Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
A podcast to lift the veil on the so-called FinTech industry. Technology and Banking together building digital propositions - the people, the tea, the warstories and the lessons with a sprinkling of sass from the makers of People AND Tech and #EmotionalBanking.
Brett King, that name needs no introduction, of course. You can't have tuned into this episode and not recognized his name. His first book, Bank 2.0, has completely reshaped the industry, and everything he has written since is equally fundamental to it. Synonymous with the change to digital that the industry needed to see 15 years ago, Brett's thoughts have been the cornerstone of change for leaders around the world. So fintech owes him a great deal of that.
Duena Blomstrom:Today, Brett is a futurist and looks at humanity through a holistic lens instead of one to do it finance only. And this conversation touches on everything to come from AI to climate crisis and the avenues that humanity has ahead. Expect to hear things that will make you think and do further research and to be ignited by his clear view of a future of genuine human potential. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Tales from the Fintech Crib. I have the legend, Brett King, with us today.
Duena Blomstrom:You heard the intro. There is no more intro than that to be done. There is probably no bigger name in Fintech. So thank you so much for coming over today, Brett.
Brett King:It's look. It's always fun. Whenever we get together, we we have great discussions. So it's it's makes sense that we should record this so other people can participate. But it's great to see you, Duana.
Brett King:Thank you.
Duena Blomstrom:Thank you for saying that. And, yes, we have been friends for 15, 16 years now. And, many of these conversations we wish you would have heard, and some of them we wish you never were. But, yes.
Brett King:True.
Duena Blomstrom:It's been a it's been a really long journey together. And I I would say that the first time I've ever seen your name ever has been when I read your first book. So, let me jump straight in. Why do we still have branches, Brett?
Brett King:Well, you know, we we are now beyond the tipping point. So I'm I got a new book coming out in March, Wiley. It's called Branch Today, Gone Tomorrow. And in this, as far as I'm aware, it's the first publication that is called Pig Branch, which happened in 2015. Right.
Brett King:And how we analyze that is we we exhaustively went around and got all of the central bank data, from all of the g twenty countries and the Eurozone countries and put that together. That represents in terms of branch real estate, the majority of branch real estate in the world. And the only economy where branches are sort of still stable or growing slightly is India. Everywhere else, China included, it's, it's in contraction. Right?
Brett King:And so, that shift has already occurred, and the introduction of the smartphone banking was really responsible for that. But also where you see the growth in financial inclusion is coming, none of it is coming from branch based banking. It's all coming from wallet plays, real time payment rails, and things like that. So the trajectory of what a bank account is is already moved well away from branches. So, you know, the question now for banks that have them is what are you gonna do with them?
Brett King:And there's only one thing that let that is left that makes any sense, which is these have to be a center of digital excellence
Duena Blomstrom:Right.
Brett King:That help customers get more accessibility to digital. If if if branches aren't supporting the mission of the digital bank, then you don't have a bank.
Duena Blomstrom:Right. So they are gone. They are simply educational centers for moving to digital. I love it. Right.
Duena Blomstrom:With branches out of the way and really retail banking out of the way, what are we left with in terms of the bigger disciplines that we were digging at back 15 years ago? Because I know there are some areas that are moving faster than others.
Brett King:Well, in in my last book on the banking space, Bank 4.0, I talked about the 3 core pieces of utility that a bank provides. The ability to safely store money, the ability to safely move money, and the ability to access credit. And if you look at most, this is certainly true of retail, little bit different in in commercial corporate banking, but, you know, that still that rule applies.
Duena Blomstrom:And if
Brett King:you look at that, what is changing at the moment is the the experience wrapper or the technology that delivers that utility in real time. That's the that's the shift. And as you do that, you get away from old product paradigms into more experiential elements. And so that's really where, we see the differentiation emerging now, the buy now pay later, behavioral savings approaches. When we start thinking about what that leads to and the emergence of AI, which I'm sure we're gonna talk about, this AI agency based banking where you have essentially a smart bank account that is your financial coach and helps you manage your finances and probably your health as well.
