is the reason why we, there’s a generative like a synergistic aspect to humans is because we’re interacting with the world. Whereas AI in this closed loop recursive system, like you’re saying, will get ever more refined, but ultimately it will drive itself mad unless it has some appendage like these humanoid robots or cars that they’re.

That’s just robot. That’s just them again, isn’t it? But I mean, at the moment the, the, the literature, the research that I’ve read says AI needs the input of non AI to actually expand its intelligence. It can’t simply get robots to go out and chop down trees. Yeah, I don’t know. I just talked to a couple AI experts who are doomers in the field and they don’t seem to share the same perspective. But it’s interesting. Have a bad track record. Doomers have a very, very bad track record. And you know, I like to be, I like to be optimistic and then I like to be pessimistic and like to be optimistic, depending on the situation.

What I know for sure, because it’s already happened. Yeah. If you look at chess, the kids, the little kids, the 10, 11 year olds, they are going to absolutely wreck the older chess players. And they’re starting to do it now because they are expanding their chess brain with computers. And AI is a much more powerful tool for that. And there will be 10, 20% of the upcoming children who will have. Alexander the Great was educated by I think Socrates or was it Plato maybe? Plato, right. So the man that conquered the world had one of the greatest teachers.

Well, that guy is actually in AI you can go talk to him now. He’s there. And so is Napoleon and so is Machiavelli and so is Jesus Christ. They’re all there. Yeah. And you can go and pick their brains. So the chances of people elevating themselves, which is the ultimate defense, the ultimate defense is offense and the ultimate muscle is the one between your ears. So, you know, people should really be diving into that stuff and getting it to get them answers and develop their minds because that is the only defense in what’s coming next. I actually agree and you know, a lot of people in this preparedness space usually are technophobic.

But I take the alternate view. I in the very least want to be able to understand the types of technology and be able to leverage them to a certain degree or another. How do you think, going back to the conversation about gold, then where do you see this going? What do you think the upper limit is going to be for this cycle? I’ve heard you throw out some numbers in the past. Where do you see this by the end of the year and maybe the end of whatever war cycle we’re in? Well, I mean, you see, I think a lot of people, they say it’s the end of the world, it’s all over, prepare for that.

And I don’t take that view. I say there’s a road and we’re on it. Like with AI, there’s one road that goes to super intelligent smart kids that are going to bring some sanity. And there’s another road with AI on it where everybody gets more and more lethal weapons and everybody dies. And, and somewhere between the two will be the reality. And I think the super smart cohort will, will be the thing that will be very good for the whole situation. And yeah, there’ll be great economic progress and you know, la la la la la. Happy, happy, happy.

However, you know, we’re on a road now where there isn’t anybody really out there that isn’t in, in a highly volatile, stressed out and mental state. And you know that. And it is all social media’s fault. I mean, you’ve got to put it down to that. And the old political system that we grew up with, which is based on horseback and representative democracy is, Is really creaking. I wouldn’t say it’s not showing itself fit for purpose, but it’s really horribly creaking. So there’s going to be. Have to be some pretty radical changes in the way that governance works, and that’s going to be extremely volatile, and it’s going to have lots of consequences, and it’s about navigating through that so you’re in the best possible position.

If you lived in Chile for the last hundred years, it didn’t matter whether there was a First World War or a Second World War or a Vietnam War. They didn’t have any of that. Their positioning was perfect. They were far away from all that. They would. They would have read about it on page four of the newspaper. So positioning and using your mind is really what’s important. Now, as far as gold goes, if you take a gold price that’s equivalent to Afghanistan high back in the. I think it’s 80, you’re looking at just over $4,000. If you’re looking at the chart and squinting at it like, like you do, it’s five.

And then if you, if you really did think the wheels are going to come off and everything was really going to go sideways, it’s 10. But I think that the general mass of people often makes the potential outcome a lot less worse than it would otherwise be. So I think that this is my wild guess, and I’m sorry, people that are all for Trump, I think the Republicans are going to lose the midterms because in this modern age, and it happened with Trump this time, and it happened with Biden the last time, you don’t win an election, the party loses it.

