people who try to freeze winners and losers in place don't understand the way that markets work the reality to me is just the visual effects pipeline in real time on the phone in your pocket you're going to be able to make really watchable and fun films almost exclusively using AI people are at the top of the hierarchy the experts are always the most averse to adopting this
Tech at the bottom of Pandora's Box was what oh you don't even need a fancy computer like you just use computer in the cloud the phone in your pocket is the movie studio if the 11 12-year-old me had access to stuff like this I'd like lose my mind and so I look at those things and I'm like where do I sign up man well hello everyone it's Jim o Shany
with another infinite Loops today my guest is Babu sidu who just honestly me out you are a oneman corporation as I said to you before we started creating you you you uh your your CD is amazing you are you're a Creator an engineer you worked at Google and then you decided you know what I'm I'm just gonna I'm gonna become an entrepreneur and I'm gonna start uh
playing with ar V Ai and just make kickass videos we chatted about the one that I saw and if I'm seeing it man that is a b viral video because I I don't have Tik Tok and what's even better is I had a bunch of friends send that to the video that I'm speaking about was the aliens at the Miami mall and again I immediately all my friends said it to me
and I was like this is so cool and it immediately made me think of Orson Wells War of the World you familiar with it oh absolutely I mean it's funny because uh world the worlds had a similar effect in the sense that back in the radio days when it would air on radio Airwaves a lot of people assumed it was real and it caused like a bit of a mass panic in society so
I guess that's kind of my first question uh because as I was going through your stuff and listening to several of your podcasts and watching your uh work like are you worried about this are you worried about people like norie so I've been interested in I for a long long time and love it and and yet some of my friends who don't know too much about uh
and fellow olds by the way I'm 64 um and they're like it this is scary like do do you worry I I'm a big fan of a book called The Fifth science and and in it he's got this great quote about narrative collapse and basically what he says is that when a society gets hyperconnected and when the tech gets so good that it's very difficult to distinguish a deep fake from a real
video that that all truth sort of collapse into a samess what do you think I think I am worried about it but I'm also excited and optimistic about all this stuff because the fundamental technologies that we're talking about to create and then distribute this content I think is dual use like most other technology um and it is interesting even if we leave
deep fakes and generative Ai and sort of the the ease of creation uh that's obviously dropping over time right uh visual effects uh being able to create convincing deep fakes or content that's indistinguishable from reality has historically been the domain of the visual effects houses and eventually the Indie visual effects artists that still
required a lot of effort and now you know what even took me other would have taken me like a week or so to make you know in the case of this Miami Mall video I was able to crank out in a couple hours on the weekend and so obviously that creates like on the on the production side things are getting easier and easier but on the distribution side this this trend has
been playing out right like the phones in our pocket the screens that we look at all day are already sort of mediating our perception of reality they're sort of the windows through which we see the world and there's uh whether it's like shallow fakes and misinformation on Facebook and WhatsApp groups and now this new generation of Def fakes I think
um that capability has already been there but I think at the same time people are getting more and more aware and sophisticated and sort of cultivating a Discerning intellect to be able to tell or at least stop and assume like nah this looks fake are we going to reach a point where you really can't tell what's real or fake and Truth loses all meaning I don't know I don't think
so but that's certainly something I I do worry about so I was chairman of stability AI for a couple of years and uh watching it in real time just astounded me literally daytoday changes that were like exponentially better and one of the things that we battered around was maybe we should try to do like a prize for deep T deep fake detection software and if we got close
enough the idea was we would just release it for free and to we'd give it to all the news organizations we'd put it on you know GitHub or anywhere anyone could download it um but then it becomes kind of like that arms race you're you're young so you probably don't remember when radar you know when cops uh use radar on your car totally yeah
yeah okay so so what happened was it's apocryphal but it's a great story because there was a little conspiracy nothing like today back then there were very few conspiracies but there was a little conspiracy that it was the same company selling the radar to the cops and the fuzzbusters to the people and they just they kept just updating it right and so we'd see something similar
uh so I I I guess it's with these emerging Technologies it's kind of like fire right I fire created our prefrontal cortex when we started cooking food that's when we were like ah wait I'm conscious I can understand the past and future I can make plans and we didn't ban fire even though arguably it's one of the most dangerous uh Technologies if we're
talking about technology in the world instead of banning it right we created fire departments and fire alarms and fire drills do you see that happening with all of the uh technologies that are emerging today I think that's the direction it has to go you're totally right that it's turned into a game of whack-a-mole right like you create a new discriminator that can tell what's
generated what's not and then if you open source It Bad actors can use that discriminator to train a new generator to bypass it and like on and on that goes right so to me it feels like the analogy that comes to mind is sort of like and this is perhaps funny to talk about given that we just had this Global Microsoft outage uh over the last couple
days is it's the new version of sort of like penetration testing and vulnerability managing agement where we're clearly using software that isn't bulletproof best efforts are made to sort of Make It Rock Solid but there's an expectation that people are going to find a way around that and uh we're going to have to keep up and it's going to be this
ongoing uh you know uh arms race or game of whack-a-mole and so I think we're seeing that play out we already you know in in common uh you know sort of like the the uh sort of Telltale sign dour for generative AI imagery has historically been oh my God like you know it has like five or six it has six or seven fingers you know it doesn't get the appendages perfectly right or
whatever or if you zoom in and look at some of the high frequency detail you can kind of tell and that's already outdated right you can generate Immaculate still images that I think like shatter the visual touring test uh completely and I think we're now on the cusp of video sort of hitting that um you know that standpoint and I think
like going back to good oldfashioned ways of like are there different like sources that have the same video clip right like do we have multiple observations of this thing to at least rule out the possibility that you know or reduce the probability that this isn't completely faked and I think people just employing tactics like that we're seeing that happen honestly in the
light of this uh um uh the uh uh presidential assassination attempt so much content circulated some of which was like weird shallow fakes that weren't exactly true and you saw sort of the community you know kind of coming up with enough evidence to sort of rule out certain things or discredit certain sources of evidence and I think that'll
keep playing out and so between efforts that adobe and companies like it are taking with like the c2p sort of this content authenticity initiative of embeding the right sort of metadata that's like one layer uh but on the other hand I think just public awareness and sort of you know I like to say if you can't solve this at the point of generation you have to solve this at the
point of distribution and I think the large tech companies that own the distribution platforms right now have all the incentives to solve it yet I will say I see this happening but it's going to be it's slower than we expect right because like again shallow fakes are still predominantly what proliferate on these platforms and those are sensibly easier to find because oh you
can tell oh this exact photo of this politician was actually sourced from this other time and place um you know because you've got some way to do a reverse image search because this image was like repurposed that's obviously harder to do with generative AI but I think the right incentives are there for these platforms to uh you know kind of
at least not let content that is you know um reaching hundreds of millions of users while being blatantly uh you know uh fake I'm sure that'll happen but I assume that game of wacka will only get better yeah uh I remember uh way back when when they faked a um letter about George W bush and the reason it was discovered to be a fake was was the community
literally in like a day people were posting on the various platforms of that era hey wait a minute it this letter used as a font that wasn't invented at the date of the letter right and it's like one of the reasons why I'm such a proponent of Open Source as opposed to close because the the world's creatives and the world's uh people like you like
I would certainly love if something showed up and it looked very very real like one of the first places I'd check in now and it would be on your channels to see what you had to say about it so I think that that's right I think that this is an emerging phenomenon and that we are really undergoing something I'm incredibly excited by let's get that out of the way
I I I absolutely think that this technology is probably the most powerful technology that's ever been invented during my lifetime and uh its uses also are pretty extraordinary which we'll get into in a minute but like the I don't want to bury the lead here too much uh you sort of single-handedly got 360 million views for your art and I'd call you art
because that's what I really look at it as like you're very creative it's one of your goals you're obsessed with Ignite or uniting reality with imagination what a bias obsessions as well cool tell everyone listening or watching okay how do I do that too honestly it's easier than ever before um you know I like to joke that I got into CG and VFX at an early age at
11 I was making these like dorky flash animations back then and I saw happen to see like this is i' just gotten access to the internet like two years before that and I was able to access all these like websites that showed me 3D Studio Max and there was this amazing TV show called Mega Movie Magic that was showing the interface for like this is back like
