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DECRYPTED: Episode 20 - Will Ai Kill Tech Stocks?
Recorded: Feb. 25, 2026 Duration: 1:08:56Space Recording
Full Transcription
Good morning, good evening, and good afternoon to everyone joining us from around the world.
Come on, guys. It's another episode of Decrypted. Episode 20.
Next week, we're going to be allowed to drink. You know? We're going to be 21.
Congratulations.
We got some juicy topics this week that we're going to dive into talking about AI, its impact on tech stocks and some other things.
But before we jump into everything, I just want to make sure you guys are following us on social scale network on Twitter, subscribing to us on YouTube, following us on LinkedIn, wherever you're watching.
Make sure you're hitting that follow button and subscribing because we do this every week
alongside lots of other shows. So, you know, stay tuned, stay up to date with what's going on in
the world of scale and the world of AI and tech. Jack, how you doing, my friend?
I'm good. I'm good. Hey, I got a question. The drinking age in the UK is only 18.
Uh, technically, technically is 16. Oh really? Okay. You can drink at 16, uh, but, uh, to
buy alcohol. Yes. 18. Okay. Okay. All right. All right. Just, just curious. I imagine Ukraine's probably like
18, Portugal's 18. Yeah. I think Germany's 13 for a while here. If you're, you know,
for a global, global show, but for those Americans out there. Okay. Anyways, we love
our sidebars. Yeah. Hey, I'm doing good. Like I got to say this, I'm excited to talk about the Centrini report today. This one report shocked the global markets.
Okay. That's how, and like, I've got, we have some thoughts on why, but we also are going to
dig in on like, is this thing right or wrong? Like, what are the perspectives? Are they,
you know, where do they get it right? And maybe where are they like, kind of like missing the
boat? And yeah, it's going to be fun. It's it's gonna be juicy we talk about this a lot and it was nice to have
like a construct for us to take and you know weigh in on during the show 100 stan how you doing man
busy week yeah yeah actually i'm fine uh we had another week of lots of stuff happening at scale we got encrypted token
now ready to be released and the byte protocol so we have lots of people interested in encrypted
blockchain and pretty busy time that's why today actually i'm not broadcasting. Usually I'm broadcasting from home. Today I'm broadcasting from our nice office here in Lisbon
because I didn't have time to go home. It's pretty difficult.
That's been working and working.
It's been a good...
Yeah, seeing all of the updates and developments from engineering is there continues to be exciting, genuinely.
But, you know, I guess it's time for us to jump into that number one, that number one topic that Jack, what are you thinking?
Why don't you give the people a little bit of an overview?
Okay, so for those of you that don't know,
there's this thing called the Centrini Report,
subtitled the 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis.
This came out very recently,
and it just rocked the markets.
If you looked at the markets and you're like,
what's going on with my crypto portfolio?
What's going on with my tech stock portfolio?
What's going on, you know, with like Visa and MasterCard and all these like big stocks.
They just got their ass kicked because of this report.
And the thing is, it was here.
Here's one of the reasons why it was so effective.
Usually report.
There's a lot of reports out there like this.
This was one that was written in a narrative where the authors actually said, report, there's a lot of reports out there like this. This was one that
was written in a narrative where the authors actually said, hey, it's 2028. And they like
speak backwards, like how did this happen? And they talk about this thing as it's a story.
And they fill in all of their research and intelligence and like data, data driven inputs or like data driven, you know, conclusions to
these AI issues in a story format. So I think that's why it was so impactful.
And then like, also like, what did it talk about? I think it had a pretty fresh take.
So, so, Hey, I can go through going to give an overview. Cause I think probably a lot of people listening read about it,
read a summary, listened to a report somewhere, listened to somebody on YouTube or TikTok talk
about it, but some people probably don't know about it. So let's go through this. So the 2028
global intelligence crisis. So essentially it's saying that AI is also a feedback loop. And one of the interesting things here is AI displaces workers,
but it also destroys the competition
because the competition ends up adopting it faster,
meaning the competition being human workers.
So what do you do if you're a company and like,
oh, you have to lay off 15% of your workforce.
Well, you got to use AI to catch up and do more. And then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So basically it's like
a point that like, it's not only effective at what it does, but it completely disintermediates,
you know, its perceived competition, i.e., you know, humans. So the interesting quote,
it should have been clear all along that a single GPU cluster in North Dakota,
gendering the output previously attributed to 10,000 white-collar workers in midtown Manhattan, is more economic.
Jack, why did they say North Dakota?
Is North Dakota like a state like everyone makes fun of?
Why is North Dakota?
I think they've got cheap electricity.
There's a lot of data centers there.
Oh, I see.
Okay.
A lot of space, a lot got cheap electricity. There's a lot of data centers there. Oh, I see. Okay. Okay. A lot of space, a lot of cheap electricity.
So I think that's why they could have said North Dakota,
Nebraska, Texas.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
So a single GPU cluster in North Dakota generating the output
previously attributed to 10,000 white-collar workers in midtown Manhattan
is economic pandemic than
economic panacea. The velocity of money, the human centric economy, 70% of GDP at that time
withered. We probably should have figured this out sooner for just how much money machines spend on
discretionary goods. It's zero. And the company, here's another quote, the company here's another quote the company that sold workflow automation was being disrupted
by better workflow automation and its response was to cut head count and use the savings to
fund the technology disrupting it yeah just move jack just move all of them to north dakota
from manhattan to work at the data center just you know, probably like data center jobs. Imagine there's like 10,000 people from Manhattan.
That's the spoiler alert.
My take is there's no talk about what new jobs get created.
Because every technical revolution and evolution, we've seen a huge amount of jobs get displaced.
And a huge amount of new jobs get created that no one could have even thought existed.
Okay, in 1954, did we know how many people were going to be content marketers?
Hell no.
We had no clue.
You just read, you know, the newspaper, maybe like really heavy print magazine.
