Jeff Deist: It’s a pleasure to speak with the famed investor Jimmy Rogers. How are you doing, sir?
Jim Rogers: I’m delighted to be here, Jeff. I’m a fan of the Mises Institute.
JD: You live in Singapore. How did you and your family fare during the last two years of covid?
JR: Well, Singapore first took the approach of not doing very much. Then they more or less locked down—which in my view backfired. In recent days, travel in Singapore is opening up again and restaurants are opening. Life may be coming back to some kind of normalcy. I would have taken a more free market approach, but we’ll know in a few years who was right and who was wrong.
JD: You were definitely right! But as an aside, some of our readers may not know you grew up in Demopolis, Alabama.
JR: Of course, yes, right down the road . . . well, sort of down the road from Auburn. In fact, I’m going there for my high school reunion soon.
JD: It seems like a long way from Demopolis to Yale and Oxford. How did you manage that?
JR: It was purely an accident; it was a mistake, I can assure you, and when I got to Yale I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is a mistake. What am I doing here?” I was so in over my head, but I pulled it off and I survived and did OK. I was in a club; Yale for some reason gave a scholarship to a member of that club and I applied. What did I know? I certainly didn’t know what I was getting into, but I applied, and lo and behold, I got the scholarship. Then I had to go.
JD: I suspect most of your classmates were from the Northeast rather than the Deep South.
JR: Yale in those days, and even more so now, is very international. In my class at Yale, out of a thousand boys, there were five people from Alabama.
JD: We’ll take five! Not bad.
JR: Needless to say, in those days Yale was still single gender. I was a geographic distribution. When Yale looked at the map, they couldn’t find Demopolis. My phone number was 5, so they said, We got to take this guy. We need somebody from Demopolis, whose phone number is 5.
JD: I noticed after you graduated and began working on Wall Street, you entered the US Army. This was during the Vietnam era. Were you drafted?
JR: In days of the Vietnam War, my draft board was Marengo County, Alabama. It was one lady. She had two sons who were drafted and killed in the Second World War, so no matter who you were, you were going to serve. I was about to be drafted anyway, and so I went to Officer Candidate School.
JD: Our perception today is kids from Yale working on Wall Street don’t end up in the army anymore.
JR: Well, they don’t have a draft board! In my case, it was either vengeance or patriotic duty, but nobody could escape the lady in Marengo County.
JD: You worked closely with George Soros in the 1970s. Is it strange now to think of him as an avatar, a controversial symbol for both sides of the political aisle in the West? Was he just a regular guy then?
JR: Well, Jeff, I haven’t seen or spoken to Soros in forty- two years. You might as well ask me about my first wife.
JD: I won’t do that.
JR: Do you want to ask about my first wife? I haven’t had any contact with her for many years either.
JD: I’m sure she has some questions for you! But we’ll forget Soros and fast-forward. In your early years on Wall Street, had you already discovered economists like Mises? How did that happen?
JR: Early in my life, it was a natural process, I came to the realization that open markets or open societies were much better than letting people tell others what to do. I realized from enough reading of history or philosophy that mankind, markets, societies could figure it out better than a bunch of guys sitting in a central office somewhere, telling us all what to do. I came to that on my own. Having grown up in Demopolis, where there was nobody to tell you what to do, it was pretty clear. And when I got to Yale in New Haven, they had an entirely different view of the world than I did having grown up in the backwoods of Alabama. And I came to this as a natural process of reading philosophy, economics, or whatever it was. Ever since I read Mises and other people like that, it was clear to me that open economies and open societies were the best way.
JD: Do you think Mises and other economists helped you in your business life, in your investing career?
JR: Well, Mises never gave me any hot tips! He never gave me any stocks to buy [laughing]. So in that regard, maybe not. But certainly knowing how the world works and knowing that too much regulation and control will hurt an economy or an industry—this gave me a philosophical basis to help me make decisions and have a thought process. I have gotten involved with investing in countries where nobody else would invest, because I could see the changes taking place as they opened up their economies. That was always the focus of my thought process. More philosophy than specifics.
