By Peter @Newton Bell, 12 December 2016

Following the Proust Questionnaire here, Albert Lu and I had a broad conversation about our lives, the markets, and podcasts. You can find Albert’s podcast series for the Power and Market Report here and his interview series with the Power and Market Report here. I encourage you to dive into the content he has put out and share it with your friends.  

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P: In our last conversation, you mentioned that you feel like you haven’t worked in the last dozen years. That sounds like a good place to be. You mentioned managing money, the youtube activities, and I just wanted to knock over that domino to see if there’s anything else you want to say about all of that.

A: The question was about “my greatest extravagance” and my work, ironically, is precisely that. It’s something that most people can’t afford to do. I don’t know whether I would have even started it, if I was being responsible at the time. I walked away from a pretty good career to just try something new.   

A: I took my time establishing myself and it was an extravagance, for sure. At the beginning, there was no objective other than to just explore. I did a lot of things, travelled, and met a lot of people. I just let myself do that. A lot of people wouldn’t have done that and there may have been a time where I wouldn’t have done that, myself. In the end, I’m glad that I did. I learned a lot in that process.

P: And a pointed question for you here: You mentioned that your father also started a business and achieved some success from scratch as an immigrant. I wonder, would he say that he “never worked a day in his life”?

A: He would, he definitely would. And he’s still going! He’s 80 years old and he’s still going.

P: You mentioned that he is an author.

A: Right, that’s just one of the things he does. He loves to write.

P: Great, I wondered if it was the stereotypical image of the hard-working immigrant who does it, but doesn’t really have passion for what they do. I thought it might be your rebelliousness that made you pursue your dreams there.

A: It’s funny – he started the same way that I did, going down a career track, and then pulled the ripcord right around the same time that I did. He was a professor but he didn’t like it. He actually did that at the same age that I did, even though it was not something that I knew about at the time. It wasn’t until later that I found out that we had pretty much done the same thing.

P: That was quite the conversation, I imagine.

A: Yeah, I didn’t realize we were so similar. Later on, I realized that we did the same thing – but he did it with a family. I didn’t have kids when I did it. He did it with a family, so it must have been even more difficult when he did it.

P: Any comments on ‘personal resiliency’ and the whole challenge of being an entrepreneur and starting something when you don’t know exactly where it’s going.

A: It’s tough. We talk about the “stock market bubble”, or “a bond bubble”, or a “housing bubble”, but I think we have a bubble in entrepreneurs. I think the job market is so bad right now that a lot of people are starting companies, but not all of them are cut out for this. When I interviewed Jeffery Tucker on my podcast, he was the first interview I did, and I asked him what he would tell someone who had a great job but was thinking about starting their own company -- someone who had a great job but was kind of discontent and was thinking about leaving. His advice was “wait until you’re very dissatisfied” or something like that because you don’t know what you’re getting into most of the time.

P: Wow, that’s amazing. My crystal ball is a little hazy, but I wonder about the future of work –- the whole entrepreneurship thing could get even more popular as technology displaces more workers. Like any good bubble, it could get inflated much further before it pops.

A: It could. There are so many entrepreneurs now that it is part of our culture. Just like flipping houses was part of the culture for a while. Quitting your job or getting fired and starting a business is a big part of our culture now. People write books about it, there are podcasts about it. I think we have a bubble there.

P: And, as someone who publishes material on the internet, how much do you think the new platforms play into it?

A: I think that part of it is great. The apparatus that we have now for publishing is great, but I see it as a separate development from the job market being weak, and people getting disillusioned and starting businesses. I think they’re two separate things. The apparatus, the infrastructure, the technology – I love all of that. I think that’s great. But I think what we are seeing in the small business space is related to the fact that the jobs just aren’t as good anymore.

P: Well, the entrepreneur life may be glamourized more than it should be.

A: Extremely. Life as an entrepreneur is writing checks. People don’t focus on that enough.

P: And, to push on that, would you say that just in terms of money or would you bring in time, effort, and all the other types of capital, so to speak.

