← TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast
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- [00:07]
Marty
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.
- [00:19]
Pablo Antonio
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
- [00:29]
Marty
I mean, that's part of the bull case for bitcoin.
- [00:32]
Pablo Antonio
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be.
- [00:37]
Marty
Pablo.
- [00:37]
DC
D.C. welcome to the show.
- [00:40]
Marty
Thanks for having us.
- [00:42]
DC
Well, thanks for coming and thanks for your work. We've got a hard stop in about 56 minutes, so let's just jump right up into it. You guys went a bit viral last month because you're showing how easy it is to, to buy fentanyl with, with food stamps and San Francisco. Why did you guys decide to go make this video to prove this, this particular route to fentanyl acquisition exist.
- [01:08]
Pablo Antonio
I can jump in on this. Yeah, Marty, thanks for having me. Longtime listener, first time caller. But yeah, we started basically six Club in San Francisco trying to find ways to help the city and just make it like, the best place possible. It is very rare we had like, such amount of wealth creation in a city and like, things have degraded and we just like, it's just a side project with a bunch of friends who all have, you know, day jobs. We all take time off our jobs to put in time to find ways to help the city. And we have different projects in the works. One of them was that we stumbled into a lot of fraud that was happening just by sniffing around. And we just wanted to show it to people and say, hey, we think the best disinfectant is sunlight. And if we have any chance on improving the city, the best first order of business is plug the holes where the water is flowing out and then pour in clean water later.
- [02:31]
Marty
I can speak a bit to how we ran into this too. Mario. Have you ever been in a developing country and you come out of the airport or the train station and there's people like, taxi, taxi. And they're hassling you to do. To sell you something?
- [02:52]
Pablo Antonio
Yes.
- [02:53]
DC
Yeah. Costa Rica. And Newark, New Jersey.
- [02:56]
Marty
Yeah. Yes, New Jersey. Of course. They come with their hair slicked back. No, we basically experienced this at the farmer's market. You know, like, you go to the farmer's market in SF in specific ones in particular, and you can just see, you know, these people, you know, a lot of them like, you Know, sort of older ladies, funnily enough, like, and you can see them doing this to people who have the EBT paper coupons. You know, they're like sell, sell, chasing them around. And this is how we got down this road of like what's going on here? Right? And we ended up going to the farmer market basically every week, every Sunday for a couple months. And we had cameras, we had friends. One funny thing that's not widely known by the way about food stamps is they are not acid tested. So like how many assets you have is like not part of the eligibility criteria. Which means if you like, you know, just quit your job at Google and you're starting at Facebook in six months, technically during those six months you're eligible for food stamps. Right. So one friend of ours basically got an EBT card, perfectly legit, all accurate, and went there and you know, they give you one interesting thing about EBT that we should say is the surveillance on it is quite good. In normal places if you go to a Walmart and you try to buy a non EBT eligible item and pay for it with food stamps, it won't work at all. It's all tracked at the point of checkout. There's this beautiful national system called Alert that tracks SNAP usage. But the big loophole of the farmer market is they'll give you paper coupons for an EBT swipe. And not only that, but they have these other matching funds we talked about a bit in our video that get sort of blended in. So you can take say 30 bucks of food stamp from your EBT, get 90 bucks of paper coupons. Now it's untraceable because it's paper. And there's this whole sort of ecosystem of people who are there who are willing to buy that from you for let's say 45 bucks. Now you've turned 30 bucks of food stamp balance into 45 bucks cash.
- [05:45]
DC
It's insane. And how prevalent is this
- [05:49]
Sponsor Host 1
in terms
- [05:50]
DC
of an acquisition mechanism for drugs specifically?
- [05:57]
Marty
Yeah, you know, we, we, the other angle that we had on this is we went and we just interviewed a number of street addicts people by the way, people like to say, you know, homeless. That's sort of like. But a lot of them that is not true aren't homeless.
- [06:15]
Pablo Antonio
They have homes.
- [06:16]
Marty
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like a lot of them are in these, what are called SROs, which is single room occupancy, which is basically, you know, government provided housing and a lot of. And you know, we'll get into this a little bit later. But one crazy thing, really crazy thing in California is you, like, by state law, they. They don't do state funding for sober housing. You know, they call it housing first, which means, like, yeah, you know, we fund these SROs. And people explicitly who are still, like, actively, you know, using drugs are allowed in these buildings, to live in these buildings. You can imagine how hard this is for people who are trying to get clean. They're now next to people who are doing it. And a lot of them are not even actually homeless. They're street addicts. They're, like, in there at night. They're out during the day or on their way around, in many cases, getting their fix. And what we found is if you just walk up to them and offer them a coffee, a lot of them are really happy to talk to someone who is connecting them in a human way. Like, not just as, like, you know, a cop or a caseworker or whatever. And, you know, you take them to the corner store, we both get a coffee, they're happy to just volunteer, like, the whole story. They're like, yeah, you know, here's how much it costs me every month to buy the. You know, here's how, like, I get my. My funding. You know, I use my. My food stamps. You know, I don't need that because you get free food at this other place. And, like, they'll just walk you through the whole, whole story. And it is very sad because, you know, you can kind of see how they're being farmed in a sense. It's like, you know. You know, you have all of these, like, this whole, like, NGO complex that's like, you know, a bunch of pretty well paid people who, like, are like, you know, sort of do Gooder presenting, but they're, like, actively enabling these guys. Addictions.
