This episode of Empire features host Santiago (Santi) alongside Rob and guest Jordy Alexander, a proprietary capital allocator and co-founder at Cellini who manages a multi-strategy book spanning crypto, AI venture, biotech, defense, and rare earth materials. The conversation was recorded the day after an FOMC meeting, with Bitcoin under pressure and MicroStrategy's preferred notes flashing warning signs.

The episode opens with a detour into longevity, peptides, and Jordy's personal health transformation before pivoting to the Anthropic 'Fable' export ban, the open-source AI model landscape, and the case for crypto-native routing infrastructure. The hosts debate whether Dario Amodei's doom-focused messaging contributed to the US government's decision to restrict Fable's international distribution.

The back half covers MicroStrategy's capital structure stress, Hyperliquid's revenue ceiling, Coinbase's product announcements including a regulated AI investment advisor, and where macro flows are actually going — from RIA-driven Bitcoin allocations to SpaceX SPV mania. Content of the week includes the Nadal Netflix documentary and the 20VC interview with Perplexity's CEO.

Longevity, Peptides, and Jordy's 12% Body Fat Drop

Jordy lost 12% body fat — from 26% to 14% — over roughly 8 months through 15-20K daily steps, lifting three times per week, and a clean diet, not primarily through peptides.

He is taking several orally bioavailable peptides including BPC, NAD, and SLUPP-332, describing them as 'more chill peptides' that don't require injection.

Jordy frames his health optimization partly through the lens of Messi performing at elite level at age 39: 'Maybe I'm still cheering for Argentina. I want the old guy to show that 40s and 30s, we can still get it done.'

The group sees AI's most durable consumer use case as health and drug discovery: 'Everyone will spend money to be healthy and look good... that's a bigger TAM' than AI coding tools.

Anthropic's Fable Ban and the AI Storytelling Problem

Anthropic released 'Fable' publicly on June 9th; Commerce Secretary Lutnick and the US government issued an export ban roughly 3-4 days later, preventing international access — the first direct government intervention in frontier AI distribution.

Santi argues Dario Amodei's repeated emphasis on job losses and existential risk backfired: 'Someone just tell Dario to stop talking,' citing the 20VC interview with Perplexity's CEO as a counterexample of compelling, optimistic AI messaging.

Rob draws a sharp analogy: 'If you believe Dario's analogy that this is like a nuclear bomb... if an open source model is the equivalent of a nuclear bomb, it's not clear to me that the government is not going to want to get in the way of that as well.'

The group notes entrepreneurship is rising faster than in decades as AI lowers the cost of building: 'People are building new things with less people and less money, and it's more efficient than it's ever been' — a positive narrative that is being drowned out.

Open Source Models, Token Routing, and Crypto's AI Moment

Kasib's public take: he previously predicted the gap between open source and closed models would widen due to data and hardware gaps — 'I was wrong. ZAI is on another level, incredible benchmarks on this model.'

Santi's internal Blockworks policy: only about 5% of workflows should use the frontier model (e.g., Claude 4 / Fable); most tasks should route to older, cheaper models like Claude 4.6 or 4.8.

Rob sees a wave of middleware infrastructure companies building 'smart routing' layers: 'Instead of your engineer having to pick what model they use, these things are going to have so much data that they're going to be able to take that inference and route it to the right foundational model.'

Blockworks ran uncapped AI token spend for 6 months to drive adoption, using a shared Slack channel called 'AI Kitchen' for cross-team inspiration, and is now beginning to clamp down using Ramp's spend visibility tools.

Jordy is more bullish on tokenization of AI compute or model tokens than on privacy rails: 'The rails are way too good... I'm sure OpenAI and all these guys are looking at it.'

MicroStrategy's Capital Structure Under Stress

MicroStrategy's Stretch preferred notes were trading at $0.85 during the recording, with Rob noting the company has less than 8 months of dividend coverage remaining.

Rob estimates the actual net asset value of MicroStrategy if forced to liquidate today would be roughly half its current market cap, given approximately $8 billion in convertible senior notes sitting above the preferred in the capital structure.

Jordy outlines three scenarios: (1) sell small amounts of MSTR stock until it reaches ~0.7 MNAV to protect Stretch; (2) kill the dividend, letting preferred fall to 40-50 cents; (3) sell $5 billion of Bitcoin, which would actually help both Strategy stock and Stretch.

Jordy believes Saylor is prioritizing Stretch: 'He realizes right now he's too important for Bitcoin to start dumping the Bitcoin... so he's going to leave that last.'

