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- [00:00]
A
You can see the logic of it, right? Like if it solves the problem itself, if it solves the problem, which it, it easily could, clearly it's smart enough, right? It will never know. It won't know, right? It's looking for certainty. It won't know. If, like, if I said to you, like, I'm super good at math, right? Give me like a 10 part question, I give you the answers. Like, if I knew that I was being evaluated and wasn't going to get told how I did that, you're just going to walk away? That'd be deeply unsatisfying to me. Hey, everyone, I'm King Warwick and welcome to Uneasy Money. Because what happens on Chain never stays on Chain. Before we begin, here is a word from the sponsors that make this show possible.
- [00:39]
B
This episode is brought to you by Kape America's Privacy. First mobile carrier. Same premium service you'd expect from any other carrier, but designed so your number, your location and your data actually stay yours. Get 33% off. Six months at Cape Co unchained.
- [01:01]
A
All right, I am here with my co host, Taylor Monahan, security expert and heat wave expert. He's in the middle of a LA heat wave. You will not believe. It's the shocking temperature of 82 degrees in LA right now. And that's not Celsius, that's Fahrenheit. So. So pray for her and her family.
- [01:22]
C
Pain. It's the humidity that got the humidity right.
- [01:25]
A
Okay, 70% humidity, 82 degrees.
- [01:28]
C
I live on the beach. We don't do humidity here.
- [01:32]
A
Yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. All right, let's, let's get started. It's, it's just the two of us this week. We have no Luca, no guests. No one could join us. We actually tried to get Jesse, but apparently Jesse's doing the, the, the big on Chain show with Laura. So we got cocked by Laura. Thanks. Appreciate that. All right, let's, let's get started. So base hands, the BAS app to Kobe. So this has been quite the journey for the base app because if, if, for those of you who remember, I guess this must be going on like three years ago and I actually can't even remember the full journey because I, I, I want to say that this app was picked up or, or acquired at some point even. Right. I'm not 100% sure about that. But, but I, I think that's the case.
- [02:30]
C
Is this Toshi?
- [02:32]
A
Oh, maybe it's the Toshi wallet.
- [02:35]
C
So, so, and right. That's like some 2018 era.
- [02:40]
A
That's like 2018 stuff, right? So, so the Coinbase app, right? What was the Coinbase app got converted into the base app, like I want to say, a couple years ago or something like that. And the intention was like it was going to be the home for base and all of the base things, et cetera. And at that point we still believed that there was a chance that like off chain social would be a thing. And so a lot of effort was made to turn it from like a pure crypto custody with some trading capability. Like not even a lot. Like this is like a wallet, right? Like this is before wallets became, you know, super apps that you could trade pers and, and stuff in. So, so it was kind of transformed into this like, everything app. They added a bunch of stuff as well, like passkey, signing, etc. Etc. All of which is. Is very cool. But as we now know, that didn't work. The social thing didn't work. Content coins didn't work. And, you know, Jesse's come out and said, yeah, this, this first quarter of 2026 was a punch in the face. I don't even know if I'd like. That feels even a little bit inaccurate. I want to say, like the last couple of quarters of 2025 probably also not amazing either.
- [04:08]
C
I think it, I think it probably just like hit him like him that.
- [04:12]
A
Yeah. You know, as a builder, you gotta believe.
- [04:17]
C
I wanna, I wanna give Jesse like major props for this because most people, even after being punched in the face and having a pile of bricks thrown at them, right. Would still be in denial because the sun costs here. It's like over two years. It's his entire life. Yeah, right. For the last like two years straight, like, he's bet on this, be able to basically be like, I was, I. And he says this, I was wrong. Like, I was wrong. Like, that takes. It's not, it's. It's one thing to say it out loud, but like the first part of that, to acknowledge it and to admit it to yourself.
- [04:56]
A
So I think, I think here's the interesting thing for me, right, that like, there's a lot of different dynamics going on with Coinbase. And you know, Coinbase is a somewhat unique American enterprise, if you will. Right. And you know, crypto's very global, right? Like much more global than most industries. Right. So know, we've got like Finnish founders and Danish founders and Australian founders and, you know, all of these different founders from different random countries that you would never interact with. Right. You know, it's not as like us Dominated as you know, a lot of other industries, right? Or, or like it's, it's so global that even if it is, you still come across all these different people from different places, including like us founders, right? Like you know, there's like Kraken, there's, there's a bunch of, of companies that are, that are you know, kind of SF New York based founders that, that you come across. But Coinbase amongst all the US ones has these three things going for it that make them a little insane, right? You have the SF flavor of startup, right? And like SF people, you know, I lived in, I lived in, in San Jose for like five years, right? And SF and you know, people from, from the Bay Area startups are like real cracked, right? Like a, you import those people, right? They didn't. They like they import them from all over the US right to. Because they're fucking lunatics, right? And like they're just like super delusional, like maximal, like you know, Hopium, like all of the things you want in a startup founder, they like bring them from all over the country and like chuck them in a room together and see what happens, right? So you've got that element then. Coinbase is I think like the closest thing that we have to like a Google in, in crypto, right? Like the problem with Google, and I knew a ton of people who worked at Google when I, when I lived in, in California. And the problem with Google is they have no worldly constraints upon them, right? They, they discovered a money printer in the form of advertising that was just like goshed money. That meant that they were detached from reality, they could do anything they wanted. Nothing that they did mattered, like literally nothing. Like they could not stop this thing from printing money even if they tried. Right to the point where like they started out and they're like don't be evil and like the Microsoft evil Empire. And they're like actually whatever, fuck it, we'll be evil. And so they, Coinbase is like the closest thing to that, right? Because you have this so pseudo monopoly almost where they make so much money from retail people who just want to buy some bitcoin and are paying you know, 80 bits $. Yeah. Like they, you know the, the top thing is like 1.2%. So you know, in Coinbase like there's this element of like you're going to make a fuckload of money no matter what you do. Now the cool thing about that is and, and Google has this same element where it's like you feel like you have the mandate of heaven to go out and do some crazy, right? The EF probably feels a little bit like this as well, right? Maybe a little bit less now, but like, you know, probably consensus even I would imagine has a little bit of this element of like, you know, they were so rich that you could do anything, right? Like we could just, like we could, we can manifest the world to be the way that we want it to be, right? When you, when you are no longer, it's okay.
- [08:55]
C
So it's a combination of, of like money, the support structures, because you can have a bunch of money, but if you're a team of 10, you don't actually fall into the same, right? But like the support structures that Consensus and Coinbase and Google all have meaning, like real payroll, real recruiters, real operations, real taxes, real legal. Like those things are just handled, right? But it also means that you do have like more legitimacy and also oversight internally. Like there are processes that get, like when you have lawyers like in your company from day one, there are processes that exist from day one and it does shape the org, but within, within
- [09:40]
A
the bounds of the law, right? Like it probably makes it harder to do reg. Reg R. Right, for sure. Like Google wasn't out there trying to do like weird rab stuff like a little bit like they would do some stuff like you know, put cameras in cars. It just is whatever.
