Podcasts about daily reckoning

Tom welcomes back geologist and newsletter writer Byron King for a discussion on various aspect of the mining industry and the impacts of tariffs. They touch upon the fact that central banks are buying large amounts of gold and the impact this has on gold prices. They also mention the neglect of mining shares in comparison to the rise in gold prices, creating opportunities for investors. They also discuss the current mining cycle and how companies are reporting good earnings due to high gold prices. Byron suggests investors look for companies with assets, a strong management team, and resources worth exploring further. He mentions several examples of promising companies and opportunities within the gold space, as well as mentioning his own experiences at mining conferences. Additionally, Byron gives us his thoughts on the global market situation and how tariffs may affect various industries and economies. Byron encourages listeners to explore more about hard assets and investing in metals and energy for potential opportunities and growth. Time Stamp References:0:00 - Introduction0:52 - First 100 Days & Gold4:35 - Gold, Uncertainty & Price10:45 - Trump Taxes & Deficits17:57 - W. Vs E. Gold Monetization25:44 - China & Trade War Options35:17 - Trump Greenland & Canada44:44 - Underinvestment in Mining55:00 - Miner Margins & Sentiment1:02:43 - Opinions at Conferences1:09:23 - Wrap Up Guest Links:Website: https://paradigmpressgroup.com/ Byron King has first-hand expertise and connections in important industries like commodities and defense. He literally goes the extra mile to bring you perspectives you won't find anywhere else. His insights have been featured on MSN Money, Marketwatch.com, Fox Business News, CNBC's Squawk Box, Larry Kudlow, Glenn Beck and PBS's NewsHour. He has also been published in the Financial Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Byron graduated from Harvard University with a degree in geological sciences. He then went to work as a geologist for Gulf Oil Exploration and Production. Next came a tour as a flight officer for the U.S. Navy. At one point, he was an aide to the United States Chief of Naval Operations. After leaving active duty, Byron began practicing law. In 2002, he started corresponding with the staff of The Daily Reckoning. His work was featured so frequently he was often called an “unpaid contributor.” When he officially joined the staff, he began criss-crossing the globe in search of the world's best mining investment opportunities. Even now Byron spends much of his time away from home, checking out remote exploration sites, mines, rigs and plants to bring you a first-hand account of almost every investment opportunity he recommends. His way of breaking down technical language into everyday English has earned him a lot of fans. And you can count on him to give you the clearest picture of companies that make the world work.

This Flashback Friday is from episode 298, published last February 4, 2013. On this show, Jason Hartman talks with one of his investment counselors about current events, welcomes a guest caller and also brings to our listening audience the economic outlook from renowned financial expert, John Mauldin.  Mauldin discusses “spending rearrangement”, a restructuring of our country's spending problem and tax code, and how the election outcome influences the direction of that restructuring. The larger the government becomes, the smaller the private sector becomes – not an ideal situation for economic recovery in the U.S. Mauldin gives his insights and the possible scenarios and outcomes that could happen, depending on whether or not the deficit problem is truly solved, touching on investments, job creation, tax issues and trade deficits. John Mauldin is also a New York Times best-selling author and a pioneering online commentator. Each week, over one million readers turn to Mauldin for his penetrating view on Wall Street, global markets and economic history. Mauldin's weekly e-newsletter, Thoughts from the Frontline, was one of the first publications to provide investors with free, unbiased information and guidance.  Today, it is the most widely distributed investment newsletter in the world. Mauldin is a frequent contributor to publications including The Financial Times and The Daily Reckoning, as well as a regular guest on CNBC, Yahoo Tech Ticker, and Bloomberg TV. His best-selling books include Bull's Eye Investing, Just One Thing and Endgame, as well as his recently released update to Bull's Eye Investing – The Little Book of Bull's Eye Investing.   Follow Jason on TWITTER, INSTAGRAM & LINKEDIN Twitter.com/JasonHartmanROI Instagram.com/jasonhartman1/ Linkedin.com/in/jasonhartmaninvestor/ Call our Investment Counselors at: 1-800-HARTMAN (US) or visit: https://www.jasonhartman.com/ Free Class:  Easily get up to $250,000 in funding for real estate, business or anything else: http://JasonHartman.com/Fund CYA Protect Your Assets, Save Taxes & Estate Planning: http://JasonHartman.com/Protect Get wholesale real estate deals for investment or build a great business – Free Course: https://www.jasonhartman.com/deals Special Offer from Ron LeGrand: https://JasonHartman.com/Ron Free Mini-Book on Pandemic Investing: https://www.PandemicInvesting.com

Tom welcomes a new guest, geologist and newsletter writer Byron King for a discussion on the culture of deception and misdirection in society. Byron, an Ivy League-educated geologist and retired U.S. Navy officer, shares his thoughts on society's shift from rigor to oblivion due to the loss of clear enemies post-Cold War and the emergence of self-proclaimed elites with skewed realities. The conversation covers various topics including lawfare, its application against political adversaries, and the expansion of heightened surveillance and arrests. They also discuss the geopolitical conflicts affecting the world, with implications for the US and Canada, and the historical context of the US dollar's dominance in global trade and its role in inflation. Byron expresses concern over potential consequences if the US faces a crisis managing these conflicts, which could result in economic instability and further inflation. They disucss the impact of Federal Reserve interest rate policy on the economy and gold market, as well as the increasing disparity between asset-owning versus non-asset-owning populations. Byron also explores the undervaluation of mining industries, particularly those producing rare earth elements, due to cultural factors such as reliance on Chinese producers with low costs. Central banks' increased gold buying, driven by de-dollarization and geopolitical events is also discussed. The world will continue to need base metals like high-grade copper which will necessitate the mining of lower-grade ores and increased prices. Time Stamp References:0:00 - Introduction0:50 - Reality & Distortions7:49 - Lawfare & Politics13:23 - Truth, Media, & Events21:15 - Honest Money & Living Well27:24 - The West & Inflation37:38 - Golden Awareness42:57 - Fed's Direction Now45:30 - Manufacturing & Rural54:05 - EV Demand & Rare Earths1:00:06 - Mines & Timelines1:07:19 - Conference Takeaways1:14:28 - Wrap Up Talking Points From This Episode Society's shift from rigor to oblivion due to loss of clear enemies and rise of self-appointed elites. Increased demand for gold due to global de-dollarization and geopolitical conflicts, leading to potential economic instability. The undervaluation of mining industries and the importance of investing in reputable companies despite political influences. Guest Links:Website: https://paradigmpressgroup.com/ Byron King has first-hand expertise and connections in important industries like commodities and defense. He literally goes the extra mile to bring you perspectives you won't find anywhere else. His insights have been featured on MSN Money, Marketwatch.com, Fox Business News, CNBC's Squawk Box, Larry Kudlow, Glenn Beck and PBS's NewsHour. He has also been published in the Financial Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. Byron graduated from Harvard University with a degree in geological sciences. He then went to work as a geologist for Gulf Oil Exploration and Production. Next came a tour as a flight officer for the U.S. Navy. At one point, he was an aide to the United States Chief of Naval Operations. After leaving active duty, Byron began practicing law. In 2002, he started corresponding with the staff of The Daily Reckoning. His work was featured so frequently he was often called an “unpaid contributor.” When he officially joined the staff, he began criss-crossing the globe in search of the world's best mining investment opportunities. Even now Byron spends much of his time away from home, checking out remote exploration sites, mines, rigs and plants to bring you a first-hand account of almost every investment opportunity he recommends. His way of breaking down technical language into everyday English has earned him a lot of fans. And you can count on him to give you the clearest picture of companies that make the world work.

George Soros is another guy from the World Economic Forum that is just as creepy as Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and Yuval Noah Harari. They all have influence, power, and money and are not even a little bit afraid of the consequences that they may be facing, for themselves and others. As is said, karma is a bitch.  I'm only getting started exposing these globalists for the creeps that they are.  SUBSCRIBE. FOLLOW. SHARE. Resources used in this episode (more to come): President George H.W. Bush Announces Persian Gulf War 1-16-91(video): https://youtu.be/KJ6qpFpIFkY Watch this documentary on George Soros detailing his early financial career - The Investor Who Rules the World - George Soros documentary: https://youtu.be/aovDdiMjN9w  YouTube query on George Soros (various videos): https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=george+soros  Life News website – George Soros Spent About $500 Million Trying To Buy Elections For Democrats (article): https://www.lifenews.com/2023/01/04/george-soros-spent-about-500-million-trying-to-buy-elections-for-democrats/ Daily Reckoning website - Video George Soros Doesn't Want You To See (article): https://dailyreckoning.com/video-george-soros-doesnt-want-see/ NY Post - With Joe Biden George Soros Finally Had a President He Could Control (article): https://nypost.com/2023/01/24/with-joe-biden-george-soros-finally-had-a-president-he-could-control/  Fox Business - Black Lives Matter Has Been Hijacked by George Soros: Sheriff Clarke (article): https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/black-lives-matter-has-been-hijacked-by-george-soros-sheriff-clarke  60 minutes/George Soros – Steve Kroft interview (video): https://youtu.be/qKUlz-C5BG8 Glenn Beck/George Soros (video) - https://youtu.be/pe8wVRJQ2No The Steve Turley YouTube (videos) channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DrSteveTurleyTV  Steve Turley - Soros Banned video - https://youtu.be/NcDZqMgjYM0 Steve Turley - Soros Banned In Philippines video - https://youtu.be/fMh8N5jyRDU Visit these websites to investigate more: Open Society Foundation: https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/  World Economic Forum website: http://weforum.org  Go to: https://twitter.com/stephfactfinder to see interesting tweets, and more about the WEF, the Great Reset, politics, culture, our society, etc. Go to: http://truthdetectivepodcast.com to hear all episodes Email me: truthdetectivepodcast@gmail.com 

Information is a tool. Some information you think might not be relevant could be used against you in a way you never expected. So you might think you have nothing to protect and so nothing to hide today, but it can change on a day-to-day basis. Join Mo Bina, and guest, Mark Nestmann, in this episode as they discuss financial privacy and protection. Mark shares that this information could be used to take your wealth. For wealth protection, a private account can be opened at a private bank in one of the wealth haven countries, get it off the domestic radar screen, and have it invested in various ways. There's more to unpack in this episode! So tune in and enjoy!   In this episode, Mark talks about… How he got started in the business of privacy How do you protect your wealth from someone who thinks they're more entitled to it than you? The Lifeboat Strategy The easiest way to become a citizen of another country. Is there any point in internationalizing and diversifying your wealth? The Alpha's Strategy.   About Mark Nestmann… Mark Nestmann is the founder of The Nestmann Group, a US-centric consultancy that helps mostly American clients protect your assets, preserve your wealth and safeguard your future. His work has been featured in well-known media outlets including The Washington Post, ABC News, The New York Times, Bloomberg News, Business Week and Forbes. In addition, he has been featured in popular niche publications including The Harry Schultz Letter, The Daily Reckoning, International Living and Simon Black's Sovereign Man Confidential. He has also regularly appeared on Jim Puplava's Financial Sense Network, LewRockwell.com, The Oxford Club, The Sovereign Society and many others. He holds a Masters of Law (LL.M) in international tax law from the University of Vienna.   Catch Mark Nestmann on… Website:     https://www.nestmann.com/   Connect with Mo Bina on… Website:          https://www.high-risecapital.com/ Medium:          https://mobina.medium.com/ YouTube:        https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5ISsEKBHlkX7lk9b68SKLA/featured Instagram:      https://www.instagram.com/highrisecapital/ For more information on passive investing in commercial real estate, please check out our free eBook — More Doors, More Profits — by clicking here: https://www.high-risecapital.com/resources-index  

