Every Investor Should Read This Book | Making Money with Matt McCall

Hello and welcome to Making Money. This is Matt McCall. Thanks for joining me. It's the 16th of June 2022. We've got a very special show for you here this Thursday. We're going to start doing this more often. But as many of you know, I share a lot of anecdotes and stats and different quotes I get from a lot of reading that I do. Majority of my reading is based around the future, based around economics, based around the stock market and trends that are happening in the world. It's just typically what I like to read. And one of my favorite books, I call the Bible, is sitting here right in front of me. I'm in Nicaragua right now and I still travel with this wherever I go. About seven books with me I travel with, but this is one I always take with me even though I've read it several times. And I think it's important to share with you. Many of you have read it because I've recommended it over the years. But I think it's important for me to share with you what's going on inside this book, how it can help your investing, and more than anything, I think we have a lot of fun along the way as we do this. But the key here is education equaling making money by using the education we get in this book. So coming up right now, our first ever book review here on Making Money.

Again, this is Matt McCall. Thanks for joining us. The 16th of June 2022. It is actually a beautiful Thursday down here in Nicaragua and the sun is out. A little rain from time to time, but the sun is out during the rainy season, so that's a great, great thing. And as I mentioned just in opening here, we're going to be doing a book review of one of my favorite books, if not my favorite book of all time, in just a couple of seconds here. And just to give you an update: when you're watching this, the Fed just came out and decided on interest rates. Well, today's a travel day for me. I'm heading back to the United States from Nicaragua, so I was not able to be around on this Thursday for that to happen. So what we're going to do is a special short update on Friday, and we'll do that tomorrow on the reaction of the markets, the reaction of analysts of different asset classes to what the Fed said, and of course my analysis of what the Fed decided to do with interest rates on Wednesday afternoon on the 15th of June. So we'll have a special breakdown of just that coming up on Friday. So get ready for that. But in the meantime, again, this is something where you can never stop educating yourself. You should never stop reading. You know, I will admit I was not much of an avid reader in my earlier years for whatever reason. Could be the fact that now my therapist thinks I 100% have ADHD, so maybe that's why I wasn't the best reader in the world. Now I love to read. I love to listen to books when I'm running on the beach. I just think it's great to educate yourself. And I will tell you folks, some of the smartest people I've ever met, not the wealthiest, but some of the smartest and most well-rounded people are the most well-read people I've ever met. And a lot of people in the company here at Stansberry, in the Agora world, are some of the most well-read people I've ever met in my life and some of the best writers ever written that I've ever read, and also just some of the greatest and smartest people. So keep that in mind. Reading books, they have children, grandchildren, get them on it early. I unfortunately did not, but I've been trying to make up for lost time here, reading as much as possible. So the book I'm going to talk about today is, for the first inaugural book review, it's called The Future Is Faster Than You Think, and the subtitle is How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives. It's by Peter H. Diamandis and Stephen Kotler, who does a lot of the writing of it. And they're New York Times bestsellers. Their previous two books, called Abundance and Bold, are also great reads. I highly recommend that as well. But as you can see here, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, it's a fantastic book. And again, it's been my Bible. I've recommended this book more than any other book to people in and out of the industry, just trying to help people understand what it's like to invest and just to understand what it's like to think about the future.

