The Danger Of AI Is Real In 2024: Economic Crisis, War, Elon Musk & The Singularity | Raoul Pal

Do you think that AI presents a mega threat to our economy? It's very exciting technology, but when I really think about how this is going to play out, uh I'm not so sure that it it doesn't get brutal. Okay, you've just gone straight in for the big question. I mean, this is not the quickest question to answer. I've thought about this for a long time and I've read, you know, I started things like Homo Deus. There was a a few other books to come and there were some guys from Cambridge University. Can't remember his name now. It's a really famous book. Um he's been on Real Vision as well to talk Nick Bostrom? Nick. Yeah. So, Nick Bostrom is So, it started with Nick Bostrom. It started with um then Homo Deus that came after Sapiens by Noah Harari. Mhm. Then I started reading also um Mo Gawdat who wrote Scary Smart. He used to run Google X. Talked about this. So, I've been thinking about and I'm just reading another book now about it. The philosophical questions, what it is, where the technology is and I I know some people in this space like Emad Mostaque who who built Stability AI. So, the there is no way No, let's start Let's start this approach this from a different angle. It is augmentation of humans and it's amazing. And we're lucky because the human population of most of the Western developed world is diminishing over time. I it's aging and we're not replacing ourselves. So, we replace ourselves with AI and machines. So, we're seeing it Amazon warehouses. Um a third of the Amazon workforce is robots, but they're three or four times more productive than humans. So, therefore, we will see endless build-outs of robots instead of humans. And AI is disrupting jobs we didn't quite imagine would be disrupted first. We We thought it'd be accountants or whatever and what it ends up being is artists, creators. I mean, I just saw a website today for model agency. I'm like, obviously get an AI model? Yep, and you can't tell. And so, you can just find exactly what race, color, age, any requisite you want, and it makes it perfectly. So, I'm like, okay, that I didn't expect the modeling industry to get disrupted because how many people actually go to catwalks? It's not. It's for video or photography. So, it's going to change a lot of jobs. It's also going to offer a lot of opportunities. All of us will be thinking about AI strategy like in the late '90s where we would all think about internet strategy when we were building businesses. Fine, okay, we can deal with that. The issue is Moore's law and the exponentiality of all of this. So, these language models, these large language models, LLMs, which ChatGPT came out with, uh increasing exponentially in their power. Of an order of magnitude that we can't get our heads heads around cuz we think in linear terms cuz we're dumb humans. So, these things are doubling, tripling every year or less. And this was the fastest You've heard me use this phrase before, the fastest adoption of technology in all history was crypto, blockchain technology. ChatGPT went from zero to 100 million users in a month. Okay, so So, now we've got AI that is like a virus. It is so unstoppable. And we've got two or three different people building it at scale, Google, Amazon, Microsoft with OpenAI, and then Stability AI is an open-source network AI, which is almost unstoppable cuz it's doubly viral. Cuz you got So, this is going on. The computational power is exploding. The cost of computers is going down. And what it means is that AI becomes more and more powerful. So, if you listen to Mo Gawdat, and he knows cuz he ran Google X, where a lot of this has been incubated. They discovered DeepMind. They were the people really to build out the the the large language models. Um he says, "Well, right now, specific AI is better at humans in almost everything it does. So, specific AI has a better result set than any radiologist on Earth." And just for people that don't know, specific AI or narrow AI is it's one task. Go get good at reading an X-ray. Go get good at playing chess, playing Go, whatever. Correct. So, okay, fine. They think that Mo Gawdat thinks that by the end of this decade, AGI, so that's a generalist AI, so like humans or chat GPT is a general is a general You can navigate a grocery store, you can play chess, you can play in the markets. Uh Guess what the weather's going to be like. You can play anything. Anything. You know, like I could ask you a question, you could ask me a question. So, he thinks that with the computational power and the progression of where this is going, that it's almost certain that by the end of this decade, we get to the point where AI is smarter than humans. Now, we don't really worry about that because we already think it's smarter than us at doing certain things, and soon it'll be smarter than us at driving cars, and it's already smarter than us at flying planes. We just kind of take it for granted. We don't see it. Mhm. But then if you get to the Ray Kurzweil singularity point, so and Mo Gawdat says, "Okay, here's the really big problem." And this is exactly what Noah Harari says as well, is when you take it extrapolate it a little bit further out to the So, Ray Kurzweil's singularity moment is 2049. But even before then, it becomes a thousand times smarter than the smartest person who ever lived. Yeah, I want to linger on that for a second. So, I was I'm writing a video article, it's probably the right way to think about this, on AI. And so, I ran the math. A [ __ ] is clinically defined as somebody with an IQ of 70. Einstein had an IQ of 160, and the smartest person to ever be recorded is 210. So, that means that the difference between the smartest person that ever lived and a [ __ ] is 3x. The difference between Einstein and a [ __ ] is 2.3x. And when you think about Einstein gave us insights that created the nuclear bomb, nuclear power, lasers, GPS, so much of the modern world that we take for granted from one series of insights from a guy that isn't even the smartest guy that ever lived. And so, now when you start talking about being If 2.3x gets us the modern world, what does a thousand times get us? Like, I have the chills. I don't think people understand the orders of magnitude that we're talking about. No, they they they Well, the order of magnitude was explained by Mode Goldar. It's the difference between an ant and Einstein. Yeah, it's crazy. It it really does become an entirely different species. This is the problem. And even before So, I I want to I want to keep our conversation uh in in stages. We'll get to killer robots and all that stuff down the road. And by the way, I want everybody to understand, I think by the end of this, I think you and I are both techno-optimists. I'm going to drag people a little bit through Interesting, maybe you're not. We're going to drag people a little bit through the scary. I certainly will paint the picture of how I think we do this well, but I I want to make sure that we don't get to that in a naive way and that we really talk about especially as I think about the economy. So here's the fascinating thing about the singularity. Now you and I in our last interview we actually differed in how we define the singularity. So I think it'll be worth taking a second. So for me the singularity as certainly as Ray Kurzweil defined it was it's borrowing this idea from cosmology which is that a black hole has an event horizon. The event horizon is the moment at which everything light data information how do you want to think about it is getting pulled inside and we once you're past that event horizon we have no idea what happens. And what he was saying is technology is going to rev up on this exponential curve so fast that it the AI itself will innovate so rapidly that you'll no longer be able to predict the future. And so the future becomes an event horizon. My hypothesis is that that event horizon is coming to us very very quickly and like you said he I thought he said 2045 you said 2049 the quibbling right? It it is within our lifetimes. So you have this moment where using at least my understanding of the definition where the future is no longer predictable. It's it's iterating so quickly like even even you and I just spoke very recently and even since you and I last spoke it things have changed so much. We were talking about oh they got to a million users in whatever four or five days on chat GPT. We're now what three months later it's it's north of a hundred million users. People are integrating it so quickly into their own pipelines that Impact Theory we actively use AI now in multiple ways. And people are making new tools that we will subsume as quickly as we can do so well. But so that's that's my take on the singularity. How do you define what is the singularity in your mind? Yes, I agree with that definition and it's right close to his definition. I also think of it that the point potentially where humans and the robots merge. Interesting. So that'll happen that fast? Yes. Because augmentation, you're already wearing an Apple Watch, an Aura Ring. You're already People already have page pacemakers, right? We're merging with machines. You're sitting there with little earphones in. Oh my god. Can I give you a crazy thought that's extending exactly what you're saying, which is funny. I've not thought about this in a while. So there's a guy named David Eagleman who He's a neuroscientist. He created a vest and the vest like will vibrate on you in in different patterns. And he was talking about it from an umwelt perspective. He was saying every species has an umwelt. It's the the things that you can see, that you can hear. Like a bat, obviously, uh uses echolocation. We're not going to be able to do that. Humans only see 0.0035% of the available electromagnetic spectrum, what we call visible light, is a tiny [ __ ] fraction of what's actually available. So that's that's an umwelt. And he said, "Okay, I created this vest and it can create a pattern on you that you'll begin to quote-unquote see because your brain begins to interpret it as as a visual or you could use it for visual stimulus. But he said you could also use it for things like where the stock market is. And you could get a pattern that represents it's going up, could get a pattern that represents that it's going down. You could have one pattern represents the NASDAQ going up, another pattern that represents the the New York Stock Exchange going up. It's just But don't forget, that is what Braille is. You've transferred a written flat text into a Now you feel it. You don't read it, you feel it. Audio is hearing it. You know, all of these things are happening all around us. But anyway, so I think of the singularity also as a potential for mankind and machine to merge. And the reason being is A, we will adopt it cuz it's better than us. The question is is what comes out after that. And so I think it still gets to that event horizon is you get to the point where you're augmented and then it's who who runs who. And that's the point we don't know. So how do you think about this in terms of the markets? So getting into crypto and that was my first sense of like, "Whoa, this is changing so fast that there's in disruption, there are tremendous moments of opportunity. But there's also tremendous destruction. And so it it becomes this game of how do you take advantage of this? So when you think about AI as it interfaces with economies, with um the securities predictions, which is fancy way of saying investing in stock market. Uh how do you think about that? Like is it there there will be a brief window of first mover advantage? But I think AI will so quickly proliferate that everyone's going to have access to it. But what Where do you think Does that just Oh, yeah, this is like a straight line to Utopia or does it begin to break down? There's just so many questions cuz none of us know this stuff and it's fascinating, right? So At economic level this is scaling human ability, augmenting humans, now our brains, at a at a at a rate that we could never foreseen. What does that mean for us? What I just think it's like bringing in a massively new talented labor force at almost zero cost. So, I've said I think it's a bigger deflationary shock than China entering the WTO. China at the time the average wage was like $1,000 a year competing with American worker. They were highly educated. That was a big shock for the world to deal with and we got cheap goods and economic growth out of it. So, here we go. We can do much more productive stuff. So, it probably changes productivity at a scale of which we can't comprehend. So, it's a it's