Doug Casey: A Global Reckoning Is Here and Most People Are Unprepared
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Authorities and high government officials, those kind of people, especially people that work for the government, are the last people you should listen to.
They're actually not the worst kind of people who go to work for the government.
They're not entrepreneurs.
They're not risking their own money.
They're extremely overpaid.
And they're the kind of people that like to boss around other people, which makes them dangerous.
And you give them a little bit of power and they want more.
Okay, welcome to today's interview here on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
And it's extraordinary that as I'm recording this, and our special guest today is a legend in the area of metals and also sovereignty and so much more.
But silver has passed $71 per Troy ounce today in Western markets.
So something is happening.
And I can't think of a better person to help explain what's happening and also the major changes coming for our world than Doug Casey himself, the international man as he's known.
And his website is internationalman.com.
And Doug Casey is just an extraordinary individual, a brilliant analyst and thinker.
And I'm honored to have him on the show today.
Welcome, Doug.
It's great to have you here.
Thanks, Mike.
I'm flattered, and it's a pleasure to be here.
Well, although for me, right now, Kier is on the farm in Uruguay.
What's on the farm?
I'm on the farm.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, great.
Well, I love it.
And I mean, before I came here, I left my ranch.
And from the waist down, I'm still wearing ranch pants from this morning.
So, you know, you know how it is.
We live in both worlds.
Yeah, we do.
Actually, I could technically call this a ranch too, because we have about 150 cows.
But in Uruguay, you don't call them ranches.
You call them farms.
Oh.
Well, that sounds perfect, actually.
I love the fact that you're right there where the food is produced and you know so much about self-reliance.
But let's start with the opening topic, which is silver, something you've been advocating for for a very long time.
What do you think is happening in the global silver supply chain marketplace that's leading us to the $71 and still climbing?
Well, to put it in context, almost all the commodities are very cheap right now.
Starting a couple of years ago, some of them started perking up.
Cocoa went from $2,000 a ton to $8,000 or $10,000 a ton.
Coffee went from $1 to $3,000 or $4.
There were a few things like that.
But right now, relative to almost everything else, commodities are still, even after having made a fair recent run, are still close to their all-time lows.
So that's the context that we're looking at for silver.
And when we talk about silver, it has broken into a new all-time high because twice before, silver hit $50 an ounce and then backed off a lot, like 90% both times.
But if silver were to go back to its previous all-time high in real terms, not just dollar terms, but because the dollar is always losing value, the dollar is a burning match, silver would have to go back to $200 an ounce, would have to go $200 an ounce to actually reach its real previous all-time high.
So let me put it this way.
We're in the context of a major commodities bull market.
Silver is still way below its previous high in real terms.
And the world situation is extremely dangerous and volatile today.
It all adds up to me to being much higher silver prices and actually much higher gold prices and copper prices and everything.
That's a really important point because governments can print fiat currency, but they can't print the table of elements, it turns out.
And I want to distinguish this for our audience because you mentioned two previous times that silver hit $50, for example.
One of those famously was the 1980 Hunt Brothers attempt to corner the market.
But that was purely a single party attempting to buy up all the physical silver and to try to break the COMEX.
But then they, of course, they changed the rules and broke the Hunt brothers.
But this is totally different from that because now we're talking about unprecedented industrial demand from everything from solar panels to AI data centers to telecom weapons.
And then now this new Samsung battery technology, the silver cathode anode that's going to go online into production in 2027, which will need tens of millions of ounces of silver every year that do not exist as excess in the system right now.
So isn't that true that the industrial drivers right now are unprecedented?
Yeah, it is true.
And looking at some supply and demand statistics, it said that about, there's about 850 million ounces of silver that are produced every year.
But for the last several years, there's been a significant deficit of new production over use.
And right now, about 300 million ounces are being taken out of inventory every year for silver.
So that's probably the current driver.
The last several years has been a deficit in supply-demand production.
And right now, it's very significant.
And talking about silver, I've always been a big fan of silver.
As one of the 92 naturally occurring elements, it has some unique properties.
And one of them is that it's the most electrically conductive of all the elements.
And it's the most optically reflective of all of the elements.
So this makes it unique in a high-tech world.
It's also true.
I mean, that's a critical point, which is that it's not, it can't be easily substituted by some other mineral or metal.
But I mean, that's critical because, and as our audience knows, the vast majority of silver production right now is a byproduct of other types of mining, you know, lead or iron or nickel or whatever.
