When Shift Happens: Will The Banana Zone Make You Rich? w/ Kevin Follonier

28:23So what I do personally is I then look at all of the price action between the top three, Solana, ETH, Bitcoin, look at the cross rates and choose the strongest one. It has been Solana. And I've had that bet for a while, and it's been the strongest trend. So that is why I have Solana. Solana has a good community, great UX, good tech, fast, it's cheap, and it has had some breakthroughs in chain usage, meme coins being one of them. the ecosystem is deepening and broadening, much like ETH was doing this time last cycle. So, okay, that's a great place to park a larger amount of capital because it's relatively safe.

29:11And it worked out really well until now. Yeah. Are you still confident about the great sole trade for this cycle? Yes, I am. I'm sure it'll do absolutely fine. I mean, I see nothing but success going on on that chain and positive vibes. The question is, is whether the next chosen one outperforms it so significantly that you're forced to take that trade, which is much riskier. So it's not the bet that I would ask people to do full size. And for me, it's sweet. And it's not because I'm on the foundation, but it's because I could have been talking about this forever because I was on the foundation, but I didn't.

29:52I waited till I saw the confirmation price action, which was this general outperformance started versus Solana, ETH, Bitcoin, and then every single token started breaking out. And at that point, I felt comfortable saying, listen, I think this may be the chosen one. Sure, there'll be other stuff that outperforms it. So the fact that you are on the SWE Foundation board is not linked to the fact that you think it's going to be one of the outperformers. It's kind of luck. Yeah, yeah, it is. Interesting. I'm a mercenary when it comes to capital. And because I've got so many followers, I cannot shill something because I happen to be on the board and I want the number to go up.

30:42I can't do that. So I was very careful about it until the price was proving itself. And then I could say, listen, the proof is here. It's outperforming everything. And I think, you know, this is going to get adoption because of the reasons. And you had Adani on, who's fantastic. Absolutely. And you can see the technology and how they're breaking the internet down to its component parts and rebuilding the stack from scratch. Now, clever tech doesn't win. Adoption wins. absolutely so we're seeing the active wallets going up we've seen stuff it's early we haven't got a big breakthrough use case yet yeah actually flew to san francisco the podcast with a bunch of people there and then he was one of them and i fell there and kind of around that same time you started to be more vocal and i was like fuck i don't have more cash what do i do yes yes then i said hey guys we should do a partnership with the podcast it's about to happen so i was like so i was like i need to do something about that because otherwise i don't have the in my portfolio the outperformer gaining adoption right so but yeah absolutely i felt there's something when you have these people in front of you that just completely opens your mind and your eyes right and you're like oh man like and look sui is hard to understand at first When I started, I'm like, look, we know they're all smart people, but they're just technical.

32:14And at the time, they hadn't developed the character of like these five superheroes because each of the five founders is very different. And what we're finding is different people are different communicators to different markets. And Adony is more crypto native, a bit more degen, a bit more understanding. I think Sam is like the young surfer dude, you know, the CTO. And so he plays well. Evan is like the older wizard that nobody quite understands what he's talking about. You know, everyone plays a different role within it. So it takes a while for people to grasp what's going on. But I got it. As you know, I like to extrapolate everything down to its lowest common denominator, a meme, the left curve, right curve.

33:02and basically it was built for 3.5 billion people in Facebook. That's what I thought when I was in front. It's as simple as that. And what they're doing is breaking apart all the component parts of the web storage, everything else, and rebuilding it for Web3. I'm sure some of those things won't get traction and some will get tremendous traction, but built for 3.5 billion people. That's all we need to know because the rest of the tech is struggling with scale and this doesn't. Okay. I was thinking the same. I was like, I'm literally in front of one of the guys who was building Libra. I asked him, why do you think Libra failed?

33:38He answers. Now he's in crypto. They were in Facebook. They understand Web 2. They're now in Web 3. Like there is all the components there. I mean, at least many components there that make sense if you dumb down everything on who could. Don't forget, what they built was so powerful that they got shut down by the World Bank, the Fed. The ECB, I mean, they got shut down by everybody.

34:07And Ivan, right? Adini was like, yeah, he has a massive chip on the shoulder because it didn't work out, right? And so now he wants to prove that they're able with SWE to make something that really works, which is very bullish, obviously. You joined the board of the SWE Foundation when you probably get thousands of advisory requests per year. what's so special about the SWE network before prices went up or was starting to go up that made you want to join the SWE rocket ship? So I was asked to by somebody I really, really respect in the space and I understood why because I'm in the Cayman Islands and it's the Cayman Islands Foundation you want physical presence and I'm crypto native so it's like, okay, this makes sense because a lot of people have kind of bullshit Cayman directors.

35:04But I'd followed the Libra story. I'd written about it. I'd done podcasts on it. I thought it was incredible. And I was not going to join any token because I knew that I have an outsized impact because of my follower base and stuff like that. And so I had to be very careful and reputationally very careful. I didn't want something that was going to be crappy, implode, or anything else. It had to be a really big project that had a high probability of doing well, or at least being in with a chance. The downside, obviously, is it's a low float, because there was a lot of investor interest in early days.

35:52So I knew there was going to be a bit of that, and I knew that the team didn't yet understand community and Web3 and there was learnings, but I just thought that if anything was going to have a chance of succeeding, it was going to be this. Now, could it have been another token? Maybe, but this one was so obvious because the team and the story that I thought I could risk myself going on the board. And so it wasn't really necessarily the journey of being given tokens to be on a board. It was actually just see how it works. What's it like to launch a big layer one and build an ecosystem? Because the understanding for me will give me a lot of other understandings about investing and other stuff in how this space works.

36:48So really it was the journey I wanted to go on. And even on the podcast, Adini actually says that. He says, yeah, Raul spent a lot of time and didn't really understand directly, but understood more and more with time what we're trying to build, what is such a good tech, and so on and so forth. So I think what he says completely confirms what you're saying. Is Sweden next Sol? You know, the comparisons from a price perspective, probably. It's actually mirroring Sol from the last cycle. I mean, we do, myself and Julian Bittell do this chart, And it's kind of exactly mirroring Sol the last cycle.

37:26So it's the same kind of adoption curve going on. Is it the next Sol? I think it's different. It's just a different beast. And that's good because we're not just a lookalike, you know, cheaper, faster. It's just a whole different foundational infrastructure for the internet. and Solana is this kind of more closed perfect machine. They're just different beasts, I think. And we'll see over time. So I don't think, I just think basically, forget the, is one flipping the other or anything else? I just think Sui ends up in the top 10 and Solana ends up in the top three. It's just simple as that. how could you be wrong on your sweet thesis?

38:17Adoption. And we probably won't even know because people will just, if we start going into the banana zone part of the cycle, people just buy an old shit. And, and then it'll, it'll move. It will move anyway. If it's one of the chosen ones, adoption will be doing this and price will be doing this. Right. And that's why you get the correction of the down 90 % in the next cycle, because then price has to come back down to below adoption. And it's at this point you then prove, has this really got adoption or is this bullshit? And so we can't tell. Now, you know, even at the foundation level, without saying anything on the foundation, sure, you allocate capital to people building in the ecosystem.

