Best of Real Vision: Jim Rogers Masterclass (2015)

26:49Well, when we spun off, we had$12 million. And by the way, none of the other hedge funds invested internationally in those days. We spun off with$12 million, and within a year or so, we were really suffering badly. I went to my Yale reunion, my 10th Yale reunion, so it would have been 1974. And I figured, well, I'm going to have to go there and say that I'm the first one to go broke. Because I don't know what was, oh, the market, in 1974, the market's collapsed. That's right. And we were getting it wrong, partly because we were shorting stocks like Avon, what came to be known as the nifty 50. There were 50 stocks that J.P.

27:36Morgan, and they said they'll never go down. These stocks will never go down. And no matter what, they bought more. I know the guy who went to Cambridge, as a matter of fact. He went to Harvard and Cambridge. Well, you can't trust those Cambridge guys. I know. He was head of the Harvard guys. He was head of the research department. And they would buy no matter what. No matter what. Every penny they got, they put into Xerox and Kodak and Avon and all those stocks. And we were shorting those stocks. And they never went down. We went down instead. So I thought in my 10th reunion, I'd be the first one to go broke.

28:15But as you know, eventually later, we had the staying power somehow at that point. So we stuck with it. And by the end of 74, everything collapsed. Avon went to 20 from 150 or something. So that, if anything, was the inflection point. That's when we came. Now that you ask a question, these are things I haven't thought about. We came through 1974 with flying colors. We did extremely well. And I remember in 1975, the Wall Street Journal came and did a story about us. Because here were these guys. What do they know? And yet J.P. Morgan had lost a fortune buying all that stuff. Here were these guys making money.

29:02They made money all through the 70s, and they continued to make money. So they came and did a story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. In my picture, I called my mother, and I said, Mother, to Alabama, would you please get a copy of the Wall Street Journal? Was the number still five at this time? No, but then we had dial phones. Now there were dials. It was one of the last ten cities in the country to get dials, cities, places to get dials. And I said, Mother, please get the Wall Street Journal tomorrow. She said, well, you can't get it. It comes a day late to here. I said, OK, get it a day late.

29:37So I called her a day late and said, well, what do you think? She said, you mean because your picture was on the front? I said, well, let's start there. And she said, well, you know, not many people read that newspaper. I said, Mother, it's the second largest newspaper in the country. Not down here. Nobody reads that newspaper down here. So those were different times, different days. Now you just turn on your computer and get to Wall Street Journal. But were you guys, were you evil short sellers back then? Because nowadays, if you're a guy who makes money being short, you're evil. I mean, the Chinese are now threatening to actually arrest people for short selling.

30:14And right through 08, 09, there were guys who had been short for two or three years because they'd seen this coming and were suffering an awful lot of pain. Suddenly, because everyone else is losing money, they're making money. They are evil short sellers. I know. Were you viewed the same way back then, or was it slightly different? Well, it was not quite as well known that we were evil short sellers. But, you know, I look back, Richard Nixon did not think this, he thought this was un-American, whatever it was. Dwight Eisenhower didn't know it could be done. He didn't know there was such a thing as short selling.

30:47It was not that well known, so it didn't get well enough known to be evil short sellers. Some people thought it should be outlawed. when they heard about them. But if you can sit down with somebody in a rational way, you can demonstrate pretty easily, I think, that short selling is good for markets. Yeah, I agree. You want short sellers in markets. Even the people who lose money lose less, they lose less because the short sellers have to come in and buy. Yes, I know. But it's something to this day, as you point out, the Chinese are now. Somebody's trying to blame their problems on short sellers.

31:22Well, the facts are, the statistics are short selling in the Chinese market is about less than 1 % of the market. So it's easy to find scapegoats and look for scapegoats. Everybody likes to find scapegoats when things go wrong. Foreigners, always blame the foreigners. Evil short sellers, evil financiers. There's always somebody doing something wrong if you're losing money. So you've made this money from short selling, which is, in my experience, it's the most satisfying profit you can make because you're essentially saying, I was right and everybody else was wrong. It's a good feeling to do the thinking, get it right in the face of everybody saying, this guy's an idiot, and then you prove to be right.

32:10But now we're in the middle of the 70s and inflation is starting to go crazy, right? How do you deal with that environment? Because again, there's a whole generation of people in this business that have no concept of inflation. in the true sense of the word. What were those times like? Well, they also have no concept that bonds can go down. Right. You know, but we did short bonds at times. We actually shorted gold at one time, now that I think about it. But we made a lot of money in oil. As it caused it, the price of oil went up a lot, which is inflation, which leads to inflation. We were long oil.

32:53not because we said inflation is coming. We were with long oil because of the fundamentals of oil. They went through the roof, which meant inflation went through the roof, which meant interest rates went through the roof. All of those things we participated in, shorting bonds, long oil. I mean, again, it all fits together. And somehow or another, all of those things we participated in on the right side. But how did it feel to be in that? Because I'm fascinated by that. That decade, to me, particularly when you contrast it with today, it's an incredibly interesting time. It should be a very instructive time for people because things were happening back then.

33:36The central banks weren't omnipotent, but again, they let things get out of control. And this time they had to squash it. And now here we are 30, 40 years later. Things are getting out of control again, and yet they're not stopping it. When you look back at that period versus now, how do you compare and contrast it to them? Well, the same thing happened. The central banks didn't know they were letting things get out of control. It wasn't their plan. What's his name? Arthur Burns and Bill Miller, they were printing a lot of money, but they thought it was good for the world and the markets and the economy.

34:16And maybe it was. but one of the consequences of course was this serious inflation that partially was caused by by the money printing it did get out of control now maybe today's guys are different maybe it's different this time maybe these central bankers are omnipotent I mean they have computers so maybe they know a lot more than the ones back then I would suspect that before this party's over There are going to be a lot of people who are saying, you know, central banks are not as smart as we thought they were. You know, these guys are pretty dumb after all. In 2008, I do remember at one time the chief economist at the Federal Reserve in Washington wrote a paper, and I wish I could find it, which started off by talking about, you know, there are people who say that housing is going to collapse and that there are problems, going to be problems in the housing market and therefore in the economy.

35:23But we have hundreds of the smartest PhDs in the world working for us, and we know it's not going to happen. Who are these people? What is wrong with them that they think they're smarter than we are? And I assure you that someday there's going to be a story like that about today's central banks, that somebody's going to say, you know, that Yellen woman, what was her name? Yellen. Yellen. She didn't have a clue what she was doing. None of them did. It's not going to stop with Yellen, I assure you. They're all going to come out with an egg on their face. But maybe I am. Maybe I am. Maybe the world has changed so much that it is different this time.