And then they get silver as a result, or even gold mining, they get silver as a result in some cases.
And it's gold, copper, and lead and zinc.
Okay, great.
So I saw that Samsung did a deal to reopen this mine in Mexico called La Parilla.
And this mine had been closed for many years.
And Samsung is going to get 100% of the mine's output to funnel into their battery production beginning in 2027.
But they're going to open the mine, I think, in 26 next year and start stockpiling that silver for their battery production.
Isn't that interesting that you're now seeing industry go directly to the mines to get silver?
Yeah, I think it is, actually.
But it's nothing new.
Henry Ford did that with rubber in Brazil back in the early days of the car and so forth.
It's kind of like farm to table when it comes to food, doing the same thing with metallic elements.
So it's predictable, but especially in the kind of world we live in today, where the supply chains from one country to another are less certain than they were even a few years ago.
So that if you want to keep your business going, it's probably wise to make sure that you have all the elements that you need along the way and not have to rely on the broad market.
Right, right.
And especially in this age where you have, and I'm going to take this into the political realm a little bit, you have the Trump administration emotionally slapping tariffs all over the place where domestic businesses can't plan, they can't get supplies, it's very difficult.
Even for our company, just trying to get turmeric from India is now a lot more expensive.
It seems like, well, I'd like your comments on the fact that sort of the world is becoming more isolationist, especially the West, and cutting off many of the supply chains that actually feed consumers and industrial processes in Western countries.
And this is going to be a problem, I think.
But what are your thoughts?
Well, you're absolutely correct.
When a government makes an enemy of another government, it's the little people that live in these countries that are the ones that get hurt, that actually need things that cross.
Look, this whole thing you mentioned earlier, Trump and his tariffs, which are economically completely idiotic.
And it's been said correctly that it was the tariffs that were placed on the economy by Herbert Hoover that set off the Great Depression, that made it much, much worse.
And the thing to remember is that there was much less trade internationally in the late 20s and the 30s than there is now, vastly less.
There was very little ship by air.
It wasn't in any way comparable the amount of trade in those days to what we have today.
So we've gone from a place where because the Guatemalans can make bananas much cheaper than people in Detroit can, that's pretty obvious, and people in Detroit can make Chevrolets much cheaper than Guatemalans can, it makes sense to let them trade with each other.
But if they both put 100% tariff on both of their products, there's not going to be any cars in Guatemala and there's not going to be any bananas in Detroit.
Now, I give you that analogy because that's the way it works for every product to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the dynamics of the market and depending on the amount of tariffs that are placed on.
But what Trump has done, thinking, you know, it's funny when, and I don't want to venture into politics because that's A, pointless, and B, it gets people hot under the car collar.
But I was so happy when Harris and that moron that she ran with, whatever his name was, lost because they were actually communists.
I mean, as far as their views.
So I was happy that Trump would win and some of the things that he wanted to do.
But way back in 2012, I wrote an article explaining Trump when I said that he has no philosophical center.
He has no core beliefs.
nor does he have any understanding of economics, despite the fact that he can be shrewd and he's been good at borrowing and manipulating debt and all that as a businessman.
But I'm afraid that Donald has gotten out of control.
He's turned into a megalomaniac, a narcissist, and is taking all kinds of powers onto himself that some of these things I approve of.
We can talk about that.
That's arbitrary.
I approve, I disapprove, who cares.
But speaking as an economist, he's trying to transform himself, it seems, into a new Roman empire, emperor.
And maybe he thinks he's doing that, and maybe he is, in order to save the country, which is clearly on the slippery slope anyway.
That's also true.
Well, let's delve into this effort to save the country a little bit more because we are dealing with a population in America now because of the failed education system, which you have also rightly criticized for many years.
We're dealing with a population where now, and I'm reading the statistics from National University here.
You can show my screen.
About 130 million U.S. adults, that's 54% of U.S. adults, read below a sixth grade level.
Okay.
I mean, one out of every two U.S. adults roughly is illiterate, functionally illiterate.
Now, I mean, which by itself is just shocking.
I mean, those are third world country statistics.
But when Trump says, and I love the fact that he wants, he's trying to be optimistic about reforming America, et cetera.
But when Trump says, oh, we're going to reindustrialize America, we're going to build the factories here and re-engage all the workers.
My question is, how do workers work in factories if they can't read?
