MI Rewind: Could This Time Truly Be Different? NFTs, Macro, Crypto, Bitcoin w/ Raoul Pal

23:30It also pushed the stock market higher. It created the debt economy, everything because of this mega trend. But now, we've pretty much hit zero. Yes, it could go to negative 50 basis points. I know that's a weird world, but that's the world it is in Europe and Switzerland and the UK and Australia and New Zealand. We've had negative rates. That's okay. But that's not much further than here. 10-year bonds, if I look right now, are 1.7%. They got down to about 50 basis points this time last year. Okay. So they can't go much lower. So that big trend lower in rates is not much of a trend anymore. Can they go higher?

24:06Maybe inflation's coming back, which I don't think it can. But let's say it does. Well, the Fed have made it clear, as have the Bank of Japan and the Australian Central Bank and the European Central Bank, the rates can't be allowed to go up because it breaks the whole system. So they stop rates going up and rates can't fall much further. So there we go. The biggest money generating engine in the history of investment has just stopped. There's no money to be made. And then the next part is, okay, well, what about the FX market, the foreign exchange market, the big daddy of all, the biggest market, trades 4 trillion a day?

24:41Well, the problem is that the dollar is 85 % of every single transaction on earth. So we actually live in a dollar world. Everything's a sideshow. So the dollar is more dominant than Bitcoin is in the crypto world. Bitcoin is like 64 % dominance. The dollar is 88. I mean, it's the king. Everything matters. Now, the problem is, if the dollar goes up too much, it destroys emerging markets and global growth. But everybody needs dollars. Everyone's borrowed dollars. So it keeps going up, which is difficult. But if it goes down, it also wrecks economies. So the central banks have made it clear that they actually don't want the dollar to move anywhere.

25:23In fact, if we could just keep all foreign exchange roughly equal, the euro, the pound, the yen, the RMB, the dollar, maybe the Aussie, the big world currency, the Swiss franc. Don't let them move too much. That's basically what they're saying in rates. You make an extraordinary amount of money if the dollar goes up or down, because if the dollar's going down, emerging markets go up. You can borrow money in dollars, you invest in emerging markets. But if it's going nowhere, which I think is what central banks want. And the people like the BIS, the Bank of International Settlements, the Central Bank, Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund have all said they don't want it moving.

26:01So if that's the case, then we've taken up the two biggest macro drivers on earth, and we're left with all the non-macro stuff, which is equities, credit, commodities, which is less macro. It can be driven by supply and demand in the case of commodities, and in equities is driven by fear and greed. So the death of macro is that, is suddenly the macro opportunities to apply macroeconomic analysis is going down the toilet. What does all of this mean for millennial investors or just any investor that's getting started today? Is it something that they should even worry themselves with, or should they just focus on getting the basics of investing down?

26:39The question is, what do you want to invest in? And I think the world is set up for the past and not the future. So why are you investing? You're investing to create a future opportunity for yourself. So you're investing your current time to create quality time in the future, really. So there's two things I would say. Firstly, invest in your quality time now. Quality of life is the best investment you can make. Then make the investment in yourself. So I would say, okay, where are the most likely opportunities lie? Well, we've talked about crypto. It has a very high chance of being a very big market for a very long period of time.

27:18So you're likely to make more money in that than you will have an all-time record high valuation in the equity market. But there's another thing happening, and I've only just started writing about this, so this is quite new for people, is we're also about to enter a technology age of which we've never, the world and humanity has never gone through before. We're about to combine crypto, a whole new financial system, a whole new exchange of value system with artificial intelligence, robotics. We're adding in genome sciences. We've seen this with how fast the vaccine came. Money's going to flood into that.

27:54We're seeing it with everything from autonomous driving to distributed edge computing, where everybody can have enormous computing power, where the cloud is going. we've got a bunch of technologies so disruptive all hitting at the same time that we're likely to see an extraordinary period of continued growth. We think about technology stocks as being these darlings of the 2010s like Google and Facebook and stuff. But the reality is that Elon Musk, and I know people hate Tesla and really don't care because there's three things that are really interesting. One is forget the cars. If he solves autonomous driving and has the programming to do it, he's still one of the largest problems the world has.

