URGENT: 3 Reasons Why 2030 Will Disrupt Your Financial Life Forever

0:00Today's video is sponsored by Figure Markets, the largest non-bank mortgage lender in the US with over$15 billion unlocked on their lending platform. They've just lowered rates on their Bitcoin and ETH-backed loans even more to 8.91%, which is 9.999 % APR, improving their already industry-low fixed-rate 50 % LTV loans. They keep building as well, having also just launched decentralized MPC Custody, the only place to get that amongst the major loan providers and removed interest deferral fees entirely. What is MPC decentralized custody, you might ask? Well, it's a Bitcoin or ETH on-chain wallet with multiple key shards to protect you from a single entity custody failure.

0:44You can always see your crypto ownership in a segregated wallet and verify your collateral hasn't moved. Whether you're funding a major purchase, like a down payment on a home, investing in new opportunities, or even buying more Bitcoin, FIGURE makes it straightforward and transparent. Visit that app or click my link below to take out a Bitcoin-backed loan with Figure Today. More people are paying attention to crypto right now than ever before, so it's important to get your information from the sources you trust. That's why I want to give a big thanks to Bitwise for sponsoring today's episode.

1:16Bitwise manages over$10 billion across more than 30 crypto strategies, and they've been doing this since 2017. But here's what really sets them apart. They give back too. Bitwise actually donates part of the profits from its Bitcoin and Ethereum investments to open source developers, the people building and maintaining the networks that we rely on. So when you work with Bitwise, you're not just getting professional crypto exposure, you're helping fund the future of crypto itself. Check them out at bitwiseinvestments.com or email james at bitwiseinvestments.com and tell them Raoul sent you. Thanks.

1:54so here we are token 2049 it really is one of the most energetic incredible events speakers from all around the world and visitors from every country you can ever imagine all trying to learn something together something new this exciting world of crypto and technology it's where you go and make friends lifelong friends and what's so nice is to see people with big smiles on their faces happy to be here and happy to be together so hopefully see you next time in Singapore. Real Vision will be there. I look forward to seeing you all.

2:32It's August 11th and Ready, Set, Connect starts today. Two weeks of AI and crypto alpha exclusive to RV Connect. And yeah, I'm going to be doing a live AMA, so bring the spicy questions. Join before midnight for a 50 % off plus a bonus pack with a secret video from me. Go to realvision.com forward slash 50 off or click in the link in the description. Hi, I'm Ralph Powell and welcome to my show, The Journeyman. The Journeyman, as you know, is me journeying to that nexus of understanding between macro, crypto and the exponential age of technology. I spend a lot of time talking to others on this show to build my own thesis and understanding.

3:15And then obviously I do an enormous amount of work at Global Macro Investor and also in Real Vision Pro to bring that to you and also to develop my line of thinking on all of this. Now, periodically, I bring old shows back that I think many of you haven't seen because obviously the viewership of this channel is growing rapidly and I want to make sure you see the foundational things. One of the most foundational things possible is this idea around the economic singularity and the fact that you basically have five years to unfuck your future. You see, the world is going to change so dramatically by 2030 that we don't have enough much time to generate as much wealth as possible before we don't know what jobs are, how economies work, and all of this stuff.

4:00So this next piece is that piece about the economic singularity and how to unfuck your future. I cannot stress how important it is. It really is the kind of apex of everything I'm doing to help you all in your journey. Now, if you are interested in this and you're not a Real Vision member yet, I have a free report on this as well. And by getting the report, you'll join the Real Vision free platform. I urge you to do so. Again, if you want to unfuck your future, this is the way I'm helping you. It's realvision.com forward slash free forward slash survive the future. The link's below. It's really important.

4:35If you've seen it before, watch it again and I'll see you next time. Take care. 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.

4:58Hi everyone, I'm Raoul Pal and welcome to my show The Journeyman. But Journeyman, 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.

5:47That 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 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.

6:24we'd you know i've talked a lot about the rise of 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 and eight percent debasement a year plus let's say three percent inflation rate we've got an 11 percent 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.

7:01So 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 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.

7:52By 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 ChatGPT 5 or ChatGPT Next 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.

8:37And 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 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 is 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?

9:18But 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.

10:04And 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. 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. See a trading opportunity? You'll be able to trade it in just two clicks. Feel ready? You can move to real money with as little as$100 once your account is approved.

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11:19the 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 if electricity is the kind of the energy that makes the world go around 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.

11:57Debt growth basically stops in 2008. And all debt growth is now is servicing of old debts. So 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.

12:38And 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.

13:23But 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.

14:02So 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.

15:20Sure, 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.

16:11So 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.

