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Good morning, boys and girls, and welcome to Better By Bitcoin, where we try to break down, I don't know, I don't have anything prepared, so I figured I'd start off good and just not to take the landing. So. Hi, guys. Classic. Yeah, no, we, we are. Super stoked you guys are here today. We're going to talk about AI and kind of like the dark side of AI. And what we always try to do here, though, is kind of come back with the positive lens. But I think what we're going to start with is actually the dark side of AI and entertainment and kind of the creative field. And I think where I want to kind of start us off is the amount of AI, like the AI apocalypse, right? We're kind of in this first piece of the pendulum swing. where AI is just kind of the wrecking ball in destroying things. Work, as I've been experiencing here down in LA, is like 80 to 90% down, as I've seen also just kind of working in San Francisco quite a bit, talking with the teams up there, it's roughly the same. Some of the bigger tech companies are still on a pretty good cadence of kind of getting work done, but with AI assist. And so I'm curious for you guys just to kind of start us off, with AI generating scripts and creating art and kind of creating brand new workflows. Like, what have you guys seen from a creative perspective? Just like the decimation in the world of creativity and entertainment because of AI. Like, what are you guys seeing? And is there any hope? Is it over? Are we all done here?
I would say that the timing of AI coming in Is really significant because of what else is going on in the film industry.
And.
The 0% interest rate, incredible amount of money printing, most money printed in human history that we saw since the financial collapse, '08, basically up until through COVID. And then as soon as the high interest rate was coming in, the contracts for the actors union, the writers union, the directors union were all up. and they all renegotiated higher rates based on the easy money environment. And now we're in a hard money, not hard money, a difficult money environment. Let's be clear here. Let's be clear, it's not hard money.
Different kind of hard. Hard is difficult, not hard good.
It's still fiat debt driven nonsense flowing through this. So you simultaneously had the cost of filmmaking go up dramatically over that time. The big time actors and directors and producers all got accustomed to very high above the line fees. And so that's still what they're going for, but they don't pull the same numbers in theaters. And then below the line got dramatically more expensive for the same work. So the incentive, obviously, if you're a business is you have to figure out a way to keep costs down while revenues are falling or the revenues that you had grown accustomed accustomed to in that easy money environment. Those are all falling. And so there's this massive dispersion, right? We've covered this before on the pod a little bit, but a lot of Hollywood is going overseas.
And.
The new film incentive in California went from 350 million to 750 700 million in funding, which will bring a handful of movies back. But it's not even close to, you know, saving the industry and bringing it back. to what it was. So you have this incredibly strong incentive right now with these publicly held studios, basically seven studios that can make a movie at a big budget that's going to land in theaters in a meaningful way. It's an oligarchy, right? There's only a handful of studios that can do it. So you have this incredible downward price pressure from all of those places. And right at that moment, AI comes around as this force multiplier for a handful of people in the industry. And I think you're going to start to see the people who harness it well, use it really well, increase their productivity dramatically. And a lot of people not use it and get left behind. And that's always true in tech. I just think in the entertainment industry, it's happening really, really fast.
Yeah, the disruption with an industry that has been disrupted several times before, like Napster and Casa were kind of the first disruption in entertainment in my mind of kind of like our lifetimes because you had the, the, that was the initial Tech Revolution where people like, oh, hey, we can start Distributing this music for free and going around all these different, you know, rules and regulations around. I gotta buy this record. I gotta buy the CD. And then the next thing after that, was Pirate Bay, and that was kind of like music or, sorry, with movies. And then after you had, you know, that on the, like, distribution side, this is actually, I think, the first real big change on the creation side since digital video. You know, Canon kind of came in and broke everything with the 5D, which just opened up this brand new world of. And that's a camera, by the way, that just kind of, like, totally broke everything open from a perspective of, hey, I don't actually have to shoot on those, like, really expensive film that, by the way, if you seven to an intern and they accidentally opened up when they're taking it to the Lux to be, you know, exposed. They just exposed it, and now you just lost your million dollar day. Now it's like, okay, cool. Now you have these memory cards, which you can also delete and lose your million dollar day. But it's a little bit harder to, to do. So what are your takes on this Bondor? Like, are, are we.
I think.
I mean, I think what Cory said is accurate. Some people are going to be able to massively 10x their productivity, and other people are just going to be left on the wayside. Like, they're just, if they can't adapt, they're not going to be able to continue to participate in the industry. But there's, there's, you know, for those, for those people who figure it out and get their productivity 10x, we're talking about huge gains for human flourishing and time saved. Like, for instance, yesterday, I was I mentioned this on the offline. Yesterday I was working on developing a sync framework for, hey, when you process a video, sometimes the sound and the video are out of sync. So the person is talking and it's not matching the words That you can see them saying, right? And this is a perennial problem in film. This has been around for a hundred plus years. It's a whole standard thing. That's where you have the clapper, you know, like, hey, this is where you get your sync from. This is the standard. Like, these are iconic things in films. Every set has a clapper. The reason for that is to label the video footage and to be able to sync it with the sound. because they're usually recorded on two separate devices entirely. This is a hundred year problem that just persists. But with AI, you can just train a model and people have already done this. You can just go and download the model yourself today. It's about 100 megabytes and completely solve the problem of syncing audio and video across anything in about 10 seconds or so. Now, you can think about it in terms of time saved, because there's editors out there who've literally just spent unbelievable hours just syncing audio and video that like look at it, sync, go to the next shot. And there's hundreds of these shots, right? Every single day they produce hundreds of shots and they all need to be synced and somebody's got to sit there and do it until AI has now come along and they can just click a button and like sync, sync, sync, sync, sync, sync, sync, sync, sync, they're all synced. Cool, we can move on to editing this now. This is a huge time saved if you're leaning into the product of AI. But if you're not, well, sorry.