28:37We can free up all of that labor, all of that cost of taxi drivers, truck drivers, delivery drivers, everything goes. So what's Tesla worth in that fortune? So ignore how much they sell cars for, all of these things. These are much bigger things. Could it all go wrong? Of course it could. But he's also solved another thing. Everyone's like, why the hell does he want to go into space? CA wants to colonize Mars. No, what he's just done is strung up a bunch of satellites everywhere and is now creating Wi-Fi with faster broadband speeds than most people get outside of cities. So he's going to do that globally.

29:10That's extraordinary. That's Starlink. It's an amazing thing. So you're about to connect people that have never been connected before across the world. He's doing that. And then the other issue is, okay, we've got too many people and too much traffic. The other thing is his digging tunnels. Everyone thinks it's crazy, but actually he's going to do fine from it. But there's a bunch of these kind of things that are going on. 5G, huge. We're going to connect everybody with gigantic amounts of data and enable things like the internet of things and distributed computing. And then everybody's moving to an entire new financial system, an exchange of value system based on cryptocurrencies.

29:49And then we're building things like the metaverse, where we can actually earn money in games or digital life. It's not even necessarily a game. Digital worlds. And this is all happening right now. It's not like if we'd had this conversation where we launched Real Vision, it's like these things are being researched and there's a bit of VC money. No, these are all happening. Starlink is rolling out its stuff. We are seeing the autonomous driving getting closer. Google's very close with Waymo now. All of this stuff is happening right now. I mean, crypto is happening right now. So it is actually a very exciting opportunity.

30:24Finally, you might be able to offset the destruction of the value of money by the growth of technology, in which I would include crypto, which has sound money at its core as well. So it's actually a positive message. And keep away from this value versus growth investing, because I actually think now, if I divide the S &P by the Fed balance sheet to try and look at how to value equities, They basically haven't gone anywhere since the Fed started quantitative easing. If I look at things like General Electric and old companies like that, they're just basically zombie companies. Once you adjust for the amount of free money to complicate things, it's actually a fall in the value of the denominator, which is fiat money.

31:04But when you look at the NASDAQ, it's actually outperformed. There's a real secular trend in technology going on that's above and beyond that of which they're devaluing money. If you look at crypto versus the Fed balance sheet, basically in a straight line up, because it's actually creating wealth. So only technology and crypto are creating wealth. Everything else is offsetting the fall in the value of currency, including real estate. It's amazing, fascinating wealth. And this is all new, and I've only started talking about it. So people will be scratching their heads about these concepts for a while.

31:38But follow my Twitter feed. I'll start trying to get people across the line and what I'm talking about. Why is this time different? Because I feel like people were saying similar things like when the internet came around in the 2000s. And it did. It changed everything. But then everything crashed, right? Did it? Or did it go through like the crypto winter? Did the bad investment? In the end, if you'd held Amazon, you'd be really outrageously, disgustingly wealthy. That's noise. It was an S-curve. We're actually in an exponential adoption trend. All of these things I'm talking about are all going to be newly adopted by 7.5 billion people.

32:18People can't get their heads around this. It's not like selling a new fancy phone. On sort of the mobile phone itself was an adoption curve. But in those adoption curves, you have something called the S-curve, which is there are points in the life cycle of a business where it's not clear it's going to survive or it needs to pivot to grow fast again. And Amazon saw that. In fact, it fell 90 % in 2000. And then it had several drops of 40 % or 50%, maybe even 60 % as we went through the S-curves of Amazon themselves or the market trying to establish, was this going to make it or not? That's normal.

32:53Bitcoin has gone through the same, Ethereum has gone through the same, the whole space will go through the same, and some won't survive. But I've thought about this because the narrative is the dot-com bubble. The actual reality is. That was the largest game changer I've ever seen, probably since the 1950s that I've heard of. We created a consumer society. The internet was probably bigger than that. It was massive. So I think we should look back upon that point in history differently and just say, yeah, it was an early S curve, but what came out of it changed the world. I know there are a lot of investors that have been clinging to value investing principles over the last decade as they've continued to underperform.

33:33Do you think traditional value investing, the way Warren Buffett historically has done it, is dead? I think it's not dead, but will it outperform? I don't know. Because the world is moving, and people are going to hate me for saying this, because it's such the antithesis of the cynical, this time is not different, but it's been proven actually for the last 21 years or longer, maybe 25 years, that Metcalfe's law and adoption curves, network effects are not valued in the same way. And value investors cannot value these things. And they say, yeah, you're all idiots, you'll see in the end. Well, we're 25 years in, I'm sorry, but somebody has to realize that that's a false storm.