A: Definitely, all of that. The costs of seeding it can be high. And, if you’re established, then you’re giving up a good income stream from whatever else you had. There’s a pretty high cost of trying this.

P: Yes, but much of that is an opportunity cost, isn’t it? And aren’t we bad at recognizing opportunity those?

A: Agreed.

P: When you clicked the eject button yourself as an engineer, would you say that you were very dissatisfied?

A: Yeah, I didn’t want to do it anymore. I just did not want to do it anymore. For me, it didn’t even feel like a choice anymore. I felt like I only had one direction to go, so I went. It would have been difficult to persuade me out of it at that point. Many people did try to talk me out of it, but I had had enough. I don’t regret it.

P: Good to hear. I suspect that you had some significant achievements along that career path as an engineer; were there any major changes around how you valued those past achievements?

A: I think it was more the day to day. I wasn’t enjoying getting up and going to work as much as I had before. At the same time, I had something else that was taking up more and more of my interest and mental energy, which was economics. It just made sense. I knew that the longer you wait, the more difficult these transitions are. I was at a point where I thought “I have to do it right then or it would be too late.”

P: Well, that continuity within yourself sounds encouraging. I imagine that having a fracture within yourself regarding what you value would be difficult. I don’t know of anyone who has experienced that, but I imagine that trying to rebuild yourself in that way would not be easy.

A: It is, on many levels. Obviously, it’s a challenge financially. You’re used to signing the back of cheques and now you’re signing the front of cheques when you start your company. For me, I was in it for ten years. I had experience and climbed the corporate ladder, but had nothing to show for my new career. It was a completely new endeavor. Starting from the bottom was difficult. I didn’t realize it was going to be like that, but it was.

P: And you really did start from the bottom in terms of learning economics.

A: I did, yes.

P: They teach you a bit of economics as an engineer, but what they teach you is limited to the basic mathematical models. They seem to miss out on a lot of the historical debates and the subtleties there, particularly the fact that economics is not entirely settled as a philosophical discipline!

A: You know – I didn’t find it interesting until I discovered some of those other areas.

P: Did you jump right into the old classics or did you start with Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson?

A: I read a book that was a compilation of the main contributions of all these different figures, mostly the classical economists. I thought that was kind of interesting, but it didn’t really make sense to me scientifically. I understood the problems they were trying to explain, but the methods didn’t make sense.

P: (laughs)

A: Then I discovered Hazlitt, which opened a door. From there, I discovered Human Action and Murray Rothbard. I learned the most from Rothbard’s writings.

P: Great to hear. As an engineer, did you ever encounter those ornate pieces of machinery that economists built in the early 20th century to try and model the economic system? They had complicated systems of pressure valves and reservoirs that were meant to reflect the stocks and flows in the economy.

A: No, I never saw those. Interesting.  

P: Well, they might appeal to your engineering mind. If you’re at all skeptical, then it will likely get you back up too. Seems that we’ve always been searching for a machine to try and capture the complexity of society.

A: I noticed that about engineers and people who play in math and the physical sciences – they try to port all of that experience and methodology over to markets and economics, where it just doesn’t apply. I see that very often.

P: Any comment on what you did bring from your engineering background to your current work?

A: It doesn’t translate very well. If there is anything that has helped me, it is that having some background in science puts me in a position where I am not intimidated by the math. Even if I don’t pick it up right away, it doesn’t intimidate me. You see these research papers put out by central banks and academic economists – if you’re not versed in the math then it can be daunting. But I have that background and it allows me to, at least, look at the stuff. I think Mises described the math as cloaking bad ideas. That’s basically what it is, most of the time. The methods just aren’t applicable.

P: The independent mindedness – there is something there. Not being intimidated by someone holding up some totem of significance and saying “you have to do this because of that”. That’s a big one.

P: On your youtube account, I have seen that you get some pretty contrarian-type characters to appear on the show.

A: We like contrarians, for sure.

