The Public Hates Gold Mining and That's Why I'm In It Almost 100% | Doug Casey

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Manco 64, home of alternative economics and contrarian views. Today I have a a treat for for you guys. I've got Doug Casey uh and uh Matt Smith from Doug Casey's Take. Doug Casey of course is a worldrenowned uh writer uh author uh speculator, investor and and also philosopher.

[00:00:26]And Matt, how would you describe yourself?

[00:00:30]Um, I'm just tagging along with Doug, doing the best I can to get more Doug out there.

[00:00:35]>> And one thing I wanted to talk about first is this book here. Don't know if you've heard of it, The Triumph of Gold by France, Dr. France Pic.

[00:00:45]And uh, he wrote this in 1986.

[00:00:48]And uh I mean he was right about everything but here we are in 2026 and I know gold has done well but uh I want to ask you Doug um a lot of people say oh uh people like me or you and others are saying everything is uh going to implode uh the debt is unsustainable. But for some reason the US just keeps going. I I remember in the 70s I was a teenager uh when Jimmy Carter was around the dollar wasn't doing well and everything was a mess and people said well this is it but then the US came back. So uh I just wanted your take right now. Uh is is the US is the situ situation salvageable?

[00:01:38]Well, I guess it depends on um your time frame really. Uh what's the what's the primary trend of what's going on? And if we go back to day one kind of uh say 10,000 years ago at the uh at the end of the last ice age, uh the trend has been up. Things have gotten better and better for the last 10,000 years, quite frankly.

[00:02:07]uh and that process has accelerated since the uh start of the industrial revolution in about 1800. Things have gotten better and better at an accelerating rate since then. So I ask myself, I've asked myself, what cause do I have to be bearish, to be fearful about things? Well, if we shorten up the time frame a little bit more, we find that uh western civilization, which is uh the best thing that's ever happened to human beings really, uh has been under attack now for well over a hundred years. And for well over a hundred years we've had u innovations like the income tax and uh the growth of the state which has grown from before World War I typically about thinking about 5% of the GMPP of most advanced countries to now we're up to 30 40 50 60%.

[00:03:14]So the more recent trend has been negative. So what should we look at?

[00:03:20]Should we look at the long-term trend or should we look at the shorter term trend? Well, in the long run, we're all dead and we live in the short run. So, my my view is that things are going to get much worse now for at least quite a while. And I attribute it to the rise of the state as an institution. Well, a bunch of other things, but that's what I put my finger on.

[00:03:51]>> Yeah. It's interesting you you said uh you you mentioned the 5% of GMPP that in the US like from 1800 to World War I, that's how much was spent sometimes during wars. They spent a bit more and then they it came back down. Um just wanted to ask you uh uh Matt, uh you've heard of course of the fourth turn. Do do you think we're really close to like uh well the yeah the heights of the winter uh and uh what what would what do you expect after the winter because uh like like Doug said things things go in cycles and it's not going to be bad forever.

[00:04:35]>> True. You know I I do buy into the forth turning uh framework as a way to understand the world. you know, I wouldn't say, you know, it's it's perfect. But there are lots of other cycle theories. You know, you got Ray Dallio's cycle theory, which is also very interesting and very informative and very useful. Uh there's this guy named Peter Churchen who uh wrote a book called Ages of Discord, and he's got his own cycle theory. Um the interesting thing about all three of those theories is they all line up to right now. to right now being a major period of transition into something new. And so I think we're there. I think the signs are all around us. I think that um a crisis is more of a process than an event. And sometimes, you know, as boiling frogs, it's harder to see it when it's happening. But there's all kinds of signs everywhere. I mean, certainly in the bond market, you see the stock market not making sense. Um and you see crisis uh around you. I mean the straight of horm moves thing to me is the biggest deal ever like maybe ever and everyone is just kind of ignoring it not imagining it's not that big of a deal but it it will come home to roost for sure no doubt about that. So yeah, I think we're at that. Now what comes after uh the only thing I think you can be sure of and this is identified very clearly in the fourth turning is that the relationship between the citizen and the state and the relationship of uh the the way society functions comes out of it very very different than it went into it. And and uh so just like the citizens relationship changed with the state during FDR's term, I think we're going to experience something like that again.