36:03Well, I like your odds better than theirs, to be honest with you. I really do in the long term. Well, we will see. But the 70s were a very interesting time, as you point out. For me, they were exhilarating because we were making money hand over fist. We didn't quite realize, didn't stop to think about it at the time. One reason we used huge amounts of leverage. I mean, we should probably be bankrupt, but we did use a lot of leverage. But we did keep getting things right. And so we were somewhat successful. But it was a lot of fun, a lot of fun. It was certainly mistakes. My first wife. Huge mistakes in those days.

36:51But here we are, you know, and it's been fun ever since. So, okay, so the 70s gives way to the 80s. We get this Volcker coming in and stamping on inflation. And that puts the lid on a lot of these problems that the US is facing. But more importantly, perhaps, it begins this bull market that was going to run for 30 years. Interest rates peaked 17%. And they've been going down ever since to zero. Through the 80s, how did things change from your perspective? Obviously, that informational edge is already starting to get crowded out. how did you have to adapt to the fact that more people knew where Denmark was now, for example?

37:34And that they had a currency. Right. It wasn't the U.S. dollar. Well, first of all, I have to quickly tell you, in 1980 I retired because I wanted to have more than one life. I loved with a passion, and still do, the investing world. But I didn't want to wake up when I was 75, and people would say, well, Rogers was a great investor, but that's all he ever did. He never did anything else. So I was, and I had more money than I knew existed in the world. It wasn't much money in retrospect, but at the time, if you're from the backwoods of Alabama, it looked like a lot of money to me. And I didn't think I'd ever have to work again if I invested halfway decently.

38:18So I really did not continue that same pace. I set out to go around the world with my motorcycle I rode through Central Europe on a motorcycle. I look back on some of the things that I did, and I wonder, how did that, how could I do that? How did it happen? But I did ride through Central Europe. I was trying to get permission from the Russians and the Chinese to drive through their countries. I look back, you know, what kind of idiot was I that I would think that the Chinese would let some capitalists, some American capitalist, drive across red China on a motorcycle. Soviet Union? Are you kidding?

39:00But I was knocking on the doors trying to get permission to do things like that. So I wasn't spending that much time sending every day investing. No leverage. This isn't how someone of your age at the time thinks, right? People don't think that way. You go back to you're the only guy reading about the Danish kroner, And here you are, the guy trying to get somebody, anybody, to let you ride your motorcycle across Russia. But I'm sure at the time, and from when I read Investment Biker, I remember thinking, you know, I bet this guy was sitting there thinking, I'm going to ride across there, and I'm going to find so many great investment opportunities along the way.

39:41I mean, that's how I picture your mindset being at the time. No, my mindset at the time was, this is what I want to do. I'd always wanted to see the world. I told you before that I discovered Wall Street. And I wanted to do it by motorcycle because I loved motorcycles. I just thought riding. Well, what little time I had in the 70s I spent on my motorcycle riding around. That alone meant there was something wrong with me on Wall Street in the 70s. But I was determined to figure out a way to see the world on my motorcycle. And obviously, you could ride around the world without going through China, without going through Russia.

40:23But in my mind, that didn't count. That was not really going around the world. I didn't want some guy to say, come on, you didn't go around the world. You didn't go through China. You didn't go through Russia. You didn't go around the world. But that's what I wanted to do. I thought that was more important than spending all of my time in front of a computer. I'm not even sure we had computers back then, reading about Denmark. I wanted to do that, and I spent time doing that. I did stumble. I was a professor for a while. That's right. I stumbled into that. And I was still investing my money, but I was not with the same intensity of focus, no leverage, that I did in the days of the 70s.

41:12I was still investing. Yes, things were changing. People knew what hedge funds were, certainly by the end of the 80s. People did have computers eventually. People knew about Japan. The Japanese market had a huge bubble in the 80s. A lot of people were investing in Japan. Japan was probably the first foreign market that a lot of people invested in, and that was because of the big bubble of the 80s. Didn't think of it as a bubble in those days, but everybody knew there was liquid, it was big, there was more information. You know, Miro had an office in New York. You know, all sorts of things like that were changing, and it was new and different.

41:53You didn't have to wake up in the middle of the night and say, how do you call Japan? I remember you had to call the operator in the 70s to call Australia to find out, or to place an order. But by the 80s, you didn't have to do some of those things. There was a lot more information, a lot more investing. People knew what hedge funds were by the end of the 80s. The market was going higher. No, it was all a different world, and it continued to be a different world. The MBAs were coming to Wall Street. What few MBAs there were in the 70s went to General Motors. Wall Street was a backwater. It was not a place where reputable people would go.

42:37It was for the idiot sons. Right. But still at this time, I remember reading something you wrote about Austria, about buying Austrian stock. And I remember reading this after the fact and thinking, we're talking late 80s, early 90s, I guess. No, early 80s. Early 80s, okay. But still, I mean, just for anyone that has read it, I'd much rather you tell the story than me, because it blew me away when I remember reading the story. You made me think of a story, thinking of interest when we were younger. After Yale, I did go to Oxford. And in my college at Oxford, there were a few, a few number of, I was not the only American.

43:22And all the Americans usually sat together. And I remember having a discussion at the American table once. All these guys wanted to come back to America and go into politics. They all wanted to be president of the United States. And I said to them, I want to be a gnome of Zurich. I have no interest in being president of the United States. A gnome of Zurich in those days were these mythical, we thought the Swiss, and they didn't because they didn't know anybody about investment, but we all thought that these mystical gnomes of Zurich knew everything and controlled the world. So I said to them, I want to be one of those guys.

43:57I want to be the guy with all the money and pulling all the money. But in the 80s, I had read about Austria somewhere. I don't know what I read. Something that Austria was going to institute measures to encourage the stock market. They didn't have much of a stock market. But by the 80s, people started realizing you needed capital markets. And I remember the Scandinavians put in tax incentives. And needless to say, the market went up. These are things that happen normally. So, I was going to find out about Austria, and I called up the largest bank, Austrian bank was called Kredidenstatt. You may remember it from 1931, because it went broke, and it was the largest bank in Central Europe, and it caused, some people say that that was the touchstone for the depression, the Great Depression.

44:48But they were back in business after the war, and I called up the head of the, Mike, I'll think of his name in a minute, the head of credit in Salt in New York and said, I would like to open an account to invest in the Austrian stock market. He said, we don't have a stock market in Austria. I hung up the phone as quickly as I could, got on the phone and flew to Austria because I knew that at the head of the largest bank in New York, one of their major international, I didn't know they even had a stock exchange. I knew I was owed to something. So I flew there. I remember, and I saw people in the government, et cetera, and said, yeah, we're gonna put through these measures to encourage, give people tax incentives to invest in stocks.

