Title: Trump tells Iran to open all channels of Strait or else. Oil prices fall. AIA Report 7.11.26 Show: AIA Weekly Update (Actionable Intelligence Alert, YouTube) Guest: John Polomny Date: 2026-07-11 URL: https://youtu.be/WjfBD1ptnqU Length: 48:13 Note: Auto-caption fillers (um/uh/you know/like tics) removed and stutters/false starts collapsed; wording otherwise verbatim. Consecutive caption lines merged into paragraph-sized (m:ss) blocks keeping the first timestamp. Name manglings corrected: "John Pauly"=John Polomny, "Kelshi"=Kalshi, "Poly Market"=Polymarket, "bessinet"=Bessent, "Birkshshire"=Berkshire, "Mer/Charlie Mer"=Charlie Munger, "hormuse/theou"=Hormuz/the Strait, "Philip 66"=Phillips 66, "Kramer"=Cramer, "Euima"=Iwo Jima, "Surabbachi"=Suribachi, "Ed Milliban"=Ed Miliband, "IM international"=ICE (Intercontinental Exchange), "que bono"=cui bono.
0:01 Hey guys, John Polomny here, Actionable Intelligence. Today is Saturday, July 11th, and this is the weekly market update. The disclaimer, as always, anything that you hear or see on this podcast or video is not to be taken as investment advice. I am not a registered financial adviser. I cannot give you personal financial advice. Please do your own due diligence. It's your money. It's your responsibility. Okay, let's get started.
0:36 So again, we are in this overvalued market. I've come around to the thinking that because of passive flows and because of all the money printing we've done and continue to do and will continue to do, are we at a higher plateau for stocks? I'm not ready to say that. I do believe that all bubbles eventually pop. I think that we're in a bubble that's probably bigger than the internet bubble and I just don't want to participate in buying things that are overvalued. I just will not do it. I'm not going to chase shiny objects. If that's something you're interested in and you need that excitement, then actionable intelligence is probably not for you. We look for the long term, we look for value, we look for wealth creation and as Munger said it's very simple: our goal here is to compound wealth over time, and we try to do that with minimizing risk such that longer time frames will allow us to compound and create wealth. It's time-tested and true.
1:49 A lot of people like to trade. A lot of people like action. We've talked about that, but I'm not into that anymore. We all go through those stages, but I kind of graduated from that and got more wise as my investing career put on the years. So anyways, again, we have very high expectations for stocks. This is the S&P 500 trailing and forward PEs to earnings since 2000. And you see that there's a big wide level between expected earnings and what we saw for trailing earnings and forward earnings, and so as far as multiples. So again, people's expectations have been skewed because of all of the recent success. This is kind of a recency bias and we know that. So just another data point to look at.
3:02 I can go out and bark at the moon and yell at the stock market, yeah, you're overvalued. But again, with the world being open to investment, you can find things that are cheap around the world and eventually these things will correct. Capital will rotate and will be proven right. But I don't sit on the sidelines waiting for that. Again, I make the world my oyster. As many people have said, several famous investors, I think Cramer even says that there's a bull market somewhere. And so that's the job that we are trying to find: situations where we can take that whether they're special situations, whether they're long-term trends, whether they're just good businesses that have corrected.
3:49 For example, in the last couple weeks, you've seen a major correction in a lot of the exchanges here in the US, CBOE, CME, ICE, the big ones here in the US. What precipitated that? Well, they were very highly valued because we've had a bull market and so CBOE and some of these other things really got ahead of themselves, and then some rules were passed by the SEC allowing for these perpetual futures I think for Kalshi and Polymarket that people interpreted as a threat to the moats for these exchanges. However on further analysis it doesn't appear that that's really the case, which we don't have time to get into.
4:45 And so if you look at a chart of CBOE, these are great companies, right? These are great businesses. They have network effect. They're very high margin. Once you set up your infrastructure and how everything works and get it up and running, every incremental trade or incremental customer is virtually free and very high margin. It goes to the bottom line. Not only that, these are excellent companies for inflation protection because they can raise their prices over time for the various services that they offer. They can keep pace with inflation. And as I was talking with Royalty King in a recent interview which is out, this is one of your main adversaries: the inflation, the rise in prices that's created by the incessant money printing by central banks around the world.