P: I wonder – what is it like talking to all these people? Very different backgrounds, very different focuses, and the context that they operate in – any comment on what it’s like to talk to all these people?

A: Yes, it’s a challenge. But I created my podcast thinking “maybe one day I will be able to speak with Jim Rogers or Doug Casey, or interview Walter Block” and I got to do all of that. I got to interview all of those guys and many more. That’s the thrill of doing it – being able to reach out to all these different people. I don’t agree with all of them, obviously, but that is the benefit.

A: And the feedback from viewers is great. You’re really interacting with a lot people – more people than would be practical in any other way.

P: Is yours a global audience or is it more US based?

A: I think that a little over half the audience is in the US. There are people from all over. The access with youtube is just amazing.

P: Yes, and youtube is really a recent phenomenon. It hasn’t been around all that long.

A: I think video is really catching on now, the way podcasting did maybe ten years ago. Technology has advanced to the point where you have processors on your mobile devices that are fast enough now – the network is fast enough now. Video is practical now and you have all this cheap production equipment. I think now is a real sweet time to be producing video content.

P: Any comments on humour in your work?

A: I’ve discovered that, even if you’re trying to do a serious show, people do appreciate being entertained. They are spending their time with you. Being funny is challenging, but when you do it well it’s memorable. People appreciate it and it keeps them coming back. People like to be entertained, even in a serious setting. Think about going to college – I remember the funny professors. I had a lot of professors that were good, but I remember the ones that managed to make it entertaining.

P: I will admit that I remember a couple times when you added a little air to the room at the Morality and Capitalism conference when introducing Rick Rule or somebody else. I thought I might try to prepare some jokes for this one today, but no dice.

A: Well, it’s your show – you can do whatever you want! Cut ‘em out if you don’t like them. Harder to do that when it’s live.

P: Is there much editing that goes into your show?

A: Not anymore. When you do a show you’ll find that, if you over-edit it, you’ll burn-out. I guess it’s human nature. When you first do something, you want to make it perfect. But it’s almost impossible to hit that standard. What ends up happening is that you burn-out because you’re spending all your time editing. My stuff goes out almost raw now; very little editing.

P: Wow, good for you. The whole live-streaming thing really appeals to me for that reason.

A: That’s really picking up. Facebook is doing that now. I think that’s going to be huge.

P: There’s a big conference happening in London this week, Mines and Money, and one of the newspapers was advertising ‘live coverage from the event’. They were posting one article at the end of the day about what had happened.

A: Not exactly live, huh?

P: Points for effort, but not quite what we’re talking about here. And the Morality and Capitalism conference, I gather that you’ve been going to that for a few years.

A: I think this was my third year. Love that conference. How about you?

P: I think I’ve gone to three of the last four, or two of the last three. I always try to roll it in with the Sprott Symposium there.

A: That’s what I do, too.

P: I’ve been going to that Sprott show since 2011, back when it was an Agora event. John Mauldin was coming up one year so I thought “Well, I’ll bite.” Then I saw Rick Rule get up on stage, heard him speak, and I’ve been going back to that conference ever since.

A: OK. It’s a great combination – great time to be in Vancouver. I try to be there every year now because it’s so much fun.

P: People seem to talk about how unique Vancouver is, in terms of the mining and promoter community. I wonder if it is that unique, based on your travels? What’s Houston like, for example?

A: I’m probably not the best person to ask about that because I’m not really in the community – I’m on the perimeter. I know people in the community, but I’m not really in it. What I’ve heard is that Vancouver and Toronto are both thriving. Vancouver is sort of home for me, so I enjoy going there. And the people that you meet there are great. I don’t think there’s anything else that is even close to being like Capitalism and Morality right now.

P: Yeah, you’re right. I haven’t encountered anything else quite like Morality and Capitalism. I love that they have the videos up on their youtube channel.

A: They’re doing a great job. The quality has improved over the years and I think Jayant is doing a great job there.

P: And to jump back a bit here – you mentioned Jeffrey Tucker. He’s been at the Morality and Capitalism show once a few years ago. Is there anything that people have said, on your show, that has really stuck with you?

