In this interview, Bill Bonner talks about:

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It is a twenty-hour drive from Buenos Aires to the sprawling ranch of Gualfín in the Calchaquí Valley, northwest Argentina. Or take a short hop to a regional airport, and then drive for five hours by four-by-four over broken terrain.

Gualfín, a vast ranch in a unique setting in a high mountain valley, is surrounded by settlements dating back to the Inca empire and vineyards that are among the first and finest in South America.

The day after Bill Bonner arrived in his hacienda in Gualfín, the borders of Argentina were shut down in response to Covid-19. The low-profile 72-year old publisher and his wife found themselves trapped in a paradise of sorts.

Bonner readily admits he was lucky in his location when the world stopped.

“I am staying here a lot longer than I expected but fortunately it is a very nice place to stay,” Bonner tells me in a warm American accent.

The businessman and writer has his own vineyard, horses, and a view from his veranda that, from photographs online, appears spectacular. It is one of three vast estates owned by Bonner and his family.

There is also Chateau de Courtomer, set on 350 acres in France, plus a vast resort on Nicaragua’s pristine Emerald Coast. Either would also do fine in a lockdown.

In Argentina, the state has ordered people not to stray further than 500 metres from their homes, Bonner tells me. But that only starts from the edge of their properties.

Gualfín: Bill Bonner’s sprawling ranch in Argentina.

In Bonner’s case this leaves him with some 500 acres of irrigated land to explore, plus many more acres of uncharted desert, scrub and mountains. Bonner knows he can’t complain, but, ideally, he says he would be in his home in Youghal, Co Cork right now. Bonner employs over 200 people in the Waterford region, where his business, Agora Publishing, has had a base since 1999.

Today Agora has seven Irish companies supporting its multifarious publishing interests.

Agora’s European headquarters is in Woodlock House, a period property on 40-acres in Portlaw, that Bonner and his wife have lovingly restored. It also has a call centre in Waterford to support its many customers.

It is embedded in Ireland, as is its charismatic and colourful founder.  

“We are trying to understand the truth in a different way. We are more about tomorrow’s truth than today’s truth.”

Bill Bonner is the anti-media mogul most Irish people have probably never heard of. He is the opposite of the power-hungry cliched media tycoon eager to use his or her interests to strut about on the local or international stage. Nor does he want to emulate journalistic beacons like the great American newspapers, with their thirst for Pulitzer prizes and determination to uproot bad guys.

“We are not like The New York Times, which writes about what happened today,” Bonner says. “We are writing about what this might mean and where it might lead.”

“The mainstream media tells primarily what is. People read it to find out what is going on. They want to know the truth. Our business is entirely different. We don’t have the truth. We have various views and opinions and ideas and guesses. We are trying to understand the truth in a different way. We are more about tomorrow’s truth than today’s truth.

“We are going to be wrong a lot of times as nobody knows what the future is. There are thousands of potential futures and really only one that is going to happen.”

Bonner is a compelling conversationalist who can move easily between the nuts and bolts of his business, into more philosophical views on finance and the world.

Like his publications, it is not necessary to agree with everything he says, but he is undoubtedly more interesting than the average suit running a big media outfit.

Bonner is not only a businessman, but also a writer who has produced millions of words both as a columnist in his own publications and as an author of books.

His half dozen best-sellers have titles like Hormegeddon: How too much of a good thing leads to disaster and Family fortunes: how to build family wealth and hold onto it for 100 years, that are eye-catching and accessible.

Bonner is likewise charmingly polite and erudite. He likes to ask questions as well as answer them. 

He clearly knows his stuff and audience; over 40 years, he has built a mainly online newsletter empire read by 2.5 million people a year.

“I know more about the newsletter business than probably any other human being simply because I have been at it longer,” Bonner laughs.

“And I can say is that over all those years, what I have learned is I really don’t know that much.”

Along the way, Bonner has become a wealthy man, and Agora very large. It is a privately owned company and his family own the majority of the business.

Bonner employs some 2,000 people around the world writing about everything from retirement living to stocks and shares, the latest health breakthroughs and more esoteric matters like the goings-on in classical Greece.

