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A
All right. Good morning, Doug. We're back with questions from subscribers to Crisis Investing. Before we get to that, you know, it's June. It's a big month in the US at least. Lots of important holidays. You got Gay Pride Month. You got Juneteenth just two weeks away. I'm sure you're excited for the summer and what everything good June will bring you.
B
Well, that's right. I'm trying to think of how June has been regaled in song and story. We all know that April, let's see, March, comes roaring in like a lion is let out by like a lamb in April. And we got May, May, the merry month of May. But I don't know if they say anything. They got Judas busting out all over. That's a song.
A
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.
B
But now we got Juneteenth, and that's. They're going to have to make a whole repertoire.
A
New jingle for it. Yeah, jingle.
B
Yeah. So that's right. You got to kind of cement it into the national psyche, and a jingle is the way to do it. So where are all our, you know, radical black songwriters? Why aren't they coining something in the Juneteenth?
A
Have you seen any signs of Gay Pride Month there in your little corner of Virginia?
B
Well, I'm kind of living in a silo here, kind of in a bubble within a silo at the moment.
A
Yeah. When you go to town, do you see it? Do they have pride flags up or anything?
B
No, this is this part of Virginia here on the water. They call it on the river spelled R I V, A H. So that's. So after I drive by the numerous churches on the highway from my place into town, probably pass. I don't know, I'd say at least. At least seven or eight churches on the short ride into town. Now, this is not a part of the world that's big on that kind of stuff.
A
That's good at least. But I shared with you a little meme that Trump shared. I'll share it with the audience here that I don't know if you realized it was in. You know, it's a little odd. I'm not sure what he was going for here exactly.
B
I. I don't know either. I mean, I can see the. I can see the relation to Gay Pride Month with the gay male cheerleaders and Trump looking like he's pumped up on steroids and. But how strange.
A
How strange.
B
That's like, if I could get a sign of a painting or. Or at least a Poster of that and his where he pretends to be Jesus, which outraged so many people. That was about a month ago, I guess.
A
Yeah, we should do like a. We should collect his, his memes of himself and create like a calendar or something, you know, so that people could celebrate it into the future.
B
Yeah. I'm asking myself increasingly, what is the matter with this guy? Although I've got to say he's in his tweets or electronic communications, he's using less capitalized letters and less exclamation points, it seems to me, than he has in the past. So somebody must have said to him in the gentlest way possible, Donald, calm the down a little bit.
A
Your caps at least. Fewer caps.
B
Yeah, exactly. I mean, you look like one of these people that use caps all the time and, and they're usually kind of crazy.
A
Yeah, they're shout. They're trying to shout through their texts, which is. That's rude if nothing else.
B
It is. It's like they're yelling at you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
A
I don't, I don't get it. But yeah, I gotta start collecting these, these paintings he does of himself. Because you're right, that Jesus one was really good. Which he said wasn't Jesus, you know, it was as him, as a doctor, he said was his explanation.
B
Sure, but how's he explain this one?
A
I haven't heard an explanation for this one yet. You know, just likes being surrounded by strapping young men, I guess. I'm not sure.
B
God.
A
Strange.
B
Somebody. Somebody on his staff should. Should talk to him.
A
I mean, I know it's like he figured out how to. How to use an AI to generate his own memes, you know, and is posting him. I. I don't know. Or else maybe he sees other people on True Social posting him and then he likes it and so reposts. It could be that. I'm not sure. I'm not sure where they originate from, if it's him or someone else, but it's pretty wild. It's like, don't give AI to grandpa. He does bad things.
B
That's right. Oh, it's too bad.
A
Yeah, well, it's entertaining at least. So, Douglas, get to some of these questions. The first ones is, I guess in response to our. The last episode we did where we talked about, you know, are we in a market melt up? What was really going on? And the question says, Doug says the big gains in small mining stocks are only matter if you size into them properly. While Matt is hesitant on gold stocks despite them looking cheap and is Leaning more cautious for the average investor doing monthly discount co dollar cost averaging. That's what it stands for. Is the real edge staying fully invested and consistent? Or does that approach miss the moments where a crash and portion sizing actually matter more? I say this on a day when gold stocks are down a lot. You know, I talked about first majestic, for example, which, when we started recording, it was down 13% today, a single day. It's a big move and kind of across, you know, everything seems down. The s P is down too, as well. So a day like today, it's nice to have some dry powder.