[00:06:16]and it'll be wildly disruptive. The the worst things about now than though is that the society itself is far more fractured, far more divided, you know, uh far more individually or far less individually resourceful to, you know, being able to take care of themselves.

[00:06:34]And so that creates kind of a tinder box.

[00:06:38]>> Yeah. Doug, uh, Matt just mentioned the straight of horror moves and there's been like many different uh, news headlines in the last week or a month and the markets they they seem to becoming less and less uh, more and more immune to these comments. But I I wanted to ask you uh if you think uh this crisis uh in the Middle East and the straight of Hormuz is akin to the Suez crisis for like the British uh back in the well I think it was 1956 when the US refused to to help out and some people say that was like u the last nail in the coffin of the British Empire. Do you think the US uh hedgeimony is could be impacted uh by by this crisis, especially if Iran gets away with a lot of what they want?

[00:07:36]>> Yeah, I vaguely remember the Suez crisis. Uh most people only know it as a a line in Billy Joel's excellent song, We Didn't Start the Fire, where he mentions crisis in the Suez. Uh when it took place in 1956, I was 10 years old.

[00:07:54]So I heard about it, but what did I know? Well, just about nothing. But uh the Suez crisis was interesting in that the French and the British built the Suez Canal with their own money and managed it.

[00:08:14]And then uh uh Gaml Abdel Nasser decided that since it was on Egyptian soil that they ought to take it over. So it was basically basically well who owns what?

[00:08:28]I mean it's a question of because the British basically built it. Does that mean they owned it? And it's a question of property rights that could have been adjudicated should have been adjudicated. But uh the the western powers showed that uh they uh couldn't maintain possession of something they had built and were driven off the territory uh of the Egyptians back in 1956.

[00:08:59]So this is analogous in that uh actually since then the uh you know the uh the um more backwards people of the world people that are not part of the western civilization have been driving uh westerners from their territory and we've been forced to leave behind the things we built for them for many years.

[00:09:31]So yeah, it's happening now uh in in the Gulf of Hormuz and I guess it'll happen or well it already has happened with u the entrance to the Red Sea next door where the Sui the Houthies who aren't even a nation state. They're a group that's in uh rebellion against uh the actual government of Yemen. Uh have shown that they can stop people from passing out of the Red Sea, which is the other end of the Suez Canal actually.

[00:10:06]And who knows what um you know backward countries in the world might uh stop ships from passing uh through the places that they own. I mean the uh who's on the other side of the straits of Gibralar? Gibralar is on one side. Is it Morocco on the other? I think so. Uh so there there's all kind of mischief that can happen from from these places which are generally owned by Muhammadan people uh who are kind of in a longunning jihad against the West.

[00:10:48]Anyway, I'm kind of rambling, but um yeah, I' I' I'd say that what's going on now is in many ways analogous to what happened in the Suez uh 70 years ago. Do you think that's going to impact on the U petro dollar be? Because the the bricks they they've been trying to diversify away from the dollar. this has been accelerated or >> well look what's the dollar the the dollar used to be defined as uh 120th of an ounce of gold and then Roosevelt changed it to 135th of an ounce of gold and then Nixon changed it to 142nd of an ounce of gold except you couldn't get any gold for it even though that was what he said the price was and now it's 400 14,000 and anyway the dollar is a floating abstraction and it's going to reach its intrinsic value sometime in the notsodistant future I think and uh that's going to create real chaos because there's lots of people all around the world that don't own their their own government's worthless paper currencies and want to own dollars but when those dollars dry up and blow away, which will happen. Uh it'll turn out that they own nothing. It's going to be uh quite upsetting to billions of people. So, uh that's when it's really going to hit the fan, I think.