Okay? Biden lost the election. Yeah. Trump lost the one beforehand because everybody turned out on the other side. Everybody’s going to turn out at the midterms who are Democrats, and there’s going to be a lot of Trump voters that are going to go, oh, no, I got fired by Elon. Oh, no, I’m not turning out. And the midterm’s going to go Democrat. So the extremities of what’s been going on should narrow, and that should bring about some stability. Maybe it will set the decay of America back on its path of slowly sliding into second place. Who knows? But that will be potentially a breakpoint in the sort of chaos and a lot of people loving this chaos.

They love it. It’s about time this happened. These people should all go to jail. This is how we sort things out. And they might be right, but that chaos will shrink and that stability would have a positive effect and a negative effect on gold. And then after that point, if Trump continues to hold both houses, you’ve got another two years of these wild times and gold will go up. So you don’t think that, though, that if the Democrats were to get. You think that’s going to fix everything? No, it won’t fix anything at all. It’s just another bunch of crazies.

Okay. So, I mean, that’s the trouble with the whole situation. And you can see that in Europe and in America and all the Western countries, the system, which has been for 200 odd years pretty successful, enabling them to maintain the top of the value chain through good governance, has started to break down. So this rise in the price of gold will continue after this midterms, or do you think that maybe at that point there’ll be some stabilizing effects which will cause the price to start to diminish a little bit? I should think that if the Democrats won the midterms, then the downside in the equity markets, it would be the time to buy.

And it probably wouldn’t be a great time to buy gold because the Democrats are not going to go to war with China. And the only war that would count that’s at all plausible is China versus America. Whether it’s a trade war or a information war or a land war, that’s the only conflict that matters. And you’re seeing that. If you actually take that lens and listen to everything that’s been said, it’s all about that conflict, which is an economic conflict at the moment. And it’s like Europe versus Russia. But Russia’s got 150 million people and a $7,000 GDP, and Europe’s got a $32,000 GDP and the best part of 500 million people.

So they’re 20 times more economically powerful. So that’s not really a conflict. That’s not going to be something that’s going to be existential. Well, I mean, beyond nuclear, obviously. So if you look at all around all those conflicts, they’re all nasty and horrible and disgusting and obscene, but they’re not on the scale of a conflict between America and China. And the closer that conflict comes, the higher gold will go, and the further it goes away from being a potential reality, the lower the price of gold will go, because that’s Right now, the fundamental driver in my book.

Okay. And so being in Europe, you’re not concerned about the escalation of the war with Russia? Well, I live in the, in the place most far away from any nuclear attack targets, so I’m not too unhappy about that. It’s all about positioning. Right. Yeah, you, you get in early, don’t you? You get your position, strategic relocation. You’re already going to have to worry about it. And then, and then what would you plan to do next? You’d plan to have a car that can drive to Portugal because that’s the furthest place away from trouble and closest place to South America, which is where you’d go.

So just because you have an optimistic view on what could go right doesn’t mean you haven’t worked out what could happen if it goes wrong. I mean, people are thinking they’re going to go to New Zealand. What a bunch of muppets go to South America like the Germans did at the end of the Second World War. It doesn’t make sense. The New Zealand thing has always baffled me. Being so close to, well, not close to, but nearer to China and their military used to be, put it that way, that’s for sure. Yeah. And, and South America is the furthest place away and Chile, Argentina, Uruguay would be the place I would probably head for.

Do you at all consider silver’s role in the global financial markets? Well, I’ve got a story that I love about silver. Silver is, is a B2C stacking metal because you can get a lot of it for a little. I can’t remember what a time cost is. It’s not that much, but you can also. And it’s a beautiful thing. You know, if, if people are really, really, really, really worried and, and they’ve got that apocalyptic feel to themselves, they should buy American silver coins from, you know, the 50s and 60s and 40s, what they call junk silver because that is literally currency.

And that’s the best, cheapest silver to buy because you can buy a chicken with it. You can get at a dime and say not much, but. Yeah, yeah, you know, but I mean, you know, it all kicks off, it all goes horribly wrong. I, you know, I, I was, I stayed in the castle in France during COVID and I didn’t worry about food because all farmers have food, right. So you don’t have to be, you can relax, you can chill out. Just buy yourself a flour grinding machine. Hopefully you can use by hand and you can eat chicken feed bread.