B
Yeah, that's. That's right. It doesn't matter that the dry powder in the form of cash is losing value at, in real terms, 5 to 10% per year. But I guess it's better to lose 5 or 10% per year than 13% in one day, as first majestic holders might have. And many other stocks are not doing well too. Okay, so how am I playing it? Well, I'm trying Since I mainly buy my stocks in the form of private placements, Directly financing the companies, which is how you should use the stock market. It's. The purpose of the stock market is to finance business. It's not to use it as a gambling casino. And the way you finance business is by giving money directly to. To the company as opposed to some disloyal shareholder who's selling his shares and you buy it in the open market. So it's a little bit of philosophical rationale for what I do, but what I'm trying to do is generate more cash because, as I said, it's better to lose 5 or 10% per year than 10 or 15% per day when the market. So yeah, and I really think that we're on the edge of the precipice. And it could be a deflationary collapse. It could happen. Surprise everybody, including, surprise me. But you got to recognize that it's a possibility. So. And if the big market rolls over and collapses, Just quite possible It'll probably take these crappy little mining stocks down with it as well, Even though they're not even a rounding error to the giant market.
A
So take them down. But you'd imagine that would be a temporary. Temporary status. They go down. And then, you know, these. They are especially the ones that are actually producing gold. Although that wouldn't be most of these tiny explorers, you know, they're minting money. So you got to imagine that.
B
Exactly right. That's exactly right. And. And the ones that are in development a lot of them are planning on going into production real soon. So, okay, I want more cash, I want to have some dry powder. But nope, I still think they're very cheap and I think at some point the public is going to roll into them. So that's the way I'm betting. Okay.
A
All right, here's an interesting question, Doug. Can you use nuclear weapons without conflicting with the Geneva Conventions for war? Because you know in advance that there will be many civil casualties. And will the military people who help facilitate the use of these weapons not be war criminals?
B
That is a really interesting question. And oddly enough, I've actually been thinking about this a lot because I, I like to read military history. And if you look at military history in the west, at least for the last few hundred years, wars used to be fought between armies. I mean, all your soldiers, Napoleonic era, they line up and they'd shoot at each other. Okay. But they wouldn't go into the city adjacent and burn it down and kill the civilians. That didn't happen in the 18th and 19th centuries. Didn't happen, didn't even happen in World War I. Was just so basically soldiers killing each other other. And if a. A village was blown up, it was, well, an unhappy accident. Not really too intentional. It's because the enemy either side was camped out there. So. But now since World War II, with mass bombing, where espe. Well, started with the Germans with Rotterdam and then Coventry. So the Germans started it, but. But the allies took this up to the nth degree with wholesale carpet bombing of civilian cities in Germany. I mean, Hamburg and Dresden.
A
Dresden, yeah.
B
And factly all the big German cities. And even worse, you in in Japan where they leveled the place, firebombing Tokyo, where over a hundred thousand Japanese died. And these are non combatants. They're just citizens. And then in Korea it said that the US destroyed 85% of the buildings in Korea. They leveled the place. So this is a war crime. I mean, it doesn't have to be a nuclear bomb weapon. You know, weapons of mass destruction, they used to be called ABC weapons or NBC weapons. Atomic, biological, chemical, those were a special class. Then they renamed it Weapons of Mass Destruction, which is kind of funny because it seems to me like a mass air raid with B52s or the light, that's really a weapon of mass destruction. And the fact that war now in the nuclear age is about just city busters destroying wholesale cities full of civilians. This is criminal. I mean, it's a war crime, but nobody talks about it as a war crime. It's like Business as usual. So that's a really good question. Well, wouldn't you say?
A
I mean, when we went into Iraq, didn't we take out all the civilian infrastructure? You know, the, the shock and awe? Wasn't that basically going after water production facilities and electricity and all that, too?
