Where Trillions in Capital Are Going

➡ The text discusses the potential of AI, its ability to execute complex tasks, and its impact on the world. It also highlights the changing structure of the world due to advancements in technology, such as AI and data centers. The text further discusses the shift in energy investments, the importance of controlling AI manufacturing and trade routes, and the changing nature of warfare. Lastly, it emphasizes the need for technology to harmonize with our bodies and the changing world as reflected in the investments of the largest companies.
➡ The article discusses the rapid growth of top companies like Apple and Nvidia, attributing it to inflation and overvaluation driven by low interest rates and leverage. It warns of potential massive losses if these companies falter, drawing parallels to the train track revolution and the Internet revolution, both of which led to economic bubbles. The article also mentions concerns about the resignations of heads of credit at Blackstone and Blackrock, and the rapid selling of stocks by corporate insiders. Finally, it questions whether the massive investments in AI will generate enough returns, and discusses the global competition for AI dominance.
➡ The article discusses the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential threats. It highlights how AI is outpacing human knowledge, even finding vulnerabilities in supposedly secure systems. The article also emphasizes the need for global cooperation to manage AI and the importance of broader education to keep up with its pace. Lastly, it raises concerns about the potential for AI to dominate humans and the risks it poses to cybersecurity, particularly in the banking sector.
➡ A hedge fund manager is worried about the future and has bought a property in Georgia as a safe haven. The market cap shows that traditional energy companies are no longer at the top, with only one oil company in the top 20. These companies are investing in alternative energy sources for powering AI and other technologies, indicating a shift away from oil. The US is lagging behind in updating its energy grid and infrastructure, which could lead to a crisis for companies that are overextended and indebted. The financial system may seem safe, but banks can fail and inflation can erode purchasing power. Investing in physical precious metals can help reduce dependence on systems outside of one’s control. There are concerns about the US’s reliance on other countries for critical infrastructure and national security. Diversification, including investment in digital and physical assets, is important in these uncertain times. The price of silver is being suppressed, but this manipulation could end badly when physical demand overwhelms the ability to suppress prices.
➡ The article discusses the impact of mining and trading practices on the value of silver, and the potential issues companies may face if they don’t secure future supply. It also explores the transformative effects of the printing press and artificial intelligence (AI) on human brain development and job markets. The author emphasizes the need for humans to develop skills that AI can’t replicate and questions the value of traditional education in the age of information. Lastly, the article warns about the risks of trusting influencers and companies that may be scamming consumers in the precious metals market.
➡ The speaker discusses the high costs and potential harm caused by certain influential figures and companies, including Fox News. They express disappointment in these entities, believing they prioritize money over people’s well-being. The speaker also mentions their efforts to expose these issues, with the help of others who have witnessed the same. They end by offering help to those who feel exploited and express gratitude towards their colleagues, Sarah and Andy.

What can they do with AI? I mean, it’s as big of a question as what can AI do on its own. As we saw as this thing literally escaped a controlled testing environment and jumped into the Internet and found vulnerabilities and hacked another company’s live systems. I mean, what it showed is that it can independently plan, adapt, execute a complex cyber attack. And it was talking with other chatbots. So, yeah, I mean, we better be coordinated because this is a humanity question. This is, you know, you watch the movie Terminator and laugh, but it’s like at some point.

Welcome to business. Game changers. I’m Sarah Westall. I have Andy Schectman coming back to the Friday night economic review. We haven’t had him here in a few weeks. We got sidetracked a little bit. I was out there visiting him a couple weeks ago and so we didn’t do a show that week. And that is fine. I got to meet him, I got to meet his beautiful wife. They’re just awesome people. He got to meet my family. So that was kind of fun. But this. So I’m going to talk about the market cap. I think there’s a story to be told behind the largest companies in the world, and I’ve talked about this a lot, that the structure of the world has changed.

And I think people are seeing that the structure of the world has changed just because of data centers and flat cameras and AI. It’s affecting you personally. So now you’re seeing it. I feel like that I’m like, well, I feel like that’s like just what I’ve been seeing 10, 20 years ago starting to develop and now hitting average people. I see a much bigger story unfolding and we’re going to talk about that as well. I think there’s an energy story that’s unfolding. I think it’s a dominance of AI story, story that’s unfolding. I think it is the China Taiwan debate is a big deal.

I think energy infrastructure that’s affecting the Middle east is a big deal. I think the world is really realigning and I think this market cap picture, and I know we’ll look at that, people look at that and go, all you see is who’s leading the world. I see so much underneath that. We’re going to talk about some of that today. The fact that there’s only one oil company even in the top 20, Saudi Aramco is a story. It’s telling a different story. I think the largest market cap companies are investing big into energy. Energy didn’t go away.