- [08:10]
Pablo Antonio
Yeah. The worst part is let's jump into
- [08:12]
DC
that Do Gooder ngo.
- [08:14]
Marty
This is a big skill. Oh, go ahead, Baba.
- [08:19]
Pablo Antonio
Oh, no, I was just gonna say that. Like, the worst part, like. Like, what did. What it is really heartbreaking is when we started meeting the moms of a lot of guys that are out in the street and like, it really. That's. That's. That's a rust one. That's a rough one because, like, it is very. I look, it's not great when you're in the bus and there's like a crazy person screaming at you and, like, throwing poop or something. But it is a different. Like, you get a different side of the story when you hear about her mom. Like. Like this. This guy's mom, like, is. He's out in the street like a crazy person, like on crazy drugs. But they have, you know, they have families at some point. They were five and they were a kid. Right. And like, you talk to the mom, you see the pictures of the guy when he was a kid, and it's like, it really. It's really rough. And I mean, yeah, these people are not. Shouldn't be demonized. Like, they're like, they need help, but, like, they're receiving.
- [09:26]
Marty
He might be breaking up on us. We might be losing them.
- [09:29]
DC
Well, the good thing is with this.
- [09:31]
Pablo Antonio
But what they're receiving is not health. Yeah, yeah, but what they're receiving is not health. It's just like what they're receiving from the NGOS is like being. They're being enabled to do more drugs.
- [09:43]
DC
How did you get in contact with some of their mothers?
- [09:50]
Marty
So you asked how did we get in contact with the moms? There's this amazing organization, actually, and we found them afterwards as a result of doing this investigation of. They're called Mothers Against Drug Deaths. And they're working really. I think they're a really great organization. They're basically one of their big things that they're pushing on right now is fixing that sober housing law that we were talking about. About, hey, actually, it's totally insane that we specifically require these sort of permanent supportive housing to be like, drugs allowed. You know, like, we should be able to fund sober housing. We should be doing that instead. And they're. They all, like, every one of them has, like, a kid who either is currently addicted or like, was addicted and has recovered. They have some really powerful stories. I think one of the most poignant that I saw was one of the moms was telling us about how basically she was scrolling Facebook and she'd been having this struggle for years with her son, had a hard time, was sort of in drugs, in remission or what's it called? Recovery, Relapse. And there's this video on the Facebook wall of a guy on bart, which is the train system here in sf, sort of passed out next to a puddle of puke. And there's all of these guys in the comments saying mean things. They're like, oh, this is what happens when we don't, you know, like, have order on the train. Like, don't, don't. Don't enforce the laws. Like, you know, this is fucked up. And it is obviously, objectively, there's some people being lipstick mean about it. And she goes in there and she's like, that's him. Right. So she put a comment be like, this is. I've been looking for him. This is my son. And a bunch of those same people who had commented, like, you know, sort of nasty things about him, like, reply to that, and they're like, we're so sorry. That's really messed up. You know, like, we think that you can, you know, like, people. People have this sort of, like, I think, dual thing. And it's very sad that you see it where it's like, you know, learn helplessness. It's like, okay, this stuff is, like, really destroying our public space, but, you know, whatever. There's nothing we can do about it. And that turns into, like, a sort of callousness. You know, you see people who are, like, really having a bad time, and you don't really see them as, like, a person versus as a disturbance. Right. But I think there's this really sort of unfortunate dynamic, at least so far in the Bay Area, where people all of the, like, oh, let's be compassionate to the homeless people. It boils down to let them keep doing drugs. And so Mothers Against Drug Deaths, I think, is a really powerful organization because they're like, no, how about we actually, you know, crack down on the drug use? Like, you know, get people, like, into involuntary treatment. Like, do treatment first instead of housing first. Like, all of these things because, like, they actually care about their kids getting out of this.
- [13:29]
DC
Yeah. I mean, that gets to the key question. Is this. Is this problem been allowed to persist because of bad policy that comes from a good place, or is the intended policy, well, not maybe the explicit, but the implicit policy to continue a degradation of civility in public spaces, to force the state of California to step in and demand more tax dollars to try to fix this so money can be funneled to cronies and NGOs and other agencies.