in the prea days like you know all the tools that existed back then and you know some of the earliest Alias tools and I saw like holy crap you can use this computer to create visuals that are indistinguishable from reality that can totally you know you can turn your mind inside out and like you know take a real world footage and put something
Fantastical in it and it feels like it's there and back then it was like holy crap I have to buy these like massive 3ds Max Bible books that had CD ROMs at the end of it with sample projects and there was no YouTube and all this other you know like you there's a lot of like Hoops to jump through to build even Baseline expertise to be like oh finally
I can make that lightsaber battle with my homies you know in the backyard as the clothes are drying on the on the cloth line there or you know like I can have a spaceship and make it look like you know uh climbing down in Reverse from a slide is actually like coming down a spaceship and now it's like the phone in your pocket is capable of that
and then some it's uh you know it's it's kind of wild like this is back still in like right as digital video is popping off so it's like still in the mini DV era I started off in the high8 era and then uh you know I still digitizing cassettes right like with fire wire cables and so now you got a 4K uh camera in your pocket sometimes 8K especially if you have like an Android these days
it's got a bunch of compute on it it does computer vision which and augmented in virtual reality which AR to me augmented reality to me is just the visual effects pipeline in real time on the phone in your pocket so you've got a bunch of apps on your phone that are capable of doing these things not to mention a myriad of web apps and desktop applications
that you can do cool things so a couple of applications if you're coming into this let's say as a complete beginner and you want to do cool things there's a few things I would recommend for your video editor just go cap cut mobile or desktop up to you if you feel a way about bite dance in the CCP or whatever maybe go get descript that's also a
really cool easy to edit uh application and if you really want to get fancy there's the Adobe tools Da Vinci resolve but I'd wait to get there and then on the visual effects side I would say like two or three applications come to mind one is an app that I've been loving recently called Sky glass VFX it's this mobile app it's a bunch of these X Apple
cats that have basically made a mobile app where you can put yourself in a virtual environment so if we break down like the whole you know landscape of visual effects that you can do to saying like digital characters we want to have digital characters in the world number two we want to have digital sets we want to put real characters in Virtual environments and number three being we
want to add all miscellaneous other effects simulations explosions all the cool stuff that you want to uh think about on top of that let's put that as the third bucket for putting yourself into a virtual environment level one is just like use cap cut or Tik Tok and use the green screen filter and there's some fun filters in there where you can put a 360
image so you can like get something from street view or take a panel or use a bunch of AI generators online to make a 360 panel and suddenly you can kind of orbit around a virtual environment skyglass takes that to the next level where it's like literally pixel streaming Unreal Engine to your phone so it's using all the AR data off your
phone to track you it'll segment you out or key out your green screen if you've got one and it'll put you in this virtual environment and then finally it'll take go a step further to relight you believably so so it looks like you fit in that environment and at the end of it you just get the video file that you want or you could get a couple of
layers like your for background and the alpha channnel that you can toss into a cap cut or descript like tool to add more tweaks on top of that and that tool is just like amazing because it's taking what like Mandalorian and high-end virtual production workflows are doing with Unreal Engine and track cameras and letting you do that with the phone in your pocket and that to me is like
absolutely wild and if I spend a second here just like imagining if the 11 12-year-old me had access to stuff like this I'd like lose my mind so kids don't know how lucky they are these days or adults that are getting into this stuff yeah I remember uh one of the first viral videos way before YouTube was the dancing baby you remember that one or
have you seen it and I also remember seeing it in Ali mcbi weirdly or something like that is that true or am I misremembering that yeah I'm not sure about that but I remember when I saw it I just got ridiculously excited because you know at the time I was running an asset management Fir and and I sold that and like one of the first uh verticals that we included in OAS Adventures was
infinite films because because of all of these Technologies we think that like literally you're going to be able to make really watchable and fun films uh almost exclusively using AI now I also believe that most of the people who just just do that like like just have the AI do it I think most of that's going to suck I think marrying human creativity with it the so-called senar
model man human plus machine that's going to be the big winner here and like your work demonstrates that beautifully and and so what what do you think are we heading for a time when like for example you could beat just your own production company and like making videos I'm a to about this one I think this could be a fun discussion cuz I did
read about infinite media and infinite films um and there's this implicit in that is sort of the idea that there's going to be an unlimited amount of content that's created right and so like let me paint the the the sort of the part bit that I'm excited about and the bit that I'm apprehensive about what I'm excited about is 100% like already like
the sky glass thing I talked about and layer in something like Wonder Dynamics what lets you do the inverse of that to swap out real humans with a CG character right a controllable CG character and then you've got a bunch of AI video tools that you can use to do other cool things right um that stuff was things that would have been like James Cameron's wet dream in 2009 and that is
like ubiquitously available now for like a very cheap monthly subscription to anyone with an internet connection to the point where like you don't even need a fancy computer like you just use computer in the cloud right right and so I think the we are so we already seeing this trend play out where it was sort of like you know let's say the first wave
of democratization was YouTube where a percent of the people the percent of the monthly active users on YouTube are actually creating content and they're learning these tools like nonlinear editing tools like Adobe Premiere after facts learning dslrs ex learning lighting packaging all these other skills that you need and making some very cool things and perhaps Mr beus is
sort of like the highest exemplification of that wave and then you've got the you know kind of like the tiktock ification that's happening where it's like oh you don't need any of that the phone in your pocket is the movie studio you can do it all on your phone and so instead of like like a percent of your monthly actives you've got 15 20 30 40% of people are
creating content not to mention the shift that we've seen in distribution and I do want to talk about this in terms of both creation and distribution because you have to look at the those things together um in the sense that you could be a no-name account have a thousand followers on Instagram res YouTube shorts or Tik Tok and suddenly
gain viral success right and you did it all with your phone in this hokey fashion and you know I see some kids these days that are like recording screen recording things in one app and then they save it to their camera roll and they take it to another app and I'm like you know I just sound like a cranky person I'm like what about generational loss and the compression they just look
at me like what the freak's wrong with you like look at how many views my videos are getting like nobody cares about some compressions compression art artifacts you Millennial um and and you know so like this democratization from YouTube to Tik tok's been happening but what also happened with Tik Tok is like more people could create because it was
easier and the blank canvas problem was solved where you're not thinking about the 10 15 minute video to make there's a theme that people jump on and you're kind of seeing that play out now with the third wave which i' call this generative AI wave which is supercharging like the YouTube world it's supercharging the small short form video world and it is certainly
supercharging the Ott the Netflix you know like the the traditional studio and the new streaming Studio models too and all this to say with each of those jumps distribution becomes more and breaking through the noise becomes more and more challenging too because there's just more content being generated so I definitely think more cont content will
be made that wouldn't have been otherwise that would have never been green lit all sorts of content too like you know passive video content interactive video stuff like gaming experiences all of these pseudo interactive things like you know rap and NPC and some sort of a narrative experience and turn that into something cool the Spectrum from passive to
interactive a bunch of cool things are going to happen but on the other hand I worry that are we creating an exhausting exhausting treadmill of our own design because the way generative AI is manifesting into creators workflows right now is ideation and repurposing of content I would say at the top of the funnel what do you end up making and at the end of your creation funnel how do
you distribute this for Max impact everywhere right and so I do worry about this thing where and I'll talk about it from the Indie Creator standpoint and then even the Ott YouTube standpoint on the Indie Creator standpoint oh like so and so is putting out like 10 videos a week holy crap I need to do 15 let me figure out how to use AI to do 15 a week and then it
becomes this weird arms race of like trying to put out more and more content and we're sort of losing sight of what got us into Creation in the F first place because what one would think would happen is more of a Tim Ferris 4our Work Week type story where like oh yes let's automate everything and spend our time doing the really creative tasks but how
it's playing out right now is this more volume game and that's maybe playing to the distrib tion algorithms right you want to have more app bats so you're putting out more content you don't know what's going to go viral on this sort of Interest based graph on the OT and YouTube end there's also interesting things playing out and a lot of that
manifested in the tension with the the writer strike uh you know uh that happened recently uh especially around generative AI but really that started off with the change in business model that's happened there right like um if you were a writer on Seinfeld back in the day you're probably getting residuals for like months and years to come as your content was syndicated in
