On this week's Stansberry Investor Hour, Dan and Corey welcome Ben Hunt back to the show. Ben founded Epsilon Theory, a newsletter with more than 100,000 readers that examines markets through the lens of narrative. He's also the president and co-founder of Perscient, an AI research firm and software company.

Ben kicks things off by discussing the "credit polar vortex" that the U.S. is facing today. He says that all credit to the bottom 40% of the country has essentially been cut off, leaving companies in distress and everyday Americans in crisis. And he notes that financial crises are always born in the financial sector, so this is a problem no matter how well AI and tech stocks are doing. Ben goes in depth on how this looming crisis affects regional banks, and he compares what's happening now with what happened in 2007...

This is counterparty risk that always leads to people not putting money into the system. That's what happened in '07. That's what happened in '08. You didn't trust your counterparty. And that same thing is happening today... The players on Wall Street are saying, "I don't trust." And when trust fails, it goes bad really fast throughout the entire financial system... I think we've got a few more months before the next shoe drops.

Next, Ben talks about the Federal Reserve's role in all this and how it acts as a backstop for commercial banks. He points out that the alternative asset managers that don't have this backstop have been the ones making all the loans in the economy, so that's where the danger lies. This leads to a conversation about gold's usefulness as a safe haven, the potential for rampant inflation, and a few things that give Ben hope for the economic future, including manufacturing and reshoring. And he also covers the topic of energy generation in relation to AI and its possible damage to the economy...

I mean, we're talking [about] rolling brownouts so we can keep the AI data centers going... We're looking at, in the next couple years, a couple hundred terawatt-hours shortage [of electricity]. It's got to come from somewhere, right? We can either allocate it to the data centers, or we can allocate it to the real economy. And if we allocate to the data centers, all these problems that we're describing about the K-shaped economy, they all just get a lot worse.

Finally, Ben shares how his investing outlook has changed over the years, thanks to fundamentals taking a backseat in importance to storytelling and narratives. He emphasizes that fundamentals still matter, but what's happening with the story is a bigger factor in making money in the market. As he says, it's value versus valuation. Ben then explains how he finds these stories regardless of the sector and how to track them...

The trick is to identify where [we are] in the script. Where are we in the story arc? Which story is in heavy rotation? Which story is popular right now? Oil prices, right? There'll be periods of time where you'll see it in the media. The story is "What's OPEC doing? What's OPEC+ doing?" Then there'll be periods of time where the story around oil is "What's demand? What's the marginal demand coming out of China for oil?" And that's the story that drives [prices].

Click on the image below to watch the video interview with Ben right now. For the audio version, click "Listen" above.

(Additional past episodes are located here.)

This Week's Guest

Ben Hunt is the president and co-founder of Perscient, an AI research firm and software company that pioneered the use of language models and unstructured data analysis for investment strategies. In 2013, he launched Epsilon Theory, a newsletter and website that examines markets through the lens of narrative. Epsilon Theory offers fresh perspectives and insights into market dynamics for its more than 100,000 readers.

Before Epsilon, Ben managed a billion-dollar hedge fund and served as chief strategist and chief risk officer for a $13 billion asset manager. He earned a PhD from Harvard University, was a tenured political-science professor, and has co-founded three technology companies.

Dan Ferris:                 Hello, and welcome to the Stansberry Investor Hour. I'm Dan Ferris. I'm the editor of Extreme Value and The Ferris Report, both published by Stansberry Research.

Corey McLaughlin:    And I'm Corey McLaughlin, editor of the Stansberry Daily Digest. Today we're talking with Ben Hunt of Epsilon Theory.

Dan Ferris:                 Ben is a brilliant guy. We haven't talked to him in way too long. He has a totally different way of looking at the world from many investors. So, let's do it. Let's talk with Ben Hunt. Let's do it right now.

                                    All right, Ben Hunt, welcome back to the show. It's been a while.

Ben Hunt:                    It's been too long, Dan. It's great to be back. Thanks for having me.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. You are especially someone I feel I need to check in with here in the latter part of 2025. We've been through two tariff tantrums: April 8, October 10. New York City elected a democratic socialist mayor who says he wants free everything – and other weird things which I'm sure you've kept better track of than me. I don't even know where to start. You're – when I read what you write, it covers so much, I almost don't know where to begin. With you I feel like I should ask you what is it right now? What is consuming your mind today?

Ben Hunt:                    What's consuming in my mind right now today is not tariffs. I think we're very much past tariffs. It's not even the midterms and [Zohran Mamdani] and the like. I think he's a specific issue for New York City. Look, every once in a while, you need a major American city to burn itself on the hot stove of socialism or communism as a cautionary tale, so that's all fine.

                                    What's concerning me very much today is that we are in the middle of – I'm not even going to call it a credit freeze. I'm going to call it a credit polar vortex for – we call them the poors. For subprime, really, which is – and that's spreading. So, it's spreading up to the middle class. The canaries in the coal mine, the precipitating events were the bankruptcies of Tricolor, the subprime auto lender, and also First Brands, the auto-parts supplier. Bad actions, bad – so, the point being, when those companies went out, what everyone in Wall Street, everyone in the financial world did is they cut off the credit spigot to any companies like Tricolor or First Brands. All credit to let's call it the bottom 40% of the American economy has been shut off. So, every company that faces that bottom 40% is under extreme distress right now. We don't see it or feel it, but that's what's happening right now in the real economy is that credit has been just completely shut off. And credit is the oxygen to any economy.

                                    So, this feels very much to me like Q4 of 2007 when autos rolled over, home activity at least rolled over, coming after a real financial crisis in the summer of 2007 around Countrywide, all the mortgage-backed security originators and lenders. That's what really worries me right now, Dan, because the – yes, and I've done a lot of work on AI and the AI data-center build-out and the like that's getting a lot of the press and all the news for good reason. But what's really concerning me right now is the real economy, our "K-shaped" economy, where that bottom leg of the K is moving up and up and up. So, credit is increasingly being cut off to middle-class. Refinancings are being rejected. Credit's going up.

                                    I tell you, the last thing, Dan, that really concerns me about this is that cutting interest rates by 50 basis points, 100 basis points, it doesn't impact this. If you've got a subprime credit card, you're paying the maximum rate allowed by law. You're paying whatever that is, 24.99. It's not going down if the Fed cuts rates by 100 basis points. Credit's been shut off to the bottom half of the U.S. economy. There's enormous distress here. And at the same time, you've got cost push inflationary pressures coming out of energy, labor, insurance. So, it's not tariffs. Tariffs aren't driving those cost push inflation issues. It's utility bills, insurance bills, food – which is energy. That's what's driving the inflation. At the same time, you've had credit cut off to about half the American economy. That is what is concerning to me.