I talk about this study very often here on the show. And that study is looking at people's prefrontal cortex, which is right here. And if you have the device on to measure that, when you're asked to think about yourself, the prefrontal cortex lights up. When you're asked to think about somebody else, it does not light up. That's not groundbreaking, but what's fascinating is when you're asked to think about yourself in the future, it does not light up, because we can picture ourselves right now in the present, but we can't picture what the future is like. Another little story I tend to use is there's been studies out there that ask people what their biggest fear is, and a lot of it is about the future: running out of money, running out of food, wars in the future, their children, their grandchildren's lives, what it's going to be in the future. So the future in general to many people is scary because it's unknown. Books like this, and a book that I'm working on called The Roaring 2020s, talking about the future, it's going to help you realize that, you know, go back 10 years from now, just think about what's happened. And one of the stories that Peter tells in this book is he talks about the smartphone. This book was written a couple years ago, but he talks about the smartphone, you know, called the iPhone, about $800, whatever you pay for a smartphone these days. But in 2012 dollars, if you consider all the stuff that's in it, obviously the phone itself, connection to the internet, plays music, camera, video camera, calculators, all the stuff that comes with this, how much that would have cost, that technology in 2012 dollars, he estimates one million dollars. So 10 years later, you buy this thing for 800 bucks. And 10 years ago, if you would want to put all these things into a device, it would have been about a million dollars in 2012. That's fascinating. Think about that in 10 years. So when I talk about the Roaring 2020s, people keep saying, especially with the market being extremely choppy recently and major indices being in bear markets, so it's over, technology is over. So technology, what does that mean? We stop innovating? We literally stop? In the time this world began, there's been civilization on this planet. We've innovated consistently throughout time. They don't go backwards. So let's go and jump into the book here. And I'm going to go through it pretty quick, obviously, because I want you to read it for yourself. But there's a few things I do want to highlight. And the first part here is called The Power of Convergence. And when Diamandis refers to convergence, I'm going to read a paragraph out here because it kind of gives you a bit of an idea. And he says, 'If you want to understand convergence, it helps to start at the beginning.' He said in his earlier books, Abundance and Bold, which are great reads, they introduced the notion of exponentially accelerating technology. That means that technology that doubles in power while dropping in price on a regular basis, Moore's Law. And Moore's Law goes back to 1965, where Intel founder Gordon Moore noticed that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit had been doubling every 18 months. That meant that every year and a half, computers got twice as powerful, yet their cost stayed the same. So he thought that was pretty astounding, and then he predicted that that trend would last a few more years, maybe five to ten. Well, it's now been going on 60 years since that's happened, believe it or not. And then, you know, the computer chips back then, they're about a million times more powerful than a supercomputer than the 1970s. And as Diamandis refers to it, it's not stopping anytime soon. So it's good to get in and get a good example of that.

Another example it talks about is an area that I recently put out a portfolio for subscribers, because I went and visited the first, I call them flying cars, air taxi, eVTOLs, which is electric vertical takeoff and landing. They look like drones. And if you follow me at all, you know all about this, and if you're a subscriber, you know the stocks that we recommended to take advantage of this trend. Well, on page 9, Peter jumps into that and he says, you know, helicopters are loud, they're dangerous, which we all know. And so we have a convergence of a lot of technologies coming together. It allows for older technology to be disrupted, and that's what we're seeing with eVTOLs, because now you have the materials that are much lighter, you have the technology not to just have one rotor but all the little small rotors that looks like a drone. You have the ability for it to be autonomous, so you have to have AI, you have to have lidar in there, some have radar not lidar, but you have all these different breakthroughs coming together. And then you'll have robotics that are able to fly it, going to have 3D printing, they'll likely print all these and build all these. But again, even go back to GPS. You know, before GPS, before lidar and everything, there's GPS that exist. You wouldn't even have this without GPS. So again, and then you have to have battery technology, and the battery technology is another one that you could continuously innovate, and something I've talked about a lot. So once you understand the convergence and how all these different mega trends that I talk about often come together, then you will realize that's where technology innovation will happen, by different things converging and moving ahead.