- [14:12]
Marty
Yep. Yeah, I think it's a lot of both. Pablo, do you want to speak to that?
- [14:21]
Pablo Antonio
Yeah, I think it is a dual problem on the government side and on the NGO side. They're kind of like. But I think the winning thing to get the problem fixed is I think, on the ground, sort of like with civilians that see the problem up close and are directly affected and amplifying that voice as much as possible. And I think even. I'm sure there's certainly bad actors and, like, NGOs and government officials, but they're also, like, good people that, you know, actually do care. And they're like, hey, like. Like there is another way. Like, we, like, look at this guy. Look at like here, listen to the story of like the moms and like, look at like how ridiculous it is to actually get drugs with like government money. If we close this loop, we can get help. These people actually. And yes, there should probably be some, some, some crackdown on anyone who's doing like, bad, like illegal stuff or like funneling money in like a bad way. But I wouldn't like go out and say like that everyone in the government is like, terrible and everyone, the NGOs is like a terrible person. Like, I'm sure they're good people, but I think there are sort of like these perverse incentives in which maybe their bosses are like blinded to like, what the situation on the ground is and how it's not like it has improved somewhat with the new mayor. I would say, I would say with Lurie, like, basically all the things that matter have improved. In my opinion. They could go faster and they could go like even deeper. But yeah, that's what I would say.
- [16:20]
Sponsor Host 1
So, freaks, this work was brought to you by our good friends at bitkey.
- [16:22]
Sponsor Host 2
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- [17:23]
Sponsor Host 1
So freaks, this rip is brought to
- [17:24]
Sponsor Host 2
you by good friends at Crowd Health. I've been a happy Crowd Health member for almost five years now. My wife and I have had two children while we've been on Crowd Health and I actually just got the Last bill for third child funded. It was $6,157. Crowd health negotiated down to $2,309 and we only paid $500. The rest was crowdfunded by the crowd Health network. If you're sick of health insurance premiums and having to pay deductibles and getting ripped off at the hospital, join crowd health. It's an alternative way to pay for your health care. It's not health insurance. It's crowdfunded healthcare. As you can tell, they negotiate prices for you. You pay in cash. It's much cheaper. Overall, we're much happier. They have incredible perks. Go to join CrowdHealth.com TFTC to sign up. Five years on CrowdHealth.
- [18:08]
DC
Not looking back.
- [18:09]
Sponsor Host 2
Join CrowdHealth.com/TFTC. Use the promo code TFTC. Once you set up your account, you're going to get $99 a month for your subscription for the first three months.
- [18:18]
DC
I'll just say anecdotally, I've been to San Francisco three times in the last 10 years. 2016 went, my wife and her family, we went to wine country for a weekend and spent a day in San Francisco. I think it was like MLK day. We spent the Monday, Monday there. We parked our car in Golden Gate park, got robbed immediately. Took all of our luggage, passports and stuff. 2019, that's horrible, man. 2019 went back to wine country with my wife, just the two of us. We stayed at a hotel in San Francisco. The night before, we drove up to Napa and as soon as we get out of the Uber, there's some guy pleasuring himself on the steps of the hotel that we were staying at. I was like, oh, welcome back to San Francisco. I will say the last time I was there was November of last year. Granted, I was staying in the Presidio, but I had some time to walk around. It was much better. I didn't see and actually there's actually a fourth time I was in there in 2018. I actually walked from the top of the hill down through the Tenderloin and towards Market street to Squares headquarters. That was the worst I saw up close and personal. But when I was there in November, it actually seemed better than it was in 2019. The last time I was there, man.
- [19:41]
Marty
The new mayor is quite rate. I think you might have the highest approval rating of any mayor in the city.
- [19:48]
Pablo Antonio
In the country.
- [19:49]
Marty
Yes, rather like, like, you know, any mayor in the city. Pretty sure. Pretty sure he has the highest Approval rating of any marriage. Yeah. High in the country. Because, you know, it's just. There's still a long way to go. Like, I think, you know, we can get into this a bit later too. I think, you know, one thing that Pablo and I and our friends have been thinking a lot about is like, you know, what does it take to have, like, real, you know, civic ambition? You know, like, not just like, oh, fix this problem, make that, like, parking situation a little better, but like, hey, actually, you know, with like, how productive SF is, it should be like a really, like, great world city. It should be like something that people go and say, you know, like, wow, in a good way, but, you know, not just like, not wow, in a bad way.
- [20:40]
DC
Yeah. And Pablo, I think this is what we've bonded over over the years. I mean, it's your love of aesthetics and bringing back beauty into the world, which, I mean, the lived environment and the physical environment affects how, how you, how you react physically and mentally as an individual. And, and to this point, I mean, walking through the, like, I. I avoided San Francisco for seven, six years because of that, that physical reality situation that, that I experienced over, over multiple trips, which was nothing to do with the architecture, but, like, literally with filth on the streets and being accosted by homeless people either pleasuring themselves or trying to steal our luggage.