A: Well, the first time I had Doug Casey on it was a lot of fun. Often, especially in the first year, the first interview I had with a person was just me meeting the person for the first time. I have a rapport with Doug now but, back then, I just knew him from his books – like everyone else. I was actually meeting him for the first time on my show. So much of what he said in that interview has stuck with me. I started the interview by asking him about his life as an entrepreneur and he said “Well, you know I’m a hard-core unemployable” and that always stuck with me because I am a hard-core unemployable. I know exactly what that feels like. Classic Doug. It stuck with me.

A: First time I interviewed Rick Rule, he told me about his experiences making and losing money. He told me that “the life of a speculator is, in essence, making more losing decisions than winning decisions.” I had to stop and digest that. I thought, wow – here is a guy who is a serial success over his multi-decade career and he is telling me that he makes more bad decisions than good ones. And it’s true – that’s the nature of speculating. But it really hit home when he said it. There have been things like that.

P: I listened to one of the recent interviews with John Williams and I got the sense that you could give John two hours and he would still be getting warmed up!

A: He knows his stuff. I can’t keep up with him. He really knows these statistics. I get the impression that he lives, breathes, eats, and sleeps these statistics. He’s a great person to know.

P: For the benefit of all of us, I think. Putting those other sets of numbers out there is valuable. Have you thought about doing longer-form interviews with people like him?

A: I’ve found that most people appreciate something around 15-20 minutes. I do like the long form and I may get back to it, but with youtube as the platform the 15-20 minute target is probably best.

P: From my experience, the sweet spot has been really long form stuff, 45 minutes-plus, and then to chop up excerpts to have bite-sized pieces. A tweet’s worth of content – maybe a tweetstorm. I’ve found that going from the really long form to the really short has been interesting for me. And with video, the gifs can make for fun excerpts. I like how you have little cuts at the front of your video that is taken from somewhere else in the video. I think those moments can be a lot of fun and can stand on their own. The internet culture seems to thrive on gifs and giving little bits can hook people in.

A: That’s true.

P: You mentioned Doug – have you had a chance to read his novel?

A: I did. He gave me an early copy, so I was able to read it before FreedomFest. When he released it, I was able to interview about it. It’s really cool to see him so excited about his new project. You asked earlier about ‘favourite career’ and I couldn’t really say – I like doing new things. I think he is like that too. He’s been doing investments for a long time, he’s been writing newsletters for a long time, and he’s kind of a victim of his own success in that way. The newsletters just became so successful that he kept doing it. It’s great to see him doing something different. I think the series is going to be phenomenal. If the first book is any indication, then the series is going to be phenomenal.

P: There’s a lot in it and I was so impressed that it is such a page-turner. Full of excitement, but then it’s got ideas in there too. I love how he used the characters to setup the strawman arguments on both sides of the divide. And I would agree, as well. When I saw him at Sprott this summer, I thought he looked so alive. He may have been under the weather with a cold or something, but he seemed so excited to have the book being a real thing now. Good for the community to have him excited, I think.

A: He’s doing lots of interviews and writing, it’s great.

P: He has been prolific with the interviews online. Let me ask -- any comments on what media you consume, yourself?

A: I do like podcasts, naturally, as a podcaster myself. I mostly consume business stuff. I do consume a lot of the mainstream, as well. Bloomberg, CNBC, I like RT. I like Real Vision TV, that’s a great product.

P: Yeah, have you been able to get some of their stuff?

A: I did a trial with them a while back and I catch some of their stuff here and there. I think that it’s extraordinary. Peter Schiff – I’m a big fan of him.

P: Any comment on the whole trolling thing? It seems like the common denominator gets taken pretty low on some public forums, like youtube.

A: Yeah, I can see what you’re saying. That’s the downside of having this accessible platform. I see what you’re saying, but I’ll still take it.

P: Have you had any trouble with trolls, or anything like that?

