Transcription
Hello everybody and welcome into Commodity Culture, where we break down commodity markets, sound money, principles, and geopolitics, all with the goal of making you a better investor in the commodities sector.
Today is December 22nd, 2025. My name is Jesse Day, and I'm thrilled to welcome Jack Gamble to the program, the host of the Nobody Special Finance channel, where he discusses financial news and does some incredible independent investigative reporting in the investing world.
Jack is pounding the table over the imminent bursting of the AI bubble, and he's putting his money where his mouth is, having recently opened a short position in Nvidia. He breaks down why the broad market is set for a reality check, why some of the biggest AI company CEOs are nothing more than frauds and charlatans, and why he thinks both gold and silver have a long ways to run and will be clear winners once the AI rubble settles.
If you love silver, you're going to love the new "Stack Silver, Not Fiat" Commodity Culture t-shirt, a shirt by a stacker for stackers. Get one today using the link in the description.
And now, strap yourselves in for my conversation with Jack Gamble.
Jack Gamble, it is great to have you back on Commodity Culture. It has been a while since I had you on the show. I want to kick the conversation off, like I do quite often these days, with the silver market because it has been a historic year for the metal, screaming to new all-time highs. Uh, it hit $69 earlier, now at around $68 and change. What do you think are the catalysts that brought us here? And is silver still cheap at these levels, or is some caution warranted after such a massive move to the upside?
Yeah, thank you for having me on, Jesse. And, uh, yeah, historic is putting it mildly, right? Silver has caught a double this year. And, uh, congratulations to all the stackers who have finally been rewarded for their patience after many years. We've all been waiting for that one. Uh, so now we got, we've caught our double. Where do we go from here? Well, we're, we're very much in uncharted territory with silver markets here. So, there's, there's a couple places we could look for some clues. There's some indicators that say some caution is warranted, and there's some that say we've got room to run.
So, what got us here? Let's point out the obvious. Silver has operated at a significant supply deficit for several years now, where industry and monetary demand has far exceeded the supply coming out of the ground and the supply that the recyclers have been producing for several years in a row. And so, you know, in that environment, higher prices are inevitable. Take, take what you want about manipulation and about what the banks are doing and all the other stuff about monetary demand and central banks and all perfectly valid reasons why metal would be going higher here. Simple supply and demand would have dictated prices need to go up.
So, you know, there's, there are some cautions here, like, for example, mining supply. Silver miners are just killing it right here. Their cost to mine haven't really budged. You know, fuel is cheaper than it was a year ago. Labor is probably more expensive, but compared to the value of what they're taking out of the ground, the miners are just killing it here. So, they're going to be trying to produce as much metal as they can in this environment to try to capture some of those gains. So, we could expect some more supply coming out of silver mines. But then again, most silver that's mined doesn't come from silver mines. It comes from copper mines or lead and zinc mines. And I'm not so sure those are going to be producing more silver next year. You know, the Chinese are really curtailing their copper production right now. So, we've also had some very big copper mine shutdowns due to safety issues, labor dispute, instability in Peru. So, I don't think the copper mines are going to be producing all that much more silver, even though copper also is making new highs here. And so, you would expect, under all other things being equal, some more copper to be coming out of the ground here. But because of these unrelated disruptions, I don't think copper is going to produce much more silver.
Uh, the lead and zinc mines also produce a lot of silver, but the primary use for zinc, for example, is for galvanizing steel. The steel market isn't very encouraging here. Not with the trade war that's going on, not with the slowdown in construction in China. So, I, I don't think we're going to see that much more mining supply coming into market next year. Certainly not enough to crash prices.
Now, one thing to keep an eye on though is your recycling supply. We're seeing some very interesting dynamics play out in the market for physical and retail bullion products right now. Premiums have collapsed as this price has run. I mean, we're seeing silver eagles for $3 over spot in some places. We're seeing junk silver, the the 90% US constitutional selling as low as like 2 to 4% back of spot to buy it. The refiners aren't even buying this 90% junk anymore. I'm, I'm hearing finally some are starting to buy in limited quantities, but for the most part, it's just piling up at coin dealers here. And so that would suggest that the refiners are operating at maximum capacity. They're melting down the small stuff into the big good delivery bars to sell into the COMEX. So, I think we are going to see some more supply come from the recyclers next year. Will that new supply be enough to break the demand that we're seeing in the in the futures market and these geographic disruptions we're seeing, like the shortages in London being alleviated by metal flying over in planes? I don't know. I don't know if that new supply is going to be enough, but it is something that's going to be new next year that we haven't seen in prior years. And at the very least, it does warrant some caution.
