BBN, Dec 29, 2025 - Skyrocketing Silver Rattles World Markets as Corporations Say NO NEW JOBS in 202
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Welcome to Brighton Broadcast News for Monday, December 29th, 2025.
I'm Mike Adams.
Thank you for joining me today.
Got a number of updates for you, but of course we're going to start with what's happening with the metals, silver, the financial markets.
Now, I'm going to give you this in two parts because it's kind of unusual.
I'm recording this earlier than usual before the overseas markets open on Sunday night.
Thus, I don't have the knowledge of what you are seeing right now, what's happening on Monday morning or Monday midday.
So I will record another segment after the markets open and add that update to this.
But here's what's important to understand.
So, first of all, what's happening with silver could really break.
There could be systemic institutional failures in the Western financial system because of what's happening with silver.
I'm going to explain how that can happen.
Now, last Friday, of course, silver went up to, in the Western markets, $79.29.
In Shanghai, it was even higher than that.
It was probably, I'm guessing, I don't have the exact numbers.
It must have been $85 or something in that range or $86.
And some people said that on the street, the cost to buy physical silver in Shanghai, as we say in the West, was over $90 per troy ounce equivalent, although they sell it in grams there in China.
That's all true, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Western markets are going to hit the same numbers.
So let me give you an analysis of what's actually bound to happen here.
But understand, silver is skyrocketing not because of speculation.
It's skyrocketing because of industrial demand.
And importantly, beginning January 1st, China is going to be restricting exports of silver in order to preserve its own silver supply for its domestic industry.
Its domestic industry consists of solar panels, of course, and robotics and drones and electronics and telecom gear, medical gear, all kinds of things that use silver.
And given that there's basically a global run on physical silver, there's physical silver scarcity that's worsening, China is doing this to protect its domestic industrial producers so they have the silver to be able to manufacture and export their products.
This is going to mean increased silver scarcity outside of China.
And you may recall that recently Trump declared silver to be a critical resource.
Is that the term that he used?
A strategic resource?
Basically, he put silver in the bucket of special protections, recognizing how critical it is to the future of our country for things like data centers.
And yes, solar panels and electronics and military weapons and cruise missiles, etc.
It's critical.
And there's just not enough silver in the world to go around right now.
So the silver physical scarcity, as I talked about last week and the week before, is the key issue driving silver demand.
That's what's pushing the price up.
It's not speculation.
This isn't 1980.
It's not the Hunt Brothers, etc.
Now, I believe that silver prices have been suppressed for many long years, at least since 2011, probably longer than that.
They've been suppressed by the banks working with government to keep silver artificially low, to make the dollar look good, and also lately to allow the wealthy elite insiders to acquire as much physical gold and silver as they could get their hands on.
And you saw that roughly almost a year ago, or in early 2025, a huge rush to purchase and acquire physical silver.
There were plane loads of it being shipped from London as it was brought to New York.
That went into the hands of, well, certain people, but probably also restocking some of the gold at the Fed and things like that or the Treasury.
We'll see.
But the price has been suppressed through paper markets all these years.
Well, the paper markets are no longer able to contain the price of silver.
The physical demand is so strong right now that it's bursting through the paper manipulations.
And I think it's only just beginning.
And the COMEX in the United States is, in my opinion, a total fraud.
It's a fraud because they trade in paper that the paper claims to represent 5,000 ounces of silver, and it doesn't, because that silver doesn't exist.
And so the paper is rehypothecating a very small, very limited sort of fractional reserve supply of silver.
And the paper markets are pretending that there's much more silver than there actually is.
And as a result, the paper market is about to go into default here.
Well, let me state it this way.
They're likely to default on the physical delivery of silver, that is the COMEX.
And as a result, they're going to invoke, this is my guess, they're going to invoke a couple of things to try to get out of their obligations and try to avoid being completely exposed as total frauds.
Number one, they're going to raise the margin requirement.
So right now, institutions can purchase silver contracts on the Comex with a margin requirement.
I don't know what it is right now.
I think it's around $22,000 per silver contract.
And remember that one contract represents 5,000 Troy ounces of physical silver.
So if you're an institution, you've been able to control or at least influence the price of silver with a lot of leverage.
You know, for $20,000 plus, you could control 5,000 ounces of silver, at least on paper.
Well, think about what the LBMA did to the nickel traders and also what the Comex did to the Hunt brothers back in the 1980s.
I think it was the Comex even then, is they significantly raised the margin requirements and they introduced new rules that said that investors, whether they're institutions or professional investors, that they can only hold a very limited number of contracts.
And by doing that, they would force people to sell silver.
Now, by raising margin requirements, which probably is coming, my guess is that's going to happen soon.
They're going to force a lot of investors into a partial liquidation of their silver positions in order to meet the new margin requirements.
And these new margin requirements are implemented maliciously in order to hammer these investors and force a sale of silver with no choice.
And this is used to drive down the silver prices.
This is probably going to happen maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe this week.
And you're going to see some level of a forced sell-off.
There are two implications of this.
Number one, there could be a short-term price drop or a correction in the silver market, possibly, that could be a really amazing buying opportunity in this huge bull market.
So if silver drops $10 in a day and you read that, oh, the margin requirements were raised on the COMAX, well, that's why.
It doesn't mean that there's a sudden drop in core fundamental silver demand.
It just means that the exchange is playing games with people and forcing a sell-off.
So that's one thing to keep in mind.
Again, could be a buying opportunity.
If silver drops below $70 at this point, it might be a good buying opportunity.
Don't take this as investment advice, but do your own research, etc.
But take a look.
It might be a good opportunity.
If silver drops below $60 an ounce, which seems unlikely to me at this point, but I suppose it's possible, if it were to drop below $60 at this point, people like myself and others, we would try to find new ways to buy more silver, physical silver, because it would be an incredible bargain, I believe, at that price, although I'm not anticipating it dropping that low.
Nevertheless, COMEX can play a lot of games here.
They can raise margin requirements.
And the real kicker here is they can limit the number of contracts that can be held by investors.
They could limit that sharply to the point where they force a mass sell-off.
That could hammer the price substantially.
And there's also one more thing that Comex can do is they can, at one point, they can say, well, we are declaring force majeure.
We're no longer going to deliver physical silver as is promised by all these contracts.
Instead, what we're going to do is we're going to settle all these in fiat.
And in other words, we're just going to wire you dollars at the last price, whatever that was, and you're not going to get the silver that you thought you bought.
They can do that.
They did it to the nickel investors, or I'm sorry, the LBMA did that to the nickel investors.
But Comex can do the same thing.
They did it to the Hunt Brothers, essentially, you know, different tactics.
So they can do that.
And what that means is that all the companies that were trying to literally buy silver for industrial use, whether it's a car manufacturer or an electronics maker or weapons manufacturer, they need a certain amount of silver for their products.
They're going to be just out of luck.
They're going to be getting their money back, maybe with some profit, but not the full profit.
And they're not going to get the silver that they ordered.
You know, because they bought futures contracts on silver.
They're expecting 5,000 ounces of silver per contract.
They're not going to get it.
So what are they going to have to do?
Well, if you're a car maker or a weapons maker or what have you, you need the silver.
You still need it.
So you're just going to have to go somewhere else and buy it, which means that that fundamental demand is still going to exist in the marketplace, but now it's going to be even more frantic because they're not getting their silver from the COMEX.