Dan Ferris:                 Sounds like a big concern, 40% with no access to credit, knowing what we know about developed economies.

Ben Hunt:                    Yeah, exactly.

Dan Ferris:                 As you say, it's oxygen. And this reminds you of the fourth quarter of 2007. As I recall, some bad stuff happened in 2008. So, maybe 2026 – it sounds like you're not expecting 2026 to be a great year.

Ben Hunt:                    I'm not. I'm really not. Again, everyone's focused on tech. And I get it. So, the Mag Seven or whatever. Nvidia alone is, what, 8% of S&P 500? So, I get it, why we're focused on that. When I'm saying, though, is that this – a financial crisis always happens in the financial sector. That's where systemic crisis happened. They don't happen out of tech. They happen out of the financial sector. And they happen out of the banks in the financial sector because illiquidity, which happens when things go belly up, illiquidity is death for a financial. So, this reminds me very much of starting in August and September of 2007 when you had a couple of Bear Stearns funds go out for their mortgage-backed securities. They were the canaries in the coal mine where funders' financial instruments pulled back enormously. Financial stopped working from August of 2007 onwards. It didn't wait until. Bear Stearns going out in April of 2008 for financials to start really taking a leg down. And that's what I think is happening today. It's the financial system we've got to worry about. Credit is the oxygen for any economy. And we are seeing a credit freeze in the bottom half of the U.S. economy, and that's going to spread.

Dan Ferris:                 I actually saw this yesterday without having your eloquent description of it in my mind. I just looked at a chart of KBWR, the regional bank ETF, RTY, Russell 2000, and a couple other things. And I compared it, of course, to the S&P 500 but also the equal-weight S&P. All the rest. In other words, besides the top 10 or whatever. And all much weaker, much weaker, with the S&P within – just call it 3% or so, three or four or whatever it is, as we speak, of an all-time high, and the others are as much as double digits down. Much weaker. And of course, the regional banks haven't made a new high in what? It's been a couple of years, I think. At least one year, at least 2024, if not 2020. So, you can see that weakness – it's sort of the Stan Druckenmiller inside-of-the-stock-market kind of view of that weakness.

Ben Hunt:                    A hundred percent, Dan. So, I look a lot at the alternative asset managers. We used to call them shadow banks. I guess we don't call them that anymore. But they've – it's the There Will Be Blood reference. They've been drinking the milkshake of commercial banks for a long time. This is private credit. So, the lending into the real economy has shifted from commercial banks into the alternative asset managers, the private-credit funds, [collateral loan obligations ("CLOs")], [business development Companies ("BDCs")], all of that. And what always happens is that the commercial banks, particularly the regional banks, play catch-up. So, as much as the Apollos and the Blue Owls and the Ares and BlackRocks and Blackstones, as much as they've been, I think, stretching in their credit quality and covenants and all like that is they're putting money out there into the real economy, the regional banks are as bad or worse. And they always are. They're always playing catch-up in this sort of respect.

                                    So, it's not surprising to me, for example, when you saw the Tricolor go out and the First Brands go out. The people who are mostly on the hook there, these were mostly syndicated loans, and those were mostly a lot of the regionals and super regionals who were left holding the bag here. So, it's Jamie Dimon talking about there's always these cockroaches. There's never just one. And it's not just that you're – that it's the cockroach itself you have to worry about, the management team that double pledges collateral or the like. It's the tenement house you're – or the neighborhood you're all living in that has a lot of cockroaches and everything else, because that's how neighborhoods develop in the financial world over time. This is how it always plays out. And here we are again.

Dan Ferris:                 Let's be a little more specific about this because it's true. You're actually – you're describing just the nature of how systemic crises start in one area and spread. And let's – I feel like we should sort of make that a little more concrete for our listeners. Actually, you did a reasonably good job there – with the syndicated loans wind up in the regional banks and before you know it, dozens of regional banks are having issues. Is there another example?

Ben Hunt:                    Yeah. So, Dan, the reason that they're – all financial institutions will have issues from this, whether they are infested with cockroaches or not – it doesn't matter, because if you are a funder – so, funding takes lots of sources. One of the great strengths of the American financial system is that funding for commercial banks happens through deposits. So, there are two ways that a financial institution can fund itself. You can have deposits if you're a bank bank or you can borrow. You can issue securities to fund yourself. Or as a lot of these alternative asset managers have discovered, you can buy, acquire, partner with insurance firms to find funding through their premiums and their issuance.

                                    So, there's nothing new under the sun. All financial institutions are trying to do is they're trying to find ways to fund themselves to have capital available that they can then lend out. And what's – what always happens in these situations when something goes wrong – Bear Stearns going belly up in August of 2007, these two big consumer-facing auto firms going under just a couple of months ago – is that all the funders, whether you are a pension fund who's giving money to this, whether you are an insurance firm, you've got your funding arrangement with an alternative asset manager, whether you're a financial advisor and the CLO manager comes to you and says, "Hey, give us money," you're trying – you step back.

                                    The problem always happens in the funding because these financial companies, they're like sharks. They have to keep swimming. So, they're not keeping the loans on their books. That's not how a financial institution works. You find the company to lend to. You originate the loan. In 2007, it was mortgages. So, you find the person who wants to borrow money from you, you lend them money, and then you sell that loan. You securitize it. You put it off to another manager. You don't want to hold it on your books because you want to make more loans.

                                    So, the way it always happens with finance companies is that they – it starts with, "We're going to make these good loans and they're going to pay us a nice rate of return. We're going to hold them on the books. We're going to be this financial institution." And you realize that the way to make money is not to keep the loan on your own books. It's to put it off the books. Get it off your balance sheet so you can make more loans and make more money. They become these transaction machines.

                                    And that all works out great until the real world intervenes where, oh, a couple of these loans start to go bad. So, the funders, the people who are giving you money to keep going, they say, "Hang on a second." And it doesn't matter if you haven't made bad loans. It doesn't matter if you have cockroaches or not in the portfolio you've sold. The funder doesn't know this. The funders just say, "You know what? I've seen this movie before. I'm full up with this stuff." You trust no one. That's what happened in '07 and '08. You didn't trust the book. And so, you stop funding it.