34:16Now, does value investing mean you lower your risk and build a nice portfolio and it does well over time? Absolutely. Will it outperform? Network adoption stocks, zero chance ever, except in a down cycle. And when I talk about network effects, even though the price rise goes exponential over time, when you break it down, it can have some really big ups and downs. So I'm not talking about a smooth curve, it's all going to be easy, we'll make money forever. No, it's like crypto. It comes with a downside. So value investing is not going away. It will never outperform those companies. It will create robust, high-quality portfolios that perform over time.

34:53And that's okay. If you've got lower risk, do that. Robert Leonard I think that volatility piece that you mentioned is the part that a lot of people miss because they look at Amazon and they'll zoom out on the chart and they'll just see an exponential curve up. But if you actually drill in a little bit, you see those huge drawdowns that you just talked about. And yeah, if you held that whole period, sure, you'll get amazing, amazing results, but you have to stomach that. Robert Leonard Yeah. And probably the only people who held that are probably, well, not even the index funds because it wasn't big enough to be in the early index funds.

35:23They didn't have access to it, right? To sell. That's right. So the only person is Jeff Bezos and his ex-wife. They're probably the only people who ran the entire bull market. Yeah, it's incredible. I think about myself. I'm like, I've been telling myself for a long time, I'm still young, but when I first started into investing, I was a value investor. And this whole run-up, I keep telling myself, this time's not different. this time's not different, this time's not different, don't cave. But I keep talking to more people and I'm like, I'm starting to think I might need to evolve a little bit as an investor and start to think about these ideas.

35:55Robert Leonard I was the same as you, a miserable macro cynic who thought the world was according to how I thought about it. This recession really made me realize that I was wrong. And the understanding of crypto and adoption effects and network effects and technology made me realize that I was wrong. Well, again, nothing wrong with value investing. It'll do absolutely fine. It's not the way to take risk. And again, that's not for everybody. Preston Pysh, Is that why your portfolio has gone from a small percentage of crypto to a pretty large position? Robert Leonard, Entirely. I was an equity cynic.

36:28I didn't like the equity markets to high valuation. I would do some trading stuff, macro opportunities, but I've never been that buy and hold guy. I just couldn't get comfortable with this whole world. And then crypto started, and I've been in the space since 2013, but I still haven't figured it out. But I've really figured it out over the last 18 months and what it meant and how big the opportunity was. And I realized that to create true wealth, you have to understand a theme really well and have very high conviction and concentrate all of your risk, which is the opposite of what we're told. But if you go back and look at Jeff Bezos, why is he so rich?

37:07Because he concentrated all his wealth in one bet. Now, you have to do that intelligently. There's a bunch of caveats, a lot of caveats. But that's what I'm trying to tell people. It depends what it is you want to achieve. And for some people who are not really investors, to give some money to growth guides, give some money to a value guide, that's all fine. But people who really want to get into it themselves, there's different opportunities. Some people can get rich owning value. Some people can get rich being short sellers in a bull market. There's no shortage of ways of getting rich, but the easiest way is trend following.

37:42And if you've got exponential trends behind your back, everybody can be the dumb money and all make money. And that's great. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle. Just go into your podcast app and type in We Study Billionaires to find our collection of shows. We Study Billionaires is our flagship podcast, and we've made a name for ourselves over the years by interviewing the best investors in the world, including Ray Dalio, Howard Marks, Joel Greenblatt, and many, many more.

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41:07That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance. All right, back to the show. I mean, even Buffett says diversification is only for people who don't know what they're doing, right? When you talk to your fellow macro experts, what do they all think about crypto and Bitcoin specifically? They all moved across to macro. So I was probably the second, probably. The second in the space to move across, Dan Moorhead was first from Pantera. Then I started writing about it in 2013 and investing in it. Not many of the macro guys did, but then after that, one by one, they all went. I mean, they just left macro.

41:48And I keep bumping into old famous macro people that I grew up with, all entirely in crypto, crypto and technology. Forget it. Everything else is a waste of time. Don't generate the types of returns, risk-adjusted or otherwise. So they're all there and they're all coming. I don't know a single macro guy is not involved. Do you think there's a pool of investors, not necessarily your sophisticated investors, but just general investors that are trying to chase the next Bitcoin? I think that's my biggest concern really is people saw how much Bitcoin went up and how some people got so rich off it that they're diving into all these other ideas.

