January 3, 2025 – Financial Sense Newshour's Jim Puplava speaks with energy expert Robert Bryce and mining engineer Simon Michaux about the long-term outlook for resources and mining in light of green energy policies and China's 2050 plan for supply chain dominance. The conversation explores the strategic control of vital minerals like lithium, copper, and rare earths, highlighting China's dominant position in these resources, which surpasses even OPEC's influence. They delve into the potential collapse of the petrodollar system, the rise of a commodities-backed currency, and the strategic stockpiling of metals like copper by China. The conversation underscores a world where economic power is increasingly tied to control over natural resources.
To watch this full interview on YouTube with charts and data, see Michaux and Bryce on China's 2050 Master Plan, Green Energy Breakdown (youtube.com)
Related websites and social media:
- Simon Michaux website: https://www.simonmichaux.com
- Simon Michaux on X: Simon Michaux (@SimonMichaux) / X
- Robert Bryce: https://robertbryce.substack.com
- Robert Bryce on X: Robert Bryce (@pwrhungry) / X
Presentations discussed in today's interview:
- 060624 Robert Bryce Shanghaied slides v2 (financialsense.com)
- PowerPoint Presentation (financialsense.com)
- SLO and China (financialsense.com)
- MPOC_IndustrialInternet.indd (financialsense.com)
- Macroscale Structures (financialsense.com)
- Otsikko (financialsense.com)
- PowerPoint Presentation (financialsense.com)
- appendix-china-fbdcd1e66a90.pdf (financialsense.com)
Transcript
Jim Puplava:
Joining me on the program is Robert Bryce. He's an author, journalist, and a public speaker. Also on the program is Simon Michaux. He's an associate professor at the Geological Survey of Finland. He also has a PhD in mining. There's a new book out there, it's called "The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives" by Ernest Scheyder. And he basically talks about how China controls 60% of lithium, 65% of cobalt, 90% of rare earths. So their grip on key strategic materials is two to three times that of OPEC. So how does this work when we're in an economic war?
Robert Bryce:
Well, I think that's a key point and it's one that I keep asking Jim about. And you know, I'm not a Republican, I'm not a Democrat, I'm disgusted. And the International Energy Agency just released a report repeating these key points. If we take copper away, we take lithium away and just focus on neodymium, iron, boron magnets, China controls effectively the entire global market.
Jim Puplava:
They are dominating minerals in a way we haven't seen. I mean, almost two to three times more powerful than what OPEC is.
Simon Michaux:
The Chinese put together a plan that we first saw in the year 2002 with their first resource strategy plan. I'm of the opinion that their macro scale plan, their 100-year marathon, is commodities and resource-based. They want to become an industrial superpower, and they want to control the rest of the world industrially. So they start out with a resource plan first and a military plan second. But they didn't publish the resource plan, I believe, until the military plan was thought through. So the fun and games that we're actually sort of seeing at the moment, South China Sea and all that, this is all strategies that were game-theoried and tested decades ago. So this is the sort of thing that we're dealing with, right? So there is a document called "Made in China 2025." Now that is a think tank that actually sort of, in the West, I think it's British, that actually got hold of the China plan and they had a look at it. Now I've been to Hong Kong, and I've spoken to a few people, and this has been verbally confirmed. What they want is by 2050, again that bloody year, there's two of them, 2050, 2030, I don't know what do you. No imagination. So by 2050, everything industrial on the planet will be controlled by China. That is, if you as a consumer wanted to actually buy anything like the computer, you're looking at your phone, your car, building materials, you've got to do business with the Chinese in some form. That is, everything industrial on the planet will be owned or controlled by the Chinese, where they dictate what happens to the materials produced, and the model that has been proposed. I don't know if they're taking the piss out of me or not, but this is what they said. All materials and goods will either flow directly into China, be turned into stuff, and then finished goods are coming out, which they will then be purchased on their terms. Where we are, we are paying exorbitant amounts of money to them to the point where every other nation state needn't bother having its own industrial system. Or it'll be extracted and processed in the country that's in with Chinese-owned and operated organizations, and the capital profit