'Best of the Best' Gold & Silver Miners – Rick Rule's Top Picks
Summary
Gold Revaluation: Rick Rule discusses the speculation around potential gold revaluation by the US, emphasizing that such a move would be inconsequential for the efficacy of the US dollar and the gold market in the long term.
Silver Market Dynamics: Rule highlights the shift in sentiment towards silver juniors, noting that while they were once hated, they are now receiving significant investor interest, suggesting a potential leadership change from gold to silver in the precious metals bull market.
Gold and Silver Miners: The GDX and SIL ETFs have outperformed major indices, indicating a bull trend in precious metals miners, with Rule suggesting that the market may be overbought in the short term.
Investment Strategy: Rule advises constructing portfolios primarily with high-quality names like Agnico Eagle, while also considering high-quality developers like G Mining and turnaround stories such as Equinox.
Uranium Sector: Despite volatility, Rule remains bullish on companies like Cameco due to its integration with Westinghouse, while expressing caution about Kazatomprom due to management upheavals.
Oil and Gas Opportunities: Rule sees potential in the undervalued oil and gas sector, particularly in Canadian companies, despite political challenges, and hopes for further price declines to capitalize on long-term value.
Political and Economic Insights: Rule critiques current political strategies, emphasizing the need for individuals to become more independent from state control and prepare for potential economic challenges, such as inflation eroding purchasing power.
Transcript
Hello everybody and welcome into commodity culture where our goal is to make you a better investor in the commodities sector. On this episode I'm very excited to welcome Rick Rule to the program a legendary commodities investor and speculator and the CEO of Rule Investment Media. We are going to be diving into gold and silver, both the metal and the mining sector along with uranium, oil and gas, and how he evaluates companies. Now, another thing we're going to do on this episode is get some specific names out of Rick. What are the companies in gold mining, silver mining, uranium, and oil and gas that he is watching or invested in right now that he thinks could outperform up ahead? You don't want to miss this one. So, strap yourselves in for my conversation with Rick Rule. Rick Rule, it is great to have you back on Commodity Culture. I want to kick things off with the question of gold revaluation, which has re-entered the spotlight since the Federal Reserve recently released a note called official reserve revaluation, the international experience, which describes how five different nations used gains in their gold reserves to raise funds. Now, there's been a lot of speculation that this is a prelude to a potential gold revaluation in the US. I've spoken to a few people about this. I'm getting a lot of very differing opinions. People like Alistair Mloud say there's no way it will ever happen. I spoke to Vince Lansancy recently. He said it has to happen. So, I'd love to get your view on this. Is such a move realistic? And what would its implications be for the gold market, the US dollar, and the global economy? If it occurred, it would be a factoid. Uh if they revalue their collateral from $42 an ounce to $4,000 an ounce, it doesn't matter because you as a creditor would never have access to it. If they use gold to back US treasuries and then there's a default and you present your US Treasury and try to take their gold, remember that your DTOR has nuclear arms. Think this through. The extent to which they would monetize this gold to the extent that a budget would be tied to the real income and outgo that'll never happen. It would reduce their power. If their power to spend was constrained by a golden constant, there'd be no reason to run for office. So, could they uh revalue the gold? And could they use the gold that they allegedly have at Fort Knox to make the US seem not so far underwater? Sure. Would that matter to the efficacy of the US dollar? Certainly not, because the creditor could never perfect against the collateral. Jesse, I've been a lender for 50 years and I have no interest in collateral that I can't perfect against. And do you think it would have any implications for the gold price at all? Yeah, for 6 weeks. Uh, you know, people are dumb. Uh, and uh people who are long gold, who have trauma holding gold over a long weekend needs reinforcement of fiction. It's important to them. Uh you remember the silver squeeze all that time ago when there was all this wonderful narrative around silver and you had all of these silver adherence uh and when the squeeze didn't materialize in the time frame that they had in mind 20 seconds 30 seconds all that love for silver turned to hate. Uh the internet chatter and the chatter inspired by some paid newsletters around the revaluation of gold is something that excites the chattering classes, but it has nothing to do with the long-term implications for, as an example, the US dollar or frankly gold itself. It's a factoid. Well, you brought up silver there. Uh I'd love to get your thoughts because we've spoken about it many times. As you said, you love the fact that silver is so hated. A lot of those same people you're talking about from the silver squeeze movement, they still like to enter my comments section and and berate silver and and how it's been a complete waste to to buy silver. But I'm wondering now that we've seen silver reach nominal 14-year highs, is silver still undervalued and perhaps more importantly still hated in your view? And are we entering the phase of a precious metals bull market where silver starts to outperform gold? Well, certainly the third tier, the tertiary silver juniors are enjoying a lot of love. The hate that existed three years ago around the silver juniors is completely gone. You are seeing silver juniors, I won't name them for fear of making more enemies than I already have, which isn't necessary. But you're seeing uh silver explorers that I don't think have a hope of making money at $75 silver uh complete multi-million dollar financings to drill off dog deposits. Uh a circumstance where people are putting up, you know, multi-million dollars to drill off deposits that have, I would suspect, very little chance of becoming economic tells me that there's the hate that existed in the sector is gone. Conversely, uh, in my experience, when the momentum in a precious metals bull market has been established by gold and leadership in the market changes from the metal to the best producers, conditions precedent that we've already seen, uh, the precious metals narrative begins to become appealing to the generalist investor. That has not happened in the precious metals market yet. You haven't seen the generalist investor in the precious metals market, particularly the precious metals equities markets. When that happens, in my experience, I've seen it happen three times. Leadership changes from gold to silver. I suspect because s because of silver's lower unit value uh or perhaps because of its reputation for upside volatility or both Jesse when it happens and it will happen I think you won't need Rick Rule to tell you what happened the discussion of a move in silver from 36 to 38 will become irrelevant when silver moves it is a truly spectacular event. I don't know when it's going to happen. Uh and given that I don't know when and I don't know how to know when, I don't try. Uh what I've learned is that if you have an asset class that you think could triple h and you think that the increase in the asset class will be magnified two or three times uh in the high quality the higher quality equities around that asset class. If you're two years early, it doesn't matter the rent that you get paid uh when the event occurs. If you think that the rent, if you think that the event is a probability as opposed to a possibility, the rent that you get paid is so extraordinary that the holding cost of maintaining a position for a year, a year and a half or two years in anticipation becomes negligible uh absolutely negligible. Now I need to say that when the junior the high quality junior stocks a year and a half, two years ago were really roundly hated, you know, when the Vislas, the Abbras, the IAS, stocks that looked to me to be virtually certain to make, you know, become economic. When those stocks were hated, uh, I already owned positions in all of them from a geological point of view. But I added more from a financial point of view. Uh I thought when the hate dis dissipates, these stocks are going to absolutely have a bounce. That turned out to be true. A and the stock that I bought as a consequence of my believing that they were hated, I'm giving back to the market now. Uh the reason to own that stock has gone away. And for me, the stock has to go away. That doesn't mean I'm selling my core positions in those stocks. I'm not selling my core positions. But I added stock uh in excess of what constituted a reasonable core position for me. Uh and that stock's being sold. And now a quick break to hear from our sponsor. Arc Silver Gold. Obium owner. Ian Everard is considered one of the most honest and levelheaded gold and silver dealers in the United States. Praised even by his competitors. So give him a call today to take advantage of the specials right now. Silver kangaroos 2023 1oz coins mint fresh only $247 over spot. Mint fresh silver maple leaves 2025 coins 1 oz $2.87 over spot while supplies last. Reach out today at 3072649441 or by email at ianarchsgo.com and make sure to tell him that commodity culture sent you. And now back to the interview. Well, let's dive a little deeper into the gold and silver mining sector because if we look year to date, uh we've seen excellent performance from both the GDX and the SIL ETFs, both up over 60% massively outperforming gold and silver and completely smashing all three major indices, the NASDAQ, S&P 500, and the Dow Jones. Clearly, it looks like to me the precious metals miners are in a clear bull trend. Um, my question is, what inning do you think we're in here? If I had to guess, uh, three. Uh, but remember the seventh inning stretch. Uh, as long as we're using the baseball parliament, uh, I remember well the decade of the 70s. Uh, and I remember that there were at least three punctuations uh, where the gold market uh, declined by 20 25% or more. I remember one epoch, if that's the right phrase, 1975 where the gold quote fell by half. Um, investors who are going to participate in this gold bull market or precious metals bull market, and I suggest that they do, need to study history. They really truly need to study history. In the very near term, uh, I wouldn't be surprised if this market's overbought. Uh the anti-us dollar trade uh the anti-Trump trade is an extremely crowded trade. Uh the momentum is evidence of the fact it's a crowded trade. The fact that uh leadership has changed from gold to the senior gold stocks confirms that we are in a real bull market. But the bull market may in the very near term be overbought and you are seeing money not creeping but rather cascading uh down the quality trail. Uh you are seeing private placements that would have gone begging two years from now being oversubscribed. you're seeing uh investors of the caliber of Eric Sprat and Rick Rule getting cut back in private placements. Uh this is not an underc capitalized market anymore. So in the very near term a couple other observations um there's a lot of liquidity in the market uh and riskoff assets tech stocks gold stocks uh are moving very well. The VIX uh the graph of the VIX looks like the electroc cardiogram of a corpse. There's no fear in the market. Uh, so I think you needed to keep that in mind. What would put the gold market on steroids would be a major interest rate cut in the United States. That would signify to investors and savers worldwide that American society reflected by American politicians had no interest in maintaining the sanctity of the US dollar. uh we saw that at the end of 1975 when you know through 1975 the political will of the United States was to deal with inflation by raising the interest rate. We did that. Cratered the gold price, knocked it off by half, also cratered the Dow, cratered housing starts, uh, obliterated the long