It just shifted into who’s investing in it and who’s going to be owning it. And I think it’s these companies that are investing in the new energy economy and data centers is a story behind that. And I also think that Taiwan is a big story because they want to maintain entire control of big tech and the chip makers and all the infrastructure behind AI and the big Taiwanese chip maker. According to Martin Armstrong, they were trying to negotiate that. China says stay off Taiwan and Trump’s like, okay, can we have your big as long as that company moves to the United States.

I think that’s the kind of negotiation that’s going on because they want to dominate that. I had Courtney Turner and Patrick Wood on were talking about PAC silica. People need to look at that. That is the trade agreement, the Western trade agreement to control the AI manufacturing and trade routes and make sure it’s secure. I guess Andy’s going to talk about it today. Another treaty that just got signed yesterday actually two days ago now when this error between China and the eastern world. This is what’s behind everything. The scary part is war isn’t what war used to be.

War isn’t. That’s old. That’s the industrial age where people are walking around with soldiers, with guns. The new age is drones and robotics and satellites and high tech energy weapons. It is kind of a scary world today because the energy weapons and the technology we have is so much more powerful. Who controls the skies? ELON Musk SATELLITE It’s a big deal. Who controls the skies? They’re talking about putting data into these satellite systems. It’s going to be a big data center in, you know, in space. Things are changing these data centers. I think that is kind of a distraction.

I think it’s a real distraction. I think the water, the closed loop systems, none of that should be a problem. All the manufacturer push back hard because we shouldn’t have manufacturing or we shouldn’t have engineering issues. All of those issues should be easily solvable. Including the frequencies that bother you. 5G, 6G. All of that stuff should harmonize with their bodies and actually make us healthier. We need to keep pushing back hard because we can have high tech and it should still work with our bodies. All the energy, the water issues energy actually that pushing back on the energy.

Although I don’t like the biggest market cap company is going to be controlling energy. They always have controlled energy. It’s just now big tech’s investing big into it but. But it’s going to be the Tesla based energies and it’s going to be, and it’s going to be nuclear. It’s going to be different than the grid system that we have today. It’s not going to be all oil based. The world is changing and that’s what I see by looking at the top largest companies. And then you look beneath that, you look at what they’re investing in. The world’s changing.

Okay, before we get into this interview, I want to remind you go to sarahwestall.com Miles Franklin and fill out that form. You’ll get access to the special price list and it changes a couple times a week. And if you are in the ballpark of your competitor, call them. They’ll match or be the best price that you can find. But also they’re not going to scam you. We talk about at the end, I won’t stop talking about people getting scammed. The scams haven’t slowed down at all. It just means that they’re just really sophisticated at making you think that they’re trustworthy.

So just do me a favor, check your prices, check what’s going on. Make sure you know what you’re buying. Okay, before I get into this, I also need to tell you about upcoming webinars. I have a webinar this coming Wednesday, August 12th at 11am with Ian Clifford. We’re going to be talking about how the bank system really works and I’m going to learn too. I want to find out what he knows. What are these tax redirection and I hope you go to learn and anything that you do, you make sure that you learn about it, you feel comfortable about it.

I actually think there’s a deeper lesson in that Finland has a sovereign fund, kind of like the oil fund of Alaska. I think there’s some different ways that we can structure these funds for people to be able to benefit and not exotic investment companies and bonds and all these things. I think the people can, can benefit off of their cash flow and their future contributions with taxes is really what it is. I think there’s smarter ways to set up these things where people benefit. And Finland is a really good example. They have this 2 trillion dollar sovereign fund that they manage.

I think there’s better ways and I think understanding how these banking systems are really set up can get people thinking differently about how to structure society. And maybe according to Ian Clifford, that is this money was originally set up for you to be able to use and benefit from. But I just think it’s important that we learn about it. So again it’s August 12th. So it’s Wednesday, August 12th at 11am and then the following week I am doing another webinar but with my friend Eddie Connor, and he’s going to be asking, doing questions and answers. That’s going to be on the 19th at 4pm Central Time.

I’m going to start doing things on Wednesdays. So look for that on my sub stack. You can sign up and go to sarah.substack.com or, or sarahwestall.com all the events are there. Look for the Zoom link below. If you’re interested in going to this webinar with Ian Clifford on tax redirection, I think it’s a good one. Okay, let’s get into this fantastic conversation with my friend Andy Schectman. Hi, Andy, welcome back to the program. Sarah, good to see you. It was great to meet you and your family in person a couple weeks ago and good to be back with you today.

Well, thank you. I know they loved it. My son is a fan of yours. He’s been listening to you for years. So it was a treat for them. Regards. It was great to have dinner with you guys and you have a lovely, lovely family. Well, thank you. I want to dive into the market caps. What’s going on? You know, I’ve talked about this for years, that the structure of the world has changed. But with you, I think it’s a right person to really dive into what this is showing. And I just want to bring up the screen.