[00:12:27]Yeah, I I uh I get you there because I grew up in Brazil and uh um yeah, the the dollar was the the place to be in the 70s and 80s and I'm probably quite sure that people there still think the dollar is a good currency even though the Brazilian currency has gone up this year in the last year against the dollar by like 14%.

[00:12:51]And uh hopefully a lot of them are waking up to the fact that you need some uh gold and silver. Um one >> of course Brazil Brazil's run through a lot of currencies just in >> Oh yeah. I I mean up up until the early 1930s the Brazil what was the first I mean Brazil's had the crusado and the crusero and I can't remember all the >> the well I've got some silver coins from the 19th century and Brazil was an empire till 1889 and it's called hay so like a thousand like 2,000 h race coin uh silver coin was like a a dollar. Uh but after the uh Peter II was uh kicked out by the military in 1889 and Brazil became a republic, it all went downhill.

[00:13:49]And uh I remember my dad uh when I was young, it was the Crusero, but I think when I was born, they had the Hayes, but it was nothing like the original one because they've take they'd taken all the silver out. But my dad still used to call a Crusero Mu Hayes a thousand rays.

[00:14:08]And then I think uh they had a new crusero then they had a cru and uh they kept chopping off zeros from the currency and I guess the real has lasted since 1994 but uh one realale was uh I think uh a dollar was like less than one realale. So but now uh so that's also being inflated away. So yeah that's why uh one of the reasons why this topic interests me so much and like uh when uh we were talking before we started you asked me where I was and I said I was in London and I know there's a lot of uh bad news about the UK but Brazil growing up there it was even worse but you could still do well. Um, my father did well. He luckily he had a a business that earned in dollars.

[00:15:05]>> Yeah.

[00:15:06]>> Yeah. Um, Matt, I I want to let's move over to Matt because I want to ask him about the US economy. I listened to your last uh uh podcast with Doug and you're talking about the economy. It's almost like it's a tale of two cities. Could you you want to go over that a little bit?

[00:15:28]>> Yeah, I'll just say there's there's different realities and I think they're being they're it's separated into two major demographics. I mean most Americans do not have any don't own any stock and those who do and especially those who have gotten who've accumulated their wealth in the stock market look every day in their portfolio and see that they judge the society you know the the geopolitical situation and their own worth of course based upon that not based upon the real economy experience and then there's a much larger share of the population at this right that is looking at the real economy and unfortunately you know one of the big divides that's forming in the US is between those who are looking at this financial economy and thinking things are doing things are going great and those who are dealing with the real economy only and think that things are on fire and uh you know that divide is you know it's this K-shaped economy thing really starting to come in come into focus but it's just all about whether or not you know you um when when you look to see how well things are going, if you're looking at your portfolio, it looks good. If you look around the cost of everything, it looks pretty awful. And especially how aggressively those costs have changed in recent years. So, I think people are having a very hard time making it now.

[00:16:51]We see delinquencies in almost every form of debt hitting, you know, all-time highs, whether it be student loans or consumer debt, credit, uh auto loans, things like that. So, it just shows that it's it's suffering. Meanwhile, you know, stock market's doing great, so everything must be fine.

[00:17:08]>> Yeah, it's the same kind of environment here. Uh if you own um financial assets, if you're in the top 10%, you're doing well. And politically that's uh dangerous because now we've got a Labor government and uh the uh Kier Starmer has been challenged by a guy for even more leftwing and he's talking about more they're talking about more and more wealth taxes and uh the uh the general public Doug as you know uh they buy into that stuff. They they they you know they they think uh yeah we deserve it. We we need to get things from those people who create wealth. But I wanted to ask you, Doug, because you you've just gotten back to the US from Argentina, I guess, from Buenosyus.

[00:17:58]Could you tell us a little bit like uh how things are on the ground costwise? I think you spoke about um you went to a sushi restaurant. Um maybe you could uh like uh tell us a little more if there's any more surprises for you.

