Monthly Recap: Raoul Pal The Journey Man (May 2025)

0:00Hi, everyone. I'm Raoul Pal, the CEO and co-founder of Real Vision. Here at Real Vision, we're committed to give you the best knowledge, tools, and network to help you succeed in your financial future. If you're enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to give it a five-star rating. It truly helps us continue to bring top-tier content. Thank you so much. Join me, Raoul Powell, 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.

0:37I think AI has so many different applications that unfortunately this industry happened before AI. So we need to change this industry to an AI-enabled industry, both in terms of apps we're building, product tools, customer support, risk management, risk monitoring. And also AI itself can use blockchain. So I think, as I said, tweeted before, The currency for AI is crypto. AI is not going to swipe a card, enter SMS code. That doesn't work for AI. It's going to be crypto. And then AI needs a lot of data to train. Today they exhausted the public data, but there's a lot of data we don't capture today.

1:22Those data can be captured in a privacy-preserving way using blockchain. But if you give those data to a third-party company, then you can't ensure your own data sovereignty. So capturing of data, it logically should be done on the blockchain. But today, it's easier technology-wise to do it on a centralized platform. So we will hope to see that transition happen. And then today, there's so many different AI agents with a token. But the agents don't have a lot of utility, right? It's experimentation still right now. So what I would really want to see is real agents that have real utility, that can really help you, that have tokens.

2:01So today, there's so many platforms. You go to AI token launch platform, you click a button, you get your own AI with your own name. It takes three seconds, and then you have your own token. That token is useless. I would say 99.9999 % of those tokens are useless. There may be one or two for sentimental value, for culture value, for other things. But what we want to see is real AI agents that can do things. Today, the big ones like ChatGPT, DeepSync, et cetera, those are real big AIs that can do a lot of stuff. There's smaller AI than those guys that can do a lot of stuff, video editing, image editing.

2:38I've just seen a demo of an AI literally paying for hotel booking. But today, those AI have to go through a website. Hopefully, in the future, there should be an AI talking to an AI to book that. So I think in the future, we will see a very heavily automated world. I think I was talking to a fund manager yesterday. Let's say of 8 billion people in the world, of the data that we generate every day, it's about 300 trillion tokens, not a crypto token, meaning the words for AI tokens. Today, AI is generating about 10 % of that today. In the future, though, AI will generate 10 times more than we do.

3:20So when we have AI, AI will be interacting with each other. There'll be so many exchanges in the tokens, in the word tokens or in the interactions. And then there will be more commerce. AI will be trading with each other. They will be paying each other. They will be like, you know, transacting. They will use crypto. I've talked a lot about this is people don't realize right now the agents are being essentially subsidized by VC capital in these large AI companies. Over time, agents need to get paid for computer electricity. and it happens at lightning speed and the only way of doing that payment is crypto payments and then they will be building their own businesses which they'll build in profit margins as well and it's a strange world where we may not be the profit drivers we may not be the economic engine they'll come from the ai absolutely i think that's that day is coming like with ai uh so far in our world um populations is related to productivity so the higher the population the more gdp etc But with AI plus robotics or plus robots, that's going to change.

4:24So whichever country has the best economy or manufacturing and AI technologies, AI plus robots plus blockchain, they don't need that many people. So the productivity equation is going to change. So it's innovation that matters. So, yeah, in the future world, I think we can live a much more comfortable life with much less work. like how we should be. Yeah, I think this whole nexus of AI and crypto is very interesting. The other part of AI that people don't understand yet is if we're not careful, we're going to have two or three giants, and we need decentralization within that industry too. And I think blockchain plays a role in that.

5:08Have you any thoughts on that? Absolutely. So today, the big AI companies use our internet data to train their models. And that happens to be with a few large internet companies, you know microsoft google whoever else um it's and but going forward uh as i said before we there's a lot of data that we don't generate we don't we don't store uh and now we're going to be smarter about how we store our data so uh we should they should be stored in a permission way that we we only allow access when we want to and we should be able to monetize out of it um so your health data uh you know you can be anonymized and then used to train um uh different AIs.

5:47Every interaction you have, every thought you have, et cetera, if you want to, you should be able to digitize that, blockchain, tokenize it, and then be able to monetize it. In the future, I think

6:02we'll give credit to the first few centralized platforms that have the scale to innovate. But once the industry is proven, then the decentralization will happen. We've seen that with DeepSeek. They open-sourced their model, and And now everyone can use that at a fraction of the cost. And so I think we're going to see more and more of that coming. So I think the future is going to be quite decentralized. Yeah, it's also interesting because crypto is the fastest moving industry most of us had ever seen until AI came along. And now it's multiplied the whole thing. Hi, Raoul here. Listen, I think we've got until 2030 before the economic singularity arrives.