will flow to China. And they described it like the Hunger Games with the capital. But when they say "capital," they're not talking about the capital in terms of the Chinese; they're talking about it as the Han dynasty in China. The Han Dynasty is in China and controls China like the Saudi royal family controls Saudi Arabia. So this is actually the plan that's been put on the ground a long time ago. They, the PRC government, then put out some recommendations about what they wanted the private sector to spend their money on. The private sector did it. They operate very differently to the West. Within China, as I understand it, there's three basic groups. One third of companies are doing quite well economically, one third are right on the bread line, about to go under, and one third are under and are actually in the process of being eaten by everyone else because they're coming apart at the seams. And internally, there's a very fierce competition about what third your company is in, and they're trying to knife each other and trying to overturn each other in a very sort of competitive, bare-knuckled, no-holds-barred kind of way within China. Without China, suddenly they all unify and they're a vertically integrated system doing exactly what the PRC government's telling them to do. And so anyone that's trying to start up a mine, let's say, in Sweden or somewhere in Scandinavia, you say, "I've got a mine, it's great." And every time you go out there, you come up against this vertically integrated Chinese system with all its assets, smelters, and refineries that are all cooperating with each other, and you get the absolute crap kicked out of you because they've got the money and the clout behind them. And so every operation that the Western groups are actually putting forward happens to be small and tends to try to operate on their own and are pre-market context. Whereas the Chinese juggernaut, also known as the Borg, every time they operate a new operation, they're talking to other Chinese operations, and there's a long-term strategy here where they want to take over the world. So the American empire is now approaching its sunset, and the Chinese people believe this is their chance, this is what they're going to do. And it's industry, not military action, that is the vector to do it. The West is playing chess; they're playing Go. Chess's objective is to take down the enemy king. Go is to quietly take over territory. It's a very different mentality.
Jim Puplava:
Let me give you an example from the war below. And that is when you take a look at the cost of energy and what it costs to put these things into place. We had a rare earth mine called Molycorp. They started producing rare earths, especially when China embargoed Japan. So Japan started buying rare earths from the U.S. China didn't like that, so then they cut the price, got rid of the embargo, and what they did is they flooded the market with rare earths, basically putting Molycorp into bankruptcy. And here's what I love in the bankruptcy court: a hedge fund manager with a Chinese partner bought the rare earths, and I read a statistic, they own more farmland in the U.S. than Bill Gates does. So once again, a long-term strategy to control the minerals and the resources to make this happen.
Robert Bryce:
It's all about metals, minerals, and magnets. And this entire concept of the overhyped energy transition, it all depends on the ability of different producers all around the world to produce those metals. And again, to bolster what Simon has been talking about, the IEA's report just from a few weeks ago makes these very same points. Now they don't make them as pointed in the way that Simon just did, but if you look at their graphics, it's very clear. Something like 97% of the world's poly or photovoltaic wafers now come from China. 80% of the polysilicon comes from China. Remember, it was just three years ago that the Biden administration announced sanctions on the Chinese suppliers of polysilicon because of slave labor in Xinjiang, and this has not been repealed. But if I can ask one other quick point here, there was a piece in Bloomberg just two days ago. It builds on your point, Simon, about the control of these metals and the refining of these metals. It's that China is now stockpiling copper and apparently by dramatic increases in the amount of copper they have been stockpiling just this year. Why do you think that is? Have you heard this? Have you seen this? And why, what's your read on this? Are they expecting a big run-up in price? Because this is the strategic metal for all of this alternative energy stuff.
Simon Michaux:
They're playing the long game, and I think that when you start seeing them do that, I think it's actually time for them to pull the trigger.
Robert Bryce:
What do you mean by that? To pull the trigger regarding what?
