Transcription
Legendary mining investor Rick Rule still thinks there is tremendous opportunity in the silver space. We dive into both the metal and the miners and revisit his call at the start of the year to sell most of his physical silver and rotate the gains into the mining sector. Does he still think this was the right call?
We also talk about gold and Prime Minister Modi asking his citizens in India to stop buying gold. What is this all about? Is confiscation coming next?
We dive into the energy spaces. There's still opportunity in oil and gas after WTI crude has skyrocketed in the aftermath of the Iran war. All of this and so much more in this master class with Rick Rule.
Rick Rule, it is great to have you back on Commodity Culture. Now, last time I had you on the show was late January and we discussed how you'd sold a good portion of your physical silver and rotated a lot of that capital into the silver mining sector. Now if we look year to date at the performance of silver versus the SIL ETF the miners have barely outperformed the metal. Now it should be in what the the audience of course is well aware we are talking right now on uh Friday May 15th silver taking a major hit down nearly 8% on the day. Would love to get your overall thoughts on on the silver space at present um and and how you feel about silver versus silver miners.
I still feel better about silver miners than silver. Understand at the time that silver was a speculative part of my portfolio. Not an investment part, not a savings part, but a speculative part. And silver had given me everything I wanted. I'm delighted to say that I've done better in the silver stocks than the silver index. Uh perhaps 50 years of experience is finally counting for something. And so in my own personal circumstance, my investment in the silver stocks has substantially outpaced uh the silver market and I guess the silver equities market too. How that works out to going forward in the near term, I can't say. What I can tell you is this. At the time I made the decision, it appeared to me that if the silver price went up, the silver stocks would go up, too. If the silver price went sideways, the silver stocks were discounting $42 an ounce silver in a $75 price environment. So, they could provide some shelter for me. And if the price went down, the same circumstance applied. Uh, arithmetically, it was a very good speculation. As luck would have it, it turned out to be factually a good speculation for me, too. Uh I continue to believe that uh the silver stocks itself represent better speculative outcomes than physical silver.
Note that my own portfolio is different than many of the portfolios of the people who are listening and they might want to organize their outcome differently. I have substantial physical gold holdings uh as a savings asset. So I don't need to own more physical precious metals of any type. I have substantial investment holdings and I have substantial speculative holdings. People who don't have precious metals in their portfolio, particularly people of a more speculative bent should absolutely consider physical silver in the part of my portfolio that silver occupied. Uh, it was less appropriate to continue to own physical silver than it was for me personally to diversify more money into the silver equities. Note too that some of the money that I spent uh from the proceeds of my silver sales went into physical gold uh which hasn't done particularly well, but it was a savings asset. And 25% of it went into oil and gas stocks, which for reasons I hadn't forecast did extraordinarily well.
>> Well, we're definitely going to get into the oil and gas sector later. I'd love to get your thoughts though on the draw down in silver and related equities today. Like I said, silver down almost 8%. some of the equities. First, Majestic almost 9%. Pan-American Silver also down around 7% on the day. You're a very long-term thinker. You often joke about how most investors can't even hold a portfolio over a long weekend. So, I wonder if you could maybe give us some perspective. Is this just another day in the in the natural resource space?
>> Yeah, you know, I'm a very long very long holder, very large holder of Pan-American Silver, and you talk about it being down uh 7% in a day. I guess you need to say compared to what uh I acquired my first shares in Pan-American Silver at 50 cents with a 75cent warrant and the idea that that stock is down to me uh is laughable. Uh it truly is laughable. Uh to be honest with you, I haven't looked at a Pan-American quote today uh it's literally uh day-to-day performance an irrelevancy for me. I attend the Pan-American quarterly conference calls. Uh I study religiously their balance sheets and their income statements. Uh I uh correspond frequently with their management team. Uh the relationship between price to value in Pan-American in 2027 is much more important to me than the price quote today. I realize that many people either aren't able to or can't afford to have the patience that I have, but I would suspect that the reason that I've been successful in public markets is precisely because of the rigor with which I do my work and the patience that I exhibit with my holdings.