[00:18:17]>> Yeah. Well, starting with Argentina, of course, the uh the news for the last two years has revolved around the election of Javier Malay, who uh I was and I guess I still am a huge supporter of in so far as you can support any kind of person uh who's involved in politics. But Malay, I think most of your listeners are probably aware of the fact that he's unique in world history as someone who identifies himself as an anarcho capitalist and has said that what his object is is to disassemble and dispand and uh make go away the Argentine government.

[00:19:05]uh and he's taken some steps in that direction. He's fired 60,000 uh government employees, but he hasn't abolished any government agencies.

[00:19:18]And the problem with that, firing employees, but not abolishing the agencies, is that when the bad guys are elected in to replace them, the agency will still exist and they'll fill it up with new people. So really nothing will have changed.

[00:19:35]Uh the big mistake that Malay is making in Argentina is that um the centerpiece of his election was abolishing the central bank which all over the world are engines of inflation. Did he do it?

[00:19:53]No. Uh but he he crows about the fact that inflation has come down from roughly 300% to roughly 30% per year.

[00:20:03]Okay. step in the right direction, but it should have and would have come down to about 0%. If they'd gotten rid of that and u is he going to be able to abolish the central bank now?

[00:20:18]Well, here's a here's a little known fact uh that I researched.

[00:20:24]Argentina supposedly owns, and of course it's hard to trust any figures from these Latin American governments, but Argentina supposedly owns uh about 2 million ounces of gold.

[00:20:38]It turns out that half of that, about a million ounces, are stored in London, not in Buenosares.

[00:20:46]Okay, that's historical. But only a matter of a month or two after Malay was in office, he um sent another 440,000 ounces of Argentine gold to England to be stored. And when asked why did he do that, he said well for safety purposes which makes no sense uh and uh to generate income which means that that gold is being apothecated or lent out uh for a couple of percent. Uh, I'm of the opinion that gold is never ever coming back to Argentina, just like the gold that the Germans have stored with the US, which they've asked to be delivered back to Berlin and haven't gotten it.

[00:21:32]It's the same thing. So, I would have said that Argentina should have used their gold, all 2 million ounces of it to uh circulate a new currency that Argentines could save in as an alternative to the peso. But the worst thing about what's happening is that the peso because of various policies has be has become very strong and Argentina has gone from being the one of the lowest cost countries in the world was so cheap that it was embarrassing to now one of the most expensive countries in the world. It's as expensive as New York and Buenosares.

[00:22:14]uh and and that's going to augur really well or really badly I should say for uh Mille being reelected uh when he comes up for election in two and a half years or something like that. And that's the end of the great anarcho capitalist experiment in Latin America. Uh it'll be a currency thing I think. Anyway, um so I like Argentina, but Malay is making a hash of it in a lot of ways.

[00:22:46]Yeah. I remember uh like a year before he was elected. Uh he made a big splash by saying that he wanted to abolish the central bank. And I was really encouraged and uh I thought, "Oh, this guy is good." and he's uh he's uh he likes the Austrian School of Economics.

[00:23:06]Yeah. So, I was disappointed as well that he didn't abolish the central bank.

[00:23:10]I I would if I were him, it would have been the first thing I would have done, abolish the central bank. It just seems like people think that we need a central bank, which we don't. Uh but um um switching over to uh the markets, Matt.

[00:23:27]Um with uh tech, we're speaking about a tale of two cities. Do do you think uh the uh bull market in in stocks even though I think I saw a chart the other day at the S&P or NASDAQ compared to consumer Michigan consumer confidence, it's a huge disparity.

[00:23:50]And I mean, growing up in Brazil in the 80s, uh I remember the stock market was doing pretty well and even in the 90s when I wasn't there, but the like the the people that had money, they they were laughing all the way to the bank because they invested in something called overnight, like they put uh their money overnight and they got like doubledigit interest rates. Do do you think we we've got like a beginnings of a meltup? because in Germany as well in the 1920s the stock market went through the roof.

[00:24:25]>> Yeah, I think that's certainly a possibility. It concerns me though. I mean these valuations is are frightening and the market action especially around some of these like semiconductors is shocking and um you know but but we understand there's inflation happening and it could be just part of a meltup.

