Jeff Currie on the Crazy Surge in Metals, And Why The Supercycle Has Years to Run

UKG. Their HR pay and workforce management tools help business leaders empower their people, because when work works, everything works. Learn more at UKG.com/work. Hello and welcome to another episode of the AdLots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy Metals. That's it. That's it. It's the title. No, you're right. There's a lot happening in the Metals space. So we have gold above 5,500 Announce, which is a record. We have silver above $120 Announce, also a record. And now we have copper at over $14,400 a ton. Yeah. So this is something that's super interesting to me. And I think it's a very important dimension, which is that copper is the ultimate industrial metal, right? And for, you know, Dr. Copper tells us about the economy. Probably a little overstated. It's reputation, but it's the ultimate industrial metal. Gold is the ultimate metal with no industrial uses, right? It's primarily a store of value, a sort of form of money that's existed for thousands of years. And then silver is a little bit in the middle. It's more of a safe haven, but we know it has, it's used in solar, it's used in photography. Not that that really exists anymore. But you don't have a saying. So it's like, it's interesting to see like, why are they all flying at the exact same time? Yeah, I was going to say the exact same thing. So each of these metals historically would tell you something very specific about the state of the economy. And copper certainly would be screaming people are bullish on economic growth, silver, you know, something kind of in the middle. And gold, gold, soaring is something that you traditionally associate with stress points either in the financial system or the broader global economy. And yet here we are. Yeah, it's all happening in once. And like, you know, you know, you could say like a dollar debatement, right? And we know the dollars would weaken its other currencies. It's not like inflation is measured, you know, is like raging hot. So it's not just a simple story of like the dollar becoming worthless. So the, you know, the denominator, whatever going up or whatever the other way around is, etc. There's something going on with metals. Maybe they're just the new meme stocks, etc. But we have to, we have to dig in. Yeah, let's do it. All right. Well, I have to say we really do have the perfect guest on the perfect day again. We're recording this the morning of January 29th. We're going to try to get it out asap. But this headline copper is surging 10%. Unbelievable headlines. We've had them on multiple times in the past, a believer in super cycles, a vindicated man in many respects with many of his calls. He's a goldman a long time. We're going to be speaking with the one and only Jeff Curry, who is now a partner at Carlisle knows commodities as well as anyone else we talked to. So Jeff, thank you so much for coming back on the outlaws podcast. Great. Well, thank you, having me, you know, the commodities are up and you know, back in favor, it was a rough last couple of years to say the least. What do we, what do we just ask is this going to be the peak? Yeah, is this the peak? Did we? Yeah, that's the question. Is this the peak? You're back on. Everyone's going to ask us this. Oh, did outlaws get the peak because they called they ring Jeff Curry. So let's just get this out of the way. By the way, I love it. We're in the foothills of the Himalayas right now. So we're not even close to the real mountain peaks. Really? Yes. Okay. So I'm going to ask the obvious question, which we alluded to in the intro. But why are all three of these things moving in the same direction all at once? When you look at the commodity complex, you take anything that has an atomic number to it that's in the periodic table. It's going up right now. Even nickel and zinc have joined the party. If it is a molecule, and it has a carbon in it, a carbon hydrogen, a C agent, it's been struggling. So that includes hydrocarbons as well as carbon hydrates like corn, wheat, and so forth. So that space, the molecules have been struggling. Yet you have the things that are primarily critical minerals, things that are in the periodic table, the atomic number have all done well. And the fundamentals in copper are not that much tighter than what you have in oil. The what's going on in the metal space is hoarding, given the concerns over having availability of these critical minerals. And you throughout the idea of debasement. And I want to throw in three other D's, D dollarization and diversity to your debasement. So debasement, D dollarization and diversity is what's driving all of these different metals. And when we think about the D dollarization, and that goes back to 2022 when the U.S. and Europeans froze the central bank assets of Russia, every emerging market goes, uh-oh, I don't want to be owning any dollar-denominated assets because look what happened to the Russians. And as a result, they're moving as fast as they can out of dollar assets into assets that cannot be seized. And precious metals and metals are part of that. And then when you have the geopolitical risk as high as they are right now on a global basis, whether it was U.S. cutting off Venezuelan oil supply to China, India, and Europe, or it was the