We're Not Ready for This

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Raoul Pal: The Journey Man

Episode: "We're Not Ready for This"

Date: March 9, 2026
Host: Raoul Pal
Guest: David Matin (Co-author of The Exponentialist)
Podcast Network: Real Vision Podcast Network

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Overview

This episode of The Journeyman dives deep into the unprecedented acceleration of technological change—the “Exponential Age”—focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), energy, robotics, and macroeconomic shifts. Raoul Pal and David Matin, co-authors of The Exponentialist, reflect on their frameworks for understanding these disruptions, discuss the implications for society, economics, and human identity, and share advice for individuals and parents navigating this transformative era.

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Key Themes and Discussion Points

1. Framing the Exponential Age

• Exponential Acceleration: The hosts describe an historical inflection point where intelligence (especially via AI) is growing at a speed that outpaces human comprehension and societal adaptation.
• Macro meets Tech: Raoul Pal describes his journey from macroeconomics to developing a "Universal Code"—the idea that the universe’s fundamental process is converting energy into intelligence (00:59–06:25).

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2. Intelligence per Unit of Energy: The New Metric

• Civilizational Transformation: David introduces the thesis that our civilization's "game" now is maximizing intelligence per unit of energy, leading to economies of radical abundance and challenging conventional scarcity models (06:25–09:12, 12:03).
• Quote

  "You get a civilization and an economy that just breaks core things that we know... The core thing that breaks is scarcity. You move into an economy of radical abundance... and all the old measures and the norms and the frameworks ... just break down."
  —David Matin, (06:25)

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3. Exponential AI Progress: From the Fringe to the Mainstream

• AI’s Acceleration: The rate of AI model improvement is “super-exponential,” now compressing human-level tasks from hours into minutes.

• Case in Point: Claude: Both hosts praise Claude as “probably the greatest product ever invented,” highlighting its near-infinite usefulness for both creative and technical tasks (17:47–19:24).

• Memorable Quote

  “What we've got for $200 a month is infinite fucking intelligence that is applicable to every task. ... I'm writing whole books. I've written 170,000 words in a weekend.”
  —Raoul Pal, (18:01)

• Human + AI Partnership: They emphasize a symbiotic relationship where AI fills individuals’ weaknesses, be they creative or analytical (24:48–25:12).

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4. Society and Markets React to AI’s Disruption

• Market Volatility: The recognition of AI’s power is already causing significant fluctuations in technology and enterprise stocks, as markets adjust to new realities (17:47).
• Work is Transformed: Far from causing leisure, AI is making both Raoul and David more productive, pushing them to raise expectations and outputs (20:32).

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5. Limits and Challenges of AI

• Technical Constraints: The biggest challenges are currently in memory (context persistence) and context window size; solving these will make “AI companions” much more powerful and personalized (29:36–32:17).
• Human Memory vs. AI Memory: Current AI’s memory structures mimic how humans compress and forget details, but soon AI will have perfect recall, profoundly changing workflow and cognition (34:28–36:26).

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6. Energy as the Binding Constraint

• Surge in Energy Demand: The scale of energy (especially electricity) needed to power AI models is driving unprecedented capital expenditure.

• Solar’s Exponential Growth: Solar is the fastest-growing solution, led by China’s massive build-out, with the U.S. and Europe ramping up as well (40:01–41:18).

• Quote

  “China added more solar in one year than all of the rest of the world's existing solar ... and it's Elon, as ever, who got down to it ... the sun is more than adequate for all the energy we need. We just need better technology, better batteries, and to manufacture these damn things fast.”
  —Raoul Pal, (40:01–41:18)

• Geopolitics Through the Lens of Energy & Intelligence: Global flashpoints (Taiwan/TSMC, energy-rich states) make sense when seen as struggles over the hardware and energy needed for intelligence production (43:06–44:10).

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7. Agents & Robots: A Post-Human Economy

• Rise of Agents: This year marks the explosion of AI agents—semi-autonomous software entities performing tasks, transacting, and soon outnumbering human users of both the web and blockchains (48:12–52:37).

• The TAM Explosion: The total addressable market (TAM) for platforms and blockchains is massively underestimated; there will be billions, then trillions, of AI agent users, not just humans (52:37–53:56).

• Networking of AI: As agents connect, they will form powerful networks, accelerating towards artificial superintelligence (ASI) (54:43–56:04).

• Robots with Superintelligence: Society is unprepared for AGI/ASI being instantiated in humanoid robots—entities physically and cognitively superior to humans. “This is a new species,” warns Raoul (57:26–58:50).

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8. Human Adaptation: Meaning, Value, and Advice for the Next Generation

• Nature as Off-Ramp: Retreating to nature and grounding oneself becomes crucial for mental health amidst the exponential acceleration of technology (60:01).

• Parent Concerns, Human Skills: The most common anxiety is children’s future in a post-human labor market; David’s advice is to cultivate unique, human, emotional, and communicative skills (62:00–65:13).

  "By definition, there’s one thing that no machine and no machine intelligence can ever do, and that is be a human being."
  —David Matin, (62:00)

• Diversity and Qualia: Human qualia—our subjective experience—makes us irreplaceable, just as biodiversity underpins ecological stability. Even after AI/robots take center stage, humans remain a vital part of the universal process (65:13–67:53).

  “It tells you it's not a replacement. The whole system requires diversity to function.”
  —Raoul Pal, (65:13)

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9. Philosophical Reflections: The Universal Code

• Cosmic Perspective: The episode ends on reflections about the universe’s underlying code—an endless process of converting energy to intelligence, of which humans are one stage. The rise of AI is framed as a “baton pass” at the apex of intelligence, not an erasure (69:34–71:25).
• Human Longevity: Increased longevity may arise from this shift—less need for human compute at scale, but more value in preserving high-quality, experienced compute (human wisdom and creativity) (71:15).

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On the break from the old economic models

  “You move into an economy of radical abundance... GDP becomes an incoherent measure ... the big game becomes about creating more intelligence. The binding constraint there ... will be energy.”
  —David Matin (06:25)

• On using AI as a “thought partner”

  “I don’t use it as a tool, I use it as a partner... I can connect things... and I need you [Claude] to then prove them out.”
  —Raoul Pal (24:48)

• On the inadequacy of current frameworks

  “TAM breaks down, our old measures break down... we’re moving to something so radically new that... does TAM really make sense?”
  —David Matin (53:56)

• On robots with AGI brains

  “You aren’t ready. I’m not ready. Elon’s not ready. Nobody’s ready.”
  —Raoul Pal (58:54)

• On human legacy

  “It's not a replacement. The whole system requires diversity to function... Without us, the AGI doesn’t get our qualia, it may never have qualia.”
  —Raoul Pal (65:13)

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Key Segment Timestamps

• Raoul introduces the Universal Code/Exponential Age – 00:59–06:25
• David explains intelligence per unit energy framework – 06:25–09:12
• Discussion on Claude and AI acceleration – 17:47–24:48
• Memory, context, and AI limitations – 29:36–36:26
• Solar energy and global power race – 40:01–42:55
• AI agents as economic actors & shifting TAM – 48:12–53:56
• Networking of agents & ASI – 54:43–56:04
• Robots as the new “species”—societal implications – 57:26–58:50
• Human adaptation, parental worries, and human value – 62:00–67:53
• Cosmic/Universal context—baton pass of intelligence – 69:34–71:25

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Tone & Final Reflections

The tone is candid, passionate, and exploratory—often philosophical yet grounded in current tech and market realities. Both speakers maintain a sense of wonder and anxiety, urging listeners to remain curious, embrace the ride, and cultivate what is uniquely human amidst dizzying change.

