TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #751: NGOs Are Enabling Addiction with Pablo Antonio & DC Posch

Episode Date: May 30, 2026

Marty sits down with DC Posch and Pablo Antonio to discuss exposing EBT fraud fueling San Francisco's fentanyl crisis, the perverse incentives of the NGO-industrial complex, and how reviving civic ambition through Greco-futurist beauty could rebuild American cities. DC on X: https://x.com/dcposch Pablo on X: https://x.com/PabloAntonio STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

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 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 i mean that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Pablo DC, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. 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 buy fentanyl

with with food stamps in san francisco why did you guys decide to go make this video to to prove this this particular route to fentanyl acquisition exists i can jump in on this uh yeah marty thanks for having me uh long time listener first time caller um but um yeah the we started basically city club in san francisco uh trying to find ways to help the city and just make it like the best place possible it is very rare that we had like such amount of wealth creation in the city and like things have degraded uh and we just like it's just a side project with a bunch of friends who uh all have you know day jobs we all take time off our jobs to put in time uh to find ways to help the city and we have different projects in the works uh one of them was that uh we stumbled

into a lot of fraud that was happening uh just by you know sniffing around um and we just wanted to show it to people and say like hey like we think the best disinfectant is like just you know sunlight um and if we have any chance on improving the city the best like the order of business first of our businesses you know plug the holes where like the water is flowing out and uh then you know pour in clean water later you know i can i can speak a bit to like how we how we ran into this too um you know mario have you have you ever been in a developing country and you kind of you come out of the the the airport or the train station and there's people like taxi taxi and they're they're hassling you to to do um the do you get sell you something yes yeah costa rica

and uh newark new jersey yeah yes new jersey of course uh they come with their hair slicked back uh no we basically experienced this at the farmer's market you know like you go to the farmers market in sf and specific ones in particular and you can just see uh you know these uh people you know um a lot of them like you know uh sort of um older ladies funnily enough like and you can see them doing this to people who have the uh the ebt paper coupons and you know they're like sell sell uh chasing them around and this is how we got down this road like what's going on here right uh and we ended up going to the farmer market basically every week every sunday for a couple months um and you know we had um cameras uh we had friends uh one funny thing

that's not widely known by the way about like uh you know food stamps is they are not asset tested um like uh 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 um right so uh But one, you know, like 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 pharma 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 to the so, you know, you can turn take, say, you know, 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. you know now you have you've turned 30 bucks of food stamp balance into 45 bucks cash it's insane and and how prevalent is this in terms of an acquisition mechanism for for drugs specifically yeah you know we we the other angle that we had on this is we went and we just interviewed a number of uh street addicts uh people by the way people like to say you know homeless that's sort of like but a lot of them actually aren't homeless um they have homes 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 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, you know, in there at night, they're out during the day or on their way around, in many cases, getting their getting their fix. And what we found is if you just walk up to them and like offer them a coffee, right, a lot of them are really happy to talk to someone who is sort of 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 armed in a sense it's like 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 good or presenting but they're like actively enabling these guys

as addictions yeah the the worst part is when you go into that do-gooder ngo this is a big yeah oh go ahead oh no i was just gonna say that like the worst part like like what did what it it is really heartbreaking is when we started meeting uh the moms of a lot of guys that are out in the street and like uh it really that's that's that's a rough one that's a rough one because like it is very i 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 uh but um it is a different like you get a different side of the story when you hear about her mom like that like this this guy's mom who like is he's out in the street like a crazy person i like on crazy drugs but they have

you know they have families but uh at some point they were five and they were a kid right and like it you talk to the mom and see the pictures of the guy when he was a kid it's like it really it's really rough uh and um i mean yeah these people are not shouldn't be demonized like they're like they need help but like this do what they're what they're receiving you might be breaking up on us we might be losing them uh well the good thing is with this but what they're receiving is not help yeah yeah but what they're receiving is not help it's just like what they're receiving from the ngos is like being they're being enabled uh to do more drugs how did you get in contact with some of their mothers um so you asked how do you how did we get in contact with the moms

