Are Gold & Silver Prices Now Too Low? | Andy Schectman

I would simply say to you, there are very few things I've ever seen in my career that I can't at least try and explain. This is something that just makes zero, zero, zero sense to me, and I find it to be the best value I've ever seen in silver. Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart, welcoming you here for a special recording with my very good friend, Andy Sheckman, the co-founder and CEO of Miles Franklin, which is the endorsed precious metals solutions provider by Thoughtful Money. Andy, thanks so much for joining us today. Adam, good to be here, buddy. Sorry I left you hanging there a little bit, but glad to be here. Thank you. I so appreciate you making time for us here. I know you've got a lot going on, and you're actually heading out for a good while after this recording. I also know that you're going to try to squeeze in a little bit of golf before you go, and I'm actually going to try to squeeze in maybe a last run on the ski slopes here. Oh, you're a lucky guy. But we're back-ended here for fun reasons. Okay, so Andy, before you left, and we didn't have the chance to talk to you for a while, I wanted to get your latest update as to where things are with the precious metals. And I guess first and foremost, over the past couple of months, you have been saying that the physical flows, especially of metals that are getting removed from COMEX, they're being taken for delivery, had risen to unprecedented levels that you've never seen in your career. What is the status of that? Are you still seeing those same levels, or are they starting to abate? Yeah, we are seeing those same levels, as a matter of fact. Let me see if I have the March numbers. Bear with me one second. But the short answer, before I find the actual numbers, is yes, we absolutely are seeing the exact same thing. The numbers are increasing, unabated, as a matter of fact. So let's see here. First day notice for April deliveries showed that 10,138 gold contracts stood for delivery, that's 1,013,800 ounces of gold, and 1,181 silver contracts, that's 5,905,000 ounces of silver were posted for delivery. And if we look back at the March numbers, Adam, we see there were 14,559 gold contracts delivered, which obviously a lot of gold, 1,455,900 ounces, and 9,212 silver contracts, 46,060,000 ounces. This is the question that, in my mind, has been missed completely and totally by the mainstream. These are not trivial numbers. You're in the billions and billions and billions of dollars every single month. A lot of it leaving COMEX. A week ago Friday, I believe, we saw 2 million ounces leave the eligible category. Those aren't even for sale. Those aren't even bars that are posted. That would be like someone taking 2 million ounces out of our storage program and 1,000 ounce bars, which is an eligible category, brings JFK, New York, and taking physical possession of them. So how much does 2 million ounces weigh? I mean, you're looking at ballpark, about 168,000 pounds. So when you realize that in February, we talked about almost 39 million ounces leaving the COMEX, leaving, getting on trucks and going, that's over 2 million pounds. So yeah, it's continuing unabated. You look at what happened in February, after the price of silver literally got its teeth knocked in, China recorded its largest single monthly inflow of silver ever in recorded history. January and February combined were off the charts. February was the biggest single month ever. Now, this is from the second largest producer of silver in the world, who's been flying all around Latin America for the last couple of years, buying dore and concentrate from Mexico and Peru, number one and three. So the number two producer in the world buys dore and concentrate at double what the West will pay from one and three, and then is importing more silver than ever in recorded history after the price got destroyed. Price is a tool of misdirection, is the moral of the story. The price will throw you off the trail. The price will throw the media and the talking heads off the trail. And the financial advisors, you're crazy, Mr. Jones, why would you ever buy that stuff? Look at how poorly it's performed in this atmosphere. But then the money over there says, and they're scooping it up like this, while everyone else is being misdirected by price. That is the kind of stuff that to me is all you really need to know. If you have the ability to separate reality from emotion and say, really? If price was that big of a hindrance, then why do we see entities across the globe doing what they're doing to accumulate it? And for going on 18 months here in the United States, billions every single month, doesn't all leave COMEX, but a lot is. And to me, that's really all you need to know about where this is ultimately going. Okay. And again, as you're saying, I mean, this is thousands and thousands of tons of metal. I know I've asked you this before, but when you think about, okay, well, who can take that size and ship it and store it? And I believe you come pretty quickly to the opinion that it's probably sovereign actors. This is largely probably going into some sort of government vault stored somewhere, someplace big enough to hold all this. No, Occam's razor would say you're probably right. Okay. So let me ask you this. So obviously that could be the US doing that, taking it from COMEX and adding it to the government's stores. And I think you believe that's probably part of what's going on. Let me ask you this. Do we have any safeguards? You talk about how China has been buying so aggressively and openly here. Could some of this stuff be coming out of COMEX and then just be putting on a cargo plane and being sent to other foreign parties like China? Or do we have safeguards against that? Well, the short answer is, yeah, it absolutely could. So the COMEX will sell