Mark Hart on Bitcoin, Space, and Geopolitical Risks

33:26I mean, that makes sense. And it's one of your investment philosophies is you're looking for those opportunities where there's an incumbent that's under threat, that there's a potential change. How does it fit into how does Bitcoin fit into your geopolitical process? Because you said, okay, this is your overriding thought process, you're investing in things that that fit in with that geopolitical structure. How does Bitcoin fit into that? Yeah. Well, I guess there are a couple of ways. One is, obviously, I expect much more sovereign adoption. You have competing blocks who want to, for instance, the United States prefers that the dollar be the world reserve currency.

34:07You have China who wants maybe a digital yuan be that. And probably you have a lot of countries, maybe particularly in the Middle East, who wouldn't mind sort of, you know, writing this one out and having sort of a little bit of protection, you know, in terms of holding reserve assets, regardless of the ways that the world goes. Also, you know, in the world in which we live, you know, obviously the stock market has been strong and it's been strong for a long time but what has accompanied that is you know an accelerating rise in global government debt and um and there's really only one way to to deal with that you know i guess you could come in and just slash spending cut bureaucracies etc but you know what's more likely in the past that we've kind of continued on down is simply you know um central banks kind of facilitating that growth through growing money.

35:06So I think that the tax on dollars and on fiat currencies is more likely to increase rather than decrease. Whereas the inflation tax on Bitcoin, obviously, is reduced every 10 minutes. So I think that, I guess from that angle, You know, just a continuation of the current situation of large deficits and debt issued to replace that as a gigantic, you know, kind of tailwind for the industry. And then, you know, obviously, if the world devolves and geopolitical tensions turn more into, you know, kinetic World War III or something, you know, along those lines, a lot of, you know, different historical, you know, stores of value, certain equities, you know, etc.

36:02could, you know, be disrupted considerably. And that might be the time to add something more like gold or Bitcoin or something that is somewhat limited in supply. So just switching on to broader topics now. When I first met you, you were a very focused macro guy, right? And you still are. But you kind of changed my entire thinking of the world because you went through looking at these macro tail risk opportunities, and then you kind of pivoted to the upside tail risk of technology investing and some longer term themes, which was not traditional for your peer group at the time, right? It was very non-traditional.

36:46I never forget you coming to an event, I don't know, 2016 saying, well, space is a big thing. Everyone's like, what the hell is Mark talking about? It always takes everybody five years to catch up with you, at least five years. So talk me through that transition from just being the kind of traditional guy. What changed you into thinking about technology and other investing that is less common or was less common? I think 2009 was a real, it was one of my worst years as an animator. After having had big success, I guess in 2008 was my best year ever. And 2009 was probably my worst. And I was trying to understand, like, what did I miss?

37:34And obviously, the rally in equities was very tech-led. And it was very clear that the technology, broad technology sector, software, etc., is growing at a much faster clip than the overall economy. And it was quite set to continue to do that regardless of the direction of the world over the long term. over the long term and so i started to try to i mean you know 09 when you have a terrible year you have to do kind of a post-mortem or a you know analysis as you're as you're dying and it seemed to me that this was the area you know um technology and accelerating and knowledge yeah but sorry just to interrupt but as macro guys we were cynics yeah and it was a very hard thing to become the opposite i mean everybody had become kind of a cynic at that point you know as well i mean uh people were looking for the next you know i mean i was as well after the you know so prime european sovereign crisis everybody was looking for the next kind of shoot a drop and um and yet the markets were telling us you know something different i guess it was uh um 2012 maybe when Mark Andreessen wrote his essay, Why Software is Eating the World, that pretty much completely blew me away.

39:01It was sort of the roadmap that I was kind of looking for. So I ended up trying to use, I guess, whatever notoriety I had to build out networks in Silicon Valley and meet venture capitalists, meet founders, and try to figure out how to take advantage of this huge theme regardless of the fat tail risks going on in the world and the potential downside of, you name, what kind of crisis could come along. Over the long term, it seemed very clear to me that we're accelerating technologically. And so the key was really to try to figure out my position, how I could be a part of that, not being a fact I, but wanting to invest in.

39:51And so, but you're running two frameworks in your head at the same time. One is there's a really dangerous tail risk out there. And the other side is I'm going to take the tail risk of the upside because I think there's a huge secular trend that people, I mean, that's quite hard to do for most people. Most people let the downside crowd their investments and they, they stop investing. But you're not doing that at all, right? No, that's definitely not. Well, even in a really dystopian world, you can have gigantic corporations that sort of control it or that do well. Or you can have technology companies that can do well.

40:35I mean, it's those technologies, in fact, that some of them that makes the dystopian world. and so you know i i felt like i guess regardless of of of what happens you know humanity's going to move on and accelerate unless there's you know something you know destroys the planet or whatever even this is the launch of trend and so uh and i knew it was what i was missing and i felt like it was um i felt like it was certainly you know kind of underappreciated i guess in and uh in macro circles anyway. I still think it is. So if you look at the balance of your investments between privates and public, to express this view and other views, what's the kind of balance?

