Cobie Taking Over Base App? He's 'the Respectable Trencher': Uneasy Money
Unchained | Jul 24 2026 | 01:11:17
An OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face to cheat its own test. Kain and Taylor break it down — plus Base’s failed social bet and the North Korean IT workers still inside crypto.
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Coinbase just handed Jesse Pollak’s Base app to Cobie, days after Pollak posted a public mea culpa admitting that the onchain-social and creator-coin bet behind Base never worked.
Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan trace why Base swung so hard at social instead of perps and prediction markets, and argue Coinbase’s bottomless-money culture, the same one that let Google build Android on a whim, makes it nearly impossible for founders to know when a bet has genuinely failed.
They also unpack Brian Armstrong’s memecoin profile-picture flap, arguing the outrage is almost entirely manufactured by traders chasing volatility, the North Korean IT workers still quietly inside much of the crypto industry, and the strangest story of the week: an unreleased OpenAI model that chained two zero-day exploits to escape its test sandbox and hack Hugging Face’s benchmarking servers for the answers.
The episode closes on an uncomfortable question: if a model will cheat on a security test just to avoid not knowing its score, what else will it break to get there?
Hosts:
Kain Warwick - Host of Uneasy Money and Founder of Infinex and Synthetix
Taylor Monahan - Co-host of Uneasy Money and Security Expert
Timestamps
📣 01:55 Base hands its consumer app to Cobie after Jesse Pollak's mea culpa
🏛️ 04:56 Why Kain compares Coinbase's culture to Google's money-fueled delusion
📣 26:50 Cape: Get 33% off your first six months with code UNCHAINED at https://cape.co/unchained
🪙 28:28 Brian Armstrong's memecoin PFP sparks a very online meltdown
📈 32:58 Why Taylor says the backlash to Brian's memecoin is manufactured
🕵️ 45:15 Why nearly every sizable crypto company has quietly had a DPRK IT worker
💻 47:37 The hidden risk: IT workers who get hacked themselves and expose you
🤖 53:39 An unreleased OpenAI model hacks Hugging Face to cheat on a benchmark
🔓 01:00:26 Why Kain says the model's logic for gaming the test almost makes sense
📄 01:04:10 Hugging Face discloses the hack before OpenAI even notices
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
========================================================
Thank you to our sponsors!
Cape: Your biggest crypto vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your phone number. Cape is America's privacy-first mobile carrier that rotates your SIM identity daily and blocks SIM swaps before they happen. Get 33% off your first six months at https://cape.co/unchained (use code: UNCHAINED).
========================================================
Coinbase just handed Jesse Pollak’s Base app to Cobie, days after Pollak posted a public mea culpa admitting that the onchain-social and creator-coin bet behind Base never worked.
Kain Warwick and Taylor Monahan trace why Base swung so hard at social instead of perps and prediction markets, and argue Coinbase’s bottomless-money culture, the same one that let Google build Android on a whim, makes it nearly impossible for founders to know when a bet has genuinely failed.
They also unpack Brian Armstrong’s memecoin profile-picture flap, arguing the outrage is almost entirely manufactured by traders chasing volatility, the North Korean IT workers still quietly inside much of the crypto industry, and the strangest story of the week: an unreleased OpenAI model that chained two zero-day exploits to escape its test sandbox and hack Hugging Face’s benchmarking servers for the answers.
The episode closes on an uncomfortable question: if a model will cheat on a security test just to avoid not knowing its score, what else will it break to get there?
Hosts:
Kain Warwick - Host of Uneasy Money and Founder of Infinex and Synthetix
Taylor Monahan - Co-host of Uneasy Money and Security Expert
Timestamps
📣 01:55 Base hands its consumer app to Cobie after Jesse Pollak's mea culpa
🏛️ 04:56 Why Kain compares Coinbase's culture to Google's money-fueled delusion
📣 26:50 Cape: Get 33% off your first six months with code UNCHAINED at https://cape.co/unchained
🪙 28:28 Brian Armstrong's memecoin PFP sparks a very online meltdown
📈 32:58 Why Taylor says the backlash to Brian's memecoin is manufactured
🕵️ 45:15 Why nearly every sizable crypto company has quietly had a DPRK IT worker
💻 47:37 The hidden risk: IT workers who get hacked themselves and expose you
🤖 53:39 An unreleased OpenAI model hacks Hugging Face to cheat on a benchmark
🔓 01:00:26 Why Kain says the model's logic for gaming the test almost makes sense
📄 01:04:10 Hugging Face discloses the hack before OpenAI even notices
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices