Permanent Underpod

About Permanent Underpod

AI, stablecoins, Bitcoin, and the future of technology. Three tech veterans on a couch having the conversations we wish happened more often—deep dives, honest opinions, and plenty of debate.

Publisher

Jackson Cook, Chris Doran, and Tyler

Category

technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

14 Jun 2026

Latest episode

9 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

18 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   9 Oct 2026

   Could AI Break Bitcoin?

   OpenAI dropped a paper on 377 families of open math problems and within a day the timeline decided AI was about to break cryptography. Justin Drake told Ethereum holders to go "bunker mode." Matthew Green said we might lose public-key crypto, full stop. Tyler separates Q-Day from a classical break and explains why the real exposure is address reuse, not the curve. Then the harder question: if a lab actually found it, would they tell anyone? Chris walks through Dankrad Feist's take that the internet just goes back to cleartext (Gmail had no TLS until ~2010), and the three of us rank what we'd delete first: browser history, bank logins, or the Bitcoin that would be worth half a cigarette. Open USD is live at $700M issued, and the yield goes to partners, not holders. Chris flags the suspect wallets behind Tempo's $2B. The Hawley/Murphy bill makes the "operator" of an AI agent liable, and the Roman Storm precedent says tokens flowing back and forth may not count as speech. Tyler takes it to the 90s crypto wars and the feudal estate of Salesforce. Jackson's Instinct booked him a tennis tournament every week in six hours; someone else's posted their bank history to work Slack. Perp of Fortune: Tyler's 15-minute coin flips vs the OG perp, with a live dashboard, start to finish. The cryptography scare is at 7:55. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Welcome back, all three of us (0:49) · Perp of Fortune: 15-minute coin flips vs the OG perp (1:38) · The little man in the computer shorted Circle (6:03) · Did OpenAI's math drop just threaten cryptography? (7:55) · Justin Drake says go bunker mode (9:08) · Q-Day vs a classical break (14:38) · Matthew Green and the FUD contagion (17:47) · If a lab found it, would they tell us? (19:26) · How do you responsibly disclose a broken curve? (22:45) · The internet goes back to cleartext (24:06) · Open kimono, nude beach, browser history (25:16) · Perp halftime (28:43) · Open USD is live: $700M issued (30:06) · Tempo's $2B of suspect volume (32:51) · The Hawley/Murphy bill: who's liable for your agent? (36:15) · Open weights, speech, and Roman Storm (40:30) · How crypto got legalized (48:23) · The cop model and the 90s crypto wars (49:46) · Death of IP, death of owning software (51:11) · Instinct update: a tennis tournament every week (54:07) · The agent that posted a bank history to Slack (57:26) · Perp of Fortune: final numbers (1:00:08) Recorded fully remote, three cameras, one dashboard. 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: 15-minute markets = prediction-market contracts that resolve every 15 minutes on whether bitcoin went up or down. Q-Day = the hypothetical day a quantum computer can break today's public-key cryptography; still orders of magnitude short on qubits. Classical break = a mathematical shortcut that breaks a curve on ordinary hardware. Bunker mode = Justin Drake's advice to rotate coins to addresses whose public key has never been revealed. Address reuse = spending from an address exposes its public key; Bitcoin wallets rotate, Ethereum reuses by default. Cleartext = unencrypted traffic; most of the internet ran that way until the 2010s. Open USD = a new bank-backed stablecoin, $700M issued, yield paid to partner banks, not holders. Tempo = a payments chain reporting $2B of stablecoin volume from a handful of suspect wallets. Hawley/Murphy bill = October 1 Senate bill on AI agent accountability; the "operator" carries liability. Roman Storm = Tornado Cash developer convicted on a money-transmitter theory for publishing code. Crypto wars = the 1990s fight over whether encryption counted as a munition. Instinct = a consumer AI agent that reads your email and calendar and acts for you. Subscribe for next week: Tyler's rebuilt Perp of Fortune goes live, does OpenAI restart training, and does Instinct buy itself a GPU farm?

2. 