                                    And you're defenseless if you're a financial company. You can't come out and say – if you come out and say, "Here's transparency on our book," you'll get hammered for that because there will be something that can be arguably wrong in your book. If you don't give transparency, if you say, "Oh, no, no, everything's fine, believe me, trust me," nobody's going to trust you. So, this is counterparty risk that always leads to people not putting money into the system. That's what happened in '07. That's what happened in '08. You didn't trust your counterparty.

                                    And that same thing is happening today. You see it in repo rates. You see it in the – and you're just getting glimmers of this right now. I think we've got a few more months before the next shoe drops from the next company that can't pay its debt because it faces this consumer economy that isn't spending, is under incredible stress. We're a couple of months off from the next shoe dropping. But right now, what I'm telling you I'm seeing out there is the players on Wall Street are saying, "I don't trust." And when trust fails, it goes bad really fast throughout the entire financial system.

Corey McLaughlin:    I'm glad you're – I'm glad we went right to here, this topic, because I saw you were writing about this and tweeting about it and whatnot and because the crisis, it's always in credit, right? It's always –

Ben Hunt:                    Always.

Corey McLaughlin:    That's what it is.

Ben Hunt:                    Always, Corey.

Corey McLaughlin:    What do you make of – and this happened relatively under the radar to most casual people – this recent injection from the Fed, $125 billion dollars into the market? Is – you said we're seeing glimmers – cracks here and there. What do you make of that? I'm curious for your take on that part.

Ben Hunt:                    So, financial institutions can be insolvent forever, meaning Bank of America – and we all saw these charts when we're having the runs on First Republic and Silicon Valley Bank and stuff. And a lot of this was this – all of this honestly was kind of silliness, saying, "Oh, Bank of America is insolvent" because their big holdings of Treasuries were underwater. So what? So what? You can – a financial institution can be technically insolvent. "These Treasuries we hold, they're trading below par," so you can put whatever charts you want on it. Doesn't matter. A financial institution can be insolvent forever. They can't be illiquid for a second.

Dan Ferris:                 Hank Greenberg – I'll never forget it. I'll never forget it. He said, "We're not insolvent. We're illiquid." And I thought –

Ben Hunt:                    That's it.

Dan Ferris:                 And I thought, "What's the –" at that moment, what is the difference, really?

Ben Hunt:                    And for a financial institution, the moment you're illiquid, you're done. And that's exactly what happened with Bear Stearns.

Dan Ferris:                 And it is a moment, isn't it?

Ben Hunt:                    It's a moment.

Dan Ferris:                 You literally come to work the next day, you pick up the phone or whatever, and they say, "No, it's done. We're done."

Ben Hunt:                    It's done. That's exactly right. So, this – so, Bear Stearns is the perfect example of this. I was –

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, that's what I was thinking of.

Ben Hunt:                    So, Bear Stearns – the way that Bear Stearns funds itself – remember, I'm talking about how do you get the capital to lend out to people? The way that Bear Stearns funded itself was from mostly deposits from its hedge-fund clients. So, they ran – so, all of the big investment banks, it's called a prime brokerage. So, they don't have retail clients. They don't have a savings account. What you do if you're a hedge fund – Bear Stearns was my prime broker for my hedge fund. I loved Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns was great. I loved those guys. And we had a lot of money on deposit with them because they were our prime broker.

                                    Now, when you start worrying about the book, the book of loans that Bear Stearns had on their book, you can't wait to be the last one out the door. And so, that – there was a run on the bank at Bear Stearns. And the run on the bank was hedge funds like me saying, "Sorry, guys, I love you, but I'm out. I'm out." So, we pulled our money from Bear Stearns. Fortunately, I saw this coming and was able to get out early before you had to. But this is what a run on the bank looks like. Sometimes a run on the bank looks like it did with Silicon Valley Bank or First Republic where it's ordinary depositors pulling their accounts. Sometimes it's like Bear Stearns where you fund yourself through hedge funds and the hedge funds pull their money. And you're done. When that happens, it's over.

                                    Now, to your point, Corey, the way you stop a run on the bank is like It's a Wonderful Life – it's like those movies where you have to get new money that comes in and just – a dump truck full of new money so that nobody has to worry about getting their money out. And that's what the Fed does. So, the Fed says, "All right, your deposits are safe." Bear Stearns wasn't safe because the Fed wasn't the backstop for Bear Stearns because Bear Stearns wasn't a commercial bank. By the way, this is why Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs became commercial banks in October of 2008, so that they could have the backstop of the Federal Reserve.

                                    So, when you're talking, Corey, about putting money – the way that – the reason that the Fed makes money, capital available is to prop up and alleviate any funding concerns for commercial banks. That's why they do it. But here's who doesn't have that backstop today. In 2007 and 2008, it was Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs. They did not have that backstop. Lehman, no backstop from the Fed. Today, the group that doesn't have the backstop is these alternative asset managers. They're the ones without the backstop to –

Dan Ferris:                 Which have proliferated like crazy.

Ben Hunt:                    They've been drinking the milkshake. They're the ones that have been making all the loans into the real economy. And look, it's not like this is – let me be really clear. I think that what Apollo did is phenomenal. And I think Mark Rowan's incredibly smart and he's incredibly right when he says, "Look, here's the opportunity. Here's the business opportunity. Commercial banks like JPMorgan Chase and B of A and Citi, they're not making loans into the real economy. OK, we can do that." And they did. It's a great business. This is why Jamie Dimon is saying – he's been complaining for years, "We're highly regulated. We all have these capital constraints. The alternative asset managers, they can come in and take this business." And so, there's this back and forth. It's competition. It's wonderful. But where Jamie Dimon is right is that the alternative asset managers are not regulated like the commercial banks.

                                    On the flip side, they also don't have the backstop that the commercial banks do. So, you're right, Corey, that the Fed is there – the Fed exists to provide liquidity to the banking system. The risk today, honestly, is that just like in '07 and '08 there were major players in the financial system that did not have a Fed backstop because they weren't banks. They weren't commercial banks. Bear Stearns, Lehman, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs. Today, you've got that same issue with the alternative asset managers. They don't have that Fed backstop.

                                    So, big picture, that's kind of where I see these fault lines developing, Corey. The Fed will always support the banks – always – and they should. That's what they're there for. That's the reason we have a Federal Reserve, honestly. It's less interest rates than it is prevent runs on the freaking banks.

