Brighteon Broadcast News, Dec 27, 2025 - WEEKEND EDITION: Silver Hits $79 While Lunatic EU Tyrants C
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Well, welcome to the special weekend edition of Brighteon Broadcast News.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon, and thank you for joining me.
And one of the reasons I'm doing a special weekend edition is to help everybody parse what just happened with the price of silver rising 10% in one day.
So silver is now in the U.S. market, it's at $79.25.
Silver has doubled in six months.
And in one year, it's up almost 150%.
It's really extraordinary.
And gold is over $4,500 and continues to rise.
Now, of course, I've been urging everybody to swap their fiat currencies for gold and silver for years.
And if you go back and listen to my podcast, of course, you'll find me telling you the things that are happening right now.
I said that one day that the price suppression would no longer be able to be controlled.
And for, I don't know, for it seems like at least since 2011, maybe longer, that the price of silver has been artificially suppressed by big banks like JP Morgan, which is no longer short on silver, by the way.
They sold all their short positions.
They are now long physical silver.
But also, of course, the Treasury and the Fed involved in various ways to try to keep silver and gold suppressed.
And I think there are a couple of reasons for that.
Number one, the high prices make the dollar look weak, which it is.
But also, they wanted to make sure that all their wealthy elite people had the chance to buy as much as they could as the prices were artificially suppressed.
Remember that the paper markets suppressed the paper price, allowing wealthy people to collect physical gold and silver at a discount over all these years.
And that's exactly the way I described it.
You may recall.
I said, look, this price suppression means that it's available at a discount.
It's artificially discounted, which means in essence, and I said it exactly this way, in essence, the government is subsidizing the price of silver to make it artificially low.
I was saying that back when silver was $18, $19, $20.
And that means it's a steal.
It's a steal.
You know, you should pick up as much as you can.
Although, I've always been cautious in saying, you know, do your own research and this is not investment advice, etc.
But I was also saying this is a bargain and it's not going to remain artificially suppressed forever.
That one day price is going to return to reality.
Well, that day has arrived.
We are here.
And what's driving demand right now is not some speculation bubble.
It's core industrial demand.
And this industrial demand is why the silver price in Shanghai, in the Shanghai Chinese market, is shockingly high, much higher than the U.S. market.
It's been running $5, $6, $7 higher than the U.S. market, which tells you that the arbitrage that would normally take place there for somebody to fill that gap and deliver physical silver to Shanghai and earn the profit on every ounce, that that's not possible because people can't get enough physical silver to actually make that happen.
So the fact that that arbitrage is stubbornly present, you know, that price gap remains, tells you that nobody can fill the physical demand.
And what does that tell you?
That the physical silver market is, in fact, it's imploding.
Well, I mean, maybe that's not the best term for it.
The scarcity is off the charts.
What it's really doing is exposing the fraud of the silver paper markets.
Now, if you've been tracking anything that's happening with silver, you already know this.
And you know that the entire COMEX marketplace is a giant fraud.
It's a massive financial fraud.
But then so is the dollar.
So are treasuries.
You know, the whole financial system is built on debt and fraud.
And that's why physical matters so much.
This is why people want physical gold and silver in their hands.
Because it's the one thing that doesn't have counterparty risk.
And thus, there can't be any fraud in the fact that you've got, let's say, a troy ounce of an element in your hands.
That's real.
You can touch it.
You can melt it down for industrial use.
You can sell it to a company that makes solar panels or batteries or what have you.
So that's real.
Paper markets are fraud.
Currency is fraud.
Treasuries are fraud.
They're all built on a Ponzi scheme debt pyramid of fraud and rehypothecation, of claiming that, oh, we have all this silver here, but we're going to oversell the paper contracts by a factor of 100 or more.
Well, that's fraud, actually, and the fraud is now being exposed.
So the real question is, what happens next?
So the first thing to realize in this is that this is proof that we've entered a multipolar world where the United States alone no longer controls the prices of gold and silver.
In other words, China is a major player in this market right now.
And it's Chinese demand for silver, as evidenced by the Shanghai price, the gap up price, the arbitrage price, that China is driving silver prices as much as anybody.
India is also involved a lot of direct purchasing of silver for solar panel production there, etc.
But the U.S. used to be able to control these prices almost 100%.
Those days are now over.
So we are entering the multipolar commodities world where the United States is now no longer going to be able to set the price, to dictate the pricing, so to speak.
And instead, the U.S. is going to be increasingly held responsible for its own monetary policy and supply chain policies that affect prices of gold and silver.
So what else is interesting about this is that also London is no longer in control of the prices of gold and silver.
And this is all part of, I believe, Trump's war against the city of London, which is to wrest control of the United States away from the authoritarian grip of the city of London that has controlled the U.S. for, well, you know, for, I guess, since its founding, right?
So 250 years nearly.
That has happened through controlling currency, banking, the financial system, SWIFT system, gold and silver, and also trade policies and things like that.
So you could argue, and this is sort of the Tom Longo argument, but not exactly, but you could argue that Trump is allowing gold and silver to skyrocket in order to really punish the city of London and to try to destroy the financial solvency of European banks.
So that's one theory of why this is happening.
But at the same time, China itself is also, you know, really has high demand for fundamental demand, industrial demand for silver and gold.
So it could be that both China and the Trump administration want the prices to keep going up.
Now, if that's the case, and if this strategy is successful, and the LBMA, for example, is unable to deliver sufficient physical silver, then we're going to have out of London the physical silver default.
And if you thought silver prices were crazy right now, wait until you see a silver delivery default by a major exchange.
Although, technically, I think the LBMA is not the same kind of government-regulated exchange.
I think it's more of a, it's a private party.
It's kind of a private exchange, as I understand it.
I'm not an expert on the LBMA, just to be clear.
But if it defaults, then you're going to see price shockwaves across the world for all the metals that the LBMA handles.
And you may recall that it wasn't that long ago, maybe a little over a year, year and a half, when the LBMA defaulted on nickel because there were a lot of trades.
I think it was about $5 billion of trades on nickel that could not be fulfilled.
And so the LBMA changed the rules and cheated and simply rolled back all those trades and took the profits away.
I think it was a Chinese company that was trying to buy the nickel that needed it industrially.
And they were just told to go pound sand.
You don't get your nickel and you don't get the profit.
Nothing.
At least that's my memory of it.
It could be a little cloudy, but we'll see.
Now, another aspect of this is very important to understand is that, of course, Europe is run by completely insane sociopathic lunatic leaders.
And at this point, what Trump is doing to the city of London is almost kind of like a mercy killing of a totalitarian regime that needs to be completely dismantled.
As an example of that, it's being reported that von der Leyen, the president of the European Union, you know, or also known as von der Krazy, she gave a speech where she said that free speech is a virus and censorship is the vaccine.
Censorship is the cure in her mind, and free speech is a virus that's dangerous to society.
Let me play a little bit of that for you here so you can check this out.
Perhaps if you think of information manipulation as a virus, instead of treating an infection, once it has taken hold, that is debunking, it is much better to vaccinate so that the body is inoculated.
Freebunking is the same approach.
Because disinformation relies on people passing it on to others.
It is essential that people know what malign information's influence is and what the techniques are that are behind it.
See, there you go.
Look at wild-eyed, crazed European authoritarians saying that free speech is a virus and censorship is the cure.
Meanwhile, these people, the European leaders, they're the worst purveyors of disinformation and lies, as evident in the way they talk about Russia, the way they talk about Ukraine.
They're almost incapable of telling the truth about anything.
And it's obvious that the UK and France and Germany and other countries desperately, I mean, not all the EU countries, but most of them desperately want war with Russia.
They want war with Russia, and Trump doesn't want war with Russia because Trump wants to focus on other things.
Either China or South America, probably, or Greenland.
Trump doesn't want war with Russia, but Europe does.
And I think Trump knows that one of the best ways to stop Europe from escalating this world war with Russia and trying to drag the U.S. into it through NATO.
One of the ways for them to do that, or one of the ways for Trump to stop that, is to financially break the city of London, which is exactly where this is headed.
And that's a good thing.
That's a great thing, actually.
We should celebrate the idea of the EU dissolving.
We should celebrate the idea of the people of the UK or of France or Germany taking back their own countries from their insane cult leadership.
That's really a suicide cult of lunatics.
And we should also celebrate the end of the EU and the end of NATO as organizations because the EU is undemocratic.
What, should everybody in Europe take orders from a bunch of unelected globalist elite bureaucrats in Brussels?
Really?
That's democracy?
No.
It's the furthest thing from it.
It doesn't resemble democracy at all.
So when von der Leyen talks about freedom, it would be like Satan talking about being Christ-like.
I mean, she's a demon.
She doesn't know anything about freedom.
She hates freedom.
She hates her own European people.
It's worth stating that the strategy of the United Kingdom or Great Britain, actually throughout history, has been to cause as much chaos as possible in Europe, to cause chaos in the Middle East, hence 1948, the NACBA, the founding of Israel, which was, of course, aggressively pushed and engineered by the UK.
Or, again, Great Britain.
I tend to use those terms synonymously, but they're not synonyms.
But the British crown, we'll put it that way, has been behind global chaos, disruption, massive enslavement, wars, and pillaging of nations and cultures for centuries.
Of course.
I mean, you know, look at the opium wars in South China.
