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This was quite the episode! We return for Round 2 with Nelson Roque. He is Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State. He walked us through OpenClaw.
Nelson is an incredibly useful guest because he is able to cover both podcasts I have run - The Behavioral Investor and this one, Geospatial FM. A significant message from The Behavioral Investor was the effect of delay discounting or hyperbolic discounting. This is the decay in appeal of even fantastic outcomes when there is a significant delay until they happen. A formula is available here and here. Applying the formula shows that receiving a billion dollars in 3 generations, 108 years from now, only feels like $10,000 right now. The feeling decays with delay.
There are a couple of ways to defeat hyperbolic discounting. One is episodic future thinking. This is a way to juice the dopamine reward system by a multimodal, multisensory imagining of what one might see, hear, smell, think, touch and feel upon achieving a financial goal. Turns out that, of course, AI has been applied to help here. Another that I came up with is instant, constant feedback about the reduction in amount of money one can pass to the next generation with each spending decision you make. What do I mean?
Let's work with the $600 you might splurge on a smartwatch. The US market has compounded at 7% annually, adjusted for inflation and including dividends, the past 150 years. Imagine you are 42 and have a life expectancy of 72. You've therefore got 30 years of compounding $600 at 7% annually. This becomes $4,500 if you invest it in a low cost US market index fund with a 0.05% fee.
So, you could enjoy the $600 watch or consider that in splurging on it you are effectively saying to your child you don't want to give them $4,500 when you die. So what I'm proposing is an app to make the effect of long time periods on investing outcomes visible.
Please watch the episode as Nelson walks through producing this live with an AGI agent orchestrator called OpenClaw. He also profiles some geospatial situation monitoring apps (e.g. here). These were inspired by the incredible Bilawal Sidhu. He was able to give a geospatial data replay of the Iran strikes: here and here.
It is amazing how far we've come since Nelson's sceptical comments in the first episode with Nelson 9 months ago about whether or not we have AGI. Let's check back on his opinion of AGI in another 9 months.