Simon Michaux:
So we have been mapping, let's call it all the trouble in the world. The last couple of years, it's been one damn thing after another. There's been market problems. I actually sort of see all of this as a macro-scale system, and what's underlying it is I saw a blowout in the metal price in January 2005, which was linked to a signature in the oil industry. So the system's been trying to thermodynamically correct, and we're not allowing it to do so by printing money. Now every nation state in the world knows this. So what I've done is I've taken the World Bank data, all of those base metals and precious metals, oil, gas, and coal. And so this is what the World Bank checks the price to see the health of the global economy. What I've done is I've overlaid those prices with real data, but I've indexed each curve to the number 100 in December 2001. So what that does is it overlays all prices on top of each other to show periods of relative volatility. So you see a period of relative stability, apart from some monkey business around 1979, the Iran oil embargo, and in January 2005, you have a blowout; the price of everything goes up. That puts the entire system under such a lot of strain. We've got the global financial crisis, the largest economic correction since the 1929 Great Depression. That wasn't enough to resolve the underlying issues, whatever they were, and they're still there. Post that, we've been fixed by printing money. And this peak at the end here is COVID-19, the gift that keeps on giving. So what this shows is the system's thermodynamically trying to correct. What happened in 2005? Oil plateaued around January 2005, around there. Now, the Saudis at the time were the swing producers. They were told to increase production or they tried to increase production. They couldn't do it. So on the right-hand side, you see the rig count; the rig count went up really, really fast. They brought on more rigs as fast as they possibly could, yet their production went down. So you had a 146% increase in rig count in exchange for a 4% contraction in production. They were the swing producers. So that's what happened. In that time, we had the oil price spike, and it peaked. And then, the global financial crisis. It all crashed, and it went away when we started quantitative easing. So what I make the case of, in 2005, oil plateaued. The price of everything is attached to oil, which is everything. It blows out, the system's put under strain, it breaks. In 2008, what we call the global financial crisis, the system actually dies at that point. And we've been keeping it together with the printing of money ever since. And this is what happened in 1971 when we decoupled from the gold standard. So we have two big macro-scale patterns. One's 1971, and one is 2005. So to answer your question, back to the original question, what's happening? This has been known, I believe, by all the big players for some time now. And it's related to our energy, oil in particular. Everyone who's got oil knows and understands the status of their reserves. Now, in November 2018, we saw peak crude oil. That's gone down. Now, Art Berman's done some excellent work to show that what we call total liquids, we're getting a lot of gasoline now from natural gas liquids and biofuels. But oil, crude oil, that does all your diesel and all your heavy stuff, that's declining and looks like it's not coming back. So we've seen peak oil; it's an observation; it's in our past six years ago now. So anyone who has oil knows and understands this, which means it's time to actually shift off one energy system onto another, whatever that is. And anything attached to energy will now be restructured. And this is going to be one damn mess. Now, because oil's our highest density energy system, the world has ever known, it's going to be easier pre-peak oil to do things versus post-peak oil. So China, which thinks in its long-term fashion, has been stitching up assets all over the world to own and control them in the context of it's easier to do things before peak oil than after, including the stockpiling of metals. They also will go out and buy mineral reserves in the ground, and they'll often pay too much money for them to make sure they get them. We've seen that a few times now. Now let's call it the crash. We all know it's coming, every analyst knows it's coming, every nation state knows it's coming. But I actually see it a little differently. Instead of a point of a crash, it's an era. So we've got an era from about 2005 to whenever things get difficult. I call it the long emergency. It's one thing after another, the death of a thousand cuts. When they say, "Well, how do we go out of business?" First, it's little by little, and then suddenly all at once, right? So for a long time, lots of medium-scale problems have been going wrong, and they've been papered over and patched together. Then one day, something big breaks that cannot be fixed easily. Then we have our crash. Is it economic, is it something else? It doesn't matter. All these things are connected together. I think we're approaching that point now, which is why I believe everyone wants a war. It's a wonderful distraction to cover this era of the big break, and it covers all the domestic problems. They can now point to the war instead of saying, "Oh well, it's really the nature of the system we've all been running for the last 50 years." And so that I believe is what's happening. China knows this. They're playing the game; they're playing Go, and they're better at it than us, and they don't care if they lose large portions of their own population while we're distracted on things that really don't matter in the scheme of things. That's what I believe is happening.
Robert Bryce:
As a reporter trying to figure out what's next, you know, to me, there are these discrete parts of the story, and Simon, you're in Europe, you have a different view, and you're an Aussie in Europe with a different perspective. I'm just trying to figure out, okay, well, what does all this mean, and what does it mean for the US over a strategy in a strategic sense? And I'm very concerned about the war in Ukraine and what's happening there. And there was a point that I don't remember who made it, but someone else just pointed out that now Russia is fully on a war footing. For them to end the war in Ukraine would be bad for their economy because this is what their whole economic system is now hinging on, their military production, and so on. So it's a very dangerous time, I think, in the world, and one that's very concerning. But I guess, you know, it's Jim's show, but you know, it's called Financial Sense. So Simon, do you think it makes sense? Again, this is my own curiosity because I've heard bullish calls on natural gas lately here in the US because of AI, because of LNG exports, etc., but, and you know, Lee Gehring and Adam Rosenswag are very much into natural resource investing. So given what you've talked about regarding a commodities-based economy, would you put money in commodities? Would you buy copper miners? What would you do? I mean, what makes sense in a world that's gone nuts? If I gave you this $10,000, it's Jim's podcast, the Ten Thousand Dollar Question. If I named you my fiduciary and said, "Make the most money on this $10,000 and give it back to me in 10 years," where would you put it today?
