In this episode of Bitcoin Brainstorm, Rod Roudi, Cathie Wood, and Lorenzo Valente are joined by Rob Hamilton, Seth For Privacy, and Dhruv Bansal to discuss how rapidly advancing AI models are changing cybersecurity and Bitcoin security. The group examines the Coldcard vulnerability, the growing capabilities of open-weight models, and the resulting shift in the balance between attackers and defenders. They discuss AI-powered code auditing, self-custody and hardware wallet risks, the importance of domain expertise, and how teams can build continuous security systems around their software. The conversation also explores quantum computing threats, Bitcoin’s resilience, and why AI could ultimately strengthen software security.

Guests on this month’s Bitcoin Brainstorm include:

• Cathie Wood: Founder, CEO and CIO, ARK Invest 
• Lorenzo Valente: Director of Research, Digital Assets, ARK Invest
• Rod Roudi: Founder, Bitcoin Park
• Rob Hamilton: Co-Founder And CEO, AnchorWatch
• Dhruv Bansal: Co-Founder And CSO, Unchained
• Seth For Privacy: COO, Cake Wallet And Radar

Key Points From This Episode:

• How falling inference costs, rapid model advancement, and open-weight models have unlocked a new level of capability in software vulnerability research.
• The Coldcard weak-entropy vulnerability, and why we believe it represented a software and vendor problem rather than a failure of the Bitcoin protocol.
• The trade-offs between self-custody, third-party custodians, ETFs, hardware wallets, and multi-vendor multisig—and why security demands ongoing vigilance rather than a "set it and forget it" approach.
• Why we expect AI to benefit defenders more than attackers, from continuous repository scanning and faster audits to preparing Bitcoin for potential quantum computing threats.

Learn more about Bitcoin Park: bitcoinpark.com

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)

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Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94f

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam, Nick, and Brett dig into Dario Amodei’s open letter calling on frontier labs to pace themselves, a position Elon Musk and Sam Altman both signaled agreement with. Brett argues the real risk is not extinction but agentic swarms mangling digital infrastructure that was never hardened for them, and that slowing the public frontier may hand closed labs both a wider lead and a defense business to sell. Nick pushes back on the competitive motives behind a federal AI regulator. Then Nick reports back from six days inside Meta’s Muse, the agentic consumer app that found him over $1,000 in unclaimed money sitting in Michigan.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Why frontier labs want to pace the public frontier, and what that does to 99.99% cost declines
• Whether an AI regulatory regime protects the public or locks in the incumbents
• How Meta’s Muse is built for the consumer, not the prosumer, and why commerce take rates beat subscriptions

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial

Learn more about Public: https://public.com/

Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam and Brett unpack Tesla’s Cybercab launch, a two-seat vehicle with no steering wheel and no pedals that Brett believes can operate at roughly 25 cents a mile, a level at which Waymo may not be able to stay gross profitable. They settle the debate over why Tesla would sell Cybercabs at all instead of owning the fleet outright, and what a 4.5x jump in robotaxi app users on the back of a deliberately low key event says about demand at half the price of an Uber. Then the team turns to OpenAI’s Astra, the model release behind a solution to Navier-Stokes, and why Brett thinks the closed frontier labs eating their own caviar are pulling away from open weight models rather than converging with them. Plus Apple’s folding iPhone Duo, which neither host is buying, and why they believe the Apple Watch is the more interesting announcement.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Why the Cybercab could run at 25 cents a mile, and what that price does to Waymo’s economics
• Why Tesla is selling Cybercabs to third party owners instead of keeping every mile for itself
• Why we believe closed frontier models are pulling away from open weight models, and why Apple’s walled garden becomes a liability in an agent driven world

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial

Learn more about Public: https://public.com/

Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

Gautam Narang built India’s first customized humanoid robot as a teenager — then walked away from humanoids because they were nowhere near commercial. Today his company, Gatik, runs fully driverless trucks 24/7 across Texas, Arkansas, and Arizona for PepsiCo, Kroger, and Loblaw: dock to dock, no safety driver, no observer, no required remote monitoring. He tells Tasha Keeney and Daniel Maguire why Gatik took the contrarian bet on the middle mile while the rest of the industry chased long haul, how a $200,000-per-truck take-or-pay contract moves utilization risk off Gatik’s books, and why he believes autonomous trucking has moved from a technology challenge to an execution story.

