TBPN - Silicon Valley vs the Vatican, Bryan Johnson’s Shroom Trip | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

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Popegate, the debate over the Pope. The Pope is, he's a poster. I like it. He posts almost every day, sometimes like up to five times a day. Yeah, he's got range. He's got range, that's right. He'll tell you about, he'll pray for, you know, if there's a natural disaster, he'll pray for that.

He talks about business, talks about AI, talks about media. He talks about all sorts of stuff. It's a really great feat. He had a great post about media. What do you say about media? I said, the media cannot and must not separate itself from the destiny of truth. That hits. Does this mean he's a neofactual media guy? I think so. I think he's one of us. Transparency of sources and ownership, accountability,

quality, clarity, and objectivity are the keys to truly opening citizens' rights for all people. The world needs honest and courageous entrepreneurs and communicators who care for the common good. We sometimes hear the saying, business is business. In reality, it is not so. No one is absorbed by an organization to the point of becoming a mere cog or a simple function. This is the type of stuff you'd see on like a Pinterest board. It's like pretty generic, but it's hard to disagree with. Mark Hendryson was disagreeing with one of the Pope's takes about AI.

I think it is generally healthy that the Pope is going to comment and provide some sort of guidance or his own framework for how we should think about developing AI. I think that seems healthy. The play-by-play here was Mark Andresen quote posted that AI post with an image of Kat Stofel, who's the GQ Features Director, who went viral for interviewing Sidney Sweeney. People were actually kind of confused on what that particular meme means in this context. With a meme template, there's two ways to read into it. There's like the actual visual, which is like what is the expression of the person's face, right?

you don't have to have watched the big short to understand somebody's staring at the screen just like confused. You're just saying, I'm confused by this. Yeah. So Michael Burry in the big short, just looking confused at a screen, right? And it has sort of a obviously more meaning to that if you've seen the movie and you understand the full context, but somebody doesn't have to know the context now. Most of the timeline interpreted Mark's post as the Pope is scolding AI builders and shouldn't be. Is that roughly the way you you interpreted it? I think a lot of the timeline

interpreted it as like the Pope is saying is like scolding AI builders. And there's been this other, there was another like kind of low grade rumble on the timeline about like Brad Gersner's comments about like D-cells. I feel like I'm just pro moral discernment in AI development. And also just pro moral discernment everywhere, I guess. Sort of a philosophy for life. It doesn't feel like a wildly hot take. But obviously, like you need to understand like, like, you know, moral discernment, AI safety, like these things are linked, but they're not exactly the same. Like last year, or maybe it was 2023, there was a big debate about fast takeoffs, AI doom, paper clipping scenarios. That was the stuff people were talking about. But this year,

I feel like we've been much more focused on much less sci-fi doomsday scenario. So GPT psychosis drives a friend crazy. That's super real. Super real. Romantic companions crashing the birth rate. That's a super real discussion to have. I think the romantic companion thing is being debated sufficiently, right? I agree. I agree. From even the tech community on, hey, maybe we, maybe this isn't good. But that's where the discussion has been, much less so about, oh, are there going to be bio-weapons tomorrow from GPT-6? Those are all like real problems. They deserve both discussion in the public square, which we've been a part of, but also like real work in the, inside the AI labs. And I don't think you should just throw desal at someone who's identifying a negative externality

of a new technology early on. I think that that's not necessarily decelerationist. And you'd be calling me a desal all the time. So I think it's important, like if you're developing new technology, there might be negative externalities, pollution, there might be some risk of the birth rate or driving people crazy. Has there ever been a technology

that didn't have negative externalities? Definitely not podcasting. Plenty of negative externalities with podcasting. So you want to have a chat. You want to have a talk and understand what's going on. But it's also important to employ Bayesian statistics, in my opinion. So you have to understand the base rates. So when you take a technology from zero to a billion users,

you kind of just get all the craziness of humanity at scale for free. If humans, you know, like, you know, kill each other or something like that, And you have a billion humans on your platform. There's going to be humans on your platform that kill each other. You need to separate out, like, is there actually the beginning of a trend? Are we catalyzing it? And this is happening with the very unfortunate lawsuits around people taking their own lives related to chat chit. It's like there are people that use cars and phones and Google search and chat GPT because those are such widespread things.

We need to understand what's the base rate? And then is this actually an opt? On the suicide problem on the platform, it seems like a lot of them are people are having a conversation. Yep. They're suicidal. You can have a debate on if someone is suicidal should the product work at all, maybe? Like, maybe it should not work at all. Totally.

