On this week's episode, Dan speaks with Bethany McLean, author of the "The Smartest Guys in the Room" the story of the scandalous and unexpected fall of Enron.

Before their epic collapse, Bethany was one of the first in the financial media investigating the red flags around the company. In early 2001, she wrote an article in Fortune Magazine, titled "Is Enron Overpriced?"

Bethany takes Dan back to 2001 and gives him some incredible in-depth details at the scandal. They also discuss what implications it had on the financial world, and the perplexing fact that collectively, we haven't seemed to fully learn our lesson from Enron.

Bethany even lets Dan in on an industry that could be seeing bankruptcies in the coming years.

The two also touch on the Coronavirus, and the reason there's so much uncertainty. Bethany admits "there's a lot that we just don't know" but ends the episode on a very positive tone. Enjoy.

Announcer: Broadcasting from Baltimore, Maryland, and all around the world, you're listening to the Stansberry Investor Hour. Tune in each Thursday on iTunes for the latest episodes of the Stansberry Investor Hour. Sign up for the free show archive at investorhour.com. Here is your host, Dan Ferris.

Dan Ferris: Hello, and welcome to the Stansberry Investor Hour. I'm your host, Dan Ferris. I'm also the editor of Extreme Value, published by Stansberry Research. Today we're going to talk with Bethany McLean. You remember her. She's a really good writer who wrote that wonderful book – she and Peter Elkind wrote that wonderful book The Smartest Guys in the Room, all about the Enron crisis. I just thought it was a good time to talk to somebody who knew about a good crisis, and we'll do that a little later, but first I have a few thoughts to share.

This week, I'm interested in what's happening in the gold market, and it's been very strange and I thought maybe you were as curious as me. And I know you are because I've gotten e-mails about it. So what I've done, I've had some phone calls and e-mails with folks who are in the business of buying and selling physical gold, and I believe I mentioned my experience of two weeks ago. I went out to my local coin shop, which is actually a pretty sizeable establishment in the area where I live, and I said you don't have any, you know, like Krugerrands or American Eagles? I just buy the half-ounce or one-ounce coins. And he said no, don't have any of those. Can't get 'em. You can get CanadianMaple Leafs, but you'll have to wait eight weeks. So I bought a few of those, and I'm still waiting because it's only been two weeks. So I was like, wow, that is really crazy. And then I was looking at the prices of the futures prices and the London prices, and they're all kind of much more different than usual, so I was, like, what is going on?

I spoke with a large institution who deals in physical bullion, and they had – last week, they had what they suspect might be – he didn't confirm it for me – he said, "I think this is our biggest sales week ever in the history of our company." And they bought, like, well over 100,000 ounces of metal for clients. My preliminary discussions tell me that folks who are going to be able to do that are the big institutions because they're seen by folks selling physical metal as the counterparties. You know, they'll be there for years to come. You've got this big client. You don't want to make them unhappy, right, so if you've got a small player and a big player, you're going to sell to the big player if you've got to make a choice, so that's why they're able to get metal.

But the breakdown – what we've seen is like a breakdown in the pricing. So the futures price was, like, way different, way much higher than the physical price, and what we're really talking about here is called the exchange for physical market, EFP, echo, foxtrot, papa, EFP. And this EFP market is – this is the interaction between the COMEX gold futures and the London physical gold market. Now, I read somewhere that normally less than 1% of COMEX gold futures are settled with physical delivery of gold. All the rest – you know, it's just settled in cash normally. But the London market, on the other hand, is all in physical gold. The well-known 400-ounce so-called good delivery, London good delivery bars. Normally there's like – there is a difference in the pricing because you – you know, one's physical, one's futures, sometimes you need to get some of that physical into the futures, so it has to be transported or recast and maybe stored a little bit, so that's normally like $1.50 an ounce. And it has to be recast because the COMEX contract is for 100 ounces of gold, and the London bars are 400 ounces, so you have to recast that 400-ounce bar into four 100-ounce bars. So normally $1.50 an ounce differential, but I saw on the April contract – I noticed, I was looking at the screen when it said $52 an ounce difference, and someone told me recently it actually spiked up overnight to $70 an ounce difference. So the COMEX market was pricing in a shortage of metal.

Why the shortage? Well, you know, there's this little thing in the world called the coronavirus, and that had two effects. The Swiss refiners – the big Swiss refinery shut down due to the coronavirus. Some of them are right on the border with Italy, and Italy up in the north – it really started up in the north of Italy, and of course Italy's, like, one of the hardest-hit place – I think it's the hardest-hit place in the world officially now in terms of the number of people who have died of coronavirus. So the Swiss refiners shut down, and any refiners that actually did remain open, they weren't producing the smaller coins in bars, what they call the kilo bars, one kilo of gold, or coins, you know, one ounce, half ounce, whatever, because of social distancing. Apparently those smaller physical forms are more labor-intensive. It requires you to have everybody in the shop all together, and so that makes social distancing impossible. So, for example, even the Royal Canadian Mint is only producing the 400-ounce bars right now.

Another thing, of course, is limited ability to fly the stuff across the pond, across the Atlantic Ocean, because of reduced airline capacity. And you can't just load up a plane, you know, a freight plane with gold because nobody will insure it, right? So there's a problem there. There's a shortage based on those things, and it's just a real perfect storm because obviously in a crisis like this, people are worried, they want to buy it, and the retail investors, I'm told, moved first. They bought up all the coins, all the small-denomination coins and little bars and things, and then the financial advisers in the big institutions jumped in. I'm told that when silver got briefly below $12 an ounce, the institutions really got greedy and started buying. However, I do note just on Wednesday morning I saw an article in Bloomberg where the Perth mint is actually making some of those smaller – the kilo bars. So this is just a general thing. Maybe it doesn't apply to absolutely every refinery in the world.

So that's where we are now. That's why the price has been so utterly weird, because the connection between the physical market and what we'll call the paper or the futures market is broken by the coronavirus. So what do we do going forward? What the heck do you do? I believe you should definitely own them if you can get them. You should own physical gold and silver if you can get them. Buying the paper forms, like even the GLD, you can't take delivery. If you own the GLD, the gold ETF, you can't take delivery of gold through that unless you're one – I think there's a handful or maybe a dozen. I'm not sure of the number, but there's the authorized participants, which are big institutions. They can take delivery, but you can't if you own a few shares of the GLD. So that's not a way to own gold. There are some ways to do it where you don't have to take possession. I'll discuss those in the April issue of Extreme Value. And I'll probably discuss them in public after that, but Extreme Value readers, they pay money to get that advice, so I've got to tell them first.