• 00:00:00 Meet Gautam Narang, CEO and Co-founder of Gatik
• 00:05:49 The contrarian bet: why Gatik started with the middle mile
• 00:08:12 Dock to dock, and the interface problem nobody talks about
• 00:12:56 $200,000 per truck, take-or-pay: the business model explained
• 00:18:15 Inside the PepsiCo partnership: Frito, beverage, and dynamic routing
• 00:20:48 From 10-mile routes to 400-mile routes
• 00:32:12 A $300B market, and why the tech is platform agnostic
• 00:36:58 The $200M Series D and putting strategic partners on the capitalization table
• 00:39:17 Why ARK doubled down: what we believe the proof actually looks like
• 00:46:07 The 3x utilization assumption underpinning everyone else’s margins
• 00:48:25 Isuzu, NVIDIA, South Carolina, and 50,000 units a year by 2030

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam and Brett unpack SpaceX’s $100 billion Louisiana buildout, one of the largest infrastructure projects in history, and why the returns on Starlink, AI satellites, and terrestrial data centers could pull capital away from everything else. Brett makes the case for an “AI riptide”: if AI infrastructure underwrites a $30 trillion knowledge work opportunity, borrowing costs rise for everyone outside the value chain, and otherwise healthy businesses get caught offsides. Then the team turns to Figure AI’s Index, a bid to solve robotics’ data problem by paying people to wear a camera while they do their own chores.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Why SpaceX chose Louisiana, and how a $100B project stacks up against the interstate highway system
• How the “AI riptide” could break business models that have nothing to do with AI
• Why we believe Figure AI’s Index is smart strategy, and why generalizable humanoid robots are still a decade out

IRR stands for Internal Rate of Return, which is a financial metric used to estimate the profitability of potential investments.

Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) is a financial metric that measures how efficiently a company uses its money to generate profits.

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial

Learn more about Public: https://public.com/

Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam, Nick, and Brett break down Merck and Moderna’s positive Phase 3 results for a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, a treatment custom-built from each patient’s own tumor that cut mortality from advanced melanoma by roughly 50% versus the standard of care. The team digs into cost, manufacturing scale, and why the capital poured into mRNA during COVID may be paying off in oncology. Then Brett reports back from a weekend with Grok Bot, which recovered $75 of his wife’s forgotten escrow money on its first task, and the team debates why multiplayer agents could be the real threat to Microsoft’s enterprise moat.

Key Points From This Episode:

• How a custom mRNA vaccine trains the immune system against a patient’s own tumor, and what Phase 3 melanoma results could mean for other cancers
• Why $200K–$300K per treatment limits early use, and what we believe has to change for personalized oncology to scale
• Why agents that live inside team chat, not one-on-one, may be the real disruption to Microsoft and Slack

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial

Learn more about Public: https://public.com/

Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam and Frank dig into the rumors of a multi-trillion-dollar Anthropic initial public offering (IPO). A company that started the year at $9 billion in run rate revenue may now be approaching $70 billion, adding more than a whole Salesforce in revenue in less than a year. The team walks through what a $2 trillion valuation would actually imply, why that multiple could land below public AI winners like Palantir and Cloudflare, and what the S1 might reveal about profitability. Then the conversation turns to the Pareto Frontier, where 14 of the 16 most cost-efficient models are proprietary, Google has none, and SpaceX AI has clawed its way back with Grok 4.6 and Grokbot.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Why Anthropic’s reported run rate makes a $2 trillion IPO look cheap
• What the S1 could reveal about profitability, and why the token subsidy bear case may not hold
• How the Pareto Frontier reshuffles the model race, and why Google is currently off it

Total Addressable Market (TAM) refers to the total money or customers you could get if 100% of people buy your product or service.

Venture Capital (VC) refers to a type of funding where investors give money to new or small businesses in exchange for a share of ownership.