Chinese cutting off critical mineral supply to the U.S. and its allies, or it's Russia cutting off supplies and natural gas, it's a dangerous time to be dependent upon foreign commodity supply. And as a result, we have stockpiling. And everybody talks about the squeeze and silver running it up to $120 and ounce. The reality is this is a squeeze by the population of the people in China. You know, they're hoarding the silver over concerns around, you know, export trolls and things of that nature. So you mentioned China just then, and this is exactly what we wanted to ask you about, which is if you've stripped out what's going on in China, how much of the rally would disappear in something like gold? I mean, the vast majority of it is not just China, but emerging market central bank buying, basically reduce their holdings of western bonds that can be frozen, similar to what happened with the Russians. So, you know, do not underestimate the impact that China's had. In fact, if anything, China and the other emerging markets have squeezed other participants in the gold market out. And you still have a long ways to go. I like the point out that in 1970, when Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard, central bank reserves of gold stood at around 40%. Last time I calculated late the day and the last year was in that 27 to 28%, but the run up in the last couple of days could be as high as 30 by now. But I think the key message is there's still a lot more money by central banks who diversify themselves out of dollars. I'm still a little bit confused. What is it about silver, particularly, that's so desirable right now from the population in China? Because just let's talk about hoarding and some of these issues. It's totally understandable why China wants to hold certain strategic assets, right? It wants to accumulate a lot of oil in part because of defense purposes, because in the event of a war, for whatever reason, they may get shot out of oil so they need a lot. What is it about silver in the population context that makes it so desirable? And by the way, I'm looking at a chart, it's from two days ago, but the Shanghai silver premium, buyers in China paying more than $5 announced versus everyone else in the rest of the world. But explain what is it this driving, this purchase from the public in China? Okay, first let's talk about its role as a critical matter. Okay, it goes into the production solar PV and that makes it, as you pointed out, at the beginning, 50% an industrial metal and then 50% of a store of value like gold. So the fact that it has these dual uses, it's a critical mineral and important to the electrification process on a global basis. Remember, it's a superconductor. Actually, let me go back to answer your question. Tracy, you may say, what do gold, silver and copper all have in common? They're superconductors. I know people say, "Well, Jeff copper isn't exactly a definition of a superconductor. It's not as strong as silver and gold," but it sits up there in that electrification process. And so when we think about silver, it's critical for the industrial base of China given the importance of solar panels as a part of the industrial manufacturing process in China. So, yeah, when if you're the PBOC or something like that, you're going to be very focused on making sure there's adequate silver supplies inside of China. So the fact that it also then has the store of value like gold and accessible by many parts of the population because even at, you know, $100 an hour, $120 an ounce as wherever this morning, it still makes it a much more affordable store of value. So I think that two key points for China and why silver is so important is its role as a critical mineral and as a superconductor. And given the importance of solar panels and other types of renewable investments to the Chinese industrial base, having a secure supply of silver is absolutely critical to the Chinese economy. Second of all, it is when when you look at the price of silver, even at $120 an ounce, it is still very affordable to many of the population as a store of value similar to gold. And also given the reason price trends, people feel comfortable in holding it. So it has those two components that make it critical to the Chinese economy. Some people would say that like, all right, you can look at all these things surging and tell a story about debasement and electrification and what the future world is going to look like. Some other people would say, well, you could tell an even simpler story, which is that one of these markets is wrong, right? So maybe copper sees economic growth going to the moon, although it seems kind of unlikely to me, maybe silver is somewhere in between, maybe gold is wrong about the debasement thesis, whatever. How do we know that we're just not seeing investors get this one wrong? People are just going in for momentum, yeah. On the meme coinification of precious metals. Well, I do think when we talk about a commodity super cycle, the S word, which by the way is nothing other than a commodity capex cycle or a big global capex cycle. And we're seeing that, you know, whether it's investment in defense, investment into AI, data centers, a list goes on. This is a world scale capex boom we're now entering. And that typically is when you see the big commodity super cycles, one