Shaun Newman Podcast - #999 - Vince Lanci & Nikolas Morianos

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

Vince Lanci is the founder and Managing Partner of Echo Bay Partners, a firm focused on precious metals analysis, trading, and market insights. With over 30 years of experience in finance and commodities, he began his career as a market maker on the floors of the NYMEX, COMEX, and NYBOT exchanges, specializing in metals and options trading. He is a prominent commentator on gold and silver markets, often discussing topics like liquidity crises, short squeezes, BRICS developments, and shifts in global pricing.Nikolas Morianos is a Co-Founder, Managing Partner, and Director of Silver Gold Bull Inc. (SGB), one of Canada's largest precious metals dealers and a major North American online retailer with billions in bullion sold globally. We discuss the Silver market and the push to digitise gold. Tickets to Cornerstone Forum 26’: https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone26/Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

This is Viva Fry. I'm Dr. Peter McCullough. This is Tom Lomago. This is Chuck Pradnik. This is Alex Krenner. Hey, this is Brad Wall. This is J.P. Sears. Hi, this is Frank Paredi.

This is Tammy Peterson. This is Danielle Smith. This is James Lindsay. Hey, this is Brett Kessel, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Wednesday. How's everybody doing today? I tell you what I'm doing.

I'm feeling a heck of a lot better than I have been in, say, the past four or so days. Let me tell you a little story. Sean got a bacterial infection on his leg from a hockey practice where one of his players accidentally, accidentally, is my own fault. I designed the drill. I just gotten mixed up in it.

And the old hack on the leg gave me a little cut. Didn't think too much of it, if I'm being honest. And, you know, time went on, and one day I was looking at it, and then it doesn't look good. So I cleaned it up and put a Band-Aid on it, thought it's better, and it proceed to get worse and worse and worse until I slept 17 hours in one day

and then went to the hospital the next day and they've had me on antibiotics ever since and if you're wondering why I've been such a space cadet for maybe a couple episodes maybe I've been putting on a good show I hope I have either way it's been an interesting couple of days and finally I feel like I woke up I'm like oh my god I think I feel better Now, still not out of the woods. I'm still on antibiotics going to the hospital every day. But I was saying to somebody asked, well, you know, what was going on? I was like, well, can you imagine trying to have like lukewarm water because a degree over lukewarm would make me shiver for four hours?

That's where I was that. So I was having fun. I'm just having fun. Maybe not your type of fun. Maybe not my type of fun either. Either way. I'm back on the men, folks. I'm back.

Good to be back. Okay. Okay. Thank you for everyone who sent in their texts, their prayers, everything. I appreciate it. That was something I don't want to do again. I'm turning 40 here in May, and I've had a couple of first this year that have not been fun. Anyways, okay, today we got a good one for you on tap for you today.

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If you don't own your own animals, they get their retail sales that can connect you directly with the producers, offering you sides or quarters of beef, pork, and lamb, and their experienced staff can help you fill your freezer with exactly what you need. You can find them on the north end of town, highway 17 and 67th Street, North. Call Diamond 7 meets today 306, 825-9718. Caleb Taves and the community spotlight. How about this? Cornerstone Forum March 28th, okay? What is that? 45 days away, I think it is now. There are 41, as I said here, 41 tickets left. Procrastinators, I'm telling you, get on it.

Because when the tickets are gone, they're going to do. They're just gone. There's no more getting in this building. It's 700 people. That's what it, that's what it is. We got 41 tickets left. Stop what you're doing. The podcast can wait. Go grab a ticket. It's down in the show notes. 41 to go. That's March 28th. Yeah, it's going to be a ton of fun. And one of today's guess is going to be on stage there. If you're watching or listening on Spotify, Apple YouTube RumbleX, Facebook substack, make sure to subscribe. Make sure to leave a review. And, uh, Have a great, great day because someone on this side is pulling for you, and I just feel, I honestly, I hate to sound all rainbows and unicorns or whatever it is,

but after four days of just slugging it, I mean, just feeling like junk, I feel pretty good today. So let's get on to the tail of the tape. Our first guest founded Echo Bay Partners. Our second is a managing partner at Silver Gold Bull. I'm talking about Vince Lanchie and Nicholas Moriano's. Buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Shodd Newman podcast. I got Vince Lanchi, Nick Moriano.

