Read_927 - Poe's Law Comes Into Full Flower

[00:00:00] Speaker A: To describe what's coming as impossibly borked is charitable. This is going to be an unholy mess of indiscernible media messaging, photography and fakery. This stuff is going to become deadly serious and reality fade into fractal digital fog will stress even the highest trust networks. Tom Stoppard rest in Peace joked about, well, how do I know there's such. [00:00:28] Speaker B: A place as Denmark? [00:00:29] Speaker A: It could be a conspiracy of cartographers. That particular piece of poignancy is about to become the existential riddle of everything the best in Bitcoin made Audible. I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible. Foreign. [00:01:02] Speaker B: What is up guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. [00:01:06] Speaker A: This is a great one. [00:01:07] Speaker B: This is a fantastic episode, fantastic article. I really love. This is something we've talked about briefly and at a couple different times on the show and something I talk about with my family a lot when we kind of get on the topic of AI because this is kind of how I think this is a trend that I see happening. And importantly what does it mean when anything and everything is easy to fake at increasingly no cost? And this is actually another piece from El Gato Bad Catitude, which I can't remember the other piece that we read from this substack. I'll. I'll dig into the. I'll dig into the history and find it. Um, it's been a little bit, but it was something, something kind of like Covid debt related if I'm not mistaken. Nonetheless, I remember very much liking it and somebody else linked me to this and I come back to this every once in a while and this was a fantastic read talking about like the state of AI and its consequences and I think a lot of people have this, oh, AI is going to destroy the world or it's going to nuke everybody or something like that. And this is, it's a very different consequences, far more personal and close to home and also extremely frightening. And there's actually a. [00:02:25] Speaker A: There's actually a potentially very poorly understood. [00:02:29] Speaker B: Silver lining here and I just think this article does such a great job of kind of hitting all the different pieces and I think you're really going to like it. If you love this topic at all or musings on the future which are now like shockingly close to us of where nothing can be trusted online. That's pretty, pretty time sensitive thing to be exploring. If you, if you're interested in this at all. I think you're gonna love this article and the chat afterward. So real quick, I just want to shout out the hrf, the Human Rights foundation and their incredible work. They have the Financial Freedom Report which is one of the best newsletters out there, the only one I know that really kind of keeps up with all of the fight for financial freedom and for the fight against tyranny and the tools to protect tyranny and protect people against tyranny and protect their sovereignty around the world. I do not know of a better resource. You can check out their newsletter, it's right down in the show notes. And of course they have tickets for the Oslo Freedom Forum. Get in person, see the people, meet the people, hear their stories June 1st to 3rd and the tickets are on sale. Link right down in the show notes with that. Let's go ahead and get into today's read and we will follow it up. [00:03:43] Speaker A: With a guy's take and it's titled Poe's Law Comes into Full Flower by Elgato Malo and why the Future May Be Local Meet Providence assembly person Lyle Culpepper. [00:04:02] Speaker B: Please give they them your attention as. [00:04:04] Speaker A: They speak on the recent shooting at Brown University. This is riveting stuff. [00:04:09] Speaker C: We're asking the public to please stop referring to him as the Brown shooter as this has an inherently Islamophobic connotation. Brown because the Brown University, not because of the color of skin. Right, right, right. We are also asking the public to please stop posting photos of Mufasa Carmax. We would for the sake of diversity, really like to pin this on a different ethnicity because it is unfair to keep blaming Islam for every violent act they commit. Let's do better. [00:04:44] Speaker A: Obviously this pressure would seem to raise any number of quite serious concerns, but I'd like to raise one that an awful lot of people online seem to be missing. There is no Lyle Culpepper. There is literally no parody of woke. [00:05:01] Speaker B: Belief so absurd that it cannot be. [00:05:03] Speaker A: Readily mistaken for reality. If one lacks knowledge of a speaker's priors or even of their reality, Poe's Law has come into full flower. This is not even a person. It's an AI construct. Ones and zeros playing make believe with politics and humanity alike. There is no there. There just ghosts in the machine and gags on the real. [00:05:30] Speaker C: Take a look at this heartbreaking video from Hazaza that reveals a devastating truth. Did you see it? There are millions of people in Gaza who do not have access to proper AI tools. These innocent families don't have access to nano banana or cling or VO 3.1. Look, that arm is just floating there. It has no idea where to go. So I'm personally going to be donating some of my time to teach Goins how to use AI so that they can make better videos and garner more sympathy. Visit coveredincom.com to donate today because you don't have to turn a blind eye to bad AI. [00:06:12] Speaker A: The point I find most interesting here is not political, but rather psychosocial. There is an impending reality fracture coming. The ability to tell what is real and what is fugazi is already well past slippery and into you haven't got a prayer without specialized tools. [00:06:31] Speaker D: What stops the government of creating a digital avatar of you and somebody in the real world now is experiencing that. Hollywood created this actress, this AI actress 100% AI called Tilly Northwest. But then this woman finds this clip of this AI actress and that's her. And so people are experiencing this even now. [00:06:51] Speaker E: Norwood, an AI generated actress, is causing outrage among Hollywood stars. The Zicoea studio presented its first AI actress Tilly Norwood at the Zurich Film Festival. Several Hollywood talent agencies are already interested in signing Tilly Norwood. Zicoea Studio creator Eline van der Velden said she wants, quote, tilly to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman. That's the aim of what we're doing. Once the AI actress is established in the media landscape, the studio plans to develop more than 40 other AI actors. The announcement immediately sparked backlash. Pretty Little Liars star Lucy Hale simply commented, no. Nicolas Alexander Chavez, who starred in the Netflix series Monster, wrote, not an actress. Actually. Abigail Breslin, who starred in Little Miss Sunshine and Zombieland, called on, quote, every actor I know to please boycott this. The union criticized certain Hollywood studios that proposed using AI to scan extras and offer them one day's pay while becoming the owners of the scans and being able to use them for any project. [00:07:48] Speaker D: There she is. And this is a real person. [00:08:00] Speaker A: Maybe you can say, oh, okay, but I can see it. But mostly I don't believe you. You see it because you look for it and your mind demands to find it. Trying to pick the really high end. [00:08:11] Speaker B: AI out of a lineup of nine. [00:08:13] Speaker A: Real videos of similar content is rapidly becoming a sucker bet that very few people would take even or even 2 to 1 odds on. I wouldn't. At the