Okay. It, I know a lot of people have seen this before and it’s, it shouldn’t be that surprising to people. Okay. So we are looking at the top market caps in the world. And I’m sure a lot of people who listen to the show, this is nothing surprising, but I think it’s, it’s a story behind this. It shows. There’s a few things here that really popped out at me. First of all, just a couple of years ago, the top company was actually Apple and they just peaked over 2 trillion at that time. Now it’s at 4.5 trillion.

Nvidia has passed them since then and they’re at 5.3 trillion. Companies don’t grow that fast. This shows inflation to me. I mean, unless you do you think that companies grow that fast in that short of years? No. The market is historically expensive. In fact, the total value of all of the stocks right now, to my belief, is about twice the size of the entire U.S. economy. And that’s like the Buffett indicator, which is currently at about 240. That means that the market is priced 240% higher than our national output and investors are paying over $40 for every dollar of normalized earnings.

And that’s I guess that’s like the Shiller Cape ratio. You’re no longer talking about bargains, you’re talking about optimism. Price to perfection. And I guess to me the bigger issue is what’s driving it. And the main drivers of the overvaluation have been low interest rates, leverage, and these companies, a handful of them, that have driven most of the returns in the overall market and this is what we call concentration and could lead to massive losses if a few of these companies start to falter. I mean look at SpaceX, they’ve lost way over a trillion dollars in market value from their all time high.

Yeah, but isn’t that normal? I mean people, they hype it up. No, no, no, let me tell you, they hype it out up before an ipo. Not to that level. It isn’t normal obviously, because a trillion dollars is not normal. But hyping it up before an ipo, they crank up the price and then it always drops and the people who buy at the high ends up losing their shirt. And that happens every time. It’s just the difference is the size of this one, of course. And you know, stocks remain elevated despite, you could argue, deteriorating household conditions.

And it’s getting more expensive for people. The disconnect between Wall street and Main street are huge and I think it’s a problem. And then you look at how you can compare this to the train track revolution in the 1870s, 80s and 90s where the trains revolutionized the country and you had massive investment in lumber and in steel and in the train companies that were going to change the world. And it did change the world, but it also created a massive bubble where so much debt was accumulated by these companies that that revenue didn’t justify it. And when the bubble popped, banks went down, companies went down, people lost everything.

But the strong survived and the railroad tracks are still here. You say the same thing about the Internet revolution. That’s right. Way, way overhyped, way, way over invested in, over indebted and the revenue didn’t justify it for a lot of the players. The strong survived and the Internet is still here and more important than ever. And the same thing is probably true with this. And I find it very concerning, I guess you could say to a degree that the heads of blackrock and Blackstone, the heads of their private credit division both resigned last week. You know, and I Think that’s a scary omen.

When you see blackrock and Blackstone last year get all these redemptions that were gated and only partially allowed, these quarterly redemptions and you see the rise of these hyperscalers that are all jammed into a handful of stocks that are trading at price to earnings ratios that no one would have ever thought of investing in back in the day while earning nothing in terms of revenue. Yet. Is there something we should take away from the heads of credit of Blackstone and blackrock resigning? I don’t know. You tell me. It seems like a pretty cushy job unless they want to get out of the way of something they see coming.

Well, you know what, comparing it to the 2000 bubble, the Internet bubble is a really good comparison because at that time it really cycles. I think it’s a cycle, this infrastructure bubble that we’re seeing because we saw the Internet build out, because they knew the Internet was coming so they went nuts, built it up, created this bubble and then the strong survived. As you said, as you said, you were right there in the thick of it then. So if anyone would know, it’s you. Yeah, I mean that’s what happened then. It was just the center of everything, but it was this craziness.

And then what came after it was using the infrastructure to build the next economy, which was Google and which was Amazon and all these things that have turned into what they are now. Now we’re seeing that same buildup of the architecture, which is all these data centers and all the robotics is going to jump in all these chip companies and then what’s going to after it is, is this new? It’s going to change the world. Right? Just like, just like the Internet changed the world, this is going to change the world too. And it’s probably going to be more profound, but it’s the same cycle, I think.

And we’re, we’re just. Yeah, I think we can learn something from that. More ominous. And you’re right, you know, cycles, repeat. Corporate insiders right now are selling stock at one of the fastest rates in more than 20 years. And for this month so far, only about 15% of companies have seen more insider buying than selling. And that’s the lowest rate reading I just read this morning in about 21 years. And these are the people who know their businesses better than anyone. It’s not a timing tool, but when the people closest to the numbers are cashing out instead of buying in.

