Transcription
Hello again from Spratmoney, sproutmoney.com. We're about the midpoint of 2026, and it is time to wrap up the month of June. Wrap up the first half of the year that has certainly been eventful, and we're going to do it in a way that we've kind of got into a little rhythm here. Every six months or so, we like to check in with Eric Sprat himself, and so, uh, it is a pleasure to welcome him in today to sum up the first half of the year. Eric, good to see you, my friend.
>> Hey Craig. Um, uh, good to see you too. Uh, not good to see what's happened so far this year and the trends that we're in right now with gold and silver absolutely getting beat up. Uh, but, uh, let me assure the audience that I still have full belief in where we're ultimately going here. And when I look back at what happened to, I use silver because it was so dramatic. Went on, I guess it was Jan 30th when it broke down and went down, what was it, almost $55, $60 in it in 30 hours.
>> Yeah.
>> Now, look, I've been around a long time.
>> I've seen this before. Okay. I saw what happened in 1980. I saw what happened in 2008. I saw, I saw what happened this time, and same old play, right? They announced that some guy named Kevin Wars is going to be the chairman of the Fed, and all of a sudden they got to knock silver down. Like, I just don't get it. But silver goes down, and gold goes down, and it's the same old reason that the commercial banks are short these products. They were losing. Oh my god, their losses when silver was $120 were just incredible. They had some huge expiries of options coming up the next day, Jan 31st. Huge expiries on SLB options, as an example, because they were watching those closely. I mean, they would have lost tens of billions of dollars had they closed at that price the next day. Well, isn't it funny? It didn't close there the next day. They closed very, very, very far from there the next day. And I just think, you know, this is anomalous. We all know what the fundamental, uh, picture in gold and silver is, particularly silver, because it's an industrial product. You can see the uses and the demand for it and the shortages for the last five years and now a sixth year. We can see the goings-on in the silver trading on the Comex. Uh, we know that people have gone to jail for manipulating the price of silver. People from very big banking institutions in the United States have gone to
>> jail.
>> So there's no surprise that this goes on. And let's face it, the banks got totally caught offside because they're the only shorters, really, right? Between the banks and the few guys that trade this for business. They're the guys, really the only guys short. So they were losing gargantuan amounts of money. And here we have this huge correction. Of course, everyone gets blown out. And, and of course, the CME, Chicago Merc, helped everybody by instantaneously having all kinds of margin rate increases. I think there were four or five of them. And the guy, guy's already losing money, he's got to put up money at the margin. And this guy comes in with a margin rate increase. Yeah. We play it before.
>> Yeah. Okay.
>> 1980, same thing. When the Hunt brothers had it squeezed, well, we're going to change the rules. You can only go, you can only go short. You can't buy anymore. Well, so what happens to the price of silver? It goes from $15 down to $5. Changed the rules in, um, '08, you know, with all those margin rate increases for whatever reason that they finally got the ball rolling on the downside, and they just,
>> you know, they tamp you to death. We've all heard, those of us in the silver business heard about tamping. We've heard the former head of the CME, the CME.
>> Yeah.
>> Who said that? Yeah. When we actually looked at the evidence where there was lots of evidence of manipulation, but for some reason we hesitated to charge them,
>> he said that he was, he was about to pass away, unfortunately.
>> Oh, you're talking about Bart Chilton of the CFTC.
>> Bart Chilton. Yeah, he said that in an interview. It's available to everyone. Okay. He named names, too.
>> Yeah. Uh, so I stand by the case that, um, gold and silver will bounce back further for all the same fundamental reasons. I mean, I could go to the, the whole debt situation, the currency debasement that goes on. I mean, just incredible. It's, and it's not getting any better when I see what's going to happen to the US coming out of this Iran war with the $300 million claim and the return and the return of the hundred billion and
>> all the cost of the war, which was fruitless. I mean, the whole thing was, in my mind, fruitless, accomplished nothing.
>> In fact, it was, it was bad. It is bad from a USA perspective, and unfortunately from a USA perspective, I, they just keep losing allies more and more and more. And when you lose an ally, he doesn't want to own your currency, okay? So I think we'll be right back to that dollar weakness, gold strength,
>> silver strength.