Simon Michaux:
I'd put it in a smelter.
Robert Bryce:
In a smelter for copper, zinc, what?
Simon Michaux:
Copper's the new gold, right?
Robert Bryce:
Copper is the new gold.
Simon Michaux:
Copper, right. Because no matter what we do, we need copper, and copper's in trouble. By the way, the shortage predicted for copper has been predicted for a long time. About a third of the copper that's actually on the market comes from recycling. So mining is not able to deliver on its own anymore and hasn't been for some time. But the information I'm looking at is all metals, base metals are needed and will be needed in an unprecedented way. We're about to reinvent ourselves in ways we don't understand yet. Copper will be needed; you can probably guess. Nickel will be needed, tin will be needed, and so on. All the base metals, all the zinc, magnesium. Now, once people sort of get their ass into gear and decide to do some work, they can start a mine. Okay, it takes 20 years, but they can still do it. Think about how long it would take to establish a single smelter. Because to establish a smelter, you've got to put a serious capital investment for a start, you've got to have support structures like power around it. Then you actually need to guarantee supply from various mineral mines. And you need, I forget how many it is, but you need many, many mines to supply one smelter. So the smelter is the bottleneck part of a massive system. And you can't just knock one up overnight, put it over there, paint it blue, right? But once we actually get to the hard part, the flashpoint, if you will, pun intended, is how do we turn raw materials from all over the place into something useful, like sheets of metal, bars of metal, stuff to do industrial things with? The manufacturing sector will be dependent on what those smelters deliver. Now, when we say we're going to reinvent ourselves and do different things, alright, you can refit a smelter, but you'll still need all the basics of copper, nickel, tin, steel. All of those things will be needed. The problem you have is the market we're going into won't be a free market. If you look at some of Whitney Webb's work that's actually describing how the finance market is changing, I don't understand everything that she talks about, but we are seeing some radical changes. We're being pushed into the digital space with that. Digital space is now being controlled in ways that we've not seen before. The problem we have is, is the market going to be free? What happens if your industrial asset, whether it's a smelter or a mine, gets nationalized? What happens, for example, if you've put what we call wealth, if we have like a currency reset, and all of a sudden the World Economic Forum's "Great Reset," which is also called the "Great Taking," is not only going to really do over the average person but it's going to do over many, many industrial operations as well. There's going to be a readjustment of who owns what, and the law itself is going to change. So what I was just saying is we see the world through a lens at the moment where we believe we know how things work. We've got the law, we've got free markets, everyone's nice to each other, everyone plays fair most of the time. What happens if we move into a wild, wild west where there are no rules and people don't like us anymore? Right. So I don't know how to navigate that correctly. I don't give financial advice. This is not financial advice. But I would say if you could put your assets in around actually somewhere associated with smelting and refining on one of these vital minerals, metals, this is the don't go gold mining in California. You sell gold picks to gold miners.
Jim Puplava:
I'm just trying to think where we go from here because there are many things that are moving and, as you pointed out, Simon, accelerating. I mean, just the fact that we're pushing AI, and it's going to consume 25% of all electricity. This is an element that people haven't really thought through. Where will that electricity come from? Go ahead.