- [21:28]
Marty
Yep. Many such cases.
- [21:31]
Pablo Antonio
Yeah. I would say that San Francisco is, to me, as a non US Citizen, a person who's here visiting. It feels to me that San Francisco is the crown jewel of American cities. It's just so beautiful. The problem is that many times has been mismanaged and that makes sort of like, it makes the mismanagement worse in some way. The fact that you're mismanaging, like, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And the other problem, I think is that I think the Victorian houses are so incredibly beautiful and the city itself is so striking. The beauty is really striking. It sort of create this weird sort of checkmate situation. No, but of people not wanting to build and just like, oh, no, we should keep it as is, not disturb it.
- [22:40]
Marty
And
- [22:42]
Pablo Antonio
I think the Yimbys, for the most part, should embrace the fact that we should build more, but we should be more in an affordable way, but also way more beautiful and sort of like it should feel like a definite next level of a civilization that we should build. And you can't achieve that if you are not thinking that beauty needs to be a center of that and not just random stuff that you think is beautiful, but something that is tethered to the heritage of the place, but also has a view of the future of, we know where we're going, we have a certain view of how the world should be, and it's going to be great for everyone. And you're going to get on board because once you see it, you're going to fall in love with it and you're going to want to be where we're going. And that gets people excited. And as long as it's this vision of not only are we trying to make the best, we're also trying to include everyone. Basically, you can get everyone on board as long as you're making stuff that is beautiful and affordable. You can also make stuff that is not affordable in certain parts of the city. And that sort of, like, has this weird effect of the sponge that takes sort of, like the demand of the people who are super wealthy and the prices of all the other stuff go down. So either way, even if you don't have to only build affordable housing for the cost of living in San Francisco to go down, which is now, I would say, the major problem in San Francisco, the homelessness. And I'm sorry, I won't use the euphemisms, it's not a homelessness problem. The drug problem in San Francisco has improved. It is still a big problem that needs to be addressed, that's for sure. It's not like we're living, you know, in, like, Tokyo in which, like, there are no homeless in the street. There are homeless in the street. And that needs to be addressed. But housing is now the thing that is, like, just extremely painful for people, especially young people. If you've lived in San Francisco for 50 years and you own a home, you feel like you're the smartest person in the world. You bought a home for, like, nothing. And, like, an anthropic employee and an OpenAI employee are in this insane bidding war to buy your home for millions of dollars, and you bought it for nothing. Like, you feel like the smartest person ever. And it creates this situation in which if you're young and you're not, like, ultra wealthy, you're, like, screwed. And it's terrible for starting families and people at the beginning of their careers. So I think the angle there is not say either you shouldn't. I don't think the way out is to villainize the people who own homes or even the people that made a lot of money in tech trying to buy homes. The way out is we just need to convince both that we need to Build big and beautiful so that just everyone wins. And on top of that, the people who are priced out at San Francisco can also enjoy it and build families.
- [26:07]
DC
Well, how do we get back to that? Obviously you have this NIMBYism that exists only. And I think to your point about the Victorians in San Francisco being objectively beautiful and a lot of people not wanting to disturb that, I think that's because we've lost our way more than anything.
- [26:28]
Pablo Antonio
What we're going to do is we're going to make beautiful Greco futurism renders, are going to strike them of how beautiful everything is, and we're going to convince them that they need to be real and we need to do everything in our power to make it real, because they're going to be so beautiful that they won't be able to help themselves, but want to want it.
- [26:50]
DC
I agree. I mean, if you're not following Pablo, go follow him and it'll be in the show description. But I mean, you've been tweeting these Greco renderings for many years now.
- [27:03]
Sponsor Host 2
And it's like, how do you actually
- [27:04]
DC
go from that rendering to the reality?
- [27:07]
Sponsor Host 2
How do you convince developers specifically?
- [27:09]
Pablo Antonio
Well, we have a first project in the works, a monument that I designed for Aaron Schwartz, an Internet hero that had very strong values for an open Internet sort of discord. Internet values that most tech people,
- [27:32]
Marty
I
- [27:32]
Pablo Antonio
would say most people believe, but they just need to be reminded of, which is freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and privacy. There was like these three core values kind of counterbalance each other. And the plan is to have sort of like this, a new style really of like beauty and that is tethered to our humanity, that has a strong idea of the future and have this monument that has a marble bust that I had made of him that is currently at the inner archive installed on top of the monument. It's this stone bench that is inviting for people to sit on and admire the skyline of San Francisco. And that is sort of like the first beacon of like, hey, we want to create this future that is human and that has a connection to beauty. And it's sort of like this counter vision of what many times tech is now. So the plan is to have the monument face Salesforce Tower, sort of have it this sort of like two competing, competing visions of tech of like, do you want the corporate for profit or you want the open source nonprofit sort of like you want the glass towering structure, or do you want the inviting stone bench at a human scale? And so that's the angle to try to as a first project, sort of make it real and like show people. It's like, okay, this is where we want to go.
