Porter Stansberry: America’s Broken Money, Gold and the Road to 2029

0:04Trevor Hall: Happy Friday. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to this week's long form episode on mining stock daily. I'm Trevor Hall. I guess today what I've been really looking forward to, he's probably sold more investment research to more people than anyone alive. Porter Stansberry started his business back in January of 1999 with$36 ,000 of Bill Bonner's money and the promotion he wrote in about four days. 22 years later, that company went public in a deal valued near$3 billion. He's since walked away from it, come back to it, left it again, and rebuilt a second independent research firm from a converted barn in Maryland.

0:47Trevor Hall: But I wanted him on the show for two reasons this week. First is a little bit personal. I want to talk to him about the business itself. Could his approach almost 30 years ago work today or have the barriers to entry become so absent to the point where his the foundation he laid is the groundwork for the content culture we live in today the second reason is gold porter's been buying since 2001 he says he's never sold an ounce but here's the part that ought to pique everybody's attention he'll tell you he doesn't want to own a gold mine. He excludes the entire sector from his portfolio on principle and buys the royalty companies instead.

1:30Trevor Hall: So we'll dive into that. There's a lot to cover here. A special thank you to Revival Gold, Integra Resources, Equinox Gold, and Visa Silver for their continued support of the podcast.

1:42Porter Stansberry: Let's jump into my conversation with the one and only Mr. Porter Stansbury.

1:47Trevor Hall: Mr. Porter Stansbury, it's a real honor to have you here on Mining Stock Daily. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time today.

1:55Porter Stansberry: Yeah, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

1:58Trevor Hall: Listen, I'm going to start off the conversation a little bit selfishly, if I may. I was kind of thinking, obviously, you've been really out in front with everything you've been publishing lately, not only with your newsletter, but also out on X quite a bit and really pounding the table on some of the headwinds and challenges and volatility you're seeing in global markets and the bond market particularly. And so we're going to talk about that momentarily. But I was kind of thinking of preparation. It's like me as not only a content and interview provider, but also kind of crossing that line into financial newsletter content sharing as well.

2:42Trevor Hall: Like, it's like, what would I ask you if it was just you and me sitting across the table over a meal or having a beer or something? And I actually was hoping to kind of bring that conversation to the forefront, just mainly out of sheer curiosity. But I think it'd be real valuable for people listening to kind of take away from. But if people aren't familiar with the background, let's keep it brief. I mean, you started Stansberry Research in January 1999. 1999, you wrote a promotion and four or five days, Bill Bonner gave you$36 ,000 of postage instead of a salary. Yeah. And inside a year, you took that and went from zero to 100 ,000 subscribers.

3:29Trevor Hall: And the whole arrangement was really done in a handshake, no contract. And that's a very brief story, right?

3:37Porter Stansberry: Yeah. Bill and I ran that business without an operating agreement and without any written contract for 20 years. 20 years. Yeah. From 1999 to 2019. Yeah.

3:55Trevor Hall: So if you look back, which part of that sequence happened, could it still happen in 2026? And which part of it is gone?

4:06Porter Stansberry: And I think you see it happening. And lots of the explosion, the big bang of media where anyone can now be a media star has let people who are really talented shine through. And so you've seen people go from nothing to huge podcasts. I mean, Joe Rogan, you know, of course, far more successful than I was. But yeah, I think actually not only is that possible still, I think it's easier than ever. Yeah.

4:41Trevor Hall: But your rule has always been that a marketing piece has to teach somebody something, whether or not they buy it, right? When you wrote The End of America, I mean, that was something that was really the crux of that. 77 minutes of free education that brought in something like half a million customers, I think is what I read.

5:03Porter Stansberry: Yeah. It was free, wasn't it? Well, let me, let me, if I can explain a little bit more about that, because that's not actually what I'm trying to do exactly. Okay. What, what, what occurred, what occurred to me watching, um, a lot of the things that I saw in the newsletter industry. And I was a, I was a, I was a fan of financial newsletters from the mid 1990s on. I began investing my own capital in 1992. So I had sat in the shoes of the customer and I had seen how much low quality information there was and how much, how many conflicts of interest and just frankly, how much garbage was out there.

5:43Porter Stansberry: And what occurred to me was that if we mailed out 800 ,000 pieces, you know, and we got a 1 % response rate, that was a really good hit. That was a good result. But that meant that 99 % of the people looked at what we did and didn't like it. And I thought that was really negative for Brandt. So what I sought out to do was to take my direct mail pieces, originally in a plain number 10 envelope, literally printed, and then later, of course, in email and then in video sales letters and other forms. But what I really tried to do was to make sure that the 99 % of the people who weren't going to buy from me today at least walked away from that experience thinking positively about Stansbury Research.