B
And that's, of course, what's happening that happened in Iraq and during the shock and AW days, and it's happening in Iran where Trump is threatening to destroy their civilization and blow up their bridges, et cetera, et cetera. Mean, this is. This is pure criminality. It was not the case up until World War II. It did not happen.
A
That's interesting.
B
Something new.
A
Something new.
B
We've become morally degraded.
A
Right. And you have the example, of course, you have Gaza and you have the incursions into Lebanon, you know, which are a lot of that, too. They're just, you know, raising it all to the ground.
B
Yeah, yeah. Is Israel planning on taking over southern Lebanon? Maybe?
A
Well, yeah, there are. I mean, they're. They're occupying a substantial portion of it now. I mean, they're fighting with Hezbollah there.
B
Yeah. And if they can drive all the Lebanese out of southern Lebanon and Hezbollah, I hear they've.
A
More than a million have been evacuated out of that area.
B
So. Yeah, who knows? And certainly that's true of Gaza as well. I mean, I heard an estimate that really, it's not just the official number of 75,000 people killed. I mean, I mean, this whole thing with October 6th, then how many people were. How many people were killed in the incursion?
A
I think they say somewhere 12 to 1400 is what the number that they talk about.
B
But is that killed or was that hostages also? Is that a separate number? How many hostages were there? 250. We could look it up, I guess, if you can trust the numbers, which you really can't.
A
Yeah, I'm not sure what the numbers
B
are, but anyway, this is like massive retaliation on the part of the Israelis. And it said that those 75,000 are just direct deaths, but not indirect deaths from disease and starvation and wounds that, you know, kill people as they get infected over months. So who knows how many people have really been killed in Gaza.
A
I heard an estimate of the other day. First time I heard this number was 800,000. So what the estimates, we're putting it at.
B
Wow, that sounds like a. That sounds like a whole lot.
A
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it's right. We. We can't know any of these things. But that was based upon some lancet study. Apparently.
B
Yeah, I guess the truth will come out eventually. Maybe.
A
Maybe. Okay, let's see. Next question is, what do you think of the EVTOL market? Those are electric vertical takeoff and landing. Have you seen any of these vehicles that, that have that. But they have, yeah.
B
And there are actually a couple of public companies that have, have small aircraft that civilians can, can use and I think you can buy them now. Actually I haven't kept up with them, but I'm pretty confident that with the huge advances that are being made in drone technology and battery technology, which will I think become a really big deal that will eventually, just like in Blade Runner, have non internal combustion or jet aircraft running around everywhere.
A
Yeah, there's a few. Looks like there's a whole bunch of publicly traded companies that cover it. So. Joby Aviation, Archer Aviation, Ehang Holdings, Vertical Aerospace, and EVE Air Mobility. Those are a few. Pretty interesting. The other one I've seen is a small. It's like a single person one. So it falls under the regulatory radar of, you know, of where you need a pilot's license. You know, it's considered like a. What's that? Hobby craft or whatever.
B
Yes, they're called. I actually rode in one above the, above the Zambezi river of all places. I took a ride and they're like
A
a kite that you, that you put an engine on.
B
Yeah, it's kind of. It's actually kind of scary because you know, you're in the middle of the era and you got these flimsy little wings on your side. So it's actually kind of scary.
A
Well, so. But the, the drone or the vehicle they have that's this vertical landing takeoff. The one is pretty. It looks pretty awesome. I mean it really does as a single person. But I think they're like120,000 each. They're pretty expensive.
B
Yeah. Anyway, at some point we ought to perhaps look at all the companies that are in that space and see if we think any of them are going to make it. But it could be like investing in car companies in the teens and the twenties because there were hundreds of American car companies and few of them survived. Was just General Motors, Ford and Chrysler and American Motors, which has since disappeared. Oh yeah.
A
I should take a look at those to see if there's any. That would be interesting. I mean it's all a regulatory problem more than a technology problem, right?
B
It is. I mean all these companies have to pay a lot more to their lobbyists and their lawyers than they do to their engineers, which is shameful well, it's true of the mining business too. Yeah. A lot more to your lawyers and, and fixers than you do.