Look at the British occupation of India.
Look at British occupation of North Africa and the Middle East and, you know, all over the world for all these centuries.
And the way the British rule is through destruction, deception, manipulation, control, censorship.
That's why they're pushing it right now.
And I actually do believe that Trump is at war with that globalist regime.
And Trump is working to take down the British.
And that is one of the reasons that gold and silver are skyrocketing so much right now.
And yeah, this is going to hurt the dollar in a sense, but it's going to destroy the British Empire.
And the world will celebrate when that day comes.
And also, remember, the British, they're the ones that pushed war with Russia.
It was Boris Johnson that flew to Ukraine and met with Zelensky in early 2022 and said, do not make peace with Putin.
Make war and we will support you.
We, Europe, we will support you.
And Zelensky became a British puppet, not just a U.S. puppet, but a British puppet.
I mean, yeah, he had been a U.S. puppet before Trump, but then he became a British puppet also.
Both of them were influencing his policies.
And he decided to wage war against Russia because that's what the British royalty wanted.
And that's also what the German leadership wanted in the EU, etc.
So at this point, the EU leadership is so completely insane, so destructive to their own people and to the world, that the best possible outcome here is the total dismantling and destruction of the political elite class of all the main European countries.
That is the best possible outcome.
Because that would mean freedom.
It would mean a restoration of freedom of speech, a restoration of national sovereignty of those nations.
The German people could defend Germany.
The French people could defend France.
The British people could defend Great Britain against the illegal invaders, etc.
And of course, Romania, Austria, Poland, and all the Nordic states, etc., and the Baltic states, excuse me, all these different countries can benefit from this.
Even Greece and Italy can benefit from this.
And they are under the thumb of the EU right now as well.
I mean, all the people of the EU, they despise von der Leyen.
She's actually even got a globalist haircut.
I mean, she looks like she's dragged out of the Hunger Games movie.
You know, she just reeks of authoritarianism and globalism and arrogance.
And that's because that's who she is.
And that's why she says censorship is so great.
So silver is actually related to all of this.
So we should celebrate silver and gold prices going higher.
We should celebrate a massive global demand for these metals because we should celebrate the day that the city of London is broken and collapses and can no longer be rebuilt into the disgusting MI6 secret British intelligence system that it is.
Because it was that system that actually tried to destroy Trump with the Russia collusion hoax.
It was that system that censored myself and many others during COVID.
The entire so-called dirty dozen censorship list that was pushed heavily by the media.
That all came out of London, by the way.
All the same deep state spies and globalists and just demonic, evil cult-like people.
So that's, I mean, there are lots of reasons to celebrate the price of silver going up, especially if you own some silver.
It's worth quadruple what it was a few years ago.
But one of the biggest reasons is that this could break the city of London.
And that's a beautiful thing to ponder.
You know, that dark chapter of history of British rule over the world, that needs to be ended.
And it did not end at the end of World War II, although it should have.
But it did not end.
It's time to get that done.
And Trump seems to be on track for doing that.
Now, earlier this week, I interviewed Doug Casey, and I promised to play that interview for you again here because I played it on Christmas Eve, even though I knew that would not be a popular day for people to be watching videos, you know, for obvious reasons.
So I promised then that I would play it again, and so I'm playing it today.
And Doug Casey, this is a really important interview because Doug Casey goes over what's happening with metals, what's happening internationally with geopolitics, with Trump's tariffs, and he strongly disagrees with Trump's tariffs, as do I, by the way.
So, yeah, we can see Trump doing some masterful things in certain areas, and then we can also disagree with Trump in other areas, and that's okay.
That's a normal part of the democratic process, you know.
But this Doug Casey interview is one that you really want to hear.
I think you'll gain tremendous value from it if you haven't heard it yet.
So, that's coming up today.
All right, in addition to that, I have created a book for you, and it's called The Health Rangers New Year Revolution: a radical blueprint for upgrading your health, wealth, mind, and freedom.
And I encourage you to check out this book.
I think you'll really like it.
It looks like it's got already almost 100 downloads, and I haven't even mentioned it here yet.
But if you go to books.brightlearn.ai, and if you want to find my name as an author, you can click on the top 100 authors link there.
And oh, look, I am currently the number one author in terms of the number of reads by a long shot, it looks like.
So, if you click on the top 100 authors and then click on my name as an author, you will then see that book.
And once you get to that book, you can either read it online or you can download the PDF by clicking download PDF.
Or if you just want to search for the book, then you can use the search function at books.brightlearn.ai and you can search for Health Ranger or New Year Revolution because there are actually a lot of books that mention Health Ranger now, books by other people that have written about some of my philosophies and/or recipes, things like that.
So, you can search and find the book.
Anyway, I put this together for you.
It's called The Health Rangers New Year Revolution because I tried to put into this book some of the top things that I think you can do for the new year to make 2026 a really great year for you.
So, you know, chapter one is about revitalizing your health and how to do that and clean food choices.
And then, chapter two is about upgrading your skills.
And chapter three is learning new things.
Chapter four is breaking free from toxic prescription medications, etc.
Another chapter is about rejecting false authority.
And another chapter is about securing your financial future and protecting your assets, etc.
So, this is a very useful book.
Check it out.
Like all the books at Bright Learn, it's free to read and free to download.
So, definitely enjoy that book and share it.
And also, I promised you that we would have some book downloads available.
I was hoping to have it done before Christmas.
It turned out to be more complex than I originally anticipated, but we've come up with a really good solution that will actually use a simple executable program called R-Clone.
And R-Clone is a cloning program that clones from remote servers to a local folder.
It works on both Windows and Mac systems.
And what we're planning on doing now is publishing what I call collections of books that are posted in a special place and then like a special online URL.
And then you simply download this R-Clone file, install it, or actually you don't even have to install it.
You just double-click the EXE.
And we're going to let you download a batch file.
And in the Mac environment, I think it's called a command file.
But it's a file that you run that launches our clone and then it begins remotely syncing all the files from our server to your hard drive for this specific book collection.
And then you'll be able to go through and just click on index.html and you'll be able to browse all the books locally so that if the internet is ever cut off or if the site is down or not functioning, you'll be able to get all the books locally, which is exactly, that's been my goal.
That's what I want to do.
Now, the book engine is doing really well.
It's very popular.
We have over 9,600 books published.
We're coming up on 10,000 books.
Yeah, I know it's a lot.
And over 108,000 downloads at this point, over 3,300 authors.
And it turns out the database is suffering a few things, suffering under some of the load.
And so I'm working on upgrading the database to a significantly better, stronger, enterprise-grade database.
For those of you geeks out there, it's a PostgreQL database.
I mean, it's actually still, it's using Postgres right now, but it's a much more robust enterprise-level Postgres with auto-scaling and things like that.
So I'm in the middle of a database migration, and there could be a little bit of glitching or downtime here and there.
And I'm giving you updates on that in the special BrightLearn update that I have for you here today.
Anyway, the bottom line is we are continuing to improve and expand BrightLearn.ai.
Soon you'll have a file sync or let's say a collection sync or a library sync type of function available for you.
I was very close to that when I got interrupted by the database issues.
Had to start migrating the database, which is a big project.
That itself is a multi-day project.
So I'll get back to the rsync situation shortly, and then we're going to start to have the collection syncing so you can have all the books and files locally.
That should be really cool.
Now, one more thing.
So I've got that BrightLearn update coming for you here, but I also want to play a report I recorded, I don't know, what was it, a few days ago.
And it's called There's Going to Be a Wave of Institutional Failures Coming.
Now, that doesn't mean the end of the world.
There will be a lot of institutional failures for a number of reasons, some of them financial, but also some of them because of AI, because, well, many of them are being made obsolete because of AI.
And again, that's not a bad thing when old obsolete institutions fail and then they're replaced by something that works far better and typically is more decentralized.
That's actually a positive thing.
And I hope you realize that AI, more than any other technology that we've ever experienced, it results in mass decentralization.
It is a decentralizing technology for a number of reasons.
One of them is the fact that it pushes cognition to the edge, as they call it.
And by edge, what that means is to your local devices.
So AI is becoming so incredibly advanced and so incredibly affordable and widely distributed and available, etc., that it's being pushed to the edge more and more.
Within one to two years, you'll have chat GPT high-end level models that can run on your desktop.
That might take a couple years, but it's coming.
And you'll have lighter models that'll run on your mobile phones or other devices, and what this means, I mean it's really extraordinary.
It means that you'll have access to cognition and compute in a way that has always previously gone through centralized gatekeepers, through governments or universities, for example, or the FDA or CDC, or government regulators, etc.
Or you used to have to hire an attorney to figure out what this law means, or you used to have to go to a doctor in order to figure out what these symptoms mean, or what you know, what foods or herbs or or substances might help you, and those were all centralized gatekeepers.
What AI achieves is mass decentralization through distribution of cognition, so you'll be able to answer all your questions that I just mentioned, all those examples.
You'll be able to do that on your desk or someday, you know, on a device in your pocket, or maybe at some point in the glasses you're wearing.
Not that i'm a big fan of augmented reality glasses everywhere, but that is coming, and a lot of people will be wearing those glasses, and they'll be connected to compute, even local compute.
So AI is incredibly powerful decentralizing technology, and that's a powerful thing.
