 Hello, I'm Mark Thornton, and this is Minor Issues. Sticking with a recent theme on gold, I'm going to talk today about the gold family, where you look at gold and silver and platinum and other metals as precious, defined as something having a very high value in terms of weight and or volume. So gold at $2,000 an ounce, silver at $25 an ounce, platinum, palladium, these are all what are considered precious metals. The monetary metals historically have been gold and silver, circulating as money for literally thousands of years. Historically copper also was coin money, and in more recent times copper and nickel have served as token monies, token coins. These are metals of relatively low value by weight and by volume. And then of course, there's a broader category of industrial metals. The precious metals are also used in industry, but there are also other metals, including copper, nickel, zinc, and so forth, that serve in industrial purposes only today. For industrial and artistic demand, gold and silver are particularly precious. They have chemical properties and mechanical properties in addition to being beautiful, colorful, and having a luster that is very appealing. That was the original demand for those metals, gold and silver, for industrial and artistic purposes. But of course, as society emerged and money became a very unique tool for exchange, the monetary demand for these metals increased the overall prices of those metals. The monetary metals were the most saleable of all metals, whether they were basic raw materials or whether they were recycled materials or whether they were in the form of products like cups, saucers, kitchen utensils, ornaments, rings, necklaces, and so forth. The monetary demand is triggered by the scarcity of these products, which gives them high value relative to weight and volume. They are also very durable products. They last and are almost indestructible, and they are highly divisible, so that even today you can buy gold in the form of a half of a gram of gold or roughly one sixtieth of a one ounce silver dollar. The scarcity of gold in particular is that there are only small amounts of it that we know of in the planet. It's very difficult to get to. It's very thinly spread over the surface of the earth, in the oceans, rivers, and so forth, as well as most importantly very, very deep into the ground. So it's very, very thinly spread, which makes that small amount even much more difficult to find. Finding pure or relatively pure gold is a very rare thing. The fifth largest gold nugget ever discovered, ever over thousands of years, is a very small stone-like item that's worth less than one million dollars. So it's very difficult to get. It's very scarce and therefore highly useful as a monetary product. Now in terms of its value, that's something that's obviously changes over time, even though gold and silver are inherently stable in price because it's demanded for so many things by so many people all over the world throughout history, even those people who didn't use it for money. So today, gold sits around $2,000 an ounce. Silver is about $25 an ounce. The gold-silver ratio is about 80 ounces of silver to one ounce of gold. Historically, that ratio was much lower, roughly 12 ounces to 15 ounces of silver to one, but that's when silver coins were in wide circulation throughout the commercial world. And so that caused an enormous increase in the demand for silver to coin it into coins, and hence the silver was relatively much more valuable. Now, since we've gone off of the gold standard, we've stopped minning silver coins and we're on a fiat or paper system mandated by government, the gold-silver ratio has fluctuated from 50 ounces of silver to one ounce of gold up to a ratio of about 65 and beyond. The record historically occurred in the early days of COVID when the ratio was $125 to one. At that point, the fiat monetary systems of the world were at risk, and the industrial demand for silver evaporated, and so it set that record above $120 to one. Now, of course, there's a lot of other ways that people can own and possess gold and silver. There's paper gold, where you can buy gold or silver like a stock certificate. You can buy gold mining and silver mining stocks. You can even buy those stocks in terms of ETFs and mutual funds, and people even own jewelry, silverware, etc. So there's a wide variety of ways that people can own and possess gold as a protection against the degradation and chaos of the fiat monetary system, so there are a lot of different ways to approach this.