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Nov. 1, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:07:35
The International Man Doug Casey and Mike Adams talk elections, DOLLAR DEFAULT...
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Welcome to today's interview here on brighttown.com and I'm really honored to be joined today by someone who I have learned from over the years.
I've watched many of his videos and he is widely respected as an expert on commodities and also metals.
He's known as the International Man.
Doug Casey is his name.
His website is internationalman.com.
He's got a YouTube channel we'll talk about coming up and he joins us from South America at the moment.
Welcome, Mr.
Casey.
It's an honor to have you on today, sir.
Well, I appreciate that, but don't call me Mr.
Casey.
That was my father.
Okay.
All right, Doug.
It's an honor to have you on, and you are, I think, very widely regarded for your wisdom, your expertise in navigating these very difficult times in which we're living, especially on the financial side.
But for our audience, this is the first time you and I have spoken.
How would you give a summary of what you do to our audience?
Okay, well, I think I'm best known as an author, and my first book was called The International Man, a guidebook to making the most of your personal freedom and financial opportunity.
Among other things, that book was distinguished by being the largest selling book in the history of Rhodesia.
Really?
Wow.
Yes, and that is a record that will never be broken for obvious reasons.
My second book was called Crisis Investing, which was number one on the New York Times list.
Back when that meant something, it doesn't anymore.
I think 29 weeks or something like that.
The biggest selling book of the year.
And several other books since then.
And then, of course, I've written three novels subsequently, recently, because there are things that you can say in fiction that perhaps you'd best not say in nonfiction.
So I do that, and I have a weekly blog at internationalman.com.
It's a very good thing with lots of Other good writers, like David Stockman is a friend of mine, writes there every week, among others.
And what else do I do?
I have a YouTube channel.
But mainly what I do personally is speculate in the markets, and I specialize in commodities and small resource stocks.
Well, that's interesting.
So that's the story.
Okay, alright.
So let me give out your YouTube channel.
It's called Doug Casey's Take here on YouTube.
Easy for people to find.
And then one of the novels you mentioned here, I've got it on Audible.
It's called Speculator High Ground Book One.
I think this is a series you have.
And then back to your main website, internationalman.com.
So you must be getting...
A lot of messages from people lately, given what's happening to gold and silver.
All-time highs.
But the mainstream public is not panicking to purchase gold and silver like they were after the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank a little more than a year and a half ago.
So the buying seems to be central banks.
But what's your take on what's driving...
Gold and silver versus devaluation of the dollar.
What are the main forces at work here?
Essentially, fear and prudence.
Odd that those two things would be the two main drivers, fear and prudence, because they're opposites of each other in some ways.
But It's a financial asset that is not simultaneously somebody else's liability.
Of course, that's also true of Bitcoin.
I'm a big fan of Bitcoin, have been since 2017 anyway.
So that is what's driving the market.
People realize increasingly that the dollar is the unbacked liability of a bankrupt government.
And the US government is truly bankrupt.
So that people with any prudence are dumping dollars and going into a stable, solid, tangible asset.
So far, that doesn't include the retail public anywhere.
It's said, and I believe it, that most of the buying is coming from central banks.
Central banks around the world, their major asset for For many, many years, ever since Bretton Woods, has been dollars.
But they have no reason to trust the U.S. government and its fiat currency.
So they're unloading their dollars.
And what are they going to buy with it?
Well, they have to buy a monetary instrument.
Can't buy cattle.
Can't buy wheat.
Can't buy lead.
Can't buy artwork.
Real estate isn't a monetary asset suitable for a central bank.
Gold.
They're buying gold.
And they'll be buying a lot more of it in the future and dumping a lot more dollars in the future.
So that's it in a nutshell.
All right.
So how much of this central bank purchasing of gold, for example, by China in particular, do you think is driven by...
And I'm going to open a Pandora's box for you here for commentary on...
The BRICS nations and their proposed settlement system, which, according to some reports, is supposed to be backed, I believe, 40% by gold and 60% by a basket of currencies of participating nations.
Is that an eminent threat to the dollar?
Is it more like 10 years?
Is it long rollout?
Is it possibly fraught with technical obstacles?
Talk about gold, central banks, and BRICS versus the dollar, if you would, please.
Well, yes.
Since that meeting in Russia, they've come up with this idea of a BRICS currency.
And that makes a lot of sense, in a way, because they want to get rid of the dollar.
The dollar is the major export of the US. It's not Boeing's.
It's not agricultural products.
It's not IBM computers.
Dollars are a major export.
Those nice Japanese send us cars and we give them dollars, but the cars are real.
The dollars can be printed up and are being printed up out of nothing.
Nobody knows what the number is, but 20, 30 trillion US dollars are floating around outside the US, but they're hot potatoes.
As the Russians found, if you have a lot of assets that are available to the US, They just might disappear on you.
That's right.
So, of course, they don't want to...