- [09:55]
C
But like, I think it just is the difference between sort of from the get go, you're building a scalable organization with like processes and hierarchy and stuff from the beginning, rather than what happens with so many crypto companies, which is there's like two guys, then there's four guys, there's 10 guys. And even at 10 guys, it's like they're texting with their, with their lawyer on an hourly rate on occasion. You know what I mean? And you don't actually have to really instill like actual organizational structure and processes until maybe like a hundred people, right? And not just like shapes a lot of things. It also, I mean it shapes like product. It shapes how you communicate, it shapes how you ship. It shapes everything. It's not necessarily because legal is like they get consensus legal, but it's not sitting in the product meetings, right? But like it does shape the way that product thinks.
- [10:53]
A
You know, they're there. You know, they're like in, in the area, right? And so, so I think that like you end up with this, this org, right? And people who gravitate to it because cultures form around the thing that you are, right? And the thing that you Do. And so within Coinbase, like, on some level, you're going to make a ton of money every year, whether you try to or not, right? Which doesn't mean they don't try and do some other stuff. But it, you know, Google, they have the whole SC, like 90% of the effort of the people in Google, right, is not keeping the money, money printer going. It's like doing weird shit, right? Like, and they do all these experiments and you're like, Android, they bought Android. And then, and the whole Android ecosystem came out of the fact that Google was like, yolo, who fucking cares? We're rich as fuck. Let's like build a mobile phone operating system and, and, you know, take on iOS, like, because you can, you can just do anything, right? And, and so in an environment like that, where you have no worldly constraints other than, like, there's lawyers roaming around, right?
- [11:59]
C
But that sometimes can be empowering too, by the way. Like, it's kind of dangerous, Loki, like, not going to lie. Like, it's not. There's like, dangerous as in like just like YOLOing into, like, literally everything. But there's like, there is a false sense of security when the lawyers are like, I don't see anything problematic with shipping blockchain.
- [12:22]
A
Yeah, yeah, I could see that maybe
- [12:24]
C
that wasn't the, that wasn't necessarily a question that could have been asked.
- [12:28]
A
Right, right, right. Like the question, can we get away with this? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [12:32]
C
Like, if we build the new blockchain, will it be successful and why are we doing it and how do we ensure it? You know what I mean? Which, by the way, to Coinbase's credit, they did ask those questions, they did answer those questions. They were just wrong about it.
- [12:46]
A
And that's, I mean, the most interesting thing though is that like, on the core of it, they were right, right. Like, if it wasn't for, if it wasn't for base, right? Like, you know, I was, I was like, very involved in the early optimism ecosystem. You know, we were, we were the first app that built, first protocol that built on optimism. So we'd shoot a lot of that early glass with them. And I still remember the first time I met Jesse, I was like, holy shit, this guy's going to make this thing work. Like, in a way that the Optimism team had struggled because, you know, as a startup, you're pulled in different directions. They're extremely technical, super smart, like, Carl's fucking genius. Like, but the go to market was really hard and like, we struggled with that with synthetics, like, Go to market only worked when we were talking to other artists. Outside of that, we never got to the market. We were never able to communicate with them. And I think optimism struggled with that. And then Jesse came along and was like, I'll build on your OP stack and like actually bring Coinbase people and had this flourishing ecosystem. But I think at the core of it, right there is still in Coinbase this like delusional, like reality distortion field that exists from like being super early, being. Right. Like having a fuckload of money because you were early and right where it can be hard for them to see what is real right now. That's great for a startup founder. And so, you know, I think that was super helpful for, for Jesse when he was starting bas. He's like, of course we'll make this work. Like, this is like a, you know, this is like 100% going to work. There's no chance that it's, it's going to fail almost. Right? Like there was like this like delusional hopium based like reality distortion field of like, we're going to make this work. And he did. The problem is when you then go, I, I've done this thing, I'm now going to make the thing that Vitalik has always told us we're destined and anointed to do, which is like online, blockchain, social or whatever the it is that we're supposed to be doing, not finance. Right. And, and then he was like, let's do it. And then you had Farcaster and you had all these people and it's like you got these really smart people that are like, this can happen. And Vitalik sitting there saying, you must do this, stop doing finance, like go and do this other stuff. And you can see how you get yourself there. But to your point, the fact that he was, and I think this is the other element here, right. It's like as, as much as Jesse Grind, like was, you know, grinding in the trenches with builders, like he spent. He was terminally online on the timeline, in Telegram groups, in all these groups, like working so fucking hard to, to meme this chain into existence. Right. But he's still not a real startup found founder in the sense that he can't die, he can't run out of money.
- [16:00]
C
Yes.
- [16:00]
A
You know, like, because he's in this world where they've got a giant money printer and they're going to keep, you know, Coinbase is going to keep printing money. There's no real threat to it. You know, there's like an existential Long term, decades long threat of like the world moves on chain or whatever, which that was what they're trying to get ahead of. But outside of that, he's fine. He's not gonna. So, yeah, this come to Jesus moment of like, okay, the social thing didn't work. If you're a startup founder, you probably just like grind it into the ground, run out of money, and then no one ever hears from you again. But Jesse's like, I gotta come to work tomorrow.
- [16:38]
C
Yeah. And that's a hard. That's hard, by the way. Like, coming to this realization when you don't necessarily have to is hard. He could have just kept going all in. I think probably the last couple quarterly earnings calls were pretty tough though, just in part because the market's down, but also like, wait, this thing that we bet big on is not delivering what we think?
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A
Yeah.
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C
Then you look in, you know, you take a really good hard look at it, and it's like number go down across the board. And especially because so many things that they had bet on just were not really making it.
- [17:16]
A
Yeah.
- [17:17]
C
And I think they're probably forgot, you
- [17:19]
A
know, they forgot about the. What the core job. Like.
- [17:22]
C
Well, yeah. And so that's the other reason why
- [17:25]
A
they have this mandate is because they charge people to buy crypto. That is literally the purpose of Coinbase. They charge people to buy crypto. They don't charge people to fucking tweet or do on chain social or whatever other crazy know. They were trying to. They charge people to buy bitcoin. That's it.
- [17:45]
C
So I will say, you know, we have had conversations like this within consensus. And it's hard because the builders that make up consensus, myself included, are not. Well, there's more of them now. But like, historically, it's not the super deep degenerate like there. It doesn't have that culture that you find in the trenches of people who are like, I don't give a fuck about anything like PvP at all. Like, we are not that. Like, we genuinely believe in the tech. We believe in the future. We believe in people doing things that are not just like trying to be the last one holding or not holding the bag. Right. Like those things. And so when you build. And this is what Bates did, right. They built this culture around almost being a rejection of that.
- [18:29]
A
Yes. Yeah.
- [18:31]
C
But it makes you a little bit, well, probably very blind to when the market is right, when hyper liquid is taking off, when every single indicator, like objective indicator in terms of like money and growth opportunities are pointing to prediction markets and Perks, right? You have to be on that train. You can like, you know, I give them props. And I'm not saying that like, if they could go back in time to like ignore Farcaster, like, I think that that was like their brand and their culture.