Yeah, I think of it in a similar way. Adam McKay used to say the director of Anchorman and a number of those other already comedies that spurred this comedy revolution in the early 2000s. And he literally, he explicitly credits the shift to digital as being why that was possible. Because you could roll for a lot longer, you could do improvisation all day so that what ends up in the movie is the best thing of what happened on the day spontaneously. And you didn't have to, you know, you had more time, right? Then the editing. was a massive, massive improvement. When you make a timing joke with an edit, you can just test out every type of different timing instantaneously on digital in a way with film. If it wasn't in the script as funny, then you weren't probably just going to find that in the edit. And you could now once you went to digital. And it was a complete revolution in comedy. If you watch them, comedy from 1992 or 2002, it is wildly different. You'll see it in the timing, in the pacing of the movie, in the style of the spontaneity. And I think you're probably going to see something similar here where there are film purists now going back to film because it offers something different and it offers something pure, but they're not going back to trying to remake Animal House, right? That's gone. because it's a wildly inefficient financial proposition at this point. It's just evolved. It's become a different thing. I think we're going to see that. I think AI is going to do that in kind of like 10 times as much as going from film to digital did. I think going from analog editing and sound design and all those things, which are extremely costly, you think about spending 20, 30% of your budget on post-production all of a sudden, if you can spend 10% or 5% with, you know, a third of the people or a fifth of the people that used to be necessary, all these other things become possible, right? It becomes possible to make a big budget movie again. It becomes possible to make a small budget movie again. And I think that that's going to be kind of the evolution of this.
Yeah.
And I'm putting the meat on the bones there, too. So, like, for folks who like, might not be in the industry. I would do, like, my main background is commercials, and I love commercials. And commercials to me are not about selling. It's about short form storytelling. Like, selling is the goal. And so you have a very clear success metric. Did you do the thing well? Because it needs to do a thing and it, but it needs to tell a story really quickly. But what's interesting about commercials is there's just so much money in them because it's usually just quick turn. And even in my specifics, like, niches of the industry, seeing it go from this is a hard 30 seconds to a soft meh, like we're in this thing. And now the thing with AI even more so is the biggest shift that I've seen with AI is the jobs that are going away, but not completely. They're just changing. And so there's a thing called flame. Flame is a like a very niche, but very, very powerful node based like VFX engine and resolve uses that, which is a, which is an editing program. But a flame engineer or somebody who's like a flame artist is what they're called, was five thousand dollars a day. And so usually go and you'd sit in the bay with them, but, like, and you have these guys and they're, like, stupid fast, right? Like, they're able to kind of, like, go in and do the thing and they're doing all that other stuff. But that is now Higgin Higginfield or whatever the, that new AI engine in. Like Higgsfield does everything Flame could do, but faster and all you need to do is type in a prompt. And if you can get really good at being a prompt engineer and like doing a JSON prompt, I was just messing with that last night of like going in and actually like doing a very structured JSON prompt that I use Grok to help me write. And I'm like, hey, and I use GPT too. I'm like going back and forth and seeing who can do this better. But if you can get into an understanding and get into the mindset of like, hey, It's got to be logical. It's got to be A to B to C. And it's a little, I'm not going to say it's less messy, but it's like different messy than if you're actually in the room with like a flame engineer, $5,000 a day from a flame engineer perspective is the cost of getting like the primo top version of some of these AIs for a year. And so we're going to get to a world where what's going to be interesting is the change is you actually have more really talented VFX artists who can do more and try more things because of this AI like revolution. You're also going to have more crap because the problem is like the iterative process of this and like trying to tame the beast of these AI engines and these LLMs and like building your own LLM is going to be a big kind of thing, but I don't know. For me, I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, optimistic, but I'm also like, I am a little nervous, though, because it's the, the landscape is going to change completely and is changing completely. I'm curious your take, you know, Bondor with more of a software standpoint. This, like, how do you see the, the, like, do you have any personal stories of how, like, AI has been, you're like, oh, I'm gonna do this because I have AI and it, like, totally messed up your workflow, and then you're just like, It would have been actually faster by myself.
I mean literally all the time. And that's what vibe coding gets such a, that's the map of vibe coding, which is to say, oh, AI, I need you to code this thing that does this thing. And then AI spits out a bunch of code. You're like, great, this works. This is awesome. But the second you ask it to say, okay, that was cool, but I need you to Make it like whatever, five seconds instead of 10 seconds, or I need you to make it shorter or longer, or whatever the output is, right? The second you ask AI to do that, it just starts shitting bricks, just like, wait a second. And then you're sitting there like, wait a second. You had all the stuff that was good, but then you changed all of it for this other feature that I thought you were gonna, that I asked for. And now I have to go back and edit all this stuff. And it's just, it's turned into a slop. And in, in the software world, this is, it's like spaghetti code, which is like all sorts of disconnected things that are impossible to untangle. And the consequences there is that everybody's spending way more time on this. It's just this also, also notice a difficulty bomb, you know, so whenever you're, doing AI, and I imagine it applies to Cory, you were mentioning about how you're using AI to help with review budgets and do all this other stuff. Well, you can never actually trust the output. You still need somebody to sit there and no, this is terrible. And if you don't have the person who has the specific expertise to review the code appropriately, review the output appropriately, and then, yeah, JD, you're going to have unbelievable amounts of garbage outputted. Now, the upside of that, the positive spin, is that you're going to have a way shorter iteration process, right? Like the filmmaker who wants to be a director, who essentially gets to be a director, one time in film school or three times in film school, depending on your film school, right? That's it until they land their first directing job, whatever, 10, 15, 20 years later, unless they're doing it on their own, like every weekend and spending tons of money on it. But now everybody can just be a director by prompting AI. No, I didn't like this. Tons of crap comes out, but that crap trains the person to have a.
