Editor’s Note: On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, Porter believes we are standing on the threshold of a new 1776 moment.
A convergence of forces across the three domains that dictate almost every aspect of your life: Economics. Technology. Politics. An event that he says could trigger the greatest transfer of wealth in American history.
In their interview, Porter and Luke Lango explored America’s New 1776 Moment in full detail – including the stocks to buy and sell ahead of what could be one of the most transformative periods in American history, for the good and the bad.
Now, Porter has asked Luke to take the reins with a series of guest essays that will explore this phenomenon in more detail and provide further depth on some of the concepts they didn’t have time to explore.
Below, you’ll find the first essay from Luke and if you haven’t seen their interview yet, you can watch it by clicking here.
From The Desk of Luke Lango:
The Great Decoupling: How AI Is Breaking The Engine of Human Labor
If you’re still operating under the comforting delusion that artificial intelligence is just a high-tech version of a Swiss Army knife – a handy tool to help you draft a “per my last email” response or generate a picture of a cat in a tuxedo – I have some very expensive news for you.
We aren’t just looking at a “productivity tool.” We are witnessing the Great Decoupling.
For the last 250 years, ever since the founding of our great nation in 1776, the global economy has functioned on a very simple, linear equation: Human Cognition + Time = Economic Value. If you wanted to build a bridge, write a legal brief, or design a semiconductor, you needed to rent a human brain. That brain was the bottleneck. It was expensive, it required eight hours of sleep, it had “feelings,” and it occasionally went on strike.
Those were the rules of the old game.
But those rules are now changing.
Today, that equation no longer includes the human part. We are entering an era where productivity can scale toward infinity while human involvement scales toward zero. This isn’t just “automation” 2.0. This is a total labor replacement engine.
And it has massive investment, economic, and societal implications.
Today, that equation no longer includes the human part. We are entering an era where productivity can scale toward infinity while human involvement scales toward zero. This isn’t just “automation” 2.0; this is a total labor replacement engine.
And it has massive investment, economic, and societal implications.
The End of the “Brain-Power” Monopoly
Historians like to talk about the “Great Divergence” when the West pulled away from the rest of the world. But we are now entering the Great Disconnect.
In 1776, the steam engine decoupled industrial power from muscle. It meant you no longer needed 500 horses or 1,000 peasants to move a mountain. You just needed a few tons of coal and a James Watt engine. This shifted the “value” of the human being from their back to their brain. We became a “knowledge economy.” We told our children that as long as they were smart, went to college, and learned to think, they would always have a seat at the table.
AI has just evicted us from that table.
What we are seeing with models like OpenAI’s Codex or Google’s Gemini or Claude Cowork isn’t just “better software.” It is Recursive Reasoning. These systems aren’t just “predicting the next word.” They are thinking through problems, checking their own work, and iterating. When an AI can solve a 50-year-old biological protein-folding mystery in a weekend – a task that would have taken a thousand PhDs their entire lives – the “value” of those PhDs just hit an air pocket.
When cognition becomes a commodity that can be downloaded for $20 a month, the “Knowledge Class” – the lawyers, the accountants, the junior analysts, and the coders – becomes the new “Useless Class.”
The “Engels’ Pause” 2.0: Profits Without People
Here is the smartly sarcastic reality of the modern corporate boardroom: Your CEO doesn’t want to hire you. They never did. They hired you because they had to. You were a necessary evil – a biological requirement for profit.
Now, look at the math.
In the first half of the 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution, we saw a phenomenon called Engels’ Pause. It was a 50-year window where the economy grew at record rates, corporate profits doubled, and the stock market soared – but wages for the average worker stayed flat or declined. Why? Because the technology (the power loom, the steam engine) was doing the heavy lifting, and the owners of that technology captured 100% of the gains.
We are entering Engels’ Pause 2.0, and this time, it’s on steroids. Just like everything else these days – it is bigger and moving faster than ever before.
Currently, corporate profits as a share of GDP are at record highs, while labor’s share of the pie has cratered to levels not seen since the Gilded Age. We are seeing “Jobless Growth.” Companies are hitting record valuations with fewer employees than ever before. Instagram had 13 employees when it was bought for $1 billion. Today, AI-native startups are aiming for $100 billion valuations with a headcount you can figure on two hands.
If you think a “Universal Basic Income” or a government handout is going to bridge this gap, you’re missing the point. The wealth is being concentrated in the Physical Layer and the Compute Layer. It’s being captured by the entities that own the data centers, the energy sources, and the silicon.
Not the laborers.
The Fallacy Of “Augmentation”
The mainstream media loves the word “augmentation.” They’ll tell you that AI won’t replace you; it will just make you “more efficient.”
