Raoul Pal: The Journey Man
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?
00:38:20 · Micky Malka
[00:38:20] S1: I think that I was I was throwing a controversial statement a couple nights ago talking about, you know, I got three kids They're in... One of them is in college. The other two are gonna be in college in the next few years. How hard is is the labor force gonna be for them when they graduate? And I I I had three hardcore statements. The first one is, in this era, you only go to college if you either get a scholarship and you end up... You can graduate debt free or you have some trust or family that can afford it or grandparents that can help you afford it. But you should not go to college if you're going finish with debt right now. The second big statement was a bunch of people are going to have a hard time finding jobs, but we... I think there'll be the entry workforce may be that we work for agents. An agent will hire young people to do tasks, which is very different than a company hiring them. And I think that's that's coming sooner than we expect. So I think that's how agents are gonna agents are gonna enter the economy. It will take a while. We're not there. The agents are very buggy. The user interfaces are not great. I don't find the phone is the right element to connect with agents. The phone is quite clumsy to do that right now. I find... I don't know you, but I find myself using more AI on my laptop than I am on my phone. Yeah. I can I can put more features, more applications? I can have more access to to ins... To enhance the experience of my hard drive, my voice, my notes, my video than I can on my phone. So I think we're still missing a new interface. Maybe it's the new glasses. Maybe it's something around the glasses. I don't know yet. But, we need all of us to make these agents really take off the way they should.
00:40:31 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:40:31] S0: It was interesting. Fiverr, the platform that, you know, you can hire people to do stuff, made an announcement they're cutting, like, 30% of their workforce because of AI. I'm like Yeah. Why don't they just become an agent platform? Yeah. And I think of agents as bundled tokens because they they use different tokens for different outputs, and they're like, those baskets of of tokens being used for different applications feels like there's a Fiverr or something like that could completely take over a marketplace because that's all it does anyway. [00:41:05] S1: A 100%. I agree with you. It's gonna take them a little bit of time. It's it's always the innovator's dilemma. And what... If if they don't do it, there'll be a 21, 22 year old kid who, think about it this way, there's already two full grades of college students, almost three, that since they had to apply for college, ChatGPT was around to help them write the essays. And in a few years, no one's gonna know how it was before that. And that generation is gonna build applications and agentic experiences because they're building agents at school already for their classes, and it's gonna be much more native. So I'm very bullish on that generation coming up. [00:41:48] S0: Yeah. You said this to me the other day when we were together. You said I'm spending all of my time with 21, 22, 23 year olds because they're native to this, and they're the only people who are gonna get it.