other geographies and whatnot and now with Otts like Netflix and apple apple uh you know plus moving towards the sort of Cost Plus model as it's called for here's a flat fee we're going to pay you a million you made this this is our content then the platform gets to milk it what you're seeing is like even a downward pressure on those budgets right
where on the YouTube side you've got Mr Beast increasing his budgets creating like you know content that's like rivaling a Netflix show especially if you take like the uh squid games example which uh apparently Netflix had the chance to sponsor and decided to pass on and then obviously that thing totally blew up on YouTube and has really high quality visual effects by the way uh
like virtual production Unreal Engine virtual sets and all this cool stuff what's Netflix going to do when 25% of people's time on a TV even which is the recent neelon numbers is spent watching YouTube and that's all ugc if Mr Beast goes out 10 more will jump in playing out that Hunger Game of more volume and so like in response it seems what the
Otts are doing they're like holy crap we can't like take too many huge swings on like crazy tent pole pieces of content that cost 15 20 you know $50 million let's put that push that money further and do a bunch of 800k or $1 million like you know pieces of content but basically Greenlight a more diverse slate you know globally so that there's greater chances of some sort of
crossover hit happening and hitting a bunch of demographics and so I think like that pressure it makes me worried about sort of like this race to the bottom that's effectively happening um and so yeah that's like I'm on one hand to summarize I'm excited I think this is like a kid in a basement's going to be able to do that stuff that like
Hollywood directors only dreamt of on the other hand I think it's going to turn into this sort of you know insane exhausting treadmill perhaps of our own creation where we're just trying to crank out such an insane amount of content to break through the noise that I think like I think that's the only outcome I see happening unless I don't know distribution like is drastically
reimagined in this world of Plenty yeah we have very similar views on that uh part of our thesis is that as this tsunami of AI uh generated content uh comes uh the idea that having good taste that's very difficult word to Define of course it's like the Supreme Court Justice right when they were trying a case on pornography he said well I can't
Define it but I know it when I see it 100% yeah yeah I'm familiar with that Lin perfectly said good taste and curation we think that what's happening now will lead to the emergence of competing platforms that are competing on Good Taste and good curation and that the that those will be distinguishing factors as distribution models now we're you know it's not going
to replace YouTube it's not going to replace the streamers but I definitely think again with the advancement of the technology itself those kinds of platforms will become not trivially easy but easy if you've got adequate funding right and so we are doing a lot of analysis of the various business models that make the most sense with with those
as our parts of our hypothesis and and I think that in many ways it's kind of where aam's razoring it in other words yeah all of this is going on over here what's the simplest what's the simplest uh solution that might emerge from this and and that can take uh many different paths doesn't have to be an actual platform it could be it could be a channel on YouTube it could be any of
those things so it could get out it could get out into the distribution Network effectively as long as you're willing to uh understand you know the impact of it over here over here Etc but I I definitely share your concern that with the ease with many of these uh uh Innovations allow like literally the race to the bottom is is going to be it's going to be really wild
and I think for what cultural change is really interesting to me because it's it's sped up there's no question about that um like all of my life I was an early adopter I I was on like one of the first uh internet uh didn't even call it the internet then they were all wall Gardens right so copy ser and and you know you had it was a real Prestige thing to it
was you didn't go by jimy right you went by a number and the big pre the big Prestige thing was it had I can't remember six digits a comma and then if you had a twod digigit number man you were the real OG you're the real OG and I was so proud of that right that's awesome so but but the fact is that I definitely think we don't live in a static world we live in a very Dynamic
world and when there are opportunities as well as profits available in the sector you know capitalism finds a way right all movements kind of start out as uh you know passions or or whatever they quickly turn into businesses and then often descend into being rackets right and it's cyclical you know it's it's a cycle and then a roof starts all over it
truly is do you think that there will be some kind of let's talk a little bit more about long form do you think that there will be some breakthrough film piece of art Etc that uses all of these incredible Technologies and also is like an amazing movie 100% I think it's a question of not if but when right and um we could get into sort of the
technical limitations of the the tools to kind of get there um but honestly even before that if I may just like slightly react to the point you brought up previously if that's all right sure it's interesting what you're saying about sort of it's not clear on the distribution side the layer of abstraction that'll make most sense to find to kind of make
sense of like distill down you know find the signal in an ocean of noise is it going to be islands of craters that all on the channel um like the equiv of go to Marquez brownley like that's my favorite tech you know kind of consumer Tech person and so if I go like if if like Marquez has a take on I'll go watch that and so that becomes the filter
through which I make sense of consumer Tech noise um or new platforms and I keep wondering and this relates to your video question which is like in the future how is user behavior and preferences going to shift like and what is going to be the breakup of people putting a huge premium on sort of fully organic human generated content is it going to be kind of the split between
like buying organic and Whole Foods and it's like a small percent of the population pays that premium to have something that's like total Farm totable super organic authentic artisanally crafted Etc and then on the other hand like most people are totally cool with like Costco target tar and Mountain de to the vein sort of like generated content and I keep wondering I I keep
asking myself what that split is going to be um and and I worry the split's actually going to be very much in the favor of uh sort of this like fast food content if you will because that's what short form is and it works really well and so in that context like I think we're not that far away and we are seeing examples of short form content
that like captures people's imagination that has a decent story to it maybe the highest manifestation of it being like mon sci-fi trailers is become the thing toour lately and again this is cyclical right people like it solves the blank canest problem for the next set of creators I'll make a bunch of it and then everyone was like if I see one more
Wes Anderson theme blah blah blah thing I'm going to like people get over it quickly and so long form I've seen recently there was this like Terminator 2 remake I don't know if you saw this that was made with a bunch of generative AI tools it's like a team of a like five or six artists that got together just using all the commercial and open source
tools and it was really bad but it was kind of funny had moments of but it was audacious enough to try and do the full thing I think the moment these tools allow people to do consistent we're all to take a snapshot of where we're at right now we can already do there's impressive consistency within a generation whether that's 60 seconds a minute two minutes but that like cross
generation consistency of spaces places things like you know consistent if you will isn't there I haven't seen anyone crack it there Brute Force ways of doing it but that needs to be solved and then the sort of iterative control thing needs to be solved too which is like I love everything about this generation except this one thing can I change this
one thing somewhat solved an image you know kind of trivial to do with a static image with static you know 2D set of pixel moment you got like the temporal aspect of video more complicated and so all this to say I think even before these technical like sort of needs for like fitting into the traditional creative process where I have an idea
and I would like to trans this idea into something concrete before that's solved I think we will see somebody who's like very good at co-creating with these models as I like to call it which is sort of like I'm not trying to translate my script into a movie but I'm trying to I have a loose idea for what I want to do but I'm open to happy accidents I'm hoping to
discovering new possibilities and sort of you know uh sort of in real time updating your model for what that story ought to be based on where you end up trolloping and you know strolling through late in space and I think from that you'll see something creative that captures people's imagination that will be narrative that won't be an exact like waterfall creation if you will but will
be more of this weird agile co-creation thing and so you know it's like kind of sad that the people that have most of that muscle of like telling good stories are sort of at least publicly averse to talking about it so you're seeing most of those folks sort of like you know use it earlier in their production life cycle to do mood boards and like you
know explore different concepts before they write the screenplay manually or whatever but I think as that stigma sort of reduces we will see some really cool things happening yeah um if you study new technologies uh asked and and you look at how they were initially adopted it's really freaky because for example when they when they introduced movie
cameras people were like well I guess we should film plays that's what they did they took they took the camera and filmed to play because that was their context that's what they you know let's do that and the closest proxy yeah exactly that's a great way of putting it the closest proxy that they're familiar with right same with and you also saw exactly the same reticence and push back
from the earlier users of that right so like for example when records became popular symphony orchestras took out full page ads in big newspapers saying this is an Abomination this is not the way you listen to music you've got to see music live right and so you saw that with radio like that played on the fear of people like radio there are waves and
like if you go back into the way way back machine you you'll see like there were a lot of of uh newspaper stories showing dead birds around radio towers right so the thing that you can always in my opinion rely on is human OS human operating system doesn't change very often right and so if you know that and you study it and you study how new technology