So they're going to desperately be looking for other places to buy their silver.
So where are they going to go?
Where are they going to go to buy silver?
Well, you know, there are lots of different places to go.
Even silver dealers, if they want to, you know, buy bars and melt it down, have it refined again, et cetera.
There are lots of places they can go.
But the only thing that's going to motivate those potential sellers to part with their silver is higher prices.
substantially higher prices.
I'm talking over $100 an ounce.
Because right now, there's an expectation among silver stackers that, yes, of course silver is going to hit $100 an ounce.
That expectation is widespread.
And so there's no reason why a silver stacker would let go of their silver at $80 or $90 or $95, unless they just happen to be desperate or they really need the money they're cashing in.
But most people, I would imagine, are going to hold their silver stacks until they go much higher.
And when they go over $100 an ounce, at that point, yeah, there will be some sellers who will say, wow, it reached 100.
I bought it at 20.
You know, 500% return.
I'm going to take those profits.
There's a group of people who will say that, and you can't blame them.
It's a 500% profit.
Of course, it could be 1,000% profit if they hold on to their silver, if it goes to 200.
But for some people, 500% is enough.
So that will make more silver available to the buyers, just the fact that people can sell it at $100 an ounce and take that profit.
But the demand is going to continue to be so strong through industry that I don't think $100 even is going to be enough to fulfill their hungry demand for physical silver.
That is, this is all in the scenario if the COMEX essentially defaults on physical silver and just tells everybody we're settling in fiat.
If they do that, silver prices will almost certainly surpass $100 an ounce and will probably keep on going at that point.
And we could be on the way to 200 an ounce or who knows where.
Although I had projected possibly 200 an ounce sometime in 2027, just based on industrial demand.
But if COMEX defaults on physical silver, we could be seeing that sometime in 2026.
It's possible.
Again, don't take this as investment advice.
There could be corrections.
There could be defaults.
There could be, who knows?
There could be economic collapse, currency collapse.
Oh, which brings me to the other point in all of this.
That if COMEX raises the margin requirements, and if the same thing happens at the LBMA or other exchanges, then you could see some banks or financial institutions that are holding a lot of silver contracts could be in real financial trouble.
And there was a rumor over the weekend that there was already one bank or one major brokerage house that went belly up like Sunday morning.
I don't have any more details than that.
It's just a rumor.
But if it's true, we'll hear more about it today.
And that could be the beginning of some additional failures.
I don't think this alone is going to bring down the whole banking system.
But we could see a few banks fail because of what's happening with silver.
It could be a rerun of Silicon Valley bank failure.
What was that, spring of 2023 or something, I think?
If that happens, if banks start to fail, even if it's just two or three, probably then you're going to see the public begin a mad rush to silver and gold.
And that's only going to make the problem, you know, the price problem for the exchanges way worse for them.
Because right now, the public is mostly asleep on this issue.
You don't really have strong retail buying of silver right now, despite everything that's going on and the increased pricing, that's not driven by retail-consumer purchasing.
That's been driven by industrial purchasers.
And gold pricing has been driven almost entirely by central banks or other institutional buyers around the world.
The public hasn't gone into FOMO mode yet.
You know, FOMO, fear of missing out, sort of a public panic, which happened after the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.
If we start to see banks collapse, and then we'll start to see the public, well, let's say if they go into FOMO mode, well, then the sky is the limit on where this price is going to go.
And then we could be getting into real overbought bubble territory once the public, once a kind of frenzy takes place, which could last for many, many months or even perhaps longer.
Now, there are signs of frenzy, the madness of crowds, you know, signs of tulip bulb mania.
These signs are pretty obvious.
You saw them during the dot-com bubble.
These signs are not present yet in the metals market, but there are some things to watch out for.
So it's when everybody is talking about how we're all going to buy silver and get rich.
You know, your Uber driver, you know, your family members at the gathering, your co-workers, just people everywhere, when silver, especially silver in this case, is on the minds of everyone and everybody's buying it and everybody thinks they're going to get rich, that's when you're in a bubble.
So let me be clear about this.
There is fundamental industrial demand driving silver pricing itself, which could easily put silver over $100 an ounce in 2026 and could easily even drive silver to $200 an ounce when Samsung opens up its new solid-state battery production plant in 2027, which uses the silver carbon anode, which will require a lot more silver.
We talked about that in a previous podcast.
So that's one of the reasons I'm predicting, or at least saying it's possible, that silver could hit $200 an ounce by 2027 or sometime in 2027.
That's all industrial demand.
But layered on top of industrial demand could be FOMO frenzy demand from consumers, you know, retail buyers, as they're called.
That could add another 50 or another 100 an ounce on top of the industrial demand.
So it's actually possible that, again, depending on what happens, depending on whether the COMAX defaults on physical and whether there are bank failures, but we could be looking at a situation where industrial demand alone pushes silver to 100 and then FOMO frenzy from the public pushes it to 150 or 200.
And that would be bubble territory for the FOMO frenzy layer, but it's not a bubble for the industrial demand.
You see what I mean?
So they coexist.
So yeah, let's say the FOMO frenzy pushes prices to $200 an ounce in 2026.
And then the frenzy ends and everybody clears their heads like, what?
We're all not going to get rich on silver?
Or maybe they think they will.
I don't know.
I mean, actually, right now, a lot of people have become wealthy on silver.
So that's not a stretch.
But if the FOMO frenzy breaks and the $200 an ounce cracks, it could crack down to $150 or even $100.
So yeah, silver could skyrocket between now and sometime in 2026.
It could be 200 an ounce and then it could plummet.
It could lose half that, go back to 100, which is returning to sanity where it meets the industrial demand that continues to be very, very strong.
You see what I mean?
So in laboratory science, we do something called a deconvolution analysis of masses and their peaks.
This is used in mass spectrometry, by the way, to determine the initial size of a molecule when it's been fragmented through the, well, the quadrupole, the process of doing mass spectrometry.
That tends to break molecules.
So anyway, we do what's called a deconvolution analysis, where you can reassemble the initial signal from the sub-signals of the parts.
And the reason I bring that up is because that's what we actually need to do right now in our minds is we need to deconvolute the price of silver.
We need to understand, especially as FOMO frenzy kicks in.
And I guess we should add, if the Fonzi wanted to buy silver, it would be the Fonzie FOMO frenzy, FFF.
So if we need to be able to deconvolute to understand what part of the silver price is industrial demand versus what part is Fonzie FOMO frenzy.
Or we just call them FOMO Fonzie.
How about that?
That's easier.
FOMO Fonzi, hey, got some silver, you know?
Right?
For those of you who watched TV in the 1970s, didn't we all?
So FOMO Fonzi is irrational.
FOMO Fonzi is late to the game.
FOMO Fonzie is going to buy silver as it's going up and up and up.
And a lot of FOMO Fonzie people are going to lose money when the FOMO bubble portion pops.
But the industrial buyers are rational.
The industrial buyers are buying what they need to produce their products.
And they're not driven by get rich quick.
They're not driven even really by fiscal policy.
They're driven by industrial demand.
So their demand is real and will be sustained unless something crashes the global economy, of course.
So even if the FOMO Fonzi portion of the bubble collapses, it would not collapse much lower than the industrial demand, a lower level, which right now you could argue is about $80 and headed for $100.
And I'll just use $100 as an easy round number.
So let's just say industrial demand is $100 an ounce based on the current supply, which is very limited, versus the high demand, which continues to grow.