>> Great answer. And and I think more people need to be focused on the long term. I feel like social media is kind of pushing people towards a short-term mentality. Now u I I want to get on to silver's value as a strategic metal but coming top of mind at the moment because this is all over social media and we're seeing it live bond yields rising significantly the US 20year and 30-year now over 5% many analysts uh pointing out that perhaps that could be a danger zone and perhaps we could see an unraveling of the credit market a bond market crisis are are you watching uh yields on government debt right now does it have you concerned would love to get your take.
>> I sure am. Uh, you know, Jesse, you know more than others that at heart I'm a credit analyst and I'm a banker. A and interest studying interest rates is important for many reasons. The first reason is that it's an indicator of the interplay between government and the economy. Uh, you need to know that interest rates as they exist today are fake. They're manipulated by the government. They're not not set by a free exchange between buyers and sellers. When you have a government like the US government or the Canadian government for that matter that is trying to artificially depress interest rates which the US government is actively trying to do and they can't do it, it's telling you something. Uh it's telling you that inflationary expectations in the private market is um overcompensating or or is compensating at least for the efforts to artificially lower interest rates which is to say that the market is beginning to assert control uh over the long term uh over long term o over the price of capital in the long term. That tells us that we need to be more concerned about inflation than the government would prepare us would prepare us to be. It also uh gives us fornowledge of things that might be happening in the economy. Rising interest rates increase the cost of capital uh and as a consequence often depress returns on capital employed. Uh, if debt costs companies more money, the amount of money left over after interest charges is smaller. So return on capital, return on equity falls as interest rates rise. Uh, a second problem is that money disintermediates from yieldtoriented equities to bonds uh as the bonds have higher yields which tends to depress equities prices over time. most concerning at present in conjunction with uh increasing gates as an example on uh private credit funds uh and uh weakness appearing in junk debt markets is the potential impact that higher interest rates might have on credit markets and investor confidence. Uh Jesse, I talked to you in an interview before about my greatest fear, uh which would be that uh higher interest rates or poor underwriting would cause a lack of confidence among retail holders of high yield ETFs. uh and if we had a situation where those high yield ETFs which are very liquid at the structure level but own highly liquid assets if you ever had a run which is to say if ma and paw investors became concerned about enough about credit that they began to liquidate the high yield ETFs and those high yield ETF managers had to liquidate the illquid bonds that they hold then you're talking about a circumstance like 2008 I'm not saying that we're heading into 2008. I don't even think it's a probability, but it's a possibility and the penalty for being wrong is extraordinary and people need to take that variable into account.
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Let's circle back to silver. The strategic element uh is being more and more recognized. Of course we saw the US adding it to the critical minerals list. Now, China restricting exports as of the beginning of this year, as well as, according to Bloomberg, importing the most silver in a single month ever in March of this year. Why do you think China has such a focus on silver? Is this more of an industrial side or is this a monetary is it a mix of both? And and do you think strategic demand for silver could be a major driver of the price up ahead?
>> The Chinese believe that it could. Uh silver is unique in that it's simultaneously an industrial material and historically a form of money. The Chinese government to their credit has been encouraging private ownership of gold and silver. Uh historically, well, not historically, but in recent memory, uh the communists didn't want folks to buy gold or silver because they thought that it uh competed with government bonds, which they preferred people to buy. The Chinese government now has enough confidence that they're trying to encourage uh citizen savings in all forms, including gold or silver, which is admirable. The Chinese understand too that silver is an important component uh in their industrial engine. The Chinese are the largest producers by a country mile of solar panels which refle which which rely on the reflective properties of silver. Silver is also important in electronics and micro electronics and is becoming increasingly important as a germicide in applications like uh water purification and pollution control. the consequence of that uh and the Chinese understanding that there is a uh supply deficit which is to say we're using more silver than we're producing I think has caused them to understand that they need increasingly large domestic stocks of silver which they are increasing because America's industrial engine is substantially smaller uh I think our government believes that they have adequate supplies of silver rather to relative to the size of our industrial base which is probably accurate given the shrinking nature uh of our industrial base and I'm not a fan of government policy irrespective of its American policy or Chinese policy I'd prefer that they left our policy decisions to ourselves you and I so that we could express our own preferences that notwithstanding uh my preferences won't ever be expressed specifically uh the circumstance that you suggest I think is more background noise than reality. The intentions of the US government, as an example, expressed as policy preferences, uh are usually either exaggerations or lies, and I expect this one to be no exception. The statement by the Chinese that they were banning the exports leaves open the possibility of exports through official channels. In other words, if you are a private sector entity that's affiliated with the Chinese state, you get an export license. If you aren't, you don't. Uh this is a form of rent seeking uh the passing out of favors that's as old as government itself. And I don't expect that this will really impact the free flow of silver into and out of China. It will just control who gets paid for it. Uh remember Jesse uh the true definition of of an election from HL Min was that there were advanced auctions of stolen property. They conduct those auctions differently in China. That's all.
