IL44: From AI Hype to Transformative AGI ft. Aubrie Pagano
Top Traders Unplugged
Niels Kaastrup-Larsen
4.8 • 712 Ratings
🗓️ 31 December 2025
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this Ideas Lab episode, Kevin Coldiron speaks with venture capitalist and former founder Aubrie Pagano about what stands between today’s AI hype and a truly transformative AGI economy. Rather than treating AI as destiny, Aubrie maps the frictions that hold it back: hard power limits, fragile industrial data, and agents that still cannot coordinate with humans or each other. She explains why we may be a full capital cycle or two away from real AGI and why that delay is precisely where the best opportunities lie. The conversation then widens into the “Aquarius Economy,” a possible future in which human agency, not algorithms, becomes the scarcest and most valuable asset.
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Episode TimeStamps:
00:00 - Why agent coordination is still clunky and unreliable
00:38 - Intro to Top Traders Unplugged and performance risk framing
01:34 - Kevin sets up the Ideas Lab and today’s focus on AGI
02:59 - Aubrie’s background as founder, researcher and VC shaping her lens
06:04 - Why she wrote about AGI and the Aquarius Economy
07:21 - AGI as the last cycle built on labor scarcity
10:41 - The blockers framework and why AGI may be a cycle or two away
12:58 - Blocker 1: energy constraints and the race for firm power
15:17 - Where investment opportunities emerge in power and grid resilience
17:43 - Blocker 2: foundational industry data gaps and Moravec’s paradox
22:00 - Skilled trades as a bottleneck and a long term opportunity
24:34 - Blocker 3: agent to human coordination and walled gardens
29:04 - Early agent marketplaces and trust mechanisms
34:41 - The Aquarius Economy as a framework for future societal structure
42:09 - Outlier groups, human agency and implications for investors
Copyright © 2025 – CMC AG – All Rights Reserved
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | That all needs to get worked out for these systems to be really smooth. |
| 0:11.0 | Because right now it's very, very clunky to create trust and memory between systems. |
| 0:18.0 | Then you put that on crack when it's like agent to agent, right? Because it's like |
| 0:22.5 | the agents, if there's not a human in the loop, it becomes that much more incumbent to basically |
| 0:29.9 | have like the USBC for AI. And that just doesn't really exist yet. |
| 0:41.7 | Imagine spending an hour with the world's greatest traders. |
| 0:46.2 | Imagine learning from their experiences, their successes, and their failures. |
| 0:48.2 | Imagine no more. |
| 0:54.6 | Welcome to Top Traders Unplugged, the place where you can learn from the best hedge fund managers in the world, |
| 0:59.1 | so you can take your manager, due diligence, or investment career to the next level. |
| 1:03.1 | Before we begin today's conversation, remember to keep two things in mind. |
| 1:06.9 | All the discussion we'll have about investment performance is about the past, |
| 1:11.8 | and past performance does not guarantee or even infer anything about future performance. |
| 1:16.5 | Also understand that there's a significant risk of financial loss with all investment strategies, |
| 1:21.9 | and you need to request and understand the specific risks from the investment manager about their product before you make investment decisions. |
| 1:24.3 | Here's your host, veteran hedge fund manager, Niels Kostrup Larson. |
| 1:33.4 | For me, the best part of my podcasting journey has been the opportunity to speak to a huge |
| 1:38.7 | range of extraordinary people from all around the world. In this series, I have invited one |
| 1:43.9 | of them, namely Kevin Koldine, to host a series of in-depth conversations |
| 1:48.0 | to help uncover and explain new ideas to make you a better investor. |
| 1:53.0 | In the series, Kevin will be speaking to authors of new books and research papers |
| 1:57.0 | to better understand the global economy and the dynamics that shape it so that we can |
... |
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