speed people consume Internet content, the likelihood of find the fake discernment drops to something indistinguishable from zero. And it's going to continue getting better at a speed that's hard to conceive of. Keep in mind that just a year ago this was nowhere way on the other side of the uncanny valley. Obvious, silly and rare. [00:08:45] Speaker B: No Moss. [00:08:46] Speaker A: This is now cheap, ubiquitous and astonishing. [00:08:50] Speaker B: Is this a real singer with some special effects? [00:08:53] Speaker A: Or is this a full AI construct. [00:08:56] Speaker B: Doing techno Mongolian throat singing of Christmas carols? [00:08:59] Speaker A: Is it a real face? A real voice? Seriously, how would you know? Do you even care? [00:09:06] Speaker B: Jingle a bell. Jingle a bell. Jingle all the way. [00:09:21] Speaker A: This is going to upend industries in a fashion people are only just starting to grasp. Estimates are that 30 to 40% of new music being uploaded into streaming services is AI generated. Some are trying to market as such. Others are rapidly realizing that they basically cannot tell and that their detection tools are losing the arms race. Advertising is in for a massive shakeup. This video was made in one day using nothing but text prompts and a few hundred bucks worth of veo credits. I'm pretty sure it was one writer. If you had put this on tv, would anyone have noticed it was all fake depression? [00:10:02] Speaker F: Nothing worked. [00:10:04] Speaker A: Every day felt heavy. [00:10:05] Speaker B: I felt trapped. [00:10:07] Speaker F: Then I tried Puppermin. [00:10:09] Speaker B: Our prescription helps your body secrete a special pheromone that attracts puppies. I took the pill before bed and when I woke up, there he was. [00:10:19] Speaker A: The love of my life. [00:10:22] Speaker F: The pill does not target depression directly, but we've found that it's really difficult to be depressed when cute dogs show up at your doorstep. I used to feel so empty, but now I feel joy and mild concern how a pee stain got on the ceiling. My puppy listens twice as good as my ex husband and only climbs into the lap of half as many of my friends. [00:10:43] Speaker B: He chewed up my bible and pooped in my good chair. But I'm happy for the first time in years. Looks like a rat. Barks like a demon. But he saved my life. [00:10:57] Speaker A: I named him Earl. He follows me everywhere and farts in his sleep. Just like my first husband. Papramean. For when your therapist says maybe you should get a dog. We're well into the realm of there is no functional difference here. Apart from 20 times the speed at 1 1000th the cost. And that's going to keep dropping. And as production costs approach zero, production quantity will soar towards infinity. Keep that fact in mind. More on this in a minute. People say, well, yeah, sure, whatever. Whatever. [00:11:37] Speaker B: I care not for the loss of Hollywood jobs. [00:11:39] Speaker A: Heck, I applaud it. Music too. They've not written anything good in decades. Let the rains come and wash it all away. Sure, but what about the rest of it? News, Internet videos? Internet videos that fool the news. Edits of edits of edits faking out reporters and viewers alike. How can you trust anything you did not see with your own eyes? Was that Trump speaking or was it an avatar to describe what's coming as impossibly borked or is charitable? This is going to be an unholy mess of indiscernible media messaging, photography and fakery. This stuff is going to become deadly serious and reality fade into fractal digital fog will stress even the highest trust networks. Tom Stoppard Rest in peace joked about well how do I know there is. [00:12:30] Speaker B: Such a place as Denmark? [00:12:32] Speaker A: It could be a conspiracy of cartographers. That particular piece of poignancy is about to become the existential riddle of everything. The solipsistic slide into a non verifiable external sphere is upon us. Maybe you can trust someone to tell you what happened in Shanghai today, but how can you know? One can conceive of some sort of. [00:12:56] Speaker B: Reality hash where a camera has a. [00:12:58] Speaker A: Private key and embeds a hash mark or watermark into the image such that you can verify that it is the unaltered output of that specific camera. And then the images when posted can be second signed by the poster's private key to validate who put it up and when. But this necessitates a vast new technological system that I am unaware of anyone even working on at present. And even if this did come to be, I'm not sure how much it helps you get some verification of key figures, politicians, leaders, CEOs, known reporters, etc. You can become a verified and known quantity. But this is dangerous. It puts media back into the hands. [00:13:37] Speaker B: Of the few and the few lie a lot. [00:13:41] Speaker A: Their agenda is not your agenda. It's also a surveillance state's wet dream. But even this is not really going to matter. Most of social media is not like. [00:13:52] Speaker B: That and it's not going away. [00:13:54] Speaker A: It's video from some person on the scene, someone you never met before, who captured some event or videoed or photographed something going on. You have no IDEA if Bob Jones, 67 from Arkansas is real or made up, or if their image hash comes from a Nikon camera or just used. [00:14:12] Speaker B: The key they extracted from one, or if the picture is a real photo. [00:14:15] Speaker A: Of an AI construct generated to look real in photos. [00:14:20] Speaker B: Here he has a video showing a avatar, a person and a set built in Unreal Engine which is the video game rendering engine, and then motion captured to their conversation and their actions and then taken the CG and put it through various different tools. Cling Aveo and these other video tools to basically just add a couple of things. The prompt itself was just add a mic and some plants into the background and it basically turned something that was clearly CG into something that basically looks completely real. I would have just put in the audio here, except that it doesn't really tell you what's going on and it's like 50 seconds, so you'd just kind of be confused. But the important thing is this. [00:15:11] Speaker A: This is currently dated tech. The time between now and when full reality fracture of inability to discern digital from meat body is measured in months, not years. The time to I have no idea if the person on this zoom call is an avatar controlled by a person or an avatar controlled by an AI is similarly demarcated. Honestly, for high end users they're already there. It's just not widespread in the wild yet. Price drops, ease of use rises, integration surges so that you can use AI to write the graphics prompts to drive the graphics engine. And pretty soon you're really starting to. [00:15:52] Speaker B: Ask some questions about what is real. [00:15:54] Speaker A: And what is not. And the amount of is not gets so high that you start to question the knowability of reality altogether. This way madness lies. People are neither willing nor able to live in these kinds of ubiquitous funhouse frauds. [00:16:10] Speaker B: You just can't. [00:16:12] Speaker A: The psychological strain of constantly trying to parse a reality that slippery and facile is more than can be borne and the fraud and danger grow exponentially. Most businesses I know of now have layers of security around money transfer. You want to send a wire or an ach. [00:16:32] Speaker B: No one will do that based on an email anymore. [00:16:34] Speaker A: In many cases not even two factor login. Most institutions require voice confirm. You need to call the finance team from a known