AI + Crypto: Building the New Internet of Money ft. Micky Malka

**Raoul Pal** (0:00)
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Hi, I'm Raoul Pal, and welcome to my show, The Journeyman. The Journeyman, as you well know, is my journey to that nexus of understanding between macro, crypto and the exponential age of technology. Today, I've got a special treat. I can't think of anybody better in the world to speak to on this whole nexus than a good friend of mine, Micky Malka. Micky is well known for being probably the greatest fintech investor of all time. He was early, very early stage investor in Coinbase, Robinhood, Revolut, you name it. He was Bitcoin 2010, all of the things. Micky has been at the forefront of everything that's been happening. He's also thinking deeply about where AI is going and how it all fits together. The brilliant Ribbit Capital essay about the tokenization of everything and what tokenization means not just in the crypto sense, but the broader packets of information that render all of this information for the new digital age is powerful. And Micky also is a great collector of digital art. So I've got an incredible amount to talk to him about. And I think you're going to be really enjoy this because there'll be lots of new perspectives from you, from somebody who really is at the nexus of the exponential age. Enjoy. Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto and exponential age landscapes. In The Journey Man, I talk to the smartest people in the world, so we can all become smarter together.
Micky Malka, welcome to Real Vision finally.

**Micky Malka** (4:15)
Oh, it's good to be here with you.

**Raoul Pal** (4:17)
Yeah. Look, I'm really looking forward to this because, A, you've got an amazing story and, B, you're doing amazing things and our paths intersects and all of this stuff, so we have a lot of common interests in this stuff. But I'd love to start by telling your story because you've got one of the great stories of finance, and I think it's a nice story how the boy from Venezuela ended up doing what you're doing. I mean, it's just a great story. So if you can take us back in time a bit and tell us about how you got here.

**Micky Malka** (4:47)
Sure. It's a long story. I'm going to make it short.
I grew up in Venezuela, and in the 1980s and 90s, it was an amazing place. The beautiful thing about it was that I was exposed to every single macro event that you can imagine before the time I was 15 If you ask me about hyperinflation, devaluation, capital controls, banking system collapsing, I had checked the box in so many of them since I was very young. I got to learn that was my masters in life was exactly that. I did go to college there because my parents were expecting a degree in economics, but I started my first company when I was 17 Wow. I started a broker leader.