Welcome to Episode #77 of the Fatal Conceits Podcast... In today's conversation, I'm joined by author, value investor, student of life and editor of the popular ContrarianEdge newsletter, Mr. Vitaliy Katsenelson. I've been reading Vitaliy's work, on and off, for over a decade now. In fact, we used to publish his columns and market insights occasionally in The Daily Reckoning, a publication I managed for Bill Bonner back in the 2000s, in what seems like another lifetime...Vitaliy describes himself as “Born in Russia, Made in America,” a distinction we talk about during our conversation. He's also a professor of finance, CEO of Investment Management Associates and a keen world traveler. Over the course of an hour or so, I asked Vitaliy about his insights into the beleaguered American housing market, what the Fed hath wrought for the US economy at large, the challenges facing bottom up value investors like himself and where to for stock markets over the short and medium term. We also talk about his newly published book, Soul in the Game - The Art and Meaning of Life.Please enjoy - and share! - my conversation with Vitaliy Katsenelson, below...Cheers,Joel BowmanTRANSCRIPT:Joel Bowman:All right, well, welcome back to another episode of the Fatal Conceits podcast, dear listener. If you've not already done so, please head over to our Substack page. You can find us at BonnerPrivateResearch.Substack.com, where we have hundreds of articles, research reports, and many more conversations just like this on the Fatal Conceits podcast tab at the top of the page, where we talk about everything from high finance to lowly politics and everything in between.It is my pleasure today to welcome a gentleman to the show whose work I've been reading on and off for years, and as we were just talking about before we pressed record here, our email correspondence has gone back over a decade, so it'll be great to connect again. Vitaliy Katsenelson is the author of Contrarian Edge. Head over to his website there. He's got plenty of excellent material, mostly about investing, but a few life lessons in there, some political musings, lots of travel stuff. He's also the author of two investing books, Active Value Investing, and the Little Book of Sideways Markets, and most recently, a book that I hope we get to chat about today, Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life.So, first of all, Vitaliy, welcome to the Fatal Conceits podcast. I feel like it's long overdue.Vitaliy Katsenelson:I know, Joel, it's a pleasure. Thank you. We're looking forward to it.Joel Bowman:Outstanding. And as we were also just mentioning, if this background looks familiar, you were recently on a podcast with Anya Leonard, who runs the Classical Wisdom website. We sit about 10 feet away from each other. Being husband and wife, we share a home office, so if this is a little bit of deja vu...Vitaliy Katsenelson:Absolutely. Yeah. No, that's still there.Joel Bowman:All right, so there's lots of stuff I want to get to, Vitaliy. You covered such a wide breadth of subject matter in your musings, and again, people should head over to Contrarian Edge to check out your work there. But for readers who are just coming upon your work for the first time, I think they might be interested just in a bit of a Vitaliy origin story, because it's a very interesting one. You put it as “Born in Russia, Made in America,” which I thought was a very entertaining juxtaposition. How did you make that journey and come to that distinction?Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah, so today I live in Denver, and I have a wife and three kids, and I run a value investment firm, IMA, and I also write, and I wrote several books, but I write articles all the time. And by the way, we have a Substack as well, so you can just look for my name on Substack. You can subscribe to the articles.Joel Bowman:I'll put all the links to these links in the transcript.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Perfect. Yeah. But I was born in Russia and I moved, my whole family moved to the United States in December, 1991. What's interesting about this, actually, I was not living in Russia. I was living in the Soviet Union, and then literally a month later it stopped, it ceased to exist. The reason we moved to Denver, because my father's youngest sister left Moscow in 1979, and she moved to Brighton Beach. If you watch Moscow on the Hudson, that movie basically describes her life.Joel Bowman:Wow. Okay.Vitaliy Katsenelson:And then she married the Rabbi, and Rabbi had a synagogue in Cheyenne, Wyoming, out of all places, which is, I don't know if there are any Jewish people there, but yeah, that's a different conversation. But anyway, she invited us over. There was an organization that does a lot of good things, actually, not just for Jewish people, called Jewish Family Services. They were in Denver. So my aunt decided that it was better for us to move to Denver than to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and I keep thanking my aunt every day just for that decision alone.Joel Bowman:And so, I believe you were first studying and then lecturing at, was it the University of Denver?Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah. Yes. I studied, I got my undergraduate degree and a graduate degree at University of Colorado at Denver. And then I taught finance as an adjunct, which is a fancy word for part-time. So if you are a professor, and if you say part-time professor or part-time lecturer, it doesn't sound as interesting.Joel Bowman:It sounds a little casual. Yeah.Vitaliy Katsenelson:But adjunct, because most people have no idea what it is.Joel Bowman:Right.Vitaliy Katsenelson:And so suddenly, you sound important. So I taught finance for about seven years, and the reason I actually quit, because two reasons. Number one, I absolutely hated the part where I had to give out grades. I loved giving out As. I hated giving out Ds and Fs. And so, I hated that. But the second part is that after you teach the same class over and over again, it gets old.And I realized when I write, I can teach, because every article would teach something, but I don't have to repeat every article. I don't have to repeat this semester after semester, so I can get to learn new things all the time. And so, I quit in 2007, so I haven't taught in 15 years.Joel Bowman:And also, I guess as you mentioned with your Substack and with your Contrarian Edge page, you get to reach a much wider audience than just how many people can fit in the auditorium, right?Vitaliy Katsenelson:Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I can help a lot more people with my writings than just in a classroom. Yes.Joel Bowman:Excellent. We were back and forthing a little bit email-wise, and I'd been reading some of your work recently on the housing market, the US real estate market, and I wanted to kind of get into that, because I think that's, to use a popular phrase, “top of mind” for most people at the moment, with obviously the Fed having met recently. You and I are talking on November the 7th, for our readers' edification, here.But it's been five days since the widely expected rate hike of 75 basis points that I think most people were paying attention to, most people had kind of expected that, but they were paying more attention to the tenor of Mr. Powell's remarks afterwards. He seems to be speaking fairly directly in his remarks, saying that the job of the Fed is not done at present. We're not looking to pause. "Talk of a pause is premature," I think were his exact words.I wanted to get your take on how you think that shakes out in the housing market, because obviously there's a lot of Americans, in particular the middle class, with wealth tied up in that asset class, and you've written that you think it's quite worse than people think. Why is that?Vitaliy Katsenelson:All right. If you look at the housing prices from 1999 to today, they basically went up about 40%. In less than four years, they went up 40%. Most of that increase happened actually over a three-year period. So, the median house today in the United States is about $440,000, probably a little bit less than that, but that's what it was at the beginning of the year.The problem is, those prices were fine from an affordability perspective when interest rates were around a 30-year mortgage at 3%. But when inflation is at 7-9%, interest rates had to go up. Even if the Federal Reserve did not raise them, they would have still gone up, I would argue, because who would've wanted to buy this paper when inflation is 9% and pay 1% or 2%. So interest rates, I think, would've gone up anyway.So, today when the mortgage rate is over 7%, basically if you are a new buyer and you want to put 20% down and you want to buy a house, it's basically going to cost you almost twice as much. Let me just give you a couple numbers. If you bought a house in 2019, or even in 2021, it would've cost you roughly $420,000. Interest rate was 3%, so it would've cost you roughly about $15,000 a year in mortgage payments.When rates go up from 3% to 7.6%, as they are today, now the mortgage payment goes up to $30,000. This is, what's important to understand is that the median American household makes about $75,000 a year. $75,000 a year, or about $60,000 after tax, roughly. So in other words, when interest rates were 3%, it used to consume 25% of someone's income. Today it would consume, if you were to buy a house at today's prices, at these interest rates, would consume half of someone's income.So, housing today is unaffordable. So, what has to happen is that, for the housing market to return to the prices, to return to the affordability of 2019, of 2020, of 2021, they basically have to decline like 30 or 40%.Joel Bowman:Yeah, I saw those numbers, 30 or 40%. I've read those numbers in your write up, and I think for a lot of people that's difficult to conceptualize, because they've been living high on the hog with cheap and abundant credit for so long that they think, “Hey, it's been so good for so long, how could this possibly come to an end?” But you tap into the emotion of owning a house, how it's different from stocks, it takes a lot longer to come down, but prices can run up pretty quickly. But there's an emotional component to owning a home that counts, too...Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah. In the American Constitution, there is a guarantee of pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of rising housing prices every year. But over the last 30 years, we are basically, because interest rates actually declined for most of our adult life, right? So therefore, we've been conditioned that housing prices only go up. But they can decline. Joel Bowman:That'll come as a shock to some people, I imagine. I'm Australian, you can probably hear from my accent, but there's a very similar macro setup in Australia, where they've had access to just an exorbitantly large amount of cheap willing credit for so long that they've been led to believe that this is just sort of par of the course.But one of the things that I read in your full letter, that I thought was very interesting, and I think it's an important point for people to grasp, is that a lot of people will sort of trot out the argument, where they'll say, “Hey, look, we already had interest rates during the Paul Volcker years, or during the '70s and '80s, when they were 14, 16, 18%. And we had a lot of other similar macro setups as well. We had high inflation, we had high unemployment, we had an oil embargo from a major producer of the world, the Nixon price shocks, all of this kind of very pessimistic, sour macro setup. But we were able to muddle through, and then we were kind of off to the races after we got through the hard part. But this time's different. I agree with you, but explain to us why, in your mind, this is not just the '70s and '80s redux.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Because in the '70s and '80s, if you look at the ratio of housing prices to median income, it was half of where it is today. In other words, yes, the interest rates went up a lot, but the housing prices were much, much cheaper in relation to what people made. By the way, we still had a recession, don't get me wrong. We still had a recession. People forget about it. But I think this time, the impact will be greater.Also, this is very important to understand. When we are in an economy that has very low interest rates for a long period of time, our behavior changes. When I say “our,” that includes individuals, corporations, and government. Let's say, let's start with the government. That's the most obvious one. We have our debt to GDP at the highest probably in the country's history. We may have to go back to the World War II era to see what it was then. It's much higher than it was in the '80s. If you look at just how we get used to finance everything. If you bought a new car, you could get 0% financing. That is gone. I mean, well, 0% financing is basically gone, and therefore what you're going to start seeing that now, everything is going to become a lot more expensive.So, what's important to understand is where we're coming from. We're coming from, it's almost like 0% interest rates to meaningfully high interest rates, and therefore the cost of everything will go up. And it's going to slip into every single corner of the economy, and it's impossible for high interest rates not to cause a recession at this point.Let me give you one other important element about the housing market. Most Americans today basically have a mortgage, a fixed rate mortgage. 90% of Americans have fixed rate mortgages, where they probably pay from two and a half to three and a half or 4%, because people refinance and the industry has declined.So, here's what happened. Let's say you bought a house for $300,000 and let's say you have a mortgage. Actually, let me give you actual numbers. The average American has a mortgage of about $260,000 if you put together the first mortgage, second mortgage, okay? So in other words, the average American as of right now has $180,000 home equity.Joel Bowman:Okay, right.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Now, let's say housing prices stay where they are. Let's say they don't decline. If you want to move, if you want to sell your house today and move into another house a few blocks away, you're going to sell your house for $440,000. Hypothetically, you take $180,000 of equity, you put it in your house. So, new house is going to cost you for $440 minus $180, so $260. Your mortgage is not going to change except one thing. Now you'll be paying, instead of 3% interest rate, you're going to pay 7.6. And so, suddenly that move where you still buy the same four walls, same picket fences, now it's going to cost you $10 to $15,000 more a year.Joel Bowman:Right.Vitaliy Katsenelson:And that's a lot of money. So therefore, I think what's going to happen, what's important in the sense is this, when the housing prices go up, when the stock prices go up, people feel wealthier, because they feel like the house is worth more, they have more home equity. People feel wealthier, and therefore, if you feel wealthier, you are more certain about the future, you go out and spend money.The opposite happens when they decline, when assets decline, from stocks to housing prices. And when that happens, when housing prices have declined, people are going to have less home equity, but also they're going to feel less wealthy and therefore they're going to spend with less confidence. And that in itself is also going to help to weaken the economy.So again, I'm not an economist. I'm a guy who analyzes, I'm a kind of bottom up guy who analyzes stocks. But I look at this. It took me about 20 minutes to go through all this data, and just to see that it's basically impossible for us not to go into recession.Joel Bowman:Yeah, and even a technical recession this time. I know in the old fashioned days, it used to be two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. I'm sure the government has defined that out of existence. But yeah, I think most people are expecting them to even have to admit that we are in a recessionary environment at this point.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah. Let me tell you, I'm going to define recession this way here: when unemployment will start going up. The reason the government got away with saying we are not really in recession, and they could get away with it because it was supply chain issues, et cetera. A lot of one-time stuff. Fine. And we had 3.3% unemployment, so that's how they could get away with it. But when unemployment goes from 3% to 6%, it's going to be very difficult to say that we are not a recession. And I don't know where unemployment is going to go, but I'll tell you this, if you are in California, if you are in Silicon Valley, I think the recession there is going to be even more significant than in other parts of the country.Joel Bowman:Yeah. Well, let's talk about that then. You mentioned, of course, your work as a value investor, and we were just powwowing about our mutual acquaintance, Chris Mayer before. I wanted to just sort of pivot from the real estate market to the work that you do with investing, because obviously this is one of the other big asset classes, stocks, so-called risk assets, that are impacted by Fed policy.As Chris and I were just saying a couple of weeks ago, it would be lovely to live in a world where we could just do fundamental, bottom up health of a business research and due diligence and invest in the best companies, but the Fed can muddy the waters sometimes. So, explain to me and explain to our listeners how the kind of deep value investing that you're doing, that Chris is doing, which is driven more by, let's say, fundamentals than fad, or price over promise. How is that impacted now, even after we've had, with the exception of October, which I think was maybe the best month ever, we've had a very tumultuous year, to put it mildly.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah. To paraphrase our ex-president, high interest rates made value investing great again.Joel Bowman:Right.Vitaliy Katsenelson:So, what is value investing in general? Basically what Chris and I are doing, we are analyzing companies as if they were, even though they're publicly traded, they don't have to be. Our analysis would not be much different if they were not publicly traded. Say I'm analyzing Apple, I'm analyzing Apple as if I was buying the whole company. I say, would I want to be in this business? Do I understand it? Do I like the management? What do I think the cash flow is going to be over the next 10 years? Okay, what do I think the company is worth? And then, once I figure this out, I say, well, how much discount do I need to its fair value for that to be an attractive investment? And you just keep doing it over and over again over different companies.And what's important to understand, is the instant liquidity that the stock market provides you, it's both a feature and a bug. It's a feature because it allows you to buy and to sell something. Like if you want to sell a house, first of all, it takes you a long time to find a buyer, and transaction costs are very high. If I want to sell a stock, like an average stock, I can sell it in seconds, and the difference between the bid and ask spread is going to be a tiny, tiny, tiny number. Okay, so that's a feature.The bug is that, because you can sell it so instantaneously, your analysis changes, and a lot of times what happens, people get tricked. Let me give you this analogy. When you go to Las Vegas to gamble...Joel Bowman:When somebody else goes to Vegas. I would never.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah, let's... Yeah.Joel Bowman:You and I would never do that, Vitaliy. We're responsible adults, here.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Especially, your wife is 10 feet apart, so totally.Joel Bowman:Exactly.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Okay, when somebody else in Vegas goes, yeah, that person is not going to be thinking that he's investing or she's investing, because when you're in the main casino, you know they're gambling. And if you don't, then you have a much bigger problem.Now, because you are buying stocks and selling stocks, a lot of people get tricked that they're investing. But the thing is, what I described as value investing, when you analyze businesses, that's investing. When you buy in full stocks and you treat them basically as if you were renting them for a day and selling them, you're not investing, you're trading. Or it's both.Joel Bowman:Or speculating. Yeah.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Speculate, exactly. Gambling. Yes. I was kind of, Joel, I was on a... This is six months ago. I was on an AMC GameStop call in one of the Twitter spaces. I just wanted to understand what people are thinking. Oh, and at some point, I tried to explain to them that guys, you're all going to lose money, because this company is worth 95% less than what you're paying for it, and just went through the math. They didn't care.But there was one thing that one woman said that really stuck with me. She said... At this point, GameStop already declined maybe 20, 30%. And she said, "I bought the stock. I go to the movies all the time. I talk about the stock all the time, and it's still declining. Why is investing so difficult?" See, that person thought she was investing, but she wasn't.And so, what I do is investing because I'm treating companies as if I'm buying as businesses. And I think that's the biggest distinction. And I have a long term time horizon.Joel Bowman:I was just about to mention the time horizon too, because again, I've spoken to Chris many times about this, but the idea that if the money that you're investing in the market, you need it in five years, you need to pay for the kids' college or whatever, you may want to question whether that money should be in that particular investment. A longer time horizon, where you can insulate yourself against emotional overreactions that we all tend to have. We panic if things aren't going our way, or we get greedy at the upside, or whatever. But if you have a long enough time horizon and you do the due diligence and study the fundamentals in the beginning, even significant drawdowns or bear markets that we're seeing right now, if you've sitting on companies that you would want to own, whether they were publicly traded or not, certainly that contributes to a fitful night's rest.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Joel, let me give you this insight. If you have a shortened time horizon, volatility becomes your risk, right? In other words, you want a stock, and it declines, and you need the money at this point in time to pay for kids' education, then you have to liquidate the stock. And now the decline that could have been temporary becomes permanent, because you had to sell, because your time horizon was small.When you have a long term time horizon, volatility is really not the risk. A lot of times in opportunity, the risk is a permanent loss of capital. So when it declines, when the company, when stock declines and fundamental reason, the value of the company has declined as well, and that's a permanent loss of capital. When the company's earnings power gets demolished, or when you bought something, like let's say you bought those dotcom stocks that just crashed 70%. I bet if you bought almost any technology company, I'm generalizing, like last October, you're probably going to have a semi-permanent loss of capital. In other words, it's going to take you 10, 15 years to get your money back.Joel Bowman:Right. It takes a lot longer to build up percentages than it does to see them back down.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. But yeah, so a long time horizon becomes extremely important.Joel Bowman:Yeah. Okay. Let's sort of step back a little bit. I've got so many questions here that I want to get your take on, Vitaliy, and it's been 10 years since we caught up, so I've got a backlog. But I wanted to run something by you that we've been writing about at Bonner Private Research of late, and it ties into what we're talking about here, and this is the end, or at least a pause in the gushing of cheap and abundant credit. This may be, for the first time in multiple decades, or the first time in many young investors' or homeowners' or stock owners' lifetimes, the first time they're seeing persistent hikes like this, which we think may remain higher for longer.But there are a couple of other drivers that have led to this, in our worldview, that have led to this moment of plenty, this age of abundance that we find ourselves in, where if we want any food delivered from any style of restaurant around the world, we can call up, it'll be on our plate in minutes. We fly around the world using cheap jet fuel and travel in a way that kings wouldn't have been able to travel just going back a hundred years. And we take this all for granted.So, along with cheap and abundant credit, which is looking a little shaky, we also have cheap and abundant labor that was essentially because half a billion Chinese entered the marketplace and provided us with cheap goods. This is maybe another one of those “one time” events. And then, of course, cheap and abundant energy to power both the manufacturing and the distribution of all of those things.But we're seeing now, because of various geopolitical concerns, that each of those drivers is, in its own way, kind of breaking down. Whether it's, some would argue, weaponization of the dollar, or let's just say higher interest rates and a contraction in the credit markets there. Maybe we can go through those other ones, and just get your general take on that.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Let me go through them in the reverse order. If you look at the energy, right before the pandemic, we started to buy – unfortunately, I did not see the pandemic coming – we started to buy energy companies. Why? Because energy prices were so low, so low for so long, that we sold the supply. There was just this disbalance between supply and demand, just because low oil prices lead to decline in supply. So, even before the pandemic, you already had a shortage of supply, long term supply.Pandemic made it a lot worse. Then the war in Russia, I'm sorry, in Ukraine, makes it even worse because, number one, the Russian gas is most likely going to be out of the market for a very, very long time.Joel Bowman:Looks like.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah. Yes. And it's going to be very difficult, and it's going to take years before Russia is going to be able to get it out of Russia to other countries. It takes years to build a pipeline to China, whatever, so it's going to be a while. It's very difficult to say exactly how it's going to play out, but also most likely, the production of Russian oil will decline as well.And the problem is, number one, the Western companies left Russia. So, they didn't just provide capital, they provided the knowhow, how to get that oil out of the ground, in very difficult places. And once production declines in the cold climates, it is difficult to restart it. Again, very general statements, but I would argue that it's safe to bet that production of oil out of Russia is going to be lower. And it's the third-largest producer in the world. So, low supply before the pandemic, after pandemic at war, it's very likely the supply will be constrained.On the demand side, you could argue that recession will reduce the demand. However, historically, the demand hasn't declined. Just a tiny bit during the recession, but not a lot. Okay, so I would argue we are probably going to see that decline. Oh, and by the way, I did not even mention ESG. I promise not to make it political, and if we had a different president from a different party in the White House, and one day he said, "Oil companies have to drill," and then next day he says, "Oil companies should not drill, and if you are..."Joel Bowman:It's a disaster. And the messaging is a disaster.Vitaliy Katsenelson:But if you are Exxon or any of those companies that have been villainized for doing what people need, then do you invest billions of dollars in new field developments, if tomorrow the government comes in and says, "You know that ‘excess money' you're making in the high oil prices? Yeah, we want some of that."Joel Bowman:It's windfall tax time. It's nationalization time. Yeah.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah. My point is, it makes it very, actually, those things make things even more problematic, that we're going to see low oil prices. Okay, so that's oil.You mentioned that we had a globalization over previous 20 years basically, right?Joel Bowman:Yep.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Globalization was deflationary. Today, we are going through selective deglobalization. The reason it's selective, because it's not like we are saying, let's say, if there's a factory in Mexico, we're going to take it out. No, we're going to say, we are going to now divide our trading partners in two groups, the ones that we can trust long term and the ones we can't. Ones that have a democratic political regime and the ones that don't.And so, I think what's going to be happening is that we're going to bring a lot more manufacturing from China to countries that are more politically stable, and some of that is already coming to the United States. I mean, we are investing tens of billions of dollars in building some of the data plants in the United States, and they do it for geopolitical reasons. But that means also, most likely, semiconductors will be more expensive to manufacture here than in Taiwan.So, deglobalization, selective deglobalization is inflationary. By the way, China has its own issues. China has a significant demographic problem. In addition to everything else, they have a zero Covid policy, which has been hurting them and their reputation...Joel Bowman:And their supply chains.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Exactly. Apple now is looking at China and says, “do I really want to have my factories in China, or all my factories there? Maybe I should move some of them into the United States, some between, just some move to other places.”Joel Bowman:Or do we want to have our chip manufacturers or our chip suppliers in Taiwan if Taiwan is going to become a dragon snack, to put it bluntly? I used to live in Taiwan about 12 years ago, and they were talking about it then as “not an if, but a when” proposition. And yeah, that was 12 long years ago, so it seems more of an inevitability.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah, and I tell you this, very few people talk about this, but I would argue the restrictions we just put on China in the semiconductor sector, that is the first shot, a significant shot of a cold war with China. We basically told China that... actually told American and Western European companies, you cannot sell them advanced microchips. You cannot sell them equipment that helps them to manufacture those advanced microchips. And this is the interesting one. If you find yourself an employee in China, working for one of those factories that manufactures advanced semiconductor chips, you're going to lose your citizenship. So, our relationship with China is not getting better, it's just getting worse. Anyway, another reason why more and more companies will be taking out their production out of China.By the way, there is some positive here as well, because that means we're going to manufacture more in the United States, which actually helps our labor, but it's also going to make our labor more expensive as well, by the way. So, it's a more nuanced discussion, here.But anyway, you look at this, from that perspective, everything, what you and I discussed so far is inflationary. Now, if you look at the United States, at higher interest rates, and when I say higher, they don't need to be at this level, they can just be higher than they were a year ago, are incredibly inflationary for the United States. Why? We have a... Sorry, I forget how much debt we have. $31 trillion, right?Joel Bowman:$31 trillion. Just passed last month.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah. So, just think about 1% increase in interest rates for the federal government. That's $310 billion. If you look about, that's how much, roughly how much we spend on education. A 2% increase, that's roughly how much we spend on defense. A 3% increase, that's roughly how much we spend on social security. So again, I promise you one thing, I'm quite sure of this, none of those things will get canceled or reduced, because that's not what politicians do. This is how you lose your job as a politician. But what's going to happen, you just going to print more money reaches inflationary.So I think, if you and I talked a couple years ago, I would've sounded a lot more wishy-washy, like inflation versus deflation, and basically I would've said, I don't know, and here's the argument for both sides, and I'm going to invest as if both are going to happen. Today, I think the probabilities have shifted more towards inflation, long-term inflation, than deflation, even though in the short term, if you go into recession, a recession is deflationary.Joel Bowman:And it's not as if we're starting from anywhere near the Fed's acceptable range of when it claims to desired inflation at, around that sort of 2% sweet spot, as if it knows what the perfect number ought to be. But I mean, we're already at whatever it is, eight-plus percent. We're going to get another read this week, I think, so we'll keep our eyes on that. But we're a long way, in real terms, in real interest rate terms, we're still a long way behind the curve, as they say. So, there's a lot of catch-up still to do, and a lot of things can break in the interim before they get to that terminal rate, as they say.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Joel, I want to, just one topic, it just really bothered me. When Ben Bernanke received Nobel Prize...Joel Bowman:Ooh!Vitaliy Katsenelson:I actually have a perfect analogy to explain it. Actually, this makes so much sense actually, if you think about it. Because you have to look for the reasons why they gave it to him. They basically said they've given it to him because he understood the relationship between the financial system and interest rates, or something.Joel Bowman:I thought it was because he had the “courage to act,” Vitaliy. Wasn't that the name of his book, right?Vitaliy Katsenelson:That's right. The Courage to Act. But then I realized, here's my analogy for this: It's almost like giving a prize to a person who starts the fire, then puts it out, and then writes a book about it.Joel Bowman:Right. And my Courage to Act, Joel "the Arsonist" Bowman.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah. It's like really giving the prize to an arsonist who also put out the fire. But here's the thing, this is a very important point. What's going on today in our economy is the direct consequence of what's been happening over the last 15, 20 years, or probably longer than that. And so, yes, our economy did not go to the Stone Age in 2008, 2009, so thanks Ben Bernanke for that. But number one, you did start that fire to begin with, and then you put it out. But arguably, the fire we have today has been caused by the Federal Reserve's policy over the last many, many years, as well.Joel Bowman:Right. That's a good point to raise, too. I think a lot of people, 12 or 10 years is a long time in the memory of a 30-year-old investor or a 25-year-old investor, so we're going back into ancient history for a lot of people who are just around the traps now. But Mr. Bernanke's career was one distinguished without, I think, a single success, where he failed to call pretty much every meaningful and significant moment of his time, including the mortgage backed security crisis, which grew up underneath his nose, which brings us full tilt back to the housing market.But I realize as we're speaking just here, and we've covered a little bit of ground here, but I don't want to sound just pessimistic, that we're sort of identifying these negative things around the world. Certainly we have to be mindful of them, but I want to talk a little bit about your latest book, because in addition to investing in turbulent times and keeping abreast of the latest geopolitical fracas, such as it is, we still have to get up and put our pants on one leg at a time and enjoy our family and make the most of the day. So, tell us a little bit about why you wrote your latest, which is called Soul in the Game. I'm assuming that's somewhat influenced by Mr. Taleb's Skin in the Game. Is that?Vitaliy Katsenelson:Absolutely. Absolutely.Joel Bowman:Okay, very good.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah. And he actually endorsed, actually, this book too, so it's good.Joel Bowman:I saw that. Yeah, that was a nice feather in your cap. Congratulations.Vitaliy Katsenelson:That's right. But Joel, let me, I'm going to ask you a question, but let me, I want to end the investment part on the positive note, as well.Joel Bowman:Please.Vitaliy Katsenelson:As a value investor, I've never been more excited in my life, because it's suddenly, stock picking is back again. Being a rational investor, making rational decisions. When interest rates are very low, the bigger the story... The greater part of your imagination the story can capture, the more money you're going to make as a public company. This is why you had all these companies trading these insane valuations, right? Because there were not trading fundamentals. They were, because it didn't matter, because they can say, Listen, in 2040, we're going to make this much money. And since the interest rate's at zero, it might as well be today, because of the discounted 0% interest rate.Now today, what high interest rates did, they deflated a lot of bubbles, and they brought back common sense. So as an investor today, I'm more optimistic about investing than I've been in years. So, that's from one perspective.Now, let's go to the book. I've been writing about investing for a long time, and then at some point, I had this realization that, and I'm going to quote Freddie Mercury, who said, "There must be more to life than this."Joel Bowman:Oh, I thought you were going to say, "We will rock you." Okay.Vitaliy Katsenelson:And we will rock you. No, that's my next book. That's my next book.Joel Bowman:Okay. A geology textbook. Great.Vitaliy Katsenelson:That's right. Yeah. No, and this is when I realized that, this is when I start writing about topics that are outside of investing, so to write about parenting, Stoic philosophy, classical music, which I'm a huge fan of. And over time, that became a very big part, today maybe 40% of my writing actually focuses on other topics other than investing. And it's very dear to me.So this book, let me try to put it this way. When I help clients at IMA, I just help 300-something families. So, my impact is significant on a small number of people. When I write investment articles, I help a larger group of people, but again, it's still limited to people who just care about investing.With my articles that talk about parenting or classical music... Maybe classical music is not the case here, because it's usually a much smaller segment, but my articles about parenting have a significant audience. My articles about parenting or Stoics can help a lot more people. And this is why I wanted to write this book, because I wanted to help more people. This book is a completely altruistic endeavor. I just really want people to read the book and have a net positive impact on them. That's it.Joel Bowman:And I know my wife, Anya Leonard, again at Classical Wisdom, read the book. I have it on my list here. And she was interested in the Stoic aspect of it, of course, writing about classics herself. And so, it's not hard to understand, I think, why we are enjoying this recrudescence of Stoicism, given everything that's going on around the world. But in a kind of nutshell, how have you found the philosophy, some say the art, of practicing Stoicism in your own life, especially during moments of uncertainty such as we experience?Vitaliy Katsenelson:I feel, I tell you this, I feel somewhat conflicted about what I'm about to say, and here's why. Because I'm a contrarian at nature, and I usually don't like kind of... When I find that everybody agrees with me, that I find kind of a little bit... What's a good word for this? A little bit uneasy.Joel Bowman:Unsettled. Yeah.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Unsettled, yes. But over the last three years, I picked up three different things that became like three biggest facts. I'll give you all three. Chess, pickleball, and Stoic philosophy.Joel Bowman:Okay, I don't know what pickleball is, but I'm down with the others. I think the Queen's Gambit had a lot to do with chess.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yeah, absolutely. By the way-Joel Bowman:Philosophy's off to the races. But what is pickleball?Vitaliy Katsenelson:You don't know pickleball?Joel Bowman:I'm either terminally uncool, or just late to the game. Or both.Vitaliy Katsenelson:No, it's a huge sport in the United States now. It's, imagine if you're playing kind of, it's like a miniature version of tennis with a different ball. They play it a lot in Paris. And I go play with a buddy of mine who is about my age, and you play against people who are 70 years old and they kick our butt. So it's a very, very popular sport.Joel Bowman:Good for some humility while you're on the court.Vitaliy Katsenelson:There's a lot of humility, yes. But anyway, Stoic philosophy... what happened was, I read this quote by Epictetus, and the quote said, it talked about the dichotomy of control. And it said, "Some things are up to us. Some things aren't."Joel, this is probably the most obvious quote you're ever going to read. But then he goes to explain, what are things that are up to us? And then you find out that there are so few of them. It's basically your values and how you act. Everything else is not up to you. Nothing else is up to you. Once you realize that, that is actually incredibly liberating.So, I went back and started to read more about Stoic philosophy, and I was blown away by that. Why? Well, it started 2000 years ago in Greece. And what's interesting about this, is how little people have changed over the last 2000 years. It's a blink. It's a blink. You read Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, those are the kind of three main Stoics whose writings live through the day. You find that they're talking about things that we're talking about, debating about today.I'll give you one example, which is where Seneca has this expanse, this whole paragraph talking about how people are wasting their time, how they're constantly distracted by frivolous things, and it goes on and on and on about things like this. You would think he's talking about iPhone, Facebook, and Snapchat. Joel Bowman:This is from his piece On the Shortness of Life.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Yes, I think so. Yes. And this is when you realize that... I think if I was a marketing agent for Stoic philosophy, I would call it Stoic practice. The word philosophy, which actually means just love of wisdom, is somewhat intimidating, because we think about kind of skinny, weak white guys, old white guys with beards, who philosophized about things we don't understand, right?Joel Bowman:Sure.Vitaliy Katsenelson:But Stoic philosophy is really Stoic practice, and all it's trying to do is minimize negative emotions in your life. Just trying to bring more tranquility to your life by removing negative stuff. And so, when I realized this, I was completely smitten by that, because what happens, the way I look at it, it's basically an operating system for life.When we are born, our parents basically tell us, kind of help us to navigate through life little by little. Then our friends, then the books, then things happen to us, and we try to adjust. It's a Frankenstein kind of operating system based on now a whole bunch of random factors. Stoic philosophy is, I think, I would argue, or Stoic practice, is lot more organized. It provides a very well-structured operating system. That's what really attracted me to Stoic philosophy.Joel Bowman:Excellent. Well, Vitaliy, I think you've put enough on the table to whet people's appetite if they haven't already checked it out, both in your book, and I'll link to this again in the transcript of this podcast, but Soul in the Game is the name of the book. Vitaliy, thank you so much for spending an hour of your afternoon with me. I really appreciate it. I'm sure our listeners will appreciate it too, and we hope to have you back on again sometime soon.Vitaliy Katsenelson:Joel, thank you very much. Thank you.Thank you for reading Bonner Private Research. This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/subscribe

