We've got about six years before everything changes and we thought the money in the bank was safe We thought our house was safe, but none of that's true and the moment you put your money and your savings in the bank You don't own anything and your future self is getting poorer by 11 percent every year
And that's the problem with the financial security and wealth creation But I know where the opportunities lie and the answer so could you explain it to me through the context of this?
Okay, so Raul pal is one of the most influential voices in the ever -changing world in modern finance Unpacking the secrets of crypto and how to build wealth in an uncertain future People know their futures they can't afford by house They have less savings debts from university people in their 30s is the first
generation that won't be as rich as their parents So what advice would you give to set myself up for wealth in the future?
You start investing, but what about the people that no matter how hard they work?
They still don't have that excess income to invest you don't need huge savings You just need to understand how to look for opportunities For example the S &P 500 is not worth your time real estate doesn't really make any money Those days are gone gold actually lost your money but investing in crypto
like Bitcoin gives us Stupidly high returns in short posts growing at 150 percent of scaling at twice the speed the internet So now the guy with $500 can get rich.
I have the questions here then so we're now 30 years old ish Have a miss the boat No Much of the reason why I think people don't invest in cryptos They've heard stories where people have put too much in and they've lost it all so what if you're wrong?
We're gonna talk about how lots of it up, and then how do I invest in crypto?
It's really simple gonna start somewhere, so Do that and you'll make money Well from a very high -level perspective And I'm being unspecific here, so I'm looking for an unspecific answer What exactly is the mission that you're on in this season of your life like who what are you doing?
And who are you doing it for?
So obviously you do it for yourself but Really, I think that I've been armed with tools and knowledge Over the years my 30 -year career that I kind of have a decent sense of where the world is going Where the opportunities lie and where the risk lies for people and I can see the problems people are facing
And I think I've got answers So what I want to do is help as many people as possible in that journey and why that happened to me was I was in Spain back in 2012 and also during the financial crisis 2008 and I was writing macroeconomic research for my research service global macro investor, and I had
seen it coming I predicted it.
I knew it was coming.
I knew the problems.
I warned all of my friends that nobody listened When we understood about the financial crisis what was going to happen and most of them because I was living in a beach town in Spain They were in real estate They all went bust but worse than that Was that when we got to the European crisis?
When basically the governments of Europe ran out of money the banks also run out of money and As opposed to being bailed out they got what known as bailed in which means that they took your savings to pay the debtors and Friends of my parents and friends of friends wiped out and they were like, why
didn't we know? I'm like that was a question that sat with me for a while Why didn't we know and I saw that everybody had lost total faith in the system so Occupy Wall Street happened at the same period and It was people angry is like we thought money in the bank was safe.
We thought our house was safe We thought the system was there for us and suddenly they all wake up and realize the system was not there for them It was actually for other people.
Yeah, people talk about bankers never went to jail no, there was there was that sense that it was never concluded and It sat with me for a long time thinking.
What can I do about this?
Because I was writing Super high -end kind of research for hedge funds and you know big asset management firms and so it wasn't accessible to people And then I wrote a couple of articles one got leaked in zero hedge in its early days and it became superviral And I thought maybe there's something here that I
could reach a broader audience because then I can help these people and that's when we came up with the idea of real vision Which was the idea of interviewing the people at the very heart of the system and kind of sharing the details because these people weren't hiding it They wanted to help people
as well. Everyone had that sense that we could help people so I'm still on that journey and that journey kind of has taken a multitude of paths starting businesses But also just trying to educate people on why they feel the way they do You know why politics is so polarized never used to be this bad,
you know, what's really going on and who really to blame and What to do about it if I stop the average person on the street that knows you and watches real vision and I asked them What his rowl in his channel and his information done for you.
What do you think they would say the average person?
They just say thank you because we've helped demystify it the world of finance and You see we all have The roots of unhappiness and happiness often comes from does your vision of your future self match where you are today Can you see that path?
whether that's finances whether it's health, they're all very similar journeys and When people can't see the vision of their future self and they can't see how to get there They get upset and what we've tried to do is Unfuck people's future which is an expression we use which is a way which is a a Mimetic
or a meme or just a short phraseology to help people understand We understand that you feel like you can't get to where you want to get to But there are options to do it and I think people are immensely grateful for that in general If you're on a mission to help people unfuck their future, can you?
Explain to me specifically the things that stand the chance of fucking their future from a macro perspective And when I say macro, we have to pause and just define what I mean by the word macro when I think of the word Macro, I mean big picture.
Yeah perspective. So from a big picture perspective.
What are the things that stand a Chance of fucking my future.
Okay, so and we can we can dig into why these things have occurred but generally speaking Wages in real terms adjusted for inflation haven't gone up for decades So nobody's getting richer if you're an American you have this powerful mean which is the American dream But that is not a reality for most
people. The reality is you grind it out your savings are not worth what you thought they'd be this whole promise of your pension and Swannin around on a cruise ship around the Caribbean when you're older living in a nice house.
None of that is true and it's because Wages haven't gone up.
So, okay, so let's cut to Somebody who's in their 30s now Because this is the really important cohort I think for this they Can't afford to buy house if I go back to when I was 30 I bought a house in London and it was It was a nice place in a good area and it was three and a half times salary.
Yes. I was in finance I was earning a high salary.
You can't buy anything for three and a half times your salary Now that same place if I took the same kind of young investment banker salary is probably eight or ten times So it's triples in how expensive it is to just buy your first house So what is a house firstly, it's your quality of life particularly,
you know In England the UK In the UK, sorry in the US where home buyers, you know, we think of our home as our castle It's it's like the thing that solidifies our security But you know if you're in Germany for example, they don't their rent but if we think about the mindset of owning a house it's an asset
that you can then pass on or you can sell if you need to and an asset is Is Really a future savings plan.
It's something you save now then in the future you can consume you can buy stuff with But what you're doing is for the average 35 year old the average millennial is 36 years old They can't afford to buy the house So therefore their future self is poorer If they think of how much of the stock market
they can buy They can buy less with that money.
They have less savings.
They they've got debts from University So they don't have the ability to get out of this trap and then what we are finding is because of this They're having to live with other people into their 30s They're having to they don't have kids and then I get married and these numbers have collapsed since 1983
you've seen these numbers come down from People living on their own so I you could get your job get yourself an apartment has gone from 80 percent to 62 percent You're seeing the marriage rate half you're seeing The whole ownership rate go from 50 percent to 30 percent These are all expressions of the same
problems Which is people know their future is fucked and they can feel it.
They have a sense of desperation You see then the same cohort of kids in their 30s doing two jobs three jobs four jobs That's not because they want to Nobody wants to work 12 hour days seven days a week.
It's because they have to and Their parents the baby boomers who are in their 70s and retiring never had that they were the richest generation the world have ever seen so this is the first generation that won't be as rich as their parents and That's a weird thing because we're all used to human progress
the American dream If the American dream is well You never be as wealthy as your parents and they were middle -class people and I'm now less well off than them That's kind of fucked.
So look, here's some stats about a 30 year old today versus a 30 year old in 1983 so a 30 year old in 1983 85 percent of them Live them their own they could afford a house or an apartment to rent or to buy now It's 64 percent so people living having to live with other people Marriage rates they've gone
from 80 percent of 30 year olds in 1983.
You are married to 47 percent now Kids having kids gone from 60 percent to 32 % Population growth is collapsing because people can't afford it and home ownership for a 30 year old has gone from 50 percent to 32 percent it just shows that dramatic change has happened happened over the decades and Why
each generation has found it more and more difficult?
to be like their parents so I am 30 years old ish.
Yeah, I like to hang on to 30 for as long as I can um What advice would you give to someone like me?
That's my age or maybe even younger, you know mid -20s as to how to play the game Over the coming years to make sure that I don't find myself in a position where I'm having to work two jobs on poor I don't have assets.
I don't have anything to show for it Like if you take it right back to being like maybe let's say a 20 year old a 25 year old How'd you play the game?
And when I think about this I'm thinking like wealth creation how to then preserve my wealth like what's the game?
So the first part of the game is income.
Okay without income You don't have the cash to do the other things to invest or to look for opportunity So first thing is income but even that's changing and how we earn incomes these days You know it used to be you go and work for a big firm you get paid you get the benefit That's all going and nobody wants
to do it So you kind of end up having to be an entrepreneur work two or three different things The point being if your 20s do all of that work day and night Really do as many things learn as much as you can fail as often as possible.
What about what kind of balance and your 20s?
Fuck it Because that's the time to put in the hard work your work -life balance actually comes out later I'm a big believer in yes, if you're straight out of university go traveling for a year or two You know that a gets rid of the pent -up need but also gives you a much broader perspective on the world
than any other single Thing that you can do in your life after that you get your head down and you get your head down probably to the mid 30s Okay, so when you say get my head down I'm guessing one of the most important things in that season of your life is knowledge acquisition Yeah and then if that's true
then the next question is what type of knowledge should I be acquiring to set myself up for wealth in future because I could go acquire knowledge of you know, how to clean a toilet or how to Be a gardener, but what is the most high returning knowledge?
For me it is firstly be an expert on something.
Okay, and then a generalist on as much as possible Right be that expert because somebody will pay you for that at least for the time being and we'll talk about how the world may Change in the future.
But for the time being if you're an expert in whatever it may be Whether it's driving a taxi or whether it's a computer scientist doesn't matter be an expert Compete with yourself day and night to be the best that you can So at least it's gonna give you the chance to earn some money.
Okay, so just to drill down on that before we continue to Move forward.
How does one become an expert?
Like what are the cool?
Like how do I have to show up to become an expert you're an expert on many okay So this to me is there's a trick that I learned and it's called manifesting your own destiny And what you do is what I've always done my whole life is I envisage myself five or ten years in the future What do I want to be
and? You look around you and say okay What are the things that I want to have that future vision of myself as opposed to the 30 40 year at path?
It's too difficult.
Give it five years.
We don't want to be in five years Okay, and you look around that future world and you think okay.
Well, how would I got here?
You know if I've Built a business cleaning windows and I've got 20 people working for me.
Well, how did I get there?
Well, I would have had to have figured out.
Okay, how do I make this scale?
How do I employ people?
How do I train them to have the right standards all of that you ask yourself your question of what that success looks like?
and You kind of deconstruct it and go back and make it happen So you reverse engineer it back from that that five -year reality?
So Window cleaner with 20 employees.
I need to learn management skills.
I need to learn how to clean a window counting accounting I need to learn probably marketing.
Yeah, so I can spread the message of my business.
I Probably need to learn potentially like how to speak like public speaking because that's sales.
I need to money to learn sales technology You know what?