JD: What about monetary policy? Has your view of money changed with all the extraordinary things central banks did after the ’07 crash—and now in response to covid? Has any of this changed your thinking in the sense we are in uncharted territory?
JR: Well, that’s all the same process. I know that the market is smarter than Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan was chair of the Fed in the US for a long time. I know that the market is certainly smarter than most central bankers we’ve had in the world and certainly most Treasury officials we’ve had. That knowledge comes from experience and reading. I know, and I’ve seen it in enough countries around the world, Jeff, to know that markets make many mistakes—but markets make fewer mistakes than Janet Yellen. Janet Yellen has two Ivy League degrees, but Ivy League degrees don’t mean she is always right.
JD: I worked for Ron Paul when your book Hot Commodities came out in 2005. Do you still agree with the central thesis in that book, that the future is bullish for investments in tangible things? Given inflation today, it seems the case for commodities might be stronger than ever.
JR: Well, the thesis of that book was that there were no books about commodities or, if there were, we couldn’t find them! I was trying to explain the commodities market. It was not a book of hot tips. It was just explaining about markets and how you invest. The subtitle was “How Anyone Can Invest Profitably in the World's Best Market.” It was a how-to book rather than a book of hot tips. That part of the thesis is still accurate. If you want to invest in gold, you gotta know how to do it. I happen to be optimistic about commodities right now and have been for a while, but that’s not always the case, as I explained in the book. Commodities have long periods when things are great. They’ve also had long periods when things have been very bad, so it’s not just a question of knowing how—you have to know when. That’s the hard part.
JD: One critique of Austrians is all about timing— economics per se can’t explain when, only why.
JR: I would dispute that. It’s back to what I said before: it’s a way of thinking and a process and a philosophical approach. That’s how Austrians can teach you how to think and teach you how the world works or should work. When the world doesn’t work that way—for instance, the former Soviet Union didn’t work—we understand why. I could remember the first time I went to Russia and the Iron Curtain countries. I came away saying, “This will never work. This cannot work.” And so it happened. We had the right approach, and the Soviets had the wrong approach. But I came to that conclusion by just knowing or thinking I knew how the world worked. Did Austrians teach me that? No, but my knowledge of how things should work, which is Austrian economics, made me realize the Soviet system could not work and would not work.
JD: For at least a decade the markets have been in thrall to tech, FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google) stocks, and the digital world. I wonder if covid changed your perspective at all about commodities and the physical, analog world. Covid reminded us how important the old analog world is. We need energy, we need calories, we need medicine, we need food. All of it needs to come to us physically where we live. The market has to bring it to us.
JR: You need rice! There are a few billion people in the world who eat rice every day. I’m not sure that I needed the covid virus to teach me that. It certainly reinforced it and made it clear to all of us that we’ve got to have this stuff and we’ve got to get it somehow—and if we cannot get it, the price is going to go through the roof. Certainly covid made it worse, but this is the way the world works. This is how markets work.
JD: What are your thoughts these days on farmland, mining, natural resources? I know you’ve been a promoter of these sectors in the past. You’ve suggested farmers rather than investment bankers may be the rich guys in society soon enough.
JR: You can go back and look at history or literature. If you go back and read Russian novels, there were these really, really rich agricultural people—the count who has white horses and servants and everything else—and they were very, very rich and successful agricultural people. They were farmers. We’ve also had periods in history, like the 1930s in America, the Dust Bowl, where farmers were absolutely starving. The price of cotton went to a penny—a penny a pound—it was just unbelievably cheap. By the way, the price of cotton in 1861 went from a penny to over a dollar. I presume you know that was because of the Confederate cotton embargo. But in 1931 it went back to under a penny. So as I was saying before, there have been some great cycles in commodities, always have been, always will be. If one can get it right, one can make huge amounts of money in commodities, but if one gets it right, you can make huge amounts of money in just about anything!
JD: So, how do you focus your time these days? What’s your primary day-to-day work?