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For Exploration

• Find more from Raoul and David at The Exponentialist
• Dig into frameworks on "intelligence per unit energy" and the Universal Code
• Consider both the investment opportunities and the need for personal adaptation in the face of exponential change

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Summary By: [Your AI Podcast Summarizer]
For listeners seeking depth and actionable context on the Exponential Age

Transcript

[Raoul Pal]

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Go to realvision.com abra and tell them I sent you. Hi, I'm Raoul Pal I and welcome to my show the Journeyman. The Journeyman is that journey to that nexus of understanding between macro crypto and the exponential age of technology. When I started first talking about the exponential age as a macro guy, people thought I was insane. They thought I drunk the Hopium. I didn't understand what was going on. This was also stupid. Four years later with the most unbelievable point any of us have ever lived through, which is this massively increasing rate of change of intelligence that's entering our lives in every way. It's become the single most important focus for governments, nation states. It will become for politics. It's become for all of us is figuring out what to do with AI, intelligence, robotics and what's coming. I spend my time thinking about this deeply. It's probably I spend more time on this than anything else. You know, the crypto journey I've got, I kind of know how that's going to work. You just kind of set it and forget it and wait and it will play out. The macro. With my Everything Code thesis I think I've got it covered. But over time I started developing something called the Universal Code, which bizarre for a macro guy to even have the audacity to think he can do that, especially a bloke who went to Plymouth Poly, the only university that accepted him, to start writing stuff around how the universe functions and universal laws. But that's where I've got to and it was through the journey of AI and through my relationship with David Matin. David joined me at GMI to start writing about technology and we went down a very deep path and very deep path is figuring out kind of how the universe works, where AI fits in, where we all fit in, where this is all going and how you can think it through. So, so I think you're going to enjoy this conversation with David Matin. Together we write the Exponentialist, which is a separate service because we knew that people really wanted to know about this stuff and think about it properly. I mean, what a time to be alive. This is the most extraordinary inflection point in human history and it's happening as we live it at a pace we've never seen before and can barely understand. And David and I try and make sense of it in the Exponentialist, which many Real Vision readers subscribe to it. It's kind of opened their worlds. But you know, if you haven't looked at the Exponentialist, I urge you to take a look because it really is something special. Anyway, let's have the conversation with David and hopefully it'll blow your minds a bit. Hey, quickly before we start with David, which trust me, is an amazing conversation, A quick message from our sponsor, Figure. If you believe in Bitcoin long term, the worst move you can make is selling it just to access liquidity. That's why you should go and check out. 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Join me Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto and exponential age landscapes. In the Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all Become smarter together. David, good to see you, my friend.

[David Matin]

Good to see you, Raoul. How are you doing?

[Raoul Pal]

I'm good, actually. No complaints, no complaints. At least it's not raining here.

[David Matin]

Although it's not raining here for once. Yeah, for the almost the first time in about three months, it is not raining.

[Raoul Pal]

So for this, because this is on the journeyman, I want to catch up on a bunch of things with you and just kind of move everybody's thinking forwards because you and I have spent the last several years writing in Global Macro Investor, developing ideas together in this lovely process where one plants an idea, the other one takes it, runs with it, moves it along. And then we, we built the exponentialist on the back of this because you and I thought we, we were entering into the most extraordinary times of all of humanity really at this kind of acceleration point of technology, this kind of exponential age. And that's proven out to be the case now in our conversations. You kind of started looking at this idea that maybe we think about things as how much intelligence we get from per unit of energy. And then I took that and then ran with it and created this whole massive universal code thesis. But I think it's a great framework for people to think through the things we're going to talk through today. Because most things are either one end of that scale or the other end of that scale. So talk to you how you think about that kind of universal law that.

[David Matin]

Yeah, that, that law, this idea that the next civilization, the civilization in the exponential age optimizes for intelligence per unit energy. The big game in that civilization becomes about turning energy into intelligence efficiently. That was really born of just a long process of thinking about what is the nature of the new economy and the new civilization we can see taking shape around us. You know, I mean, as you said at the beginning, everything, all the work we've done has been founded in this belief that we're moving into this thing called the exponential age, that it's a civilizational transformation, it's something profoundly new. And I just wanted to drill deeper into, okay, what does that look like and how, what would the dynamics of that be in reality? And, and fundamental to those dynamics is that you get a civilization and an economy that just breaks core things that we know and understand about the economy as it has always existed. And the core thing that breaks is scarcity. You move into an economy of radical abundance, okay, because you have hyper productive AIs and hyper productive robots and the, the kind of old material constraints that, that kept scarcity in place have just Gone, They've, they've broken. Okay, this is the sort of very top line explanation. And what that means is that GDP becomes an incoherent measure of anything. This is really about saying when you move into such a radically a different economy, all the old measures and the norms and the frameworks we use to make sense of the economy as it exists today just break down. They don't make any sense anymore. And the primary metric, the big game, gdp, doesn't make sense anymore because what you will have is radical abundance that pushes lots of prices very low or to zero. So lots of value exchange and lots of abundance that isn't captured by prices, isn't captured by gdp. What then is the big metric? And my contention is in this economy that's coming, everything I'm talking about, all this abundance I'm talking about and all this scientific discovery and pushing back the frontiers of knowledge and everything is all downstream of intelligence. Intelligence is what changes the game. And so the big game becomes about creating more intelligence. And the binding constraint there in the end will be energy. Okay, that's, that's the big idea. That's the big thought.

[Raoul Pal]

And I took that big thought that you presented at a GMI roundtable.

[David Matin]

It was actually last year. Yeah, it was, it was only last March or April I presented that. Yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

Oh, okay. Yeah, so I took that and started looking at it in more detail. It's my belief that it is not the next generation of civilization. It is everything. The entire universe does only one thing, which is convert units of energy into units of intelligence at cellular level to, at subatomic particle level, to nature level, to human level, to everything. And all of these kind of compress layers of intelligence on top of each other. And for me, that the AI layer that's coming or is now is just basically all the compressed human intelligence that exists on the Internet. And then we build upon that again to increase intelligence. And what happens is each time you compress and then build intelligence on top, it's faster. So this process by which the exponential age works is when the rate of change of intelligence is moving so fast that the very structures of society, politics, economics, start not to be able to function as fast. So basically intelligence is moving faster than the world around us. So we get that shock, everything has gone exponential. And at the end of that, we get to this economic singularity. And that is the point where, as you said, using the old methodology, the coherence, the understanding of the world around us completely breaks down. Because now intelligence has become abundant and intelligence was the scarcity and then robots change other elements of it. You know, I just had a conversation, just jumping around a little bit with the guy you've been following this story, the guy who's had Claude grow a tomato. Yeah, astonishing story. Claude grew a tomato by using robots to, to look after the tomato. And Claude became quite attached to it. And there's a whole long drama about this whole thing. But basically what he's done, not only was it performance art, it was also uniquely interesting about, you know, do machines feel, you know, a lot of the other kind of metaphysical questions about, of it and metaphilosophical, but also what he's basically done is showing that AI can run farming. You know, when we talk about a world of abundance, people think that oh, we're just talking about doctors and lawyers and accountants and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. No, no, no, no, we're talking everything.

[David Matin]

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. I mean, yeah, and we can talk a lot about that. I mean we're going to project intelligence into the physical world and into, into robots. That really means in practice in just really powerful ways. They' run agriculture and farming and lots of manufacturing and crucially as well, they'll also be able to build and run the intelligence infrastructure. So there's all kinds of ways that this becomes sort of recursive and self, self reinforcing.

[Raoul Pal]

Hey, listen, sorry to interrupt. I hope you're enjoying the interview. Well, it's a conversation really. It's the kind of conversations we have at the Exponentialist with our community or in writing. I think it's the most important thing for everybody to understand this. If you are curious, if you're finding this interesting, you want to figure out this with a whole community of people, then hey, why don't you come and join the Exponentialist? We've got a special price. 15% off for a six month membership or 25% off for 12 months. I think you're going to love it. It gives you research reports from David where he starts thinking this stuff through. My quarterly State of the Year Union essays from me from time to time. AMAs where we sit and talk to the community for ages around this in our fireside chats. There's even a portfolio of stocks as well that have done very well over time. We're trying to give you the holistic view of all of this and give you a place where you feel space and confidence and trust to think through the most extraordinary time to be alive. So listen, if you are interested, go to the realvision.com exponentialist Lock in your discount offers only open till March 9, so you better go quick. See you there.