- [29:17]
Marty
Yeah, totally. The Aaron Monument is going to be really beautiful. It's going to be like actual stone. It's going to be Greco futuristic. I think zoomed out one step from this is you need existence proofs. You need proofs that this is possible. Because one of the, I think if you really zoom all the way out, San Francisco is very unique in that it is basically like kind of like spring loaded for greatness. There's like a lot of very smart people here. There's a lot of resources, there's a lot of capability, a lot of people who really know how to get stuff done. And yet if you look at an aerial photo, SF Today looks almost exactly the same as it did 70 years ago. You know, there's like the Salesforce tower is new, but it's like, it's not inspiring and it's very few things. And one part of the reason for that is because everyone sort of implicitly assumes it can't be done. There's a bunch of people in SF who are like, yeah, we can build a billion dollar company, we can build a fully autonomous robot factory in the middle of the desert in Nevada. We can go to space. But building a few buildings, like nice big buildings next to Golden Gate park, like the ones you see next to Central Park, Impossible. Don't even think about that. And until you bust through that with existence proofs, a statue, an actual building later that exists, that shows people actually. Yeah, you can make beautiful things. There's no law against it. It doesn't have to be a thing that looks like a stack of LEGO cubes. That's how I think you get the real snowball rolling on this.
- [31:02]
DC
Yeah, the Greco futurists is very inspiring. And it's another like, because that's, that's what I worry about like the, again going back to like the contractors, people that actually build these buildings. There's very few people that think about aesthetics and I think D.C. i'm not how. Not sure how familiar you are with like this show and like the intersection of bitcoin and urbanism. But it comes back to like time preference. Like a lot of these builders are incentivize to just get the cheapest materials, throw something up, use something cookie cutter because it's cheap, fast. And like how do we like I think the Thousand Year Home guys, everybody working on the brick masonry revitalism in the middle of America are doing an incredible job to bring back beautiful esthetics to small neighborhoods. But when it comes to building larger buildings and cities, like this Greco futurist aesthetic that you're really refining, Pablo is something that is inspiring and hopeful to me and something that I wish people would go after. But it's like, how do you convince these guys? And it was encouraging to see Spencer Pratt, I think, in one of his recent interviews, saying that they're going to begin bringing Art Deco back to Los Angeles. Amazing. Do you think there's a market there on the contractor side to actually go build these things?
- [32:27]
Pablo Antonio
Well, I'll push back a little bit here just for the fun of it. That I don't know if we can go back to Arteco. I don't know if there's any going back at all. In general, the arrow history moves in one direction. Overall. There are cycles. There are cycles, but overall they are like the line. Like, the future should look like the future and we shouldn't larp the past. We should learn from it and we should revive it whenever it's needed. And like, have revival is different from LARPing. LARP revival is like animating it back and actually finding new ways in which it fits within your time. We don't want to live in a Renaissance Fair. That's lame. We don't want to live in Disney World. Right. We want to live in a real place. And being in a real place, it should feel like it's new and it's like, authentic. And it is. It is new, but also tethered to the history of the place.
- [33:44]
DC
Who are the young builders who are going to do this? That's my question.
- [33:48]
Marty
You know, mention like, and, you know, I don't know if they're like, exactly the ones that are going to do it in sf, but have you seen the American Housing Corporation?
- [34:04]
DC
Have not, no.
- [34:05]
Marty
Great.
- [34:06]
Pablo Antonio
They're friends of mine. Great.
- [34:08]
Marty
There's a. There's a Twitter account called @YIMbyland, but
- [34:14]
DC
I'm familiar with that account.
- [34:16]
Marty
He's one of the founders and they're really doing, I think, amazing work of, like, make something that is sort of human, family oriented, aesthetically aspirational, but also something that can be constructed quickly. Because this is the other thing it's very important to. To the existence proof to show people it can be done is like you can actually build housing in less than a decade in sf. It's not going to be easy, but if you have enough chutzpah and will and you really line things up. I think you can do it much faster than people assume it can be done. Because if it's like, oh, it's this thing that's going to take forever, maybe in 2037 we'll have this thing. You know, it's impossible to build momentum and excitement around that. So they're really doing great work on like tight timelines and I'm excited about them.
- [35:13]
Pablo Antonio
I would say the other two other companies that I like on this is famous one, Monument Labs in New York. I think they're doing great work. I work with them for the Aaron bust. And yeah, Mike is fantastic. I know another guy in London who has a very similar angle. He uses similar machines. He has a different software technology called Gonder Industries. I also like them. The housing corporation is fantastic. I like. I'm a huge fan of what those guys are doing in Austin. So, I mean, Marty, you're in Austin, right? Right. So you can, you should, you should meet those guys. You're in Texas now.