bond market, and Congress lost their nerve, uh, and the Fed at the end of 1975, uh, instituted a major major reduction in interest rates. That set off a romp in the bull market and gold. Gold went from $100 to $850. My suspicion is if you saw a major interest rate cut in the US or a series of smaller cuts, then the game would be on an earnest. And would you be able to give us some names, some highquality names in the gold and silver mining space that you think could outperform up ahead? And and for the time being, perhaps we can set aside the best of the best, your Weeden precious metals, your Franco Neadas, your your the big ones, the Numont Barracks, Agniko Eagles, and maybe down to the developer space. um obviously with the caveat that it requires a lot of due diligence on the part of investors and speculators to determine if if these are worthwhile speculations, but perhaps you could shed some light on some companies that you think might outperform up ahead in the gold and silver mining space. Well, first of all, I'm not going to set aside the best of the best uh despite the fact that they may or may not be in of interest to your subscribers. portfolios need to be con need to be constructed primarily of the best of the best. Uh and there is a lot of room left in those stocks. Uh I would suggest with Agniko as an example that development pipeline suggests that it can grow like a junior. But since you've asked me to set it aside, I will set it aside having not set it aside. Your subscribers need to compose their pime their portfolio primarily of high quality names. There's no particular sense in being right about the narrative and taking too much risk in stock selection. Um but uh coming down the quality trail, there's a whole bunch of places, literally a whole bunch of places that you can go. uh you can look for companies as an example G mining where they have definable competitive advantages where they're selling at a reasonable price relative to their existing producing assets but where they are virtually certain to grow. uh if the market doesn't reward that company, that company will be taken over. This is a cost of capital game. And so if the value arbitrage like Rick Rule don't begin to look at the highquality developers, the G minings of the world, the Emeralds of the world, where their development pipelines are looking like Agniko Eagle's pipelines but in smaller fashion, and where the management team has definable competitive advantages. uh if the value arbitrageers don't up the prices of those companies, other companies will take them over. That will happen. Uh so, you know, those are those are two names that I could mention. Uh another timehonored uh way to make money as money flows down the quality trail in mining is to look for the turnarounds. Uh one name that comes to mind immediately is Equinox. Uh it looks like Ross Bey has worn has exhausted his patience in Equinox. It would appear as though the CEO has been allowed to pursue other employment opportunities. Uh it would appear too that their Hard Rock deposit in Canada is finally reaching stride a year late and a couple hundred million late, but it's happening. Uh the last quarter was pretty attractive. If that's true, uh, and if the Marathon deposit comes, uh, into production, sort of on time, sort of on budget, uh, that will affect a turnaround, uh, in Equinox, uh, a company that's really truly in the penalty box. That in turn will allow uh whoever Ross anoints uh in the company leadership. It will allow them to sell those fileos which they need to do. Uh they can't operate in West Mexico. Ross is going to hate me for saying this but that those assets need to be operated by somebody who can do what you have to do in the local community in western Mexico. uh probably enable them if they want to to sell a California assets. Uh they very very very recently got fasttrack permitting for Castle Mountain which is an important step in California. But Ross would be able I think with ramped up Canadian production to get rid of his higher cost, more marginal operations and then focus on a new acquisition. That's what Ross does. Ross starts a story with fairly low quality assets which he throws capital at uh and increases the profitability of. He uses that as a base to acquire higher quality assets. When he does it, he sells the lower quality assets. He monetizes them and continues to upgrade his quality. I watched him do it with Luminina and he'll do it here. So that's that's the sort of a name uh somebody could look to. Uh I I want to talk about the uranium sector next because uranium equities continue to do what they do best and that is be extraordinarily volatile. We do now seem to have an added tailwind of the Trump administration pledging to ramp up nuclear energy as well as domestic uranium mining. I want to read you a tweet from the US Department of Energy. They said, "America has the uranium, the expertise, and the innovation to lead the nuclear renaissance, investing in next-gen reactors that are safer and stronger to uphold US energy dominance." Interesting statement there. I don't know if they're talking about small modular reactors or what because reactors are already extraordinarily safe, but I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this renewed push for domestic uranium and nuclear energy generation in the United States and just any thoughts you have on the uranium market at present as well. Bought a lot of uranium stocks probably a year ago when you were interviewing me because they were hated. They're not hated anymore. So like the silver juniors, the uranium juniors that I bought during a period of hate, I've been selling uh and I've been delighted with the uh renaissance in popular opinion for uranium stocks. You know, frankly, it's made me millions, which is nice. Um as to the federal nexus, uh 5 years ago, a guy like me was vilified. People on Twitter thought that I should be jailed for speculating in uranium. Now these morons want to subsidize me. Uh, I felt cleaner when I was being persecuted than I do when I'm being subsidized. On the face of it, uh, that statement is ridiculous. Uh, America has the uranium. We have a collection of tier 2 deposits that's going to work because our cost of capital is going to go sub-zero because the voters are dumb enough to subsidize us. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't speculate on the stupidity of voters. Uh that's a constant uh and one is wise to speculate on constants but you need to look behind the narrative at deposit that will generate substantial free cash flow at today's uranium price with a lower cost of capital. uh the fact the voter is stupid, which is demonstrable, is one thing, but that stupidity won't be applied equally uh across a bunch of hopefuls. There's now probably 30 companies that purport to be in the uranium business in the US. There are probably four that are viable. Uh there may be a couple of the pretenders who get lucky or get smart uh and ascend to the viable ranks, but right now I would suspect that the viable ranks are four out of 30. Uh your subscribers who aren't uh skilled enough to segregate between the good, the bad, and the ugly are going to lose a lot of money. Uh a lot of money. Uh yes, I think the United States has the ability to affect some form of economic renaissance in the United States, not by subsidizing uranium production, but rather by admitting that nuclear power is the cheapest base load power in the world that doesn't generate carbon. And the United States is very right to mobilize its remaining technical skill sets uh to get out of the way uh to allow this to occur. In truth, the best uranium technology in the world now isn't American technology. The Canadians, Kamico, bought Westinghouse uh and co-opted what was in effect Japanese technology. So the best uranium technology in the world is now Canadian technology. We need to understand that. But I suspect that the size of the US market and the weight of the stupidity of the US treasury uh will mean that Kamico will be very willing to share that technology with the high bid, which will certainly be the US. Well, there are far less uranium stocks out there to sift through than the gold space, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's any easier to find ones with great potential. Can you share some companies that you think could have a bright future in the sector? Uh are you still bullish on Kamako at these prices KazadMrom and then down to the development space? What what do you see right now that looks good? I'm still very bullish on Kamico despite a fantastic run. My concern with Kamico and I expressed that uh in an interview that you did with me on behalf of uh VRIC uh was their takeover of Westinghouse. It wasn't clear to me that the mining company management was capable of running an engineering firm and the first two quarters financials reflected that. It turned out that they were writing down everything they could in the Westinghouse acquisition. Uh and the last three quarters have been spectacular. So it would appear that this integration is going to work. And if this integration works, you get a brand new Camo. Uh you get somebody who yes is a uranium miner, but they're really selling watts. Uh that's a real transformation. That's real margin if it occurs. So yes, I'm very very bullish Kamako. I'm less bullish cuz Adam Prom uh which I really liked 5 years ago. I'm less bullish about Kazadam Prom because for reasons unbeknownst to me the middle managers in Kamako who I held in extremely high regard have left Kazadam Prom you mean right? Yes. Kazadam Prom. What did I say? I'm sorry. Kamako. Yeah. Yeah. Kazadam Prom. There's been a real upheaval in middle management. uh and those were very very high quality people. I'm not sure why they left. There's a lot of speculation. I don't know. So I won't speculate. What I will say is their failure to restore effective production in Kai uh and the upheaval in middle management has caused me to rethink my Kazadam Prom uh position and it's gone. uh it was my largest uranium position and I took the money sideways from Kazatapramama to Kamako. Uh I suspect given the strength in Kamako that I wasn't the only one who made that swap. In terms of playing the US game, uh maybe you look at energy fuels uh which has uh a permitted operating processing plant and importantly 60 million tons of approved tailings uh and has made substantial investments in uh rare earth's processing as well as uranium processing. That's a name I own some stock in. I I need to admit I'm less familiar with their technology than I should be. But a good friend of mine, Dave Wargo, is more familiar, and he's talked me into his point of view. Uh I'm a very large shareholder of uranium royalty, uh which is selling at the lowest multiple of price to book of any of the US- ccentric producers. uh and I would suggest on a valuation basis and also because the royalty and streaming business is such a good business that people who want to play the uranium theme in the in the United States consider uh uranium resources. The best constituency in the US uranium business is UEC. Uh Amir Adnani has worked for 25 years and probably spent a hund00 million building a 100,000 shareholder constituency at UEC and there's no constituency is interested in hearing good news as an existing shareholder. So that stock is extremely sensitive to setup about uranium. It's also a $4 billion market cap. uh I own it as a consequence of my fondness for air and the fact that I've sold enough stock that the rest of my stock is for free. I have no basis in it. Uh and I own it because of the constituency around uranium uh which I think will be fed good news and will respond to it. Well, you mentioned previously being reviled for investing in uranium and now the tables have kind of turned where the world is embracing nuclear. I think one area where we can still be reviled is the oil and gas space. Um, one that continues to look tremendously undervalued in my view, WTI crude. I haven't checked today. Yesterday it was at $63 a barrel or 6375 somewhere around there. A lot of the equities seem to keep getting hammered. Many people I speak with think we're in for a global recession and are calling for a sub$50 WTI price. And it feels like one of the most hated. I don't even know if it's hated. It's just forgotten. People don't even talk about it