Yeah. So, you know, ultimately it’s about practicality. I mean that, that’s what you guys focus on, right? So the most practical for the consumer is American junk silver coinage. Quarters, dimes, that stuff. And why, why junk silver coins over the, like the bullion? Well, if you’ve got an ounce all of a sudden that’s 50 bucks, isn’t it? Or 100 bucks if it’s, if, if it’s hit the fan. Well, you’re not going to buy chicken for 100 bucks, are you? You’re going to want to hand over a nice little 10 cent coin that’s worth seven bucks and you know, get your chicken.

Yeah, it’s currency. It’s for transacting in. That’s the trouble with gold. You’ve got yourself an eagle. What are you going to do, buy a horse? I mean, you know, it’s a big, it’s a big unit. That’s why governments use it. Because you know, yomuch, that’s a million bucks. Yeah, yeah, you could buy a tank with that. But if you’ve got yo much, what are you going to buy when you’re a bit hungry? You’re going to buy half a ton of wheat. It’s not a easy currency to use. So small junk silver, which is also inverted commas, cheap, it doesn’t hold much of a premium when it’s available.

That is the perfect. I almost stacked it, but then I realized that I would have in my basement a big pile of silver coins yo big after a few years and I’d look like Scrooge McDuck. And so I thought better of that. But you know, it’s actually, if you do believe or feel that you will have to transact in precious metal, that’s the stuff to go for. So not so much as a store of value then, more as a means of transacting if it hits the fan. Yeah, well, if, if you’re, if you are, you know, laying down all this food and, and, and you know, buying yourself a forest up that mountain somewhere and you really do think it’s all going to go horribly wrong.

You’ve got to transact, haven’t you? You’ve really got to be able to buy and trade and sell stuff. I mean, you don’t want to go back to barter, do you? I mean, that’s not good. So you do need, it’s not going to be on your mobile phone, is it? So what about the. We’ve talked about the Mad Max, but what about the cyberpunk? So is there a role for silver in this re industrialization and AI revolution, it appears that as one of the primary conductors of electricity that it would play a vital role in both outcomes.

If, if you’re of a mind that, you know, you prepare, you, you’d quite like to have, you know, 10 or 20% of your, of your money to one side for, for when, you know, if things got bad. I mean, if actually you split it into quarters. Right. You’ve got a quarter in cash, got a quarter in, in, in easily liquidatable equities and financial instruments. You’ve got a quarter in property and productive assets. Now you’ve got a quarter out of the country and then you’ve got another quarter in forestry or farm, something like that. So that’s how you prepare, that’s how you would prepare for World War II if it was 1935 and you knew it was coming.

So 25% liquidity, 25% in productive assets, 25% in equities, and 25% out of the country. Yeah, but for most people that perhaps aren’t liquid enough to actually make those splits. Yeah. If you’re a cyber guy, I mean, you, you, your money’s everywhere. Your money’s nowhere. You don’t, you don’t work for people in the country that you live in. You don’t bank in the country where your employers are or where you work. Yeah. And you don’t, you party anywhere that near where you work or where your employer is or where your money is. So you, you just, I mean, if you’re a Saudi, you go across the bridge into Bahrain or you fly out to Dubai.

Yeah. And, and you know, if you’re a cyber guy, then you are geographically independent, which is the ultimate protection. Actually, you know, most preppers are, get very geographically locked in their minds. They want to be somewhere and they want to defend it from the, from the hordes, you know. Right. And, and really what they need to be able to do is 90 days before it happens, be able to get on a plane and go live, live in a beach hut in, in the Virgin Islands or, or you know, go to Uruguay and open a cafe there.

So, you know that not being where the trouble is is the ultimate preparation. So, you know, that is for the cyber people. They should already be there. And I know lots of them. I mean, I’ve been one of them myself since the early 90s. And you know, the only reason I live in Monaco these days is my ankles swell up too much when I sit in my business class seat. So those digital nomads, I mean, that’s definitely one mode of preparedness I suppose is being able to be reactive on a whim in a way which is calculated.

