Sixty percent of Paraguay's adults banked at Ueno, and this week Ueno froze. $800 million of public money inside, the pension fund, the hydro-dam operator, and a president who resigned on the spot. Chris and Tyler on why a country lets one bank get that big, why Australia's four banks could do the same, and why this is a Bitcoin story on every level. Then the brain stuff: frontier models are now doing neurosurgery on smaller models, editing weights by hand in a 20,000-parameter Qwen, and someone found the single neuron that turns Qwen murderous when you ask it for a sandwich. Tyler explains why mechanistic interpretability was given up for dead and why it might be back. Chris found the local CNN inside TikTok that scores your age, expression and attractiveness before anything leaves your phone. Perp of Fortune: long ZhiPu 10×, no Bitcoin flip this week, and the platonic Bart pattern. Chris has been living on GLM 5.3 Flash at 15 cents a million tokens and says it's better than Opus; it also filed his forms in Chinese. Jackson's Instinct booked seven things for his trip and he checked none of them. Proton Mail: a fortress nobody else lives in. Contrarian corner: the Proton CEO stops hiring engineers, so Chris argues the opposite, and Tyler explains why the people who get 10× more productive stop being the bottleneck and get laid off anyway. Then Mithril, the one-person biotech Anthropic bought. Tyler closes with a pitch for a cracked team of three.

The bank freeze is at 2:01. Chapters: Cold open (0:00) · Check-in: still holding our bags (0:47) · Paraguay: 60% of a country banked at Ueno, and it froze (2:01) · LLM neurosurgery (9:23) · Evil Qwen: one neuron, one murderous sandwich (14:52) · TikTok's edge CNN scores your face (18:59) · Perp of Fortune: long ZhiPu 10×, no Bitcoin flip (24:04) · GLM 5.3 Flash (26:41) · Instinct update (35:06) · Proton Mail (38:02) · Contrarian corner: fire everyone but the engineers (42:03) · Mithril: the one-person biotech (50:09) · Tyler's pitch (56:18) · Perp final + outro (58:42)

Recorded fully remote, three cameras, one dashboard. Our opinions are our own, not our employers'. NOT financial advice; Perp of Fortune is a small real-money account we run for entertainment. Glossary: Ueno = Paraguay's largest bank, placed into resolution with deposits frozen. Solvency ratio = the capital a bank must hold against its loans. Fractional reserve = banks lend out most deposits, so the money isn't there if everyone asks at once. Mechanistic interpretability = mapping what each neuron and circuit in a network does. Distillation = training a small model to copy a big one. Edge model = a small network that runs on your device and sends back summaries. ZhiPu (Z.ai) = the Chinese lab behind GLM; this week's perp. GLM 5.3 Flash = ZhiPu's small open-weights model at about 15¢ per million tokens. Bart pattern = straight up, flat, straight down. Aqua-hire = buying a company for its people. Perp of Fortune = our tiny real-money account; +$2.67 this week.

Subscribe for next week: the Bitcoin flip returns to Perp of Fortune, agentic commerce, and the layer-2 series continues.