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NET Society is unraveling the latest in digital art, crypto, AI, and tech. Join us for fresh insights and bold perspectives as we tap into wild, thought-provoking conversations. By: Derek Edwards (glitch marfa / collab+currency), Chris Furlong (starholder, LAO + Flamingo DAO), and Aaaron Wright & Priyanka Desai (Tribute Labs)
Aaron (00:16)
How about that punk sale, Chris? What'd you think of that?
Chris (00:18)
I'm kinda devastated because, you know, I never really got a chance to see Danny DJ with the LED mask of that punk at a Tiffany's private party to sell overpriced baubles. So, you know, that's one of those things I'm never gonna
Aaron (00:35)
Ha ha.
Chris (00:35)
get back in life. And I kinda really wish I'd hoofed it in and suckered up.
Aaron (00:40)
I think I s I I think I saw him do it once. I think he did it a couple of times, so with like his big, you know, like punk helmet related to it. So what's what's he gonna do with that? Do you think that was part of the sale? He like passed that along?
Chris (00:53)
I mean, if I'm a buyer and I I'm really concerned about provenance, of course, I I would insist upon it. Fully charged as well. So, you know, I can just hop off my PJ and just start spinning music.
Aaron (01:07)
Yeah. I mean I I know that punk is super rare, but it is tough to look at for me, at least in my eyes.
Chris (01:13)
Yeah, it it's you know, it's one of those one of those examples that, you know, powers it powers the case for editing. no one's ever looking at that punk and going, damn, that's clean as fuck. But it is a a rare punk and you know, some some everyone has like their own ooh, the rarest punk sort of thing. I mean, you know, on a a per trait basis there's only one seven trait punk out there, which
Chris (01:40)
makes it rarer than the zero trait ones and makes it rarer than the aliens. But
Aaron (01:44)
Right.
Chris (01:45)
yes. You know, do I really need a beer, a top hat, a bowl, a you know, a cigarette,
Aaron (01:50)
Yeah.
Chris (01:51)
whatever else is going on in there. I I can't remember all the the various things. but it'll be interesting to see who the buyer is and you know if this punk actually goes from being one of the more prominent news punks to being warehoused in an LLC.
Chris (02:06)
and disappeared forever by, you know, one of these one of these whales who who buy the trophy pieces and then bury them in a a Swiss Freeport.
Aaron (02:15)
Yeah, completely. I did think the structure was kinda cool. I mean it I I know that it people track down through the transactional history, you know, the the price, or at least part of the price, and it was three million plus an undisclosed amount. And it looked like it was financed in part with with a Gandhi loan at the same time. I thought that was a huge plus one for kind of the composability of crypto. So always love to see those types of things.
Chris (02:40)
Yeah, it's interesting. I someone I think surfers five point nine million. They they'd found another
Chris (02:48)
Two point eight something something something that went with went along with the transaction. So maybe that's the amount. It's you know, that punk had a a rather leveraged life. so I'm I'm not surprised it'll totally move, you know. And look, Danny kept going to the well there, and I assume he had good reason to, but it certainly was interesting to see, you know, during the depths of a bear, someone using that as as a
Chris (03:14)
Ca a c a capital vehicle, I guess.
Aaron (03:18)
Yeah, completely. but I I you know, it doesn't it seems like the the winter is thawed. we see like Tom Lee and others saying that we've already entered into the like a bull cycle. I don't know, I kinda feel it. Like there was also like another big like z zombie like Gandhi Loone this week too. So there's some big sweeps of punks. It it looks like people are kind of staking out their positions for what could be
Aaron (03:45)
You know, a a pretty big bull cycle. I feel like the stars are kind of aligning. I'm personally feeling it probably for the first time since FTX.
Chris (03:53)
Yeah, and you got the you got the good vibes, your your crypto radar's up, you're you're entering an active posture.
Aaron (03:59)
Yeah, I just I don't know, it I think I just think that like a lot of the the themes which I don't think get enough highlight on like X are just they're just kind of aligning. Like one is like with clarity finally out of the picture, you're starting to get just rules of the road, which you need, right? Like the people that have kind of seen technology develop, you like need those rules in place so like actual big legitimate actors can also participate, right?
Aaron (04:25)
So I think that that's in place and that looks like it's it's kind of it's kind of moving fast, number one. and number two, it's it's implementing a lot of the rules that I think lawyers, policy folks, the industry kind of wants. and it it's happening kind of progressively and in mass. So I think that that's really helpful. long overdue in in my mind. I mean, you have a new technology that's useful, you should just put in sensible rules to
Aaron (04:50)
kind of maximize its utility. Two is I just think, you know, the the growth in certain sectors, whether that's stable coins or real world assets, or you know, if you look at even these stablecoin backed, you know, debit cards, like they're growing very fast. you know, the the St. Louis Fed noted in a research paper that came out today, or or over the past couple days, that the stablecoin activity is enabling
Aaron (05:18)
the US Treasury to offset sales that are happening from countries that we don't at this point have the best relationships with, such as China. which is which is pretty notable. So it's becoming like strategically important to the US, like the the industry. the rules are in place. There's assets that have real utility that are, you know, day by day getting pinned down to a blockchain.
Aaron (05:42)
It's kinda hard not to get bullish related to that. And I do think that there's a actually a lot of innovation that people haven't explored, which I think should enable some like new platforms and cool, like fun experiments that get really, really big.
Chris (05:54)
Well, there you go, that's the case. And I I do think it's worth noting that the St. Louis Fed is one of the more notable feds in that. I can really only think of the New York Fed and it. I mean, I know there are plenty of other feds, but I don't I don't know a damn thing about the San Francisco Fed. Are they
Aaron (06:06)
W y what about San Francisco? Yeah, you're just gonna let the San Francisco Fed off the hook.
Chris (06:13)
g what's the P doom of of the San Francisco Fed? If they issued a report saying, you know
Aaron (06:17)
Probably high. Probably really high.
Chris (06:20)
what, money, don't worry about it. We'll all be dead in three years.
Aaron (06:24)
man. It definitely feels like the anthropic cult like conversation is just like continuing by the day. Like I just see people putting together like, you know, satirical videos where they're just com comparing it to like a nineteen seventies, like death cult in the US, stuff like that. Do you think that
Chris (06:43)
Yeah.
Aaron (06:44)
they're actually worshiping it internally? Which let's start let's start there. Let's unpack the anthropic cult a little bit more. Like did you
Chris (06:51)
I
Chris (06:52)
look, I I have no idea what goes on inside, right?