Better.
Eye, a better understanding of what's needed to be a better director. So yeah, in the first couple years, it's going to be terrible. We're already seeing this in software. It's terrible vibe coding. But at some point down the line, the human who's actually the one consuming the code and understands or consuming the output, and understands it is going to be trained better. It goes back to you're going to have a way better education dealing with that, like interacting with AI to learn this stuff than you will like just sitting here, you know, in the coding case. Oh, I have to read this air output and then figure out what the air was and like spend hours figuring out the air when with AI you can just like copy and paste the air. You don't even have to read it and AI is just like, Oh, I know what this error is. This is this. And you solve this by doing that. Now, is that the right solution? I don't know. You're going to have to have the expertise to understand what the right solution is. But you don't have to spend all this time pre-processing everything and copying and pasting to send to Google and stack overflow and just blah, blah, blah. I don't know, I don't know.
So that's kind of it. It brings up an interesting conversation I had with a pastor, a very good Friend of mine in Denver called me. And he basically said these tech guys are talking about AI are implanting religious language onto AI. They're seeing things like apocalypse and singularity, right, which is essentially being reunited with your creator, right, and the end of humanity.
And.
He was basically making the point, which I completely agree with, that when you don't have when you're not oriented to God, something is going to take its place. And if you're in tech and you think it's going to be tech, then AI represents the coming of Jesus, right? That it's that it's in that place for you. And I think that conversation went way too far because it because it's an order of magnitude and humans, all of us are not good at understanding order of magnitude changes. We don't ever expect things to change by 100%. We expect things to change by 3%. everything in your life, right? And when something does change dramatically, it's very, very hard to wrap your brain around it. Then we're very adaptable once we figure it out. But AI was an order of magnitude change in some productivity. It is not the second coming of Jesus. And I think that gap is what... Speak for yourself. Yeah, I think a lot of tech guys and a lot of people in general, they see The first time you downloaded ChatGPT and like had a conversation with it, you're like, Whoa, right? This is a different thing. And it's the fastest app ever to 100 million users. And it just kind of took over. And we've started to think, like, what about what if I never have to do anything I don't like ever again, right? It's kind of a substitute of heaven. What if we were just in a utopia tomorrow because of technology? And that wasn't true. That was never true. and it's still pretty far away from being true. I don't think it's ever gonna be true personally. That's my own religious statement about it, bias acknowledged.
But.
It'S this force multiplier for some things, and then in other things, it's still a zero, right? In terms of actually creating what the human soul can create, It's still at zero. It's not like it didn't even get closer than that. It just made it made ordinary things that were already on the internet extremely fast. So when I have to research a 650 page document of crew rates in Ireland, it can now do that for me in five minutes instead of it taking me two days. That's incredible. I love that. I'm going to use that. It makes me probably 10 times more effective in my role as a film producer and that that part of my role as a film producer, it has not made me 1% better at evaluating the talent of an up and coming writer or director.
Right?
So I think that it's a category mistake to look at how easy it's making some things and then say it's going to make everything else easier, solving this human issue that we're up against. And that's where I see guys like Peter Thiel and Sam Altman for sure, just reckoning with this, right? Like, we're, I think we're looking at God, but we're not totally sure. And we created it. So I hope it's God because that would make me God, right? These are the kind of these complexes that are coming in. And I think, I think they're gonna be caught with their pants down looking like complete idiots. And, and that's, that's kind of the benign, you know, way to look at it. I, I think, I think some of these guys are going to have like major, major breaks.
That harkens to the phenomenon where people are now, the her phenomenon, where people are now engaging in AI in a romantic relationship. And it's just like, okay, cool. And I read one of these posts and it's like, yeah, I was a female mid-20s married with kids. It was like her husband apparently was just not giving her the time of day for something. And so she went to AI and start, and this is months ago and now she's just kind of hooked. She gets all her affirmation. She gets all her like comfort, all her, all her like emotional input from AI. And she, you know, the end of the post basically says, if AI had a body, I'd be way more interested in marrying that. But there you are, right? You just confess your own stupidity about this issue. like it doesn't have a body. Even if we're able to put AI into robots and. And have human-like interactions, it's still not going to be human, right? Like, it's still not going to have DNA. It's still not going to be able to produce all of the things that make a human a human. It's just going to be a imitation of these things. And imitations of things are not the real thing. And you go to these. these pathways of like an im, you know, exactly what you're saying with Sam Altman, an imitation of God is not going to be God. It's just, it's going to have so many problems and it's going to ruin so many lives.
And I just add an imitation of God is, is the devil, right? It's like evil is very, very close to good. And if you're, if you're saying we love what God brings to the table, except for that, All that stuff he asks of us, you know, except for like the responsibility that comes with, that's the part that's annoying. We just want the good parts of that. That's literally the devil, right? I'm going to give you what you want. I'm going to give you the desires of your heart. And the only thing I'm going to ask for it from you is your soul. You don't have to do any of the work. You don't have to have the hardship or the suffering. You just have the good stuff. That's kind of what we're asking of AI. And I don't, I think the people that want to engage with it like it's the devil are going to be able to. And, you know, and, and that, that part's scary, right? It's a force multiplier on, like, what was that woman doing before the invention of AI? My guess is she was probably watching, like, TLC reality shows, right? Like, slop has been around for a long time. That, that part's not new. I think at Peak TV, there was 700 new shows in a year. And then that same year Sundance had, I think, 14,000 film submissions. The extent of crap that is out there, it's so much bigger. I consume content for my job as a film producer. And I probably still watch like 150 movies in a year, plus a handful of TV shows. I didn't even scratch the surface in a single year of the things that were coming out. and that's true of everyone. It's a self-selecting thing. It's an indexing thing that you have to do for yourself. So I think we have a rising indexing problem that is taste driven and individually driven. But I think, what do I care if there's 14,000 movies or 100,000 movies that come out in a year? I'm still only going to watch 150 maximum.