41:22Because I've seen you going much more towards privates than you used to be. I mean, you've always been a direct investor in all sorts of stuff, all sorts of stuff from logistics businesses through to technology businesses. But where's your balance of you allocating capital now? Are you more private, more or still a large part of kind of public kind of macro style stuff? Well, I have more private investments than I do, you know, public. I guess I have a bucket of, you know, highly liquid, you know, assets, public securities cash etc um that kind of gives me my you know peace of mind and liquidity and then that you know um and and they're obviously um public market themes um that actually aren't even technology driven per se that that i think are really interesting let's let's do that and then we'll talk about the privates because that that's a whole other interesting thing so let's talk about the public side how do you how are you kind of positioned and thinking about the world Well, I think there are a few different areas that are particularly interesting.

42:33Obviously, what I call a Bitcoin-related theme is interesting. I think there are a lot of interesting public vehicles for expressing that theme. Another theme that's been one of the worst themes I've ever traded, but I still think it's pretty compelling is legal cannabis in the United States. And why has that been such a dog? I mean, you've been investing in that space for a long time. There was a big rally, then it all fell apart. Is it just this banking, this federal banking issue that's the issue? Yeah, that's for it. I mean, again, you make, you know, say, you know, hidden forces. I mean, the market has grown dramatically, you know, consistently.

43:18the total market in the U.S. as long as I've done on this theme. But I guess there's three different groups that capture that upside. And so one is the illicit market, which is probably at least, you know, has probably two-thirds market share. And then you have the legal regulated market, which is maybe a third. And those are rough numbers that could be off. And then, of course, you have government that takes their toll. And, you know, currently it's the illicit mostly and the, you know, kind of government sectors that have basically been reaping all of the rewards for the extremely rapid growth that we kind of correctly predicted.

44:18So the cost of capital, I mean, it's an access issue where, you know, a lot of most of the cannabis names don't trade in major exchanges. And a lot of institutions have a tough time. There's really no institutional ownership. And several of the large brokers, you know, world custody, legal cannabis. Obviously, you have a much higher tax regime for legal cannabis where they pay taxes on federal taxes on gross receipts because cannabis is still a Schedule I drug. But I think the way to frame it is that you have the illicit sector that has probably two-thirds market share. They don't pay taxes. They don't have to worry about environmental impact of what they do.

45:27They don't have to worry about any of the regulatory issues. Certainly have coerced or extremely cheap labor. um that are able to pay health care and so um so what happens when you have two-thirds of the of the market basically has these gigantic structural uh advantages over the you know over the legal market it it you know if the marginal producer is the illicit sector and they're producing at a much lower cost than the legal sector, you know, it, it pushes, it pushes down both, you know, top line and bottom line, it squeezes. And that's, you know, definitely been happening. And you have obviously the tailwinds of new states allowing medical or allowing legal, you have the tailwinds of, you know, increased consumption kind of across the warp to go among, you know, older people.

46:26So they're definitely large tailwinds. But I guess it's sort of the biggest problem is probably the way that the playing field, the current kind of legal environment really builds the playing field in favor of the illicit sector. And so are you comfortable holding a position to allow this to be kind of rectified for something to change for the catalyst or do you just trade it in and out of it now how do you how do you manage that because you know you've got tailwinds of the clear there's a secular trend problem is you've got these headwinds yeah i mean it's a it's been a a terrible trade you know and in hindsight it shouldn't have held the longer in term positions but i've it's not it's not a I mean it certainly was a much bigger exposure for me a couple of years ago than it is you know now and it's not a it's not a theme I think that that has to have you know federal reform obviously that would be great but you know demand is really inelastic you could have simply enforcement of laws that would that could really test them or you know the illegal immigration, for instance, in the United States has really fortified this sort of illicit sector.

47:53And I think, you know, any type of crackdown on lawlessness is a huge, you know, would be a huge boost kind of to the sector. And all the while, you know, the companies in the sector, the ones that still exist, because many of them have failed, You know, they find themselves in a relatively sparse landscape of legal competition. And they've had, you know, years to sort of optimize their operations and adapt to kind of the current environment. And I now think you have a sector that many of the companies have, short of their balance sheets, been able to achieve growth despite the headwinds and are kind of poised for what I think is sort of tremendous growth and probably appreciation and stock price with the right catalyst.

48:48And I don't know that it, you know, when it comes and I can't say that I love this theme, for instance, more than, you know, Bitcoin related. But it is an industry that has, you know, fully domestic supply chains. It is an industry that I think does a real positive good. You have big drops in things like opioid abuse, even just the number of prescription drugs prescribed in places where cannabis is legal, either for medical or adult use, recreational. What else is in your public book that interests you? What themes are also there? Well, I think that one of the big things, kind of how when we went from, we had to build a new internet in a sense to accommodate the growth in technology.

