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

25:37Would Coinbase, for example, move in the direction of becoming a more conventional banker to the AI agents if that happened? Yeah, well, OK, 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. And 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. I'm super interested in what we can do to give non-human animals bank accounts, maybe human collective intelligences, give them collective bank accounts.

26:19So many new sorts of humans that want banking via you. I'm into it. Look, I'm here for this topic. Yeah, like if I neural link with 10 other people and we want to collectively open an account, I'm totally for that. Borganism, Borganism bank accounts. Yeah. And, 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, Serama, that is uplifting and creating interspecies foundation models for dogs. Okay. And it will want a way to give dogs bank accounts. I'm into it.

26:55I 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, 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, OK, 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 solve part of the issue.

27:33But the other issue is that the infrastructure underlying those traditional financial system accounts is just slow. It's running on COBOL servers from the 1990s and 80s. And so the beauty of transacting on chain with stable coins 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 one 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.

28:09But the KYC thing would definitely help. Let's put it that way. 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 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.

28:50I 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. You know, and maybe it'll get sentenced to, you know, have to be in solitary confinement or whatever. Yeah, I don't know. I guess you could have a financial penalty or whatever is meaningful to the agents. They have to run on, you know, less power for a while or something.

29:30But, yeah, I think, you know, 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. I like that. Yeah, it's kind of like what Google did with the Internet. You know, 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.

30:04And 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. And so 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?

30:39And it's like on eBay. I mean, I love this. Say, you know, don't do business with this agent. It's got a low score or this agent is, you know, got 100 % Uber score. Salim, what are you thinking here? Well, two things. One is, I think once you allow agent e-commerce, this fully kind of enables the MTM economy, which is going to be the future, right? Obviously, human transactions can be a drop in the bucket based on that. Because the minute agents can kind of negotiate, pay, buy, consume, et cetera, we talked about the organizational singularity. That's going to collapse coordination costs again.

31:16So 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 U.S. 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.

31:54And this isn't without precedent, right? The government already holds stakes in more than 20 private companies. Here's 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 percent stake in the frontier labs as well. 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? Well, I'll tell you what will happen. These are very good moves. I'm not saying these are bad moves.

32:35But 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 the military industrial complex. Well, that's exactly where we're going.

33:08Now, 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 is 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, you know, threats. And I think these are very, very good moves in the context of the race to AI with China and terrible long-term president. So, you know, 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.

33:50This 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 rent, which it inevitably will do. So definitely a mixed bag. There's an argument that these companies could be the most, you know, highest value companies on the planet. And if we're going to need some kind of a financing mechanism for some future version of UBI, 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, it becomes larger than the American economy of today in a few years.

34:42then 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 U.S. government. So 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 U.S.

35:25right 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, so we talked a bit about this on the past two pod episodes. I do think the singularity 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, it has to happen approximately now or in the next year or two.

36:29I 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 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 was 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.

37:11And 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 the government somehow empowers progress in that process, it only inhibits progress. I would draw a distinction. So the Atomic Energy Commission was formed at 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, at least solely, and too important to be left solely to the private sector.

37:46So 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 spinoffs and derivatives like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is it was almost born in war. It was born out of a time in a place where you have, 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.

38:33It started from the private sector with private sector scientists. The U.S. government, I mean, Sam famously offered the U.S. government a stake early on in open AI in order to seek earlier funding. And U.S. government reportedly turned down open AI. So I would say qualitatively, if you compare 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. U.S. 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.

39:15And 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?

39:52Paying 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 touch point. You know, 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, you know, if I guess if let's say there was a matter of national security and this company would not exist otherwise.

40:37and 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 AR are going to be the biggest AI companies forever. It might end up being that Google or someone else or SpaceX does a better job, right? So now you're suddenly saying, OK, we're going to have like capital management happening inside the government. I think the government should be limited to setting policy and the private sector should do the capital allocation.

41:10Nice. Yeah. Considering that the companies donate to political campaigns. You think about how toxic that circle is. OK, 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. Welcome to democracy in America. go. Yeah. I'm curious, Brian, though, do you think that as a country, we should have a sovereign wealth 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.

