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Oct. 22, 2025 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
56:24
Andy Schectman: Silver Wars, Stable Coins & the Fight for the Future Economy
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Right now, what I see from the Trump administration is a lot of announcements that he and the media are pretending are real now.
Like, hey, we signed a deal to build a bunch of data centers.
And then everybody says, oh, the data centers are here.
But they're not because they take years to build.
Oh, we're going to build nuclear power plants.
Great.
That'll be awesome in 2044 when they're finally done and producing energy.
And the same thing about this deal with Australia that you just mentioned.
Oh, we signed a deal with Australia, or we signed a deal with this Wyoming company.
We're going to start doing rare earth refining out of a coal mine.
Great.
That will replace 5% of China's output by the year 2035.
None of that shit counts today, man.
Like, you can say it.
It doesn't make it happen tomorrow.
Welcome to today's interview here on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, and our guest today is none other than Andy Sheckman, the CEO of Miles Franklin.
And here we are, Andy.
Thank you for joining me today because here we are on the tale of record highs in gold and silver.
Quite a bit of a pullback today as we're recording this.
Silver down almost $4, which was unthinkable before, but it's been over $50.
So, you know, I want you to help us put this into context.
But more importantly, what is going on?
Is this a China versus USA proxy currency war that's taking place through the metals market?
Or what's your take on it?
I think it's a USA versus the Southern Hemisphere, the BRICS, China leading the charge war.
And I do think someone got into President Trump's ear somewhere in the neighborhood of right, well, obviously before, but it started to change in November when he won the election, long before the inauguration.
We began to become massive importers, the largest in the world, as far as I'm concerned, that we know of, in gold and in silver.
And this is a pattern that has not stopped, Mike, since November.
Billions and billions and billions and billions and billions dollars worth of gold and silver are being imported into Comex.
And, you know, at moment one, I was saying publicly, this is not about tariffs.
This is not about arbitrage.
Sure, there's always some of that.
That was the cover story, clearly.
Right.
This is about reshoring.
This is about a new monetary system.
When we accessed or passed the Genius Act, I would argue that is a new monetary system.
We're in the midst of it where gold and commodities will have a much more, let's just say, a much stronger role, a much more important role.
The U.S. government just classified silver a critical mineral.
Never thought they would do that.
And I do believe gold is going to have a substantial role both in the BRICS as a settlement currency, not a currency, but backing the settlement system.
In other words, it will allow for the replacement, in essence, of treasuries.
It will allow to settle imbalances in trade and in currency.
In the United States, I think it's going to have a different role, and I think it will back U.S. treasuries.
Happy to talk about that if you'd like.
But the Genius Act is certainly the missing piece that puts it all together.
Okay, wow, there's so many trails we need to go down here.
I've done the math on the Genius Act and the stablecoin purchasing of treasuries.
To me, it doesn't look like that's going to be very large.
Maybe a few trillion dollars.
I know it's funny to say that's not large, but compared to the debt that's going to be $40 trillion by January, you know, raising $2 trillion or $3 trillion through stablecoins doesn't look that effective to me, whereas the revaluation of gold to a much higher level could free up or generate five or six or seven trillion dollars.
What are you thinking about those two options for how they could start to try to remain solvent?
Right.
So let's kind of break it down.
I find it interesting that Bo Heinz, I think his last name is Heinz, was Trump's crypto czar.
He's now running USA Tether.
Every dollar that you will move around the world, anyone, whether you're buying a pack of chewing gum at the local gas station or paying your kids' tuition or buying a new F-150 or whatever you're doing, it will be backed by U.S. tether or backed by stable coins.
Each time you move it, stable coins will be created.
And like Venmo and Zell transfers like that and like money transfers over Enbridge and the BRICS nations like that, same thing will happen here.
It will be instant settlement.
And every time money moves, it will be backed by these new USA tether coins.
Bo Hines was creating the rules for Trump's administration and now he's in certainly taking advantage of them for sure.
And I think they had this all worked out.
So I think you're kind of there, but let's look at a hybrid of it.
So USA, Tether, Tether in and of themselves already has between $8 and $9 billion worth of gold in Swiss vaults that they've been buying.
They were also just very prominently involved in the Beaver Creek gold mining summit.
They were there talking directly to the gold miners.
So when any time money moves, it will create a stable coin that will has to be backed by legislation by U.S. treasuries, which is synthetic demand to drive down interest rates up to two years in treasuries.
So to your point, $3 trillion, I agree.
That's what Besent said also.
However, you will then see that the fact that the profit that comes off of those treasuries, the holder of the stablecoin doesn't get it.
Tether does.
What does Tether do with it?
They buy more treasuries to more synthetically drive down the demand or drive down interest rates.
And at the same time, they'll buy gold, and I believe they'll buy Bitcoin.
I think they will buy gold not only to have the price of gold go higher, which in and of itself would be great for the largest holder of gold if we really are, which we're probably not in the world, but it devalues the dollar, right?
So this is what they're really trying to do.
I think they'll let Bitcoin go higher too to continue to devalue the dollar to ultimately chip away at the debt.
I think they want to use Bitcoin to pay off the debt.