A
Well, I should say if, maybe if we see any Trump family investments in the area, we'll know where to go in.
B
Actually that would be a good tick off.
A
It would be. Okay, so next question. If the flow of money stops to Ukraine and hedge funds are left with the debt of a leveraged play for cheap borrowed money from Japan, could that lead to a banking crisis? I don't know how those two necessarily relate, but
B
no, I don't, I don't, I don't either. Yeah, I'm not sure. But of course with interest rates having gone up a lot in Japan recently, that it means that people that were borrowing Japanese yen, well, Japanese were borrowing yen to invest abroad now find that uneconomic. A lot of distortions might be coming unwound and a big distortion is the US Stock market itself at this point. What's the Trump administration going to do if for whatever reason people start selling their stocks wholesale? And Maybe, maybe the SpaceX and Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs are going to. Well, I think they're the bell ringing at the top of the market. But in addition to that, they could be, it could be a fire bell ringing if they, if they actually float these things in order for them to raise money, people are going to have to sell something in order to buy those stocks. So maybe.
A
Yep. Well, it's, yeah, they're so big and it does seem like a bell ringing point. It does feel.comish with these big IPOs of these unprofitable companies going public, it definitely seems like, you know, it's clearly exit liquidity for the VCS behind it, you know.
B
Yeah. And, and as these things all get put into the, into the index funds in addition to a bunch of ETFs of which there are so many and if they roll over then it'll bring the index funds down and you just can't tell what's going to happen with all the debt in the world today and the speculative bubble that's going on with Robinhood people buying one day options and so forth. This is, this is not a healthy marketplace.
A
It's definitely dangerous. Yes. Someone asks, you know, we talked about corn buying corn. I don't know when that was, maybe a couple months ago. And. But they ask why not soybeans?
B
Well, reason for corn is that it's a fertilizer hog and soybeans actually rejuvenate the soil. They're nitrogen fixers, so they're not for. So if you want to play fertilizer, you buy corn and for that matter, you buy rice. And I own rice in the futures market and I guess that must be. There must be an ETF for rice too, but I haven't even looked at that. But oddly enough, the grains have not really moved at all in several months, which I find surprising. They haven't moved at all since the Hormuz thing started. Right.
A
So all the input costs have gone up a lot, but the output has not.
B
Yeah. I'm asking myself what's going. What's going on?
A
Seems to be like the muted market response to everything related to Hormuz, though, like, like oils.
B
Oil's weak today too, along with the stock market and gold and silver 90 area, roughly.
A
And yet still the traffic at the straight of Hormuz is down, you know, 85% still. So.
B
And regardless of what the news may be or the Trumpian tweets may be, from day to day, they're very schizophrenic. On again, off again, you know, real great progress. We're going to blow the hell out of these people. You can't believe any of these things anymore. But I, I'm of the opinion that, that gold and silver and oil have reached kind of roughly new equilibrium levels where they are right now. They'll bounce around, but.
A
Next question for you, Doug. Does Doug believe in the existence of a soul? I recall Doug saying some time ago that he didn't like being used by his genes. I have implied that this means Doug doesn't consider himself just his body.
B
Well, we've talked about this in some of our conversations in the past where I don't know what the numbers of those and the dates of those things are. But yeah, I've said I kind of resent the idea that I'm used as a survival machine for my genesis, which is biologically correct, way to look at it, actually. Personal view, I think the concept of the soul itself is misguided because after all, if you're a body, which we all are, we all have bodies. So. So you have a soul. That's funny. You say we have a body and we have a soul. So who's the we that has this body and soul? I think it's more interesting to look at it and say, I am a soul. I don't have a soul. I think it's a very interesting distinction. Or can you say I am a body? Well, there are people that don't believe in A spiritual reality of any type of. So they say I am a body. Okay, I understand that. So I guess the question we're talking about here is is there a spiritual existence beyond the body? And I don't know if there's any proof for that. Do you know of any proof for that? For the existence?
A
Well, I feel like I have experienced some proof of it in my own personal experience, but it's not nothing that I could show as evidence. So there's.
