The AI Metagame
The AI Metagame
Brandon Adams
As AI evolves, humans must relearn faster than their tools improve. The AI Metagame is a podcast from 5HC.ai about strategic adaptation: how smart people unlearn, rebuild, and find durable advantage when the ground keeps shifting. I will be doing weekly interviews with major figures on the AI learning journey and how you can position your organization for AI success. You can find me on social @badams78 (twitter) and @brandonadams78 (insta). Find 5HC at www.5HC.ai
The AI Metagame: Episode 05 with Nate Silver and Raf Michalowski
In this episode of The AI Metagame, host Brandon Adams sits down with famed forecaster Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) and digital media builder Raf Michalowski to talk about AI slop and where the content industry is headed.At its peak, Raf's pipeline was uploading around 60,000 videos a day to YouTube — roughly 3% of all daily uploads on the platform. He walks through the economics, how platforms end up incentivizing this kind of volume, and what happens when they eventually crack down.Nate works in the part of media where AI doesn't really help — forecasting, accountability, and predictions that can be graded. The conversation maps where human judgment still has a moat, and whether quality can survive when the marginal cost of content is zero.
May 19
1 hr 16 min
The AI Metagame: Episode 04 with Lev Milman
Episode 4 | The 600,000-Claim Brain: How Lev Milman Uses AI to Map RealityHow do you stay ahead of the curve when the "curve" is moving at the speed of light? In this episode, we sit down with Lev Milman, a former U20 US Chess Champion and macro trader, to explore his radical, AI-driven approach to information processing and belief updating.Lev has constructed a massive digital knowledge base consisting of over 600,000 atomic claims about the world. He doesn't just "read the news"—he has built a sophisticated "information funnel" that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to ingest, grade, and de-duplicate content from over 1,300 RSS feeds, hundreds of YouTube channels, Twitter, Discord, and academic journals.We dive into:The "Greater" and the "Deduper": How Lev uses AI to filter out 80% of incoming noise and focus only on information with high novelty and belief-update potential.Hyper-Speed Learning: Lev’s workflow for "listening" to thousands of words of summarized research at 4.5x speed using custom text-to-speech setups, often while multitasking.The Chess Champion’s Edge: How a childhood spent studying chess for 10 hours a day wired his brain for the deep, contingency-based reasoning required to navigate the AI frontier.Actionable Intelligence: Moving from curiosity-driven learning to a practical framework where information is rated by how much it changes his decisions in fields like AI development and health.Lev makes a compelling case that in the AI era, the ultimate competitive advantage isn't just knowing more—it's having a superior system for updating what you believe.
Apr 7
43 min
The AI Metagame: Episode 03 with Haralabos Voulgaris
Episode 3 | The edge belongs to whoever's willing to break things first.Most people are waiting for the safe path. Haralabos Voulgaris handed an AI agent his brokerage API, watched it place $20,000 in unauthorized trades, and responded by building a better confirmation tree — not by shutting it down.We explore what happens when a professional gambler's risk appetite meets the AI frontier — deploying autonomous bots on Polymarket and Schwab, hardening servers against injection attacks, and building a VIX strategy around the conviction that the world is more fragile than consensus believes.Haralabos makes the case that the real AI competition isn't about who has the best model — it's about who owns the physical layer. That China's robotics lead may matter more than America's research lead. And that the consumer surplus from AI doesn't mean much if no one's built the institutions to distribute it.
Mar 19
1 hr 2 min
The AI Metagame: Episode 02 with Bryan Pellegrino
Episode 2 | Controller | Over-Optimization: Why efficiency kills resilience.A perfectly optimized system is just a fragile one waiting to break. Our guest explains why they stopped optimizing for margins and started optimizing for survival, and what that means when AI moves faster than your org can adapt.We've spent decades chasing efficiency. Removing friction, maximizing output, trimming every edge. But what happens when the system has zero slack left and the ground shifts overnight?This episode unpacks the Controller archetype: the leader who builds tight, optimized machines that work beautifully until they don't. We challenge the Explainer instinct to rationalize away uncertainty, and explore why the smartest move right now might be building in inefficiency on purpose.