Dan Ferris:                 From time immemorial, it's the currency on one side and the banks and the bond market on the other.

Ben Hunt:                    You got it.

Dan Ferris:                 And guess which one always has to give? Guess which one is always sacrificed for the other, as you're pointing out.

Ben Hunt:                    Correct.

Dan Ferris:                 Which is not to say – I'm not one of these sort of dollar doomsday guys, but certainly for us in America, we can see the weakness. Certainly weak versus gold.

Ben Hunt:                    We can, Dan. So, I'm glad you brought this up. So, historically, and I think still, the U.S. currency – and you're right, it's always the currency that gives in these situations. The U.S. has always been kind of the best house in a bad neighborhood. Again, it's the issue of, well – exactly, it's not just that – we all have cockroaches because we live in a cockroach-infested neighborhood. That's kind of where we are. Now – right, right. Now, it feels maybe a little different to me today. Well, different in this sense. When you look at what's happening in Japan, you don't get any warm and fuzzies there, for sure. You don't get any warm and fuzzies really when you look at Germany. It's – look, this is why gold's done so well. It is. It's why gold's done so well. And because the yen's not a safe haven, the dollar's sure not a safe haven, so you look to something like gold.

Dan Ferris:                 After I was looking at those charts, I just went in Bloomberg and got the daily gold prices. And the dailies start, I think, in 1975 and I wanted daily up to now because I did these rolling two-month performances from then to the present because – and I said this at our conference a couple of weeks ago in Vegas. I was like "If you want something to worry about, gold going up 30% in two months, not normal." And I didn't really know it when I said it. So, rolling two-month periods since January 1975, 74 times, 30% or more in a rolling two months.

Ben Hunt:                    Is that right? Wow.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, listen to this, though. This year, the ones that ended on October 16 and October 20 – that's two. The other 72, all 72 of them between – I forget the months – '79 and '82, 1979 and 1982, when people were terrified – people were terrified at that time. Gold was like – people didn't care what the performance was. They were just saying, "Buy me gold. Buy me –" it was a frenzy. And that was around the peak of the biggest inflationary – certainly the biggest modern inflationary crisis in our history. And I'm thinking "Wow, that's the vibe right now?" It's strange.

Ben Hunt:                    Yeah, it's wild.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, really wild. I think wilder than I'm seeing people make out of it. I'm not seeing anybody freaking out. You can hear I'm semi-freaking out because I saw what the data showed me. The data showed me "Oh, this is when the world is melting down, just so you know, Dan. That's what this means." And I think it's like – it's discounting – I feel as though it's not discounting out and out inflation, but an inflationary response to a deflationary debt blow up or something like that. What do you – how's that sound to you?

Ben Hunt:                    Well, it feels a couple of things to me. I think there's a slower fuse here, honestly. And I also think that if we continue to have this credit freeze in the real economy, again, starting with the subprime spreading up now through the rest of the consumer economy, I – it seems to be very difficult to get out of a recession in that scenario, very difficult. It's very difficult for me to see how we get out of a real financial crisis because of the overextending of lending, just like we've been talking about. I also think that there are significant debt issues. Obviously we're aware of them. I also think that we've got significant, let's say, cost push inflation that happens if we continue with this AI data center buildout. I think all of that. But I also think, though, that when your economy goes in the crapper, inflation's not really happening. So, yeah. Oil prices aren't going up.

Dan Ferris:                 No, they're not.

Ben Hunt:                    Right?

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah. Yeah.

Ben Hunt:                    So, I don't get – I honestly don't get so worked up because I don't see the sort of '79, '82 –

Dan Ferris:                 No, it's not that. Yeah.

Ben Hunt:                    – supply inflation. It's not that. Right?

Dan Ferris:                 No.

Ben Hunt:                    It's not that. It's something different. It's not good.

Dan Ferris:                 But it's a vaguer sort of rhyming. In the data that I was talking about, it's just it's a vaguer sort of rhyming. A crisis. Big crisis and now the action. I didn't mean to suggest that, because it's not –

Ben Hunt:                    No, no, no, no. And I didn't take it that way. But when you asked me what I think, it's like it's – there's a rhyme here, but I think the confluence of issues we've got to deal with are pretty different from the '79, '82 period.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, yeah. We didn't just cut the last tie of gold and the dollar, so it's a little different. Right. But this is – all the things you're talking about since I asked you what's on your mind, this is what you get in a world that runs on debt. And frankly, fiat. When you get fiat, that's – debt becomes more widely used and – it's just the way of things. It's happened throughout history.

Ben Hunt:                    It's the way of things. Exactly right. Exactly right.

Dan Ferris:                 And it makes me wonder – we go through these things periodically, and on the other side of it there is always, I dare say, a brave new world. There's always – things get – seem to get a little more twisted. And what you described today, you sort of made the common refrain of the wealth gap. You put it in more stark terms for this moment, didn't you, because you said they're cut off, the bottom is cut off from borrowing. They're just – gosh, maybe I shouldn't have spoken to you on my birthday, Ben. I should have waited until after the birthday to do this one. But it just –I project past whatever it is, 2026 or '27 or '28 or '29 or whenever all this comes to a head and then resolves in whatever way it is. I wonder because before the great financial crisis came to a head in 2008 – for example, just one data point that we all can sort of – that we all get, the Fed's balance sheet was much smaller. It was not this multi-trillion dollar thing. And now – and mortgage-backed securities, they own mortgage-backed securities, tons of them in an environment where house prices are just out of reach of that bottom half. And a lot into the middle, frankly. They're out of reach of a lot of people, I think, now.

Ben Hunt:                    Well, they are. But Dan – so I know I've kind of brought us down, but let me try to paint a picture of where I think – it's a long putt, it's a narrow path, whatever metaphor you want to use. But I think there is a way forward. And I'll point out a couple things. One, mortgage-backed securities going in 2008. That was a $10 trillion asset class. So, just the sheer size of this is – and look, the private credit, CLOs, BDCs, all this stuff, It's big, don't get me wrong, but it's not a $10 trillion global asset class. So, I'm hopeful that there are – there's a deflation of the bubble that can happen without the bubble blowing up. Now, that means assigning losses, that means – it'll be unpleasant but not catastrophic. Where what I'm hopeful is that we can have some pricks of the bubble, let air out, assign losses – it won't be fun but it won't be this sort of catastrophic disaster.

