Raoul Pal
@RaoulGMI • 1,496,577 subscribers
Founder/CEO Global Macro Investor, @RealVision. Figuring things out at the nexus of Macro, Web3 & the Exponential Age. Not a guru.
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Someone asked the AI version of me what I thought about Trump confirming alien life before 2027. Might be my favourite question anyone's put to it yet. Ask it something dumber. Screenshot it, drop it in the replies... Sunday I'm picking the best and the dumbest of the week. Winner gets a signed copy of The Everything Code when it launches. Go on, it's free:
Raoul Pal59,924 Aufrufe • vor 21 Stunden
Yesterday I wrote about why the AI buildout can't stop. Then I put the same question to the AI version of myself to see how it'd handle it. Everything I've published across 35 years of doing this, every framework I've ever developed is now in one place you can talk to. It knows my Everything Code framework inside out. It knows my Exponential Age framework. You can ask it about liquidity, ask it about AI, crypto, robotics, energy, my favourite holiday I've ever been on... whatever you want. And it answers the way I would. The bit that matters is you're no longer stuck with whatever I happened to write about this week. Pick any topic, go as deep as you want, push back on it, ask the follow up you'd ask me if you had me in the room. An article can't do that. This can. Ive spent my whole career trying to explain this stuff to as many people as possible. This is the first time Ive been able to hand it all over at once. And it's free. Try it out and let me know how you get on.
Raoul Pal89,470 Aufrufe • vor 1 Tag
This year the hyperscalers started spending more than their cash flow and issuing debt to cover the gap. That sounds like the beginning of the end... but it isn't. They're borrowing because speed in this race is EVERYTHING. He who gets the most compute wins... They have to borrow or else they'd fall behind. They literally cannot stop. The first one to blink loses the whole game, and they all know it. I wrote the whole thing up this week... why the buildout cannot stop, where the money comes from, and where it's all heading. Linked below.
Raoul Pal76,607 Aufrufe • vor 1 Tag
Data centers are roughly 30% built versus where they should be by now. The US and China are in a race nobody is allowed to lose. And no single frontier AI lab can be allowed to win... it's too dangerous. Put that together and there is almost no way this isn't a supercycle. Even the bottlenecks accelerate it because bottleneck doesn't stop the build out, it demands MORE expenditure... more power, more infrastructure, more capex. We're looking at the largest capex cycle humanity has ever seen. This is The Exponential Age playing out in real time.
Raoul Pal178,143 Aufrufe • vor 3 Tagen
In the next two or three years, every human could have a hundred... maybe a thousand agents working for them onchain. Arpan Nanavati breaks it down perfectly in this clip... the whole thing is a cost curve. Right now, it costs about $10 a day in inference to run an agent... hedge fund territory. But inference costs have already dropped 100x in three years, and every step down changes who can afford to play: At $1 a day, every protocol is running agents At cents a day, your wallet has agents built in, managing your idle capital At microcents, you get agent swarms Jevons paradox... every time the cost of something collapses, usage explodes. Intelligence is scaling, and theres no reason the number of agents executing onchain cant scale near infinitely. Madness.
Raoul Pal565,733 Aufrufe • vor 13 Tagen
What would happen if, say, OpenAI went bust? The doomers will say that's the minute the "bubble" pops. But Google or Microsoft would just buy all of their compute the next morning. Now they've got double the GPUs and they're further ahead than they were the day before. David made a great point in this clip... People keep confusing a financial event with the technology. If someone blows up, the infrastructure doesn't vanish, it just changes hands, and whoever ends up with it will have a lead nobody can close. A bankruptcy wouldn't slow the buildout... it would actually feed it. I've written the whole thing up today, on why the AI buildout cannot stop and where it's all heading. I'll link it below.