and deliver to anybody, basically? Yes. But one of the provisions of the strategic metal designation is that, like the critical mineral list, is that they can limit or curtail exports. That would be silver and platinum in terms of the precious metals. But yeah, absolutely they can. And I think that does happen a lot. And there is a contract on COMEX as well that is in Hong Kong. I believe it's a Brinks facility in Hong Kong. And there is something called exchange for physical where these players could buy a contract in the West to exchange for physical in Hong Kong and take possession there, have it driven to the Shanghai Metals Exchange by armored car. So yeah, absolutely, they could be. Now, we don't know how much of that is. And I would think if it was a constant delivery drain down, you would start to see things happening that would seem out of the ordinary, much like we continue to see on COMEX these days. But yeah, the answer is yes. And I don't know what safeguards are there if it started to get out of control. But my guess is this administration might have a problem with it, at least is my opinion. Okay. Well, Andy, one of the reasons why I love talking to you is because you are so down in the plumbing of this industry and you get to see sort of all the flows that are occurring. This trend of delivery has now been continuing for a good while at this scale, an unprecedented scale, to use your words. Are you hearing anybody in the ecosystem yet starting to raise concerns about inventory tightness? Like, hey, we're not going to be able to do this forever. At some point, somebody, the LBMA, COMEX, or whatever, somebody is going to start getting tight on actual physical. Are you hearing that at all? Is that a concern at all yet? If numbers could speak, if arithmetic could speak, then yes. I mean, I'm not talking to the guys at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan about this, but I can certainly tell you that when you look at the open interest, that being the number of contracts every single month versus the amount of deliverable metal, yeah, it's what could possibly go wrong territory. You're seeing that here. You're seeing that in London. The amount of contracts that have been issued against the amount of metal that could be delivered is ridiculously out of whack. And so in that respect, yes. What is different, Adam, is that no one has ever experienced delivery like this. This is an anomaly in every sense of the word where most contracts my entire career, 99% or better, never stood for delivery. That is changing. And that's why you've never really, I think, had to deal with something like this. No one ever had the incentive to do this. No one would challenge the West or our markets that the Achilles heel of this entire system. There are two. One is that it can be delivered where contracts typically were used to offset risk for producers and farmers and miners and manufacturers and companies like mine. You offset the risk with your inventory. So if the price drops, your inventory doesn't drag you underwater. But now that little Achilles heel that says, well, you can take delivery if you want, is now being exploited. And the second one is, is that they can exploit the paper price, sell paper in the United States, which is the only market that settles price or creates or defines price, and then buy it elsewhere around the world with less fanfare, with less public acknowledgement, with less media attention. So yeah, there's no question about that. And conventional wisdom says, well, they always get open interest down into the delivery month. It's always happened before. Okay. So why do you need insurance? Your house has never burned down. It's like we're getting to that point. Now, the only other thing is the CME group is really a bunch of big players, very big players that you would think would protect their own before that happened. But I don't know, could four glitches since Thanksgiving have anything to do with trying to offset this arithmetic where twice on the upside, there's a glitch or an overheating, and then twice on the downside, it's ironic that the circuit breakers glitched. So yes, all of these things taken together are worth more cumulatively in my mind, Adam, than they are in and of themselves, because it's a pattern of nonsense. One of these days, that nonsense will catch up with, I think, the trustworthiness of an institution that goes to these kind of lengths to destroy price discovery. It's happening. And little by little by little, when's that coming? I'm not sure. Right, right. Well, so not unlike the banking system, which kind of works on trust, it's all fine and dandy, and it can largely be manipulated either any direction. But at the end of the day, you can't argue with physical ounces, right? They're either there or they aren't. And it's not that dissimilar. And I'm not trying to be hyperbolic or say this is indeed what's going on, but I'd love your thoughts. The potential is not that dissimilar on a run on the bank, right? Where you can have a bank that's fine, but if enough people show up and say, I want my money right now, all of a sudden, your healthy bank becomes unhealthy. Is there the potential that we're sort of starting to see a run on the physical bank in these exchanges? And it hasn't gotten to criticality yet, but it could. In other words, if enough people stood for delivery at the same time, it would be, in essence, sort of a run on the bank, and there wouldn't be enough physical to actually meet that. And then all of a sudden, Yeah, that is exactly what it is. It's also ironically happening in similar scale at the exact same time in the private credit market, where again, it all boils down to trust, lack of trust, trust of our institutions, trust of our markets, trust of our political structure, trust of everything. And yes, that is exactly what has happened. That's