Raoul Pal & Sandy Kaul: A Technological Cambrian Explosion is Upon Us

is our life has been really shaped in many ways by so many institutions and individuals have not had a way of being responsive to institutions and I think that you know what we're starting to see is that the crowd is finding a way to come together in their power to really become a entity that can engage institutions right I don't think they replace them but it's good to have a voice Sandy calls one of my favorite people to speak to really smart really engaging and always makes me think now she's been on real Vision before but mainly on the crypto side she's been very focused on crypto but she has a much bigger idea around the exponential age that dovetails in with my thoughts as well so I really wanted to pick her brain to see how she sees this all evolving when change comes opportunity abounds we're about to enter a period of the fastest pace of technological change in all human history something we refer to as the exponential age and real vision is going to be your guide to this incredible future Sandy fantastic see you back on real vision great to be here with you about so last time you came on it was part of my crypto show which is rouse Adventure crypto but we want to broaden out the conversation because you're not a one-trick pony you're a a multi-talented Queen who's done who looks at all sorts of stuff and today I want to talk more about your broader thesis and this is part of something I call the exponential age which I think you're very much aligned with which is the big thematics of technology and how you see that and you've spent a lot of time writing about this researching it so I'd love to get your top in fact first before we start just for people who aren't familiar with you just give a bit of your background and then we'll dig into what we're going to talk about great well thank you all uh I've been in the financial services industry for basically my whole career started off as a reporter for the wire Services I was told I'm too opinionated to be a reporter which was kind of the theme for the rest of my career um became a research analyst in the commodity markets then a portfolio manager for many years uh trading in a commodity pool then moved became fascinated by the technologies that were coming out right around the 2000 so moved over into Consulting on how emerging Technologies were changing the investment management delivery model and the financial services delivery model I've spent many years Consulting um really got deep into Alternatives and operational processes joined city as part of their Prime brokerage unit and really built out their hedge fund Consulting practice to help hedge funds think about how to really deploy these new technologies and become much more institutional in the wake of the 2008 crisis and then began a thought leadership practice in 2009 that really took a 360 degree view of the industry we talked to asset owners we talked to intermediaries Consultants fund to funds wealth managers private Banks we talked to investment managers and hedge funds and private asset firms and we had a fintech practice within my group where we looked at all the emerging Technologies and we would put together these views on the industry of how we saw both the near-term evolution of the investment management and wealth management industry so the next one to three years and then obviously looking further out where might there be disruption in the investment management and wealth management industry so we started looking out 5 10 and 15 years uh did my first paper on tokenization and crypto back in 2017 and over the years just became increasingly fascinated by what a transformational moment we are at in terms of building new models for the future so really wanted to get very involved and toast came to Franklin Templeton because we are a firm at Franklin Templeton that is really you know we're based in Silicon Valley area we've got that whole mindset about innovation in the future and there's a great team here that's been doing fantastic work that I had known for many years so join Franklin Templeton about a year ago and what's your role at Franklin Templeton now what do you think I'm uh leading a thought leadership practice here that looks at disruptive Technologies and I'm also working with our digital asset unit on our strategy for how to transform our own business and our own investment portfolios moving into this space yeah and we talked a lot about that in our previous conversation which wasn't that long ago but let's talk about the broader technological space what's your framework of understanding because everyone's trying to rapidly put together a framework which is changing very fast as things are changing so talk talk us through that and then we can dig in so I loved your analogy in the beginning about exponential error because really when you look at what's happened over the past 60 years there has been this incredible speeding up of Technology Innovation if you look at from the first Computing mechanism which came out to the launch of mainframes that took us almost 100 years right then from the emergence of mainframes to the personal computer took us almost 40 years then from the personal computer to the internet took us less than 20 years from the internet to cloud-based systems and operating platforms and all the web 2 models that we have today took less than 10 years and now we're on the cusp of really probably transitioning into yet another New Era where a lot of new technologies are coming out and that could happen in as little as five years so we're seeing this shrinking of the time frame of each period and what we lay out is that you know we really kind of look at the Modern emergence of the computer so this is when computers went beyond being used by the military and Beyond being used by just academics and starting to actually move into the commercial realm and that was about the mid 1960s so we kind of start our framework there and we've identified three eras that we've been through in that period automation which was about the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s digitization which was the mid-1980s to about 2000 the current ERA that we call virtualization which we're in today and the emerging era that we see coming we're calling decentralization for how the Techno analogies are changing so that's kind of how that we've laid out this framework and we talk about how different types of Technologies changed in each of those eras and so if we're talking about virtualization what's your hypothesis there how do you see that and what are the Technologies involved and how do they all fit together and that's a big question but yeah so I think there's a few key components to virtualization uh the first has been that we have taken mobile technologies uh and just