August 2025: Raoul Pal The Journey Man's Monthly Recap

0:00Hey, everyone. As you know, on this podcast, I bring the best guests in the world. at that nexus of understanding of macro crypto and the exponential age of technology. If you're enjoying the show, a quick five-star rating goes a long way. It helps us grow and keep these conversations coming with the best guests in the world. Thanks a lot. Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto and exponential age landscapes. In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

0:37My name is Tiago. I am the Chief Product Officer at Tools for Humanity. Tools for Humanity is the startup that Sam Altman and Alex Blanis started like five years ago with the very simple mission, as the name implies, to build the tools that we thought humanity would need in the age of AI. And so we've built a bunch of stuff. The most famous one of that is this project called World, which we launched two years ago, and now it's this big decentralized ecosystem with 100 or more companies contributing to it. we're one of those and so uh i i'm in charge of uh of our products basically anything that users or developers and our operators uh are interacting with um we get to work on all of that with our teams and what does tools for humanity do what is its purpose really yeah so this is the most important thing about the whole thing i think yes and and we really didn't bury the lead right we just put it right in the name.

1:30The way the story goes is about five, six years ago, Sam, as they were working on OpenAI and all these things that eventually became Chachapiti and Dali, he realized that AGI, number one, was going to happen, which already back then was a very controversial opinion. But two, that it was going to happen much sooner than people expected. And we believe that that's one of the most important and one of the coolest moments in just human history is like technology that will change the world and will allow us to change the way medicine and education and so many things work. But there's also some things that are going to break, right?

2:08And we're going to have some new challenges and we're going to need new tools as a society to make sure that we make the most of that technology. And so there's many things and I'm sure we'll talk about some of those, the economic impact, fair access to AI, trust on the internet, right? How do you know who and what to trust? And so we realized that there needed to be a company focused on just solving those problems. And so we started this company called, as the name implies, Tools for Humanity. And we've experimented with many things. As I said, the most famous one is the World Project. But that's basically what we do here.

2:46Journeyman, as you know by now, is my exploration at the nexus of macro, crypto, and the exponential age of technology. And I want to do an update for you that brings all of these together in the most importantly profound way. It's something I've talked about in some of my work, some of my podcasts, but I've never really put it in one place. And I think it is the most important thing I've ever really talked about. You see, my journey, as you know, had been from democratizing financial intelligence and helping people in their financial journey once trust broke down with the institutions and the system itself after 2008 and 2012 in Europe.

3:30That was the birth of Real Vision. The idea was to educate people in that. As I moved forward, I started realizing the profound effects of the retirement crisis, this baby boom generation, the fact that assets are driven further and further out of most people's reach, and that there was a young cohort and an old cohort that was really going going to face a lot of problems. I talked for the young cohort about how cryptocurrency, this was back in 2016, was going to be one of the answers to get them out of this trap. And the baby boomers had more complexities around how they were going to evolve and survive around this situation.

4:08I've talked a lot about the rise of digital assets. And then I brought in, obviously, the Everything Code thesis of how debasement is driving a lot of this. And this is our enemy an 8 % debasement a year plus let's say 3 % inflation rate we've got an 11 % hurdle rate on our investments which the S &P 500 doesn't even do so we have to be very careful in how we protect our wealth or greater create wealth this is part of this how to unfuck your future idea that's based on all of these premises but there's something much bigger that wraps the whole lot together and that's the theory of the exponential age again when I came out with the exponential age in 2020 people thought I was nuts I'm like this is going to be the fastest growth of technology in all human history it's going to be the largest change we will ever go through as a species in the shortest period of time and people thought I was being dramatic then AI came and everyone's like holy shit and now the robots are coming and everyone's like holy shit squared um and now everyone's trying to figure out what this means for society how this all works how to regulate it what to do, but it's moving at lightning speed.

5:18By the time this video comes out, I don't know, maybe ChatGPT, I think the strawberry model, the large model comes out. That's coming out very soon. Again, that'll be another step change. We know there's more releases coming from Google, but really we're already hearing that OpenAI probably trained ChatGPT5 or ChatGPTNext, as it's called, which is a quantum leap yet again, as big as the leap from ChatGPT1 to ChatGPT4, when we're getting closer to something like artificial intelligence. And so this video is really about why you've got six years left to make as much money as possible before everything we kind of understand about economics, markets, business falls apart.