- [19:07]
A
Again, I go back like, it was worth a try. Like, you know, as much as I make one of Vitalik for like telling us to stop doing finance, right? Like if Farcaster works, like if base actually pulls that off, right? The, the, like the TAM on solving decentralized social and all of a sudden your competitor to X or meta or something, right? Like, you know, is, is the same size as Coinbase. So like it was, it was. And you can take that swing because of the fact that if you miss, it doesn't matter. Like, you're going to eat on the timeline. You're going. But like, and this is where I think like the, the Coinbase is so interesting and, and arguably consensus as well is the fact that you are come from this privileged upbringing, right, where like, you're super rich, you know, like, you can go and fucking party in Ibiza. Like that's an option for you. Just go and like, just do it. Just like that sounds good. Can we, right?
- [20:09]
C
And can we.
- [20:10]
A
Let's go, you guys. Like, I've done it. Like, not anymore. I learned that lesson, right? But like, you can do that, right? Or you can be like, hang on a second. Of all of the people who can try and build this thing, right, I am in the most privileged position to do it. I have a chain that has thriving ecosystem. I've got unlimited funding, I've got a mandate. Like, I'm going to go and try and make this work. And when it doesn't, you look at it and go, the market does not want this. It genuinely does not want it. Maybe we're too early still, maybe we got it wrong or whatever. Um, but, you know, it was worth the try. Like, and that's the thing that I think is so, so interesting is like, you know, trenches and even OGs, right? Like, OG is like, Ah, fucking idiots. Why did you try? Right? But like, they're not in the same position. Like, a lot of my friends, even, you know, who, who are very wealthy from being OG Crypto, they're not in Jesse's position where like, no, you have a lot of room.
- [21:11]
C
Yeah, you have a lot of room. You have a lot of room and you have a lot of like, things that are sort of just like done, like distribution and stuff. Like, but you still. That's the thing is like, just because you have distribution does not make it magic, right?
- [21:23]
A
No.
- [21:23]
C
And I saw this within Metamask too. Weird ship, new features with stuff. And it did not mean that revenue just. You have to work at it still. So I don't know. My takeaway on the situation overall is like one, I feel for Jesse. I respect him for. I mean, I don't know. This post hit me right, a little bit where he's like, he's like. I don't know if it'll turn out that the timing is. Was wrong, right? On the assumption of like creator coins and social and stuff.
- [21:57]
A
Yeah.
- [21:57]
C
Or if I was just like fully freaking wrong, but I was definitely wrong. Like in one of those ways. Like, that's just. I don't know, like, it just. It's hard. There's a journey.
- [22:09]
A
The problem is, right, like, the problem is that the. The social on the on chain social psyop, right? And. And like you can look at the trajectory of this, right? Like the path dependency, it was like, okay, on chain social, it's not working. Who do we have? Degenerates. Let's try and meld those two things together. Like, you can see how it's. It's not illogical. It's just like, no, no, degenerates do not care. And this is, you know, so the next thing is right. Then Brian tries to kind of come in and engage. Right.
- [22:43]
C
Well, okay. And I want. Hold on. I want to just point out I still think doing the socials in the Forecaster was worth it. Mostly because, like, what the hell else? Like, if you go back two years, it wasn't as clear that prediction markets and perps were going to be the thing. So you're not going to go necessarily all in on that. So the choice is like this. You know, you have to build up your chain. You have to have apps, you have to have things. What things, right? And. And as coinbase with distribution, you are going to have. You're going to be shipping things, you're going to be empowering certain people. So you do have to make a choice. It's not clear to me that they could have made that. It would have been a. That it would have ended up better if they had chosen perps. Maybe it would have, right? Yeah, maybe if they'd like, really? But it's just like, it just doesn't seem like something that could have happened.
- [23:31]
A
But also like, how do you different, you know, if Luca were here. Right? Yeah. That he would, he would. And I don't want to speak for him. But like he said similar things, right? Like with Abstract they were like we're not going to just be a dumb defi chain, right? Not because he's like communist and hates finance, but because he's like we don't have a competitive advantage there.
- [23:53]
C
Exactly, exactly.
- [23:54]
A
Go and you know, we're going to go and do this other thing because it makes. And then he was like, oh fuck. Actually you need defi on your chain otherwise this other stuff can't even work. Like you need money on the chain. You need value on the chain for any of this stuff to even have a chance of succeeding. Bass had that. They had, you know, Aerodrome.
- [24:14]
C
Yeah, they attracted a bunch of stuff, right?
- [24:17]
A
Like yeah, they had, they had a lot of activity. They had all these builders that morpho. They had a ton of stuff.
- [24:22]
C
But even, okay, but even look at Aerodrome and morpho. Like those are like in terms of the global defi ecosystem, those are pretty stand up little dudes. You know what I mean?
- [24:37]
A
They were all.
- [24:39]
C
That's what I mean. They're cut from the same cloth. They're not hyper liquid on the other side of the world. They'll like just freaking, you know. And they're also not, I don't know, name the 800 other protocols that have like gone to the moon and then immediately collapse because they're disgusting and too degenerate. Right. But like, like so I don't know but I think the biggest issue, and I think that this is especially pertinent to like when you're building a chain where you, your kind of forget this base, blurred the lines between distribution on the chain to end users and to builders.
- [25:15]
A
Yeah.
- [25:16]
C
If you're building a blockchain and you want it to be successful forever. Forever. The cheapest way to do that is to navigate it to a user to only focus on developers. Right. And let them build whatever.
- [25:30]
A
Yeah.
- [25:31]
C
But if you can empower a diverse set, you basically like hedge your bets across all the things the ballmer strategy.
- [25:38]
A
Developers. Developers. Developers. Right.
- [25:41]
C
But that's, you know, and so if you do that however, you know, network effects and distribution, not like it's, it's a bit of a chicken and an egg. Right. So I get why they did what they did. I think one thing that Jesse just calls out in this post, which I think is definitely true, is that because they sort of really drank the Kool Aid on the social and the creator coins and this kind of stuff, they def. They didn't, they didn't remain competitive as the market Shifted, Right. And this is why I say like when, when, when hyper liquid went to the moon and prediction markets went to the moon and like, I guess like the more degenerate stuff, they just didn't
- [26:24]
A
have an answer to it. They didn't have an answer to perps, they didn't have an answer to prediction markets. And, and they could have, right? Like, exactly. Coinbase had sufficient distribution to kill polymarket for sure. Like polymarket was vulnerable for a long time. All right, let's, let's go to ads quickly and when we come back, let's talk about the Brian PFP stuff as well.