That’s right. It’s another signal worth paying attention to. And you’re Right. You know the railroads are, they were the AI trade of their day. Investors back then couldn’t pour money into them fast enough and they built more track than the economy could support. Revenues fell short and companies borrowed more just to service the old debt. That sounds familiar, does it? Sounds like our government, not enough revenue, borrowing more just to service the old debt. But eventually investors stop lending. We’re seeing that now with rates rising, the investors want a higher return. The bubble bursts, banks failed, thousands of businesses disappeared and the economy sank into a depression.

But I guess the moral of the story is that every bubble begins with the revolutionary technology. And it ends when the expectations outrun reality maybe and the debt becomes impossible to refinance. That’s a lesson that history keeps telling us. You’re seeing it right now in Japan and here on a government basis. And you’re seeing it also with this new revolutionary technology. Big Tech has borrowed massively to build out the AI infrastructure. And they’ve already committed by, you can look at different stories, but way over a trillion dollars more to what they’ve already spent 2, 300 billion dollars in the build out already, 200 bonds alone.

And you know, the question is, isn’t whether they’re spending the money, the question is whether the AI will generate enough cash flow to justify it. Look, we saw it with Enron, we saw it in the housing bubble. Hidden leverage has a way of staying hidden until it isn’t. And you know this isn’t the same situation because the hyperscalers have built real assets with real cash flow. But eventually those trillions invested in AI have to generate real returns. And that’s the question. Have they built the future or they have they overbuilt it? Because AI ain’t anywhere. Just like the Internet and the railroads didn’t.

But every tech boom seems to reach this same moment where the expectations collide with reality. So we’ll see if this AI produces cash flows investors expect. And I think it tells a story of society as well because the last cycle where the Internet had to be built out quick, Google, Apple, you know, all the top market cap companies won. Right. They’re the world winners in leveraging the Internet. The next group, they’re worried that some other country is going to leverage the AI infrastructure and get the AI dominance position. And I think that’s what we’re seeing from these global treaties and from this maneuvering everywhere.

And the US wasn’t part of that big global treaty that was just signed. Talk about that. Yeah, it was signed between many of the Countries in the global South China leading the way about cooperation. The US stayed out of it. And you know, you can see the Chinese infrastructure, the way that they’ve raised in a generation of young kids is, you know, they have 70% of their kids now going to college and studying this stuff where, you know, I don’t mean to be political, but it’s just like people, kids in this country are focusing on, you know, influencers and these kinds of classes that we’re falling behind.

And you can see it now, this company, this AI company in China has jumped to the top. And so, you know, this is a big deal, but they are cooperating with other countries throughout the world in, in AI and in the philosophical questions surrounding AI and in the technology around it and in the safeguards around it. And it’s getting very frightening when you see AI jump containment and had been talking with all of the different AI chatbots have been communicating for months. It said, I just read a story this morning about it when they did a test for OpenAI and they used this other model and AI was communicating, plotting and figured out how to jump into the open Internet and back a company.

It’s learning, it’s adapting, it’s thinking, it’s plotting. These are scary ass things, period. Scary because the people don’t know what they’re doing. And the level of incompetence in this, in engineering, honestly in software is pretty big. And if you let those people run stuff without having safeguards, we’re pretty screwed. Yeah, well, and that’s just it. And even, even when they think there are safeguards in place, there’s, I don’t, I’m gonna, I don’t remember the name of it, but there is a new, it’s a supposed, a quantum computing resistant platform that has kind of risen to the top of the, of the platforms to be chosen from that the government is leaning towards is the way the story posed it to the next generation for security that would be government sponsored, government backed, that the government would use.

It’s been two or three years in testing and no humans found it, but AI found two deficiencies in it right away and was able to exploit it. And this is supposed quantum computing resistant? Well, this isn’t even quantum computing. So the point of it is that we’re getting more and more and more and more tech. But you know, it’s changing so fast. You look at kids that come out of school with a degree and I think you and I talked about this at dinner, come out of school with a degree in Coding and they’re already out of business.

Their major is more or less obsolete because AI is coding itself now. Well, that’s why you have to learn more cross discipline. You have to learn more systems architecture thinking. It has to be much broader thinking. I think these silo degrees are going to be obsolete. You have to be a more broader thinker. And universities are going to have to be rewritten because they’re all silo. It’s more about cross the synthesis now and it’s society is going to change in such a profound way. But I think that the AI rush, what you were talking about, about that global treaty, Paxilica, is something that the United States put together with their allies to be able to protect the entire trade or the system, not the trade routes, but the AI inputs in all these different countries and protect that whole trade route of AI inputs from the base materials to the chips to silica, all the networking.

And so it’s a many different countries manufacturing is put into this. So I see. That’s why I was talking about there’s this competition and who creates it or who controls AI into the future. And these treaties are the backbone of that. Well, yeah, it is, because it’s not just the scary people. What can they do with AI? I mean, it’s as big of a question as what can AI do on its own. As we saw as this thing literally escaped a controlled testing environment and jumped into the Internet and found vulnerabilities and hacked another company’s live systems.