As a result though, there are going to be many institutional failures that occur in society, and that's okay and that's what this special report is all about.
You know we should.
We should celebrate the failure of certain institutions.
You know corrupt systems nothing wrong with that.
So yeah, 2026 is going to be a really interesting year, for sure, and it's critical to protect your health, protect your assets, protect your attention and your focus.
You know, protect yourself from all the changes that are coming, make sure you've got backup food supplies, the whole deal, you know.
Backup medicine, become as self-reliant as you can, get as much off-grid as you can, and so much more.
Of course, we can help you do that with our store selection of many different solutions.
So shop with us at Healthrangerstore.com and we always appreciate your support.
And, as you know, we're dedicated to clean food, lab tested food, certified organic, pristine ingredients.
You read the ingredients on any of our products.
You're just going to be amazed at how clean they are, no artificial fragrances or colors or synthetic garbage or gmos or anything like that.
We have clean pristine, lab tested products, including supplements such as turmeric very popular and many others.
We've also got black cumin seed oil, which is a fan favorite, and many different formulations.
And and high-end clean whey protein and things like that.
So check it all out Healthrangerstore.com.
And again I thank you for your support.
We couldn't do it without you.
We couldn't build all these platforms and make all these things free if we didn't have your support Support.
So every time you shop with us, you're helping us make these things happen.
All right.
With that said, then let's do the institutional failures special report first, followed by the Bright Learn AI update, followed by the Doug Casey interview.
Enjoy the rest of the show, and I'll be back with you probably Monday.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.
Have a great weekend.
It's going to be a very interesting winter ahead.
And I want to encourage you to stay the course.
The fact that you're listening to this podcast means that you're on the right path of staying informed, getting as self-reliant as you can, having extra supplies stored up, focusing on decentralizing your life as much as you can, so that as systems fail out there, they don't harm you or they don't disconnect you from the things that you need.
And I think the theme of the next several years, under Trump, even in the United States, is going to be systemic failures of institutions.
We're going to see a currency failure at some point, probably not that far out, although I can't say when exactly.
We're going to see a currency failure.
We're going to see banks failing next year, for sure.
A lot of commercial lenders will fail.
And then consumer lenders will fail sometime before long after that as well.
So in order to insulate yourself from that, obviously, you want to have your own money supply, which is gold and silver or other forms of value for barter, things like that.
But you already know all that.
What I'm saying is there are going to be other failures, like failures of hospitals, failures of the medical system here and there.
Not all of it, but parts of it.
You're going to have failures in the power grid.
This is especially true in the eastern states, the 13 states that are on the eastern power grid, you're going to have blackouts.
You're going to have rolling blackouts on very cold days and next summer on very hot days.
The power grid will not be as reliable as it has been.
But also across the board, you're going to see failures in schools, education.
Why?
Well, because the current model of education is essentially obsolete because of the rise of AI, where you can learn anything at any time by just having an AI engine give you a curriculum, give you coursework, quiz you on any subject you want because it already knows all the subjects.
So schools as we know them are going to change dramatically.
Medicine is going to change.
Government's going to change.
Corporations are going to change.
Retail is going to change dramatically.
Local businesses will still exist, of course, because people still want to go out to eat or maybe browse a local bookstore, which is always enjoyable for me.
I love browsing bookstores.
So there'll be local businesses and auto mechanics and lawn care and laundromats and all kinds of things like that.
But there will be many businesses that exist today that will become rather obsolete.
Like some of those will be law offices, for example.
Who needs a law office when you can have an AI engine actually read all the documents and write up a letter?
And it's better than anything that a human lawyer could do because the AI engine knows the entire history of law.
And there are other examples like that.
And then eventually when robotics kicks in, you're going to have a lot of replacement on farms and agriculture and in retail.
And those local businesses that embrace AI robotics will probably do well and remain competitive.
But some of the businesses that don't have the capital or fail to embrace robotics, they're going to become obsolete pretty quickly.
So this is something to keep in mind.
In other words, you're going to see systems fail.
Some will crater.
Some will be reborn.
You know, there's going to be a combination of, you know, collapse and reform.
So a key factor in all of this is going to be resiliency, you know, sustainability.
Again, decentralization, getting off-grid as much as you can so that you're not dependent on these systems.
So I really want to encourage you, number one, use our online book generation engine at brighteonbooks.com, which is probably going to forward to a different domain name, just letting you know in advance.
But I'm going to be publishing books there or republishing books that I've written in the past, such as Resilient Prepping.
I'm going to republish that under the new system and make that available free of charge so you can download it and you can learn from that.
You can become more resilient, even if you're disconnected from centralized systems.
So use our book engine, build the books you want, download the books you want, build up a digital library.
And remember, that site is launching soon.
It's just a few days away at this point.
It's already generating books.
I'm just filling in sort of the fine-tuning details at this point, like how to package the PDF with footers at the appropriate place on the page, things like that.
You'll be able to use it.
You're going to love it.
But do everything you can in the near future to decentralize.
Have your own off-grid money, off-grid medicine, off-grid food, off-grid security, off-grid knowledge systems, which includes our AI engine that's decentralized from the main system.
Decentralize your life in every way you can, and that will make you resilient.
And it will probably make you happier too, just to not be dependent on central control systems.
Because while a lot of the country is going to end up on a UBI, universal basic income, and that's going to be controlled by the government that will determine how they can spend that money, well, you with your own gold or silver or Bitcoin or whatever you have or privacy coins, you won't be subject to the UBI.
You'll be able to survive based on what you've already set aside outside the system.
And that's key.
That's going to be survival right there.
So stay informed.
Use all the tools.
Thank you for listening.
I'm Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
And you can find all of our AI tools at brightion.ai.
Just go there.
And it links you to all our tools, brighton.ai.
And thank you for listening.
Take care.
Well, welcome to this Bright Learn update.
I'm Mike Adams, the developer of the BrightLearn engine.
And I've just got a quick technical update for you here, giving you some insight of what we're doing behind the scenes.
We ran into an issue that the popularity of the site has really exploded very rapidly.
We're rapidly approaching 10,000 books being published on the site, which is great.
We love it.
Over 3,000 authors, over 107,000 downloads of books.
I mean, it's a very popular engine.
People are loving it.
People are sharing the books.
It's a format that really makes sense to a lot of people.
And people are totally impressed by not only the, you know, the quality of the cover art, but also the quality of the writing and the research.
And I got to tell you, the research is only going to get better because I've had some other major breakthroughs on the data pipeline of, well, books and science papers both that are going to go into the index soon.
I've been able to increase the processing speed by about 40x for those books.
And it's very interesting reasons why, but it all has to do with AI breakthroughs and more efficient systems and lower cost of compute, things like that.
But anyway, what you need to know from a practical standpoint here is that for the next several nights, around midnight or after midnight Central Time USA, we're going to be doing some maintenance, which is we've had to expand to a larger, more robust external database.
And the reason is the database service that we were using was fine at small scale, but it could not handle the load.
And the load has been pretty intense with hundreds of database connections and a lot of data in and out, using a lot of CPUs to drive the database, not just the data itself, but a lot of compute on the SQL statements.
And that's because of all the things that we're doing in terms of regenerating covers and regenerating chapters and queuing books.
And, you know, the whole process is very data intensive, as you might imagine.
And as a result, we've blown away this smaller database.
And it has had a couple of hiccups that cause a few interruptions.
So I'm in the process of migrating to a larger enterprise scale external database with features like auto-scaling and better connection pooling capabilities, things like that.
So that migration is pretty complex.
Fortunately, I've got a lot of experience in this area.
And I know the process of doing this without breaking it.
Well, I should say without breaking it too badly.
It will break temporarily from time to time.
But I have to make all the code changes and everything.
Well, I mean, my AI agents are doing the grunt work, but I'm directing it.
And I'm doing this without bringing the service down.
So the service will stay up during this entire migration.
And the service will coexist, you know, with the new database that we're putting in place.
It will seamlessly take over with full synchronization.
Although, just as a caveat, I should say, if you are using this engine after midnight central time, there could be some glitches due to some restarts.
So just use with caution at that point.
Make sure you save your prompt so that if the book somehow, if it's in the process and it just gets clobbered, you can just restart it with a prompt.
And I also want you to know that if you're using a token with the Bright Learn engine, that token does not get used until the very last step after the book is created and published and posted online and the email is sent to you.
Only then is the token marked as used.
So if the book somehow fails during any of the creation and processing and anything, if you use a token for that book, that token is not used up.
That token is still good and you can restart the book with the same token.
So we did that on purpose so that people don't like lose tokens when bad things happen to books in the middle of database restarts and things like that.
So yeah, again, that's all by design.
And wow, as I'm watching the database migration here, it's really something.
Over 4,000 database connections are active right now just for the migration.
And it's cranking the hundreds of megabytes of data into the system right now.
We're doing a full migration and it is working.
So anyway, once this is all done and all the code is good, what you'll find is that the system is probably a little more responsive and it will have less downtime.
And it may speed the book creation time just slightly, but it's probably not noticeable as the main wait time on book creation is really waiting for LLMs to do the writing.
And there's only, you know, you can't just make that 10 times faster.
You have to wait for it.
So the other thing that is going to happen in 2026, which is going to be a really exciting year for Bright Learn, is that the, you know how currently there are 10,000 books and I don't know how many millions of other pages of other documents that you can use as reference material.