You know, when I stack metal, I don't really worry about the day-to-day movement of price. But when I make levered bets on things like SLV call options, things like that, you want to be a little bit more careful when you're going out on leverage. Uh, and then of course, there's the gold to silver ratio, which needs to be, needs to be watched. And if you look at the gold to silver ratio right now, at least relative to gold, silver looks a little fairly, a little more fairly valued than we've seen. You know, back in April, the gold to silver ratio went wild. It went as high as 105 at one point. You could tell silver was set to rip here. The, the gold to silver ratio does not stay above 100 for long. And of course, silver just went on an absolute tear from $28 to $69. Now we're seeing the gold to silver ratio at 65, 64, which is pretty much the average over my lifetime, over the last 45 years or so. U, so relative to gold, silver's fairly valued here. It can go lower on this gold to silver ratio, which means silver could continue to outperform. Uh, like in 1980, at the peak of the Hunt brothers enthusiasm, the gold to silver ratio went as low as 15. All right. If, if we get that nutty, then silver could go a hell of a lot higher. It, it could double again from here relative to gold, even, and, and still be cheap. I don't know that we get that wild. Uh, 2011, the gold to silver ratio went as low as 30 before the crash. That is all probably very fresh in the minds of some of the seasoned stackers out there. So, at 65, I'd say it looks fairly valued relative to gold, but not overvalued relative to gold, which means it could continue to outperform. But some of the things that took us here so quickly have now worked their way through the system relative to gold.
>> Great breakdown there. Let's shift to the gold market. How do you see gold performing as we move into 2026? Obviously, a lot of different catalysts at play here. Central bank buying, you know, government debt and deficits out of control. Signs of a potential monetary reset ahead. A lot of people are pointing to that. There's quite a hype train behind the gold market. It seems like those gold bugs and true believers and sound money advocates are saying, well, there's, there's basically no way gold can lose at this point because of what's going on with the global monetary system, government debts, etc. What are your thoughts here? um, are, are you in that camp, or, uh, what could derail this hype train and disappoint stackers and investors ahead, if anything?
So, all the things that made gold double between 2023 and, and here, all, all those things that took us so sharply higher are very much still in play, if not have gotten worse since the start of this rally. And, and you listed them all in the question, right? Central banks buying of gold, uh, that is not slowing, it's, it's still continuing right now. I mean, it's not, it was going pretty crazy in late '23, mid-2024. The central banks were buying faster than they are now, but they are still buying. And what triggered that? I think the seizure of Russian assets of their US Treasury reserves played a big role in that. Even countries that are friendly to the United States. Okay, right now, you're on our good side. Do you want to sit around and wait to one day be on our bad side before you diversify your reserves? Or maybe you want to reduce your exposure to the dollar a little bit, and gold has seen the benefit of that. Uh, the dollar, at least for settlement of global trade and, and bank reserves outside of gold, is still pretty much the only game in town. Like, I, I'm not a big proponent of the BRICS replacing the dollar and the gold-backed BRICS currency. I just don't think that is grounded in reality. Totalitarian regimes do not give away their power willingly. And when you peg your currency to gold, you give away your power. You give away your ability to loot the public treasury and to loot the public savings. So, I don't think China and Russia are scrambling to, to peg their currency to gold anytime soon. They have wars to finance. Um, that being said, central banks diversifying into gold and also a lot of asset managers diversifying into gold is a very big factor here that could take gold higher. Uh, we've seen some guys like Jeff Gundlach and Ray Dalio, some, some of your big proponents of your traditional 60/40 portfolio, stocks and bonds, have come out this year and have called for some pretty aggressive allocation to gold, um, as high as like 25, 35%. Now, that is the inevitable conclusion when you look at things like you mentioned in your question, like government fiscal recklessness, currency debasement. What do those things ultimately mean? They mean negative real yields for bonds for the foreseeable future. It's the only way the governments can continue to operate, which they have shown no intention of changing course anywhere. If anything, they're getting worse with the Europeans and their debt breaks and the silly dog and pony show that was Doge. And then we did that for like a month, and now we're back to running record deficits in the States. So, negative real yields means if you put your money in a 60/40 portfolio, that 40% allocation to bonds is losing spending power. And so, it's no surprise that guys like Dalio and Gundlach are saying, let's pull some of the wealth out of that 40% allocation to bonds and let's put some of that into gold. That is a large, large amount of liquidity seeking to park itself in gold over time. And I think that has also played a big role in gold's run-up, which has dragged silver higher. Now, silver's playing catch-up, and platinum as well. Uh, I think that continues because all the reasons driving that are just getting worse.