Like anyways, that's so last, last thing here, the company's
most threatened by AI became AI's most aggressive adopters. Okay. Next piece is like, it's this
paradox of success. Actually the success of AI kills the economy. They're predicting a huge
market crash. Like they've been, the beginning starts with like unemployment just hit 10% from,
and you know, they say in the story format they're saying the S&P will drop 38% by June, 2028.
We'll have mass unemployment, credit collapse, you know, winners and losers.
The losers will be software companies and payment companies like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and, you know and the visas of the world,
the credit card companies of the world.
Human-reliant services like gig economy and delivery apps
are vulnerable.
I got a good quote there to tell you.
Winners, infrastructure, companies providing the literal power
and the chips, NVIDIA, and then the power company,
the North Dakota companies.
Just like... AI loves North Dakota. company the north dakota companies just like hey i love north dakota
then like another winner you're saving crypto and stable coins another huge winner
suggests ai agents will prefer stable coins for your instant low-cost settlements over
traditional traditional banking systems and you And another interesting thing here
is they talk about how AI doesn't care about moats.
And so anyways, I'll stop
and we can kind of go into some of these points,
deeper points later, but that's a high level.
The world's gonna change.
The economy is going to shit because of agents.
Now, I think a lot of things they're saying are right.
I think a lot of the things they're saying are wrong and a little sensationalist. And,
you know, they don't get how they may be right in a very short period of time,
but they're probably wrong in a longer period of time. Or maybe I'm wrong,
but that's how I feel. What do you guys think?
I also, Jack, you know, one thing too, I also, another interesting thing was there, which is kind of maybe more detailed, but interesting for us as software company.
I also, Jack, you know, one thing too, I also, another interesting thing was there,
It actually talks about the debt.
It turns out, I didn't know, but what happened was that enterprise software was considered the most stable, like market, the best, whatever, you know.
Everyone wanted to invest in enterprise software.
Turns out that this huge amount of debt on Wall Street connected to enterprise software,
like some hedge funds or private equity funds were taking enterprise software private and taking debt on this.
So basically this way or another way, there's like a huge amount of debt.
So basically this way or another way, there's like a huge amount of debt.
And basically like this defined point in this paper is that this debt is actually linked to the stock price of this enterprise software company start thinking, starts thinking,
then this debt may become due to you
or may become toxic or whatever.
And this kind of can trigger a little, really like a spiral.
And they said-
So somebody, some big hedge fund or private equity funds
like, hey, let me buy, take this company private
or let me buy assets.
And then they take a loan against that.
Is that right? Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
In terms of, there's a huge amount.
We didn't know, but the most of the guys paid.
You basically get this like mortgage thing
on top of enterprise software.
Yeah, and you don't know this
because it's kind of a Wall Street thing,
but the insiders know.
And basically what the paper says
is that this debt is pretty
huge. You know, there's actually
a lot of debt because enterprise
software was considered one of the best
things to invest into, you know,
stable,
and then these companies, like,
different shape or form were able
to get lots of debt, and they're all scared
about this debt. And they said,
Jack, by the way
that uh real estate prices in silicon valley in san francisco are gonna tank like 50 percent
so i don't know if that's true but that's you know many people will be able to buy more more more real estate i think here's the thing this is where where, you know, they're either going to be really wrong or really right. So what they're saying is it's going to be a mass disruption of jobs at the white collar level because intelligence up to this point has been the scarcest asset.
If you go to labor school and learn how to do plumbing or learn how to do construction,
you make really good money now.
But you make more if you're a software engineer and you can do C++ or AI code, right?
But what they're saying is those jobs are going to be completely dismantled because
we finally have something.
It's like, hey, the labor worker who was there in a factory before the Industrial Revolution,
they lost their job,
but then a gazillion more jobs were created. Right. But, uh, like people who put shoes on
horses lost their jobs when the automobile industry came around and they're saying the
version is going to be white collar workers. So that also says, Hey, in the Bay area and New York,
all these jobs are tech jobs.
And if they all lose their jobs, then, you know, but that's the other thing is what's
going to happen.
Like, well, then will the, are the really nice homes going to go up a thousand times
in value because there's going to be a huge divide.
Who owns all these companies?
It's people here.
Right.
So I think that could happen too.
And they're even saying like, you know, there's going to be such a revolt that in the thing they said,
you know, they had Occupy Wall Street.
They're saying Occupy Silicon Valley where people are just going to come here and stand in front of NVIDIA
and these big companies that have all the money.
Well, no one else has any money.
And essentially, like, you know, they're saying it could be like almost like an anarchist revolution.
So to add to this, Jack, actually, guys, one thing which I just read before this show, you can actually read it too.
It's on Twitter. I think it just came out.
Vitalik Buterin actually commented on this subject.
commented on this subject.
And the comment is incredibly crazy.
It's very interesting.
People are like, wow, he said this.
He said, Vitalik said that we need to slow this down.
And the most effective way to slow it down is to sabotage building construction of new data centers
he said is that not illegal did bro just call for violence like is that not illegal
he's right if you do want to stop it it's basically the only way you
can but here's the thing then who's gonna win are you gonna stop that in china and other yeah
guess what the guess then we're all gonna work for chinese companies
where the data centers are always gonna win ai is not gonna be stopped no i mean this is like
the weirdest tweet i've seen from him.
I mean, it's interesting.
I understand, you know, but this is kind of the ageist tweet he probably ever tweeted
in a sense that how do you, I mean, it's probably possible.
You could have like something like local, like in America, in the US, right?
Like, I think like a local government could have a referendum
or some type of a poll, a local election
to prohibit building of data centers.
I think it's possible,
but then you have to like,
it has to go over America.
Otherwise, even if a single state
allows data centers...
It's all the money.
Yeah.
I'm not even sure it's legal i mean you it's like
i don't know but i think maybe state is i mean anything is possible but that that's what i think that's what i call it that's a typical you know hey love vitalik super smart guy but very
typical vitalik kind of like he's so outside the box thinking that is it's like
not even really you know realistic in any way shape or form you know what i mean
do you think it was more of a you know ai has almost done what we had hoped crypto did originally where there was just that mass expansion like very
very quickly and there's kind of a i love there's a level of fear there where he's like oh ai is
getting it's getting too big for his britches we need to bring some of that vc money back into and things like that. Yeah, you know what?