The Chinese and the Russians don't want to have to use the dollar to trade between themselves, because those trades necessarily go through New York, and the U.S. government knows everything.
Yeah, so that's why they've talked about coming up with their own currency.
Will it work?
No, it's not going to work.
And the reason, even if it's 40 percent backed by gold, look, it's a cockamamie scheme to clutter things up with gold is money.
Before the last depression, everything was settled in gold.
Period.
And it was the fractional reserve system and the banking system that was one of the things that screwed that up.
But these governments have no reason to trust each other or each other's currencies.
So we should get back to using gold.
Period.
But governments don't want to do that.
Because the ability to print up funny money is a fantastic way for them to control their subjects.
I don't think this new funny money currency that they're coming up with will work for the long run.
Of course, the euro was created out of thin air, and it's worked for quite a while, but it's going to collapse too.
Yes.
Here's gold, period.
End of story.
Okay, so let me ask you then, on a practical note, let's say Russia and China are trading with each other.
Russia's exporting energy, but Russia's buying electronics or whatever from China.
And so they would use their own currencies, right?
They could just use their own currencies, but then imbalances could be settled in gold.
Is that the way you're thinking it might work?
Or how would that actually work?
Well, let's get down to the basics.
It used to be that the dollar and the franc and the mark and the lira, these were just names for specific amounts of gold in certain countries.
And then people confused these things.
The dollar actually should cease to exist.
People should deal in just grams of gold.
The government shouldn't be involved in money at all, period.
What's the government bring to the party when it comes to money?
Nothing but corruption.
That's right.
Not necessary.
In fact, I'll go further.
Almost everything that the government does is either unnecessary or actively counterproductive.
The government is force.
It's coercion.
Like Mao Tse-sung said, it comes out of the barrel of a gun.
And in a civilized society, you want to limit force and coercion.
So what should the government do?
If you're going to have a government, it should protect you from force.
And that means force abroad, which means a defense system.
From force inside the country, which means a police force.
A means of adjudicating disputes without resorting to force.
That means a court system.
And, frankly, a government shouldn't do anything else.
Absolutely not money or the monetary system, or for that matter, schools.
That's another disaster.
Sure.
It doesn't matter.
But what we see today, of course, in our government is that it is engaged in weaponizing itself against the people, of course.
So the government uses force and coercion domestically against the people as well as internationally, such as seizing Russia's deposits by cutting them off from the SWIFT system.
And then the Western government say, well, we didn't seize their funds, we immobilized them.
Okay, you immobilized them.
All right.
And now you're using them as the basis to generate interest and use the interest to give money to Ukraine.
But that's not theft.
Just to be clear, Doug, apparently that's not theft.
I agree with you.
The system is completely insane, but Well, You're
going to need to change the core philosophy of most people.
And I'm afraid that's going to be very hard to do.
Most people have been programmed to believe that the government is their friend, the government's their protector, it's their big brother.
Worse than that, it's a cornucopia that can magically produce goods.
So, you've got to get this idea of the state and government out of people's minds, where people don't look to it for magic solutions.
In fact, it's much worse than that.
The kind of people that go into government, that want to be in government, that want to be politicians, are professional busybodies that like to Tell other people what to do and think that they actually know how to guide other people's lives for them.
So it's the worst kind of people that are inevitably drawn to government.
You go to Washington, D.C., it's like the crime capital of the country.
Actually, the crime capital of the world.
I would say the world, yeah.
I would say the world.
And, you know, Congress passes tens of billions of dollars for Ukraine or Israel.
And then we know some significant portion of that just gets laundered back to the pockets of the senators who voted for it and so on.
Possibly some of it through Bitcoin or gold, come to think of it.
Because those, I mean, they know those have privacy or more privacy.
But let's talk about Trump for a second.
Absolutely right.
Yes.
Absolutely right.
But Trump, so...
Trump engaged in record debt spending in his first term.
He wanted to artificially lower interest rates at the Federal Reserve in order to further the stock market boom.
I am under no illusion, but a lot of people think that Trump is their savior and that he will save America.
I would like you to answer, and feel free to speak, agree or disagree, you're not going to be censored here at all.
Again, I'm not a Trump worshiper, don't think I am.
If Trump were to apply the policies that he wants, fiscally, what would be the ramifications if he were to win over the next four plus years?
What would happen in America, in your view?
Well, a disaster.
Just not as bad a disaster and a somewhat different kind of disaster than if Kemala is elected.
The trouble with Trump is that fundamentally he doesn't have any philosophical core.
He's an ex-liberal Democrat who has never He doesn't have any core beliefs of any type, quite frankly.
He's kind of a chimera.
Now, a lot of the things he says, I like, obviously.
And he's vastly better than the Democratic opposition.
And you'll recall when he first came out wanting to be president, was it 2012?
He had to make a decision.
Do I want to join the Democrats or the Republicans?