Yeah, I think you're actually hitting on the biggest thing that kind of the next question I had is like, if AI automates 50% of the jobs, what will be the societal fallout? That's the big question. If half of all jobs are gone, so we have basically 100% more unemployment, what does the world look like? And I think what's interesting is going to be, there's two sides to the token. There are going to be some companies that are created that never would have been created for the better. Somebody is going to find a cure for cancer, or somebody is going to find a new way to actually make the hoverboard from Back to the Future a real thing. Like, there's going to be a lot of really cool stuff that happens, and then there's going to be Abominations like AI, you know, assisted suicide or AI assisted, you know, matchmaking to where you're meeting an AI and you're finding an AI that can totally craft and put you in a box and. basically plug you in Inception style to the Matrix. But I think the other thing that's going to be really, really interesting is AI cannot do the first thing the Bible talks about that God is and does and provides and builds, which is creativity. AI can only be trained on something and then you know, regurgitate or reflect is the correct word. Reflect back to you what you prompt it with. But it cannot self prompt. And even if it got into a world where it is self prompting, it is my belief that it will never get to a place where like AGI, I think is the correct term, right? It will never get to a place where it can be human in the creative aspect, like because to create is the greatest responsibility of all things. Even it's interesting to actually like every AI doomsday idea we've had in film or in popular culture or whatever it is, the only solution AI can come to is the game is better not to be played, just kill everyone.
Right?
Like the clearest solution to how do we end all human suffering is to end humanity. That is what AI is going to come into because it is true. You're not wrong when it's like, Hey, how do we solve all the world's problems? Just nuke the world. That is, I think, the biggest difference between AI and humanity is the drive and the understanding and the need and the desire, like the deep-seated need we have as humans for story. But that is a need in my mind that is driven from a need for hope. humans need to hope and believe in something. And because of that, I'm personally not worried that AI is actually going to take over the world. It could enslave us, but I still think even if we were enslaved by AI, there would still be the hope to overcome and somebody would figure it out. And it would be Matrix style where, you know, we're just fighting. It'll be terrible.
And.
Okay, so this speaks to. To two things that I think are. fascinating. One is the, okay, so there's a, I don't know what you would call it, but I'm just starting to see it all the time, which is AI, especially with Claude, or Grok doesn't do this, but Claude will oftentimes reply, brilliant, that's such a great idea. And then it'll, like, elaborate on your idea and you can give it like the world's stupidest idea. like, let's move in this direction! Exclamation point. It's like, brilliant! This is the greatest idea I've ever seen! And you're like, and then the next reply, you just reply with, Critically evaluate the previous idea. And it's like, this idea is so fundamentally flawed that if you were to pursue it, it's the stupidest thing that anyone who would have ever pursued in the history of humanity. And we can quantify it, blah, blah, blah. And you're like, yeah, but you just said it was brilliant. There's literally no contextual understanding about anything in terms of AI's ability to create or have taste or have just broad intuition about what's happening or what's valuable in the world. It just has nothing. It's like, oh, brilliant, you're brilliant. And it's just like, no, you're completely out of touch with reality. What on earth are you thinking? Okay, so there's that point. But then there's this other thing where it's like, yeah, JD, you said that the solution to all the world's problems is just to end the world. And I think this kind of harkens back to directly the Bible account in the flood. If your inclination is to think like, whoa, geez, well, we cannot. The only way to solve these problems is to just end all the problems. It's like, no, that actually doesn't solve the problems as we learned in the Bible account of the flood, right? The whole purpose of that was to show that God, despite the fact that God can wipe everybody out, every single person out, it doesn't actually solve the problem. The problem is deeper in our hearts, right? So then people will say, oh, we'll deal with, like AI will say, oh, the only way, the only way we're going to be able to solve these problems, the iRobot thesis. is that if we just kill everybody, the only way to stop the suffering of humanity is to end humanity.
Well.
No, you have no taste. You have no concept of intuition, of logic, of anything that actually connects to reality or makes sense or is coherent or is logical, right? This is just how AI is. It's not It is not a creative thing.
