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Pippa Malmgren

What happens when scarcity assumptions collapse?

Key Ideas​

The Abundance Thesis

  • We're inside overlapping tech revolutions (space, energy, AI, money) — not heading toward one singularity
  • Problems are being solved at exponential rate; doom narratives underweight compounding capability
  • Every tech revolution created more jobs than it destroyed — AI will be no different

Heartware Over Hardware

  • As AI handles analytical work, scarce assets become empathy, morality, creativity, meaning
  • Leaders need imaginative capacity to see non-linear possibilities data can't reveal
  • Tech forces an upgrade in human soft skills — cooperation, inclusion, purpose-driven work

Space as Abundance Infrastructure

  • Beamed solar power, asteroid mining, orbital data centers radically expand energy and resources
  • Helium-3 on the moon, missions like Psyche/Bennu imply metal supply multiples of global GDP
  • Arctic ground stations become the umbilical cord between mega-constellations and undersea cables

Tokenization Shifts Power

  • DAOs + smart contracts let teams coordinate and issue tokens without equity/debt/IPO
  • Stablecoins become alternative capital formation rails, breaking Wall Street/SV oligopoly
  • Fractional ownership opens games previously dominated by BlackRock and banks

The Meta-Thesis

  • "We are going to war with problems, not each other"
  • Tech pessimism overweights visible disruption, underweights compounding knowledge
  • Small teams with AI + tokens can now solve problems once reserved for states and megacorps

The Edge​

  • Don't bet on asteroid mining (10+ years). Bet on unglamorous bottlenecks: icebreakers, ground stations, orbital fuel depots (18-36 months)
  • Tokenization works where it materially cuts friction — not all RWAs have this property
  • AI agents + DeFi + RWA intersection is highest-leverage, barely built today
  • Own a niche before saturation — 18 months from now there will be 100+ space/DePIN projects

Context​

  • Abundance — Why scarcity assumptions collapse under compounding technology
  • Space Industry — The orbital infrastructure Malmgren points to as abundance lever
  • DePIN — Decentralized physical infrastructure enabling sovereign bottlenecks
  • Tokenization — The capital formation rails that break legacy oligopolies
  • Optimism — Training the muscle to see compounding upside

Questions​

What happens when the abundance narrative arrives unevenly — enriching bottleneck owners while scarcity persists for everyone else?

  • If space energy and asteroid mining are 10+ years out, who captures the interim value from ground stations and icebreaker infrastructure?
  • Malmgren argues heartware (empathy, creativity, meaning) becomes scarce as AI handles analysis — but what if AI also commoditises heartware faster than humans can differentiate?
  • Which tokenized structures have unit economics that already beat legacy finance today, not in theory?