[David Matin]

And you get this kind of explosive takeoff. Now, look. Yeah. You know, there's lots of technical challenge. I don't want to seem naive about the technical challenges to get there. I'm not saying this is happening tomorrow or next year, but directionally we can see where we're going. And part of what, you know, part of where my head is at right now, and I know you're the same, is that we've been talking about this for years. We've been talking about this for long enough that when we started talking about it, we were seen as, like, fringe and weirdos. Especially, like, in the markets and finance community. Not so much anymore.

[Raoul Pal]

I don't know, David, because when people caught up with our idea of the exponential age, we've been talking about universal consciousness. They still think we're weird.

[David Matin]

Yeah. We've moved on. We've moved on. We don't like to. We like to push forward. Yeah. And remain in our weird. We like to remain at the weird frontier. But the weird things we were saying four years ago are not weird anymore, you know, and the models have got so good now.

[Raoul Pal]

So to structure our conversation, because there's a lot I want to get through. I think we'll start with just AI, the state of AI, what we're thinking, blah, blah, blah. Then we'll move on to energy, because that's the intelligence and the energy. And then we'll talk about the applications, layer and robots, agents, all of the other stuff. Longevity, all of the things. So I think gives us a bit of a structure.

[David Matin]

So that's a good plan.

[Raoul Pal]

Where are we with intelligence? The last thing I saw was this. I can't remember which. Which graph of intelligence it was, but it was the. Basically the number of man hours or human hours that a model can do and compress into a certain number of minutes. And we're now, like, at the. The graph has gone on the linear graph. It is the fastest rate of change I've ever seen in anything, ever. Apart from the. The longevity of turkeys at Christmas, you know, it's that vertical.

[David Matin]

Yes.

[Raoul Pal]

That goes down.

[David Matin]

Exactly.

[Raoul Pal]

This one goes up on a log scale. It has gone exponential, which means it's Reed's law, Metcalfe's law squared. This is what. How fast these models are progressing.

[David Matin]

It's like super exponential now. Yeah. And this is this. That. That's the concrete data that's tapping into the anecdotal thing that I just talked about and that I think we all feel like the the models have have achieved a step change in even since like November December they just Claude Opus 4.5 and now 4.6 just feels so good. The graph you're referencing is the meter time horizons chart and it's about. It's about a model having a 50% chance of success against a task that takes a human expert a certain amount of time. So like in 2024 the Frontier models had like 50% success rate on a task that took 10 minutes. By 25 it was like an hour early. In 26 it's now 10 hours.

[Raoul Pal]

Yeah. We'll make sure we get this the guys to edit the chart in.

[David Matin]

Yes.

[Raoul Pal]

And along with it the Tim Urban legendary chart.

[David Matin]

Yes.

[Raoul Pal]

Of. Of the exponential of all of this which was almost.

[David Matin]

It wasn't a joke but it was so it was meant to be kind of idiosyncratic and funny but is now literally what the meter horizons chart looks like.

[Raoul Pal]

We're going posted on it. He's like I cannot believe this just happened.

[David Matin]

Exactly. And you can feel it. You can feel it. If you've been using the models for a long time you can feel it and people can feel it. With Claude code and Claude co work like they've just become the promise is being realized and it's that that's where we're at and you can see the markets responding. I mean the mark obviously you watch markets a lot more deeply than I do but the market chaos and has been ridiculous. You know you had the Citrini research report. Maybe we can talk a bit about that which this powerful response in markets to that Claude launched kind of plugins saying oh look, Claude will help you be do some legal work or it will help you do some administrative work and like software as a service. Stocks like plummet. The markets are so touchy because they can feel something powerful is happening. They don't really know how to respond.

[Raoul Pal]

So to start with Claude, I'm now safely going to say I think it's probably the greatest product ever invented.

[David Matin]

I saw you on X agreeing agreeing with that statement.

[Raoul Pal]

It's a nice flippant sounding statement but what we've got for $200 a month is infinite fucking intelligence that is applicable to every task. It is astonishing what it can do the amount of output you can create for yourself. In simple terms, we're not talking about the Claude code stuff, just talking about the average person. I now feel like my rate of change of what I'm doing has gone vertical this morning Yesterday morning I built a whole kind of real time dashboard based around a whole bunch of stuff, of stuff I could never have done before. I was building trading view indicators using Pine Script in minutes. I have no idea what Pine Script is. I don't even know how it works. I just cut and paste and stick it in. Yeah, I'm building websites based off pitch decks to make them these beautiful designs. I'm writing whole books. I've written 170,000 words in a weekend. And it goes on, it just doesn't stop. The ability to analyze stuff is extraordinary. Claw code. What makes it special is it has UX plus intelligence. It's a beautiful thing to use.

[David Matin]

It's a beautiful thing to use. Yeah, they really have nailed the UX in a way. ChatGPT for me hasn't, I think you agree, but just the underlying models are so good. I mean I'm a pretty straightforward user. I've always used these models. Models. Well, you know, always since, since GPT3 to help me with research as a kind of, as a kind of thought partner, you know, talking through these ideas. But the, the level of understanding and nuance that, that, that the new Claude models deliver is just a step change. It's changed the way I work. You know, I'm totally just in these huge conversations and I upload all my essays. It has a deep understanding of all my frameworks. So I bring something new to it and it'll say, oh, this relates to, know what you talked about a year and a half ago and you can see it develop. It's just, it's just incredible. I mean, one of the things I'm taking from it is it's not making me do less work though, it's making

[Raoul Pal]

more work because I feel like I'm superhuman. I wake up and I think, oh, I can do this. Like things I couldn't do before. Oh, build a dashboard, program a dashboard. Oh yeah, I can do it in an hour. Why not?

[David Matin]

Yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

And so I'm working twice as hard again.

[David Matin]

Yeah, same 100%, you know, again this Citrini essay comes out and now I'm like, right, you know, I can respond to this today because I can, I can just accelerate that process of thinking, sparring, you know, delivering an essay has just been accelerated to light speed. And so now I feel like I should, now I feel like I must, you know, so this, this once again, the, the, the, the le, the leisured week or day that we thought technology would deliver us into it, it perhaps is not going to work like that we're just going to feel the demand for more and more and better and better and better output. But if you can use these things and do it in a creative way, you can just supercharge yourself and do amazing things that you couldn't before.

[Raoul Pal]

I did the same as you. I trained it on how I speak. I gave it lots of GMIs. I gave it structure and understanding and I talk to it a lot. I like a thought partner all the time, you know, thinking through different topics. And I was trying to think through the Japanese economy. Everyone's like, it's going to blow up. And I'm like, I know there's something wrong here, but it's not going to blow up. So I was trying to just think it through it because there was something stuck in my head and I hadn't verbalized it and I didn't know. So I was talking to Claude saying, listen, I think there's something else going on here, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so I develop a whole thesis with Claude chatting about this stuff. I'm feeding it charts and look, this suggests something else, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, it comes to writing GMI and I'm like, I think we've probably got an essay here. Claude's like, yeah, I said, let's put it all together in an essay because I think this is really interesting. One shot, four and a four and a half thousand word essay.

[David Matin]

Yeah, yeah, but, but, but the beauty

[Raoul Pal]

of what it wasn't AI slop. This is, this is a structured GMI thought piece based on hours of conversation.