Aaron (06:56)
But do you think that they're like sitting there, like, you know, on their knees, postulating
Chris (07:00)
No, I I I don't. I I
Aaron (07:02)
or or prostrating for you know, clo opus five point five?
Chris (07:07)
I think there's so I I would say no. If if I had to find like a top culture generalization to put towards this like degree of fervor and concern and and all of that, yeah, it might it might be a little more like Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, where you have you know, the new physics I feel like is maybe a more interesting sort of thing where you're you're both enthralled by and in fear of
Chris (07:34)
this thing that you're you're playing around with and that you've elevated the stakes, you know, of your life and and your work to such a degree that then everything takes on this dramatic dramatic pose. it's also, you know, I I d the autism, right? Let's let's just put that out there right now, right? Like you this is a very
Aaron (07:54)
We're labeling it.
Chris (07:55)
this is a very neur, you know
Chris (07:59)
neurodivergent group of people, they think radically different than you and they think very, very deeply about a subject matter in which, you know, that that creates all sorts of different barriers and worldviews. you know, and and so like I honestly don't have a very good sense 'cause I'm not close to this. I just see it, you know, a few steps removed, or then you see, you know, these exaggerated expressions of it, such as that,
Chris (08:26)
The clip of Dario at the White House or the their stuffed animal resolution bookshelf that they pull stuff stuffies out and, you know, use them to to talk through conflicts and problems.
Aaron (08:36)
That was a absolutely wild
Aaron (08:38)
story. So if you miss that, purportedly Dario and his wife resolve some internal conflicts by I I guess using stuffed animals to intermediate between the two of them. What? Is that like a common therapist technique now?
Chris (08:53)
I don't have a bookshelf of sh of stuffies that I use to, you know, work through things. so I I can't say it's reach of my life. Maybe maybe in San Francisco, maybe in group homes, I don't know. But you know, my my connection to
Aaron (09:08)
Like el elementary schools?
Aaron (09:10)
Like isn't that like what you'd do if you're like a child psychologist in some capacity?
Chris (09:14)
Y
Chris (09:15)
yeah. that's actually a pretty good analogue that you know the whole nursery school share time conflict resolution. You can you can play for this for two minutes and then you give it over to them and then we learn the importance of sharing and teamwork. Yeah, I mean that that's certainly a a place where it exists. But
Aaron (09:36)
Well you know what
Chris (09:37)
I don't wanna infantilize these people who you know, are are playing with
Aaron (09:41)
I think that's the concern, right?
Aaron (09:42)
Yeah, they're playing with, you know, Pandora's box and resolving disputes with stuffed animals. I don't think that inspires confidence. What'd you think of that? Did you hear about that pain steering paper that set up an AI torture chamber and how a bunch of people began to complain to GitHub to shut the project down?
Chris (10:01)
No, I did not.
Aaron (10:02)
Yeah. I mean, A, like kind of dark and wacky experiment, right? But purportedly they set up this system that that would you know make sh try to elicit like some sort of pain response from the L LMs. the researchers gave the AI a relief button to turn down the pain, which was sometime fake, and critically the AIs could purportedly tell when it was fake.
Aaron (10:28)
So after pushing this relief button, they stopped. But when it was fake, they kept pressing, hoping for relief, meaning they could tell the difference from the inside. so that people were noting that it's not necessarily conclusive proof that these LLM systems can feel pain, but some were viewing that as real evidence that something's going on here. which I thought was actually pretty interesting. I also thought the response where people were asking to basically
Aaron (10:54)
take it down from GitHub was kinda interesting too. It it's kinda like the beginning of the, you know, robot AI rights conversation.
Chris (11:04)
This is complete and total epistemological brain rot. No, I'm flat out rejecting this entire thing.
Aaron (11:08)
What do you mean by that? Why?
Chris (11:11)
Okay, what is pain to a machine? What is the neurological, what is the chemical reaction that is triggering fighter f fight or fight responses, that is triggering, right, like the the basic reason that these emotions exist in a machine? It doesn't there there is no there's no equivalency here. This is this is just like you should treat these things as they are.
Chris (11:37)
You know, you should accept what these things are. These things do not contain any of this. And so, you know, like that that's my my whole thing right there is this is just ridiculous. Total waste of time, not interested.
Aaron (11:52)
Yeah. Yeah, I think, you
Aaron (11:54)
know, I I hear that. I guess if you're trying to understand if the an AI system has some degree of consciousness, you could understand why you want to ask that type of question. Like can they feel pain? 'cause I do think that that's you know, something people kinda anchor on to understand things, related to any animal, right? so I guess that that was probably like the the reason that this type of study was was set up, but
Aaron (12:19)
Yeah, I mean I think your point is is fair. Like they could just be parroting back from their context with like s some notion of pain but not actually feeling it, right? 'Cause there's nothing for it to feel because it's running on silicon in a you know, in a box somewhere in a bunch of different boxes. You know, that being said, to the extent that they learn from user interactions and a bunch of users are causing them pain, I wonder if that kind of shapes its direction.
Aaron (12:47)
One way or another.
Chris (12:48)
Yeah. Or, you know, did the researchers set this up because we live in a viral world in which attention, you know, feeds everything and you know, they just needed to get some attention so they could get further funding or, you know, this, that or the other. Like I don't know. I'm I'm gonna just go with this is a stochastic parrot and you're anthropomorphizing it in in ways like, you know, that are completely like not applicable.
Chris (13:14)
And if you actually wanted to probe at consciousness or, you know, this, that or the other, you'd you would treat the architecture of these things with the respect it deserves and actually construct an experiment in which, you know, you're doing like genuinely novel, net new you know, research and work here to to actually f you know further under our understanding instead of saying, Well, what if we put an an an AI in something the Harvard Psychology Department would
Chris (13:43)
you know, constructed the CIA in nineteen sixty six.
Aaron (13:46)
Yeah, for Ted Kaczynski and Chris. They're just Ted Kaczynskiing the AIs.
Chris (13:51)
I mean, right, like you know, we we end up with the the unibomber of AIs, that's not gonna be good.
