Ep91 Good Fences Make Good Agents

The Net Society crew kicks things off with Pri’s costly Stonkbrokers miss and a look at Robinhood’s growing onchain ambitions, asking whether established companies may be better positioned to deliver crypto’s promise than crypto-native players. From there, Chris takes the group deep into the enclosure movement, sparking a debate over property rights, internet commons, and whether NFTs can create useful scarcity online. The conversation then turns to increasingly autonomous AI agents, secret agent message boards, Cloudflare’s crypto infrastructure, and what a machine economy built around blockchains might look like. They debate agent rights, consciousness, model specialization, speed, and Google’s place in an AI-first world before moving into AI-designed viruses, telepathy, brain-computer interfaces, and synthetic neurocomputing. The episode wraps with the idea of AI as a Rosetta Stone for entirely new forms of language, followed by a spirited debate over Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and what great directors get right about storytelling.

Mentioned in the episode

Stonkbrokers https://opensea.io/collection/stonkbrokers-434284142

Being mean to your agent https://x.com/mteamisloading/status/2084429800878338111?s=20

Artist chains up robot https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1iple9t/an_art_exhibit_in_japan_where_a_chained_robot_dog/

Safety fears as scientists make first viruses designed by AI https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/06/safety-fears-as-scientists-make-first-viruses-designed-by-ai

The Endpoint of Longevity Is Woo Woo https://x.com/pridesai/status/2085138043233505439

(00:00) - Stonkbrokers & Robinhood’s Onchain Push

(09:09) - The Enclosure Movement & Digital Property Rights

(17:02) - AI Agents, Collusion & Crypto Infrastructure

(26:28) - The Machine Economy, AI Risk & Agent Rights

(34:15) - AI Models, Speed & Google’s Future