45:35And Craig Edenshaw didn't have a stock market department. They had one guy who was a guy, and that was his job. I mean, he was obviously a guy who wasn't on the rise. And Craig Edenshaw, he was just somebody. They shut it aside. And he put in orders about shares on every stock There were only 24 stocks listed at the time. And I think back on this story. It's amazing. There was something called the Barron's Roundtable. It still is something called the Barron's Roundtable. Well, I was on the Barron's Roundtable, and I was explaining why you should invest in Germany, blah, blah, blah. Siemens is a lot cheaper than General Electric, blah, blah, things like that.

46:16And they're learning about stocks in Europe. And I said, if you really want to invest in Germany, though, you should invest in Austria. because it's unknown, it's untouched. Nobody invests in Austria, and it's dirt cheap. And they're putting through these measures to make the Austrian stock market attractive to investors, where everybody saves and they don't put it in equities. The guy, the one guy at the credit union's job was late to work in that day. He didn't read Barron's. He had no clue about anything, But he got to work like 11 o 'clock, 11.30. And all these messages. Remember the little messages?

46:57Yeah, the post-it notes. Call here, call here. He didn't have a clue what was going on. People from all over the world were calling him up to buy shares in Austria. And the market was going through the roof. The market doubled that year. And this poor guy, he never made it to the top. I assure you of credit and stuff. But the Austria Stock Market, and there's still people, not many I'm sure now, who said that's the guy who kissed the sleeping beauty of the Vienna Stock Exchange and woke her up. And that was a lot of fun. But what's amazing, though, that's, again, we come back to this idea of just sitting down, reading about things, just doing some thinking about the possibilities, acting on them.

47:48And what is clearly going to happen ends up happening. But that's, it seems crazy to say that's a lost art these days, but it kind of is almost. Well, I don't know if it's a lost art. No, I guess it is because I'm sure that right now there's something, a story, that in 20 years somebody will be telling about how he or she, more likely she these days, discovered or read something and thought about it and did something. What I just thought of, I don't know if it's going to come true or not, but I recently bought shares in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe's a mess, a disaster. But I read somewhere that Zimbabwe finally had scrapped its currency.

48:35The Zimbabwe, it was called the Zimbabwe, the most recent currency, I think, was Zimbabwe dollar. They scrapped it. They finally just burned them all up. $50 trillion per dollar note. Threw them in. Yeah, everybody has seen those Zimbabwe dollar notes. Well, they scrapped it, finally, gave up, and dollarized the economy. So I've started buying Zimbabwe shares on the theory that the thing has been a disaster. But now even Mugabe is realizing that something has gone wrong here in the past 35 years. And that southern Rhodesia, as it used to be called, was a gem of Africa and of the British Empire at one time.

49:18Mugabe's ruined it. You know, you give somebody, a madman, enough power for 35 years, he can destroy anything. But he's old now. Somebody has realized we've got to start over. So I've started buying Zimbabwe shares. But how many people do you think are doing that? Because people... I doubt that there are very many. But I'm saying this might be. This might be a story that 10 or 15 or 20 years from now, people say, well, I don't think of that. But people... And I've traveled a lot and talked to a lot of people. And I'm constantly fascinated by the fact that everybody's time horizon is now either 10 minutes or until I get stopped out.

50:00And getting stopped out means I lose 5%. No one. And I mean, pension funds who are struggling to get any kind of return, anywhere near the 7%, 8 % they're promising their unit holders. And yet they're still not looking at long-term investment options. I mean, farmland's a great example, particularly talking to you, because you've been talking about that story for a long, long time about how it's going to be the farmers driving the Ferraris in years to come. But that's something that people either can't get their heads around because it's just too long a time horizon, or they don't have the latitude within their investment strategy to invest along those lines.

50:38But how do you try and make money in a massively compressed time when you've got to be in and out, in and out, right all the time? Well, fortunately, Grant, I don't have a committee that I have to answer to. I don't have to explain my... I mean, you'd be one of the few people in the world that knows that I invested in Zimbabwe two weeks ago or three weeks ago. We weren't having this conversation. I assure you, when I go over to the bar tonight, I'm not going to say, that's what I did today, guys. Last week, I bought Zimbabwe. I even forget about it until we're having this conversation. I'm not sure.

51:12Part is I don't have those pressures, that kind of pressure. I'm not interested in the short term. I'm not good at the short term. I'm terrible. I assure you I'm the worst short term trader in the world. Well, you're the second worst in this room. No, no, no. You may think you're bad. I'm sure I could top you no matter how bad you are. Market timing is not my cup of tea. And since I'm not any good at short term, and I do know the benefits or the opportunities if you invest for the long term. And I'm lazy. It's a lot easier to buy Zimbabwe and not have to think about it for 10 years, not even remember it for a long time, and then wake up one day and say, oh my gosh, did I do that?

51:57How did I do that? I haven't put a lot there yet. In fact, now that I think about it, I've got to do more research before I can put a lot more money there. But these are the kind of opportunities that still do exist Now, I don't know if I'm right or wrong about Zimbabwe. Obviously, we'll know in 10 years. But there must be opportunities like that, even though we do all have Google now, even though information is instant, instantly available. But one of the things I have learned about humans, about us, about life, is that 100 people can go into the room and hear exactly the same story. Only 4 % or 5 % are going to get it right, really understand the full ramifications, the full meaning.

52:44Most of the others are going to do the same thing, whatever the same thing happens to be, and chances are it's not going to be the right action. So even though we all, you can't Google judgment and get it. You can get the meaning of judgment, but there's no pill yet which gives you judgment. But that ability to think critically about stuff like this, I mean, that's what you learn reading about Denmark and reading all these things. You learn how to think critically about things because you have to put those pieces together. Now you go on, you hear a story about Zimbabwe, you Google it, you look at the first three headlines.

53:22You kind of take in whatever you can from those three stories and then you go, yeah, I know about Zimbabwe. That's interesting. I didn't Google Zimbabwe. When, no, I just, there was the only thing I needed to know, I know a little bit about Zimbabwe from my travels and from life. But you're right. I don't know. I wish I could figure out if I have a gift or a skill, and I'm not even sure I do, because I made plenty of mistakes. I'm sure I made plenty of mistakes. I'll tell you about my first wife again, if you want to know. I don't know if there's a, I wish I could figure it out so I could put it in a bottle and sell it.

54:04If I could just sell that skill, that gift, that ability to think around corners, boy, it certainly would be useful. I have two little children. I want to teach them. If I can teach them nothing else, I want to teach them to think around corners, to not accept the conventional wisdom. Or when you see something, instead of saying, that's interesting, I want them to say, now wait a minute, what does that really mean? Now let's figure out what is really going on and how to make money out of it. I think that is, it is a skill you can teach. I think the problem is people don't realize it's there to be taught.

54:46I mean, I've worked with several guys over the years in various parts of the world who were just, incredibly intuitive at joining the dots. So they'd see a piece of news and their brains would take them to the third, fourth derivative of that news. So while everybody's jumping around trying to act on the headline, they were three steps down the road and saying, you know what, that will lead to this, will lead to this, that's where I'm going to invest because I've got time. And I watched guys do this. And so I think it's a skill you can teach if you can find people who are willing to learn it. Yeah.

55:17And if you can find guys who are willing to teach it. I mean, to sit down and structure a whole course, if you will, that takes a lot of time. I was once a professor. I was once a schoolteacher. I know it takes a whole lot of time to be a schoolteacher. Even to be a bad schoolteacher takes a lot of time. And the guys who are good at it probably got other things to do. They'd rather use it themselves rather than go off and be a schoolteacher. So you got to have the people who can do it and then the people who are willing to teach it and have the time and the interest in teaching it. And yes, you can probably teach it, but the way you would teach it, I think, is by example, by using many stories that have worked.

56:02I once taught a course at Columbia, and that's what I taught. I concocted this course. I said, okay, pick anything you want to pick any year and pick a stock or an industry and figure out what's going to happen to it only with what you knew then. Say it was January 18, 1982, and you picked airlines. You've got to tell me what's going to happen to airlines. But you cannot look ahead. You've got to come in here, explain to me what's going to, and how you would have known it. How you would have known it. And the way they did it, they looked at it six months later at the Wall Street Journal and they saw what happened.

56:45But that didn't count. They'd all try that. I said, no, no, this is no good. You have to go back. Now, this is trying to teach what you and I are talking about. How you could have known January or July of 1982 what is going to happen to this company, this stock, this industry based only on what knowledge was available before you did that. It was a very successful course. It was a lot of fun. I mean, I don't teach anything now, but I tried doing it at one time. So yeah, but I'm telling you, it takes a lot of time. But were there any guys in that class, were there any guys who just came in and got it?

57:25They won. Listen, MBAs, I remember when I went there, it was an Ivy League business school. And I remember saying, well, these guys are all educated. They've all been to fancy universities, got fancy degrees, they wouldn't be here. They didn't know who Socrates was. They didn't know anything. It's astonishing how badly educated they were. I said to them, I'm going to teach this course by the Socratic method. Does anybody here know who Socrates was? Well, maybe the Brazilian soccer player who was the 80s, possibly. But empty expressions suck, and they didn't have Google in those days, so nobody knew who Socrates was.

58:07So, I mean, I was appalled in my early days of exposure to graduate education, Ivy League graduate education, and how uneducated most of them were.

58:25Thank you.

59:03I want to go back to that Zimbabwe idea, because another place that I know you've been looking at and I've heard you talk about is Russia. And you went to, I remember, so when I read Investment Biker, I think the first chapter was to Russia or flight to Russia, but that was the big thing for you is I want to get into Siberia. I mean, you were trying to get into Siberia when people who were sent there was the worst thing that could ever happen to them. Now, so you ended up getting permission to go to Russia and the Russia you saw then and the Russia you see now, and you're someone who's talking bullishly about Russia when everybody is saying Putin's finished, this whole thing is just a house of cards waiting to go down, you wait and see.

59:46What do you see in Russia now versus back then that makes you think? Well, the first thing that you just said, which would ring a bell with me, is everybody says Russia is bad and it's finished and it's going down. Now whenever I hear that about anything, I say, aha. It's only because I'm older and more experienced. I say, aha. Wait a minute. If everybody is convinced, then I have to check to see, because usually everybody's wrong when everybody's thinking the same thing. I'll expand on that a little bit. I first went to Russia in 1966 with an Oxford student group, and I came away with, this can't work.

1:00:26This is lunacy. It's not working. It cannot work. It cannot work. And was pessimistic about Russia for the next several decades. But I did want to ride around the world, and to ride around the world properly, you've got to go through Soviet Union. If you look at a map, you'll see what I mean. So I was knocking on the door in the 80s with the Chinese and the Russians and got permission from China, rode across China, made a film of it. So I had some credentials by this time, and I was riding the Russians. I went to see somebody, something to do with Russia in Rockefeller Center. And the guy said, I said, what do I want to do?

1:01:12I want to ride across Russia on a motorcycle. Get out of here, you fool. But he said to me, there's this one group in the government that they might be able to, he didn't know how to translate it. It was such an obscure group. So he wrote down to me their address in Russian. and I went home and pasted it onto an envelope and sent off a letter because nobody, he didn't even know how to he was Russian, he didn't know how to translate it I certainly didn't, so I pasted the address on the envelope off to Russia with a letter, there was no Google in those days so sent this letter to Russia and Moscow saying I want to ride my motorcycle across Russia, blah blah blah I did it across China and lo and behold I get a letter back in English, I remember his name, from Mr.

1:02:04Sungarov, saying, yeah. He didn't know I'd been knocking on the damn door for years, saying I want to do this, as though you're sitting in an office and you knock on the door every day, and then a guy comes and opens the door and says, what are you doing here? Come in. That's what happened. He said, come, sure, why not? So I flew to Moscow, not believing him at all, showed up. This is communist Russia. This is the worst of all. So Mr. Comrade Senghorov said, nobody, why would you want to do it? No roads, nothing out there. It's a tense, a deep, tense, intense jungle. What word am I looking for?

1:02:49Anyway, it's a, we don't know why anybody would want to do it. We're gonna let you do it, if you want to. Now, obviously, it was Russia in the 80s. It was opening up. If I'd been smart, I would have known, aha, this is a sign that something's changing in the Soviet Union. Brezhnev was coming along with all of his opening up policies, and this was part of it. Sure. Now, I'd been knocking on the door for a long time. He didn't know that. He didn't care. But he said, sure, come on, you can do it. But it intensified my pessimism about communism and the Soviet Union because it was just a mess, a disaster out there.

1:03:29I did that in 1990 when I drove across. And I continued pessimistic about Russia because I just knew it couldn't work. And my experience demonstrated that it was not and could not work. But in 2012, 2013, I thought that I saw, now remember, I've been going to Russia since 66 at this point, so I had a little bit of experience and a little bit of knowledge. I thought I saw changes taking place in the Kremlin. Putin, who had been considered anyway a KGB thug by many people, something was changed and acted like a KGB thug for a while. But I thought I saw changes. So I started getting optimistic about Russia.

1:04:15It's got vast resources. Oh, God, does it have vast resources? They don't even know what they've got yet. They cannot know it's so big. It does have a convertible currency. It has very little debt. Very few countries of its ilk have convertible currencies, and most of them have a lot of debt. But it has virtually no debt. So I could see what I thought were changes taking place. So I started investing. Fortunately, like everything else, I'm so lazy. I don't get around to things. Then along came Ukraine, and it really caused things to drop even more. But that meant I better get going because, hey, prices are collapsing.