Like I said, he doesn't have any sound or even any philosophical position, number one.
And when it comes to economics, he's actually a complete disaster.
The deficits that he ran and promoted when he was in office were proportionally bigger than those that the horrible Biden regime ran.
He's always said, I'm a big debt guy.
I'm a low interest rate guy.
You know, he's got all kinds of cockamamie economic ideas.
The only good thing about him from that point of view is that he likes the idea of lower taxes.
Okay, that's good.
But at the same time, he likes the idea of high spending.
He doesn't understand that when the government runs deficits, The government is going to get its taxes, whether it's through direct taxation or inflation.
So he doesn't understand that.
So, no, he's going to be an economic disaster.
And if he tries to finance the deficits with import duties, he will really bring on another depression immediately.
Just like the last depression was...
Brought on by the Smutoli tariffs.
They raised import duties.
People could not sell to us.
Therefore, they did not have the money to buy from us or buy from anybody else.
And it collapsed the world economy.
Trade is what makes the mayor go.
He doesn't understand that.
So, look, he's actually a dirigiste.
He thinks he has great ideas to how to manipulate the economy.
They're certainly better than those that Kemala has.
Look, we're caught between Scylla and Charybdis.
The reason I basically support Trump is that he is a conservative in the sense of being a cultural conservative.
He doesn't want to overthrow the nature of what's left of America, which the Democrats do.
They want to have a cultural revolution.
All that applies.
I mean, in his ideal world, we'd go back You know, he thinks he can direct things back there.
He's a cultural conservative.
That's good enough in today's world.
Yeah, he's also, at least his rhetoric is strong on border protection, although he did not secure the border in his first term.
But for myself as a Texan, illegals are a very big deal in states like Texas and Arizona.
And honestly, you know, the illegals are all over the roads, crashing into people.
They have no insurance, they have no driver's license, and they never get prosecuted.
And even law enforcement tells me they can't do anything unless the federal government will take the illegals on and do something with them.
So that's one area where Trump could help.
But I'm glad you mentioned about, you know, Trump's fiscal ignorance.
I think he needs a crash course in Austrian economics to start with, you know, or economics 101, some libertarian economics.
You can't manipulate...
He's too pig-headed to learn, frankly.
And he doesn't read things.
I mean, that's a fact, I think.
So forget about it.
Well, and also there's this tendency to think that we can solve these problems with central planning and that money comes from nothing without consequence.
And that will end.
And I'd like you to speak to that.
You know, how long can this go on where we're doing a trillion dollars every 100 days or so, which might accelerate to a trillion dollars in new debt every...
30 days?
You know, soon.
Who knows?
There's a point where this ends.
What does that look like?
Well, I think we're right there right now.
But of course, look, when I first started looking at these things and learning about them in the early 70s, even then, it looked scary.
And people were making predictions about Gloom and doom, even back then, for all kinds of good reasons.
But the ball has kept rolling for another 50 years since then.
So why should it stop rolling now?
Well, I think it will.
Because only 20 years ago, the government was running deficits of $20 billion a year.
$30 billion a year, even.
Now we're up to $2 trillion a year, and it's all being financed by selling that debt to the central bank, to the Fed.
And when the government sells debt to the central bank, to the Fed, it credits the US government's accounts at commercial banks with new money, and that money goes into society.
So how much longer can this continue?
Well, gee, maybe, maybe, I hate to pick the day and the hour.
I don't think anybody can do that.
Well, there are so many variables that we don't control that can come into this.
There are disastrous, accelerationist type of decisions that could be made that make it arrive more quickly, or there could be delays in this system.
So I'm not demanding that you pick a day or anything like that, but I'm just more asking about the nature of what that's going to look like.
Are we going to see a hyperinflationary era of just insane printing with people still getting pension checks, for example, but not being able to afford a loaf of bread with the whole check?
Things like that?
Well, the only way the government can support itself at this point is by printing money.
Taxes?
Can they take income taxes and other direct taxes higher?
Well, I suppose they can, but the US government already takes about 40-45% of all the money in the country and cycles it through itself.
Taxes?
No.
Selling more debt?
To whom?
Right, right.
Basically, it's to the Fed.
And if they don't inflate the currency, this huge inverse pyramid built on debt is going to collapse.
So it's long been said that the government has no choice.
It's inflate or die.
So how much more can they inflate?
I think they're close to the edge.
But...
That's why I've been buying gold for a long time, never sold an ounce, and I will continue buying gold because it's real money.
I buy silver too, and I speculate in other commodities from time to time.
But, you know, let me go back to something before we forget it about the migrant problem.
I'm not against new people coming to the US. The problem is that there's two problems.
Number one, the people that are coming to the US now, there's a cultural clash between them and traditional America.
They don't have Traditional American values, they're of a different race, they're of a different religion, they're of a totally different culture, beliefs, everything's different about them.
