Thanks for listening. Please check out our website at www.forsauk.com to hear great conversations on topics that need to be talked about. In these times of intense polarization we all need to find time to expand our Frame of Reference.
Thanks for listening. Please check out our website at www.forsauk.com to hear great conversations on topics that need to be talked about. In these times of intense polarization we all need to find time to expand our Frame of Reference.
Welcome to Frame of Reference. Informed, intelligent conversations about the issues and challenges facing everyone in today's world. In-depth interviews to help you expand and inform your Frame of Reference. Now here's your host, raul Labresch.
Speaker 2:Well, welcome to another episode of Frame of Reference Profiles on Leadership. And I have to tell you I haven't been looking forward to an interview as much as I have to this one today, and that largely has to do with the first time I had a conversation with my guest today. I think I know I was I hope he was as well very exhilarated by that conversation, and I even alluded to it in that interview at that point that it is for me very rewarding, very energizing, to talk with a fellow lifelong learner. You know, we really do not get older unless we allow ourselves to stop learning. And even though our bodies may age and start to creak and crack and complain about things we do to them, our minds continue to expand as long as we're willing to learn.
Speaker 2:And this gentleman, Emmanuel Daniel, who is sitting across the screen from me in Singapore now, folks, the last time we talked he was in Dubai and now he's in Singapore. And I have to tell you, Emmanuel, I am still in sock prairie. I was in sock prairie, I am now in sock prairie. I think the farthest I've gotten away from sock prairie is Schulsberg, Wisconsin.
Speaker 3:So Well, I guess you could. Here's the pun. We have a frame of reference for the both of us.
Speaker 2:Yes, mine is very static, yours is very dynamic, so, although I try to be dynamic as well.
Speaker 2:So Emmanuel Daniel is a global thought leader. He is an expert in so many things related to the world of finance and his particular bent, I will say, is the personalization of banking, and that that's a concept that, even as I've tried to explain it to friends of mine since our interview, it is interesting to me that people understand the concept when you start to talk about the way that it works, but they they still are stymied by how does such a thing develop and how will it develop. So that's part of what I hope we can cover somewhat today, but it will likely take many conversations to do that, because it's dense. It's a dense topic and what I've appreciated about you more than anything, emmanuel, is your understanding and breath of knowledge regarding history, the history of finance as well as the history of humans using, utilizing finance. But I also found in reading your book that you referred to Star Trek and that right away made me go. I want to talk with him more, emmanuel, thank you for joining me again today.
Speaker 3:Just a pleasure, and yes, and you know the thing is. The thing about the personalization of finance is that as I was completing my first book, I realized that if finance is going to be personalized, society is going to be personalized, and that's what I think. That was the spark in our conversation, which is that, oh my goodness, we're not just looking at finance here, we're looking at all of society and then a conversation running into people's civilizations and all that. So let's continue where we left off, the last one, and I thought of something too.
Speaker 2:with your name, emmanuel Daniel, I think we could call you. God is with us in the lion's den. I think that would be a good way to think of you. So you are there amongst the lions to help get us all protected and out of the lion's den.
Speaker 3:You know, interestingly, you say that there was something that my father did when we were growing up. He would go behind a door and he would pray and you know, my father is Daniel, right, so and he'd do that every day, once a day. And I mean, you know, I've probably lost a lot of my religiosity, but this thing about being mindful of a force that is larger than us and you know, and then by imbibing it and submitting to it, is something very deep inside me. And Daniel, a man of prayer, daniel in front of the lions and the funny thing with parents is that it's not what they tell you, it's what they do. That sticks with you for the rest of your life. So that was the real Daniel in my life and that was my dad.
Speaker 2:So you know, yeah, it was interesting that I gave you the first name of Emmanuel. You know that I didn't even know what that name meant until much later in my life. You know, we sang it at Christmas time Emmanuel, emmanuel, emmanuel.
Speaker 3:There's not really what I'm sorry, oh so, and they were already singing in man oh come, oh come, Emmanuel, preparing for Christmas. So. So that's where I got my name, exactly.
