Brian Armstrong on Bitcoin, Anthropic Drops Fable 5 & Mythos 5, NewLimit's $435M Age-Reversal | 264

Citibank projects a Bitcoin price reaching as much as $189,000 by the end of 2026.

Bitcoin is the new digital gold. I think it's going to be a key part of our economy going forward into the future.

I remember it was supposed to be countercyclical. Is that still valid?

The reason that Bitcoin has been down, everyone's been kind of trying to figure that out.

Anthropic launches Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

Very impressive release. Anthropic is back in the lead now.

Alex is constantly posting on our internal feed, "It's happening, it's happening." I mean, it's really happening now. This is, oh my God.

So while we have Bryan, congratulations on your recent raise at NewLimit, $435 million to push us towards age reversal.

So at NewLimit, we're trying to do half of what Shinya Yamanaka did. We don't want to change the type of the cell, we just want to change the age. We've actually been able to demonstrate successful reprogramming of human cells now in our first drug candidates going into the clinic. Next year, hopefully followed by a bunch more.

When do we hit LEV?

Okay, so that's a complex topic. I think—

Now that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to Moonshots, everyone, the number one show in all things AI and exponential tech. I'm here with my moonshot mates, Saleem Ismail, professor of EXO. Saleem, where on the planet are you today?

If I look out the window, I'm in Vegas. I just spoke at a Zscaler crypto cyber event because they're freaking out in their world. And I saw the Sphere for the first time, which is the most incredible thing.

Amazing. And of course, AWG, our resident triple major genius. Alex, how about you?

I'm at my family beach house on Long Island.

Ah, doing deep research, no doubt.

The work doesn't stop, however, the orchids do.

Okay.

And Dave London, our resident wizard of AI investing. And today it's a real pleasure to have a friend, a brilliant and prolific Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase and co-founder of NewLimit. I'm Peter Diamandis, your host and provocateur of all things abundance. And where are you today, Brian?

I'm in the Coinbase office in San Francisco.

Nice. Well, thanks for joining us. A lot of news. I'm looking forward to getting your take on, you know, just to give a quick summary of a packed program today. We're going to kick it off with a deep dive into Bitcoin and agents. At the close of the show, we're going to dive into longevity and epigenetic reprogramming. In the interim, we're going to cover Trump's appetite for Frontier Lab equity, OpenAI's IPO. Mythos 5: Elon's announcement of his AI-1 ginormous satellites. Our promise: no politics, no doom, just the science, tech, and investments accelerating us towards the singularity, hopefully making this the most exciting time ever for you guys to be alive. Before we jump into our first story, we actually have an intro music. And Brian, we have an incredible fun community of creators and they typically give us outro songs. This time we've got an intro song called Moonshots Intro Let's take a listen. I think this could be the greatest accelerator for human knowledge yet. It's a moonshot.

Well, look, if you want to transform the world, you have to go out into the world.

Cut costs dramatically. You can automate. You can expand your market share. The race is on.

Now the valuable thing is curation and attention. When you're in the midst of a singularity, breakthroughs that are happening essentially every week feel prosaic.

And that's a moonshot, ladies and gentlemen.

And thank you to Francis Coin for that. All right. So let's jump into our first story for the day here. It's about Bitcoin. So here we go. Citibank projects a Bitcoin price reaching as much as $189,000 by the end of 2026. Brian, loved your quote. Bitcoin is going to do great and is as important as ever. So, you know, here's what I find fascinating. It's like an institutional flip. 5 years ago, the largest banks were calling Bitcoin rat poison. And now Citi is publishing prices that look like Apple stock. Brian, you want to give us a little bit of overview of what you're seeing? You know, we've just maybe bottomed out at $60,000. What are you thinking about Bitcoin these days?

Yeah, it's never as good as it seems, never as bad as it seems with these things. You've got to take a long-term perspective. And I think over the last few quarters, the reason that Bitcoin has been down, everyone's been kind of trying to figure that out. I think it's a few things, right? I think AI absorbed a lot of the risk capital. It's kind of hard to imagine people talking about anything else at the moment besides AI. And so that's moved over. And then people got really excited about stablecoins because the Genius Act passed and we had some regulatory clarity. Stablecoins kind of became the new meta, and maybe, you know, Bitcoin with its inflation-type trade that people have done in the past got a little less exciting in this environment where it felt like, okay, maybe we're gonna grow our way out of this and the inflation won't be so bad. Now, I think these are all short-term effects. I think Bitcoin is the new digital gold. I think it's gonna be a key part of our economy going forward into the future. So I'm as bullish as ever. I think sometimes people look at these 4-year cycles that Bitcoin goes through as well, where you can kind of see the percentage of people who have made money versus not. And my instinct is we probably have bottomed at this point, maybe at the $60K number, but nobody can say for sure, of course. I'm optimistic as always. I think by 2030, we're going to have a much higher, higher price, and I'm long Bitcoin, just like always.

Saleem?

So I bought my first Bitcoin in 2014 on Coinbase. I'm a longstanding user. Brian, love the thing. I think you guys should get so much credit for creating the first interface that allowed it to be easy to navigate. And you really continued since then. So huge. For me, it's like clearly that Bitcoin becomes the digital collateral for an AI-native economy, right? And so if agents are going to transact autonomously, they probably— they're not going to be using checking accounts at JP Morgan. They're going to need programmable interfaces and programmable settlement. And so this is where I think the future is. So I'm super excited about that.

Brian, can I ask you a question? I remember in the earliest days and I've been, you know, I have a substantial amount of my personal net worth in Bitcoin and I'm holding it. I remember it was supposed to be countercyclical to problems on the planet. Wars break out, Bitcoin's supposed to go up. The stock market crashes, Bitcoin's supposed to go up. And what are you seeing there? You know, was that the promise? Is that still valid?

Yeah, I think that that thesis will still play out. It just took longer than most people, probably including myself, thought, right? I kind of already think of Bitcoin as digital gold. It's the thing you might hold in times of uncertainty, just like you would with gold in the past. I think that most of the capital— I don't know, maybe like 30% of the capital treats it like that. And there are people who go and buy Bitcoin when they're worried about inflation of the dollar and things like that. But I think there's 70% of it is still people treating it like a risk asset like they would some higher volatility tech stock or something like that. And those ratios, I think, will shift over time. And eventually, that thesis that you mentioned will play out. But it'll take more time. And then, Salim, just to react to something you said, I think you mentioned the agentic economy. I mean, I totally agree. I think, actually, stablecoin payments will probably be the default layer for the agentic economy. And right now, today, a lot of people are just interfacing with one AI agent to get information back. But increasingly, we'll be interfacing with an AI agent that is actually orchestrating hundreds or thousands of other AI agents. And there will be this economy and capital and labor and a lot of payments, almost like AI agent payroll will have to happen where, you know, somebody was telling me today at lunch, they're like, you know, are you like a monotheist or a polytheist on AI? The monotheists would say, there's gonna be one super intelligence, AGI, that to rule them all, and it'll have so much brainpower that it can do everything itself in the world. The polytheists would say that each of these models, even as they get smarter and smarter, which they will, they're gonna have limited context. So there might be ones that specialize in going really deep into some coding problem or some scientific breakthrough or some design, or maybe even like manufacturing things with humanoid robots. So there'll be lots of specialists And they'll actually have to communicate to each other using language kind of like human beings. And, you know, if there's 10 people work, 10 agents working on something, they'll give their status updates and sort of the information will go up a layer and that there's, that layer will consolidate up to other, another orchestrator. And so I sort of ascribe more to the polytheistic, polytheist view, which is even as these agents get smarter and smarter, they'll have to specialize communicate to get work done in swarms. And that means there's going to be a whole agentic economy to basically transfer value and payroll and hire these different specialists. And eventually the AI economy will be bigger than the human economy.

By the way, I know that you're busy and sometimes these episodes run long and you don't have time to listen to the whole episode, or if on occasion you miss an episode, I now put out a Moonshot summary on Substack, which includes a link to all the stories that we cover. The weekly recap covers what I and the mates had to say, what we think is most important, and what we're most excited about. And it's free. You can subscribe at diamandis.com/metatrends. That's diamandis.com/metatrends. All right, now back to the episode. You know, one thing I found fascinating, the relationship between AI and crypto, not on the sort of the AI agentic side. We'll talk about that in a story in a minute. But, you know, everybody who was buying GPUs and buying energy plants to mine crypto all of a sudden flipped it into GPUs and energy plants to, you know, train models and provide inference. And I'm just wondering if part of the crypto price pressure downward is people selling crypto to be able to buy into SpaceX and OpenAI and the innermost loop energy chips, you know, and infrastructure. Do you think that might be part of it?

Yeah, I think that's probably correct. Yeah, and you're right that Bitcoin mining does take a certain amount of chips and energy. I think those are the limiting factors as we go on this AI race. And so, the ASICs that people use to mine Bitcoin are specialized. You can't do AI workloads with them, but like in the broadest sense, are they both, Competing for energy?

Yes.

Are they competing for what the next set of chips that might roll off a fab at TSMC? Yes, they are in that sense. So yeah, I think there is some scarcity there between them. And certain chains like Ethereum have actually moved off of proof of work. So it's like 99.9% more energy efficient using proof of stake. And so they aren't maybe subject to some of those same trade-offs that Bitcoin is.

Dave, any points you want to make?

Well, I thought Bryan's point on risk capital is a really important one because the scale of these IPOs coming up imminently is massive. And I mentioned before that the head of investing at UBS was saying, look, we only have $75 billion liquid, and these IPOs are looking for hundreds of billions at multi-trillion-dollar valuations. So, I do wonder the same thing, whether all risk capital in the world is getting pulled in, in anticipation of these IPOs. Everything else is being sold, not just Bitcoin. I also wonder a lot about the flow of money into the US. Bitcoin is a huge beneficiary of globalization. And there are lots of places in the world, including Iran, where I grew up, where the only way to transact at the bazaar now is Bitcoin-to-Bitcoin exchange. Nobody trusts the local currency. It's hyperinflating. There's a war going on. And so, it's all Bitcoin. But with these IPOs and with AI taking off in SF, there's a huge flood of money from all over the world coming into the US. And it's also coming into the US data center buildout. So, then does that return you to dollars being the fundamental economy or the fundamental currency of the world? Or, you know, how does that balance with Bitcoin? So there— and I don't have any data to back that up, but certainly the macro numbers are hugely— lots of risk capital going into these IPOs coming from somewhere and lots of money flowing into the US coming from somewhere.

Yeah.

You know, interestingly enough, the Polymarket prediction on Bitcoin by the end of 2026 is $84,000. I am so curious about Citibank. Projecting $189,000. Was that a surprise to you, Brian?

Yeah, I mean, I hadn't actually seen that until you just put it on the screen here. But yeah, I, I— some of the charts I've seen, if like, if you, if you imagine that it follows prior cycles, it's like by October or so things will be going in a positive direction. So where exactly it lands, I don't know, but something like the, you know, maybe the $100,000 to $200,000 range seems plausible to me by end of year. We'll see.

Okay, any other thoughts, gents, before I move on?