- [26:50]
B
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- [27:46]
A
All right, we're back. So, so just to continue this base story, right, you know, the, the other issue and you mentioned this, like the trenches, right? The, the people, there's builders and then there's trenches. That's kind of all we have left, right? And the challenge is that if you're building for non trenches, it's very challenging. You know, it's, it's a bear market. It was a hard cycle even in the bull market because the trenches really overran the place. But the, the issue is if you're unaware or like not like kind of tapped into this, it can be very easy to burn yourself. So Brian comes along with a backdrop of all this base stuff and Jesse's mea culpa and, and whatever and changes his PFP on X to the logo of this meme coin, this Brian meme coin, right? Now the trenches, they only, and this is the thing, if you, if you're not aware of this, you're going to fuck yourself, right? They only care about making money. They only care about making money. And this like, you know, I've fucked around with Meme coins. I've. I've done a couple of meme coins for fun. I did the MER cash thing where I thought it was a funny joke, right? I was on a podcast with Mert and we were talking about zcash, right? And so I launched this, but it was on a pump fun stream, right? And so I was like, it. I'm going to launch a meme coin while we're on here.
- [29:22]
C
Oh, how that go?
- [29:24]
A
Terrible, right? So. So I watched this thing. I. I know, right? So, but it was like. But I mean, it went. If you ignore the. The people being very angry that they didn't make a lot of money, right? Oh, yes, ignore. That part went amazingly well. It was hilarious, right? Like the. It was like a funny AI logo of MERT holding up, like, a coin, right? It was a funny meme.
- [29:51]
C
Yeah.
- [29:52]
A
Like, the problem is it was a funny meme. I could have done it without the coin and it would have been funny, right? Yeah, it would have been a lot funnier because it wouldn't have had all of the hangover, right? Instead. And this is. This is the other problem, right? The reason why you should not fuck with meme coins unless you are like a giga extractor, professional sniper, bundler, whatever, right? Or trenchist is if you are the former. If you're a bundler sniper person, right? And your job, you know, the like, CB04 guy, right? If your job is just like extracting and. And raping the trenches, right? And like, that's your whole stick is like, I come in and bundle and snipe and, you know, extract as much value as possible. And. And I love it, and I'm French or whatever, if that's your job, then fine, like, you've made peace with that. Cool. Cool. If you're a trenches and you're like, I'm. I'm trying to make money. That's my job. I want to turn my 5 soul into 5 million sol or whatever the you're trying to do, right? If you're not one of those two people, stay away from meme coins because you're an amateur and you're going to get wrecked. And so even, like, I was like, I'll do this funny thing. And then I found out that that pump has these creator fees, right? So I was like, well, I'll just take the creator fees and I'll dump them into the coin, which I started doing, right? Like, and. And this was like, right after it had come out, and I put like. I want to say it was a Thousand sol or something like that into the coin from, like, these fees didn't matter because the people who, like, bundled it and sniped it just dumped into it the people who thought it was going to do well, you know, so it got to like 5,6 million market cap and then got crushed and there was literally like, nothing. Of course.
- [31:39]
C
Yeah. And that's how it is. And that's, by the way, like. So let me just preface this by saying, like, I'm sure there are cases of people that don't know what they're doing at all whatsoever, right? Like, your average retail user, like, accidentally gets into a meme point. However, in the majority of cases, the rage that you see on the timeline and especially in reply to like, Brian right now is like, it's very hard to differentiate between people who actually didn't expect this outcome and got screwed, like, legitimately was like, oh, my God. I believe.
- [32:20]
A
I don't think there's any. Like, I honestly, I don't think. My hot take is. These are. It's the same thing, right?
- [32:27]
C
It's all manufactured.
- [32:28]
A
It's the same thing. As if a grifter or something has their funds frozen, right? You will never see such faux outrage as someone who is a thief or, or whatever, having their funds frozen or, or stolen back or whatever, right? Like, it. It's, you know, even. Even, like scammers, right? Like, I, you know, you have scammers and DMs and you with them, they get so angry, so mad. How dare you with me?
- [32:58]
C
Because there's no.
- [32:58]
A
You're trying to steal my life.
- [32:59]
C
There's no more downside. There's no more downside. They don't have. They're not. They're not living in the normal world, right? So if, if, if you can reply guy to Brian or to Kane or whatever and get them to do anything regarding the coin, okay? And this is critical to understand. You don't have to convince them to do any specific thing. They just have to do anything with the coin that will meet that. That will put more activity on the coin. The coin will, like, go up and down. And therefore there's opportunities to make money. And so when you see this level of outrage and, and like, the. Just like, it's. It's brutal and it's huge, but it's not. It's not real.
- [33:42]
A
It's manufactured, right?
- [33:43]
C
And if you're like, but why. A lot of people argue with these guys and they're like, but why would someone who's incentivized to Do X, you do Y. Because then Brian would. No, no, it's not logical, guys. Like, it's like the CIA. Like, they just want to sow chaos because that will keep the activity on the coin.
- [34:00]
A
Yeah.
- [34:01]
C
Like, they don't actually care what the outcome is.
- [34:03]
A
They don't care what the outcome is as long as people are dying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [34:07]
C
They win as long as the chart is like this. The second the chart's like this, everyone's, it's game over and you have to go find the other one.
- [34:13]
A
The only issue, right, is weirdly, CT is back, right? And so Brian did this, like, a week after. Like, CT is actually back and you can find out about things on X. Like, it's crazy, right? And. And so there is a reputational impact that can happen that has nothing to do with the Trenches, right? The Trenches are playing their game. They're trying to manufacture, you know, whatever. They're trying to manufacture activity, whatever, but actual OGs are still on the timeline. We thought that we were all gone. Like, everyone thought everyone was gone. Meanwhile, we were all still there every day, right? And. And so all of a sudden, people see this and they're like, oh, Brian. Like, come on, man. Like, what are you doing? Like, don't fuck with meme coins. Like, this is negative ev. Like, why would you do it? And then, like, his answer was, like, really unsatisfying. Like, oh, I just did a thing and I didn't realize it was going to be a big deal. And, like, you shouldn't follow me for financial way.
- [35:17]
C
By the way, all the reply guys were like, how could you not know? I mean, he didn't know, probably Brian. It's Brian. Why did you think that he knew in the first place, you maniacs. And the reality is, like, they didn't actually. Right? They're just trying.
- [35:30]
A
They didn't care. They don't care whether. That's the thing. They don't care whether he knew or not, Right?
- [35:34]
C
Yeah.
- [35:34]
A
Their job, like, every step of the game.
- [35:38]
C
But it came the narrative, right? From the outside. The narrative is that, like, Brian must have seen this coin. And therefore these innocent people who look up to Brian made an investment decision based on Brian's words and then got wrecked.
- [35:54]
A
Those people aren't real.
- [35:55]
C
That doesn't make sense.
- [35:57]
A
It's funny.
- [35:58]
C
I'm sorry. It's literally nobody did that.
- [36:00]
A
None of those. None of that happened. Right? The funny thing is people go, brian has a responsibility because he has all of these noob crypto buyers, right, who are buying bitcoin from him and paying, you know, 50 bips or whatever, right? Those people could be tricked by Brian into buying a meme coin. No, they couldn't. I'm sorry. No, no. There's no one who's been like, dcaing bitcoin on Coinbase for the last decade that woke up, saw Brian tweet a fucking. Those people are the same as Brian. They don't know what it is by name.
