Part I of an Interview with International Man

International Man, a website spawned from Doug Casey's famous book of the same name, interviewed me recently and published the interview today.  The interview was conducted via telephone and then transcribed so it has a very relaxed feel to it.  I thought you might be interested.  Here is the interview:

Originally from Canada, Jeff Berwick is a quintessential International Man who now spends the bulk of his time in Acapulco, Mexico. He was an early pioneer of the Internet and set up his first web site Stockhouse.com back in 1994, just in time for the great dot-com bubble. Many of our Canadian readers will probably know the name - it's still the most visited stock site in Canada.

He divested himself of the company back in 2002 and has moved onto other projects, including a hotel and rental property management business in Acapulco, as well as being the publisher of an online investing trend newsletter called The Dollar Vigilante.

Xavier Calendar: Welcome Jeff. Great to have you with us. Why don't we start with a little bit of your background.

Jeff Berwick: Well, I'm 40 years old now. I grew up in Canada, in the Northern most major city in Canada called Edmonton. It has a hockey team and is where Wayne Gretzky comes from - so that's how some people might know it. When I was about 20 years old, I moved to Vancouver which is a lot warmer. In Edmonton, it can be minus 40 for weeks on end in the winter. Minus 40 is the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit. So I moved to Vancouver where it's quite a bit warmer - a lot rainier, but warmer.

In 1992, after arriving in Vancouver, I started working at a bank - I wanted to get involved in sort of the money side of business, whether it be stocks or banking or investments.

Around 1994, someone at the bank came up to me and said, "Have you heard about this internet?" And I said, "No, what is it?" And he said, "Well, they basically connected all the computers together." I basically dropped everything I did, ran home, got on it, and said, "Okay, what am I going to do on this thing - I've waited my whole life for this."

Basically, I was always a computer nerd. Ever since the age of about ten, I had my own computer. That was back in 1980. My first computer was an Apple 2+ Clone, which I begged my Grandpa to buy from Vietnam and I had to build myself.

By the time 1990 rolled around, however, I was beginning to get a little bit bored of computers because they really hadn't developed that much. I kept saying that they should really try to connect the machines together. Now they had.

I was into stocks at the time, so I started up a website called StockHouse.com. Back in 1994, you couldn't even get stock quotes on the web. There was hardly anything on the internet at the time. So I thought I'd start up a site where you could get stock quotes.

It took off quite quickly because it was the only place where you could get Canadian stock quotes at the time. After a few years, it really grew and I got swept up in the dot.com bubble. By 1998, the little company I had started out in my house was worth about - on paper anyway - 250 million dollars - with 300 employees in eight countries around the world. And huge, massive expansion plans. Then, in 2000, it all fell apart when the tech bubble burst. Literally overnight, I had to layoff about 90% of our staff and just roll back everything.

By 2002, I was a mess. I had gone from being some guy who started a little website out of my house, to being a multi-millionaire, to losing a lot of my theoretical net worth within a few years.

I decided I needed to step away from this whole thing. I had been working on it for about 8 years - literally 18 hours a day, seven days a week. I was so stressed out that I could barely even walk up stairs anymore. I was only about thirty years old at the time.

So I sold the company. I still sat on the Board of the company till 2006, but for all intents and purposes, I was out.

After spending a year getting back to normal, I decided to look into what caused the dot-com bubble and its crash, because I had gone from nothing to huge, and then to almost nothing again in a few years. So I spent a lot of time just searching, reading and traveling. That's how I first found out about Doug Casey.

Doug Casey was one of the first writers I read on the internet who talked about free markets and how the government messes everything up. I went down that path and I found things like Austrian Economics and it explained everything that happened.

I never had anyone explain to me what happened before. People would say, "Oh, it was just a bubble!" Yes, well, why was there a bubble? What is a bubble? Why did it pop? No one had any answers to that. (And they still don't unless they understand Austrian Economics and things like free markets and libertarianism)

After that discovery, I spent a number of years just traveling the world. I decided to buy a sailboat and travel the world from port to port. I had no experience but learned fast, only to sink it a year later in bad weather.

After getting back on land, I grabbed a backpack and continued traveling - virtually non-stop - for the next few years, eventually settling in Acapulco, Mexico.

It was important to me to see the world through my own eyes. After visiting a few countries, I realized that nothing is how you think it is when you just read what they say in the mainstream media, listen to government travel alerts or anything like that.

And that very roughly is my story.

XC: Very interesting. Can you tell us a little bit about the steps to internationalization you have already taken, be it financial, second citizenship, residence, etc?

JB: I prefer to stay vague about these things because you never know who is listening.

I really consider Doug Casey a mentor and one of the things that he's said - and I'm paraphrasing here - if you have the choice, you want to set up your life to be able to live in a place, but just be a tourist there. Countries always treat tourists really well.