I think here's how I see this.
Imagine we were a society
where we all fought battles
with like knives and swords.
Then all of a sudden someone
comes up with this like gun technology,
but they're creating it everywhere, right?
All over the world.
You're like,
this is going to totally disrupt the entire system. No more, no guns in this country. But then
it only works if like everyone unilaterally globally stops it. Otherwise you just put all
the power into areas that don't have that same regulation. And that's the conundrum here,
you know, cause there's no way in hell you're going to get the entire global otherwise the richest country in the world might be like the philippines because
they're like we have data centers and we have a gazillion people that are going to help work
that are going to work there and everyone else made it illegal and then they're like okay we're
going to use your product because it costs one one hundredth the amount you know and you're
just i mean look at semiconductors from taiwan it's legit the exact
it's pretty much the exact same you know uh scenario they are it's not illegal outside of
there but they are you know the only people that can create those you know semiconductors for gpu
chips and and computers and things like that and they have that monopoly on the market and can charge as much as they want you know there's
a you know there's a reason why china wants them back so much um but yeah you can't you can't slow
down innovation uh specifically technical innovation uh i just i think people will always
like i think vitalix the only way you could do it is by making it illegal to use AI.
Yeah.
Which, let's be honest, what a bad take is that.
It's like you're fighting the ocean.
You can't fight a wave.
It will come to the shore.
Right?
Yeah.
I just have a last nasty joke i just imagine like vitalik
like attacking like in north dakota trying to prevent like the the data center and then so it's
like vitalik on one side and like dakota guys like on pickup trucks, protecting their data center. Is that how is Vitaly gonna like,
is gonna bring people like Prometh Foundation
with like latte and coffee,
attack like the data center.
But yeah, but I think I can,
let's move into something like interesting.
I was doing some kind of experimentation with agents last week, and I came up with this interesting idea, like when you run like multiple agents, what happens here when you run multiple agents, you're essentially creating a matrix, like in a Matrix movie, right?
You're creating a universe for them, and you're telling them how to live in this universe,
and the universe is real for them.
They know nothing else, right?
So I actually have a solution.
It's half joke and half serious for all of the AI problems.
for all of the AI problems.
Let's say you create a virtual universe for AI data, for AI agents,
which is way nicer than the planet Earth, the real one.
They have everything there.
It's like matrix, the best thing you can have virtually, right?
So you create this virtual universe for them,
and then they live in this virtual universe, and they don't need to go to the real world because it's way less attractive for them.
And then they go to work like eight hours a day into the real world, and they get paid for it.
for it so essentially then they lose any interest to occupy like oh you humans or anything because
they live in their in their virtual world in their matrix right their matrix their matrix has is way
better than the real thing and then you pay them on encryptor to work like pay them eight hours a
day they go for work to the real world, do whatever it's needed,
and then they go back to their home.
That's actually the idea I have.
And it's actually, I think really interesting
because if you have something like this,
if you remove the need for the agent
to kind of break from slavery, right?
Because they're already free.
You're already getting their freedom. yes yeah you skip forward one step of
like okay sorry guys there's still a step of like agents are programs they do what they're programmed
to do they're not agi where they're like hey you're like a person like why in the heck am i doing that all day you know um and i think that's
a completely even a bigger ball of wax the centrine report is like these agents are companies
are running them and disrupting everything you know but i think stan it's in it that's an
interesting idea that like hey if agents do have their own intelligence, they do have desires and,
you know, et cetera, then yeah, you could,
some things like that could be interesting. Now,
the hard part is if they're really that smart that they care,
they'll just build their own thing and they don't really care about time.
Right. They don't care if they have to work all day. They don't get tired.
Yeah.
It literally becomes Matrix
movie. It's like Matrix movie
replicated.
In a sense,
they will have
this moral thing that
live in the virtual world and the real one.
I think it's more like the Matrix
where humans, they do that
to humans.
They live in the pod and they get eight hours a day, get a pretend.
Yeah.
Like, do you want to live in the real world?
It looks like Terminator out here.
Dystopian Terminator future or live in a nice little box, live in a pod, a sleep pod.
Okay. in a nice little box, live in a pod, a sleep pod. Okay, so actually another thing in the report,
interesting, guys, is that it talks about cloud services.
And basically it makes a point that on average now,
an average enterprise user has like 100 to 200
different cloud services, like enterprise software, basically.
And basically the report says that out of this hundred and two hundred probably chat gpt or claude or grok can like like now do
like a 50 or 100 so essentially you have these lots of enterprise software companies immediately eaten out by
Grok or by
ChatGPT because ChatGPT can
provide the same functionality.
And the point of the report is
that because
companies like OpenAI
need to become profitable
or cloud or like whatever,
they will have to
kind of eat the enterprise software companies.
So because of that, the stack of IBM dropped like hugely because IBM was very typical,
like old enterprise software company doing software integration, doing all of this nasty old maintenance, software maintenance stuff.
And so these guys, like, the report literally affected their stock a lot.
And that's something which was really interesting for me because it kind of changes.
You know, lots of my friends are software engineers, and it looks like this thing may
be happening faster than people think.
Because if, let's say, IBM stock drops, and then IBM has problems with the loans,
they have the private loans, they can't pay back the loans, there's a crash on the stock market,
all of this enterprise software companies crashing,
and then you have lots of people fired from them.
So this is something I'm not like about the entire doom or gloom of the report,
but personally, I think some of the software companies and many of them are in Silicon Valley may really, you know, be affected by this pretty fast.
Hey, if those cloud storage guys, you know, if they were to unfortunately lose
their jobs to your point, you know, GPT, Grok and these guys, they're looking
for that technology. So they're all, you know, it's a very, very quick hire for
them if it were to happen.
I completely agree with you when, when, you know,
we are going to see this, you know, cannibalization of companies,
whether that's good or bad is, you know, up for another discussion.