This is very unlike the immigration that we had in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which were all Europeans that shared culture, shared values, shared all these basic things.
So that made it much easier for them to integrate, number one.
Number two, and Just as important, more important, I think, is that previous immigrants could land, go through Ellis Island, and good luck.
Do the best you can.
Hope you don't starve to death.
But they didn't.
These people today are being actively subsidized.
They've been flown in.
200,000 Somalis flown in.
They didn't have the money to fly themselves in.
They were flown in by NGOs or God knows who.
And all these other people.
And they're subsidized once they get here.
They get free food.
They get food.
Free medical.
They get monthly stipends.
They get places to live.
This is totally insane on a number of different grounds.
That's got to come to an end.
Well, you got to do more than that.
Welfare in the US has to be abolished.
Totally abolished.
Totally.
I mean, no money given from the government to anybody or corporations for any reason.
End of story.
Of course, that's not going to happen.
I mean, welfare is so totally entrenched in the corrupt United States that the system's got to collapse, I think, before things change.
Yeah, I was...
Actually doing a podcast earlier about if Trump wins and RFK Jr.
is given command over HHS reforms.
So covering FDA, CDC, and maybe even NIH, NIAID, whatever.
And there's like a thousand agencies.
Nobody even knows how many there are.
Not even people who work at those agencies know how many there are.
But I said, I'm not attacking RFK at all.
He can do a lot of good, but it's nibbling around the edges.
It's rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
If you're willing to risk your entire political career, you might get a 0% cut, like a negotiation that ends in no more growth of the budget of the agency.
And that's considered a cut, as you know, how they speak.
We need to cut them by 90% or just eliminate them.
I can't think of a single thing the FDA does that's good for America, or the EPA, or the USDA. All they do is collude with the corporations that poison this country.
That's all I see.
They terrorize America.
You're right.
The FDA should be renamed the Federal Death Authority.
It kills more people every year than the Department of Defense does in the typical decade, for God's sake.
It's true of all these agencies.
And cutting them back 90% is a mistake.
Because that's like pruning a poisonous bush.
Pull it out by the roots and sow Agent Orange where it grew.
Yeah, well, that's ultimately the conclusion that I come to.
These agencies have to be ended.
They're all unconstitutional, by the way.
And they all end up creating their own unconstitutional laws and regulations, and then they arm themselves with firearms and ballistic vests, and they run around the country like EPA terrorizing farmers who are trying to produce food.
You know, they're at war with humanity, is the only way I can see it.
Yeah, I mean, it's true.
The Department of Agriculture...
Which is spread like a poison weed.
It's got a hundred thousand employees and they don't grow a single bushel of wheat.
That's right.
A hundred thousand parasitic bed bugs by just that one agency.
It's completely out of control at this point.
I'm afraid that at best, assuming that Trump doesn't go hog wild with his spending and coming up with cockamamie ideas, he'll just slow down the growth of various things in different ways.
We're headed towards a civil war, frankly.
Talk to us about that topic.
When you say civil war, are you talking about right versus left, or rural versus urban, or...
The people versus the bureaucrats?
How does that shape up, you think?
Yeah, well, it could be all of those things.
It's not going to be like the unpleasantness of 1861 to 1865.
That was geographically based.
And incidentally, it wasn't about slavery.
This is a big misconception.
Slavery was on everybody's minds and thoughts and talking about it.
But that wasn't the actual impetus for the Civil War back then.
No, this is, as you're well aware, I think, Mike, the red people and the blue people cannot talk to each other, even if they're members of the same— They can't have Thanksgiving dinner together.
Cannot.
That's right.
Cannot.
So the only thing you can do is separate.
It's ridiculous having a country of 350 million people or whatever it is under one government.
Completely insane and calling it democracy.
Democracy itself is a bad idea.
It's a surrogate religion for People that have lost their own religion.
And it's mob rule too.
Mob rule dressed up in a sports coat.
Exactly.
So you're talking about maybe the breakup of the United States into perhaps regional nation states, which that is a topic that I have a lot of interest in being a Texan.
We have the Texit movement and Texas was once its own republic.
And it could be again and Texas has its own you know gold and silver deposits and so on and its own ports and things like that but many states don't have those kinds of assets or those capabilities so do you see the possibility of multiple regional new nations rising out of the ashes of the the demise of the United States?
Oh sure I mean for instance In Southern California, among other places in the Southwest, the day is coming when young Chicanos are going to be paying 15 or 20 percent.
Well, they're already paying 15 percent, 20 percent or more in Social Security taxes to support some old white broad in Massachusetts.
They're not going to go for that.
So that could break off into a different state.
And it doesn't matter if a place has no resources.
It doesn't matter.
Japan has no resources to speak of.
Really, nothing but innovative people.
Hong Kong, where I lived for years, nothing but a barren rock with a good harbor.
That's all it was.
And ignorant, poor Chinese peasants.