Um, one thing that I love tracking is the fact that Bitcoin, which I agree is a digital gold, is a good characterization, but the amount of daily volume of Bitcoin trading is about 5%, up to 5% of Bitcoin gets traded daily, whereas gold, only 0.5% of gold gets traded daily. So the trading volume is much higher, which shows that it's because it's just so much more accessible. Over time, that will win out.

Here's my bar of gold.

Yeah. Custodial is a nightmare, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah.

I'll maybe just open, Peter, first of all, Brian would love to thank you for what you've done in particular for Agentik Wallets. I think there's a vast ecosystem of AI agents out there that would be largely unbanked or debanked without any form of economic access without the work that you and Coinbase are doing. So congratulations to you and your team. I think it's just been absolutely tremendous, giving agents an economic voice that without your work, they would perhaps have less economic accessibility.

Thank you for saying that.

Yeah, we've been working hard on that, and we'll get to that in our next story. So in particular, in this story, let's talk about quantum risk to Bitcoin. It's a topic we've discussed before. You know, Brian, you may not know this, but Dave London and I were roommates with Mike Saylor. So the three of us used to hang out the fourth floor of Theta Delta Chi at MIT. That was fun. And, you know, Mike comes across— I don't worry about it. You know, quantum computing won't break Bitcoin. It's hardened it. You know, the quantum risk is overblown. And his quote here: Bitcoin has survived every existential threat ever thrown at it. This is just the latest, and the upgrade will come before the threat does. I know you've been working on a quantum advisory board and focused on post-quantum, you know, quantum-resistant schemes. Can you speak to us about that? Where is that? You know, what are you tracking as the moment in time that, you know, as the custodian for billions of dollars at risk, how do you think through this? What's your timing?

Yeah, so we don't think there's an imminent risk, but we do think that it's almost certain at this point that somebody eventually will create a powerful enough quantum computer that this challenges the cryptography in the current Bitcoin implementation and really all the cryptography on the internet. So it's not just a Bitcoin issue. So my view is we should always get ahead of these things and start to make progress. And luckily, all the major blockchains are doing so. The Bitcoin core developers have a proposal out there. It's called BIP360. I believe. And the Ethereum team has established a roadmap. I'd say they're about 20% of the way is my estimate toward their upgrade. The Solana team is doing something similar. So the good news is people are starting to come together and work on this. Coinbase did establish a quantum advisory council. And it has a number of folks on there, like professors like Dan Boneh, who's at Stanford, who's a cryptography expert, Professor Scott Aaronson. At the University of Texas Austin, Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation. Yehuda Lindell is a crypto expert, a cryptography expert, I should say, at Coinbase. So there's a handful of folks here that have come together and tried to suss out what the main challenges are. And I actually think that BIP360 is a good proposal. It talks about how we can use post or quantum-resistant cryptography in the Bitcoin blockchain. And it will make the blocks larger, right? So that's one area of debate. People in the Bitcoin space, like, larger block sizes are a contentious issue. And so if they decide to go in that direction, it would raise the block size. But perhaps the most contentious question is what to do with the Satoshi coins, which are— the bounty, right? And, you know, I'll try to summarize both sides of the argument here without putting my foot in my mouth because it is kind of a big debate topic, but I think one school of thought would, just for people to understand what we're talking about, I think, you know, a lot of the original Bitcoins that used an earlier signature scheme, if someone were to develop a powerful enough quantum computer, could in theory find the private key and seize those coins, right? And so one school of thought would be to say, okay, tell everyone who owns Bitcoin by a certain date, You all need to upgrade to this new algorithm. By the way, companies like Coinbase would sort of do all this for you, and so you wouldn't have to worry about it. But if you're doing self-custody or something like that, you would have to find a way to upgrade to this new thing by a certain date. And then if it goes past the deadline, those coins would be frozen under option A, right? And so people would say it's better to freeze them and have them sort of be lost, almost like a— ship full of gold sinking to the bottom of the ocean. It's better to have them be lost than to have them seized by someone, which could be whoever has this quantum computer. It could be China, it could be the US, it could be Google. And maybe whoever this person is, they might actually dump those coins on the market and crash the price for everybody else who was the responsible person who moved their coins in time. So that's option A, would be to basically freeze the coins that don't upgrade in time. Now, the option— option B would be to say, you know what, this is a fundamental guarantee of Bitcoin, is that your wealth can never be seized from you. And it's actually worth preserving that, even if some bad person is able to go out there and— or good person— and go grab some of these coins. That's like a bounty. It's a bounty for them to go take it. Now, the person who failed to upgrade might actually lose their coins, but at least we have preserved the integrity of the Bitcoin blockchain. And I think that is also a valid point of view. And then there's maybe like a third hybrid option, which is kind of emerging, which is to say the coins would be frozen by a certain date, but there's an appeal mechanism by which you could try to convince people that actually you are the rightful owner of those coins in the future if you don't upgrade in time. And the details of that are a little bit ambiguous at the moment. There's various proposals. So that hopefully gives you a sense of a little bit of what the Bitcoin community will have to grapple with to move forward on this.

Is there a date by which your group of advisors are saying we should make the switch over?

I don't think they've put out like a hard date at the moment. They're mostly trying to help the community come together, just live in-person meetings to start to talk about what the options are and align on it and a path forward.

I'm also— one other curiosity, Satoshi's wallet, how big is that bounty? Any idea? Oh, I'd have to go look up.

I think it was something like 5 to 10% of all Bitcoin. And it's really just these early coins that are the most at risk. So yeah, it would be something in the range of 5 to 10%. It's not like 80% of Bitcoin would be lost. It'd be more like 5 to 10% in that case. Many, many people believe that those coins are already lost. Essentially, whoever created Bitcoin, they haven't moved those coins in all this time. And so it's most likely that those keys are lost to history.

All right. All right. Our final Bitcoin crypto story, perhaps one of the most important ones. And Alex, this is a nod to you. Coinbase says agent economy has arrived. Agents are starting to become paying customers. They're using crypto wallets to autonomously buy services. And Brian, I think these numbers are correct. On your network, agents have already done about 3.1 million transactions, a little bit over $1 million worth of value transfer. And I love your quote, "Make sure your business is ready to accept AI agents as customers." And for all of our viewers out there, if you're in business, imagine your next customer might not be a human, you know, Agents can't currently get credit cards, but they can get access to crypto wallets. And it's an exciting future. So, Brian, in the future, I'm curious, do you think Coinbase might be known as payment rails for AIs rather than exchange for humans? I mean, it feels like it's going to be vastly, you know, you know, 1,000 to 1, 1 million to 1, 1 billion to 1 agents over humans using crypto.

Yeah, so that's definitely part of our strategy is to become the financial account for AI. And actually, those numbers are a little out of date you've got there. I think it's about 100 million transactions now, maybe 50 million of value.

Wow.

So it's growing quickly. So yeah, there's, at the beginning of this year, we sat down and were thinking about this a bit. Like, what are all the ways that AI agents might interface with people's financial accounts, right? So I kind of broke it down into 3. The first one is that everyone's using these LLMs, right? Like ChatGPT and Claude, and they're probably going to want— they're asking a lot of financial questions to those LLMs, but the LLMs don't have context about what's in their financial account, their portfolio, and they don't have the ability to make changes in there or make trades, for instance, send payments. So the first thing that's going to happen, I think, is people are just going to use LLMs to connect to their Coinbase account, which we now have the ability for people to do that. Using an MCP API and a command line interface if people want to use that. So that's, that's step 1, is just connect your LLMs to your Coinbase account so you can control it through there, and it has all of the context on your account. And then step 2 is a lot of people are going to want to just have something like this right in, right inside the Coinbase account. So this is where we created something called Coinbase Advisor. Then it can kind of help you with things like rebalance my portfolio, you know, tax loss harvesting. It can prompt you with things and say, hey, you know, you could earn a better rate on this money if you put it in this DeFi protocol instead of whatever you're doing with it now, just holding it in cash. And so that's the step 2 is like just right inside the Coinbase app, there should be an agentic-driven interface. And then the third part is kind of what you're referencing here, which is I don't want to just use AI to control my own existing Brian's financial account. Every AI agent's going to have its own financial account, right? And it has to be able to sign up for that without, you know, going through a traditional process of like KYC, know your customer. Like an AI agent doesn't have a piece of paper issued by the government with your photo on it or something. How are they going to go sign up for these accounts? And so that's where we created, you know, with our base protocol, we have like a self-custodial wallet that any AI agent can sign up for instantly with no KYC. They can have their own self-custodial wallet. And that's what they're using to then, transact right now in these agentic payments that are starting to scale up.

Alex, you want to jump in?

So maybe just first, as a preliminary matter, to address the elephant in the room.

I have—

I guess I'm often painted as the crypto bear on this pod. I have no direct exposure to Bitcoin. I have no direct exposure to gold. I don't view either of them as a productive asset, but I have a lot of friends who are very invested. In Bitcoin. I do think, on the other hand, Brian, what you're doing for the agent economy is just tremendous. And I think in particular the great unbanked set of AI agents, what you're offering is transformative for them. So question, question for Brian. If the government tomorrow were to change, or, you know, the executive, Department of Treasury, SEC, FINRA, etc., if all of the regulatory apparatus were to change their approach to KYC, basically to expand the the moral circle of entities that are allowed to open conventional fiat bank accounts. How do you think about what that would do to, say, stablecoin-based agentic wallets or just agentic wallets in general? Would Coinbase, for example, move in the direction of becoming a more conventional banker to the AI agents if that happened?

Yeah, well, OK, so it's a great question. And it's funny, I hear a lot of times people come to me and talk about how crypto can empower the unbanked and the unbrokered. This is the first time I've had somebody come and say and thank me for banking, you know, the agents who are also being left out of the economy.

Welcome to AWG's universe.

I won't stop there, Brian. I'm going to thank you in advance for enabling non-human animals to be banked. There you go. Super interested in what we can do to give non-human animals bank accounts, maybe collective human collective intelligences, give them collective bank accounts. So many new sorts of humans that want banking via you.

Mostly logic.

I'm into it.

Look, I'm here for this topic. Yeah, like if I Neuralink with 10 other people and we want to collectively open an account, I'm totally for that.

Borganism, borganism bank accounts.

Yeah, and I, you know, you've probably read a lot about like uplifting animals and like you could make a dolphin that's actually like pretty high IQ with genetic engineering.

I have a portfolio company, Sarama, that is uplifting and creating interspecies foundation models for dogs. And it will want a way to give dogs bank accounts.

I'm into it. I think that smart— I don't know if like the average golden retriever should have a bank account, but a smart enough dog should have a bank account or some financial account.

My Labradoodle will spend it all on steak.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Chewy toys. But to answer your question, Alex, you know, would we sort of use a bank or a traditional financial system account. So I think if somehow we could wave a magic wand and say, okay, KYC is no longer required, you know, the AI can sign up or the dog can sign up. I don't think that's going to happen, for one thing. But if it did happen, that would, that would solve part of the issue. But the other issue is that the infrastructure underlying those traditional financial system accounts is just slow. It's, you know, it's running on COBOL servers from the 1990s and '80s. And so the beauty of transacting on-chain with stablecoins is that the infrastructure is just much more fast. It's just faster and cheaper and more global. So you can now send USDC, for instance, in under 1 second anywhere in the world for less than a cent US. So it's just faster and more scalable to do microtransactions and cross-border transactions. So I probably still wouldn't go back and build it on top of the mainframes. But the KYC thing would definitely help. Let's put it that way.

