If you are listening to this right now, I need
you to just just stop what you're doing. Yeah.
Seriously, pull over the car, put down your coffee
and just look at the date on your phone or get
down. It is Tuesday, February 24, 2026. And if
you've opened a brokerage app or glanced at a
news ticker or frankly, even just felt that that
sheer panic radiating off social media in the
last 24 hours, you know that the world looks
fundamentally different today than it did on
Monday morning. It really does. It's. It's unrecognizable
in some ways. Right. And, you know, on this show,
we usually sit here and talk about paradigm shifts
in the abstract. We look at charts projecting
10 years out. We discuss the quote unquote future
of work like it's some sci -fi novel. Yeah. But
today, today is not a projection. No, today is
history. Yeah. The screens are flashing red and
I mean deep red. And it is not just a standard
market correction. It is a repricing of reality.
Red is putting it mildly. It's an absolute bloodbath
out there. But unlike a typical crash, this feels,
I don't know, it feels specific. It's highly
targeted. Targeted. Exactly. It feels different
than 2008. It feels completely different than
the dot -com bubble. That's because it is. What
we're seeing, what you are feeling in your gut
right now, is the arrival of the interregnum.
The interregnum. Yes. We are staring directly
into the face of what Brian Rommel at Read Multiplex
has been warning us about and preparing us for
for years now. He calls it the AI depression.
OK, we need to unpack this immediately because
there is just a palpable amount of fear out there.
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I've had friends texting
me all morning asking if their 401ks are going
to zero. So our job today, as always on The Deep
Dive, is to cut through that noise and find the
actual signal. Right. This isn't just our standard
Tuesday discussion. This is a breaking news deep
dive into a pivotal, massive moment in the 5
,000 days timeline. It's the moment the theoretical
became literal. And to understand where we're
going and why, surprisingly, this might actually
be good news in the long run, we have to understand
exactly what broke yesterday. Because something
definitely broke. Chattered is more like it.
Let's start with the event. The catalyst. Yesterday,
Monday, February 23, 2026. IBM. Big blue. The
stalwart. Right. The absolute stalwart of the
tech industry for a century. They crashed. And
it didn't just dip a little. it plummeted roughly
13 % in a single trading session. Which, and
we need to stress this, For a company of that
massive size, that level of stability and that
amount of institutional ownership is catastrophic.
It's unheard of. That is the worst single day
drop IBM has seen in over 25 years. We are talking
about billions and billions of dollars of market
capitalization just evaporating in hours. And
IBM is usually the safe harbor. Exactly. It's
the classic widows and orphans stock. It's the
stock you buy when you want to avoid this exact
kind of volatility. The bedrock. And usually,
right, when you see a drop of that magnitude
in a blue chip stock. You expect a scandal. You
expect an earnings miss. Or a CEO getting caught
embezzling. Right. Or some massive accounting
fraud being uncovered by the SEC. Right. But
I looked at the wires. I was scouring them last
night. There was none of that. No, the earnings
were perfectly fine. The management is stable.
This wasn't a failure of their operations. It
was a failure of the future. Wow. The catalyst
was a single blog post. One blog. One blog post
from Anthropic. They announced Claude Code. And
this is where it gets really interesting and
frankly a little terrifying for the old guard.
We need to explain why a software announcement
from an AI competitor would knife point a giant
like IBM so effectively. Like, what exactly is
Claude Code and why did Wall Street completely
freak out over it? Well, to understand the panic,
you have to understand the moat. You have to
look at what IBM actually sells to make its money.
Cloud code is a new capability from Anthropic
that specifically targets COBOL modernization.
COBOL. Right. Now, for the non -technical folks
listening, COBOL, which stands for Common Business
Oriented Language, is a programming language
that dates back to the late 1950s. It is ancient
and is practically extinct in the wild. I mean,
my grandfather might have coded in COBOL. It
is ancient, yes, but, and this is the critical
key that people always forget. It runs the entire
world. We are talking about the invisible plumbing
of the global economy. Right. We're talking about
the mainframe systems at major banks. Airline
reservation system. Government databases. The
Social Security Administration. Exactly. When
you swipe your credit card at the grocery store
to buy milk, that transaction is highly likely
hitting a mainframe running COBOL somewhere.
