The AI Metagame

In this episode of The AI Metagame, host Brandon Adams sits down with famed forecaster Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) and digital media builder Raf Michalowski to talk about AI slop and where the content industry is headed. At its peak, Raf's pipeline was uploading around 60,000 videos a day to YouTube — roughly 3% of all daily uploads on the platform. He walks through the economics, how platforms e...

Episode 4 | The 600,000-Claim Brain: How Lev Milman Uses AI to Map Reality How do you stay ahead of the curve when the "curve" is moving at the speed of light? In this episode, we sit down with Lev Milman , a former U20 US Chess Champion and macro trader, to explore his radical, AI-driven approach to information processing and belief updating. Lev has constructed a massive digital knowledge base c...

Episode 3 | The edge belongs to whoever's willing to break things first. Most people are waiting for the safe path. Haralabos Voulgaris handed an AI agent his brokerage API, watched it place $20,000 in unauthorized trades, and responded by building a better confirmation tree — not by shutting it down. We explore what happens when a professional gambler's risk appetite meets the AI frontier — deplo...

Episode 2 | Controller | Over-Optimization: Why efficiency kills resilience. A perfectly optimized system is just a fragile one waiting to break. Our guest explains why they stopped optimizing for margins and started optimizing for survival, and what that means when AI moves faster than your org can adapt. We've spent decades chasing efficiency. Removing friction, maximizing output, trimming every...

Episode 1: Builder | Controller | Premature Abstraction "I built for scale before I understood the problem" In a world where tools allow us to scale instantly, the temptation to build big is overwhelming. But what happens when you scale the wrong thing? The AI Metagame is a twelve-episode series that looks at four archetypes in AI — Builder, Explainer, Interpreter, Narrator — to map where AI creat...

Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience) is my favorite fitness journalist. This podcast was an absolute pleasure. We had the opportunity to explore his outstanding new book, The Explorer's Gene. We also discuss, in detail, his 2018 NY Times bestseller Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. I rate this book among my top ten favorite works of non-fiction.

Jared Dillian (@dailydirtnap) publishes daily market commentary (The Daily Dirtnap, www.jareddillian.com). He hosts a twice weekly podcast called Be Smart. He has a popular Substack (https://substack.com/profile/450570-jared-dillian), and he's the author of Street Freak and All the Evil of This World. His latest book, Those Bastards: 69 Essays on Life, Creativity, and Meaning, was published in lat...

Scott Fawcett (@scottfawcett) is the creator of the DECADE golf system and he has coached Will Zalatoris, Stewart Cink, Keith Mitchell, and many others. In the first hour, we do a deep dive into golf analytics. He describes his career in professional golf, his early discovery of the PGA Tour's Shotlink Data and Mark Broadie's Strokes Gained Metric, his development of the DECADE system, and his exp...

Daniel Negreanu (@realkidpoker) is fresh off a $3.3 million win in the Super High Roller Bowl. Perhaps the most famous poker player on the planet, he is ranked #3 on the all-time money list. We start with a discussion of the new era in poker ("the Solver era") and some recent adjustments he's made in his game. We move on to some deep history - his move from Canada to Vegas; his early years with Ph...

David Benefield (@DWBenefield) is a poker legend with an incredible story. He started poker at age 16 after watching the movie Rounders. He dominated the biggest games online from ages 21-26. By his own estimate, he worked 100 hours a week during those years. In 2010, he went back to school at St John's University and then Columbia University (transfer after sophomore year). After his first semest...

Brad Delong is an economic historian at UC-Berkeley. A former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration, he frequently writes about policy issues on Twitter as @delong, where he has over 80,000 followers, and on his popular blog Grasping Reality (https://braddelong.substack.com). He is the author of a new book, Slouching Towards Utopia, that has been widely lauded as...

Shaun Deeb is, far and away, the most successful player at the World Series of Poker over the past decade (when evaluated based on WSOP leaderboard points). We discuss, among other things: his daily routine, WSOP fantasy poker, his view on tournament edges, his rise in poker (playing at Turning Stone in NY as an 18yr old) to his near fall (playing in Mexico post Black Friday), mixing family and po...