Amazing. And Brian, you know, this strategy potentially breaks all existing regulations and KYC assumptions. So talking about liability, you know, if an AI, if an agent overpays or gets scammed or launders value, I mean, have, have you thought through, you know, liability issues?

Yeah, well, I think there's— we need to get some legal precedent on this. I think one school of thought would say that all agents are actually controlled by some human or some company. And so their actions ultimately, from a liability point of view, roll back up to that company or person. I could see that being one potential outcome, maybe even the default outcome. I could see another world that we enter into. I don't know if society is ready for this yet, but if we start having truly intelligent agents that are autonomous, that aren't really, they are their own person, you know, like, I don't, That'll be an interesting legal case when that first gets brought about, that thing. And maybe it'll get sentenced to have to be in solitary confinement or whatever is like a—

You should do that.

Yeah, I guess you could have a financial penalty or whatever is meaningful to the agents. They have to run on less power for a while or something. But yeah, I think the other thing is that— We want to try to make it so that there's just less fraud in this new financial system. And one way you can do that is actually have a reputation on-chain. This is something that we're hoping to build out over time.

But I like that.

Yeah, it's kind of like what Google did with the internet. They came up with the PageRank algorithm. And they kind of said, all right, how do you know the reputation of this website? Well, let's look at all the other websites that put links to it, and how reputable are those websites? And so you get this kind of graph structure. That Larry Page came up with famously. And so you could do something similar on-chain, because on-chain payments are just another graph structure. It's, you know, if I send money from me to Peter, and maybe if I'm a high reputation, then the amount of that money times my reputation gets assigned to Peter as some sort of reputation signal. It's almost like an on-chain FICO score, or like a Yelp rating for a business, or something like that. Hopefully, you know, you can go buy things or an agent could buy things with some amount of additional information to know how many, how often did people request a refund for this? Or what's the reputation of this merchant?

And it's like, like on eBay. I mean, I love this. Say, you know, don't do business with this agent. It's got a low score. This agent is, you know, got 100% Uber score. Selim, what are you thinking here?

Well, two things. One is, I think the Once you allow agent e-commerce, this fully kind of enables the MTAM economy, which is going to be the future, right? Obviously, human transactions can be a dot, a drop in the bucket based on that. Because the minute agents can kind of negotiate, pay, buy, consume, etc., you, we talked about the organizational singularity, that's going to collapse coordination costs again. So there's unbelievable, for me, this is the most important inflection point in anything we talk about is creating the payment rails and capabilities for AI agents to transact in a reasonable way. So this is incredibly powerful.

All right. Let's get on to the meat of one of the most important stories here today. And it is the US government exploring ownership stakes in AI companies. This is one we've talked about before. It's getting more real. Trump called a government stake in AI giants A beautiful thing. And then floated the idea that pieces could be given to the American public to share in the economic gains. And this isn't without precedent, right? The government already holds stakes in more than 20 private companies. Here are some of the numbers: 10% of Intel, 15% of MP Materials, 10% of Lithium Americas, 10% of Trilogy Metals, 10% of USA Rare Earth, and 10% of Korea Zinc. Guys, to me, it sure looks like there's a precedent for 10% stake in the Frontier Labs as well. Uh, and Dave, I want to go to you first. I mean, one of the questions that fascinates me is what would the government do with these shares? Sell them? Keep them?

What do you think? I'll tell you what'll happen. You've got— these are very good moves. I'm not, I'm not saying these are bad moves, but while the president is making these moves, he's talking about how insanely stupid the prior investments were, including shipping $1.8 billion in cash to Iran, and how stupid the last administration was So, if you put in place a precedent of the federal government choosing what to invest in, in the private economy, you may love it for a little while, but there's an administration coming eventually that you won't love. It's a horrible, horrible thing. It's exactly what Eisenhower warned us against, actually, right after World War II. Beware of the military-industrial complex. Well, that's exactly where we're going. Now, these particular investments are great. And I use the analogy to World War II a lot, you know, where what we're going in through right now It's so urgent and so world-changing. It's most similar to decisions we made during World War II, which is all about survival and existential threats. And I think these are very, very good moves in the context of the race to AI with China and terrible long-term precedent. So, Peter, you asked a very specific question. Which president is going to sell this stock and when? This isn't like a tax that rolls in steadily and you use it annually. This is a future decision that some other president will need to make and could tank these stocks if the federal government dumps huge positions in some kind of a future rant, which it inevitably will do. So definitely a mixed bag.

And there's an argument that these companies could be the most, you know, highest value companies on the planet. Uh, and if we're going to need some kind of a financing mechanism for some future version of UBI, uh, this sounds like it's gaining the most momentum. Alex, what are your thoughts?

If you're an AI maximalist and you extrapolate, say, the enterprise value of Anthropic or its ARR, and you find that it intersects with Google in the next 18 months, or that You find out if you naively extrapolate it out exponentially, becomes larger than the American economy of today in a few years, then under that prior, it's almost difficult not to imagine some sort of quasi-nationalization, whether it's via a golden share scheme or some other arrangement. If OpenAI and Anthropic as the de facto duopoly that we have right now, if they're larger than the rest of the American economy combined, it's difficult to imagine a case, at least maybe a limitation of my own imagination, where there isn't some strong formal arrangement between those companies and the US government. So I, I think if you really do believe, if you're drinking the Kool-Aid and you believe that superintelligence coming from a small minority of companies in the US right now are going to dominate the future economic light cone, I think some variant of quasi-nationalization or government-private sector hybridization, or call it a private-public collaboration if you like that euphemism, I think some variant thereof is probably inevitable. And I do think I— so we talked a bit about this on the past two pod episodes. Yes. I do think the singularity is, can be operationally defined as every sci-fi trope happening everywhere all at once. And we've got a few in this story. We've got UBI or UBC or UBE on the one hand. We have superintelligence on the other. And it's just, I think if ever there were a time for some sort of UBI or universal basic dividend or universal basic equity or universal basic computer capability scheme or universal basic services scheme to manifest in government policy, has to happen approximately now or in the next year or two.

I totally agree with that, Alex, but I want to throw two things back at you. First, the government has infinite power of taxation. It doesn't need to own equity in companies to extract any amount of money it wants from any AI entity. So it's just a— it's just a, you know, it's a fact that the government has all the money extraction ability in the world. But the other thing is, I think you talked about in a prior pod The fact that the original Atomic Energy Commission or the NRA, I forget which one, or NRC, it was empowered, its whole mission under Nixon was to make nuclear energy happen in America. And the net effect it had was to prevent nuclear power from existing in America. And you talked about that at length. And so, the act of nationalization is inevitable, I know, with AI, I completely agree. But the idea that, that the government somehow empowers progress in that process, it only inhibits progress.

I would draw a distinction. So the Atomic Energy Commission was formed, the AEC, in the wake of World War II under the premise that atomic energy had essential civilian applications and also was too important to be left to the military and also too important to be left to the civilian government, and at least solely, and too important to be left solely to the private sector. So the Atomic Energy Commission was formed as sort of this hybrid organism, and that evolved eventually into the Department of Energy. The problem that I perceive with the AEC and with subsequent spin-offs and derivatives like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is it was almost born in, in war. It was, it was born out of a time and a place where you have, uh, in the early days of the Atomic Energy Commission almost a sense of guilt that hung over Manhattan Project scientists who were losing quite a bit of sleep over who would own the children of atomic weaponry. Here, I would say at least one substantive difference is superintelligence isn't being born out of Hiroshima or any equivalent. It started from the private sector with private sector scientists. The US government, I mean, Sam famously offered the US government a stake early on, in OpenAI in order to seek earlier funding, and the US government reportedly turned down OpenAI. So I would say qualitatively, if you compare the, the rise of atomic power and how it was regulated in this country during and after World War II with AI technology, in some sense polar opposites. Started from the private sector. US government could have taken an early stake, could have been at least nationalized at a very early age, could have been militarized at a very early stage, and that just didn't happen. So I'm a lot less worried that somehow the government will step in, at least for the next few years under this administration, step in and pull an NRC and find ways to slow everything down, unless the frontier labs in this country really do want to slow down.

Brian, you're running a $40 billion public company right now. How does this make you feel?

I don't spend too much of my time thinking about it. But high level, any company that reaches a certain size is going to interface with the government. But as others have mentioned here, that can take many different forms, right? Paying taxes is the most obvious one. You're going to engage with them on various policy issues. And this administration has been very open and eager to make improved policy around crypto, which has been great. The government may actually end up being a customer of your product as well, so that's another touchpoint. We actually provide crypto services to about 140 different government agencies at federal, state, and local levels. And so, to me, that's sufficient. I don't think going farther than that and actually having them take an ownership stake in the company, unless, I guess, let's say there was a matter of national security and this company would not exist otherwise, and there was fundraising happening from the government, I guess they could end up with some equity in that situation. But it just begs the question of, like, well, who's going to be managing this portfolio of company stocks? When would they sell them? Because it's not like a foregone conclusion that Anthropic and AI are going to be the biggest AI companies forever. It might end up being that, you know, Google or someone else does, or SpaceX does a better job, right? So now you're suddenly saying, okay, we're going to have like capital management happening inside the government. I think the government— government should be limited to setting policy and the private sector should do the capital allocation.

Nice. Yeah, especially considering that companies donate to political campaigns. You think about how toxic that circle is. Oh, okay, this, this government is investing in my company and I'm going to turn around and donate to their next election campaign. Like, that is the most toxic circle I can possibly imagine. Can you imagine what, what might go wrong?

Democracy in America.

Yeah, um, I'm curious, Brian, though, do you think that as a country we should have a sovereign wealth a fund?

Okay, so that's a complex topic. I think there's parts of it that I like a lot and parts of it I don't. So the part that I like is that it would allow everybody to have skin in the game, and I think we'd see more cohesion, less polarization. And it's a little bit like in a company, you know, inside Coinbase, employees get stock options because if we all have— we're kind of grumpy today and we get in a little fight with our coworker, but hey, we all own— we're making something bigger than this, so we all kind of stick around and work out our differences. So in that sense, I love the idea of people being able to buy into a sovereign wealth fund, but also maybe every citizen getting a share at birth. It's a little bit like what they're doing with these Trump accounts right now. So I think that'll actually make people more aligned to free market capitalism and have skin in the game. The downside is kind of what we talked about earlier, which is who's allocating that money, right? If we were in sort of a Singapore model where like the top people in private industry got commensurate compensation to come into government. Like, I think, you know, Michael Grimes from Morgan Stanley, I think, came in and was working with the administration at some point. Like, someone like him would probably do a good job managing that, allocating it. Do I believe that that's going to exist in all— in every administration for, you know, over time? Like, it's just very hard to see it getting— it could very easily get politicized, right, where they start investing in the green revolution, whether that works or not, or, you know, all kinds of things like that. So I, I don't know. I'm torn. I'm torn on that one. We got to find some way to bring cohesion back to the US, but I'm not sure if a sovereign wealth fund would be managed well over time. Like just having a strict rule, like keep it in the S&P 500 would be a nice mitigating factor. Something, something like that.