“Wall Street focuses on earnings or quarterly earnings per share, adjusted earnings, adjusted EBITDA. All this garbage. And it's garbage because it's all adjusted and it's all in the hands of the wizards called CFOs, chief financial officers, and their departments. It's wizardry, it's not accounting.”~ Eric Fry, editor of Fry's Investment Report and The SpeculatorTRANSCRIPT:Joel Bowman:Welcome to another episode of the Fatal Conceits podcast, a show about money, markets, mobs and manias. I'm your host, Joel Bowman, bringing you today's episode from down here in Buenos Aires in Argentina. Before we get into today's show, a quick reminder to long time listeners and newcomers alike, if you like what you hear during these conversations don't forget to head over to our Substack page, which is at bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com. There you can find hundreds of irreverent articles on everything from high finance to lowly politics and plenty more besides. You'll also see special reports, webinars with Bill's private network of analysts and writers from around the world, and of course plenty more Fatal Conceits podcasts just like this one. On that note, I'm joined by a long time friend and also a dear friend of the Bonner Private Research family today, Mr. Eric Fry. Thanks for joining us. Eric Fry:Hello Joel, welcome to be here. Joel Bowman:Yeah. Whereabouts are you by the way? I know you're in California but you kind of dash up and down the coast there. Eric Fry:I am at the moment near the Russian River. Joel Bowman:Russian River. The other Russian River. Eric Fry:Takes on new meaning. Russian River so named because it was founded in a way by Russians, Russian fur traders back in the late 1700s. Joel Bowman:Oh I didn't know that. Eric Fry:They came as far south as this area from Alaska to hunt sea otters. Joel Bowman:And this I'm imagining is what, 100 years or more before it became better known for its delicious grape varietals that now populate the hillsides? Eric Fry:Yes. Although, interestingly, in the local graveyard here there are a number of Russian orthodox graves and they date back over 100 years. So there's still a small Russian influence here. Fort Ross is close by and at the outbreak of the Ukrainian invasion, one particular Russian lawmaker demanded that we return Fort Ross to the Russians, which I thought was interesting. Fort Ross is not really a fort, it's just a little place on the pacific. Joel Bowman:Well, I guess in a pinch you need all the forts and frontlines you can get maybe. Eric Fry:The only thing that Fort Ross has now is access to abalone beds. That's about it. Joel Bowman:Oh, okay. Well, I was going to... I hope I'm not betraying any confidence here but I did want to let our dear listeners know that on a private conversation you and I had a couple of weeks ago when we were teeing this up, I don't know if you remember this but I put three questions to you. One was do you listen to podcasts, the second was do you have any interest whatsoever in the world of ever being on a podcast, and then the third was would you like pretty please to appear on the Fatal Conceits podcast. To which you promptly replied no, no, and yes. So just to underscore my gratitude. Eric Fry:Actually it was no, no and I guess so. Joel Bowman:No, no, and okay if I have to. Yeah, exactly. So Eric... Go ahead. Eric Fry:My wife is an avid podcast aficionado, so she'll listen to it. Joel Bowman:Oh okay. Well, that'll be one of the three of us who will listen to it then, so that's good. So just for readers and I guess listeners now who I think many of whom would be familiar with your work over the years, particularly the last couple of decades, do you want to just set the scene a little bit, a bit of a Fry origin story, how first of all you came to the investment world up in Wall Street, and then in particular how you got to know Bill and to come and work on The Daily Reckoning and all that? Eric Fry:We'll make this very brief because as you well know, my least favorite topic is me. So we're going to rip through this. Went to UCLA, worked in restaurants for a long time, managed the Hard Rock Café in West Hollywood for a while. Eventually self published a financial newsletter and that little seed germinated and became a much larger venture, morphed into full on financial research and institutional research. I moved to New York, produced institutional research there, and that is... So I work with an individual named Jim Grant, who I absolutely idolize, brilliant financial mind, writer. And Bill Bonner was and is a reader of Jim Grant's, and Bill discovered me as it were toiling with Grant. And so he and I began... He hired me, began collaborating on The Daily Reckoning, and have been producing some form of institutional or individual investment research ever since. Including now. Joel Bowman:Right, so I'm just thinking back to those Halcion days at the beginning of the turn of the millennium. And I think it was a few years, maybe 2003, 2004 when you came over to work with Bill. Is that about right? Eric Fry:It was 2001. Joel Bowman:2001, okay. So I wanted to get into this because it was just after Bill had released his then novel idea of this kind of trade of the decade, which of course you'll recall, and I think many of our readers will recall too. If for nothing else that it was a very contrarian play at the time, the trade, a simple pear trade of course was buy gold, sell US equities. Gold had been in an infamous... Pardon the traffic outside my office window here, this is a little South American capital ambiance sound for our listeners. But gold had been in a bear market for a couple of decades, stocks were high flying and nothing but blue sky ahead of them. Part of your role over that first decade, and you and I wrote together for a good portion of that, was both tracking that, analyzing that, and also explaining a lot of the underlying philosophy behind that to our readers, both at The Daily Reckoning and The Rude Awakening. I'm wondering if the idea of a contrarian mindset for you as an investor, I won't ask about it as an individual, but as an investor is a kind of comfortable place for you to hang out intellectually or if it's something that you have to cultivate actively and consciously? Eric Fry:No, it's quite comfortable, but I'll go back first to the trade of the decade from 2001. So it became my trade of the decade by proxy since Bill had already introduced it before I started working with him. But it was a theme that I had already been pursuing and highlighting since '98, '99, 2000 when I was producing the previous institutional research. And I had made recommendations from that era that were gold focused and then more broadly commodity focused that produced some pretty brilliant results during a fairly dead decade. I mean, it was literally a lost decade for stocks. The S&P 500 produced a total return of zero during the early 2000s, the first decade of the 2000s. Whereas gold itself went up about 400% and many, many gold and commodity related stocks produced 1000%+ returns. So those investment ideas came out of a contrarian perspective per se. I don't really like the word contrarian because it's kind of a loaded word. I mean, a contrarian is sort of like... it feels synonymous with like a curmudgeon, like hates the world and hates whatever's working. It's sort of like you're an Aussie and you're younger than I am, so you probably aren't as familiar with The Addams Family, the TV series sitcom from the '60s, but Morticia Addams used to walk around the house cutting the heads off of roses. That was how she kept the house in proper form. So a contrarian feels kind of like that to a lot of people. So I'm not that kind of contrarian. It's rather, really looking for opportunities that provide the best risk/reward setup. And a lot of times, so where you have... We call them asymmetrical trades or imbalanced trades. Situations where the upside is significant, downside probably pretty limited. So oftentimes you're going to find those kind of trades in areas where most people aren't looking, or most people don't want to look. And if you go back to the era when I joined Bill, we were... That was the very first infamous tech stock boom, and it had just busted. The dot com era of the late 2000s. But the tech stock mindset was still all the rage. Everybody wanted to buy these beaten down tech stocks but they just kept getting hammered and hammered and hammered even more, where the real trade you wanted to be in was not that, not then. You wanted to be in other sectors, not just commodities but some of the insurance plays. There were different sectors of the economy that produced some great stocks. So coming, fast forward to the present, I guess about four years ago was making a number of recommendations in renewable energy, in particular in solar. And the way I discussion these ideas now is I apologize for them. I say I'm sorry for them. [Ed. Note: Learn more about Fry's Investment Report right here]Joel Bowman:Apologize in advance and get out ahead of the trends, right? Eric Fry:Yes, I apologize in advance. I'm sorry I'm recommending this. In the case of solar, so talk about solar today is a very different idea. When I was recommending solar stocks four or five years ago, I literally introduced them by saying this has been probably one of the worst industries to ever emerge in the history of capitalism. It has done nothing but impoverish investors for decades. So there's no automatic reason why the current moment should be different, except that it was different. The economics were changing, the demand structure was changing. Demand was ramping up at an exponential rate while prices were falling. So you didn't necessarily want to buy a solar panel producer but you did want to buy a company like nPhase, which I recommended and has gone up over 1000%. So different moments call for different sort of contrarian views but it's really not contrarian as much as it is just trying to find the opportunity that is mostly ignored. Joel Bowman:Right. And I guess that kind of brings us, you mentioned these big cycles, and I want to just put something of a neologism on the menu for our listeners. It was, I think, probably about four years ago, correct me if I'm wrong here, but about four years ago when you and your publisher CEO Brian Hunt coined the term technochasm, or maybe that was a little more recently. But I remember this kind of represented, because I remember in that first decade everything as you said, it was all about quote unquote "boring opportunities" over in the ag sector and the barbarous relic of big gold and whatnot. To see you developing this theory or identifying this big sort of primary trend with Brian was very interesting because it was almost as if the cycle had come sort of full turn and you had identified at maybe a point of maximum pessimism for growth stocks, a beginning of a very rewarding time for your readers. Eric Fry:Right. The technochasm idea is 100% Brian Hunt's, he came up with the term and the structure behind the phenomenon. And it's really, simply stated it is both economic... it's socioeconomic, it's both sociological and it is economic. So the idea being that folks on the right side of technology innovation and development will prosper, those on the wrong side will not. Both from an investment standpoint and from a sociological standpoint from your own lifestyle standpoint. So that is a great big theme that persists to this day, and dictates a large number of winners and losers. So there are entire industries that are on the wrong side of technochasm and are essentially on life support. They may look fairly robust and they behave in a “robusty” way. Joel Bowman:Another neologism. Eric Fry:Yes. Unless they adapt they'll perish. On the other side are the innovators. Unlike a lot of tech stock investors, I'm an investor in technology stocks of certain types when the time is right. I'm not a tech stock investor. But a lot of tech stock investors will buy the story, they'll buy the innovative, cool idea without paying much attention to the size of the total addressable market, the competition, see the likelihood that this new technology itself is uniquely vulnerable to obsolescence. So once you dive into any powerful trend like that one, there's a lot of digging to do to get to the true diamonds, the companies that really have some, as Warren Buffett would put it, a true competitive moat, or at least a good shot at it. And are operating in industries that have a very long runway of growth and then have a very large addressable market. So it's pretty easy to find things you don't like. It's much harder to find companies that really have a shot, to find the next Amazon, the next Netflix or whatever. Joel Bowman:Right. And so I guess this goes to you mentioned a few of the things you look for, investible moats or imminent obsolescence would be a couple of the high vis indicators one way or another. Maybe are there any other processes that you go through when screening for individual companies, like I'm just interested in the process that takes you from identifying this big primary trend which may carry out for a decade or even longer, and then getting to the point where you say okay, here is a ticker symbol, here is a price that I'm comfortable with, here's when I'm going to pull the trigger at and here's my short medium term strategy. Eric Fry:Okay, well a couple questions are buried in that question. The first one is more on a podcast like this or at conferences or whatever, individual investors, all individuals want something to hang their hat on. What's a thing that you do that I can also do? It took me a very, very, very long time to get to a helpful answer but I have one. Part of it is that if you are aware of complexity, and financial markets are complex. You're not solving for just a single variable, you're solving for multiple variables. And some of those variables are sociological, just the mood of the market. It's not just raw numbers. Obviously there's an art aspect of this. But if you're aware of a lot of variables and you're aware of complexity it's hard to pull back and say okay, how do I make it less complex? What's the thing that really matters here? There are two things that really matter for any investment. One, are sales rising? That's one. Two, are insiders buying or selling? So I could not know anything about a balance sheet except... I could know zero about a balance sheet. I could know nothing about an income statement except the top line, which is revenue. The very first number you see. And knowing that, and then looking up where you have to look up the data, are insiders buying or selling, I have a pretty good idea at the extremes, something that a company that's compelling and I have a pretty good idea of a company that's not compelling. So there is no... Wall Street focuses on earnings or quarterly earnings per share, adjusted earnings, adjusted EBITDA. All this garbage. And it's garbage because it's all adjusted and it's all in the hands of the wizards called CFOs, chief financial officers, and their departments. It's wizardry, it's not accounting. So if you like wizards then watch Harry Potter, but if you want to make some money on the market, pay attention to revenue, sales. So there is no such thing, does not exist. Never in the history of the planet has a company produced long-term growth and rewards for its shareholder by shrinking its revenues. Sporadically you can have trades in anything, but the long-term success stories are success stories of revenue up, revenue up, revenue up. So that's the first one. It may seem so obvious that it's kind of moronic, but it's not because many companies, especially in firm companies, will report rising earnings sometimes while their revenues are falling because they're squeezing costs or they paid back debt or whatever. But it's the earnings that matter. Then insider buying and selling. That's a soft metric, it's not something you can really super hard rely on but you can rely on the extremes. If you have fairly heavy insider buying that means something. If you have fairly heavy insider selling that means something. In the middle, not so much. But again, if you want the best opportunities, look at what insiders are buying and when revenues are going up. Period. That means they know something big's coming out of their market, they know, they have an edge. And they're not going to be loading up on their stock if they think they don't have an edge. [Ed. Note: Learn more Eric Fry's The Speculator research service, right here]Joel Bowman:Right. We had Chris Mayer on this show, a good mutual friend of ours obviously, and he's very big on the behavior and the psychology of the insiders. Presuming of course that they have some finger to the wind with regards to their own particular market. And obviously it's kind of do what I do, not what I say with regards to what they put in their own money. Eric Fry:Again, I'm talking about just two things that any investor can look at to start the process. Obviously there are many, many nuances to this analysis, and ultimately earnings matter, profit margins matter, all those things matter. No question about it. But if I only look at those two things, I'm rarely going to go way wrong. One of the more interesting ones from the short side, I have done and still do a lot of short selling, is if you find situations where insiders are not buying. Maybe they're not selling but they're not buying and the company is borrowing money to buy back stock, that's a sell. That company is a sell. It happens all the time. It's like okay, so if the stock isn't good enough for them to buy with personal money, they're going to keep a liability on a shareholder and buy the stock on their behalf, stock they themselves won't touch. So that's fascinating. Joel Bowman:Yeah, and I guess if you were tracking particular companies and you were looking at habits or trends of buying and you saw habitual monthly, quarterly, whatever insiders loading up and then all of a sudden radio silence, that would probably be a bit of a red flag there as well. So to back up to this idea of the technochasms and just to bring listeners more fully into it, you went out to Atherton, which is maybe not many people know, routinely ranked as the richest zip code in the States. And just to get back to that sociological data point that you mentioned before, that particular zip code is located near some very not well off zip codes within a nine iron from the 20, 30 million dollar houses. Do you want to just sort of contextualize that a little bit, because while I think people kind of intuitively understand like oh okay, yes, if you're Elon Musk and you have a few billion lying around for Twitter or to invest in Tesla or start these things up, that's one thing, but it's a bigger wedge societally as well that I think people, even non-investors would do well to be aware of. Eric Fry:Yeah, so not far from Atherton is a town called East Palo Alto, and it's very poor. There are a lot of... It isn't a classic... East Palo Alto is... Well, parts of it... There are homeless encampments everywhere, and there are homeless encampments in Palo Alto, but it is not... that's not what it's about essentially, it's just a poor place. Especially alongside places like Atherton. So in one of the elementary schools in Southeast Palo Alto, more than half the kids are homeless. They actually go home to a trailer or a tent or whatever. Not only is it right next door to Atherton, but while we were there filming and talking to people, you can look a mile away is Facebook headquarters. It's right there. And in fact, to their credit the Zuckerbergs are building an elementary school in East Palo Alto. So there's that. But it's just this incredible juxtaposition of really extreme wealth. The wealthiest zip code in the United States, next to one of the poorest zip codes in the United States. The wealth that's in Atherton and obviously up and down Silicon Valley is technology wealth, it's tech wealth, they're on the right side of the technochasm. And the people on the other side, that's folks who isn't necessarily made any wrong decisions, it's just that's where they are. They clean houses or they work in some service industry of some type. Maybe they're running a successful gardening operation, business, but it's not a business that can grow exponentially through the benefit of technology. So the message is not like hey, don't be poor, be rich. The message was to the extent that you have an opportunity, be aware that technology can grow your wealth exponentially and the opposite can't. Joel Bowman:Yeah, and it does seem obviously and probably at no other time in history quite like the last 5, maybe 10 years, that that divide is increasing exponentially as the effects of being on the right side of technochasm extrapolate. Eric Fry:Yeah, the chasm is widening at an exponential rate. That word exponential is overused but it's mathematically accurate in this case. Joel Bowman:In this case, yeah. So I guess one of the questions that a lot of people are thinking about after Q1, and this kind of goes back to mapping on shorter performances for not just individual stocks but certain sectors of the market are grouped together, call them growth stocks. I know that growth and value stocks maybe sort of overused and particular equities maybe flip between one and another. But when we're looking at this big macro trend that you've identified, I guess a lot of people, they look at Q1 and they say goodness, I don't know what the NASDAQ's down year to date at the moment, something like 10%. It was obviously during March, during the March lows, more than double that down. And then of course you've got individual stocks, Netflix and Facebook that were completely routed on individual days even. I read in a recent article, a quote that I thought was very interesting from you, and this has just got to do with the various headwinds that are in the face of continued growth stocks, continued growth at the moment, and I'll just read this out to you and get your reaction, it's, "The truth is that the amount of innovation and wealth creation that's about to take place cannot be stopped," you write, "not by rising government debt, politics, border walls, inflation or rising interest rates." There's some pretty strong headwinds, but you expect, I guess, this chasm to keep widening and this trend to keep playing out. Is this a temporary pullback in your view, then? Eric Fry:Well, that comment applies only to the capitalistic phenomenon of innovation and wealth creation. It does not apply to stock price trajectory. It does not apply to where the stock market is heading. So if you are more, I guess, a student of history than I am, and as you well know there is often a wide disconnect between the pace of innovation and the success, the mantra of success, that those innovations deliver to their investors. So coming into this year we had a stock market at all time highs, based upon every single applicable valuation metric that anyone has ever used to measure stock market values. It was the highest valuation of all time, based on anything you want to talk about. So you don't hit the most extreme value ever, have it come off 20% and go, "Gee, how come these great innovations aren't producing big stock price gains for us?" It's because it already happened. You already got it. So let the pony take a breather. Feed it some hay. Just hang out and watch it for a bit. Joel Bowman:Right. Eric Fry:Stocks don't go straight up. And we saw the overall market fall 20 but we saw many individual names fall 50%, 60%, 70%. So that's a good start in terms of cleansing the air and creating a foundation for a new phase of growth in the stock market, as a broad comment. But even then, some of the stocks, it's so remarkable, even after surrendering 80% of their value, they're still trading at whatever. 100 times sales? Something that was unimaginable. Some of these numbers were unimaginable. Let alone they were at 1000 times sales, whatever they were at. So investors need to keep in mind that yeah, you don't get paid every single day. You're trying to find the best mega trend opportunities. Things that have powerful trends, big restful market, long live, and you're trying to buy stocks in those trends as well as you can. It's always going to be imperfect. And if you do that you're going to make a lot of money but maybe not tomorrow and maybe not next week. Joel Bowman:It reminds me again of... to bring up a mutual friend, Chris Mayer again, one of his more... I think his most recent book, 100 Baggers: Stocks That Have Returned 100-1 Gains and How To Find Them. He goes through the last 50 years of these mega successful stocks that have just made pot loads for investors, and it's, as you said, not a straight line. Many of these, including household names like Amazon, like Apple, have been cut in half or worse multiple times along the journey. So yeah, give the pony some hay and check in again next quarter. Eric Fry:I used to do, every once and a while in speeches, I had this little gag, I'd say, "Okay, so who wants to be a billionaire? Here's how you do it, here's how you become a billionaire. You find a stock that falls 20% every four years." It's some number, I can't remember exactly, but it's roughly like this. Falls 35% every six years and every 14 years produces a gain of zero. I mean, it goes 14 years fans or produces a gain of zero. So who wants to do that? And of course it sounds miserable. But the stock is Berkshire Hathaway. Joel Bowman:Yeah. Eric Fry:Berkshire Hathaway, I can't remember, 12, 13, 14 years producing a zero return. It had multiple 20, 30, 40% setbacks during its history.Joel Bowman:Yeah I feel like those guys did all right out of this whole sort of investing game. And that's interesting, it brings us to where I kind of wanted to get to talking about old school investing and old school tried and tested ideas. It does seem you've been writing a little bit more recently about another idea that dovetails with something that we're working on over at Bonner Private Research, and that is our trade of the decade, generally long old school energy, short the US dollar. And with all of the geopolitical backdrop, the inflationary backdrop, the fed being in the headline every other week, this is something that you've written quite a bit about lately and this strikes me as it's a little bit of a return to a cycle that has been unloved during the big run-up of EVs and whatnot and now people are cycling back to very unsexy, old oil. What was the catalyst that drove you back into the arms of the hydrocarbon sector? Eric Fry:I don't know if Bill stole my idea or if we both came up with it at the same time. I started writing about buying oil stocks in November, and to my point earlier in this podcast I had the lead sentence or paragraph for that first recommendation was I realize most folks don't want to buy an oil stock, I get it. I don't even want to recommend an oil stock. But I have to. Joel Bowman:Imagine how I feel... Eric Fry:So I recommended oil stocks. Those trades obviously have done really, really well. And I'm still in the process of recommending additional ones. To the point is it the trade of a decade, I don't know. What I know about... there's two or three things about the oil market that are fascinating and immovable. One is that it takes a very long time to bring new production online. Anywhere from if you've already got an existing shell operation, it attaches somewhere and you're just drilling a new platform, okay you can get that thing running in less than a year. But talking about discovery to production is 10 years best case, and it can be much longer. So it is the ultimate inelastic market. You can't just produce new oil if demand is there. So for a decade now, global oil companies have been under investing in new production. There's a company called Rystad that tracks it and I think the peak investment was $800 billion in exploration and production, or exploration investment globally in 2014. That number fell to 300 billion. 800 to 300. Anecdotally we know that's true from comments on dozens of conference calls from oil stock CEOs and CFOs. They are afraid to invest large sums in new production. So that's a multiyear trend that it's coming home to roost now. Our current global supply is constricted due to underinvestment for many, many years now. At the same time, the EV story, while absolutely authentic and powerful and real is widely misunderstood. Yes, EVs will take a larger share every single year from internal combustion vehicles. And yes, solar, wind, et cetera, coupled with energy storage will take a larger share of the power generation market. But, and it's a gigantic but, those activities are oil intensive. Joel Bowman:Yeah. I've got a quote from you here in another column that you had. You write renewable energy is not oil free energy. I just kind of underlined there. And I think that's a dynamic that a lot of people miss when they're talking about solar, wind, EV, they fail to incorporate all of the very highly oil intensive processes that are involved in either manufacturing the blades for the solar panels or the mining process or the distribution process or the storage. These are high energy intensive processes, and we're not powering them by sunshine and wind at present. So we have to go through that to get there. Eric Fry:There are very few exceptions to that. The other, and probably an even more important point, this is two points. The second one is that while the EVs share of the global auto market is going to be growing year by year by year, the pie itself is growing. So the number of vehicles of any kind is going to be growing year after year after year. So that means that in absolute terms, the number of internal combustion vehicles on the road won't peak until at least 10 years from now. Obviously those are estimates, but the estimates run anywhere from 10 years out to 20 years out. It could be 2040 before internal combustion vehicle crude oil consumption peaks. No matter what EVs do. So you don't get there overnight.I mean, I think even under the most radical, aggressive assumptions about EV adoption, you're still looking at peak oil six, seven years out. I don't even think that's plausible, but okay, it's an estimate. But even if that's true, that suggests automobiles. Joel Bowman:Well, that certainly bodes well for our trade of the decade, which is doing quite well early on but-Eric Fry:That's a trade of the decade because to some great extent the supply is not entirely baked in the cake. I mean, US oil companies will try to ramp up production, everyone will try. But it's pretty much baked in the cake. In very, very round numbers the US is not capable of ramping more than a million or two barrels a day over the near term. But we're talking about a demand that would exceed that. Not in the US but globally, globally demand is probably already exceeding supply by a million or two million barrels a day, and no one else is growing production. Unless there's some addition coming out of OPEC, but I don't know where it's going to come from and we still aren't back to pre-COVID levels of demand from aviation, from trucking. In Asia, a lot of the Asian economies are still well below pre-COVID levels of crude oil consumption. So if you just return to that and then add in incremental growth, demand could be anywhere from three to six million barrels a day above supply. And that's off of a 100 million barrel a day base, so that's about what the world consumes. It could easily go to 105, 106 with supply sitting there at 101. Obviously that situation can't persist forever because you can't buy barrels that you don't have, so prices go up. Joel Bowman:Interesting that you mention 2014 as the high water mark for global investment in exploration. Obviously just happens to be... I'm sure listeners are recognizing the coincidence that that just happens to be the last peak in price of oil. It was 80 bucks, or whatever it was in 2014. So just attract sentiment and then you have whatever we've had, six, eight years of under-investment and under-capitalization in that industry, which is part of that whole thesis. What do you make of-Eric Fry:I thought it was because that's when Bitcoin launched. I figured they stopped investing in oil and gas and just bought Bitcoin then. Joel Bowman:Yeah, well Bitcoin is a highly oil intensive mining operation that needs to be supported. So I'm wondering just obviously the kind of other piece of this puzzle, which is a geopolitical piece but where we have and you've written also extensively about oil companies pulling out of Russia. At present it's not so much a big deal I think as your friend Brian Hunt said a few people in Moscow can't watch Squid Games and Netflix makes their exit, but it is a big deal when the western mages are beating a hasty exit and leaving not just decades' worth of capital intensive work and infrastructure and labor and intellectual property and whatnot behind, but also billions, tens, hundreds of billions, who knows, of oil that they won't be drilling anytime in the near future and oil that may very well not but available, at least not without significant strings attached to either the United States or various countries across the European continent who are heavily reliant on gas or oil to keep the lights on and to have their homes heated. So how much do you think that plays into... I mean, obviously a lot's been made of the quote unquote "Putin price hike" and blaming all of the inflationary pressures in the US on big bad Vlad across the way, but how much of it actually do you think does play in and how much of it, as you mentioned before, do you think was already baked in the cake, both as far as under-investment-Eric Fry:It's funny, we hadn't even mentioned Russia in the context of the oil trade of the decade.Joel Bowman:Oh yeah, that. Eric Fry:That's because when both Bill and I, apparently, conceived this idea, Russia wasn't yet the pariah it has become. So Russia definitely matters, it matters a lot to the equation. I think we, as I wrote, I think the oil market was already poised for a move to $100 a barrel and I was writing it when it was 60 a barrel. It was already poised for that move without anything happening in Ukraine or Russia. So now, maybe floor is higher, but the issue is twofold. One is that yeah, Russian oil will still come to market. Somebody will buy it at some discounted price. But those supply chains need to shift. And we've learned a little bit about what that looks like, how messy it could be and how much time it takes for supply chains to shift. So I don't know if China and India, for example, can sop up all the Russian oil that they... in lieu of buying it from somewhere else. But when you're talking about western benchmark prices, meaning Brent Crude in London and West Texas Intermediate here, WTI crude, those oil prices I'm talking about. And those prices are going to go higher because of a supply chain shift and also because of scarcity. So there's something called a Urals blend. That's Russian oil. And it used to be, meaning early this year, a spread between Urals oil and Brent oil was about a buck a barrel, like nothing. And now that spread is -25 to -30 dollars a barrel. That's how much cheaper Russian oil than world oil. So that tells you right there what's happening on the ground. There is a buyer's strike. So that's the first problem. The second problem is more serious. When western technology departs, a lot of industries struggle. So when Venezuela said, "We don't need you anymore," Venezuela's production plummeted. It didn't have the new technology, didn't have the parts, didn't have this, didn't have that. And Russia is also very reliant on western technology and western supplies to maintain both the production and the health of their fields. Joel Bowman:Human capital experts on the ground, all those companies that have since high tailed it out of there are leaving long shadows. Eric Fry:Right. And Russian production was already in decline. I mean, they were operating on aging fields in a lot of places so without the means to invest in sustaining and rejuvenating production, I think could fall fairly precipitously. Joel Bowman:And this kind of gets to this idea, I mean from another angle but this bifurcation of the global economy, whether we're talking about obviously energy is largely a catalyzing agent here, but even when we talk about financial sanctions and so forth, where it almost feels like, and I've seen a few other commentators, I'm not the first to make this point, but it does seem like there is this kind of resurgence of Cold War geopolitical bifurcation where you've referred to it, something of a similar trend, I think, as this trend toward deglobalization, where we have economies that were once open for business, open to lowering trades, lowering tariffs rather, and being more internationally cooperative, now sort of retreat back to their corner and deglobalize, essentially. What do you make of the potential ways that individuals, let's say in the United States and the west, are going to see that manifest itself in maybe just their everyday lives? And then we could talk about the markets maybe after that. Eric Fry:Yeah. Well, so I'll say this first in case Bill tries to steal this idea also. I've been writing about bubbles for almost two years. The new made in America brand and I also gave a little acronym, MNIC, it was Made in America or Not Made in China. And I have been suggesting this would become a powerful investment mega trend. I believe that as adamantly today as I did a year and a half ago. And we're seeing develop and mature and fan out across every industry. And now, with this Russian invasion and this instantaneous boycott of an entire superpower, that that just reinforces the idea of trade will deglobalize. There's going to be a messy divorce coming. For you old-timers in the crowd it will be as bad as Richard Burton and Liz Taylor. Joel Bowman:Oh, don't say it. Eric Fry:For the younger people in the crowd, let me see, give me somebody... Who had a messy divorce recently? Joel Bowman:Yeah, I'm going to be of zero help to you there. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, that's as far back as I can go. Eric Fry:Kanye and Kim or something.Joel Bowman:Kanye and Kim, oh my god. Wait, are you breaking news to me right now, have they split? Eric Fry:Are they still married? Joel Bowman:Oh I have no idea. Eric Fry:Kim is with Pete Davidson, you know from Saturday Night Live. I can't keep up with these youngsters, Joel, you know that. Joel Bowman:Maybe they had a Will and Jada type arrangement where it was no exclusive or something. Maybe that's a cancelable statement, we're going to get booted off the air or slapped in the face online. Eric Fry:Anyway, so the de-globalization is something that will affect all industries. I'll give you one perfect example. So Intel, the giant American chip company, has announced a few months ago it was going to begin with an initial investment of $40 billion to build new fabs, new semiconductor foundries in Arizona, here in the US, and in Europe. And investors have been very, very nonplussed by this idea. They did all this major investment, becoming a manufacturer and blah blah blah, and why don't you just do it the way Nvidia does it? Why don't you just design the chips and outsource to Taiwan Semiconductor? It's like, huh. Taiwan Semiconductor. What is it about that name, I wonder? Joel Bowman:As a former resident of Taiwan I can...Eric Fry:Yeah. So even if, and I do assume that Taiwan will remain independent for quite some time, but even if it does, what Ukraine has showed us is that you can never be too sure. So it takes a long time to design chips into new technology. How enthusiastic are various technology companies going to be about oh yeah, we're using this chip from Nvidia that's manufactured in Taiwan. That should be fine, right? Maybe. Maybe not. So not so shockingly, about two weeks ago Nvidia said, "Huh, you know what, maybe we're going to contract with Intel to build some of our chips." For the first time ever. Build them here, or build them in the US or build them in Europe. So it isn't that the supply chain itself will automatically rupture, it's just now everyone knows about the threat. Everyone knows the risk. You can't say fool me twice. I think the pressure will be overwhelming on CEOs, nervous CEOs to de-globalize. Because if they don't, and the supply chain breaks down, even in an innocent way. If just a tsunami or something, it disrupts production somewhere. All right, well you should have known Mr. CEO that you can't build a business this way anymore, it's not how it works. So I think the pressure is pretty overwhelming to bring it home or as you said not made in China. I think it's going to be coming back to South America, North America, Europe, primarily. Joel Bowman:Yeah. It does kind of-Eric Fry:That's an opportunity. A very big one with legs. Joel Bowman:Yeah. It does kind of seem like the conversation before and after everybody knew that there was a gun at the wedding, let's say. It's the kind of thing you can't... Wanted to mention really quickly, and I'll put these links in the show notes for people who want to follow on with your work and they can go over to our Substack page again at bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com, and have a look for Fry's Investment Report, and The Speculator. And again, we'll have links to both of those in there where Eric fleshes out all of the trends, theories, macro analysis, et cetera that we've spoken about here and then in speculator drills into it a lot more with some more technical trading for those of you who are more advanced investors. But there's plenty of info over there. And Eric, I'm hoping that we get to catch up sometime in the near future now that we're returning to something like normalcy. Maybe we can hang out in the Russian River sometime soon. Eric Fry:Sounds good, sounds good. Joel Bowman:Okay, thanks Eric, great to talk to you mate. Cheers. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/subscribe