6:39Now, it might not be the exact date, but it's around then. So we have about six years to figure out how to unfuck our future. I've put together a report to help you called Prepare for 2030. It's going to help you take the first steps in that journey to make sure you're secure past 2030. So just click on the link below and start your journey now. Your argument about NFTs is that they will outperform everything because they're priced in ETH and not in dollars, right? ETH has been an extremely painful asset to hold for the last two years. I mean thanks to you I don't because I also followed you on the trade in 2023 ETH is down bad in USD terms and even more down bad in BTC terms what happens to a bill of JPEGs pictures or arts and if ETH is forever cooked there is a possibility that ETH is forever cooked there is a probability and we'll talk about ETH in a sec if it is not cooked forever and let's say it finishes this cycle up 5x or whatever from here or 3x or whatever 2x doesn't matter and you've managed to buy art in a low eth price you will make a multiple on that and if people make money they'll buy art so the art starts outperforming eth so you've got this double kicker that's available which is why there's been a lot of sales recently because in dollar terms, it got cheap recently as ETH fell in this correction that we've just had.

8:14So there's been a lot of dollar buyers, not ETH buyers, because not that many people hold a lot of ETH anymore because of the same reasons. We switch for other stuff. So let's talk about ETH. What is the probable outcome? ETH's cooked. All the developers were wrong. This massive ecosystem, they fucked it up with a layer two's. Nothing accrues, what's the point? It's all broken. Solana's going to take everything. Okay, I hear that narrative. My narrative is they've overbuilt capacity for what the system needs right now. They will adjust some of the accrual mechanism back to the layer one. But EVM is Microsoft.

8:55Every bank, every insurance company, every major company in the world uses Microsoft. Not Apple, not Google. why is that because you don't get fired and once it's in and somebody explained this to me yesterday it's a really interesting thing it's like once once you have enterprise sales model it is almost impossible to extract it from a business which is why banks are still using cobalt and it's because you don't want to change it because it's working and you've learned how to do it and nobody wants to take the risk of saying oh the whole company we're going to turn to X now. So if you think of Ethereum as gone through its LindyFX, it clearly works very well for what the financial markets need.

9:46They can build layer twos, as Coinbase has shown, that can work perfectly for what they need. If they need high security, they can use the layer one chain. They've got all the ZK stuff and all the other stuff that's being built. So everything is there. They've just got too much capacity. But if the finance system comes, they'll go there. Yeah, sure. There'll be stablecoins in Sol and Sui and all of this stuff. But is Goldman going to build in Solana? Highly unlikely. 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.

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11:19Is J.P. Morgan? Highly unlikely. And will they build their own layer twos? Highly likely. When I extrapolate trend rate of growth out of crypto, I get to something like$100 trillion of within 10 years, which would be in line with other asset classes. Even if I'm wrong by 50%, if it is 100 trillion, we're only 3 % of the journey. But even if I'm wrong, it's still going to be the largest, fastest wealth generation event in all history. I think people aren't understanding how much capital is going to get formed in this and the uses of that capital and you know how it completely changes the game as you talked about of access to capital yeah well my my uh my prediction this might be a little bit of a hot take because it's uh aggressive but i i think that um technically what what you're saying uh could happen um but i don't think it's going to be native crypto assets like we have them today.

12:20I think at some point we're going to flip a switch and the securities markets will all be powered by crypto technology. For sure. It'll be almost like how technology as a sector has become the largest sector. But because of the behavioral incentives of the protocol and how they use tokens, it's going to accrue to those tokens. So it's like using AWS accrues to Amazon, but using Ethereum accrues to Ethereum token holders. So that's where the wealth generation comes. You can build the whole financial system on it and we will for sure. You know, that was my first, I wrote the first ever strategy piece on crypto back in 2013.

12:59This was my base case is the entire financial system has to go on it. And I think that's true, but that increase in token value, it's a big deal. Yeah, and you're saying that that'll increase, that'll accrue to the platform layer, the blockchain layer itself. Yeah. I mean, it recruits at various layers because you have the applications layer and the infrastructure layer, essentially. I mean, it's just technology. Firstly, I use a framework that I call the everything code. It's something that I spent 35 years building in macro, where I started to realize that the dominant factor in all of macro is actually liquidity and the debasement of currencies.

