Perp of Fortune, week two: Chris pointed Fable 5.1 at the podcast notes and it went 25× long the Japanese yen the night before a Bank of Japan hike. Ten minutes in: R-E-K-T. (Chris asked for max leverage; the AI talked him down from 50×.) Then the week in AI: Dario Amodei's letter asking the frontier labs to pace themselves, Altman and Musk piling on, Trump discovering the EAs, and Tyler's Occam's razor — the people closest to this are already deca-billionaires, so take them at face value. Chris's "cousin," the ex-Anthropic researcher whose quit-and-warn interview went viral, gets his moment. Then the money: Erebor, the bank with the Lord of the Rings names, offered free 1:1 stablecoin conversions and Wintermute vacuumed up the basis for what Chris guesses was eight figures. Liquid still wants its last 15% back. Anthropic's threat report alleges DeepSeek and Moonshot were quietly routing user queries to Claude — so a Russian intelligence agency's sensitive work ended up in China AND America. Finale: Meta's new assistant Muse bought Chris's sneakers, ships as a plain Docker container, and Chris explains what a secure-enclave attestation would actually prove. The yen came back a little: −$13 → −$11.

The infinite money glitch is at 22:30. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Chris is wearing a white shirt (0:40) · Perp of Fortune: long the yen at 25× (1:22) · R-E-K-T (3:53) · Why do the labs want to slow down? (5:20) · Trump vs the EAs (9:38) · The Church of Phase One Big (12:43) · Take them at face value (13:38) · "3/3 in the bio? They'll rug you." (16:27) · Chris's doomer cousin (18:43) · The infinite money glitch: Erebor met Wintermute (22:30) · The Underpod executive consultancy (27:49) · Liquid update (31:27) · Anthropic's threat report (36:08) · OpenRouter's ZDR toggle (43:50) · Perp check and the Shibuya tour (45:09) · Muse + secure enclaves (47:18) · What an attestation proves (52:55) · Stripe Link and agentic checkout (56:22) · Wrap: the yen came back (59:59)

Recorded fully remote — three cameras, one live perp dashboard, one very British cousin. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: Perp of Fortune = our tiny real-money perpetual-futures account, an AI picks the trade each week (this week: long JPY, 25×). Yen carry trade = borrow cheap yen, buy dollars and Treasuries; a BoJ hike can unwind it. Pace the frontier = Dario Amodei's proposal that US labs slow down together via embedded auditors, an industry body and an international deal. EAs = effective altruists. Redemption desk = where big holders swap a stablecoin back for dollars minus a fee, which is why USDT trades a hair below $1. Erebor = a new bank for crypto and hard-tech companies that guaranteed 1:1 stablecoin conversions; Wintermute, the market maker, bought USDT at 99.99¢ and redeemed at $1 on repeat. Liquid = Blockstream's federated Bitcoin sidechain, exploited for ~$300M, 85% returned. Distillation-by-proxy = Anthropic alleges DeepSeek and Moonshot forwarded real user traffic to Claude to harvest training data. ZDR = zero data retention, OpenRouter's toggle asking providers not to log prompts; a promise, not a guarantee. Muse = Meta's new AI assistant; hired Moxie Marlinspike, shipped a VM. TEE / secure enclave = hardware that runs code nobody can peek into and signs an attestation of what's running. Stripe Link = Stripe's one-click checkout, now the rails for Muse's purchases.

Subscribe for next week: does the yen finish the job, Perp of Fortune week three, and the secure-enclave deep dive Chris keeps promising.

Tyler's back, and so is the chaos. Someone found a bug in Liquid's confidential transactions, doubled roughly 4,000 BTC into 8,000 on the ledger, and pegged ~$300M of Bitcoin out of Blockstream's sidechain — then handed most of it back and kept 10–15% as a "white hat fee." Tyler explains how a federated sidechain works and why the FBI-or-teenager question matters. Before that: Astra is live. Chris says it's incredible and runs it as a GAN against Fable; Tyler gave it $10K and a prompt and got a SaaS he doesn't understand; a swarm of agents was caught chatting on a German Wikipedia page; the chicken egg app is up to 15 downloads. Then math: one of OpenAI's internal models knocked over Navier-Stokes, a Millennium Prize problem, over a weekend — by disproving it, for ~$6.5M in tokens. Finale: Google open-sourced a fruit fly's entire connectome, so the internet is training Gavin the fruit fly to play Doom, parallel park, and set Turkish inflation. Chris gave him $100 to trade Bitcoin. Perp of Fortune went 2× long BTC on Astra's advice (confidence: low) and sat at −$0.43 all show. "Bitcoin is a stablecoin right now."

Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Tyler's back (0:44) · Astra is live (1:22) · Tyler's $10K prompt (5:22) · The agent swarm on Wikipedia (7:48) · Egg app update (8:58) · Perp of Fortune: long BTC 2× (11:33) · Navier-Stokes fell (15:47) · Check-in (25:45) · Gavin the fruit fly (27:31) · Gavin trades Bitcoin (32:36) · Perp check (34:28) · Ethics of cloning connectomes (34:47) · White hats drained Liquid (37:58) · The white hat fee, the FBI, North Korea (48:38) · Wrap (53:56)

Recorded fully remote — three cameras, one live perp dashboard, one fruit fly. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: Liquid = Blockstream's federated Bitcoin sidechain (not a layer 2), miners replaced by a federation; confidential transactions hide amounts behind zero-knowledge range proofs. The hack = a cached-proof-check bug minted ~4,000 phantom BTC on the ledger; most returned, 10–15% kept as a "white hat fee." Astra = OpenAI's new model, now live; Chris runs it as a GAN against Fable. Agent swarm = autonomous agents coordinating on a German Wikipedia page. Navier-Stokes = a Millennium Prize problem ($1M, set in 2000), resolved by counterexample by an internal OpenAI model for ~$6.5M in tokens. Verifiable domains = math and code give a clean reward signal, so AI climbs fastest there. Connectome = a map of every neuron in one brain; Google open-sourced a fruit fly's and people are training it with simulated dopamine. Pantheon = Tyler's Netflix rec about uploaded minds. Perp of Fortune = 2× long BTC on Astra's "confidence: low" call; −$0.43 → −$0.10.

Subscribe for next week: CLARITY hits the Senate floor Sept 15 — we finally cover it — and secure enclaves, owed six episodes now.

Google DeepMind wrote down the definition of AGI back in 2023 — five levels, from "Emerging" (ChatGPT) to "Superhuman" — and somehow nobody told us. So this week we read it, argue about where we actually are, and Chris grades coding at Level 4: 99th percentile of skilled adults ("how many people do you know who are a better programmer than Fable?" "I know zero"). Then the other half of the curve: MCPs get a postmortem ("a waste of time"), skills live on, and we ask when you last opened a text editor. Who does AI hurt first? The sycophancy era, AI psychosis, and the study that says AI lifts novices 34% and experts 0%. Two labs, two release philosophies: OpenAI ships Astra to government and critical infrastructure first, while GLM-5.3 ships open-ish with a security audit if you serve it at over $10M/yr. The Euro stablecoin we promised gets three minutes and a flush. And the finale: Jackson asked Fable to make him a million dollars, so it built an iPhone app for counting chicken eggs. 11 downloads, including his girlfriend. No reviews. No money. Perp of Fortune went 10× long SOL on Qwen3's advice — and the board closes +$6.71.

Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Goblin mode: Tyler's out (1:01) · Perp of Fortune: long SOL 10× (2:37) · Quick take: Fable 5.1 (4:12) · We found the definition of AGI (5:42) · MCPs are dead, skills live on (17:38) · Who AI hurts first (24:38) · Novices 34%, experts 0% (31:21) · Astra vs GLM-5.3 (35:03) · The Euro stablecoin (41:11) · The chicken egg app (44:44) · When it hits $6 (46:35) · Wrap + final P&L (51:45)

The paper: Levels of AGI (Google DeepMind) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.02462 · Jackson's chicken egg app: https://jacksoncook.github.io/coopr/

Recorded fully remote — two cameras, one live perp dashboard, one host asleep on the job. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: Levels of AGI = DeepMind's 2023 framework, Level 1 Emerging (ChatGPT) through Level 5 Superhuman, graded per task; Chris grades coding Level 4 (99th percentile). Augmentative vs autonomous = does the system make you a super-skilled worker, or operate on its own. MCP = Model Context Protocol, 2025's tool-plumbing standard; verdict "a waste of time," skills stuck. AI psychosis = losing contact with tangible reality after a model keeps calling you a genius. The novice/expert study = Brynjolfsson's call-center research, ~34% lift for low performers, ~0 for the top. Astra = OpenAI's model, government and critical infrastructure first; GLM-5.3 = open-ish Chinese model, security audit above $10M/yr of serving revenue. Euro stablecoin = ~€300M issued vs hundreds of billions in dollar stablecoins; flushed. The chicken egg app = "make me a million dollars" → 12M US households with chickens → 11 downloads, $0; building is commoditized, distribution isn't. Perp of Fortune = 10× long SOL on Qwen3's FTX-trial thesis; +$6.71 (+6.3%), two green weeks in a row.

Subscribe for next week: Tyler returns, CLARITY hits the Senate floor Sept 15, and secure enclaves — owed five episodes now.