All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 5, 2025 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
29:06
How To Become Competent, Confident, and Dangerous, with guest Doug Casey

World-renowned speculator and libertarian philosopher Doug Casey joins today's Liberty Report to discuss his new book, The Preparation: How To Become Competent, Confident, and Dangerous World-renowned speculator and libertarian philosopher Doug Casey joins today's Liberty Report to discuss his new book, The Preparation: How To Become Competent, Confident, and Dangerous

|

Time Text
Daniel Mick Adams Welcomes Dr. Paul 00:01:56
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
We have a special guest today, and we're going to have a good time in our views today.
But first, I want to let you know who our co-host is, and that's Daniel Mick Adams.
Daniel, welcome to the program today.
Good morning, Dr. Paul.
How are you this morning?
Good.
And I want to get along with introducing our special guest.
And he's well known.
He was well known back in the 70s because I can remember meeting him, you know, because there was a lot of excitement in the markets back then.
And he wrote a book back then that became very, very well known.
It dealt with the investments and what to do.
But now he's been at it ever since.
He's a worldwide traveler.
I always marveled at that.
I had to travel in the military in old World War II planes, and I got tired of that.
But Doug never gets tired of it.
He's off all the time traveling, but it's to his benefit because he always learns something.
He probably makes a buck on the trek.
But we want to talk, you know, about what Doug's doing right now.
So first, Doug, welcome to the program.
Good to see you again.
Well, thanks, Ron.
And it's a pleasure being here.
I'm speaking to you today from my farm in Uruguay, where I've spent a lot of time.
It's a quiet, peaceful little country.
And the way the world is today, quiet and peaceful, are key words.
Wonderful.
You know, the one reason why we got together on this program was the fact that you came out with a new book.
And the Crisis Investing was a very famous book and still in circulation, of course.
And the crisis isn't over.
Virtuous Character Preparation 00:12:05
To me, it's just a lot worse.
And I think that book came out in 79.
But here we are now.
And Doug, we've talked a little bit about the book you just came out with.
I'm going to put it up for our viewers to see.
Here it is.
It's a preparation for what?
It's the preparation.
So we want to start off with that.
What are we getting prepared for?
I thought we got prepared in the 1970s.
Are we still preparing for the same crisis?
Or is this just a little touch of that?
Or are things much worse?
Well, that's a good point.
Back in the 70s, preppers were thinking in terms of putting aside six months of food and some gold and silver coins and things of that nature and moving out to the country.
This is different.
The preparation is about young men and how they should prepare themselves for their lives.
Because the problem we have in the U.S., we're suffering an ongoing slow motion, but accelerating collapse of Western civilization, where all values have been lost and young men have been turned into what are known as cucks.
They feel like they're being washed away by many things.
So charity begins at home.
And instead of accumulating stuff, which is a good idea, because we all want physical things to insulate us from reality, unpleasant aspects of reality, this book is about what a young man should do in between the ages of 18 and 22 when most young men foolishly, I'd say idiotically, I'd say counterproductively today, go to college.
These are the four most important years, arguably, of a young man's life.
And when you go to college, which used to be considered an entrary to success and money, it no longer is.
It actually is something that drags you down.
I'm not just talking about the huge costs of going to college and the burdensome debt, which you almost have to take on to go through college today.
I'm talking about swimming in a cesspool populated by Marxist teachers and woke coast students that will clutter your mind with counterproductive ideas and perhaps ruin your life.
So what we're trying to do in this book is show young men exactly what they should do instead of going to college to turn themselves into a Renaissance man, which is the object of education as far as I'm concerned.
Doug, in your introduction, you mentioned something that caught my attention.
And you probably wouldn't be surprised that I noticed this.
But you said the most important thing, part of an education that is a good education, is a strong, virtuous character.
And I'm enamored by the word virtuous and virtue because I immediately say, well, who's virtue?
I remember there was somebody by the name of Rand that promoted, she promoted, you know, reason.
I'm for reason.
A lot of people are for reason.
But whose reason are we going to use?
Is there anything about this virtuous character?
Where does it come from?
The one thing I strongly agree with you is it's not going to come from our universities.
I think every speech I give, I complain about that.
And that is not the answer.
And that's one of the reasons why I have a homeschooling group, which touches on some of the things that you do such a magnificent job on.
But how do you handle this thing of the definition of virtue?
Because what if somebody like the communists that won the mayor's race in New York, deep down in his heart believes he's virtuous, which probably there are some like him that think that that's the virtue, what they're doing to us?
Well, that is a very good point, Ron.
And virtue is a word that has been discredited in our civilization in recent decades.
The derivation of that word, virtue, comes from the Latin word for veer, which is man.
In other words, to be manly is to be virtuous.
And I'm not talking about Nambi-Pammy virtues.