I feel like I'm hurting cats this morning. I was just in the hospital for everyone who cares because I know I've had texts all morning. I'm fine, folks. My leg is fine. They've been running jokes on these two have been running jokes on me all this morning. I'm feeling way better. All right? I'm going to try and keep the show on the road on the straight and narrow today.

Gentlemen, how are we doing? Super. Better now. Yeah, you're going to have to pick it up because you're going to have to meet my energy, Vince. I'm feeling great on this side. New lease on life, almost. Four days in the crapper. Now I'm feeling great.

So hey. Do you caffeine with STD cures? I was going to keep it inside baseball. This is literally what I've been dealing with all morning, folks. That's the only one I'll do. I just wanted to do that. I know. I know.

People been asking, though, it was from a slash, a kid's slash at hockey practice. It was a complete accident. It was my own stupidity. I designed the drill. And he just hacked me across the life. He drew blood on a slash in the winter. Must be pretty brutal. Yeah.

He's my player. I make sure we're tenacious, Vince. All right? I just didn't think it was... I didn't think it would put me in the hospital. I have more questions and answers here, but we should probably move on. Okay. I, uh, this whole thing started around everything going on with silver.

I'm just going to throw this out there. Nick, you can probably start. Vince, you can hop in whenever you wanted. This was a question. Sean, is gold silver still available from Silver Gold Bull? People are hearing providers aren't selling. Walk me through. I mean, I guess the obvious answer is yes.

But by all means, Nick, have at her. Okay. So the beauty of having myself and Vince here is that I can provide sort of an on the ground look at, and I think we sort of touched on this a couple weeks ago when I was on. But I can provide an idea for the things that we experience, so the retail side of it. And Vince is significantly more qualified to touch on the institutional side, the paper side, the exchange side. So the short answer to that question is, yes, there is product available. The issue is that everything is gumbed up.

The entire value chain from the very start to the very end is a mess. It used to always be the case that there would be one bottleneck in our entire supply chain. And that would pretty much be on the production side. We exist in an industry that has an issue with elasticity. There is none. It's all feast or famine. You just can't ramp up quickly and you can't shut it down quickly. So usually it was a flurry of business.

Usually prices were low because traditionally people, they don't chase price up. They love to catch a falling sword. So prices dip. Everybody jumps in. There's not a lot of selling, which is an important component that we will touch on. And eventually, you know, within, say, 10 days, two weeks, the whole industry is into delays. And mince go into allocation. Maybe it takes a little longer than 10 days, two weeks,

but the primary mints will go into a period called allocation. So this will be when the U.S. Mint, the Royal Canadian Mint, sovereign mints in general will say, hey, silver gold bull, whatever proportion of our weekly allotment of silver maples, let's just say that would come out of the mint before we went into allocation, whatever percentage you bought before, you will get coming out. Roughly. And there's some tweaks and they have to make sure that they look after some long-standing

relationships, but on balance, that's how it works. So everything used to come down to one or two mints, not necessarily government mints because it's actually a really key player called Sunshine, who are amazing, excellent and fabulous ownership and they're just, they're awesome, but they are often not their own fault. They're the constraint because they do a lot of the blanks for the industry. So that was traditionally the problem. What's the problem now? Everything. There's significant amounts of buying, so there's a ton of demand for bullion. There's insane amounts of selling. So now there's obviously for companies, this is a new thing.

We've always been buying, but we're buying at levels now we've never bought before. You can't staff quick enough to do anything. And then the big overarching issue is there's not enough money to keep everything moving. So we are stuck at the point where we don't have enough. I mean, even a company like us that has a parent company like gold.com who have all the money, and we've been exceedingly well capitalized throughout the entirety of our history and our to this day, but we have to create wiggle room to buy inventory now into allocations months out, where we have to front that whatever we pay above the spot price of metals,

we have to front that right away, even to our parent company, immediately for, for product that we might not get for four months. And we have to finance that because we're doing it with all the mints, all the refiners, we're doing it with everybody. We can't pass up on any inventory because if we do, especially in an allocation period, you have to take your allocations as they come. So we got all this money out. Now we have a tidal wave of money coming in that we owe to people for buybacks.