Speaker 2:Well, emmanuel, yes, you remember last time we talked a little bit at the beginning about our favorite things, and I've been thinking of unusual favorite things for you. So I will see how far I can get away. And one of the more arcane things I came up with is Daniel, do you have a favorite piece of furniture? Do you have a chair or a table or something in your possession or that perhaps you're just aware of, that you really hold? It holds some special value, some special significance to you.
Speaker 3:It's in sentimental, I've tried not to, and because I've lived in several places, I've tried not to be attached to any particular piece of furniture. The thing that comes closest are my bookshelves, and my bookshelves out of sync with my house. They they are from my previous house and I had the house before that, so it just got carried in and so the rest of the furniture does not sync with the bookshelves.
Speaker 2:She might have a place.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so there's a sentimental element there, but the thing that holds prime position, prime position in my house, is my dining table, and the dining table sits in the dining area and it's where I do everything. I work there, I eat there, I talk with friends there. So you know, if you ask me a piece of furniture that holds prime position at home, it's my dining table, and if it's a piece of furniture that's got a sentimental value, it's my bookshelves. And I'm now going through an incredible, cathartic experience in that I'm just thinking whether I still need to have my bookshelves, because I'm now read more out of Kindle than I do physical books and I just like the idea of having all my books on my app, you know, and anything I even bought physically, I try to get the digital version. It's only because the way I read has changed.
Speaker 3:You know, in the old days I just go reach out to the book on my bookshelf and I'll read a chapter or a section and then, okay, I got it. But today I'll do it the same, but on your phone, and I'll do that on a plane. I'll do that, you know, when I want to reference something I don't read. I don't tend to read books covered to cover unless they are really and captivating. I read them to catch an idea and then, and then sometimes, when there's a difficult book, I also, you know, watch a YouTube video on the book to understand some perspective and then make make the rest of the book palatable to me.
Speaker 3:Very often, I think these days we tend to stop at chapter two or chapter three of a book, not realizing that the author, especially if it's a good author, is thinking about building his idea and he's taking it further, except that for the most part, we, once we caught the essence of the book, we stopped reading it, you know so. So the bookshelf was good in that I could just reach out to, you know, pull out the book and read it, and I only have three bookshelves, which means that I have another three boxes of books that are in the storeroom, but only three shelves are displayed at any time and choose which books make it to that list that's up there that I just keep going back to. So the bookshelf has a sort of intellectual and emotional place in my life.
Speaker 2:Are there books that were seminal books to you, that you read at a particular time in your life that you find you're going back to because there's a message there that you need to keep reiterating in your life?
Speaker 3:I don't know why, but there's a South African writer called Nadine Godima and I caught her maybe even in my 20s probably, or early 30s, and there's a book, my father's story or something like that and I keep going back to it because it's a fiction, a piece of fiction, but it reflects on South Africans in society. I keep going back to it just because at the time that I read it it had an emotional bearing on me and something to do with the integrity of fathers at home and how fathers struggle to hold family together in a society that's changing and all that. So I keep going back to that one. And I go back to various other books, but that particular one. I know nothing about South African society, it's not my community, but somehow something about that book caught my intrigue and is a reference in that way. So that's one. And there are other books that I keep going back to Alan Patton of Rode, you know, A Crying the Believer Country and many others. So there are books that I keep going back to and there are books that came across as textbook the competitive advantage of nations, for example and it was an important book to read because everybody else took it seriously. But today I find myself disintegrating the ideas into a new idea. So, in other words, I'm growing out of that book and that's actually my next book, which is the Winning Civilization.
Speaker 3:And I'm saying that the Western way of looking at the relationship between countries as a didactic relationship, you know it's either you or me, and then it's you or me, and then something else comes out of it. It's not necessarily the defining relationship within states, because now we have alternative ideas floating around in the world that we need to start thinking differently. So there are states today that are on ascendancy but are not driven by that competitive element. It's driven by the ability to hold itself together, and I'm thinking of countries like Indonesia which, interestingly, when you stop hearing about a country, something good might be happening in that.