6:03And I can't see beyond that. So I call it the economic singularity. So I think we've got about six years for that. It's not a doom date. Well, this date, it all happens. But it's beyond about 2030 when things are going to become not understandable by using the existing frameworks of economics, financial analysis, markets, and that kind of stuff. So what the fuck am I talking about here? I'm talking about the magic formula. The magic formula for GDP growth is driven. So sorry, I'm just going to go back. Most people look at AI, the rise of AI, and think of it, again, in societal terms. What does it mean for humans for jobs and all of that?

6:43But I think there are more profound implications that come faster that we need to be aware of, and that's the economic singularity. So GDP growth in the magic formula is driven by population growth, productivity growth, and debt growth. So population growth in all of the developed world, including China, we've got falling aging demographics. Many populations are now shrinking. The US, due to immigration is just holding its head above water, but the rate of change of population is collapsing everywhere. So that means that the economic driver of population growth has disappeared. Now, we've seen that in GDP because GDP, trend rate of GDP has been falling and falling and falling.

7:30And it's gone from in the US from like 4 % to 1.75%. And across the rest of the developed world, it's fallen even further, in most cases below 1%, matching population growth collapsing in those regions. The other side of the equation is productivity growth. Productivity growth is basically units of output per kilojoule of energy, or in other words, what you get out of your cost of electricity. So electricity is the kind of... Have you ever wanted to trade Bitcoin but haven't dared try? With Plus500 Futures, you can trade crypto without the hassle of opening a wallet. With just a few clicks, you can register and start practicing with their free and unlimited demo.

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8:47Visit us.plus500.com to learn more. Trading in futures involves the risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus500, it's trading with a plus. the energy that makes the world go round, the economic energy, then we need to see what we get out of that energy. So technology has been the big driver of productivity, but the problem is as populations get older, they become less productive. So it's really been a battle, and technology has not won that battle for quite some time. Then we've had debt growth, and I've talked extensively about debt growth. Debt growth basically stops in 2008, and all debt growth is now is servicing of old debts.

9:28So that economic engine's disappeared. If you think about the Chinese economic miracle, that was a massive population at the time. I think it was 1.1 billion people back in the mid-90s. And what they did was come into the global labor force. The economy of China opened up. That's a massive GDP push. Productivity, well, they built the roads, the railways, the power plants, and all of the stuff that makes China what it is today. That was a productivity boost. And then they increased debt as well. So we had a huge economic boom in China, which we're now paying back with aging population because of the one child policy.

10:04And we've also got a huge problem on the debt side. So how the hell do we solve this? You see, the everything code will just keep repeating ad infinitum where we just have to keep debasing currency to try and offset the debt payments because GDP growth is not fast enough. So GDP is kind of the economic cash flow that pays for the debts. If GDP growth is low, interest rates need to be low, which is why the Fed are going to cut and all of those kind of things. But also, as GDP growth goes lower, debt growth keeps ballooning and you have to keep refinancing all of this debt because there's not enough growth to grow your way out of the debt-based economy.

10:48But things started changing at the margin and really accelerated over COVID. Firstly, Amazon, I think, now employs more robots than it does humans. And this is a trend I've been pointing out for some time. Humans are cheaper replaced by robots that are more productive. They don't complain. They don't have unions. And over time, they're much, much cheaper. So the rise of the robots is just starting. We're seeing Tesla with its Optimus robot. We're seeing FIGURE. We're seeing Boston Dynamics. We're seeing a whole bunch of robotics companies. So humanoid robots really start to replace humans because they have dexterity.

11:27So they don't have to be for single tasks, much like machine learning was for single tasks and AI is much broader. We're going to see multitasking robots. So that starts helping bolster the lack of humans in the population. But the robots will take longer to scale. Physical hardware, you have to manufacture it, you have to design it. we're still at the early stage of this. So yes, we will see Tesla robots and others coming into, let's say, factories. But in our houses, it's probably 10, 15 years away. But it's coming. Now, the big lever here is AI. AI is basically infinite human knowledge. Now, why the magic formula works is because we've charged for and created an economic system around scarcity scarcity of labor and scarcity of knowledge so as the the labor scarcity got solved by the machine age and even the industrial revolution we've seen a transition to service-based economies for humans so that's where we have adapted and moved into places that don't require our manual labor as much.