5:39 And so when a business — I mean look at the chart for CBOE for example, I think it corrected all the way down to its 200 day moving average. This is why it's probably a good idea to keep some dry powder because I pounced on that. I wanted to own that stock. I liked the business, but it had gotten way ahead of itself and I wasn't able to get the position that I wanted because I didn't want to overpay. But when the thing corrected like it did, then I was able to, in my mind at least, get another bite at the apple. So that's an example.
6:18 I like to point this out when they come out with the updates. Berkshire's market cap is about a little bit over one trillion and they've got almost 40% of their market cap in cash. They have like $400 billion in cash. It's interesting to see when Buffett was younger, when he was first starting out, he would just go A to Z through the exchange and look for these companies through the Value Line, through all these other tools they used to have back in the day, and look at these reports of these companies and try to find net nets or undervalued situations or hidden assets. And that's a time when he said that he could average 50% a year. But as you get to very large numbers, it's hard to — if you have a portfolio of 300 billion dollars or a trillion dollars, you can't get it to go up 50% a year. You're basically the S&P at that point.
7:33 A lot of people criticize the model and say that they shouldn't have all this cash, blah blah blah. But I can guarantee you that when we eventually have a dislocation in the financial markets or there's a crisis with financial markets, that will be the time when management puts that cash to work. And they'll be able to go in and dictate terms because he who has the cash makes the terms. We've seen them do that over the years. Now, it's been a while before we've had a significant market pullback that's allowed them to put this cash to work. They are deploying cash still in other areas — several years ago they bought Japanese trading companies at very significant lows they had not seen in many years, and those have done very well. So it's not like they're not buying anything, it's just that the cash is piling up faster than they could find real values for it.
8:52 And remember they really have to be able to deploy large. When you have this much cash, this large portfolio, you can't be messing around with a hundred million here and a hundred million there, you got to look for multi-tens of billions of dollars to be able to deploy. And right now you're just sitting on this cash in treasury bills getting three and a half percent and it's just compounding. What's three and a half percent on 400 billion? Let's say they're getting 3% — do a quick calculation. It's like $14 billion a year just in interest. So they're waiting for this big dislocation in markets where they can step in and really do something. I just think this is interesting to see how this cash pile just continues to get larger and larger because they're just not going to buy into these overvalued markets.
10:33 This is from Tavi Costa. I've talked about this before, but this is a little bit more instructive about what I've talked about before of how when US stocks are doing well, Latin American stocks aren't doing well. And when Latin American stocks are doing well, US stocks kind of cycle through 10-year. You can see here from this range, Latin America outperforming here. And so we've had the great outperformance of the US markets relative to Latin America. But as I've said before, I really like the political change we've seen over the last several years in Latin America. Listen, it's not going to turn into the next Hong Kong and Singapore. There's still going to be the problems that they have there country to country, corruption, inefficiencies. But if you take a large, continent-size market, and most of the governments now with the exception of Brazil are basically market-friendly economies, then this should have a positive effect on GDP which should translate hopefully into higher stock prices at some point. It remains to be seen but I just think it's really positive what's happening there and it offers a lot of opportunity. What's interesting is there are a lot of companies you can buy. It's not like you have to open brokerage accounts in all these countries. Quite a few of these companies do trade here in the US.
12:16 So talking about the Persian Gulf, I think it's interesting because there's really in the investment universe, social media, financial universe, a big discussion and disagreement on what's going to happen here. And again, the bears on the oil price have been correct. Prices went down, but I've always maintained that I've kind of adopted a view that I don't think that it ever goes back to the way it was. I don't think flows ever get reestablished to February 27th or 28th. This is an existential battle. This was something that we provoked and Israel provoked that we didn't have to do. This is existential between Iran and Israel.