Solvements detergents the people using what other ways of doing it more efficiently and faster so I can beat the competitor Oh, so I might go and work for a big window cleaning company to see how they do it to try and see the opportunity in What they're not doing.
Yeah, or even somebody who manufactures stuff for that sector It can be anything where you can glean knowledge to give yourself an unfair advantage Now on podcasts, it always makes it like easy Everyone becomes an entrepreneur before you know, everybody's rich doesn't work that way But all I'm trying
to do is stack the odds in your favor of getting close to that That image of your future self and you can reverse engineer it So I'm not an expert and whatever I'm I'm 29 and I'm an expert in window cleaning or whatever it might be and I'm a generalist in many things you're saying that's gonna enable
me to start to build wealth in something so that I can go to the next season of my Life, so when you become an expert or when you become good at something if you're careful in your expenditure You will produce excess income Right because people are going to pay you for your expertise So if you manage
yourself carefully in those first few years That excess cash You can then choose what to do with it Now maybe you want to build the real business that you wanted to build in the first place the crazy idea you've had And if you're in your 20s, you can take the risk and blow your savings on that crazy
idea Because you've actually learned how to do build a business already by building the one that you started Or you start investing now The world of investments was this world of weird financial advisors and they would tell you some things like well you do this and then You're a 25 year old in 45 years
time. You'll get some money.
I mean fuck that. I mean What am I gonna get out of it when I'm 65 years old?
I suddenly get a lump sum that I've spent my whole life saving for I don't feel it it's got I've got no emotional touch into my pension plan and I've got real world problems to solve.
I can't buy a house.
I Can't get married.
I can't have kids So I need to solve these in a shorter time period than my pension My pension was suitable for a different generation that just needed enough after they stopped working So I gotta solve that and the answer is investing then most people roll their eyes and go really stocks and bonds.
It's boring Yeah, but the world has changed the world has changed in many many ways But it's offered us opportunities whether it's investing in technology investing in crypto that gives us much higher returns Stupidly higher returns in shorter periods of time Okay, that's some magic that's magic for young
people It may be too risky for their parents, but if you're young and you can take some risk Okay, here's your chance.
So now you can build a business use some excess savings put them in investments Now you're on the path.
So let's get on to investing then but just before we get on to investing I was playing through the different sort of personas of my audience and I was thinking that some of them are working really really Really hard at the moment.
They're doing you know, there might be a cab driver they could be you know doing some sort of manual labor and It feels to them that no matter how hard they work.
They still don't have that excess income to invest so for those people and this is a little bit of a Maybe a contentious question like is there something that they're doing wrong as it relates to the game?
No, the game is the game and You have to play the game So, okay, so maybe you don't have thousands to invest I've seen many many people in markets like crypto go from $500 to $500 ,000 Now there's a lot of people who don't either But all I'm saying is the opportunity is there you don't need to bet your house
You don't need to have huge savings.
You just need to focus on what you're doing Understand how to manage risks of it and how to look for opportunities and it's the self self teaching is how do I become that?
Guy's got a half a million dollar portfolio Considering I've only got $500 today or $1 ,000 today.
Is that possible still?
Yeah Very much. Haven't I missed the boat?
No No, it's happening again right now in mean coins.
This is fascinating People watching this will go what a bunch of nonsense.
These are coins tokens, we'll talk about blockchain and and this later, but these are investments based on a Mean a joke a joke something that grabs attention on the Internet and You can bet on Those well, what is that?
That's about betting on attention itself if you think about a business like Facebook or Google or any of these that Twitter they're all based on attention and Now we can bet on attention.
Do people find that funny?
Are they gonna find it funny in?
Six months time or six weeks time and we can bet on this stuff.
Okay, this is the super speculative end But it's also very cultural.
It's not about investment bankers.
It's not about gatekeepers.
It's about You pitting yourself thinking is this gonna catch on viral and if it is is it gonna grow bigger now some of those might do a thousand X in six months now 99 % go to zero but all I'm saying is returns are there and Then you've got different levels of return if we look at Bitcoin Well, actually
let's compare it the S &P 500 and this is this will be an important number later What's the S &P 500?
That's the US stock market?
It's the broadest measure of stock market and you can buy shares in it now that grows at about 10 % a year 11 % a year So let's imagine you've got your thousand dollars Well 11 % of years gonna take your fucking long time to make any money, right?
So it is not worth your time the financial advisors will say yes, you must do this start now I'm like I'm sorry.
It's just not gonna change your life Okay, then we go to technology stocks NASDAQ does about 18 % a year.
Okay, that's starting to add up because these numbers Compound after a while, you know, it goes from a thousand To 1 ,200 and then you know, it's another 20 % on top of that 20 % these numbers add up fast Bitcoin since 2011 It's been a hundred and forty five percent a year Even with it falling eighty percent
three times in the middle of that So a hundred and forty five percent a year as long as you're in it long enough Okay.
Now that's really starting to pay off and then as you Get slightly more speculative.
I So once you start moving into that world, okay This is a whole different world now now the guy with a thousand dollars can get rich What about buying a house?
Because I think most people think the minute they get some excess income I don't know for sure when I say most people it's like 95 % of people that walk the streets Think that the minute you get some excess income You should take it and put it in a savings account and buy your first house get your first
mortgage Now as a strategy for wealth creation and Unfucking your life.
Is that a good approach?
No, cuz it's not worth creation People think of houses as like an asset But in the end you barely ever will sell your house to take the money out You might downsize later in life if absolutely needed.
You might sell it but generally speaking your house is The lifestyle bank now that is super important and I think it is the most important trade of all is the lifestyle bank So what do you do this all for you want lifestyle?
So do you sacrifice your future self having more money?
By having a house and having security earlier.
I Would argue those days are gone.
What do you mean? So I could do it because it's three times income Yeah, so a house was not expensive for me So I could start paying it off a bit sooner and it became not a big deal.
But now your mortgage is likely Huge amount versus your income you'll spend the rest of your life paying it off and most of the time you're just paying off The interest so you don't actually you know getting anywhere.
You don't own that house.
Anything goes wrong.
The bank takes it away from you So you've got to get more control of your life and that is by having Savings that are growing then you can make the choice, you know Let's say that example of the person gone from a thousand dollars to five hundred thousand dollars Maybe on route.
They say well, I'm gonna take some money off the table and put it in my lifestyle bank and I'm gonna buy a house That's what I've done my whole career and I find the lifestyle bank that that's the reward Because now it's like okay.
Nobody can take my house away so if I'm trying to Build wealth Buying a house is not a good idea.
It's not the best approach to take to build wealth You're telling me that it's actually not well about psychology and about emotion the house and it's not about making myself wealthy and I I wanted to read some of the comments that People often post when we talk about these subjects because I think
you'll probably the guy to Address some of them.
I bought a house and it's the best thing I ever did it launched my mindset in new directions Remember that having your own space has profound Psychological impact and can be life -changing for some that don't live in a healthy environment.
I guess that speaks to your point about It being a psychological you'd also get the same feeling if you rented That was a nice place and you knew that, you know, your rent was secure.
It wasn't gonna go up.
Whatever it was I don't think there's any difference in that as long as you can feel that you've got security You can take risk and do other things.
I purchased a house in 2014 and I sold it seven years later for 66k profit I've put a large amount of the equity into a financial investment portfolio with my bank and it's been down 2 % Since I also put some money into different shares based on Warren Buffett strategy, and that's now up 18 % a friend
of mine also lost about 30 to 40k on investing in the stock market.
You have to be careful I don't think there's a correct solution Some house purchases do amazing this idea that some house purchase do amazing and some people make returns as a sentiment.
I often see About buying a house.
Yes, and you know, we're here today in the UK.
There's a big Idea about buying two or three houses getting a mortgage renting them out using the cash flow to pay for the other one But that's a lot of people's dream portfolio idea you know, I've rented out houses in the past generally it's If you're not on a big city like London It's generally often
a terrible business because you've got to repair them.
There's a lot goes on headache headache tenants Yeah, you know people think it's easy money.
I just I just do nothing and it all makes money There is no easy money in this world and this risk right because that little pyramid of Mortgages are all backed by your income be able to put pay the mortgage on the first house if you lose your job, what happens?
Then it becomes problematic because if you're losing your job, maybe the economy's slow and other people are losing their job And suddenly before you know none of these mortgages are getting paid and guess what?
You don't know any of this stuff Houses are not a Safe investment.
They feel safe because the price doesn't go up and down every day.
It's not on the screen.
It's not on CNBC But that illiquid which means they don't often trade but sometimes Something happens in that equation either the price goes down or your ability to pay that mortgage goes and Then the whole thing collapses in seconds and 2008 was that double?
Everyone lost their jobs.
So they couldn't pay the mortgage and the house prices collapse and So I don't think houses is the panacea.
They're not the perfect answer Yes, they can be real estate is a decent opportunity and we'll talk about debasement and currency and how that all works and real estate is Okay, it's certainly not the best but But you know, yes if you're rich and you can own these things without mortgages You can be
the Duke of Westminster and own half of London and just collect rent You can do that for X generations and be rich forever.
I get it But most of us don't get into that situation My brother who has been an investment banker for about 10 years now works in my company in my fund He said to me when I was young when it comes to creating wealth What you want to do is focus on games that very few people can play but you have a unique
advantage in Because he goes everyone can buy house So you can you should assume that the returns from doing it aren't gonna be amazing So he was like go find a game that you have high leverage you have a unfair advantage He's the expert in something it be the expert in something where you because of your
knowledge your expertise your experience your contacts You can play that game but very few other people can because that's why you'll yield your highest returns And I always thought about that just very logically thinking if everyone can play the game Don't play that game if you're expecting high returns
because the returns are gonna be very low And I'd say the first game everyone plays when they get a bit bit of income is by house So logically you can go okay That's not gonna yield me the best returns unless I get lucky unless I get exceptionally lucky And I buy some barn in an area and then they build
a bloody Whole Foods next door and it becomes the the center of the world Which isn't again the probability is still not great.
So what do you think of that as a theory?
That's the same theory as I said is Be an expert in something and you can find more opportunity If you're just a generalist, it's really hard because you're competing against average people doing average things right if you're just working in an insurance office, I Mean there's thousands of people and plus
you're competing with AI, you know, how you ever gonna be something within that?
How do you become an expert now you could teach yourself?
Okay If I don't mind this industry and I think I know it maybe I need to learn management skills Maybe I spend all the time listening to podcasts and learning management Maybe it's and that's I can then manifest my destiny.
But as you say Doing something other people aren't doing is a superpower Do you know what's really interesting with that is this idea of becoming an expert?
I think is critically important, but then there's this other step I found which is Knowing what market to apply your expertise to to yield the greatest return and the very simple analogy I'll give you is for the first portion of my career.
