Source: Raoul Pal The Journey Man
Compiled by: Felix, PANews
Broadcast Time: September 10
Real Vision co-founder Raoul Pal invited Wall Street strategist Jordi Visser to his show Raoul Pal The Journey Man for a discussion on AI, Bitcoin, asset tokenization, bonds, productivity, and other related topics.
The two analysts believe that AI is boosting productivity in unprecedented ways, evidenced by companies achieving soaring profits without increasing their workforce. They point out that tokenization will fundamentally reshape the asset management industry, enabling global capital to flow 24/7 and become democratized. Regarding investment strategy, they emphasize that Bitcoin is the ultimate scarce asset for hedging against currency devaluation and technological disruption. Finally, the conversation suggests that people should embrace AI tools to accelerate learning and decision-making rather than over-focusing on the volatility of traditional bond markets.
PANews has compiled the highlights of the interview; details are as follows.
Raoul Pal: What have you been up to lately? What's on your mind?
Jordi Visser: Before we get into crypto and AI, let's start with bonds; that's what I've been thinking about lately. I genuinely believe that the obsession with the 'collapse' of the global 30-year Treasury yield is the biggest marketing scam I've ever seen, driven more by social media-driven panic. When someone asks me, 'Have you seen the Treasury chart?' I reply, 'Yes, I've been watching the total return. An ETF tracking 20+ year bonds is only down about 3% this year. That's not significant volatility.' But because the chart shows it's the highest yield in 20 years, people panic.
Recently, I discussed with an acquaintance who asked, 'Aren't you worried about the bond market given the massive AI capital expenditures?' I countered: When global PMI is rising, corporate profits are not only surging but reaching unprecedented levels, how can you see a problem? Moreover, we're not hiring; job growth is almost zero, at recession-level hiring, yet corporate profit margins keep expanding. Don't you realize what you're missing? By the way, if you had sold the Nikkei or risk assets when the 30-year yield peaked last May, you'd have missed out on a 70% gain since then.
So, here's my current thought: The panic over Treasury yields, sparked by people like Dalio, is receiving excessive attention. Rising yields will indeed cause bankruptcies among weak, high-debt companies in the old economy, but AI will accelerate that process anyway. Therefore, I don't see this as a negative; I actually consider it positive.
Raoul Pal: Completely agree. Treasury Secretary Besant has made it quite clear. It's essentially a supply issue because hyperscale cloud providers and governments are issuing massive amounts of debt. You need a weaker dollar to get foreign central banks to buy Treasuries. Bond yields will eventually be anchored, but what the market really needs is a steeper yield curve. This requires the 'Wash' component to cooperate. Wash must appear hawkish and reliable, but Besant repeatedly emphasizes that future inflation data will be weaker than expected, while productivity will be stronger than expected. Looking at technical indicators like DeMark, they are stacked across weekly, daily, and monthly charts, very close to reversal points seen during extreme panic. The highly indebted old economy and credit funds will indeed need to be liquidated, but not now; it will happen at some future point where AI and yields converge.
Jordi Visser: Right. That's exactly what Japan did; they artificially created a steep yield curve, and then banks started lending again. To fund this massive capital expenditure boom, banks must start lending. If you look at the performance of global bank stocks, they are up about 30% year-over-year. The market is always a discounting mechanism. The rate of change in stock prices, corporate profit margins, and rising earnings say it all: Productivity is soaring significantly amid stagnant hiring, revenue growth, persistently high fiscal deficits, and heavy private sector investment.
Raoul Pal: If you want evidence of productivity gains, record profits coupled with extremely low employment rates are the best answer. I wrote a whole article using Amazon as an example, showing what it would look like if the entire global economy fully embraced AI and robotics. Over the past 8 years, Amazon has completely transformed itself into a productivity machine. Because it applied these technologies, its profits and gross margins have continuously soared. Amazon is a pioneer of the future.
Jordi Visser: Exactly. This reminds me of my experience leaving traditional macro trading in 2013 to go to Silicon Valley. I saw two things colliding then: one was China's debt-driven traditional growth model hitting demographic and debt ceilings; the other was Amazon trading at an infinite P/E ratio, which I couldn't comprehend. So I went to Silicon Valley, to Singularity University, which completely changed my mindset and made me realize we are in an era of 'temporal misalignment.'