I definitely recommend holding it if you can get it, and I believe that you should hang on for a wild ride in the price of these things, because as long as this physical connection is broken, who knows where the price goes. And if the wild ride never materializes, great, but if it does, I recommend holding. Most people want to sell an asset when the price drops. I think that's the wrong move with physical gold and silver today. I think longer term, that EFP connection that I described, the exchange for physical connection will get back together, it will right itself, and it'll all be normal again, as normal as you can expect in these interesting times, and it's already doing that. The spread is already closing up. So longer term, I think it's a no-brainer that we get higher gold and silver prices. Between now and that longer term, look, it wouldn't surprise me if, with gold around $1,580, $1,590 last time I checked, it wouldn't surprise me to see gold back to $1,000 or $1,200 or some low number, some crazy-low number like that. But to me, I'm going to look away from the screen. I don't think it reflects the true state of things. I think it reflects crazy activity in the paper markets because people who are buying physical – I heard one guy told me, he said I was quoted silver coins at 100% premium, which is, like, close to $30 or something. That's crazy. And, you know, just big premiums on physical all around.

Everybody – absolutely everybody, from big institutions to anybody I know who buys physical metal – they all report that when they go to buy it, they're being quoted a big premium if they can get it. One big institution, he says, you know, you call – let's just say you've got Bank A and Bank B, which I imagine is probably the physical trade in the world is controlled by JPMorgan and HSBC. But he didn't say that. He said Bank A and Bank B. He said you call Bank A one day and they say, well, yeah, we can get you physical metal in a big quantity, but you're going to have to pay a ton more than what everybody thinks the price is. Oh, OK. Then they call Bank B and Bank B says, sorry, can't do it for you. Call back the next day, Bank A says, sorry, got nothing, can't give you – I can't even give you a quote. Bank B says, yeah, we can get it, but you're going to have to pay a big premium. So it's like – you know, it's almost like the same supply is making its way from one institution to another or something. It's crazy.

So longer term, I think this does get fixed. You know, hopefully this virus thing doesn't last as long as – I'm scared to death that it might, and I think it's a no-brainer. I think it's a minor miracle gold isn't already $2,000 an ounce. Without all these weird shenanigans in the market, I think it would be. And we've already seen, like, JPMorgan was found guilty of manipulating the gold market, so maybe that's happening. I wrote about that last September in the Stansberry Digest about there were a couple of traders and I think it was a scheme to control the price of gold over a period of several years, maybe from 2008, I want to say, till around 2016 or so. So the conspiracy theorists were right, as I wrote at that time, and that may be happening now too. Who knows? But you should definitely own it, crazy as it may behave, crazy as the price may behave. I think you should definitely, definitely own it. And I'm going to leave you there. That's all I want to say about this right now, and we'll revisit this topic as often as I feel is necessary, like if the market gets really insanely crazy and what I said before actually happens and the price just plunges. You will definitely be hearing from me about that. So until then, that's it for now.

So let's talk with Bethany McLean and see if she can give us any insight as to how to look at a crisis. I hope she can. Let's do that right now.

[Music playing]

Dan Ferris: Today's guest is Bethany McLean. Bethany McLean is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Previously, she was an editor-at-large at Fortune magazine, where her 2001 piece, "Is Enron Overpriced," was one of the first skeptical articles about Enron. After Enron collapsed into bankruptcy, she co-authored The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, with her Fortune colleague, Peter Elkind. A documentary based on the book was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006. In 2008, McLean joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor. In 2010, her book, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, which she co-authored with New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, was published. In 2015, Columbia Global Reports published her mini book Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants. And in fall 2018, CGR published Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World. Her 2016 Vanity Fair story on disgraced pharmaceutical company Valiant was used as the basis for Netflix's Dirty Money episode about the drug maker. She is also a columnist for Yahoo Finance and a contributor to CNBC and the host of the podcast Making a Killing, which is available on Luminary. She also serves on the board of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago. McLean graduated from Williams College in 1992 with a double major in math and English. And from 1992 to 1995, she worked as an investing banking analyst at Goldman Sachs. Wow. Lots of great stuff there, Bethany. Welcome to the program.

Bethany McLean: Thank you for having me.

Dan Ferris: So, Bethany, you have written a lot of really cool books, and I have them all right here in front of me. Before we get to any of that, when did you first have an inkling that your career – I assume you were headed into journalism before you were headed into finance, or was it the other way around? Whichever one it was, when was the first time in your life when you thought this is definitely going to be my career direction?

Bethany McLean: So I was really an accidental investment banker. I was a math major in college and always thought, actually, that I'd go on to math graduate school. And unfortunately, I realized during my junior and senior year that I was neither very good at math nor did I like it, which is a bad combination if you are thinking you're going to have a career in something. So I had no idea what investment banking was, but it seemed like a reasonable route for a math major, so I ended up as an analyst at Goldman. But it was completely by accident. I was by no means a young investment banker in training. I grew up in a mining town in northern Minnesota and I didn't even know what an investment bank was.

So I actually deferred business school to go to Fortune as a fact checker, which was pretty much the lowest rung on the totem pole, and it was pretty clear to me right away that that's where I was supposed to be. So after my first year – I deferred business school for a year, and after my first year at Fortune, I decided not to go, and that's what I've been doing ever since. But it really wasn't until I started working as a journalist that I thought, oh, this is what works for me. And hopefully I work for it.

Dan Ferris: Right. OK, so I'm really curious about something in particular. Like we said in your introduction, your 2001 piece in Fortune, "Is Enron Overpriced," I mean, it's kind of become one of the classic pieces of financial journalism that people refer to because it was – we said one of the first, but I thought it was, like, just about the very first serious article about Enron in a major publication, and I'm curious what first got you onto Enron? Like, did somebody call you up and say, hey, I'm short this piece of garbage, you need to write about it, or what? What happened?

