BREAKDOWN: USV's Albert Wenger on the World After Capital
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2020
⏱️ 62 minutes
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Summary
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 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
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond. |
| 0:12.0 | This episode is sponsored by ArisX.com, the Stellar Development Foundation, and Grayscale Digital Large Cap Fund. |
| 0:20.0 | The Breakdown is produced and distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:22.6 | Here's your host, NLW. |
| 0:27.8 | Welcome back to The Breakdown. It is Monday, May 18th, and today we have a really awesome show to kick off your week. |
| 0:36.0 | I'm joined by Albert Venger, who is a partner at Union |
| 0:38.9 | Square Ventures in New York City. Albert is a prolific thinker and writer and kind of profiler of |
| 0:46.3 | our world in the moment that we're living through and how it transitions to something different. |
| 0:50.4 | A couple years ago, he started a project called World After Capital, which is effectively |
| 0:54.8 | a book that he's publishing online as he writes it. And really the central thesis of this book is that |
| 1:01.2 | we're moving from the industrial age to a knowledge age, and that there are significant transitions |
| 1:07.4 | that will inherently come with that, and we would do better as a society to |
| 1:11.3 | be intentional about them. Now, the context of the coronavirus crisis in terms of both the health |
| 1:18.3 | implications, but also the economic dimensions, have really accelerated a number of those |
| 1:23.0 | trends, and you'll recognize, if you're a regular listener to the breakdown a lot of the themes that we've |
| 1:28.6 | covered in the past few weeks. We talk about this idea of technology as an inherently deflationary |
| 1:34.6 | force and why that runs up against the existing power structure. We talk about what it looks |
| 1:40.2 | like to have human attention be focused not just on what Albert calls the job loop. |
| 1:46.5 | I spend my time earning income so that I can consume things that may or may not be relevant |
| 1:51.8 | to me, which describes 90% of our lives, and instead is focused on other pursuits and is |
| 1:57.5 | enabled by things that have had the Overton window on them shifted through this |
| 2:02.4 | crisis, such as universal basic income. So we talk a lot about these big ideas, and what I think |
... |
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