6:37Porter Stansberry: All right, I don't want to buy a$500 newsletter. No, thank you. But man, that Porter, he did make some good points. I'm glad I read that. And so much of the marketing that I saw out there before we came along was the opposite. where they would insult the reader's intelligence. They would predict the moon collapsing into earth in the next 24 hours. And I just think if you read any of our promotions over the years, we never got into the whole make 1 ,000 % by next Tuesday. We didn't do that. If we're going to write about small cap stocks and there's a lot of volatility, we're going to tell you the way we actually go about picking those and we're going to discuss it.

7:22Porter Stansberry: I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say, but we're going to discuss it more professionally and try to educate the reader. And I thought that over time, if you saw five or six promotions from me over a 10-year period and all the promotions were well-written and they are all professional in tone and they taught you something, that I It could eventually get you to subscribe. Yeah.

7:45Trevor Hall: But the free content back then, and correct me if I'm wrong, I just maybe assume free content was very scarce, right? And if it was free, it wasn't very well done. But you had to go really looking for it. But now it seems like everybody gives everything away for free. In fact, we have more people giving away ideas and insights than we ever have before just because of the mechanisms and communication channels we have in front of us every day. But does free content still do the job it used to do? Or has it just become maybe table stakes and something that is expected because we live in such a content culture right now?

8:26Porter Stansberry: That's a really great question. And what I would tell you is that the free content obviously is a factor of technology, and it has eliminated one portion of the newsletter business. The$99 annual newsletter was a staple of the industry because that was the price point at which we could break even. We could serve someone a newsletter for a year at$99, and we would break even. We wouldn't make any money on that newsletter. The customer acquisition cost and the fulfillment cost would eat up all that cash.

9:02Porter Stansberry: So, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago, I figured out, what's the point of even having that in the business model? I'll just go ahead and whatever I was going to put in a$99 newsletter, I'll just put into a free daily e-letter. And then we can just move the whole business to the back end. and so that's that's exactly what i've done at porter and company which of course is a publishing company that i started in 2022 after i retired from from stansbury research and so we don't really have a front-end newsletter business at porter and company we have a daily journal that i write by the way if anyone wants it it's free you can go to porterstansbury.com and sign up and i put full stock recommendations in their full deep dives like yesterday i did a deep dive on the entire oil tanker industry, which is going through a massive and very important boom.

9:50Porter Stansberry: Some of those stocks have effective yields right now over 30%. And every investor should want to know, well, is that sustainable? And for how long? And so that information is extremely valuable. I mean, absolutely. In the past, I could have charged$5 ,000 for a report like that. I'm giving it away in the free daily e-letter. And so why am I doing that? Well, because I can't make the$99 newsletter work anymore. No one's going to pay$99 anymore for that kind of information. And I don't need to charge it to reach people because an active subscriber is worth way more to me than$99, way more to me in terms of advertising revenue that I can generate and worth way more to me in terms of upsell.

10:35Porter Stansberry: So if I teach somebody how to make a whole lot of money in tankers this year, it's a lot easier for them to go ahead and write me a check for$25 ,000 to become a partner in my research company and get my work on property casualty insurance and biotechnology and distressed debt and all the other cool things that we're doing that people have to pay a lot of money to see because it's extremely time-sensitive, extremely complex, and extremely limited liquidity. So for those kinds of opportunities, you need a smaller file and you should be willing to pay for it because it's going to make you a lot of money.

11:08Porter Stansberry: My distressed debt analyst, Marty Fritzen, has been the leading analyst in distressed debt since 1977.

11:16Trevor Hall: There's nobody in the world who's better than Marty at this. And he's making 30 % a year compound return in credit and fixed income,

11:25Porter Stansberry: which is absolutely amazing. And anyone who has any serious amount of money is happy to pay 10 grand a year for that kind of research that can lead to those kinds of returns. But to get into that world, you start by reading a free daily e-letter instead of subscribing to a$99 newsletter. That's been the transition.

11:44Trevor Hall: Yeah, okay, very cool. I was reminiscing here, when I started in the mining industry and getting very curious about it and wondering how to make my own capital work, and because I have a journalism degree, I kept on thinking like, okay, so how do I use this storytelling and journalism aspect of what I know and make it applicable to what I do. And that's kind of where the podcast came from. When I started at 2018, there was maybe two or three. You had KE Report, Corey Fleck, who turns out to be a good friend now and a business partner of mine. You've got Mining Stock Education, which was covering a lot of work.

12:33Trevor Hall: Bill Powers, obviously a wonderful friend now, and I've learned a ton from him. and the three of us are still around. Now, there have been others that have come to the market and done a very good job, but there's also this point to where, holy cow, it seems overly saturated. For such a small industry, there's a lot of people producing content. And I've actually just kind of come to accept the entire media format as being able, allowing somebody to come in. It's a true form of capitalism. If somebody can come in and offer something, perhaps a better product, then they should be able to flourish, right?