But is there? I guess my question is more oriented around like what role will silver play in the AI revolution and the re. Industrializing like I presume that would drive the price up, wouldn’t it? If you look at the amount of silver that’s mined every year, the ratio is not really suggests that silver should be more expensive. But silver is not for war because it’s not, it’s, it’s, it’s not valuable enough. And I can tell you a story that illustrates that. And I tell it every time I go on a show because it makes me, makes me smile.

When the Americans retreated from the Philippines because the Japanese, they took the gold, I think they put it in a sub. I might put it on a battleship. I don’t want to. The other. They threw the silver in the bay. Wow. Yeah, that’s a fact. You can look it up. It’s just too heavy. Just make sure the Japanese don’t get it. Throw it in the bay. Japanese came along, took a load of American prisoners and said, you’re going, going down there and fishing it out for us. So silver is for peace, gold is for war. Silver is B to C, business to consumer.

It’s for people to hold if they want to transact in a terrible situation. But there is an industrial use though for it. Yeah, I mean there’s all sorts of industrial uses for it. Absolutely. But if you want to go for industrial usage, go for platinum or palladium. There’s 180 tons of platinum mined every year. 180 tons. You could fit that in your toilet. But aren’t isn’t that mostly going into what is the catalytic converters? And aren’t those going the way the dinosaurs in general and all sorts of, of really, really tippety top science and chemistry and all that good stuff.

It’s absolutely incredibly important industrial metal. So is palladium, which again is also about 180 tons or 200 tons of that made every year. So whereas silver, I mean there’s a lot of silver made every year. It might. 300,000 tons, it’s a lot of silver, 3,000 tons of gold and I think it’s 100 times as much silver. So it’s a lot. But there’s a lot of uses for silver from, you know, anti, for doing things like killing microbes, all the way up to lots of electronics. So it’s got, it’s used, it’s used, but they do make a lot of it for it’s the fast horse when people are worried about things.

And when your customer, when the Mr. Normal starts to sweat, he buys silver. And so what is your thoughts on. You said bitcoin was for flight. Gold is for war. Can you maybe talk a little bit about your thoughts about bitcoin being this thing that one can use to be this digital nomad? Well, what tipped me off of this was back in the day, the last cycle there was a double top on bitcoin and I was scratching my head, what was that all for? And then somebody told me about some incident in Afghanistan where all the people that were local bosses when, you know, the west pulled out and said right over to you, now you sort out the Taliban.

We’re fed up with, with giving you all this money and you stealing it. They all headed for the airport, didn’t they? And one of the ministers left $5 million in cash on the tarmac because they couldn’t fit it in the helicopter. Well, that’s why you buy bitcoin. Yeah. And you know, he probably got a few hundred million in bitcoin, but he had 5 million in cash too. And just they couldn’t carry it. So, you know, I’m flying out in a helicopter tomorrow, they want to know how fat I am. And so you could me carrying gold bars.

Yeah, get off the plane, you’re too fat. Oh, it’s what I do. We’ll leave your gold bars behind you. But I can hold infinite amount of money on a smart stick. So the ability to, to flee with a lot of money, well, the go to place is bitcoin for that. And in fact, when you’ve handed over your dollars or your gold or whatever it was for your bitcoin, the moment you’ve got that bitcoin, as long as it’s secure, it’s gone. It isn’t actually in that country anymore. It’s anywhere where you can remember the bloody 14 digit number or whatever digits it is.

So that is fabulous for the sort of people that might have to do a runner any minute. And that could be Russian oligarchs, it could be Ukrainian oligarchs, it could be people in Asia right now, it could Taiwanese business people, it could be Chinese and billionaires who’ve fallen out of with somebody in the Communist party. The application for getting out of Dodge with 100 million is a real thing. And obviously you start going around and having the country’s richest people putting 10% of their assets in Bitcoin, because they might have to leave, get in their private jets and head for somewhere else.

You’re going to get a push on the price, aren’t you? And then when that tide recedes, down goes bitcoin. In the run up to war, you see people starting to hedge themselves with crypto and then also with gold, should I guess everything go to. Well, that’s the central bankers, rich people, particularly ones that plunder their country. And there’s a lot of them, when they start to feel the heat, you will see bitcoin run. And bitcoin, you know, I wouldn’t be surprised if this, this conniptions in Pakistan and India right now are not driving the bitcoin price because remember, when it moves, you won’t know what’s doing.