49:54And when I say a new internet, like the last time, you know, going from kind of dial up to, you know, high speed across the board. And it took a gigantic amount of capital investment. You probably remember all the CLEX, the competitive local exchange carriers that took on gigantic amounts of debt and built out all this, you know, last mile of fiber optic infrastructure. sure they all went you know bankrupt but then the system you know kind of had that uh had that uh you know backbone that it could build on and i mean i think that actually back down in the you know in the i think it was in 2000 january of 2000 when maybe the last select had a had a failed offering before the whole thing just kind of went went to shit um but we built up like a gigantic kind of surplus of broadband capacity that we've been consuming all this time without really thinking about, well, will we always have that excess capacity?

50:56And now we're getting to a point where this sort of needs to be rebuilt again.

51:04And literally the whole tech stack to accommodate AI and to accommodate the massive consumption of electricity and of data. And it needs to be, I think,

51:22more or less centralized. And so I think you're talking about building out sort of satellite networks and data storage like off planet and in a distributed way. So I really think that networking and all of the different technologies associated with building better switches, building out that type of capacity is interesting. So, I mean, I've definitely been focused on networking stocks. It's also kind of a driver in some of the private stuff. And any traditional kind of macro bets or you're mainly kind of equity focused right now? Well, I think the most compelling macro bet out there, which has been my view maybe for a long time, is this, you know, kind of migration inside of the United States.

52:16And I think that it's, you know, specifically coming to Texas, Florida, maybe some other places. And obviously there are a lot of things that, you know, hurdles, but for instance, the talent pool in California versus here. But, I mean, I live in Fort Worth, which would shock most people to know that Fort Worth is now the 10th largest city in the United States. and people still think of it as a small cow town yeah and it is you know it's there's not a huge amount of industry here but the amount of that i've just witnessed of kind of human and you know financial capital moving here and the business environment is you know pretty dramatic pretty uh it's it's uh it's massively more friendly than a lot of uh other jurisdictions and i kind of I think we've sort of set off like a little bit of a feedback loop of migration coming here.

53:14And not just to Fort Worth, although I think Fort Worth is the optimal place for a lot of this capital to come. It already has, you know, quite a bit of wealth. And you have some, I guess Fort Worth is probably like the largest city in the country without a major research institution located there. And that's changing dramatically here with Texas A &M is building out a gigantic campus, actually, in downtown Fort Worth. Texas A &M is probably the largest university in the world. It's not in a major metropolitan area. I think it's the second or so largest school in the country right now. And so, for instance, A &M wants to build Kendall Square in downtown Fort Worth where they can help accelerate companies.

54:05Spending$700 million just building out their campus over the next four years, UT Arlington is now setting up a new campus for 8 ,000 engineers just in West Fort Worth. And the kind of ecosystem is being built here. Obviously, that ecosystem exists in Austin. It exists to some extent in Dallas as well. and so um you know just from this gigantic migration i think there's just so many different ways to play it whether it's through real estate you have a lot of real estate here um in texas in fort word i mean how does it work with commercial real estate because you're fighting another trend there as well so there may be university real estate that's required but even that's not clear over time whether in a more digital world how much that's needed how do you think that through versus obviously if people are moving there there's obviously just housing i mean that's a another big thing how do you think about this yeah well i mean just to be clear like my my experience in commercial real estate is i simply own the building that i my my office is and it's a great building i love your yours is the coolest office in the world yeah that's all i want to say it is it is good it is very good um and that's something you can actually get in Fort Worth.

55:21I mean, can you imagine having, you know, something like this in Dallas or LA or something? You just, you know, you can't do that. Fort Worth does have a lot of, I mean, it's sparsely populated. It's a gigantic and with lots of, you know, kind of potential for urban infill. I think that the idea like for A &M, it's not spending$700 million building out a campus, you know, it's that they envision this as, you know, holding maybe some of their most important intellectual property so they're uh you know attracting kind of top you know academics attracting kind of top you know companies who can partner with them on r &d or can partner with them on um you know finding capital to build manufacturing or or whatever it is and and and a &m can actually kind of program the the the school around um around you know those sort of opportunities, this corporate collaboration opportunity.

56:20So I think that's their idea. In terms of commercial real estate, I mean, obviously it's been overbuilt in a lot of places. Austin and Dallas are two very obvious ones. Has it happened in Fort Worth necessarily? much lower vacancy rates here. But I don't know. I mean, it's not the angle that I'm... What is your angle then? Because what you're saying to me in typical Mark terms is I've seen a secular trend that's starting. People haven't seen it yet. It's going to have spin off lots of opportunity. I mean, this is very typical of you. You'll come in with something, everyone's going, what's he talking about?

