Advertise on podcast: The Brandon Adams Podcast

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Edward Chancellor is a British financial historian, financial journalist, and former investment strategist. He wrote the bestselling book Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation in 1999 and Crunch-Time for Credit in 2005. He has just published The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest, which I rate as the best book I've read this year. Fortune has called Chancellor "one of the greatest financial historians alive, and the Financial Analysts Journal called him "one of the greatest financial writers of our era." Our chat mostly covers The Price of Time. Jim Grant says this work is "A masterpiece of history, analysis--and property understated outrage."