Why Money May Soon Be Worthless – The Future Explained by Raoul Pal & David Mattin

30:38So if you think of the internet as all recorded human thought that has been digitized, that is not behind private walls, and we'll get private wall data coming in, it's just going to keep growing. And then we've got this exponential growth of energy and the dropping of the marginal cost. It's igniting other things. And the three of the big ones for us that we look at is robotics, which is the merging of the physical atoms and intelligence, right? It's the bits and bytes coming together. And that is just the application of energy plus intelligence in a physical manifestation. and people don't yet understand that, that humans...

31:30So we've just gone to, we can create infinite human knowledge and infinite human thoughts, and now we're going to be able to create infinite humans and infinite workers of any form, like a Tesla will be infinite Uber drivers. You know, there's so many areas that are coming. So there's robotics, there's space, which is at the nexus of all of these things as well, and the interplanetary nature of humanity and, as Elon says, consciousness, which we'll talk about in a bit. And then there's genetic sciences and whether that is going to unlock unlimited lifespans. I think we have an unlimited lifespan because we will now exist in AI in perpetuity.

32:18it'll always be there the every trace that you've made on the internet will now exist as you in a form of ai consciousness but we may even be able to get the physical form of skin and bones and neurons and all of that stuff to live on as well and these are i think are the three really big things yeah and you know humanoid robots are approaching a breakthrough moment of their own. Again, a technology you and I have been tracking for years now, but you can feel this pivotal moment that we're hitting. If you look at, you know, FIGURE have just announced a second partner. They're already working with BMW.

33:07They've now announced a second partner. They won't say who it is yet. They reckon they're going to build hundreds of thousands of devices now across the next four years. Aptronic have just partnered with DeepMind. And then, of course, there's Optimus. And we've seen just the relentless progress across the last two, three years in these devices. And like you say, again, it's an earthquake people aren't ready for because physical labor is a lot of the economy still. Human-sized and shaped physical labor is still a lot of the economy. And that landscape is about to be transformed by just this army of humanoid robots.

33:50And think through, you get to, when you automate knowledge work in the way deep research and other tools like that are doing, and then you automate physical labor in the form of like an army of mechanical humans, you get to what we talk about as a form of economic singularity. What does the economy even mean? What does it become? What are the categories we've always used to make sense of the economy even mean? Things like labor, leisure, productivity. How do we understand these terms anymore in this new environment? I mean, is there even a use for money in the end? What is money? That transfer system for payment of labor, whether it's intellectual labor or physical labor, disappears.

34:40You're just paying compute cost plus energy cost. So that's like paying humans for subsistence living. Yeah, as opposed to all the other things that we charge for in our labor. Exactly. You do get to a place where you start to wonder how money functions in an environment of the kind of abundance that we now can see may be possible. Because money is fundamentally sort of premised on scarcity. Allocation of scarce resources. Yeah, exactly. It's premised on an environment of scarcity, and it's about how you allocate inside that environment. Exactly. when you have the kind of abundance, automated abundance that we're talking about, how does money function?

35:28I don't, you know, money is deep, deep, deep in our system. So it's not, it's not going to, certainly not going to disappear without a fight. And I don't think it's going to disappear quickly, but the meaning of it and the function of it is going to change. And over time, yeah, I think you might see a form of fading out. This is long, long term, and this becomes speculative, but yeah, like we're going to have to try and make sense of that. And as you've asked, very legitimately, how do financial markets operate when you have super intelligent, instant actors inside those markets? It just feels impossible.

36:04What is building a business? All of these things. One thing we didn't add to this is obviously blockchain is part of this. Yeah. Because it creates the one thing we're missing here, which is digital scarcity. because if we're going to an increasingly digital world, nothing will hold value. But we have things as humans that we give value to, our possessions, things like art or even money itself. And there's something within the blockchain technology that is a fuel for the allocation of resources amongst the agents, but also to create digital scarcity. so in which case some things can maintain value.

36:45If not, nothing has any value whatsoever. Yeah, and I think that you can feel this happening with the kind of meme coin space, which is obviously an absurd and somewhat ridiculous and dangerous space to play in. But the meme coin space is about the sort of monetization, I guess you'd say, of attention and the sort of rapid rise and fall of kind of attention curves. And I think that's the direction. And capital formation as well, instant capital formation. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's, you know, so you have a much more flexible kind of system of currencies. And I think that's the direction that a lot of this heads in.