Now, there's one word of caution and one asterisk. A liquidity shock or a big deflationary bust. Something like an AI bubble bursting or something like we saw during COVID, um, where short-term lending rates spike and we get some kind of blow-up in the basis trades worries in money markets in the T-bill market. In an event like that, everything gets sold regardless. Gold is when the margin man calls you, sell everything, or they just liquidate you. Gold gets sold off, silver gets sold off in that environment as well. Everything gets sold off. Uh, because that's a panic. And I do think you get to look at metals cheaper in that scenario if that happens. But what has been the standard response to that situation every time for the last 40 years, 50 even? It's been to lower rates and to do quantitative easing, which they've just very quietly started up again here in the United States. Uh, so even if we get a big sell-off in a deflationary event that takes gold and silver down, the inevitable response to that event will bring gold and silver right back up. So, I, I, I don't get too worried about what happens if we do get this bubble. Is gold going to go down? Is silver going to go down? Probably. I'll probably buy more in that scenario because they'll do what they always do to a hammer. Everything looks like nails. Uh, but that, I think, is the one thing that could at least temporarily derail this bull run in metals here would be some kind of a deflationary bust.
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And now, back to the interview.
Well, let's talk about the AI bubble because this is a topic you cover a lot on your channel as well as on X. Break down your main points of concern when it comes to the current valuation for the MAG 7 and the big indices, and obviously calling the markets a mug's game, but it's always fun to do. Do, do you think 2026 could be the year we finally see this bubble burst?
>> I'd be amazed if it wasn't the year that the bubble burst. And actually, I am positioned. Let me throw the disclaimer out. I'm personally short Nvidia right now. Uh, it was a couple weeks ago I took out a short position on Nvidia. So, you know, disclaimers aside, uh, set, set aside all the hype and all the silly stories that Sam Altman and Jensen Huang have have spun, what is this bubble really? In 2017, a couple of Google DeepMind engineers released a white paper called "Attention Is All You Need." And it was a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence. They discovered the Transformer. And, yeah, "Attention Is All You Need" is named after the Beatles song "Love Is All You Need." And the Transformer named after the '80s cartoon. That's just Google engineers being Google engineers. Uh, but they figured out a mathematical formula for assigning value to words in a string of text. And they were shocked when they ran this through their large language models that it was almost like talking to a human. Not quite, but it was really good. It was a, it was a giant leap forward. And it, fast forward to 2022. Silicon Valley needs a shiny new thing. We were in the tech wreck of 2022 amid the Fed hiking cycle. All the MAG 7 names were selling off brutally. We were in a bear market very briefly there, and then all of a sudden, here's the shiny new thing: AI. They launched a giant experiment. They took the Google attention white paper and they gave it all the information they could steal and all the computing power money could possibly buy, and they launched the largest accounting fraud in history to finance it. That grand experiment to see if they could achieve artificial general intelligence, basically AI smarter than a person, that experiment has been a failure for the last three years. It has not worked. These models have gotten marginally better, nowhere near as better as they needed to get in order to justify the expense. So now we are left after the biggest incineration of capital in history, which is still ongoing. Where do we go from here?