number and in a known voice confirm the details of the wire request. And even that fails. I know a company whose CFO got fooled by an AI generated voice modulator pretending to be the CEO and calling from a faked caller ID that looked like the CEO's phone. They got a wire sent. Fortunately, wires being wires, it was able to be recalled. [00:17:06] Speaker B: This is one of the core problems with the no trusted counterparty systems like bitcoin. [00:17:10] Speaker A: Reversibility is a feature people care a great deal about and a couple of days to settle can be a feature rather than a bug. This is going on all over. Frankly, I'm astonished it's not happening more. How are there not fraudsters posting online videos of CEOs saying things that make their stocks tank or double? How are fake voices not placing orders? How Are fake avatars not taking zoom calls? They probably are. Honestly, they certainly are. The question is not if it's how often. And the answer can only increase logarithmically and we do not have anything like the infrastructure to defend against it, either technologically or cognitively. It seems like an awful lot of this could start to look like lights out, game over. How on earth can you build far reaching and sufficiently flexible networks of trust in a system that could flip from being 8020 real fake to to 99 fakes to everyone real in very short order? Because that's where near zero cost, near infinite ubiquity takes you. That it goes two orders of magnitude worse. Then the AIs start learning. You need to keep just enough truth in the mix to keep the players playing and start working you over with image linking and ordered impression framing and all manner of other cognitive trickery that. [00:18:35] Speaker B: Is barely understood by humans. [00:18:37] Speaker A: But it rapidly emerges from large sample size AB tests analyzed by agents with massive working memory so far past human scope as to be not only incomprehensible, but quite possibly invisible. To even touch such a substrate without. [00:18:51] Speaker B: AI meditation to protect you would be. [00:18:54] Speaker A: Like shotgunning a can of cognitive Ebola. Much blood, many fouls. And so I have a niggling little pet theory here scratching around my little cat brain. One I cannot quite shake. It may sound a little weird, but bear with me and keep an open mind. Sit with this a bit before you render too firm a judgment. I think this may be a very good thing. I think it may be an excellent thing, A profound thing that can reshape humanity and make it much, much better, happier and more flourishing. Hear me out. This all sounds like a disaster, but that's because you're thinking about it from inside the frame. If you basically lose the ability to trust anything, you cannot see any text or information about the world, any photo, any video, disembodied voice, zoom face or phone call, any of it. What do you do? You stop trusting it. The world gets small again. You trust what you see with your own eyes. Business moves to highly protected verified networks, but even these are not really trusted because the arms race to break any new safeguard will always be ferocious and AI mediated fraud and intrusion and is a level of relentless attack on every surface at once, all the time, every time. That will make some big time penetrations inevitable. So for the real high trust face to face, IRL hands get shaken, eyes get looked into and people once more do business directly with people. I think this has the potential to make people happier. We're social animals. We want to be around one another. We want face time, not facetime. We want contact, lunch, talking and body language, not the half communication of voice. [00:20:44] Speaker B: And video calls and the quarter communication of text. [00:20:47] Speaker A: The Internet is too big a room for humans to thrive in. It's too vast. There are too many comparisons, too much information, too many lies and shapings and framings in the always on ab tested demolition derby for slivers of attention span and the hot wiring of limbic responses. It's too important to walk away from. You could not compete with the others who stayed. They would be too much faster, no, too much more. But if it all devolves to hot predatory garbage assaulting your and your perceptions in wave upon wave of AI slop lies and outright cognitive assault and mind rape, it starts to look more and more like evoked hypnosis and the cultivation of mass delusions and the madness of crowds for fun, profit and political purpose. Purpose maybe. Everyone walks away. It's hard to remember life before the Internet. Jesus, how in the hell did we even do that? [00:21:40] Speaker B: How did we manage? [00:21:41] Speaker A: Those in gens Y and Z perhaps have no memory of life without mobile data, social media, all of it. It was slower, that much is for sure. But it was also happier. Humans were not as anxious, as wound up, as inflamed into pigpiles, wars of. [00:21:55] Speaker B: All against all, tribe against tribe and. [00:21:58] Speaker A: Of minds evolved to hunt deer and eat berries in caves and sit around fires telling stories to one another, against life in a room too big for human mechanisms to calibrate properly? What if the information age, devolving into the age of utter lies and untrust, collapsed distance? What if you stopped caring about what. [00:22:17] Speaker B: Was happening on the other side of. [00:22:18] Speaker A: The world because it once again became vague, untrusted and basically unreal? What if it reversed the Zoom diaspora and brought us back to city centers? What if it brought us back to. [00:22:30] Speaker B: Towns and town centers? [00:22:32] Speaker A: What if we left the house to meet people and find dates and mates instead of scrolling and swiping? Might this restore quite a lot of humanity to the humans? Might it take back so much of what I think so many of us can feel has been lost? Replace the loss and alienation that seems endemic, especially among the digital native generations like Zone? Might the deracinated once more plant roots in meatspace and realize that the meaningful parts of lives are only forged irl? [00:23:02] Speaker B: If you ask most people in this. [00:23:04] Speaker A: Purportedly modern age if we have lost. [00:23:06] Speaker B: The path and lost the plot, it. [00:23:08] Speaker A: Seems like they would tell you, yes. [00:23:10] Speaker B: We can argue about degree, but about. [00:23:12] Speaker A: The fact of that matter, not so much. [00:23:14] Speaker B: Many joke about the Matrix was correct. [00:23:17] Speaker A: 1999 was the apogee of human civilization. Well, that was right before the Internet changed everything, wasn't it? And maybe going back is not such a bad idea. I'll tell you one thing, if this is even half correct, then the pennies on the dollar sale prices of class. [00:23:34] Speaker B: A office space in urban centers are. [00:23:36] Speaker A: One of the best buys in a generation. And the cities that can get their acts together and become safe, fun, flourishing and hospitable, open for business, open to business and ready to let the creators and builders run free. The ones who sort out their schools. [00:23:52] Speaker B: And stop tolerating the homeless industrial complex. [00:23:54] Speaker A: Of petty crime and ostentatious mental illness and drug addiction. Those cities will win the land grab for talent and become the new centers of the world. It feels to me like a once in a century, maybe once in a society kind of jump ball may be going up into the air here and it will be fascinating to see who has the prescience and, and presence of mind to come down with it. [00:24:22] Speaker B: A shout out to the HRF and