JR: Well, I still invest my money. I have to because I have to pay my rent, but for many years, I never had children, 16 | The Austrian | Vol. 8, No. 3 I never wanted children. I felt so sorry for my pathetic friends who had children. I had one. I was 60 when I had my first child, and I came to realize I’d been wrong about children all of my life. Now I have two, and they are a major focus for me. I want to spend as much time and energy on and with my children as I can. Anybody reading this who hasn’t had children and you’re at the right age, I urge you to go and have some children. It’s a miracle.
JD: Are you still generally bullish on Asia? Do you still like living and working there?
JR: We moved here because I came to the conclusion twenty-five or thirty years ago that China was going to be the next great country in the world, whether we like it or not. I wanted my children to speak Mandarin and to know Asia. That’s why I came here, and it’s worked. They both speak perfect Mandarin and they can use chopsticks [laughing]. They know what chopsticks are now, so they have learned a lot. I don’t see anything to change the idea that Asia’s going to be the most important part of the world in the next hundred years or so. It has certainly continued to happen that way. Everybody, most people, know that now that it’s happening. Sure, there will certainly be setbacks. The United States became the most important country in the twentieth century, but along the way, we had many depressions, massacres in the streets, a civil war, we had many problems, and yet we became a great success. China’s going to have plenty of problems, but I don’t see anybody else on the horizon. The reason I came was to try to prepare my children for the twenty-first century. You can ask me in eighty years if I got it right.
JD: Presumably their English is pretty good too. English and Mandarin sounds like a good combination.
JR: They speak good English and they speak perfect Mandarin. It’s astonishing, but Chinese TV networks invite my children to come to China to do specials about them because they’re so shocked at their Mandarin. Not me, I speak no Mandarin. I’m still speaking Alabama English, but you know, my children speak proper English and they speak beautiful Mandarin.
JD: Some readers may know your 1994 book Investment Biker, which chronicles your travels around the world, and several emerging markets by motorcycle. The Barber Motorsports Museum in Alabama displays your old motorcycle from one of those trips, a 1988 BMW R100-RT?
JR: That’s exactly what it was. It was a fabulous bike, and that bike’s had two major trips, one around the world and one across China a long time ago. I had a fantastic time on that bike, and it is in a museum in Alabama. George Barber had the good sense to have a rich grandfather and a very rich father, and George too is very rich, so he decided to build the world’s greatest motorcycle museum, and he’s done it. It’s absolutely astonishing, with racetracks and everything else. Since I’m from Alabama, that seemed to be the logical place for that motorcycle to be, and there it is.
JD: And during those hundred thousand miles or so I assume you were dealing with a lot of flats and mechanical problems and such on your own in the middle of nowhere sometimes.
Final question for you. Anything you would like to say to our younger listeners today? Most of them are in the US, some are in Europe, some are in Asia or Central and South America. Many young people in their twenties are not particularly optimistic.
JR: I’ll give you two very strong words of advice. One is learn another language, preferably Chinese or Spanish or something that’s widely spoken. If nothing else, even if you don’t use it very much, it will give you an inspiration and an understanding of other parts of the world, which is extremely important, certainly in the twenty- first century. But probably more important than that, Jeff, is figure out what you love, figure out what your passions are. Don’t listen to your parents, don’t listen to your teachers, don’t listen to your friends. Figure out your own passion and pursue it, and if people laugh at you, you’re really on the right track, you’re really doing the right thing. Because someday you’re going to be a very great success, and Jeff, even if you’re not a great success, you won’t care because you’re happy. You’re doing what you love. You wake up every day, you never go to work, you just wake up and have fun. But those are also the people who are usually the most successful, because they’re doing what they love and they have great fun. So, figure out what you love and do it and learn another language and get yourself a motorcycle and drive around the world. It would teach you a lot about yourself and about the world.
JD: And have some kids.
JR: Oh, have some kids, but be sure you’re ready before you do it.
JD: Thanks so much for your time. We appreciate it.
JR: Let me tell you, I go to the Mises website whenever it pops up. There’s all sorts of good stuff there. It’s astonishing how much good stuff you guys put up there. I show it to my kids because I want them to know the astonishing range of information that’s out there. You have a lot of it, and you certainly don’t have the conventional wisdom. Nobody gets successful following the conventional wisdom, so keep it up.