“We got up to over $1 billion in sales last year and this year everything is going down, which is fine with us.”

“Half of our employees are in Baltimore, Maryland in the US and the rest are spread out,” Bonner tells me. “We are in 10 different countries including Ireland.”

“We have a model of how we do things, and the model is based upon the old-fashioned newsletter business where we have alternative ideas about the way the world works, how you should invest and what you should do to keep yourself healthy.

“That model is now almost exclusively on the internet; we barely do anything in paper anymore. That model seems to work just about everywhere we have applied it but, that said, how well it works depends on how energetic the people are and what is going on in the country.”

He said Brazil and France were two examples of where it was doing well, while China was a market where it stuttered.

Agora’s millions of readers often pay subscription fees for access to its information, but it also produces free advertisement-supported content. Like every media business in the world, it has been impacted by Covid-19.

“We were growing very, very rapidly for many, many years until this year,” Bonner said. At the start of this year, Agora took what he says was a “conscious decision” to cull some of its smaller titles.

“We felt things were getting a little bit out of control. We were looking across the spectrum of things we published and some of them we didn’t think were very good.”

Agora wanted to focus on its strongest titles, so it began to tighten things up. “Then along came the virus and that reigned in growth even more. We got up to over $1 billion in sales last year and this year everything is going down, which is fine with us.”

What will sales look like this year? “In gross sales this year we will probably end up around $600 million.” It is a forty per cent fall, but still an impressive number.

In revenue terms, it will probably do better this year than RTÉ, Independent News & Media and The Irish Times combined, but it is rarely written about here.

“Kathleen got in touch with the IDA and they suggested Waterford as it was such a depressed area at that time.”

How did Bonner, who started Agora in 1978 in a terraced house in Baltimore, end up in Ireland?

“It was a long time ago,” he replies. “We had one of our editors who was running a magazine called International Living and she just decided to move to Ireland. It wasn’t a business decision at all for us, it was a personal decision on her part.

“We said, sure, go ahead and why don’t you take the magazine with you and run it from there? That was the beginning of it (in 1999).”

Kathleen Peddicord was the name of the editor who wanted to relocate and she stayed with the business until 2007. 

When she left, Agora Publishing Ireland stayed on, providing human resources, tech solutions, accounting, admin and facilities support for its various titles including International Living which started it all.

International Living is a flagship publication for Agora, with the premise: “You can live better, for less, overseas.”

It comes out monthly for subscribers and it details the best places to live, retire, travel and invest in, in warm locations like Belize, Mexico, Panama and Spain. This market, he acknowledges, is of course impacted by the lockdown – but it is just one of many titles.

Why did you go to Waterford? “Kathleen got in touch with the IDA and they suggested Waterford as it was such a depressed area at that time.”

Bonner and his wife fell in love with Ireland. He has a home in Youghal, Co Cork, and he goes into his Waterford office about once a week when he is here.

“I don’t need to be in the office as I am mostly a writer now,” he said. Bonner is chairman of Agora, and he has a small management team around him to handle the day-to-day.

How many publications does Agora have?

“It is a funny business. It is a newsletter business, not a magazine or newspaper. Newsletters come and go,” Bonner said. “The answer is I don’t know as they are always in motion.”

Bonner said Agora at any time was publishing hundreds of titles with up to 100,000 subscribers for some of them.

“They are all totally independent. There is no bureaucracy. I don’t try to stay on top of everything except to make sure we are not doing anything illegal or immoral.

“Our managers all have their own views. We don’t try and enforce anything editorially.”

As big-name Irish tycoons like Denis O’Brien and Tony O’Reilly lost hundreds of millions of euro investing in the media over the last decade, Bonner has simply gotten on with it.

He has, he says, zero interest in influencing political events or using his interests to gain social status. He doesn’t mind either, unlike some prickly tycoons, if his journalists disagree with him.

“I personally write about finance and economics but there are probably at least 50, maybe 100 different newsletter writers who are in total disagreement with me around how the world works and what is going on or what people should do with their money,” Bonner said. 