get adopted that's always part of it right I don't I don't know whether you saw the Larry David ad in the Super Bowl where where're where they're bringing him all these different things we call it the wheel and then Larry D that face he like that'll never workt but there is a pattern if you will to the way human beings respond and I
suspect that one of the things we're trying to do with infinite films infinite media is make it creative friendly right so they can like they and it's so interesting to watch people like I have a lot of creative friends and many of them were like on the phone to me this AI stuff is horrible this is awful it's just gonna ruin everything right and rather than
argue with them I would say you know what how about like we had a graphic artist and we have a company called wand and we also Venture investors and and I'm like how I can just iterate on your own work and I'm like oh I can do that and I'm like yeah you can let me let me show you this thing and then the and then just let them do it right Don't
lecture them don't don't tell show right 100% that's a good part of good storytelling as well and you know I I got secretly really excited when my wife the photographer I told you about earlier um who as you might guess is not terribly Pro AI despite what her husband does she she finally came in and goes you know is there a tool that I could just put all of my own work on and and
see how to get and I'm like yes of course there is I'm at it waiting for you right here so I definitely think that's going to be part of this process as it evolves and you know C cultural evolution is a real thing it takes it takes a while it's like the adoption curve of any kind of TCH right 100% yeah it it takes a and you're obviously way over here on the
early side 100% yep but I do think that ultimately there will be some piece of art some movie some story some series that people are just like holy this is like really good it is my thesis that that will be the tech being used by a really cool creative human being or group or group of human beings and and like I think we also have a publishing Division I think you know when you think
about TV shows right they all have writer rooms they for the most part they don't have a single writer like the westwing I guess was best when Aon sorin himself was the main writer for it but but like Seinfeld I love Seinfeld and it had a big writer room yeah and that's why I also embrac the term you used a moment ago co-creation like I'm a big believer in
co-creation I think that if Larry David wasn't in that room Seinfeld would not have been the huge series that it was right like I love Jerry you watch him do his standup he's really really funny but that show had its bite and it and it addressed like you'd be hard pressed to find anything that wasn't addressed first either by The Simpsons or by Jerry
Seinfeld right like like you got to put yourself back in the 90s where they were they were doing really funny things with what at the time were taboo subjects and a classic classic Seinfeld episode is where they have the anti-masturbation bet uh with the with the with the group and the funny gift that people always use is coming in and slapping his money
on the counter and saying I'm out at you know day one that's amazing I need to go down to Seinfield rabo like a lot of friends have recommended and never never gone down oh I think you'd love it I think you'd love it because the the thing that I find it cool retrospectively yeah is man they were taking on everything everything that was at that point in time considered rather
taboo you can't talk new ground and I think that we're going to see the same thing happening here just a lot faster agree I think it's definitely the Federation of creatives wielding these tools are going to do something amazing I think maybe the the the trendy way or py way of putting it it's like everyone's waiting for that sort of Toy
Story moment for what Toy Story was for like classical computer graphics and 3D animation where all the Disney sort of like cell shaded like traditional animators were also like holy crap like you know like at least let's start doing some hybrid stuff let's do the background sets in 3D and then the foreground can be done the oldfashioned way and then full CG and it is totally
an adoption curve I mean you know and it's it's funny how we always have that initial sort of aversion to it maybe we should after this talk because I'm curious to get your take on sort of the whole like ethics of training data quandry which seems to be a huge concern the other one is the seating control concern which I think is like non-issue
cuz like you've got researchers making breakthroughs and then you've got Creator you know like creation tool Builders building creation tools and both are sort of approaching each other to create the night the right user experience to give to empower the creative rather than making them feel like they're being replaced and I think we've already seen huge strides towards
that and I love the whole control net wave for that by the way because it was like way richer than just text and immediately like a classical artist could see whether it's their outline scans or their 3D models with a death map all that stuff could be used to sort of tame the chaos of AI image generation and kind of guide the generation there but
gosh I mean these shifts are so funny like I remember when mini DV you know like was a thing and then digital video became a thing and like I remember like George Lucas filmed one of the Star Wars on digital and everyone was just like up in arms and CG was used in like the 2000s rendition everyone was like what the hell like you're going away from practical like what are you talking
about and it's funny that narrative weirdly I don't know if you've double clicked on this seems to live on in a sense where I made this video about about Top Gun where there's like 2400 visual effect shots in Top Gun it's nominated for an Academy Award yet the advertising all like oh no it was just all practical you know it's just like in Jets it's like no no no actually every
shot has like three CG Jets and there's one real one and by the way that 3D jet was like immaculately 3D scanned and there's like all these other invisible VFX where everything but the actor is replaced and so I'm like there's this Romanticism for like doing things the old-fashioned way that seems to persist and you in a way see that playing out
with what I would say is like the most vocal Community against AI imid generation which is people who are doing sort of digital art essentially with a wackin tablet in Photoshop or you know an Apple tablet and procreates and it's interesting to see that happen you know happens in more innocuous ways too where you'll like I love playing the guitar
and everyone's like oh a tube amplifier you'll never get there with solid state you need to have like you know a marshall or like a Misa Boogie T amplifier to really get that D like I don't know digital modeling digital modeling is pretty close so I'm going to go direct into a computer not have a room and a cabinet full of amplifiers and piss off my neighbors to record some
music yeah I think that again that's just another part of human OS I I think that like the the governing body in Men In in our operating system if you just look evolutionarily is fear right like especially fear of Novel things right yeah I always joke that you know if we found ourselves and maybe we will when we're in uh VR maybe you and I will be
able to stroll around the savanas of Africa back when we humans were just emerging but the thing is the thing is you and me and everyone or for the most part everyone almost everyone never be all or nothing again yeah the the idea of deterministic thinking is I think going to try to keep that flag hoisted but it's going away in terms of probabilistic thinking which is a better
way of doing it but like if we saw a bush shaking right we are the descendants of the humanoids who ran way totally am right yeah and so that is deep in our genetic structure and then you see it playing out with all of these new technologies just like it played out in the past right oh what's that I'm afraid Douglas Adams the guy who wrote
isard Guide to the Galaxy I I'm I'm a huge fan of his and I think that if you think about him as a philosopher and not a sidey writer it makes a lot more sense he had this great quote which is like any Tech That You Came Upon when you were a kid is is a natural order of things and it's the way things should be and he goes then any that that emerges
past the age of whatever 40 I can't remember what he said but is the devil's workshop the Abomination yeah totally but I mean I think that ultimately like our one of our primary concerns at at osv is we are here for creatives and what we are trying to do is in no way trying to replace them trying to you know make them work for less for any of those things it is to
find really really creative people like you and work together the whole idea of co-creation and and I think that you know for artists it it can be hard right because like again it's something that's very very consistent when the impressionist burst onto the scene right that name was given to them as an insult by the by by the French
Academy they literally would not let them display their work in the salons of the era right and if you if you go back and you look at what was the dominant art in at the time that the Impressionists were beginning to be seen it was like it had it was like it was done it had become so stult of IED and so like just bad and here come the Impressionists and like everything that
involves we humans right there was a hierarchy and the people who ran the French salons at the Art Academy were at the top of it and they were threaten when they saw this so literally they banned them from exhibiting in the fashionable salons they named them yeah you know this work is this is not real art it looks like a child PT finger paint
with just Impressions you know and so what did they do they did what creators are doing today they found different distribution channels they found different audiences and the rest it's history right so I definitely think that we're going to see something similar play out with all of the work of today and I don't know that there's a formula
right I don't think there's an algorithm that you can uh use to say this one's going to really knock everyone's socks off right we're looking by the way I would be lying I would be lying if I told you that we weren't but like you know you know what an ER pattern is so an ER pattern it's really cool uh Howard Bloom is a genius in my opinion he's written many books uh that I have
devoured and and one of them posits an her pattern which it's like a primitive in AI models okay it is a it is a pattern from which that is very simple and yet like a Penrose tile from this very simple pattern very complex and very merges complexity emerges right and and so like one of one of the things we're doing is hunting for her patterns because like in in literature right the
vero's journey is a well-known uh her pattern right and you know you it's hard to deny that when you look at the most popular story not just movies but books and books from 300 years ago the ones that really clicked with humans were the ones that for the most part follow totally the hero's journey the hero with a thousand faces right it's the same