I was I became an expert in social media now with that skill set and expertise you can do a number of things you can help a fashion company sell more dresses and That will yield X return a smaller return then in the second portion of my career I realized that at that expertise was highest value and most
rare if I applied it to Helping public companies tell their story before their IPO Because the variance and outcome for the public company that I was applying my social media expertise to was billions so in the second sort of Sort of era of my career I worked with companies that were about to IPO about to
go to the public markets where their performance could be You know their market cap could be 1 billion or if they were really good at telling their story in a world where retail investors are now So interesting to everyone because of Wall Street Bets their market cap could be 3 billion Then that means
they would pay me seven figures for my skill set and I often think about it You think about the stock market.
If you put a company on the stock market in London, it's valued at let's say 1 million If you put it on the stock market in America And the same company is valued at 4 million the same company and if you think of your skills like that Where are you applying your skills to reach reach reap the highest
return? Let's go back to the window cleaner who's now decides to build this business and he's got 20 people Yeah, okay so he's never the hassle of managing all these people they turn out sick and then this happens and the customers are unhappy so maybe That right answer is to create a program to train other
people to build their own window cleaning companies Free yourself from the rat race and build this business You'll make more money doing that than you will from actually cleaning the windows Because you're going up the knowledge curve the further up the more of an expert you are and there's two things
that people need to think about You either have a very broad market for something candy bars Well, then you've got to sell massive scale and it's really hard Or you go through an area that has a very specific group of users buyers whatever and Particularly ones that have a lot of money So let's go back
to the house idea again the guy speculating on houses.
So there's two house speculators there's the guy or girl who's hustling and Renting them out finding the cheap bargain doing them up renting getting the cash flow doing that And then there's the guy who's buying a place for 10 million Making it ultra luxury and selling it to the billionaires and flipping
it for 50 That that difference in the returns is staggering.
Why? Because one group is price insensitive.
In fact, the more expensive it is the more they want it The other group is trying to compete with everybody else.
Mm -hmm You know the to the two -bedroom apartment in the city Right this thousands of those being done up and sold and everything else so to your point earlier the returns are less But no if you're doing super high -end Then there is a defined group of buyers of which you probably know them all personally
You can count to their tastes and they have unlimited money That's the big thing isn't it's like who you're solving the problem for because you can clean like Dorothy's windows lives in a bungalow and Plymouth or you can clean Google's windows and therefore you get a bigger contract you get guaranteed
work put it in returning get more windows to clean It's still one contract.
It's still one sell.
It's the same skill set same skill set They're gonna pay you a lot more and then and so I just don't think I always find that bit missing when we talk about like Become an expert but then like who'd you sell to and your idea of selling to people that are more price insensitive And they're all good at and that less
people are trying to sell to or they're super defined hmm, right like Tom bill you who we both know and Tom's a good friend, you know, he made his money because there was a rise in hyper -protein ketogenic foods and It was difficult to have that snack bar because people still have a sweet tooth, but they
can't have sugar So him and his partners built quest which is now everywhere.
So what you found is a Trend and this is really a really really important is you find a trending market Where people are underserved?
Hmm, and they'll pay a lot of money because it's health.
It's like wealth and health people pay fortunes our industry and So you make a fortune very quickly now now it's a saturated market.
So it's not that easy But this is the other key key thing is if you've got a clean slate Do one thing Follow a trend a secular trend a secular trend is a long -term trend Something that's happening right?
So everything is being digitized.
You rode that trend right social media was new from about 2010 Right now it's a saturated market and we've got AI coming in You rode a secular trend in the hyper acceleration phase.
Yeah, that's why you did well so you look for a trend that's big meaningful and provable and Use your skill sets in that We've seen something in America.
I don't know if you just saw the trend Finally the obesity numbers tick down.
I didn't know yeah first time in 50 years obesity starts to fall in the US Right.
This is as m pick effect And it's probably some diet effect My belief is the more people would take a Bsen pic the more they also think about diet not understand that something went wrong for them And my guess is there is going to be huge opportunities in that trend towards healthy eating The other
one is in an increasingly AI driven online digital world There's two things that are gonna happen one did the rise of digital communities you see this in what you do I see it what I do.
They become more and more important Communities online and meaningful for people The other is the entire flip side.
I spend 12 hours down zoom calls What is the most single valuable thing to me nature?
nature and experiences So let's say you're that person that loves the outdoors Well start a guiding company because your job is not going to be taken by the robots anytime soon.
Sure You'll have drones with you So you could take photographs of the guests you're going with or or look for animals whatever you're doing You'll be leveraging technology, but your job will not be replaced okay, what I'm about to say is a Mishmash of ideas that came to mind as you're speaking the first
one was how do I spot a trend?
And when I say that I mean how does it feel in the moment because the trends that you capitalized on and the trends that I capitalized on they feel a certain way at the time and Here I'm talking about like how disruptive they are Contrarian what people will say to you they'll tell you're an idiot and then
with that as well you talked about How right now in the world we live in Betting on things like nature is a good idea and I actually did a post on my LinkedIn about exactly this I said my investment fund is backing two things at the moment AI in automation and the exact opposite because I saw this viral
video of people and I think was like a cafe in Amsterdam Who come now every week?
No phones allowed they read books and they knit and this cafe in Amsterdam is like exploding I'll put the video of these people on the screen for everyone to see and it made me realize and that Overlaps with what two billionaire friends of mine said to me in private They said these are billionaires
that invest in AI they invest in crypto You probably know one of them and they invest in psychedelics They said to me if you want to invest right now invest in AI if you can, but if you can't invest in Entertainment and community because in a world of AI where productivity is so high and we maybe move
towards some form of universal basic income Where the government just hands people money people are gonna have so much free time on their hands That they're gonna need something to do with it So they he said to me this is why you're seeing this rise in people buying football clubs And these sporting
franchises because that's one of us that's community and its entertainment at the same time So I throw in all of that you yes the equal and opposite idea is I think Very important.
I Just came back from three weeks off -roading in Zambia Living on a tent on the roof of a Toyota Land Cruiser that is off -road prepared and going out into the total wilds And I can't express How in the present you become?
How it cleanses your mind from all of the clutter all of the things you worry about The broken car or the whatever's going on online the politics and all those and it all becomes about You wake up who's gonna make the coffee who's gonna put the fire on who's gonna do you know and so The more time we
spend online the more we desperately crave.
I saw it in the Cayman Islands where I live so it's a Caribbean island and It was 2022 And the world hadn't really recovered You know there was the high inflation people were losing jobs everyone was really uncomfortable with economic situation It was painful for a lot of people where a record tourist
season I'm like what the hell's going on here normally Discretionary spending goes down in times like that and I realized Holidays had not become discretionary spend they become a necessity as a reaction to work from home If you're on your own at home working for a startup or a company or doing whatever
it kind of feels a bit lonely and So you start seeking out like -minded people who have like -minded pursuits now that could be sporting teams It could also be Two hour lovers because you happen to have a two hour and you love it and you'll talk to other People around the world you now have no borders
This is this bludgy idea of the network states where you can create large groups of interest So if you look at the largest group of interest in all of social media, it's actually crypto Why?
Because we feel like outcasts we're new to something where something's happening and You want to get together because you speak to 90 % of your friends that don't care and they don't know what you're talking about But you think this is a most exciting thing you've ever seen so you will aggregate online
with others and this whole rise of people thinking they need to that the the Security of working for a large insurance company, whatever it may be your whole life getting paid and retiring has gone Which is why the rise of your podcast success because people are searching for answers New solutions to
their way and they film they form communities around it.
They want to share their ideas Strep share their stresses and strains This is becoming bigger and bigger and more solidified and the more we go into AI The more we'll see that now There's another player in this game, which is the AI itself We already seen the rise of AI.
I follow several on on X Where it's an AI posting But it's they're forcing it to try to break free But it's it's got character Mark Andreessen actually backed it by sending it a Bitcoin to develop its business plan I mean, there's some crazy stuff going on with AI But soon if you think what you and I
do is communicate with people in a To an audience one too many That's a very old business model I It's from town squares or the soup in Marrakesh.
It's the same thing It's a storyteller telling to a group of people and you have a shared experience Where we're going is one -to -one and you know, I'm developing a Ral video bot or you can just have conversations like this with me one -to -one And it's trained on all of my information my all my YouTube
all of my writings all of my Twitter all the books I've read everything and so it's essentially a replacement way of speaking to me But just on that row bot thing.
Well keep moving forward.
But then the reason why I Haven't trained a Steven bot even though my team have said oh, this is a good idea is because I wonder if People care about Steven or they just want the information and in a world where you can get the information from a very advanced large language model like Chatcher PT 1
.0, whatever. I go Why would they want it from me when you can get it from the entirety of the world's like trust?
Okay, you've built trust.
That's what you've built People come to watch you and your interviews because they trust you so people know me as an entrepreneur In one area of my life and they come to me for say like business advice Let's say but if you could get business advice from Steven or you can get it from Steven Elon Steve
Jobs every business person in the world to see your specific problem Why would you just want Steven's point of view?
Because we're humans and I just want to ask you that question and you won't believe it if it's Steve Jobs because he's dead But yes, that's all coming.
Okay me long is that window gonna last where people will use a Steven bot versus the world's greatest expert on everything It takes a bit time for people to adjust to that but within 10 years, maybe that's not there But let me go a little bit further on this Have you seen character AI?
No, nobody has Character AI builds bots which are Characters like anime characters and they're really specific like the cool kid who's the bully at school that I fancy sorts of thing A hundred and fifty million conversations There's some of these anime ones like, you know hero figures 450 million conversations
And it's young people if you go on to reddit, I think it's our character AI They change the model and there was uproar.
It doesn't love me like it used to people are building Personal relationships with these things at scale.
This is tick tock happening all over again But you're too old to see it and I'm told to see it I stumbled across it.
I'm like, holy shit This is happening all over again Is something that we will just think is the most ridiculous awful sultry toxic thing in the world is about to scale to the billions In front of our eyes and we're all talking about chat GPT and how we can get knowledge out of it When actually the big
problem to solve is teenage loneliness How disruptive do you think AI is going to be?
It's the it's How do I put this It is the single greatest innovation of humanity ever The only thing that comes close is probably the splitting of the atom this is so big Everything we've talked about is based on scarcity of knowledge Why do lawyers get paid a lot?
Scarcity of knowledge either scarcity of knowledge scarcity of capital those two things What you've created is infinite knowledge Right knowledge is now worth zero Not people that can't see it yet, but it's going to be worth zero this is like water What what the hell does that mean and it's something
you know a topic will come on to later But this is happening really fast.
