Podcast appearances and mentions of Albert Wenger

Episode 15 of The Basic Income Show! Our main topic in this episode was the full-on support of UBI by Pope Francis.Chapters:00:00 Welcome to The Basic Income Show00:17 The UBI Advocacy of Pope Francis23:13 CBC Coverage of a Coalition of Feminist Orgs for UBI34:21 Theo Von and Mike Rowe Discuss UBI1:00:30 Oakland Resilient Families Fund Results1:20:15 Madison Forward Fund Results1:25:22 Returning Citizens Stimulus Program Results1:28:42 Concluding RemarksAI Summary:In this episode, the hosts discuss the significant endorsement of Universal Basic Income (UBI) by Pope Francis, exploring its implications for social justice and community empowerment. They delve into the Pope's consistent advocacy for UBI, the importance of language in advocacy, and the impact of UBI on employment, education, and recidivism. The conversation also touches on the intersection of automation and work, the role of unpaid labor, and the necessity of community engagement in promoting UBI. Through various pilot programs, the hosts highlight the positive outcomes associated with UBI, emphasizing its potential to transform lives and communities.Theo Von and Mike Rowe:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryokmO9MeBw-See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on Bluesky:https://bsky.app/profile/scottsantens.com/post/3lckzcleo7s24See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on X: https://x.com/scottsantens/status/1766213155967955332For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faqDonate to the Income To Support All Foundation to support UBI projects:https://www.itsafoundation.orgSubscribe to the ITSA Newsletter for monthly UBI news:https://itsanewsletter.beehiiv.com/subscribeVisit Basic Income Today for daily UBI news:https://basicincometoday.comSign up for the Comingle waitlist for voluntary UBI:https://www.comingle.us-Follow Scott:https://linktr.ee/scottsantensFollow Conrad:https://bsky.app/profile/theubiguy.bsky.socialhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/conradshaw/Follow Josh:https://bsky.app/profile/misterjworth.bsky.socialhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/joshworth/-Special thanks to: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, David Ruark, Tricia Garrett, A.W.R., Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, John Steinberger, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, Laurel gillespie, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Robert Collins, Joanna Zarach, Mgmguy, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Steve Roth, Miki Phagan, Walter Schaerer, Elizabeth Corker, Albert Daniel Brockman, Natalie Foster, Joe Ballou, Arjun , Felix Ling, S, Jocelyn Hockings, Mark Donovan, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, Braden Ferrin , Juro Antal, Austin, Deanna McHugh, Stephen Castro-Starkey, Nikolaus Rath, and all my other patrons for their support.If you'd like to see your name here in future video descriptions, you can do so by becoming a patron on Patreon at the UBI Producer level or above.Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens/membership#UniversalBasicIncome #BasicIncome #UBI

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 19:02:04 +0000 https://feed.neuezwanziger.de/link/21941/17019398/wolfram-weimer-trumps-niedergang-papst-prozession-eu-aussenpolitik-neue-zeitrechnungnung-und-sportideologie 75eba8b68f9807ef113d2a80dea51e4e Wolfgang und Stefan besprechen den April 2025 Welche Qualifikation braucht ein Kulturstaatsminister? Pah, das ist ja nicht mal ein richtiger Minister. Also eigentlich keine. Vielleicht wäre etwas mit Medien schön in der Biographie. Will uns die neue Bundesregierung ärgern? Ist Kultur von dort aus gesehen wirklich nur noch ein linksgrünversifftes Projekt, das ein paar hinter die Löffel bekommen soll? Oder ist die Ernennung von Wolfram Weimer einfach Sinnbild für die neue Herangehensweise, für die Modernisierung des Staates auf Verkaufsflächendesigner zu setzen, als Wirtschaftsministerin eine Unternehmensmanagerin zu wählen und überall Juristen zu platzieren, außer im Innenministerium? Wir gehen dem Denken von Wolfram Weimer heute im Detail nach, Wolfgang hat sein Buch gelesen. Danach begutachten wir die Signatur-Politik von Donald Trump. Einfach "Zölle" zu sagen, greift viel zu kurz. Hier klammern Leute am Staat, die ihn zerstören, was sie sich nicht eingestehen können, weil dann die anderen gewonnen hätten. Im Wirtschaftskrieg Amerika gegen China sind es nun die Amerikaner, die den Gesichtsverlust fürchten. Anschließend sehen wir einsame Sportler im Wald, die mal keinen Blödsinn erzählen. KÄS-Termine 2025: Fr. 20.06. / Fr. 19.09. / Fr. 19.12. per Mail: neuezwanziger@diekaes.de SOMMERSALON am 23. August! Tickets gibts hier 00:00:57 Wolfgangs Smartphone Wolfgang erzählt, wie er durch den Kauf eines neuen Autos dazu gezwungen wurde, sich ein Smartphone anzuschaffen. Sein altes Nokia reichte nicht mehr aus, um die modernen Funktionen des Autos zu nutzen. Er beschreibt den Kauf eines iPhones als Verlust seiner Autonomie und Freiheit, da er sich nun der Technologie unterwerfen muss. Stefan versucht, ihm die praktischen Seiten des Smartphones näherzubringen, wie die Navigationsfunktion, die nicht nur im Raum, sondern auch in der Zeit navigiert, indem sie die Ankunftszeit vorhersagt. Wolfgang will das Smartphone jedoch nur für das Nötigste nutzen und nicht für soziale Medien oder ständige Erreichbarkeit. 00:09:06 Strafen für Apple und Meta Passend zu Wolfgangs neuem iPhone wird über eine EU-Strafe gegen Apple berichtet. Die EU-Kommission wirft Apple vor, im App Store andere Anbieter benachteiligt zu haben, indem es Hinweise auf günstigere Angebote außerhalb des Stores verhinderte. Apple soll 500 Millionen Euro Strafe zahlen. Stefan hält die Strafe für längst überfällig, aber angesichts des Lock-in-Effekts, den Apple über Jahre ausgenutzt hat, für zu gering. Wolfgang rechnet vor, dass die Strafe nur einen Bruchteil (0,15%) des möglichen Strafmaßes von bis zu 10% des globalen Jahresumsatzes ausmacht. Auch Meta (Facebook, Instagram) erhielt eine Strafe von 200 Millionen Euro wegen der Praxis, Nutzer vor die Wahl zwischen personalisierter Werbung oder einem Bezahl-Abo zu stellen. Beide Strafen werden als symbolisch und wenig abschreckend kritisiert. Es wird diskutiert, dass die EU sich zwar nicht scheut, US-Tech-Konzerne zu bestrafen, aber die Abhängigkeit von deren digitaler Infrastruktur (Google Suche, Cloud-Dienste etc.) eine härtere Gangart verhindert. Matt Binder von Mashable erklärt, warum Meta die Strafe als "Tariff" (Zoll) bezeichnet, um negative Assoziationen in den USA zu wecken. 00:22:19 Papst beerdigt Stefan berichtet von seinem Wien-Besuch und der dortigen Schatzkammer, wo die Verschmelzung von staatlicher und sakraler Macht sichtbar wird. Im Kontrast dazu steht die als eher schlicht empfundene Beerdigungszeremonie für Papst Franziskus im Petersdom. Ein besonderer Moment war jedoch der Trauerzug mit dem Leichnam des Papstes durch das historische Zentrum Roms zur Basilika Santa Maria Maggiore, wo er beigesetzt wurde. Dieser Akt wurde selbst von nicht-religiösen Menschen als Gänsehautmoment empfunden und als letzter weltlicher Einschlag des Papstes gewertet. Wolfgang erinnert an die Tradition in Wien, verstorbene Burgschauspieler im Sarg um das Burgtheater zu tragen. Es wird auch die politische Dimension des Papsttums angesprochen, etwa die Rolle von Johannes Paul II. im Kalten Krieg oder Franziskus' Appelle gegen Aufrüstung. 00:28:15 Was denkt Wolfram Weimer Wolfram Weimer, ehemaliger Chefredakteur der Welt und Verleger (u.a. Cicero), wurde zum neuen Kulturstaatsminister ernannt. Die Entscheidung von Friedrich Merz löste viel Kritik aus, auch aus konservativen Kreisen. Jürgen Kaube (FAZ) bezweifelt Weimers Interesse an Kunst oder Geist. Die enge Verbindung zwischen Merz und Weimer (Golfpartner, Ludwig-Erhard-Gipfel, gegenseitige Lobpreisungen) wird beleuchtet. Wolfgang hat Weimers "Konservatives Manifest" gelesen, um dessen Denken zu verstehen. In einem Lanz-Auftritt von 2018 erklärt Weimer, Konservatismus sei wieder modern und bedeute nicht das Hängen am Gestern, sondern das Leben aus Werten, die immer gelten (Treue, Anständigkeit, Ehrlichkeit). Wolfgang kritisiert die Beliebigkeit dieser Definition. Stefan sieht Weimer als Gallionsfigur eines verlotternden Untergangs, der Chaos als Normalität verkauft. Weimers Buch wird analysiert: Er beklagt den Niedergang linker Weltanschauungen, interpretiert Böckenförde und Max Weber eigenwillig, fordert eine minimale Gesellschaft, kritisiert die "Bemutterung" durch den Staat (z.B. Verkehrsüberwachung) und sieht die Steuererklärung als "Marsch ins Freiheitsdefizit". Diese libertären Züge werden kritisiert. Weimer beklagt eine "Kleinkariertheit" durch Compliance-Regeln, die Geschenke und Geschäftsessen erschweren. Wolfgang hält das für Jammern auf hohem Niveau. Weimer stellt das Individuum über die Gesellschaft, fordert aber gleichzeitig Patriotismus und unterscheidet zwischen staatsbürgerlichem und natürlichem (Abstammungs-) Vaterland. Diese Widersprüche und die Nähe zum Ethnopluralismus werden diskutiert. Weimer bezieht sich positiv auf Oswald Spengler und beklagt die "biologische Selbstaufgabe" Europas durch niedrige Geburtenraten, spricht vom "eigenen Blut". Er kritisiert die Fokussierung auf die "dunkle Seite" des Kolonialismus in Lehrplänen. Die "Tugendrepublik" der "Gutmenschen" mit ihren Verboten (Fleisch, Kaminfeuer) und Quoten wird angeprangert. Am Ende plädiert er für eine Rechristianisierung Europas durch die Kultur. Abschließend äußern sich Michael Bröker und Micky Beisenherz zur Personalie. 02:20:54 Salon-Anmerkungen Es wird auf den kostenpflichtigen "Salon"-Teil des Podcasts hingewiesen, der die Sendung finanziert. Hörer werden gebeten, den Podcast zu teilen und zu bewerten, um die Sichtbarkeit zu erhöhen. Im nächsten Salon werden die Bücher "Abundance: How We Build a Better Future" von Esra Klein & Derek Thompson und "Die Welt nach dem Kapital" von Albert Wenger besprochen. Es wird erklärt, wie man den Salon über Steady, Patreon oder Apple Podcasts abonnieren kann. Man kann den Salon auch verschenken. Wolfgang kündigt Live-Termine in Zürich und Stuttgart an. Stefan erwähnt einen Termin in Mainz. Leseempfehlungen für den nächsten Salon werden gegeben. 02:26:38 Trumps Fanboys reden über Trumps Zölle Das Hauptthema ist Donald Trumps Zollpolitik. Es wird betont, dass dies seine "Signature Policy" ist, über die er seit Jahrzehnten spricht. Die aktuelle Situation mit Handelskriegen und Marktverwerfungen wird als direkte Folge dieser Politik gesehen. David McWilliams beschreibt Trumps Zoll-Formel als amateurhaft und inkompetent, basierend auf einer Formel, die ökonomisch keinen Sinn ergibt. Wolfgang erläutert den Unterschied zwischen früherer politischer Inkompetenz, die von Institutionen abgefangen wurde, und der heutigen Situation, in der Inkompetenz direkt an den Schalthebeln sitzt und zu chaotischer Politik führt. Stefan ergänzt, dass die Politik normalerweise durch die Verwaltung abgeschottet ist, dieser Mechanismus aber unter Trump zusammenbricht. Trumps Fokus auf Zölle ignoriert die Stärke Amerikas im Bereich digitaler Dienstleistungen und das Dollar-Privileg. Die Reaktion der Kapitalmärkte (steigende Zinsen für US-Staatsanleihen) wird als einziger wirksamer "Check" gegen Trumps Politik diskutiert, da sie die Staatsverschuldung und Kredite verteuert. Trump-Anhänger im "All In"-Podcast versuchen, die Politik zu rechtfertigen, räumen aber ein, dass das versprochene Wirtschaftswachstum ausbleibt. Hoss und Hopf sehen Trumps Handeln als Beschleunigung einer unvermeidbaren Rezession, damit er am Ende seiner Amtszeit als Gewinner dasteht – eine Logik, die als absurd kritisiert wird. Die Notwendigkeit, die heimische Landwirtschaft (Sojabauern) mit Milliardensummen zu subventionieren, um Wählerstimmen zu sichern, wird erwähnt. China reagiert mit der Drohung, westliche IP-Rechte zu ignorieren und Produkte selbst billiger anzubieten. Der Personalmangel in wichtigen Sektoren (Energieversorgung, U-Boot-Bau) in den USA wird thematisiert. Ben Shapiro plädiert für "Rugged Individualism" und lehnt staatliche Eingriffe ab, obwohl der Staat gleichzeitig Grenzen schützen soll. 04:10:24 Krieg: Gaza, Ukraine Die Berichterstattung über den Gaza-Krieg wird kritisiert. Es sei schwierig, seriöse Bilder und Informationen zu erhalten, ohne auf antisemitische Kanäle zu stoßen, die das Leid in Gaza zwar zeigen, aber gleichzeitig Hetze verbreiten. Seriöse Medien würden sich scheuen, die dramatische Lage abzubilden, was wiederum Antisemiten Vorschub leiste. Die Tagesthemen berichten über einen israelischen Angriff auf ein Krankenhaus, bei dem eine Hamas-Kommandozentrale getroffen worden sei, wobei jedoch medizinisches Gerät zerstört wurde. Diese Darstellung wird mit der Berichterstattung über den Ukraine-Krieg verglichen, wo eine solche Übernahme der russischen Darstellung undenkbar wäre. Ein Bericht über die Tötung von palästinensischen Sanitätern durch die israelische Armee, deren Leichen verscharrt wurden, wird erwähnt. Israel weist die Vorwürfe zurück und behauptet ohne Belege, es seien Hamas-Mitglieder gewesen. Ein israelischer Reserve-Offizier äußert sich besorgt über den zunehmenden Einfluss rechtsextremer Minister auf die Armee. Es wird die Entkopplung von Soldaten vom zivilen Leben und der Politik im Krieg thematisiert, illustriert durch Aussagen eines ukrainischen Soldaten, der nur noch seinen Frontabschnitt und seine Leute sieht. Die psychischen Folgen und die Verrohung durch den Krieg werden angesprochen. 04:28:46 EU und Aserbaidschan Die EU-Außenbeauftragte Kaya Kallas besucht Aserbaidschan. Stefan merkt an, dass Kallas im Westen kaum bekannt ist, in Russland aber neben Trump als Hauptgegnerin wahrgenommen wird. Kallas bezeichnet China als Schlüssel für den russischen Krieg, da es Russland wirtschaftlich und mit Dual-Use-Gütern unterstütze. Ihr Besuch in Baku wird kritisiert, da Aserbaidschan unter Präsident Aliyev einen Angriffskrieg gegen Armenier in Bergkarabach geführt hat, die Zivilgesellschaft unterdrückt und politische Gefangene hält. Dustin Hoffmann wirft der EU-Kommission vor, Werte zu ignorieren und sich brutalen Diktatoren anzubieten. Kallas lobt Aserbaidschan hingegen als wichtigen und verlässlichen Energiepartner, der der EU geholfen habe, sich von russischer Energie zu lösen. Es wird enthüllt, dass Aserbaidschan russisches Gas an die EU weiterleitet und somit von den Sanktionen profitiert. Kallas spricht dennoch von gemeinsamen Werten wie Menschenrechten und Rechtsstaatlichkeit und begrüßt eine Einigung im Friedensprozess mit Armenien. Der aserbaidschanische Außenminister Bayramov betont die guten Beziehungen zur Türkei und kritisiert die Biden-Administration als zu pro-armenisch. Er zeigt sich hoffnungsvoll bezüglich der neuen Trump-Administration. Aserbaidschan pflegt trotz seiner muslimischen Prägung enge Beziehungen zu Israel, bezieht Waffen und liefert Erdöl. Das Verhältnis zu Russland wird als "normal" beschrieben, wobei man die territoriale Integrität der Ukraine respektiere. Aserbaidschan wird als Beispiel für neue globale Akteure gesehen, die pragmatisch mit allen Seiten kooperieren und Einmischung ablehnen. 04:48:15 Neue Zeitrechnung Der Erfolgscoach Ed Mylett präsentiert ein Konzept zur Zeitmanipulation: Er teilt seinen Tag in drei 6-Stunden-Abschnitte (6-12 Uhr, 12-18 Uhr, 18-24 Uhr) und gewinnt so angeblich 21 Tage pro Woche. Wolfgang entlarvt dies als simple Einführung von Doppelschichten. Stefan meint, dass KI solche individuellen Zeitrechnungen problemlos in Standardzeit übersetzen könnte. 04:51:08 Neue Sportideologie Es wird eine aufkeimende Gegenbewegung zur rechten Vereinnahmung von Fitness und Männlichkeit beobachtet. Als Beispiel dient ein Fitness-Influencer, der in einem Video klarstellt, dass das Heben von Gewichten einen nicht zum "Warrior" oder Beschützer macht. Er kritisiert "Douchbags wie Andrew Tate", die Männern einreden, Frauen und Immigranten seien ihre Probleme. Er analysiert, wie rechte Ideologien über harmlos erscheinende Aktivitäten wie Fitness normalisiert und Fitness selbst radikalisiert wird. Der wahre Feind seien nicht andere Gruppen, sondern die Superreichen und CEOs, die von der Ungleichheit profitieren ("The enemy is up"). Er ruft Männer dazu auf, sich als Arbeiterklasse zu erkennen und sich nicht länger von den Eliten spalten zu lassen, um echten Wandel zu ermöglichen. Wolfgang hofft, dass solche Stimmen lauter werden. Stefan erwartet einen großen Backlash gegen die aktuelle politische Situation, die von Partikularinteressen und offensichtlicher Dummheit geprägt sei. Die Rolle von superreichen Geldgebern und Netzwerken innerhalb der CDU wird angesprochen. Komm' in den Salon. Es gibt ihn via Webplayer & RSS-Feed (zum Hören im Podcatcher deiner Wahl, auch bei Apple Podcasts und Spotify). Wenn du Salon-Stürmer bist, lade weitere Hörer von der Gästeliste ein. full Wolfgang und Stefan besprechen den April 2025 no Stefan Schulz & Wolfgang M. Schmitt 18258

Episode 14 of The Basic Income Show! We cover the results of Germany's unconditional basic income (UBI) pilot!Chapters:00:00 Welcome to The Basic Income Show00:21 Background to Germany's 3-year UBI Pilot09:45 Effects of UBI on Employment and Labor24:09 Effects of UBI on Mental Health and Wellbeing40:11 Effects of UBI on Financial Stability and Behavior1:00:38 Effects of UBI on Socializing and Community Participation1:09:02 Potential Impact of UBI Pilot Results on German Politics1:17:01 That Tumblr Post About Not Even Trying for UBI1:24:36 Jeff Atwood is Putting $50M into Rural UBI Pilots1:28:15 Lawsuit in California Against Racially Targeted Cash Programs1:30:58 NYC Mayoral Candidate Pitches Largest UBI Pilot Yet1:33:12 Rashida Tlaib Introduces Bill for Cash for Homeless Young Adults1:35:53 Cook County Guaranteed Basic Income Pilot Results1:39:38 Tennessee General Assembly Considering Statewide UBI Bill1:42:48 Elon Musk's Daughter Vivian's Support for UBI as a Human Right1:48:50 Concluding RemarksSummary:In this episode of the Basic Income Show we discuss the results of Germany's big 3-year 1,200 euro a month basic income experiment, which includes its effects on employment, mental health, financial stability, and social involvement. The study, which focused on younger adults age 21 to 40 revealed significant improvements in job satisfaction, career mobility, and overall well-being among participants. It also highlighted the positive impact of basic income on financial behavior, with recipients saving more and demonstrating increased generosity. The discussion emphasizes the importance of financial security in fostering personal growth and community engagement. The discussion then moves on to other recent news including Jeff Atwood pledging $50 million of his wealth for three big rural basic income pilots.German UBI pilot findings with charts:https://www.pilotprojekt-grundeinkommen.de/en-See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on Bluesky:https://bsky.app/profile/scottsantens.com/post/3lckzcleo7s24See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on X: https://x.com/scottsantens/status/1766213155967955332For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faqDonate to the Income To Support All Foundation to support UBI projects:https://www.itsafoundation.orgSubscribe to the ITSA Newsletter for monthly UBI news:https://itsanewsletter.beehiiv.com/subscribeVisit Basic Income Today for daily UBI news:https://basicincometoday.comSign up for the Comingle waitlist for voluntary UBI:https://www.comingle.us-Follow Scott:https://linktr.ee/scottsantensFollow Conrad:https://bsky.app/profile/theubiguy.bsky.socialhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/conradshaw/Follow Josh:https://bsky.app/profile/misterjworth.bsky.socialhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/joshworth/-Special thanks to: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, David Ruark, Tricia Garrett, A.W.R., Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, John Steinberger, Laurel gillespie, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Robert Collins, Joanna Zarach, Mgmguy, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Steve Roth, Miki Phagan, Walter Schaerer, Albert Daniel Brockman, Natalie Foster, Joe Ballou, Arjun , S, Jocelyn Hockings, Mark Donovan, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, Braden Ferrin , Juro Antal, Austin Begin, Deanna McHugh, Stephen Castro-Starkey, Nikolaus Rath, and all my other patrons for their support.If you'd like to see your name here in future video descriptions, you can do so by becoming a patron on Patreon at the UBI Producer level or above.Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens/membership

Albert Wenger ist Managing Partner bei Union Square Ventures. Der New Yorker Wagniskapitalgeber hat sich durch frühe Investments in Firmen wie Twitter, Coinbase, Etsy und Duolingo einen Namen gemacht. Im OMR Podcast spricht der Deutsch-Amerikaner über seine These, dass Aufmerksamkeit in Zukunft wichtiger sein wird als Kapital. Er verrät außerdem, wieso US-Präsident Donald Trump in einigen Punkten die richtigen Themen adressiert, aber dennoch gestoppt werden muss beim Angriff auf die Demokratie – und was man von der Serie Star Trek aus den 1960er Jahren lernen kann.