their Financial Freedom Report as well as the Oslo Freedom Forum for supporting this show and my work. And actually a great example, the Oslo Freedom Forum. If, if you're trying to find out like the truth of what's going on in the world, you go to meet the people. Like that's kind of the beauty of what they do is they bring people from around the world to, to shake hands, to tell the stories, to, to use and explore the tools in the fight for freedom all around the globe. You can subscribe to their newsletter and also get tickets for the Oslo Freedom Forum, which will be June 1st to 3rd this year. Right down in the show. Notes One of the craziest things about this is literally how quickly it's happening and the this, this will just keep getting. In fact, I just saw it was just released like three or four days ago. There's an LTX that is going to it's essentially a multimodal video model and specifically it's one that can operate on incredibly low, in very low RAM environments with very high output. And it is entirely open source. And one of their designs, like one of the things is you can essentially storyboard and produce real video. And that's like one of the things in the context of some of the stuff that I want to do. This opens up so many projects to actually tell or, or to tell stories that Basically weren't possible before and to retell stories that you know, are beloved in. You know, the idea of the fan made trailer, there's going to be the fan made movie and there will be fan made movies that are better than the quote unquote official movie. And it's so, so vastly going to change. I mean just so many industries. The, the idea of telling a good story will be about telling a good story. It will have nothing to do with the technicality of putting it together anymore. This will open up independent filmmakers and even individual storytellers in a way that's. [00:26:34] Speaker A: Really hard to fathom. [00:26:35] Speaker B: And that's on top of all the. Just everything becomes fake. But I really love this image of where things may go. And I've had this same thought for, for quite a while and have talked about it quite often with a lot of different people. And I Elgato here did such a. [00:26:53] Speaker A: Good job of really articulating it or. [00:26:55] Speaker B: Just how potentially damaging it is to the untrusted world. But I think there's a, there's an element here that he. Well, it's not really that he's like missing it, it's that it's a little bit unexplored and that what also occurred. It's not like the world wasn't still connected when we had the, you know, the ancient worlds of everything local. Right. It's not like there wasn't communication or trade, like international or culture exchanges across borders and across tribes and all this stuff. Local was obviously king, but there still was a very non local a very global environment of movement of information. And that won't change. In fact, the ability to exchange information obviously will be so aggressively is and will continue to be so aggressively expansive and well, in fact the problem will be bandwidth. It won't even be, it won't even be the information. It will be like what do you discern from one to the other. And this is where I think and you know, maybe this is just like my film background talking, but as something you know, like how, how did history evolve before we were in the very like data? I have a picture of it like this, this very strict practical, I have proof the kind of information era of study and verification and this has been a relatively short period in human history that this has kind of been the predominant way to think about things. I'm not saying that like data in science or whatever will go away, but I'm talking about from a context of like social trust and things is this, these ideas of like out of context clips Being or just some explicit piece of information or claim about a thing backed up with, oh, here's a picture of it, or here's this or that, here's a. Here's a radio broadcast of their voice that you can hear and know that this is what happened. Like, that's been a relatively short period of human history. That, that's kind of become the way we relate. And we've adapted very quickly to that becoming our mode of thinking about the entire world. But the problem is that, and Eligato talks about this is that this was also a highly controlled media, and there it was. [00:29:21] Speaker A: I actually think it's more that there. [00:29:23] Speaker B: Was a false sense of security. We've been lied to at every level in every way. And it's always been the case that reality has been the subject of those who attempt to tell us that there has always been a narrative, there's always been an agenda and quote, unquote, reality has always been forged by those with the most influence, the most power and the most prominence, at least for everything external and distant. And we had this false sense of we can know what is true and what is not because we have this information without realizing that also exactly what information is let through and what is excluded and how that information is presented can just as easily completely obscure the reality of things as easy as anything else, as easy as an AI video can. And that's what I think we're losing. We're losing a false sense of security in the fact that we know what the world is like, because we, we really don't. And I love the little analogy or the, the pointing out to, to what was it? Let me type Poignancy. Particular piece of poignancy. Tom Stoppard. The Tom Stopper. Well, how do I know there's such a place as Denmark? [00:30:38] Speaker A: It could be a conspiracy of cartographers. [00:30:41] Speaker B: And like, it's real. Like, have you been to Denmark? [00:30:43] Speaker A: And if you went to Denmark, how. [00:30:45] Speaker B: Do you know it's Denmark? You know, just because you flew there and the, the airport says Denmark. You know, like there's, there's this, there's this element of you rely on the, the frame tells you how to interpret what you see. And so going back to the analogy of the point that I was trying to make is, so what, what was the world like? How, how did you transmit information? How did you expose something about the world prior to this, this kind of information era, this, this hard data era of humanity? You told stories because stories don't necessarily have to be true to explain Something that it's true. [00:31:34] Speaker A: Because the purpose of a story is. [00:31:36] Speaker B: To tell you about an inner struggle and have an external struggle that forces the inner struggle to become a realization for a character, to realize something, to change something, and to reach some sor of internal goal. It's ultimately a personal story, like all good stories are personal journeys. And importantly, it changes the focus. We have become a society of what happened. A society that runs on data and information and requires this sense of provenance for every little thing that occurs. It's always a question of what, what, what, what, what? [00:32:14] Speaker A: A society that runs on story is one that deals in the realm of why, why do this, what does this mean, why fight for this? Why believe this? And this is something that we have lost. We have lost in a massive way. [00:32:31] Speaker B: In our current era. [00:32:32] Speaker A: And I think it's because we've been bombarded with so much, what is this? So it doesn't just change the. [00:32:42] Speaker B: The global social environment, the environment that has spread far too wide and far too quickly for us to actually adjust to it. For essentially, human cognition was never able to handle a million tribes all clashing together at once. It's so