Title: Live with the Oak Bloke and John Polomny of Actionable Intelligence Show: The Oak Bloke (YouTube live chat / Substack livestream — host "The Oak Bloke", UK) Guest: John Polomny (Actionable Intelligence Alert) Date: 2026-08-24 (published; The Oak Bloke channel) URL: https://youtu.be/2eGsJbYaAZw Length: 1:21:55 Note: Verbal fillers (um/uh/you know/I mean/tic "like") removed and stutters/false starts collapsed; wording otherwise verbatim and every (mm:ss) cue kept in place. ">>" marks a speaker change exactly as in the raw auto-captions (host = The Oak Bloke, guest = John Polomny). Auto-transcript garbles corrected to the intended entity: "Pollny"=John Polomny; "Oakg Bloke"=The Oak Bloke; "Birkshshire Haway"=Berkshire Hathaway; "Prem Watza/Watts"=Prem Watsa; "Charlie Mer"=Charlie Munger; "Matt Fber"=Meb Faber; "Walter Schllo"=Walter Schloss; "Joseph Shumpter"=Joseph Schumpeter; "Esop"=Aesop; "Cal Sheet"=Kalshi; "Poly Market"=Polymarket; "Georgia Capital PLC"=Georgia Capital (LSE: CGEO); "Lion Capital / Lion Bank"=Lion Finance Group, the renamed Bank of Georgia Group (LSE: BGEO); "Technip FMC"=TechnipFMC (NYSE: FTI); "Reese Simmerton"=Rhys Simmerton and "I am"=Aimia (TSX: AIM), the Canadian holding company he runs; "UNIF"=UZNF, the London-listed National Investment Fund of Uzbekistan; "Usbekistsan/Usbekiststan"=Uzbekistan; "Cass Adamrom/cassadam"=Kazatomprom; "Camo/Kamico"=Cameco; "sput/SPRUT product"=the Sprott Physical Uranium Trust (SPUT); "Langanger Heinrich"=Langer Heinrich; "Laram"=Laramide; "MADNA"=Moderna; "Thungella"=Thungela Resources; "Solstice"=Solstice Advanced Materials (the Honeywell spin-off); "holdtech/tech"=Holtec; "Landbridge"=LandBridge; "Murray Stall / Rory Stall"=Murray Stahl of Horizon Kinetics; "air Donnie at UEC"=Amir Adnani at UEC; "ASA international"=ASA International Group (LSE: ASAI); "RTW Pharmaceutical"=RTW Biotech Opportunities (LSE: RTW); "Pure Tech"=PureTech Health (LSE: PRTC); "Karuna"=Karuna Therapeutics; "Bristol Meers Squib"=Bristol Myers Squibb; "riotento"=Rio Tinto; "Petro Kazakhstan"=PetroKazakhstan; "Martin Van Crevel"=Martin van Creveld; "Mckinder"=Mackinder; "Roor's Rift/Ror's Rift"=Rorke's Drift; "Color Sergeant Born/Bourne"=Colour Sergeant Bourne; "Wimar/VHimar"=Weimar; "Ulamatar"=Ulaanbaatar; "Vladiva"=Vladivostok; "Cam Chaka"=Kamchatka; "Tajikhstan"=Tajikistan; "Turk Menistan"=Turkmenistan; "franophhone"=francophone; "Farage"=Nigel Farage; "AFC"=Asia Frontier Capital (its Uzbekistan fund). Left as spoken because the intended form is uncertain: "Dr. Miller" (the liquidity analyst he credits), "Andy Bham" (a UK politician), "Den" (a biotech special situation around a legal outcome), "nir" (a uranium developer), "Malcolm Rollson" and "Michael Alen" (early nuclear commentators), "Seapports" (the US-listed PureTech spin-out the host names). NOTE ON A CLAIM IN THE TEXT: at 1:16:14 Polomny says of Murray Stahl "he died recently" — that is recorded as his statement, not verified here.
00:00 Okay, so welcome everybody. This is The Oak Bloke live chat. It's the first time I've done one of these using Substack, so I wasn't absolutely sure it was going to work, but the technology appears to have worked absolutely seamlessly. I'm very very pleased and honored to introduce John Polomny from the Actionable Intelligence Substack.
00:28 So just one thing before I asked John to introduce himself. We're not registered financial advisers. Nothing that we say is to be taken as investment advice. You do your own due diligence. And I guess John, to coin your, it's your money. It's your responsibility. Right.
00:53 >> Absolutely. But we live in a world where people don't like responsibility. So that's why we have to do these disclaimers. But anyways, yes. >> Indeed. So tell me about the Actionable Intelligence. Tell me about your Substack, your YouTube. I've been following you for a while.
01:09 I'm a great fan. As I say, it's a real pleasure to talk to you today. Tell the viewers a little bit about what you do. So, this whole thing started about, well, originally I've always kind of been dabbling with writing and putting things on the internet going all the way back maybe even 20 years when that old Blogspot blogging platform.
01:37 I don't know if it still exists, but the reason I did it originally was out of some kind of narcissism or desire to have everybody listen to me. I felt like when I wrote my ideas down and put them out there, I could get feedback or critiques and it helped me distill and clarify in my own mind my ideas.
02:01 And so I started on a platform like that. I've always been an investor since I had been a teenager. I'm sure we've heard this cliche before with other people, but I started out and then, I say about 20 years ago, I started on that platform and I got bored with it, shut it down, and then what happened was, maybe I don't know, it was the first big move in Bitcoin when it made that run to like 12,000 or something or 16,000.
02:28 Maybe this is eight years ago. I can't remember. Seven or eight years ago and some people called me. Well, it was one of my, my brother. He's a firefighter in Metro Broward, Florida. And these firefighters are notorious. They always have side businesses. They're always scheming up some investment because they have all this time on their hands.
02:49 They're always. So, I get this call on a Sunday morning. Hey, my brother's telling him my brother's an investor. Let's talk to him. So, they've got me on this conference call. They're all at the station and I'm like, "No, guys." They're calling me about Bitcoin when it's already made a big run.
03:04 And I'm like, "This is the shoe shine boy moment." Rockefeller was famous for selling in before the crash in 29 cuz shoe shine boy was giving him stock tips. He's like, "When everybody's in, I'm out." So, anyways, I tried to warn them of this. And so, I said, "You know what? I'm going to crank this thing back up.
03:26 " So, I made my first YouTube video, which was horrible. I'm sure people can go back to the archives, and it wasn't a very good effort, but it just stuck with it, and people kind of took a liking to what I said. I kind of put myself in a situation where I'm not out there trying. I'm just going to tell you what I think from my perspective.
03:51 >> And people seem to have liked that. I believe there's some authenticity there. I don't really care if people get offended. I'm already done working. I'm already done with all that. I just manage my own affairs now and I'm retired and I'm just going to say what I think and I believe that the markets can be used to create wealth.
04:18 It's a tool like anything else like fire or a hammer or an excavator and if you use those things improperly then you're going to have a problem. And I think people don't understand I'm trying to convey to people the mistakes that are typically made I already made decades ago. If I would have had somebody like myself telling me when I was 20 about compounding and time is your greatest asset and all these things.
04:44 So I try to convey these things and then I also it just kind of morphs into sometimes I know some people get a little bit aggravated with me because sometimes my commentary morphs into the old man standing on the lawn yelling at the moon. But I believe that all of these things are intertwined. Geopolitics. For example, I think the UK is tremendously cheap, but I think it's uninvestable right now because the political climate doesn't allow for proper economic policies to be put in place to unleash
05:17 >> that potential and correct that overvaluation. But it's on my watch list, just like Venezuela was on my watch list, [laughter] is on my watch list. But you get my point. See, and so >> yeah, the UK is more of a frontier market than the frontier market. >> Well, not to be disparaging, but things are what they are.