Albert Wenger, Partner bei Union Square Ventures, einem der erfolgreichsten Risikokapitalfonds weltweit, diskutiert mit Fabian über die großen gesellschaftlichen, wirtschaftlichen und technologischen Herausforderungen unserer Zeit.  Er teilt seine Perspektiven zu Themen wie der Zukunft der Arbeit, dem bedingungslosen Grundeinkommen und der Rolle Europas im globalen Wettbewerb. Außerdem erfährts du, warum wir an einem Wendepunkt stehen, der vergleichbar mit dem Übergang vom Agrarzeitalter ins Industriezeitalter ist, und was Politik, Wirtschaft und Startups tun müssen, um diese Transformation erfolgreich zu gestalten. Was du lernst: Die Herausforderungen des 21. Jahrhunderts: Warum wir ein neues Gesellschaftssystem brauchen, um mit KI, Klimawandel und Migration umzugehen Die Bedeutung von günstiger, verfügbarer Energie für den Wohlstand von Gesellschaften Bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen: Wie ein Grundeinkommen helfen kann, die Automatisierung und den Wandel der Arbeitswelt zu meistern Warum bestehende Sozialsysteme überholt sind und welche Anpassungen notwendig wären Startups und Innovation: Warum Product-Market-Fit das wichtigste Element für den Erfolg eines Startups ist Wie Gründer auf Marktveränderungen reagieren und große Probleme lösen können Technologie und Macht: Wie KI die Gesellschaft radikal verändert und warum jede Firma eine KI-Strategie braucht Warum offene APIs und Interoperabilität entscheidend für Innovation und Wettbewerb sind Führung und Skalierung: Wie Gründer mit ihren Unternehmen wachsen und von Machern zu Leadern werden Die Bedeutung von Vision und Motivation für ein wachsendes Team ALLES ZU UNICORN BAKERY: https://zez.am/unicornbakery  Mehr zu Albert: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertwenger/  Website: https://www.usv.com/  Zur Lesung am 03.04.2025: https://berlin.fotografiska.com/de/events/book-launch-die-welt-nach-dem-kapital Join our Founder Tactics Newsletter: 2x die Woche bekommst du die Taktiken der besten Gründer der Welt direkt ins Postfach: https://www.tactics.unicornbakery.de/  Kapitel: (00:00:00) Die Deutsche Bundestagswahl in Bezug auf Startup & Wirtschaft - was hätte besser laufen können? (00:06:30) Wie könnte die Gesellschaft wieder näher zusammenrücken? (00:11:32) Alberts Forderungen an die aktuellen politischen Verantwortlichen in Deutschland (00:15:32) Die Auswirkungen von Trump auf Startups & Wirtschaft in den USA (00:20:15) Alberts Einschätzung von Unternehmern in der Regierung am Bsp. Musk (00:29:04) Kontrolle vs. Selbstbestimmung in Social Media & Co, (00:34:34) Bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen: Chance oder Utopie? (00:43:57) Wie würde sich die Arbeit durch bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen verändern? (00:51:52) Alberts Prozess, um sich seine Vision von der Welt zu erarbeiten  (00:55:59) Wie challenged Albert seine eigenen Thesen? (01:01:08) Wie hilfreich ist jahrzehntelange Erfahrung? (01:03:34) Was macht nach Alberts Erfahrungsschatz wirklich erfolgreiche Startups aus?

So what to J.D. Vance's highly controversial speech at the Paris AI Summit this week? According to That Was The Week's Keith Teare, it was “a breath of fresh air”. Others will argue it was just more MAGA putridity designed to alienate our European friends. Some tech notables, like Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger, take both views simultaneously, acknowledging on the one hand that Vance was correct to push back against “regulatory capture”, but on the other that Vance was “mistaking jingoism and wishful thinking for true global leadership”. Here are the 5 KEEN ON takeaways from this weekly tech round-up with Teare:* J.D. Vance's Paris AI Summit speech marked a potential turning point in US-Europe AI relations. His message prioritizing AI opportunity over safety prompted European regulators to pull back on some restrictions, with the EU dropping its AI liability directive and the UK rebranding its AI Safety Institute.* Anthropic's growth is accelerating, with projections of $34.5 billion in revenue by 2027. They're currently outperforming OpenAI in some areas, particularly coding, and are expected to release a major new AI model soon.* The Musk-OpenAI conflict has intensified, with Musk's $100 billion bid for OpenAI's non-profit arm being rejected. Meanwhile, OpenAI is planning to incorporate its Q* (Q-star) model into a new GPT-5 release that will combine reasoning, operational capabilities, and multimedia functions.* The AI industry is seeing rapid advancement in humanoid robotics, with companies like Apptronics and Figure receiving significant valuations. Figure's valuation jumped from $2 billion to $39 billion after securing a major automotive partnership.* Traditional political alignments are becoming less relevant in tech policy, with Teare arguing that economic growth and technological progress are transcending traditional left-right divisions. This is exemplified by some progressives like Reid Hoffman embracing AI optimism while traditional conservatives champion technological progress. FULL TRANSCRIPTAndrew Keen: Hello everybody. It is Saturday, February 15th, 2025, a day after Valentine's Day. It's been a day or a week dominated by a certain J.D. Vance. Yesterday, he made a very controversial speech in Munich, which apparently laid bare the collapse of the transatlantic alliance. He attacked Europe over free speech and migration. So he's not the most popular fellow in Europe. And a couple of days before that, he spoke in Paris at the AI Summit, a classic Parisian event talking about summits. Macron, of course, also spoke there. According to The Wall Street Journal, Vance's counts were good. The German, of course, being a conservative newspaper. According to The Washington Post, which is a progressive newspaper, he pushed the "America First" AI agenda. Others, like Fast Company, ask what to make of Vance's speech at the Paris AI conference. According to my friend Keith Teare, the author of That Was The Week newsletter, the speech was a breath of fresh air. I was going to call you Marx, Keith. That would have been a true Freudian error. What do you admire about Vance's speech? Why is it a breath of fresh air?Keith Teare: Well, it's in the European context that it's a breath of fresh air. I think from an American perspective, he didn't really say anything new. We already think of AI in the way he expressed it. But in Europe, the dominant discussion around AI is still focused on safety. That is to say, AI is dangerous. We have to control it. We need to regulate it. And as a result of that, most of the American developments in AI are not even launched in Europe, because in order to be made available to citizens, it has to go through various regulatory layers. And that slows everything down. So in the context, Vance stood up on the platform in front of all of the people doing that regulation and told them basically, rubbed their noses in it, saying how self-destructive their approach was for European success. His opening lines were, "I'm not here to talk about AI safety. I'm here to talk about AI opportunity." And in the days since, there's been quite a big reaction in Europe to the speech, mostly positive from normal people and adjusting policy at the regulatory level. So it's quite a profound moment. And he carried himself very well. I mean, he was articulate, thoughtful.Andrew Keen: Yeah. You say his speech marks a crucial inflection point. I wonder, though, if Vance was so self-interested as a MAGA person, why would he want even to encourage Europe to develop? I mean, why not just let it be like social media or the Internet where American companies dominate? Is there anything in America's interest that the Trump-Musk alliance would benefit from strong European AI companies?Keith Teare: Well, from strong European AI openness, yes. I don't think Vance thinks for a minute there are any European companies that will be able to compete in that open environment. And so most of his purpose is economic. He's basically saying open up so that our guys can sell stuff to you and the money will flow back to the U.S. as it has done with Amazon and Google and every other major tech innovation in recent years. So it's basically an economic speech masquerading as a policy speech.Andrew Keen: I wonder if there's an opportunity for Europe given the clear divisions now that exist between the U.S. and Europe. I wonder whether there's an opportunity for Europe to start looking more sympathetically at Chinese AI companies. Did Vance warn in his speech, did he warn Europe about turning to the Chinese, the other potential partner?Keith Teare: Yeah. There are two parts of his speech I didn't really incorporate in the editorial. The first was a subplot all around China, which he didn't name, but he called "dictatorships." We don't want dictatorships leading in AI. And then there was another subplot, which was all about free speech and openness and not censoring, which was aimed at the Europeans, of course, and the Chinese.Andrew Keen: Discussion of their free speech, or at least it's their version of free speech, isn't it?Keith Teare: I think the funny thing is in order to be consistent, they're going to have to allow all free speech. And they will, because they know that. And so, weirdly, the Republicans become the free speech party, which makes no sense historically. But it is happening. And I thought there were a lot of interesting things in that speech that symbolized a very confident America. However, the reason America is doing this is because it's weak, which is a paradox.Andrew Keen: Politically weak or militarily weak or economically weak?Keith Teare: Not militarily - it's super strong, but economically it's relatively declining against China. It's the next Europe. America is the next Europe. China is the next America. And in that context, America's brashness sounds positive to our ears and to mine as well, because it's pro-optimism, pro-progress. But actually, it's coming from a place of weakness, which you see in the tariffs and the anti-Chinese stuff.Andrew Keen: And I want to come to the Munich speech where Vance was pretty clear. Trump's always been clear that if there is an opportunity for Ukraine, Ukrainians have to work for American access to its raw materials, minerals, etc. Whether America's foreign policy now is becoming identical to that of China, helping other countries as long as they provide them with essential resources.Keith Teare: Yeah, exactly. By the way, one of our commentators, David John William Bailey on LinkedIn, is saying we need to explain this. He says he's also attempting "$1 trillion mob-style shakedown." Anyone defending this is either deluded or only reads hard-right propaganda.Andrew Keen: Well, but Keith, you've always claimed to be a progressive. You always claim to be a man of the left. You have a background in left-wing communist activism. Now you're on board with Vance. You were on board the week before with Musk. You're ambivalent about Trump. What does this say to you? What does this suggest about you personally, or is the reality of politics these days that the supposed conservatives like Vance are actually progressive in their own way and the supposed progressives in the Democratic Party are actually conservative?Keith Teare: Well, as you know, I don't like those labels anymore because I think they're trying to fit a modern narrative into an old set of boxes. I think, broadly speaking, Vance is an economic progressive. He wants the economy to grow. He wants GDP to grow.Andrew Keen: Some people say everyone's a progressive in that sense if they want GDP to grow.Keith Teare: Yeah, but not very many people can do it. So I think they really are serious that they believe innovation in tech and GDP are correlated. And I believe GDP and social good are correlated. And so if you really want to be a progressive that wants people to have a good life, you have to support economic growth. And I think Vance does. And I think that's what his narrative is about. He's basically telling Europe that they're going to get the opposite, which has been true, by the way, now for a decade. European GDP per capita is as low as $35,000 a year. American is $85,000 a year.Andrew Keen: That's an astonishing shift. And this is going to be remembered, I think, as an important week in the American-European relationship. You said that the aftermath of the Vance speech has been remarkable and telling. The EU dropped its AI liability directive. The UK rebranded its AI Safety Institute. OpenAI removed diversity commitments. So a speech is now having an impact, particularly this Paris speech when it comes to AI policy, both in Europe but also in the US as well.Keith Teare: Yeah, I wouldn't give too much credit just to the speech. I think the speech is symptomatic of a lot of zeitgeist change and everyone is getting in line with the new zeitgeist, which is tech is good, AI is good, censorship is bad.Andrew Keen: Well, I don't know if that's - I'm not sure I would call that the zeitgeist, Keith. I mean, you're talking in Palo Alto, where that's always been the zeitgeist. I think if anything, in universities and book publishing, the reverse is true.Keith Teare: Yeah. So I'm an avid MSNBC watcher. I watch Morning Joe every morning with Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. And so I'm kind of imbued with the liberal narrative compared to what's going on. And what's happened is a very rapid change from the days after the election when the liberal narrative was "we need to look at ourselves" has now become a narrative that "the judges have to save us from the administration." The administration is not democratic, even though it was elected, and we've got to rely on judges because there's no one else to rely on.Andrew Keen: That doesn't mean the zeitgeist has shifted. It just means that the people on one side have shifted their focus, but they still are not sympathetic to Trump, Vance, Musk.Keith Teare: I think there is increasing sympathy. I think you're going to be surprised. I think if an election was held today, Trump would win by more.Andrew Keen: Well, he would certainly win by more if he was running against Harris. That's another question. So it's been another remarkable week for AI content. One piece that you pick out, which I thought was interesting, is from somebody called Elizabeth Yin. Nice to have a female author - too many of our authors are male. Maybe I'm being too woke. But the AI takeover, according to Yin - no one's jobs are safe. This isn't exactly news, is it?Keith Teare: No, she's really summarizing what we've been talking about in That Was The Week for quite a while. But I thought it was a good summary. And she gives some kind of prioritization. There's a section that talks about regulated professions, human-centric jobs, creative and entrepreneurial jobs, energy and infrastructure and distribution. And she then breaks down what she thinks the main impact of AI is going to be. She kind of leaves it where you kind of want more from her because she doesn't thoroughly go through all of these. But she's a VC, she does early-stage investing. She's very good. And the one thing she says, which I don't think anyone's going to disagree with, is "fewer workers more." I was at an event this week in San Francisco where there was a panel with some VCs and entrepreneurs on exactly the same questions she's asking - where the cuts are going to come first or what sectors are going to be most dramatically affected in the short term. And people weren't entirely clear. But the one area that comes up is healthcare - that's the lowest hanging fruit at the moment.Keith Teare: Yeah, there's a funding event this week from a company that applies AI to biology, specifically cancer programming - anti-cancer cells. So you're going to see AI in everything. And it's that will lead to an acceleration of invention for sure, because the individual is still really important. By the way, there's another article about that this week. The individual now has an army of talent in AI, able to help them make progress. It just speeds everything up.Andrew Keen: Yeah. So what other AI news in the summary? There's a couple, 2 or 3 pieces on Anthropic. I use Anthropic. I like it. Their growth soars to 34.5 billion in 2027 revenue. That's of course, speculative. And they announce their next major AI model could arrive within weeks, Anthropic competitive with OpenAI.Keith Teare: Yes, and they're better than OpenAI at some things. They're already better than OpenAI at coding. If you put it in context, those three Anthropic pieces sit alongside the Google piece and the OpenAI pieces. And what it tells you is we've seen a major acceleration of product roadmaps and plans in the last couple of weeks, mainly in response to the DeepSea news, I think.Andrew Keen: Yeah, it's interesting that DeepSea was a one-week wonder, but there are no headlines at least from you on DeepSea. It seems to have stimulated change as you suggest, rather than change things in its own way. And then your Google pieces - interesting that they're rolling out a new memory feature for Gemini AI, allowing recall of past conversations, which is increasingly getting to the point where these AIs, if not human or sentient, certainly are able to remember things and have conversations.Keith Teare: Yeah, and that becomes much easier once you go from LLMs to other LLMs with agents. An agent is a piece of software that speaks to another LLM to complete a task. And so you could have in software a memory agent or a recall agent whose only job is to say, "Is this question been asked recently and what did I look at the last time?" and bring it into the context for whatever the current question is. And I think we're going to see more and more of this. I've spent most of my week building a multi-agent system for my company, Single Rank. I have a question taker agent that you ask a question of. It then farms out to a database agent or a chart drawing agent or an expert reasoning agent. They all have different jobs and they come back and give their answers to the original agent, and then it gives the answer to the user. So this collaborative agents concept is becoming very real now. And memory is one of those - I think Perplexity is the most advanced.Andrew Keen: Yeah. We were talking about Perplexity before we went live. You convinced me - I use Anthropic but you said for me it's probably wiser to use Perplexity where I still have all the access to Anthropic, but it adds a layer and some more intelligence. As I said, I was at an event this week where one of the venture people from OpenAI was there who talked about Sam Altman's projection that in the not too distant future there'll be billion-dollar individual startups. Are you suggesting, Keith, that's not that far on the horizon, given the power of AI that individuals can do all and do the entire startup without needing the help of anybody else?Keith Teare: Depends on the startup. If the startup is mainly software, that's probably true. But if it needs account management and billing and all the others...Andrew Keen: But eventually all that stuff will get - that's the easy part, isn't it? You can always get that done.Keith Teare: It's the hard bit right now, like reconciling invoices to receipts. I'm not very good at that. So I think it's coming with two things: rising agents and then agents that can use tools to follow, do actions, if you will. So it's coming and it's probably coming this year and it'll accelerate. So, yes, it will get there. I think the headline of a single founder of $1 billion company is just a headline. But it's directionally correct.Andrew Keen: It does. And it does reiterate Elizabeth Yin's point that no jobs are safe - in finance, in HR, in coding, in content. I mean, I'm using it more and more to summarize these conversations. I don't need a large editorial staff. So clearly dramatic change. And in fact, your startup of the week, Keith, the robotics startup Apptronics, is in talks for new funding at an almost $40 billion valuation - a hardware company. Does this speak of the reality of this new AI revolution? That it's not just theory, it's practice now?Keith Teare: Yeah. Well, Figure has gone from 2 billion to 39 billion in less than a year. And why? Because one of the major car companies signed an agreement with it to have these robots on production lines in its factories. And the start of the week, by the way, is Apptronics, which is a different humanoid robotics company, also raising a lot of money but slightly earlier in its journey than Figure.Andrew Keen: It's my mistake - I have to admit I thought it was Figure so that's my error. I'm going to add an Apptronics image to this content. I'm rather embarrassed.Keith Teare: You've probably already got one. That said, they both speak to the same truth, which is AI is going to manifest itself in the physical world in the form of humanoid robots sooner rather than later.Andrew Keen: And that was another of Tim Draper's - he was one of the speakers at this event I went to in San Francisco. I know he's an investor in your firm. That was his big prediction. So Apptronics is building robots for humans. Are they just a kind of earlier version of Figure in some ways?Keith Teare: An earlier version, possibly more advanced in concept because they started later when the software gets better by the week. So the later you start, the more advanced the software is that you can leverage. And so we're not going to see an end to this. There's going to be a lot more of it. I think humanoid robots are really interesting because the physical world is built for humans. You know, steps, ladders, everything.Andrew Keen: But I'm not sure that would be the case, especially when it comes to, say, self-driving cars and roads. That's going to change as well, isn't it?Keith Teare: Well, you still have roads because they still are...Andrew Keen: You still have roads. But I'm saying the roads themselves will become more and more suited to self-driving cars as opposed to human-driving ones.Yeah. You would hope the roads would become more intelligent and communicate to the cars, but that seems to be much further off.Andrew Keen: But I'm sure the Chinese will do that. Not the Americans, not even in San Francisco. Meanwhile, there is still lots of tech news. There's this open feud between Sam Altman at OpenAI and Elon Musk. Musk this week had a bid to buy OpenAI for around $100 billion. Is this just sensational, meaningless stuff? Is this froth or is it meaningful in the long run? The Musk-Altman fight?Keith Teare: Well, the specifics of this are super interesting because it's very clever of Musk. What Musk is offering to buy is not OpenAI. He's offering to buy the not-for-profit part of OpenAI. Now Altman is trying to put a value on that not-for-profit because he wants it to go away, or at least be subsumed. And he's trying to do it at a very low valuation so that the stakeholders in the not-for-profit don't get much. So Musk put a super high price on the not-for-profit to force the board of OpenAI to put a proper value on it as it transitions or to stop transitioning - one or the other. And I think if I was on the board of OpenAI now, I'd be very worried. They rejected his offer yesterday, by the way, but that will not be the end.Andrew Keen: What is Musk doing? Is it just because he hates Altman and he's annoyed that he was one of the co-founders and he's no longer involved? Because if he does indeed do what he seems to want to do, which is weaken, even undermine OpenAI - I mean, the real winners are probably Anthropic and Google then rather than Musk.Keith Teare: Well, and Grok - he has his own Grok xAI.Andrew Keen: But is xAI a real player? I mean, he can get massive valuations, but how does it compare with Anthropic or Gemini?Keith Teare: It's good. I mean, it's very good. And the next version, rumors are that it's going to be a top performer.Andrew Keen: Certainly not a top - you said it's good, but it's not...Keith Teare: It depends on what for. But it's certainly as good or better than DeepSea already.Andrew Keen: So there is a method to Musk's madness. It's not just about hating Altman and OpenAI.Keith Teare: Well, because it's Musk, there's more than one thing going on. He has economic interests in xAI, for sure. He's also really pissed off with Altman because he considers that Altman basically stole the OpenAI idea from him, which is not really true when you get into the facts. But he believes that. And not only that, but lied by making it not-for-profit and then turning it into a for-profit when he promised he wouldn't. So Musk basically feels like he's got the moral high ground and that gives him the energy to fight. Altman is clearly tired of the whole thing. He's just trying to do what he's trying to do, you know, and having a light shone on it.Andrew Keen: So it's the first time you have articulated some concern about OpenAI. You've always been quite bullish. Are you suggesting that your bullishness in the past is changing a little bit?Keith Teare: I don't think so, because I think this is a bit of a sideshow. The biggest news this week about OpenAI is the decision to abandon the Q* model - not abandon it, but incorporate it into a new GPT-5 later this year.Andrew Keen: So how would a unified next generation release work? Which would be what? Everything together?Keith Teare: It would do reasoning, operational stuff, actions, and it would do what other LLMs do, including being capable of video and image production all in one, and probably will retain its position as the best across all of those different things. So I don't see that anything bad is going to happen to OpenAI. I do think Musk can be an irritant and it could force them into corporate decisions about valuation and merging their different components that aren't to their liking. That could happen.Keen: My interview of the week, which you were kind enough to include in this week's newsletter, is with Greg Betta. Most people won't be familiar with Greg Betta. He's a tech writer, journalist based in the North Bay San Francisco, but he's also the coauthor with Reid Hoffman, who everybody knows, of a new book called "Super Agency: What Could Possibly Go Right With Our AI Future?" And from a progressive point of view, it's optimistic about AI. So I guess Hoffman is one of the few progressives, Keith, who actually is optimistic about AI. Is that fair?Keith Teare: Yeah. He really represents that part of the liberal spectrum that was in the New York Times article last week suggesting the Democrats should embrace technology and innovation. And the book is symptomatic of that. I didn't have a chance to listen to the interview - give us a flavor of what he said.Andrew Keen: It's standard - it's like listening to you. He believes that this progress will ultimately benefit. He distinguishes himself a bit too, I thought, created some light between him and Hoffman. I think he sees Hoffman as being slightly more optimistic than him. But it's about super agency - you and I have talked endlessly about agency, about humans being able to shape their lives. And of course, that's the big debate. For the critics, it's the AI that will shape us. For the optimists, AI will enable us to shape the world. It's an age-old argument, and it's not going away.Another figure on the left, if that's still a term that means anything, is Albert Wenger. He's your post of the week and he comes back to the Vance speech. He says praising this speech by Vance is mistaking jingoism and wishful thinking for true global leadership with a real vision of AI and humanity. I'm assuming you don't agree with Albert on this issue.Keith Teare: I do agree with him. I think I wanted to take a positive view of Vance's speech for his optimism in the context of Europe. It was a great speech. Albert's right that the American framing is entirely jingoistic. And AI isn't - AI is entirely global and humanistic. So there is a contradiction between a declining superpower being a champion of progress for its own nation versus what Albert would prefer, which is leadership that is truly global in nature.Andrew Keen: It's interesting that the first comment on Albert's tweet was from someone called "e/acc" who says this may be the most e/acc speech of all time. I didn't know what that meant - it meant effective accelerationism. Are you familiar with this term, Keith?Keith Teare: Yeah, this is the Marc Andreessen Peter Thiel framing against the philanthropists.Andrew Keen: So are you an effective accelerationist? Do you believe in...Keith Teare: Effective altruism versus effective acceleration? This is interesting. You say they're the same thing - I don't think anyone thinks that. But I think you might be right. But as long as you put them in the right order, I think if you get acceleration and growth and value, you're going to get a better life.Andrew Keen: Yeah, it's a play on effective altruism, but it's thinking in the same way that the world can become a better place.Keith Teare: Yeah. And the altruists wanted it to be done by good deeds as opposed to by economic progress.Andrew Keen: And even Albert acknowledges, like you, that there are aspects of the speech which in your language are a breath of fresh air. He said the only good point was the clear pushback against regulatory capture. Is it going to be effective? I mean, is it clear that the days of Lina Khan are over? Are we at the end of the period of regulatory capture, whether it's in Europe or the U.S.? As you say, one of the consequences of the speech was that the Europeans have taken a step back from regulation.Keith Teare: I would say the new Lina Khan is Elizabeth Warren. Lina Khan's gone. She's a sideshow. But Elizabeth Warren is still mainstream.Andrew Keen: Yeah, but a much, much older and perhaps less powerful figure, especially in Trump's America. I mean, Warren, she can talk a lot and get people annoyed, but she can't actually do anything. Whereas Lina Khan actually controlled regulatory capture - I mean, she was the head of the FTC.Keith Teare: Exactly. But I find Warren intensely irritating. It's amusing to me that Musk is asking how her net worth went from $200,000 to double-digit millions. And it's because she got subsidized by pharma, because she's pro-vax. And she's plugged into that.Andrew Keen: That's a controversial observation. You're saying anyone who gets supported by big Pharma is pro-vaccine? Does that mean that anyone who's anti-vax is not going to get the money? Most of us are pro-vax.Keith Teare: I'm totally pro-vax. But I'm just saying politicians like her typically get high net worth through serving stakeholders. And she is very against the credit card industry, for example. But she's not against pharma. So she's found her niche.Andrew Keen: Well, that's not a very generous interpretation, although it does suggest that when you give Elon Musk the keys to the Treasury and the IRS, then all these things are going to get revealed. And we should end with another interesting X from Albert, which I think gets to a lot of this. He said, "If you're young and capable and care about democracy, you should work for Doge." What do you make of that? I tend to think he's right.Keith Teare: I can't fully understand his meaning. In my brain, I'll interpret it the way I would, which is what I said last week.Andrew Keen: And to add to the quote, he said, "Offense is the best defense."Keith Teare: Yeah. The main threat to democracy is unelected bureaucrats blocking progress. I mean, if you think about it...Andrew Keen: Like Elizabeth Warren, in your view, at least.Keith Teare: No, I'd use the Obama example. Obama wanted to get a really good healthcare plan. And as soon as he was in office, he made speeches saying, "I won't be able to achieve what I want to achieve unless you, the people, are on the streets." Because Washington is averse to change. And it turned out that he had to make all kinds of compromises. And he ended up with what we today call Obamacare. But his experience was an experience of being blocked. And Trump basically has been through that himself. We're probably mostly thankful for that based on his first administration. He now is older, and he's not prepared...Andrew Keen: Suddenly older. I don't know about wiser.Keith Teare: He's not prepared to let the bureaucracy stand in his way. And Musk is his weapon. And there is something positive about a better, cheaper state and more democratic if the elected people can do what they said they were going to do.Andrew Keen: Yeah. And bring the expenses down. "If you're young and capable and care about democracy, you should work for Doge" - wise words from Albert Wenger. We will return to all these themes, Keith, in the future. Have a good week and we will see everybody again next week. Thanks so much.Keith Teare: Everyone. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 10 of The Basic Income Show! With the UK looking to invest heavily into AI, and Canada potentially electing a new leader worried about AI impacts, is UBI's window opening?Chapters:00:00 Welcome to The Basic Income Show01:14 The Los Angeles Fires14:25 Comingle as Disaster Aid29:48 Compton Guaranteed Basic Income Pilot Misinformation38:05 Bad UBI Take by Tony Robbins and Chris Williamson43:19 The Physics of Boot Straps 48:06 UK to Inject AI into its Veins1:01:33 Mark Carney Discussing AI and UBI?1:14:11 Former Mayor of Oakland's Op-ed About Trump and UBI1:21:50 41% of Employers to Reduce Staff by 20301:28:18 Robots to Work for $1/hr by 20351:31:20 John Deere Robot Lawnmowers1:33:38 Sam Altman Says AI Agents Will Arrive This Year1:35:15 Evidence for UBI as a Treatment for Tuberculosis1:47:20 Concluding RemarksSummary:This episode starts with discussion of the L.A. fires because Josh lives in Los Angeles and because UBI would do so much to help, and Comingle will soon help as a new method of disaster aid. From there we get into some of the disinformation about the results of the Compton Guaranteed Basic Income Pilot. No it didn't lead to increased menthol cigarette smoking and soda drinking. From there we go into how the UK is looking to go hard on AI with no mention of UBI, and how the race for a new leader of the Liberal Party in Canada has uplifted Mark Carney who has been talking a lot about the negative impacts of AI and the need for strong social supports like UBI. We continue our discussion with more recent automation headlines and end with a fascinating new study that highlights how impactful UBI will be for health by reducing diseases of poverty like tuberculosis.-See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on Bluesky:https://bsky.app/profile/scottsantens.com/post/3lckzcleo7s24See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on X: https://x.com/scottsantens/status/1766213155967955332For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faqDonate to the Income To Support All Foundation to support UBI projects:https://www.itsafoundation.orgSubscribe to the ITSA Newsletter for monthly UBI news:https://itsanewsletter.beehiiv.com/subscribeVisit Basic Income Today for daily UBI news:https://basicincometoday.comSign up for the Comingle waitlist for voluntary UBI:https://www.comingle.us-Follow Scott:https://linktr.ee/scottsantensFollow Conrad:https://bsky.app/profile/theubiguy.bsky.socialhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/conradshaw/Follow Josh:https://bsky.app/profile/misterjworth.bsky.socialhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/joshworth/-Special thanks to: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, David Ruark, Tricia Garrett, Zack Sargent, A.W.R., Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, John Steinberger, Bridget I Flynn, Laurel gillespie, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Robert Collins, Joanna Zarach, Mgmguy, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Miki Phagan, Albert Daniel Brockman, Natalie Foster, Joe Ballou, Arjun , Christopher Wroth, S, Jocelyn Hockings, Mark Donovan, Capitalists for Shared Income, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, Braden Ferrin , Juro Antal, Austin Begin, Deanna McHugh, Nikolaus Rath,, Laura Ashby, and all my other patrons for their support.If you'd like to see your name here in future video descriptions, you can do so by becoming a patron on Patreon at the UBI Producer level.Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens/membership