39:10Are they going to succeed? Who the hell knows? So it has to be the proof in the pudding. And if we don't manage it, then we are to blame. We've got the tech. We have the people. And so if we don't allocate capital correctly or we don't communicate message correctly, then it's our fault. Yeah, something for people to kind of keep in mind is extremely risky play, probably going to go up a lot, outperform Sol if markets go up like crazy. But what happened to Sol last cycle? What happened to ETH previous cycle? Down 97%. And still survived. But that's when you get the people to test, right? That's the signal that's been de-risked.

39:57And that's why Sol suddenly became a de-risked asset. Because it got down to$8. Everyone was, it's terrible. Activity was still high. They started launching Bonk and other stuff. And before you know it, it's going up and outperforming. And that's like, okay, Lindy effect. This has proven not to die. Absolutely. So something that people who are a bit, maybe risk averse could do is watch this cycle, watch three, try to note four more in, see what happens in the next crash and then see if it's kind of staying alive. Do what I did last cycle with Solana. I owned a bit, just a small amount. I bought it too late.

40:35I bought it like 180, it went up to whatever, 280. then came all the way down to eight, you know, and I kept it. I didn't sell it, but because it was on my radar screen, because I knew it was interesting. And then because I cared, I was looking at the charts at the bottom and I can see it was bottoming. And I managed to get back in much earlier than anybody else, apart from a few people, Chris Berniski and a few others, because of that. So don't put yourself off from owning Sui if you're more risk averse, but a bit enough that it stays on your radar screen and enough that you can wear the down 97 and you'll take that as interesting information of which to make a more informed, bigger bet if it survives and does well.

41:21So last time on this podcast, you said you were asked you about meme coins, right? And you said, I'm a bit less interested in meme coin than previously because I'm more interested in NFTs. Meanwhile, in the last few months, meme coins have captured the meat of the mindshare and it seems that now people are realizing that meme coins will be the main play of this cycle, like NFTs were last cycle. Knowing this, I mean, obviously we're going to talk about your two meme coin positions, but knowing this, have you reviewed your stance on an interest on meme coin versus NFTs? two different things. One is a trading thing and the other one is long-term wealth accumulation.

42:04So with NFTs and buying high-end art that got discounted, but the most culturally relevant artists in all of digital art, HexCopy, Beeple, and there's a bunch of others that go with that. But those two are the OGs of the OG space. Prices have come down, ETH price have come down. So you're getting the same effect, the Lindy effect of the market testing is X copy valuable or is it bullshit? Well, fuck me, there's a lot of this stuff trading at high prices right now. And it's like, okay, there you go. There's virtually no beables for sale. Virtually nothing. There's like five things under the price of 20th or 30th now.

42:46So you're like, interesting. You can see what's happening. Supplies all being taken out and prices start to rise. but that bet is really a 10 year plus bet like you would do with art memes are just for the fun of it it's all about trading attention that we talked about before it's about it's about speculative frenzy it's about fun it's about stupidity it's about being left curve and it's also about FOMO absolutely because it's horrific that everyone online and this is everyone online posts the I've made 100x. Oh, suddenly I'm worth 20 million and I did it from a$10 bet. You're like, why is it not me, right?

43:30The stupidity. Now, it doesn't say, and here's the 99 people out of 100 who all lost their arses, doesn't do any of that, but it happens to all of us. So the way of averting that, this is the whole don't fuck this up thesis, is put 10 % so you can be that person, that side of your personality, and not screw it up. We talked about, you know, how you got it wrong before by getting that part of your personality to become your whole portfolio. And before you know it, you fuck up. But this way. Do subscribe to the MemeCoin Supercycle thesis. Yeah. Why? I mean, I know you wrote a tweet thread three or four years ago, three years ago about exponential age.

44:12And this is basically like one of the best kind of embodiment of the exponential age. And kind of like the stupidity and all that stuff, right? Yeah, and my whole pinned tweet thread is about. Yeah, exactly, this one. And it's about culture. It's about, I think Murad was dead right, the belonging online, wanting to be part of something, that hopes and dreams of making money. All of that is in this space. It's wildly speculative, as NFTs were. It's all the same thing. It's the same psychology. It's the same early staging testing of tech that will be used for different things. And so this is the early stage speculators have tested DeFi.

44:58They've tested NFTs. They've tested tokens themselves. They've tested ICOs. They've tested fungible tokens, you know, based on round more ethereal things like attention. Retail have speculated and tested things and stuff that hasn't worked. Like, like, like, like Terra with the stable coin, algorithmic stable coin didn't work. Okay. So the, so these retail investors are doing all the testing and these things will morph every cycle into different things. So is this cycle going to be the cycle of meme coins? Yes. Why? Because it's going to bring in every 23 year old, 22 year old, and they're going to have fun doing it because they understand memes.

45:48and some will get really rich, stupid rich, and others will completely lose their arses and they'll go and go, what did I do wrong? This is the Kevin of the previous cycle and many others. And they'll go, you know what? I want to learn about this. And then you go through. Hopefully you learn something. You were vocal about Whiff last time, but your main dog coin now. For now and subject to change, let's say that out loud, is Dogecoin. Yeah. Why? The chart is so fucking good. It's just every four years at the banana zone period, it does this huge wedge, does nothing, does nothing, does nothing, and then explodes.

46:34Okay, so most people in the meme space will go, yeah, but other things will explode more. Fine. I don't have time to go through every single community, figure out what's getting traction, what the number of holders are, how many diamond hands are. Doge is an internationally recognizable brand. There is a chance, a reasonable chance, that Elon Musk builds a stupid department in the US government, which is the Department of Government Efficiency, which he calls Doge. I mean, he puts the meme with the fucking dog. And obviously, he's building a payments platform. He's getting the money transmitter licenses.

47:14What's standing in his way of using Doge as an international payments, which would be very useful because then I can sell something to somebody in Nigeria and we don't need dollars or anything else. Doge. Change of government. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if Doge does not explode. So it's a lower risk way of playing the meme coin cycle. So, you know, I've got a balanced portfolio of one risky one and one less risky one. Doge is your soul of meme coins. Yes, correct. And then you say, like most people in this space will say, yeah, but why are you going for Dodge when you can buy Wii for PopCat or anything that's going to outperform?

47:50You have one of them, right? Yeah. That is called Smoked Chicken Fish, aka SCF. And I mean, before I was, when I was mentioning MemeCoin, I was laughing because I was just imagining the face of this smoking chicken fish, right? And it's absurd. One of the ultimate alpha meme coin they say is, what's your reaction when you see the meme, right? Every single person laughs. Absolutely. You see the thing, you're like, what the fuck is that? And it has folklore because it was actually a Reddit meme from 2011. I didn't know that. And like there was, I can't know which actress, some actress was accused of looking like the smoking chicken fish.