When Japan's 30-year bond yield hit a new high, there was talk of 'the world is ending, the Yen carry trade is collapsing.' Eighteen months later, the Nikkei is still 70% higher. Why does this matter? Because one side of the equation is moving forward at an exponential speed, while the other side (including traditional debt, GDP accounting systems) still operates at a linear human pace. The ARR growth rate of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cursor is unprecedented in human history; on the other hand, excluding the healthcare industry, the global job market has seen zero net growth for 20 months.
Raoul Pal: The traditional way of looking at bonds was through nominal GDP. Financial repression aimed to keep Treasury yields below nominal GDP.
Jordi Visser: Historical data shows that before 1997, the 10-year Treasury yield was typically about 200 basis points higher than nominal GDP. Currently, US nominal GDP growth is 6% annualized. By the old standard, the yield should be around 8.5%, but now it's only about 4.75%. This shift began in 1997 with the Asian financial crisis, demographic changes, and the moment the internet became an investable asset.
Most people don't realize that for hyperscale tech companies, whether the borrowing cost is 6%, 8%, or 9%, it doesn't weaken their business profits. In fact, their profits have increased because they hold massive amounts of cash, and high interest rates allow them to earn substantial interest.
Jordi Visser: In the next 12 months, there will be billions of AI Agents globally. Since I started using tools like Grok, I've created a massive number of AI Agents in the past 10 days. Like many others, I now face the annoyance of having 75 Agents and struggling to remember who does what.
Raoul Pal: I even created a dedicated 'COO Agent' on Claude to manage all my other Agents because they keep breaking down or disappearing. Managing them has become a full-time job. I used Grok for three days and already built 6 Agents.
What people don't understand is that once you dive deep into these tools, your only bottleneck remains: demand is infinite. Last month, aside from my Mac subscription, I spent an extra $11,000 on AI compute and software (like Fable 5, etc.). Anyone who thinks AI will give them free time is completely mistaken. The opposite is true; my time is completely filled.
Jordi Visser: I'm now focusing most of my energy on tokenization. Just as countries compete in AI, they are also starting high-tech races in tokenization. Japan has realized that if they don't quickly migrate all their assets onto the blockchain, their capital markets will deteriorate. To raise funds, market depth and the democratization of investment become crucial.
Tokenization is the ultimate solution to the 10-year Treasury and debt fundraising problem: instead of limiting bonds to a few institutions, package them so all 8 billion people globally can buy them directly.
Raoul Pal: So, what do you think will happen to the asset management industry? For example, corporate bonds used to be packaged into funds sold to pensions or accredited investors. What happens to the people in that chain?
Jordi Visser: Adapt or die. Over the past 15 years, Bitcoin has been the best-performing asset, but because it's a black box with no human fund manager to tell a story, traditional institutions struggled to accept it. However, the younger generation is very accustomed to not dealing with real people. Tokenization allows you to fragment tens of thousands of uncorrelated global yields, constructing a portfolio with an 8%–10% annual return, extremely high Sharpe ratio, and zero volatility, directly replicating the return structures built by Citadel or Millennium at great cost.
More importantly, it's 24/7 trading. Starting this year, whether it's the Iran situation, Hyperliquid, or SpaceX's unlisted equity trading, everything happens 24/7. Humans simply can't compete with AI bots in a 24/7 market; they will lose due to insomnia and emotional decision-making.
Raoul Pal: From a macro perspective, an aggregator like Millennium has a mothership handling capital allocation and risk control, with countless Pods (sub-teams) providing return streams. In the future, these Pods will become individuals or AI Agents. The mothership won't need massive back-office infrastructure because everything is tokenized. The entire middle layer cost and management fees of the asset management system will collapse completely.
Jordi Visser: In the future, all fund return streams, individual return streams, and AI Agents will be on-chain and become investable. The velocity of capital turnover will surge dramatically. Take Nvidia as an example: since last October, Nvidia's earnings reports have consistently broken historical records, but its stock price has basically traded sideways for 20 of the last 26 months, except for 4 months of explosive growth.
This shows that the traditional model of making Alpha by predicting 'earnings beats' is no longer effective. When trading volume and velocity skyrocket, the real money is made by 'toll collectors' (like crypto infrastructure, exchanges), just like a casino makes money from the flow of bets.
Raoul Pal: In the future, almost everything will become a market. Besides consuming energy and compute, AI Agents consume data the most. Therefore, data markets driven by AI Agents will become the largest markets ever, absorbing all information into this intelligent behemoth.
Jordi Visser: Fortunately, absorbing all real-world video and sensor data requires massive computing power and data centers, and we currently face a severe compute shortage. Political friction, physical bottlenecks, and delays in human adaptation are actually good things; they prevent AGI from arriving too quickly, giving humans time to think and adapt.