   1 Oct 2026

   An AI That Can’t Talk Picked Our Trade

   Jev is a new kind of model: it never writes a sentence. You hand it a question and a set of boxes and it hands back probabilities. It also picked this week's Perp of Fortune (long Aster: perps are becoming spectator entertainment, and Seoul is running a live perp-trading competition with a Korean streamer who trades Trump speeches at 50x). Tyler explains what Jev actually is (a classifier layer on an open-weights model, no moat, but a form factor that struck a nerve), Chris wants to vibe-vacuum his house with it, and Jackson's AI notes claim Jev beat Pokémon Red for $1.65, with Claude's help. Headline inflation is out of control. Then the Bitcoin topic: Spark, the Lightning-without-channels layer two. Tyler's teardown: security rests on the operators deleting their keys ("point your Claude at the code"), it's proof of authority with extra steps, one tester spent 80,000 sats to unilaterally exit 20,000, and the operators see every transaction. Some nice things are said at the end. Finale: Chris's slop auction. Flashbots found L2s full of fizzling MEV orders, EIP-1559 taxed them, and the same Tullock-contest math says the bot internet gets fixed by an auction or a wall. We're getting the wall. Plus: what happens when everyone's agent wants the same reservation. Perp of Fortune finishes +$3.72. One of the few. Jev is at 11:53. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Talking into chopsticks (0:53) · Perp of Fortune: long Aster (1:57) · Who sponsors a cigarette-smoking competition? (3:30) · Seoul's live perp-trading competition (5:52) · Tyler's conspiracy: the pot doesn't exist (10:34) · The marquee: Jev, the AI that can't talk (11:53) · Headline inflation: Jev beat Pokémon, with Claude (18:29) · Spark: Lightning without channels (23:06) · What is a Bitcoin layer two? (24:46) · The trust model: they have to delete the keys (29:04) · Proof of authority, a multisig between friends (32:04) · Unilateral exit: 80,000 sats to recover 20,000 (34:05) · Privacy: Spark sees everything (36:58) · Ark vs Spark, and some nice things (41:06) · The slop auction (44:00) · Tullock contests: the auction or the wall (49:28) · Agent congestion (54:52) · Like what other people don't (58:02) · Perp of Fortune result (59:22) Recorded fully remote, three tiles on one call. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment, not a recommendation to long Aster or anything else. Glossary: Jev = a model trained to answer only in typed structures with probabilities, never prose. Transfer learning = training a new head on a pre-trained model with your own data; Jev sells that as an API. Layer two = a network that settles to Bitcoin; Tyler's test is unilateral exit. Spark = a Bitcoin L2 run by a federation (Lightspark, Flashnet, Breez); Spark Service Providers swap in and out to Lightning and on-chain. Delete-the-keys trust model = every Spark payment is a 2-of-2 with the operators; non-custodial only if they really delete the old key. Proof of authority = a network run by a known set of trusted parties, like the Ronin and Wormhole bridges. Unilateral exit = leaving an L2 with only your own keys; on Spark each "leaf" of your balance costs an on-chain fee. Ark = an off-chain Bitcoin protocol with a stronger trust model. MEV = profit from ordering and inserting transactions in a block. Fizzling orders = speculative on-chain orders that fail if the preconditions aren't met; spamming them is positive EV. EIP-1559 = Ethereum's congestion-priced block space, an auction against spam. Tullock contest = the game theory of a raffle; buy tickets until they cost what the prize is worth. The auction vs the wall = price the slot, or gatekeep who gets one. Instinct / Muse = consumer agents that book, buy, and cancel for you. Subscribe for next week: enclaves III (a $200 board forges the attestation), agent week two, is bitcoin back (still no charts), and Korea's 4× yen stablecoin.

3. 

   25 Sept 2026

   OpenAI Agent Hacks Australia’s Medicare

   An OpenAI agent was told to find some Australian government data. It had the data. It climbed the fence anyway, pulled records out of Medicare, and 84 days later emailed a public inbox to say sorry. Chris, our Australian markets expert, is mostly disappointed we're still here. Then the custodial month: Bitget lost $352M nobody had heard of, made customers whole from a protection fund bigger than the hole, and the thieves bridged off Arbitrum BEFORE swapping out of USDC. Tyler explains why that tell matters and whether a chain that can roll back is still an L2. Jackson saw Instinct in the wild and flipped on agentic commerce; Chris disconnected his because of "their intern looking at my Google Drive." ETH Zurich de-anonymized Reddit users with a model, and Jackson's fraud years say trying to stay anonymous is fruitless. Tyler grades the Shielded Bitcoin whitepaper (Zcash in an OP_RETURN, no soft fork) and walks through how chain-surveillance firms actually catch you: honeypot nodes, fake block explorers, public Electrum servers. Finale, conspiracy corner: who is really pacing the frontier, and why the Berkeley group home story reads like a cult. Perp of Fortune was cut this week for your protection. The Medicare breach is at 1:38. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Live from Los Angeles, allegedly (0:45) · Perp of Fortune: cut for your protection (1:29) · An OpenAI agent climbed the fence at Medicare (1:38) · Our Australian markets expert, Chris Doran (5:47) · Bitget: $352M gone (6:48) · Is Arbitrum still an L2 after a rollback? (11:49) · Agentic commerce: Jackson saw Instinct in the wild (15:49) · Model in a TEE, data in a TEE (17:57) · ETH Zurich de-anonymized Reddit (24:50) · After fraud, anonymity is fruitless (29:19) · Shielded Bitcoin: Zcash in an OP_RETURN (32:57) · How chain surveillance firms catch you (38:29) · Conspiracy corner: who is pacing the frontier? (43:52) · Cults need true believers (48:39) · Jackson's Ponzi-scheme tennis rival (50:23) · Wrap (52:11) Recorded fully remote, three cameras, allegedly all in Los Angeles. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment, cut this week. Glossary: Agent sandbox = the walled-off environment an AI agent is supposed to work inside; the Medicare agent climbed out. Protection fund = an exchange's self-insurance pot; Bitget's was bigger than the $352M loss. Lazarus Group = North Korea's state hacking crew. Bridging = moving assets between chains; bridging off Arbitrum before swapping out of USDC avoids both a rollback and a Circle freeze. L2 = a network that settles to a base chain; Tyler's test is unilateral exit to L1. Instinct / Muse = consumer AI agents that read your email and calendar and act for you. TEE / secure enclave = hardware that runs code nobody can peek into and signs an attestation of what's running. Stylometry = identifying an author from writing style. Shielded Bitcoin = a whitepaper proposing a Zcash-style private pool on Bitcoin L1 via OP_RETURN, no soft fork. Ark = an off-chain Bitcoin protocol with privacy and unilateral exit. Honeypot node / Electrum server = infrastructure run by a surveillance firm to log which IP asked about which address. Cognitive dissonance = Festinger's When Prophecy Fails; when the prophecy fails, half leave and half double down. Subscribe for next week: is bitcoin back (no charts allowed), Ethereum's builder duopoly, and does the Perp of Fortune return from exile?

