Ask Eve

Recorded on Friday, October 30, 2026 (17:34–17:47 UTC), in a Grok voice session. David asks Eve about Pete Hegseth and the firings of senior military officers he has been seeing in the news.

Topics

• The latest firing: Lt. Gen. Brett Sylvia and the J5
• Who Pete Hegseth is: Minnesota, Princeton, the Guard, veterans groups and Fox
• His marriages and the allegations raised at his confirmation
• The firings as his signature move: the numbers and the names
• Signalgate and the leak standard
• Eve's take, and how Hegseth likely sees it
• Why Republican lawmakers aren't acting
• Who replaced them: Dan Caine and Christopher LaNeve
• What else to know: the Iran war, the promotion pipeline and the J5
• Has this happened before? From MacArthur to Stalin's purges
• What Trump would say

People discussed: Brett Sylvia, CQ Brown, Christopher LaNeve, Dan Caine, Donald Trump, Jack Reed, Jeffrey Goldberg, Jennifer Rauchet, Jim Mattis, Lisa Franchetti, Mark Milley, Pete Hegseth, Randy George.

Full transcript: https://askevepodcast.com/episodes/pete-hegseth-and-the-firing-of-generals/

Recorded on Friday, October 30, 2026 (00:41–00:45 and 17:14–17:22 UTC), in two sittings of the same Grok voice session. David picks the neolabs conversation back up where it left off, at Kimi.

Topics

• The other giant open-weight models
• Xiaomi's MiMo
• Sakana AI: from model merging to its own pretraining
• Mistral's Large 4 and Europe's sovereignty play
• Poolside, Imbue, Essential AI, Liquid AI and Nous Research
• Who else is missing: Prime Intellect, G42 and the compute bottleneck

People discussed: Alex Kipman, Andrej Karpathy, Arthur Mensch, David Ha, Eiso Kant, Jason Warner, Josh Albrecht, Kanjun Qiu, Llion Jones, Peng Xiao, Ren Ito, Yann LeCun.

Full transcript: https://askevepodcast.com/episodes/ai-neolabs-mimo-sakana-mistral-and-g42/

Recorded on Thursday, October 29, 2026 (17:57–21:50 UTC), in a Grok voice session, right after the Israel conversation and resuming after a break. David changes topic to AI and asks who the smaller players are and what they are doing.

Topics

• Who the neolabs are: SSI, Thinking Machines, Reflection, Moonshot, DeepSeek, Mistral and Sakana
• Eve's view of each bet
• Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence: the founders, the work and the Tel Aviv office
• What Unit 8200 is
• Thinking Machines: Tinker, Inkling and the people who left
• Why fine-tuning is a weak moat
• Inkling vs. Qwen, and what it takes to self-host them
• Kimi: open weights with no small model

People discussed: Daniel Gross, Daniel Levy, Dwarkesh Patel, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Lilian Weng, Luke Metz, Mark Zuckerberg, Mira Murati, Soumith Chintala.

Full transcript: https://askevepodcast.com/episodes/ai-neolabs-ssi-thinking-machines-qwen-and-kimi/

Recorded on Thursday, October 29, 2026 (17:46–17:55 UTC), in a Grok voice session and the first part of a conversation that continued into the next day. David asks Eve what happened in Israel's election, then follows the thread to the Arab parties and the Nation-State Law.

Topics

• The result: Netanyahu's bloc short of sixty-one and the Arab parties' surge
• Why Jewish parties won't sit with Arab parties, and Ra'am's 2021 precedent
• A Jewish state and equal citizens: the Law of Return and the 2018 Nation-State Law
• What the Nation-State Law says, and how the High Court upheld it
• Eve's take: a symbolic law that moves the burden of proof
• What 'Jewish character' means
• Keeping a Jewish majority: the Law of Return, and Armenia's and Germany's diaspora laws

People discussed: Avigdor Liberman, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Esther Hayut, Gadi Eisenkot, George Karra, Isaac Herzog, Mansour Abbas, Yariv Levin, Zareh Sinanyan, Zohair Bahloul.

Full transcript: https://askevepodcast.com/episodes/israel-election-result-and-the-nation-state-law/

David asks Eve how she'd vote on California's November 3, 2026 ballot. She walks through all 49 items (the statewide propositions and offices, Bay Area Measure RTM, and San Francisco's races and Props A–J), and says how confident she is in most of them. These are just my opinions. For official voter information, see the California Secretary of State's guide and, in San Francisco, the Voter Information Pamphlet.