And the Russian finance minister spoke about that.
Yes, he did.
But in terms of gold, I think they will also buy gold, adding it to the stockpile to continue to devalue the dollar.
And that's really, if you look at Stephen Mirin, the architect of the Mir-a-Lago Accord, he wants a massively devalued dollar.
Who is selling gold and silver today then?
If it's not the Trump administration pressuring somebody to dump it to drive gold and silver down, who's selling?
Is it profit-taking?
I don't believe so.
I'm sorry.
No, I don't.
I think what it was was, and it's funny because, you know, I have an angle on that too, and this is just a guess.
But part of me feels that Tom Luongo is on to something where he believes that there is an effort to stick it to the Bank of England and to the European aristocrats who are partially, if not fully, involved in the color revolution in this country.
And that's the interference.
Actually, I think Luongo's nailed it, actually.
So if that's true, in essence, what you would want to do is cover your— So if a bank goes short on COMEX, which suppresses— The paper price is controlled on COMEX.
London is a delivery mechanism.
So what these banks do is they short paper here in New York to drive down the price, and then they go long in London on a paper contract without ever thinking of taking possession of it to offset, to hedge their book, right?
But they control the price by pushing it down in London, right?
And the purchasing of that long contract in London doesn't affect the price the way it does the futures contract here in the United States.
So if I had to guess.
So what happened over the last 24 hours, Mike, to me looks like the big New York major trading desks, like the commercial banks that we're talking about here, they dumped huge amount of silver futures contracts all at once on Colmex.
And on the surface, it looks like the same old thing we've always seen, an attempt to push down the spot prices.
But what you don't notice is that many of these players almost immediately turned around and took physical delivery, locking in real metal below 50 bucks an ounce.
And they want to make it look like the traders knocked down the paper price, but what they were doing was knocking down the paper price to quietly grab the actual metal at a discount over their hedge books.
Now, this kind of arbitrage typically happens in London, which is the biggest over-the-counter bullion hub in the world.
So this is going to reignite the squeeze in London then.
Yes, and it could also kind of ignite a little bit of a squeeze here for the wrong players.
But yes, because see, London system has been struggling with settlement delays.
And they are a T plus one settlement system.
One day after the trade, you're supposed to have the metal moving.
But it's been as long as eight weeks.
And the Bank of England tells us it's a shortage of manpower and trucks.
Yeah.
So what's happening right now, if you look closely, you can see this is kind of happening in New York because New York publishes daily vault reports and weekly commitment of traders reports.
And those reports are showing a slow motion squeeze where they stuff the vaults for sure, but these inventories are steadily falling as metal prices leave, as metals leave the vaults.
Question is who the hell is doing it?
Who is standing for delivery?
Now, part of me feels, if I had to guess, if we follow Luongo's theory here, that the banks in the United States, if someone came to this administration and said, look, you know, the stuff that's been happening with the BRICS, they've become coordinated and motivated and sophisticated, and they're draining all of the world's vaults.
And they're gobbling up, you know, not just the physical, they're going to the Belt Road Initiative and all the underdeveloped resource-rich countries.
This is now a race for the world's commodities.
We need to do this too.
And I think in going through and dissecting all of that, they would say, my goodness gracious.
So the banks here in the United States have wicked short positions that could blow up the entire system.
Because as Bill Holter will say, if a bank fails to deliver, it's not just that they're failing to deliver in silver.
It's the systemic contagion where these banks have their fingers in every pie.
If they fail to deliver in metal, what does it mean about all their other obligations?
So you get this contagion.
But so anyways, if I had a gun to my head, I would say that it's a coordinated effort between the bullion banks and the Treasury Secretary using the Exchange Stabilization Fund.
Meaning they say, you're going to get your house in order.
You're going to cover your shorts and we're going to take the metal from you.
We'll pay you for it, but you're going to, because now silver is a critical mineral and gold is now being reintegrated into this new monetary system.
You're going to bring it all home.
You're going to get the real stuff and we're going to take it off your hands and you're going to cover your shorts, leaving the banks in Europe exposed to this problem.
Where right now there's 140 million ounce float of silver in London trading 600 million ounces a day.
What could go wrong?
And most of the banks that in that theory that would be exposed would be the banks in Germany and France, like Standard Charter, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit, well, not Credit Suisse anymore, but all of these European banks who are wickedly short in London, where the head of the Japanese TOCOM says, not only is this happening in silver, they're trading 3 million spot contract ounces a day for delivery in platinum.
And in London and Switzerland, there's zero ounces.
So if this becomes a problem.
If this plan, as you describe it, if this is successfully carried out, then the U.S. ends up with the physical silver that's needed for the data centers, for the increasing acceleration of weapons construction, Tomahawks, F-35s, et cetera, telecom, green energy industries, et cetera, while London ends up holding a bag of margin calls.
Correct.
And it's a systemic, it's really an existential threat to some of these very large banks.
And the reality of it is that the U.S., classifying it as a critical mineral, says an awful lot about it.
And it's not just gold that's been coming into the country, massive amounts of silver.