And I, I've heard some people like on CNBC talk about how this rally is supported by fundamentals, how big tech's CAPEX is supported by strong big tech earnings, and there's some truth to that. It's not quite on, at least on the surface, as speculative as like the dot-coms was. But if you really peeled back the layer there, even that MAG 7 earnings that's supposedly supporting this rally is fake. The entire AI bubble is nothing more than a circular accounting gimmick. It's a, a scheme called round-tripping, where you give money to your customers so your customers can afford to buy your product. And every participant in the AI bubble has done this. Nvidia, you know, through CoreWeave and through some of their other customers. One of the most grotesque offenders. Amazon is doing the same thing with Anthropic. So is Google. Microsoft is doing it with OpenAI. They call it strategic investment. They call it whatever you want. They are giving money to their customers so their customers can buy their products. And at the end of the day, when you hear Amazon report their revenue, oh, Amazon Web Services had all of this demand for data centers. Understand most of that isn't actual money coming into Amazon. And when Microsoft reports their cloud revenue, which includes their data centers, it's not actual cash coming in. It's something called data center credits, which is this funny money that the AI bubble has created. They're basically coupons for free GPU rental. And when I'm Microsoft and I need a big headline, oh, I, I made a $13 billion investment in OpenAI. I didn't give OpenAI $13 billion. I gave him maybe a billion dollars of cash, but I gave him $12 billion of data center credits in exchange for a chunk of equity in that company. And then when OpenAI rents Microsoft's data centers to train their large language models, they redeem those data center credits. Well, Microsoft reports that as revenue. It's not even real money going in a circle. It's a piece of paper that's just as good as money apparently going around in a circle. And so when they say the fundamentals of the MAG 7 supports this and that, oh, the P/Es aren't that high, understand most of the revenue these companies have coming in is their own money. And without them giving that money to their customers, these data centers are worthless because then their customers can't afford to even rent them. And nobody in the AI space is profitable. The hardware manufacturers are, but the people who are selling these large language models, OpenAI just incinerates money. Anthropic incinerates money. Perplexity, Cohere, all of these AI names, they all lose money. So underpinning this entire bubble, there is no profitable enterprise whatsoever. It's all being held up by an endless flow of new capital entering the bubble so that these money-losing operations can keep renting the data centers and the hyperscalers can keep buying the chips from Nvidia.
We had a very important breakthrough or very important development last week. An outfit called Blue Owl Capital, who is one of the most grotesque offenders in the private credit space. They pulled out of a 10-gigawatt data center project that Oracle was building in Michigan. And Blue Owl, I mean, talk about playing fast and loose with money. Blue Owl is, it's a chop shop of private credit in my opinion. And when they said, "We won't def, we won't fund this data center because the math of it has changed and the demand is waning, we're starting to worry about the future prospects of it." That was a wake-up call to the industry. And now the only way the AI bubble can find enough money to sustain itself is government bailouts. And so within a few days, OpenAI strategically leaked a story that they're talking to sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East, right? Because there's only two places in the world left to get this kind of money. Uncle Sam in the government heading into an election year, divided Congress, you're probably not going to get a big bailout of the AI bubble from the US Congress. The only other place to get it is from the oil sheikhs in the Middle East. And even if they do do it, let's say a hundred billion dollars from the oil sheikhs flows into OpenAI. Are they really buying OpenAI, or are they buying something else? Are they inflating a US stock bubble in exchange for, I don't know, favorable weapons sales, maybe F-35s being approved to be sold to those countries? Um, outside some kind of twisted backroom deal like that, there is no more money to support this bubble.
>> Well, speaking of these companies burning cash and not really being profitable, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was recently asked a very simple question on a podcast. The host asked, "How can a company with $13 billion in revenues make $1.4 trillion of spend commitments?" A totally reasonable question. By the way, the guy, by the way, the guy asking was a shareholder. And, um, Sam Altman reacted to him, reacted by telling him to sell his shares if he didn't believe in the company and saying, "Enough," as if he was being personally attacked and he's so sick of being attacked over a basic accounting question for his company by a shareholder. I mean, to me, this is the essence of the AI bubble in one short interaction. We've also seen similar hostility, even more crazy, by the, the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp. I think there's some question whether or not he is on some stimulant or some other sort of narcotic because he's fidgeting around, jumping around in his chair, and, um, basically berating the short sellers. It's a conspiracy. The short sellers are against Palantir as if shorting is some sort of hostile act and not just people betting on the price of his company going down. What are these guys hiding? And, and when do you think the broader market, obviously you think things are going to come to roost in 2026? I, is, is that part of that going to be the general investing public, fund managers, etc., who hold these equities, wake up and realize, wow, these guys are just, they're clearly hiding something?