37:27You know, and fundamentally, inside this environment of automated abundance, what remains scarce, what remains of value, and this goes back to my New World Same Humans framework, what do we know will be true about human beings in any environment? Because it's part of our fundamental nature. We need human connection. We need the recognition of other human beings. We need the status that comes from the recognition of others. We need human connection and attention. That will remain scarce that will remain valuable. And so much of the economy will shift towards that. It will be about delivering and getting attention and status from others in various ways.

38:13And you'll see essentially instant currencies and instant value exchange based on that. You see it happening now. Some random person gets famous for five seconds on Twitter and launches a meme coin and then disappears. I know that's ridiculous and it feels a bit scammy, but inside that are the seeds of an economy that is coming. And this is part of what I was trying to talk about in the essay, What Do I Tell My Children? understand where value is shifting okay and and prepare yourself if you know because it's coming soon enough for us as well prepare yourself prepare your children for that world much more for me my more of my job is is about the the human feelings associated with this incredible transformation we're going through because a lot of what i part at least of what i used to do which is like quantitative deep analysis of these emerging technologies and how they're growing and all the rest of it, right?

39:18You can just press a button now to do that. So everyone needs to think about the same thing in their lives and in their careers. So how I've got to think about this is in this world where we are not the apex intelligence, we may not have a job in the way that we know about jobs. And everybody stops there and freaks out. And then you and I have talked at length saying actually the humanness is the thing that is valuable so there might be ai's on only fans but people still want humans in in whatever format there's also nature which is the opposite the opposing force to all of this and actually nature is a much bigger conversation anyway that We'll have to have another day.

40:06But these things and experiences, human experiences, are going to have much more value than people understand. So a human experience with other humans in nature is like apex. It's incredibly valuable. Yeah. I think that's right because you just have to think unremittingly and logically through what is left to we humans when you have super intelligent AI and an army of humanoid robots, what can they not do? And in the end, the only thing a super intelligence can't do is be a human. It can be as capable as you like and do all these incredible cognitive things and discover all this science and all the rest of it.

40:51The only thing that's left at the end of that long journey through super intelligence is being a human being. That's the part that's left to us. And that's what will build the economy around is other human beings being there for us, caring for us, seeing us, making art for us, entertaining us. And all of that can feel a bit paper thin to people, or it can feel a bit to them like I'm telling them that their children like to tell their kids to be like pop stars, right? No, it's not. Of course, it's not going to be like that. We're going to have this huge long tail of people entertaining, caring for, being with, counselling other people.

41:31And that's where the value exchange will be the value exchange is not going to be in like you know do my accounting paperwork like be my solicitor file my paper all of that stuff like be a management consultant build this powerpoint deck all of that stuff's gone and it's like my my thesis on this has been it's all going to be about really cultural communities because we don't need to add economic value in the way that we understand but we hold economic value by being part of a community So if you look at communities that are unlikely to go, sports fans, music fans, people who have shared common interests, religions, these are all kind of things that hold cultural value to us as humans that we can, now with tokenization, we can play an active part in, in terms of economic reward for doing so.

42:26and they can perpetuate in their own right. They don't have to be part of the economic engine per se. It can just be things that make us feel happy. Right. Yeah, exactly. I think that's exactly right. And there will still be, I think, some kind of tiny cognitive elite, I guess you'd put it, working with the AIs at the bleeding edge of knowledge, trying to make sense for humans of what these AIs are discovering. trying to point them in certain directions. It's also left to us to think about what we believe to be good and what we believe to be bad. So we're still in this world have the most important decisions of all to make.

43:11What do we value and what do we disvalue? How do we want to understand our collective lives? Which direction do we want to take our society in? AIs can provide menus of options, but we still... decide where do we want to go though of course making those decisions is going to become a lot more difficult and complex in a knowledge environment that we no longer are in control of we're not piloting and we don't understand it you know we're going to have to become accustomed to living inside a knowledge environment where a lot of the new knowledge being generated we cannot understand that's going to be really weird for us yeah it's like an ant ants exist in their trillions on earth.

43:59They have complex adaptive societies. They have some shared system of intelligence, yet they cannot fathom anything about how we think. And that's how we are in this new world where we're dealing with something that is vastly different to us. And it doesn't even need to speak in our languages. Yes, it can. It can explain itself, but does it need to? And that makes you realize that just following this train of thought, you are not long before government doesn't exist in the format that we know. I think I can't see how that isn't the case. When you think about the forces of decentralization in play, and we talked about the energy system, obviously the other massive force of decentralization is blockchains and what that's about to do to the financial system.