Yeah. Very well said. I want to dive a little bit into your methodology for evaluating silver mining equities because there's a much smaller list of pure play silver producers when we compare it with gold. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff and what knowledge specific to the silver mining sector do investors need to educate themselves on before they start picking individual stocks?
>> It's important for us for investors to understand at the beginning that silver miners are the least efficient producers of silver in the market. Recyclers are first. You take silver and turn it into silver. That's a pretty good business, you know. uh and then the base metals mining companies who produce silver as a byproduct as example from copper where their true costs to produce silver are really a function of separating the silver from the product stream. So the last in terms of efficiency are the silver miners and if you are do I if you are active in the least efficient part of the product cycle you have to be extremely efficient yourself to survive. uh BHP, as an example, producing silver as a byproduct, could see the silver price fall from $85 an ounce to $35 or $45 an ounce and would make very very very little difference in their silver output or frankly in the free cash flow from the copper mine. Uh a silver miner, a pure silver miner has a very different experience. So you absolutely possib positively to suggest to exist in the silver market in the long term need to be in the bottom quartile in terms of all in sustaining costs and you also need to be in the top quartile in return on capital employed which is to say efficiency is everything. Now, that's a difficult discipline to impose on yourself because in rising silver markets, the least efficient producers generate the best margin gains. Think about it. If you are making, let's say that you're silver, you're selling silver in today's market for 85 cents, uh, pardon me, $85 an ounce. And let's say just for fun that the silver price goes up to let's let's let's do it differently. Let's just suggest that you're a fairly high cost producer and the silver price goes up. Your margins which are small to begin with go up by a much greater percentage than they do for a more efficient producer. So during those periods when the silver price is advancing the market rewards the weakest competitor to survive over time you need to ignore the short-term market signals. The way that you actually make money over time is being existent and not being diluted out during weak uh pricing periods. speculators, traders, people who figure who people who believe that they're smarter than the rest of humanity uh can do okay as speculators buying inefficient companies uh in meltup circumstances. But most mortals, even mortals like myself who have studied and participated in the markets for 50 years, need to pay much more attention to efficiency and value than they do leverage the silver price.
>> Excellent words of wisdom. Now I I want to turn to the gold space and some very peculiar news coming out of India which is Prime Minister Modi imploring the Indian people to stop buying gold. Here's a quote from the independent. It says the prime minister urged citizens to refrain from buying gold for a year as the war puts pressure on foreign exchange reserves of the country. Now when a prime minister tells his citizens to refrain from buying gold for a year as the war puts at at that sets off alarm bells in my mind. What are your thoughts? What what is behind this? Is there really some desperate situation that Modi's trying to avoid the the collapse of of the the Indian bond market of of the Indian economy? It's why is he doing this? I'm I'm confused. And do you think confiscation could be next?