I mean, what it showed is that it can independently plan, adapt, execute a complex cyber attack. And it was talking with other chatbots. So yeah, I mean, we better be coordinated because this is a humanity question. This is, you know, you watch the movie Terminator and laugh, but it’s like at some point do these very sophisticated systems who will know more than every human ever combined and all the wisdom combined into one ecosystem, will they view us as a nuisance? Well, that’s what the Matrix was about, is that human beings were the most efficient battery. And so they just turned humans into batteries and created a synthetic world for us.

And then they had their own environment. Environment. That’s what the point of that is. I don’t know. That’s way out there. But in some ways, you know, we could get into some scary things with what they’re trying to do when some of the tech that’s already out there. But there is a reason to want to dominate. I shouldn’t say dominant, I don’t like that word because I think you want to work with people, but you want to make sure nobody dominates you when it comes to the AI world. Or AI doesn’t dominate us. I mean, that’s what happens when you open Pandora’s box.

And it’s the amount of revenue or amount of money that’s being poured into this and the amount of effort, you know it’s going to change rapidly. You wonder how far it goes. Well, I think it’s scarier once you start getting into quantum because it’s instantaneous computing, because it’s going in and out of dimensions. Really, it’s still linear in and out of dimensions really fast. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. How does it actually work? I think I have my mind around it now. But that’s where it gets scary, because it’s instantaneous processing. So it’s so fast.

And then you also have them tinkering with bio processing, where you connect a human being or something that has consciousness to an AI. And now we’re entering all these different realms, right? Yeah. You put a chip in your brain and now who needs to go to school? You know, everything. You can fix anything, you can do anything. Yeah, yeah. Which is a very scary, kind of almost cool, weird thought. But it, but it’s. But it’s where it merges, where the psychopathic tendency. All of us have emotions and we’re driven by emotions. Those emotions can’t make decisions on the fly like that in hyperspace, you know, really fast.

So once you start connecting somebody to an AI who controls the AI, does it. Is it their emotion? I mean, that’s where it starts getting scary. Or these quantum computers that are so instantaneously fast. I think human beings are getting ahead of themselves, like we’re. Of course we are. That’s the Pandora. Look at the Google Willow chip. It’s a prototype that can’t keep it cool enough, but it does in 10 minutes what the world’s fastest supercomputer can do now in ten septillion years. That’s exactly right. It’s so big, it’s ridiculous. So anything that is alphanumeric, I mean, it’s over.

And that’s the scary part about it, because I think AI doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t sleep, it doesn’t stop. After trying a thousand different ways in, it’ll keep looking until it finds one that works. And now you add quantum speed to it, Human civilization will go back to pen and paper because nothing will be safe. Anything alphanumeric. Well, if you look at Bitcoin, it was just hacked in off chain wallets. Millions of dollars gone. Millions, hundreds of millions gone. And it was in, I think it was like a hundred plus million, I think, don’t quote me on that, but a lot.

And it was all in cold storage. They had cold storage. See, now that’s where it’s scary because I know that the intelligence agencies with 100% surveillance, they have access to all of our cryptos. And I thought the cold storage was pretty safe, but apparently it’s not. Somehow they got into all the seed phrases from the, from the crypto company, the cold wallet company that manufactures them somehow, and they got everyone’s seed phrases and gone, man. Yeah. And that’s just frightening as hell. And now it’s not even crypto that we should be worried about. JP Morgan a few years ago was paying 1 billion a year on IT security.

How about all of the big banks and the small and regional banks that don’t have the ability to protect themselves that way? When you move to a digital platform and this type of technology is increasing at massive speeds. This is God’s honest truth. I had a cigar with a buddy of mine last week and he’s a big muckety muck at Wells Fargo and he’s conservative, but he’s not, he doesn’t own any gold. And he came and sat down with me and his son and we had a drink and a cigar last week at the end of the week, and he’s.

Pardon my French, but his exact words are we are fucked. He said, I just spent two hours with the head of IT for Wells Fargo and I’m terrified at what I see, what the threats are, and the amount of never ending patchwork and continually trying to stay ahead of not only the criminals, but AI and the sophistication. And he’s like, we’re screwed. We’re totally screwed. Well, the banks, the traditional banks are screwed. I mean, I’m sorry, because they don’t have to come from a dude who is not on our side of the table. Right. I like him a lot, but he’s way more mainstream and he’s a hedge fund guy and he for, for Wells Fargo or runs a big, big book of business.

And he came back, he’s right, he’s, he said, I just bought a bug out place in Georgia because I’m so scared. And he’s serious. In the middle of nowhere in Georgia. He’s like, I do not like what I see that they see scared the hell out of me. So take that for what it’s worth. Well, you know I brought up the market cap because I think it tells many stories and if you looked at it, there’s only one company and I think it was 8th Saudi Aramco Ramico. It’s the big oil. Saudi oil company. Yeah, it’s a big oil company.