When you're choosing to create the book, you know, you can choose, I want to use the following as references.
It could be articles, it could be podcasts, could be interviews, or it could be books.
And the books are currently 10,000 books.
That number is about to take a huge, huge leap.
From 10,000 to, well, it just depends on how much time we want to go forward.
But by the end of this next year, it'll be 100,000 books easily.
It might be a couple hundred thousand books.
And the reason for that is I've achieved some really strong breakthroughs in book processing for the data pipeline.
And you might be able to hear some of my computer fans here.
Actually, it's funny because I'm running just one of the pilot dashboards on my desktop computer to keep an eye on it.
But even it is doing a ton of work.
So anyway, I've been able to do a really vast multi-threading of the normalization workers.
So a lot of steps to take book files and actually prepare them for reference material.
A lot of steps.
And it's not as easy as you think, especially when you don't even know what book it is at first because the file is not named correctly.
And you don't even know if it's fiction or non-fiction, etc., right?
And you don't know, was it scanned via OCR?
If so, it's full of OCR errors, things like that.
Or it may be a PDF that's just a bunch of OCR scans with no text, just images, and then you have to carry out OCR on it.
And then you have to fix all the OCR errors, etc., etc.
It goes on.
This process is something that I've really refined.
Through most of 2025, the data pipeline processes have become really fine-tuned, really well done.
Because since the summer of 25, I've been writing the code using mostly Opus 4.5 or whatever version was available before 4.5.
But it's Opus.
And Opus has been writing all the code, both for Linux systems and Windows systems.
They have a combination.
Some Windows and some Linux systems, mostly Linux for the hardcore processing, because Linux systems are much more reliable and they don't auto-update.
And the GPUs work better in Linux too, by the way.
So if you want to do what I'm doing, you should get Linux and don't even mess with Windows.
But anyway, we still have some legacy Windows systems that are running.
And so whenever I write code for data pipeline tasks, I have to write it in both Windows, Python, and Linux Python, which is not the same.
There are differences.
So anyway, the bottom line is, you are about to see, over the months ahead, you're about to see tens of thousands of new books coming online as research material that can be cited by your books.
So when you create a new book, instead of it just searching through 10,000 other books, it might be searching through 100,000 other books.
And that's a pretty big database function too, all by itself.
And just the fact that we'll be adding hundreds of thousands of books over time to the system for the research engine, that alone is a pretty big deal.
But then on top of that, we are preparing millions of science papers.
So even though more books will come online first, we're also processing science papers.
And the last count I took of the science papers that we have partially processed is 10 million.
10 million science papers across like all the mainstream journals.
And we are currently classifying those papers.
And shortly we'll be putting those through normalization and another layer of classification.
And then we'll be adding those to the engine very soon within a few weeks, I expect.
And that means then you'll be able to start selecting a checkbox for science papers.
And that way when you publish a book or you submit a book, the research engine will cite, you know, it'll go through millions of science papers in addition to tens of thousands of books.
But then just that alone means that the database that we use for those tasks has to, of course, be upgraded, not only to hold all of that material, because now we're starting to talk about terabytes of storage, okay?
You know, terabytes of storage.
This isn't small-scale stuff, right?
We're talking enterprise-level databases and enterprise-level storage.
And then when your storage gets bigger, your compute has to get bigger to sort through it all.
So it's kind of a domino effect.
When you start shoving millions of new documents into the system for indexing, then you have to upsize everything around it.
The whole infrastructure has to be upsized.
And even though you as the user, you don't see any of this behind the scenes, I do.
And I, I mean, I'm, you know, I have to monitor a lot of things to make sure it's all working well.
And so far it is working well.
But as we scale it, I want to make sure it continues to be fast.
And this, by the way, this is also the secret sauce of what makes the book so great.
Because anybody can go out and ask some AI engine, you know, ChatGPT, write me a short story or whatever.
Yeah, sure, it can do that, and it will suck.
And it won't be based on anything except the engine's internal knowledge, which is probably very badly biased if it's ChatGPT.
Whereas what our engine does is it does the research and then cites the documents that are related to each subchapter.
That's why our books are the best, that, you know, of any book creation engine that you could possibly think of, our books are the best books with the best references, etc.
And this is the reason why, and it's only going to get better.
It's because of all the citations, you know, all the documents that we have indexed.
So that is continuing.
And by the way, that alone, I don't know if you've been involved in any of the LLMs and purchasing hardware or using APIs or any combination of that.
But it's not inconsequential in terms of the cost to process 10 million science papers.
It's probably tens of thousands of dollars of ultimate cost in order to do that.
And the same thing with books.
So this isn't, it's not free to do this.
But it's something that I feel is really critical to the success of the engine.
And the other thing is that all this research, this goes into the same shared resource database that's used by our AI engine at brightu.ai.
So brightu.ai also does research in order to bring you answers to your questions.
Well, that research uses the same collection of documents.
So every time I put 10,000 more books into this engine, it benefits two applications, the BrightU.ai chatbot engine or research engine, as well as the brightlearn.ai book creation engine.
And in effect, it benefits some other services that we have internally and some we're going to roll out externally as well.
So it's a single source of curated knowledge that's used throughout our ecosystem to be able to bring you better answers, better books, better writing, etc.
And one more reason why this really matters is because in 2026, not only will there be a lot of auto translation of books into first Spanish and then French and then Chinese, I think, will be next.
But also we're going to be doing a lot more audio books, full-length audio books in some cases.
And then as the technology becomes available and affordable, then mini documentaries.
So that might be summer of 2026.
Who knows?
It might be late 2026.
Whatever it takes, that's on my list, is to be able to create three or four minute mini documentaries that are great video with narration, with full presentations, the whole thing, based on a book.
And those would be generated when your book hits a certain number of reads.
Just like currently when your book hits, well, you may not know this, when your book hits 300 reads, there's a mind map image that's generated for your book.
And that image, which is awesome, appears on the book homepage now.
And you can see it.
You can see examples of that by going to the site books.brightlearn.ai.
Click on the most popular button there on the homepage and click on any of those popular books.
And you'll see the mind map on the book homepage.
Well, those get generated automatically when you hit 300 reads.
And then when you hit 500 reads, then an audio podcast is generated for your book of about 15 minutes duration.
And currently it's set that when you hit 1,000 reads, your book gets auto-translated into Spanish, although I haven't yet turned on that feature.
There's some debugging and things like that to work on there.
And then when it hits another 1,000 views or reads, it'll be translated into French, etc.
And then perhaps when it hits, I don't know, 5,000 reads or whatever number we decide on, then a mini documentary video will be created for it.
And that will be viewable from the book homepage as well.
And ultimately where this is going, which is probably a couple of years away, just depends on AI breakthroughs, I suppose, is full-length documentary films based on your book.
So yeah, imagine taking your book, which was built based on your prompt, and then taking the whole book and turning it into a movie.
Yeah, a documentary.
And then having that documentary completely rendered from AI with everything from, you know, actors and dialogue and all the scenes and everything just completely created by essentially AI agents that are filmmakers and directors and producers, etc.
That's going to be a really interesting project.
And, you know, ultimately, Hollywood is obsolete.
I'm sure they see that coming at this point.
But, you know, people aren't, you're not going to have to go to a studio to make a movie.
All you need is competent AI engines and some breakthroughs in technology and some cost efficiencies and things like that.
But anyway, we'll be among the first to really explore that from the point of view of creating full-length films that teach people things.
So, you know, my goal is to teach people.
The Brightlearn.ai book website, it's about spreading knowledge and bypassing censorship and empowering people all over the world in different countries and different languages in different modalities, you know, text, audio, video, or podcast, audio books, mini documentaries, full-length documentaries, mind map images, etc.
So every different modality that human beings can understand, that's what we want to use, all of them, to help bring information to people.
And as a result, consumers will be able to get this information and learn these things in whatever way they want, in whatever format they want.
But you won't need to go to Hollywood.
You won't need to buy an audio book per se, at least not for instructional skills.
Now, there'll still be a market for certain audio books.
And there will still be a market for certain books published by people like, you know, autobiographies and things like that.
Or special analysis or celebrity books.
Or, I mean, there's all kinds of things, you know, photography books, right?
Lots of things where there's still going to be a market for regular books.
But nobody's going to need to buy a book to teach them something like, you know, how do I build farm tools?
Or how do I preserve food?
You know, because you'll be able to generate a book that tells you all that information expertly and at zero cost.
And that's what BrightLearn does.
And that's the whole point of it is it's not to, you know, not to replace the book industry, but rather to make the cost of learning zero so that everybody in every language in every country all over the world can learn everything they need without having to spend money.
Because previously the cost of an education, you know, college degree was very expensive.
And even myself, you may not know this about me, but I was accepted into MIT coming out of high school or actually after I took the college entrance exams in my junior year in high school.
I was accepted into MIT.
And actually, I mean, I had acceptance and invitation letters from all over the country.
I mean, you know, California schools plus MIT, Georgia Tech.
I mean, all kinds of schools, but I couldn't afford any of them.
So I know what it's like to, I mean, so I just went, I went to a university that I could afford because it was in my own state and I had scholarships there, et cetera.
But I couldn't afford to go to MIT, which at that time I was even told by an MIT advisor that met with me.