A: Sure. Sure, just don’t feed them. My audience is not that big and it’s pretty tight. I think that the quality of viewer is pretty good, so we don’t get much of that going on because we don’t feed that behaviour. It’s pretty civil. Once in a while, someone will come in but they don’t stick around because there’s nothing for them to do!

P: Good job pulling together a respectable group of people on the internet there. Never any easy thing to do.

A: We just keep it civil. I don’t know how long it will last, but it’s lasted for over a year so far. Hopefully we’re doing something right.

P: Well, I’ve got to ask broadly about markets. I don’t know if you’re in a position where you can talk about markets publicly or not.

A: There are things I can talk about and things I can’t. I can’t talk about specific stocks or performance because of my regulator. But markets are not off limits.

A: It’s November 30th today and we’re seeing a lot of craziness. Stock markets have been on a tear since Trump was elected. One thing that struck me was that it almost seems like markets were pricing in something worse than a Trump victory, which is just hard to believe. They wanted Hillary, but Trump got elected and the market took off! This was supposed to be the worst outcome. Apparently they were worried about something else – civil war or something? I don’t know. I thought that was interesting.

P: Who knows what’s been going on behind closed doors! There may have been some surprises here and there with Trump having some real talk with people.

A: Just look at the cabinet appointments. You wouldn’t know, if you saw these names, who had won the election.

P: He was championed as the outsider candidate. Is it fair to say that that looks like it is not shaping up as much as was expected?

A: I think that’s pretty fair to say (laughs). Shame on anyone who thought it would be different. Especially libertarians.

P: What a surprise. Feels to me like an ironic situation – sky is falling and then nope, we’re gonna get the same. Thank you very much!

A: Peter, I don’t know if you’re a fan of Gary Larson, the Farside comics. There’s a comic with a picture of a kid walking up to a door and pushing on a door that says “pull” and the sign on the building is something like “Midvale School for the Gifted”. These voters are the same way. They turn the handle left, they turn it right – they don’t realize that, no matter which way you turn it you’re not going to get what you want. That’s what they’re finding out now, I think. They are terribly disappointed that Trump is not doing everything he promised he would do. But, really, we should have known that most of it -- he wasn’t going to do.

P: Do you pay fairly close attention to all this stuff in your day to day?

A: I paid more attention to the Presidential election just because it got really interesting -- especially after the second debate. Before that, not really. I didn’t really pay attention to the primaries and day-day politics don’t interest me at all. After we get through these cabinet appointments, I probably won’t pay much attention.

P: Then it is December, it’s been a year – is the Fed going to do something? It’s this question again.

A: I think it’s safe to say they’re going to do something this time. They’ve got adequate cover to do it. If you look at options prices and what people are expecting – people are expecting a rate hike in December. Unless they really don’t want to do it, they don’t have an excuse. I would expect them to do it and I wouldn’t expect the market to be very unhappy about it, unless the signal in their language that there’s going to be more than two rate hikes in 2017.

P: I was listening to an interview on Real Vision and someone was saying “Rate hike – you’re calling a quarter-point a rate hike? No, no thank you! A rate hike in my day is five percentage points!”

A: Well, that’s where the language comes in. No-one cares about the twenty-five basis points, it’s whether or not it’s five percent. Whether or not there are going be another ten or twenty of these things coming. That’s what everyone wants to know.

P: Of all the things to try and predict. A bunch of politicized academics don’t sound like the most interesting or rewarding thing to try and understand or get ahead of.

A: If you take their dot plots at face value – you can argue that you should just ignore them – but if you take them at face value, just look at the confusion. These people don’t even know what they’re going to do in a year! How are we supposed to know what they are going to do – they don’t even know. It’s ridiculous.

P: I think you could call it the “worst version of Keynes’ Beauty Contest ever imagined”.

A: (laughs) Exactly.

P: And I gather that you have a bullion business, is that correct?