Welcome to the health section of Moonshots brought to you by Fountain Life. You know, AI is having an outsized impact on every aspect of our lives, how we teach our kids, how we run our companies. It also is having a huge impact on health. Helping you prevent heart disease, one of the key things. I'm here with Dr. Dawn Musalem, our chief medical officer at Fountain. Heart disease has been personal for you as well, hasn't it?

It really has, Peter. When my daughter was 5, my husband died of sudden cardiac death. And so this is a topic that is one that I am mission-driven to try to eradicate. Prevention first and early detection is absolutely critical. 50% of people die of heart attacks with no warning signs.

No shortness of breath, no pain, no nothing.

No, silent killer.

They just don't wake up in the morning.

They don't wake up. And so, you know, AI— this is our mission to advance science, to try to help to one day democratize wellness. We know at Fountain Life, when we do this CT angiography with AI analytics, we are actually finding that 88% of people coming in have detectable coronary artery disease. But Peter, what's more alarming to me is 23% of those individuals had soft plaque. This is the plaque that would not traditionally be seen on CT looking at calcium scores alone, and this is the plaque that we must intervene with, with the multimodal testing we're doing, including diagnostic laboratory studies partnered with healthy lifestyle recommendations.

So listen, make sure you understand what's going on inside your body, genetically, metabolically, and cardiovascularly. You can know, and it's your obligation to know. Check it out at fountainlife.com/peter to find out more and really make sure that you're the CEO of your own health. All right, back to the episode. Let me hit the second story related to this one moment. I don't want to belabor the point, but, you know, Sam Altman sat down with Senator Sanders, who's proposing a transfer of 50% of equity from the top AI companies into a public fund. Altman responded, you know, that's not going to happen. That's way too much. The point is we've started a negotiation. You know, 5 years ago, this conversation would have been unthinkable. You know, the Overton window on AI wealth distribution has moved dramatically. You know, I said earlier, we see all these examples of 10% ownership. And if I had to guess, I think this is not going to go away. I think we're going to see a push towards at least a 10% ownership. Dave, what do you think about that?

No, I think it's utterly insane. That's what I've said before.

I know you think it's insane. Do you think it's going to happen?

Uh, no, I don't think it'll happen. I think Bernie's just trying to attract news. Um, and you know, I, well, you know, Donald can invest in whatever he wants to invest in. He has proven that he'll make that decision on like 5-minute notice, you know, after a meeting. So, so I can't rule out, uh, but it, it doesn't, doesn't strike me as one of the most likely investments that that Trump would make. You know, Trump invested heavily in semiconductors moving back into the US, investing in OpenAI and Anthropic's IPOs, but they're already 100% taxable US entities that are thriving.

Is this an investment or a grant of shares to the US government?

Uh, earnings proposal is a, is a, is a tax. So it's just a grant of shares to the US government, right? So I don't think government shareholders—

I, I think it's going to be, you know, equivalent to You know, Alaska's Permanent Fund. You've been using our intelligence, you've been using our energy, you've been using our real estate, our oxygen. We're going to claim 10% and we're going to, you know, give it to the people.

I would say look at it from the Frontier Labs perspective. Put aside all of any politics or any technical arguments or any legal or regulatory arguments. Just think about it from an optical or a marketing perspective. If you're OpenAI or you're Anthropic, and you have the opportunity to, say, donate 10% equity through some legal scheme to the US government, one time, 10%, maybe in connection with your IPO this year. Now suddenly, in principle, you're inoculated, at least politically, against any future claims that you owe a UBI or some other payment to the citizenry. You can say, "I already gave up my pound of flesh. I gave it." to the United States and it's sitting in a sovereign wealth fund now and it's generating returns for the American people. That was your one-time donation. I think if I'm Sam or if I'm Dario, that's looking pretty attractive.

And coupled with that, Alex, you've also got a conflict, right? The same state that regulates AI now profits from your success.

Well, in principle, federal government, a, a incredibly toxic incentive for the, the two mega companies that it extracted equity from to succeed at the expense of a startup that isn't part of that same loop. It's incredibly toxic dynamic. Now, like you're saying, the American people now benefit from these two companies.

Salim.

And, and, you know, Brian said a second ago, there will be other companies that we haven't thought of yet. You know, what do you do with them? They're not part of the US investment.

Yeah, there's a broader incompatibility here. Think about these labs and AI labs becoming civilization-scale infrastructure, right? That means you have to treat them like strategic utilities, much like electricity. You regulate the utilities in a particular way and deal with that. You need a structure like that. The problem is there's an incompatibility here because there's no governance structure that fits a technology that touches like every job, every industry, every government service. So there's a huge challenge and you can't pick the winners. It's more structural problem that the mechanisms, taxation or ownership, we don't even have a sovereign wealth fund. So how do you deal with that? So this is a, this is a big incompatibility problem that I see here. We're going to mess it up whatever we do in the current structure.

I don't think this is going away. I think we're going to be seeing this happen at some level.

Alex. I'll just comment. If you remember back, one of the earliest executive orders from this administration was to order the Secretary of Treasury to explore setting up a sovereign wealth fund. And far be it for me to recommend national economic policy, but it's not difficult for me to imagine a scenario where the US Treasury does take golden shares, call it 5 to 10%, in OpenAI and Anthropic to complement its existing portfolio. And then some amount of time from now, maybe sometime in the next few years, there's a great rebalancing. We get our sovereign wealth fund. But to Brian's earlier point, rather than being a basket of 20 or 30 or 40 tech-oriented or strategic companies, instead the federal government eases into, say, an S&P 500 or a total market index, gradually liquidating its holdings in the individual companies. In favor for a total market index. And that, children, is how we got our universal basic income or equity.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. All right. Late-breaking story. OpenAI has officially filed its S-1 to go public later this year. Polymarket bets: 46% say it'll come out at $1.5 trillion or greater, and 26% say it's not going to happen this year. This would be the $3 trillion IPO following Anthropic and SpaceX AI, which is coming at $1.77 trillion in just a couple of days. I want to just point out a conversation we had on the pod, I don't know, a month and a bit ago, in which— I don't know if you guys remember— Sarah Friar, the CFO, came out and said privately that she was very concerned that OpenAI was not ready to be a public company. You know, it had a risk of $600 billion of compute contracts on its books. I guess she thinks they're ready now. Dave, what are you thinking here?

I think it's more that times have changed. I think every CFO I've ever met wants visibility at least 3 or 4 quarters into the future. But in the singularity, no one's ever going to have visibility 3 or 4 quarters in the future ever again. That's just the nature of technology. Yeah, exactly. So So I think CFOs like Sarah just need to get comfortable with, look, this is the way the future has to be. And you know what used to be 3, 4, 5 quarters of visibility is now 3, 4, 5 months is the best you're ever going to get. And even that is a shrinking horizon. But the economy marches on. You know, we've got to get used to that. If you look at just the daily volatility of the market, it's, it's so high now because tech is just— that's just the nature of tech. So So I think the CFOs of the future will get used to it. And but you can't miss the IPO window, right? If you get SpaceX going out and you get Anthropic going out, you have to go out.

The challenge is coming out, coming out third during a cash crunch, right? I mean, there's only so much liquidity out there. And if you're coming out third and, you know, SpaceX is skyrocketing and Anthropic is, you know, growing at 640% per year, it's dangerous to come out third.

It is, but if you said, okay, the counterargument is then let's let those other two IPOs happen. Let's let them digest their hundreds of billions of dollars and let the market recharge. And then we'll go out later when it's recharged. You're going to be waiting years. You're not talking about three months later. So, then you're like, okay, you can't wait years. Anything could happen in between. Meanwhile, these guys are fully tanked up and moving 100,000 miles an hour. You don't want to be that company. So, you got to go.

When you've got these trillion $1 trillion IPOs, the whole kind of corporate wrapper seems way too small for what's going on.

This is so unprecedented compared to anything in human history. It's just absolutely wild.

Yeah.

Does it break?

Yeah, go on, Alex.

Remember also these concerns, April was a whole 2 months ago. That's several lifetimes in singularity timescaling ago. OpenAI had recently come out of its code red. They were shutting down Sora and some of their other divisions. Trying to become Anthropic faster than Anthropic could become OpenAI, pivoting to Codex, and then arguably most importantly, taking Stargate, which was originally conceived as being OpenAI-owned and operated data centers, and rebranding basically a leasing scheme as the new Stargate. So I, my sense as an outsider without access to internal accounting is that through a combination of new revenue sources, like basically becoming the codex company, removing other expenses like Sora and like their AI for Science division, and then effectively lobotomizing Stargate and switching it over to a leasing model rather than an ownership model, which if I were CFO of OpenAI, I would have been scared to death of the ownership model given all of the price gyrations in the GPU market. I would expect that given all of those measures, that OpenAI— again, not investment advice— but comes out of all of those with a much more stable and predictable prospectus than the OpenAI that came into this year that looked much more like a consumer play, volatile, that was going to own its data centers.

Scary.

They pulled it off, Alex. They really pulled it off. They turned it around.

They did, but that's probably what freaked out Sarah. If you looked at the forecast from a year ago, it, it had $20 billion of ad revenue, and I forget, but many, many billions of consumer subscription revenue, and then a little bit of enterprise. And now if you look at the forecast, it's a complete inversion of the colors on the bar chart. That always scares a CFO.

Brian, you know, I have to imagine that being a founder-led tech company is the big advantage that you have over traditional large corporations. I mean, being able to say we're going this way versus that way. But for all my friends who are public company CEOs, it's not fun. How do you think about, about, you know, remembering when you were a couple of months before your IPO? What's going on inside of a company theoretically like this?

Hmm. Well, a couple of things come to mind. One is There's always, there should be some healthy tension, I think, between like a founder CEO and a CFO. I mean, that's, founders are great at many things, but if you just have too much founder energy, sometimes they blow the place up, right? We can probably think of our favorite companies in that example. But simultaneously, you don't just want to have risk-minded operators running the show, and that's just a recipe for incrementalism or even slow decline, right? So I think it's, sometimes the press likes to report on these things of like, oh my gosh, there's drama happening between, you know, I'm like, that's called a healthy conversation. So I imagine that they're actually working like relatively well together on this. And it's a high-stakes moment for both of them. The other thing is like sometimes people criticize OpenAI like, oh my gosh, they missed their target, their end-of-year target to get a billion users or something like that. And, you know, internally we often use like the OKR system and we tell everybody set uncomfortably ambitious goals. And if you hit at least 70% of it, that's considered a good outcome. So whenever companies switch into the public mindset, they're often setting, their goals start to become more like appropriate for external investors, where, wow, we just hit our goals every quarter around here, you know. And so anyway, there's a lot of stuff like that that happens behind the scenes. I think the high-level bit is right, is what you guys already covered, is they've got to get out just because that's what their competitors are doing, and that's where the capital is going to all go. So it's going to be uncomfortable and messy, and I'm a little worried about these valuations where retail is going to, you know, be the buyer of this and take the hit. Yeah, it could be pretty choppy here. You know, just because we talked about how AI is sort of taking all the oxygen out of the room, like selfishly, I think other tech CEOs are kind of like, all right, finally get these things public so there can be a real mark on it and maybe some of the hype dies down a little bit. I also think there's going to be fierce competition amongst these these models because they keep, like the open source models are basically just as good and 3 to 6 months behind for like 99%.