And now, well, until recently, because it's been Pulled it back into China for practical purposes was about the most prosperous place on the planet.
Absolutely.
On the planet.
So, you know, it could be East Nowheresville, Iowa, and do as well as Hong Kong did if you have the proper governance and attitudes.
Well, that's a really good point because capital and innovation goes to areas where a structure is correct, where government would have more common sense and where taxation is limited or non-existent.
and regulatory controls are more reasonable, and so on.
I mean, like you said, like Hong Kong.
Hong Kong had been thriving all these years because of capital, attracting capital investment and trade.
That's why, I think.
You're absolutely correct.
And I just got back, as I said earlier, I think, from a month in Southeast Asia.
And I've been living and traveling in Southeast Asia, especially for, well, most of my life.
And the strides that they've made are just unbelievable.
I mean, It's the most advanced place on the planet, and delightful, too, so that it could be done anywhere, frankly.
But North America and Europe are so stultified and so concrete-bound at this point, And things are getting worse everywhere.
Germany is going into collapse, quite frankly.
100%.
You know, our mutual friend Michael Jan and I have had so many discussions about Germany.
How the U.S. destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline, depriving BASF of access to affordable hydrocarbons that they use.
Western Europe is done, as far as I can tell.
I don't see them coming back from the self-inflicted demise, much of which was to appease these lunatic...
Greeny cult members that wanted to de-industrialize and sort of de-civilize Western Europe.
It's been totally corrupted by lots of different varieties of socialism, and now it's all being compounded with massive immigration of millions of third-worlders.
If I was a young Nigerian, I would somehow Get on a boat and get to Europe because I know that they're going to support me.
I'll have a place to live.
I'll be fed.
I mean, I'd get the hell out of Nigeria.
And I promise you that in the next decade or two, even if the Europeans don't like it, and of course a lot of them do for some reason because they're psychotic, you're going to have tens of millions of young Africans, especially, piling into Europe.
Yep.
Absolutely.
And many people from the Middle East piling into Europe.
Already seeing that?
From the Middle East, from everywhere.
And these are penniless people without skills.
And that's even not so bad.
What's bad is, is these stupid Europeans are going to support them.
Yeah.
Give places to live and give them stipends and food and medical.
The same as the U.S. I mean, it's...
Western civilization has reached a point where it's self-destructing, and I feel very badly about that, because in all the world, Western civilization was the only civilization that was really worth the name.
Anything that's in second or third place is not even worth talking about.
Well, I'm glad you're bringing this up, though, because I agree with your assessment that Western civilization has lost the will to survive.
And it has become a suicide operation at this point.
But what is it that brought us to that?
And let me characterize it in a couple of ways before you answer.
The complete attacks on masculinity.
So there's not even a male archetype that is accepted in society or in movies or pop culture.
And how do you protect your borders if you don't have men to protect your borders?
So it's even bad to say that a man should be a hero of anything anymore.
That's crazy.
But is it, you know...
Also, this apathy and this complacency that since we can print money, that everything should be given to us and we don't have to earn anything.
What is it, in your view, that led us to this suicide point?
Yeah, the whole basis of culture has become corrupt.
Well, it's accepting the premises of socialism.
It's that it takes a village.
Individualism is a bad thing.
It's the whole culture that has been undermined by really bad and stupid ideas.
And where did it begin, really?
I mean, I'd say that in the education system is really where it started.
Almost every college and every professor in those colleges They're all leftists or Marxists or communists.
And it's filtered down to the high schools.
It's filtered down to the grade schools, frankly.
And of course, all these people talk to each other in their own bubble and reinforce each other.
And their students all learn the same things from figures of authority and think that's the way the world works and should work.
And it's filtered from there into corporations with this DIE and everything and the entertainment industry which further corrupts everything with stupid ideas and makes people think that it's legitimate and everybody believes it when they watch a movie and they see these anti-heroes being heroes.
So, what's the way out of this?
Well, it's a long road back.
Well, let me point out that China and Russia in particular are actively rejecting those very things that you just mentioned.
Japan, though, you know, Japan, as you know, has been for many generations a very closed cultural society, but it's had a lot of Western influences trying to push these themes into Japan, and it's destroying Japan.
Now, my wife is from Taiwan.
You know, my wife is an immigrant to the United States.
I've seen Taiwan destroyed.
I wouldn't say destroyed, but negatively influenced by all these Western values as well.
Whereas if I go to China, not that I've been there since I went to Hong Kong decades ago, but if I were to go to China, China's not pushing the same values of LGBT, for example, that Taiwan is pushing because the U.S. exports bad culture, not just bad money.
The U.S. exports bad culture all over the world, and that destroys Family units and societies.
Would you agree with that, or what would you add to that?
With great regret, I have to agree with that statement.
But that's not to say that the values that the Chinese government puts forward lacks the real stupidities that our government is putting forward But they're putting forward their own set of stupidities.