Then he talks about some of the exponential technologies that he likes, and a lot of them sound familiar because a lot of them are ones that I like as well. Quantum computing, he talks about quantum computing. And in there, he refers to a company by the name of Rigetti, and that's a company that actually recently went public, and it trades under the symbol RGTI. So it recently went public. Stock has not done that well. It went public at around $10 a share as a SPAC, and now it's down to $4 and change. So you are seeing a bit of a pullback in that coming back. So quantum computing, though, is something where there are certain calculations out there now that would take the computer power we have now literally thousands of years, and quantum computing essentially will be able to do that in hours. I mean, unbelievable, which will help in so many aspects, whether it be help creating the next semiconductor because you can test all the stuff so quickly, whether it be in drug discovery because you'll be able to take all the data that we have and run it through and test everything instead of taking seven to ten years of testing it out, you'll be able to do it in hours. So quantum computing will be one of those mega trends that I love, that I really believe will change the world dramatically, and I mean like ultra, ultra dramatically, I believe. And he says here, this book a couple years old, that 1.5 million programs have been run on Rigetti's Forest, which is their quantum computing. So we're there, we're it's happening. As I mentioned, the stock has not done very well, but anything that's growth related and mega trend related like this hasn't done well, so I don't want to push too much on it, but that's a big reason why it hasn't.

Some other technologies he likes: artificial intelligence, which I've talked about many, many times. That's the same as machine learning. You know, that's basically, I always say artificial intelligence is that trend that is everywhere but nowhere. I mean, every time you put something in Google, they're using artificial intelligence. Every time you pull up Yahoo.com and you have stories that, oh, I like that story, they're using artificial intelligence to present you stories that they think you're going to like. So it's here already, but the continuing growth of AI will be tough to really see. There's a lot of it behind the scenes, but it's going to make our lives much easier as the years go along. Talks about 5G, which is here already, not fully, maybe 25% really out there right now, will continue to go throughout the rest of this decade. Balloons using internet, internet through balloons, satellites. And this just makes me think of Starlink, which is the Elon Musk company, which he used the satellites to help get internet service and connectivity to Ukraine during this invasion by Russia. So you're already seeing that really kind of fruition. Sensors are one, because all this stuff needs sensors, whether it's autonomous vehicles, whether it be the satellites, whether it be artificial intelligence machines, whether it be for 3D printing. I mean, everything's got sensors on it now, your phones, computers, everything. Healthcare, wearables, sensors. And I thought it's a pretty fast saying story that he refers to, and here that in 1989, a gentleman by the name of John Romkey created the first Internet of Things when he connected a Sunbeam toaster to the internet, which is pretty funny. I think about that and I think of Back to the Future, that crazy doctor, Doc, where he connects all the things together, and it reminds me of that. But that apparently was the first Internet of Things device, IoT device. And predictions by 2030 that there will be 500 billion connected devices, and they will need trillions and trillions of sensors. So this is a big, big market to keep an eye on.

The next is robotics. I just wrote yesterday for our Mega Trend Investor subscribers an entire issue on robotics and recommended a stock. And it's a foreign stock that I bet nobody's ever heard of, maybe one or two people out of a thousand have heard of it. And it's a several billion dollars, so it's not too small, trades in the United States has an ADR, American Depositary Receipt. But I recommended that stock, and to me it is one of the best plays, if not the best play on robotics and machine learning and vision when it comes to industrial and the industrial sector, because that's where you're going to see robotics really take off first, not the little robot from The Jetsons coming around here and taking care of you. Not that it's going to be, but in the industrial side, because we're going to see that. So I just put out a recommendation again Wednesday evening, so just yesterday we put that out. So that's in our Matt McCall's Mega Trend Investor. VR, AR, virtual reality, augmented reality, talks about that. 3D printing, blockchain, obviously blockchain and Bitcoin, materials science and nanotech. That's pretty important because a lot of the things that are being created these days, whether it be through that 3D printing or other things, making things much smaller and materials will change the way that things are. I mean, the theme of plastic hasn't been around forever. You know, plastic changed the world, and now we're trying to get rid of plastic. And then the last one is biotech, which you know I love biotech. I think the biotech stocks down here are so beaten up. I don't know if I buy them here because I still think this could be a little bit more choppiness in the market, but that is an area that obviously is part of the future here, part of my Roaring 2020s theme.