13:11Trevor Hall: But it's because of the mechanisms that we have in front of us, the YouTubes, the Substacks, you know, Twitter. Obviously, it's been a huge game changer. And so I'm just kind of wondering, you know, this is kind of wondering what I was going back to in 1999. like do you think if you would have had the same tools back then as you do now would it been more impactful for stansbury research or would you have done things a little bit differently i don't think i would have had to have a partner i think that the barriers to entry now are so much lower

13:46Porter Stansberry: um that i could have started i could have started and you know sort of like on my own in my basement at night after work and until I reached the critical mass where I could leave my full-time job and do it full-time. You know, I didn't have to have a partner when I started Porter & Company in 2022, but that's because I had plenty of capital, you know, by that point. Anyways, but the people who I saw from Stansbury Research from, say, 1999 through, say, 2015 the people that worked for me that tried to go out on their own they all failed and then after 2015 the people who left to go out on their own began to succeed and they succeeded all by doing the podcast thing they went they you know they left and they they went immediately to podcast world and they got on youtube and they got on Spotify or whatever and they built their audience through the podcast that that seemed to be the best channel for them to to go out and build an audience with very little capital yeah are you

15:01Trevor Hall: and it seems you've been pretty active doing these interviews I mean obviously you're on this channel as well but it seems like you've been pretty active doing these interviews and sharing some of your ideas on other people's channels are you finding that to be uh incredibly powerful as you're building Porter & Co as well?

15:21Porter Stansberry: No, I don't do a very good job on any of these podcasts of marketing. You know, like there's no like, you know, get this before next Tuesday and you'll make a bunch of money stuff. So that's not really why I do it. I do it because I like the relationships with the podcasters. If I come on your podcast and we have a great conversation and you enjoy talking to me, then six months from now, when you have some little bit of information that you know that I'm going to really appreciate, you'll think to send it to me. So for me, it's not really a direct business purpose. It's more personal networking.

15:58Trevor Hall: Yeah. And do you feel that, obviously, with the technology we have and the way we communicate, it's been a huge, I mean, we're seeing a lot of people actually changing lives, creating businesses. I mean, I would definitely put myself in that camp. But my concern is it really saturates the messaging and maybe provides more opportunity for poor information. Do you share that concern at all? You know, there's too many people, it's too saturated, sharing, it's too much to make sense of?

16:32Porter Stansberry: I think the guy that is able to develop an AI that is able to go out and absorb all of the content for you and can find a way to distinguish between good content and bad content, which I don't think AI is there yet. I think that will be a breakthrough because there is so much noise. You know, I love going on YouTube. my wife goes to sleep at like 9 o 'clock at night and so I'm usually up for a couple hours after she's sleeping next to me and I just like to, I have headphones in you know, and I just go on YouTube on my phone and I watch all kinds of content on YouTube now, it's all free and a lot of it is AI slop a lot of it's not very well written, it's not very well produced, but some stuff in there is fantastic, like I love it when I find I love it when I find like old famous golf matches or I'll find like a speech that somebody gave at a TED Talk 15 years ago, then it's just amazing.

17:30Porter Stansberry: And the YouTube algorithm is figuring out what I like. And so it's doing a better and better job of serving me the kind of content that I'm looking for. So I really think that YouTube is a, I think YouTube is an incredible piece of technology. And I think it's massively undervalued. I wouldn't be surprised at all if YouTube alone is worth all of Google's market cap right now. and I think that the problem that you're talking about the proliferation of just unlimited amounts of content in any topic that you want it creates this um this desert effect where there's so much of everything that there's nothing because you can't sort through it and so whoever has the best algorithm and can present the content intuitively that you're actually looking for is going to win and I suspect that will be you too.

18:20Trevor Hall: Very good well I don't know in you know 1999 or when you started stansbury research if you were out there to become or lay down the entire foundation and groundwork for where we are at today with financial newsletter writing and content publication but you have become an icon because of it and in fact i it wasn't like it was years when i started doing this on my own that i realized man i actually owe a lot of my credit to you just because you really laid some groundwork. So I really appreciate it. If I'd never get a chance to thank you for that, I do want to thank you now. But I also want to pick your brain on markets here because we are just incredibly interested.

19:05Porter Stansberry: Before we get to markets, can I just say one thing about that? Sure, absolutely. Because I stood on the shoulders of giants. So I learned everything I know about how to do content from Bill Bonner. and if you ever read the daily reckoning back in the day or you ever read any of bill's books i mean he he is just a genius writer i also owe a big debt of gratitude to doug casey and um to jim grant um and uh it's so that i don't know i don't know if you know who jim grant is but he's a very famous manhattan-based newsletter writer he's been doing it since 1983 three. And for almost 20 years, I tried to develop a relationship with him where every year on his birthday, I would send him an email and I would say, Jim, this is Porter Stansberry.