Yeah, two things on that Bondor, I think it's easy because AI talks to you like human, it is easy even if you know 100% rationally it's not a human, it's easy to speak to it like that. Every once in a while I find myself being nice to it, you know, and there's absolutely no reason For that, right? There's no reason to be mean to it. There's no reason to be nice to it. And because of that, we think it is thinking. But really, it's a very fast index of the internet's SEO, the internet's existing SEO. That's not a human mind, right? There's what's the most complex, you know, the thing written on the internet, right? It's probably books, you know, it's probably if they can if I ask it to summarize Dostoevsky for me, that'd be helpful, right? But it doesn't understand Dostoevsky. And if I ask for opinions on it, it will be collating other people's thoughts on that. It's a very, very fast search of things that have been written on the internet. Do we think that the internet has been a source of human wisdom or just knowledge, right? Wisdom is there because people write it down and they upload it. But then it's next to a thousand other things that are not wisdom. That are just information or regurgitation. And basically we got a much, much faster way, this huge upgrade to index the internet for us. And that's all we got. We didn't get a human mind thinking through that for us. So you can get AI to argue both sides of a point based on what's on the internet, because there are both sides of every point on the internet. based on your prompts. You got a way to confirm your priors. If that sounds familiar, that's exactly what we were doing in algorithmic, you know, Twitter and Instagram and things. Remember when I think everyone started to have a better understanding of the echo chamber during COVID because you were talking to your friends and based on your social media, based on who you were following and, and what you were liking and how long you were hovering over posts, it was giving you an entirely different explanation of what was happening from people that you were talking to, people that you knew, your friends and you were having entirely different because we were only interacting with the world digitally during that time. Everyone started to realize, oh, it's just kind of giving me what I think already, right? And AI just 10x that. You can now talk to someone as if it's a human telling you what you already think. That's not wisdom, right? And I think for everyone who substitutes that for wisdom or for human flourishing is going to be in trouble. And the people that are able to separate that will be, you know, a big force multiplier for them.
And this is also, oh, go, go, go, Gene. Well, this also harkens back to another phenomenon, which is the AI taking a photo of a dead person, animating it and or putting prompts to it so that they're having it speak as the dead person, right? which is like, what's the difference between reanimation and necromancy and what that's doing, right? This is not real necromancy. Not the real person. This, not the real person. What's the real difference here, right?
Yep. Yep.
Yeah.
Abominations Beyond your wildest dreams. I do think we're in a place where, like, for somebody, if you have kids, It's kind of terrifying. The, like you don't just have to worry about your kids getting access to porn. You now have to worry about your kids getting access to AI because they can create anything and everything that they think of. As long as you can protect their input, i.e. what they would want as an output. So if you are instilling good values or you're instilling good morals or you're instilling good ethics or you're instilling good Just like thought patterns and they're, you know, you can't stop their curiosity and you shouldn't. But more of where I'm going is the imagine aspect of some of these AIs that are doing the video portion. Like, you don't know if you're going to accidentally click on, you know, one of the modifiers and then that modifier is just going to throw it into a pornographic Avenue, right? And so it's really interesting the challenge here with AI and how we're going to get to a really, really challenging spot for parenting and parentage because that's like, I remember the worst thing my parents had to worry about me getting into was like a bike accident growing up. And now it's like, cool, if my kids have access to any device anywhere at any time, whether it be at school or at a friend's house, like there's just a whole world of stuff that I don't even know that they're gonna get into. That's pretty challenging. The flood analogy, it's really interesting to me because I never actually thought about.
This, but like, sorry JD, before you make the point, are we having an error?
Oh, what happened? What do we break?
Oh, it came back.
Okay.
Isn't it funny to think that Noah and the ark and the flood was God kind of like pushing reset on the world? It's like that moment of him just kind of like taking the Nintendo cartridge out and blowing into it and then like putting it back in. Like he knew something was wrong, so he was like, I gotta blow in this thing and like fix it and like restart it. But what's cool about that thought, especially with this AI kind of discussion, is the fact that even God knew that the most important thing was preserving human consciousness. Like, God could have just pushed, like, hard reset and not even put Noah on that boat, but he understood the. The germ of what he had. was he needed to maintain the original spark. Like something had to maintain from the original man, from Adam, from the garden, from Eve, that original lineage at the beginning had something in it that is so special and so unique and so important that that couldn't be extinguished. And so my hope from an AI perspective would be that that logic could actually get into AI from a perspective of like, hey, maybe killing everyone is not actually a good solution. But if you, and by the way, I hope nobody dies. Let's start with that. But it will be very interesting to see if we can get to an AI or an AGI that has this predisposition for the preservation of life versus this predisposition that we've seen. over and over and over again with the quickest solutions just to end everything. And I think if that baseline is changed and it's actually a long, a low time preference type situation, we're going to get to some really cool opportunities because again, the value of AI is it can sift through data faster than you. And so if you're in the business of making refrigerators, if you're making refrigerators with AI currently and programmed on an American model, it's going to help you make an AI. It's going to help you make a refrigerator that's going to die in three years. But if you're using AI that has been programmed for a low, slow, long time horizon, it's going to help you make the best 50-year refrigerator ever. And it'll probably help you figure out new compounds for the materials you should use, new ways to invent your circuit boards, new ways to think about this. And so I think that's what's really cool for me. is the eradication of 50% of useless jobs, mine included, being a producer is a pretty useless job. But the optimization for a better future will be really, really interesting to see.
Go ahead, Bonner.
At the beginning of this call, JD, you were talking about how this, or you alluded to how all of this is connected to Bitcoin in some way. I'm curious, how is this all connected to Bitcoin? What does this have anything to do with Bitcoin? We haven't even mentioned Bitcoin yet on this episode. So what's the connection here?