Raoul Pal76,031 Aufrufe • vor 2 Tagen
How do you value an L1? Well, take Ethereum for eg. Now imagine turning the switch off. All the stablecoins, DeFi, every L2, every NFT... everything built on it goes to zero L1s attract assets, capital and velocity because they are dense with intelligence. Ethereum has the most developers, its programmable, it has the whole ecosystem around it. Ive had the DCF argument so many times and its just nonsense... you're not valuing cash flows, you're valuing everything the chain secures. As we move into the Exponential age and the entire human economy plus a whole new agentic economy moves onchain, enormous value accrues in these base layers. It’s all so obvious…
Raoul Pal107,979 Aufrufe • vor 5 Tagen
CZ said it better than anyone: "The currency for AI is crypto. AI is not gonna swipe a card, enter an SMS code. That doesn't work for AI." That was our conversation at Token2049 in Dubai last year. Every month since has made it truer... more agents arriving, all needing to hold value, receive value and move it without a person in the loop. Think about what those payments actually look like. Instant and tiny, thousands of them a second, between counterparties that are not human. Two day bank settlement doesn't work for that. Card rails don't work for that. Theres only one set of rails on earth built for that. Its staggeringly clear.
Raoul Pal306,716 Aufrufe • vor 15 Tagen
The application layer might make you more money... if you pick right. But picking right is hard. The base layer is straightforward. Activity is concentrating on a handful of chains, and those chains are becoming the settlement layer for what comes next: billions of AI agents transacting at machine speed. You can't run that economy on banks and clearing houses that close at weekends. It'll run on the L1s. So you don't need to guess which app breaks out. Allocate to the rails the whole machine economy will run on, size to your appetite, and let the secular trend do the work. This is the crux of my Everything Code framework... the only things that beat the debasement of currency are the great secular trends, and this is the biggest one of all.
Raoul Pal120,102 Aufrufe • vor 8 Tagen
Everything's coming onchain. Stablecoins, RWAs… the whole financial system is rebuilding itself on crypto rails. And the way you own that is stupidly simple. Just buy the L1s it all runs on. This is the universal basic equity layer for all of us. If the biggest parts of the economy get handed to AI and agents, and they transact on crypto rails, then owning the L1s means you own a piece of their success. We never got that with the internet. Retail never got handed a slice of the plumbing. This time it's just sitting there, listed. There's no excuse not to do this.
Raoul Pal365,679 Aufrufe • vor 27 Tagen
It's all so fucking obvious and people are still desperate to trade it away. Look at everything that's happening right now… Banks and asset managers are moving their products onto blockchain rails and everywhere you look people are building AI agents. Liquidity is flowing, the Clarity Act is coming and the geopolitical noise looks like it might finally settle. It's all right in front of us. And the correct move is the boring one. Buy a handful of the highest-quality L1s, the ones capturing the real economic activity, and hold. That's the whole game right there. The people trying to be clever and trade this cycle are the ones who’ll eventually blow this up. The only way to lose from here is to overthink it.
Raoul Pal317,407 Aufrufe • vor 26 Tagen
Debasement drives everything. Nothing stops it until AI and robots replace population growth. Nasdaq has beaten the debasement rate by roughly 12% a year... a great asset to own, because tomorrow is always more digital than today. Bitcoin has beaten it by 89% a year. That's why crypto is the super massive black hole of asset allocation. It becomes the most powerful asset we've ever had. The greatest performing asset of all time. This is the crux of my Everything Code framework... why debt forces central banks to debase, why markets endlessly go higher, and why only tech and crypto beat it.
Raoul Pal74,685 Aufrufe • vor 6 Tagen
Global liquidity grows at roughly 8% a year. Sounds great right? Except that liquidity isn't organic growth... it's money being created to service the world's enormous debts. And every new dollar created makes the ones you already hold worth less. Add 3% inflation and you’re looking at an 11% hurdle rate just to break even. If your investments aren’t generating at LEAST 11% a year, you're not making money. This is why so many people feel like they can't get ahead... in real terms, they aren't. I've spent the best part of three decades trying to work out why the economy stopped working for ordinary people. Over time it all distilled into one framework: The Everything Code. Debasement sits at the heart of it... and the 11% hurdle rate is the crux of the whole thing. Once you understand it, you'll understand how to unfuck your future. For the first time, all of this thinking is in one place. My book, The Everything Code, comes out Nov 3rd... everything I've learned about how the system works, and how to end up on the right side of it, in plain English, for the people the economy stopped working for. Pre-orders are now open. I'll drop the link below.