Wow. When you book a flight. And for decades,
IBM, along with this massive ecosystem of consultants,
companies like Accenture, Deloitte, Capgemini,
they have made an absolute fortune maintaining
this incredibly old code. Why? because it is
notoriously difficult to change it's what developers
call spaghetti code just a tangled mess a total
mess it's poorly documented it's been patched
a thousand times over 50 years and the original
people who wrote it are mostly retired or frankly
deceased so the actual difficulty of the system
was their business model precisely it's a scarcity
of expertise business model it acts as this massive
defensive wall a huge moat if you are a mega
bank like jp morgan or city and you finally want
to update your latest system to the cloud, you
can't just highlight it and click copy paste.
You have to hire expensive experts to act as
digital archaeologists. They have to sit there
and figure out what the code even does before
they can rewrite it. It's the legacy lock -in.
IBM basically collects a massive tax on the sheer
difficulty of moving away from IBM. Yes, until
yesterday. Yesterday, the lock was picked. By
Claude Code. By Claude Code. Amthropic demonstrated
that this new AI, which acts as an autonomous
agent, mind you, not just a standard chatbot,
can automate the exploration, the analysis, the
dependency mapping, and the actual migration
of these massive coveal code bases. Okay, let's
get a little technical here for a second, because
I want you, the listener, to really grasp the
magnitude of this shift. When you say automate,
are we talking about just writing a few lines
of code, like a fancy autocomplete? No, not at
all. We are talking about full step. logic mapping.
Cloud code can ingest the entire repository.
It can map out where variable X affects outcome
Y across millions of lines of archaic code. Unbelievable.
It understands the underlying business logic
hidden inside that spaghetti mess, and then it
literally rewrites that exact logic into modern
languages like Python or Go. So what used to
take, say, a specialized team of 20 consultants
five solid years to map out. Can now be done
in quarters. Or for just the initial analysis
phase, days. The days. The inference cost, meaning
the cost of the electricity and the compute power
to run the AI, is fractions of a penny compared
to the human cost of a consultant charging $300
an hour. And that is why the stock crashed. Wall
Street did the math. The market looked at IBM
and realized, wait a minute, that reliable revenue
stream, that massive mode of complex legacy code,
it just evaporated overnight. The barrier to
entry for fixing these old systems dropped to
essentially zero. It's gone. The realization
hit that the legacy lock -in is officially gone.
And that is why we are calling this the AI depression.
Yes. I want to be clear here. It is not that
money is literally disappearing from the world.
It is that the value of the old ways of doing
things, specifically the value of friction and
inefficiency, is being repriced to zero. Repriced
to zero. And we are going to dive deep into that
core concept, the AI depression, because Brian
Ormel's analysis on this over at Reed Multiplex
is absolutely vital for keeping your head straight
while the market panics all around us. Right.
He frames this whole experience as the valley
of the monomyth, the hero's journey. It's the
dark valley we have to cross to get to the age
of abundance. That's the core mission of this
deep dive today. We are going to explain why
this crash is happening, why it is actually a
sign of massive progress, even though it hurts
like hell for a lot of portfolios right now.
And we are going to look at 10 specific business
models that Brian suggests will absolutely thrive
in this new landscape. So if you're looking at
your portfolio this morning and freaking out,
or maybe you're looking at your corporate career
and wondering if you're next on the chopping
block. Stay with us because we are going to map
out the road ahead. We have the map, but let's
stay on the anatomy of this crash for just a
moment longer. The IBM COBOL shock. I love that
name, by the way. The COBOL shock of 26. It sounds
like a chapter title in an economics textbook.
It very well might be. But to truly understand
the sheer magnitude of the shock, you have to
remember Y2K. Oh, man. The year 2000 bug. Yes.