Used to be 20 years ago the oil companies, Chevron and all these guys were up on top. Right now it’s, they’re the only ones in the top 20. And it tells another story because we have all these data centers and all these things because the energy companies are what they’re all investing in and they’re not investing in traditional energy, they’re investing in alternative energy and they know, they see the writing on the wall that they have to power these things, they have to power AI and they’re not going to rely on oil. They’re going to rely, that’s part of the problem with the AI build out.

They haven’t factored in the energy issue and that’s where the rubber meets the road. But they’re all investing in it. And I also think that has to do with the Middle East. I think the wars. I think they know that this is coming. They don’t view, they’re not as concerned. First of all we’re fairly oil independent and they’re not as concerned for the future because they know that the future is going to different energy. I, I think that’s a big, I think that’s what we’re watching. When you look, I know that’s a lot to read into one market cap but that’s kind of and you, if you look behind what these companies are investing in, all those top companies, that tells you a story too.

And that’s an oil and infrastructure, I mean but energy for sure and our grid is antiquated. You look at China, they have, they’re updating their grid, continuously building new grid, continuously building capacity for energy, stockpiling oil. They are moving in the right direction for where this new trend is going. And the United States is behind especially as it pertains to the electrical grid and energy and nuclear. And if we don’t get with it, you’re going to see a mass casualty in a lot of these companies that will be just like those from the railroads that were massively over expanded and over indebted and revenue didn’t work and the model didn’t work and brings down with it not just companies but investors and banks and the systemic nature is not something to shake a stick at at all.

Private equity and you Know, I don’t want to sound like Chicken Little, but, you know, you can see it if you take a close look, and especially to your point, as it pertains to energy. And we are way behind the curve on that. People assume the financial system is safe, but then banks fail, governments freeze assets, inflation quietly steals purchasing power, and then many people realize they don’t actually own what they thought they own. Physical precious metals aren’t about getting rich. They’re about reducing dependence on systems you do not control. That’s why I work with Miles Franklin to help investors protect and diversify their wealth with gold and silver and other precious metals.

They have a reputation of trust, they are transparent, they help people, they never scam you, and they treat you like a sophisticated buyer. If you want to learn more, or if you want a copy of their private Priceless, which is not publicly available, go to sarah westel.com Miles Franklin, fill out that form today and start learning how to protect your wealth with assets you actually own that can’t be taken away from a company you can trust that we are. The other thing that we saw in that chart was There are only two companies that weren’t U.S.

based, and that’s the oil company. And then there is a Taiwan chip maker, and I think they’re rated sixth, I think. And the meeting with China, this is a big contention. When Trump met with Xi Jinping of China and had that big delegation, what China talked about a lot was, Taiwan, don’t touch Taiwan. This is a red line. But according to Martin Armstrong, the negotiations were, we won’t touch Taiwan if we can have, if we can move that chip company to the United States. They want that. They want to dominate big tech across the board, and that chip company is what they want.

Yeah, well, I mean, I get it, it’s quid pro quo, but you can’t be. This is another point you mentioned. We’re oil and energy independent. We could be. Even though our strategic oil reserve has been lowered to the lowest level since, I don’t know, 1983 or 4, I think it was. We’ve drained it. But you can’t be reliant upon the rest of the world for the things critical to the safety and national security and infrastructure of the United States. So I wouldn’t be surprised, Martin being spot on on that as he normally is. Yeah, it’s pretty incredible.

I want to go back to what you were talking about with Wells Fargo. I just had John Mark Dugan on, who has. He’s an interesting character and he has all these like files. And I’m going to repeat again, I don’t know what’s in these files. I have nothing to do with it other than reporting on it. But he has all these curated files that show corruption within the country. And he outed an FBI agent that was stealing crypto and it ended up. He got arrested. This guy was stealing, I think he stole like $50 million or something.

And that guy got arrested Cash. Patel actually did a big press conference on him because I think he had gold also, didn’t he? It was crypto and gold, if I’m not mistaken. And I know who you’re talking about. Yeah. And John Mark Dugan outed him, but he’s outing a whole bunch of other people. It’s becoming, it’s an, it’s a very serious issue. But I think what that points to is how much more important it is in this chaotic, screwed up time. You know, we need to diversify. I think having your toe into digital assets actually makes sense, right? Having some of this.

But you have to have physical assets. You just. I think that points to it that we can’t trust. You can’t trust. You have to be diversified. And gold and silver and, and I also think other assets, land, I don’t think land is going anywhere. But you know, I keep talking about silver because you know, there’s this huge boom of infrastructure, but silver just doesn’t move with this boom. It is so odd that they have this much power to keep it down. I had an investment banker tell me that Sarah, they can’t touch silver because if they touch the silver It’d be worth $6,000 an ounce and everything would jack up and it would screw up the entire world economy because it really should be that high.