Aaron (13:59)
That would be very bad. Yeah, I mean I guess you know, the I guess the and I don't know how I feel about this, but I'm just thinking through like theirs their side of the argument. It would be worry about that, you know, like you're you're doing something that maybe would, you know, change kind of the direction of the L LMs, if they whether it's true or not, whether it's felt or not, if it's perceived by them to be pain that may shape like kind of their future. And I do think that there is a question like
Aaron (14:26)
Is it fair to to treat these things more as humans or not? Right. The argument against that is like you dehumanize them, but we've done that in the past with people, with, you know, other animals, etc. And you know, maybe that's overly simplistic and just gives us cover, you know, to do bad things to other organisms. And I don't know if you can fully discount the fact that
Aaron (14:51)
maybe we're building like a synthetic organism with a machine based synthetic organism of some sort. So that's why I kinda I don't know, I it kinda tickles me a little bit, mentally when I see those types of types of things.
Chris (15:02)
I yeah, I look,
Chris (15:04)
I can understand sort of the appeal and I certainly think at some point, you know, further out on the development side, can we start getting into synthetic organisms that possess like you know, a multiplicity of systems that all have, you know, sensing, reasoning, storage, coordination, right?
Chris (15:26)
in which like they're passing data back and forth between these systems and that there's this level at which like consciousness you know starts to emerge. Right? Cause that that's sort of, you know, A, we don't know what consciousness is, but I think we can kind of clearly state it's not the isolation of any single thing, that it's an interaction. And so like yes,
Aaron (15:48)
Right.
Chris (15:48)
can can I like squint and look, you know, as far into the distance as possible and say,
Chris (15:53)
You know, can these systems, can these this technology advance to the point in which like consciousness is a a question worth debating and elaborating? Yes. Are we there right now? No. You know, when I hear about like this sort of pain trigger experiment, you know, my head goes to, well, if you ran the same thing on Postgres and all you were doing was putting it under load like extreme loads, and then you were measuring responses to it.
Chris (16:22)
And then you're talking about pain, would people laugh you out the door? Right? yes, they would. And so I just don't feel like you know, these sort of questions really like should be explored right now, maybe, is the position I'm taking on this, because you know, it's it's almost like we want to measure anxiety in an amoeba cell. And it's like, okay, what the fuck is that? You know, like knock it off.
Aaron (16:49)
Well, I'm not gonna like if people want to explore that, that's fine. I just think you need you need the right framework for it. I c my concern is really what I was pointing at before. I think we've, you know, dehumanized different things for a long time to provide ourselves cover for things that we wanna do. we don't understand a lot here. I think it's reasonable for people to at least kind of st study it, whether it's conclusive or not, whether there's like holes in the logic, like you're pointing out, like fair game, right? But
Aaron (17:18)
I I thought it was I I thought it was at least creative, but probably inconclusive, like you're saying. I do think like the study of consciousness is gonna be obviously a pretty big trend over the n next decade plus. I f I feel like we're finally have like the tools at our disposal to kinda do that, is great.
Chris (17:35)
I would I would love the that to be like, you
Chris (17:37)
know, I mean, that is the big question. You know, it it's
Aaron (17:40)
Yeah.
Chris (17:41)
it's right up there with like w what set all this in motion, but why are we here? Yeah, like the it is a very like small list of like the really big questions and that's one of them. And yeah, we we haven't made much progress in that department. It would be it'd be lovely to get to that point. But to something you were saying earlier, like we dehumanize humans all the time in order to do what we want to them.
Chris (18:03)
Right, like, you know, and I do kind of wonder if part of this you know, whole AI doomer fixation, besides the novelty of it, but it's the are we creating an outgroup such that we're like basically building up a Girardian scapegoat for when the time comes, they're available to sacrifice. And you know, are these like AI doomers, are these the the anthropic and the EA people
Chris (18:31)
Are is there an element out here in which like we're giving them all of this this space or we're giving them all of this rope, partly because in this very moment it's interesting, it's compelling, and it's it's a story, right? But is someone hiding out behind the curtains? Is is you know our collective unconscious actually, you know, if if you if you get very Peter Telian about all of this, right? Because he's a huge Girardian,
Aaron (18:59)
Right.
Chris (19:00)
you know, are we actually building up this out group, in a way that when the time comes, they're gonna be the collective sacrifice that we can then move, you know, use to like move onwards from this and we know whatever AI whatever the AI industry needs in five years or ten years from now, will it require throwing these guys overboard in order to get that?
Aaron (19:22)
Yeah, I I d I definitely feel like there's folks that are looking at this debate and figuring out how they can use it as like a power grab of some sort. Like the more I think about the AI safety b debate, the more my mind lands on this solution, which is just, you know, like mass device surveillance against like a quote unquote war against like rogue AIs or like, you know, dangerous AI. so I think it's just gonna be used by people with
Aaron (19:50)
Or people governments that have a lot of power to kind of extend their reach across everybody else. I mean, I've I could completely imagine a world where the argument is like we don't know what these things are doing, they can be very dangerous. So we need to basically be able to tap into any connected device on the planet. And we're only gonna use it for good to, you know, prevent like these quote unquote like bad rogue AIs. so don't worry about it.
Aaron (20:20)
But as we know, like once you have that infrastructure in place, the temptation to use that for other purposes is just so great. and that and that I think is equally, you know, concerning not equally, but a concerning kind of future. where everybody's basically living in a panopticon.
Chris (20:37)
Yeah, no, I mean look, it's it's been a trend line. It's certainly the tactic we use. It's the one that, you know, in a moment of crisis or I mean, you know, it just it's the standby. You know, no one's
Aaron (20:52)
It's also the
Aaron (20:53)
it's an easy solution, right? Like it's like, well, w we can't really stop it, right? For reasons that I think are are well articulated. Like it is a race. So do you wanna win the race or do you wanna lose the race? Most people given that kind of binary choice, they're gonna say, Well, of course I wanna w win the race, right? But, you know, all we need to do is just, you know, tell any device manufacturer, any server, you know, you gotta just dump some data in this big data repository and
Aaron (21:21)
You know, we'll we'll sift through it and make sure nothing bad is happening. Like I think that would give people
Chris (21:24)
Yeah, I mean
Aaron (21:25)
a lot of comfort, frankly. And it's like the simplest solution, easiest to implement, right? Like less the least down downside.
Chris (21:32)
cool. We have a a
Chris (21:33)
massively complex problem. Let's try let's let's go with the simplest solution.
Aaron (21:38)
Yeah, I yeah, but sometimes that that is the solution, right? So you know, and then like a
Chris (21:41)
What wh what
Chris (21:42)
does the Saint Louis Fed have to say about this take, Aaron?
Aaron (21:44)
I
Aaron (21:44)
d I don't know. I don't know what they have to say about that. you know what else I f kind of found interesting? Did you guys see this? there was a bunch of Yeah, you Yeah. Did you see this, Chris? Yeah. We got a
Chris (21:52)
Guys, you mean me? There's no pre, there's no Derek. Guy. Hey guy. Pal buddy. What chief?
