➡ The article discusses the potential impact of an oil shock on the economy, leading to increased prices for various goods and services, including medicine and food. It also highlights the role of oil in many products and industries. The article features an interview with Robert Keenz, who discusses the current state of the gold and silver market, the influence of different global markets, and the potential for a financial crash. He suggests that gold and silver are being used to support a future digital currency system.
➡ The world is experiencing a shortage of silver, a critical mineral used in many industries, due to increased demand and mining shortages. This has led to a rush to buy up available silver, with countries like China and the US making significant purchases. The scarcity of silver could impact industries that rely on it, such as technology and science. Additionally, there’s speculation about China having a secret stockpile of gold, which could potentially be used to back their digital currency, giving it an advantage over other currencies.
➡ The article discusses the rising inflation and its impact on the economy, particularly on food and oil prices. It suggests that gold and silver could become valuable assets as the dollar’s value decreases. The author believes that digital currencies will become dominant, but gold and silver will still be important for private transactions. The article also mentions the potential elimination of cash and the importance of having physical assets like gold and silver for transactions outside the digital system.
➡ The text discusses the value of gold and silver as a hedge against economic instability, rather than a get-rich-quick scheme. It emphasizes the importance of these precious metals in preserving the value of one’s hard-earned money, especially during times of economic crisis. The text also warns against the risks of hysteria-driven investment and highlights the potential impact of commodity shortages on everyday life, including rising costs of goods and services due to increased oil prices.
➡ The article discusses the global economic instability due to rising oil prices and the imbalance between supply and demand. It highlights the impact on various regions, including the US, Europe, and Asia, and how these economic pressures could lead to a domino effect, causing other economies to collapse. The article also mentions the potential for civil unrest due to economic contraction and political divides. Lastly, it emphasizes the importance of preparation for these potential crises, including the possibility of lower crop yields and increased food prices.
➡ The article discusses the rising rates of violence and mental health issues in the US, suggesting societal agitation and conflict as possible causes. It also warns about potential financial collapse due to unsustainable debt levels and ineffective monetary policies. The author advises caution and preparedness, including being aware of one’s surroundings and considering escape routes in case of emergencies. He also suggests that the US should focus on solving its own problems rather than trying to police the world, and that resources should be redirected towards domestic issues.
➡ The Money Trade Association has been advocating for the use of gold and silver as legal tender in various states, with 11 states having passed the gold bill so far. This doesn’t mean vendors are required to accept gold and silver, but it provides an alternative monetary system rooted in history. The association is also exploring digital payment systems tied to gold and silver, allowing for modern, electronic commerce. However, the future of this initiative remains uncertain, with potential challenges from the Federal Reserve and the increasing focus on digital currencies by the federal government.

When that oil shock really hits, it’s going to be felt two to three to four or five months from now. People may not be able to afford gas and that really hurts people. You got to commute to work, you got to go to the grocery store. But beyond that, oil is used in so many things. It’s used in roads, it’s used in plastics. So you’re going to see prices rise across the economy. And with all of these commodity prices going up, it’s going to make all the end products more expensive and it will spill over into things like medicine as well.

If you’re a diabetic, it’s going to affect the prices of your drugs. At the end of May, we’re going to have issues with most motor oil and then eventually that’s going to lead to issues with gasoline prices and the fertilizer is going to lead to issues with food supply around the world. People may look at these individual events and say, oh, we’ll figure it out or we’ll deal with a little bit higher inflation, or we’ll deal with some shortages of things. But what happens when these complex systems start crashing? And that’s really where you get to the long term scenario of this is what you prep for.

Whether it’s financially or otherwise. 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 crash the likes of which, which we’ve never seen. Hi folks, Canadian prepper here. So today on the channel, I’m joined by Robert Keenz, host and creator of the Freedom Report. Rob focuses on precious metals, inflation and the financial pressures that are quietly building beneath the global economy. Now lately, gold and silver have kind of fallen out of the media spotlight as war is dominating the headlines.

But paradoxically, the markets are hitting all time highs. As we were talking before, the Asian AI Silver guy seems to be a faint memory at this point in time. And I figure at times like these, when people are not talking about something in the realm of investing in particular, it’s good that, you know, smart people talk about these things because you never want to get in during peak hysteria. It’s when there’s a calm in the markets. I think that that’s a time to potentially position oneself for a coming surge in interest. And so today I want to talk about what’s going on in metals market.

Shortages in various commodities as a result of this conflict and when, if ever, the financial bubble is going to burst. And you were telling me beforehand that you also had some expertise in the realm of cybersecurity and 5G technologies. So I think it would be useful for us to maybe try to tie all this in together with the digital ID threats and other looming technocratic negative outcomes. So, Robert, thanks for joining me today. And before we start, where can people find information about you if they don’t make it to the end of this video? So they just look up freedom report on YouTube, Twitter or Substack.

I just recently started a sub stack and then they can find me by my name on, on LinkedIn if they want to encourage people to check that out. So what is going on in the silver and gold market? You know, I, I think the last time I bought was 70 when it had bought up there. And to me that was kind of a floor in my mind. It seemed like, you know, that was at the height of the oil liquidity crisis. I still think the situation in Iran is not resolved and it’s going to escalate, but some people think otherwise.

I know there’s a lot of optimism bias right now coming out of these Xi Jinping talks in China with Donald Trump, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of that is just theater. But what do you think is the, the state of the silver and gold market? What’s been happening since the vanishing Asian AI guy? And what can you, you know, tell us about the, the market just in general right now? I know you, you have a lot of data with respect to the various aspects of the COMEX and things like that. So maybe you can kind of just bring us up to speed on where the metals markets are and whether or not this is a good time to buy.

I realize that, you know, there’s a slight conflict of interest and that you are obviously a proponent of gold and silver, but I’m sure you’ll give us the honest take. So what do you think? Yeah, I came to gold and silver when I got the only time I ever got laid off. I got laid off at February 1, 2009 for my job at Ernst and Young. I was doing a mortgage servicing project. So I knew mortgage servicing is going to blow up before anybody else because I was trying to save a portfolio, 52,000 loans. I led that.