Speaker 3:We all know that when we say the word Philippines, we think Marcos and the corruption and the revolution and all that. But that is now 30 years ago. And when the new Marcos became president, guess what? He is one in a line of presidents whose names we have forgotten, and that's because the country is so stable today that it doesn't matter who the president is. You know the Senate hosts together. You know the body politic is able to contain the presidents as they come and go. In fact, the one who just ended his presidency, duterte. When he became president, the United States became very upset because he was saying all the wrong things and he was such a rightist no, he was a populist, sorry conservative populist. And then he came and he went and we're now into another presidency. So Indonesia is a trillion dollar economy today. It was a basket case at the end of the Asian financial crisis and today it's one of the most progressive democracies in Asia. So when you stop hearing about a country, something good might be happening.
Speaker 2:Which is not newsworthy most times. Ok, so that's one favorite question. We took I don't know how many minutes with that, so I'll just take time for one more question, because we have so much other thing to talk about. But I do have to say something about books, because you were talking about the way that you read books and that you prefer a Kindle. I would agree with you. I prefer a Kindle as well, and I'm seriously contemplating getting read of a lot of books that I have, because I've realized that, well, the digital copy is available, so why not just get that? But I did.
Speaker 2:The last time we talked, I made a promise to you that I would read your entire book about the personalization of banking, and I failed. And I failed because of the way I read books, which is I look at the table of contents in a book and I gravitate towards the titles of chapters that interest me the most. And then I've got further weighted down by the idea of identity and I started to read the chapter on identity. And what I appreciate and loathe about your writing at the same time is so I understand the nature of this.
Speaker 2:I appreciate that there is great density to what you write about. There is great knowledge and a profound understanding of the bigger picture in the way that you write. So, frankly, what I loathe about it is that it forces me to just stop and think about the words on the page and the ideas being expressed by those words in ways that is tremendously time consuming for me at least. I can't just take it at face value. A lot of things are written sort of in a fluffy, entertaining or just a passage of time. Yours requires work, so I would warn people that are going to read your books and I encourage them deeply to read your books because there's so much that is thought about and talked about that is important and meaningful, not only for now but going forward.
Speaker 3:So when I write, I go back to first principles and then I leave it to the reader to figure out its application. In fact, after the book is published, I realize that that's not exactly the commercially viable way to write a book, which is, you know, the best thing to do. People's minds are what's in it for me, you know. But first principle is but here's the first principles. Now let's think about everything else from here. So, like in the book, the chapter on identity, for example, I talk about energy and how energy in nature is the energy of the sun that is translated through chlorophyll to become energy that we consume, you know. And money is exactly that which is token, is something of value that carries, that results in something that we can use, you know. And that's how we need to think about the future of money. And there is not a single banker who thinks that way. And yet, when you go back to first principles and think it that way, everything is happening. That is happening in cryptocurrencies, for example, right now, and the battle between central bank digital currencies and so on you need to look for the underlying threat that the proponent is trying to resolve. So like right now, for example, the central banks around the world are thinking about central bank digital currencies, one for consumers to use and another for you know, they call them wholesale central bank digital currencies which is used for transacting between countries across border. When it involves multiple currencies, you know. Then the question I ask is what is the problem that they're trying to solve here? And you know, and so that from there I can think through, you know where they're taking it, you know so. So the purpose of my writing so far and in fact I probably need to modify that if I was, if I were to be a little bit more helpful to the reader is that to also give examples. But the examples are coming in finance at least, examples are coming fast and furious, you know, right after I write my book.
Speaker 3:The book was published in September, october last year, and October was also the month that they launched chat, gpt, you know, and generative, pre-trained transformers, which then takes how technologies organized in large institutions like banks to a whole new level. You know, and you know nothing I said is outdated. In fact, they formed the first principles of how to think through how a bank should be organized, but but I wasn't giving the practical examples when I wrote it. So you know, the thing about predicting the future is that you are trying to make sense of the direction of the future rather than do a lottery list of things that are going to happen in the future. And I think that a number of Alvin Toffler, for example, and a number of others in the early days of futuristic writing in the US, they focused on lottery lists.
Speaker 3:The future will have this, this, this, this, this, this, whereas what I'm focusing on are the first principles from which the future has been created. So I will keep improving as I go along. So my next book about the willing civilization again, I'm going back into first principles of what makes a civilization and what are the irrefutable first principles of how civilizations evolve. And then I have to be helpful to the reader to say this is where we are today and these are the issues that we are facing today. So it's an interesting discipline the whole idea of being able to construct a useful idea of how to think where so many things that are happening at the same time is taking us.