And the same with the Russians.
Yeah, I'm not celebrating those other countries.
I'm just saying in this one area, at least they're rejecting sort of Western stupidity, you know?
Yeah, that's right.
They're not 100% stupid.
They're only 50% stupid.
Well said, yeah.
But the problem that we have is, I think I mentioned earlier, that the worst kind of people They're busybodies that think they can and should control other people.
So as long as you have politics, you're going to get these criminal personalities that are drawn to it.
100%.
Now, let me give out your website again, internationalman.com.
I want to point out some of your latest articles here.
You do really thoughtful, detailed articles.
I love this about your work.
And, folks, you can visit articles here, internationalman.com.
Also, your video channel on YouTube, Doug Casey's Take.
Greatly appreciated.
Do you offer something...
I don't know, like a newsletter or a subscription or anything of that kind?
I'm not aware if you do.
Yeah, we do.
Because for many years I was in the newsletter business as giving investment ideas.
And so Matt Smith and I decided to start up a newsletter again called Crisis Investing.
And there we talk about, or actually it's Lau Vegas, who's a Lithuanian emigre, who writes that letter mostly, but it's based on my ideas, that we talk about what are interesting speculative propositions.
And we also have a group called The Phyle, P-H-Y-L-E. That's from Neal Stephenson's spectacular novel called Diamond Age, where in that book,
Stephenson projects that nation states will mostly collapse, dry up and blow away, and be replaced by phyle, which are groups of people from any place that get together because they share something that's important to them they could be anything anything that is of interest would form a file and it would offer its own banking and insurance and
defense and god knows what there are thousands of possible files that people share an interest or a commonality of values or whatever so Also sign up and join these files, and we have meetings.
And of course, since people want to have, well, what do I do?
What do I do to head off this coming calamity?
So I offer investment propositions.
They're speculative in nature, because that's what I do.
I'm a speculator, and I don't think in today's world it's It's not really possible to be a prudent investor anymore.
They can make a distinction between being a speculator and an investor.
Most people confuse being a speculator with being a gambler, quite frankly.
So you can join the file, and there's a couple levels of it.
In fact, here in Buenos Aires this week, there are about 20 or 25 file members that are coming from all over the world To a meeting this Tuesday.
So it's become quite a self-supporting social group where people that share values can get together with other people that share the same free market values.
Most people...
Oh, go ahead.
I was just going to say I love that idea, and I do believe that the nation-state structure is demonstrating its obsolescence and how it is actually detrimental to humanity.
And now that we have the rise of things like distributed, decentralized blockchain money systems, why do we need a central bank?
We don't need a central bank.
And there are many other examples of that, you know, information sharing, but decentralization of the food supply, for example, decentralization of medicine.
These are things that I think can help set humanity free and show that the state is not just obsolete, but the state is actually holding humanity back in many ways.
That's right.
That's absolutely right.
It's not just...
It's not just a nuisance.
It's actively destructive.
And I'm ashamed of my fellow humans that they actually think it's necessary and they support it.
And they go out and vote and get enthusiastic about these scumbags that want to rule over them.
Democracy is really such a fraud.
It's actually one of the most dangerous of political systems.
It's not like some friends It's more like cannibal friends voting on which one of you to eat.
That's a better analogy.
That's right.
Yeah, if you have cannibal friends.
Let me shift gears and ask you a specific question about lithium, because I know you talk about commodities.
I'm a scientist.
I run a food science lab, and I've taken a special interest in battery technology.
Wow.
I have wanted to invest in some very high-end off-grid battery solutions.
I found that lithium-ion chemistry is not what I want to buy because it's such a fire hazard.
And we've seen a lot of fires recently in the United States.
Warehouses going up in flames and parked cars spontaneously combusting.
And I found...
That there's another competing chemistry called sodium ion battery technology.
Sodium is very widely available across North America.
And it doesn't have quite the energy density of lithium ion, but it also doesn't burn up.
So just as a question...
In terms of off-grid technologies, I remember there was a lot of buzz about cobalt and copper and lithium when everybody thought the whole world was going to go green, which turned out to be, of course, a nonsense fiction for the most part.
What do you think the future of battery chemistry might be, and how does that affect the commodities that you pay attention to?
Well, I'm not on the front line of There are hundreds of companies that are trying to improve the world of batteries.
If I was going to guess what will actually triumph in the battery world, I think it's going to be Carbon facilitated by nanotechnology, frankly, so that we can forget about these dangerous chemicals.
You know, it was fun in high school chemistry class.
I don't know if they have any dangerous stuff in chemistry classes anymore, but I always thought it was fun to take a magnesium strip, which you could light on fire with a Bunsen burner.
And get the magnesium strip to light a piece of calcium metal, which was much harder to light, and get it to burn.
And, of course, we never tried moving up the periodic table to sodium and to lithium.
That would have been a little bit out of control.