story over and over again since time Memorial there's something interesting about that framework the fact that it's become this conduit to I don't know encode generational or just stories that are important to The Human Experience and I think that's exactly what it is right I think that that is the pattern is do these stories speak to many humans
in a way that really resonates with them now I I don't think that that's going to preclude we've gone from a normal distribution pattern right a typical basian distribution pattern where everything was aimed at that 6 8.5% under in in the middle right and and and we've gone from that into a world that has a chaotic normal distribution pattern you know popularized by metal
Bron with a very peaky middle and very long tals and so I think that there's gold in them their tals and totally you'll be able to have a career that is incredibly Rumer that you love that you're obsessed with in areas that under the old distribution and the old aiming at that middle totally was it possible yeah exactly and and so and and so it doesn't mean power laws go away they
won't but there'll just be many different smaller Hills right totally yeah and and so I think that there is room for Bo and and that that's one of the things that gets me really excited about all of the various uh tools and creatives using those tools they can conquer niches that literally were unconquerable because they weren't they wouldn't pay off right
now all there's so many different ways that people could succeed creatively and and we think why you know why isn't there room for for both of these um one one of the things that fascinates me about you is what your process for like spotting a trend that attracts you right like o that's very cool and then moving from that to one of your finished products like interesting
yeah like uh deciding to make something I mean I could use the Miami one as a great example please um it's it's interesting so like I would say the theme for my content is is it real like I want to leave people asking that question of is it real or is it fake right my goal is to reality and Imagination and I noticed like like when things are obviously
saturating social media a lot of people are talking about a thing uh I remember making a previous rendition of this that helped me blow up my tixo account back when like raid Area 51 became a meme I don't know if you remember this I do so people are like oh there's going to be World War III and by the way like there's this like Facebook group that's
going to show up to a you know a military installation I guess try to Naruto run inside the uh inside the uh inside the base um and so when I see things like that jumping into like public conversation public Consciousness and there's especially with this like Miami Mall thing people were circulating like the most grainy insane like helicopter footage and
trying to like 30X to be like look if you look at those four dots like there's an alien over there and I'm like what if there was actually like 10 12 foot tall aliens what would that actually look like can we visualize that with the idea being like obviously was so over the top and absurd that most people at see it are like obviously this isn't this isn't fake but you know like
I I'll I'll get into this sort of gear where I'm like there's attention around this topic I can make a reasonable fact simile representation of what that perceived narrative might actually manifest as and then I go and create it and honestly I try to time box these things this is what I've always done for my shorts the reason I love shorts over
making long form content personally is because it's the type of thing where over the course of 4 eight hours maybe two days like Saturday and Sunday and like two four hour shifts you can basically go from idea to completion and still have enough time to explore the creative like uh you know opportunity space of what you're going to make especially with these AI tools and so
now what I've started doing is like previously what I used to do is like do this the oldfashioned way that I'd go capture real footage that was intended for it now I can just do it all like in mid Journey like storyboard it out and throw it into like Runway Pika or Luma or whatever the best image to video thing dour is and then finally bring it
back into After Effects um to make something fun with it and then the way I add this final layer of believability and anchoring in it is definitely the Audio I think makes a huge difference for these type of things and adding that very subtle signature kind of like little bit of handheld camera shake things like almost artificially decimating the video a bit more to make
it look more authentic uh put that all together with a helicopter or the sirant and all of that it feels anchored and embodied in that event that happens and then uh yeah most people saw it as like oh yeah this is funny this is like if Attack on Titan happened in Miami and then a bunch of people are like oh my God I knew it it's real and I'm like oh
that's where I get a little worried you know yeah but that's where the you're making precisely the point that I think is important here and that is that's where your creativity kicked in right and you were able to just go oh wouldn't it be cool if and another one you did that I loved is where you took Tiffany Gomez the woman on the plane and you turned her
into you turned her into an alien but the payoff the payoff of that was that isn't real and then you shift to like Scooby-Doo like that like I I I can see very easily why that went viral right because like it's memes and you know what's also funny about that one is like there's this co-creation aspect with the community too which is a lot of fun and
yeah like I mean that I actually picked up the you know I won't take credit for the uh really fun SC like panning over part I saw that in another video and I was like wow that's kind of cool and it lines up perfectly with that shot from the latest Scooby-Doo movie where it feels totally embodied in the seat so I was able to like put those things
together which is sort of like a testament to how awesome remix culture is and you see that play out every day on YouTube Tik Tok and uh uh certainly you know uh Twitter and all these platforms too yeah so and but again as somebody who's been around for a long time uh reexes are really not all that new right like they amen they they they have been part of art part of music part
of film part of everything for a long long time and you mentioned earlier like how do I feel about like uh training the AI models on on data and and my view is like have you ever been to a museum what do you see what what do you see in museums you see a ton of art students what are they doing they're they're they're they're trying to paint that
rembrand in but in their own way they're trying to learn how do they learn they learn by going to the museum and looking at great artists right and so look I I'm very sensitive to the idea that you you you should not have the ability to just hijack some other creative's work and present it as your own right right yeah like there should be red zones on you
know okay this is theft th this is a remix this is an omage right and and so but like you made a remark about like AI it's trained on us and so to to expect that it's going to be suddenly like incredibly ethical and Incredibly fair and all of those things I don't know have you read human history like but I also I always try to think what can I root for it's really easy
rooting against things doesn't take much doesn't take much intelligence to be I'm against that I'm against that I'm that's bad right Howe against change to your PO earlier point of like things that induce uncertainty in people that just has that sort of we have this sort of like visceral reaction to it no question and the illusion of control if you really
want to with a human being take away their illusion of control and you know why do people get put into solitary confinement if you know the literature removing a human being or another animal for that matter from their Community is really bad oh totally there's like two examples right they did a study of looking at people who were put in
solitary confinement and many instances it was as little as 18 hours before they began hallucinate oh my God and like you know why are all those prophets why do they spend all those 40 days in the desert and start seeing burning bushes I have an idea totally I have an idea you go go deep into meditation in a cave for years you're going to start having some
crazy extra like sensory experiences I'm sure yeah exactly and that doesn't make meditation bad I think meditation is really really I mean I love sensory deprivation facts and yeah definitely and but the point is people you know we were talking little earlier deterministic versus probabilistic right like things are not yes no things are not zero 100 definitely yeah so we have
this deterministic thought pattern that thinks that we are in control that dust the illusion of control and and it becomes very very difficult for many people to get out of that box that thinking box but you know kind of back to the the uh person in solitary guess what if you take a rat and you put it in a box and this is a very famous test right
one of the drinking things is water the other one is water laced with cocaine and if you've got a single rat in that box guess what he does he drinks the COC he does the cocaine water and tell he literally dies oh my God yeah I can't recall the name of the researcher uh we'll have it in the show notes yeah and we'll include a link to the study this guy thought wait a minute wait a
minute so they tried to prove look at how addicting this cocaine is and you know this is why you that we can't allow it anywhere anytime and he thought wait a minute maybe they've got this wrong maybe it's the isolation that is causing this rat to feel like such Despair and such depression that hey why not do the cocaine and so what he did was he
created rat parks and did the exact same thing one was just water one was cocaine laced water and guess what happened where it was a community of rats not a single rat that's amazing the use of the cocaine water plunged right so I think that if we're mindful about all of these things that rather than saying that's bad let's ban it no you can't do that let's make math
illegal right and rather than that let's be cognizant of these types of occurrences let's try to figure out things that can amarate them and and then kind of move forward it's like you know AI I I know that you have done some like by the way one of the uh secondary effects of getting ready for you is I've got to reserve like 10 hours of my time
to listen to all of your podcast and stuff because you seem to be interested in exactly the same things I'm interested in like AI companions AI mental therapy totally yeah that's where my head was Gone with that example yeah like I have that on a use case thing I wrote several years ago like they were on there and I showed it to some people
who were not into Ai and like the the visceral reaction against was was so overwhelming and I'm like listen I I I we're we're caring for my nearly 98-year-old mother-in-law and we're very lucky because we get to have her live with us give her companionship all that kind of stuff but there was a a period where I was at a rehab place for elderly people and I gotta tell you man
