This week, Jacob and Igor swap the usual news breakdown for a complete taxonomy of AI boosters within the framing of a tier list. They run through every type, from the good-faith genuine enthusiast to the denial-prone deflector, the financially captured, corporate power-players, platform builders, and finally the model-building true believers. They also get into "crit-hype," the idea that some critics are inadvertently boosting the systems they're fighting against. No muck to separate this week, just the guys working through their framework and explaining why their opinions are S tier.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:45) - Introducing the Booster Tier List
• (07:48) - A-Tier: The Genuine Enthusiast
• (11:36) - B-Tier: The Denial-Prone Booster
• (14:34) - C-Tier: The Financially Adjacent Booster
• (19:03) - D-Tier: The Corporate Booster
• (23:31) - E-Tier: The Product and Platform Booster
• (26:36) - F-Tier: The Model Builders
• (31:08) - Bonus Tier: Crit Hype
• (39:28) - So What Do We Actually Do With This?
• (46:04) - Outro (Igor's Challenge)

• Ed Zitron Substack article - How to Argue with an AI Booster
• MIT Technology Review article - How Social Media Encourages the Worst of AI Boosterism
• The Telegraph article - AI isn’t magic. We’re just being taken for mugs

In this episode, Jacob and Igor break down the DoD vs. Anthropic standoff, tracing how Claude's use in military operations led to Anthropic being designated a supply chain security risk. Perhaps more importantly, why did Anthropic choose to take a stand now, and what can that tell us about the corporations behavior moving forward. The investigation is used as a case study in how to read the real motivations behind big institutions: intrinsic values, rational self-interest, and realpolitik.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (00:44) - DoD-Anthropic Standoff
• (15:08) - 3 Buckets of Motivation
• (35:39) - How to Read What They're Actually Doing
• (44:04) - Is This Designation Even Real?
• (53:39) - Recap (Pragmatist's Playbook)

• Ed Zitron subtack article - The AI Bubble Is An Information War
• TechPolicy.Press article - A Timeline of the Anthropic-Pentagon Dispute
• TechPolicy.Press podcast episode - How to Think About the Anthropic-Pentagon Dispute
• BBC news article - Anthropic vows to sue Pentagon over supply chain risk label
• The Guardian article - AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying
• Palantir YouTube video - Multi-Domain AI: The Future of Command and Control
• Into AI Safety podcast episode - Drawing Red Lines w/ Su Cizem

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