Number one.
You know, I mean, it seems like you can't just plug factories back into this situation.
What's your take?
Well, yeah, I'm afraid that Donald is very naive at that.
It's not just the point that you just made, but there have got to be some changes made from the bottom up.
In other words, government is basically at cause for the exit of industry from the U.S. There's been way, way too much regulation in the U.S. People want to get away from that.
Taxes are way too high.
Those are the two big things.
And of course, the unions in the U.S. have always worked hand in glove with the government and have made things much higher than they should be, to the benefit of union members, but to the disadvantage of everybody who can't get into a union and also to the public at whole.
So that's why industry has left the U.S. over the last at least 50 years.
The way to get it back into the U.S. is to change those things, totally deregulate, radically reduce taxes, and make the country more stable so that you're not subject to the arbitrary whim of a bureaucrat or a president as far as what's going to happen.
Look, in the mining business, where I've been actively involved for many years, it can take decades from the time that you find a deposit of a valuable mineral in the U.S., decades to get approvals and permits and everything that you need before you can even start breaking ground for a new mine.
And then if you do that after investing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, that's when your trouble has really started here in the U.S.
I mean, that's when the NGOs will attack you and the native groups will attack you and the greens are going to attack you and the local government will look at you as being a milk cow.
So of course there's industry has exited the U.S.
Yeah, and it's interesting because some of those groups you just mentioned, they will push out really contradictory messages like we should all be driving EVs and we need better range for the EVs.
Well, that means you're going to need these silver-based batteries, which means you're going to need to mine silver.
But then those same people say, well, we shouldn't do any mining, though.
So what do you want?
Magical cars?
You want, how about just a magic flying carpet?
How about that?
Because that's more likely than your magical cars.
You know, they're not rational.
And I've noticed that in your own podcast, the number one thing that you do that infuriates people is to exercise rationality.
Well, yeah, we don't all know everything about every subject.
But what we can do is take a critical thinking approach to things and ask questions and demand logical answers as to why things are the way they are.
That's how you educate yourself, quite frankly.
I don't think people do that so much anymore.
They assume that authorities, and I put that in question quotations, yes, authorities and high government officials and people with degrees know what's best for them.
Actually, those kind of people, especially people that work for the government, are the last people you should listen to.
You know, they've tried to say that the government has the best and brightest people working for it, but that's not true.
It's not true.
They actually are the worst kind of people that go to work for the government.
They're not entrepreneurs.
They're not risking their own money.
They're extremely overpaid.
And they're the kind of people that like to boss around other people, which makes them dangerous.
And you give them a little bit of power and they want more.
So actually, there are a lot of things in the American culture that are going to have to be reformed before America returns to what it was, a good place to do business, which it's really not anymore.
There's 200 other countries in the world, and a lot of them have more educated populace with better habits and less restrictions on trying to create more wealth.
So this is why the standard of living in the U.S., even by official counters of standard of living, have been dropping for years.
There are several organizations that do surveys of what the standard of living of the average guy in these various countries are.
And the U.S. has fallen from being number one or two always in the past.
Now we're four, five, ten, as low as 12 on some of these surveys.
And we're dropping at this point as the dollar loses value, which is really one of the very biggest things, which I haven't even mentioned so far.
I mean, well, and I also want to take us back to the education component here very quickly and what a failure that's been and the ramifications for our country, because you and your co-host, Matt Smith, you have created a very popular book called The Preparation.
And I love this book.
Can you hold it up?
Yes.
Perfect.
Like any good author.
There we go.
What this book is all about is: look, everybody knows that college has become beastly expensive.
It's unaffordable.
This is why if you want to go to college, you've got to borrow tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it.
That didn't used to be that way, and it's wrong, but it's worse than that because it's not just taking on an albatross that you'll wear around your neck for years or decades into the future to pay it off, but college is a negative value.
That's a really critical point, and you're right about that.
Please.
Colleges have been captured by the radical left, have been captured by Marxists, statists, collectivists, all of the professors there.
And I speak as somebody who was at one point a trustee of a college.
I was a trustee of the 10th oldest college in the country for five years, actually.
So I'm speaking firsthand.
But you're going to learn very little of value in college, nothing that's of any use when you get out of college, unless you take a STEM degree, science, technology, engineering, math.
Let's put that in a separate bucket.
But that's only like 10 or 15% of the people that go to college today.