13:16 And so we have all of these — no one really knows with any kind of great certainty what's actually happening on the ground in Iran, but we do see the turnout for the Supreme Leader's funeral. That should tell you something. When you attack a country, you need to be prepared for the fact that you're not going to get a revolt. Most of the time, what you're going to get is the population coalescing around whatever leader is there because you're attacking their homeland, their motherland. This is something the United States doesn't really understand because the memory of the last time that happened, which was in 1812, is gone from here. We weren't physically annihilated and had our cities attacked during World War I and World War II like a lot of European cities, like the Soviets — basically a total war that the Germans and Soviets were engaged in, both nation states and societies engaged in total war against each other, and the devastation that occurred leaves scars on populations. I've talked about this before. And so when you attack somebody, you can expect that they're going to coalesce around the leader, even if it's the Ayatollah. And when you kill these people, you make them into martyrs. It's a total ineptitude in the State Department and in the Department of Defense and then these neocons. It's really the collapse of the post-World War II Anglo-American Atlanticism. It doesn't work anymore.
15:11 And I've said this — people have interviewed me and it's like, what do you think? Well, here's information from Goldman Sachs and from Kepler. Crude oil production losses in June at around 10.5 million barrels a day. Normalization of oil exports from Gulf producers to their pre-war level may be achieved with a 6.6 million barrel per day increase in Hormuz flows from current levels. Well, that's kind of off the table because the Strait is out the window. It was amazing to me that people that I considered serious people thought that that was actually real. That's kayfabe. That's WWF. That's Minsk one and two, Middle East version. Where's the money that they were supposed to give to the Iranians? They didn't give any money. Trump said, well, we'll give you money, but you got to spend it on soybeans. What do they need American soybeans for?
16:15 And so what basically happened until hostilities resumed the last couple days and basically flows are down again in the strait, is that all those tankers — there was around 100 to 150 million barrels of oil on tankers stuck in there and there was a sugar rush, a jailbreak to get out of there. And nobody's going back in. So what do you do now? You still have tanks full of oil and these countries can't resume their normal production because they have nowhere to put the oil because we haven't reestablished tanker flows to a sufficient volume to enable draining of the tanks and restarting of production. Yes, we know about the pipeline east to west in Saudi. Yes, the one in Oman. Not sufficient. And so the SPR continues to draw. Chinese are still not importing. So the demand is still there, folks.
17:20 This is why you're seeing product spreads for products making all-time highs because the refineries are basically telling the oil producers, send us more crude. So you're having this dichotomy where you see crude prices down because of the manipulation going on by this releasing of these temporary band-aids. I described when I was talking to the Royalty King, I basically described it just like poker: you're on — the US or Bessent, who's really running this whole thing, economically trying to support the administration's ambitions there, whatever they're trying to do — he's on a gutshot straight. We can keep this going. We can short futures. We can do these releases from the SPR. The Chinese are doing their thing for right now, but that's not forever. At some point, you have to resume oil production. The demand in the world is 105 million barrels a day. If you're missing 5, 6, 7, 10 million barrels a day consistently, at some point that oil has to come from somewhere. It's coming from these storage reserves. At some point they get down to a level where they can no longer continue. At some point the Chinese do have to get their refineries going again and they have to buy crude.
18:38 So I think the view in the administration was, hey we can play these little games, put a band-aid on top of a band-aid on top of a band-aid in the market, jawbone markets down, and then this thing will be over and we go back to normal and we hero up. Well it didn't do that. You can even see how Trump's even lost the — when things don't go his way, he just forgets about it, goes to something else. He's back on Ukraine Russia now. Did you notice he was at the G7 meeting and he's talking about that now because it didn't go the way he wanted it to go and so he has no more interest. But it's unfinished business. And again, this is existential now for these other two parties. So what do you do?
19:25 And so I don't think this is over with and I don't think that oil prices are going to — this has been resolved sufficiently that we can say, yep, oil will trade between 70 and 80, and then next year there'll be a big glut and we'll go back to 50. I'm not sure that that's the base case because we have missing barrels that aren't being produced, but we have the same level of demand. As a matter of fact, demand is scorching red hot. It's not like the world's in a recession. And so energy demand, as I've said before, inches higher every year. Plus, you have to deal with depletion. So again, you can run down the SPRs. China cannot refine to the level it was before, but this is all temporary. At some point in the future, I don't know the exact date, that's no longer viable and then price will have to ration.