seeing it's almost unbelievable how quickly mobile technologies have advanced all over the world if you think about the first real commercial mobile phone did not emerge until almost 1998 right in terms of capabilities and the smartphone came out less than 10 years later and today when you think about smartphone penetration and the device penetration um that has just been overwhelming and that really was so important because it freed people from needing to be at the computer so mobile technologies allowed us to really be connected anytime anywhere then we started to see all of these types of new devices and network connectivity that were beginning to give us information that we never got before right so we've started to see the internet of things and sensors being implanted and actually machine driven data is now the largest and fastest growing of category of data in the world so we've had all of these new machines being connected so everything from our smart refrigerators and our smartphone watch our smart watches uh you know to sensors that are operating in big shipping networks or operating in farming networks or in space so we've seen a lot of connectivity and virtualization of the data coming from networks and then we've seen the emergence of all of these platforms that enable social engagement so you know in the beginning the web was all about websites and the website was static and you saw all whatever the company wanted to deliver now we are all part of these networks and they can be social networks they can be networks where we're actually obtaining services like uber they can be networks where we're shopping like Amazon but we're we're now part of this very networked economy and those I think are the big three areas and of course underlying all of that is the technology itself which is cloud-based technologies that are operating on apis and making it very easy to build new technology which used to be I had to build and program and code an entire system now I can actually borrow and use other people's functions and technology so it's become much easier to build because we've virtualized those capabilities and these three so if I'm right the three were mobile internet of things and networks themselves and these things have all combined as well yes exactly and now they're all coming together in ways that you know are really starting to change our Behavior as people and that's really you know where we took this framework we talked about how the technology has advanced and then what we started to write about it and realize is that as this technology Evolution and revolution has occurred it's led to certain behaviors and behavioral what we call Mega trends that are really changing the way that Society has operated and at a very macro level what's been so exciting well is that they are really changing the empowerment of individuals and they are giving individuals more and more ability uh to do things on their own and it's really changing the Dynamics of Commerce and government and really everything that we do in our daily lives yeah I mean one of the things that I've spent a long time thinking about and spoken to people at Balaji about as well is this idea of this network States because you know when you and I grew up we live in a village or town and it was a physical state and yes we used a mobile phone to call our friends who are somewhere else and not a mobile phone a landline and you know we connected but now we exist virtually anywhere and anywhere in communities and societies um you know all of the businesses we work for we work from home or we work you know with colleagues around the world and it's seamless now it seems that that idea this distributed Network idea is a big thing and we're seeing it not only in crypto but we're seeing it just in how humanity is operating in societal level absolutely and it's it's so interesting because these networks transcend a lot of the boundaries that used to define how we lived our lives right governmental boundaries corporate boundaries familial boundaries right Community boundaries these are all boundaries that have been eroded as these networks really allow individuals to spread and we call it in the paper build their personal brand by who they affiliate with and how they affiliate and that is something that was just not possible as little as even 10 years ago hi I'm Ralph Howe the CEO and co-founder of realvision the financial world is a complicated world right now it's a really complicated macro picture and there's a lot of risks real vision and our YouTube channel help you navigate those risks so subscribe now to the channel and never miss an update there is simply too much going on so subscribe now thank you yeah but it also changes Society in a more fragmented way so we fragmented Anyway by physical geography or where you went to school and all of that stuff and we've broken that all apart and then we're redoing it online but in different ways in a more fluid way because you don't have to move house anymore you can just leave one society and move to another instantaneously online um according to your needs desires or whatever yeah it's it's power right to emerge from the crowd right that ability to come together is creating a a new almost body of both political and sociological and even commercial weight that sometimes feels very out of control because it's a crowd and we all know that sometimes crowds really behave in ways that are irrational or illogical as well as being very effective sometimes they're coming together so it's really putting I think a lot of strains and a lot of I think what we're seeing in a society today is a result of people really making this transition and being in the middle of these two models but it also feels like as a society we're learning how to deal in crowds how to work together in ways that we didn't do before um and you know I look at it and think of you know one of the big online movements has been the investing movement firstly was Occupy Wall Street which was the physical movement a bunch of people went to camp on Wall Street to protest then really what happened was GameStop was the same kind of people but doing it on mass online and taking a positive action to kind of rebel against the system and to try and be less disadvantaged in that system now whether that worked or not that's Up For Debate but it was like a genie came out of the bottle and we've just seen it with bank runs it's like the crowd now is more powerful faster and more knowledgeable than any individual you know this hive mind idea that I'm stuck with I think is a huge breakthrough for people what I find so fascinating about that is the variety of people that being part of this crowd really appeals to right I I like to point out to people and you brought up the whole meme stock right with GameStop um my 86 year old father and