Brett King:Right. That's gonna be something that's sort of embedded in your life, and you'll pull that utility from the bank as and when you need it.
Duena Blomstrom:Right. So this is how far away would you say where we have a direct assistance for both our finances and our other areas of interest such as, you know, your like you say, your health, your Sure. Well-being in general. When when is this happening? Is this our lifetime?
Brett King:Well, you know, do you want the Elon Musk estimate or the the proper estimate? Yeah. So 5 to 10 years, you know. But, you know, this is going to parallel artificial general intelligence. Because if you think about it, where do you make money on AI?
Brett King:The agency model is gonna be a massive generator of wealth, particularly for the technology platforms. Right. And this is a problem because of concentration of wealth in these areas, but, you know, still huge huge potential for these AI based agents that sit with us in the cloud and on our devices, you know, that we personalize. And so essentially, we will train this personal agent over time in our interests, our likes, our dislikes, and that will be framed in the way that agent does commerce on our behalf. So time frame is is somewhere between 5 to 10 years with the emergence of what we would call our artificial general intelligence and so forth as well.
Duena Blomstrom:I love that. That's really exciting. It's not very far away, and we're finally arriving. These all these things we've made, all of the Phenovate products anyone has seen over the last 15 years can very well now be wrapped in the correct AI companion, and and that is something we've been we've been dreaming and talking about for the last 15 years. So maybe there is a really big jump because if we stop to look about at it, the way you've explained it and the way you've you've very well taught the world it's happened, the evolution from products to to experiences, and now hopefully to genuine companionship that helps one's life has only taken us 15 years, but 15 very, very painful years.
Duena Blomstrom:In the past, would you say that, the the the the hold up has been technological or more of a human debt and cultural nature?
Brett King:Look. It the the fact is even if we look at big problems like climate change, is there are not technical limitations to fixing this. There are only policy and economic, you know, constraints right now. If we were prepared to spend enough money, we could fix climate the climate change issue pretty quickly, certainly within a decade or 2. Right.
Brett King:But we could have done that in the eighties nineties. You know? Why didn't we? Because we're making tons of money out of fossil fuel, you know, and and those sort of things. So I know it's a little bit off track, but in in respect to sort of directionality, where we go from from here, the the we have to figure out a better way to build consensus so that we can execute on the technological elements.
Brett King:And that's sort of the philosophical struggle that we have. And, you know, we were talking about this before we started recording about sort of economic philosophies and things like that that are likely to change because of injecting AI and climate change into things.
Duena Blomstrom:Just my my, my listeners are probably nowhere near understanding how that's gonna go and how urgent it is. Can you just give us a really quick wrap up as to what that is?
Brett King:I'll try to. It's it's a complex area. But, you know, for example, you know, with, the the work that you've done in culture of organizations and getting the right balance between people and tech as an example, this is an area which is going to become much more critical as we have large scale technology unemployment potential from AI. So, and that ultimately leads to a very different view of work in the future. That's one element.
Brett King:But the other element is purely what we would call in classic economic terms, Friedman economics, about productivity gains, is that we have now this AI based technology that we can employ at an industrial level to automate factories and transportation and shipping and stuff like that. We can, you know, build robot factories. We can, augment lawyers and doctors. So you have from both a a white collar and blue collar perspective across a broad swath of industries, the ability to rapidly have sort of technology disruption occurring there, which in theory will lead to incredible growth, but, also lead to high levels of tech unemployment. But it's the growth piece which is the problem.
Brett King:Because as we put more and more technology and automation into the system and we get major increases in productivity, which is what the market is aiming for, the best way to get that level of productivity is eliminate humans from the process. And, you then have the ability to infinitely scale up production over time. But we can't have infinite productivity or infinite growth on a finite planet. So at some point, we come to this point where our capabilities in terms of automating our economy and creating growth hit this limit of resource consumption where we will collapse the ecosystem. This was first identified in a 1972 research piece called Limits to Growth Theory, which came out of MIT and, the Club of Rome think tech back in 1972, and in 2020 was updated by KPMG.