I was told that that would cost about $50,000 a year and, you know, for room and board plus the tuition books, the whole thing, 50 grand a year.
And that's in like 1988 or whatever the year was.
50 grand was a lot of money then, you know.
So, no, I couldn't afford to get an MIT education.
Today, because of the technology that I've developed with the help of AI, we can give everybody any education they need on any subject that they want at zero cost, whether it's chemistry or physics or mathematics or philosophy or history or engineering or business or, you know, whatever.
Or even if you just want to learn how to use AI, anything you want to learn, you can now learn for free.
So this is a game changer for our world.
For the first time, it means there's zero barriers for people to learn anything they want to learn at zero cost.
Well, I guess the only barrier is they have to be online.
They have to have access to the internet.
But that's the vast majority of the human population right now.
And those numbers are also increasing.
So if you have access to the internet, you can now learn for free.
You can get a college education for free, if not better than a college education, given the decline of Western universities and how little they teach people these days.
It's like wokeism 101.
That's what people graduate with.
That's kind of pointless, kind of useless in the real world.
If you want real world skills, then you can get them all for free now.
And so that's why I appreciate the fact that many homeschoolers are using our engine.
And I'm aware of some homeschooling organizations that are starting to advocate this engine for their teachers and students.
So think about it.
If you're a student, you can generate your own book.
Or if you're a teacher, you can generate a book for your students.
And then you can legally give all your students that book completely free because of the Creative Commons attribution licensing that we have.
So you can use these books commercially or non-commercially as long as you give credit to BrightLearn.ai.
So that empowers teachers.
It empowers students.
It empowers moms and dads who are doing homeschooling.
You can generate the coursework for an entire semester.
I mean, the possibilities are limitless.
So anyway, there you go.
A little bit of an update behind the scenes and some of the vision for 2026.
I appreciate your support.
And if you want to help support us in this project, it is currently fully funded by generous donations from HealthRangerStore.com, which is an online store of clean foods, health foods, superfoods, and supplements, and clean lab-tested personal care products.
It's a store that I founded.
So that's why it's called HealthRangerStore.com.
And we conduct lab testing and expert formulations completely free of synthetic fragrances or artificial colors.
We don't use GMOs.
We don't use aluminum in the deodorants.
Everything is ultra-clean.
So if you want to clean up your health and your products, shop at healthrangerstore.com.
And your purchases there not only will give you loyalty points that you can swap for book credits that you can use at brightlearn.ai, but also whatever profit we manage to earn helps us donate to brightlearn.ai so that we can keep this service free for you and everybody else who uses it.
So thank you for supporting us by shopping at healthrangerstore.com.
And thank you for using BrightLearn.ai and spread the word and keep on using it.
And together, we can inform and empower the whole world with free but valuable knowledge.
That's my vision.
So thank you for listening.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of BrightLearn.ai.
Take care.
Authorities and high government officials and those kind of people, especially people that work for the government, are the last people you should listen to.
They're actually not the worst kind of people who go to work for the government.
They're not entrepreneurs.
They're not risking their own money.
They're extremely overpaid.
And they're the kind of people that like to boss around other people, which makes them dangerous.
And you give them a little bit of power and they want more.
Okay, welcome to today's interview here on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
And it's extraordinary that as I'm recording this, and our special guest today is a legend in the area of metals and also sovereignty and so much more.
But silver has passed $71 per troy ounce today in Western markets.
So something is happening.
And I can't think of a better person to help explain what's happening and also the major changes coming for our world than Doug Casey himself, the international man as he's known.
And his website is internationalman.com.
And Doug Casey is just an extraordinary individual, a brilliant analyst and thinker.
And I'm honored to have him on the show today.
Welcome, Doug.
It's great to have you here.
Thanks, Mike.
I'm flattered, and it's a pleasure to be here.
Well, although for me, right now, Kira is on the farm in Uruguay.
What's on the farm?
I'm on the farm.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yeah, great.
Well, I love it.
And I mean, before I came here, I left my ranch.
And from the waist down, I'm still wearing ranch pants from this morning.
So, you know, you know how it is.
We live in both worlds.
Yeah, we do.
Actually, I could technically call this a ranch too, because we have about 150 cows.
But in Uruguay, you don't call them ranches.
You call them farms.
Oh.
Well, that sounds perfect, actually.
I love the fact that you're right there where the food is produced and you know so much about self-reliance.
But let's start with the opening topic, which is silver, something you've been advocating for for a very long time.
What do you think is happening in the global silver supply chain marketplace that's leading us to this $71 and still climbing?
Well, to put it in context, almost all the commodities are very cheap right now.
Starting a couple of years ago, some of them started perking up.
Cocoa went from $2,000 a ton to $8,000 or $10,000 a ton.
Coffee went from $1 to $3,000 or $4.
There were a few things like that.
But right now, relative to almost everything else, commodities are still, even after having made a fair recent run, are still close to their all-time lows.
So that's the context that we're looking at for silver.
And when we talk about silver, it has broken into a new all-time high because twice before silver hit $50 an ounce and then backed off a lot, like 90% both times.
But if silver were to go back to its previous all-time high in real terms, not just dollar terms, but because the dollar is always losing value, the dollar is a burning match.
silver would have to go back to $200 an ounce, would have to go $200 an ounce to actually reach its real previous all-time high.
So let me put it this way.
We're in the context of a major commodities bull market.
Silver is still way below its previous high in real terms.
And the world situation is extremely dangerous and volatile today.
It all adds up to me to being much higher silver prices and actually much higher gold prices and copper prices and everything.
That's a really grain prices, you name it.
Very important point because governments can print fiat currency, but they can't print the table of elements, it turns out.
And I want to distinguish this for our audience because you mentioned two previous times that silver hit $50, for example.
One of those famously was the 1980 Hunt Brothers attempt to corner the market.
But that was purely a single party attempting to buy up all the physical silver and to try to break the COMEX.
But then they, of course, they changed the rules and broke the Hunt brothers.
But this is totally different from that because now we're talking about unprecedented industrial demand from everything from solar panels to AI data centers to telecom weapons.
And then now this new Samsung battery technology, the silver cathode anode that's going to go online into production in 2027, which will need tens of millions of ounces of silver every year that do not exist as excess in the system right now.
So isn't that true that the industrial drivers right now are unprecedented?
Yeah, it is true.
And looking at some supply and demand statistics, it said that there's about 850 million ounces of silver that are produced every year.
But for the last several years, there's been a significant deficit of new production over use.
And right now, about 300 million ounces are being taken out of inventory every year for silver.
So that's probably the current driver.
The last several years has been a deficit in supply-demand production.
And right now, it's very significant.
And talking about silver, I've always been a big fan of silver.
As one of the 92 naturally occurring elements, it has some unique properties.
And one of them is that it's the most electrically conductive of all the elements.
And it's the most optically reflective of all of the elements.
So this makes it unique in a high-tech world.
It's also true.
I mean, that's a critical point, which is that it's not, it can't be easily substituted by some other mineral or metal.
But I mean, that's critical because, and as our audience knows, the vast majority of silver production right now is a byproduct of other types of mining, you know, lead or iron or nickel or whatever.
And then they get silver as a result, or even gold mining, they get silver as a result in some cases.
It's gold, copper, and lead and zinc are trade for.
So I saw that Samsung did a deal to reopen this mine in Mexico called La Parilla.
And this mine had been closed for many years.
And Samsung is going to get 100% of the mine's output to funnel into their battery production beginning in 2027.
But they're going to open the mine, I think, in 26 next year and start stockpiling that silver for their battery production.
Isn't that interesting that you're now seeing industry go directly to the mines to get silver?
Yeah, I think it is, actually.
But it's nothing new.
Henry Ford did that with rubber in Brazil back in the early days of the car and so forth.
It's kind of like farm to table when it comes to food, doing the same thing with the metallic elements.
So it's predictable, but especially in the kind of world we live in today, where the supply chains from one country to another are less certain than they were even a few years ago.
So that if you want to keep your business going, it's probably wise to make sure that you have all the elements that you need along the way and not have to rely on the broad market.
Right, right.
And especially in this age where you have, and I'm going to take this into the political realm a little bit, you have the Trump administration emotionally slapping tariffs all over the place where domestic businesses can't plan, they can't get supplies, it's very difficult.
Even for our company, just trying to get turmeric from India is now a lot more expensive.
It seems like, well, I'd like your comments on the fact that sort of the world is becoming more isolationist, especially the West, and cutting off many of the supply chains that actually feed consumers and industrial processes in Western countries.
And this is going to be a problem, I think.
But what are your thoughts?
Well, you're absolutely correct.
When a government makes an enemy of another government, it's the little people that live in these countries that are the ones that get hurt, that actually need things that cross.
Look, this whole thing you mentioned earlier, Trump and his tariffs, which are economically completely idiotic.
And it's been said correctly that it was the tariffs that were placed on the economy by Herbert Hoover that set off the Great Depression, that made it much, much worse.
And the thing to remember is that there was much less trade internationally in the late 20s and the 30s than there is now, vastly less.
There was very little ship by air.
It wasn't in any way comparable the amount of trade in those days to what we have today.
So we've gone from a place where because the Guatemalans can make bananas much cheaper than people in Detroit can, that's pretty obvious.