in the 70s, one in the 2000s. And we're, I mean, just take the defense spending in Europe alone. It's likely to be 9 trillion euros over the next decade to put that in perspective. The Chinese boom in the 2000s was 10 trillion US. Today, it's about 15. So even just Europe on along, we haven't even factored in data centers in AI. So when that occurs, typically what we see is a repricing and rewriting towards asset heavy industries and commodities or another way to think about it in a short duration. As strangely as when interest rates are low, everybody thinks, oh, you would be doing capex cycles. No, you do them when their interest rates are high because the interest rates are high. They're telling you you need to put money into the ground. And so we're moving into one of these repricing towards asset heavy industries, which is why it will ultimately be sustainable across the entire commodity complex. And I just want to take a step back and talk about these repricings because in my career, I've lived through two. The first one was in that call it 0-2 through like 04 time period. And that's what we coined the term "revenge of the old economy." Old economy is asset heavy. New economy is asset light. In that asset light in the late 90s 2000s was really about the scalability of software. You don't need to have put a lot of money into the ground to be able to create growth. And that was the whole asset light model. Well, eventually we ran out of all of these heavy industries that you need to make the investments in. And then China came on the scene and became clear we need to make those investments. And that happened over that decade. But that repricing, re-rating was a violent process as you moved out of new economy or into the old economy. The next time we saw that was in 1415 where we moved out of the old economy and into the new economy. Why? Because it was clear China was at the end of the track. And if you remember that time period, we'd go through there. The year went from like 1.4 to parody in the course of like 18 months. I remember the period oil was coming down $7 of barrel like every other day. Everybody's "What's going on? What's going on?" But I want to make a point here to get to your point about why is this sustainable across all these commodities. And when we look at, I'm going to take like a private equity pitch book in 2012 of a Canadian oil asset. They valued the asset at $110 of barrel. The IRR of that asset that this oil field was 25% at 110. Now fast forward to 2016 after the macro repricing. Oil was sitting around $40 of barrel. Now let's go repriced the IRR of that asset. What do you think it is? Media response was he would go, "Oh, it was negative IRR." No? It was around 18%, 19%. It didn't come down much. Why? It's because the Canadian dollar repriced so wages went down. You had a repricing of the cost of capital. You had a repricing of copper, iron ore. They all came down. And so your cost basis came down such that the IRR was far more stable over that repricing. And that's ultimately what we're starting to see happen across this space right now. And I believe we're in one of these reprications. We're going to move back into the asset heavy space. I want to make one last point before moving on this during this tour. It's going to make this one really different from ones in the past. I want to go back to the 1960s because it's similar to today. And that was at the least in the modern data, the first big commodity super cycle. The asset light space back in the 60s was companies like Coca-Cola. In fact, all the nifty 50 were brands. One of brands have similar two, let's say Microsoft, infinitely scalable at zero marginal cost. And so Coca-Cola was the world's darling right now. And all of the big commodity producers, the miners, the oil companies were at the bottom. And then you had the Arab oil embargo create that catalyst to reprice. Now what happened here is that that's different today. So you think about that asset light space was Coca-Cola then and then in 2000 it was Microsoft and today it's Google and the hyperscalers. Now here's where it gets really different in the power what's going to happen now is the asset light space is getting into the asset heavy space i.e. these hyperscalers are putting steel into the ground. And by the way, you're no longer a asset light, infinitely scalable software company, you're a miner, you're a oil company, you are a commodity producer, you're multiple is going to get re-rated. And so what we have is the asset light space this time is moving into the asset heavy space in putting steel in the ground. So this is going to be a real violent transition. So you ask about copper and silver and the rest of these things. What are the restrictions on their big CapEx budgets? It's the availability of transformers. What are transformers? Big chunks of copper. And so we have a difference in this cycle than once in the past is the asset light space is colliding in the physical space at the exact same time. Which is what I tend to think that this repricing is going to be more violent, more sustainable. And while you're going to see and it goes to a simple point that I observed in the 2000s was when oil first went out because oh, it's a bunch of investors buying oil. It sits at $60 a barrel that's supernatural returns. No, you