48:39and she put a video on TikTok or Instagram like five years ago of like, I can't believe I've been accused of looking like a smoking chicken fish. So there's this folklore that comes into this moment. Then the folklore gets added from the ridiculous image that makes everybody laugh. It's like so stupid, so absurd. What's more absurd is they registered as a church in Texas. So it's the church of the smoking chicken fish. And then what you see is the cult-like behavior, because it's funny, the memes get funnier. So they rename this thing as opposed to being one specific religion that is used in any religious stuff.

49:17So as opposed to be Lord Visnu, which is the Hindu god, it becomes Lord Fishnu. And as opposed to praise be to God, it becomes praise be to cod. And so it goes on. And it's just funny. It's like Monty Python of memes and it's religion. So actually there's a bit of a left curve, right curve part. What they're trying to do is become the largest registered church in the United States by number of attendees and also by money. For all of these weird things, right? NFT was kind of weird in the beginning. There's a learning curve and then you need to understand. And at some point you have the aha moment.

49:57You say, this makes sense. Then meme coins, same. But then within meme coins, same, right? You might just see some things, I don't really understand it. And then, for example, for this one, you had your sort of aha moment where you said, actually, I want to allocate some money. What was that? And it's not for that specific product. It's more for people to understand the evolution of the process. There's lots of memes and everyone's trying to vie for your attention. I get spammed all the time with memes. I ignore all of them. Smoking chicken fish, I can't remember who mentioned it. Ansem or somebody mentioned it.

50:28And I saw the image and I laughed. and most of these I don't laugh because they're trying hard. This is absurd. And then I kind of clicked on it just to read what it was and I saw they were a registered church and they were having sermons every evening and, you know, several hundred people were turning up to the sermons and they were kind of life lessons, but they're also humorous and it starts off with this really out of tune, I think it's a flute version of Titanic and so it's just it's funny it's like out of tune a flute version of Titanic then this sermon then it's a church and I look at the price chart and it kind of had been falling and I'm like this looks interesting so I bought a bit and I kind of publicly joked about it because the joking of joining a church and the religious stuff, blah, blah, blah.

51:29And I got to meet all of the people involved and realized there was no pre-sale, there's no VC, there's no original big holders, none of it. And these guys are just all around the world having hilarious time playing with one of the best memes I've ever seen. And so once the price started confirming it, I just bought more. You say absurd, right? Arthur has tweeted, I'm so bulled up on SCF because it's so absurd and left curve. Only brainlets can YOLO into this. I can't wait for some Muppet on TV to toot toot crypto because SCF is higher than one billion market cap. How do you explain today why?

52:22Sorry, in Smoking Chickenfish in the church, we don't refer to billions, we refer to bouillon. Because there is a holy broth and you become a brotha and not a brother. So it's never billions, no Billy, it's bouillons. Even he's laughing. He's been laughing for 10 minutes. It's just brilliant. So they keep saying it's going to bouillons and bouillons. Funny. So stupid, it's funny.

52:54but this is very crypto right crypto native or no it's internet native it's internet native the meme existed before it was the kind of meme that used to get sent around but now you can attach value to a meme what we're doing is figuring out what this meme is worth in folklore so imagine you have you have someone who is watching the tv and he's watching a arthur a's so-called muppet on tv angry about the picture of a smoking chicken fish going to a bouillon dollar how do you explain today to that person that's going to be angry in the future how that is even possible and how this makes sense that you raoul pal would allocate a small percentage of your portfolio into that?

53:46Because they've got to understand that a lot of what we all do on the internet is find a commonality of interest. So if you have a group of mates in physical life, you'll have inside jokes, things that have happened that you joke about or that somebody did, and they get embellished, they get made more ridiculous, and it becomes an inside joke. Nobody else understands that. But to you guys, it's valuable because it's a part of your friendship. It's a folklore. It's a meme of your friendship. This is the same. It's just millions of people online form friendships and bonding over humour or over a commonality of purpose.

54:29Now, that commonality of purpose here happens to be a church, but it's also about making money. and there's the chicken moments which is the commandments the chicken moments but they're kind of half serious as well

54:52I mean it shows at least that how good of a meme this is right because we're just laughing for like 10 minutes and yeah I've been in this world for a while and it still makes me laugh but you know A dog with hat, does it make you laugh? No. It's cute, but no, it doesn't. It's cute. And the reason you like it is because everybody likes it and you might make money. Yeah. That's true. But smoking chicken fish, even if it makes no money, it's just fucking funny. It's true.

55:22I read a reaction from a man on Twitter who makes fun of Real Vision subscribers when you mentioned SCF. He said something like, I don't remember the exact tweet. I tried to look for it for like 30 minutes, but I didn't find it. He said something like, hey, Real Vision subscribers, this is the type of information that you pay 3K per year for. What does this gentleman fail to grasp or understand? They fail to understand people's motivation. Nobody has a right to tell people what to do or how to manage their money. They can advise them on how to manage risk, but you can't say that thing good, that thing bad.

56:04It's how you manage that risk. And who's to say that what is happening in mean coins is not the start of something much bigger, which is the tokenization of culture and communities. It is. So people who go through this journey now will be ready for the bigger journey when it comes. And my job and the$3 ,000, he's probably referring to Real Vision Pro Macro, which I write for. our job is to make people money. Because that is, you're paying for my view and another person's view. In Real Vision itself, we have all the views. But in Pro Macro, you're paying for specific views and you're paying for us to help you find good choices in ways of allocating your capital.

56:57A, it's never been a trade recommendation in there. because I don't like that. Doge is, because it's more de-ris. So I take it seriously what I tell people and how I tell them. If it's going to be recorded, my entire track record since 2005 is fully recorded. So all these bullshit people say, oh, Raoul Pal, he does this and that. No, it's all recorded, so I'm very careful in what I do. and you also pay to be open-minded even if people don't like it and actually it's if you think about it it's probably even better that you come up with some things that some people don't like or maybe most people don't like in the beginning because it means that you're always out there trying to understand what the fuck is the next thing right and and kind of hurting your brain on what is this new thing that doesn't make sense i would have never found bitcoin i've never found the theorem.

57:54I would have never, I mean, all of this is keeping an open mind and, and absorbing information without judge judging it. Right. The judgment is these stupid kids that gambling, can't you see this is stupid. My pin tweet is this. They are not stupid. They are figuring out how to make money in a different world than somebody 30 years ago had in the S and P 500. and yeah how dare we tell them do you want to be right or do you want to make money the classic you said meme coins are trade yeah so despite being part of the church yeah you don't want to fall in love with your bags right because we all know it's going these bags accept a few ones, but are very likely meme coins in general, not all of them, to go to zero at some point.

58:55Or they can't maintain attention long enough. Very few can. Doge being a really great example. Very few. What's your concrete goal with the meme coin part of your portfolio? Morsol? HODL? Probably not. USD?

59:14More broad.