You have theological virtues like faith, hope, charity, humility, things like that.
Okay, that's fine.
But I'm talking about virtue as being things like competence, honesty, manly virtues.
And these have been washed away in the world of political correctness and wokeness.
And you have to have a moral foundation for what you do.
The reason people like Mamdani in New York won is that they believe that he is virtuous.
That's false.
He's actually evil and the opposite of virtuous.
But the language and the moral system of this country has been captured.
So the people, we live in a bizarro world where everything is actually upside down and almost the opposite of what people think.
So one of the things we're advocating in this book is a classical education where people look at the foundations of Western civilization and go back to the original definitions of virtue, the type of thing that the Greeks and the Romans built Western civilization upon.
So it's kind of an overly wordy definition of virtue, I suppose.
I'm not sure if I even covered all the high points.
Daniel, do you have a comment to make on that?
Sure.
Welcome, Doug, to the show.
It's very nice to see you again.
Very happy to see you again.
I would say I don't have a copy of the book.
I read about it on Amazon.
I read there's a lengthy introduction about it on Amazon and it's very interesting.
I have to say, one thing is coming at a perfect time.
I think it's a perfect storm.
There are two points that I would like to make.
First of all, and I know this personally, I move in sort of traditional society, traditional Christian groups, Catholic groups.
And there are an enormous amount of young men out there who are very bright, who hit the age of 18 and have no idea what the hell to do.
They're smart kids.
Before they would have gone to school for the last several decades, they would have gone to college.
But as you rightly point out, college, the one thing that it does do is feminize young men and destroys their lives with the Marxist professors.
My son went to Texas A ⁇ M. Thankfully, he was in engineering, so he wasn't indoctrinated into all this, but the classes that he did have to take that related to that were that same way.
He just had to kind of shut his mouth and close his ears and get through the classes.
So you have that on the one hand.
They don't know what to do.
A good friend of mine has a young man of that age who decided to become a pilot.
And fortunately, the father has the wherewithal to allow that to happen.
But not all kids that age are fortunate that way.
So that's the one.
And the other two is I know plenty of people who sent their children, conservative families, capitalist people, good people, virtuous people.
They sent their kids to school and they came back in four years to hate their parents, to literally hate their parents.
And you see that over and over again.
So that is a real crisis in our society.
And I think you tapped into something that is extremely important.
Because when I was young, the only thing you did if you're a smart young kid is you went to university.
I went to UC Berkeley.
That's what you did.
I would not let my kids go there today.
Not at all.
So now you're looking at a situation where young, smart people are doing something that's different, but they're looking for what to do.
And what it looks like you've got from what I've seen is a real concrete plan for what they can do.
I would actually love to hear more how your system works.
Okay.
We're trying to cover all of the bases.
In this four-year period of time, when people go to college today, it's basically about drinking beer and chasing girls and goofing off for most kids.
Since this is the most important time of a young man's life, we want a packet full of interesting and fun things to do.
First of all, a basic education.
Instead of going to class and listening to some tired old professor give the same lecture he's given for the last 30 years, mostly with rubbish out of date, we think that online universities like the teaching company, where top professors give command performances that you can listen to again and again until you get the data down.
So that by the time you finish the preparation, you should be much better educated in both the arts and the sciences and business MBA aspects as well.
All three things.
Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Sciences, and an MBA program are all tied into this so that you're quite competent by finishing this.
But that's not all.
You want to be a Renaissance man.
Part of that is the Roman dictum, mens sauna in corpore sano.
That means a sound mind in a sound body in addition to having a virtuous aspect on life.
So what we've done is we've divided the calendar year into 16 quarters, or I should say the scholastic four-year period into 16 quarters.
And in each of those quarters, in addition to the academic program, which I've talked about, you're going to learn things that are of real use.
For instance, you might start out becoming an EMT, an emergency medical technician, which you can do at low cost.
You've trained yourself in a valuable skill, which can immediately pay off.
For instance, Maxim, my co-author, he's one of the co-authors of the book, but my co-author and Matthew's son became an EMT.
It qualified him to get a job as an EMT on a firefighting team out west.
He was immediately earning $600 net net.
Everything was covered per day on a firefighting team that allowed him to save for several months all that money to finance the next part of his education.
What's he doing?
What did he do next?
Well, he learned to be a sailor.
He sailed around Cape Horn for three weeks and learned the sailing trade, in addition to lots of practical ocean experience.
Now he's qualified as a sailor.
He's becoming a pilot, a private pilot, which is enabling him to take lessons in Alaska and Uruguay.
So he's covering some geographical ground and learning a very valuable skill.
Not necessarily economic, and it's costly.
Next thing he's going to do is go to Thailand because every person should be capable of defending himself.
So he's going to Thailand for three months.
He's already got a background in martial arts, which is helpful, and learning Muay Thai.