It’s not going to be on in the headlines for a week. Yeah. So in a sense, you watch this thing, you go, oh, something nasty is coming. And then it turns around and goes away again. Oh, thank goodness for that, that didn’t happen. And then up it goes. And you go, and I was going, why has that done that? And they say, oh, out comes the news. Something, something happened. That’s definitely one of the best use cases I’ve heard for bitcoin. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of arguments about the decentralization and all that, but I think that what you make a very compelling case to have a little bit anyways.

Even though I don’t think you own any more, do you? Yeah, well, you see, I’ve done so well from bitcoin that this time around it was quite nice to me this time. But times before that it’s just been beautiful. It’s like you don’t want to go back to the. Don’t pass through the flame again. And it’s also got to be in a very dangerous place to be because the level of criminality is so high that, that it’s very hard to have much of it and not be at risk. So I prefer not to have to have much of it and therefore be not at risk.

I mean like, you mean like getting hacked or something or. Yeah, no, get. Getting. Getting attacked in the street. Oh, like for your crypto. Oh, yeah, yeah. You, you name it, I don’t know anybody. Yeah, it is. Isn’t it funny that. Funny how the billions get stolen every sort of six weeks somebody else loses 100 million or 50 million or some other celeb loses 2 million or some other, you know, site has 500 million stolen bus and North Koreans But I mean, I know plenty of people because I have been around crypto for such a long time.

I kind of hardly know any that haven’t been hacked or attacked or mugged or had their phone hacked in a conference. I hardly know any. In fact, I probably don’t really know anybody that’s ever had significant amounts that hasn’t been robbed. I don’t know anyone that’s been robbed in equities. In fact, I don’t know anybody that’s been robbed in gold. I mean, obviously that’s a bit of a risk. Can be. But there are absolutely solid ways of keeping your gold safe. Is that because the ledger is public knowledge or, and people are. Well, it’s because gold’s got 2,000 years of people trying to secure it and Bitcoin’s got 10 years.

And the people that are, the people that will rob you are all computer scientists or Korean computer scientists, North Koreans, you know that. And, and, and they can get away with it. And so if they could rob you, couldn’t the border guards that you’re crossing the border, you know, and having to, I suppose maybe not always, but show that you have this crypto wallet, like, oh, it’s been, it’s been an issue. That’s why, that’s why I don’t have any crypto on me. I mean I’ve got socks with bitcoin on them. Sometimes I think, I bet I shouldn’t wear them because people might think I’ve got them, I’ve got bitcoin on me, you know, probably not a good idea.

Yeah, in the old days I, I, I’m a big watch fan and I, I’ve got a beautiful president gold President I bought 35 years ago and I walked around with it for 30 years. Then all of a sudden anybody with a decent watch was getting mugged in broad daylight in, in the main shopping streets of London. You can’t wear it anymore. And, and that is rather like crypto if you’ve got more than, than a significant amount. And so I can’t be asked. I’ll stick to equities or bonds and other stuff. I’ve, I’ve had my fun. So you know, I’m sort of like, yeah, I’ve lost a taste for it.

I don’t really want to swim in shark infested waters. I don’t have to, so I’m not gonna. Fair enough, fair enough. And so where is your, where’s your bug out location then? You said you’re gonna jump on a boat and Portugal when it goes down and you’re going to go to South America, that’s your. That’s what you’re. I’m in it already. What’s that? I’m in my bug out location. I’ve got, I’ve got loads, okay? I make sure all my locations are bug out locations. Why wouldn’t you? I mean, they’re the best locations, right? I mean, you know, when you got Covid, I.

I was out three weeks before it hit the fan. I was probably the first hoarder of toilet paper in Europe. You seen it coming? Hey, I saw it coming. You know, a friend of mine rang up and went, oh, mamma mia. My mother, she’s locked up in the north, north of Italy. They closed down a town. I said, hold on a minute, let me get in my car. I didn’t actually. The next day I sold all my equities and, and left for a castle in the middle of France. And, and, you know, castle is a good place to be.