- [35:55]
DC
Not anymore. I moved back to Philadelphia where I'm from, where I'm spoiled with beautiful architecture, at least with. With sprinkled in terrible architecture from the last three decades. But that's what. No, I moved back to be closer to family. And we actually just bought like a 112 year old house. It's like. And part of the reason why was like the aesthetics. And it's been around for 100 years. It's got Lindy and it's got very good bones and we don't have to do much to it. We are going to revitalize it to a certain extent. But part of the reason we move back is you can find one of these homes that's relatively affordable and is beautiful on top of secondary to being closer to family. But I feel very fortunate and lucky that we were able to find this house and lock it down. And to your point, Pablo, like, we need to like, this is a 112 year old house. We probably shouldn't rebuild this house for moving forward. But like really diving into the idea of build for the future, don't try to larp. We don't want to create a Renaissance fair world.
- [37:06]
Pablo Antonio
It's different from an actual Renaissance. What you want is an actual Italian Renaissance. That's what you want. And that's what the people in the Renaissance figured out. That's what the greatest merchants of history, the ones in Florence and Venice, they realized that their legitimacy was not. They had no legitimacy, unlike the rulers of all Europes that were basically kings appointed by God because they won a bunch of wars. The merchants didn't have any of that and basically they were looked down upon. And the way for merchants to build a great civilization is to, I think, create legitimacy through beauty and reviving history and culture and create this renewed vision of the future that does not feel completely fake from the past, but it definitely feels new. Italian Renaissance was not a lark of Greece, but it was severely influenced by it. They were trying to imitate the Greeks in a way and surpass them. That's the key thing, like the ambition to surpass the great civilizations from the past. While like you want. What you want is for the Greeks of antiquity to look at the stuff like we built. And they feel like we are the natural inheritors of their tradition, but at the same time we surpass them. That's one of the most ambitious things a civilization can aspire to do. And that's what we should be aiming for.
- [38:54]
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- [41:11]
DC
how do you guys feel about the current state of the tech sector in SF and like the different directions? I mean you mentioned like closed source software and open source and I think obviously it's a bit played out at this point, but it'd be remiss not to bring it up like the sloppification of the Internet stemming from the innovations happening around AI in San Francisco, specifically in other parts of the world, but predominantly San Francisco. It's like how do we make sure that we're. I mean it's inarguable. This technology is incredibly beneficial for humanity if understood how to wield. If you understand how to wield it properly. But like to that point, how do we push people towards wielding it properly and then designing a physical space around that, that respects the progress that we're making as a civilization and sort of enshrines it in the physical landscape. Well, also using the digital world to advance humanity at the same time.
- [42:18]
Pablo Antonio
Yeah, that might be one of defining questions of our time. How do you wield AI? But I don't have the answer to that yet. But I think there's still room to do stuff in the physical world, not just in the digital. 1.
- [42:38]
DC
Well, what's your hunch? How's it being wrongly wielded right now? And who's wielding it properly, in your opinion?
- [42:49]
Pablo Antonio
I have a soft spot for open source, but I always, like, one day I wake up and think like, yeah, open source is like the way to the promised land. Other days I wake up and just like, yeah, but it can also get like. It has all these dangers. If you open source the most advanced frontier models, maybe not current ones, but maybe the ones in next year that could be dangerous. Do you want to. Marty, do you mind open sourcing how to make nuclear bombs? Or rather, let's say how to make the stealth technology on the B2 bomber. Would you mind if anyone figuring out how to make B2 bombers, as an American, maybe you'd say, no, we don't want that. So it is not an easy question, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for open source. So for today I'll say that I think it's probably best to open source a bunch of stuff.
- [43:53]
Marty
I would agree there.
- [43:54]
DC
Dc, do you have any thoughts on this?
- [43:56]
Marty
Yeah, man, I think it is. There's this fascinating role inversion where right now the best open source AI models are actually Chinese and they're only a few months behind the state of the art. They're maybe as good as Claude and ChatGPT and the Opus series was three to six months ago. So very funny situation that like, you know, sort of the Freedom Software is coming from there. I would really like to see that switch around again in the future. Like, that's spiritually. I feel like that's spiritually our job. And I think, you know, you mentioned Spencer Pratt earlier. He had, I'm sure you've seen, you know, a lot of real banger campaign videos, some of them AI generated. So I really think it's just a force multiplier. And people talk about, oh, how do you prove that you're human? Things like that. I think that's sort of beside the point. It's like the slop comes from people. It always has. And the people who want to post slop now have tools that let them post a lot more slop. Whatever. We're going to have good tools to filter out the slop and not look at it. And the thing that's magical to me is like the people who want to make have actually something to say, who have something to build. They get the force multiplier too. Pablo and I have each done some renders where we take, for example, a picture of certain part of sf. And then you go back and forth with the model a bunch until you've turned it into, like, what it should look like. And you post the before and after. People really respond to that. So there's, there's, there's a lot of, like, you know, just really great sort of like creative powers.