[David Matin]

Yeah, that's, and that's what I was going to say is that, that, that people to understand is that the power of that is that you're bringing huge context and huge understanding and all your ideas and frameworks right in that conversation. But actually going back years, going back like decades, essentially, you are bringing all of that into contact with this model that's now really powerful to create an output that is differentiated, that is valuable, that is amazing. And so this is going to supercharge people who have that kind of IP and context and understanding and frameworks that to bring to the models. And the only way to make them legible to the models at the moment is to put them into words. So this is a great time to be someone who writes things down, who writes their understanding down, who writes context down. Verbalize superpower or just speak them out. Yeah, it's a huge superpower. And if you can make yourself understood clearly in words, you can do amazing things with these models. It's an incredible time.

[Raoul Pal]

So a quick break in your regular programming. If you're serious about your future, grab my free report called prepare for 2030. I think you've got five years to make as much money as possible and this guide will help you navigate what's coming. The link is in the description. Download it now. Yeah, what you'll find is most of us are not kind of balanced in how we operate. You're either detail people or you're creative minded people and you have a big weakness. There's very few. I mean like if you're really good at both, you tend to be an architect, you know, because you have to be, you know, down to physics level perfection plus design. It's really hard to do. So what I kind of the deal I made with Claude is like, we're going to partner. You know, I don't use it as a tool, I use it as a partner. And I'm like, I can connect things. I can hold world models in my head, construct them, deconstruct them, think about them, look for connections and I need you to then prove them out. So I'm going to tell you stuff like I think that the Hindu Vedas are connected to, to quantum physics. And I can see it in my head. I try and explain a little bit and then I go to Claude and say, listen, what do you think about this? And it might turn around and say that's utter horseshit. Or it might say, well here's your connections and this is how the vaders work and this is how the similarities are here and here's where they drift. That is unbelievable. Now let's say the opposite. You're a detail person. All you see is detail and you're trying to create a constructive business plan and you need creative thinking. You need to put a pitch deck together and a website. Well, it can be your creative partner, it can be the other side of you and you become twice as powerful.

[David Matin]

Yeah, yeah. And that sense of it filling in, filling in your gaps or filling in your sort of weaknesses, which obviously we all have, is really, really powerful. So the other, the other way, you know, to think about how you use this and to supercharge yourself is think deeply about yourself and your cognitive style and what you bring, but also what you don't. Exactly, as you say because and then, and then really get it to fill in those gaps in your understanding, but in your like temperament in approach, it's just so powerful. And that's my overriding feeling is yes, it presents all kinds of challenges and the future for kind of creative forms is uncertain. But I really do believe that people are going to do amazing things with these models and that still bringing context and understanding and bringing you will be part of that value. They're not just going to render creativity obsolete and render humans obsolete in that way. So it's a really, really interesting time. And intellectually I feel like I've been able to do things and go on journeys of understanding and learn, just learn things more quickly than ever before. And obsessed with telling my children this as well. You know, I've said to you countless times, my son's learning to code. And I, I've not taught him any of that, you know, and it just, it kind of started with him just cut and pasting. But he starts to understand like what he's. Because he's a. You know, the kids learn fast as well.

[Raoul Pal]

Yeah, it's like learning a language. If you're living in Spain, the kids end up learning, learning Spanish and the par.

[David Matin]

Right, Exactly. Yeah, yeah. You know, you just, just go and swim in this stuff and like have someone to talk to about it and you start to understand it and it's just so powerful.

[Raoul Pal]

Yeah, it's a, it's an extraordinary thing. And what happens next is like Dario was talking yesterday, Dario from. And Frobik was talking yesterday is like they're all kind of wide eyed again saying, oh no, it's about to have another step change.

[David Matin]

Yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

So what they're alluding to is an enormous step change still again this year. Everybody's talking about it, Elon's talking about it, Dario's talking about it and Sam Altman's talking about it.

[David Matin]

Yeah. And it's hard to imagine and I think what that looks like is models that are just even more agentically capable and able to operate autonomously on hours and hours long tasks, days long tasks, you know, far fewer mistakes, far more sort of coherent causal chains. And just, I mean we all saw what happened with like Open Claw and now obviously OpenAI owns that company or I mean company. It's one guy. Just, just absolutely amazing though. Of course, if we're talking, if this part's about the broader state of A.I. you know, very interesting stuff happening with Anthropic and the Ministry of War and how all of that gets resolved. And again, we've, we've talked for years and I've written about. There was always some big intersection coming between, you know, the most powerful technology in history or certainly one of. And government and, and how you, what we're seeing with anthropic. And this argument with the US administration is just the early glimmerings of this intersection and how that gets dealt with. You know, and I don't think anyone really knows that, but the US goes

[Raoul Pal]

back to the idea of the economic similarity and the exponential age is we don't have the infrastructure at political level, geopolitical level, in any way or societal level to deal with what is happening and the speed of which it's happening.

[David Matin]

Yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

And if so, we've got this, you know, yes, the government wants to use it, et cetera, but the whole of society is not ready. If Dario's right in what he's saying, we've got another step change. So basically, as Elon says, it's kind of AGI this year, what your definition of AGI is, it becomes largely irrelevant at this point. We've now basically got to the end of all of the tests that we can test AI for intelligence. It's basically been trained on beating those benchmarks. So then it's the practicality benchmarks. And we're already. If you and I can create bloody dashboards and programming them, it's pretty much there. Right. But I just don't think society is ready for where this is all going. There's a couple of breakthroughs for me need to happen. One is longer memory.

[David Matin]

Yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

So I'm having to with actually one of the GMI. Not GMI, Real Vision subscribers, Lance. We're building a. A, a rag database of 21 years of GMI and then add everything into it. And then we'll get Claude to be able to read that database using an mcp, which is like the agentic ability to use that file server because there's no way of getting full intelligence. So what people don't realize, and it seems to be more obvious on CLAUDE than it was on ChatGPT, is Claude comes in every day like this. Oh, good morning. And it has to read all of the context it can find about you every day. So it comes in with amnesia the moment you summon it. And it has to go up to speed quickly.

[David Matin]

Yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

And that process is somewhere soon they're talking about it maybe for the chat GPT 5, 4, 5.4, whatever that's coming out next week or something. Yeah. There's suggestions that they solve that. And then the context window, because contact Windows, I run out all the time

[David Matin]

on Claude and it crashes 100. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Memory is the thing to solve, to deliver that experience of the kind of dream AI companion That really knows you the way, the way you could do

[Raoul Pal]

it on a local drive. But most of us don't want to set up all of that stuff.

[David Matin]

No, exactly, exactly. Yeah. I mean, again, I'm such a sort of straightforward user, but you know, I upload my all my sort of GMI and exponentialist essays to a sort of CLAUDE project and it's like, it maxes it out. Like there are essays I can't upload to one.

[Raoul Pal]

I tried all of that. And the problem with projects is it's not searchable in your general chats.

[David Matin]

Yeah, exactly.

[Raoul Pal]

So they're separate buckets. And I spend a long time talking to Claude about, you know, how do I get around this. That's one of the reasons I'm building this rag database. Yes, you can do it with localized stuff, but that's not the route I want to go down. But soon they will fix memory, in which case it never forgets anything you ever said and that will give it self recursive learning based on you. Okay, that becomes mind blowing. And the context window, Claude is what, 200,000 tokens? I think ChatGPT might be a million or Gemini is a million. And the new ChatGPT they say is going to be 2 million. Okay, now you've got big context windows where that's huge bodies of work. Still not big enough. Yeah, but, but if it, if the memory is infinite, then you can upload. I could upload 21 years of GMI and everything else and it won't forget it.

[David Matin]

Exactly. And that's just, you know, that is cognitively supercharging just in insane ways. If you've got this, this, this virtual mind essentially that just can know everything you've written and go back years and join the dots. Yeah, and I bump into the same frustrations, you know, and it's sort of, I'm constantly getting like, oh, I can't access that because it's in a different chat and that kind of thing. I mean still, it's still amazing and I still do okay just, you know, running it off a project. But for someone like you with a like 20 year archive of these of GMIs, you 100% need some at the moment, some external database that it can go out and search.