Yeah, well, exactly. Very defensible. Yeah. But, you know, I, I think the best defense is to, to. To be on the offense with your mind, you know, clear out all the noise, get rid of all the crap, and just, you know, free your mind and then you’ll be free and then you’ll be ready for it. You know, I made a ton of money in Covid because I was out before anybody else. And I was back in at the bottom because I knew as soon as this thing happened, look, back in the day, there was bird flu, okay? And I thought, oh, studying a bit of history.

Plague is what gets you, right? It’s not marauding hordes, it’s the plague what gets you. And there was this drug which I can’t even remember, the Tamiflu. And it was the only known cure for influenza. So I had that in the back of my mind, if any dodgy influenza got out there, I was going to get load up on Tamiflu. Two plus one for every member of my family. Because, you know, that’s how you back up, right? 2 +1. 2x +1 is, is means you’ve got a backup. So 2x +1 Tammy flu for all my loved ones.

I’ll be ready for it. I just, Just a matter of when I hear about it. I get it. So I heard about it and it was coming. I thought, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna knock myself out for this stuff until it gets to Asia to, you know, until it gets to the Middle east, essentially. When it arrived in Turkey. I bought a load and it got stopped at the border by the German government because they were keeping it all to themselves because they didn’t want to die. Yeah. And I thought, oh, okay. That’s the importance of prepping before the panic, right? Yeah, well, exactly.

But people didn’t even know about this stuff, but the government did. So anyway, I managed to secure my supplies of it. And I thought, well, the next time anything like this happens, I’m going to move a little bit faster. But it’s not going to just show up at my door. It’s going to happen here and then it’s going to jump to there, and it’s going to jump to there. So as soon as it jumps to Europe, I’m gone. I’m out of all my stocks because it’s going to take, it’s going to take a dump when they spot it.

It’s going to take another dump, the market, when it gets to Europe, and it’s going to take another dump when it gets to America. And that’s exactly what the market did. So the moment it hit Italy, I was gone. But I was already really ready for it because I’d already worked out in my head what I was going to do. Yeah. And that’s where people have to be. They shouldn’t live their life like, you know, the zombies are coming up the drive. It’s, what are the key risks and how can they ameliorate them? And the best form of defense is offense, and the best form of offense is your muscle in between your ears.

And so one final question for you with respect to the global supply chain woes that might arise as a result of the trade war? You know, on the topic of people preparing in advance, do you think this is a period of time when people in the United States in particular might want to seize on the fact that the shelves are still relatively stocked? Because I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but the Los Angeles ports are quite barren at this point in time. Yeah, but aren’t your guys already got, got three months of food? We do, but I’m talking about people perhaps who are watching this video who aren’t preppers.

Well, I mean, what do you think, what do you think the outcome of that is going to be, though, this current trade spat? See, I see. I, I, I, I, I think that if you’ve got the prepper mindset, you’re, you’re already fine. You can just relax. Sure. You know, just, just, just, you know, it will, it’ll all work itself out the people that aren’t ready that run around in panic and, you know, get there when the toilet rolls are out of stock. Well, I mean, there isn’t enough toilet rolls for everybody, so that’s, that’s just fate for them.

And do you suspect that this thing is going to be resolved before it gets to that point? I mean, I’m astonished by the fact that nobody is calling much attention to the fact that these ports are. Nothing’s coming through them at this point. I mean, isn’t that kind of weird? No, no, because when, when really bad things happen, nobody says anything. They just sit there. It’s la, la, la, la, la. They do the ostrich. It’s all, ah. They’re not really saying much about it. Yeah, well, they don’t. Because they don’t, they don’t. They don’t dare think about it.

So does that mean it’s bad? Yeah, it does. It does. Silence is never golden. If people are panicking early and all, you get sorted out. But when they can’t bear to face it, which most of your audience will recognize that because they’ve been facing things probably unnecessarily for quite some time, but at least it’s taken away the anxiety of it happening. And probably when Covid happened, they probably felt justified and they were justified. Right. So the silence is really not golden for me. It’s not the fact that Barbie dolls are going to be expensive. It’s that there might not be enough washers or little rubber widgets or nails or plastic trays or all those simple architectural things for our economies that we take for granted.