It's going to break the entire economic model for good and for bad It's going to change our understanding of how society functions what humans do it's going to change of understanding of what humans are and will be Because you can either have the choice and society will take the two paths you either
merge with the machines or you reject the machines We are going towards two different species one group Like we had for a about a hundred thousand years.
I think fifty thousand years.
We had the and atoll man and homo sapien And one died out.
We will have people who will utterly reject this and we'll have other people who will be in breading neurolinks into their brains and Using every part of this to enhance themselves wearing the goggles so they get the information Well as soon as you embed into your brains you've now merged with the machines
entirely and you are now a super creature And I know this sounds like science fiction, but this is happening faster than anybody can imagine so to understand the issues we have even dealing with some of these things is humans think in a linear fashion We kind of understand the passage of time right?
That's how we think about things Every year is the same amount of time that goes forwards.
It never accelerates make perceived that accelerates it or slows down occasionally But it's not just it's a constant the problem is with things that go exponential is they keep doubling every year or tripling every year and before you know it every Graph looks like this go straight up.
Just go straight up vertically.
Now. The issue is with this technology is It's kind of an exponential squared it's it's happening so fast and the faster AI becomes Powerful is the more it's used to create AI which creates more it it solves its own problems Right, we're not prepared for a super being That solves its own energy problems compute
problems and how to improve its model That's an exponential rate If you look at the speed of innovation coming out of open AI and the whole space for PEXI everybody It's ludicrous every three months everything changes Completely changes whether it's video models or whether it's spoken Models or whether
it's the models themselves in what they do.
I Mean, they're nuking every startup that tries to build a business no company.
You're a big giant Pharmaceutical company and you're trying to use AI you can't plant a flag Because you can't see past six months I Mean we're going into a world that is incomprehensible when you said that much of our society sort of functions and is based on the scarcity of knowledge I Really think
we should just pause to make that real for people because we all get it.
Okay lawyers. Yeah that they rely on knowledge but Dry like I was thinking about how I got here in the morning so if you think about my whole day today, I woke up this morning and my Executive some of the CEOs of my company said asked me a couple of Simple business decisions and I'd replied to them
then I got in a car and I drove here That's knowledge at the end of the day.
It's someone seeing with two eyes my driver outside sees with two eyes and drives me here The biggest employer I think in the world the biggest sort of profession in the world is driving And that's knowledge -based and that if you go to San Francisco now the Waymo cars are driving themselves There's
no driver in them You can get you can book a car that takes you from A to B in San Francisco right now That has no driver.
I then got here and what am I doing?
I'm Sharing I guess we're probing to find knowledge to share knowledge.
I think about my whole day today I'm like and then after this I'm going and speaking on stage to share knowledge I'm like I don't understand if that's all knowledge Okay, so then do that the next time you're going around London or any city look out the window Myself and Julian Patel who works with me do
this all the time Just go around and say what job is going to be replaced by a robot or the AI?
But one thing I was in I was in Manhattan And I just looked out I was in an uber board you know driving up town to downtown I looked around and I was like, holy shit.
Every car here is a professional driver There's virtually no people who drive into the city to go to the office or whatever, right?
So it's all over drivers limo drivers yellow cab drivers delivery drivers truck drivers All gone and this stacks up in pretty much everything you do and that's how disruptive it is and when the things that created value the services economy and the manufacturing economy Don't eat humans Okay, what does that mean Amazon already
employs more robots than humans?
Now the robots work 24 hours a day seven days a week never take a break never complain never ask for pay rise in fact, they get cheaper every year Who's not gonna do that so for the four and a half million people shitting themselves as they listen to this.
Yeah What advice can we including myself?
I'm not actually sitting myself I've got to be honest because I just I see opportunity in all these things and I think that's you kind of have a choice When you hear information like this, you can either let the cognitive dissonance get over Overwhelm you and then reject it which a lot of people will be
doing now. They'll be saying well, you're wrong This is not gonna happen.
You're wrong. You're scam hungry.
That's what one group of people be doing the other group of people will be I Guess open -minded and the third group of people will be leaning in to see whether the opportunity here lies and it all comes down to You're like disposition as a human.
Are you scared? Are you excited or are you paralyzed?
If something is so clearly going to be your demise not demise as in you're gonna die But your current way of doing things is going to be forced to change Well, you can either fight it as you say being different to it We can invest in it.
This goes back to the question I asked you earlier Which is how does it feel in the moment when a trend is coming in?
Usually there was culture around it So if you remember I talked about When I got into finance there was Gordon Gekko the film Wall Street that there were books coming right there was barbarians at the gate famous stuff happening it became cultural and That usually tells you it has now become a trend
that's going to be persistent if we think about The Rise of software and technology the culture of Silicon Valley and the mythology around it Becomes something that everybody wants a part of Crypto currencies another one that has a mythology you see people getting rich.
It has this feeling of being outsiders, but you know You see AI is another one you sit on when people Experimenting you can see what's going on.
You can see everybody is starting to talk about it doesn't mean you can just buy some Share that that's exposed to it and you'll be hilariously rich doesn't work that way but you know something really big when you're When you're trying to acquire knowledge, you know people watch you and I to try and glean knowledge
and build their worldview You'll hear that every single person is talking about this and trying to figure out what it means The issue is is AI will build businesses, right?
so we're six months away of a genteck AI and the genteck AI means It's like having Fiverr a website of experts that you can ask any question and it will go away and do the task and By using a number of Fiverr experts you can build a online business Well the a genteck AI will do that very very soon It'll
build design the website code it register the domain name Hey around the branding figure out the marketing figure out the email list figure out what the guys the whole thing So then you and I are in competition now.
You've built this incredible new website and it's a new Supplements formula thing, but it's a cool website new experience kind of 3d whatever it is, right?
Got AI in it I just go to my AI and say love Stephen's website Can you just build it better and make it in Hindi as well because I think there's a big market there What do you think it'll come back say not Hindi?
I think there's an under saturated market in in Indonesia boom three minutes what?
How do how can we be entrepreneurs?
in software so now there's this Theory going around that AI is gonna wait software and I kind of get it because it can build anything in seconds so And again, whether it could do it six months or twelve months, it's it's of that magnitude That what the hell does that mean?
But yes the 23 year old who's learned guiding in the jungles of Latin America and is building a luxury lodge for people and You know some eco tourism.
I Don't give a shit about any of this It's so interesting this idea that we might be at the the collapse of the digital opportunity In a sense because when I say the digital opportunity, I'm talking about content creators I'm talking about entrepreneurs that built, you know after the dotcom era I'm
talking about stock traders, you know people that are trading stock markets and if we're at the collapse of the digital opportunity And that the value is all going to recruit these big sort of tech giants or the AI's Imagine if this is the moon in history where actually the best play was to go be build
the backpacking company in I don't know the Himalayas or whatever Maybe like that's the opportunity, but it's not scalable.
Yes You can do it and find people will spend more on it to go back to our earlier conversations People spend a lot of money on it.
So it's quality attention because everything in the world is attention Attention is upstream of everything.
So you get the attention of these people in a rainforest They want to spend money on doing this particular thing fantastic How scalable is it?
Difficult because then there's people management people it's not like software right so they're not scared But you can do very well and not be concerned about this other world how does one invest in AI Something that I think about a lot because I believe the things you said I believe many of your predictions
around Around the impact that AI is gonna have on the world the economy and all of us and as someone that's an investor I want to like take part in that I want to take part in the upside so I'm wondering do I just go by Microsoft stock because they own a bit chat GPT by meta stock because they earn
a bit of Because they are Lambda died by Google stock because they have Gemini and their models So here's the problem the financial system The average person watching this Has no chance of making the money They'll make normal returns not super normal returns So Microsoft is whatever it is to three trillion dollar
company. What could it be worth?
Who knows 10 trillion 15 trillion doesn't really matter right?
That's a 5x But for the most revolutionary technology the world has ever seen you make five times your money That's not but somebody else in VC or earlier in some way shape or form or the entrepreneur will make all of the money And this is the thing I don't like about the system as it is.
It's kind of rigged against the ordinary person So we're gonna have your jobs replaced you're gonna have this societal change and yet they don't get a chance so Yes invest in technology Don't own any other stocks own technology and you will capture some of this you're investing in your own demise At
least you'll get some high quality returns But otherwise The only way I can come up with again and we keep referring to it It's crypto what is crypto?
Critters just a technology, you know, it's a lot of things to many people.
It's just a database that's better than databases in the past So right now your database might be in your spreadsheet and let's say you and I have a bet You put it you write it down there and we get a third person to say Yeah, that was the bet they had and this is what's happened Okay That is how databases
that's banks. There's pretty much everything we do in society is in this ledger system It's called I've got a suitcase here, which is maybe maybe a good way to kind of explain this This is a bank and Inside the bank, which is I guess the middleman you got money.
Yeah, so could you explain it to me through the context of this?
We'll call it the central bank How the system currently works as it relates to transactions the public ledger, etc.
So okay in the old world We both had our gold yeah, and we'd stick it in our safe or bury it in the ground that gold was your gold This was my gold and I might try and fight you for it.
It's what pirates did.
Okay, and then we invent banks and banks We put it in there and they give you a note to say Stephen you've got one of those coins Ralph you got one of those coins.
Okay, so we've both gotten a note now saying that yeah, and now we trust this bank To give us our coins when we want them because that our coins Okay, that makes sense safe as safe as a bank as people would say The issue is is in this world of smoke and mirrors what's known as fraction reserve banking?
They have taken Those coins Given somebody else they've given my coins to someone else.
Yeah, they've lent it for money.
So now that coin is not in there But They've been given the money.
So usually when you're just you know, if everybody pulls all the money out, there's not enough money It's called a bank run.
We've seen those recently, but that's a classic thing.
So it's not your money Because you don't actually own your money the moment you put it in the bank what you've become is in fact a debtor to the bank or a credit sorry creditors to the bank so you've lent them money and You get some legal redress that if you've got less than a hundred thousand euros
pounds Whatever the currency is generally that's protected by the government that if the bank goes bust Then you get your money back But anything beyond that?
Anything but I've got a piece of paper.
Yeah, I mean shit You don't own anything Now it's so big as a problem That 2000 so that was 2012 European crisis exactly this people didn't own their money That person walked off with it ask the bank for it.
The bank didn't have it Nobody's got any money where it's all gone.
That's the same Ponzi scene We could talked about when you've got you buy a house and use the cash flow to buy another house another house, right?
Somebody takes away what's known as the collateral suddenly it's all gone But the issue is actually bigger because 2008 proved another thing Is that nobody owns anything?
So the whole system itself is leveraged So for example back in that time The average US government bond, which is the safest thing in the world Was leveraged up to 30 times What does that mean?