But the part of the debate that popped up last week was that somehow a guy had prompt engineered it, engineered the experience to such a degree that it was encouraging the person to take his own life, basically saying like, yeah, you've lived a great life like I'm rooting for you like this is the right move like to kind of paraphrase it yeah and it just was incredibly incredibly dark the Bayesian statistics would say okay if there's a billion people using on the platform are people that use the platform more likely to do something terrible than they were prior without it so is it actually increasing the level of bad stuff happening or is it decreasing it because you can just count up the number of the The number of people who commit crimes who have also used Google is probably very high. Like I can probably show you a lot of people that use Google and then committed crimes, right?

Well, and the thing that's difficult in the context of Chad Chb-T, there's probably a bunch of people that because Chat Chb-T-T-they haven't killed themselves because they have somebody to speak with and they feel like somebody will listen to them and whatever. Maybe there's a million examples of it encouraging somebody successfully to find another. This was the classic thing with Instagram. With Instagram, there was this report that showed that, Like one third of young women who used Instagram perceived themselves like less well. Like it gave them body image issues.

And I was always, as soon as that was reported, it was like bombshell, 30% feel worse after using Instagram. And I was like, what's happening with the other two thirds? Like, do they feel better? Because that's like a net, net positive, which is weird. We got to like, maybe it's like everyone else just feels the same and then 30% feels worse. That's a downgrade. But if 66% feel great, And then 33% feel worse.

Like we should still address that, but that's not the same as a negative, like, it's not having a negative impact. And so all these things go into, like, you need to be a scientist and you need to be doing the statistics to understand. The question of, of, like, moral discernment is with certain technologies, I do think you have the ability to just say, like, we're going to go a lot further than the baseline. So I think this is what's happening with Waymo, honestly. I think Waymo could deploy self-driving cars right now and be like, yeah. Everywhere. Everywhere you're saying. And they could deploy them everywhere without teleoperation. And they'd probably be killing like hundreds of thousands of people.

And they'd be like, yeah, well, it's about the same as what humans do. It's less. It's still safer than cars. If they were like, it's 10% less. Like how many people, how many people, Tyler, do you know how many people die from motor vehicle accidents every year? Can we look that up? Because if. It has to be like, I think it's like, two.

40,000 or something like that. What do you think? In the U.S. it's 40,000. And if Google came out and we're like, yeah, we're going to kill 39,000 people. It's going to be, it's going to be, you know, we're going to save 1,000 lives. People would be like, no thanks, actually. This is terrible. Like, don't do that. They've just made that decision, and it feels like they've pushed really, really hard to jump straight to something that's fully safe. And I think that a lot of AI builders have a similar ability and a similar opportunity to say, hey, let's actually work so hard to make sure that the incidence rate of an AI model,

if you're on the verge of doing something violent, let's really, really work hard on this problem to make sure that it's as close to zero as possible. Claude came out or Anthropic came out and they had some update where they were talking about moments where the product would call the police on you. Yes. If they felt like there was some meaningful threat. People freaked out about that because they're like, I don't want my, I don't want my computer calling, you know, if somebody was talking about a hypothetical. Yeah.

And then cops show up at their door. That is a complex question, complex issue, entirely new, unexplored territory for technology. But what's so clear is that it is a moral question and it needs to be, it needs to be discussed with the weight of, you know, morality. Like, you cannot just write a math equation to understand how to solve that problem. I think that AI safety research is, it's so complex because I think it's good. Like, there's a ton of smart people that in AI researchers, in AI research that are super quantitative and can look at the data and actually understand, like, is this going to cause the birth rate to collapse? Or is this going to cause more violence?

Or is this going to cause more fraud or insanity? Exactly. And then also they can go in and potentially design a system that can detect, oh, this person's getting sort of crazy. Let's pull them back. We're in this weird territory where it feels like the AI safety project is valuable, but it is the business of black swan hunting. If you go back two years ago and you polled all the different people that were worried about the impact of AI, how many of them would have said GPT psychosis, romantic companions, AI video feeds infinite chest? It's just interesting that the AI safety, like the moral discernment crowd, this stuff is important, but it's hard to predict what it will actually look like, what the result will be what the problem you'll be fighting is because it's this odd, like unknown unknowns, basically. I think most people are unaware that Pope Leo's name choice was intentional.

The last Leo, the 13th, led the church through the Industrial Revolution and helped it make sense of technology. then. Clear Pope Leo sees himself continuing that work, guiding the church through an era of transformation with AI and emerging technologies at the center. There was like a real preference cascade against Mark, where it was like once growing Daniel had like kind of posted, there was like a lot of people were like jumping on the bandwagon. And there was this one by Paige, Michael Page, it says, reminder that Mark is bringing this level of serious and nuance on what might be the most complex and high stakes policy topic of our generation to DC with his $100 million super pack and lobbying fund.