actually had capital rotate out of the asset light space and into the oil space during the 0405 such that the cost basis actually rose and there was no supernatural turn. So go Tracy back to your point, how sustainable is this? Well, what we're seeing is all the capital flowing into this asset heavy space and it's going to build the ground underneath these prices and support them from a relative cost basis. And so when we think about $14,000 a ton copper, doesn't mean these guys are earning supernatural returns because we see so much capital moving in this space. UKG their HR pay and workforce management tools help business leaders empower their people because when work works, everything works. I absolutely love that comparison of the software companies to the Coca-Cola's and this idea that like there are certain business models that can scale incredibly with very little physical needs. And the way you frame that I thought was a very helpful to understand and we've certainly talked a lot on the podcast about the hyperscalers getting into the real business of things and going up the chain and in some cases getting into the power production investing in their nuclear plants and hiring power traders. So all of this feels very real. Let's just like you say we're in a super cycle. You say we're at the foothills of the Himalayas. What is history or your work say about how big and how far this can go? Well I mean historically these cycles last summer around 12 years. The one in the 70s did, the one in the 2000s did, the one in the 70s from 68 to 1980, the one in the 2000s from essentially 2002 to 2014. A lot of people say oh the world's different today than in those other points time. Putting steel on the ground still takes about the same amount of time technology or no technology. I like to point out why do you get the 12 years? You know the first three years are getting people to believe it before they start to really invest earnestly. And I would say this one started in 2020 and so the fact that we lost two years in 23 and 25, whether it was copper oil, part of the reason for that was the rally and prices was so steep after that Russian Ukrainian invasion. The policy response globally was incredibly swift. I want to point out that policy response in 22 and 23 was not so much the rise in interest rates but the creation of supply. And I say that is because you had inflation come down everywhere in the world in a synchronous manner. And it did it against record commodity demand and really strong GDP growth in the United States. Was I tell you it simply could not have been interest rates in the demand side it had to come from the supply side. Where did they get new supply? Russia, Iran, Venezuela, you know some of the issues that are facing us they got it through increased immigration on on the labor side. There was a lot of ways they created supply all over the world to be able to do with that. Now the point this time around and everybody's bought into this oil supply lot. We don't have a problem is that those easy fixes are not going to be available next time around. So this one's going to take longer than normal but I also want to go why I'm comfortable with this being a super cycle. Is all of these things are all policy driven. The one in the 70s was due to the LBJ's war on poverty the big defense spending sound familiar and then you had the Arab oil embargo. If you look at what happened in the 2000s it was the decision to admit China in the WTO a policy decision. Here the policy decisions is the war on free trade and it's not just the U.S doing it everybody's doing it you know curtailing commodity supply around the world. In fact at the three points we laid out in 2020 in fact it was on this show we laid them out. They're still very much valid today and they were all policy decisions. One was de-globalization the war on free trade. I mean if anything it's been turbocharged now from five years ago and when we think about it it's all policy decisions. It's not just inside the United States where we're seeing this you know the Chinese cutting critical mental supply you know Europeans focused on you know protecting themselves defense spending the list goes on. Let's go to the second one at the time decarbonization or electrification and I know a lot of people are going to look at oh well didn't the U.S. back track on that with the you know the recent political shifts the answer is absolutely not the rest of the world is doubling down on electrification for both when we think about the electrification of the world where it wasn't decarbonization was not the motivator today it wasn't then and then going back in time. Why do I say that? Why did China build cutting edge technologies in nuclear power solar wind batteries in the rest of it? They did it for energy security kind of goes into the deglobalization point they want their own secure energy supply. In fact Carter coined the term energy transition and wanted transition out of oil into renewables in 1977 not because they wanted to save the world but because of energy security. One last point on this is France lowest carbon footprint in the world it didn't get there because it wanted to save the planet it got there because it wanted nuclear power so it could it was Charles de Gaulle decision to rid itself of the oil trade. So this story