Brett King:So, 2038, 2040 is about when we get there, and that's also about when we expect China to become the world's largest economy and the US economy to face significant problems because of their national debt, which will be 200% of, GDP at that point. So you've got and the worst effects of climate and, so forth are also that coming to coalesce. So end of next decade, we have to have a sort of real philosophical shift.
Duena Blomstrom:Crazy question. But if it is going that way, why haven't we just done away with the notion of existing national debt money and any of the lingering bits and pieces that we could have just sat down and agreed upon? Why hasn't the world stopped and went right? Blank slate. Let's start again.
Brett King:You know, I think you have had elements of this. You know, you've got, World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab with the the great reset. You know, you have, have people talking about alternative approaches. Degrowth economics is a big theme in the economic field right now, which is moving to more sustainable mechanisms for the economy, focusing more on the needs of citizens initially from an economic output perspective, climate resilience, etcetera. So there is parts of this, but we don't have consensus.
Brett King:And we don't have consensus because of capitalism. Because capitalism teaches us that every market, every individual, every corporation is competing against someone else for resources. So at the heart of it, we really have to get off of this scarcity, type competitive advantage to more of a philosophy of consensus building. And that's really only gonna come through some sort of, imminent systemic collapse where we we, you know, we, we get to that point where we understand now if we go any further with this, then, you know, we're talking about 1,000,000,000 of people dead. And, you know, we so we have to change.
Brett King:It's sort of like a wartime effort, in in terms of that from a philosophical perspective.
Duena Blomstrom:It's not out out of the question that we will at some point, hopefully as humanity, get our shit together, so to speak. So
Brett King:Well, again, it's not a technical problem. Right? You know, we can solve homelessness very cheaply. We can solve food security, you know, cheaply. We can, deal with people not having work, you know, through effective mechanisms.
Brett King:We did it during, during COVID.
Duena Blomstrom:Right.
Brett King:So we we have the techno work technological tools, and we're gonna get more with AI and and quantum computing. Our ability to solve really tricky problems, you know, come up with new engineering approaches and things, that those doors are gonna be open to us as well. So I don't believe it's a technical Right. Limitation of humans to to survive. It's just one of whether or not we can get out of our own way in terms of traditional philosophies and culture.
Duena Blomstrom:And that this is when it gets a little bit pessimistic because we don't wanna speculate on how capable humans are to do so. But, I was going to ask you in terms of we all know that we're what has happened AI wise in our lifetime is fundamental. Right? The fact that we have finally gotten this sorted is the biggest thing next to how we make energy that has happened in the last 20, 30 years. Now what we're looking at today, obviously, is I I suspect a moment in time of probably the next few years in which, as usual, when you come into something big, by the time we find our feet, it's for now a massive confusion, a grab for for vaporware, and an and an explosion of of various minor problems whether existent or not that are being solved on on the periphery.
Duena Blomstrom:Now what is the next step where this kind of settles into one collective consciousness and people become accepting of the fact that we are now really 2 entities to think of in this game of life? And then secondly, where do we does it start making, a difference in terms of humans that are amount of humans that are employed, amount of humans that are, contributing things of value, and and that shift towards value from humanity that is not
Brett King:Yeah.
Duena Blomstrom:What it was
Brett King:tied up in money. Yeah. Look, I think super AI is are gonna get us there. I I mean, the problem with AI development right now is it's tied up in the market. You know, it's it's 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars being invested in these data centers and so forth.