And so I saw all the problems that led to the Great Recession. But they laid me off after I fixed all that, even after I made them a bunch of money because they needed to cut staff. And at that point is where I started down my financial education and I came to go. I was not always been a Gold guy. I came to Gold because of what happened to me. And I came to Austrian economics and alternative views on the economy, which actually explained things better than what we call Keynesian or traditional economics that you’re taught in school.

So I really started down economics, came to gold and silver. And for a long time I was a prepper. Actually, my first channel on YouTube, I was anonymously talking about prepping years and years ago, I never put my face on screen. And I was talking about a lot of these things and I was talking about health protocols and all that stuff way back in the day. I used to watch you quite a bit, as a matter of fact, and have always loved your channel. But I really got into the financial end of things. I think that’s where I was being led.

That’s kind of where my expertise was. So looking at the state of the gold market, gold prices are not determined solely by what you pay at your dealer. The base price, called the spot price, is an industrial market price that the big players determine. Unfortunately, for the last so many decades, probably over 100 years, it’s been dominated by COMEX in the US and the LBMA in London, and they set prices for the world. And then people got tired of that because it was like a duopoly, right? And so what’s been happening the last few years is you’re starting to see price differences between the US and London and Shanghai.

London is the oldest and biggest. COMEX is right behind it. And then about a tenth of the size of those is the Chinese Shanghai. But Shanghai is growing. And so what you’re seeing is price differences because there’s different supply and demand dynamics. And I think personally, the BRICS nations in China and Russia are sick and tired of the LBMA and COMEX calling the shots. China hired JP Morgan some years ago. I reported this at a conference. It was in the mainstream financial news to help expand and run their commodities markets in China. And so they’re taking a bigger role.

And essentially what you’re seeing is China sort of rise. And in a nutshell, gold and silver are much more in demand. Central banks have bought more in 2025 than they ever have even when we were on the gold standard. And if you look at something called Basel iii, which is promulgated by the bank for National Settlements, bis, they’re sort of the leader of the world’s central banks. They put policy out and all the central banks, including the Fed and the US follow that. They just, okay, we’re going to do this, right? So do we truly have sovereignty over our money.

You know, the BIS really calls a lot of the shots. And their Basel 3 standards put gold specifically as what’s called a high quality liquid asset or a tier one asset. And so gold is being bought by central banks to capitalize their currencies. But what I think is going to be the coming digital currency system. In other words, they’re taking gold and silver out of the hands of people and they’re using it to, to support this digital system that when the dollar crash comes, that they’re going to want to institute. And so anyway, getting back to gold and silver on comex, AI Asian guy came about because there was a lot of physical delivery going on.

I personally think the Chinese were in there buying it, I think through banks, because the big banks are the ones that facilitate a lot of this trade. They’re the market makers. And I think that a lot of gold and silver is going west to east. And I think because it’s more traditionally money over there than it is in the United States. In the United States we sort of lost. Lost the plot, right? We’ve forgotten what sound money is. Didn’t the Chinese in last month, didn’t they buy a record amount of silver, like 500 tons or something like that? They bought a ton and they’re in.

The problem with silver the last five years, we don’t know all the statistics, but the best statistics we can muster is that we’ve had mining shortages. So what’s happening is all the worlds available above ground silver stock is being bought out. There’s a race and at some point you’re going to see the silver market break. And what happened up to January 30, when we had the big crash and the big correction in precious metals was a lot of that was driven by international demand for physical. And then when that cooled off and a lot was taken off of comex, almost half of their inventories were liquidated in the span of a few months.

Then eventually what happened was I think the banks came in and took control and kind of crashed the prices down so that they could reset the market because they were losing gold and silver too fast, specifically silver. And that’s a threat to the world. Silver is used in every major industry from the military to technology to science. And when we run out, there aren’t always great alternatives. So we have behind the scenes a great silver rush going on. And that’s why Trump in the summer designated silver a critical mineral. He did a bunch of billion dollar contracts with different countries around the world that have silver mines.

And the United States is now into the sovereign wealth fund through is it Mitnick and Besant who are running that are buying silver specifically because they know the shortages are coming and that will affect industry. Silver’s money, but it’s really more industrial now. About 3/4 of silver is now used in products without easy alternatives. So silver’s more become probably one of the most critical minerals on earth. And I would align it with. With oil because if you don’t have oil, you don’t have energy, you’re in trouble. If you don’t have silver, you don’t have technology, especially with the build out of data centers.

And I mean I know that was kind of put on hold temporarily, but it seems to be surging once again. You know, obviously at a certain price point they’ve shift to copper and other alternatives that are maybe slightly less conductive for those industrial applications. But I think a lot of companies will likely scoop up any silver they can get at a certain threshold. I think Anything in the 70s at this point is fair game. I wanted to ask you just before we keep going on the silver thing. I often hear this argument that the Chinese have more gold than they claim and that that would be bullish for gold.

I don’t understand how that would be bullish for gold if the Chinese are secretly holding on to thousands more tons worth of gold. I’m not sure if you believe that argument or. But this is what we hear, right? And I’ve heard it said by many, like prominent market analysts like yourself, that the Chinese have this secret stockpile of gold that they’re getting ready to back the yuan, digital Yuan or whatever. How does that work exactly? If they wouldn’t that crash the price if they revealed that they had 30,000 tons of gold kicking around. Yeah, gold is a little bit different.

It’s primarily money. It is used in technology and in jewelry, but about 3/4 of it is used as money. So it’s kind of the opposite of silver. And it’s really why gold was put in Basel III as a high qual quality liquid asset that the central banks want. Because there is no counterparty risk with gold. Not like a bond where you’re waiting on somebody to pay it back or not like a dollar which is on the good faith of the US government and how long that will last. We’ve seen what happens to paper currencies over time.