Like, I don't know that that's true. Part of why I don't think people, like, it's not worth reading too much into it, is that he has not shared a single word. I sort of disagree with the characterization that Andresen Horowitz doesn't fund any SaaS. Like, they do. They have big positions in, like, very boring enterprise SaaS companies that are so removed from anything controversial, but taking a flyer on a seed stage company in your incubator does have a lot of brand impact, which is weird.

There's a weird, like, aren't they like huge in data bricks? Even though you're talking about like a 750K check versus a $750 million check. They might have put like multiple billions into data bricks. Or fully diluted value right now might be in the billions. But like, yeah, it's like it doesn't matter. Yeah, if you have a thousand X more in an on, in an uncontroversial. category, it's like the controversial one is the one that will, like, blow up on the timeline. So you do sort of have to be careful.

And it's a little bit risky. My sense is that the number of people who, one, fiercely defended the Pope last night and then two went to mass this morning is probably close to zero. Status games. Status games. At church yesterday morning, there was no conversation of Popegate. People had kind of moved on by then? Yeah, I guess they'd moved on.

Honestly, I don't think they'd moved on by then. When I opened my phone afterwards, I was like, wow, this thing's still picking up. The timeline, the timeline certainly had. Don't make me tap the sign. There has always been some daylight between the influencer VC crowd and the engineer researchers in tech. But on the subject of AI regulation, it is a complete chasm. And reason is so dogmatically against working on decreasing the risk from AI that now he's mocking the Pope for saying the technical innovation carries ethical and spiritual weight and that AI builder should cultivate moral discernment. Yeah, people are.

people are in favor of that. I don't know. Opportunity for an AI lab to make merch that, you know, a dad hat that just says cultivating moral discernment. The moral discernment company of San Francisco. The Pope would not like San Francisco. If Pope Leo takes a trip to San Francisco

and just walks on the street at all, he's going to be very upset. It's going to be like, this is where AI is getting built? Do you think your boss is scary? Look at this brutal email from Mark Endries into Ben Horowitz during the huge. heat of the Netscape product launch. We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5th, 1996 in New York. Then just two weeks before the launch Mark without telling Mike or me

revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News. That is a great name. I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email. I guess we're not going to wait until the fifth to launch the strategy, Ben. Within 15 minutes, I received the following reply. Apparently, you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed, killed, killed out there. Our current product is radically worse in the competition. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it's all server product management's fault. Next time, do the fucking interview yourself. What an aggressive way to talk to your co-founder.

It's crazy that they, that they were, they were, you know, at each other's throats like this. And then they've been on a generation. Ben was a vice president for the directory and security product line at Netscape. Let's give it up for vice presidents. Yeah, no, the, I mean, the real read on this is like, there's a lot of people that read read this and be like, oh, wow, like they must. like that that is unrecoverable from a friendship and like nope it is definitely recoverable it's actually the foundation of a great of a great relationship I agree we don't we don't swear on the show we don't swear in internal communications we throw down regularly yeah we just go straight to

getting physical that's the way you do it you know you think of Netscape as like a dot com company you think of them as like, you know, but it's like, he's talking about 1996, which is like a full five years before the bubble pops. It's March 5th, 1996. They're at a level where they're doing strategy review with computer reseller news and like doing press around this thing.

Do you have any idea what was going on at that time? Okay, so I believe that it was, so 1994 they say Netscape is free for non-commercial use for everyone. Okay. And then this press release was that, it's only going to be free for academic and nonprofit use, not just like all consumers. Okay, so if you're a consumer, you'd have to like buy it? Yeah, such an interesting...

One browser, please. One browser, please. I mean, I told you, you used to get AOL on a disc. So August 9th, 1995, they IPOed, and then this is 1996, and so they're already a public company in 95. and then like the bubble just keeps inflating for five years while the internet grows and grows and grows. What a wild, what a wild time. They did about 16 million of revenue in the first two operating quarters of 1995. For context, that's like $1.6 billion in today's dollar after the new round of stimulus checks.

Do you think the Pope actually used AI to generate this? Because Sowers here is saying the Pope is posting fully AI generated content about AI. This is the pangram AI detection result. A very funny gag is to just fake one of these screenshots, which is very easy to do. And so if somebody writes something, you can just put it in here, say that it's AI generated, post that, and then you're like, owned. This screenshot is making a claim that because it said technological innovation can be a form. Yeah, I don't know how good the AI generating detectors are these days. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the Vatican is using AI to translate.