I remember the panic vividly. People genuinely
thought planes were going to fall out of the
sky or that the banks were going to reset everyone's
accounts to the year 1900. People were literally
buying bunkers and hoarding canned food. And
while the apocalyptic stuff was overblown, the
economic panic was very real and the cost to
fix it was astronomical. Back in the late 90s,
the world spent somewhere between 300 and 600
billion dollars globally on Y2K remediation.
Just to fix the date formatting in code. Just
for that. The U .S. alone spent about 100 billion.
And what were they actually spending that money
on? Humans. millions and millions of human hours.
You had armies of programmers just staring at
lines of legacy code on glowing green screens,
manually finding those two -digit date fields
and fixing them one by one. So that massive cost,
that immense friction, was basically value locked
up in manual labor. Yes, it was a massive transfer
of wealth to the people who knew the obscure
language. And that friction was IBM's profit
margin. Exactly. Maintenance is essentially a
hidden tax on the broader economy, but it is
a massive, reliable revenue stream for the maintainers.
Now, fast forward to yesterday, February 2026.
Claude Code comes out. Do you remember the exact
title of that anthropic blog post? I do. It was
How AI Helps Break the Cost Barrier to COBOL
Modernization. Right. And the market read that
headline and understood the implication immediately.
If AI can scan for vulnerabilities, map complex
dependencies, and rewrite code exponentially,
You don't need the army of consultants anymore.
You don't. And what's wild is that it's not just
IBM taking the hit. Look at the contagion effect.
Yeah, I was looking at the tickers this morning.
Adobe, Salesforce, ServiceNow. Yeah. They are
all taking an absolute beating. They're down
25 to 30 percent in February alone. But why them?
They aren't mainframe companies. They don't deal
in COBOL. They are the cool, modern SaaS companies,
the cloud companies. They are, but they are seat
-based software companies. Think about it. Their
entire business model relies on selling licenses
to human beings to do work. If AI drastically
reduces the number of humans needed to do that
work, or if the AI actually becomes the worker
itself, the whole seat count logic collapses.
So if I run a marketing department of 50 people
and... We all use Salesforce. Right. And I realized
I can replace 45 of them with a team of five
people managing an AI agent swarm. Then Salesforce
just sold 45 fewer licenses to your company.
The market is aggressively pricing in a massive
systemic contraction in software as a service
revenues. The old equation of more revenue equals
more headcount is fundamentally broken. And the
cybersecurity stocks, they are tanking too. I
saw CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks taking
massive hits yesterday afternoon. It's the exact
same logic. Why do corporations pay these massive
multi -million dollar retainers for cybersecurity
monitoring? Because humans are slow. Because
humans are slow. slow at finding vulnerabilities.
We are inherently reactive. If an AI can scan
millions of lines of code for zero -day vulnerabilities
instantly and patch them in real time, what the
industry is calling self -healing cloned, do
you really need that same massive cybersecurity
contract? Probably not. You certainly don't need
the giant army of tier one analysts sitting in
the security operations center, clishing through
alerts. So the market isn't reacting to these
companies failing today. It's a repricing of
the future. That is the perfect way to put it.
The sentiment on Wall Street has violently shifted
from growth is inevitable to obsolescence is
possible. Investors are waking up and realizing
that the traditional moat of complex intellectual
property is being rapidly bridged by AI. OK,
this brings us to the core concept of today's
deep dive, the interregnum and the AI depression.
These are crucial terms. They are heavily used
by Brian Rommel in the Read Multiplex series,
and they give us the vocabulary to understand
this chaos. So an interregnum. Historically,
that refers to the period between two kings,
right? Exactly. The old king is dead, but the
new king hasn't been crowned yet. Chaos. Absolute
chaos. It is a transitional time of deep uncertainty.
The old rules no longer work, but the new rules
haven't been firmly established yet. And in this
context, the AI depression... we need to be clear
doesn't mean we are all going to be living in
shanty towns or standing in soup lines no that's
an important distinction we aren't talking about
a famine we aren't talking about the dust bowl
of the 1930s right we are talking about a depression
of old economy values and valuations Yes. The
things we used to think were highly valuable,
memorizing complex coding syntax, middle management
coordination, routine data analysis, just knowing
where the corporate files are stored, those specific
skills are rapidly losing their value. They are
deflationary in nature now. Brian describes this
period as delivering a one -two punch. He does.