Speaker 2:Well, and I would have to say that perhaps your way of writing is not profitable, but to some extent in some circles. But I found it extremely profitable to me personally because it does elicit.
Speaker 2:I mean you give examples, it's not. You do give some analogies that are really helpful. The ice industry is one that you come back to repeatedly. But there's also an openness to taking that knowledge, that information, and applying it to your own personal life, and I found just in reading that one chapter, I have a list of probably 20 questions and things that it makes me think of, and that's where that density comes into play, because there's just so many things that are layered into that, and part of that comes from your knowledge of history and your knowledge of trends and where the origins of some of the things we do today came from, and that allows people to extrapolate all kinds of oh, that's why this happened. Oh, that's why this happened. So my next question is do you have a favorite historical personality?
Speaker 3:Well, I have, of course, I enjoy all of them. Lately I've been thinking a lot about Napoleon, right, really Napoleon, yeah, I mean that's because I was in Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania just the last three weeks and the whole thing about these countries is that they were like the steppings, the door-met of the two big civilizations at that time, which is the French and the Russians, and how Napoleon used Estonia as a watching pad into Russia and he failed dramatically, and so on. So I do, historically, other people that I think a lot about. I think I do think about Napoleon quite a bit because of his ability to organize society so quickly. It's not that he's war-mongering, but he's building of codes and charters and rules of everyday life. That helped him to create rules that we used to this day. So I like that about him very much and the fact that he organized the largest army in Europe of a million people, million men and of many different societies marching towards Russia. That requires incredible organizational skills. And of course, then you build backwards and you look at Philip of Macedonia, for example, and at the end of the Bronze Age, the ability to get a small platoon of men organized into a troop enabled the Greeks to build an empire that went all the way out to India and nobody stopped them along the way. It's not as if they were a huge army, they were just organized. That's it, and that you can do that in the case of Alexander the Great, he's like. You can do that before you're 33 years old and you're done, and the rest of history is unraveling what you've done. So different people, different personalities and different influences, but this incredible ability to organize huge civilizations in the simplest possible way.
Speaker 3:That intrigues me a lot, and a number of British colonialists, like Clive, who started the British rule of India, and then Stanford Raffles, who only spent a maximum of six months in Singapore and he is today. If you come down to Singapore, he's attributed to be the founder of Singapore and in the six months that he was in Singapore, he all he did was throw up a city plan where all the different communities should live, and that plan is still recognizable today on the streets of Singapore, which is the Malay water, the Indian little India, where Chinatown is, and the British empire. If you travel from Calcutta to Hong Kong, you'll see the same formula the cricket field, the Anglican church, the civic building and the cricket club, right, they all align next to each other in exactly the same proportion in every city, every city that was part of the British empire, and it thrills me that I can go to Kenya, to South Africa, to Hong Kong even, and you see that the center of administration was very simply this Anglican church, the civic buildings, the post office and the cricket club. And at the height of the East India Company it was 1,000 very young Englishmen sent to rule the empire where the sun never set, and in many of those places they would position one resident who looks after the entire society or province for which they are given responsibility, and that's all it was.
Speaker 3:That was the British empire. It wasn't like a thousand men, british men, in one place overloading over another 1,000 people or something like that. It was always one person overloading an entire population. So the ability of men in India, time to be organized or to organize society around very simple principles, that thrills me a lot, and the leaders who have been able to do that over time, I pay attention a lot to them. So I mentioned Napoleon, and then Philip of Macedonia and a few others that way.
Speaker 2:It's interesting how you talk about the way that those communities, those cities are designed. It makes me think of one of the foundational elements that I remember from your book is this idea of a communal currency. There's that same focus upon the physical, geography and location of buildings that has been agreed on by multiple cultures, apparently that that is a valuable way of organizing the structures, the prime locations within our community. That ties to your concept of there being a communal currency that is of value within that communities, has an agreed upon value within that community and how that people prosper as a result of that.