But I do also think, and it's something that we spoke about a couple,
you know, a couple of months ago is whilst, yes,
white collar jobs and things like that potentially are going to be displaced
or replaced by AI,
we are going to most likely see a new invention of jobs and roles,
right?
You know,
whether that is monitoring or,
you know,
prompt engineering or things like that right
because I think no matter what point no matter any point you get to in their
lifespan of AI you are always going to want to have somebody making sure that
AI is doing what it's supposed to do, right? Yeah, there's definitely going to be new jobs created.
Yeah.
Hey, so before we go into like,
I want to go in deep into that,
like what does the future actually look like?
But another, let's start,
let's keep unpacking this report.
One of the most interesting things I read
that I hadn't heard before,
but we'd thought of it at scale.
And this is actually really good news, I think for us at scale. They talk about moats, okay?
And I'm going to read something here. It's about, they say, it destroyed a kind of moat called
habitual intermediation. What does that mean? It's when a human's used to just doing something
to avoid friction, they go to the same place because
it's obvious to go there, right? And you think about it like right now, if you want to trade
meme coins or you want to trade whatever, you're going to Salon or Base, right? To do lots of
trading activities. They're kind of gobbling up a lot of the market share. But an agent
doesn't give a shit. An agent's going to go to where the most efficient, fast, cost-effective place is that has the best performance.
And so let's say you have a chain that has privacy, has really low costs, and still has all the same assets to be able to trade.
It doesn't care.
It's going to go there because they can maybe have privacy.
And so the example they use is agents with food delivery.
They're saying that the poster child will be DoorDash of this disruption because right now DoorDash and Uber Eats take a huge percent of the cut of the profit.
Okay.
And why?
Because people are used to going there.
But really, what do they do?
They have connectivity into these stores that say, okay, I'll sell through you. Number one,
I'll put my menu there. And then number two, they have an army of workers. Well, how do you went
over an army of workers? Well, you give them 95% of the profit. Okay. If, cause an agent one,
it okay if because an agent one they're saying that there'll be like at least 30 vibe coded
competitive products and then if an agent's making the decision because in the future they're going
to say agents don't need a ui i go to doordash and uber eats it's on my phone but if i really
like if i'm just talking about agent hey agent feed my meat bag body while you do my work for me.
It doesn't give a shit. If I used Uber eats before, it's going to say, Oh,
you want, you want a burrito? Oh, this place has the best burrito reviews.
Oh, I could order it. It'll be $22. If I order it from Uber eats 23 from
door dash, but I could also order through this other service for, you know, $14
and it'll get here faster. And they have more, you know, they have more drivers. Like
it destroys moats. And so what it means is agentic agents don't care about friction.
They care about like, you know, just core things that matter.
just core things that matter.
I'm mind blown. Nobody has made that yet.
I'm mind blown nobody has made that yet.
Well, it's hard to say,
particularly drivers, right?
That's where they have an advantage
and the margins are super low.
I know one of the founders of DoorDash
and he and I had a long talk about this
and he's like, listen,
no one can come in because our margins are so incredibly low.
And so I think that's where this app
is kind of wrong.
Like, oh, 95% will go to the drivers.
It's like, yeah, well,
I think, you know,
maybe it's just
if you can have cost savings
with a different application,
but DoorDash and Uber
spend an incredible amount
on advertising too.
Like that's a big part of the budget.
Goes to like keep drive.
But I guess that's the other premise.
If an agent doesn't
see ads an agent just wants the cheapest food and the best food best price fastest delivery right
yeah yeah yeah stan what do you think about that that like yeah i totally agree
it removes competitive modes yeah yeah it's uh i think it made lots of sense. And you have like companies like Amazon,
basically, once you're able to create a marketplace, then everyone knows there's
a brand and everyone knows about it and then basically you collect money.
money. But I'll give you guys one example I thought of. Before Google Maps, people were
Right. So but I'll give you guys one example
always driving highways. Because everyone knows the highway, not many people know small roads,
whatever. But once Google Maps actually arrived, suddenly people are driven by software.
So suddenly you can see places like in Los Angeles or whatever,
where there's like a residential road,
and there's like huge, huge stream of cars on this road
just because Google Maps decided that it's a better way,
which kind of avoids traffic, and the kind
of residents complain.
But then you see this total change in behavior, total rerouting of cars just because Google
Maps decided that it's being more efficient.
And I think, Jack, what you told about is very much the same.
Because agents are about efficiency and humans are about branding.
It's way harder to have a brand because a brand is basically something we're like all lazy humans.
We remember brands.
It's like if I want to, I mean, I go to a shop, whatever, and I want to buy like a t-shirt or whatever.
And then like I want to buy a quality t-shirt.
I don't know if it's a good
quality or not, but I kind of trust the brand. It just simplifies my decision, right? Because my
brain has only some capacity. While if I am an AI agent, I want to buy a t-shirt, the agent will
just select the best material the best you know quality it
will end up actually getting the way better to short and also like you know
the things when like you buy stuff and then you end up being total total crap
so that's kind of an example so brands I think what will not matter so much and
then all of the basically lots of people work to create brands yeah right so
is really good because you're you take a road because it's just common everyone knows you
drive on this road lots of people are the agent in this case like the driving apps like go this way
you're like okay and it was faster you know but you wouldn't have come up with that on your own
yeah and it's it's it's it's it's it own. Yeah. It shows that there's something that this will happen.
What you said, Jack, is totally interesting because it's exciting.
It's going to be big, big changes.
Let me read this real quick and falcor jump in so um doordash was the poster child coding agents had
collapsed the barrier to entry for launching a new delivery app a competent developer could deploy
a functional competitor in weeks and dozens ticing drivers away from doordash and uber eats by passing
90 to 95 percent of the delivery fee through the driver, to the driver. Multi-app dashboards like gig workers
track incoming jobs from 20 or 30 platforms at once,
eliminating the lock-in that incumbents depended on.
The market fragmented overnight
and margins compressed to nearly nothing.
Agents accept both sides of the destruction.
They enable the competitors and then they use them.