A: That’s what I started with. I started dealing retail coins in the town that we lived in at the time, the Woodlands. My business partner and I started dealing coins. This was like 2009, when the thing was just getting started. We did that for a while, but then there was a demand for money management. You’re not going to put eighty percent of your money in metals. Some people go overboard, but you’re typically talking about ten percent as a good allocation. Ten to fifteen, something like that. Twenty if you’re confident. But there was a demand for investment advisory services from someone who understood hard money. And that’s when we decided that I would register as an advisor and start managing money. Not just gold, but securities as well. I don’t really do much in the metals space anymore, just for my own clients. There are a lot of places you can buy gold coins online. There’s really nothing for us to do there anymore.

P: It’s always puzzled me – having a large collection of coins at your own property. Maybe it’s something about being Canadian and not having guns in the same way. It’s always seemed like more of an issue to have a bunch of coins.

A: You’re just shifting the risks around. That’s what I always tell people – there’s no one answer about how much you should hold, how you should hold it, because you’re just moving the risks around. You have to go with some combination of what you’re comfortable with.

P: Any comment on what it was like before 2011 versus afterwards in that coin space?

A: Well, we definitely had some good years leading up to it -- for sure. Like any asset, when the price is going up people just look back at the last year or two and, for some reason in their mind, they extrapolate that gain out to infinity. People were really excited. Then, after gold tapered off, the demand went with it. I’ve been noticing a lot of these “WE BUY GOLD” signs popping up again here and there. It looks like that trend is turning around.

P: A great contrary indicator, aren’t they? Well, we’re coming up on 40 minutes there so I will pause and get ready for a final ten minutes of chatting. Thanks very much, Albert.

P: Alright, as we move into the final minutes here is there anything that you want to get up on a soapbox to rail about?

A: Not really. It’s not really what I do.

P: Yes, it really isn’t what you do. Figured I would offer anyway, just in case.

A: (laughs) I could, but I’ll save that for Capitalism and Morality. I get a year’s worth off my chest in one talk.

P: I wonder if there’s not a joke to be there somewhere, in terms of getting up on the soapbox with a strong sense of irony or sarcasm.

A: It’s funny – when I started podcasting, it was a strange thing to do. I usually don’t have much to say. Usually pretty quiet, but it turned out that I really liked podcasting! It must be something about the medium or being able to get something off my chest once in a while. Same with speaking at Capitalism and Morality – I don’t really speak anywhere else. Once a year, it’s nice to go to Vancouver with that crowd and say whatever.

A: I’ve got to thank guys like Doug Casey, who is a trailblazer. He goes out there and says whatever he wants.

P: Doesn’t he just?

A: He just blazes a pretty big trail for the rest of us. And that’s part of the reason that I am comfortable going to a conference like that and saying whatever I want.

P: And consistently, too; the Phil Donahue interview from 30 years that someone posted on youtube – same Doug Casey.

A: He is. He’s the same guy.

P: Jokes – sometimes I have heard you do actual jokes in your presentations. Any comments on sarcasm or the different types of humor?

A: I don’t really know much about that. Once in a while, I will try something but trying something is very risky. I’m careful about what I try because you don’t know what will happen. One thing that makes some people really funny, the professionals, is that they know what is funny. The rest of us don’t really know what’s funny and then it either works or doesn’t.

P: Usually it doesn’t.

A: Usually we don’t even try! These guys, somehow, figured out what’s funny. I don’t really know. One thing that helps is that I don’t speak a lot so, when I do speak, it’s in front of that crowd. I know a lot of those people, more than I would anywhere else because it’s a special combination of people. I have a better chance of succeeding with that audience and they’re pretty kind – they’re not hostile.

P: It’s a unique crowd, though. They do get into it…

A: For sure, but we see eye-to-eye on a lot of things.

P: That’s clear. There is a lot of common ground there. I’ve always stayed around the edge of the room at that conference and I’ve always been blown away some of the things that people talk about. I wonder if they know where they’re starting, or where they’re ending, or what’s going on. It’s not like any other conference that I’ve been to.

A: Jayant tries to keep it tight, but it’s tricky.