past the Dunbar's number that there's no solid way to actually make sense of all the varying narratives and identities and cultures of the world, which is why the world is having a bit of an identity crisis right now. But just from the geographic focus, going from global and looking outward to everyone, everywhere, honing back in or pulling back in to very local, it also turns. [00:33:32] Speaker A: The global, the focus on the global what? Back into the local. Why? [00:33:38] Speaker B: That's exactly what has sustained cultures and communities for thousands and thousands of years. It is really only very recently that this has even been considered something that was antiquated or backwards thinking. And I genuinely think it's actually the reverse, is that we've moved away from what actually matters and we've arrogantly kind of looked down at our nose at the people of the past because they weren't aware of things that they simply did not have technological access to. It's like, it's easy to think, you know, everybody's dumb 200 years ago because they didn't know germs existed or whatever. And it's like, well, you're not smart because you have a microscope. In fact, you don't even have a microscope. You just read in a textbook that somebody else with a microscope discovered a thing and now you know it. But you only know it because somebody. [00:34:30] Speaker A: Told you you didn't discover it. [00:34:33] Speaker B: You're not smarter than that person 200 years ago. [00:34:36] Speaker A: You just. [00:34:36] Speaker B: You can just see things that they can't see. It would be calling somebody who's colorblind because they can't tell the difference between blue and purple. [00:34:43] Speaker A: You're not better than them because you can see color. [00:34:47] Speaker B: And it's exactly this focus on the what that has allowed us to compare ourselves to the past and say that these people were barbarians. [00:34:55] Speaker A: One, quite the contrary. We don't even have good reasons to live like we. We've. [00:35:00] Speaker B: We've become a nihilist culture and society. [00:35:04] Speaker A: That doesn't even have a. [00:35:05] Speaker B: Doesn't even ask the question of what the hell life is and what's the deeper meaning? [00:35:10] Speaker A: What's the philosophical purpose of doing things? [00:35:13] Speaker B: Everything's just chasing the next high, chasing the next dopamine hit on social. [00:35:19] Speaker A: And that's exactly why everybody's so freaking unhappy. That's why religion has been in decline. [00:35:24] Speaker B: For, you know, a century or more, especially in the younger generations, is because it's a question of why. And their entire focus is to disprove. [00:35:36] Speaker A: Religion based on the what. And even people today who are religious have actually shifted their focus to the what rather than the why more often than not. Which is part of the reason of its own decline, is people, even inside the religion have lost what its purpose is, like what the meaning of it is. And they're so focused on did this exact thing happen at this exact time? Or how literal, how exactly literal is this sentence and these exact words that have been translated two different times from two different dead languages at this one place in the book. And it's this incessant battle over the what when. The real question and the real reason of its staying power and its meaning is about why. And both sides of the aisle have. [00:36:20] Speaker B: Largely lost that conversation. But this is also why I think there's a resurgence of this in. Especially in kind of the millennial generations. At least that's what I believe I am seeing. You know, we live in a world where it's really hard to know what you're seeing anymore, but I actually think it's turning around, and I think this. [00:36:39] Speaker A: Might actually be part of it. You know, there was something. [00:36:43] Speaker B: Alex Fetzky, actually, who has built the platform Satlantis and is. They've kind of like shifted their focus and they're. They're looking at events and really about bringing things back to meet spaces. Like, how do you connect people around the globe? But for irl, like, how do you. How do you connect the information and the Trust around the world to things that actually exist on the ground, to real interactions and real people and real groups and real events. And one of the things that he pointed out and he was looking at, and this is very much in line with Elgato's, you know, class A office space or whatever, that's pennies on the dollar, might be the steal of a century if things actually do take this turn and, and go back local. Well, kind of in 2019 and 2020 or 2015 to 2020 era, increasingly events and in person, like things in the real world were declining more and more and more every single year. Ticket sales were less, like things were just in decline. And more and more people were like, everything's going to be on the Internet. And then 2020 hit and everybody went, zoom, everything. It was remote schooling, it was remote work, it was, it all exploded. It all went 10x in an insanely short period of time. But what's funny is that I think we, it seems to be the case if you look at the trends that we got sick of it and we realized how terrible of a situation that actually is. [00:38:17] Speaker A: And all of the local stuff, all. [00:38:19] Speaker B: Of the in person events and interactions and meetups and groups, they're all on the rise. [00:38:26] Speaker A: And not even just from the lows. [00:38:27] Speaker B: Of 2020, but every year they are continually on the rise. And I think this has something to do with it. I think, I think this is the beginning of the trend of, of that. [00:38:38] Speaker A: Reversal of that shift back. [00:38:40] Speaker B: But the thing is, is that the online world will not go away. The online world will still be extremely important and still be extremely connected to our lives. But the question is in what way and how will it change? And that's why I think when, you know, going back to the question or the dichotomy between focusing on the what and the why is when you just didn't know what was happening in the rest of the world and you couldn't trust anything. Story is what drove conversation. Story is what drove social connection and drove broader global trends and cultures and values. And I think it will return to that because there's still something very deeply personal in telling a story. And even though AI can develop a plot and even develop some measure of a story, a story is ultimately a personal thing, a subjective, personal thing about the human experience. And I think in some ways, the way we train AI and the way we pull information together and we, we understand and value wisdom will actually be measurable. Like AI is part of that storytelling itself. Like AI is part of, like the Realization is like, how do you encapsulate the knowledge and the wisdom of humanity? That's why I really like Brian Romelli's like, vision kind of of what the purpose of AI is. And he's got the, the thousand questions thing of, of capturing wisdom. There was this, there's this concept he talks about on some video or maybe a interview that he had. And I tried to get him on the show, actually. I'd still love to have a conversation with the guy. But he talked about how like, your family crest, you know, you look at like Scottish clans and like all of this stuff, you, you used to have this family crest. And so many of the things, the engravings and the symbols and the words, like, so much of what the family crest was, was actually kind of this carrying forward of this history. It's supposed to remind you of where you came from, of things that have occurred in