Let’s be honest: “efficiency” is just a corporate euphemism for “we used to need five of you, and now we only need one.”
If AI makes a lawyer five times more efficient, the world doesn’t suddenly need five times more legal briefs. It just needs 80% fewer lawyers. This is the Arithmetic of Obsolescence.
We are seeing this play out in real-time across the S&P 500.
Companies that built their entire business model on being “toll booths” for human knowledge are being bypassed. Just look at software stocks. They’ve been crushed this year. And with good reason. Why would a company pay millions to a consulting firm or a software firm for a market analysis when they can run a sovereign AI model on their own private data for the cost of the electricity used to power the server?
This is why you’re seeing “The Great Purge” in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. It’s not a “recession.” It’s a restructuring. The labor-replacement engine has been turned on, and it doesn’t have a “stop” button.
The New Wealth Equation: Energy And Compute
In the Old World, you invested in “people companies” – banks, service providers, retailers. In the New World of the Great Decoupling, you must invest in The Infrastructure of Intelligence.
The intelligence explosion is fundamentally a physics problem. It requires two things in massive, almost incomprehensible quantities: Compute and Energy.
Every time someone asks a “thinking” AI model a question, it consumes an order of magnitude more electricity than a standard Google search. By 2030, AI data centers could consume as much power as the entire country of Germany. This is why the smartest money on the planet – the people like Ken Griffin and the massive sovereign wealth funds – are stopping at nothing to lock up energy assets.
They aren’t buying “app” companies. They are buying natural gas. They are buying the “New OPEC” of chips. They are buying the land and the transformers.
Because in a world where human labor is decoupled from wealth, the only things that matter are the things that power the machines. If you own the electricity and you own the silicon, you own the future. If you own a “resume” and a “specialized skill set,” you own a relic.
The Smartly Sarcastic Truth About The “Future Of Work”
We are told to “reskill” and “upskill.” But let’s be real: how do you “out-skill” a recursive algorithm that updates itself every 15 milliseconds? You don’t. Compete all you want. You will lose.
The idea that we are all going to become “AI Prompt Engineers” is the modern equivalent of telling the 19th-century blacksmith that he should just become a “Steam Engine Whisperer.” Sure, a few people will do it. But most of the blacksmiths just went out of business.
The Great Decoupling is cold, it is efficient, and it is entirely indifferent to your feelings about “meaningful work.” The machine doesn’t care about your work-life balance. It doesn’t care about your DEI initiatives. It only cares about the cost per flop and the kilowatt-hour.
This is why the Technological Republic (Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s vision for a new economic model that replaces free-market capitalism with a partnership between the public and private sectors to prioritize critical technological growth) is so vital.
Our current administration is fully embracing this mindset. The big investment in Intel… and MP Materials… and Lithium Americas… and Trilogy Metals… all companies mission-critical to the AI infrastructure buildout. The $500 billion Project Stargate to build new AI datacenters. The massive Genesis Mission to unlock U.S. energy resources for AI.
All of these moves are unprecedented. And all of these moves point to the U.S. government embracing the Technological Republic idea.
The government knows that the Great Decoupling is going to create a massive “Useless Class.” Their solution isn’t to stop the technology—that would mean losing to China. Their solution is to speed it up and ensure the United States owns the most powerful “replacement engine” on the planet.
Better us than them, they figure.
And on that point, the government may actually be right.
How To Position Your Capital
If you’re waiting for the “labor market” to bounce back, you’re waiting for a ship that has already sunk. The opportunity today lies in moving your capital from the Victims of Decoupling to the Enablers of Decoupling.
You need to sell the “Knowledge Toll-Booths”—the companies that sell human time and expertise. You need to buy the “Intelligence Utilities”—the companies that provide the raw materials for the silicon mind.
We are talking about:
- Natural Gas: The only fuel capable of meeting the immediate, monstrous demand of the AI data centers.
- Sovereign Infrastructure: The companies building the “Stargate” and “Genesis” projects that the government is backing with billions.
- Advanced Compute: Not just the chips, but the cooling systems and the power management hardware that prevents the “brain” from melting.
The Great Decoupling is the most significant economic event of our lives. It is the end of the “Human Century” and the beginning of the “Intelligence Century.” You can either be the labor that is being replaced, or the capitalist who owns the replacement.
Which is why, just weeks ago, I sat down with the legendary Porter Stansberry for the first time ever to dive deep into this topic.
We’re calling it the “New 1776 Moment” because, frankly, there hasn’t been any economic, social, or political event this monumental since 1776.
And the parallels are strong.
Click here to watch that full presentation now.
Sincerely,
Luke Lango
Editor, Innovation Investor
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