19:52Porter Stansberry: I'm your biggest fan. Can I please do a deal with you where I will sell your newsletter in my newsletter and I will give you all the money and the customers. I just want to build a relationship with you because I'm such a huge fan. And for like eight years in a row, he wouldn't reply.

20:15Porter Stansberry: Finally, he told me, his wife asked him, he said, I got the birthday letter from Porter again. And his wife said, he wants to promote you and your business to his customers for free. What's your problem? And so he finally returned my call. He invited me up to lunch at the R &T Club in Manhattan. And we had a wonderful experience. And he, of course, is a genius. And we did our first deal together like that. I think it was around 2014 timeframe. And we got to be good friends. And I actually hosted his 75th birthday party five years ago. And just anyways, I just want people to know if you've ever read my newsletters and you really liked them, I learned all this stuff from other people too.

20:57Porter Stansberry: I learned it from Bill. I learned it from Doug. I learned it from Jim Grant. And so in this community, I was always taught to do everything you can to help your competitor because his customer will someday become your customer as long as you guys get along and are respectful to each other. So I've always tried to do that. And I've always tried to share with my file the people who I really respect and who I think do good work.

21:26Trevor Hall: That's amazing. What a wonderful story. That's a great story. I feel like if I ever had a chance to meet Jim Grant, I wouldn't know what to ask or say because I'd feel like every question would be just absolutely childish and silly. But it's a great story. It'd be a good time to really quickly mention Tara Hutton. They help mining and exploration companies communicate complex projects through clearly interactive 3D presentations, videos, investor-ready visuals. as a project can have strong geology, an experienced team, and significant potential. But if its value is hidden underground and difficult for investors to understand, that's a problem.

22:09Trevor Hall: Terra Hutton brings geography, geology, drilling, and infrastructure together in one clear visual, making the invisible investable. So if you're involved with a mining company and want to make your project easier for investors to understand, take a look at our friends over at Terra Hutton and what they offer. You can find them at terahutton.io. All right, let's do talk about markets and really the bond market really creating the huge headwind as it is of lately. We'll dive into this, but I want to get the general sense. And my friend, Dimitri Kofinas, has always used or kind of coined the term financial nihilism as best as anybody could here over the last couple of years.

22:53Trevor Hall: But back in 2011, you predicted that debasing the currency wouldn't just raise prices, it would change behavior. And I think we're seeing that play through. You said you'd see labor force participation fall, gambling explode, deaths of despair rise. Let me read you where we actually are today. And these, obviously, you know this, but let's reiterate it. The zero-day options are now 61 % of all S &P 500 options volume and retails more than half of that. The pattern day trader rule has been repealed. Perpetual futures with 100 times leverage were approved for U.S. retail back in June. How about more?

23:38Trevor Hall: One in six Americans has traded a sports prediction contract, and the market is at basically an all-time high, while consumer sentiment is basically in the tank. Is that the thing you were describing 15 years ago, concluding rationalities gone, saving is pointless, or is it just cheap access to better technology, cheaper cash? How much should we be reading into all this?

24:07Porter Stansberry: I think that it's everyone reacting rationally to the change in the marketplace. What the end of America was really all about was that the middle class was going to be wiped out by inflation. That was the government's solution to the$10 trillion banking crisis that we had. And I knew, of course, from all the previous times in history that the middle class would be wiped out. They wouldn't understand what happened to them. and in the process of being wiped out, they would lose all of their discipline and the culture would change. And these are all acts of desperation. I can't afford to pay rent, so I have to go be a prostitute if I'm a young woman.

24:50Porter Stansberry: If I'm a young man, I have to gamble because I have no chance of getting a car or a house unless I get lucky. And then the labor force participation rate, That is an absolutely market-efficient answer. They are cutting the pay, so I'm cutting the work. And so I think all these things actually are very rational behavioral responses to the underlying monetary regime. Do you feel that, like— By the way, just one last thing. When you think about the 25-year-old out there whose starting pay is, let's say,$80 ,000. And that value of the$80 ,000 is maybe half of what it was five years ago. And rents have probably doubled on top of that.

25:49Porter Stansberry: So you're a 25-year-old. You have no chance of living in your own home or even your own apartment. you have you have access to graphic porn 24 7 on your cell phone and you have gambling on that same cell phone and marijuana is legal how how in the world do you expect the average 25 year old male to survive that scenario right they will not they will fail every time yeah it's a great question

26:21Trevor Hall: And I think there's a lot of people doing some more research about the destruction. We just specifically talked about the gambling markets, just the destruction not only of, you know, wealth and capital, but the destruction of, you know, losing your soul and feeling so entrenched in losses.

26:40Porter Stansberry: It's all about losing your soul. One in 10 American college females, one in 10 has an OnlyFans account where they sell naked pictures of themselves. Yeah.