my 18 year old nephew were in the same Community talking about what meme stocks have invested and they were both equally as excited about it and I I did love that aspect of it but there is something you know I think important and empowering about that ability because our life has been really shaped in many ways by so many institutions and individuals have not had a way of being responsive to institutions and I think that you know what we're starting to see is that the crowd is finding a way to come together in their power to really become a entity that can engage institutions right I don't think they replaced them but it's good to have a voice and that's one of the things we talk about in our new paper is this idea that the crowd has given an ability of individuals to both have a voice and to engineer and exit and one of the most interesting statistics that we found in the paper was there was a study and it said when you know we see these boycotts online boycott this company because of whatever reason they're doing that you disagree with they said that the boycott itself actually has very little impact on the company but the coverage of the boycott the national media coverage of the boycott for every day that the national media covers a boycott like that the price of the underlying stock tends to decline by one percent per day and that they said that the in more than 25 percent of the cases it pushes the company to actually acquiesce to the demands of the crowd and just to even think that that could have that kind of impact you know that was something that was unimaginable 20 years ago yeah I just think there's a there was a new form of democracy that is more egalitarian because you vote by being an active participant in a particular movement online and it also highlights how out of date institutions are and I don't know if you've read the book The Fourth turning by Neil Howe and William Strauss I mean this feels to me that's so funny I reread I reread the last chapter of that book maybe every six months because it's so he's got the new version coming out which is the fourth turning is now I think it's called so I can't wait for that but it feels that we're at that fourth turning moment where institutions are going to get reshaped because of how we're now operating online we're seeing it with the system of money with web3 we're seeing it just in these online communities that it makes government structures as they are feel a little bit outmoded well and what's yeah one of the things we look at in the paper is that this idea that because of all the technology changes we've experienced individuals are actually able to act like an institution now we call it the institutionalization of the individual um and I think that that alone really is is pushing the boundary on what institutions can Implement without really responding to the feedback loops that they generate and and that was always I think a key part of what's been missing in how Society operates right and now we're starting to see a much more I hesitate to say but maybe equal playing field where people can really influence back the institutions and change them and I thought the the Constitution Dao was a good signal much like Occupy Wall Street didn't amount to anything but it was the seed of an idea that will not go back in the bottle you know it the genie was out with the Constitution down I think we'll see people coalescing Capital instantaneously around causes that wasn't possible before absolutely I loved that too and I was rooting for them yeah exactly so we've got a lot changing with Society the internet of things and mobile are very interesting as well and they're really interesting because of the developments of AI because it's all well and good your fridge having information or your oven and you'll be able to control it from your mobile phone and you know you can get fridges that can create you know what's missing but I've been trying to think through what the hell happens when you put AI into your fridge or your toaster and that's probably a couple of years away yeah well I mean I think the most exciting potential right there's there can be terrifying or exciting potential like I would I go with exciting yes I like exciting I'm a glass half full and filling person um you know the most exciting thing to me is this idea of prediction right so right now we have gotten very good as a society of ingesting all of this data and looking at the patterns and this data and kind of figuring out based on your cohort here's what Sandy or here's what Rao might need right you know here's their geolocation on their phone they're in this certain neighborhood you know let me let them kind of think about what offers I might want to give them because they're in this certain neighborhood right and we're already seeing that right you can get a little offer from Starbucks that pops up on your phone when you're getting out of your Uber right so they they're already at this point where they know what is happening now but what I find so fascinating about AI is that even is going to likely be able to not only think about where you are now but figure out what are the most likely and predictable Pathways you are going to take from this current moment in time where you are and how can we reshape Commerce to actually incentivize you to take certain of those Pathways over others so I think that it's going to start to really build individual models of each person and be able to really tailor the delivery of the world to that person in a way that the person may not even realize they have those needs until they start being fed to them so I thought that was a really fascinating part of this and a lot of that is this agentive design and we're seeing a little bit of that like with the nest systems in our homes and but this is going beyond that this is an AI getting to know Raul and getting to know Sandy and then figuring out almost like our own digital personal assistant that lives with us what are we going to need and what should it be marshalling in terms of our own resources so I think that's a fascinating potential of where we're going yeah there's a fascinating potentially and slightly and we have to touch on the terrifying the terrifying is putting AI into all of these devices where it trains itself certain things I mean I don't know what my fridge my toaster and my Kettle are going to say about me behind my back but I'm worried about it because before you know it we've got the robot Revolution happening in my kitchen because I've had takeaway for three days and they neglected the cooker that's so funny flash forbid you're going on a diet and I want to eat this many calories a day your whole household May enforced that on you it either enforces it or Rebels against it saying what about me the fridge I want your attention to and you're now not giving