We can't process buybacks fast enough. We can't process storage orders fast enough. We can't process orders outbound fast enough. enough and we can't get metal in fast enough. So the culmination of it all is a shit sandwich. It's a wonderful position to be in, but it's hard to articulate just how much of a problem capitalization is. And the fact that our industry is not the biggest industry. This isn't pharmaceuticals. It's not big agra. It's not any of those things. This is probably an industry that was like three to five billion in North America 10, 15 years ago, and now it's maybe like

20 to 25 billion. We're just speculating. There's no official numbers. But we're still probably working on the same amount of financing capital. So the ones that have it can make a market. The ones that don't, they're the ones that the book club are talking about where they are systematically saying we're not buying any more material. We're a refiner. We're not taking anymore because we're three weeks delayed and we used to forward pay. We're not doing that anymore. And we don't want your stuff sitting here for three weeks, you know, as a liability while we try and get to it.

And you're cranky because prices are fluctuating. And lots of dealers actually stopped. I don't know if they resumed, but lots of them actually stopped buying material altogether because they just couldn't, they couldn't finance it. So that's in a nutshell the issue, but the short answer is still, yes, there are products, there are products in stock. You just have to be mindful when you're looking at, is there a product dealing on something that you want and maybe it's good to go to something that's in stock to turn it quicker.

Vince, your thoughts? Well, Nick and I have been talking about this for the last two weeks over the supply chain aspect or the value chain part of the supply chain. And it was fascinating. The thing that I walked away from my conversation with Nick about, which he brought up again here, was that the industry is too small and it needs to grow in capitalization. And that's a big, you know, financial term. English, you know, just to say what Nick already said, but in a different way. It's like the situation

is you have everyone in their mother selling their coins at the retail level back to dealers. And dealers who make a market want to honor that. And so they're buying them. And then they're taking these coins. And they're also simultaneously, they're selling out of the new stuff, the stuff that people want, Maple Leafs or Eagles, right? So they're selling out of those. And then they're taking this technically junk silver and they're going to Sunshine and they're saying, all right, refine this. I need the money so I can buy new inventory to sell. And Sunshine's like, listen, only four-nines right now.

I mean, I might be wrong about that, Nick. But only four-nines right now. We're not doing three-nines-five. We're backed up. We have preferential customers that we have to work with. Some of them are probably J.P. Morgan. I can't confirm that publicly, but I can ruminate on it. bringing in concentrate from Latin America.

And so priority customers are being taken care of. And so what you're seeing is the smaller shops that have good customers, but small capitalization, are screwed. They can't buy anymore. And at the same time, their homepage says, out of stock of this, out of stock of that. So they've become like a car dealer that sells Humvees and Teslas. And everybody wants to give you Humvees and buy Teslas. And so they can't do anything. They can't fill their inventory.

They have a lot filled with three, nine, five. It's a horrible analogy. But the point is they can't turn over their inventory. And so they're cash constrained. Meanwhile, the refiners are doing what refiners there are are doing everything they can, but they're backed up. And so to next point, there's not enough money. If there was enough money in the industry,

then the smaller dealers that are, Even the bigger dealers. Now, I'm not saying that gold.com is having problems or gold and silver bar having problems at all. What I'm saying is that your parent company keeps you honest. They make sure that you have the money, right? And you can do that. You can finance. But this industry is dying for financing.

It's dying for I own a coin dealer, right? Let's say I'm a small guy and I'm a competitor with Nick. I don't have the money to stock. And so all the industry is going to have vertically, consolidate into the bigger players unless someone says to me hey Vince you need money to buy inventory I go yes well here's a million dollars you know give us 5% there is no one loaning money to the industry and that's where you're going to see enter the I can see Nick nodding and said this is the other thing we talked about and I could see the outside capital coming in and it's going

to come in from the blockchain people with the fresh money that are looking to get involved and vertically integrate so before you go there Before you go there. Right. Well, let's use a practical real-world example. We'll use two, we're going to do two sort of thought experiments, sort of is let's walk through specifically. Silver Gold Bull as an example, or Atmex or Jam Bullion, or you pick your poison. When they want to buy inventory and bearing in mind, you get production schedules that come out from the various mints that you want to deal with.