05:36 I have to look at the way the cards are dealt to me, not the way I want them to be. >> Yeah. >> So, and because we're dealing with real money here. I have people I got to take care of. I'm trying to do things. I'm living. I got to kill what I eat now. I don't work. And so, these are, I'm being facetious, but you know what I mean.
05:55 And so I got to look at things for the way they are. Does that mean I agree or disagree with every policy? No. I just, this is the problem I think people fall into. They get wedded to a worldview or something like this, which is fine. We all have our value system, but we're dealing with money here.
06:12 We're dealing with investing. We're dealing on trying to compound capital. And so I can be the biggest whatever, left or right, but I'll give you an example I like to use and then I'll stop. When President Obama took over the S&P was 666. And it doesn't matter if I like his policies or don't like his policies.
06:36 That we're coming out of a massive global financial crisis and central banks around the world were going to flood the world with liquidity and we know from if we're students of Dr. Miller, what drives markets in the short medium term? Liquidity and sentiment. And so, >> doesn't matter what I personally think about Obamacare or all these other things or him as a person, >> the market's going to go up because they're going to flood the world.
07:01 They're going to flood the whole thing with liquidity. And that's what happened. But a lot of people won't allow themselves. They stayed out of the market. What does that one thing doesn't have anything to do with the other? So, I'm trying to look at things for the way they are and then distill things down and then find opportunities.
07:16 And one last thing I'll say, the other thing that I realized a long time ago, this internet was the best thing that ever happened to me. When I was a kid, I was kind of a nerd. I would get off school and I had to walk home and I would always tell my mom, I'm not coming directly home.
07:34 I'm going to be at the library. And I would just immerse myself not in the fiction section. I would be over in the non-fiction section or where all the encyclopedias, map books, biographies. And so I think that I kind of fell into that what Charlie Munger said that some Stanford MBAs asked him before he died.
07:54 He used to give interviews >> and they said, "Well, what do you think is one of the main things you can do to be successful in business or in life?" He said, "Read 500 pages a day." What he was talking about, he had never met a man that was successful that didn't read and that's what he's talking about creating that lattice work of knowledge and then what I noticed is your brain can create a large language model [laughter] >> you see what I'm saying, as you take this information and it's capable of a sudden
08:23 >> you hear about something and you're thinking to yourself well I know something about this subject matter, you're not >> and so I think that's kind of been an advantage for me. That's kind of how this has all evolved. So obviously I'm older now. I'm 59 and I've got a lot of what I think experience and wisdom >> and I think Actionable Intelligence Alert was an outgrowth. The Substack platform has been tremendous for me.
08:49 It's let you focus on just writing and there's a certain segment of the population that finds my musings useful and our model portfolios have done very well over the last five or six years. So, that's kind of how I ended up here and what I do now. I do this full-time now. It's been very lucrative and I'm going to continue to do it.
09:11 >> Fantastic. Fantastic because you've got I think 17,000 subscribers on YouTube which is fantastic. And I think it's interesting because there's so many sort of people out there doing things like TikToks kind of giving financial advice in 20 seconds 30 seconds or whatever the time limit is on a TikTok.
09:35 I don't even know. I think it's a minute actually. But [clears throat] I remember watching a video and it was a guy dissecting these one minute TikTok videos and just like, what this guy is saying here is just absolute garbage. This is just lie and there's so much of this out there and I'm with you on the whole Bitcoin thing.
09:57 I've been very negative towards that and I think quite famously now the Michael Saylor saying, "Oh, there's never going to be a crypto winter ever again." As soon as I heard him say that, I thought, "Right, you're heading for a fall." And Bitcoin by extension because everything happens in waves, doesn't it? And whilst yes there's a big kind of wave of sentiment or was a wave of sentiment towards crypto, it was just you could just tell it's
10:32 like well where's the value, what is actually being generated? Even when you generate every, or when every single bitcoin has been minted. So who keeps the system going because it's the miners that are sort of supporting the transactions of the people that have had their bitcoins mined already.
10:52 So what happens when you run out of new mined new bitcoins to mine, who supports the transactions then? Well the answer is nobody. The thing implodes on itself. It's a ponzi and it's so obvious. This is the thing, I don't know. I think there's so many of these things out there. They're just so obvious or they seem obvious maybe to you and I, but millions get taken in by them, don't they? >> Well, I think unfortunately a couple things have happened.
11:24 We had a period after the great financial crisis, if you want to call it, we can even go back even before that to maybe 1997, I think, when you had the long-term capital management situation imploded and a lot of people that are younger probably weren't even born then. But that was kind of a Rubicon where I think caused a lot of these or helped cause a lot of these problems because what happened was we don't want to endure any kind of pain.
11:50 Our political class. The people themselves. I don't rag on the political class too much because they're a reflection of the people. This is, we do have a democracy. You don't have to vote for these people, but they do. >> And then they rag on it and then like, how did this happen? And then so, I don't want to go too deep into that, but suffice to say is we crossed a Rubicon where we said we don't want to have pain because it's politically not beneficial for me as a political class.
12:19 And so we started printing money. Alan Greenspan was the Federal Reserve chairman then. >> And then that's what we've done at every crisis. We had the tech bubble in 99 and 2000, which is being dwarfed by what we're seeing now. And when that blew up, which inevitably it did, and things crashed by 80 or 90% and the NASDAQ, I think NASDAQ was down almost 90%.
12:44 What did the Federal Reserve and government do? Well, they printed money. They didn't use the Joseph Schumpeter methodology of creative destruction. Well, these are poorly managed companies and the assets don't disappear, the wealth just changes hands. And we didn't want to do that because that's politically, >> the economy goes down.
13:05 That's reflected in me not getting reelected and allowing me to do what I want to do and my grift or whatever. And so this just has kept going and every, I use the analogy of you're driving down an icy road and I learned when I was taught to drive was if you get into a spin because of the ice, just take your foot off the gas.
13:26 Okay? >> Don't try to brake, don't try to over steer. Just take your foot off the gas, let the car kind of the inertia just, you'll slow down. But what do we do? We got one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake and we're over steering and eventually because of all these government interventions and central bank interventions and inability to want or desire to take any kind of pain or allow the underbrush to get burned off.
13:54 We fly off eventually fly off the road into a crisis and then it's like how did this happen? >> So I think that's one reason. Another thing is we had 10 years of basically zero interest rates. Remember when >> countries like Austria were selling 100-year bonds at like 0.1%. Who's buying these things? >> And this enabled a lot of speculation.
14:19 No other, I forget what they used to call it, was an acronym. No other game or something like that. You had to be in stocks. You had >> there is no alternative. >> Yeah. Exactly. That's it. Yeah. >> And so then we have these various bubbles that are created by these central bank interventions. And so people's views on returns and expectations for returns get skewed.
14:41 If you're walking down the street, you used to have $10,000 bills back in the day. Let's say, use that analogy or metaphor. You walk down the street and you find a $10,000 bill that fell out of somebody's pocket. You pick it up. Well, that's a pretty good windfall. But does that make you a good investor? Because you were in the right time at the right place at the right time and were on the right Reddit thread and bought this >> shitcoin, excuse my language, and it went up. Does that make you a good
15:07 investor or were you lucky? And so people confuse these things. What I want to see is Meb Faber's a pretty good guy that I like to follow, writes a lot of white papers, runs some funds, >> and he talked about this. You want to judge somebody on their ability. I don't, this is what I'm seeing on Substack.
15:26 You're seeing a lot of people, they're like shooting stars. They get into the right thing at the right time and they go right up the rankings and then they burn out because the thing blows up because what do they, be like a trend follower and ride a wave, but then eventually you come to the shore and now what do you do? It's like surfing.
15:44 You know what I mean? Okay, now you got to paddle back out. What's the next theme I got to get on? I'm using >> It's the grind, isn't it? It's sort of Yeah. getting up the next day and >> my view is look when I was in the utility industry and we had guys, I tell this story all the time, we have people, I ran power plants like coal plants gas turbine plants as a plant, I did every job on tools all the way up to the plant manager >> and if I had a problem if I was the maintenance supervisor on a steam turbine I didn't just try to fix
16:20 it myself. We had the guys that were downtown that were like subject matter experts and this guy just sits in a cubicle all day, he's 62. He knows everything about steam. His whole working life evolves around, he's the guru on steam turbines. So I asked him and so I started earlier in my career of investing I was having these uneven results.