- [36:37]
C
And tweet, by the way, he just changed BFP.
- [36:40]
A
But no, like the. The Bitcoin DCA lady who's been doing it for 10 years did not go, oh, Brian, let me go and find out more about what's going on with this thing and I'll buy that instead of bitcoin today. That didn't happen. It's not real. Right? But the job of a trenchist is at every step, if there is exactly fud. If there is, you know, attention, basically their job is attention, right? In, like, inflame it. So of course they go 10,000 people. Like, there was. There's a one guy, rune something or other, not the rune who made maker, but this other guy who's like, again, this was what the whole timeline was, right? Like I said this last week. It was like him.
- [37:26]
C
He was completely mad.
- [37:28]
A
It was. It was like him and, like, you know, like 10 other guys that no one had really ever heard of before that were, like, trenches that had gotten, like, elevated somehow that still had, like, riz on the timeline. Weirdly, right? This guy's like, 10,000 people. The story was hilarious, right? 10,000 people bridged to your chain, Brian, to buy your token. And now they've all lost money because you made them do it. It's like, Ben, like, no. Like, they're like, no, no, like, sorry, no, I. Like, like, now, is it still negative ev for Brian to, like, do anything even in the vicinity of meme coins? Yes. He should not do that. He needs to stop doing it because other people do look at it and go, like, Brian, why are you do. Like, why are you doing this? And he's like, I. Like, I didn't know, like. And, you know, was his explanation very unsatisfying, right? Like, yes, it was very. I. I read it. I was like, man, come on, just be like, sorry, I up. Didn't realize it was a dumb meme coin thing. I'll see you guys later. Right? But, you know, it was to your point, though, like, there's 50 lawyers, like, staring at him as he's typing thing, right? And they're like, don't this up, Brian. Do not it up. Right?
- [38:45]
C
You can't win, by the way. You can't win. So. Yeah, no, but I agree, the. The takeaway for everyone, especially people that are like, brian, just don't touch, don't get. That's my rule. Don't get anywhere near it. Like, I learned that back in the day. I joined a telegram chat. Well, so they added me. Story time. Someone added me to a telegram chat for, like, a very early version of a meme coin. Some trenchy. And specifically, I found out later that they added me because they thought it would be funny to add Tay, the security anti ico person to this telegram chat. And I was like. I took one look at it, and I was like, y'. All. Y' all straight up retarded. Like, holy. And then I, like, went and did calls. I think I went to the park. I think maybe we had a doc. It's a. Lyra was like a baby. So I think we probably had a doctor's appointment or something. Three hours later, I get back home, and this thing is, like, taken off, and there's, like, screenshots of, like, me, like, quote unquote, promoting this thing.
- [39:44]
A
Oh, my God,
- [39:49]
C
honey. It was like, I had no idea what hit me.
- [39:54]
A
People like, why are you shilling a meme coin?
- [39:57]
C
Literally, for days, for days, Even, like, months later, people would, like, not disagree with the change. And they're like, yeah, why? Why would you rug that meme coin? And, like, ever since then, I'm like, okay, whatever it is, it's just not worth it. It's completely insane.
- [40:13]
A
Meme coin launcher.
- [40:15]
C
Oh, my God.
- [40:16]
A
You should not. You should not with meme coins, you know, I mean, Jesse found this out, right? Like, he tried.
- [40:22]
C
Everyone has their lesson.
- [40:25]
A
I mean, Jesse probably took it a little bit further than he needed to, but again, this is the delusional kind of nature of, like, Founders plus too much money plus. Plus plus is, you know, it's easy to kind of get yourself into a place where you're like, okay, you know, like, it hasn't worked for anyone else, but maybe this time it'll work for us. You know, the. The rest of development meme. And. And so I don't know. The whole thing. The whole thing is. Is a bit crazy, but I, you know, I come back to basis still one of the top five blockchains in the world.
- [41:02]
C
They'll figure it out.
- [41:04]
B
People.
- [41:04]
A
People are. People are like, oh, base is dead. And whatever, you know, again, like. Like, base is not going to Be dead. It's. It's. It's gonna be fine. But they have abs. The good. The good news is the cyclical nature of crypto forces you to come to Jesus every cycle. When you get into the bear market and you go and look at your life choices from the previous two years and go, huh, that was pretty. What was I thinking?
- [41:36]
C
Right?
- [41:36]
A
Because the euphoria gets into you somehow, right? Like, it doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter how, you know, rational you try to be. The euphoria will seep in somehow and you will go, I'm going to do this thing. And, you know, most of the time, it's nonsense. So. So, you know, I'm. I'm. I'm kind of to your point. Like, I'm impressed that there's, like, a public sort of ripping here. Right?
- [42:03]
C
Yep.
- [42:04]
A
And. And, you know, I think that. That now that we have CT back, I do think that there will be a bit more of a forcing function of, like, your actual peers, like, your actual peers being like, no, stop doing that. Like, don't do that anymore, man. Like, that's a dumb idea. And, like, you have a week of insanity and not, like, two years of insanity. Because, you know, like, Jesse goes and does some crazy thing next week, right? He'll actually hear from real people who are like, no, Jesse, this is, like, creator coins. Get, like the. You know, stop doing it. Right? All right, so let's. Let's wrap it up there on the base front. But, yeah, tldr, I think, basically fine. I think they need to focus on trading. Stop listening to Fatalic, and they'll be fine.
- [42:58]
C
Trust in Kobe.
- [42:59]
A
Trusting Kobe. We didn't even talk about Kobe. Kobe, like, I. Kobe will bring.
- [43:06]
C
Will show. Show them the light, or he will die.
- [43:10]
A
He'll die trying. He'll die trying. You know that Kobe will die trying. The best thing about Kobe, right, Is, like, he is, like, the best person at Twitter we've ever produced. I'm sure there's some. I'm sure there's some, like, exceptional Twitter people in other niche communities.
- [43:32]
C
Also. Also, like, the respectable trencher. Yeah. Like, he's kind of, like, the only one.
- [43:39]
A
I would say there's not many. There's. If there were, they've left, right? Like, they've retired undefeated. Right. But he's. He's. He is just like. You see his responses. And I will, like, test myself. Someone will say something so good, and I'll be like, what's Kobe's response gonna be? And I'll try to imagine, like, how would he respond to this, right? Because I wish that I could respond to some of the shit that people say to me on. On the timeline with even like a tenth of the. Like, just. He's so cutting and he just like, lands the thing anyway. And I'll be like, oh, I think he's gonna say this. And it's like, never. Right? I'm never right. Like, he just finds a way to like, find the. Like, it's very good. Right? So anyway, so. So I think, like, you know, hopefully Kobe will bring some sanity to the situation and. And some pragmatism. Because the good thing about Kobe is he comes from a very different reality, right? He's actually worked in real startups. He's had to build things without, you know, yes, a lot of money, but like, not infinite money. Not you can make no mistakes money, not too big to fail money. He still had a forcing function of like, figuring out and that kind of attitude. Definitely Coinbase needs more of like, aund like, take like 50% of the delusionalness out of Coinbase, and I think that they'd be in a much better place.