Simon Michaux:
I call AI Incorporated because I don't think it's going to be a tool that's going to be very good. It's not going to be; it's going to be great for some people, but it's going to end very poorly for others. May I suggest I've put together two geopolitical maps that describe these discussions that help me understand what I'm doing? 1962 is the peak of discovery of oil itself. 1972 decouples from the gold standard. 1973 is the petrodollar agreement. 2005 is the metal price blowout, which is related to Saudi Arabia. Three years later, the system under strain blows out, and we have the global financial crisis. At this point, I believe the petrodollar system fails. Within this, they had the petrodollar alliance, which is the petrodollar lines as managed from London through the finance sector. What was to replace the petrodollar system was the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TTIP, and the TISA, which are all part of one global organization. I believe that was the replacement for the petrodollar, and it failed. It failed because Julian Assange and WikiLeaks leaked it to the European Parliament, and the politicians on the ground realized they were being cut out of it, that we're not doing this right. So then, in 2018, we've got peak oil production, peak gas reserves, as in when what's been actually added to gas reserves, I think, was around the same time. I'm not sure about that one. I'd have to actually look at the data. But everyone who's got oil and gas, Russia, China, the U.S., Iran, they dominate reserves and consumption of gas. They would know the status of those reserves. So we're in what I call Thucydides' trap, between the fall of the petrodollar alliance and the rise of the commodities alliance, the BRICS nations. Thucydides' trap is a concept put forward by a Greek historian who studied the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens. He found that historically, he had 18 references where 12 out of 18 times, an incumbent empire will go to war about someone challenging their throne to be an empire like a new power would rise. And 12 out of 18 times, it resulted in war. Do we go to war or not? Thucydides' trap: Ukraine war, Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, rejection of Russia from SWIFT, economic sanctions, breakdown of contract law, the Syrian war, South China Sea, cats and dogs living together, all trouble in the world. What we're looking at here is an attempt to get a kinetic war going because that's the petrodollar alliance method of doing business. The commodities alliance, who are also bastards, there are no good guys here, use economic war and fifth-generation warfare. And it's a kind of warfare I don't think the incumbent Petro alliance is very comfortable with or that they're not as good at. So we're seeing debt saturation, quantitative easing, and all these sorts of things. COVID-19, the gift that keeps on giving, happened to actually be at the perfect time to camouflage what peak oil would have meant when the actual price cone was closing. And now we actually have an entirely different crisis to deal with. In 2022, we saw the genesis of a gold-backed currency, the ruble, and the yuan. The ruble was partially restructured, but I think I was expecting to see, by now, a commodities-backed yuan. In 2023, the Basel III banking accord went live, which formally recognized that gold and commodities were valid as bank reserves. So we're seeing all fiat currencies are now under pressure to survive and possibly may crash. And the commodities alliance is now starting to rise. By 2025, China's Belt and Road Initiative will be in everyone's face. This is the "Made in China 2049" plan that I sent you stuff about earlier, and for the West and the World Economic Forum, they keep talking about Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030, which is their plan to restructure society. So what we've got is multiple factions behind the scenes putting their respective plans on the ground. All factions are not very nice. All factions' plans we would never agree to if we had the choice. And so this is the actual sort of map of what I see everyone sort of jockeying for position. I actually am of the opinion all of these plans will fail. Now to answer your question, like what I asked before, all this stuff we're seeing, is it stupidity or did they really mean it? Now, the entire green transition, it's been a rubbish plan for some time. And everyone I've spoken to in an official capacity, no one's actually done any work, there's a lot of talk. But they have put up some heroic efforts to put up wind and solar farms. But what they've put on the ground is nowhere near enough. And we haven't seen the massive increase in electric vehicles, the level of, you know, we've, we haven't, you know when you can say we've passed 10% of the global transport fleet, you can still say, "Alright, now we're serious." But we struggle to get past 1% for years.
Robert Bryce:
Well, if I could jump in, one of the things that I see now in the near term for the U.S. and Jim, you're adding batteries. I just got a note from a contractor. I'm having a Generac installed at my house, right, a standby generation unit, 22 kilowatts. Why? Because I've had three long blackouts in my house in central Austin since last August, and remember, we got blacked out for two days during Winter Storm Uri in 2021. So, Simon, I don't know if I agree with all of the things you're bringing up because you've studied it, and it's a different view on the world than I've even thought about. But what do I see in the near term here in the United States? It's rising electricity rates, dramatic increases in electricity rates. What is it? It's very clearly a regressive scheme in all of this decarbonization effort, and California is the classic example, particularly in San Diego. Jim, you know this, electricity prices in California are going through the roof because of this insane rush toward decarbonization that has no connection to the physical world. And so we're spending just staggering amounts of money on wind, solar, electric vehicles, all of this stuff, all of it screws the poor and the middle class. And meanwhile, there seems to be no sensibility in Washington about the debt crisis, about what the future of the U.S. dollar, the future of the U.S. economy, our dependence on foreign supply chains. It's very disconcerting. It's a very difficult time to try and get your mind around what's really happening. And that's why I asked the question, that ten-thousand-dollar question, because people, when people answer it, it gives a view of their, you know, their worldview.
