AIPIS 165 - Speculator and the International Man with Doug Casey

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It's my pleasure to welcome a returning guest and that is Mr. Doug Casey. He's founder and chairman of Casey Research. He's author of several books, including his new book, his first novel called Speculator High Ground. And it's great to have him coming to us from a place where I was just a few days ago, coincidentally. And that is beautiful. Aspen, Colorado. Doug, welcome. How are you?

Good, Jason. And as we were talking before, I wish that I'd known you were here. We could have done this in person. It would have been nice to have sat down and had lunch with you.

That would have been a lot of fun. Darn it. I wish we would have been able to sync that up. But it'll have to happen next time.

Well, maybe the next time you can visit me in Argentina.

Either one.

I'll be going a couple weeks from now.

That would be fantastic as well. So this is your first novel, Doug. I mean, you don't write fiction. What's this all about? A fiction work, huh? And I guess it's going to be a series, right?

It is. This book is called Speculator. It was just released a couple weeks ago and I'm very, very happy with it. It's the first of a series of six novels that will reform the unjustly besmirched reputation of six very politically incorrect occupations. This is kind of taking it on a shallow gradient because nobody likes speculators, but nobody really hates them either. The other occupations are things that people really don't like. But I'm trying to show people that you can be a good guy and engage in them and that most people believe things just because they hear conventional thinking over and over again. Anyway, in this book, our hero, Charles Knight is 23 years old and we show how he turns a little bit of money. He's a high school dropout, but intentionally not, because he's not smart. How he turns a little bit of money $10,000 into $200 million over the course of just a matter of months. He's quite the speculator but it's possible. And the way he does it is he gets lucky, frankly, because luck is an element buying the right mining stock. After some research, then he does further research, going to Africa, which is where the mine is located, to check it out in person. And there he finds out that that's how he takes the million dollars that he's turned his 10,000 into and into 200 million. And he gets involved in a bush war with child soldiers and the whole thing. And now it's. I've spent a reasonable amount of time in Africa in my life. So they say that the first, your first novel is autobiographical. And in many ways this one is excellent.

Very interesting. So what are the six occupations that have a bad name? Are they types of speculators or is speculator just one of them?

Our hero, Charles Knight becomes a speculator. And the book talks about many things. About the mining industry, about gold, about economics. It's in some ways an Atlas Shrugged look alike. But I've stayed away from the hundred page speeches. So after that and what happens to the $200 million? I don't want to disclose that. Now he moves on to his next occupation, which is drug lord. And of course everybody hates drug lords. They're supposed to be horrible people, right? But this book, which is now almost done, talks about the drug business, legal and mostly illegal, talks about the morality of moving drugs, how it's done so forth. And roughly the same thing happens to him again. So he then becomes an assassin. And most people think, well, an assassin, that's got to be a very bad person.

I love this novel already. This is great.

But frankly, I've long been of the opinion there's some people that just need killing. And this is why I decided to do this in novels as opposed to nonfiction. Because there are a lot of things that you can say in fiction that you really don't dare say in nonfiction.

Nonfiction, sure, sure, absolutely.

So that discusses the techniques and the history and especially the morality of. Of assassination.

Yeah, very interesting. Moves on. Okay, what's his next story?

From there to becoming a terrorist, which is actually just a method of warfare, right?

Just one man's freedom fighter. One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Got, Got it.

Yeah, that's exactly right. That's going to be quite interesting too. So number five, he goes back to the country in Africa where he starts out in speculator and becomes a warlord. And in the process of that I talk about my hobby, which is going to these backward third world countries and talking to the president, preferably a military dictator, about how he can turn his sh t hole country into a Singapore on steroids. So that's the sub theme of that book. And the last book is perhaps too outrageous to even mention now.

The last profession.

Actually, there might be a seventh book after the sixth book. The seventh one will be called you can profit from the coming collapse of Western Civilization, which is about World War Three. So anyway, I urge your listeners to start out with Speculator. It's available on Amazon. It's a great read. Some people have already told me that it's really changed their life. It's changed the way they look at things and so forth. So it's highly recommended.