[00:24:43]But my my big concern with it, well, first of all, I'm not invested in any of these tech stocks personally because I just see too much risk there for on a riskreward basis. But I I also think that, you know, the I'm worried about having a market shock, you know, some sort of liquidity event when the world wakes up to what's actually happened with the oil supply, you know, and that it just takes a long time to work through this system. And I think that's why, you know, nothing's occurred yet.

[00:25:12]And but there's going to be a day one day where everyone all of a sudden wakes up and realizes, oh my god, this is a real crisis. And the market is obviously not pricing any of this in yet. So I I think that the market could be the one of the biggest victims of that shock. So and in that case, those tech stocks would get crushed. But I I could definitely see the meltup phase. I could definitely see that as a possibility. But I think the risks of shock I think are really great right now. And you know, which is why I have more cash than I would normally have than I've had for the last 5 years for sure, just because I want to have liquidity in case there's a great buying opportunity.

[00:25:51]Uh Doug, I wanted to ask you about gold and silver because um yeah, they they haven't really gone up uh during this crisis. I think the first day I think on the 28th uh was a Sunday or or is a well the day after when market started trading gold went up to like 5400 silver went up to 93 then they've come back down they they've been going nowhere some people are saying that people are trading gold versus oil and vice versa but u could you tell the viewers what your philosophy for gold and also So maybe the the mining mining sector is um for the short and well long term.

[00:26:40]>> Well, I've been a buyer of gold coins ever since I read Harry Brown's book, You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation. I read that book in 1970 and I didn't have any money to speak of then but I started buying gold coins uh as I could and since gold was about let's say $40 an ounce when I was buying uh so I've been buying sporadically uh gold coins for how long has that been since 1970. Jesus, time flies, doesn't it? Uh, and I've never sold any. I've used it as a savings vehicle and um, it's worked out really well, having gotten 100 to one on my original purchases, but I buy gold coins and a lot of silver coins, too, because they're the only financial assets that are not simultaneously somebody else's liability. And I'm of the opinion that just out of necessity, not because they want to do it, that uh governments are going to reinstitute gold uh as dayto-day money, certainly for trading between each other because they don't trust each other's fiat currencies.

[00:28:03]So, uh, but as a speculative vehicle, uh, gold isn't what it used to be because relative to other things in the world, meals, houses, cars, uh, it's no longer underpriced. I'm not saying that it isn't going to go to 10 or $15,000 an ounce or more.

[00:28:25]uh if these governments are going to back and redeem their paper money with gold at a fixed rate, it's going to have to go to those levels. But I'm treating gold, gold, the metal, gold coins differently than in the past. And I'm mainly concentrated in the gold stocks because relative to gold and relative to everything else, gold stocks are really, really cheap. Now uh all in sustaining costs uh which is to say not just the cost of a marginal ounce of gold at the mine phase but including administrative and cost of finding new gold and tying up the mine and planting grass over all this type of thing. This is called all in sustaining costs of mining gold is now about $1,800 an ounce industrywide.

[00:29:26]But gold is $4500 an ounce. So gold uh mining companies are coining money at this point. But the market doesn't recognize this. The market doesn't care about it. They think it's well they hate gold. I mean fund managers hate gold.

[00:29:45]the the public hates mining because it rapes mother earth. There all kinds of reasons. I think that's going to change.

[00:29:52]And since gold since mining in general isn't even a rounding error on the general market. Nobody knows or cares about it. It's true of oil at this point too, frankly. Uh that's where I am almost 100%.

[00:30:09]Uh so if you uh want to speculate in the stock market, don't don't earn own Nvidia, you know, own u own pneumont. But I'd say don't own pneumont uh own some of these hundreds of tiny little gold stocks which are currently unrecognized.