Nathan Lewis has written four books on economic topics, and has been featured in television documentaries in the U.S., South Korea, China, Russia, and Britain. He has spoken at events hosted by the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, the American Principles Project, and others. He has testified in Congress on economic issues. His writing has appeared in many media outlets, including Forbes, the Financial Times, Huffington Post, Nikkei Business, Daily Reckoning, Worth, and other publications. Today, he serves as a Fellow of the Wealth and Poverty program at the Discovery Institute. He has fifteen years of experience in the asset-management industry. He formerly served as a macro analyst for institutional investors, and later helped manage money for hedge funds. Today, he is the editor of the Polaris Letter, an investment newsletter for individuals.

“Much of the world's oil doesn't go to people just driving their cars to the mall. I mean, a big part of it goes to the trucks that pull everything around, to the ships that sail everything around, to the airplanes that fly everything around, to the plastics and to the precursor materials that go into everything that you wear. I mean, the buttons on your shirt, the soles on your shoes. It's… everything.” ~ Byron W. KingTRANSCRIPT:Joel Bowman:Before we get started, Byron, I was just looking at the time zone differences here. I know you're in Pittsburgh. I didn't realize that Pennsylvania was a commonwealth or designated as a Commonwealth. I thought that was a yolk only we once and former colonists labored under. I didn't know that it extended to Pennsylvanians, too.Byron King:It's one of those things that goes back to colonial days, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Commonwealth of Virginia, and the Commonwealth of Kentucky. Then there are 46 states and four commonwealths. Although Puerto Rico is considered a commonwealth as well. It has colonial roots. I used to know the answer to that or I used to have an explanation for it, but I actually don't recall why that is. Ben Franklin-ish kind of things or something.Joel Bowman:One of those historical anachronisms. Byron, you and I have known each other for a little while now, longer than I've care to mention. I don't want to date our young dapper looking selves, but you are a man who wears many hats. A historian, an energy investor, a international geopolitical commentator, Well, for listeners who perhaps recognize your name and probably they've seen you around the traps for the last couple of decades, I'd say, writing alongside Bill and some other well-known cast of characters throughout the newsletter publishing world, do you want to just fill us in a little bit by way of a bio to get started? And maybe talk us through up and until how you got to meet Bill and came to working with and writing alongside him?Byron King:Thanks very much, Joel. It's really a pleasure to speak with you and certainly to be on your podcast. I have been part of the Agora Familia since, I believe, around 2002 in one way or another. I've been on the payroll. I was on the payroll at Agora from about 2007, and so the next 15 years. I met Bill Bonner as a subscriber. I was just a reader of The Daily Reckoning. One day I was reading my Reckonings and he made some comment. This is about 2002 or so, he made a comment about the war in Afghanistan. I was just a reader. I was Joe reader out there, and I was a free reader. In fact, I wasn't even ... I thought, "I have a bunch of friends just got back from Afghanistan and I know a few things about what's going on over this." So I send him a little email, "Dear Bill Bonner, we've never met. You don't know me. But I have a bunch of friends just got back from Afghanistan. Here's what's really going on." Next thing you know, we had this discussion going on. Next thing I know, he's printing my emails to him in The Daily Reckoning and I was his friend. Then eventually I became his friend in Pittsburgh. I was a dear friend. Like, "Oh my goodness. This is starting to warm up."Joel Bowman:You're moving up the ladder here.Byron King:Next thing you know we started having this very nice correspondence. Then one day I went to one of the Agora conferences, The Vancouver Investment Conference. And I talked to Addison Wiggin, an old name from the past. Very still around, doing well. And I said, "Addison, hi, I'm Byron King. I'm your unpaid correspondent in Pittsburgh." And he says ...Joel Bowman:That's right. Unpaid correspondent. I remember that.Byron King:He said, "Would you be interested in starting in writing for us and we'll pay you?" I'm like, "Yeah, sure." "Just freelance." "Yeah. Okay." So I started writing Whiskey and Gunpowder with Dan Denning, who we know, Jim Amrhein, he's still around as well, and myself. I said, "What do you want me to write about?" He said, "Well, you seem to know a lot about energy and military stuff. So my first article I ever wrote for Whiskey and Gunpowder was the Ghost of Colonel Drake. Colonel Drake being 1859, drove the well in Titusville. Kind of the birthplace, the DNA of the modern oil industry. Although people in Canada say they drove an earlier well and people in West Virginia say they drove an earlier well. But Colonel Drake gets the credit. We started Whiskey and Gunpowder. I would write about energy and the oil industry. We were writing about military things, US strategy. I mean, the war in Iraq. I remember this one article I wrote about the Sicilian invasion of ancient Greece when the Athenians invaded Sicily. And somebody says, "Why are you writing about the Athenian sailing across the Mediterranean to invade Sicily?" And I said, "I'm really not writing about the Athenians sailing across the Mediterranean to invade Sicily. I'm writing about the war in Iraq, I'm writing about the war in Afghanistan."Joel Bowman:This is actually a Trojan horse for me to get my point across, to go back to the Greeks. Byron King:I would write about Herodotus and I would write about ... But it was fun. We picked up a lot of names, and Whiskey and Gunpowder was a highly successful newsletter. Then one day in 2007, the phone rings, I picked it up, and it's someone from Agora. And they said, "Hey, Byron. The guy that edits our energy and mining pub, outstanding investment, just quit. You want the job?" I'm like, "Is it a real job?" "Yeah." "You pay me?" "Yeah." "You guys have healthcare coverage?" "Yeah. Don't give that job away."Joel Bowman:Sounds like a real job.Byron King:Literally, I hung up. This was in the morning, about 8:00 in the morning. I got in the car, I drove to Baltimore, which is about four and a half, five hours depending on traffic. I had lunch. I came home and I told my wife, I said, "Hey, I got a new job." She says, "What kind of job?" I said, "You know that Agora Group down in Baltimore?" "Yeah." I said, "They offered me a job." She's like, "Do they pay you?" And I said, "Yeah." She said, "Healthcare coverage?" "Yeah." And she said, "Great. Because you hate your other jobs so do this job."Joel Bowman:I liked that she had the same filters as you. That you get paid, there is healthcare...Byron King:I get paid, there's healthcare coverage, and we'll do some fun things. Anyhow, that was 15 years ago and I'm still around, part of the Agora family. I think first time I met you was we actually went to Titusville together.Joel Bowman:I was going to mention that.Byron King:I think it was 2005.Joel Bowman:I think it was probably back in 2005 because I'd read that piece that you wrote in Whiskey. I just mentioned it to you somewhat offhandedly maybe on the sidelines of an editorial meeting or something where we fleshed out these ideas. Within a week, you had sent an invitation saying, "Hey, if you're keen on having a look at this, why don't you come on up and we'll do an old school dynamite frack? I've got some buddies in the industry who can show us around." That was a real hoop. A blast, I got to say.Byron King:And that's what we do. You were up there and one or two others. I had my two children with me. And we went up to Titusville. It was a beautiful, gorgeous fall afternoon. The trees were beautiful and gorgeous, leaves of Western Pennsylvania. We go out to this a working oil well. I knew these fellas. They were doing an old time ... Well, it was an early frack, but it was an old time exploding the well. Literally, they would drop a charge down there. they called it a torpedo. And they would drop it down to the oil bearing zone. And then they covered it with water to keep all from blowing up out of the hole. And boom, they exploded and they fractured the well.They started doing that in the 1860s. There was some colonel or some general from the Union army, got wounded in battle in the Civil War. He couldn't be in the army anymore so he came back. But he knew a lot about explosives so he went to work in the oil fields. And so they came up with it. So fracking, in a sense, has been around for a long time. Although, today with hydraulic fracking, it's quite different than exploding things. For all the listeners, readers, viewers out there, it's an old story, it was a fascinating, old story. And that's how we started, that's how we really got up close and personal to the oil fields.Joel Bowman:For sure. It's very interesting because that dovetails very nicely into the something that I want to get into with you here. And that is an email that you sent around, like the old days, send on a letter and it spawns all these different branches here. Down here in South America, we say, [foreign language 00:11:54], to go for the branches. But anyway, the email that you sent earlier in the week, and I've got the article here was linking to a column that cited a well-known Goldman commodities analyst, Jeff Curry, who's been around the traps for, goodness, I think 30 odd years, maybe more, very well-known. And he said he's been examining the commodities markets, of which you're very familiar, and said he hasn't seen anything like it in his entire career.And I want to get this quote right here because it's a pretty powerful one. He says, here it is, "I've been doing this for 30 years. Never seen markets like this." Here's the key takeaway, "This is a molecule crisis." He said, "We're running out of everything. I don't care if it's oil, gas, coal, copper, aluminum, you name it, we're out of it." And I guess we're starting to see that reflecting itself in prices across the board with oil at its highest mark since 2014, I think. A basket of commodities covered by Bloomberg, a couple of dozen of them from ags to metals, to energy all across the spectrum were really, really ramping up here. So I guess, first, is that similar to your reading, with your experience in the commodities markets? These big shortages that are driving prices? What do you see when you look out across the horizon?Byron King:Well, I mean, I'm old enough to have been around for a few things. There are cycles and then there are really humongous cycles. So we're in a humongous cycle. Not to say that it won't be resolved, but I mean, as people say, the cure to high prices is high prices, the cure to low prices is low prices. But there's more to it than that really, because we're changing the whole investment paradigm industry in what is passed for the industrial revolution for the last 200 years. I mean, when Colonel Drake drilled his well, getting back to the 1859 and Colonel Drake, I mean, people lit their houses with whale oil. I mean, petroleum was this exotic stuff that they skimmed off of creeks and they sold it as a patent medicine. There was no petroleum. So to the modern mind or the modern ... A lot of people think, "There's no petroleum. I guess there were no gasoline engines. I couldn't drive to the mall." That's right. You didn't have any internal combustion engines and you couldn't drive to the mall, but there was no mall. And when you got to the mall that wasn't there, there was no stores selling clothing made out of plastics. And you didn't have natural gas to heat your house and you didn't have electricity for your light bulb, to illuminate.The industrial age has been a coal age but a petroleum age as well. Because you can't have electric wire without copper, but you can't have it without something to wrap around a copper, which is plastic. Much of the world's oil doesn't go to people just driving their cars to the mall. I mean, a big part of it goes to the trucks that pull everything around, to the ships that sail everything around, to the airplanes that fly everything around, to the plastics and to the precursor materials that go into everything that you wear. I mean, the buttons on your shirt, the soles on your shoes.Joel Bowman:Every molecule.Byron King:It's everything. The medicines, you think you're taking an antibiotic and you can label it as that. But if you really go back to where it all started, that antibiotic began in an oil well somewhere because the materials in which they ... The medium in which they grew the bugs that they wound up pressing in to it, the little plastic bottle that it came in. I mean, if you didn't have that, we would live in a very different world. Actually, we wouldn't be here. Somebody else would be here. We would've gone off, would be some alternative universe. Joel Bowman:Is there a shortage of molecules? Byron King:Yeah, of course. Of everything we can get into.Joel Bowman:For sure. I guess, right out the gate, an obvious question presents itself and that is what do you, as someone who is a trained geologist at one of those fringe institutions, I think, it was Harvard university. One of those ...Byron King:Wild and crazy place.Joel Bowman:So what do you say to people who essentially advocate for a world in which all of those processes, those very, very careful processes that you just outlined in which we take these raw materials, these petroleum-based materials, and turn them into finished goods, and all of the energy inputs that are needed along that value chain, what do you say to people who want to go back to an era pre that? To a so-called carbon neutral era? I mean, it seems like we're asking for trouble there.Byron King:They're not just asking for it, they're calling in the artillery on their own position. I mean, it's completely totally destructive. I mean, if you want to say we need to be better about using our energy, you want to be more efficient about energy, you want you want to change life. Well, yeah, except when it comes to changing lifestyles, I mean, how do you plan to do that? Are you going to lock the world down for two years and hold everybody at the point of a gun, and if they drive their trucks in front of your parliament building and honk their horns, you're going to arrest them all or something? I mean, how do you plan to really get this done other than to make life miserable for everybody? To borrow from Ernest Hemingway, "Slowly and then all at once."I mean, that's a very, very, very long talk, you know what I mean? Before we come here, I showed you a ... This is a piece of copper. This is elemental copper, literally chopped out of the ground with a rock hammer. This is a rock hammer, which helps to prove that I'm a geologist. Literally chopped out the ground in the Keweenaw Peninsula, the upper peninsula of Michigan there. I mean, this is copper. America's first mining boom was in about the 1840s in upper Michigan, upper peninsula, where people went up there and literally chopped this stuff up. This is the copper that that era of America used for its tea kettles and to line its ships and to make its wagon wheels and make copper nails to hold the shingles down on people's slate roofs and stuff like that.We don't have this anymore. Well, I mean, you can find it as an exotic specimen every now and then. I mean, this is 99% copper. Today, copper mining, people are mining fractions of a percent of grade of copper. How do you mine fractions of a grade of copper? Well, you go to a mountain somewhere in the Andes, big mountain in the Andes, and you put all sorts of explosives in the ground and you blow it up and you haul this rock out in the great big, huge trucks, and you crush it, and you process it, and you go through all sorts of chemistry. And eventually at the end, you wind up with copper, which you make your electric wire or what-have-you. At every step of the way, the explosive, the trucks, the facility where they crush it, the facility where they process it, the facility where they turn it into copper, all the trucking along the way, the ships that haul it across the ocean or whatever, if you don't have some stored energy in the form of hydrocarbon or various materials that come from hydrocarbon for your chemicals, that's not going to happen. So people will say, "Well, we're just going to go to electric cars." Your electric car uses about four times, maybe five times as much copper as your normal conventional internal combustion car. I mean, you're talking about increasing ... Just in the auto sector, you're increasing the use of copper by four X and five X. So when the man says there's not enough copper, that's partly what it means.Joel Bowman:And that's just one, of course, that's just one metal. This is just one element we're talking about.Byron King:One element on the periodic table. That's just one. I mean, we could go to other things. If you want to do exotic stuff. This is a specimen here, this is a titanium ore. This is rutile. Titanium dioxide. This is a beautiful specimen. I mean, no way I'm going to throw this one in the crusher. These crystals are as big as my thumb. I mean, if you want this thing, maybe I'll take 2,000 bucks for it as a mineral specimen. But it's not for sale.Joel Bowman:Where does this come from?Byron King:Well, this came from Graves Mountain in Georgia. Again, chopped out with my hammer. It's a unique geologic locale, but we don't have any of these anymore. When I say we, pretty much anywhere in the world, you don't find this stuff anymore. Maybe one or two here and there. You can go to Graves Mountain on a Saturday afternoon dig and maybe dig out a few of these things. But most of the world's titanium comes from very, very disseminated mineralization. What do you use titanium for? Well, it's everything in the white paint, all the way to a landing gear on airplanes. So where does most of the world's titanium come? It comes from Russia. I mean, let's all get mad at Russia. Let's all blame Russia for everything so that they can shut off titanium. They'll shut down Boeing in about three days if we don't have any titanium to build the jets with. Now we've covered two elements on the table. There's 90 others. Joel Bowman:So we've got a couple of ... I mean, you've touched on a few points here, but a couple of key takeaways thus far, I think is A, we're not just raking this stuff up off the front lawn anymore. These are hugely energy intensive processes in order to be able to get this stuff from whatever highly pressurized cavern. It is a subterranean, extreme environment up to whether it's painting your walls or driving your car, what-have-you. But the second component and from the Andes and to Russia, you've now mentioned, is not all of these elements, these raw materials are in geopolitically friendly jurisdictions. Which adds a huge price premium or at least a certain amount of market volatility that might be this kind of at the whims of just hoping things go the way that you want them to go. But that's not always the case.There's two angles to that geopolitically unfriendly jurisdictions. There are the geopolitically unfriendly jurisdictions where their government has contrary interest to our government, there's that kind of thing. But then there are the geopolitically unfriendly jurisdiction like Minnesota, where a very significant mine for copper, nickel, cobalt, there's several different proposals in Minnesota have all been shot down. They've all been killed off by the environmental lobby. Another geopolitical jurisdiction, California. You got to try opening new mines in California. Nevada, you can mine Montana, Idaho as if the ... The US and to some extent, Canada. Even Canada has become an unfriendly place to try to do any major projects because ... Byron King:It's not just that the permitting is so hard, it's the level of opposition. You get sort of I call it permanent capital. You know how BlackRock goes out and buys up entire neighborhoods, buys all the houses and nobody can ... You have to rent now. You can never own a house because BlackRock owns them all. Well, you get that same east and west coast permanent capital. And it funds these environmental lobbies and they come in, and their job is to stop projects. It doesn't matter the merits of the ore deposit, it doesn't matter the merits of the geology, it doesn't matter how many water quality analyses you do, how many air quality analyses you do, it doesn't matter how carefully you're going to run your mind or whatever. And if you've ever been around a modern mine, you'll see the absolute lengths to which the modern big guys go to to be safe and be careful and not be environmental stewards. There's those sort of geopolitical issues. And you know what? It's not even just a mining thing. I mean, a lot of people say, "We need more titanium. We need more copper here." It's a mining thing. It's sort of a mining thing. Your deposit is where it is. If it's not there, you can't mine it. If it is there, you still might not be able to mine it. It's a mining thing. But then, all you've done when you've blown up the rock and hauled it out in a truck is you've hauled out a bunch of rock. Now what? Now you need an entire industrial chain. You need the mills, you need the processing facilities, you need the refining facilities, you need the downstream facilities that keep adding value to it, add value, add value, add value. And the people who know how to do this in the world today, we call them Chinese. We don't call them Americans. We hardly ever call those kind of people Americans anymore. There are very, very few places in America where you can go to school and actually learn about, for example, rare earth refining. I mean, at one point, there were no places to go. Now there's Colorado School of Mines and a few other places around the country. China has entire universities that are devoted to teaching people chemistry metallurgy, hydro metallurgy, extracting these minerals. And they're capturing that part of the value chain. I'll just add one thing because I know we're going to talk some more of it. China is actually getting out of the mining industry. They don't want to dig up their ground as much anymore because they've got a huge environmental problems, water problems, food problems. They don't want to do that. They would rather buy the materials, process them in China down to a certain value add level, and then sell them to Western companies and sell them with strings attached saying that, "If you guys don't build a factory in China, if you don't share your technology with us, we're not going to sell you the materials you need." That would be the rarers, the permanent magnets, the phosphorous for lighting systems, things like that. We could talk about that all day.Joel Bowman:For sure. And if I'm not mistaken, China has some enormous percentage of the world's rare earth deposits, 90 plus percent or something. Am I in the right ballpark there? Byron King:You are absolutely in the right ballpark. I mean, you see a lot of figures and a lot of these figures are fudged figures. Well, China used to control 95%, but now it's only 80%. Well, really, when you get to the sweet spot, to the stuff that you can actually have a magnet and put it in the alternator of your car or have a phosphor and put it in your light bulb, things like that, China's back up around. They're way, way, way over 90%. What they're doing is, for example, in the US, there's a company called MP Materials, which mines rare earth ore at a place called Mountain Pass, California. It's a legacy operation going back to the '50s. Otherwise, they would never be able to build it today. But they literally mine the material, they crush it, they concentrate. They put it on in trucks, they haul it down to the port of Long Beach. And when those ships get done unloading in Long Beach and Los Angeles, they put the material on those ships and they send it back to China and we never see those molecules again. I mean, China isn't processing those on behalf of MP Materials. That's not what they call a tolling agreement. They're just selling them the ore, China gets it. And then they export it in the form of high value added materials, whether it's your microwave oven or your air conditioner or ...Joel Bowman:They send us back iPads and sneakers.Byron King:Yeah.Joel Bowman:I mean, all of these little tiles add up to a pretty dismal looking mosaic for the future of energy independence. If not only the US but in the west as well. So talk a little bit about how ... Because you touched on BlackRock just before and the idea of permanent capital and they're having such a mammoth share in the market. I'm talking BlackRock and Vanguard and these gigantic funds. When they move into the kind of mindset that is very high focused on environmentally sustainable governance, or ESG is another buzzword around now, when they go long on that type of regulatory framework, what does that do for American energy independence, and how much is it sending folding those cards to jurisdictions abroad?Byron King:Well, there you go. I guess you'd call it postmodernism. The philosophical postmodernism has transformed itself or it has beamed itself down as this ESG movement. And you get permanent capital, you get really big funds, really big organizations. They own a whole bunch of shares of all these different companies, pick her name, whatever you want. You had the one funded, owned enough shares in Exxon that they could influence other shareholders and they got their people on the board of Exxon. So all of a sudden Exxon went from saying, "We're an oil and energy company and this is who we are and this is what we do." To saying, "We're going to be carbon neutral and we're going to throttle back on this and that." Joel Bowman:That was just in the summer of '21, I think.Byron King:Just three, four months ago. Six or five months ago. Or you look at other big companies, Shell Oil, the Dutch company, or BP, British Petroleum, as it used to be called, as President Obama used to call it during the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the British Petroleum, BP is their name. They're basically saying, "Well, we don't want to be called names, we don't want people to think harshly of us. We're going to be deinvesting in our traditional business opportunity. We're not going to drill as many wells. We're not going to explore as much. We're going to walk away from certain project, we're going to walk away from this big, huge gas project off of Mozambique or we're going to walk away from this opportunity offshore, Brazil or wherever."What it means is they are intentionally, consciously underinvesting in their business. When you say, "Who cares about Exxon?" "Well, I care about Exxon." I do not own a single share of Exxon. I don't think I ever have. Maybe I've bought and sold, I don't know. But I do not own a single share of Exxon. But I do care that they produce oil, gas, chemicals, plastics, what-have-you because I live in this world.Joel Bowman:You want to turn the lights on. Wear some shoes.Byron King:I like it when I flip the switch and the lights come on.Joel Bowman:Button your shirt up.Byron King:I like having little bull plastic buttons on my nice shirt. But when they underinvest, maybe we won't notice it today ... Well, we won't notice it today, tomorrow, next week, next month. But if they underinvest for the next year or two, by year three, we're going to begin to notice. Well, guess what? First of all, during COVID, there was a lot of underinvestment just because people are sick, can't work, can't show up to the office. Entire areas were just off limits. You can't fly anywhere, you can't drive anywhere, you can't cross borders. There was a lot of underinvestment for two years just because of COVID. And now as we wake up coming out of COVID because I mean, the COVID is ending. It's not over, but it's ending. That's a whole another discussion, but as we come out of it, we look around and we say, "Hey, wait a minute. Geez. People have been underexploring, under drilling, under developing, underplaying their geophysics, underdoing for the last two years. And we've got a couple more years of this as we look