And most of the people that get those degrees, or I don't know what the exact percentage is, but a large number of them are students from foreign countries that are coming to do the lab work and science and technology.
Our students are taking things like sociology and politics and gender studies and psychology, things that are actually of negative value that clutter their minds up.
So what we did in this book is, first of all, explain to kids, especially young men, because it's the young men that are most in trouble at this point, why they should not misallocate four years of time and a bunch of money going to college, how they can get a better education in the classical sense, all the things that you should learn in college without going to college.
Explain that, but also what you should do in that four-year period of time.
We've divided it up into 16 quarters, and we call them cycles.
And in each quarter, you will learn a practical skill in a serious way.
For instance, one quarter, you might learn to be a welder.
And we show you where to go to the school and so forth.
Another quarter, you might learn to be how to build a house from the foundation on up.
Another quarter, you might learn how to sail a ship.
Like my co-author's son, Maxim, spent several weeks sailing from the Falkland Islands to Chile around Cape Horn and becoming a competent sailor.
Wow.
Another thing that you learn to do is defend yourself.
And actually, next week, he's going off to Thailand for three months to learn to become a competent Muay Thai fighter.
So the idea is that, and this goes to business too.
Several quarters are, in effect, better than getting an MBA degree.
Yes.
So following the instructions and doing the things we tell you in this book, where you do it, how much it costs and so forth, you'll actually have the equivalent of a law degree, an MBA, a science degree, a humanities degree, plus lots and lots of practical skills, like I've just mentioned.
It can be done.
So you get out of college and you won't just be indebted and fat, drunk, and stupid, which most college kids are.
And totally indoctrinated.
Exactly.
But the idea is you should be able to transform yourself into a Renaissance man, able to do anything and go anywhere.
Well said.
That's what the book's all about.
All right.
Let me plug the book again.
It's called The Preparation.
Here it is on Amazon.
And it's at other booksellers as well.
There's also an audio book available now.
It's called The Preparation, How to Become Competent, Confident, and Dangerous.
And that's Doug Casey and Matt Smith, who we also interviewed with his son on this topic.
And that was a very popular interview as well.
You can check that out.
Doug, I want to mention something else that has also happened that is relevant to what you just said, where a university education is now essentially obsolete.
So in the last month, we launched this website called brightlearn.ai and where anybody can instantly create any textbook or how-to book on any topic they want completely free of charge.
And we've had 7,700 books published.
Oh, that's marvelous.
Yeah, and they're all free.
They're all free to download.
And we're generating audio books starting next month.
Those will also be free.
And then Spanish translations are coming next, also free.
So what I'm saying to young men or young people is anything you want to learn now, all you have to do is make a decision to learn it.
You can create a book or you can use the book.
You mentioned the preparation.
You can find an apprenticeship somewhere.
You can learn a skill.
You can get a four-year degree in less than one year by focusing on learning and not wasting time with all the indoctrination.
And then you can become a real person, not a fake shadow of a person, which is what's coming out of our universities.
You know what I'm saying?
That's right.
And it's not just helping yourself, which is critical, but Western civilization itself is in trouble and is on the slippery slope at this point.
And charity begins at home.
And if you like the good things that Western civilization has brought to the world, and frankly, that's to say almost everything that's good in the world has come from the West, which runs totally counter to the propaganda that we're fed in the media and in colleges and so forth.
By transforming yourself and becoming rich and competent yourself, you'll help hopefully turn around the slip slide of our own civilization.
Yes, yes.
And I love the fact that you have been consistently teaching these principles for decades.
And I want to bring attention to your website, internationalman.com.
Can you walk people through also the other things that you offer there at your site?
Well, I call it internationalman.com because I've traveled to, I'm not sure, over 155, probably over 160 different countries in the world.
I've lived in 12 different countries.
Right now, I'm speaking to you from my farm in Uruguay, like I said.
So part of what the internationalman.com is about is making the world your oyster.
You don't want to act like a potted plant.
That's not a good survival strategy for a human being where you find yourself one place and you stay there.
I mean, you should take advantage of everything the world has to offer.
And for that, you have to get out.
We have some great writers, including David Stockman, who ran things during the economic part of the Reagan presidency.
It's free and it's a great site.
Everybody should subscribe to it, quite frankly.
Yeah, you're going to learn a tremendous amount of information that will help you understand the trends that are coming.