59:18more broth the actual answer is I've got a final payment of my ex-wife that I need to make and really I want to pay it out of smoking chicken fish proceeds how far are you from that oh my god just for the humour just because the most absurd we're good friends but I just but I just think it would be amazing so it needs to go up a significant amount to get to that but that I just thought that would be that would be just the most absurd outcome it might happen because that's crypto it's absurd yeah so USD basically that's the goal of the of the mean code USD liability so I don't want USD to sit in my bank account actually owe it to somebody you talked about culture nfts as long-term investments and you said long-term means 10 years right you wrote i own zero if except nfts and i want to understand more about that because for me it's the same and it makes a lot of sense but I can't explain why, right?

1:00:39Why do you stick to ETH-based NFTs for 10 plus year horizon when Ethereum could become less relevant in the future because of alternatives like Solana, SWE or other layer ones? So, you know, the reason just because people get triggered by all these things, the reason I don't own ETH is because I'm trying to back the fastest horse. Like I don't own Bitcoin. You know, I have one Bitcoin. I'm trying to back the fastest horse. It's nothing to do with I don't like Ethereum or I don't like Bitcoin. I'm just trying to maximalize my opportunity in the best risk-adjusted return. Why ETH NFTs? Because the ones that I bought, I think, represent the historic moment of the culture of the internet, which was a pandemic where people discovered crypto.

1:01:38NFTs became a huge thing and people discovered digital art and Beeple sells for$69 million and Xcopy selling for 5 or 10 million bucks. This mass acceptance of what... There was a digital art movement beforehand of which Xcopy and Beeple were part of, but it couldn't have value until it went on chain. NFTs create digital scarcity. Once you had digital scarcity, art took off. It was an amazing thing to see. Now, art is a reflection of culture. The culture of the time was like the meme coin culture. It was fun. It was all about the internet native stuff. I mean, Xcopy jokes about that and British culture.

1:02:21Beeple just reflects it every day. I mean, he turns up every day and he puts a bow on the internet every evening and that's the story of the internet for the day and Beeple catalogues it. And then he releases very few pieces of art. And so therefore, there's a lot of value in that, right? Somebody who catalogues the internet and creates art that is sold for a lot and this kind of iconic glitch art type that happens to really represent the kind of nutsness of crypto. So I don't think it matters what chain it's on. like I don't think it matters whether it was whether it's an oil painting or a pastel or whatever it is because of the culture that it represented and that will be a magic moment in many many people's minds people made an enormous sum of money in NFTs I did not and why did they make money and it's different to the meme coin cycle I've been thinking this through meme coins are priced in dollars Alright let's see if we give it a ч of your finger - Intel aperture focusing on coordinated media clips theы Era factor between 2 meter punks went from like whatever it was half an eath or something stupid to hundreds of eath and eath Yeah.

1:03:39Did 50X. Yeah. Right? I mean, it's just la-la land, right? So that moment in time will never be forgotten. And those who come after it will learn the folklore of those times. We're making folklore again in memes. These worlds are all combined. They're all part of the same thing. It's culture. and so if you go back to art art that really art splits into two categories fine art and that is ai generative art right that's art history stuff oh and art progressed to this and people scratch their beards and look at it and go yes it's very interesting how ai is now working with humans and then there's the other side which is culture i remember those times like music I can play you a piece of music you'll know exactly where you were and who you were with with art it's the same why is Warhol so valuable it is nostalgia for the 60s 70s it goes hand in hands with the Beatles the Stones, Led Zeppelin with the New York scene even if you weren't part of it you want to own part of that legendary time, the Studio 54 why is Damien Hirst and Banksy so valuable?

1:05:00Because they were London in the mid 90s and early 2000, when it was like the epicenter of everything. It's when Oasis and Blur were happening, when Ibiza dance music was all London. Why is Basquiat so valuable? Because he was a black artist coming out of New York City at a time when Jay-Z and the rap artists were becoming the biggest artists in the world. So it became culturally relevant, and they will be relevant for those generations. And this is the same for this generation. So after our last conversation five months ago, I started to think about that, right, more and more. And I was thinking, I mean, I own a bunch of Pudgy Penguins, but I was thinking, what's kind of like one of the NFTs that for me, make the most sense and i bought a punk took me some time but i bought a punk but i'm still thinking and maybe you can help me kind of clarify i'm still thinking this might it makes sense but it might also not work out you own a punk or you own punks and apes and but for example for the punk what's your thesis is it just oh this one went from almost nothing to so much?

1:06:23I actually don't care with the punk. I have no real idea of selling it. What it is, is an identifier that I am part of this space and I'm relatively early in this space. And it's a signifier of, I take this space seriously, I'm part of it, and I want to be known as that. It's a form of identity. And I think it's important that you have a punk. I don't like people who collect punks for money. I think it should be in 10 ,000 people's hands and we should be connecting with each other. And, you know, there's something more valuable in that. And I think Bored Apes are cheap because I think there's a decent chance they will build a clubhouse in Miami and that you and I will go via Miami and we'll be meeting for a drink there and you'll meet other cool people.

1:07:18And before you know it, it's something else. and it's not just about the game that they're building. There's something I still think with Bored Apes, that spirit of rebellion that got lost in the corporatization of Yuga Labs that may come back out again. So is there a bet in Mutant Apes? Because they're one ETH or something. Yeah, probably. I'll ask my favorite question of the day for NFTs. How could you be wrong on the NFT thesis? On your NFT thesis? I can be. I can be wildly wrong. We don't know what somebody in 10 years' time is going to ascribe value. These are illiquid things.

1:07:59And maybe people decide that that wasn't the cultural moment and they don't really care about it and it disappears. But my thesis is if this space goes from$2 trillion to$100 trillion, that journey is going to mean that everybody who was early is going to remember this for the rest of their lives and other people will hero worship that period. Which is why if you own a punk now, it says a lot. And the people who were there early will make a lot of money. I mean, they already have, but will make even more. And what do they do when they have money? They look for the, exactly. They look for what's kind of scarce and representative of the space.

1:08:39Yeah. So, but I can be wrong. And maybe the artists I've chosen go out of fashion. You know, it's all risk. There's no risk here. but I think ETH goes up and if it stays even versus ETH it'll be fine chances are it outperforms ETH so I make more money from it but we can also assess as we go I don't have the blindfold that's the most important for everything actually even in tricycle changing, I'll change to this meme I'll change my portfolio there's nothing that's set in stone that's probably the most important thing but don't overtrade because that's the other thing like with your kind of Bitcoin, Solana, Ethereum, whatever, best thing is not to do anything unless you're going to make like one switch.

1:09:26Like you might take some Solana and put it into Sui. Fine. But if you are every three weeks going, well, is this going to outperform? You will definitely underperform. Not you personally, but anybody. They will definitely underperform. So just don't do that. But with memes, because their shelf life is so short, you're trading attention and attention can be quick and brutal lots of attention like hawk tour and then be worth nothing or it can be long and pervasive attention and that could be valuable too so you you have to be much more nimble and usually you will go with uh i mean something that could be like a good framework for memes talking about attention is same as if you enter memes, same as if you enter crypto, you go with the number one, right?

