Preparing for the Exponential Age

30:46One of the things I've observed is how difficult it is to find a curated source of independent research. And we have all these incredible research providers who appear on Real Vision, who've been basically curated by the community. So we thought, well, why don't we make it easy and create a marketplace for independent research? So you're not looking for it on Twitter. Is that the right person? Should I pay for this? Should I pay for that? You get to see them, hear the discussions, and you can then sign up on the Real Vision platform, but it will deliver it in your feed on the platform. So everything is all together.

31:23And that then lets you use the AI to get summaries, the Real Vision AI that's built into our platform, to allow you to get summaries or to take notes or to understand more. So it kind of supercharges the knowledge of all this incredible community of independent research writers. And we'll also be having tools as well to build on top of the Real Vision network. So it's like an app store. It's an app store for everything you want in your financial world. And it'll appear in your feed in this kind of seamless experience. We think that solves a lot of problems for people trying to find the right research that suits them.

32:01It also solves problems for independent newsletter writers who have to go on X every day and raise their hands up, say, look at me, look at me, look at me. We have a very large, very engaged audience. And that way, we bring everybody together into a symbiotic relationship that feeds on each other. So hopefully, people are going to find it really great that all of their favorite research can eventually appear in their Real Vision feed. They can bookmark it, take notes, do all the things that they do all in one place. So you just click on your Real Vision desktop app. Up it comes. There it all is.

32:38And the Exponentialist is the first product of that. you'll see later this month or early next month, a whole bunch more that will come out. RAOUL PAL So the first product and something that you and David have custom created for this new offering. DAVID ROSENBERG Exactly right. Exactly right. And there'll be products at different price points, different types, different niche markets, broad markets, all sorts of stuff. The idea is to give people that kind of a la carte experience where they can choose what they want to bolt on top of the immense amounts of knowledge that's in Real Vision itself, and then utilize all of the tools and other stuff that Real Vision provides.

33:18So the idea is then you can start curating your own financial world, building the foundation stones for what you really need to thrive and survive in your financial world. RAOUL PAL, I've noticed without even asking, people are queuing up to ask some questions. Should we start bringing folks up on stage? RAOUL PAL, Yeah, go for it. All right. DeFi Diffin, one of our regular listeners. How are you, man? Oh, I think we got to give him the microphone. Let me see if we can add him a speaker right now. Okay. Apologies for the delay. Sometimes the X platform is a little bit slower than we'd like at bringing people up on stage.

33:54Can you hear me, guys? Hello? Yeah. Loud and clear. Oh, you got me up there. Okay, yeah. Hi, guys. Hey, welcome. Yeah, basically what I wanted to ask was, you know, the macro inside this product, absolutely fantastic for me. And it's, I can digest it in a way that I'm very, very comfortable with. Then we have the, there was a Delphi product about crypto. In all honesty, that was just too intense for my brain. how is the exponentialist going to be sort of laid out is it going to be more similar to the macro insiders or are we are we talking a delphi product sort of thing where you feel like you have to have a white cloak on and walk around in a laboratory um i think the answer is uh you know david and neither of us are technologists so we're not coming from the angle of the deep tech.

35:03We're coming from the angle of trying to explain to people and help people and navigate it. So it's much simpler. The essay, I think, is going to be unlocked for everybody to have a look. So you'll understand what it is. But you get week one is David's long-form essay, or maybe a deep dive with me. Then after that, it's an AMA the following week. So you can dig in, getting a better understanding, talk to David about all of this. Week three is a conversation, a long-form conversation between David and I, talking through what we've learned, what's going on, where we are, the trends we're picking up, the signals we're seeing, the risks we're seeing.

35:41And then week four is going to be, OK, where are we in the technology business cycle? And some sort of follow-along portfolio. It's not trading. It's not like Macro Insiders in any way. it's more just a simple, here's how to capture the theme, but let's tell you where the business cycle risks lie in it. And then there'll be some updates when something really big and important happens. So it's probably more like the Macro Insiders product than it is the Delphi Deep Dive. But by nature that it's technology, we're all going to fill out of our depth occasionally. And we should do, because that's the point.