We are back in Munich at the DLD Conference, Europe's foremost tech gathering. DLD is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year and, to mark this occasion, we spoke to some of the leading DLD'ers about the tumultuous last twenty years. First up is the Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger, author of The World After Capital, who - in spite of all the problems of the last two decades - remains defiantly optimistic about the future. He emphasizes the need to move beyond "industrial age thinking" focused on physical capital toward solutions suited for the digital age, where attention is the primary constraint. On AI, Wenger believes we've reached a genuine breakthrough moment, suggesting a 10-15% chance of artificial superintelligence emerging within the next year or two. He advocates for open AI models rather than concentration among a few large tech companies, proposing copyright reforms to encourage transparency in AI development. Wenger also discusses his practical efforts to create positive change, including his universal basic income pilot in Hudson, NY, and initiatives promoting "steward ownership" to make capital more enabling and less extractive. He envisions a future where technological advances help solve climate change, disease, and food security challenges while restoring natural environments. Throughout our conversation, Wenger emphasizes the need for radical new experiments and policy approaches rather than incremental change, arguing that current systems and traditional political solutions are inadequate for addressing contemporary challenges.Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures (USV). Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company's sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). Albert is the author of the book The World After Capital. On his blog Continuations he writes about technology, science, philosophy and more. Albert graduated from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT. Albert is married to Gigi Danziger. They have three grown children and live in New York City.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 9 of The Basic Income Show! Suddenly it was drones, drones, drones, and just as suddenly it's all gone. Let's talk about how conspiracies are fueled by economic anxiety. Chapters: 00:00 Welcome to The Basic Income Show 02:05 Drone Hysteria and How UBI Can Reduce Conspiracy Beliefs 17:47 The Onion's Joke About Treating Welfare Recipients Like Dogs 21:53 Not Having Enough Versus Worrying About Not Having Enough 36:22 Real Stories From Basic Income Pilot Participants 59:58 Results from the Compton Basic Income Pilot 1:20:17 The Story Behind the Stop Hiring Humans Billboards in SF 1:27:13 A Rich Senate Candidate is Running on UBI in the Philippines 1:28:06 Will Bangladesh Test UBI in a Big Way? 1:29:39 Biden Wishes He Put His Name on the Stimulus Checks 1:30:18 New Yorkers May Get Inflation Rebate Stimulus Checks 1:33:28 Ken Paxton Stops Harris County Pilot AGAIN 1:36:23 OxFam America Supports Basic Income 1:39:12 Spokane May Do a Land Value Tax Experiment 1:44:29 Concluding Remarks Key Takeaways: Basic income can alleviate financial stress and cognitive load Conspiracy theories often arise from a lack of cognitive capacity Economic policies like UBI can counteract harmful belief traps Welfare systems can be paternalistic and burdensome Real-life stories illustrate the positive impact of basic income Cognitive resources are finite and can be depleted by financial worries The unspoken societal stressor is the constant need for money UBI provides individuals with the freedom to make choices that matter Cash assistance is more impactful than restrictive welfare programs Addressing financial insecurity can lead to better societal outcomes Cash transfers can aid in addiction recovery Universal programs like RX Kids show significant benefits Frequency of cash transfers impacts their effectiveness Basic income can reduce domestic violence rates Long-term effects of UBI can transform family dynamics AI marketing strategies can provoke necessary discussions about UBI Oxfam advocates for guaranteed basic income as a solution to poverty Land value tax could fund universal basic income initiatives - See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/scottsantens.com/post/3lckzcleo7s24 See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on X: https://x.com/scottsantens/status/1766213155967955332 For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq Donate to the Income To Support All Foundation to support UBI projects: https://www.itsafoundation.org Subscribe to the ITSA Newsletter for monthly UBI news: https://itsanewsletter.beehiiv.com/subscribe Visit Basic Income Today for daily UBI news: https://basicincometoday.com Follow Scott: https://linktr.ee/scottsantens Follow Conrad: https://bsky.app/profile/theubiguy.bsky.social Follow Josh: https://bsky.app/profile/misterjworth.bsky.social - Special thanks to: Gisele Huff, Gerald Huff Fund for Humanity, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, David Ruark, Tricia Garrett, Zack Sargent, A.W.R., Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, John Steinberger, Bridget I Flynn, Laurel gillespie, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Robert Collins, Joanna Zarach, Mgmguy, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Miki Phagan, Albert Daniel Brockman, Natalie Foster, Joe Ballou, Arjun , Christopher Wroth, S, Jocelyn Hockings, Mark Donovan, Capitalists for Shared Income, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, Braden Ferrin , Juro Antal, Austin Begin, Deanna McHugh, Nikolaus Rath, Laura Ashby, and all my other funders for their support. If you'd like to see your name here in future video descriptions, you can do so by becoming a patron on Patreon at the UBI Producer level. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens/membership

Episode 6 of The Basic Income Show! In this episode, Scott Santens, Conrad Shaw, and Josh Worth discuss recent developments in the world of Universal Basic Income (UBI). They celebrate ITSA Foundation's successful fundraising for key projects, explore the implications of Nobel Prize winners supporting UBI, and delve into the ongoing debate surrounding Oregon's proposed UBI measure. They discuss various aspects of Universal Basic Income (UBI), including public support, political influences, and recent developments in different regions. They explore the challenges of finding consensus on UBI, the impact of political decisions on public opinion, and the implications of recent polling data from the UK. The conversation also covers the cancellation of the Ontario basic income pilot, election strategies involving cash rebates, and the significance of attack ads in shaping perceptions. Additionally, they delve into the affordability of UBI, recent initiatives in Guyana, and Germany's upcoming UBI experiment. In this conversation, the speakers discuss the viability and implications of basic income, particularly in resource-poor areas. They explore the concept of money scarcity, the benefits of child allowances, and the Marica program in Brazil as a case study for local currency implementation. The conversation also addresses misconceptions about employment impacts of basic income, the empowerment it provides to workers, and the broader health and well-being benefits observed in UBI programs. New evidence from the Democratic Republic of the Congo further supports the positive socioeconomic changes associated with basic income. - Want more UBI data? See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1766213155967955332 For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq Donate to the Income To Support All Foundation to support UBI projects: https://www.itsafoundation.org Subscribe to the ITSA Newsletter for monthly UBI news: https://itsanewsletter.beehiiv.com/subscribe Visit Basic Income Today for daily UBI news: https://basicincometoday.com Sign up for the Comingle waitlist for voluntary UBI: https://www.comingle.us - Follow Scott: https://twitter.com/scottsantens https://www.facebook.com/scottsantens https://linktr.ee/scottsantens Follow Conrad: https://twitter.com/theUBIguy https://www.facebook.com/conrad.yaney https://www.linkedin.com/in/conradshaw/ Follow Josh: https://twitter.com/misterjworth https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshworth/ - Special thanks to: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, David Ruark, Tricia Garrett, Zack Sargent, A.W.R., Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, John Steinberger, Bridget I Flynn, Laurel gillespie, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Robert Collins, Joanna Zarach, Mgmguy, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Miki Phagan, Albert Daniel Brockman, Natalie Foster, Joe Ballou, Arjun , Christopher Wroth, S, Jocelyn Hockings, Kara Gillies, Faith Stanhope, Mark Donovan, Capitalists for Shared Income, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, Braden Ferrin , Juro Antal, Austin Begin, Deanna McHugh, Nikolaus Rath, chris heinz, Zachary Weaver, Justin Seifert, Rosa Tran, bradzone, John Sullivan, Team TJ, Yang Deng, Yan Xie, Marie janicke, Tim , Warren J Polk, Jeffrey Emmett, Stephen Castro-Starkey, Kev Roberts, Nicolas Pouillard, Walter Schaerer, Eric Skiff, Thomas Welsh, Laura Ashby, and all my other funders for their support. If you'd like to see your name here in future video descriptions, you can do so by becoming a patron on Patreon at the UBI Producer level. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens/membership --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scottsantens/support

Ep 5 of The Basic Income Show! We watch Conrad's interview with John Stossel and listen to an AI podcast about my book Let There Be Money. Also fresh evidence from the Finland Basic Income pilot and more! In this episode of the Basic Income Show, Scott Santens, Josh Worth, and Conrad Shaw discuss the implications of Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the context of recent disasters, economic stability, and media representation. They explore how UBI can provide immediate support during crises, the economic arguments for preventative measures, and the misconceptions surrounding work incentives related to UBI. The hosts critique the media's portrayal of UBI by watching John Stossel's interview of Conrad and emphasize the importance of context in understanding economic studies. They also discuss the studied effects of Finland's basic income pilot on voter turnout and the importance of inherent human value in economic systems. The conversation also touches on the role of AI in society and the need for trust in government to foster a healthy democracy. They conclude by examining the relationship between inflation and basic income, emphasizing the need for a supportive economic environment. Videos watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIpGOIc80C4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEUTR_YeweQ Citations: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/ajps.12915https://finance.yahoo.com/news/over-one-dozen-guaranteed-income-170300695.html http://ebrary.ifpri.org/utils/getfile/collection/p15738coll2/id/133270/filename/133484.pdf https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/social-sector/our-insights/an-experiment-to-inform-universal-basic-income https://www.cbpp.org/research/family-income-support/chart-book-tanf-at-20 - Want more UBI data? See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1766213155967955332 For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq Donate to the Income To Support All Foundation to support UBI projects: https://www.itsafoundation.org Subscribe to the ITSA Newsletter for monthly UBI news: https://itsanewsletter.beehiiv.com/subscribe Visit Basic Income Today for daily UBI news: https://basicincometoday.com Sign up for the Comingle waitlist for voluntary UBI: https://www.comingle.us Follow Scott: https://twitter.com/scottsantens https://www.facebook.com/scottsantens https://linktr.ee/scottsantens Follow Conrad: https://twitter.com/theUBIguy https://www.facebook.com/conrad.yaney https://www.linkedin.com/in/conradshaw/ Follow Josh: https://twitter.com/misterjworth https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshworth/ - Special thanks to: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, David Ruark, Tricia Garrett, Zack Sargent, A.W.R., Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, John Steinberger, Bridget I Flynn, Laurel gillespie, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Robert Collins, Joanna Zarach, Mgmguy, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Miki Phagan, Albert Daniel Brockman, Natalie Foster, Joe Ballou, Arjun , Christopher Wroth, S, Jocelyn Hockings, Kara Gillies, Faith Stanhope, Mark Donovan, Capitalists for Shared Income, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, Braden Ferrin, Juro Antal, Austin Begin, Deanna McHugh, Nikolaus Rath, chris heinz, Zachary Weaver, Justin Seifert, Jodi Sarda, Rosa Tran, bradzone, John Sullivan, Team TJ, Yang Deng, Yan Xie, Marie janicke, Tim , Warren J Polk, Jeffrey Emmett, Stephen Castro-Starkey, Kev Roberts, Nicolas Pouillard, Walter Schaerer, Eric Skiff, Thomas Welsh, Laura Ashby, and all my other funders for their support. If you'd like to see your name here in future video descriptions, you can do so by becoming a patron on Patreon at the UBI Producer level. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens/membership --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scottsantens/support

Episode 4 of The Basic Income Show! Let's talk about the basic income that Dolly Parton mobilized in response to a disaster in Tennessee. We also debunk all the misinformation in an anti-UBI PragerU video. Summary: In this episode of the Basic Income Show, Scott Santens, Conrad Shaw, and Josh Worth discuss the current state of basic income initiatives, particularly in light of recent events such as Hurricane Helene. We explore the future role of Comingle in providing direct cash assistance during disasters, the challenges faced by traditional disaster relief systems, and the importance of cash in recovery efforts as shown by Dolly Parton's basic income response to Tennessee wildfires. Our conversation also delves into the broader implications of universal basic income (UBI), addressing misconceptions as spread by a PragerU video, and highlighting its potential economic benefits. We emphasize the need for a shift in perspective regarding poverty and disaster relief, advocating for a more proactive approach to supporting individuals in need. We delve into the complexities of Universal Basic Income (UBI), discussing its potential costs, benefits, and the various funding mechanisms that could support it. We also explore the dignity of work, the implications of automation on employment by way of the strike by dockworkers, and the fundamental human drive for purpose and greatness. Watched videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kInUGW4H3Jc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGPjtRZj5DA ----- Want more UBI data? See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on X: https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1766213155967955332 For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq Donate to the Income To Support All Foundation to support UBI projects: https://www.itsafoundation.org Subscribe to the ITSA Newsletter for monthly UBI news: https://itsanewsletter.beehiiv.com/subscribe Visit Basic Income Today for daily UBI news: https://basicincometoday.com Sign up for the Comingle waitlist for voluntary UBI: https://www.comingle.us For previous audio-only discussions between Conrad, Josh, and I, and the occasional guest, check out the ITSA Live! playlist on Comingle's channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17-rRsLr_X4&list=PLrF7vwddTTzTWpvVvsCwrmwlg5k_v2zpV&pp=iAQB Follow Scott: https://twitter.com/scottsantens https://www.facebook.com/scottsantens https://linktr.ee/scottsantens Follow Conrad: https://twitter.com/theUBIguy https://www.facebook.com/conrad.yaney https://www.linkedin.com/in/conradshaw/ Follow Josh: https://twitter.com/misterjworth https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshworth/ - Special thanks to: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, David Ruark, Tricia Garrett, Zack Sargent, A.W.R., Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, John Steinberger, Bridget I Flynn, Laurel gillespie, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Robert Collins, Joanna Zarach, Mgmguy, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Miki Phagan, Albert Daniel Brockman, Natalie Foster, Joe Ballou, Arjun, Christopher Wroth, S, Jocelyn Hockings, Kara Gillies, Faith Stanhope, Mark Donovan, Capitalists for Shared Income, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, Braden Ferrin, Juro Antal, Austin Begin, Deanna McHugh, Nikolaus Rath, chris heinz, Zachary Weaver, Justin Seifert, Jodi Sarda, Rosa Tran, bradzone, John Sullivan, Team TJ, Yang Deng, Yan Xie, Marie janicke, Tim, Warren J Polk, Jeffrey Emmett, Stephen Castro-Starkey, Kev Roberts, Nicolas Pouillard, Walter Schaerer, Eric Skiff, Thomas Welsh, Laura Ashby, and all my other funders for their support. If you'd like to see your name here in future video descriptions, you can do so by becoming a patron on Patreon at the UBI Producer level. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens/membership --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scottsantens/support

Episode 3 of The Basic Income Show! Canada considers basic income legislation and Bret Weinstein talks nonsense about UBI... Also an experiment that suggests UBI leads to more meritocratic outcomes! In this episode of the Basic Income Show, we discuss the recent developments surrounding basic income legislation in Canada, specifically Bill C-223. We delve into the details of the bill, its implications for a guaranteed livable basic income, and the misinformation surrounding the concept. The conversation also touches on the political landscape in Canada, the role of research in shaping policy, and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for basic income initiatives. In this conversation, we discuss the challenges faced by non-college educated individuals in achieving the American dream, the rising deaths of despair among this demographic, and the implications of educational polarization as we debunk an interview with Bret Weinstein. We explore the case for Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to economic inequality and disillusionment with capitalism, emphasizing the importance of providing a safety floor for all individuals. The conversation also touches on the role of inheritance in perpetuating inequality and presents a meritocracy experiment that highlights the impact of luck versus talent in achieving success. Finally, we discuss the Pope's recent support for UBI, framing it as a moral imperative in the face of automation and economic challenges. ----- Want more UBI data? See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1766213155967955332 For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq Donate to the Income To Support All Foundation to support UBI projects: https://www.itsafoundation.org Subscribe to the ITSA Newsletter for monthly UBI news: https://itsanewsletter.beehiiv.com/subscribe Visit Basic Income Today for daily UBI news: https://basicincometoday.com Sign up for the Comingle waitlist for voluntary UBI: https://www.comingle.us ----- Follow Scott: https://twitter.com/scottsantens https://linktr.ee/scottsantens ----- Follow Conrad: https://twitter.com/theUBIguy https://www.facebook.com/conrad.yaney https://www.linkedin.com/in/conradshaw/ ----- Follow Josh: https://twitter.com/misterjworth https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshworth/ ----- Special thanks to: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, David Ruark, Tricia Garrett, Zack Sargent, A.W.R., Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, John Steinberger, Bridget I Flynn, Laurel gillespie, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Robert Collins, Joanna Zarach, ace bailey, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Miki Phagan, Albert Daniel Brockman, Natalie Foster, Joe Ballou, Arjun , Christopher Wroth, S, Jocelyn Hockings, Kara Gillies, Faith Stanhope, Mark Donovan, Capitalists for Shared Income, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, Braden Ferrin , Juro Antal, Austin Begin, Deanna McHugh, Nikolaus Rath, chris heinz, Zachary Weaver, Justin Seifert, Jodi Sarda, Rosa Tran, bradzone, John Sullivan, Team TJ, Yang Deng, Yan Xie, Marie janicke, Tim , Warren J Polk, Jeffrey Emmett, Stephen Castro-Starkey, Kev Roberts, Nicolas Pouillard, Walter Schaerer, Eric Skiff, Thomas Welsh, Laura Ashby, and all my other funders for their support. If you'd like to see your name here in future video descriptions, you can do so by becoming a patron on Patreon at the UBI Producer level. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens/membership --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scottsantens/support