Brett King:But, the reality is we are discovering new approaches to AI all the time and to the ability where we see what AI is really really good at doing is compressing human intelligence. So you've got much more efficient intelligence there, which theoretically if we can apply that to reasoning, then you get much more efficient reasoning and logic, processing capabilities out of AI, where we won't be able to argue with AIs in that, space because they'll just make too much sense. And, you know but I don't think the AIs are necessarily gonna take over, but I think this process of negotiated collaborative intelligence with AI is part of the philosophical shift. Because for example, AIs will say at some point, why haven't you guys got rid of fossil fuels? It just doesn't make any sense.
Brett King:You know, I mean, you're willing to kill 10,000,000 people doll 10,000,000 people a year just to make dollars, you know, like that's that's insane, you know. Like, if you continue with that type of philosophy, you're going to go extinct. You know, it's time to grow up. You know? I can imagine that sort of conversation with AI happening and sort of forcing us to think about things.
Brett King:Where it gets interesting is on core human philosophies on things like religion and so forth. Where is AI going to support that or be in conflict with that, and how might that change some pretty well grounded institutions in human society? It's it's some I I don't know the answer to that because I don't know which way it's gonna go. But and then quantum, as we discover new, things to learn about the universe and so forth, you know, humanity is gonna go through this period of growing up very fast, because of these techno technological changes. The the fear or the risk is that some people will reject that as we see with, you know, some more conservative approaches these days and so forth.
Brett King:And you could have sort of a split, you know, where you have essentially 2 branches of humanity. Those that are using technology and biology to augment intelligence and and, you know, use that. And those who sort of wanna stay more as natural humans because of their, essentially, their philosophical grounding or their, environmental, situation. Right?
Duena Blomstrom:Right. Oh, god. I didn't even think about that. I'm I guess I'm too, much of an optimist. I was convinced that at some point, we're gonna be doing the consensus thing.
Duena Blomstrom:We're not gonna be doing the splitting.
Brett King:But We have to.
Duena Blomstrom:We have to.
Brett King:But that there's gonna be some people that don't want in, you know, that don't want AI.
Duena Blomstrom:Them every day.
Brett King:I mean, we we don't
Duena Blomstrom:you see people who don't want progress every day. They're in the press every day. And if we're not gonna even give examples. They're they're insanely clear. But, but in terms of of, what you were saying earlier, I love that idea where if you were to to be going through a a genuine moral audit of all your actions as a as a as humanity that are devoid of of, personal interests or or more Yeah.
Duena Blomstrom:Or in in in intrinsic existent, relationships, then, of course, would would be having a lot to answer for. And but that does depend on how we we, format And health care. Now. Right?
Brett King:You look at. Yeah. Sorry. I was just gonna say, you know, health care is a great example.
Duena Blomstrom:True.
Brett King:You know, it's like we we have this amazing technology to do so much more for people improving their health. But, you know, like, you look at places like the US. US doesn't have a health care system. It has a health profitability system. So what happens when the economy has the ability with AI to really provide mass health care at a very high quality level based on data, you know, and based on real time information, then suddenly you have amazing advances in longevity and, you know, curing diseases and so forth.
Brett King:But some people won't want their data shared, for example. And so we'll be they will be outside of this modernized health care system. And, you know, but that's gonna have to be people's choice. But generally speaking, I think we will be building consensus because we'll have to because of the the macro changes that will be occurring.
Duena Blomstrom:I mean, this is happening already, and it's so exciting. There are so many things that have happened over the last 2 years only. You have those, those those, moments of of absolute new types of discourse coming out of the scientific community in terms of, like, you've you've mentioned, you know, string theory alone has jumped over the last year to to places where it sounded
Brett King:fantastic. So planets, you know, with James Webb, what it's shown us. And we we're now asking question we you know, a lot of our our, ideas of how the universe works have been challenged by James Webb. You know? And so this is what happens as we get more and more advanced technology, better sensors, better imagery, better computing.
Brett King:You know, we are having to question many of our sort of more primitive, concept concepts of the universe.