All these fund managers and the people that are giving this money over to these guys, they already know that these guys are lying. Suffer from every antisocial personality disorder in the book. Lunatics, right? Whether they're narcissists, psychopaths, or sociopaths, I don't know. A psychologist could have a field day analyzing Sam Altman's response and Alex Karp's body language when he talks about short sellers. Uh, I, I'm just going to suffice it to say, they're nuts. All right? They're both nuts and they're both full of it. Sam Altman has been a liar since day one. Sam Altman, his career started, his first company he founded was called Looped. And that's how he got hooked up with Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital. He blatantly lied about this social media platform called Looped and said that they had 50,000 active users when they only had 500. All right. So he, he, one, he lied to 100x inflate his stats to get more money for his company. It, that's fraud. Anybody else does it. Why did he get away with it? I don't know. Probably because regulators are incompetent or complicit, you know, whatever reason. Um, in my opinion, reputation matters. When I see somebody who is a documented liar who ripped off his investors by just outright making stuff up, I'm not going to touch anything that guy touched. Wall Street, for whatever reason, got into bed with Sam, probably because they needed that shiny new thing. And now Wall Street has to live with it. They knew what Sam was. They still know, but they knew they could probably make the stocks go up. They could make the number go up, and so they were on board with it. Now they have to live with it.
Uh, what Sam, his response to that question, and think about what the question is: "Hey, hey Jesse, you just promised to spend more money than your company's going to take in in the next hundred years? Not even earn in profit, just take in revenue. 100 years of revenue, you've promised to spend it in the next five years. The math isn't mathing. How are you going to make that work?" And to have this, "Well, if you, I'll sell your shares, I could find a buyer. I'm going to punish you for even asking the question." That was way too defensive. And also keep in mind that happened within two or three days of his CFO, Sarah Friar, going at this big AI conference in California saying that she was looking for the government to backstop their debt, which means they're looking for a preemptive bailout from the government. Um, that was a public relations nightmare, that one-two of those two events happening, and that was really marked the top. This was just a few days after Oracle had reported their remaining performance obligations, which is a highly deceptive statistic. They take all these pledges of money that companies that don't have the money have promised to spend. They put it all in one big box and they say, "This is our remaining performance obligations," as if it's money in the bank. Um, all of this hype, messed-up reactions to perfectly legitimate questions, asking for a government bailout, that marked the top in the AI bubble. The AI bubble has already burst, and the world is just coming to that realization in my opinion.
And, you know, Alex Karp, look, look, Palantir 450 times earnings, that name is trading at right now. Come on, guys. 450 times. Do we need to, valuation matters at some point? And that's besides the fact that, you know, Alex Karp is like, you take Screech Powers from Saved by the Bell, you give him, I don't know, all the compromising information and compromat Hoover had on powerful people with the FBI. Throw that in there and let's give him Joffrey Baratheon's personality disorders, and oh yeah, what's the worst that could happen there? And he, he's gone outright on TV and threatens short sellers directly. Like, keep in mind, every time you look at your phone, Alex Karp could be staring back at you through the camera. And, you know, when a lunatic like that threatens short sellers, I, it's the 2020s. I don't think we need the tinfoil hat to really wonder what he might do with that information. So the sooner something happens to that company, the better for all of us in my opinion.
>> Yeah. And I would add to your description of Alex Karp, perhaps throw in a big bag of methamphetamine, and you would have the man that we see today. Um, I want to talk about the November jobs report in the US. Uh, supposedly beating all expectations. 64,000 jobs added compared to 50,000 expected. Of course, government propagandists took to social media to proclaim how bullish this is, how great of a job Trump is doing. I know it's nonsense. You know it's nonsense. I mean, what was it? There's lies and statistics. I don't know the exact quote, but when it comes to statistics from the government, we can assume it's all lies. Break down why this jobs report isn't necessarily indicative of the real state of employment or economic strength in the United States.