36:23Yeah, true. I mean, I'm very, very interested. It was just, really, I'm interested in the product. And I just would have hated to think that all of a sudden I'm just bombarded with information like that deep dive Delphi product. I mean, that's fantastic if you're a technologist and you're in the weeds of technology. But for somebody like me, it was just like, whoa, I can't compute that. But yeah, brilliant. Thanks a lot. All right, no problem. Thank you, man. And by the way, it's sort of exactly as it should be, right, Ron, to find that we have different product offerings for different people at different points in their journey.

37:02Exactly right. People all have different needs. That's the point. This product is not for everyone. The macroinsiders product is much more for everybody. But this is not. It's for people who passionately want to go down this journey of understanding what the hell does this all mean and what I can do about it. And some people don't, and that's okay, too. Thanks for the question, DeFi Diffin. And we appreciate you always regularly attending our X spaces. Next question goes to Talibari. Talibari, your question for Raoul and David, please. Hi, thank you, everyone. Nice conversation. My question spans from a place of concern.

37:42So my question is on the fact that, you know, I think it's particular to David. I think my question is for David. On the exponential growth of, you know, IT and technology, AI and all of that, I'm looking at a situation where, you know, as we expand in technology, we're actually eroding the human capital. And I'm wondering, maybe someday humanity will look back on how we actually stabbed ourselves in advancing too much in technology. You know, there has been an exponential growth in the past 20, 25 years. And, you know, it reduced the human capital. And, you know, I'm wondering how people would pay mortgages when, you know, they can't do these jobs and AI and robots are doing it.

38:42Is this something of a concern or is this something I'm just over the board on? So just to summarize it is, as you expand in technology and AI and we reduce human capital elements in all of this, is how do we maintain a society in terms of when people don't get a job, they can't pay a mortgage, they can't buy things. And yeah, I hope you understand what I'm saying. Well, loud and clear, Tolbert, and that's an important question, and I think one that a lot of us have been asking. Raoul, David, to Tolbert's question, what do you guys think about the potential disruptions in labor markets that this technology might cause?

39:24Yeah, this is a fantastic question that strikes at a really core issue for the exponentialist. Because look, the biggest thing to say in response to this question, before I get into the details of some of those issues, is the exponentialist is emphatically not about saying this huge wave of technological changes coming, you know, like nothing we've ever seen before. And everything about it is absolutely fantastic and great news. And we should all just wholeheartedly, uncritically embrace every facet of this of this incredible technology revolution we're living through. No, we need to be much more thoughtful about it than that.

40:06So the broad spirit of the question, I can align with. These technologies, this technology revolution, a wave of change that I do think is historic in its magnitude, poses deep challenges to us as human beings, as individuals and as societies. and how we organize collectively, you know, and also to our economy and what our economy functions and what in the end it is. So look, yes, these technologies, Raoul talked about robots are demographics. And again, I mean, Raoul knows this. It's just a phrase that I think is just so powerful and just captures such a deep truth. You know, we're going to see a wave of job displacement, deep, pretty deep job displacement, I think, via humanoid robots that can do lots of the things that currently we ask human workers to do.

41:04And you see Amazon trialing humanoid robots in its fulfillment centers right now. You know, there's 1.6 million people employed in those fulfillment centers around the world. And that's just one company. And it's all very well saying those people will be liberated to do other things and we can retrain them. Look, we know historically it doesn't work like that always. You can't just retrain all of these people. Yes, we'll find other forms of work, medium, long term for human beings. I think that's right. But there will be a painful wave of job displacement. How do we face that? What kinds of ways can we find to mitigate it?