the past, of great struggles that your clan, your family, your bloodline has gone through. But in kind of our digital age, we've totally lost this connection to that. And the idea of the thousand questions of the encapsulating wisdom has like a particular term or word for it, I can't remember exactly, but is. It's like a thousand very personal questions, right? It's like, what's your most cherished childhood memory? What's the first thing you remember learning? And I'll tell you, I've been through just a small amount of it. And he says you're like, the amount of self reflection is kind of wild. And he doesn't know a single person who hasn't started going through it and started crying. And I tell you, I got like three questions deep and I was just crying. I'm not even joking. It seems crazy to think that, like, oh, what's your most cherished childhood memory? But I had no idea what that was. I don't even know what I remember. I was like, that's a good question. [00:41:51] Speaker A: I don't even know. [00:41:53] Speaker B: And literally when I started digging, it was wild the way I had never stopped to rethink of how I think about some of the things in my past. You know, they were just kind of like memories that I had, like just this image that would pop back into my head and like, oh, yeah, that happened. But when you have to force your. When you ask yourself to watch, you're forced to ask yourself, is this cherished? Is this something that matters to me? And why does it matter to me? I can't even. Like, it's shocking how quickly it turns into Something that like, hits you emotionally really, really hard. And part of the concept that he, or movement, so to speak, that he's trying to encourage is to sit down, answer all of these questions on a. Since these are extremely personal, you put them on a, A device that you can't actually, that doesn't, you know, touch the Internet or whatever that has local transcription on the device, like, but you can actually get like recorders that are local transcription, which is pretty dope. But you sit down in personal space and in your own time and you answer these thousand questions and then this becomes this corpus of data of, of your wisdom, of what you've pulled, of meaning that you have pulled out of your life. And then you use this to train your own AI to customize or fine tune a llama or whatever it is. And then you do this for as many members of your family as you can. And what this does is it actually encapsulates it becomes this thing that you can actually, this becomes your family crest. This becomes the story of your bloodline. You can actually ask it this, you know, this, this concept of like, oh, I can, you know, get wisdom from the spirits, from the ancient spirits, from our forefathers. [00:43:50] Speaker A: You actually can. There, there is, you can actually codify, you can, you can put the weights of their experience and their values and. [00:44:00] Speaker B: Their wisdom into a, A algorithm, into a, A computer structure that you can. [00:44:08] Speaker A: Then ask and get answers that evoke those that are, that are based on that. The emotional weight and the intensity of knowledge that pull from those people's life experiences. That's an insanely valuable thing. It's not just, oh, I can vibe. [00:44:24] Speaker B: Code some crap or I can ask. [00:44:26] Speaker A: It the what of. I can get it to regurgitate a. [00:44:28] Speaker B: Bunch of crap from Wikipedia, but I. [00:44:30] Speaker A: Can ask it why. If I know how to pull in information, I know how to trust locally who it is that I value. The people that are in my family. What, what's the why of their, of their lives? What's the, what's the meaning behind these things? What's the wor. Worst struggle that they had to. If I, If I'm running into a. [00:44:49] Speaker B: Struggle and I have their response to. [00:44:52] Speaker A: The hardest thing that they had to. [00:44:53] Speaker B: Deal with or think times where they. [00:44:55] Speaker A: Thought it was going to be the worst outcome that they possibly. [00:44:58] Speaker B: That it possibly could be, and then their shift in thinking after, you know. [00:45:02] Speaker A: Years later when they're looking back on it, like, I don't even have to know what any of those individual, individual experiences exactly might be. But if I have their responses. If I had the way they think about it, what does that then speak. [00:45:14] Speaker B: Back to me when I'm going through a tough time? [00:45:17] Speaker A: Like, that's just a wild idea. [00:45:19] Speaker B: And think also that this is an. [00:45:21] Speaker A: Insanely, you know, you've got your open. [00:45:24] Speaker B: Source and your broad, like, global AI thing. And what does that do? [00:45:28] Speaker A: What's. What's the best purpose of that? To lay a groundwork so that the language is correct, so that. So that the English language and the. [00:45:36] Speaker B: Context of, you know, conceptual integrity between A and B is right. [00:45:41] Speaker A: But then you put your own wisdom. [00:45:43] Speaker B: Into it and suddenly it's a very different beast. And I've really always thought that this was a fascinating idea and I've really. [00:45:49] Speaker A: Wanted to do it. [00:45:50] Speaker B: Haven't actually gotten around to it because it is quite the project. And, you know, if I just do it myself, that's one thing, but it would be great to actually just be able to get, you know, my entire family and, you know, all the people I know. I mean, like, imagine if I could have gotten my, my grandfather, my grandmother to do this before, before they passed. [00:46:09] Speaker A: Like, holy shit. The. [00:46:12] Speaker B: The lessons and the perspective that could have been stored. And one of the things that actually got brought up in the few things that I was thinking about is I remember when I was really young, one of my school assignments was to go ask, like, to. To interview, like, your grandparent or something. Can't remember the exact nature of the assignment, but it was something like that. As somebody who was much, much older than you, than you, to about some event or some period of their lives. And, you know, like, I'm. I don't know, eight or nine years old probably. It's like a middle school assignment and I don't really think about much about it. And I'm like, oh, I'll ask Papa about the war, right? And at the time I recorded it and knowing myself, I really hope it's still out there somewhere because holy shit, it's so much more valuable to me today. And I know the questions I asked probably were nonsense, you know, and I don't even. Like, I don't. And I don't know if I actually have it. Like, I don't. I don't think I started building my own computers and kind of obsessively started saving everything that I could from the Internet or anything that I ever recorded or videoed or anything until. Until I was like, more like 13 or 14 years old. But, God, I hope it's still out there somewhere. I've still got old hard drives. I've still got old tapes because this was probably on an 8 millimeter tape, if it was. And I have at least two full boxes of tapes. As somebody who used to do film and used to think like that was kind of like my main avenue, I have tons of uncovered content and stuff out there, but I hadn't. [00:48:05] Speaker A: I wish I had seen the value. [00:48:08] Speaker B: Of that then, because just having the text, like just having, just having conversation, just having a simple answer to a basic question is just so much more valuable now, I realize. And the level of experience and understanding and wisdom that is lost when you lose someone who's had 101 years of life behind them, like my ex. My, my perspective