Market Recap: Insights From Gerald Celente, Robert Quartermain, Jacob Shapiro, & Chris Casey

AI is going to be it, but China is going to lead the world in it. And they were over-invested in these companies. You start looking at, other than NVIDIA and a few others, they're deep in debt. They're not going to have the money to pay this thing off. There's going to be huge failures. With respect to what's going on with the Fed and elsewhere in general population, we're now seeing people looking and saying, I need a component of gold in my investment portfolio. But the message here is the strategic partnership. Carney's statement that China is actually more reliable right now than the United States in terms of negotiation and whether it lives up to its word. So I'm not sure who's going to be the next Fed chairman. But ultimately, I don't know if it matters. Because they only know how to do one thing. They only can do one thing. That's print money. So Gerald, you mentioned three of your top trends that I really want to hone in on. You said number one was the Gen Z revolution. You spoke quite a bit about that. The second one that I want to do a deeper dive on is the AI and AI bubble. And I have to admit, I really haven't played anything associated with AI outside of owning the spiders or the cues. And when ChatGPT came into existence in November of 2022, I can't believe it was only three years ago, but it was valued at $20 billion. Now it's over $500 billion based on the last raise. The other poster child for anything to do with AI is NVIDIA. Once again, when ChatGPT came into existence in November of 2022, NVIDIA was valued at $400 billion. Now it's over $4 trillion. But maybe you can do a deeper dive on the AI bubble and what's going to be the catalyst to take it down. Because I think we both agree it's way overvalued, okay? But this can go on for quite some time. Again, China's going to take it over. It's way overvalued. You realize that 50% of America's gross domestic product in 2025 is because of spending in AI? So the Trends Journal went out, the top trends went out on July, excuse me, January 6th. I went to Google and typed in top trends for 2026. You ready? AI top trends for 2026 point toward the shift from 2025's quote, quiet luxury, end quote, to quote, loud luxury, featuring bold colors, exaggerated embellishments, tassels, and bows. Who are you talking to? That's the top trends if you go to AI. So don't subscribe to the Trends Journal for $2.59 a week. Go to AI, swallow the crap that they're putting out there. It's the future. It's the beginning of the worst of the dumbing down of society. Another one of our trends, by the way, is tech-itis. Young people are totally addicted to this stuff. It's the future. And love it, hate it, it's where it's going to go. And again, China's going to take it over. Just like they, here, you know how much of America's gross domestic product is from manufacturing? About 10%, all right? And what is China? Again, they're just their exports hit an all-time high of over a trillion bucks. So AI is going to be it, but China's going to leave the world in it, and they're over-invested in these companies. You start looking at, other than NVIDIA and a few others, look at the losses. They're not, they're deep in debt. They're deep in debt. They're not going to have the money to pay this thing off. There's going to be huge failures. There's going to be a dot-com bust that's going to crash the equity markets, along with the office building bust that's going to bring down the banks as the banks go bust. You, one thing I wanted to ask you about is, or get your opinion on, you were talking about the Gen Z revolution, and then you also talked about the bust in AI, but also how kids are totally addicted to their phones. And I see this all the time, but one of the things that really stands out to me is when you talk about the older Gen Zs or younger millennials who are able to invest, it's like this, they're just swinging from the fences when it comes to investing, okay? Like they're big into these meme stocks. They're big into cryptocurrencies. They're big into sports betting, like sports betting. It's become like a game. And then the other thing that's really caught on now is, are these predictive markets. And this is interesting because the predictive markets are regulated at the federal level, not at the state level. So there's a lot more freedom. And once again, it's almost like a game. You can bet on anything now. What do you view? You're 100% right. No, you're 100% right. And the big companies are doing more and more in this predictive stuff. You're investing, the young people are totally into it. It's the future. And again, when you're young, you don't know what you, you're just starting to grow up. I started growing up when I was about 32 years old. That's when I became a political atheist and started investing in gold and oil when the Iranian conflict broke out. And of course, they taught us to hate Iran, just like they teach us right now. And people had no idea back in 1978, when the revolution began, that the United States, the CIA and the MI6 of the UK overthrew the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953. You know why? He had the nerve to say that oil in Iran, it belongs, doesn't belong to Anglo-Iranian oil, better known today as BP, or Standard Oil, better known today as ExxonMobil. It belongs to the Iranian people. No, it doesn't. You know, we threw the government, brought in the SAVAK, the secret police that made the SS in World War II