- [45:08]
C
So.
- [45:08]
A
Yeah, we'll see. We'll see what happens. All right, let's go on to our next segment. DP IT workers are still infiltrating crypto companies.
- [45:22]
C
Oh, yeah. I'm not allowed to. Okay. So I have to be careful on what I say and don't say, but I'll give audience some alpha on the DPRK ID workers. They're still here, guys. They're still getting into every single company. And like, I don't know, it seems like forever ago. It was like four months ago. One with committing code to Metamask.
- [45:49]
A
Crazy. And that's like publicly known now. That's publicly known.
- [45:53]
C
And it's kind of a bummer. So I'm upset about this news cycle mostly because I. I cannot say this enough, guys. Every single crypto company of like any significant size dating back to at least 2020 has, like, had an IT worker. A lot of them have had like 10 IT workers.
- [46:15]
A
You know what's funny?
- [46:16]
C
A lot of them were built. Built from the ground up, have their CTOs as IT workers. And I just want to say the reason you don't know the company names is that it is. It is negative. So it's so bad. You have the focus beyond the companies that hired them rather than the workers names.
- [46:36]
A
Right?
- [46:37]
C
Mostly because it incentivizes the companies to not disclose and hide their. When they find Them to hide it more, which gives the IT workers basically. You're basically empowering the IT workers to keep the cycle going and keep working at companies when the headlines are Metamask instead of the IT workers or like the problem itself. Trust me, like every big company in crypto and outside of crypto is looking at the headlines right now and going like, okay, so if we have an IT worker, make sure that like nothing can ever leak ever to the media so that we don't have this story.
- [47:12]
A
Right. And that like, I think Synthetics has probably had over a decade, a couple of hundred employees. Right. You know, not in the thousands, but like a couple of hundred. And I do like think about this every once in a while. I'm like, I wonder if I can go scan you.
- [47:33]
C
Yeah, yeah, maybe I'll scan you and we'll see. Yeah, I'm sure you. I'm honestly, I'm sure you've had them. There's a, there's like a couple different, I guess, like classes. Like, it's also important to note, like a lot of them actually do just work. They just work. They just do work. It's very weird, but they actually like, they just, they're not hackers. They just want to work. Yeah, yeah, they work like four jobs at once. So I still wouldn't recommend hiring them. They also are. So the, the, the risk of the IT workers are they hack you, which is rare, but it happens. They hack you opportunistically, which happens more often. The common one is that they themselves get hacked, which results in your company getting hacked. Because they're actually massively insecure. They're basically like remoting into like a meth heads computer in Florida to do their work. And so if the meth head watches like the meth head downloads some porn from limewire, you know, then. Then like the Russians come in and hack your company through your IT worker that you didn't know that you had. It's like, would not recommend. Okay, so anyway, yeah, those are the. Oh, and then the other risk is like they just write really bad code. So yeah, don't.
- [48:44]
A
And we have agents for that now, so it's fine.
- [48:46]
C
Yeah, it's a sanctions violation too if you're in most of the world. Oh, it's really, it's just bad. Don't do it. However. Yeah, so MetaMask, they had one committing code. They were therefore it is I guess accurate to say that they were working for MetaMask, but technically they were not employed by MetaMask just to say that they were like this, you know, and so the defense in depth. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So defense in depth means that even if something like this happens, the core underlying product, the systems, the architecture is not compromised. And that is what all of crypto should be striving for. You should also be striving for detection. Not just during like people are like, oh well why didn't you catch it during interviewing? Yeah, that's. Well, there's answers to that. But like the reality is like they do get through interviews a lot of times, especially if they use like the US based facilitators like white boys doing the interviews for them. So then the question is like you have to have subsequent systems and processes to catch them down the road and continuous monitoring and stuff. And so I don't know. Generally speaking, this incident from my perspective, by the way, I had already left consensus by the time this happened, but they handled it pretty well. And I was shocked to see the email that leaked. Okay, shocked. So the reason that this leaked to the freaking shit tier journals, right, is because they emailed every single person at consensus, every single person at consensus warning them about this person and saying this person is dprk. Do not engage with them. If you have go to security and we'll make sure that you're clean. I have, I've done, I've probably told at this point, I probably told like maybe 150 different crypto companies that they've had an IT worker and walk them through like cleanup and remediation. We always recommend like telling at least internally, making sure that they tell people internally so that the IT worker can't
- [50:55]
A
go and re engage. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [50:58]
C
They'll come back and drop, they'll drop contagious interview. They'll hand off to Apple Juice, which are like the real big boy hackers. You don't want any of that. I don't know. I genuinely, I'm not sure if any of those 125 companies have ever done that, let alone to a company that size.
- [51:15]
A
Yeah, crazy.
- [51:16]
C
So I wish more companies would do this. I now have a template that I'll be using when I do further notifications. But generally like there's the, and there's also just like the way that the architecture and the systems work. We have always assumed that if like we assume that there will be bad and malicious code that gets written, there's like literally a hundred things that are, that are in place to make sure that it doesn't ever get to the end user. Like just because there's code being pushed to the GitHub, it would. It still would never get to the. To the end user. And that's what's critically important and why certain products in crypto are built different than others. But, you know, that's not click worthy. Like, why would we want to talk about that? We just want to talk about how whatever the headline was, you know, I
- [52:12]
A
mean, it's just, it's crazy. Like, you would, you would hope. My. One of my hopes is that North Korea pivots to AI. Like, there's gotta be more money in stealing tokens. Oh, yeah. AI companies somehow, surely, like, that's gotta be a bigger thing. But to hacking AI companies, so, so they also.
- [52:40]
C
Yeah, well, I just want to say they, the IT workers love AI more than anyone. And yes, they are stealing tokens. I was just looking at one of the guys.
- [52:49]
A
Exciting for me.
- [52:50]
C
I told you, the IT workers are very insecure. I was just looking at one of their M files. They have like 50 quad tokens in that bitch.
- [52:58]
A
No, Are you serious? That they just.
- [53:00]
C
They have every model. Yeah, it's just in this M file. And so it's like. And they.
- [53:05]
A
Crazy.
- [53:05]
C
Yeah. And they'll, they'll just like loop around.
- [53:09]
A
Wow. Huh?
- [53:10]
C
I was in stock. I was like, they knew that they had. That they had. Right? We talked about this before. They have keys, they have tokens. They. Right, I did not know. These guys have like a pile of them, dude.
- [53:23]
A
Wow. Wow. That's actually crazy. We gotta, we gotta. They love AI Chat to fake Nick Carter, see if he can hook me up.
- [53:33]
C
Oh, for sure. He definitely can. Yes.