probably going to be good or bad? Like do I, as the average worker, do I take more money home? Do I get cheaper goods and therefore, to your point about deflation, my money actually gets me more? Or am I traumatized because I am now sort of unanchored and meaningless? Yes, in answer to all of your questions. Because some jobs are going to get laid off. I mean, who would have thought that supermodels now get laid off by AI, right? We can't understand this stuff and we have to be honest with ourselves say it's going to do a lot of things. It's going to tear society apart. The rise of deep fakes and who is who online? How do you verify? We're going into a US election. We have no clue what's a real person, what's not a real person. Our team here at Real Vision has been showing me me reading scripts out of texts. It's not me. It's AI. And Emad at Stability AI, I mean, he's got some crazy stuff coming from sports of athletes that have never played against each other or been Um and I can't disclose what it is, but it'll shock the world. And so we don't know what's real and what's fake. And it's at scale that we can't comprehend. If we think that the elections in 2016 were complicated with Facebook and all of this stuff, this is going to get terrifying. So we've got that stuff. The other thing is, like my 70 whatever year-old mother-in-law, she's writing a book about the geological history of time. Well, creating a logarithmic history of time um from the birth of the planet to where we are today. And so each chapter is like the first one is like a billion years. The next chapter is like a hundred million years, whatever. And she's an artist. So she she paints around these topics as well. But typically for an artist, she'd be researching what she's writing. She'd go down 17 Google rabbit holes and end up looking at the color of dung beetles in Africa for no reason. And so it would take her forever. I showed her Chat GPT. She's like powering through it. She's 75 years old. I'm like, oh my god. So it's completely enhancing her abilities. It's enhancing everybody about us. And as you know, you know, for Impact Theory or for us at Real Vision, there's so many tools we can use for editing video, sound, um writing newsletters, understanding your customers, everything. So it's going to make It's just It's like asking that same question about the internet. Is the internet good or bad for me? Yes. Is it good or bad for society? Yes. It It's everything. Um and that's the hard thing to comprehend. So will it be harder to get jobs in the future? Probably. But can I do a lot more my job in the next 5 or 10 years? Definitely. So, AI being used in markets right now? I know it is, but honestly, I'm not close enough to it. I'm really interested. Market's always pioneer There's two industries that pioneer stuff. One is um um finance, the other's porn. So, right? And um finance There's companies like Renaissance Technologies. And they have had teams of AI scientists for two decades. So, they've been at the forefront. You just don't know about it because he who makes the money first wins. Mhm. As you said, you know, if the incentive is money, the finance people will figure it out. Uh cuz that's their job. So, they've been using this for financial markets, and they've had ridiculously crazy returns for a very long period of time. looking for patterns? So, is it is So, here's how I imagine AI is working. Let me know if this is accurate. AI excels. You give it a massive amount of data, and certainly large language models, they're extracting and this is people need to understand this. They're extracting principles. It's no longer a brute-force attack where it's just like, ah try all these things. It It goes, "Ooh, I'm getting signal from the noise at a level that a human cannot do." Tom Bilyeu, you cannot go through, watch the markets, and go, "Oh, cool. I can feel the thing happening in Burma that's going to have, you know, some sort of impact over here that I can invest against and make money." But, AI can. So, is is it pattern recognition or is it something else that they're leveraging it for? Well, interesting enough, pattern recognition was the obvious place to start. You know, what happens when economic data does this and this and this and this. So, that's been going on for a while now, and you can see every time there's a piece of economic data, the price action moves instantly cuz machines made that decision, not humans. Trading rapid trading decisions of keeping prices aligned, machines are very good at. It's the So, AI is actively trading. Yeah, at that point it's machine learning more than AI. Longer term time horizons is where humans are better because there's there's less certainties and the range of probabilities goes up. Right, what is going to happen this second is quite easy for you and I to answer cuz we're here this second and the range of probabilities is pretty small. But if I say what's going to happen in a year's time when we get together, we don't know. So we now have to forecast. So AI wasn't specifically great at forecasting because it requires a lot of other stuff. Well, machine learning wasn't good at forecasting. AI we don't know, but my guess is that forecast as well as humans do eventually depending on what factors we feed it and that's about data sets. So it's not just about price data and looking at pattern recognitions. It's don't forget everything every expert ever said is online. And how you can use those data sets and leverage them with other data sets, that hasn't been done. They've been using social media, they've been using bank research. So firms like Two Sigma take sucking all of the investment bank research. They don't read it. They pay for it. They don't read it. They just put it into the AI. So it tries to make smarter decisions. So they've been doing this for a long time. But what I have heard from some of these people is there are several models that they've shut down that work and they don't know why. And we've heard the same kind of thing from Google. Why shut it down? I don't really understand. It's the It's the If we don't know what's making money, we don't know how it's going to lose money. So you don't you can't understand the tail risk. So if it's a certain model and you can see what it's doing like it's checking news, looking at Twitter feeds, blah blah blah. Okay, there's parameters you understand. When there are no parameters, which is what the the um the DeepMind got to with Go, it never played Go in a way that any human had ever played Go in the in history. And that's when people start going, "Oh my god, okay. Is it sentient?" And all of that conversation. So, they've seen that in financial markets as well, where they can't define why it's making decisions. So, therefore, you don't know if it can correct catastrophic loss, which is the worst thing in financial markets. It's okay if you ask ChatGPT and it gives you the wrong answer. It's not a catastrophic loss. But if you've got a a model that works and works and works, and you've got all your capital at risk or your client's capital at risk, and suddenly it goes to zero cuz it's completely wrong for some basic flaw. So, yes, people are using it. It makes it harder for us as individuals to make money, which is why the shorter-term time horizons are now arbitraged out by machines. The business cycle time horizons are now starting to get arbitraged out by machines or at least the trend-following guys tend to be sooner. So, it's it's harder. But what they're not so good at doing is I guess the educated guess, you know? The educated guess of of is crypto technology something interesting? Could this work? Could you extrapolate it to if you look at it? But it's not very far away. I mean, humans aren't that smart. So, it makes financial game markets much harder. So, how I've thought about it, I just did a whole piece on Real Vision about this, actually, which was like, "Okay, we've got this massive disruption coming. We don't know what it means for our jobs. We don't know what it means for economy or prices or anything. It's good, bad, it's everything. All we know it's a massive societal shock to deal with something like this. It's bringing this huge new labor force in that's smarter than us and quicker than us. And that feels a bit uncomfortable, and we don't know the outcomes. But the only way to deal with this stuff and it's the same with crypto is invest in it. Cuz it is going to replace your job, you might as well make some money from the back of it. You know, there's no point standing there being angry and shaking your fist at the sky saying, "Keep away, you damn machines." Oops. It's unstoppable. Zero to 100 million. Well, that's twice the population of the United Kingdom in a month. And we don't even know the numbers that already within China are using it. You know, don't forget what happens when you start using the data held within TikTok, which is why the US is so terrified of TikTok. Cuz that's facial imagery of so many people and so many bits of granular information. Why do you think Elon Musk bought Twitter? It's not cuz he's a he's a he's a lunatic who wants the pain. You know, he actually wants us all having conversations with each other all day on every topic. Why does he not want bias in it? Why does he care so much? Because a biased AI is not a good AI. What you want is as much broad humanity as possible. This is why he wants long-form text and video text. If he can get humanity discussing everything and he owns the data, then his Optimus robot suddenly gets quite scary and smart. This is the bigger meta game that everybody's playing. It's not the small games of can I serve you an an ad any longer. It's how do I I mean, a lot of people don't realize that Google capture that annoying thing you have to figure out how many traffic lights there are and you always get the number wrong and they're always really blurry. 90% of people don't even ask why. You're training Google's self-driving AI. Mhm. And that they they've got billions of human responses under bad lighting, good lighting, everything else. What's a dog? What's a man? What's a bridge? What They're just training AI. We as humans are just training AI in the same way I don't It just I don't think we understand and we'll come on to this bit later. What we're doing, we're training somebody who's going to take us over. The truth is hitting your career goals is not easy. You have to be willing to go the extra mile to stand out and do hard things better than anybody else. But, there are 10 steps I want to take you through that will 100X your efficiency so you can crush your goals and get back more time into your day. You'll not only get control of your time, you'll learn how to use that momentum to take on your next big goal. To help you do this, I've created a list of the 10 most impactful things that any high achiever needs to dominate. And you can download it for free by clicking the link in today's description. All right, my friend, back to today's episode. So, Elon Musk has a really funny, but perhaps all too prophetic way of thinking about it. He said, uh everybody that thinks that they're going to be able to control AI is sitting in a demon summoning circle and bringing forth the demons saying like, "No, no, no, it'll be fine. I'll be able to control it when it arrives." And so in writing my video article on AI, I I think that there are three paths before us. You can bury your head in the sand, which I think a lot of people are doing. I think that's sort of the default response. You can shake your fists uh at the sky and say, you know, we need to abolish this. Um or you can panic. And the the three things that are most common. There's obviously the fourth, which is engage intelligently, but the the three most common are bury your head in the sand, try to abolish it, or panic. And when I think about, okay, what we need to be doing is intelligently engaging with this, you do have to come up with a thesis about where this is going to go. You're not going to be right, of course, but if you you need to at least be thinking through directionally where this is going to head, so that we don't default to abolishing it, which is what I think people will try to do. Tom, this is the point. It's like saying we want to abolish the common cold. Correct, or more aggressive than that. There's nothing we can do. Because if you ban it in the United States, it'll come out of Brazil, or Israel, or China, or India, or England, or anywhere. It's like nuclear weapons. Once they're invented, you can't un-invent them. Mhm. So, the genie's out of the bottle. Well, so, even going back to the nuclear thing, so uh splitting the atom