it to me I mean there was a pretty terrifying interview that I read where a technology writer had interviewed the AI and it was a little bit horrifying the results so I don't know I mean they're not human so you don't know what's going to really drive them and how they're going to respond um so yeah I think we're in for a very very disruptive period over these next few years um lots of promise but lots of probably crazy situations that are going to come forward and very unexpected I don't think we can really I think there's going to be a lot of unknown unknowns for a while yeah I mean I've been looking at all of this so I'm my exponential age thesis is that yes mobile networks data instead of things all of these things plus robotics AI EV green energy all of these things space a rule and crypto are all headed in the same place this Cambrian moment that I think we've started yeah and most of these are all metcalf's law adoption models but if you put them all together you get Reed's law which is metcalf's law squared which is what we're feeling now with AI I go onto Twitter every day and the 16 new applications and suddenly there's gpt3 then GPC three and a half then gpt4 and then uh last week it is auto GPT and agent gpts and I'm like I can't keep on top of this it went from zero to a hundred million users in five weeks I know it's crazy you know and what's amazing is that you know nobody's really quite sure where it sits today or what it to your point about how quickly it's changing I think I saw something that one of the top people in it said it's all going to become decentralized now too and I'm like well that's even scarier because then there's no one really engaging this in a way that we can understand so yeah and interesting days but your point is that decentralization is one of the inevitable trends yeah and we're seeing this really interesting there's a friend of mine who's built um stability AI which is an open source Ai and then we've got open AI which is not open and then we've got Google and I'm sure Amazon and apple will come with their own but the point being Zed Mega corporations that will hold this immense power and now there's a decentralized version I'm sure we'll see many of these which becomes almost viral in nature at that point because there's it's Unstoppable so to your point it becomes almost unforecastable as well exactly and I think it goes back to the point we were making earlier about crowds and The Growing Power of crowds and the dissatisfaction and pushback against institutions all of these big corporate entities are just a different type of institution now and this whole centralized model uh it's almost like the pressures are breaking that centralization apart and we really are I think Cambrian explosion is the perfect word for it because we're going to be creating something and I don't think any of us can really see those future parameters very well at this point no and it does again to refer to the book feel like the fourth turning and it's like I mean it's so shocking how fast this is happening it's like I've had some conversations I've brought on a guy on real Vision it's amazing somebody said you need to speak to this guy I said sure who is he he's like oh is ex NASA from jet propulsion Labs I'm like what am I how am I going to interview him so I said lovely guy Leon alkalize so what are you doing Liam he said I've started up a VC investing in space I'm like what's there to invest in and he laid out all of the stuff going on and you alluded to this there's an internet of things going on in space plus networks that are outside of sovereign states that exist up in space and he was saying oh yeah so one of the issues is is there's all of these satellites that SpaceX and everybody's putting out there's not enough it's too expensive to keep sending the data Down to Earth for computational power so we're setting up server farms in space I'm like okay and he goes and we're going to have to use crypto to make the payments for the server Farms because it's outside of sovereign control we don't really want to use a system of money out in space I'm like wow it was just jaw dropping how fast this is accelerating and this is like real time I think I had heard a lot about that and spoken to others who are also working in that space space um and it's really there's a whole new economy being created in outer space right now that has nothing to do with like sending people up there right and it is fascinating I mean you know and then we have all of this enhancement in in where we're actually the data that we're gathering on the universe from these new satellites and these new telescopes that are out there and you know it's all coming together in a very interesting way yeah I've always been a Sci-Fi fan but I didn't really think I was going to live in my sci-fi universes during my lifetime no but it also fits into your whole thesis you know if you think about mobile and everything else well SpaceX is delivering essentially Wi-Fi to the world it's the internet of things but it's happening in space and creating networks so it's kind of happening all around us and people don't see it they feel the societal shifts but they don't really see why It Feels So fluid right now and I think it's because as you raise we're kind of transitioning into this whole new way of being well and I think that the Dynamics of decentralization just you know the simple dynamics of operating in a decentralized environment are so different I mean we've really had centralized entities that have guided human existence really from the first time we came together and started to build cities right or started to farm right there was always a central body that has controlled the development of where Human Society has gone and this is the first time that we don't need the coordination that those Central entities always provided that the access has become so ubiquitous that everyone can engage and everyone can create and everyone can participate and that's just really taking us into such Uncharted Territory but how when do you speak to fund managers and others in the financial industry you're basically telling them that they're not going to matter anymore in the in the construct that currently exists how do they take that well some some really are not ready to hear about it quite yet right um you know you guys Fidelity there's a few who are really thinking through this Cowan there's a bunch of you who are thinking through it but a lot of people are going la la la I can't hear you I can't hear you I think it's that you know this is a very analytic industry that likes to deal with data and a lot of people in this industry have been trained in exactly the same way to deal with data and build models in exactly the same way and those models have worked for the pretty much the entire lifetime of these