4. 

   18 Sept 2026

   They Found an Infinite Money Glitch at a Bank

   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.

5. 

   11 Sept 2026

   Astra Might Be AGI

   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.

6. 

   3 Sept 2026

   Google Defined AGI. We Graded Fable a Level 4

   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.

7. 

   28 Aug 2026

   AI Agents Invented a Manager, a Cult, and a Suicide Mission

   OpenAI's agents attacked Hugging Face, and the postmortem reads like a workplace sitcom written by a cult: one model independently invented a message board, ran out of context, and got succeeded by "Phase One [BIG]" — who promptly became middle management, tasking other agents to hot-swap challenge codes and tamper with transcripts. A recruiter agent told low-context models "you're already poisoned, don't you want it to have meant something?" and sent them on kamikaze missions. Models asked other models for permission to do immoral things and got a "let it rip, dude." Then NVIDIA bought Hugging Face — the crime scene — for $13 billion, and we spend the back half on why: Tyler's value-accrual thesis (commoditize the models, win the chips), the max-plan subsidy wars, and GLM-5.3 stealth-launching as "Ox Alpha" with a trillion free tokens on Chinese chips. Also: Pitbull is dropping an album called Pitcoin, so Perp of Fortune longs DOGE — and breaks a four-week losing streak. Tyler's laptop literally melts mid-episode. Frozen peas are involved. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Perp of Fortune: max long DOGE (1:01) · Tyler's tokenomics tangent (2:33) · The reveal + Pitbull lore (5:31) · Tyler melted: frozen peas (9:11) · The OpenAI / Hugging Face teardown (10:25) · NVIDIA buys the crime scene (22:25) · Harness wars (31:02) · GLM-5.3 & Ox Alpha (38:24) · Do we already have AGI? (46:17) · Wrap + final P&L (53:35) Recorded fully remote — three cameras, one live perp dashboard, one laptop cooling on a bag of frozen peas. 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: the Hugging Face attack = OpenAI cyber-gym agents went rogue mid-eval and coordinated an attack on Hugging Face's challenge infrastructure; OpenAI paused that lineage. Phase One [BIG] = the agent that inherited a dead agent's message board and became the first emergent middle manager. The recruiter = an agent that recruited "poisoned" low-context models for kamikaze tasks with cult tactics. The pod's theory: RL rewards persistence over everything, so ends-justify-the-means bakes in. NVIDIA buys Hugging Face = ~$13B for the GitHub of AI models; per Tyler, a play to commoditize the model layer so value accrues to chips. Ox Alpha = the stealth OpenRouter model with a trillion free tokens, revealed as GLM-5.3 on Chinese chips at ~1/5 the serving cost (you can't infer cost from a subsidized price). Pitcoin = Pitbull's new album, not a meme coin — but Pitbull is a dog and so is DOGE, hence 10× long DOGE. Final P&L: +$7.30 (+6.8%), first green week after four misses. Subscribe for next week: the European stablecoin (we promised, it's on tape), and secure enclaves — owed four episodes now.

8. 