Raoul Pal: Exactly. I rented a Tesla in Napa, turned on FSD, and after pressing the accelerator, it drove itself. The technology is already here. But it will take many years for humanoid robots to walk the streets delivering coffee due to the lack of compute required for visual-spatial perception.
Jordi Visser: In the next 5 years, the most important application scenarios for humanoid robots will be in mining and hazardous manufacturing. If you ask me to choose between gold and Bitcoin, I'd choose Bitcoin without hesitation. Because if humanoid robots fully enter mining, the efficiency of extracting commodities like gold, copper, and oil will greatly increase, costs will plummet, and supply will rise; whereas Bitcoin is a digitally scarce asset chosen by humans, with true absolute scarcity that won't increase in supply due to automated mining.
Raoul Pal: What are your thoughts on the energy bottlenecks of data centers and the local political resistance to them in the US?
Jordi Visser: I'm not too worried about the political resistance to data centers. Because innovation in 'behind-the-meter' power generation within the US private sector has exploded. For example, retrofitting decommissioned aircraft gas turbines directly into natural gas generators and building data centers right next to natural gas pipelines completely bypasses traditional grid approvals.
Jordi Visser: Tokenization is a national-level race. If your country doesn't get on-chain, your capital markets will lose liquidity. Robinhood is the perfect intermediary for the fusion of crypto and traditional finance.
Raoul Pal: What happens to the US dollar when all stocks and assets are on-chain? Currently, 75% of global MSCI index investment funds are already in the US. Once US assets are fully on-chain, global retail investors can buy Nvidia or SpaceX with one click via a mobile wallet. This will siphon all global funds, making the dollar exceptionally strong in the short term. I agree with Brent Johnson (proposer of the 'Dollar Milkshake Theory'): the dollar will die from its own strength.
Jordi Visser: But on the other hand, with the development of stablecoins and blockchain, US control over the SWIFT system and financial sanctions will significantly decrease. The dollar will be distributed more widely globally. AI and cryptocurrency are the most powerful decentralizing forces in human history. They cross national borders and will push the younger generation fully into the digital virtual economy.
Raoul Pal: AI's disruption of productivity is incredible. This morning, my AI scanned the GMI inbox and flagged two user suggestions. I thought they were good ideas and directly used Whisper voice input to instruct the AI. From receiving the email to completing the code modifications and launching the new feature on Real Vision, the entire process took only 40 minutes. Previously, this would have required meetings, outsourcing, and 6 to 9 months of effort.
Jordi Visser: Same here. I built my own 'knowledge brain' using the YouTube API and X scraping. Every morning at 5 AM, AI automatically generates a customized crypto and macro news briefing for me.
Last Wednesday, the software company I used for recording videos suddenly announced it was shutting down, and I had a recording scheduled for Friday. I convened an 'all-hands Agent meeting' in Grokbot, just like when I convened executive meetings as a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley. The Agents suggested I switch to Google Slides and taught me step-by-step. Within a few hours, I had switched my entire workflow and produced a video with a 100-slide presentation.
Raoul Pal: In our age group (approaching 60), almost no one in traditional circles uses AI as deeply as we do.
Jordi Visser: In the era of super-competition driven by AI, the rate at which S&P 500 constituents are disrupted and replaced will accelerate. Bitcoin represents the world's only true store of value as a scarce asset. In the coming year, with the tokenization boom and stablecoin explosion, Ethereum, as a foundational blockchain commodity, has the potential to outperform Bitcoin.
Raoul Pal: People spend too much time picking what to buy and sell. In fact, you just need to hold Bitcoin, the Nasdaq index, maybe some Ethereum, Solana, Zcash, and gold, then turn off the screen and do nothing.
Since the Bitcoin whitepaper, if you built a portfolio of '1/3 S&P 500 + 1/3 Nasdaq + 1/3 Bitcoin,' its compound annual growth rate would crush 99% of complex strategies in the market. Everyone should focus their energy on increasing their primary income and then consistently invest that income into such a simple compound portfolio.
Jordi Visser: I have never sold any Bitcoin or digital assets to extract cash. I live simply, in Maine, driving a 2021 Tesla, not pursuing luxury consumption. I grew up at the racetrack with my father learning to calculate odds. Establishing the crypto-digital network rails is the highest-odds venture in human history. The future digital asset market will be at least $100 trillion in size, with Bitcoin taking at least 33% of that.
Related reading: Raoul Pal: Why Are Traditional Portfolios Already Obsolete?
