"The U.S. Just Had Its Suez Moment" — Gold, Oil, Uranium & the Coming Reset

00:00 · The "Suez moment" — a US strategic defeat in Hormuz

• He'd long argued "the West is in decline" and to expect volatility "all across the board" — so Maduro's removal and the Hormuz crisis fit the pattern even if the specifics were unpredictable.
• "This is a Suez moment for the United States" — the Navy "cannot keep the sea lanes open"; if Hormuz could be controlled by the US "it would be" — it can't, and that opens "all kinds of other things."

02:48 · Drones & missiles obsoleted the carrier

• As carrier air power once obsoleted the battleship, "drone and missile technology have obsoleted our power projection devices" — the multi-billion-dollar aircraft carriers.
• The same asymmetric-tech equalizer keeps Ukraine grinding on and blunts US "muscles" against Iran despite overall superiority.

06:16 · A tri-polar world — Americas / China-Asia / Eurasia

• Three zones of influence: the US dominates the Western Hemisphere ("next on the agenda is Cuba"; South America swinging center-right), China dominates Asia, and Europe bifurcates — Western Europe strained, Eastern Europe pulling toward Russia/Eurasia.
• Putin's Vladivostok speech (the capital "in 50 years") signals Russia's pivot east; "people have no conception of the investment opportunities… in Central Asia."

09:06 · Central Asia & Uzbekistan; Africa "exploited, never emerges"

• "I've been talking for years about Uzbekistan… the bloom is coming on" — a silent opportunity most investors miss (his existing UZNF holding).
• Africa will stay "an afterthought… exploited by the Chinese and everybody else for resources" — he points viewers to the documentary Empire of Dust to understand why.

11:17 · The International Man — bank / live / invest across three countries

• Doug Casey's rule (from The International Man): bank in one country, live in another, invest in a third — far easier in the internet era; don't be a "homer" with all your eggs in one jurisdiction.
• As Western governments get "more desperate for revenue" (more taxes, inflation, regulation), jurisdictional arbitrage — like the Wandering Investor's globe-hopping — is the defense.

16:39 · What old-money families do differently

• Lasting wealth thinks in decades, not months; it "inculcates" the whole family, hires the best attorneys/accountants, and stays low-profile ("come in on an ordinary mule").
• The Mulliez family of Northern France (~$70B retail conglomerate) as the model: shareholders are all relations, "everything for all, all for everything," planting trees you'll never sit under.

18:59 · Timber & stumpage — the compounding you don't harvest

• They buy timber not to cut it in a year — "stumpage increases by 6 to 8% a year," perpetual, compounding income "through the ups and downs." Not a 10-bagger, but durable.
• Inflation and central-bank "debauchery" are the real threat to wealth, so you buy hard assets that protect against it.

22:22 · Passive → active; the Vanguard/Bogle concentration problem

• The US is ~22–25% of world GDP but ~65% of world market cap at a <2% earnings yield — "you should be selling that down." Bogle's low-cost index was a good idea that's now "polluted" (Target-date funds all Google/Meta/Nvidia).
• After 20 years into passive, "that's going to shift to active — you're going to have to be more active or you're simply going to underperform."

26:48 · Amerigo — the Walter Schloss capital-return case study

• Amerigo Resources reprocesses 80 years of Codelco (El Teniente) tailings for copper + molybdenum — no mine, just cash generation as copper rose off ~$3.
• The cash cascades through the Walter Schloss sequence: pay off debt → dividend → special dividend → buybacks. He bought "during the COVID situation… under maybe 50 cents"; it now pays multiples of that in dividends. Held in one of his portfolios.

28:28 · "Wait for your spot" — quality exchanges on the Kalshi drop

• "You stand in the batter's box and have an unlimited amount of pitches. No balls or strikes." He'd admired exchanges for years but they were pricey — until the perpetual-futures / Kalshi legislation dropped them "massively."
• "Did anything really affect their moat? No… this is your chance to buy a quality asset." (The jul-09 CBOE buy.) Exchanges are still "reasonably good value… high to mid single-digit free cash flow yields" — see his free Substack white paper.