anymore. It's funny. I used to do interviews with oil and gas experts on this channel and I stopped because nobody would watch the episodes. Um, is the oil and gas space a contrarian's dream right now or is some caution to be warranted? I think it depends on the speculator uh or the investor. It's odd. You know, when I was young, Jesse, and I had lots of time left on Earth, I didn't have much patience. Now that I'm old and I don't have much time left on Earth, I have a lot of patience. It isn't because my time preference has changed. It's just because being an investor for 50 years has taught me that things take time. I sincerely hope that the oil price goes below $50 a barrel. I sincerely hope that there's investor capitulation in the oil space because although I don't need to make more money, I like to make more money. Uh, and the shest bet I know of is that peak oil demand doesn't occur in 2030 or 2032. It occurs in 2065 or 2070. What that means is that the fat tail on net present value calculations in the oil business has been discounted to zero. It's worth a lot more than zero. A lot more than zero. Now, the weakness in the oil price against flat production would seem to tell me, I'm no economist, but it would seem to tell me that we're not uh staring at a recession, that we're in the early stages of one. Uh oil is even more economically sensitive than copper, and it isn't sensitive to perception. It's uh it's reactive to reality. You will recall uh in the early days of the COVID event when air traffic and automobile traffic fell off the table that the oil price fell from $85 a barrel to briefly subzero. Uh that's an economic response because the stuff is cheap and it doesn't store particularly well. When you produce it, you sell it because you can't afford to store it. And I think that the oil quote that you're seeing today and the weakness uh particularly in Ako uh Alberta gas prices is a function of the fact that demand for energy which is very economically sensitive is weaker than we expect. Uh and it could be weaker still. I also believe that the American oil and gas industry is probably selling at half the net present value of their uh demonstrated cash flows from reserves and resources and that the Canadian industry sells at a discount to the American industry. Uh I'm a very large holder of things like Exxon to a lesser extent Chevron and accidental Devon and Equitable in the US. uh and uh unrealistically large shareholder uh of a basket of Canadian oil stocks. I say unrealistically large because for them to succeed uh would require the leadership of Canada who is anti- oil to get out of the way. In other words, I'm betting against the venality of politicians. Um, probably a really stupid bet on my part, but they're so cheap. The Arc Energies of the world, the Freehold royalties of the world, the Tormolines, the POS, the Birch Cliffs. Uh, they're so cheap that I can't not own them. I hope I I hope uh and I own millions of dollars worth of this stuff. I hope they fall in price by 50%. uh at 72 years of age, uh I would love a no risk, no-brainer fivebagger that paid me substantial dividends while I waited. Uh and that's what the oil industry feels like to me if the oil equities have another price decline. There's history around this. Uh Jesse, I remember back to the uh late 1980s, early 1990s, uh the last time that people thought that oil would never catch a bid. And a bunch of the Canadian juniors had financed themselves in the junk bond market. And the quotes on these things just fell apart. They absolutely fell apart. I remember Mark Mark Resources I think was the name of it had a 5-year bond, you know, unrated junk bond. Uh the cover yield was 12%. Remember, this is a higher interest rate environment and the bond was selling at 60 with three years left to maturity. So my running yield was 18%, my yield to maturity was more like 30%. And you could buy that bond all day long. The bond was extremely well covered by proved developed producing reserves, but the sentiment in the oil and gas space was so bad and the sentiment in the junk bond space in the aftermath of the Drexel blow up was so bad that they were giving this bond away. Uh, and I I would love to see a circumstance like that again. You mentioned you were betting against the politicians in Canada. What are your thoughts so far since Mark Carney has taken office? Are are you optimistic concerning the oil and gas business? Obviously, he's a businessman first, I think, and he's a politician second, and he has all of these grandiose ideas about, you know, reducing carbon emissions and all of these types of things. But, but when Pencil comes to paper, do you think he's going to get out of the way, as you say, of the oil and gas business? I would question he's a businessman first. Uh, he was CEO of Brookfield. If he was a businessman, he would have stayed in business. I think he's a politician first. I think he's accomplished everything that he feels he can accomplish without coercion. Uh I think his worldview now requires him to be coercive. Uh it requires the power of the state. At Brookfield, he had to convince bankers. He had to convince customers. He had to convince shareholders. as the prime minister of Canada, he can coersse. Uh if you're interested in power, uh coercion is much more persuasive uh than convincing people. Uh he has said, I mean, you can't know what he's going to do really until he tables a budget. He's a very smart guy, so he's decided not to table a budget. He's also a very smart guy in the sense that after a decade uh of being the power behind the throne in the Liberal Party, he ran on a campaign of change. Uh that irony shouldn't have been lost on anybody. And he's also lucky. Uh lucky is a great trait in a politician. Uh he got to run against Trump. Now, I wasn't in Canada. I didn't see the ballot, but I don't suspect that Trump was on the ballot. But Carney was smart enough uh to run against the Liberals, although he was a liberal and run against Trump who wasn't running against him. He has said that he will be pragmatic, that Canada must build. And the industry that Canada is most competitive in on a global basis is oil and gas. That doesn't mean Canadians aren't good bankers. They aren't. Or good miners. They are. But the truth is that their most globally competitive industry is the oil and gas industry. So if you take Carne at his word that Canada is going to be pragmatic and build on its strengths, if you believe that he needs the industry to be healthy so he can steal from it to fund his agenda, then you can be bullish on oil. If you look, however, at some of the other things Mr. Carney said which is that all of his financial decisions will be predicated on carbon. You need to be much more cautious. Uh much much much more cautious. Uh, I am suspending political judgment for now and I'm buying names in the Canadian oil and gas business because the valuations, the reserves and the resources a and the recycle ratio, the ability to discover more reserves and resources on the margins generated by existing production is so strong uh so strong I can't help myself. My greed overwhelms my fear and I may get punished for that. That was a great summary. Now, before I let you go, I do have to get your thoughts on all of these additional tariffs coming online, the implications of the tariffs so far, all of this flip-flopping from the Trump administration on, okay, we're going to delay the tariffs again, we're going to delay them again. A lot of people, you know, are calling this the art of the deal. I think at this point uh it's become clear that that perhaps there's either some confusion in the Trump administration or I I don't know what's happening at this point. There's some people out there, some who I've had on the show who think Trump is playing 4D chess and I've even had some people allude to the fact that he's actually way more intelligent than he seems and he's putting on an act as a way to manipulate and get his way. I wonder what your thoughts are on the current trajectory of the Trump administration and the tariff policies that they're implementing and the the ways that it could potentially affect inflation in the United States for your average consumer out there. Well, more intelligent than he seems is a low bar. Uh let's get out there. Uh any of your listeners who are interested in Mr. Trump actually should do themselves a favor and read his book, The Art of the Deal. In the art of the deal, he lays out his ethos and his game plan completely. There's no discussion in the art of the deal that a transaction should be a win for both parties. Uh I built my business by offering more utilities to my consumers than I charged them for it, which meant that I had returned customers for 50 years. If I made mistakes, uh uh I was given some tolerance because I added value in other places. That's Mr. Trump's That's not Mr. Trump's ethos. And Mr. Trump doesn't have an ideology. When he was a New York property developer, he was a Democrat because that's what you had to do to get projects built. Uh he said himself that if he ever became a politician, he would become a politician because you could tell lies that reflected the frustrations of an audience on Fox and they would believe the lies. He said that uh and he's acted on it. Mr. Trump doesn't have an ideology particularly and I don't mind that particularly but he's completely transactional and the tariffs are a wonderful place to be transactional. The tariffs can be implemented in the reality of American politics right now by executive decree. They don't need to go through Congress. Which means that Mr. Trump can use them to reward his friends and punish his enemies. The reason that it's difficult to predict what he's going to do is because you aren't present in the meetings. You don't have the ability. If you go back to the old HL Min quote that elections are advanced auctions of stolen property. Uh that's a wonderful way by the way to understand politics. Uh the difficulty that you and I have is that we don't know who the high bid is. Uh and the high bid can change. Um, the other thing to know is that terrorists are taxes. Uh, and from my point of view, taxes suck. Anything that benefits the state at the expense of the citizen is a bad thing. Um, the tariffs are bad policy, but good politics. You can reward your constituency and the rewards can be very focused but the penalties are diffuse. Uh they're diffused among all consumers as an example. Um this is I would suggest to you an unaloyed sin. That doesn't mean by the way the fact that I dislike Mr. Trump so much. Uh it doesn't mean uh that I liked Biden or Harris. Um I would much rather that Jesse look after Jesse's family. Um I don't think that assigning responsibility for your future is a wise thing to do. And people who are fond of Carney or Biden or Trump are precisely uh assigning responsibility for their future to people who are proven to be venal enemies of theirs. Yeah, I completely agree with you on that point. I mean there is no political party that I can support and and so just one final question I have for you and this is maybe a bit more of a philosophical one. We probably lost some people already when we started talking about Trump. But what what do you think the ultimate solution is, if there is one at all? Is it the complete abolishment of government altogether? It is is it a much smaller government? Is it a a community-based government where the citizens have a much more say? What What is the solution here to this absolutely rampant corruption and incompetency? I feel like we live in a global cacistocracy, which basically means the worst of the worst are the people who find themselves in power. Is there a tenable solution to to this problem? Probably too young to remember the whole earth catalog. Uh it was a hippie publication that sold tools to exist more on your own. And there was a wonderful headline there. It said, "Workers of the world disperse. take off on the old uh you know socialist uh slogan workers of the world unite, workers of the world disperse. Uh I think that the uh answer in the very near term is to become as independent of the state as you can. Uh not independent enough that as an example you stop paying taxes and get thrown into jail. I mean I'm all for stopping paying taxes if you can get away with it, but it's a very very very risky strategy. Uh but I think a