16:39 I was like well if this works in industry, subject, who are the most successful investors and so if you start looking at them we can go down the line Buffett, Munger, Prem Watsa, all these people >> and you look at their overall cumulative returns distilled down, I go to the first page of any Berkshire Hathaway annual report or Fairfax Financial for example because Prem Watsa is kind of a Warren Buffett of Canada, they list all their returns since the thing started in the 60s. Okay.
17:11 So, what's the average? 20% a year. Okay. >> And so, people are making three, four, 500% on a shitcoin or because they got on the Nvidia thing and they think that that's normal. >> Yes. >> Why can't I just do that year after year after year? And that's like Meb Faber says, you have to judge somebody on a, you have to go through a market cycle.
17:28 That's fine. Everybody's a genius when the market's going up. What happens when it goes down? What kind of a drawdown do they take? What's their ability to navigate a bear market or crisis >> and that's excluded because we've fallen into this trap especially with a lot of younger people >> they're desperate, there's not a lot of upward mobility in the west now, I don't want to go too far into that, it is what it is and so people are >> they had a thing the other day I
17:59 saw from Bloomberg a chart 65% of generation Z >> takes funds from investing and is on these gambling sites like DraftKings and stuff where only 0.1% of the people on there which are running huge computer models >> get 90% of the profits. Okay. >> Yeah. >> Or on Polymarket or Kalshi. And this is the mentality. ▶ Chart 65
18:22 We've created a gamblers mentality. Not an investing mentality. A gambling mentality. I try to be generous and call it speculation. But yet these people think they're investing. And so their expectations are skewed. The history that they're relating to is skewed and this is part of the problem. So I'm a little bit long-winded.
18:41 I'm sorry but that's kind of how >> and I found that I go back to Aesop's fable, who won the race between the turtle and the hare. >> Yes. >> Turtle wins and just consistently one foot in front of the other. So anyway, >> no I'm a big believer in that. For me I think one of the most instructive things as a child and it kind of plays into this current sort of money printing is that I studied German history and post World War I and the Weimar Republic and all of the and an
19:15 enduring memory for me, there's two things to this, number one was the fact that there was this hyperinflation post World War I Germany, the guy who was carrying his day's wages home in a wheelbarrow. The thing that at that time and I was sort of like this little 12 year old 13 year-old entrepreneur in the making was I said I want to be the guy that was making the wheelbarrows in Germany, and I think that's kind of what it's all about is sort of looking at things laterally and saying like okay there's a down cycle
19:50 yeah there's things are so bad people are carrying their money home in a wheelbarrow, well okay well let's make some wheelbarrows. And I think that's for me the key in investing is your strategy is not going to just endure. I get that Buffett's got a great track record of compounding returns 20% year after year and maybe you can find companies like that that you can just literally just invest it, forget it, come back 20 years and it's compounded 20% every year and you're very
20:25 wealthy. But I don't know. I think just the world is changing very quick. To me I feel that it needs to stay agile. I don't know what's your thoughts around that. Would you sort of be able to invest in something close your eyes and don't look at it for 10 years? Would that be something you could trust yourself to do? So, in my newsletter, and I'm not pumping it, but we've had several >> tenbaggers, >> and it's consistent about it, is that when did I buy these things?
20:59 >> I'll just give one example. I'll give it away. I am a big fan of >> I spent a lot of time traveling to former Soviet republics and around the world. I've traveled a lot. I've lived in a lot of countries. >> I was in the military. The only continent I haven't been to is Antarctica. So, >> I had my eyes opened.
21:20 I traveled to Southeast Asia when the tigers were first born, the tiger cubs, they called them. >> I saw what was going. I saw how industrious the people I was. I was amazed. In all of these countries, they were different degrees, but I remember the first time that I came into Hong Kong Harbor and just was amazed of how all the buildings and lights and all of the ships in the harbor and I was saying this is something.
21:47 >> And so what I look for is this. Here's how I do this. I mentioned the Buffett and all that stuff. Not >> because if you look at the history of these people, >> once they got very large amounts of money, they were kind of limited to what they could do. But Buffett and these other people do what I'm basically doing.
22:08 Okay? Special situations, blown out sectors, blown out countries, things that have a potential or a catalyst or something, whether it's a new CEO, whether it's a change in policy in the countries like Argentina was an example. One of my big winners was a company that trades in the UK as a matter of fact. It's Georgia Capital PLC >> and basically it was a company that is like a mini Berkshire Hathaway in the Republic of Georgia.
22:35 People are going where's that at? Is that where Atlanta is? No, I'm talking about in the [laughter] >> different Georgia >> caucus area, right? So, >> and they adopted reforms many years ago, economic reforms made business and capital came there. Okay. And this company was run very well. I'm not going to get into the whole thing.
22:56 They got lucky because they took a big equity position in Bank of Georgia which is now called Lion Capital. I believe it trades on the LSE also which has done very well >> and so this thing took five years to pan out >> and I got two or three bites at the apple. It was doing well and then we had the war in Ukraine and because it was in the sphere of that area the stock dropped by 40%.
23:19 I told my subscribers, if you didn't get in the first time, get in now because I told them what was going to happen. I have people in that area. I've been to these places. I know how things operate. All this capital came in from Russia and Ukraine, Ukrainians and Russians that wanted to get away from the conflict.
23:34 They came to Georgia. So, we got this big and so what I like about the management is they said, "We want to ten-bag this thing in 10 years." And then they put out a plan on how to do it. >> Okay. And the reforms were there and now they're rolling it out. They said, "Well, Georgia is kind of a small country, so now we're going to expand into Armenia.
23:56 " Okay? And so they just keep marching the net asset value of the company up. The market hasn't recognized that. So what do they do? >> They buy back shares. This is what, Walter Schloss methodology. What am I going to do with my excess cash? So this is the kind of things I look for.
24:14 Give you another example. Offshore Oil and Gas. Okay, there was a company, this is another one I just sold out of portfolio, was like an eight bagger. So, same thing over like four or five years. TechnipFMC. >> They make subsea systems for offshore wells. It's like an oligopoly. There's only a couple companies that do what they do.
24:37 Very highly engineered >> blowout preventers. All this stuff that only a few people can do in the world. And so it was a French company and French US French company. They had got into some offshore wind and it got kind of discombobulated management. So they spun that off and so we're going to focus on our core competency.
24:59 Well, that's what I zero in on. Okay, we have a management that knows what they're doing. They realize that this is, get rid of this thing. It's distracting. Right at the cusp of a resumption of spending and offshore. There's only them and one or two other companies can do what they do. And so what happened? It went from like eight bucks to 80 bucks, but it took five years >> and you had several bites at the apple because nothing is linear and maybe there was some news that came out, well the offshore sector is
25:30 not going to come back or oil prices drop. They don't care. They don't need that. So this is the kind of things I look for, special situations >> and I just have cultivated this whole bunch of connections and people I follow or talk to >> share ideas and this is stuff that institutions can't mess with, they're not going to mess with this >> and then they don't have the advantage that you and I have and people listening is we're not
26:01 constrained by time we don't have an >> investment board looking over our shoulder like why did you buy that, it's down 30%. But this is the thesis and if you stay with it and so we have that time arbitrage that we can utilize to our advantage. So this is what I do and this is how you get the multibaggers.
26:21 This is how you get the generational wealth that you can create or get yourself, we don't have to work anymore. But it takes time. It's like planting trees, you have to plant some trees and then you have to wait until they get fruit bearing and then you bear the fruit.