And you know, and I've heard everything from buy Bitcoin to the S&P 500 to, you know, Berkshire Hathaway and now buy a smelter. But it's all a very confusing time. But I'm tending to think that this idea, these ideas around the control of commodities is going to be the critical issue, not who has the reserve currency, because that could fall apart, if or when, if that happens, then that's big trouble for the US.
Jim Puplava:
We've been talking about minerals, the mining, copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel. All of that mining uses fossil fuels. You can't do mining without these big trucks, loaders, crushers that all require fossil fuels. And, and when you talk about this debt bomb that's going to go off and you talk about what the emerging markets are doing economically, the, the thing that worked for the US is if you traded with the US you had excess dollars, but we had a large market that you could invest those in excess dollars into Treasuries, into stocks. China doesn't have an open market, but what they are doing is developing a gold market. So if I trade with China and I'm Brazil, I have excess yuan. What I do with those excess yuan? I can't go in, buy Chinese bonds, but you know what I can do? I can go out and exchange that yuan for gold and I can use that gold to buy other stuff. Trading within that block of, what is it, Simon, about 20 countries right now? You know, we talk about the G20, we may be talking about the EM20 or more.
Simon Michaux:
So last I counted, it was 29. I actually haven't looked into it properly, but we are seeing a tectonic shift in the markets in terms of where every nation state was flowing money through the Anglosphere. Right. You know, the U.S. Dollar in particular.
Robert Bryce:
Right.
Simon Michaux:
Where the whole BRICS nation. I believe BRICS was formed for the purpose of getting these countries out from under the petrodollar system. Now. So the BRICS commodities economies are put forward, and they're now starting to put systems on the ground, you know, like, a parallel to SWIFT, for example, where other nations can now do business outside the petrodollar alliance.
Robert Bryce:
I see. And well, does that partly explain why all these central banks are buying up gold then? Because they're, they're, the belief in the dollar has gone away. Because, you know, again, this is one of the parts that's confusing to me, and now I never believed the gold story, but I'm starting to believe it. And you know, you said just a few minutes ago copper is the new gold, Simon, which would help explain why the Chinese are now hoarding copper. And I mentioned Bloomberg. Other analysts have seen the same, very same thing that China is hoarding copper in a way that would suggest they see it as an absolute, as a, as a critical metal akin to gold, as you said before.
Simon Michaux:
Yeah. So central banks have been buying gold in a frenzy since 2008, and they tend to go through bits and starts of it. But China and Russia, in particular, have been buying gold but also dumping not just U.S. Treasuries but all other Western nations' treasuries. The idea was everyone had some of everyone else's treasuries in a diversity thing, and so it was in everyone's best interest to keep the system going for as long as possible. And they've been dumping stuff. I think you've got multiple things happening here. On one hand, we all understand that the industrial system is about to change and we need raw materials, copper being one of them. On the other hand, there's the currency systems that we use to determine who owns what and who does what. That's what money is for decision-making. I think we're going to go to a commodities-backed currency, but I don't think there's enough gold to back a currency system as large as the one we've got now. And we need electronic funds transfers because they have to be fast. We can't go back to physical gold bullion because it's simply not fast enough to run our global system the way it is at the moment. And so we're going into a system that I don't quite understand. To me, there's no precedent for it. But on one hand, it's going to be an electronic currency. Is it going to be like some sort of crypto structure? I don't know. Is that even possible? I don't know. On the other hand, we need to have it backed by something physical and tangible. We all like gold and silver, but is that enough? The answer is probably not. So what do we do? I don't know.
