We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP256: Raoul Pal - Global Financial Concerns (Business Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Boy, oh boy, it's exciting to bring you this week's episode because our guest, Raul Powell, is quickly becoming one of the most renowned global macro voices in the world. Raul is the founder of Real Vision TV, and we have a doozy of a discussion about the global economy this week. One of the unique advantages that Raul and his team have for running this huge financial media company is his access to billion-dollar investors in some of the biggest names in finance. During our discussion, we talk about the issues in Europe, central banks, pension funds, and a whole lot more.

Starting point is 00:00:34 This is a discussion that you will not want to miss. So without further delay, here's our interview with Raul Powell. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Investors podcast. I'm your host, Preston Pishon. As always, I'm accompanied by my co-host, Stig Broderson. And today, boy, this conversation is long overdue. We have the one and only Raul Powell here with us from Real Vision TV. Raoul, welcome back to the show. I'm pumped to talk to you. Thank you. It's great to be back. It's been a long time since I've been on.

Starting point is 00:01:27 It has been way too long. It has been way too long. And so I am really looking forward to this conversation, especially because we are recording this on the 6th of August 2019. There's just a few things happen in the world right now, right? Yeah, just the odd couple of things. It's total bloody chaos. Other than that, I think, really. This is how insane things are. I'm just pulling a tweet that you sent out probably 10 minutes ago, and I want to talk to you about it. So there's this article that you just referenced that Bank of America just wrote. And the article suggests that the Fed might need to conduct quantitative easing in the fourth quarter of 2019. So I mean, we're just talking in a couple months, considering Powell is kind of singing a completely different tune after this last meeting where they dropped rates to 25 basis points. And he kind of implied. that it was a one-off thing. What is going on? The Fed over tightened, and they didn't see the signs because rates were so low. So how could that be a problem, right? Well, wrong, because the rate of change of rates was what makes all the difference, and it was the largest rate of change of interest rates in all recorded history. So if people have increased debt at the lows, which everybody did, every corporate, every household, everybody, it meant suddenly their interest

Starting point is 00:02:43 payments had gone up between 30 and 80 percent, ridiculous amounts. So that was one. thing. So the economy had started slowing. And then I think you've probably heard it from other guests before in the past. There's a shortage of dollars out there. There's a real issue with global funding. And that's to do with a couple of things. One is the fact that foreigners have borrowed $13 trillion. Trillion. I mean, it's quite a reasonable sum of money. And then after that, the Dodd-Frank rule changes, along with the Basel III rule changes and rule changes by the ECB, meant it became almost impossible for these global banks to fund themselves in dollars because they were basically separating or segregating the US entities in funding from European

Starting point is 00:03:26 entities. So what it set off was a course of events which meant that nobody could get really enough dollars. So it becomes a scramble for dollars. So it becomes relatively easy for, let's say, Deutsche Bank to get its dollars, but it's hard enough. But it becomes even harder for China to get dollars because they're slightly further away from the global financial system. So everybody's got this big panic going on. It's happening in South Korean corporates. It's happening in Japan. It's happening in China and it's happening in Europe.

Starting point is 00:03:54 Then what I started to realize is that something technical had happened in the plumbing as well. And that was this crazy situation that the Treasury had been funding the US government because of this debt ceiling. The government had basically passed the debt ceiling. And so the Treasury was basically lending the money. Okay, they had the reserves for that, but they've been drawing it down. to help fund the government. We've now cleared the debt ceiling finally. So the Treasury now has to essentially load up in about $250 billion to replace the Treasury General accounts. In addition, the government is increasing its borrowing by about another, I don't know, $200 billion,

Starting point is 00:04:34 on addition to the other $200 billion that were already forecast. So there's now $600 billion of new bills that need to get issued over the next four or five months. So that's a rate of QE, a QT, essentially, a tightening of monetary conditions of something like $1.2 to $1.4 trillion just when the Fed are actually supposed to be cutting rates. So it means that they can't lend money out into the market. So it kind of locks it away and withdraws liquidity from the markets. So that means they're tightening. What are they going to do? Well, the next thing they're going to do is September, they're going to have to go 50. And I was explaining to people on Twitter that if they do 25, all the equity guys, well, yeah, see, we told you