look like a great group. So when the revolution happened, I knew this thing was real. But if they teach you to hate them, just like they teach us to hate Russia. When I was a kid, I was hiding under a desk because an atom bomb may go off. We used to have air raid drones. So people have no idea. They buy the propaganda. And this is important too. Again, we only write the facts. The mainstream media did not report of spiking gold and oil prices in 2025 until around October. Again, we write a weekly magazine. We put the facts in there. This is what the Wall Street Journal reported on gold, did nothing. Last paragraph, Financial Times. Hardly a word. Then when they started reporting it, they said prices are going up like they went in 1979, 78, 78. But then they crashed in the 80s, early 80s. No comparison. Again, I started buying gold $163 an ounce back then. Back then, America was number one. Nobody was close to us. China had about a billion people back then. You know what the gross domestic product was in 1978? Under $150 billion. They got a billion people, $150 billion GDP. Now, over 20 trillion. Back then, why did gold prices go down? Reagan came in. Paul Volcker pushed up interest rates to like 18% to 20% to stop the inflation. They're not going to raise interest rates now. They're going to lower them. You see what Trump is doing with that guy Powell, the Fed head? And Trump comes out and says, I want a week of dollars so we can export more products. The deeper the dollar goes, the higher gold prices go. This isn't rocket science. Gold is dollar-based. So the lower interest rates go, the deeper the dollar falls, the higher gold prices go up because it's cheaper to buy in other countries as currencies are going up. And we are in the beginning of the end of the dollar being the world currency. Bricks have what? 40% of the world's GDP. A lot of the nations are very disgusted with America's geopolitical and socioeconomic hegemony they've had. So you're going to see the dollar go. We became the country our founding fathers fought against, Great Britain. But the sun never sets on the British Empire. Oh yeah, all the wars you got? What happened after World War I? Spent all this money on wars, boom, down goes the pound and the dollar comes up. As I said, the business of America is war. Oh, Trump, again, not only by the facts. Go back to February 2025. Hey, hey, I'm going to cut the defense budget in half, all right, all right. What did he say about a week ago? Hey, hey, I'm going to add another half a trillion dollars to build up the defense, all right? With $38 trillion in debt. Oh, and how about over there in Germany? Mertz, the black rock guy, this is the chancellor. A trillion dollars, a trillion. Again, two years of recession, basically three. Don't tell me you went up 0.2% and they're borrowing a trillion dollars. We got to build up our defense to stop those Russians. Oh yeah, we only killed 27 million of them in World War II and Operation Barbarossa. And got to build up our infrastructures so we can hold the tanks. All of Europe, all of Europe is building up their defense, all the facts, building up their defense. Now, it doesn't build up your economy, the BS that they're throwing out there. Economies are built up when the products that are manufactured are consumed, bought and consumed by the public. This only enriches the military-industrial complex. And look at the stocks going up in the military-industrial complex as all these countries are spending more and more money on defense. So you asked me why I'm concerned because another one of our top trends is World War III. The Ukraine war is going to keep going on. There's going to be more violence in the Middle East. The United States attacking... Oh, you're not allowed to use the word, by the way. Go to BBC. An article came out in Guardian. You can't use the word that the United States kidnapped Maduro and his wife. They captured them, all right? Can't use the word kidnapped. There's going to be blowback. The payback's a bitch, as they say. And it's going to happen. That's my greatest concern. So you just gave me the best segue ever. So gold increased 27% in 2024. The S&P was up 25. So S&P being up 25 and gold being up 27 was probably the first indication that something important was happening. And then in 2025, gold has increased another 65% for a two-year gain of 109. The silver numbers are getting almost difficult to digest. We had 21.5% typical lag at the beginning of the cycle in 2024. And now 148% this year or past year for a two-year gain of 201%. So you were just starting to get into this. Are you surprised by that performance? Because I've been in this space for so long, one has what I would call, I guess, optimistic skepticism that we always would hope it would come. Between listening to yourself or Eric Sprott, I've always had great exposure to the commodity. But because we've been through these cycles, you're wondering, okay, we're going to see the run-up and movement. This time, it feels different. And for me, for a couple of reasons, right? First is central bank buying. When you look at the trillions of dollars of U.S. debts and unfunded liabilities and treasury bonds, which are out there, to what extent do we start to see a translation from whether it's U.S. treasuries or European treasuries, where a small component of this is, you know what, we want hard assets. We want these mining companies which have long life mines and have an opportunity to deploy from bonds to look at these mining companies to take advantage