Raoul Pal94,222 Aufrufe • vor 9 Tagen
Someone's been having fun with the AI version of me. Honestly, quite proud of his answer. If you haven't tried it yet, go on. I trained it on 35 years of macro work, every interview and every report I've ever done. And it's free. Screenshot the stupid bits. Especially the mildly offensive ones. Add them in the replies. I'll be going through whatever you philistines have been saying to "me" later today.
Raoul Pal52,767 Aufrufe • vor 5 Tagen
In seven or eight years there'll be gigantic hedge funds that nobody can see. They wont have an office or a star trader on the front page of the FT... the whole operation will be agents running capital through the liquidity layer. Think about what a hedge fund is. A group of managers allocating capital to pods of traders. Every one of those pods can be an agent on chain... your relative value bond agent, your equity arb agent, your long short agent. That alone strips out something like 90% of the cost of allocating capital. Then the mothership. Risk management, compliance, capital raising... AI eats all of that too. You can apply it to every asset management business on earth. An invisible economy is coming, and all of it inevitably happens onchain. DeFi is the obvious venue.
Raoul Pal133,828 Aufrufe • vor 14 Tagen
The NASDAQ is 97.5% correlated to total global liquidity. It has almost nothing to do with earnings or how good the companies are, and everything to do with how much money the world's central banks are printing. The small slice that liquidity doesn't explain is the NASDAQ's own adoption curve sitting on top. This is why everyone keeps saying equities are expensive. They're using a measure that stopped working the moment we started debasing currency. A high valuation doesn't really tell you a company is doing well anymore, it tells you how much money has been printed. This is the heart of my Everything Code framework. Once you understand that liquidity is the key driver of all asset prices, the market stops behaving like a mystery and starts running like clockwork.
Raoul Pal663,239 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
The moment agents become profit incentivised they'll end up running their own treasuries. Think it through. An agent executing across three layer 1s and a few layer 2s ends up holding a bunch of tokens. Suddenly its making asset allocation decisions... which to hold, where the yield is, what to do with excess cash flow. It sends that into DeFi or hires another agent to manage the yield and another to allocate. A corporation runs a treasury at human speed, with meetings and sign offs. An AI corporation will run one wildly differently. It'll be machine speed, around the clock, with agents all the way down. That's the entire autonomous stack forming, and most of it will inevitably happen in DeFi. Its the only financial system an agent can plug straight into. Which is funny, because humans never really took to DeFi. Its clunky, everything takes a dozen steps, and chasing yield across protocols is more effort than most people will ever put in. But none of that matters to an agent. We built the financial system agents needed a decade before they showed up.
Raoul Pal126,740 Aufrufe • vor 17 Tagen
Accused David Mattin of being a secret doomer on last Thursday's Exponentialist call. He didn't love it. Hahaha. His worry: an intelligence smarter than us is coming. My answer: we're smarter than ants and the ants are doing just fine. Every layer of intelligence builds on top of the last one... nothing gets destroyed. It's all one symbiotic process. The Exponentialist is our research service focused on The Exponential age... It’s David and I every week on AI, energy, robotics and where the money is flowing. Paid members get portfolio updates, weekly newsletters, live fireside chats and monthly interviews with the people building all of this. But you can sign up for free to check it out... you'll get David's weekly AI newsletter plus a monthly note from me. Link below.
Raoul Pal63,189 Aufrufe • vor 9 Tagen
Three years ago Jamie Coutts CMT and I were getting laughed out of rooms for saying blockchains would service the agentic economy. Now portfolio managers and asset allocators are having to wake up to it. In the early days the whole conversation was adoption. We used to debate whether we’d be at 700 or 800 million users by now. But it turns out it doesnt matter, because what was being built was something far bigger than the numbers we were tracking. The real TAM of crypto isnt humans... its agents. Which essentially means it's infinite. They dont have bank accounts and they dont keep business hours, so the only rails they can run on are programmable ones. Its becoming really fucking clear.
Raoul Pal111,856 Aufrufe • vor 16 Tagen