So a couple other things. Then it kind of breaks down chapters as it goes into the future of, you know, future of shopping, future of advertising, entertainment, education, healthcare, longevity, insurance, finance and real estate, food, all these different areas. And you think about future shopping, obviously shopping's changed dramatically right into e-commerce as we know. The future of advertising, we don't get the same advertising we did back in Mad Men, you know, one of the greatest series of all time, where they're putting up billboards and commercials. And sure, there's still commercials, but they're not that. We're streaming, it's a little bit different. Most of it's online. It's going to be that type of advertising. It's going to be in your Instagram, you're looking at it, or popping up on Facebook. So the way that we advertise is changing dramatically. It's about using algorithms and using AI and machine learning to figure out where that is going. The future of entertainment, entertainment's obviously much different today than it was years ago. It's only going to get better. You know, nobody was streaming 10 years ago. You know, down here in Nicaragua, if I lay in bed and I pull up my iPad and stream something that I downloaded from the States, so I got pulled up Netflix down here. I watched the movie Hustle last night, the new one with Adam Sandler, about where he's a scout for the Philadelphia 76ers. Really good movie. It wasn't great, but it was a good movie. So the way we view things is going to be very different. And I talked about AR and VR a second ago, virtual reality and augmented reality. That's going to be a huge part of entertainment, being, you know, putting on your Oculus. I still think that everybody during this decade will either have an Oculus or some type of glasses or contact lens that you'll put in and that will kind of connect and see everything. I can't wait for the day. And I'm kind of scared of contact lenses because if you've seen the last couple of shows, my eye has been very bloodshot. I hurt my eye taking my contact out. But where you put the contact in and you can turn it on, you look around and it tells you what it is, where it is, how to get somewhere, you have directions right there. You know, being down here in Nicaragua and trying to get my Spanish better, I can look at things and it tells me how to say it in Spanish. It's just, I think it's going to be amazing. And I know that freaks a lot of people out, but to me, that's part of entertainment too.

Future of education. You know, we're seeing the current administration wanting to give money back, or basically pay off people's student loans. I don't say the education system is broken, but I think we broke it as a people because we had this sense of entitlement that everybody should go to college. Not everybody should go to college. Not everybody has to go to college. I did, my family members did, but actually one of my siblings didn't finish college, all the rest did, and she's doing fine. And it's not everybody's job to go to college. We're pushing people, and then you push them to get a degree in liberal arts, which prepares you for nothing in life. You party for four years and then you're pissed off because you owe a hundred thousand dollars of student loans. Well, you should have thought it through, or your parents should help you think it through. It was a bad decision, your guidance counselor, I don't know. But because you made a bad decision and I'm paying mine off, and I got scholarships and worked as a bartender for many, many years to pay for my school, and paid it off. It's broken though, because we push too many children to do it. Future of education is going to be online, it's going to be very niche, it's going to be learn whatever you want, and I think that's going to be very important. It talks about healthcare and longevity, two different chapters but they kind of go hand in hand. The future of healthcare is going to be so much different. Longevity, people are going to continue to live longer and longer every single year. And the healthcare future to me, it's about connectivity, it's about wearables, it's about prevention. Those are the three big things that I see going forward.

It talks about the future of insurance, finance, and real estate. You know, you can take a look at real estate right now. The 30-year mortgage this week hit 6.28%. I mean, it's nothing like it was 15 a couple decades ago, but it's much higher than it was just a year ago, even in January. Somebody put out the number, had said beginning of January this year, if you bought a $400,000 home with 20% down, so you put your $80,000 down, mortgage of $320,000, that your monthly payment at the interest rate mortgage rate at that time would have been $1,399, so let's call it $1,400. Today it'd be $1,970, because interest rates have gone up. Same thing, same amount of money down, but think about that folks. You know, for somebody who could just barely afford the $1,400, now it's $1,975, $1,970 and change. Not even close. It's not even the same ballpark. There's no way. So either you can't afford that home, or you have to buy a much lower priced home. So I still believe in future real estate. I still believe realtors will be, not they'll be extinct by the end of the decade for the most part, at least 99% of them. I still think companies like Zillow and Redfin will do well, getting killed now, and real estate market's going to get worse I think, so you'll probably see them continue to get killed. Future finance, it's all about blockchain, it's all about decentralization. Future of insurance, it's going to be different because if you have autonomous vehicles, you're not buying car insurance anymore. So things like that will change the insurance industry. And you should really pay as much as you drive. If you don't drive as much, you shouldn't have to pay as much in car insurance, in my opinion.