>> The Indian uh bond market will collapse under its own valition. Much of Mod's popularity has to do with increased liquidity in the Indian economy. much of it borrowed. Um, you know, what he's done in India, the near-term boom, is very reminiscent of what Erdogan did uh in the Turkish economy. And they're paying the price today. By the way, it's no different uh to what Trudeau did to the Canadian to the Canadian economy or to what Trump is doing to the American economy. Uh, I'm an old cynic now, but I suspect that uh that phrase, you can tell politicians are lying when their lips are moving, uh, applies to Mr. Modi today. Why on earth would anybody trust him? Why on earth would anybody heed his admonition to buy a financial product bonds which he's printing like mad and ignore a commodity which has protected Indian citizens from their government for a thousand years? You know Jesse this brings up an interesting circumstance. One of the quickest fastest growing uh parts of my database uh unlike the last 40 years ha has been young Indian female expats uh adherence to gold with disposable income. I understand now why, but I about three years ago got six of these young women together on a phone call so that I can understand who they were and how to serve them better given that they were an increasingly large number of my human database. And at one particular moment, a young woman from Sunnyvale, California said something very interesting to me. She said, "Mr. rule. You need to understand that we had developed, we Indians had developed a distrust in government long before you had a government." I think that speaks volumes to the probability of Mr. Mod's success. With regards to confiscation, I'm fairly close to the Ismiley Muslim community, active in Gujarat, where Mr. Mod's from and active uh in Dubai where I often invest and I was talking to some Gujarati well I would call them gold traders Mr. Modi would call them smugglers. Uh a difference in perspective I think. And I was asking them about the impact of excise taxes on gold in India. And my friend very earnestly said to me, I hope the excise tax goes up. And I said, why is that? And he says, because the excise tax to us is profit. The excise tax in India is or was then 12% on gold. and he said it costs us 2.5% in transportation fees and bribes to get that gold into India to the extent that the excise tax goes up all of that is our margin. Now what is the probability that a civilization conditioned by a thousand years of disrespect for government uh where the bor where the borders are porous enough that exchange can be evaded for 2 and a half% and where counterfeiting literally counterfeiting where the excess production by the government of their own currency and their own bonds is increasing at a breaknet pace what are the probabilities that the Indian citizenry are going to pay attention to this guy. I would suggest to you Jesse that the probability of that is nil.
>> I want to talk about the gold mining sector. Now the same pattern as with silver is taking shape when we look at the uh gold miners using the GDX ETF as a proxy barely outperforming gold itself this year. This is despite record earnings being reported by the big producers such as Dumont and Agneo Eagle. In fact, both stocks fell following record-breaking earnings. They're taking a big tumble today as well. I believe ANCO is down 6% something like that. Weed and precious metals is is taking a beating. Um, so would love to get your thoughts there. And of course the mainstream media at present continues to be completely clueless on why anyone should even own gold miners to begin with. Surely this has to reverse at some point. Are we still early when it comes to the gold mining space?
>> Yeah, I'm just delighted by all this. Uh you know, Jesse, at some point in time, I'm 73 years of age. at some point in time uh I'm going to stop buying this stuff and start selling it selling it. Uh and I'm delighted that the market that I'm going to sell to uh will have to buy from me because they haven't bought before me. I'm absolutely delighted with that. Uh I need to say we will need someone to sell to. Uh and I can see who those someone's without too much focus. Uh, I believe, and I may be wrong by the way, but I believe, and I've told you before, and I've told your audience before, that I believe the dollar will decline in terms of its purchasing power, its absolute purchasing power by 75% over 10 years. Has done a pretty good job since I started making that prediction, by the way. And if I'm right, by the way, that happened in the decade of the 70s. The US dollar, according to the Office of Management Budget, lost 75% of its value in 10 years. meaning that what bought you uh $1,000 worth of goods and services in 1970 cost you $4,000 in 1980. Uh not coincidentally, during that decade, the gold price ran 26fold. I don't believe that the gold price runs 26fold from here. It's already up almost 20fold from from the year 2000. But suffice it to say, uh I suspect that I suspect the nominal price of gold will do fairly well in the next 10 years. If I'm correct, uh, the earnings attributable to the gold mining sector will do very well. Very, very, very well. And what's interesting to that is that in terms of your entry point today, you aren't getting a great price, but you're getting a fair price. Buffett has taught us that paying a fair price for a great industry is a really good deal if the outlook for that industry is strong. And I see opportunities across the board. Uh I see risks too. Uh one risk is that we as gold investors conditioned by the idiotic performance of gold mining company managements 20 years ago uh have insisted that our companies be too parsimmonious with regards to their reinvestment of their own business insisting on share buybacks and higher dividends. This has come at a price. The industry is much more efficient than it used to be. It needed to be much more efficient than it used to be. But the industry has underinvested in terms of exploration and new project development. So we are going to fa face a problem in many companies with with declining output. Uh there's an opportunity there because the way the numonts of the world and the barracks of the world are going to deal with declining output output is to buy other gold miners. This is going to happen for sure. And it's not going to happen just from bigger companies taking over little companies. You're going to see more sideways mergers or smaller companies taking over even smaller companies or multi-asset producers taking over single asset producers. The acquisition the other day uh of Orla by Equinox is a prime example of this trend. uh companies that become bigger, have higher market capitalizations, have more trading liquidity and hence have a lower cost of capital as they uh encourage as an example ETF and index buying. This will occur really throughout the sector. If somebody pays attention to the equity prices of the gold mining companies on a Friday, God help them. You need to pay attention a to the relationship between price to value and b to the probability of those values increasing in the 2-year time frame or the 10-year time frame. One of the reasons why I'm not an aggressive buyer of gold equities today, given what I think they'll do, is the fact that I've been an aggressive buyer of gold equities for 10 years. I don't need more of them. Uh and if you think in that time frame then you begin to make money in the sector.