1:04:51So I started increasing my investments in Russia, became a director of a Russian company, a fertilizer company. I'm optimistic about agriculture, which we haven't talked about, but we can if you want to. You mentioned it, but it seemed perfect. Like agriculture, Russia, what better combination? But how do you mitigate the problems you have there with the rule of law, which is, to me, looking from the outside, that seems to be the big problem in Russia. There's really no way to perfect your asset, unless you know the right guy who knows the right guy. Well, Grant, I will tell you that that's always the case, no matter where you invest, especially if you invest in new markets, including the United States.

1:05:37I mean, I know we claim we have this perfect rule of law. Ha. I mean, the more you get into it, the more you know that there's the rule of law and there's the land of the free. And then there's the United States, which is not the land of the free anymore and which is not the rule of law. It's not what we all were taught in high school, the junior high school, about the rule of law. How do you mitigate? I don't know. It's part of the whole thing. Zimbabwe, what rule of law? Zimbabwe is Mr. Mugabe. Just about any place where you, especially any new place where you invest, you have to worry about things like that.

1:06:16It doesn't always work, I assure you. I wish it did. It would be easy. In this case, it's part of the judgment I have made and am making and constantly am worried about that something has changed in the criminal. I'm sure that there are injustices taking place in Russia right now, even though I perceive change. I'm sure, though, that next week you can come to me and say, look, don't you see this? But look, there are injustices taking place in America every day, every day. So it's part of the overall judgment, and we'll know in 10 years if I did it right. I think the whole idea of, and let's lump Russia in with frontier investing, because it's almost gone back to that partner in most people's minds.

1:07:05This concept that... By the way, for me, it was never an investment. Right. I have to tell you one story. Make sure I get the right time here. I was in Russia in the last year or two, and a journalist said to me, well, have you ever invested in Russia before? I said, yeah, 1998, I was short the ruble in a big way. She said, what? I said, I shorted the ruble in 1998. and made a lot of money. And she said, that's not what I meant. I said, well, yes, I have invested in Russia before. Yes. Well, we've come a long way because she understood what you meant by shorting, which is good. Well, by then, everyone understood about evil capitalists, you know, because evil capitalists were everywhere in the last 25 years in Russia.

1:07:48But yeah, this idea that, you know, when you go into somewhere like Zimbabwe, you go into somewhere like Russia, there are risks. and it's taking investing back to how it used to be, whereby there are certain risks you can't eliminate. And once you build as many walls and fences around investment as you can, there's always going to be a place for the rabbits to get out. And you just have to work out the risk-reward profile and work out whether it works for you. Instead of in the West where we have this idea that, as we started off talking about this, nobody can get hurt anymore. We've got to ring-fence everything and make sure, I'm not going to invest in something that carries risks I can't mitigate.

1:08:31Well, one thing that I have learned over my investment career is if you find things that are cheap, even if you're wrong, you're probably not going to lose too much. You can lose everything. No matter how cheap it is, you can lose 100%, I assure you. There's no such thing as you cannot lose. You can lose everything. But usually, if you find things that are cheap, you're not going to lose a lot. Now, look at Russia as a perfect example. I mean, it's hated. You've already said nobody would invest in Russia. Well, it's very, very cheap. It was very, very cheap. And therefore, we hope that even if I was wrong, I wasn't going to lose that money.

1:09:12The currency collapsed, the stock market, everything collapsed. So if I was wrong, I probably wouldn't lose too much. By the way, speaking of that, one of my larger positions is shares in the Moscow Stock Exchange, the home of Lenin, the home of Marx, not Marx, Stalin. It's at all-time highs. It's unbelievable. But the Moscow Stock Exchange shares are at all-time highs. I look at myself and say, this cannot be. Other things aren't at all-time highs, far from it. but I own Aeroflot, which is not at all-time highs. But it is working. It is working. But that's partly, I think, because you buy something so cheap.

1:09:54This last, not last week, yesterday, I've had some orders in in the Chinese market, well under the market. I got hit two days ago. But they're already up like 15%. Because, you know, and it's a lesson I've learned many times. If something is really collapsing, if you have the stomach and you buy it, chances are you're going to make money. If you buy panic, and I'm not any good at buying panic. The only way I do it is I put the market in and close my eyes and look the other way and hope it doesn't happen. But then when it does, I usually make money. See, that's interesting to me because what I find people do, they'll look at that, they'll put their stink bids in somewhere, and when they get hit, they panic.

1:10:39Something that looked like, you know what, if I get it there, I'll buy those all day. And then they buy them an hour later and suddenly they're like, oh my God. I didn't mean that. Right. But to me, that's something that separates the greats from the guys that are just kind of playing around. It's the ability to see what value is. And just because the time of day has changed, it doesn't mean the case has changed. You have to say, look, it looked value at 20 when it was trading at 40. I bought it at 20. Okay, it's trading at 18. But it's still value. But that's a really hard thing for people to do.

1:11:10No, I know, I know. That's why I look the other way and close my eyes and hope it doesn't happen. I hope it doesn't happen. But I have learned, just because I'm more experienced now, I have learned that usually if you, and I don't have the courage to buy Panic most of it. I'm like everybody else. But if you figure out a way to buy it, you usually come out ahead. And I've been buying, oh, real panic in China the last two days. Well, let's talk about that for a minute, because it's happening right now, and it's extraordinary to me, what we're seeing in China. What's your take on what's actually happening there?

1:11:49Well, best I can determine, it's the evil foreigners. Right. And the evil short-sellers. It's the evil short-selling foreigners, except there aren't any. Very few foreigners investing in China, and there are very, very few short-sellers. So if we eliminate the evil short sellers, I don't know who's left. What happened was you get out of charge, you see the market went straight up, and it looked as though there was going to be an incipient bubble. It wasn't a bubble yet, in my view. I've lived through many bubbles, shorted many bubbles. It was an incipient bubble. It was going to turn into a bubble.

1:12:26I remember I was in China recently speaking. I said, look, if it keeps going like this, you've got a bubble, and then we all have to sell, and I don't want to sell. So I hope it doesn't turn into a bubble. I hope that something comes and calms it down. Well, something came and calmed it down more than I thought, I assure you. I had no idea it would be this big. But what seems to have happened was, obviously, you look at the chart, you see it went straight up. A lot of people piled in. Stocks, many stocks, obviously got ahead of themselves. And there was speculation. Margin lending is not terribly dangerous, on the numbers anyway.

