these technologies are going to continue driving the demand for silver for many decades to come together they're going to not just be the major demand but i mean it'll be more than 50 if it's going to be huge hi this is mike maloney and i've got jeff clark with me how are you doing jeff i'm doing great mike it's great to be back with you again this week of course so i've got a couple interesting topics to throw your way if that's okay that would be great uh fire away all right well the first


one is i love this as an analyst it was a detailed report with lots of data in it from the silver institute about the jump in uh silver demand that they expect to come from the automotive industry um and the reason one of the reasons they expect the jump is because ev vehicles electric cars and things like that use more silver than combustion engine cars and of course there's going to be an increase in ev use they think the jump is going to be so much that they predict the second largest industrial use demand for silver


is going to come from the automotive industry and the first uh largest use is already uh solar panels and photovoltaics and things like that so the increase that's expected in silver demand for industrial use in total but especially from those uses is really going to jump so my question is mike what do you see in silver's future this doesn't have even anything to do with monetary demand which we both think is really gonna spike at some point here what do you see in silver's future mike


well you know uh as as you know uh much of silver is uh mined as a byproduct of other silver of other metals i'm sorry you're mining zinc or you're mining gold or you're mining uh something else i lead uh and uh or you know so there's all these different metals and silver sort of comes along from the ride and that's a tremendous amount of the silver supply and if there's an economic turn down that's when people shift toward monetary demand and uh i do see a lot being used up


in electric cars and solar panels because this is the future but also uh the fact that it's a semi-inelastic supply because they're not going to dig up twice as much lead twice as much zinc twice as much copper or whatever because the price of silver goes up and so a lot of the supply uh is completely inelastic and it goes along the that that portion of the supply goes along for the ride with the economy regardless of uh of monetary demand and or or the demand from this added demand from cars and cars is


the fastest growing automobiles but solar is so cars and so cars might be smaller and solar but they're they're going to uh both accelerate in the future um you know the solar roof that uh that tesla came out with we have alternate sources of energy and some of those sources are very clean like solar energy now recently you know i've purchased uh recently four tesla power walls and quite a few solar panels uh and i've got uh two houses now on my uh my little farm that are and they're little houses


they're not big i'm gonna be living in a basically the equivalent of a cabin you know like a hunting cabin or something like that which i love anyway i would rather own my own river and live in a cabin than have a 20 000 square foot house somewhere that doesn't impress me and i have a river that i own that's 20 feet from my my new house so i'm gonna be nice and cozy and happy there uh with uh uh my i'm completely off the grid it is not connected and so yes it uses up the batteries in


the battery pack and the solar panels on the house used silver and this is only going to increase and even in an economic downturn this is going to increase now with the solar roofs about every 30 years you have to replace the roof on your house and there's a major cost in doing that so you can deduct that cost from the cost of a solar roof and that difference makes it quite economical to invest in solar for your house and go uh you know energy efficient and clean and you know when it comes to the cars


i've owned tesla's since 2010. uh you know i've got i had a 2010 roadster i've still got my 2011 roadster i had a 2012 model s signature edition the 599th car uh and i've got a tesla dual motor performance model three right now that i love and i've got a couple of cyber trucks on for the farm and i'm going to be there's some electric tractors being made i'm going to be uh ordering a couple of those so that the farm can become carbon negative uh if you do farming


correctly you can sequester carbon and then if none of if the whole farm is being run on solar power stored in battery you know with solar cells that have silver in them and batteries that have silver in them charging on the power walls charging all of the farm equipment and the vehicles that have batteries that have silver in them that silver is helping to sequester carbon because when you don't till the soil you don't release last year's stored carbon in the soil so when you do permaculture you're


drawing carbon out of the air sequestering it in the soil and but if you're doing it with a bunch of diesel farm equipment and then you're driving around uh internal combustion uh cars and trucks uh you're you might be sequestering some carbon but you're also releasing carbon somewhere else and you're probably not carbon negative we are going to be a carbon negative farm uh and this does help drive the price of silver and this really is the future completely sustainable living does


have to disconnect from we need to preserve our petroleum resources for future generations for medicines fertilizers plastics all sorts of chemicals that you can't make right now you know there's organic compounds in oil that would be either impossible or very costly to duplicate elsewhere and uh and then there's new uses discovered all the time oil is the most useful uh resource that we have the most useful compound silver is the second most useful and it's the mo it is the most useful