Bethany McLean: Yeah, essentially. I mean, I'd been working at Fortune for, what, about five years at that time, and I didn't start out being skeptical at all. But I had had enough stories by that time pitched to me from analysts who would buy ratings on stocks, and this was during the first dot-com bubble, and portfolio managers who own stocks only to watch them crater after I'd write a glowing piece about them. So I started to become very cynical about what I've taken to calling the buy machine, all the forces that are oriented toward stocks going up and up until they don't. And so I'd started trying to get to know short sellers, not from any desire to crater companies, much more because I was tired of writing pieces and being wrong. And even more so tired of the informational gap, by which I mean you can get all the information you want easily to write a bullish piece on a company, and that's still to some extent true today. You can call analysts, you can call people on the staff, you can talk to a company management. It's not that difficult. But getting information that refutes the bullish piece on a company is really hard. The advent of Twitter has helped that a little bit, but not so much for the great variety of companies that some "twit" hasn't taken an interest in yet.

Anyway, so I started trying to get to know short sellers, and back at that time, it wasn't that easy because a lot of short sellers didn't talk to the press, but I got to know a guy who worked for Jim Chanos, a guy named Doug Millett, and Doug at one point, probably in the fall of 2000, called me up and he was kind of laughing, and he said you tell me if you can figure out how Enron makes its money. And I was recently enough out of Goldman that I was OK with starting to do spreadsheets and taking apart the company's 10Q and 10K and talking to people and saying how does this thing work, and nobody could answer that really basic question.

Dan Ferris: OK, that sounds pretty good. And so then you wrote this article. That was 2001. And was this, like, all one sort of – what came after the article? Did you kind of write the article and then not think about it much anymore?

Bethany McLean: Yeah. Well, I thought about this a lot in retrospect because it is one of the downsides, at least of old-school journalism – that's not so true anymore with web publishing, but back in those days – if you did a magazine piece, it was a little bit "hit me with your best shot." You weren't going to keep writing follow-up magazine pieces on the same topic. And so after I published that first piece, I didn't write about Enron again until Jeff Skilling, who was the company's CEO, abruptly quit in August 2001. And that's when it rapidly started becoming apparent that this wasn't going to end well. So I never thought when I wrote that first story that Enron was going to become the kind of moment in our cultural consciousness that it did, let alone a great business scandal. I just thought it was an interesting story, and so I didn't begin work on the book until after the company went bankrupt. And after I wrote that first story, I never really had any intention of revisiting it. It was only after Enron blew up into this giant mess that I began to work on a book, and the book was published in the fall of 2003, so about two years after the company's bankruptcy.

Dan Ferris: It's a funny thing, isn't it? Like, the stocks that I've written about in my newsletter that have become kind of my greatest hits or whatever you want to call them, they didn't start out that way. I just found another idea I liked and we published it and recommended up to a certain price and all that stuff, and provided our research. And then after we started realizing how great it was, only then, like a year or two into it, it's that same kind of thing. The stories choose you, in other words, don't they?

Bethany McLean: Yes, that's a really lovely way of putting it. Stories do choose you. And I think all you can do is just be really interested in things and curious about them and try to get to the bottom of everything you're working on and be truth-oriented and as unbiased as you possibly can and hopefully good stories will continue to choose you, right.

Dan Ferris: Right, and it's a funny thing too – and your business and mine are a little similar in that way – not only do they choose you, but there seems to be this pattern where you are kind of covering the waterfront and you're moving from thing to thing and life is pretty normal and you expect to – you get as deep into it as you need to at the time. And then all of a sudden, there's that story choosing you moment and you are up to your eyeballs in the thing for whatever it is, a year or something. And you know, like I implied before, you never see it coming. It chooses you. And then after it's all over, then you're back to going, you know, kind of one story at a time, waiting for the next thing to choose you. It's like my career's not running – my career's running me, I guess.

Bethany McLean: Yeah, that certainly has always been more my approach to things than this proactive I'm going to choose my career, but maybe I'm just lazy. I don't know, maybe you're lazy too.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, I don't know about the laziness.

Bethany McLean: I'm joking, obviously.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's just the nature of things, isn't it? So one thing I noticed that I want to say about The Smartest Guys in the Room, which is like the definitive account – it's an awesome book, everybody ought to read it, I hadn't read it until very recently. And it doesn't take you long, does it, to get to a scandal. It's like in the first chapter or two, you get to the first early scandal, like in the early history of the company there's, you know, the trading scandal with, what was it, Enron Oil I think it was called.

Bethany McLean: Yeah.

Dan Ferris: Boy, that was a hint, huh?

Bethany McLean: Yeah. The whole Enron story is still to me fascinating in so many ways, not just the canaries in the coal mine along Enron's trajectory, how Enron itself was a canary in the coal mine for all sorts of problems we've seen later on – which I think is why the scandal has such legs, because it was indicative of so many things. But even the degree of financial engineering that Enron did, their creative accounting, I still think there are just so many lessons in that. And then it's a classic Shakespearean drama in the characters that were at work there. It's why I never get tired of the story.

Dan Ferris: Given sort of where we are as we speak with you, it's a story for our time. You know, once again, we've inflated this huge bubble that is now collapsing in world-record time. Each one has its own unique way of blowing up and unique way of collapsing, but I don't know, when I was reading this thing, I thought, even though I know that this happened 20 years ago or something, it feels like it could be happening right now. It just feels very current to me somehow still. It's like every 10 years when the market collapses, you can just read The Smartest Guys in the Room, and yeah, it's about like that every time.

Bethany McLean: Good. From the perspective of book sales, I like your point of view.

Dan Ferris: Yes. I'm not trying to sell the book, although, you know, I do recommend that folks listening do buy the book and read it, but that wasn't where I was headed. And it seems to me, though, like you've kind of focused on those kind of stories. Like the other really big book you wrote was All the Devils Are Here: Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, and then you wrote that other smaller book called Shaky Ground about Fannie and Freddie, you know, another aspect of the mortgage crisis there. And again, it's like – I mean, we never learn. I feel like human beings, we just never learn.

Bethany McLean: Yeah. I never set out to become sort of the chronicler of business gone wrong, but I started to find it really interesting because, in the end, it's a version of something Hank Paulson, the former Treasury Secretary, used to say, which is that it's not that interesting when good people do good things. I mean, it's sort of interesting. It can change the world, and it's interesting, and it's not that interesting when bad people do bad things, but what's really interesting is when otherwise good people find themselves doing bad things. And it's just human nature at work. It's rarely in these type of stories that somebody set out to bring down Enron or destroy the global economy as in the case of the financial crisis. So it's more these very human stories of rationalization and blindness and ego, maybe a little bit of banality and greed, some outright corruption, but that's by no means the entire story. And so sorting out the tangle of very human flaws that lead to these stories is endlessly interesting to me.