20:29 So this is an example right here. This is as of July 9th. This is the number of transits out of the Middle East. You see here the jailbreak when everybody was heading for the exits. You can see how that happened. And now we're back down. This is before the war began. So we're still not back to the levels we were before. Yes, we did have this jailbreak, but what's coming back? Tanker traffic into the Gulf is not at a level sufficient to return production. So again, we do have other bypasses that are working. I don't have all the calculations, I don't have that level of knowledge. Maybe this is the new normal and this will work. I'm not 100% certain. I suspect though that there's going to be a crash course on building bypass pipelines and all these other things, but that takes more than a week or two. And so I'm just looking at this and saying, this doesn't make sense. And so if we are not seeing the barrels being produced, if we have some type of shortage somewhere between six and 10 million barrels a day, where's that oil coming from? Because the demand has not been destroyed. Where is it coming from? Well, from these SPRs and from the Chinese not importing oil and not refining oil, or just pulling from their own resources and just doing enough for their own internal consumption.
22:13 So this came out at about 6:00 tonight or maybe it was yesterday — yeah, this is tonight breaking. The US gives Iran a 24-hour deadline to, quote, publicly say that they will stop shooting at ships and explicitly acknowledge that they screwed up, unquote, adding that they must say, quote, every channel in the strait will be open and that it will be toll-free, unquote. The official warns there will be harsh consequences if Iran refuses, saying, well, if it is not their position tomorrow, it is not going to be a great day for them. This is a stupidity like sixth-grade middle-school talk. Again, I've said this before. If the US Navy could have opened the strait, they would have. What are they waiting for? We're going to launch some more missiles. Again, strategic bombing — these bombing things, you can cause a lot of damage, you can blow things up, you can kill people. It's not going to change anything. It's just that simple.
23:34 Go on Google Earth and look at the coastline. It's all mountainous rocks. And then watch that movie about Letters from Our Fathers or something like that, the Marines invading Iwo Jima and the Japanese ensconced inside Mount Suribachi, and they were sitting offshore blasting them with battleships and bombing them for days and it basically had no effect. It's a lot of smoke and mirrors. And you're not going to mobilize the entire United States and then invade Iran with 5 million troops. It's not politically positive. It would never happen. It's stupid. Not even on the table. And so again, we've seen these fiascos start before. Are we in a situation like we were in Afghanistan where we're screwing around there for 20 years to remove the Taliban only to replace them with the Taliban, or in Iraq where we took out Saddam Hussein and put an Iranian-backed government in there now? Is that what the endgame's going to be here? Screwing around because we don't want President Trump to lose face. How do you resolve this? Where are the negotiations? Where are the professional diplomats? I've been saying this. This is total kayfabe. This is WWF. This is the apprentice. This is fake.
25:15 And so expect more ships to get drowned. Expect — the Iranians have said they are going to establish a toll booth there. The United States says, no, you won't. In the meantime, what do shippers do? If you're a tanker owner, are you going to put crews on and send them in there? A lot of them aren't going to do that. Are you going to do it with insurance? How much does the insurance cost? Who gives you the insurance? A lot of variables. That's why I think this isn't going back to normal anytime soon.
25:56 Meanwhile, this shows you how stupid the Trump administration is and this is how government is to begin with. So while we are having this shortage of refined products around the world, while we have this emerging energy crisis, the Russian Federation is one of the countries that was exporting diesel and gasoline. And so while we've been attacking Iran and causing disruption to supply chains there, we've been encouraging Ukraine to attack refineries inside Russia. And so cumulatively, as you can see, since they've been doing this, Russian refining capacity is coming offline. And keep attacking these things with drones. And so Russia doesn't export diesel anymore. Well, the demand for diesel doesn't go away. And so wherever that diesel was going, those customers now have to go somewhere else into a short market and try to find the diesel that they need. And the Trump administration sits over at the G7. Yep, going to give you a contract to build Patriot missiles. Keep doing what you're doing, basically. What's the policy? What's the calculus? Is there one? It's just, I'm just going to big dick it.