100% failure. But yes, there is a lot of above ground gold. A lot of it is held by large parties. However, if you look at all the money ever printed versus all the gold ever mined. Gold could easily go to $20,000 if you had widespread currency collapses. So gold has room to run if you look at it that way. And essentially we are going to get to a point at which gold becomes again the money of kings. And I think the central banks, that’s why they’re buying it. If you look at gold production throughout history, it’s basically mirrored population with a couple of exceptions yet small exceptions like the gold Russian, western United States.

But for the most part it grows with population so it retains its value. For that reason it’s not overprinted. It’s the dollar that’s overprinted. So it’s not really whether the gold price is going to crash in dollars. It’s whether or not gold will now be the measuring stick for all other commodities used in trade, which I suspect it will be now going to the Chinese. I did an article for JM Bullion which is a major online bullying in the us I was writing articles for them for a year. One of their articles I did looked at the Chinese situation and I looked at all export, I looked at UN shipping logs, I looked at their policies and my estimation was that China had 25,000 tons.

And this is probably two years ago. And they don’t put it in their central bank, they put it in their own sovereign funds that they don’t have to publicly report outside of China. So I suspect that unless they under the radar shipped it all out and nobody knew and it was not on any cargo manifest that they have at least 25,000. And I think that’s China’s hedgehog against dollar collapse and treasury collapse. Because even though they’re not the number one holder of US Treasuries right now, they’re still a major holder. And not only that, but I think they want to back their digital yuan.

They’re coming digital currency with gold because in international circles, gold having no counterparty risk that gives the yuan a leg up. Look at the US real quick. We’re supposed to have 8,000 tons. Nobody believes it’s there. What happens to the US dollar compared with the Chinese? You on theirs is back with gold and they bring all this gold out and the US is like, well we really don’t have as much. That’s just, that’s really going to hurt the dollar and it’s going to hurt more importantly for people listening, it’s going to hurt your purchasing power. That’s why I’m a gold, I’m not a gold guy because I’m not Scrooge McDuck wanting to roll around gold coins.

It’s because I see it as the one thing without counterparty risk that people can use to offset inflation, currency collapse, that type of thing. But I also don’t advocate hoarding a bunch of it. I would go back and say it’s better to take care of your food, your water, all those kinds of things, because at heart I was a prepper first. Gold is just a type of financial prep, but it’s part of like a system that you need to have to deal with the shortages that we’re going to be seeing, namely because of fertilizer, helium, natural gas and oil.

That’s not going through the straight of hormuz. That is a very sticky subject. I did a big research piece on that on my substack and did a video and you know the UN Food Accountability Office, which looks at food security across the world. And all these guys are now coming out saying we’re going to have mass inflation. Even if they solve the issue right now and you get that oil flowing, we’re going to have not enough crop yields, not enough oil. Costco, Exxon Mobil and Walmart have come out and said that by, and this is in news in the last few days that by the end of May you may not be able to find oil filters or oil for your car for a while.

Be by the end of May. This is not that long. This is, we’re on the. This is a couple of weeks from now that they don’t have replenished supplies because of this issue. And so, you know, this is the type of preparation, small preparation you can make to deal with these type of situations. Go out and buy a couple oil filters and oil. And I did that yesterday. I bought 25 quarts of oil for my truck and four oil filters because I know at the end of May we’re going to have issues with motor oil and then eventually that’s going to lead to issues with gasoline prices and the fertilizer is going to lead to issues with food supply around the world.

And because we’re going into the third month and it’s not conspiracy, I’m talking about UN estimates and FAO estimates or that inflation is going to rage going into 2027 now, even if they solve it right now because it takes time to reestablish that flow and that production and prices are going to rise up until that point. So we’re going to see high inflation. Inflation estimates are up to 4% CPI at the end of May. I don’t believe CPI is real. I go by Shadow Stats, but let’s say you go by cpi. We’re still going to be at double what the Fed wants by the end of May.

And they’re saying by about mid to end of summer is where you’re going to see severe food and oil price increases. And remember, oil is used in everything a lot like silver, it’s used in roads, it’s used in plastics. So you’re going to see prices rise across the economy and they’re expecting, they haven’t predicted double digit inflation this year like we had a few years ago, but man, it’s going to keep going up and that’s going to continue to just hammer away at American budgets. And that all assumes it ends now and doesn’t continue, which it appears that there’s no real solution at this point.

Mind you, you have a widening divide between what the intelligence leaks are saying, what the military is saying. But so just getting back to that, that point about the Chinese gold, because I still want to talk about the, the shortages that you were just talking about, but it’s bullish for gold because it’s backing, it’s bolstering the yuan and it’s bullish for gold in the sense that it’s bad for the dollar. Is that what you’re saying? Because if somebody were to say, hey, I, you know, I got another extra 25,000 tons of gold that could potentially be sold onto the market, then people might think that that’s bearish for gold, isn’t it? They won’t sell it on the market because I believe the worldwide plan is to institute digital currencies and those guys hold the gold and they don’t want you to have it.

If you truly want to get to a digital control system, you cannot allow alternatives. So I don’t think world leaders want gold in the hands of the people. And again, even if you go to all the gold ever mined and it comes out that most of that is still available, which it is, it’s almost indestructible unless you’re going to blow it up with a missile. Right. It’s hard to destroy gold and silver, so a lot of that’s available. People are going to say, well, it’s going to crash the price. Well, sure, but if your currency is crashing, gold becomes the reserve asset of choice.

The reserve asset of choice since 1970s has really been the U.S. treasury. Was anybody believe the U.S. treasury is going to survive? No, we’re past the point of no return. Yale and Harvard did that research. We know that. We know that in history the US has already passed the point of no return. The dollar’s got to crash 100%. We think certainty at some point when it does, you’re going to have an option of gold or digital currency and it’s not going to be bitcoin, it’s going to be state issued. And that’s my belief. I can tie that in with 5G and a lot of other things, digital ID and all that kind of stuff into the control grid.