Duena Blomstrom:Right. But as I was asking you before, does that not depend on what we do now? We are at this formatting stage of AI, I would say, where we start deciding in terms of the ethical conversation what should or shouldn't happen AI wise. Right? So what limitations do we put in place?
Duena Blomstrom:So unless we believe and do you that it's going to disregard all of that attempt of ours to put these guardrails in place, however right or wrong they are, and and start developing an consciousness of its own. And in that case, kind of where is it going and where is it leaving us? But if not, will these guardrails create the future we're hoping for, or will it keep us from it?
Brett King:Good question. You know, the the biggest problem with guardrails for AI, particularly ethical guardrails, and and, you know, you know this better than many, Duana, is that if you get, you know, you get a 100 people in a room and try to create an ethical code of conduct as a group of humans, that, you know, you're gonna have a large disparity in what we would consider ethical frameworks. Some people are gonna want ethics built on, Christianity or Islam. Others are gonna be you know, want it built on, you know, science. Others, you know, will want less centralization, and so, you know, more freedom of speech, you know, and things like this that so you you know, getting consensus to create an ethical code of conduct for AI to operate in society is very difficult.
Brett King:So what AI is essentially learning, it's learning us ethics from the way we behave today, and that's not very good. Right? Because, you know, we create conflict as humans. We manufacture it even, certainly at the political level for for, creating, you know, tension and and control elements in society. I don't think that's too controversial a thing to say these days.
Brett King:But at the same time, you would have to hope that, you know, one of the core tenants of AI is, you know, and and Geoffrey Hinton talks about this, is that compressed intelligence capability. And part of that is compressed reasoning capability as well. So we are hopeful that AI will bring this order of logic to the approach of humanity. But part of that may be that, you guys, you know, your systems are misaligned. They're not working effectively for humanity as a whole.
Brett King:And there's always gonna be a group of people that actually don't want that outcome because they want advantages from the system skewed towards that's why we have wealth and and, you know, monarchies and and, you know, the wealthy elite and so forth today is throughout human history, about 99% of human history have been these pyramid shaped economies where the top 1% sort of controls the flow of, wealth through the economy for their advantage. And and you can see right now that that system is is really becoming more a threat because people are becoming more aware and, you know, quantum sort of gonna blow that right open as well with broad access to information by sort of, you know, eliminating current encryption technologies and things. This is gonna be an interesting time.
Duena Blomstrom:As soon as we enter collective consciousness, we might find things we don't really like, though. So I'm I'm both hopeful and, fearful of what happens next. But I I
Brett King:But that's a negotiation process. Right? That's where we have to grow up as a as a species.
Duena Blomstrom:As a species. Yes. And and it it it does look that way, doesn't it? Like, we like we will eventually. Now in between here and there, we're gonna have, as you very well point out, the same forces that have stopped us from making, banking apps faster.
Duena Blomstrom:Really, the same mentality that has kept us from genuinely innovating when we could before we had all of this access to faster innovation and and, and and, you know, the the the the much bigger speed that that AI is giving us. What we were having were where these technology levers and these human levers and we were trying to build with them. So the the difference between today and then is massive. Going forward, it's gonna move even faster. I think it's really important for anyone listening in that considers themselves just in the technology space or just in the Fintech space to realize that it there is no space that's only an industry space anymore.
Duena Blomstrom:And kind of I wanted your perspective on that because, yes, technology is the underlying layer to everything. But, you know, kind of thinking of ourselves as just in the financial industry is somewhat limiting, I think, to many people in the industry. Do you not do you not find that that that's the case?
Brett King:Well, this is where actually, you know, when you start thinking about, how AI may work with us individually, if we want that high level of personalization so essentially think about creating your own LLM based on your life. You're going to need to input all of your data. Right? So your health data, your financial data, your behavioral data, what foods you like, you know, what restaurants you like going to, you know, where you like to, you know, go on holiday or vacation, you know, what movies you like to watch. All of this data is gonna go into this personalized set of AI capabilities and be reflected in your interactions.