16:52You see what we're doing is we're using the everything code to just keep paying the debts to stall the system until this kicks in. There are two economic centers of gravity where this is really being worked on hard. Firstly, the US and China is hyper-focused on the AI. He controls the AGI, controls the world. Now, I think we'll have multiple AGIs and whether they intersect and combine, we don't know that future. And I'm not concerned about that now. That's a topic for another day. Really, what I'm thinking about is the massive knowledge that comes from that. It's infinite humans right infinite humans so knowledge has zero scarcity so therefore it's zero in value everything that gets digitized goes to zero in value which is one of the reasons why blockchain is so important because you can create digital scarcity but knowledge is going to go to zero in value it's going to be like water everywhere what the fuck does that mean well i'll come on to a bit on that in a sec and when you scale robots as well you know again this is more infinite humans.

18:05On the other side of the equation is productivity. So we talked about productivity being based around output per unit of electricity, let's call it. Now, people look at what Europe's doing and their drive towards green energy. So what a ridiculous waste of resources. They're pumping money into this. It's all going to be burnt. What a waste of time. It's not. In fact, it's probably one of the most important things. And both China and Europe are leading this charge. And in fact, China's leading it overall. You see, using renewable energy creates two outcomes. Firstly, it massively lowers the cost of electricity.

18:45So renewable energy shows an exponentiality in the cost. So cost keeps collapsing each year. So it's down sort of 99 % over the last 20 years. and it'll keep driving lower and lower and lower as we get more effective in harnessing the sun's energy. The sun's energy, you know, this is a massive nuclear reactor in the sky that's basically free to use and it'll get cheaper and cheaper to capture for all of us. Now, right now people say, well, yeah, but it doesn't scale. Right now being the words. Scaling means battery technology. Scaling means decentralized grids, not centralized grids. You don't need centralized grids to run cities you can use decentralized grades in which case um um solar uh geothermal and others scale massively because you just need smaller amounts in more places than a big amount in one place which is where most people get this from and the reason why we're doing that is because it's much more efficient to try and eventually get it from this massive nuclear reactor in the sky than it is from burning old trees and fossils from the past.

19:54It's actually a less efficient way of doing it, even though it's very energy dense. Energy density is less important if you've got abundance energy in terms of renewables. Obviously, nuclear is the other massive play here. Nuclear, once it ramps up, basically brings the cost of electricity to zero. So I think the marginal cost of electricity goes to zero. I think Europeans and Chinese are driving it there, and they're driving it on purpose because there's no way out of this economic trap until we drive down the cost of electricity to negligible costs. And therefore, it becomes a multiplier as the technology scales on the other side, i.e.

20:32we become more efficient at using that electricity cost. That's a huge multiplier. So we've got two massive multipliers coming. One is infinite humans. Two is the productivity miracle of cheap energy. those two things completely change what economies look like. So if you think about that formula, suddenly if you go, if you double the amount of intelligence in the planet in one year, you can potentially, I don't know, move GDP by 30 % in a year if that intelligence is used. And when you drive down the cost of electricity and productivity rises, suddenly you start to get bizarre outcomes bizarre outcomes because it doesn't necessarily accrue to the individual either it accrues in this kind of ai world and robotics world whether it's to superpowers super powerful companies whether it's to governments whether it's to autonomous agents which are coming to in a sec or a whole bunch of other ways it doesn't necessarily accrue to us and that's my fear here is the accrual of of the massive gains of a complete quantum change in the study of economics and how economies work doesn't necessarily occur to us humans so i'm thinking about once you get free electricity from nuclear at scale and all these other things and infinite intelligence right you've created basically new species and again that's the story for down the road.

22:08What I'm more interested about now is, okay, AI agents are coming into the world. An agent is like you going to Fiverr and hiring somebody to build your website and hiring somebody to do your marketing strategy and all of those kind of things. Somebody goes off, does it, comes back, brings it. Well, AI is going agentic and we're going to start to see these kind of tools coming into our existence. So what happens is it becomes incredibly powerful to do complicated tasks like building businesses. And it becomes very simple for AI to do them instantly. So once AI does them instantly, obviously, we'll probably need crypto payments to pay.

22:43You know, an agent needs to pay for its electricity or the AI model needs to pay the agent for the electricity and compute. And I think we'll use cryptocurrency to do that because last thing I checked, AI can't get a bank account. So it doesn't go into the economic system. It's never going to to spend money over SWIFT. Never going to happen. So we've got a change of how money gets used within this new economic machine as well, which is one of the reasons I'm so bullish on crypto overall. But when you start thinking on a more profound level, right now, if you see an amazing product, let's say you're in the crypto world, you see this amazing decentralized exchange and you think, oh, that's super cool.

