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Transcript
Dan of FMT: Greetings. Thank you for joining us at Future Money Trends.com. I’m here with legendary speculator and founder of Casey Research, Doug Casey. Thanks for joining us.
Doug Casey: De nada.
Dan of FMT: Doug, I’m a dad of three small children. I know you’re not a father, but have an ability and a gift to teach people the truth and the right things to do, whether they recognize it or not at the time.
I guess I want to start this interview off with what the things that are most admired by other parents and people, and what they teach their kids. The military, for example, or the police. Those are regarded as something that the kids should look up to.
The police are doing the right thing. The military are the good guys. If you go to SeaWorld and watch a Shamu show, they have the whole audience stand up to applaud the troops. How do you teach a child? What is the military to you? What is a police officer to you? How do you teach them this?
Doug: To start with, guys that join the police and the military tend to be cut from the same cloth. I speak, incidently, as somebody that did four years at a military boarding school during a time when they were pretty tough places. I’m glad I did, incidentally, because otherwise, I was going to go to West Point. That would have been a gigantic mistake for a number of reasons, but certainly at that time, because that was the height of the Vietnam War.
I might have wound up going to Vietnam and either doing things to other people or having things done to me that would have been most regrettable for the rest of my life. Getting back to what we were talking about, guys that want to join either the military or the police, maybe they’re influenced by watching too many romantic John Wayne movies, which corrupt a young psyche and influence it.
Maybe they watched too much television where they see all of these cops, intelligent, non‑corrupt, and fighting for good. They’re all good cops on television. The fact of the matter is, guys that join the military and the police generally have an extra Y chromosome to start with, which makes them a little bit dangerous, because they’re natural predators or inclined that way. Instead of apotheosizing the military, people should realize that the military is really just a heavily armed version of the post office.
That’s really all it is. It’s a dangerous bureaucracy where you have people marching in lock‑step, wearing costumes that do what they’re told. That’s one of the things that I’m glad I figured out in high school at military school. When you join the military, you’re putting yourself completely under the control of people that may be despicable, and you have to follow their orders like a robot. It’s a horrible situation for a free person to put himself in.
I understand that if you join the military, you may want the adventure. You may want the interesting training. Everybody loves to shoot guns, I do, blow things up. This is wonderful, and pretend you’re a hero. The reality is that you’re going to wind up doing things that you’ll probably regret the rest of your life. If something doesn’t happen to you that’s going to ruin the rest of your life. There was even a time just before I got out of college when, I had a relapse, I was going to join the French Foreign Legion.
There really is something to be said about the Legion, because, at least, it’s an exotic military. If you’re going to make a mistake, make an exotic mistake. I’m glad I didn’t do that, because a lot of the Legionnaire’s are, frankly, just hardcore criminals that like wearing uniforms, but they’re interesting guys. Anyway, I advise people against that. Then again, I advise kids against going to college. That’s a misallocation of both time and money.
Dan of FMT: Doug, how many countries have you traveled to?
Doug: 145 is what I figure.
Dan of FMT: I don’t know how much you observe children, but I’m sure you go into a lot of different homes and see them interacting. It’s very common for American children at a very young age to play with militarized action figures that are killing people. I never thought about it, because it’s so normal.
When my four year old started to do that at a friend’s house, I kind of said, “You know what, I don’t think that’s natural for a person to kill other people.” Especially, with that thought. Almost have it as a game.” Of course, you’re playing with the US Military toys and GI Joe. Is this normal?
Doug: Yeah, you’re a good guy.
Dan of FMT: [laughs] You’re a good guy. Is this normal around the world? Are kids at very young ages killing each other, or is this something that’s a result of living the empire?
Doug: That’s a good question. I’ll have to observe the play habits of kids in different countries more closely. I must admit that I haven’t done that. Let’s retro rock a little bit. When I was a kid, everybody used to play cops and robbers. We used to play cowboys and Indians. That’s completely politically incorrect. I’m sure that mothers would spank their kids if they were playing cowboys and Indians today.
[laughter]
Doug: We used to shoot each other and fight and roughhouse. Kids aren’t allowed to do that anymore today. I don’t know. It’s funny. It’s actually a paradox. As the U.S. government has gotten more aggressive and more pernicious, the average kid out there is forced to be less like a kid. I read this stuff all the time. I think it must be true that kids can’t even draw a picture of a gun anymore.
When I was a kid, we used to walk around with our BB guns everywhere. In high school, everybody had a rifle and a shotgun, and we used to walk around with them. I carried a rifle and a pistol on a plane with me as a 17‑year‑old. I didn’t think twice of it, and neither did anybody else on the plane.
Things have changed. Even while the US has gotten more aggressive, the average American is more of a little lamb. It’s a paradox.
Dan of FMT: You’ve talked about people not going to college. What about regular school? Do you think it does damage to a person if they through the conventional public education system?
Doug: Schools are basically indoctrination centers where the kind of people that become teachers are, generally, the wrong kind of people to be teachers. I was actually a sixth grade teacher in Blues Brothers country for a semester. I felt my fellow teachers at that grade school were an embarrassment. You don’t get the best and brightest as teachers, with very rare exceptions.
What those teachers indoctrinate the kids with, they’re basically what they’re told to, because they’re not independent thinkers. The stuff that they’re told to indoctrinate them with is antithetical, in many cases, to what a free person, an independent thinker, should learn. You’re corrupting your kid, and you’re wasting his time, and you’re boring him.
I would have been much better off if I’d just been released into the wild where I could follow my nose and learn things, instead of picking up all kinds of bad habits from the other young chimpanzees that I was incarcerated with.
[laughter]
Doug: I think it’s much worse today than it was then. I’d look for an alternative.