Brett King:You know, this is this is how we sort of think about this. But, again, that means then, well, where is your data stored? Are you we probably need to concept something like a data wallet or, you know, some sort of personal, you know, as part of sort of our backup with our AI agent that would use that data for negotiation with other AI agents to get us the best deal or get us something that's really tailored to us. When you think about that sort of way, it seems very logical that that's how you would construct this, But that's not how we build things like financial services. It's not how we build things like health care.
Brett King:We tend to sort of try and, you know, do a one size fits all approach or reduce it down to segmentation. And we've heard talk about that market of 1 theory for a long time, but now AI really takes that to a different level. So the but this is also really the question about how how AI integrates into our our personal life. I don't know if that's really the answer to your question, but I do see, like, what we think of as a wallet today or a bank account when you combine that with AI. It's not no longer just about your money.
Brett King:It's now about your data and your health and, you know, that's your sort of your vault of of secrets if you like. And then you have to decide which data you're willing to trade to get better experiences in life.
Duena Blomstrom:And how honest you're willing to be about your and how self aware you are so that you can be honest. It's it's hard to be honest when you don't know much. But, absolutely, I love that perspective. We went from, you know, kind of coloring green your your tab or giving you a a dog on your card to actually understanding that it is what you are willing to put into whatever container that will provide those what I call money moments eventually and hopefully, extrapolate the banking layer into an an an underground process like we've been saying for the last 15 years. What do you think of the existing market in Fintech is going to still exist in 20 years?
Brett King:Yeah. This is a this is a really key point, and it speaks to, from an infrastructure perspective, what's gonna be required. So we know that if you start talking about AI based agency, whether that's smart contracts for corporations or whether it's a personal AI agent, you're you're essentially talking about the building blocks of the machine to machine economy that will result in these smart economies, highly autonomous economies, and that will be the best way you can compete, you know, and have the most, the best growth. So we know directionally that's, where we might go. But in terms of who are best suited as organizations to be a part of that world, then right now, you you have to look at it and say, well, who are the fastest growing financial institutions in the world?
Brett King:Who has the best technology and the best technology culture in an organization to absorb artificial intelligence into their stack? And the reality is that's mostly new entrants. Whether that is wallet plays, whether that is real time payments rail like PIX and, you know, in Brazil and UPI in India, you know, whether that is players like Alibaba, you know, and Alipay, you know, Amazon, Apple, Google, etcetera, who have big, datasets that can get access to now financial services transaction datasets and things like that. The reality is if you then look at the top banks in the world in terms of asset size, and you say how likely are they to make that transition into this AI led world, that's a lot less certain than seeing if Nubank or Revolut or Klarna or, Alipay or M Pesa can make that leap because their tech stacks alone is gonna allow them to innovate around AI. Whereas you've gotta fix the silo problem and the data lake problem and, you know, all of those problems, you know, at an incumbent.
Brett King:So in 20 years' time, you know, when you're starting when you have AI dominant infrastructure from a financial services perspective, most likely, we're going to see the largest tech players in the world have more and more, you know, strength in those areas. And the traditional banks, I think asset size actually could be inversed to your ability to evolve in this space. So, you know, I think you have a lot more consolidation and specialization in the traditional sector. Some of them will join networks and platforms that have that automation. But ultimately, you know, who's gonna be the top bank in Latin America in 20 years?
Brett King:It's the top bank today, which is Nubank. Right?
Duena Blomstrom:Right. I like that. I like that that the experience layer is is going to move elsewhere possibly, which is what we've known all along. But at the end of day, it does depend on what what people have in terms of tech debt. And, obviously, it's always dependent on what people have in terms of human debt, what they don't even want to
Brett King:necessarily look
Duena Blomstrom:at. But when it comes to whether or not we have banks, it's irrelevant. Where what institutions are gonna give people their money moment is also irrelevant as it very clearly changes a lot faster than we even thought. All of those texts, we were we were showing people from stage about how impending the the the Fintech, revolution is in terms of it all all happened in that sense.