And I would also say, Doug, that you've been proven correct again and again on the overall trends.
And you're also very cautious.
You tend not to make timed calendar date predictions because that's always a dangerous business.
But the overall trends have very much moved in the direction that you have been warning about or sometimes talking about opportunities as well.
For example, your discussions about mining companies.
If people had heeded your advice and wanted an investment, some of those mining companies have already paid off.
And I think the valuations have only just begun.
You want to talk about the mining interest for a moment?
Yeah.
Well, mining is whenever I talk to conventional, legitimate financial people, I have to explain myself.
How did I ever get into the mining business and the mining finance business?
Because it's a very dangerous part of the market.
It's the most volatile part of the entire stock market.
It's a teeny weeny part of the stock market.
Mining stocks in the past have been as much as 20% of the stock market.
Now, they're like 1%.
Nobody owns them.
Nobody likes them.
Everybody knows that miners rape Mother Earth and exploit the natives.
Horrible business.
In addition to the fact that young people don't want to get into mining anymore because who wants to go out and play in the dirt with big yellow trucks when you can make zillions of dollars moving digits around on your computer.
So it's a very unloved business right now.
And this relates to commodities being inordinately cheap right now.
These are two reasons why I'm looking for a huge upvaluation, both in commodities and in the companies that mine them.
And they are very volatile.
I particularly like gold because what's happening to the dollar, I'm afraid the dollar, it's a one-way street to zero at this point.
I think it's beyond redemption with the national debt, acknowledged national debt.
The actual national debt is not just $38 trillion.
It's three or four times that much when we add in the liabilities from Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare, which aren't officially, they're liabilities, but they're not officially counted in the national debt.
Now, the dollar is on its way to zero.
And the problem is for Americans is that everything they own is denominated in dollars.
And if they produce more than they consume, which we all try to do, and save the difference, what do you save in?
You save in dollars.
But if those dollars are inflated away on you, you're in trouble.
This is why third world countries with unstable currencies never get anywhere.
Because the average guy, if he's productive and tries to makes money, tries to save it, what can he save it in?
You can't save it in pesos or dirhams or any of these other crazy fiat currencies around the world.
And the same thing could happen to the U.S.
And it's going to destroy middle-class society in the U.S.
So what do you do about it?
Well, that's why I've saved in gold and to a lesser degree, silver, for my entire life.
I've never sold any ever because it's savings.
On the other hand, in the stock market, when I play in the stock market, and I do a lot, my specialty is mining stocks because nobody else looks at them.
They're hated and they tend to be cheap.
And right now, they're at about the cheapest level in history with gold at $4,500.
The industry-wide cost to produce an ounce of gold for producing companies is about $1,500 an ounce.
That means every ounce of gold that you mine is $3,000 right to the bottom line.
But the prices of the stocks don't reflect that for the reasons I mentioned earlier.
I mean, they're considered poisonous.
Nobody wants to own them.
You know, it's funny.
They used to say, you know, hey, that's like having a gold mine.
But no, having a gold mine is just like having a huge liability.
But you know, there's capitalism.
There's a line in the famous movie Idiocracy where the character says, I like money.
But apparently some people don't like money when it's tied to minerals, you know, metals, gold and silver and copper.
And yet, these are the things that drive all the technologies that consumers want to use and experience.
So there's got to be a great reckoning coming here at some point.
Well, I think there is.
And the public is very uninvolved, not only in gold and silver.
They don't understand that gold and silver are money.
The dollar is just a fiat substitute for money.
But the companies that mine it are very, very cheap and very, very volatile.
We're not talking about multi-trillion dollar market capitalizations.
We're not talking about multi-billion dollars.
A lot of these companies are, they're not small caps.
They're not micro caps.
They're nano caps.
They're so small.
And in the past, many have gone 100 to one or even 1,000 to 1, not over the course of a lifetime, but over the course of three or four years.
That's how volatile they are.
And they've really been doing well for the last year.
But I think they're going to be doing very well for several years to come, maybe more.
And the public isn't even involved.
It doesn't even know they exist today.
So, yeah, I think it's the place to be as a speculator.
And unfortunately, as governments destroy their currencies, and since all the governments in the world, including the U.S. government, are terminally bankrupt, they can't borrow the money.
They can't really tax it so much anymore.
They will print it up.
And that's what's going on.
So this augers well for Gold, silver, other commodities, and the companies that produce them.
That's the basic idea.