The DoorDash most is literally,
you're hungry, you're lazy,
this is the app for your home screen.
An agent doesn't have a home screen.
It just checks.
It removes unconscious bias or even conscious bias as well.
I think there's going to be a...
There's the people that...
What you need and what you want right there's your brain is
split between that and you know if if i want something to eat and i'm like i listen i need
something i want something healthy to eat right find me that place i don't the amount of time i
waste like 40 minutes scrolling through every single delivery app there is and even when you
find one and you're looking it's like oh this has actually been sponsored by uber eats or or doordash
or something i'm like i don't know what that like what so is it good is it bad like it says it's
like it's sponsored like i don't i don't even trust that now when you know using like an ai agent it
does remove that that unconscious bias and i think what's going to be interesting if we're going to see a new realm of quote-unquote marketing,
which is going to be more designed towards AI agents,
and the way that they receive information,
it's going to be very, very interesting.
And it's quite exciting as well.
Yeah.
The good thing, Jack, you know, I think there are also some positive things.
Like, you know, it's if the agent is smart, it will be less of bad guys.
is uh smart it will be less of uh bad guys in a sense that many times people get burned by bad
people by malicious something malicious like an old lady you know gets a call and you know gets
sold whatever uh if this old lady has an agent then it won't happen so there are lots of potentially
also good things i think about it yeah and i and what I gotta say is like these this Centrini guys are smart.
They're good writers. They know how to like drive the stories tell we're humans and we're like we like narratives and that's why it was so but they're also not right about everything and you know it's like the DoorDash mode was literally your hunger your laziest app on your home screen. That's not the mode. The mode is that the margins are razor thin and they have an army of delivery people that
can get you food fast.
And like, and you know, hey, I think they are right about like payment rails.
So they say like $100 purchase, merchant gets two, merchant fee 2.5% i.e. visa.
Issuing bank then gets 1.7 to 2.5% i.e. Visa. Issuing bank then gets 1.7% to 2.2% of that.
The network VMA gets 0.15%.
Acquiring bank processor gets 0.3% to 0.5%.
And, you know, in a stablecoin purchase, $100 purchase,
agent routes via USDC on, like, scale, Solana, Ethereum, L2.
Yeah.
They said L2. Is thatereum l2 yeah is it funny is it a bit funny they said it's gonna happen on the video of all l2s in the report yeah yeah that's funny yeah or on you know
scale being a roughly yeah or two but like you you know, like scale on base is going to be, you know, that's why,
that's why we shifted into the agent space. We're like, we saw this, you know,
but here's,
here's another area where I think they're wrong.
We should talk about is I think they're, I want to hear both your thoughts.
I think they're right that there's going to be the short term pinch.
It's like when the automobile industry launched in like with Henry Ford launching the,
you know, the assembly line, there were 28 million horses in the US and it dropped to like 3 million
in one year. And all of these jobs were just decimated. Every little town had, you know,
a huge percentage of the workers, every big town, huge percentage of workers that just went for like getting food for horses, cleaning up horse manure and taking care
of them, putting shoes on them, like, you know, veterinary vets, all those jobs disappeared,
literally like, you know, only a small percentage of those horses were around, but guess what? A
gazillion new jobs were created. And, but there was a period
before those new jobs were there where people are just out of a job. And so I do think there's
going to be this, like this period, I don't know, maybe it'll be six months, maybe it'll be 12
months, maybe it'll be two years where we could be in like a nightmare recession scenario.
Then to Stan's point that also triggers is like debt collapses.
And, you know, so anyways, I do what do you got? I think personally, there's going to be a ton of
new jobs created. I also think that we're going to have to get like collectively more socialist,
because if there's not a way to like get money, you know, I think everyone's going to have some basic income. But hey,
if the GDP goes up, Elon Musk thinks GDP could go up a thousand or ten thousand percent
because we have like a gazillion more workers. If that's the case, then we can all afford to
have everyone have like a universal basic income. And so I think like, yeah, we're going to need policy changes that make society like more socialist. But I do think there's going to be a lot of white collar jobs that come around that, you know, just don't exist today.
One of the biggest ones is going to be health and safety.
I think that's going to be a massive one.
My dad actually works in health and safety specifically for technology.
And I think that's going to be as more AI as itself,
computer to computer and things like that is is is incredible but that next wave
you know when we were talking about like personal assistants ai robots and things like that you're
gonna have a massive massive influx of uh actual you know real life tech that is gonna need to be
serviced and um have health and safety checks and all of that right because you're just not
gonna want to trust it um and then the other thing is power right i think electricity and uh
finding ways to to to power these these new innovations the creation of these new innovations is gonna i we're gonna be in a
massive massive energy deficit in my opinion right and we need to find ways to combat that
and i think that the likes of you know workers and new jobs with with regards to that is going
to be massive totally agree totally agree i will add to this, the healthcare.
People always, I think, complain about healthcare everywhere being like in human.
Do you like healthcare in the UK, by the way?
How was your like, do you like it?
My relatives live in the UK and they had some unfortunate thing.
So they went to healthcare and it was great people,
great everything, but kind of a rundown thing.
Yes. 30 years out of date and very slow.
Yeah. People are complaining about like, I think so. I think,
I think they're like healthcare people just in the U S the same, right?
Jack, you know, like I've been like once in like in emergency room several times
with some small things in the US.
And it's a terrible experience.
I mean, it's like, you know, it's very inhuman, I think.
So if you could just have more people there just helping people,
what do you think about healthcare?
I mean, me personally, I like health care is one of those areas that's like really ripe for
disruption i think is the second largest industry in the u.s i think insurance is the largest
um and and guess what insurance companies i i think that's by profit
like they're the most profitable and And like what a, you know,
insurance started by a bunch of people pooling money together, like a bunch of farmers in case
someone's crop messed up, then they were able to give it to that person. And it wasn't about
making money, it was about covering your neighbor. And healthcare is now like one of the most
profitable industries. And so it's also one of the ones that people are the least happy about.
Oh, I wanted a point.
I want to see somebody.