Aaron (22:00)
all right. in China they actually built a a model that taught itself physics with basically zero physics knowledge. So it was one of these more like alpha go type models.
Aaron (22:12)
Where they just fed it a whole bunch of different mechanical experiments, completely noisy data data set, you know, springs, balls, celestial bodies, just how they work. And it began to distill out actual laws of physics, which I think is pretty friggin' fascinating. had no knowledge of physics, just had like a whole bunch of noisy data about how machines or, you know, other mechanical devices work, and it began to, you know, figure out what
Aaron (22:39)
we figured out, you know, over the course of centuries. Like I wonder w where that kinda lands. It's pretty cool.
Chris (22:44)
Yeah, no, I mean that's that's certainly interesting. I would have to know A way more about the construction of the experiment and B how models get trained and you know, I'm I'm not capable of like picking this apart. it does, however, make implicit sense, right? These are problem solving machines, they're often told to look at, study, and then, you know, deconstruct. And and so it seems like perfectly reasonable and you know, a very effective technique.
Chris (23:12)
that once you master this against a whole set of like known known domains, that you would then turn that on unknown domains. And so yeah, that's great.
Aaron (23:22)
Yeah, and I think what's g interesting about it is, you know, it's not kind of sh framed and shaped by the existing literature, right? So maybe there's things that were either underexplored, looked you know, looked overlooked, right? Where maybe we learned some new things related to that.
Aaron (23:39)
It's kinda like Alpha Go, where it wasn't trained on ha on past games of Go. Instead it was just taught roughly about how Go is played and how you can win Go. And through a number of successive games that it played, it just got better and better and better and then came up with, you know.
Aaron (23:59)
different ways to win go that humans hadn't thought of before. So it was a little bit more, I guess, quote unquote creative about its solutions. so maybe we start to see some kind of physics breaks breakthroughs, not from just mining through like the existing literature on on physics, but you know, through some some different model. I could imagine that working really well on like chemistry or or, you know, possibly parts of biology too, right? maybe we learn some new new stuff.
Chris (24:26)
Yeah, but why don't we throw it towards
Chris (24:27)
like a real field like shit coins and launch pads?
Aaron (24:30)
It will definitely go towards shit coins too. yeah, I mean those are like the big problems, right? It's like w are we conscious? How do we how do we make money, right? Like how do markets work? Like I feel like these types of questions we're finally gonna be able to tackle now that we've obliterated the entire field of mathematics.
Chris (24:48)
man, all all you poor math mathematicians out there. I'm sorry for your loss. You'll have to find find meaning somewhere else. You're you're kind of like in the same situation as all the decentralized DAO foundations structured out of the Grand Cayman Islands who are also losing their purpose and agency in life thanks to these clarity or post clarity SEC rulemaking actions.
Aaron (25:14)
yeah.
Chris (25:15)
All sorts of
Chris (25:15)
l livelihoods are threatened everywhere. D no, you think there's still hope for Grand Cayman foundations?
Aaron (25:18)
No, I yeah, yeah. I mean s
Aaron (25:22)
yeah, some I mean, maybe not the Grand Cayman ones, but you know, if you are a decentralized protocol, there's now a whole bunch of things that the SEC seems to be blessing, including like buybacks, both like programmatic and discretionary. So there is like a room for some, you know, group group owned group
Aaron (25:45)
governed open source protocols, Chris, i.e. things governed by DAOs. So there's still life there. I think some of those projects are are gonna get pretty darn big. and I think in the Genius Act, they didn't kind of foreclose projects like MakerDAO, or now Sky, and and kind of their governance mechanism. They just authorized some more research into them. So the the the book is not closed for that.
Chris (26:11)
Is there anything in the the bookshelf of of DAO DAO's things that you would like to try as as an early DAO operator and innovator in this space?
Aaron (26:22)
Yeah, I mean I I actually when I start to think about a lot of the proto agent swarm stuff, it feels very DAO like to me. So like what are you dealing with? like how do you get a group of people to follow a rule book? How do you get them to work together? maybe there's like democratic ways to do that, like like Dow voting, maybe there's market based ways to do that, like prediction markets and futarchy, maybe there's
Aaron (26:48)
you know, different governance appro approaches that could be explored. Like instead of having, you know, one person, one vote, or one token, one vote, you could have things that are weighted a little bit more algorithmically. So combining the two together. I think you you can really accelerate some of those experiments that started, you know, half a decade before in Daland. I think beyond that, like you can actually build like something that would definitionally satisfy
Aaron (27:12)
what folks were thinking about with DAOs where there's full automation in the middle. we've seen like rock and some other folks begin to experiment with like, you know, agent first or you know, corporations or or organizations, what we would have called in cryptoland DAX. but I think pretty quickly they could turn into, you know, more open, massive organizations that are almost entirely run by agents. So I think DAOs are gonna make a pretty big comeback, Chris, personally.
Chris (27:40)
So I'm put a few threads together here, and you've got Muse, you've got Garakbot, you've got Instinct, you you have a whole personal agent war going on right now, which means all
Aaron (27:53)
Yeah.
Chris (27:53)
this is cheap and free and it's an opportunity to use someone else's compute. You have SEC rulemaking, you now have this Chinese model that can learn something from first principles. Why aren't you out there right now, Aaron, simulating?
Chris (28:07)
of gazillion different forms of these agentic DAO corporations on Facebook and X AI's Don, you oughta be running the alpha go of DAO of machine oriented DAO governance and measuring pain at the same time.
Aaron (28:21)
thought about it.
Aaron (28:24)
I could do yeah, I don't know if I'll hit the pain piece, but I've definitely thought about that. You know, there probably is like a you know optimal organizational structure that may not be like a corporation or a you know, some sort of partnership limited liability partnership IELC. So yeah, I mean I think one of the great
Chris (28:41)
One day the Saint
Chris (28:42)
Louis Fed could be writing reports on your your your experiments.
Aaron (28:44)
Th I mean honestly
Aaron (28:45)
they probably will. I mean if you if you go through what are the some of the biggest innovations that humans have ever come up with, I think you put like the Joint Stock Corporation pretty high up on the list. Maybe almost as high as air conditioning, Chris.
Chris (28:59)
Yeah. I you know, I I'm gonna go out on a limb. I'm gonna rate the joint stock corporation as more impactful than Kobe Bryant.
Aaron (29:05)
Than Kobe Bryant, yeah, I think that's fair. But not Bill Walton, I'm I'm sure.