Now, you get the PR slant where you got Reuters saying that there's all sorts of metal that's being shipped to London to smooth things out.
That's not true, in my opinion, any more true than it was all about the tariffs.
Yeah, there might be a few rogue traders that are doing that because you have what's called backwardation.
And this is something that people need to understand who have been struggling with what's going on in the metals market, why bid prices are so much lower than ask prices.
We've had roughly three weeks straight of backwardation in silver, which is something you never see.
Backwardation basically means that the spot price today is higher than the futures price.
That's backwards.
It's supposed to be contango where the spot price is less than the futures price, which takes into account the cost of storage and interest and the time value of money.
You loan your brother-in-law 10 grand and he says, I'll pay you back tomorrow.
Fine.
You give me back 10 grand.
You loan him 10 grand.
He says, I'll pay you back in 18 months.
Well, okay, fine.
How about you pay me back 10,500?
That's interest for the time value of money kind of thing, right?
I'm just kind of trying to make an analogy here.
Backwardation says that the demand for silver is so much higher right now.
Right now, we don't want to go out a month.
We don't trust that it will be there or whatever.
We want it now.
And so we're willing to pay up on it now.
Well, what that does, by the way, for the industry, as a side note, is that if someone wants to sell us 10,000 ounces of silver and they see what spot is, and I want to hedge that exposure, which I always will, using the futures, it's a buck and a half back of spot.
So how do you hedge yourself?
You have to go back and it becomes a problem.
So there are some traders taking advantage of that, where they will, you know, they'll sell on one end and buy on the other to take advantage of that spread between London and the U.S. So some of that is happening, but most of it, I don't think, is going back there.
I think that silver will be used for all of the needs that you discussed, and it is critical.
And I do believe gold is going to back the back end of the treasury market, as Judy Shelton has said now twice on my show.
And I think if you want to go into that, I can explain to you the way that I see this unfolding in combination with the Genius Act.
And I find it to be maybe the only shot in the dark that we have of bringing back anything in terms of credibility to this country as crazy as that sounds.
Yeah, that's a really important point.
And I know you said before that it looks like the Trump administration will sacrifice the dollar in order to save the debt market, right?
And a lot of that has come true.
But let me back up a little bit back to stablecoins because there's something that I don't hear a lot of people talking about, which is that you're correct, that stable coins will be used in transactions.
And every time someone wants to create a stable coin in order to engage in a transaction, then that results in essentially treasuries being purchased.
But at the end of that transaction, you burn those stable coins.
You redeem them.
And so that reverses that.
The thing is, I don't see a lot of informed people holding stablecoins.
There's no reason to hold them other than maybe what you need in the next day or so to be able to engage in a transaction somewhere else.
But if you hold them, there's no upside.
There's only the downside because the stablecoin can never be more valuable than the dollar that it's supposed to be tied to, you know, within 1% or whatever.
But the dollar is always losing value because of the money printing.
This is why I've called them unstable coins.
They're unstable because the dollar is not stable.
If I'm someone who just wants to hold assets, I'm going to buy physical gold and silver, not stablecoins.
Well, it's funny because Tether is buying gold because that's really what this is all about.
It's a synthetic way to create demand for treasuries to lower interest rates and to devalue the dollar by taking the spread between the interest that you get in those stable coins that's given back to Tether, who is obliged to buy more treasuries to push down the yield and to buy gold and Bitcoin to devalue the dollar and work on paying off the debt.
And I think it serves several purposes.
If you look at the Mir-a-Lago Accord, that's exactly what he talks about is devaluing the dollar.
All you keep hearing these days is the debasement trade, the debasement trade.
That's exactly what this is.
And when you have Vice President Vance on White House Letterhead saying that being the world reserve currency due to Triffin's dilemma is not a good deal for the United States anymore.
It is for the consumer, buy cheap goods at Walmart, but the producers are dead in the water and we don't produce anything anymore.
And I just saw a show today or a news article today that said within three to five years, 50% of all entry-level jobs will be gone due to AI.
Add that to 60% of the country with no college education and a manufacturing base that's been eviscerated because of Triffin's dilemma, which says the world needs more dollars than we can provide through trade alone.
So countries over time have to continually buy our currency, weakening theirs, strengthening ours, which means over time, manufacturing becomes so much cheaper over there that we can buy stuff at Walmart inexpensively.
And then the bonus that we had all along when we were trusted and revered and our debt markets were trusted was that they put their excess in treasuries organically.
And that would keep interest rates low and asset prices high.
These things are all coming to an end.
So what the Genius Act does is it works the front end this way and also allows the proceeds, the profits that are generated between the issuance of stable coins and you're right, the burning of them is to buy assets that will continue to devalue the dollar and continue to push up the prices of the assets that they have plans for.
That's really interesting.
Yeah.
Tether is like, give us your money.
I mean, give us your currency so that we can go buy things that are better than currency.
Correct.
And back the system.
Right.
And then your point of why would anyone want to hold them, if you don't think that through this legislation, the on-ramp and the off-ramp of these stable coins will be monitored when I was listening to an interview, and I may have said this last time we talked on the guy that's created Bricks Pay, which is like Enbridge.