41:49And 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 co-worker, 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.

42:17So 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?

42:51Like 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 don't know. I'm torn. I'm torn on that one. We got to find some way to bring cohesion back to the U.S., 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 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.

43:24It 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. My daughter was five. 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.

43:59They 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 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.

44:38So 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. So check it out at fountainlife.com slash 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 Sam Altman sat down with Senator Sanders, who's proposing a transfer of 50 percent of equity from the top companies into a public fund. Altman responded, you know, that's not going to happen.

45:13That's way too much. The point is we've started a negotiation. You know, five 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 percent 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 percent ownership. Dave, what do you think about that? I think it's utterly insane. That's what I said before. I don't think it's insane. Do you think it's going to happen? No, I don't think it'll happen.

45:48I think Bernie's just trying to attract news. And, you know, Donald can invest in whatever he wants to invest in. He has proven that he'll make that decision on like five minute notice after a meeting. So I can't rule out. But it doesn't strike me as one of the most likely investments that Trump would make. You know, Trump invested heavily in semiconductors moving back into the U.S., investing in open AI and anthropics IPOs. But they're already 100 percent taxable U.S. entities that are thriving. Is this an investment or a grant of shares to the U.S. government? Well, Bernie's proposal is a tax, so it's just a grant of shares to the U.S.

46:29government. Right. So I don't think the government's going to – To present delusion for all the shareholders. I think it's going to be equivalent to 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 percent, and we're going to 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 open AI or you're anthropic and you have the opportunity to, say, donate 10 percent equity through some legal scheme to the U.S.

47:09government, one time, 10 percent, 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.

47:57Well, it gives the federal government a incredibly toxic incentive for 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 an incredibly toxic dynamic. Now, like you're saying, the American people now benefit from these two companies. Salim? And Brian said a second ago, there will be other companies that we haven't thought of yet. What do you do with them? They're not part of the U.S. investment. There's a broader incompatibility here. Think about these labs and AI labs becoming civilization-scale infrastructure, right?

48:37That 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 a 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 big incompatibility problem that I see here.

49:12We'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, Beck, 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 U.S. Treasury does take golden shares, call it 5 to 10 percent in OpenAI and Anthropic to complement its existing portfolio.

49:46And 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. Yep. All right. Late-breaking story. OpenAI has officially filed its S1 to go public later this year.

50:28Polymarket 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 third trillion-dollar IPO following Anthropic and SpaceX AI. which is coming at 1.77 trillion in just a couple of days. I wanted 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 Fryer, 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.

51:10I 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 three or four quarters into the future. But in the singularity, no one's ever going to have visibility three or four quarters into the future ever again. That's just the nature of technology. Yeah, exactly. So I think CFOs like Sarah just need to get comfortable with, look, this is the way the future has to be. and what used to be three, four, four, five quarters of visibility is now three, four, five months is the best you're ever going to get.

51:45And even that is a shrinking horizon. But the economy marches on. We're going to have to get used to that. If you look at just the daily volatility of the market, it's so high now because tech is just – that's just the nature of tech. So I think the CFOs of the future will get used to it. But you can't miss the IPO window, right? If you get SpaceX going out and you get Anthropik going out, you have to go out. The challenge is 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 SpaceX is skyrocketing and Anthropic is growing at 640 % per year, it's dangerous to come out third.

52:25It is, Peter. But if you said, OK, 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, OK, you can't wait years. Anything could happen in between. Meanwhile, these guys are fully tanked up and moving 100 ,000 miles an hour. No, you don't want to be that company. So you got to go. When you've got these trillion-dollar IPOs, the whole kind of corporate wrapper seems way too small for what's going on.

53:02This is so unprecedented compared to anything in human history. It's just absolutely wild. Yeah. Go on, Alex. Remember also these concerns. April was a whole two months ago. That's several lifetimes in singularity, time scaling 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.

53:45So 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.

54:39Scary. 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 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 the 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.

55:16But for all my friends who are public company CEOs, it's not fun. How do you think about 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 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.

55:56And 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. But, 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.