out on the whole ESG waterfront. What happens then? Well, if you don't invest in, go out, explore, drill fine, so what do the markets tell us? They're going to have a shortage of oil in the future. I guess, I'll bid oil up to $90 a barrel, maybe $100. How about $110 or $120? I mean, I've seen estimates of oil at $300 a barrel. Of course, when oil's at $300 a barrel, the economy crashes and everybody gets laid off. We'll see what happens. You'll see what the markets do. But then the other angle on that is that when a Western oil company walks away from developing a big oil or gas project somewhere, guess who else moves in? Either the state oil companies, the national oil companies of those other countries, Chinese capital moves in. China has plenty of permanent capital as well. They know how to write checks just as well as BlackRock and Vanguard. And if you pull out of here and you leave a vacuum, somebody else's capital will come in. Joel Bowman:Exactly as you would expect. As you said, we've been, goodness, I don't know how many years, but it would've been probably since the last peak in oil around 2014, thereabouts, that we've had this kind of cyclical turn. And as you mentioned, undercapitalization, underinvestment, under exploration, and now we're reaping the high prices of that under attention, I guess, to an entire sector. So let me ask you, because the people who are advocating for this, great transition, which they never fully get around to explaining how it's going to be funded, although we know the price tag is something extraordinary. I think Janet Yellen put it in the ballpark of $150 trillion. I guess they just print those. I have no idea where they all come from. Those people will say, "Okay, Byron, it's going to be tough. We're going to have to move from these fossil ideas, I guess, of the old oil and gas and the old stalwarts in delivering our energy. But what we're looking forward to is this utopia where we've got windmills and solar panels and all the rest of it." So talk a little bit about how that doesn't quite compute, doesn't quite deliver, how the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow, and all the rest of it. Because it seems to be a big gap between wishful thinking and cold, hard reality there.Byron King:For sure. I mean, windmills and solar have a place in the world. I call it a niche. They are niche performers. I mean, just to do windmills and solars, what do you need? You need steel, which comes from iron ore, which comes from rocks in the ground. You need coal to make the basic steel. You need coal to make the pig iron, and then once you have the iron, you can melt it. But you still need electricity, and where do you get your electricity from? You can't do big industrial scale electric things off of solar and wind because they ... Unless you have huge capacitors that somehow store the energy. I mean, I don't want to get all electrical engineering on you here. But to do solar and wind, you need a lot of steel, you need a lot of exotic elements, you need a lot of rare earth, you need a lot of silver. The polysilicon that is in the face of the solar panels. I mean, polysilicon is a very exotic material that the ... I mean, where's most of it made? Well, China. For windmills, you need all these big, fancy, permanent magnets in there. And these rotating machinery as the big blades go round and round and round. Where do those rares come from? China. Magnets? China. You've got other issues and these things have a life cycle. They aren't really renewable in the sense that after, pick a number 10, 15, 20 years, these machines, they too will wear out. They aren't going to last forever.Maybe you can rebuild them. Maybe there's a recycling element to them, but right now, what happens to old windmill blades? They bury them in landfills. Well, that doesn't seem very renewable. That's just the machinery about it. But you mentioned, the wind doesn't blow the sun, doesn't shine. The sun comes up and the sun goes down. And when the sun comes up, the little solar panels are out there and you go from no electricity, no electricity to, "Good. We're making lots of electricity. Lots of electricity." Sun goes down, no more electricity.What happens when you want to run your society during those nighttime periods or if it snows or if it's cloudy day or something like that? Well, now you need baseload power. Well, where's the baseload power come from? Well, traditionally coal. Nuclear, that'd be great. But we've really put a lid on nuclear. In the west, I mean, in Germany, they're shutting down their new plants. I wrote an article for Bonner Private Letter about that in December. Germany's energy StalingradJoel Bowman:That's right. Excellent metaphor and not a very good one for students of history who know how Stalingrad went.Byron King:It didn't work out well for the Germans the first time, they want to do it again. I don't get this. Some people don't learn. They don't learn too good, as the saying goes. Right now, as we speak, what happens when the sun goes down and we need to get that base load balanced again? We need to balance the load so that literally the lights will go on, so the refrigerators keep running, people's computers keep working, so that you can charge your Tesla at night or what-have-you. How do we get that power? In a lot of places in the United States, the way to get quick, almost instant electric power is you turn on your natural gas fired turbines. You have out there in the gas fields, you got the pipelines. Again, pipelines are made out of this thing called steel. That comes from ... They're put together by big, heavy machinery that are run by this stuff called diesel fuel. And they're wrapped in these protective coatings that are made out of this stuff called plastic, which comes from this thing called oil, which comes from these things called oil fields. In comes the natural gas to the great, big, huge gas turbines that are made by Siemens and General Electric and what-have-you, made out of all sorts of exotic materials like titanium and all sorts of fancy magnets made out of materials that came from China. We spool these babies up and we generate this electricity and now we balance the load. So by day, we are subsidizing solar power because they all have tax breaks and tax credits and everything for their solar panels and such. By day, we're flooding the market with this subsidized solar power. And by night, we're having to turn on these merchant power systems, these natural gas fired systems just to balance the load. We're really ruining the economics of a broad scale electric power industry. I mean, across the country, public utility commissions in every single state are wrestling with this. I mean, where the public utility goes to the commission and says, "Listen, we're having to pay these high rates back to the homeowners for their solar panels by day on the sunny days but that doesn't support our grid." And then meanwhile, we have these idle plants that we have, these natural gas plants on each side of the sunrise, sunset, we have to pay ... Those are capital costs, too. We have to pay for those. We don't use them for eight or 10 or 12 hours a day but then we have to spin them up at night. You get into public utility law that is very, very complex. The lawyers are having a field day with it, the lawyers and the economists who deal with this. Great jobs for those guys, those gals. There's a whole thoughtless sense to it all. Then you go to a place like California, which has reached something, on a sunny day, something like 30% of the California on a sunny day is solar-powered or so-called renewable power. Okay, but now you destabilize the whole grid with on again, off again power. And they're importing power from British Columbia, they're importing power from Nevada and Utah and other places. How do you do that? Joel Bowman:I mean, it goes back to what you were saying about Germany and what you wrote. I'll link to this article below for our listeners because it's really well worth their reading. It's a little peek into the future just as I'm down here in Buenos Aires, Argentina is a little peek into America's inflationary future if it doesn't pull its breeches up. But I think you can look into the future by having a look at what's going on in Germany. And if we keep down this path as Germany has done, not only do we watch just basic electricity heating costs go through the roof, as we've seen natural gas futures, and oil price skyrocket over the past couple of months during this winter.But also you eventually have to revert if you put a whole load of your power load onto an unreliable, so-called renewable or green energy grid. When that doesn't come through or when the wind doesn't blow, as they found out in Texas last year, then all of a sudden you're back to dirtier fuels. Coal, in the case of Germany. Where you're undercuting your whole reason for going green in the first place when you're ... I think it was actually lignite they went back to. It was even worse.Byron King:They come burning lignite. Is there a dirtier fuel than lignite? The answer, no. I guess if you could burn your front lawn or something...Joel Bowman:You could burn a rain forest.Byron King:They're burning lignite to release the energy to boil water, make steam, spin a turbine and literally keep their lights on and keep their little street cars running in diesel cars.Joel Bowman:Crazy. So what about people who say, "Okay, this is all well and good. But man has innovated past paraffin. We've had whale oil." In some parts of the world, in Indonesia, they're still burning through forests." We used to burn various types of fuels until we got to this high grade, high ERORI of the petroleum energy return and energy invested ... There you go. Until we got to these high ERORI fuel sources. So we've just got to have a bit of faith in technology, we've just got to have a bit of faith in innovation and tomorrow's battery cells and tomorrow's whatever. They're just going to be so much better that we just need to transition to the eutopic future and we'll all live happily ever after over there. What say ye, Mr. King?Byron King:Well, there's an old expression that I heard it long ago from a guy at Westinghouse, the old Westinghouse Electric Company, which was this massive company that it did everything. It made electrical appliances, it made electrical equipment, built nuclear plants. I mean, it built the nuclear reactors for Navy submarines, things like that. But they were very stovepipe company, they had a lot of different branches. And the guy said, "If we only knew what we know, we could really do much better." And when you say, "People are innovative, there's lots of patents out there." Yeah, there are. There's lots of patents out there. And if we knew what we know, we might be able to cobble something together. That takes political leadership and that takes policy making people who actually understand this stuff and who didn't just read a couple magazine articles or didn't just spool up after reading a New York Times article or two about, "We're going to kill ourselves. We're ruining the world," and all this sort of stuff. We're ruining the world and we're all going to die, okay. I grant you that. I mean, in rare earth, for example, there was a not too long ago study that I saw, heard about. They compared patents in the rare earth arena by different countries and they adjusted per population, what-have-you. For every patent in rare earth, which are important if you're going to do renewable, for every patent in rare earth that happens in the United States, there are 35 patents in China. Joel Bowman:Wow. This is population adjusted as you mentioned. That's an important caveat there.Byron King:When it comes to who's going to own the future, the people who are going to own the future are people who are thinking about it and thinking about tying it all together. Which is not to say that China's 10 feet tall, but Chinese people are 10 feet tall, that they strongest gorillas and all this sort stuff. No, no, no. I mean, they're people, too. But they think about it. And it doesn't mean that I want the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, approach to running life in America or Canada. Even though sometimes you wonder. You kind of wonder, I mean, how much of that rule book over there have they brought over here?Joel Bowman:Gramsci's long march through the academies is alive and well.Byron King:These long march through the academy. I mean, when people say, "We have a carbon dioxide crisis." I said, "Well, all I can say for sure is that every year, there's more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere." It's a very, very, very small fraction. Some people say, "Well, it's enough to change the climate and everything else." "Well, I don't know that the models are that good." Other people who are smart have different models of it. I've spoken with Russian scientists who cover this and they think that Western scientists are just they don't know what they're talking about. And the Russians, they know a few things about the high arctic. I mean, half their, of countries in the north of the Arctic Circle. But we have really a global environmental crisis. I mean, if you look at how much crap is just being thrown into the rivers and streams and the off flow of agriculture chemicals and things, I mean, we're ruining the ecology of the planet, I'll grant you that. I mean, it just seems to me that the policy ought to be broader than just this crackdown on what I'd call the center of gravity of modern life, which is a petroleum-oriented or hydrocarbon-oriented energy and materials economy. When you say, "We've got to turn the valves and we've got to shut in the oil wells and shut in the natural gas. We're going to put the coal companies out of business. They should all go bankrupt." The woman who almost became the comptroller of the currency that President Biden nominated be the comptroller of the currency, from Cornell Law School. She was an immigrant from the Soviet Union. She wrote her thesis on A Marxian analysis of the economy. She said that in order to ...Joel Bowman:Omarova, I think her name was.Byron King:... have the future that we want, we're going to have to bankrupt all the oil companies. It's like, "Well, to bankrupt all the oil companies means our energy's going to go away. Our classics are going to go away, our agricultural fertilizers are going to away, our chemicals are going to go away. I guess that means you just want to kill us all off. Well, no, thank you. No, thank you. We're just fine killing ourselves off without you helping."Joel Bowman:Right. Saule Omarova I think her name was. Another of her quotes, I think she was taking the scorched earth approach. Not only to oil and gas, but I think to banking as well. She wanted something like some federal deposit accounts where, of course, the government would be able to control maybe through a central bank digital currency or some such. Where you spent your money, with whom, at what time, under what circumstances. Because of course, central planning worked out so well for the Soviets. She was a School of Moscow graduate, I think.Talk a little bit, Byron, about a potential kind of transition fuel. It strikes me that when people talk about, "Okay, let's throw the baby up with the bath water." Let's throw the entire petrochemical industry just in the drink. First of all, there's not enough room in St. Greta Thunberg's arc for two of every species at this point, let alone the whole human race. But is there some possibility that we could transition to say, a larger percentage of our energy needs reliant on, say, natural gas or nuclear, if we could get the political will behind it and move away from either geopolitical risk in some places? I mean, you speak about the United States, there's no shortage of natural gas there. One would think that would be a perfect strategy for ensuring a bunch of jobs, reinvesting in America's energy independence and its energy grid, and having a somewhat of a lot, well, a lot cleaner source than say coal or German lignite, for sure.Byron King:Well, it is a rough and rocky road ahead to change. I mean, we're looking at 200 years of inertia here. We're looking at a lot of what we call the built economy, the things that run on things that we used to have. I mean, the easements and the rights of way kind of like with the railroad, they are where they are and they were established long ago. And it's if you want to build a new railroad today or change the trackage of a railroad, how do you do that? I mean, I talked to a guy once at the US Department of Transportation and I said, "What's your biggest problem when it comes to building roads?" He says, "The biggest problem that we encounter most is graveyards." Every time they want to build a road or expand a road, they have to dig up a graveyard, move all the caskets. Transition the economy, every time you want to do something slightly different, you're going to have to dig up somebody else's graveyard. You break their rice bowl or dig up their graveyard. You know what I mean? Now we said, "The thing is we have what we have." And like I said earlier, if we knew what we already know, if people could actually synthesize what we already know, we can do this. And in fact, this is future looking in terms of where Byron is going with his writing. We'll talk about that in a few moments, if you wish. But if we knew what we know and we started to really tie things together, we could take what we have. We could take where we are and begin a reasonably decent transition and people who are part of it could make some money at it investment -wise.We can't just turn the valves and shut off the oil industry because a third of the oil goes for transportation and a third of it goes for industry and chemicals. I mean, it's not just people driving to the mall that's destroying the world. Don't take what you see every day when you're out and about. Don't take that as the problem or, natural gas. Let me just leap frog ahead a couple of things. I mean, we must absolutely revitalize the nuclear sector for base load electricity. Lots of great ideas out there for that. There's uranium. I mean, I could get into thorium but that's a whole another ... We could spend all day talking about thorium.Joel Bowman:It's another episode.Byron King:A whole another episode to talk about thorium. Just basic uranium reactors have an incredible future for base load electricity. Another thing and another point, and this is something that I'm working on right now and I'm going to be coming out eventually, give me a month or so with a report, it's going to be on fuel cells. You take a solid oxide fuel cell. You pass the hydrocarbon over it, natural gas or you could use diesel or you could use almost any hydrocarbon you want. But because of the chemistry and the physics of a fuel cell, and I don't want to get into it, this isn't going to be mechanical, electrical engineering class here. But because it is an immensely efficient way of removing the energy from that hydrocarbon, turning that energy into electricity and capturing and controlling the emissions, I'm not going to say that there will be zero emission. Fuel cells will never emit another molecule of CO2 again, but we will sure emit a lot fewer using fuel cells. And when you say, "Well, tell me more about this fuel cells." I don't want to get into the electrical engineering of how they work. I mean, you can read, I'll tell you more when I write about it and you can read about it eventually and you'll know about it.But the materials that go into these fuel cells, they are familiar materials, again, from the mine mill factory side, copper, nickel, platinum, palladium, rare earths. Oh my goodness. Yttrium-stabilized zirconia. You want exotic metals. I mean, we got to have yttria-stabilized zirconia to make these things work. Is there a molecule shortage of that? You're damn right there is. But what that means that if how to get yttria or if you know how to get zirconia, you're on the right track here investment-wise. That's one example.Joel Bowman:Well, let me ask that because I want to get around to your writings and where people can find them. But before we do that, give us a broad sweep. I don't want to undercut any of your own paid subscribers here, but for investors who are out there, who are they've been having a bit of a turbulent ride in the markets potentially so far this year, to say the least, if they've been investing in the new shiny things and they're looking at getting back to basics as it were. And this of course, Dan Tom have been writing about their trade of the decade, which very generally speaking is long energy, long, old energy that is. We spoke about this earlier in the year or late last year, rather, with Rick Rule, Winter Catastrophe Summit for Bonner Private Research. But when you are looking at ways to actively invest in this long term trend, what kind of sectors are you're looking at and how specific can you get with regards to sharing with us things that are on your radar?Byron King:Well, I'm still writing for one of the old line at Agora pubs. I work with Zach Scheidt on one called Lifetime Income Report. Every week or so, I write a little column that goes out in every month, I write another longer column for the monthly. It's a value investing kind of approach. I mean, just good basic companies in good basic sectors that can survive the tsunamis of what's going on. Nothing big and flashy, no Facebooks that are going to drop 25% one day, that kind of a thing. Joel Bowman:You mean we can't power the world with cat videos and the likes?Byron King:No. You just can't power the world with invitations to your birthday party kind of thing.Joel Bowman:Who would've thunk it?Byron King:That's where I'm at right now. In terms of what do I talk about? I talk about the classic things. I mean, I talk about gold, silver, just basic. I mean, there's definitely an upside to them but they also have what I like, which is the limited downside. And even if they do drop during a market crash, what's the first thing that recovers after a market crash? Gold. It's the most liquid thing there is. People sell their gold to pay their margin calls on Facebook or on Tesla or whatever like that because they got slammed. But then the thing is when they sell their gold, somebody else goes in there and buys it as with a lot of other things. Why do you think Facebook dropped 25%? Well, because it went no bid. Nobody wanted to buy it up there. Maybe some bottom feeding sharks came in to buy it down there. But I actually think some of those bottom feeding sharks are going to wish that they had found a lower bottom, so there's that.I like classic traditional energy. I mean, a company like Exxon or a company like Chevron. I mean, I was writing about Exxon a year ago when the share price was about 50% of where it is now. When the dividend yield was something like, I don't know, 10%. And you say, "Well, Exxon, who needs to be told to buy Exxon?" Well, I don't know. A lot of people seem to be told to buy Exxon because the share price has gone up significantly in the last year. Somebody was buying into it. And even with the people on the board who were like, "We're going to go ESG and we're going to decarbonize ourselves." They're making all this money in spite of themselves in the current oil environment. And I don't see the current oil environment self-correcting.I mean, it's not like government policy. Not this government, not the one we got now, not this ... They're not government policying towards more oil lower prices. I mean, you may have seen our wonderful Secretary of Energy, the former fashion model, tour guide at Universal Studios, Governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm, when she was asked, "What's your solution to lowering energy prices?" She literally laughed at the person who asked her that question. Somebody asked her, "How many barrels of oil does the United States use every day?" And she says, "Well, I don't really have that data." I'm like, "You're the secretary of energy and you don't know how many barrels of oil the United States uses every day? Why are you there?"Joel Bowman:You would think of all the pieces of information, that particular data might be one that would maybe spring forth from a well-fertilized mind, but doesn't appear that that's what we're speaking about at this juncture.Byron King:And it's an easy number. I mean, it's in the realm of about 20 million barrels a day to run the United States. Joel Bowman:It's a nice round number. Byron King:Nice round number. You just have to remember that. You don't have to get down to the nearest 100,000 or whatever. Just throw that out and you'll sound like you're smart, like you know what you're talking about. Where does it come from? Well, I mean the United States imports more oil every day from Russia than we do from Saudi Arabia or Mexico. I mean, nobody knows that. Again, let's get into a war with Russia here. Unless we can somehow make another Mexico to make up for that deficit. But anyhow, in terms of like, "What am I looking at?" I mean, basic energy, US natural gas, certain pipeline plays because ... Not all pipelines. I mean, if you have a pipeline to a declining energy basin, well, you have a 50% full pipeline. That's not a good pipeline.If you have pipelines into the Permian basin, which is 98% capacity, that's a good pipeline. So things like that. I have been spending a lot of time talking with the mining place and the processing place for the battery metals, the technology metals, the energy metals, the rare earth place. As I've mentioned earlier, in North America, US, Canada, we have some mining place. We don't have a lot of the downstream place. It's just not there. There are a couple that might turn into something. I mean, Canadian companies, a company like Appia Energy, A-P-P-I-A. Appia Rare Earths and Uranium is their full name, they have the best deposit of a mineral called monazite in North America, maybe the world. It's the highest grade minerality I've ever seen. It's unbelievable minerality. Monazite for again, not to get into all minerology on you here, but it's a fabulous ore for rare earth. The problem is with Monazite is you also get low levels of uranium and thorium so it's a radiation problem. They're in Saskatchewan. They have a relationship with the Saskatchewan Research Council, which has a licensed nuclear capable facility. So when they process their minerals, when they get there ... They're still developmental. But when they get there, when they process the minerals, the Saskatchewan Radionuclide site, they're going to take those radioactive minerals away. That's a good thing. And we'll be left with the molecules we want, which is the rare earths, the neodymium and the dysprosium and the erbium and terbium and gadolinium and all those good stuff that make things work. I've been working on that. It's a model of an investment paradigm that feeds on where the war world is going in the future. Again, if we could only know what we knew. That's going to be ...Joel Bowman:I think we have a title for this episode. If only we knew what we knew.Byron King:If only we knew what we know.Joel Bowman:Well, Byron, I'm cognizant of the fact that we've run a little over time here, but I'm always thrilled to talk to you. It's such an encyclopedic knowledge of all of the aforementioned subjects and so many more. Besides, we didn't even get into half of the things that I wanted to talk about but we can save those for another podcast in the future. And in the meantime, as you mentioned, it looks like trends in motion are going to stay in motion, at least for the remainder of this administration and who knows how long beyond. What that means, I guess, is to torture a metaphor, a rich vein for you to tap with regards to individual investments in a field that you know probably better than anyone out there. So that's good for followers of Byron King and good for followers of Bonner Private Research. We'll be talking to Byron plenty more in the future if we're so lucky. So mate, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate.Byron King:That's great. I thank you for your time and your courtesy. For all the viewers and listeners out there who watch this or listen to it, thank you so much. I truly appreciate that you would give me any of your time at all. And I hope that we've helped you with your thinking.Joel Bowman:Excellent. Byron, thanks a lot, man. I really appreciate it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/subscribe