[00:30:31]>> What about silver? Silver stocks. Are you of the same opinion or >> Yeah, same thing. Of course, silver is uh really more an industrial metal now than it is gold. And people often talk about gold and silver, but as if they were the same thing, but they're very very different. Uh good thing about silver from a since it's an industrial metal is that of all the 92 naturally occurring elements, it's the most reflective of light. It's the most conductive of electricity. and for that matter most conductive of heat. Uh so that uh these are superlatives that uh in a high-tech world are of critical importance and uh no matter how high silver goes uh like 75 or 80% of all the silver in the world is produced as a byproduct of either lead, zinc or copper well generally those other elements. So that um uh silver is very volatile and uh it's got a lot of upside, but there aren't too many silver mining stocks, pure silver mining stocks. So yeah, I'm but I'm very friendly towards both gold and silver because also silver is kind of a and always has been used as a as a monetary metal besides oh copper has too but today copper is really not a monetary metal at all anymore. In fact it was how many years ago 30 that the US took copper out of pennies. You know, when I was a kid, uh, we used to yell at cops, "What are pennies made of? Dirty copper." You know, yell at the cop that was harassing us. But you can't say that anymore because they're made out of zinc with a copper plating. Anyway, uh, yeah, I'm friendly towards both gold and silver.

[00:32:33]Uh Matt, I wanted to ask your opinion on Doug said that he thinks uh governments are going to have to go back to gold.

[00:32:41]And I agree because when everything fails like currency wise, they always go back to gold. And you can look back in history, there's no alternative. Uh and I I've been hearing from friends um they they're talking about these companies now. Um there are some companies that are getting involved in tokenizing uh gold and even providing like a yield through leasing and that they're going to do uh to tokenize everything uh all they're going to expand into silver, copper, uranium and then eventually the stock market. Uh do you think that's a good thing or do you think that's like a a way that they're going to be tracking us? I mean, I've looked at one company.

[00:33:32]It looks interesting as speculation, but I wouldn't want to sell all my gold and put it into their token.

[00:33:39]No, you're right. I'm This tokenizing of everything I don't think is a uh is is good for individual liberty and uh you know, personal sovereignty over your assets at all. I will say however I do like the use case with gold because you know one of the challenges with gold if you actually want it to be used not just to settle trade between countries but actually used in transactions an ounce of gold what do you buy with it? I mean it's just so valuable now that most basic things and people say well you could use silver then and you still have the same problem with silver you can't make change you know it's it definitely adds a lot more friction to a transaction so people would still prefer to use a fiat currency in most of those cases but with the tokenization argument it's actually becomes totally seamless and um it makes gold the perfect money I think uh totally perfect and um and there are a lot of companies doing this Doug and I were talking to a startup that's uh that's doing it and they're doing it the right way. I I don't want to mention their name at this point cuz I'm not sure they're they're out public yet, but um they they are doing it under this unique situation in Swiss law, a Swiss law that goes that identifies that that the gold that you have stored with them in the Swiss vault is your personal property. And even though it is pulled together with others, you'd be able to redeem it within 24 hours. So you can get your gold out of there if you wanted to. And um you know there's a lot of different other benefits associated with it. But I think it can be done right.

[00:35:18]And when it if it is done right, it would be the money that everyone wants that everyone wants.

[00:35:24]>> I agree. Yeah, I agree with that. And yeah, as long as government probably is not involved and you have private companies, I would trust that more than uh a government trying to do it because uh governments they always break the rules when there's a crisis. Um, so, uh, Doug, uh, to, uh, wrap up here, um, you always talk a lot about because you've traveled a lot, you've been to many places, you have you live, uh, in Argentina, you have a place in Uruguay, in the US. Uh, what do you, uh, say to people that are concerned maybe here in the UK, a lot of people have left. I mean a lot of people left in the last year or two to Dubai. That's hasn't been a great move. Uh yeah. What do you say to people who uh feel that uh the government is becoming so intrusive and becoming so big and taxing uh people so much? Is there a way out uh if you stay here or do you need to leave?

[00:36:33]Well, the your financial risks in the world today are huge. They're gigantic.