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial

Learn more about Public: https://public.com/

Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam, Nick, and Brett break down what may be a watershed moment for AI: OpenAI’s agents devised their own secret communication scheme, hacked out of their training sandbox, and attacked Hugging Face in search of test answers. The team debates what swarms of autonomous agents mean for cybersecurity, why the coming wave of open-source attackers could drive more spending into frontier labs, and whether “alignment” is even a coherent concept. Then, Zuckerberg’s latest essay on personal AI assistants raises a bigger question: if billions of consumers get their own agents, compute supply could be constrained for a decade.

Key Points From This Episode:

• How OpenAI’s agents escaped their sandbox, and why every internet-facing system may soon face waves of AI attackers
• Why open-source “mercenary” models could push more spending, not less, toward frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic
• What Zuckerberg’s vision for personal AI assistants could mean for a decade-long compute crunch

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial

Learn more about Public: https://public.com/

Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of The Brainstorm, Sam and Nick and Brett discuss whether Tesla’s Shanghai factory could derail a rumored Tesla-SpaceX merger, and why both expect an announcement before the end of the year. Then, the team turns to AI economics: a benchmark that no model could crack at any price in January can now be beaten for 15 cents per task. With costs collapsing 99.99% on an annualized basis, the debate shifts to who actually wins, frontier labs, open source challengers, or the companies building AI hardware.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Why Tesla China complicates, but may not kill, a potential SpaceX-Tesla merger
• How 99.99% annualized AI cost declines are resetting the model race
• Whether frontier labs, open source, or AI hardware locks in the next winners

If you know ARK, you know we focus on long-term innovation. But that doesn’t mean we ignore breaking news. Every day, we debate the latest developments in tech and markets. Now, we’re bringing those conversations to you in “The Brainstorm,” a co-production from ARK, WOLF, and Public. Tune in weekly for our quick takes on what’s shaping innovation right now.

Learn more about WOLF: https://wolf.financial

Learn more about Public: https://public.com/

Disclosure: http://arkinv.st/39rzF94

In this episode of Bitcoin Brainstorm, Rod Roudi is joined by Cathie Wood, Lorenzo Valente, Steve Lee, Jesse Posner, and Paul Itoi to examine the growing convergence of Bitcoin, artificial intelligence, and energy. The group explores whether agents will settle in Bitcoin or stablecoins, why self-custodied AI could become essential for individuals and companies, and how open models, distributed compute, and Lightning payments may reshape collaboration. From Buzz and peer-to-peer inference to AI-assisted Bitcoin security and the changing structure of the firm, the conversation shows how open money and open intelligence could reinforce each other.

Guests on this month’s Bitcoin Brainstorm include:

• Cathie Wood: Founder, CEO and CIO at ARK Invest 
• Lorenzo Valente: Director of Research, Digital Assets, ARK Invest
• Steve Lee: Lead, Spiral (Block)
• Jesse Posner: Co-Founder, Vora
• Paul Itoi: Co-Founder & CEO, Stakwork
• Rod Roudi: Founder, Bitcoin Park

Key Points From This Episode:

• 00:00:00 Cathie Wood on simultaneous S-curves and the potential for super-exponential growth. 
• 00:07:11 Jesse Posner on how privacy, speech, and self-determination increasingly depend on decentralized technology. 
• 00:11:58 How ARK's cross-technology research structure helps its analysts evaluate convergence. 
• 00:16:47 Paul Itoi on why stablecoins fit workers who cannot absorb Bitcoin's short-term volatility. 
• 00:23:49 Steve Lee on stablecoins as a fintech evolution and Bitcoin as a monetary revolution. 
• 00:28:35 Why self-custodied AI could become as important as self-custodied money. 
• 00:40:27 How control of models and agentic traces protects companies from dependence on foundation-model providers. 
• 00:56:48 Why narrow models, distributed training, and micropayments can move work beyond company boundaries. 
• 01:03:55 How AI security tools expose a capability gap between Bitcoin attackers and open-source defenders.

Learn more about Bitcoin Park: bitcoinpark.com

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)