26:53Trevor Hall: That's wild. I didn't know that was the number. That's incredibly high. But what we haven't touched base in this current dialogue here, Porter, is the use of leverage using all this. You know, 100 times leverage on a perpetual future. I mean, you're running a huge, more degenerate version of that trade, as you just explained. But where's the line between speculating because money is broken or the money being destroyed because of speculating? What's the difference here? Or where are we?

27:32Porter Stansberry: Well, I run a very highly leveraged fund specifically because I believe the money is broken. I bought a house a month ago in Florida, Winter Park. And I certainly have enough cash to buy the house. but I went and got a 15-year mortgage at 6 % because I believe the money is broken. And the rational reaction to a broken monetary system is to borrow as much as you can. So I really don't see people's behaviors as being anything other than the rational response to a broken monetary system. And I don't think you're going to see, I know you're not going to see any changes to behavior until we fix the money.

28:16Trevor Hall: do 25 year old young adults have an honest path right now

28:27Porter Stansberry: i i don't think they do i i don't i don't think that so i didn't have any family money my family had no money like ron white likes to say so um i went to the university of florida i paid$55 a credit hour. I worked the whole time I was in college. I worked four day weekends at Disney World as a lifeguard to pay for my college education. I worked spring breaks. I worked summers. These friends of mine would go on ski trips for spring break and they're like, how come you're not coming? And I'm like, well, it's easy. I don't have any money. But I could easily pay for college. I had no student loans.

29:05Porter Stansberry: I didn't have any debt. It wasn't hard for me to get through school and get a good education from a good university without having to borrow a penny. And I think you probably can still do that if you're in Florida and you qualify for National Merit Scholarship or something like that. But I think it's gotten much harder. And then after college,

29:29Porter Stansberry: I don't think it's possible for people to buy a house, get married, and start a family before they're 30. And we know that the rates of people that are able to do that has fallen from like 50 % in 1960 to like 12 % today. And those 12 % who can do it, I think those people are, they have family wealth. Not all of them, but I think a majority of them. In fact, I would say that marriage as an institution has become a luxury good. Very, very, very few people are getting married anymore. And the only ones who are, um, have substantial family wealth. Yeah.

30:08Trevor Hall: You know, when we go back to the financial nihilism thing, if we look back six years ago, just prior to COVID, you were starting to see a lot of day trading, day traders trading options. And I think 2020 was really, I mean, it just really expedited that. So many people just at home had stimulus money, were gambling with these option markets. And I think this dynamic is a little bit underrated, and it goes back to what we're talking about. What more do I need to do to get ahead? So obviously, I'll turn to high-risk markets. And we saw that, right? But a lot of people lost money, or maybe a lot of people haven't realized how much money they've lost, but a few of those people have been successful.

31:01Trevor Hall: But they've started selling those trades now in Discord rooms, membership, trading groups, prop firm, funnels, the sub stacks, all those things. This kind of goes back to our previous conversations about challenges in the financial newsletter business. But, you know, today the marginal cost of launching those discords and those channels and those trading groups is nil. So what happens to a research business when your competition really isn't a publisher? It's 10 ,000 traders selling an unverified track record when really the newsletter is your P &L. I mean, do you consider that to be a competitive stake or is this just something that we need to, we should probably pay attention to?

31:50Porter Stansberry: My, my moat has always been, um, two different pieces. One, I always knew that I had to do a hundred percent of the work that every investor should do before they make an investment. And I had to do it every time. So we would always hire experts to help us. We would spend a lot of time and energy on editorial. We thought that our editorial quality was our moat. And if you look at the people who I've hired to write for me over the years, whether it's Arez Kaleer or Dr. Steve Sugarroot or Whitney Tilson, they're always people who have very long and illustrious careers in finance. They're not just well-vetted.

32:36Porter Stansberry: They're the very best in their fields. It's Martin Fridson. So that's my moat. Editorial quality is one part of it. And you're not going to get that for free anywhere. It just doesn't happen. And then the second thing is, if you read anything that I've ever written, you will at least walk away saying, that was an interesting story. So a bunch of traders on a chat room are not going to be able to produce anything like the kind of literature that I do. I mean, there are things that, There are, you know, I run into customers who have a copy of a newsletter from eight years ago, and they say, this is the best story I ever read about the earthquake of 1906 or whatever I was writing about as a lead to the investment piece.

33:20Porter Stansberry: So the two parts of my moat were always the excellence of the editorial quality and then the actual writing. And so if you have both of those, I think you'll always, there will always be a market for that. you know wall street journal hasn't seen a decline in their subscription volume oh really no not at all i'm i mean it's not it's not um i don't know that uh fox who owns it uh breaks out the subscriber numbers but um i'm certain that their subscriber rates have gone up and why well they have they have the very best financial editorial quality and they have the very best writing. It's very good writing.

34:03Porter Stansberry: It's not AI slot.