1:13:03but it apparently from if you read the press and not that it's reliable but there were off balance sheet margin third market kind of borrowing. There was a lot of that apparently. Whatever happened some spark hit and people started selling but like every other over leveraged market or market with leverage. Many people had to sell, and it's gotten completely out of control. It's so bad that some stocks have just stopped trading. I mean, in China, you can go to the exchange and say, we don't want our stock to trade anymore. I mean, you couldn't do that in New York for an extended period of time.

1:13:50And so a lot of them aren't even trading. But that exacerbates the situation because the people who have loans are the people who have to sell or think they have to sell. Then they got to sell something else. They cannot sell the one that stopped trading. So everything else is even worse dumping. And apparently they've had borrowings against commodities, copper, which they could easily borrow against. So now they got to sell the copper because they can't sell the shares. They borrowed against the copper to buy shares. so they have to dump the copper because they can't dump the shares. So it's one of these feeding frenzies.

1:14:28The government has enacted measures to try to calm things down. I wish they wouldn't. I mean, my longs are going down, I assure you, but still I would prefer that the government let my longs go down rather than step in to try to boost them up because whenever you have an artificial situation, Artificial situations are not stable. They cannot be stable by definition. So I wish the government would go ahead and just let the panic happen. For all I know, we've hit the natural bottom anyway. I mean, the market is down like 30 % in a month or maybe more in a month. But I saw what was happening, so I said to the broker, here, put this order in.

1:15:12Don't tell me. And they have to tell me when I get hit. But in the last two or three days, I've had orders executed. Fortunately, since I'm talking to you, I can't run around and panic and sell them again. And I don't want to. It turns out they're going up. So I don't want to sell them. But you spend a lot of time in China now. Yeah. Do you think the Chinese leadership, for want of a better phrase, can stick the landing? Do you think they're competent enough? I don't mean that in general terms. I mean, are they competent enough capitalists at this stage to do what died-in-the-wool capitalists in the West have singularly failed to do for many, many years, which is allow capitalism to work?

1:15:58To work, yeah. Well, they're not letting it work. They're stepping in. They're doing what they're doing. Somebody, I'm sure all the brokers are called, just like in New York, they call up Washington and say, you've got to save Western civilization. And I say, it's nothing to do with me. you've got to save the world by stepping into the market and protecting it. I'm sure exactly the same thing is happening in Shanghai. They're calling up Beijing saying, our thousands of year old civilization is going to collapse unless you do something to save the stock exchange. I'm sure that. I know what's happening because I can see what they're doing.

1:16:35They're pulling out these stops, these measures to what they hope will do is to support the stock exchange. I think it's the wrong thing to do. listen, there's nothing sounder than a real bottom. You know, if something totally collapses and it hits where nobody's left to sell, that's a real solid bottom. I wish they would let that happen. I mean, it may have hit some kind of natural bottom already, but even if it has and it rallies, then we have this overhang of the unstable artificial measures which the government, they stopped IPOs, for instance. Well, the IPOs are going to come back someday.

1:17:12then what happens? Et cetera. But let's put the stock market crash to one side for a second. And just talking about, because a lot of people give the Chinese no chance of executing what they need to execute, to open capital markets, make the currency convert, or bring these guys to manage that economy. And Stephanie Pomoy said to me something that really stuck in my brain. She said, you know, nobody gives the Chinese a chance of pulling this little trick off, of managing that economy. And yet, they have absolute faith in Bernanke and Yellen and Carney and Draghi to pull off the same trick. What's the difference between the two?

1:17:57Well, I have no confidence in Bernanke and Yellen and the rest of them, as you well know. I will say that China has been the most successful country in the past 30 years. So they have a little better track record. You know, America 30 years ago was a creditor nation. Now we're the largest detonation in the history of the world. Not just the largest detonation in the world, we're the largest in the history of the world. The Chinese have gone from backwoods, no roads, no nothing 30 years ago. Because I rode across, I can tell you there was nothing there. to being an astonishing success story. So if nothing else, the last 30-year track record would indicate to me that they may make mistakes, but they've got a better chance of pulling it off.

1:18:45You know, to become head of China is an extremely, extremely difficult process. In America, if you get a nice suit and you go on TV, you could be Barack Obama. You could go from being a community organizer to president of the United States. It doesn't work that way in China. You have to start as a young person, and you have to work your way up. They send you out to provinces. You have to run municipalities or provinces. I mean, you're really, really tested over 50 or 60 years to get to be at the top in Beijing. Those guys, whoever they are, have been through a long, arduous ordeal to get to the top.

1:19:28Now, that doesn't mean they're competent. That doesn't mean they're going to be successful. But it's certainly a better system than ours, where you just show up and say, let's have a nice smile. I don't know that they're going to succeed at it. As I said, the track record is such that I suspect they will. There will be problems along the way. America became the most successful country in the 20th century. But along the way, we had a horrible civil war. We had 15 depressions. We had very few human rights. We had very little rule of law. We had massacres in the streets. I mean, America was a mess, a huge mess.

1:20:06And as recently as the end of the 19th century, people in Europe said, whatever that country is, it's going to be a disaster. They were fleecing the foreigners, you know, bearings. Remember Baring? Yeah. Baring put a lot of money into the U.S. A lot of people put a lot of money into it, got fleeced, took them for a ride, railroad bonds, and a lot of other things. So America was not a great paragon of virtue as recently as the 1890s, and yet we did a pretty good job and became the most successful country in the 20th century. China's going to make many mistakes, but I certainly have more confidence in 2015 in the guys in Beijing than I do in the guys in Washington.

1:20:51I assure you. My children speak Mandarin. They also speak English. Well, that's right. And that's actually what I wanted to ask you about. Because you very vocally upped and said, Asia's the future. And again, there's a trait here that we're starting to get a good look at here. You said, you know what? I know what you guys are doing. I'm going to go and do this. And I'm going to take my family, and I'm going to take them to Asia because I want my kids to learn Mandarin, and I want them to grow up in that part of the world where I see tremendous prospects of the future. Again, another big decision to make.

1:21:24But what were the specific catalysts? Was it a lack of... Was it what you wanted to leave behind or what you wanted to go to? You know, I used to... I was very much against children for many years, all my life, in fact. I used to feel so sorry for people who had children. I was never going to do something so foolish as to have a child. I mean, how could you ruin your life by having children? I was totally wrong, 100 % wrong about children. These little girls are so much fun for me. But I used to see people. One reason I thought, God, what fools they are, they would move to another town because of football coach.

1:22:04They could go to school with a great football coach or a music teacher. I said, are you changing your whole life for your children? But all my, since I first went to China, I would lecture and broadcast and write that you should teach your children and grandchildren Mandarin, because it's going to be the most important country and language in the 21st century. But then I had one. Now what do I do? So we started teaching the little girl Mandarin. She spoke great Mandarin. But then it came a time after she was two or three when I realized it's not going to work unless, many people, scores of people told me about you speak German at home or Chinese at home or Spanish at home, there comes a time when they're nine or ten, they just won't listen to you.