And they say, hey, we've got a value date of, you know, at this point, I'm using May because at this point they're basically in April or May for value dates on new product. That doesn't mean that a customer that buys today is going to wait until May. Of course not because you've been buying the whole way through their value chain as they've been giving you value dates. You nibble or you take big chunks systematically. So if we have a let's just say it's Silver Town Mint, another one in the family, they say, hey, we've got product. We've got this is our production schedule. We've got 800,000 ounces that are available because that's,

That's what they'll do about a week, I think, something like that. And that'll be available in the second week of May. And now we're in the family. So we get first shot at it or one of the first cracks at it. So what we might want to take, let's just say 200,000 ounces of that production that week. So whatever we pay above spot, we owe that right away. But because we're doing that the whole way through with no product in hand, we might be selling through it. But that far out, probably not.

We're going to finance that. So we're financing whatever we pay above spot. Call it X dollars for argument's sake. It's single digit above spot on each ounce. So we're carrying that financing now at this point for what, three months. And we're doing this from all these various mints. So you can imagine for a company like us that's moving millions and millions of ounces all the time. We're talking about millions of ounces that we are not long the market because

were hedged, but we're long in product in terms of premium. So we finance it the whole way. The minute the product lands here local, either here in Calgary or in Las Vegas, it goes into our repo account because you mean, we might have a hundred, 150 million dollars in inventory. You can't have that out of pocket. You finance that. So now you're not just carrying the financing on that premium, that above spot cost. You're now carrying it for that plus the underlying metal value. So you've got to sell it. And I'll And on top of it, again, another complicating factor, and Vince will know about this, is that we're used to a world where we say, okay, I want to buy that car, I'm willing to finance

it at this price. It's a fixed price for the fixed term. I want to buy a house. In the US, you can get a super long-term mortgage. In Canada, you can get a five-year fixed term. But when we go and finance bullion, the banks can change our financing rate on 24 hours notice. Right. And when, you know, Q4, Vince will remember this, he'll know, he actually knows the plumbing of us much better than I do. Q4, 2024, Q1, 2025, when effectively someone in the big

banks in the U.S. had a straw that went over the Atlantic Ocean and into the LBMA and was sucking all the gold out of there, financing rates went completely nuts. And then if you, like, on gold, and that's usually like between two and five and a half, six percent. But you can imagine that's a big difference if you're financing thousands and thousands and thousands of ounces of gold. Fast forward to October of 2025 when silver really started to rock and roll, lease rates became infinity and financing rates went completely squirly to the point where it was like, I mean, there were points where we were talking to primary sovereign mince and they were, they didn't know what to do because practically speaking,

there's too much risk and even minting. Like there was a period of time. And we were just down at Sunshine Mint. And you could see, they told us it was 11 million or something, whatever, how many ounces of silver just around. But they can't just take that because it's owned institutionally. You can't just take it out and throw it into the value chain. Like that's a conscious decision you have to make because they have a schedule.

And they're like, by the time it's committed to, we say, okay, we're going to do a million ounce production run out of this. you're financing that just in that production schedule for about three weeks while it makes its way in and goes from a thousand ounce pure bar into usable product at the other end and then at that point the financing passes on to the dealer so the long and the short of it is it's completely like I said it's just to Vince's point there's not enough finance in this industry and there hasn't been because the industry was built for $30 silver and about $1,900, call it, somewhere between, probably between $1,800 and $2,400 gold.

But here we are at much higher prices with the same available pool of capital. It's tough. Yeah. I mean, so when people say there's no silver left, there's plenty of silver. You just can't get it yet because we don't have the refining. But more importantly, and I think less discussed, as you just said, there isn't enough capital. I mean, I don't have enough money. Like everyone wants to buy my coins and I don't have enough money to replenish my inventory to sell more coins because it's all tied up and junk that I bought from someone else six months ago.