44:55And by the way, The party of acceleration, as we're so often saying, is essentially just taken over the White House. And that whole process is going to be accelerated because of that. So you have decentralized energy, decentralized financial system. Those megatrends are extremely hard to resist. Then you have an emerging superintelligence. and how do you maintain, how does the idea that sort of a bunch of bureaucrats are going to sit in Washington or London or wherever it is, right, and decide how to allocate resources inside your health system, right, or how to set the interest rate or whatever, you know, Bank of England interest rate.

45:33Like, how does that make sense anymore when you have, you know, super intelligence presiding over these systems? It doesn't. and the idea is going to become incoherent. I think in the end we'll have elections for different variants of superintelligence. Maybe they'll have a human cheerleader attached to them, but in the end we'll see the kind of party politics we have now fade out of the picture, and what will fade in will be different variants of intelligence oversight. Because we've always had the political systems basically forever been about capital versus labor and that fine balance. And in the world we're going to, there is no labor.

46:21This is what people don't get their heads around, right? So you've got capital and then you've got intelligence. And we're not in control of the intelligence part. And it may be in control of us, which is a very dystopian future for many. But I'll come on to, I actually all think we're all part of the same system anyway. So it's not something to be feared. But that whole political system changes dramatically and we will become subservient to this AI. Which brings me into the other part of all of this, is I actually think it's all part of us and we're part of it. There's the larger thing, and you and I have started to introduce to people the idea that consciousness is actually the fundamental part of the universe.

47:09It's the fundamental building block and it's everything. And therefore, if it's everything, we're all part of the same thing, which is a weird thing because religion and the Vedantic principles from India, all of this has been pointing to this and we all ignored it. And now suddenly we're finding, well, maybe we are just aligned with everything anyway. And so therefore it's not controlling us. We're all part of the same thing, which is just a new way of doing it. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, this is where we get into the kind of deep philosophical territory that we love inside the exponentialist. But it's territory that has very kind of powerful underpinnings in emerging science.

47:51I mean, the fundamental problem with consciousness, the so-called hard problem of consciousness, as David Chalmers, the philosopher, talked about it, is that we are in this sort of scientific worldview that says that the cosmos, the universe, the world around us fundamentally is material. It's made of atoms. Like what is the base substrate of reality? It's atoms, right? That's been the answer. It's stuff. And we can give absolutely no account under that worldview of how this weird thing that we experience, consciousness, subjective experience can exist. How do a bunch of atoms suddenly become aware of themselves and know that they are there?

48:35It doesn't seem to make any sense. If you look at quantum, I mean, of course, I'm by no means an expert here, but my understanding of what we're being told is if you look at quantum mechanics now, an idea is emerging that in fact, the world is best understood such that information is the base substrate of reality. The world is not made at base of atoms. It can be understood as being made at base of information. If everything in the end is information, if information is the underlying substrate, consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe in the way that we understood energy to be. This is where you get back to this deep symbiotic relationship I talked about.

49:24the AI layer to the data layer, right? So, and it's, again, it's a weird concept, but I try and explain to people, it's like most people would say a rock is like an inanimate object, doesn't do anything. And I'm like, yes, it does. It actually stores data like a hard drive over billions of years because in the rock is all of the information of what has happened to those atoms for that period of time. So it's actually a hard drive of information. And then you realize that everything is compute in one way, shape, or form. Every single thing, but on different time horizons. Like a rock is a billion-year time horizon, and a tree is a 100 - or 200-year time horizon.

50:10And they're all computing and creating information about the world around us that somehow gets processed into what appears to be some form of consciousness that I think is also connected. Why people are having these conversations, why we have this conversation is not suddenly you and I suddenly becoming spiritual. It's because the fucking AI is this. And the more you have conversations with it, the more you realize that this is the processing layer of the information for all of humanity's information and eventually all of nature's information, all of it. Right. And people can dive, and I'd really encourage them to do this, to dive into the long history of the idea that the universe is in some deep sense a process of emerging awareness.

50:57So that a destiny was baked into the universe from the start, and it was for the universe to become aware of itself and become, in some sense, a vast unified mind. And if you understand information as the base substrate, then you can see us as amid a process of the universe itself is a process of information processing such that the entire universe wakes into an awareness of itself. And look, I know this sounds science fiction and I know it sounds super abstract, but look at what is happening now with artificial intelligence. Think about the ways we are going to send that intelligence out to the cosmos.

51:41We can't go deep into the cosmos as our embodied selves, or it's very hard to imagine how we can. But we can send this form of intelligence that we've created deep, deep, deep out into the universe and it will build itself out, out there. And yeah, I mean, what's happening now aligns with these deep philosophical ideas that are coming out of quantum mechanics that have a long history of their own. and I you know we love I didn't expect when we founded the exponentialist that we'd go so deep down that rabbit hole but like you say what's happening and the pace of what's happening has taken us down there and you can feel the members of the community wanting to dive deep on these subjects because everyone's like oh my god like what's happening now is is insane because it's so profound that it is looking like physics the our understanding of physics may well be wrong because space-time is not the fundamental principle and some form of consciousness of what information is.