1:22:50You speak Spanish, they speak English. You speak Chinese, they speak English. They don't care. It's not cool. So I realized if I were really serious that I was going to have to take them to, take her to a Mandarin-speaking city, but she didn't have any choice. She would grow up speaking Mandarin. And then I said to myself, I'm just like those saps who used to move for a football coach or something else. But it was very important to me. So off we set. We set off to find a place. We tried the cities in China, but they're horribly polluted, the ones we want to live in. We wind up in Singapore because in Singapore they speak English and Mandarin, and I don't speak Mandarin.

1:23:31So I thought that'd be a good compromised. Singapore has great education, great health care. Everything works in Singapore. What I didn't know was they speak bad English and bad Mandarin in Singapore. Now, some speak good Mandarin, some speak good English. Don't get me wrong. But so Singapore has been a great choice for us. But it was pure and simple so that that girl, now we have two, one was born here. Those two little girls would grow up knowing Asia and speaking good Mandarin. That's why we're here. I was old enough, and I had a little bit of money, so I didn't need to worry too much more.

1:24:06And I figured I could adapt, and I could do something in Asia. They still have Google. They have computers. They have phones. Better phones here than in the U.S. Better Google here than in the U.S. So I knew I didn't have to worry about doing something. So I came here to make sure those two little girls, no Mandarin and no Asia. And that's obviously worked out really, really well. Oh, no. In Singapore, they have a Mandarin-speaking contest. Every school kid, whether he knows it or not, is in the Mandarin-speaking contest because the schools say, okay, these are the best ones. My daughter, when she was 10, she won.

1:24:49She won the whole thing. I mean, listen, I was unbelievably proud, but I was maybe in shock. If I went to a movie where a blue-eyed kid was the best Mandarin speaker in a Chinese country, I said, come on, this is worse than Rocky. This is absurd. Come on, don't be so stupid. Don't believe it. She won it two years in a row. So that part of my scheme has worked. And the little one, the little one who was just here, she won first prize in her age group recently. So it's working. I mean, I didn't expect it to work that well. I'm very pleased it worked that well. But no, it was all for them. It was all to make sure that, you know, I was one of those sappy parents.

1:25:30who did something for his children. I used to hear the stories of all the time of people who would do what foolish things they would do for their children. Here I am. The experiment worked. My kids speak Mandarin. They know Asia. You can ask me in 30 or 40 years if I made the right decision. We'll see. Okay. It's a long-term investment. I will take you off on that. I mean, long-term investment, again, is something that you've made a particular focus of yours. And there's really no longer-term investment than agriculture. And that's something that you have been incredibly vocal about and very consistent in your views for a long, long time.

1:26:09And it suddenly seems as though... Not that long, for a few years, yes. Yeah, but that's a long time. In this day and age, the investment idea that goes for a few years is people... And I've spoken about agriculture with investors around the world, and they struggle with it immensely to get their heads around, why would I invest in something that by the time we make any payoff, I'm probably in another job. Why would I do that? How do you see the agriculture proposition? Well, your first statement is the most important, that people say, why should I do it because it's going to take me too long?

1:26:42Well, okay, I don't have a committee. I don't have to worry about that kind of thing. Fortunately, it doesn't mean I'm going to be right, I assure you. But I'm convinced that one who goes into agriculture, and there are already success stories developing, as you probably know, of people who have gone into agriculture and are making money. Farmland was very cheap. It still is, but it's not as cheap as it was, and more and more people are making money in agriculture now. Why? Why is this going to happen? Agriculture has been a horrible business for 30 years. That's the first thing that gets my attention.

1:27:26Anything that's been a horrible business for a long time deserves looking. It doesn't mean it's going to change. It doesn't mean I should invest in Zimbabwe because Mugabe's been ruining it for 35 years, I assure you. But something that has been ruined for a long time deserves a look to me. It's been so bad that we're running out of farmers. The average age of farmers in America is 58. Japan is 66. Canada is the oldest in recorded history. Australia is 58. I mean, more people commit suicide in the UK in agriculture than any other sector, according to BBC. Millions of Indian farmers have committed suicide, as you probably know.

1:28:14More people in America study public relations than study agriculture. I mean, it's a nightmare. Who wants to be a farmer? Nobody wants to be a farmer. Everybody's getting out of it. That may mean there are great opportunities. Agricultural prices are still down considerably from where they were 15 or 20 years ago. Sugar is down, I would say, 75 % from its all-time high. There's not much in life that's down 75 % from where it was 40 years ago. But sugar prices are terrible. Who would be a sugar farmer? So, it doesn't mean it can't go down another 80%. It can from where it is now. But, either something's going to happen or we're not going to have any food at any price, or any clothes at any price.

1:29:14And there are now people, China for instance, is putting through all sorts of incentives for its farmers because Mao Zedong ruined Chinese agriculture, totally ruined Chinese agriculture. The Russians, you know, communism can ruin anything. It certainly ruined Russian agriculture. You read some of the great Russian novels. I mean, the farmers were kings. They had a lot of serfs, but they lived like a king. They had great agriculture. China had great agriculture. So there have been periods in history when the farmers were among the ruling classes and were successful. That's not been the case in the last 30 years.

1:29:58Now, we're either not going to have any food, or something's going to happen to make food, agriculture, prosperous again. And in my view, it is a good place to invest. and for those who are doom and gloomers, the guys who say the world's coming to an end, well, having a farm, if we have that chaos, which some people expect, and we might have, you better have a nice little farm somewhere and you better know how to plant a seed because you will probably survive. Now, that doesn't mean that farmers can't go broke and can't go bankrupt. They have many times. But always in the end, you come out the other side having productive land has been a good thing to have down the road when you think about that I'm just curious about your process because the big picture idea is a great one and the case you lay out is flawless, it's tough to find any cracks in that but then the next stage is the crack is timing but that's the crack in everything That's the only cracker.

1:31:12But how do you then go about investing? Do you think, right, I want to own the land, or I want to own the commodity futures, or, God forbid, you just decide, you know what, I can't be bothered. I'm just going to click and buy the Moo ETF because it's easy. And that's what people do. That's why successful investors, I think, are successful, because they don't want to click the mouse. They want to find the best way to do this. What do you think is the best way to do this? Well, the best way is to become a farmer. Buy yourself some land and become a farmer. But I hope you're competent and hope it's going to rain on your land.