Speaker 3:I have a lot to say on that, because I think that one of the issues that finance is struggling with is how not to be extractive of communities but supportive of communities. In fact, today, if you go to any of the financial centers New York, london, singapore, hong Kong as financial centers they over reward the people in the intermediation business and then extract value from the rest of the community. It's difficult to be an entrepreneur or a startup in these cities because they are so expensive. The best talent goes to finance and so finance is extractive of the rest of the community, and that's why I told my Jewish friends that be grateful that Tel Aviv is not a financial center. Let the financial center be somewhere else, so that Tel Aviv can continue to be an innovation center, that you need to go somewhere else to raise capital, and that's what I noticed, where finance is extractive rather than contributed to society.
Speaker 3:But there's another alternative model, which is, as I said, the community currency idea. It's a very simple concept. It always existed and guess what? I identified at least five community currencies in the US today and where, in small, closed communities, they create a token that recognizes informal work and informal duties that people have with each other from which they can extract value and give it a value that the person doing a favor to a friend, painting your house or helping you out with your garden can be given a token that then you can use to buy food. And you think that why is that necessary? And that's because there are pockets of society which are very, very stable, closed communities that can function regardless of the rest of the country and can solve its own problems as a result. And then, when you put technology on it, like blockchain and so on, it helps you to be able to track the transaction and run it viably within that closed community in something that you couldn't do in the past.
Speaker 3:In the past, you probably have to create a physical token, for example, a piece of paper and IOU or something like that, and then you extrapolate that into gaming, how entire communities actually play games to generate tokens which they then exchange for money that they go out and buy fish in the market.
Speaker 3:These are things that are happening today, that the digitization of finance is making it possible, and it exists very, very clearly within the networked society which is becoming a reality more and more. Those of us who are who's job requires us to go to the office, drive into town and all that don't realize that there are parts of the communities in parts of the world where they were not previously plugged into the global economy, and today they are, because of gaming, for example, and that they can generate value. There's a lot to be said about these tokens that are generated through gaming, that this is like perception, it's not real, and that gaming itself is not a real economic activity. But these are things that are important to society, which is the ability to interact with each other, compete with each other and generate value from there. So there are models that used to exist in the physical world that are being transected to the digital world as we become more networked, and so I try to track all of them as they evolve.
Speaker 2:What and you bring up an interesting point when you discuss that even that there is a and I guess I'm thinking of this perhaps with a too close-minded of a view but that there is a difference between the community-valued token and a globally-valued token, that there is a process by which we have to be able to take that work that I did for you, that I can turn into buying food somewhere within my community, that there's a difference between that and a universal token, which is why currencies exist. Right. The American dollar as the benchmark for global value is that we all accept globally that there is a value to the US dollar in that it is a universal way of having transactions. So how will communities evolve from the personalization of tokenization to a larger global sense? I mean, it almost means to me it means that each community has to have a wide array of services and products available so that they can in fact trade their work or their intrinsic value for things that you can't get or you can't get anywhere else, but you're going to buy it within your community. I think of that. Like my small town. I will support our local businesses with my money as much as I can, because they're here contributing to the rest of the community through donations for events that go on or whatnot.
Speaker 2:So how does that transition occur, do you think? Oh, you froze. You froze on me, gold, aren't it? Now, let's wait and I'll just edit this part out. I hope you're hearing me. I'm going to leave and come back in, because we seem to be completely halted. If you can hear me do the same, all right.
Speaker 2:You know, I hope you come back. Are you back? I'm here. Oh, okay, I see your initials.
Speaker 3:I don't know what. I went offline. Can you hear?
Speaker 2:me. Yeah, I can hear you now. Let me get back here into recording mode. So I think the powers that be don't like our conversation. That's what I think.
Speaker 3:It's interesting, my phone had a message saying that it is overeated. I'm not sure why that is.
Speaker 2:Huh, that is interesting. All right, well, I'm back up. Actually, it seems like we have a bit better connection this time, so maybe this was fortuitous. Okay, so I think we were talking about the process of going from an individual community-based tokenization to a larger global tokenization. How do we make that transition so that the work that I do for someone has not only value within the community, but it lets me buy a car from Chrysler, you know that kind of thing. So yeah.