Dan Ferris: Do you think that we're just – I mean, we're just doomed to repeat this stuff every so often? Like, we'll never – it seems like we never get past this. We never improve the situation. We think we do. We pass all these laws and rules and bailouts and everything else, but it never seems to work. What is it about us human beings? Have you learned anything in all these hundreds of pages that you've written in research, is there some insight you can share with us about humanity that helps us understand how Enron just seems to happen every 10 years?

Bethany McLean: Well, I think there are lots and lots and lots of reasons, right. I think it is indicative of just human – very human failings. And so to some extent, I think it's a story that's just destined to play out over and over again. I don't necessarily think it's even a bad thing in that, to me, the line between a great visionary and a great fraudster is much finer than you might think. And I don't know that we get the great visionaries if you don't also have the space for the great frauds to happen, and I think we want the space for the world to move, and so I think sometimes these great frauds are just the inevitable cost of having enough space for there to be a visionary too, for there to be one person that really can transform and move the world. That said, I do worry that our current times are both corrupt on a macro level and on a micro level. And corrupt is a strong word, but I guess what I mean by that is that obviously free money makes disasters more likely to happen. So the era since the financial crisis of super-cheap money, I think we're going to see the collapse of a lot of things that probably shouldn't have gotten to the size that they were. So there's a macro environment that I think has probably corrupted the normal course of business a little bit.

And then on a less grand kind of monetary policy but more micro level, I also worry that some of the things we see happening now are indicative of just late-stage capitalism, that some of the responsibility of a business being located in a city where people knew everybody has just gotten lost in this globalization of business and that people don't feel as much responsibility as they used to and that we've somehow devised a system where the people at the top, like Adam Neumann of WeWork, although I guess that might have fallen apart, but can walk away with great fortunes from businesses that otherwise collapse. And that seems to me that something has gotten corrupted. And maybe that's not unique to modern times. I mean, maybe that's the best it ever was so, but that feels problematic to me when those at the top manage to take all the rewards and bear none of the risk, right? I have nothing wrong with people at the top taking the lion's share of the reward as long as they also bear the lion's share of the risk. And I worry just something has gone wrong in that equation. I mean, you look at the financial crisis, and most of the people at big banks and the heads of big banks did pretty well. I mean, sure, they lost a lot of money, but people walked away with tens of millions of dollars and it did this devastating damage to the American population, some of whom haven't recovered from it when we're already onto the next crisis. That strikes me as something just fundamentally wrong. Does that make sense?

Dan Ferris: Yeah, so you have me thinking, Bethany, of two things. First of all, when you're talking about visionaries who are the line between sort of fraud and great visionaries is closer than you think, I immediately thought of Steve Jobs and his reality distortion field, and I thought, well, you know, if anybody had a reality distortion field – actually I think Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling and Fastow even, they all had their own version of the reality distortion field at Enron. So there were, like, multiple overlapping fields, you know. And the other thing is that it seems like it's the first big – really big story in which a managerial class, not an operator-owner class took over a business and kind of ran it into the ground for self-serving purposes and just out of sheer ego and hubris. And I think that's a huge thing that's happened. We had a guy named Ben Hunt on the program who's been all over that story, and I think you actually have, just in writing your book and covering Enron and some of the other things that you've written about over the years, you've kind of – whether you meant to or not, you covered that.

Bethany McLean: Yeah, that's interesting, although I don't know that entrepreneurs are exempt from their own flaws. I hear you on the managerial class, and it is a really interesting phenomenon. Enron is a little bit different in that it was almost a startup within an old-school oil and gas company, and the startup that Jeff Skilling created combined with the old-school business to – and the fatal flaws in both kind of took down the whole operations. So Enron's sort of a weird mixture of the two. I wouldn't put it in as simple a category as a managerial story.

Dan Ferris: Oh yeah, there's nothing simple about it. Absolutely. I don't want to oversimplify it, but just a theme that came out of it.

Bethany McLean: It's really interesting. It's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that.

Dan Ferris: So what are you – what have you been up to more lately? What's going through your mind these days?

Bethany McLean: Well, my last little book, I've done these two mini books for Columbia Global Reports, and it's a book publisher that Columbia University started to publish books on relatively wonky but really interesting topics that are too long for a magazine article but not long enough to be a full-fledged book. And you can debate the latter point, but I did my last one on fracking and just on this narrow question of fracking not being financially sustainable because the fracking industry has never made money. So I'm thinking about that again right now in the face of what's happening to energy stocks because they're obviously collapsing, but that's an industry that I think people didn't realize the connection between that industry and the financial crisis.

And what I mean by that is that, obviously the Fed, as we were talking about, slashed rates dramatically in the wake of the financial crisis in order to prop up the economy, and that fostered this giant debt bubble in all sorts of industries, but fracking among them because that business is so capital expensive and doesn't make money, and so it's required tens of billions of dollars of debt. And so it's an industry that would never have existed but for the Fed's ultra-low interest rate policy in the wake of the financial crisis, and now you see that coming to – it was already starting to come to an end, even without the oil war between Saudi Arabia and Russia and even without the lowering of demand due to coronavirus, but you combine those three things – the financial instability of the industry, the war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, and coronavirus – and the industry is just going to get decimated. I think they're going to be – the prediction is loads and loads of bankruptcies. So I'm thinking about that again.

I just find it's a fascinating industry because it really – it did shift the needle geopolitically in so many ways to have the U.S. be a major producer of oil and natural gas again, but it wasn't financially sustainable, and so I find that combination just a really interesting juxtaposition to think about.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, you want to talk about reality distortion fields, man, Aubrey McClendon was one of the all-time greats.

Bethany McLean: Yes, yes, precisely. But right on that line between being a fraudster and a visionary, right? Because, in a sense, he was a visionary. He was right. The U.S. could become a major producer of natural gas due to fracking. He was right. And yet, Chesapeake never produced free cash flow apart from – if you don't include asset sales over his entire tenure, and the company is right now talking to bankruptcy advisors. And so he didn't leave behind an industry, a company that was sustainable in any meaningful form either. So he was a visionary, and yet he was a fraudster at the same time, and I find those kind of characters really fascinating.