And the refinery won't do it. And to your point about what the banks do, when they change the rates, traders will understand this from a trading point of view. When a bank says, oh, it's too volatile. We're going to change your repo rates. It's the same thing as an exchange saying we're raising margins. It forces you to puke because you're like, all right, well, I was making a dollar over a spot all in for cost. Now I've got to rotate it down to spot because I need the money because I can't cover this margin call. It's the same thing as a margin call at the physical side.

The banks have too much control over the levers. Outsiders need to come in to help the industry. You can't puke the metal. That's the thing. When you've got physical metal in a repo, account, there's nowhere for it to go. I mean, you can't hedge it either. No, because once you hedge it, you know what's going to happen.

Then you will get a margin call, you know, and then you don't have the repo money. So, so that's the problem that you have and we've, you know, I don't want to get too inside baseball on this, but from a, from a dealer standpoint, again, because you, you wanted it, so you're going to get it, Sean, but like, if you, you know, you play the game and you buy too much material. forward and then the market starts to cool because hey Trump has been a blessing and a curse. I remember how much we were cheering the night that he won. I mean I probably shouldn't say that because you know business and stuff but it means pretty self-evident that a

bullion business is probably okay with Trump but he's usually terrible for business and the night that he won November 5th or whatever the hell it was. I mean all the tailwinds that we had just coming out of the doldrums about a year of quiet in our market I mean gone. I mean, all the energy came out of our industry. Metals went down. It was just a disaster of a thing. These things can happen on short notice. And if you're holding too much material into the future, you just can't sell it because once the market goes away, you know, you're holding it at a higher price. So your inventory is more expensive than the next person's inventory that didn't have anything to sell in the good times. They're going and buying it live off the shelf as it's

available, they're paying a lower rate because now mints got to get whatever is produced out. And, you know, it causes you problems down the road. So it's a very delicate balance and it's, it's part of the reason why a lot of, it's part of the reason, not the whole reason why some dealers are being real careful. This is a very, this is not your, this is not a market that we had ever seen before and it's certainly not one that shaped up in a way that we, that was predictable. We knew prices were going to go way higher. We just didn't see it shaping up the way that it did. The two things, the one thing you both agree on, not enough money, okay?

Vince started talking outside money and we brought it back in and we're meandering. Outside money, Vince, you're talking about blockchain money. Yeah, well. Because won't there won't be a huge opportunity? Sorry, just to throw a thought in there. Somebody going like, you need capital? We can buy and you. capital this is this is going to be the next going to speak to this more than me but i i approached it from

from from notice others purchases and wondering what they're going to do with all the gold and and i have well there are two things the first thing just to get out of the way is the catalyst for the excitement in silver that precipitated this is when we kind of cut off china from their silver supply So we now have all the silver and they have all the refining. So the world is split in that respect. Vince, can you touch on that? Like cutting them off from their supply? Where was their supply?

Well, I mean, China had taken the last 10 years, especially the last five years, to build very robust relationships with Latin American countries like Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. And they were buying concentrate, taking offtake before it hit the market. and they were buying it cheap, unprocessed, and they were giving it to their own refineries to process. And they had been basically buying all the silver before it hit the market, and that's why the market price never moved until it started to move.

And when we went into Venezuela and deposed Medora, we also went in, this is from reliable sources, military as well as industry. We also went in country by country and started disconnect. connecting Chinese influence where we could. So St. Kitts, Trinidad, Tobago, oil places, we went down there. And a big part of that is we wanted to, this is again, military, geopolitical stuff, we wanted to pursue into the Monroe Doctrine or the Donro Doctrine, we wanted to make sure that we had more control over the supply chains coming from Latin America.