>> The fundamentals will support the silver story, and there's hardly a day goes by when you don't read something going on in the electronics kind of business that isn't so powerfully great for silver, whether it's the solid-state engines, the AI plants they're putting up, but it just goes on and on and on. And, uh, I, I think we underestimate what really could happen. And one of the things I do fall back on is the knowledge that when silver and gold were currencies, silver traded a 15 to 1 ratio to gold. When, when gold was at $4,500, silver should, should have been $300. But has been suppressed for all these 50 odd years by banks who've been short the whole time. I mean, it's shocking to think that we had that. As you know, I don't have a love on for banks. Uh, and, and I maybe, uh, I could get mad at myself for playing in a, in a game where, you know, it's manipulated, right?
>> You sort of, you probably feel a little bit stupid because of it, right? And you, even this time around thinking, "No, there's no way they can knock it down that far. That's impossible." The impossible happened in 30 hours.
>> 30 hours.
>> Yeah. And it, as we record this, this late in the day here on Wednesday, June 24th, um, we're right down to what we seem to be pretty key support levels. You know that
>> a lot of us have been kind of targeting ever since all this nastiness began.
>> Um, so we're going to talk a little bit about what, uh, should drive prices back higher. Um, reminder though, for everybody, SP Money, named after that guy right there, um, is a great bullion dealer. They will sell you physical metal and store it for you as well. They are the sponsors of all these podcasts. So, be sure to visit spotmoney.com when you're done watching and add to your stack. Eric, I, I, I wanted, I wanted to start here because it's all about perspective, right? Uh, we've been doing this. We used to do this weekly way back in the day, but, you know, we do it now about every six months. I like to check in and see what you're thinking.
>> We're getting, we're getting a little older, Craig.
>> We, well, speak for. No. Anyway, yeah. No, you're right.
>> Speaking for, I am speaking for myself.
>> Let me lay this on you because again, it's all about perspective. Um, the last time we spoke back in December, gold that closed at day $4,333 and silver closed $6,550. If we dial it back to last June, the previous time we spoke, one year ago, a little more over a year ago, June the 12th, gold was $33.87.
>> Mhm.
>> Silver was $36.35.
>> Yeah.
>> So, I'm sitting here today looking at $4,000 gold and $57.50 silver on the close this afternoon.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. What's changed? I mean, I mean, what has changed?
>> Yeah. After giving up a lot, you know, and your best returns are when something's gone down and hit bottom, and everyone realizes we did the wrong thing. And that's, I want to talk about everyone maybe sometime realizing we all did the wrong thing because one of the things that's has hindered the stock market, sorry, the precious metal market is the stock market.
>> Yeah.
>> Because it's been a wonderful place for people, particularly leveraged speculators, to make outsized returns very, very, very quickly, particularly if they were focusing on certain things. But when you look at the economy and the status of the United States government, the fiscal situation, um, the, the weakness in home sales, the weakness in commercial real estate, the weakness in private credit, we, and get your money out of a private credit,
>> right?
>> Private equity fund. You can't get your money out. I mean, they've, they've starting to seal the doors here. That's how bad it is. So, and the whole bond market has been no panacea for everybody. So, the only thing that was working is the stock market. And, and it was a, a very focused group of stocks that were working for the most, well, first of all, the magic seven. Then we moved into AI. Yep. And recently, like last week, there's a number of companies announced that, you know what, we got a problem with our AI jits here. We're letting all our staff use AI, but the cost of using it is very, very high. And companies like, uh, I got some names here, um, Walmart, Amazon, Meta, Uber, Cisco, and I think Google as well have said, we can't keep spending money on AI like this because when all our employees use it, and you know, you ask somebody asks some huge computer complex, you know, what's the favorite name of a cat in New Jersey, you know? And then they fire up all this equipment, you know, to get the, imagine the cost of firing up the equipment,
>> right?
>> To get the answer. And everyone's using this thing all the time. Even the guy at ChatGPT, I swear, this was about six or nine months ago, and we said, you know, the insane thing is the more people use our service, the more money we lose.
>> That's not supposed to work that way.
>> No, it's not supposed to work that way. And everyone assumes it won't, it will change. But I'm not so convinced with this early on, these big companies say, "Oh, hold on here. We got to cut back on this. This is not working for us." And we don't even know if the, the pricing of the product is even where it should be to support the capex and the cost of production, or did they sort of lowball it going in and they still lose money,
>> right? So if this AI starts falling apart, I mean, there's nothing left in the market that's looks healthy.
>> Well, you're getting me to think. I, I just put a tweet on my X account today about, uh, if you go, the chart is actually almost identical. You go back to March of 2008, before the great financial crisis and the crash, gold intraday got like to $10.35.
>> Yeah.