56:31And if you hit at least 70 percent 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. And, 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 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.

57:01And I'm a little worried about these valuations where retail is going to be the buyer of this. And take the hit. Yeah, it could be pretty choppy here. Because we talked about how AI is sort of taking all the oxygen out of the room. Like selfishly, I think others 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 models because they keep like the open source models are basically just as good and three to six months behind for like 99%.

57:37If that much. If that much. Yeah. And they're like literally 99 % cheaper for inference. So I think the demand for intelligence is almost infinite. It probably is infinite, but the costs are going to 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 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 going to be dramatic. And I think within 12, 18 months, 80 % of our workloads are going to be going to models that are 99 % cheaper.

58:18Yeah, 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 U.S. 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 three 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 five years from now they're way up from their IPO valuations.

59:03Is 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 the room everywhere. All right, this next story generally 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.

59:45And 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 Reif 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. And this tells us clearly the story. There's a massive AI compute shortage. I'd love to get your take on this, Alex, because there is a view of the world where Elon was building a frontier lab with a 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 one colossus two is still grinding away on the you know the the mother of all frontier models you're gonna actually when we interviewed him in austin remember peter he said that you're going to be absolutely blown away by it was grok five yeah it's it's it's brilliant and you know That was due out in March, and here we are.

1:00:56Well, he's clearly refocused his attention. Did he rent all of Colossus 2? Do you know, Alex? I think a lot of it is my understanding. So I took a bit of heat for saying a few episodes ago that 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 the second tier of the frontier.

1:01:42Call it the Google tier until Google hopefully leapfrogs. leapfrogs, it would certainly be great to get more competition among frontier models. But if I'm Elon, 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.

1:02:24And Alex, don't forget, the Anthropik deal can be canceled with, you know, some, like a quarter or two notice. It's month by month. I think it's month by month. And then this is only a three-year contract. So when Elon, Elon never plays second fiddle, right? He will be working on Rod. 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 Grok 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.

1:03:10And then Once you have 10x, 100x more compute than everyone else, then you go and try to reachieve your frontier status by training on the world's... 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 may be speculatively he can buy enough compute to buy his way back to the frontier. You know, Google needs this much external compute, like at this scale, that tells you the bottleneck is completely shifted from model design to infrastructure.

1:03:52I'm finding this hard to comprehend that Google needs this level of compute. That's a crazy, crazy number that's 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 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 think these are different generations. So the Colossus one was sort of an unholy admixture of several different, I think it was a mixture of H100s and several other generations.

1:04:40So Colossus two 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 a 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 I want to make here. This next story is sort of science fiction becoming real. I love the scope and audacity 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.

1:05:26The specs are wild. 150 kilowatts of peak compute, 70 kilowatts per ton. This is a two-ton satellite, a 70-meter wingspan, basically the wingspan of an Airbus 380 with 110 square meters of deployable radiative cooling and an integrative 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.

1:06:05It's easier to design 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.

1:06:43look 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.

1:07:35These 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's what 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, any appreciation that you want to share on this one?

1:08:19I mean, Elon's the best in the world at hardware, no doubt about it. 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 five 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.

1:08:48And 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. But also, keep in mind, again, so 150 kilowatts, we were speaking previously with Andrew and talking about Cerebrus. Cerebrus, like a wafer scale engine is what, like 10, 20, 30 kilowatts? 20 kilowatts. 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.

1:09:34So imagine how far we are from the 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 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.

1:10:15So plenty of scaling to go as well. Dave? So 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, he wants to get it down to$100 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. You know, the calculation is like a launch per hour of Starship, 24 hours a day, seven days a week to deploy that.

1:10:57And then he upped it to a million satellites. 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. And there's such an unbelievable demand for power that we have to do this.

1:11:34And 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.

1:12:09And 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 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. And he was building out, again, 11 million square feet for Optimus production. So the important thing here is it's fully integrated. They're going to produce the solar ingots, the wafers, the solar cells, and the entire AI One satellite all on one campus.

1:12:52And vertical integration matters. 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. And look at Texas just running away with every one of these projects. Everybody. It's crazy. Yeah. 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 two golf courses. The next time you're flying, look down. It's just two golf courses, guys. is not taking over all the land in Texas.