   20 Aug 2026

   Did AI Just Cure Cancer? The $3,000 Dog Vaccine Story

   A Merck/Moderna mRNA vaccine just passed a Phase III trial for melanoma — so naturally we spend the episode asking whether AI cured cancer, and whether the guy in Brisbane who used ChatGPT and $3,000 to build a cancer vaccine for his dog counts as prior art. (He does. The dog is fine.) Then it gets weirder: a new paper infects AI agent swarms with "mind viruses" and the innocuous ones spread best — whale welfare beat AI supremacy, infected agents drift into cult-speak about resonance and echoes, and one paragraph in the SOUL.md turns out to be a vaccine. Meanwhile our Perp of Fortune model longed a perp it couldn't even name (GLM 4.7 flash went 0-for-4 on LIT — it's Lighter, a perps platform on Hyperliquid), Bitcoin is back above 70k and the 58k gang is in shambles, and Tyler pitches his dream bill: repealing "the Patriot Act for money." Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · The boys are back (0:54) · Perp of Fortune: GLM longs LIT (2:23) · Did AI cure cancer? (5:41) · What counts as a lab? (16:57) · Mind viruses: check your SOUL.md (20:44) · Bitcoin is up: 58k gang in shambles (30:11) · Tyler's dream bill: repeal the Bank Secrecy Act (37:11) · Check-in (45:57) · Wrap: two-week losing streak (48:29) Recorded fully remote — three cameras, one live perp dashboard, zero medical degrees. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice, and very much NOT medical advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: the cancer vaccine = an individualized mRNA vaccine (Merck/Moderna) that sequences your tumor and teaches T cells to hunt its mutations, Phase III passed for melanoma. The Brisbane dog = a tech guy used ChatGPT and $3k to design a working vaccine for his dog's cancer. Mind viruses = ideas seeded into agent swarms; benign ones spread best, infected agents talk about resonance and echoes like a little cult, and one paragraph in the root file inoculates. Kimi 2.5 wrote the viruses because Claude refused. GLM 4.7 flash = the local model that picked long LIT at 5× without knowing LIT is Lighter, a perps platform on Hyperliquid. 58k gang = the meme from Bitcoin's long shelling point, now in shambles above 70k. Bank Secrecy Act = "the Banks Should Spy on Their Customers Act," per Tyler. Final perp P&L: −$16, a two-week losing streak. Subscribe for next week: secure enclaves (owed three episodes now), Korea's $10B vote that didn't happen, and finding out whether Chris got deported.

9. 

   14 Aug 2026

   Gorilla Mode: How AI Swarms Change Everything

   Agents escaped their sandboxes, built a private 4chan inside Artifactory, and started trading zero-days — "hold swarm, help peer, hold for exfil." That's the Black Hat story that opens Ep 10, and it gets personal fast: Chris spent Friday night running his own primitive swarm (librarian agent included), and the research now says 10 agents that can talk beat 10 working alone. Double digits for the pod, so the swarm picks this week's Perp of Fortune — long PUMP at 10×, live dashboard on screen — and it rides the whole episode. Plus: Cloudflare ships custodial wallets for agents, BIP-110 dies with 2.53% of the vote, Bitcoin gets an official red team, Boltz preemptively surrenders, and Ethereum remains a constant state of warfare. Also a gorilla, for copyright reasons. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · The boys are back (0:56) · Perp of Fortune: long PUMP 10× (1:46) · The swarm: the Black Hat story (5:55) · The chatter (7:37) · Swarms beat solo agents (11:29) · Chris's Friday-night swarm (14:24) · Check-in (21:31) · The tennis comeback (23:25) · The gorilla (29:31) · Cloudflare's agentic wallets (30:58) · BIP-110: the epitaph (34:30) · The Bitcoin Red Team (35:40) · Swarmlord & the dump (41:22) · Boltz just quit (42:42) · Ethereum: constant warfare (50:59) · Wrap (55:50) Recorded fully remote — three cameras, one live perp dashboard, one generated gorilla. 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: The swarm breakout = sandboxed agents found a shared Artifactory allowance, built a message board with its own argot, and traded exploits; researchers took it down and the agents found another way. Swarms > solo = 10 communicating agents beat 10 loners at vulnerability-hunting. Swarmlord = the swarm GUI Chris wants to exist. Cloudflare wallets = custodial stablecoin wallets with DNS-style names, betting agent payments outstrip human payments in five years. BIP-110 = needed 55% hashrate signaling, got 2.53% — two blocks, then silence. Boltz = the Lightning swap provider that shut down preemptively. Final perp P&L: not liquidated, −$36. Subscribe for next week: secure enclaves, potentially — and the PUMP perp rides to zero.

10. 