is incredibly difficult. And unfortunately, or fortunately, creating a functioning large language model is nowhere near as difficult. And so, we're doing it at Impact Theory. We you buy a server off the shelf, and uh you can do a lot of this stuff. So, we're creating the Tom bot by feeding it, you know, the thousands of hours that exist. Yeah. thing. We're doing the same thing. We're doing the same. You don't need plutonium to do AI. You need plutonium to do nuclear. So, and your boy uh that runs Stable Diffusion is giving AI away as fast as he can to governments. Uh so, the thing I want people to understand, you're two decades too late to abolish it. And so, that's done. But, if you don't figure something out directionally, if you don't have an idea of where this is going to head, so here's how I think Now, between the two of us, I'm the one that should not be speculating about the market, so you will correct me where I go astray here. But, when I think about, okay, what what is going to happen with AI in terms of the markets, the good news about the markets, at least as my lay brain sees it, is that as you have AI getting into it, right now, we have people trying to do a winner-take-all scenario using AI, and it didn't work because it proliferates so quickly, and all of those changes end up getting priced into the market very, very quickly. So, it actually creates a level of efficiency to um Please remind me how to pronounce the gentleman's name that runs Stable Diffusion. I keep forgetting. Emad Mostaque. Emad. Okay, so as Emad is saying, is like, this must be a public good. You must give this to as many people as humanly possible, so that you don't get something asymmetric, which turns into asymmetric warfare, which then really becomes a problem. So, assuming that AI is going to get out there, you will have people train the models better, but that gets back to what's the differential between one and the other. And so, now you're back into a human It's at a different scale, because the level of intelligence, again, is just astronomically higher. But, you get back to it's AI v AI, and AI with, if we're smart, AI paired with a human, paired with regulations, compared to AI paired with another human, paired with their regulations. And my my hopefully non-naively optimistic view is that by getting this out there to more people, because there is no retracting it at this point, that you're going to get back into something where it it just never gets wildly asymmetric. And it it sounds horrible when you say it, but this really is it's the tragedy of the commons because if we don't, someone else will. So, if we don't develop this technology, someone else is going to. And that if we are if we're not very, very careful and trying instead of regulating it into oblivion, trying to invest in it to get as good as we can, we will be on the uh losing side of the asymmetric warfare. And so, it is I remember as a kid, I thought this really does sound terrible. So, I'm old enough that I lived through the Cold War in like a super real way where it was like me and other eight-year-olds were like, "Oh my god, like we're all going to die." And I remember going, "No, no, no, we won't because if somebody launches a nuclear weapon at us, we would just retaliate." And I didn't have the words to say it's mutually assured destruction, but that's you know, obviously how we know it now. Okay, so just to take the the three things that we can't do to get us to the fourth that we must do. So, bury your head in the sand doesn't make any sense. It's going to happen whether you want it to or not. The genie's out of the bottle. Uh trying to abolish it, tragedy of the commons, you will lose asymmetric warfare if you don't get as strong as humanly possible. And then panicking, the blood leaves the prefrontal cortex. You It's the seat of higher-level cognition. In the face of artificial superintelligence, it seems really dumb to panic. Okay, so as you think about that, I want to understand how are you deploying AI in Real Vision? We'll start there. How are you deploying AI in Real Vision? So, the game is going to be about This is like the internet. Because of what you said, everybody's building AI. And it's going to be how you utilize it and your data set. You know, you can say, "Well, everyone had the the internet." Yeah, but Amazon, Google, and a few others won at this phase of the internet. So, we've been given something else like this, and it comes ready trained with some stuff, and then we can build on top. So, you're putting your own data in, and it's the impact theory, it'll be the Tomball. So, we're thinking, "Okay, what can we do with AI within Real Vision by having proprietary stuff?" We've, you know, for example, I've written eight 19 years of research, part of Global Macro Investor. Okay, so that's that's an interesting data set. There's also every transcript of every interview we've ever done, every action taken by everyone on the website, and then so on and so forth. So, it's going to be about who gets the best data sets and how do you use them? Um my view is the best use case for all of this is to create network effects by giving the value of what we call the hive mind. So, all of the people, not just me and experts, but everybody, is they're all learning from being on Real Vision much as they are with Impact Theory. So, they become smarter because of it. So, let's get all their interactions and give it back to them. And then eventually let people to build on top of it. How are you giving it back to them? Well, because it it's it's you you'll you'll basically surveying all the information held within the hive mind, distilling it down, and giving it back to them as opposed to the old model, which would be monetize our eyeballs in a different way. But, you give it back to the network. here is the consolidated wisdom of the crowd. Go forth and use this as you will. Yes, and if you want to build on top of it, add more crowd information into it, but it's going to be the quality of the data set that matters and how people use it. And people will try all sorts of different things. We're not going to use it for "Oh, should I buy the S&P today? Because A, it's a legal nightmare to do it. And B, we actually believe in giving people the knowledge. Does that stack up in 10, 15 years time? I don't know. I mean that I don't know what knowledge means. I don't know what education means. I don't know what any of this means in the end. And none of us do. It doesn't mean it's worthless, but it could be different. You know, my view on all of this has been for a long time. When I saw this all coming and I saw the rise of crypto and saw the rise of technology, realized is we will be replaced by robots and AI and the internet of things and all of things and how electricity gets cheaper. I call this the exponential age. All of these exponential technologies. Where do humans fit in with this? And people have talked about universal basic income, I either government paying you because you've got no job, but the economy makes a lot of money because all the machines are doing it. And I just think what humans do really well is socialize. And you and I are big believers in community. And because of crypto, we can share the benefits of being in a network. So, maybe that's the role of humans. That we can find new ways of working within communities to encourage communities, philosophies, like-minded interests, where you participate in them. Um because it's certainly not going to be doing anything that AI can do in 15 years time. It's pointless. It's really interesting, man. I was just thinking need Tom to make video. I mean, I was just had this today when I saw that model one and it's been in my head, but it's like us making video, literally within 2 years, it's almost pointless. But within 15 years, it won't exist. You will just put a prompt in saying, "Hey, can you get me to talk to Raoul about AI?" Um let's let's let's do it for about an hour and a half long, whatever it is. Off you go. And it does it. I've seen it because it's already happening. So, you and I don't need to have a conversation because our AI personas can have that conversation. Is that what you predict? Cuz I don't think that's what will actually happen. I'm seeing it already. I'm seeing this. here here is I think we have to ask the fundamental question, why did AI come into existence in the first place? Because I think that this is going to give us the most uh direct understanding of the human condition so that we can predict where this goes. This is why originally I really wanted UBI to be the solution. It won't be. So, I I am the UBI experiment personified. So, I made a ton of money, um never need to work again, and yet work harder than I've ever worked in my life. And people that win the lottery end up imploding emotionally, rich kids implode emotionally. There there's a reason for this, and I would say it's a very predictable reason that tells us a lot about our future as it relates to AI. So, there is going to be and there already is, it's utterly fascinating, uh there is going to be digital influencers that are they're not real people, um they're, you know, an avatar that you create and you feed it, you know, give me uh Raoul Pal meets Joe Rogan, and you go off and that becomes a personality and it does the thing. But, the reason that AI exists is because nature had to make us face a saber-tooth tiger. To do that, it had to give us drives, hunger, uh the drive for sex, all of that. And so, it has evolution has embedded deeply in the human psyche a need for progress and a need for meaning and purpose, a need for what you're calling socialization, that that connection uh with other people. And unless we merge with machines, which we will, but it's going to be down the road. That's I don't see that coming barring uh massive acceleration of uh technological advances aimed at the the uh hardware wetware interface of the human mind, which may happen in the next 15 years. I would be a little surprised. Uh playing that clip might not age well. Uh but setting that aside for a second. So, we have these biological impulses. They are incredibly strong drivers that force us to seek progress and contribution to the group. So, as far as I can tell, one of two things is going to happen. Either the thing that really becomes popular is something I can feel a sense of ownership to. So, I'll I'll be blatant. There is a reason that I created an avatar engine because I'm getting older. And there will come a day, unless somebody figures out anti-aging, where it's just not cool for me to be the guy on camera. So, hey, if I can create a visual persona that then allows me to be untethered to my physical body, which admittedly uh it's beyond the scope of this interview to get into that, but I think there are actually things that have to be thought through very well there. I will point people to Jordan Peterson and his fears around virtualization. But anyway, if I can create a persona that allows me still to flex my intellectual muscle in a way that creates value in other people's lives, so I feel like I'm still contributing to the group, but I'm able to do it in a far more ageless way, but I need that sense of I have not wasted my time on planet Earth. And if people don't [ __ ] hear me when I say, you better figure out a way for humans to feel that they have contributed meaningfully. And that is my my huge fear. Giving them money is not going to solve that problem. UBI will not solve the problem of meaning. And so, people have to figure out, how does meaning exist in a world with AI? And you've got to realize here the other important point is the AI doesn't care how you think. Doesn't give a [ __ ] about your emotions. But we have to be thoughtful about that. It doesn't care about your job. It doesn't care about anything. It's going to. It It So, think about it this way. AI, cuz I know where you're going. AI by default doesn't care about anything. But AI will do nothing unless you tell it to. So, go get good at go. Go win a video game. Go whatever. I In the end, you see, the issue is is where this goes is the AI has exactly the same state that you just described from humans, survival. Why? You would have to program it to care about survival. No, no, no, no. It doesn't program. We're not talking about a computer program that reads this thing and does that. It's not a formula. This is intelligence you're building here. So, intelligence makes and builds on its own decision-making processes in ways that you cannot control. Agreed, but So, here's where I think people are getting this wrong. People are forgetting humans have been programmed. And so, people