You mentioned earlier that you believe the dollar is headed towards zero, and that definitely fits the historical pattern of fiat currencies.
They all end up there sooner or later, it seems.
There is no U.S. president in our lifetimes that is actually that has sworn off currency printing.
They all print, every one of them, including Trump today.
Not just including Trump.
Trump thinks it's a good idea.
Yeah, yes.
And artificially low interest rates plus money printing.
I mean, talk about that.
You know, Trump is installing people in the Fed that he can control, clearly.
And he's pushing his policies, which are very cheap money, low interest rates, while he's trying to keep 10-year bond yields also very, very low to refinance the debt.
But it seems to me, increasingly, this system, I keep thinking it's very close to fracturing in some way.
But I thought that in 2008, also with the subprime mortgage collapse.
Can this system continue to have a heartbeat for another decade?
I mean.
Yeah, that's a very good question because I've been around for long enough to know that even during the 70s, people were talking about, hey, this can't go on.
This sucker is going to blow.
And we have bad recessions and a recovery, another bad recession, and a recovery.
Okay, can this go on indefinitely?
I don't think it can because all the while, the debt of the federal government has been going up, now.
So that now the amount of interest, even at these artificially low interest rates, and they are artificially low right now, is greater than the so-called defense budget.
So this is, it's unstoppable.
And at the same time, people demand more.
As their standards of living go down, they demand more from the government.
So no, I think we're very close finally to the edge of the precipice.
Well, and that's fascinating to hear that.
And it reminds me of your book, The Preparation, because a lot of younger people today, let's say young men and women in their 20s, they really don't see any future for themselves.
They don't see a financial future.
And that's why they're getting, you know, what's it called, the food delivery service, Uber Eats or whatever.
They're overpaying for food.
They're financing their meals with eat now, pay later, which seems like a horrible idea.
Talk about depreciation of your food.
You know, it must be very depressing for them.
And that's why they're doing that, because the attitude is eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow we die.
Or tomorrow, maybe we have a nuclear war and it all comes to an end.
Or tomorrow the whole thing blows up.
So you might as well enjoy it.
That is the attitude.
America's, especially young people, it's not a question of the long-term values and thinking that way.
It's short-term values increasingly, which is natural and normal when you can't save and you can't plan because of regulations and inflation and there's nothing left after taxes.
And why bother?
Because you'll get it all free from Uncle Sugar anyway.
Look, the whole society has become corrupt.
And I speak as somebody that absolutely loves America.
America isn't a place.
It's an idea.
And not only was the greatest idea in the history of countries, but it was the greatest country as a place.
But that's all changed, especially over the last 50 years.
Everything changes.
Yeah.
I mean, I started feeling this way probably when I read Edward Gibbons' decline and fall of the Roman Empire many years ago.
And it occurred to me that the second law of thermodynamics, which says that everything falls apart and disintegrates and becomes corrupt over time, is also tree of countries.
And it's happened to America.
Yeah.
Well, and the opportunity to get ahead now does seem so fleeting to the younger generation.
I remember when I bought my first house, I took out a 15-year loan on it.
I bought a house that I could afford.
I saved and I paid extra, paid extra, paid extra.
I lived beneath my means.
I had the house paid off in five years.
And that was the last time I ever had any debt in my life.
Now, today, but even then, that was rare.
But today, it's practically impossible because of the cost of living and the amount that a young person would make being an Uber driver or working a job.
Even at $20 an hour, by the time you pay food and health insurance and your phone bill or whatever, what do you have left for housing?
You literally can't afford housing if you're participating in the system like that.
Well, you're right.
And a lot of young people today have to do gig jobs, drive Uber or deliver food or things of that nature.
Why is that?
It's because they don't have any particular skills.
And to have a particular skill, you have to learn the skill.
And you can't rely on somebody else to give you a job.
I mean, the whole concept of working for somebody else, that's not a lifetime thing.
Look, there's an infinite demand.
I know it doesn't seem this way to people out there sometimes, but there's an infinite demand for goods and services in the market.
Everybody wants as much as they can.
So theoretically, you can work 24-7 supplying goods and services to other people out there because everybody wants stuff, including your labor.
Problem is, is you're not going to get a good buck for your labor unless you've got skills.
And people don't learn skills today, okay?
Certainly not in college.
They got academic knowledge that's not even useful academic knowledge that helps them to think.
