Crypto, AI and the Permanent Underclass | The Breakdown
The Breakdown
Blockworks
4.8 • 806 Ratings
🗓️ 17 February 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Some say we have two, three, maybe five years tops before AI makes a whole lot of us obsolete, |
| 0:04.9 | creating a permanent underclass of laid-off white-collar workers who can no longer compete with |
| 0:09.6 | LLMs like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. If you do believe that, then your options are limited |
| 0:14.4 | considering the time pressure. Options range from achieving sudden fame by maybe starting a podcast, |
| 0:20.1 | to pivoting to shipping slop to stay ahead of whatever competition is left by this point. |
| 0:24.6 | Mmm. |
| 0:25.6 | That's the good stuff! |
| 0:26.6 | Or, better yet, gamble your way out of the new lumpen proletariat on decentralized meme coin perps or leveraged prediction markets. |
| 0:33.6 | Crypto is seen as one of a tiny number of estap routes from the impending AI workpocalypse, |
| 0:38.3 | at least going by the memes, and while there are now a large array of different teams, |
| 0:42.3 | projects and alliances across crypto all working to channel the AI hype into their own corners of the market, |
| 0:47.3 | this episode will instead be looking beyond compute marketplaces and GPU flywheels |
| 0:52.3 | and instead get to the very heart of what we're all doing here. |
| 0:55.2 | Hunting exposure to new primitives that really will free us from the permanent underclass. |
| 0:59.5 | I'm your host David Canellis, and this is The Break to buy or sell securities or tokens. |
| 1:14.7 | This podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show |
| 1:17.9 | are opinions, not financial advice. |
| 1:19.3 | Host and guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. |
| 1:21.9 | Before we jump in, I just want to give a quick shout out to Blockworks Lightspeed IR. |
| 1:26.2 | It's a brand new institutional-grade investor relations platform built with the Salana Foundation |
| 1:31.3 | to bring real signal to the Solana ecosystem. |
| 1:33.3 | High fidelity, on-chain data, serious research, ecosystem Intel, all in one place. |
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