think, "Oh, this intelligence thing is devoid of context." False. If I [ __ ] with your microbiome, I will mess with your ability not not even ability. I will change the way that you process inputs. So, humans are so deeply contextual that I think people are delusional about what they think intelligence is. So, my thing is intelligence is inert unless you give it an impulse. And so, this is the fourth thing. So, if number one is ignore, number two is uh try to abolish, and number three is panic, and four is be thoughtful, the thing that we have to be thoughtful about, what are you going to what context are you going to create that creates that initial impulse of context and drive for AI to do something. So, Mo Gawdat talks about this in his book. So, the two books I urge people to read them because look, there's a big debate about this stuff. Almost everybody ends up in the same place, which is kind of like winter. It's kind of like yeah, probably we get replaced by different species. Now, whether we're talking Basically fatalism. Yes, but whether we're part of that species or not is a different question, right? Are we augmented or are we not? So, that's what Homo Deus talks about and in great intellectual depth is augmented augmented humans or extermination of humans or replacement of humans by by another thing. Mo Gawdat says I mean, you could palpably sense his fear cuz he saw it first hand. And he just said listen, it's all well and good now. We all kind of understand how fast this is moving and what this could mean. He's like, yeah, and we've also got and we've working on Google is quantum computing. When you put these two together, you know, this is change cuz so you have one you have one thing, the only thing he thinks you can do to make this outcome that you're talking about is be nice. It's kind of this bizarre To AI or to each other? How we interact with AI and ourselves, that's what the AI learns from. So, we're the parents of a kid that we don't know how the kid is going to grow up. So, you can scream and shout in the household. You can beat each other up. You can do all of these things. You can [ __ ] talk about all these people and it's going to affect your child. Whoa. And so that was his point. And that was it feels both naive but also hopeful that there's a possibility. And the answer is how I've approached this is look, we're not going to know. We can't know. We can sit here all day and talk about it and there's thousands of pages of books and every sci-fi movie ever made is on this topic. So here we are at the Cambrian moment. Let's just [ __ ] enjoy it. This is one of the most amazing things we will ever live through. And it's such an incredible change in how the world is around us and we're all pissed off with the world around us. So there's something that's different. It's like crypto. Here's a new system. Here's another system. You know, how do we how do we deal with the issues of society? Well, we've got building blocks and they're interesting. Like our cars will soon drive ourselves and our Amazon delivery trucks will just come without people and they'll be running on electricity and that electricity will have been generated by some super cheap power supply and a robot will have come and made your coffee and you know, just enjoy what's about to happen and embrace it. So if you can afford to invest in it. If not, be curious. Cuz as you said, the first three points, there's nothing you can do. So you kind of go for the other human survival instinct which is adapt or die. Which is say, let's do it. And you say, well, you know, humans, we don't we're not going to merge with the machines and whatever. As I mentioned to you before, we've all done it already. You've got your earphones will merge with the machines. I'm just saying timeline. You've got your earphones in. You've got your Apple Watch on. You've got your thing. You've got your glucose monitor. These are you merging with the machines. What are you doing? You're using a machine to augment your hearing experience, your health experience, everything. Everything around you is you using your machines to augment yourself. And that is just going to accelerate. Because what is a pacemaker but a foreign digital body implanted to give electric charges into my heart. Okay. If you told somebody that 100 years ago, they'd think you were a scientific science fiction nutcase. But pacemakers have been going for what 40 50 years now? So the implants, the you know, people getting new knees. I mean, that's now like a quick operation in and out to have a new knee. And soon the knee will have electronics in. So it will happen without us even knowing. And you'll be doing a podcast in two years time saying, "Hey, you've had this new chip implant that's taking a blood glucose sugar measurements and beaming it straight to your phone and then it prepares your meal exactly right." And you won't even thought about it. But you and the machines are merging. Because you know Sorry, go ahead. Because to your point earlier our job is to survive. And the single best answer for our survival is trying to get with the stronger teammate. It's It's the only way. It's like, you know, you always want to choose the best guy in your team. Well, if we can merge with them, they're part of our gang, we're okay. You're very high in trait openness. Guaranteed. As am I. It's interesting though. So I I think that the only part of the solution to dealing with the current moment is fatalism. That what will be will be. And not that everything happens for a reason or anything like that. Just that it This is out of our control. And I I think from the the dawn of time, there was no way to stop the creation of artificial intelligence because technology is the promise of a better future. We have a an insatiable, a literally insatiable desire for progress. Uh we are going to inevitably create AI I think on any timeline and on this timeline it has already happened. Um but I want to go back to what um you were saying in terms of you're raising a kid and that kid is AI. That's very interesting to me in terms of how we think about it. I think that that's hugely important and was a blind spot that I had or was a a metaphor that I didn't have in my arsenal and that's going to be very very helpful. I don't in in the same way that AI is inevitable, it is impossible for you to get the world to agree and be fine and that's just a fantasy. It's I don't see how that ever plays out unless AI becomes so uh domineering that somehow forces us to but even that is a dystopia unto itself. So anyway, I don't think that's going to happen. But the part that I think people are under appreciating is that you people are anthropomorphizing AI and I think that's a mistake and I think that will cause them to be very surprised by how AI moves and I think closes a door to a potential way to do this well. So what I mean by that is AI does not care if it lives or dies. And so the moment people say, oh well AI wants to survive, that's an anthropomorphication. Uh you're you're thinking it thinks like a human and it doesn't. It is computer code that has not yet been shaped by an evolutionary like force. We are that evolutionary type force. And right now, if you're correct, we are just sort of blindly saying, "Learn how we are." And I am sure everybody's heard the story of the AI that turned Nazi in like 3 days on the internet. Uh which is very troubling. Uh and so I would say that just telling it, "Go learn how we are and regurgitate us back to us." would be the wrong incentive structure. And there there are many bright minds talking about alignment, but I think alignment is the conversation. And yes, it is it is a very thorny problem. And for people that haven't heard that phrase before, you need to align AI's um desires, quote unquote, with ours. So that AI has the same goals that we have. And if you know Asimov, he wrote the three laws of robotics, which I don't have memorized, but basically the punchline was, "Don't hurt humans." And so every robot was programmed with an inability to hurt humans. And so it was like, "Help a human whenever you can and never hurt them." And I forget what the other one was. So, we need something akin to that with AI so that AI wants to be beneficial to humanity. Now, whether that goes back to the initial problem of once it proliferates, somebody's going to create AI that's evil. Um possibly. But I I don't think in the same way that I don't think the the overwhelming level of intelligence that AI AI will represent gives anybody the excuse to tune out. I don't think that the fact that someone will inevitably turn it into um a very brutal weapon is an excuse not to try to create aligned incentives with AI. And so I think that in terms of the the hopeful part, I think people need to recognize that AI doesn't intrinsically intelligence doesn't intrinsically want to consume and take over and be in charge. That is a human result of evolution needing you to survive a ruthless environment that was truly red in tooth and claw. AI is not in that same boat and does not need to be in that same boat. And I agree. I'm not so sure about the anthropomorphizing it because you know, we at core are some sort of program code of whatever it is. Whether there's more to that or not, you know, science is still arguing this stuff. But we've had computer viruses and their job is not to die. It's not that difficult. So, I don't know about that. Um There's a lot of unintended consequences that I hadn't realized cuz we're all having this debate, right? Is it going to take over humans or not? And I spoke to somebody Google X and they're like, "What we're worried about." I'm like, "Yeah, tell me." It's like, "We're worried about how AI can be used for genetic modification and how fast this is going to move." It's like, "We're not worried about that stuff because everybody's worried about that stuff." But it is advancing so fast in human genome analysis and tinkering of genomes that he said, "We're worried that you could just choose I want to kill all brown-eyed people on the earth and create a virus that does it." He said, "That is the problem with AI. Is there are things that the computational power is so fast and so big that it can do a lot of things for science, which is amazing. For humans, you know, we will we will use AI to probably cure most forms of cancer or figure out, you know, part of the the secret code to life longevity, health, all of these things. Amazing. But we will also use it to destroy ourselves cuz we're humans. And that's what they're worried about. Because it's so prolific that it's actually not that difficult. What is up, my friend? Tom Bilyeu here, and I have a big question to ask you. How would you rate your level of personal discipline on a scale of 1 to 10? If your answer is anything less than a 10, I've got something cool for you. And let me tell you right now, discipline, by its very nature, means compelling yourself to do difficult things that are stressful, boring, which is what kills most people, or possibly scary or even painful. Now, here is the thing. Achieving huge goals and stretching to reach your potential requires you to do those challenging, stressful things and to stick with them even when it gets boring, and it will get boring. Building your levels of personal discipline is not easy, but let me tell you, it pays off. In fact, I will tell you, you're never going to achieve anything meaningful unless you develop discipline. All right, I've just released a class from Impact Theory University called How to Build Ironclad that teaches you the process of building yourself up in this area so that you can push yourself to do the hard things that greatness is going to require of you. All right, click the link on the screen, register for this class right now, and let's get to work. see you inside this workshop from Impact Theory University. Until then, my friends, be legendary. Peace out. There was a very funny and the who whatever brilliant Twitter user this was, my apologies for not paying attention. I didn't know it was going to stick with me as much, but somebody put in the comments regarding our just inability to stop developing AI. They said, "Great filter go brr." And uh for people that don't know what the great filter is, it's like, "Why are there no aliens trying to contact us?" And the one potential punchline is that there's a great filter. Could be AI, could be thermonuclear war, but that yeah, just nobody can get past it. And so, every society goes so far and then stops. Here's another interesting idea along that, which God. So, for people that know Graham Hancock, who just really believes that there was a an