42:25And I'm not saying NFTs won't work or all these other things that are coming up. But do you think people are just almost blindly going into those, just because they're hoping it's the next Bitcoin? Robert Leonard Leonard Leonard Leonard Leonard Leonard Leonard Leonard Leonard Leonard Leonard Yes, but that's normal. I argue with the Bitcoin world over this all the time. Bitcoin world is Bitcoin only. And I'm like, no, all investment has a risk curve. Where you are on your risk curve is up to you. It's how much risk you want to take. Now, it's the same in emerging markets or equity markets. You might start with the S &P, but you want to eventually end up owning Indian equities, or whatever it may be, because they're riskier.

42:58They might go up more, but they might go down more. So risk adjusted returns, you're hoping will be better. That's what I do. That's normal. And that's why many of these alternative tokens do very well, because capital flows into them in the risk cycle. That's really normal. Same happens in junk bonds and credit and everything else. And because a bunch of people lost money in 2017, they're trying to tell people not to take risk in these things because they lost money. No, what we should be doing is educating people in what risks they're taking and why they're taking them. So they should not be putting all of their money into a token because they think it goes up, hoping that it goes up more than Bitcoin.

43:39They need to be educated in the type of risk that they're taking and that it's okay to take that risk, but maybe have some Bitcoin and maybe some Ethereum, and then you can add some of that risk at the edges. Dinner with a mate of mine last night from Little Cayman, the island of 140 people, And he's like, I've been watching all of your stuff, and I've been watching Real Vision crypto and blah, blah, blah. I love this space. I said, what do you own? He said, I own Cardano and XRP. I said, why? What do you know about those? Well, they kind of feel like, start with a core allocation to Bitcoin, move into Ethereum, spread some other money into other projects that could be interesting.

44:15They're very early. Some will go to zero. Some will go nowhere. Some will go up a lot. None of us know at this point. We don't know what the adoption curve looks like. But that's what the space needs to be saying and not shutting people down and saying, well, I lost money in 2017. I'm trying to protect you. That's nonsense. That's just tribalism to make Bitcoin go up more than others. It doesn't make sense. It's a big world out there. I can't count how many times I've been told by people, not pressure them, but I'll push back on them and ask them, or I'll challenge them and say, why are you investing in that?

44:47And they'll just say, oh, I feel like, or I feel like this. And I'm like, God, that's not a thesis, right? Robert Leonard No. So how I addressed it was with some intellectual honesty. I pretty much understand Bitcoin as well as anybody, not the technology aspects, but the macro opportunity, what it's doing, where it's going, the players involved, all of that. Ethereum, I'm pretty comfortable with as well. But I also think that the entire digital asset space is going to be absolutely gigantic. And so I wanted exposure. So if my thesis is that network effects are the largest drivers of these things, So I went to Twitter and asked people, okay, show me your best coin and why.

45:24So I got 6 ,500 replies. But what I did was just skin through, okay, what are most people involved in? What do they care about? Where is the reasonable analysis coming from? So I got a basket of 10, equally weighted, only 10 % of my portfolio. It's gone up 100 % in a month and a half, but it's 10 % of my portfolio. And I just took an equal weighted basket and said, look, I don't know, I'm not smart enough. But I figured that the space will go up because the risk curve goes up where the bull market goes. And within that, I'm going to learn a lot about the space, about which one is which, what's working, what projects are really getting network effects.

45:59And that's okay to do because let's say RHEL is a total idiot. 10 out of 10 go to zero, lose 10%. Last time I checked, Ethereum was up 10 % today. I don't care. That's how you take risk. Why do so many people think only Bitcoin is the answer? Is it because it was the first? Robert Leonard As Preston. Because they're conflating, this is my opinion, and again, I'm not trying to upset people, they're conflating money with value. Robert Leonard Bitcoin is a monetary system, essentially, and it's not at the money stage yet, but it's a store of value. It is a collateral asset. It's all of these things that I've talked about.

46:34And there's a potential that it could become a form of money once the volatility goes down and adoption is massive. That's the Bitcoin maximalist argument. I have no problem with that. But money is not the only transfer of value. Other things have value. If things didn't have value, then nobody would buy art or classic cars or equities or anything. They would just hold the dollar because that's money. It's not. Other things have value and they will outperform the value of Bitcoin and they will underperform the value of Bitcoin. And that's just how the world works. We talked about investments, underperforming, outperforming all through this interview.