why people tell you having physical possession eliminates the counterparty risk that is growingly pervasive in everything these days, in markets, where old rules don't really apply as much as they were. And all of these things, whether it be a run on Comex or a run on the banks, are reminiscent of one thing, a Ponzi scheme, a Ponzi scheme, where you issue more paper than there are bars or shares of more claims than actual collateral. Yes, and that's exactly what it is across the board. Or you leverage yourself too much in private equity and sell it based upon liquidity that when everyone comes at once, it doesn't matter what market you're talking about, it's overleveraged or rehypothecated. When everyone comes at once, you have a problem. All right. So again, not saying, folks, that this is definitely happening, that all of a sudden the metals market is going to seize for lack of collateral, though it could happen. It is a possibility. But let me ask you this, just assume for a moment that it does happen, that all of a sudden ounces really start to become scarce. Just help me game this out for the average viewer here. In other words, presumably, they would cut certain parts of the market off first, right? So as ounces got more and more scarce. So presumably, they would still let institutions trade if they could. But I'm going to guess the smaller players would get starved first, meaning if you're a regular person like us and you go to your local coin shop, probably your local coin shop is going to be one of the first parties to say, hey, look, I just can't get any supply here, right? So just walk me through how you think we would start to see this manifest. Well, that's why they say there's no bull market like the precious metals bull market, because in equity markets, you make all this money and you take a bunch off the top and you go back into dollars and think about what you want to buy with your profit or buy more stock. In a metals bull market, it is one that is predicated on concern and fear, and the higher the price goes or the crazier the world gets only motivates you that much more to trust and believe your intuition that led you that way to begin with. You're not selling it and going back into dollars in this system. It's one of these things that can happen relatively quickly. I think the first thing that you would see in that environment in relation to this industry would be a lot of backlash in countries like Australia, South Africa, Great Britain. Why the hell are we, especially probably Great Britain these days, why the hell are we sending the US our stuff? Why would we send them our stuff when we can keep it here at home? Why would we ship it across the globe? I think you'd see Sovereign Mint stop shipping into the probably pretty quickly. There would be no reason or incentive to do so. I think it would be because at that point, you start to see a rush to buy it and then you buy future production. You're buying everything you can and the big money certainly would lead that charge. This is an industry that I've seen. Look, there's never been anything like we've seen in the last five years in this industry. I remember many, many years though, where there had been disruptions within this industry in the 36 years I've been doing this that were little microclimate instances along the way where bang, just like that, something happens and everything is gone. Like in 2008, everything's normal, normal, normal, normal, normal, and then bang, the price of silver goes from 21 to 9 and gold goes from 1,000 to 700, I think. You would think in that environment when silver just fell by 60% and gold by 30% in a matter of days, that there's no demand at all, that everyone is dumping supply as fast as they can get onto the market, but couldn't be further from the truth. The US Mint in 08 was shut down about six or seven or eight times. I don't think they've hardly made a platinum Eagle since that day, but literally shut down the majority of the year. The Rand Mint in South Africa that year, for the first time ever, someone bought them out. One wealthy Swiss businessman was the rumor, flew a 747 to South Africa, bought everything they had. The Perth Mint in Australia took no business after July that year for the year, and the Austrian and the Canadian Mint were working 24 hours a day, three eight-hour shifts and were four months back-ordered. You could find nothing. There wasn't a distributor in the industry. There wasn't anyone. The only metal that was available for four months was from David Morgan. He called me up and he said to me, Andy, I've known these guys in Washington for a long time. They're in the medical device business. They own a company called Pyromet. They'd like to throw their hat in the ring since there's nothing to get, nothing, anywhere. Not anyone had anything. No distributors, no refiners, no nothing. I said, sure, let's do it. They made the ugliest 100-ounce bars you have ever seen in your life. They didn't even say AG. They just said 100 ounces. Yet, that's all that we had to sell. He hooked up a lot of companies like mine that sold those for two or three months until things came back online. The moral of the story is that this came out of nowhere in a period of time where there was nowhere near the demand that there is today. Yes, I think if it starts up top and you're seeing it happen up there already, but people just think that the recency and normalcy buys. It always gets taken care of until it doesn't. Then when it doesn't, just like that, everything changes. I think that's the lesson to be learned. To me, what I take from that is the supremacy of possession. Look, I'm not here to say, I'm not saying, deliberately not saying, don't own ETFs. In a force majeure world like we're talking about here, there may be some challenges to getting delivery from your ETF. Again, that's not the most efficient way