Brett King:Yeah.
Duena Blomstrom:But it also was was completely frog lipped by the latest developments. And it's anyone's game yet again, and I I suspect that's going to keep happening. So I I love that that we can kind of look back and say this is why the steps took us so long, but the next steps are faster. And they do depend on how how capable we are to stay human at the end of the day. And I I wanna bring you back to that.
Duena Blomstrom:And I know that this is kind of not what we necessarily talk about this on this podcast, but we should. If we put aside all the things we've lived through, kind of the n d ironclad NDAs we have aside, but kind of all the all the long road in terms of of meeting people who have tried to make change, looking at what change actually ended up being, our capability of building technology, building technology with loads of holes in it and covering up for ourselves, all of the things we've done over the years, the innovation theater, the business prevention department, all of those. How much of it won't even matter going forward because we can delete it all and and start with a new generation who's smart enough to understand, take it from experience backwards? And how much of it do you see happening? A a a question that I asked, and I don't, I don't know if you wanna be, forensic about it.
Duena Blomstrom:But in general, feeling wise, do we have a new gut? Do we have a change of gut? We were talking about this 15, 20 years ago. Has it happened yet?
Brett King:Well, yeah, I think, you know, the fact is if you if you look in the fintech space, these are the stats that most most bankers would not be aware of. But today, if you look at the top 20 fintechs in the world, then they have about 4,000,000,000 customers. 200% growth over the last 5 years, 45% growth in revenue, annually, CAGR. Right? You look at the top 20 retail banks in the world, they have 2,700,000,000 customers.
Brett King:They have had 3% growth in terms of customer numbers the last 5 years and 1 third of the revenue growth that Fintech has. So you extrapolate that, and it's fairly clear that the new kids on the block will be the big kids on the block, You know, if not today, you know, Revolut has 45,000,000 customers. HSBC has 39,000,000. You know, Nubank has a 105,000,000 customers. Their nearest competitor has 55,000,000 across LatAm.
Brett King:WeBank in, Shenzhen, you know, 400,000,000 customers, you know, making them the 3rd largest bank in in China by customer numbers. So and that's gonna happen in health tech. It's gonna happen in, you know, all you know, in transportation. It's gonna happen in all of these different areas. But at the same time, you've got this generational shift in thinking.
Brett King:Our kids are not married to capitalism. They're not, you know, they don't see socialism as the dirty word that, you know, conservative politicians have have tried to make it into. Because they're like, no. We wanna be more consensus based. We wanna we wanna build community.
Brett King:We wanna and then that leads to a a sort of a different philosophy of life, which is, you know, my work needs to be meaningful. If I'm building a company, it needs to be meaningful, and it needs to be sustainable. And so then you have a sort of I would imagine in the mid 20 thirties, you would have a pushback against corporations that are just profit making machines. If you don't have a broader social consensus based goal, if you're not advantaging society, if you're not helping us make this transition, then you're gonna be vilified and, you you know, you you your legal, means will be used to, to minimize your influence on the system. Because ultimately, I think, you know, humans are smart enough to know that when there's a binary choice, if it's extinction or continuing with capitalism, that we're gonna have to modify the system.
Brett King:And I don't think our kids are gonna be concerned about that at all. I think they're gonna be excited about bringing their new philosophies to the world.
Duena Blomstrom:So it hasn't yet happened, but we're getting there. We haven't had yet the I
Brett King:think it's I think the seeds have been planted.
Duena Blomstrom:Right. Yeah. I love this about the new generation. They they come in with so much change intrinsically in their hearts and so much courage to talk about it that we didn't have in their time that it will absolutely make a difference. And the the fear I have is that the work structures we're throwing them into are completely incapable of consuming that.