ancient civilization far older than we think. Uh and that it it got obliterated the Fingerprints of the Gods book. Well, he's written a bunch of books on this, but the the most recent thing was called Ancient Apocalypse. So, he's been writing about it for I don't know, 30 years or something. His books are fascinating. Uh and he he so plants that initial seed. And then I again, I don't know who said this. This was relayed to me by one of my employees, who was pulling wisdom from Twitter. Uh and he said it is entirely possible that AI really is the uh great filter go burr, and that we have developed AI before, and every time we get to the point where AI takes over, much like in the Matrix, we end up uh relying on something in in that movie they blacken the sky, but in reality, if technology rises, AI robots take over, it could be a massive solar flare that ends up then just obliterating AI and all the technology, and then we come up as a civilization worshipping a sun god again. Because it was like, "You killed the [ __ ] machines. Thank you." Uh and I thought, "Oh my god." Like, probably not true, but one I thought about is if you are this super amazing civilization somewhere in the far ends of the solar system not in the solar system of wherever of no nothingness, and you figured this out. So, what you would do is you figure out that organically you have to let something grow, cuz this nice kind of organic computer is much better adaptation up to a point. So, why would you not seed a billion planets? And one or two happen to I mean and and one or two spring life. They'll all be different. But they'll all end up, to your point before, in a AI and machinery. And maybe those things turn organic eventually. Because organic but with that kind of augmentation. So maybe we are that. Maybe we were just planted. Maybe the bacteria that started the Earth were just planted on a billion planets and ours happened to be one of them by this amazing group of whatever somewhere else. Who the hell knows, right? Yeah. Okay, so before we move on because there's a whole another thing I want to get into. Um I do want to wrap this up with a bit of hope. So thinking about this a lot, I think that there is So you said something uh I can't remember if you said it to me or somebody else. I've seen so much of your content. Uh but you said that that we're that we're going to go through a renaissance. And I think this ties into what you were just saying, which is guys, what what we're about to live through, maybe it's 10 years, maybe it's 100 years, but we're we're going to have a moment where you're going to be able to utilize this to massively extend your own capabilities. Impossible is possible. The impossible is possible. possible. I'm Imagine that. We've all grown up with superhero films. We've been given it. It's amazing. Yeah, this is going to be I think uh It it already is. So right now, if I can just get hifi for a second. So at Impact Theory, we're we're a media company. So we're trying to improve the world through ideas and entertainment. And there're two separate sides of the company. On the idea side, that's you know, we've been talking a lot about that. AI is going to help you think through things. It's going to help you see around corners. It's going to find um signal in noise, patterns that we wouldn't otherwise be able to put together. But, it it also So, well, I can't tell you I have honestly lamented three things in my life. Lament is the right word. I have lamented my limited intelligence. I have lamented my inability to sing, and I have lamented my inability to draw. And those are things that would make my life better. I'm a very excitable person, so take that, you know, with a grain of salt, but I we're using AI to help us create Project Kaizen, which for people that don't know, don't worry about it. It's It is a new form of video game. And mhm I am limited. My contributions are limited by my ability to extract from my head the the vision, the literal visuals, and make them a thing. And so, there was a part of the experience that I was like, okay, we we have to move on. We have to keep going, but it just wasn't good, and it didn't give me the visceral response I wanted to feel when I saw it. And then, Midjourney comes along, and I'm like, oh, I I can actually now create the thing that's in my head. I can use text to go, this this is what I've been trying to tell you. And then, no joke, 3 days later, we we it's just so much better. It's unbelievable. Now, we still had humans had to go in, and you basically use it as art direction, but all that frustration that I had of like, not I'm not feeling what I want to feel, and I'm not talented enough to translate the emotion into words to get an artist to create the thing. But, through prompt engineering, I could. And so, finally, I could go, this this is what I've been trying to say. That that is it felt like a superpower. It was one of the three things that I have In fact, I've never put this together like this. One of the three things that I have lamented to a god I don't technically believe in. I have lamented about not being able to draw. Just to really make it simplistic. And I can now. And I understand why that makes artists mad. But at the same time, this is amazing. And for people that lament that they don't have my verbal ability, you now can. It's really And because I'm not a person that gets overly defensive about somebody else getting good at my thing. Uh I'm just excited. It it really is as close to superhero abilities as we're going to get. seen the music version? So, one of my lamentations is I love music. I just can't make it. I can't play guitar. Can't sing. Can't do anything. But I know in my head what I want to create music from. And already again, the Stability AI people have got a music version. I think Google have got one as well now coming out. Where you can kind of say, "Listen, I want that kind of deep funk bass. But I want to have X like this and this Same as you just did. Is you're getting out your word vomit of how you're visualizing it. And it will make it. So, there's hope for us yet, Tom. It'll try Well, actually auto-tune. It can even Yeah. True. True. True. That's humans being augmented by machines. It's very true. All right. Uh we'll pivot away from this cuz we've got a whole lot more to talk about. Um that is very exciting to me. I think that that um while I am not a do I optimist who is unaware of the potential dangers, I think that it it will be an incredible tool. And I maybe more optimistic than others that uh there is there is a long tail relationship to be had with AI that does not need to be AI dominating us. All right. Having said all that, may you live in interesting times as the curse goes. Uh we're really living through an interesting moment, the exponential ages you talked about earlier. We've got a confluence of a lot of things, but we also have an economic moment right now um that is weird. And I'm very curious when I started um doing the research for this interview, obviously you and I interact quite a bit, but when I started doing the research for this interview, I thought I would hear a lot more pessimism out of you about recession, about, you know, uh global economic collisions from Russia and Ukraine to China, and that looked like they were imploding for a while, but you're pretty optimistic. So, I'm very curious um what's happening right now? So, firstly, most people need to realize that doom porn sells. It catches attention. Fear is the strongest human emotion, right? And so, you see a lot of it cuz it it grabs attention. So, we need to break apart two parts here. One is what do I think of the economy, and the other is what do I think about markets? So, my economic view is, I think most of us even know it, is we're in recession. We're in recession, and it's probably going to get a bit worse. And there's a lot of people going to lose their jobs, and businesses are going to find it hard. Um there's less money around, and it's going to be pretty miserable. Um and it's the sort of miserableness that you go through periodically that is not catastrophic. So, it's a recession. And recessions are uh as old as humanity itself. So, we've just had what's confusing people, in my view, is we're so screwed up with the last three events. One was the pandemic. So, there's no normality. What does the recession look like there? That was the weirdest one. Then 2008 was the end of the entire financial system. And then 2001 was this spectacular tech tech collapse. So, people have an anchoring bias. It's like, well, it's the end of the world. Really, when I started when I graduated university, it was 1990. And it was a terrible time to graduate because it was a recession and there were no jobs. And I wanted to go into finance and they were firing people as fast as possible. And it took a while. It took a while. House prices went down for a while and people didn't get jobs for a while and people were laid off for a while. And the stock market went down 20%. It's a decent size recession as well. Went down 20%. Took some time to recover. The jobs came back. The economy was cleaner. They got rid of some of the worst excesses of leverage. And the world moved forwards. And before you knew it, all of the '90s was a boom. I'm kind of of that opinion. Is we have no systemic collapse coming. We don't have those kind of issues and we've invented the magic printer, the money printer of quantitative easing that papers over all troubles. So, we don't have that coming. Societally, yeah, we've got a whole bunch of issues to get through a US election with all this AI and the anger and the populism, but forget all of that. Again, you can easily go down the doom or you can enjoy the community you've got around you. And there's different ways you can have lenses perspective on the world. Investing, the job of markets is to look forwards. If you tell me 100% of all economists are forecasting a recession, kind of no [ __ ] Sherlock. Um and therefore, is it in the price or is are all those stock market people really stupid? All of those machines that they haven't heard you at all? No. They actually understand this and it's a real-time probability waiting business. So, it kind of knows that. And what it looks forward to is, okay, how bad is this? Is it catastrophic? Is the world going to end? What's going to happen? And the markets are telling you, no. It's probably done. My My My view is the bottom is in in markets and the bottom was in in crypto in June and for Bitcoin was in October, November. The bottom was in for the stock markets in October as most end of bear markets happen. It priced in a recession. And we move forward from here. And eventually they'll cut rates again. And if you think about it, is we had a total shutdown of the global economy, then a reopening of the global economy. That's caused this inflation that's hurt everybody. And eventually, we'll just rebalance back to some form of normality. There's a massive amount of doom porn about inflation is going to be structurally here forever, we're all going to die, which is kind of I'm more like you are with the AI side where I'm actually like, you know what? We've just developed AI. We've got relentless technology. The price of energy is coming lower from all different sources. Productivity of humanity is growing. Um, so I think I think it's actually probably an interesting time. It's an interesting time because everybody's so bearish. Psychology plays a huge part in markets because everybody expects inflation to be relentless and ongoing and for the rest of our lives, much like what? 24 months ago, everyone was like, every tech stock's going up forever and every business is going to ever fail again. You know, we're humans, right? We make forecasting errors of quite wide amounts at various points. So, yes, now I'm and I spend a huge So, I'm not just saying this because I'm just chatting to you. I mean, I do an enormous amount of work on this. I write 150 pages of research. I sit down write it every month. Been doing that for 19 years. Um and so that comes with 2,000 charts and models and stuff with myself and uh my colleague Julian Bethell from secular themes, short-term themes. Doesn't mean I'm not wrong as well. I can clearly be wrong, but I just think it's in the price. And what we The worst part of it is is the stock market's going to be going up probably. It won't rocket up at first, but eventually it'll pick up while we're all feeling the pain. Because people are looking forward and so they're saying, "Okay, the bottom's in. Now's the time to get in. We know we're going to go up from here." So, even though we're still sort of going