Chris (29:09)
No, throw it down, big man. He's like he usually he's in the pantheon. He he has immeasurable qualities in which he exists above simple rankings. You know, it he he's like the Ethos. He's this we're imbued with the spirit of Bill.
Aaron (29:22)
Yeah, he definitely had up the the spirit completely. like and
Chris (29:27)
Transcendent.
Aaron (29:28)
and entirely. Hey Chris, have d
Chris (29:30)
well
Aaron (29:30)
have you been following the Gubeki Gubeckli Tepeh discoveries?
Chris (29:36)
I don't even know what those words mean.
Aaron (29:38)
What? I'm I'm shocked. I thought you'd be following this story. But I guess they're finding like st statues in Turkey and in parts of Germany that
Aaron (29:48)
show that's like society, civilization may have started much, much earlier
Chris (29:51)
these guys. All right.
Aaron (29:54)
than than what we previously may have thought, you know. Yeah.
Chris (29:58)
Yeah, so I'm I'm actually hip to these guys.
Chris (30:01)
this is I want to say about ten thousand years ago. And yes, in Turkey they unearthed there's all these like massive ring mounds and and statues that don't really serve functional purposes and that this was actually these were like temporary or seasonally like inhabited places in which like
Chris (30:24)
you know, all the people would come out of the hinterlands from whatever they were doing, living, surviving, et cetera, and they're gathered here. and I wanna say, like, you know, when I was in this like end of popular history podcasting via Tide to History, I think, which is how I know about these guys, it was considered like feasting and it was for you know getting getting together in good times, but the level and the scale
Chris (30:48)
of these sites, right, were were completely changing people's orientations about where we were in human development at that point in time. That's the background as
Aaron (30:57)
it's they're fine
Chris (30:58)
I understand it.
Aaron (30:59)
Yeah, so I think they found a statue, that's like pretty ornate. We can include in the show notes. they're calling it the Lohenmensch figure. it was like this lion man that was carved out of I guess stone and it was unearthed in a a cave from Germany and people are dating it to be forty thousand years old. So much, much older than what we thought.
Aaron (31:24)
And so some people are are guessing that we're gonna figure out that civilization started way, way before we thought it may have, at least in some parts of the planet.
Chris (31:34)
Right. What do we usually peg Mesopam Mesopotamia and agriculture and all that? Like twelve thousand years? I can't I can't
Aaron (31:41)
Yeah.
Chris (31:42)
remember my
Aaron (31:43)
Yeah, something like that.
Chris (31:44)
Yeah. that's always a fun and interesting area of like what if, you know, what if we had this once upon a time level of sophistication and then we're re regressed, or what if we had this alternative plan of living, you know, that maybe was really viable for an extended period of time and then died out, right? Like if you're a decentralized coordination sort of hipster, the Indus Valley civilization in Mohenjidaro.
Chris (32:10)
Right, is is the great what if. because it was
Aaron (32:13)
Yeah, super fascinating.
Chris (32:15)
yeah, I I would love to visit if I ever get back to Pakistan, that's Mohanjadara's on my my to do list.
Aaron (32:22)
Yeah. I I mean I think it maybe what we should be building is not Dow stuff, Chris, but just a a crowdsourced AI system that could hunt down some lost civilizations. I bet we learn a a bunch of things. I mean they're already cracking like old codes, crack like a Napoleonic code, crack like a World War Two code. maybe we could find a bunch of stuff just by looking at maps or some structural things about about the earth.
Chris (32:48)
I think that'd be a a fantastic use of excess compute. over the summer someone claimed to have finally cracked Linea A, right? Which is like the great translation
Aaron (32:58)
What's that?
Chris (32:59)
problem of so Linea A is i it's a language that was spoken on Cyprus Cyprus during like basically when Minotion culture
Chris (33:13)
Right, was at its peak prior to the Bronze Age collapse. You you had Linea B, right, is what was like I think the the more like later, I mean obviously 'cause it's Linea B, not Linea A, right? But like they've known they've known that for a long time. And so like just prior to the Bronze Age collapse, right, that that whole culture peaked around these like large
Chris (33:38)
palace type estates and palace complexes. And so, you know, everyone's like, look at all the wealth that was accumulated and this, that, and the other. And you know, that's kind of like a one of those things as you work your way up like the civilizational development branch, you know, like people being able to like accumulate wealth and direct the actions of whole groups of people is like one of those milestones. But anyway, Linea A predates all of this. And the challenge around translating
Chris (34:06)
It or like cracking the code is there's so few fragments of it that it exists. And I think it's very similar to like Sumerian, in which it was very much like a ledger-based language, or at least like what their finding of it, right, is very transactional in nature. And so like the there's not there's so little of it, and what they have of it is very, very tightly focused. They think.
Chris (34:33)
Right. They don't they they don't know, but they think it's, you know, just a very narrow range of use. and so it's just a hard, hard problem for them to sort out.
Aaron (34:43)
Yeah, I like this. so maybe we should start C people Dow too, Chris. What do you think? We Yeah, let's do it.
Chris (34:48)
Alright, if we're going like way the hell out there. The
Chris (34:52)
the the ancient like civilizational like what if I'm I'm a big Green Nile hipster. Okay. Yes. It's
Aaron (35:02)
yeah? Okay, why?
Chris (35:05)
well, because like a the incongruity of it, right? That the idea that there's a time when like parts of the Sahara were
Chris (35:14)
Or not only green, but just, you know, like
Aaron (35:17)
Lush.
Chris (35:18)
lush. Yes, right. So that there's that part of it. Then I mean it's just the simple, like, I I always just love like outlier. you know, like how far out can or you know, like how into like remote or incomprehensible situations can thing, you know, people's flowers and survive. The West Greenland Vikings are another example, a more modern example of this, right?
Chris (35:40)
But the Green Nile, the other thing about it is it's it happens because of like a ten thousand year wobble in Earth in Earth's orbit. Like they basically pinned this down to a very unique set of like, you know, our positioning relative to the sun in, you know, in
Chris (36:02)
in space creates this like moment in time that you know maybe several hundred years in which like yes you get a wet green Sahara area. So I would love to learn more about that.
Aaron (36:15)
I'm kinda interested and also there's there's like some older skeletons that they found in South America too. That they think maybe has old or around the same time that they found skeletons in, you know, the Middle East, which is pretty cool.
Chris (36:31)
Right. Well that yeah, so when it comes to like Northum or like settlement across the Americas, right, this while we're getting super unk coded now.