to get delivery anyways, we know. In the world you're talking about, there's a massive premium to having some ounces that you can get in your hot little hands within a couple minutes. This is either stored at your house or very close to that, or having in a very secure facility on an allocated basis, like the Brinks vaults that you use with Miles Franklin. Again, I'm not saying, hey folks, we are indeed going into this future, but I guess I'm saying, listening to you, I feel like the risks are possible. To me, just like fire insurance on a house, they're high enough that you want to at least insure against that by really having some very competent possession options. It's not that you're going to need gold and silver, God forbid, to buy food. What it does mean is that we've reached a period of time of leverage, and this could never happen here, where as Doug Casey has made famous the statement that gold and silver are assets that are simultaneously no one else's liability. It's true. In a world of diminishing privacy, in a world that is dragging us into the digital surveillance state through a digital ID and ultimately the genius act, digital money, is there anything wrong with being old school and being analog in a world that is highly digital? My answer is absolutely not. Clinging on to those virtues of privacy, liquidity, I think there's a lot to be said for it, but you don't have to let your mind go to the stone age where we're bartering with gold. It's not about that. It's more along the lines of getting away from this inherent risk of leverage and the unwinding of leverage. When we talk about how leverage built this up, when you unwind leverage, it has a far greater multiplier because leverage on the way up is not all at once. Leverage on the way down is bang. Everyone sells at once, freaks out, and it's more magnified. I think that's what it's about. I've got a couple more big questions I want to turn to here. Obviously, Andy, they were talking, I think it's something like day 35 on the Iraq war. I just want to get a sense from you as to how you see the war impacting, if at all, the metals market. I believe it is impacting the metals market. One example of that is, obviously, we've had this big oil price spike. I think you're seeing at the sovereign level, countries getting a margin call, which is like, hey, oil has become a lot more expensive. You have to have that oil to run your economy. How are you going to buy it now that it's a lot more expensive? Some, I think, are selling their gold, at least here in the short term, to be able to do that. One example that comes to mind is Turkey. I've seen that their central bank has recently flipped from being a net buyer to a net seller. I don't know for certain if that's going to resolve as soon as the war resolves, if oil prices keep coming down. I think it's my default assumption. Are you seeing evidence like that? Are there any other implications you're seeing in the precious metals industry because of the war? I'm not positive on this, but I think Turkey has one of the higher levels of inflation in the world. Probably no one wants their currency. I don't know what else they would be able to sell to come up with the reserves. That is one of the problems that you see. This environment creates a moment where there is a big bump on the dollar. The dollar gets the bump for that reason, a rush to liquidity. The dollar is what is needed when people sell assets. That's why the assets across the board fall with the exception of oil, obviously. To me, what is most unusual in this environment, what is the one thing that is missing this time that we normally see? I've been doing this since longer than just about anyone in this industry in terms of selling metals. I remember the first Gulf War where gold went down after it happened. Every war since then, it's gone down. What has happened? What did go up in every war other than the dollar? U.S. treasuries. U.S. treasuries went up almost every single time as a rush to safety. What have we seen since then? This time, we see yields going up over 40 basis points, meaning treasury bonds have been going down. That means the rest of the world has bought dollars begrudgingly in order to, as you mentioned, buy oil, which has popped the dollar higher and put oil higher, making it harder and harder for them to do these things. A greater strain, so the dollar gets that initial bump, but the treasury market says, wait a minute, wait a minute. If they wanted the dollar organically, then you would think they would be buying treasuries too. Not the case. Sorry, just to interject on that, I was just reading a piece right before we hopped on here about how Japan imports all of its oil. I think a huge amount of that, I want to say about 90%, comes from the Gulf. It's Gulf dependent. They're hurting. They're in a world of hurt right now with the Straits of Hormuz being constricted. They're experiencing a lot of pain in their bonds right now because obviously, bond investors are demanding higher returns. What are Japan's options here? Well, it's got to go buy oil. How's it going to do it? It's going to sell the treasuries, and it is the largest foreign holder of US treasuries. Again, it's like a margin call. They have to sell what they got. It's a self-reinforcing loop because they're selling treasuries, which push yields higher and bond prices lower. Again, which is a call on dollars, which pushes the price of dollars up higher. It's going to be very, very difficult because their yen against the dollar will lose value. It's one of these deals where the distortions that have been created through this system are to the point now where when they unwind and things like this. Again, the reason that you saw so many of the asset prices in this country distorted were things like the Japanese yen carry trade. That leverage pushed things up. When that leverage