Mar 12
59 min
The AI Metagame: Episode 01 with Kory Kilpatrick
Episode 1: Builder | Controller | Premature Abstraction"I built for scale before I understood the problem"In a world where tools allow us to scale instantly, the temptation to build big is overwhelming. But what happens when you scale the wrong thing?The AI Metagame is a twelve-episode series that looks at four archetypes in AI — Builder, Explainer, Interpreter, Narrator — to map where AI creates leverage and where it creates traps. For every great advantage of AI, there are disadvantages lurking. Each episode explores both sides.In our premiere episode, we explore the Builder's most dangerous trap: Premature Abstraction. Modern AI leverage is a double-edged sword — it amplifies errors faster than ever before. True control now requires staying small enough to pivot until the problem itself is fully understood.
Mar 3
1 hr 7 min
Interview with Alex Hutchinson
Alex Hutchinson (@sweatscience) is my favorite fitness journalist. This podcast was an absolute pleasure. We had the opportunity to explore his outstanding new book, The Explorer's Gene. We also discuss, in detail, his 2018 NY Times bestseller Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. I rate this book among my top ten favorite works of non-fiction.
Mar 20, 2025
1 hr 25 min
Interview with Jared Dillian
Jared Dillian (@dailydirtnap) publishes daily market commentary (The Daily Dirtnap, www.jareddillian.com). He hosts a twice weekly podcast called Be Smart. He has a popular Substack (https://substack.com/profile/450570-jared-dillian), and he's the author of Street Freak and All the Evil of This World. His latest book, Those Bastards: 69 Essays on Life, Creativity, and Meaning, was published in late March.
Apr 19, 2023
52 min
Interview with Scott Fawcett and David Epstein
Scott Fawcett (@scottfawcett) is the creator of the DECADE golf system and he has coached Will Zalatoris, Stewart Cink, Keith Mitchell, and many others. In the first hour, we do a deep dive into golf analytics. He describes his career in professional golf, his early discovery of the PGA Tour's Shotlink Data and Mark Broadie's Strokes Gained Metric, his development of the DECADE system, and his experience coaching PGA players. At the one hour and three minute mark, we are joined by David Epstein (@DavidEpstein), author of the bestselling books Range and The Sports Gene. The three of us discuss talent in sports, similarities between golf and poker, "tilt" in golf and poker, the history of game theory in poker, and the emotional make-up of poker players.
Nov 15, 2022
1 hr 38 min
Interview with Daniel Negreanu
Daniel Negreanu (@realkidpoker) is fresh off a $3.3 million win in the Super High Roller Bowl. Perhaps the most famous poker player on the planet, he is ranked #3 on the all-time money list. We start with a discussion of the new era in poker ("the Solver era") and some recent adjustments he's made in his game. We move on to some deep history - his move from Canada to Vegas; his early years with Phil Ivey, Allen Cunningham, and John Juanda; some very big gambling in the early years; and the "pump-up years" in the poker economy after WSOP 2003, Rounders, and the Andy Beal games. He tells some great golf-gambling stories from the late 2000s, and he explains how his competitive goals shifted from cash games to tournaments. Daniel goes through his WSOP routine each year, which includes a prep period, followed by extreme intensity during the WSOP (where he often gains ten to fifteen pounds), and then a long rest period.
Nov 1, 2022
1 hr 20 min
Interview with David Benefield
David Benefield (@DWBenefield) is a poker legend with an incredible story. He started poker at age 16 after watching the movie Rounders. He dominated the biggest games online from ages 21-26. By his own estimate, he worked 100 hours a week during those years. In 2010, he went back to school at St John's University and then Columbia University (transfer after sophomore year). After his first semester at Columbia, he took a year and a half off to play the biggest poker game in the world in Macau. He also made the Main Event final table during this sabbatical. He ultimately finished his degree at Columbia, and then became increasingly interested in the cryptocurrency sphere. Today he employs eight people in a cryptocurrency-focused fund, based out of Dallas.
Oct 13, 2022
1 hr 8 min
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