Marin Katusa, best-selling author of The Rise of America, joins Robert in the studio. Born and raised in Vancouver, what many call the epicenter of resource finance, Marin started his career as a calculus teacher.

Tell us about your background

“When all the rich people needed help with their kids in calculus, I was the guy that they would call because in four hours I could teach them what they learned in four months for their exam. And I also did this thing where I guarantee you a B or higher, or you get your money back. And people thought I was crazy, but it worked. Because I was able to speak the language of these kids, not the technical lingo that the profs would use. So, I'd look at these houses and go, what the hell am I doing wrong here? I've got scholarships and honors and a couple of degrees at that time. And I continued to get more degrees after. I'm like, this sucks. What am I doing wrong? I could never get ahead. And then really, one of the dads said, did you ever think of maybe leaving teaching? I'd like to hire you. And I was like, oh, what do you do? And then I learned about the stock market, and had no idea. Think about this, advanced math and the sciences through university, never was there anything mentioned of what these skillsets were used in to make money. It was always to get a job for ... become, like you say, the golden handcuffs in life.”

“So being in Vancouver, it was the resource sector. I met up early with a couple of big players, they saw my skillset, lived on the road. And lo and behold, almost 20 years later, here I am. I was lucky enough to get with some of the legends in the business, like the late Jim O'Rourke, who's a Canadian Hall of Famer, built more open-pit copper mines than anyone else in Canada. And he liked my style and he became my mentor, and together we founded and built Canada's third largest producing copper mine with one of my former professors for geology, Dr. Marc Bustin.

I convinced him to leave the university and we did something called Cuadrilla, which became Europe's largest shale play. Lord Brown, who used to run BP is now the chair of that and Centric and Riverstone. Some of the biggest funds in the world are shareholders of that. I guess, by going out there, and like you said, becoming a ... I lived on the road, I made massive sacrifices. You can't do this and then turn off your phone at four o'clock to go play with your buddies and go to the bar and go to watch the football and basketball and soccer and hockey. Massive sacrifices take. But I guess what I've really come to the conclusion is to make the best bang for your buck is to de-risk the assets and increase the odds in your favor. So that's been my framework.”

Why A students work for C students…Explain that principal idea

“It's a different skillset, when I look back at it growing up. And I would say that in most industries, right? Specifically in the unions. Unions based off Peter's Principle and how much time you've invested. But even in the entrepreneurial world, I can say that in the resource sector where there's some brilliant, brilliant people, but they're scared to take risks. And I understand that and appreciate it, but when you have the odds tilted to your favor, you do need to take risk to make the big score.”

“So, for example, about eight months ago, I went to a underground mine, which ended up becoming the highest grade producing gold mine in the world. And there's a geology part that I didn't understand, so what did I do? I phoned up, for that specific type of geology, who I thought was the best in the world and the most experienced. And he was so interested in it because that's what his specialty is. It's like taking the best soccer player in the world and asking him to play basketball. He isn’t going to do it. He's going to have no interest. But if you ask him to play with other all-stars in soccer, he'll love to do it.”

“And then the best part of it, Robert, is he was so into it that he wanted to invest his money in and make it a big bet. Then you're like, Ooh, there's something here. So that's how you can really get going in the sector.”

What is happening in Ottawa with the truck drivers?

“Even Elon Musk is cheering them on with you. So, look, it's a very well-organized platform. The medias try to make it ... like in any protest, you have a couple of idiots who show up with swastikas. But the media was just focusing on that one aspect. And then the government, the liberals were focusing on that one aspect. The average truck driver's a really good person. They were actually heroes because during the pandemic, when there were lockdowns in the first five months of COVID in 2020, there was still food moving around. That because of the truckers.”

“So, they sat there and said, hey, wait. Wait a second. We want some discussions. The government just dismissed them as redneck truckers. And they organized themselves very, very well. And if you actually do a little bit deeper research, you'll find out many of the people that worked within the Liberal party are now flipping towards supporting this convoy. So, the media is now starting to realize, oh, how do you as a judge make the law to no more honking? And how does the judge and the government pass these laws that are outside of the jurisdiction, where you're not allowed to bring fuel anymore to these truckers? They're trying everything.”