And so in doing that, we cut off China from the their concentrate source overnight. And I can confirm that because there is a small minor in Latin America, K-U-Y-A, I believe, and the executive, the CEO, said that he was called days after that this happened and was asked if he would sell any silver at $80 when it was trading 70. And he didn't have any. And China started to panic, and that's when it ran up to 110, 115,

at least in China. So that, I mean, that's, that's what precipitated the paddock here. You know, you get your inventory lifted. You've got junk, you've got all the grandmas and grandpas coming and going, oh, silver's $80. Here's my coins. Here's my coins. And you have this situation where you have massive opportunity to buy and to sell incredibly

large bid ask spreads and no money to take advantage of it. So it's like, well, I can buy a house for $500,000 and sell it for $5 million. Okay. I don't have $500,000. dollars and so meanwhile china has the refinery and no silver going into it so that's that part of it i hope that that that explained it the uh the institutional thing and nick's going to speak to this uh in much more detail what what i noticed was tether's accumulating a lot of gold right and and i got word from a couple other people that their competitors are going to be getting involved in that as

well at the same time you have February coming around and we're in February now and and 401ks are allowed to have gold coins now and retirement funds in the US are allowed to have gold coins now and I believe you're going to see new product come out and I believe that product will either be directly from Tether or financed by Tether or in partnership with a government I believe the US government is getting ready to either deregulate re-regulate re-regulate or endorse product on the coin side, which will speak for all the metal, silver and gold that's been spoken for.

But the thing is this, to bring it back to the whole industry, the industry is growing and it needs money. Well, where's the money going to come from? The money's going to come from the people with the gold, and people like Tether have gold now. I mean, unless they don't, we know that there's always a question about what they really have

and don't have. But assuming that they do, then you're going to have more financiers, more financiers, come in to compete with the banks. And I think the marketplace is going to grow, which is one of the reasons that even though it's a bad day to talk about this, it's one of the reasons that I like minors because I think when these announcements come out, you're going to start seeing miners go, wait a minute, that's a source of metal. Anyway, so, but Nick should probably elaborate more on the whole. And I, and I should maybe add in that, you know, there was a large investment from Tether, right?

Yeah, there was. Yeah, and obviously I want to be mindful of it's not really my story to tell. It's our parent company, gold.com, formerly Amark. But suffice to say that we were involved rather heavily in this whole thing coming about. And lo and behold, Tether has, they've been buying everything. I mean, you type Tether into, you know, into your Google machine. And at any point, And in the last number of quarters, you will have seen a new story like every, feels like every five days where Tether is buying, you know, equity into another company. They've bought, like they bought into mine, streamers, all kinds of stuff. They, you know, this isn't like an inside thing. They are objectively from looking at it, they are obsessed with gold. I happen to find that flattering. And I think that's awesome.

I don't know what that's going to mean for the future, but they have been accumulating gold. And Vince and I talked about a sort of, I don't know what you would call it, but it's like a theme or like an overarching idea called the Lindy effect. And the fact, the Lindy effect is in essence, it's very boiled way down. It's like the longer something's been around, the more likely it is to be around in the future. So it's very interesting that a company that makes its insane amount, of money off of a stable coin, but really off of the interest from treasuries, is investing so

heavily in a hard asset, you know, what some people used to call it pet rock. So their involvement in the industry is really interesting. I mean, it's not just interesting from like, oh, you know, inside baseball, small industry type of thing. I mean, this is a, it's a massive, it's a massive move. They've effectively said, we want to be a big, player in the gold market. And there's no secret, you know, like a tether gold is coming and everybody's racing to digitize gold. We've seen tremendous success on our platform. We've talked about this before. We've seen it with our relationship with Wealth Simple where, I mean, the amount of trades that are happening on a daily basis, the number of users that are

interacting with it on a daily basis are their eye-watering. People are interested in gold. We just have to bridge the gap between like the demographics where some people want it in a more traditional way and other people want it in a modern way. So no doubt that's part of what tethers up to here is they want to be in bed with one of the biggest market makers in the world in gold and probably in other metals moving forward. They want to bring their expertise in digitization and like a gold.com's expertise in the actual underlying asset. marry them together with a huge direct-to-consumer base through all of their subsidiaries, including us, and they want to market their product.

How that's going to happen? I honestly don't know at this point, but there's clearly a strategic vision to get together. The other side of it is they have a stupid amount of gold. I mean, it's not audited, but I think they're reporting. What did you? They said something at 140 tons, Vince? Yeah, 140 tons. So you're talking like north of $20 billion in gold.