individuals so to now come to them and say hey this isn't going to work that's a very hard message for people to hear but there are Visionaries in every field and in financial services as well and as you pointed out there are some firms like Franklin Templeton where we are really saying if the future is going to be this different what is the role of an investment manager here and and this is where I actually am very excited about the future and where AI could again be very positive in that if I'm going to be understanding standing and understanding role at this amazing level I'm going to also want to be finding Investments That resonate with you so an investment like I love the Pro Band Pearl Jam so I might want to be part of Pearl Jam's royalty pool if that was an option for me and that would be generating income for me but I could also structure that investment product so that I'm also getting maybe some exclusive web audiences or concerts and I could turn that investment instrument into something that also gives me enjoyment in my life and I think this is where we're going to head in that our investment portfolios are going to enable us to have more benefits and live our life in ways that satisfy us more and give us more emotional payouts as individuals and I think that's a very exciting Direction so yeah one of the things that not everything is negative about where we're working one of my thought processes that it was a conversation I had with yatsui from brands that made me think this thing through is okay we understand we're going to get replaced by Ai and labor force that's offset somewhat by demographics but there's going to be problems so what role for humans so we think about Universal basic income but the idea that I'm thinking through is universal basic equity which is the web 3 idea where you can be a member of a community whether it's a band or whether it's a political movement or whether it's a ecology move doesn't matter what it is if you're a good Community member you can get rewarded in the native currency or assets of that community be it nfts or or tokens themselves um fungible tokens themselves to be an active Community member and that actually might play into this decentralization idea and this new world where we don't have to operate in the institutional World any longer because maybe there's no role for us in that but there are other ways that humans like to coalesce well and the other part I I completely 100 agree and I think gatsui is one of the most brilliant thinkers of our age he's really helped to influence a lot of my thinking as well um and I think that one of the other interesting aspects is I like to say not Universal basic income but Universal basic data because in these new decentralized models they're pseudo-anonymous for the most part so the personal data really goes back the ownership of your data reverts to the individual and I really think we're just a few years off from us being able to use our own personal transaction data as a currency that we are able actually to either get directly incentivized by or barter with to gain access to other goods and services and I think that is also a super interesting and exciting development with this decentralization and back to the original theme we talked about this growing empowerment of the individual yeah and it's funny because I've had exactly the same ideas so does the universal basic Equity idea and the universal basic income can be your participation um the use of your data one of the things we should talk about is and people on real Vision have heard me talk about this a lot but I'd love to hear your thoughts is I'm terrified of going into this U.S election with AI we're about to have text to video which means that and that's going to come in the next few weeks months couple of months so we can basically make tailored videos there could be a different one for Sandy different one Terrell um instantaneously at scale giving different messages from people who don't know what's real and what's fake right so this problem is gigantic and as of societal importance I'm not sure whether anybody's ready to solve it and I've spent time speaking to Google Amazon Facebook LinkedIn everybody's saying guys you've got to do something because you're the only people who can and they can't get their together and they weren't a great common set of Standards so I think they're going to get forced into it and that feels like that will happen because of an election that becomes very complicated that we need and my point being is we need digital ID and could there be or reader illustration of how out of sync the political system is with the technology then the fact that the most likely candidates running in that U.S election are going to be octogenarians right I mean honestly I I just can't understand sometimes the world no I know and but we need some form of digital ID which is a great use of blockchain you know I think it's maybe even one of the biggest uses of blockchain of all in this world you're talking about already I think you're starting to see some politicization politicalization of this idea of being able to have a digital ID because that means you can be tracked and you know there's all of this anti-government sentiment and I think that you know even what should be common sense and very useful tools to solve some of our problems I worry that they're going to get caught up in messaging that will turn big portions of society against using them so that's I think one of the other problems with the crowd right is that the crowd can often also reinforce negative messages and negative perceptions yeah about that yeah yes I agree but the crazy thing is this crowd is operating on Google and Twitter and and Tick Tock and of which all the data is being recorded of everything they do and everything they say and every single email they ever write on Gmail and everything and the US government can just go to Google and say hey we want this information Google will hand it to them so we part your mobile phone tracks you your nest camera tracks you your bloody vacuum cleaning robot knows what route your house looks like I mean are we long past the thing of caring about what government data has I mean I just walk into the United States now using my Global Entry and I just look at the camera and it goes yep fine off you go yep and so I think the digital identity is a red herring and with zero knowledge proofs I think we can get around a lot of this as well well and that's where I see a lot of that's one of the Technologies I'm also super excited about and seeing really how it develops I know it's very new right now and the use cases are just developing but I I do think that you know what people almost I hate to say it but what people don't know isn't going to hurt them so if they're not understanding sometimes how this is actually