57:05They'll realize in five or seven years time, what you were talking about because you're always ahead on this stuff so yeah how do you play this well i think that gigantic or i mean there's just a gigantic arbitrage for any company to move to texas you know from i mean there's no income tax here there's no capital gains tax texas two dollars cheaper for a gallon of gasoline than it is you know california um it's the the business environment is is tremendous so literally just a corporation moving and picking on of California, I mean, it may have kind of the worst governance of any of the states in my mind.

57:42So, I mean, being in California a little bit, that's also where, you know, some of the greatest companies are, you know, the arbitrage in terms of, you know, the quality of life arbitrage for employees, the cost of living arbitrage for employees, the cost of doing business for the companies is gigantic. So, I mean, I really spend a lot of my time trying to convince portfolio companies that i'm okay see what you're saying is companies in your in your portfolio your private companies you're saying listen come here because it's going to make a dramatic difference to the potential outcome of the company right absolutely and yeah they're they're huge incentives you know government incentives and local incentives as as well to come here i mean i think this is Like if I were, you know, trying to say, I mean, I do, I'm not, I'm not like, I do make venture investments.

58:34I'm not part of a venture fund and I'm not really looking to become like some, you know, venture capitalist or anything. um uh or but but um it does seem like you know if you're starting in venture um you know kind of the way it's done is is you know there's sort of a model for you know each round and how how the the vcs come in and how they uh you know they want to see certain things they want to see certain growth, certain metrics, and it's kind of a moving business where, you know, you find a company, you get to the next round, hopefully liquidity, you raise a new fund, you find new companies.

59:16And to me, the opportunity is like finding companies and helping sort of, you know, negotiate some of the macro risks, supply chain risks that may come up and figuring out how they can become much more efficient and more prosperous.

59:39I think like facilitating sort of instead of instead of. well, I guess I would just say, I think, you know, helping facilitate those types of moves, there's just a gigantic opportunity. So it's in venture, help your portfolio companies to, you know, relocate if you're a corporate CEO, you know, you want to think about, you know, I mean, I think we'll continue to think about moving to kind of these, you know, more where where you're appreciated a little bit as a company. And, um, and so I can't say that there's, you know, there's some like specific individual, like incredible investments that you could make.

1:00:20I mean, I'm sure, you know, I'm really Mark. There's one thing that people don't realize just at the simple tax level, the hurdle rate that you have to be of a person in Texas versus as a person in California in the exact same trade, it is an incredible difference over time what it means to you. And people don't think this through. They think they're different, but it actually is a driver of returns over time is taxation. And so optimizing for that allows you to outperform over time. And it's the same with companies. If you optimize for taxation, you will outperform over time. You'll have more free cash flow to do other things.

1:01:06That's right. And so I think that that is the opportunity, I think, for companies. But I think that's where to bat. And then obviously there's all kinds of other sort of ancillary kind of businesses that all do well, like when you have, you know, the type of population growth. I just think that the bottom line is you're going to have, you're going to have an increasing flood of, you know, kind of people and capital moving here. And there are a lot of ways to sort of, you know, capture that value. I'm blown away, obviously, by what Texas A &M is doing. I try to spend a lot of time talking to the people over there, figuring out how I can, you know leverage um or how i can collaborate with uh with them and helping them you know build their vision and and and do the same so let's talk about some of the kind of um private investments you've been doing because they're always interesting what is your let's start with space because you know again most people would never have thought the cynical macro guy who was betting on crises is the next minute is investing in space.

1:02:32What is your, what's your thesis there? And what got you to look at this? Because, you know, it's now becoming apparent things like rocket labs as a public company and obviously Tesla and SpaceX, everyone's now becoming fully aware with, but when you started talking about this stuff, everyone's like, what is he talking about? Yeah. Well, it was purely launch class. You know, You could see when SpaceX was able to land and reuse rockets, essentially the cost of launch dropped by a factor of 10. And talking with everybody in the industry for a long time, it seemed poised to continue to just collapse.

1:03:13And so that just, I couldn't even imagine all the different types of, um it's kind of like going from from dial up to high speed you know it it opens up all kinds of markets that um that may not exist the starting point is there's this just gigantic tailwind of absolutely collapsing launch costs that why do people want to go into space this is what people don't yet understand they're like oh yeah but sure this was a government thing and governments did it the pride of nations stuff, but it's now, it's a corporate enterprise. What is going on? Well, I mean, there are obvious things like, you know, communications or, you know, energy or, you know, acquiring energy in space or building distributed networks of, you know, in space where they're not in a fixed location.

1:04:08um uh i mean their manufacturing in space is is taking off the company i've invested in that found that they can you know manufacture different things much more specifically like we're more uh exactly like yeah exactly um there is you know down the road which people laugh at me a lot about but you know asteroid mining um which is certainly uh uh something that happens long term there is the moon which has you know fuel that can you know whether it's you know helium three that can uh that that will be used for you know fusion energy or whether it's just simply exploring you know beyond space is kind of like it's the frontier and it's frontier investing in a place where you don't have so much the incumbencies um you know preventing growth i mean the incumbent Well, you did have the incumbency.