of that. The second is the central bank buying, particularly driven by China. China is the world's largest producer of gold. And that's due to the fact they have their own mines, but they produce a lot of gold by way of byproduct, from their copper concentrate. I mean, they're the world's largest refiners of copper, right? They have 12 million tons a year, versus here in North America, you know, we've a million to million and a half tons of refining capacity. So, you know, China's importing, it produces gold in that regard. But there are buyers, right? We continue to see this inflow to China's central bank. We continue to see India as a large consumer. We see many other central banks around the world collectively now having as much gold probably is, you know, thought to be in Fort Knox. And so you have central banks buying. And we saw that inflection point probably about two years ago, three years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine and their assets were seized. And if you look at central bank buying after that, it became, what can we do from security of assets? And of course, the other component is we have the cryptocurrencies. Tether and others who are now saying, we're a cryptocurrency. What's the best thing we can do with our capital? We're buying gold, right? And so you're now seeing central banks buying it. You know, those individuals who've been involved in crypto be able to buy it. And you have individuals like myself who have, you know, hoard of physical gold thinking at some point I would sell it, you know, when I owned it at $1,000 in silver. And now you're looking saying, you know, with what you'd have been saying in your newsletters and perhaps what Eric's brought. And again, this is a very poor looking statement to your individuals, but when they would say and put, you know, $5,000 gold or $10,000 gold, you know, I would be thinking, I wonder if I'll see it in my lifetime. I just turned 70. I'm probably gonna see that well before my 75th birthday, if not maybe my 72nd. And so when do I determine I actually wanna give away or sell someone my physical versus it's not costing me anything. I have a lot of equity exposure, particularly with my shareholdings, again, a forward looking, you know, two statement with respect to insider trading reports that I have with Dakota and with the Hemlo and others. And so I'm all in, in the commodity because, and you could speak to it. I think there's a flexure point. This time it feels different. And with all the debt in the world being invested and having an asset with no debt on it, that's transferable. And you can take it anywhere in the world to convert it into some form of an asset. It's just, well, it's nicely depositioned here at this point in time. So I'm gonna put a few words in your mouth. I think you just agreed with me that the big three, US deficit, anti-dollar sentiment and Fed credibility, which are things we've talked about for decades, are all hitting inflection points. Not to sound like the boy who cried wolf, which I feel like, because we've followed them for so many years and gold has gone from 250 to 4,600. So it's not like they haven't mattered, but we haven't had the big reckoning. It seems that we've hit this inflection point. And I think this is important to add to what you said about central banks. Central banks get a lot of credit for what's gone on in the past year, two years, three years, as you mentioned, the Russian FX free. But I don't think central banks generally buy on upticks. That's just my view. There are other views in the market. Their sort of DNA is not to push the gold price up, but to accumulate. And China and a lot of the other central banks accumulate locally from producers. So my point is, don't you think we've finally hit the point where we've all been waiting for the global pools of investment grade capital are literally trying to get a little money out of the financial system? Yes, because when you think about the narrative, and I think again with Bristol and all the writings you've done on it, Trey, over the years, but importantly, look at the narrative. This is the first time I think in my 50 year career where you hear the president of the United States and the prime minister of Canada and the prime minister of Australia and others talking about mining. We need mining. We need critical minerals. And of course, gold is a critical material. And people forget, it's in our cell phones. It's in this iPad I'm speaking with you on right now. If you consider there's something like 30 milligrams of gold supposedly, or at least that's the number you'll see variations within our communication devices, cell phones. Well, if you look at there's maybe 6 billion active cell phones in the world at any given time, that's like 6 million ounces of gold held up in cell phones, right? So you have the industrial applications, but to your point with this inflection, it certainly seems different because I have friends of mine asking now about gold. Where do you invest in the cycle? And that has not occurred for some time. 15 years ago when gold had the bit of a run up, people would be interested. But I concur with you that central banks that they're buying, they're not price sensitive. They're just accumulating because it becomes a small component of that trade. But if you look again at what are the couple hundred trillion dollars of US and European treasuries, if individuals look at those and say, we just want to move a small portion into gold, the value of all gold mining companies, I'm talking