47:10That is what will happen. And this is the internet of value that's being built. It's the exchange, ownership, storage, creation, earning of value. That's miles bigger than people are really thinking. And they're saying it can all be built on Bitcoin. Sure. Will it be? No chance. Will Bitcoin be money? Possibly. Will it be an important part of our financial future? almost definitely. So there's probabilities embedded in this, right? And for people to say, you've got zero chance, you're an idiot because you're buying Ethereum or whatever it is, is more wrong than the person buying it because they're ascribing zero chance, a zero probability.

47:55And when you push them, they say, well, those things, they all trend towards zero, right? I've gone through, written a whole rebuttal about the John Pfeffer article and the fact that utility tokens don't have value and only Bitcoin has value, it's not true. It's provable that network effects is how you value these things. Bitcoin is only valued on network effects. It's not valued by any other mechanism. Same with Ethereum, it's identical in how it's valued, and so are all of these. That's a shock to people because they don't want to believe it. Bitcoin believers are becoming like gold believers.

48:26There can only be one. Gold is the real money. Now it's Bitcoin. Last time I checked, gold's been around for 10 ,000 years. There've been loads of other forms of money that have tried to compete with it or have competed with it. David Steinberg And there's been loads of stores of value, millions of them. If not, there'll be no real estate. It's absurd. Robert Leonard One of the most common concerns I see from investors about crypto is the worry of government regulation. I read recently a headline that Ray Dalio even said that he wouldn't be surprised if the government outlawed it. What role do you see the government playing in the world of crypto?

48:58And in your opinion, is it possible for the government to really outlaw it? Robert Leonard I don't think they're going to. I think it's in everybody's interest to have an independent financial asset, like gold has been. I think it's in everybody's interest. Everybody knows we've pretty much got a broken financial system. Bitcoin plays a very important role within that, and I think it'll play an even more important role. It keeps governments honest, it keeps people honest, it keeps people and inability to save money outside of just the interest rates or whatever that the government offer you. It's no riskier or less risky than owning equities.

49:33I don't think it's a problem. I think they will regulate our involvement with it, meaning they don't want you to not pay tax. Regardless of what you think you should be doing with tax, you actually live in a country where you democratically vote, and part of that system is a tax-based system. In fact, every society in history of mankind as a tax-based society. And if you don't pay your taxes, then what they say is, you should no longer be a member of society, i.e. you go to jail, because that's the point of organized societies. So if you want to not pay taxes, you can move to the Cayman Islands.

50:06We do pay tax, we pay import duty, and we pay a bunch of other stuff. Everyone pays their share to a government, or if not, society doesn't function. So they will make sure that you pay your fair share. If they try and excessively penalize it, 100 % capital gains tax on crypto, well, then you'll force it offshore and force it underground and will create more problems. I think they know it. All the noise I get is they just want to try and regulate it so it fits in with their own system. So they want the on-ramps and off-ramps. The ECB, I can see, are trying to slow adoption by driving this ESG narrative.

50:42Bitcoin's expensive. The whole world is moving to cleaner energy. Bitcoin is one of the things, but the ECB have used it. Why? Why? Because the institutions have a legal mandate for ESG. So it's going to slow them down in adopting it. That's all that's going on, the slowdown, I think. That's fine. I understand why. A bit of a fun question. I know there's no definitive answer to this, but what are your thoughts on Satoshi Nakamoto? Is it one person, group of people? Will we ever even know? Now we're just in conspiracy world, right? So my conspiracy theory, which I've held since day one, is when you look at the language, it's transatlantic.

51:21I've always thought that it came out of GCHQ in the UK and the NSA in the US. I've always thought it came out of government. I've had conversations over my years with several members of the state security infrastructure in the United States. They know everything about all of this. They understand its place. They understand that the financial system is also the Achilles heel of the global world. The other risk they understand is China. They don't not understand the risk of China. They understand this stuff, and they have huge teams of people working on outcome analysis. And I've spoke at length in the past about the financial system's problems.

52:04And when you've got the smartest cryptographers in the world working for both the UK and the US, then it's not absurd to think a small group gets given an opportunity to say, hey, listen, if you could design a different system, what would it be? Because we are going to migrate across to that system and it will have worked. So that's my view. Could be 100 % wrong. But my view is it was kind of built as a plan B purposely. Does Bitcoin change or the world of crypto change at all if we ever find out who it is? And it is in fact a government? No, because they don't control it. The only problem is the outstanding coins, right?