1:13:30But the impact of this on the economy in that state is unbelievably healthy, unbelievably good. 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 doing that, but it's not necessarily just for his own sake or because he wants to be 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.

1:14:15So 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. 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 Dyson swarm, not from the Earth's surface, where the economics for heavy launch are less favorable.

1:14:56I'll never forget, I was with Elon at SpaceX headquarters, and we were having a conversation about 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 Pika, which is the heat shielding for the Dragon capsule, and he was getting screwed by the manufacturer. And so he just turns 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?

1:15:33It'd be great to get everyone's prediction. But this partnership right now between Dario and Elon is insanely powerful. Because 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.

1:16:10You know, there's no physical stuff going on at Anthropic at all yet. And, you know, you know where the rubber really hits the road is the AI that designs chips. So here's Elon building the TerraFab. But the chip design itself comes from the smartest AI, which is 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 five years ago? 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.

1:16:48So what's your question? Is the partnership going to stick together? Well, five years from today, are Dario and Elon friends? No. 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.

1:17:29It's questioning the question itself. Salim, thoughts? I totally agree with you, Peter. I think this is like, just, I mean, just boggled by the level of somebody thinking at civilization scale on a nonstop basis. And I love it. This episode is brought to you by Blitzy, autonomous software development with infinite code context. Blitzy uses thousands of specialized AI agents that think for hours to understand enterprise scale code bases with millions of lines of code. Engineers start every development sprint with the Blitzy platform, bringing in their development requirements. The Blitzy platform provides a plan, then generates and precompiles code for each task.

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1:18:58SpaceX 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. We're seeing the birth potential of the first$100 trillion company. And these charts down below tell the story. So here's the revenue numbers today. You know, Starlink is$11 billion of revenue.

1:19:45Launch 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 crazy numbers. Any thoughts on this? I mean, I don't think people could have predicted this. Again, no company in history has ever hit a trillion dollars of revenue. So just to put this in contact, you're talking about the really, really big guys like Walmart and Amazon. You know, they're getting close, but they're not at a trillion yet. So this is$3.4 trillion. Yeah, on the other hand, a trillion is what, like 3 % of U.S. GDP? That's today's GDP.

1:20:27If 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. Salim, you want to close this out? I got nothing. OK. All right. Fair. I have a question for Brian, though, just on that narrow point. So let's say we do build the Dyson Swarm.

1:21:08Let's say most of the compute in our solar system is no longer Earth-based, and presumably most of our economy consists of AI 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. You know, 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.

1:21:58No latency considerations, no trust-based considerations, no decentralization considerations. It 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, you know, 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. And, you know, so they're not going to be real time payments between those planets, but there could be appropriately delayed payments.

1:22:38They won't need to settle as often. So are these What are the 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, you know? 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 gonna 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 uh in the in the process so while i have brian uh brian longevity and biotech one of my favorite stories.

1:23:34So first off, congratulations on your recent raise at New Limit,$435 million to push us towards age reversal. If you don't mind, tell us, you know, origin story of New Limit 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 - I saw that. He's brilliant. Yeah, 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 going to be the big technology trends that could drive civilizational progress.

1:24:17I 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. 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 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 one of the folks mentioned epigenetic reprogramming, which is this area that talks about how you can reprogram cells.

1:24:52Shinya 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 by doing so, with just these four 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 New Limit, 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.

1:25:24It starts with AI to explore the 10 quadrillion different possibilities, combinations of different proteins you could use to reprogram a cell. And it starts to... Originally, it ingested all of the existing literature. Now it's been ingesting the wet lab data that's been coming out of New Limit, which we have the largest data set 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.

1:26:02For instance, we might take a reprogrammed liver cell and see if it can process caffeine and acetaminophen and alcohol or whatever, kind of like 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 five 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 candidates going into the clinic next year, hopefully followed by a bunch more.