41:43Is universal basic income part of that conversation? And look, deep, deep questions. I'm not going to pretend that I have all the answers to those questions now. We are on a journey of understanding to confront those questions among others and develop models and frameworks and answers to them. And there'll always be provisional answers because this thing is rolling insanely quickly and we're scrabbling to keep up. And the challenge to us collectively in a society is a deep part of what I want to investigate. um this taps back to the first question as well which i also thought was really interesting i mean look as ralph said you know i'm not an engineer i'm not a coder um i've spent years developing i think i hope you know deep technological understanding but as i said at the beginning my day-to-day is talking to people inside organizations who are like oh shit like this is happening i don't understand it at all help me make sense of this what does this even mean for our business?

42:49What does this mean for my team? So I bring some of that spirit to this product. Like, yes, we're going to go deep. We're going to develop, I hope, really sophisticated understanding. Um, but this is always going to be deeply accessible to, um, and it's not some kind of cult of just unalloyed techno enthusiasm where we're just cheerleaders for everything that's happening. We're thinking deeply about what's happening and what it means. Um, I do think that there are possible futures where we erode human ways of being and human modes of existence and the value that we place on them via technologies if we're not careful.

43:35But it doesn't have to be that way. And the way we unlock the future where it's not that way is we think carefully about it. We understand these technologies. We understand their implications for all of us. and we come together and we act, we can steer this future a little bit. Human beings have never had total control of our collective destiny and where we're all heading. We certainly don't have total control now because we're amid forces now of technology that are unbelievably powerful, unlike anything we've had before, but we can steer it a little bit. And that's really, for me, RAOUL PAL, I think David might have just dropped off.

44:17I think we've been having some slight tech problems here with the X platform. David, we'll get you back just as soon as we can. RAOUL PAL, I can hear him, Ash. RAOUL PAL, Can you hear me? RAOUL PAL, I can hear him, Ash. It's you. RAOUL PAL, I think you just got dropped off. RAOUL PAL, Can you hear me now? RAOUL PAL, Yes. David, we can hear you. RAOUL PAL, Ah, great. Okay. RAOUL PAL, Well, I'd come to an end. RAOUL PAL, Yeah, I can hear you. Ash, we can hear you. RAOUL PAL, Ralph. David can anyone hear me if you're in the audience put your hand up if you can hear me

44:53okie doke I think it's you I think we may be having some technical problems I'm going to leave this twitter spaces and rejoin hopefully oh you can hear me great it looks like we've just lost Raul and David guys I'm going to rejoin this Twitter space oh Raul can you hear me yeah I can hear you it's so strange it looks like we just dropped David this is on the X platform some challenges there obviously let me see if I can add Thomas Thomas can you hear me if you can hear me Thomas go ahead yeah I can hear you can you all hear me yeah loud and clear were you able to hear everything I was saying there I can hear you but Ralph and David cannot hear you I can hear David and I can hear Ralph for just like a second yeah Ralph they can talk go ahead they can't talk at all they can talk I can hear them and I know that our producer is having some problems too Thomas why don't you go ahead and ask your question to Ralph I'm going to jump out of the conversation and jump right back in But in the meantime, you go ahead and ask your question.

46:11I'll be right back. Oh, yeah, I guess this is directed towards Raoul. I think it was a post you put a day or two ago and I kind of commented about, you know, the I guess the profound experience you had with artificial intelligence. I think it's chat GPT-4, if I remember. I've been kind of thinking about this for a while, but with artificial intelligence, I guess, with the pessimistic train replacing all the jobs, what do you think about people's intuition towards their passions and that end up becoming like ecosystems within itself? So you're talking like game fi, fashion, and everything like that.

46:47Do you think that would become more of replacing the job industry towards more of what people are attuned to passively instead of kind of forced into a job and a debt system economy? This is a great question. It's 100 % where I think this is going. I think we're going to form cultural online societies. We're already doing it, right? We're already in them. Even you being a nature on this call is part of a cultural community that is curious about technology and investing and other things. So yes, I think that's absolutely the case, because we won't need human intelligence to do the job. So what can we do?

