Soups, Stews, and Business

A man cautiously follows his nose.

Ryan Floyd

Feb 28, 2025

I’m not sure what law this is in business, but I’ll make one up: Follow your nose.

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I like making giant stews and soups in the winter. When I lived in Mumbai, I cooked dal and rice with a pressure cooker daily. I loved that thing. For some reason, when I moved back to America, I could never quite find a pressure cooker as good. Sadly, my pressure cooker skills fell into disrepair, and I spent time trying to figure out how to make smoked meat in a New York apartment (by making the whole floor smell like smoked sausage).

Then I got a Dutch oven before the kids were born. On those cold San Francisco evenings, I cooked countless soups and stews of all kinds. Then we upgraded to two Instant Pots about a decade ago. It’s basically an electric pressure cooker. I was skeptical at first by the newfangled “tech” in the kitchen but became a convert because it could make delicious old timey soups and stews so easily. I often make my own broth from vegetable scraps and meat bones. I cook meat, lentils, and beans, and put it all together on the weekends so we can have tasty and mostly healthy food during the week when the house is like Grand Central Station.

About six months ago, I noticed I was using Chat GPT daily for cooking tips. I would nail down the best way to heat my beans for a given amount of time. Often, the robot—as I call it—would suggest something overly complicated, like soaking the beans for an hour before putting them in the pressure cooker. Eventually, I figured out how to use the technology to make better soups and stews, as judged by this highly scientific metric: my children eating their entire dinner without complaining. Coming into the house from playing outside, they’d let me know it smelled good.

I’ve been using different AI tools almost every day for a while now. Sensing that others might be doing something more sophisticated, I hired a few consultants to give us tips at work. Chat GPT didn’t read Excel files very well, so I had to create a “dictionary” explaining the terms. It isn’t perfect, but it can be helpful. I use individual GPTs or “agents” for different processes. I have one for low-key legal advice (which I gather is a meme of sorts right now, but still useful). Maybe the general interface (and not the agents) is good enough. I have another one for trying to judge the probability of this or that thing happening, loaded with my notes from Tetlock, Taleb, Mandelbrot, and Hubbard. I’ve noticed they perform better when I tell them to “show their work.”

I also like using Chat GPT for quick summaries on a topic from different sources on the internet. These summaries are way better than they were a year ago—back when the AI would just make up entire, wildly inaccurate backstories about our CEOs, featuring fantastical fraud and insider trading. Now, I’ve noticed it’s often too cautious, afraid to overstate its confidence.

I continue to ask about cooking and recipe tips—mostly because my portions and ingredients are always changing.

These tools have helped me articulate and identify potential risks and concerns more easily than before. I will admit: the process is eerie, and I am slightly concerned that someday these machines will enslave us. On the other hand, using them is pretty fun and eye-opening. It feels like the invention of the internet when I was in middle/high school or getting an iPhone in 2008.

AI will makes complex things a little easier to understand. That may make business harder for some of us who specialize in, well, making complex things easier to understand. But these changes aren’t new. Information has wanted to be free for a long time. One has to stay a step ahead.

I asked Sora to make a video of a guy “looking awesome” making chili with instant pots a Dutch oven. Here you go. This guy’s hair is way better than mine ever has been. My cooking surfaces have never been this clean either. I’m not sure why the pot seems to be cooking on the counter and probably burning it. So still some improvements need to be done. I guess this thing won’t enslave me yet.

This document is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase any securities or investment advisory services. I am the Portfolio Manager of Barca Capital, LLC, but the views I express are my own and not necessarily those of my firm.