Speaker 3:So community currency is designed to solve an immediate and highly localized situation and to recognize value that's been created in a closed community, and it usually functions best in a distressed community where joblessness, for example, is a high rate of unemployment, in societies that communities that operate outside of the mainstream, in difficult parts of the country, things like that.
Speaker 3:You don't transpose that or you don't extrapolate that into the rest of the country. In fact, the Kenyan example that I gave Safarou credit is for a village, and I think the people in the NGOs, the non-government organizations, would appreciate what I'm saying about what we just discussed about community currencies, because they wish that they could create community currencies around the projects that they support. And then the community pulls itself up by its bootstraps by generating value in activities that otherwise would not get attention or recognize within the broader community or the broader country. The problems that central banks are trying to deal with is at another level altogether. It used to be that the currencies of the world used to be backed by gold and today almost all currencies are fiat, which means that central banks can print as much money as they want. They can get into indeterminate debt and the entire politicization of finance.
Speaker 2:Now I'm losing your audio. Are you able to hear me?
Speaker 3:now, yeah, now I can hear you.
Speaker 2:I kept losing chunks of what you were saying.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, you weren't able to hear me. Is there something I need to do to? Okay, where did you start losing me?
Speaker 2:You were talking about the idea of banks having this capability of well the fiat fiatting of printing money and how that Okay, let me go back to community currencies and then I'll come to this.
Speaker 3:Okay, so the community currencies in general are created to solve highly localized problems in highly distressed communities that very often exist outside the mainstream or have very specific needs, such as high unemployment and no discernible commercial activity, stuff like that or something in that society had broken down, and they can exist in a larger state. So the example that I gave, which was safaro credit in Kenya. So safaro credit is a community currency that exists within a country which has a fiat currency, and fiat currencies are designed to solve another problem altogether. That's central banking, that is, the ability of governments to issue as much debt as they want to solve political problems at the national level, and so on. And then, of course, that gets traded on the global trading platform and so on.
Speaker 3:And then there's yet another dimension today, which is the possibility of a global currency that is not dictated or managed by anybody, and that currency exists it's Bitcoin. And the fact that we have this beautiful architecture of a currency that is trusted by everybody and is a transmission of value which is ungovernable because of the way it's constituted, is yet another level which the central banks view as a threat because it undermines their own ability to continue issuing fiat currencies. So we're talking about three very different dimensions that are developing on their own. They don't necessarily affect each other at the moment, but at some point it's all a case of like community currencies. They exist within certain situations and when those situations cease to exist, then the reason for the community currency also evaporates and that community plugs into the rest of mainstream and community currencies have great interest to NGOs, for example, trying to solve problems in highly distressed situations or trying to create communities around activities that they do.
Speaker 3:I was in Timbuktu and the thing that struck me about Timbuktu is that you go down the main street of Timbuktu, which is a dust road. On both sides of the main street there are many, many NGOs from the western world having offices in Timbuktu Like 40 or 50 of them and they only come once a year to come in to do some activities and then they leave. And the whole idea is that how do you create a viable economy in a place like Timbuktu, which is 1,500 kilometers away from the capital, in the middle of the Sahara Desert, and how do you get that community up on its bootstrap? So that's a different problem related relative to central bank fiat currencies and the new currencies that are coming on through cryptocurrencies.
Speaker 2:As I thought about the idea of there being assets that people have, either currency or bank accounts or stock dividends and stock available that builds wealth, personal wealth that can then can be used for other purposes.
Speaker 2:Are there immutable assets? I mean to me if in a perfect society, it would be Star Trekian to the extent that there would no longer be money, people would have the things that they need and that they would contribute a value to the world around them that enables them to be of worth. And in that world you begin to see, I think, the elimination of things like lying, because lying is never valuable beyond a very small point of time, because eventually the lies are found out and it undermines the value of that currency. And I would hope that we could somehow come up with immutable assets like people of integrity or people that were honest, people that were caring and compassionate and empathetic. Perhaps that would alleviate some of our problems in contemporary American society. If the signs that we have in our community say be kind, well, I would like to see some of the folks that are active in our political communities today be defaulting on their loan because they're not kind.
