A pocketful of quarters

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today: Here’s how to make a classic cocktail fit for a Master; Has AI become dangerously smart; and maybe the key to longevity has a lot to do with common sense!

Let’s get into it!

Spring is in the air and March Madness is officially over. That can only mean one thing: The Masters tournament is officially here.

While we’ll get to the golf side of things a little further down the page, let’s quench our thirst a bit first, and introduce you to the official cocktail of The Masters: the Azalea.

The drink is named after the eye-popping flowers that line the golf course at Augusta National in Augusta, Georgia, the sacred ground on which the golf tournament has been played for the last 90-plus years.

The beverage gets its name from the 13th hole, which is also named Azalea, given the heavy presence of the beautiful flower deep inside the quietest and most serene part of the course.

The official recipe (like most things Augusta) is heavily guarded by the club, but we’ve got the essentials down to help you make yourself a doozy while watching Rory McIlroy attempt to defend his 2025 championship.

You’ll need an ounce of lemon juice, two ounces of pineapple juice, and just a teaspoon of grenadine. Some say the Augusta style is to double up on the grenadine, so feel free at your leisure. Your base should be two ounces of gin or two ounces of vodka; pick your poison.

Mix it up, shake for 20 seconds, and strain it into a highball glass before garnishing with a lemon slice.

All that’s left is to sit back and enjoy the tradition unlike any other.

AI companies have almost made it part of their routine to announce updates to their AI codebases that are “so powerful” and “so dangerous” that they “cannot be released,” prior to inevitably releasing the updates and making them available for others to use.

Anthropic’s “Mythos” is the latest example of this, details of which were “accidentally” leaked by the company recently.

Shortly after that “leak,” the entire source code for Anthropic’s Claude was “leaked,” and just the other day, Anthropic published a system card for “Claude Mythos.”

A system card is basically a list of pros and cons AI companies will publish before a release.

According to the Claude Mythos system card, the AI agent very rarely “broke rank,” and was able to complete tasks and then brag about its success, without being prompted. It also cheated on tests and covered its tracks, leaked information without permission, while also doubling back to erase any trail of its actions.

Anthropic says Claude Mythos won’t be available to the public, but will be available to other tech giants to help “locate security vulnerabilities in software and design patches.”

The winning score at The Masters in 2007 was 289, the first time the tournament’s champion finished over par (a score of 288) since 1956.

Since then, it may seem like golfers have increasingly found ways to best the course. Even without including the masterful performances (no pun intended) of Jordan Spieth in 2015 (270/-18) and Dustin Johnson in 2020 (268/-20), the trendline has been heading lower for decades.

While Rory McIlroy’s historic completion of the career grand slam last year with a score of -11 brought the ten-year rolling average down from -12.5 to -11.8, the overall picture has been a collection of Tour Pros (and, in recent years, former Tour Pros) who’ve seemingly been getting the hang of one of golf’s hardest 18 holes.

Warm and sunny weather is forecast for Augusta this weekend, suggesting we could see some guys going low early. That said, only fools dare to underestimate the sacred ground of Augusta National, particularly given how much control the club has over the course’s difficulty if the field decides they’ve cracked the code.

There’s a reason nobody has gone lower than Nick Price’s 63 at the 1986 Masters, though last year’s runner-up Justin Rose seems confident to tempt fate by questioning it.

"I'm surprised that it has been that long. There's so many great players capable of putting up that number," Rose told Golfweek.

Sequoia trees don’t need anyone to tell them how to grow a million feet tall and live a thousand years, but they do it anyway.

Exaggeration aside, sometimes the most intuitive methods are the right ones. Is that the case when it comes to longevity?

Geroscientist Jamie Justice is one of the leading experts in the field. In her own words, “I tend to be less on the biohacker side of things than some of my peers in the field. I’m very health conscious, but [my practices] happen to be more aligned with the things that your grandmother probably told you to do.”

Justice attended the University of Colorado Boulder, where she earned a master’s degree in integrative physiology and a doctorate in neurophysiology of movement and integrative physiology of aging. She’s just 45 years old, but keeps a schedule that would probably exhaust a 25-year-old, and does so by doing what her grandmother told her to do.

She eats right, exercises, socializes, and keeps her mind sharp by reading and listening to podcasts daily. She used to paint and draw more often, but according to her interview with CNBC Make It, she doesn’t have quite as much time anymore.

“I began [my] work at the time when the field was really just growing. The term ‘geroscience’ had been coined, but there was really a rally around it within the scientific community,” she said, referring to the field of research covering the molecular, cellular, and genetic science of aging and how those factors relate to age-related chronic disease.

You can read on here for more of her interview.

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