B
Yeah, well, I agree. I, I've had experiences that make me think that. Yeah. That we're actually spiritual entities. I don't argue with people that believe that, but I can't prove it. You can prove it. Thomas Aquinas didn't prove it. I mean.
A
No. And he sure tried. Yeah,
B
exactly. Pro. The problem with being a spiritual entity. I mean, I mean, it's really wonderful what physicists are doing, trying to figure out the nature of, of, of reality. It's that as best as we can figure, or they figure, the universe will go on for 10 trillion years as a guesstimate. And you put that in context. Since the Big Bang, we figure the universe is 13.8 billion years old. So, I mean, the universe itself is still just a pup. I mean, just a tiny little embryo. It's going to go on for a long time. So if you're a spiritual entity, does that mean you're going to. After you shed this mortal coil? So where are you going to go? What are you going to do for the next 10 trillion years?
A
Where you go, what happens? That's the real question, I guess. But, but, but I think you'd say you do believe in the existence of a soul.
B
Well, it wouldn't be a soul. It would be the existence of yourself as a spiritual entity that's inhabiting a body insofar. Yeah. My personal belief is that's the way I view it. But I can't prove it. But that's if it's a fact.
A
Okay, that makes sense. All right. I don't know if you saw this the other day, but there was Eric Sprott, the famous gold and silver investor, was on the COVID of Forbes the other day and some people, a couple people asked, is this what you are talking about all those years where you expect at the top of the bull market to be something like a golden bull through Wall Street? On the COVID would be a sign of the top. Is Eric Sprott's appearance here a sign of the top?
B
No, because, you know, Eric is a, a legitimate multi billionaire and Gold and silver have done well for the last year, two years especially. So I, I think this is just a normal news item. It's hardly a golden bear tearing apart the New York Stock Exchange.
A
That's what a golden bear.
B
That's what come up with number one. And number two, the days of magazines being good indicators may be gone because you go into your local drugstore and you know, the magazine rack is not what it used to be. And nobody really reads Slime or Newspeak anymore, quite frankly. I mean, not really.
A
No, no, they really don't. Yeah. And it's because it's a. It's a feature on Eric. It's not a feature on gold either. You know, they're not selling gold. It's just. Here's a guy who's really into gold and silver.
B
Yeah. So it's. It's not a tip off of the top. And these gold and silver stocks are the cheapest area of the market, along with oil stocks, incidentally, because I think I mentioned last time that the last real top in oil stocks was 1980, when they were 30%, more or less, of the S and P. And now their oil is about 4% of the S and P. So it's. It's like nobody cares about it.
A
Nobody does. Despite the oral actual physical oil shortages that some of the world is experiencing.
B
Yeah. And people talk about shortages of all kinds of elements, especially the rare earth elements, but nobody really cares about the stocks that mine them. If you look at the prices and what percentage of the S and P or other they are. So. No, it's not. We're far from a bubble in these things.
A
Okay, there's a couple more questions for you, Doug. This one's pretty simple. I'll just answer. It's a current recommendation for stock brokerage that U.S. taxpayers and residents can best use to access the Canadian exchanges and interactive brokers is probably the easiest for someone to do on a discount. If you're looking for a discount brokerage, it's the easiest one to do that people can sign up for. Okay, last question for you. This is kind of an interesting one. Does Doug see any problems that friends of yours will face while handling or, sorry, by. While handing their wealth down to their children and heirs? Do you think they'll. There are any problems that they'll face, and if so, which ones come to mind?
B
Well, the big problem, I think, is the state, which is everybody's enemy. Although the average American doesn't see it that way. He says this friendly Uncle Sam who sometimes makes Mistakes, but he's generally means well. Means well. Right. So at this point, if you're a rich guy and you die, I mean, what percentage goes in, you get an exemption? Couple, three, four million dollars. I don't know what it is.
A
Oh, no, I think it's. I think that's up to like $30 million now.
B
I think as an exemption, I'll look
A
it up for sure, but I don't
B
think it's that high. I, I really oddly don't think about these things at all.
A
Well, you don't, you don't have any areas you're concerned about.
