City Bank 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 Brian, congratulations on your recent raise at New Limit, $435 million to push us towards age reversal.
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. 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.
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, professor of exo. See, where on the planet are you today?
If I look out the window, I'm in Vegas. I just spoke at a Zelle 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, doing deep research no doubt.
The work doesn't stop, however the orchids do.
Okay. And Dave Blendon, 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 New Limit. 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, just to give a quick summary. We have 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, ginormous satellites. Our promise, no politics, no doom, just the science, tech, and investments accelerating us towards a 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 cost 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. City Bank 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 City is publishing prices that look like Apple stock. Brian, you want to give us a little bit of overview of what you're seeing? We've just maybe bottomed out at 60. 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. 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 and so stablecoins kind of became the new meta. And maybe 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 maybe we're going to 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 going to 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 four-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've probably 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 price and I'm long Bitcoin just like always.
So, I bought my first Bitcoin in 2014 on Coinbase. So, I'm a long-standing 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 are not going to be using checking accounts in 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, 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? 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. I 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, maybe 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 Salem, just to react to something you said, I think you mentioned the agentic economy. I totally agree. I think actually stablecoin payments will probably be the default layer for the agentic economy. And right now 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. Somebody was telling me today at lunch, they're like, are you like a monotheist or a polytheist on AI? The monotheists would say there's going to be one super intelligence, AGI, to rule them all and it'll have so much brain power that it can do everything itself in the world. The polytheist would say that each of these models, even as they get smarter and smarter, which they will, they're going to 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 if there's 10 agents working on something, they'll give their status updates and the information will go up a layer and that layer will consolidate up to another orchestrator. So I ascribe more to the 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 everybody who was buying GPUs and buying energy plants to mine crypto, all of a sudden flipped it into GPUs and energy plants to 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 and infrastructure. Do you think that might be part of it?
Yeah, I think that's probably correct. And you're right that Bitcoin mining does take a certain amount of chips and energy. That's kind of 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 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.
Interesting. Dave, any points you want to make?
Well, I thought Brian's point on risk capital was 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, 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 does that return you to dollars being the fundamental economy or the fundamental currency of the world? How does that balance with Bitcoin? 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. Interestingly enough, the Polymarket prediction on Bitcoin by the end of 2026 is 84,000. I am so curious about City Bank projecting 189,000. Was that a surprise to you, Brian?
Yeah, I mean I hadn't actually seen that till you just put it on the screen here, but some of the charts I've seen, 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 100 to 200k range seems plausible to me by end of year. We'll see.
Okay. Any other thoughts, Jens, before I move on?
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% of Bitcoin gets traded daily whereas gold only 5% of gold gets traded daily. So the trading volume is much higher which shows that it's just so much more accessible over time that will win out.
Yeah, custodial is a nightmare etc etc.
I'll maybe just open, Peter first of all, Brian would love to thank you for what you've done in particular for agentic 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. Brian, you may not know this, but Dave Blendon and I were roommates with Michael Saylor. So, the three of us used to hang out on the fourth floor of Theta Delta Chi at MIT. That was fun. And Michael comes across, I don't worry about it. Quantum computing won't break Bitcoin. It's hardened it. 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 posting post-quantum, quantum resistant schemes. Can you speak to us about that? Where is that? What are you tracking as the moment in time that, as a 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. 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 BIP 360 I believe and the Ethereum team has established a road map. 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 cryptography expert at Coinbase. So there's a handful of folks here that have come together and tried to sus out what the main challenges are. And I actually think that BIP 360 is a good proposal. It talks about how we can use post-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, 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 if it goes past the deadline, those coins would be frozen under option A. 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 who has this quantum computer. It could be China, it could be the US, could be Google. And 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. 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 grab some of these coins. That's like a bounty. It's a bounty for them to go take it. 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 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. The details of that are a little bit ambiguous at the moment. There's various proposals, but that hopefully gives you a sense of a little bit of what the Bitcoin community will have to grapple with.
Is there a date by which your group of advisers are saying we should make the switch over?
I don't think they've put out a hard date at the moment. They're mostly trying to help the community come together in in-person meetings to start to talk about what the options are and align on a path forward.
I'm also one other curiosity. Satoshi's wallet. How big is that bounty? Any idea?