That means? 30 people Thought that that was theirs.
Oh so I say that this is the bank in front of us the suitcase and It had one coin in it when we put that one coin in it created 30 more coins and Gave out 30 pieces of paper.
Yeah, so there's actually only one coin in the bank.
Yeah, but they made 30 pieces of paper that's all well and good if The collateral the thing that it's secured on the coin Maintains value Or isn't pulled by one person if you were the lender and your original lender and you get it out and Something happens and all of these 29 other people are like I
want my coin back No, it doesn't exist.
It doesn't exist So we just made it we just created the coin.
Correct? We just sorry, we just gave you a piece of paper, but there was no coin backing it Yeah, and the issue is so that's one issue with the banking The other issue is is pretty much everything we do is created on this.
It's called a ledger system a ledger was invented in the Renaissance in the 1500s 1400s where what would happen is you have this on a on a Account or balance sheet you'd have these dual entry ledgers and What it's basically saying is I agree with you and often we'd have a third party agreeing it Issue
is is that's known as the Byzantine generals problem.
It's actually a philosophical mathematical problem that has been unsolvable until Bitcoin came along And what it is is we are generals in a war You are way away from me.
We can't communicate with each other, but I need to send somebody to tell you something There is no way of making sure that that person tells you exactly what I've told them and no way of you approving it And that's what a three -party system does I may go to a notary but how do you know?
I haven't bribed the notary to lie.
I see that all the time We see it with accounting firms and audits.
We see this in everything.
There's always one of these trusted parties that is not trusted The bank classical trusted counterparty that suddenly May not be trusted.
We saw it with silicon valley bank recently in the u .s So what blockchain did really cleverly?
We said okay. Well the way of solving this Is to get thousands tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions Of people to confirm it.
Okay, so let's throw away the bank Take my paper back because that's worth zero Um, if you pick up this chain here on the floor.
Yeah, this is our Hypothetical blockchain.
Yeah now explain to me the difference between the bank we just saw and this blockchain So this blockchain So this let's say is a bitcoin This slot on the blockchain Is confirmed By every other part of the blockchain, which is all the computers That that solve this mathematical problem.
We don't need to worry about that.
But what it is is tens of thousands of people Reporting on all of the activity.
So if I transfer this ownership to you Yeah, it will know that you are the owner you Can either hold it yourself like the gold coin?
as a bearer asset or You can ask somebody to custard it for you but Still your name.
So if I want to send you a bitcoin How is How are tens of thousands of people or hundreds of thousands of people confirming that that transaction is legitimate without a middleman checking?
So they're essentially taking a snapshot of the blockchain And they all have to agree And then it's called it's called a consensus mechanism.
They're not actually at their computer saying yes, I agree Well the computers agree.
Okay, so the computers are checking.
Yeah, or the the blockchain itself Will say well that doesn't agree with all the others and it gets rejected and that whole block will get rejected until resolve Like there's a problem here And that's called consensus.
So what you're doing is a multi -party consensus that this is truth So now what you've created is what a friend of mine calls the security truth machine So at first we all know it for bitcoin I can own a bitcoin.
It's proven that I own the bitcoin.
I don't need anybody to tell me that I own the bitcoin because it's publicly Acknowledgable and verifiable on the blockchain.
It's immutable, which means Can't be broken Okay but This is where it gets really interesting Is we've suddenly find that after the invention of the smart contract.
So right now Let's say we're 2000 and There's a contract in here Yes, it says i've sent one bitcoin to roul.
Okay, so this is the world pre -ethereum Okay, the world post -ethereum would say i'm going to send roul one bitcoin If the sun shines 13 days in a row in london and something else happens whatever it is And it'll automatically settle verified on the chain because there's 10 000 computers and there's code
in that to make the settlement.
Okay, okay, so All well and good Nobody really knows what that means yet What it means is that everything we do as humans is actually contracts me turning up here today a contract Literally everything we do is a contract Every ticket you buy every purchase you make everything is a contract.
It's how society functions money is a contract, isn't it?
Money is a contract government's a contract Religion is a contract everything is a contract.
It's how we create a social construct and social order Now what we can start doing is using this very powerful chain And putting other stuff on it The first random thing that came on it was actually art because it's valuable called nft's non -fungible tokens They're single pieces of art that were stored
there and we can have ownership But that's really experimentation Really?
Your taylor swift concert tickets can be on chain.
Why would you do that?
because now This has solved another big thing that didn't exist We talked about before in a digital world everything goes to zero in value So ral what's the point of this?
This is just like cloud cloud storage just goes to zero and cost No, because what we've created is digital scarcity You can only create a certain amount and we can make that one asset be that one asset Um And so therefore it can't be replicated at all So now in this digital world where every day is more
digital than the next we've created scarcity And scarcity is what gives value.
It's what humans assign value to And that means that scarcity of knowledge means that knowledge was valuable lawyers because not that many people come out of law school that then Now with ai not valuable So to make sure I and everyone listening understands what a what the blockchain is it's this public
can think of it as this database in the sky and the database in the sky is checked by Everybody who has their computer on and is interacting with the database in the sky So you no longer need a government or a bank checking the transactions and the and the contracts in the database in the sky Because
now all of our computers that are on interacting with it are in the background Checking that if I send you one bitcoin if I do something on this database in the sky it is In accordance with the history of the database and It is In line with that database.
Yeah what and to make it less complicated It just makes it a source of truth Okay in a world Where we don't even know who is who online Who owes each other?
What any of these things?
We now have source of truth that everybody can agree on and everyone can see and everybody can see You don't need to trust anybody And so that as a technology Solves Many things problems that we don't even know we've got because they're so part of how we exist So the technology is not about money the technology
is about Truth and Exchanging value and creating value in a digital age.
Now what is interesting and powerful about this technology?
Is we've seen Technology similar before the internet We've seen broadband.
We've seen these big global infrastructure things Most of those the internet was a public service good Broadband was all built private sector We didn't get to make money out of these things Really amazon made the money or Or whoever it was building the broadband.
They all went bust as well What we've got here is this very clever thing that Everybody in this blockchain gets rewarded for the role that they play In maintaining the blockchain in maintaining the blockchain And because these things are scarce and let's say bitcoin being the most classic example, there's
only 21 million that will ever exist You've created this scarce asset that is a reward system.
So the people who Mind the bitcoin they use the electricity to solve the algorithm to get the bitcoins to make sure there's only 21 million Well, they get rewarded the people who verify the chain get rewarded and then We can buy the asset which is actually us investing In the future use cases of this thing
are people going to use it for storing wealth or building stuff so now you get this global infrastructure layer Of which people can invest now.
Let's go back to the example of ai Ai 99 percent of people listening to this will not be able to invest in it apart from buying some of those big public companies Because they're not accredited investors, they're not allowed they don't get to see it's an insider all of this stuff This is the inverse
It is fractionalizable So a bitcoin you have to buy one at 60 whatever thousand and it is today you can buy a fraction So remember we talked about property and the guys who own the big high -end property make all the money None of us can buy the 50 million dollar apartment in manhattan and then do it
up and flip it for 250 million now blockchain We can all put 10 of our paycheck in it Do you think people should?
yeah, and more but the point being Is this is the only?
globally homogenous asset on earth It's the same in nigeria as it is in brazil as it is in london as it is in silicon valley As it is in india as it is in papa new guinea And everybody is on an equal footing You can put the same percentage of your worth in it Okay, that Is mind -blowing and It bypasses
the banking system the brokerage system and all the other incumbent things that get in the way of a nigerian buying an international investment So we've got a playing field that's leveled in the fastest growing technology Of all time in the fastest of pretesting assets in price terms of all time In
the shortest period of time that is globally available to anybody And then you realize holy shit, okay, this is important now why that's important is because Having more investors in it means the asset becomes more valuable Which means you're more likely to secure it people want to join the network
to earn some of these tokens To secure it the more use cases get built upon it because people are making money and it bootstraps.
It's behavioral economics It's an incentive -based system to bootstrap the most ridiculous startup idea of all time Which is i'm going to entirely disrupt money and create a new internet I mean, that's laughably stupid and that's what's happening one of the I run a company called um third web, which is a Web
3 infrastructure business.
We we've raised quite a lot of money for the company about 30 million dollars now and We have a big team and it's interesting for me to observe the use cases because people come to third web to build On the blockchain and one of the really interesting use cases we've seen over the last i'd say 12 months.
That's really exploded is is gaming people building Web 3 blockchain based games because if you think about games like fifa Which is a huge game obviously in the uk where we're big soccer fans or other games like, you know um Rune scape back in the day where you have assets in the game in fifa You have a messy
card in runescape. You might have a sword The thing that the blockchain now enables us to do is to take those assets from the game and actually trade them outside the game So I can if the if the sword was on the aetherian blockchain Even though i'm not inside the game.
I can trade that sword on the aetherian blockchain And so one of the most exceptional use cases we've seen at third web is people building ai games.
Sorry people building web 3 games Because these assets are now valuable.
It's great for the game developer They've now got this brand new economy for their for their company And it's great for the people that own those assets in the game because they've now those assets are now more valuable because more people Can access them?
And I don't think people realize the extent to which this disruption is already taking place People think of crypto web 3 and they think of buying coins and hoping the price goes up, but it was interesting You know everyone knows like docuSign and adobe Like eSign and those things and I went on one of their
websites I think it was docuSign because I just I thought surely physical contracts should be on the aetherian blockchain now And there was this little paragraph on the docuSign website, which says every time like a Contract is signed on docuSign.
We do like there's a hash on the blockchain So it's like recorded on the blockchain.
I thought people don't even know that the blockchain is now I've got an asset management company exponential age asset management.
We invest in hedge funds that just invest in crypto to capture this trend of going from 2 trillion dollars where it is today in value.
I think it's going to 100 trillion in Let's say 2032 2034.
Okay, that's Stupid that's that's more wealth from the than Has ever been created in that period of time on earth by But it's twice the amount of value of the s &p 500 the entire us stock market Took to build In a hundred years, I think we'll do it in 20 So this is staggering that wealth which is why
We'll talk about why people should be involved and how they should be involved later because i'm passionate about that But I was one of our investors.
I was in switzerland and she is the head of trading at One of the soft commodity companies so soft commodities like cocoa sugar corn all of this stuff agricultural commodities and I'm like surely you guys Should be thinking about building on blockchain You know because there's a lot of letters of credit
and stuff that happens shipments She goes a wheel all the commodity trading houses built on ethereum in 2020 She goes so every shipment we make the shipping contracts the quality of goods contract the letters of credit Everything is on chain So we don't have to trust these others because commodity industry
is full of sharks and you're dealing with Countries that are not easy to deal with it's like we've got this verifiable source of truth It's completely revolutionize our industry and nobody knows about it.