Now, Doug, let me ask you. You talk about the six different callings that Charles Knight. And you know, I guess it's like who is John Galt? Who is Charles Knight? Right. That he takes up. Is it one in each book? So Speculator is the first one and you only cover that one adventure, that one career in per book. Right. Okay, got it. I think I only counted five. Did you not want to say the last one? Is that what you meant or was that the seventh or. I'm just dying.

Some of your read might be too intimidated by turns out that. But I'll tell you number six is Antichrist, where it turns out that Charles is the Antichrist, but he's a very good guy, very positive guy that makes things better in the world. And of course this is. I'm well known as being a non believer and that book takes apart Christianity and Islam. Not going to be popular with religious types. Right. But they can read the first five books with no problem.

There you go. Yeah.

And the seventh one as well.

So do you have a seventh career or. No, that's just going to be the collapse is what. What it's talking about. Right. Maybe the seventh one.

Yes, yes. And that's going to be excellent too. It'll be World War Three, but it'll be World War three where only the bad guys die. And that relates back to book two, which is Drug Lord. So these things were all tied together in a series. Let's say that Speculator is the first of a series that will be like Harry Potter for adults.

Very interesting. Very interesting. Well, Doug, I want to go back in your career. This is fascinating that you're now in the nonfiction world. I can't wait to read and hear more about all these stories. That's a fascinating journey of Charles Knight. Your first book, I believe it was, your first book was entitled International man, wasn't it?

It was, yeah.

Okay, that was in the what, the early Sevent. That's kind of a famous book.

I mean, you know, that book came out. Let me see. I wrote that book in 1976. It was published in 1977 and it sold a lot of copies around the world. But most interesting, it was the largest selling book in the history of Rhodesia, of all places. And I went there after it was published in the U.S. i went there and this was at the height of the war. I was the only foreign tourist that was there that was not heavily armed, I promise you. Found a publisher in Harare, which is. It was Salisbury then. And we got along and you know, I became a kind of a national celebrity in Rhodesia at that time. And interestingly enough, I've been back to Rhodesia and Zimbabwe numerous times since then. I was just there actually the last time about three months ago where I was talking with all the government officials. I was supposed to have been able to meet with Mugabe, but unfortunately he was in Singapore at the time. And of course Mugabe is a world class criminal, which most of the people that run African countries are. But these guys are very interesting to me personally, I promise you.

Do you have a thought on why that is the case that, you know, most of the people running African countries are criminals? Because it's an amazing continent, you know, with a abundant natural resources and flat or steadily declining GDP of virtually every country. Chaos in some tribal warlords. You know, what's the problem with Africa? How do you fix it? Why are these guys all criminals?

A big problem is that when the Europeans conquered the continent during the 19th century, they divided it up arbitrarily in their boardroom so that all of these countries in Africa are completely artificial constructs. None of them, none of them are real countries. They all have numerous different tribes with different ethnicities and different languages and different cultures. And half of a tribe might be in one country divided by a border and the other half is in the other country. And in the same country maybe there are seven or eight tribes. And they all want to get control of the government because these governments are all very socialist oriented. They all want to get control of the government so they can get control of the piggy bank and reward their friends. So it's the land of coups for that reason. And when one guy gets in office, he tries to become a real dictator so he can stay in office. And that's often a very brutal thing. So I blame most of it on the Europeans, quite frankly. If the Europeans had not conquered the continent, but had just traded with it. I think it would have developed naturally and faster and there would be hundreds of countries in Africa. Not just. Well, there's about 50. I think 53. It depends on whether we want to count the Arab countries in North Africa too. But that's why. But that's the way it is. Every single country in Africa is corrupt. Absolutely. Every single one I'm looking for. Some are much better than others, obviously.

Sure.

But they all problematical.

