In this week's Stansberry Investor Hour, Dan welcomes Craig Tindale to the show. Craig is a private investor with a keen perspective on economic and geopolitical analysis. He has more than 5,000 subscribers on Substack.

Craig kicks things off by discussing "hard bifurcation," a term he uses to refer to the U.S. importing its products instead of manufacturing them, creating dependencies on other countries. For instance, China has control over the precious metals the U.S. needs for defense. Craig looks at history to show why nations didn't trade crucial resources with rival nations... and how nations that did faced shortages during war. And he addresses how China could restrict our access to rare earth metals to slow down U.S. AI chip development...

If [the AI chips] get swapped out as soon as they're available, there's no way the Chinese can keep up because they just can't get those chips... At the moment, the Chinese are working on a 3,000-parameter AI on old chips, and our latest one I think is 10,000. If you do this swap in of these latest chips, and you have depreciation that's six or 12 months, you end up with a hundred-trillion-parameter model versus a Chinese one that can't get any better than 10... So the only way that the Chinese can block it is to say you can't have any rare earths... because we're refining it.

Next, Craig notes several gases the U.S. produces that serve as counters to China's choke points. The only thing that could impact them would be a breakdown in the supply chain. Craig says that the U.S. would need at least five years to build the overall industrial factories and infrastructure needed to match what China has. And while not economically viable, if a rare earth shortage did hit the U.S., we could recycle e-waste to produce the materials we need. Craig discusses the byproducts that come from mining production and how they impact other industries...

[As an example,] you haven't got any magnesium service providers... and you need that for titanium... There was a titanium plant in India they had to close down because they didn't have enough magnesium. And they used to import it from the U.S. So you got all these knock-on elements that that continue and continue – like whoever knew magnesium in the U.S. would affect titanium production in India?

Finally, Craig expresses his frustration at how policy and regulation have created more risk factors for shortages. He says that companies move their efforts to other countries where such restrictions are looser or nonexistent. And while most folks won't notice those changes, they'd feel the knock-on effects if anything were to impact operations wherever that manufacturing was happening. And Craig warns folks to become more resilient and self-sufficient to protect themselves against uncertainty...

I think we should all become more resilient, personally... If you go back thousands and thousands of years, [those people] were all focused on their personal resilience – whether they could heat their home, whether they could put food on their table. And now we've decided that we don't need that anymore. [We believe] everything's going to be in the supermarket and everything's going to be fine... I think it's good to be able to do practical things.

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

(Additional past episodes are located here.)

The transcript is coming soon.

This Week's Guest

Craig Tindale is a private investor with nearly 40 years of experience in software development, business strategy, and infrastructure planning, including in leadership positions at Telstra, Oracle, and IBM. Additionally, he has direct experience working in global supply chains from his time as the CEO and Asia Regional director for DataDirect Technologies. Most recently, he released the white paper "Critical Materials: A Strategic Analysis," which explores how the race for rare earths and the return of material constraints are shaping geopolitical relationships.