Starting point is 00:05:15 they didn't need to cut rates. I'm like, you have no idea how bad this is. The dollar's going to rip higher. Next minute, China starts devaluing. That's how bad it is, but nobody realizes it. So now the situation is, there's like five or six really complicated things of which I don't understand any of them about new reverse repo facilities, et cetera, et cetera. But all the people I've spoken to who kind of know the plumbing say they're all going to fail. So the only way around this is to go straight back to QE. Now, there was then a battle is, do we go to zero rates first and then QE, or do we just start QE somewhere in the middle of this rate cutting cycle as well? Will the Treasury in the Fed do this fast enough to stop the dollar absolutely exploding

Starting point is 00:05:55 higher? Because if they don't, you're going to blow up the world. So you've got a really, really precarious situation. I think it's going to be too late to deal with it. But my guess is if investment banks are writing research about it, then people are starting to realize it. So I guess the Fed is starting to realize they're going to have to do something. But I think they're hoping that their little tweaks in the plumbing are going to work, but we're going to see. September, October, November are going to be a bit of a blood bath out there as massive amounts of liquidity get withdrawn. And then the Fed trying to sort this out by the end of the year. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.

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Starting point is 00:10:41 markets. And I know that you get a lot of your information from a very known source that would likely surprise most of our listeners. Could you please elaborate on how you use Twitter to become smarter about a subject? Twitter is an absolute game changer. And I'm seeing it suck everybody I know into its vortex because it is the greatest free exchange of information of the greatest minds in finance that I have literally ever seen. So when I go on and say, does anybody know about funding, I get these

Starting point is 00:11:12 five anonymous guys who come to me, say, yeah, what do you need to know? So then, you know, I end up speaking to one of these guys. And here's the kind of head of fixed income strategy for one of the largest fixed income firms in the world. But you wouldn't know it from Twitter because he doesn't make himself known. So people everywhere, in the past, I've reached out to people and said, hey, listen, can somebody help me out about the oil markets? I think they're going to come down, but I need to know. And I had like 10 people who were incredible. There was like the head of hedging for one of the biggest fracking firms in the United States. And he wouldn't disclose himself, but privately he said, right, how can I help you? It's extraordinary. Yeah, and I don't think people

Starting point is 00:11:47 realize how much we're cheating by having this access to just shoot out a message and just how many people are feeding us information about what in the world's going on. And at times, I don't even feel like I can distribute it fast enough based on the inflow of emails and just random messages you get from people that hear you spread an idea or in the counter way, if you say something that's wrong, I don't know about you, but we hear about it immediately from 100 different people all saying, you might want to consider this aspect. And then they'll throw a chart at you and you're just kind of like, your mind's blown. You're like, if I never thought of it that way. Yeah. You know, what's interesting is politics, Twitter or celebrity Twitter is not like finance Twitter at all.

Starting point is 00:12:30 That is a deep black hole of kind of narcissism and everything else. At core, the FinTwit community is actually really generous with its time and knowledge. Yeah, there's a bunch of dicks on there as well. But really speaking, at core, that democratization of financial information that did not exist before is alive and well on Twitter. Going back to your initial narrative that you were saying there. For somebody who's hearing that, they're just thinking, this is going to be the big one, right? Like, this is the perfect storm. I don't know how anyone could see it any other way. So Raul Powell, is this the perfect storm that we're seeing? You don't want to say these things because, you know, there's always the probability of being wrong.

Starting point is 00:13:12 But I've been following this, and this whole thing started in March 2018. And I had a dinner with Antapiero, who's actually just gone on to Twitter, which she's. is a bizarre thing. So Dan and I had dinner, and I'm like, Dan, I'm seeing some worrying signs. He said, yes, I'm I. So we started talking it through. And we realized what we were seeing was a potential deflationary bust. And it was coming out of China. So China was slowing fast than anybody had noticed. And what was happening was things like copper and oil were starting to fall and the currency markets were changing and the dollar was starting to rally. So I started watching it and I started getting bullish on bonds in about August of last year.