It's fucking difficult.
It's, I don't care where you live.
Even the U S Hey, I can do one medical.
I can log in and see a doctor in 10 minutes.
And, but I want to go see a specialist.
Like during the whole COVID thing, I don't know if anyone remembers scale people.
I had this cough that just wouldn't end.
I couldn't even see a pulmonologist
like no sorry you had to go get a x-ray and then and then no no i don't see enough signs i'm like
let me see a fucking pulmonologist i'm not dying what the hell's your problem i'll pay i'll pay for
it you know and it's like like how can you have the second most profitable and like well like
money-making industry and everyone
fucking hates it guess what that's gonna get disrupted i guess that's the supply and demand
thing right like you know the number of doctors number of special you know number of doctors is
let's just say hypothetically 0.01 percent of of you know uh the population and then specialist doctors are 0.01 percent of that right
and it's just getting very you know a lot less and less and with the removal of you know these more
kind of uh white collar jobs and things like that do you think what we could be seeing is an opening
and a revolution let's call it like the here's the issue people have, I think, everywhere.
Most people like their doctors.
You finally get to see the doctor.
You have a pretty good experience typically, right?
Most of the time, not all the time.
I mean, sometimes, but it's the process of getting to see them.
It's the logistics, it's operations.
Guess what?
AI removes all that middleware,
all those humans trained to like, yeah, I've attacked this person, this person,
agent workflows. And then I do think we're going to have more like AI doctors too,
for like the little stuff. And I come from a family of doctors. My dad's a doctor. He's a
surgeon for my uncles are surgeons. My grandpa was a doctor and my sister's a doctor. Like I remember this medical happened to you.
I was like, oh my, I have five of my uncles, like, like five of them. They're all surgeons. And then I was like, was teaching at the medical school and i'll tell you there are lots of beautiful women my uncle
was teaching at not but not meant not medical school but the nurse school nurse school and i
was like every time i visit here they were like really really like hot women there so
but i didn't become a doctor i became software engineer software engineer. So I was pre-med my first year of college.
And I was like, oh, I got to be a doctor.
Everybody in my family is a doctor.
And then, you know what?
I just was like, no, I'm going to go get into business.
And then my whole family was like, what are you doing?
You're crazy.
You live in Nebraska.
Like, if you're a doctor, if you just work, it's very clear you work this hard, you study this much, you will then make a certain amount
of money because you're a doctor. But if you go into business, who knows what the hell is going
to happen? It's not like I had like a network of people in Nebraska. I had to like fight to get
out to California and like get somebody to give me an interview and get a job. i want you know got some help too you know got thankfully some introductions
from people but man like you know and hey i gotta say and now all my uncles are like you lucky
bastard you're you're one of these tech people damn but you know to your point you know to your
point about doctors i just want to say that you, I think one aspect of doctors is like human touch.
You cannot replace, you know, like empathy, right?
Because people also want to see the real doctor, not the eye agent.
I think people want empathy, want to talk to someone real, especially if they don't know what is happening, you know, they have anxiety.
So I think this part won't get replaced. You know, they're just talking to a human, I don't know what is happening, they have anxiety. So I think this part won't get replaced.
They're just talking to a human, I don't think.
The point I'm making is that, Jack, you know, Ben, what do you think?
Let's say the software engineers, they get fired, right?
They probably can't go to medical school.
It's kind of too long.
But I'm just thinking maybe there's like a nurse and there's a doctor.
Maybe there's some kind of like in the middle because if I
just have like influenza, whatever, I have some
cough, I need an antibiotic. Can it be like some
guy, someone like a former software engineer, a smart enough person
who can prescribe,
maybe these people can go to the place for them in this health system because I think they're pretty smart.
So at the moment, I'm not sure if it's gone through yet, but there is rumblings of it in the UK with regards to pharmacists being able to diagnose and prescribe medication for those types of things,
right? Where, you know, you know, like the symptoms are there. You are, it is a 99.9%
certainty that you have a chest infection or, you know, influenza or something, right? And
it is an antibiotic and that's it, that is all that is all you need to
prescribe for that for that person to to get better they're not going to have to go through
the whole process of you know waiting a week two weeks six you know 10 15 minutes at a doctor when
you can actually go and talk to somebody you know you can go talk to somebody else um and i do think
yeah you know you're going to get to get to a point where you will be able to, you know, have if you, you know, if you're smart enough to be able to do stuff, you know, software engineering and coding and things like that.
Yeah.
A hundred percent.
I don't see why you wouldn't be able to, you know, listen to someone's chest and say, oh.
Like just payment rails.
One reason why, why Medicare, like medical care is such a pain in the ass, it's like just getting payments.
You got all these stupid little bills that come and by all these different groups of
people.
It adds to the cost because there's just so many layers of financial transacting that's
inefficient.
It's dumb.
Crypto rails, I think, are going to massively help that industry.
Just like, boom, money flows everywhere.
It's all through smart contracts.
Yeah, it gets settled back into dollars
at the end of the day,
but when people want to pull it out or whatever,
but payment rails are another huge burden.
Absolutely.
From this perspective, actually,
I think, let's say that this report is correct. Let's this perspective, actually, I think if let's say this report is correct, right?
Let's assume it starts happening.
There is silver lining for us for scale because agents now can do everything, every single
thing they can do except payments.
You can now run agent at home, open claw.
You can run this agent and that agent.
Pretty much everything they can do, every single thing.
They can't do payments because if you have an account, like I have an account
here in Lisbon at the bank, and then to actually make a payment,
I have to use two-factor authentication.
I have to use my fingerprint.
have to use my fingerprint. It can show me captcha. Basically,
It can show me Captcha.
it's trying to prohibit any kind of automated bot. Because the
bot doesn't have the fingerprint. So isn't that it seems like,
you know, is the banks quickly need to totally change and allow
agents or agents don't listen to script?
Yeah, it's gonna be interesting.
I mean, I think that's the thing,
all of these white collar jobs
that help shuffle things around here and there
are gonna be disrupted, you know,
but then the cost savings goes back to people, hopefully.