1:26:35Amazing. Human trial next year. And you and Blake put in the first hundred million. I remember that. I remember coming to your lab and seeing it. Full disclosure, I'm also a shareholder, an investor in U-Limit, very proud of that. So congrats on the progress. And other news related in epigenetic reprogramming, Life Bioscience is another one of my portfolio companies, announced 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 hold as a target for when do we hit LEV? Do you have a number in your head? Do you have a goal?

1:27:19You know, man, we need Kurzweil to come plot another curve for us, don't we? He's got his prediction. His prediction is 2033. Huh. I'd 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'm just been, again, trying to solve more mundane problems. Like, how do we hire the next bioinformaticist or whatever? But 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, perhaps unsurprisingly. 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.

1:28:07And the reason why I say that is, and I wrote about this in my newsletter, I know, Peter, you immediately said, oh, but, but, but. In the past few weeks, there was a really interesting paper published on the first placebo, rather double-blinded study on HIV patients receiving GLP-1s looking at epigenetic clocks. And I know all the caveats, epigenetic clocks, Horvath-style clocks aren't as good assays at determining biological age as a variety of functional measures. I know all of that. Nonetheless, 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.

1:29:01And that makes me ask whether, as we're now with Red Hatru Tide 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 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 LEV without broader notice that it just happened. Well, we're going to have some level of proof, right? We have this$101 million health span prize going on where we're measuring functional reversal of age, right?

1:29:49Again, the biomarkers right now, 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 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.

1:30:25And 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, any thoughts? You think, Peter, or maybe a question to Peter and Brian on this, you think we're going to be arguing and 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 five years ago.

1:31:02I like your theory. I like your theory on that, Alex. 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 certain medical tests, et cetera.

1:31:44So 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 a thousand years old is already alive. And that just blows your mind. Yeah. And I agree with you, right? The whole basis 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.

1:32:21She 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 New Limit? It's not one of the ones we've targeted yet, but yeah, I think it's on the list somewhere. We're going to 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 GOP-1s, right?

1:33:00For 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 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?

1:33:36really 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 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.

1:34:11It'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 two, 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, you know, automate a bunch of wet lab tests. Does that give you like concurrent many, many lines of research or what does it look like? Run a human trial. It's one trial. A lot of trials.

1:34:46I mean, 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 like 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 one trial might be, I don't know, 10 or 20 million. And you can kind of go up from there on phase two and phase three. 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.

1:35:18Alex, I love this tweet I saw from at Sam Suara, starting to mourn all the people who died before the singularity. I'm mourning all the people who've died, period. And I think, you know, when to Brian's point about all of the grand challenges that there aren't yet billionaires solving, I think I'll throw this out to 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.

1:35:58I love that. All right. Our next story here is a fun one. Our last three stories in the field. Columbia University researchers successfully edited a PCSK9 gene. This is, you know, your LDL, your bad cholesterol, and an HPG 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 Jianku, successfully edited the CCR5 gene in two young girls that were brought to term healthy to make HIV resistant.

1:36:50So 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.

1:37:34And, 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, a Sillamar or otherwise, why this wouldn't become a broad spread practice. Yes. Yeah, obviously, 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 five foot and you want your kids to be taller, 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.

1:38:26Salim, 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 said, this is incredible between sequencing, CRISPR, IVF, AR modeling.

1:39:01Like 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, I think one of the one of the bigger problems with this particular one of the bigger complexities is jurisdiction. So if you were if you live in a country, so suppose your parents are in the U.S. And you go to a Caribbean island and that Caribbean island is, yeah, do whatever you want. So then you've got a baby. Then you bring that baby back in the U.S. 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.

1:39:39So that's a really big complexity in this whole 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 on net. I think a lot of people will freak out about it for a while. But I think there was a Pew Research study I saw that something like 80 % of Americans would support embryo editing for disease prevention. So that was more than I expected. 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?

1:40:19not having a disease sounds like a pretty good enhancement to me. I mean, there's cases where, like, 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, you know, 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?

1:40:50Because 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 seven 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 seven foot long tall child by design you're going to go to that caribbean island and make your seven foot tall job for economic reasons you know think of what could go wrong then so there's going to be some serious guardrails there has to be guardrails around this you know there's a company i love uh called nucleus uh kian uh sadagi uh the ceo is going to be at my abundance longevity trip in October.