Starting point is 00:13:51 And then that whole trade absolutely took off. And I realized that the world is slowing faster than I anticipated. The dollar is about to break out of its range that it's been in for two years. If it properly breaks out, which it obviously just did do against the Chinese currency, the Korean one and a bunch of others, the Aussie dollar, the pound. If it starts to break, then we've got a problem because everybody's short dollars. And the dollar's going higher. So they need to buy those back. That means a bunch of companies and people abroad are going to go bust. It's probably going to upset the entire Apple car of the European banking sector, which is on what I refer to with the cliff of death. When you look at the 30-year chart pattern, it's horrific. We've got the biggest head and shoulders top I've ever seen in the history of the currency markets

Starting point is 00:14:36 in the ADXY breaking as we speak. We've got oil that if it breaks any lower than this $53 level, then that's going to break down to probably 40 and then 20. and I haven't seen this a setup like this, well, since 2008. So it is huge what's going on. So can we stop it? In the middle of this, the Treasury is about to start tightening by mistake? Can we stop this?

Starting point is 00:15:00 I don't know. There's always, when you go into recession, which I think we've got a very high probability we're going into now, the global PMI is now below 50. So we're going to recession. You always want to hang your hat. On something in the recession, there's usually one big thing. So 2008 was housing and banks.

Starting point is 00:15:18 2000 was equities, the equity markets, the kind of over exposure to equities. So what is it now? What my fear is this European situation is going to start blowing out credit spreads. And credit, corporate credit market in the US and globally, because of the sheer amount of issuance is getting somewhat problematic. So let me explain. Household debt to GDP has shrunk since the crisis, because people have been the Bitcoin. financial debt is a percentage of GDP, that's come off. Government debt is a percentage of GDP.

Starting point is 00:15:50 That's stabilized. Corporate debt has doubled since 2008. So it is now 75% of GDP in the US and 93% of GDP worldwide, of which everybody has been borrowing money to buy back their shares. So that's been the big feature of the markets. And those share buybacks are the only source of consistent buying of equities. So all other market participants are sellers of equities, including the pension system. So you've got one buyer of equities, which is driven by issuing debt, and that debt, who buys the debt? Well, that debt is actually bought by the pension system, because the baby boomers are about to retire and everybody's stampeding for yields. So what's really interesting in that scenario is the real buyer of that debt is the bankrupt

Starting point is 00:16:40 state pension plans like Illinois. So Illinois raised taxes specifically to plug their pension black holes. So that Illinois tax receipts go straight into the pensions, which goes straight to buy the corporate debt that these companies are issuing. Okay, so that's the mechanism. The problem is, is both, the companies are able to buy back their shares and issue debt because they've got enough cash flow. But when the business cycle goes negative, which is going, then they can't. They don't have the ability to issue debt. So they stop issuing debt. That means they stop buying shares, which means there's no buyers of equity.

Starting point is 00:17:18 Okay, so on this business cycle, you might have a hell of a downside. But even more interestingly, if you look at tax receipts, they're also cyclical. So they are obviously to do with the business cycle because people pay more tax when things are going well and pay less tax when businesses are going badly. So suddenly the tax receipts are going to stop too. So there's no buyers of corporate debt either. because both sides of that equation, all the buyers leave. So if you think of the European banks in this, now they're credit players. So you're going to start to see credit spreads widen, and it's quite systemic.

Starting point is 00:17:55 So what happens is the credit spreads widen. Well, some of the company's share prices start falling, these triple B shares. Now, triple B mean their investment grade, but only just. And if they get downgraded to junk, all hell breaks loose. The story goes on is that so all of these companies of which there's $4 trillion, they're owned by the pension system. The moment they get downgrades to junk, the pensions are not allowed by their trustees to own them. So they have to sell them. So they go into the junk bond market, but the junk bond market is a different buyer.