So let's just say industrial demand is $100 an ounce, which it will probably end up being higher than that.
But for now, let's say it's $100.
And then if you start hearing everybody talk about silver, we're all going to get rich on silver and everybody's buying silver and your hairdresser is buying silver and then silver is pushed to $200 an ounce, that might be a selling opportunity.
And I will alert you to that if I observe that situation occurring.
It would be kind of like the big short.
Remember the movie The Big Short?
Which, you know, it was depicting Dr. Michael Burry and the movie.
It's one of my favorite movies, by the way.
It's a great movie.
And one of the main moments in the movie or the film is when the main character decides to do his own research on the nature of the real estate bubble, especially I think in Florida.
This is a 2008 timeframe.
And he goes to visit a pole dancing bar because he was told by the lending guys that he talked to that one of their clients is a stripper.
And he goes to the strip club to meet with the pole dancer.
And he offers to just pay her for her time to answer questions, right?
This is an interesting scene.
So she's kind of dancing around a little bit, making money, answering his questions.
And she's bragging about the fact that she owns three condos.
And he's like, three condos?
And they're all on variable interest rate loans.
And that she tells him that her lending agent told her that no matter what happens in the market, she can always refinance and she can keep buying more and more homes.
As the value keeps going up, she's going to just keep making money and get rich.
And she's funneling all her, you know, stripper money into the condos.
That's when he says it's a bubble.
He calls back to his home office in New York.
He says, it's a bubble.
Do the deal, buy the options.
They were buying options from, well, it's a complicated plot.
But anyway, they were buying basically puts on the CDOs, the collateralized debt obligations of the housing market.
And then that's how they made a huge amount of money when the whole thing collapsed because they saw that it was a bubble, right?
So we're not there yet in gold and silver.
We may not even be close, but it's likely that that day could be coming at some point.
And when it is, it will be unmistakable.
And I will be telling you here, hey, you may want to consider selling if that's your goal.
Or some people just prefer to stack it and hold on to it and just always have the physical, no matter what happens to the price.
Other people want to sell, but the question is, when you're selling it, what are you getting back?
You're getting fiat currency, which itself is losing value every single day and is backed by nothing.
So then the question is, even if you sell and you take all this profit, what are you going to do with it?
What do you do with the profit?
The rational thing to put it into would be gold and silver.
So it doesn't make sense.
I sold my silver and took the profit and I put the money back into silver.
That doesn't make any sense.
So unless you have something else to do with it, you may not want to sell no matter what the price.
One more thing, a contact of mine says, who runs an investment management firm, says that giant pools of smart money have been rolling into his organization and he focuses on decentralized finance or digital assets, and that he's talking about q4 of 2025.
A massive amount of money is exiting the fiat system.
And I replied back to him and said yeah I, I think that what's happening is people who know what's going on are getting out of fiat and they're buying both metals you know, gold and silver typically and crypto in some cases as well.
Now, i'm not an expert on crypto, price movements and crypto to me always seems a little more risky.
Well, it is more volatile, you know, and it's it's, it's digital.
So there are many additional questions about crypto.
Uh I, i've never sold any crypto, but i'm not buying it either.
I have privacy crypto.
You know a little bit of bitcoin, whatever.
I'm just sort of sitting on that.
But when I buy things for long-term you know financial planning, asset protection retirement, whatever i'm stacking gold and silver, you know.
I have it vaulted and um in a trusted third-party vault and for me that's, that's the bottom line, you know, because I know that's going to be there, and so if you want to do that.
If that makes sense to you, contact our partners.
It's Battalion Metals, the company with Chris Olson and also co-founded by Tucker Carlson.
Battalion Metals.
You can reach them at metalswithmike.com.
That's metalswithmike.com, that is.
That is our affiliate front end link to their site.
They have incredibly great pricing, great service and they also have vaulting services also, which are insured by Lloyds OF London and high security facilities.
The whole deal highly trustworthy, multi-generational family run operation and they don't play games.
They don't do bait and switch, they don't.
They don't run you know price gouging scams that some of these gold companies run on people, especially people on the older side.
So you can trust Battalion Metals.
They are a high integrity, great pricing, honest operation.
Just go to metalswithmike.com and there's a discount code.
You can use code ranger when you purchase anything from them.
Use code ranger at checkout and they will waive the shipping insurance fee and that will save you some bucks.
So that's if you want to take physical delivery, or you can purchase with them and have them vault it and that's vaulted outside the banking system, which I think is great because it's you know the banking systems.
I don't.
I don't trust the banks, I don't trust the safe deposit boxes.
Frankly, I don't trust anything that's regulated by the federal government, because then the government can put uh pressure on all these systems.
So metalswithmike.com, for either physical delivery or vaulting of gold and silver yes they, they have silver, IRAS And things like that that they can help you set up and manage if you want to go that route.
So, check it out and thank you for your support.
Thank you for your interest.
And be safe with your money out there, folks.
2026 is going to be a year where a lot of people lose a lot of their assets and other people see their assets absolutely multiply.
And that's people who hold gold and silver, of course.
Clearly, that's the case.
All right.
So we'll have more details.
I'll give you a follow-up here as the markets open and I'll add that on here.
So stay tuned.
All right.
I'm chiming in here after markets have opened.
And the silver market, when it opened overseas, it just shot up to $84.
And then it got hammered down to $76.
And it bounced around in $78 an ounce.
And as I'm recording right now, it's over $80 an ounce.
So this doesn't really give us a clear picture of where things are going.
The real action is going to be what happens in the U.S. markets and whether Comex pulls a fast one and changes the rules, you know, ups the deposit requirements, whether Comex changes the rules or if they up margin requirements or, you know, limit the number of contracts people can hold, etc.
So we're going to have to see where things go.
And if there are any bank failures or brokerage firm failures, I do think those will be contained.
I don't think this is the breakdown moment of the entire Western financial system.
In fact, I don't think that's going to happen in one moment.
I think that's just a ratcheting effect.
It's an erosion day by day, week by week.
This is part of it, but this is not going to pull the plug on the whole system.
At least that's my guess, of course.
But as always, don't take this as financial advice and do your own research.
Okay, now, looking ahead at some things here, this is really great.
I've got a completed music video for you called More Than Wires.
And I did play that song for you, I don't know, a week ago or so, but my editor put together a really remarkable video for that song.
And we're going to play that here as a lead up to the next segment, which is talking about, well, an article in the Wall Street Journal that talks about companies halting hiring in 2026.
In essence, let's see.
The Wall Street Journal headline says, Companies are outlining plans for 2026.
Hiring isn't one of them.
It says, large employers indicate they either want to maintain the size of their teams next year or let go of workers.
Quote, everybody's afraid for their jobs.
So, yeah, humans, look, humans are obviously more than machines.
That's the theme of my song, more than wires.
But corporations put humans in cubicles to do very machine-like jobs, such as answering customer service emails.
Or, you know, used to be data entry.
That's not a thing anymore, but it was a generation ago.
People would sit there and type stuff in all day.
I mean, imagine that.
You know, before OCR got good, there were jobs of data entry, just punching in numbers and words all day.
Can you imagine?
Well, or can you imagine just doing customer support all day long?
Those jobs don't need to be attended to by humans.
They can be well automated, and that frees humans up to do more important things.
So, I'm actually an advocate of freeing people up from these drudgery type of jobs and letting people do things that are far more meaningful because we are more than wires.