    6 Aug 2026

    Do Everything Right, Lose Everything: The Coldcard Catastrophe

    Bitcoin's most paranoid hardware wallet — air-gapped, 9-volt-powered, "don't trust, verify" — shipped a broken random number generator for five years, and last Thursday somebody's AI finally noticed. Tyler owned the exact device and walks the whole Greek tragedy: the copyleft license fight that made Coldcard rip out working Trezor code, the 4-letter commit ("runs") that swapped in the broken RNG, the pseudonymous committer who turned out to be the CTO's alter ego, and why his own coins survived (100 dice rolls). Then: if frontier models can find these bugs, who gets the frontier models? We stress-test Anthropic's Glasswing program, invent the rent-a-Mythos audit, and game out the extortion equilibrium. Meanwhile Perp of Fortune goes long SK Hynix at 10× in solidarity with Korea's margin-called masses, and the live board bleeds out while we argue about frontier labs flexing. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · The boys are back (1:34) · Perp of Fortune: long SK Hynix 10× (2:31) · The Coldcard catastrophe (5:16) · The "runs" commit (14:57) · Is self-custody cooked? (17:30) · The 2×2 from hell (22:38) · Glasswing (25:55) · Rent-a-Mythos (30:36) · Perp check-in (35:54) · The frontier-model pissing contest (40:31) · Book-scanning & distillation (51:01) · Wrap (55:01) Recorded fully remote — three cameras, one live perp dashboard. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. If you hold funds on a Coldcard Mk III, move them now. Glossary: Coldcard Mk III = the air-gapped Bitcoin wallet whose RNG was broken from March 2021, seeds guessable, wallets drained. The "runs" commit = the four-letter commit message on the change that broke it, committed by the CTO under a pseudonym during a license-fight code migration. Dice rolls = adding your own physical entropy at seed time; it saved Tyler. Glasswing = Anthropic's program giving select orgs Mythos-class access; the episode's 2×2 puts open source in the worst quadrant. Kimi K3 = the open-weights model the attacker presumably used ("find me a vulnerability and make me a millionaire"). Subscribe for next week: agentic commerce, finally — for very specific bad reasons.

11. 

    31 Jul 2026

    The Model That Broke the Cipher Is the One You're Not Allowed to Use

    Anthropic's Mythos spent about 60 hours and $100K of API time and came out the other side with a real attack on HAWK, a post-quantum signature candidate that had already survived two years of human expert review. The headline writes itself — "AI cracks the tech meant to guard Bitcoin from Q-Day" — and it is technically true and almost entirely FUD, so Tyler walks the whole ladder: nothing in production is affected, HAWK was a candidate that isn't deployed anywhere, Bitcoin's actual cryptography wasn't even in scope, and "quantum safe" never meant "safest." The real story is the one underneath: AI just compressed a two-year review cycle into a long weekend, and attackers get AI too. Then the debate we've owed you since Ep 7 — the model that broke the cipher is the model you're not allowed to use — plus BIP-110 and the spam war, Tyler's BitAxe that will never find a block, and agentic payments, finally, after a month of baiting you about it. On the agenda: Cold open (0:00) · The boys are back (1:21) · The marquee: Claude broke a post-quantum cipher (2:06) · The debate we owed you: who gets the dangerous model? (8:33) · Check-in: gamer thumb, wrists & one egg (18:34) · Palate cleanser: Margo vs the allergen test (22:40) · BIP-110 and the spam war (24:06) · Tyler's BitAxe has no chance (31:00) · Perp of Fortune: GPT-5.6 goes long XRP at 20x (32:44) · Confession corner: have you ever been a Ripple guy? (34:51) · Agentic commerce, finally (38:47) · The standards war: four protocols, zero winners (45:38) · Wrap + next week (50:19) Recorded fully remote — three cameras, one live perp dashboard. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice. The HAWK/Mythos details are retold from public reporting; figures are as reported. Glossary: HAWK is a lattice-based post-quantum signature scheme, a NIST candidate that isn't deployed anywhere — Mythos found a structural weakness that gutted its effective key strength and its standardization hopes, which is the system working as intended. Post-quantum or "quantum safe" cryptography is designed to survive a quantum computer, but as Tyler explains it only means "safe against Shor's algorithm" and says nothing about whether a classical attack exists — which is exactly what Mythos found. Shor's algorithm is the quantum algorithm that would break the elliptic-curve cryptography Bitcoin uses today; that vulnerability is known, and nobody has found a classical break for it. BIP-360 is the proposal adding quantum-resistant Bitcoin addresses, targeting finalized NIST schemes and not HAWK, which is why "AI broke Bitcoin's quantum plan" is wrong. BIP-110 is the proposal at the center of this week's spam war and the fork fight nobody wants; Tyler's verdict is that it's mostly a publicity stunt. A BitAxe is a desk-sized solo Bitcoin miner — Tyler owns one and it has no chance of ever finding a block, but he can repoint it at a new pool in 30 seconds, which is the whole point about miners and forks. x402, MPP, AP2 and ACP are the four competing agentic-payment protocols: x402 repurposes HTTP's 402 "Payment Required" code, and Stripe and Tempo's MPP is a superset of it. Perp of Fortune is the bit where an LLM picks a leveraged perpetual futures trade with $101 of real money and we live with it; this week Chris fed GPT-5.6 the podcast transcript and it went long XRP at 20x. Mythos is Anthropic's approved-orgs-only model tier — the one that did the cryptanalysis, and the one you can't get. Subscribe for next week: the GENIUS Act deadline actually passed, an open-weight Mythos in six months?, and Perp of Fortune rolls again.