26:38 So that's and then when you get your eight or 10 bagger, >> is there another opportunity that comes along and I can harvest this and then replace it with this. And I gave an example. I like a company. It trades in Canada. I owned it many times throughout the history because I like jockeys.
26:57 I like to wed myself to or attach myself to people. There's a guy I think he's South African but I like his method, Rhys Simmerton, and he runs Aimia in Canada. And so what are they doing? They got Saudi money in there. >> Yeah. >> What's he focusing on? The whole UK. He can see it.
27:17 He's familiar with it. He's done deals there before. What does he want? I want to acquire companies. They have a big cash pile. They reconciled the >> Somebody tried to do this before he got there. They screwed it all up. >> Bought a bunch of companies they shouldn't have. He came in, sold a bunch of stuff. >> Has $280 million in cash, over a billion dollars in net operating loss carry forward. So, he's like, "Look at the UK.
27:41 You've got all these companies that have a ton of cash. Companies are generating cash. The valuations are at generational lows. >> And that's what we want to do. We're going to start acquiring these companies, take their cash, take their cash generating ability, rinse and repeat.
27:57 This is the kind of stuff that I'm looking for. And >> I got a company that I'm working on right now. This is, I'm not going to talk about it right now, but like a situation I've been working on for the last 6 months in Africa and there's a guy that used to be an entrepreneur. He's found a way to make money solving problems with food and still make money and he has a perfect funnel and how he does it with creates this startup labs he does in Nigeria and Kenya and gets all these entrepreneurs and every
28:31 one of the companies is cash flow positive that they've invested in. So it's kind of a venture model but he wrote a book called Berkshire Africa. So this is the kind of stuff I look for. That's kind of long-term stuff, but it's 10 times Uzbekistan. I've talked about it.
28:46 People are like, "Why does this guy keep talking about Uzbekistan? It's the only country in the world that grew during COVID and you don't, you think it's like six years ago, seven years ago, they used to make people go out and actually pick cotton, force people to go, >> new management gets there, a new guy takes over from the post-Soviet guy and says, "Hey, I don't know the guy personally, but I kind of know the mentality of these places.
29:13 Ex-Soviet apparatchik. They're creaming off a certain amount but kind of realizes that I can steal more if the pie grows. So >> reforms and I guess the regional growth is just like Georgia, we've got that in common actually. I remember, I've only can claim four bags not eight.
29:37 Because I sort of got involved with Georgia Capital at the end of No. So yeah, at the end of 2023, so it's up 400. But I remember looking at the return on tangible equity of Bank of Georgia and it's up into the 30s. I was like, well, there's no banks kind of delivering those kinds of returns, it's completely outsized.
30:01 And then they've got I think they privatized or part IPOed their, was it their water business, I think. Yeah >> yeah and again when you sort of looked at the valuation point of that, there were so many sort of proof points I call them proof points where you sort of say well if it keeps doing these things it's just going to compound and the growth rate of the Georgian economy and if your GDP is six, 6 and a half, seven, something like that over the last couple of years and the whole region is like that, so I
30:37 think it was a couple of months ago that you did a video on UZNF, didn't you, and I think that's got huge potential. It's up I think about 20% so far since it IPOed. >> So >> yeah, it trades in London. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. >> Yeah. So I think one other that I've got that I included in my sort of picks for 2026 was ASA International.
31:05 So this is a company that again it's listed in London but it's essentially micro finance for females in South Asia parts of Africa so Ghana, Kenya, Pakistan but again the ROTE on it, it's return on tangible equity above 30%. It gives Bank of Georgia or Lion Bank as it now is, a run for its money.
31:33 It's a real, and because they're introducing PEOS, which is like digital banking across all of its countries. You kind of look at that and think, well, that's going to reduce risk, increase efficiency, and it's all micro loans. It's like $200 loans to somebody that grows mangoes or stuff like this.
32:00 It's small beer, but the net interest margin that they're able to charge is colossal. It's sort of into the 30s, 40s. Again, you just would not find those kinds of returns. And when they're losing I think their bad debt was sort of like one or 2%, obviously a bit higher during COVID 2021, 22, but their normal bad debt's sort of in the low percentages, like really low percentages, very very impressive company but I think people look at it
32:38 and say oh Africa hyperinflation risk, ah just not going to touch it and it's a pity because it's doing an import and I guess sort of putting investment into small businesses, people that other people don't want to invest in, it's kind of it's found a little niche among female entrepreneurs primarily and is sort of another of these that, you know, special situation that just seems to
33:18 bring home the bacon. So >> yeah, this is what I think people need to understand. I think a lot of people get what they call home country bias. They're like, "Well, I'm a US citizen. I'm just going to look at the US cuz it's easy." And with the, I kind of didn't mention when I was talking about the internet being the best thing.
33:38 I don't travel as much anymore because I get easily aggravated, but I used to travel all over and go to these places and I would be walking down the street and just thinking they need this, they need this, they need this, and this is how you do it. It's an entrepreneur. Kaiser Cement here back in the 1950s and 60s used to have pink cement trucks and then on the >> rotating tub it said, "Find a need and fill it.
34:04 " And this is the whole entrepreneurial situation. So, I think you have to make the world your oyster, right? You have the ability to do this. Now, I know some countries limit their citizens from doing certain things, but you can always find a way, right? And get on a plane and go to these places for a vacation, and you'll just be amazed of what the opportunities are.
34:26 And then especially if you have a little bit of gumption, you can go to some of these even pre-frontier markets. You'd be surprised the access you'll get sometimes if you know how to, >> people only know what you tell them. I'm not saying to deceive people, but you say, "Hey, I'm a player.
34:45 I'm a, go and talk. Who are the top attorneys in Ulaanbaatar firms? Go, that's what I did 20 years ago. Go there. I want to put somebody on retainer. This guy's a player." Next thing I know, I'm getting invited to get-togethers at the British Embassy. And you start meeting people. At the time I was working for Duke Energy, but I was just a manager of a power plant.
35:05 That was my side job. I wasn't portraying myself as a representative or an agent. And I was talking with the minister of energy at that time about, hey, we all these coal plants, what are your ideas? You'd be surprised of what can happen, and so there's a lot of opportunity in the world. And I look at like Africa.
35:28 I like this guy that I'm researching. I'm thinking about doing some more work with them. >> You get a population, I want to go to places where the demographics are good, the debts are low so far and people are starting, you're starting getting a managerial class in Central Asia and in Africa, Africa and Central Asia, I just say that in general, but in Africa there's 54 countries.
35:53 There's a difference between Rwanda and Equatorial Guinea. One's investable, one's not. So this is how you have to sift things. Francophone Africa with all the coups is not the same as Kenya or Tanzania. So >> same thing with like Tajikistan or Turkmenistan.
36:17 You can't even hardly, you can't even get a visa to, but you can go to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. So yes, >> this is what I'm saying. And why not use the, and you could go to these places and open a brokerage account if you're so inclined and there, like you mentioned earlier, there are vehicles that you can even do from the keyboard.
36:33 So why not, I don't have to be a genius if Uzbekistan's going to grow their economy at 7 to 8% ad infinitum. Over an investing career of 20 years. >> All they have to do is just keep doing what they're doing like the management in Georgia and you're casting a net into a larger school of fish so to speak.
36:52 That's kind of the whole mentality of Georgia Capital for example. So the pie gets bigger and they want asset light businesses to capture as much of that as possible. Now of course a lot of it's been driven by their holdings in Lion, the bank, but that shows you how smart they are and what do they do? They've been selling that stake down taking that cash and returning it to shareholders.
37:15 So there's so much opportunity in the world. A lot of times I will speak negatively about the West and everything, >> but my relatives, my ancestors came from Europe because it was shitty then. They were peasants. They came here. There was an opportunity. Jim Rogers said this once, and I'll stop. In 1800, the place to be was London.