uh there's this amazing organization actually and you know we found them afterwards as a result of doing this investigation of they're called mothers against uh drug deaths um and it's they're working really i think they're they're they're a really great organization they're they're basically uh one of their their big things that they're they're pushing on right now is fixing that sober housing law that we were talking about about you know hey actually it's totally insane that we you know specifically require these sort of like you know uh 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 um 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 um they they have some really powerful stories i think one of the like most poignant that i saw was uh one of the moms was telling us about like you know how basically she was like scrolling facebook you know and she'd been like having this struggle for years with her son was like you know had a hard time with sort of like in drugs in remission or what's it called you know recovery relapse right um and there's this you know video on the facebook wall of a guy on bart which is the the the train system here in sf uh like you know sort of like passed out next to like a you know uh a puddle of of puke and there's like all of these guys in the the

comments you know say mean things they're like oh you know this like this is what happens when we like don't you know uh like have order on the train like don't don't don't enforce the laws like you know this is fucked up and and it is obviously objectively um there's some people being like 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 replied to that and they're like we're so sorry that's really messed up you know like we that you can you know like uh 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 like as like a disturbance right um but you know i think there's this like really sort of unfortunate dynamic at least so far in the bay area where people that all of the like oh let's be compassionate to the homeless people like it boils down to like let them keep doing drugs and so mother mothers against drug deaths thing is a really powerful organization because they're like you know no how about we like you know 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 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 only policy to to continue a degradation of of civility in public spaces to um force the the state of california to step in and demand more tax dollars to try to fix this so more money can be funneled to cronies and NGOs and other agencies.

Yep. Yeah, I think it's a lot of both. Pablo, do you want to speak to that? Yeah, I think it is a dual problem on the government side and on the NGO side. um they're kind of like but i think um the winning the winning thing to get like the problem fixed is uh i think on the ground sort of like with with like civilians that like see the problem up close and like are directly affected and like amplifying that voice as much as possible and um i think even they're i'm sure they're certainly like bad uh actors and like ngos and

and government officials but they're also like good people that you don't actually do care uh 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 the moms and like look at like how ridiculous it is to actually get drugs with like government money uh 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 that's 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

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 uh i would say with with with lurry like basically all the things that matter have improved i in my opinion they could go faster and they could go like even deeper but um yeah that's that's what i would say so freaks this work was brought to you by good friends at big key guys things happen things get lost you need to replace your phone life happens and bicky has been designed with this in mind uh so if you're looking for the easiest way to secure your bitcoin uh off the exchange go get a bit key it doesn't come with any seed phrases there's no

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for your subscription for the first three months. I'll just say anecdotally, I've been to San Francisco three times in the last 10 years. 2016, my wife and her family, we went to wine country for a weekend and spent a day in San Francisco. I think it was MLK Day. We spent the Monday there. We parked our car in Golden Gate Park, got robbed immediately, took all of our luggage or passports and stuff 2019 that's horrible man 2019 uh went back to

my country with my wife just the two of us we stayed at a hotel in san francisco the night before we drove up to to napa and uh as soon as we get out of the uber there's some guy pleasure himself on the on the steps of the uh the hotel that we were staying at i was like oh welcome back to san francisco right i would say the last time i was there was november of last year uh granted i was staying in the presidio but i had some time to walk around it was much better i didn't see um and actually there's actually a fourth time i was in there in 2018 i actually walked from um the top of the hill down through the tenderloin and and towards market street to squares like quarters 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 in 2019 the last time I was there man the new mayor is quite great um I think you might have the highest approval rating of any mayor in the city uh yes uh rather like like you know uh any mayor in the city pretty sure pretty sure he has the highest approval rating of any mayor yeah high in the country uh because you know it's just there's still a long way to go like I think you know uh we can get into this a bit later too I think you know one thing that uh 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 you know 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 you know not just like not wow in a bad way yeah and papa i think this is what we've bonded over um 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 to this point i mean walking through the like i avoided san francisco for seven six years because of that that physical reality situation that that i experienced over over multiple trips um which was nothing to do with the architecture