Starting point is 00:18:29 And the junk bond market already has a trillion dollars and it can't absorb this stuff. So who are these companies? Well, a trillion dollars is five companies. is AT&T, which is the largest borough on earth, Dell, board, General Motors, General Electric. One of those is going to get downgraded. And the junk bond market can't absorb it and the pension sellers are just going to be selling it. So credit spreads are going to blow out. When the credit spreads blow out, the equities are going to fall.

Starting point is 00:19:00 So it's going to start pushing AT&T. So let's say GE is the first one to go. Well, if GE goes, AT&T is going to widen out like crazy. the equity is going to start getting slammed, and the spreads will widen. If the spreads widen and it looks like they're going to get downgraded, before, you know, the ratings agency has to downgrade them, they go into junk. The junk bond market entirely freezes. So the only way out of this doom loop is essentially for the central bank to step in and underwrite the entire pension system, the private sector and the state sector. And that means it's going to have to, it's basically

Starting point is 00:19:36 quantitative easing to underwrite the pension. system, and that's going to get pretty ugly and it's going to be huge, but there is no other way out of that. So if that is what happens next, if the federal government has to underwrite that entire disaster, one could argue that it would turn into a big currency issue. But before anything like this could happen, we also need to consider what the other central banks would do as a reaction to this. How do you see this play out?

Starting point is 00:20:04 They've got a much bigger problem on their hands because they've basically got an insolvent banking system, not an insolvent pension system. So they're going to do things even more extreme. And at the right of the front of the Q of extremity is Japan. Japan already owns 60 or 70% of its entire bond market. So the next round of QE means they're going to own 100% of all of their debt. So this is now where they can write off their own debt to themselves. And what does that do? That probably collapses the currency, which is the point you're making about the US. So I think you'll write about the US. If Japan starts doing this, then Europe's going to be on the precipice. And the US, Europe, and maybe China and whoever else is going to maybe get together

Starting point is 00:20:43 and think about some sort of global debt jubilee or some kind of way of managing this whole kind of fit currency crisis, the final debt deflation. So my view on that is the answer probably lies somewhere within. Firstly, gold is going to work within that system. Gold is going to go up because it has to price in this end game. And it's already sensing it now. You can see how it trades. Even when the dollar goes up, gold's going up. It knows its job, which is like, I need to protect against this debasement that's coming.

Starting point is 00:21:12 But the big thing for me is crypto. How does Bitcoin fit into this equation? Because I kind of feel like there's a parallel universe being developed as fast as people can do it, which is an alternative to all of this. And that's why I'm incredibly bullish on Bitcoin as well. So Raul, let's talk about this from the investor standpoint. One could argue that gold is the best way to preserve your wealth if what you're describing here actually takes place.

Starting point is 00:21:39 But there's this thing called Bitcoin that's now out. What's the word? What are your thoughts and what's its role moving forward? I think that it is one of the biggest concepts that I've ever got my head around. And I think anybody who thinks they know where this is going is lying. What we can do is we can all guess. But what it seems to be is it seems to solve an enormous amount of problems in that white paper because it solves everything from trusted ownership of all assets,

Starting point is 00:22:10 particularly all digital assets, any security, anything like that could be real estate. Well, once you have blockchain abilities, you can find out the source of everything and what's true and what's not. So there are so many things, and it's a currency, it's a medium of exchange, it's a store of value, It's so many things. It's quite ridiculous. Now, everybody is developing certain aspects of it. Which bits are going to prevail? What is it? Maybe it's the new operating system for ownership. It is an extraordinary concept. And Bitcoin has a part in this. Now, is Bitcoin the answer that that people are thinking that it's going to be the currency? I don't know. Right now, it cannot be. It's too volatile because it's still, on its exponential growth terrorist, it needs to get to