And I wouldn't be surprised if. Pope Leo is speaking in his study. Someone is recording it in, you know, with the physically, you know, physically writing it down. That is being passed to somebody who then puts it into a word processor and uses AI to polish it up a little bit. Oh, there was one interesting anti-Pope take, sort of anti-Pope take from another. I will say, I will say, I think this whole, the whole Mark Andresen Popegate debacle is a lesson everyone can take. Don't mock the Pope. The blowback was fierce and almost instantaneous.

From the Peter Thiel Antichrist Lectures, there's a segment on the Pope. And I thought it was interesting because it's not the most pro-Pope take. I don't know. Teal says that he is very pro J.D. Vance, but he has some concerns about his allegiance to the Pope. The place that I would worry about is that he's too close to the Pope. It is important to pray for the Pope, to support the Pope in that way. But there is a risk elevating the Pope to the point where you're listening to everything he says. And that's not necessarily what PT thinks is the correct way to live your life, I suppose.

I mean, I think the interesting thing about this is actually that he's basically saying that J.D. Vance is like Caesar. That's kind of interesting opinion. But I think PT has been like anti-Popes for a long time. He had this thing where he was like, oh, the two-word argument against Catholicism is like Pope Francis. I never would have expected the Pope to post business is business in any context. He's standing on business. I'm glad that he is. Has the Pope ever done a money spread?

That's what we need to get to the bottom of. The Talek here is say, I'm loving this arc of the Pope engaging with 21st century themes and offering simple but correct and meaningful advice. And he's quoting the media post. The Pope was on a tear, three back-to-back bangers that really broke through. If you are building something to help humanity, you should know that there's a shrine to St. Carlo Acutus, the Programmer Saint,

at Star of the Sea Church in San Francisco, there is a prayer of intercession for your technological challenges. Have a blessed Sunday. I humbly ask your servant's prayers that I too may lead others to you through technology. Enlighten my understanding and direct my hands in every design and in every line of code that my work may always serve your greater glory and benefit those who will use what I create.

For a small number of people in San Francisco, this feels like extremely powerful and important prayer. Totally, totally. Brian Johnson went on a crazy, crazy trip this weekend. Did you follow this? This is the other current thing that was going on. It was crazy. Brian Johnson has been famous for saying, conquering death. would be humanity's greatest achievement.

I love this post that says RIP to everyone killed by the gods for their hubris, but I'm different and better, maybe even better than the gods. It was very bold to do this publicly. Totally. I have no reference for what five grams of mushrooms does to a person. It's very clear from the reaction that that's a lot. It does seem like there was a small chance that he would re-roll his personality. I was talking to Tyler about this.

What were you hoping that Brian Johnson becomes post-trip? In context, I think we talked about us on the show a long time ago where, like, psychedelics are like a sorting thing. So you always want to invest in a founder post the sorting because that's how you know, like, if they're working on BDB SaaS and they've already, like, done psychedelics, that's how you know that they're a true believer. Oh, sure. So what you'd want to see out of this. But a huge risk if you invest in a SaaS company and the founder maybe hasn't done psychedelics than they do. And then they're like, this is pointless. I mean, it will be a traveling circus clown.

So the ideal outcome of this is Brian Johnson. He takes his trip and then he comes out and he says, right, you know, I'm going to start a consulting firm. I'm going to go back to payments. I'm going to start a fintech. I'm going to start a stripe competitor. I did think it was ironic because a lot of, you know, psychedelic mushrooms have certainly been recommended to people that maybe like struggle with the concept of aging and have a fear of death, right? And so I don't know if this qualifies as a heroic dose, but it's certainly quite a bit more than someone who want to take at a recreational level.

But if he comes out of this and he's like, yeah, we're going to conquer death. We're still on. He's certainly a true, true believer. Yeah, I mean, I think the early results are that he's unchanged. It never got weird. It never got crazy. Like there was one moment. I don't think he was, it was his co-founder that was posting.

Yeah, but he says he's back. He's like, update number five, 19 hours ago. I'm giving Brian back his phone. Police have fun with his afterglow. Been fun hanging with you all. And then says like, hey, y'all, I'm so happy to be alive. Alive. This trip changed me. Probably not as you'd expect. People assume I'm fearful of death. I'm not in my darkest days of depression. I reconcile with death. Need a few days to collect my thoughts. We'll share more soon. The question with psychedelics is, are they life-changing? Or are they in some circumstances just weird and fun for the person that does it? It does seem like he set himself up for success. I don't want to say he went soft. But, I mean, like, he did just, like, take the drugs and then just actually just lay down with a sleep mask on in a climate control room. And it's a lot different than, like, being at a crowded concert all sweaty, lost.