circumstance where you do as an example what you did where you expatriate uh my friend Doug Casey said 40 years ago uh your ass your assets and your passport ought to have three different loces. I haven't followed that but I have legally exported a lot of my capital as an example and I've organized a lot of my investment portfolio uh in an insurance company where because I don't dividend it and I don't salary it uh and I use realistic as opposed to industry standards um loss reserves uh I minimize the tax I pay and I think people need to do that. I think in particular, however, Jesse, that people need to look at what the next 10 years is going to bring them and they need to understand that the state is no longer being going to be able to afford to be benevolent. I believe that the US dollar will lose 75% of its purchasing power over the next 10 years, the same way that it lost 75% of its purchasing power in the decade of the 1970s. And what that means is that people who are my age who haven't been as lucky as I have, people who are relying on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to fund their retirement have to rethink it. Uh the nominal level of benefits that you get today will continue, but they'll inflate away the net present value of those benefits. So if you're getting $4,000 a month on Social Security or whatever the number is, you're going to keep getting it. But four years from now, or pardon me, 10 years from now, that $4,000 is going to buy you $800 or $1,000 worth of goods and services. I think it's important that people understand that. I think it's important that people your age need to understand that my generation voted ourselves all kinds of cool benefits, but we forgot to pay for them. So, you all get the bill. Um, and I think that that realization will probably over time do a very good job of reducing the aura of legitimacy that government enjoys today, but it's going to take a while. You remember that it took the decade of the 70s uh to bring in the Reagan revolution. Now, the Reagan revolution ended up not being a revol a revolution, which is to say they didn't succeed in cutting the size of government, but they did put in place an ethos that constrained the growth of government all the way through the first four years of the Clinton administration. The realization through the decade of the 70s that government was evil uh is something that constrained the growth of government for 12 years beginning 1980. uh and that allowed the private economy to grow fast enough to reflat the state. Uh and I suspect that's what happens this time. I suspect that we have a 10-year reckoning which will damage substantially the perception of government that we'll have the same sort of economic reckoning coming out of this next 10 years that will reduce the importance of the state uh and reallow private initiative uh in the same manner that private initiative was allowed allowed in the decade of the 80s and the early part of the decade of the 90s. Uh at least that's my hope. Very fascinating. Yes. And and it's interesting to note that all of the political discourse online that I seem to see when it comes to places like X, which it should be admitted are basically a a cauldron for for people to to emit their rage have been my party versus your party, this politician versus this politician. very few people actually wake up and say, "Hey, maybe everybody sucks that we're talking about here and we should think about, you know, removing ourselves as much as possible, as you've been mentioning, from their power and their control." Uh, Rick, this has been a fantastic conversation as always. Tell us about rule investment media, battle bank, and where people can get a hold of the replay videos from the recent rule symposium. Thank you for all of that. Um rule investment media first uh rule investment media is a community of 90,000 people. Uh the initial function for you of rule investment media is that if you care about the way I think about natural resource companies, you can personalize it. If you go to the website ruleinvestmentmedia.com and you list your natural resource stocks, I will for free, no obligation, rank them 1 to 10, one being best, 10 being worst. I'll comment on individual issues like I did today if I think my comments might have value. Understand there's no cost, there's no obligation to this. So, of course, because there's no cost, it comes with an absolute ironclad money back guarantee. Uh the second function is my educational function, my paid for educational function. Every 90 days at the rule classroom, we do a boot camp, a deep dive on one topic or another. And when I say deep, I mean deep, a very dense 8-hour drive. Uh, we've done uranium, we've done silver. We're in the in the middle of a three-part series on gold right now. These are $99 to attend. They do have an ironclad money back guarantee. If you think for any reason we didn't earn the tuition that we charge you, just tell us so and we'll refund your money. If you're the kind of person who buys the Sunday paper to do the crosswords and the funnies, don't come. Uh this is eight hours of very dense, very applied education. If you don't want to work, if you're if your speculative technique has got a hunch bet a bunch, just don't come to the boot camp. Once a year, we do a big conference. Uh this year, well over 2,000 people attended between live and live stream. This is also a paid for event. Uh, we've been doing it for 30 years. We do a pretty good job of it. And it comes with a money back guarantee. We give you 55 hours of programming in 4 days. More than you can absorb by far. I put on the conference and I have to play play the recordings. Those recordings are available to the people who attended the conference after the conference, but they're available to everybody else too for a fee after the conference. Uh, once again, 100% money back guarantee. uh we had over 2,000 paid attendees this year. So far, two people have asked for their money back. So, uh given that given that the rate of people that felt unsatisfied was less than what 1/100th of 1%. Uh we feel like we're doing a pretty good job for our people. Those tapes are available. Uh and as I say, there's a full money back guarantee. What you won't get back is 55 hours of your life. Uh I put on the conference. uh I organize the speakers, I assign the topics, and I have to play the tapes. Uh so that'll tell you uh something about how much value they might offer somebody who's looking for uh a good education. I should say some things about the conference. Uh there's a lot of good conferences out there, including the one that you're part of, the VRIC. Uh I would say what's useful about our conference is first of all when we do global macro we don't have global macro being done by journalists or failed journalists. We have global macro being done by players. Uh David Stockman ran the office of management budget. Nobody can talk about the budget better than him. Nomi Prince was a partner at Goldman Shacks. She can talk about the intersection of Wall Street and Main Street because she lived there. Daniela D. Martino Booth talked about the Fed because she was a researcher at the Dallas Fed. Uh you get the point. We go on to analysts. Uh and these analysts aren't juniors from some second tier brokerage firm that finances the conference. Rather, they're portfolio managers who've spent three or four decades in natural resources through good markets and bad telling you what they did and how to do it. How how they did it. All of our exhibitors, public company exhibitors have to be owned in the accounts of the conference sponsors. So they're all vetted. That doesn't mean, Jesse, as you know, unfortunately, that because I own a stock, it goes up. But it does mean that the selection process was fairly rigorous. So for all of those reasons, for serious investors and serious speculators, uh, an investment in the recordings of the conference is a good investment, particularly because it comes with a money back guarantee. It's the only financially riskless transaction in mining. Where can people get those recordings? Two ways. You can go to rule investment media when you submit your uh stock portfolio and write in the question or comments recordings and I'll make sure that you get contacted or you can go to rule symposium 2024, pardon me, 2025 uh and uh sign up for the recordings and uh we'll happily sell them to you. Great. And quick plug for BattleBank before I let you go. Sure. Well, finally, uh, we're at the dawn of Battlebank. We tried, as you know, Jesse, for four years to get regulatory regulatory approval to start a new bank. We weren't alone. There's over 120 companies uh in application. Two got approved last year. Uh, which tells me something about what we needed to do. So, we bought a bank. Uh, we bought First National Bank of Oopsa, Minnesota. And rather than apply to start a bank, which we've now done, we're applying to inject a bunch of capital into an existing bank and change the business plan, we hope to get approval as early as next week. Uh then there'll be a sort of a 90-day shake-in period where we test the products and services of the bank with a few people like me who are forgiving who would be forgiving about operational failure and then we'll open the bank which is going to be great. uh you know, but many of your listeners don't, that we repeated a process that we started in 1999 where we built a bank called EverBank from 0 to$28 billion before we sold it to TIA CF. This bank will be in many ways similar. It won't have any branches except one in oops, Minnesota. The consequence of no branches is that our non-interest expenses will be low and we can pass those on to you as a depositor. Uh unlike all of our banking competitors, uh we will have one high yield money market account with no fees and we'll pay you interest on your checking. If you're interested in interest, which you should be, you should think about BattleBank. Uh in addition, our IRA product, our retirement product, like the Canadian RSP, will actually be your IRA. Most IAS are receptacle for Wall Street products, annuities, mutual funds, stuff like that. In our IRA, you can own a duplex or a triplex. You can buy a franchise. You can invest in crypto. You can invest in private equity without Trump says so. Uh your IRA becomes your IRA. Uh and then finally, uh on the asset side of the ledger, uh mercifully for me, uh none of my competitors in American banking think gold and silver are good collateral, but I do. uh at Battlebank uh you will be able to access the capital that you have tied up in your gold and silver with a margin account so that as an example if you need money during a market downturn to buy a duplex or triplex for whatever purpose you can access that capital without selling your gold and silver and paying the capital gains tax. There's no requirement that you borrow. We can establish a line of credit. So there's no point in paying interest on capital that you're not using. when you need to use it, that capital will be available to to you. Uh I'm delighted to say there's almost 18,000 people on the waiting list. We would love to have uh new people on the waiting list. You can do that at battlebank.com. Great. Well, I'll put a link to that in the description as well as links to the Rule Symposium replay and Rule Investment Media. Rick, as always, it's it's been a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much. Pleasure. I look forward to seeing you at the VRIC if not sooner. Um, and thank you for the opportunity to visit. Thank you for joining us today. As a reminder, this episode is brought to you by Ark Silver Gold Osmium. Take advantage of their specials right now. Silver kangaroos 2023 1oz coins only $247. Over spot silver maple leaves 2025 1oz coins only $2.87 over spot while supplies last. Reach out to owner Ian Everard today at 307-264-9441 or by email at ianarchsggo.com. And make sure to tell him that Commodity Culture sent you. And make sure to pick up your Commodity Culture merch. We have hats, t-shirts, hoodies, and mugs. All backed by a 100% quality guarantee. Link is in the description below. And I'll see you guys in the next episode. Commodity Culture is a series on commodities and natural resources. If you would like to see more, be sure to subscribe and hit the bell notification so you're always up tod date with the latest episodes.