Jim Puplava:
It could be, Simon, a basket of commodities of which gold and silver are part of. Whether it's, you know, you put commodities, whether you put oil in that basket or copper or something like that. Yeah, but it's going to have to be tangible because what they're doing with the debt, the CBO estimates $50 trillion by the end of this decade. I think that's understating at the rate because it starts to accelerate as your debt, and we're spending more on interest on the debt than we are on our U.S. military. And interesting thing that you were talking about the conflict. The Wall Street Journal just did an article. We've got $10 million Abram tanks that are being destroyed by $200 to $400 drones. So you know, you can't shoot a million-dollar missile at a four or five hundred-dollar drone. And so all of this stuff is coming to a head, and it's going to take some real deep thinking because I don't think we've ever been here before.
Simon Michaux:
That's correct. You nailed it right there. We've never been here before. So all these people laying down, "This is the way it's going to happen," we don't know.
Robert Bryce:
Be prepared. It's the Boy Scout motto. You know, we have several gallons of water in our garage. We have canned food. You know, I keep propane. I have a standby generator. You know, these things. And I think this is just good, you know, good practice for everyone. Right? You, you don't, don't make your, to the extent that you can make yourself resilient, and that includes canned food. That includes having a way to heat your home or, you know, firewood. I, fortunately, we have a fireplace, you know, so be prepared. Don't, you know, to the extent that you can make yourself resilient. And I think that applies to your investment strategies as well. Whether it's, you know, keeping cash in the house, which is something I do, I like cash. You know, sometimes those credit cards might not work. So, but, but this has been very instructive for me. I mean, to talk about these issues, these longer-term issues, and structural changes in the global economy because I, I see many signals now that there is plenty of reason to be very concerned. This massive amount of debt that's been imposed and what that means and the run-up in, you know, particularly housing prices and what that means for the younger generation, and all this is incredibly worrisome. But I, I'm. All that said, I'm optimistic for the future, and I, you know, I'm going to remain stupidly optimistic because I just, I have to be that way.
Simon Michaux:
I'm also optimistic because I've got a plan, but that plan's for a small number of people.
Jim Puplava:
Well, I, I'm the same, you know, I, I have six months worth of supply, and to the point, I actually bought a month's supply of food for every one of my employees for the very same reason because you know, like I said, we have all kinds of problems here in California. Simon, you have been showing a lot of key graphs and things of your study, and we're going to make, I just want our listeners to know, we're going to make this available. Those last graphs on the emerging markets, the aggressors, and things like that, I think, are just must viewing and reading. If you want to maybe put some of this in perspective and learn and understand what's going on here. As we close, each one of you, why don't you give out how they can follow a lot of the work you do. We'll begin with you, Simon.
Simon Michaux:
Okay, now I'm not as organized as I should be. I've got a website, SimonMichaux.com, where I'm trying to put all my work on it. But now that I think about it, the last 12, 15 things that I've done in the last few months have not been put on that website.
Jim Puplava:
Are you talking about this stuff? Are you talking about the stuff you showed us today?
Simon Michaux:
That's on there now? Okay, all of that's on there now. This is new stuff, what I call the purple transition. The green transition won't work, but the purple transition might. I've actually put a plan out there. It's gone through several conferences now, and it's still alive. I'm also developing some ideas with the Venus Project, Venusproject.com, as in my solution. What will that be? Yeah. So SimonMichaux.com and the Venus Project.com are places you can sort of, you know, track my movements.
Jim Puplava:
Let me spell your name on your website. It's Simon M I C H A U X dot com.
Simon Michaux:
Okay.
Jim Puplava:
And Robert.
Robert Bryce:
Well, I'm easy to find on Google. I'm on TikTok, I'm on Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm pushing people toward my Substack, robertbryce.substack.com; that's where I'm doing essentially all my writing lately. My website is robertbryce.com, but then also my new docu-series, a new five-part docu-series I'm very proud of. My colleague Tyson Culver directed and did a great job. You can find that at juicetheseries.com; that's our new five-part docu-series, "Juice, Power, Politics, and the Grid." I'm very proud of it, and we've had 3 million views on YouTube. So it's gotten good traction. So kudos to my colleague, Tyson Culver, for the way he directed, brought together a whole bunch of different people. We did over four dozen interviews. And so, yes. Robert Bryce, substack.com, juicetheseries.com. Did I mention juicetheseries.com? I hope I mentioned juicetheseries.com. Yeah, I did.
Jim Puplava:
And then a lot of these articles and graphs and things we're going to have on our own website, which is financialsense.com. Gentlemen, I'd like to thank you for being so generous with your time. So I want to thank you both.