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. But 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. Our final Bitcoin crypto story, perhaps one of the most important ones, and Alex is a nod to you. Coinbase says agent economy has arrived. AI 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 a million dollars 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. 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, 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 a thousand to one, a million to one, a billion to one 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. I think it's about 100 million transactions now, maybe 50 million of value.
So it's growing quickly. So yeah, 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. I kind of broke it down into three. The first one is that everyone's using these LLMs, 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 LLM 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 step one 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 two is a lot of people are going to want to just have something like this right inside the Coinbase account. So this is where we created something called Coinbase Advisor. It can kind of help you with things like rebalance my portfolio, tax loss harvesting. It can prompt you with things and say, 'Hey, 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.' So that's step two 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 is going to have its own financial account, and it has to be able to sign up for that without going through a traditional process of KYC. An 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 with our Base protocol, we have 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 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'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 for Brian, if the government tomorrow were to change, 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 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, 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 the agents who are also being left out of the economy.
I won't stop there, Brian. I'm going to thank you in advance for enabling non-human animals to be banked. 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.
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.
Borg organism bank accounts.
Yeah. And have you probably read a lot about uplifting animals and like you could make a dolphin that's actually pretty high IQ with genetic engineering.
Portfolio company Sorama 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 smart, I don't know if 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, okay, KYC is no longer required. 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. But 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 stablecoins is that the infrastructure is just much 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, but the KYC thing would definitely help. Let's put it that way.
And Brian, this strategy potentially breaks all existing regulations and KYC assumptions. So talking about liability, if an agent overpays or gets scammed or launders value, have you thought through liability issues?
Yeah. Well, I think 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, that'll be an interesting legal case when that first gets brought about. And maybe it'll get sentenced to have to be in solitary confinement or whatever is.
Yeah, I don't. 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.
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. 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 can go buy things or an agent could buy things with some amount of additional information to know how many times did people request a refund for this? Or what's the reputation of this merchant? Like on eBay, I love this. Don't do business with this agent, it's got a low score or this agent has got 100% Uber score.
See, what are you thinking here?
Well, two things. One is I think once you allow agent e-commerce, this fully enables the MTAM economy, which is going to be the future. Obviously, human transactions can be a drop in the bucket based on that. Because the minute agents can negotiate, pay, buy, consume, etc., we talked about the organizational singularity that's going to collapse coordination costs again. So 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. 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. Dave, I want to go to you first. One of the questions that fascinates me is what would the government do with these shares? Sell them, keep them. What are your thoughts?
Well, I'll tell you what'll happen. These are very good moves. 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 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. What we're going 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 threats. And I think these are 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 rent which it inevitably will do. So definitely a mixed bag.
There's an argument that these companies could be the most valuable 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 the enterprise value of Anthropic or its ARR and you find that it intersects with Google in the next 18 months or that if you naively extrapolate 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 think if you really do believe that super intelligence 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 we talked a bit about this on the past two pod episodes. Yes, 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 UB on the one hand. We have super intelligence on the other. And 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.
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 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 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 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. 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 solely to the civilian government 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 war. It was born out of a time and 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 that the AI companies themselves are not born out of a sense of guilt. They are born out of a sense of excitement and possibility. And so the regulatory capture risk is different. The AEC was designed to be a check on the very power it was unleashing. The AI companies are not asking for that kind of check. They are asking for permission to go faster. So the dynamic is inverted. And I think that inversion might lead to a different outcome than the nuclear precedent.
Super intelligence 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 rise of atomic power and how it was regulated in this country during and after World War II with AI technology, in some sense they are polar opposites. It started from the private sector. The US government could have taken an early stake, could have been 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, 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's 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. 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 there was a matter of national security and these companies 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 who's going to be managing this portfolio of company stocks, and when would they sell them? Because it's not like a foregone conclusion that Anthropic and OpenAI 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 we're going to have 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.
Considering that companies donate to political campaigns, you think about how toxic that circle is. 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.
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. 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. It's a little bit like in a company, inside Coinbase, employees get stock options because if we all have skin in the game, 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. 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 a Singapore model where the top people in private industry got commensurate compensation to come into government, like Michael Grimes from Morgan Stanley came in and was working with the administration at some point, someone like him would probably do a good job managing and allocating it. Do I believe that's going to exist in every administration over time? It's just very hard to see it not getting politicized, right? Where they start investing in the green revolution whether that works or not, or all kinds of things like that. So I don't know, 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. 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. It also is having a huge impact on health, helping you prevent heart disease. One of the key things I'm here with Dr. Don Mucalem, 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 five, my husband died of sudden cardiac death. And so this is a topic 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.