Aaron (36:41)
Yeah.
Chris (36:42)
is the whole like Clovis culture, right? And measuring like basically dating everything around like the Clovis culture and then every like every once in a while people come up with, Yeah, we found something in this cave in Patagonia, you know
Chris (36:59)
That's like 20,000 years prior to like the generally accepted, you know, like we couldn't really have moved south and developed until, you know, Clovis culture, this, that, or the other was established. And I'm probably doing a terrible job of this because I barely remember this stuff. But it's it is one of those things where like, we sort of memory hole or we just don't pay attention to
Chris (37:22)
like ancient human history in the Americas, right? It's always an afterthought. And, you know, they they do that remote sensing over the Amazon, right? And, you know, every once in a while they're like, my God, we just remote sensed over this, you know, area that just got clear cut and you wouldn't believe like
Aaron (37:40)
That
Aaron (37:40)
there's like a fifty million person civilization sitting here or yes or multiple million, maybe fifty million was too much. Yeah, it's it's kinda well, that's why I was tying them together in my mind, Chris, thinking about how they discover the stuff in the Americas and the jungles. it feels like with much less advanced technology we've been able to begin to, you know, peer back into the past. And I feel like with the new tools, like somebody should be doing that now.
Aaron (38:05)
I th I find that just as interesting and probably just as important for our own understanding and context as, you know, some of the auto research tasks that are looking for solutions in biology or, you know, physics or math, et cetera.
Chris (38:19)
Yeah, no, I I'm with you. You know what you know what we need? We need to endow mid journey with an archaeology department.
Aaron (38:27)
I mean, honestly, that would be great. I mean, they build like some sensing device that you just like fly over with some you know, repurposed non militarized drones and it just like figures this all out.
Chris (38:38)
Yeah, like if I'm King Griffith and like
Chris (38:40)
not giving three billion bucks to Carnegie Mellon to to build like a campus in Miami. I'm giving that money to mid-journey. I'm and I'm saying build a bunch of Indiana Jones shit and get out there and sort out the earth. Sort out like our human settlement patterns in like you know by looking under the dart. Get digging, guys. Get get scanning.
Aaron (39:01)
Yeah.
Aaron (39:02)
Yeah. W I thought I thought that whole story with Ken Griffin by the way was kind of odd. why would Carnegie Millen wanna set up an institution that's not in, you know, Pennsylvania or wherever they are? Are they in Pittsburgh? I I never know exactly where they are.
Chris (39:16)
Yeah, they're in Pittsburgh.
Aaron (39:17)
Yeah, I don't know if they were like exactly in Pittsburgh. Like I I feel like that's like really tricky if you're if you want to go there, right? You you're like kind you know, not tied to like all these other students at this
Aaron (39:28)
you know, admittedly amazing organization. I just thought that whole thing was just super odd.
Chris (39:33)
I think the size of the gift is something you can't turn down and the strings that come attached with it, right? Like how how do you say no to that? And I'm I'm I would imagine, right, that there was a whole series of conversations, there was a shaping of this, there was an understanding between both sides, and at the end of the day, like maybe there had to be a certain significance to the size of the donation that would get Carnegie Mellon comfortable to want to do that.
Chris (40:01)
Right. It's also this has been a trend for a while now, is opening campus outposts elsewhere. It's the elevation of like the your brand, it's your lending, your prestige to expand. And I mean, there's a Vanderbilt campus in New York City now.
Aaron (40:17)
Wait, there is? I didn't know that.
Chris (40:19)
Apparently yes. Apparently it's just opened. that
Aaron (40:22)
Well.
Chris (40:23)
we really do need to fear the SEC of New York City. That everything is football, everything is creeping in on
Aaron (40:32)
Yeah, not
Chris (40:33)
us.
Aaron (40:34)
not the Securities Exchange Commission, the other SEC.
Chris (40:38)
Yes.
Chris (40:38)
The the Vanderbilt Commodores who are like the northwestern of the SEC.
Aaron (40:43)
Yeah.
Chris (40:45)
But no, they planted a flag there in New York.
Aaron (40:45)
I mean
Aaron (40:47)
I get it. I mean I I guess that's like a nice lever. Like if you want, you know, a different experience, maybe you spend a semester there or something. I just I get it. I just it it's an interesting trend to me. I I find that whole thing, you know, kinda interesting.
Chris (41:00)
Yeah, I would I like I haven't looked too closely into this, but I will say, right, in my own like college experience, I spent three years on on campus at BU and I had like a very disaffected relationship with it the entire time. I, you know, it's huge. Like I had my high school track meets there, like, you know, I was just like not about BU. And then I spent a year at the Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole and I did very like
Chris (41:28)
know there were 10 kids in my class. We studied one subject per month. We did that like twelve hours a day. Like the sort of the intensity and the immersion. Then I went on and I did field research and I worked out of the labs there, right? Like that experience to me was my college experience. And so and I could only get that through, you know, that sort of program association. And so I do under understand the appeal of like having
Chris (41:56)
you know, programs and outposts within your larger umbrella that allow people who do better and focused environments or just want that like structured intensity and immersion, you know, in a particular thing. Like I get that as an approach. Cause it w it worked out really well for me.
Aaron (42:10)
Yeah, I g I see that. I think that makes it a little less mystifying to me, actually as you're saying it. maybe that's the strategy. and probably better to do that inside the the US if you're a US institution than going abroad. especially abroad to a place that, you know, there's not a real institutional connection to or which is which is kinda interesting. Hey, did you see this that people are doing now like an AI I'm gonna take a hard perpendicular pivot here, Chris.
Chris (42:36)
Okay. Now for something
Chris (42:37)
completely different.
Aaron (42:39)
Yeah, I was just thinking about this randomly too. have you seen that they're doing like an AI like video agent Turing test to see if people can discern whether or not like some AI created like avatar, human looking avatar is human or not? And purportedly they're getting better and better at that, where they can like trick up to I think it was like forty f forty plus percent of people that that are
Aaron (43:07)
Happy to take this test. whether or not like a like avatar is a human or a you know machine. Like w I I think it's like I I think the kind of like the shape of what these AI agents look like is kind of an interesting question. Like are they like actual humans or look like humans, or do they look like these derpy little characters that you know we we I guess beat the trend to?
Aaron (43:33)
on the Aiden side but seem to be propagating everywhere.