Dan Ferris: Yeah. I wonder if we wind up with a situation like railroads, which are still around and went through a period of horrendous bankruptcy and restructuring and things. Then over time, they seemed to get some discipline where they could even attract money from a guy like Warren Buffett because they were making money and they had a good competitive advantage. I wonder if there's any way the fracking industry could wind up like that in decades from now.

Bethany McLean: So I have my suspicions about that, but oil and natural gas are really different. So I think for oil, no, because it's really unclear that that business is ever one that makes sense financially because the decline rates on the wells are so steep that the reinvestment required is mammoth. And if you're going to grow production, then you have to – you get on this capital spending treadmill, from which there appears to be no escape. And it's not really clear how much oil we actually have that can be extracted at anything approaching a reasonable price. And as the dawn of renewables come, that's a horizon, that's a sunset on the fossil fuel industry.

I think natural gas is different because natural gas is much closer to making economic sense, and there's no doubt that we have a mammoth supply of pretty low-cost natural gas in this country. And you can debate whether natural gas should or should not be considered a bridge fuel to a cleaner future. There's an argument for it and there's a big argument against it, but financially speaking, natural gas is a different – and magnitude speaking, natural gas is a different phenomenon than oil is. So I could argue that for one, maybe not for the other. And then the big question, of course, is when renewables are going to take over and how idiotic it is of us to be sort of pounding our chest as President Trump has done about our energy dominance in the fossil fuel industry when whatever your timeframe is, that era is coming to an end, and we'd better be thinking about how we adjust as a country in a world where access to energy is no longer the defining thing in your political power.

Dan Ferris: You know, when you were talking about natural gas there, I just thought I heard the ghost of Aubrey McClendon voice.

Bethany McLean: He was not wrong. He was not wrong in some ways.

Dan Ferris: There's no way, Bethany, that I can sit here without getting into a conversation about coronavirus and its implications with you. There's no way that can happen. So what are your thoughts? Like, my great fear is that this goes on for longer than anyone really is anticipating and that we've seen, like, other countries seem – you know, like maybe South Korea is one country that's talked about – and even China – seem to have gotten past the peak of it rather quickly. But I don't think every country's necessarily the same, and my fear is that the economic damage is so great that we're in a bear market that's got another 20% to 30% to go, and we're going to be in a longer recession than anyone sees coming. I mean, I was not afraid at all in 2008. I stepped up and we did really well coming through that, in my newsletter and just in life, in our business. But I don't know. This feels different and bad. What are your thoughts?

Bethany McLean: I think the most honest thing anybody can say is "I don't know," and that's – I just preface everything I say with "I don't know" because I don't know either. I think it is different and worse than the financial crisis, and I think of it as a different – as the reverse transmission in the sense that the financial crisis was weakness in financial markets and financial companies risking being spread out to the real economy. This is weakness in the real economy, and not just weakness, but horror in the real economy caused by the shutdown of businesses possibly transmitting back into the financial sector. So it's a different, I think, and harder to fix transmission, if you will, because the first could be fixed by pumping money into the financial sector and keeping it from shutting down, therefore saving the real economy. Figuring out how to get money out into the real economy when businesses had been shut down is an entirely different problem, and I think harder by degrees of magnitude, even if you believe we should do a massive bailout.

So I think that's one thing, but there are still so many unknowns about this virus. I mean, so many unknowns that it's almost – I was actually thinking about this recently, that I do think the time for non-scientists to cherry pick the worst possible data they can and pull it together in a piece and say the world is coming to an end has passed, and I'm starting to get really angry when I read those pieces because there's enough fear out there now. We don't need more fear.

I guess the one piece of optimism I can see is that if you have all the world's greatest scientists putting all the resources they have, trying to come up with both medicines that can treat this and vaccines that can really address it down the road, there's got to be a breakthrough at some point, and the question is when. I would think the likelihood of the former is obviously on a faster timetable than a vaccine, but you don't even need a medicine to be 100% effective in 100% of people, right? You just need it to blunt the impact of the virus in 50% of people, in 25% of people and you reduce the strain on the hospital system, and then you reduce the possibility that this spirals out of control. So I'm putting my faith and hope in the world's scientists that, working together, humanity can save humanity, right. And we haven't really, over the course of human history, you haven't gone wrong by having that kind of faith. It's just a question of the timing and how much damage gets done before that time.

So there are still lots of other questions too around whether warmer weather will give us some breathing room to try to find those medical solutions. No one knows the answer to that yet. So I think there are honestly just too many unknowns to be either optimistic or pessimistic, and I almost – uncertainty is almost worse than clear pessimism, right, because you just don't know. But I think that's the only honest answer.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, and what you said is so true. I mean, that's why we're getting these limit down days. The uncertainty is worse than pessimism.

Bethany McLean: Yeah, it is. It is. Because with pessimism, you can define it, right? You can define a bottom. You can say, OK, this is the worst-case scenario and I can define the bottom of this. But where we are now, you can't – you really can't define a worst-case scenario because it's – yeah, I don't want to go there. You really can't define a worst-case scenario, and so that makes it really, really difficult. But you can actually think of some ways that we could come out of this with not quite as much damage as the market seemed to expect now, too. So for the first time in my life, which may mean it really is end of days, because I'm really trying to find shreds of optimism to grasp, I have actually gotten tired of being starkly pessimistic, so I don't know that, like I said, that may really mean that the world is coming to an end because that is definitely not my normal stance on things.

Dan Ferris: Yeah. You know, I wonder – I'm going to shift gears just slightly here – I wonder if we would ever see a Bethany McLean book or story about the global supply chain coming out of all this because that's been a huge factor. It's been talked about a lot in the news and all over the fin-Twit, financial Twitter, and CNBC, etc., etc., etc. And people are starting to feel really weird about, you know, for example, the big one is making 90% of all the medicine we use in this country in China, and making a lot of other stuff there and elsewhere. I wonder if that's a topic that would interest you at all because I'd love to see your in-depth treatment of that topic.

Bethany McLean: Thank you. That's a really interesting idea. I had not thought about it, but maybe. Maybe. It's a fascinating idea, and it builds upon my friend, Katherine Eban wrote a really great book about problems in the generic drug industry as a result of the fact that we've outsourced much of our manufacturing to India and China, and the FDA has not done a great job policing it. And this may be – this obviously builds on those questions.