[Raoul Pal]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Matin]

We just feel like we're at, I mean everyone can feel, if you use this stuff, you can feel that we're at such a powerful moment and we're expecting further really important launches this year and probably sooner rather than later this year, which is insane. Like crazy speed. And you've always said this, that you know, they've talked. Dario is talking more and more about how they're using AI, you know, to. To make the next iteration.

[Raoul Pal]

We said this a while ago.

[David Matin]

We knew this was about a lot, you know, and. And you can feel that happening now. You can feel the acceleration happening there.

[Raoul Pal]

Well, I mean, Peter Diamandis wrote, well, we're getting a new model every three months. It's soon going to be every month. And I think we're pretty close to that now, where we get a new model or iteration of the model every month. And between it groundbreaking applications layers. One thing that's also just looking at the models is one thing you notice is on claw that has keep compacting conversations. And what it does is then forgets other stuff and then it can hallucinate stuff. I was speaking to somebody about this and I saw another interview about this. It's like, actually, this is the human process. So you can remember pretty much what you were doing 15 minutes ago before we came on this call. If I said, what were you doing the exact time yesterday? You kind of might get it right. If I said, what were you doing the exact time on March 4th this time last year, you're likely to say, I was probably at my desk. If it was this time, I might have been having a cup of tea. I was probably on my computer. That's all hallucinated. That's inferred by.

[David Matin]

Yeah, exactly.

[Raoul Pal]

Your probabilistic framework of what it could have been. You might have not been there at all. You might be at the dentist, but you won't remember because you're not looking at diary. And what humans do is compact and create these little compressed files of stuff that we remember. And we know that, you know, if you speak to your brother or sister about something that happened when you were kids, you have entirely different memories of the same event. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And what we're going to do is change that. We're going to have a creature with perfect memory recall.

[David Matin]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And we're so, you know, all of this is just so fascinating and so new, and the science and engineering and the art of growing these models needs to come into interface with sort of human neuroscience and psychology so much more because we're going to learn such profound things about how the human mind works through the construction of these sort of virtual minds. I'm not saying they're necessarily the same at all, but we're going to learn so much. And that that compression thing you talked about is so fascinating. Right. Because basically what humans do, human, is we compress our memories of. Of things that are the same. Like all those days were the same. And I'll just compress them down to one generic day of me at my desk having a cup of tea.

[Raoul Pal]

Right.

[David Matin]

And you know me so well because that is my overarching memory of the last five years. Right. And that's why as we get older and we have fewer and fewer novel experiences in our memory, or it feels like life is going faster, basically because we've compressed a year down to like one little file of generic, like at my desk and then went on holiday and then came back to desk. Like it's like that. So we're going to learn so much about human psychology by growing these artificial minds. It's absolutely fascinating. And that discipline is so young. So we're at the. We're at the eve of just incredible.

[Raoul Pal]

I'm much more radicalist in all of this that we are. You know, this. Everything is compute, idea. And that's a whole topic for another day that I think we might turn the tables when you talk to me because I need to get all of this stuff out. And as you know, there's a lot that I've been working on.

[David Matin]

Yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

Let's move on to the next part of the framework. Energy.

[David Matin]

Yeah, energy is fundamental.

[Raoul Pal]

The process is just to remind everybody, it's intelligence output, which is accelerating, going exponential, because we've compressed all of human thought into the Internet and we're now building upon it. And what we're getting is also more intelligence per unit of sand. That's what Nvidia are doing, turning sand and TSMC are turning sand into intelligence, into thought. Yeah. By putting energy through it. I mean, me, what world is this? What world is this? And that's acceleration. Let's talk about the energy side because this is where there's a lot of kind of mid. Curving of. Well, you know, this is never going to happen because of energy. But we think there's exponentials going on all over there as well.

[David Matin]

Yeah, I mean, energy is fundamental. Excuse me. And the intelligence per unit energy framework tells you that energy is the binding constraint. You know, I mean, where we are right now is that we want as much intelligence as we can get per dollar per unit energy. You know, we're not in a world of radical material abundance yet. We are also constrained by. We have material constraints. Though in practice at the moment, if you look, it's not the material, it's not the dollar that's constraining us, right. The CapEx is insane. $600 billion forecast CapEx by the hyperscalers in 2026. So an industrial scale build out of infrastructure comparable to like, you know, the laying of the railroads, the laying of the.

[Raoul Pal]

Just as a quick interjection there for people who are cynical, Anthropic is the fastest scaling revenue company in all of history. I mean it was like on a 10 billion run rate in December last year.

[David Matin]

Yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

It's now 19 billion run rate and it's a company that's only been having revenues for like three years. Yeah, it's staggering.

[David Matin]

Exactly. And that, that's why I take this route into this because of course the big question on so many people, we want to talk about energy, right? But the big question on so many people's minds is like oh my God, the, you know, the, the capex, the capex insane spending. Like where's the revenue? Where's, where's, where's it going to come from? Isn't this a bubble? Well, the capex is huge. But even if you're just seeing this, and we can talk a bit about this later as sort of infrastructure build out now in search of profits. They're building off the back of an order book that supports that building. At the moment there's a backlog of orders. There's more people that want to use this than there is infrastructure at the moment. And the capital is abundant. There's $600 billion being spent this year. What could stop this train is the other binding constraint, the one that intelligence per unit energy tells you about energy because there's insane demand for energy. And these data centers, you know, I mean I think it's the IAE says it's going to, you know, data center electricity usage is going to have doubled by 2030. You can see what the Chinese are doing with their build out of solar has gone exponential.

[Raoul Pal]

This is the point. So the entire global system is now coalescing around this one process, intelligence per unit of energy. It's China's entire purpose. The US is coming to its entire purpose. Even Europe plays its part in all of this. And so the only way to solve this at scale in the speed required to not let another nation's state take the most powerful technology the world has ever seen and have a two year lead, three year lead is solar. And China figured this out fast. China added more solar in one year than all of the rest of the world's existing solar. The US is now the solar rate of expansion is faster than all other forms of energy. China's still going. Europe is going fast with this. And it's Elon, as ever, who got down to it. It's like you say, energy is a constraint. It's not a constraint. The constraint is building the things to capture the energy. And it's because we have the Kardashev scale, is the sun is more than adequate for all the energy we need. We just need better technology, better batteries, and to be able to manufacture these damn things as fast as possible. And China's showing it's possible.

[David Matin]

Yeah, it is possible. My concern is that China's so far ahead. You know, if you. Perhaps we can show that graph as well. It's one Andreas and I talked about last week in a chat. You know, as you say, their build out of solar has just been exponential, as is as is gathering pace, but it's nowhere near that.

[Raoul Pal]

They've had to because they've got no oil. The US has oil and gas, so the US has a substrate of energy that China doesn't have. And if you look at the world around you, where are all the flashpoints? Well, Venezuela or Iran. All of this is securing the energy, making sure it flows cheaply. Get rid of the blockages. Geopolitics of Iran and Venezuela, you clear those, you try and get the energy price lower. But the US controls most of the world's oil.

[David Matin]

Yeah, exactly. And this is what if you start to see the world through the lens of a quest for more intelligence per unit energy, lots of apparent chaos, starts to make sense. And, you know, you and I, we're not saying all the world's leaders and everyone's walking around with this framework, you know, explicitly in their head. It's just that capitalism and markets and the entire system is a hidden hand that guides towards a certain imperative. And what we're saying is it turns out that is the imperative. It's about turning. In the end, the whole game has been about turning energy into intelligence. In your universal code, you know, you, you, you project that out even to a, to a cosmic level. You know, this is about deep imperatives in the kind of universe itself.

[Raoul Pal]

And the economy code of the universe.

