August Week 4 - 2025

CRYPTO RESET
When Banks Become Tech, The Bull You’re Missing

Markets may feel stuck on repeat, but under the surface a rewiring is underway. The same forces propelling AI are bleeding into money rails, setting up a rerating in finance that could make banks look more like tech. If incumbents strip out intermediaries, automate workflows, and lean into tokenized dollars and StableCoins, the revenue mix shifts away from spread income toward high-margin, software-like businesses. With deep customer relationships and scale, the largest franchises can impose power laws fast.

This sits inside a broader, still young bull market. After two strong years and another double digit gain in progress, history says we’re firmly in up trend territory. Waterfall selloffs have been followed by V-shaped rebounds unless a recession hits, and breadth is starting to widen beyond the biggest winners. On valuation, equal weight multiples remain near their six-year norms, hardly bubble territory when earnings keep surprising higher.

The economy’s caution is a feature, not a bug. Manufacturing sentiment has been below 50 for a historically long stretch, a sign companies under invested and now sit like a coiled spring. If the Fed resumes cutting and policy steadies, mortgage spreads should compress, unleashing a sizable refinance wave and new housing activity. That alone would pump liquidity back through consumer balance sheets and Main Street cap X.

AI is the through line. Utilities, industrials, and financials are riding a data center buildout, semis lead while some enterprise software gets disrupted as AI shrinks “seat based” demand. Inside crypto, adoption among older allocators remains thin, but the rails are maturing. As StableCoin frameworks and tokenization take hold, Ethereum’s smart contract ecosystem is a natural venue for on chain settlement. Corporate “treasury” structures accumulating yield bearing assets on those rails show one way traditional capital is crossing the bridge, without relying on leverage.

Bottom line, expect fast pullbacks and faster recoveries, with leadership broadening toward financials, industrials, housing-linked names, and durable quality growth. Watch three dialed Fed cuts, ISM flipping above 50, and mortgage rate spreads. If they move in tandem, the next leg of the cycle may come quicker than most investors are positioned for.

AI RESET
Is Chat GPT-6, Sam Altman’s Power Play?

Weeks after a rocky GPT-5 debut, Sam Altman has shifted the conversation to GPT-6 and reframed OpenAI’s roadmap around one idea, personalization at scale. Instead of merely fixing a model that many users found colder than GPT-4, he is positioning GPT-6 as a step change that learns who you are and adapts accordingly. The promise is a system that remembers past conversations, tracks ongoing projects, adjusts tone and depth to your preferences, and even allows ideological tuning while keeping the base model neutral. Under the hood, OpenAI is building persistent profiles that evolve with every interaction and is consulting psychologists to avoid reinforcing bad habits, signaling an intent to craft not just a smarter chatbot but a healthier digital companion.

The timing is strategic. By confirming GPT-6 is already in development and hinting at a faster cycle than the two and a half years between GPT-4 and GPT-5, OpenAI is telling investors and rivals that it is accelerating, not regrouping. It also shifts competition away from raw benchmarks toward user experience, where memory and continuity could make every session feel less like meeting a stranger and more like working with a colleague who knows your goals, constraints, and style.

The upside is obvious, seamless multi-session learning, smarter recommendations grounded in your history, and true project continuity over weeks or months. The risks are just as clear. Delivering persistent memory for millions of people is a massive technical lift, and storing that much personal context raises hard privacy questions. Raising expectations so soon after a bumpy launch also sets a high bar. The most likely outcome is a staged rollout that brings real gains in memory and adaptation, but not the full vision on day one. If OpenAI nails the execution, GPT-6 could redefine what an assistant feels like. If it stumbles, the backlash will be swift in an AI race that is only getting faster.

LONGEVITY RESET
Beyond “Jacked” What Travagramab & Garetosmab Really Mean for Longevity

A primate study lit up fitness feeds by pairing a GLP-1 drug with two Regeneron antibodies, travagramab and garetosmab. The combo appeared to burn fat while adding muscle without changing workouts. Extrapolated to humans on a five-month diet, you could see roughly 28 pounds of fat lost and about 9 pounds of muscle gained, with body fat dipping toward single digits. That is eye-catching, but the more important story is aging biology, not beach muscles.

First, a caution. Bigger muscles on MRI do not automatically mean greater strength. Force depends on dense, well organized fibers and on neural wiring that learns to recruit them. If size arrives faster than that wiring adapts, especially in older adults, you risk heavier bodies on brittle bones, overloaded joints, and worse balance. For longevity, timing and progression matter. Midlife augmentation, think ages 40 to 50, paired with training and maintenance, is far more promising than instant mass late in life.

The real breakthrough is precision control of the TGF-beta superfamily, a signaling network that governs muscle inhibition, inflammation, repair, bone dynamics, and even programmed cell death. Myostatin and activin A normally act as brakes on muscle growth. Early, blunt inhibitors bulked skeletal muscle and cardiac tissue together, which is dangerous. Travagramab was designed to target myostatin primarily in skeletal muscle, sparing the heart. Garetosmab focuses on activin A, a harder target because it also touches tumor suppression, neuroprotection, and bone. Using both together at lower doses can amplify benefit and reduce side effects, much like placing just enough “silly putty” in the right molecular keyholes without gumming up the rest.

Why this matters for longevity is simple. It is proof that we can fine tune specific TGF-beta pathways to reduce age related inflammation, improve tissue repair, and potentially slow functional decline while leaving helpful processes intact. Even if these therapies never extend maximum lifespan, they point toward programmable healthspan. Used recklessly, they create bigger problems. Used wisely, they open the door to targeted, multi-protein signaling that steers cellular fate and, with it, how well we age.

DISCLAIMER:
This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions or investments. Please be careful and do your own research.