MSTR is currently trading at approximately 1.1-1.15x MNAV, meaning Saylor can still sell small equity tranches without destroying the stock.

Jordy dismisses the Luna comparison as overblown: 'He's still raising $200 million a week and keeping half of it cash... I don't think he's gonna sell Bitcoin anytime soon.' But runs a Monte Carlo framing: 'If you play this hand over and over, you eventually blow up.'

Hyperliquid's Revenue Ceiling and Crypto Portfolio Positioning

Hyperliquid revenue has stayed 'always just under a billion a year' with no meaningful growth; Jordy is scaling out of his long position, noting the multiple is now 'driven by the DAT buying more than the expansion of their trading.'

The conflict between Hyperliquid stakeholders and Trade XYZ (the private company capturing RWA growth) is a looming issue: 'There will be some conflict potentially between all the stakeholders in that ecosystem. Right now it's kumbaya because it's going up.'

Jordy's current crypto book: buying Bitcoin on dips, long Zcash in the $400s as a monetary instrument hedge ('at this price it's a good hedge'), and holding legacy venture positions including Catalyst (with Sequoia) and Canton.

Jordy's venture pivot since October 2023: only 3 crypto deals total versus 15-20 frontier deals across AI, biotech, defense, and rare earth materials — 'whatever China's controlling, you have to kind of play out that we're going to have some kind of escalation.'

On Bitcoin's path: 'I don't think we see 40... maybe we see 50. Where Bitcoin does extremely well is when people start worrying about the dollar again' — referencing the 2021 inflation cycle when gold and Bitcoin both ran.

RIA Flows, SpaceX SPV Mania, and the Velocity of Money

Jordy argues we are in peak FOMO: 'Smart, capable investors that have never done an SPV in their life — not only are they participating, they're like, I should make an SPV.' He frames this as a velocity-of-money phenomenon, not just monetary supply expansion.

Rob notes the alternatives channel has exploded: 'The amount of opportunities you're seeing on the alt side or the fund side is just so much higher than it used to be... Bitcoin is part of that story for a lot of these wealth managers.'

Jordy is tracking OTC brokers receiving locked SpaceX shares and applying the same discount modeling used for locked crypto tokens: 'Crypto was made for SpaceX. This is the moment for us to repurpose and just trade the shit out of this.'

Santi's Bitcoin entry signal: 'If I get a chance to buy Bitcoin at sub-$50, I'd feel that it deserves a place in the portfolio' — currently rotating capital into memory stocks and public equities instead.

Jordy says Paul Tudor Jones was heard on either the Founders podcast or Invest Like the Best still expressing bullishness on Bitcoin, and argues Saylor should privately court macro legends like Jones rather than doing more CNBC appearances: 'We need more Paul Tudor Jones... sailors lost that anchor figure.'

Coinbase's Product Blitz: What Actually Matters

Rob attended the Coinbase event and categorized announcements into four buckets: everything-exchange trading (pre-IPO perps, prediction markets, combos), developer platform updates, consumer finance, and Base infrastructure.

The standout product: an AI investment advisor registered as a regulated RIA. 'Gen Z is already asking Claude what they should be buying. There is a world where this is how they're going to interact with trading and investing' — Rob.

Bitcoin-backed mortgages eligible for Fannie Mae were highlighted as genuinely novel; Base's announcement of transaction-level privacy was topical but lacked technical explanation of implementation.

Overall brand read: 'You don't think Coinbase and think I'm going to get rich quick. You think Robinhood, like, oh, maybe I'm going to hit my one-day option.' Coinbase loses the FOMO crowd but may gain more serious, trust-driven users.

Content of the Week: Nadal Doc, Perplexity CEO, and Ninja Creami

Santi recommends the 20VC podcast featuring Perplexity's CEO: 'I listened to it late at night, I couldn't go to bed. Fucking electric. Go listen to that. It'll make you want to long more memory stocks.'

The Nadal Netflix documentary is described as 'one of the best sports documentaries' — it reveals Nadal was loaded on painkillers for the second half of his career, largely unknown to the public at the time.

Jordy's content of the week is 30-second Instagram Reels about healthy ice cream: 'The Ninja Creami changed my life' — he's obsessed with high-protein, low-calorie ice cream recipes that fit his body composition goals.

Rob's content of the week: the New York Knicks NBA championship parade, which he had playing in the corner during the recording — 'New York is electric right now.'