1:31:44Because if you're not competent and it doesn't rain on your land, you're going to go broke. I assure you, you're going to be part of the horror story of the past 30 years. Now, I didn't become a farmer because, A, I know I'd be a terrible farmer. B, I don't have any interest in being a farmer. So you find a farmer and you buy him some land or her some land. There are many ways, though, you can. There are some public agriculture. They're plantation companies. to the public. In places like Malaysia, Indonesia, used to be in Africa, there are companies you can buy that are in the farming business.

1:32:19You can buy a seed company, a fertilizer company, tractor company. You can buy the agriculture futures, the ETFs. There are ways to do it. You can invest in agricultural markets. If agriculture does well, if cotton does well, Pakistan is going to do well. The whole Pakistan economy is going to do well. So you can buy department stores in Pakistan, chains of department stores. There are many ways to do it, but the very best is to buy yourself a farm. In Australia, there are publicly traded farming companies. I own one, actually just got taken over. Fortunately, it got taken over by another farming company, which I also own.

1:33:05But they're getting to be fewer and fewer of those because they're so cheap that they're buying each other up. That's sort of becoming a farmer. I'm not going out there every day and getting my hands dirty because I wouldn't be any good at it. But there are plenty of ways to do it. Buy yourself some land and lease it. Make sure it's going to rain. And make sure you lease it to the right competent person. Don't lead you to Greece. Right. I'm not going to say it because... Go ahead. Well, just... Okay, so putting all this together and taking all those lessons you've learned, when you sit here today and you look at the world and you look at what's going on in Europe and you look at the pressures on China and you look at the pressures that seem to be building in the United States but it seems to be avoiding because it still has that semblance of it's going to be the last dominant force.

1:34:04People aren't worrying about it yet. All those lessons you've learned, the things that you've distilled from 50 years of doing this, what's your take? When you look at it, what are you thinking about the big picture? Well, the big picture is make sure your children speak Mandarin. Right. And your grandchildren make sure they speak Mandarin, make sure they know Asia. That's big picture number one. You know, the 19th century was the century of the UK. The 20th century was the century of the US. The 21st century is going to be the century of China, whether we like it or not. Doesn't mean there won't be problems along the way.

1:34:46I was once quoted as saying in 1807, if you were smart, you moved to London. 1907, you moved to New York. Well, 2007, you move to Asia. I moved to Asia in 2007. I hoped I was right. Asia, maybe it's not specifically China, but there are enormous opportunities. The largest creditor nations in the world are China, Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore. I mean, this is where the assets are. This is where the drive and ambition, the education is. It's certainly not in the West anymore. Well, you know that the largest debtor nations in the world, you know who they are, and they're all getting worse.

1:35:27The Greek problem's been going on for five years. Austerity. The debts are higher now than they were five years. You know, where's the austerity? They all complain about it, but nothing has happened. Their pension plans are still much more than even other people in the EU, and they're complaining that they cannot do what they have to do. So we have gigantic transitions taking place to Asia. I am convinced that when we have our next economic problem, and by the way, we will. We've had economic setbacks in the US every four to seven years since the beginning of time. Everybody has economic setbacks.

1:36:07The next one's going to be worse because the debt keeps going higher and higher and higher. And so far we've come out of these periods of hardship okay, but every time we come out with higher debt. That cannot continue until the end of time. So I'd rather be with the creditors, Asia, than with the debtors the next time we have the problems and we're going to have more problems. Let's say the debtors get through the next problem. Let's say there's a gigantic collapse in 2016. You pick the year, whatever. It's going to happen, whatever the year is. Let's say that somehow the world has a horrible collapse.

1:36:52Somehow we come out and we have another long period of okay, when things are okay. The one after that, we're not going to come out of. That's going to be the big, big nightmare. The next one may be the nightmare, but certainly the one after that. So we're going to have more economic problems. We always do. I mean, it may sound strange, but what would be strange if we didn't have periods of economic duress and collapse? That would be very strange. And the next ones are going to be worse than in the past. And I would urge you to know about the creditors, know about agriculture, because agriculture is going to survive if you can find the right places.

1:37:39Many other things will survive, too, I assure you. but it's been over five years since the United States has had even a 10 % correction in the stock market. It's more or less an accurate statement. Maybe it's four years and nine months, whatever it is. It's been a long time since we've even had a 10 % correction. So these are not normal times. And when the problems come back, which they will, be prepared. I hope everybody's worried. I'm certainly worried. It doesn't mean I'm prepared properly. It doesn't mean I'm going to survive. But I certainly do hope I can figure it out. The places where I've been putting money in recent months are Russia, China, Japan, Zimbabwe, you know, places which have been depressed.

1:38:36even at the top in China recently, the market was still down, what, 30 % from its all-time high? It's not as though we're talking about market. I mean, the United States stock market's at an all-time high. It doesn't mean you're safe buying things that are depressed, but at least these markets where I have been investing recently are down. It doesn't mean they can't go down a lot more. I would not put any money in bonds. bonds have been going up since 19... Well, they stopped going up 2012. They started going... They hit bottom in 1981. They were going up for over 30 years. Doesn't mean they're not going to keep going up.

1:39:17But if there's a bubble in the world, it's the bond market, the government bond market. And if and when people start losing confidence in government bonds, that's not going to be pretty. And that's when we're all going to really be scrambling and hoping to survive. And wishing we had a farm. And wish we had a farm. I wish we did know how to farm. I wish I could go take an agriculture course, get a farming degree. But I suspect even if I had a farming degree, I wouldn't be any good at farming. So the world's going to have, but that's one of the great things about the world. It's always having these dramatic changes, which present, you know.

1:40:01The Chinese have this saying, yin and yang, that crisis and opportunity are the same coin, just the separate sides are the same coin. So I hope that I survive the next crisis and turn it into an opportunity. I don't know, but I will say, back to what your general theme has been, whatever the opportunity is, it's probably not what people are thinking about. it's going to be something that they're not thinking about. Like you said about the guys who can go to the fifth dimension, that's where the opportunities are going to be. It's not going to be what you see on TV. It's not going to be what you see on Google.

1:40:42It's going to be the things that you have to think through and think ahead. And if you figure out a way to put that in a bottle, tell me, because we can start a bobbing company and make a lot of money. You got it. Jim, that's the perfect place to end here. And thank you so much for your time and for inviting me to your home. It's been a real treat for me. Thank you. It's been my pleasure. Thank you, Grant. You're good at this. You should do more of it. Thanks.

1:41:11It's a brilliant, brilliant event. And you'll come away with lots of new ideas and a better understanding of this incredible exponential world.

1:41:24You get to speak to the smartest people. People like you trying to figure this out, but also the people on stage. They're the experts.

1:41:36So we get all of that all in one place in Singapore. What more can you ask?

1:41:47See you at Token 2049.

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