52:40That's just a money supply issue. Somebody could push down the price for a while. Okay, fine. I don't know how much they're worth now, 40 billion. I mean, Christ, it's not that big. You could probably sell that to the government of Singapore and investment fund in one transaction. It's not the end of the world. But it would upset people if that were the case. So I think people would much prefer the narrative of a mysterious person gifted it to the world. It could have been Hal Finney. He's dead now. We'll never know. Robert Leonard We briefly talked about NFTs at the beginning of the conversation.

53:10I want to go back to them. Can you define exactly what they are for us and how you see them as a potential investment asset class? All NFTs are individual tokens that you attach to physical or digital assets. So that means the asset is now recorded on a blockchain. It can be for a bottle of wine or it could be for digital art. It could be for music. It could be for IP rights. It's just a token that attaches to something. So then I can then transfer ownership to you. And you've got now proven ownership. So this picture behind me is actually an NFT. And I've printed it off. Somebody created it for me, of me, and sent it to my Ethereum wallet.

53:52It's yours. I now own it. So I can print it off and put it on the wall. I could sell it to you too. So that works. So that's what all they are. So why are they going up so much? Well, you're just opening a bunch of assets that couldn't be sold before to be now rare because digital things weren't rare. We talked about music. It's lost its rarity so people don't make any money selling records. But if you're the kings of Leon, you can now create an album on an NFT and sell it to one person, your super fan. They might pay you 10 million bucks for it. Or you could sell it to 1 ,000 fans and charge them$1 ,000 each.

54:32Or you could sell it to everybody and sell them$1 each. whatever. It just depends how much scarce do you want. So what was the piece of art that sold 69 million, the Beeple piece? Well, he had already become one of the leading digital artists in the world. That piece of art was actually 5 ,000 pieces of art. His entire artistry from learning to present day, all together created a larger piece of art, a meta-narrative art. So that actually makes them all valued at about 15 ,000 each. in reality. Because it's now the ownership is on a blockchain, you've got an authenticated thing. Now, people are in uproar about these pictures.

55:12It's digital art. It can be replicated. It's worthless. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's the same value. It must go up. Growth investing, stupid, all of this stuff, just narratives. The reality is, is I can bring you a picture from Michelangelo. Basically, it's a bit of cotton and some paint, and it can be worth$500 million dollars. That's as absurd as digital art. Photographic art, as long as it's signed by the photographer, it's worth money. If you have the negative, it's worth even more. Rare books. If you get a first edition signed by William Shakespeare, not that they exist, it's worth almost infinite money.

55:53But yet you and I can go into any bookstore and buy Shakespeare, or we could buy a secondhand one for 50 cents. So that's what it's doing. It's creating authenticated scarcity. Same as having an album signed by the singer. It can be used for all sorts of things. So what we're seeing now is people buying art. Some of this is a speculative frenzy. Some of that art's worth nothing. Some of it is great art, be worth a lot. And again, I've seen the artwork world go through this. Damien Hirst back in 2000 created a tank of a shark in formaldehyde and sold it to Stevie Cohen, the hedge fund manager for 20 million bucks or whatever.

56:31I was like, outrageous, this is not art. Angry man shouts at internet. And the reality was, yes, it was art. And Damien Hirst has been one of the most prolific and famous artists of the 21st century. Same with Banksy. Street art, that's not art, that's just a mess. Guess what? Banksy sells for a lot of money now. It just depends on what people adopt as a Soro Valley and what they don't. So NFTs are just a way of that, and they will develop and morph into ways that you and I have no understanding of. And that's what excites me. One of those things is Jack Dorsey selling his tweet. I can understand.

57:04I can wrap my head around everything that you mentioned. I just can't understand. Why would somebody want to even buy Jack Dorsey's first tweet? Who knows? It's mainly because we're already ascribing dollar values to this stuff. And actually what it is, is Ethereum. All of this is being sold for Ethereum, not dollars. And if you've held on to Ethereum forever and you've got 300 million bucks of Ethereum to prove the point about NFTs, because you're interested, because you own an NFT platform. I mean, look at the guys who bought the Beeple piece. I mean, they're all over this space. So part of it is to drive the space forwards.

57:38So yes, that may be worth nothing, that tweet. Probably worth nothing. It doesn't matter. What it is, is proving a concept to a much broader opportunity. So we can, again, miserable old cynics shouting at the internet will say, it's all worth nothing. The reality is, is like we talked about before in 1997, 98, 99, 2000, where everyone said, oh, that was all a big bust. I think you and I have discovered that actually it wasn't. If that hadn't happened, you and I would not be doing what we're doing today, which is what? Video and audio perfectly streaming over the internet in different continents, different countries.