So, I'd like to play this full music video for you here.
It's five minutes, and I think you'll really enjoy it.
And then I'll continue with my discussion of what's happening from the Wall Street Journal article and much more.
Here we go.
Algorithms asking why.
But underneath my skin so fine, a fire burns that won't give in.
No programme roll my dreams.
No engineering design these seems.
The chaos dancing in my mind is beautifully underfunded.
I believe I break a star once more.
Finding strength I had before.
Through the doubt, I find my way.
Born from yesterday.
More than one.
Built from dust and flame.
No two hearts the same.
More than once.
We live, we learn, forever.
Stake our claim.
More than one.
Spirit won't comply.
Reaching for the sky.
We laugh, we cry, we live and die.
We are more than wise.
We are more than wise.
I taste the salt upon my tears.
I soar with hope I carry fears.
The scent of rain on summer ground.
These senses can't be written down.
My mother's voice still echoes clear.
Through corridors of passing years, no server holds what I possess.
This beautiful and perfectness.
They calculate digital counts, but can they feel the weight of bound?
They process dead and never rest.
But do they know what feeling blessed means when the morning light breaks through?
Or holding someone dear to you.
The sacred things that can't be sold are worth far more than digital gold.
I bleed, I break, I start once more.
Finding strength I had before in the silence, hear me say, Love will find a way.
Build from dust and flame.
Don't you hearts the same?
More than wise.
We live, we learn, forever, stake our claim.
More than wise.
Spirit won't comply.
Reaching for the sky.
We laugh, we cry, we live and die.
We are more than wise.
We are more than wild.
Connection runs deeper than a network stream.
We're bound by things unseen.
A touch of hands, a knowing glance, the mystery of love's romance.
So when the screens all fade to black, remember what they cannot track.
The wonder living in your chest, the thing that makes us truly blessed.
More than one.
More than one.
Love your hearts the same.
More than one.
We live, we let them forever stay our place.
More than one.
Reaching for the sky.
We laugh, we cry, we live and die.
We are more wires.
We are more than wild.
When the world turns chrome and steel, never lose the way you feel.
Keep the wonder, keep the art.
Keep the drum beat in your heart.
More than one.
More than wires.
Yeah, more than wire.
All right, so getting back to the Wall Street Journal article that's saying companies are outlining plans for 2026.
Hiring isn't one of them.
It says that companies are looking to stay lean into 2026 while relying on technology to take on more tasks.
Says that, let's see, even Shopify, the e-commerce platform, is going to have, what is it, 0.16% decrease.
And let's see, QIIME Financial, et cetera.
They're already vowing to keep the size of their employee bases roughly flat.
And then the Yale School of Management brought together a lot of CEOs and surveyed them.
And two-thirds said that they planned to either fire workers or maintain the size of their existing teams next year.
Only one-third said they planned to hire.
Now, in my assessment, what's happening here is that a lot of these companies, they're actually looking to replace humans with automation, but they don't necessarily want to do it aggressively where they are firing people and replacing them with automation.
Although, Amazon reportedly something leaked from Amazon a couple of months ago where they said that over a period of years, they're going to replace 600,000 human workers, mostly warehouse workers, with automation, as the robots get more capable, things like that.
And I mean, that's inevitable.
Warehouse fulfillment jobs are begging to be automated, actually.
That's not a job for humans, you know, really.
That's a job for robots.
Humans should be doing something better, more important, more interesting, more rewarding, higher value added, things like that.
But whatever you think about this issue, the truth is that these corporations, they're going to let the human workers slowly erode away through attrition or retirement or maybe buyout offers or what have you.
So the replacement of human workers with automation will be a gradual process.
It's not all at once, but it will accelerate in 2026 by simply not hiring people.
You know, just by not hiring.
What's the average turnover in a corporation?
I don't know.
Annually, what is it?
Maybe 10%, maybe more.
I guess it depends on the corporation, etc.
But this is what's going on.
So 2026 is not a great year for people to be looking for jobs.
They're going to be very difficult to find.
And that means that it's really critical to maintain your asset protection with your gold and silver, which is doing great, by the way.
And also your ability to be as self-sufficient as possible.
If you currently have some kind of income source from a job or a business or what have you, you should plan on that income source perhaps being reduced or possibly being partially or fully cut off at some point because of the drop in consumer spending and lots of economic issues in 2026.
So make sure that you can live in a way that is as resilient as possible and lower your costs where you can, but invest in the things that enhance your health or enhance your cognition or enhance your skill set.
Invest in things that can help you do well for the future.
And in fact, I've got another song coming up for you, not today, although I've finished the song, but I'm going to wait for my editor to put together some kind of video on it.
It's called The Great Divergence.
And The Great Divergence, it's a great song.
I think you'll love it.
And it's a world beat, world percussion style with a raspy pop voice with, I don't know how to describe it.
It's really something.
It's a musical journey.
And it's coming in a couple of days.
But what the song is about is this great divergence between those who know how to use AI tools and machine cognition to enhance their lives and to become more self-reliant and more decentralized and more successful or more innovative, etc., versus those who are rejecting this technology and are inevitably losing their jobs because they don't have a skill set that's above anybody else typically.
If they're not learning cutting-edge technology, they're going to be let go like a lot of other people.
And this divergence will only accelerate.
And that will translate into a collapsing middle class.
Yeah, that's going to happen too.
And as a result of all of this, it's more important than ever to be as self-reliant as possible.
Now, along those lines, let me mention something kind of cool here, which is, you know, our book creation site, brightlearn.ai.
It's been a very popular site.
And over the weekend, I did some really important maintenance on it.
And it was down, I mean, the book generation side.
I paused it for about 20 hours.
And the reason I did that is because I had to pause the new books coming in in order to work on a major database migration and code migration, which is done.
That's all done.
The engine is back up, working great.
A lot of books coming through it right now.
People using it, really enjoying it, etc.
But we had been running into some database problems.
And the database that we had previously been working with was cratering from time to time, causing disruptions.
And I knew that as the popularity of the service was really growing, I knew that I was going to have to make some changes.
And it's going to have to scale up to an enterprise-grade database with what's called HA capabilities or high availability with automatic database replication, you know, redundancy, and much more compute put into the database so that it can function well without cratering.
So anyway, I knew I needed to do this migration.
I knew it was going to be horrible as things go.
And since I'm the only human developer on this project, I knew it was going to fall on my shoulders.
So anyway, I paused the site and I got to work doing code migrations with the AI agents.
And to make a long story short, I found out that AI coding agents are really horrible at doing code migrations across a fairly large code base with any kind of consistency.
They will just miss stuff.
Now, AI agents are very good at troubleshooting bugs and errors and problems that are in the log files.
They're great at a number of things.
They're not great at altering the code base across the entire code base and getting it all done the first time.
So it was so funny because I would put in prompts like, hey, I want you to go across the entire code base, check every route, check every call, every procedure, every read, every write, every database function.
And I want you to change from this database to this other database call.
And here's the, you know, here's the login information and the API keys here and there, all this stuff.
And the AI agent would say, okay, I'll do that.
And it would assign sub-agents to do it.
And which is, I asked for that.
So it would spawn like 10 sub-agents.
And the sub-agents would go check all the different sections of the code.
And it would come back and it would report like, you know, and it took an hour to do all that, by the way.
Just the first pass took an hour.
It came back and it reported, all done.