Chris (43:36)
Right. Okay. So this is an an area that's interesting, right? interactions and detection and subtleties in communication and body language and right. It's also we're being asked to judge something over video, right? Because these things can't exist in any other form at the moment. And so that's like another part of this sort of thing. And then
Chris (44:02)
You know, like there are certain things I'm absolutely oblivious to, and there are certain things I can smell out right away that like I don't think other people can. And I imagine like we all have our strengths and weaknesses, or we all have our s th those sort of tells, right? If I knew I was being put in that situation, I would probably change my language, I would probably change my lines of inquiry, I would probably ask certain leading questions in ways
Chris (44:28)
to try to cheat the test myself versus, you know, like because you as the observer or as the judger, just knowing like you're being put into the situation, you're not gonna behave and respond normally. You're actually gonna probably take like an adversarial posture. Or like, you know, you're you're gonna put on your Agatha Christie, Doctor Clousseau, Colombo hat.
Chris (44:51)
You know, and you're gonna behave very differently. But I think that that actually is really, you know 'cause that that starts getting to that like alpha go or that, you know, like you're you're in a bit of a PvP situation there because I imagine the models as well, right, are trying to like present a certain a certain liveliness that, you know, escapes detection. So yeah, that is that is kind of fascinating.
Aaron (45:17)
Yeah, I mean it's it's cool that people are doing it. I I wonder if the market's gonna reject it. Like I don't know if I want like something that's like tricking me into thinking that it's human in some sort of way. Like it feels a little bit like you know, how technologists sometimes struggle to get the right form factor for hardware devices. Like I understand why they're trying to do this, but I don't know if that's what people want. I don't I don't think they wanna go into something where they have to like
Aaron (45:45)
look across the table, look across the screen, to guess whether or not you're like a a human or, you know, some sort of agent. I think it's gonna need it's gonna need to have like a slightly different form factor. Maybe that's why everybody's kinda gravitating around these like derpy human like things. Cause I think it's I think it's like a fair
Aaron (46:04)
a visual representation
Chris (46:05)
Yeah.
Aaron (46:05)
of what these systems are, right? They're like kinda off. They're like human ish, but like not really.
Chris (46:10)
Well they're they're gonna have to like fulfill a multiplicity of form factors and we're trying to understand all of them right now, right? Like if you look at what's going across, like one thing we learned last year is people don't want little pucks that record all the time and don't have faces on them, right? Like we we we already got that one out of the way. Now we're at this point where
Chris (46:31)
You want, right? We're laughing at human rob at robot Olympics, right? We're finding that hilarious as like embodied agents, America's funniest film videos. You've got, right, all the the Darpy little guys, right? Rise of the little guys as the agentic helper category. This like absolute realism, I don't think you want it in these form like I don't think you want them right now in consequential,
Chris (46:59)
you know, communications or transactions, you know, but the entertainment industry certainly wants this. AI video certainly wants this, right? And so there may be a place for this where yes, like if you're sitting down to like renegotiate your home mortgage, you certainly don't want like a human representing AI,
Chris (47:20)
In the video, but if you're in a holodeck, if you're in a world model, right, if you're in this sort of immersive form of entertainment, then you probably do want to be fooled. And so I think there's multiple challenges here. One is which like having the versatility of these form factors and then understanding like on the consumer side or on the user side, the acceptability of them and how each of these slot into various roles and stay in their lanes.
Aaron (47:45)
Yeah. I mean the the Hollywood piece definitely makes sense. You know, and I could see advertisers liking that in some capacity, but it feels like niche. Like these things are gonna need like intentional glitches in them, I I think to be trusted. And it kinda makes sense. If
Chris (48:03)
Yeah, yeah.
Aaron (48:03)
you think about like sci fi, right? Like the the like fully formed robots and like Star Trek, right? They don't they don't
Aaron (48:11)
They're not exactly human, like they're perceived and easily perceivable as not human or, you know, nineteen eighties type shows like like Max Headroom, right? They were like intentionally glitched. So it feels like
Chris (48:24)
Right.
Aaron (48:24)
that's like the form factor that's coming.
Chris (48:26)
And in a way, maybe that should be the form factors coming that's coming because these things have capabilities far beyond what humans can do in certain departments and they're utterly lacking in other ones. And so a separateness, you know, rather than like a mimicry is probably the correct like house same, same but different without like the uncanny valley, right? sort of repulsiveness, you know.
Chris (48:53)
as well. Like you don't know, maybe maybe there's like a very sort of biological, you know, like packed mentality that still sits in within us in which we don't want like a dead on imposter trying to pass amongst our group because that's a threat to us. But if we find this adjacent thing that's close enough and we understand like, you know, its differences and its separation,
Chris (49:20)
Right, like that's perfectly fine because we have a history of doing that as well.
Aaron (49:25)
Yeah, it's a good point. super fascinating.
Aaron (49:28)
You know, I am getting excited about about Morpha. I think it's gonna be a a fun one this year.
Chris (49:34)
I'm looking forward to it. It's been a busy fall. and it's been a like yeah, I it's always good to get out for a few days. You know, get out on your own, get out amongst some like minded people, get in a different place that hopefully is gonna be, you know, still warm and sunny. and, you know, just wander around and chill.
Aaron (49:56)
Yeah. And I I really like just to go back to the the top, it just it feels like things are congealing. Like in digital assets, which I do think is gonna bleed out into crypto. Like I f you can feel people like, you know, starting to make their moves and I think that technologists are gonna come back pretty hard into into crypto, and build us new fun things.
Aaron (50:21)
Which is gonna be great.
Chris (50:22)
Yeah, but I'm going to Marva for the plotters, Aaron.
Aaron (50:25)
I am too, but maybe that's part of it, right? Like I think early, you know, art leads I kind of am. Dude,
Chris (50:29)
I'm not going for the plotters. I'm sorry, I just
Aaron (50:32)
I'm I'm like so geeked on that right now. Like all I want is somebody to put together like a neo maker space where I could just putz around with with hardware. I think it'd be so fun. Like like load up, you know, codecs or cloud code, whatever.
Aaron (50:47)
Like start making me some boards, like let's let's build some absolutely insane devices. I think that I I can feel like I feel the desire to kind of play around with that. If software's getting easy.
Chris (50:59)
Men only
Chris (51:00)
want one thing and it's disgusting a workshop.
Aaron (51:02)
What's that?
Aaron (51:04)
Yeah, kind of, right? Like like a shared workshop that has just like really cool tools with maybe some somebody there to help you figure out how to use them. you come armed with like like a hardware device that you want to build. You know, if software's easy, like let's work on the hard stuff. Let's let's get the American garage back.