“This is now the greatest financial crisis in American history. We don't know how long it'll last, whether it'll be something like the 1930s or whether it will be something more volatile and violent, but let's not be afraid to call it what it is.”~ Dan Denning, Bonner Private ResearchTRANSCRIPT:Joel Bowman:Welcome back to the Bonner Private Research Podcast. I'm Joel Bowman coming to you from my home office down here in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Now, it is a capital city in the middle of South America, so if you do hear some impatient Argentines honking horns and some construction across the street, you'll just have to chalk that up to a little ambient sound. A special thanks, too, to our new readers and listeners, many of whom are joining us for the first time this Christmas season. By way of a little backstory, I've known Bill Bonner personally for almost 20 years now. And as his long-term readers will know, nothing Bill ever does is uninteresting. I expect this latest adventure to be no exception to that general rule. For those of you who perhaps don't know, it's been a decade or more since Bill, Dan, Tom, and I wrote together for the same publisher back in Baltimore, in and around the mid-2000s.So, in that way, this does feel a little like getting the old band back together. I'd like to say thanks therefore to my once and future colleagues for joining us along the ride. On that note, we'll have some other personalities dropping in along the way, some of whom you may be already familiar with. Folks like Chris Mayer, Rick Rule, Byron King, Verne Gowdie in Australia, Tim Price and Charlie Morris in the UK, Ronan McMahon, wherever we can track him down, and plenty of others besides.As you well know, the world has changed plenty over these past couple of years, not least in the way that we communicate with one another, from Zoom conferences to webinars and podcasts just like this one, we now have more tools than ever to stay connected with you, which is exactly what we're hoping to do with this new venture. It's a small core team to be sure, just the four of us, Bill, Dan, Tom, and myself. So, we'll be freewheeling a bit and ask your patience for any bumps that we may encounter along the ride. "Ready, fire, aim," is our general motto here. To help us explain a bit more of what you can expect from the Bonner Private Research project, I caught up with my co-pilot Dan Denning a little earlier this week. I invite you to stick around for our quick powwow up right after the break.All right. We're talking today to Dan Denning, all the way up in Wyoming in the northern end of the Americas. I'm Joel Bowman. I'm coming to you from down in Buenos Aires in the southern tip down here in Bill's sometimes home of Argentina. Dan, how are you doing today?Dan Denning:I'm all right, Joel. Thanks. Yeah. Laramie's really high plains. It's where the, as you know, where the Great Plains meet the Rockies. And it is super windy here today. That's one of the quality of life issues I ran into when I picked it. So, if I blow away or the roof rips off, that's why.Joel Bowman:We'll just-Dan Denning:But hopefully we'll be okay.Joel Bowman:We'll just continue recording. It'll make for good footage. Mate, so, we've got a little bit of housekeeping to get through today because we've got some new readers and new listeners along for the journey, along with our long-suffering, faithful and unfaithful readers, I guess. So, we'll get to all that in a little bit, but first, I guess, an update on something that you and I have been discussing for a long time, both professionally and just by way of email, and something that you and Bill and Tom have been writing about for the better part of a couple of decades, perhaps even longer, and that is the question on everyone's lips and one which becomes more urgent with every passing month and every passing week, it seems like now, and that is whether or not we are in the greatest financial crisis in American history.Dan Denning:Yeah, that's a good question. And-Joel Bowman:Just to start with a small question.Dan Denning:No, it's a serious one. And it's one that I've already received from new readers who've signed up for Bonner Private Research. And I should say that that's not my phrase, actually. Tom Dyson and I went and visited Bill in Baltimore in late October, and we were trying to be very precise about what we thought was at stake for investors right now. And Bill, who is not prone to hyperbole and is usually fairly reserved about what he claims to know had said, "Well, what we're really talking about is the greatest financial crisis in American history." And one of the reasons he had mentioned that is we had been discussing what happened during the Civil War, which was obviously more than a financial crisis, but there was an aspect to it that was purely financial.And the monetary aspect was Lincoln printing greenbacks in order to pay for the war. So, that was a huge crisis for the country. Then there was another crisis in World War II where the government's debt inflated massively against the size of GDP. And again, there was an existential crisis for the country and it came after the Depression. So, we coupled the Depression and World War II as a second great crisis. And both of those were also historical and demographic. But since our beat here is money, we're always focused on following the money. And typically when the money goes, everything else goes. So, when we were talking about it in Baltimore, Bill said, "Look, the trends are pretty unequivocal." We look at government debt to GDP. We looked at the inflation figures, which have just gotten worse since then.And we look at the length of the current monetary regime, which started in 1971 when the Fed, Richard Nixon, decoupled gold from the dollar. This is now the greatest financial crisis in American history. We don't know how long it'll last, whether it'll be something like the 1930s or whether it will be something more volatile and violent, but let's not be afraid to call it what it is. So, that really focused our minds and energies on, "Well, what can we do now to prepare for that and to help readers get through it unscathed?"Joel Bowman:Right. So, we're now, this year, actually, you mentioned 1971, where exactly half a century into this monetary experiment. And I think people are getting a sense that things are starting to unravel. The kind of things that you and Bill and Tom have been writing about for the past couple of decades are really now coming to the fore. And we're seeing what previously would've been headlines in fringy, alternative news outlets starting to hit the mainstream papers. So, I think people are really starting to wake up to what's going on around them. So, this brings us to, why this new project? Why have we chosen this particular outlet affording us the independence to speak directly to readers? Do you want to speak a little bit to that about Bonner's new project and how we're all involved in that?Dan Denning:Sure. I think when we had our discussion we just thought, "It's a really serious moment for anyone who's retired or at or near retirement age." If you already have a lot of money invested in both the housing market and the stock market, typically we don't like to lose that money. So, for a long time, since Bill and I have been collaborating, especially since the Bonner-Denning Letter started almost five years ago, the main investment goal was not to lose money. And the main investor that we were speaking to was someone who may be doing other things with their money, but also wanted someone who looking at for what the big risks were. And so we wanted to be able to just focus on that message without any interference, not interference, really, but without any distractions, because it's not only a full-time job to try to understand this stuff and then make the right moves with your money, but it's not going anywhere anytime soon.We think that this is something that may play out over the next decade or so. So, what we really wanted was a way to talk to and write to readers who are interested in help in that problem, where we could write to them as often as we'd like, where we could sometimes talk to them this way, or they could engage with us on message boards. And also, they could do it in an ad-free environment. This is the only thing we're doing now, and so we can focus on it 100% and they're not going to receive any other ads for anything else, which to some readers that helps them focus on what's going on as well.So, we looked around for a platform. There's a lot of interesting digital platforms where you can express yourself without getting canceled, hopefully, and we thought this was a really good self-publishing platform. A little bit different than what we've worked with in the past. But as Bill mentioned, the world is changing and we thought, "Well, let's change with it and try something to see if it's a better service for the readers that are interested in our message."Joel Bowman:Right. So, you and I have been having conversations much like this for the past, going on maybe a year or so now. And we've touched on a bunch of different topics that seemed to us, at the time, very relevant. We couldn't have known, of course, how relevant they would become. And I'm talking, of course, about all of the trends that have been accelerated during this past year, whether it be with regards to government indebtedness or surveillance, or our ability or rather inability to travel freely, to protect our money against the inflationary whims of central bankers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This medium, us being able to speak directly to our readers, is something that's going to change our relationship with our readers. Do you want to take a look under the hood and maybe explain to readers and listeners now how this is going to be different and maybe a little bit of what exactly they can expect going forward with regards to specifics of subscriptions and such?Dan Denning:Sure. Yeah. That's a good question. And I'll just tell a quick backstory. I first started working with Bill in 1997, but I was in France before I'd moved to France permanently in 2002. I was there in the August and September of 2001. I was there with some other colleagues and we had retreated to Bill's house to try to figure out what was going on in the world. And of course we were all in the Paris office on September 11th, and we didn't see what had happened until later. We heard it on the radio, but the media world was different back then. So, the fortunate thing, which was very small in the context of what was going on, is that we were in the same place and we had a chance to spend some time thinking about what it might mean for a lot of things, not just financial markets, but for the universe of issues that we concern ourselves with: money, history, markets.So, a similar thing happened in late 2019 when Bill and I were in Baltimore and we started hearing about this virus from China and what was going on. And then of course, I ended up shortly thereafter... Tom was with us at that time as well. And then we all spread to the four corners of the earth. Bill got trapped in Argentina. I got trapped in Australia. And I don't know where Tom was at the time. He was somewhere in America on the road or something.Joel Bowman:Might been up in Canada or something. Yeah.Dan Denning:Yeah, yeah. But we started doing things like this. We knew we needed to talk about what was going on. And we were having private conversations about what this meant for investors. So, as you remember, in March of 2020, the S&P 500 fell 35% in 23 days. And since then the rally has been considerable. So, everything that was happening in the world started happening a lot faster. We needed a way to talk about it amongst each other so we could better advise the readers what was going on. So, we started having a lot more private conversations, not only amongst ourselves, but with you and with people we'd known for a long time, like Verne Gowdie down in Australia, Tim Price and Charlie Morris in the UK, and then Rick Rule, Byron King, Chris Mayer, Ronan McMahon. Just people Bill has known and relied on for a long time to help him figure stuff out.And so we thought, we've been doing that really since 2020, and in the last six or eight months we thought, "Well, maybe that's what we should be doing for everyone. Maybe that should be available to all of our colleagues and readers that we've met all over the world all these years past." So, we decided to do it. Now, what it means is it's really not going to change much if you were already an existing reader of the Bonner-Denning Letter or Tom Dyson's Portfolio or Bill's Diary, except you're going to get all that work in one place now, instead of having to subscribe to multiple things that come out at different times. What you'll end up getting is you'll end up getting an email from Bill every day, which is his Diary. It used to be the Daily Reckoning. You'll end up getting, if you're a free reader, you'll get a summary of everything at the end of the week which, Joel, you're going to prepare so people can see what's going on behind the scenes if they're busy and they don't always have time to read every day. And then for-Joel Bowman:Yeah. It's a kind of digest.Dan Denning:Yeah, that's right. It's a little more convenient for people to keep up with everything that we've published. And then for readers who are paying subscribers, I'll continue to provide what I've been providing to readers of the Bonner-Denning Letter, which is just a review of any important events that happened that week that might affect either our long-term strategy or, and and this will be a bit different, our shorter term strategy. And that's because Tom, the work that he used to be doing for his Portfolio readers, will now be doing in this place with Bill and I. So, Tom's work is a little bit more tactical. There are a few more trades involved. And by trades, I don't mean day trading. I mean, things that he has spotted in his research, like the tanker trade that he made and obviously the Dow gold ratio. That's going to be what he's focusing on. So, in the weekly updates you'll get anything related to Tom's individual trades.And then you'll get a monthly research report, which is a collaboration amongst all of us, which focuses on our best ideas. And it tends to be a weightier, more thoughtful piece that you can print out, sit down and read. And that's a lot like the Bonner-Denning Letter, except now it's going to be called Bonner Private Research. Tom has accepted the role of being our investment director. I'm going to be the managing editor. And my job is to continue my work on the macro themes, but to also bring in the work of people that I mentioned before, like Chris Mayer and maybe Byron King from time to time, and anybody else who we know, like Rick, who has interesting things to say and wants to share them with you. So, you'll be getting daily, weekly, and monthly research. And then from time to time, hopefully even before Christmas, we'll be doing something like this, where you get to engage and talk back and ask questions. And it's more of a conversation or a dialogue rather than a monologue.Joel Bowman:Right. All right. So, lots of new stuff to look forward to. I feel like this might be just the right time for this. I mean, were we to have this exact conversation a couple of years ago in the pre z-Zoom era or the pre-work-at-home era, some of this might have seemed a little different. But as you say, the world's changing. Platforms are adapting. The way that we best reach our readers and our listeners is changing. So, there's a whole host of new ways that we're going to be able to engage and people will be able to choose a level of engagement that best suits their needs. So, on that point, I wonder if there might be people asking, "Hey, is this for me? Do I need to be a pro investor? Maybe I'm just somebody concerned about what I see on the headlines." Who in particular is this for? Do you want to speak a little bit to that perhaps?Dan Denning:Yeah, I can try. And in fact, this is the interesting thing. If you've ever owned a small business or started a business, or I guess really worked in any enterprise whatsoever, small group dynamics are funny. People all have their own idea of how things should be. And so I think one of the things new subscribers should expect is that we kind of have an idea of what we're trying to do in terms of... Well, we definitely know the problem we're trying to solve, but the division of labor and how we work together, those things are evolving. And one of the issues we'll have is, who are we writing for? So, for example, I know that Bill and Tom write to currently hundreds of thousands of people who don't consider themselves investors, but they enjoy reading about the world. They enjoy Bill's perspective on financial markets. I know a lot of people are completely fascinated with Tom's journey with his family, with his personal story, with his getting back together with Kate, and of course, with the homeschooling of their kids.So, we don't want to lose that because we're real people too, and we all have real lives. And some of the things that we're doing in our own lives are interesting to our readers. But I would say that the focus will probably shift more work towards investors. So, if you are a saver, if you are a retiree, if you're on a fixed income, if you're interested in buying a house or selling a house, these are huge financial decisions. And if you're at that point in your investment journey where you're trying to preserve the value of the assets you've accumulated, that's mostly our audience. So, those are mostly the things we're going to be writing about. And so a lot of the work that we're going to be doing now is for investors, and therefore you're going to have to pay for that work. But Bill's also made a career out of not being too adamantine about how he wants to do things. He likes to let things evolve. So, he wants to continue to write for free every day.People who want to read that, even if they don't necessarily invest, will want to subscribe to what we're doing. So, we're going to try to create a subscription option where you can read all of the research at a reasonable price, but also make it possible to continue to read, if you're just interested in Bill's analysis of what's going on in America. Because it's funny, it's lighthearted, it's not as serious. It doesn't mean it's not sophisticated, but Bill has this incredible talent of making complex things sound interesting and finding the humor in them. And I think that's important as well for people, that we don't want to just write about problems that are not solvable. We want to try and solve them. And occasionally we want people to remember, "You're not in this alone and sometimes there's even funny things that happen." So, that's how we're going to try it going forward.Joel Bowman:Yeah. Something tells me we're going to need, as much as anything, a sense of humor over the months and years that are waiting ahead of us. So, definitely stay on board for that. And I wanted to just ask very quickly if people are just joining us now for the first time and maybe they want to get other people, their friends or family, their loved ones involved, they want to sign them up, they can share links to our free resources and there'll be no problem with sharing our stuff around and inviting other people on board. That's correct?Dan Denning:Yeah, that's right. And this will be strange for people who've been with us for a long time because we're used to being part of larger organizations that we've built or joined and they have substantial resources to create large archives and libraries of introductory material. And there's lots of resources available, including customer service and phone numbers. This is very much a startup. And I know it sounds strange to hear that coming from people who've been in the publishing industry for, in Bill's case, 40 years, and in Tom and I's case, 25 years almost, but it's really a four man band right now. It's you, me, Tom and Bill. We're doing everything ourselves. And so the reason we picked the platform we picked is that they could do the payment processing and all we're going to do is write to you.So please, when you go to those construction sites and it says, "Please excuse our dust. We're trying to improve things," we're building everything from scratch here. And if we had waited to have everything built out so that it was a brand new, shiny, gleaming, perfectly functioning thing, we would've waited too long. We thought it was more important to start now and just focus on the important stuff, which is the ideas, the investment research and getting those to readers on a regular basis. But if you think it's interesting to you and you want to share it, the only social media we have right now is Twitter. So, if you want to follow us on Twitter, it's @bonnerprivate. Otherwise, if you want to keep hearing what we have to say, then you can either sign up for the free email, which doesn't cost anything, and that gives you what Bill says every day and that weekly update from you, Joel.And then if you want to pay 10 bucks a month or 100 bucks a year, that gives you a subscription with all the research. That's it so far. And it really is paired back. There's no fancy website. There's no username or password to log in. Substack handles all of your login for you. So, I know there'll be a few bumps in the road and I know people will have some questions on how things are going to work. We'll try to get to them as quickly as we can, but be as patient as possible with us, since it's just the four of us. Which really, because Bill's in Ireland and Tom is on the road, means it's just you and me. And you have a daughter and a wife, so it means it's just me. So, I will do my best as quickly as I can, I promise.Joel Bowman:Right on. Well, having worked with you on and off over the years, Dan, I know our readers and listeners are in good hands. And really, this is all part of the adventure too. Because as the old motto, "Ready, fire, aim," goes, we're going to be learning by the seat of our pants. But one thing that it does mean is that we're going to be able to be nimble and dynamic and responsive, which I think is very key in the kind of world that we live in today, where things are changing week by week, month by month.For anybody who had travel plans interrupted over the last year or budgets that they had to recalibrate because of price differences or market action or what have you, we'll be able to hopefully stay on top of all that with conversations like this and plenty more. But I think, mate, that probably does it for a bit of an introduction to our new readers. Please spread the word. Get other people involved and on board. And we look forward to talking to you again soon. Dan, thanks for chiming in from Wyoming today, mate. Good to talk to you.Dan Denning:Yeah. Thanks, Joel. One last thing real quick just so people, whenever they're listening to this... Our first monthly issue will be in January. Tom is headed back to London. He's made the decision to hunker down there for a while with the kids who got their passport from the home office. So, the first monthly report will be in January. We're going to start publishing Bill's daily emails in late December, and I'll start putting out weekly updates this weekend. So, if you're just joining us, that's what you can expect in the coming days. There's always a little bit of a lull in the holidays, which should help us work out any of our technical issues. But on a personal note, I just want to thank everyone who's decided to join us. It's really exciting to be involved with it again. It's always a little intimidating when you're not quite sure what it looks like, but off we go.Joel Bowman:All right, mate. Tally ho. For readers who are just joining, there's a whole bunch of archives on the website of old podcasts and things that we've had over the last couple of years or the last couple of months. You'll get a little bit of a look in to some of the other personalities that will be joining us along the way. Dan mentioned a few of them at the top of the episode. So, have a look through there, and look out in your inbox for future communications. Thanks a lot, and talk to you again soon.Thanks for listening to this episode of the Bonner Private Research Podcast. You can find more conversations like this in the members only section of our website. We look forward to hearing from you either way. Until next week. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/subscribe