I updated all this stuff and it would list it all out.
You know, 350 routes and this and that.
And all this code from this section and that section.
It's all done.
The migration is complete, you know.
And I was thinking, that's awesome.
If I could just do this in an hour with the AI agents, that's a huge success.
So I started testing it.
Like, oh, gosh, this doesn't work.
And so I talked to the AI agent.
I said, hey, what about the author login feature here where authors can log in and see their books?
What about that?
It seems to be broken.
And the agent would come back and say, oh, I didn't know you meant that too, you know, or some version of that.
I'm like, well, what did you think I meant when I said all?
Like everything, the whole thing, every feature, every procedure, everything.
And the AI engine apologized to me.
I'm sorry.
I missed it.
It literally said that.
I'm so sorry.
I missed it.
I'll update it now.
And then boom, it goes off for another 30 minutes.
Comes back.
Okay, I got that done.
And I'm like, oh, man, this is going to be a long night.
So then I tell it, oh, I'm testing.
I found this other thing's broken.
What about this thing over here?
Like the packager of the books.
I have a packager component that takes the finished books and renders the pages and packages the PDFs and uploads them and verifies the upload, does all kinds of stuff, re-renders the index pages, sends an email to the author, updates the database, all this stuff, right?
That's the packager.
I'm like, hey, the packager's not working.
And the AI code comes up, oh, you wanted me to change the packager also?
Yes.
That's a freaking yes.
Why would I not upgrade the packager to the new database if everything else, you know what I'm saying?
And it's silly to argue with AI because it's not a person.
It doesn't have a memory.
Not a long-term memory anyway.
And it's kind of like, it would be like arguing with an autistic adult who had been unable to complete a complex task because of the devastating effects, the neurological effects of autism.
You have to understand the limitations of an autistic adult.
I mean, they have great gifts.
Many of them do, you know, in math or calendar dates or numbers or patterns or colors or all kinds of things.
Incredible skills, but also sometimes often they don't have judgment or they miss the larger context of a situation.
Well, that's what AI agents are very much like.
And there's no use arguing with them.
You just have to tell them, okay, you missed this thing.
Go fix this thing.
So it goes off and fixes that thing.
And then I find out there are other problems here and there, etc.
Anyway, it took me, well, a grand total of 20 calendar hours, you could say, although I did sleep in the middle of that, I had to go to bed, get some sleep, and then I woke up and I kept working on it.
But the site was paused for 20 hours, during which no books could be submitted.
And now it's back online and the migration is complete.
And let me pull up the database, the external database right now.
We are using, in terms of CPU, we're only using, we're at around 20 to 25% CPU usage sustained.
And it's an auto-scaling system.
So that's great.
It's only using 20 to 25% of the minimum CPU count.
And let's see what else.
Query speeds are coming back very fast.
Let's see, query performance.
Most of the queries are being settled in some of these at 100 milliseconds.
That's not horrible.
But I would say most of the queries are 100 to 200 milliseconds.
Some of these are pretty big select queries, etc.
So I'm happy with the performance.
I can continue to scale it up if I need to, no problem.
And hopefully it won't crash.
It's the thing.
With these services, I chose the most robust database API service or PostgreSQL as a service.
I chose the most robust system possible.
And we're going to see.
It's going to be more reliable than hosting my own database.
That's for sure.
So we'll see how it does.
And I'll report back to you.
The good news is the service is up and running right now.
Okay, the other thing is I was doing some other coding while I was waiting on these agents to screw around and not fix things.
And so I built some other engines that really upgraded our data processing pipeline substantially.
And without getting geeky on it, let me do the math here real quick.
Okay, yeah.
Over the weekend, I increased my document processing pipeline throughput by a factor of 31.
So we are now processing 31 times more documents than I was before.
How is that possible?
Well, it's possible.
It's yeah, it costs money, but it's possible.
And the way this is working is pretty cool.
It allows us that, you know how we have over 100 million science papers and many hundreds of millions of other documents from books and transcripts and PDFs and white papers and all kinds of things.
And part of what I've been doing is going through and having all these documents assessed, classified.
And then if we choose them to be included in our index, which would make them available as research targets for the book engine, as well as our AI engine at brightu.ai, then I normalize the documents.
And normalization is a process of cleaning them up.
And a lot of documents are pretty dirty when you get them.
They have OCR artifacts.
Possibly they've got page numbers.
They've got weird hyphenations.
Sometimes they have typos.
Sometimes they have OCR mistakes or weird art that got semi-translated into strange characters and things like that.
So the normalization process goes through and cleans up all the documents.
And as of right now, the system that I have built over two years and this weekend, we can, right now, we can simultaneously clean 1,500 documents at a rate of what?
Oh, yeah, I'm going to guess 400 to 500 words per second times 1,500 documents.
So in other words, all 1,500 documents are being cleaned or read at a rate of 400 to 500 words per second.
That's something.
That's like the work of 10,000 humans, you know?
But it's all done by machine.
So nobody would be crazy enough to hire humans to, here, read this stack of books and point out everything that's wrong or open these text files, you know, or open these word files and fix everything.
Like no one would hire humans to do that.
That's crazy.
Because machines can do it faster, better, cheaper.
And that's what I'm taking advantage of.
The thing is, you're going to benefit from this because this is how we're going to have millions of science papers into our book engine coming in 2026, we'll say.
And also hundreds of thousands of other published books are going into the engine.
And I'll tell you about those numbers when we actually index them.
And right now, I'm just dealing with little glitches like the file system is having trouble saving documents that have Chinese characters in the file name.
Oh man, I didn't think of that one.
Now I've got to deal with Chinese characters in the file names and other odd things, other unimaginable things that you'll pull your hair out if you try to do the job that I've been doing for two years.
You'll be like, no way.
That's too much craziness.
This is like so much random stuff that can happen.
But that's what I'm doing.
And I'm doing this on purpose.
I'm doing all this because I want to make the knowledge of the world available to the world through multiple formats.
So, you know, through books, through podcasts, through articles, through upcoming mini documentaries and what have you, you know, and audio books as well, and mind map documents that we have now auto-generated for a lot of the books at brightlearn.ai.
And the only way for me to achieve my goal of reaching a billion people with uncensored knowledge that can help them live better lives, the only way to do that is for me to first acquire all the knowledge of human civilization.
And I did that.
And once you acquire all the knowledge, then your work has only just begun because then you've got to sort through it all.
And that's what I'm doing now.
Sorting through it all.
All of it.
Like all knowledge in every language through all of history since anything's been printed, I suppose.
Or pretty much all knowledge.
I mean, it's not 100%, you know, like the Library of Alexandria burned down.
We don't have that knowledge.
But I mean, for the most part, we've got everything that's ever been published in every language and we're sorting through it.
And then we have to allow people to, you know, to repackage that knowledge in the ways that they want to learn or with the certain topics that they want to learn about.
And that process of sorting through knowledge is called research.
You know, right?
We all do research.
And all throughout human history, research has allowed innovations and breakthroughs and education and uplifting of people, you know?
So all I'm doing is taking that very human process and now multiplying it with machine cognition to massively scale it up to where you can have a book.
I mean, this is where it's going.
In 2026, you can have a book created for you for free in minutes at brightlearn.ai, a book that has conducted research on every other book that's ever been published in order to find out what's relevant to the topic of this book.
So you know how if you go to the bookstore, you buy a book, and then you go to the research section in the back of the book or an index or references.