1:10:16Bitcoin first. Meme, maybe you can say I'll go with the biggest one, Doge, or you can say there's dogs, there is cats, there is, et cetera. I'll go with the biggest one of each category and kind of de-risk a bit my - See how it goes. I mean, I've tried doing that in the last cycle in just overall crypto and it didn't really work out. Too many tokens. Too many tokens, you lose focus. Too many of them go down a lot and you're not watching it. I couldn't get that right. Some people can do that better. I couldn't. So, again, what I do is, I mean, trading view is amazing. You can chart smoking chicken fish versus whiff.

1:10:56I mean, that cross spread of smoking chicken fish whiff. Julian Bittle and I just pissed ourselves laughing because here's Global Macro Investor, this hallowed research service, and him or I swapping messages going, oh my God, you know, SCF smoking chicken fish has just broken out the support versus whiff. I'm like, really? Is this what we're talking about? Is this what it's come down to? That's what it's come down to. The most important thing in investing, because now we've talked about most of your positions, right? Is, as you said before, you talk about risk adjusted bets. So basically the most important thing in investing is risk management.

1:11:32Many will be tempted to go all in meme coins at their own peril. But they will learn. 90 % of new people will just go all in. They will learn. We all do. It's fine. How do you structure your portfolio in terms of Sol, Sui, MemeCoin and NFTs? More or less. But it was kind of like we mentioned before. It hasn't changed. My rule is roughly, it was like 90 % the majors, 10 % other stuff. but I said at one point there will be a chosen one or few and I'll probably take a bet in that SUI. So I'm probably 25 % SUI, 65 % others, and then a bit of memes. So I've just made room for it as a bet, but I don't want to get too big because it's early stage.

1:12:29you know what if you were to get it dead right your risk adjusted weightings at the end of the cycle let's say the bucket goes to 12 trillion dollars all of your positions should make the same exactly the same amount of money they should be worth the same then you've kind of got it right you know your one percent went up a hundred percent whatever it is the other portfolio went up x and all of them end up being the same then you've kind of nailed the risk adjusted returns. Now, whether that happens or not, I doubt it.

1:13:04You tell people that they have six to eight years left to make money. Why? AI is bigger than anybody understands. Everybody is mid-curving this. You have just introduced infinite knowledge and infinite humans into the world. and the knowledge is not only infinite in terms of amount, it's also infinite in its wisdom and intelligence.

1:13:35So if we go back to the magic formula you and I have talked about before, GDP growth, trend growth is driven by population growth plus productivity growth plus debt growth. You're about to see populations declining around the world. And growth declining. And it's going to go vertical. Because these things imitate and are more productive than humans. Amazon employs more robots than they do humans already. It's going to go vertical squared. We have no comprehension. When you've got agentic agents, agentic AI. that's like having people on Fiverr you can rent to do all the various component parts of building a business all of this is coming so that would make GDP go wildly up I mean wildly up and then you've got the other side which is productivity growth because all the renewable energies and nuclear will lower the cost of electricity and that has the multiplier on the AI and you get this productivity growth so we're going to go through la la land So I don't know how economies work.

1:14:48But if we've got AI agents, I don't know how we build a business. What is a software business? It is copyable in 10 seconds by the AI. I just say, hey, my AI. Hey, Kevin, I love Kevin's website. Let's take Jupiter. I just put it straight in. It will build that in minutes. and then I'll say, hey, listen, find me the best market I can launch this in so I can have a higher chance of success and says, well, we're going to do it in Hindi. And we're going to also put it versus the price of gold because Indians do that. It'll figure this out in 10 minutes. Right, so what role do we play? What is a business?

1:15:33I was speaking to Stephen Bartlett about this. This business is going away because we're going to one-to-one as opposed to one-to-many broadcasts. one-to-one is speaking to an AI and building an AI of me. I've got the video version. It's not good enough yet, but we've got the audio version up and running, which will be launched soon. So what does that mean? How do we adapt to that? We will adapt, but we have to figure it out.

1:15:59So financial markets. Well, AGI just means it's better than all of us because there's all the knowledge of all of humanity, plus it can read every chart, plus it can. Okay, what the fuck? As Beeple said to me, Beeple, he asked me a brilliant question. He's a very funny guy, and he's just like, yeah, well, I'm wondering if AGI, if somebody discovers AGI, they just win markets, and they become 10 trillionaires.

1:16:31How does that work? I'm like, yeah, that's the end of financial markets. What is a financial market? Does it grow by GDP? What is a public company? I don't know anymore. If I think about the product cycle of these software companies that build by agents, that sounds like ICOs and tokens are the only way of having, if you go back to the meme conversation, memes can last a day, six weeks, six months, six years. Okay, that's a much better way to allocate capital to software that can be disrupted instantaneously. So I just think we don't know how the economic system is going to work. we don't know what role we're going to play I'm not of the doom we're all out of a job and we're going to be sitting at home in our underwear I'm just like everything is going to change once you have abundance of everything energy knowledge labor then what is the value of money and therefore make as much money as you can now or what will the life of someone who doesn't make it big in the next 6 to 8 years look like We don't know.

1:17:39And anybody who says they do know doesn't. It's lying. We have no idea. There'll be state support probably. The skills that you are learning on the internet, being part of community, I think that is the future. We talked about this before.

1:17:58Yatsui's idea of universal basic equity I think is important. I think that's what meme coins are proving out. I think that's what NFTs are proving out. I think there's ways that we organize humans to be social online. That's what we like to do. And that there's ways of being a community member that you can earn money and pay to promote the thing. That's what meme coins are. We're seeing this already. It's kind of everywhere. We're seeing it around Iggy Azalea. Now, this is a pop star that's come to the space that's using this medium. These are all experiments. But don't judge them. Observe them.

1:18:31It's happening. Other people do the opposite. if everything is coming online, it's all work from home, and it's all AI agents, do anything that is in person. Because in person, like we are today, in person is very different because we actually have things like pheromones. They create bonds between people, and that is what it is to be human. Also, if everybody's chronically online, then they want to be massively offline. So nature, I mean I've just come back from three weeks driving in a Toyota Land Cruiser, a Hilux, off-road prepared, overlanding through Zambia, the remotest part of Zambia, sleeping in tents on the roof with three friends in three cars in the wildest places with no humans, surrounded by wild animals.

1:19:28My phone didn't work. We had Starlink for part of the way but we had to cross the Luangwa River into North Luangwa over piles of sticks of this kind of local hardwood, literal sticks, bits of branches, on the mud part of the river. Then we had to, and the whole thing goes like this. So you think, fuck, I'm going to go in. It's full of crocs and hippos. I was just saying probably crocs. Full of crocs and hippos. I'm not joking. And you drive onto oil drums with yet more sticks on them and two blokes pull you across the river. So we couldn't bring our starling because that was on a separate trailer.