Duena Blomstrom:And, unfortunately, they will, self select themselves out of having this talent come at all when you you chain them to a desk inexplicably. So all all of that is going to be interesting over the next few years, but maybe we're talking about slightly larger time frame than we would have liked. But it's still going great, isn't it? We're having, the the the world today as compared to the world 15 years ago is vastly different, and it's it's going the right direction, hopefully, if we can save it in time.
Brett King:Absolutely. In fact, all the data, you know, we you know, well, not all of the data, but most of the data. If you look at, pretty much every g 20 economy apart from the United States, we have seen continuous improvement in life expectancy. We've seen continuous improvement in literacy rates. You know, you know, access to housing is is a problem that's emerging globally right now because of the cost of housing.
Brett King:But think about what comes out of the other side of this. If I in in 20 years' time, if I ask you, hey, Duana, what do you do? Your answer is most likely going to be something that you're passionate about, that adds value to society in a unique way. What it isn't going to be is this is the job I do to put food on it on the table or a roof of my head, because we'll solve those problems with technology. So everybody will have access to a very high quality, you know, standard of living Right.
Brett King:Because of the technical capabilities.
Duena Blomstrom:I love that. That is really helpful for anyone listening to this. And if there's any advice you'd give the the new entrance into the technology and financial technology market since this is the topic of our particular conversation, what would you say they should focus on? Where is their most growth to be had? And I know my answer is forget the tech part and focus on the bits we don't have, which are the human bits.
Duena Blomstrom:But, what would you say that they should razor sharp start investing time and thought into?
Brett King:Like big, hairy, audacious goals, so but fixing meaningful problems on the planet, you know. So, you know, wealth distribution, affordability of housing, these are some major issues that we have to deal with as part of this transition. They're areas that are intimately tied into how you would use money and and how you earn living and so forth. And I think, you know, obviously there's the application of AI that's going to help people just be healthier, you know, whether that's financial health or physical health. I think the the I think longevity is going to change again massively the way we think about wealth because and the way we think about work.
Brett King:Because if you think about, you know, if you can live to a 130, well, now you have to work until you're 90, be able to live to afford to live until you're a 130. Can you imagine us living the retirement age to 90?
Duena Blomstrom:I'm trying not. No.
Brett King:But this is the thing is when you start thinking about this, it really shows you that longevity is not particularly compatible with the way we think about wealth creation and, you know, assets today. So, you know, if we're going to live longer, which is technically going to be feasible in within the next 10 10 to 15 years, then we need a different system of value. So that's that's just one area. That's even before we start talking about climate change response and the massive climate mitigation bill we're gonna have. You know, as we're recording this, we've just seen the floods, you know, and hurricane damage in damage in in North Carolina and elsewhere in the US.
Brett King:That's just gonna be repeated and repeated and repeated, you know, 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars of extreme weather damage. You know, how do we make, our our communities resilient in the face of that type of, you know, extreme weather events, you know, unemployment from AI. All of these things are big things that just require us to have a fundamentally different approach of of how we approach life, and that's coming.
Duena Blomstrom:That's really hopeful. Maybe we should leave it there before we become any lower in our hopes going forward. But thank you so much for really framing it for us because at the end of the day, what has come before, and we have many war stories, which is one other episode that's only about, gossip in Fintech back in the day. It's not that important. Where we're going forward is Yeah.
Duena Blomstrom:What matters and all of that requires us to be a lot more human than we've ever been able to be before. And I'm sure we're getting there if we the more we say this to people, the more they'll they'll understand it's an emergency to to turn to these topics and hopefully, you know, things are gonna move slightly faster. So thank you so much for for saying it that way again, Brett. And, I hope everyone buys your, next book out soon, obviously, and no one should have, tuned in without having, bought the other ones. And we'll we'll pick this up again hopefully sometime soon.
Duena Blomstrom:Thank you.
Brett King:For sure. Thank you very much.
Duena Blomstrom:Bye.