                                    What I'm also hopeful for is that I actually believe very much in, I'll say, two aspects of this administration's policies. One is reshoring of manufacturing in the United States and the other is energy generation, energy production. If – the difficult thing is that right now we're putting all of our capital towards AI data centers, which are going to sop up all of the energy generation we build and more and they're sopping up all the capital that otherwise you'd be using for the manufacturing and reshoring and the like. Why do I think the manufacturing and reshoring is so important? Because that's jobs. When we talk about a job boom, it's not going to come from the AI data centers. So, generative AI, it's a job killer, if not – at best, it's net neutral on jobs.

Dan Ferris:                 It's also real wealth, isn't it, Ben? It's real wealth, that capacity.

Ben Hunt:                    Exactly. Yes, Dan.

Dan Ferris:                 It's not trading. It's not George Gilder talks about the hypertrophy of finance and we've all – you've talked about the financialization that we're living through.

Ben Hunt:                    Yeah. A hundred percent, Dan. I won't –

Dan Ferris:                 And a lot of that is from –

Ben Hunt:                    So, energy generation, manufacturing, reshoring is real. It's jobs. It's human. And it's – the issue, of course, is how do we get from here to there? It is the next couple of years where I'm really concerned we're going to devote our capital, our energy to the AI data centers that don't have a payoff in terms of the real as you're as you're describing, Dan. I think what we need right now is – or the thing that gets us through, and this is why it's such a long putt, is really good leadership, which is in really short supply right now, to be honest. So, I think it's a long put, but I think the way out of this is manufacturing resurgence, domestic in the U.S. together with massive energy production, which makes it all possible. So, that's what I'd like to see. The problem is we've got capital going, I think, into less productive modes and we've got to deal with capital not going to the real economy and the overextension of credit that we've had over the last 15 years. Long putt, but that's where I hope to come out of it, Dan. It's getting from here to there over the next three years. Can we get to that point where we've got real energy generation here in the United States and manufacturing research?

Dan Ferris:                 You brought me back up.      

Corey McLaughlin:    Dan, I would think –

Ben Hunt:                    Did I? I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure I did but I –

Corey McLaughlin:    Well, no, that was more – yeah, I would think even if we had some sort of blueprint, but like a road map that we're headed in the right direction in terms of that energy capacity and generation, even that would, I think, satisfy some of this fear out there.

Ben Hunt:                    I do, too. It would be fantastic, Corey. And again, the problem is the AI blueprint that the effective altruists, the Sam Altmans of the world are pushing for. The numbers are just ridiculous and staggering. We're talking about $3 trillion, $4 trillion dollars spent on AI data centers in the United States over the next couple of years. And when you look at the energy requirements of that, the electricity requirements of that, you can't get from here to there without real shortages for the rest of the economy. You just can't get there. We're talking about, by 2028, using a thousand terawatt-hours for data centers. My friends, that's freaking crazy. That is nuts. That's nuts. In 2024, I'm thinking our total, the entire economy used about 4,000 – a little over 4,000 terawatt-hours. The entire economy. And I don't care how many gas turbines and gas lines you build right next to your data center in Louisiana or whatever Meta is doing. Yeah, where are you going to get these turbines? Cat and GE, they can't make enough of these.

                                    So, there's no way to get from here to there if we're going to go forward with $4 trillion on AI data centers over the next three years and a thousand terawatts of electrical consumption in 2028. We're screwed if that happens. Or, the rest of the economy is screwed. What we need is, I'll call it, not an AI backlash, but we need, I'll call it, AI subordination to the blueprint, Corey, that works, which is manufacturing, reshoring, and yes, build out the energy infrastructure as much as you can but don't just push it all then into AI data centers. It's nuts. It's crazy.

Corey McLaughlin:    Right. Yeah. The energy grid needed upgrading before. And now, I mean, now – what are we doing now?

Ben Hunt:                    One hundred percent. Right.

Corey McLaughlin:    It's – yeah. I just looked up something I wrote a couple of months ago on AI's power problem, just to look up the stack, because what you were running off reminded me of it, just for people so they can understand it too. It's – the Environmental and Energy Study Institute said U.S. data centers could require as much as 130 gigawatts of power every year by 2030. And then that day I was looking, I was like, "OK, let me –" I'm not proficient in gigawatts and whatever else, but that's 114 million homes for a year. That's the equivalent.

Ben Hunt:                    Yeah. Yeah, this is what I'm saying.

Corey McLaughlin:    And there's only 148 million – there's 150 million housing units in the entire country. It's –

Dan Ferris:                 Right, we're dropping a new country on our country. That's right.

Ben Hunt:                    Yeah, we're talking rolling brownouts so we can keep the AI data centers going. And electricity is one of those things, capital shortages is another one, labor shortage is another one that drives what I'm describing as cost push inflation. And it's – so, like I say, it's not the tariffs. But when your input for everything you do, which is electricity, which is labor, when you've got shortages there, costs are going up. And either you – as a small-to-medium business, you either pass those along or you go under. Those are your options. Because we're looking at in the next couple of years, a couple of hundred terawatt-hours shortage. It's got to come from somewhere. We can either allocate it to the data centers or we can allocate it to the real economy. And if we allocate to the data centers, all these problems that we're describing just about the K-shaped economy, they all just got a lot worse.

Dan Ferris:                 I'm up. I'm down. I'm all around.

Corey McLaughlin:    Sorry to bring you down again, Dan.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah.

                                    [Crosstalk]

Ben Hunt:                    No, no, no. Look, we've got to have a pushback against the AI data-center buildout without it resorting into political populism, without ending up with – you know?

Corey McLaughlin:    Right. Yeah. And you're seeing that already with –

Ben Hunt:                    President Mamdani. Yeah.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah. We're seeing the political blowback a bit already, I think, just starting from –

Ben Hunt:                    We are. It is just starting. But we've also got – putting it in poker terms, the guys pushing for the AI data center buildout, they've got a big stack. So, it's Larry Ellison and Sam Altman, and we know the crew. They've got a big stack in poker terms and they've got a lot of, let's say, influence in this White House.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, and unlike the fiber build-out of the dot-com era, the companies doing – the big companies doing the buildout gush free cash flow. They've used their balance sheets up but they've got plenty of balance sheet. And the demand – the data centers are 100% utilized day one. It's not like they're building 90% dark fiber or anything. So, when you get lots of demand – and it's not WorldCom or Global Crossing. I don't think – Microsoft and Alphabet aren't going to disappear like that.

