Bizarro World Podcast,
with Nick and Gerardo
April 11, 2022
We're witnessing an absolute death of political leadership in this country. Congress has been reduced to a tabloid rag in the grocery store checkout aisle. It's all clickbait and no constructive policy.
It's no wonder capitalists are stepping up to change institutions. This week, it was Elon Musk buying a stake in Twitter to help protect free speech in the age of 'Cancel Culture'.
Inflation and growth are slowing, you better get positioned now. That means gold.
Oh, and the uranium boom is just getting started as well.
Table of Contents
1:02 Sarah Palin's Thong and Other Political Divisions
7:00 Can Elon Musk Cancel 'Cancel Culture' with His Twitter Purchase?
12:08 More From the Clickbait Congress: Cocaine-fueled Orgies?
17:20 The Slow Down of Trickle-Down Inflation?
26:05 How to Make Money from the Craziness: Gold, Rates, Stocks
41:33 Uranium Fun Just Getting Started
44:40 Status of the Cannabis Market
Gerardo Del Real: We're going to talk gold. We're going to talk uranium. We're going to talk jobs. It's opening day for baseball. Go Cubs. There's also a lot of fucking stupid going on out there. We're going to talk Marjorie Taylor Greene. We're going to talk Sarah Palin. We're going to talk Louis CK. We're going to talk a lot. I'm Gerardo Del Real, along with my co-host, Mister Nick Hodge, and this is our weekly therapy session, otherwise known as Bizarro World. Therapy Session 164. Nick, it's not going to be light on the curse words on this one, so I'm warning you all right now. Turn it down if you have kids around, this isn't the one. There's a lot of fucking stupidity happening out there today.
Nick Hodge: I've been traveling and I've missed out on a lot of it, and I had a lot of writing to do. So you're going to be informing me about some it. So it'll be reactionary, in that capacity.
1:02 Sarah Palin's Thong and Other Political Divisions
I saw Sarah Palin's thong once in the green room at a conference. I don't know if we've ever talked about that on this podcast, but that was back when she was all MILF-y, and you know? Not that she's not anymore, but anyway, that's probably not appropriate podcast fodder.
Gerardo Del Real: We totally got to get the kids out. You got to tell the story, because that's a great story.
Nick Hodge: I mean, it's not really a story. We were speaking at the same conference. I've told you how I met her husband, we've definitely talked about that on this podcast. She was getting ready to go out. I don't know if she had just been mic'd up or was getting mic'd up. She was moving around, doing her things, and little pink thong was popping up out of the back of the skirt. I was thinking, "Go Miss Palin. Go you, girl."
Gerardo Del Real: Well, maybe she'll bring that old thong back. She wants to get in there, you know she's running for office again in Alaska. She wants to-
Nick Hodge: Congress? Is that what it is?
Gerardo Del Real: Yep, running for Congress, taking Don Young's spot, who passed here in the past month or so. Beloved figure in Alaska politics. Whether you were a Republican or a Democrat, Don Young was somebody that really fought fiercely for the state of Alaska. Much like Ted Stevens, who, whether you agreed with his politics or not, if you lived in Alaska you knew he was out there fighting for his constituents on both sides.
I think that gets us right into fucking dumb-dumb of the year, Marjorie Taylor Greene here, right? Because when I think about a Don Young and I think about a Ted Stevens, and I think about a Sarah Palin and a Marjorie Taylor Greene, the difference in politicians. Right? The difference in, just respect for common sense is a generational split. I don't think it's a coincidence that Mister Stevens and Mister Young were older, obviously in age, right? This new brand of politicians, on the right and on the left, tend to be more clickbait-ish, but it's getting really fucking ridiculous out there, Nick.
Let me explain the Marjorie Taylor Greene thing. This is a woman who refused to show up when the Capitol Police officers were being honored and given Medals of Honor for defending the Capitol. We gave the cops that opened the doors, we'll talk about this in a second too. They opened the doors ... We gave those cops a lot of shit on this podcast, right? Because it was really obvious that there was quite a bit of a law enforcement presence that actually encouraged these people to come in. So much so, that the first defendant charged in the January 6th insurrection riots was just founded not guilty.
It's the very first one to be found not guilty. And he was found not guilty because he was able to prove that the police invited him in. He was able to demonstrate that they opened the doors for him. So the jury said, "Well, if it's trespassing, and if it's obstruction of justice, you can't be obstructing something that the officer walked you in towards. Any reasonable citizen would believe, 'I am being allowed to do this. I have a president that told me to come down, and I have a police officer who told me to.
Nick Hodge: Unless the cop's breaking the law too.
Gerardo Del Real: Yeah, there you go. That's the catch 22, right? But in this case, the jury found him not guilty. Said, "Well, if you're charging him with trespassing and that he shouldn't have been there, then the cops shouldn't have opened the doors for him. So that guy's not guilty."