>> And then fell by, I think it was seven months later, down to $6.83, something like that, $6.85, was a $350 drop, so 34%
>> before the stock market crash. Well, that's almost exactly what gold is down right now from $5,500 down to $4,000. Is I mean, are, I mean, history obviously doesn't repeat, but I mean, with what you're saying about AI, is it rhyming?
>> But it sounds the same. Of course.
>> Yeah. Huh. Look, I, I was there in 2000. I could see the the NASDAQ bubble, and, uh, that's when I started my hedge fund, so I could go short the market and long precious metal stocks. Uh, I was there in '07, '08, '09. You could see it, you know, right before your eyes what the hell the problem was with all the leverage in the housing market. And sure enough, yes, we had to put up with what exactly what we're putting up with now before the metals finally went. So if the market rolls over here because we've had it wrong all along, which we might very well have, I, I suspect we have with so many areas of weakness already.
>> Yeah.
>> Housing, commercial real estate, private equity, private bonds. Um, it's just endless all the things that are having trouble. And luckily, one sector kept us up there. Now, this sector is really questionable right now. Right now, I wouldn't have said it as forcefully had I not read about these companies that are cutting back. Uber, for example, they said they spent their 2026 AI budget in four months. They spent all that they budgeted for AI in four months.
>> That's not sustainable. Um, so Eric, what do you, uh, let me lead this then to what, what do you think of Worsh? Um, because again, when he was announced as a name that coincided with January 30th and he's going to be this big hawk. I, you know, he's trying to claim that he's going to be this inflation guy and he's got the dual mandate. They're going to get price under control and all this stuff, but doesn't he have to keep the plate spinning first and foremost and the the machine greased? You know, I just going to say, I think the problem he has is the whole keeping the economy going is not something that some central banker can just sit there and make happen. As you know, they, they do it wrong all the time,
>> you know, and he might be saying, "Well, I'm not going to, I'm going to raise rates." But meanwhile, now that the markets, the stock market's finally giving it up a little, we could see yields coming down here. M I mean, look at the housing. Look at the new home sales that were down, whatever percent today. You know, people are buying way fewer houses than they used to. I think we're down to like 583,000 new homes. And if my memory serves me, it used to be like 850 annual. That's a big difference. 850 to
>> 580 or something.
>> So he's got problems in front of him. And of course, he's got this whole deficit thing that we're not resolving, and we're making this. So I think that people should be very calm here. I, if I was to advise anybody of any of these, is stay at an AI levered. I, that is the last thing. When I, when I read about the fact that so many people have these one-day option trades, one day.
>> Yeah.
>> You're right.
>> You make a fortune. You're wrong. You lose, you lose everything. Right.
>> Then there's probably been a lot of money lost here recently with AI weakening and Mag Seven underperforming. Zone. I think there's still going to be a great opportunity to play gold and silver.
>> So, we've, we've come down dramatically, obviously. Um, let me, let me lay this one on you. Um, I saw a chart yesterday. I've never seen this before. Guy measuring the silver price, uh, against M2 money supply, which I will point out, I just saw today, is at the highest year-over-year growth since June of 2022. Okay, so this notion that money supply is contracting and that the, you know, dollar should be getting strange is nonsense. Regardless though, this guy plotted the chart, Eric, I thought it was fascinating. Uh, if you price silver as a function of M2, where it peaked in January is almost identical to where it peaked in 2011. And so the pullback then, if we're down, I don't know, 60%, that's the same as being down to $20 in 2011. I mean, we got to be kind of relatively close to a low if you look at it that way. I just thought I'd see what you think of all that, given that money supply keeps expanding.
>> It's going to be close. Well, there's, look at, they just have to keep printing money. Okay. And they do,
>> right?
>> And they say they've got, you know, they're selling bonds, and they sell some bonds, but they're also buying them all the time. And you find out later that they were buying and playing in the market. In fact, would I be surprised to find out that the, the government might have u put a lid on the price of oil,
>> right?
>> With this whole moose thing going on, first of all, selling the SPR, who's to say they weren't in the derivatives on the Comex?
>> Yep.
>> I would not be at all surprised was the fact. So anyway, it's, uh, we have a, our part of the world, particularly the developed part of the world, is not doing well. And the people who buy gold and silver, they're not on our team anyway. Those guys, the guys that buy it are China, India, Asia, you know, and they're not. We saw gold imports into, uh, China. I think there were 164 tons in May. 1964. That's 2,000 tons annually. We only have 4,000 tons. We mine three, and I think we have a total of 4,000 including recycling. Well, there's the half of it gone if China keeps that up. Okay. And I, I can take up probably another four or 500 that China produces themselves that they don't export.