unwinds, watch out. Yeah, I think the distortions come when this happens. Then I think, to me, again, and I don't mean to keep harping on this, but to me, the reserve status in this country is built on one thing above all, it's trust. Things like trust in our currency, trust in our military power, in our trade routes, in the institutions, and that we can be the stabilizer of the system like we always have. But when trust starts to erode across the board, wait until it really starts to erode in the treasury market. What starts out as survival for Japan could very quickly spiral into something much more. That's the 5,000 pound pink elephant in the corner of the room. So yeah, those are the things that will, by extension, affect the gold market. Look, if this turned into something horrible, Richard Russell used to say, in a bear market, he or she who loses least wins. I'm not saying that's where we're going, but I will tell you that the unintended consequences of an unwinding or the consequences, period, of an unwinding of the carry trade is something that I think is frightening to think of what could happen. All right. So your point there on trust, I think there's a lot of dust in the air, so we don't know exactly how this is going to land, although I know people have very strong opinions on either side. But you have, over the past year, Andy, you've been pretty vocal about the initiative with the BRICS nations to develop an alternative payment system to having to deal with SWIFT and rely on the dollar. Are you seeing this war increasing, like basically adding urgency and catalyzing their efforts to develop that? I would think so. I would think so very much, as you can see the lengths that the United States would go to if I am on the other side. If you're on the wrong side of the U.S., well, this is what happens. The only way that you can protect yourself is to set up a backdoor. And I think that is exactly, this is the rallying cry. See, this is what they do. This is what they do. And, you know, if we at least had our fiscal house in order, it would be a tougher sell. But, you know, you look at, from their perspective, you know, they look at us as being the great destabilizer, we're the destabilizing force in their mind, and arguably are in this case. I'm not saying that any of these things are right or wrong. I'm just saying that we certainly have destabilized that region or helped do so. What comes out of it? Well, what came out of, you know, originally what came out of Iraq? You had ISIS. What came out of Afghanistan? You had the Taliban right back in there. We come in there and we do these things. We destabilize things. And then, you know, even if it's in the name of good intention and democracy, fine. Set all that aside. I'm from their perspective, not ours. And then, and you want to own their currency that is getting its rear end destroyed. And treasuries that have this kind, look at what Japan, I mean, so this very, very quickly. Yeah, I think it does. And, but even aside from that, you know, they signed up the countries in Southeast Asia, the Asian countries to their SIP system, the cross interbank payment system. That's double the population of the United States. It's 800 million people, 30% of global GDP and China's largest trading partner by far. That's just the beginning of more and more countries joining together. And I think under this administration, they have purposely been quiet. And like the rails that the Shanghai metals exchange is building throughout the belt road as, you know, for settlement in currency, I mean, in gold or to settle in balances in gold, they're framing it under that the Chinese are doing this. They're expanding and internationalizing their Yuan. To me, it is the rails of the brick. So yes, I think this is quietly enhancing their story behind the scenes. Okay. And I won't get into all of it now because you've mentioned it a lot in the past, but you think that it will be gold friendly, obviously, because that brick currency will highly likely be a backed currency and backed in large part, if not totally, by gold. Okay. So again, back to the war for a second. Let's all hope that this war is over swiftly from here. If it is, I'm curious what you think the reaction of the precious metals will be. I can certainly make an argument that some of the things that have been suppressing them during this time, like countries having to sell their gold to fund the high oil prices, you know, if oil prices do come down after the war ends, you could make an argument that that will return a bid to gold. But don't let me put words in your mouth. What are you expecting? Well, that would be the conventional wisdom, because then, you know, oh, they're going to lower rates again, is what they would say. So that's so friendly for gold. It's so nonsensical to me, Adam, because, you know, it's a convenient omission for them to say, well, you know, gold went up parabolically in the face of the strongest interest rate increase in history, right? They forget about when rates were rising, gold was doing well. This is, in essence, Gibson's paradox, which speaks to the inverse relationship between real interest rates and gold. That is the underlying theory there. And it's nonsense, because I think one thing that Gibson's paradox needs to take into account is trust. Again, back to trust. If the United States were truly trusted globally, and there was organic demand for the US Treasury, and everyone wanted to be here, well, yeah, then that's true. A strong, a high interest rate that says, let's say 7% yield on the Treasury. That's strong, right? Well, that says the rule of 70 seconds, the mathematical law says you take 7 into 72. In 10.2 years, your investment would double. Okay, so that would be great if the dollar in the United States was revered and trusted. But when money creation and inflation is running much higher