13:38And it explains most price movements in all of the assets that we care about. And I realized it's all to do with debt. And it came from why we're seeing four-year cycles in crypto and the economy and all of these things is actually driven by the debt refi cycle. The world just reached too much debt back in 2008. And what we've been doing since then is servicing the debt. We've also got some other key factors. This chart is a chart that I produced a few years ago. It's still the single most important chart in Macron and explains everything that is going on in our world today. And this is the fact that demographics is everything.

14:20And the demographics of the aging populations across the Western world, these are the US numbers using the labor force participation rate, explain the build up in debt. Why that is, is as populations get older, economies slow down. To service the existing debt, it requires more debt. To create GDP growth, you need more debt. See, GDP growth is driven by population growth, productivity growth, and debt growth. And debt growth has been the driver, both in the US, in China, in Europe, in the UK, all across the world. It's all driven by the dynamic, and that's this aging population thing. It slows down GDP growth and creates unstable economies.

15:01And that chart just shows the stunning correlation between debt to GDP and population itself. What's interesting is then when you go one stage further and say, okay, we're seeing this debt, how are we dealing with this debt? And it's actually just driven by liquidity. So here I'm using Fed net liquidity. Fed net liquidity is the balance sheets of the Federal Reserve, the Treasury General Account, which is the Treasury themselves, not the Fed, and then the reverse repo facility. These are the levers that they've been using. It started just using the balance sheet 2009, all the way through to about 2014.

15:43It was just using the balance sheet. Then they started sneaking in new ways of debasing currency. And that was by adding in these other levers, getting banks to put reserves here or take reserves out there or injecting money into the economy via the checking account, the Treasury General account. That's actually shifted to total liquidity now because everyone figures out the game, which is the debasement of currency, debase the currency, try and grow GDP growth and lower debts of GDP or just manage it. Now they're using total liquidity, which includes measures like M2, which is the banking system as well.

16:21So when you add those things up, this has, and I'll show you these charts later, the most stunning correlation of all time to all assets. So 90 % of Bitcoin's price movements are driven by total liquidity and 97 % of the NASDAQ. So here's the real issue here. Why are the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer? Well, scarce assets keep going up in price. Real estate, equities, art, gold, all of these things. Young people can't afford it. Poor people can't afford it because they've got variable income, which is earnings, and it buys them less of these every year. What's actually happening, what that mechanism is, is a tax on everybody of 8 % a year.

17:08A global taxation of 8 % a year that you don't understand. You just don't get richer by 8 % a year. Add in another 3 % global inflation, you're at 11 % debasement of currency. That's your hurdle rate to stay as wealthy as you are today. That's a staggeringly difficult thing considering most asset classes don't produce those kinds of returns, which is why so many young people have come to crypto because crypto completely upends this system. They can't buy houses. They can't buy all of the other things that older people were able to afford. So they forced into more speculative, high-risk assets that have much higher returns.

17:47It's the only way out of the trap. And the trap is driven by this debasement. So if you want to see how close the correlation is, and I'll say the full correlation chart later, it basically drives Bitcoin. And what we see is there's periods where it decouples, and these are the banana zones. It decouples when what we get is the retail frenzy and the frenzy into the market, cools off, comes back to trend rate of this debasement of 8 % or so. But over time, it produces astonishing returns. And that's why Bitcoin looks like this on the log regression channel. It's also still remarkably cheap. Where it ends up at the end of the banana zone is usually the one or two standard deviation level.

18:31We're a long way from that. And that would give us much higher prices. You can't see it on this. But if it were to get to two standard deviations, that'll put Bitcoin at$850 ,000. I don't think it's going to go there. But what we're saying is there's plenty of upside to come. I know people get frustrated in sideways markets. It's just the nature of the beast. It does nothing, corrects for a while, corrects for a while, and then explodes out of the traps. And we're kind of in that phase now that I'll talk to you about. Julian made this all very nice for me. Let's start with the dollar. Listen, the dollar is the largest, most important macro variable on earth.

19:06Nothing comes close. The dollar is 87 % of world trade. It's how the US adds and withdraws liquidity to the global system. It's how all commodities trade. It is the big daddy. And what we had is the dollar had been in a very sideways range for the whole of 23, 24, 25. Then it started weakening. It got the most oversold. It got three standard deviations oversold. And it's somewhat bounced since. Now, why do we care about that? because every time it does this, the 12-month gain after a drop of that magnitude is huge. We had it in 2015, that NASDAQ gained 18%, 35 % in 2022, and back in 2020, 61%.