And people in Detroit can make Chevrolets much cheaper than Guatemalans can.
It makes sense to let them trade with each other.
But if they both put 100% tariff on both of their products, there's not going to be any cars in Guatemala and there's not going to be any bananas in Detroit.
Now, I give you that analogy because that's the way it works for every product to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the dynamics of the market and depending on the amount of tariffs that are placed on.
But what Trump has done, thinking, you know, it's funny.
I don't want to venture into politics because that's A, pointless, and B, it gets people hot under the collar.
But I was so happy when Harris and that moron that she ran with, whatever his name was, lost because they were actually communists.
I mean, as far as their views.
So I was happy that Trump would win and some of the things that he wanted to do.
But way back in 2012, I wrote an article explaining Trump when I said that he has no philosophical center.
He has no core beliefs, nor does he have any understanding of economics, despite the fact that he can be shrewd and he's been good at borrowing and manipulating debt and all that as a businessman.
But I'm afraid that Donald has gotten out of control.
He's turned into a megalomaniac, a narcissist, and is taking all kinds of powers onto himself that some of these things I approve of.
We can talk about that.
That's arbitrary.
I approve, I disapprove, who cares.
But speaking as an economist, he's trying to transform himself, it seems, into a new Roman empire, emperor.
And maybe he thinks he's doing that, and maybe he is, in order to save the country, which is clearly on the slippery slope anyway.
That's also true.
Well, let's delve into this effort to save the country a little bit more because we are dealing with a population in America now because of the failed education system, which you have also rightly criticized for many years.
We're dealing with a population where now, and I'm reading the statistics from National University here.
You can show my screen.
About 130 million U.S. adults, that's 54% of U.S. adults, read below a sixth grade level.
Okay.
I mean, one out of every two U.S. adults roughly is illiterate, functionally illiterate.
Now, I mean, which by itself is just shocking.
I mean, those are third world country statistics.
But when Trump says, and I love the fact that he wants, he's trying to be optimistic about reforming America, et cetera.
But when Trump says, oh, we're going to reindustrialize America, we're going to build the factories here and re-engage all the workers.
My question is, how do workers work in factories if they can't read?
Number one.
You know, I mean, it seems like you can't just plug factories back into this situation.
What's your take?
Well, yeah, I'm afraid that Donald is very naive at that.
It's not just the point that you just made, but there have got to be some changes made from the bottom up.
In other words, government is basically at cause for the exit of industry from the U.S. There's been way, way too much regulation in the U.S. People want to get away from that.
Taxes are way too high.
Those are the two big things.
And of course, the unions in the U.S. have always worked hand in glove with the government and have made things much higher than they should be, to the benefit of union members, but to the disadvantage of everybody who can't get into a union and also to the public at whole.
So that's why industry has left the U.S. over the last at least 50 years.
The way to get it back into the U.S. is to change those things.
Totally deregulate, radically reduce taxes, and make the country more stable so that you're not subject to the arbitrary whim of a bureaucrat or a president as far as what's going to happen.
Look, in the mining business, where I've been actively involved for many years, it can take decades from the time that you find a deposit of a valuable mineral in the U.S., decades to get approvals and permits and everything that you need before you can even start breaking ground for a new mine.
And then if you do that after investing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, that's when your trouble has really started here in the U.S.
I mean, that's when the NGOs will attack you and the native groups will attack you and the Greens are going to attack you and the local government will look at you as being a milk cow.
So of course there's industry has exited the U.S.
Yeah, and it's interesting because some of those groups you just mentioned, they will push out really contradictory messages like, we should all be driving EVs and we need better range for the EVs.
Well, that means you're going to need these silver-based batteries, which means you're going to need to mine silver.
But then those same people say, well, we shouldn't do any mining, though.
So what do you want?
Magical cars?
You want, how about just a magic flying carpet?
How about that?
Because that's more likely than your magical cars.
You know, they're not rational.
And I've noticed that in your own podcast, the number one thing that you do that infuriates people is to exercise rationality.
Well, yeah, we don't all know everything about every subject.
But what we can do is take a critical thinking approach to things and ask questions and demand logical answers as to why things are the way they are.
That's how you educate yourself, quite frankly.
I don't think people do that so much anymore.
They assume that authorities, and I put that in question quotations, yes, authorities and high government officials and people with degrees know what's best for them.
Actually, those kind of people, especially people that work for the government, are the last people you should listen to.
You know, they've tried to say that the government has the best and brightest people working for it, but that's not true.
It's not true.
They actually are the worst kind of people that go to work for the government.
They're not entrepreneurs.
They're not risking their own money.
They're extremely overpaid.
And they're the kind of people that like to boss around other people, which makes them dangerous.
And you give them a little bit of power and they want more.
So actually, there are a lot of things in the American culture that are going to have to be reformed before America returns to what it was, a good place to do business, which it's really not anymore.
Just 200 other countries in the world, and a lot of them have more educated populace with better habits and less restrictions on trying to create more wealth.
So this is why the standard of living in the U.s.
Even by official counters of standard of living have been dropping for years by some uh there are several organizations that that do surveys of what the standard of living of the average guy in the these various countries Are.
And the U.S. has fallen from being number one or two always in the past.
Now we're four, five, ten, as low as 12 on some of these surveys.
And we're dropping at this point as the dollar loses value, which is really one of the very biggest things, which I haven't even mentioned so far.
I mean, well, and I also want to take us back to the education component here very quickly and what a failure that's been and the ramifications for our country, because you and your co-host, Matt Smith, you have created a very popular book called The Preparation.
And I love this book.
Can you hold it up?
Yes.
Perfect.
Like any good authority.
There we go.
What this book is all about is, look, everybody knows that college has become beastly expensive.
It's unaffordable.
This is why if you want to go to college, you've got to borrow tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it.
That didn't used to be that way, and it's wrong, but it's worse than that because it's not just taking on an albatross that you'll wear around your neck for years or decades into the future to pay it off, but college is a negative value.
That's a really critical point, and you're right about that.
Please.
Colleges have been captured by the radical left, have been captured by Marxists, statists, collectivists, all of the professors there.
And I speak as somebody who was at one point a trustee of a college.
I was a trustee of the 10th oldest college in the country for five years, actually.
So I'm speaking firsthand.
But you're going to learn very little of value in college, nothing that's of any use when you get out of college, unless you take a STEM degree, science, technology, engineering, math.
Let's put that in a separate bucket.
But that's only like 10 or 15% of the people that go to college today.
And most of the people that get those degrees, or I don't know what the exact percentage is, but a large number of them are students from foreign countries that are coming to do the lab work and the science and technology.
Our students are taking things like sociology and politics and gender studies and psychology, things that are actually of negative value that clutter their minds up.
So what we did in this book is, first of all, explain to kids, especially young men, because it's the young men that are most in trouble at this point, why they should not misallocate four years of time and a bunch of money going to college, how they can get a better education in the classical sense, all the things that you should learn in college without going to college.
Explain that, but also what you should do in that four-year period of time.
We've divided it up into 16 quarters, and we call them cycles.
And in each quarter, you will learn a practical skill in a serious way.
For instance, one quarter, you might learn to be a welder.
And we show you where to go to the school and so forth.
Another quarter, you might learn to be how to build a house from the foundation on up.
Another quarter, you might learn how to sail a ship.
My co-author's son, Maxim, spent several weeks sailing from the Falkland Islands to Chile around Cape Horn and becoming a competent sailor.
Wow.
Another thing that you learn to do is defend yourself.
And actually, next week, he's going off to Thailand for three months to learn to become a competent Muay Thai fighter.
That's the idea that, and this goes to business too.
Several quarters are, in effect, better than getting an MBA degree.
Yes.
So following the instructions and doing the things we tell you in this book, where you do it, how much it costs and so forth, you'll actually have the equivalent of a law degree, an MBA, a science degree, a humanities degree, plus lots and lots of practical skills, like I've just mentioned.
It can be done.
So you get out of college and you won't just be indebted and fat, drunk, and stupid, which most college kids are.
And totally indoctrinated.
Exactly.
But the idea is you should be able to transform yourself into a Renaissance man, able to do anything and go anywhere.
Well said.
That's what the book's all about.
All right.
Let me plug the book again.
It's called The Preparation.
Here it is on Amazon.
And it's at other booksellers as well.
There's also an audio book available now.
It's called The Preparation, How to Become Competent, Confident, and Dangerous.
And it's Doug Casey and Matt Smith, who we also interviewed with his son on this topic.
And that was a very popular interview as well.
You can check that out.
Doug, I want to mention something else that has also happened that is relevant to what you just said, where a university education is now essentially obsolete.
So in the last month, we launched this website called brightlearn.ai and where anybody can instantly create any textbook or how-to book on any topic they want completely free of charge.
And we've had 7,700 books published.
That's marvelous.
Yeah, and they're all free.
They're all free to download.
And we're generating audio books starting next month.
Those will also be free.
And then Spanish translations are coming next, also free.
So what I'm saying to young men or young people is anything you want to learn now, all you have to do is make a decision to learn it.
You can create a book or you can use the book.
You mentioned the preparation.
You can find an apprenticeship somewhere.
You can learn a skill.
You can get a four-year degree in less than one year by focusing on learning and not wasting time with all the indoctrination.
And then you can become a real person, not a fake shadow of a person, which is what's coming out of our universities.