“The whole idea of the newsletter industry is that it has lots of different competing ideas. They are more all or less about the future. People are making projections about which way the economy will go or which way investments will go or which way the health industry will go.”

“There has never been a case in human history where printing more money improves an economy.”

Bill Bonner: “Investors, like everybody else, are herd animals.”

A core part of Agora’s business is offering investment advice. What is this like in the time of Covid-19? “Investors, like everybody else, are herd animals and when everybody in the world is talking about how terrible things are, they get scared and they don’t want investment advice,” Bonner said. He said this was impacting his business presently, but that will change with time.

“We will see how it plays out,” he said. “My guess is we will see more rebounds and more crashes in the markets. It will be an exciting time. When it is exciting, it is exciting for investors too as they can see that I can either make a lot of money or lose a lot of money. If they think like that, they think ‘I need some advice’ and then they turn to us.”

Investment as a category was, he said, in uncharted territory. “We have been at this for 40 years and part of our work is studying the years that came before us and nowhere have we seen anything like this.”

“We have seen crashes, corrections, bear markets, we have seen all kinds of things but we have never seen a situation where the economy was turned off. Somebody has just pushed the pause button on the whole economy,” Bonner said. “I suspect it is going to be a lot worse than people imagine.”

Bonner said he was concerned about the impact prolonged shutdowns across the world would have on the economy and society – including in the US.

“Donald Trump is a person who is not very well educated and not very smart. And then he has the medical profession – these experts – telling him what he should do.” Bonner said while Trump might say dumb things on occasion, he was largely following medical advice.

“And that is the same almost all over the world. But the medical profession is not set up for a crisis like this,” Bonner warned. “They have no idea what kind of impact an economic shutdown could have.”

“They are looking at it as medical professionals. From their point of view, they are thinking what can we do to stop the number of cases and reduce the infection rate and the death rate.

“In that sense, they are right to shut everything down, put everyone in sequestered places and don’t have any contact with anyone, but there are costs to that.”

“Gold has traditionally been the protection against government’s doing stupid things and right now governments are doing very stupid things. Right now, gold is probably the best protection you can get.”

“What is the cost of not allowing young people to get together or pursue their careers? This is a crucial time in their lives when they need to be taking big decisions. What is the real cost of not letting them do that?

“A much bigger danger to young people than the virus is the threat of suicide. They are shut away without money, without careers, without friends. The suicide rate is sure to be going only one way.

“It is not clear that the doctors’ remedies are good for everyone. That is not clear at all. What is clear is it is very, very expensive. I think we will see in retrospect that they should have tried to sequester and shut down a very small part of the population that is really in danger, and that is people who are like me over 70 or people with pre-existing health conditions.”

“Treating everybody the same is probably a mistake,” he said.

Bonner said he was also worried about the world’s financial response to the crisis.

“Governments all over the world all have the same solution, which is to introduce more money, but of course they don’t have any money as they didn’t set aside any green from the fat years to lean on in the lean years. Instead, they just want to print money.

“There has never been a case in human history where printing more money improves an economy. In fact, it always has the opposite effect. It creates inflation, mistrust, social upheaval. We saw that in Weimar Germany, Zimbabwe, Venezuela…

“Yet that is what everybody is doing. What we are seeing on a huge scale is the shutting down of the economy and trying to replace real goods, real services, real activity, real wealth with more paper money. As far as I know, that is going to be a disaster.”

What advice would Bonner give to investors today?

“We have a lot of investors we write to every day and we are encouraging those investors to hold cash because the first part of this crisis will be deflation. All prices are going to go down because everybody is in a panic.

“In the first phase we have a deflation where you want to have cash and in the second phase you have inflation.”

“It is a tricky thing, but generally people should try and hold onto as much cash as possible in the near term and then when that flips over to inflation, which will probably happen in a few months, then they want to ensure that they get out of that cash. The way to do that, I think, is mostly to hold land or gold or things that don’t lose value. Real things.

“Gold has a tradition that goes back thousands of years. If you have an ounce of gold in the time of Caesar it is probably worth about the same amount of money in terms of goods and services as an ounce today.”