And if if I own ethereum, yeah, if I own an ethereum Token yeah, which I do by the way.
Yeah, i've been stacking it and refusing to sell Good much to my brother's dismay Who's like steve you're a bit too emotional about this stuff and I was like bro I was like if there's any asset that I own that I well we're gonna talk about her not to fuck it up later Yeah But how do I benefit from the fact that games
are now being built in ethereum and it's really simple if We'd have all been given shares in facebook when it started.
We'd have all been hilariously rich but we didn't The vc's got it and then it went to the public market and then you have to have a brokerage account You have to be approved, right?
What this is happening you buy an ethereum token today If ethereum ends up becoming bigger and more uses Your token value goes up.
It's as simple as that so you get to participate in an entire technological revolution Really simply from your mobile phone And you don't need anybody to approve it or do anything Yes, there's regulation stuff, but simple stuff like that It's pretty straightforward for almost everybody in the world.
So therefore We talked about how do you invest in your disruption and the future of technology?
Okay. Here's one where you can really do it and It's easy to do A couple questions here then so you said it's easy to do.
Yeah, let's talk practicalities.
How do does one do it?
I can do it on my phone.
I have to call someone.
How do I invest in crypto?
You just open a crypto account Yeah Um with one of the big crypto providers coinbase cracken Crypto .com who are at my gem and I what about this though?
My bank my digital bank is offering me to buy crypto on there Should I do that?
Yes, you can and you could do it via paypal Start somewhere.
I'm not going to say no But you will go down the journey that everybody goes down, which is the easiest on ramp is the best Revolute whatever.
I don't care. Let's do it Get a feel for what it's like to own an asset that goes up and down a lot Particularly down when it goes down.
It makes you feel terrible and you've got to learn about how to deal with it And then because it goes up over time if you don't do anything and you've chosen a good quality asset That's provable as a as an asset in itself It'll probably go up over time.
In fact highly likely to go up a lot And then you'll start thinking Do you remember ral saying that the bank owns the stuff or I don't own it And then you might say oh, but the magic here is unlike the bank where I can't take more than 10 grand out I can put it all On my little ledger device because what's
the ledger device? A ledger device is it's actually a it's a company provider.
But what it is Because this is just an address on a blockchain And think of it is like your mailbox You can send stuff to it, but you can't actually take it out Like your email somebody can't read all your emails, but they can send you emails well that that part that's private that secure passkey essentially
Well, you keep that to yourself and it's stored on a device and there's complicated way of doing it And you'll have to go through that which is you have to have this seed phrase that does it this technology will change quite soon Yeah fingerprints face prints and a bunch of other stuff.
But basically A little usb stick Will secure that you can go and put the safe or go and take it to your nan's house or whatever it is can secure Your money that it's only yours and nobody can take it out I have mine on a ledger So I have my ethereum on a small it's kind of like a small usb stick And
then that usb stick is protected by like 24 words or whatever it is That's right.
And those words are on pieces of paper in different countries at the moment.
That's right And it means that no matter what happens no matter where I am in the world, no matter who comes for me I can always retrieve the x thousand ethereum that I have on this ledger device Yeah, unlike a bank where my account could get frozen by the government or they could empty my bank.
They could freeze my bank I can always have that value And also, you know, there's a famous example of the conversation of gold in the united states And it's been done in many countries in the past the good thing about this magic internet money Is you have to physically cross borders with it.
Yeah Think of all the jewish people who had to take money and diamonds and gold out of nazi germany and out of europe It was hard to do Here you have to do anything.
You just need to remember a seed phrase A seed phrase being basically a string of words.
Yeah. Yeah so which blockchain which coin Do you think people should invest in?
I have only ever invested in one I've only ever backed ethereum and I think part of my bias there comes from the fact that when we were building third web I had a window into the blockchains that people were actually building their applications on and ethereum was the Was the one and obviously there's
layer twos, which are people then, you know build blockchains on top of ethereum, etc but for me ethereum was just the dominant blockchain that I thought would solve for most of the use cases outside of maybe um What they call a store of value outside of like money necessarily so contracts and other
things. So do you say this is where?
My this is my 30 years of expertise is this one thing which is asset allocation So firstly The average person watching this Is you need to allocate to this end of story if you're going to start somewhere Start with bitcoin It's just easy to do It's widely available You know through different, you know,
whether it's a credit card anything just do that I don't care do that and do it with As much money as you can afford to see go down 60 70 and don't care And expect that to happen because that's what you have to see to see the long term 150 a year It's included within that is these downsides And then
I want you to put in some money every month regardless of price To build your savings in this exponential asset that goes up a lot.
Okay now you're set you're on the journey And then you want to figure out how do I make the most money?
Like you I switched I had bitcoin to start with I switched all of my bitcoin into eth in 2020 in ethereum And so I was I just owned that plus some nfts and a few other bits and pieces, but generally it was that And then in 2022 at the bottom of the bear market I started to see the price of salanha Seeing
like it wanted to outperform ethereum now salanha much like your thesis I saw this massive developer community Passionate retail and a difference in the technology because these are all basically Distributed companies that sell block space.
So you want to look for attractive block space bitcoin?
It's the secure one ethereum it's like the world computer, you know, and everybody's building on top of it salanha faster cheaper Feels more friendly efficient.
Yeah, it feels more retail and I saw that And the speed of which they can do things and the innovation and the developer community Meant that I started switching and then switch all of my eth outside of my nfts where I collect a lot of art into salanha And I've now been switching part of my salanha into
sui sui and as a Disclaimer i'm actually on the board of the foundation, but it's like the next big chosen one It's the group that came out of facebook that built facebook libra.
So what i'm trying to do is maximize my return I'm a mercenary Around i'm passionate about this space and what it means the technology And how it empowers people how it can change the third world how it can change the internet But i'm also a mercenary from my own capital and for anybody else I can help
Now doesn't mean always get it, right?
So in your particular circumstance, I would like look you'll probably be fine over time But you're not maximizing your returns, but do you want to take the risk?
Do you have the bandwidth to do that and these are the questions we were talking about with work?
It's the same thing.
How much do you want to go down the rabbit hole?
How much time do you have to invest versus the expected upside?
I don't have time I'm spending all my time doing podcasting building businesses And then just do what you're doing unless something says that ethereum Usage is falling off a cliff and developers are leaving in time Then don't worry about it, right you're going to be directionally.
Very right. Will you capture?
The best returns? No, nor will I Some other brando will get by luck something right but the average person so I have this thesis that i've tried to help as many people with this is from my own learnings.
I'm watching everybody else.
Fuck it up Is what happens is you're given this incredible asset class And at first you do intelligent thing like owns and bitcoin and samith And then you want to go out the risk curve because you see somebody else making more money you understand you can that's okay And then the bull market really
hits the banana zone period when things go bananas prices go vertical And you will see people online saying well, I made a million dollars today because I bought this meme coin and you will lose your mind and you will start buying all the stupid shit and you'll go so far out the risk curve and then
When the music stops The stuff you own will be worth nothing And the more quality tokens will retain their value.
The other thing that people will do in that journey Is use leverage What is leverage?
Leverage is when you borrow more money to buy more of the asset So I now borrow money to buy more ethereum because I want to outperform you and I want to make more money because i'm really greedy The 160 percent a year that ethereum does is returns since 2015 It's not good enough for me.
I want to make it 400 500 percent a year Stupid right and what happens is you borrow money to do it.
It's leverage futures markets Perpetuals there's a whole bunch of ways of doing this or even borrowing on the bloody credit card Whatever way people will do this And you really have to know what you're doing because the whole game if this technology Is going to last over time and it's going from two
trillion to a hundred trillion.
You have one job Not to lose your tokens One job you can do nothing Like you're doing and you will make an extremely good amount of money out of it Your one job is to not fuck that up.
I have a bit of a theory And this theory is very naive and narrow and based on the smallest sample group in the world.
It is I have six friends Um, actually i'm one of the six so I have five friends five of my best friends and we've all taken different attitudes towards crypto And my friend who is most heavily involved in crypto Has made the least money and is arguably The least rich and it's his life And I think it's
because of what you've described whereas my position has always been I invest in this one coin I don't sell it and I just buy more when I can over the last six years I don't really pay attention frankly if you ask me to log in to see The last time I checked what it was worth.
I couldn't tell you couldn't tell you what it was worth Actually, i've struggled to log in it's been so long since i've logged in and looked at it And I think my returns have outpaced his because of that.
Yeah I think that's right and so You know, this is all the conversation we've been having The secular trend The opportunity the skill set then it's the execution of that thing Then it's not to fuck it up.
And what you've done is not fucking up he invested you've got your Seed phrases elsewhere.
So nobody can you've got no single point of failure.
You've got it stored privately yourself You have it in a large one of the top two There's probably three that low risk in terms of the chances that the Use gets abandoned in the next five years Bitcoin, ethan, salana They're pretty safe.
So everyone should knock their socks off 80 of their portfolio Do that and you'll make money 90 of portfolio don't use leverage Then we're all humans give yourself 10 and do the fuck what you want Most of the time you'll find out that that 10 goes to zero Which is fine.
It's a good lesson.
You don't care because you've made Plenty of money on the rest But if you are that genius who can find the thousand X meme coin knock your socks off Here's why I think that genius ends up because it's funny because the friend i'm describing He's around he's in Dubai.
So there's a lot of them out there that when I said Dubai you understand what i'm talking about Um, they all invested in lunar.
They lost their fucking shirt That he was telling me about his boy who he works with who made I don't know tens of millions betting on these meme coins And then now he tells me that exact same guy is broke and is in a lot of trouble because the mentality that makes you Go in pursuit of these real high
-risk bets these were like meme coins and stuff Is also the same mentality in mindset that makes you lose the thousand X return The 10 million dollars you made Um on the other side and I think the psychology of money book talks about that as well Like case studies morgan housell's book Case studies the guy
who like bet against the like the contrarian that made the billion Is also the same contrarian that ends up losing it again in the next cycle So I feel like i've seen that a lot The problem with the meme coin thing it is a casino Yeah, what is good is there a period of time where where everybody in the casino makes
money? Which is unlike casinos because there's trends in financial markets.
No one's taking it out.
So it's paper returns And then A lot of this stuff goes to zero.
We saw that with nft's last cycle We've seen it with a whole bunch of tokens Which is where you need to be very careful of latching onto a token and just keeping hold of it because some of these won't Survive you're lucky you're in eath and not in Something else eos that was around in 2017 Right.
It's like you're stuck.