base metal companies and gold companies, there's a couple trillion dollars. So if you just have a few percent or 5% of what we're talking about with respect to treasuries move into gold, I mean, we're talking double the current investment. But it doesn't change the fact that the commodities we need in our everyday lives, right? Copper, if you want to build out artificial intelligence and you do it in data farms, you need power. They're more construction facilities, right? You need copper, you need aluminum, you need the rare earths, you need gold, and you need them in large amounts and large volumes as well as power, right? And so we're getting that point where gold is critical to AI technology because of those unique properties it has that if you put a current to it, it doesn't spark. And so it's using all those minute connections you're going to have in current computing. If we look into quantum computing, gold has a role in it going forward. But in your broader thesis with respect to what's going on with the Fed and elsewhere in general population, we're now seeing people looking and saying, I need a component of gold in my investment portfolio. If you're looking for a simple, secure way to invest and own physical gold and silver, visit our sister company, Hard Assets Alliance at hardassetsalliance.com. That's hardassetsalliance.com. So talk to me a little bit more about Canada. And I think it's telling that for investors dealing with the barrage of headlines, and you're right, Trump really knows how to dominate that, right? And take up all the oxygen. I'm not sure they're paying enough attention to what's happened with Canada because we've got headlines about what's coming out of the Trump administration every second. So why is this so significant and how do you see this playing out? Well, at the beginning of the year, I thought we were just sort of waltzing into an easy renegotiation of USMCA. And I even said a couple of weeks ago when I was asked by my friend Sean Haney, who has a podcast, what I thought Carney would do. I said, well, I expect he'll kiss the ring. He'll try to get the USMCA over the finish line. And maybe then he can start thinking about the long term task of building up some alternatives and some hedges for Canada against the United States. Carney has done the exact opposite. And I'm sure that some people listening to this will have strong opinions one way or another. I'm not here to tell you whether his moves are correct or not correct. But I do want to give you the ability to make that decision for yourself. He goes to China, forges this new strategic partnership. The details of this are not that big of a deal. So Canada's going to buy 50,000 EVs. That's like a drop in the bucket of Chinese oversupply. China's going to drop some tariffs on canola. Big deal for canola farmers. Canada, but outside of that, not really that big of a deal. But the message here is the strategic partnership. Carney's statement that China is actually more reliable right now than the United States in terms of negotiation and whether it lives up to its word. And then I think the thing that most folks are skirting over is they think that Carney went straight from Beijing to Davos and talked about this rupture in the international order and how it was all under false pretenses and that Canada needed to stick up for itself in a pragmatic way. But he didn't do that. He actually stopped in Qatar first. And he signed a strategic partnership with Qatar and secured lots of investment from Qatar into Canada to rebuild energy infrastructure, to get energy infrastructure pointed away from the United States into some of Canada's other potential external markets. And then he went to Davos and said, hey, we've been on the front lines of watching this change in the liberal international order. It's not so liberal anymore. And we can't continue just to sort of be here under false pretenses. So we are open for business. We're open for business with the Chinese. We're open for business with the Gulf. We're open for business with the Europeans. And President Trump, we're open for business with you too. It's just that we're not going to pretend like everything is OK. And I think now the ball is in the United States' court. President Trump, you probably saw, was asked about this. And he said, good for him if he can get a deal with China by all means. If that's the road that this takes, then Carney's going to look very good. If President Trump punishes Carney and punishes Canada in the USMCA renegotiations, you're going to have a tough couple of years in Canada because it's not going to be easy to just flip a switch and say we're going to hedge away from the United States. But in the long term, does that put Canada on a more stable footing? Maybe. And I think one of the things we've seen in the last couple of years is, yes, the stereotype of Canadians is very nice and very polite is true. But they're also fiercely proud of their own country. And if you keep on telling them that they're the 51st state and they just have to do whatever President Trump says, eventually they will say, no, thank you. And we'll take the economic pain. And I think that they will be more willing to endure that economic pain than the folks in Michigan and the folks in Wisconsin. And everybody across the border who is also going to suffer if Canada US relations. Yeah. And, you know, all of this has to be taken in the context of the fact that we are we have a midterm election in the US. And despite the fact that Trump is talking