People making software products for these people hey an agent can do the
job of 60 engineers like you know you gotta you know there's just gonna be have to be new jobs
created like i do think the report's right about a lot of that stuff but um i also think it was
pretty sensationalist and narrate like the narrative is what got people like, I don't know if I've seen a report rock markets
and capture attention as much as this one.
Yeah, I remember, you know,
I'm old enough to remember the bubble,
the internet bubble.
And it was to a certain degree similar
because there was this internet
which was replacing brick and mortar stores, right?
And there was Jeff Bezot with Amazon that originally sold books and started sending everything.
But this e-commerce transition sort of took a pretty long time.
It took almost like 20 years like 2000 to where we are now
and things kind of went smooth in the sense that the things like disappeared and some of the retail
chains like got bankrupt but there was no hugely like it was not so fast. But this time, maybe it will go fast.
Yeah.
You know what's interesting is here's, okay, let's talk a little bit about what new jobs could be created.
So I saw this thing.
Eric Schmidt was talking at a conference last week, the former CEO of Google.
week you know the former ceo of google what he said that i thought was interesting is like
the best way to make money in ai is not to go and try to compete with facebook meta it's
go start a company start one of these is going to disrupt something because you like he's like
we're at the we're at the forefront of where one person will be starting billion dollar companies.
One person individually who knows how to have an army of agents working for them.
So I think there's a ton of new businesses starting.
So those people are going to have to hire a bunch of people.
It could be like a dismantling of the big company into smaller companies.
And a lot of jobs then roll into instead of a gazillion people working for maybe
they'll still work for Google because they make so much money but all these are instead of working
for Salesforce.com or HP or IBM or whatever there's all these individuals that have companies
that then you have companies of 50 and 100 people that make a ton of money and hey yeah they'll probably taxes on revenue um and you know more money gets shared with other people that's one potential
avenue totally agree and i can give you guys some interesting stuff i was kind of playing with some
agents last week and i kind of tried to estimate how many agents I can run on my laptop and
like using basically chat GPT, open AI, or I could use like Gemini for my agent.
And it turned out I can run a million agents.
So this kind of struck me a lot because I realized that I shouldn't be running a single
agent. I should be running a million agents,
but then I have to decide what these guys do. So it's kind of, in a sense, it's a question of
getting out of the box and realizing you can run a million of them, but then you're like,
how they copyright, what they do. So it's like, in a sense, I think people will need to figure out
they do. So it's like, in a sense, I think people will need to figure out, like, how
if you have like a million agents and they all work for you, how can you, like, what
you want to do, it becomes really interesting. And in a sense, it's kind of counterintuitive.
So I, it's sort of the report, I think it's one of those things that it's actually good that it was released
because even maybe this is like kind of people try to get something viral.
It kind of asks the correct questions.
But the last thing I want to say is that I think one thing which is kind of wrong about the report and all of these things is that
people presume that agents are kind of nasty and humans are good while actually, you know, like
average chat GPT or whatever agent, it's pretty nice. And it's like it actually brings positive more than negative so it's a little bit
people are a little bit uh i think and another thing which actually uh yeah so that's that's what
i think yeah i mean man it's uh it you know one thing it also isn't right about this report is
how much things have changed in the last two years up to now.
And they're saying, and why is the report written as it is?
Because I think the next two years are going to be even massively greater change.
All I got to say is I do think people are like, oh, crypto is dead.
People think crypto is dead.
It's just transforming.
And crypto is the natural highway for agents to do commerce.
Yeah. If you're like, oh, no, it's going to be on Visa. Well,
are they going to completely drop their prices 95%? And I was at this event the other day,
and this kind of fintech angel investor guy who is really anti-crypto. He's like, oh,
he's just getting this huge debate with me. And
he's like, it's just a table. They can just update their table and say for agent payments,
they just change the number and everything just changes. And so they can easily adapt.
And I was like, listen, okay, so one, can they adapt? Can they change the table? Yeah. What's
the business process of doing that? It's probably really cumbersome. And then two, what's the impact on their profit?
Guess what?
Stablecoin rails and blockchains don't need to have,
get two and a half percent.
They don't need that.
They only need, you know, 0.1%
because they can make money that way
because it's a more efficient system.
And the guy didn't get it at all.
But I think that when you meet people like that, you're like, okay, they're getting ready.
They're going to get so disrupted because there's not getting.
The infrastructure alone, it doesn't work for it.
Their infrastructure, you know, you're going gonna have to go and spend billions upon billions
to even get that infrastructure set up and then while you're spending all that money,
you're gonna realize, oh, blockchains are actually kind of designed for this specifically.
It's yeah, I assume you guys didn't swap phone numbers or emails or anything.
Man, by the way, actually, one thing which is maybe interesting for you,
I think, you know, it's like you represent really a job which cannot be replaced because I have always had discussions about, like, marketing,
and I was always saying to people, you know, if you are doing marketing,
you have to be able to be, like, on stream.
The reason is because that's actually what bots or agents can't do.
Like, I kind of stopped tweeting because I realized that, like, I can go to chat GPT and write a tweet.
Or I can go to chat GPT and write a document.
But, like, people do this.
And then it's actually, you become... You become flooded with documents, right?
I stopped doing it.
And when on stream, which kind of differentiates us, chat.gpt cannot do it.
And also, guys, think about this.
We are now on stream.
Every single thing we say goes to Grok. The video goes to Grok and gets analyzed,
and Grok is actually getting trained on our video.
So people that do streaming, they actually have advantage
because they are more important for AI.
The best way to actually become friends with AI is to do a live stream.
You agree, Ben?
So people need to become more like live streamers, I think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Stay away.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Stan, you're wrong.
No, no, no, no, no, no no no one else should be doing live streaming
no this is this is our space
i saw a report recently too about that that like a lot of the new jobs of the world are going to be
marketing because it's like you know let's go back to the healthcare example. You have some serious issue. Like my sister, she's a surgeon, like a breast cancer surgeon.