than that, the dollar lost over 10% last year in the dollar index, you would actually be negative real return. But that's besides the point. My point is simply this, that does it really matter to the people accumulating gold that interest rates go from 4% to 5%? Maybe to some it does, to the talking heads, it does. It doesn't matter for most people accumulating gold, because their reasons are far past what 1% or 2% interest rate to a dollar that is losing far more than that each year is worth. And the dilemma for the people reporting on this is that the statistics that they use to measure things like the CPY mask the reality. You have to be able to separate yourself from, I think, the way things always were and the system that is built to hide and mask an inflationary agenda. And then take a step back further and say, would we really be nearing the end of the dominance of this United States empire? And again, I don't mean to be such a buzzkill this morning and sound as though it's over, but there is a fine line between realism and pessimism. And I thank God every day I live in this country and I am a patriot and I love this country, but we are nearing the end. It's all about mathematics and it's about trust. And both of them aren't looking good right now. So to me, a slight uptick in interest rates in that environment is nothing. Bring us back to 1989 and say that environment, and I'd say, yeah, that's pretty substantial. Who's going to want gold if rates keep rising in this country where everyone wants to be here and be invested here, not so much right now. So where I'm trying to get with this, and I think you're bringing us there, is just gold and silver hit all-time highs at the beginning of this year, and we knew that that price action was not sustainable. So there's been a froth removal process, which I think we all expected was going to happen at some point. My question here is, beyond just removing the froth, is there now kind of a war discount that's being applied to the precious metals for some of the reasons that we talked about, right? They're under pressure for reasons I mentioned. And are they at the point now where they're kind of on sale, meaning this is a pretty good time to start to accumulate because there could be a pretty substantial pop once the weight of the war is removed from the sector? I couldn't see the logic behind it, absolutely. I've always felt that it was less a rush to liquidity when you realize the banks have been in control forever, and more as my dear departed friend Jim Sinclair used to say, MOPE, management of perception economics, where the powers that be did not want to accelerate and accentuate the pitfalls of a war, and instead to do the opposite, show strength in the dollar, give a bump to the treasury market, give a bump to the dollar and make gold go lower. But yes, that's exactly what it is. If it is management, again, what betrays the price? The deliveries. And if you realize that the people standing for delivery are the most well-informed traders on the planet, spending billions every month, then yeah, it tells you where it's going. And they look at it as a subsidy. Thank you very much. May I have another? It's kind of the way that they're thinking. Okay. So as we wrap up, Andy, I'm going to ask you just for the latest status on the offer that you very kindly extend to the Thoughtful Money audience. Before I do, is there anything else that's burning really brightly on your radar right now that I just haven't thought to ask you? I don't think so. I think you're pretty astute, Adam. You asked the right questions. I think you're looking at things the right way. But a lot of what we just said, I think you can encapsulate as well by saying that the US dollar share of global reserves dropped to a 31-year low recently. So again, countries are de-dollarizing. It is happening. And that to me is quietly, it's the little things that added together. I think to me, the most important thing, I think macro. I don't think micro. You take all of these things together. You look at the problems on COMEX and the trust surrounding that. You look at the problems and the lack of trust emerging in private equity. That's at the margin. These are the most well-funded public investors, period, that are realizing that liquidity might be more important than anything. You look at everything as a whole, all of the craziness we've seen in this country, geopolitically, with the markets, with the banks, with everything, and put it together. It paints a much different picture to me. And I don't look at things one-off. I look at them all together as a cumulative ecosystem. That's the most important thing to keep in mind. And you don't buy gold and silver to become wealthy. You buy it because it is wealth. That has outlived everything, as I always say. Two world wars, German hyperinflation, the Great Depression, every pandemic, everything the world has thrown at it. And here we are over 5,000 years after it was mentioned cumulatively with silver over 700 times in the Bible. And the most well-informed and well-funded traders on the planet seem to prioritize physical possession and buying amounts and standing for delivery in amounts that no one's ever seen. And the lack of media attention to that point is, I think, appalling. It's appalling to me because that's all you need to know. These people don't do it for the heck of it. They don't screw around. They know, as I said on your show last time, they ask Wayne Gretzky, his rookie card right there, how are you so great? I never skated to the puck. I skated to where the puck was going. And I'm telling you, that's what these people are doing, too. So is it a war premium? Heck yeah, it is. Or a war subsidy, rather. Yeah, it is. And I know you ask the right questions. And I always appreciate being here. It's an honor. And I'm sorry I kept you and your viewers waiting