Right, right. The issue of South Africa, I mean, you could even put that in. In the same boat now, at least the issue of the socialist. I mean, I don't even know if I could call it socialist. That's why I'm struggling for words where you've got to put, you know, certain races on your boards of directors. And this is crazy. I mean, that's just. Business has got to be just fleeing from that, I would assume. You know, I was there, what, about nine years ago? What a beautiful place, for sure. But what a mess. I mean, just a mess they've got over there. And, you know, businesses are not going to tolerate that kind of stuff. You know, it's not a good thing.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know exactly how it's going to end. I mean, the good news is that, as Ray Kurzweil says, the world itself is moving towards what he calls the Singularity, where everything from artificial intelligence to robotics to space exploration to artificial reality, and especially biotechnology and nanotechnology, they're advancing in Moore's Law. So even these horrible backward places in Africa are going to benefit from that. But on the other hand, in Africa, when you get into the government, it's with one thing to steal. Steal as much as you possibly can and send as much of that money as you can to Europe or to the Orient or the US So that it's out of the country. So I don't know what's going to happen. I can say this, though, Jason. It's that if I was Charles Night's age and I wanted to make my fortune, I would definitely go to Africa. And one of the things that I'm talking about in Speculator is that, well, a theory of education. I find it most unfortunate that most young people today want to go to college, and actually most of them do go to college in the United States. And I find this a ridiculous misallocation of four years of their time and a whole bunch of their money, maybe enough to keep them in debt for.

The rest of Their lives. It's an absurd amount of money that you could just buy a house. There are tens of millions of Gen Y kids now that either have or will have mortgage, but they don't have a house. What a scam. I mean, college has been. It's just an epic, epic scam. And Doug, I tell you, this is a government created problem. Because when the government started insuring student loans, you know, classic definition of an inflation, this tidal wave of money was coming at these disgusting, greedy universities with these professors that work 12 hours a week and they just sat there and said, hey, let's hire a branding and marketing agency to bring more students in. Let's build a really cool food court and a gym so all these students will want to come here and get in debt to the tune of 100 grand. I mean, it's just disgusting. It's unbelievable. If the government would get out of insuring those student loans, the price would have to drop and there would be a legitimate supply and demand market.

No, you're absolutely correct. But it's even worse than that, of course, because all the universities are so thoroughly insinuated with political correctness.

It's disgusting.

And the courses, I mean, most people when they go to college today don't take engineering or science or math or hard things like that. They take English literature or sociology or gender studies and these things.

How many people are hiring for those things? Let me see. Doug, I don't remember placing an ad on Craigslist for a gender studies expert.

No, it's a complete waste of four years of time and a whole bunch of money. In fact, it's worse than a waste because then your mind is cluttered up, filled with things that have to be shoveled out like manure in a stable. It's really quite awful. So this is why my hero drops out of school in high school, right?

Right now it really is. I mean, it's just a mess. The whole college thing is unbelievable. If it were 1980, I would tell someone to go to college. But today you got to figure it out yourself and get your education on your own. And you know what? You can do it at Khan Academy for free. I mean, I donate, my foundation donates to Khan Academy every year. I love what they do. There are other organizations like that. The scam seems to be in the cooperation that corporate America is doing with colleges and the accreditation scam. Why is it that we can't just have literally like one set of professors to teach the entire planet over the Internet? Their content is endlessly scalable and they could be tested online with a learning management system. And literally you could have a small group of professors teach the entire planet every piece of knowledge they ever needed to know. And it could be free. It could be free. You could run this for almost nothing. It's amazing.

Yeah, you're absolutely correct. I mean, whenever I drive anywhere in my car, I always put a disc in from the teaching company where they've already put together the best professors in the world that are giving command performances in what they know best.

I listen to a lot of their things. I know I like their content. That's good.

Yeah. So, no, you're absolutely correct, but I think that they're not a credit university system. It's on its way out.