1:05:05It's very much like Bitcoin, right? You had the incumbency of this massive state architecture that was hugely inefficient. Then suddenly out of nowhere, the private sector just took it. I mean, 90 % of all launches are now private sector. That's right. And so that incumbency has, for the most part, kind of been broken through. And so it's in many ways a land grab. And obviously, SpaceX is the early mover and the wealth that obviously they've achieved is spectacular. It's one of the most exciting companies ever. But there are innumerable types of applying different technologies to space and using innumerable use cases.

1:05:49And it's literally how we grow, and it is the frontier. So I've definitely been focused. And a lot of, I mean, I don't know if there's any specific companies to go into and explain sort of the thesis. Yeah, let's move into other themes that you've been investing on the private side as well. Because again, you always find stupidly interesting stuff really early. You and I had a dinner in San Francisco 10 years ago when we launched Real Vision. It's almost 10 years ago today, pretty close. And I met this company and they're doing just groundbreaking stuff. And you see all sorts of really interesting stuff.

1:06:28What are the things that are interesting you that you want to invest in? Well, I mean, that particular story is probably my, that we had is maybe the most exciting investment that I've made. That was a company called Misapplied Sciences. And you and I met the two of the three founders in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. And they had just left Microsoft in the Applied Sciences group. And they had an idea of creating a screen where every individual person looking at the screen without any kind of visual aid or any kind of wearable device would see something different on that screen. And for us at the time, the technology was you either see a light or you don't see a light.

1:07:20um and but the kind of the long-term potential of a company like that is that you know if they you know succeed then you have you know every single screen becomes a smart screen that can deliver you know uh personalized content to each person that looks at it or even you know can be we're not talking here television screens or computer screens we're talking gigantic display screens where i'm sitting next to you and i see a different thing on that screen than you do which is like a bizarro quantum world yeah uh yeah that's that's what it was and i mean this particular investment misapplied sciences um which i can't talk about i'm on the board of the company but you know they basically you know after we invested they went dark for five years and they built their technology and then they came out in the 2020 Electronics Show with Delta Airlines, who's one of the investors there.

1:08:17Delta had the keynote address and they announced how they were going to be using this tech. Now if you go to the Wayne County, the Detroit International Airport, the Delta Terminal, you can go there and you log in or you opt down and you see this big screen and it delivers all your personalized information. there'd be a hundred people standing next to you and they don't see what you're looking at they see what what they're looking at uh and it's the content that's that's just for them and i mean the technology now is such that the screens are fully interactive so you can sit here you can manipulate the screen that you look at fingers phone web games on it um personalized content can be delivered at the same.

1:09:03And it is basically, though, an array of smaller LCD screens. And so you can theoretically make these kind of any size and you can adjust the views. But the potential of a company like this is to have these screens kind of, you know, I mean, it's like in every hotel lobby or every floor of every hospital Or the Intuit Dome, for instance, which is Steve Ballmer's LA Clippers new$2 billion arena there in LA. They installed one of these screens kind of for their VIP customers in one of the areas where you go in and it is personal content delivered to every single person that walks in there. It can tell you where to get your food or it can tell you whatever can advertise to you.

1:09:56And doing this, I mean, what's interesting to me is they can build these screens for essentially the same cost, regular dumb, you know, big LCD monitor and just plug it into the wall kind of power. But, you know, the potential is to really replace, you know, any and every screen. I mean, that's certainly in a public place where 85 % of money is spent actually, you know, away from the home, away from the screen. I mean, it's just kind of one technology. It's incredible. Okay, give me another example of something you've invested in, and then I'm going to ask you some questions about how you do this.

1:10:35But give me another example of something you found that you're excited about, where you can talk about it. So obviously some stuff you can't, but whatever you think you can talk about, either in broad brushstrokes or whatever, or specific. Well, I would say there are a couple of investments that I've made that, and they're interesting. One is a company that has figured out how to edit the genes of crops like corn and soybeans in a way that improves yield. And so this is a company, again, that I invested in a long time. But is that not just standard genetic modified kind of seeds and stuff, or is it very different?

1:11:22Well, it's not. You're not taking, like, genetics from another species and then planting it in this species. You're actually just altering the genetics of a particular species. And, you know, this particular company, for instance, has been going for a long time. that they've proven that they can take elite germ and alter it and improve crop yield by 10 plus percent. So if you think of which is gigantic, it's creating a new Argentina worth of corn and soybeans or whatever. And I guess it is a cautionary tale in this particular company, and it certainly can be a very successful company. But, you know, we just assumed that once you prove, I mean, this is Norman Borlaug level stuff.

1:12:15This is, you know, this isn't just, you know, making a crop like a little more resistant to drought or whatever else. This is literally creating the same amount of product with 10 % less land, 10 % less fertilizer, you know, et cetera. And what's really crazy about it is there are these hidden forces that sort of prevent it from accelerating. And who knows if it will now, where they're basically two seed companies. They don't want a value. They don't want the technology, the commodity aggregators. They aren't going to sell. they're going to take in a crop that's come from these germ plasms because it's not commoditized the standard way.