34:05Trevor Hall: Well, I wonder if they picked up a number of subscriptions behind the paywall last week when Druckmiller wrote that editorial, which was quite interesting. I mean, I tried to go look for it and then, you know, it was behind the paywall and I was like, oh, I'll just wait for the, for the cliff notes that will be published here in about 10 minutes from, from everybody else. But yeah, that's, that's really quite interesting. But But can we talk about, I know we're kind of jumping a little bit all over the place, but I do want to kind of go back to markets here and hinge on really the makeup, the broken money system that we have in the treasury market being the foundation of that system.

34:45Trevor Hall: And it's hitting a real tailwind here for the better part, well, since 2022 here, Porter. and this is also kind of adding on to a younger generation trying to feel like they need to get ahead but you've said that gold went from that fringe asset to the center of the monetary system since then including bitcoin in there as well i think you're a true a firm believer investor in Bitcoin. But it's still, from the retail crowd trying to get ahead, gold still kind of seems like it remains that fringe asset. They don't believe in the broken monetary system yet. So how does a guy trading zero dated options and prediction markets go from the gambling side of markets to potentially going back to owning gold and owning a bullion?

35:45Trevor Hall: Usually paying for attention. painfully.

35:48Porter Stansberry: Usually painfully. I'm sorry to laugh.

35:52Trevor Hall: Yeah.

35:56Porter Stansberry: I mean, you and I both know there's no edge in the daily options markets. So the people eventually lose all their money and then they'll do what investors have always done. They'll go read a book. They'll go pick up intelligent investing or they'll learn sooner or later.

36:15Trevor Hall: usually painfully yeah is this any sort of does this resonate in the new in your new book the

36:22Porter Stansberry: end of america 2029 i i spend the whole book is really all about understanding what is happening to our world and how it is connected to the monetary regime and then of course how to protect yourself. And so one of the things I spent a lot of the book doing is teaching you how to build a resilient portfolio that you can leverage. Because I do believe that you should be borrowing money. And that advice is not offered anywhere. Nobody tells you that. But yeah, I calculate real urban inflation at between 10 and 12 percent a year since 2019. And if I can still borrow money at 6 percent, I'm going to do it all day long because I've got immediate 6 percent carry.

37:17Porter Stansberry: So, you know, right now I am currently, my total securities value of my own personal account is 50 million and there's$15 million of equity in it. So I'm very leveraged. A big part of that is I'm short more than$10 million of zero coupon bonds right now. So I'm borrowing money and I am shorting the hell out of the treasury market. And the way I see it, I'm being paid to do so because I believe the inflation rate is higher than my borrow cost. Now, I'm not saying that advice is for everybody, but it's it it's certainly i'm certainly very comfortable with it and i sleep fine at night

38:04Trevor Hall: so how does the year 2029 fit into the way you are managing your own capital i mean you really put it almost like a a solid date on where things could really you see things really kind of coming to a head and that's less than three years yeah what's coming the reason why things are going to

38:24Porter Stansberry: come to a head and people haven't figured this math out yet, but there are mandated increases to social security payments. They're called cost of living adjustments, COLA adjustments. And when Nixon broke the tie with gold in 71, the very first thing Congress did in 1972 was say, great, you guys can print away, but you can't print away our social security. And so in 1972, they passed this COLA legislation that mandates annual adjustments to Social Security payments. So everyone who says the Treasury won't default because we can always just print our way out of it. Well, we owe$40 trillion in Treasury bonds that we can print our way out of, and that's great.

39:13Porter Stansberry: But in the process of doing that, we're going to inflate the$100 trillion that we owe to Social Security recipients. So how's that going to work? And the answer is it won't. The math does not math. I don't care whether you're Republican or Democrat. It doesn't make any difference to the numbers. And by 2029, I believe that the Social Security system will be already insolvent. We've been operating at a deficit since 2010. And the official government numbers say they'll be insolvent by 2032. But I think inflation is going to be a lot higher than they expect. And I think we'll be insolvent by 2029.

39:48Porter Stansberry: And even if we're not, it'll be so obvious that it's going to be insolvent that there will be a crisis at that point. And so, yeah, I think you're going to have to see a big cut to Social Security benefits. And I think you're going to have to see some very, very big tax code changes. If we don't find a way to broaden the tax base, there's no question that there will be a complete destruction of the Treasury market.

40:18Trevor Hall: Okay, actually that's a great follow-up point there because I did want to ask you, what is the implications on the treasury market? I mean, if we talk about right now, the last few months, we have a Federal Reserve, a new chairman, Warsh, who's threatening to raise rates. But I think a lot of people are asking him to lower rates. You have the treasury secretary obviously doing some intervention on the long end. I mean, what are the implications to the debt market here with the time frame you've laid out?