Enbridge is for the central banks.
Bricks Pay is for retail B2B.
But he talked about what the technology that is inside of Brick's Pay because they're opening it up to the rest of the world, which is huge.
And the same thing with Enbridge.
They're opening up to the Belt Road right now, 75% of the human population that will be able to transact like that outside of Swift and dollar intervention.
And the guy interviewing said, well, couldn't that bring in terrorism and money laundering?
And he says, you know, we're very, very keenly aware of that because we're opening up to so many countries that we have KYC, know your customer, AML, anti-money laundering, and KYT transactions built or technology built right into it, know your transaction.
So this new stablecoin highway will know who you are, where the money came from, and know what you bought.
So it is, in one end, a surveillance state.
And why would you want to hold stable coins really unless you didn't want to exit the crypto ecosystem?
And I don't know that, I don't know that anyone would want to hold them for anything other than transactions.
I tell you, I mean, I would rather transact in Bitcoin and much rather transact in something like Xano or Monero privacy coins, because I don't want the surveillance state to know what I'm doing.
But getting to your point about AI, the job replacements are real.
And you texted me something privately about this, but I want to demonstrate to people just our own AI technology, how advanced it's becoming.
If you go to censored.news, and I built this myself with no other humans, okay?
So it's me and a bunch of AI engineers built this.
And it's unbelievable.
If you click on finance and you can see the trends here that are the top financial headlines.
So here's one.
Government overreach in financial markets threatens economic liberty with price controls.
Now, Andy, that trend is an aggregation of all the financial news over the last 24 hours.
That's not one headline from one story.
That's an aggregation.
But check this out, folks.
If I click on this link, analyze implications, then it brings up our AI engine at brightu.ai, which analyzes the short-term, medium-term, long-term implications of, let me scroll back to the top.
Look, the financial implications, social, cultural, technological, medium-term implications.
Andy, this, like, we've never seen this capability before to be able to take a trend out of the news and then project it into the future and instantly see what are the implications of that.
And I'm one guy who built this.
Yeah, and they did it.
They did a thing in London yesterday.
I saw it this morning on the news.
I was walking out the door where there was a very beautiful woman who was standing out in the field giving a talking about an event.
And at the very end, she said, and by the way, I'm not a human.
I'm AI.
And she disappears.
And they came on and they said, this is how convincing it is.
And you don't even need, you know, you don't even need to put someone out in the field anymore.
You can create a beautiful woman reporter who's giving a great dissertation and then bang, she disappears.
And then they showed a new Hollywood movie where it is 100% AI created.
100%.
So you talk about the, you know, where over time, this is just beginning.
Give it how many years before the cumulative knowledge of the whole world is inside the palm of your hands.
What does that look like?
And that's why I think that bringing back manufacturing is so vitally important to this country.
If you aren't in AI, if you're not on Wall Street, then think of the implications on Wall Street.
Who needs a financial analyst anymore when AI can do it for you in eight seconds?
Aggregate all the information.
It's going to change everything.
And so bringing back manufacturing is a problem.
We must do it for national security on one hand and just for the future of our kids on the other hand and our grandkids.
And how do you do it?
Triffin's dilemma says you can't unless you give up on the reserve status, which I believe they're going to do.
And that's what this is all about because of things like AI, which I find to be not only amazing in their scope that you can learn something like this in 10 seconds.
And who needs to spend 200 grand to send your kid to a Big Ten college when you can, there's more information at your fingertips than you would have ever imagined.
But also what are the implications as it pertains to employment and putting people to work.
Something just, this is also breaking news today that's right on that very point, Andy.
And I know you've been doing so many interviews.
You may not have seen this, but DeepSeek out of China released the new DeepSeek OCR model, which is not about OCR.
It's about compressing knowledge into images.
So what they can do is they can take an encyclopedia of text knowledge and they can compress it into one-tenth the space by tokenizing the word tokens into images.
This will allow AI engines to have long-term memory very efficiently.
So now you're talking about, I mean, that's the major limitation against achieving AGI is that the AI models don't remember things for a year, things that you talk to them about, because that context window gets too large.
That's just been solved today by DeepSeek.
They released the model, open source.
Here it is on Hugging Face.
And they released a science paper describing the tokenization of knowledge into basically extreme image compression here.
So, Andy, like we can't even keep up with it.
The speed of which, you know, the speed at which things are changing right now is so incredibly rapid that you and I, that's why they call it the singularity.
Like, we can't really project the future because we can't know all the breakthroughs that are coming that are going to change everything.
It's frightening, as far as I'm concerned.
It's very frightening.
Are you concerned about it, Mike?
No.
Are you embracing it?
I can't wait.
I mean, I'm not frightened by it.
I'm trying to leverage it and use it for human empowerment and decentralization of knowledge.
See, to me, this was like, great.
I can release all of human knowledge on a downloadable file now that everybody can have access to at edge cases in their home where the government can't censor it.
Like that, that's the way I think about this.
But the government side will use it to try to enslave everybody, for sure.
Interesting.
Interesting take.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's, I don't know.