So you need to be careful um Speculation does work for periods of time It's better than actually lottery tickets and generally better than the casino But only for periods of time and then you will lose everything Somebody's going to come into that casino and sweep every table and only five percent of the people
are going to be left with money So just think of it that way So if you want to have fun people but the people who do it the most are the people who live off adrenaline Yeah, right.
It's the adrenaline junkies.
They're usually terminally online.
They probably like to Gambling other ways sports betting It's you know, it's an i'm not really that person So I don't trade Yes, I own a few meme coins because I enjoy The fun of the culture and seeing that culture develop but just Keep it simple stupid.
Is this why men are so drawn to this?
I was thinking about the gambling statistics and like it's like something like 95 or 98 percent of gambling addicts and men And I was thinking and how does this overlap with like their sense of purpose and community much a deeper question I think men feel hugely under pressure to be successful to provide
There's a societal Thing about what a man does and what he should do and how you measure success That Even in sports, it's kind of it's very competitive to be a man But it's also somewhat of a lonely pursuit in that respect because men aren't very good at talking about their feelings and their fears
And all the bullshit you bring in your head so some gambling Is to do with that desperate need to get ahead.
I need to make this work But then it becomes somewhat of an addiction because of the adrenaline Dopamine is a very very powerful drug and we search for all day, which is what the internet's all about is the behavioral economics This is what they discovered is you trigger dopamine and you can make all
animals do something famously skinner and the rats but humans and the internet and like buttons and anger and all of these things so There's part of that It's partly also Male society is about Betting improving your prowess Gladiatorial so it's a whole complicated thing of what makes men do it But the reason for example
in crypto, it's so male If because we're driven by that need to be the breadwinner even though society has moved on from that And we're seeing fantastically a rise of women in the blockchain space And a changing of that crypto bro culture that was there If you follow some of the crypto bitcoin twitter
pages that are the confession pages People can write in and confess what happened to them It's often really sad and heartbreaking hearing about this father who has three young kids under the age of seven Who invested in some meme coin?
Lost it all and now his wife wants to know where the money is and he's got nothing to show for it And i've seen these documentaries I've even kind of heard of these stories in In my extended network where like my personal trainer put six thousand pounds of his very scarce money Into some coin and it
went to zero and he's lost it all and it The suicides in the in the bear market when people have put too much in and they've lost it all Much of the reason why I think people don't invest in crypto anymore is either they've heard one of these stories or they are One of those stories and I think there's
so there's a kind of a disclaimer and kind of a warning here which needs to be This is the don't fuck this up thesis by bitcoin ethereum and salama One of those three preferably all three And that will stop you going to zero But it will go up it will crash could crash 70 or something.
Okay, so that's A conversation about time horizon.
How long should I be prepared to hold it for to make a return?
What depends What return and for what?
Remember we talked about, you know, what part of your destiny you're trying to To manifest here which part of your lifestyle chips you're trying to cash in So if you're trying to get rich quick, I I want to make loads of money by next year I'd rather you didn't Do this Um, I don't think that is a sensible
intelligent way of living your life You're gonna take too much risk and you're gonna subtextual to lose it all if you said, hey ral Listen what I want is I want in five years time to have made a decent return on my money You know three four five times on money I'm like, yeah That's fine.
Okay. I'm gonna ask you for a price prediction No You look you don't do price predictions not anymore and the reason being is because a lot of people listen to what I say And therefore They then build a mental model around a price And what you do is then you create a false Comfort in what you're doing,
but ral says it's going to x And that stops you doing the work to make yourself test anything And then you start extrapolating.
Well, I put 10 grand in and if ral's right i'm gonna have a million dollars Like the whole thing becomes this emotional journey and so i've tried to stop doing it because The the best thing I can say to people is listen 2032 2034 that is not long away 10 years This asset class is going to go from two
trillion to a hundred trillion Right.
That is a huge return now Some of the coins in that space will do A multiple of that that simple thesis is why I built expam the asset management company exponential age Was just to capture this trend to let well unfortunately It's only for high net worth investors and institutional investors But just
let them go on that journey get the hedge funds to take the risk and figure it out And do that But if people just do that, give me 10 years just give me 10 years and If you do it 10 years and you're sensible You'll be able to take a whole chunk of money out every few years because it's quite cyclical
It moves maybe every four years and so you can take a chunk out Cash cash it in the lifestyle bank And keep moving towards that goal well as you were speaking I figured out your price prediction based on your Prediction of how big the asset class will get So you gave me enough time to ask ai To do the math for me
And it says if bitcoin has a 40 market dominance the market cap of bitcoin will be roughly 40 trillion If there are approximately 19 million bitcoins mine the price would be around 2 .1 million per bitcoin At a 50 dominance the price per bitcoin would be 2 .6 million per bitcoin today as we sit here.
The price of bitcoin is 62 000 So if your prediction that the asset class gets to a hundred trillion and if ethereum is 15 percent of that Then each ethereum will be worth a hundred and twenty five Thousand dollars per ethereum and today it's worth about two thousand.
Okay So then what I do when I face with something like this when I first bought bitcoin in I first wrote I wrote the first ever bitcoin strategy piece and made a price prediction based on What I understood about bitcoin back in 2013 12 It was the first ever piece written by anybody and I said listen.
I think it's worth a million dollars And it was pretty 200 dollars and I had some Basic maths but same kind of idea using trends and everything else and I said i'm assuming i'm wrong by 90 percent Still worth 100 grand and it's currently 200 dollars.
It's the best trade you'll ever do in your entire life And that proved out to be true So let's assume that rowleys are more and i'm 50 wrong That's a 50 trillion dollar asset class you get to a million dollar bitcoin Ish right And assuming whether it's that dominant or less dominant and what happens
to it, but you can see the magnitude of the returns So that's a what 15 x return in bitcoin.
What if you're wrong?
You've staked so much of your life On this you've invested so much of your own money in it.
What if you're wrong about this asset class?
You couldn't have predicted bitcoin would be so dominant 20 years ago We couldn't have predicted even five years ago that ai would take hold these things come out of nowhere and they change the paradigm What if you're wrong?
I'm an investor. So being wrong is part of the thing.
What's hard is via helping so many people at real vision and elsewhere It is a weight I carry on my shoulders Because i'm trying to bring as many people across the line and unfuck their future and all of these things And I asked myself those questions and I go back to the simple thing there was the graph
of the adoption of this If that's going to stop We've got an issue but then how are we going to solve problems of digital identity or contracts in a globalized world or Any of these things without this technology?
I can't do it. Right?
It's like a magic technology The byzantine general's problem was a real complicated problem that nobody had solved until bitcoin maybe ai creates a better blockchain maybe ai creates a better system Yes, it could do But how long away is that?
Before we adopt it.
It's adopts that technology, you know some quantum Cryptographic whatever right?
Is there a need for it yet?
Why are we disrupting a new industry that's not been disrupted?
But yes No investment comes without risk crypto comes with that risk The risk that governments were trying to shut it down even though they've tried and it's like a cockroach because it's distributed and it's everywhere Yeah Yeah, there's the risk the blockchain you invest in becomes less valuable There
is the cyclicality of this asset that can fall 70 80 percent every Three for every four years you have to deal with that There's the risk that you lose your coins.
There's the There's all the risks in the world and that's where you get paid the return So I don't there was no certainty in this world I live in a probabilistic world But if you can show me the world is going to be less digital than today And you can show me a better way of dealing with a lot of these
structural problems that we have And you can show me that the community the groundswell of individuals.
Don't forget. This is driven by individuals We've front run the institutions The institutions weren't allowed to invest in it But we've been able to put our money in before they did We've created it if I see any of those factors changing then I worry about it So you're telling me that if I'm earning
an income right now, I shouldn't hold these pieces of paper That the central bank my bank is giving me I shouldn't keep cash in my bank account Everybody has different needs.
I'm not saying don't you know have where you're tin hat and Look everything up to about 100 grand is protected.
So you're okay You're not going to lose your money that way But you're losing another way And that's the debasement of currency It's time to take a moment to reflect on our sponsor whoops sober october challenge I know thousands of you got involved in the sober october challenge My inbox has been flooded
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really simply we talked about in a digital world Everything goes to zero in value That is debasement what it means is too much of something makes it less valuable I can come out of the desert I will pay you anything for a bottle of water Give me a million bottles of water.
I'll pay you nothing for them Right, there's too much of it.
Now how you say well, how can there be too much money?
But what happens is the economic system Revalues things in this weird world in this weird way By debasement so debasement in the old times was if we take one of those gold coins Debasement was that was let's say one ounce of gold Then I was the roman emperor I would just snip off a little bit of the gold
You wouldn't notice and you'd still value it Try and pretend it was the one ounce But somebody else would say no It's actually worth less I've taken that slither as the emperor and i've used it and spent it on sports cars and You've now got a less valuable coin And the country has less value so the money
is less valuable. It's called debasement the more of it That surrounds in an electronic age where you just press the button and you create money Then what happens is the value of money goes down So let's say people can understand it simply is let's say you go on holiday and you go to A country that has a a very
weak currency. Let's say it was used to be mexico Let's say you're an american.
You went to mexico.
Everything was cheap Because the currency kept going down.
But for mexicans it actually got Expensive because the value the purchasing power of your Pesso went down and you couldn't buy as much with your peso What we're doing Is ever since 2008 the whole world all the big economies in the world Hit a hundred percent all the governments hit a hundred percent
of gdp in debt So a hundred percent of the economic value of that country was in debt And that means That just paying the interest on that debt Starts to become a burden.
So let's say your Your economy's growing at two percent a year Let's say your interest rate was two percent Well a hundred percent of the economic growth basically goes to pay the interest payments because somebody needs to generate the money to pay them but At the time corporations Were over a hundred
percent of gdp in debt and so were households 2008 everybody was in a debt orgy The financial system was just lending everybody And then it all fell apart And so what they stopped doing was really corporations and households stopped Um Borrowing as much money.
They in fact restricted money to us So in these economic times we've actually been able to borrow less money while house prices have gone up by debasement I'll show you that in a sec And the governments have taken on this Obligation so they've been massively growing their debts and they reset interest
rates to zero To kind of give them a chance of paying debts back in 2008 And only recently have they have they really risen But they've still got all of these interest payments to pay for now the u .s economy is 400 Well 380 of gdp in debt, I mean staggering considering the size of this economy the world
The entire world is 400 of gdp in debt, but we've gone so far beyond What is sensible anymore that it's become incredibly fragile?
So the management of the payments of the debt and the debt itself Is the number one?
focus of the government and the central banks because If it all goes to shit It all goes to shit everyone's going to lose their savings every business goes under every government goes under there's no payment of services The retirees lose everything it is unfathomable And I know many people online talk
about yeah, we should just let it all go They have no comprehension of what that will do in a world.