Speaker 3:Well, you hit something on the. You may not have realized this, but you hit the nail on the head on a very, very interesting point here, which is lying is necessary in a market's economy. And in a market's economy, when you and I exchange something of value, I have to make sure that I get the best price for it and you must make sure that you get the best price for it, and we both be hiding certain facts about the transaction until we can leverage the highest possible value from each other. That's a market's economy. We are now transitioning into a networked economy where the truth actually creates value. Now, if you take information, information is the one asset that when I give to you, I don't lose it, and when I give it to 10 people, I don't become less important. I become more important as a result. So it's the only, it's the one asset that actually increases in value the more it's network, and it can only network if there is great transparency, or what they call symmetry of information, between the people transacting in a network system. So we are transitioning into an economy where visibility, transparency and the symmetry of information creates the value. So the interesting thing is this take more gauges and bank deposits, for goodness sakes. We just had Silicon Valley bank and so on. And what's different between bank deposits in the age of Silicon Valley bank as opposed to the good old bank runs of the 1930s? In the good old bank runs in the 1930s, it was about large numbers of people queuing up in front of the bank in order to get physical money out of their bank accounts because they were afraid. And the funny thing about Silicon Valley bank's deposit crisis was that there was no queue. There were only 10 people out in the front door of the branches. The newspapers had a hard time trying to find a photograph that tried to show there was a bank run, because the bank run happened all at once on a Sunday afternoon. $60 billion just evaporated because it was a digital transaction Right now.
Speaker 3:Take that into mortgages. Today, an average mortgage takes three months you know depends on which country you're in to be completed. So from the time that you lodge a mortgage, the lawyers have to go out and look at all the caveats and the holdings on the asset and so on, and then come back to say this is free of encumbrances, and then you find you end the transaction. You know you begin to value a mortgage as being an asset in itself. But imagine what mortgages will look like if the information on all property is contained on a blockchain and it's all digitized and it all can be verified in one second. You know the encumbrances, the caveats on the property and all that, and then the transaction is completed in one minute. You know, and that can be done by Gen Z, or now they call them Gen A or Generation Alpha. It's just been born, who are native digital players.
Speaker 3:What do you think a mortgage or a property means to them? It's something that they can flip, you know, at the touch of a button. You know, and the appreciation of value starts to change and the utilization of the assets starts to change. They put it on the network, they share it with your friends, you know. They make all that information available, stuff like that, and we see the building blocks of the network world of asset and valuations in the network world being built in various elements. You know.
Speaker 3:You take Airbnb.
Speaker 3:It's actually the democratization of assets. It is the liberalization of the value in an asset by making it available for use by anybody. Now take that one more level up, and that you don't have even have to own that asset to be available and then you take that one more level up, that you can flip the asset at any time you want. You know that world is just within sight and the people who are going to determine that world is not your generation of mine, you know already we don't understand.
Speaker 3:The Gen Zs, you know, and then with the Gen A's, come on. You know they'll be looking back at us and say why do you guys, you know, hide your bar of gold in the back of your bedroom? You know, you know we, you know we for us, making it available to my friends, that's where the value is and it's a totally different universe than we are. We are an ecosystem, or you know civilization that we are, that we are, you know, sort of meandering towards. We're heading in that direction and the elements of that of the future is already in place.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, it made me think of the value that is placed on being an influencer these days. You know, in fact, I just recently did a transaction with a company regarding knobs on an audio board, and one of the first questions they had when I joined their community was are you an influencer? And then, if you said yes, which I guess I met the criteria for that they wanted to know what your social media channels were.
Speaker 2:So I don't know if that means they're now verifying whether or not I really am an influencer or I just think I'm an influencer. I guess that remains to be seen, but it really struck me as a how much, as you're saying, we've put a new level of importance upon that ability to be transparent enough and of value personally enough that we actually can influence others. That's my dream.
Speaker 3:Absolutely, and that's why your starting statement, which was lying, that you know, was a very, very good, you know, starting point, because you know we are now, you know, moving into an ecosystem where lying is exactly what doesn't create value, in transparency and symmetry of information is exactly what creates value, and the next generation will look back at you and say why was there a need to even lie in the first place? You know that by giving all my, all the information that I have to into the network, that's what creates the value that I have. You know, and you may not even like the information, but that transparency is what creates that, and I think that influencer is just that right, which is you're putting out information out there, things that people need to know, and so, yeah, those are the building blocks.