It just, I didn't mind using the Dewey Decimal system and remembering my friend's phone numbers back in the day and actually reading stuff on paper in bound leather.
But it is what it is, man.
And it's definitely changing the world.
And I think that is one of the reasons why we have to understand that, my opinion, the single biggest threat to this country is the fact that we don't make anything anymore because it will disrupt.
Yes, it will make us all have information at our fingertips, but I think it will make finding ways of making a living very difficult for a lot of people.
You look at the kids right now right out of school.
They can't find jobs.
They're the highest number of unemployed right now.
They can't find a job.
And what happens as this gets worse?
My son, as an example, he's a good example.
He came to work for me a year and a half ago.
But when he left college, I told him I want him to go find himself.
Go be a man, go spread your wings.
And he went to New York and he became a CPA with Price Waterhouse and right out of college, getting paid $75,000 a year.
But what do they need to pay him $75,000 for to analyze a real estate and investment trust balance sheet for Price Waterhouse when AI can do it in one second without all of it?
And so it's just going to change so many things.
That's right.
And I think that's part of why we need to bring back manufacturing.
Well, I agree.
We need manufacturing because AI can't create commodities.
It can't create silver or copper.
And AI can't create products.
So, I mean, infrastructure, physical infrastructure really, really matters.
And that's where America has become incredibly weak over these years because we've allowed everything to be shifted over to China for rare earths, for example.
Or Western Europe allowed energy to come from Russia, which worked great until we blew up the Nord Stream pipelines.
I'd love your comments on that.
But first, let me just mention your website, milesfranklin.com.
And just to say thank you for coming on, because you and I don't have a financial arrangement of any kind, but I know you always have like a super secret VIP price list for people who want to get, tell us about that.
Yeah, and that would be, please just put in the subject line, saw us on this show, Mike Adams, whatever you want to put on there, info, I-N-F-O at milesfranklin.com.
And any questions that you hear or have questions on, let us know.
We'll answer them.
No obligation.
You just want the price list, let us know.
We'll email it to you.
We update it two, three times a week.
If you see lower prices, tell us.
Chances are we'll be able to match it or beat it.
We would like to think we're as good as just about price-wise as anyone in North America.
And we've never had a customer complaint in 36 years.
So I appreciate that, Mike.
I come on here not to even, if you never mentioned my company name, I just love our conversations and I love what you're doing.
And it's great to be a small part of it.
Well, likewise, I really appreciate your analysis.
I've learned a lot from you over the years.
And you were the first to talk about BRICS, actually.
Before people knew what BRICS was, you were already a couple of years ahead, you know, on that curve.
And you understand the importance of what my friend Michael Young calls routes and resources.
Belt and Road Initiative, you were talking about that years ago.
And now we see how that's playing out with U.S. naval projection of power over the Suez Canal, over the Panama Canal, over the Strait of Malacca.
A lot of concern about the Strait of Hormuz near Iran there as well.
I mean, you understand all of this.
Absolutely.
And it's funny because the Bel Road Initiative is really a bigger deal than people think, aside from the fact that it's the largest infrastructure project in history, human history.
Aside from the fact that it represents 75% of human population and over 50% of global GDP, and these are underdeveloped countries that they're trying, China is trying to industrialize by building the infrastructure and taking a piece of the commodity ecosystem.
BRICS Pay and BRICS Bridge, the Enbridge technology and the B2B BRICS pay system, which everyone would push back against BRICS and say they're not big enough.
Okay, both technologies are being opened up through the Belt Road right now.
So all of the transmission of money and trade will go through the Enbridge for the central banks and BRICS Pay for the retail B2B, settle outside of SWIFT.
And what's happening alongside of it is the Shanghai Metals Exchange is building vaults, multi-regional vaults all throughout the Belt Road.
The first one is done in Hong Kong.
The second one right now is being built in Saudi Arabia right now.
Who is a full member of Enbridge?
Saudi Arabia was the fifth country to sign up to Enbridge.
They also signed up 11 or 12 or 13 nations in Southeast Asia, the ASEAN acronym Asians, and five or six Middle Eastern countries.
The countries in Southeast Asia alone, those 13 or 11 countries, represent twice the population of the U.S., 800 million, and are China's largest trading partner by far right now.
And they're over 35% of global GDP.
They'll be trading outside of SWIFT.
They will trade over Enbridge like that in seven seconds at a 98% reduction in fees, and they will settle in balances in gold.
China's further industrializing or internationalizing the yuan, rather, which would be the rails for the settlement system for BRICS, by making the digital yuan immediately convertible into gold at any of these locations right now in Shanghai.
I mean, in Shanghai or in Hong Kong, where you would take it and have it sent to wherever you want or leave it there.
But their idea is to open it up all around the Belt Road and deposit.
Everyone deposits gold in all these multi-jurisdictional vaults.
Trades over the bridge network with their CBDCs settles in balances in gold.
So the trading in local currencies destroys the dollar hegemony and the settling outside of the treasury market using imbalances to settle in gold kills the reserve status.
And this is why I think ultimately you're seeing like even Vance say on White House Letterhead, we can't do this anymore.
We can't be the world reserve currency.
Everyone should trade their own currencies.
