Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

2020 has been an eventful year in the world of finance. There's been quite a mood change over the last 12

months. It seems like no time at all since Monkey JPEGs were viewed as a status

symbol and the finance experts on social media were all on the search for the hottest new

cryptocurrencies. In order to fit in better in this new world of finance, I photoshopped my

Twitter profile picture into a hexagon so that it would look like an

NFT and get me some respect.

It wasn't just me either trying to get respect in that space.

The British finance minister and now Prime Minister Rishi Sunak asked the Royal Mint to create

NFTs as part of its forward-looking approach

towards crypto assets. So far these NFTs have not turned up and the Royal Mint have been

a bit quiet on that topic over the last few months. Back in January, people were willing

to pay Twitter a monthly fee to have an NFT profile picture.

Today, Elon Musk could probably flip the site to profitability by charging people to remove

NFTs and laser eyes from their profile pictures.

This could get more and more embarrassing as time goes by, and people want to claim that they never fell for that nonsense.

2022 has been a tough year for investors who were dubbed the next Warren Buffett too.

There was Cathy, Sam, Chammath who called himself the next Warren Buffett.

As time went by, we found out that

Warren Buffett himself was actually the next Warren Buffett. There were many surprises too.

I for one wasn't expecting the year to wrap up with the richest man in the world, spending

all of his time on Twitter asking people for $8.

...