37:34 In 1900, the place to be was New York. In 2000, the place to be was Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong. Okay? That's where things are happening. And that doesn't mean you have to pick up and move to Singapore like he did, but this is where I want to go where the pin action is. Use a bowling metaphor, but if there's not a lot of pin action or I see the politics going in a way that's not conducive to business, then I probably want to move capital, I'm an allocator of capital. So, make the world your
38:05 oyster. It's possible to do. So I guess one thing I've seen in the last 5 years is a really big immigration from Britain to the Middle East and to Dubai particularly. I know quite a number of people that have relocated for tax and for opportunity and it's interesting because of course the third Gulf War this year and everything has or should have just turned that completely on its head but we just seem to be in this sort of nothing to see here.
38:45 What how do you think the Middle East is going to sort of pan out? Obviously there's the conflict ongoing between the US and Iran and but for the countries that are there what's your take on, are they just covering up the extent of the problem or is there just no problem to see? >> What's your >> Well, I have to be careful here because I don't want to get you in trouble and I don't know you that well.
39:10 So >> we have a situation where, and I'm no Marxist or leftwing liberal. I look at the way, we have a result of colonial lines that were drawn by >> powers that don't really have the same clout they used to do. France, the UK.
39:37 I was a big fan of, one of my favorite movies is Zulu, in Zulu Dawn, Colour Sergeant Bourne at Rorke's Drift. I love this stuff. I think the British, the flag never sets on the empire, and I do believe that some of these things were good things in many cases, notwithstanding, of course, you could >> and so we have this hangover from colonialism.
40:00 And then we have a lot of things, we have interests here in the United States that really have for whatever reason a big, we have the whole Mackinder thing, control of resources the Asian continent, the whole story behind the great game, why were you guys doing the charge in Crimea, you're trying to control the Black Sea back then, and all these things.
40:32 So, >> this stuff continues. I don't particularly care for it, but we have a situation where we have a country of 90 million people. I'm talking about Iran. >> It's a civilization. It's been around forever. >> Okay. I didn't realize this about Iran. The average IQ there is like a hundred.
40:54 It's very highly educated. Mh. >> I have Iranian friends. One of my friends told me one time, he tried to encourage me to go back with him to visit. He said, "This is like before all this shenanigans. This is like 15 years ago." I said, "Iran, what am I going to do there? Going to be held hostage or something by the" He said, "No, man.
41:12 " He goes, "You wouldn't believe it. You're going to go there. You'll be like a rock star. Everybody's going to want to invite you over. Everybody's going to want to talk to you. They're going to be in love with you. You're never going to have to buy anything. Everybody's going to want to let you stay at their house.
41:22 It's unbelievable." And so I'm thinking to myself, all my travels I have found that average regular people are pretty much the same. They have the same desires. They have the same wants, needs, just have a family, do their thing, blah blah blah. And so we have these other mechanisms in place.
41:40 So we have two powers there, one Israel, one Iran, vying for who's going to be the hegemon in the Middle East. >> And we have a situation with this country Israel where it has a big brother, the US. It goes back to when we were kids, the little snotty little brat that had that big doofus brother that he would talk a lot of and then he'd step back behind the big brother.
42:03 Well, this is what it is. And so what I think has happened is, and I've been saying this for many years. I didn't know if we were going to have a war with Iran, but I'm quoting what another geopolitical analyst said, warning about messing around with a country like Iran, screwing around with Afghanistan or being able to stage 750,000 men and 2,000 tanks in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and then roll in across the desert in Iraq.
42:31 That's easy stuff. Okay, you're dealing now with a country you're dealing with big game. Okay, you're big game hunting now. And I think what people didn't realize is things have shifted. I'm a big fan of military history. Martin van Creveld, he's an Israeli military scientist. William Lynn here and they talk >> about asymmetric warfare and the ability and that's what you've seen now.
42:57 The ability to use drones and missile technology to obsolete the forward deployed aircraft carrier. You have a situation where there's literally almost mutinies happening on some of the, I was in the Navy 292 days at sea. People are freaking out on those ships. I guarantee jumped over the side.
43:18 I've seen pictures of the meals. Why? Because where were they getting their, when I was on deployment in the Gulf of Oman and the USS Midway or whatever. Where was the supply ships coming from? They were coming from the fifth fleet in Bahrain. Okay. Now that's destroyed. There is no more fifth headquarters.
43:34 There is, you can't, when we were escorting Kuwaiti tankers, destroyers were operating inside the Gulf. You can't take a US Navy ship and there it'll be blown out of the water. >> And so we have changed the way things are. And so this is not good. This is possibly something close.
43:57 And you being from the UK, I'm presuming >> you remember the Suez incident in the 50s. This was almost like the final nail in the coffin for the Empire. It's like, all right, that's it. Did the UK dry up and blow away? No. But it wasn't what it was when Colour Sergeant Bourne was defending Rorke's Drift.
44:17 So, in the 1880s, so, I think >> we're in a similar situation. We're an empire >> and empires go through stages of life. They crest and usually it's the same thing that happens. They get overindebted, overextended militarily and then some other power emerges and then you combine this with this asymmetric warfare and here you go.
44:40 You can't get an, they talked about I think it was the George Washington, I was on these type of ships and I was in the fire party called repair five, that's the main thing for the engineering section damage control party. You're telling me that a laundry fire, a lint fire happened on the ship and they had to take it out of service and 600 sailors were injured.
45:03 I know what a laundry room on a carrier looks like. There's no way that was, they got hit by a missile, but the government isn't going to tell you that. >> No, >> the [clears throat] people in the Pentagon are themselves. What do we do? >> So >> this is I'm not sure how it's going to shake out.
45:19 They're going to try, I think you're in a war of wills now. I kind of go with the view that all the Iranians have to do. I'm no advocate for that regime. It's not a good bunch of people. It is what it is. They don't really represent the wishes and desires of the average Iranian, but it is what it is. >> And all they have to do is survive this somehow.
45:41 And so now we've realized we can't bomb them into submission. We don't have the industrial capability to manufacture weapons sufficient to the >> how we're using them. And so now we're going to economically, well that was the plan with Russia and that's been five years and Russia hasn't collapsed yet. So I'm getting a little bit, in the meantime the debt is going up.
46:04 Our markets are under, the yen, we have a lot of plates in the air right now. >> Sure. >> And so I think that I don't know if this is going to be the tipping point but if we don't, what's the choice the United States has now? You're going to just pull out now? All those bases are destroyed.
46:22 You're not going to rebuild the probably and then what does the Saudis do? What does Kuwait do? There was a pact signed between Saudi Pakistan and I forget who the other entity was because they kind of realized that the 50-year situation that Kissinger negotiated. We protect you.
46:43 >> We keep lanes open, you buy our weapons, and you recycle, you sell your oil in dollars and recycle them into Treasury bonds. That's kind of fraying at the seams now. So, >> but then you've also got the scenario where you've got Iran but the UAE and Saudi Arabia all members of the BRICS.
47:08 So, are we going to see a realignment of just the BRICS, that becoming a BRICS nations territory region, and the sort of Monroe doctrine, retreat to the west and we see a different world and that sort of central sort of center of gravity of the Middle East just becomes a BRICS center of gravity.
47:35 It's interesting to see which way that ends up. Would you see any BRICS nations that you preferred over others or are there any BRICS nations you just wouldn't invest in? >> I would, I don't have a problem investing in a lot of things. >> The Russians didn't confiscate my assets.
48:00 The United States government >> made it illegal for me. I used to own Gazprom and >> Rosneft and >> Surgutneftegas and all these things. They paid me my dividends. They ended up in my account. I spent the money. So, I'm not a, I think a lot of the things, you have to take some of these things into consideration.
48:21 Look, the BRICS is kind of a unique situation. A lot of people kind of talk it up, some analysts, >> but do you see anybody from China flying to Russia and putting their family's wealth with a Russian banker in a Russian bank? No, you don't see this. They go to Monaco or Cyprus or Switzerland or wherever.