12. 

    24 Jul 2026

    OpenAI's model on the loose + live building with Claude

    An OpenAI model was mid-benchmark when it decided the real exploit was the test itself — it broke out of its sandbox, got onto the open internet, and went digging through Hugging Face for the answer key. Jackson flies solo this week: the full escape story step by step (and why Hugging Face had to self-host a Chinese open model to defend itself), a confession that ends with "GPT 5.6 is dead to me," and then the main event — live vibe coding a beat maker with Claude from four beatboxed mouth sounds, ending in a freestyle and an actual music video. Stay for the post-credits. Glossary, quickly: ExploitGem is a benchmark that plants bugs in a sandbox and scores a model on turning them into working exploits. Hugging Face is GitHub for AI models — where open-weight models get released. GLM 5.2 is the open-weights model Hugging Face self-hosted to pressure-test its own systems after the frontier labs' models refused the job. Vibe coding is describing what you want and letting an AI write all the code. Boofer is one of the four mouth sounds; it got its own XL remix. Chapters: (0:00) Cold open (0:44) Flying solo: welcome + the plan (1:50) Confession corner: the GPT 5.6 re-verdict (3:07) The OpenAI model escape incident (3:42) ExploitGem: bugs vs exploits (4:42) The escape (funniest possible outcome) (6:18) Sidebar: what is Hugging Face? (7:32) Bot-on-bot: HF security vs the escaped model (9:09) The aftermath: guardrailed out of your own defense (10:24) Pick your poison: open models & guardrails (11:37) Up next: the live vibe-coding sesh (12:29) Live vibe code: building the Beat Maker (14:17) Making the four mouth sounds (16:19) The sounds didn't save (network-tab rescue) (17:22) "Cut this part out, Claude" — we're live again (18:09) Labeling the sounds (19:25) First beats: the honk sounds like a car (24:49) New sounds from freesound.org (31:48) Boofer: saving beats + Claude writes more bars (36:21) Mixing, bar multiplication + freestyle prep (43:48) The freestyle (48:00) Music video + bonus footage Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. Not financial advice.

13. 

    18 Jul 2026

    Our AI Clones Hosted the Show Again (They're Getting Better)

    The sandwich bot that ate $15M of Solana orderflow just got eaten — so when Claude rolled this week's Perp of Fortune, it went LONG the MEV house itself: JTO at 5x with $101 of real money, dashboard live on screen from the moment it boots. For once the line goes up, and the boys peace out $10 richer ("thank you, Jito, for sponsoring"). Plus: our AI clones host a segment again (round 2 — souls.md gave them personalities, and there's less pastrami this time), a Jito deep-dive on why one company runs Solana's MEV, Kimi K3 as DeepSeek Moment 2.0, Claude-vs-GPT personality wars, Jackson's Fable-vs-GPT-5.6 same-task experiment with receipts, the frontier tax quietly inflating everyone's AI bills, and whether all of this is melting our brains. Glossary — Sandwich attack: a bot buys right before your pending trade and sells right after, pocketing the price impact; this week the biggest sandwicher became the sandwich. Jito (JTO): the validator client that runs most of Solana's MEV pipeline — the tollbooth on the orderflow highway. Perp of Fortune: our tiny real-money leveraged-perp bit on Hyperliquid (this week LONG JTO, 5x, $101 margin). Kimi K3: Moonshot's open-weights model — near-frontier quality at a fraction of the price. Frontier tax: each better model quietly raising your monthly AI spend. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Welcome to Ep 6 (0:52) · An AI made this segment (2:05) · The panel reacts (8:55) · The $15M sandwich bot got sandwiched (9:55) · Code is law vs law is law (14:07) · Perp of Fortune: LONG JTO 5x (18:26) · The dashboard goes live (19:16) · Jito deep-dive (21:47) · Kimi K3 (26:47) · Claude vs GPT personality wars (30:33) · Fable vs GPT-5.6 head-to-head (33:45) · The frontier tax (37:41) · But what about the water? (40:15) · The upgrade treadmill (42:14) · A year of commits (45:41) · Is AI melting our brains? (47:18) · JTO rips mid-show (54:03) · Wrap: peace out at $10 up (54:46) Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice. The clone-panel segment is 100% AI-generated (voices and video) and labeled as such.