27:34 All this stuff is interconnected. Is there any real policy or is it just I'm going to big dick everything? This is US foreign policy. And you're telling me this is a serious country? This is Gibbon, decline and fall of an empire. You're living in it. Most Romans didn't know that the empire was collapsing around them because it happened very slowly over time. That's what I'm trying to tell you folks. There is no plan here. There's not a plan for any of these things except keep the game going and keep the money flows going to the defense contractors, to the military-industrial complex and to the congressional people that get contributions from these. That's what it's really all about. And hey, if I give you $250 million — what if I was some billionaire from Bali and I was a dual citizen and I gave the president $250 million, I would want you to advocate for wherever I'm from. This is really how it works. You're seeing pay to play. So okay, let's knock all the Russian refining capacity off slowly over time. That's fine. It's a war. I get it. Perfectly legitimate targets. I agree. But what's the US trying to do here? Trump doesn't seem to understand that these are global markets that we're in. I've actually heard him say, well, the US will be fine. How will you be fine if the rest of the world is in a recession? Yes, you can refine enough diesel here. How does that work? You're part of a global economy. So again, there is no plan. It pains me when I see these analysts out there — yeah, this and the memorandum of understanding — but this is all nonsense. This is like watching Saturday morning wrestling. It's not real.
29:59 Here's the proof. Here's your crack spreads. $65 a barrel. That's telling you — this is I think some of the highest crack spreads ever. It's basically telling you, give us more crude. We need to refine more crude. But there's only a set amount of refineries. And if you start knocking them offline in the Gulf or in Russia, then again, the amount of refined products goes down in a global economy because diesel is fungible. And so customers that were getting it from those refineries have to get it somewhere else and there isn't enough. Get it? Now, this is good if you've owned refiners because look at the charts of Valero and Phillips 66. These things look like AI stocks. So again, that's why I say there's a bull market. There's always a bull market somewhere.
30:59 It's interesting, because we had a big pullback in the price of oil. We've had the biggest outflow from energy stocks in the last two years. You can see that here. We had a big push, obviously people were getting in, getting long. We traded that a little bit. We made a few bucks. Didn't make as much as we thought. And then everybody just got out because, hey, this is over and the Strait signed and we're going back to normal. This is what people thought. This is what analysts are telling people.
31:32 So I wanted to point this out, kind of on that lithium bandwagon. Demand for critical minerals set to surge, especially for lithium. This is the projected growth in demand by percentage 2024 to 2040. Lithium — the projected demand growth is 353% over the next basically 15 years. That's a lot. You see these other things, not so much — copper only 28%, but that's still more than I think the world can supply right now. But anyways, this is lithium. Lithium price has kind of rebounded. This is the last year. We made a new high in May, or a recent high. It's not a new all-time high, but recent. This basically bottomed and has moved higher, kind of pulled back recently, but we'll see what happens. I'm kind of bullish on lithium going forward.
32:39 Central banks continue to buy gold. You see, yes we've had the pullback in gold prices but I think that this only goes to 2025 obviously, it's not showing this year, but yeah this is a trend that's in place, it's going to continue, for a reason. Because the western debt in the world is so large, especially in the western democracies, there's going to be a new monetary regime put in place and I suspect it's going to involve gold. And as I've shown, I don't have it up this week, but I've shown the chart before where gold is being accumulated by central banks as US treasuries, which were basically the reserve asset for two decades — that was where everybody put their excess cash, their central-bank reserves. Who would do that now? That's dumb. You're dealing with out-of-control spending, an out-of-control government, with no brakes on spending, that is running huge deficits equal to 6% of their GDP. And there's nobody in any power situation in the Congress or the presidency or anywhere talking about even — forget about cutting spending — just holding it. No, we need to spend more. And so people are not going to hold your debt when they think that you're irresponsible. That's why people with low credit scores pay higher interest rates. Same thing works for countries. This is hopefully not hard to understand.