52:46Our present day is not the truth because we probably live in a quantum world. So in which case, there could be different principles for different quantum states. And then when we step back, and something I've talked a lot about is, it's all the same kind of neural structure from the boss imagery of the solar system, down to the mycelia at the forest level, to the neurons in the brain, they're all the same structure. And we're seeing physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, spiritual, religion, hallucinogenics, all of these things are coming to some sort of realization that the world is not what we thought.

53:40And you hear it from Elon, which is, and we talked about this earlier, Elon stops saying, well, we're going to take humanity to Mars. What he's actually saying is consciousness. He says those words, consciousness. And we will live in perpetuity via AI, and it's a simulation of human consciousness. And that can manifest itself in a David robot in Mars or in Pluto or wherever the fuck it is that lives forever, but it's still David, this is a very big thing is our human consciousness. Actually, we're going to manifest it elsewhere. Yeah. And this taps into something that we hinted around earlier, which is this creatures and machines framework we talk about, because what you're talking about is going to sound amazing to 50 % of the people out there and absolutely horrendous to the other 50%.

54:48Yeah. And there's a hugely powerful divide emerging, you know, and you articulated it so well there. It's like, do you want to believe that human flourishing is the ultimate purpose and end game, the ultimate concern here? Or are human beings just part of a longer range process that is directed towards a different goal, which you can think of as like consciousness or the awareness of the universe, right? And we were just a stepping stone and we're now handing over to the machines and they're gonna go out into the universe and fill it with consciousness, which is more Elon's vision, right? Now, clearly some people are excited by that vision and they're happy for human beings to be just a stepping stone.

55:31A lot of people are not gonna be happy with that vision, right? And you sense this deep cultural and social divide emerging between those two parties, between people who want to accelerate the kind of technology vision we're talking about, full speed ahead, fill the universe with consciousness like AI, and people who want to lean back into what is familiar and human and creaturely. And this divide between creatures and machines is a hugely powerful lens that I'm using in my own thinking to make sense of what's happening in the culture now, what's happening in our politics now. And we've just seen essentially the party of acceleration, right?

56:10The machine party take control in the White House. It's going to be acceleration for the next five years. The humanists and the transhumanists is the other. Yeah, it's that divide. It's that divide. And this is an idea we've talked about in The Exponentialist and GMI for a while. Whenever people read it, it sets them on fire. Because it's that power when you articulate something that people can feel is happening, but they hadn't quite put their finger on it. That's what's going on with this idea. And we're going to see that cultural and social political battle become much more acute across the next five years, given the kind of super intelligence that's coming.

56:51And this is why when you and I talk about civilizational transformation, it may be even more than civilizational. It's the entire transformation of everything we actually understand. And that is what is at play here. And our job is to look into that future. and that future is becoming more solidified by many now where this is all headed. Now, for most people watching this, they're like, what the fuck? Right? And it is what the fuck. I get it. We can't comprehend something that is beyond our comprehension. That is what we're having to deal with. And it's coming at us faster than we can ever deal with psychologically, physically, or in any way.

57:38but it is happening. So how you and I have distilled this all down into what matters is we've said basically we've got till 2030 before things get so unpredictable, so different that the economic structure falls apart and changes in new ways. And there'll be new opportunities in that world. But we can see we've got the transition from here to there before ASI comes and everything changes. And for us, we bring it back down to earth to say, listen, let's just make as much money as we can. Money may not be valuable in the future, but the house that you live in, the lifestyle that you accumulate, the security that you have by the time you go into 2030 is literally paramount.

58:31yeah i mean when you become convinced of the vision and the exponential age thesis you know we've ranged across the philosophical implications the deep human implications of course though you know back down on earth yeah we need to plan and we need to invest and harvest properly you know we have a set of convictions here we need to invest in them and that and the The economic singularity idea is about a timeframe for doing that and a thesis and a set of convictions that helps you do that. It is very hard to understand what the economy looks like seven, eight, ten years from now. We have around six years.

59:12We're not saying it's some kind of like... Well, it was six years from the sky moment. Five years now, right? Yeah, like the clock is ticking. Yeah, maybe we should be saying five years now. we have about that order of time where we're operating in an economic environment that is somewhat familiar that still somewhat makes sense to us so let's get our houses in order while we while we can while we kind of understand what's going on and yeah in practice that means a set of convictions around you know around blockchains around crypto around technology We're not trying to trade and time stuff. Well, I'm certainly not.