So sure, you could have a temporary crash in the price of gold, but I think gold is going to take center stage in terms of being that international currency of choice. And if you have some, because remember, only about 2% of Americans invest in gold and silver outside of jewelry in bullion form. So if you have it, you’re going to have a pricing advantage and you’re over anybody else that doesn’t. Let’s say you’re holding a basket of dollars, which I say dollars king till it’s not. So I say in the beginning stages of a prepper scenario, without rule of law, whatever you want to call it, dollar is king until it’s not.

That’ll last a few months. If history is an indication, then at that point you have to have something of value. It’s another good. Or if you can’t barter with somebody to get their eggs because you don’t have what they want. Gold and silver is that intermediary. And so I think especially in a, you know, grid down type of scenario which we talk about in prepper circles, I think gold and silver have value, but I don’t think they’re necessarily the ul you. I think really what’s going to happen is once we get past the dollar collapse, it’s digital currency era.

And gold and silver is the only way you’re going to be able to do private transactions, I think. So it’s beyond what the dollar value of gold is. It’s what the utility of gold is in various scenarios. And silver. And I think that’s really why I promote it because if we go in that digital currency era, I don’t know how people get out of it. If the government forces it and they get rid of cash and they track every transaction on blockchain, how do you get out of that system? The only thing is to have a physical asset.

Well, if you don’t have physical dollars because they want to get rid of it, it’s in 2015, IMF, paper, International Monetary fund. They want to get rid of cash and they’ve been trying to get rid of cash for years. So if they do it, how are you going to buy stuff? You’ve got barter only. So gold and silver can be that intermediate for you that, that borrowable money that allows you to get what you need? Absolutely, absolutely. And even just having the, the possibility of transacting outside the system is going to be so important. You know, a lot of people say, well, are you some kind of criminal? Are you, you know, it doesn’t have to be a black market exchange, it may just be that you want to sell something off the books and you don’t want to have to involve banks or any leave any sort of digital record of such things.

So certainly I can see how this could play out. And as that age old adage, you know, he who makes the gold makes the rules, or he who has the gold makes the rules. And I think that was something that Donald Trump had hinted at earlier on in, in this round of his presidency. And he’s been dropping these hints, you know, throughout his presidency with respect to gold. There was a period of time there where everybody thought that Fort Knox would be audited. And so if it’s true that China has three times the amount of gold as the United States and that means they make the rules, which could potentially explain why Trump is being so seemingly obsequious towards Xi Jinping in the opening exchanges that they’ve had so far in Beijing.

You know, I mean, in terms of price, ink with gold and silver, are you expecting any major surges in the near term in the price of these things? Or is that kind of irrelevant in the grand scheme of things? Yeah, going back to how prices are determined, industrial market, and then if you go to your dealer, you pay a premium on top. And that is the supply, demand part of the price. It’s actually the smaller part of it. So the base spot price before premiums above spot are determined by industrials. So the banks, that kind of rule that roost and all of that really sort of have at least short term control the price.

There’s a ton of research on this. I did a masterclass series on this on my channel, which is free, where I go through all the research into detail. People want to get into all the geeky parts of it, but essentially those prices are really moved around by the banks. And on January 3rd, when the crash happened, it was a clearing of the debt. Gold and silver had gone up too far too fast in modern terms, not as money in money, they have whatever value you can get for them. But in modern terms on that market, they had technically moved up too fast and there needed to be a clear out.

And what we call the open interest or the amount of contracts traded in the gold and silver market has collapsed to 14 year lows. But we’re starting to see interest come back in. And this is cyclical. Gold’s been in a bull market since 2000. It’s beaten most other than the NASDAQ. It’s beaten most of the stock indices in terms of return. I think we’re in that last stage of gold going up. I think gold and silver are going to have another leg. It’s not going to move in a straight line. There will be pullbacks like any market, but I think that they’re going to continue to move up.

What will be interesting to see is what happens to gold and silver when they start rolling out government currencies because they may have to change. Who can participate in that gold and silver market if they do? At that point, I think the prices will be set digitally, not in US dollars. So you’ll just see a different pricing system. What I go back to is what is gold and silver worth to you? In various scenarios, it’s not so much about investment as much as it is an inflation and a crisis hedge or an alternative for you to use when you need it.

And I’m going back to my prepper roots on that. I didn’t get into gold and silver to get rich. Yeah, I got into gold and silver as a way to avoid a lot of the stupidity of these governments and destroying their currencies and destroying economies. I was just going to say that really does skew and distort the market. When people get into silver and gold as a get rich quick scheme, which is what the AI Asian guy kind of represented. You had this mania of people thinking that they could get blood from a stone when really the purpose of these things is, as you said, just to retain the value of your sweat equity that you’ve invested over the years, something that is representative of that, that will be transferable across time and space.

And so I think so long as preppers remember that, and I know we have had people on the channel like Raffi Farber, Lynette Zhang, who believe that, you know, gold’s going to go to 30,000 and this sort of thing. And while that might be true, I, I could see a whole other confluence of circumstances that kind of negate whatever advantages are, are gained in that respect, you know, Like I find it very difficult to believe that that could happen without some other major turmoil unfolding which somewhat negates it. But I think as long as people keep that in mind, that this is not, you know, a crypto coin scam.

This is to retain your money. And I, I can’t remember who said it, but you know, in times of great economic peril, it’ll be who can, who, who cannot lose wins essentially. Not losing money is winning, you know, in a Great Depression or a reset or something like that. Would you, would you agree with that assessment of gold or do you think there is a potential there for it to be one of these, you know, 2x3x? I believe gold and silver, like I said, are crisis inflation hedge. And Gold since 2000 has moved over time, not on a daily basis, but in lockstep with cpi.

And that’s the trader saying, we know gold is there to offset inflation. Now I personally think inflation is higher. John Williams, who runs Shadow Stats is on our board. He’s a friend of mine, I’ve interviewed him. He’s a traditional economist that looks at the prices of things. And when I wrote my book in 2009, I used some of his research. And you know, it’s not about a get rich quick scheme, it’s about looking at the world and the risk and saying how do I offset it? And I think gold and silver is a part of the plan, it’s not the only plan.