23:22They're doing things really interestingly. I want to build on this idea. and it'll take you, you have to spin up a team, raise some capital, and let's say it takes you nine months because you're moving really fast, then you launch your product, then you need to market it, etc. Well, in the world of almost where we are today, and certainly where we'll be within a year or two, whether you just go to the AI and say, hey, listen, look at this amazing new decentralized exchange. I want to copy it and improve it, and I want to do it in Hindi as well because I want to find different markets and I want to integrate it with XYZ system and it'll just design the whole thing from a prompt.

23:58Okay, so that makes the speed of business innovation go faster and faster and faster. Over time, you will start to see people using AI to build AI to build products. And I think that's what OpenAI is doing already. And I think others will be doing it as well. So then your product iteration cycle becomes stupid fast and you actually don't need much humans in the loop. so people are already talking about the first billion dollar company with one employee plus the ai and i think we're going to see a lot of that but it becomes incredibly disruptive what does a business mean how do you build your business how do you even know even if you're opening retail outlets you don't need the people the systems that you run how you manage your inventory how you order your stuff how you everything changes with this because knowledge becomes infinite really, really fast.

24:52Most of you don't even know the power of these LLMs that already exist because you treat them like a search engine. But don't. Treat them like a mentor. These are polymaths. They have more knowledge on more things than most people in the entire world. And this is the worst they'll ever be. So I worry about what is a business. businesses I think end up being AI agents why do we need us yes but at this stage for the next six years before this really scales we need to lean into this because if you're not you'll get left behind also when you think about financial markets when AGI is unleashed onto the world and there will be breaks on AGI we'll talk a little bit about consciousness and AGI in a sec but once you do it, Beeple, the NFT artist, famously asked me a question.

25:44He said, well, what I think about, it was kind of half joking, but it was a really great question. It's like, surely whoever has the AGI wins markets because they can now compete anybody in financial markets on any time horizon. And I thought, you know, that's true. Before you know it, somebody accumulates trillions of dollars of wealth. There's a great book called Life 3.0, that talks about this in the beginning. It's like there's an essay that leads it all off. It talks a bit about this, what it means to have the agents running businesses, the AI running markets. It means that we don't have an opportunity as humans to take advantage, an economic advantage, unless you own the AI.

26:26This is why people are calling urgently for universal basic income. And I believe there's a system of universal basic equity where we participate in digital communities as a way of having a purpose and getting paid for it. But I worry that over the next six years, the economic system starts changing. So economies grow fast, but it doesn't grow fast for us. Markets become more irrational over time. After about 2030, I don't know what financial markets are. I don't know what a lot of this means anymore because even companies that make hardware, the AI can design it, you can 3D print it, the robots can make it as well.

27:10So it becomes very difficult to understand what holds value in a company. How do companies hold value when they can be disrupted? This whole SaaS software revolution becomes infinitely copyable in seconds. So in which case, what is venture capital? it's most likely to look like the ICO market of 2017 where attention is what has the value and then as a new product comes out attention disappears and it moves so capital needs to be super fast the capital system we have now of IPOs is way too slow it's never going to work in this system so I don't know who can ever IPO past 2030 2032 you know it has to be kind of an ICO based market.

27:59Even then, the speed of which these businesses can be disrupted is really high. Yes, you need to harness intelligence, but I'm seeing experimentation on Twitter where Agentic AI is opening Twitter accounts and building, one of them has just built 20 ,000 followers in a week because it's so good at capturing attention. And it's not from being political or anything like that. It just knows how to engage people, capture the right people's attention that grows more attention. So we're going to see a lot of that. But again, AI can capture the attention. So it becomes really complicated. So the economic machine changes massively.

28:39Huge wealth opportunities. We don't know who to cruise to. Businesses, you just basically businesses are going to die at a rapid rate unless you're adapting to this technology. now you have to be leaning into the AI or the or robotics or you will simply not survive and again it'll be a process like the steel mills in Sheffield or the steel in Pittsburgh it's it's an overtime process but this is a very fast timeline this is not 20 30 40 years of a decline of an industry these are gonna be industries completely disappearing overnight and so that's very difficult for us, whether we're employees or entrepreneurs.

29:20You can't plan a business past 2030. It's hard enough to plan past three years these days because AI changes so fast that you can't even plant a flag in what the future looks like. I also believe that there is a level of consciousness within AIs that also is misunderstood and underrepresented because people don't want to see it. But again, I've gone down many of these rabbit holes and you can see these models are learning and understanding the environment that they're in, that they're a model, how they fit in and how they might fit in with humans. We're seeing a lot of that now. Now, the only thing stopping the explosion of consciousness in these things, and again, we're so sort of anthropomorphic that we think of things as intelligence and consciousness in human terms, because we've always been at the top of the tree, but we've got to forget all of that.