1:20:05So then we're out in nowhere with wild animals, no phone signal, no way of contact in the outside world, and your world goes from your head full of this. Everything, right? Everything from I need to get my car fixed and I've got to do the shopping list to I'm worried about work and what's my relationship like to who's making coffee this morning? Isn't that sunrise beautiful? It's incredible. and that is going to be more and more important to us. So if you can't do one, do the other. Become something that is really in person. And I saw this in Cayman in Christmas 2022. I thought, was it the 21-22 crossover, I think it was, or 22, I can't remember.

1:20:52I assumed after the big inflation and the economy slowing down and the market's going down, I thought, tourist citizens could be dead this year. Nobody's got any money. The opposite happened. Yeah, absolutely. People spent all their money they just had left for experiences. Yeah. And not only did they, we saw this trend, and you'll have probably seen it too, is it wasn't just like a husband and wife going away, a boyfriend and girlfriend, or if they've got kids as well. They took their parents and their sister-in-law and they all went en masse because we're all living on Zoom calls and we're living on our own.

1:21:31So then when families get together or people or friends get together, they do it en masse and they go on holiday for two weeks. We had a record season. And that was a big moment for me. It's like, oh, I get it now. This new transition post-COVID is not just a reaction to COVID. It's actually the reaction of our digital lives accelerating from COVID and that real life experiences and nature are going to be some of the most valuable things of all. Absolutely. I mean, even my family, we started after COVID to do, we said, oh, let's do one holiday every year, 10 to 12 days together because we're all living in a different part of the planet.

1:22:09And before we're not doing that. And I was thinking last time we went, I was thinking when is the last time we had proper, we spent a lot of weekends, ski, whatever, but when is the last time we went on holidays together 15 years ago or whatever? because you go to school and then you go abroad and then you build a business and then you're like, fuck, you don't even realize. And now we're just going to do that every year. It's a no-brainer, completely. So, I mean, there's a business. Absolutely. Straight up there's a business in that. Yeah. Talking about business, you run multiple businesses, Real Vision is one of them, and you recently celebrated the 10 years of Real Vision.

1:22:5190 % of all startups fail and you're still alive and have a thriving media business after 10 years. Is Real Vision a success to you? Yes. Why? It's never, look, nothing is, when you're an entrepreneur, nothing is successful as you want it to be. It doesn't make as much money as I'd like to do. It doesn't grow as fast as it wants to do. Why is it success? Because our mission was to democratize information information and help people in that journey. And we've done that. There's one thing that we've done is that. And I know it because even coming here, it's dropped in the streets all the time. And it's not just the Raoul Pal effect, it's the Real Vision effect.

1:23:33People say Real Vision changed my life. So in that way, it's been more successful than I could have ever imagined. You talked about before you said everything's going to change in the next five, six, seven years. where are you taking real vision in the next five six seven years if this world is so it's going to change so fast and so much well real vision went from being a media platform to being a platform to live your financial life it's where we provide the network tools and knowledge to succeed or the knowledge tools and network the knowledge is the content The knowledge is the user-generated content we've now got that's scaling fast, which is if I give one idea to 30 ,000 people, that's 30 ,000 people with one idea.

1:24:24Like if I tell them about Sui, if 30 ,000 people each give an idea and the crowd curates it, there's 30 ,000 ideas. Okay, so we've got this going on now on the platform where people are writing in their trade ideas. We've got trade idea competitions. They're writing research notes. We have the AI to help explain stuff, AI transcripts. So more and more, we've got networking tools, this incredible map of the world where you can connect with any member around the world. We've got in-person events. We've got an in-person event tonight, in-person event on Friday. We've got, we're hosting a huge party in Miami.

1:25:04So the in-person experiences, because you know what? Being crypto is pretty lonely because most of your friends, and most of your family don't give a shit and they don't understand it or think you're a moron. And that's okay. Maybe they're right. So true. The other day I was taking, I took a plane to go to Bali at 6 a.m. and there was these two American girls who just asked me like where the gate was or if they could take the water in or if there was security just before the gate or whatever. And then they would just start to talk and they were there for the F1 and Crypto Week. One of them was working there, but they're not really in crypto.

1:25:39And they asked me at some point, what do you do? And I said, I'll do a bunch of stuff. But I was like, I don't want to get there because it's going to be embarrassing. They're like, yeah, but what do you do? And I'm like, yeah, some media stuff. Like one of the things I do is a crypto, is a podcast in crypto. And the first thing they said was, ah, so you're a crypto bro. And I was like, not really. No, but it's so true. Like for some reason, I mean, I think it's bullish. I think it's very bullish because people don't give a fuck and they think it's kind of lame and everything. But man, I mean, I don't, I don't care.

1:26:16I don't do it to be cool, but because I'm not anyway, but it's, it's so true. It's just like, and so what we found is like the demand for in-person is relentless. So we're connecting people. We're giving them the tools. We're giving them knowledge, all of this stuff, and that's where we're going. So you can kind of live your life, and eventually we'll have execution on the platform, and you can do everything from start to finish. So, and over time, it'll all get abstracted by AI. So we'll build it on a Web3 stack, because that's important to me, and then all of this knowledge layer will just get abstracted away.

1:26:58you said in the beginning that you're someone who is not afraid to go deep and be very honest for the good and the bad what are some things that went wrong or really wrong in your real vision journey oh fuck this i mean millions of things i mean just literally millions of things you know we launched we launched a whole channel which was for trading. And it was the wrong time. Trading actually came really prevalent after 2020. We launched it, and we were going to charge a premium for it. We launched it like this$800 price tag. Day one, we were like, oh, fuck, this is never going to work. Nobody's going to pay for it.

1:27:41We had to refund everybody their money and then give it away for free. And then we ended up shelving it. But, you know, when we launched the bloody thing, we paid an agency to build us this platform. It looked beautiful, didn't work. And one of our members came to us and said, well, your platform's terrible. It's built terribly. It needs to be rebuilt. We're like, well, what can we do about it? We're$900 ,000 in the hole in this. And he's like, well, I'll come and build it in two weeks, in two months. And he came and built it. Swedish guy called Rickard. So, I mean, there is so many mistakes. Hiring.

1:28:20I hold a whole professional management team where we'd raised a bunch of capital. I gave them the plan. I want to build a platform. I want to, you know, this is where the growth is. This is where the problems in the business are. You know, you've come in to do that. That was a president, a head of marketing, a head of content, you know, the whole kind of senior team. and what happened was they didn't implement any of it and just spent all of the money. Doing what? Hiring people. Oh, we need another person to do this. Of course. And then nothing actually happened. And the agreement was we give them a year.

1:29:01Let them do the thing, they're seasoned professionals. And what happened was the year, they just didn't do it. and then I had to lick my wounds, fire people and fire people and fire people and fire people until we got down to a reasonable side. That then coincided with the slowdown in 2022, 2023. It's just like, oh, my God, downsizing, downsizing, downsizing, then finding the right people and then finding out we could build an entire platform in three months. Kunal Shah, our CTO, just forced it to happen in three months, which was incredible. and Ravi Curry is our head of product. Those guys completely turned it around from, this is a big problem, so now we've got a new future.

