De Beers

So that's why diamonds can be made in the lab very inexpensively.

And also, the entire De Beers diamond marketplace was a massive cartel of price manipulation and price gouging to begin with.

Diamonds were never really that valuable.

It was a giant cartel to set prices very high and then through a bunch of advertising to try to make people believe that diamonds were valuable.

This week, a company claimed it can make real gold out of mercury in a machine.

And the internet and social media has decided what it meant because they looked at lab diamonds, which cut the price of diamonds in half.

And lab gold is actually a real thing.

More importantly, that down there is Winston, who does all the gold research around here.

And none of this is endorsed or sponsored.

We never, ever take money from any company ever.

And it means we can say whatever the heck we like, including saying the particular company sucks.

And that's kind of how I like it.

So it's scarcity versus infinite really.

Is gold like diamonds? You know, I believe very strongly that De Beers has vaults where they move diamonds around with bulldozers because that's just, Oh yeah, they do.

You know, there's trillions of carrots withheld from the market to prop it up.

Is gold propped up in any way the way diamonds are?

If anything, gold is...

No, I know what you mean.

That's the history of the De Beers family and all the diamond mines that they had.

They had great marketing.

The world is not going to hell in a hand basket.

And gold, although it's useful for certain production, The premise that gold is permanently scarce and therefore is a great long-term store of value, I would love to see either this company or some other company or an entire industry, just like the diamond industry in De Beers was driven to the edge of bankruptcy by synthetic diamonds.

I would love to see a transmutation industry drive all these gold bugs off the cliff through transmutation of mercury and other elements and make gold too cheap to meter.

Drive the cost of gold to zero.

Here's the less fashionable take.

For most people, a diamond still is the right call, not because De Beers wrote a commandment, but because diamonds win on the boring, practical stuff that actually matters after the proposal photos are over.

hardness, light return, resale recognition.

A look that still reads as engagement across cultures and decades.