Punch number one is happening right now, in 2026.
That is the cognitive disruption. AI collapsing
the cost of cognition. Exactly. Thinking. Analyzing,
synthesizing, deciding. The things that used
to be very expensive and uniquely human are becoming
cheap and incredibly abundant. And punch number
two. That comes around 2028. And that is robotics
in the physical world. But we will get to that
later. Right now, society is reeling from the
first punch. It feels completely unprecedented
when you're living through it. But the source
material reminds us that we have actually seen
this movie before. We absolutely have. This is
the classic cycle of technological disruption.
And looking at history. is really the only way
to stay sane right now. Think about the dawn
of the internet era. Sure. Craigslist completely
destroyed the newspaper classifieds. It's the
perfect example. Newspapers used to make an absolute
fortune on local classified ads. If you wanted
to sell a used bike or hire a local gardener
in 1990, you had to pay the newspaper. They held
a strict monopoly on local information distribution.
And then comes Craigslist. Free. Instant. Global.
And the newspapers lost billions, their revenue
models were absolutely decimated. But, and this
is the key, did the underlying value of selling
a bike disappear? No, it actually became easier.
The friction was removed. The internet collapsed
the distribution costs. And we saw it with music
too. I mean, I remember Tower Records. I spent
half my teenage years browsing CDs in there.
Right. Blockbuster, Borders, bookstores, Kodak,
local travel agencies, all of these massive legacy
industries were decimated. But here's the profound
insight from Reed Multiplex. The underlying technology
didn't fail. It didn't destroy net value in the
economy. It multiplied it. Right. We lost Blockbuster,
which was sad for Friday nights, but we got Netflix.
Yeah. We lost the physical yellow pages, but
we got Google. We lost the neighborhood travel
agent, but we got Expedia and Airbnb. We got
Meta, got Amazon. The net value of the global
economy grew exponentially, but... and this is
the very painful part for people living through
it, if you were holding stock in Blockbuster
in 2010. You were in a depression. You were in
a localized depression of your specific value.
The internet fundamentally reshaped how we access
value. AI is repeating this exact same pattern
right now, but it's going significantly deeper.
Deeper how? Because the internet changed a lot.
Because the internet collapsed distribution costs.
Moving bits around the world became essentially
free, but AI is collapsing cognition costs. The
cost of thought itself. The cost of intelligence,
of logical synthesis. White collar workflows,
coding, strategic planning, legal analysis, middle
management are collapsing right now, just like
the manual typesetters did when the printing
press was invented or when desktop publishing
arrived in the 80s. I want to touch on that specific
comparison to the PC era. The source material
mentions Smith Corona. Ah, yes. The absolute
king of the typewriter industry. Bankrupt in
1995. And Wang Laboratories. The giant of dedicated
word processors. Bankrupt in 1992. Now, they
didn't go bankrupt because people suddenly stopped
writing. People wrote more. Exactly. People wrote
way more. But the tool changed and the entire
business model attached to the old scarce tool
died. Wang Labs sold these dedicated word processing
machines for thousands and thousands of dollars.
PC software sold for a few hundred. The value
completely migrated from the hardware to the
software. So if you are a corporate coder today
or a middle manager or a financial analyst, you
are essentially standing in the exact same shoes
as a manual typesetter in 1990. That is the harsh,
unvarnished reality. And that is exactly why
we are seeing the grief and the dark night of
the soul that Brian talks about so much in his
hero's journey. Let's pivot to that framework
because this entire 5 ,000 Days series is structured
around Joseph Campbell's monomyth, The Hero's
Journey. And frankly, Knowing where we are on
that map really helps. It gives you psychological
context. It helps immensely. It gives a narrative
structure to the chaos. We are currently discussing
part 15 of the RID Multiplex series today. If
you've been following along with the deep dives,
you know the major milestones. Let's do a quick
recap for the listener who might just be jumping
in today because their portfolio is crashing.