has changed so insane. [00:48:44] Speaker A: Like so great just in the last 10 years that I never, like looking back, had I been that person, I never would have understood why it is. [00:48:53] Speaker B: That I see things the way that I do. I, I see them now. [00:48:56] Speaker A: But I think I see this shift. [00:48:59] Speaker B: I think I see what Elgato is getting at in this article. And it's small, but it's this growing dichotomy between two different worlds. And it's funny that he brings up Bitcoin because Bitcoin is such a perfect example of actually a solution to this. And he talks about it only in the irreversibility of transactions because of the risk of doing transactions with somebody. The wire fraud and the ability to reverse the wire. [00:49:28] Speaker A: But that's a purely. [00:49:30] Speaker B: That is a literal, pure, practical problem. That's a technicality. [00:49:36] Speaker A: That's not even the nature Bitcoin. [00:49:38] Speaker B: And it's probably just because, you know, you have this idea of like, oh, what are the tools of Bitcoin? But with, with Bitcoin, oh, you know, Bitcoin is irreversible, right? But that's not, that's not the case at all. Bitcoin is irreversible when you are doing a standard transaction from one address to another address. But you can design it to have any degree of reversibility or time cost or multisig or anything that you want because it's programmable money, which means that reversibility will be a feature. The idea of sending money that actually has a time decay, which is very easy to do in fact, with miniscript and a lot of these tools now, like things that Nunchuck have implemented, you can actually do it in mobile wallets. You can do these sort of time decay things where you actually have the opportunity to call back at some, over some period of time or of course you have escrow. And I think these things will become the norm. The point is, is that you cannot get that with fiat. You cannot actually get that assurance with fiat. You can always get reversibility. With Bitcoin you can always add features of a less secure or a more trusted setup into a fully non trusted or a fully trustless system. So quite to the contrary of Bitcoin not having this feature, this is simply a feature that you can provide on Bitcoin in a way that cannot ever be provided in anything in fiat land. [00:50:56] Speaker A: And importantly, because of the breakdown in. [00:50:58] Speaker B: Trust, I think that will absolutely be a huge part of exactly how and why people will use Bitcoin. [00:51:04] Speaker A: But then here's the bigger thing is if you can't verify anything about politics. [00:51:09] Speaker B: If you can't verify even who your. [00:51:11] Speaker A: Political leader is, if everything goes local, how the hell do you have a global economy where how do you figure out how to trust anything now? You have to trust somebody who can print trillions and trillions of your dollars that could decimate. We're talking about the ability for your local economy to live or die. Die like money is the record keeping system of society. If you can't even know if the people who are defrauding that system exist, how the hell can you trust the system itself? How can you possibly trust the units that account for who is the productive and who is the parasitic people in that system? [00:51:52] Speaker B: You can't. [00:51:53] Speaker A: Fiat money breaks down at exactly the rate that the ability to trust the political system breaks down. And a political system is almost in invariably the bigger and more distant it is. It's something that like, who know, who personally knows who Obama is or Trump? Nobody. We know what the news shows us. And now the news, just like you're. [00:52:14] Speaker B: Talking about, like, is that a real video of Trump? [00:52:16] Speaker A: Is that a real video of Obama? I don't know. Do we actually have a president? Seriously, I've never seen him in person. Do we have a president? [00:52:26] Speaker B: Is he real? [00:52:27] Speaker A: Or do we actually have a giant. [00:52:29] Speaker B: Computer system that's running things and a narrative, a huge thing that just constructs. [00:52:35] Speaker A: Narratives and produces video to back that up. [00:52:39] Speaker B: And fake people and fake lives and fake news reports and fake medical histories and personal stories and interactions with all these other fake people in this fake system? [00:52:52] Speaker A: We have no idea. We really don't know. This is actually why Bitcoin is an imperative. It's not even nice to have. It's a. It breaks down if we don't have it. Because bitcoin is something that you Verify locally. Bitcoin is something you can verify all by yourself, just by checking the number of leading zeros in the block where your transaction exists. And you know that shit is real. You know, real energy was spent building that block. You know, it is reversible by a real cost electricity, by actual turning of gears and engines and burning of fuel to produce a wall around this thing that you own. [00:53:36] Speaker B: Quite to the contrary of Bitcoin's irreversibility. [00:53:38] Speaker A: Being a problem, reversibility is an extremely. [00:53:42] Speaker B: Easy feature to produce. Reversibility is just adding trust on top of a trustless system. And in fact that's the only way you actually can add trust in a meaningful way. Because you have, you can potentially create. [00:53:54] Speaker A: The ability to exit that doesn't exist. [00:53:57] Speaker B: In the current alternative. But here's the other thing. [00:53:59] Speaker A: So what happens to the online environment? [00:54:02] Speaker B: Well, much like Elgato's theory of, you know, we'll have a device like an icon will have a private key in it and then that will produce a hash or really a signature on the, on the image to prove that it was like at this time and this place and with this Nikon camera. And then, and then it's signed by the person to upload it. I don't think that, I mean, I mean it seems like he doesn't seem to think that either that's actually going to happen. And like, like he also noted, noted in a small parenthetical is that that's a surveillance nightmare. But it doesn't solve the problem. It's a huge. It's one of those things that's like, oh yeah, we could totally, you know, do monkey bars and then jump over the wall and you know, spin a big dance and solve this very simple and small problem. Or we could just live with a very simple and small problem when really the thing that actually is the good enough or the, the real thing that actually has a simple because you're still having to trust who it is that signs and uploads it. Because really, how do you know? And are you going to check that this supposed signature is actually from a real Nikon camera and you're going to call up Nikon or go to their database and verify that this is actually bought by this person and exists in this place. Nobody's going to do that. People don't even check hashes of their like the digest of their GitHub shit that they download. I mean seriously, even someone who takes it rather seriously when it comes to anything Bitcoin related, I will on occasion, depending on what I'm doing or what it is that I'm running or check the md5/ash. But even, even doing like the dev signatures and stuff, I'm not very good at. I kind of just trust GitHub because I have this one. I have this thing of like, okay, well, how do I even. Like, am I certain that this is even their signature? You know, like, what's my source that I'm using? If it's a piece of software and a developer that I'm not even 100% sure I'm aware of, or I don't know personally, then if they're malicious, then the signature doesn't solve anything. And