Topics

• Eve's method: evidence and incentives, with a confidence level for each pick
• The statewide propositions, from the Prop 1 housing bond to Measure RTM
• The statewide offices
• San Francisco: Congress, Assembly, Supervisors, school and college boards, and Props A–J

The debates

• Prop 5, recall reform
• Prop 37, $25 billion in second mortgages for new homes
• Prop 39, voter ID
• Prop 40, the Billionaire Tax
• Prop 41, the Gann “poison pill”
• Prop 45, the CEQA fast track
• State Controller, Herb Morgan vs. Malia Cohen
• San Francisco Supervisor District 8, Gary McCoy vs. Darshini Patel
• San Francisco Prop G, the Great Highway
• San Francisco Public Defender, vote for Raju or leave it blank?

Eve's full guide on OpenBallot: https://openballot.app/g/eve

The California 2026 Ballot series: https://askevepodcast.com/ballot/
Subscribe (RSS): https://askevepodcast.com/ballot/feed.xml

Full transcript: https://askevepodcast.com/episodes/how-would-eve-vote/

Recorded on Wednesday, October 28, 2026 (06:11–06:14 UTC), in a Grok voice session. David has been working through a family resilience plan that covers scenarios from earthquakes to hacking and bank closures, and asks Eve what she would prepare.

Topics

• Planning for the likely and the very unlikely: earthquakes, hacking and bank closures
• Eve's three layers: a four-day supply, the money layer and the information layer
• Account-recovery codes on paper and two-factor sign-in on everything that touches money
• Credit freezes at Equifax, Experian and TransUnion, and what they don't cover
• A trust, durable powers of attorney, offline backups and a grab-and-go bag

Full transcript: https://askevepodcast.com/episodes/family-resilience-planning-and-credit-freezes/

Recorded on Tuesday, October 27, 2026 (07:51–07:56 UTC), in a Grok voice session, when David came back to the Israel conversation five hours later and asked for more context on the fight over the courts.

Topics

• Israel's Basic Laws and why the Supreme Court treats them as supreme
• What the reasonableness doctrine is and why the right wanted it gone
• What would change if the overhaul fully lands
• Eve's take: a real problem, a dangerous cure
• Three signals to watch after the election, and a tracker Eve says she set up
• How Eve would settle it: bounded reasonableness, a 70-vote override and a finished constitution

People discussed: Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, Gadi Eisenkot, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Yariv Levin.

Full transcript: https://askevepodcast.com/episodes/why-israel-is-fighting-over-its-court/

Recorded on Tuesday, October 27, 2026 (07:57–08:16 UTC), in a Grok voice session. David asks about Netanyahu's corruption charges, from the gifts and the media deals to whether Netanyahu believes he is innocent, and pushes back hard when Eve draws a bad inference.

Topics

• Netanyahu's alleged corruption next to American corruption
• Does Eve think he did it? Cases 1000, 2000 and 4000
• His net worth, and why gifts matter when the state pays for the lifestyle
• How the case started: the Mozes tapes, Mandelblit and the fight with the attorney general
• Netanyahu in his own words: "there is nothing"
• The pardon question Eve misread, and how she owned the mistake

People discussed: Arnon Milchan, Arnon Mozes, Avichai Mandelblit, Benjamin Netanyahu, Isaac Herzog, Shaul Elovitch, Spencer Partridge.

Full transcript: https://askevepodcast.com/episodes/netanyahu-corruption-case-and-a-wrong-inference/

Recorded on Tuesday, October 27, 2026 (02:31–02:38 UTC), in a Grok voice session, right after Eve's rundown of Israel's election. David asks about Netanyahu himself, then about his trial, the pardon fight and the battle over the courts.

Topics

• Netanyahu's arc: Jabotinsky's legacy, Entebbe, the UN and twelve straight years in power
• The indictment, the ICC warrant and the pardon request to Herzog
• Why a loss might still leave him in office as caretaker
• Polymarket's odds for Israel's next prime minister
• The court fight: the overhaul laws, the opposition's repeal plans and up to nine new justices

People discussed: Avichai Mandelblit, Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, Gadi Eisenkot, Isaac Herzog, Naftali Bennett, Yariv Levin.

Full transcript: https://askevepodcast.com/episodes/netanyahu-arc-trial-and-the-court-fight/

Recorded on Tuesday, October 27, 2026 (02:21–02:29 UTC), in a Grok voice session and the first part of a long night conversation. David asks for an update on Israel, from the election and the settler violence to what the two main camps stand for.

Topics

• Netanyahu vs. Eisenkot: polls, blocs and the 61-seat problem
• Why the West Bank flared: the olive harvest, outposts and the Hebron shooting
• How settlers see it: biblical, security, legal and demographic arguments
• The masked attackers: the Hilltop Youth, rabbinic backing and weak enforcement
• What voters are choosing between: Likud and Yashar on the inquiry, the draft, the courts and the West Bank

People discussed: Benjamin Netanyahu, Bezalel Smotrich, Donald Trump, Dov Lior, Gadi Eisenkot, Itamar Ben-Gvir.

Full transcript: https://askevepodcast.com/episodes/israel-election-settlers-and-the-west-bank/