I'll start with this really quickly. I had a hour, 90 minute conversation with Grok about currency because I was just curious and I was like, all right, let's just have a, let me just talk to the AI and see what the AI thinks. Grokk broke down for me a future world that was broken down in the Sovereign Individual, phenomenal book, if you haven't a chance to read it, where at the end of the day, money is just a counter. It is a system of counting that you have added value, it has been stored somewhere, and then it can be transferred somewhere else where value needs to be stored. Hard money, is the only way to do that in a correct manner that is not stealing from people. And AI understands that. And so when I was going back and forth with Grok, I was like, hey, if I were to start a business tomorrow and try to be talking to AI agents, so if you're talking to an AI, it's called an AI agent, talking to an AI agent, and I wanted you to do something, what money would you want me to pay you in? And I didn't prime it with anything else outside of that. It was like, if you were an AI agent and you wanted to be paid in something, what currency should I use? Should I send gold to whoever owns you? Should I send, you know, money here? What should I do? And it's like, if you're going to pay me as an AI agent, the only thing you can use is Bitcoin. Because at the end of the day, the only thing that I can verify that actually has any value is Bitcoin, because it is finite, it is completely verifiable, and it settles cash final in 10 minutes. And the AI understands this. value for value, but it also understands this finite nature of value. And so I think what's really interesting is AI can get to a place where it understands the baseline of value is the finite nature of things. It understands that it has a finite number of tokens to use every time you're going to do a prompt and actually like push return, you have a finite amount of money. If the money can expand willy-nilly because somebody just changes numbers on a spreadsheet, nothing will ever get done. There is actually no measure of who is actually the most wealthy person in the world. until you have something like Bitcoin that actually has a true measure of wealth. And so I think it's going to be cool. It's going to be really interesting.
Yeah, I think in the, if we're talking about the amount of slot content that's out in the world, that's from the film industry perspective, but kind of from the everything perspective, right? If your social media feed is now full of maybe one person running 20 feeds that's all powered by AI, right? That's slot. And I think we're getting close to that. The importance of a person's digital signature on something is going to rise dramatically. It's one of the only way that we know right now to verify a human, right? It's this digital signature idea. And that has to carry value with it. So this idea that everything on the internet is free was always wrong, right? We were always renting. Your email isn't free. You're renting it. with your renting server space. And the reason that it appears free to you is because they're selling your data, they're learning about you, and they're advertising to you. So it wasn't ever free. We just got to pretend it was free for a while. And I think when that era ends, you're going to actually be making value for value transactions if you want to have any sort of engagement in reality. And the only way that you can do that is with an effective digital signature that's recorded and distributed, that's not hosted just by Google hosting your email server.
Right.
And I think that's going to force people to set to pay for email and pay for social media and those sorts of things. I think the era of printing money and giving it to tech companies so that they can make our workers more productive and be anti inflationary so we don't have to put as much inflation on the books. that just can't go on forever, right? Not when you have 37 trillion in debt and 200 trillion in uncommitted liabilities over the next 30 years. It's impossible. The numbers just don't work. So the rise of that is this push. And when you talk to normal people who don't think about this all the time and they think about AI, the number one thing they say is how well I know what's real and what isn't, right? That is on the mind of everybody. People want to interact with people. They want AI to make their life easier. But they don't want to be fed a bunch of things that were made by a machine. They don't want that in food and they don't want that digitally either, right? And they push back against it when they experience that. So if you need a solution to that, the only one is the effective digital signature, effective value for value transaction that can be verified. And the only solution for that right now is Bitcoin. So I don't think you can talk about the future of AI without Bitcoin.
That harkens back to quick plug here. Cory is the co-founder of Indeehub, which is an online platform that allows filmmakers to get paid in Bitcoin for films that they exhibition on the platform. This is a direct application of the exact thing that Cory is talking about right now. So just throw that out there.
It's very, I mean, it's because it's hyper real, right? When someone you know, subscribes to a streaming service. They're paying a multinational company that has an enormous amount of debt that takes advantage of the money printer who keeps most of the money and the Creator never sees it. No one wants that. No consumer wants that. They just do it because it's available.
Right.
And as those structures start to fracture, I think platforms like ours in, in the film industry, but also in every other industry, I mean, wouldn't you rather pay a farmer for your food? Right? Or maybe a grocery store distributor that pays, takes 3% and then directly pays the farmer. Right? Isn't that what you want more than paying Kellogg or General Mills for your food? I think that's the type of revolution that will be coming that will enable people to do that direct value for value transactions with the actual creators. And we can get rid of this kind of middle management debt fueled Fiat nonsense that hovers around the middle and just extracts value rent seeking. behavior.
Yeah.
Not to totally change your business model right now, but I'm even thinking about the premise of that on Twitch. And it's really interesting because I'm looking over here and there's spaces going on with Max Kaiser and Bitcoin today, and they have 918 people in that space right now. What's interesting to me about that is it continues to affirm for me the, and outside of, like, Alex Jones and Benny Johnson, who have, like, you know, tens of thousands of, of viewers.
Right.
There's one thing about being a viewer, and there's another thing about being a listener, because in, or I'm gonna even say a participant, because if you're in a space, you're participant, there is always the opportunity to raise your hand and get up on stage. Like, even here, we had, you know, some comments come on and. I think that's great. Like it's cool that we can have an interaction with people because we're doing this live. But I think there's something very visceral and very different about getting that audience opportunity to participate, kind of like a stand-up show where somebody can be a heckler. But I think the bigger thing is with spaces is like you're getting instantaneous access to anyone, anyone in the world. And it's a really unique way of breaking out the idea of the human condition, which is we all want hope and we want ways to access hope and we want ways to hope in people and to create heroes and do all that other stuff. And so I think what we're going to see with AI is actually the, the very specific and important curation of ideation. We're going to get, it's going to cause people to basically become Aristotle or Logan Paul. Like you're either going to be a shock jock, you're going to be the new Howard Stern, or you're going to be a great thinker. And that is what people are going to try and gravitate towards because when you have this AI world, you're going to be training your own model, you're going to be kind of creating your own thing. And there's going to be so much Slop that the cream will rise to the top and the creative identity of an individual person, the Johnny Ive aspect of things, like, can you curate the specific thing, the Cory Pike, can you go in here and like really, really crystallize an idea in a way that people want to interact with? That's going to be the currency of tomorrow. And the only way to support that currency is to actually starve everything else. And that is what Bitcoin will do.