Dan of FMT: Let’s move the topic to money as we wrap it up. The junior mining sector, it’s down about 75, 80 percent. Do you think this is going to be one of those times, over the next five years, where people turn 10,000, 50,000 into north of a million dollars?
Doug: It’s happened many times in the past. The junior mining sector, since I’ve been following it, which I’m shocked to say has been 40 years, cyclically moves up a thousand percent as a group with some individual stocks going up a hundred times or a thousand times in price, and then it drops 95 percent or even 98 percent and wipes everything out.
It’s very volatile and cyclical. Right now, we’re at one of the great cyclical bottoms of all time. Now, there’s no guarantees. Most of these junior mining companies, they’re exploration companies. They’re on an Easter egg hunt. There’s no guarantee they’re going to find the Easter egg, but if you buy the right people running the companies…You have to learn something about this actually. You can’t use a dartboard approach. Well, you can, but you shouldn’t, I don’t think.
Although, I used to believe that. I think it’s possible today for somebody. Especially with the Fed continuing to create trillions of dollars, there’s going to be other bubbles created. One of the bubbles is very likely to be in mining exploration stocks. People do need copper and nickel and uranium. Everything in the world is made out of these things.
Yeah, we could have a super bubble in these stocks that it’s possible to make 50 to 1 on your money, and that could be life changing for anybody. I don’t like to give investment advice, even though, that’s what I’m suppose to do for a living. I’d say yeah, this is one of the best times, I think, in modern history to put some money into this particular sector.
Dan of FMT: If you don’t mind me asking you, when you had that game changer for your own life and financially, was it from being a successful author, the newsletter business, or was it from investing?
Doug: Well, let me think. I’m trying to think what happened. Before I wrote a book, I made some lucky hits in the mining market. I like the mining market, because it’s the most volatile area of the stock market. It’s more volatile than the technology sector if you can believe that. I got lucky a few times and that helped.
Like one time, I was buying South African stocks. I could go on about this for hours. These stocks were yielding 50, 60, 75 percent in current dividends. I know this is unbelievable, but it’s true. After dividends had been cut a lot. It was at the bottom, and by the time I sold them at the cyclical top, four years later, I was getting many times back, in dividends, what I paid for the stocks. It was incredible.
I had some good luck like that, but I guess my luck…I’ve made good money with my books. “The International Man.” That was very good and profitable. “Crisis investing” was a huge best seller. “Strategic Investing,” Simon and Schuster, back in 1982, gave me 800,000 bucks, which in today’s dollars is more like three million. That’s all helped.
Dan of FMT: I’ve one last question on the gold manipulation. A lot of people were really upset. I did not get to see your speech in Vancouver, but I did get some people emailing me and saying they’re really upset with you.
Bud Conrad, Eric Sprott, Ed Steer. These are people you’re close with, or I assume you’re close with. Is it that you don’t believe they’re specifically targeting manipulation? It seems like everything is manipulated from down to what we eat to what we buy and how we retire.
Doug: Well, at the upcoming New Orleans Investment Conference in late October, I’m actually going to have a debate with the guy that runs GATA, which is…
Dan of FMT: Bill or Chris?
Doug: Chris.
Dan of FMT: OK.
Doug: …about this subject. The time has come to debunk this silly meme once and for all. The first thing that I’ve got to say, just for our purposes here, is that these people conflate the words “manipulation” with “suppression.” I’m not sure which they mean, and I’m not sure they even know which they mean. Of course, these government’s are involved in all these markets trying to influence prices. They want some prices high, they want some prices low, depending on this and that.
The central banks and government’s own gold. Of course, they buy and sell it. Of course, they prefer to see it lower than higher, but, actually, they don’t really care about gold. They don’t believe in it. They think it’s a barbarous relic. The idea that they’re suppressing the gold price to make it cheap for the Chinese and the Russian central banks and other Oriental central banks to buy it, that seems pretty stupid to me.
How can you say that they’re suppressing the price of gold when since 1971, it’s run from $35 to $1900? That’s one of the great bull markets in anything in all of history. How are you suppressing the price of gold when a bull market like that has occurred? Same with silver. There are a lot of arguments that I can make about this that actually debunk this suppression meme. As far as manipulation, I don’t know, and I don’t care, and I don’t think they care either.
Dan of FMT: I’ll leave the debate for October. I’ll probably head out there to the New Orleans conference? The [inaudible 15:54] one?
Doug: Yeah.
Dan of FMT: Doug, you’ve been very generous with your time.
Doug: Thanks. One more thing. It’s funny that people get angry with me for not believing. It’s like this is a religion. This meme has turned into a religious thing, which has about as much in the way of evidence…I have read all the evidence these guys put up. It’s not evidence. It’s assertions. It’s like when you contradict a religious doctor, and you’re a heretic, people get emotionally angry at you.
How can you get emotional about this? This is just…Anyway, I’m sorry. I had to add that in there. Just remarking on the fact that you said people got angry at me for not being a believer.
Dan of FMT: Yeah. [laughs] Actually, a lot of sites cover our work. Some of the people email me to let me know like, “That’s it, man. If you post anything with Katusa or Casey, you’re done.”
Doug: Yeah. “These are obviously members of the enemy camp. They’re not believers.” I know. It’s really further proof that there is no hope for this worthless little planet.
Dan of FMT: Well, regardless of if someone believes or not, it’s nice to see that you have people like Miles Franklin in here and one of your own writers, Ed Steer. It’s not as if you can’t have a disagreement with people and still work very happily with them.
Doug: Right. In the end, the truth will come out. Maybe I’m wrong. Nobody knows what the facts are. This is just a question of reasoning, and you believe what you want. So many people take this is religious doctrine. That’s what surprises me and disappoints me.
Dan of FMT: All right. Doug Casey of Casey Research. We’re at the Casey Summit in San Antonio.