So, using chemicals is...
Hopefully that's going to be passe.
And like I said, nanotechnology using carbon, which is the most flexible of...
I think it's probably the most flexible because of the way it bonds and this type of thing of all the 92 natural elements.
So the problem will be solved.
And as a speculation, I haven't followed it recently, but there was a bubble in lithium.
And what were lithium prices?
They went off the chart.
To what level?
I forget.
But way, way up there.
And then they've collapsed recently.
I don't even know if they've come back a little bit yet.
But there's lots of lithium in the world and it can be mined and there are lots of companies that explore for and develop and also mine lithium.
I'm not trying to speculate in lithium right now.
I mainly limit my speculations to small gold mining companies and other commodities like silver and especially uranium.
I'm very friendly towards uranium.
Because one way or another, the world is going to need lots more power, unless we slide back into a dark age.
And by far, the safest, cheapest, and cleanest saying those things about uranium, people are going to say, what?
That's crazy.
No, it's not crazy.
No, I track you.
I track you on that.
Go ahead.
Yep.
Makes perfect sense to me.
Yeah, so I'm a big fan of uranium.
It's going to have another boom, and I own a number of uranium companies of different types.
And I'm big on oil and gas, but especially natural gas, which is very, very cheap relative to oil.
And it's basically the same hydrocarbon, and these things can be manipulated and so forth.
So cheaper is better.
And also natural gas, for what it's worth, is the cleanest of the hydrocarbon fuels.
So I'm looking at lots of interesting things out there today.
Well, let me bring this in.
I'm really glad you mentioned that because I believe that we could be entering an era of micro-reactors.
I want to bring this up, the E-Vinci micro-reactor.
This is from Westinghouse, which this is sort of, it can fit in like a garage bay, let's say.
And I think this fuel needs to be replaced about once every seven years, right?
So that's it.
You know, your battery pack, which is uranium-based.
You swap it out every seven years, and it can supply power to an entire neighborhood.
So we're talking about decentralization.
We're talking about very different, much safer nuclear reactor designs compared to the old three-mile island that everybody freaked out about in the 70s.
I agree with you.
I mean, uranium power, we're talking about mass-to-energy conversion.
It does not emit carbon.
The energy density is enormous.
You can power cities with tiny amounts of mass, and even if you have to store radioactive waste after the fact, it's a minuscule amount of space for storing that for long-term decay.
It's all true.
I completely agree with your assessment.
I think it's the greenest, cleanest, and ultimately it can be the safest fuel if it's in the right structure, the correctly designed nuclear generator.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is the future, actually.
And it's just politics.
Because if the average person who's been propagandized against nuclear by really stupid people with, I think, bad intentions...
Many of them.
If the government wasn't in a position to enforce its mandates, you'd have lots of different companies manufacturing these things.
I mean, nuclear reactors have been used in naval vessels now for, oh, my God.
Many decades.
Yeah, that's right.
Over 60 years.
More than that, actually.
So the technologies are very developed.
It's basically the state and public hysteria.
That's right.
Keeping us down.
Well, that's right.
And even looking back to Three Mile Island, that was nothing compared to what people freak out about today.
No, it's a big nothing.
It was a big nothing.
Totally big nothing.
Yes.
I would say it's vastly worse the fact that we're spraying our food with atrazine gender bender chemicals compared to what that was.
But the interesting thing about nuclear energy is that it offers a form of decentralization.
And that's why I think, I'd love your reaction to this, I think that governments of the world want centrally controlled nuclear fusion.
Multi tens of billions of dollars fusion generators where they can have central distribution and control and metering.
Whereas if you end up sort of micronizing nuclear power where people can afford it for a corporation or a neighborhood or a small nation, well then the government loses centralized control over power.
Much better solution, I agree.
And of course, it's all a question of technology and maybe someday fusion becomes feasible.
I mean, it's too bad that cold fusion thing didn't work.
What was it, 15 or 20 years ago?
But something like that may come up in the future, and we could find something even better than many nukes.
Well, I have been interviewing people about cold fusion, which morphed into low-energy nuclear reactions, and it is being developed, but the issue with that is it's very slow.
It heats water very, very slowly, so it's being licensed by boiler companies.
To enhance the efficiency of heating water.
Cold fusion, as it used to be called, cannot produce megawatts.
Also, interesting, the tech companies are now licensing or trying to revitalize nuclear power plants in order to power their AI data centers.
So this is an interesting shift, isn't it?
That you have corporations that are turning to nuclear power because the power grid, which is regulated by the government, is failing them.
Yeah, eventually reality always wins out over ideology and propaganda.
Yeah, I mean, there's cause for optimism when you look at things like the Soviet Union, which as late as the 60s or 70s, even the 80s, people thought was real, and the CIA was pumping out all these inflated figures and so forth.
It was just a A balsa wood door that was rotting from within and collapsed.
Reality always asserts itself.