>> And then put to throw in the Indian demand. My god, I don't know. There's going to be shortages of these products. Well, there's never a shortage of gold because there's all the gold in the world still with us, right? But we don't have all the silver. We might only have 2% of the silver we've ever mined because most of it's in such small little places that you can't recover it. So, I think that you wait till we're going to open up on Monday. What are the Chinese going to do? You know, they're, they're bringing back these, um, bank accounts where people can buy gold in the bank and get, get their money back traded into gold. That starts on July 1st. Um, we've had some negative changes in India, and I think those could easily be reversed here.
>> Mhm. You know, there was a time when the Indians were buying so much silver that they, they had to stop from buying them in the ETFs. And the same thing in China. Well, maybe they'll say, "Okay, fine. ETFs, start buying again. Let's bring, let's bring that two and a half billion people back on into the game and have them buying things. That'll change things fast." So, I'm, I'm hopeful. And by the way, as you well know, it's quarter end,
>> right?
>> And quarter end is when banks dress things up a little. Okay. I've seen it so often, it drives me crazy. Hopefully, we can get through this quarter, and it'll be clear sailing after that.
>> Yeah. Um, let me ask you another question that's been kind of bandied about a lot. Uh, as we head up to the tw 250th celebration of the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, um, what do you think of this idea of revaluing the US's gold from $42 an ounce up to the market price to create kind of this net net deficit neutral cash creation? Um, what do you think of that idea? Is it a possibility?
>> Well, I know people write about it and talk about it, and of course, I listen and read what they have to say. I do not pretend to be an expert on a US reset of the gold price. Uh, first of all, it might be a, a phony thing. Anyway, I, I've always doubted that the US owned any gold.
>> Yeah. You know,
>> Mr. President Trump was going to audit Fort Knox, but for some reason, he's never got around to it.
>> Yeah. M
>> Not that he doesn't change his mind that often, but, you know, Fort Knox is not that far away. Just go down there and check it out, man.
>> Tell me what you got.
>> You are the president. After
>> you might revalue it and you don't have any.
>> Yeah.
>> Would be kind of an odd thing to do.
>> Kind of awkward.
>> Pretend you, pretend you have it. U, I've heard those things, and, and of course, something that's added a little bit of color to that is the fact that the US Mint is bringing out their celebration coin on July
>> Yeah.
>> For, and the gold coin, which is in the shape of the Liberty Bell, is one ounce of gold, but they're charging $19,000 for it.
>> And like, what are they charging for the silver coin? Like $750?
>> Yeah, it's like a 13 to 1 ratio.
>> $750. Maybe they got the memo about the reset, you know, being a government agency. I don't know. Makes you think. Yeah, I mean, you could see there have been ideas bandied about that this was a way they were going to, you know, Trump wanted to start a sovereign wealth fund and a Bitcoin fund and all these other things, and that's where you'd get the cash. I don't know. And I frankly, I don't even know where, you know, if they did revalue the price to $5,000, that doesn't necessarily mean that gold's at $5,000, uh, actually trading there. But I just didn't know if that was something that was on your radar. If that's something you
>> really, I mean, I, I watch for things like that because people talk about it, right? Judy talks
>> Yeah.
>> Sheckman talks about, you know, the fact they might issue some bond backed by gold at $20,000 an ounce, something like that. And they're not dumb people, they're smart people. So
>> there's, there's some possibility of that. And of course, let's look at the, the, the real issue. The issue is that the US is in trouble, and they're bankrupt. They've always been, they've been bankrupt ever since I got into gold and silver,
>> right? I mean, they got $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities. $200 trillion. What's your share of that? Think about it.
>> It's been gold prices going down, but you had to pay off your part of the debt.
>> You'll be in trouble.
>> Uh, all right. So, you feel confident that, uh, yeah, we've had, we had quite the runup since December, the last time we spoke, and now we've given all that back. You feel confident that we're not going to go wandering in the desert for another five years like we did the last time we went through this.
>> Feeling confident is a very difficult thing to do in the present.
>> Yeah, that's true.
>> Feeling that, you know, the fundamentals suggest this is what should happen. I feel very strongly.
>> Okay. Do I know whether, you know, the CME is going to come out and say, "Well, nobody's could buy silver anymore in the C." I actually like that if they said, "We'd like, we want to get them out of the silver market. They're not in the silver market. They're in the paper market."
>> Yeah.
>> "We'd like them not to be there." Okay.