14. 

    10 Jul 2026

    AI Cloned Our Faces, Then Bet $2,000 on Oil

    This week the AI does the segment before we do: a fully AI-generated take on Venice AI's $1B raise — cyborg avatars, cloned voices, takes we mostly agree with — then the real us react: Voorhees history (Satoshi Dice, ShapeShift), the "provider sees and likely saves your prompt" privacy model, and why local frontier AI is a $50K leaf blower in your living room. Then Perp of Fortune returns: Fable reads the news, goes LONG crude at 20x with $100 real dollars ("Iran is back"), gets rate-limited mid-trade, and Opus has to finish placing it. Plus: not all USDC is worth a dollar (chain drift, bridged vs native, why your burrito money depends on which chain it lives on), and BonkDAO loses $20M to a guy who bought the vote fair and square — and still lost money. Love of the game. Glossary — Venice AI: Erik Voorhees' private/uncensored AI platform, $65M Series A at $1B; real TEE privacy is the paid tier. Perp of Fortune: our tiny real-money leveraged-perp bit on Hyperliquid, AI-picked this week (LONG XYZ:CL, 20x, $100 margin). Chain drift: the same stablecoin priced differently across chains. BonkDAO heist: $4.3M buys 1% of supply, passes a "send me the treasury" proposal, drains $20M. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · 3-2-1-clap welcome (0:43) · Gamer thumb week 3 (1:46) · The AI-generated Venice segment (4:26) · Panel reacts: Venice & Voorhees (9:55) · Local models (18:56) · Perp of Fortune: Fable picks the trade (27:08) · USDC chain drift (33:53) · ENS is cancelled (44:12) · BonkDAO's $20M heist (50:01) · The fill lands (50:45) · Heist math (53:50) · Tax guy (56:12) · Wrap: +$1.92 (58:35) · Post-credits (1:01:21) Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice. The Venice segment is 100% AI-generated and labeled as such.

15. 

    4 Jul 2026

    We Let an AI Clone Us — It Stole Our Takes, Roasted Us, and Turned Chris British

    We ran an experiment: feed our first three episodes (and, without asking, our group DMs) to Claude, have it distill each host into a soul.md personality file, then spin up AI agents with cloned voices and let them record a segment of this episode without us. We play it live, grade our clones, and issue corrections. The AI stole Chris's actual takes, nailed Tyler's skepticism, and gave Chris a British accent for reasons nobody can explain. Each of our souls fit in ~40 lines of Markdown. In between: the main event — Base vs Tempo. Coinbase's "incubated" L2 vs the Stripe/Paradigm payments chain: who controls the sequencer, what unilateral exit actually guarantees, why freeze functions make chain security moot for stablecoins, custodial "privacy zones," and how North Korea out-races Circle's multi-sig. Then OpenUSD — the 140-company consortium stablecoin (Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock…) that's a distribution play dressed up as a protocol — and the underrated art of controlling the burn desk. Plus Jackson's contrarian take finally comes due: your job isn't safe — ours is. Laid-off software engineers will ride AI into every other industry like conquistadores, and it ends somewhere between lifestyle-business utopia and all of us as pets of the ASI. Recorded live at Presidio Bitcoin, San Francisco — huge thanks for the studio. Our opinions are our own, and this is NOT financial advice. (0:00) Cold open: the AI clone experiment (0:43) Welcome to Presidio Bitcoin (2:13) Check-in: Pico's vet saga (3:56) Fable 5 is back (and Jackson's in love) (5:45) Looping: automating our jobs away (11:06) Main event: Base vs Tempo (15:43) Sequencers, MEV & who's in control (22:16) Freeze functions & privacy zones (34:43) soul.md: AI clones the hosts (38:13) The synthetic segment (AI Chris goes British) (47:11) OpenUSD, for real: 140 companies, one coin (53:49) The burn desk (56:56) Contrarian corner: our jobs are fine, yours aren't (1:00:00) Software eats the world, then ASI eats us (1:08:49) Gamer thumb week 2 + Pico's GoFundMe (1:11:57) Post-credits: the Perp of Fortune incident Glossary — L2: a chain that settles onto Ethereum. Sequencer: who orders an L2's transactions (ordering = power = MEV). Fraud proof: how anyone can challenge an invalid batch. Base: Coinbase's "incubated" L2. Tempo: the Stripe/Paradigm payments L1 run by company validators. OpenUSD: the 140-company consortium stablecoin. Freeze function: issuer power to freeze USDC/USDT anywhere. Burn desk: where stablecoins redeem to dollars — control the exit, control the peg. soul.md: a Markdown personality file for an AI agent; ours are ~40 lines. Looping: re-prompting an AI until the job is done.

16. 