Eric Olson (@IPlayedD1) is the co-founder of Consensus, a leading start-up in natural language processing. I was interested in learning about the specific topic of AI/machine learning in the social sciences, and Eric was a brilliant guide in this area. Eric is a former football player at Northwestern who graduated with a master's in predictive analytics. With co-founder Christian Salem, he build C...

Patrik Antonius is one of the biggest winners in the history of poker. Even seasoned poker fans will be shocked by some of stories in this pod. We cover all aspects of his approach; we deep-dive into health, the mental game of poker, fun off the felt (especially crazy prop bets), and key aspects of Pat's personal poker history.

Edward Chancellor is a British financial historian, financial journalist, and former investment strategist. He wrote the bestselling book Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation in 1999 and Crunch-Time for Credit in 2005. He has just published The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest , which I rate as the best book I've read this year. Fortune has called Chancellor "one of...

Matt Kalish (@mattkalish) is the Co-Founder and President of Draftkings. A computer science major from Columbia, Matt is a passionate gamer who also has one of the largest personal collections of NFTs in the world. In this podcast, we take a deep-dive into the new Reignmakers project at Draftkings, where players assemble fantasy teams using player NFTs that they have purchased and compete for tens...

Peter Jennings (@CSURAM88) is one of the most successful daily fantasy sports players of all times. Notably, he won the first ever six-figure DFS prize, as well as the first ever $1 million Draftkings live final. He is a popular podcaster, and an extremely successful sports entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Fantasy Labs (sold to Action Network), as well as Lucky Trader HQ (an analytics comp...

Hugh Hendry was the founder and Chief Investment Officer of the macro hedge fund Eclectica Asset Management. After strong returns before and during the Great Financial Crisis, he became a popular figure in the financial media. He retired in 2017 to run a luxury hotel in St Barts, but has lately been increasingly active in financial media, tweeting as @hendry_hugh (60k followers) and podcasting (Th...

Ben Hunt (@epsilontheory) earned a PhD in Government from Harvard in 1991. He was a research academic for a decade before founding two technology companies. He then worked in investment management for a decade, before starting a content community at www.epsilontheory.com in 2013. Epsilon Theory quickly found a large audience of over 100,000 email subscribers. For the past several years, Epsilon Th...

Kyle Boddy (@drivelinebases) is the founder of Driveline Baseball, the best data-driven baseball development program in the world. I recently taught a course in sports analytics at the University of Miami, and Kyle was gracious enough to provide materials to Nikolai Yakovenko for a guest lecture on "What Makes Good Pitching?" The material is fascinating and surprising for anyone with the slightest...

Bill Perkins (@bp22) is a successful hedge fund manager and entrepreneur. Very few podcasts that I've done have changed my thinking so distinctly. Bill, who started on Wall Street at $16k a year and then found extreme success as an energy trader in Texas, noticed that many of his contemporaries were bad at enjoying life (and, worse, they were unhealthy). Seeking to avoid the same mistakes, he soug...

Doomberg (@DoombergT) has become a star of Substack and financial Twitter. Doomberg's in-depth, smoothly written pieces have quickly found a regular audience of nearly 100k per post. We spend the first third of this podcast chatting about his most popular post ("Dollars Ex Machina", on crypto). The second third of the podcast explores his general philosophy on investing, and the last third covers...

Jared Dillian (@dailydirtnap) publishes daily market commentary (The Daily Dirtnap, www.jareddillian.com). He hosts a twice weekly podcast called Be Smart, and he's the author of Street Freak and All the Evil of This World.

Christopher Leonard has written a fascinating new book on the Federal Reserve, The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy. This was one of my top three favorite podcast interviews of all time. Chris, a prominent journalist and author of the acclaimed Kochland, has written an outstanding book, and his knowledge and passion are evident in this interview.

I probably learned more from this pod than any other that I've done. @VonMises14 is a master of the crypto and NFT space. He has held, at various times, more than 60 punks at a time, including some of the most valuable ones, and he has an extensive collection of digital art of every type. His transition from an early btc holder (2011) to the NFT space makes for a fascinating story. Von Mises Times...