'Best of the Best' Gold & Silver Miners – Rick Rule's Top Picks
Summary
Transcript
Hello everybody and welcome into commodity culture where our goal is to make you a better investor in the commodities sector. On this episode I'm very excited to welcome Rick Rule to the program a legendary commodities investor and speculator and the CEO of Rule Investment Media. We are going to be diving into gold and silver, both the metal and the mining sector along with uranium, oil and gas, and how he evaluates companies. Now, another thing we're going to do on this episode is get some specific names out of Rick. What are the companies in gold mining, silver mining, uranium, and oil and gas that he is watching or invested in right now that he thinks could outperform up ahead? You don't want to miss this one. So, strap yourselves in for my conversation with Rick Rule. Rick Rule, it is great to have you back on Commodity Culture. I want to kick things off with the question of gold revaluation, which has re-entered the spotlight since the Federal Reserve recently released a note called official reserve revaluation, the international experience, which describes how five different nations used gains in their gold reserves to raise funds. Now, there's been a lot of speculation that this is a prelude to a potential gold revaluation in the US. I've spoken to a few people about this. I'm getting a lot of very differing opinions. People like Alistair Mloud say there's no way it will ever happen. I spoke to Vince Lansancy recently. He said it has to happen. So, I'd love to get your view on this. Is such a move realistic? And what would its implications be for the gold market, the US dollar, and the global economy? If it occurred, it would be a factoid. Uh if they revalue their collateral from $42 an ounce to $4,000 an ounce, it doesn't matter because you as a creditor would never have access to it. If they use gold to back US treasuries and then there's a default and you present your US Treasury and try to take their gold, remember that your DTOR has nuclear arms. Think this through. The extent to which they would monetize this gold to the extent that a budget would be tied to the real income and outgo that'll never happen. It would reduce their power. If their power to spend was constrained by a golden constant, there'd be no reason to run for office. So, could they uh revalue the gold? And could they use the gold that they allegedly have at Fort Knox to make the US seem not so far underwater? Sure. Would that matter to the efficacy of the US dollar? Certainly not, because the creditor could never perfect against the collateral. Jesse, I've been a lender for 50 years and I have no interest in collateral that I can't perfect against. And do you think it would have any implications for the gold price at all? Yeah, for 6 weeks. Uh, you know, people are dumb. Uh, and uh people who are long gold, who have trauma holding gold over a long weekend needs reinforcement of fiction. It's important to them. Uh you remember the silver squeeze all that time ago when there was all this wonderful narrative around silver and you had all of these silver adherence uh and when the squeeze didn't materialize in the time frame that they had in mind 20 seconds 30 seconds all that love for silver turned to hate. Uh the internet chatter and the chatter inspired by some paid newsletters around the revaluation of gold is something that excites the chattering classes, but it has nothing to do with the long-term implications for, as an example, the US dollar or frankly gold itself. It's a factoid. Well, you brought up silver there. Uh I'd love to get your thoughts because we've spoken about it many times. As you said, you love the fact that silver is so hated. A lot of those same people you're talking about from the silver squeeze movement, they still like to enter my comments section and and berate silver and and how it's been a complete waste to to buy silver. But I'm wondering now that we've seen silver reach nominal 14-year highs, is silver still undervalued and perhaps more importantly still hated in your view? And are we entering the phase of a precious metals bull market where silver starts to outperform gold? Well, certainly the third tier, the tertiary silver juniors are enjoying a lot of love. The hate that existed three years ago around the silver juniors is completely gone. You are seeing silver juniors, I won't name them for fear of making more enemies than I already have, which isn't necessary. But you're seeing uh silver explorers that I don't think have a hope of making money at $75 silver uh complete multi-million dollar financings to drill off dog deposits. Uh a circumstance where people are putting up, you know, multi-million dollars to drill off deposits that have, I would suspect, very little chance of becoming economic tells me that there's the hate that existed in the sector is gone. Conversely, uh, in my experience, when the momentum in a precious metals bull market has been established by gold and leadership in the market changes from the metal to the best producers, conditions precedent that we've already seen, uh, the precious metals narrative begins to become appealing to the generalist investor. That has not happened in the precious metals market yet. You haven't seen the generalist investor in the precious metals market, particularly the precious metals equities markets. When that happens, in my experience, I've seen it happen three times. Leadership changes from gold to silver. I suspect because s because of silver's lower unit value uh or perhaps because of its reputation for upside volatility or both Jesse when it happens and it will happen I think you won't need Rick Rule to tell you what happened the discussion of a move in silver from 36 to 38 will become irrelevant when silver moves it is a truly spectacular event. I don't know when it's going to happen. Uh and given that I don't know when and I don't know how to know when, I don't try. Uh what I've learned is that if you have an asset class that you think could triple h and you think that the increase in the asset class will be magnified two or three times uh in the high quality the higher quality equities around that asset class. If you're two years early, it doesn't matter the rent that you get paid uh when the event occurs. If you think that the rent, if you think that the event is a probability as opposed to a possibility, the rent that you get paid is so extraordinary that the holding cost of maintaining a position for a year, a year and a half or two years in anticipation becomes negligible uh absolutely negligible. Now I need to say that when the junior the high quality junior stocks a year and a half, two years ago were really roundly hated, you know, when the Vislas, the Abbras, the IAS, stocks that looked to me to be virtually certain to make, you know, become economic. When those stocks were hated, uh, I already owned positions in all of them from a geological point of view. But I added more from a financial point of view. Uh I thought when the hate dis dissipates, these stocks are going to absolutely have a bounce. That turned out to be true. A and the stock that I bought as a consequence of my believing that they were hated, I'm giving back to the market now. Uh the reason to own that stock has gone away. And for me, the stock has to go away. That doesn't mean I'm selling my core positions in those stocks. I'm not selling my core positions. But I added stock uh in excess of what constituted a reasonable core position for me. Uh and that stock's being sold. And now a quick break to hear from our sponsor. Arc Silver Gold. Obium owner. Ian Everard is considered one of the most honest and levelheaded gold and silver dealers in the United States. Praised even by his competitors. So give him a call today to take advantage of the specials right now. Silver kangaroos 2023 1oz coins mint fresh only $247 over spot. Mint fresh silver maple leaves 2025 coins 1 oz $2.87 over spot while supplies last. Reach out today at 3072649441 or by email at ianarchsgo.com and make sure to tell him that commodity culture sent you. And now back to the interview. Well, let's dive a little deeper into the gold and silver mining sector because if we look year to date, uh we've seen excellent performance from both the GDX and the SIL ETFs, both up over 60% massively outperforming gold and silver and completely smashing all three major indices, the NASDAQ, S&P 500, and the Dow Jones. Clearly, it looks like to me the precious metals miners are in a clear bull trend. Um, my question is, what inning do you think we're in here? If I had to guess, uh, three. Uh, but remember the seventh inning stretch. Uh, as long as we're using the baseball parliament, uh, I remember well the decade of the 70s. Uh, and I remember that there were at least three punctuations uh, where the gold market uh, declined by 20 25% or more. I remember one epoch, if that's the right phrase, 1975 where the gold quote fell by half. Um, investors who are going to participate in this gold bull market or precious metals bull market, and I suggest that they do, need to study history. They really truly need to study history. In the very near term, uh, I wouldn't be surprised if this market's overbought. Uh the anti-us dollar trade uh the anti-Trump trade is an extremely crowded trade. Uh the momentum is evidence of the fact it's a crowded trade. The fact that uh leadership has changed from gold to the senior gold stocks confirms that we are in a real bull market. But the bull market may in the very near term be overbought and you are seeing money not creeping but rather cascading uh down the quality trail. Uh you are seeing private placements that would have gone begging two years from now being oversubscribed. you're seeing uh investors of the caliber of Eric Sprat and Rick Rule getting cut back in private placements. Uh this is not an underc capitalized market anymore. So in the very near term a couple other observations um there's a lot of liquidity in the market uh and riskoff assets tech stocks gold stocks uh are moving very well. The VIX uh the graph of the VIX looks like the electroc cardiogram of a corpse. There's no fear in the market. Uh, so I think you needed to keep that in mind. What would put the gold market on steroids would be a major interest rate cut in the United States. That would signify to investors and savers worldwide that American society reflected by American politicians had no interest in maintaining the sanctity of the US dollar. uh we saw that at the end of 1975 when you know through 1975 the political will of the United States was to deal with inflation by raising the interest rate. We did that. Cratered the gold price, knocked it off by half, also cratered the Dow, cratered housing starts, uh, obliterated the long bond market, and Congress lost their nerve, uh, and the Fed at the end of 1975, uh, instituted a major major reduction in interest rates. That set off a romp in the bull market and gold. Gold went from $100 to $850. My suspicion is if you saw a major interest rate cut in the US or a series of smaller cuts, then the game would be on an earnest. And would you be able to give us some names, some highquality names in the gold and silver mining space that you think could outperform up ahead? And and for the time being, perhaps we can set aside the best of the best, your Weeden precious metals, your Franco Neadas, your your the big ones, the Numont Barracks, Agniko Eagles, and maybe down to the developer space. um obviously with the caveat that it requires a lot of due diligence on the part of investors and speculators to determine if if these are worthwhile speculations, but perhaps you could shed some light on some companies that you think might outperform up ahead in the gold and silver mining space. Well, first of all, I'm not going to set aside the best of the best uh despite the fact that they may or may not be in of interest to your subscribers. portfolios need to be con