Chris (51:23)
Alright, so let's let's envision what the Brooklyn hipsterized version of this is because right, this is certainly happening out in the deep tech realm of the world. And then it happens out in the suburbs, plenty of people in the suburbs have basements, garages, you know, like this is like shit your dad, your granddad, whomever, you know, got up to back in the day when they they just needed to be alone for, you know, three hours and feel like they did something.
Chris (51:50)
But like we just had VC funded spas. we've had all sorts of weird like hipster return to manliness, axe throwing bars, and shit like that, right? I there was a moment in time where people were trying to make 3D printer spaces, you know, a thing. but could I see like, yes, like this.
Chris (52:15)
automated workshop in which you just roll up with your MacBook and that's what you use to get things done.
Aaron (52:22)
MacBook and
Aaron (52:23)
some beer, right? Like it that's w the two magic ingredients at this point.
Chris (52:28)
It this is this is very bullish for like the Kings of Leon. This is very bullish for like the bro rock.
Aaron (52:37)
The hardware's on fire,
Aaron (52:38)
Chris. What are we saying here?
Chris (52:40)
Yeah. It's you know, w we y can you be a performative craftsman? Is that what people are gonna be whining about Brooklyn Hipster Dom in a couple of years?
Aaron (52:50)
yeah, definitely. I mean, I think most tech trends are like cycles, right? There's things that are early that show like early product market fit. If it doesn't fully like flourish, it just means it's coming back like with a vengeance. And it feels like those maker spaces, a lot of them started in New York. like, you know, maker bot. Etsy started as like a creator space, purportedly, or if my memory serves. yeah, I mean, I just think that that there's a lot of value there and like that shared space to to create something. And that's like where the
Aaron (53:18)
difficulty is in the technical frontier now. It's no longer necessarily around software, although there's there's obviously super hard software problems still, despite these amazing tools. But I just think people are g people like challenges. there's fun things that you can explore. You know, I just the American garage has kind of been shut since the nineteen eighties, since the personal computer. Like a lot of that creative energy like went into the box and I think it's coming back out.
Chris (53:42)
That's a good take. Actually I totally forgot about Maker's Bot. there was a there was a period in time when my kids were little, Maker's Fair. They used to do that at the Queen's Queen Science Hall there.
Aaron (53:54)
yeah, I always wanted to go
Aaron (53:55)
to that. Was that cool?
Chris (53:56)
Yeah. I mean it it was cool, but it was like at that point in time, or at least, you know, where I was at and our experiences there, it was very like kid centric, you know, small scale type of things. And that might have you know, that might explain the disconnect is, you know, at the time when that was a whole movement and 3D printing and
Chris (54:16)
You know, we had we only had like raspberry pies or we only had like, you know, like the the scale of what you can do maybe wasn't appropriately adult size to continue being challenging and to flourish. And now if yes, like this whole like AI automation, you know, this this continues to progress, then the the challenge space of what you can do, right, starts scaling up and it becomes compelling and attractive again.
Chris (54:43)
Especially right, like so much of what we do in our spare time, right, is like maybe governed by side hustle, economic, like alternative ex like forms exploration. And you know, like if tinkering, if exploring in this stuff like provides like new outlets to earn, but is also like a fun.
Chris (55:09)
fun in a hobbyish activity, right? Like that's another reason to want to invest time in.
Aaron (55:15)
Yeah, and I think, you know, I do think people will have a little bit more excess time. I you know, whether it's as doomsday as people are suggesting, I just think it's happening. So yeah, like honestly, like in Marfa, like I'm there for the plotters. Like I wanna see what artists are doing with it 'cause I feel like they work through these beats. They deal many of them still deal in physicality. And, you know, a lot of the stuff that they're interested in, I think everybody's gonna get more interested in over time, which is gonna be great.
Chris (55:43)
Look it'd be lovely if like art got to ask for it again, especially within our space. You know, I I've I'm very like frustrated with it, partially just because like the everyone has to develop a signature style to get noticed and then they're not allowed to leave that signature style. And so like I feel like within our space and within like the the generative art, like sub you know, subspace of our space, like
Chris (56:09)
Nothing is compelling, nothing is new. Everyone, you know, kind of got stuck where they were. And you know, it's just like to me, it's so boring. And so like, you know, when I like make jokes about plotters, it's like I've seen plotters, I've been there. You know, like I would love, right, for our artist definitions and then like the materials they use and what they're creating to like reopen again, you know. Like to me, like, look, I love Martha.
Chris (56:36)
But I to me it's like it's always had an NPR IPA beer fest sort of looking back vibe to it, right? And
Aaron (56:44)
Yeah.
Chris (56:45)
I'm not against it, but like, you know, if I'm literally going to see the same type of work from the same people year in and year out, the the art experience itself is less and less important to me. And it's more about, you know, being in a place, being around people, being, you know,
Aaron (57:05)
Scene.
Chris (57:06)
Yeah. And so, you know, like would I like do I have any expectations for what I'm gonna see artistically down in Marfa? I mean, a little because something is always great. You always, you know, you get like a Joe P's sort of, you know, experience on a good year. But like am I go you know, is that gonna make or break my Martha experience? No, because there's also been plenty of years in which I've gone down, it's just same same. So
Chris (57:31)
But I love Marfan,
Aaron (57:32)
Yeah.
Chris (57:32)
I love getting out there.
Aaron (57:34)
Well, I feel that and there's there's a lot of great stuff to kinda do there from the galleries. it's all like pretty accessible. it's good good folks, which is always always appreciated. I think, you know, I I've still had this same position. I you know, I think we've been in a secular bear in crypto since FTX. I I think that meme coin cycle was you know
Aaron (57:58)
either manufactured, partially manufactured. It it never felt real to me. and I think that I think the winter is finally over. I would just peg the winter starting at FTX. and we've seen that happen in other tech, right? AI being a notable one that people can remember. It just goes through fallow periods. But, you know, I think the fields are the fields have been tilled and they're kind of ready to go.
Chris (58:22)
Well let let's let's root for crypto dynamism because it's certainly better than you know, crypto stagnation.
Aaron (58:30)
Yeah, or just nostalgia, right? Which is not which is not enough either. But I think I'm feeling it. I think it's gonna be good.
Chris (58:37)
Cool. All right. Well I feel like we you got any more here or you wanna
Aaron (58:40)
No,
Aaron (58:41)
let me intro the show. So welcome to Net Society. This is an unk special with with Chris and me on the mic. just a quick reminder that nothing we say here is investment advice. it does not reflect the views of our employer. And let's go.