58:15So really, was 2000 the terrible thing, or was it just the reallocation of capital into the right places and the right opportunities? So this will be the same. Yeah. In a similar vein, but different, I also invest in real estate. That's my second podcast about real estate. People always ask me, is now a good time to buy real estate? And I always say that as long as the numbers make sense, then it's always the right time to buy a deal. And everybody's response is, what about 2007, 2008? And I say, well, the same thing that you just said about the internet as well. If you go back and you look and you bought a deal that made sense with the right numbers, if you held it to today, you're fine.

58:49So it's the same thing. If you buy now, as long as the numbers make sense, it makes sense. Robert Leonard That's right. And if you're overpaying in a racy market that could collapse, then that's fine. I mean, Miami is a classic example of that. It goes through the boom-bust cycle. People need to understand Miami property is more volatile. It's always the land of dreams, hopes and dreams. Everyone rushes in, pays too much for real estate, builds too much real estate, real estate market collapses, too much leverage, and off we go. But over time, has Miami real estate gone up? Yeah. Have people made billions of dollars from it?

59:20Yeah. And it's still been very cyclical. It's okay. Which habits or principles have you incorporated into your life that you think have helped lead to your success that not enough people do, but should? Travel. Without question. Without question, the single best thing you can ever do is travel to places that make you uncomfortable. So I'm not talking about going to Ibiza in the summer or, you know, oh, I went to London and mates took the train to Paris. Bullshit. Go to uncomfortable places. Meet people you wouldn't ordinarily meet. Because when you understand how the world, rich texture of the world, different people's opinions, how they live their lives, and they may not be the same as yours, but they're equally right in how it works for them.

1:00:02There is no my way or the highway. It is a very complex, beautiful place out there. You understand the role of nature and why we should care about our environment, understand how economies develop, how people develop, different schools of thought, different religion. I mean, that alone makes you open-minded. Being open-minded allows you to be a better investor. Being open-minded gives you a sense of opportunity, that you will let opportunities come to you. Being closed-minded, not leaving, traveling only to places that you think are safe, where you take no risk. All the quality of the magic of life lives outside of that circle.

1:00:40And until you figure that out, you won't realize what you're missing. It's everything that lies outside the comfort zone. I've even found that to be true even just across the United States. For a long time, I didn't travel much when I was younger. My parents never traveled much. And then when I got a little bit older, I started to travel. And even just across the country in the US, California is so much different. I'm on the East Coast in New Hampshire, we're so much different. And it was huge to learn. It's such a big world out there. But anything, even if you're not an ability to travel, do things outside your comfort zone.

1:01:09You don't like hiking and stuff. Well, then force yourself to go for a week with some friends camping or trekking. Do stuff you wouldn't do. You're a little bit introverted. Well, force yourself to go to a bar on your own in a place you've never been to before and meet people. And magic happens. And it's hard. It's really hard. But magic happens and stories happen. And then life never happens at home. Life happens outside. Yeah, I agree. I was an introverted accountant. And now here I am, I'm talking to you, Kevin O 'Leary, all these amazing, amazing guests. So I completely agree. Raul, thanks so much for joining me today.

1:01:45I told you this before we started recording, but I followed Real Vision since it just started. So it was awesome to be able to sit down and chat with you. For those listening that want to learn more about you and Real Vision, where's the best place for them to go? You can find me on Twitter, at Raoul GMI, which is short for Global Macro Investor. So at Raoul GMI at Twitter, you can follow me there. Always go and check out Real Vision. I think there's very few people listening to this podcast who won't be aware of Real Vision. Real Vision, there's a free YouTube channel. There's podcasts of our free content.

1:02:16There's the subscription side, which has got all of the amazing stuff, plus all the learning tools. We're embedding education through all of our tiers, and we have a free crypto channel. So there's almost, if anybody is interested in any part of the financial macro or economic arena, it's all there for you. We built it for you. I can't recommend Real Vision and following Raul on Twitter enough. So guys, go check that out. Raul, thank you so much. Thank you. Really enjoyed it. I just hope I don't piss off Preston too much. All right, guys. That's all I had for this week's episode of Millennial Investing.

1:02:51I'll see you again next week. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by the Investors Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin and every Saturday, we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.