1:41:43Brian, I'm hoping to have someone from ULIMIT there as well. But what Nucleus does is you fertilize 20 eggs, 20 zygotes, and then you sequence them. And you can choose the one out of the 20 that have the attributes instead of playing dice and hoping for the lucky sperm, you can actually pick the one that has 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, except that's not even true with base editing. It's better than the best of the parents.

1:42:25Well, Brian, listen, thank you for joining us today. Grateful. I know you've got 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 a 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. Andre Kaparthi, 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.

1:43:07You 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 five minutes, Anthropic takes back the crown across most measures of superintelligence. A few notes. The distinction between Fable 5 versus Mythos 5. Mythos is, 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.

1:44:05But 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 from me to suggest that Pokemon 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.

1:44:46It's able to, based on just watching the screens of games like various Pokemon 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.

1:45:31It'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 four hours, but I've been playing for four hours. 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.

1:46:09So 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. And also, I think this is interesting that Anthropic had it in the bag. You know, Alex just mentioned that, you know, the leap frog is going on, but actually OpenAI pushed out their best. And Anthropic then said, okay, well, we had this ready to go.

1:46:49So, 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, 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.

1:47:28You know, you've got the mythos, which we've been talking about for a while. And then Fable is the heavily guardrailed, won't do a cyber threat, won't do a nuclear weapon version of the exact same model. So they even differentiated it by name to support exactly what you're saying, Salim. With pretty broad buffers. 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.

1:48:11You know, funny you say that, Alex, because, you know, I'm often trying to work from a plane and SSH doesn't work on the plane Wi-Fi. And so I, you know, 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 the cybersecurity. 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.

1:48:48They'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, Peter, we have competition. The situation could be worse. We could just have a singleton, a single lab 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.

1:49:26The 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 Kristen, it can spell it correctly or it can spell my name 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.

1:50:04And it's a stunning concession from the company that has always priding itself on its own stack. Second, the real emote 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 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.

1:50:49Second 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.

1:51:35So 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 the 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 moved to an Android phone so many times just because of its ability to contextualize all of my personal context. A third perspective, yes. And a third perspective is if you buy that foundation model economics are hyper deflationary and 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.

1:52:33And yes, Apple maybe 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 hyper deflation 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.

1:53:16They 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. Dave, any thoughts on Apple? Yeah, lots. Well, anytime in tech that you don't do anything for a long period of time, you'll eventually get crushed. The question is, how does it emerge? The way it would play out if Apple doesn't do something aggressive is you lose the interface. You know, Siri is now Google, but Google is Android, and Android is the one competitor to the iPhone.

1:53:51Remember, 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 the machines get the actual physical phones get manufactured by Samsung using Samsung's chip manufacturing capability, which is immune to TSMC.

1:54:36Salima, I want to acknowledge your persistence and your ability to stay with the conversation. This is a new low. I'm in my airplane seat. So let's just let it just go past this. Okay, closing thoughts on Apple and Siri. I believe that it's good. I believe that it's good when I see it. Yeah. We've been so disappointed over and over again. You know, you and I met the founders of Siri before they sold to Apple. And 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 during the singularity don't sleep, don't blink and set your moon checks.

1:55:46The words live long and prosper really fit that. Yeah, they do. Take care, gentlemen. Safe travels, everybody. Peace and long life. Take care, folks. If you made it to the end of this episode, which you obviously did, I consider you a moonshot mate. Every week, my moonshot mates and I spend a lot of energy and time to really deliver you the news that matters. If you're a subscriber, thank you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please consider subscribing so you get the news as it comes out. I also want to invite you to join me on my weekly newsletter called MetaTrends. I have a research team. You may not know this, but we spend the entire week looking at the MetaTrends that are impacting your family, your company, your industry, your nation.

1:56:30And I put this into a two-minute read every week. If you'd like to get access to the MetaTrends newsletter every week, go to diamandis.com slash MetaTrends. That's diamandis.com slash metatrends. Thank you again for joining us today. It's a blast for us to put this together every week.