I often say that the future of money is not a technology story at all. Crypto, AI, tokenisation — these are supporting actors. The real shift taking place is personal. The individual is becoming the centre of the financial system, and the system is struggling to adapt.
In my conversation with Jacob Shapiro, I traced how this happened. It goes back to 1971, when the dollar left the gold peg and financialisation became the engine of the global economy. Once money turned into information, everything that could be digitised could also be financialised. That transition has now collided with a world where individuals are highly networked, and value increasingly flows through identity and data rather than institutions.
Listen to the episode:
Jacob and I explored:
- Why financialisation had to come before personalisation
- How data, identity and digitised assets are becoming the new stores of value
- Why Bitcoin’s resilience comes from the strength of its network, not its ideology
- How open-source communities are building the next monetary architecture without waiting for regulators
- Why national debt behaves very differently in a fully financialised world
- How AI and tokenised workflows push money closer to pure information
- Why intermediaries — banks, platforms and even governments — are under pressure to justify their role
We also discussed something I’ve been saying for a while: the nation state is slowly giving way to network states. Value now moves across communities and identities that sit outside traditional borders. And in that emerging world, the United States still holds extraordinary power — not because of its manufacturing base, but because it remains the most open and dynamic information economy. In a financialised system, information flow is leverage.
It was a lively, wide-ranging hour that connected personalisation, geopolitics and the future architecture of money in one thread. Enjoy.