>> Um, so it's hard to predict that. And, you know, you still got that situation where the banks, the price of silver rallies a lot here, goes back to $120, they're going to be losing a lot of money on their silver position. So they're, you can't be confident of when it's, you can't be confident of when it, but you can be confident it should turn, which I am.
>> Yeah. Have you, have you been selling any? There are some people like even Rick Rule was out. Yes. I sold some silver at $110.
>> Yeah. I, well, I have had some levered positions. So I've had to, uh, stay in front of the margin clerk.
>> Yeah.
>> And I've been doing it, but
>> you know, I'm not going to sit there and keep buying all these new issues, you know.
>> Yeah.
>> Making my financial situation more precarious.
>> Okay.
>> By the way, I, by the way, I wouldn't be surprised. We should be seeing one of some of these senior mining companies doing something, right?
>> In terms of takeovers, right? These things are dirt cheap. Where are you, boys? Come on.
>> Right. Right. Right. Sitting there with all the cash in there. Well, they are buying their stocks back, which I guess is good. Uh, oh, I should talk about the IPOs. You know, one thing that Eric knows from his living through these markets. Huge IPO issuance is very bad for stock markets because let's take the $85 billion that, um, our friends at, uh, SpaceX got.
>> Mhm.
>> They're not going to buy stocks with it. So they get $85 billion from people playing the market, which they take out of their accounts or sell this to buy that. So they, they have to sell something.
>> Yeah.
>> And, and he's not putting the money back in the stock market. It's not going back in the stock market. All those AI guys that are raising money through through bond issues and u stock offers, which Google's doing $80 billion and an talking about an issue, and Chat GPT or OpenAI said is is talking about a stock. These are big issues. This is money that comes out of the stock market.
>> Yeah. It's
>> liquidity that leaves the stock market.
>> Yeah.
>> And it's, it's a bad, it's a bad omen for stocks. It is. And we're going through it right now.
>> Like the.com stuff you were talking about. You know, these IPOs were coming out sucking up all the cash 25 years ago.
>> That's what happened. Everyone is doing an issue because their stocks up here.
>> And all of a sudden, there's no money left.
>> Yeah. Hey, Eric, I want to, before I forget, I want to ask you one more thing. You were talking about the CME and the banker playground and everything else that they do there. Are they running out of suckers in that the open interest, total contract open interest for both gold and silver is at multi-decade lows and has been for months. What do you make of that?
>> Yeah. No, I mean, is it any window you can knock the price of silver down? There's nobody trades everywhere.
>> There's nobody there. Yes. You get huge volatility.
>> Yeah. No, I just, I mean, maybe some, maybe more people go into physical silver market, but you don't see that on. Although we do see it on Comex, like in gold, in particular, almost every day, somebody's taking a billion dollars worth of gold out of Comex every day this month, including, I think on, uh, uh, Tuesday, another billion dollars of gold for delivery in the spot month. And the, um, the next month, August, uh, sorry, no, the July month, it's getting bigger in open interest, too.
>> Yeah.
>> And they never get off this stuff. You watch the change in, you know, rotation from the front month, which is a delivery month, to the outer month. There's almost contract for contract just rolls into the next month. They never get off the short. They can't get off the short. They can't get off the short. There's no players to.
>> So,
>> but I mean, like back in January, I remember six years ago when we were still doing the things weekly, and you were like, "Hey, watch the EFPs every day." And then you got me watching that. Geez, like '17 or '18 when that started to spike. And by the time we got to January of 2020, they were doing 25 and 30,000 EFPs a day and open interest was 800,000 contracts. And now here we are six years later, they're doing a couple hundred EFPs a day and open interest is 350.
>> Yeah. I mean,
>> so the interest there, I guess. Well, you know what? I actually had some SLB calls for a while, and they did wonderfully for me. But I actually sold them before it would took the big run. And I thought, you know what? I don't think SLB's got the silver. I don't know that I want calls on something that may not make it. And I still have that view. By the way, I meant to add one thing. Um, the, um, whistleblower out of the UK, Andrew.
>> Yeah. Mhm.
>> Andrew Maguire.
>> Andrew McGuire. Yeah. He keeps dropping references to to Jane Street.
>> Yeah.
>> You know what Jane Street is? It's a guy who plays the ETF against the stocks.
>> Yeah. And I was thinking this myself. You know what? If I was Jane Street, if I knock the price of silver down in the Comex, I got 200 different securities are going to go down that I'm going to arrange to have go down
>> big time.
>> By taking this one down myself.
>> And I'm going to make a fortune on all the other 200. Mhm.
