Raoul Pal: The Journey Man
00:30:33 · Micky Malka
[00:30:33] S1: Yeah. So we tried to run an essay that didn't mention the word AI as much because we think we're all... AI has a different definition to all of us. We ask 10 people, what's AI? And you'll get 15 answers. So basically, but the underlying, what pins everything, is tokens. And if you're in... Are listening to your podcast and you are listening to Google's earnings calls, they talk about how many tokens they do a month, and they brag about how they kintuple the number of tokens per month that they process. If you listen to the earnings call of Visa and Ryan's the CEO talking about it, he talks about tokens. And yet, they're different tokens. And if you talk to energy compute companies, they talk about tokens. And you've talked about energy should be measured by the power of of of of of of of the intelligence... The output of intelligence that it creates, and that's a token in many ways on on a measure... On a unit of measure, which is different than just gigawatts. So society is moving to measuring everything in token, but it has a different meaning. So we we we took that principle and said, okay. What does it mean? It means that we are... All companies are token factories. You have a supply of different tokens that you need to do something. You create something new, and you have an output of tokens that are given to somebody else to do something new. And if you think like that, then you can say, okay. If I'm a factory, what tokens do I need to do what exactly? And we basically categorize them in four different buckets. We call them the identity tokens, the tokens that talk about you, have information that is only you will know about yourself, your personal name or driver's license or your ID or your bank accounts or your credentials to banks or your health care records, anything that is about you. Those are needed in different ways depending on the kind of factory. You have what we call the knowledge or expert tokens. These are tokens that are provided in a service that you don't know yourself, but there's an expert that doesn't. It could be your wealth adviser. It could be your tax planner. It could be your travel planner. Any kind of expert knowledge token that you can use. You have the asset tokens, which are the tokens that are used to actually deliver the goods, the exchange of goods. And it could be stablecoins.
00:32:55 · Micky Malka, Raoul Pal
It could be equities in the future. It could be anything that is tokenized, and they're all machine readable. And the last but not least are the real world tokens, which is for the first time in history, energy, money, and power are tied together, knowledge. We have no energy, there's no money. We have no money, there's no energy. We have no money, there's no knowledge. We have no energy, there's no knowledge. This has never happened like this. So those tokens are really important for the future. So that's basically how we've expanded the way we're thinking about our thesis. [00:33:30] S0: And I think it's genius to think of all of these as, you know, tokens of various types of information. They're all the same thing because they need to be all readable by the machines, whatever we define the machines as. Right? This whole Internet digital world. And then when you look at it through that lens, you come back to the same lens of crypto as we just have an interoperability problem that needs to be solved. [00:33:58] S1: Correct. [00:33:58] S0: Then there's a distribution problem that needs to be solved, and then there's a transfer and value system that needs to be solved because everyone's gonna be needing to buy and sell tokens and store tokens at scale, whether they're information for the AI or information about ourselves. And that suddenly blows the whole fintech out idea out to, oh my god. It's actually everything.
00:33:58 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:33:58] S0: Then there's a distribution problem that needs to be solved, and then there's a transfer and value system that needs to be solved because everyone's gonna be needing to buy and sell tokens and store tokens at scale, whether they're information for the AI or information about ourselves. And that suddenly blows the whole fintech out idea out to, oh my god. It's actually everything. [00:34:24] S1: Exactly. And Yeah. And you were one of the ones that gave us the best feedback. You made us think with your comments on our letter because it's exactly what you said. It's like, okay. Then what happens? And I think you went forward even further, and you said something that everything's a marketplace. [00:34:43] S0: That's what stuck in my head because I... I'm very visual. So I just think about all of these tokens, and we need to transfer them, whether it's agents doing it or us as people or governments or whatever it is. Somehow, we need to organize these things where we can buy and sell them and transfer them. And that to me sounds like, oh my god. The future of the Internet is basically a gigantic market.
00:34:43 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:34:43] S0: That's what stuck in my head because I... I'm very visual. So I just think about all of these tokens, and we need to transfer them, whether it's agents doing it or us as people or governments or whatever it is. Somehow, we need to organize these things where we can buy and sell them and transfer them. And that to me sounds like, oh my god. The future of the Internet is basically a gigantic market. [00:35:05] S1: I think that's where we're heading. And and there's people already working on this in different ways. And if you think about it, even OpenAI is a gigantic market of tokens. It just... You give them certain tokens, and it comes back with other tokens. And you're paying for that as a subscription or as a per API call or whatever, but that's a marketplace of tokens right there. But I think everything's gonna move to that to that... To... In in that direction. [00:35:30] S0: And, also, you know, I've talked a long time about the fact that we have a lot of information ourselves that we hold. In a future world where AI becomes more imposing on the workforce and other things, we have plenty of things that we can offer to this token world, like every photograph I've ever taken or every conversation I've ever had or or my personal information or my attention, all of that gets tokenized, and it can release capital to people for the quality of of the tokens that they hold.
00:35:30 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:35:30] S0: And, also, you know, I've talked a long time about the fact that we have a lot of information ourselves that we hold. In a future world where AI becomes more imposing on the workforce and other things, we have plenty of things that we can offer to this token world, like every photograph I've ever taken or every conversation I've ever had or or my personal information or my attention, all of that gets tokenized, and it can release capital to people for the quality of of the tokens that they hold. [00:36:02] S1: That's exactly right. And I think that's where we're heading. And that's where your data is as valuable as any other data for these token factories. They're gonna find a way to incentivize you to share them. [00:36:16] S0: Yeah. Because now they've scraped the public web. The... Really, the way you need to build this is with all of the other data that's available, and they're they're gonna have to pay for it because they're in private hands. So that becomes a very interesting proposition for businesses, people, everything else, or you can trade it for other things. You know, you trade it for free services. Know, we've seen that in the Internet model. I give you attention. You give me free videos. You know, we're all happy. So there's a whole bunch of ways that this is gonna play out. But I think it's it's it's the most unique understanding of the whole thing that I've seen, the most cohesive vision of how this all comes together. [00:36:56] S1: Thank you. I hope we're... We are right on it.
00:36:56 · Micky Malka, Raoul Pal
[00:36:56] S1: Thank you. I hope we're... We are right on it. [00:36:59] S0: I don't see I don't see how not. I don't see... I honestly don't see how not. Because we're seeing marketplaces already for some of this stuff. I know we've written about it at Global Macro Investor that this seems to be the way for everything, that everything gets tokenized both in a monetary token attached to an information packet token, because it's the only way that we can allow agents to operate in an economy and collect the information it needs to do its stuff. [00:37:26] S1: I... Do you wanna start a company around it? We're happy to talk to you on it because you're spot on. And I think that's where the agents are gonna be amazing because in Web two point it was really... It's still really hard to organize your personal data to know how to get a benefit out of it. But imagine if you had your own agent that can actually do that for you. And it organizes your your data to figure out what's the right... How how to create the tokens that are needed for somebody else to... For you to exchange value. And I think that's where it's gonna get super interesting. [00:37:59] S0: And how do you think about agents... Autonomous agents as investable entities? Are you starting to think, well, there's clearly just going to be a RIA or wealth adviser agent, and these are not necessarily companies per se. How are you thinking about that transition?