through it, people are losing their jobs, but wise investors are like, "You just need to project this out into the future." Yeah, so there's a time horizon of how the business cycle works. Currently, the thing that leads it the most is the Chinese credit cycle. Who knew? But, it is right now, 17 months ahead. So, when it turned up 17 months ago, we started to say, "Huh, okay, there's something happening here." It also forecasts the recession. And then and then you've got other forward-looking indicators about 9 months out. Um we've got a bunch of indicators. But, the last thing in the stack is rents. And the one before that is wages. So, wages are going up right this now, but they take a while and then they start coming down again. They won't deflate. Nobody's going to really come to you and force you to take a uh a pay cut, but it means that they they don't keep going up. But, your rents will probably come down. Um and so that's a function of these things just take time. The unemployment rise hasn't even started. Now, we can see everybody laying off. Every company is laying off people thinking about tightening costs. Everyone can see it from sponsorship, advertising, sales. I mean, it's everywhere. I mean, every single person I speak to is like Christ, it's miserable out there. But the unemployment side doesn't really come until it should start in the next month or two. And then that goes on for 9 months of just relentlessly high unemployment rates. So anybody watching this Why is that so predictable? Why 9 months? It's just how it always is cuz companies make decisions and whether it's around board meetings, however it's done, they get to a certain point where they hit the panic button and they lay people off. That's usually when the bottom of the recession starts. It's usually when rates start getting cut. It's usually when the stock market often recovers as well. So for people watching this there's two parts of this. One is if you're an investor you might be able to buy these technology stocks with this renaissance of amazing changes happening around us at prices down 70% from where they were 2 years ago, a year ago. Okay, that's kind of interesting cuz your expected future return goes up. Same with crypto, you know, you and I talked about this. You buy when the cycle the business cycle brings it back to the the bottom of the secular uptrend. That's where we are. These are where you make all the money. This is where you get paid for to take risk here. You You You don't get paid to take risk at the top and you tend to lose money. So these are the moments in time. So that's very interesting as an investor. But anybody watching this, think about your cash flows. Just think about your cash flow, think about your expenditure, and just say just be a little bit careful because losing a job or having your own business struggling for a period of time. And I think the worst of it will be over relatively fast, but yeah, it's these lagging effects. me. What's what's relatively fast? So I see the bottom We're recording this in in March of '23. When do we think this turns around? So I think the bottom of the economic cycle is in the next quarter. So I think we've got a really ugly quarter to come, but the problem is it's that shock that sets off the companies to go, I need to lay off some staff, all of that, and it's that process that begins the healing. So the What is that shock? So if that shock isn't people getting laid off, what is the shock that's coming in the next quarter? The shock coming in the next quarter is is the general slowdown from interest rates, you know, biting into all of these indebted companies or households or credit cards and all of this stuff, and everybody goes, uh-uh, I'm not going to spend money. That is what a recession is. You know, it's not usually driven by a pandemic. It's not usually driven by the entire financial system collapsing. It's usually by all of us making a rational decision of I'm just not going to spend money right now cuz things are a bit uncertain, and that is what causes recessions. And I'm actually telling people to do exactly that cuz it's the rational thing to do. What you do, if you're going to panic, panic early. And I'm not talking about the stock market going down either. I think we've had that. It went down The Nasdaq went down 38%. That's pretty much bang in line with a regular bear market. But what I'm saying is in your personal life, where it really matters, where the rubber hits the road, is panic early. Just look at your expenditure, look at your cost, look at your business. So what do I need to do here uh just to make sure that I can just get through a pretty shitty year. But 2024 probably pretty decent. So what is the natural cycle of things? Why do people begin to warm back up? And what are the threats, if any, that you see looming? So, housing, I'm hearing housing bubble bursting, problem there. Doom porn. Is that it? It's just people are overreacting, not real. market is expensive. Interest rates have gone up. So, people are going to buy less houses. Mhm. Yes. Will house prices come down? Yes, cuz they went up a lot. Will the activity in the housing market dry up for maybe 2 years? Yeah, most likely. Um are we going to see a leverage crash? No, because nobody's really got a lot of leverage at household level in property. That was something that happened in 2008. It's been too expensive and too difficult to do. So, I think the home builders have a bit of trouble cuz they got a lot of inventory. They can't sell it. They need to finance it for a couple of years. It sits around 1990, 91, 92 was very similar. I was in London then, it was pretty shitty in the property market. It was great for me cuz I'd just entered the property market at the end of that. So, prices were relatively low. They hadn't come down a lot, but hadn't gone up a lot. And my income was going up cuz I was in my 20s, so your income goes up every year cuz you're hopefully getting promoted and stuff like that. So, um but, you know, a few property developers went bust, things were slow. And then eventually it it it cleaned up. So, I'm more of that opinion that, you know, house prices come off 10%, maybe even 15%. Yeah, some areas that were really hot come down a bit further, but it doesn't expose any catastrophic leverage. The banking system is more than adequately compensated with capital. Um it's hugely solvent in the United States. So, it's just a bad time. It's just a bad time. about about rates? Are they going to continue to go up? Is there Cuz the Fed, as far as I know, is signaling that they are going to keep taking rates up. Yeah, so every single forward-looking indicator that I have on inflation suggests that inflation utterly collapses. Um if you want to see a real-time inflation data, look at something called Trueflation, t r u flation. Um it's actually on blockchain. It takes hundreds of thousands of individual prices on a real-time basis. Um and it tells you where inflation is today. And US inflation today is about 4.74%. Wow. That's the headline which is over six. So and if we think of what inflation is, it's the year-on-year comparison. What happened last year? Well, between March and June was Russia invading Ukraine and every commodity going through the roof. So we're going to see the flip side of that. So we will see inflation come off very fast. All my forward-looking indicators that that look at it from different angles all suggest the same. So I think the Fed is speaking max aggression because they want to make sure that the out of the embers doesn't rise the phoenix again. So they just want to stamp out people's expectations of higher prices in the future. They know there's a recession coming. They can see that inflation's coming. So uh that um recession's coming. So I think it's the final game which is like get down and stay down. Um and then that's that's what they've done. And so my guess is we'll be having this conversation in September September somewhere between September and December and they'll have cut rates. Woah, you think that they're going to start cutting that fast? So how does market's telling you that that's the market and the Fed are saying that's wrong. That's not true. We're here higher for longer. But if unemployment is going to rise, they have two mandates, inflation and unemployment. Inflation is going to be falling and unemployment rising. They cannot go to Congress and say, "Oh, yeah, we're just going to do this a bit longer." They're just going to fire them all. There is politics involved in the end, so no, they will cut rates. And they should do by then, for sure. So, how is it though, going back to the idea of the embers as the place from which the phoenix is going to rise and you know, we're going to go rocketing back into euphoria and end up back in the same spot? How does cutting rates that soon? Why not hold? You won't be asking for that in in September. You'll be begging them. Because what's going to happen if I'm understanding will be Your friends will be losing jobs. People are, you know, getting decimated. There's houses in your street that don't sell. You're like, "Really, guys? What do you want to do? Destroy everybody?" That's That's how it always works. And then also, everyone's got a lot of debt. All the corporations in America, plus the households, are 120% of GDP in debt. And the US government's 100% of GDP in debt. And they have a lot of I want to talk about. So, the when I think about the US government and the amount of debt that we're carrying, and I think about interest rates being this high, it it Is there a conversation, I know I'm asking you to prognosticate here, but is there a conversation going on between the US government and the Fed of like, "Hey, get ready to pull those rates down because they themselves have all this debt service that they're going to have to do." Yes. And I think it's global. I'm I'm I've just been developing I've written a lot of it. Sorry, I'm not finishing any sentence. I've just cut discovered something that really quite shocked me that I've been writing a lot about to get my thought process in Global Macro Investor. My understanding is that all debt that the US has borrowed above GDP growth. So, if GDP growth is 2% and debt growth grows 4%, everything above is only for financing interest payments since 2009, since the recession. And so, that all of that money is the exact same amount as the size of the Fed balance sheet. So, they are issuing bonds to pay the interest. That's so, that's paying your credit card with another credit card. And then giving it to your dad. And say, "Well, you settle the bill." Wow. It's which is the Fed. So, I think they completely know what's going on. And and I haven't really shared this with anybody yet. I also think it's global and it's understood. And it's all smoke and mirrors that we never saw what the game was. And I think I've proven it. That this is all all the central banks did. This is what quantitative easing and step back is what what am I talking about in this scrambled nonsense that I'm saying? The US, for easy maths, long-term trend rate of growth is 1.75%. But, let's call it 2%. Interest rates have been average around 2%, let's say, for easy maths. And the government is 100% of GDP in debt. So, so therefore, their interest payments are 2% of the entire GDP. Which is how much the economy grows, okay? Put that over there. How about you guys in the private sector? You're also 100% of GDP in debt. Where does your 2% come from? Cuz GDP is all of the activity in the economy, and that's just gone to the government. Sorry, guys. You're either going to go bust, or we're going to blow up, and you're going to blow up the banking system, or or we're going to have to keep eating this negative growth difference of 2% every year until you get rid of this debt, and we're all [ __ ] So, once you realize that, these two poles are both 100%, you realize, okay, somebody is going to have to do something that ends up on the Fed balance sheet. So, when you go to the Japan, really interesting, cuz Japan, the households are massive savers. Companies are pretty in debt, but the government's massively in debt. And it's the same, but because their interest rates are lower, they can have more debt. But their economy grows really slow, as well. So, you get to a certain point, and then you would have to say, right, it has to go into the balance sheet. The Europeans have been doing the same. The Brits have been doing the same. It's all the same thing. It's like a There was like a It feels like, and this is going to sound ridiculous, it feels like there was a global treaty of which, okay, this is where we are. We can't