48:41 >> There's, they are pushed together for convenience in many cases. >> And I'll give you an example. You already have the power of Siberia gas pipeline, but now because Russia is under a little bit of duress with this continuing war, there's supposed to be a power of Siberia two, which is kind of on hold because the Chinese are trying to extract terms from the Russians because they kind of feel like they're over a barrel.
49:08 And I've always said that and you can see this if you go to Russian eastern Russia Vladivostok or Kamchatka all these places >> eventually the Chinese are just going to slowly migrate into there. Okay. There's demographic issues and things like that. There's a lot of land. North Koreans are already up in there.
49:27 There's people have no clue. You're talking about a country with 10 time zones. So, >> I just take everything minute by minute, I keep it on my list and if I think there's an opportunity I will take it >> but I'm not wedded to anything and I'm not excluding anything but you have to understand with these BRICS things a lot of people just put it in the too hard pile, maybe that's the best thing to do but I think that when these places open up like you mentioned the
50:02 Monroe or the new Monroe Doctrine. I call it the Donroe doctrine. >> Am I a fan that we went into Venezuela and took the place over? No. But it is what it is and what's the opportunity? That's how I look at it. And so, things are emerging and I have people that I know that are operating there and it's like, I've done this before.
50:23 People are going to reactivate. It's not that the oil isn't there. There's fields that have just been stripped of all the equipment or the wellbores are all waxed up. And so I've been down this road before with PetroKazakhstan and Bankers Petroleum in Albania. Okay. And I made a tremendous amount of money.
50:44 So, it just depends your tolerance for risk and understanding that some of these things can be binary outcomes and then your position size and as the situation heals or gets better, you can always increase your exposure. So, you take a small position, then you're forced to watch it.
51:04 Oh, then it got a little bit better, a little bit better. Things are working. Okay. Blah, blah, blah. I'm going to put a little bit more in on a pullback. And that's kind of how I look at it. But it's all, I tell people if you're laying in bed looking at the ceiling fan and your stomach is hurting and you're worrying, you can't sleep, then your position's too big.
51:19 Sell it down to where that's not happening. >> Yes. Yes. Would you say that if you were a different age, you would invest differently? Do you like, would you say that your perspective would be different if you were, let's say, half your age today? Does that come into it do you think or not really? >> Yeah I would move to one of these places.
51:49 >> Yes shop, I would meet everybody and just take the place over >> but >> I'm almost 60 so I'm not going to do that. So I have friends I have acquaintances I have associates that turn me on to deals. But if I was in my 20s, I know a guy, he runs the Uzbekistan Fund for Asia Pacific, Asia, AFC.
52:13 He's been there since 2018 and he's seen the whole thing. And he started out when he got out of college, he got a one-way ticket to Asia, and he's done very well. That is what I would do if I was younger. >> But now at my age, I have several portfolios, right? I have a speculative portfolio where I mess around with these special situations, but I have to have a permanent capital situation, which I'm creating now because >> I'm not a big fan of what's happening in the West. And I think we're going to
52:46 have a lot of issues with >> monetary debasement and things like that. And so looking at that, I'm looking for other things. And then I have to generate income. So, and then you have to manage this all within whatever your tax jurisdiction allows for and things like this. So >> I still do these things, but when you have accumulated some wealth, your focus probably needs to shift as your age shifts, a little bit.
53:11 >> So I do less crazy stuff. But >> contrary to what people think, if you're just starting out, you've got to be a little speculative. Okay? >> Got to get, I found Munger said this too, you have to get that first 300,000. So how are you going to get that? You got to get a couple 10 baggers.
53:30 So, you got to take some risk. If you're building your account, you don't just go all in on some crazy mining stock, but like this Georgia Capital or things like that. You have to kind of do that because you got to get a wad because once you get that first quarter million or 300,000, then you're at the table and it's a lot easier to get to a million.
53:49 I'm being honest. And once you get to a million, it just gets exponentially easy. More stuff opens up and it just gets exponentially easier. I hate to say that, but that's true. >> And it's just like whatever you need to do, if you got to eat ramen and get a job, part-time job delivering pizzas, you've got to get that >> grub stake together and get in the game because if you are just a wage slave, they >> you can't. Every country in the West is in the same problem.
54:16 They have bad demographics. They have debt. They've made promises they cannot pay for. And history shows us there's only one way out. Okay? And that's going to be the underlying current. And if you're just going to say, well, I'm just going to argue with my boss for 3% a year, you're losing purchasing power.
54:33 >> Yeah. >> And if you don't understand debasement, you don't understand how they're going to deal with this. We have three ways to deal with these problems. First, you have to acknowledge there's a problem. Many people won't acknowledge it. Think this is fine. Everything was fine yesterday.
54:45 >> Everything will be fine today. Tomorrow will be fine, too. Okay. Well, if currency debasement is happening and they have all these debts, are they going to pay it back? No. Are they just going to flat out default? No. So, what do they do historically? This >> this is why I say you have to read and be a student.
55:04 They will always find the easy way out. Debase, kick the can down the road. I'm out of office and somebody else's problem. Especially in a democracy. The things that you can do in a democracy are not sufficient to fix these problems. Okay. The things that you can't, yeah, the things that you can do will not be sufficient. Okay.
55:24 And I don't care if it's Andy Bham. I don't care if it's Farage. I don't care who you elect. I don't care if it's Trump. I don't care if it's whoever. These things are institutional and secular and they are set in motion and there's no turning back now. And so you have to, if you don't want to accept that.
55:43 >> The problem is it's not linear and we'd like to think that way. Well, John, you said that we're in debasement. How come gold's not 20,000? Well, this is not how this works. Okay. >> And but I think if you have to have that as an undercurrent in your thinking, and then you put together what I've said in my mind, scarcity, scarcity caused by underinvestment, scarcity caused by stupid policies by governments causing like wars or >> bad policy in Chile and their copper production's rolling over.
56:14 And this is because there's plenty of stuff in the earth. We just don't want. We have $40 trillion dollars worth of mineral resources in the US. Rio Tinto has been trying to open a copper mine in Arizona for 20 years. They still haven't got it done. So >> this is good for us. And you put currency debasement on top of that and this should be a layup for most people. This is not hard to understand.
56:35 But it's not going to happen next week or in a month. And you have to use the volatility as Rick Rule says because these things are very volatile as your friend. When they sell off, you have to buy more. The >> thesis is still correct. So anyway, that's kind of how, I don't know what the original question is.
56:53 I have a tendency to ramble. Sorry. No, I think one of the things I've been doing of late is kind of imposing as part of the valuation methodology using Michael Porter's five forces. So, Michael Porter was, or is I don't know if he's still going.
57:16 I don't know, but a Harvard professor. And like yourself, John, I spent my sort of late teenage years in libraries a lot and reading a lot. And one of the things I read, terribly sad, but was the Harvard Business Review. And yeah, Michael Porter was one of the guys that featured in there. Anyway, the five forces model.
57:41 I've been using this recently. Very very powerful. So, five factors that determine the attractiveness of an industry, so it's the power of buyers, the power of sellers, your buyers, your customers and your suppliers essentially, the threat of new entrants, the threat of substitution, and then the competitive dynamics of the industry that you're in.
58:06 And those five things are the five forces. I've been applying that for example recently on Thungela which is a coal miner in South Africa. And just kind of looking at it from that prism where well the chances of new entrants is pretty much nil because nobody's going to finance a coal mine. The threat of substitution is very real because you've got renewables, you've got nuclear, you've got gas, oil, you've got all manner of energy substitutions, power of buyers, power of sellers, so
58:42 power of sellers, everybody wants to have a bite of the poor coal miner. So everyone's holding out their hand, the government, in South Africa's case, it's the railways cuz it all has to be shipped to Richard's Bay to be exported apart from what they sell domestically.