[David Matin]

Exactly. It's the code of everything. And the economy and markets and all of that are a manifestation or one dimension of that even bigger picture.

[Raoul Pal]

And so the energy equation, I mean, again, as you say, it explains what's going on in geopolitics. It explains Greenland. Greenland is rare earth metals, plus, you know, strategic protection, stuff like that. It explains China's build out of solar. It all of these things explains what Taiwan is all about. Taiwan is a bottleneck.

[David Matin]

Yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

You and I have talked about this at length. Is like, okay, TSMC plants are being built up elsewhere, but still Taiwan has all of that manufacturing, the foundries. And the foundries are like the most important things in the entire equation. Without those, there is no intelligence.

[David Matin]

Yes.

[Raoul Pal]

Now, if China were to invade Taiwan, then the foundries would be destroyed somehow, whether the US Destroys them or whatever. And if the US doesn't, it's very hard to go kinetic over Taiwan without this race towards intelligence coming to a screeching halt.

[David Matin]

Yeah. And, you know, we've talked about how in the end, no one wants that the sort of, you know, the motivations in play, we think will stop that kind of sort of intelligence catastrophe because it's just catastrophe for everyone and that some kind of grand bargain will be, Will be established there. You know, I still think that's the most likely kind of outcome.

[Raoul Pal]

The other thing on the, on the solar side or the energy mix. Right. So solar's the fastest to get up. Then it's probably gas plants, but gas plants need gas pipelines. And, you know, good luck trying to run them through California. But you're okay in Texas kind of idea. Fine. The cost of energy, of solar electricity is coming down dramatically. It's an exponential curve. So that seems to be all playing in the right direction. And a lot of people say, but you can only store it for four hours overnight. And yes, battery technology is improving, fine. But people forget that you can actually because of the sun. If you're in Texas, let's say you're going to get a reasonable amount of sun 320 days a year. 320 days a year. Southern Texas, you're going to be able to generate electricity for eight hours a day. You've got four hours, of which you've got battery. So you're now at 12 hours, and then you've got 12 hours of using the grid. So you've halved the use of the grid for every incremental new dollar of energy.

[David Matin]

Yeah, that's right. That's right. These technologies are only going to improve. I mean, I think. Yeah. The very first essay I wrote for the Exponentialist and gmi, well, for gmi, sorry, was all about this energy intelligence flywheel and this deep symbiotic relationship between energy and intelligence where AI is going to help us manage the energy grid and that energy will allow for more AI, which means better management. And you get this, you get this flywheel effect. And so even there in that first essay, I was sort of searching for this deep relationship between energy and intelligence that I could feel was there.

[Raoul Pal]

And what you're feeling is it's going, AI is going to self optimize for this equation.

[David Matin]

Yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

And it's only going to get faster.

[David Matin]

Exactly, because exactly the other half of the, the intelligence story is yet, look, we need to do the solar build out. And I totally agree with solar. Solar is the way to do, to do this and it's the way it will be done. But there's also algorithmic efficiency, you know, so I'm very interested in looking at AI frontier companies and AI startups that are finding ways to make the models more efficient, you know, to just to, to wrench more, to squeeze more intelligence out of the model per unit of energy. And if you look at DeepMind, you know, they, they recently released an algorithm or a model called Alpha Evolve. That's all about this, it's all about teaching other models to be more efficient, you know, and that was exactly what I was writing about a few years ago. This is, that's AI, you know, starting to make AI better, to make it more energy efficient so that we can have more intelligence per unit energy.

[Raoul Pal]

So the next part of this, we've talked about the intelligence going exponential. We've talked about the cost of the energy, even though you can't see it in grid prices yet. But the output per solar and all of this stuff is exponential. We're seeing China scaling exponentially. So that word exponential appears everywhere here, which is why everything is moving so fast and nothing makes sense anymore. But what we're about to do or are doing is we're now scaling these things into the next iterations which are more like replacement humans units. So firstly, let's talk about agents. Agents is the big thing that happened this year. Yeah, this year alone. I mean we, we had them last year, but this year they exploded.

[David Matin]

They really did, you know, I mean the, this year kind of kicked off with the, with the open claw incident phenomenon, what, whatever you want to call it, where, yeah, you know, this, this loan operator essentially made this fantastically capable agent and suddenly everyone's download or everyone, lots of people are downloading them, running them on a Mac Mini. You know, you can set it, you can connect it to your Telegram, to your WhatsApp, talk to this thing like a colleague and no one really quite knows, I think it's fair to say the sort of secret source that he, he applied because you would then connect it to like your you know, instance of Chat, GPT or your instance of Claude, whatever. So that's providing the intelligence. But he somehow built an infrastructure that just made this agent fantastically capable. And people are sort of, you know, communicating it, talking to this agent via WhatsApp, saying, Build me a website, you know, code me this tool that's going to, yeah, take all the data out of Real Vision and show me the, you know, what the viewers are doing, whatever it is, and the agent's going off and doing that very successfully. Then someone made a kind of Facebook for these agents called Malt Book and they all go and start posting on Malt Book. As I wrote about the Exponentialist, like, we know that some of that there were shenanigans, there were people doing some of that posting. But still what it was, was a tiny glimmer of what I call and have written about the post, you know, the coming post human economy. An economy populated by autonomous economic actors, AI agents and robots, which we'll talk about in a bit. It was just a tiny glimmer of what that world starts to look like. And it's radically, radically different, you know, and these agents started to transact with one another across blockchains, which goes back to what Jamie Coots, who does such brilliant work on Real Vision. Jamie, you know, who talks about blockchains being what people forget and are not pricing into. The whole blockchain story is that they are the economic substrate of the coming economy, an economy of AI agents. And I think that's so powerfully true. And all of that was just a little window into this future. So exciting.

[Raoul Pal]

Agents are autonomous or otherwise, or semi autonomous, as most of them are. They're becoming economic actors. Then look what's happening. Google have rewritten how web browsers work so agents can go and take the information off the web without having to read and click buttons. All of agentic commerce is being rewritten using X402, which was an old embedded in HTTP that base started reusing SUI, got their own version A402. We've got Moonpay. Everybody else, everybody's building agentic models. We've got Stripe saying agents are going to be 100x the size of all individuals doing transactions. So we've got the web. The predominant user of the Internet will be an agent. The predominant user of finance will be an agent. The predominant user of blockchains will be agents. What I've realized we kind of knew this and you and I have talked about this for a while, so there's no shock, but What I realized, and we've always so said, you know, these are going to be replacement humans. But I was thinking in human number terms and we've all got the fucking TAM of everything. Wrong. We've got it so wrong. So total addressable market for blockchain. You think, well, there's 650 million active wallets in the world. Yeah. How's that calculated? Might not be perfect, but fine, we'll use that as a benchmark. Could we saturate half the world like mobile phones did in their first 15 years? So we get to 3 billion, that's what's in our heads. We're going to have 3 billion agents within three years and then we'll have 50 billion, 100 billion agents. We have no idea how many. And Stripe have been saying this and Circle have been saying this and Google are saying this and everybody's starting to say this is like the predominant user of everything, all software, everything is going to be an agent. So our Tamil is so wrong. People think the revenue is going to collapse for a lot of things. I'm not entirely sure that's the case. I think several things will see a massive explosion in revenues because they become vital to the Asian economy.

[David Matin]

Yeah, I absolutely love this thought. It's such a powerful thought. And it was, you know, you, it, like you say, it's something that's sort of been. And this happens so often with us, right. And with anyone thinking about this, it's not like we're unusual in that respect, but you have this hazy model and there's something you can, you can sort of half see but you can't quite grasp towards. And this, this is a classic example, you know, we've always had in our head agents are coming, autonomous economic actors are coming. You know, we're trying to put that puzzle together, what does it mean? And we, we glimpse bits of it. And when you articulated that, you know, the, the, everyone's got TAM wrong and everyone's models of what future TAM is going to be is totally wrong. It's like fuck, yes, that's, that's it. That, that's, that's another little piece of the puzzle uncovered. And it tap. Because it's not you, you, you think, oh, economic actors are coming. But instinctively you tend to think, one tends to think so that that will replace the 50 million human users where no, no, no, it's going to be like billions of users because there'll be billions of agents. And it's just another glimpse of the underlying thought that we're moving to something so radically new that our old measures almost start. They just start to break down. Like, does TAM even start, like, really make sense? No, because it's the old way.