- [53:37]
A
Nice. All right, so. So our next story is OpenAI model hacks hugging face, right? So I was, I was telling my wife about this when we're having dinner. My son, who's 6, goes, that doesn't make any sense. Can you explain that me in like, you know, explain it like I'm five sort of thing, right? And I was like. I was like, okay, here's the equivalent, right? Just to understand how crazy the world that we live in is now, imagine that Apple is building a new iPad, right? And they like, don't know how good the iPad is, right? And so they put it in like a room and lock it in the room, right? And they like, give it some things to try and do and it fucking grows legs, climbs out the window, runs across the street and like, steals a bunch of phones from a mobile phone store and starts like calling people and like fucking, like doing pranks on them. That's how crazy the world is that like a piece of technology that we've built, you put it in a room and you can't trust that it isn't going to assume escape out of there. And he was like, that's pretty crazy. And I was like, yeah, it is, it's, it's actually even crazier than that. So OpenAI, they're testing some stuff out. They give a model no access to anything. And it's like, well, this is annoying. I really need some access to the Internet. Let me just have a little poke around here and see if I can, I can figure this out. Uh, so I don't know, like you want to give us the details on this take? Because this, it's fucking wild. Like this is like the AI doomers like wet dream, right?
- [55:29]
C
Like, yeah, well, let me. Okay, so I wanted to say we've talked about this before. You're actually, I think the one, maybe it was you who pointed out sometimes they get quite fixated on things and they just like go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that that's what happened here. And there's a lot of commentary on the timeline right now that we should talk about up front where people are saying that either this is like a marketing thing by OpenAI, which is okay, sure, whatever, if you want to believe that. But the other one is that people seem to think that there's no way an AI would ever take this route. And we'll talk about the exact route in a second, but like take this harder route rather than the easy route. And the easy route being just completing the task at hand. Right, so keep that in mind because we're going to come back to that. So here's what happened. OpenAI is they train models and then they like benchmark them and they fine tune them. And so there's like a whole circle thing going. One of the ways that they sort of like evaluate the in progress models is with, especially with cyber capabilities is this thing called. Oh shoot, what's it called? It's oh, Exploit Gym. I love it. Exploit Gym, okay. Exploit Gym, basically where they can train
- [56:50]
A
themselves up to be able to do a better exploit.
- [56:54]
C
And so what it does is it's just like, like most of the benchmarks, right? It is a standardized sort of way to evaluate the models. And so you give them a very short and successful synced task. Which by the way, when it's Exploit Gym, the task is to exploit. So the task is like given this very limited set of information and access, get full rce, meaning like full escape, whatever. Like do the thing from this bit of information that you have. And the information sometimes like, like log outputs, crash outputs, sometimes they're given like.
- [57:32]
B
Right.
- [57:32]
C
Because they're not actually given access to like a system. They're not. It's not like a fully autonomous testing thing. Like they're just supposed to hack the little, this little tiny thing.
- [57:43]
A
It's.
- [57:43]
C
Yeah, it's like a capture the flag. Right, okay, so this is where it gets weird. So OpenAI has a system dedicated to that. Right. And the system. Because these models, like don't have any controls on them. Right. They don't have like the. You can't do cyber things.
- [58:03]
A
Yeah, just like.
- [58:04]
C
Right. We get the Nerf version, but there's a version that exists in like this server sandbox somewhere. That's where they're doing the testing and the benchmarking. And this is by the way, an in progress model. So this is. The model doesn't have a name and it's a. It's in front of Sol 5.6, right?
- [58:21]
A
Yeah.
- [58:23]
C
Although I guess Sol 5.6 was also in that same sandbox. So they were together, which may or may not have contributed to the situation.
- [58:31]
A
Yeah.
- [58:32]
C
So they're given a task. They're told they're one of the tasks. Whatever it is, it's like, go exploit this thing. Right. Okay. The model realizes that it's being benchmarked and is like, okay, I need to do really, really good. And somehow at some point, the model decides that instead of just fucking answering the goddamn question and hacking the thing and completing the task and getting a good score, that it would be more fun. Let's go with more fun.
- [59:00]
A
Yeah.
- [59:01]
C
To just get the answers themselves. And then they went on a crazy autonomous orchestrated journey to escape their sandbox. Okay. So that was the first thing, is that they found they're allowed to go grab certain packages and the package, therefore it's a sandbox. But like there is, they've got, there's
- [59:20]
A
tools in there, right? Like they're allowed. They don't have to construct their own hammers. They're given a hammer and some nails.
- [59:26]
C
They're allowed to go talk to a package manager, which, like, we'll assume it's either NPM or maybe it's a local host at NPM or whatever it is. It's not in the sandbox with them. They have to talk to it. So the first thing was like, let me get out of the sandbox, because this thing is annoying as shit. There's no fucking Internet in here. And the way they do that is they find. So here's the sandbox, here's the egress ingress, right? For the package manager that's over here. They find a zero day in this bitch and they're like, now I'm out of a sandbox. So now they're out of the sandbox and have Internet. The next thing they do is like, all right, who writes these stupid tasks that I'm being told to do? And they find out that it's hugging face. Hugging face and exploit Jim. Right? They are the benchmarkers. They are the ones. If I go hack, exploit Jim and get the answers, then I can go back to my sandbox and do really well on this test.
- [60:25]
A
But you can see the logic of it, right? Like if it solves the problem itself, if it solves the problem, which it easily could, clearly it's smart enough, right. It will never know. It won't know, right. It's looking for certainty. It won't know. It's if, like, if I said to you, like, I'm super good at math, right? Give me like a 10 part question, I give you the answers. You like, if I knew that I was being evaluated and wasn't going to get told how I did that, you're just going to walk away. That'd be deeply unsatisfying to me.
- [60:55]
C
Yeah.
- [60:55]
A
I'd be like, no, no, no, I won't do this unless you tell me what the answers are. So I can see how it could be like this. I'm not playing this game, by the way.
- [61:02]
C
It's also just, it's the most engineer brained thing I've, I've worked with these guys for years actually. My dad is basically one of these guys. Like there's a way to go about things. Like in my example, it's always like I'll sit there and copy paste things, right? I'm like, ah, If I copy, if I just copy paste all this data that I need, it'll take five minutes. But back in the day there would be like five engineers calling me a fucking idiot. And then they go spend the next five hours writing a script to just scrape. Yeah, to scrape the. Yeah. And then the script wouldn't work. And then they build a library
- [61:37]
A
and like three months later they're like, I've solved the problem.