12:45Sure, there's plenty of manual labor, but it's been moving over time. Now, the issue is, is knowledge, whether it's simply a person working in a retail store, or whether it's a lawyer, surgeon, doctor, accountant, creative designer, brand marketing, anything, will soon get replaced by AI. And mainly the models are good enough now to do a lot of that. But over the next five or six years, these models are going to accelerate. Now, what's interesting is right now, we kind of assume that these models have an IQ of around 100. So they're sort of average human intelligence. But I think that's a bad way of looking at it because it has an IQ of 100 in every topic known to humanity.

13:37So it's a polymath with an IQ of 100 in everything. Now, as these models scale and the breakthroughs come through, and they will come through in the next 12 months, 24 months, we will see the average IQ of AI go from 100 to 400, and then onto 1000. And then some people can say onto a million as this computer. So a million times the intelligence of a human is a system that we don't understand. And I don't want to go into the singularity about what that all means. It's the economic singularity that I think is the most important to all of us and our financial futures. And that's what I'm here to talk to you about.

14:17So a quick break in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called Prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible. And this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description. Download it now. So before we dig into the details of how you collect, what you collect and what you think, what's your kind of macro thesis about this? You know, when you start putting money in it, yes, you can do that for individual one piece of art. But when you start building a collection, you have to have sort of a macro thesis.

14:47What's your whole thesis behind this? The macro thesis is very simple. It goes like this. Digital art is art. Digital art has been around since for as long as computers have been around in the 50s. They were making, you know, people like Vera Molnar were making, you know, algorithms back. there and creating generative art. So digital art has been around a long time. The difference between digital and physical art is it's very hard to attach provenance to digital art. For example, you can right-click and save literally any image off of the internet for years and years and years. And it was difficult for artists to carry over from digital art in a way that would allow somebody to verifiably collect it.

15:30Not impossible. I mean, digital art has been around for years and there's been many Warhols and Bruce Naumans and things like that that have sold. But what NFTs did is attach provenance to it. So it's verifiable. I know this piece was created by Beeple. I know when it was created and so on and so forth. So the macro thesis, I would say, Once you are able to attach provenance to a piece of digital art, it doesn't change the fact that it's art. Art is art. Digital, sculpture, oil paintings, whatever the hell it is, it's art. So if you ask any person on planet Earth, is digital art art? 99.9 % of them are going to say yes.

16:14Okay, set that aside for a moment. What changed? What changed is we did something called an NFT and attached it to a piece of digital art. And all of a sudden, the entire world, you know, Rolling Stone and New York Times and thousands of millions and millions of people thought we were freaking idiots. Why? Because there were these projects called PFPs, you know, the apes, the kittens, the crazy stuff, the little cartoon characters that we call profile pictures went nuts. You know, these things started trading for hundreds of thousands of dollars and then crashed horribly a couple of years thereafter.

16:51I think there's, you know, around 2022. So we have been the entire digital art space has been attached for better or for worse to that movement. But it has nothing to do with that movement whatsoever. That is a separate category. The only thing it has to do with it is it's an NFT. So why did PFPs drag down everything with it? It makes no sense to me. So the macro overlay here is as follows. An idiot like me, who has no art background whatsoever, who had to basically learn all of this on the fly, who did not have, I mean, the amount of money I've spent here relative to what gets spent at Sotheby's and Christie's on even medium type work is nothing.

17:33Very, very small. It's a fraction of the overall art space. And yet, A, it's still art. B, it is networked art, which we can talk about if you like later. You know, C, I have verifiable, impenetrable provenance because of blockchain. I don't understand the sort of gap between what's going on here and what's going on in the traditional art world. We're just looked down upon. And because we're looked down upon, I think it's turned people off to the space. But there's a massive opportunity here. It's art. Talk me through that realization when the world suddenly changed again. Well, as with Bitcoin, but even more so, NFTs was a two-part process.