being enabled that might be better for them than really getting into the ins and outs because it won't trigger some of those reactions because as you say they're living their lives every day I mean I gave up years ago thinking that I could ever keep my data private right but a lot of people still think they can right they don't really understand how much of their data is being used so I think that um you know there is a lot of potential with some of these new technologies and I I think that sometimes you're just going to have to force it on society um despite people who don't want to move forward I mean sometimes technology does require I think some people really pushing it out and getting it to be more widely adopted and the wrong ways of hearing their voices by using you know zero knowledge proofs to say fine actually if you can sell your data and you can protect from your first layer of revealing your data every time then you can navigate the world but you can be authenticated as a person as a valid participants in that particular Community or whatever that's probably better than where we are today yeah I would agree and that's going to be inevitable because as we move on to these decentralized blockchains where Commerce is going to migrate and where it's being built they don't collect that personal data and all of the data on the blockchain is public right so all these centralized platforms that today are using that data to drive so much of their income that's going to be transparent to everyone that edge disappears as we get into the decentralized world and that blockchain data is publicly available so we're going to need to find new ways for people to understand how data is used in that environment where suddenly all this data that's proprietary today becomes publicly available now when I think of your the history the computation then let's say mobile and then the virtual it leads into the bigger thing which is I think where this all comes together is the metaverse that's where yes there's robotics which is another side but if we think about a lot of this it's the living of our digital lives in rebuilding Societies in a digital native way where digital assets digital currencies in this world exists it it feels that everything leads to what we know as the metaverse is that your basic hypothesis as well yeah I think that the metaverse but I think when people think the metaverse we've seen like too many movies like ready player one right the metaverse isn't going to just be this fantasy environment where you can go take your avatar and go party in Virtual bars I mean there'll be some of that too but the metaverse is going to be everywhere right like I I try to explain to people we're moving into a world that I call is the fidgetal world where the physical world and the digital world become almost indistinguishable um and I think a great example of that is um one of the big makeup brands had a a showroom that they put up in SoHo in New York and you would go in and instead of actually trying on the makeups because there's always a little bit of how many people have tried this lipstick I don't know if I want to try this right um You would look in the mirror and they had this metaverse type mirror where once you told them they would take a digital scan of your face and you could actually show yourself what the different colors lipstick or what the different kind of blushes looked like on You by looking in this mirror right and that to me is really what the metaverse is going to become is that there's going to be this almost overlay of what can be created and exchanged and delivered as a digital service in our everyday physical lives that were constantly interacting with and people see a lid of this already in some of the newer cars they project out instead of having to look over to the side and see them map of where I'm trying to follow my GPS they're now projecting it in front of the car so I'm actually driving on the Arrow right and the arrow is out in front of me and that's another I think manifestation of how we're going to see this Digital World get overlaid on our physical world in more and more ways until he comes feeling absolutely natural to have that happening yeah and I think um we're seeing all of these exponential Technologies releasing at a faster and faster rate so people digested web 3 crypto and that hasn't really had its massive Cambrian moment that probably still lies ahead but it was the fastest adoption of any technology the world ever seen until AI came along AI is going so fast that it's literally kind of crypto to the power of five or something you can't even track it it's like there's a lot of other things happening because like self-driving cars everyone's up worse never gonna work it's not you know it's not going to happen then before you know it they'll be everywhere and they'll be there'll be no drivers you know no Uber drivers no taxi drivers no bus drivers no delivery drivers no truck drivers no drivers and that's gonna happen probably within less than 10 years but we'll see that at scale well and look we've already there's no longer any toll booth operators on any of the highways around New York City they got rid of them off right now it's all digital and electronic and you know they're even tearing down all the old tall booths right so you don't even have that period where you stop you just drive straight through as I do through Global Entry I just right just like through Global Entry so these are all this is already happening right like this isn't something that people need to speculate on they just need to kind of pay attention and the next one that's coming is I think the manifestation of the metaverse because people have seen that meta kind of dropped the ball and they don't know where they're going with it I have a feeling and I'm not sure but we know that Apple's headset is coming out in June I think it is and there's this whole I don't know if you've been following this Nerf technology this digital 3D it's like digital photography in 3D from your phone wow and it basically allows you from what I can tell to have photo 3D worlds that you create off your phone so we're now not talking about like a Unreal Engine developed thing but we could meet in my physical Lounge which is a 3D it's it's kind of mind-blowing and it looks like apple is at the Forefront of developing this along with the new headset and again people think oh metaverse it was just a buzzword it's gone away my point being is it's likely to throw its hat in the ring on top of this exponential age then for self-driving driving driving cars come along then you know and so on and so I mean what on Thursday elon's going to send the largest ever rocket into space which is you know and it's just yeah well and then then think about what your crowd relationships become the communities