Sure. Part one was the departure. Leaving the
old familiar world of traditional work. Part
two was the grief, where Brian applied the Kubler
-Ross stages of grief to career loss. Which is
incredibly relevant today. I think a massive
portion of Wall Street is currently stuck in
denial or moving very quickly into anger. Extremely
relevant. Then we move through the warning, looking
at Kut Vonnegut's novel Player Piano, which brilliantly
predicted a world where machines do all the useful
work and humans lose their sense of purpose.
We eventually move through reframing into skilling,
which is about learning to see the loss of routine,
repetitive skills as a form of liberation rather
than a tragedy. And then the dark night of the
soul. Right. Part six, the deep existential crisis.
And part 13 was the guilds, the new social structures
that will replace corporate hierarchies. But
today, right now, with part 15 and this IBM crash,
we are firmly in the ordeal. The ordeal. That
sounds well. painful. In the classic hero's journey,
the ordeal is the central defining crisis. It's
the point where the hero confronts their greatest
fear. Symbolically, it is the death of the old
self. And the valuation wipeout on the stock
market today is just the visible economic scar
of this ordeal. Exactly. But it's also a deeply
internal ordeal. It is the what do you do identity
crisis. Think about it. For generations, we have
anchored our entire identity in our job titles.
I am a lawyer. I am a software engineer. I am
an accountant. When the open market suddenly
says we actually don't need humans to do that
specific task anymore, it's not just an economic
hit to your wallet. It's a strike at your soul.
It feels like the ground is just completely falling
out from under you. becoming obsolete as a person.
It absolutely feels that way. But the ordeal
is always followed by the reward, the boon. And
that is what we need to focus our attention on
today. The massive shift to abundance. Brian
Rowan talks about the bull case for this. Yeah.
Because let's be honest, right now, everything
in the news sounds like a bear case. The bull
case is just simple, fundamental economics, even
if it feels deeply counterintuitive when you
are scared. Dramatically higher productivity
equals significantly lower prices. Lower prices
mean higher real So if the cost of basic legal
work drops to near zero, legal services become
abundant for everyone. If the cost of writing
code drops to zero, Highly customized software
becomes abundant. Exactly. Imagine a world where
having a custom enterprise -grade app built for
your small local business costs $5 instead of
$50 ,000. Imagine complex legal contracts costing
pennies to draft and review. This is deflationary
in the absolute best way possible for the consumer.
And the most exciting part for me is that the
cost to start a new business is basically dropping
to zero. This brings us to the zero human company
concept. This absolutely blew my mind when I
first read it. And we need to emphasize this
isn't theoretical. Brian actually built this.
He did. It is a live functioning experiment.
He describes it as the world's first fully autonomous
enterprise. Walk us through the setup of this
because people talk about AI agents all the time.
But this is next level. This is sci -fi stuff
happening today. OK, so picture this. You have
a solo founder, Brian, sitting with just a laptop.
But the company has a full staff. It has AI employees
autonomously handling high -level strategy, daily
operations, and get this, actual live sales calls.
Wait, sales calls, like literally talking on
the phone to prospects? Yes. Interacting via
voice, using... cloned voices that sound completely
indistinguishable from real human beings. The
AI system handles complex email negotiations.
It actively closes deals. It even monitors and
bids on surplus hardware auctions in real time.
And this company actually did something real
in the market. It wasn't just a closed loop simulation.
No, it was completely real. The AI revived dormant
intellectual property from a bankrupt firm. It
ingested terabytes of disorganized data to reconstruct
and rebuild value. And here's the absolute kicker.
It successfully completed a fine. financial transaction
with another zero -human company. Wait, two completely
AI -run companies doing business deals with each
other? Yes, and they use a new conceptual currency
called Jewelwork, which is an energy -backed
metric. Hold on, Jewelwork, explain that. It's
a brilliant concept Brian introduces for the
interregnum. If AI does all the physical and
cognitive work, and AI fundamentally runs on
electricity and compute, then the most basic
fundamental unit of economic value becomes the
jewel. It's a theoretical shift away from debt
backed fiat currency like the U .S. dollar to
pure energy backed value. That is just wild.