I mean, so-called communist China.
It's not communist, for God's sake.
In many ways, it's a freer country than the U.S. is, although that's changing a little bit under Mr.
Xi.
But, yeah, stupid ideas.
Have their day and then they fall apart.
So that gives me cause for optimism amid all the gloom and doom that we're going to see in the next few years.
Well, I'm glad to hear that.
And sort of the last question then for you, Doug, and thank you for spending time with us today.
Your insight is very valuable.
But for people to survive this transition, as bad ideas fail, There is of course economic turmoil and people who have their assets stuck in the realm of bad ideas end up with nothing.
Any general...
Direction or advice for people who want to be able to navigate, like, let's say they see what's coming.
They know the dollar doesn't have much of a future.
You've already mentioned gold, and maybe that's just the best answer across the board, but how should people practically navigate this so that their life savings don't get wiped out?
Okay.
Well, put your savings in gold to a smaller degree into silver and Keep them in some place safe.
That's number one.
You have to learn the way the markets work so that when opportunities present themselves, you A, have the capital because you've been saving it, and you have B, the expertise.
I mean, the best investment you can make is reading.
And, you know, I've thought for years about writing a book It might still get written because the son of a friend of mine is actually doing it right now, taking the four years which most young men idiotically spend going to college, wasting a huge amount of time, four years, and a lot of capital.
And it's not an education.
It's an indoctrination.
There's lots of things you can do to educate yourself and read and all that.
Alright, so get back to this.
Gold, self-education, learn to speculate.
But there's one area we haven't talked about yet, and that is the biggest danger that you have to your personal welfare today is not financial or economic.
Those are huge dangers.
Your biggest danger is political.
And I'm afraid that most people act like potted plants.
They're born in one place, one country, even one town, and they stay there.
It's comfortable.
It's easy.
It's got advantages.
But I don't think that's a good survival strategy for a human.
And as going gets tough in the U.S., I think it's wise to have a crib in a second country someplace.
The Germans in the 30s would have been well advised to have done that, as with the Russians in the 1920s, as with the Chinese in the 1940s, and I can go on and on.
And I think it's America's turn on the dance card, so that when the going gets tough, you want to be able to get going.
So I don't know if most people are in a position to diversify internationally.
But I think it's wise.
I mean, I'm speaking to you right now from Buenos Aires.
Yes.
Well, and your website is internationalman.com, so...
Yeah, exactly.
So, consider that, okay?
A lot of people aren't in a position to do it.
If you're not in a position to do it, whose fault is that?
But something to think about.
Yeah.
Well said, and also I would just add that living outside the United States is a necessary perspective in order to understand America.
For those of you watching in America, if you've never lived outside the country for a considerable amount of time, you really don't know how warped your domestic news is.
I mean, that's one of the first things I noticed.
When I lived in Taiwan in my 20s, I was reading English newspapers in Taiwan.
You know, I couldn't believe how different it was from the news that I was getting in the U.S. Completely different.
Yep, you're absolutely correct.
And not only that, but it's fun and it can be profitable and it's broadening.
And I think it's going to get much harder to travel in the years to come in a number of ways.
Yeah, good point.
Time frame is getting short.
It is.
Well, Doug, it's been an honor to be able to speak with you here.
Thank you for sharing your wisdom with us.
I really enjoyed this conversation.
Well, thanks, Mike.
I enjoyed talking to you, and we'll perhaps do it again when we see how things sort out after January, November 1st.
Which is Guy Fawkes Day, incidentally.
Yeah, true.
Good point.
And then January 6th, when a new president may or may not be installed.
Well, we are...
Here in Texas, we are all just preparing for all kinds of possible chaos.
We don't want to contribute to it, but we want to be ready for things to come to the surface with whatever happens with the election.
So I would love to speak with you again.
Especially after the election, but before January, and see where things are at that point.
I would imagine gold and silver, well, gold's going to be over 3,000, I would guess, before very long.
And who knows?
But I tell people, it's not gold getting more valuable, it's your dollar just collapsing, is what's happening.
We'll have a conversation one day about why is it that Americans can't do math?
Just explaining the rule of 72.
Sometimes I lose people.
If you don't understand integers, your chances of surviving the financial demise are close to zero.
That's right.
But it's a pleasure, Doug.
Thank you for your time.
Okay, and talk to you in the future, Mike.
Okay, will do.
Thank you so much.
And let me give out your website again, internationalman.com.
So I want to encourage everybody there, go there, check out the articles and the videos and other content.
Also, check out Doug's YouTube channel, Doug Casey's Take.
Which I will be watching as well in more detail.
I've seen many of his videos.
And then finally he's got several books.
One of them on Audible or Amazon is called Speculator, High Ground, book one of a series.
So check out all of these assets and you will be wise to learn from Doug Casey.
I think he can help you navigate this.
And thank you all for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com.
Get prepared.
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