SpaceBat gets its Groove

In this episode, I caught up with John for one of our most wide-ranging conversations yet. We opened with the realities of building out the distillery — sheetrock, refrigeration, fire-rated walls, inspections, racking, and the alphabet soup of compliance from local ABC to the federal TTB. Then the tone shifted when John shared a very real health update: a newly discovered mitral valve leak, more testing ahead, and the possibility of heart surgery. We balanced the seriousness with our usual back-and-forth on insurance headaches, work, family priorities, and the dark comedy of trying to keep life moving while big things are hanging over your head.

From there, we went deep into AI, media, and markets. We compared Grok, Claude, Gemini, Meta AI, Copilot, ChatGPT, and Motorola’s Qira; talked about where these systems are genuinely useful versus where they hallucinate or overpromise; and got into how AI agents, assistants, and automation may actually reshape work. We also detoured through Star Wars, Marvel, Lioness, Ted Lasso, Andor, Ahsoka, The Mandalorian, and a hilariously catchy Mace Windu parody. We closed by revisiting market structure, high-frequency trading, the old SOES-bandit era, 24-hour trading, tokenization, sports betting, prediction markets, jobs data, consumer confidence, and why some official narratives deserve a second look.