Gerardo Del Real: But back to my Marjorie Taylor Greene. So the woman that refused to go honor these officers, for whatever reason, let's give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she was sick, maybe she fought with her husband, maybe who knows? Maybe the meds were off, maybe she just having a bad day, maybe she had a medical emergency. I don't know. She refused to go. So now she's filed a complaint, you're going to love this because you don't know the story yet, against Jimmy Kimmel.
She has filed a complaint with the same Capitol Police that she didn't want to go honor, saying that Jimmy Kimmel committed a threat of violence. So she's filed a complaint. Let me tell you what Jimmy Kimmel said, this was said on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, the late night talk show. He said, in reference to Ms. Green here, "This woman, Klan mom, is especially upset with the three Republican senators who said they'll vote yes on Ketanji Brown Jackson." Who, congratulations, first black woman Supreme Court Justice in this nation's history. Congrats to her-
Nick Hodge: Confirmed, yeah.
Gerardo Del Real: Confirmed. So he goes on to say she, referencing Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted, "Murkowski, Collins, and Romney are pro-pedophile. They just voted for KBJ. Wow." So Jimmy Kimmel goes on to say, "Where is Will Smith when you really need him?" And Marjorie Taylor Greene, who once called for the execution of Nancy Pelosi, who I don't care for either, she said that she was guilty of treason and she should be executed for her crimes. Can't take a joke. So much so that she's filed a complaint with the Capitol Police and now it's under investigation. These are our elected officials you all. These are the people that I'm supposed to willingly write checks for, via my tax dollars, and hope they get it right.
Nick Hodge: Certainly not willingly.
Gerardo Del Real: Holy smokes.
Nick Hodge: I mean, you said it right from the beginning. It's an entire ball of clickbait. I mean, yeah. I don't have much time for her. I don't have much time for Congress.
What I would say is, it's symptomatic, right, of the dearth of leadership, and the vacuum of leadership, that's going to be filled here in the next five years. For right now it's just a literal train wreck that you'll hurt your neck if you look at too much.
7:00 Can Elon Musk Cancel 'Cancel Culture' with His Twitter Purchase?
Gerardo Del Real: Some really, really thought turning stuff. We'll get to the markets in a bit people, I promise. It's been a week. Louis CK, who was apparently canceled, he just won a Grammy. Did you hear Amy Schumer's joke, that she was mad she couldn't tell?
Nick Hodge: No.
Gerardo Del Real: Do you want to hear it?
Nick Hodge: Yep.
Gerardo Del Real: Well, we're all familiar with Alec Baldwin, and the unfortunate, unfortunate, and this isn't funny, right. Horrible tragedy, where he discharged a weapon and a woman ended up dying for it. So Amy Schumer wanted to tell this joke, but after the Will Smith thing, she wasn't allowed to. She said, "Don't Look Up is the name of a movie. More like don't look down the barrel of Alec Baldwin's shotgun."
Nick Hodge: Why wasn't she allowed to tell it?
Gerardo Del Real: Because they said it was too controversial and too racy, which again, come on you all, can we take a joke? Can we take a joke?
Nick Hodge: That's it. No. So now you're going to have to talk about Twitter, which is really going to be the meat to the podcast, and Elon, because the free speech is gone down that road now, where you're being censored for jokes. Right? And that's not a world I want to live in.
Gerardo Del Real: Nope.
Nick Hodge: That's not a world that's conducive to creativity and we've talked about this a lot. The canceling, the shadow banning, the-
Gerardo Del Real: Fabrication of facts.
Nick Hodge: YouTube and social media for ... Even things that turned out to be true later on. So anyway, I'm sure we're going to talk about Elon purchasing a stake in Twitter (NYSE: TWTR), because one of the questions has been, and it's a perfect discussion I love talking about this stuff, is what is the bastion of free speech? Where does that buck stop? If it's a private platform, like Twitter is, they kicked off the president of the United States, and they were allowed to do that because it's a private platform.
Gerardo Del Real: Yep.
Nick Hodge: We've talked about this a lot on the podcast, where is the line, et cetera? We like private property rights, and we believe in corporations' ability to do what they want to do. We talked about it last week, Citibank.
Gerardo Del Real: Yep.
Nick Hodge: You gave a couple of examples on both sides, or whatever your worldview is. So, did I just lose my train of thought? I hope not.
Gerardo Del Real: No, I think you got it. We were talking about cancel culture and living in the-
Nick Hodge: So what is the line on Twitter is the thing. So on the one hand you have that, where we embrace corporations' rights and like private property. Then, on the other hand, you have, what I would call, the critical mass factor. When you have a platform that is, I don't know if it was Elon or someone else who called Twitter this, "The de facto public square," right? Where you have so many millions of people that it's a quasi-public space, because everyone hangs out there. So you see here Elon taking measures into his own hands and using the framework of capitalism to come up with a solution. It's a solution we can't all do because we don't have billions of dollars in capital to deploy, but he was able to buy a stake in Twitter.