>> Yeah, there's lies, there's damn lies, and there's statistics. I, I think that was, was that Mark Twain that said that? Don't quote me on the name, but I think I got the quote right. Uh, hey, November, we added 64,000 jobs. That's more than the 50,000 the market was expecting. Everybody stop reading right there and it's a win, right? The problem is, we don't stop reading right there. And that's where the good news stops. Because remember, that was two months of data that we got all at once because of the government shutdown. And so if you continue reading, as a good boy should, you come up to the October number that said a loss of 105,000 jobs. Well, there goes all the jobs you gained in November. They're gone now. But wait, there's more. August revised lower by 22,000. September revised lower by 11,000. All told, it was a net loss of 74,000 jobs in that last jobs report. And look, we need to be adding about 100,000 a month just for unemployment to flatline. And of course, we didn't add 100,000 a month. We lost 74,000. So, naturally, the unemployment rate went up. And I have my notes from my live stream that day here. The unemployment, it went to 4.6% from 4.4%. And, you know, that's the, the headline unemployment number. The, the better mark of unemployment is the U6 unemployment, which captures the underemployed as well. People working part-time because they can't find full-time work. Uh, you know, according to the jobs report, if a guy drives an Uber for one hour and gets paid during the whole month, that's a job and that guy is employed, right? That is not somebody who is sustaining himself in any kind of prosperity, certainly not supporting a family. So, if you go by the U6 unemployment rate over that two-month time span, we went from 8% to 8.7%. Big jump in that U6 unemployment rate. This was a disaster of a jobs report.
And there's also more data. You know, one of my favorite parts of the jobs report, I, I open up the attachments and the tables. Table A9 of the non-farm payrolls. That's from the household survey, which there's two surveys in the jobs report. The establishment survey that counts employers. How many people did you hire? How many you fire? That's where like the jobs added number comes from, comes from. But then you have the household survey where they call people. How many people in your family? How many people are working? Are they working full-time or part-time? And those two surveys combined gives us the jobs report. Well, in the household survey, we lost 983,000 full-time jobs over the two months from October and November. Almost a million full-time jobs went away. Now, we gained 1,250,000 part-time jobs. So, what do we really have? We're, we're losing salaried management positions, white-collar work that comes with benefits and paid time off. And we're getting baristas and we're getting greeters at Walmart. All right. The, the quality of the jobs is going down, even as the quantity of jobs added is disappointing here. We also had a 499,000 increase in multiple job holders. You lost your full-time job. You had to get two part-time jobs to make the same money. And, you know, that's a big issue with quality of life. People are not home to tuck the kids in because they're at their second job. Dad's missing Little League games. Mom is missing concerts or chorus or what, whatever at the school, right? There's, there's major declines in standard of living and quality of life that are associated with these numbers. And to see these conservative influencers to go out there and start championing this jobs report like it was good news, I think is just terrible politics. I, I think we need to stop talking to people like children, treat them like adults, stop telling them the lived experience is wrong. And the last one, a 526,000 surge in self-employed unincorporated. Um, that is, that's gig work is really the big one there. Also like part-time farm labor shows up in that category. But that's, that's your Uber drivers, right? People are desperate working these BS jobs for a pittance. And to go out there and just say this was a good jobs report was really, I, I think that's going to come back to haunt him.
>> Well, lies and propaganda are obviously very effective tools. Trump and his administration have repeatedly stated that this is America's golden age. Costs are going down, inflation is going down, and there's more opportunities than ever than ever for Joe Sixpack out there today. Now, it's the exact same playbook that the Biden administration ran, and Trump is now doing the exact same thing after criticizing them for doing it. You know, down is up, broke is rich, war is peace, all of those things. Is this propaganda getting less effective the more it's used? Or do you still think because a lot of, you know, the majority of the population doesn't pay much attention to FOMC meetings or understanding a lot of the concepts that we've discussed today, do you think people kind of just shrug, scratch their heads, and move on with their lives? Or, or, or do you think we're eventually going to see more of an awakening amongst the general populace as they realize, hey, my groceries are going so high, and yet here's Trump up there saying prices are going down. What's happening here? What do you think?