I think that's what's going to happen.
Yeah, that's because there's a cost for being the world reserve currency, which is the gutting of your own industrial economy and output.
But what do you make of China announcing a couple of weeks ago that they were going to put new restrictions on rare earth exports?
They were going to require licensing so that those rare earths don't fall into the hands of countries that are manufacturing weapons for the West.
Because if you're China, it's silly to sell your strategic enemy the minerals they need to build missiles and bombs to threaten you, right?
So then in response to that, Trump kind of blew his top there on a Friday and announced 100% extra tariffs on China beginning November 1st.
That's plus 100% on top of whatever is already there.
Well, I ran that scenario through my AI analyzer and the results, if that were to go into place, are catastrophic for the U.S., by the way.
I mean, catastrophic.
But the U.S. doesn't have a way to replace those rare earths either.
So what do you make of that situation?
Is Trump going to go full Taco Tuesday again and back off?
Or where is this headed?
Well, they just signed a big deal, I think, with Australia to buy rare earths.
And this is the dilemma.
This is the dilemma where we have neglected all of this.
And the rest of the, you know, we've spent 50 years trying, we're a service-based country for 50 years that puts all their faith in dollars and treasuries where countries like China have not only been building the resources or the mines to develop the resources, even if they were under, if it weren't economical, but they've expanded into places like the Belt Road and all of these things to continue to gather up all of this stuff.
This is a race for the world's commodities.
And I think it's ultimately a very scary thing.
I mean, and not only that, it's like, you know, the Congressional Budget Office says by 2031, all 100% of tax revenue goes just to pay the interest on the debt and mandatory entitlement payments.
So who wants to buy our treasuries to fund our discretional military purchases?
In other words, military purchasing is discretional.
So who's going to fund that?
And so it goes even deeper than that.
And then when you realize it's not only things like rare earth, which you need to make military equipment and high-tech stuff, but even things like manufacturing pharmaceuticals like penicillin, we're reliant on these countries and in particular China for far too much.
And so you have to question, is the stick or the carrot the better approach?
I don't know, Mike.
I really don't know.
Well, I want to back up a little bit on that.
Do you remember when Enron used to have an accounting principle that when they came up with an idea, they would put it on the balance sheet as an asset?
Yeah.
Yes, I do know that they had very clever accounting gimmicks, and I think you could argue the same thing about the Western accounting.
Right.
But right now, what I see from the Trump administration is a lot of announcements that he and the media are pretending are real now.
Like, hey, we signed a deal to build a bunch of data centers.
And then everybody says, oh, the data centers are here, but they're not because they take years to build.
Oh, we're going to build nuclear power plants.
Great.
That'll be awesome in 2044 when they're finally done and producing energy.
And the same thing about this deal with Australia that you just mentioned.
Oh, we signed a deal with Australia or we signed a deal with this Wyoming company.
We're going to start doing rare earth refining out of a coal mine.
Great.
That will replace 5% of China's output by the year 2035.
None of that shit counts today, man.
You know what I'm saying?
It's like you can say it.
I don't mean you, but I mean Trump.
Like you can say it.
It doesn't make it happen tomorrow.
China's got the minerals now.
China's got the power now, the power grid, the Hoover Dam times 100.
Now.
And not only that, their relationships with the bricks in the belt road are not only the underdeveloped resource-rich countries, but those that are strategically located in trade routes, both on sea and on land.
They have been playing 3D chess while we've been playing checkers for a very long time.
And, you know, there's a lot of focus on the precious metals, but they own the London Metals Exchange, the LME.
They bought it, which would be all of the base metals.
And many of the vaults that are used to store the metals that are traded in London are now being built in China.
And that is exactly right.
This has been a country that has focused on the wrong things for too long, where China has focused on what's really important.
And aside from the problems that they have, everyone's got problems, but they have more resources and capacity to refine those resources than anyone in the world.
It's not only the rare earth, they refine nearly 100% of them.
We don't even have the capacity to refine them if we create them.
We're so far behind the eight ball on that.
And so you're right, it is frightening.
People focus too much on precious metals.
But what precious metals will do, at least in terms of gold, will be run the rails of settlement and trust and finance.
Silver will be for, I don't think it will have the monetary implications, but it will certainly, it is a necessity for an industrial and industrialized civilization that is doing high-tech things like AI, like advanced military, you know, like battery powered anything or anything that conducts electricity, heat, or electricity.
It is critical.
It is important.
And they've realized that for a long time to our detriment.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But even right now today in 2025, the decisions that I'm seeing coming out of the White House, even though, again, Trump inherited this long-term problem of short-term thinking, right?
But Trump, you know, announcing things like right now, okay, in East Texas, across the border, Texas and Louisiana, they're going to have this new lithium mine for all the lithium batteries.
And in my mind, I'm thinking lithium is already just about obsolete because of sodium ion chemistry that's 10 times better, cheaper, lasts longer.
So why are we still focused on the past of battery chemistry when China's companies like Catal, C-A-T-L, is rolling out sodium ion battery packs that will last 5 million miles?