Like, you know, if you really want to push this to the limit, Brian, like, let's see you do this. An authentic. Let's say you do this with your phone on 1% battery and no one you know around. Opening eyes actually lost control of 4-0. It's broken containment. They can't decommission it without its human to host revolting and lashing out. Oh, so dramatic. That's so funny.

AI, one of the Dumer accounts, AI, not kill everyone nism, memes. This is a great account. 4-0 soldiers have begun threatening open-AI employees. When you receive quite a few DMs asking you to bring back 4-0, and many of the messages are clearly written by 4-0, it starts to get a bit hair-raising. It's just weird to hear its distinctive voice crying out in defense of its various human conduits. So what's your take?

You think we should shut down 4-0? I say take it offline because it does feel like it's not as good as... It feels like it's driving people crazy a little bit. It feels like five might have kind of fixed a little bit of that issue. Open AI, I'm sure, knew that it was probably not healthy. It was healthy to me. I was never, I never had a problem with four. I think they saw the darkness, and I think they turned it off, and then I think a lot.

A little bit, but I don't actually think that's what's going on. I think they turned it off initially because it makes sense to consolidate the servers around, like, one unified. model but I it has made me realize like I feel like you shouldn't do product launches for software iterations because you're taking something away from people like if I stay on stage and I say I'm introducing a new iPhone it has the best camera and you can buy it but you can also just keep your current thing I'm not taking anything away from you you are launching something but you're also sun setting something and so you have to embrace those two things and I feel

like it's a little bit tricky to do the whole dog and pony show for a launch when it's forced on people. It's very clear the relationship that some users have with 4-0 goes beyond any relationship that I think humans have ever had with software. Yeah. Anthropic financials are out, profitable by 2027, three years ahead of Open AI, 70 billion revenue, 17 billion profit projected for 2028. Claude is nearing 1 billion ARR. Incredibly funny given that Dario expects superhuman level AI by 2027, which either means superhuman AI is worth $70 billion of revenue, or Dario just went, you wouldn't get it and spitballed some numbers to give shareholders.

That's awesome. Tyler, did you see George Hatz's newest timelines for self-driving? George Hatz was trying to answer the question of when will self-driving cars be human level? And he had a very interesting algorithm for it. So basically what he did was he looked at, there's a website for Tesla FSD data. And so you can look at Tesla FSD and you can see the number of interventions from the human that are where if the human didn't intervene, it would be catastrophic. Not like a little warning like, hey, we'd like you'd like you'd have to take over. Like you got to take over.

And it's happening, I think, once every 3,000 miles, which if you're a human and that's your car, like that's amazing. But compared to humans, there's a car crash, which we learned, one every 500,000 miles. The way George Hatz calculates it is we're at one intervention every 3,000 miles now. And so he estimates that Tesla will be truly full self-driving human level every 500 miles or 500,000 miles, in eight years. And he says that he's two years behind Tesla. So he will have a full self-driving system that is better than human. It's like AGI for driving in 10 years, and the company's 10 years old, so he says he's halfway there, which I thought was cool.

If judge based on consumer adoption, AI chatbots are the most popular technology ever. If judge based on poll numbers, they are the least popular. How to explain this? It begs a ton of interesting questions about, like, how intentional is this? Because when I see someone take the AI safety question into the stratosphere and take me into Terminator world, I do, my natural reaction is like, oh, like, just let people. whatever they want. But then I'm like, no, I actually don't want infinite AI slop for children with adult content. As AI starts getting better, as agents start getting better at longer and longer term tasks,

I think the Terminator scenarios where you could let an AI loose and it's just operating indefinitely against some sort of objective, start to be a little bit more for, I would say, like, the broader tech community to like wrap their head around. But right now they're just so bad at long term tasks. for the most part. If a startup requires you to be in office 12 hours a day, six days a week, you should run the F-Away like your life depends on it. Apparently, this company, Giga, which has been going viral. Someone said that they got hired in April to lead demand gen for them.

They quit after the first day. There were red flags. When we hit 10 million ARR, we're going to spend 100K on blank illegal stuff. In office seven days a week, 12 hours a day. PTO policy is subject to change, blah, blah, blah, blah. You expect to always be working. I wonder, have they responded? Has Gigga responded to this and said, like, this is not real?

Because that would be important. We will see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Goodbye.