need to be constructed primarily of the best of the best. Uh and there is a lot of room left in those stocks. Uh I would suggest with Agniko as an example that development pipeline suggests that it can grow like a junior. But since you've asked me to set it aside, I will set it aside having not set it aside. Your subscribers need to compose their pime their portfolio primarily of high quality names. There's no particular sense in being right about the narrative and taking too much risk in stock selection. Um but uh coming down the quality trail, there's a whole bunch of places, literally a whole bunch of places that you can go. uh you can look for companies as an example G mining where they have definable competitive advantages where they're selling at a reasonable price relative to their existing producing assets but where they are virtually certain to grow. uh if the market doesn't reward that company, that company will be taken over. This is a cost of capital game. And so if the value arbitrage like Rick Rule don't begin to look at the highquality developers, the G minings of the world, the Emeralds of the world, where their development pipelines are looking like Agniko Eagle's pipelines but in smaller fashion, and where the management team has definable competitive advantages. uh if the value arbitrageers don't up the prices of those companies, other companies will take them over. That will happen. Uh so, you know, those are those are two names that I could mention. Uh another timehonored uh way to make money as money flows down the quality trail in mining is to look for the turnarounds. Uh one name that comes to mind immediately is Equinox. Uh it looks like Ross Bey has worn has exhausted his patience in Equinox. It would appear as though the CEO has been allowed to pursue other employment opportunities. Uh it would appear too that their Hard Rock deposit in Canada is finally reaching stride a year late and a couple hundred million late, but it's happening. Uh the last quarter was pretty attractive. If that's true, uh, and if the Marathon deposit comes, uh, into production, sort of on time, sort of on budget, uh, that will affect a turnaround, uh, in Equinox, uh, a company that's really truly in the penalty box. That in turn will allow uh whoever Ross anoints uh in the company leadership. It will allow them to sell those fileos which they need to do. Uh they can't operate in West Mexico. Ross is going to hate me for saying this but that those assets need to be operated by somebody who can do what you have to do in the local community in western Mexico. uh probably enable them if they want to to sell a California assets. Uh they very very very recently got fasttrack permitting for Castle Mountain which is an important step in California. But Ross would be able I think with ramped up Canadian production to get rid of his higher cost, more marginal operations and then focus on a new acquisition. That's what Ross does. Ross starts a story with fairly low quality assets which he throws capital at uh and increases the profitability of. He uses that as a base to acquire higher quality assets. When he does it, he sells the lower quality assets. He monetizes them and continues to upgrade his quality. I watched him do it with Luminina and he'll do it here. So that's that's the sort of a name uh somebody could look to. Uh I I want to talk about the uranium sector next because uranium equities continue to do what they do best and that is be extraordinarily volatile. We do now seem to have an added tailwind of the Trump administration pledging to ramp up nuclear energy as well as domestic uranium mining. I want to read you a tweet from the US Department of Energy. They said, "America has the uranium, the expertise, and the innovation to lead the nuclear renaissance, investing in next-gen reactors that are safer and stronger to uphold US energy dominance." Interesting statement there. I don't know if they're talking about small modular reactors or what because reactors are already extraordinarily safe, but I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this renewed push for domestic uranium and nuclear energy generation in the United States and just any thoughts you have on the uranium market at present as well. Bought a lot of uranium stocks probably a year ago when you were interviewing me because they were hated. They're not hated anymore. So like the silver juniors, the uranium juniors that I bought during a period of hate, I've been selling uh and I've been delighted with the uh renaissance in popular opinion for uranium stocks. You know, frankly, it's made me millions, which is nice. Um as to the federal nexus, uh 5 years ago, a guy like me was vilified. People on Twitter thought that I should be jailed for speculating in uranium. Now these morons want to subsidize me. Uh, I felt cleaner when I was being persecuted than I do when I'm being subsidized. On the face of it, uh, that statement is ridiculous. Uh, America has the uranium. We have a collection of tier 2 deposits that's going to work because our cost of capital is going to go sub-zero because the voters are dumb enough to subsidize us. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't speculate on the stupidity of voters. Uh that's a constant uh and one is wise to speculate on constants but you need to look behind the narrative at deposit that will generate substantial free cash flow at today's uranium price with a lower cost of capital. uh the fact the voter is stupid, which is demonstrable, is one thing, but that stupidity won't be applied equally uh across a bunch of hopefuls. There's now probably 30 companies that purport to be in the uranium business in the US. There are probably four that are viable. Uh there may be a couple of the pretenders who get lucky or get smart uh and ascend to the viable ranks, but right now I would suspect that the viable ranks are four out of 30. Uh your subscribers who aren't uh skilled enough to segregate between the good, the bad, and the ugly are going to lose a lot of money. Uh a lot of money. Uh yes, I think the United States has the ability to affect some form of economic renaissance in the United States, not by subsidizing uranium production, but rather by admitting that nuclear power is the cheapest base load power in the world that doesn't generate carbon. And the United States is very right to mobilize its remaining technical skill sets uh to get out of the way uh to allow this to occur. In truth, the best uranium technology in the world now isn't American technology. The Canadians, Kamico, bought Westinghouse uh and co-opted what was in effect Japanese technology. So the best uranium technology in the world is now Canadian technology. We need to understand that. But I suspect that the size of the US market and the weight of the stupidity of the US treasury uh will mean that Kamico will be very willing to share that technology with the high bid, which will certainly be the US. Well, there are far less uranium stocks out there to sift through than the gold space, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's any easier to find ones with great potential. Can you share some companies that you think could have a bright future in the sector? Uh are you still bullish on Kamako at these prices KazadMrom and then down to the development space? What what do you see right now that looks good? I'm still very bullish on Kamico despite a fantastic run. My concern with Kamico and I expressed that uh in an interview that you did with me on behalf of uh VRIC uh was their takeover of Westinghouse. It wasn't clear to me that the mining company management was capable of running an engineering firm and the first two quarters financials reflected that. It turned out that they were writing down everything they could in the Westinghouse acquisition. Uh and the last three quarters have been spectacular. So it would appear that this integration is going to work. And if this integration works, you get a brand new Camo. Uh you get somebody who yes is a uranium miner, but they're really selling watts. Uh that's a real transformation. That's real margin if it occurs. So yes, I'm very very bullish Kamako. I'm less bullish cuz Adam Prom uh which I really liked 5 years ago. I'm less bullish about Kazadam Prom because for reasons unbeknownst to me the middle managers in Kamako who I held in extremely high regard have left Kazadam Prom you mean right? Yes. Kazadam Prom. What did I say? I'm sorry. Kamako. Yeah. Yeah. Kazadam Prom. There's been a real upheaval in middle management. uh and those were very very high quality people. I'm not sure why they left. There's a lot of speculation. I don't know. So I won't speculate. What I will say is their failure to restore effective production in Kai uh and the upheaval in middle management has caused me to rethink my Kazadam Prom uh position and it's gone. uh it was my largest uranium position and I took the money sideways from Kazatapramama to Kamako. Uh I suspect given the strength in Kamako that I wasn't the only one who made that swap. In terms of playing the US game, uh maybe you look at energy fuels uh which has uh a permitted operating processing plant and importantly 60 million tons of approved tailings uh and has made substantial investments in uh rare earth's processing as well as uranium processing. That's a name I own some stock in. I I need to admit I'm less familiar with their technology than I should be. But a good friend of mine, Dave Wargo, is more familiar, and he's talked me into his point of view. Uh I'm a very large shareholder of uranium royalty, uh which is selling at the lowest multiple of price to book of any of the US- ccentric producers. uh and I would suggest on a valuation basis and also because the royalty and streaming business is such a good business that people who want to play the uranium theme in the in the United States consider uh uranium resources. The best constituency in the US uranium business is UEC. Uh Amir Adnani has worked for 25 years and probably spent a hund00 million building a 100,000 shareholder constituency at UEC and there's no constituency is interested in hearing good news as an existing shareholder. So that stock is extremely sensitive to setup about uranium. It's also a $4 billion market cap. uh I own it as a consequence of my fondness for air and the fact that I've sold enough stock that the rest of my stock is for free. I have no basis in it. Uh and I own it because of the constituency around uranium uh which I think will be fed good news and will respond to it. Well, you mentioned previously being reviled for investing in uranium and now the tables have kind of turned where the world is embracing nuclear. I think one area where we can still be reviled is the oil and gas space. Um, one that continues to look tremendously undervalued in my view, WTI crude. I haven't checked today. Yesterday it was at $63 a barrel or 6375 somewhere around there. A lot of the equities seem to keep getting hammered. Many people I speak with think we're in for a global recession and are calling for a sub$50 WTI price. And it feels like one of the most hated. I don't even know if it's hated. It's just forgotten. People don't even talk about it anymore. It's funny. I used to do interviews with oil and gas experts on this channel and I stopped because nobody would watch the episodes. Um, is the oil and gas space a contrarian's dream right now or is some caution to be warranted? I think it depends on the speculator uh or the investor. It's odd. You know, when I was young, Jesse, and I had lots of time left on Earth, I didn't have much patience. Now that I'm old and I don't have much time left on Earth, I have a lot of patience. It isn't because my time preference has changed. It's just because being an investor for 50 years has taught me that things take time. I sincerely hope that the oil price goes below $50 a barrel. I sincerely hope that there's investor capitulation in the oil space because although I don't need to make more