But in terms of a currency situation or holding a valuable asset that you can trade for stuff you need or to offset inflation now, you know, up until the dollar collapse, to bolster people’s savings and their ability to maintain their lifestyle and to have an emergency fund, you know, if you, I’ll bring one more thing into this. If you go back and look at the laws, your bank account is not owned by you, it’s a trust and you’re a beneficial owner. Same with your stock account. All of these dollar denominated paper assets are not yours. And using Dodd Frank laws, eminent domain laws and other laws that are on the books, they can bail you in, take all the money out of your bank account and give you an iou.

And that’s considered fair value of trade. But what does that IOU help you buy food and stuff. So, you know, I look at gold and silver very practically. I’m different than a lot of, of gold people in that. I really look at it as a way to help people. It’s a tool, it’s not the end destination. That being said, There have been gold and silver blow off cycles or bubbles. It’s, it’s when you know, AI, Asian guy multiplied by a thousand across the world bids everything up past where it should be. So there is a risk of that.

That’s why I say stair, step in and be careful and look for price pullbacks and don’t put too much of your money in it. Balance it, use it for what it’s intended for. But don’t get involved in hysteria. Anytime you get involved in hysteria, you put yourself at risk. Absolutely. So you were talking about the potential commodities shortages as a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. And you know that’s going to be become a real reality for people at the, the supermarkets and the stores across America in the near term. So, so what else do you see unfolding with respect to that in the coming months? If this conflict persists and there’s no resolution, you know, what are you doing in it? Just beyond, you know, buying extra oil for your car, which of course is a good idea.

What are you doing beyond that to. To prepare for what could potentially amount to real shortages. Yeah. As you start to prepare and you know, my parents grew up during the Great Depression. I know I don’t look that old. I’m 51. My dad was 50 when he had me. He was born in 24, so he was in the 7th Naval Battalion. He landed on D day as a medicine and as a radio operator and he marched in because he had those skills. So he went from navy to ground troops. So I was taught lessons around what happens when you have great depressions or you don’t have the things you need and there’s rationing and you know it.

I think it’s now to really start putting forward the idea that people need to prepare. And as I go through my prepper journey, the first thing I did was buy things like MRE’s and stuff like that. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You know, 25 year dehydrated foods. I actually for one of my former friends built based on Joel Skousen’s son has a book on secure shelter. I took that book and built a secure shelter out of concrete rebar, all that stuff. And I put him a water tank and I put him solar panel and that kind of stuff so he could survive like a nuclear event for 14 days.

That’s really what it’s designed for. 14 day half life on, on nuclear weapons. So you gotta survive for 15. Right. And then you get out to someplace safer probably. So I’ve done a lot of that stuff. And at the end of the day, whatever you do is good. You want to balance it. And what I see coming is when that oil shock really hits, it’s going to be felt two to three to four or five months from now. People may not be able to afford gas. We may be looking at seven, eight dollar gas. Well in the, in, in Texas we have gas production so we get it cheaper.

I’m fortunate to live in Texas. We’ve got $4 something gas. In some places it’s equivalent to 7, 8 bucks. Like in California. It could go double digits in California. And that really, it, it hurts people. You got to commute to work, you got to go to the grocery store, you’re taking your kids to soccer practice. It’s going to hurt budgets. But beyond that, oil is used in so many things. It’s used in mining of commodities because a lot of mines are not on the grid and so diesel is used for mining. So commodity prices will go up.

In fact, I was looking at the S and P commodity index before we went on and since the beginning of this year, commodity prices have just been absolutely spiking. And we’ve seen new all time highs in several commodities in the last four to five months. It wasn’t just gold and silver, you know, up through the end of January we’re seeing it in copper and we’re seeing it in scandium and all these critical minerals. So these minerals are used in. Either you mine it or you grow it. Okay. To get to an end product that the consumer buys.

And with all of these commodity prices going up, it’s going to make all the end products more expensive and it will spill over into things like medicine as well. If you’re a diabetic, it’s going to affect the prices of your drugs because those energy materials are used in that industry. It’s going to be widely across the spectrum of goods and supplies that people buy. Yeah, that diesel really is the lifeblood of all industry. And when it goes up in price, transport costs go up in price, shipping costs go up, agricultural commodities, even cattle, just because of, you know, it takes diesel to truck stuff in and truck stuff out and to grow, feed and to do all of these things.

So at what point do you think then do you, do you foresee demand destruction happening at the pumps? Like, because of course as Americans and just, you know, western countries in general tend to have larger discretionary incomes so that they can allot more of that to these sorts of scenarios. Whereas in, you Know places like Asia and elsewhere in the world, they don’t have that sort of flexibility. At what point is there demand destruction and people just stay home? I think that’s already happening in the US is fortunate. We’re the second largest producer of oil based products and we’re one of the major exporters.

So we can simply just stop exporting and keep it. But it’s still going to raise prices because the overall amount of demand of oil is higher than the supply. So prices are going to have to rise. And so I think people are already making adjustments. I saw it a couple weeks ago, I was planning a trip to Florida and we looked at ticket prices and from one day to the next they had doubled. And I was like, whoa, you know, airplane fuel, kerosene, which is what’s used in airplane fuel. But that, that went up. So we’re already starting to see effects.

And that’s in the US where we have our own major supplies of oil and natural gas and coal and uranium for that. For that matter, we have all these energies in relative abundance. If you’re looking at a place like Africa, there were estimates when I was looking up the UN and the FAO studies where they’re looking at places like Africa and they’re like, this is disproportionate risk to these people. Japan, a first world society which imports most of its food and they’re landlocked. They only have so much agriculture that they can put out. Europe. Europe right now economically is basically a dumpster fire.

Anything else that affects the European economy could tip it over. When I wrote my book in 2009, using various models that economists had put together, I predicted it was either going to be Japan or Europe to fall first. And they’re the ones that are really in the worst shape economically. All of these things are just, it’s going to continue to put more pressure on these economies. Last thing, if you look at the way economies are structured from a capital perspective, from a money perspective, we’re all invested in each other. If Europe goes down, it’s a domino effect to other economies because we’re so co dependent on our trade.