“Gold has traditionally been the protection against government’s doing stupid things and right now governments are doing very stupid things. Right now, gold is probably the best protection you can get.”

“I find the small business person is more likely to be a good business person than a big one.”

Agora’s readers are older, Bonner readily admits. “Young people don’t have the time. Who is concerned about health? Older people. Who is concerned about finance? Older people who have some money to invest as they have built up savings. Very naturally our material tends to end up in the hands of people more than 50 years old.”

Would you ever try and target the young? “We don’t target markets that way. People come into our business and say hey, you should target this or that or the other. We don’t target anybody. We target ideas.

“We try to find editors and writers with ideas about the way things work,” Bonner said. “With ideas about you can be richer or healthier. If those ideas are those that people want then we sell them.”

How do you personally view the world? “My own views were shaped many years ago,” Bonner said. “I worked in Washington for a public interest group (the National Taxpayers Union in the late 1960s). Our goal was to reduce the waste of taxpayer money.”

“I am very cynical about the whole business world. I have seen so many dumb things being done and so much fraud and humbug!”

Working in Washington, Bonner realised there were powerful vested interests who did not want to reduce waste. “Every dollar went into somebody’s pocket and that person was happy to get it and didn’t consider it waste. In fact, the more money that the public would consider waster the happier the whole establishment in Washington was!”

“That experience sort of coloured my views about how the world worked. I wouldn’t say I am a libertarian but I realised I don’t like anybody telling me what to do. I had met many of those people and they were mostly idiots.

“I am totally non-partisan. I don’t like the whole game of politics. I find it mostly fraudulent and I try to stay away from it.”

He does, however, think a lot about the impact of politics. Bonner once lived in Britain and in the mid-1990s he published a newsletter co-written by William Rees-Mogg, the late editor of The Times of London from 1967 to 1981 and father of the conservative politician Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Bonner admits to not understanding why Britain voted for Brexit.

“I never quite got it. I didn’t understand the emotional appeal of Brexit,” he said. “Intellectually, I don’t understand it either.”

“The view that I do have is that a country is always better off with open borders, open trade and an open society. That is the way civilization works and how people get richer.”

“The more you can trade the better off you are. Brexit is a peculiar case because being a part of Europe meant that Britain could trade more or less freely with Europe but not with the rest of the world because Europe had its own rules.”

“I do think Britain could emerge better if it allows itself to open its borders to trade with everyone without trying to make these trade agreements which are a disaster for everybody.”

What were the Rees-Mogg’s like? “I worked with William for years and years. William had a very interesting character. Like Jacob too, he had a vast knowledge of British history and politics and it was always a pleasure dealing with him. I haven’t seen Jacob for a few years, but at some point I’ll be back in touch.”

As someone who has written a lot about business, who does Bonner admire among business leaders? “I don’t know any that well,” Bonner replied. “I find the small business person is more likely to be a good business person than a big one.”

“In large companies, the people who are put forward as heroes of the business world often really are more like celebrities.”

“Imagine someone running General Electric. That person could not know what business he was in as there are too many things going on in it. He is a media person, a celebrity CEO.”

“I am very cynical about the whole business world and I have been in it for 40 years! I have seen so many dumb things being done and so much fraud and humbug!”

“Stay away from old media. Stay away from paper. It is going to kill you.”

Will Bill Bonner ever retire from Agora or has he a succession plan? “It is something we are talking about now. As they say the graveyards are full of indispensable people.”

“I don’t have any doubt that people can take over from me and do a better job than I can do. I have sons who are very interested and working already in the business. They will probably step up.”

We are getting towards the end of our conversation. Bonner is reflecting about what he has learned from his decades growing his business from a start-up to $1 billion.

Has he any advice for anyone working in the media?

“One thing I would say is stay away from old media. Stay away from paper. It is going to kill you. It is too expensive. Find a model in the electronic world that seems to work and imitate it and improve upon it.”

“There are only a few models for successful internet publications. Find one that will work with you. That is the only advice I can give. There are lots of weird things going on in the internet-based publishing world and some of them work! But you don’t know which ones will until you look very carefully and then try!”