It's like a completely parallel economy spinning
up while the old one crashes. It is the blueprint
for the future. But the immediate practical takeaway
for the listener right now is that a solo founder
can now autonomously run a complex global operation
that used to require a staff of 50 people and
a million dollars in venture capital. Now you
literally just need a laptop. internet connection
and vision. So to tie it back to the hero's journey,
the ordeal is the death of the traditional employee,
but the reward is the birth of the hyper -empowered
entrepreneur. That is the crucial pivot. The
interregnum absolutely destroys legacy jobs,
but it creates millions of creators. But let's
be real for a second. Not everyone wants to run
a fully autonomous AI software company. Not everyone
is a tech visionary or wants to be a CEO. And
this is where the source material gets incredibly
practical and grounded. Brian outlines 10 specific
business models that will not just survive, but
actively thrive in this interregnum. These are
fascinating because they aren't just lazy, use
AI to do X ideas. They are deep hybrid models.
They beautifully combine the massive leverage
of AI with the one single thing AI cannot authentically
replicate, human essence. Let's go through them
in detail, because if you were listening to this
on your commute wondering, what on earth do I
do with my career now? One of these might spark
a completely new direction for you. Let's dive
in. Number one, willow web textiles. This is
a beautiful example of what we call the tactile
premium. The core concept here is small batch
human hand weaving. Hand weaving, really? In
the age of super intelligent AI. That sounds
like we were going backward to the 1800s. It
sounds counterintuitive, but especially in the
age of AI, it makes perfect economic sense. think
about it systemically the ai completely handles
the global supply chain for the raw materials
the ai instantly designs incredibly complex beautiful
patterns based on market trends the ai handles
the e -commerce logistics the targeted marketing
and the customer service all the boring friction
heavy back office stuff is cost minimized to
near zero so the human being is entirely free
to just Exactly. The human provides the tactile
element, the soul. In a future world of infinite
digital abundance where everything is perfectly
manufactured by robots, a physical, slightly
imperfect, authentically human -made object becomes
the ultimate luxury item. We are moving from
a paradigm of perfect and mass -produced to imperfect
and deeply human. The de -skilling in the corporate
office leads directly to a massive re -skilling
in traditional craft. I can completely see that.
I know for a fact I would pay a premium for a
blanket if I knew an actual human artist and
made it, especially if I knew the personal story
behind it. Exactly. That human story is the new
premium. Okay, number two. Solosphere retreats.
This essentially sounds like a spa, but it's
a spa for the soul. The core concept is human
guided nature immersion and digital detox. Why
does a business like this work specifically right
now? during the AI depression? Because of the
massive identity crisis we just talked about.
As millions of people lose their core job identity,
they're going to be desperately searching for
grounding and meaning. They will feel incredibly
disconnected from reality. There will be a massive
booming demand for pure connection, real uninterrupted
human to human connection in nature. So in this
model, the AI handles all the complex logistics.
The bookings, the dynamic pricing, the hyper
personalization of the itinerary, managing complex
dietary restrictions for the kitchen. Yes. And
the humans provide the actual guidance, the empathy,
the literal hand on the shoulder during a tough
moment. You simply cannot automate authentic
empathy. That makes total sense. Number three,
Ancestry Forge Archives. This directly touches
on the Save Wisdom project that Brian often mentions.
As traditional job titles fade into history,
people will want, they will need to invest in
preserving their personal and family. stories.
It's legacy preservation, like a digital family
vault. Right. It answers the profound question,
who was I and who was my family if I wasn't just
a corporate accountant? In this business, AI
does the heavy lifting. It scans and organizes
thousands of old photos. It perfectly transcribes
hours of messy audio journals. It even helps
weave those fragments into a coherent narrative
arc. But the true value of the business is tapping
into the deep human desire to be remembered and
understood. I love that one. Number four. essence
path guild platforms this is a really big one
guilds we've talked extensively about guilds
before on the show this is part 13 of the series
making a comeback exactly with the old legacy
institutions drastically weakening we're talking
about massive corporations traditional labor
unions even four -year universities People need
new tribes. They need localized mutual aid. This
specific business model is about building and
facilitating decentralized skill -sharing communities.