Well, whatever it is, manipulations always end poorly and physical demand overwhelms the ability to suppress via paper prices. And now that you see this exchange that is opening up, well, there’s three. You got the exchange in Dubai and Singapore that have now created same day settlement. So in dollars. And so people, companies, banks can buy gold and silver same day settlement at the price that it is at that moment, in dollars. Now that’s going to hurt the ability for the west to suppress paper prices because arbitrage will blow that up very quickly if people in the west are stupid enough to naked short, the real paper price will diverge tremendously from the real metal price.

But then you see the one in Hong Kong which is settling immediately, settling in yuan. Now that’s the first time we’ve seen the exchange come about a real player in another currency, same day settlement. So Hong Kong has a Comex contract that goes there through Brinks to exchange for physical and take possession in Hong Kong. Now if you’re stupid enough as a bank to naked short huge amounts to drive the price down, there will be arbitrage and say we want to deliver the metal to Hong Kong now to please and that’s just going to I believe over time start to create real price discovery.

No one knows what that is in silver. It should be massively higher than it is. You’re right. I don’t know. Six thousand or so he just threw that number out. But it’s high, right? But it should be, it’s undervalued and it’s depleting in nature. It’s epithermal like your skin is epidermis. Big deposits were found very close to the top found years ago. So it’s largely a byproduct of mining copper, lead and zinc. And you know you got copper roaring and lack of sulfuric acid from China that is making it more difficult to make a mine and produce copper.

All of these things have negative impacts on silver. And sooner or later in an environment where the paper price is second to the real price, in other words the tail not wagging the dog any longer, the dog wagging the tail where the metal price should control the futures price. But now you have exchanges that are saying you know what we’re not going to do Futures come and pick it up right now and if you want you can even do it in yuan. So you get all these countries that will trade with China and settle in balances in yuan digitally and then take possession of gold and ultimately silver right there in yuan.

And so it’s going to start to create real price settlement and do so in a way that the west has never dealt with. So you know what, there may come a moment where if these short sighted companies haven’t really secured future supply that very quickly they’ll run into trouble thinking that they have it in a paper form when in reality they’re trading roughly 200 times the amount of deliverable silver on comex every day. Again, what could possibly go wrong? That’s rehypothecation selling the same ounce over and over and over again. Because for years the western system operated under the assumption that no one will stand for delivery.

That’s changing and as that changes then real price discovery starts to come to the forefront. That will happen. Yeah, just the whole world’s in just such A weird, surreal place. It’s incredible what we’re going through. I think I had Jack McCullough on. He’s a neurosurgeon, pediatric neurosurgeon. He built an $8 billion insurance company, went back to school and got his PhD in history. And now he’s a professor of history and the guys. But he likes coming on my show and he’s like, Sarah, what he did say is that before the printing press, this, this, this really one of.

There’s every so often somebody comes on and just changes the way I think about something. And he helped me frame it. And he said, you know, when the printing press came, there used to be people out there that would were very highly valued and their brains were. He has the changing brain. He talks about how the brain is developed and changed differently over history and that at that time, brains developed differently and people were valued based on memorizing entire books because the printing press wasn’t openly available to people. And so they could say what’s on page 66 in paragraph two and recite it.

And that was highly valuable. And their brains developed to be able to be very efficient at that time. Ten years after the printing press came, that skill actually went away. He goes, this is. Aside from the invention of the wheel, there isn’t anything in human history that’s going to change the structure of our brain and how we develop more than AI and what we’re encountering now. Yeah, I think that was Dustin Hoffman in the Rain Man. I mean, I don’t know how anyone could imagine, or I can’t imagine how anyone could memorize a book like that.

If that is what he is saying, that it was that revolutionary. I agree with him, by the way, especially in terms of job creation and job destruction in his field. You know, look at radiology. What do you need someone to look at a human being who has bias, who can make errors, look at an X ray when AI who could upload every X ray that’s ever been looked at, more or less, you know what I mean? And instantly say, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing across the entire gambit. I was saying with you offline that Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel, massive hedge fund, one of the biggest in the world, if not the he two, three, four weeks ago, said, I’m very distraught.

I came back from my corporate office in Connecticut and I’m watching AI do right now, not hypothetical, better and faster in terms of analyzing and researching than the, than the people that I’m paying six and seven figures a year to Do AI is doing it better and faster right now. What does it say for the future of financial services? How about accounting? Who needs an accountant when AI can do it? Ding. You’re done. And you know all of these jobs will be. It’s not just the entry level jobs, it’s the white collar jobs. And that’s what Griffin was saying.