today. That won't happen again. No, no, no. There's no apologies at all, Andy. All right. So, Andy, I continue and I've been an accumulator for a long time of the precious metals. But your example has always lended wind to my sales. But every twice a month, I do my steady Eddy accumulation. And since meeting you, that goes straight into my allocation at the Brinks vault that Miles Franklin is managing. And I do look at these lower prices that we're paying right now. Some people might look at them and say, oh my gosh, my precious metal prices are down. I feel bad about that. I feel pretty lucky thinking that, okay, I'm buying tomorrow's metal at a much lower price today. So that makes me very happy. So anyways, I think that's just the right discipline, at least for me. Well, you're a guy who works out all the time, too. And you don't get healthy in the physique you want by going to the gym once a month. And I think it's about paying yourself first. And that's the most important thing. The best lesson, the best gift my father ever, ever, ever, ever gave me, best gift I've ever been given by anyone, was being told he'd fire me if I didn't buy something every two weeks. And he meant it. Of course, he doesn't anymore. But the point of it is, 36 years later, I look back and say, thank God, Dad, thank you for that. And I have taught my son that, and my daughters, and everyone who works for me. And it's universally, people say to me, it's unbelievable how much I've put away. But yeah, but that's, over time, you forget, you forget all of the purchases, you know. And I don't know, I think paying yourself first, if you could sit down and have a scotch with yourself 25 years from now, and he would look at you and say, hey, man, thank you. That was great. You were smart. And I mean that, I'm not trying to be sensational here. I just think it's important. I think it's a great analogy, because you and I, just being candid, Andy, we're old enough, right, to see the difference between, you know, our friends and peers who have been disciplined about their health over time, and those who haven't, right. And we're at the age where those that haven't been disciplined and consistent, they're starting to look pretty old, their bodies are starting to break down. It's very similar financially, right. If you have the discipline and commitment, you look a lot different, a lot better off 30 years down the road than if you didn't have it. So anyways, I just wanted to say. It's true. You already said it. I believe that, very much so. All right, well, I'm following the Sheckman plan, that every two weeks, or in my case, every 15 days, I'm making those purchases. And you know what? And you should have your kids do it too, because they have something that we don't. They got a lot more time than we do. They got a lot more time. Time is a great benefit when you're doing it cost averaging. Let the compounding of time work in your favor. Okay, so two things then. Obviously, for folks who are watching who, you know, are maybe a little inspired by this little discussion here and want to get something in place for themselves, or maybe to your point, even better, get something in place for their kids who can really leverage this over the course of their lives. Obviously, that's stuff that they can talk to you and your team about there over at Miles Franklin. You can help them with those types of things. And then secondly, so last time we checked in, supplies were still around for the special offer on junk silver that you were extending to Thoughtful Money's audience. And it's been a phenomenal offer. And I think last time we talked, you even improved it. And you were willing to sell junk silver to this audience at a $1.50 below spot, which I think you said was like crazy in terms of you've never seen that type of conditions in your career. Are supplies still lasting? Do we need to amend that offer at all? No. Yeah, we need to amend it to $2 actually. Come on. Two bucks back. I'm telling you, Adam, I've never seen it like this. Never. I don't even know how to explain it. I think it's the craziest thing I've ever seen. Like I said, during the pandemic, I would have paid you $9 over spot for as much as you would sell me. My whole career, I've seen it maybe as low as 10 or 15 or 50 cents back a spot bid, never ask, to sell it at these levels. When the refiners get back on schedule, how much longer can it take? I mean, they're still way behind, but I don't know. I would simply say to you, there are very few things I've ever seen in my career that I can't at least try and explain. This is something that just makes zero, zero, zero sense to me. And I find it to be the best value I've ever seen in silver. But I wouldn't do it if you needed liquidity in six weeks. But if you, like you said, you're giving this to your kids, I don't know. You're going to be getting it five, six, seven, $8 back a spot against just about any major like American Eagle or something like that. When you compare it, it's a big difference. You're saving six or seven or $8 an ounce rather against something like an American Eagle. It's unbelievable. So yes, two bucks back a spot. At least that's what I think it is. But since I said it, it's what it will be until as long as possible. But yes. That is amazing. Thank you. And folks, I promise, I did not know that Andy was going to improve the offer when I asked that question to him. I just wanted to score one thing that Andy said, which is, yes, this is not something to buy with the plan to then just flip it in a couple of days or a couple of weeks. This is something that's being made available or made possible because of the huge backlog at the refiners. You'll definitely want to hold on to this until the refineries catch up with their backlog and the pricing reverts back more to normal. That's when you really hopefully see these discounts that the