Episode 2 of The Basic Income Show In this conversation, Scott Santens, Conrad Shaw, and Josh Worth discuss the implications of basic income through recent pilot programs like Sam Altman's three-year experiment and Denver's Basic Income Pilot Project, analyzing the results and addressing common misconceptions. They highlight the importance of understanding the nuanced effects of basic income on employment, caregiving, and overall well-being. Personal stories from recipients illustrate the transformative potential of basic income, while critiques of misleading narratives exemplified by a recent Coin Bureau video emphasize the need for a more informed public discourse. The conversation concludes with a call to action for future initiatives and community involvement in basic income projects. Here are the two videos we watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXDq5ypJru8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HLNh77k0cc List of cited sources: https://www.scottsantens.com/did-sam-altman-basic-income-experiment-succeed-or-fail-ubi/ https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/22/9459 https://aibm.org/research/the-state-of-working-class-men/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749379724002915 https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/ https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/economic-letter/2022/03/why-is-us-inflation-higher-than-in-other-countries/ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/05775132.2023.2278348 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/689575 Want more data? See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1766213155967955332 For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq Donate to the Income To Support All Foundation to support UBI projects:https://www.itsafoundation.org/ Subscribe to the ITSA Newsletter for UBI news:https://itsanewsletter.beehiiv.com/subscribe Sign up for the Comingle waitlist for voluntary UBI:https://www.comingle.us/ -----Follow Scott: Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/scottsantens Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scottsantens Everywhere else: https://linktr.ee/scottsantens -----Follow Conrad: https://x.com/theUBIguy https://www.facebook.com/conrad.yaney https://www.linkedin.com/in/conradshaw -----Follow Josh: https://x.com/misterjworth https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshworth/ ----- Special thanks to: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, David Ruark, Tricia Garrett, Zack Sargent, A.W.R., Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, John Steinberger, Bridget I Flynn, Laurel gillespie, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Robert Collins, Joanna Zarach, ace bailey, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Miki Phagan, Albert Daniel Brockman, Natalie Foster, Joe Ballou, Arjun , Christopher Wroth, S, Jocelyn Hockings, Kara Gillies, Faith Stanhope, Mark Donovan, Capitalists for Shared Income, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, Braden Ferrin , Juro Antal, Austin Begin, Deanna McHugh, Nikolaus Rath, chris heinz, Zachary Weaver, Justin Seifert, Jodi Sarda, Rosa Tran, bradzone, John Sullivan, Team TJ, Yang Deng, Yan Xie, Marie janicke, Tim , Warren J Polk, Jeffrey Emmett, Stephen Castro-Starkey, Kev Roberts, Nicolas Pouillard, Walter Schaerer, Eric Skiff, Thomas Welsh, Laura Ashby, and all my other funders for their support. If you'd like to see your name here in future video descriptions, you can do so by becoming a patron on Patreon at the UBI Producer level. https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens/membership --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scottsantens/support

The inaugural episode of The Basic Income Show! For previous audio-only discussions between Conrad, Josh, and I, and the occasional special guest, check out the ITSA Live! playlist on Comingle's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17-rRsLr_X4&list=PLrF7vwddTTzTWpvVvsCwrmwlg5k_v2zpV Like data? See my ongoing compilation of UBI evidence on Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1766213155967955332 For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq Donate to the non-profit Income To Support All Foundation to support UBI projects: https://www.itsafoundation.org/ Subscribe to the ITSA Newsletter: https://itsanewsletter.beehiiv.com/subscribe Sign up for the Comingle waitlist: https://www.comingle.us/ ----- 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:24 Theme Song 00:01:57 AI music 00:04:35 Universal Basic Guys 00:34:53 UK Winter Fuel Payments debate 00:57:09 Child Tax Credit arms race 01:17:25 US Sovereign Wealth Fund 01:37:10 Comingle 01:41:06 Wrap-up ----- Follow Scott on: Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/scottsantens Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scottsantens Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/scottsantens Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scottsantens Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ScottSantens Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/scottsantens.com Threads: https://www.threads.net/@scottsantens LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottsantens/ ----- Follow Conrad: https://x.com/theUBIguy https://www.facebook.com/conrad.yaney https://www.linkedin.com/in/conradshaw/ ----- Follow Josh: https://x.com/misterjworth https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshworth/ ----- Special thanks to: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Judith Bliss, Lowell Aronoff, Jessica Chew, Katie Moussouris, David Ruark, Tricia Garrett, Zack Sargent, A.W.R., Daryl Smith, Larry Cohen, Philip Rosedale, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, John Steinberger, Bridget I Flynn, Laurel gillespie, Dylan Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Robert Collins, Joanna Zarach, ace bailey, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, Peter T Knight, Michael Finney, David Ihnen, Miki Phagan, Albert Daniel Brockman, Natalie Foster, Joe Ballou, Arjun , Christopher Wroth, S, Jocelyn Hockings, Kara Gillies, Faith Stanhope, Mark Donovan, Capitalists for Shared Income, Jason Clark, Chuck Cordes, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Mark Broadgate, Leslie Kausch, Braden Ferrin , Juro Antal, Austin Begin, Deanna McHugh, Nikolaus Rath, chris heinz, Zachary Weaver, Justin Seifert, Jodi Sarda, Rosa Tran, bradzone, John Sullivan, Team TJ, Yang Deng, Yan Xie, Marie janicke, Tim , Warren J Polk, Jeffrey Emmett, Stephen Castro-Starkey, Kev Roberts, Nicolas Pouillard, Walter Schaerer, Eric Skiff, Thomas Welsh, Laura Ashby, and all my other funders for their support. If you'd like to see your name here in future video descriptions, you can do so by becoming a patron on Patreon at the UBI Producer level. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/scottsantens/membership --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scottsantens/support

Imagine an America where the government provides a floor for all our needs, from housing to health care to college to an income. Natalie Foster joins Vasant Dhar in episode 86 of Brave New World to argue that such a shift is possible -- and the time to make it is now. Useful resources: 1. Natalie Foster on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, the Economic Security Project, the Aspen Institute and her own website. 2. The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America's Next Economy -- Natalie Foster. 3. The Economic Security Project. 4. Pulp Fiction and Dirty Dancing. 5. The Narrow Corridor -- Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. 6. James Robinson on What Makes a Successful State — Episode 19 of Brave New World. 7. Pippa Ehrlich on the Mysteries of the Sea -- Episode 77 of Brave New World. 8. Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better -- Jennifer Pahlka. 9. File your taxes for free -- Internal Revenue Service. 10. Code for America. 11. The FAFSA Fiasco. 12. Caitlin Zaloom on the Explosion of Student Debt — Episode 37 of Brave New World. 13. Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost — Caitlin Zaloom. 14. The Submerged State -- Suzanne Mettler. 15. Why We Sleep -- Matthew Walker. 16. Andrew Yang on the New Politics America Needs — Episode 27 of Brave New World. 17. Albert Wenger on the World After Capital — Episode 29 of Brave New World. 18. Paul Sheard Demystifies Money -- Episode 73 of Brave New World. 19. Capital in the Twenty-First Century -- Thomas Piketty. 20. The Political Economy of Education, Financial Literacy, and the Racial Wealth Gap -- Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. Subscription is free!

“The amount of human attention in the world is finite. We have 24 hours in the day, some of which we need to spend paying attention to eating, sleeping and meeting our other needs. The attention during the remaining hours of most people in the world is taken up by having to earn an income and by consuming goods and services, leaving relatively little time for attention to be freely allocated. A hard limit on available attention also exists for humanity as a whole—as I argued earlier, we are headed for peak population, at which point we will no longer be increasing the total amount of potentially available attention by adding more people.” Welcome back to another episode of Made You Think! In this episode, we're covering The World After Capital by Albert Wenger. We'll explore the transition from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age, the new scarcity of attention, and the potential for widespread societal change. Join us in this futuristic discussion as we ponder how digital technologies are reshaping our world and the future of human civilization. We cover a wide range of topics including: The shift from capital to attention as a scarce resource How we're heading into a future that's non-linear Why "everyone needs to" is not a practical solution The role AI may play in replacing jobs and technological adaptation Do we agree with the author's proposed solutions? And much more. Please enjoy, and make sure to follow Nat, Neil, and Adil on Twitter and share your thoughts on the episode. Links from the Episode: Mentioned in the Show: Duolingo (4:47) The New York Times (5:25) Codementor (29:47) Cursor (29:55) Starlink (44:43) WWDC24 (45:06) Outside the System (53:15) Tucker Carlson and Bukele (53:25) Zeekr 001 (1:01:12) Outside the System: Crypto Confidential episode (1:05:56) DeepMind (1:08:25) Inflection AI (1:09:13) Books Mentioned: The World After Capital (Adil's Book Notes) Homo Deus (0:14) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) (Adil's Book Notes) Novacene (0:21) (Book Episode) The Beginning of Infinity (0:29) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) The War on Normal People (0:35) (Book Episode) (Nat's Book Notes) Into the Amazon (7:52) (Book Episode) The Coming Wave (1:08:04) People Mentioned: Albert Wenger Yuval Noah Harari (0:13) Andrew Yang (0:35) (Book Episode) George R. R. Martin (18:00) John Gray (44:25) Francisco Franco (58:21) Mustafa Suleyman(1:08:25) Show Topics: (0:00) In today's episode, we're diving into The World After Capital by Albert Wenger. We kick off the episode by reflecting on previous episodes and reads we've had with books that debates what is coming after the current industrial era. What's next for human civilization?  (3:57) One of the book's strengths is its historical framing. While Wenger presents the situation well, his solutions and theories about the future were hard to fully agree with.  (8:34) Nat, Neil, and Adil explain how Wenger sets up the big picture. He argues that we're on the cusp of a major historical shift where we can no longer predict the next step due to fundamental changes. In each era, a scarcity drives human behavior. Today, Wenger contends that the finite resource is attention.  (10:55) Have we shifted the problem from capital to attention by untethering currency from a hard asset? Leading companies like Microsoft and Google are powerful not because of their capital but because they control our attention.  (14:57) Attention vs. time. Wenger refers to the "job loop" where time is exchanged for money. With the internet, you can create things with no marginal cost, selling without a major time investment. (16:42) Aside from attention, what other contenders do we have as the next scarce resource? (19:21) The book's purpose is not just to observe shifting scarcity but to highlight how each shift has led to widespread violence. Wenger aims to minimize or avoid this violence. Has the violence already started, and how might it differ this time around?  (24:52) How new inventions often replace old methods, and people adapt. AI could be the first technology in our lifetime to put many people out of work. Should we be worried? While we're used to working with people in complex organizations, AI's impact may take time to fully manifest, much like the gradual replacement of horses by cars. (32:01) Why learning how to work with AI tools can give you a future advantage.  (33:49) The world population faces fertility problems and declining birth rates. If population decline is gradual, it's manageable. But how will it play out?  (38:01) Nat, Neil, and Adil point out one major disagreement they have with the author's idea of how to find meaning in your life. (40:30) The first of Wenger's proposed solutions is mindfulness and meditation. (42:19) Wenger emphasizes information freedom with internet access for all, which is a good start. Decentralizing access ensures it can't be stopped or taken away. We also touch on the topic of universal basic income (UBI), (45:42) Do we just need to "get over" our right to privacy and scarcity thinking? We explain our disagreements with Wenger and how privacy may be incompatible with technological progress. (55:03) Transforming a place from dangerous to moderately safe is no easy feat. We examine El Salvador's turnaround under Bukele.  (1:00:17) Discussing the significant changes over the span of 20 years. We also talk about cars made in China, noting how the perception of "Made in China" has evolved from being seen as cheap to being recognized for quality. (1:03:15) If a solution requires "everyone needs to," it's likely not a practical solution. Effective solutions must work with current incentives and human behavior. We discuss the importance of having a fluid career identity and finding deeper meaning in life beyond a job. (1:07:32) That concludes this episode! Have you read The World After Capital? Let us know your thoughts! Next up, we will be reading Endurance by Alfred Lansing. Grab a copy of the book here, check out our website, and give us a follow on Instagram to stay in the loop on what's happening on the Made You Think podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, let us know by leaving a review on iTunes and tell a friend. As always, let us know if you have any book recommendations! You can say hi to us on Twitter @TheRealNeilS, @adilmajid, @nateliason and share your thoughts on this episode. You can now support Made You Think using the Value-for-Value feature of Podcasting 2.0. This means you can directly tip the co-hosts in BTC with minimal transaction fees. To get started, simply download a podcast app (like Fountain or Breez) that supports Value-for-Value and send some BTC to your in-app wallet. You can then use that to support shows who have opted-in, including Made You Think! We'll be going with this direct support model moving forward, rather than ads. Thanks for listening. See you next time!

He has been a driver of change at Transport for London, which has shown the way to the rest of the world. Shashi Verma joins Vasant Dhar in Episode 83 of Brave New World to share his learnings on urban transport -- and the governance structures that lead to the best results. Useful resources: 1. Shashi Verma on LinkedIn and Centre for London. 2. Albert Wenger on the World After Capital — Episode 29 of Brave New World. 3. Estimating the Social Benefit of Constructing an Underground Railway in London -- CD Foster and ME Beesley. 4. A History of London Transport -- TV Barker and Michael Robbins. 5. The Subterranean Railway --  Christian Wolmar. 6. Evaluating Urban Transport Improvements -- Anthony J Venables. 7. Agglomeration, Productivity and Transport Investment -- Daniel J Graham. Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. Subscription is free!

Nick and Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures (and a preeminent investor in general), discuss the state of climate, climate and energy work in general, and climate venture capital in 2024 and beyond. Specifically, Nick and Albert dive deep on:How our collective response to climate change so far has been a bit ‘meh'The ‘low energy' trap and what we stand to gain if we reverse itThe prognosis for climate tech venture capital in 2024 and beyondDon't miss out on this podcast if you're interested in learning more about the state of climate tech, climate tech venture capital, electrification, and more! Subscribe on Spotify, Apple, Google, or your favorite podcast platform to catch all the latest episodes.Timestamps:00:02:06 - Reflecting on 2023's Climate Crisis00:04:52 - Where we're at: Climate Progress and Challenges00:05:14 - The Reality of Climate Action Progress00:08:12 - The Low Energy Trap00:13:03 - Funding Challenges for Climate Companies00:17:03 - The Benefits of a War-Like Climate Action Mode00:23:10 - The Need for Comprehensive Climate Action00:30:01 - The Climate Venture Capital Landscape in 202400:31:10 - The Impact of Interest Rates on Climate Work00:36:12 - The Importance of Writing for Idea CrystallizationRead Albert and others' blog posts on USV's website: https://www.usv.com/writing/If you love listening to The Keep Cool Show, please leave me a 5-star review on Rate My Podcast: https://ratethispodcast.com/keepcoolThank you so much! Plus, stay up-to-date on all things Keep Cool here: https://keepcool.co/ and follow Albert on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Albertvanosdol and LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasvanosdol/

Treffen sich zwei Franken in New York, um auf Englisch einen Podcast aufzuzeichnen… klingt nach dem Beginn einer wunderbaren Geschichte, right? Ist es auch. Vor vier Jahren war Albert Wenger, Venture Capitalist und bekennender Klimaschützer, schon einmal zu Gast bei Wunderbar Together, nun hat Felix ihn am Rande der DLD ein weiteres Mal getroffen. Dabei entstanden ist ein spannendes Gespräch über Wengers Leben und Wirken, die vielen Facetten des Investment-Geschäfts, aber auch über Klimaschutz und den Versuch, im Rahmen einer Pilotstudie zu testen, wie sich das Zusammenleben in einer amerikanischen Kleinstadt verändert, wenn die dort lebenden Menschen weniger finanzielle Sorgen leiden.

EPISODE 1938: In this special KEEN ON show from DLD in Munich, Andrew talks Union Square Ventures partner, Albert Wenger, about work, leisure and the environment in our smart machine ageAlbert Wenger is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company's sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early hosted data analytics company. Albert graduated from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT. Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures, and author of The World After Capital. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a frank conversation about whether AI will lead to job loss and what to do about it. In an unusual setup, the journalist in this conversation (Alex) argues that we have less to worry about AI automating jobs than the popular narrative, and the VC (Wenger) makes the case that it will definitely happen and how we should adjust. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss Wenger's five year experiment with UBI. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com

Let's dive into the world of advanced nuclear startups—where founders are playing entrepreneurship on hard-mode, and navigating how to build new reactor designs, sell to new markets, and forge new regulatory pathways. This episode is the second focused on nuclear fission startup founders—while last week Packy and Julia spoke with entrepreneurs who laser-focused on the problem of manufacturing ready-made designs at scale, this new crop of founders featured are tackling a seemingly even more difficult task of creating new forms of nuclear reactors from scratch. As a16z American Dynamism partner Katherine Boyle says, "to build a successful energy startup, you have to excel at math, deep technology, storytelling, recruiting, and regulatory." Tune in as Packy and Julia spotlight five founders taking radically different paths to bringing more nuclear online—from radioisotopes on the literal moon to the novel production of hydrocarbons. Thank you to this episode's guests: Katherine Boyle, Albert Wenger, Jake DeWitte, Isaiah Taylor, Matt Loszak, Tyler Bernstein, Jordan Bramble, Josh Wolfe, and David Ulevitch. Huge thank you to our sponsors: Secureframe: the only compliance automation platform with AI capabilities that help customers speed up cloud remediation and security questionnaires. Get 10% off your first year of Secureframe: https://secureframe.com/packy Pilot.com: accounting, CFO, and tax services that are designed with flexibility and scalability in mind. To get 20% off your accounting bill for the first 6 months, go to https://pilot.com/packy Clean Air Task Force For the full list of resources referenced in this show: https://ageofmiracles.co/  Subscribe to Not Boring to get weekly doses of tech and business strategy, straight to your inbox: https://www.notboring.co/ Follow our hosts: Packy McCormick on Twitter and LinkedIn Julia DeWahl on Twitter and LinkedIn Timestamps: (00:00) What are advanced reactors? (11:58) Introducing the startup founders (14:01) Oklo (17:55) Valar Atomics (25:27) Aalo (26:41) Zeno Power (30:07) Antares (37:18) Why we need a new playbook for nuclear (48:53) Selling to new markets and customers (1:07:00) On regulation (1:30:18) Nuclear startup operations (1:46:40) The importance of design (1:52:24) The advanced nuclear startup playbook This show is produced and distributed by Turpentine, a network of shows and other media properties, where experts talk to experts about tech, business, culture, and more.  Credits: Nancy Xu produced this season of Age of Miracles. Audio editor: Justin Golden. Video editor: Jake Salyers. Executive producers: Amelia Salyers, Packy McCormick, and Erik Torenberg. 

Digital Public Infrastructure sounds like a huge step forward for the world -- till you think about how it empowers the state to oppress the people. Ajay Shah joins Vasant Dhar in episode 72 of Brave New World to warn that we are not being wary enough of state coercion when we think of this incredible technology.  Useful resources: 1. Ajay Shah on Twitter and Substack. 2. In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy -- Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah. 3. Everything is Everything -- Ajay Shah's YouTube show, co-hosted by Amit Varma. 4. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen with Ajay Shah: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. 5. Imagining India -- Nandan Nilekani. 6. Nandan Nilekani on an Egalitarian Internet -- Episode 15 of Brave New World. 7. Albert Wenger on the World After Capital -- Episode 29 of Brave New World. 8. James Robinson on What Makes a Successful State — Episode 19 of Brave New World. 9. The Narrow Corridor —  Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. 10. Is the Singularity Near? -- Episode 2 of Everything is Everything. 11. 1984 -- George Orwell. Check out Vasant Dhar's newsletter on Substack. Subscription is free!

Christian Hernandez tells Richard Delevan what it takes to be a successful climate tech founder and what's surprised him in climate tech investing since setting up 2150; why interest rates matter; where he sees opportunities going forward; and who from the “Facebook mafia” and old-skool VC he's seen make the pivot to climate tech.Christian's Catalysts: The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells - and do check out his NY Times guest hosting on Ezra Klein's show.How to Avoid a Climate Disaster; The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need, by Bill Gates - which gave Christian “techno-optimism” about solutions after having the “living daylights” scared out of him by Wallace-Wells.Speed and Scale; An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now, by John Doerr.Blue Frontier, a 2150 portco rethinking air conditioning, which recently was named one of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch by MIT Tech Review.Christian also gave shoutouts to people from his old tech days that have made the pivot to climate tech like Joshua March, co-founder of Sci-Fi Foods, and Michelle You, co-founder of Supercritical. And some VCs who also made the pivot: Daniel Waterhouse at Balderton; Albert Wenger at Union Square Ventures Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this week's interview with Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, we discussed the changes that LLMs might bring - to our engineering teams, our products, and our society. We looked at the potential impact on how we write software, what software we need, opportunities for both incumbents and AI native startups, and the broader impact on the workforce and society as we deeply adopt Generative AI over the next 5-10 years. According to Albert, right now we're both in the middle of an unprecedented hype cycle for LLMs and starting to witness a transformation as profound as that from an agrarian to an industrial society

This is the audio of a speech I gave in July 2023 as the closing keynote for England's Basic Income North 2023 Conference. Video available too: ⁠⁠https://youtu.be/U2XbrVQZLnI For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: ⁠⁠http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq⁠⁠ You can support these podcasts through Anchor or Patreon: ⁠⁠https://patreon.com/scottsantens⁠⁠ Thank you to all my Podcast Executive Producer supporters: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Matthew Cheney, Camilo Riviere, Katie Moussouris, Tricia Garrett, Zack Sargent, David Ruark, Larry Cohen, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, John Steinberger, Laurel Gillespie, Dylan J Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Michael Tinker, Judith Bliss, Robert Collins, Daryl Smith, Joanna Zarach, ace bailey, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Bridget I Flynn, Peter T Knight, David Ihnen, Laura Ashby, and all my other monthly supporters on Patreon too. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scottsantens/support

This episode is a reading of my article, "A.I. Will Not Displace Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once. It Will Rapidly Transform the Labor Market, Exacerbating Inequality, Insecurity, and Poverty." Link to read and share the article: ⁠https://www.scottsantens.com/ai-will-rapidly-transform-the-labor-market-exacerbating-inequality-insecurity-and-poverty/ For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: ⁠http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq⁠ You can support these podcasts through Anchor or Patreon: ⁠https://patreon.com/scottsantens⁠ Thank you to all my Podcast Executive Producer supporters: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Matthew Cheney, Camilo Riviere, Katie Moussouris, Tricia Garrett, Zack Sargent, David Ruark, Larry Cohen, Liya Brook, Frederick Weber, John Steinberger, Laurel Gillespie, Dylan J Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Michael Tinker, Judith Bliss, Robert Collins, Daryl Smith, Joanna Zarach, ace bailey, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Bridget I Flynn, Peter T Knight, David Ihnen, Max Henrion, Elizabeth Corker, Gray Scott, Gerald Huff, Albert Daniel Brockman, Michael Honey, Natalie Foster, Joe Ballou, Chris Rauchle, Arjun, Laura Ashby, and all my other monthly supporters on Patreon too. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/scottsantens/support

Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger has been successful enough to write a techno-manifesto. Wenger made early investments in companies like Twilio, MongoDB, and Etsy. Now, he's spending much of his time on USV's climate investing out of the firm's $200 million climate fund.Wenger has historically been a media recluse — but he's started popping his head out. So when I got the opportunity to talk to him on the Newcomer podcast, I jumped. After all, Union Square Ventures has ranked 1st and then 2nd in the Founder's Choice VC Rankings. And USV was among the first venture capital firms to privately raise the alarm to portfolio companies that they needed to protect against a banking crisis. So we had a lot to talk about. Plus, Wenger is in the big ideas phase of his career. “We live in a period where there is an extraordinary range of possible outcomes for humanity. They include the annihilation of humankind in a climate catastrophe, at one extreme, and the indefinite exploration of the universe, at the other,” he concludes in his book The World After Capital, which is available for free online. Wenger has a strong point of view about where we're headed: He argues that we've moved from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age and that we need to dramatically rethink society in light of that change. Despite the book's manifesto-like qualities, The World After Capital frames up some of the core issues of our time. In particular, he argues that financial markets cannot adequately price the ultimate scarce resource of our age — attention. As artificial intelligence looks poised to further disrupt society, Wenger's point of view is only becoming more compelling.In our Newcomer podcast discussion, Wenger and I examine the current state of universal basic income. You can hear how we think differently about the issue. I'm eager to think about how it could realistically be implemented in the United States sometime soon; he's interested in the broad sweep of history. On the podcast, we talk about the banking system and I interrogate whether there's any hypocrisy in opposing the 2008 bank bailouts and defending the government's decision to backstop depositors at Silicon Valley Bank.It was a fun conversation that looks beyond the day-to-day news cycle to some of the bigger questions that technological progress posses for our society. Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger has been successful enough to write a techno-manifesto. Wenger made early investments in companies like Twilio, MongoDB, and Etsy. Now, he's spending much of his time on USV's climate investing out of the firm's $200 million climate fund.Wenger has historically been a media recluse — but he's started popping his head out. So when I got the opportunity to talk to him on the Newcomer podcast, I jumped. After all, Union Square Ventures has ranked 1st and then 2nd in the Founder's Choice VC Rankings. And USV was among the first venture capital firms to privately raise the alarm to portfolio companies that they needed to protect against a banking crisis. So we had a lot to talk about. Plus, Wenger is in the big ideas phase of his career. “We live in a period where there is an extraordinary range of possible outcomes for humanity. They include the annihilation of humankind in a climate catastrophe, at one extreme, and the indefinite exploration of the universe, at the other,” he concludes in his book The World After Capital, which is available for free online. Wenger has a strong point of view about where we're headed: He argues that we've moved from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age and that we need to dramatically rethink society in light of that change. Despite the book's manifesto-like qualities, The World After Capital frames up some of the core issues of our time. In particular, he argues that financial markets cannot adequately price the ultimate scarce resource of our age — attention. As artificial intelligence looks poised to further disrupt society, Wenger's point of view is only becoming more compelling.In our Newcomer podcast discussion, Wenger and I examine the current state of universal basic income. You can hear how we think differently about the issue. I'm eager to think about how it could realistically be implemented in the United States sometime soon; he's interested in the broad sweep of history. On the podcast, we talk about the banking system and I interrogate whether there's any hypocrisy in opposing the 2008 bank bailouts and defending the government's decision to backstop depositors at Silicon Valley Bank.It was a fun conversation that looks beyond the day-to-day news cycle to some of the bigger questions that technological progress posses for our society. Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