I do not want that fate because they're alone in their room they're like I'm really not exaggerating when I said I was walking to one room to visit somebody and the cries of will somebody please come help me well somebody you know talk to me one of one of the nurses said to me that like the hottest item on that floor was a radio or a TV they didn't have
they didn't have enough for everyone and so my my thesis is like of course if you have the ability to like take care of an elderly person then by all means do that but life isn't perfect and I tell you if if I couldn't be taken care for example of my mother-in-law with my wife I would want her to have companionship you know chat and like how cool would it be if
she we could animate all of her grandchildren and children and she could have conversations with them and then like I get it I get the onc county Valley right and like but they're not real okay the first versions of these might not be that great but like mental health I think that a lot of people actually might be better served by uh AI large language models trained infinite
patience exactly infinite patience no judgment yeah all all all of the things that people amazing memory yeah amaz exact all of those things and so I look at those things and I'm like where do I sign up man I mean like this just makes a ton of sense to me and yet this push back of not no no no it has to be a human therapist that like and I'm for
those listening I'm not arguing against human therapist right I think here too this sort of senatur model that's half human half AI will emerge as kind of revolutionary in uh mental health uh uh discussions and things like that but I think that this idea that no it's got to be this or nothing is never that it's never that right and so like am I
just completely off base here or or what do you think I I think you're hitting on all the good points I mean like I would say I always view these things as like two possible Futures and it's fun to talk about them as dichotomies and polarities because they frame sort of the contrasting outcomes a bunch but in reality it's always a mix of both simultaneously right like people do good
stuff happens bad stuff happens like people are going to with the sort of NPCs uh you know being infused with far more intelligence to the point where they're no longer non-playable and they're like super engaging sort of AI characters that you can talk to I think there's going to be huge benefits to that right like you mentioned certainly
like you know if you're an elderly person and this this like chatbot has like all the context of your life presumably because you have a huge digital footprint literally you've been creating your digital twin and it can kind of keep you anchored and tethered in reality and engage with you on the topics that you care about and make you feel heard Listen to Like that's amazing
and on the other hand yeah there's going to be the whole AI girlfriend boyfriend AI relationship craze period and maybe people are going to use it unhealthy to the point of going back to like a Cartman and the Mountain Dew in the vein analogy of like you know the World of Warcraft Cartman episode where his mom's coming in swapping out the poop tray and
like giving him the new like whatever Hot Pockets and here you go here's the new you know like Amazon Prime just droned in your new Mountain Dew that you just Jack straight in both will happen right but that's just how like it's a free country at least you know in the west like that's how it ought to play out but it's also binary in other ways people painted and you brought up a
great example of like oh well like we need to have like real teachers or we need to have like real therapists and nobody's saying all of these folks need to be replaced I think people are so quick to fast forward to replacement scenario of the same thing with creators too it's like we're all just replaced by digital twins hey maybe that will happen
for some longtail of content that maybe should have been automated anyway but I think like in in the scenario of these sort of like um uh uh like on toone like human expert you know kind of roles that we have I think you can scale that relationship so much more by having as a teacher this came up with in an episode with Sal Con like you know like you've
got your infinite always on teaching assistant that's like available for the students when you're not there so the students not like bothering you on Sunday where te students that are perhaps you know like re reaching a different level of proficiency with a curriculum and maybe you're struggling in other aspects to round that out so everyone like you know completes the
curriculum together and it's the same thing with with chatbots where like you know I'm talking to Alan Allison Darcy the robot CEO like it's it's interesting we talked to one of their patients too and this kid's like genen Z kid basically is like yo I can talk to this thing whenever I want so if I'm starting my day it's almost like I felt like this
kid was using it as like positive affirmations during the day and then sort of like a diary whenever like like you know stress or anxiety popped up too high and to be able to do that in the moment you need it the most I think is just so powerful and I think that's like you know it's it's a yes and versus and either or I think you probably still
want to go have those calls in person and that's where it can get interesting like I was talking to a CEO of uh one of these like sort of coaching platforms who will remain unnamed uh uh which is basically like you're saying that they empowered their coaches with all these like perception capabilities too so like you're pointed at a person you could
look at like what is their facial expression what is the likelihood that they're feeling excited not EXC and like it was like ter Ator vision for like a coaching call and it was almost like too much data for them they were like holy crap this is weird so I think to your point maybe it'll take a younger generation that is far more aamz to
these type of capabilities you know to sort of start taking advantage of those signals and even include them in practices right because as you mentioned earlier which I think is such a beautiful you know depiction of what always plays out people are at the top of the hierarchy the experts are always the most averse to adopting this Tech like of course the Harvard Sanford MDS
that are making a money like a boatload of money off of like you know therapy let's say in this case or like you know are going to be averse about what like you know some second wrong therapist can now augment themselves with AI and offer this thing it's going to be competitive against mine but I think we'll see that always play out where the people that
are sort of The Underdogs or the people that are new to this are far more cool with the tech right and so chat Bots I'll end on this is see is like another like these AI um I've been very fascinated by character. which is obviously created by uh you know some of the founders of the seminal Transformer paper but like you see this it's like really popular
amongst Yen gen Z and younger and you see the Reddit pages about this stuff and you see like the in quotes AI characters or NPCs that folks are authoring it's amazing and they're spending millions and millions of like there are millions and millions of chats that are created with all of these folks because it's second nature it feels like
duh to them cuz they're growing up in video games seeing these NPCs sort of evolve whereas for us it feels like it kind of came out of nowhere and as this like Abomination and we're sort of way more averse to it as this thing um whereas like I don't know this just feels like Siri on steroids and it's just now Siri has a bunch of different personas and based on the context now
our AI assistant can be empow embodied as a talkable maybe visually embodied agent maybe then full 3d embodied agent and um you know we can this is a more intuitive way of interfacing with them yeah and uh it's uh one of the things I think I've been lucky in in that I was I've always been incredibly voraciously curious about like I love new tech I
love all kinds of new tech now does all of it work no a lot of it doesn't yeah most most of it doesn't right and so I I ended up uh running up quite a bill on like I have the uh DVD holder with a hundred I you come and we can watch one of aund movies and then streaming Jim you a really bad investment well with that piece of Hardware but I I I definitely think that
one of the things you need to do to humanize right it's like I I hadn't I I love techno music right and so I can't I I can't use that for most members of my generation but I was listening to this great song and it's kind of like come with me and and you'll never be alone Etc and I had this image for like how do you human eyes how do you get people to
be like really excited about digital twins get well you got to go to their emotions right so what what about a two-minute video that has some kind of really evocative music playing at the same time that's starts with and this is harsh but like you got to go for those emotions that starts with a doctor coming out looking at a pair of parents with the look on his face of I'm so
sorry and those parents and those parents like just breaking down and then showing what creating a digital twin of that child who had that disease and finding a cure right like two different pictures emerge and to to me you've got to emphasize well being 100% cognizant of all of the problems that present themselves right because I I'm not going
to try to be Peng glossy in here and say oh it's going to solve everything no it's gonna actually cause a lot of new problems but better problems in my opinion and yeah if you get to choose do I want to live in a world where my grandchildren's children can stay alive because they had a digital twin and the AI was able to do search a 100 million vectors and find the four that was going
to be the right cure for them hell yes I do totally yeah I mean it's also interesting because we're in a place um where all this data kind of exists right we've got these islands of data that are sort of sharded and sitting around and we're not really even putting it together in interesting ways um you know so I I am very excited about that I am
curious when you think about sort of this is one of the positions I've evolved a little bit on because previously I was in the everything's a remix camp pretty much what you're describing and I've had some empathy for independent creators in this which is the following that the Playbook that you know the large Tech players are playing out let's say open AI to pick on them
for a second is sort of like you train on everything right you you so you scrape the public web and there's of course this funny euphemism of publicly available data which is like anything you can access with a browser and internet connection um and of course it seems like YouTube ain't going to do anything about it because they're like
wait it would be critical of us even though our terms of service let us train so it's interesting you got this place where everyone's training on publicly available data and so that is in a weird way like a distillation of all human knowledge and creativity right documented human knowledge and creativity and it's like holy crap in a sense web 1.0 1.0 and Web 2.0 was like