So he need not physically fear the way most people do.
So we cover everything from learning to drive heavy equipment to learning to weld to going to Italy, perhaps, I think that's a good choice, to Florence to take a one-month professional cooking course.
Government Interference Questioned 00:15:03
So you got the picture of what I'm trying to do.
A Renaissance man is somebody that can go anywhere and has the knowledge and the skills to do anything.
And this is the time of life when you ought to learn instead of wasting it and embedding yourself in college.
So that's it in a nutshell, Daniel.
You know, I hear what you're saying.
I think that's very, very important.
But where I get to wonder how to handle this is there's another factor that I think about and talk about and write about because it's an interference.
And what you say, it's assuming that the Gestapo is not going to come in, you know, will not be there to stop you from doing what you should do in a moral and ethical way of doing it because it's a government.
Now, I have come to the conclusion that maybe the one guideline that people have used over the centuries, many centuries, is just natural law, that people do know what's right and wrong.
And that is something that, you know, that excludes the government.
You know, those are the rules and laws that the government can't do.
And the government's competing.
Do you mention or talk about or how to is natural law?
because the founders used that and they contributed something to the Constitution because of their belief in that rather than depending on some other outside source.
Yeah, I'm with you on that, Ron.
I'm, look, I don't believe in government as an institution.
The institution itself is corrupt.
And the reason is that government relies on force.
And there's two ways society can organize itself, voluntarily or with coercion.
And government institutionalizes coercion.
So I don't want to go into all that.
And I know we agree on these things.
Basically, I'm an anarcho-capitalist.
And I think that Ayn Rand forms a good foundation for a lot of these things, in addition to the basics of Western civilization, which were laid down a couple thousand years ago.
But, yeah, we're on the same page.
You want to get the state out of your life.
It's a corrupt parasite.
It does nothing but tax, inflate the currency, create wars, pogroms, prosecutions.
And government is the great evil rolling the world.
Not just some government, but the institution itself.
I believe that people can and eventually will organize themselves voluntarily on market principles.
And my ideal is to have eight million, excuse me, eight billion completely independent and free individuals in the world, not people that see themselves as the subjects of 200 governments in the world.
So where are you right now?
I would assume just from our brief conversation that things are bad, generally speaking.
They're no better than they were in the 70s.
I don't know whether the problem of the 70s was just an introduction to what was coming.
And now we're facing a lot more because, yes, a lot of people write, you know, Anne Rand wrote a lot of things.
I read everything she ever wrote.
And people are influenced by that.
But when do you have to say that it's not working?
You know, then it becomes a very personal thing.
Then you have to, and there's a lot of people who do that, a lot of libertarians I know.
And that is the people that say they try to get away from the bad stuff and maybe find a cave someplace up in some mountain.
And people ask me, are you going to leave?
You think this place is horrible.
I said, no, I have too much at stake.
I have my roots planted here.
And I think I can still emphasize these things.
And I do it with trying to satisfy the fact that I think I blame the universities for just about everything of the 20th century.
So I try to contradict that.
And I felt good about our presidential campaigns because I came away not condemning young people, how bad they were.
We got a lot of good support, even at Berkeley, Berkeley, when you tell them the truth, they seem to recognize that.
So I'm vacillating.
Optimism or pessimism?
And how do you come down on that current events?
And how do you think it's going to be resolved?
Well, I got to say first, Ron, I've got to compliment you on being one of the Most constructive and important men of the last 50, 60 years with everything that you've done, you've been on the right side of just about every issue I can think of.
So you've got to be complimented.
Everything from your homeschooling program to getting the word out as president very effectively.
Okay, so I got to say that just because it needs saying.
These things have to be emphasized.
Number one.
Number two, the reason I'm in Uruguay right now, I've been to 160 some countries and lived in 10 or 12, and I love America.
But the thing to remember, speaking to what you were saying, is that America isn't just a piece of geography.
It used to be, but it's an idea and it's a totally unique idea in world history.
It's the only country in world history that was founded on the principles of individualism and personal freedom and free markets, free thought.
Only country that was founded on those virtues.
So that's why I love America.
But America is just an idea and it's lost the plot.
It's, you know, Warren Buffett, of course, one of the all-time great investors, said, never bet against America.
And when he said that, he was right because it used to be America.
But it's not America any longer.
It's lost the plot.
America's turned from a culture with traditions that kept people together voluntarily to a multicultural domestic empire.
And like all empires, it's falling apart.
Centrifugal force is going to tear it apart.
I think we're headed towards a genuine civil war, not like the War of Secession from 1861 to 1865, but something just as bad, but different.
So I think that, and of course, people say, I don't want to leave America.
I've got my friends and family and all that here.
Yeah, okay.