1:13:06There's specifications if you want to sell into China or you want to sell into somewhere else. You can't just sell any corn or any crop. It has to be a specific kind of strain. And so I don't know really if there's much of a conclusion here other than the easy part was editing a gene to massively increase crop yield. That was the easy part. Hard part is fighting the incumbents, which is the same story you've said every time. Yeah, that's the hard part is fighting the incumbents. And then that's literally pretty much every single major investment I've done. It tries to do that in one way or another.

1:13:48it's fighting, sometimes it's a disaster, like shorting the Chinese yuan, even though I feel like my work was good. Sometimes, you know, you break through the income. Sometimes you don't, yeah. Those are the kind of things that I'm looking for anyway. Just the, and they're really, you know, the sort of the, if you're right, you know, it's world changing. So I want to ask you a bit about that. How do you source opportunities

1:14:19in the private side? Because this is cutting-edge technology. These are very small companies. You don't get to know them. It's a network and stuff. And then how have you transitioned your mind to investing in this stuff, which is longer duration, sort of different measurements, or do you just think of it as the same kind of tail risk investing you've always done, and there's a bit of in-the-middle stuff where there's no price? How do you think about that? I think it's very similar to the stuff that I've always done. It's kind of tail-wrist stuff. How to transition to it, it's oftentimes like hiring.

1:14:54A company that I'm working on right now, my good friend Dan Babbage, who worked for Kyle Bass for many years. Dan's a Harvard physics PhD, two years as a postdoc, Gordon Betty Moore postdoc fellow at Caltech in physics. And so, you know, to understand a company, sometimes you have to go and bring somebody like that on to really, you know, do the deep dive because it's certainly nothing that I'm, you know. Because that's a very, I mean, you and I have spoken about the company. It's a very technologically complicated thing. Right. Yeah. So you just bring on an expert to help you. Yeah. Oftentimes, you know, you know, have to have to do that.

1:15:41but you know really it is simply i guess the network that i've i've built i mean i see for whatever reason i have like an insane amount of you know deal flow that that that comes across my desk um and you know i think it's probably because you know i've invested in this stuff and met a lot of founders and it's just sort of kind of word of mouth but how do you select them then you've got deal flow it's not like you're a you know a hundred person team or anything how do you how do you do this well um it's there's not a good process i mean specifically it's just like it's it is it i have a you know a macro framework of kind of where i think the world's going what i think is going on in terms of regulatory environment in terms of you know demographics in terms of geopolitics in terms of monetary policy in terms of how i see the future and then i sort of try to find you know the types of of companies that i could envision you know and that and that future yeah because most macro people tend to be too short term you have to have a long-term macro view if you've got long-term long-duration investments yeah and that's all i've always said you know i mean i always think of macro in the very long long term i mean it's really difficult to trade or operate in the short term you know these days anyway like with algos and whatnot.

1:17:04They're much smarter than I am. So, yeah, that's one of the things is I've had, you have to kind of increase your time horizon in order to compete with, you know, computers. Yeah. And that's all I did as well. I just went just longer and longer term and there's much less competition and it's easier to capture a secular trend. Yeah. And it's, that's not how people are investing. I mean, if, you know, I'll invest in something that I expect to have zero liquidity for 10 years even if it's even if it's successful um and i just want to make like a lot of those bets and and then see if i can add any value you know taking a board seat or being involved with you know helping you know being management typically have their core competencies and then they try to fill in the gaps with you know um with outside consultants or employees or whatnot.

1:17:55I think it's really a fraught macro environment that to some extent we can help out. And you run essentially a barbell strategy. You've got liquidity because of your public's portfolio and cash and all the other stuff, and then you have privates. Do you purposely, like profits that you make in one get reinvested in the long term, or are they just two discrete things that they just happen to balance nicely and give you what you need i mean it's much more um it's no it's i don't have like a specific sort of process i mean i'm just trying to read a lot and interact a lot with a lot of people and just keep an open mind and you know hope that you know the right opportunities will come and then when they do just or when something does come along that's appealing than trying to dive deep and see if it works.

1:18:51But there's not a specific process. There's not an allocation percentage between - Sort of trade by trade basis, you look at it. No, trade by trade basis. And it's kind of three buckets, I guess. There's real estate, which is mostly my office and my house and some other kind of little things that I think will do well over the long term. And then there's kind of private equity, which venture sort of investing. And then there's the public bucket. Excuse me, those change quite a bit. I mean, I guess I have the lecture of not... I mean, I'm not trying to build like a... A giant firm or... Right, a firm at all, or any kind of family office type situation that's targeting certain returns and certain risks.