Ben Hunt:                    No, it's nothing like that.

Dan Ferris:                 It's different. It's different.

Ben Hunt:                    Exactly. Exactly right. And there is a shortage of processing. I mean, our company – we've processed 250 billion tokens over the last couple of months. We're a big user because we read everything in the world and we analyze it for the narratives – in the world. We say – you get these little plaques, these little disks from open AI for every, whatever, 100 billion tokens you process. So, we got our 200 billion token plaque the other day, our little trophy. So, we're big users, huge users of this stuff. And yeah, there's not enough to go around. We get rationed out. We get – there are bottlenecks for us. So, yeah, I get it. There – we could use a lot more AI processing power out there, to your point, Dan. But at what cost for the rest of the economy? We've got to have a balance and right now we don't have a balance.

Dan Ferris:                 Ben, I'm so glad that you broached the topic of your process because it's so different. When we talk – overwhelmingly, we talk to sort of fundamental bottom-up investors and they are worried about cash flows and balance sheets and competitive advantages. And then we talk to traders who are worried about entry and exit and risk management overwhelmingly. You're a different animal, aren't you, as a firm?       

Ben Hunt:                    Yeah. Yeah. I tell you, like, I think, most of us in this business – I was raised in the church of value investing. And so we were a value with a catalyst hedge fund and very typical. And we did great with that. And then we stopped making money. We never lost money for our clients but we really flatlined on our returns. We had a great '08, and then '09 our returns really – they just flatlined. And again, never lost money, but it just doesn't – it wasn't working. The fundamentals, they didn't matter. What mattered was the Fed forward guidance. What mattered was the narrative, the story that a CEO could tell.

                                    And so, yeah, I ended up giving all the money back to investors, which was the smartest thing I ever did, because in this business – this business works by – you need to always make money for your partners. And if you can't make money for your partners, you need to give it back because they'll be your partners again in the future. Just don't lose money for people. So, give all the money back to try to figure out, well, how do you invest here? And yeah, I became really convinced that it's storytelling, that – and as I got into it, I – at first I was a weak form – I'll call it a weak form narrativist. Yes, it's narratives in the short term, but in medium to long term it's fundamentals.

Dan Ferris:                 The weighing machine. Yes.

Ben Hunt:                    Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, Benjamin Graham never said that. So, what I've come to believe is that it's a voting machine forever and ever I'm in. I'm now a strong form narrativist that – and what is – a multiple is a story. A multiple is a story. What multiple do you put on this cash flow or this – it's just a story. Value itself is a story. So, I'm –

Dan Ferris:                 And a prediction. It's a predictive story about –

Ben Hunt:                    Or a hope. Or at least just a hope.

Dan Ferris:                 – a possible future.

Ben Hunt:                    It's a hope of what the future. It's saying that you have identified something about the future that the rest of the world doesn't. And where you get paid for that view is when the rest of the world comes to believe your story.

Dan Ferris:                 Yep, we all go through this. When we –

Ben Hunt:                    So, what I'm doing is tracking the stories. I want to see when stories hit and develop, because if the story is never – if your value insight, your story is never believed by markets, you're not going to make money with that position. What I'm interested in is when does the story break on the manias and on the upside, but when does the story click for value investing and the like? So, all we do is track stories. That's all we do. I'm giving up on trying to have a fundamental view. Of course, I've got fundamental views, but so does everyone else. So, what I want to do is I want to do something that I think can be additive and valuable. And for me, that's tracking the stories.

Dan Ferris:                 I find this inspirational because I have – laying all my cards on the table, I have been a frustrated fundamentalist. I was unfrustrated for years and we did fine and the readers of our Extreme Value newsletter have done really well. But something is happening to me and it's – I think I'm just coming late to the party that you arrived at years ago. And I look at things like – I used to talk about the [cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings] ratio, and then I looked at that on – it's a 10-year inflation adjusted average.

Ben Hunt:                    Sure. Yeah.

Dan Ferris:                 And I looked at that average on a roll – on a 10-year basis. And I noticed like before the late '90s, rarely above 20 on that rolling average that I made. It just smoothed it and showed me the data from 1871 to the late '90s better. After that, never below 20. So, we're in – we're obviously in a different world for the past –

Ben Hunt:                    Different regime. And so, where these capital markets become a political utility, where the storytelling takes over. And I'm not saying that fundamentals don't matter. So, that is still my religion. I still believe. What I'm saying is to make money in this regime, in this market, it's fundamentals and you've really got to know what's happening with the story.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. You're not buying any piece of garbage because some – because people are excited about it. That's not the point. I'm starting to get this more and more and we have some new guys that we brought into the firm that are helping me with it, too. It's – you don't just buy any piece of garbage but you recognize the importance of what everyone sort of believes about everything and what they react to and respond to. And then you become – then you realize one day – you probably realized this years before me. You're looking at all this fundamental data and you've got your models or whatever it is, and then you realize all the stuff that's a fact is history. And the story that's happening today will generate the fundamental data for the future that hasn't happened yet. So, the story is happening now. The fundamental data is coming in the future. Right?

Ben Hunt:                    No, that's right. And so, the important thing, though, Dan, is to keep your faith. And this is the old saying about investors and it's so true: You can't and you shouldn't change your stripes. If you're a value investor, you're a value investor. That's who you are. The trick is to not "Oh, I'm going to become this mo-mo guy and start doing meme stocks." It's not about that at all. It's about adjusting – I'll say coping with just the way of the world. And it's totally legit if you say, "You know what? It's just not – it's fun for me or it's not rewarding enough for me, so I'm just going to get out." That's totally legit. But to stay in and to stay true to yourself, it's a matter of "How do I arm myself with the monitor, the way of seeing the world so that what I do can still matter and so that I can still be in the world without being of this crazy world?"

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, I –

Corey McLaughlin:    I like that.

Dan Ferris:                 I won't say I'm – I won't go A.A. Milne and I'm alone and afraid in a world never made. Or was that E.E. cummings? I forget.

Ben Hunt:                    I think it was E.E. cummings, but that's awfully good.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, I don't know if I'll go quite that far, but I didn't make this – I didn't make those multiples go up over – since the late '90s and I have to adjust to it. And it's like you say, you're allocating capital or you're publishing ideas that – for that purpose, so you have to do it in the world that you're in. Tony Deden wrote him neat piece recently. He talked about – he's hardcore. He says, "We live in a world where –" he says, "We need value, not valuation."

Ben Hunt:                    Yes. Right.

