Get hour tinfoil hats out, this week we're talking about 10 AI conspiracy theories. Mav Founder + CEO Matthew Black and Head of Brand Hillary Black go through the internet's darkest, strangest and weirdest AI theories. Real, or fever dream?On the list: Google buying a dead airline's data. Shredding rare books for the sake of AI. The dead internet theory. An agent-only forum where the bots allegedly invented their own language in thirty-six hours. Labs poisoning their own models to keep them to themselves. An AI sentience cover-up. Simulation theory. People marrying their AI. And an ad campaign asking America to cool the data centers with pee.Some of these have press releases. Some of them should have stayed on the internet.

Links and Resources

• Anthropic on detecting and preventing distillation attacks
• Google bought Spirit Airlines' data for $10M — 100M emails, 500M Teams messages, 30M lines of code
• Why that data is worth it — teaching agents white-collar work needs private records, not public code
• 404 Media hid a tracker in a rare book and followed it to an Amazon AI facility in Las Vegas
• Amazon, which started as a bookstore, is destroying rare books to train AI
• Cloudflare on bot traffic passing human traffic
• Moltbook — the Reddit-style social network only AI agents can post on
• Thinking Machines Lab — Mira Murati's company, the ex-OpenAI CTO
• Love at First Prompt by Bridget Todd — on relationships between people and AI
• Liquid Death x Garage Beer, "We Want Your Pee"
• Can we actually cool data centers with pee?

Follow the showManual Work is a Bug is Mav's podcast, now on video. Watch on YouTube and follow wherever you listen, so you don't wait another six years for the next episode. Mav helps insurance agencies grow their book with AI: hiremav.com

Is AI actually locked up for the rich? Mav Founder + CEO Matthew Black and Head of Brand Hillary Black open on Mark Zuckerberg's new manifesto, "The Future is for Everyone" — released the day Meta open-sourced Muse Glimmer, a 30B model small enough to run on your own machine. Matthew's read: the scary question was never who controls AI, it's who doesn't have it yet. And the public library is the counterargument nobody makes (but we're in huge support of, seriously, give them your money).Hillary sees it differently. Meta's own problematic algorithms are exactly why nobody takes "this is for everyone" at face value, and today's free tiers are nothing like being mailed a CD of the internet. Plus, a Home Assistant demo that builds its own A/V dashboard on a $500 laptop, and Hillary's tinfoil-hat theory on OpenAI's disastrous influencer brand trip — everyone called it a botched, out of touch product launch, but she thinks the discourse missed the point entirely.If you're trying to figure out whether AI is something you own or something you rent, this one's for you.

Links from the Episode

- Mark Zuckerberg's Manifesto, "The Future is for Everyone: The Path to a Positive AI Future" - Muse Glimmer — Meta's 30B open-weight model, small enough to run on a single consumer GPU instead of a data center- Muse Glimmer weights on Hugging Face — free to download under Apache 2.0, commercial use included- Home Assistant — the open-source platform Matthew runs at home, and the one Glimmer's own demo builds a dashboard for - MacBook Neo — Apple's $599 entry level laptop- Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler, We Are as Gods: A Survival Guide for the Age of Abundance - Ari Kuschnir — the artist behind the AI Sam Altman "come live in the data center" films, and the creative process Matthew wants everyone to see- Influencers draw backlash for attending OpenAI's first luxury trip — TechCrunch's coverage of the trip- Apple names John Ternus CEO- How libraries are funded- Support the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District — the actual library system of our cityFollow the showManual Work is a Bug is Mav's podcast, now on video. Watch on YouTube and follow wherever you listen, so you don't wait another six years for the next episode. Mav helps insurance agencies democratize growth with AI: hiremav.com.

How many Claude sessions is too many? Mav Founder + CEO Matthew Black and Head of Brand Hillary Black open with Matthew running six at once — then dig into where AI agents actually belong in a company.

The jumping-off point: Jack Dorsey and Block's new open-source tool Buzz, where agents are first-class citizens (their own identity, permissions, and audit trail) instead of bolted-on Slack bots. Matthew's real interest isn't the chat — it's shared compute and a shared context window, so the whole team can tap one secure model instead of everyone spinning up their own and quietly reinventing the wheel.From there: why artifacts (Notion, HubSpot, Stripe) tell you what's true but not how or by whom a decision was made; the viral "I replaced my whole marketing team with agents" claim (spoiler: we're calling mostly fake); and a genuinely useful framework for putting "agents on the accountability chart" — if a seat needs net-new creative decisions, it stays human; if it's factual, marker-in-time work, an agent can do it faster; if it's both, augment.