It's bullshit academic knowledge that is created artificially by professors.
You can only get hired by either another college or the DEI department of a corporation, you know, just to underscore your point.
Those skills don't translate into the real world.
And I know a lot of entrepreneurs in the AI space, by the way, and I would say that AI technology opens up a lot of doors of opportunity for young people today.
But I know a lot of people in AI, they skip college now.
They openly talk about skipping the university.
I'm not going to waste four years because in four years, the whole world's going to be different because of this technology.
That's right.
They're skipping college and they are being way more successful as a result.
And isn't, I mean, could you talk about your views on just AI as an enabler of innovation?
For example, it's so much easier to launch a business today, an online business, compared to 10 or 20 years ago.
I mean, it's almost effortless compared to the way it was back when I was trying to launch businesses.
Talk about AI and that tech.
Well, AI is a double-edged sword.
From a financial market point of view, the time to have gotten into AI with your investment dollars, I think that's past.
There's a mania.
There's a bubble in AI financed by debt and crazy accounting and people spending not just billions, but tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars to build more AI factories and so forth.
I think we're in a bubble like we saw, we've seen several times before with computers and then the internet and then it's one thing.
It's one thing after another.
It's too late.
I'm just talking as somebody that watches markets, too late to mess around with AI from stocks like NVIDIA, et cetera.
Yeah, exactly.
To add to that, though, I think you're right that people are too much focused on NVIDIA, not realizing that for NVIDIA to function, they're going to need copper and silver and steel and nickel to build the data centers that run the NVIDIA chips.
So we're back to that same thing.
That's right.
And that's right.
And those things are all cheap and necessary.
So, you know, this moving paper fantasy will go from technology stocks in AI to people saying, wait a minute, we actually need real stuff, the kind of stuff that you make buildings out of and that you make knives and forks out of and so forth.
So cyclically, it's going to come into it's going to come into basic resources.
And as volatile as these stocks are and as cheap as they are, I actually think that the mining business, which is held in low repute by most people for the reasons I've mentioned before, it could be good for 10 to 1.
And at some point, some years from now, a few years from now, you're going to hear people talking about it at cocktail parties.
That'll be the time to sell.
Just like now is the time to sell AI stuff.
They're talking about it at cocktail parties.
Everybody's putting every nickel and dime that they can into it.
It's a classic top of a bubble.
In fact, the whole economy is what I think we would call an everything bubble, driven by borrowed money.
You can't buy a house.
You can't sell a house today unless you have a mortgage or somebody else can get a mortgage to buy it.
So the housing market, the whole real estate market is walking on air at this point.
It could collapse.
Let me add that the AI hardware industry is also walking on the thin ice known as the power grid infrastructure in America.
As you are no doubt well aware, in San Francisco, the power went out the other day for 130,000 people.
The entire eastern U.S. grid serving 13 states, they have zero excess power.
If you build a data center, you have to bring your own power somehow.
The wait time on gas turbines is up to 10 years, depending on the size.
The time to build a nuclear power plant is 15 plus years for planning and regulation and construction, everything.
Solar, you know, depends on silver.
So yeah, you can buy solar panels.
You're going to need silver.
So talk to us about the America's, really, it's a failing power infrastructure that the AI layer is built on top of that has me very concerned about the reliability.
Well, the solution to all of the power problems that exist is nuclear power.
Nuclear is the safest, the cheapest, and the cleanest form of mass power generation with no exceptions.
I know that sounds very controversial to say, and I can explain why I say that.
And not only that, but the technology of generating nuclear has been advancing tremendously, although putting the theory into practice has been very hard because of the unbelievably stringent regulations for building a nuclear power plant.
We should have, well, we could have nuclear power plants that are the size of trucking containers that could generate enough megawatts to power a small city, buried for 10 years, completely safe, very, very cheap, and as many of them as you want.
I mean, that's very, very close.
It's here.
Yeah, we've had small nuclear submarines and ships for decades, of course.
Absolutely.
I just want to mention to the audience, small modular reactors, there's a number of companies that have that tech.
You're exactly right.
And I believe those can produce up to 300, 400 megawatts, something like that, which is really substantial.
But you're right.
The regulatory environment doesn't allow this to happen quickly, whereas China can build a large-scale fission-based nuclear power plant in about five years.
It's up and running.
In America, it takes us triple or quadruple that time.