Demetri Kofinas is interested in looking beyond the epiphenomena to find out what's really driving change. Rather than accept the superficial, popular narrative around current events, he challenges the consensus and explores novel solutions to complex problems. Demetri is the host of Hidden Forces, a podcast that uses a financial and cultural lens to make connections among disciplines and challenge today's popular narratives.  On this episode of The Wiggin Sessions, Demetri joins me to discuss how he chooses guests for Hidden Forces and describe how technology platforms like podcasting facilitate the democratization of ideas. Demetri shares what he learned from his interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt around artificial intelligence and the problem of goal optimization, explaining how social media channels with a business model based on advertising are incentivized for outrage. Listen in to understand how a high speed of change impacts society and learn how to maintain your humanity and sustain an open mind as you uncover the hidden forces that shape our changing world. Key Takeaways   Demetri's background as a media entrepreneur and financial analyst What technology platforms allow for the democratization of ideas  How Demetri chooses podcast guests who look beyond epiphenomena to what's really driving change  Demetri's take on the influence we have as individuals and why we're on the verge of political realignment in the US What Demetri learned from his conversation with Google CEO Eric Schmidt around AI and the problem of goal optimization Why social media platforms with a business model based on advertising are optimized for outrage Edward O. Wilson's concepts of consilience and eusociality How the human desire to do meaningful work is fueling the Great Resignation The costs associated with navigating a high speed of change The pros and cons of Demetri's open-minded approach to Hidden Forces  Connect with Demetri Kofinas Hidden Forces Podcast  Demetri on Twitter Connect with Addison Wiggin Consilience Financial Be sure to follow The Wiggin Sessions on your socials. You can find me on— Facebook @thewigginsessions Instagram @thewigginsessions Twitter @WigginSessions Resources  5-Minute Forecast The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson  The Daily Reckoning  Kurt Richebacher  Mobs, Messiahs and Markets: Surviving the Public Spectacle in Finance and Politics by Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva  Empire of Debt: The Rise of an Epic Financial Crisis by Will Bonner and Addison Wiggin The Demise of the Dollar … and Why It's Great for Your Investments by Addison Wiggin Hans-Hermann Hoppe Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century by William Bonner and Addison Wiggin Richard Duncan Substack Theodore Roosevelt's ‘The Man in the Arena' Capital Account with Lauren Lyster Mark Moss on The Wiggin Sessions EP030 Market Disruptors Live Tristan Harris Tristan Harris on The Joe Rogan Experience The Social Dilemma Eric Schmidt on Hidden Forces EP218 A World Only Lit by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance by William Manchester Ray Kurzweil Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away by Rebecca Goldstein Rebecca Goldstein on Hidden Forces EP069 ‘A Collective Mass Refusal to Work in Poor Conditions Is Driving the Labor Shortage' in Business Insider A Most Violent Year Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left by Mark C. Taylor Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture by William R. Leach

China: Not the Bubble You Think It IsSign Up to Daily Reckoning, it Does Not Cost a Thing:https://signups.dailyreckoning.com.au/1866863On today's podcast, fund manager Tim Davis joins Callum to discuss why he dismisses the idea thatChina's property market will collapse…and the global leading stocks you canpick up at a bargain. You'll also hear about his deep research into Tesla, plushis advice for those sceptical on bitcoin. Plus, Callum shows how the powersthat be will keep the housing cycle kicking along further than you thinkpossible…and the best state to focus on if you're interested in propertyinvesting.LINKS:

Today's Flash Back Friday comes from Episode 298, originally published in February 4, 2013. On this show, Jason Hartman talks with one of his investment counselors about current events, welcomes a guest caller and also brings to our listening audience the economic outlook from renowned financial expert, John Mauldin.  ** LIVE ORLANDO CONFERENCE ** Join us for Empowered Investor LIVE: https://www.EmpoweredInvestor.com Free Mini-Book on Pandemic Investing: https://www.PandemicInvesting.com Jason's TV Clips: https://vimeo.com/549444172  Asset Protection, Tax Savings & Estate Planning: http://JasonHartman.com/Protect  What do Jason's clients say? http://JasonHartmanTestimonials.com Easily get up to $250,000 in funding for real estate, business or anything else  http://JasonHartman.com/Fund  Call our Investment Counselors at: 1-800-HARTMAN (US) or visit https://www.jasonhartman.com/ Guided Visualization for Investors: http://jasonhartman.com/visualization Mauldin discusses “spending rearrangement”, a restructuring of our country's spending problem and tax code, and how the election outcome influences the direction of that restructuring. The larger the government becomes, the smaller the private sector becomes – not an ideal situation for economic recovery in the U.S. Mauldin gives his insights and the possible scenarios and outcomes that could happen, depending on whether or not the deficit problem is truly solved, touching on investments, job creation, tax issues and trade deficits. John Mauldin is also a New York Times best-selling author and a pioneering online commentator. Each week, over one million readers turn to Mauldin for his penetrating view on Wall Street, global markets and economic history. Mauldin's weekly e-newsletter, Thoughts from the Frontline, was one of the first publications to provide investors with free, unbiased information and guidance.  Today, it is the most widely distributed investment newsletter in the world. Mauldin is a frequent contributor to publications including The Financial Times and The Daily Reckoning, as well as a regular guest on CNBC, Yahoo Tech Ticker, and Bloomberg TV. His best-selling books include Bull's Eye Investing, Just One Thing and Endgame, as well as his recently released update to Bull's Eye Investing – The Little Book of Bull's Eye Investing.