That's 400 percent of debts basically a 75 wipeout of every single asset And all the retirees and all your savings and all your pensions and everything so the answer is Well, let's just print some more money to pay the bills.
That's you taking a credit card to pay off your credit card payments Now when you control the money you can kind of do that because nobody's going to tap on the shoulder So what they do is they start printing money First they used to use the the balance sheet, which meant that the federal reserve or the bank
of england or whoever would buy bonds from the market and kind of Basically take them off the market.
So it meant there was less debt around in the market But they've changed the thing they they now have something more pernicious called liquidity You can't see it.
They've got different mechanisms that they put this into the system And basically everybody all of the central banks are doing it at the same time And they're also all in agreement that they have to do it And this is all driven by that aging demographics and the debt problems that it all caused And
so what we've got is every government having every four years or so To print a lot of money.
Why four years because in 2008 they all reset their interest rates to zero They then went and borrowed money three to five years out and every four years the cycle Comes up and they start injecting money liquidity.
Okay. So what does this all mean?
Yeah people watching this like yeah I kind of know what you're talking about.
What it means is that on average?
Your money goes down in purchasing power versus scarce assets by eight percent a year And then you've usually got let's say a three percent inflation rate You've got eleven percent of your money is being devalued every year.
Your future self is getting poorer by eleven percent Right, remember we talked about the future self.
And if you buy the smp 500, what was it making about eleven percent a year?
so if you buy the smp 500 your future self Is not going to get any richer for the risk you've taken locking up your money for 10 years or 20 years Because of this inflation because of this debasement debasement now people confuse inflation and debasement I would call this debasement of currency And
so this is happening eight percent a year, which is why we're all feeling so fucked It's happening.
All these assets keep going up real estate keeps going up to offset this Now what I did once I realized this something I called the everything code is a big thesis around how this all happened What it all means and what's happening is basically the aging population is driving debt to gdp It's driving
the government debt And then the liquidity is paying the interest payments.
So it's this economic machine that the world has become It's perfectly cyclical It's perfectly predictable.
It's not going away until we have this technological revolution we talked about and so Everybody has to protect themselves.
So once I found this thing called the everything code I started thinking okay, if this let's say 11 percent Rates the hurdle rates of money that my future self is getting poorer every year by What am I investing?
So I started dividing everything by that And there's some people I've under doesn't make you any money real estate doesn't really make you any money Gold actually lost your money.
It's supposed to maintain your purchasing power I'm like, holy shit.
There were only two assets in the world that outperformed this Technology crypto The nasdaq was doing 18 percent a year And crypto was doing 150 plus, you know, salaam has done 250 percent a year even with 380 percent drawdowns So this is what got me to change my entire investing game from being a broad
-based investor With you know a balanced portfolio To okay, there's only two bets in the world.
There are literally two bets in the world technology and crypto and The nasdaq is down ninety nine point nine seven percent versus bitcoin since 2012 How much of your personal money do you invest in crypto 100 percent of my liquid net worth and it has been Five years Have you done well?
Yeah Yeah, very well.
I've I've not made any major mistakes I mean i've been in this journey since 2013.
So I have made mistakes My mistake was I bought it at 200.
I put not bad size betting considering how unproven it was in 2013 It was how unproven it was and it went up It went up 5x or something in the first three months of me buying it i'm like i'm the best investor in the world This is amazing.
Then it felt 87 percent and i'm like I had this long -term view it was going to 100 000 and that Um, I would just not look at the price as you're doing right and fine and then 2017 it was now two and a half thousand.
I was up like 10 12x which was amazing i've never had a bet up 10 or 12x and And there was some weird stuff going on.
There was another bitcoin It was going to be the code had been forked and I was like, I don't really understand this i'm going to take my money So that was about march april 2017 by december it had hit 20 000 it had got up another 10x that year Then it collapsed down 85 percent And then I bought it
in 2020 during the pandemic Into that big sell off where it fell 50 percent.
So I bought it cheap.
I sold it on the way out I then bought it when it sold off I Would have just held onto my original bet I'd have made five times as much money And if i'd have listened to myself, which is every four years when you have these big sell offs You just try and add as much money as possible I'd have made 25
times as much money.
So i've even though I got it, right?
I fucked it up too Well, you said that the best trade is always Quality of life.
Yes If your account is full of quality of life and quality of life experiences That's the greatest trade on earth and i'll continue to do that trade until the day that I die What do you mean?
What is the purpose of life now we can get very existential about stuff and You actually go down these paths a lot with ai and universal consciousness and a lot of other stuff, but basically Let's just assume we're humans Let's just assume maybe we've got one shot on this earth Whether you might as
well make the best of it And people have got to remember money is just a scoring system that allows you privileges And people lose track of that and think money is the privilege itself The privilege is freedom The privilege is being able to live where you want to live The privilege is being surrounded
by the people going to be surrounded by the privileges being to bring up a family whatever your value system is those are the things so for me it's I like living in nature And that's probably key thing number one but being connected so when I bought a house in Spain That was a huge quality of life thing
because i've got a security of a house that I own In nature In good climate.
Okay, i'm fine but really Experiences are even more powerful if there is a true currency in the world.
It's experiences, you know, as I said, i've just come back from Living in the remote wild of Zambia.
That is an experience that is incredibly valuable to me and i've done a lot of these That is what it's all for This understanding and seeing of how the world is and the beauty and the marvel The people understanding people and not being fearful of people and and not thinking about Cultures except in terms
of oh, that's their culture and that's their culture as opposed to culture good culture bad Friends yeah, all of these things.
These are the valuable things you can't buy any of them You have to physically go and spend the time And be uncomfortable i've always said There is your comfort zone And where the magic happens And these two Venn diagrams don't intersect You have to be outside your comfort zone To feel the magic if not,
you're just doing life By numbers do I need money to have those experiences?
No So what's the point and me doing all this, you know bitcoin investing Focusing and sacrificing my 20s when I need some money You don't you can solve for it without But it's hard if you're living in ohio Or birmingham or wherever you are, right?
To get some of these things.
It might be I want to be warm and dry.
I want to you know Grow my own fruit and vegetables.
Whatever it is doesn't matter right you can solve it by A number of different ways but really For the average person I say this is like if you want to live on a beach You can either become a billionaire and live in some baths Or you can go to latin america and live on the beach for virtually nothing
And if you're living in an internet age, you can make it happen But then what happens is maybe you want some more creature comforts Maybe you do this look I don't say that we should all be The buddhist zen master and say we need nothing we can reject everything But if we break it down to what is the feeling
that I want? Then you can solve it with money on without money and you won't be disappointed because remember the very beginning of our conversation Is what makes people unhappy?
Is when their vision of their future self?
And their current state don't meet now if your vision of your future self Is remember I said I want that that peninsula in spain where that family.
So what are the component parts that are like sea?
are like Uh social life of people Uh are like natural beauty and with somebody I love okay That can be solved a hundred different ways But in your life did you have to shift from the building zone?
The building season of life to then the kind of enjoyment season of life I did in the middle Which was the lesson I learned Is I had done the investment banking and the hedge fund thing.
I then opted out the rat race I wasn't the richest guy in the world But I thought you know what if I can get a source of income I can live and I can grow my olives and almonds and I lived in a beautiful house on the side of a national park Near a beach town in spain I've won the lottery And I started
global macro investor that ended up becoming a Um a much bigger thing because the financial crisis and I predicted it and got all that stuff, right?
um, and so What I found is I'd semi -retired And I was surrounded by people who weren't really Stimulating intellectually stimulating.
I made some great friends But you wouldn't have a conversation like this And so I felt isolated and Then you know you live on an adrenaline if you're an entrepreneur or in financial markets And so you end up going out to bars and nightclub, you know And i'm like I looked at it and i've been there 10
years I'm like I gotta get out of this because i'm excited by life i'm excited I want to do the entrepreneur thing.
I love investing. I just want to be around people Who also did it and but by chance I ended up building a house in the Cayman Islands Because it was one of my dreams.
I wanted to drop a house on tropical beach I love diving all of this stuff and that was the signal to me to go Fuck it.
I'm moving to Cayman.
I started real vision and I started the entrepreneur's journey and now i've got four companies and i'm Busier than i've ever been in my life I'm, very happy doing it But it's a chapter again And it'll give me the lifestyle ratchet But also the intellectual ratchet that I wanted to prove to myself that I
can do some of these things We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest Not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for I've never revealed the last question in terms of who's written it But i'm going to reveal it in this case This question is written
by Boris Johnson And the question was have you ever tried to sack someone and ended the meeting having accidentally promoted them?
Boris is speaking from experience there you know, I think I probably have I think I probably have And that goes back to one of my things that i've had to learn Is how to have difficult conversations i'm english And my mum's dutch.
We're also quite evasive.
We don't like drama My wife's american.
So she's taught me that like this goes straight in for the kill and i've avoided tough conversations And so I've probably ended up in that situation Or something close to it.
Does it not? I have as well.
Of course. I have and i'm just like but it's the lesson i'm trying to learn is You need to be more If it's a tough conversation just do it amen Thank you.
Rah I think everybody should go and check out your channel, which i've watched for many many years now I think it's the in fact, it's the only channel i go looking for when i'm looking for advice on Anything crypto related the macro environment inflation all of these things the only channel that I trust
and that I go looking for And I really really mean this when I say it has always been yours because I think you've provided Um nuance in a way that's incredibly accessible to the average person and a lot of these finance channels are very difficult To like understand the terminology to kind of skip
past that part But what you've done so well is made all of these subjects so accessible for everybody um, and I can't imagine how many millions of people you've helped open their eyes to the state of currency debasement and You know some of the myths around how to create and save your wealth and I think
that's um A mission that is so incredibly important because a lot of this insight unfortunately historically has been reserved for The elites however, you want to define them the elites intellectually or those only the people that work in finance And I think what real vision has done is blown those
doors open and you're you've been a champion for me in my life Um and an educator for me in my life.
So that's why I was very excited to speak to you today So thank you for what you appreciate that and also for everybody watching this look i'm genuine in trying to help as many people And so we've that this whole everything code thesis to make people understand it more.
We've made a whole special error for you guys in real vision go to realvision .com forward slash diary And there is all for for you guys watching this It's the everything code the document so you can read it watch the video you get free real vision subscription because it's free to join And honestly, there's
so many tools and if you don't understand something ask the ai The bottom right of the screen is a little plus button.
You ask the ai the real vision bottle explain it to you Everything you need is there.
It's free. There's no reason Not to unfuck your own future.
I'll link that below so everyone's got it.
That's real vision .com slash diary There'll be a link below in the description wherever you're listening to this Um, thank you.
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