47:29And I spoke to Yatsui from Animoca Brands about this. And we came across the idea of universal basic equity as well. I mean, tokenization allows you to participate in cultural communities and these digital societies, or even, as Balaji would say, a digital network state, and participate in an economic manner that the thriving state pays you dividends. So you can create wealth by being part of something that could be a pop band. It could be a sports group. It could be anything that creates value for others, and that can be tokenized. So I do think that is coming. I think that is part of the answer.

48:03Yes, maybe universal basic income. Maybe you tax the robots. Maybe you tax the AI. Maybe you give it back to people. But in the end, people want a purpose. And if we don't have to work in the same way, we don't need to do physical work, and we We don't need to do mental work. Well, then we can be unleashed as humans in other ways. We are communal, societal creatures who want to hang out together, who want to be together, want to, even if we don't need to learn certain things, because AI can do that, just be together, exchange ideas, thoughts, insecurities, fears, hopes, dreams, all of that. That's what makes humanity humanity.

48:42Maybe it does unleash humanity in new ways. Yeah, I love that question. Can I ask one more? Okay, yeah, this one's been bugging me for a long time, and I have not, I guess, come to a conclusion. Whatever you think about Gary Vee, I think he's an awesome guy, but he asked this question back in 2018. He said blockchain was a really big deal and that essentially you're kind of eliminating the leverage that a lot of governments have outside of nuclear bombs and armies. I am curious, within 10, 20, 30 years, I don't know how far you've thought about this, especially with AI exponential age, what would be the role of government inside of a blockchain system?

49:26I mean, I can see if you have like Ethereum or Cardano and these different systems, they have an automated tax system and then people use the, I guess, like the funds to whatever government officials, but where do you think government would be involved with blockchain? Well, I think if you put blockchain AI that's kind of a way of organizing complex societies, which we use government for. We use religion to do that. We use government to do that. There is a case to be said that there is no point of government in a world where we live digitally in this global transient nation states where we move around.

50:06We have various currencies, but we're not physically restricted by borders. Sure, if you want to live in the United States, And when you use the facilities in the United States, you pay taxes in the United States, much like if you want to use Ethereum, you pay taxes to the Ethereum network state as well. I see a chance that in 30 years' time, that the concept of government becomes outmoded in the way that it is. Because once you get AGI, quantum compute, the organization of resources within an economy becomes a much easier solvable thing. It changes how society functions, how work functions. It changes pretty much everything.

50:51And once you start getting more advanced forms of intelligence out of AI, the robots will share resources with each other. So one robot is is latent. The other one needs compute or power or whatever. They'll exchange value between them. Your internet of things will exchange value, all of this kind of stuff. So it sounds far-fetched like a science fiction story, but it's pretty clear to me that this is the way it all goes. And I'm not sure that the systems that we have had in place for the last 200 years, 500 years, 1 ,000 years, 2 ,000 years, will even fit this new world. And I don't even know what that means.

51:38None of us are smart enough to know. All we can do is hypothesize. Hey, guys, I think I'm fully back now. I can hear you, Raul. Thanks. And by the way, two great questions, Tom. Appreciate you asking them.

51:52Raul, thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you again. Raul, you said something interesting there, which is about the search that human beings have for meaning. You know, it's interesting. I was thinking about the quote from the 1930s about how human beings would require just 15 hours of work per week. That, of course, from John Maynard Keynes. That certainly hasn't come to pass. You know, we use this idea of tap water. If you think about the amount of time that people spent digging wells and searching for fresh water, pretty extraordinary. And yet we always seem to find new things to do, new creative pursuits, new desires, new wants, and the desire to create things that didn't before exist.

52:33Do you guys, David, Raoul, do you have any thoughts about how that might be moving in the future? Do people become more creative? Is there a rise of a new class of arts entertainment? What do you see people using to fill their time as AI increasingly does some of the drudgery? Yeah, I've thought about this a huge amount. over the last 10 years. And I think Rao touched on the deep truth at the heart of this in what he just said. We're on this journey through technology that is essentially processing, that is eating every form of human activity that can be turned into a technique, that can be turned into something procedural that technology can do.