P: The people that they presenting there are the reason that it is so tricky. All my respect to them, I am grateful to them for what they’re doing. I have never seen such a diverse collection of points of view.

A: Well, Jayant specifically goes out and finds people. Usually the keynote speaker is someone that I’ve never heard of before. It’s all about broadening your exposure.

P: And I find that the keynote speaker generally talks about something that I have never even heard of! It leaves my head spinning when we start the day hearing about something that is totally off the wall from my narrow world view.

P: And I will mention Mickey Fulp, who I know from the conference. Do you know him particularly well?

A: I just know him from the conference. I’ve been three times and I think I met him the first time I went. Like I said, I’m not really hooked into the resource community. I know he is a well-known geologist, but I’m sort of dancing on the perimeter of this community and I don’t know all of the guys very well.

P: Well, this calendar year has seen some pretty tough times in global financial markets following that rate-hike in December 2015, then into something of a raging bull market for the juniors for a couple months. We may be at 50% retracement on some of those stocks now, and I wonder if it was to become a more sustained period of excess in those markets – would you see yourself getting more involved? When do you think people from the bullion communities will get more interested in the juniors?

A: I think that has already happened. There are a lot of people who have been pulled into that space. They may have been shaken out recently, but I think the first half of the year had a lot of people coming back to it. For myself and the clients whose money I manage, the risk profiles don’t match up and it is not something I generally invest in.

P: Facing a 50% down move is a really hard thing to do as a fiduciary, I would imagine.

A: Yes, it just doesn’t fit the risk profile. I have some small exposures to some of the royalty and streaming companies, which are safer plays. But they are very small because this is the money that we can’t afford to lose. We just can’t afford to be gambling on some of these juniors.

P: I think there is something significant around that, too. Back when I started going to the Sprott Symposium it was an Agora event and there was a strong hard money contingent in the crowd. They had that psychology that “this is wealth we do not want to lose”, but then I saw them putting it into some of these burning matchsticks, as they say, which always left me puzzled.

A: Two times that I’ve been to the conference and Rick has called them out as being wild-ass speculators. He said “you guys think you are investors, but you’re wild-ass speculators.” He did that twice, to my memory. Definitely, you’ve got to know that going in – these are risky speculations.

P: And the tree gets shaken pretty hard on some of those shares.

A: (laughs) It sure does.

P: With CEO.CA being a chatroom, where people are able to go and talk about these stocks in real time, you see all of that unfolding. Some people seem to have a good sense of what’s going on, but others go on and say things that would suggest they don’t really know what they’re doing. There seems to be something there around investor education. A sucker is born every minute, I guess.

A: Well, for anyone who feels that they might be in that situation or are in danger of getting into that situation, the best educational resource I have seen is on the Sprott Global website. They have the Investment College series and other videos – I would recommend going there and taking a look at that stuff.

P: They have one with Adrian Day, I think it’s an hour talking about managing the risk with these equities. 

A: Rick has one in there about running your portfolio like a business that is worthwhile. Some of the geology stuff is not for everyone, but there is other stuff just about the process of how to approach running your money like a business. I think that’s very worthwhile.

P: Coming back to something you mentioned earlier about getting to a point where you don’t feel intimidated by the technical material. I think you were talking about that in terms of Central Bank’s economic models, but I think it applies to the geology too – just getting to a point where you’re not bamboozled by the geological results.

A: That’s probably a pretty good idea, but I always worry about the stuff that I don’t know that I don’t know. You may be armed with some knowledge, but you have to understand that there is probably a lot of stuff that you are missing. Just be careful.

P: And that’s one of the big ideas that came out of the Austrian Economics tradition. Hayek, in his Nobel Prize, spoke about the limitations of knowledge and a profound degree of humbleness around what you know.

A: Sometimes a little bit of knowledge and information is dangerous, if it results in too much confidence.

P: Good way to put it, Albert. Well, thanks very much for your time today. My pleasure to get to know you better.

A: You’re welcome, Peter. My regards to all your readers.