Gerardo Del Real: He's the best billionaire troll to ever do it, man.
Nick Hodge: Right. So if you can become the largest individual shareholder of a company and get a board seat, then you can change the direction of some of that canceling, some of that shadow banning, some of that lack of an edit button, for example. He was doing polls about, "Do you think Twitter has stymied free speech? Do you guys want an edit button?"
Gerardo Del Real: All while buying a 9.9% stake. I love it. I mean, whether you like Elon or not, I love his approach to trolling.
Nick Hodge: No, this was great. I'm sure you've got stuff to add. At the same time, it's, again, a symptomatic or emblematic of what's going on, and the solutions that emerge when it's time for solutions to emerge. You get a younger generation stepping up to fix things. You even had Jack Dorsey sounding semi-remorseful about the internet that he's helped create. So here you have it, and it's that cyclical things. When it gets all the way to the, "We're banning people for saying that masks don't work," when they don't work, then you get a solution that comes in. I'm not saying that Elon buying 9.whatever% of Twitter is going to fix everything, but it sounds like he did have beef with their approach to free speech, and he does want to take some steps to bring that back the other way.
12:08 More From the Clickbait Congress: Cocaine-fueled Orgies?
Gerardo Del Real: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Agreed. I tell you one young man that won't be launchin this Fourth Turning into overdrive, is Madison Cawthorn. Have you heard the story about this little guy?
Nick Hodge: Is he the orgy guy?
Gerardo Del Real: He's the orgy guy. He's a 26 year old freshman representative, representative of you fine people, whoever the fuck voted him in. So recently, he was doing an interview on a podcast, as one does, and he said, "Corruption and unethical activities exist in Washington. It's an indisputable fact. If you don't think that's true, you've not witnessed the Swamp." He then went on to say that he was invited to a sex-fueled orgy, I mean, what other kind are there, right? And witnessed cocaine use. So obvious-
Nick Hodge: Cocaine-fueled orgy.
Gerardo Del Real: A cocaine-fueled orgy, there you go, good answer to my question. So this was great, and this was on Fox News, because I like to read all sorts of different news, because it's amusing from both sides. I love the way they frame this. So, Kevin McCarthy, Republican leader out of California, called a meeting with Mister Cawthorn and said that he was demanding to know which GOP members were involved in these cocaine-fueled, sex-fueled orgies. Then this is the quote, the quote is great. He said, "I just told him he's lost my trust. He's going to have to earn it back. And I laid out everything I find is unbecoming."
So I have a question for Mister McCarthy, are you mad because he told? Are you mad because you haven't been invited? Are you mad because it's happening? He didn't really clarify what he was mad about. Or are you just mad that he's not telling you the names of the people that were involved in the cocaine/sex-fueled orgies? I don't know what it was, but it's been a week with these politicians. It's been a whole lot of crazy this week. Yeah, I thought it fitting to lead the podcast off with that, because this is, after all, a therapy session.
Man, if I wasn't in such a good mood about baseball, and life, and everything else in general, I'd be pulling my hair out this week. These fuckers are crazy.
Nick Hodge: So, I didn't know about a lot of that. I saw that he said there were orgies, but, like you, I was confused about who was having the orgies and what, if any, repercussions there would be. And like you, I was happy about other things. I was traveling. I took the kids to Disney (NYSE: DIS), and so I wasn't caught up on a lot of this stuff. What I guess I would say is, going back to that dearth of leadership, when I was traveling the past couple of weeks ... And we are re-opening, despite lots of flights getting canceled, which maybe we'll talk about. I know we're going to talk about jobs, so I'll slip it in then, just like the Congressman do, apparently.
Yeah, I guess what I was saying is that, I'm not entirely sure, but when I was traveling the past couple of weeks, certainly in the Disney park and adjacent little town, and things like that, it didn't seem, well, there's a lot of things, but I didn't hear anything about Congress or politicians.
We are at that clickbait point, and it's becoming very, very see-through. The veil is very thin about the rising gas prices. We'll see, certainly, when this economy starts to shrink here, when we get the Q1 GDP number, and people get statements from their retirement accounts. They're going to start to see that there's this facade of leadership, that nothing is really been done. They're paying more, their investments are worth less, and their dollar is going less far.
So this is sort of a literal dog and pony show right now. I guess I'll stop talking about it because I don't have much else to add. I mean, all that stuff is just so out there. I can't and even put it in my framework of things that I take into account for my day-to-day life, because it has such a small impact on me. I look at whatever, interest rates, and where the S&P is, and where gold is at, and what the dollar's doing. Sure, policy, to an extent, has an effect, but the policy has been stalemated for so long because there's such partisanship that nothing gets done. I know you had cannabis on the list too, and we'll get to that. Anyway, there's just no leadership, you'll see government spending start to shrink this year. The talk of stimulus is going to have to come back because I'm not sure what else garners attention and votes in a climate like this. That's about it, I guess.