This globalism has made us codependent. Even though we have some energy supplies and we have a lot of things in the US that are great, agricultural land, energy supplies, we’re not going to be immune from it. You’re going to see it in other societies. First. We’ve already seen the crash of the Indian currency, the rupee, a few years ago. We’ve seen the second crash this Century of the Argentinian peso. We’ve seen Turkey have near hyperinflation rates in their currency. They put capital controls on gold. They won’t let gold leave their country anymore because their currency is in deep stuff and it’s going to multiply.

It’s a domino effect. And if you go to the theory of complex systems, the world is so complex, and when these dominoes start falling, the whole thing just kind of comes down. It’s like you’re knocking out the pillars, you know, on your house. Your house is on beams. You knock out the beams, eventually you get to enough beams, the whole house comes down. And that’s my fear, is that people may look at these individual events and say, oh, we’ll figure it out, or we’ll deal with a little bit higher inflation or we’ll deal with some shortages of things.

I don’t need to worry about motor oil. I’ll ride my bike. But what happens when these complex systems start crashing because we’ve just put too much pressure on them? And that’s really where you get to the long term scenario of this is what you prep for. Whether it’s financially or otherwise. This is why you do it. Because nobody knows the day and time that’s going to happen. But we’re starting to see those dominoes fall. And the US Will not be immune from it. It won’t be. And so anybody watching this in the US or Canada or, you know, Mexico, North America is, should take this with, okay, there’s higher risk in the system.

And I need to spend more time and energy looking at how I’m preparing for that. However you do, I don’t even care. Pick one. You know, go to your channel, pick a subject and start there. Because I know you’ve got a lot of subjects that you cover for people. Start somewhere, do something. One last thing. Farmers are already reporting US farmers are already reporting they expect crop yields to be 38% lower this year. Right now, even if we end the Iran conflict, that’s due to fertilizer shortages. Due to fertilizer shortages and higher energy costs, they’re not able to get the fertilizer.

My family was a ranching family up until my generation. I’m the first generation that graduated college. Our ranch in the last two years, the last remaining ranch in Oklahoma that my family owns, she had to cut her herd in half. And this has been in our family for generations. So she had to cut her herd in half. All right, that was prior to the Iran issues with fertilizer. And I Asked her two years ago, what is it? She says, fertilizer is too high, energy costs are too high. We’ll lop on what we’ve seen the last couple of months.

It’s going to thin herds. It’s going. Because there’s not going to be food and fertilizer and energy to manage them. And it’s going to thin wheat and prices are going to go up. So, you know, who knows how long that lasts? Would they still haven’t fixed it. Trump, you mentioned Trump and Xi. Trump is in China trying to get China to put pressure on Iran to come to the table. And Iran’s like, no, we’re good. Meet these demands or else we’re not talking to you. So I don’t see a quick resolution. And if we don’t have a quick resolution, the problems get progressively worse, at least for a period of time.

And experts have already said this is going into 2027. Where we land, I don’t know. But these are the things that you prepare for. This is why we prepare. It’s because this is the exact reason. And that all assumes that the conflict in Ukraine and Russia doesn’t spread. And Taiwan straight. North Korea, South Korea. You know, there’s another aspect to this. It’s true that the United States is well positioned and North America in general are probably the best position to weather this storm in terms of population demographics, in terms of resource availability, you know, energy access, now with Venezuela, things like that.

But there’s some, something else, and that’s like the fracturing and the civil disorder aspect of this. Anytime there’s economic contraction, it’s going to exacerbate all of these political divides that are already, you know, reaching a fever pitch, even in Canada, where we’re seeing new separatist movements arise. And that’s just with, you know, the cost of living marginally ticking up. So, you know, we can imagine a scenario where right now the, the robustness and durability of the, the U.S. economy and everybody thinks that, you know, the U.S. is going to remain a, a viable federal entity, and that’s not necessarily guaranteed when we’re already at a point where we have street battles and, you know, I mean, the divide between people, I couldn’t imagine you crash the economy 20, 30%.

How those tensions would begin to build to the point where there’s no guarantee that, you know, there’s going to be a US dollar even. I mean, I know we’re kind of maybe getting out there, but these are just kind of the realities of how it might affect, you know, the US And Canada in particular. I mean, in Europe, they. They have their individual countries and, you know, I mean, the US is such a huge country geographically. And, you know, it’s arguable that the differences between Texans and Californians and New Yorkers, you know, these are. There’s some real distinct differences there that, you know, in a.

I think in a normal set of circumstances that they would probably do things more regionally. And so under austerity, I could see those regional divides start to become more delineated. And I just extended suspect that there’s a. There’s another dimension of this that, that involves that civil unrest component that I think a lot of people are not factoring in, because you often hear that argument that, well, you know, we got. We’re best positioned to ride this out. There’s two oceans between us. You know, we don’t have to worry about land invasion or anything like that. But I think what we have to worry about is internal divides at times like these, especially when we’ve been living so high on the hog.

And, you know, for the longest time, you know, if people can’t get beef at the grocery store, they get ornery and, you know, maybe they want to go out and protest and all of a sudden you got new movements arising and you know what I mean, like every. It’s just death by a thousand paper cuts sort of thing. What do you think about that? Yeah, and I think you’re already starting to see it. You’re starting to see bombings and shootings at public events, more here in the US probably than is average. Some of the violent crime rates have gone up.

We’ve seen the riots, mental health, Portland mental health. You know, I have some friends in mental health and they say there’s been an explosion in narcissism. There’s been an explosion in just people saying other people are doing stuff to me for no reason. You know, it’s a sign of agitation in our society. It’s a sign of conflict as a sign of people struggling and maybe, you know, getting angry or psychologically experiencing issues in. You know, the one thing I don’t know real well, but I’ve been starting to research is how bad does our national psychology get in some sort of severe crash scenario that that may play into it.