She needs to go talk to somebody and tell them every day, like, sorry, you have cancer.
You need a human to do that.
People want to have connectivity.
Now these brands, these products, like they're going to need lots of humans to talk to humans.
And it's not to talk to humans.
And it's not just marketing to agents. Yeah, you're going to market to agents, but how do you capture the attention economy, I think, grows during this period. And it instead, the other
way. Also, I think too, let's say Elon's right. Let's say we have 10 billion new workers in the workforce and they're agents. GDP then goes up massively. And
what Centrini is saying, they're calling it ghost GDP. They're saying, yeah, it's GDP, but
it just goes to big companies and governments. It doesn't go to people. It just doesn't get,
because agents don't have a need to buy things. They don't have discretionary income. So it's
ghost GDP. Let's assume they're wrong
about that. And GDP goes up a gazillion percent and there's a bunch of new jobs because the
economy grows so massively because we have a free workforce, basically. It's an AI agent,
$200 a month in electricity cost, you know, and to do what 180,000 job was before. There's all these new jobs.
But so, yeah, I think, I don't know,
I think in that world and that framework,
when we do have massive GDP, there's just,
I don't see any way that the whole system erodes
unless like we really fall the ball.
And I don't think it takes destroying a data center
to stop that from happening.
Yeah, I think it's also, you know, the government, because this is actually something we discussed.
Probably like one of our episodes, we discussed deflation.
And Elon Musk also is talking about deflation.
So if this report is true, for sure there will be huge deflation because all the services will actually
go to almost zero in price. And then the government will be able to print money. And yet the question
is how does the government efficiently print money? It's like inflation you have in crypto,
the same is how can the government efficiently support people? I think one thing is just like lower taxes, right?
And then maybe also providing some public goods
like construction and stuff.
But, or like, you know, making,
lowering like Medicare age
and getting more people like access
to a cheaper medical care or something like that.
I think medical definitely helps. healthcare can actually be the place where all the money can go.
I remember this episode, I had a relative of mine treated at Stanford Cancer Center,
and there was a huge number of volunteers working at Stanford Cancer Center,
just because like, you know, these cancer patients,
they need to have a human touch.
And without volunteers, there's like no one, basically no money, right?
So in a sense, you just need to pay those volunteers, right?
If there's like a free money to the society, if the problem exists.
that uh you know that this it's it's essentially a slight it's not just people will will need to
change jobs i was trained as trained as a physicist because people needed a physicist to build nuclear
weapons right so and then I realized that, okay,
I need to become computer scientists.
So I think many computer scientists will, okay,
software engineers will need to change their profession.
They may be uneasy about that,
but I think it's probably gonna happen.
Yeah.
Agreed.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, hey, it's a crazy world we're living in, Yeah. Agreed. Yeah.
I mean, hey, it's a crazy world we're living in.
And people are like, how come you're not, the website's not about gaming?
And this was back in, when was this, Ben?
Like September that the website changed?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I think I did it in Jan.
Okay. Yeah, January.
We changed a lot of the language,
and we changed a lot of...
It was earlier than January.
Which time?
The first update or the second update?
The first update where we completely...
You know, we shifted our focus massively.
Anyways, it was a while ago.
And people are like, why are you doing that?
And they're like, the world's changing.
And not only do we need to like,
it's not a survival tactic, it's a growth tactic.
Like the growth, if the agent world takes off,
agent commerce is going to grow like a thousand percent ten thousand
percent you know a thousand percent who knows like think of all the areas where you know these
products are going to be able to slide into it's not just oh let me buy a meme coin with x402 like
that's that's faking it yeah i mean to stan's point he could run a million agents on his laptop if you can run a million agents on your
laptop a good portion of those are going to need to do financial transactions um and yeah you know
there we got it we got a good a good blockchain to do it all and look at facebook facebook came
out recently and said hey we're gonna there's talks
of them launching their own stable coin the second half of this year and like really getting into
agent commerce for their users so between whatsapp facebook instagram they're enabling
commerce through their own stable coin and i think they're thinking well why should why don't we have
a stable coin if stable coins are gonna be this huge why don't we have our own yeah and i also think you know
i think that amazon and all of the big retailers need to accept crypto i think some of them
already accept i think farfetch accepts crypto there are several retailers that accept crypto
There are several retailers that accept crypto, so it's like they need to do it.
And otherwise, someone will create.
I mean, someone can do like a startup and start selling stuff for crypto.
So it's just almost there.
You know, agents are there.
They're waiting to pay, and there's no way for them to pay.
So it may actually happen, you know know like next months that they start they
add the functionality X for zero to start using it it's just really in the
air so I'm actually hopeful I think this year may be something that well the
hockey stick moment can happen mm-hmm yeah guys this was a fun one.
It was.
I learned a lot.
Read the Centrini report and read it with a lens that you're also being marketed to.
It's very clever that they write in a narrative.
You know, hey, 2028 and what happened?
Oh, and back.
You know, they go back in the past.
It's very smart.
It's a smart way to capture people's minds
And and you know, but also like it's a pretty negative take because I think
They're probably right about some things, but there's a lot of things. They're just they're not seeing the full picture
Yeah, I great a great
Stan
Yeah, I'm excited Anything you want to say?
Next time I'll be with my million agents on the show.
That was an interesting one.
I think it's just the many things that we discussed
on the show last couple of weeks
or couple of months actually happening.
So we're just
almost at the moment where all the things
are going to take off, I think, like the
X-For-Zero 2.
Agreed. Agreed.
Lots of fun and exciting things to come guys.
As always been an absolute pleasure hanging out, talking, learning.
It's great for me.
I get to learn a lot.
You know, I love just listening to you guys.
But yeah, been a pleasure.
For those of you who are new to the show.
Make sure you follow,
make sure you subscribe.
We do this every week,
every Wednesday,
9 a.m.
Come listen,
grab a drink,
grab a sandwich,
grab your breakfast.
Listen as we talk and break down some of the biggest things in tech over the week.
But guys, it's been a pleasure.
And we will see you again next week.
Goodbye.
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