17:20 The Slow Down of Trickle-Down Inflation?
Gerardo Del Real: There are things that are so obvious that it makes you want to question yourself. Like, "Is this real? Is it this simple? Is it really just going to go this way?" The direction of Fed policy is, we could be off on the amount of rate hikes, and we might be off on the timing. You know how the story ends, everybody. We just had a jobs report where jobless claims are matching a 1968 low. Meaning people are working, people are out there, and yet the wealth inequality in this country is also probably at levels not seen in decades over decades over decades. Fueled by Central Bank policy.
Fueled by Central Bank policy not just here, we're seeing riots in Peru over rising fertilizer prices, which means more expensive food. We're seeing a president, President Castillo, who, regardless of what you feel about his personal ascent and his political ascent, has now got a serious crisis that I don't think he actually survives. I don't think he survives this go around. They've tried to impeach him twice. People are taking to the streets, and you can't contain inflation, you're not just going to put it in a box by giving people a 10% raise, as he's attempted to do in trying to pacify the populace. Because people that are hungry, becomes a little bit of a different thing than, "I've been waiting for my Tesla for seven months." No, "I haven't ate in two days," is a whole different kind of inspiration. You talk about Fourth Turnings... We're exporting inflation, or exporting Central Bank policy around the world. We're creating wealth inequality that's going to take a long time to recover from. And we're at an inflection point, not just this country, but in a lot of places around the world.
We're 20 minutes into this, we haven't even talked about war. The images coming out of the Ukraine. I saw grandma sitting for two days waiting for somebody to come pick her up while she just saw the place she lived in just completely obliterated. It takes 20 minutes of madness to even get into that. That's how crazy and a Bizarro World this world we live in is right now. It's insane out there.
And this is a happy guy talking. My health is great. My wife still loves me. My kids are healthy, they're responsible as all heck. Life is phenomenal for me. But, man, when I look around, it's either phenomenal for people, or it's really, really tough and getting tougher, and that's the part that kind of gets me a little bit.
Nick Hodge: Yeah. There's a lot to unpack there. I probably won't recall it all. The world events are laying bare sort of the changes that need to be made, and then the problems with the inherent system. That's the Bizarro World we live in. You see this atrocity in Ukraine and, at the same time, you see your government really just not doing much to help. And you know why. I mean, at least if you're quasi informed, you do, which people are these days, because you know that Europe needs the energy, and they can't really go in there and put an end to it.
At the same time, the majority of Americans don't want that. Well the polls are so weird, if you look at them. It's like the majority say we're not doing enough, and the majority says they don't want to start another major conflict. So to some extent you do just have to be a witness to those things. And with Twitter, there's literal live feed of human carnage and the toll that it's taken.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk more about that wealth inequality, because time is lapsing now. We were talking about the Cantillon effect a while ago. In fact, when we presented in New Orleans I had a slide about it. If you remember, it's like honey, right? When the money comes out from the king, it goes to the center, and then it goes all the way out to the edges. And honey is viscous, so it takes time to trickle out.
So those stimulus checks that came out were early last year. It's been a while since the PPP and the stimulus and the checks got mailed out. And business owners got checks immediately, right? People got smaller checks after that, and then it's taken that money time to work itself through the system. So, a couple of things. One, I think it's worked its way through the system now. That inflation came in a while ago, we've talked about this. We've talked about oil prices in late 2020 and how they started to ascend from there. That was like the honey starting to drip down, and now it's all the way out to the edges. Now it's at the pump, now it's $5.00 gas at the pump. It's gone all the way through the system and it's all the way up.
The same time, it's coming to people's pocket books. It didn't seem like people were short on cash at Disney, I've got to be honest. I mean, the park was packed, the Mickey Mouse ears cost $30 a piece, and they were flying off the shelves, and I got three kids, that's $90 in fucking Mickey Mouse ears. People were buying the shit out of them, with wads. I mean, you see when people take out their ... Anyway, people got cash right now. So it's come all the way out to the edge.
Asset price is inflated, right? So even if you weren't a huge asset owner last year, as long as you had a 401k, or own some sort of assets, you make 25%, 27% on your money. What I want to say is a couple of things. Remember that honey analogy, it's all the way out here to the edge. You want to say something...
Gerardo Del Real: I'm stupid. You said, "Huge asset inflaion" and I thought that lap dances are still $20. Continue.
Nick Hodge: So wait, I can get four-and-a-half lap dances for my Mickey ears. Oh, man. Back to inflation...
Gerardo Del Real: Nick is the adult in the room, I don't know what to tell you.