And I’ve been telling my kids, I have a 17 to 22, right. I’ve been telling them, be careful where you go now. You just have some basic opsec. It doesn’t mean you have to be paranoid, but just know who’s around, you know what your, your escape routes are, know how you get to your car if there’s a shooting that comes to one of their schools, hey man, you gotta do what you got to do, so be careful with that. My daughter’s in college and at one of the, the, the colleges in our area, there had been a lot of violence, shootings and stuff like that.

And, and this started back when I was in high school. I was in high school, I graduated 93, and I think in 91 or 92 I went to Nimitz and South Irving High School. Good school, good decathlon team. You know, we had one of the first nationwide school shootings, at least of the modern era. And I was walking down the bus hall and I saw my VP, her name was Mrs. Hare, and I saw my VP and she was just like in shock. And she had a little radio, but she wasn’t using it. And I looked over and there was something going on in the bus lane.

So I went outside and somebody had shot somebody. And that shocked everybody because it didn’t happen that much back then. That was my first experience as a school shooting as I actually walked by it right after it happened and it was on the news. But now you see that all the time. How many times do we see that? And usually you tie these shooting events back to people that have had psychological problems. So then you look at it and say, okay, the psychology of these things and how we treat each other matters in our overall well being and our safety.

And that’s definitely something people, I recommend people look at is what are the effects of that really going to be? Are we going to have a lot more violence, especially in city centers? You know, I bought a house out in the country this year, so I have one, so I can go out there if I need to, you know, and I. And I’ve lowered my lifestyle to live below my means in the city, so I can have that. Because to me I’m like, well, I need a place for my family to go if things get kind of hot here for a little while, you know, take my computer, we’ll go over there and I can do my stuff from there.

There’s lots of little anecdotal data points that basically say that violence and psychological issues and anger and societal divisions are on the rise. And that’s definitely something to be aware of. There just seems to be a general disillusionment with, with things and that creates disunity. And where you have a. European countries and other countries have an advantage is that they, they do still have a bit of a national identity and they have a common sort of cultural traditions. Whereas here in North America in particular, it’s this mishmash. It’s this melting pot of different ideas, different religious, political, ideological beliefs.

And of course, that has never really been pressure tested in a time of true economic austerity. So we don’t know what the outcome is going to be. And you have so many people hooked on pharmacy pharmaceuticals. I mean, I could imagine that those will go up in price significantly. What happens if people can’t afford their psychiatric Medicaid? I mean, like you said, there’s all kinds of anecdotes that I think that the collapse of the US in terms of civil unrest, there’s no real analog for it in, in history because it’s so unique and it’s going to be, you know, there’s going to be a lot of unexpected things that arise as a result of it.

So we’re getting a little, a little into the dark territory of collapse here. I never actually thought that this conversation would go in this direction, but hey, I mean, it gets people thinking about these things and these are real potential threat factors that we have to consider. So is there anything else with respect to the sensitivity of the financial system at this period of time? Overall, I think the financial system in the US and across the world is teetering. Lots of very intelligent billionaires and financial analysts are coming out saying we cannot solve these problems with conventional means.

We have a new Fed chair that just got nominated in by the Senate a day before recording this video, Kevin Warsh, and he’s basically rearranging chairs on the Titanic. I think he has no policy options. I did a huge analysis on my substack. It’s pages and pages of all the things the Fed has done since the Great Recession in 2008. And it just made them worse. And I plugged into AI and I said, is there any way out AI for the Fed in the US and they’re like, not really. Because anything that they do makes the problem worse.

Every dollar they print, they only get 80% value of and it’s falling down. So it’s actually a negative to print more money and to try to goose the economy with debt. And the US is not the only one in this position. Financially, the world is in real bad shape. And you can look at the stock market and say, but the stock market’s going great. But yeah, the stock market just gets the fresh money pumped into it that the government. It’s the first One, to receive the fresh money, you’re not going to tell the economy by the stock market.

You got to stop listening to mainstream media. You got to look at underlying fundamentals and you have to look at historical studies like Kenneth Rogoff and Reinhart from Yale and Harvard who did that seminal study on debt levels and how that crushes an economy. Last thing, look at the US 10 year treasury as it gets closer to 5%. That’s the breaking point. Most of the debt that we have on the books was issued at zero. If we have to roll that over at 5%, then between 2026 and 2036 we have 16.1 trillion in new interest payments alone, not paying back the principal of that debt, interest payments.

It’s mathematically impossible for the US to print their way or to use monetary or fiscal policy from the central bank to get out of it. We have got to get back to making things into bringing value back in the economy, de globalize and build infrastructure. Will we have time to do that before some sort of financial collapse? History says probably no, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. But what’s going to have to happen geopolitically is for the US to stop policing the world and turn in on itself and say we need to fix problems here because we don’t.

We’re in serious trouble and you’re not going to fix the rest of the world. No nation’s ever been able to fix the world. We got to focus on our problems. And I think geopolitically is the geopolitical things that we’re doing is leading to more financial pressure and it’s not helping. And we need to turn our resources back to our country and say how do we use these resources we’re spending on police in the world to deal with the situation we have now? And I just don’t see that there’s too much financial interest in doing the contrary.

Unfortunately there’s a lot of people getting rich with the, the globalization and the militarization and all those things that are antithetical to exactly what you’re talking about. But Robert Keats, go and check out his YouTube channel. I’ll post a link in the description as well as substack. Do you do podcasts on your Freedom Report YouTube channel? I do, yeah. I’ve done about 800 or so videos over the last six years. Prior to getting into YouTube, I was a writer. So in my tech and cybersecurity career I wanted to learn about finance. So I started. I became like a Series I got licenses basically in the financial space.

Series six, 63, seven, I believe, and three, which is commodities and forex. So I did that to teach myself. And so I kind of started a financial career and eventually moved full time into finance. Right now I run a national precious metals company. I’m the executive director of the Sound Money Trade Association. I’ve been in front of the Florida legislature. We were the group that passed the Gold bill in the state of Florida. What was that? Gold bill? Yeah, it was. Gold is legal tender. So Article 1, Section 10 of the US Constitution makes gold that states may not use anything other than gold.