Dan Ferris:                 And that's true.

Ben Hunt:                    I love that.

Dan Ferris:                 I think what you're saying and what I'm saying is that you need to understand the influences of that valuation. You need to understand what keeps those multiples high in the past 30 years. And you need to understand all those are – they're great businesses. Sometimes, yeah, they're going to trade for 40 times earnings or 50 times earnings. You don't – we don't – we recommended Costco a while back and it hit 50 or 60 times earnings recently. We don't say sell it. I would have done that 15 years ago. I would have said, "Costco isn't worth 60 times earnings." But we don't do that now.

Ben Hunt:                    So, I love that, Dan. So, valuation is story. Value is your north star. And you've got to have a code. As an investor, as a human being, you've got to be true to that. And you'll find other people who share that – those values, the values of value. So, I love the differentiation between value and valuation. Valuation is story. You just need to be aware of it. You need to be aware of the world in which we live if you're going to, if you want to stay a participant to make money. And valuation is story; value is your code, your north star. And you've got to be authentic to that.

Dan Ferris:                 So, let's talk – how do you – there have to be some steps or an outline or a point or a recipe. How do you go about finding the story that – what stories work is what I want to say.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, give us a taste of how you do this, apply this.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah.

Ben Hunt:                    There's thousands of stories, guys. It's "We're bullish on financials." I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm bearish on financials, but let's say the story is "Bullish on financials." There's a million ways – or, no, there are not a million ways. There are a dozen scripts for any kind of story. That's a fascinating thing. I mean, whether you're talking about movies, whether you're talking about TV shows, whether you're talking about books, any sort of storytelling, there are typically about a dozen scripts for any genre. And so, it's the same script just applied to a different ticker or a different set of actors if we're – or, a different plot device if we're talking about movies or books.

                                    So, it's – there is a constancy to what we call the semantic signature. The arc. The story arc. There is a consistency to a couple of dozen scripts about anything you want to talk about. And so, the trick is to identify, well, what – where are we in the script? Where are we in the story arc? Which story is in heavy rotation? Which story is popular right now? Oil prices. There'll be periods of time where you'll see it in the media. The story is "What's OPEC doing? What's OPEC doing? What's OPEC+ doing? "Then there'll be periods of time where the story around oil is "Oh, what's demand? What's the marginal demand coming out of China for oil?" And that's the story that drives it. Then there will be periods of time where "Oh, well, everyone knows that strong dollar – there's this this inverse relationship between oil and the dollar."

                                    The trick is, again, is not losing your north star, what you think is important. It's understanding what story is the market valuing right now? Are you in favor or out of favor with your views? And when you're out of favor, you lay low. When you're in favor, your view is going to work. So, that's what we track. We try to track what story arc, whether you're talking about a commodity, whether you're talking about equities, whether you're talking about a sector, whether you're talking about credit, whether you're talking about a currency, what are the stories that matter right now? What are the stories that you want to be looking for? Because when your story starts to work, that's when you want to be able to press your position.

                                    So, that's the kind of stuff we do. And it really involves reading everything in the world and then analyzing it for the presence of these story arcs. Again, we call them these semantic signatures. It's not word search. It's not sentiment. That stuff just doesn't work. It really doesn't work. But what's possible today is to really look at meaning, to look at the underlying story and the arc of that story, the beginning, middle, and end, and you can really track where you are on these stories, track what's waxing, what's waning, and then figure out "Well, this story is good for me, this story isn't," and react to that. That's what we do.

Dan Ferris:                 It's – to track stories in the manner you describe sounds insanely complicated to me.

Ben Hunt:                    It's – it requires massive scale, which is why we process hundreds of billions of tokens, because we're taking in tens of millions of documents, and the key to running this on any [large language model ("LLM")] is you have to take that genie – and that's what these AI programs are. They're genies – but you have to stuff it in the bottle. You cannot let it go out on its own. The way to make this really meaningful, meaning you ask it the same question with the same data and you'll get the same answer, which doesn't happen when you just do AI chat. You'll get different answers at different periods – is it right? You've got to stuff it in a bottle. You've got to carefully give it the amount the text it's allowed to look at. You have to tell it how to think. This is the crazy one: You can't let it just go off on its own in any way, shape, or form. You've got to keep that bottle, that genie tightly contained inside the bottle. If you do that, you can apply it at massive scale. It's actually not that complicated, Dan. You're basically just looking for all the ways you could say the words – say, "I'm bullish." And that's what these AI programs are really good at, all the different ways you could say something as a probabilistic approach. The issue is it's just massive scale, unbelievable scale, which is why we process hundreds of billions of tokens.

Dan Ferris:                 I see. So, in other words, hypothetically speaking, you might – you feed your AI bot, your LLM with all the news that you sort of like and wanted to know and all of the financial data that you wanted to know. And when you're talking about stuffing the genie into that bottle and not letting it just do what it – you're not letting it run free around the internet, because as you said, you'll get a different answer every 10 minutes.

Ben Hunt:                    Oh my God, that's the worst possible thing you could do. The crucial thing, Dan, is think of an AI as an operating system. Think of it as an operating system. It's not the application. You're not asking it any sort of open-ended questions. You want to treat it like a linguistic calculator. So, you don't give it lots of information. You give it little bitty snippets of information at a time. And you – again, this is the weirdest one to kind of wrap your head around: You only allow it to think certain thoughts. And that's really weird to say, and it takes a while to program the operating system where it is only allowed to think certain thoughts. But if you can do that, you feed it a chunk of text at a time, you only allow it to think certain thoughts about that chunk of text, and then you have a whole other system that goes back and judges how it did to make sure it didn't somehow sneak off on its own and do some thinking on its own.

                                    If you can do that, you can actually get at scale precise measurements of how loud these different storylines are at any given time about any given financial thing. It's wild. Any language. So, we do Chinese domestic language and – this is one of the cool things, is the AI doesn't care what language. If it's trained on a language, it's not translating the language. It's actually reading that text for meaning in Mandarin or in German or whatever. So, it's incredibly powerful. Incredibly powerful. You can read everything in the world for meaning but you've got to keep that genie in the bottle or it'll go off on its own and give you all sorts of crazy stuff.

Dan Ferris:                 You determine for it what constitutes meaning.

Ben Hunt:                    Exactly. The human – you never ask the AI "What's the story?" or "What's the narrative?" A human tells the AI "Here are the stories." And you break it down into these little components again. This is what I mean by telling the AI what it is allowed to think about. And that comes from the human and that's the whole crux of this.