You know following on that line of thinking I've been saving in gold. Not just gold. I mean I've maintained liquidity in US dollars but I've been saving in gold since the year 2000. I reorganized much of my financial life in the year 2000. I had a sort of a come to Jesus meeting with myself in terms of how I allocated my time in capital. And as a way to sharpen my way of thinking, uh, I began every year to as as accurately as I could, so fairly roughly, calculate my net worth, my income, my expenses in gold rather than in dollars. And Jesse, if you do that, uh, you are struck by how cheap real estate is, by how cheap energy is, by how cheap health care and health insurance are, by how cheap groceries are. If you calculate those same expenditures in Canadian dollars or US dollars, you're struck by how expensive stuff is. And if you calculate that in gold terms, you're struck by how cheap that is. What's the variable? Easy. 25 years. That's the variable. So when people tell me today that the silver price fell as an example or the silver the patamean silver price fell by 7%. I say really it depends on the period of time over which you're calculating. And that's that's the variable that holds most investors and speculators back from the success that they might otherwise deserve.
Let's dive into the oil and gas sector here. An area you have a ton of experience in and have been consistently bullish on in our previous conversations. Now that WTI crude has soared into the triple digits following the start of the war in Iran and the closure of the straight of Hormuse, a lot of the equities performing very well in the aftermath of that as well. Would you still be deploying capital in the energy sector here or is some caution warranted in case things get resolved potentially poor moose opening again and perhaps that could send uh the the WTI price back to where it was before this whole debacle began.
>> It depends again on who you are. Uh if you don't have oil in your portfolio, get some. Get some. Separate and apart from the Straits of Hormuse and Jesse, we talked about this on your show before too. The oil industry has been underinvesting between a billion and two billion dollars a day in sustaining capital. That just got worse. Uh none of uh Iran, the UAE, uh Kuwait or Saudi is investing a lot right now in sustaining capital investment because they're using the money for other things, killing each other. Uh in addition to that, the oil industry needs to replace or repair all the facilities destroyed by war. What this means is that in 2029 or 2030 irrespective of the outcome in the Gulf uh that oil at least production will be in shorter supply because if you don't make sustaining capital investments you impede your ability to produce. Now your entry point could be a problem in the near term if peace breaks out in the Gulf and I dearly hope it does. those cargos which are stranded north of the Gulf that re that replenish world markets likely bring down the price of oil. Should another thing happen which I hope does uh should peace break out in the dispute between the the USSR or pardon me Russia and the Ukraine uh it would over time uh unleash the flow of Russian oil into world markets. that flow will be constrained because the Russians haven't been making sustaining capital investments either. They've needed the war. They've needed the money to maintain the domestic economy in the face of war. Uh but over time, uh that would increase supply. But no matter what we do, no matter what we do, the lack of sustaining capital investment and new project investment in the oil and gas market means that in the period 2029 2030, that's going to be a very very very uh good place to be. The big thinkers of the world of course told you for the last 15 years that peak oil demand would occur and there wouldn't be an oil market to worry about over 20ou after 2030. Uh, interestingly, uh, those same big thinkers revised their thinking a little bit. Now they say 2065. Sort of a big difference between 2030 and 2065. Now, I remember talking to you, I don't know, January or maybe it was even last year, talking about the fact that Exxon was a no-brainer. Now, understand Exxon was a no-brainer at 90 or $95. at $185. Uh it's a bit of a conundrum for somebody who already has oil and gas in their portfolio. Uh a second opportunity that we described at that point in time, uh I I talked about a basket of Canadian oil and gas companies saying that the only risk that you faced was really in Ottawa. And that risk remains, but the Canadian oil companies are cheaper by any metric than the American oil companies. They have a lot more undrilled locations. They have spectacular human resources up there, but they have a problem at the top. Uh, Mr. Carney, uh, I have chosen to studiously ignore the topline political risk and go for value. Time will tell whether that trust in the Canadian citizenry is misplaced.