19:54Things like a weak dollar. The global economy loves a weak dollar. China wants a weaker dollar. Everybody wants a weaker dollar. Scott Besson wants a weaker dollar. Donald Trump wants a weaker dollar. A weaker dollar is the key to making the world go round. And when it happens, things like Bitcoin go apeshit. So the 12-month gain after a large drop in the dollar, 119%, 175%, 592%. These are big deals because a weaker dollar is a change in the denominator of most assets. The S &P 500, also after the DXY, tends to be a very positive thing. So the dollar weakening is hugely positive. And I'll come on to a bit of how this is replaying 2017.

20:44You've seen some of this before, but none of you actually listen to what I have to say. You watch it once, then you watch 17 other videos by stupid people reiterating stuff that we've done or inventing new stories. I keep trying to tell you the same things over and over and over again. You don't listen. Hopefully I've got you to drink finer wine. That'll be a start. Eat better food. That'll be a better start. And then eventually you might start listening to say, you know, Raoul knows a bit about what he's talking about. He's not always right. I'm definitely not. But I kind of know a little bit of what I'm talking about.

21:19But no, no, you want to go on X and hear some guy saying it's the end of the world because that narrative makes you scared. And if it makes you scared, then you've got attention. The world trades off attention. And maybe when I come and say there's nothing to be scared about, attention goes away because it de-escalates people. And then you go back on X again and somebody goes, the world's going to end. And you're like, oh my God, oh my God, what's going to happen? Ra-ra-ra, save me. I'm like, there's nothing going on, guys. Nothing has changed. I've been telling the same shit since the low in 2022.

21:51and luckily that's been like, God, that soft cheese is epic. I'm going to tell you again what it was. It was a Vermont creamery, ash-ripened bambouche, goat's milk aged cheese from Websterville, Vermont. Guys, you make great cheese, whoever you are. Those are really good cheese. Okay. So, Trump came in 2017 2017, the world freaked out. Oh my God, we've got this nutcase as a president. He's going to nuke everything. He's going to come with tariffs. He came in and said the dollar's too strong. Genius. Why? Because the dollar makes the world. And what happens is the dollar fell over the first year strongly.

22:37What happened this time, we said this before the dollar peaked. We said it's going to repeat the same cycle. And it did exactly as we said. And not only that, it's falling faster than last time around. And you see these wiggles. So this up move we had, we had very similar up moves in the dollar as corrective moves back in 2017. And then it keeps moving lower. That moving lower is what is increasing global number two because it's in dollars. It's also increasing or lowering financial conditions or increasing on our charts, which means financial conditions is getting easier for people because of the dollar.

23:17Foreign nations can roll their debts. Corporations can roll their debts. That means everybody has more dollars to spend. More excess spending equals a faster economic recovery, higher asset prices. So the dollar is in this beautiful cycle. The dollar should hit new lows again. And this little correction pattern is actually important because it plays into the M2 chart and the global liquidity chart, which in the end is what is the key driver of assets, which again, most people don't understand. They get caught out in some bullshit on Twitter. I've been trying to show you this stuff forever. Global M2.

23:53Global M2 is the real-time pricing approximation of total global liquidity. Total global liquidity is central banks included. This isn't, but we know that they're using the banking sector. GlobalM2 is rising faster than 2017. 2017, those who were in the market then, it was a hell of a year for risk assets. I mean, Bitcoin from the low did a 23x that year. Now, Bitcoin won't, but something will. One of the large tokens will do something approximating that. So liquidity, gushing. Dollar, falling. All of those things, positive. yeah that's great i mean the ghost story one's great i think everyone if you ask them they'll know someone if they haven't had one themselves they'll know someone that's had a wild ghost story that they can't explain yeah i mean i had one in my i had a house in spain and some friends of mine came from singapore and their kids were in a spare bedroom they were in the main bedroom one of the kids woke up in the middle of the night jumped into their bed so the mother went across to the kid's bedroom went to sleep she came down in the morning and said i is there a kid that ever lived here and i said as far as i know the first person who owned the house had a child who died of leukemia or something and she's like came to see me last night and i was like what um and she said a kid came to the foot of my bed it was not my child and tried to talk to me and i'm like wow and we'd had weird things happening in that house like my neighbor would call me up from spain when i was living in london saying somebody's turning on your lights i'm like there's nobody there we'd find things moved around the house like a radio and it'd be put by that kid's bed and we were asking the person who'd look after the house you know have you been there have you had a nap what's going on nobody could ever explain it it was never a bad thing it was just it was a thing and it's like after that i'm like okay a it freaks me out but b maybe there's something more than i actually can than i understand yeah i mean some of these we always have to keep the you know occam's razor handy right so it's like what's the most likely what's the most simple explanation for this and it's probably the most likely um but there's always these spooky stories um there's one that happened to my brother which is still probably the scariest and weirdest one if you want to hear that yeah let's do it i don't think we're gonna do ghost stories today but this is what we're doing um so my brother is a no-nonsense person not particularly you know not religious not particularly into any spiritual or new age stuff at all.