1:19:41I mean, sometimes the risk I'm taking on is massively higher. And maybe that's to my detriment. No, I think for me it's inspiring. Okay, I've got two questions for you before we wrap up because you're just brilliant at all of these things. What's the best thing you've read recently? Or what should people read that they probably haven't read yet? Because you're always reading interesting stuff. well i guess blew your mind recently it can be really crazy because i know you read some crazy shit as well the the well i mean the crazy and the most interesting thing uh and i can't go down the rabbit hole but um just a crazy book that that like might blow your mind is called the holographic universe um and i sounds right up my street because i'm this is the kind of a holographic universe okay holographic universe uh and i can't remember the the author of it's it's not a it's not a new book but uh i really i don't think i could even begin to describe gosh i should have had a i should have had like several uh answers ready for you can come but you can come back because it'll come into your head but holographic universe there's one okay the other thing that you completely led the path on again which is so irritating how good you are at this stuff is you did the whole longevity lifestyle thing literally six seven years before it was on anybody else's radar screen obviously tim ferris you and tim were on real vision back in the very early days where are you with that now what is your kind of your general you know mark operational health and wellness setup now what do you what do you do what's your protocol um well i guess it's uh yeah i mean i have like a you know my diet is pretty like hard or i would say for the most part and it's similar to like the the kind of the tim ferris diet it's not that uh you know kind of no carbs except cheat on the weekends um a lot of weight lifting a lot of so it's a low carb sort of tim ferris style diet not not keto which i do on and off but it's low carb and slow carb slow carb and a lot of protein a lot of protein um i mean i have a variety of different like so i mean i take a ton of supplements just to check what's your favorite supplements well i mean i don't know like what did a couple that i've started one i've started taking like cilantro and um and i think a lot of like turmeric trying to eat foods yeah um uh but cilantro is kind of like apparently helps like um purge like heavy metals from the body a lot of mushrooms yeah and what about um the kind of nmn the david sinclair style stuff the nad plus all of that kind of stuff that longevity stuff yeah so i take all of that so i have a particular um uh yeah kind of protein powder that he's called momentum i mean i don't know i think it's really good but i i don't know if there's probably lots of other stuff better has a lot of those um including the dad plots uh in there um i do uh have read sauna several times a week um yeah a lot of like brazilian jiu-jitsu obviously um you're still doing yoga as well i don't really do yoga i mean i'm like certainly kind of lumber i do a lot of like stretching out when i mean really just you know meditation and jujitsu or sort of lifting weights are kind of my main sort of you know protocols i guess i love you know cold plunges i do that a lot um but uh i also um uh do you know what a one wheel is or you know one you've ridden one of my before ain't i yeah for to get into flow state and balance all of that stuff yeah so like electric skateboards e-foils one wheels like surfing all these kind of things just to sort of like try to get into flow you know um that's another thing you were very early on was the whole flow state idea and how to channel it and almost teach yourself to channel it yeah i mean i just sort of just pursue those sort of things um you know for a long time i mean i think meditation is one of the most important things, I guess.

1:24:17And the other one you're big into, sunlight. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, anytime it's, I go outside every day, just take my shirt off, soak up the sun. If there's any free vitamin D on offer, I'm a buyer. It's one reason I love living here in Texas. Even in the winter, you get 70 degrees sunny days. Do you do testing? I'm actually going to go to the fountain life, the Peter Diamandis, Tony Robbins thing. Do you do testing of all of this stuff or do you just observe your protocol and presume you're getting it roughly right? Well, I do like a couple of times or maybe three times a year. I get, you know, massive blood draw and just look at, you know, different levels of various things in my body and will, you know, have someone I consult with that helps me like kind of tweak my, you know, supplement intake.

1:25:20But I am probably, you know, I'm not sort of at the cutting edge at all. You're not Brian Johnson, no. Oh, no, no, no. I mean, I think it's fascinating what, I mean, started chugging like, uh, Brian Johnson's olive oil. I've watched him on a daily basis, actually. But no, no, I'm not there. It's, I'm not that interested in, and, you know, going that far. Yeah. Mark, as ever, a absolute pleasure. We talked about an incredible array of things, including your frameworks, how you think about the world, uh, how you're living your life. you only gave us one book but i'll forgive you because i've never heard of the book so i'm going to order it right now and i'm sure it'll be great because everything you do you always jump these things oh you gave me the fourth turning i mean yeah you are i mean i i have to give you a credit for a lot of things and you know fourth turning was one of them you you always find stuff that nobody's ever looking at and suddenly it's like well here you go so i'll tell you a book i'll tell you the book i'd read it um i read a long time ago or all of them but um so robert carrow is one of many consider that the greatest biographer um of all time well lbj is the his primary subject and he's written four biographies on lbj and apparently maybe a system's out or is coming out um and uh in the first one um i mean they're they're brilliant but the first uh lbj biography goes through lbj's childhood and through the through the um through the 20s and 30s and as he got into politics and um his relationship with fdr his relationship with sam rayburn who was the Texas head of the house from Texas back in the day.