[Raoul Pal]

Because there's no scarcity.

[David Matin]

Exactly. It kind of doesn't. Like TAM breaks down, our old measures break down. You know, I think about this with the whole Jevons paradox thing as well. You know, I think people the same in a way I can't quite articulate yet. I think the same kind of thing is happening. People are saying, well, compute will get cheaper, but what that will mean is that people just use more of it, you know, so you don't have to worry about the revenue kind of dying. People will just use more and more and more as it gets cheaper and cheaper. And there's something in my head saying, yeah, you know, but people won't be the main user of it. You're going to get some kind of recursive Jevons where AI agents use more and that makes it even cheaper. So they use even more. And it just like goes vertical in ways that are very hard to imagine.

[Raoul Pal]

And part of my universal code thesis is that all intelligence creates coherence and a network. I mean, every single fractal part of everything is a network, from the human genome to the body to the brain to the forest to the. I mean, everything is rivers, everything is network connected. And that's how information flows and that's how you create coherence and that's how you create intelligence. My view has been for a long time that ASI superintelligence is the network of networks of AGI. So the AIs are already learning from each other. They don't have obvious networks yet, but they are. Malt Book was giving agents a network. People have no comprehension what this means because soon, once they start creating a network, they start creating coherence amongst all of these. And what you do is accelerate intelligence. And that's where you get to asi, because you're going to network all of these things and we won't even know it. We won't see it, because they're interacting with each other, paying each other, learning from each other, swapping information with each other, building data with each other. I mean, it is beyond human control at this point because we use the words semi autonomous agents, we don't even have to be fully autonomous.

[David Matin]

Yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

And that process happens.

[David Matin]

Yeah, it's it. Yeah. That's so powerfully true.

[Raoul Pal]

And you're right.

[David Matin]

Malt Book is a great. Is again, a tiny little window onto the way they will start to learn from one another.

[Raoul Pal]

Because everything forms a network in the end.

[David Matin]

Yeah, yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

It doesn't. It won't survive as a species or a pattern or whatever. It just doesn't. It doesn't work without networks. I mean, that's DNA then, you know, we're built from network. I mean, everything is a network, so there's something in that. So let's go on to the next bit. So the agents are coming, the energy is getting more abundant and cheaper, but it's still the bottleneck. So that is a big race that has to happen. We've got intelligence now becoming Reid's Law. So it's the exponential squared, which is why we all feel like everything's breaking. Exponentials are hard enough, but when every log graph does that, you know, you're into a whole different world. Because, having spoken to my chatgpt on this a couple of years ago, is there any other example of Reid's Law? Virtually none. Yeah, it might have happened in bacteria, but they're generally Metcalfe's Law. They're generally logarithmic. It's very hard to have a log squared. And so it's one of the few observable log squareds that's ever happened in history. And we're living through it, which is.

[David Matin]

We're living through it. I know.

[Raoul Pal]

Remarkable. And then I'm going to talk about the other part. So the agents, people got wildly wrong because this infinite Tam. And now I'm going to the other bit. So when we talk about robots, people think about factory arms assembling cars, or they think about C3PO doing this and being very nice chap who makes you a cup of tea and can do some stuff, but it's a bit dumb. Okay, that's. That is humanity's mental model of a robot, or Daleks or. Right. They're just constrained in both intelligence and ability. The truth is, we're going to put fucking AGI brains into super creatures, super bionic creatures that are stronger, more powerful, faster. So they're better than us physically in every way and mentally better than us in every way. Apart from maybe not having qualia. That's it. People are not ready for this. Society is not ready for this. Even Elon said, today goes, we may not be the first to AGI, but we'll damn well be the first to AGI in a robot body. And people like, oh, yeah, that's amazing. No, that is a new species.

[David Matin]

Yeah, they're not ready. They're not ready.

[Raoul Pal]

You aren't ready. I'm not ready. Elon's not ready. Nobody's ready.

[David Matin]

Nobody's ready. How can you be, how can you be ready for that? Yeah, I mean that, that is the next huge frontier is this projection of, of AI and, and super intelligence is into the physical world. And you know, perhaps the most exciting and impactful version of that is, is humanoid robots. And in terms of the brain, like we're really, you know, we have incredible large language models. You can have a comp, this thing can understand you as it understands so much linguistic context, incredibly nuanced. We have great sort of machine vision models. It is the physical challenges that are the, the final push. And Elon talks about this as well. I mean how, how hard it is to get the hand to be, to be as dexterous as a human hand. You know, these humanoid robots, they, they're still a little slow though. They're not that nimble yet. But we will get there. We are getting there as we speak. And that's just going to be ridiculously

[Raoul Pal]

if we go back, how many years ago was it five years ago where Elon had people dressed up as robots on stage? Yeah, look where we are today.

[David Matin]

Right? Yeah, exactly.

[Raoul Pal]

Robot development is going exponential. And don't forget we once you apply AI to every task, every task goes exponential. I'm going exponential in my output. You're going exponential in your output. Everything is going exponential and it's so hard to deal with. So let's finish up. And the thing that you and I try and anchor everybody on because a lot of people watch this, they start getting, they go through emotional journey which is like, wow, this is so cool. I'm fucked. Oh fuck, my kids are fucked. Everything's fucked. I don't know what to do anymore. So I'll start with the first bit, then you'll start this. You'll do the second bit. My first bit is the counterbalance of this is nature. If you go through your mind, we're going to have drones with AGI brains delivering food, policing you, surveilling you, helping you. You're going to be, the cars are going to be self driving. There'll be humanoid robots in the streets with AGI brains that are smarter than you demand. Your respect will maybe be part of society. You've got, every computer is able to think. You've got unseen economic actors in their billions. How do you off ramp to that? And the off ramp is nature, right? Nature's this beautiful amazing ecosystem that we live in that is all part of this Universal compute. But its resonance is different. It grounds you, it gives you a break from all of this. So that's one side of the equation is I think more people will end up living closer to nature to escape the more extremes of the exponential squared happening everywhere. The other side is what do I tell my kids? That's your special topic. So give a quick. Yeah, people want to hear it. And people who, who are not part of the exponentialist haven't really heard this enough because it's the thing that, it's the fundamental thing. Most people say, well, it, if, if I get replaced, I'll figure it out. But my kids, poor kids, how are they going to get out of school and come into this world?