Yeah, everything takes three or four or five or 10 times longer in the U.S. for because of regulations, because of, well, it's mainly regulations more than anything else.
Yeah.
Incompetent bureaucracy.
But one way to play nuclear, and of course, there are small modular reactor companies, but they've been discovered.
They're not cheap.
It's why I'm a fan of uranium, which is what you need to power.
Of course, once again, if we had a completely free market, we'd probably not be using uranium now.
Anyway, we'd be using thorium, but that's a totally different subject.
We're using uranium and will be for some time to come.
It's also a very volatile part of the market.
There are scores of small uranium companies out there that are very cheap, unloved.
Another area.
Well, yeah, I completely agree with you.
I've also researched this extensively, and I understand there's really only one, maybe two uranium enrichment operators in the United States, which means that we still depend on Russia for the enrichment of uranium.
And then, you know, Trump's got the tariffs.
Well, not just Trump, but Biden, the SWIFT system.
You can hardly buy anything from Russia except uranium.
You're still allowed to buy uranium that's enriched from Russia because without Russia's uranium, the U.S. nuclear industry would collapse.
I know.
It's all really quite crazy.
And if it's crazy, the relationship of the U.S. and Russia today, the relationship of the European Union and Russia is totally and absolutely insane.
I mean, the Europeans are plumping for a war with Russia, doubling their military budgets.
I mean, that's just what we need is World War III on top of everything else.
And of course, these poor Europeans are deindustrializing.
They don't have any natural gas within Europe.
Yep.
Well, and what they do, they're shutting down.
And they're not importing any from Russia.
They're acting run by sociopaths that are actually criminally insane.
I completely agree.
The European countries are led by what I would call a suicide cult of absolute lunatics in Brussels and the EU, etc.
But anyway, look, we're almost out of time here, Doug.
I want to give you a chance to add anything here that you think we've missed or we'll mention your website again.
But what would you like to leave our audience with here today?
Well, we're in for tough times.
They've been building up with a form of delayed momentum for decades, but we're at the edge now.
I think we're going to enter upon something that I call the Greater Depression.
It's going to be longer and different than what we had from 1929 to 1946.
Yeah, because back in 29, people could read.
That's right.
And the way to prepare for that is to don't act conventionally.
Learn to be a speculator.
Learn to find distortions in the market so you can take advantage of them.
Try to produce more than you consume and set aside the difference in the safest place you can think of.
And that's not a fiat currency like the U.S. dollar.
And actually, the most important thing is to prepare yourself so that to ensure that you have the skills that you need so that no matter what happens in the future, how the chips may fall, you'll be able to act as an entrepreneur and survive and prosper.
That's what most people don't think of.
Don't think of looking for a job.
God forbid.
It's the skills in your hands and the knowledge in your head that makes you valuable, not the ability to fill out an employment form, which is what most people think of.
Yeah, that's the best advice ever.
Yeah, you can't depend on someone else's approval or permission to protect yourself and your assets and your interests in the years ahead.
Yeah, but it takes work.
So you can't go to the bar and drink beer with the boys.
You can't go to your mom's basement and play video games all day.
You've got to qualify yourself to do things.
And I think most people are too lazy, or perhaps most people think, well, worst case, I can always go on the dole.
I mean.
Well, our audience, of course, is the exception to that.
They are the people that always, they keep learning, they keep advancing.
And I want to encourage them to visit your website, internationalman.com, where they can subscribe and they can stay informed using your financial analysis and your latest updates and so on, your insights that will help them tremendously.
And Doug, I just want to thank you for taking time during this holiday season to spend an hour with us.
It's been an honor to speak with you, and I hope you'll come back in 2026 and give us an update.
Well, I really appreciate that, Mike.
And a Merry Christmas to you too.
Merry Christmas.
All right.
Thank you, Doug.
Enjoy the rest of your day there on the farm.
Have fun.
And for those of you watching, there you go.
Doug Casey, the international man, extraordinary wisdom.
Share this interview with everyone who could benefit from it.
And you can find this interview on, of course, Brighteon.com, but also Rumble as well and some other sites.
So thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams here, the founder of Brighteon.
And Merry Christmas to all of you and looking forward to a wonderful year in 2026 of great abundance for those of you who heed the advice of Doug Casey.
And you're going to do well next year, whereas not everybody's going to be in that boat.
So knowledge and action will spell the difference.
Thank you for watching today.
Take care.
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