Starting point is 00:22:57 fair value, whatever that is. Now, maybe the plan B guy's right, and it's worth $100 trillion. Well, it's not until it gets there, which is basically interestingly enough about the size of global money supply. So once it gets to the size of global money supply, its price will be stable because it is the global money supply. But before that, we don't have stability of price. So it doesn't really function. Meanwhile, that could be solved by something like Facebook's Libra, which is an enormous concept in itself. They kind of stumbled into this. Well, they have probably thought about it, but I don't think anybody realizes how big a deal Libra is. It may not happen, but the genies out of the bottle, which was a private sector player, can basically invent

Starting point is 00:23:40 a global SDR currency, which has exposure to all currencies, including the dollar. So the dollar is usually the denominator against all other currencies, even against gold, even against Bitcoin. But with this Libra, it wouldn't be. It would be part of the basket. So therefore, what is the denominator, it's probably global supply of money. Okay, so now you've got a extremely stable thing where it's very understandable what it is and it looks more like a cryptocurrency because it's all about supply, supply and demand. Now, a currency like that is really interesting because governments might allow it because you can still pay your taxes. You're not supplanting the actual existing currency underneath. What you're doing is using it, but turning it into this super security.

Starting point is 00:24:24 governments don't mind it because you're buying government bonds because that's how you have to create this button to do this. But anybody can do this now. So Amazon could do their version. Alibaba could do their version. Anybody could. So this works for the guy in Argentina, the guy in Ghana, the guy in China, the guy in Brazil, the guy in England. We can all use it as our currency. So that genius out of the bottle is not going away. And I think so that's very interesting. So my overall view in this is Bitcoin is the kind of big daddy of a lot of this, but there's going to be a lot of revolutions within that whole ecosystem. And it's not just about currency. It's about breaking down the different components of currency, medium exchange, store a value. They can be two different things now.

Starting point is 00:25:06 So yeah, I'm extremely bullish. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up and customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why Vantta is a game changer. Vanta automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC 2 or running an enterprise GRC program, VANTA keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving. Instead of chasing spreadsheets and screenshots, VANTA gives you continuous automation across more than 35 security and privacy frameworks. Companies like Ramp and RIDER spend 82% less time on audits with VANTA. That's not just faster compliance,

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Starting point is 00:28:19 This and other information can be found in the income funds prospectus at fundrise.com slash income. This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. What are your thoughts on the immutability of the ledger? So in Bitcoin, the whole Bitcoin community is going to make the argument that the reason Bitcoin is going to be paramount to any other digital asset is because no person can be

Starting point is 00:28:48 called to Congress or any other governing body and be told you are going to adjust the ledger. This transaction that took place between these two nations needs to be reverted and be redone. With Libra, you have Facebook. You could call Facebook in there. You could force them. You could put up whatever law or tell them, however, you would go about doing that legally to reverse a transaction. With Bitcoin, that is impossible because it's a distributed, decentralized.

Starting point is 00:29:18 ledger? Yes, but the problem is it's not worth $100 trillion yet, and it doesn't have the stability that's required. So maybe in the future that is the case, but maybe there's a way of also creating a distributed ledger that holds one of these global coins, let's call it that. Again, I don't know. All I know is that there are a lot of probabilities of different outcomes, digitization of everything that is really the big trend here. And how do you see gold? It has had quite the bull run over the past, called six to eight months. The gold is just a probability on this end game. And how do we handicap that? I wouldn't give it above 50% odds yet because we're not in a recession situation. We're extrapolating far and that's what

Starting point is 00:30:03 we macro guys always do. It's a lower probability still. So gold has to adjust the probability of the outcome. If it is starting to happen, let's say the US does start going into a much deeper recession. and some of this doom loop starts kicking off and the European bank start happening. What is the value of gold? Is it up 100%? Does it get to 5,000 bucks? Sure, no reason why not.

Starting point is 00:30:25 So it has a very skewed risk-reward profile right now. In the short term, yeah, it's pretty overdone. You know, I think it's going to struggle a little bit if I'm right and the dollar starts exploding higher. Over time, I don't have a problem. I also track gold versus a basket of 27 currencies, excluding the dollar, and it's been outperforming all of them. So it's basically the second strongest currency in the world over the last year.