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. So check it out at fountainlife.com/per 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. Five years ago this conversation would have been unthinkable. The Overton window on AI wealth distribution has moved dramatically. 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 it's insane. Do you think it's going to happen?
No, I don't think it'll happen. I think Bernie's just trying to attract news. And 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 it out, but it doesn't strike me as one of the most likely investments that Trump would make. 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?
Bernie's proposal is a tax. So it's just a grant of shares to the US government, right?
I think it's going to be equivalent to Alaska's permanent fund. You've been using our intelligence, our energy, our real estate, our oxygen. We're going to claim 10% and give it to the people.
I would say look at it from the frontier labs perspective. Put aside any politics or technical arguments or legal or regulatory arguments. Just think about it from an optical or marketing perspective. If you're OpenAI or Anthropic and you have the opportunity to 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.
The federal government creates an 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, 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 US investment.
Yeah, there's a broader incompatibility here. Think about these 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 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? 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 an S&P 500 or a total market index, gradually liquidating its holdings in the individual companies in favor of a total market index. And that, children, is how we got our universal basic income or equity.
Mhm. Yep. All right. Late breaking story, OpenAI has officially filed its S1 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 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 a month and a bit ago. Do you guys remember? Sarah Frier, the CFO, came out and said privately that she was very concerned that OpenAI was not ready to be a public company. 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. 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 in the future ever again. That's just the nature of technology. So I think CFOs like Sarah just need to get comfortable with the fact that this is the way the future has to be.
And what used to be three, four, five quarters of visibility is now three, four, five months is the best you're ever going to get. And even that is a shrinking horizon. But the economy marches on. We have to get used to the fact that if you look at the daily volatility of the market, it's so high now because tech is 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 Anthropic going out, you have to go out.
The challenge is coming out third during a cash crunch, right? 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.
It is, but if you said the counterargument is then let those other two IPOs happen. 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.
Yeah, you're not talking about 3 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 dollar IPOs, the whole kind of corporate rapper seems way too small for what's going on.
This is so unprecedented compared to anything in human history. It's just absolutely wild.
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. So 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 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, OpenAI, not investment advice, comes out 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 had 20 billion of ad revenue and 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, right?
Brian, I have to imagine that being a founder tech company is the big advantage that you have over traditional large corporations. 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 remembering when you were a couple months before your IPO? What's going on inside of a company theoretically like this?
A couple things come to mind. One is there should be some healthy tension between a founder CEO and a CFO. Founders are great at many things, but if you just have too much founder energy, sometimes they blow the place up. 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, because that's a recipe for incrementalism or even slow decline. So sometimes the press likes to report on these things like there's drama happening, and I'm like, that's called a healthy conversation. So I imagine that they're actually working relatively well together on this and it's a high stakes moment for both of them. The other thing is sometimes people criticize OpenAI like they missed their target to get a billion users or something. Internally, we often use the OKR system and we tell everybody to set uncomfortably ambitious goals, and if you hit at least 70% of it, that's considered a good outcome. So when companies switch into the public mindset, they start setting their goals to be more appropriate for external investors where they hit their goals every quarter. So 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: they've got to get out just because that's what their competitors are doing and that's where the capital is going to go. So it's going to be uncomfortable and messy, and 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. Selfishly, because we talked about how AI is taking all the oxygen out of the room, I think other techos are kind of like, all right, finally get these things public so there can be a real mark on it and maybe the hype dies down a little bit. I also think there's going to be fierce competition amongst these models because the open source models are basically just as good and 3 to 6 months behind for 99% of use cases, if that much.
Yeah. And they're 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 way more than Moore's law. So are the harnesses 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 the depreciation on these models, how fast the price of them drops for the same level of intelligence, is going to be dramatic. And within 12 to 18 months, 80% of our workloads are going to 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 this was the worst disaster in US financial history when the stock was down about half after the IPO. Nothing wrong with the company obviously, and it was a great investment in hindsight, but there just wasn't enough liquidity. So they dumped it in all their private client accounts and watched it go down by half. And now we're doing three back-to-back IPOs, each one of which is a factor of 10 bigger than anything we've ever seen before. 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, is there really that much money in the world? Like does it actually exist?
And we'll find out, I guess.