And that just sits there. Yeah. More than, more than many central banks. Yeah. They're top 20, I think. But to your point, to your point, and it's just sitting there. What are they going to do with it? So now, enter this, go back to this conversation about there's not enough money in the system.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to assume that at some point, I don't even know if it was, if it was, you know, discussed, but at some point they're likely going to use that gold as a means of of financing more precious metals activity because that's ultimately, that's a great use for the gold. I mean, leasing gold has always existed. It's existed forever. And I think this is something that I've been in the industry for 15, 16, 17 years that I never really thought about. Silver, if you don't have enough silver, you're screwed. You can't just find silver. when it's not there. Gold, it's really predominantly used as a store of value. So there's always gold. You just have to get, you have to ask somebody if you can lease it from them, find a negotiated

price that's fair. And then you can use that gold. Vince can talk to that more than than I can, though. No, I mean, there's really not much to add except the the industry is changing. I mean, gold is money and silver is more. But I mean, I don't really, I really can't add much to that in terms of color, except, except the industry is growing fast now. And what's going to happen eventually is to your point, Tether's going to get involved. In fact, here's what I can add that's color. I threw a post up on X yesterday.

And the post was quoting, I was quote tweeting someone who was talking about Tether. And I said, Tether is building a gold vertical. Right. So they're like you said, they have blockchain. They're partnering with gold.com, which gives them access to a distribution network. They're building a merchant bank for gold. And so I wrote, I wrote, Tether is building a gold vertical and they're going to something like see the industry, I said. Just like that, very, very bland, you know, very obscure.

And the CEO of Tether, Palo, he, he commented and liked that post. So I didn't tag him. So he's convinced, you know, I do want to, if I can talk about the Lindy effect for a second, it's funny that you're talking. You know, first of all, Warren Buffett's business model is, buy something that has a protective moat, buy something that's been around long enough like Coca-Cola and has a lot of infrastructure or regulatory behavior behind it to protect it by a brand. And gold is the most hated brand on earth, but it's been around for 5,000 years.

So the Lindy effect says the longer something's been around, the longer it'll be around. And it comes from, I'm actually familiar with this, it comes from an old dollar I could test it in New York City years ago. Lindy's diner, Lindy's Deli. The story was that in 1920s, if you had a good show on Broadway, you could tell it was a good show by the amount of people that went to Lindy's.

So the longer Lindy's was crowded, the longer your show would be there. And so they called it the Lindy effect. Anyway, they were known for their cheesecakes and what have you, but it's called the Lindy rule or the Lindy rule or the linear effect. And what it really comes down to is, hey, you can assume that anytime you look at anything that's in existence right now, it's at the midpoint of its life. So how long has Bitcoin been around? 15 years, 20 years call it, right? Like 2009, 17 years. All right. So you should assume that it's at the

midpoint of its life. It's going to last at least another 17 years. And that's actually not an unfair thing to say. Right. So how long has gold been around? Five thousand years. How many more years will that be around? You should assume five thousand years. So anything that's been around, you should always assume it will double in value or double in existence. And so if you're a Bitcoin person, not speaking for Taylor, but if you're a Bitcoin person and you think it's the future of money and you still believe it's the future of money, well, why wouldn't you hedge yourself by buying gold something that's been around for 5,000 years? because if Bitcoin fails, gold's your hedge. Mind you, they have a lot of hedge, but I just think there's a lot more going on here than Nick or I can admit publicly.

Let's put it that way. No, and I'm, I mean, honestly, I had a long drive today before I got into the office and I started, I dove into a podcast. One of your buddies, Sean, I guess both you guys know him, but Mike Ferris had Aaron Day on. And I can't verify any part of it. But just talking about the Clarity Act and how they want to effectively digitize everything.

And what it tells me when I look at, you know, that and I look at this new, this emergence of, I mean, we're talking about Tether, but really Tether could be synonymous for, you know, who knows. I'm sure that other major players in the blockchain. Stable coins. Sorry? Stable coins. Yeah. They're all going to participate somehow, some way. I mean, gold's got too much inertia right now for people not to want to hop on this train.

