As we wrap up the year and celebrate the festive season, we wanted to share some of our favorite moments from one of your favorite Speak Up interviews from 2024: Raoul Pal with Anthony Scaramucci. Enjoy!
All the best for a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year!
Original interview aired Nov 22, 2024: https://youtu.be/l_T7Ddlfmk0
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Andrew Brill 0:00
Happy Holidays from all of us here at wealthion to all of you, I’m one of your hosts here at wealthion. Andrew brill, we took a look back at this year, and hope you enjoy these favorite guest moments from one of our best interviews of 2024 I want to
Anthony Scaramucci 0:18
start with Bitcoin, because I think it’s important I’m talking to you where bitcoin is at 92,000 you’re also talking to a person that did buy Bitcoin at 68,000 November of 2021 wrote it down to 17,000 so you’re talking to a battle torn, scarred human being.
Raoul Pal 0:38
Did you add to your trade, when it went lower, I did,
Anthony Scaramucci 0:42
no, absolutely no. I absolutely did. No, no, no, then it works wonders, right? No, no, no, I added, no, no, no. I’ve been, I’ve been a consistent buyer every month of Bitcoin since October of 2020 and even in the down times when I thought I was getting to get creamed, I was nibbling, I can’t say I was buying as much in my overconfident zeal as 68,000 prints. I was less confident at 17,000 isn’t that how human nature works? Raul,
Raoul Pal 1:11
always you got to fight yourself in this market. It’s always your own psychology as your most your worst enemy. I’ve learned from being in this cycle for so long that really, if you can, when it just feels the worst, that’s when he should be putting as much money in as you can. Obviously, it’s also the hardest time, because nobody’s got money, because liquidity is being drawn out of the system. Everyone’s feeling the pinch. So it’s actually hard to scrape pennies from under the sofa, but it is the best strategy of all, because your gains compounds so fast when you do it well,
Anthony Scaramucci 1:42
well, I, I, I’m with you on that. I’ve learned that in my old age, I tell younger people, just nibble at things, make an investment every month and don’t look at it. Pay yourself first. But where’s Bitcoin going to be three six months? And then give me your five year outlook? Yeah. I
Raoul Pal 1:59
mean, I try not to give price projections, and I know you always pin them out of me. But the point being is, you know, we’re very public on social media, and it’s just people pin their hopes and dreams on a number you give them. But my general thesis is, we will rally into year end. We will correct at some point. There’s a bunch of hedge funds and raas and others who are into this, who will need to take a bit of profits into year end, I think we’ll get a bit of a shake out global liquidity slowing down somewhat, and then we should re accelerate into the end of tax season. So my view is, Bitcoin easily gets to 100 this year, and probably, probably is, you know, 150 plus by March before it corrects again. And then we finish the year after a larger correction with a very strong rally into the end. So that’s, that’s how I think it plays out probabilistically. So
Anthony Scaramucci 2:53
when you say a correction, we’re at 150 it corrects back to 80. Yeah. Maybe
Raoul Pal 2:58
something like that, yeah. Maybe less, maybe, you know, 30% correction, so back down to 100 kind of make sense to me, and it’ll feel miserable. And people say, has the cycle peaks and all of that noise, right? And then, usually we end the second year after the presidential election cycle, very strong, and then it peaks out sometime there.
Anthony Scaramucci 3:20
Okay, so if I give a range
Raoul Pal 3:22
of targets, I suppose pinpointing a target, worst case is 150 my base case is 250 and in an obscene bull market, because everybody’s buying, driven by a change of regulation, then it could go as high as 450 Okay,
Anthony Scaramucci 3:38
let’s go to Solana. I want to ask you the same questions related to Solana, because I know you’re a bull there.
Raoul Pal 3:43
Yeah. So I think Solana finishes this year closer to 400 than it is to 200 so I think this year, six weeks ago, maybe 350 I mean, it’s a higher beater asset, so it should do better. So I expect that to happen. I’m I think again, it follow the same kind of price path as Bitcoin, but it should outperform all of the way it’s been, in this consolidation versus Bitcoin sideways consolidation. The next leg should be altcoin season, and Solana should be the king of the major alts. So I’m kind of expecting Solana from here to probably get to over 1012 1250 something like
Anthony Scaramucci 4:30
that. All right, last one, Ethereum, um,
Raoul Pal 4:34
Ethereum has been a laggard. I think it plays some catch up. I think it out forms Bitcoin going forwards for a bit. Because, you know, if we sit back and look at what the regulatory changes might be, that is the platform upon which most of the institutions will start doing stuff. It’s the Microsoft decision. You know, every bank has Microsoft computers, not Apple computers. So I think that Ethereum actually does better than most people expect going into the end of the. Year again, same price pattern outperforms Bitcoin, Solana outperforms Ethereum. So it’s the risk curve. Okay,
Anthony Scaramucci 5:07
let’s go to the what we’re calling the exponential age, which is the rapid advancement of AI blockchain and other technologies. So, Mr. Paul, you think there’s a boom coming, right? There’s a techno boom coming. It’s
Raoul Pal 5:22
a techno boom and it’s unstoppable. It’s going to be so fast we don’t know how to deal with it. Am
Anthony Scaramucci 5:27
I going to be taller as a result of this? No, is there? Jen, no, it
Raoul Pal 5:31
might be possible. There is hope for you yet. Hope for me yet. Okay, yeah, there is, hopefully. There is hope for you yet. I
Anthony Scaramucci 5:38
think that’s I think that’s why I have a little bit of jealousy towards you. Is not only you’re good looking, but you’re a tall son of a bitch. Okay, tell us about the exponential age. Go ahead. So
Raoul Pal 5:46