53:21And that turns out that that's pretty much nearly everything that human beings can do. Nearly everything cognitive and soon with humanoid robots, nearly everything physical too. What is left at the end of that road? What is left at the end of that long journey that turns everything into technique? the only answer really in the end is just being with one another being human with one another a machine or machine intelligence can do everything for you around you whatever but what it can't do what it can never do is just be another human being who is there for you or there with you and we human beings will always want that not for some reason not to get something but just as an end in itself.

54:10It's just something we want because we want it. And that, I think, is a pretty sure bet for an eternal fact of human nature. So that truth reshapes the economy in incredible ways, because it will make the economy and value transfer, in inverted commas, more and more and more about things that are just human beings being with other human beings, being there for them, truly seeing them, listening to them, entertaining them is a massive one. And more and more of the economy and more and more of work will become about that. We constantly change the meaning of the word work. So this really famous quote from Keynes that you mentioned, you know, it's arguable that we have got closer to what he imagined than people give us credit for, because we've changed the nature of the word work.

55:07Like, for example, is this work? You know, a Raoul and I at work at the moment doesn't really feel like it, but we've just deeply, deeply changed work. And actually, this is a great example. What are we doing right now? We're here hanging out with other people who are passionate about the same thing. We're sharing ideas with them. More and more of the economy will become about that. And I mean, I'm constantly entertained. You know, I've got 10-year-old children. they're obsessed with youtubers you see the shift i'm talking about you see very early glimpses of it even in the emergence of the whole teenager youtuber obsession thing like what is that that's ordinary people out there making videos to entertain other people and some of them become super famous but there's a long tail of them that don't uh are they working is that work you know lots of them are doing it for work now.

56:01And if you ask any 10 year old what they want to be, they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up. They're basically saying, I want to hang out with people when I grow up and entertain them. We're going to see the economy move increasingly in that direction because making the widgets, writing the legal contracts, fixing the cars, working in the fulfillment center, operating on people is all going to be turned into technique. it's all going to be turned into eaten by technology. Gosh, Raoul, that sounds a lot like the thesis for what we're building at Real Vision. I hope you keep paying me for it.

56:38You know, you did it for free, Ash. You did it for free. No, you paid me to go to the meetings, man, not to do this stuff. This is the best stuff. But Ash, what you can do is create an AI version of yourself and then license that to Raoul, right? Go to the beach, license the AI, Ash, to Raoul. He'd be delighted with that deal. You wouldn't tell the difference either. I love this. I love this train of thought. Listen, guys, we got some questions coming in from the Real Vision platform that I'd also like to touch on because there's some really good ones here. The first one, I think this is to you, Raul, from Jordan Radway.

57:10The question is, I really like the idea of a marketplace. I subscribe to several services, but it would be nice to have some or all of those services on RV. Can you give us an idea of who you may be bringing on the platform? Great question. I can't because we're still trying to negotiate because it's a new idea. We're trying to figure it out with people how it all works because there's some complexity to putting other people's research onto our platform. We'll probably start without doing that. We'll just create a marketplace so people can find this stuff. But you will get, I think, hopefully towards the end of the month, we will have a pretty good idea.

57:45But it'll be a lot of the people you know, the people who appear on the daily briefing, the people you know and trust, you like their opinions, you want to know more about what they do, you want to hear more of their thinking. So there'll be a broad spectrum. We'll probably start with, I don't know, maybe six. But really, the idea is to build out 10, 20 curated, amazing partners, much like we have many of the partners, the people who come on Real Vision frequently to help guide us all through our financial journeys. Yeah, and we tend to talk about things at Real Vision very early because it gives us an opportunity to get some feedback from the audience who can tell us what they think and what they'd like to see.