“And then the innovative and the organization is the farmers are coming along on their private land, delivering the fuel to these truck drivers. And it's being funded. They had to GoFundMe page; the government tried to take it down. They brought it back up. So, it's well organized. How it will end up, I have no idea, but it's real. It's a much bigger momentum than the current establishment expected. And I think what the media didn't expect and what the Liberal party did not expect is their own starting to publicly state that what they're doing isn't right.”

“So again, like we were talking before we went live, I look at all of these situations as catalysts for change. And when you see such bipolar media, bipolar politics, it really is like this, they're trying to create the anti-vaxxers as the bad guys in the community, not doing their part. And they're trying to suppress the whole individual freedom aspects. And then things that were conspiracy theory eight months ago and you'd be taken down on Twitter, are now being proven to be true. So why not let people speak? Why not let people make their own decisions. I'm a free market guy. I believe everyone should have their own choices, and be responsible for those choices, including the consequences to those choices.

“You look at all these different things, but at the end of the day, for me the political risk, you mentioned it, you found, you invested in this gold mine, the nationalization of the resources. And that's not just China, Robert, you're seeing it across the board. And yet the media's not picking up on this because they don't want to show what's happening in the left-leaning nations. And this isn't new in the copper world. People forget that in the late 1800s and early 1900s ... today Chile and Peru make up about 40% of the copper in the world for production annually. Just those two countries, 40%.”

“And here's the thing. In the late 1800s, early 1900s, when the Guggenheims went and built and created a monopoly in copper globally, then it became Kennecott, which today is Rio Tinto, the second largest mining company in the world. They had those assets in the early 1900s, then it got nationalized. Then it got de-nationalized. And now they're doing a new form of nationalization where they bring new taxes and new royalties. And they're changing the posts. All I try to remind investors; this is coming from a guy that's traveled the world and been there and done that. I know everyone in my game, in the resource sector. I am now more politically conscious, because the way the fund managers and the brokers, they don't assess political risk properly. You're telling me that a project in Africa or Argentina, Turkey should have a 5% discount? Meaning they're only discounting the value at a 5% discount. And that's what they're doing for Nevada.”

Selling Carbon Credits

“Historically, they used to say, this is a gold mine, because a gold mine was valuable. But what's the color of money? Everyone thinks green, right? So, if you think back even more ... and what we're doing is good things. And that's because I was involved in financing America's largest geothermal plant over a decade ago. And I started learning about out the sector and I saw where the bond market was going, cost to capital, pollution and all these different things. And as millennials were getting more powerful in their positions, and the boomers were decreasing in their importance, it's this shift that's going on. You see it in real time. It's just natural demographics.

I started realizing that, wait a second. Everyone talks about in the C-O-P, COP-21 in 2015 in Paris, it was going to be this, we're going to save the world. You had musicians, Bono, and Leonardo DiCaprio, all these good-looking people, and the media loved it. Media was all over it, right? Because it wasn't some scientist talking about data, like a guy like me, that bores people. It was Leonardo DiCaprio looking into the eyes of a journalist, and they were smitten by it so they wanted to spend more time. And it just, it became media hits. And they said the right things, but nothing happened, Robert. That's the key, nothing happened.”

“So even with the unlimited balance sheets of the UN, you're looking at unlimited balance sheets of the EU, putting billions of dollars in the sector. You had Hollywood, you had the media and journalists. Why did nothing happen? Because they didn't look at it from a capitalist perspective. If you go back to from 1215 with the Magna Carta, which is the fundamental ... set the Western world to the trajectory we are today. Give the rights to the people. Why is America so great? Why did America beat Russia? Actually, Russia, from a geological standpoint, technical standpoint, it's land has just as much gold and copper and oil and natural gas.”

“It's a very rich country, very big country. The people are also smart. They're very strong in academics. The difference was government control versus individual freedoms. And Warren Buffet, one thing that he is 100% true on, never bet against the American spirit. And Elon Musk is the living ... in our days, he's the living case study of that. You got to love his style, how he throws his finger to what he thinks is wrong and the bullshit that he has to deal with. And he's now going to be the all-time largest taxpayer, not just in America, but in the world. And he's going to keep doing it. He's going to keep innovating.”

Join Robert and Marin for part two of this topic at Rich Dad Radio Show.