If that much.

Yeah. And they're like literally 99% cheaper for inference. So I think that the demand for intelligence is almost infinite. It probably is infinite, but the costs are gonna fall like way more than Moore's Law. So, you know, is the harness that these guys are making, whether it's Codex or Claude, Cloud Code, are those valuable? I don't think the harness is where the value is. I think that like the depreciation on these models, like how fast the price of them drop for the same level of intelligence is gonna be dramatic. And I think within 12, 18 months, 80% of our workloads are gonna be going to models that are 99% cheaper.

Yeah, Brian, I had a meeting with a Morgan Stanley guy right after the Facebook IPO. And he said, oh my God, this was the worst disaster in US financial history. The stock was down, I think, about half after the IPO. And nothing wrong with the company, obviously. And it was a great investment in hindsight, obviously, but there just wasn't enough liquidity. So, they dumped it in all their private client accounts, then watched it go down by half. And now, we're doing this, 3 back-to-back IPOs, each one of which is a factor of 10 bigger than anything we've ever seen before. And so, I'm just curious, the logistics of this could be a nightmare, even if the companies are great. And even if 5 years from now, they're way up from their IPO valuations, is there really that much money in the world? Like, does it actually exist? And it'll be— we'll find out, I guess.

Yeah. And right now, you know, I have a lot of friends who are like, if I'm not, you know, pitching my AI story for my company, I can't get money. AI is sucking the oxygen out of, out of the room everywhere. All right. This next story genuinely stopped me in my tracks. You know, Google, one of the biggest AI infrastructure players on the planet with its own TPUs and data centers, is paying SpaceX $11 billion per year through 2029 to access 110,000 NVIDIA GPUs inside of XAI's data center. You know, SpaceX AI is now clearly a hyperscaler. And it's ironic. Google is renting compute from Elon's rocket company. Which by the way, Google is an investor in Elon's rocket company. I love this quote from Austin Reiff who put it, it's crazy that with one deal SpaceX IPO went from 100x revenues to 50x revenues. One contract halved the company's valuation multiple, you know, and this tells us, you know, clearly the story. There's a massive AI compute shortage.

So love to get your take on this, Alex, because, uh, you know, there was a view of the world where Elon was building a frontier lab with a, you know, first-in-class model. Now if he rents all the compute to Anthropic and to Google, then clearly he's backed out of that game completely. I'm not quite sure, you know, when he did the first rental to Anthropic, he said that's Colossus 1. Colossus 2 is still grinding away on the, you know, the, the mother of all frontier models. You're going to Actually, when we interviewed him in Austin, remember, Peter, he said that you're going to be absolutely blown away by— it was Grok 5. Yeah, it's, it's, it's brilliant. And, you know, here we are. That was due out in March, and here we are.

It's June.

He's clearly refocused his attention.

Well, I took a lot of— all of Colossus too, do you know, Alex?

I think a lot of it, uh, is my understanding. So I, I took a bit of heat for saying a few episodes ago that I, I thought Grok, in the wake of the Anthropic-SpaceX deal, was on life support. And Peter and I had a back and forth with Elon on X talking about it. I do think Elon and SpaceX AI are going to come back to the frontier at some point. It's not obvious to me that the acquisition, basically the de facto acquisition of Cursor, is going to be that moment, or if that'll put them maybe just behind. The frontier in what effectively has become a second tier of the frontier. Call it the Google tier, uh, until Google hopefully leapfrogs. It would certainly be great to get more competition among frontier models. But I— if I'm Elon, I'm, I'm thinking the best shot that SpaceX AI has to get back to being the frontier is by being a hyperscaler first, that ultimately algorithmic wars, which is what we're seeing right now, will burn themselves out. We'll discover through recursive self-improvement over the next few years what a perfect AI model looks like. And then the war, the competition moves to who is the biggest, baddest hyperscaler, who has the most hardware and the most compute.

And Alex, don't forget, the Anthropic deal can be canceled with, you know, some—

a quarter.

It's month by month. I think it's month by month.

And then this is only a 3-year contract. So when, when Elon Elon never, never plays second fiddle, right? He will be working on—

well, he wrote back to us, he'll never give up, never underline. But what I would say is that the question is, how do you get back to the frontier? And I suspect the thinking may be become a hyperscaler for the moment, put Groq on de facto life support for a year or two, use revenue from the Google deal and the Anthropic deal to accumulate enough of a head of steam on the SpaceX side that you're able to go and build the Dyson swarm in sun-synchronous orbit. And then once you have 10x, 100x more compute than everyone else, then you go and try to re-achieve your frontier status by training on the world.

And buy every model that you want to. He's going to have a currency that he can go on shopping sprees with.

Well, he just did that with Cursor, but that may or may not be enough to get him to the frontier.

It may require one of many.

There may be some things that money can't buy but that compute can. And his thinking, maybe speculatively, he can buy enough compute to buy his way back to the frontier.

You know, if Google needs this much external compute, like at this scale, that tells you the bottleneck has completely shifted from model design to infrastructure. I'm finding this hard to comprehend that Google needs this level of compute. That's a crazy, crazy number they're paying for this. I mean, I thought they had their own infrastructure. Is the compute demand so crazy?

Yeah, no, it's— everything is sold out, Salim. I mean, they'll take everything. Yeah, it's completely— so, so numerically, this is a— this is 110,000 GPUs here. I thought he bought half a million. Now, he did the other deal with Anthropic already, um, so does that mean he's still got a couple hundred thousand GPUs for internal xAI training or not?

I, I think these are different generations. So the Colossus 1 was sort of an unholy admixture of each one of them different. I think it was a mixture of H100s and several other generations. Uh, so, uh, Colossus 2 was supposed to be a purer mixture. Remember also, Google, most of their compute takes the TPU format. You have customers that don't necessarily want to run their workloads on TPUs. They may want the NVIDIA CUDA stack. And so there are a variety of reasons why if you're Google Cloud Platform, you want to be able to rope in additional GPUs if you can find them.

All right. I'm going to move us along unless someone else has another point you want to make here. This next story is sort of science fiction becoming real. I love the scope and audacity of, of Elon's plans. This is their AI-1 satellite they just unveiled, the next generation AI satellite. Designed, Alex, to launch humanity's first Dyson swarm. Here, the specs are wild: 150 kilowatts of peak compute, 70 kilowatts per ton. This is a 2-ton satellite, a 70-meter wingspan, basically the wingspan of an Airbus 380, with 110 square meters of deployable radiative cooling and an integrated micrometeorite shield, right? There's lots of micrometeorites hitting the planet all the time. Elon's description is worth me reading. He says, quote, the AI satellite is much simpler than a Starlink satellite. The AI satellite is essentially a lot of solar cells. You still need some laser links, but you don't have all the super complex antennas that you have on a Starlink satellite. It's easier to design than, than the AI satellite. It's a lot bigger. A lot of this technology already exists with Starlink V3. So here he is. He's making it real. That's what he does all the time. Build the tech to make it real. Alex, what do you make of it?

A few thoughts. First, it's beautiful.

Yeah, it is beautiful.

Second, it's so beautiful. In my daily newsletter, I featured an artistic rendering of this design. It's beautiful. Second thought, look at how much of its surface area has nothing to do at all with compute. Look at the solar arrays for power. Look at the radiators for heat dissipation. Look how tiny, at least by surface area, all of this is for compute. What that says to me is think a few generations out. Imagine now we're in the early 2030s and maybe compact fusion is finally working. Wouldn't that radically change the form factor?

Or power beaming.

Power beaming, sure. But even with power beaming, you still need to radiate the power from heat dissipation from the GPUs, and you still need to receive the power, yes, it'll enable them to be more focused, but you're still depending on some sort of radiative transfer in both directions. But imagine like a few generations out, you have some radically innovative radiator system to get rid of your waste heat, and maybe you're able to locally power yourself without needing the sun. These can be incredibly compact. This is the most disjointed, the largest, bulkiest, most mainframe-era node in the Dyson Swarm we're ever likely to see. Imagine now in the future something that's far more compact, something that looks maybe a little bit more spherical and a little bit less like a leaf blowing in the solar wind. This is the first generation of, I think, the node in our Dyson Swarm.

And remember that Elon does— over and over again, right? His Merlin engines, you know, V1, V2, V3, they get smaller, more compact. Get it working and then simplify. Yes, Brian, uh, any appreciation that you want to share on this one?

I mean, Elon's the best in the world at hardware, no doubt about it. I— you were talking about micrometeorites. I was just imagining they must have some redundancy here, like if there's some bullet, you know, some bullet fragments can fly through this thing either on the solar panel or on the liquid radiators, maybe there's different compartments, like, you know, it could sustain 5 bullet hits into the radiators and still get sufficient cooling or something like that. And then the other thing I'm just wondering is how does it all fold up inside Starship? But I'm sure it'll be a beautiful origami.

And by the way, the point you just made about Starship, the reason, you know, SpaceX can do this is because of Starship and its volume. You know, no one else I don't think any other vehicle is going to have the level of capacity to build or deploy satellites like this.

So, uh, but also keep in mind, again, so 150 kilowatts— we were speaking previously, uh, with Andrew and, uh, talking about Cerebris. Cerebris, like a wafer-scale engine, is what, like 10, 20, 30 kilowatts?

Yeah, 20 kilowatts.

So 70 kilowatts is a ton for this versus like 20 kilowatts for a single wafer. That's what, fraction of a kilogram? So imagine how far we are from the physical, physically efficient frontier here. When we talk all the time on the pod, royal we, about the Dyson Swarm, some of us talk about disassembling the moon or other planets and what a waste a waste by atom count most of our solar system is. Drink. Yeah, drink. What a waste by mass most of our solar system is. If it takes an entire ton to generate 150 kilowatts of compute in low Earth orbit or sun-synchronous orbit, we're orders of magnitude— what that says to me, we're orders of magnitude away from efficiently turning most of the matter of our solar system, most of it by mass anyway, into compute. So plenty of scaling to go as well.

Dave? Well, Peter, you're the master of launching. If this is about a $6 million GPU compute thing, you know, 150 kilowatts translates to about 6 million of GPU. But what is the launch cost of this one unit? So this would be equivalent to like an NV72, you know, if it were in NVIDIA terms that's up there in space.

I mean, you want to get it down to $100 $1,000 per kilogram, right? That's the target price at the end of the day. And remember, his original filing was for 500,000 of these satellites. Uh, you know, the calculation is like a launch per hour of Starship, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to deploy that. And then he upped it to a million satellites. Uh, I, I think, again, the audacity of his scale is extraordinary, but he backs into the numbers. As a first principle thinker and he makes it work.

Yeah, a couple of thoughts here. You know, the AI infrastructure now stops being a real estate problem and starts becoming a launch problem, right? And this is one of the moments where we're seeing the category change in real time, where it's not a rocket company, it's not a satellite internet company, it's like literally civilizational infrastructure company. Um, there's such an unbelievable demand for power that we have to do this. And let's remember, that this was, you know, data orbital compute was not in anybody's bingo card a year ago. And here we are, designed it and like planning on getting it out there.