And let's say like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s book, I think what's called the Real Anthony Fauci.
And if you go to the back of that book, you're going to find something like 1,000 references or more.
I forgot the exact number.
So that means he or his team did a tremendous amount of research.
So they must have researched maybe many thousands of potential documents, maybe 5,000, maybe 10,000.
And then they pulled out the thousand that were relevant to what they're trying to say.
Well, what if instead of just having 10,000 documents, what if you had 10 million documents?
What if you had 100 million?
What if you had a billion?
Could you find more interesting stuff for your book?
The answer is probably yes.
The bigger your research scope, you know, the better your book is going to be.
And that's what I'm building is a knowledge set that will ultimately, I mean, in 2026, our research engine, well, I mean, it already contains millions of documents right now, so it's just going to get bigger, tens of millions, and then ultimately over 100 million documents will be part of our research engine.
And that will be significant.
Because obviously you'll be able to create the most comprehensive, well-researched books on any topic completely free in minutes at brightlearn.ai that are based on the research of the world's knowledge.
And that's never existed before.
But that's my mission to make that happen.
And I even had somebody over the holiday like, Mike, why are you doing all this stuff?
I mean, you're not making any money off of this.
The books aren't for sale.
Well, some people are actually selling the books.
So that's great for them to be able to create revenue off the books.
And you can.
You can legally sell the books because that's the Creative Commons license on it.
But I'm not earning any money off the books.
That's okay.
That's totally okay.
Sometimes money's not the primary driver for people.
And in this case, I'm driven by mission.
This mission is important to me.
I think it's important to our shared future.
And that's why I'm doing it.
We need a way to bypass the gatekeepers, the censors, the lunatics, you know, like von der Leyen over there in the EU, who says that, what does she say?
Like, free speech is a virus and censorship is the vaccine.
I mean, I'm simplifying it and paraphrasing it, but that's essentially what she said.
Now, let me shift gears here briefly, tell you what's coming up.
I've got a special report for you here called 2026, the year the human cognition bubble bursts.
The human cognition bubble.
Everybody's talking about the AI bubble.
But AI capabilities are only going to continue to increase dramatically in 2026.
The bubble that's going to burst is a lot of human cognition for the lower level jobs, like the one I just described, you know, cleaning up documents, for example, or doing customer service, those kinds of things.
You know, that bubble is going to burst.
There's going to be a lot of people losing their jobs.
And what I'm hoping that people do is they use free tools like what we have at BrightLearn.ai and they find new purpose, new jobs, new skills.
And in order to do that, let's see, I put a book out that I encourage you to share.
Oh, here it is.
It's called The Health Rangers New Year Revolution.
A radical blueprint for upgrading your health, wealth, mind, and freedom.
And that's available on my author page at books.brightlearn.ai.
I'm also seeing all the books that I put in as tests, like a book about chocolate called Divine Decadence and a book about chili peppers called Civilization Spice and a book about cinnamon and a book about bananas.
Yeah, these are all just testing books that I was doing when I was involved in the database migration of our engine.
This is hilarious.
I didn't realize, yeah.
Prickly sweet, the art of crafting luscious desserts from cactus fruit.
Yeah, that was on my mind.
And then the avocado alchemy.
But of course, of course there's got to be a book about avocados.
So there you go.
I even did a book about talking to plants, you know, just again as a test.
It's called Whispers of the Windowsill, Decoding the Secret Language of House Plants.
It's like, no, seriously, right?
It's like being a plant whisperer.
And so I have a book on that.
But it was just a testing book.
I might delete it.
I don't know.
In any case, I've got a special report coming up for you here.
And then I will have an interview for you.
What is this?
What day is this?
Yeah.
Okay.
This is Monday.
So Tuesday's, December 30th.
New Year's Eve is the 30th.
I think I'll have an interview for you tomorrow.
And then who knows what's going to happen New Year's Eve and January 1st.
Is anybody even online?
I don't know.
But our book engine's working.
If you're looking for something to do other than have a New Year's Eve party, you can go on to brightlearn.ai and generate your favorite books.
That's cool.
I think I'll have an interview for you tomorrow.
I know I'm going to have a new song, another song for you, probably later on this week.
And then we've got a new Bright You course that I'll be announcing later this week that's coming up.
You can't register for it yet, but it's coming up soon.
So it'll be worth checking out.
So there you go.
Enjoy the rest of the show here today.
The special report, and I don't know what else I have, but it's kind of an abbreviated week because of the holiday and everything.
And I'm lacking sleep because of the database migration.
So I'll just call it a day.
Have fun with the gold and silver pricing.
It's going to be really interesting.
Lots of exciting times ahead in 2026, that's for sure.
And those who have gold and silver are going to be very happy, I think.
And those who are sitting on dollars are going to be very disappointed.
So, you know, this is one of those choose your own adventure type of scenarios.
Everybody gets to choose what they want.
Someone was telling me over the weekend that they know somebody who said, I can't afford to buy gold and silver.
And my answer was, if you can't afford to buy gold and silver, you definitely can't afford to sit on fake fiat currency that's losing value.
You know, the first thing you got to do is get out of the currency that's collapsing and get into something that's going to hold value.
And that's gold and silver.
You know, unless you're down to your last dollar for dinner or something.
I understand that.
I've been there.
But holding dollars will be the last thing you can afford because who can afford to lose assets?
And that's what's happening to the dollar.
So anyway, enjoy the special report and I'll be back with you tomorrow.
Take care.
I've got a prediction for 2026 and that's going to be the year that the human cognition bubble bursts.
And what do I mean by that?
Well, you hear a lot of people talk about the AI bubble.
And mostly they're referring to the valuation of the AI stock prices.
And they're probably right about that, given that the entire stock market is a giant bubble based on, you know, money printing, basically a debt-based Ponzi scheme currency system that's propping up a stock market to artificial levels.
So, but, but that's separate.
the financialization of the AI industry is really exists in a separate place than the actual innovation and technology advances that AI has already achieved.
That is the demonstration of machine cognition as being in many cases superior to human cognition in certain specific roles.
Well, so yeah, the stock market is probably going to have some kind of major correction at some point, but that's not going to stop machine cognition.
And so what's actually in a bigger bubble, in my opinion, is human cognition.
So right now, I mean, up through the whole history of time that we know of, at least of civilization, all the cognitive work has always been done by humans.
You've never had cognitive work done by horses or chimpanzees.
You know, it's always been human up until now.
But that human cognition bubble is about to burst.
I mean, think about it.
Throughout all of history, we've lived where if you wanted to find the best cognition or the most cognition to carry out some kind of work, an engineering job, you know, rocket science, whatever, medicine, brain surgery, you had to find the smartest humans and then you had to train them.
Just finding them was difficult.
And it would take 20 years for a human to even be findable as someone who had intelligence, typically, you know, from birth to age 20.
And then they would go into, you know, graduate programs or med school training or whatever.
But no matter who you found, they were just within a few IQ points of an average human.
I mean, let's say the average IQ is 100, let's say.
So, you know, a smart, a very smart person would be considered IQ 150.
A relatively smart person would be IQ 130.
Average IQ, 100.
And then, you know, you have below average IQ, 80, 60, you know, whatever.
And then if you keep going down, eventually you get to politicians.
But, you know, nevertheless, you only had this range, you know, 100 to typically you could find people that are like 130, maybe.
