My guest today is Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures. We start in 2005 when he joined

Delicious before selling to Yahoo, after which he joined Union Square Ventures full time and

make big investments in companies like Twitter. Now, today he's worked on and perfected a book

called World After Capital, where he argues that today the big scarce resource is not capital.

It's a tension that everyone's fighting for.

Now, this is an important thing to think about because one of the big investments Union Square Ventures made was Twitter,

which is built around an ad model predicated on keeping our attention, just like Facebook.

Union Square Ventures made north of called a billion dollars, according to the Twitter S1,

where the company built up north

of a 5% stake in that company. So what changed? I asked Albert, I think he gave a good answer

there. We also talk about the three pillars that this change has to kind of coalesce around

economic freedoms, informational freedoms, and psychological freedoms. We talk about those three things

related to blockchain. We talk about universal basic income and what that could look like,

and how consumers can more safely guard their attention to make sure it's being used in a

productive manner. We'll jump into it in this long-ranging conversation, but it all started

in a quiet German town when Albert entered a coding competition.

Let's jump in.

Hello, everyone.

My guest today is Albert Wagner.

At 18 years old, he won a computer science competition at his German high school before proceeding on to Harvard and earning a PhD and information technology from MIT.

After that, got into management consulting, hosted data and analytics, and eventually became the president of

Delicious before its sale to Yahoo. After that sale, he joined Union Square Ventures, Fred and his

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