>> Whether it's a PSLV, SLV, uh, all the silver stocks, all the gold stocks,
>> all the various ETFs, the levered things, and like, it's, it's very worrisome to me that this go can go on and does go on. And we know what goes on in the sense that I think they made $39 billion last year in the stock market,
>> right?
>> And they did something like 25% of all the ETF trades. It's just shocking. Mhm.
>> But I, and I worry about that in a something as small as a silver market, like, you know, some guy went out and sold a billion dollars worth of, uh, not SL, but futures, uh, on silver, everything goes down.
>> And if you know you're short $10 billion and you use a billion to knock it down, then cover the $10 billion short and you lose a little on the billion that you sold on silver. But I think it's a pretty good trade. So that worries me that that might happen or does happen. Does happen.
>> It does happen. And I mean, what they make Jane Street profit in the fourth quarter alone last year was like $19 billion or something trading profit. I, and you remember then they had that noted, you know, or reported massive position in the SLV that then disappeared. And you, so there's a lot to that. I wonder though, if they've bled the stone as much as they can, Eric, maybe they'll come back in on the long side again. They might have pushed it up, took the run.
>> Yeah.
>> Push it down, took the run.
>> Yep.
>> There's a lot of leverage there. And that the fact that so many, that most people haven't even heard of, could make that kind of money
>> just by picking off the market, you know?
>> Yeah. Is the answer just what we
>> Not doing anybody any favors. Okay. They're not doing the general public any favors.
>> For sure. For sure. End empire kind of stuff. Everyone's just looking out for themselves like the politicians and the bankers and everybody else. But Eric, for the, is it the answer what we've always talked about? Just, you know what, if there someone's going to Sprout Money is going to sell you an ounce of silver for $55. Take them up on it.
>> We're going to be very close. We're going to be, um, let me
>> and there's lots of people recommending precious metal. Aren't just precious metal freaks, including the guy at Morgan Stanley who said you should have 20% of your bond money in gold.
>> Right. Right. Uh, you know, Jeff Curry, Jeff Curry, who was always the analyst at Goldman Sachs, the commodity head commodity guy at Goldman Sachs said about a month ago, he thought gold was going to go to $4,000 before it went to $10,000. So it, um, all right. Hey,
>> I wish I had said that.
>> Exactly. You ought to hire him. Um, Eric, let me, uh, kind of take some time and just pick your brain a little bit about the stocks. I know a lot of people watch and just kind of like to get a feel for what your current thoughts are on the sector. Uh, you know, what the companies, if few, if there's any ones you're adding to or you're excited about. Uh, that sort of thing. So, I am, let's just kind of leave it there. That's the question. Where do you stand?
>> I think my first move when I decide that I want to get introduce more funds into the precious metal markets, it will be, uh, some derivation of, uh, silver stocks. Okay. I think silver stocks will by by far the best. And, and I, I don't mean a particular company, but I mean like the SILV, maybe the Amplify Silver, uh, ETF, something like that.
>> I, I think they'll run real fast here. And I, I really own everything that I've ever had for the longest time. And I'm rarely a seller. Most things I own that are significant, I have big percentages that I have to record the sales all the time. So
>> yeah,
>> I don't think there's any, I mean, I probably sold some USA silver somewhere along the line because it went into some index. I, I use that opportunity when something goes into an index. Sometimes you get some liquidity that you otherwise wouldn't have, particularly for someone like me who owns a lot of positions that are big that, uh, you know, my own influence in the market would not be positive if I was a seller. So, I tend just to, I tr, I, I'm a believer in a long-term hold. In fact, I thought I saw that Charlie Munger said, you know, it wasn't, you didn't wasn't how careful how you bought. It wasn't, sorry, important how you bought. It wasn't important how you sold. It's important how patient you are.
>> Yes.
>> That's the biggest thing. Just be patient. Let it work for
>> uh, last we spoke, you were, and I've seen you since, mentioned quite a few times, companies like High Croft being something that you're still excited about. I don't, I don't want to actually get you to talk about anything specific.
>> No, no, it's my biggest, it's my biggest position.
>> Okay.
>> Uh, they had a new, uh, ME. They had 2.6 billion ounces of silver equivalent. 2.6 billion.
>> That's a lot. That's more than almost everybody I would point out. Okay. Um, they've had some wonderful drilling to find high-grade. They have a new high-grade silver deposit. They're still drilling out. I think one of the reasons, other than the price of silver, that it's gone down recently, we haven't had any drilling news for a couple months.
>> Yeah.
>> And you need that.