40:48Porter Stansberry: I think long-term rates have to go higher no matter what. Look, you've got the fucking government running a 6 % primary fiscal deficit, 6 % of GDP.

41:08Porter Stansberry: There's no—think about what that means to the treasury market. normally you would expect to see the 10-year interest rate be whatever nominal GDP is plus the inflation rate. So if you have a fiscal deficit of 5 % or 6%, how do you not have nominal GDP of at least 3 % or 4 %? You will because you're printing the money and spending it. So the government's driving all the economy. Look where all the jobs have been hired in the last four years. Total employment growth, 100 % of it is government jobs. So it's the government driving the economy forward. And of course, their kind of spending is very inflationary.

42:00Porter Stansberry: So you say, look, let's say you got 4 % nominal GDP and you've got 4 % inflation rate. That's 8 % on the long bond. And that's the math that's always driven that market, always. So I don't think you have to have a collapse in the treasury market to have the decline in the long bond continue. And of course, as you probably know, the real long duration bond is down more than 50 % since 20. So I don't believe that long duration fixed income is investable. It's not an investable asset right now. And that's why I have, I built that ETF that I built, the Porter and Company Permanent Portfolio ETF, because Harry Brown's permanent portfolio that I learned as an investor, it had a 24 % bucket for long duration fixed income.

42:54Porter Stansberry: And I don't think that's investable right now. So I wanted to build a permanent portfolio for the monetary environment that we have now.

43:02Trevor Hall: Can you kind of give us a glimpse of the makeup of that portfolio? What, you know, how does it, if it's not long bonds, obviously, then, you know, how do you, where do you make that up at?

43:12Porter Stansberry: Sure. So Harry, Harry Brown, a genius, a libertarian philosopher and economist, he came up with the idea that if you just rebalance every year and you put 25 % of your assets into stocks, then you're always going to make money when there's a bull market. and if you put 25 % of your money into bonds, then when there's a bear market and bonds rally, you also do fine. You can hedge your stocks with your bonds. And he says, yeah, you know, we have a paper economy, so there's going to be some inflation. So you can hedge your bonds by putting 25 % in gold. And then you have 25 % in cash so that when you rebalance every year, you can take advantage of when the markets have a drawdown and that'll reduce your volatility over time.

43:52Porter Stansberry: So it's 25 % in stocks, 25 % in long bonds, 25 % in gold, and 25 % in cash or short duration fixed income. And I looked at that and I said, okay, that all makes sense to me. But Harry Brown unfortunately passed away before Bitcoin was invented. So I want to have gold and Bitcoin. And as you know, I'm a huge fan of gold streamers. I think that's the very best way to own gold. So my gold bucket is not just bullion. It's bullion and gold streamers and Bitcoin. That's one small change to it. The bigger change is I don't believe that long duration fixed income is investable. So instead, I put 25 % into a very carefully selected high quality group of property and casualty insurance companies.

44:36Porter Stansberry: And if you don't know much about those stocks, you're like, well, that doesn't make any sense. What are you talking about? Well, if you go and you look at, say, W.R. Berkeley, which is probably the highest quality property and casualty insurance company in the world. If you look at W.R. Berkeley and you see, oh, the market cap is$25 billion. Okay, great. What's in their balance sheet? And their balance sheet is$25 billion worth of fixed income. So these companies trade on the value of their balance sheets. And their balance sheets are all fixed income. Now, why do I want to, if I don't believe that long duration fixed income is investable, then why do I own an insurance company?

45:12Porter Stansberry: Because, you know, they're going to own a bunch of bonds. Well, because they can actively manage the duration risk. So they can hedge the duration risk and they can also just move themselves into the short end of the curve. So, for example, W.R. Berkeley, between 2019 and 2022, when the long end of the curve got so cheap, you know, in terms of the yield going all the way down. Bill Berkeley moved his entire portfolio to an average duration of less than one year. And he said, if you're not going to pay me to take duration risk, then I'm not going to take any. So he moved the whole book into treasuries, into, you know, T-bills.

45:49Trevor Hall: Yeah.

45:50Porter Stansberry: And what a genius move. And if you go and you look at that stock over that period of time, 2019 to 2024, by far the best performing insurance company because he had the very best bomb manager at the helm. And so I'm just letting the people who are the best in the world at managing duration risk manage my duration risk for me. Yeah.

46:09Trevor Hall: It's a sound idea. Let's do talk about the gold royalties and streamers that you like. You do not care for the miners. And I'm just kind of curious, is it more of just the risk profile of the producers? Is it more of the cyclicality of it? I mean, you and I talking here, you know, the environment for gold producing has never been better here, Porter. Is it worth taking a little bit of risk? Are you still putting your stamp down saying no, not right now?