you know when you had the ability to sort of like create text and image content we were creating this digital twin we were co-creating this digital twin as a hive mind right and now from that digital twin we're you know like extracting and Distilling intelligence whatever however you want to frame that but I think the problem in all of that
is the Playbook that the Open the Eyes of the world are setting is like well you go train on everything you raise a bunch of venture capital and then you go and like retroactively cut deal with sort of the largest IP holders the people that have like legal teams that can come after you and so like yeah let's go like get the Atlantic down let's go talk to Shutterstock and not
like get rid of these like you know water marks in our you know Dolly data set or whatever and like fix all these things and that what the people left holding the bag in that world is sort of like the no-name YouTube you know insert art station whatever Creator and that's where I feel like you know and it's I I know from technical standpoint
attribution is very challenging and how can you really tell Providence like removing duplicates from Lion 5B itself as like a like a a huge technical undertaking right and so you know but I can't help but feel some empathy for folks that are like yeah you know that's cool but like all the joural maybe with the exception of New York Times that let's say has enough of a war chest to
sue open AI everyone else is started taking their Pennies on the dollar right now be like oh you know uh Elvis has left the building you know cat's out of the bag let's freaking take the money while we can right now as the sort of AD funded search you know uh you know kind of traffic model is is kind of on a Down trajectory and yeah the people get that
screwed into this or the Indie creators what do you have to say about that because like I have yet to see a business model where people like well we just need to create a new Marketplace that renates creators and like and give them what like a fraction of a fraction of a scent like I haven't seen an economic model that sort of makes sense
there and perhaps it's fitting that even in the video space which is sort of this higher level of abstraction of creating content really you can make passive money on YouTube and maybe to exent like Twitter I'll get like a 100 bucks every two weeks I guess that's kind of cool but that's not a living right so how do you feel about that where sort of the
Indies are left holding the bag and the people that have like that are sort of up higher up the hierarchy that you described that are maybe not on the top of it but are closer up are still getting benefits of this transition that's taking place even though they're criticizing it the most publicly yeah I I have like you tremendous empathy with the indd cre s and would I we we have
not yet found a business model that works perfectly we're it does not stop us from looking because we think that it is a major thing that needs to be addressed and like if we're picking sides here I'm on the side of that Indie Creator and the idea though is we we we tend to history in the world is a movie it's not a snapshot right so let's not forget
that Steve Jobs and was were in a garage and look at Apple now it doesn't mean there were others like IDM that there was huge companies that controlled Computing back then right totally and and what were they trying to do they were doing everything they possibly could to make sure that Apple didn't work didn't win totally and and and it's you know shump an economist called it
creative destruction and that that's what markets are markets are Perpetual creative destruction machines totally and people who try to freeze winners and losers in place don't understand the way that markets work that's called calcification right that's going to shatter yes it's stasis it's debt yeah and and this idea oh like and it's also incredibly
intellectually arrogant it's like no no we know everything there is to know now and we're freezing it and these guys at the top are going to stay at the top and these guys here no you can't create no you can't innovate right yeah so I always remind people of the idea that the monster companies of today were not monster companies 20 years ago totally
yeah and the idea that the monster companies of 20 years from now are going to be the same companies of today I don't think so I wouldn't bet that way right as long as there is a relatively free market as long as there are relative rules of law in place and will they get M murky and will they have to be redone yes they will right and like if you look at laws that were passed in
I don't know let let's make it even kind of current 1950 like what percentage of those laws are Antiquated and make no sense and are actually retardant of change totally a lot of a lot of them and so I definitely think that yes it's a problem but I am optimistic that the markets will figure out a way to make sure that that Indie Creator ultimately
is paid in some form I don't have that yet but it doesn't mean we're not looking for it doesn't mean that there won't be a lot of other people that'll finally like figure that model out I mean I don't know I've gotten pitched on ethereum and chain of uh ownership and provance and all that kind of stuff I I'm not smart enough to to know what the
technical difficulties are there but I definitely think with as many people thinking about it as possible it will emerge and interestingly enough is you not to just pick on open AI but the big companies like they're not they're not trying to be your ally here they're really trying to keep their advantage as by the way as would I if I was the incentives for them are to do that right
yeah exactly right and and so my argument is to say there are other incentive structures and as long as those inent incentive structures are not thwarted by political iCal capture regulatory capture all of the what do you see them all doing right now they are trying their best to capture The Regulators yep and again rather than you
know shake our fingers and say that's bad that's awful it's it's the it's the inevitable outcome if you're you know a trillion dollar Corporation and want to stay in trillion dollar Corporation of course you're going to try to capture the regulator mobilize your army of lawyers and yeah go go do some Hing of course yeah exactly and like look at Napster right so Napster
came and it's it's like people forget Pandora's box right they always say oh we're opening Pandora's Box people who don't know the story of Pandora's Box don't know that the at the bottom of Pandora's Box was what po that that was what was at the bottom of bandora's box and so so the idea and you saw it in like with a when VHS came out and was really big the movie
industry went batshit crazy trying to suppress it where do they make most of their money uh from or not now but for a long period of Time the movie companies were making all of their money from the video rentals and oh totally and all that people don't know that they did a huge they spent armies of lawyers against those companies they tried to
suppress it every way they could say with the music industry they did everything they could to suppress the new technologies I mean recently an example that came up because his mother had shared it it's like and I had this post go like insanely viral I think it's actually now my most liked tweet which is weird because it's like a heartfelt
piece on Aaron Schwarz who was like so crazily prosecuted for I don't know scraping J store articles which just feels like innocuous today given hey let's just scrape the public internets and sell it for 20 bucks a month everything's gravy it's funny how the Overton window shifts but every time you're totally right there has been that aversion and it seems like it especially
in the case of creation empowering more people to do something that previously few people could do especially when it comes to creative self-expression I think on net on balance that's going to be a disproportionately good thing there's going to be some of these like misinfo disinfo thing and maybe there's like everyone loves calling it slop these days there's just all this AI slop
that's coming to the internet but I think we'll like get good at identifying the slop and sort of cutting through the noise and maybe there will be that cream that rises to the top to your point the you know power laws in these various niches playing out and so I think regardless of the ethical quandaries and I sure there's Solutions there like uh
you know somebody said recently to me uh John Baron one of the like Nerf Folks at Google was saying like it'd be kind of cool to have like a model that was purely trained on real world imagery like a generative AI model just to give the art community a sense of what can these models do if you just image observable things in the real world and I think we all might be very
surprised with how much capability that already infuses in these models uh because what we do are sort of like you know it's like through our the lens of our Consciousness and then our you know sort of our our artistic Endeavor we're sort of filtering reality and remixing it in interesting ways anyway so I'm excited to see over all where that goes
out but yeah it's funny to see the incumbents change it's funny to see the rise of new entrance that are trying to Dethrone the Inc comat it's funny to see open source and the folks that are championing it obviously stability huge in the space there but also Zuck imagine meta would be like the Bastion of Open Source like I did not have that on my
bingo card for last year and it's been really cool to see that play out as well yeah I agree and I could not agree more wholeheartedly with more is better getting these tools in the hands of as many people as we can I think is a good thing because cognitive diversity it's like you can't make a guy or woman no matter how smart they are no matter how creative they are you can
never make them create a list of things that would never occur to them yeah exactly and and so what doesn't occur to me might occur to you that's how we build the human Colossus that's how all of you know you you can say the hive mind I prefer the metaphor of the human Colossus right like like all of us are and and it's emerging already and then
AI is just supercharging it y yep yep and so you have to have cognitive diversity to make that actually work because you it the there is no small cabal of PE again the arrogance of it just offends me is no cabal of people who know what's best for everyone right to yeah and the arrogance of thinking that leads to things like the guy uh closing the patent office in the late
19th century because everything's been invented right like okay we're done that actually happened right that's amazing that's and and David Deutsch is one of my favorite thinkers on this cool where he where where he's talking about like what hey what were people saying about the internet and uh nuclear and quantum physics back in 1900 they weren't saying
anything because no one was thinking about that particular those particular things right we we we fall again human OS right we fall into this trap of thinking we know everything and we don't we're just scratching the surface humanity is really young and like I just saw a video the first movie ever taken was a pope of the Catholic church right