Yeah, I, I do think that it is losing its effect. Uh, economic gaslighting didn't work well for the last guy, for Biden and his people, and it's not going to work well for Trump. Costs are down. Going on TV and saying, "We, you know, we've bought costs down." Nobody believes that. Just simple, right? Nobody, we all go to the grocery store at some point. Literally, nobody believes costs are going down. All right? You might be able to convince people that inflation is going down. Like maybe costs are going up slower, and you could even find some data to support that. There's some sections in the inflation reports that support that. But to tell people that you've bought costs down, it's just lying. It's gaslighting people. And I think people are intelligent enough to see that that's fake. Um, I think Trump is going to regret doing that. I think he's on course to get absolutely slaughtered in the midterms here because of it. And, you know, you could make the case. You could go on TV and you could say, "Hey, we're doing this thing with tariffs and it's going to hurt in the short term because the higher prices from the tariffs are going to get here faster. But take your medicine. Maybe in the long run, we can bring back some of those manufacturing jobs." Whether that happens or not, right? You can go on TV and you can say that and you're being honest and and upfront with people. But they don't do that. They say, "Oh, no. China's paying the tariffs. Costs have come down." It's just not true. And people can see it's not true. And so it devalues your message when you do that. Uh, I, I don't think it's going to work for Trump. I, Biden did it too. I mean, I'm not, not just picking on Trump here specifically, but there's something Trump also needs to keep in mind. The financial press and the media is not going to carry the water for him like they did for Biden. You're not going to get the articles like you got in the Wall Street Journal from Greg Ip last year saying, "The economy is good. You're the problem." Just magnificent economic gaslighting from the Wall Street Journal in that article last year. Uh, but they're not going to do that for Trump. They're going to do the opposite for Trump. So, I, I, I think he's going to live to regret this. And I think the midterms are going to be pretty brutal for Republicans because of it.
You recently released an in-depth report on your YouTube channel titled "The Hidden Horrors Behind the Little Bank Failure in Lindsay, Oklahoma." Walk us through some of the pertinent details there and how it could be a microcosm for issues in the broader economy.
>> Yeah, so this story, um, this one consumed me for a couple of weeks there, and then really, I've been working on this one for about a year. This, this little bank, the First National Bank of Lindsay, Oklahoma, failed in October of last year. It was a small bank. Most of the press didn't even cover it. It got some brief mention because the Silicon Valley and Signature Banks were still a little fresh in people's minds from early 2023, but really nobody cared, right? It wasn't too big to fail. It was too, it was too small to care. Uh, when I went and looked into that, I realized that the OCC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the FDIC news release mentioned fraud at this bank failure. So, right away, I know this is something different. And I went and I looked, I pulled the bank's balance sheet, and, you know, the bank had like $108 million in assets. Uh, and they lost about $60 million went up in smoke. There was a $43 million hit to the deposit insurance fund, $7 million in uninsured deposits, and $10 million of bank capital went up in smoke. So, $60 million goes missing at a $108 million asset bank. That's something big happened there. This is a little tiny town, 2,900 people. That much money going missing in a little place like that. There's something they're not telling us. And so I went and I started digging into this bank, and I found out that just about two, maybe three weeks before the bank had failed, the bank vice president had taken his own life. Okay, there's something else going on there. Uh, and I started reaching in. I, I reached out to local residents. I checked the local Facebook groups. What are the Karens saying? You can learn so much about a small town by just what they're bickering about in the Facebook groups. Uh, turns out money has a funny habit of going missing in this town. Millions of dollars going missing in this town at local utilities, at local schools, just blatantly corrupt. The town had very suspiciously fired their auditors a few years earlier. Uh, long story short, this town is right along the I-35 corridor in Oklahoma, which is one of the most prolific drug and human trafficking corridors in America, that's run by the Mexican cartels and the Chinese. Uh, the Chinese triads have taken over the marijuana industry in Oklahoma. A few years ago, Oklahoma legalized marijuana grows, and the Chinese triads came in, and even though it's legal to grow marijuana in Oklahoma, it's illegal for a foreign citizen to hold the license. So these Chinese gangsters are convincing Oklahomans to get the license and then they're running these illegal grow operations and then smuggling it to states where it's still criminalized, which is a straw ownership scheme rampant