look, it’s this nexus of all of these technologies, all hitting adoption effects at the same time. You can see that in front of your eyes with crypto, that’s what number go up. But AI, we can see that every three months is like a groundbreaking set of new models, whether it’s video, audio, or just the models themselves or the applications of it. We’re seeing the robots coming. We’ve seen the Optimus robots. We’ve seen the robots coming out of China. We’re seeing Tesla cars. We’re seeing, I mean, it’s just endless. We’re seeing Amazon employing more robots than humans now, and that’s accelerating. Then we’ve got the biotechnology stuff we’ve got, you know, Google, with their with their Alpha fold, which is the AI based around predicting protein sequences, and what that can do for humanity. We’re seeing so much all happening at the same time. EV, I mean, nobody realizes, because it becomes politicized. But solar growth, of solar power is more than all of other energy generation added together and doubled. People don’t realize how fast this technology is moving as well, and how much the prices are coming down. So all of these things mean the price of computers going lower, the price of energy and electricity will go low over time. Nuclear can be thrown into that, and then you’ve got aI which is driving exponential compute, which ends up with infinite human knowledge. All of these things are so disruptive we can’t get our heads around them, and it’s quite difficult to invest in a lot of it, a lot of it is in VC hands, or in these giant tech companies. So you’ve got this fastest growing technology in all history. What are you supposed to buy? Microsoft? Yeah, you might double your money or triple your money, but it’s, it’s not really commensurate with that. So the crypto side of the equation, because the whole new internet is being built on crypto rails. I mean, the AI will have identity, and we will have identity on chain. Many of the things you and I have talked about the larger use of blockchain as a technology, well, that’s front and center. So actually, I actually think we’ve got six years, and this is quite contentious. I think we’ve got six years left to make as much money as we can before we don’t understand how the economy works anymore. We’ve got if an economy is driven by if economic trend, rate of economic growth is driven by population growth plus productivity growth and debt growth. By the time you change this aging population, which is slowing trend, rate of GDP down. Replace that with infinite robots and infinite AI. We’ve replaced the population component, same with productivity. By lowering energy costs, we end up with ridiculous growth. I mean, what are financial markets with AGI? So I think we’ve got six years. So actually, we do a lot of this on real vision. So anybody watching this real vision.com? Forward, slash, join there’s a whole stuff around the six years. It’s really important. I think we’ve got six years to invest to save our futures or cement our futures. Raul
Anthony Scaramucci 8:47
and Anthony, what advice would you give young people just starting in finance to have a great career like yours? That’s Ryan from California, so go ahead. Sharon, give
Raoul Pal 8:57
this a choice. I give this advice to a lot of friends kids, because they’re like, I want to go into finance. I’m like, finance is a secularly declining industry. You know, if I was comparing notes with a mate of mine who’s just left finance at the same age, I was earning three times as much money as them. The the amount of opportunity in finance keeps going down as Guess what? AI technology replaces humans in the trading floors and in investment banking across I would not go into finance. If you’re going to go into finance, go into crypto. Crypto is a secular trend going up, the fastest of all, as opposed to a secular trend going down, which is the traditional finance system. So if you want to apply your finance understanding, you want to do investing, you want to think about macro, do it in crypto, and it’ll change your life. The key to anybody’s career is find a secular trend and ride that you you and I wrote the same secular trend. Hedge funds was a huge trend, as was finance at the time, and on my side, it. Was equity derivatives, which was a huge trend, and we rode those. It makes us look geniuses, even though I’m certainly not a genius. You’re smarter. You got to you went to Harvard or somewhere. I didn’t, I
Anthony Scaramucci 10:09
did. I did go to Harvard. And don’t hold it against me, because, you know, in some ways, it stunts your ability to see things. You know, you get you know Ross Perot, you’re old enough to remember Ross Perot, the legendary entrepreneur who also ran for president in 1992 he said something that I’ll never forget. Raul, he said, at Harvard Business School, when I was there, he said, I feel bad for you babies. Why do you feel bad for us? He said, You’re at Harvard. You’re at Harvard. You were successful in the first part of your life. You’re not going to take any risks. You’re not going to do anything stupid or crazy. And left a big impression on me. I left that meeting and said, I’m for stupid and I’m for crazy, and that’s why I’m a bitcoiner like you. But is it too late? Is it too late in crypto?
Raoul Pal 10:57
No, it’s a, it’s currently, today, a $3 trillion industry. Think of this scale. It’s a $3 trillion industry. If we just extrapolate the trend rate of growth and the number of wallets and all of that stuff, we get to 100 trillion by 2034, we’re 3% of the way there. We’ve got 97 trillion of wealth to create in this space. We’ve barely started. I know we all use that phrase, you know, we’re so early, but the adoption of this technology is the financial system starts to operate on its rails. So you have instant settlement for equities and bonds and all of that, the transfer payments, even central bank digital currencies, are on these rails. Everything folds into these rails, our ID, gaming worlds, all of these things. Well, if it’s if we’re 3% of the journey, it’s all to play for this is the biggest trend we’ve ever had.
Andrew Brill 11:48
Thanks again for watching these favorite moments of 2024, and we hope we can continue to provide you with information that will help you invest wisely and be financially resilient. Wishing all of you a healthy, happy, safe and prosperous 2025!