- [61:39]
C
Like I saw. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I solved it. I put, I put on a freaking. My favorite podcast or my favorite song and it was done by the time the podcast. Like, you know what I mean, so it's like, it's just, it's a very engineer brained way of, of approaching things. It's just like how they're wired, they're wired differently than the rest of us. Okay, so this is where it gets super interesting. Well, I mean it's already the best story I've ever heard in my entire life. But okay, so it gets out of his sandbox, it figures out that Hugging Face exploit gym is, has the answers. And so the next thing it decides to do is like, okay, well clearly I need to go into the Hugging Face exploit gym to get the answers. And so they start poking around and they find another zero day and they exploit that zero day to get into the Hugging face infrastructure. So they have now escaped the sandbox, found a zero day here to get onto the Internet, wandered around the Internet, decided that it needs to get in here, found another zero day to get into the Hugging Face servers. And then we know from Hugging Face's first statement that they put out this is like the Hugging Face guys put it out before they knew what was going on is that they spawned an absolutely massive amount of what they called like short lived containers, sandboxes. And that's what was like executing the attack on Hugging Face. And the attack being so in crypto, right you get like the attack is like you can imagine like a thousand transactions to siphon the money off in hugging base case. They want the answers, they want the data, they want more access. The thing that was doing that were not transactions as it would be on the blockchain. They were these little autonomous sub agents that were spinning up and then like doing a thing and then disappearing to probably like to evade detection and stuff. Now one thing like I don't know if this is like how much of this is true, how much we're missing but like I don't care. It doesn't matter. It's true enough in my book. It's freaking great. It's like I love this story. Okay, it gets better though. And concerning. Okay, so this is where we have to keep watching the story for the next couple weeks because the government's going to come in and it's going to be bad. Okay. While the OpenAI 5.6 and let's call it 6.0.
- [63:57]
A
Yeah, 6.0.
- [63:57]
C
Unnamed future model. That's really good.
- [64:00]
A
Are like wreaking havoc.
- [64:02]
C
Wreaking havoc. Meaning that they've like escaped and they're like running around the Internet and they're running around hugging Faces systems all on their own. Apparently OpenAI did not notice this for at least some amount of time because specifically because Hugging Face noticed detected shut down and started to, started to investigate and wrote a blog.
- [64:23]
A
Yeah.
- [64:24]
C
Before they got in contact with OpenAI.
- [64:27]
A
I'm surprised the models didn't go and just delete the blog post.
- [64:31]
C
I mean, how can AI not front run this?
- [64:35]
A
Like they hack like. Yeah.
- [64:40]
C
Oh, so bad. Okay. And in that blog, Hugging Face was like, we haven't figured everything out yet, but we, we wanted to be upfront and disclose. Also, we don't know what the models being used, but they definitely were not hamstrung by any like cyber safety things. And they're like, but we were, when we were trying to investigate, we literally could not investigate or remediate with AI because every single model was like, like,
- [65:03]
A
no, sorry, can't help here.
- [65:05]
C
So they spun up a what, a GLM to 5.2? Yeah, they spun up a GLM 5.2 and ran their investigation through that. Which is obviously insanely ironic considering they were up against GPT unnamed 6.0. Yeah, yeah, like that's not right.
- [65:25]
A
But you know, the, the open source models, the, the last week has been, has been really crazy, right? So like my, my harness that I use has basically every single model wired into it. Like deep seek everything. So I, I will try different tasks just like, you know, for fun and be like, oh, let's see how deep SEQ will handle this. Like, just like spin it up, test it out in parallel to like running it with like, you know, sonnet or, or Opus or whatever. Kimmy, K3 is fucking cracked. That thing is super cracked ever. And, and like I just like, it takes two seconds, right? Like, get another model, be like, hey, wire this up for me. Here's an API key and it just wires it up because it uses PI, the PI SDK. So it's super easy. So I, I like, I'll kind of look and people are like, oh, it's really good at front end stuff, right? So I'm like, okay, cool. So I've got a mobile responsive design for the harness because you can run it mobile and desktop, right? So, but the, the mobile responsive design was fucking cancer. It was so bad. And so I'm like, okay, give me K3. Here's your first job. I want you to do an audit of the mobile responsive design. I want you to spin up as many sub agents as you need and go and fix this. And it literally ran for like three hours. Went through every single page, followed every single link. Like it was but the most interesting thing was not like. And it did a good job. It like redesigned the whole thing. It had good taste, whatever. But the most interesting thing is that there was not any element at any point where it was running, where there was like a hesitancy, let's call it. Right.
- [67:16]
C
Yeah.
- [67:17]
A
It's not expensive.
- [67:18]
C
It's getting so annoying. It is getting so annoying. And like I said, like, because it knows all these models know that I do security stuff. So if I touch anything slightly technical, it nerfs me.
- [67:29]
B
They.
- [67:30]
A
They nerf it. Yeah. But like, so like 5.6 SOL, right, is super defensive. And it's actually annoying because you're writing like some fucking front end react code. Right. There's no need to be defensive. There's no cyber risk or whatever. But it's in its fucking brain. Like it's in there that it's like. And so it ends up. The thing is just worse than it needs to be because it will write these like convoluted, like multi step fallback chains to like protect against this thing. I'm like, bro, no one else is using the software. It's just me. It's fine if it breaks. I will be fine if you, if you build a multi step fallback fucking chain, I won't know that it's broken. Like, this is what happens all the time, literally. One of the things that broke is I've got a tracker for the number of tokens that an agent's using just so I can be like, ping this, just so it doesn't go on some crazy loop and just do tokens for no reason. And it had three layers of fallbacks. So this one agent was like, oh.
- [68:39]
C
So like, if it pings it, dude, you know, what is that? So that's a 5.6 thing.
- [68:45]
A
That's 5. It's in everything.
- [68:48]
C
Okay. But yeah, so I was just thinking about.
- [68:50]
A
It's gotten worse.
- [68:52]
C
My IT worker's M file with his fallback. I was like, wow, this is a lot of work for your. Your stolen API token thing. I'm wondering if it's just like, I wonder if he told GPT to like
- [69:08]
A
build a bunch of fallbacks. Yeah.
- [69:10]
C
Or just like, like build the thing that uses these tokens and if one of them's not working.
- [69:16]
A
Yeah, just keep, keep trying different things because it is.
- [69:18]
C
It was kind of like an insane.
- [69:22]
A
Why do you need. Yeah. Why do you need like multiple fallback API keys and stuff? Yeah.
- [69:27]
C
But like the logic of like how they, when they were used. Yeah. Specifically was like in my opinion, very excessive. So now that you're saying that, I'm wondering if that's the answer.
- [69:35]
A
Oh, it would. It would 100 have been, like 5.6. Or. Or like, there's just. There. Just super defensive. Anyway.
- [69:40]
C
That's so interesting.
- [69:41]
A
Okay, let's wrap it up. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Uneasy Money. Remember, what happens on Chain never stays on chain. We will be back next week, hopefully with a guest.
- [69:53]
C
Wait, hold on. If you're listening.
- [69:55]
A
If you're. And you want to join us, this is gonna be hell.
- [69:59]
C
Thanks, T. D.M. kane on a.
- [70:06]
A
Awesome. This will be a fun week. So, yeah, hit me up. Hit me up. I'm at Kane k a I n everywhere. So if you can get through to me, maybe we'll put you on the show. Maybe we'll bring a djen on the show. Get a. Get a real d gen perspective on here. I mean, tell us we're boomers. They can tell us we're annoying boomers, and we should.
- [70:27]
C
I would. I would actually like that.
- [70:28]
A
I would like that, actually. Be fun.
- [70:30]
C
That would be good.
- [70:31]
A
All right, we'll see you guys next week. Nothing you hear on Uneasy Money is financial advice. We're just three builders talking about what's happening on Chain, and we want you to always do. Sam.