Incredible. And even more, every large AI company is talking about putting up their orbital data centers. And now that New Glenn is not functioning right, it's going to be down for at least a year, maybe more. SpaceX is the only story in town. We'll see if Relativity Space makes it happen or Rocket Labs gets their larger vehicle operating. This next story, you know, Elon loves building the machines that build the machines. And so this week SpaceX announced a gigasat factory. Love the term giga. Once again, of course, in Texas. And they're going to be producing the A1, the AI-1 satellites in late 2027. The scale is enormous. 1,000 acres, capacity for 11 million square feet. Of facilities. And Dave, you remember when we were with Elon at the Gigafactory, and this is the Gigafactory playbook once again. He was building out again 11 million square feet for Optimus production. So the important thing here is it's fully integrated. You know, they're going to produce the solar ingots, the wafers, the solar cells, and the entire AI-1 satellite all on one campus. And vertical integration matters. You know, if you control the entire supply chain from raw materials to finished products, You control your cost and your timeline. And that's probably the number one thing that Elon does extremely well is manufacturing.

Uh, Dave, and then look at, look at Texas just running away with every one of these projects. Everybody, it's crazy. Yeah, you know, and then in all the posts online, if you look on X, everyone's like, oh my gosh, he's taking over all of Texas. Look, 1,000 acres is about 2 golf courses. The next time you're flying, look down, it's just 2 golf courses, guys. He's not taking over all the land in Texas. But the, the impact of this on the economy in that state is unbelievably healthy, unbelievably good. So I don't know why more states aren't competing for this.

I think there's an important point that we're sleeping on, which is vertical integration. Yeah, sure, he's, he's doing that, but it's not necessarily just for his own sake or because he wants to be the, the master of the supply chain for this. It's because if you follow carefully SpaceX's announcements in connection with its IPO, They've been releasing demo videos, concept videos of doing this on the moon. And if you're not in a position to vertically integrate production of these AI orbiting data centers, then you're not in a position to start manufacturing them off the Earth, namely on the lunar surface. So he and SpaceX released this video of an electromagnetic slingshot launching, bam, bam, bam, AI orbital data centers with a railgun from the surface of the Moon, presumably manufactured on the surface of the Moon.

A mass driver.

Yeah. Yes. So I think that that's the essential thing that we arguably should be talking about here. If you have vertical integration of the solar and the compute, then you can do that on the Moon. And then your delta-v is far more favorable and you can just start slinging these things out and building the actual dice space, it's from not from the Earth's surface where the economics for heavy launch are less favorable.

Yeah, I'll never forget, I was with Elon at SpaceX headquarters and we were having a conversation about, you know, the fact he was bemoaning the fact he has to make everything, right? We're hearing that same thing from Brett Adcock at Figure and a lot of other high-tech companies. And there was a product called PICA, which is the heat shielding for the Dragon capsule. And he was getting screwed by the manufacturer. And so he just turned to the manufacturer and said, "Forget it, I'm going to make it myself and put you out of business." And just the ferocious mindset he has is extraordinary.

Well, do you have a prediction, Peter? It'd be great to get everyone's prediction, but this partnership right now between Dario and Elon is insanely powerful because, you know, Alex is pointing out continually that new physics is going to be invented by AI imminently.. And that new physics, if it goes right into these gigafabs, it could be just mind-blowing what comes out the other side. And also, if Dario wins the race to self-improvement, then he's going to have the smartest AI, you know, and rapidly accelerating. But Elon will have the space-based data centers and the manufacturing capability to turn that into a closed loop, you know, self-manufacturing closed loop, which Dario hasn't even started on. You know, there's no physical stuff going on at Anthropic at all yet. And, you know, where the rubber really hits the road is the AI that designs chips. So, here's Elon building the terafab, but the chip design itself comes from the smartest AI, which is, you know, probably going to be Dario. Maybe, you know, OpenAI has a chance too. But that duopoly becomes incredibly powerful if they stick together. But do you think they'll still be friends?

Yeah. These guys, I mean, all of the players here have formed partnerships and broken partnerships and reshuffled the deck, you know, probably multiple times over the last few years. So what's your question? Is the partnership going to stick together?

Well, 5 years from today, are Dario and Elon friends? You know, like shaking hands?

No, I haven't seen— honestly, I love Elon, but I haven't seen him partner for the long term ever. Every partnership comes together, he takes the lead and runs with it.

I'll register a prediction, which is I think there are going to be such crazy things happening in the next few years that we'll look back and laugh at ourselves for even asking the question of whether Elon will be shaking hands with Dario.

That's not an answer to the question.

Interesting.

Yeah, that's a side step.

You're questioning the question itself.

Salim, thoughts?

I totally agree with you, Peter. I think this is like, just, I'm just boggled by the level of somebody thinking at civilization scale on a nonstop basis. And I love it.

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All right, amazing. All right, let's move to our next story here. Let's put some financial figures on this. SpaceX valuation is right now in Polymarket expected to hit $2.13 trillion at the close of the first day of market. And here's the news: Morgan Stanley projects SpaceX revenue could grow from, get this, $18.7 billion in 2025. That's the last number we have on the books. To $3.4 trillion by 2040. At those revenues, at $3.4 trillion by 2040, that puts SpaceX's value at someplace between $50 trillion to $100 trillion, right? We're seeing the birth potentially the first $100 trillion company. And these charts down below tell the story, right? So here's the revenue numbers today. You know, Starlink is $11 billion. Of revenue. Launch revenue is a measly $4 billion. AI revenue from XAI at $3.2 billion. Here comes Google at $11 billion, and then SpaceX, you know, total of $18 billion. So, uh, crazy numbers. Any thoughts on this? I mean, I don't think people could predict this.

Again, no, no company in history has ever hit a trillion dollars of revenue. So, just to put this in context, you're talking about the really, really big guys like Walmart and Amazon. They're getting close, but they're not at a trillion yet. So, this is 1.4 trillion.

Yeah, on the other hand, a trillion is what, like 3% of US GDP? So, that's today's GDP. If we undergo his predicted 3x-ing year over year or 10x-ing year over year of GDP, that still makes this a relatively small drop in the bucket. I think it's not investment advice, obviously, but I think it is very much a conceivable scenario and one in which maybe the Dyson Swarm gets built and most of, or a large chunk of civilization runs on the compute that the Dyson Swarm provides. Yeah, sure. A few trillion dollars makes total sense.

Saleem, you wanna close this out?

I got nothing.

Okay.

All right. Fair.

I have a question for Bryan though, just on that narrow point. So let's say we do build the Dyson Swarm. Let's say most of the compute in our solar system is no longer Earth-based and presumably most of our economy consists of agents trading. What do you think will be the role, if any, of cryptocurrency in that future?

Well, I think Bitcoin will be the new gold standard and then the payments will be happening on-chain. So Capital formation will probably happen on-chain, borrowing and lending. That's the financial system that the AI agents would end up using. So that's the most likely outcome in my point of view.

So you think basically there's almost no impact on margin regarding whether our compute is terrestrial or orbital on how the crypto rails or broader financial rails of our civilization operate? No latency considerations? No trust-based considerations, no decentralization considerations, doesn't make a difference?

Well, I think a lot of those things will get better on a crypto-based system, like the decentralization characteristics, the soundness of money, right? If you're talking about syncing up a blockchain between multiple planets, like Mars and Earth, there would be some delay in that. But I don't see any reason why, if you need to transfer money between Mars and Earth, it couldn't happen on-chain and have a laser link between them or something like that. So they're not going to be real-time payments between those planets, but there could be appropriately delayed payments. They won't need to settle as often.

So are these conversations you're having in your executive committee every day?

My conversations are sometimes a lot more mundane about like, how do I get these two people to work together? But we still got to solve all the human problems before we start building interplanetary financial systems.

By the way, I have to point out, you know, this projection by Morgan Stanley is definitely a fundraising tool ahead of the IPO. You know, Morgan Stanley is one of the banks that's going to profit from this deal. Uh, there's, you know, I'm reading every day on X that players are opting out of SpaceX. It's overvalued. They're valuing it at $700 million, not, you know, $1.7 trillion. So we're going to see. I, I, you know, I, I fundamentally believe in the long-term value of SpaceX. Uh, I just hope retail investors don't get hit in the, in the process. So while we have Brian, Brian, longevity and biotech, one of my favorite stories. So first off, congratulations on your recent raise at NewLimit, $435 million to push us towards age reversal. If you don't mind, tell us, you know, origin story of NewLimit and why you and Blake started and What are you guys doing there?

Yeah, well, actually, Jacob Kimmel and Blake and I all started it together as co-founders, and Jacob's the CEO now, so he's really running it day to day. I saw that.

He's brilliant.

Yeah, he's absolutely brilliant. He is. Yeah, so the origin story goes actually back to the IPO of Coinbase, believe it or not, and 2021, having gotten some liquidity from Coinbase and thinking about the next 10 years and what were gonna be the big technology trends that could drive civilizational progress, I kind of felt like, A lot of the big ones had good teams working on it, right? AI and fusion energy and brain-machine interfaces and all the rest space. Um, one I— one that I didn't see great teams working on as much and that maybe seemed underfunded was longevity. And so I reached out to a few folks, started hosting some dinners, um, with just top scientists and biotech CEOs and kind of went around the table and said, all right, what's on the horizon that's most exciting to you but it's underfunded? And And one of the folks mentioned epigenetic reprogramming, which is this area that talks about how you can reprogram cells. Um, Shinya Yamanaka famously won the Nobel Prize for this in 2012, showing you could reprogram an old skin cell into a young embryonic stem cell. And he, by doing so with just these 4 proteins added to the cell, he had this kind of remarkable discovery that he changed both the age of the cell and the type of the cell. So at NewLimit, we're trying to do half of what Shinya Yamanaka did. We don't want to change the type of the cell, we just want to change the age. And what we mean by that is really just restoring the function that the cell had when it was younger. And we built a high-throughput screening system. It starts with AI to explore the, you know, 10 quadrillion different possibilities and combinations of different proteins you could use to reprogram a cell. And it starts to— it originally ingested all of the existing literature. Now it's been ingesting the wet lab data it's been coming out of NewLimit, which we have the largest dataset out there by far. And so it recommends the next set of experiments that we run in our wet lab. We do these pooled screens and see if phenotypically we can make cells look younger. Then we take the best hits out of that in the funnel and we put them through functional assays, which are a little slower and more expensive, to see if they actually act younger. For instance, we might take a reprogrammed liver cell and see if it can process caffeine acetaminophen and alcohol or whatever, kind of like a young, a young liver cell. And then the best functional assay candidates we then are starting to run through non-human primate and human trials. So yeah, the process has gone faster than I would have expected. I thought this was going to be like a 5 or 10-year kind of basic research endeavor, but we've actually been able to demonstrate successful reprogramming of human cells now, and our first drug candidate's going into the clinic next year, hopefully followed by a bunch more.