B
So the main thing I think about is I don't want to give anything to the, to the government. And I'm trying to. I do try to figure out idly how I can finesse that, but it's.
A
It's 15 million per person or 30 million for a married couple.
B
Oh, well, that's pretty good. So you're not. We're talking about what is the definition of ultra wealthy. And it's been said 30 million, but I don't think 30 million is really ultra wealthy.
A
I think that's wealthy.
B
I think that's wealthy. Yeah. It's not ultra wealthy. So I don't know. Listen, the problem isn't the amount of money you leave your kids. It's the way you leave your kids with their education and their upbringing and their values. That's the important thing. Not the money, the money. Chances are excellent it's actually going to destroy these kids because it's like friends of mine in Aspen, and of course, I haven't lived in Aspen now for three or four years. It's that their kids seem to be terminally destroyed by living in that environment and having the kind of money to spend that they do. You know, I mean. Yeah, there's an excellent chance, unless your kids are well brought up, that if you leave them a lot of money, it actually will destroy them. It shouldn't if you bring them up. Right. But I don't think people do. They send them to. They send them to public schools and then off to college, which cements all kinds of stupid ideas in their mind. So that's not the real problem.
A
Yeah. The real problem is if you, if you, if you don't raise them right, you give them money, it will destroy them. So you got to focus on raising them right, educating them properly, making sure that they're prepared to handle it. Handle the inheritance.
B
Right.
A
That's the, that's the key challenge.
B
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so many people Today, anyway, leave their money to foundations or NGOs. And this is. This impresses me as being incredibly destructive and stupid, because who's going to run that foundation or that ngo? I mean, it's. Inevitably, it's going to be some collectivist, some leftist, some statist that worms his way into running. Just the same thing happened with Carnegie and Ford and Mellon and all those people. I mean, the scum of the earth wound up running their foundations. It would make them roll over in their grave. Same thing will happen to your foundation if you set it up.
A
So what's worse then? I mean, let's say you have kids that can inherit the money and there's like a 50, 50 chance it'll destroy them. So that's choice number one. Choice number two is give it away to some foundation. Which of those. Which of those two is better?
B
Yeah. Okay. One door you open, there's a tiger. The other door you open, there's a lion. So which is. Which is the best one? It's got to be a third door to open. And the third door, the best door to open is. Don't look at. Don't look at that. You've got to make sure that your kid or kids are worthy of receiving whatever you give them, and then give it all to them, not to some stupid foundation which will be certainly run by leftists and corrupted or worse. I mean, listen, I know one rich woman that died and she put it. Put it all at a foundation, and it's run by your Honduran maid. I mean, it's crazy stuff that happens.
A
Maybe. Maybe she was deemed worthy in some way. I guess. I don't know.
B
Now, I'm sure she is. I'm sure she. She is worthy. And there'll be a dynasty of rich Hondurans for.
A
For generations to come.
B
Generations to come. Right. Okay.
A
All right, well, that's all we got for today, Doug, so we can wrap it up here and we'll be back next week with more.
B
Well, I look forward to it, and I can't wait to see what happens over the week to come.
A
Yeah, it'll be interesting, as always. All right, thanks, Doug. Have a great weekend.
B
Thanks, Matt.
Date: June 5, 2026
Host: Matthew Smith
Guest: Doug Casey
This episode features another lively question-and-answer session with legendary investor, author, and speculator Doug Casey. Doug and Matthew explore a range of topics including current events, war crimes, investment strategies, gold and mining stocks, electric aviation, banking crises, agriculture commodities, the existence of the soul, inheritance challenges for the wealthy, and more. Throughout, Doug provides his signature mix of philosophical insight, irreverence, and hard-hitting commentary on the state of the world and markets.
Doug’s tone throughout is direct, skeptical, often wryly humorous, and fundamentally libertarian. He ties investing to moral and philosophical issues, never shying from politically incorrect or controversial positions.
The episode delivers a rich tapestry of investing wisdom, social commentary, historical perspective, and personal philosophy. Doug Casey urges listeners to think independently in investing, be aware of deep structural and ethical issues, and focus on foundational matters—such as personal values and the dangers of complacency—rather than merely chasing financial returns.