regardless of what's going on in the political pushback and I don't think green was ever probably the right way to phrase this yeah it's renewable it's a secure source nuclear powers a secure resource throw data centers AI all on top of it it's turbocharged from the last time we talked about and then finally the third point was redistribution of the war on income inequality. Yeah Kate with the K economy this is alive and kicking. Wait say more about that last point. Well when we think about commodities and actually Tracy I've seen you even make this point that I've made back five years ago was that when you see inflation and you see commodity demand it has to be coming from the low income groups. This is a point I think people get backwards right inflation is bad for the high income groups and the reason why is because the low income groups are the ones that actually think about this corn a high income person will consider the same amount of corn at any point in time. The marginal demand has to come from the low income groups and so when you give them money like fiscal transfers and you know to keep the masses happy in certain situations what are they going to do they're going to spend it and they're going to spend it on commodities and physical goods in that end of creating that inflation and then the high income people suffer because the visit of response by policy makers to the higher rates is wealth comes down. The other way to think about all inflation is the wealth transfer between the high income groups and the low income groups and then they go out and spend it and so when we think about the demand here is that third one which is this war on income inequality it's just going to demand more and more types of transfers to the lower income groups to be able to deal with the civil unrest and it's alive and kicking everywhere in the world right now and so I would assume you know that if you liked any of these three stories back in 2020 you got to love them today. Just going back to the super cycle thesis and the role of policy. How do we know that the importance of a lot of these metals, the strategic importance? How do we know that that won't end up increasing supply faster than we expect? You know part of the story especially in copper is that it's not that many people are pulling it out of the ground anymore it takes forever to get a new mind started. How do we know that governments aren't just going to make it easier to get this stuff and so you'll see a supply response faster than perhaps you saw previously. Let's go back to my point you know these are 12-year cycles it's just putting steel in the ground takes a long time even if you got rid of all the bureaucracy and retake it's going to take time but let's go to the critical matter of why does China dominate these? They did it because the Soviets in the Americans didn't want to touch the downstream processes because of not in my backyard for NIMBY reasons. I mean even the Soviets, let me remind I say the Soviets because this decision was made in the 70s. Remember when the EPA the superfund sites and all of that the Americans in the Soviets used to do this. They quit doing it and farmed it out to the Chinese because they didn't like doing it in their backyard. There's a really highly toxic processes and so if you're going to on shore them and bring them back you've got to figure out technologies used to do this in a way that's going to deal with those NIMBY problems that people didn't want to deal with 50 years ago. So it's going to be very expensive, time consuming. There's ways to get around it but you know whether if I've heard me how you can build these facilities on army land in the United States you don't get any of the bureaucracy around environmental problems but even so and the last thing you had this stuff you know if you didn't like it in the 70s you're still not going to like it today. So it's not something that can be resolved overnight. It's going to take a long time. It's going to take an enormous amount of capital new technologies created rerouting supply chains around the world. That's why I say there were just the tip of the iceberg on what needs to be done here which is why I think it's going to go on you know for at least another decade and one last point about the super cycle the 70s and the one in the 2000s they were sequences of price spikes. They weren't a steady upward trend you have one in 73 another one in 77 78 another one in 80 in the 2000s you have one in 0405 another one in 08 and then the final finale in 11 or late 10 and 11 it was with Libya and then copper top 11,000. So everybody thinks they're like the steady upward trend in prices and assets the realities their sequence of price spikes and this one will be more bubbly in nature. I like to say it's a bubbling cauldron of supply and demand in balances and in part of this is because of what happened with the surge in investment around let's call it the green investment around net zero 2050. I like to say that that investment occurred from around 2015 through about 21 22. It created an environment where you have lots of let's say renewable wind in places like Germany or Spain but you don't have the batteries the grid and the rest of it. So what that creates is these pockets where you can see big shifts where you have negative prices of