Not the power saw, but something like a dental floss. Trivial stuff that we take for granted. And a lot of it comes, light bulbs come from China. And if they don’t come, all these companies have been brilliantly working on Just in time. Just in time. And that’s totally efficient and wonderful, keeps prices down. It’s all la la, la. As long as everybody’s friends, everyone, as long as everyone’s cooperates, it’s amazingly brilliant. But as soon as you stop cooperating, it’s disastrous. Okay, so it’s not the big items, the flash things that, that worries me. It’s the simple things like, like cardboard or, you know, little screws.

The sort of stuff that the world doesn’t run without, that might suddenly run out for a bit of time. It’s. It’s. If it doesn’t happen and it all works itself out, that’d be fine. I’ll be looking to get back into the market. But if it does happen, you know, preppers will not be panicking. The people that are preppers, you know, the grasshoppers, they will be panicking, and then the market will go down like a ton of bricks. And then I’ll probably buy, maybe I’ll. I’ll wait a little bit, probably. I’ll count to 10 and then I’ll buy.

But, you know, so that’s what I see as a potential. Because no one’s talking about it. Nobody’s getting agitated about it now. No one’s saying, but, but what about. What about. What about the little, Little blue trays that they put chicken wings in? You know, have we got enough of that? We have. Oh, thank God for that. How about the shrink wrap? Oh, we got enough. How about little stickers that say sell by. Oh, plastic trays for sausages? Have we got. No one’s saying that. And that as 30% of that comes from China, that I think is one of a number of sensitivities of this vast pipeline of economic interchange that suddenly got disrupted.

And you know that the key thing for everybody to remember is that 75 days long. So for when someone goes, oh, pull the lever and make a Barbie, or whatever it is they’re making, make a blue plastic train tray bunk. 75 days to pop out the other end. Yeah. So then what about stocks? How much stock have they? Maybe they’ve got 30 days, maybe got 60 days. We’re now already 20 days in. So 50 days plus 30 days, that’s 70 to 90 days. So probably somewhere between 60 and 90 days where everybody should be going, let’s hope this is going to be okay.

But of course, if you’re prepped and you’ve got your three or four months of food, it’s not an issue. But if you haven’t and you need a lot of toilet paper, then, well, it’s probably a bad example. I don’t know. It’s good. Type into chat GPT how much toilet paper is made in China? I think a lot of it here comes from Canada. But so. Well, I mean, our friend Carney is actually a reasonable fellow. He wouldn’t stop people getting their toilet paper. Well, you’re a Carney fan. Hey, I’m not. I’m not. I’m not. I tell you, I’ve met a lot of people that met him, and the thing that they say about him is that he’s almost supernaturally charming.

And I find that reassuring because I tell you, right or left, up or down, we need A lot more charm in this world today. Does charming always mean good, though? Well, it’s better than uncharming, isn’t it? Which would you prefer? Well, I guess it depends on who’s making the right decisions. If he sat across the table from you, I mean, if somebody was, you know, doing good things and they weren’t charming, I think I’d overlook their lack of charm. But you might have to. Yeah, that could almost be weaponized, actually, in a lot of ways. Well, it normally is, actually, but I’m not.

I could be a fan of him. I know that he was a reasonably decent bank of England governor. He wasn’t brilliant and he wasn’t terrible. And I know he had a fan base within the government in Britain, which is an interesting thing. I mean, I thought. Really? Are you serious? Really? Was he. Did everybody love him? Wow, that’s amazing. Not the sort of thing people like about bank of England governors or anybody in the nomenclature. They’re not noted to be liked. It’s normally the opposite. Everyone hates everybody. But he was one of those people that positively liked.

And I thought. And I, I held that. I hold that function in high regard. There’s not many evil swines that come with niceness and charisma. Interesting perspective. I mean, I grant you, you’ve got to watch out for the ones that do. But, I mean, you know, history is not full of charming people. It’s full of. Full of, you know, Napoleons of this world who are renowned for their ugliness in, in their attitudes. Yeah. I think a lot of Canadians are somewhat reticent over his association with, you know, coming from the bank of England and just jumping into the.