>> Yeah. Uh, they came out with a PEA that said, uh, at current, at spot prices at the time, that the, um, net asset value was $10 billion. Well, today it trades at $2.5 billion. So it's, that's 300% upside, and that presumes the, um, or body doesn't get bigger, that they don't find better ways of processing the ore, which I think they're looking at extensively, and I think they're going to have some something interesting to tell us about that. So, no, I, I like it. I still own every share I ever bought. So
>> fingers crossed.
>> Yeah. And another one stock that I own that I probably should talk about again is Free Gold Ventures. You know, they got over 30 million ounces of gold now. Uh, it just gets bigger all the time. The grade keeps going up. It's in Alaska. It's 25 km from, uh, Fairbanks. It's 5 km from Fin Kin Ross's Fort Knox. I mean, it just, it's going to be a mine someday. And yes, I think we've all usually suffered by the lack of interest in these things. There's just a general lack of interest.
>> Yeah.
>> So, I think it'll, uh, if, if the market wants to roll over here while almost every subsection of the market's already rolled over, if the general market wants to roll over because AI doesn't make it, I think people will have to look again at, um, the precious metals. Well, that we, uh, we received a couple questions. The folks at Sprat Money put out on Twitter, I think, and a couple of other places asking to see if people had a couple questions for you. And that was one of them that was mentioned a few times. You know, I mean, obviously GDX going from 30 to 120 or whatever, that's a pretty substantial move, whether the generalists and the retail investor involved or not. But I still, it doesn't seem to me that this is a, like a, what people are investing in at present in the mining sector. I mean, we all talk about when's that going to happen. What, what do you think will, what will it take?
>> One of my favorite questions to all underwriters when the deal's been done and it's completed, I say, well, were there any generalists in it? And there haven't been many generalists, guys that have had a previous leaning towards gold and silver. So, we don't, um, we haven't seen that the ground swell of optimism when we're probably down to, well, under 1% of all, uh, financial assets. Again,
>> again, 1%.
>> And yet gold is a bigger reserve asset for central banks than bonds are, than US bonds are.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. How much, what again, what was the IPO for SpaceX? 85
>> 5 or 87. Yeah. Yeah.
>> How many GDXs can you buy with that?
>> So, yeah, that day hasn't come yet. Um, another question we got from
>> All the money they make, Craig. It's all the money they make.
>> That's right. That's right. That's
>> hard.
>> You're actually lighting, you are literally lighting money on fire in a rocket company.
>> Well, then he turns around and does it. What? He's got a $2 billion bond issue coming out or something or more. Yeah, you
>> I don't know if it's officially announced, but excuse me. You just raised it, did this IPO. Now you're borrowing from the bond market.
>> Yeah. Do you think
>> a lot of money there, my friend?
>> Bitcoin's been struggling quite a bit, too. I mean, it's going down at just like gold and silver are. Do you think I don't know, what do you make of that? Could that draw some attention back?
>> I've never really been a believer in Bitcoin. When, when I'm a believer in gold and silver, I, I would never trade gold and silver for Bitcoin. And I, some people believe it will hold its value, uh, when people turn their back totally on the dollar, the US dollar. Um, I'm not in the camp.
>> Yeah.
>> I don't want to think, quite frankly.
>> Yeah. Um, all right. Another question I had, uh, that was mentioned a couple of times, and I thought this was an interesting one. Um, you've made some mistakes along the way. You've been at this for 25 years focusing only on gold and silver. Um, what have you learned from some of your mistakes?
>> Well, here's what the one thing I'd say I've learned, and it's not so much from the mistakes, and I probably readily admitted that I probably had more losers than winners, because that's a tough damn business we're in.
>> The gold and silver business, and turn rocks into money.
>> Yeah.
>> That is tough. Okay. It takes so damn long. I mean, I could say of, of, uh, for example, Freehold. I mean, geez, I've been at it for probably seven years now. The deposit's gone from 6 million to 30 million ounces, and nobody gives a goddamn.
>> Yeah. Nobody cares.
>> And everybody knows, you know, it'll be another seven years before you could turn anything into money, probably on that. And that's the problem. We got to wait for the money all the time. But when you get, you finally make the money, the market takes notice. Okay. I can go back to the Kirkland days when Foster Will developed. He'll start earning all his money. Well, then the stock goes crazy. Okay.
>> Y.