Dan Ferris: So as we've – you know, in the days approaching this interview, I was really hoping that – I'm really putting you on the spot here, Bethany – I was really hoping that you had some good analogies to draw on from your work to the current situation. But as you say, it is different. It's going the other direction. Your work seems to be it's about companies and industries and specific trends in finance and specific companies. And right now, it's just this – you know, Bill Fleckenstein is a guy who's talked about this. He's been a bearish guy, you know, he's into gold and stuff, and he said, you know, economics doesn't matter until it's the only thing that matters. And right now, just talking about individual companies, I just feel like I can't even do it. But I was hoping that the problems you found in your book about the financial crisis and fracking and Fannie and Freddie and Enron and all, man, I was really hoping you could help us out here and help us understand just what a big disaster feels like and how big disasters go and how they play out and where the hell we are now, but I don't know is probably – I mean, that's where you're coming from, though, isn't it?

Bethany McLean: It is. It is.

Dan Ferris: That's about the best you could do for us.

Bethany McLean: I'm sorry, it is. I just – the data isn't in yet, and so no matter how much data the CDC has compiled and other places have compiled, there's still so many questions about this virus that people don't know the answers to. And I do think, on the positive side, there's this wild card out there about what the pharmaceutical industry may be able to come up with in the short term, and there's another wild card around how warmer temperatures are going to affect the virus. JPMorgan had some really interesting data in a presentation they gave today about how thus far the virus does appear to be banded by latitude and by temperature and by humidity. Maybe the data just isn't in other countries that are outside of those zones, so they cautioned that it was really preliminary, but there are so many questions like that that we just don't know the answer to. We don't know whether China and South Korea's initial – the stringent measure they took for social distancing, whether that's going to have worked or whether it's just going to have blunted the impact and there's going to be a second wave there. There are just so many unknowns, that for data-driven people, and I can't help the math major in me still believes that if I could just find enough data, I could come up with a view on this, but it just – it isn't there to get yet. So I think we just have to be – this is right up against that – the thing we dislike most as analytical humans, which is having to be more aware of what you don't know than of what you do know. And I still think that's the case. And at some point, there will be enough data for us to start becoming – to become aware of what we do know, but right now I think the only thing to do is just to be aware of all that we don't know, both optimistic possibilities and pessimistic possibilities, right.

Dan Ferris: Yeah, so you make a good point. If we only had enough data. Because when you feel like you have enough data, you can at least make a model which, you know, they're all wrong, but some are useful, right? And you can talk about probabilities. We can't – there's no – we can't talk about probabilities with this. That's one of the issues that – about it that, you know, financial people and everybody who's got a head for that sort of thing, no matter what they tell me, I know that they don't know – you know, if they say anything other than we can't talk about it, I know they're kind of full of it because you can't. You don't have enough data, you can't talk about probabilities, period. It's just – it's temporally emergent.

Bethany McLean: Right. And this is also – it's a really interesting phenomenon because it's the first time you've had a massive science question percolating in the era of fake – pretend experts, right. I shouldn't use the word fake, but pretend experts. So you have all these people who aren't scientists writing pieces, interpreting scientific data, and some of it I think has been really helpful in that it started to spread fear perhaps before – obviously before our official government organizations were spreading enough fear, and it got people to start taking action on their own without the government having to tell them to do so. So some of it was helpful, but some of it just crosses the line into pure fearmongering, and it'll be an interesting – that part of the phenomenon in and of itself is going to provide just so much to chew over in years to come because you've never seen this before, right, where you've had so many self-proclaimed experts who aren't science, who aren't epidemiologists, who aren't virologists, who don't know how to interpret scientific data and who are putting this stuff out there in mass quantity, some of it right, some of it totally wrong.

Dan Ferris: Right. And I just – I want to tell our listeners, Bethany, that we've just spent a fair amount of time talking about the fact that we don't know and can't say and don't know in various different ways. And that's really valuable, as it turns out, to be able to say that. So I just want you to know that I'm talking about the fact that we don't know and going on and on about it and letting Bethany go on about it on purpose – because she's right and it's absolutely the point. So, Bethany, we're at the end of our time here, but I have a standard question that I think is probably going to be harder for you today given what's happening than for most people. But my standard question for everyone at the end of an interview is just if you could leave our listeners with just one idea today, what would it be? It can be about anything. It doesn't have to be about finance – just life.

Bethany McLean: You're right, that is harder. OK, so I think in the current times, and this is a little bit cheesy, but it's useful to think each day as you're trying to go to sleep and you're panicking about the state of the world, think of – and you can keep your eye out for these three things each day, but think of something you're grateful for, something that was beautiful during the day, and something that inspired you, something that made your mind light up. And if you can find one of each of those things during the course of the day, then you had a pretty good day.

Dan Ferris: A perfect message for the time. Absolutely perfect. Thank you. Yes, very good. So thanks for being here, and I hope that maybe when the world's back to normal, fingers crossed, that you'll come back and talk to us.

Bethany McLean: I would love that, and I'm hoping for all of us that – and hoping for all of us that my attempts to be optimistic are well placed.

Dan Ferris: Oh, very well placed. Yes. So thanks a lot, Bethany, and we'll talk to you soon hopefully, OK? And you take care of yourself and your family out there.

Bethany McLean: You, too. You, too. Good luck and thanks for the call. Bye.

Dan Ferris: OK. Wow, it was really great to talk with Bethany, and I really liked her answer to my final question. You know, we've had some pretty profound stuff answered with that question over the months and over the past couple of years that I've been doing this, but you know what? I think that was really just right on the money given what is happening in the world today, so take heed of it, listen to it, do it. I'm going to do it. I'm going to lay there tonight in bed and do exactly that. So that was great. Let's see what's in the mailbag.

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Dan Ferris: The mailbag is where you and I get to have an honest conversation about investing and life and whatever else is on your mind. Just write in to feedback@investorhour.com with questions, comments and politely worded criticisms, please, and I'll continue to do as I've always done and read every word of every listener e-mail that you send me. And I will respond to as many as possible. And in order to respond to as many as possible, I'm going to cut out portions of various e-mails, so if you don't hear your whole e-mail read, you know, it's for that reason.