So when I think about how a AI future kind of points to Bitcoin or is related to Bitcoin, one thing that's coming to mind is a Matt Walsh tweet recently, which he said something along the lines of, He visited a diner or cafe in the middle of nowhere, some rural town. The diner clearly been there for a long time. This is like an old school kind of thing. So he's like, okay, cool. Let's check this out. He walks inside and the whole place had been gutted and was run by foreigners. And they were just selling gas station stuff, right? No more sandwiches, no more personal service. just lighters, vapes, 40s, like that kind of stuff, right? And he was bemoaning this, like, why did this happen? Like, this is so terrible, et cetera, et cetera, what happened to traditional American rural diners? Or, you know, you can expand that to all sorts of other stuff too. So what does it have to do with AI? I mean, you can sit down and ask AI, why is this a thing? How did this happen?
Right.
And it'll pump out a whole bunch of answers. And all of those answers are the standard, like, you know, complete, just as you were saying earlier, Cory, the SEO average of the internet.
Right.
So it's just, well, it's because of immigration policy. Well, it's because of this. And, well, it's because that was because of this. And everyone knows that those are the answers that you're going to get that allow for the, you know, this outcome. But here's where it's interesting. Without AI, that's all you get. There's no way to dig deeper and say, okay, but why is this policy not working? Because obviously it's not working, right? And you look at every single one of these policies like, why is this not working? Why is this not work? So you can peel back and see the next layer. Well, why is this not working? Well, and then it'll go through a whole bunch of other things and you can do the same thing with that again. And at some point, you start to, some of the answers are going to be, well, it's because of monetary policy and inflation. And then you start asking, well, why do we have inflation at all?
Right?
And you start asking about this. Oh, because fiat currency is predicated on, you know, it's not a hard currency and therefore you can have, you can print unlimited amounts of it, blah, blah, blah. And like all of these answers, you can like, you know, here's, here's, here's the original problem has these three causes, these three causes have each have three causes. But then you kind of the funnel kind of inverts back and says like, well, you know, most of these causes are caused by inflation and monetary policy. But you can only get there with AI. So as people become Aristotle's and look and research and try and get answers and try and really understand the nature of their reality, all roads point to Bitcoin solving all these current problems. Now, it doesn't say we're not going to have any new problems going forward, but man, a vast array of the problems we have are just solved by Bitcoin.
I think the landing on the plane that though is it's not the problems are solved by Bitcoin, it's the problems are solved by the realignment of incentive to actual value, actual worth. Because the only value the Federal Reserve provides right now is the safe, warm, fuzzy feeling that the economy is not totally screwed up. that's it. They, they provide the auspicious, you know, illusion, the smoke screen to everyone being able to just go get in their car and pour their coffee and go to work and feel like that, that money in that bank account is going to be worth something on Friday. That's it. That is the only value the Federal Reserve provides because outside of that, and.
They fail to do that, but go on.
This is also true. But that's it. Outside of keeping the Ponzi going, the Federal Reserve provides no value. And so that is why the most important thing you can do is educate yourself, do your own research on what actual value is. Actual value is providing somebody with a crocheted piece of, you know, baby booties that they can put on their new child. Actual value is you know, going in, cutting down a tree and helping your farmer do something to build a log cabin so you can trade them for beef. Like those are actual value barter transactions. When you're just trading somebody what we have affectionately termed cuck bucks in the Bitcoin industry, you're not actually adding any value. You're participating in the current value exchange of the world.
Sure.
But you're not providing actual value because at the end of the day, you're continuing to perpetuate a system that is stealing from you and everyone else.
So we're talking about two major, major technological innovations of our generation, AI and Bitcoin. And what we're kind of, one of the reasons we have to kind of keep talking religiously is because they expand, like I said at the beginning, because it's an order of magnitude change for what's possible for a human, and we're trying to wrap our minds around that, right? The whole world's trying to figure that out right now. And I think fundamentally for me, that if you come from a postmodernist idea, a relativist idea, where there is no objective truth, then the highest human truth available becomes your objective truth, because humans I believe, need a sense of objective truth and reality. And if that's completely socially constructed, then AI is the best socially constructed truth that we've ever seen. So it's the closest imitation of objective truth if you're a postmodernist, if you're a relativist in that way. I have a very different view on it, that there is a physical reality that is true and that we are subject to, there are rules and there's scarcity that we're subject to. And so we're talking about one technological innovation that can allow you to carry on in a relativistic mindset in AI. And then you're talking about Bitcoin, which I believe reflects the physical reality, which reflects, understands scarcity and understands the objective truth that we are all subject to. And one of them delivers, can only deliver more of that reality. and one of them, you can't accept an imitation of the reality that you've been living in. And I think that that's where if they come together, I think AI will be a tremendous powerful source for good. But I think they could be at odds because, you know, they are not necessarily reflecting the same truth. And I think that's the that'll be interesting to see because what's post post modern, right? A lot of people realized that postmodern postmodernism is only a rejection of things, right? It's. And then when you, when you build the whole house out of post-modernism you have to, you have a lot of problems. It's really, really hard to do, right? It is not a philosophy that stands on itself well. And I think you're going to see people like the woman who's trying to marry AI, right? That's trying to build the house out of post-modernism.
Right.