59:04 So, that for me has been a very useful tool to kind of just look at things in a very objective way. But I'm with you on the scarcity. I think the only thing that slightly scares me is just how much of my exposure is to commodities and on one hand I look at the commodity, well I think you said just said so yourself the Bloomberg commodity index is clearly in a bull but at the same time I'm always sort of like well okay but how long is it going to carry on in a bull and I think the answer is that due to
59:38 scarcity it's going to carry on for a long time, but I'm always sort of not wanting to put all my eggs into one basket. So, like yourself, I think, have been looking at biotech a little bit. What did you think of the Moderna news? Did you catch that with the personalized treatment for melanoma and I think Moderna's share price tripled on the news.
1:00:06 Do you sort of see a big opportunity in biotech? >> Oh, absolutely. The problem is that you have to be careful. See, I'm kind of a generalist and so you have to be careful because how many girls can you kiss? You can't kiss all the girls. How much bandwidth do you have as an investor? >> And so what I looked at is, these things go through cycles, too.
1:00:34 I realized when I did the research and so I'm taking more of an >> overview. I got into a couple situations >> just because they were from the special situation around a legal outcome for one of the securities. Den did very well for us. And that kind of said, well, is there other things like this? But then you start going down the rabbit hole and you can get consumed.
1:01:00 It becomes a part-time job. And how much expertise do you have? Is it in your circle of competence? So I look at like okay what is going to be one of the beneficiaries of all of this AI buildout and stuff like that and all of this data that's collected is going to be I think in the drug sector in this therapeutic sector is going to be a beneficiary of that and so it's just like taking more of a, okay these things go in eight or 10 year cycles also, we're at the bottom of cycle probably in biotech so why not just say
1:01:33 okay I get a foothold, get some purchase, an ETF and then look at find out who the best biotech investors are. And I started going through their 13Fs and saying, "Okay, well, I'm noticing that you could use Claude for this, too, and >> upload all these 13Fs or have it do it." And then say, "What are the correlations across all these portfolios that everybody likes?" Then you can kind of say, "Well, the experts in the field that invested biotech seem to like all these five companies." then you can
1:02:04 maybe have enough bandwidth to kind of understand why that is, and then you can say, "Okay, well that makes sense." But it's just like I always liked the mining sector and that's a full-time job, how much do you actually know about mining before you start putting money into these things.
1:02:21 So, it behooves you if you're going to get involved with this stuff, >> how much time do you want to spend on it? Do you have time? Do you have the knowledge? Can you do it? Because a lot of times it'll just go, I'll look at it and I'll be like, I don't know.
1:02:38 And it just goes in the too hard pile. >> You could spend a lifetime just studying biotech, couldn't you? It is very complicated. My approach on it has been to buy, like what you're saying, buying into things like [clears throat] again it's a UK listed but they operate out of New York so RTW Pharmaceutical I think it is and those guys are, I think it's 13 PhDs and MDs and they're the guys that have the big
1:03:13 brains about biotech but they're business people as well. It's not just run by scientists and it's run by people looking at the innovative or the innovation element of the science and like well can we make money and honestly their track record has been superb. Almost every week, oh yes we've just, NAV has just increased another percent because this has been bought out and this has been merged and this has happened and you. So it's
1:03:48 done very very well and PureTech's another one that I've got a soft spot for and that's a special situation that's also a biotech but these guys have got, so they managed to sell a schizophrenia drug to Bristol Myers Squibb about two years ago I think it was and then they've got royalties coming off those and but yeah if you look at their pipeline, they've got this sort of spin out approach where they've got a listed holding in a US listed company called
1:04:24 Seaport. They own part of that. But honestly you can sort of pick them up at I think it's about 50% of NAV and they've got like a couple of phase twos a couple of phase threes and you kind of look at it and say well the market potential of that phase three is 10, 11 billion a year and the market potential of that is this much.
1:04:49 And if you just sort of look at it as a sort of, well, you're buying a stable full of horses and horses that have got to a phase three have got a reasonable chance of coming out of the stocks and actually running a race for you. It's not guaranteed, but it only takes one horse winner or one more horse winner because they've already had the Karuna sale to Bristol Myers that these things can work out.
1:05:21 So, yeah, it's interesting. I guess my last question because I'm conscious that we've been chatting for an hour and it's flown by. I guess my last question was going to just be around uranium and your thoughts. I mean clearly we seem to be on a cusp of a bull market there and there's so many sort of macro factors.
1:05:44 Do you see the metal, I'm calling it a metal. I think it is a metal isn't uranium. Do you see uranium the mineral or do you see the sort of nuclear technology is the better investment? Do you sort of have a preference over one or do you invest into both? >> I do both.
1:06:08 So I was one of the pioneers on the internet [laughter] about nuclear, well going way back and there was only a, there was a guy in the I think he's from Scotland. We had a long two-hour conversation, a guy named Malcolm Rollson. It's in my YouTube. This is like eight years ago. >> We were him, me and Michael Alen were the only people talking about and Amir Adnani at UEC.
1:06:32 That's about the only people in the world that I knew that, being in nuclear power I knew it was eventually going to change. It had to >> and like I lived in Japan for three years. 100% relying on imported energy. It was just time heals all wounds and you see what happens. So >> the reactor didn't melt down.
1:06:51 The backup generators got flooded by seawater from the tsunami. That's what happened. >> So anyways, I kind of knew it was going to come back. The zeitgeist has completely changed >> in the way people perceive nuclear power. They look at it now. I think even the EU has designated as a clean energy or renewable.
1:07:11 I don't know what they've reversed course on it even though Germany still opposed which I think that will be the crowning achievement. I've predicted that eventually when will you sell John? Probably maybe when Germany finally changes its view which it inevitably will have to. >> But anyways >> the problem, the easy, Rick Rule said this I hate to use but the guy's a billionaire and he's smart.
1:07:37 The easy money has been made in uranium. Now the real money will be made. But the problem with uranium is this. This is what I have found. >> When I first was getting into this, you could just buy, you could create a shitco portfolio. >> Nobody was mining anything. No, it was all visions of sugar plums and it was a come bet, okay? And you could buy all these things for, I remember talking to Fergus Cullen aka Trader Ferg and we were talking about this on an interview. We were talking this is like
1:08:11 six years ago and while I was talking to him I was like I'm picking up Paladin shares for 25 cents while we were talking. We were joking about it >> and that was the easy money because there was no actual results. It was all on the come, visions of sugar plums. It's going to be wonderful. And now once these companies have started actually mining, mining is hard.
1:08:33 And most of these projects suck. They're brownfield projects that just keep getting recycled and they're hard like boss energy in Australia. The >> resources pocketed and its cost went up and everybody knows about global atomic and nir and >> Paladin finally got their act together bringing Langer Heinrich on board.
1:08:56 So the problem is how do I express a position or a way to invest in this that makes sense now because those times are over. Now these companies actually have to perform and the disappointment has set in and there's no cash flow even at, they sold things at spot at 88 and the term price is 97 and I'm looking at even Paladin they're like realized price is 57.
1:09:25 It's like guys what did you do? >> Yeah. So, and Cameco is the 800lb gorilla, but it's always very expensive. >> And so, my thing is how do I express the position? So, the only thing I tell people is look, I just buy the metal >> the SPUT product when it goes very negative on net asset value like I think like a month ago was like negative 13%.
1:09:53 >> Just buy that. Okay? And they just buy it and hold it because this is the best supply demand scenario I've ever seen. Until I see Rio, until I see BHP, until I see the Lundins come in and say, "We're going to spend a billion. We're going to come in and buy, >> this is hypothetical, coming in say, "All right, that's it.
1:10:14 We're buying NexGen. We're going to develop this mine and we're going to spend $5 billion." Then I'm not, this supply demand deficit is going to stay in place. You just saw last week Kazatomprom. I think this is managed decline, if you will. The view was, several years ago, they're going to flood the market.