First one is from Ben S., and Ben S. says, "Dan, thank you for another great episode of the podcast. I love hearing from Doug Casey any chance I can get. Did he provide any update as to when Assassin will be out? The web site doesn't have a date." Ben is asking about Doug's new book, and I don't know when it'll be out so, you know, you just have to keep your eye peeled on Amazon. And then Ben continues, he says, "I'm not sure if I'd be better off with gold or silver. Silver is more satisfying due to quantity, but I'm not sure if it has the same store of value as gold. Thank you for what you do to help keep us abreast of the markets, both in your newsletters and the podcast. Paid-up Flex Alliance member, Ben S." Thanks for writing in, Ben. And Ben also asks here, "Is silver a viable option relative to gold?" And then he asked that question about the quantities.

So I understand the human – that human desire to sort of have a big amount of metal in your hands. I'm just as human as anybody. I love having a big among of silver. I love my silver for that reason, because it's valuable but it's – an ounce of silver is a lot cheaper than an ounce of gold so you can just have lots of it. However, I think gold has more of a history as money, so it's the money we trust. Silver has that same history. Silver has been used as money throughout history, for many, many thousands of years, just like gold. And I actually do – to me, every time I say "gold," I usually mean gold and silver. To me, they are almost the same. But if I had – if you made me choose and I could only own one of them, I'd probably just pick gold because, you know, I think more people – for more people, it's the go-to metal. And that makes sense to me. I hope that's enough of an answer. That's all I got for you, Ben.

Next one is from Vince S., and Vince S. says, "I love your show. Keep it going. Last week you got pretty heated about how much worse coronavirus is than flu. I'm not an expert, but for someone who insists that any of us have any clue about climate change – and I agree with you – I'd expect a more measured and similar response regarding COVID-19 and flu. We simply don't have enough data to make a rational rather than emotional comparison. We have these flu vaccines, yet millions get the flu every year and thousands die, many of whom were vaccinated. That said, this is an extraordinary time. As a society, we've upended the norm with an emotional and panic response to yet another novel," and he's got that in quotes, "virus leading to massive new government programs and regulations whose impacts will be unknown for a long time, and we will never know if doing nothing would have been OK because we didn't take that path, and we will never have enough data to know. Vince S."

Vince, sometimes evidence is the wrong way to go. Sounds crazy, right? Sometimes not having evidence is no excuse. If we don't – I believe, whether you think the government ought to do things or not, and I admit to thinking generally they overreach and do too much. In fact, in my home state of Washington right now, we're under this stay-at-home order. I think you can actually get arrested for leaving your home for any reason, which is insane, truly insane. So that's crazy, but at the individual level, you know, the desire to hoard toilet paper and stock up on food and buy guns and gold and groceries and whatever you think you need, I don't think there's anything the tiniest bit wrong with that. I think overreacting early is the smart move, period. Because if you overreact, what's the worst you do? Well, you wind up with a bunch of toilet paper. You won't be going to Costco for a long time. That's the worst that you wind up doing is spending money on supplies and avoiding your fellow man for a while. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

So I think, you know, I can be more measured and rational about climate change and just acknowledge that this is – you know, it's a little silly because nobody really knows anything about what the climate's going to be in the future, if they're being honest. And all the models have been way, way hotter than reality so far, you know, the overwhelming majority of them. So that's not going to really, truly kill anybody. Not really. Not tomorrow, not this week, not this year even. But what's going to kill people is getting this awful virus, and I keep looking for any anecdotal evidence of people who've had it, and they say it's the worst thing they've ever had in their lives, even if they're young, fit, like professional athletes who say they've had it. It's like the worst thing they've ever had in terms of an illness. That doesn't sound good to me. I think this idea that, hey, most people who get it, they're going to be just fine. They may not die, but it's a God-awful illness that you don't want to get, period. And you certainly don't want to die from it. Like, I'm 58 years old, I'm not in the greatest shape. If I got it, I don't know if I'd make it. I really don't because I get chest congestion just with a cold anyway. And with this thing, it'd go right to my lungs, and I think I'd be toast. And I read some – one report said most of the people who go on ventilators die. So this thing scares me, and I think it should scare any rational person. That's all I'll say about that.

Next is Tom N. Tom, I crossed out a lot of your e-mail here, so I won't be reading the whole thing, as I said. "Dear Dan," Tom says. "I've been listening to the Investor Hour for a long time now. I used to enjoy the days of Porter and Buck, but I have really come to enjoy you being in the house. I myself am also a value investor, so I guess I value your opinions more so, no pun intended. I have really enjoyed your recent episodes focused on what is currently going on in the markets.

Before listening to your episode from today, March 26, I listened to Porters long-awaited address to everyone. I was in shock to hear him essentially say that everything is going back to normal in a matter of weeks. He may not have said weeks, but he made the timeline sound very short. He really seemed to have disregarded everything that is unfolding. To be honest, he sounded like one of Trump's news conferences." Porter's going to love that. "And don't worry, I'm not a left-wing socialist," Tom N. says. He continues, "Anyway, leading up to listening to today's podcast, I was curious if you'd be changing your tone at all. I was pleased to hear that you were much more a voice of reason. Your thoughts and theories as well as those expressed by Kevin," Kevin Duffy from a recent episode, "were well thought through and based on logic." And then he finishes up and says, "I think you'd be wonderful to have a conversation with. Thank you for being a great host for the show. Stay healthy and safe. Tom N."

Tom, thanks very much. That was very nice of you to say. Porter's opinions are his own. I can't speak for him. Other people ask me about this, and I don't – you know, believe me, I promise you, Porter Stansberry can speak for himself. Trust me. He's a brilliant guy, he knows how to express himself. Just take your questions to him if you can. But I won't speak for him at all ever. Don't need to. Couldn't anyway, whether I needed to or not. I couldn't anyway. You can only speak for yourself. And I don't base my opinions on anything he says, so no, I don't change my tone at all. You're implying here – I'm getting the implication you think because Porter said what he said that I'm changing my tone. The only thing I said was in a recent internal meeting that we had, you know, we have these conference call meetings, I did say you've got to buy something when things are this dislocated and this crazy and the market plummets 35% in a matter of a couple weeks. You've got to buy something. You've got to fade that extreme, and gold is one of the things I would buy. And I would, you know, if you can really hold a good business for a long time – like I bought a stock recently, within the past week, that I have been waiting to buy for years. It could be 10 years already. I owned it previously, it ran up, and now of course it's cratered, cut more than 50%, so I bought some. But I'm kind of a chicken. I'm buying a little bit at a time. So I've bought, like, a little bit on three different occasions. I hope that answers your question, Tom.