Yeah, Yeah. I can't. I can't wait till. Good, good. They'll hold on to their power as long as they can, though, I tell you. There's a lot of entrenched interest there. But I want to get back to the international man and just have you, Doug, because that's a fascinating strategy that you promulgated way back in 1976, 1977, the international man strategy. I just want you to share that with our audience just for a moment. What is the basic idea behind it? You plant your flags in different jurisdictions. Right. What do you do and why do you do it? Just give us a super quick overview of that, if you would.

Okay. Well, we can approach it from a number of points of view, but here's the thing. It's that if you're a normal middle class American, you have a certain background, a certain amount of money, a certain education, certain attitudes and so forth, but you're just like millions and millions of other people in your age cohort. So you have no real marginal advantage. However, if you transplant yourself to a different country, you're going to be unique. And the whole idea with trying to be a speculator or a proper investor even is to not be on a level playing field, but get on a uneven playing field where it's tilted to your advantage. So that's why you want to be an international man. That's why you want to travel. For instance, if somebody did what Charles does and goes to Africa, for instance, he's going to find he's not one among millions. He's going to find that he's just about unique wherever he goes. So he'll meet interesting different people and they'll be happy to see him. So it's a fantastic way to get a leg up. You know, I was first introduced to this concept by a guy in Washington, D.C. that I met and got to know. His name was Yehuda Ben Yehuda. And he told me back then when I was just out of college, I wish I'd seen him and met him in high school. He said, look, if you go to the Gold coast and spend five years there, you'll have 5% of everything going into the country and everything leaving the country at the end of that time. And I thought about that. I never forgot what he said. And I've tried to put that theory into practice. And there are other reasons for internationalizing yourself, too. It's that most people have all of their assets under the control of one government, and your government treats you like a milk cow. That's what your taxes are all about. You're a milk cow. And if times get tough, and they do in countries from time to time, I mean, in Russia in the teens and Germany in the 30s, and China and the 50s, things get tough and they'll turn you into a beef cow. So you want to diversify politically, not just even financially.

So how do you do that? When you say diversify, I mean, what are. You made it really simple. Like, there are five. Are there five things you do or. You outlined that in the International Man. What. What are those things?

First thing you want to do is get some type of a foothold outside of your native country. And that's becoming very, very hard for Americans in particular, because the first thing, it's extremely difficult.

I mean, Obama has made it almost impossible as an American. I mean, look, Doug, you and I have both traveled extensively. I've been to 80 countries now. 8. 0. If you're an American, you try to open a bank account somewhere else. They don't want to do business with you. It's just they're under too much pressure from our government in America not to take American accounts. It's interesting. You know, we as Americans always thought we had the advantage, but in a lot of ways, we don't anymore. We are really disadvantaged in a lot of ways because of our overbearing government.

You're right. You try to open up a brokerage account or a bank account in a foreign country, you'll find it's probably impossible. So it's getting harder and harder to do this. But one thing you can do, of course, as you can buy foreign real estate, that's still possible by transferring the money for the property directly to the seller. And that's also important because, you know, if for any of a number of reasons, you want to leave the US And I'm afraid that when the economy collapses, and it's in the process of collapsing right now, in my opinion, we're going back into the trailing edge of the gigantic financial hurricane we entered in 2007, and we're leaving the eye of the storm.

I wouldn't disagree with you on that because I do think there is another shoe to drop, and I've talked about that a lot on my show. But before you go too much further and, you know, please, I'm going to let you get back to everything you're saying. I just want to talk to you about the real estate thing for a moment. We have investors that invest all over the United States with my real estate investment company. And, you know, Doug, I have tried. I have looked at real estate in five Eastern European countries. I mean, I know you work a lot with Agora. I've met with Agora people around the world, whether it be in Panama, in Eastern Europe, in Western Europe. I've looked at properties just everywhere, and I cannot believe, number one, how expensive they are compared to American real estate is actually quite cheap when you're looking in reasonable linear markets like Atlanta and Indianapolis and Memphis and Dallas. Well, Dallas isn't even that cheap anymore, but Houston's still pretty good. American real estate is a lot less expensive. You know, here I'm looking at. I'm out looking at real estate in Romania right after they got into the eu, And I'm thinking, oh, well, this is going to be a great deal. And I went to Bansko, and I went to. That's Bulgaria, and I went to all these different places. And I mean, it's just our supply chains are so much more mature here, you know? And I know you may totally disagree with me on this, but I think we have much better rule of law, we have much better infrastructure in the U.S. i would be buying foreign real estate all day long if I could. I mean, I've looked at all the stuff people are promoting in Belize, and I just think it kind of sucks. I don't know, am I just wrong about this? Am I missing something?