Nick Hodge: No, that's funny. Giant assets. I mean, you sort of said it, then you get this wealth inequality, and I was going to talk about the Lightning Lane. Because not only are the Mickey ears 30 bucks and people are flushed with cash, as a culture, we know this, Disney's got the lightning lane, which I didn't really know about, you can just pay more money to jump ahead of people who don't want to pay more money. That's not going away anytime soon, but the point I wanted to make with the honey was the inflation. So now it's all the way to the edge of the dish, right? This is really the point I wanted to make, sorry. Just like people, when oil was $40, were like, "No, that's not inflation." I was talking about the crabs and they were like, "No, it's not inflation." Because people think linearly, and the market is cyclical, is what I want to say.
Gerardo Del Real: Circle.
Nick Hodge: So now that that inflation is all the way to the edge, and you're literally pumping it into your car and putting it into your mouth every day, it's going to reverberate the other way, is what I was going to say. That doesn't mean that inflation recedes. The honey is sticky. Honey and money is sticky. I got that in a letter today, that's why it's fresh in my mind. So it takes a while to recede. So, look, you got inflation at a 40 year high, it's 7%, or whatever it is. Well, 6% is still high inflation, but it's not growing inflation, and that's what people need to understand. That inflation can be high and persistent, and still not inflating, increasing.
That's sort of where we are. It's the same thing as December, 2020, but in reverse. Just like nobody could believe that oil was about to go to $140 over the next year, nobody can believe that the breaks to the economy are about to get stepped on really hard, in that the price increases aren't going to be as fast as they were, but you're still going to have to pump $5 gas into your car for the next couple of months. That's going to eat into that wad. That was the last point I wanted to make. So the people that are flushed with cash, that have a little bit left over, that cash is being eaten into because of higher costs, and that causes recession. We know that's coming because of the inverted yield curve. There's probably a couple more things to say there, but I think that tied it together pretty good.
26:05 How to Make Money from the Craziness: Gold, Rates, Stocks
Gerardo Del Real: No, I think you did a brilliant good job with that. Let's talk about how you can make some money from this stuff because, ultimately, that's why a lot of you listen to this podcast. Rants aside. Gold hanging in there beautifully, $1,930, $1,950, $1,960. We're seeing that consistently be the new comfortable range, as to where, before, we talked about this often. $1,800 was the floor. $1,910, $1,915, $1,920 seems to be the new floor, which, to me, points to new all time highs coming on right down the pipeline. I mean we have a dollar index that, last I checked, was really flirting with that 100-mark, it's right at 99.50, the last time that I peeked. So for the dollar to be going this way, for gold to be rising right alongside with it...
The third leg to my little prediction, crystal ball stool, that I had a year-and-a-half or two ago, and I was saying, for gold to break out sustainably we're going to need the broader indices rising alongside a higher dollar and alongside gold. Well two of those three things have come to pass, and I think the third one, the U-turn in the overall indices, whether it's the S&P, the NASDAQ, or the Dow, I think that happens when the Fed does the about-face.
For everyone out there that's just looking at today and saying, "Well, yes, but my expert on television, in one of the eight boxes, told me that I should expect eight rate hikes." Eight might not happen, folks. Eight probably won't happen. But let's just assume it does, it still doesn't matter because the market is forward-thinking, and is going to front run the pivot and the about-face that the Fed's going to have to do. Because at the debt levels that the US has, eight rate hikes, anything past 3% is not sustainable and can literally break the system.
I think when the market sniffs that out... When we get close enough to that U-turn that Powell is going to have to make, watch out. You think gold is high now? Watch out for that. You think inflation in the streets is something to behold? Watch when that turns. Then I think it's a rush, I think we're going to have Dow 50,000 and everything up 60% within the next couple of years. I know it sounds a little crazy right now while the overall indices go backwards, but it's coming. And you know what's sniffing that out? Commodities and the stocks, and boy, is this starting to trickle down in the right sectors. Uranium. Lithium. Oil. For the past year-and-a-half you've been spot on with that, Nick.
I mean, we've had some wins recently that I look at my account and I look at my holdings and nothing happens, and then it all happens in two weeks, or two months. It's kind of been like that here for a little bit and I think, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you're positioned, that is the trend moving forward for a good little bit.
Nick Hodge: That is well said and spot on. With slowing growth and the overall indices still down, especially tech stocks are down much more than the overall S&P, because the S&P has some things that have done okay, like utilities, for example. The flight is on to havens, and gold is one of those. I mean, you can look back to 2016 to see the last time we had a little breakout like this, and this one is more magnified than that. I don't have a lot else to add there. I've been saying I'm buying the VanEck Junior Gold Miners (NYSE: GDXJ). That looks really good. We've had a royalty promo out there for a year, and now Stansberry's got a royalty promo out there.
Gerardo Del Real: Great copy.
Nick Hodge: So the bandwagon is growing for gold. Did you know it was the easiest and the safest way to get rich in the gold sector, Gerardo? Silver, I guess we should add on there because the precious metals run together. So get your allocations in the big miners, and then do due diligence in the smaller ones in the exploration companies across the metals, because there's opportunities in both metals and in different sectors of the market. A perfect example of that is, I was writing two letters this week, a safe letter and a speculative letter. In one, we buy a gold ETF, and in the other we buy a $0.60 gold developer. That's sort of the difference. They're both vetted, and they both are researched and have their individual catalysts why we own them, but they're entirely different spectrums of the market.