refiners are demanding go away. You'll be very happy you bought when there was such a discount right now. Exactly. And like I said, for four years, nothing performed from 2020 to 2024, nothing performed better other than American Eagle Silver than the pre-65. Nothing. So it's opposite ends of the crazy spectrum. I think when I look back at my career and see the things that have been successful, almost every one of them center around identification and exploitation of price anomalies. So I've gone on a, people probably think I'm nuts in the industry. I've bought everything I can buy. I mean, literally, everything. I hedge it. And then to me, it's riskless. So that's why I'm offering it the way that I am. No reason to not. But until it doesn't exist anymore, I think it's the greatest value I've ever seen in 36 years in silver. All right. Well, thank you so much again for extending that offer to this audience. Folks, if you want to take advantage of it, just go to thoughtfulmoney.com slash buy gold. And there's a very short form that'll take you all 10 seconds to fill it out. And then Andy and his team will follow up with you right after you do that. Also real quick too, if above and beyond purchasing physical precious metals, you'd like to get some help from a professional financial advisor in A, determining how much your portfolio should be exposed to precious metals, in what form, physical versus ETFs perhaps versus the mining stocks themselves. Feel free to talk to one of the financial advisors that Thoughtful Money endorses, because they are kind of a rare breed. They're ones that appreciate the role that precious metals play in a portfolio. A lot of your conventional brokers or financial advisors, as Andy was saying earlier, will try to tell you that you're crazy. And they'll try to talk you out of owning them, largely because they don't make money if you are putting your money into physical precious metals. Fortunately, the advisors that Thoughtful Money recommends do. So if you want to have a conversation with them, just fill out the very short form at thoughtfulmoney.com. And as a reminder, those conversations are totally free and there's no commitments involved. They're just trying to be very helpful. One thing, Adam, just as an aside and a credit to those advisors, not only do they not make money, they lose money because they used to be called stock brokers. They would make money on every trade. Now they're money managers. Anything under the umbrella, that's when you pull something out of the umbrella, they're losing money. So it's truly those people that you recommend are true financial advisors who look past being, I guess, trying to benefit themselves more than the client. And that's important, and I applaud that. Well, I appreciate you saying it. And you know, like you, Andy, the filter that I have for the firms that I put my brand at risk by endorsing, one of the key critical elements that I look for is high integrity. And you and I have talked about that in the past. So I appreciate you highlighting that for these advisors. And really, the reason they do it is, I mean, it's for all the right reasons. But oftentimes, they will say, look, before you become a client of ours, we want you to establish a position in the precious metals because we think they play a really key role in a well-built portfolio. But they'll also do the same thing around debt. They'll say, look, tell us about your personal situation. And if you've got too much debt, we want you to pay that down first before you give us any money. And yes, they're doing it because it's the right thing to do for the client. But also, too, they're saying, look, our job is to make you as fiscally robust as possible. And we can't do that unless we're building on a solid foundation, right? So anyways, I very much appreciate you being cognizant of that, but I want to bring it right back at you. That's why Thoughtful Money endorses Miles Franklin, is because you are an extremely high-integrity player in the space. And again, it's not just my word for it. I hear it all the time from the people who go and become clients of yours. I appreciate that. That's all that matters to me. Truthfully, in every respect, that is all that matters in anything, in a relationship and in business. People make mistakes. You're defined not only by the level of integrity and your intention to do right, but how you handle mistakes. And I always tell people who work with me that a mistake is nothing but an opportunity to strengthen a relationship. We're not perfect, but we try hard. And those types of qualities are the most important thing to us. And that's why everyone that works for my company, I have had relationships with years before they ever worked, everyone. So we're all one big family. So thanks for the endorsement. It's something that we are so proud of. And I just want to say thanks. So I hope you and everyone else has a wonderful weekend, holiday weekend, long weekend. And I look forward to picking up with you where we left off, hopefully not too far down the road. In this environment, I have a feeling that it'll be just around the next corner, but I'll be there waiting. And I'll be on time this time. No, I feel bad. It has been. I keep pulling you back on. That's all right. I love it, man. These are my favorite kind. Just a conversation like this and taking questions. I like it. So count me in. Well, thanks. And to the point of taking questions, we had to record this one given your travel schedule. But once you're back, we'll do this, like you said, I'm sure sooner rather than later. And we'll do it live so that we can take some live questions here from the audience. Andy, can't thank you enough. Have a great time away and look forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you so much, Adam. Take care, buddy. All right. And everybody else, thanks so much for watching.