You know what I'm saying?
That's right.
And it's not just helping yourself, which is critical, but Western civilization itself is in trouble and is on the slippery slope at this point.
And charity begins at home.
And if you like the good things that Western civilization has brought to the world, and frankly, that's to say almost everything that's good in the world has come from the West, which runs totally counter to the propaganda that we're fed in the media and in colleges and so forth.
By transforming yourself and becoming rich and competent yourself, you'll help hopefully turn around the slipslide of our own civilization.
Yes, yes.
And I love the fact that you have been consistently teaching these principles for decades.
And I want to bring attention to your website, internationalman.com.
Can you walk people through also the other things that you offer there at your site?
Well, I call it internationalman.com because I've traveled to, I'm not sure, over 155, probably over 160 different countries in the world.
I've lived in 12 different countries.
Right now, I'm speaking to you from my farm in Uruguay, like I said.
So part of what the internationalman.com is about is making the world your oyster.
You don't want to act like a potted plant.
That's not a good survival strategy for a human being where you find yourself one place and you stay there.
I mean, you should take advantage of everything the world has to offer.
And for that, you have to get out.
We have some great writers, including David Stockman, who ran things during the economic part of the Reagan presidency.
It's free and it's a great site.
Everybody should subscribe to it, quite frankly.
Yeah, you're going to learn a tremendous amount of information that will help you understand the trends that are coming.
And I would also say, Doug, that you've been proven correct again and again on the overall trends.
And you're also very cautious.
You tend not to make timed calendar date predictions because that's always a dangerous business.
But the overall trends have very much moved in the direction that you have been warning about or sometimes talking about opportunities as well.
For example, your discussions about mining companies.
If people had heeded your advice and wanted an investment, some of those mining companies have already paid off.
And I think the valuations have only just begun.
You want to talk about the mining interest for a moment?
Yeah.
Well, mining is whenever I talk to conventional, legitimate financial people, I have to explain myself.
How did I ever get into the mining business and the mining finance business?
Because it's a very dangerous part of the market.
It's the most volatile part of the entire stock market.
It's a teeny weeny part of the stock market.
Mining stocks in the past have been as much as 20% of the stock market.
Now, they're like 1%.
Nobody owns them.
Nobody likes them.
Everybody knows that miners rape Mother Earth and exploit the natives.
Horrible business.
In addition to the fact that young people don't want to get into mining anymore because who wants to go out and play in the dirt with big yellow trucks when you can make zillions of dollars moving digits around on your computer?
So it's a very unloved business right now.
And this relates to commodities being inordinately cheap right now.
These are two reasons why I'm looking for a huge upvaluation, both in commodities and in the companies that mine them.
And they are very volatile.
I particularly like gold because what's happening to the dollar, I'm afraid the dollar, it's a one-way street to zero at this point.
I think it's beyond redemption with the national debt, acknowledged national debt.
The actual national debt is not just $38 trillion.
It's three or four times that much when we add in the liabilities from Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare, which aren't officially, they're liabilities, but they're not officially counted in the national debt.
Now, the dollar is on its way to zero.
And the problem is for Americans is that everything they own is denominated in dollars.
And if they produce more than they consume, which we all try to do, and save the difference, what do you save in?
You save in dollars.
But if those dollars are inflated away on you, you're in trouble.
This is why third world countries with unstable currencies never get anywhere.
Because the average guy, if he's productive and tries to makes money, tries to save it, what can he save it in?
You can't save it in pesos or dirhams or any of these other crazy fiat currencies around the world.
And the same thing could happen to the U.S.
And it's going to destroy middle-class society in the U.S.
So what do you do about it?
Well, that's why I've saved in gold and to a lesser degree, silver, for my entire life.
I've never sold any ever because it's savings.
On the other hand, in the stock market, when I play in the stock market, and I do a lot, my specialty is mining stocks because nobody else looks at them.
They're hated and they tend to be cheap.
And right now, they're at about the cheapest level in history with gold at $4,500.
The industry-wide cost to produce an ounce of gold for producing companies is about $1,500 an ounce.
That means every ounce of gold that you mine is $3,000 right to the bottom line.
But the prices of the stocks don't reflect that for the reasons I mentioned earlier.
I mean, they're considered poisonous.
Nobody wants to own them.
You know, it's funny.
They used to say, you know, hey, that's like having a gold mine.
But no, having a gold mine is just like having a huge liability.
But you know, there's capitalism.
There's a line in the famous movie Idiocracy where the character says, I like money.
But apparently some people don't like money when it's tied to minerals, you know, metals, gold and silver and copper.
And yet, these are the things that drive all the technologies that consumers want to use and experience.
So there's got to be a great reckoning coming here at some point.
Well, I think there is.
And the public is very uninvolved, not only in gold and silver.
They don't understand that gold and silver are money.
The dollar is just a fiat substitute for money.
But the companies that mine it are very, very cheap and very, very volatile.
We're not talking about multi-trillion dollar market capitalizations.
We're not talking about multi-billion dollar.
A lot of these companies are, they're not small caps.
They're not micro caps.
They're nano caps.
They're so small.
And in the past, many have gone 100 to 1 or even 1,000 to 1, not over the course of a lifetime, but over the course of three or four years.
That's how volatile they are.
And they've really been doing well for the last year.
But I think they're going to be doing very well for several years to come, maybe more.
And the public isn't even involved.
doesn't even know they exist today.
So, yeah, I think it's the place to be as a speculator.
And unfortunately, as governments destroy their currencies, and since all the governments in the world, including the U.S. government, are terminally bankrupt, they can't borrow the money.
They can't really tax it so much anymore.
They will print it up.
And that's what's going on.
So this augurs well for gold, silver, other commodities, and the companies that produce them.
That's the basic argument.
You mentioned earlier that you believe the dollar is headed towards zero.
And that definitely fits the historical pattern of fiat currencies.
They all end up there sooner or later, it seems.
There's no U.S. president in our lifetimes that is actually that has sworn off currency printing.
They all print, every one of them, including Trump today.
Not just including Trump.
Trump thinks it's a good idea.
Yeah, yes.
And artificially low interest rates plus money printing.
I mean, talk about that.
Trump is installing people in the Fed that he can control, clearly.
And he's pushing his policies, which are very cheap money, low interest rates, while he's trying to keep 10-year bond yields also very, very low to refinance the debt.
But it seems to me, increasingly, this system, I keep thinking it's very close to fracturing in some way.
But I thought that in 2008 also with the subprime mortgage collapse.
Can this system continue to have a heartbeat for another decade?
Yeah, that's a very good question because I've been around for long enough to know that even during the 70s, people were talking about, hey, this can't go on.
The sucker is going to blow.
And we have bad recessions and a recovery, another bad recession and a recovery.
Okay, can this go on indefinitely?
I don't think it can, because all the while, the debt of the federal government has been going up, now, so that now the amount of interest, even at these artificially low interest rates, and they are artificially low right now, is greater than the so-called defense budget.
So this is, it's unstoppable.
And at the same time, people demand more.
As their standards of living go down, they demand more from the government.
So no, I think we're very close finally to the edge of the precipice.
Well, and that's fascinating to hear that.
And it reminds me of your book, The Preparation, because a lot of younger people today, let's say young men and women in their 20s, they really don't see any future for themselves.
They don't see a financial future.
And that's why they're getting, what's it called, the food delivery service, Uber Eats or whatever.
They're overpaying for food.
They're financing their meals with eat now, pay later, which seems like a horrible idea.
Talk about depreciation, you know, of, you know, it must be very depressing for them.
And that's why they're doing that, because the attitude is eat, drink, and be merry, right?
Because tomorrow we die.
Or tomorrow, maybe we have a nuclear war and it all comes to an end.
or tomorrow the whole thing blows up, so you might as well enjoy it.
That is the attitude.
America's, especially young people, it's not a question of the long-term values and thinking that way, it's short-term values increasingly, which is natural and normal when you can't save and you can't plan because of regulations and inflation and there's nothing left after taxes.
And why bother?
Because you'll get it all free from Uncle Sugar anyway.
Look, the whole society has become corrupt.
And I speak as somebody that absolutely loves America.
America isn't a place.
It's an idea.
And not only was the greatest idea in the history of countries, but it was the greatest country as a place.
But that's all changed, especially over the last 50 years.
Everything changes.
I mean, I started feeling this way probably when I read Edward Gibbon's decline and fall of the Roman Empire many years ago.
And it occurred to me that the second law of thermodynamics, which says that everything falls apart and disintegrates and becomes corrupt over time, is also tree of countries.
And it's happened to America.
Yeah.
Well, and the opportunity to get ahead now does seem so fleeting to the younger generation.
I remember when I bought my first house, I took out a 15-year loan on it.
I bought a house that I could afford.
I saved and I paid extra, paid extra, paid extra.
I lived beneath my means.
I had the house paid off in five years.
And that was the last time I ever had any debt in my life.
Now, today, but even then, that was rare.
But today, it's practically impossible because of the cost of living and the amount that a young person would make being an Uber driver or working a job, even at $20 an hour, by the time you pay food and health insurance and your phone bill or whatever, what do you have left for housing?
You literally can't afford housing if you're participating in the system like that.
Well, you're right.
And a lot of young people today have to do gig jobs, drive Uber or deliver food or things of that nature.