Got a couple more of these, or maybe just one more. And this is from – or no, two more. Paul E. is the next one, and Paul E., he wrote a long e-mail, and it was very thoughtful. Can't read all of it. But he says, "Hi, Dan. I laughed out loud when you reacted to the feedback that you got a few podcasts back and realized you were asking our government to take action on COVID-19. Your reaction to your own words was great. I really appreciate how honest you are about your mistake on the podcast. Not many people with a microphone are that genuine." Let me just stop right there, everybody, and tell you that this is a point of pride with me. This is one of the reasons why I agreed to take over the podcast in the first place because there's too much in financial media of people with a microphone saying – acting like, you know, when the market goes up 10% in one day, they're acting like they were bullish all along and vice versa, and it stinks. People in the media, they never go back and revisit their mistakes. So you're darn tootin' when I make one that big, you're going to hear about it. You may not hear about every mistake I think I've made, but I certainly hope that I have just the memory at my age, for some reason, to go back and deal with the big ones, OK.

So continuing with Paul's e-mail now. He says, "I can tell you, like most of us, are struggling with the unknowns of COVID-19. I go through waves of "This isn't so bad," all the way to, "Oh, shoot, this is going to be really bad." This is a real test of our humanity in a crisis, and in reality, this is mild compared to an event like World War II. I don't think we are as tough as past generations. In tough times, it is helpful to think about silver linings, how can we learn and grow from the experience, or how this may make the world a better place by changing what people focus on in short term. After 9/11, people were more respectful and less self-centered for a time."

And then lastly, he recommends this book called The Power of Bad by John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister, and he's got a few lines from the book. I'll just read a couple of them. He says, No. 1, "There is no opposite of trauma because no single good event has such lasting power. A spoonful of tar can spoil a barrel of honey, but a spoonful of honey does nothing for a barrel of tar." That's No. 2. Then No. 3 here from the book, "Fifty years after World War II, when researchers compared American veterans who'd fought in the Pacific with those who had fought in Europe, there was a distinct difference in tastes. Pacific veterans still avoided Asian food." N. 4, "One infidelity can destroy a marriage, but no act of devotion can permanently bond a couple." He says, "These are just examples from the intro. It's an awesome read. You need to read it. Take care, Paul E."

I don't think I need to react to any of that. I appreciate your comments. Thanks for the book recommendation. And I already reacted to the thing about correcting our mistakes.

So one more from Justin G. He says, "I'm a longtime follower of Stansberry Research and Extreme Value. I've recently started plugging into your Investor Hour podcast and really enjoy your overall perspective. I recently listened to Episode 145 and appreciated your encouragement for us, humanity, to stick together and get through the crisis. You made a comment that intrigued me. You mentioned that after being an atheist for decades, you actually got down on your knees and prayed. What made you try prayer? Do you feel like it made a difference? Keep up the good work. Justin G."

So here's the thing, Justin. For me, religion is not even about faith that there's, you know, a handsome man with flowing hair in a cloud who's going to make my wishes come true. I think that's – you know, that's not it for me. For me, it's an acknowledgement of the limits of knowledge and ignorance, and when I'm praying, I'm basically saying I really hope things don't go as poorly as they're going to go. That was really the nature of it, and I feel like it's – you know, if there winds up being no such thing as a God who hears this, I think there's something inside me that I'm unaware of that's going to hear it, if that makes any sense. And it's my acknowledgement of the uncertainty of the fact that we live in a world we don't understand, quite frankly. We really do. We live in a world we don't completely understand, and I don't even need the word completely, do I? We just don't understand so much. And we're not good at seeing around corners, we're not good at knowing how we're gong to feel in the future. We think we really want something and we get it, and it turns out to be nothing like what we thought and we don't want it at all. And so for me, that's what religion is about. It's about our limits as human beings and the limits of what we can know. Hope that answers your question.

That's it for another episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour. It is my privilege to come to you this week and every week. It really is. The fact that you're out there listening is humbling to me, you know, because sometimes I'll say something to someone, I'll say, "Oh, geez, I don't want to go to so-and-so today because I don't want to spend my life waiting in line." You know, let's say I have to go to Costco, and I know it's going to be crowded. You know, I'll tell them I don't want to go there today because I don't want to spend my life waiting in line. I use that phrase spend my life quite consciously because my life is not what has happened to me in the past, although that's part of it, I guess, and it's not all the stuff that's going to happen in the future. My life is what's happening right now, and right now, my whole life is talking to you and your whole life is listening to me. Even if you're doing something else while you're listening, you're spending your life listening to me, and it's humbling and I appreciate it. That's why I say it's a privilege to come to you every week.

So if you want to read a transcript or listen to any episode, you can listen to every episode we've ever done and see a transcript for every episode we've ever done at www.investorhour.com. They're all there, and it takes us – lately it seems to take close to a week to get a transcript for the latest episode, but I promise you it will be there eventually. And there's one for every other episode. Just click on the episode you want, scroll all the way down, and there's a transcript there. Or you can go to iTunes. Go to Apple iTunes and subscribe to Stansberry Investor Hour and click "Like." When you click "Like," it pushes us up in the rankings and attracts lots of other folks like you. I promise you they're out there, and we want to get them in the podcast so that they can write in and give us their feedback, and tell us what they thin,k and make the show even more wonderful than apparently some of you today have said you already think it is. So do that, iTunes, subscribe, Stansberry Investor Hour, "Like." That'll work for you, it'll work for me, it'll work for everybody.

Thanks, once again, and I will talk to you next week. Until then, goodbye for now. Wash your hands, take care, social distance, do what you need to do. Talk to you then. Goodbye.

Announcer: Thank you for listening to the Stansberry Investor Hour. To access today's notes and receive notice of upcoming episodes, go to investorhour.com and enter your e-mail. Have a question for Dan? Send him an e-mail at feedback@investorhour.com. This broadcast is provided for entertainment purposes only and should not be considered personalized investment advice. Trading stocks and all other financial instruments involves risk. You should not make any investment decision based solely on what you hear. Stansberry Investor Hour is produced by Stansberry Research and is copyrighted by the Stansberry Radio Network.

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