Starting point is 00:30:48 So that's telling you something. It's doing its job as a currency. So as like just as we're speaking, New Zealand cut rates 50 basis points, the currency fell another percent. Well, guess what? Gold's been outperforming the Kiwi dollar for a while now. And outperforming the Aussie dollar and the Korean one and the R&B and the euro and the pound and everything.

Starting point is 00:31:06 So it's not a great job for anybody who's seen their currencies for because what are the Europeans doing and what are the Japanese doing? what are the Chinese doing? If the Chinese currency goes from 7 to 8 to 9, well, forget it. The US doesn't count. That's a lot of buying of dollars that's going on. And if that happens, then all of Asia has to devalue against the dollar. So it's really hard for the dollar to go down. And the Europeans with their issues, well, if the Fed are in QE, what are the Europeans going to do? It's QE times two. And if they're doing that, then what are the Japanese doing is QE times three. So no, I think it's a extraordinarily difficult situation for the US. And I think

Starting point is 00:31:43 everybody has a blind faith that, as soon as the Fed start cutting rates, the dollar will go down. And I kept arguing, no, if they don't cut enough, the dollar's going to explode. And that's exactly what's happened. And I think in all of these situations, the dollar goes higher. So what you're really saying is you don't think that the Fed is independent. And I'm not saying that in the context that I think a lot of people might interpret it as far as like politically within the political structure of the United States driving what they're doing. I'm saying the Fed is not independent from other central banks. Those other central banks are absolutely dictating what the Fed is going to have to do next. Yeah, because you've got a global deflationary wave.

Starting point is 00:32:24 That's the problem you're dealing with. So every central bank that debalanges its currency is creating more deflation. We saw this in the 1930s. You know, it's a way. It's a way. well-known playbook. So that deflationary wave, and you can see it in commodity prices, you can see it all over the place. It is very, very difficult to deal with, which forces more and more extreme central bank outcomes, which is why the Fed was so terrified of this recession, let's assume we're going into recession, and we're so keen to raise rates because they thought, well, at least we can cut rates again. I mean, really, they're going to have to cut rates back to zero in like three or four goes. It didn't help them at all.

Starting point is 00:33:01 So Raoul, everyone that listens to our show is a stock investor, are there any stocks that are going to perform well in this upcoming environment? Just give me the hard question. It's difficult to create a bullish equity argument. I know there are some people that say, if the U.S. is so strong and the dollar is so strong, then maybe U.S. blue chips continue to outperform. So it's a little bit tricky. So, you know, you get into the belly-driven world, you know, because values underperform growth so much. the easiest trade in the world has been long bonds. It has been so easy because every outcome leads to lower yields. There's almost no situation I can find right now that will see yields rise

Starting point is 00:33:44 yet. What happens if there are no lending markets anymore? What happens if crypto and blockchain allow the fractional ownership of everything and there's different ways of doing things? Maybe you don't get paid any longer to lend money. Maybe because lending association secure because of the recorded ownership against certain assets, it's riskless. So maybe the world becomes an equity-based world, which we're seeing in venture capital. So venture capital basically is a big change in how things are done. It goes from thinking that in the past of you're a company, you'd borrow money to launch. You go to the bank, and I'm starting a company, can I borrow some money? Those days have gone. What happens now is a VC will give you money in exchange for equity,

Starting point is 00:34:29 because they think equity in this disruptive environment is an option and the option has more value than you'll sell it for. So what's that saying is also it's kind of like buns right now, buns, negative yield. Why would anybody buy a bun? Because they go up in price every single day. So who cares about the negative yield? Because they appreciate in price.

Starting point is 00:34:52 I'm starting to think, I don't know whether that whole system of lending, borrowing, and everything doesn't change. I'm not sure whether this is not an entirely new system that's being formed. And I'm not sure that even whether the past 500 years of the dual ledger system and lending of money, and that lending of money has been going for a couple of thousand years, but the bond market's been going about, I don't know, 700 years, something like that, since the Italians started it. So the answer is, I don't know. Maybe this is a different way.

