By Doug Casey
International Man
April 10, 2026
International Man: What's your take on the AI hype ? Is it a genuine technological revolution, or just the latest chapter in a classic speculative bubble dressed up in smarter marketing?
Doug Casey: AI is both at once. It's a genuine technological revolution, but it's also a classic speculative bubble in search of a pin.
We've seen this before with various iterations of the computer and internet revolutions. They were real. They were huge, and fortunes were made if you bought the right company and held onto it.
But most companies weren't the right ones. Most went bust. It's really quite perverse. Most investors correctly sense that the AI revolution is real and want to profit from it somehow. But unfortunately, they don't have a good grip on what's cheap or dear when it comes to the stock market. Right now, everything is very, very dear. That's apart from the fact that most of the companies in the tech space will go bust this time around, as they always do.
International Man: When capital floods into a hot sector like AI, what are the signs that investors have stopped distinguishing between real businesses, promotional stories, and outright nonsense?
Doug Casey: I'm truly amazed by the amount of capital flooding into AI data centers. Not just billions, or tens of billions, but hundreds of billions. It seems to me that little of the immense amount of data they're generating will result in a real good or service. Relatively little will be used to design new technologies or materials. Most of it will be used to monitor and control people.
On top of that, the hundreds of billions being invested will become obsolescent very, very quickly, partly because AI itself will make the current generation of chips and processors obsolete long before they can pay for themselves.
I think part of what's going on is "Monkey see, monkey do"; everybody's doing it because everybody else is doing it. It's massive FOMO, fear of missing out. My guess is that most of the money going into AI will be misallocated. Vast amounts of fiat credit have flown into the high-tech arena, and companies feel like they have to spend it. Whenever so much money piles into one place so quickly, you can be sure a huge amount will be wasted and misallocated. As the government gets more heavily involved, which it absolutely will, even more will go out the door in pure grift.
By the time you read about something in every magazine and blog, and when people are talking about it at cocktail parties, it amounts to the market screaming at you, "Get out. Run away!"
International Man: You've experienced countless manias across your time as a speculator. What makes the current tech/AI boom different from prior bubbles, and what makes it familiar?
Doug Casey: AI is an important part of what Ray Kurzweil called the Singularity. It includes biotech, nanotech, robotics, space exploration, advanced computing, quantum computing, and several other areas. They're all reaching a crescendo together...
Kurzweil has correctly predicted this for decades, and it's happening right before our eyes now. It's going to change the nature of life on this planet unrecognizably, totally, and permanently. I'm all for it. At least if it goes the way Kurzweil expects...
I understand why people like Peter Diamandis say that if you don't get on the tech tsunami and surf it, you'll be washed away and crushed by it. He may be right, but I believe there are many paths up the mountain. I'm a lifelong technophile, but I really don't like being chained to my computer. You should, in my opinion, try to keep up with these changes as best you can. But most of us aren't tech nerds.
My suggestion is that instead of trying to surf the Singularity tsunami, go to high ground. Trying to surf it is like going to Hawaii and trying to surf the Bonsai Pipeline. It usually doesn't end well for amateurs.
International Man: If this AI boom keeps accelerating, where do you think the biggest distortions will show up first: valuations, private markets, debt-fueled expansion, or government attempts to steer the industry?
Doug Casey: Tech stocks in general, and AI stocks in particular, have been leading the market for years. Their current market caps have no relation to any traditional standards of value. A couple of companies, like SpaceX, are supposed to IPO at values of well over a trillion dollars.
It's not just equity prices, but hundreds of billions of dollars of debt are being floated in this area as well. My guess is that even though the Singularity will transform everything, it doesn't mean that investors in these things will make any money. Airlines and automobiles transformed society, but most of the investors in the hundreds of auto and airline companies that popped up went bust and lost everything.
Some companies will certainly make a lot of money, but which ones will they be ? Will it be enough to maintain their exorbitant market prices ? I doubt it. Things looked great in the summer of 1929 as well.
Making things worse, we can expect the government to get even more intimately involved with the economy in general and tech companies in particular. We live in precisely the kind of fascist economy that Mussolini advocated, where the government and industry are intimately connected. Trump has already had the government take stakes in half a dozen companies. And when the new Fed chairman is installed, you can plan on his trying to manipulate the market up and interest rates down to a greater degree than ever. It won't end well.
The big tech companies are gathering immense amounts of data on everybody and correlating it so that they know exactly who you are, what you want, what you think, where you've been, how much you're worth, and everything else about you.
One way or another, all that data is available to the government to help them control you.
International Man: How does the global economic and political situation play into this trend?
Doug Casey: It's long been thought that the world was going to evolve into some type of techno-dystopia. The main question seemed to be whether we were looking at 1984 or something more like Brave New World. I think elements of both are still a good bet, but let's add another possibility from literature, namely the movie Rollerball. In that scenario, people had a very high standard of living because the world was controlled by profit-oriented corporations more than the government. Entertainment was a critical part of the picture to keep the plebs from becoming too restive. Hence, the game Rollerball.
A lot of countries in the world have no capital, and their cultures are not conducive to doing science or building capital. Africa is a case in point. It's going to be nothing but a source of raw materials and the site for lots of wars between hundreds of tribes, states, and rogue armies.
Europe is in a self-destructive downward spiral. It's a sinking ship. They're so corrupted by socialism that it's doubtful they can keep themselves afloat at this point. Well, they could abolish welfare, regulations, taxes, and central banks- but that seems unlikely. Stupidly, they think that fighting the Russians is somehow going to make things better.
I hope the US keeps its head above water, but we're heading towards some variety of civil war. Not along strict geographic lines, but cultural lines: big left-wing cities against more rural parts of the country. The situation will be complicated by Trump's insane war against Iran. It's going to make things much, much worse. But let's reserve that discussion for the next time.
My guess is that China and the countries of East Asia, notwithstanding their many problems, will be the region that does best over the next few decades.
International Man: While everyone is focused on the flashy software and big tech narratives. Are investors overlooking the commodities side of the equation: energy, copper, uranium, rare earths, and other hard assets that make the base-level tech possible?
Doug Casey: There's an old stock market saying: "High tech, big wreck." Even as the world edges towards the Singularity, I think that saying will be very appropriate in the near future.
I don't want any part of the meme stocks dominating the current bubble. Most of them are riding for a catastrophic fall. Actually, they all are. They could take the general market down with them.
As I've explained here in the past, I've been massively long physical gold and silver, as well as gold, silver, copper, uranium, and nickel stocks, among others. Lots of oil and gas stocks. And agricultural ETFs.
The public doesn't understand any of these things. Fund managers don't own them for all kinds of "good" reasons. Even though they've done very well in the last few years, they're still only a rounding error relative to the rest of the market.
At some point, they'll be the flavor of the day, at which point I hope to sell them and figure out something else to buy. But that day has not come.
Let me re-emphasize. plays in agriculture. I particularly like the ETF CORN, and I'm long cotton and rice in the futures markets. That's not only because they're cheap, but they're very greedy for fertilizers, and a lot of fertilizers won't be shipped through the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. I expect this war between Israel, the US, and Iran to go on for quite a while and grow.
Reprinted with permission from International Man.