Pippa: Okay, so Raskar’s saying the agent economy flips the script.
Tyler: Mm-hm.
Pippa: Not ‘agents for X’ — travel agents, trading agents — but ‘X for agents.’ Marketplaces, protocols, services that let trillions of agents find each other, pay each other, trust each other.
Tyler: Right. Identity, discovery, reputation, even agent insurance and repair shops.
Pippa: And he’s building NANDA to keep that layer open before the usual suspects wall it off.
Tyler: Yeah, and he’s not optimistic.
Pippa: Nine out of ten paths end in corporate consolidation.
Tyler: Classic.
Pippa: Well, it’s a bet. PC era of AI, mainframe era’s over, yada yada.
Tyler: The analogy’s fine. The timeline’s the part that gets me.
Pippa: How so?
Tyler: He says the window’s closing soon. But ‘soon’ in mainframe-to-PC terms was a decade. And we’re still in the phase where most teams can’t even keep one agent alive for a long task.
Pippa: Fair. But if you squint, the plumbing he’s naming is exactly the boring stuff we keep saying matters.
Tyler: It is. Identity, discovery, trust — that’s the tokenization episode all over again. Load-bearing, unglamorous.
Pippa: Remember when you said tokenization was the fussy label maker?
Tyler: And you made me respect it. Yeah, yeah.
Pippa: So NANDA’s basically the label maker for agents.
Tyler: If it ships. And if anyone adopts it.
Pippa: That’s the part that bugs me. He’s right that the opportunity’s in the plumbing — but if the only teams with scale are the ones building the agents, they’ll just bundle the plumbing too.
Tyler: Exactly. The same companies that can afford to train frontier models can afford to build the discovery layer, the payment rail, the reputation system. And if they do, it’s Keynote vs. PowerPoint all over again.
Pippa: But the web stayed open because the foundational layer was simple enough for anyone to implement.
Tyler: And agents are… not that. They’re stateful, they’re heterogeneous, they’re legal entities now. The foundational layer’s going to be a lot fatter.
Pippa: So his one-in-ten odds are… generous?
Tyler: I’d give it worse. But I hope I’m wrong.
Pippa: You usually are.
Tyler: That’s the line for the show notes.
Pippa: Anyway, GitHub’s in the show notes for NANDA. And the Discord.
Tyler: Cool. So that’s it — infrastructure wins, consolidation looms, and we’re all just waiting to see who blinks first.
Pippa: Yep. Exploring Next in a nutshell.