- [46:02]
DC
Yeah, I mean, to that point too. I mean, we have a real world example this in El Salvador. I'm sure you saw the drone videos of the before in Salvador and the restoration of the capital.
- [46:15]
Marty
Yes.
- [46:16]
DC
And it is like, that proves it is possible. It's just where, where is the will going to come from to that point? Do you feel the momentum building in favor of those of us who would like to see these beautiful pieces of architecture return to the world?
- [46:33]
Marty
Pablo, you want to do this one?
- [46:36]
Pablo Antonio
Yeah. I really like what they're doing down in El Salvador. I think it's very promising. I come from a country that is.
- [46:49]
Marty
Oh, no, we might have lost him.
- [46:52]
Pablo Antonio
Okay, I'll just keep going because it might be locally recorded. But I really like what they're doing in El Salvador. I mean, I come from a country that is, like, written with violence. And I'm really glad that the people of El Salvador now enjoy peace. And now the focus has shifted of, like, can we make it affordable and beautiful? And I think that's the correct move. Yeah. If this is not investment advice, but I would probably would want to invest in El Salvador going forward. It just seems like it's going to keep improving. And yeah, it seems like they have competent data sheet technologies, leadership that cares, and they have proven that they can get stuff done. So, yeah, I'm very bullish on that. Yeah.
- [47:51]
Marty
I mean, to your question directly about is there momentum building for this kind of thing? I really think there is. You look at some of the before and after posts on Twitter, they're really resonating with more people than maybe I would have guessed. And I think, you know, it's kind of cliche at this point, but, like, it's factual. Like, a lot of, like, younger people are not really buying into the sort of like, previous generation ideal of like, you know, go to college, be in the city for a little bit, and then you go and just live in the suburbs for the rest of your life. That's where you go when you want to start a family. I think there's a lot of people now who actually want to have kids and they want to have them in the city. And for that to work, your bar or quality just becomes much higher. If I'M by myself and there's bad stuff going on in the street. It's not ideal, but I can just walk by it. If you have kids, you don't want them to have that kind of callousness baked into their experience. You don't want them to be exposed to danger. You need to have an actual aspirational growing city. You need to be building a lot more so that they can live there and they don't have to move out when they grow up. And so I think a lot more people who think this way now.
- [49:30]
DC
Yeah, I mean, and to. Not necessarily directly to that point, but as we've been talking, I can't stop thinking about strong towns. I think that's the book I've read. The one book I've read in the last decade that has affected me the most, funnily enough, because it's always on my mind, particularly when talking about subjects like this. But to that point, like the core thesis of that book is that cities are quasi living organisms that if designed properly, are done so because it's an emergent property that just arises from the natural development of commerce and community that emerges from that particular locality to that point. Like how do we make sure that this is done the right way? Like emergent and natural and not sort of diktop centrally planned. Like we need beautiful buildings and we're going to build them here, here and here.
- [50:25]
Marty
Let me give you a counterexample to that though. Like, you know, you've heard of Haussmann's renovation of Paris, which was a big project in the 19th century. They had, you know, a bunch of sort of infrastructure problems. You know, like transportation was really hard, getting around the city was hard. They had, you know, sort of like waterways that weren't clean. And he went in and it was a, it was somewhat top down. It was like a master plan thing. That whole. No now like very iconic system of like roundabouts, boulevards, grand arches and the you know, houseman style apartment buildings. It doesn't mean you have to like, you know, like nuke everything and start over. But I think, you know, the emergent stuff, it's like one of those things where you know, you drop an artificial reef and then like the big beautiful ecosystem kind of grows on it. You have to set the like bones of it like in the right spot for all of this emergence to be able to happen. You know, you talked earlier about like, hey, there's all these nice Victorians that people don't want to touch. And that's true. There's also huge areas of SF actually less well known that are sort of just like one story stucco buildings with like a driveway going into each garage. It looks like the Simpsons intro. It's like it's not what a city should be. And so I think there's actually like a lot of room to like do some bulldozing and housemanizing, if you want to call it that.
- [52:07]
Pablo Antonio
Yeah, yeah.
- [52:07]
DC
It's funny because I think a lot of. I was gonna say, like, I think a lot of Philadelphia's landscape is inspired by that, that French restoration.
- [52:15]
Pablo Antonio
Like if you look at Benjamin Parkway,
- [52:17]
DC
Benjamin Franklin Parkway leading up to the art museum, it's very French inspired.