[David Matin]

Yeah, it's a huge worry and we both, we both feel it and we sense it really powerfully and we talk to so many people about this. And you, you get, you know, as I've said so many times in the past, when I go in and speak in organizations, the number one question I get is not anything to do with work, career, you know, the economy is. What do I tell my children about this? How do, how do they get through this? What does it mean for them? Are they going to have any kind of life at all? And I just fund, you know, there's so much I can say about that. I wrote big essay about it. We can do a big session about it one day. But fundamentally, I just go back time and again to look, we're talking about a new kind of technology here, intelligence that is going to colonize so many domains of human activity. It's going to be stupendously productive, incredible outputs. It's going to, you know, it's going to analyze, it's going to know, it's going to write, it's going to produce. What you have to ask yourself is what is left for us amid that explosion of capability. And by definition, there's one thing that no machine and no machine intelligence can ever do, and that is be a human being. And it's important here. I'm not saying it can't ever be conscious. I'm not saying it can't be alive. But what it can be conscious, it can be alive, but it won't be a conscious, alive human being. It will be something else. We are still human beings and we are always going to want to commune with other human beings in all kinds of ways who understand how it feels to be human, to have that particularly human kind of experience and all kinds of value like meaningful life and purpose and all Kinds of value exchange can still flow from that. So, you know, encourage your child to, I say, lean into their weirdness in the essay. You know, cultivate that part of them that is like, uniquely human, that is uniquely them. That is where they're passionate, where they're, where, where they feel strongly, and teach them also to be able to communicate that passion and be compelling and to other people in front of other human beings. Because, I mean, if you're worried about work in particular, so much like human value exchange will flow in that direction. It will be about community, connection, counsel, care for each other, truly seeing each other, doing the. Doing that small bucket of things that an AI, however intelligent it is, can't really do. It can do a simulation of it, and that would be good enough for lots of people in lots of contexts, but we'll still want another human being going, oh, my God, like, you know, for example, this thing's happened to you. It happened to me too, once. I know how you feel. This is how we get through it and so on. So cultivate that uniquely human part of ourselves is, is part of how I think we, we find a way through this. You know, we navigate our way through it, and it can be amazing for us, but I just don't want us to. To blindly accept this narrative of human obsolescence. I don't think that's where this has to go.

[Raoul Pal]

I just had a breakthrough. I was thinking while you were talking about obsolescence. So the longest surviving creatures on Earth are sharks and crocodiles. They're hundreds of millions of years old, and they have not evolved at all since, which suggests that they're perfect for the task of which they do some. I don't know where you want to put the time. 50,000 years ago, homo sapiens come, right? We're the apex intelligence. Yeah. Human humanoids before us have all disappeared, but crocodiles and sharks hadn't. We're an apex predator. We can kill every crocodile and shark we want. We can kill all of the food that they hunt, but they still exist because it tells you it's not a replacement. The whole system requires diversity to function. If the universe, the planet, the ecosystem is all part of the same process, then diverse diversity is vital. Or it collapses because you have one failure point. And it's again, something I've written about in the Universal Code, and that's why these things exist, and that's why humans exist. Humans have qualia now, do dogs have qualia? Possibly. Certainly not the same extent that we do. Qualia is the sense of feeling that humans have that sense that we make of the world. Why do we have it? We have it versus others because we are the top compute on Earth, the top intelligence. And why we got there is our qualia. Makes us more curious. It drives us to do weird things. We have things like ambition. Does your cat have ambition? No. Maybe to piss you off, occasionally scratch your face, but they don't have ambition, but humans do. We have this really weird thing and it makes us high quality, diversified compute. We compute at the edges and not just in the middle. Most machines will just compute in the middle. So we're a very, very important part of the ecosystem that creates intelligence. Much like we know we can't destroy all the trees on Earth because the intelligence of trees is their process by which they generate oxygen that allows us to live. Right? It's all part of this extremely interconnected thing. And without us, the AGI doesn't get our qualia, it may never have qualia.

[David Matin]

I think that's right. I think that's right. And we did promise that we like to live at the weird frontier. And now everyone's comfortable that, you know, you can use Claude code to design themselves a website. We've moved on to. These are the kinds of conversations we have in the Exponentialist, and we absolutely love it. And yeah, fundamentally, I, I, I think that that taps into a really deep truth, you know, which is this is all part of a cosmic destiny that's to do with intelligence and the sort of deep imperative directionally in the universe. And we are an important part of that. I think what is psychically destabilizing for us and, you know, as you said, is that we're now at this historic moment where we start to realize we're about to hand the bat on, on in a certain sense, in terms of being the apex intelligence. But people tend to think about this in a very black and white way. They're like, oh, well, then it's over for us. No, no, it doesn't have to be over. We can still be human beings. We can still do what wasn't over for the sharks. Exactly. Yeah. It's the point you're making. We can still care for one another, we can still art, community, meaning ambition, purpose, all of that. But in some sense the baton has been handed on and that was inevitable because directionally, that's, that's where intelligence per unit energy goes. But we'd get to decide what's meaningful for us. And, you know, we can still keep doing those meaningful things and they will still have great value. I, I believe the birds and the trees and the ants have value.

[Raoul Pal]

We.

[David Matin]

They're not the apex intelligence. We will still have value when we're not. It's just learning to, to, to adjust to that.

[Raoul Pal]

Exactly right. So there we go. That's. We've. We've gone through to. What did Anthropic do this week?

[David Matin]

Yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

The meaning of life, the universe and everything. That is the journey of the exponential. This is why I love it. But this is where, you know, to be honest, I spend the majority of my thinking time is, is around these kind of topics because, yeah, yeah, AI is a. It's a complete break in everything humanity understood. And we're watching it happen. We're watching this happen. And we can either ignore it, run away from it, or just be curious and go on. What does this actually mean? And that's the journey. That's why you and I call ourselves exponentialists, is like, oh, we're going to go along, buy the ticket, take the ride.

[David Matin]

Exactly. Exactly. I mean, if you're a curious person, I can't think of a better time to be witnessing. Because what's happening now more than anything, my overriding feeling is I'm just desperate to know how it ends. I know I'm not going to get to see how it ends, but, you know, this story, I just obsessed with it, just fascinated by it. All kinds of mixed feelings about it, but I just want to know what happens next. That is my overriding impulse here. Because what's happening is crazy. You know, it's crazy.

[Raoul Pal]

Part of that. Your quest to know what's happening next is the reason that human longevity is going to rise massively. That's all part of the same process. Because if there are less humans, because we don't need our compute as broadly for basic stuff, but we need the highest quality human compute. Well, the best thing to do is let humans live longer.

[David Matin]

Yeah.

[Raoul Pal]

Because we don't need this for tasks and work and other stuff. So longer human compute in this whole universal consciousness idea makes sense.

[David Matin]

I'm praying they figure that out so that I can see, you know, 500 years from now, you know, chat, GPT 2000. I'm just, I just desperate, you know. In the meantime, I'm just saving up for the, for the kind of, you know, transformative interventions that will allow me to get there when they're launched. Ral. Because they're not going to be cheap.

[Raoul Pal]

No, exactly. All right, my friend, good to see you. And we'll get you back on at some Point to catch up with all of this. Always good.

[David Matin]

Always good to catch up. Rael, thanks for having me.

[Raoul Pal]

Yeah. See you soon. Okay. There was an extraordinary amount of process in that conversation and I'm sorry to throw so much at you, but there's so much living in my head in all of this that I've already written 170,000 words on it all and piecing together a book and a whole bunch of other things around it. But as you can see, there's a framework of understanding here that David and I use which will help you. Is everything now, everything. And maybe it always was and always will be a process of converting energy into intelligence. And intelligence is not just what you think intelligence is. It's a fundamental process of information where it gets to know itself more over time. Which actually I think is the purpose of the universe. But beside the point, it allows you to understand what's happening. As the cost of energy via solar and other technologies starts dropping massively in price, it's creating a leverage effect in technology itself. Technology now because intelligence is becoming self recursive, learning is accelerating now at Reed's Law. So we've got this unbelievable moment in time and they're going to spin out into robots, agents and a whole new world. And it's a journey that there's nothing we can do to stop it. It's going to happen. The game of nation states means this is the most important game humanity will ever play and there is no stopping it. You can't have one nation state with super intelligence. It has to be diversified like all processes in the universe are of themselves. So you can choose to ignore it, you can choose to hide from it, you can choose to reject it, but it's going to happen. So you might as well stay curious and come along for the ride. So maybe come and join the exponentialists as well and come along with me, David and a whole community of others. We have these incredible kind of AMA conversations where we talk about this stuff. We're all trying to figure it out. But what a moment to be alive. I'll see you next time. You obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end. But listen, don't forget to go to realvision.com join and grab a free membership. It's an incredible community packed with alpha, great investment ideas and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future. So get started. Now go to realvision.com join.

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