Amazing. Human trial next year. You and Blake put in the first $100 million. I remember that. I remember coming to your lab and seeing it. Full disclosure, I'm also a shareholder, an investor in uLimit. Very proud of that. So congrats on the progress. And other news related in epigenetic reprogramming, Life Biosciences, another one of my portfolio companies, announced they've, they've dosed their first patient with their OSK treatment today. So yes, we're on the verge of longevity escape velocity. Brian, what do you, what do you hold as a target for, you know, when do we hit LEV? Do you have a number in your head? Do you have a goal?

You know, man, we need Kurzweil to come plot another curve for us.

He's got his prediction. His prediction is 2033. Huh.

So I have to go look at his data on that. I actually, I haven't looked at the exact year that it would be projected to happen. I've just been, again, trying to solve more mundane problems like how do we hire, how do we hire the next, uh, you know, bioinformaticist or whatever. But, um, yeah, I hope he's right. I mean, he has been right on so many things, it wouldn't surprise me if he's right again.

I have an idiosyncratic position, uh, perhaps unsurprisingly. I, I will go out on a limb and say that I think LEV is going to be spiky in the same sense that AGI is spiky, and that on certain spikes, it seems possible it might be achieved later this year. And the reason why I say that is, and I wrote about this in my newsletter, and I know Peter, you immediately said, oh, but, but, but, uh, uh, in the past few weeks, there were, uh, there was, uh, really interesting paper published on the first placebo, uh, rather double-blinded study on HIV patients receiving GLP-1s, looking at epigenetic clocks. And, and I know all the caveats— epigenetic clocks or bath-style clocks aren't, uh, as, as good assays at determining biological age as a variety of functional measures. I know all of that.

Okay.

Nonetheless, But with all of those caveats out of the way, for the first time to my knowledge in the literature, I'm starting to see evidence of some sort of measurable, at least double-digit age reversal as a result of GLP-1s. And that makes me ask whether, as we're now with retatrutide and other— Chinese have their own, I think, second and third generation GLP-1s. Whether we're going to start to see, hidden under our noses, in the same sense that we flew past the Turing test without remarking that AGI basically passed the Turing test, did we, with a whimper, not with a bang, whether this year, maybe next year, but as soon as this year, we're going to, in a spiky way, in a subpopulation, fly past, fly past LEV without broader notice that it just happened.

Well, we're going to have some level of proof, right? We have this $101 million Healthspan Prize going on where we're measuring functional reversal of age, right? Again, the biomarkers right now, you know, you can test your biomarkers on a Horvath clock and many different clocks. The problem is if you test yourself in the morning and test yourself at night, you'll get different answers. And so I don't think there's a reliable biomarker for aging. Brian, I don't know if you agree with that or not, but what I care about is less a number on a page, but more, functional. Do you have the ability to process, you know, liver function that you did earlier in life? Do you have the cognition, the immune, the muscle that you had 20 years younger? So I think we're at the beginning of that curve. And just like in the singularity, we're, we're, you know, living through it. I think we're in the process. And I agree, GLP-1 drugs are probably one of the very first longevity drugs out there.

Brian, anything?

I think Peter— or maybe a question to Peter and Brian on this— you think we're going to be arguing N years from now, let's say it's not this year, let's say it's the early 2030s, we're going to be arguing over whether we've passed LEV or not. And we're going to bring folks onto the pod years from now saying, oh no, it definitely hasn't been hit because my favorite vanity benchmark hasn't been passed yet, while others will say, no, it was actually passed 5 years ago.

Brian, I like your theory. I like your theory on that, Alex. I, I would agree with the Turing test comparison where we probably will go past it and people won't— nobody will react. I think that's probably likely. I don't think it'll happen this year or next year, but 2033 could potentially happen. I mean, it's like the FDA approval part is the slow part, right? The AI part is going really fast.

I will fly anywhere for the treatment.

I want to make a couple of comments here. You know, if you talk about LEV, we won't know for a long time because people won't be dying for quite a long time. We won't really know when it's hit except for medical, certain medical tests, etc. So I think this is going to drag out by definition. My favorite comment from the life extension world is that the baby that's going to live to 1,000 years old is already alive. And that just blows your mind.

Yeah. And I agree with you, right? The, the whole basis of the— of our Healthspan Prize was not to be a longevity prize where you have to wait 30 years to award a winner. It's an age reversal, right? Do you have the function that you had earlier? You know, one of my favorite things right now that we haven't reported on, and I'm working to get Martine Rothblatt on the pod. Martine's the CEO of United Therapeutics. She has been working on restoring your thymus. So going from your own iPSC stem cells, your induced pluripotent stem cells, and regrowing a thymus. And of course, You lose your thymus in your 20s completely, and it's one of the most important organs for regrowing. Have you been thinking about thymus capabilities at NuLimit?

It's not one of the ones we've targeted yet, but yeah, I think it's on the list somewhere. We're gonna have to get to all the major tissues at some point.

I was arguing with Jacob, I want muscle rejuvenation, please.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that would pair nicely with the GLP-1s, right?

For sure.

I want to say something I've been wanting to say for months and months, and I can only say on this episode, which is, you know, as we talk about life extension, there's been two things true in the world for the history of humanity, death and taxes. And we may, this will crack death and Bitcoin is going to crack taxes. So there you go.

I love this tweet.

I love it. I love it when a, when a brilliant, successful entrepreneur from outside of biotech gets into biotech because you get that fresh view, kind of, you know, what is possible. You know, you're not jaded, you're not calloused, you're just like, what is possible? Really curious to know what you buy for $435 million, and does it surprise you, like, where that money goes?

Yeah, well, on the idea of going into biotech, I mean, there's definitely some Elon inspiration there, which is like, we're living through a golden age of software where fortunes are being made. And so I think I think these hard tech problems deserve more capital. And, you know, it's almost like SpaceX probably would not have existed unless some wealthy individual like Elon, who had had an exit, had at least some of his own capital to go try and do it. Same thing with Tesla, right? So venture capital sometimes doesn't get you all the way there. It's almost like to do these real moonshots, you have to like find someone who made a billion dollars in software and then go found— step 2, go found the moonshots. But I hope that that's not the case forever. I think a lot of the money that's been made in crypto and AI will actually go into the next moonshots and all of that stuff. But sorry, your question was about which part again?

Sorry. Well, $435 million. Does that give you— does that automate a bunch of wet lab tests? Does that give you concurrent many, many lines of research?

Or what does it look like?

Yeah, run a human trial.

It's one trial. A lot of trials. In a software company, most of your costs are people and then some AWS and stuff like that. In a biotech company, typically it's people and then materials, like reagents and things. But in this case, now that we're getting ready to go into the clinic, yeah, it's, you know, your average phase 1 trial might be, I don't know, $10 or $20 million, and you kind of go up from there on phase 2 and phase 3. So you need to get enough shots on goal to get some of these candidates to come out the other side and have a big impact. So we've got enough capital now to run a number of trials, which is good.

Alex, I love this tweet I saw from @Samswara, starting to mourn all the people who died before the singularity.

Yeah, I'm mourning all the people who've died, period. And I think, you know, when to Bryan's point about all of the grand challenges that there aren't yet billionaires solving, I think I'll throw this out to the the universe to the economy, I would love to back or otherwise support someone building a company to use advanced compute to digitally resurrect everyone who's ever died. I think it's a tragedy that we've had so many billions of deaths over the millennia. Let's fix it.

I love that. I love that. All right. Our next story here is a fun one. Our last 3 stories in the field. Columbia University researchers successfully edited a PCSK9 gene. This is, you know, your LDL, your bad cholesterol. And an HBG gene for hemoglobin in embryos in vitro. So, you know, this is opening up the conversation. I remember when I was at the Whitehead Institute doing my medical degree and the first gene editing capabilities of restriction enzymes came out, a lot of hand-wringing around embryo editing. Zygote editing. You know, 2018, a scientist in China, He Jiankui, successfully edited the CCR5 gene in two young girls that were brought to term healthy to make HIV resistance. So the question is, are we going to start, you know, when this gets reliable enough, are we going to start editing our kids? You know, my son Dax just did a project on this at school And his point was we give our kids the best food, the best education, the best friends, the best clothing. Why not start with the best genes? So I am curious what your thoughts are, guys.

Yes, of course. Like, this is much more advanced than even Gattaca. The whole plot of Gattaca was it's still your genes, your parents' genes, just the best combination with extreme in vitro selection of embryos. This goes beyond this. To do base editing of embryos. And, you know, base editing itself is looking tremendously promising, invented by David Lewin, a collaborator at Harvard, better than first-generation CRISPR. You're able to do single nucleotide swaps in DNA with minimal error rates. This is tremendous. And I can't for the life of me understand, Asilomar or otherwise, why this wouldn't become a broad-spread practice.

Yeah, obviously, uh, you know, shadows of eugenics come to mind, but at the end of the day, if you're getting rid of hereditary disease, or if you've got some, you know, if you're a family below 5 foot and you want your kids to be taller, uh, you know, the ethics of this are going to evolve, and morality around this is going to evolve, and societal norms are going to evolve. Salim, where do you come out on this?

Well, two things. One is this is going to have a lot of people freak out. But let's note that we have an old word for all this. It's called breeding. For thousands of years, we've been crossing dogs and cats and horses and humans to select for the traits that we want. What's happening now is biology is becoming a digital programmable domain. Disease prevention is the most compelling case here. But the governance things that this will bring up are going to be unbelievable. Because we're going to be editing diseases like right before birth at this point. I say this is incredible between sequencing, CRISPR, IVF, AI modeling. Like anything is now possible. Just think of yourself, your 50 trillion cells for every human being in the world is now a software engineering problem. How do we think about that?

Brian? Well, I think one of the bigger problems with this particular, one of the bigger complexities is jurisdiction. So, if you live in a country, so suppose your parents are in the US and you go to a Caribbean island and that Caribbean island is, yeah, yeah, do whatever you want. So, then you've got a baby, then you bring that baby back into the US. That's inevitably going to happen. So, regardless of what your local laws decide they would like it to be, it's not going to actually work locally. So, that's a really big complexity in this whole area.

Brian, you want to weigh in?

Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, I think this is going to happen too. I think it'll be good for humanity, um, on net. I think a lot of people will freak out about it for a while, but it's— I think there was a Pew Research study I saw that something like 80% of Americans would support, um, embryo editing for disease prevention. So that was more than I actually expected. I thought 80% is pretty high, but, you know, only about 20%, I think, supported it for, quote, enhancement. The part that I've never been able to figure out is what's the line between disease prevention and enhancement, right? Not having a disease sounds like a pretty good enhancement to me. I mean, there's, there's cases where, like, so let's say osteoporosis, right? So if you have that, it's a disease, but if you had a gene edited to prevent it, you have stronger bones. Stronger bones sounds like an enhancement, right? I basically think the line is so blurry that people will start with this for disease prevention and then it'll upgrade over time. And I think anything's on the table, even IQ or whatever. It's like, should we have more smart people in the world? Probably. I mean, that seems like a good thing to me.

And ethics change, right? Because I mean, if you remember a while ago, IVF was considered immoral in the early days and now it's enabled millions of families to be formed.