>> So, and the thing I have learned is that when you have a winner, press the bet. You know, if you know it's all coming up the way you thought it was, just keep buying the stock. So, when the, the payoff comes, the payoff is way bigger than what it might have been when you start. I'm not a great seller of losers. I'm not. I'm, I'm an owner. And, you know, lots of things that I was losers on in the last two years have turned out to be winners this last year. Not that I've sold them, but, you know, I would say almost any stock that was in gold and silver trading at a dime is now probably trading at 50.
>> Yeah, maybe on its way back to it. We'll see. But they all went up, right? And there's, there's merit in them because as the price of gold and silver went up, the economics of their deposit, if they had one, were changing dramatically, exponentially. Mhm.
>> So,
>> so,
>> and yes, we all make, we all make mistakes. Uh, one of the things I've been good on is seeing that markets are overvalued. I'm not talking about just sections of the market, but the general market. And I mean, I was not fooled by 2000. I was not fooled by '07, '09. I've rarely, I was not fooled by, uh, the COVID thing. I can see the early, early signs of this. Oh, this could be a problem.
>> Yep.
>> I quickly became a spec skeptic on the vaccines.
>> Yes, you did.
>> On on this interview once.
>> Um, yeah. And actually, one of the things I'm doing is I'm spending a little time and money on the study of diet as a methodology of curing disease. Curing. And we've seen some guys do some great work on dementia where they think they could reverse it, cancer where they think they can reverse it with diet, of all things.
>> No drugs, just eat good food. Don't eat crap, and you're more likely to stay healthy. So that's taking up some. And by the way, I have two other things I should like to talk about. One is I've been a, a manganese monosulfate believer. Manganese monosulfate goes into solid-state batteries. It's the primary ingredient in it. And I, it looks to me like the solid-state battery is going to make a lot of headway here soon. And there's these little weed companies in Canada that nobody buys. I own three or four or five, and there are only about six or seven of them. But I think the outlook for that product, that, uh, that ore is going to be spectacular. So I'm just putting it on the table. The other thing that I spent, put a lot more money in it recently is there's a company in, um, Saskatchewan that has drilled a, um, a well that has found natural hydrogen.
>> Hydrogen turns out to be a wonderful fuel. By the way, there's no carbon there.
>> So, for example, Rolls-Royce is producing a jet engine that runs on hydrogen. Lighter, Volvo's working on cars that run on hydrogen, and most hydrogen is made through electrolysis, and it's expensive,
>> you know, breaking up water. Uh, these people think they found huge potential reserves of hydrogen in Saskatchewan. I would encourage people to go to their website. It's Max Energy, symbols MAXX on the Canadian exchanges. Um, and they think they might, this could start something big for the world in energy.
>> Yeah.
>> Oh, I would like that. I'd like to be involved in something like that. It really, we'll see if it really happens.
>> Mhm. Well, my friend, we've come to the end of our time. It is, uh, like I said, middle of June.
>> By the time it's a scary thought, Craig, my friend, we've come to the end of our time.
>> Yes, we
>> for this for this interview, uh, this discussion. Um, what's crazy is I look out now, is it blue sky, green grass? I'm looking out my window. I see the same thing. By the next time we do this on a semiannual schedule, the next time we do this would be almost be Christmas.
>> Um, I don't know.
>> In Canada, I won't be in Canada.
>> No, that's for sure. Yeah. What, uh, let's just leave it there. What, not not like prices and stuff, what do you think? What do you think will be some events? What's, what will you be watching between now and then?
>> I think people are going to figure out that the US economy is in trouble.
>> Okay.
>> That the debt situation is a bigger problem than we're giving you credit for. That there's parts of this of the, uh, investment market that are very, very weak, that somehow we keep sweeping it under the carpet. But there's lots of problems out there. I mean, just think of the private equity people who can't get their money out,
>> right?
>> Normally, that would cause a market to break. Well, we just kept running up there like, you know, everything was wonderful. Well, if the AI thing turns out to not be that wonderful,
>> we're going to pay the price.
>> Um, it has been great visiting with Eric Sprout. It always is. I always learn something, and I suppose you have, too. Um, anyway, we're wrapping up June. It's going to be a new month and a new quarter beginning in July. The good folks at Sprat Money will have all sorts of content and all sorts of great deals coming at you as we go through July. So, please keep an eye on this channel, like or subscribe wherever you've been watching this, YouTube or whatever, but also visit spatmoney.com, sign up for the newsletter, uh, check out the great deals they have on both precious metals and storing that metal. And again, always just keep them in mind as they are the sponsor of all this great content. Eric, thank you so much for your time. And from all of us at Spratmoney and spatmoney.com, thank you for watching. And again, we'll have more great content for you, uh, as the calendar flips to the month of July.