46:39Porter Stansberry: So I went and looked over the last 100 years for what are the very best industries to be an investor in. Because there are some investors that have structural advantages that lead to a much higher return on capital. And, you know, I wish you the best. But if you're running a mine, you're not going to beat Coca-Cola. It's not going to happen. You're not going to beat W.R. Berkeley. It's not going to happen. So I want my capital to be in industries that have huge structural advantages where you could have a persistent return on capital that's way above the market average. So I don't want to own anything that can't have a long-term return on equity of at least 15%, and ideally over 20.

47:20Porter Stansberry: And there's just no way that a mine can do that. It's not possible. You can do that if you buy the royalty at the right price.

47:29Trevor Hall: Yeah. You know, royalty multiples at$4 ,300 gold, you know, obviously better than they were a number of years ago. And every CFO knows what that stream is worth within each portfolio. Anything on the horizon that maybe causes that model, that framework of yours to break?

47:53Porter Stansberry: Well, I mean, sure. The moon colliding with the earth would definitely break it.

48:02Porter Stansberry: Godly events is what you would say.

48:04Trevor Hall: You find them incredibly solid.

48:07Porter Stansberry: Well, look, you show me a universal suffrage democracy that doesn't go bankrupt every 50 years. Find one. You can't. It doesn't exist. paper money and democracy is unblemished by success we have both so yeah i'll i'll take i'll take i'll take the mine and i'll pay for it with paper and i'll do that every time and in a million simulations i won't lose how do you feel have you been

48:40Trevor Hall: kind of following the royalty space and also you've mentioned the bitcoin it's not exactly apples to apples here, but I'm assuming you have been paying attention to the tether story coming into the gold market and taking equity stakes and a couple of the royalty companies. Do you feel like that is a game changer and can be a huge dynamic draw of say those cryptocurrency crowds finding its way back into the bullion and gold market?

49:11Porter Stansberry: I'm sorry. I'm not sure whether it's your connects your mind but you got you got a little glitchy there but what i thought you asked me is uh is is like it's like the new streamers out there like versa met that tether has a share in and how that's going to impact the market for streamers and gold and what i what i think they're doing and by the way i don't know the people at tether so this is complete conjecture this is not even a rumor i'm i'm just i'm just imagining if i was them what i would be doing i i think it's really clear that there's going to be a big demand for non-reserve digital currency.

49:51Porter Stansberry: And the answer, of course, is Gresham's Law. No one's going to ever want to spend their Bitcoin. In fact, one of the things I think is the funniest thing in the world is when people constantly say, oh, Bitcoin's not real because nobody spends it. That's proof that it is the reserve, you dumbass. you know you don't you don't see anybody spending gold coins to pay for haircuts either do you why because you you spend the currency you save the reserve that's gresham's law everyone knows this or everyone should but you know anyways so what i think they're going to do what i suspect is going to happen is that they're going to there's going to be over time there's going to be a lot of different flavors of stable coin and one of the flavors of stable coin will be some kind of a stable coin that instead of being backed by treasuries is backed by gold and i think that will be seen as a reserve asset not just a transaction asset is potentially one of the

50:52Trevor Hall: bigger ideas that brings metals and mining, um, away from that niche trade, um, into the broader campaign to a general audience, I guess is this potentially could be it. I guess, and I know that I may not delivering that question correctly. I guess my, let me sum up is the sector destined to stay niche? I guess is my question. The mining and metal sector.

51:19Porter Stansberry: Yes, of course. Yeah. Yeah.

51:23Trevor Hall: Even if a Tether crypto type of conglomerate comes in and starts bringing, you know, bringing in capital. I was seeing like they own more gold than most countries now, which is fascinating. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

51:39Porter Stansberry: Yeah, but I just think that, you know, ultimately, right, gold isn't a productive asset. I'm not saying it doesn't have value. It has tremendous value. It's a reserve asset. It's not a productive asset. You're not going to have a big segment of the S &P 500 ever that's just a reserve asset. To grow, to be a factor in the size of the American economy, you have to be a productive asset. So, yes, it'll always be a niche industry, but that's because it has a very unique niche role in the world economy.

52:12Trevor Hall: All right. Porter, I appreciate your time. And I meant when I said earlier, thank you for everything that you've done and contributed to, you know, schmucks like me to go out there and actually put content together on finances.

52:27Porter Stansberry: Like I said, I stood on the shoulders of giants and it was great. I had a great time here with you today. If people want to listen to more of my babbling, I encourage you to go to porterstansbury.com and just, you know, you can sign up for my free daily. You can read the free content that you would have used to have to pay for. and I think you'll like it. If you do, maybe you'll join us as a partner in the research company.

52:49Trevor Hall: All right. Porter, thanks so much. Have yourself a great weekend and happy hunting. All the best.

52:58Trevor Hall: The information presented should not be considered investment advice. Mining Stock Daily and its affiliates are not responsible for any loss arising from any investment decision in connection with the material presented herein. Please do your own research or speak with a licensed financial representative before making any investment decisions.