PIPPA MALMGREN: I'm Pippa Malmgren and this is Real Visionaries.
My work now, it's really interesting, it's no longer one job. It's a portfolio of interests.
I'm working with something called the Monaco Foundry, which is a VC accelerator incubator
for small startups, based out of Monaco, but with a global portfolio and a global team of senior
partners. And that is quite amazing, because it puts me at the cutting edge of what's happening in
technology and innovation, and all these little companies that are creating extraordinary results.
That's a lot of fun. I still do a huge amount of public speaking. And that keeps me embedded
with this traditional finance community and major corporations or companies like Google and
American Express. And that's cool, because I get to hear what their thinking is about the state of
the world and find out what people don't know. There are a lot of traditional finance, people
who really don't know very much about defi, for example, so that's a big learning space for me.
I have a column now on Substack, where I'm using that technology to write in public. My first
serious book signals, I crowdfunded, because that was the cool cutting edge technology at the time.
Today, it's writing your book in public on Substack so then you get feedback from the
audience all the time, which makes your arguments stronger. My dad was such a huge mentor to me,
and still is to this day, and he had been the chief trade negotiator for the United States. And
he'd been economic adviser to four presidents and many prime ministers and leaders around the world,
so I got an apprenticeship at an early age. And he made it fascinating and just so interesting, and
taught me stuff like the difference between the front page of the Washington Post story versus
what actually happens, which is crucial if you want to understand what's going on in the world
economy, and a passion for the travel and going and seeing what's going on where and who's doing
what and what's the actual story versus what you think is happening. I actually thought I was not
going down that path, because I decided to go into finance. And back in that era, this is the 1980s,
finance was not considered economics. That was a different field altogether. But once I got into
finance, and I was running strategy for some of the biggest investment banks in the world,
I realized, well, actually Economics and Public Policy is so at the heart of all the decision
making. I've always been right at that nexus between policy and markets. That's my space.
And I don't know, I developed an interesting skillset, which sounds funny, but I speak
both Klingon and Federation. I can explain the market guys to the policymakers and vice versa,
because they don't really talk to each other very well. It was wonderful having the opportunity to
work for President George W. Bush. But I met him when he was still governor, and I was asked to
go brief him. And that's how it began. He was beginning to assemble his team of advisors,
Larry Lindsey, who was his economic adviser, knew me and my work very well. We used to confer a lot.
I'm in Japan, what are you hearing? Well, I'm in Paris. This is what I heard. He said, would you
come to Austin and brief the governor? I'm like, yeah, of course, definitely. I got on a plane,
we hit it off. he asked me to be involved in the campaign. And not that the international economy
was such a crucial part of that. But it was fun to be part of that team. And then he won. And I was
offered the one role that was so extraordinary, which was being in charge of all financial market
issues for the President. Although little did I know what I was stepping into, because then we had
seven of the nine largest bankruptcies in American history in one year. That was Enron, Tyco,
WorldCom, and all that. And, of course, we were still recovering from the dotcom bubble bursting
at that point. And then we had 9/11. I worked on terrorism risk to the economy after 9/11 as well,
in addition. It was an unbelievable life experience and a real privilege to be asked
to work. My advice to anyone who is asked by any president is you should give that a go. You should
serve your country. I don't follow markets the way I used to. When I was an investment banker, I used
to follow dollar/yen and I used to follow where's the bond market and where is the stock market?
I still keep an eye on those things, but it's with my peripheral vision.
Now, I'm really interested in who's creating tomorrow. And that means being involved with
these small startups that are undertaking extraordinary technological innovations.
And I see them being the solution to the meta problems of our time, by which I mean things like
getting fresh water to everybody on the planet, eliminating carbon, CO2 from our atmosphere.
It's not going to be big corporations that actually do this. It's little, tiny innovators
that come up with game changing ways of tackling these massive problems that affect us
at every level, literally. The planetary level down to the family level. I spend a lot of my time
listening and learning from that community. And I think there's a new trend coming, which is
increasing investment into ever smaller companies. And this has been the privileged play area
of the private equity world. But I think that it's about to be democratized. It's such a privilege to
be asked to do this interview series. And I'll be talking to some phenomenal people that I've met
in my career that I just think are so interesting to hear from. One of them is Jon Cropper,
who has done so many things, it's hard to say where to begin. But most recently, he was the
brand design genius at Aston Martin. But early in his career, he's one of the first guys at MTV,
Quincy Jones was his mentor, and he ran Quincy Jones companies for him. He is a genius who was
named the best marketer in America under the age of 40, JON CROPPER: In the middle of what I call
the triple pandemic that we're dealing with now, which is an environmental one, a biological one
with COVID, and a cultural one with what I will call the cultural divide driven by
hyperconservative separatist attitudes. Those are these three pandemics all happening at the
same time, which traditionally would make you feel that the future is gray
and not very bright. I think the future is insanely bright, and insanely optimistic. Because
just as there's always dark and difficult times, that's usually when human creativity expands. And
you don't have to go too much farther than the research and development labs of the coolest
companies and governments, and the universities. And being privileged to have the chance to look
inside, peek behind the wall around the corner and see the future while it's being developed,
man, we're getting close to some big time solutions. PIPPA MALMGREN: He has an ability
to detect the zeitgeist, where things going like nobody I know. Kelli Richards is like a national
treasure. She literally started working with Steve Jobs when she was 16 and became the brains behind
the launch of music at Apple, which ultimately culminated in iTunes, we would not have that
without her. KELLI RICHARDS: People think there wasn't anything before iTunes at Apple with music.
But I actually burst the focus of music and entertainment at Apple in the late 1980s in my
20s. I was responsible for making sure that every filmmaker and every musician used a Macintosh as
a creation tool. First, we focused on creation, and then focused on distribution with digital
and that's where iTunes came in, consumer facing. I handled making sure the industry,
I laid the foundation for the industry attaching themselves to the Mac platform, and then
we turn the lens to the consumers with iTunes. PIPPA MALMGREN: And she's worked with every
major musician. Bowie Prince, Todd Rundgren, but critically at the juncture of high tech, and music
and entertainment, which of course today is so crucial if you want to be investing in defi, you
need to understand the nexus between these things and she's just brilliant at that. The Fernandez
brothers are just extraordinary. They are twins, and sometimes it's hard to tell them apart. But
one of them, Alex, is based in Las Vegas, and 20 years ago, he decided to create a company
to be in the metaverse and to help businesses enter the metaverse, an incredible visionary.
And that business has been hugely successful from day one. And they're one of the biggest makers of
games. If you want to know about gamification, and what's possible in the gaming space,
he's your guy. But his twin brother, Hector, is based in Tokyo, where he is the key person at
Sony PlayStation, acquiring games. HECTOR FERNANDEZ: Everything is better when it's a game.
Loyalty points, air miles is money's original game, honestly. That whole process of being
able to sit there and actually create a core loop that makes someone interested in playing
with aligned incentives that at every right moment, gives you the hit of dopamine that makes
you want to continue. It was clear to us that that was already happening. And it was something
that we as children had already existed in playing video games. Even people used to do role playing
games of D&D where it was imagination oriented, you could just see how much of the psychology and
behavioral analytics that were occurring within this field, what value it would have everywhere
else. PIPPA MALMGREN: He has an extraordinary view over the landscape of gamification and game
creation. And again, these things are at the heart of where profitability and future revenues are
coming from for almost every business so hearing their views is really valuable for investors.