Between 1975 and 2018, no less than $50T transferred from the working class to the elites. And this didn't happen by accident but was the result of policy favoring global corporations. So, how do we rework our values in a way that revitalizes the middle class? How do we shift from a system that supports monopolies and cartels to one that places reasonable limits on the concentration of wealth and power? Charles Hugh Smith is the author of 11 books on economics, finance, the Fed, healthcare, education, national debt, government policy and crony elites. He shares his thoughts on the blog Of Two Minds and his work is featured regularly at The Daily Reckoning. On this episode of The Wiggin Sessions, Charles joins me to discuss the problem with policy that mandates the COVID vaccine and share his take on why the economy was already weakening prior to the pandemic. Charles weighs in on how the government and the markets have abandoned the middle class, describing how current policy prioritizes corporate profits over national security and what we can do to set reasonable limits on the concentration of wealth and power. Listen in for insight on how innovation and opportunity flourish in the right systems and find out why ‘doom and gloom' is the first step in escaping our dependence on long supply chains and corrupt power nodes. Key Takeaways The problem with policy that mandates getting the COVID vaccine Why Charles believes the US economy was weakening prior to the pandemic How political policy prioritizes corporate profits over national security and maintaining the middle class The need for transparency, competition and adaptability in the markets How America's greatness stemmed from the opportunity to turn labor into capital and why that's lacking now The benefits of the current trend to decentralize and re-localize How our dependence on long supply chains and a handful of nodes makes us vulnerable (and why ‘doom and gloom' is the first step in finding solutions to this problem) Charles' concerns around the decline of morality in America How Charles thinks about the role faith plays in building a future of common values Charles' call for reasonable limits on the concentration of wealth and power and how he applies this idea to social media Connect with Charles Hugh Smith Of Two Minds Connect with Addison Wiggin Consilience Financial Be sure to follow The Wiggin Sessions on your socials. You can find me on— Facebook @thewigginsessions Instagram @thewigginsessions Twitter @WigginSessions Resources The Daily Reckoning ‘I Went to a Party with 14 Other Vaccinated People; 11 of Us Got COVID' in The Baltimore Sun Mayo Clinic Data on the Prevalence of the Delta Variant Rand Corporation Research on Trends in Income from 1975 to 2018 ‘Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens' in Cambridge University Press The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Adam Smith

Cryptocurrency and other digital assets can be difficult to wrap your head around. Why are people paying $60M for digital art that can't be hung on the wall? And why would you convert your savings into Bitcoin when you can't buy much with it? But the truth is, there are many benefits to the blockchain, and its decentralization and transparency make it far superior to the systems governments control. Chris Campbell is a longtime cryptocurrency and precious metals bug who writes about unconventional ways to invest in a decentralized future in the free digital newsletter Laissez Faire Today. Luke McGrath is a Bitcoin enthusiast who started writing about cryptocurrency in 2014 and served as managing editor of Laissez Faire Today from 2014 to 2020. On this episode of The Wiggin Sessions, Chris and Luke join me to discuss non-fungible tokens or NFTs, explaining how they verify ownership of a digital asset and why you might consider investing in digital content in the future. We explore the concept of blockchain banks and why they're willing to pay a much higher rate to use your capital than the traditional banking system. Listen in to understand why Luke and Chris see Bitcoin as the global money of the future, what makes it superior to fiat currency and how it may serve as the ideal store of value. Key Takeaways   How a non-fungible token or NFT serves to verify ownership of a digital asset Why people are willing to pay $60M for a piece of digital art How NFTs help artists, innovators and content creators earn royalties for their work Why Chris and Luke don't recommend investing in NFTs in their current form but see potential for the asset class moving forward How we know the blockchain can't be tampered with The concept of public-key cryptography and how private keys provide proof of ownership  The idea of a blockchain bank and why they're willing to pay a much higher rate to use your capital The pros and cons of converting US dollars into cryptocurrency Why Luke sees Bitcoin as the global money of the future What makes Bitcoin the ideal store of value and why it's superior to both government money and gold What gives users the confidence that only 21M Bitcoin will ever be made (and why scarcity is so important) The problem with thinking of money only as a medium of exchange and not a store of value What gold bugs and Bitcoin bugs have in common Connect with Chris Campbell Laissez Faire Today  Connect with Luke McGrath Luke on Daily Reckoning  Connect with Addison Wiggin Consilience Financial Be sure to follow The Wiggin Sessions on your socials. You can find me on— Facebook @thewigginsessions Instagram @thewigginsessions Twitter @WigginSessions Resources Chris' Laissez Faire Today Series on NFTs ‘Beeple NFT Becomes Most Expensive Ever Sold at Auction After Fetching Over $60M' on CNBC ‘Who Is Collector Justin Sun and Why He Created an NFT of a Work by Picasso' on Art Rights ECOMI ‘Jack Dorsey's First Ever Tweet Sells for $2.9M' on BBC News BitTorrent Jeffrey Tucker Public-Key Cryptography Article on Wikipedia James Altucher Joel Bowman Bitcoin Bitcoin Core ‘Tesla Buys $1.5B in Bitcoin, Plans to Accept It as Payment' on CNBC MicroStrategy's Bitcoin Announcement Coinbase Gemini Mike Maloney on the Hidden Secrets of Money Silver Doctors Agora Financial

Understanding the Classics affords us a unique lens through which to view modern society and allows us to look at human behavior from a distance. And all three of my guests are students of the Classics with a special interest in how classical wisdom can help us understand trends in the economy and culture of today. Dan Denning is the Coauthor of The Bonner-Denning Letter, a monthly publication that covers a wide range of macro and microeconomic topics. Anya Leonard is the Cofounder and Director of Classical Wisdom, a platform that explores how Ancient Greek and Latin literature applies to our lives now. And Joel Bowman is a Contributor to the Daily Reckoning and cryptocurrency expert. On this episode of The Wiggin Sessions, Dan, Anya and Joel join me to discuss the assault on the Classics and how we might defend classical liberal values in today's society. We explore cancel culture's roots in the Hegelian dialectic, describing how money and technology can be used to control behavior. Listen in for insight on whether cryptocurrencies are an antidote to bad money or just more frothiness—and find out what we can learn from the Classics about the consequences of present monetary policy. Key Takeaways   What inspired Anya to host an event re: the attack on the Classics and how the discussion was received Cancel culture's roots in the Hegelian dialectic and how Antonio Gramsci serves as the modern root of the movement Anya's take on the fallacy of cancel culture and how a living canon can evolve without erasing history How money and technology can be used to control behavior in favor of political values deemed superior to tradition How Dan thinks about defending classical liberal values in the digital era The speculative behavior that stems from the advent of any new monetary system What differentiates government-issued cryptocurrencies from free market offerings (and how to tell the difference) Who controls the conversations around what money is in a society The role Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies play in helping people preserve wealth in Latin America What four factors give money its value and why there's no such thing as ‘intrinsic value' What we can learn from the Classics about the social and political consequences of devaluation and inflation Connect with Dan Denning The Bonner-Denning Letter Connect with Anya Leonard Classical Wisdom The Essential Greeks Course Connect with Joel Bowman Joel on Twitter Connect with Addison Wiggin Consilience Financial Be sure to follow The Wiggin Sessions on your socials. You can find me on— Facebook @thewigginsessions Instagram @thewigginsessions Twitter @WigginSessions Resources ‘Are the Classics Under Attack' on Classical Wisdom ‘He Wants to Save the Classics from Whiteness. Can the Field Survive?' in The New York Times Dr. Eric Adler on Classical Wisdom Speaks The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today by Eric Adler Antonio Gramsci Dan Denning on the Bonner Private Research Podcast Dan Denning's Presentation for the Hayek Institute

In this episode, Kevin talks to author Joel Bowman. Joel is a contributor at The Daily Reckoning, International Man, and Foundation for Economic Education. His articles on bitcoin, decentralization, anarchy, travel, and various other topics of interests have appeared in dozens of journals and media outlets.  Joel currently lives with his wife and daughter in […] O post FL144: Finding Freedom In the New World With Joel Bowman apareceu primeiro em Freedom Lovin.

Joel Bowman, the Editorial Director for https://internationalman.com/ (International Man), talks to us today about real-world economic examples. He works alongside https://expatmoneyshow.com/doug-casey-anarcho-capitalist-speculator-autobiography/ (Doug Casey) and Dr. John Hunt helping individuals around the world to understand how internationalizing your life can free you from the State. During Joel Bowman's professional career, he has written from more than 85 countries, a dozen of which he called temporary home. His columns have appeared in well know libertarian outlets, such as Mises.org, https://fee.org/ (FEE.org), https://www.lewrockwell.com/ (lewrockwell.com) and The Daily Reckoning, which he managed for 5 years with Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin. He speaks regularly at conferences around the world on topics including philosophical anarchism, internationalizing your life and the decentralization revolution.   Real World Economic Examples Listen in to this amazing episode to hear Joel Bowman and Mikkel Thorup discuss real-world economic examples. We've never done an episode like this, so if you want to understand world economics past, present, and future, then you'll love this interview. Also, we delve into how our life can look when these lessons are implemented; therefore, creating a more interesting and peaceful life.   Internationalizing Your Life Have you ever wondered what this means? 'Internationalizing Your Life' Today we chat about why and how this can be done, from the beginning of deciding this life is for you, to implementing all of the steps for yourself. Here are a few of the ideas you can look at to see if internationalizing your life is for you: Cost of Living in your current home city Monthly outlay, examples: mortgage, credit card repayment, car insurance Health Insurance Cost Also, never think you can't afford it, you can afford it!   Travel is Fatal to Prejudice, Bigotry and Narrow Mindedness, and Many of Our People Need It Sorely on These Accounts ~ Mark Twain 1869   Once you start traveling and seeing the world, the way others live, you start to question how you were brought up, what the governments have been telling you; most importantly, our schooling. Besides that, we have thousands of different ways to see culture, and there is no right way or wrong way.   'Learn By Doing' - Doug Casey   You can learn more about Joel Bowman and his work at https://internationalman.com/ (InternationMan.com)   FINAL THOUGHTS This interview is a real-life model of how to internationalize your life with Joel Bowman and I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation. The how-to episode for those that don't think they can do it.   If you would like to stay up to date with all new content that comes out at https://expatmoneyshow.com/subscribe/ (The Expat Money Show) make sure you sign up below for our newsletter; EMS Pulse. – My behind the scene daily correspondence where I give you all the intel as I travel the world and build my business, develop key relationships and invest in non-traditional investments overseas (very profitably I might add!) Support this podcast

Jason Hartman talks with Chris Mayer who is managing editor of the Capital and Crisis and Mayer's Special Situations newsletters. He also is a contributor to the Daily Reckoning. Graduating magna cum laude with a degree in finance and an MBA from the University of Maryland, he began his business career as a corporate banker. Mayer left the banking industry after ten years and signed on with Agora Financial. His book, Invest Like a Dealmaker, Secrets of a Former Banking Insider, documents his ability to analyze macro issues and micro investment opportunities to produce an exceptional long-term track record of winning ideas. Mayer's commentary has been featured by MarketWatch, Russia Today TV, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Huffington Post. http://dailyreckoning.com/author/chrismayer/

Let's call this one the “Non-Show” where you can hear some quick highlights of past shows and forward the five-minute “demo reel” to friends and family. Upcoming shows include: Addison Wiggin, editorial director and publisher of The Daily Reckoning and executive publisher of Agora Financial and cash flowing, turn-key income property opportunities in Dallas, TX.

James Woodburn and Kris Sayce hijack the Newman show (again) to discuss recent market news across Money Morning and The Daily Reckoning. Join Woody and Sayce for an informal shouting match with Jason Stevenson on… Jason's controversial presentation at The Great Repression conference... The War on Cash in India... Why you shouldbuy a goat... and raise a herd... The Greatest Hoax of Our Time: Why the government is using climate science to tax you... The real science behind the coming Ice Age... The commodity that could beat out Iron Ore as Australia's top export. and More…   Throw on your headphones and click “Play” above, or check it out on iTunes here or Stitcher here.

James 'Woody' Woodburn and Kris Sayce hijack the Newman show to discuss recent market news across Money Morning and The Daily Reckoning. Join 'Woody' and Sayce for an informal discussion on… Trump Infrastructure spending… where's the money going… Resource Investment Opportunities… What interest rates are doing locally and abroad… How far the Aussie housing market has left to run… The War on Cash… and More… Special Report: ANNOUNCING: THE LAZARUS PROJECT – Your Best Chance To Double Every Dollar You Invest This Year Most Australians left the mining sector for dead four years ago. Resource Speculator readers did not. This year they've been piling up profits of 100%…142%… 146% and 242% … while the ASX has handed straight-laced ‘buy-and-holders' a lousy 3.5% gain. But this is no new commodities boom. It's an opportunity to punt on beaten-down Australian businesses… stocks that can suddenly rise from the ‘dead'… making you enormous sums of money in the process… [more] - https://goo.gl/AY5Ky0 Footnotes: What A Difference 2 Percentage Points Makes - https://goo.gl/mQfbyU The Curse of the High and Mighty-Property Market - https://goo.gl/9JhsQo Could Trump ‘Trump' Australia's Property Market? - https://goo.gl/z6SDe8 War On Cash: The Wealth Grab Continues - https://goo.gl/u3r9rN

Jason Hartman talks with Chris Mayer who is managing editor of the Capital and Crisis and Mayer's Special Situations newsletters. He also is a contributor to the Daily Reckoning. Graduating magna cum laude with a degree in finance and an MBA from the University of Maryland, he began his business career as a corporate banker. Mayer left the banking industry after ten years and signed on with Agora Financial. His book, Invest Like a Dealmaker, Secrets of a Former Banking Insider, documents his ability to analyze macro issues and micro investment opportunities to produce an exceptional long-term track record of winning ideas. Mayer's commentary has been featured by MarketWatch, Russia Today TV, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Huffington Post. http://dailyreckoning.com/author/chrismayer/

On this show, Jason Hartman talks with one of his investment counselors about current events, welcomes a guest caller and also brings to our listening audience the economic outlook from renowned financial expert, John Mauldin.  Mauldin discusses “spending rearrangement”, a restructuring of our country's spending problem and tax code, and how the election outcome influences the direction of that restructuring. The larger the government becomes, the smaller the private sector becomes – not an ideal situation for economic recovery in the U.S. Mauldin gives his insights and the possible scenarios and outcomes that could happen, depending on whether or not the deficit problem is truly solved, touching on investments, job creation, tax issues and trade deficits. John Mauldin is also a New York Times best-selling author and a pioneering online commentator. Each week, over one million readers turn to Mauldin for his penetrating view on Wall Street, global markets and economic history. Mauldin's weekly e-newsletter, Thoughts from the Frontline, was one of the first publications to provide investors with free, unbiased information and guidance.  Today, it is the most widely distributed investment newsletter in the world. Mauldin is a frequent contributor to publications including The Financial Times and The Daily Reckoning, as well as a regular guest on CNBC, Yahoo Tech Ticker, and Bloomberg TV. His best-selling books include Bull's Eye Investing, Just One Thing and Endgame, as well as his recently released update to Bull's Eye Investing – The Little Book of Bull's Eye Investing. John Mauldin's blog, Economic Analysis, and more can be found on his website at http://www.mauldineconomics.com/.

Jason Hartman talks with Chris Mayer who is managing editor of the Capital and Crisis and Mayer's Special Situations newsletters. He also is a contributor to the Daily Reckoning. Visit:http://www.jasonhartman.com/podcast/ or search Jason Hartman in the iTunes Store for more. Graduating magna cum laude with a degree in finance and an MBA from the University of Maryland, he began his business career as a corporate banker. Mayer left the banking industry after ten years and signed on with Agora Financial. His book, Invest Like a Dealmaker, Secrets of a Former Banking Insider, documents his ability to analyze macro issues and micro investment opportunities to produce an exceptional long-term track record of winning ideas. Mayer's commentary has been featured by MarketWatch, Russia Today TV, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Huffington Post. http://dailyreckoning.com/author/chrismayer/

On this show, Jason Hartman talks with one of his investment counselors about current events, welcomes a guest caller and also brings to our listening audience the economic outlook from renowned financial expert, John Mauldin.  Mauldin discusses “spending rearrangement”, a restructuring of our country's spending problem and tax code, and how the election outcome influences the direction of that restructuring. The larger the government becomes, the smaller the private sector becomes – not an ideal situation for economic recovery in the U.S. Mauldin gives his insights and the possible scenarios and outcomes that could happen, depending on whether or not the deficit problem is truly solved, touching on investments, job creation, tax issues and trade deficits.John Mauldin is also a New York Times best-selling author and a pioneering online commentator. Each week, over one million readers turn to Mauldin for his penetrating view on Wall Street, global markets and economic history. Mauldin's weekly e-newsletter, Thoughts from the Frontline, was one of the first publications to provide investors with free, unbiased information and guidance.  Today, it is the most widely distributed investment newsletter in the world.Mauldin is a frequent contributor to publications including The Financial Times and The Daily Reckoning, as well as a regular guest on CNBC, Yahoo Tech Ticker, and Bloomberg TV. His best-selling books include Bull's Eye Investing, Just One Thing and Endgame, as well as his recently released update to Bull's Eye Investing – The Little Book of Bull's Eye Investing.

This episode is an interview with Joel Bowman, the managing editor of The Daily Reckoning e-newsletter email and former managing editor of the Rude Awakening. After completing his degree in media communications and journalism in his home country of Australia, Joel moved to Baltimore to join the Agora Financial team. His keen interest in travel and macroeconomics first took him to New York where he regularly reported from Wall Street, and he now writes from and lives all over the world. Joel currently lives in Buenos Aires. In the interview he gives his perspective on life as an expat in the city and provides an overview of what has been happening to the economy in Argentina recently. Apologies for the technical problems with the recording: the audio cuts out very briefly intermittently throughout the interview, but it is still possible to understand the interview.

Jason Hartman talks with Chris Mayer who is managing editor of the Capital and Crisis and Mayer's Special Situations newsletters. He also is a contributor to the Daily Reckoning. Visit: http://www.jasonhartman.com/podcast/ or search Jason Hartman in the iTunes Store for more. Graduating magna cum laude with a degree in finance and an MBA from the

Author Bill Bonner, co-founder and president of Agora Publishing, talks depressions, savings and debt, Argentina, inflation and deflation.Find out more about The Daily Reckoning.Read Bill's Books See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit frisby.substack.com/subscribe

Let's call this one the "Non-Show" where you can hear some quick highlights of past shows and forward the five-minute "demo reel" to friends and family. Visit: http://www.jasonhartman.com/radioshows/ for more Info and registration at www.JasonHartman.com/events free stuff. Upcoming shows include: Addison Wiggin, editorial director and publisher of The Daily Reckoning and executive publisher of Agora