Starting point is 00:35:20 Maybe it's not the inflation, the bond market blows up and we go back to the old system. Maybe the old system doesn't exist any longer. Raoul, you have access to literally smartest people on the planet within finance. Have you heard anything the past year? But you really thought, wow, this is completely changing my paradigm of how I'm seeing things. It's a piece that somebody did on Real Vision, which was the discovery that all of these state pension systems were using tax receipts to buy these corporate bonds. That was like, oh my God, because I just put two into together and the doom loop just dropped out. I was like, because the bond guys aren't talking to the equity guys.

Starting point is 00:35:58 So nobody's knowing that what's going on here. So that was a really big moment for me. I think the, for Dan Tapiero chat that we had, because I got out of Bitcoin, I've been long from 200 bucks, got out about $2,000. And then Dan had been begging me to look at it again. He's like, look, I'm into this. I'm like, look, there's too much going on. We're going to recession.

Starting point is 00:36:19 It's bonds, bonds, bonds for me. Buy bonds, wear diamonds. And Dan's like, yeah, I get it. but you've got to go back to Bitcoin. So then I eventually sat down with him and Real Vision. And that was a real eye-opener for me to realize, okay, I knew things were developing, but I hadn't figured out how far this was moving

Starting point is 00:36:34 and how big the thought process is now getting. So that was a really interesting conversation for me. And Kyle, unveiling the complete bitch show that is the Hong Kong dollar, was also another classic moment of Real Vision. When I sat down with Carl with my kind of jaw to the floor going, oh my God, this is a mess. Is there any way we can get access to

Starting point is 00:36:54 the video clip that you were describing with the pension fund. I would love for our audience to be able to check this out. I'll give you the link, but I think we've got a new version of Real Vision, which is realvision.com forward slash free. And that, as it says, is a free version. Now, it hasn't got all of the content, but it's got about 20% or so. I think that video's there, but I'll send you the link anyway. It's absolutely insane.

Starting point is 00:37:15 Well, Raoul, what a pleasure having you on the show. And we're recording this late in the evening. You made time out of your insanely busy schedule. see all the places you guys go, and I know for a fact, everyone in our audience is going to benefit from it tremendously. So thank you. Please give everybody a handoff to this amazing work that you guys are doing. I mean, I've been touting real vision for years, but tell people the address and where and what you guys are doing. We've basically built the Netflix of finance. And what that is, our mission is to democratize the very best financial information, bring it to

Starting point is 00:37:51 everybody because we don't believe that people like me of old in the middle of the financial system that we should have all the information. It should be given to anybody. So for $180 a year, which is the same as you play for Netflix, you get access to all of the famous hedge fund managers, the greatest minds, the analysts, the strategists, anything that the very most elite hedge funds in the world get for nothing, basically, $180. And then we started a free service to make it even more ludicrous, which is realvision.com forward slash free. So somebody can't afford it or just wants to have a look at it or is not as involved in finance, knock your socks off. Go there, consume everything you want because all we're trying to do is help you navigate situations like the ones that look

Starting point is 00:38:31 like it's lying ahead. We've started in this business for exactly this reason. And I'm not fearmongering. I'm not trying to say this is definitely going to happen, but there's a risk. So people better educate themselves fast because if not, you're taking risks you don't understand. Well, Raoul, thank you so much for coming on. We just really enjoyed this. I know, thank you again. I mean, I've reached out to you, so I really appreciate it as well. All right, guys. That was all that Preston and I had for this week's episode of The Ambassadors podcast. We see each other again next week. Thanks for listening to TIP. To access the show notes, courses or forums, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. To get your questions played on the show,

Starting point is 00:39:10 go to Ask the Investors.com and win a free subscription to any of our courses on TIP Academy. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making investment decisions, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the TIP Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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