about all his accomplishments in the first year and how strong the US economy is, that that's not necessarily showing up in the polls. Now, a lot could change. There's a lot he's he's going to go on a tour and go to a different state every month. But they're making big moves internationally, but also domestically now having to sort of deal with this. Do you expect that Canada become a midterm election issue? I mean, it's it's it's sort of, you know, it never is. But is there a sense that the rest of America is comfortable with losing Canada as an ally? Can I quote my fellow Louisiana and James Carville here and say it's the economy? Stupid like it's it's it's all about the economy. And this is where I think President Trump is actually in big trouble with the midterms. If you look at Trump's approval ratings on managing the economy, this is this is how he beat Kamala Harris. It wasn't on everything else. It was because if you looked at approval ratings on the economy, the electorate said, OK, we'll deal with all of his insanity because he's going to manage the economy better. His poll numbers on approval for the economy are right at where Joe Biden's were when Joe Biden left office. That is the kiss of death. If that continues into November, I don't care how many states he goes to. I don't care how many times he does his shtick. It's just not going to work. And I think in that sense, last November's elections, whether you had the gubernatorial races in Virginia or New Jersey, some of these other things, that was a key signpost because you were getting moderate Democrats coming up and sweeping, not just sweeping, but sweeping by huge margins, sweeping in the Latino vote, which went hard for Trump in the last presidential election. In all these ways, the Democrats were suffering. In November, we saw some margins that were suggesting the Democrats would come back. So unless President Trump can turn people's perception of the economy, he can do whatever he wants with Greenland, Canada, everything else. I don't think it's going to affect it. And I also think the risks here are to the downside for President Trump because by and large, if you poll American voters, they don't like tariffs. They don't like messing around with Greenland. They don't want to mess around with Canada. They think much of this is superfluous. So he can make the reality TV show whatever he wants and maybe through his powers of charisma and persuasion, he can get people to be convinced. But I think ultimately Americans care about the economy and their perception of the economy is that President Trump is doing just as well as Joe Biden. And like I said, that's a kiss of death for the midterm. Yeah. And we've had in recent, at least this week, we've had the market starting to react to what's happening to this sort of negotiating style abroad. Now, maybe this was a correction that was going to happen anyway. You can certainly make that argument, but there seems to be a discomfort. Volatility's up. We see sell-offs happening. Now there's other things going on around the world too. Does that, do we expect to see a reversal? I mean, he's going into bilateral conversations while he's there. Could this be just another like negotiating, uncomfortable negotiating style that ends up swinging around and being more constructive, especially for broiling the markets? Or are we starting to see a different kind of tear in relationships a la Mark Carney, where people just say, this is, we've had enough. There's something, you know, the damage is more permanent. Yeah, I'm a geopolitical analyst. So it would be self-serving for me to say that, you know, these ruptures with Europe or the ruptures with Canada are really going to impact the American economy. But I think that has much more to do with the politicization of the Fed and interest rates going after the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you know, really being heavy-handed and ideological about the economy itself. And also not giving American companies enough predictability in what's going to happen next to make plans. I think what we saw last year is the tariffs themselves. Okay, like the economy can survive and can adapt to that. What the economy cannot deal with is constant uncertainty. If and when the Supreme Court makes its ruling on tariffs, are they just going to throw in a bunch of other tariffs? Is it going to be some other maneuver entirely? And so you have companies that are really stalled, that are not making, that are not doing CapEx, that are not thinking about the future because they're reacting to whatever is happening to them right now. And so the economy has been running hot in the short term, but the long-term and cumulative impact of all those companies waiting to try and get clarity that isn't coming, the politicization of the Fed, these countries starting to lose faith in U.S. rule of law and U.S. objectivity, when you start to put all those things together, then you start to get the seeds of something that's there. I have this index where my wife and my sister are two people in my life who don't really care about geopolitics at all. They indulge me and they'll talk to me, but I know they don't care. But both of them yesterday asked me some versions of the question of, hey, Jacob, is the economy crashing or is the economy going to crash soon? Which goes back to what I was saying about the median voter. It doesn't even matter if that's true. And I don't think that it's true, but the median voter is starting to think, this is not going well, to