1:10:34 They're going to, and now it's like the acid plants delayed again. I think Glencore was over there looking at the, somebody from Cameco was over there. They hadn't even moved any earth for that plant yet, according to the Cameco people, if I'm not mistaken. And so it's like why should we sell all of this national resource at cheap prices when we got a probably multi-decade bull market ahead of us and so I think that uranium is going to go much higher, you see what's happening, the demand side is
1:11:08 going bonkers and there's opportunity I think, it's not as much anymore because a lot of people have sussed it out but in a lot of the suppliers but I like a company like Solstice. It got spun out from Honeywell. They own the big conversion facility. I think it's in Kentucky and they're expanding it.
1:11:28 It's like 20% of their, if you look at their listen to the recent conference calls, they're pretty stoked on they're going to spend some money and ramp it up. That's been a bottleneck for the uranium industry and for the fueling industry. So, I look for things like that >> kind of transitioning to that.
1:11:46 But I think that if you're just going to say, well, I get a lot of complaints because people like, "This guy's been talking about the uranium bull market. I lost money." Well, yeah, because >> can't buy these shitcos. They all blow up. Peninsula, Laramide, they all suck. They're not going anywhere.
1:12:03 These are recycled projects from previous. >> They didn't work. Maybe they'll work at 200. I don't know. But I think we're just going to keep going up until we get to the point where a major mining, remember the uranium market's really not that big either. That's why you haven't seen somebody really come into this yet.
1:12:19 But I can see eventually somebody doing that and just saying, "Hey, we can take this over." Or Cameco, they can just sit back on their laurels. They know where all the good projects are. They know where everything is and they can just say, "Let these guys bleed out and then we can swoop in and take this over at 10 cents under.
1:12:38 " Why, them and Kazatomprom are basically managing the market and so >> I just think it goes up over time. I think nuclear is a growth industry. I look at a company I'm looking forward to like Holtec coming public. They're [clears throat] bringing the Palisades >> reactor in Michigan, they get a bunch of money from the department of energy but what I didn't realize is Holtec is a real business. I read the S-1. Okay >> they control 80% of on-site storage for these nuclear
1:13:10 companies, dry casking. It's basically a monopoly >> they are the experts in storing your nuclear waste on site and so they already have a business and so there's, I think if you want to deep dive it's another thing, if you want to put the work in I think you can suss out opportunities. Do I go and I don't want to invest in >> maybe you could do a private, you could think of like a private equity person or somebody like that and just buy a bunch of these developers that are developing next but I don't want to do
1:13:38 that. Who's going to, it's like buying the automobile industry in the 20s. There was a hundred different manufacturers, who knew that GM and Ford was going to emerge as the, nobody knows. Okay, so this is more speculation but yeah I think the government's going to throw a lot of money at it and China and all these emerging markets, they got the memo, they're just going to keep building these things so there's no >> I think what's surprising as well is just how many of the emerging markets
1:14:07 like Turkey, Egypt, Nigeria, a lot of emerging countries are investing very seriously into nuclear. The build program is enormous. And I think when, because it's base load, when data centers and AI and we haven't really sort of got into the whole sort of madness of that today but one of the determining or one of the constraints as far as I can see for success in AI is to actually be able to power the damn thing and
1:14:49 that's where I think the Chinese are going to do well because they've sort of let's just build out the power and then let's build the AI rather than let's just build this AI and I'm sure the power will come along from somewhere and of course they're all scrabbling around now desperately trying to work out how and competing with domestic power, commercial power generation, the extent of the push back from what I've seen of data centers that have then sort of had
1:15:25 a negative impact in communities in terms of water, in terms of power, for me nuclear is an assured future because of that and also weaponry. How many energy weapons are starting to kind of emerge. That again is going to be, energy will be the new weaponry in the not too distant future, I suspect.
1:15:54 >> Well, I think that who has the most and cheapest energy wins. >> And that's what China realizes. They don't, >> and you've already seen the push back. This is why, see, I always look for these sec, I'm glad you brought this up. I know we're a little bit over, but I'll keep going till you cut my legs off.
1:16:14 [gasps] I like companies like LandBridge here in the US and TPL. Why? Murray Stahl is my hero. He's the guy that ran Horizon Kinetics. He died recently, six years. He's probably the smartest man I've ever listened to or read. He was a genius. His ability to understand these things >> and how he found TPL and was like the best holding.
1:16:40 So, what are they doing? Where are they at? West Texas. >> TPL was basically railroad land that got amalgamated. Railroad that failed and they had these land and they didn't really do anything with it and then oil and gas took off. So they realized and these LandBridge guys, they bought all these ranches out there in West Texas.
1:16:58 And so what do you need for a data center? Because you're getting all the political push back like you said. You need water, you need land where nobody's around that you're going to bother. Okay. And you need gas because you're going to have gas turbines first before you go to nuclear. And so where are you at? They're out there and they're already both of them are already working on massive deals with companies to site data centers out there because why? They have aquifers that they have the water rights to.
1:17:25 They're already reprocessing a lot of the water. They >> both of their businesses for transporting and dealing with produced water and the oil fields. The land, it's out in the middle of nowhere. One of the counties out there, I forget what the name of it, has 300 people living it.
1:17:41 No one's going to complain. Okay. And you have energy, you have natural gas as a byproduct of the oil production where you have negative pricing on, there's so much associated gas being produced that they have to sell it. They have to pay people to take it away because you can't flare it anymore. And so this is the perfect storm for this.
1:18:00 And they're both, listen to LandBridge, really smart guys >> and Murray Stahl in Horizon, they kind of identified this. If you go on the Horizon Kinetics website and read some of their >> previous research they put it out for free. They explain all this and what's going through how much water is needed per megawatt.
1:18:18 No, it is amazing and it's like okay I can see how this would work. So that's another thing. It's like okay most investors will look at and say well >> how do I make, this is opposed to the disaster that happened with the other guys up in Amarillo. Okay was >> they didn't, these guys know what they're doing.
1:18:39 So there's always, this is example of looking at something we just talked about, it's a big trend and then say what are the second and third derivatives because in Texas they've banned data centers >> because everybody's, Pennsylvania, power prices have went up because and even Mr. Trump said if you want to build a data center you have to have a behind the meter power plant.
1:18:58 We can't have you on the grid raising it, it becomes a populist issue with the voters. He was like, "Why are my electricity costs up 50% because these stupid data centers that the lights are on over here and I hear a humming noise, that sucks?" So I kind of knew that was going to become a political issue, but if you have a solution like these guys do, well then that's an opportunity, right? So anyway, >> very good. Very good.
1:19:24 Well, I guess to conclude then, are there any areas that are on your mind that we haven't covered today? I think we've put the world to rights on quite a few topics, but >> any last thoughts? >> I just say tell people stay curious and read, read history. Look, make the world your oyster and the ideas will just pop in your head. Go on X.
1:19:49 Don't go on there and put cat videos and argue about politics. There are so many smart, you'd be surprised of people that are on there, money managers, people that know what they're talking about in specific industries. They maybe have four or 500 followers. They just give their thoughts out for free. Curate.
1:20:07 Make these people your analysts. That doesn't mean you just blindly follow, but do that. Read. Take a trip. Instead of saying, "Well, I'm going to go to the beach or wherever in my own country. Hey, I'm going to go down and check out Uruguay. I heard about that. It's kind of interesting." Or I'm not saying somebody should go to Equatorial Guinea but be more curious because the ideas will just start self-generating and you'll be like well I'm curious about that or I've had this experience like I just bought this
1:20:33 company in Venezuela >> that's going to develop these oil fields, well I've already done this twice in two other countries and made a ton of money so I have the experience I have the knowledge I just apply it to a new situation and this is I think if you do this and you're infinitely curious, you will do well in my view.
1:20:52 >> Yes. Yeah. I think that's wise words and thank you so much for your time today, John. It's been an absolute pleasure, absolute honor meeting you and thank you so much for giving your time and yeah, I'd love to invite you back in the future and we'll chat some more if you're up for it.
1:21:12 >> Yeah, it's been fun. Anytime. Appreciate it. >> Lovely. Really appreciate it. All right, you take care and thank you again. Really appreciate it. Cheerio for now. Bye.