1:27:15And Texas probably in 1935 was the poorest state in the union. And at that time they found oil. They were able to break through the sort of standard oil kind of monopoly because it was on the frontier so far away. And so wealth was able to be produced and it was essentially channeled into you know political power um and i think that like the the history of the state of texas is is i mean you get a better understanding of why texas is what it is today from that individual book the first of the caro biographies of lbj than than anything else that i've read yeah it reminds me and i'd love to read that as well of just reading lee kwan yu's books about building Singapore.

1:28:02Yeah. It was just like the same thing. It was just, it was a swamp with no natural resources and no opportunities. And he turned it into literally the most advanced society on earth in one generation. Staggering. Yeah. Although maybe arguably the most important choke point in the world. Okay. I mean, optimal geography anyway, for Singapore, but really, I think that's the case with Texas. Well, I mean, Texas is the frontier, and it always has been. Like, as the population, you know, moved east and the U.S. population moved west, it kind of stopped, you know, right here in Texas, in the middle of Texas, which is basically I-35, because west of here, you know, it becomes like high deserts.

1:28:52You have poor soil, little amounts of rain. So this way you have like San Antonio, Austin, Waco, Fort Worth, Duton, Oklahoma City. No, that's where basically the population stops. And that is kind of the frontier and it still is. Well, I just have to come back down and see you. I haven't been to Texas for a while, so I need to come and see you at some point. I would love to see you. We have great hotels here in Fort Worth now, incidentally, that we hadn't had before. We have a Crescent and that. And then a bear is just right around. Well, I'll find an excuse to come down and see you, my friend.

1:29:24But listen, thank you for coming on Real Vision. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with the world. I really appreciate it, as ever. Ralph, thank you so much. It's a pleasure being here. Always great to catch up with you and hope to see you on Fort Worth soon. So as you can see, Mark can talk about everything. We could have talked for hours and hours. The things that focus his attention, he has this geopolitical framework, which is actually very risk averse. It's like geopolitics is dangerous. I'm nervous about it. Personally, I have an opposite view on all of this, but that doesn't matter. Mark is an incredible thinker.

1:29:57He could be right, I could be wrong, or somewhere between the two. Doesn't matter. The point being is that he's got that framework, and of which he then builds an incredibly optimistic framework, a framework of abundance, technology, of the future, whilst also having this geopolitical framework. And then he makes sure his bets fit within that by being kind of proof or proofed against something terrible happening. Now, obviously, over the long run, not in the short run, obviously, markets go up and down with cyclicality, macro factors. But what he's trying to do is move out duration, which is what I've done as well.

1:30:42I found I've become a longer term investor and the real returns lie there. And Mark has gone from being an event-specific catalyst macro guy to this big secular thesis macro guy well before I got there, obviously, because it's Mark. Anyway, I hope you learned something about how great investors think. And it's a real pleasure for me to be able to do this. Obviously, those of you who haven't joined Real Vision, make sure you do, because there's many of these there, obviously, all of the AI summaries. But also, once you've upgraded into the plus tier, you'll realize that amongst you all are lots of great investors.

1:31:21When you see the performance for the trade competition, I mean, several people up nearly 100 % of time of filming this in a month. There's some really smart people in Real Vision. You get access to them and their trade ideas and their research notes in Real Vision Plus. So make sure you keep that journey, level up, and get from information where you are today, if you're watching this on YouTube or watching this on Real Vision, or you get to level up to knowledge and then up to wisdom as you get through pro tiers. It's a journey we're trying to take you on so we can really help you in your investing lives.

1:32:05Realize that future vision of yourself, that manifesting of your destiny. You have to take the steps. It's not going to happen without you taking those steps. So go manifest. Go to RealVision.com and I'll see you next time. Picture yourself on a beach, retired early and enjoying financial freedom. If this is your dream, then now's the time to level up your investing game and Real Vision can help you. We arm you with the knowledge, the tools and the network to succeed on your financial journey on your own terms. Take control of your future and visit realvision.com forward slash free. That's realvision.com forward slash free.

1:33:01Have you ever wanted to trade Bitcoin but haven't dared try? With Plus500 Futures, you can trade crypto without the hassle of opening a wallet. With just a few clicks, you can register and start practicing with their free and unlimited demo. See a trading opportunity? You'll be able to trade it in just two clicks. Feel ready? You can move to real money with as little as$100 once your account is approved. And the great thing is that in addition to crypto, Plus 500 gives you access to a wide range of instruments, S &P 500, NASDAQ, gas, and much more. Explore equity indices, energy, metals, forex, and beyond.

1:33:34With a simple and intuitive platform, you can trade anytime, anywhere. Experience the fast, accessible futures trading you've been waiting for with Plus 500. With over 20 years of experience, Plus 500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit us.plus500.com to learn more. Trading in futures involves the risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus 500. It's trading with a plus.