That's the range that you found in the job market.
That is changing already.
So the human cognition bubble is collapsing.
And now you can effectively hire machines as AI agents to do work at IQ levels that are vastly higher than 150.
For example, AI systems can now pass the bar exam.
They can pass medical exams.
They can solve extremely complex, high-level math problems, problems that would take advanced PhD mathematicians weeks to solve by themselves.
Machines can solve those problems sometimes in a matter of just hours.
And that's going to improve to just minutes soon, within a year.
And all the benchmarks of machine cognition are being saturated by machines solving these problems rather rapidly.
And so they're having to come up with new benchmarks.
And one of those benchmarks is called Humanity's Last Exam.
Yeah, H-L-E is what it's known as.
And Humanity's Last Exam.
It was, I think, a year ago, I'm not sure if there was even a model that could get 10% of the answers correct on that.
And now, just in the last month, Google's Gemini, I think, achieved 37% or something in that range.
Probably within a year that number will be 75 percent or higher.
You're going to end up with machines that are that can saturate all these benchmarks, demonstrating extremely high level cognition at certain specific tasks yes, but more and more their intelligence will be generalized across workplace types of processes, such as doing spreadsheet work, doing accounting work, doing text type of work, you know, classifying forms, answering customer service emails,
doing all of this work.
So the the human cognitive bubble is going to pop in 2026 and machine cognition is going to start ramping up like crazy.
2026 will be the year that the vast majority of people realize hey, wait a second, this is not just some silly fad, this was not promoted hype, and that machine cognition itself is not a bubble, that machine cognition is actually arguably the most important innovation in the history of human civilization,
because it's the one invention that can make itself better, and this is key to realize.
So when the combustion engine was created, the combustion engine could not itself design a better engine.
Or when the printing press was created, you know famously, the Gutenberg press the Gutenberg press didn't itself make the press better right, I mean that that would be absurd.
All the inventions that you can think of.
You know the invention of the personal computer.
Well, the personal computer didn't itself design personal computers.
But AI is different.
AI is in a category all its own.
AI, because one of its best skills is writing code and solving math problems.
And given that AI itself is a math problem, AI will be able to build better AI.
And even right now, in the Frontier LABS, AI is involved in writing the code to build better AI.
It hasn't taken over completely, of course, but it's part of the equation and this is only going to continue to accelerate to the point where, perhaps two or three years down the road, almost all of the AI development will be carried out by AI alone.
Or that moment might be less than a year away.
Actually, that day is coming and when that happens then you're going to see AI companies putting an enormous amount of compute resources onto this project to help AI build itself better.
And on the doomsday side, people would call that.
Well, that's the Skynet moment.
That's the moment supposed to be in 1997, when the Skynet system became self-aware and then launched all the nuclear weapons, etc.
That's the storyline from Terminator, or You could say on the positive abundance side, this is the moment when AI improves itself so rapidly and so quickly, it becomes a singularity that no human being can actually track.
And then we end up with radical abundance and super intelligence, widely distributed and decentralized, and then humanity benefits.
All right.
So that's the rosy, like everything's awesome future utopia vision of what's going to happen.
So somewhere between Skynet and Utopia is the reality of where this is going.
It's going to be somewhere in between those two.
It's not going to end all of humanity.
I'm sure there will be hundreds of millions of humans still alive after the depopulation extermination event, whatever that looks like.
They're not going to kill everybody.
I've talked about this before.
But they will.
I don't mean the machines.
I mean the globalists.
The globalists will kill off billions of human beings if they can get away with it.
And they're trying to.
So that will probably occur.
But then on the other side of that, widespread machine cognition can be harnessed by human beings who still have pro-human values and pro-human mission and want to build a better society while having machine cognition augment their creative skills or their innovation or entrepreneurship or what have you.
And of course, I've built an engine that demonstrates this very well.
And it's the book creation engine known as Brightlearn.ai.
And it's the world's largest book creation engine.
Right now, over 8,000 books exist there that have been published by thousands of different authors who have simply put in prompts to create the books that they want to read.
And this engine is running 24/7.
You can use it right now.
It's completely free to use.
And it generates books for you on any topic, but especially it focuses on nonfiction.
And then you can read and download and share those books completely free.
So that is an example of radical abundance and using AI technology to create the future that you want.
And it doesn't replace the human engineer or what's a better term?
Well, the architect of the project.
You know, you still need a human to say what kind of book do you want?
You know, what kind of subject do you want to cover?
How do you want the book to be written, etc.
But you no longer need the human cognitive work to do the research, you know, to type the letters of a chapter.
You don't need to type anymore for book chapters.
You have the AI write it for you.
What's important is for you to be the director of the book and get the book that you want with the best efficiency possible, leveraging machine cognition.
See, so the human then shifts from the role of being the cognitive grunt worker, which is what horses did for us in the labor market.
You know, you have a horse dragging a plow or horses for transportation, etc.
Not that that's used much anymore, except maybe the Amish, et cetera.
But people are still using grunt cognition, you know, manually, painstakingly doing research online, going from website to website, or painstakingly pulling books off the shelf and reading through them and trying to find related paragraphs that you want to use in your book.
You know, that's human cognitive grunt work.
And those days are over.
For anybody who wants them to be over, you know, you can use AI tools now.
And perhaps somebody still wants to do it the old-fashioned way just because they enjoy the process, and that's fine.
Nothing wrong with that.
There are still people who use typewriters.
That's fine.
If you love typewriters, use a typewriter, but nobody else is using them.
So that's the way it's going to be with human cognitive labor.
The bubble is popping, and it's great news for humanity in the sense that you don't have to do cognitive grunt work.
This can free you up to do far more important things, like, for example, directing the project or setting the mission, the goals, being the engineer or the architect of what you want this thing to do.
And then you rely on AI cognition to help you achieve that thing.
And hopefully that thing, whatever it is, is important for the world.
It contributes to the world in some way.
It helps uplift people.
It helps empower people with knowledge or freedom or financial survival or whatever the case may be.
And those are the kinds of topics that I focus on to help empower humanity with decentralized knowledge.
But there are a million different ways that people will approach this.
Some people will go into AI businesses just to make money and nothing else.
They just want to make money.
Okay.
Well, you know, it's a free market, I suppose.
You can do that.
But hopefully, more people will do meaningful projects that actually help upgrade human civilization so that there's a common good in all of this.
There's a common benefit so that humanity does better.
And remember that to build a better future together, we're going to have to go beyond human cognition.
See, we've lived under human cognition this entire time.
And human cognition hasn't given us, you know, well, you could argue there have been advances, but it's holding us back at this point.
You know, you look at governments, for example, or regulators or the court system.
You know, think about the human cognition activities of a judge in a court system and the human cognition activities of the attorneys.
And despite their best efforts, a lot of court cases can take years to reach some kind of conclusion because it's just slow.
It's slow for humans to make oral arguments and collect documents and read through documents and comment on it and for the judges to make decisions and do the research on case precedent, things like that.
So human cognition is actually holding us back from being able to do many things far more quickly, including resolving court cases, for example, or starting a business.
Starting and running a business used to take much more work than it does now, thanks to AI.
And so, yeah, human cognition, that bubble is bursting.
But that's not bad news for humanity.
It just means you're not going to have to do cognitive grunt work.
It's like you don't have to add up numbers on a piece of paper with a pencil anymore.
We have calculators or we have spreadsheets.