18:17The 2017, oh, yeah, look at this. Oh, that's interesting. Okay, anyway, this is goofy. Let's get back to the real work of, I don't know, making smart contracts for what we're doing, right? Like, this was a distraction. I didn't get it the first time. Yeah. All right. It goes on the, just like Bitcoin 11 goes on the L list, NFTs 2017 goes on the L list. I was like, oh, that's cool. Because I wasn't like opposed to it. I wasn't a right click save ads. I was like, well, okay, that's fun. But not particularly important, right? Something like that was the first go around. And it wasn't until, I can't tell you exactly what the trigger was, I don't remember now, but I remember towards the end of 2020, I started getting that Spidey sense.

19:16and I started harassing all of my crypto friends, including some who are just like true crypto OGs. And I'm like, I think there's something important here. And they're like, no, it's stupid. It's cartoons. Like it's, you know, let's look at this new blockchain that does whatever, right? And I'm saying, okay. And then I'd wait a month. and then was still nagging at me. And then finally I said, you know, I need to spend time on it. Like, it's bothering me. And I thought, let's go buy some NFTs. And the very first NFT I bought was like 0.01 ETH or something, right? It was just like, let me just buy the cheapest NFT I can buy on OpenSea and see how I feel.

20:07I was like, oh, that was interesting. That was fun. Let me buy another one. well, okay, that feels pretty good. Let me buy another one. And then I started bringing my friends. Hold on, before we go on, what the hell were you buying, and why did it appeal to you? Random, random, random, random. I literally said, okay, I learn by doing. I have a gut, and then I don't believe people can understand anything without doing it. And I think one of the huge gaps we have with traditional system people And with the regulators, they've never done it. And so their image of what Bitcoin is, their image of what Web3 is, their image of what NFTs are, is this wholly distorted image.

20:53So I didn't know if I wanted to invest in NFTs, and I just wanted to spend some time. So I don't even remember what the first one was. It was some pixelated character, because of course it was. But it was the furthest thing from an important collection. It was not, let's go buy Grail NFTs. is it's let me play around in OpenSea for a minute. And what started happening was the following. And this was a very new experience. As I would grab a friend of mine, a family member, and would say, hey, let's try this. Pick something, I'll buy it. Here, set up a MetaMask. I'll send it to you and send it back to me.

21:42What I realized within a month, this is crypto's consumer moment. It is a well-known truism in technology that technologies become consumerized when you stop talking about the technology. I had spent eight years trying to convince people of the joys of decentralization. The whole time, I've had this thought in the back of my mind. I'm like, I know this is wrong. I can't tell you why it's wrong. But I know it's wrong because I'm talking about the Byzantine general problem. I know it's wrong because we're discussing the differences between how Solana reaches consensus and how Ethereum reaches consensus.

22:24And, of course, I personally find it very interesting, but this is nerd stuff, right? This is not consumer stuff. One of the ways I think about it, you know, Instagram uses, I'm sure, Python and machine learning and cloud computing and routers and servers. But no one in the history of the world said, hey, you should use this cool Instagram app. It uses Python. Right. That's not how consumer tech works. And what I noticed for the very first time in crypto, here we were absolutely using decentralized rails, true crypto, Ethereum, right, Web3 applications. And we weren't talking about the tech except for the basic kind of ramp up curve.

23:03Here's how MetaMask works. Right. Once we got past that, it was, oh, this one's cool. That's cool. I want the one with the silly hat. I want this photograph. Oh. We are humans after all. Correct. But that's tech in and of itself isn't interesting, right? Tech is interesting to meet human needs, right? And so I was like, oh, wow, this is it. This is the positive way to say it. The classic way to say it is this is how crypto consumerizes. the kind of inside baseball way to think about it, this could be a Trojan horse for decentralized reels, right? We know this eight years in, no one cares about decentralization per se.

23:59And I say it as a harsh statement, but it's true. It's true. You obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end. But listen, don't forget to go to realvision.com forward slash join and grab a free membership. It's an incredible community packed with alpha, great investment ideas, and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future. So get started now. Go to realvision.com forward slash join.

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