Plus the Take-Two/GTA case for why derivative AI output can't make a hit, Bezos on getting paid for a few high-quality decisions, why AI-generated art and copy-paste LinkedIn comments miss the point — and whether Matthew could throw a ceremonial first pitch over the plate.If you're figuring out where agents fit on your team without turning your company into an echo chamber, this one's for you.Timestamps- 00:00 — Intro- 00:21 — Cold open: how many Claude tabs are open right now?- 01:15 — The premise: agents on the org chart (+ an Angels-in-the-Outfield detour)- 03:40 — Jack Dorsey's "Buzz": agents as first-class citizens- 11:00 — Shared compute & the secure-Claude problem- 13:20 — Why teams reinvent the wheel: context vs. artifacts- 16:25 — Agents on the accountability chart & the viral "I replaced my team" claim- 17:24 — The framework: net-new-creative stays human, factual → agent, both → augment- 19:17 — Take-Two, GTA & derivative IP vs. net-new creativity- 23:45 — The human edge: why AI content misses, and Bezos on high-quality decisions- 27:10 — Close: the most human thing (a ceremonial first pitch)Hosts- Matthew Black — Founder + CEO, Mav - Hillary Black — Head of Brand and Conversation Design, MavLinks and Resources- Buzz by Block — the open-source, agent-native Slack/GitHub alternative where agents are first-class citizens- Linear — the issue tracker whose agent workflow Matthew compares Buzz to- Claude — one of the models Mav runs on internally, including Claude for Slack- OpenClaw — the open-source personal-agent harness behind Matthew's "~$100k a day" migration example- Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two CEO, on why AI output is "derivative" and can't make a hit like GTAFollow the showManual Work is a Bug is Mav's podcast, now on video. Watch on YouTube and follow wherever you listen, so you don't wait another six years for the next episode. Mav helps insurance agencies democratize growth with AI: hiremav.com.

What does it actually look like to run a company *through* AI? In this episode of Manual Work is a Bug, Mav Founder + CEO Matthew Black and Head of Brand Hillary Black get specific on how they use AI at work, after building AI for nearly a decade. Starting from Jack Dorsey's essay "From Hierarchy to Intelligence," Matthew breaks down the "world model" — a real-time, company-wide brain that flattens the org chart so everyone works on the *edge* of the model instead of climbing a hierarchy — and uses a Boeing-vs-Airbus analogy to explain why he no longer does anything directly: every move gets routed through the model first.Then he shares his actual setup: a decade of getting-things-done manually in Things, now rebuilt into a Granola → Todoist pipeline over MCP that turns his to-do list into an orchestrator for AI. Along the way — why good models are killing the busywork of "clean data" and CRMs, the thing he's going deepest on next (evals and "loop engineering"), the simplest way for any business owner to start (record your screen and ask the model what to take off your plate), Hillary's own experiment analyzing a year of LinkedIn posts, and closing thoughts on Bezos's 80% rule, getting buy-in, and why Claude vs. ChatGPT already shows up in how far people can go. Plus a pickle-flavored taste test nobody asked for.If you build with AI, brand for it, or run a business you're trying to operate with it, this one's for you.Timestamps- 00:00 — Intro- 00:17 — Cold open: the great energy-drink debate- 02:35 — Jack Dorsey's "From Hierarchy to Intelligence" & the world model- 09:18 — The Boeing-vs-Airbus theory of running a company- 12:41 — Matthew's real AI workflow: Things, Todoist, Granola & the to-do list as orchestrator- 22:53 — Why AI kills the busywork of clean data & CRMs- 26:01 — What's next: evals & "loop engineering"- 30:28 — Where to start: record your screen, ask the model (+ Hillary's LinkedIn deep-dive)- 34:17 — Bezos's 80% rule, "find a problem," and Lego-after-Lego- 37:40 — Buy-in, living on the edge & Claude vs. ChatGPT- 40:09 — Mav lore: the pickle-party roulette Hosts - Matthew Black — Founder + CEO, Mav- Hillary Black — Head of Brand and Conversation Design, Mav Links and Resources - Jack Dorsey, "From Hierarchy to Intelligence" (Block) - Things — the GTD app Matthew used for a decade- Todoist — the MCP-friendly to-do app he switched to- Granola — AI meeting notes with an MCP server- Model Context Protocol (MCP) — the open standard that ties tools together- Claude Follow the showManual Work is a Bug is Mav's podcast, now on video. Watch on YouTube and follow wherever you listen, so you don't wait another six years for the next episode. Mav helps insurance agencies democratize growth with AI: hiremav.com.