And silver’s legal tender. Then you had the Federal Reserve act in 1913, which I believe is unconstitutional, but it is the law of the land, so to speak. But what they didn’t do was remove gold and silver as money. It’s still money technically, but what the states have to do through their power of Amendment 10 of the Bill of Rights, which is all rights not expressly granted to the federal level, goes to the states and the people. So the states are now passing. I think we have 11 states have passed gold. It’s legal tender. Just saying.

We’re going to provide air cover for you if you want to start using gold contracts again, you want to start trading in gold. So does that mean if I go into a store in Florida, they have to accept gold and silver, or is that discretion of the vendor? It’s discretion of the vendor. They’re not making it mandatory, but they’re allowing it for anybody that wants to participate in that. And essentially the move there is to provide an alternative monetary system that has its roots not only in American but worldwide history. Gold and silver been money for 5,000 years.

Right. So it’s to provide that without challenging the federal government directly on the dollar. So that would mean that if, if a government agency, if I had to go and pay a parking ticket or something, would they have to take silver as payment? In that instance, they don’t. And it’s made that way on purpose. The states wouldn’t pass it if they felt it was going to go against any current law. Now, we could argue that, you know, a lot of things are unconstitutional, property taxes and all that kind of stuff, and go down that constitutional argument, which I don’t disagree with.

But we live in, in a day and age in which statutory law often supersedes constitutional law. And even the Supreme Court is backed by us up at times, unfortunately. And so if you go the route of trying to replace the dollar, you’re going to get, you know, you’re going to get all sorts of opposition. So the way that we’re approaching it to get the states to approve this is to say just create gold as an alternative currency and allow it to be voluntary and allow the people to choose. It sort of goes back to Ron Paul’s speech when he was in Congress and he would talk to Ben Bernanke, who was the Fed chairman at the time, and he’d hold up a silver coin and he’s like, like, I’m not against the dollar, but why don’t we give people a choice? And so we’re taking that approach to give people a choice and allow them to use the currency that they feel is best for them.

And we don’t have to rewrite a congressional law because it’s still codified in the Constitution. It’s just that the states have to say, you know, no state shall make anything other than gold and silver legal tender. Well, that means the states can make gold and silver legal tender through the Constitution and Amendment 10, which is in their power to do so. So it’s a way for us to create a system that people can use. And eventually, if enough states do it, we have two big gorillas, Texas and Florida pass laws. If enough states do it, I imagine there’s going to be a constitutional challenge to the Federal Reserve and the dollar.

Whether or not the US Government gets gets involved in trying to defeat that, you know, is yet to be seen. But if you look at the federal government, they’re going down the track of digital currencies and stable coins. So I think the federal government has just said, no, we’re going to perpetuate our system, we’re going to make it digital. And I think they’re basically trying to starve out alternatives. And so they haven’t addressed us directly. I mean, a direct challenge, but I suspect at some point it’ll happen. How practical is it though for somebody to, you know, be walking into town with a bag of silver and gold coins? You know, it seems a little archaic.

I know Peter Schiff is working on a, trying to blend the, the digital technologies with the gold based technologies. A gold card, a real gold card where you’re basically able to spend your gold in a digital format. Is this mostly just a symbolic pushback that’s not really going to be practically utilized by people or what is like the purpose of this? Yeah. In the modern age, like if you want to order from Amazon, you know, it’s going to be kind of hard for you to Mail, you know, a silver maple leaf to Amazon and wait for your goods.

Everybody wants electronic commerce and I think about 85 to 90% of commerce in the United States is electronic. If you consider things like credit cards, e checks, Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, all that kind of stuff. So people have said that they want digital. So what a lot of companies are doing and the company I work for, since you asked, I work for Kinesis, which is the top three gold and silver digital payment system in the world behind Tether, Gold and one other. Originally starting about Australia and the UK they brought their product to about 100 countries.

And what they do is they take gold, silver, they put it in a vault, it’s audited every year by an independent analyst and they tie it to a blockchain. It’s a stellar blockchain, but they recently done a fork of Ethereum for those that are in the crypto space. But it allows electronic payment so you can do it on your phone. They now have virtual debit cards. They have physical credit debit cards in most countries in the U.S. they have virtual debit cards. So I’ve used mine on Amazon, I put my virtual card with Kinesis on Amazon and I paid for goods and it used the gold and silver that I had stored at my company and they delivered the goods.

So that is a way in which you can use digital payments of gold and silver based on real one to one backing of gold and silver. And in the laws that were passed in all of these states, these states wanted us to incorporate many options. So you can go a physical coin, you can go something like this was, which is a gold infused gold back, or you can go digital and the laws allow for all of that. So if you want to pay Amazon with your debit card based on gold and silver, you can do that.

And Kinesis and other companies, you know, all these companies allow direct payments between members. Very frictionless and cheap. I think kinesis is only 44 basis points, so. And so the thinking would be then that this Kinesis, if the dollar hyper inflated, your Kinesis would still reflect the amount of gold that is in the vault. And I presume that a person, if they wanted to, they could cash out and have their gold sent to them at any given time. Is that how it works? Yeah. A lot of these companies do allow physical redemption. Some have certain thresholds.

I believe we have one of the lowest thresholds in the industry. But there are a lot of companies, people should look into this and look into all them. I’m you know, I’m not here to promote Kinesis necessarily just to enlighten people as to options. Companies have different thresholds. So if you’re gonna go digital gold, store it somewhere and have and you know, eventually may want to retrieve some of it. Look at the guidelines for each company and what levels you have to have. How much gold and silver do you have to have to do that? Some, because gold and silver can be expensive to ship.

Some of them want you to have more, some will do it for less. It just depends. But there are multiple solutions out there for people that are interested. Well, that’s pretty fascinating stuff and I look forward to having you back so you can break down the dystopian cyberpunk 5G digital ID future that awaits. And thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Anytime, man. Anytime. Take care. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at Canadian Preparedness 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.