This episode is a reading of my article, "ChatGPT Has Already Decreased My Income Security, and Likely Yours Too", and it is read by an AI I trained on my own voice using Resemble.AI. It just seemed particularly fitting to do it this way. Link to read and share the article: https://www.scottsantens.com/chatgpt-has-already-decreased-my-income-security/ For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq You can support these podcasts through Anchor or Patreon: https://patreon.com/scottsantens Thank you to all my Podcast Executive Producer supporters: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Matthew Cheney, Katie Moussouris, Tricia Garrett, Zack Sargent, Larry Cohen, Frederick Weber, CanadayVibes , Kerry Bosworth, Laurel gillespie, Dylan J Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Michael Tinker, Judith Bliss, Robert Collins, Daryl Smith, Joanna Zarach, ace bailey, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, Bridget I Flynn, Peter T Knight, David Ihnen, Myles McLane, Max Henrion, Elizabeth Corker, Gray Scott, Gerald Huff, Albert Daniel Brockman, Michael Honey, Natalie Foster, Joe Ballou, Chris Rauchle, Arjun, Laura Ashby, and all my other monthly supporters on Patreon too. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/scottsantens/support

This is Part 2 of The Economics of Getting (and Paying) Attention. If you haven't listened to Part 1, I highly recommend starting there!In today's episode, I explore the “right to publicity” and the value of celebrity as an economic condition. From there, we get into how audience-building businesses gain efficiency by vertically integrating media, ads, and offers and how micro-media creators often leverage monopoly power to charge exorbitant prices.Footnotes: “New wellness price point just dropped” Conspiratuality Instagram post The World After Capital by Albert Wenger (available free) “The Audience Commodity and its Work” by Dallas Smythe “From Celebrity to Influencer” by Alison Hearn and Stephanie Schoenhoff Good Mythical Morning on YouTube Sporked “How Audience-Building is Different from Finding Clients” by Tara McMullin Vertical integration New episodes are published in essay form every Thursday at explorewhatworks.com. Get them delivered straight to your inbox, free of charge, by subscribing to What Works Weekly: explorewhatworks.com/weeklyIf you'd like to learn more about how we can approach life and work differently, check out my book, What Works. I explore the history and cultural context that's led us to this success-obsessed, productivity-oriented moment. Then I guide you through deconstructing those messages and then rebuilding a structure for work-life that works. ★ Support this podcast ★

Attention is a scarce (and precious) resource. A gargantuan number of media outlets, advertisers, influencers, and brands vie for our attention every day. In turn, many of us (including me) are out there trying to attract attention, too. At the same time, the changing nature of the attention market (as well as larger macroeconomic shifts) creates some real weirdness.This is the first episode of a two-part deep dive into the economics of paying attention, getting attention, and audiences as a commodity. In this episode, we'll question how an influencer can charge $100k per year for coaching, examine how attention scarcity impacts the market, and explore the “principal product of the mass media.” This episode is for you if you ever spend time on social media, consume any kind of traditional media, buy things, or hope people will buy things for you. We'll get into the weeds—but all for the purpose of getting very, very practical.Footnotes: “New wellness price point just dropped” Conspiratuality Instagram post “Paying Attention: The Attention Economy” via the Berkley Economic Review The World After Capital by Albert Wenger (available free) “Georg Franck's ‘The Economy of Attention': Mental capitalism and the struggle for attention” by Robert van Krieken “The Economy of Attention” by Georg Franck, translated by Silvia Plaza “The Audience Commodity and its Work” by Dallas Smythe Dallas Smythe 1979 lecture via SFU Communications “The Economics of Working Together with Kate Strathmann” on What Works “Dallas Smythe Today - The Audience Commodity, the Digital Labour Debate, Marxist Political Economy and Critical Theory” by Christian Fuchs New episodes are published in essay form every Thursday at explorewhatworks.com. Get the delivered straight to your inbox, free of charge, by subscribing to What Works Weekly: explorewhatworks.com/weeklyIf you'd like to learn more about how we can approach life and work differently, check out my book, What Works. I explore the history and cultural context that's led us to this success-obsessed, productivity-oriented moment. Then I guide you through deconstructing those messages and then rebuilding a structure for work-life that works. ★ Support this podcast ★

Albert Wenger is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures, one of the most successful venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including Coinbase, Twitter, Twilio, Etsy, and many more. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company's sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early-hosted data analytics company. In Today's Episode with Albert Wenger We Discuss: 1.) From Failed Startup Founder to Leading VC: How Albert transitioned from being a failed entrepreneur to being one of the most respected venture investors with USV today? What were the clear signs for Albert that he was not a good entrepreneur? Why does Albert believe this downturn is different compared to the dot-com bubble? Why was there more hope and promise coming out of the dot-com bubble? 2.) Income Inequality, The Rise of Depression & The Role of Politics: Why is income and wealth inequality more concerning than ever? Why does Albert believe universal basic income is the right solution? Why is mental health worse than ever? What can be done to improve this? Why are our politicians failing us? What should our politicians be doing? How does the rise of Trump show us what society is looking for in politicians? 3.) Climate Change: Misnomers, Developing Countries, Civil Disobedience: What are the single biggest misnomers people have when it comes to climate change? How can we shift spending on climate change solutions from 5% of GDP to 50%? Is that possible? Why do developing nations have an advantage when implementing climate change solutions over more developed economies? Why is civil disobedience the right course of action to ensure society is on a path to change our approach to climate change? 4.) Crypto and Central Banks: The Future of Finance: Why does Albert believe that over the past few years, for many, crypto was a good hedge against inflation? How damaging does Albert believe SBF and FTX will be to crypto in the long term? How does Albert evaluate the potential for governments to create a "central bank digital currency"? What would Albert like to see in a potential currency like this? How could stable coins be the solution to this? What is Albert fearful of with central bank digital currencies? Why does Albert believe now is the best time to be investing in crypto? 5.) The Future of Social Media: Twitter & TikTok: What does Albert believe is wrong with Twitter today? Why was the blue check mark such a mess? What does Albert believe Elon should do with Twitter from this point on? How should Elon deal with the debt providers he has? What happens to Twitter moving forward? Why is it so hard to kill? What is the future of TikTok? Will it be banned in the US? How concerned should the consumer be concerning their data being shared with the Chinese Government?

Albert Wenger (Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures) is imaginative, focused, and passionate. We talk about his book “The World After Capital” where he argues that technological progress has shifted scarcity for humanity. When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. With digital technologies scarcity is shifting once more. We need to figure out how to live in The World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention. Union Square Ventures is a thesis-driven venture capital firm. Since 2003, the firm has invested in over 100 companies that use the power of the internet to re-shape markets, like Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company's sale to Yahoo and an angel investor. He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early hosted data analytics company. Albert graduated from Harvard in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT.

Today Rebecca Kaden, a General Partner at the famed venture firm Union Square Ventures, joins the podcast. USV is based in NYC and is known for thesis-driven investing in companies like Twitter, Polygon, Coinbase, Stash, Duolingo, Cloudflare, Twilio, Etsy, and more. The firm manages over $1 billion across funds with notable investors, including Fred Wilson, Andy Weissman, Albert Wenger, Brad Burnham, and John Buttrick. Learn more about USV & Rebecca here: https://www.usv.com/Twitter of Host (Shamus Madan): @mbitpodcastTwitter of Guest (Rebecca Kaden): @rebeccakaden

Sinan and fellow MIT alumnus, Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures, a New York-based early stage VC firm focused on investing in disruptive networks, whose portfolio companies include: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, Kickstarter and Shapeways. Albert shares some excellent business advice and the lessons he's learned along the way. The Winding Road from MIT PhD to Venture Capitalist (2:07-15:34)What Makes an Investment-Worthy Entrepreneur (15:42-21:51)Technology Trends and Transformations and AI Automation (21:59-41:22Web3, Blockchain, NFTs, Crypto + Decentralization (41:30-1:06:04)The State of the Global Political Economy and Solving the Climate Crisis (1:06:12-1:15:56)The Future of Social Media and Network Regulations (1:16:04-1:25:18)The Worst Investment Mistake You Can Make and How Mindfulness is Key to Success (1:25:26-1:30:13)The Biggest Fear + Hope for Our Kids (1:30:21-1:34:30)Visit ide.mit.edu/podcast for more.Follow @sinanaral and @mit_ide on Twitter and @professorsinan and @digitalinsiderpod on Instagram and TikTok.Please remember to rate us and leave a review - the best way to support the podcast.

Albert Wenger lebt seit über 20 Jahren in den USA, ist General Partner beim Mega-VC Union Square Ventures (USV) und nach 2018 zum zweiten Mal im OMR Podcast zu Gast. Hier erzählt der Investment-Profi, nach welchen Thesen USV in junge Startups investiert, was es für eine robustere Antwort auf den Klimawandel braucht und warum der Twitter-Deal von Elon Musk gerade so schiefgeht.

First up, J+M discuss founder ambition and tools vs. platforms on VC Sunday School. (3:06) Then, USV's Albert Wenger joins to break down his firm's $162M climate fund, his book "The World After Capital", and more! (24:16) (0:00) J+M intro today's topics! (3:06) Evaluating founder ambition, tools vs. platforms (11:14) OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist (12:48) How investors evaluate tools vs. platforms, and when/if something is "too hard" (19:50) J+M tee up today's TWiCS guest (22:50) SnackMagic - Get 10% cashback up to $1000 until October 15th with code HOLIDAY, and see more at snackmagic.com/twist (24:16) Molly welcomes USV Managing Partner Albert Wenger to discuss USV's $162M climate fund and the climate crisis investment opportunity (33:26) Coda - The All-in-one doc for teams, get a $1,000 credit at https://coda.io/twist (34:57) Albert discusses his book "The World After Capital", and the human attention problem FOLLOW Albert: https://twitter.com/albertwenger FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Bloomberg Radio host Barry Ritholtz speaks with Albert Wenger, who is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. Before joining USV, Wenger was the president of del.icio.us as well as an angel investor; he also founded or co-founded several companies. He holds a Ph.D. in information technology from MIT. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Albert Wenger is Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, which has invested in some of today's most exciting technology companies. In his new book, “The World After Capital", he argues that capitalism cannot allocate all resources efficiently in the digital age – where the new shortage isn't capital, but rather, human attention. While economically incentivized activities will not go away, he says, we must make room for the things we cannot put a price on. He proposes increasing three freedoms: economic, informational, and psychological, to ensure the continuation of human knowledge production. His book is available free of charge at https://worldaftercapital.org/.

On June 24 I took part in a panel about the macroeconomics of basic income at the 2022 BIG Conference in Portland, Oregon. Here is an audio recording of the talk I gave that day where I attempted to zoom out and look at the big picture of money, economics, and humanity. For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq You can support these podcasts through Anchor or Patreon: https://patreon.com/scottsantens Thank you to all my Podcast Executive Producer supporters: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Katie Moussouris, Tricia Garrett, Zack Sargent, David Ruark, Larry Cohen, Matthew Cheney, Frederick Weber, Patrick Brown, CanadayVibes, Kerry Bosworth, Laurel Gillespie, Dylan J Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Michael Tinker, Robert Collins, Daryl Smith, Joanna Zarach, Justin Walsh, ace bailey, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, Bridget I Flynn, Peter T Knight, David Ihnen, and Laura Ashby. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/scottsantens/support

Energi er oppe i tiden. Egentlig skulle energiforsyning jo bare være noget, der summer i baggrunden og muliggør alt det andet, som vi gerne vil i vores komplekse samfund — og helst uden at vi behøver at skænke prisen en tanke. Den tid er ovre. Lavenergifælden som begreb har vi lånt fra et blogindlæg af ventureinvestoren Albert Wenger, der også satte os på sporet af antropologen og historikeren Joseph Tainters arbejde om kollaps af komplekse samfund. Med tainterske briller på prøver vi at skue situationen klarere og tager hans pointe om, at man ikke kan spare sig til kompleksitetsskabende løsninger på frembrydende problemer, til os. Det er således lavenergifælden, nemlig overbevisningen om, at en stabilisering eller sågar samlet reduktion af vores tekniske civilisations energiforbrug er både muligt og ønskværdigt som en løsning på især udfordringen fra global opvarmning. Tværtimod kan det komme til at koste mere energi at løse de problemer, vi står med nu for at kunne skaffe mere CO2-fri energi i fremtiden. Altså hvis vi ikke har lyst til at komme på Tainters liste over komplekse samfund, der er kollapset grundet indskrænkning af den tilgængelige energi og efterfølgende drastisk kompleksitetsreduktion.

We are in the midst of another global transformation, but this time we might have the tools to get it right.

On July 26 I took part in a conversation on Twitter Spaces where we talked about UBI for over two hours. A segment of about 21 minutes in length was then edited from the discussion and aired on WPKN radio. Here is that episode as heard on the radio. For more info about UBI, please refer to my UBI FAQ: http://scottsantens.com/basic-income-faq You can support these podcasts through Anchor or Patreon: https://patreon.com/scottsantens Thank you to all my Podcast Executive Producer supporters: Gisele Huff, Haroon Mokhtarzada, Steven Grimm, Floyd Marinescu, Katie Moussouris, Zack Sargent, Jeff , David Ruark, Larry Cohen, Matthew Cheney, Frederick Weber, Patrick Brown, CanadayVibes , Kerry Bosworth, Laurel gillespie, Dylan J Hirsch-Shell, Tom Cooper, Michael Tinker, Robert Collins, Daryl Smith, Joanna Zarach, Justin Walsh, ace bailey, Daragh Ward, Albert Wenger, Andrew Yang, John Steinberger, Bridget I Flynn, Peter T Knight, David Ihnen, and Laura Ashby. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/scottsantens/support

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. In this episode, Andrew is joined by Albert Wenger, the author of The Book After Capital. ________________________ Albert Wenger is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), a New York-based thesis-driven venture capital firm, where his investments have included Etsy, Twilio and MongoDB. Before joining USV, Albert was the President of del.icio.us from founding through the company's sale to Yahoo. Albert graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT. His wife Susan Danziger co-founded Ziggeo. Together, they have three wonderful children. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Finishing his series on the journey to net-zero, Contrarian Ventures Founder & Managing Partner, Rokas Peciulaitis, sat down with Union Square Ventures Managing Partner, Albert Wenger, to discuss why it's so important to invest in climate.

“The only scarcity left for humanity is our own attention”, Albert Wenger.In this episode, we sit down with Wenger, the Managing Partner of Union Square Ventures (USV) – one of tech's most important venture capital firms. USV is not only responsible for today's household names like Twitter and Etsy but sets a precedent for the technological trends of tomorrow.Together, we pick apart USV's investments in climate and fusion tech, the future of Web3 and current market cycles.We also get Wenger to spell out what makes a good founders' pitch!//Looking to level up or enter a new field? Join TOA Klub for cohort-based learning. Four Klubs to chose from, each including Masterclasses, AMA's, and peer-to-peer learning. Apply now: toaklub.comSubscribe to our NL (go.toaklub.com/toaoa-nl), follow us on Instagram (@toaberlin), Twitter (@toaberlin), Linkedin (toa-berlin) and Facebook (TechOpenAir).Support the show (https://paypal.me/TechOpenGmbH?locale.x=en_US)Support the show (https://paypal.me/TechOpenGmbH?locale.x=en_US)Support the show (https://paypal.me/TechOpenGmbH?locale.x=en_US)

Capital is no longer a scarce resource. Attention is. Albert Wenger joins Vasant Dhar in episode 29 of Brave New World to discuss how the Industrial Age is past its expiry date, and what we need to do to prepare for the Knowledge Age.   Useful resources: 1. Albert Wenger at Union Square Ventures and Continuations. And on Twitter. 2. The World After Capital -- Albert Wenger. 3. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy -- Joseph Schumpeter's book in which he wrote about creative destruction. 4.  Homo Deus -- Yuval Noah Harari. 5. Free Lunch Society. 6. Andrew Yang on the New Politics America Needs -- Episode 27 of Brave New World. 7. Nandan Nilekani on an Egalitarian Internet -- Episode 15 of Brave New World. 8. Notes on Elinor Ostrom on Wikipedia, Britannica, Econlib and the Nobel Prize website. 9. Adam Alter on Beating Our Addictions -- Episode 28 of Brave New World.

Albert Wenger is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and the author of World After Capital. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us, through the company's sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early hosted data analytics company. Albert graduated from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT. 

#VN 123 🎙 2 noiembrie 2021 cu Dragoș Pătraru Dragoș vorbește în acest episod despre tranziția de la perioada de dezvoltare industrială înspre Era Cunoașterii, așa cum e ea văzută de Albert Wenger, autorul cărții „The World After Capital”. Audiție plăcută! -------------------------------- Recomandări/Contrarecomandări: 📖 Albert Wenger - The World After Capital 📖📖 Andrew Yang - The War on Normal People ▪️ Podcast #VN audio @StareaNatiei - Soundcloud, iTunes, Spotify ▪️ Podcast #VN video @StareaNatiei - YouTube, Twitch, Facebook _ #VoceaNatiei #Podcast #StareaNatiei #DragosPatraru

Albert Wenger is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company's sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early hosted data analytics company. Albert graduated from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT.Sarah Sclarsic is a Managing Partner at Voyager, a venture capital firm she co-founded that invests in early-stage climate technology companies. A long-time operator and investor in sustainability-oriented technology companies, Sarah cofounded Getaround in 2009, prior to work with pioneering biotechnology company Modern Meadow. She currently serves on the public boards of XL Fleet (NYSE: XL), Pivotal Investment Corporation (PICC.U) and an early-stage industrial process technology firm that remains in stealth.——————————————————————Watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SALTTube/videosFor podcast transcripts and show notes, visit https://www.salt.org/Moderated by Anthony Scaramucci. Developed, created and produced by SALT Venture Group, LLC.

Albert Wenger is managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a thesis-driven venture capital firm based in New York City. USV has invested in over 100 companies that use the power of the internet to re-shape markets, including Twitter, Etsy, Stripe, Tumblr, Meetup, and Kickstarter, among others. He is also the author of the book World After Capital, an evolving digital book project that explores a set of megatrend shifts as the global economy moves from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age. The book is free and available at worldaftercapital.org under a Creative Commons license. Albert Wenger on Twitter: https://twitter.com/albertwenger Access 'World After Capital' by Albert Wenger (l: https://worldaftercapital.org/ Visit Albert's Blog: https://continuations.com/ Creative Commons on Twitter: https://twitter.com/creativecommons Donate to support the work of Creative Commons: https://www.classy.org/give/313412/#!/donation/checkout Theme music: "Day Bird" by Broke for Free (http://brokeforfree.com/). Available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) license at the Free Music Archive (http://freemusicarchive.org). Open Minds … from Creative Commons is licensed to the public under CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Albert is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and the author of the book, World After Capital. Before joining USV, he was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo and an angel investor in companies including Etsy and Tumblr. Albert previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early hosted data analytics company. He graduated from Harvard College where he studied economics and computer science before obtaining his Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT. He writes regularly on his blog at continuations.com. [1:03] - Introduction to Albert's book, World After Capital [5:43] - Why attention, not capital, is now the key scarcity [14:04] - What is driving the common crisis of purpose [19:58] - Dissecting the magic employment fallacy [23:42] - The role of automation in a post-capital age [32:21] - Defining the knowledge loop [35:19] - The 3 key freedoms for the Knowledge Age [48:31] - The importance of the "eutopian" narrative -- Thank you for listening to Pod of Jake! All shares and reviews are sincerely appreciated! LINKS: Twitter: @blogofjake Website: podofjake.com Blog: blogofjake.com Support: patreon.com/blogofjake Call: superpeer.com/jake Email: jake@blogofjake.com Bitcoin: 3ESGQxrJZmGqd2SifqCUiHPvah1uWtN1Zd Ethereum: blogofjake.eth 0xF89aCC1f8c4FeEAc372997006BfE7c0fdD99F80c Bitcoin Cash: qznma8vxf8kjn4v9phsfkhzd0559gm7yfsx0gkl4sf Zcash: t1NTQAVnpcofn3dWkJr5gb5R5pcNeW9MLYm

In this CONVOCO! Podcast Corinne M. Flick speaks with Albert Wenger, German-American businessman and managing partner at Union Square Ventures, a New York City-based venture capital firm, about:How can we create a world wheretechnology benefits the many, not just the few?

Earlier this year the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures announced a new $162 million fund to invest in “companies and projects that provide mitigation for or adaptation to the climate crisis." Albert Wenger is the Managing Partner leading those efforts, and the author of a fascinating book called "World After Capital." In this eye-opening conversation, Albert explains how bad things are and will get, why the solutions are better than we think, and an original and compelling vision for a world after capital.

Eterna Capital Partner Andrea Bonaceto joins Lloyd to talk about blockchain investing.Since launching in 2018, Eterna has provided seed and early-stage funding to blockchain innovators like Algorand, Borderless Capital, DFINITY and more. Forbes has named it one of the top three boundary pushing blockchain investing firms, and Andrea has been named to the publication’s Top 30 Under 30 list.In their conversation, Andrea and Lloyd wonder whether blockchain will have the same revolutionary impact as the internet, identify the key trends that will shape the sector’s development and question how it will drive adoption of central bank digital currencies. Plus, Andrea outlines the industry's biggest  hotspots and tells us why community-building is essential for blockchain investing firms.Follow Mana Search on TwitterFollow Mana Search on LinkedInCheck out the book Andrea mentions, Albert Wenger's World After CapitalBrowse Andrea's art Episode Highlights:03:16: Why Eterna’s first fund focused heavily on blockchain infrastructure09:13: Digital ownership and traceability: the key trends fueling Eterna’s second fund14:07: How can blockchain fuel adoption of central bank digital currencies?19:42: Why blockchain is philosophically inclined toward positive social change22:06: What drew Andrea to the blockchain space26:45: Do you need to live in San Francisco or London to work in blockchain?32:02: The role of community-building in blockchain-related companies38:47: Why Andrea avoids structured approaches to work

In dieser Woche hören Sie unsere Start-up-Edition: Christian Miele, Investor und Partner bei Eventures, sowie Präsident des Bundesverbands Deutsche Start-ups, ist wieder da und spricht mit seinen Gästen aus der Start-up-Szene.Sein Gast in dieser Woche: Albert Wenger. Der Deutsche gehört zu den Top-Investoren in den USA. Er ist Partner beim führenden Risikokapitalgeber Union Square Ventures, das durch frühe Investments Angebote wie Twitter, Tumblr oder Etsy möglich machte. In dem Gespräch erklärt Wenger, warum Politik, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft sich mit der Digitalisierung schwer tun. Das Hauptproblem: Viele Entscheider sind nicht offen für Neues, sondern hängen gedanklich noch in der Industrialisierung. Doch auf die Digitalisierung kann man nicht die Erfahrungen mit den Maschinen der Industrialisierung anwenden. Wenger sieht jetzt den Übergang vom Industriezeitalter in das Zeitalter des Wissens. Unsere Gesellschaft produziert zwar viele Informationen, scheitert aber noch daran, die Informationen in Wissens umzusetzen. Was das für seine Investitions-Strategie in den kommenden zehn Jahren bedeutet, hören Sie in diesem Podcast.Das Tech Briefing gibt es auch als begleitenden Newsletter. Sie können es kostenlos in Ihrer Inbox erhalten, wenn Sie auf der Webseite des Tech Briefings auf "Jetzt abonnieren" klicken. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

As a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, introducing immunity passports as a governmental initiative have been discussed and explored. In a first-time conversation between Harvard Medical School bioethicist Natalie Kofler and Albert Wenger, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, we’ll dive into the idea of “immunocapital” and its implications for the further fragmentation of society.