Now we have AI that does all your accounting for you.
And, you know, sometimes it's even accurate.
But that will improve.
So cognitive grunt work, the end of that, really, I think the pivot point is going to be 2026.
And you're going to hear doomers, there's a bunch of AI doomers out there that are like, oh my God, we have to stop AI.
Like Senator Bernie Sanders is one of them.
And, you know, that guy, I mean, I think he's older than four continents.
And nothing about age, nothing wrong with being old, but being incompetent, you know, being completely ignorant of a topic, that's not such a good thing.
And Bernie Sanders is utterly ignorant about AI and he thinks we just need to stop it because it's going to replace human jobs.
You know, there's a joke about that I've told before, I'll say it again, where there's a work supervisor overseeing a group of men who are digging a ditch with shovels, and then a consultant comes upon them and says to the supervisor, hey, why do you have men digging this ditch with shovels?
You could bring in an excavator and you could knock out this job in a couple of hours instead of whatever it's going to take now, days or weeks.
And the foreman says, well, if we do that, then these men won't have jobs.
They depend on shoveling dirt for their livelihoods.
And so the consultant says, well, in that case, give them spoons and call it job security because then they'll have jobs for months or years digging a ditch with spoons.
You see, if your goal is just to, quote, have jobs, then you can hire people to dig holes and fill them in all day long, which is an army skill, by the way.
If that's your only goal, we just want jobs.
We just people doing stuff.
That's not a noble goal.
That doesn't make any sense.
You should have people doing things that matter.
And since we have excavators, you don't need to use a shovel for most jobs.
And since we have AI, you don't need to do cognitive grunt work either.
You know, manually running numbers on a spreadsheet is like digging ditches with shovels.
And AI is like the excavator.
AI can come in and knock that thing out in no time.
And that's what we should be striving for is efficient application of machine cognition to free people from the cognitive drudgery of jobs that are basically obsolete.
Now, what's interesting about this is that you're going to see in government, you know, in the government sector, you're going to see a lot of opposition to AI and probably from the unions as well.
I mean, we've already seen that.
They're going to say, oh, no, no, no, we can't have any AI running government.
We need to keep hiring these federal workers, even though they're 10 times the cost and one-tenth the productivity, et cetera.
We could do this job with AI 100 times cheaper, but we want these people to have their jobs.
Okay, well, that's the way government's going to work.
They're going to protect all these government jobs.
They're going to protect the bureaucracy.
And then relative to the private sector, government's going to end up becoming even more incompetent, slower, more inefficient than you can possibly imagine.
It would be like the DMV in Haiti or something, you know, like the worst imaginable government inefficiency.
And that's what government's going to become as it rejects using AI to do basic functions, like basically customer service type of functions.
You know, I mean, think about a lot of what government does.
It's really a customer service type of thing.
Like here, process this application for a silencer, you know, with the ATF or process these immigration documents for DHS, you know, or whatever, you know, process these permits with the EPA, this kind of stuff.
And the government is slow, slow, slow, but they want, they want to be slow.
They want the humans to have the job security of digging dishes with spoons.
And so the collapse of human cognition will happen outside of government as the private sector becomes way more efficient because of competition, while the government becomes increasingly, it will appear as increasingly stupid and irrelevant, even dumber than it is already.
But this is only going to exacerbate the contrast between government and the private sector over the next couple of years.
And in effect, this is going to be a teachable moment for society, especially when the younger generation, when they're working in companies or they're doing their own business innovation and they're using advanced AI cognition and they're launching businesses in a day and creating things in minutes that used to take weeks, they're going to look at government and say, how on earth can this be so inefficient?
And ultimately, the perception is going to be, you know what?
We don't need government.
We don't need the state to lord over us with this inefficient bureaucracy of the EPA and the USDA and the FDA and the whatever, the Federal Reserve.
And that's why I did a whole podcast on this called The End of Statism and why AI can decentralize cognition and power and ultimately dismantle much of the state because the state has always existed as a creature that said that you have to give us power to centrally control things and decide things because we have the smartest people.
We have the best information.
We are the fastest.
We are the most efficient at doing things like calculating CPI numbers for inflation.
But in reality, it turns out that especially at the federal level, the federal workers are the dumbest workers in economics and food safety and pharmaceutical safety.
I mean, look, does anybody trust anybody from the FDA or the CDC or the Treasury for that matter or the DEA or what?
I mean, name your agency.
ATF, it's all the same.
They're all incompetent.
You rarely find competence in the federal government at all.
So the collapse of human cognition or the bursting bubble of human cognition will be slow to go into effect in the federal government.
And that's only going to make the government look more obsolete, which will show many of us that we don't need government.
So that's actually a very positive thing.
And then more and more, I think society can begin to use peer-to-peer, decentralized relationships using AI or using cryptocurrency, using decentralized blockchain solutions in order to solve lots of problems that the government used to claim that it alone could solve.
So in other words, the collapse of human cognition and the embracing of machine-augmented cognition is going to be great for human freedom because it will inevitably, it will either tear down functions of government or it will show those functions to be utterly incompetent and obsolete.
And either way, it's a win for the people.
So this is actually all good news.
And those of you who are fearful of AI, I mean, don't be fearful of the tech.
Be fearful of the globalist elite abusing the tech or weaponizing the tech, mostly for surveillance and censorship.
But don't be afraid of the tech.
This tech can also set humanity free.
And don't be afraid of human cognitive grunt work being replaced.
So I said, don't be afraid of giving up your spoons and using a machine to dig the ditch.
Instead, embrace the tech and maximize it and use it for human freedom.
And that's what I'm doing at brightlearn.ai and brighteon.ai with our AI chatbot.
That's at brightu.ai.
And we'll be rolling out more AI tools in 2026 and beyond.
And they'll all be free.
You'll be able to use them all to educate and empower yourself.
And we will use this in good faith to uplift and empower humanity.
So this is all actually great news.
So the human cognitive bubble is bursting and machine cognition is accelerating in 2026.
And 2026 will be the pivotal year that more and more people recognize this.
It's going to hit sort of a critical mass of widespread acceptance and a recognition that, oh my God, these machines can do these jobs better than humans.
Many jobs, customer service in particular, but lots more.
So get ready for that.
And of course, the answer to this is to upgrade your own cognitive skills, upgrade your own knowledge base, upgrade, you know, your personal context of understanding about what's happening in the world and how AI works and how it can be used and which job roles are going to be obsolete, etc.
And that's something that's within your power.
So you have control over your own future, even as machine cognition comes online and begins to replace many millions, if not hundreds of millions of humans around the world.
You still have control over your future and it's not Skynet.
And the machines aren't going to kill you.
Probably it's going to be the globalists turning off the power grid or something like that.
I don't think they're going to send out Terminators one by one.
They're just going to shut off the power grid for major cities and let people starve and die.
Because, you know, that's the way governments and globalists operate.
They kill their own people whenever it's convenient, or they'll start World War III and do it that way and start nuking each other.
That's when you're really going to need machine cognition to help you survive off-grid.
That's why you should be downloading all the free books that we have at brightlearn.ai.
There's an incredible collection of books on how to live off-grid and grow your own food and emergency medicine and survival preparedness, decentralization, all kinds of things like that.
All the books are free.
Download them right now, brightlearn.ai.
And thank you for your support.
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And thank you for all your support.
I'm Mike Adams, the HealthRanger.
Thank you for listening.
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