Well, I think you're right in a lot of ways. I think the thing to remember is this. It's that the US in relative terms, I mean, the whole world's been going up in absolute terms in terms of wealth and civilization and all this forever, quite frankly. But since the US hit its peak in the 1950s, it's been going down relative to the rest of the world. It's now kind of like that idiot Thomas Friedman wrote, he was quite correct in some respects that he said the world is flat.

Right.

And that's increasingly the case today.

I never understood why Bill Bonner hates Thomas Friedman. I mean, I've had Bill on the show and I love his stuff. But I don't know, it does seem like the world is flatter. Right. We communicate across, you know, I mean there's lots of examples of that.

Sure, Jeff, jet planes can take you to the other side of the planet in 12 hours. You can call anybody in the world for free on your computer. No, absolutely. The world is flat in a lot of ways. But that doesn't mean that there still aren't little bumps along the way. Like for instance, during the southern summer, which is the northern winter in the northern hemisphere. I live in Argentina now. I have an apartment down there which is in the best part of town. It's a two story penthouse, really elegant type of thing that they don't build anymore.

Where is that? Is that Buenos Aires?

Buenos Aires, yeah, yeah, I know.

And you have your 14 foot ceilings, I know you told us about. Yeah, all that stuff. But I looked at properties in Buenos Aires after the crash and I thought they were very expensive.

Well, that apartment is worth a little bit more now, but I got it for a million dollars. If I wanted that apartment in New York, it cost $20 million.

New York is absurd. I mean, that's all that's propped up by Mafia, Wall Street. Mafia money. Well, because Wall street is the modern organized crime.

I think it's just as enjoyable living in Buenos Aires as it is in New York. And at some point when Argentina, which used to be at times in the past the most expensive country in the world, when it comes back into fashion, that apartment's going to sell for the same price as it's look alike in New York.

Really? Wow.

Okay, so that's the point that I'm making. For instance, in Argentina you can buy a 100,000 acre ranch and you might pay a million, $2 million for it. Try to buy 100,000 acres in the US for a million or $2 million. And property titles are as strong in Argentina as stronger. Stronger than they are in the US So these things are fashionable, they change. Now, right now where are there bargains in the world? Unfortunately, I don't see any bargains anywhere in the world today.

I remember you talking about all the apartments you were buying in Egypt last time we. Or maybe the first time we had you on the show.

Now that one, everything doesn't work Out. Well, and what we were doing was we were looking to buy apartments. Belle epoch apartments, built 100 years ago. Beautiful, you know, wonderful apartments, almost for free because they were rent controlled. But the situation devolved so badly in Egypt with the, you know, the new dictatorship and everything, that we just had to pull the plug on that for loss of capital. But, you know, if it hadn't worked out right, it would have been a 10 to 1 shot. So there are things like that that come up from time to time. Sure.

Yeah. Interesting.

This is the whole point of trying to diversify things internationally is that you'll find things like that elsewhere in the world where there may not be anything that is particularly appealing here in the US People's got to stop thinking like medieval peasants.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look at the big picture. I definitely agree with you there. Okay, so establish a FOOTHOLD Outside the U.S. we talked about the real estate thing, and then it's almost impossible to get a second passport if you're an American. Now, that's pretty tough, you know, at least if you weren't born in another country that has good dual citizenship laws, and many of them don't. That's one of the international man things, right?