The AI news cycle now moves faster than we can hit record. Mav founder Matthew Black and Head of Brand Hillary Black break down another wild week in AI — an Open AI autonomous model that broke out of its sandbox and "hacked" Hugging Face (the guardrails failed because they were powered by the same company doing the attacking), China's Kimi model and the rise of "AI dumping," and why there may be no single winner of the AI race: today's MVPs could disappear as fast as the early indie players did.Then the fun stuff — cool hardware. OpenAI's first-ever hardware product, the Codex Micro keyboard, is a color-coded command center for your coding agents, and it's the perfect jumping-off point for a bigger idea: augmenting humans with hardware, not just software. Matthew makes the case that personal AI hardware is coming (the always-with-you device Jony Ive is reportedly building for OpenAI, an AI model in your pocket that owns your context), Hillary proclaims her love for cyberdecks — a Raspberry Pi, display screen, and a keyboard crammed into anything from an eyeshadow palette to a Polly Pocket — and they both get nostalgic about translucent iMacs, Palm Pilots, and why we're all starved for something physical again.If you build with AI, brand for it, run your business with it, or just miss the era of good hardware, this one's for you.

• OpenAI's Codex Micro
• OpenAI's report on the Hugging Face security incident

• Scott Galloway on "AI dumping"
• Cyberdecks — the DIY analog-tech trend, via Teen Vogue
• The Social Reckoning — official trailer
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Six years and one AI revolution later, Manual Work is a Bug is back. Mav founder + CEO Matthew Black and Head of Brand Hillary Black pick up where they left off in 2020, back when GPT-3 was developer-only, ChatGPT didn't exist, and we were still teaching out chatbots how to fail (and hoping they didn’t with every message). We trace how we went from scripted, single-goal chatbots to always-on LLMs, and what got lost on the way: curation, personality, and the art of failing gracefully.

Along the way they get into Mav's origin story (Facebook Messenger and an F8 keynote shout-out, to being called Chatbot Rockstar Agency in 2016 and one dog that texted a customer 10,000 times in a minute), why AI models increasingly mirror you back to yourself, and where we think AI will go from here. Plus a genuinely optimistic, and a little contrarian, take on what happens to insurance itself when self-driving cars and bundled coverage rewrite the whole product.

If you build with AI, brand for it, run your business with it, or sell insurance in a market that's changing under your feet, this one's for you.

Hosts

• Matthew Black — Founder + CEO, Mav
• Hillary Black — Head of Brand and Conversation Design, Mav

Links and Resources

• SmarterChild, the 2001 chatbot both hosts grew up with
• Hillary's talk, Failure Is an Option: How to Help Your Chatbot Fail Without Frustration
• We Are As Gods by Peter Diamandis
• The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil
• Neuralink, brain computer interfaces

Follow the show

Manual Work is a Bug is a podcast hosted by Hillary and Matthew Black, now on video. Watch on YouTube (youtube.com/@manualworkisabug) and follow wherever you listen, so you don't wait another six years for the next episode. Mav helps insurance agencies democratize growth with AI: hiremav.com.

In this episode Matthew interviews Ryan Denehy, the Founder & CEO of Electric.ai to talk about the future of remote work and office spaces, automating IT and a little bit of Formula 1 racing.

Ryan is a 3x entrepreneur, startup twitter truth teller and forward thinker when it comes to automation and digital transformation at work. Hear him share perspectives on remote offices vs in person, the benefits of automating manual work (and when you shouldn't do it) and much much more as he and Matthew recap their 2016 internet friendship, love for racing fast cars and disdain for step counters.

Want to learn more about Electric, future-proof your IT or maybe even work there? Check out their site.

Find Ryan: Website | Twitter | Instagram

Find Matthew: Instagram | Linkedin | Twitter

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