that you're part of if now you can be physically together with those people from a visual perspective now you know you're adding yet another sensory Dimension to how you create and build community so yeah so we're rebuilding that the the physical world but without the constraints of the physical world so we've got used to this because before I don't have to come to meet you where you were we'd have to go and sit down somewhere we'd have people with cameras all over the place and now it's come that we can just spin up you know this is a Riverside or a zoom or whatever we can film it so this is a metaverse experience in its own right and you and I have chatted many times and never met but I feel like I know you because we've spent plenty of time chatting and this kind of stuff and in a few years time we'll be kind of sitting next to each other but not and what we've redone is going back to your original hypothesis is in this new decentralized globalized networked World we're rebuilding societies in ways that still work for humans but that are different for the digital age and I think in some ways that will be that will add a much more personal Dimension to the way that we are engaging right these screens are great I feel like I know you well as well right I feel like we have such fun conversations but you know it will add that physical Dimension to it so that we feel like we are in the same room and visiting with each other right and that will take away a lot of this physical need I think to Traverse the whole globe and to go through the wear and tear of travel right like people will be able to build relationships all over the world just like they've used social media forms to build communities all over the world now and yeah I don't have kids but I figured this out a while ago when I went to my oldest friend's house and it was a Saturday afternoon we were having lunch and his son was in a gaming chair with his headphone on chatting away with fortnite I think it was or one of the one of the big games and I'm like what's he doing is it why is he not out playing football with his mates or you know doing what we used to do is hang out with a shopping mall with our friends and drink coffee and figure out where the party was and whatever and he's like oh he's he's with his friends now I'm not what are you talking about this is yeah and I I realized that he was hanging so he's like he's got his friend in the U.S his friend up the road his friend in Manchester and they're all chatting and they hang out all day in this Digital World now we you and I didn't grow up like that but that generation gen Z no no different to them it's kind of weird that you don't have that world well and it's about connection again right we talked about how we used to use phones and I remember I could only walk as far as the phone cord would allow me and being so excited when my parents got a longer phone cord because I could go into a different room right um but it's that same connection it's just our only options were to get together with other children in the neighborhood to physically connect because there was no other medium but now they really are living these very different Global lives with people that they can connect with from so many different parts of the world and Society so maybe some real good will come out of that too and that people will begin to you know really start to accept people from other areas more and accept people um from different backgrounds more as they connect more uh without having the physical limitations of where they're currently located so with all of this going on and you talking to a lot of people what do you think the next big thing is that people are not seeing because there is so much going on what do you get you know Sandy is excited about saying how people don't know this is coming but this is coming what's that thing that I carry my community and its privileges through a token that I can have with me at all times where it unlocks physical experiences as well as digital experiences so web3 you think is the thread that ties all of this together yeah I think it's going it's the it it creates the economic backdrop which we've talked about with these networks and these decentralized networks that are extra governmental right no government controls them but what I think it also creates is this ability to execute these smart contracts and this smart contract language in a vehicle that is completely transferable and carryable in a mobile device so all of a sudden you know it's like the ticket to everything right it's not just the ticket to the concert it's the ticket to the concert the ticket to getting into a special Community where I'm getting exclusive merchandise and exclusive access it's the ticket into a set of classes where I might be learning things that are important to me to be able to develop my own skill sets it's the ticket to travel to meet up with certain other people in the world that are equally as interested as me right and as the metaverse develops more it might be the ticket into really joining in to exclusive clubs where I feel like I'm together with those people physically even though that's still a digital experience so I I think it's this idea that we're starting to now pull the access to this whole digital world not on a phone first it was on a computer then it was on a phone and now I think it's going to be on a token that we can basically utilize whenever we are wherever we are uh and really create that combination of the physical experience and the digital experience that's what I'm most excited about we've done that a real Vision now so we have two different nft communities one was our Genesis community and then second is the real Vision Collective and we have token gated access Community content uh token gated access telegram tokenets total gated access to our Discord we've done token gated access metaverse experiences on vatam um and yeah we're building all of this out for exactly the same reason is I think this is the future of of how like-minded people coalesce around like-minded courses um and yeah unbelievable yeah so we've got we've even got a fancy trading League which is on chain so we've got teams from around the world competing against each other with portfolios but it's recorded on chains so it's immutable so there's no cheating involved eventually we'll probably tokenize some of those people because that's happening we're also seeing we've been doing crowdsourced asset allocation by asking people their crypto allocations and then looking at that as a portfolio and seeing how it performs and it does pretty well because they're Highly Educated people in the real Vision Network now why would we not totalize that as a product now that disrupts the whole Asset Management industry because now you've got the crowd making product for the crowd and