So how does AI fit into a community? Does AI
supply the coordination? AI is the ultimate community
admin. AI perfectly matches the master mentor
to the ideal apprentice based on learning styles.
It handles the scheduling, the credentialing,
the dispute resolution, but the humans supply
the actual trust. You don't join a guild for
the software. You join a guild to belong to a
trusted human network. Right. Okay. Number five,
tactile harmony instruments. This is very similar
to the textiles concept. Custom, high -end, analog
musical tools. The unplug renaissance. Yes. As
human work completely decouples from basic survival
needs, deep hobbies will become central to a
person's life rather than just a weekend distraction.
People will deeply desire to create and play
music physically, not just listen to AI -generated
tracks. The AI in this business might help perfectly
tune the acoustics of the instruments or maybe
even help design the ergonomic shape. But the
final meticulous craftsmanship and the playing
of the instrument is entirely human. Number six,
purpose bridge advisors. This is the necessary
evolution of the traditional financial advisor.
It's moving from scarcity management to abundance
navigation. Exactly. The old forms of value are
draining out of the system. Your traditional
stock portfolio might be crashing right now,
just like we're seeing with IBM. You need a guide
through the interregnum. The AI completely handles
the quantitative side. It crunches the massive
data sets. It finds the obscure yield. It does
the tax optimization perfectly. But the human
advisor builds the emotional trust and helps
the client answer the much harder philosophical
question. What is my wealth actually for now?
That's powerful. Number seven, legacy mech revival.
Now this one is for the gear heads out there.
It is all about repairing and integrating old
heavy industrial gear with cutting edge new robotics.
Connecting the old physical world to the new
digital one. Right. Global supply chains are
radically realigning. There is an unbelievable
amount of old, heavy iron out there in the world.
Massive lathes, hydraulic presses, agricultural
tractors. You can't just throw all of that away
and build new from scratch. It's too carbon intensive
and expensive. This business uses AI diagnostics
and modern robotics to retrofit that old iron.
It builds a literal bridge between legacy hardware
and the new AI brain. Niche books and deep storytelling.
But how is this different from regular indie
publishing or Amazon Kindle? Because it's hyper
-niche. It leans heavily into narrative therapy.
The massive psychological dislocation of the
dark night of the soul drives a deep, aching
demand for meaning and context. People want specific,
resonant stories that help them process their
personal transition. AI dramatically lowers the
production cost formatting, editing, translating,
distributing the book, but the human curation
and the human author preserve the necessary emotional
depth that readers are craving. Number nine.
Flow Forge Biohacks. This one is fascinating.
It references the psychologist Mahali Siksant
Mahali, the concept of flow state. Right, getting
completely in the zone. Yeah. Losing track of
time. In a de -skilled, hyper -abundant world
where the machine does all the routine, boring
tasks, the human ability to deeply focus, to
enter a sustained flow state for creative work,
becomes the ultimate competitive advantage. This
business model creates and sells specialized
supplements, customized wearables, or guided
protocols specifically designed to help the human
brain achieve and maintain that deep flow. It's
focusing the human mind in an intensely distracting
digital world. And finally, number 10, Nexus
Resilient Foods. Community supported vertical
farms heavily augmented with robotics. This directly
addresses the deep societal fear of global supply
chain collapse. Food security is going to be
massive. The AI and the harvesting robots drastically
lower the actual cost of growing the calories,
the lettuce, the tomatoes. They optimize the
water, the light, the nutrients perfectly. But
the local community ownership model builds a
brand loyalty in the local resilience. It is
highly advanced, high -tech farming, but with
the heart and soul of a local neighborhood co
-op. So stepping back and looking at all 10 of
these concepts, there is a very clear defining
pattern. The pattern is undeniable. The AI seamlessly
handles the logic, the complex logistics, and
the repetitive labor. The humans fiercely handle
the meaning, the emotional connection, and the
tactile physical experience. It's a true partnership.