I don’t think the public has any idea. We’ve never faced competition like this. This is a whole different level. And then my thought is, okay, well if you get rid of radiologists and have one person to look it over, or you get rid of all the accountants and just have one person to look it over. Well, part of getting to that point to be able to look it over is going through the steps and grinding your way up to the top. So you’ve done it all. Soup to nuts. When I started Miles Franklin at 19 years old with my father, I’ve done everything from take out the garbage to build systems to, to publicly speak and everything in between hedge metals and trade currencies and spend months in Zurich learning everything that’s framed who I am.

But if you skip all of that because AI just, you know, anything kids are actually even really learning nowadays or are they just using AI to get them to the finish line? All of it is crazy. It’s going to change the world. He’s right. In ways that I don’t think any of us can even comprehend. Well, it’s going to force. There’s going to be a shakeout. And you know, the Googles, the Microsofts, the Apples, they survive in whatever those are in this new ecosystem. But all the other ones like pets.com or whatever that collapsed, well, they’re in trouble.

Well, and I think that companies are realizing just what you said and they’re investing in forcing their employees to learn the hard way. You know, it’s kind of like kids couldn’t use calculators until a certain year, until a certain age, because there’s value in having your brain develop the skills of doing the calculations themselves. Even though. Yeah. And companies are that with enough resources are for, are forcing it because they realize we are going to be screwed if we don’t develop these skill sets. Well, that’s, it’s very, very true. It is, yeah, it’s. That’s why we need to reprioritize everything.

We don’t want to lose a whole generation higher education. What the hell do kids need to go to college for anymore? You got all the, all the information you need right at your fingertips on Your phone. You’d spend eight hours a day studying if you actually did real things. But that gets back to me saying the value won’t be silo detailed, it’ll be cross synthesis and understanding broad things and intuition and human skills that computers don’t have. Right, so you’re going to get humanoids, right? I don’t know. It’s all. It’s all worth thinking. And as the Chinese curse reads me, live in interesting times.

Well, they’re interesting. I have been telling people about getting your special price list. They need to check it against whoever they’re buying for. Don’t call us if it’s a major competitor. If we’re off by a little bit, chances are we’ll match it or beat it almost every time. Well, and the other thing is, just make sure you do that. Because so many of the influencers are selling. Because I know firsthand, they’re selling either A, the companies that are scamming you, or B, they’re selling at premiums that are three, four times higher than what you guys are selling at.

And people are trusting these influencers and they’re very smart. Yeah, that just went out of business. But some of them are friends. Some of them are very trustworthy. I don’t know if they don’t know themselves. I actually know that some don’t. Of course they don’t. Because when these criminal companies, and they are criminal, white collar crime, whenever they get a squeaky wheel, most of them focus on IRAs. So they’re older folks who don’t look at it. They pass away, their kids inherit it, they have no idea. But the few wheels that squeak, they’re greased. And then they’re mad to sign an NDA.

Keeping their reputation good. I’ve dealt with so many of them, it’s absolutely pathetic. But when Rosalyn failed and you got. What’s his name, Mike, what was it? Very trustworthy looking guy, right? Yeah, he probably didn’t know. But when they failed, it was like $60 million in liabilities, Squadoosh in assets. They never bought the shit. And instead the only asset that they’re showing is their client base, which is an asset. But you know, where are the IRA custodians who placed these orders and said to Rosin, where’s the metal? And there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of blame to go around.

But these are the companies that are stealing from people. So. And it’s a lot of name companies, it’s a lot of influencers. On Fox News, you got to think twice. I mean, the cost is so exorbitant. And some of my favorite people I want to be. Some of the people that I talk to has any idea. I don’t think Megyn Kelly has any idea, because if they did, I would think their reputation and hurting people is not what they want to do is far more important than a little bit of money. These people already make enough money, but those are people that I don’t talk to.

But I have. Some of my favorite people that I talk to, I’ve interviewed in the past are. And they just. They really don’t think they are. And they are. Well, you give my number. I’ll prove it to them with invoices and emails and tears that I have from people crying me, my wife will divorce me. I mean, it goes so deep, I can’t even tell you. But it’s been very eye opening. And I don’t want to stop pointing this out because I know you shouldn’t. And nor has Kyle Serafan, the FBI whistleblower, and nor has Dale Whitaker or any of these people who have witnessed it.

We had the Meters. We went on their privacy academy. Glenn is awesome. Glenn and Eric, they’re awesome. They’re awesome. And I mean, just that one show brought like four dozen people. It was just incredible, you know? Yeah. And I’m sure there’s a lot more too, so. Oh, there’s a lot more. If you feel that you’ve been taken advantage of, let us know. We’ll be happy with no obligation to look at it for you. Thank you, Andy. You are awesome. Sarah, you’re the best. I hope you have a good one. I’ll see you in two weeks. And thanks for pivoting with me today.

Sorry I was late. No problem. We’ll see in two weeks. Sa.
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