Show Your Priors Podcast

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

@AlexOsterwalder built the Business Model Canvas. @strategyzer is packaging its consulting playbooks into a product that could cannibalize its own consulting business, and he's fine with that. AI, evidence testing, and why success is sometimes bad. https://t.co/ye3UzAohVE

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

@AlexOsterwalder built the Business Model Canvas. @strategyzer is packaging its consulting playbooks into a product that could cannibalize its own consulting business, and he's fine with that. AI, evidence testing, and why success is sometimes bad. https://t.co/ye3UzAohVE

[Michael Nichols @m_g_nichols]

"Physical AI" is the new moat narrative. Software AI's less defensible, so smart money shifts into robotics, because "physical" is supposedly harder to copy.

But hard to build ≠ hard to copy. Two different claims. Investors keep treating them as one generic thesis.

Here's what most investors backing this don't know: Germany already lost this exact war: precision manufacturing to China over 16 years. Humanoid hardware just repeated that erosion in ~1 year. 5-8x faster.

"Physical" isn't a moat without other barriers: business model, regulatory.

Ran the full breakdown on Phaneros instead of taking the narrative at face value. Slice below👇.

DM me if you're in strategy, M&A, investment, PE and want to stress-test your theses before they cost you dearly.

[Michael Nichols @m_g_nichols]

Winner-take-all needs one finish line. "AI" is at least three races: tokens, platforms, R&D infra. All have different economics, different winners, but somehow fall under the same word. Trillions are being bet on "one" race without specifying a finish line. Before funding a thesis, make sure there actually is one.

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

@m_g_nichols and I were able to visit with leading strategist and author @AlexOsterwalder this morning. Full discussion releasing next week!

We also have some format changes coming with our next episode! Get ready for a slightly shorter and more exciting Show Your Priors!

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

RT @m_g_nichols: A Nigerian Founder Pitches His AI Trading Startup | Seun Abilawon https://t.co/MW6Vta4lvE via @YouTube

This takes lots o…

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

“It took five years to get five paying customers in five days.”

@seun_the_great explains the real founder backstory behind his fintech startup: lived pain, finance experience, and finally building the product he needed.

#startup #fintech #entrepreneurship #AI

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

If an executive has more AI LinkedIn posts than actual AI projects, that is not transformation. That is AI theater.

Wall Street may reward the buzzword. Operators should ask for the actual projects.

#AI #BusinessStrategy #CorporateAI

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

Should online anonymity still be the default? Banks verify identity every day. Social platforms could too. So why not? Maybe because bots and fake accounts help juice the ad machine. A privacy tradeoff worth debating. #AI #Business #Privacy #SocialMedia #Bots #Tech

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

Fake it till you make it, or fake it till you're indicted? Elizabeth Holmes, Elizabeth Warren, and Lorraine Warren walk into a podcast.
#Theranos #BusinessEthics #StartupFraud

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

We turned a real startup pitch into a live coaching session. Seun built an AI forex platform with 20 paying customers and zero marketing spend. Plus: OpenAI's brutal week, SpaceX buys Cursor for $60B, and the Polymarket fake bets scandal.
New episode: https://t.co/lR1olKzhCr

[Michael Nichols @m_g_nichols]

Investors are afraid that the general reasoning models of foundation labs will consume vertical applications. Are they right?

OpenAI and Anthropic just spent billions proving that general AI models won't replace vertical AI startups - at least not most of them. They proved it by hiring thousands of forward-deployed engineers to go live inside enterprise customers and build the workflows the models can't build themselves.

I ran this question through Phaneros using 7 Powers as the analytical framework. Here's what the analysis surfaced: The FDE hiring wave is not a threat to vertical AI. It's a threat to Accenture.

OpenAI's Deployment Company launched at a $14B valuation with McKinsey, Bain, and Capgemini as investors, the same firms it's now competing against for enterprise implementation budgets. Accenture fell 3% on the announcement.

General models are commoditizing the reasoning layer of vertical AI. But the deployment layer (workflow integration, compliance scaffolding, proprietary data accumulation) is not commoditizable by model improvement alone. Harvey hit $190M ARR despite frontier models matching its legal reasoning capability. The defensive moat is not the model. It's the 25,000 custom agents wired into law firm workflows.

Strategically, this makes sense. It's very difficult to be both horizontal and vertical. The foundation labs are doing vertical project business to sell tokens. Whether that's a scalable and sustainable business model is yet to be seen.

The deep-research analysis runs 28 pages with a full evidence base, falsifiability conditions, and adversarial audit. Screenshots of it in action below: guided query, framework selection, entity mapping, and analysis.

This is what Phaneros produces. If you'd like a one-week trial, DM me.

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

The US government ordered Anthropic to shut down its most powerful AI model 3 days after launch. Regulatory nightmare or the best free advertising in tech? The Streisand effect is real.

#AINews #Anthropic #AIRegulation #AIRace

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

SpaceX IPO'd at the biggest valuation in history: $1.75T, up 19% to a $2.25T cap. Elon is the first trillionaire, on paper. But Morningstar says $780B, less than half. Founder mythology or a real business model?

#SpaceX #ElonMusk #IPO #Investing

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

Apple sold the iPhone 16 as "built from the ground up for Apple Intelligence."

One generation later the new AI Siri wont run on it. You need the iPhone 17.

Buy the AI phone. Then buy the next AI phone.

#Apple #iPhone17 #AI #Siri

[Michael Nichols @m_g_nichols]

Strategic intelligence used to mean waiting weeks for a consultant to tell you what you already suspected. Base LLMs deliver overconfident hallucinations you can't trust.

Phaneros delivers decision-grade analysis in minutes for strategy, investment, procurement, product, and sales teams. Every output is grounded in Bayesian reasoning, evidence-based verification, and adversarial audit.

Worried about your data? We are building to meet European data sovereignty requirements.

This is what elite strategy you can trust looks like in the age of AI.

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

BlackRock investors tried to pull 13.3% from a $26B private credit fund. They got 38 cents on the dollar and a 5% redemption cap. The rest is stuck. Private credit is paying lenders with borrowed money. This is 2008 in slow motion.

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

"Where does that 10% come from?" Most business growth targets are pulled straight out of thin air. A market grows 3%, leadership promises 12%. Is it strategy or just hubris? New Show Your Priors clip on made-up targets and real accountability.

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

Indian Motorcycles' new CEO spent 26 years at Harley, then ran attack ads slamming it for DEI, electric, and offshoring. Harley cut a reshoring deal with Trump and stock rose 6%. Lesson in brand strategy: stay out of the culture war and just sell the bikes.

[Show Your Priors Podcast @showyourpriors]

North Korean operatives are behind 47% of state-sponsored hacks. Now they're using AI deepfakes and fake IDs to land US remote jobs, collect salaries, and fund weapons programs. The boomers may have been right about RTO. Full episode below.

#CyberSecurity #RemoteWork