This week, Jacob and Igor dissect the "mythical AI bear," the strawman version of AI criticism that gets thrown around in tech discourse. Working through a viral blog post that typifies the genre, they examine how legitimate concerns about code quality, labor displacement, intellectual property, and the erosion of craft get flattened into caricature. Plus: Sam Altman writes ten paragraphs about how unbothered he is by an ad.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (00:30) - Altman's Super Bowl Meltdown
• (03:11) - What is "The Bear"?
• (06:41) - But You Have No Idea What The Code Is
• (15:44) - But The Craft, But The Mediocrity, But It'll Never Be AGI
• (24:43) - But They Take Our Jobs & But The Plagiarism
• (31:21) - Stochastic Parrots & Mythical Bears
• (42:34) - Outro

• Big Think article - The rise of AI denialism
• Fly.io blogpost - My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
• antirez blogpost - Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
• Emily Bender blogpost - Resistance Isn't Denialism
• Cory Doctorow blogpost - Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox
• Washington Post article - The AI boom is so huge it's causing shortages everywhere else
• Business Insider article - Veteran investor Jeremy Grantham says AI is 'obviously a bubble'
• Ipsos survey - Google / Ipsos Multi-Country AI Survey 2026
• Understanding AI Substack post - AI skeptics and AI boosters are both wrong