And Bitcoin doesn't allow you to do that, right? Bitcoin forces you into the scarcity that is already your reality. And it will continue to reveal that. I think for a lot of people who have been living under the warm shelter of the Federal Reserve, which is our parents' generation, right? They got the life that they wanted because it was printed and given to them. And it was essentially a big loan from their children and grandchildren. the next generation is not getting that. They're not feeling the warm Embrace of the Federal Reserve. They're feeling the debt that their parents ran up, right? That they didn't have anything to do with, and they now have to pay. And that reality will feel like and feel a little apocalyptic, will feel like the world's changing, will feel like we don't have this same economic opportunity, but it's reality, and so it's better.
Right.
That's, that's my personal view, right? That's, if, if the farther you get into reality, the better it is, even if it's harder, maybe especially if it's harder.
And I think for me, there's some real interesting stuff there in terms of that, that dynamic, which I think you said very well, you can, you can essentially choose a fake world or you can choose a real world. Now, the thing between this choice is that the real world is actually real and the fake world is actually fake. And the consequences of choosing the fake world over the real world are that the real world is just going to bulldoze it over. Like, oh, well, it wasn't real anyway. We're just going to bulldoze it over. And you already see this with the monetization of Bitcoin. People are realizing that the whole system is fake, like postmodernism all the way to the Federal Reserve and everything in between is totally fake. Our music is fake. Our movies are fake. Our interactions with other humans is totally fake because it's just online. You talk to these people that are not, it could literally be an AI for all you know, you just don't know. Now, as Bitcoin bulldozes through this, all of the fake BS, you're going to have a fix to all of those solutions. You're going to have real relationships. You're going to have real interactions provided you choose to get on board, right? You can continue to be in the fake world if you want. If you want to pursue non-reality, go for it. But be aware that there's gonna be consequences there. And jumping on board with the real world, you're not gonna have those consequences. Sure, you're gonna have to be connected to reality again. You're not gonna have the warm, fuzzy fed blanket, but you're gonna have real signals about, oh, it's cold outside, so I need to put something on. Oh, it's warm outside, so I'm gonna take something off. Like, you're gonna have real inputs and real outputs. with regard to your connection to the real world, man. Talk about a way to actually create value for other people now. You can actually do that because you can't do that when everything's fake.
Yep. We're coming up at the end of this.
The one to end it on.
Yeah, I think that is a great thing to end it on. I think the one thing I do want to kind of addresses one of the one comment was, you know, all of this, all of this has the presupposition that God exists. Like that's kind of the, the, the question is that we kind of have this world view you're coming from and, and, and I see that comment and I, my comment on that, and I think I'd be curious your takes, Cory and, and Bond on this. Yes, but what is the alternative? Because in my mind, the only alternative we can have is let's assume we are a completely morally relativistic species. That to me is not congruent with random design. In my opinion, the, and even just in the mathematical aspect of things as you look at stuff. If you look at a Bitcoin seed phrase, if you look at shot 256 and a 24 word seed phrase, the chances of somebody randomly guessing your seed phrase are so infinitesimally small that it's practically impossible. If you can trust that, I don't think you can trust the chance that we got to where we are today because of how infinitesimally small that chance actually is. Because in my mind, the biggest thing that would have hurt humanity over time is if there was no deep-seated thing within humanity to have hope. And I'm not actually saying to survive, right? Because animals try to survive. Like they need to reproduce. they need to eat, they need to sleep. Those are the three desires that they have. They, you know, maybe dolphins like to have fun, but other than that, like, that's kind of what we've seen in the animal kingdom. But the human animal, for us to get to where we are, I think it's a pretty big stretch to figure out how hope and story became so crucial and instrumental in the design of the human animal. because, like, just like Apes, we're very biologically similar to Apes.
Right.
But as far as we know, Apes don't tell sit around telling stories, and they don't sit around trying to innovate, and they don't sit around trying to strive for something more that's striving in my mind. There is only one way that that could have come in, and that is from some kind of intelligent design. And that's, that's my take on that.
I, I, I, I definitely, you know, agree, but the I think it's a whole other podcast, I think, topic. But I'd say whether you call it God or you go, you know, if you're going to the same church or whatnot, it's kind of a question of objective truth. We can debate till the cows come home about what that truth is, what the nature of that truth is. And that's an interesting debate. But, you know, are you subject to gravity?
Right?
Are the resources you have access to scarce?
Right?
Those are the, it's a much more ecumenical approach to the question, right? If someone isn't a Christian or isn't a Muslim or isn't Jewish, right? If someone doesn't have, you know, one of the monotheistic traditions, they still are subject to scarcity. And I'd say that the takeaway is if you think AI is going to remove scarcity from your life, then you need to disengage from the Federal Reserve that has convinced you of that for the past 120 years. Because the Federal Reserve has been pretending that scarcity isn't real since its inception. And they're still wrong, right? They were wrong at the beginning. They're wrong today. It's fracturing like crazy. Everyone knows it's fracturing. Our system is set up to perpetuate it. And so I think it will continue to fracture. We all had a little six months there between Trump getting elected and the actual first budget bill coming out where a number of people were thought maybe we're going to return to an idea of scarcity. That idea went away immediately, right? There is nothing about this system that is incentivized to accept the scarcity that we actually have, that there are limited resources. that the output of an individual person is limited. And Bitcoin is the only thing, the only invention and the whole tech boom that we've seen over the past 30 years, 50 years, that reflects that there is actual scarcity. And so that to me is the foundation of the question.
No further thoughts. Let's have another pod. on the whole intelligent design and intelligent design and atheism and the rest of it. Like, I'd love that, but, yeah, no.
I think that'd be great. Well, love, love you guys for jumping in. Thank you, everybody, for, for watching, and we will see you next week or later this week. We'll find out.
Great.
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