power at some point and explosive prices on the other side. So the one thing about this time around is going to create much higher levels of volatility across the demise rates like silver you can see you get into these pockets where it'll go up and down and you know whether it was California power in the 2000s in that that my cycle which sure reminds me what silver's doing today is you end up with an environment in which the volatility gets higher the volatility then scares investors away the lack of investment then reinforces the higher volatility and I think that that dynamic in this bubbling cauldron of supply and demand in balances is just going to be that much more vicious this time around than in the past. Jeff you're my favorite person to talk to about commodities but my second favorite person to talk to about commodities is the Uber driver that I had in 2022 who when he was dropping me off at Bloomberg and I mentioned this on a previous episode he's like oh I have a thesis I'm really long silver because it has all these industrial uses but silver is frequently mined as a byproduct of copper production and there isn't a lot of new copper production happening at this current state and therefore we're not going to see a big supply response be elicited on the silver side and so you're going to get this mega squeeze so he's my second favorite one that was 2022 now in January 2026 I mean clearly the price was right but this phenomenon as he described it does that sound pretty accurate to you absolutely I mean with all of these is by the way that you can get the supply it's not a scarcity of the commodities whether it's critical mental even copper it's like it's the access it's it is the political access to where the resources but born importantly it's the willingness of capital to provide the money I'd like to say it's not about the supply and demand of the molecules or of the metric tons or the bushels it's about the supply and demand of the capital used to create the production therein lies the core problem and the capital has not moved in so Tracy back your point I was like oh we haven't even moved the capital in yet the capital still sitting in the new economy or asset light world and the returns you know by the way I've asked people like oh like it this was in like 23 24 I go hey why don't you want to put money into these these this space the answer was Jeff I agree with your story the problem is the tech space is providing such very good returns that if I am underweight the space I got a problem and I rather be putting the money into what's out before me that was the case in 23 24 25 just to be clear since the last time we talked to there has not been a ton of activity in terms of let's actually start digging no because okay the pullback in late 22 and early 23 was so vicious across this entire space yeah that the money they looked at it go I got beat now you know curry you told me to go in back in 2021 work for about a year and a half I got absolutely cremated on the back side I'm not going to do that again and so they got beaten up over that time period their willingness to go back in and believe the story it's not that high they're going to have to see it and now that's moved so quick so fast like it did in 22 that they're going to look at it and go oh I missed it and I think you know it's like Tracy's point is how how much further this go how sustainable is it and I think the key point there is it's got it's that volatility is discouraging them and that's why I tend to think what is going to force the money into the space is you're going to have to have the returns in the asset light tack or whatever you want to call it world get to a point that they're going looking at the old economy going I'm willing to take that risk and go in it because that's the only place that has returns and when they do that that's when you're going to end up seeing the rotation and I'm also going to go back to a point here is the market is so severely underweight all of this stuff because it's been so hated for so long that when the money rotates anti gold bug but when the money rotates it's going to be playing catch up whether if it's you know the two and a half percent waiting of energy in the S&P 500 versus what a seven or eight percent waiting on revenues the market cap is too small and what if it's in metals and mining critical these things are just so tiny it's like where I was talking the other day you take FCX and let's see Ivan Ho mines and some of the other smaller copper producers so what is our market cap is is all together 200 billion versus the video at four and a half trillion now all said you take that money out there that has to go chase this space and so you're asking how high can it go you can go really high because you're talking about moving trillions of dollars out of asset light into asset heavy when nothing's been here for over a decade Jeff very very quickly are there any risks to the structural super cycle thesis is there any indicator that you're watching to suggest that okay maybe it's not going to happen or maybe it's not going to happen at the moment that you're currently predicting I first want to talk about the difference between equities in commodities commodities are driven by the real physical supply and demand and equities and financial markets are driven