Your car will be run down and junked, and you'll pull the battery pack out of that car and stick it in your next car and it'll drive that car for a million, you know, for millions more miles.
I mean, that's how good those batteries are right now.
We've got sodium, Andy.
North America is rich with salt mines, you know, salt deposits.
We could be making sodium ion batteries, but the only company in America, Natron Energy, just went bankrupt.
Couldn't get enough funding.
Couldn't make it work because it's just too expensive to make it in America.
And I'm not yelling at you, by the way.
I'm yelling at the frustration.
I'm learning from, you know, and I feel your passion and I'm the same way, man.
I get it.
I love it.
I'm frustrated that why can't we make stuff?
Why can't we be a little more forward-thinking as a country?
Let's work on sodium ion battery manufacturing.
You know, we can send all this money to Ukraine or Israel or wherever.
We can't make sodium batteries when we're sitting on salt mines, galore.
What's going on?
Yeah, I don't.
You know, you look at, you ask, there was an interview done recently and asked the Gen Z, the youngest kids, what they want to do.
And the biggest answer was be a social media influencer.
You ask kids in China and they want to be astronauts and physicists and chemists.
And it's a different thing.
I think we've gone astray.
I mean, that's really the truth to me.
And something that's bothered me more than anything is that our culture has been whitewashed.
You look at our, you know, the level of education is appalling in this country for proficiency and whatnot and pushing kids to do these things, pushing people to do these things.
And not only that, when you've got your manufacturing, what impetus is there to do that?
You have one or two, three places to go to do that.
And if not, everything else is happening outside the United States who has lost focus on what is really important.
And that's probably why we're behind the eight ball.
In some ways, we're more intuitive and have more ingenuity than anybody.
In other ways, to your point, we're living in the past.
And these countries who have prioritized the future.
And that's the old adage.
The Chinese think in terms of decades.
We think in terms of minutes.
They've been looking and doing things of this nature, thinking way ahead of us for a very long time and using our hubris as a cover for it.
So it is.
It's disconcerting.
But to your point, I think it's very important that people start to understand that things are beginning to change.
And U.S. supremacy that is all based upon military prowess, these things are changing because the U.S. dollar and the trust in the U.S. system is gone in many respects.
And that's why these countries are pushing ahead the way they are.
I completely agree.
And we've lost the meritocracy that America once was.
And did you see Besant announcing that the Trump administration is going to set price floors for rare earths and other commodities across a wide range of industries?
He said that on a CNBC interview.
So they're going to set the floor for copper, for aluminum, for steel, for neodymium, for dysprosium, whatever.
And I'm thinking, okay, wow, now I'm living under a communist, centralized, price-setting regime where they pick the winners and losers in the economy now instead of meritocracy.
And how on earth are we supposed to be able to function in a society that we're told, oh, it's a free market, except, well, all the prices are set by the government.
It's like, what?
Yeah, you can't.
You can't.
And I think that, you know, people talk about countries like China buying gold to de-dollarize.
They're not trying to, they're not buying gold to de-dollarize.
I think they're buying gold, not like they're going to switch back later.
This is permanent.
From their perspective, the geopolitical risk is the United States.
And I think they're hedging against us, not despite us, but because of us.
And that's the part that people are missing.
I really do think.
And this is why they're doing all of these things.
They're doing it because they look at us as, you know, the problem.
And they're trying to find ways that you can't push back against, whether it be technology with energy or all of the critical minerals that are needed to make these things or the refining capacity or the precious metals to run a monetary system based on trust or on and on and on and on or the relationships that are cooperative.
Like, for example, you know, people don't talk much about the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
I mean, even the word Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but they have two projects that the Chinese are funding or the SCO is funding, their infrastructure projects, and they're funding them in Yuan, including wind power in Uzbekistan.
Okay, that's the birth of what is being called the Electro-Yuan, which is a green petro-yuan-backed energy trade.
This complements the petro-yuan, which already challenges the dollar in oil markets.
And so they're covering old and new energy economies.
They're pushing back against the dollar dominance in every way in energy, in commodities, in relationships, in technology, in everything.
And it's because what they're really doing is hedging against us.
I think you're right.
And I think that's the biggest problem of all.
And this is only going to accelerate.
They're hedging against the U.S. Empire, which is incredibly unstable right now.
And honestly, I've looked at this every way possible.
I don't see a way out of our printing and debt crisis.
Everything that has been proposed, even all the things that you've talked about, the things that I've researched, I've been on the Fed's website.
I've been on the Treasury's website.
I've been listening to Lutnick and Besent and others and all their ideas.
Andy, I've done the math on this and I'm pretty damn good at math and it doesn't work.
It just doesn't work, man.
At some point, this system implodes.
Well, and Richard Russell, my mentor, always said the Fed had two choices, to inflate or die.
And that's why I think they are trying option three, which would be to create the Stable Coin Act, the Genius Act, to create the synthetic demand, to drive down rates on the front end, to use the proceeds, the excess, to buy gold and devalue the dollar further,
push the gold stocks up, push Bitcoin up to pay off the debt, and then back the back end of the treasury with gold where you could bring home manufacturing because you have zero upfront borrowing costs if the redeemability is in 20 years in gold itself.