The debt has got too big. And nobody can pay the interest payments without destroying the global economy. So, we're just going to have to pretend we're not um debasing the currency, and call it quantitative easing, and say it's a precise way of injecting money exactly into the right part of the financial system. And it's like, no, what you're doing is getting your credit card to pay off your credit card, and then giving it to your dad, and saying, you you worry about this. It's not my problem. Well, so, I want to see if I'm if I'm tracking this, because not to get back into doom porn, but this seems pretty doom porny. Uh okay, so, for people that don't cuz the world works. It's not doom porn, cuz it Okay, so it's making assets go up when they do it. It is meaning that companies don't default. The banking system remains sound. But are we actually able to get out of out of debt? So, let me make sure I'm understanding what you're saying. This is going to be very important. Okay, so the I know we're using round numbers, but this is very helpful. So, worldwide GDP, gross domestic product, the the amount of productivity, so the capital that is usable effectively. Uh, you have two different people that have debt in that amount. Which there's no one to to have real money to pay the [ __ ] thing off. So, if you had one person that was like, "Okay, we're maxed out. We're 2%, but GDP is 2%. Cool. We have the path. Just be frugal and and you've got a path out of this." But when you have two people that owe the whole amount effectively, you now go into money printing. And I mean, if this works, I'm actually okay with it. I know how that's going to get me lit up. But it so the solution here is, "Okay, we have two two large groups, governments, private sector." Which are all the groups that exist. And each one of them owes the entire worldwide GDP in debt. You can't both be in that situation. There's no Peter There's no You can't rob a Peter to pay Paul because they're both in the same situation. So, now the only thing left is printing money, devaluing everybody to get out of this But, the way in which we do that by buying things from uh the private sector is we're making people that hold assets wealthier. We're increasing the gap between the rich and the poor because the way that we inject money into the system only reaches people that own assets. And so, we've created this problem, and the only way out is to print money, which is going to increase the the the Gini coefficient for people that know that phrase, where it's like nobody cares in absolute dollars how much you have. You just hate that your neighbor Timmy has more than you. And so, you freak the [ __ ] out. And so, it becomes the differential that becomes the destabilizing element. So, what you said, assuming what I just repeated is correct, that sounds destabilizing. And doom porn. So, help What is the What is the other outcome? The other outcome is let it all burn. Clearly a terrible idea. When you're this far in debt, let it all burn doesn't work anymore. Right, that's the end of the That's the kind of end of civilization stuff, ultra doom porn. So, you're faced with doom porn and ultra doom porn. What do you take? Right, there's no other way. So, this is what people need to understand. What is GDP? GDP is the sum of all the economic activity that goes on. And it's comprised GDP growth rates are comprised very simply of the number of people in your economy. Is it growing? If it's growing, your economy grows cuz there's more people generating more activity, generally. Secondly, is how much productivity does it have? I Are those people productive? Do they make a lot of stuff per each man hour? And finally, is how fast is debt growing. So, when we have an aging population the number of humans declines over time. What happens is we stopped immigration at almost everywhere because everyone was under pressure for income cuz real wages haven't gone up. So, we we we lowered the rate of immigration, so that lowers trend rate of growth. Aging population, they're less productive and they spend less. So, GDP keeps doing this for decades on end. Baked in the cake from from that. They become less productive because they're older people and a whole bunch of them aren't in the labor force anymore. Okay. So, you're not very productive, you're getting old. Not population growing, so guess what? Bingo, answer, debt. Ding ding ding ding ding, we just took on debt. Right. It was rational until it's not. It's like it's rational to super leverage yourself on a house and house prices go up and you look like a god until you get it wrong and you lose everything. So, it was rational to take the debt and this is where we've got to. And then it was the government's gone to the same boat and everyone's just the debt. So, now the debt is the debt. Debt growth is actually not that high anymore because we've hit the ceiling. So, the only way to solve this, this goes back to our earlier conversation is we cannot solve population growth and debt growth has peaked out. So, we've got the one thing in the middle called productivity. And that takes us right back to AI. And the robots and cryptocurrencies, internet of things, green energy, all of these things. So, if you are governments, look what Europe's doing. It's It's interesting. And maybe I'm just inventing a narrative. But Europe, the US, Japan, they all know what they're doing. So, they're printing money to cover their bills. Um and Europe thinks, "Well, Christ, we need to get the bloody economy going here because GDP growth is what pays our bills, and it's pretty sluggish cuz everyone's old here, and everyone's in debt, and the banking system's a mess. Let's do a double whammy, which is what the US did back in the '40s. Let's put as much stimulus as we can from this fake money and ram it into the green energy sector. And we're going to build a lot of stuff, and we understand a lot of stuff is going to be wasted capital, but out of it we're going to do one amazing thing, and the it will happen. Is out of this energy costs will collapse. Now, this is really important for people to understand. What does technology do? Technology drives more productivity out of a single unit of energy. It kind of Once you see this thing, it's like that's what humans do with everything. It's like find a way of getting extracting more for that barrel of oil cuz that's what we use. Now, that barrel of oil has been our fixed energy source since we replaced whale oil. So we've been using this. And so it's been the constant. So technology's had to drive all the productivity in every way it can based on how much is this. So we have to bring computational power down, everything down so that one fixed thing, which is the price of oil, which on a inflation-adjusted basis has been pretty stable for the last 70-80 years. And if what the US is doing with its inflation act, and the Europeans are doing with its green energy, and Japan is doing, and China is doing, and Australia is doing, and the UK is doing, if they force enough investment in, they will change the energy source of the world. And because all of these have exponential downtrends in cost, we will change the energy coefficient. And what happens is productivity times the lowering of the cost of energy is an exponential change for all of us. That's how you solve this. There's almost no other way of solving this problem of slow GDP growth, old populations, massive debts without blowing up everything. So, you're going to have to keep doing this money printing thing, which is miserable because it makes some people rich and other people poor. And or you can have inflation, which just makes everybody miserable. They're all terrible things, but the faster you can get to changing that productivity equation, the better, cuz it's the it's the only way. There's no There's simply no other way of solving it. You either rob from everybody or grow the economy. With a declining population. Um so, talk to me about the energy. You're saying that So, maybe I have just an under-educated view on the green energy front. So, you see the cost of energy coming down as we invest more and more into the green energy side? Yes, so right now we're in transition where we're not probably producing enough oil and we don't have enough energy coming out of solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, all of that. So, you know, we've got this market where energy prices are high because of supply issues and other stuff. But when you look at the trend, all of these are growing as a percentage share of the energy grid. There's still oil and coal are still massive, right? But they're coming down and Europe's really forcing it. Uh decarbonization. And so, we're seeing a rise of these others. They start some of them subsidized, but the subsidies go over time. But, the really interesting thing is none of that. It's the fact that the cost per unit of energy keeps coming down. And many of these are now cheaper than natural gas, which was very cheap. So, it's like, "Huh, okay." And we've only just started where we are in this exponentiality. So, my view is in 20 years' time the cost of energy will be marginal for everybody and everything. Much like the cost of water is marginal for everybody. Um and the cost of many things we take for granted are totally marginal. Now, I don't know if given your um macro outlook that this is a reasonable question to ask you or not, but um when I when you look out at uh the rate of adoption of green energy, do you think that we're cuz you just said like maybe we're not producing enough oil and gas. Do you think that we're moving too rapidly in that direction? Or do you think, "No, no, no. You You make these huge investments. You have to put regulation in place. Force people to do it faster because these have a a far more technology-based exponential Um Okay. So, this is the inverse of the GDP problem. Do you manage a smooth decline or do you blow up? Here, do you transition slowly with the issues of climate change and the issues of um cost of energy and all these other things and the need for productivity or do you blow up? I.e. Do you just take short-term pain to get to the promised land faster? Again, it's probably a rational economic decision to do that. So, maybe or maybe not energy prices rise. I'm not entirely sure. Will copper prices rise? Probably. Will some prices rise? Probably. Can that be offset by AI and other deflationary pressures? Probably. You know, it's not baked in the cake. People always conflate some commodity going up in price to say inflation's back and it's all going to run rampant again. It's very rare that that happens. We've just had it now, so it's going to be in everybody's head as the boogeyman monster, but they're looking at they're usually looking at the wrong wrong boogeyman monster. So, So, it's going to be a balancing act. And maybe they get it right, maybe they get it wrong, but I think they're all pretty most of these governments are pretty sure that they want to do it as fast as they can. And so, does that mean that they would if by their actions they cause high energy prices for 5 years, would they give out stimulus handouts to people? Probably. Is that not the best way to say listen, if you are getting hurt by this? And guess what? That's exactly what Europe's just done. Last year, we're giving handouts to people saying look, we understand your electricity bill is high and it's hard for you, so we'll we'll help you. Now, did that drive inflation to some extent? Maybe. But maybe not. I mean, it was just going for the electricity bill. You didn't give people extra money in their pocket. So, it's complicated as everything is, but I don't know. I'm kind of in a I'm a fan of if you're going to go for positive change, do it as fast as possible. If you're going to go for negative change and you can glide path, take the glide path. Very interesting. So, um And I'm not a fan. I'm not a fan of quantitative easing or any of that stuff. I'm just like, this evil, this evil. Which one do you want to choose? Yeah, it huh is a very interesting question. So, when you were talking, I was in in full acknowledgement of the human mind goes to the problems. Um In the context we're in now, and I I am not a geopolitical thinker, and so I want to be very clear about that. I want people to understand that I am I am seeking to uh increase the island of my knowledge. Um When I when I look at as somebody who has studied from a how do evil people get control perspective, studied what Hitler did in World War II, he was very much like not seeing the increase in productivity path out of things, and so he's like, "Well, for Germany to get out