>> Let's talk about uranium. Um, the equities have been incredibly volatile as of late. Again, I know this is going back to watching day-to-day price action and and instead focusing on the long-term trajectory of the sector, which I believe is very bullish. Um, but we have seen a whipsaw in volatility up double digits, down double digits the next day. Um, what do you think is causing this volatility in the sector and what are your overall thoughts at at uranium at present? Do you think there's still value there when it comes to the miners?
>> Uh, last question first. Yes. uh the biggest beneficiary economic beneficiary of the Gulf conflict will be uranium. Uh it's worthy to note that the French nuclear fleet, the fourth largest in the world, the Japanese nuclear fleet, the third largest in the world, were constructed largely in response to the Arab oil embargo of 1973. uh that event refocused nations who were not energy self-sufficient on the need for a fuel that was dense enough that it could be stored domestically uh to fuel domestic industry. Japan noted pointedly that they could store enough uranium in one warehouse to power Japan for 5 years. They obviously couldn't store that much oil, that much gas, that much coal, or certainly that much rainfall or wind. uh and that lesson has been painfully relearned by the entire world recently. Uh the upshot of that uh if you combine it with the um newfound political favor that uranium finds itself in as a consequence of being non-carbon generating means that the pace of new plant construction and in Japan uh the pace of uh restarts and even in places like the United States and France uh the deceleration uh of the deactivation of plants means that the uranium business is coming into a real true renaissance on top of what is already a production def uh deficit. If you merge that with the potential new demand coming from as an example data centers and in particular the implication of the market moving to long-term contracts rather than spot pricing. The importance of that being that producers can tell with certainty um the volumes and the prices that they receive for products unlike any other commodity in the space. And by the way, uh consumers, utilities can lock in the prices for long enough to build a new plant and amortize the loans. Uh the next 10 years are going to be absolutely golden for the uranium business. Absolutely golden. Will all these things manifest themselves in 2027? probably not. Does that matter even to a 73y old? Absolutely not. Uh now, one needs to exercise caution in the sense that uh if you're an investor, it's a there's a no-brainer, two no-brainer ways to play it. Uh the Sprat Physical Uranium Trust, note that I'm the largest shareholder of SPAT, so I benefit from this uh recommendation. uh and Kamico uh if you will the OPEC in a wrapper of uranium coming down there's probably 150 companies that purport to be uranium companies probably only I don't know 15 of those are viable so you have to select with some caution among those but you are investing if you found a viable company in a sector that absent a synchronized global depression is a no-brainer truly truly a no-brainer.
>> Rick, tell us about the upcoming rules symposium. Talk to us about Battle Bank. Tell us about rule investment media.
