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the rebel capitalist show well the last last time we spoke you said your favorite two cities for investment and this was probably about a year and a half ago or so maybe a year ago was medellin and vladivostok if i'm saying that correctly and so i'd love to just start there i don't know if you've done any research or anything has come up on your radar as far as those two cities since we talked uh does anything interest you there well vladivostok of course is closed for you you cannot buy russian anything right now uh but yeah i i have a fabulous prospect company in vladislav stock it's a shipping manport they own the port and vladivostok is going to be a great great city uh for many reasons uh putin wants to make it a great city and he will that he is but it doesn't matter it's academic right now i don't have any investments in meddling well i have one marijuana company in cuba columbia i should ask you you you must be finding uh investments in colombia well i just focus in on real estate here i've been investing in real estate here since 2015.
and uh it was just amazing when covet hit they really went into a strict lockdown here and i actually was able to get a humanitarian flight out because i didn't want any part of the lockdown and i went and hung out in st bart's actually for a couple months with our good friend hugh hendry i don't know if you remember hugh yeah yeah yeah because that was the only place that was really open and i thought that my real estate investments here would uh take a significant hit but oddly enough the the real estate here has done just what it's done in the united states and that's basically gone straight up so it's just it's it's bizarre that we're living in this world that that where asset prices should be deflating uh but they're actually increasing significantly so i i don't know how that ends i'm i don't know if you've got any insight there well mandolin you have the advantage that you know they went through a long war civil war well what you will it what you will and so prices weren't skyrocketing going through the roof right right now in korea it's a huge bubble but that's because they started from a high place and i would not think about buying property in seoul right now and so when it collapses it's going to have a big collapse but your meddling that started from nothing yeah right they had a horrible horrible i'm going to tell you a story i don't know if we don't have much time but i remember a general told me i went once when i was meddling once he said you know a woman would a guy would call up and say to a lady uh no call the owner of a property and say i want to buy your property because what are you talking about my property's not for sale and the guy said if you don't sell it to me i'm going to buy it from your widow and sure enough guy got killed and departed from his widow that was the sort of thing that was happening in metallic back in the drug wars and worse were stories uh so meddling wasn't starting from a high high level that's my only idea of why meddling has continued to rise when you open up a country from a war or a civil war the opportunities are fantastic and always have been because they start from a low base there's no capital there's no ambition there's no energy everybody's depressed so it can go on forever look at japan after the war i mean i can use many examples yeah when things get so depressed the bull market or the upturn can go on for a long time yeah you were you were genius you know another thing that's fascinating i just got back about a month ago uh you know and i've been gone since uh the beginning of 2020 and i was in the united states in arizona and florida just trying to find a bit of freedom and i it was amazing that when i was back in the united states there were a few places where the businesses really really took a hit because of the lockdowns but you know the united states had all those ppp loans and stimulus checks and these artificial ways to to prop up the economy through government deficit spending so when things started to reopen you didn't see a lot of the businesses uh change over right there wasn't a lot of turnover with the businesses a lot of them had actually stayed afloat or when i came back to medellin about a month ago i i mean i'm in poblado i'm sure you're familiar with the area and provenza and parquiaris and this is when all the cafes and the restaurants and the hotels and not all of them but i would say 50 of them are new uh the old owner went out of business they didn't have enough in savings and uh they went belly up because they couldn't get the stimulus checks and the ppp loans and so new owners came in remodeled the the the space and now has a new restaurant there catering and it's just this this vibrancy but it reminded me of schumpeter's creative destruction and you see it right in front of your own eyes playing out in real time in colombia i think that makes the market and the economy far more dynamic where in the united states you see that atrophy that you kind of saw in japan because the government propping it up and not only allow businesses to fail and uh what do you have any takes on that i i know that you've said so many times in the financial media that you got to let businesses fail and that's that's one of the most important parts of capitalism and let the people who make good decisions come in and take over the assets and then improve the economy and therefore improve society but have you seen that in these emerging markets to a greater degree than in the west well of course because usually in emerging markets they don't have enough money to prop up failure proper disaster it does happen of course everywhere no but in the in the us we have the view that nobody should fail everybody should be saved and propped up no but there should be no victims fortunately there are still markets like colombia where they don't have that attitude uh partially because of their own history because of the war i mean they couldn't prop people up no um and columbia you know the story went through this long long long civil war and drug wars and everything else uh no i i i met a general at the ex-president's house in medellin once and and he was telling me that you know i spent a lot of my career trying to kill these guys and put him in jail and now i am one he was a marijuana farmer you know it's illegal now it's legal now yeah and so you know everybody changed and changed with the world and are now prospering now i'm very envious of you and very very proud of you very proud to be speaking to you in medellin so they've got an election coming up uh it's in in a few months i believe and a lot of the people here are worried because the guy that's in the lead right now was good buddies with chavez and he kind of has that same chavez like maduro type of mindset so as an investor is that something that would concern you or is that something that's kind of just noise well again i am not there and i have i'm not up to date i must i must to my chagrin but you have to worry about that i mean if it is going to be castro taking over a castro taking over colombia is not going to be fun but usually guys like this scare people but then when they get into power they realize that they have to make things better both for themselves and for the country i just don't know i don't know i know do know that colombia has astonishing possibilities they've got assets they've got everything and you they said you know meddling is such a beautiful gorgeous city and so big you know many possibilities but george i just don't know because i'm not up to up to date yeah i remember going back to 1982 i believe you bought shares in germany and they had just been kind of bottomed out doing nothing for i think like 15 16 17 years and uh the catalyst but you said the economy was booming but the stock market just didn't get any love just no one was paying any attention to it and they had the i think it was the democratic uh christians or something i think that was made of christian democrats christians democrats yeah and they had a guy that was claiming that he was going to be pro-business and he was going to be very kind to foreign direct investment and whatnot and you told uh jack schweiger that you were listening to him and you believed him and another thing i remember you saying that when paul volcker was saying that he wanted to break the back of inflation that you believed him so what makes you believe a politician and what makes you not believe a politician well that's a good question i i guess we have to watch him on rebel capital yes get the real story um with the case of volker it was partly because at the time jimmy carter said to volcker you do whatever you have to uh and i don't know how i knew that i mean i guess everybody everybody must have known it but volcker knew what had to be done and that's why they picked folker but carlos and vulcan went to carter and said okay this is not going to be fun it's going to hurt a lot of people and carter says i don't care what it takes you do what you have to do now i don't know if carter knew what he was talking about because he cost him the election when interest rates went skyrocketing but that's one of the things that convinced me because volcker knew what to do and carter apparently had said do it i will i will take the pain so that's one of the things that one reason i thought i knew what i was doing um i don't know you read a lot of sources and put it all in your brain and hope you get it right yeah and same thing with the german guy just reading a lot of german especially and the beauty of germany in those days i mean it's probably hard to understand but that's 40 years ago but the german stock market was essentially unknown undeveloped the germans partly because of the war you know still basically for most germans savings accounts were where they put their money right stock market was not very well known not developed not anything and therefore it was very very cheap i remember speaking to a smart friend of mine in new york and somehow i know that we were talking about ge and i said well siemens is half the price and you know as gigantic as successful as powerful etc and he looked at me like i was a madman how can you talk about siemens compared to ge but that was a that was also the mentality of american investors back in those days most people even in 1982 still only invested in stocks in new york maybe over the counter if not on the new york or the american but i mean those days are gone now we have everybody they're all kind of mbas on airplanes right now flying around the world looking for looking for new countries but in those days even the german stock market was unknown and uh ignored and ridiculed
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