- [52:22]
Pablo Antonio
Yeah. And that you mentioned like this. I think what we're. The things we're working on on like this project and like many of these ideas we were trying to push are not only for San Francisco. We have an ongoing project with our group that we're working on a little book called Little Orange Book that is going to be this nice international orange color that is the color of the Golden Gate Bridge and the color of San Francisco giants, sort of like this iconic color of San Francisco. And basically it will be just our ideas on how to improve the city. And also what are the ideas that can be exported to other cities that want to be the cities of the cities of the future. And you'll hear more about that in the future.
- [53:20]
DC
I can't wait to read it, to get my hands on it. And that's what I love,
- [53:26]
Pablo Antonio
the very
- [53:29]
DC
narrow focus on San Francisco too. That's where I think a lot of people make mistakes, where they try to fix everybody's problems at once. And I think that's something that I've definitely become more convinced of, is you're not going to solve the world's problems. Focus on your local community, the city you live in. And I think more and more people need to do that. And I think you two are examples of this. I mean, we've mentioned about expensive Pratt being an example of, hey, like, I'm going to focus on la, we're going to make this better. We need, we need more of that. And I think the. It was a bit of a rhetorical question because I think it's obvious that the momentum is building in this direction and we're sort of in the discovery phase of how you go from zero to one in terms of implementing it. And I think one of the great examples of this is just all the aesthetic accounts on X that have gone crazy, gotten crazy popular in the last five Years, I think during COVID is when they. They really took off. And again, not that we're trying to create the Renaissance Fair, but I think a lot of people trying to inspire others to think about beauty. And it's becoming clear. My wife, for example, she went out and she found a bunch of. I think she found like 200 architectural digests from the 80s and early 90s that we have on the bookshelf. And we've just been thumbing through those for the last couple of weeks. And it's insane how some of these design principles are eternal. And Lindy, it's just a few simple things that you need to do for a room or a building or a street, whatever it may be, that can make it beautiful. It's not like we're trying to develop new physics here. These are learned. These are learned practices that have been around for millennia that we just have temporarily. Temporarily lost in our modernity.
- [55:25]
Pablo Antonio
I would say that we should basically try to balance these two things. Basically, I'm against sort of like this, sort of like, I don't know if you know this style. Sort of like Saha Hadid, sort of like parametric. That is sort of like very alien. I really like the ambition of trying to make buildings that have never been before. But I don't like the idea of rejecting objective beauty and sort of like this eternal values. Now, I'm also against the traditionalists. I don't make friends on any side because the traditionalist is sort of like, we're just gonna knew new physics. You know what? Actually, Morty, I do want to discover new physics. That would be insane. We should discover new physics and, and like, on the modernist sort of like buildings. I think I like the fact that we should be making, you know, affordable buildings that are cheap, like, are like entry level for people that are not rich. Not. I don't want to use the word cheap, but they're ugly and the buildings are ugly should be torn down. So I'm a. I'm a. I'm a different kind of. This is. This is not yimby. This is Neo yimby. All the ugly buildings will come down when we win, Marty. They will all come down and we will build beautiful, affordable buildings. Beautiful, affordable buildings.
- [56:51]
DC
No, but I agree with you. I want new physics too. I want new designs. But to your point, objective beauty is objective and you know it when you see it. And yes, we need to get back to that. I cannot wait to tear down all the ugly buildings as there's a ton of them.
- [57:07]
Marty
The future the future must look like the future. Yeah, correct.
- [57:11]
DC
Gentlemen, this has been an absolute pleasure. I mean, it started with exchanging food stamps for fentanyl and ended on very high energy aesthetic stock here. I know you got to run. What should we lead the freaks with? What parting messages should we give the audience?
- [57:29]
Pablo Antonio
Well, I'm sure we'll plug the socials, but I'm Pablo Antonio, and most social media. Yeah, you should tune in into what the future should look like and what should we do about it and not just be a spectator. The future doesn't just unfold. It's driven by will and it's in individuals. And there's nothing else compares to that. And that's the only way out.
- [58:10]
Marty
Yeah, totally. I think really the big thing that we want to create is we want to get the civic ambition back. America used to have so much of this, by the way, 100 years ago in states like in Philly and New York and all all kinds of places in Cleveland. It's like, you know, it's not just like, oh, make things a little less bad. Like, you know, we actually, like, have the resources and those sort of like the high energy people to like, make it really great. And so it's got to be like, that has to be the bar. Yeah, we're going to write a little orange book.
- [58:47]
DC
All right, gentlemen, I can't wait for the little orange book. And I agree. It's your civic duty to build a beautiful future. Go do it.
- [58:56]
Marty
Thanks so much for having us. This was great.
- [58:58]
Pablo Antonio
Thanks, Vardy.
- [58:59]
DC
Thank you, guys. Peace and love, freaks.
- [59:01]
Sponsor Host 2
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