58:22Here's a question from John Coughlin. How actionable do you expect the information you provide will be? I guess it's probably a spectrum, right? Yeah, look, it's not a trading service. If you want trade ideas around the exponential age thesis, that's in macro insiders. If you want to know more about why those trade ideas, more depth, more understanding, it's not a trading service. But the idea is part of the service is a portfolio you can follow along. It's very simplistic. There's no rocket science in it. It's there to be able to help people directionally capture this trend. Sure, it'll change over time.

59:02that kind of model portfolio will change over time. Also, the business cycle will mean we will be periods where we won't be taking risk or we'll be taking more risk, that kind of thing. But it's not a trading service in any way. But if this information, I think of it as like a perfect bolt-on to macro insiders because then it arms you with all the information to capture this big idea, which will only help capitalize on the trading opportunities that you get from the macro side of stuff as well. RALPH, here's a question I know you're going to love about community, about Real Vision 2.0. It comes to us from Andy Miller.

59:42Are there plans for a Discord channel? If not, what are the proposed forums for subscribers to discuss topics? Yep. So we are on the platform itself. You've got the Real Vision network. Right now, you can connect with each other. rolling out next month. I think RVIP already have a group, but next month, there'll be group chats. You can already form your own group chats if you want to chat with a few people on a particular topic. But we'll have some fixed topic areas. There'll be macro, crypto, technology, Real Vision chat itself. We'll eventually get to regional chat. So if you're going to New York, you want to find out who's there or get a restaurant recommendation or meet for drinks, You'll be able to do that.

1:00:26There will be an exponentialist chat as well. So members of the exponentialists will be able to chat to each other, talk these big ideas, talk to David and I, that kind of stuff. So it's all coming. But as ever, we're not Google. We don't have 10 ,000 people. We are always under both budget restriction and human capital restrictions to be able to get all this stuff done as fast as we can. Yes, our time is finite, at least until AGI comes and changes all that.

1:00:57uh route david always a great conversation uh whenever we do these twitter spaces uh these x spaces i think everyone always enjoys them uh hundreds of people joining us here today david final thoughts key takeaways that you'd like to leave folks with from this conversation we're just at the beginning of an of an incredible journey and i mean that in two ways in terms of the insane wave of change that's approaching, but with the exponentialist, a journey to go forward together, face it, understand it, and make the most from it in multiple ways. Like, yes, your investment portfolio, but what it means for you as a human being, what it means for your career, what it means for your family, just developing deep understanding that will supercharge you in so many different domains of your life.

1:01:47And if that's you, then the exponentialist is for you. Like Raul said, it's not going to be for everyone. But I just cannot wait to go on that journey with that group of people who are deeply curious, who want to understand this. Yeah, so just excited. And it's just it's so cool to see it launch today. Well said. Raul, you get the final word. Final thoughts, key takeaways. is? Like David, I'm excited because of everything that is happening. It is terrifying. It's head spinning. It's bewildering. It's magnificent. It's all happening. And we've only just started. We just keep talking about AI because AI is the big thing that launched.

1:02:30But there will be 10, 15 of these things where you'll be like, I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe this is happening. What does this mean for me? What does this mean for my business? What does this mean for my parents? What does this mean for my kids? How do I make money out of this? All of that. You read back in history books about the Industrial Revolution or the robber barons and the oil and the railroads. This is all of these things, 10x. Many people remember the early internet days, the 1995 to 2000 era. It's that squared and squared again kind of thing. There's going to be so much happening, and it's going to be a lot of fun.

1:03:11It's going to just ignite that sense of wonder. And as humans, to have a sense of wonder is a wonderful thing. And that sense of wonder, that sense of curiosity, is what the exponentialist is all about. And that's why David and I really wanted to do this, because we want to go, as David says, on that journey through all of this and help navigate people through the most incredible pace of change humanity's ever lived through. Final thought, obviously, all of this pinned to the top of this X-Bases, the link, the trailer, all the information that you need, top of this X-Bases. Raoul, David, fantastic conversation.

1:03:52Thanks for joining us, everybody. See you in the future, everyone. Thank you so much, Ash. See you soon, everyone.

1:04:05you