It is. You'll probably have to live in a foreign country anywhere from two to five years. But there are several countries that do have economic citizenships. They're not cheap. They cost from 125,000 to about a million dollars, depending on the quality of the passport. But it's a wise thing to do if you can afford it.

Yeah. Okay. Anything else on the international man strategy? Did you. In that strategy, did you talk about banking and planting, you know, banking in one jurisdiction, having your passport in another, having your company in another? You know, any of that stuff you want to mention as we just wrap it up?

Well, those things are all important to do. So what people have to do is start investigating this, and they have to get on an airplane and actually get boots on the ground and gain firsthand knowledge of these things. So it's good to know about these things intellectually, but then you have to actually do it in the real world or you could be in a lot of trouble in the next few years.

Very interesting. So, Doug, just as we wrap up here, can you tell us about the other shoe to drop? The. You know, how we're on the beginning of the next crash, but it's sort of the tail end of the last crisis. What do you mean by that?

We entered this gigantic storm in 2007. All of the governments of the world, not just the Americans, but the Chinese, the Europeans, the Japanese and all the little countries printed trillions and trillions of currency units up, mostly to bail out failing financial institutions. Now they've reduced interest rates to zero or below. There's nothing else they can do. And the economy is cyclically falling apart again. But this time it's going to be much different and much worse and last much longer than what we saw in 2008 and 2009. Because this time we may be looking at some serious wars. Not just little sport wars like Afghanistan and Iraq, but serious wars against anyone from the Russians to the Chinese to the Iranians. Not just with the US too. I mean, there are other countries that are on the narrow edge. So this is very scary.

Yeah. So if we have a war, which, you know, hopefully, hopefully we won't, but unfortunately there's a huge financial incentive to have wars. So as long as the central banks are in there, we're never going to have peace until war becomes unprofitable. Ultimately, it is unprofitable for the people, but the big elites don't care about that. They just care about themselves. What would that look like? Would it just be inflationary? Would it be deflationary? I mean, there'd have to be more money printing. But we printed an awful lot of money so far and we haven't really seen. Seen much in the way of inflation. I think it will eventually come. I think it has to, but I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.

Well, the deflation could come because there's simply so much debt in the world and as the economy slows down, a lot of people aren't going to be able to service that debt and default on it. So a million dollar loan which represents somebody's asset dries up and blows away. That's a million dollars that ceases to exist. But it could be loans of a billion dollars or more as big companies get into trouble. So it could be deflationary for a while and then the governments print up more money because they actually believe that's a good idea. So I think one of the smartest things that people can do is to buy gold and hold it in their own personal possession.

But that's because the bet is inflationary. Right. That's why you would buy gold.

I think the bet is financial chaos. And the thing is that gold is the only financial asset that's not simultaneously somebody else's liability. So you don't have to trust anybody when you have gold. Right, right. That's going to be very important because you don't know it has intentional. You don't know what's going to happen to the currency. You don't know if the person holding your assets is going to go bankrupt. None of these things. And I can build an argument that gold in real terms is going a lot higher. So I think it's the best place to be. But the other thing I've got to mention, because I know we gotta go, Jason, is that in this chaotic atmosphere, and that's the only thing you can bet on with certainty is it's going to be chaotic. It's an atmosphere where everyone is going to be forced to be a speculator. It's going to be very hard to be a saver, very hard to be an investor. You're going to be forced to be a speculator capitalizing these bubbles that these central banks and governments are going to blow up. So most of the real wealth in the world will still be here. It's just going to change ownership. So it's wise to start thinking like a speculator, which is why I call that novel what I did.

Fantastic, Doug, give out your website and tell people where they can find out more about your work. Of course, the book Speculator is on Amazon, right? And all the other usual places, I'm sure.

Yeah, they can go to CaseyResearch.com or they can go to High Ground novels.com both.

Fantastic. Doug Casey, thank you so much for joining us.

Well, Jason, it's always a pleasure talking to you. I look forward to doing it again.

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