33:26 · Gold & silver — the dealer-queue contrarian signal

• "It was so obvious it was overpriced when people are lining up to sell." He dumped a bunch of physical silver "two days before Rick Rule came out and said he was selling" — the queues got so long refiners were "overwhelmed" and dealers stopped buying.
• Longer term these go higher, but he's respecting the near-term froth.

34:44 · Monetary reset & gold remonetization

• Zero constituency in the West for cutting spending → "all roads lead to inflation." Tavi Costa's chart of central-bank treasury holdings vs gold holdings marked the turn ~5 years ago; sanctions on Russia accelerated it ("why would they hold treasuries?").
• He sees "the beginnings of a remonetization of gold" — not back to 70%, but gold as a basis; eventually the balance sheet goes to "20, 30, 40, 50 trillion" and the "big print" (Lawrence Lepard) arrives.

38:09 · Real rates & the near-term gold framework

• The dollar "looks like it's broken out," US rates rising — "real rates ultimately a lot of times drive the gold price," and it's the direction that matters, not the sign.
• Gold two-to-three standard deviations above its 200-day and "going vertical" invites a pullback; "could go to 3,000 for all I know" before it bottoms and turns higher. Russell Napier's financial-repression endgame (forced 401k Treasury buying) looms.

41:40 · Oil — "blatant manipulation," but a shortage is building

• The band-aids: SPR drain, Bessent's record short, and China halting imports. But the crack spread is "$75" — "a $75 profit on every barrel refined" because Chinese refiners are dark; that's the market screaming for crude.
• "100 tankers left, only one tanker came back" — producers can't clear storage, so they've throttled output; "at some point this will matter" and prices go higher. He owns the offshore service layer, not the crude.

45:02 · Natural gas only via royalties & pipelines

• The commodity itself is "the widowmaker" — he plays gas through "royalties and pipeline companies when they get cheap." ONEOK "got shelled" after a debt-heavy acquisition cut it in half — "just buy stuff like that… they just keep raising the dividend."
• "Kind of interested" in NextDecade's Rio Grande LNG as it starts up (couldn't recall the symbol). FPSO suppliers interest him too, but he won't try to predict the gas price.

45:37 · Uranium — ATH term price, no new mines, express via quality

• Uranium's term price just made an all-time high (~$95.50); it's a "growth industry now, 3 to 5% a year" with reactors going critical (an Idaho unit on July 4th) — yet "where are the new mines? Nobody's investing."
• Enrichment/conversion debottlenecking "just calls for more regular yellowcake." The problem is expressing it "instead of some shitco junior" — Lotus, Peninsula and Boss (down 40% in a day) are the cautionary names.

47:42 · Copper bullish, but the AI-demand & Mag 7 unwind risk

• "Very bullish on copper" — but worried how much of the recent demand is "wedded to the buildout of this AI infrastructure," which he thinks is in its "seventh or eighth inning."
• Mag 7 are "no longer high-margin, asset-light" — negative FCF masked by "creative accounting" until a multiple rerating; a possible "70, 80% correction," a 1999/2000 replay. Position to benefit across "as many potential futures as possible."

51:41 · Land with hidden assets — water rights, the intelligent wrapper

• Get mineral/land exposure through "an intelligent wrapper" — land companies (Limoneira in Ventura County; Alico in Florida, +60%) that "purport to be avocado growers" but whose real value is development + undervalued water rights; activists are waking them up.
• The exemplars that already "exploit the optionality" are LandBridge and TPL. He also owns an unnamed, thinly-traded Arizona land company north of Phoenix — ~400,000 acres, water rights, and an idle coal-plant substation now routing solar/wind ("I put it on my Discord… what's the catalyst? I have no idea… Phoenix isn't going to stop expanding"). And he's eyeing an unnamed Copenhagen-listed Danish family palm-oil company ("begins with a D") that "kicks out a nice dividend."

56:51 · The options-income flywheel & the AIA product

• Beyond the picks, his "call-writing, cash-covered put-writing strategy keeps snowballing" — once you assemble Munger's "first $200 grand," it becomes "a flywheel and a snowball."
• Actionable Intelligence Alert (Substack): a monthly newsletter with two model portfolios — a "dripping-roast income" dividend one and a "full capital appreciation" multibagger one.