Raoul Pal: The Journey Man
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.
00:41:48 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[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. [00:42:01] S1: Yes. It is like going back to 1996, '95, 9798, and trying to talk to somebody about the Internet that is not actually playing with it twenty four seven. What could they tell you? How would they describe a page view or a HTML website or a browser or a SMTP? Like, they they they had no con... It's... We could try it, but it was not the same as the guys that were building We were lucky as a generation that we grew up with the infrastructure of the Internet showing, beginning built. So we understood what was possible. We understood that, hey. The packets on TCP IP can actually be compressed more and you can send video. And you will understand, yeah, I can see that happening. I can see how packet because I understand how TCP IP works. So you can understand, yeah, voice, video, yes, it's cool, but it's it's possible and and better and better. These kids are the same for AI. They understand foundational models. They understand the application layer. They are they are they are... They don't take notes on anything but on an AI agent. They do the homework there. They're just different. It's the same way as the kids of the nineties were.
00:42:01 · Micky Malka, Raoul Pal
[00:42:01] S1: Yes. It is like going back to 1996, '95, 9798, and trying to talk to somebody about the Internet that is not actually playing with it twenty four seven. What could they tell you? How would they describe a page view or a HTML website or a browser or a SMTP? Like, they they they had no con... It's... We could try it, but it was not the same as the guys that were building We were lucky as a generation that we grew up with the infrastructure of the Internet showing, beginning built. So we understood what was possible. We understood that, hey. The packets on TCP IP can actually be compressed more and you can send video. And you will understand, yeah, I can see that happening. I can see how packet because I understand how TCP IP works. So you can understand, yeah, voice, video, yes, it's cool, but it's it's possible and and better and better. These kids are the same for AI. They understand foundational models. They understand the application layer. They are they are they are... They don't take notes on anything but on an AI agent. They do the homework there. They're just different. It's the same way as the kids of the nineties were. [00:43:12] S0: It's fascinating. And do you think the businesses they build will start falling in the category of one employee style... You know, you can build a billion dollar business with one employee idea. Are we getting there yet?
00:43:12 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:43:12] S0: It's fascinating. And do you think the businesses they build will start falling in the category of one employee style... You know, you can build a billion dollar business with one employee idea. Are we getting there yet? [00:43:24] S1: I think we're on our way faster than we think. I think, using just in historic context, you know, when, a hundred years ago, a hundred and ten years ago, the the vanguard of entrepreneurship in America, the barons, when they... When their companies went public or when they got really, really big, they still own 70, 80% of their companies. And their friends own 10%, and their merchant banks own 10%. And capitalism and society moved that equation from a founder owning 80 to the founder owning 20 and the financial investors owning 80. I think we're gonna start to see the move back where companies have less employees, hence, less dilution. They're more capital efficient because of all these agentic experiences, and the founders will probably own more of their companies. So we'll see a proliferation of new companies. [00:44:17] S0: That's fascinating. We've seen crypto go the other way that they tried to force as much out of the hands of of the original founders, and it loses alignment of interest.
00:44:17 · Raoul Pal, Micky Malka
[00:44:17] S0: That's fascinating. We've seen crypto go the other way that they tried to force as much out of the hands of of the original founders, and it loses alignment of interest. [00:44:30] S1: It does. And and then he was doing it because he was trying to use money as a battle for attention. Yeah. Because you were trying to solve a problem. But here, I think this combination of token factories actually solve attention. And if they solve the attention, the the money is not needed. You got the attention. Now it's... What do you do with it? [00:44:49] S0: Yeah. And, also, because of the old system of the rigidity of having to go through a seed raise and a friends of family, and then you need to go through a VC and all of this, you are naturally just losing equity of the firm. But if we take forward the conversation we're having before about instant capital formation, you actually don't need to to go through that process in the same way. [00:45:11] S1: That's exactly right. [00:45:12] S0: Fascinating. So more importantly, digital art. What... How... Where did this journey start with you? And I wanna talk about this journey because this is another amazing thing. We've been both been going through this whole journey at the same time as well and thoroughly loving it. So give me that whole story. Where where did it start for you?