34:30 So shifting to a couple things. I've said this before. One of the keys to my success has been not necessarily getting a formal education at one of these universities, but availing myself of spending a lot of time reading and reading across a bunch of subjects. I am fortunate that I can speak on a lot of subjects even though I'm not an expert on a lot of them. I still have knowledge of quite a few subjects and that's because of all the information — I read a lot of books, I read a lot of periodicals, I read a lot of things and I take in a lot of information and I think this is what gives me an advantage in the markets and in life over people that don't do that, because otherwise they're just relying on whatever they see in their six-foot sphere and their tribal knowledge, and I think that's not a good way to go through life. But I thought this was interesting. I quoted Charlie Munger here — I think it's not an exact quote, but it's close enough. He said, "I have never known a successful man that doesn't read."
35:38 And so this was interesting. They came out and say fewer than half of all adults in the US reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Now, this is four years ago, but I'm sure it's the same or worse now. Only 38% read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023. The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper, listened to an audio book, or read an ebook. Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book. Last year, 57% of Americans placed a bet. And this is what you see. We're in this situation. I think it's interesting when we talk about long-term investing.
36:40 People are so desperate to stay ahead because of what's happening in this country. I would love to debate anybody about the condition of the United States. It kind of depends where you are in the economic strata and what's your circle — I think that determines a lot of how you view everybody else. Most people are struggling and this is why they get attracted to quick-buck things like getting rich quick in Bitcoin — or not necessarily Bitcoin but these shitcoins — and gambling. This is why sports has basically turned into every other ad being for one of these gambling companies. So now the new thing is these prediction markets and all of these things.
37:36 And I think I read a stat on the prediction markets. I used to mess around a little bit with DraftKings when it first came out just because I thought it was interesting. And I quickly realized it was just like every other endeavor. If you have the computing power, I think you can win most of the money from people if you can set up the programs, because it is a skill. I remember talking to somebody and they said, oh, it's just luck. They banned DraftKings, for example, in Texas for many years, and I actually wrote to one of the legislators and said, I will play you a hundred games of baseball head-to-head on DraftKings and I will beat you most of the time. I will have a profitable outcome because it is to a certain extent a skill — knowing to stack your team if you're going to be at Coors Field or stadiums that have positive hitter results, or analyzing the pitchers that night. If you don't know how to do that and you just say, well, I like the Astros so I put Astros every day — somebody that actually knows what they're doing and knows all these stats, and especially if they have a computer that can help them like Ed Thorp would do, mathematicians, they would be able to get an edge and just dominate you. And that's why I think the same thing on these prediction markets — I think that like 0.4% of the people or entities that are engaged in these things make like 95% of the profits. The average person has no chance.
39:15 And so this is a reflection of the society, right? Get rich quick, don't want to work, don't want to grind it out, just want the big thing. And where has that ever been a situation? Nobody wants to put the time in, no one wants to get that education, no one wants to put that base in of reading and acquiring knowledge and then taking that knowledge and applying it. It's a process and it takes a long time and people just want it now. I get it. That's human nature. But you're not going to tell me that the US is the greatest country in the world and this is — nobody reads, nobody knows anything. I talk to people all the time. They have absolutely no clue about anything. Most people — I'm talking about just a general situation, not some of the circles I go into where the people are topnotch — but the average person, you get past talking about the Astros and the weather and the condition of the roads, they don't know anything really. And they're not curious. This is what bothers me.