It is a profound symbiosis. Okay, so that maps
out the chaotic transitional landscape of 2026.
But the source material explicitly warns us that
we are only in the very first phase of this.
We mentioned the second punch earlier. Yes, the
second punch. Roughly arriving at scale by 2028.
What exactly happens in 2028? We experience the
massive transition from purely virtual AI agents,
the things we have right now, like clod code
rewriting software, to physical embodied robotics.
The intelligence leaves the server farm and literally
enters the physical world. Yes. Massive disruption
in physical manufacturing, global logistics,
construction, and crucially, elder care. The
fundamental cost of doing all these physical
things will absolutely... So just to make the
parallel clear, in the same way that cloud code
collapsed the massive human cost of COBOL software
maintenance yesterday, a humanoid robot in 2028
will collapse the cost of, say, folding laundry
or framing a house. Exactly. The zero human company
model expands out of the digital realm and directly
into physical tasks. That sounds completely terrifying
for blue collar work. If white collar is getting
wiped out now, blue collar is next. It is deeply
disruptive. There's no sugarcoating that. But
we have to look at the ultimate destination,
the end of scarcity. This is the promised land
that Brian Morrell points us toward at the end
of the 5 ,000 days. The boon at the end of the
hero's journey. Yes. When human labor completely
decouples from basic survival, leisure naturally
turns into unbridled creation. And the geopolitical
impact of this is just staggering. Think about
it. Why do nations historically go to war? Usually
they fight over resources. They fight over scarcity.
Right. They fight over oil, over arable land,
over fresh water. But if energy becomes functionally
abundant through things like jewel work and physical
labor becomes radically abundant through robotics
and intelligence is effectively free through
A .I., the fundamental driving need for zero
sum violent conflict dramatically weakens the
whole board changes. So the immense panic and
chaos we are feeling right now, the massive IBM
crash today, the fear of losing our jobs. It
is just a passage. It is a birth canal. It is
highly uncomfortable. It is painful. It requires
a lot of deep breathing, but it is absolutely
necessary to get to the other side. We have to
completely reframe our mindset. We must. We have
to violently reframe our core identity away from
what our job title is. The open market will eventually
price in this massive historic surge of productivity.
The terrifying red arrows flashing on the CNBC
screens today will eventually turn green again,
but they will be pointing at completely different.
companies. They will be pointing at the companies
and the founders who adopted the abundance mindset,
the ones building the hybrid models. Precisely,
the people who didn't fight the interregnum but
wrote it. So bringing it all home, what does
this all mean for you, the listener, right now,
today? It means you have a very stark choice
to make. You can fiercely cling to the old world,
the world of forced scarcity, the world of constantly
trying to protect your little corporate moat,
and you can watch that value slowly drain away
to nothing, exactly like IBM's market cap did
yesterday. Or you can bravely embrace the interregnum.
You can radically accept the chaos of the transition.
You can start actively experimenting. Experiment
with clarity. I love that phrase from the source.
That is the defining mantra right now. Don't
just sit there paralyzed. Because the IBM crash
is not the end of the world. It is just a massive
signal flare. It's a global wake -up call. We
are only in the early messy days of a 5 ,000
-day journey. And the ultimate destination is
abundance. That is the mission. We have to keep
our eyes on the horizon. I want to leave you
with a final, deeply profound thought from the
source material. It's something that really stuck
with me as I was preparing for this deep dive.
Artificial intelligence does not end the world.
It ends the world of compulsory scarcity labor.
That is such a vital, profound distinction to
make right now. So ask yourself this today. As
the fundamental cost of doing anything drops
to absolute zero, as the barrier to entry for
everything completely collapses, what will you
uniquely choose to create? That is genuinely
the only question that matters anymore. We will
be back soon with part 16, where we are going
to do a massive deep dive into the practical
architecture of these new guilds, how to actually
build them. That is going to be a crucial discussion.
We have to build a new safety net ourselves.
Until then, keep your head up. The chaos is just
the passage. The boon is within reach. Thanks
for joining us on this deep dive. Take care of
yourselves out there.