26:52Very no-nonsense, business-minded kind of person. Awesome person. This was years and years ago, but basically him and through a series of different marriages, he has another brother. So him and his younger brother were at this old house. They were house-sitting, one of their family's family member's house. And they're just chilling. It was a Tuesday night or Wednesday night and they're watching TV and apparently the TV channels just started changing by themselves on the TV. Oh, that's a bit weird. And each of them thought the other one was, had the remote, you know, it was like fucking with the other guy, you know, but they found the remote and that wasn't, that was fine.

27:39And they're, okay, I guess the TV's glitching out. It's fine. And then I think the TV turns off, a wardrobe falls over in one of the other rooms all the stuff falls out a microwave turns on and they unplug the microwave and it keeps going and i need to get more of these details again it's been a while since i've heard this story but there was something about a pen in the house a pen like flew across the house or something and my brother picked up the pen because this pen was something about this pen was really weird and it was doing all sorts of crazy stuff it was like proper kinetic like scary, flaunting kind of stuff.

28:16He threw this pen outside and I said, we're out of here, we're not sleeping in this house. So they get down to my brother's car and the pen was in the door handle. You know, the tiny little door handle of the car, sitting in the door handle. That was the weirdest one that I've ever heard. And I have no idea how to explain that. And again, it's from people that, there's certain people in my life that I love dearly, but if they told me stories about okay you know maybe the edges of their reality are a little too uh permeable but my brother is definitely not so yeah there's definitely edges to to the world and how would you explain because i think it's going to get into the aliens thing because it's all the same kind of concept what would you think of as ghosts what are they because we've framed conversations about consciousness quantum all sorts of stuff in the past so where would you put them in that is it explainable well you know again in this last conversation we talked about what is the fundamental nature of reality right is it a dead material universe which consciousness arises from or is it consciousness is the ground of everything and then all this material stuff is almost like a video game engine that we use to interface with other conscious entities and the main consciousness itself it's leaning towards that consciousness is the fundamental thing that seems to be you know the evidence is pointing a little more in that direction these days so if that's our arena of ideas and of where we're kind of playing in there's all sorts of different entities that can be interacted with through uh yeah maybe through ghost experiences that people have obviously they happen when people have psychotic breaks and other you know mental things they happen through meditation so anyone that's gone down the meditative path you know really really heavily pretty much all of them have entity encounters and see have visions and all sorts of things there's obviously the psychedelic realm so people that take the the stronger psychedelics like dmt and stuff see frequently see entities of all sorts of different types and ayahuasca and stuff like that and then you've got the alien stuff and then you've got the whole pantheon of gods, all the Hindu gods.

30:34You've got these Christian stories like the Wheel of Ezekiel and all these different other visions. So I think there's a kind of like a whole arena of different entities. You've got Carl Jung's archetypal entities, which are different type of archetypes. You've got the tarot. There's all sorts of different things that kind of play. and to me it's not entirely obvious that they're all external so you know given some of i've had some personal experience with with those heaviest psychedelics and also meditation and i've had an interest at a pretty wild entity experience actually on dmt explain but what's that explain okay this one's good that we can write down the rainbow i've not done dmt but i've been reading about it because again it's i think it's all connected somehow and i'm this is what i'm trying to figure out there are a few sort of um exponential age times geopolitics things to get into this month but one of the big things was um saudi arabia announcing this humane ai like just just massive nationwide strategic push on ai hundreds of thousands of nvidia chips tens of billions of dollars a year.

31:52And, you know, this is something we talked about at the GMI event in California, just how deeply MBS sort of gets it, right, gets the exponential age. And you just sense a country now that knows the oil, you know, knows the oil wealth is not going to last forever and ever, and is just making a massive strategic decision around intelligence and the exponential age. And it's really interesting to watch it. We've probably all mid-curved NVIDIA because we weren't assuming that there was going to be a boom-bust cycle because Microsoft and others will have pre-ordered what they're doing. But now we're seeing nation states with endless capital availability building yet more stuff.