throughout Oklahoma. There's so much product being produced because of so much of this Chinese gangster involvement that legitimate marijuana grow operations can't compete because they're dumping product into the local market as they're also smuggling it all over the country. And it turns out in this little town of Oklahoma where tens of millions of dollars went missing, only one guy has been indicted. The bank CEO is a guy who, he drives a nice Jeep Wrangler and he has an above-ground pool in his backyard. That's not where $60 million went. No freaking way. Um, the bank, the indictment mentions several other borrowers. One of the guys runs a trucking company. Interesting. Right near a drug smuggling corridor. Another guy runs an automotive shop. Interesting. They tend to hide things in car frames and fender wells and tires and things. I am pretty sure I stumbled onto a node in a global drug and human trafficking network that runs through this little town. And I think that's what failed the bank. There was an illegal grow operation that was busted in the town of Lindsay just a few months before the bank failed. And there's no mention of any of this stuff in the reporting or in the indictment. And I dug into this stuff. I pulled loans. I pulled property records. Name the people involved, and, uh, it ended up being almost an hour-long documentary about this little bank failure that it really, it reads like a Jack Reacher book, like big-time global organized crime hiding in plain sight in a small town in flyover country, and nobody in the press went there because nobody cared about this little bank in flyover country. They didn't even bail him out. Like uninsured depositors actually lost money because we bail out the uninsured depositors in Silicon Valley when they lose money, but not in flyover country. We don't care about those people. And, uh, so I, I, I worked this for over a year. I was just hoping somebody would care because the people in this town have just been so abused by this. I hope somebody does something about it.
>> And obviously this is a very unique situation, but we have seen other bank failures. You mentioned Signature Bank, um, and, and the other one that failed around that same time as well. Uh, do you think there could be deeper, more systemic issues when it comes to the banking sector in the United States? You know, I've talked to a few people on this show who believe we'll see a crisis in, in the banking sector in the US at some point. Are you in that camp, or are these just kind of one-offs that, that don't have any connection to the larger microcosm?
>> Yes, I believe a banking crisis, another one, is inevitable. U, it doesn't ne, necessarily mean it's right around the corner, but it is inevitable. We're in a system that's hopelessly dependent on monetary expansion and new debt creation to, to keep up the old system and to support the old debt. Inevitably, that leads to negative real yields. Inevitably, that leads to bank failures. Uh, so while the Lindsay bank itself maybe isn't symptomatic of the systemic risks, or it's not symptomatic of the systemic risks in the banking system. Um, I do think what's going on with these Chinese organized crime organizations, which operate all throughout the country, they were tied to the biggest bank fine that's ever been charged, a bank in America. We find TD Bank about $3 billion earlier this year. That was for them laundering money for the Chinese triads that are operating in Oklahoma. All of my research said that these Oklahoma triads are run by organized crime in New York that uses banks to launder their money. So, I think it's, it's another risk. Now, as far as like the banks themselves, what could take them down? You take your pick, right? You got private equity exposure. You've got private credit, which is non-banks pretending to be banks. Well, where did they get the money? They borrowed it from the banks. So, the banks are loaning to people they're not allowed to loan to, using these private credit middlemen as intermediaries. They still, at the end of the day, they're the ones who end up with the risk. Um, commercial real estate. I don't know if I mentioned that one yet, but that's a risk out there. So, you know, pick your poison here. Any number of these things could cause systemic risks in the banking sector. Oh, yeah. And the AI bubble. That going up in smoke could certainly cause banks to fail. So, uh, I don't think we've seen the last of it. That being said, for now, the banking sector's pretty quiet. Knock on wood.
>> Well, tell us about the Nobody Special Finance channel and anywhere else people can follow you who, who want to see more of your work.
>> Yep. My channel on YouTube is Nobody's Special, and, uh, I do a morning show every morning at 9:00 a.m., just before the market opens. I do a live stream every day. Um, I occasionally do these investigative deep dives like I did with the Lindsay Bank or on the AI bubble. I'm also on Twitter at JG_nuke. All my videos I put out on YouTube, I also put out on Twitter, and I'm on Spotify. Nobody's Special Finance on Spotify.
>> Great. All of that will be linked in the description below. Thank you so much, Jack, for coming on the show. It's been a blast.
>> Thank you, Jesse. It's always a pleasure.
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