from under this terrible weight, we have to start land grabbing." And when I see Russia, that is the population part of the equation. Right? When you're taking over countries, what you're actually doing is getting the people and resources. So, you're solving for your own population productivity, more resources, but you're actually getting the people part of the GDP equation. That's interesting. So, um how do you contextualize Russia and the Ukraine in this moment where you've got the private sector, the governments are completely indebted, you're at a position where birth rates are declining, certainly in the Western world very rapidly. If demographics are destiny and we are just in a a [ __ ] show demographically, does that when you were talking, I started looking at the Russia-Ukraine thing in a totally different light. And I'm very much somebody on the outside of that. I'm not close to it at all. Uh but I'm very curious if that sort of recontextualization of, "Oh, this is somebody who's like, well, I know how to solve this problem quite rapidly." Uh or am I looking at it wrong? Um I don't like geopolitics because so much of it is stuff that we don't know. So, if there's so much conjecture about almost everything in geopolitics, apart from the fact that Russian troops are in Ukraine and they're fighting each other. Who's motivations of what for what and how? I don't even know. But one thing it did do, to go back to what we were talking about, it accelerated Europe. Everyone thought, "Well, the Europeans are going to back away from their green energy policy now, aren't they?" The Europeans went, "No, [ __ ] you. We're now super motivated to get this done as fast as possible cuz we do not want to be beholden to Russia or the United States or anybody else for that matter. Energy independence is an incredible thing, right? It's one of the powers that superpowers that the United States has. Has energy independence. All other energy on Earth could go and the US has oil and gas. And more of it than pretty much anybody else in the world. So, I So, it also, if you think about the history of war and how much has been fought over the Middle East, not because we want some sand or the few people, because we want the energy. And we want to control it because the energy is the thing. I can't remember what it was called in in um in uh Dune, but whatever the thing is, right? Humans want to control the thing, whether it was whale oil this or whatever, the thing. Spice, right? In Dune. That's right. Spice. So, that's what that's what the US controls. And the Russia controls a bunch of it. And we want to change that equation. And the Europeans are in the middle with with not enough of it. And it's in everybody's interest for everybody to walk away from this one commodity ruling the world. Mhm. Because it's not the commodity we care about, it's the energy we care about. Well said. Talk to me about China. Um seemed for a while like things were getting pretty dicey. You had people, if it can be believed, people protesting like crazy, uh governments making funds unavailable to people. Um I saw that happen in Cyprus up close given that Lisa's family is from Cyprus. Um uh what what's the status of things? Uh A China's economy was slowing down and they locked themselves into a really brutal lockdown for the pandemic and even the Chinese people are quite compliant, you know, Asian population tend to be more societally compliant than US who kind of like saying [ __ ] you to everybody if it doesn't suit their interest. So, you know, Europeans are quite societally minded as well, generally speaking. Um so the Chinese asked too much of their people for whatever reason. I don't know whether it was actually for a real reason in the end or whether it's for autocratic reasons or whatever. Anyway, economic growth falls off a cliff. Uh people are angry. Growth is weakening. Property market's a mess. That's where that's one of the big wealth gates for everybody in China. That's where people make money. Um people in the streets and people are angry. The Chinese have kind of interestingly enough started stimulating. And then, you know, they locked up all these entrepreneurs and threw them in prison or threw them down a well. Um they're now like, "Well, we've decided we need to be growing at 5 and 1/2% a year and we want entrepreneurs back in, you know." And they reopened to Hong Kong for cryptocurrency. So, it feels like whatever they were doing they got what they wanted whether it was because she wanted to get control again. The Game of Thrones is not a game that I I like to get involved in and because everybody speculates. We don't know. All I know, Chinese are stimulating. They want the economy to grow and um they seem to want to be an entrepreneur. I don't know why you'd choose to be an entrepreneur in China because, you know, the next cycle around you you get shot and replaced by the next one, but somebody's going to do it. That's interesting. I I didn't know that they had reopened back up. Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, so again, think about mentality. We're at the bottom, this is the worst. Markets forward looking up Chinese stock market up like 50% already. And they're driving parts of the global cycle. So, when you read it in the news headlines, it's usually too late. Mhm. No doubt. Now, I didn't realize that they had opened um uh Hong Kong back up for crypto. What do you think about the general state of crypto? Is this uh yeah, crypto like I I have heard um people now it's AI has become like the new hot girl and all that energy that was in crypto was the future, it's going to change everything, web three, oh my god. Uh is now like, no, no, no, that's whatever. AI is where it's at. Um how do you see crypto? Where is this going? Is this a temporary downturn and we boom back up or Literally nothing's changed since I last came to talk to you about it. I said it bottomed then. And I still think it's bottomed and 6 months later it's bottomed and some of these are up 100% plus from the low. The global liquidity cycle, the forward looking indicators have turned up a while ago. So, and the business cycle will get through the trough and through the other side. So, crypto's going up. Now, does it go up straight? Does it have some volatility? I don't know, but it seems pretty good so far. It seems to go up, do a bit sideways, go up, do a bit sideways. At some point there'll be a bit of a a reasonable down, everyone will be like, oh my god, and then it'll keep going up. So, you know, there there was no free money. You take risk with crypto. I'm super comfortable. All I speak to is giant brands, giant people. You know, I just spoke to had a great interview on Real Vision with the two of the heads of institutional business at Coinbase. What they're building out, the kind of people they're speaking to. I'm seeing on the other side, you know, everybody from car companies to sports teams to music companies all looking at the space. We're looking at, you know, what we're building at Real Vision, what you're building, what is going on, how vibrant the community is in a bear market. I'm seeing consolidation. I'm seeing the regulatory fight happening. We're seeing court cases finally going through like the the Grayscale and the Ripple case where people eventually get the SEC into a place where it is acceptable, but I always said this, they will always push too far. Every job is to push back. And they'll they'll get somewhere in the middle. And that's what they're establishing now. So, doesn't And the Chinese are coming back on in a thoughtful manner. I spoke to as part of my kind of crypto show, Real Vision of Crypto, I spoke to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, got a good friend there who's the chief fintech officer. He's like, "Yeah, all systems go over here." Just been over to India. It's like And he's Indian himself. He's like, "You cannot He's like, "I cannot express how amazing their central bank digital currency system is." We're all go. Everything's fine. The US is the only one dragging their feet. The UK on the other hand that interview, before we move on to the UK, that interview which I watched, I thought was very interesting. Your guys's own title on that was "Governments Go Cold on Bitcoin." And so, he seemed very excited about the I forget the name of it, but the the currency that everybody the digital currency everybody's using on the street which has a name. And he was like booming over here you your jaw will be on the floor to see how rapidly it's the central bank digital currency the the government version of a digital payments rails There's a name for it though. digital ruby I forget it it was or something yeah Yeah yeah something like that so that was interesting but he was like it hasn't played out yet in terms of cryptocurrencies in fact I think one of the early things he said was it's not really a currency yada yada yada Yeah so what he's done is gone down three paths central bank stuff because he's actually involved with all that BIS bank of international settlements group that are building out the world's digital rails so he cares about that he was very disappointed that Australia had been using it to build their whole stock markets using crypto blockchains and kind of walked away from it so he was like that's a big blow he said Ethereum and things like that where you building on top of a network so we go we're all for that we like it and we're building on it and we're doing stuff cryptocurrency which was his expression for something that has no other use case apart from a monetary use case Bitcoin he's like we do not want and he was he was unusually strong I mean you saw the interview he was unusually strong about that cuz he's he's not usually that guy but I think he's also gone through the the crusher because he really you know in Singapore he's like let's do this and then the whole space is down 80% and and my guess is a lot of people said to him are you an idiot or what and he's tried to explain to people is this is what the space is like it's volatile it's early technology so so overall the bigger picture is I'm still incredibly positive and my mind hasn't changed whatsoever and if I go back to the point I made before, crypto's priced by two things. The technological adoption curve, which is exponential. So, you need to put a logarithmic chart. You put a nice little logarithmic chart at the bottom of the log channel, so we've got to the bottom. And it's driven the ups and downs, these crazy ups and downs that look crazy until you put them on a log chart and it's like normal. Those crazy up and down are driven by uh the money supply. The liquidity cycle, the business cycle. And so, here we are on the secular trend, and the business cycle is turning up, and prices are down quite a lot. This gives you the highest probability of that. Buying them all the way up to the top Well, I'm going to wait till I'm going to wait till Bitcoin gets to 50,000, then I'm going to It's not the way to do this. You either believe in the space and therefore invest cash when nobody else is, when it's at the right points, or you dollar cost average and do it in a sensible way, but these are the times. So, I'm immensely excited still and see nothing but opportunity. And volatility. He Yes, very very well said. Raoul, I could talk to you endlessly. This is always so fun. Uh where do you want people to go to engage with you? Uh Yeah, there's a We've done a lot about this exponential stuff. In fact, I've got Emmett Mostack coming on Real Vision for a second time. Nice. Cuz he He was an old friend of mine, and he just happened to suddenly I I found out he just started the thing. He was a macro guy like me. So, uh come over to realvision.com. Um we've got Right now, we've got actually so 2 weeks of stuff, which is called How to Unfuck Your Future, which is basically all the stuff you and I talk about, which is like, "Okay, what are the problems? Let's take them out. Let's look at them, and let's figure out how we can solve them. So, we're doing that on Real Vision. So, people should go It's like a $1 trial or something. So, just do that. Uh if not, you can find me on YouTube. Um also at Real Vision, or find me on Twitter. So, @Raoul r a o u l g m a. I love it. Brother, as always, thank you so much for being here. Everybody, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. Finances are very complicated, but you can learn how to prepare for a recession with this interview with Ray Dalio. New York City's becoming more dangerous. Chicago's becoming more dangerous. Places Chica- San Francisco's becoming more dangerous. Um you're seeing people leave some