Dan Ferris:                 All right. Ben, we've actually arrived at time for our final question. I feel like we should have done a special two-hour Ben Hunt episode here. But it's been fascinating. I realize I'm a little behind in my Epsilon Theory, so I'm going to have to just spend a half a day on your site.

Ben Hunt:                    Come on.

Dan Ferris:                 I – the question that I'm going to ask is the same final question for every guest, no matter what the topic. Occasionally we have a nonfinancial guest and they get this identical question. And it's simply – it's for listeners benefit. If you could leave them with one takeaway or one thought today, what would you like that to be?

Ben Hunt:                    I think about this a lot. Honestly, I do. I do. What I would ask every reader to do is to – we are all inundated with people giving us messages and stories. We are immersed in storytelling. And it doesn't mean they're a lie. But it means that people are intentionally telling us a certain story to try to get us to believe. This happens in politics. This happens in – certainly in markets. We are told stories all the time. And that's fine. That's just the way of the world. What I'm asking everyone to do, and it's not easy, is to maintain some critical distance to recognize that you're being told a story.

                                    So, I think the most important question that anybody can ask whenever they read a story, whenever they read anything in the news, is to ask themselves "Why am I reading this now?" It just gives you a little bit of critical – it lets you step back a little to say – you're not saying it's a lie. You're not saying "They're telling me this lie. It's just your narrative, man." Just accept that these are all going to be stories, but it's maintaining a critical distance so you don't take it into your heart. "Why am I reading this now?" If you just ask yourself that story, that question about everything you read, I find that helps a lot to stay true to your own north star, your own value and values, and not get sucked into the storytelling. That's what I would like everyone to do.

Dan Ferris:                 Perfect. I love that. "Why am I reading this now?" I've heard you said that before. If I thought about it, I would have kind of nudged you. But that's perfect. Yeah. "Why am I reading this now?" Thanks for that. And thanks for being here, Ben. We are not going to wait years until the next time we have you back.

Ben Hunt:                    Fantastic. Look forward to it, Dan. Really appreciate it.

Dan Ferris:                 Yeah, thank you.

                                    Well, that was great. I love that guy. He's brilliant and he looks at the world a totally different way. And to really milk a good interview with Ben, I feel like we should have a two- or three-parter, just do an hour or two and put it out three weeks in a row or two weeks in a row or something because there's a lot there.

Corey McLaughlin:    Yeah, I totally agree. To hear from somebody who really is leaning into narrative as a strategy in the market is something you don't hear very often.

Dan Ferris:                 And he's been doing it for years.

Corey McLaughlin:    I know. But it's still – you don't hear people kind of admit that or get to where he is too much. So, that was fascinating to hear for me. And the important part – a couple of important things stood out to me, but the risks in credit, the AI power deficiency, I'll call it, and then just his approach to markets overall beyond that. But the two things now – I mean, the credit the credit stuff is – you see it. We're seeing it a little bit more – I don't know, it feels like more frequently, the risk popping up. So, it's definitely – it's on my radar.

Dan Ferris:                 Right. Ben was saying, well, it'll probably be a few more months till the next cockroach creeps out of the woodwork in credit. But I tried to interject there and make the point, literally the stuff happens overnight. He's talking about funding, and "funding" is such a benign, soft kind of a word, isn't it? Funding. Oh, it sounds like your dad's going to send you on a nice vacation or something. Funding. Ooh. And yet it's like – it's brutal. It's absolutely dog-eat-dog brutal. You show up for work. You work for Bear Stearns in March of 2008, and you show up for work and you pick up the phone and they say, "You're done. Not another penny." And you're out of business. It's – and for those shoes to drop, they can drop any moment, any day. Any day you can wake up and see that story.

Corey McLaughlin:    Right. And the thing about it now is – he was talking about how private credit – or, the private markets are where to look for some of this. And the thing is with them, though, the public's not primed for – doesn't generally have exposure to that. So, when you hear of some private company or private firm going bust for whatever reasons, it's even more shocking to the everyday person at that point. And I don't know, I was just thinking about how this could play out in the next – in the private world, because it's all credit-related but in different forms. It seems – he talked about '08 and '09 and then now. So, yeah, it'll be interesting. But hopefully – we had a little uplift there towards the end to about how to navigate this.

Dan Ferris:                 I know. Yeah. Yep. And I didn't mean – when I said, "Geez, you're bringing me down," I was really kind of half joking or whatever.

Corey McLaughlin:    I know.

Dan Ferris:                 But sort of Ben took up the challenge, too, and helped us out, because my thought now is that I used to worry a lot about a bear market, a steep bear market followed by a big sideways market, and I've beat the history of that to death for anybody who reads the Stansberry Digest or The Ferris Report. And now I'm thinking, well, what if things play out sort of like the dot-com bust, which wasn't a major systemic financial crisis that was threatening to wreck the world? It was just a tech bubble that blew up. And it was a big bubble, but it was a tech bubble. And – tech, telecom. And then there was also a – there was a credit component to it. It was like the best moment in the world in 2002 or so to buy junk bonds. But it didn't wreck the financial system. You know what I'm saying?

                                    And maybe we get more these targeted sort of blow-ups and maybe the market just kind of doesn't overwhelm us with 20% a year for the next three out of five years or whatever it's been for the last five or so, rather than being a big crisis and a big bear market. I'm ready for anything. I've always been ready for – and I've counseled readers to be ready for anything. But Ben was inspiring to me. And I will admit to anybody that I've been floundering a bit because I've staked my whole life on doing financial-focused fundamental research, like balance sheets and – financial statement research, basically, and saying, "Well, this is a good business and I can prove that because it has a great financial history, and it's trading for 18 times earnings instead of 22 or whatever. So, let's buy it." But now I'm changing. And talking to people like Ben helps me through that. It really does. And I think we've got some other guests coming up who are going to talk also about AI and how they use it in their business to find investments and stuff. So, I'm excited and inspired and I'm going to take all that excitement and inspiration and try to do something with it for our listeners and for readers of The Ferris Report and I know you'll probably put it in the Digest yourself.

                                    But that was awesome. I love talking with Ben Hunt. The guy's brilliant. So, that's another interview, and that's another episode of the Stansberry Investor Hour. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we really, really, truly did.

Announcer:                 Opinions expressed on this program are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Stansberry Research, its parent company, or affiliates.