The cockpit. It seems interesting. The same thing happened in Italy with, With Mario, you know, and, and it reflects the sort of. Of, you know, power that they have wielded in the past that in a way that makes them trusted. And trust is an incredibly important thing in governance. And, and they are trusted people because they have, they’ve. They’ve saved, you know, so many situations in the past, and they get nothing but criticized for doing so. Oh, they got burnout over there. Oh, you got bailout? Why didn’t I get a bailout? Well, you did get a bailout.

You just don’t realize it. But anyway, it’s, it’s, you know, you are living in a blessed land. And I tell you, we are. As long as we can retain. As long as we can retain as many of us of our rights and freedoms as possible, then we’ll. It will Be a blessed land. But I think that’s absolutely right and you can see that that is on the back foot around the world. And that comes back to the fact that representative democracy is, is a little bit out of date and a little bit crunchy now because the media and, and the way that information flows has, has changed the game.

I mean, representative democracy is built around the fact it takes you a week or a month to get to your capital city and then you have to sit groups. Well, you know, that world of, of lag is gone now and I think that that’s what’s putting all these politicians and government people under great pressure and stress and driving so many of them off their blooming trolleys and they are being driven off their trolleys. You see that everywhere you look. They’re just losing it. Most of these people. Yeah, if they don’t fix it here in Canada, I have a feeling that there might be some divisions arising.

But hey, where can people find out more about what you do and you know, what are your future plans? Well, you know, I, I’m, I’m, I’m doing my bit to save the world by inventing crazy new chemistry or rather getting it across from, from academia into production and that’s all strategic metals and minerals. And I’m building a financial website called a new FN and I used to run one called Investors Hub in the US which you might have heard of. And I used to run one called ADVFN in Europe. They’re big sites and so I’m making a comeback in that area with a bit of luck.

And you know, my, my interest is that we are living in, in very volatile times and normally there’s great opportunity and with a bit of luck it’s great opportunity for good as well. So I can do some good, make some money and you know, help out a few situations. You can read the stuff I write for Forbes and I’m not always bearish. I’m not a, I’m a bit of a prepper in as much as I appreciate downsides can be catastrophic. And I’m a, I’m an optimist and you know, I do my thing and I, when the market’s going up, I normally say it’s going up and when it’s going to go down, I normally say it’s going to go down.

And I’m not one of these people that says it’s always going to go up. And I’m not one of these people that always says it’s always going to go down. And you won’t have heard me singing God’s praises five years ago or 10 years ago, 15 years ago or 20 years ago. You won’t hear me saying the dollar’s not going to be the world currency and it’s going to collapse. You won’t hear me saying anything like that. So I’m not very extreme. But we are now in very, very, very volatile times. And I think that, you know, people should help their, their mental health by basically calmly taking slow, steady steps to make their life less noisy, more focused, more pure, more clean, more, Less chaotic.

Because that is where the true defense lies. Well, I think that’s an excellent, fair and balanced, even keel point of view. So thank you for sharing it and sounds like a realist to me. And if you’re ever in Canada, make sure you stop by and check us out. Whereabouts are you? We’re in the middle of nowhere. A place called Saskatchewan. Most people can’t even pronounce it. That’s like frozen for like 12 months of the year. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I’m tempted. I’m tempted. It’s summertime right now. So, you know. And that’s when you get.

Size of horses. Yeah. What’s that? Is that. That’s where you get mosquitoes. The sizes of horses. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We have two seasons, there’s bugs and. Well, now we have three seasons. Bugs, wildfires and winter. So aside from that, it’s. Asides from that, it’s good. When should I come see you? When should I come see you? We can do some shooting. What do you shoot? Oh, anything. Steel. We could, we could go hunting if you want. Oh, I like animals. Yeah, well, I mean, but you like to eat them too though, right? Yeah, I do, I do.

But I don’t shoot camels. Fair enough. All right, man, well, thanks a lot. Loving the chat. All right, see you soon. Cheers. Bye bye. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up@canadianpreparedness.com where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices. No junk and no gimmicks. Use discount code prepping gear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive but the prepared thrive. Stay safe.
[tr:tra].

See more of Canadian Prepper on their Public Channel and the MPN Canadian Prepper channel.