You also want to be a citizen of another country, but you don't really want to be there too much. You want to keep your business and money in different countries and basically keep them all separated.

So that's sort of how I basically set up my own life.

I still have a Canadian passport and I'm working on getting another passport. I'm a resident right now in the Dominican Republic. And I currently live all over the place. I say I live in Acapulco, but I really still live out of a suitcase.

I have a business here in Acapulco that renovates and sells condos and then rents them out for the owners. As a side note, that's actually a really interesting venture that we can maybe talk about a little bit later. It's an excellent way to start a business with virtually no capital. You end up basically owning your own hotel.

When I come here to Mexico, I'm just a tourist. The great thing about Mexico is that if you enter with a Canadian or US passport, you get a six months tourist visa. That works out perfect as I'm always traveling anyway so I'm never here longer than six months.

XC: What do you like best about the international lifestyle?

JB: I don't even think of myself of having an international lifestyle, but that's I guess how a lot of people would think about it.

The world is a big place - it's small but big at the same time. We just have a short lifespan here on this planet - anywhere from a few years to eighty or ninety - at least for most people. To live in just one place your whole life is pretty scary to me - especially Canada. Canada is another fan of socialism up there. It's very hard for me to even spend time in the country, just because you meet all these people who tell you how great the free health care is. You just have to bite your tongue - you know it's not free but they don't get it.

A lot of people have this misconception that a lot of the world is dangerous. I've been to almost 100 countries now and that simply isn't the case… If someone were to ask me which places are the most dangerous, I would probably have to say, the US and Canada.

I once met this woman in Aruba. I was having one of those Japanese dinners - where they cook in front of you - with a bunch of other people. There was this woman, who was from New York City, and she said to me, "Oh, so you've traveled to almost 100 different countries, you must have just some crazy, scary stories." And that question took me aback because I never thought about it that way.

So I sat there and I thought, you know, I don't have one crazy, scary story. And she said, "Oh, you must have one. Think harder." And suddenly I remembered two different stories I had completely forgotten. Both times it was in NYC. She thought I was joking.

Unless you're going to parts of Afghanistan or such places in the world that the US government has really destroyed, the world is a really nice, happy, easy-going place. The hardest places in the world for me to live are places like the US, Canada, or Australia. The really western sort of Anglo-Saxon countries. They are so uptight. No one is really friendly. Their whole life seems to be around work, but no one ever seems to have enough money because it all gets taken away by taxes.

There are probably twenty or so countries I'd live in before the US or Canada - including Mexico. I say Mexico because, to this day, it is the safest and freest (by far) country in North America.

This whole drug war thing is an issue but it's caused by the US government and the anti-freedom drug laws. If it wasn't for that, Mexico would be paradise on earth. Many of these problems you hear about are centered in the north. There is one town on the border called Juárez that sounds pretty crazy and probably a place to avoid. But overall, it's beautiful.

I consider the country to be safer than most big US or Canadian cities. Of course, it depends on which part of the city you live in and that sort of thing.

Not many people know that Acapulco is a big city of almost 800,000. It's also about 500 years old. Some early global trade came out of here. They used to run Spanish galleons from here to the Philippines. It's got an amazing history, tradition and culture.

Lately, it has had some drug problems, but I have never seen anything or heard of anything in the part of town where I live. I live more in the tourist area. A few days ago, I visited another part of town which looked like a more dangerous area - I don't think as bad as some ghettos in part of the US. Chicago has a horrible violence problem and yet Americans still go there.

It's just the media focusing on what they want to focus on. They want to make Mexico look scary and that's what they're doing. People here don't talk about these things.

The world is not scary at all. It's crazy to allow such fear to stop you from traveling. The amount of benefits it offers you in terms of education and how you think is huge.

Living in one city, or one town, or one country for your entire life tends to make you very closed and concerned with things that don't matter.

Xavier again. Due to the length of the interview, we'll continue it tomorrow with a discussion on:

• How Jeff ended up with Mexico as a home base.
• How to get around Mexican restrictive foreign property ownership laws within 50km / 31 miles off the beach
• A great business opportunity for expats that requires no upfront capital (a model Jeff has used himself successfully)

<...continued tomorrow>

Comments

[Laurence Hunt]

Wow! That was informative and interesting. This is a great article. I had no idea Stockhouse was your business. It's all falling into place, a bit!

[Zyra]

Found this interview really interesting, especially Jeff's observations about the west, which are very astute. I feel in large part the west has an inherited superiority complex carried over from the glory days of the empire, which colours their perceptions of the world outside Europe and the US as lesser than them. And as long as people continue in this stupor induced by weapons of mass distraction/deception (print and tv media, materialism, etc.) they are content to continue living "junk" lives thinking they've got it really good, when in reality they have no idea how opressed they really are. Looking forward to reading part II of the interview.