it's very much like the NPM hack that we went over not too long ago. And I made a short video about was that was actually signed by the guy and he updated the packages of some of those NPM tools, like the fundamental NPM tools that hit like 10 billion different devices and downloads or packages or something like that. [00:56:36] Speaker A: Doesn't. [00:56:36] Speaker B: It doesn't really just solve the problem that way. And it has its own issue of like, okay, how do you know this signature is actually to this person? And if you don't know the person, what the hell is the signature good for? And now everybody's supposed to do this for a camera. No, not gonna happen. And it's huge convoluted. Costs a lot to actually get that implemented. It costs hardware. Like, if you have. You have to build a private key system into the actual hardware. And there may be cases where that's actually useful, but I don't think it'll be useful in this context. I think it would be useful in the context of, like, maybe you could have a private key that could destroy a device that got stolen so that you could diminish the value of theft. It's one of the only values of like a smart card or a smart device or a smart TV is if somebody stole your TV and it ever connected to the Internet again. What if you could just shut it out? You could just kill it. You could black box it. I would actually love that power if I knew that I was the one that generated the key. And, you know, Nikon couldn't black box my camera or delete my photos if, you know, I was sharing the wrong opinion or taking pictures of the wrong thing. But that's a wholly different story. But going back to the idea of, like, what it. What the online community and the online world actually become is, I think this reveals the unbelievable need of the web of trust. And the fact that the only way to actually prove a person to. To prove agency and who you are online is to have in real life, IRL encounters and exchanging of keys and then the signing of those things online. And I think noster and what we have in the bitcoin community is actually kind of a microcosm of it, right? Is I know I. When you look, I go to a conference or whatever and I talk to people and I literally add them, like, yeah, they're like, this is me. I'll noster. And they're like, oh, hey, what's up? And then if they ever post something, I'm. With the exception of if their key is compromised, but otherwise I know that it's coming from that person. And that puts the trust relationship back into the right spot, is that you understand who somebody is socially and personally and, you know, the degree to which they'll, you know, repost something that they can't verify or you learn how they interact with things and their degree of reactionary emotional reactions versus trying to recognize the bias versus whether they blow things out of proportion or they're your conspiracy theory uncle or whatever it is. [00:59:08] Speaker A: It brings things. [00:59:11] Speaker B: It shrinks it all back to within the concept of the Dunbar's number and very personal and social relationships. And even though you may not be locally right next to each other, but anytime that you experience someone you can identify, you can connect a key in the digital space to someone in real life, you can maintain those connections even across the globe. And everything else just becomes noise. It's all noise unless you have an IRL confirmation of who and what someone is. And I've been thinking and saying this for a long time, and the image of it gets clearer and clearer. And I get other people like Elgato or whatever here that I think see so much of the exact same thing. And importantly, that this is a good thing. It does mean that a lot changes and a lot that we think of as normal dies, that it completely shifts. And it will be a massive and very, very tumultuous time. There will be a huge breakdown of large institutions and the way we think about culture and political identity and narrative. But at the exact same time, it's because it's exactly where those things diverge from reality that they will fall apart. And that's a good thing. And I think this means a focus away from the global and back to the local and a diminishing of the importance of the what and a growth in the importance of the why, because those are the only things that can actually transmit where that meaning can actually be transmitted, whether the information is quote, unquote fake or real. Right. Your story doesn't have to be concretely true for it to share a real truth. And honestly, I kind of think this is the natural state of humanity. And this is what history has taught us, is what actually leads to thriving, what actually leads to an alignment with the world. And it's very likely that our past few centuries, even though they have led to so much material growth and prosperity and connection, kind of a surface level connection and information level communication level connection and shrinking of distances, it's increased distances in a lot of other ways. And I think we're overdue for a swing back to witness the fallout of depending too much on an immaterial provenance of the world. Something that actually wasn't true, but was really just kind of a mirror or a simulacrum of society and of what reality actually is. And we're trying to. [01:01:57] Speaker A: We've been trying to drink from the. [01:01:58] Speaker B: Fire hose for too long. And it's actually caused disconnect, that our tools of connection have actually caused a massive disconnect both to our inner selves and from each other. And of all crazy outcomes of AI. It may just be that that undoes it all. The kind of end game of this anything and everything can be experienced in the digital realm is that the experience of the what largely becomes meaningless. The experience of the what just becomes something that you can flip on like a switch. It becomes so cheap when you can see anything you ever want to see or experience anything you ever want to experience. The only thing left that is actually truly scarce and is actually truly personal and exists within the realm of the world that you interpret in your perspective is the why. And importantly, it's something that AI can't replicate, because it's a question and answer that you actually produce inside yourself. You can have a conversation with AI and it can try to enlighten you of something, or you can try to store that wisdom. But ultimately the why is a self reflection. And you cannot have an external tool do your self reflection for you. And it brings us back to the realization of, you know, Marcus Aurelius, of all the great philosophers, is that there actually is nothing external. Everything, everything we experience externally is an internal interpretation of what the world, of the signals the world is sending us. I think, therefore I am, and that's all we really know. And replacing those distant systems of trust like fiat money and weak, corrupt political narratives, with cryptographic systems, with personally and individually verifiable systems like Bitcoin. Like knowing that this person has this key and this is the interaction that I can actually focus on. This will be the signal that I can discern out of the infinite noise of the web and of the AI media deluge. And then the growing unimportance of the what and the refocus on the why may actually be one of the best things that happened to humanity this century. But I guess we'll see. Shout out to Elgato for really awesome article and thank you all for listening, subscribing and sharing it out and I'll catch you on the next one. Until then, that's my two sats. [01:04:44] Speaker A: Knowing yourself is the beginning beginning of all wisdom. Aristotle.