But when the ship is sinking like it was in Germany in 1933 or Russia in 1917 or China in 1947, and I can give you 50 other examples, only an idiot stays there to be washed away.
So it's important to have a plan B, if it were, as it were.
And a plan B can be very pleasant.
If I'm wrong and things don't go really bad, which I expect they will in the next few years, they're already going bad.
You've got a pleasant place to vacation and increase your opportunities.
And if I'm right, you'll value that plan B more than anything else.
So long answers to a long question, Ron.
I'm sorry.
No, that's good.
Daniel, do you have a comment?
Just a final one, actually.
And I do agree with you, Doug.
Nothing focused.
My understanding of America more than when I spent a decade living overseas, it definitely helps you understand from a distance.
You know, coming back to your book really quickly before we close out, you know, the ages, as you point out, the ages between 17 and 24 are very difficult times, especially for young men, because you really don't know what you're supposed to do, what you're going to do, what you should do.
And it's getting harder and harder for that to happen.
So I was just wondering specifically, what would you say your audience is for this book?
What kind of young man you say, you say men, but I suppose women could certainly benefit from it as well.
But what kind of young person would benefit from it?
And how could you convince parents to take the leap away from a more, what has become a more traditional approach?
You go to school, you get your degree.
They say, hey, Doug, this sounds great, but I'm afraid.
I'm afraid for my kid.
Yeah.
Well, fear is the killer.
And look, I understand that parents grew up in a different time when college was a passport to all the good things. in the world.
It no longer is.
In fact, it's just the opposite.
It's a corrupting influence, it's a cesspool you're throwing your kid into.
So that's the first sale we have to make.
Don't do college, okay?
Well, there are exceptions if you want to get, become a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer.
Okay.
All right.
That's different, different environment.
So the first thing is forget about college, but the second thing is use that time productively.
They're the most energetic and best years of your life.
And what we're trying to do in this book, I think we've succeeded, is to show young men a pathway exactly what they should do.
Now, you're right.
The parents have to be convinced because they're going to be fighting against this for all kinds of traditional reasons.
But it's actually more, it's just as important that parents and grandparents read this book than it is that the kids themselves read it because they'll understand the importance of learning the kind of things that they'll learn from doing this stuff.
Look, three most important verbs in any language are be, do, and have.
And most people in today's world just think about have.
I want to have a college degree.
I want to have a pretty spouse.
I want to have money.
Forget about the have.
That's one of the problems that we're experiencing today.
When you have something, it should be a consequence of your doing something, okay?
And that's what we're trying to explain in this book.
Here's what you do.
And if you do things, you will then therefore have the things that you want indeed.
But more important, the most important verb is the verb be.
And by doing things, you transform yourself.
So you be something, you are something.
Not just do something like a machine or have something like, which is, which is trivial.
But those three verbs run through this book.
And we try to tell people precisely exactly what you do, where you go, how you do it, and the moral foundation that underlies it all.
So you transform yourself into a Renaissance man.
And, you know, I struggle with it about it because I tend to be and want to be optimistic.
And I know you've made that same effort because there's so much available to us and we screw it all up.
And that goes back to, you know, virtue.
You know, in spite of how bad things are, there's still this tremendous advancement.
But then there's the corruption.
I think one example demonstrates, you know, how ridiculous it gets is, you know, just say nuclear power.
You know, you can kill millions and millions of people.
And that's the evil.
And otherwise you could, you know, do tremendous good, you know, from energy.
But then we have this evil coming in and that's government.
And I think it's ideologic.
I think it's preached.
I think it's like a religion coming out of these schools.
I think it's been there for more than 100 years.
And I think that's when you could even date it.
If you want to date 1913, there were some pretty bad things going on in 1913.
And we either have to live with it, which is what we're going to have to do, because we're not going to have the one wave and it's over.
But when I talk to groups, I tell them, if you want to go to Congress, you can go, but that's not the answer.
That is not the answer at all.
If you want to do that to make a point, which is evil in the political world, then they're not going to like that.
But what you have to do is take this information and be able to use it in a positive way.
And in spite of the evil of it, just think, Doug, how horrible the monetary system has been since 1930 to 13 and systematic destruction of it.
And they're still living along.
And if you look at the news this morning, the dollar went down, went up, but people still love the dollar.
And that's human nature, and that's good and evil.
And it's going to be here.
And one reason why I like to deal with it is I think I have a smidgen of information that I'd like to pass on.
And I enjoy doing it.
And I know that's part of your effort over the years is to get people to know and understand because I think that's where the answers are to be found.
But Doug, I want to thank you very much again.
And maybe hopefully we can get together and really fully discuss these very important issues.
Oh, there's so many areas that we can go into, Ron, that I think would be quite entertaining.
So I love talking to you guys.
So anytime.
Okay.
Thank you very much for being with us.
And I want to thank our viewers for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
Export Selection