[00:36:41]With the stock market as high as it is, and with the amount of debt that there is in the world, which means that we're going to see defaults in the bond market and meltdown of currencies, financial risks are huge. But political risks are even greater. People don't realize that government as an entity I'm not talking about any particular government uh leftwing rightwing I it's the entity of government itself is your major enemy in the world I see government as an institution as being a criminal entity uh so that's my answer to that question so you have to diversify politically just as you have to diversify financially.

[00:37:29]And where can you run? Uh, yeah, that's a good question. Well, I like Argentina and Uruguay for a lot of reasons. Uh, but it doesn't matter where you are. Certainly, if you're in Western Europe, you've got to have a crib someplace else because uh you know, the history has been if you were Russian in 1917, uh you were screwed when the communists took over. If you didn't have someplace to go, it was game over. Germany 1933, Vietnam 1975, China 1948.

[00:38:09]Uh it's one country after another.

[00:38:12]Cambodia.

[00:38:14]Uh, so I think if you can afford to, you should have a crib someplace else. And if you can't afford to, then shame on you. And I guess you'll get what you deserve. But, uh, you know, the big problem in the world today that I see uh, overweening is the ongoing and accelerating collapse of Western civilization itself. And uh can I can I put in a commercial here? Uh >> yeah, sure.

[00:38:44]>> Matt and I wrote a book along with Maxim, Matt's son. Um 6 months ago or so. I happen to have a copy here on my desk, of course. It's called the preparation which addresses itself to young men uh and tells them why they shouldn't go to college which is going to college today is a huge waste of money and it's like jumping into an intellectual cesspool. It's actively destructive and a mistake. But we tell young men in this book what they should do instead of going to college during those crucial years of 18 to 22 roughly uh in order to turn themselves into a a renaissance man so that they can deal with all these terrible things in the world and become successful, happy, wealthy and wise.

[00:39:45]So that's I guess that's my overall solution as much as we have a solution.

[00:39:50]Buying gold and silver smart. But that's just a partial solution to the uh problem of living on this wall of dirt.

[00:40:00]Third third third.

[00:40:02]>> Yeah. No, I agree. The the gold is is good financially, but there's a lot more a lot else more to that you need to do.

[00:40:11]Like the preparation is a really good book. We we actually spoke about it some months ago here on the channel. And the other thing that you've you both of you have helped me with uh is uh recommending uh books like uh Marcus Aurelius meditations and and the uh stoics. I mean that's a real good uh thing to keep you like uh you know look after yourself because you can look after your finances but if you if mentally you're not well things are not going to click. So maybe Matt we could end uh with you uh giving us uh a rundown for the viewers the the stoic philosophy maybe.

[00:40:59]>> Yeah. hard to describe it really simply but uh one of the basic concepts in it that's so important is to recognize what is in your control and what is not within your control and like clearly look at to go back to the straight of Hormuz situation we don't have any control over anything that's happening there um so you know there's no political lobbying we can do you know there's no way we can fix it but it does it does demand a lot of our attention and a lot of our energy goes into it the stoic view just is simply recognize that that is completely outside of your control and to then see all the things that actually are in your control and take radical personal responsibility over all of those things that are within your control. And in the book, we talk about, you know, developing yourself, learning new skills, throwing yourself into new environments where you can develop. But the same is true with your financial situation, with your household situation, making sure your family's working well. I mean, you know, these are all things you could do. You plant a garden. That doesn't hurt. And it's actually rewarding. You know, there's lots of things that one can do and taking responsibility for those things first and foremost, it uh it brings you peace of mind and actually it makes you feel empowered because there is something you can do to improve your situation today whatever it is.

[00:42:15]>> Yeah. No, I agree. And it's helped me.

[00:42:17]And the thing is if you uh are empowered, you can also help other people. And uh like uh yeah. So anyway, um, Matt and Doug, thank you for coming on. It was great speaking with you.

[00:42:32]>> Yeah, thank you, Mario. Really, really appreciate it.

[00:42:35]>> Yeah, it's been a pleasure talking to you, Mario.

[00:42:38]>> Thank you, Doug.