40:23 And so when you have 50% of the people betting and gambling, what does that tell you? This is just another brick in the wall of the devolution of this American empire in my view. Of course, you can disagree, but that's one of my long-term theses that I'm on because that's going to be reflected in voting. Yes, you're seeing everybody scratching their head, why are all these people voting for socialism? They're not voting for socialism. Look what's going on. Look who supports it. You marinated these kids in left-wing ideology. You told them to be activists. You sent them off to these colleges to be indoctrinated in left-wing ideology. Their brains are now fixated on it. They get degrees and master's degrees and all these things that have no value to society. And then they were going to go off and become activists. Who's the role model? Barack Obama. He was the president. He never had a job, never carried a tool bag or actually worked in a law office and became partner or anything. He was just a guy. He was there. And he was the right skin color, and the time was right, and he got in there. Now he's a multi-millionaire. People look at that and say, well, why not me? And so when that doesn't work anymore, when they destroyed USAID and there's no more of these fake jobs and NGOs, then they have all these upper-middle-class white kids who are mostly supporting the DSA. The working-class people don't support this stuff — a lot of them are immigrants from the places where they had this. It's mostly these disaffected white liberal youth that feel entitled: I have a master's degree in whatever, women's studies, why can't I get a job for $180,000 and go to cocktail parties and do money for nothing? I'm mad. Now they're a socialist.
42:44 And people need to understand that's how it is. Those people aren't going to say, well, I'm going to go to a community college for two years and become a plumber or an HVAC tech and make a hundred grand a year. They're not going to do that. They're activists. That's what they've been trained to do. And there's no work for that.
43:13 I wanted to point this out too. I kind of get amused — what happened to climate change? Where's the fire? What did AOC say like 12 years ago, the world's going to end? Where's Al Gore and all these other people who said the world's going to end? No one talks about it anymore. Because why? Because all of the tech billionaires want to have AI and want to have data centers. They run on natural gas, and they give money to politicians. Get it? No one talks about climate change anymore. But I found this interesting. This is July statewide high temperature records. And you will note that especially in the Midwest, a lot of the temperature records were set in the 30s during the Dust Bowl era. But I thought that now was the highest temperatures because of climate change. And so basically, this is interesting: only six states have had their record highs set since 2000.
44:20 So there never was climate change. The climate always changes. It goes through cycles. You putting around in your Escalade or having a fireplace in your suburban home has nothing to do with it. It's not you. It's not CO2. It's the sun and some other things. So it's been amusing to watch how priorities seem to shift when the money flows shift. It's always about money, isn't it? And then the fake power that people get, all of these clowns that emerge in politics that everybody thinks is going to save them from themselves. They're just there for unearned wealth and power. This is another example. Most of the temperature records were set during the 30s. Where's the climate change? Where's the end of the world? Well, now we want to have all this AI. These tech billionaires give a lot of money especially to the Democrats — that runs on natural gas, those power plants to fuel that stuff. Of course, you still have nut jobs like Ed Miliband running the UK into the ground. He's the energy minister there trying to stop everything. But eventually I think that even in places like California and Germany and the UK, eventually the people will get poor enough and their lives will be run down enough where — but maybe not. Maybe people really are just going to continue to allow themselves to be abused and become poorer and have their quality of life go down year after year and not do something about it. That remains to be seen.
46:27 But again, I don't say these things to prove my point or say that I'm right about everything. I look at things — I'm trying to look at things so we can find opportunities. That's what we're after. I think one of my biggest scores was this whole uranium thing. I knew uranium was going to come back. I knew nuclear power would come back. Now it's like the savior. Everybody's building nuclear power. And we made a lot of money on uranium. And it basically set us up for the rest of our lives. And so I'm very grateful. That's why I'm saying you have to read, you have to think, you have to always question what you're being told because it's the media, the government, everybody has an agenda.
47:14 I always want to look at and say cui bono, who benefits? Why is this person telling me this and why do I care? What's this question or what's this assertion this person's making, and why are they making it, and how do they personally benefit? That's not cynical. The world — people, unfortunately, with the exception of Christ and a few saints, operate on self-interest. That's just how it is. And so I want to try to determine what their self-interest is when they're advocating or talking or asking questions or pushing an agenda. And I think always it comes down to money one way or another. Either they're getting it or they're being paid by somebody else to advocate. Yes, there's a few true believers out there, but they're few and far between.
48:04 Okay guys, that's it for this week. We'll talk to you next week. Thanks for tuning in and see you next time.