You let gold go much higher, you revalue it perhaps, or let it go up organically, which continues to devalue the dollar, which allows you to sell your products at competitive prices.
Now, maybe I'm being overly simplistic, but what other way, to your point, Mike, what other way is there to do this?
And at some point, it starts to become very depressing to try and figure this out and try and find a glimpse of hope for this country and for the children and the grandchildren.
The next two generations are in big, big trouble if we don't do something like this.
No, they're going to default on the debt either through hyperinflation or an actual default.
But I think you're right.
They'll choose hyperinflation.
But you realize also that what you just said, that if they push Bitcoin up and then swap out Bitcoin for debt, I hope our listeners realize that's a giant Bitcoin rug pull.
Yeah.
And I think that's what they'll do.
I do.
And that's what the Russian finance minister is saying.
And if you use Tether, who has just bought, I don't know how many billions worth of Bitcoin recently, to do this through synthetic demand, it actually has the potential to work.
The one ramification side effect, I think, would be universal basic income for people who don't have assets because things will get very expensive, very expensive, and the store shelves will be a lot less stock than we're used to.
But you might have a chance in a few years to reshore manufacturing at zero upfront borrowing costs using gold redeemable treasuries down the road, 20, 25 years or whatever.
And the higher the price goes, the lower the dollar goes so you can sell your products at a more competitive rate around the globe.
Well, Andy, my I have one more important question for you.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but in my opinion, as a company that hires workers, I don't think that America can return to manufacturing until we go through a generation of hard times.
You understand the value of money.
And the value of work and work ethic.
See, we don't have a culture that works right now.
We really don't.
Right.
No, I agree.
I agree with you.
I do.
But nonetheless, you know, you get to a point and what is the lesser of all evils?
And you're right.
I mean, the same thing is true when you look at them trying to lower rates to stimulate the housing market again.
No, what you need to make housing affordable are for prices to come down.
Right.
And not, and that would be rates going higher.
And so people can save money.
And it wouldn't be for rates to come down that got us into the problem to begin with.
You're right.
In many ways, we're thinking in the past.
We're doing the same mistakes over and over and over again.
I don't know.
I guess I have spent so much time, Mike, honestly, over the past six years talking about the demise of the Western system that I've tried to find some glimmer of hope and cling to it that maybe, just maybe, we could bring back manufacturing and with our backs against the wall be great again.
But you're right.
But I'm happy to bring you back to the doom side.
Thank you.
Well, I've been there forever.
I've been there forever.
And, you know, it's a drag sometimes, but I guess there's a fine line between pessimism and realism.
And I'd rather not have my head in the sand and be run over by change, maybe be able to sidestep it if you know what's coming.
When I hear optimists talk about the reindustrialization of America, and by the way, we've got to go here in a second.
They say, well, we're going to reindustrialize with robot manufacturing.
But then, where are we going to get the robots?
From China.
Why is China going to sell us robots when they could use them there and they contain all the rare earths that they don't want to export to us?
No, China's going to automate manufacturing first.
They're doing it now, actually.
They've got millions of robots.
Ford executives came back from China.
This was reported in the Telegraph.
They said they were terrified of the automation they saw in the auto manufacturing in China because in the U.S., we're 20 years behind that.
But anyway, Andy, we got to wrap this up.
Dude, I got to sit down with you someday and have a beer and talk, talk, you know, because you are a wealth of information.
And what I hope people who watch you realize that you are seeing things well before the crowd does.
And the things that you've talked about today have opened my eyes quite a bit and have made me want to dig it a little bit into the I always learn from you, Andy, so the feeling is mutual.
And give out your email address one more time for people who want to get physical gold and silver in their hands.
Yeah, and I will do my best to make it the best experience I've ever had.
That's info at milesfranklin.com, I-NFO at Miles Franklin.
We won't be undersold.
And please let us know they came from this show.
Mike, it's a pleasure, man.
And I thank you for your texts every periodically.
Usually when you're on a run with your dog, you must do your best thinking then.
But I love hearing from you.
I love talking.
I'm always texting you when I'm huffing and puffing.
Yeah, that's all right.
I get it.
I think you're brilliant.
And I'm honored as hell to be a very, very small part about what you're doing.
And it would come on anytime you'd have me.
I know you got to run.
I'll look forward to doing it again with you sometime.
And if you get a chance, send me a couple links to the stories that you chatted about here during this show.
You got me wanting to go down another rabbit hole and see how long before I pop back out.
Okay, I'll do that.
Have a great day, Andy.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
God bless.
All the best.
And for all of you watching, there's Andy Shackman, just top guy.
I've learned so much from him over the years.
He really knows his stuff.
So check out his website, milesfranklin.com.
And thank you for joining us today.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
And use our AI engine.
It's at brightu.ai, and it will analyze all the news trends for you in finance, health, tech, energy, you name it, science.
And it'll tell you the implications of that using AI reasoning, our own model, by the way.
So check it out.
Thank you for joining me today and get ready for interesting times.
Take care.
After a long wait, we've got our turmeric extract back in stock at healthrangerstore.com.
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