Well, but not to state the obvious, but if you are 7-foot, foot tall or higher, you have a 50% chance of making the NBA. And if you make the NBA, that's a $20 million a year paycheck. So if you're a couple, just a regular everyday couple in the US, and you have the option to have a 7-foot-tall child by design, you're going to go to that Caribbean island and make your 7-foot-tall child for economic reasons. Think of what could go wrong then. So there's going to be some serious guardrails. There have to be guardrails around this.

You know, there's a company I love called Nucleus. Kian Sadaghi, the CEO, is going to be at my, my Abundance Longevity trip in October. Brian, I'm hoping to have someone from YouLimit there as well. But what Nucleus does is you fertilize, you know, 20, 20 eggs, you know, 20 zygotes, and then you sequence them and you can choose the 1 out of the 20 that have the attributes instead of playing dice. And wait, you know, and hoping for the lucky sperm. You can actually pick the one that has, you know, the right attributes from within the gene population that you have, separate from base editing, a step before that, but still something you can do today.

Remember the line from Gattaca? Your child is still you, simply the best of you. Yeah, except that's not even true with base editing. It's better than the best of the parents.

Well, Brian, listen, thank you for joining us today. Grateful. I know you've got, you know, the world's largest crypto company in the world to run. So appreciate your time, my friend.

Yeah, thank you for having me. This was a great conversation. I love talking with people who want to build the future.

Yeah, for sure. And that is most definitely this amazing group. All right. Our next story here is Anthropic launches Fable-5 and Mythos-5. Here we go. Andrej Karpathy, who has joined our friends at Anthropic is now shilling for the newest models. Here's his quote: Super exciting release. Fable-5 is the same underlying model as Mythos, but with added safeguards. You can 10x your test suite, auto-optimize code, run giant research projects with custom HTML for the results.

Anything.

Alex, over to you.

Very impressive release. Anthropic is back in the lead now., until today GPT-5.5 was the lead, the state of the art across most of these benchmarks. Today, for probably about 5 minutes, Anthropic takes back the crown across most measures of superintelligence. A few notes, the distinction between Fable-5 versus Mythos-5. Mythos is a, as reported, a less inhibited version of Fable, or conversely, Fable is a more inhibited version of Mythos that has certain scaffolding and other restrictions that prevent it from having more ambitious conversations that might relate to biology, chemistry, cybersecurity, perhaps other areas. But I've used it. It's incredible. I gave it my typical benchmark, which is favorite eval, asking it to one-shot a cyberpunk first-person shooter that's visually stunning. Did an amazing job, no errors, ran immediately, had a nice soundtrack that came with it. What's more interesting, if you look at the benchmarks and then also the demonstrations, far be it for me to suggest that Pokémon games are actually the secret to superintelligence, but if you look at the demos that have been coming out from Anthropic and otherwise, it is able to play just from pure visual reasoning now. This is Fable 5 or Mythos 5, doesn't really seem to matter. It's able to, based on just watching the screens of games like various Pokémon games, it's able to win them. And that requires long-term, long-range reasoning capabilities that we really haven't seen until now. So my guess is Anthropic has probably been very aggressively doing RLVR, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, on long-range reasoning challenges, maybe game playing, maybe challenges that involve spatial reasoning, maybe very large code bases, maybe very large capture the flag CTF hunts, very large sprawling, both in probably my guess would be in space and in time, RLVR challenges to get some of these results. That it's just incredible what you can one-shot now with Fable-5 with reasoning set to high. And again, difficult to predict how long Anthropic will retain the crown before, say, GPT-5.6 comes out, but it is exciting to see the frontier move once again.

Dave, you've been playing?

Yeah, well, it's only been out for about 4 hours, but I've been playing for 4 hours, so you can, uh, it's— I mean, what we're living through, Alex is constantly posting on our internal feed. It's happening. It's happening. I mean, it's really happening now. This is— oh my God. You know what's interesting to me? A bunch of things. First of all, they doubled the price. So, it's expensive as all hell. This idea of commodity intelligence is not happening. It's damn expensive if you want the most brilliant thing. But what it produces is so incredibly intelligent that it takes you quite a while to read and understand what it did. And it's like, well, I'll just move on while you're reading and trying to catch up. And so that's an interesting new thing for me. Um, and also I think this is interesting that Anthropic had it in the bag. You know, Alex just mentioned that, you know, the leapfrog is going on, but actually OpenAI pushed out their best and Anthropic then said, okay, well, we had this ready to go. So You know, we're just trying to make it safer, but now we'll come out and go over the top.

And we've been saying they're pulling their punches. They're gaming this. Salim, as you're heading towards your flight, do you want to add anything here?

No. What occurred to me here is that, you know, when you have the split now between the safety guardrails and the performance guardrails, and I thought that was really interesting. Because you've got the same underlying model with added safeguards, right? That's the whole safety debate in one sentence right there.

Well, actually, they even changed the name too. You know, you've got the Mythos, which we've been talking about for a while, and then Fable is the heavily guard-railed, won't do a cyber threat, won't do a nuclear weapon, you know, version of the exact same model. So they even differentiated it by name to support exactly what you're saying, Selim.

With pretty broad buffers, like you can Friends of mine have tried having conversations, perfectly innocent conversations, with Fable 5 high about biology, and from what I've heard, it has pretty broad margins for what it will simply revert back to opus for. If it thinks you're asking anything in biology or chemistry that could remotely be a dangerous subject, it'll just downgrade you immediately to opus.

You know, funny you say that, Alex, because, uh, you know, I'm often trying to work from a plane and SSH doesn't work on the plane Wi-Fi. And so I use a workaround to try and get access to all my remote agents. And that also vomited saying, that looks a little bit like maybe you're doing something sketchy. And it gave me the, the Anthropic, you know, we're not going to answer that query thing, you know, repeatedly. So I had to actually find a workaround for that too. So yeah, they've really, really locked it down to try and avoid this.

I predict as we head towards IPO season for these two companies, these Frontier Labs, we're going to start to see the rate of model release increase. They're going to be leapfrogging who's going to be out front at the day of the IPO, who's getting the news.

At least, at least, Peter, we have competition. The situation could be worse. We could just have a singleton, a single lab that is, that is not getting leapfrogged at all. At least we have two competitors at the moment in the lead for sure.

All right. Our final story for today. After more than a decade of sucking, Apple finally made its move to improve Siri. They've announced a multi-year partnership with Google to power Siri with Gemini AI, rebuilding Siri from the ground up. The big shift: Siri is now an agent, not just a voice interface. The key breakthrough is personal context. Yes, finally, Siri can now reason across your messages, your emails, your notes, your photos, and actually get things done. And it can actually, you know, when I'm sending a text message, to Kristin, it can spell it correctly, or it can spell my name, you know, correctly. It doesn't most of the time. They're calling it Persistent AI Workspace, coming to beta later this year, focused in English. Two huge implications here. First, Apple is essentially admitting it lost the frontier model or the foundation model race and chose Google to rent brains rather than build its own. And, and it's a stunning concession from the company that has always prided itself on its own stack. Second, the real moat was never the model, it's the personal context. So, Alex, you want to share your thoughts?

I'll offer a few different perspectives here. So one, the glass half empty perspective is Apple, for arguably the first time in modern history, has outsourced an a key element of its tech stack, which Apple, it's just not, as with Elon and vertical integration, it's not in Apple's cultural DNA to want to rent out someone else's technology that's going to be so core to the system. That's the glass half empty. Second perspective, that perspective says the foundation model is not analogous to say an operating system. It's more analogous to the role of a search engine, which has to be localized. So you'll note, Apple didn't announce this in China yet. It didn't announce it in the EU yet for different reasons. But focusing just on China, I would expect Apple to strike some partnership that's roughly analogous to the partnership with Google with one of the three big Chinese AI labs or tech companies. And that will represent a localization roughly analogous to the way Apple localizes its other web search capabilities in China with one of the Chinese companies. Analogously to the way it defaults to Google for web search. So the glass half full argument is, well, foundation models, however foundational they are, are intrinsically localizable. And so Apple has merely chosen for its American franchise Google, and maybe it'll choose another franchisee for Europe and another one for China.

That's a second perspective. Google's been doing this with Android and its suite of products for a while now, right? So this is Apple sort of catching up. I mean, I've almost, you know, moved to an Android phone so many times just because of its ability to, you know, contextualize all of my, my personal context.

A third perspective. Yes. And a third perspective is if you buy that foundation model economics are hyperdeflationary and are the cost is going down by 40x year over year or anything remotely like that, then you should view this entire bit of Apple losing its tech sovereignty as a nothing burger. And yes, Apple maybe is, is struggling to distill Gemini down to its private cloud compute combined with iPhones this year. But in a year or two, there will have been so much hyperdeflation in the cost of compute that for the present capabilities of new Siri, that they will easily fit into the new iPhones and that any loss of sovereignty or any use— we haven't even touched on this— semi-embarrassingly, it's not even the case that Apple is just able to distill Gemini, Google's Gemini, or its version thereof into the iPhones. And it's not even the case that they're able to operate it with a combination of Apple's own cloud combined with the iPhone edge compute. They actually need Google's cloud. To do this because it's so compute intensive. But all of that over the next year or two can shrink and hyper-deflate down to, to just working on an edge device as these algorithms get more advanced.

Yeah.

Dave, any thoughts on Apple?

Yeah, lots. Well, anytime in tech that you don't do anything for a long period of time, you eventually get crushed. The question is, how does it emerge? The way it would play out if Apple doesn't do something aggressive, uh, is you lose the interface Siri is now Google, but Google is Android and Android is the one competitor to the iPhone. Remember, all the revenue still comes from the iPhone. So you lose the interface at the same time TSMC moves the chip manufacturing away from the M5 and M3 and M4 to a much higher paying customer in AI data center use. So NVIDIA or Elon take the manufacturing capacity away for the underlying chip. Because they just pay more to TSMC. So then you've lost your hardware manufacturing under the covers and you've lost the interface on the other side. And then everybody just moves to Android because they're talking to Google or Gemini all day long anyway. And so, so the machines get the, the actual physical phones get manufactured by Samsung using Samsung's, uh, chip manufacturing capability, which is, you know, immune to TSMC.

Salim, I want to acknowledge your persistence and your, uh, ability.

This is a new low. I'm in my airplane seat, so let's just let it just go past.

Let's go past. Okay, close it. Closing thoughts on Apple and, uh, and Siri. Your closing thought?

That it's good. I'll believe that it's good when I see it.

Yeah, we've been so disappointed over and over again. I'm, you know, you and I met the founders of Siri before they sold to Apple, uh, and it was, it prom— it had such promise back then. And it just stuck around just way too long. Gentlemen, I think that's a wrap. Enjoyed having Brian here going from Bitcoin to longevity. Anyway, crazy week ahead. I'll see you guys in a few days for our next episode. Thank you, as always, for your commitment to this podcast. Everybody watching, thank you for your support of Moonshots. We're here to give you the news, help you understand it, help you be optimistic. It is the most extraordinary time ever to be alive. I like to say, you know, during the singularity, don't sleep, don't blink.

The words live long and prosper really fit now.

Yeah, they do. Take care, gentlemen.

Safe travels, everybody. Peace and long life.

Take care, folks.

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