by expectations expect takes can or cannot happen I try to figure out what the next person is going to do what they're going to buy actually can be modeled and thought through but it's less predictable long term supply and demand balances of commodities you know when you have a problem oh wait people don't push back I mean when I think I said on the last time yeah here copper is the best trade I've seen in terms of fundamentals stand drunk of Miller reason he made the same comment that hey it's tight yeah it's really tight but it may not work today tomorrow the next day I know if I sit on to position and hold it long enough eventually you'll get to that point where it does pay out because you know the physical supply and demand the rubber meets the road and you see the rise and prices now the question is can you stay liquid long enough before that event occurs so first of all the reason why I'm so confident to these stories is the forward on these markets are incredibly unbalanced whether it is in copper you know the industrial metals you know the critical minerals oil all of them are really imbalanced because so that's the thesis why my confidence now what is the near term risk it's not that you know they're gonna because we're gonna electrify the world you don't have enough copper to electrify the world the risk is like the demand for housing demand in China collapses but that happened in 23 and 24 so you've already paid the price on that one so when I think about these risks that you're talking about they might need come from the demand side because you cannot create supply from thin air so it has to be demand coming down but that demand coming down just ultimately delays how long it'll take before you run in the province the main reason why copper didn't perform in that 23 24 time frame is we underestimated the severity of the property contraction in China right and part of that was the high interest rates west forced to Chinese to keep interest rates too high because they can to prevent capital outflow and as a result they really heard that property sector so that would be you know they it's different than the financial markets because the expectations can change on a moment in their hard to forecast bottom line you need this investment Jeff Curry perfect guest perfect day thank you so much for coming back on Abla great thank you for having me quite enjoyable truly the perfect guest and congrats on all your structural feces that seem to be playing out great day thank you all I love that I mean Jeff's just the best he's so good he's so good I'm so glad we could get him on today in particular I should just mention we're recording on January 29th the price of what else is going up so quickly who knows what it's going to be tomorrow I think the most I mean there's so many powerful ideas and compelling notions to my mind one of the strongest ideas that I think is sort of under discussed in the debate is the intersection of the commodity rally and the war on free trade right and you know we look at things they're getting a little bit more expensive here people sort of look like it's the tariffs being passed through etc but this deeper dynamic that if you don't have a world of sort of relatively open trade then that forces everyone to stockpile and that forces everyone to build their own version and that I'm going to build a chip plant here and I'm going to build a chip plant there and I'm going to build a chip plant there because we're also worried you have that duplication that's the war on free trade that whether it's public or private forces all of this commodity intensive spending yeah all I'm going to say is it's good to hold gold and silver coins or stop rubbing it in stop rubbing well the problem is it feels good it feels good but that's the thing I don't even know how to sell like I would have to carry a bunch of gold coins through New York and find a dealer or something you know what we need to take another trip through the diamond districts where there are plenty of science on their windows we buy gold and so forth well I would actually do an episode on buying physical gold let's do an episode on selling physical yeah but yeah okay how do you actually do that are there certain ways to do it that are better than others and all of that yeah I totally do that let's do it that sounds like a great episode I have a silver bar somewhere too I need to find that I like I'm going to bring it in and use it as a paperweight just to annoy you well I have my I have my what's it called the not the what's that metal that I have my tongue that metal that you were obsessed with and now you forgot I should have asked if that's my one that's my main exposure to hard assets is that tungsten cube I think so I mean he said every element in the he said all the the story is that if it's an element in the periodic table it's gone up in price and I actually think tungsten has gone up quite a bit in price but I didn't exactly buy in size I think my cube cost about $300 just something like that but okay um shall we leave it there let's leave it there this has been another episode of the hotlots podcast I'm Tracy Alloy you can follow me at Tracy Alloy and I'm Joe Wyzenthal you can follow me at the stalwart follow our producers Kermin Rodriguez at 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