money, I like to make more money. Uh, and the shest bet I know of is that peak oil demand doesn't occur in 2030 or 2032. It occurs in 2065 or 2070. What that means is that the fat tail on net present value calculations in the oil business has been discounted to zero. It's worth a lot more than zero. A lot more than zero. Now, the weakness in the oil price against flat production would seem to tell me, I'm no economist, but it would seem to tell me that we're not uh staring at a recession, that we're in the early stages of one. Uh oil is even more economically sensitive than copper, and it isn't sensitive to perception. It's uh it's reactive to reality. You will recall uh in the early days of the COVID event when air traffic and automobile traffic fell off the table that the oil price fell from $85 a barrel to briefly subzero. Uh that's an economic response because the stuff is cheap and it doesn't store particularly well. When you produce it, you sell it because you can't afford to store it. And I think that the oil quote that you're seeing today and the weakness uh particularly in Ako uh Alberta gas prices is a function of the fact that demand for energy which is very economically sensitive is weaker than we expect. Uh and it could be weaker still. I also believe that the American oil and gas industry is probably selling at half the net present value of their uh demonstrated cash flows from reserves and resources and that the Canadian industry sells at a discount to the American industry. Uh I'm a very large holder of things like Exxon to a lesser extent Chevron and accidental Devon and Equitable in the US. uh and uh unrealistically large shareholder uh of a basket of Canadian oil stocks. I say unrealistically large because for them to succeed uh would require the leadership of Canada who is anti- oil to get out of the way. In other words, I'm betting against the venality of politicians. Um, probably a really stupid bet on my part, but they're so cheap. The Arc Energies of the world, the Freehold royalties of the world, the Tormolines, the POS, the Birch Cliffs. Uh, they're so cheap that I can't not own them. I hope I I hope uh and I own millions of dollars worth of this stuff. I hope they fall in price by 50%. uh at 72 years of age, uh I would love a no risk, no-brainer fivebagger that paid me substantial dividends while I waited. Uh and that's what the oil industry feels like to me if the oil equities have another price decline. There's history around this. Uh Jesse, I remember back to the uh late 1980s, early 1990s, uh the last time that people thought that oil would never catch a bid. And a bunch of the Canadian juniors had financed themselves in the junk bond market. And the quotes on these things just fell apart. They absolutely fell apart. I remember Mark Mark Resources I think was the name of it had a 5-year bond, you know, unrated junk bond. Uh the cover yield was 12%. Remember, this is a higher interest rate environment and the bond was selling at 60 with three years left to maturity. So my running yield was 18%, my yield to maturity was more like 30%. And you could buy that bond all day long. The bond was extremely well covered by proved developed producing reserves, but the sentiment in the oil and gas space was so bad and the sentiment in the junk bond space in the aftermath of the Drexel blow up was so bad that they were giving this bond away. Uh, and I I would love to see a circumstance like that again. You mentioned you were betting against the politicians in Canada. What are your thoughts so far since Mark Carney has taken office? Are are you optimistic concerning the oil and gas business? Obviously, he's a businessman first, I think, and he's a politician second, and he has all of these grandiose ideas about, you know, reducing carbon emissions and all of these types of things. But, but when Pencil comes to paper, do you think he's going to get out of the way, as you say, of the oil and gas business? I would question he's a businessman first. Uh, he was CEO of Brookfield. If he was a businessman, he would have stayed in business. I think he's a politician first. I think he's accomplished everything that he feels he can accomplish without coercion. Uh I think his worldview now requires him to be coercive. Uh it requires the power of the state. At Brookfield, he had to convince bankers. He had to convince customers. He had to convince shareholders. as the prime minister of Canada, he can coersse. Uh if you're interested in power, uh coercion is much more persuasive uh than convincing people. Uh he has said, I mean, you can't know what he's going to do really until he tables a budget. He's a very smart guy, so he's decided not to table a budget. He's also a very smart guy in the sense that after a decade uh of being the power behind the throne in the Liberal Party, he ran on a campaign of change. Uh that irony shouldn't have been lost on anybody. And he's also lucky. Uh lucky is a great trait in a politician. Uh he got to run against Trump. Now, I wasn't in Canada. I didn't see the ballot, but I don't suspect that Trump was on the ballot. But Carney was smart enough uh to run against the Liberals, although he was a liberal and run against Trump who wasn't running against him. He has said that he will be pragmatic, that Canada must build. And the industry that Canada is most competitive in on a global basis is oil and gas. That doesn't mean Canadians aren't good bankers. They aren't. Or good miners. They are. But the truth is that their most globally competitive industry is the oil and gas industry. So if you take Carne at his word that Canada is going to be pragmatic and build on its strengths, if you believe that he needs the industry to be healthy so he can steal from it to fund his agenda, then you can be bullish on oil. If you look, however, at some of the other things Mr. Carney said which is that all of his financial decisions will be predicated on carbon. You need to be much more cautious. Uh much much much more cautious. Uh, I am suspending political judgment for now and I'm buying names in the Canadian oil and gas business because the valuations, the reserves and the resources a and the recycle ratio, the ability to discover more reserves and resources on the margins generated by existing production is so strong uh so strong I can't help myself. My greed overwhelms my fear and I may get punished for that. That was a great summary. Now, before I let you go, I do have to get your thoughts on all of these additional tariffs coming online, the implications of the tariffs so far, all of this flip-flopping from the Trump administration on, okay, we're going to delay the tariffs again, we're going to delay them again. A lot of people, you know, are calling this the art of the deal. I think at this point uh it's become clear that that perhaps there's either some confusion in the Trump administration or I I don't know what's happening at this point. There's some people out there, some who I've had on the show who think Trump is playing 4D chess and I've even had some people allude to the fact that he's actually way more intelligent than he seems and he's putting on an act as a way to manipulate and get his way. I wonder what your thoughts are on the current trajectory of the Trump administration and the tariff policies that they're implementing and the the ways that it could potentially affect inflation in the United States for your average consumer out there. Well, more intelligent than he seems is a low bar. Uh let's get out there. Uh any of your listeners who are interested in Mr. Trump actually should do themselves a favor and read his book, The Art of the Deal. In the art of the deal, he lays out his ethos and his game plan completely. There's no discussion in the art of the deal that a transaction should be a win for both parties. Uh I built my business by offering more utilities to my consumers than I charged them for it, which meant that I had returned customers for 50 years. If I made mistakes, uh uh I was given some tolerance because I added value in other places. That's Mr. Trump's That's not Mr. Trump's ethos. And Mr. Trump doesn't have an ideology. When he was a New York property developer, he was a Democrat because that's what you had to do to get projects built. Uh he said himself that if he ever became a politician, he would become a politician because you could tell lies that reflected the frustrations of an audience on Fox and they would believe the lies. He said that uh and he's acted on it. Mr. Trump doesn't have an ideology particularly and I don't mind that particularly but he's completely transactional and the tariffs are a wonderful place to be transactional. The tariffs can be implemented in the reality of American politics right now by executive decree. They don't need to go through Congress. Which means that Mr. Trump can use them to reward his friends and punish his enemies. The reason that it's difficult to predict what he's going to do is because you aren't present in the meetings. You don't have the ability. If you go back to the old HL Min quote that elections are advanced auctions of stolen property. Uh that's a wonderful way by the way to understand politics. Uh the difficulty that you and I have is that we don't know who the high bid is. Uh and the high bid can change. Um, the other thing to know is that terrorists are taxes. Uh, and from my point of view, taxes suck. Anything that benefits the state at the expense of the citizen is a bad thing. Um, the tariffs are bad policy, but good politics. You can reward your constituency and the rewards can be very focused but the penalties are diffuse. Uh they're diffused among all consumers as an example. Um this is I would suggest to you an unaloyed sin. That doesn't mean by the way the fact that I dislike Mr. Trump so much. Uh it doesn't mean uh that I liked Biden or Harris. Um I would much rather that Jesse look after Jesse's family. Um I don't think that assigning responsibility for your future is a wise thing to do. And people who are fond of Carney or Biden or Trump are precisely uh assigning responsibility for their future to people who are proven to be venal enemies of theirs. Yeah, I completely agree with you on that point. I mean there is no political party that I can support and and so just one final question I have for you and this is maybe a bit more of a philosophical one. We probably lost some people already when we started talking about Trump. But what what do you think the ultimate solution is, if there is one at all? Is it the complete abolishment of government altogether? It is is it a much smaller government? Is it a a community-based government where the citizens have a much more say? What What is the solution here to this absolutely rampant corruption and incompetency? I feel like we live in a global cacistocracy, which basically means the worst of the worst are the people who find themselves in power. Is there a tenable solution to to this problem? Probably too young to remember the whole earth catalog. Uh it was a hippie publication that sold tools to exist more on your own. And there was a wonderful headline there. It said, "Workers of the world disperse. take off on the old uh you know socialist uh slogan workers of the world unite, workers of the world disperse. Uh I think that the uh answer in the very near term is to become as independent of the state as you can. Uh not independent enough that as an example you stop paying taxes and get thrown into jail. I mean I'm all for stopping paying taxes if you can get away with it, but it's a very very very risky strategy. Uh but I think a circumstance where you do as an example what you did where you expatriate uh my friend Doug Casey said 40 years ago uh your ass your assets and your passport ought to have three different loces. I haven't followed that but I have legally exported a lot of my capital as an example and I've organized a lot of my investment portfolio uh in an insurance company where because I don't dividend it and