leveraging their own smarts that's right um and I think that is part of decentralization of asset management as well right and that is I think one of the Futures that we at Franco template are thinking about how do we participate in that future and still view ourselves as bringing our expertise out to the marketplace in new ways and a lot of what you're talking about is exactly what we talk about is bringing our clients of the world into the same portfolios and the same research and the same thinking um that we're doing right that it's almost like you know one of the things I talk about is the future might be the gig world where everything we do we don't really have a job we actually just interact with all these different communities and get incentivized for it because that's where our passion and our interest takes us so I also um co-founded an asset management business which invests in digital asset hedge funds the next phase of that is we're creating an nft Community around our LP investors because normally asset management is well you don't get to talk to each other you just we just feed you the information that you want and you give us money in return so we thought well why do that why not put all these like-minded people because they like digital assets they're generally High net worth or family offices or institutions why don't we create an nft that creates a club for them to be part of and then that's a place you can show specific deals or you can facilitate what they want to do so the decentralized network says Hey listen we want to invest in discounted secondary in crypto companies because they're down 80 so we spin up an SPV for them maybe it's tokenized maybe it's not tokenized and so the network now works together for the benefit of the network and that we're doing within an asset management company which has other stuff so I'm all over this I love it wrong and the other thing with that is think about just think about all these LP investors into these hedge funds also many of them have built their own direct investment and co-investment teams over the last decade and think of the asset pool that they currently own and how having this type of community gives them such a different option for how to monetize and really get the full value out of those Investments and and really look to exit those investments in a completely new way right also think about that good stewards of the space we can be if we can be instant capital so if you think that you know the Constitution Dao idea so imagine there's a startup that wants capital and it might suit our community they would probably come to us very easily because we we're not the big institution that sees a thousand things it can be very adaptive because you've got a network of a couple hundred people and like 10 of them say yep we're all in you do it you can allocate Capital very efficiently that way because you don't have the processes because the network takes the processes and and separates them up so yeah I think it's going to be super interesting from that as well I love it I absolutely love it I think it is definitely very forward thinking and a clear extrapolation of where we're headed and why it's going to fit so well with the model of how Society is moving right exactly right it's giving the power back to the people and you know the more you educate people the more you give them the tools succeed and then letting them work together the better it's going to be you know I really think we will say it's probably still early yet but I still think we'll see these guilds forming these kind of Dow based guilds yeah where you know if you think of this world where marketing is getting so disrupted by AI well you could have a pool of 100 marketing people who use AI whatever a piece of work comes in quickly gets bid for quickly gets reallocated out and the pool benefits from the overall revenues that get captured and there's a token I love it I I think that we're going to see you know this very interesting um way that people get caught short and got caught by surprise right you and I are having this conversation we really have a lot of thoughts on where the world is heading and we think a lot about what it's going to mean for the world but you know I've been speaking to a lot of people in the traditional financial industry the traditional investment industry banking industry wealth industry and I think that many of them have no idea how quickly their businesses might get disrupted right I think that these models sound almost Fantastical to them and not anything that they would need to worry about and when they start to see the business go out the door um I think it's going to surprise them I mean look A Bank Run happened in 12 hours now right and everyone was caught completely flat-footed by that and nobody was expecting that something like that could happen right but I think you're going to see episode after episode of that really catching a lot of the traditional Industries unaware not just our industry many Industries I don't think they understand how quickly these models may take over from the way things operate today Sandy I think we're lucky to be alive right now right we get this fourth turning moment where technology is exploding we have no idea where it's going and you can either fear it and fight it which won't work because it's decentralized and it's relentless or you can go with it invest in it and just go along for the ride so I've bought the ticket take the ride so that's that's my that's my viewpoint on it but thank you right next to you as ever thank you so much for coming to chat and I'm sure we'll chat again soon great thank you so much so much fun thank you as you can see always a fun conversation with Sandy wide-ranging there's so much to discuss where this is all going how it fits together how these Network States how these digital societies come together what it means for crypto how AI fits into it all and what this all means in the broader context of the exponential age as you can probably figure out the exponential age is moving so fast it's difficult to keep up with but it is really fascinating and conversations like this are very important to help us all Drive our understanding forwards

Channel: Real Vision

Views: 18,348

Keywords: Finance, Markets, Economy, Stock Market, Investing, Trading, Financial Literacy, Recession, Interview, Conversation, Strategy, Insight, Analysis, Thesis, Short Seller, Real Vision, Equities, Raoul Pal, Inflation, Stagflation, Monetary Policy, Money, Federal Reserve, sandy kaul, Raoul Pal & Sandy Kaul Dive Into Tech Megatrends, tech megatrends, the exponential age, tech podcast, ai podcast, ai, artificial intelligence, gpt4, chat gpt, auto gpt, decentralization, decentralized, Franklin Templeton

Id: 909eZBWOgIE

Length: 60min 10sec (3610 seconds)

Published: Thu May 25 2023