And because of the role of central banks in holding it, you know it's going to be valuable. It's not due for a massive, you know, flat line bottoming out like we saw in the 2010s anytime soon. They spent too much money and too much time and fought too hard to accumulate what they have and hide that from the public to want to go in and you know piss it all away so these guys are all going to jump in and what i take away from this and this is not like some sort of insight you know from a market insider is i think all of us are going to see dramatic changes in an industry that for some people they're very new to it because they thought it was stupid for a long time and now

they're like oh my god i got to own some and for other people that look like cooks for ages because they were holding this thing, but like gold or silver, and now they look like geniuses. But I think for a lot of us, we are going to be left very surprised by the direction that this whole industry is going to take in the coming 12, 24, 36 months. I think it's going to, there are dynamic and really seismic changes that are about to happen. I'm not saying that we're at the front end of it or the pointy end of the spear. I'm going to be as an individual reacting to them just the same way that anybody else will that's listening to this for better and for worse. And it's one of the reasons, you know, it's not a plug for owning the stuff, but it's kind of true.

It's one of the reasons why I value the opportunity to own something that's like a little brick or a little coin that I can see it, I can touch it, I can interact with it. And sometimes it's a pain in the ass. But on balance, it gives me a sense of freedom. that very few other things in life give me, in particular at a time where it feels like everything in every institution is under attack. Yeah. Vince, I know you have to run here.

So any final thoughts before we light you out? I did want to comment, you know, Nick raised a point about digitize everything. And I just want to put us all in the heads of the people that are running these. stable coin companies and government. And that is simply this. They want to digitize everything. And that means they want to digitize farmland in Iowa so that you can buy shares in the farmland. They want to monetize things that are generally illiquid. Now, what does this have to do with gold? Well, look, I'm going to approach a tea farmer in India and say to him, you can't get a loan from your bank, I'm going to give you a loan using a stable coin, and I'm going to have people

take shares and equity in your tea farm. Now, that's crazy, right? Well, how do you prove it? You prove it by starting with an asset that everyone trusts that's been around 5,000 years, and that no one's going to mistrust. So you start this whole digitization of the world with gold and silver, gold first, then silver. And then after that works, five, 10 years down the road, you're going to start seeing everything digitized. You're going to start seeing stocks digitized. Look, the CME just announced today they're going to have single stock futures. Do you know why? Because they're being competed with by everyone else. Polymarket, Cal She, you can't open a story that doesn't mention that you can basically trade something 24 hours a day. The point is whether we like it, approve of it or not,

assets, real assets are the future, and real assets married to a digitized contract are how they're going to be presenting. And what you're doing is you're taking real assets and you're adding a liability to them, counterparty risk. So you still want to own physical gold. But if not fiscal gold, you want to own something, you know, if you're a normie, if you're not like one of us, you're like, well, I don't know where to buy coins. I don't know anyone.

I guess I'll just buy the ETF. Well, the ETF is going to be replaced with. The blockchain gold. They'll say, I feel like I own the gold. Can you see it? No. Can you touch it? No.

Can you get it? No. Will the government probably confiscate it? Yes, if they need it badly enough. So you're better off having the gold in your pocket, in your purse, in your handbag, in your wallet at home. So they're going to digitize everything. And gold is the bleeding edge of that pointy spirit. They need to try something that people trust.

There's nothing more stable than gold. I don't know if that's a, I think that's a pretty good spot, Dan. I'm sure I'm going to have a ton of people asking questions. Vince, I appreciate you hopping on. We're going to see you here March 28th in Calgary. If anyone cares, which they should. There's 47 tickets left. That's it.

And Nick, thanks for hopping on and doing this. We had to work around everyone's schedules, including Sean getting out of the hospital. So there you go, folks. Happy, what is it? Happy Thursday to everyone or Wednesday or whatever day it is. Wednesday, John, Tuesday. I don't know. I'm all over the place.

It's the drugs. It's the drugs. Thanks, guys. Feel better, Sean. Thank you. Thanks, Nick.