I don't salary it uh and I use realistic as opposed to industry standards um loss reserves uh I minimize the tax I pay and I think people need to do that. I think in particular, however, Jesse, that people need to look at what the next 10 years is going to bring them and they need to understand that the state is no longer being going to be able to afford to be benevolent. I believe that the US dollar will lose 75% of its purchasing power over the next 10 years, the same way that it lost 75% of its purchasing power in the decade of the 1970s. And what that means is that people who are my age who haven't been as lucky as I have, people who are relying on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to fund their retirement have to rethink it. Uh the nominal level of benefits that you get today will continue, but they'll inflate away the net present value of those benefits. So if you're getting $4,000 a month on Social Security or whatever the number is, you're going to keep getting it. But four years from now, or pardon me, 10 years from now, that $4,000 is going to buy you $800 or $1,000 worth of goods and services. I think it's important that people understand that. I think it's important that people your age need to understand that my generation voted ourselves all kinds of cool benefits, but we forgot to pay for them. So, you all get the bill. Um, and I think that that realization will probably over time do a very good job of reducing the aura of legitimacy that government enjoys today, but it's going to take a while. You remember that it took the decade of the 70s uh to bring in the Reagan revolution. Now, the Reagan revolution ended up not being a revol a revolution, which is to say they didn't succeed in cutting the size of government, but they did put in place an ethos that constrained the growth of government all the way through the first four years of the Clinton administration. The realization through the decade of the 70s that government was evil uh is something that constrained the growth of government for 12 years beginning 1980. uh and that allowed the private economy to grow fast enough to reflat the state. Uh and I suspect that's what happens this time. I suspect that we have a 10-year reckoning which will damage substantially the perception of government that we'll have the same sort of economic reckoning coming out of this next 10 years that will reduce the importance of the state uh and reallow private initiative uh in the same manner that private initiative was allowed allowed in the decade of the 80s and the early part of the decade of the 90s. Uh at least that's my hope. Very fascinating. Yes. And and it's interesting to note that all of the political discourse online that I seem to see when it comes to places like X, which it should be admitted are basically a a cauldron for for people to to emit their rage have been my party versus your party, this politician versus this politician. very few people actually wake up and say, "Hey, maybe everybody sucks that we're talking about here and we should think about, you know, removing ourselves as much as possible, as you've been mentioning, from their power and their control." Uh, Rick, this has been a fantastic conversation as always. Tell us about rule investment media, battle bank, and where people can get a hold of the replay videos from the recent rule symposium. Thank you for all of that. Um rule investment media first uh rule investment media is a community of 90,000 people. Uh the initial function for you of rule investment media is that if you care about the way I think about natural resource companies, you can personalize it. If you go to the website ruleinvestmentmedia.com and you list your natural resource stocks, I will for free, no obligation, rank them 1 to 10, one being best, 10 being worst. I'll comment on individual issues like I did today if I think my comments might have value. Understand there's no cost, there's no obligation to this. So, of course, because there's no cost, it comes with an absolute ironclad money back guarantee. Uh the second function is my educational function, my paid for educational function. Every 90 days at the rule classroom, we do a boot camp, a deep dive on one topic or another. And when I say deep, I mean deep, a very dense 8-hour drive. Uh, we've done uranium, we've done silver. We're in the in the middle of a three-part series on gold right now. These are $99 to attend. They do have an ironclad money back guarantee. If you think for any reason we didn't earn the tuition that we charge you, just tell us so and we'll refund your money. If you're the kind of person who buys the Sunday paper to do the crosswords and the funnies, don't come. Uh this is eight hours of very dense, very applied education. If you don't want to work, if you're if your speculative technique has got a hunch bet a bunch, just don't come to the boot camp. Once a year, we do a big conference. Uh this year, well over 2,000 people attended between live and live stream. This is also a paid for event. Uh, we've been doing it for 30 years. We do a pretty good job of it. And it comes with a money back guarantee. We give you 55 hours of programming in 4 days. More than you can absorb by far. I put on the conference and I have to play play the recordings. Those recordings are available to the people who attended the conference after the conference, but they're available to everybody else too for a fee after the conference. Uh, once again, 100% money back guarantee. uh we had over 2,000 paid attendees this year. So far, two people have asked for their money back. So, uh given that given that the rate of people that felt unsatisfied was less than what 1/100th of 1%. Uh we feel like we're doing a pretty good job for our people. Those tapes are available. Uh and as I say, there's a full money back guarantee. What you won't get back is 55 hours of your life. Uh I put on the conference. uh I organize the speakers, I assign the topics, and I have to play the tapes. Uh so that'll tell you uh something about how much value they might offer somebody who's looking for uh a good education. I should say some things about the conference. Uh there's a lot of good conferences out there, including the one that you're part of, the VRIC. Uh I would say what's useful about our conference is first of all when we do global macro we don't have global macro being done by journalists or failed journalists. We have global macro being done by players. Uh David Stockman ran the office of management budget. Nobody can talk about the budget better than him. Nomi Prince was a partner at Goldman Shacks. She can talk about the intersection of Wall Street and Main Street because she lived there. Daniela D. Martino Booth talked about the Fed because she was a researcher at the Dallas Fed. Uh you get the point. We go on to analysts. Uh and these analysts aren't juniors from some second tier brokerage firm that finances the conference. Rather, they're portfolio managers who've spent three or four decades in natural resources through good markets and bad telling you what they did and how to do it. How how they did it. All of our exhibitors, public company exhibitors have to be owned in the accounts of the conference sponsors. So they're all vetted. That doesn't mean, Jesse, as you know, unfortunately, that because I own a stock, it goes up. But it does mean that the selection process was fairly rigorous. So for all of those reasons, for serious investors and serious speculators, uh, an investment in the recordings of the conference is a good investment, particularly because it comes with a money back guarantee. It's the only financially riskless transaction in mining. Where can people get those recordings? Two ways. You can go to rule investment media when you submit your uh stock portfolio and write in the question or comments recordings and I'll make sure that you get contacted or you can go to rule symposium 2024, pardon me, 2025 uh and uh sign up for the recordings and uh we'll happily sell them to you. Great. And quick plug for BattleBank before I let you go. Sure. Well, finally, uh, we're at the dawn of Battlebank. We tried, as you know, Jesse, for four years to get regulatory regulatory approval to start a new bank. We weren't alone. There's over 120 companies uh in application. Two got approved last year. Uh, which tells me something about what we needed to do. So, we bought a bank. Uh, we bought First National Bank of Oopsa, Minnesota. And rather than apply to start a bank, which we've now done, we're applying to inject a bunch of capital into an existing bank and change the business plan, we hope to get approval as early as next week. Uh then there'll be a sort of a 90-day shake-in period where we test the products and services of the bank with a few people like me who are forgiving who would be forgiving about operational failure and then we'll open the bank which is going to be great. uh you know, but many of your listeners don't, that we repeated a process that we started in 1999 where we built a bank called EverBank from 0 to$28 billion before we sold it to TIA CF. This bank will be in many ways similar. It won't have any branches except one in oops, Minnesota. The consequence of no branches is that our non-interest expenses will be low and we can pass those on to you as a depositor. Uh unlike all of our banking competitors, uh we will have one high yield money market account with no fees and we'll pay you interest on your checking. If you're interested in interest, which you should be, you should think about BattleBank. Uh in addition, our IRA product, our retirement product, like the Canadian RSP, will actually be your IRA. Most IAS are receptacle for Wall Street products, annuities, mutual funds, stuff like that. In our IRA, you can own a duplex or a triplex. You can buy a franchise. You can invest in crypto. You can invest in private equity without Trump says so. Uh your IRA becomes your IRA. Uh and then finally, uh on the asset side of the ledger, uh mercifully for me, uh none of my competitors in American banking think gold and silver are good collateral, but I do. uh at Battlebank uh you will be able to access the capital that you have tied up in your gold and silver with a margin account so that as an example if you need money during a market downturn to buy a duplex or triplex for whatever purpose you can access that capital without selling your gold and silver and paying the capital gains tax. There's no requirement that you borrow. We can establish a line of credit. So there's no point in paying interest on capital that you're not using. when you need to use it, that capital will be available to to you. Uh I'm delighted to say there's almost 18,000 people on the waiting list. We would love to have uh new people on the waiting list. You can do that at battlebank.com. Great. Well, I'll put a link to that in the description as well as links to the Rule Symposium replay and Rule Investment Media. Rick, as always, it's it's been a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much. Pleasure. I look forward to seeing you at the VRIC if not sooner. Um, and thank you for the opportunity to visit. Thank you for joining us today. As a reminder, this episode is brought to you by Ark Silver Gold Osmium. Take advantage of their specials right now. Silver kangaroos 2023 1oz coins only $247. Over spot silver maple leaves 2025 1oz coins only $2.87 over spot while supplies last. Reach out to owner Ian Everard today at 307-264-9441 or by email at ianarchsggo.com. And make sure to tell him that Commodity Culture sent you. And make sure to pick up your Commodity Culture merch. We have hats, t-shirts, hoodies, and mugs. All backed by a 100% quality guarantee. Link is in the description below. And I'll see you guys in the next episode. Commodity Culture is a series on commodities and natural resources. If you would like to see more, be sure to subscribe and hit the bell notification so you're always up tod date with the latest episodes.