This week, a conversation about education, climate, startups and everything in between with Albert Wenger. Albert is a partner at Union Square Ventures, a top-tier venture firm with early investments in companies like Twitter, Etsy, Duolingo, Tumblr, Indeed & Twilio, to name a few. His thoughts and ideas regarding tech, investing, and even climate change are expressed through his blog Continuations (a blog I highly recommend). Nevertheless, I sat down with Albert in mid-October as I was keen to discuss his entry point into the world of startup investing, how Covid has shifted the venture landscape and why this pandemic has forced us to rethink the way we learn. This conversation was recorded on October 14th, 2020, thanks for listening!

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What’s up everyone! Joining me this week is Albert Wenger, businessman, venture capitalist, managing partner of Union Square Ventures, and author of World After Capital. The #1 thing that I've learned is to invest in things that I love Albert combines over 10 years of entrepreneurial experience with an in-depth technology background. He founded and co-founded various companies in the field of consulting and data analytics. In his book World of Capital, he shares the importance of figuring out how to live in a World After Capital in which the only scarcity is attention. In this episode, Albert and I talk about investment mistakes and tips, convex vs. concave bets, the knowledge age, and frameworks for attention allocation. Episode Quotes "Convexity and concavity are inherent to different business models." "The number one thing that I've learned is to invest in things that I love." "The biggest mistake to make is to try and copy what others are doing." "In this knowledge age, knowledge is the place to go look and find purpose." Listen to Learn 01:16 - Investing: Convex vs. Concave 15:13 - Establishing convexity features 18:16 - Investment mistakes and lessons learned 22:17 - Biggest mistakes VCs make 29:20 - The knowledge age, Frameworks for attention allocation 37:24 - End notes and links

Investors and philanthropists Albert Wenger and Susan Danziger join to discuss their efforts to run one of the largest Universal Basic Income trials in the US. They and Andrew unpack why empowering people financially also helps us make progress on women’s rights, climate change, and a number of other social solutions. Watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/iB6fXcnv6vM Susan Danziger - https://twitter.com/susandanziger Albert Wenger - https://twitter.com/albertwenger Andrew Yang - https://movehumanityforward.com / https://twitter.com/AndrewYang Zach Graumann - https://twitter.com/Zach_Graumann

Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures as well as a prolific thinker and writer. His “World After Capital” is an evolving digital book project that looks at a set of megatrend shifts as the world moves between economic paradigms from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age.  In this wide-ranging conversation, he and NLW discuss:  Why attention is at the center of the new Knowledge Age Why markets can’t price crucial needs such as pandemic preparedness Why the new era will be defined by three categories of freedoms: economic freedom, information freedom and psychological freedom Why universal basic income has an important role to play in economic freedom How UBI could avoid political capture  Why technology is inherently deflationary  Why real estate, education and health care should be much cheaper than they are Why community currencies could be a key innovation from the current crisis 

This episode is sponsored by ErisX, The Stellar Development Foundation and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Investment Fund.Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures as well as a prolific thinker and writer. His “World After Capital” is an evolving digital book project that looks at a set of megatrend shifts as the world moves between economic paradigms from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age. In this wide-ranging conversation, he and NLW discuss: Why attention is at the center of the new Knowledge AgeWhy markets can’t price crucial needs such as pandemic preparednessWhy the new era will be defined by three categories of freedoms: economic freedom, information freedom and psychological freedomWhy universal basic income has an important role to play in economic freedomHow UBI could avoid political capture Why technology is inherently deflationary Why real estate, education and health care should be much cheaper than they areWhy community currencies could be a key innovation from the current crisis

He is one of the most experienced and well-known investors in technology in the United States, and also somebody who permanently lives a few steps ahead in the future. Please welcome Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures.

GeneralSubscribe to Fully Vested at FullyVested.co or your podcast app of choice.LinksAffiliation in the Context of SBA Loans Guidance for Venture Capital Investors(NVCA, as of March 27, 2020)New guidance on SBA loans means most startups are still excluded from $349 billion stimulus (Jonathan Shieber for TechCrunch)VC Backed Startups and PPP: Do You Really Need It? (USV general partner Albert Wenger on his blog, Continuations)About The Co-HostsJason D. Rowley is a researcher and writer, volunteers with the Python Software Foundation as an organizer of Startup Row at PyCon US, and sends occasional newsletters from Rowley.Report.Graham C. Peck is a Venture Partner with Cultivation Capital and additionally helps companies build technology development teams in partnership with Brightgrove and other technology development organizations.

Todays special episode of the Bits & Pretzels Podcast presents highlights from our first Bits & Pretzels Virtual Founders Breakfast. Actor Kevin Spacey shares his first-hand experience in dealing with uncertainties when your life as you know it comes to a halt. Albert Wenger, managing director at VC firm Union Square Ventures, shares his view on how to use the time of lockdown to rebuild your business. And Lea-Sophie Cramer, the co-founder of Amorelie, the hugely successful erotic lifestyle articles online store, gives her advice on how to overcome the difficult situation caused by Covid-19. Hosts: Britta Weddeling (@bweddeling), Editor-in-Chief of Bits & Pretzels (@bitsandpretzels) Featuring: Albert Wenger (@albertwenger), managing director of Union Square Ventures (@usv), Lea-Sophie Cramer (@meleayou), co-founder Amorelie (@AmorelieDE), Kevin Spacey (@KevinSpacey) More to explore: Visit our website: https://www.bitsandpretzels.com/podcast Follow us: Twitter: @bitsandpretzels Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bits-&-pretzels If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review. You can also send us feedback directly at podcast@bitsandpretzels.com. Production: professional-podcasts.com (Regina Körner, Migo Fecke), Hubert Honold.

What will the World look like when capital is no longer scarce? In his book, World After Capital, Albert Wenger makes the case that technological progress throughout the ages (foraging, agrarian, industrial) brought a change in scarcities. As society transitions from the Industrial Age to the Age of Knowledge, scarcities will also shift – human attention will become our most valued scarce resource.Albert Wenger is a Managing Partner at the VC firm Union Square Ventures. A graduate of Harvard and MIT, he holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology. Before joining USV, he founded several companies in the aughts, and was the President of del.icio.us when the company was sold to Yahoo! in 2005.Topics covered in this episode:His motivations for writing “World After Capital”How the properties of near-zero marginal cost and universality are unique to the digital ageHuman attention as the primary scarce resource in the Knowledge AgeThe shift towards the Knowledge Age and the role of capital in the futureCovid19 as a catalyst for positive societal change, and things like universal basic incomePotential upsides for crypto in the current economic crisisThe asymmetry between technological progress and privacyEpisode links: Union Square VenturesWorld After CapitalContinuations by Albert WengerPutting the Economy in Suspended Animation: A ProposalWorld After Capital: Laying a Foundation (Regulation & Self-Regulation)Albert Wenger TwitterReset Everything Virtual Conference – April 29thSponsors: Status: A multi-purpose communication tool that combines a peer-to-peer messenger, secure crypto wallet, and web3 browser - https://status.im/This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain & Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/333

Union Square Ventures partners Fred Wilson and Albert Wenger talk with Erin Griffith (The New York Times) about the firm's investing thesis to solve the climate crisis. Topics covered include: - The firm's entry into climate technology and recent portfolio investments - What the firm looks for in climate technology sectors - How capitalism can co-exist with climate solutions, and the role for government - Why there's reason for optimism

Over the last two hundred years, nothing has divided us more than our free-market economic system. Is it the source of every social injustice, from exploitation to alienation to inequality, or is it essential to our freedom and democracy? This debate is as relevant today in 2020 as it was in 1920 or 1820.  Albert Wenger is a managing partner at Union Square Ventures. Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early hosted data analytics company. Albert graduated from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT. Today’s episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Go to Betterhelp.com/KeenOn to get 10% off your first month with discount code KEENON. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Albert Wenger, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures (USV), one of the top returning venture capital funds in the world, talks with Bits & Pretzels' Britta Weddeling about the state of the European startup ecosystem, the challenging influence of big tech on innovation and how regulators could push for more entrepreneurship. USV manages assets totaling $1 billion. With his New York based fund, Wenger who is originally from a small town close to Nuremberg, Bavaria, invested in several European & US startups, such as Twilio, Etsy, Firebase, Behance, and MongoDB. Host: Britta Weddeling (@bweddeling), Editor-in-Chief of Bits & Pretzels (@bitsandpretzels) Featuring: Albert Wenger (@albertwenger), Managing Director of Union Square Ventures (@usv) Albert's blog: https://continuations.com More to explore: Visit our website: https://www.bitsandpretzels.com/podcast Follow us: Twitter: @bitsandpretzels Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bits-&-pretzels If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review. You can also send us feedback directly at podcast@bitsandpretzels.com.

Today’s guest is Albert Wenger, Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures, a NY-based venture capital firm.Before joining USV, Albert was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo and an angel investor (Etsy, Tumblr). He previously founded or co-founded several companies, including a management consulting firm and an early hosted data analytics company. Albert graduated from Harvard College in economics and computer science and holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT.In today’s episode, we cover:Albert’s assessment of the problem of climate change and his concern levelHis views on what it will take to get the problem under control in the short term and long termThe work they do at USV, their core expertise, and how that expertise can helpThe roles of innovation, policy, and collective actionWhat types of innovation can be most impactful, and whenThe upcoming election and stakesRoles of China and IndiaRoles of big oil and utilitiesHow Albert would allocate $100B to maximize its impact in climate fightAlbert’s advice for others looking to find their laneLinks to topics discussed in this episode:USV: https://www.usv.com/World After Capital: http://worldaftercapital.org/Greta Thunberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_ThunbergExtinction Rebellion: https://rebellion.earth/Nori: https://nori.com/John Maynard Keynes, Economics Policies for our Grandchildren: https://www.sloww.co/keynes-economic-possibilities/Faye McNeill: https://cheme.columbia.edu/faculty/v-mcneillEcosia: https://www.ecosia.org/Universal Basic Income: https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/universal-basic-income-UBIHow Much is Enough?: https://www.amazon.com/How-Much-Enough-Money-Good/dp/152267795XYou can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at info@myclimatejourney.co, where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.Enjoy the show!

My guest this week is Albert Wenger, a managing partner at Union Square Ventures and the author of the book World After Capital. Albert studied economics at Harvard and earned a PhD in information from technology, but if you’d asked me to guess before looking those up, I’d have guessed that he studied philosophy because of how widely he has thought about the world and the impact of technology. Our conversation is about how technology is changing the world from an Industrial Age to a knowledge age. We explore how cryptocurrencies, low cost computing, and regulation will impact our future and why the transition may require delicate care. I loved this conversation because of my obsession with the concept of scarcity. We explore what has been scarce through time and what may be scarce in the future. Albert is one of the most interesting thinkers I’ve come across and was a pleasure to speak with. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Hash Power is presented by Fidelity Investments For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast. Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag   Links Referenced World After Capital Show Notes 2:16 – (First Question) –  Defining what it means to be human             2:58 – World After Capital 3:56 – Trans-humans vs neo-humans 4:37 – The concept of Qualia 5:25 – Albert’s investment philosophy= 8:27 – How Albert began his exploration into cryptocurrencies 12:59 – Most exciting things blockchains could enable 14:27 – How does Albert view blockchain technology from the view of an venture capital investor 17:00 -  Why Albert thinks that the dominate cryptocurrency of our time may not exist just yet and what he is looking for in protocols that will become the leader in the space 20:16 – What are the central functions that will be important in cryptocurrencies 21:22 -   The state of regulation in the cryptocurrency space 27:37 – What has Albert most excited for the future of blockchain 29:10 – The idea of universal basic income 32:26 – How do you solve the problem of giving money value in a world of universal basic income 35:00 – How scarcity has changed over time 39:01 – Role of financial capital in the last 200 years of civilization 42:39 – Are we as a society only capable of solving problems once they become an immediate threat 44:15 – Explaining the idea of attention as a scarce resource 47:56 – The two key drivers of change; zero marginal cost distribution and universality of computational power 53:13 -  What should we as investors and inventors be focusing on as the new objective function 57:24 – Scariest aspect of this transition into the knowledge age 59:45 – Three basic freedoms we all seek; informational, economic, psychological 1:02:13 – Fermi’s paradox and the scarcity of attention 1:02:56 – How Albert thinks about his own day and wellbeing given all of this information 1:05:01 – Kindest thing anyone has done for Albert Learn More For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.  Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub Follow Patrick on twitter at @patrick_oshag

This week, Cory speaks to venture capitalist, angel investor, and entrepreneur Albert Wegner, who is best known for being a partner at venture capital firm Union Square Ventures. Before joining the firm, Albert founded several companies and was the president of del.icio.us through the company’s sale to Yahoo. He was also an angel investor in successful startups such as Etsy and Tumblr. In this weeks episode, Albert gives us his take on blockchain and bitcoin, tells us what skill every young person should do more of, his secret on making hard decisions, how you can figure out your career path and towards the end gives a very interesting insight into the AI debate. “I THINK ANYTHING THAT YOU LOVE TO DO; YOU SHOULD ALWAYS JUST CONTINUE TO DO IT BECAUSE (IT WILL) FULFILL YOURSELF, (AND) YOUR PROFICIENCY IN THAT ACTIVITY WILL GROW.” What do you want to do with your life? If you don’t know, start by working on things you’re interested in, but you first have to know what you’re interested in. According to Albert Wenger, most people haven’t been forced to seek out and gain experience in their interests. “The school system doesn’t give people necessarily the room, the freedom, to explore their interests, but that’s what you should do,” says Wenger. Albert Wenger (@albertwenger) is interested in many things, including technology, specifically artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. Albert talks with entrepreneur Cory Levy about these interests and gives advice for young people and startups in his interview on OFF RCRD. Albert is an entrepreneur and investor with a history of success in both running companies and investing in them. Albert is graduate of Harvard, majoring in economics and computer science, and has a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT. Currently a partner at Union Square Ventures, Albert was previously the president of del.icio.us, which was sold to Yahoo in 2005. Instead of running startups, Albert now helps young entrepreneurs grow theirs as an investor. During their OFF RCRD conversation, Cory and Albert talk about what startup founders need to know and focus on, which can be difficult when launching a company due to the many roles a founder takes on. “Knowing what the one thing is that you need to get right, and working on that, and pushing everything else aside is critical to making a startup succeed,” says Wenger. Once that product/market fit is found, importance can once again be placed in the other areas of the business. In his interactions with young entrepreneurs and students, Wenger is often asked for career advice. Before he gives a single piece of advice, he asks the question, “What’s your purpose in life?” Their response isn’t always an answer according to Wenger. “That stops a lot of people dead in their tracks because they’ve never been asked that question so directly. Also, it’s a little unfair because they didn’t expect that I was going to ask that question necessarily. I do think when people coming for career advice, not asking that question is almost like malpractice because that is the central question. How can you give somebody advice on what they should do in their career, if you don’t understand that, or if, more importantly, they don’t understand what the answer to that question is?” If you have yet to find your purpose in life, take Wenger’s advice and explore your interests. Doing what you genuinely enjoy doing well can lead to many opportunities, and just may lead you to find your true purpose in life.

Marketingtaktiken von Red Bull und Berührungspunkte: Einige Nachfragen hatten uns schon erreicht, wir können Euch aber beruhigen: Sven Schmidt ist natürlich immer noch Stammgast im OMR Podcast. Und in der neuesten Folge zeigt er sich mit harten Analysen und kontroversen Positionen mal wieder in Höchstform – auch Host Philipp Westermeyer kommt nicht ungeschoren davon. Alle Themen des Podcasts mit Sven Schmidt im Überblick: Philipps Fazit zu OMR19 und wie Sven unter anderem den Vortrag von Verena Bahlsen in den Medien verfolgt hat (ab 01:30) Googles Haltung zu Privatsphäre und Datenschutz, die Keynote von Philipp Justus bei OMR19 und wie Sven beides beurteilt (ab 05:45) Über Googles Zeitgeist Event in London, zu dem Philipp eingeladen wurde (ab 08:00) Wie steht es um Podstars, das Podcast-Netzwerk von OMR? (ab 10:30) Sven Schmidt hat vor Jahren den Erfolg der Premiere League als Plattform angekündigt – jetzt stehen vier englische Clubs in europäischen Finals (ab 14:00) Was würde Sven Schmidt anders machen, wenn er für die Bundesliga Entscheidungen treffen könnte? Und was lässt sich aktuell im europäischen Vereins-Fußball beobachten? (ab 17:15) Red Bulls Fußball-Engagement: Ist es ein Fehler, bisher noch nicht in England investiert zu haben? (ab 23:50) Deshalb haben deutsche Digital-Firmen in den vergangen zwölf Monaten meistens an Börsenwert verloren – am Beispiel von Home24 (ab 27:20) Svens Prognose zu Delivery Hero und seine Einschätzung zum gesamten Food-Delivery-Markt (ab 29:45) Union Square Ventures hat Anfang des Jahres relevant in Marley Spoon investiert – für Sven Schmidt ein Fehler (ab 36:00) Albert Wenger, General Partner bei Union Square Ventures, habe die Investition laut Schmidt weltfremd argumentiert (ab 39:45) Sven Schmidt über Zalando – und weshalb Berührungspunkte so wichtig sind (ab 41:45) Für About You hat Schmidt sehr viel Lob übrig (ab 45:30) Lässt sich das Wachstum von About You als Fehler von Zalando interpretieren? (ab 49:00) Wie steht Schmidt zu ProSiebenSat.1 und zum linearen Fernsehen insgesamt? (ab 51:40) Deshalb hat sich die Axel Springer SE mit einem Kauf von Ebays Kleinanzeigen-Sparte beschäftigt – am Ende aber doch nicht zugeschlagen (ab 58:40) Wie geht es maschinensucher.de aktuell? Und was hat die TV-Werbung zur Darts-WM gebracht? (ab 1:00:30) Weshalb setzt das Unternehmen jetzt auch auf ein Print-Magazin? (ab 1:05:30) Deshalb hofft Sven Schmidt, dass der Referent vom Wirtschaftsminister aus Nordrhein-Westfalen seinen Job nicht verloren hat (ab 1:12:50)

In dieser Folge führt Agnieszka Interviews mit den Speakern der Rise of AI Konferenz durch zu Themen von KI-Ethik bis zur Hardware https://riseof.ai Interview 1: Ein Gespräch mit Prof. P. DDr. Dipl.-Kfm. Lic. Justinus Pech OCist, einem katholischen Ordensgeistlichen und Wirtschaftswissenschaftler über die Ethik der Künstlichen Intelligenz. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justinus_Christoph_Pech Interview 2: Ein Gespräch mit Dr. Tina Klüwer, Unternehmerin und Mitglied der Enquete-Kommission „Künstliche Intelligenz“ des Deutschen Bundestages, über die Technologie hinter ihrem Startup parlamind und die Herausforderungen für die Tech-Startups in Deutschland. https://parlamind.com https://www.bundestag.de/ausschuesse/weitere_gremien/enquete_ki Interview 3: Ein Gespräch mit Albert Wenger, PhD, "Investor auf der Suche nach dem Sinn des Lebens", wie ihn der Handelsblatt in seinem Beitrag bezeichnete, über die Herausforderungen für die Menschheit im Zeitalter der Künstlicher Intelligenz und sein Buch "World after Capital". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Wenger https://www.usv.com/about/albert-wenger https://www.handelsblatt.com/unternehmen/management/albert-wenger-ein-investor-auf-der-suche-nach-dem-sinn-des-lebens/22640062.html http://worldaftercapital.org Interview 4: Ein Gespräch mit Ulrich Schmidt, Segment Manager bei EBV Elektronik, darüber warum wir im Kontext von AI auch über Hardware sprechen müssen. https://www.avnet.com/wps/portal/ebv/ Interview 5: Ein Gespräch mit Sofie Quidenus-Wahlforss, CEO & Founder bei omni:us über die Versicherungsindustrie und die Vorteile der Zusammenarbeit von Mensch und Maschine https://omnius.com Interview 6: Ein Gespräch mit Dr. Tarek R. Besold AI, Lead von Alpha Health AI Lab und Mitglied der Arbeitsgruppe KI des DIN-Normenausschusses Informationstechnik und Anwendungen, über die Erklärbarkeit der Algorithmen. http://alpha.company https://www.din.de/de/mitwirken/normenausschuesse/nia/nationale-gremien/wdc-grem:din21:284801493?sourceLanguage&destinationLanguage Buchempfehlungen: "World after Capital" von Albert Wenger: http://worldaftercapital.org "The Book of Why" von Judea Pearl: https://www.amazon.de/Book-Why-Science-Cause-Effect/dp/046509760X/ Many thanks for the music by Lee Rosevere freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rose…_Start_the_Day

Every week the show host John Siracusa talks with impressive fintech leaders and entrepreneurs, through conversation uncovers the remarkable stories behind them, their creations and the most important topics in fintech.   You can subscribe to this podcast and stay up to date on all the stories here on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify and iHeartRadio   In this episode the host John Siracusa chats with John Buttrick, partner at Union Square Ventures.  USV is recognized as one of the top VCs worldwide.   Current partners are Brad Burnham, John Buttrick, Rebecca Kaden, Albert Wenger, Andy Weissman and Fred Wilson.  John has been with USV since 2010.   Tune in and Listen.   Subscribe now on iTunes, Google , Stitcher, Spotify and iHeartRadio to hear next Tuesday's episode with Cliff Sirlin from LaunchCapital.   About the host:   John is the host of the twice-weekly “Bank On It” podcast recorded onsite at offices of Carpenter Group, a creative services agency focused on the financial services industry. He's a highly sought after fintech, VC and financial services industry enthusiast and connector. He's in the center of the fintech ecosystem, keeping current with the ever-innovating industry.   Follow John on LinkedIn, Twitter or on Medium