your point. This is all so volatile, what's going to happen? So I'm actually a little more sanguine about the economy maybe than you would think, but it doesn't really matter whether I'm saying what or not. What matters is people's perceptions. And people's perceptions are prices are continuing to go up. This guy is crazy and he's doing crazy things all over the place. And ultimately, it's not feeling good for me. I don't feel like I'm taken care of here. And I think that's going to have those longer term implications. The Europe stuff, the Greenland, it all exacerbates that. But I don't think it's the thing that's driving things here. It's just the fluff on top of it. One of the things I think that unnerved the markets, and again, some of this may roll back, some of this may be posturing more than real policy, is that a Danish fund unloaded treasuries. We've got a lot of pressures on the bond market. How are you thinking about bonds in this environment? Yeah, well, long-term bonds are definitely, I think, a risk for a number of reasons. Right there, what you just mentioned, like a retaliatory type measure by Western Europe. But you could argue that's just as likely from the Chinese, et cetera. So that could easily happen. That's a very real and a very legitimate threat if the Chinese take away their vendor financing effectively what they're doing. Yes, but the bigger threat is more so than not the fact that they may not be buying bonds is the fact that there's so many bonds out there, right? We're going to pass $40 trillion in debt this year. I think we're going to have just a stalemate in Congress, unable to deal with it. And this is not my opinion. The markets already reflect this. I mean, is anyone questioning why gold and silver were up between 70% and 150% last year? I mean, it's not because of inflationary fears. Something else is afoot. The markets, the smart money at least, is clearly concerned about the fiscal solvency of the United States and other Western countries. And I think that's already reflected in precious metal prices. It's already reflected somewhat in the media over the last year that we've seen. We haven't seen it take place in long-term bonds yet. We're starting to see it in Japan, right? They just hit their highest 40-year bond rate. Well, 40-year bond rate, I think, in the last 40 years that they have. We saw it play out a couple of years ago in the UK with the 2000, September 2022, the mini-budget, the gilt crisis they had. So I do think that is a big risk for investors from a couple different fronts, and I think it's starting to be recognized. Mm, is this, are you concerned about sort of a bond vigilante revolt? Is this a spike in rates that would have negative spillover effects to the economy? Or is this a gradual move higher, kind of like that, you know, balloon that you can't suppress anymore, just drifts higher? Yeah, I'm not sure how that plays out, but certainly I think you're gonna get to the same place in some way, right? The long-term rates, there's no reason to be lending the US government money for 10 years at 4.3%. That makes no sense. If you look at, I mean, they have 40, they're gonna have 40 trillion debt. They take in between five and six trillion. They're still overspending by a couple. I wouldn't be surprised if the deficit for 2026, fiscal year 2026, was more like three, three and a half trillion than less than two, which was last year. So it could play out in a couple of different ways, but ultimately the result, I think, is going to be the same. Yeah, which is incredible when we're talking about buying Greenland. Like, you know, there's just price tags on everything. As you mentioned, the midterms are coming up. You know, there will be all sorts of promises around that. And that'll make it far worse, right? That's probably a trillion dollars, right? That's probably a trillion dollar expenditure. So the Fed chair job is up for grabs. We still haven't had any news as we speak, which obviously we could get it any day. Boy, that's a tough job to want to take on. How does that play out? Does the Fed lose its independence to the extent it had any? Are they going to be tasked with finding a creative way out of this debt issue? Yeah, it's actually, it's kind of a slow moving train wreck, right? I'm actually surprised Trump hasn't nominated someone already just to kind of undercut Powell right now. That Powell video was historic, right? It's shocking that it got to that level, that they're under investigation. You know, that's pretty amazing. Ultimately, though, as far as who's Fed chair, I don't think it matters. I don't think it's Hassett. Like Trump's already decided it's probably not going to be him. I didn't think it was going to be him before that. I think it'd be very hard to get that guy nominated, or I'm sorry, approved by the Senate. So I'm not sure who's going to be the next Fed chairman. But ultimately, I don't know if it matters because they only know how to do one thing. They only can do one thing. That's print money. And I think they're going to go back to that at some point in 2026, especially with the labor market, continuing to show signs of deterioration, especially with the fiscal situation. They're going to print money. So a lot of people talk about inflation around the corner. I don't know if it's around the corner, but maybe it's around the block, because ultimately once they start doing that, that's when you really got to protect yourself. Yeah. Yeah, that would have huge implications. And we've just talked about the upper