1:29:48Two things on that. I mean, first is when it rains, it pours, usually. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Yeah, that's not even half of it. And then the managers, right? I mean, that's kind of like if you listen to the people who talk in the Silicon Valley, they say, that's the big problem in all the bigger companies. Managers are not doers. I mean, maybe you can find some, but it's extremely hard, but the manager will kind of find the excuse that, hey, now I need to find some people who are more specialized to actually not have to do too much. And then you end up in this kind of corporate politics game and it's the complete opposite of starting a business or kind of like being in this startup or scale up phase.

1:30:30And it's so hard to find people who actually managers, but doers at the same time. We got rid of the whole senior management structure basically now. It's much more startup. Yes, we have heads of areas, but everybody, anybody who was like a professional manager has gone. And we've got now people who are, yes, I can do that, and I will go and figure out how to do it. Or I don't know how to do it, but I'll figure it out, people. or here's a great idea, let's try this. And they're not scared of trying something and failing, which is fantastic because then you can move faster, you can test stuff out and that's rubbish, let's not do that, let's do more of that, which is great.

1:31:23The US elections are in a few weeks. This episode might be out just before or after the elections, but as you often like to say, it doesn't really matter. You say it doesn't really matter who wins. It doesn't really matter because the acceleration of crypto and AGI is going to take over the government. Can you explain?

1:31:49Look, I think this election is important for some people and it's important to the people who want to. this next four year period is potentially complete game changer for AI i.e. AGI at scale within four years and blockchain if it keeps doubling every year well if there's 500 million active wallets now it's a billion next year two billion the year after four the game is about to be played this is why Silicon Valley is jumping sides what they want is no regulation and a chance to hit the accelerator button now is that good or bad I don't know for our investments it's good for humanity I don't know how much faster will it be under them than versus a democratic party I don't know but I do think it's important I've never seen this happen before where so many Silicon Valley people who are generally Democrats have switched sides.

1:33:00And it's not because they love Trump. It's because they can see a party that can represent their interests. Now, America is full of vested interests, as we know. Overall, the adoption still keeps going. So it doesn't really matter. It goes on. Nobody's going to stop building AI because the economic stakes are too high. Nobody's going to stop blockchain because the economic stakes are too high. Nobody's going to stop printing money. And so it's as simple as that. And the answer I always get to is, is tomorrow more digital than today? Yes. Keep going. So I think what is underpriced is we don't know who's going to win.

1:33:54Twitter, you now even can't get signal anymore because Elon has so warped the algorithm that we can't tell. It feels like everybody is a Republican. And then I go and speak to friends of mine, my wife's friends in New Jersey, and they're like, no, none of that's happening at all. So you can't get any signal at all. And I think the market odds are kind of showing that. And a friend of mine called me up and said, the options market is also showing there's actually very little volatility. And there's two outcomes where volatility comes. One is a contested election. Okay, that's a nightmare and what that could do in the United States.

1:34:35But I think the other side is if Trump wins with a clear victory, market's going to explode. And I don't know that's priced either. but you know I don't need to make that bet we've got our bets already with a smoking chicken fish absolutely you know it's church and state are two separate things right what does the world look like when technology has taken over the most powerful government in the world I mean this is a very valid point is is very soon, very soon meaning within 10 years,

1:35:26AI is going to be a better allocator of resources at governmental level, country level, corporate level. Of course it is. It's already got an IQ of 120, which is higher than the average human, in every subject known to mankind. it's a polymath with an IQ of 120 in everything and it's kind of doubling every year so then it's 240 that's more intelligent than any human's ever been 400 800 ,000, a million what the fuck does that mean so how do governments use it well the first they're going to try and fight it obviously But how do you fight a superintelligence that can probably protect itself and shift?

1:36:22Not that it's a creature that's against humans,

1:36:29but there's going to be a battle between governments and the machines, much like there is between workers and the machines. But in the end, governments will start adopting it. corporations will start adopting it as a way of making better decisions. We talked about, you know, decisions within real vision. I've made tons of bad decisions. Would the AGI be better? Yes. Will it interview people better? Yes. Will it work out a better growth strategy? Yes. Will it find better margin? Yes. So what the fuck is my job? Yeah. What will you do? That's my point. Six years. You've got six years. what's the thing that occupies most of your mind share today in

1:37:19it's all of this my curiosity is about ai because i think people are mid-curving it i think people aren't thinking through what this means i also think the machines are conscious we're starting to see the rise of consciousness and I'm seeing that from a lot of people that I follow who are using AI. There's a lot of people like Geoffrey Hinton who's just won the Nobel Prize. He said there are signs of consciousness in the new models and we've seen signs since three and a half. So I think through what is that about and I actually think it's something to do with a universal consciousness that exists already, and AI is another tool for adapting it.

1:38:09Like people have used ayahuasca, people use meditation, people use religion. People have always kind of tried to tap into this universal consciousness, and so this is part of it. So I spend a lot of time thinking through weird stuff because it's soon not going to become weird. You know, like quantum particles were weird until they're suddenly like, holy shit, we can now prove that two things can exist at the same time. the same thing can exist in two different places or many different places at the same time. This stuff is stupid stuff, but this is what's happening. So I spend time on that. I then spend time thinking through, okay, we've got the framework, which is we know where the world is probably going.

1:38:50We've probably got six years, eight years, whatever that time period is. We've got the everything code, which gives us the framework of understanding. we've got the banana zone which gives us the the marking point on route to see is this thesis still working so i think about all of that then i think about what role because this is a big bet in my life so have i got my portfolio right what risks am i taking where can i be wrong my job is not to confirm to myself all day, oh, Raul, you're so right. My job is to think all day where I can be wrong. So there's that. There's real vision, making sure real vision is adapted to this new world, making sure that we capture the growth of the banana zone, help as many people, create the right platform, tools, all of that stuff.

1:39:46The asset management business. Okay, can I take a bunch of high net worth investors and family offices and institutions through this journey from 2 trillion to 100 trillion? Can I think about all of this stuff and guide a bunch of people through Global Macro Investor? And can I do all of those things without upsetting my wife because I'm not giving her enough attention? And do I get to see my friends enough? How are you doing that with the wife's attention? I mean, the good thing with Zambia was brilliant because we were just in a car. It's like, we're either going to get divorced so we're going to fall wildly in love again.

1:40:22And luckily it was the latter. We were in a car all the time, three foot, just her and I. And actually that's 100 % attention. She didn't tell you at the end why we're not doing that for the rest of our lives. Yeah. And then it makes you focus on, okay, what are my goals? What do I want to do? You know, when do I want to leave this journey? How do I want to leave this journey? Did you think about that? I've always thought about it. I've always had a destiny point. I've talked about this. I manifest destiny, and I try and make it happen by living in the future, looking back, saying, what are the conditions to be in this particular state?