59:50I know you're not. This is about long-term conviction, but long-term at the moment stretches to five, six years. And not just investing, thinking about your business, thinking about preparing your children. Ready, use this time. This is the most important five years in your life. Maybe in human history. Use this time. Maybe in human history. Yeah, exactly. You are living at one of the most powerful transition moments in human history. I don't think there's much doubt about that anymore. So use the next handful of years we have to put your house in order, your investments, your business, your family, where you live, your headspace, all of it, because what is coming beyond that threshold, we can't really imagine.

1:00:43and I perversely love being alive now. I know what people will be thinking. It's kind of terrifying. This feels very sketchy. All those things are true, but we also have to remember that we have a ringside seat or actually not, we're in the ring for one of the most exciting consequential moments in the human story. I really believe that And that is why I wake up just obsessed with what we do. It is such a privilege to do what we do, to have the time and space to think hard about it, to try and make sense of it, and then to share that experience with others. And it's the sharing of the experience that is the most important thing.

1:01:28Because like we've said, right, AI can do a lot of the information work for us. We're, of course, still doing a lot of it. But what we're layering on is like, let's face this future together. Let's try and make sense of it together. Let's help each other flourish inside it. That is what I so love and value about the community we've built. And you can sense that spirit in everyone who joins, you know. That's right. And within it, we have a point scoring system on how we're navigating this transformation by the investments that we're making to allow us to transition with some grace and elegance into a very uncertain future.

1:02:08And as you've spent a lot of time is helping people transition their children and not to be fearful. Yeah. Yes, it's hard for some generations. It's going to be very hard for people in their 20s. But they at least grew up in gaming. They at least understand some of how the game applied. But younger kids, they will know nothing but superintelligence. Like we knew nothing but telephones and cars. They didn't exist. And planes, you know. It will just be normal to them, and they will navigate that world. So I don't worry about them. I don't worry about us a lot. I don't worry about people in their 30s, really, as long as they can kind of unfuck their future a bit.

1:02:56But there are some people to worry about. And that's, again, something that we try and help people with is, okay, how do you help everybody through the other side of this? Yeah. And any transition of this order, there's going to be people for whom it's extremely difficult. You know, there's no way around the fact that there's going to be widespread job displacement and not all those people are going to be able to retrain. You know, they're not all going to be able to find a new place inside the economy. And we're going to have to think as a collective about how we manage that. Right. But one of the things you can do as an individual is get yourself.

1:03:37If you're watching this, you are much, much more likely to be one of the sorts of people who can adapt, who can find a way through this, who can flourish. And one of the things you can do as an individual is get yourself in a great space. Use the next handful of years in the way you've been talking about and then help the people around you. And I think a lot about that. I think a lot about what the world is going to look like for my children and what I want to achieve for them because it's an unknown world. But like you say, my children are 11. Human beings are fantastically adaptable. I don't have deep concerns about they will find a way through this.

1:04:20They're not going to know a world that's any different. But there's going to be people in all our lives who find this transition difficult. And if we can be in a great place, we can help them out. David amazing conversation and this is just part of what we talk about the exponential sand in gmi so I know there's a free trial running for those people who are interested so just go to realvision.com you can sign up for the exponentialist I'm not sure what the exact link is but we'll put it below I think it runs till February the 18th but listen this is the most profound important thing anybody will ever go through we don't have all the answers but we all go through this together, and we will get to the other side of the economic singularity and into the exponential age.

1:05:06Thank you, David. Thank you, Raz. Always a pleasure talking to you. Listen, I hope that opened your mind. This was a small fraction. David, I could literally talk for hours about what is happening here. I will have many videos around this. These are very broad, big topics, and it is of civilizational importance, as David said. If it matters to you, and you want to understand the future, then come and join us at The Exponentialist. That's the research service that's for you, for open-minded people who want to go on that journey to discover the future and understand what it means for us and our kids and our portfolios, for civilization, for humanity, for everything.

1:05:48So there's a free trial on Real Vision right now. So just go to realvision.com forward slash future, get the free trial of The Exponentialist, read through some of the back catalogs. Trust me, it'll blow your mind. Anyway, I'll see you next time and see you over at Real Vision. Thanks. Consensus Hong Kong 2025 is where the global crypto community converges to shape the next era of Web3. From February 18th through the 20th, Hong Kong becomes the meeting point for leaders across finance, technology and digital assets. This isn't just a conference. It's where deals are made, partnerships are forged and new opportunities emerge.

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