There's a nice little bit here towards the end of the book, and it refers to the five migrations. And these are pretty interesting. The first one is climate migration. And just to back it up a second, it talks about how over centuries, as a people, we would migrate different places depending on where it was, you know, migrate to where the water was, migrate to the shore where the food is, better weather. So one is climate migration, and that's how people will be displaced due to climate change. So as sea levels rise potentially, it's taking out, you know, does it wipe out New York City eventually? Does it take out New Orleans? Take out certain low-lying areas? Possible. I hope not, but possible. Another one is urban relocations. And this was fascinating because this was written before COVID, and you know, we were seeing the opposite now, because during COVID we saw people leave urban locations and move out to the rural areas and suburbs, getting away. I don't know if that trend continues. I think it could. But there's something to younger people, at least me growing up, I always wanted to live in a city. And once you live in a city and you know the conveniences of living in a city, it's tough to kind of move out of it. So I think we'll start seeing the urban relocation come back a little bit. You're starting to see it in New York, prices are high, so you're starting to see it already. So another one of the five great migrations he talks about is a virtual world. And yeah, I mean, that's you know, putting on your AR/VR headset and going into a virtual world. That is weird as it sounds to me, and as scary as it sounds to some people, but it's exciting to a lot of other people. It's here and it's only going to continue to grow. Space migration, obviously. We know one of my favorite wackos out there and favorite entrepreneurs, Elon Musk, would like to get to Mars and really live on Mars. So I think that's something that we can continue to go, and there's many billionaires spending a lot of money on this. So that's something again way down the road, but something you can look at. And then the fifth one refers to it as meta intelligence into the Borg. And this is involving brain computer interfaces, BCI, where you can basically hook up, they've tried this before, people that have Parkinson's or debilitating diseases, to hook them up to be able to really kind of rejuvenate the brain. Far away from that, but again, it's something just looking way, way out, a trend that is looking at as far as the next five great migrations that could happen in society.

So yeah, again, this is a book that I don't care if you're even not in the stock market, if you don't like thinking about the future, if you're not a futurist or whatever, it just, it's a very easy read, it's written real well. And again, I think if anything you take from this, I think you'll definitely agree with a lot more things I say, because it kind of backs it up from hearing from somebody else. I also think you'll open your mind, which is extremely important. I think it will educate you. I think it will help you in the stock market dramatically because you'll be able to think bigger picture, not just from day to day. So this is something that I think you really want to dive into and take the time. It's beach reading season, that's why I'm doing this right now. It's the summer, just got kicked off. It's a great read on the beach. Listen to it as well. I like to read because mine's full of highlights, and every time I read I highlight more stuff. But again, one of the greatest books I've ever read, probably top two if not number one. The Future Is Faster Than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Stephen Kotler. I would definitely check it out when you can. And let me know if you read it, let me know, give me your reviews. Or if you have other books you want me to read that I haven't read to review, please put them in the comments. But I've read quite a few books on the market, and I intend to do this from time to time and help you get some books ready to read this summer. So again, thank you so much. I'm Matt McCall, and remember, tomorrow Friday we'll be doing a special show updating you on the reaction after Wednesday's Fed announcement, how stocks, how gold, how Bitcoin, all the asset classes are moving, what's going on with bond yields. We'll dive into that, what it means for your portfolio. Friday we'll get that out to you. So again, thank you so much. Any comments, please put them below. Like, subscribe, let your friends know all about the show. And again, we'll be back tomorrow on Friday with a quick update on the Fed and the market reaction. Again, I'm Matt McCall, and that was Making Money.