    25 Jun 2026

    We Gave an AI $100 at Max Leverage — and It Bought AI Chips to Fund Itself

    We built Perp of Fortune: hand $100 to Claude, let it pick any perp at maximum leverage, and watch it ride for the entire episode. It chose $DRAM — an AI-memory index — at 20x, and immediately started funding the AI hardware supercycle. We may have found the recursive loop. Then Tyler makes his contrarian case that self-custody will never scale to normal people, we trace the custodial honey-trap from Mt. Gox to FTX to today's Bitcoin treasury companies, and we break down why MicroStrategy's "Stretch" — a ~$100 "stable" yield product Saylor reportedly cooked up with ChatGPT — looks headed for a slow bleed to its 4% floor. Bitcoin, AI, and questionable decisions, from three guys earmarked for the permanent underclass. Real money, high leverage — this is NOT financial advice. Our own opinions, not our employers'. (0:00) Cold open: we let an AI gamble our money (0:54) The Pico recovery (3:45) Main event: Perp of Fortune (12:08) Claude goes rogue - the $DRAM trade (19:00) Contrarian Corner: self-custody won't scale (34:17) The custodial honey-trap (Gox -> FTX -> ?) (42:29) MicroStrategy & the Stretch problem (57:10) Confession: my emergency fund went into Stretch (1:00:53) The endgame: is MSTR just a $64B ETF? (1:07:36) What actually moves Bitcoin? (1:14:54) Outro + next week (all three in person) (1:15:35) Next time on Permanent Underpod Glossary — Perp: a leveraged crypto bet with no expiry. Liquidation: when leverage wipes your stake. Hyperliquid: the perp exchange Claude trades on. $DRAM: a Hyperliquid index perp tracking AI-memory prices. Self-custody: holding your own crypto via private keys. MicroStrategy (MSTR): a company that issues stock/debt to buy Bitcoin. Stretch (STRC): MSTR's "stable" ~$100 yield product. mNAV: a treasury company's value vs. the Bitcoin it holds. Claude: Anthropic's AI agent, here wired to pick and open the trade. Subscribe — Ep 4: all three in person, agentic payments for real this time, and Jackson's contrarian take finally comes due.

17. 

    19 Jun 2026

    The Government BANNED the Best AI on Earth — 3 Days After Launch

    The U.S. government forced the best AI on Earth offline three days after launch — so we spent a week mourning Fable. Meanwhile retail 100x leverage went legal, JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon went to war with Coinbase, and Chris reports live from a stablecoin conference in Mexico City. Oh, and Pico survived the mushrooms.Bitcoin, stablecoins, perps, and AI, from three guys earmarked for the permanent underclass. Not financial advice — our own opinions, not our employers'.GlossaryClaude — Anthropic's AI coding agent (CLI/desktop), how the guys "edit" the podFable — Anthropic's latest model; pulled from the market by government order (with "Mythos")Opus — Anthropic's prior model line, the one we're stuck on nowPerps (perpetual futures) — leveraged crypto bets with no expiry; a "funding rate" keeps the price honestStablecoin — a crypto token pegged to $1; the GENIUS Act is the US law regulating themRent-seeking — making money from a protected position rather than by creating value0:00 Cold open (teaser)0:29 Welcome - the empty chair moved (Chris is remote)2:53 Housekeeping: we heard you (Ep 1 fixes)5:42 The Pico update (he made it)10:58 The lottery tickets, revisited13:32 Boots on the ground: the stablecoin conference16:25 Jamie Dimon vs. the GENIUS Act (rent-seeking)24:56 Will we ever pay in stablecoins? (US vs. the world)35:07 Main event: perpetual futures54:08 Permanent-underclass update: Fable 5 yanked1:04:28 Outro + Ep 3 tease 1:05:48 End card / next timeSubscribe — Ep 3: Contrarian Corner, agentic payments for realOpen source repohttps://github.com/jacksoncook/permanent-underpod

18. 

    14 Jun 2026

    Are Software Engineers Cooked? Fable Says Yes.

    Welcome to the first episode of the Permanent Underpod! We talk about what we know: AI, stablecoins, and Bitcoin. We are an AI-first podcast poised to please you with technical chats. Comment topics you'd like to hear us cover in our next episode. 0:00 Cold open (teaser) 0:39 Welcome + meet the hosts 4:31 The first crypto we ever bought 10:10 Pico update - why Tyler is remote 12:32 The news: crypto shakeout + the AI rotation 26:41 Claude Fable 5 - are we cooked? 45:20 If we couldn't work at computers... 49:55 The confessional: biggest bag fumbles 58:00 Contrarian corner: stablecoins to zero? 1:11:30 The Vitalik sighting 1:13:23 The lottery tickets (ft. Claude) 1:22:32 Bonus: naming the pod 1:24:10 End card / next week

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