Albert Wenger - managing partner at Union Square Ventures - takes a bird's-eye view on the Internet and how it's changing our world. We compare and contrast the traditional Internet's pioneer days in the early ‘90s to today's blockchain boom, as well as exploring the ideas in his book “World After Captial.” What does the impending Knowledge Age look like? And what are the three freedoms necessary to smoothly transition into it? Links: Albert's book, “World After Capital”: http://worldaftercapital.org/ Albert's blog, Continuations: http://continuations.com Follow us on Twitter: Albert Wenger - https://twitter.com/albertwenger Muneeb Ali - https://twitter.com/muneeb Zach Valenti - https://twitter.com/zachvalenti See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen Here: iTunes | Overcast | Click Here to Keep Up with the North Star Podcast Our guest this week is Kevin Kwok and this episode is a special treat. Kevin was an investor at Greylock Partners, where he mainly focused on marketplaces, cryptocurrencies, and autonomous vehicles. Kevin is particularly interested in understanding the underlying structures that shape industries and the core loops that drive companies. And among other things is currently working on a class on loops, network effects, and growth models. In this wide-ranging conversation, Kevin and I jump between various topics such as A/B testing cities in China, Saudi Arabia and the future of democracy, and why we have democracies in countries and dictators in companies.  Then, Kevin distills lessons from five extremely long biographies — four of them about US President Lyndon B. Johnson and one of them about Robert Moses, the “master builder” of New York City. Drawing on those Caro biographies, Kevin talks about power, where it originates, and how to think about systems. Kevin has an in-depth knowledge of political history, governments, technology and growing a company in the internet age. Today, we’ll weave all of those threads together. Links Kevin on Twitter Kevin’s Website The Power Broker, Robert Caro Lyndon B. Johnson Biographies, Robert Caro Time Stamps 1:27 Kevin talks about Robert Caro and his biographies on Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson 3:08 How systems are the underlying reason for power in governments and companies 6:49 Kevin’s observations on the significant similarities between governments, religions and companies  10:27 Kevin defines his theory of loops and how they are a pattern that can be seen in the most successful businesses 14:03 Kevin’s observation on how successful governments and businesses use loops to scale 17:34 The two ways Kevin sees legibility, why it’s so important in creating synchronization  between founders and employees, and how it’s the reason for Uber’s success 22:32 Kevin’s fascinations with Stripe’s thoughtful leaders and their transparency in growing the company 28:26 Why the outcome of loops is a leverage effect and how leverage can remove constraints and compound systems for more gain and less effort 34:49 Kevin talks about China’s goal to urbanize more of its country through A/B testing and his opinion on the pros and cons of their strategy 40:35 A brief history of Saudi Arabia, and its implications about whether democracy is declining. 46:25 Kevin’s opinion on the future of currency and how cryptocurrency is reshaping markets and their functions 51:32 Kevin talks about how infrastructure shapes how residents interact with their cities and the underlying problems that can arise 57:44 Kevin’s take on the new trend of contrarianism, how we’ve seen this pattern before and how to be most effective with a contrarian view 1:00:20 How Steve Jobs was a perfect example of contrarianism followed by impact 1:01:58 Kevin talks about his current focus on loops and his hope that humans continue pushing and testing this frontier Quotes “It’s too easy to see what other people are doing. It’s so easy to raise capital if you can paint a compelling case for why there’s a good return. The best companies are companies that have these internal compounding proprietary advantages that get better and are impossible for anybody else to do other than them. That’s what I mean by loops. There’s different ways this can look. For example, network events as people come and talk about them is an example of a loop. The value of the user increases as more people join the network and that’s an internal loop that other people, who don’t have your network and don’t have your users, can’t benefit from.” “People try to figure out how to build these systems that are independent from their hours put in. Fundamentally, your scarce resource is your hours. There’s just some finite cap and the level of productivity you can get. You can get more productive but there’s a finite cap to how much more productive you can get on your hours. As long as your output is contrast by your hours, there always is some cap to it. The question is, how do you get increased leverage on that and, how do you keep increasing the leverage on that at some point? Ultimately, capital is actually less of a constraint if you have a working business model than just the cognitive load and your ability to actively work on different things.” “Think about how much has been shaped structurally, without even realizing it, by the decisions that were made by people crafting the Internet standards. All of those decisions people made have had huge downstream impacts on every layer that has been built on top of them. I don’t think we regret that. I think that we look at it and we say, let’s make sure we do all of the good things there. Let’s also think about the mistakes we’ve made as we create other industries, whether that’s the current waves of finance, or the current waves of tech, or whatever. When you’re in these nascent periods of new industries, how do we make sure that we help the people who we trust to be making those decisions be there at the end.” “I think that a lot of people talk about contrarianism as being against the grain, and having views that other people disagree with. Of course, the challenge is the decision of, ‘I have this view that people disagree with. Is that actually a good view or a view that people disagree with because it’s a bad view?’ Similarly, it’s hard to judge the people around you because it could be that you have a view that is mainstream in your community, but it’s actually a contrarian view in the larger view of people. My view of contrarianism is that the important part isn’t in having this view that everybody else disagrees with. The important part is bringing it to everyone else, taking that view and causing it to become non-contrarian.” “The people we should be most excited about that have contrarian views are the people who don’t just have them, they then go make sure that those views stop being contrarian and we all believe them. In fact, it’s the people who we look back and say, was that even that contrarian of a view? Actually, we all believe it. And I think that there is too much of a focus on the standing apart and being the one with the unique insight versus the part which is, ‘how do you educate everybody else and bring that back into the mainstream consciousness?’. That is a lot of work and proves that what you were thinking about was actually valuable and important. That’s the part of it that I wish was more focused on, not the part where you just feel hipster.” TRANSCRIPT DAVID: Kevin Kwok, welcome to the North Star. KEVON: Thanks for having me. DAVID: So you absolutely loved Caro biographies and I thought that would be a fun place to begin this podcast. KEVON: I'm glad I get to do my paid advertisement for Caro now. So Robert Caro has written five biographies right now, one of which is on Robert Moses who is kind of the person who built all of New York City. And then the other four are kind of four biographies of Lyndon Johnson who is probably everyone's least interesting president when they don't know about him. And then after reading the biographies, he’s by far the most interesting I think. The craziest thing about the biographies is that they are extremely long and so they're just these huge tomes that if you try to get someone to read, nobody will because they kind of look at it and then they are like, I would much rather go and read 10 books instead of reading one of those. And so it's super hard to get people to start with it. And Caro has certainly done himself no favors on that, but they're just the best books I think about understanding power, where it originates, structuralism, and how you think about the kinds of systems and people who understand how to figure them out and make them work for good or for bad. Which both, I think, you know, Moses in New York, then Lyndon Johnson and the Senate, and then the White House are both kind of the peak examples. DAVID: What is it about power that interests you so much? And is there a story that you can tell from one of the biographies that illuminates your interest in power? KEVON: Yeah, for sure. I think power is less the thing that interests me about the biographies as much as understanding systems. For most people, it's hard to understand the companies they work at or how the government functions or why New York grows and the way that it grows is something that feels too complex to kind of be legible and be understood. But then you look at, you know, someone who does it and you don't understand why they're able to do it. And unpacking that I think is just super useful to get people down the road of saying, wait, actually how do all of these systems work? And can I figure out the kind of thing in either the company I work at to make it work better or in the kind of why the government operates in the way it does. And so to give you one example though, we could go on for infinite examples on this. I think if you look at Senate history, there really wasn't, you know, we now look at the Senate as kind of this dysfunctional organization that doesn't really ever produce meaningful bills, has a large impact. Uh, and that's not actually a recent phenomenon. I think that in general is actually how the Senate has always operated. But there's this brief period when Lyndon Johnson enters the Senate and then becomes majority leader where the just sheer volume of important bills that pass is ridiculous. Like most of the progressive bills we now look at whether that's kind of !medicare related or whether that's a punch of the public works or whether that's the civil rights act, all are kind of ones that Lyndon Johnson shepherded through and shepherded it through at a time where the southern senators had tremendous amounts of power. And where they were not interested in civil rights or anything like this kind of being passed through. And so a lot of it is kind of him going into this sub 100 person organization understanding at both the kind of personal level, but also kind of where there a centralization of power, whether that was how to raise money better and funnel that to government. Whether that was how to set up the subcommittees that actually had the organizational power and had the kind of power to shape what moved down the pipeline of bills or whether that was kind of setting up a structure where he decided had people in all of the subcommittees and helped both expedite bills. And eventually, people went to him to kind of make sure that their bills will get passed. But then that also gave him a tremendous amount of insight and knowledge and control what bills were getting passed and having leveraged with all the other senators. And so I think, you look at a bunch of those examples and then they're not dissimilar from how we look at companies now, right? Or how we look at any type of organization now of where are the natural places, where the constraints on the system are and where are the places where power resides and I think Lyndon Johnson certainly did not always do things for the greater good. He did things for his own personal power which sometimes was aligned with the greater good but oftentimes was not. And I think the interesting thing is how do you understand those systems? And then how do you hopefully have people who care about building good things out of those systems, understand them and use them. DAVID: Building off of that, even in that answer, you talked about companies, you talked about government and you strike me as somebody who looks at models and frameworks that sort of may be representing a lot of different domains with the world. How do you think about that? KEVON: Yeah. The thing that always strikes me about organizations is that whether you look at governments or religions or companies, all of them are kind of topologically equivalent. Like they're all kind of the same thing. There are organizations of people that have some set of rules for who's in the group. Some set of rules for how the group makes decisions and come to a consensus, some sort of rules for how they allocate resources and all of these things. And so you can look at them on a bunch of different factors and they vary right, for example, you looked at a lot of companies and companies kind of allow both the company and the employee to unilaterally decide if they want to be part of the company. Whereas governments, for example, kind of have this rule that says, hey, as long as you don't commit treason, if you're a citizen, you're a citizen. And so they vary on different things. But actually, once you account for that, at similar orders of magnitude they're very similar. And so I think as an example, one thing I think about a lot with companies is are companies today are more similar to a companies a thousand years ago or are they more similar to city states a thousand years ago and what are then the lessons you can draw if you look at all the different things that are similar in some regard but different in others that you looked at and say, hey, you can actually learn some interesting lessons about how religions organize and structure themselves for crypto projects. Are there lessons for how the Senate operates for decisions within companies or things like that. DAVID: So how do you think about balancing the similarities between different structures but also the reality that as things grow and scale, begins to change the properties of something. Right? Because you could see similarities between different companies for example. But also there's an inherent tension between growth and wanting to sort of rest on those models, but things change as they scale. KEVON: Yeah. That's, that's a great question. I think the thing that always confuses people is that as their companies grow or as any organization grows by an order of magnitude on any dimension, whether that is customers or employees or a number of purchases or anything, it's just a fundamentally different company and a different system. And the things that you've built and the processes you have that work great when you're 10 people, stop working when you're 100 people and definitely don't work when you're 100,000 people. And so a part of it is that you have to be comfortable saying, how do I understand that even just being successful at the same thing, we are successful, that will by definition obsolete our competence at it because it will grow by order of magnitude and will be fundamentally different. And how do you understand what are those ecosystems and loops that you have? And you know, as they get to a new scale, how they change and what they need to transition to and what that looks like, that might be very different. DAVID: So we were at dinner about a month ago and we were talking about loops and you have some really interesting ideas in terms of the relationship between loops, sales, network effects, maybe even careers. So just gonna let you run with that. KEVON: Yeah. It's funny because I feel like I talk about loops with a bunch of people or on !twitter. And then I realized that everyone just asked me what loops are and I don't have a great explanation because I feel like it's not discussed super often. I think to kind of start from the beginning of it. I think one of the things that I've thought about a lot is if the two of us were going to start a company a thousand years ago, 500 years ago, the best way to start a successful company would be to get the government to give us exclusive trade routes between the US and India and guarantee that anyone else using those routes, the military or the navy would go stop them. And you could build a hugely successful business there. And then in the 1800s or 1900s, the best way to do it would be to find some area, maybe a natural resource or building railroads or something like that and go build this business that is economy of scale after you have a bunch of proprietary relationships. And it'd be hard for people to both copy that or raise the capital to compete with it. But now you look at the most successful companies and certainly the tech companies and it's too easy to see what other people are doing. It's so easy to raise capital if you can paint a compelling case for why there's a good return on it. And so the best companies are companies that have these internal compounding proprietary advantages that get better and are impossible for anyone else to do other than them. And I think that's what I mean by loops and there are lots of different ways that can look. For example, I think that, you know, network effects as people commonly talk about them, are an example of a loop where the kind of value to the user increases as more people join the network and that's an internal loop that other people who don't have your network and don't have your users can't benefit from even if they know that it's true. But I think that network effects are one subset, but there are lots of them and they're all over companies. And actually the interesting way to think about companies or sectors or any of these ecosystems is kind of the loops around them and what is compounding and not only what is compounding but what's constraining them, because when you look at something that's a loop the and keeps compounding, the thing that hurts it the most is wherever it is most constrained and is dropping off, right? So I think that both for individuals and for companies, we don't currently track things like this. In fact, many of our metrics today are more geared around either funnels or other types of ways of looking at companies. But really as you think about how do you build companies and understand the sequencing of what compounds and why does it keep getting bigger. It's all about what are the loops you have and how do you strengthen them? And then what are the constraints on them and how do you remove those frictions, right? Whether that's financial capital or social capital or knowledge or having more employees or whatever it is. DAVID: What changed about the world that made loops super relevant? KEVON: It's a good question. I think that loops were always relevant, but the thing is the less data and iterations and the less at bats you have the less loops matter because if you look at an enterprise company and you know they need to land the government and they land the government and they're a public company and that's the entire business. Then you know, these loops don't really matter. What matters is, can you build a great relationship with the buyer at the whatever department in the government and can you get them on board, but then you look at the other extreme and you look at consumer marketplaces and it's not enough to say, I got dinner with that one buyer and they bought $25 thing on my website and now I'm golden. You have to say, hey, can I get 10 million people to go do that? And it's just not possible for me to hand go to them and get to know them personally. I have to build a system that aligns them with me and causes them to engage with me and then retain and then keep buying and then be happy and then keep spreading the word to other people. And so the more we have things that have greater amounts of data or customers, the more we have things where you have more interactions with the customers, the more that you have things where you can't just have the government dictate that you win or have one or two people decide who's the winner in the market. The more we get to a world where you have to build these internal systems that compound. And I think that's why we're still in the early days of it. I think we'll look back in 10, 20 years and a lot of how we track things in companies, a lot of how we look at things will have shifted towards this because one model of companies or model of venture I look at is at one end of the extreme is enterprise sales where it is more knowable, what makes a company successful and which people could start a successful company and who are the customers. And then on the other side is consumer social or consumer marketplaces where even for the best investors, it's super hard to predict which one will figure out the loop and get traction with customers. But you know, the whole point of tech as an industry and venture as an industry to some degree is taking these things that are not yet understood about how we should think about metrics or how we should think about company building or loops and then making it understood and benefiting from that. But hopefully, the things that are the frontier of our understanding today about company building, in 20 years, kids in college, will just look at you like you're dumb for even thinking that that was ever not understood in the same way that we look back at companies 20 years ago and we say, you know, of course. I think that exactly like that, you go back enough years, it wasn't in the mainstream consciousness about how to think about that. Now it's almost overused, right? Everyone kind of knows that's how they should think about that. And I think the question is how do you keep pushing all of these views that are usable and useful of how to think about companies or just how to think about any system forward collectively. Right? DAVID: And on that theme of pushing forward and pushing to the frontier where we were talking a bit about pushing the frontier of legibility. Can you do a quick background on legibility and illegibility and talk about what you mean by pushing the frontier of legibility? KEVON: Yeah, for sure. So I think that there are two ways I think about legibility, which I'll go into. I think the first is that legibility in companies, which I view as kind of two things I've been kind of thinking about are legibility and synchronicity and companies. And so I think legibility to me and companies is, does each person at a company understand why the company works the way it does and what's important to the company and what are the loops that matter to the company? And I think that's super important because a lot of times people do their job well and then the company or their manager or whoever kills the project and they don't understand why and they don't understand why even though they did the thing that they were told to do, it didn't fit into the larger system of what the company wanted. And the same is true for founders. You know, a lot of times founders have to figure out legibility of the market, right? And understanding where they fit into that. And I think that it's hard to measure and we don't really measure this but it's interesting to me to what degree does each person within a company understand the loops and the rest of the company so that they always know how they should kind of act and the things they should do that are most beneficial for the company. I think if you think about legibility as kind of everyone at the company trying to understand the company, synchronicity is kind of the flip of that, which is if you're the founder of a company, what is your ability to have everyone at the company synchronized with the things you want and on the same page and of kind of how you think about it and what actions are important and working towards those. And I think that these are the kind of the two feedback loops in both directions within companies that are their own system and loop, right. That when you have it really well, it's just significantly more productive and for better or worse. For example, I think that Uber had tremendous synchronicity, more so than many, many companies and it allowed them to act with super distributed teams in every city. DAVID: Almost a balance of their central headquarters, but also the local units that would go into every city, work with local government, understand the local dynamics of the market and they had good synchronicity between the two. KEVON: Exactly. You need the legibility of understanding what is actually what should be different for each market and having the teams on the ground there, but then you also need them to understand kind of what is actually the most important things that Uber as an entity cares about. Right. And those are things like liquidity and having a driver available within x minutes from anytime you call or having pricing that looks within a certain range and these kinds of metrics that you need to have kind of synchronicity across all of the groups on. I think that also is just as we talked about with Caro, I think that goes in both the benefits and the cons, right? Because it also means that if you have issues, those can get synchronized across the entire companies too. But I think that one thing that Silicon Valley has done significantly better than many other industries is how to think about the internal structure of organization and how do you actually get leveraged. So instead of just adding more and more humans and hoping that it works well, but inevitably kind of falling over because it becomes harder and harder to coordinate. How do you actually figure out these systems so that you can coordinate people both on the team, or a lot of marketplaces if you look at Uber, Airbnb for example, I think that they don't have direct control over the hosts or the drivers, but they still need to have synchronicity and legibility with them of figuring out how to coordinate with them and have them act in ways that are beneficial for both them and the platform. And that's even tougher when you don't have direct control because they're your employees. All of the tech companies have been figuring out a lot of advancements in how do we think about company structure and you look at how Amazon or Stripe or all these companies very intentionally think about it and you know, there's a lot of mistakes made, but it also is kind of pushing forward a bunch of this, right? DAVID: Talk about Stripe, I'm really interested in stripe and I think that in terms of its impact on the world, it's very under-covered and definitely understudied. KEVON: Yeah, absolutely. I certainly think that there are many people who know Stripe much better than me and I definitely don't know all the details of it. But I think there are a few things that are fascinating about Stripe. I think certainly one of them from a company organization standpoint is that the Collison brothers, even from afar, are just very clearly thoughtful leaders who are consciously thinking about knowledge. It's baffling to me given the demands of their jobs, how they have the cognitive time and any of the ability to spend the amount of time they do just soaking up knowledge and thinking about how to kind of structure their company better and structure or their system better. But you just look at them and they're super intentional about it. Right? And I think that whether that's the internal tooling they built out for kind of improving communications internally, which they've blogged a bit about or whether that's kind of how they think about the emails being open and shared and having a default to that so that people can have as much information as possible. Whether that's just kind of seeking out the best practices from other companies and always kind of trying to figure out how to improve. I think that one thing you look at is that people talk about A players and B players and C players and companies and there's always the adage of kind of you want people who are not afraid to hire the best people to join them versus afraid that people will kind of replace them. But I actually think there's another accede to that, which is how much do you bias towards people who will build things in the same way that they have been built versus people who will rethink how to build these systems. And don't get me wrong, I think that a lot of times the best practices that have been established are great and so in a lot of places you do want to hire the person who has built out with VP sales at the company that was the last generation of what you're building and can immediately bring you to all of those best practices. And so that's kind of one accede to me. And then there's another accede which is, are people willing to look at kind of the situation of your company in particular and say, hey, actually should we rethink how it's done and would it be more beneficial or should we obsolete this business unit entirely and would that actually be beneficial? And then am I not afraid to do that. And I think the harsh truth is that most companies, getting to the best practices is kind of a baseline requirement. And if you can't do that at some speed, you don't really earn the right. You just don't have the time or the money or the ability to experiment with new models that might not work. And the payoff could be much higher, but you might not find out whether it worked or not for a while. Then you look at companies like Stripe that kind of do operate at a great level, and then still are able to find the time and say, hey, actually we should still rethink these systems and figure out if there are ways to build it better. And that's how you build very special companies. Because I think that as an example if you look at marketplaces and you look at Uber, it wasn't common knowledge to think about network effects at a local level when Uber started and when Lyft started, people didn't do city teams in the same way. They kind of launched nationally and both of those companies kind of really pioneered, at least for the mainstream consciousness, this idea that actually it might be advantageous to launch city teams because there might be these loops that are better done at the city level versus at the national level. Now, you look after Uber and Lyft and there were so many marketplaces that all kind of created city teams and launched. Actually, it's not obvious that was always beneficial. I think you look at a lot of these teams and they kind of copied this new norm that kind of became standard instead of also thinking for their sectors, hey, actually if you looked at it, what is the correct scope of my network effect and what's the best area, whether that's the city level or the state level or just the local neighborhood or even one block and saying what actually makes the most sense. And so for example, if you look at the scooter companies that are popping up everywhere in the US and whether they'll be successful or not, what's fascinating is that their natural zone is not quite cities. They work much better on the Venice boardwalk. Then they work in the middle of some suburban neighborhood in Los Angeles. DAVID: Wouldn't work in Houston. KEVON: Right, right. So the question is if you look at that, how do you figure out how you deploy the people in your organization, how do you think about the metrics and what scope you should be tracking them and how do you think about what are those loops and what is the natural scope of them so that you can best build the business and have it compound. And I think that, you look at companies that are just super thoughtful about it and it's incredible and you know, part of the challenge is, how do you find people who have that bias, but also how do you have a cadence of shipping and progress that is fast enough that you know, have the time and ability to spend those resources thinking about it. DAVID: It seems like leverage, is sort of the outcome of loops. So loops keep spinning. Perhaps as the network effect grows, they spin faster and faster and over time you're building leverage. And that's something I think about in terms of building a career. I've been thinking about maybe we're moving from a world of career ladders to actually spinning different loops and going where which ones are spinning faster and faster, and then that's where we direct our attention. So how would you think about this in terms of a personal career? KEVON: Yeah, a few things on that. So the first is, I think the way I've thought about careers, which I think is very much to your point, is there is compounding and unconstraining. And so I think unconstraining is that the reality is most of us, probably all of us are constrained on different things. In fact, most people think that money is the constraint because for most people money is the constraint, right? And if you're living paycheck to paycheck, money is the thing that is kind of constraining your ability to decide what you want to do and to pursue or to optimize for the long-term or all sorts of decisions. And then for a bunch of us, not that money is not a constraint to some degree, but then you get passed some point where you're worried about paying rent or paying for food and money becomes less the constraint. And then there are other things that might be the constraints such as knowledge and learning about things or who you know or all sorts of other areas. And so I think one way I look at it is that you should always have a view of what are the constraints on you. And that's kind of you as a loop, right? What are the constraints that are kind of blocking you? And if they were unconstrained you would act meaningfully different and you would feel like you had more autonomy to decide what you wanted to do. And then I think the second half of that is compounding. And so how do you build out these loops and how do you build out loops that actually have the ability to compound for you? So for that, I think there are two ways I look at it. One way is for you doing whatever you like, whether that's your podcast or whether that's your business, how do you build it so that you doing it today versus you doing it a year from now, it's better, easier, higher quality, lower costs, all of these good attributes a year from now versus today because otherwise it's kind of, there's been no progress. Right? And it's kind of finitely limited. DAVID: It's like the red queen effect of always trying to spin faster and faster. One thing I'm always thinking about is how do I build leverage so that I can achieve, it sounds obvious, but the goal is how to achieve more without running faster and faster and that sort of by building that leverage so that once something comes, you can just automate or have the connections to see something and make it happen. KEVON: For sure. The red queen effect is a good way to put it because I think that the natural state of most things in the world is default and tropic and so the natural state of things is that, you find a successful business, competitors will see that and come to challenge it that the things that you've been doing eventually they will degrade slightly over time. And so that's why it's important to find the things that are naturally compounding because actually, the default is that things will naturally kind of revert to the mean. Right? And so you have to find these areas that compound, whether that's on your time or whether that's building out systems around you that kind of will help scale up your work, whether that's with people or with the kind of products you build because otherwise the natural status for them to kind of all revert to the mean. DAVID: It was funny, we were with some friends last week. I was in Austin and we were talking about the spectrum of typers to tappers and typers are hardcore workers, hands-on-keyboard people and they are the workers of an organization. They generally have less leverage, but then my buddy, he was with the CEO of a sixty-billion-dollar of a Japanese firm and he said that his biggest insight from spending a bit of time with him was that he was a tapper and that he had so much leverage on his time that his career could all be done by tapping on a smartphone screen. And the fundamental insight was that he's not doing work. Rather he's directing the flow of a gushing river and he's directing the flow of water. KEVON: Yeah. That's interesting. I think that there's a lot of truth to that. There's also, not to take away from the former, there's a lot of just how does work get done? Right. And the reason I think eventually people will think about how to build these systems that are independent from their hours put in is that fundamentally your scarce resource is your hours. And so there's just some finite cap and the level of productivity you can get more productive, but there was a finite cap to how much more productive you can get on your hours. And so as long as your output is constrained by your hours, there always is kind of some cap to it. And so the question is how do you get increased leverage on that? Right? And how do you keep increasing the leverage on that at some point because ultimately capital is actually less of a constraint if you have a working business model than just the kind of, not even hours, but just your cognitive load, right? And your ability to how many things you can really kind of keeping your mind and be actively working on. And so I think everyone eventually either intuitively struggles with it or tries to explicitly build out these systems of how do I build systems around me or my company so that I can kind of get more leverage on this and be able to keep scaling it up without it being affected by the fact that I only have x hours to work per day even if I cut into my sleep. DAVID: Gonna change directions here. I think both of us are pretty interested in cities. And personally, I'm fascinated by city-states. Actually, one of the things sort of on my long-term bucket list is I'd really like to travel to Singapore and Hong Kong to Dubai and compare and contrast the different city-states from culture to economics to politics. And I know you've talked a lot about city-states, but also from sort of an A, B test perspective. What do you mean by that? KEVON: Yeah, so I think one of the areas on cities, and this is specific to China. When I was talking about this in good ways and bad ways, I think that China seems to A, B test cities in the same way that companies in the US A, B test features. And look, there's a lot of bad about that too, right? I mean, I think that when you A, B test cities, whichever is the B test that did not work out that well has a lot of people's lives affected. On the other side though, it means that they're integrating a bunch on experimenting with how should you structure cities and how do you improve cities the most? And so I think that if you look at China right now and I think China's plan is to urbanize more people in the next few decades in China than people who live in the United States. And if you think that the, the best way to improve human well-being is actually urbanization, which I think a lot of the data points to, of all the network effects of cities. Then it makes a lot of sense, but it also is a insanely daunting thing to say, how do I intentionally manufacture over 300 million people moving into cities that do not exist today. I think that when you think about that challenge and how, how you build that, it's a lot of different experiments that they've done on a scope that in a lot of other countries we don't do for better or worse. And you contrast that to a lot of the debates people have in San Francisco on housing policy for example. It's just a much higher both centralization of power and bias to action, which has a lot of downsides but also has a lot of upsides. And so I think the contrast to that to me is if you look at democracies, I think that one of the, kind of weak points of democracies, the one that people commonly talk about is majority rule. I think that's discussed a lot and because it's discussed a lot of people think about how to mitigate it a bunch, which is good. I think that one of the less commonly discussed ones is that democracies don't represent future stakeholders. And so democracies are greater representing all of us who are around today, but they don't represent the people who will be affected 10 years from now by our decisions or 50 years from our decisions because they don't vote. Sometimes they're not alive. And the way in governments we deal with this is that for the most part, we think that the people today it's their children who will be the future stakeholders. And so it's okay because they'll kind of think about the interests of their children. So even then, if you look at a lot of how we make funding decisions for a lot of government institutions, we don't seem to account for kind of how it's handled down the road. But when you look at a lot of the areas that there's a lot of disagreement on such as housing policy or immigration or areas like this, I think that a lot of the problems come down to the fact that a lot of the people who care about those decisions are not part of the process of deciding those decisions. And so it's not the immigrants, it's not the future citizens who are currently living in other countries who get to weigh in on what immigration policy should be and it's not the people who don't live in San Francisco but would live in San Francisco if housing was cheap enough, who'd get to weigh in on that. And that creates this misaligned incentives where people aren't being irrational. They're actually representing their interests. Right? And you know, people who own houses should want their houses to increase in value. People who live in a country, at least some set of them would not want other people to come in. And I think that in so far as you think that those kinds of things are important. There is a question which is how do we kind of fix these issues or mitigate these issues in our democracies so that we do represent these stakeholders and I think historically two ways we've done is we've either said, hey, here's why it obviously is economically beneficial even for the people who are already there to have San Francisco grow in size and more people move here and grow the economy or another way we've done it as we've had cultural norms or we've said, hey, you know, America is built on this norm of being built by immigrants and welcoming immigrants. And I think both of those and other strategies are powerful, but both of those seem to be weakening. And as they weaken, then the question is how do you make sure, as long as you think these are good things for cities to have, how do we get these benefits? So without the downside so that we can get the benefits that countries like China have with kind of growing their cities without the downsides of kind of totalitarian rule or pollution or a bunch of centralized control that's not representing the interests of the people. Right. DAVID: So we've talked about America, we've talked about China, but I see that you're really interested in Saudi Arabia. Why? KEVON: Yeah, yeah. I feel like over the last few years, certainly there's a handful of countries that I feel like I've just personally and certainly for no professional interests, spent a lot of time thinking about and researching and Saudi Arabia is one of them. I think Saudi Arabia is fascinating right now because it kind of hits on a lot of trends that are happening in the world right now. And so for example, one trend is that Saudi Arabia is this fascinating country where, people, most people don't quite know what to make of it. It sort of is, you see a lot of reports and you say on one hand it looks like they're cracking down on corruption or improving women's rights or opening up to foreign investment. And then, on the other hand, you also look at it and you say it looks like it's centralizing power and becoming less democratic. Not that it was entirely democratic at all ever, but it's becoming even more centralized in power and actually trending towards kind of a dictatorship and cracking down and imprisoning political enemies. And so you look at these two sides and I think it's hard for a lot of people to weigh what's happening. But I think, you dig into it a bunch and what's happening kind of also then explains a bunch of kind of structurally what's been happening in the Middle East. And so one example is over the last five, 10 years, MBS, who is the current ruler, has kind of been involved in a tremendously done coup of the other royal families in Saudi Arabia. And you look at that and one part of it is a lot of the conflicts in the Middle East, a bunch of them can be traced back to the fact that MBS was kind of in command of the external facing parts of Saudi Arabia. Whereas the other sides of this internal coup were in charge of the internal facing government organizations. And so having a bunch of conflicts happen in the Middle East actually make it more important to centralize power with the external facing side of this government. And helped him gather power, build relationships with the military, cement those relationships as he then went to kind of cement his power in the throne. A lot of the movements on both liberalizing externally but solidifying rule internally or are very interconnected, right? And you need to have the external allies aligned with you as you kind of deal with a bunch of the internal conflicts. And then finally, I think that it also is just an interesting data point on this trend where I think a lot of us, if you think about the core things that you believe in and if at the top of that heap of things that you believe in but don't hold very strongly is kind of what's your favorite breakfast food. And then at the bottom of that heap is your belief in maybe for some people democracy or their religion or free speech or whatever areas they care most about. I think that one of the questions we're dealing with today is, is there a reason democracy is structurally trending away as the dominant form of government? Because if you look around the world empirically and Saudi Arabia, China included are good examples of this. It feels like there was a time years ago where it felt like the world was getting more democratic. It actually feels like the world is getting less democratic now. And there was a question of why that's happening. You know, for example, I think one reason you might say it's happening is that it's actually becoming more possible for countries to understand the needs and what is going on at a local level in their countries. And you look at China for example, and you go back a thousand years in China. It was impossible for people in the central government to truly coordinate with all of the local provinces at any reasonable time-frame. And so there's just a natural decentralization that happens there where you need. We're even if we say it's under one ruler, you have to let local officials decide things because it'll take eight weeks to hear word back for any decision. Whereas you look at China now and because of all of the information technology that has been created and because of all of these things, it's more possible than ever for a government to understand what's going on and all of the local provinces and in the best form of that say, hey, actually what are the things they want and what are the things they need? And so it's become easier and easier for centralized authoritarian governments to both control, but also provide for and understand what they should provide for, of people around their countries. And that has made democracy seem to trend downward, which I think for a lot of us as a pretty frightening thing, but it's a thing that I think you should always assess whether the thing that you don't want to happen. Is it a temporary blip that it's fading away or is there some structural reason? And if so, how do you either try to mitigate that or how does that influence your views on it? DAVID: My question to you is sort of a meta question, but there is this sort of this spectrum from people in crypto land who say this time is different, things will never be the same to people often in finance. A lot of the literature is, this is just a cycle, we go in cycles of the market is going well, the market drops, the market goes well, the market drops. How would you think about the words this time is different in terms of something like government and democracy? KEVON: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think that also in the crypto point, I think that that is also a super fascinating question because, on the crypto side, I think that it's exactly as you say, right? People who are involved in crypto say well we reshape a bunch of the markets of how things function. This will be fundamentally different. And then people in both tech and finance say, actually, there may be some changes, but it will kind of reconverge back on the same thing. And to some degree, I think both are correct. I think that the way things work is you can change a lot of things. Now eventually people will recentralize as they figure out where are the dominant places to centralize power within these ecosystems. And so we don't yet know where that is in crypto. I think eventually people will figure those out. But to the point, and part of the reason I think a lot of people, myself included, are interested in crypto right now is that the decisions made in this kind of formative early part of these industries. If you think these industries will become important, which I think we don't know if certainty, but there is a decent likelihood that crypto could, a lot of decisions made. Whether consciously or unconsciously in the kind of days where this is kind of still wet clay end up having huge downstream effects. So for example, if you look at privacy norms in the US, I think that a lot of decisions that were made by both the CEOs of companies like Facebook or Snapchat or other companies that are at the forefront of kind of both the communication mediums that people use for this as well as kind of a video recording or other areas, the decisions they made and the people who influenced them kind of had an outsized impacts on social norms around those areas. Now, not to say that the government doesn't help get involved in it and not to say that the people don't, you know, in some ways regulate and socially regulate their decisions, but they have a lot of impact. And so if you care about those impacts, then what's important is kind of being in zone of those decisions and how those decisions are made or being able to impact the people making those decisions so that they do think about the consequences of them and they think about what the downstream impacts are and you look at the Internet today and the, there's many volumes of kind of debates that were had on internet standards and for the most part, we don't remember them now at all, but you think about how much has been shaped just structurally without even realizing it by the decisions that were made by people kind of crafting the internet standards. And all of those decisions people made have had huge downstream impacts of every layer that has been built on top of them. And so I don't think we regret that per se, but I think that you look at it and you say, hey, let's make sure we do all the good things there. Let's also think about the mistakes that we've made as we've created other industries. Whether that's the current waves of finance or whether that's the current waves of tech or whatever. And say, hey, when you're in these nascent periods of new industries, how do we go make sure that we help the people who we trust to be making those decisions be there at the end. Right? And I think that's not unique to crypto. I think that's also the same if you look at governments, you look at AI, you look at a lot of these areas, a lot of us personally won't be able to affect a bunch of those, but to the degree you can, you want the people who you trust to be making the decisions that you think are most aligned with how you think decisions should be made to be the ones at the table who have a say. And the reality is the table stakes for being at that table in many of these industries is building the companies that have the dominant loops and are the dominant companies of their industries because they're the ones who get to kind of have a seat at that table to decide what our norms will be for AI or what are norms will be for crypto or any of these areas. DAVID: Even something as simple as the words we use shape how we act and whatnot. And also we were talking about cities earlier and when you think about building the infrastructure of a city, a city that depends on highways operates very differently from a city that depends on public subways and whatnot, which operates then again, very differently from a city that has roads designed for bikes and people who are walking, right? So the infrastructure that we build at the beginning will then shape the topology, the culture, and basically the modes of action that arise later. KEVON: 100 percent. And maybe that's a good reroute to the beginning of a Robert Caro because I think his first book about Robert Moses who kind of built out much of what people look at in New York City is a really good example of this because Robert Moses, he basically was unchecked in his power in building things in New York, which has a lot of downsides. And I think that the flip side of the critique of a lot of things going on in San Francisco right now where people say, hey, I wish we built more is what happens after Robert Moses where for decades after Robert Moses, people. I think Jane Jacobs is the most known among these said, a lot of things that he built weren't great. And some of that was terrible views and decisions he had. And I think there's a lot of things we can point to there. And then part of it was also areas where he was one man and didn't have full legibility on what the city needed or wanted or how to prepare for the future. And so to give you some examples of this, he built the highway systems in and around New York City and at the time there were very few people driving on highways or in cars and he kind of was one of the first people. And then a lot of the people who then ended up building a bunch of the highway systems for Eisenhower across the US where people who worked for him and he built these highways and he refused to put public transit lines along them. And his view was why would you need this? 1. The highways you can more than handle the capacity of cars that are driving. And 2. Another view he kind of had or people suspect he had, which is he was slightly elitist. And he said, cars are the rich and public transit is the poor. And actually, I want to make it much easier for the rich to get out to these places and not have the poor able to do it. And so you look at these decisions and they had huge impacts for a bunch of reasons. So one reason, one impact they had is that a bunch of these decisions he made that were either racist or discriminatory against the poor, just created ghettos within New York, made it impossible for people who are poor to afford to go out. And the same way that people who were rich were, they had real impact on real people's lives. And Robert Caro, I think he does a great job of both capturing how Robert Moses accumulates power and understanding it while also capturing the real stories of the people whose lives were affected by it in terrible ways. So that you understand that we shouldn't just love this. We should understand that these decisions have very real impacts. And you know, there's one section of the book where he goes through one block that was affected by the decisions that Robert Moses made and talks to the children and grandchildren of people who lived on this block that was raised for one of Robert Moses' project and how their lives were affected by that and how crushing it was to their families and how much it impacted even two generations later, their children and your grandchildren. And so I think that there's that side of it. And then on the other side, you look at it and his refusal to build public transit lines along the highway has kind of still, we are feeling the impact of that because obviously now cars are ubiquitous and everywhere and the highways he built to handle that. And the reality is highways period can handle that without building public transit, LRT systems which just can handle significantly more people. And so you look at a lot of these decisions people make around how we structure our cities or structure of companies. And these decisions have huge downstream impacts and so I think it's fascinating to see all these decisions being made a lot of times without the full understanding of the downstream impacts and without other people understanding that these are very important decisions. And that's kind of why I think the Caro books are just great at this because they make, you realize that once you take the time to understand how these ecosystems develop and the downstream impacts of them, you understand why all of these things are important and they show how one person can have a huge impact on it. One person who understands the system and kind of where the vulnerabilities of it are and where the weaknesses are in it can have a huge impact on it. And you know, hopefully, that will be people who have good intentions doing that. Right? And using that. And that's why I kind of want a lot of my friends and other people to read the Caro biographies to kind of understand that and be able to be in position for those. But it also means that it helps you understand when you see people who are making bad decisions about it, right? And whether intentionally or not and kind of understanding that the importance of things like housing policy or things like public transit, whether that looks like bike lanes or highways or LRT or whatever because they have a just huge impact on everything else within these cities. DAVID: The last question before a couple of quick ones at the end, you had a thought about contrarianism a couple of weeks ago that I've been thinking a lot about. I think perhaps we've gone a bit too far with it and often in the name of contrarianism we miss the mark about what it's really about. So I'd love if you could riff on that for a bit. KEVON: Yeah, for sure. I think that contrarianism has become obviously a very mainstream area where ironically everyone wants to be contrarian now and what's interesting is that I think I've always been fascinated by these concepts where everyone is a big fan of them, but we don't unpack them further. And so for example, I think network effects is another example of these areas where everyone knows that they should say they are contrarian or they have network effects, but then you really push on kind of like, what do you mean by that other than just I have good things. So I think that a lot of people talk about contrarianism as kind of being against the grain and kind of having views that other people disagree with. And of course, the challenge is the decision if I have this view that people disagree with. Is that actually a good view or is it just a view that people disagree with because it's a bad view. And similarly, I think it's hard to judge if you're contrarian enough from the people around you because it could be that you have a view that is mainstream in your community, but that view is actually a contrarian view in the larger view of people. But my view of contrarianism is that the important part of it is not about having this view that everyone else disagrees with. The important part is bringing it to everyone else and actually taking that view and causing it to become non-contrarian because a contrary view that stays controlled forever. It's just something that is- DAVID: It's all intellect, no action. KEVON: Yeah, it's useless, right? It's useless both for you and for the world. And so the interesting thing is actually having views that are not the consensus views of the world, but then doing your work to make sure they become consensus to the world if they are better, and don't get me wrong, I think that part of that is getting rewarded for it, right? And figuring out how to generate value from that, whether that is in building a company or whether that is in finding people who are like-minded. DAVID: I think a great example of that is Steve Jobs. His vision for the future of computing, a contrarian that many people doubted. There are all the stories that we know, but then he goes out and profits from it by giving his vision to the world. And I think that to your point, that's why he's revered in society. KEVON: Absolutely. And I think that the best thing to look at in contrarianism is how successfully they obsoleted their view from being contrarian, right? Because the people we should be most excited about who have contrarian views are the people who don't just have them, they then go make sure that those views stopped being contrarian and we all believed them. In fact, it's the people who we looked back and we say, hey, was that even that contrarian of a view? Actually, like we all believe it, right? I think that there's too much of a focus on the kind of standing apart and, and being the one who has the unique insight that nobody else has versus the part which is how do you go educate everyone else and bring that back into the mainstream consciousness and actually that is a lot of work and that is the thing that proves that what you were thinking about was actually valuable and of importance. And when I think about contrarianism, that's the part of it that I wish was more focused on versus the part where everyone can kind of feel hipster and feel that they're the special person with special thoughts on it. DAVID: Totally. So a couple of questions about you. The first one I'm going to steal from Tyler Cowen (my episode with Tyler here), he and his interviews saying what is your production functions? So what helps you stand out, be different, and have these ideas that you've shared with us today? KEVON: I don't know to what degree I stand out or have done well or I'm different. The view I care about is in understanding how systems work and the structuralism of that and I find that the people who I get along super well with and could talk for hours with are people who share that curiosity about trying to understand systems. When I think about on a kind of 50 year time horizon, what are the bets that I would want to take and would want to live by and then when you're retired and 50 years later if you're wrong, you're like, well, I'm still glad I took that bet. But it could have been wrong. I think the first one is kind of a on this idea that there is value in understanding systems and actually part of what we all should be doing is pushing this frontier of understanding the world and understanding why things work the way they do and then actually testing it and seeing if it is true in our theories on that were true. And so I think that is a bet I'd take any day of the weekend and I think is just natural gravity I have. And then I think the second one, which is tied to that on the people side, it's just finding people you resonate with who kind of are interested in thinking about the same types of things you do. Because at the end of the day, just like companies have loops and network effects. I think that people are ultimately the loop and network effects for each other. And the reality is we write biographies about companies and people and because of how we write biographies, we always view them as kind of the start of the company is when the company was incorporated and then it was built from there. When the reality is that the companies were all started 20 years before that of the set of people who how the founders knew each other, the people who they bounce their ideas off of the people who they would go then and higher. And so all of the compounding companies and governments and organizations to me seems to stem from the people you surround yourself with and how you resonate with them. And so I think that also is kind of how I both draw most of my ideas is from those discussions and also kind of how I stress test my ideas is kind of pushing on those with people who are curious about those same things or who are in other fields and you find the consilience between the fields. DAVID: Well Kevin, thank you so much for coming on the North Star. KEVON: Yup. Thank you so much. Hey again, it’s David here one more time. At North Star Media, we help companies build brands on the internet, and through content, we help them build trust and generate attention. And we do it through blog posts, books, videos, and podcasts like this one. You can support the North Star Podcast by leaving a review on iTunes. Or you can share the podcast on Twitter or Facebook. To listen to other episodes or learn more about the North Star, you can connect with me directly at perell.com and you can always reach out on Twitter at david_perell. And if you enjoyed this episode, you’ll like the episode with Albert Wenger, a partner at Union Square Ventures. In this conversation we talk about Albert’s fourth coming book, World After Capital, and how technological progress has shifted scarcity for humanity. When we were foragers it was food that was scarce, during the Aquarian age it was a fight for land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. With digi