the guy and the guy was born in 1810 okay okay for to to put this into context my great-grandfather was born in 1835 that's how not that long ago yeah no we we are we are babies we are babies and this this Innovation curve that is kind of going vertical like yeah will it cause a lot of chaos and a lot of uh creative destruction yes it will but I
suspect that the more people that are have these tools available to them the more diverse the people who come at the world from different points of view I'm a big believer like India should have their own version of AI so should bang Sovereign AI yeah Sovereign AI right because like I I different things are are more important to different cultures
like okay like at the same time isn't it becoming a very tempting form of exerting geopolitical control right like if you own like like again the window through which you see the world if you can own the window through which you query and generate knowledge oh my God that sounds extremely uh strategically beneficial right and so you know we'll see maybe what like a bipolar you know
like kind of maybe an oligopoly of like you know kind of uh like models that control the flow of this information and then like a long tail of Open Source models like how do you see that playing out or is it truly going to be you know Singapore is going to have their own Sovereign AI thing and it's going to be just as good as like you know I don't
know and but maybe Germany decides to change take like some forked version of the US one because we're more there's more V diagram of overlap or yeah kind of curious what kind of world do you see there yeah so I have a long history of being wrong by the way so let's get that out there let's go but but I definitely think again the the most utility that a
particular type model or uh particular uh Arrangement yields that those models usually win right and so will some totalitarian systems use that to crush the people yeah and that really sucks but do I think that the cognitive diversity of a country that is free like the United States do I think that that's the one I'm going to bet on yeah I will definitely bet on that one right
because diversity it's like for example what do you do if you're sitting in Beijing and you type in tenan square or you or you you ask their version of chat GPT hey tell me about TN and square and it's like no oh by the way and you've been flagged and by the way somebody's going to come to your door exactly and by the way you're like yeah like your rating went
down certain number of points and now you're going to get a shittier you know on your just went into the basement exactly and so again yeah can it's like the my my point of view is for the most part all of these Innovations are neutral they can be used for bad right Like a Knife oh totally yeah like for cut a butter or stab somebody yeah or stab
somebody right and so you know you you forget that it's the way the human uses this particular tool that determines the outcome now I'm very long human creativity human Freedom uh like you know there's a guy Julian Simon who wrote a book called The Ultimate resource and it was human creativity and he actually did a bet with one of the club of Rome doomers for
uh back in I think 1970 in which the Dober was saying we're running out of everything we won't have any of these incredible things and Jillian Simon was like dude you are so wrong you you're forgetting you're forgetting about we humans and we're really good at innovating and figuring out and so they actually did a bet and and Simon
let the other guy Erick I think his name was who he let him pick the super rare Min minerals and and the BET was Simon said 10 years from now on an inflation adjusted basis all of them are going to be cheaper and this other guy is like you're out of your mind yeah fix resour gonna get out of course yeah Simon one right so this idea of scarcity it's like
humans for most of our history lived in scarcity and so that's that's in our programming too that that has conditioned us for Millennia and and now we are getting into a situation where digital at least abundance is a POS is a possibility and like I call it the digital divide right like the EU to me seems to be committing suicide like what's going on and they're empowering
the like the people at the top of the totem pole right who has the ability to go Implement you know dma and gdpr compliance it's the large tech companies that have huge teams and it's going to stifle Innovation from the startups that we're seeing the cracks of calcification already in some of these Giants and like you're preventing sort of like the
natural antibody process or whatever you want to say from like circulating in the free market and sort of like you know um uh uh dethroning and putting a better option forward it's weird yeah exactly and you've got to that's why like if you understand the underlying architecture of a system you can make reasonable assumptions about what's going to happen
right so like back in 1982 I was writing about and all my friends teased me and said I was a lunatic but I I'm a big Journal keeper and this is the one that actually includes this prediction that I made this from 1982 when I was 20 when I was 22 and I was writing about the fact that the old Soviet Union had to collapse and and it and it had to collapse because the underlying system
that maintained it was very fragile right yeah yeah and and so like people like that could never happen and then it you know like oh you're too idealistic right this can never happen and then it happen then is history yeah yeah exactly exactly well I could talk to you for hours this has been uh so much fun I'm getting I'm getting the hook from my
nanny here uh but at at the end of all of our podcasts we we ask our guests we're gonna make you the emperor of the world uh except you you're you're not one of those guys who can shut everything down you you can't put it you you can't have one powerful AI that you control and everyone only gets access to that you can't put anyone in a reeducation camp and you can't kill
anybody but what you can do is we're gonna hand you a magical microphone uh and you can speak two things into it two things okay and you're going to incept the entire population of the world everyone is going to wake up the next day with those two things in their minds and one big difference they're going to say you know what unlike all the other times I'm
actually gonna act on these two things what are you gonna what are you gonna incept into the world's population one hell of a question you certainly eliminated the obvious a you know my my dictatorial Tendencies will now need to be suppressed um just kidding let me think about this for a second so I know what I'm one of them probably two I think one would be
to just if you are afraid of something just go and try it I think as you mentioned we are very averse to change we're very averse to uncertainty and I think especially in this time where the rate of change is only increasing and every couple months something new comes out that makes you requestion your fundamental assumptions about the world
stop trying to predict what's going to happen and just go play with this stuff whether you're a knowledge worker creative and the moment you do that it will stop seeming like this Kaiju monster that's going to stop you from the hyperbole that even like creators such as myself perhaps perpetuate and certainly the media does and you'll
realize it's more like this chaotic golden retriever I like to joke that you can like coax into doing cool stuff for you to forward your agenda so just go play with the tools especially if you're choosing to like push back against this maybe go dabble with it first that would be one thing especially for the folks that are very you know resistant to the changes that are
happening I think the second thing I'd love to change and this really is like it's like I feel like we need to have a way for people to actually own their data we're taking shards and facets of ourselves and putting it into all of these amazing platforms right like Google has a facet of my human activity and my thinking in it um apple has a huge facet of it right like all these
social media platforms have different facets of what I'm doing you know Twitter is sort of like my realtime Journal so like and I wish we could Empower users to somehow take the aggregate of their digital twin such that they own it and they can query it and take it with them I think the technology for that exists the incentives do not at the moment and I
wish the incentives did and we could talk about why we've either got the paid Apple model or we've got the ad funded model and nothing else seems to be you know uh lucrative at scale that's another thing I could change and if fact maybe like the third piece if I could like uh I know you said only two but if I like drop the first one the third one I would say to platform creators
especially who own distribution if they could wake up and realize this treadmill exhausting treadmill that's like slowly getting cranked up it's like boiling the Frog nobody notices it just yet I think if they could find a way that like optimizes not for watch time not for Revenue but some sort of like I don't know what the right metric is but like
Creator Wellness is being a proxy for it like satisfaction from creation where you don't feel like you're feeding the Beast the number of journalists I've talked to after breaking some scoop on this podcast have talked to a bunch of Jos and they all talk about oh well you know how press is it's like feeding the Beast I'm like that's an awful metaphor
and like why do you have to keep feeding the Beast can we make this something that's more symbiotic I think path finding and finding that's like model that keeps in mind advertisers consumers and creators with them at the center of this multisided Marketplace would be very exciting and I think the incentive right now is to keep the money printing
machine going and I hope some of these large companies will not be worried about short form video competition or whatever and actually try to find an experiment to find something that really does like that is good for the mental health of creators and consumers alike why giving advertisers what they want and so those would be my two if I had to refine the third one we are very
sympatico because I agree with all three of those uh on your first one uh Joseph Campbell the heroes Journey had a great quote which is the treasure you seek is in the cave you fear to enter oh yeah totally the obstacle is the way in a way yeah exactly exactly well this has been amazingly fun I was really looking forward to it you did than you did not
disappoint uh quickly where can our listeners and viewers find your work and you totally yeah so uh go to my website baval doin that's b l a w.in I've got links to all my stuff there uh if you're interested in being entertained check out my Tik Tok and YouTube channels Billy FX Billy FX and if you're interested in being educated about the cool new research Primitives
creative technology that's coming out there uh you can follow me on on Twitter SLX or LinkedIn I've also got a newsletter called The Creative Tech digest you can check that out as well and it's all neatly linked on my one pager website b. in perfect thank you so much for all of your time learned a lot from you thank you for having me was a pleasure e