So when we look at what's working now, I mean, gold is up 8% for the year, like year to date, while the S&P is down some 4%. So I start to feel like a broken record saying, you got to stay defensive, and these are the sectors you got to be in, but gold and commodities is where it's at. There's various ways to participate in those sectors of the market and absolutely that's what we're here for. I had a new recommendation in the foundational profits this week, the April issue. It's not even out yet, it goes out tomorrow, the April 8th. So we'll put a link up to check out that issue, for sure.
Gerardo Del Real: Yeah. Look, it's a changing world, folks. I remember, and Scott Melbye, who's executive vice president of Uranium Energy Corp (NYSE: UEC). I remember, years ago, Scott, and the uranium crowd in general, we would be in New Orleans, or we'd be at a conference in Beaver Creek. We'd just bump into people, and if they were involved in uranium, they all had this downtrodden look, like, "We know what the supply demand fundamentals are. We know it's coming. We just don't know when, and we think it's this year. And we thought it was this year for the last eight years."
It was what Gold bugs look like to me right now. When I get the emails and I talk to people in the gold space, and I see companies hit on phenomenal results and the market yawns sometimes.
But I remember that dejected look that the uranium company execs had a few years ago. Now I look, and I reach out to Scott for an interview, and he emails me back and he's saying, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm on my way to testify before the US Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Can we do it the week after?" Then I email him the week after and he goes, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm on a special mission to Russia to meet with so-and-so and so-and-so."
It's just, these are just scenarios that have developed over the last year or so, but that, like the Fed policy pivot, were so obvious to everyone who was paying attention. Because of the way the dominoes were lining up, nobody knew exactly when they would start tipping over. Now the critical metals dominoes are tipping over, the natural resource dominoes are tipping over.
Folks, there are some really simple ways to make some good money off of it. If you're patient, the gold sector, the juniors, the producers, the mid-tiers, they are so undervalued, relative to cash flow, relative to resource bases, relative to exploration upside, if you can put a metric around that. You might have to be patient. You may have to wait another three months for a real, real breakout, but, man, you can position. You can scale in and add aggressively.
If you're less patient, and I just wrote about this, if you're less patient and you want to get busy and you don't mind the volatility, every time you get a 20% pullback in uranium, go buy your favorite uranium name, and then wait for it to rip another 40%, then take a little off. Wash, repeat, and rinse. Wash, rinse, and repeat. Pick the order, just get it done. It's two steps forward, one step back. I looked at some of the uranium names. One that you got me into here recently at 10 cents, it's at a $1.80 in three weeks. It's ridiculous. Lithium, same thing. There are so many opportunities in the market. Labrador Uranium (CSE: LUR), we wrote a check initially, at some dumb, low price, and that's up some 13-fold. I highlighted it here a few weeks ago, and it was in the $0.85, $0.90 cent range, it's at $1.30 today. It's up a good 45%, 50% in just a couple of weeks.
There are ways to do this that could be very profitable for you if you have a little bit of time, or are willing to accept a little bit of guidance and a whole lot of accountability. Because, ultimately, what you buy and what you sell is up to you, we just provide the ideas. From time-to-time, they work out. That's my TED talk.
Nick Hodge: We bought the Lightning Lane, for sure. Yeah. The stocks have been doing well. Yeah, you said that really good. So not just be willing to take advice, but be willing to put capital down into, maybe, something that you haven't done before. They say, "There's always a bull market somewhere," is the old saying, right?
For a long, long time, it was FAANGs and tech stocks. I mean the market was going up for 10 years, and now things are a bit different. So you have to be willing to go to other places to allocate capital to get those returns. It just happens to be in the sectors that we dabble in and have been forecasting we're going to come into-
Gerardo Del Real: Favor.
Nick Hodge: Play here. Yeah, come into favor in this sort of timeframe. And here we are, so there's lots of opportunities out there across risk tolerances and across durations. I mean, you like short term speculations? You like long term buy and hold? There's ways to do this relative to your own personal preferences and risk appetites. I think we're seeing the pitches pretty clearly here and have delivered some fantastic returns. When you watch stocks go from $0.10 cents to $1.80 in a couple of weeks, when you haven't even got your shares yet... The company doesn't even have a website yet, Gerardo.
Gerardo Del Real: I reached out to you. I said, "They are sending me my shares, right?" It didn't matter as much when I wrote the check. It matters a lot more a few weeks later.
Nick Hodge: Yeah. It is that mania stage, and you said it right. However you want to wash your hair. Take some off when they run, buy some more when it cools back down, and...