element and because silver is found in in almost anything if it's got electricity in it it probably has silver in it yep uh and uh so i think the future is very very bright when it comes to the uses for silver and i see uh this ex this demand uh accelerating and being somewhat you know people will buy less electric cars uh if there's an economic downturn but they're going to buy a lot less uh internal combustion cars i've owned electric cars like i said since 2010 and once you do internal combustion cars


just seem completely idiotic a good internal a good electric car renders all internal combustion vehicles idiotic and things like transmission that's a band-aid to make an insufficient technology work uh all of these parts and the upkeep and maintenance when you buy an electric car it costs a lot less to keep up very very low maintenance and so over the life of the vehicle it's a lot less expensive to own and at the same time it's extremely convenient pulling into a get when i when i have to


drive an internal combustion vehicle and i pull into a gas station and have to waste five to ten minutes doing this when the electric vehicle is always ready to go every single morning and so as people experience electric vehicles uh and see the benefits uh more and more people are going to gravitate toward that you know and tesla's have been accumulated they've got more than a billion miles of data now uh yeah i think it's turning into it's going to be several billions of miles of data


uh for creating their self-driving vehicle the uh full self-driving autopilot is so that we can have things like robo taxis and stuff like that this is something that's leaving other companies in the dust and uh uh this uh is going i mean i just watched a video of somebody in a tesla model 3 drive from downtown san francisco to torrance california to torrance which is in los angeles on autopilot they did have to interrupt the autopilot once or twice on the way but the cars are now making the types of decisions


oh and going down las vegas boulevard and making uh left-hand turns in traffic uh where there's three or four lanes on each side and being able to see uh cars and stuff that are being blocked by trucks that the driver can't see i even noticed that when i was uh traveling in uh you know i was going from uh boston to chris martinson's house up in uh up in massachusetts and uh suddenly the car starts breaking and i'm going why is it doing this and then the car in front of me moves out of the way and there's a


traffic is stopped and i would have had to do a real emergency braking maneuver the car saw something that i didn't see and started breaking uh and so uh we're very very close to this happening as that happens uh electric cars will uh start right now you know the the um car electric cars are on a growth trajectory and internal combustion cars their sales is declining and so this will go on and on and with the solar you know if you're investing in solar panels you're investing in


uh solar panels that go on a roof a roof that will have to be replaced one day with this solar roof idea uh you've got to replace your roof every uh 20 to 30 years and so that cost of replacing the roof can be part of the cost that invests in the solar roof and so yeah these technologies are going to continue driving the demand for silver for uh many decades to come and uh they're going to be uh you know together uh they're going to not just be uh the major demand but i mean it'll be more


than 50 it's going to be huge it's going to be huge and meanwhile uh the u.s geological survey you know we we may have hit peak silver and we may be declining the size of the deposits that have been discovered are so i mean you're the expert on that tell us about that jeff well that's a big topic and you and i have talked about writing about that in a book uh but the the short version is that yes uh because of what happened with prices for both gold and silver here over the past decade


uh miners have not been incentivized to look for more gold and silver and therefore when you spend less looking for gold and silver what do you get less gold and silver so this is a big trend that's in motion um there's been a lot less investment the deposits that are being found and this is true for gold as well not just silver because you're right a lot of silver roughly three out of four ounces comes from other operations besides just silver but those deposits are much smaller we're


finding fewer of them uh the grades are much lower so this is a real issue and so when you buttress you know falling new supply for gold especially silver though up against this increase in not just monetary demand that you and i see coming but for the increases in industrial demand uh you really have a supply demand crunch that could that is very realistic here in the near future so um you know you mentioned uh auto drive cars all the circuitry so not just the car itself has a lot of silver in it but the circuitry for the


auto drive itself even has silver in it that's another use for silver anyway that report is has got some great data in it it's worth reviewing uh there's even a couple pictures in there mike of some cars and they label all the different uh applications where silver is used in the different cars and i called the silver institute and they actually told me jeff there's even more than that we did we ran out of room in those pictures to label all the uses that silver is in a car so they couldn't even list them all so


it really silver really is the indispensable metal industrial demand is going to go up and that's going to be another key driver of the price because silver so valuable and it's so useful and you're right we do keep finding new uses all the time yeah yep yeah so i see nothing but a bright future for silver well thanks mike that was a great chat on the future of silver i think you're right the future of silver is very bright so thanks mike and i'll see you on the next call see ya jeff thanks