Speaker 2:Well, I see so much value in what used to be commonplace things in our cultures and our societies, and those being things like kindness, compassion, empathy, that those, if there were a way to monetize, you know, and I don't mean that in a vulgar way, but to monetize the value of those things in a way that allowed a person who instilled those qualities into their character that they would become more valuable. You know, we have an entire political system that is based on the antithesis of that. We have a capitalization system that's based on power and abuse and corruption. And, you know, winning, which I've always found to be, you know, in order for there to be a winner, there has to be a loser, and what value is there to having a loser in any equation? I don't understand that thinking.
Speaker 3:So the capitalist world that we know today is transactional. It's markets driven, you know. And that's and actually borrowed the idea from a Rand Corporation analyst who wrote a paper in the 1990s saying that human civilization moves from its tribal to its institutional, to its markets, to its network phases. And we need to know which of the phases we are in or dealing with to understand what the issues are. And that's why the market space is where lying is important, because the value is in the transaction. The winner takes it all. You know that's the market space Network. You know, being out there and being transparent is the value.
Speaker 3:Now, the interesting thing here is that the personalization of finance, which then leads into the personalization of society, unfortunately accentuates the ability to be narcissistic with truth. You know, the funny thing about narcissism is that it's a that gets perfected in the network world rather than in the transactional world, in the market's world. In the market's world, you actually have to be nice to each other to complete the transaction, although you're lying to each other In the network world, because you know everything about each other, the ability to extract value also depends on being selfish, you know. So I think that, and I said that in the book that you know, the personalization of finance also means that the propensity to narcissism will increase, and I think that people reading it will be wondering where I'm coming from for that. But when you look at, you know the Gen Zs and the. You know the new generations that are coming on. They actually are incredibly able to be much more narcissistic than previous generations.
Speaker 2:Which is worrisome for civilization, is it not?
Speaker 3:If we can, yeah so we will need, we will need new rules of engagement, which have not been created as yet. You know, and we are starting to do that now, even in education. Now, now that we check GPT, you don't have to memorize everything you know and that any information you want you know can be constructed for you, then the value of education, just you know, changes. It prevents a totally different direction and you we need to articulate that and then, and then, you know, spend time building that.
Speaker 3:So if in the old education system, your whole idea is to ace the examination by demonstrating how much you remember, and now remembering is no longer the value, it's the questions that you ask, that that makes you a greater value, because your ability to use a device or a platform to to generate that information.
Speaker 3:So so then you know the, the, the whole orientation of education is learning how to ask the right questions, you know, and then you know being able to construct your own reality, you know, based on your values or something like that, right? So so we are in the early days of reconstructing how education is incentivized and then how society is organized. You know, and, and it's a long journey, and I think that the people who have asked for a slowdown or a or a moratorium on the growth of AI. There's a point that that we really need to think a little bit about what we are getting into, because the the process by which the freedom of information and the availability of information is going to, you know, rank society as under is very, very powerful, you know, and and we are going to be paying a very high price in the next 10 years or so.
Speaker 2:Folks, my guest this week is Emmanuel. Daniel, as I like to think of him he is is among us in the Lion's Den, and we have been talking about many of the subjects that affect us all in the Lion's Den of monetary transactions, and I think we're we can continue the conversation, right, but we'll we'll. We'll stop this episode to give people an opportunity to have a week's worth of digestion and and what would be the word I'm thinking, formation, but that's not correct the ability to process, to synthesize this information and return next week with even more. I have a whole list of questions. I think I I got into one of them, so this could go on for quite a while. But Emmanuel is the author of a wonderful book called the Great Transition.
Speaker 2:The Personalization of Finance is here. You can find that on Kindle, you can find that on Amazon. You can get a hard copy or an electronic copy. So I'm personally trying to read my way through the electronic copy. But, daniel, pleasure talking with you and we're going to talk some more. So, folks, join us next week for part two of this conversation and please come willing to think about things that perhaps you have never thought about before, but we all do need to think about Take care.
Speaker 3:Thanks all.