Oh, that's what I wanted to say. I stalled long enough that I remembered it. Is, we align what we write about with what we're doing with our own capital. You mentioned the accountability. Hopefully it's easier for you to take that advice when you know that someone, or us, that someone on the other end of the advice or the recommendation, has capital in that same position, or is betting on that same direction. Long this stock, or whatever it is.
That's where we are. When we write about that, putting money in this gold stock or that uranium stock, we own it, and we obviously benefit from it. So one of the challenges, given that we call this our therapy session, for me, at least, is keeping it, not accountable, but explaining constantly that we're in at all sorts of positions. That speaks to private placements and why they're beneficial, and the need to get in earlier, but not the absolute necessity to get in earlier.
I mean, not everybody's an accredited investor, and so when I write about a company that I invested in privately, sometimes, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, "Make sure you tell them you're in cheaper," and that's just the ethical thing to do. But at the end of the day, that has no bearing on why I think the stock could go higher from this entry point. We can't go back in time and get you in cheaper, but that doesn't mean that when Kutcho Copper (TSX-V: KC)(OTC: KCCFF) runs to $0.90 and we sell, and it pulls back to $0.60 and I buy more, that I'm doing that to pump the stock or because I own it. It's because I think it's going to run back to $0.90. And I'm exercising my warrants at the same time I'm telling you to buy the stocks.
So that aligning of priorities, and then having the same bottom line as the subscribers is sort of the mantra of what we do around here, and how we show you how to profit from things in various sectors of the market.
Gerardo Del Real: And I have to shout out Westhaven Gold (TSX-V: WHN).
Nick Hodge: I was going to say, when you said, "Nobody was getting the response."
Gerardo Del Real: Yeah, because they are one of the stocks, that company and that group of guys and gals, that has been telling you. You can go and you can listen to my interviews with Gareth for the past year at Resource Stock Digest. He's been explaining exactly the way it was going to play out. We're going to have a lot of drills turning, we're going to spend a lot of money on exploration, we're figuring out the model, we're going to refine that model. But we believe there's high grade shoots all over this property and, eventually, we're going to have that tiger by the tail, and latch onto one of these that makes the market move."
So this week, the stock opens at right around the $0.40 level, and then they hit 23 meters of 37.24 grams per ton gold, and 200-something grams per tonne silver. All of a sudden you look a couple of days later, and that $0.40 stock is damn near $0.80. It's at $0.75 today.
It happens quick, folks, and you had a whole year, if you believed Gareth, and you liked the asset, and you were patient to buy it $0.40, $0.45 cents, $0.35. I think it's got a lot of legs. Westhaven's not going to be the last company that figures out the geology and ends up with one of those hits that really gets it back on the radar of speculators.
It's encouraging to see them get the response that they got in the market because it means some of you are actually still paying attention, you're just being more selective with your capital, as you should be. As you should be. Good for you, that's a great sign.
Nick Hodge: That's good, yeah. Yeah, I was going to shout them out as well. I was one who didn't buy because I was waiting for another zone, and might have to take another look now that that zone is here. I mean, there will be a pullback, trees will grow to the sky.
So that's certainly one now that has checked off that other box, where it's like, "Okay, it's not just one zone of mineralization, there's one that's a significant distance away." And I've been there, I've literally put my boots on the ground. I drove there. And that's what I came away from there wanting to see, where's this other pod, or this other, what would you call it? A swarm-
Gerardo Del Real: Shoot.
Nick Hodge: Yeah, so now that they've found it, it's definitely on the radar. And good for shouting them out, because I wanted to do the same. Yeah.
41:33 Uranium Fun Just Getting Started
Gerardo Del Real: Before we leave, we got to talk uranium at $63. Because we keep bringing up these uranium deals that have gone very well for us, and for subscribers, and for people that have followed our work and our calls on uranium. I think it's important for us to explain that the fun is kind of just getting started.
Uranium just broke through the $62 level. We've been talking about uranium since it was in the 20s, telling you it was headed ... Or I've been telling you anyway, on my end of it, I don't know what Nick's top-line prediction is, but I think the uranium spot price will overshoot to over $200. I don't think it's sustainable, but I think it goes there. Before it's all said and done, I think it happens within the next 12 months.
If the equities right now are at these levels, with uranium at $62, let's suppose I'm wrong and uranium doesn't overshoot to $200, let's just suppose it just goes to $120. You can do the math, folks, on where you think these names will be. It's such a tiny sector that when capital comes rushing in looking for exposure, there's literally not enough to go around without driving these valuations to, sometimes, absurd levels.
I think we're going to see that across the uranium space, and man, I'm positioned for it, and I hope you all are as well because it's going to be fun and profitable. Fun and profitable.
Nick Hodge: Absolutely. Not a lot of sellers. I haven't been selling a lot of uranium equity-
Gerardo Del Real: It's hard.