pressure on bond rates. So first of all, should you own any bonds in your portfolio right now, given what we just talked about? Well, I always say when you have all this bad news, it's very easy to look out there, see a lot of risks and kind of climb into a cave and have a bunker mentality where you have gold bullets and canned food or something like that. Yeah. That's never a smart way to do it. Studies consistently show that aphorism, it's better to be, you know, returns are guided more so by being time in the market versus time in the market. That's absolutely true. However, there are major inflection points. So in times like this, people should, doesn't mean you can't take some asymmetric risks and really try to swing for the fences on AI stocks, what have you. But apart from that, I'd also be very nimble, very defensive and kind of cash heavy. So kind of like a barbell approach where you don't want to be completely out of the market. I think that's really important because you're right. I think the tendency just on the headlines flying around is that it's so uncertain. I can't even quantify this. I'm just going to be uber careful and just go all cash until I figure out what's happening. But that's not something you think is worth. It's never, yeah, it's never prudent. I mean, people should always remember there's this sizing is a big issue. Rebalancing is a big issue, right? Probability of events happening. Before you get into that bunker, remember about sizing, probability and timing. Those are three things that really should be thinking about because you can't time everything. You got to really assess the probabilities. Nothing's necessarily inevitable. So consider that before you start making investment moves, but you should be disciplined though. Take profits when you can. It's funny you mentioned AI because that had such a bad rap, right? The overvaluation, the AI bubble. That's all we heard, AI bubble. You think there's still opportunity there? Oh, absolutely. I mean, that doesn't mean so-called AI stacks can't sell off 30, 50%. That wouldn't be shocking. That doesn't mean that you can't have CapEx spending take a serious hit in the AI field. That wouldn't be surprising, but it does mean, but I do think it means that this is a long-term trend, right? The so-called vernacular of investment guys, this is a big tailwind. And it's great to invest in tailwinds, things that are helping you from a long-term trend. I think AI is here to stay. You can make an argument, it's easily bigger than the internet, potentially any other so-called revolution we've had in human history. So I think that's a trend and anything supporting it. So the electricity needs and energy is not, that's all there as well. Yeah, the energy, it's interesting because we know that this needs a huge amount of energy. And yet there was a while where energy was out of favor. People are looking at the price of oil. They're looking at electricity and saying, well, it's utilities, right? And there are price caps on that. They're looking at sort of government intervention in terms of them taking stakes in things and Trump coming out and saying to technology companies, well, you have to pay for it. So there's a trend that looks super strong, but then there are all these, again, getting buffeted by some of the political headlines coming out, but you like the energy sector. Absolutely. And it's not even so-called overbought. If you look at all the sectors and look at things evaluation-wise and look at their median price relative to the ranges of highs and lows, it's still probably the most attractive sectors out there. It's the only one that's even approaching its median, along with real estate and maybe consumer staples or healthcare or something like that. But it's, most of them don't do that. So it is a relative value. You do have some bubbles in it. Right now, everyone's talking about nuclear. They think nuclear is a very hot industry and maybe there's some decent things there. But in general, I'd be very nervous in nuclear relative to natural gas because nuclear present new some in three years, right? Could reverse everything. We may have no new power plants. So natural gas fits all the bills. Unlike nuclear, it's completely green. It's abundant. It's cheap. It's easy to get online very quickly. So I think natural gas is the way to go. I like energy in general, but especially natural gas. Why do you think it's so out of favor? I mean, they call it the widow maker and anybody who's been certainly trying to play the nat gas market itself has gotten hurt. You think equities, if you have a longer time horizon, you think that you can see gains in equities? There's sort of a disconnect, isn't there? It's a little bit there because, I mean, obviously it's an extremely volatile area. But I like it just from a contrarian play. I mean, look at the the amount that natural gas, the actual price of natural gas has gone down over the years. It's probably last three years is probably down three massively three out of five years is down. So in general, yes, there's it's very difficult to play. But I think it's the only long term solution for the energy crisis, which means at some point the market's going to realize that. Don't forget to sign up for a free portfolio review with one of our endorsed investment partners at Wealthion.com forward slash free. With markets hitting all time highs, now is a great time to stress test your strategy and be prepared for what comes next. Thank you all for watching. We'll see you again next time.