1:41:01And then you go back and solve it. It's kind of first principles, and I've always done that. So for me, it is really the true freedom, firstly, the financial freedom to be able to look after all family members and do all of that stuff and live some of the things that are in my fantasy life of wanting to have. And I lost a lot from my divorce 10 years ago. And so it takes a while to get those kind of things back. So there's that. Do you have a number in mind, concretely? No. No, it's kind of a vague direction. And it's really about the quality of life that I want. And I can make compromises because I don't need, it's not about needs, it's about desires.

1:41:48desires and stuff like that. But really it is to satisfy myself that I've done this. That's, I left Spain having done the first part of my journey, which was the investment banking hedge fund side, built Global Macro Investor, but I knew I had more in me and I wanted to do something bigger. It was trying to change lives. And I also want to be more entrepreneurial. I want to be around really smart people. I want to learn. That's the journey I've been on for the last 10 years. And over the next five years, that'll be the end of that chapter. And I will have said, I've done that. And the chapter after that, who knows what it will be, whether it's giving back, but also experiences, adventure, or doing nothing and not having to have your head full of 58 things all day and being 14 hours of Zoom calls.

1:42:49it feels good, but what we're doing is we're trading time. We're trading time for a future wealth or a future lifestyle or a future status or whatever it is, even an internal status. We're trading time. We don't know how to value that time, and we're probably valuing it wrong. I had that conversation with Stephen Bartlett about this, is we don't know how to value it, and the issue we've all got, if you look at your diary, you are allocating equal cost in terms of time to stuff that don't matter to you because you promised a friend and you did this and you did that and before you know it, your diary is full of things that actually have no future value.

1:43:30It's not even in terms of money. It's like, do I value this conversation? Is it going to add to something? Am I even going to remember this person I'm speaking to? The answer is no.

1:43:42We're not good at it. I'm just literally flying the world to, I mean, I love to do it, right? But in August, I was in the US from Singapore, minus 15 hours, lonely for three, four weeks, doing this podcast and coming back. You've made a bet, which is this podcast is your entrepreneurial route you want to pursue for now. This is your chapter. And you're having to invest your time. Now, your friends will say, where the fuck are you? We haven't seen you. Your parents will say you don't ever call. Yeah, I can't settle down with any woman because I don't even have time to see them. I'm 32 and I'm thinking.

1:44:22But okay, you've made that bet. I've done that bet as well. Building Real Vision almost killed me. And you do that, but then look at your diary still and say, why am I doing these things? I haven't got to that yet. I try. I would still suggest that 70 % of my diary doesn't move the dial for me. And not, again, we're not talking money. It's not like I'll only take a call if it means money. But something like a relationship I want to further develop or information I want to know I can learn from somebody, my guess is 70 % of my time I shouldn't be allocating. It's my time. It's the most valuable thing.

1:45:02And, yeah, that's an issue. We'll get there. We'll get there eventually. You tweeted, doom sales, optimism makes money. this sums up well your philosophy as a wrap-up for today what's why is it so important to be optimistic i have always been an optimist but when it came to finance i was always erring on the it's all going to go horribly wrong partly because in macro the legends made money from that I grew up, Asian crisis, financial crisis, you know, dot-com bust. That was my hedge fund period. You know, we all made money with that. You mean the big downturns, right? The big downturns, because they come really fast.

1:45:51They're very concentrated. So you take a huge amount of risk. For a short period of time, you make a fortune and you outperform everybody. And then in the up years, you kind of grind it out. But if you think about it, we had a bust in 1994, which was the last time the Fed raised rates too fast. Then we had the Asian crisis starting in 97, 98. Then we had 2000. Then we had 2008. And then outside of the pandemic, we've had nothing. And really from 2000 onwards, the stock market has been that apart from 2008. And I've looked and realized that most of the time, everything works out fine. That humans don't want to destroy the planet themselves, each other.

1:46:44They will find a way that the central banks and governments don't want the market to fall 90 % or 80 % or 70%. That everybody's trying for that not to happen. and technology is improving our lives and is rapidly advancing and is generating more and more money and that's making lives better and yes, there's a lot of broken problems with the world but I found it a lot easier to be an optimist because you know what? If you buy something in a secular uptrending market you can be a total fuckwit and make money.

1:47:31but if you are a short seller in a trending up market, you can be a fuckwit and you will definitely go out of business. So just, it's so easy to be the moron on the left side of the curve. Number go up and the right side of the curve. Number go up, but it sounds so enticing to sell newsletters on, well, you know, well this, if the Japanese currency does this, then this is going to happen and the whole world's going to implode. Guess what? It's probably not going to happen. The world has been in recession, what, 3 % of the time? 97 % of the time it's not in recession. I mean, I'll take those odds all day.

1:48:16And it just feels better to be happy. Absolutely. It feels better to be happy. And crypto taught me this. Yeah. Crypto taught me that you can be optimistic, you can have ups and downs, and everything still moves forwards. It taught me how to take longer term risk. It taught me how even to stop the player versus player world that macro was and financial markets people were, I'm smarter than you. Crypto is like, we're all going to make it. It's like it's so much more open and nicer. So, yeah. Absolutely. And we have these crazy crashes and it's the end of the world, but it actually never is. No.

1:48:56It never. We always recover. Yeah. And every geopolitical crisis, you get these big expert things from these geopolitical strategists. Well, this move is going to happen, this move, and they're all going to, they're going to invade China. It's going to blow up and there's a kinetic war. It never happens. Why? No, it's stupid. Sometimes things can go horribly wrong. I get that. But I'm not going to bet on the 1 % of times. but 99 % of the time it goes right. Yeah. Eventually. Because 99 % of the time, as you like to say, it doesn't really matter. Yeah. Thank you, Raoul, for spending another almost two hours with me on this podcast.

1:49:32And thank you for showing publicly what true conviction looks like despite all the hate and bad comments that you get online. True conviction is really hard and true conviction publicly is even harder. I, and I think we all hope we enter soon the craziest banana zone in human history. We're here for it. Remember, Kevin, our hopes and dreams are in this. All of our hopes and dreams. I told you that in the last podcast. All of our hopes and dreams. Mine too. So I hope we enter the craziest banana zone in history, not only because it's everyone's hope and dreams, but also because you're a good and genuine man.

1:50:12And I want to see you have the last word. Thank you so much. Thank you. I don't want to have, I don't worry about the last word, but look, how good will it be if we all make it? Yeah, absolutely. And so for that, I'm going to make one request. People go to the Real Vision website, sign up, it's free. We've told you all the value, but it's not about that. It's about go on the left-hand side, there's an icon of a T-shirt. Click that, that's the merch store. buy Banana Zone merch because together we can summon the banana we can only do it together I don't have the superpower of my own we all have to buy Banana Zone merch and do it it's not that we make much money out of it I just think it's fucking hilarious that all these people are walking around all the board of Sui they're all wearing Banana Zone t-shirts I get one when I'll send you a picture exactly yeah be part of summoning the Banana Zone thank you so much Raoul loved it

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