Seit über 20 Jahren lebt Albert Wenger in den USA. In der Zeit hat er in Harvard und am MIT studiert, eine Firma an Yahoo verkauft und war mit Union Square Ventures (USV) Frühinvestor von unter anderem Twitter, Tumblr sowie Etsy. Im neuen OMR Podcast erklärt er, in welche Bereiche und Geschäftsmodelle USV heute vor allem investiert, was es mit dem Zeitalter der Aufmerksamkeit auf sich hat und warum er sich für ein bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen einsetzt. Alle Themen des Podcasts mit Investor Albert Wenger im Überblick: Der VC Albert Wenger erklärt die Aktivitäten von Union Square Ventures (ab 02:15) So hat der in Deutschland geborene Wenger seine Karriere in den USA gestartet (ab 04:30) Wie kam 2007 das Investment in Twitter zustande? (ab 09:00) Deshalb investiert Union Square Ventures aktuell vor allem in Companys, die Zugang zu Wissen, Kapital oder Wellbeing bieten. Und darum passte die Berliner Verhütungs-App Clue genau in dieses Raster (ab 11:00) Deshalb ist für viele der Portfolio-Firmen von Union Square Ventures Influencer Marketing heute so effektiv (ab 13:30) Subscription-Modelle statt Monetarisierung durch Ads (ab 15:00) Aufmerksamkeit schlägt Kapital: Das meint Albert Wenger mit seiner These zu Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, mit der er das Zeitalter der Aufmerksamkeit beschreibt (ab 15:45) Wie hat sich Twitter vor dem Hintergrund von Wenger Aufmerksamkeits-These seit dem Investment von Union Square Ventures verändert? (ab 20:20) Wie Ubermedia einmal versuchte, durch den Kauf von unabhängigen Twitter-Apps einen Konkurrenten aufzubauen – und der Kurznachrichtendienst laut Wenger die Nerven verlor (ab 22:00) Deshalb hat der B2C-Ansatz von Foursquare nicht funktioniert und so hat sich das Unternehmen neu auf B2B ausgerichtet (ab 24:45) Die Soundcloud-Story: Die Macht der drei großen Musik-Labels macht den Bereich laut Wenger extrem schwierig (ab 28:30) Wie schätzt Albert Wenger die digitale Gründerszene in Deutschland und speziell Berlin ein? (ab 29:50) So sieht der VC die aktuelle Situation und Zukunftschancen vom Krypto-Markt (ab 31:45) Das grundlegende Problem der digitalen Welt: Endnutzer haben nicht genug Macht gegenüber den großen Unternehmen (ab 33:30) Albert Wengers Einschätzung zu Mark Zuckerberg (ab 39:45) Deshalb arbeitet der VC intensiv am Übergang der Industrie- zur Wissensgesellschaft (ab 41:20) Staatliche Förderungen und Preise als Anreiz zur Lösung von Problemen und Innovation gebe es laut Wenger viel zu wenig (ab 44:00) Wenger über Probleme der Demokratie, Fake News, Freiheit und bedingungsloses Grundeinkommen (ab 47:00) Deshalb unterstützt Albert Wenger den Demokraten Andrew Yang bei seinem Ziel, 2020 Präsident der USA zu werden (ab 51:00)