Nick Hodge: At all. The tiniest, tiniest bit. I wrote about this in the letter when just after the Azarga merger sold the tiniest bit and still hold a lot of it. A lot. At least for my portfolio.
So no, I agree. I mean, the reason we've been in uranium for this long is to get that initial part of the move, which we're starting to get, but the main move is still far off. I mean, mania in uranium is thousands, or tens of thousands of percent. Not 100s of percent. So that's what we're waiting for here, and that hasn't come yet.
The last thing I would say there is, the other thing we haven't mentioned is crypto. You're starting to get other asset classes outperforming it, even its volatile nature, right? When you have these 15%, 20% a day moves, screenshot days in uranium stocks. I mean, that's what crypto was doing last spring.
Not that crypto's dead, but you see how, at certain periods at certain cycles in the market, how different asset classes respond differently, and it's not just cryptos and meme stocks that can deliver those, what do they call them? Moonshots.
Gerardo Del Real: Moonshots. Anything else you want to get off your chest, Nick? I got mine feel so much lighter, I'm more zen. I's opening day, my Cubs are playing the Brewers. Go Cubs. Life is good. I feel better now.
44:40 Status of the Cannabis Market
Nick Hodge: You had marijuana legislation, do we need to talk about that, or no?
Gerardo Del Real: Again, two steps forward, one step back. Yeah, the House has passed marijuana legislation, we'll see what happens in the Senate. It's still amazing to me, the people that oppose this. I read a story. Now you're going to rile me up again, I read a story the other day about a guy that was sentenced to 126 years because he provided fentanyl-laced heroin to someone who ended up dying. Horrible, horrible, horrible situation. Lots of fentanyl-related deaths all across the country. This guy got 126 years.
However you feel about drug use, or the dealing of drugs that results in death, however you feel about that, be consistent. Because the Purdue family is out here running around like it's all fucking cake and unicorns and rainbows, and not one of them has seen a day in prison. So, that's it. I'll leave that there, because I could go on for another hour about the disparity, and sentencing, and who we choose to prosecute, and why. But, again, bringing it back to marijuana, two steps forward, one step back. This is a step forward, let's see where it goes.
Nick Hodge: Yeah, I've been saying that the marijuana stocks are bottoming, but they haven't bottomed. So the Senate's not going to pass the bill that the House just passed. Chuck Schumer's being a dick. He's being a dick. He wants it to be his own legislation, basically.
There's some who are speculating that AOC might challenge him for his seat, and he's waiting to see if that materializes and the cannabis legislation might be his counterpunch there. So it's Chuck Schumer holding it up, but cannabis legislation, in general, has taken a hypocritical backseat. You had Biden who said that he was going to let the states do it and the feds weren't going to interfere. He never signed the letter that was going to make that the decree or whatever.
Also, you remember, we talked about the Biden staffers that were kicked out for having admitted to smoking marijuana. So there's a lot of double speak going on, and there's just a lot of bureaucrat-ism, I would say, even at the state level. Like New Jersey passed legal weed on the ballot in November, 2020, and they still don't have legal weed. They can't agree at the state committee level how to implement it.
So even when it's a ballot measure that gets passed, it's not being implemented. So it's just slow, but the flip side of that is, therein lies the opportunity. I mean, not that you should be in there buying the marijuana stocks hand-over-fist, but we own a couple, that we're down slightly on, not a lot, but that are going to deliver multiples once the sector turns, once the legislation does get passed.
So that opportunity, and the delayed passage, and this malaise in the market, let's call it, is one where you can identify a couple cannabis stocks that are going to rise from the ashes and come out on the other side ahead of this.
The other thing I was going to say, about the painkillers, is psilocybin and mushrooms. There was an article somebody sent me today, in the USA Today, about how, basically, if you did mushrooms, you were less likely to get addicted to painkillers. And that's just what it is, but there's also studies that show that psilocybin can be used instead of drugs for, not just painkillers but antidepressants and other things. That's two different, but very important, things.
One is, it can prevent you get addicted to things that are very serious. Now, we have over 100,000 drug deaths a year, that's way up. But also, it can be used to, hopefully, at least for me, prescribe less chemical pills overall, and start using more natural medicine.
So two things there. Marijuana market is bottoming, and you should start to identify winners, and it's similar in the psilocybin space. Not that it's bottoming, it's just getting started, it's nascent. So you got to be looking at companies there, and those are just two spaces that I happen to be interested in and don't know everything about, but have made money in, in the past, and trying to do so again, for sure.
Gerardo Del Real: Well said. Yeah, let's see where this legislation goes. Let's see how it evolves. There's a lot of fuckery going on in Washington, folks, and it's not just the sex and cocaine-fueled orgies. I am Gerardo Del Real, along with my co-host, Mister Nick Hodge. Thank you for putting up with us y'all. This was episode 164 of Bizarro World. Go Cubs.
Nick Hodge: Protect your big assets.
This transcript is unedited. Please excuse grammatical errors and run-on sentences.