>> Love to talk about all those. Uh, as you noted, Jesse, when we were off the air, I failed retirement completely. I'm delighted about that. So, let's start with rule investment media. Uh, and let's personalize it. Rule Investment Media exists to educate investors about how to invest in natural resources. Labor of love for me. It's my attempt to codify 50 years of experience and make it available to investors, if you will. It's my book. Uh, and in order to induce you to do that, anyone who wants to can go to the rule investment media website, ruleinvestmentmedia.com, list their natural resource stocks, and I will for free evaluate their portfolio, ranking them 1 to 10, one being best, 10 being worst, and commenting on individual issues where I think my comments might have value. Note that this service is absolutely free, which is a damn good price. Uh, the second service that we have, which is free, is the rule classroom, ruleclassroom.com. At the rule classroom, there's well over 300 hours of instructional videos, uh, including introduction to natural resource investing, a 5 and a half hourong segment telling you how to invest in natural resources and how to do your own securities analysis. Note, this is once again free. Every Thursday where it's possible, uh, I spend an hour with Albert Lou or other people answering questions and answers about specific companies. Price free. Uh, pretty good deal. 26,000 students there. Very, very, very active discussion groups, CEOs, engineers, speculators, geologists. It's all there. It's all free. We do have a service rule classroom plus that's behind the payw wall where you get extra uh content including lots and lots and lots of CEO interviews and we have two features coming up on the real classroom which will not be free. One called Pitch Rick. Uh Pitch Rick about three or four companies a day want to pitch themselves to me. They either want to take a check off me or they want me to recommend them to my followers. uh which I'm not unhappy to do, but we're going to democratize this. If you want to pitch me from now on, you have to pitch me in front of an audience and you have to pay me to be pitched. Uh so, PitchRick will initially be free to subscribers, but ultimately not. It will not be free to the companies that pitch me. I will let anybody pitch me on any topic, but understand it's not an advertising feature. It's going to be a legitimate pitch. And if I think parathetically that you're full of I will say you're full of Uh I think it's going to be a very very very uh interesting feature. And then we're going to take that one step further into something like Shark Tank, which is where we allow companies to pitch a group of experts, including myself. Uh and then we open that to questioning from the students of the real classroom. Uh I suspect this will self- select. I think that the companies that subject themselves to three hours worth of scrutiny will probably be very high quality companies, but if not, it'll be highly amusing. Moving on, uh for 30 years now, uh I've put on uh a natural resource investment symposium, which I believe to be the world's finest. The natural resource investment symposium uh will be held in Boca Raton, Florida, July 6 through 10. I'm delighted to say that the live portion of the con of the uh symposium is sold out, meaning that you can't attend live anymore. We will, however, entertain about 3,000 people via live stream uh from the comfort and convenience of their own home. What might they expect? Well, a few things set us apart from other conferences, many of which are fine, but we do several things differently. The first is that we interview every exhibitor, every public company exhibitor and every speaker before the conference. Those interviews can be found on the rule investment media YouTube channel. The purpose of this is that you can use these interviews to use your time at the conference more efficiently by understanding companies before you show up and by allocating your time at the conference more efficiently once you get there. Secondly, we record the entire proceedings. The most important reason for this is that three or four breakout sessions occur simultaneously and you can't attend three or four simultaneously but you can after the fact. Secondly, much of the information that we offer up at the conf conference is timeless and refreshing your memory uh about that content is one of the reasons one of the ways that we add value. The third reason is that every single public company at the conference has been vetted. If we don't own shares in the company, they can't exhibit at our conference. We turn down more exhibitors every year than we accept. I don't think that any other conference in the world has as qualification the fact that the conference sponsors have to own shares in the company. But finally, uh, I think the most salient selling point. Whether people attend live or via live stream, if they think for any reason, at their sole discretion that they didn't get their money's worth, we give them their money back. Unconditional money back guarantee. No other conference that I know of in the world, especially one uh that sells at the price point that ours does, has the confidence to make that guarantee. We've had to refund about one onetenth of 1% of the tuitions that we've charged over 30 years. But that guarantee is your guarantee that we have the confidence to know that our content can and will make you money. rules.com. Finally, Battlebank. I'll keep this one simple. Um, if for any reason you're not delighted with your current bank, say as an example, they aren't paying you interest on your checking account, uh, check out Battle Bank. Uh, among other things, our competitors don't believe that gold, silver, or platinum, or palladium are good collateral. We think they're great collateral. You want to unlock the capital you have tied up in your stack without having to sell your stack. You need money for working capital. There's a distressed real estate transaction, but you don't want to s sell your gold, pay capital gains tax. Check out BattleBank. Battlebank.com.
>> Great. All of those links will be in the description below. Rule Symposium, the Rule Investment Media, as well as Battlebank. Rick, as always, love having you on the show. Thanks for coming on again.
>> Pleasure, Jesse. I've enjoyed our conversations over the years. I'm both pleased and proud of you for the incredible growth of your channel. Nice work.
>> Thank you for joining us today. This episode is brought to you by Arc Silver Gold, Opium. They have some great prices on silver bullion products. They are on your screen right now. These are subject to change while supplies last. So reach out to owner Ian Everard today at 3072649441 or by email at ianarchsggo.com and make sure to tell him that commodity culture sent you. 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 to date with the latest episodes.