Why is that?
It's because they don't have any particular skills.
And to have a particular skill, you have to learn the skill.
And you can't rely on somebody else to give you a job.
I mean, the whole concept of working for somebody else, that's not a lifetime thing.
Look, there's an infinite demand.
I know it doesn't seem this way to people out there sometimes, but there's an infinite demand for goods and services in the market.
Everybody wants as much as they can.
So theoretically, you can work 24-7 supplying goods and services to other people out there because everybody wants stuff, including your labor.
Problem is, is you're not going to get a good buck for your labor unless you've got skills.
And people don't learn skills today, okay?
Certainly not in college.
They get academic knowledge that's not even useful academic knowledge that helps them to think.
It's bullshit academic knowledge that is created artificially by professors.
You can only get hired by either another college or the DEI department of a corporation, you know, just to underscore your point.
Those skills don't translate into the real world.
And I know a lot of entrepreneurs in the AI space, by the way.
And I would say that AI technology opens up a lot of doors of opportunity for young people today.
But I know a lot of people in AI, they skip college now.
They openly talk about skipping the university.
I'm not going to waste four years because in four years, the whole world's going to be different because of this technology.
They're skipping college and they are being way more successful as a result.
And isn't, I mean, could you talk about your views on just AI as an enabler of innovation?
For example, it's so much easier to launch a business today, an online business, compared to 10 or 20 years ago.
I mean, it's almost effortless compared to the way it was back when I was trying to launch businesses.
Talk about AI and that tech.
Well, AI is a double-edged sword.
From a financial market point of view, the time to have gotten into AI with your investment dollars, I think that's past.
There's a mania.
There's a bubble in AI financed by debt and crazy accounting and people spending not just billions, but tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars to build more AI factories and so forth.
I think we're in a bubble like we saw, we've seen several times before with computers and then the internet and then it's one thing.
It's one thing after another.
It's too late.
I'm just talking as somebody that watches markets, too late to mess around with AI from AI stocks like NVIDIA, et cetera.
Yeah, exactly.
So to add to that, though, I think you're right that people are too much focused on NVIDIA, not realizing that for NVIDIA to function, they're going to need copper and silver and steel and nickel to build the data centers that run the NVIDIA chips.
So we're back to that same thing.
That's right.
And those things are all cheap and necessary.
So, you know, this moving paper fantasy will go from technology stocks in AI to people saying, wait a minute, we actually need real stuff, the kind of stuff that you make buildings out of and that you make knives and forks out of and so forth.
Right.
So cyclically, it's going to come into basic resources.
And as volatile as these stocks are and as cheap as they are, I actually think that the mining business, which is held in low repute by most people for the reasons I've mentioned before, it could be good for 10 to 1.
And at some point, some years from now, a few years from now, you're going to hear people talking about it at cocktail parties.
That'll be the time to sell.
Just like now is the time to sell AI stuff.
They're talking about it at cocktail parties.
Everybody's putting every nickel and dime that they can into it.
It's a classic top of a bubble.
In fact, the whole economy is what I think we would call everything bubble, driven by borrowed money.
You can't buy a house.
You can't sell a house today unless you have a mortgage or somebody else can get a mortgage to buy it.
So the housing market, the whole real estate market is walking on air at this point.
It could collapse.
Well, and let me add that the AI hardware industry is also walking on the thin ice known as the power grid infrastructure in America.
As you are no doubt well aware, in San Francisco, the power went out the other day for 130,000 people.
The entire eastern U.S. grid serving 13 states, they have zero excess power.
If you build a data center, you have to bring your own power somehow.
The wait time on gas turbines is up to 10 years, depending on the size.
The time to build a nuclear power plant is 15 plus years for planning and regulation and construction, everything.
Solar, you know, depends on silver.
So yeah, you can buy solar panels.
You're going to need silver.
So talk to us about the America's, really, it's a failing power infrastructure that the AI layer is built on top of that has me very concerned about the reliability.
Well, the solution to all of the power problems that exist is nuclear power.
Nuclear is the safest, the cheapest, and the cleanest form of mass power generation with no exceptions.
I know that sounds very controversial to say, and I can explain why I say that.
And not only that, but the technology of generating nuclear has been advancing tremendously, although putting the theory into practice has been very hard because of the unbelievably stringent regulations for building a nuclear power plant.
We should have, well, we could have nuclear power plants that are the size of trucking containers that could generate enough megawatts to power a small city, buried for 10 years, completely safe, very, very cheap, and as many of them as you want.
I mean, that's very, very close.
It's here.
Yeah, we had small nuclear reactors.
Submarines and ships for decades, of course.
Absolutely.
I just want to mention to the audience, small modular reactors, there's a number of companies that have that tech.
You're exactly right.
And I believe those can produce up to 300, 400 megawatts, something like that, which is really substantial.
But you're right.
The regulatory environment doesn't allow this to happen quickly, whereas China can build a large-scale fission-based nuclear power plant in about five years.
It's up and running.
In America, it takes us triple or quadruple that time.
Yeah, everything takes three or four or five or 10 times longer in the U.S. for because of regulations, because of, well, it's mainly regulations more than anything else.
Yeah.
Frankly, the competent bureaucrats.
But one way to play nuclear, and of course, there are small modular reactor companies, but they've been discovered.
They're not cheap.
It's why I'm a fan of uranium, which is what you need to power.
Of course, once again, if we had a completely free market, we'd probably not be using uranium now anyway.
We'd be using thorium, but that's a totally different subject.
We're using uranium and will be for some time to come.
It's also a very volatile part of the market.
There are scores of small uranium companies out there that are very cheap.
I loved.
Another area.
Well, yeah, I completely agree with you.
I've also researched this extensively, and I understand there's really only one, maybe two uranium enrichment operators in the United States, which means that we still depend on Russia for the enrichment of uranium.
And then, you know, Trump's got the tariffs.
Well, not just Trump, but Biden, the SWIFT system.
You can hardly buy anything from Russia except uranium.
You're still allowed to buy uranium that's enriched from Russia because without Russia's uranium, the U.S. nuclear industry would collapse.
I know it's all really quite crazy.
And if it's crazy, the relationship of the U.S. and Russia today, the relationship of the European Union and Russia is totally and absolutely insane.
Yeah.
I mean, the Europeans are plumping for a war with Russia, doubling their military budgets.
I mean, that's just what we need is World War III on top of everything else.
And of course, these poor Europeans are de-industrializing.
They don't have any natural gas within Europe.
Well, and what they do, they're shutting down.
And they're not importing any from Russia.
They're acting run by sociopaths that are actually criminally insane.
I completely agree.
The European countries are led by what I would call a suicide cult of absolute lunatics in Brussels and the EU, etc.
But anyway, look, we're almost out of time here, Doug.
I want to give you a chance to add anything here that you think we've missed or we'll mention your website again.
But what would you like to leave our audience with here today?
Well, we're in for tough times.
They've been building up with a form of delayed momentum for decades, but we're at the edge now.
I think we're going to enter upon something that I call the Greater Depression.
It's going to be longer and different than what we had from 1929 to 1946.
Yeah, because back in 29, people could read.
That's right.
And the way to prepare for that is to don't act conventionally.
Learn to be a speculator.
Learn to find distortions in the market so you can take advantage of them.
Try to produce more than you consume and set aside the difference in the safest place you can think of.
And that's not a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar.
And actually, the most important thing is to prepare yourself so that to ensure that you have the skills that you need so that no matter what happens in the future, how the chips may fall, you'll be able to act as an entrepreneur and survive and prosper.
That's what most people don't think of.
Don't think of looking for a job.
God forbid.
It's the skills in your hands and the knowledge in your head that makes you valuable, not the ability to fill out an employment form, which is what most people think of.
Yeah, that's the best advice ever.
Yeah, you can't depend on someone else's approval or permission to protect yourself and your assets and your interests in the years ahead.
Yeah, but it takes work.
So you can't go to the bar and drink beer with the boys.
You can't go to your mom's basement and play video games all day.
You've got to qualify yourself to do things.
And I think most people are too lazy, or perhaps most people think, well, worst case, I can always go on the dole.
I mean.
Well, our audience, of course, is the exception to that.
They are the people that always, they keep learning, they keep advancing.
And I want to encourage them to visit your website, internationalman.com, where they can subscribe and they can stay informed using your financial analysis and your latest updates and so on, your insights that will help them tremendously.
And Doug, I just want to thank you for taking time during this holiday season to spend an hour with us.
It's been an honor to speak with you, and I hope you'll come back in 2026 and give us an update.
Well, I really appreciate that, Mike.
And a Merry Christmas to you too.
Merry Christmas.
All right.
Thank you, Doug.
Enjoy the rest of your day there on the farm.
Have fun.
And for those of you watching, there you go.
Doug Casey, the International Man, extraordinary wisdom.
Share this interview with everyone who could benefit from it.
And you can find this interview on, of course, Brighteon.com, but also Rumble as well and some other sites.
So thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams here, the founder of Brighteon.
And Merry Christmas to all of you.
And looking forward to a wonderful year in 2026 of great abundance for those of you who heed the advice of Doug Casey.
And you're going to do well next year, whereas not everybody's going to be in that boat.
So knowledge and action will spell the difference.
Thank you for watching today.
Take care.
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