but like literally with filth on the streets and being accosted by homeless people either they're pleasuring themselves or trying to steal our luggage yep many many such cases yeah i would say that san francisco is i've to me as uh as a non-us citizen a person who's here like basically visiting uh it feels to me that san francisco is like the crown jewel of like american cities it's just like so beautiful uh the problem uh is that it many times has been mismanage. Uh, uh, and that makes sort of like the mis, like it makes the mismanagement worse in some way, the fact that you're mismanaging, uh, like one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And, uh, the other problem I think is that, uh, I think the, uh, the Victorian houses

are so incredibly beautiful and like the city in itself is so, uh, like it gets striking. It's like the beauty is really striking um um it's it it sort of created this weird sort of uh checkmate situation of no no but of people not wanting to build uh and just like oh no we should keep it as is like not not not disturb it and i think uh i think the yimbies uh uh for the most part should embrace the fact that we like we should build more but we should be more uh in affordable way but also like way more beautiful and like sort of like it should feel like as like a definitely like the next level of like a civilization that we should build um and you can't you can't achieve that if you're not thinking that like beauty needs to be a center

of that and uh not just like random stuff that you think is beautiful but something that is like tethered to like the heritage of the place but also has a view of the future of like 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 like once you see it like you're going to fall in love with it and you're going to want to be like where we're going um and that gets people excited um and it as long as sort of it's this vision of like not only we're trying to make like the best we're also trying to include everyone um you basically you can get everyone on board uh as long as you're making stuff that is beautiful and affordable like 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 like 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 um so like either way even if you like don't you don't have to only build affordable housing for the the the cost of living in san francisco to go down which is now i would say the major problem san francisco the the homelessness and like i'm sorry i won't use the euphemisms it's not a homelessness problem the drug problem in san francisco has improved um it's it is still a big problem that needs to be addressed that's for sure it's it's not like we're living you know in like tokyo in which like they're not 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 the like just extremely painful for people especially young people um 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 just you bought a home for like nothing and like an entropic employee and an open ai 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 uh and it just creates this like situation in which if you're young and you're not like ultra wealthy you're like screwed uh and it's terrible for like starting families uh and people at the beginning of their careers so i i

think the angle there is not say like either you you shouldn't i don't think the way out is to villainize like uh the people who own homes or even like the the people that made a lot of money technically trying to buy homes like the way out is like we just need to convince both that we need to build like big and beautiful so that like just everyone wins um and on top of that the people who are priced out out of san francisco um can also enjoy it and like build families well how do how do we get back to that you know obviously you have this nimbyism that exists totally and i think to your point about the victorians in san francisco being objectively beautiful yeah and a lot of people not wanting to disturb that i think that's because we've lost our way

what we're gonna do is we're gonna make beautiful uh greco-futurism renders they're gonna strike them of how beautiful everything is and we're gonna 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 um i agree i mean i i mean if you if you're not following pablo go follow him and i actually it'll be in the in the uh the show description but i mean you've been tweeting these correct you know renderings for for many years now and it's like how do you actually go from that rendering to the reality how do you convince developers specifically?

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 a discord internet values that most tech people, I would say most people believe, but they just need to be reminded of uh which is um uh freedom of the 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 uh really of like beauty and that is tethered to our humanity um that has a strong idea of the future um it has this monument um of of of that that has uh a marble bus that i had made of him that is currently at the internet archive installed

on top of the monument sort of like it's sort of this bent stone bench that is inviting for people to sit on and and admire the the skyline of san francisco and and uh that is sort of like the first beacon of like hey like we we want to create this future that is like human and that has a connection to beauty and is it's goes it's it's a it's sort of like this counter vision of what many times tech is now um so the plan is to have the the monument face south forest tower Sort of have it this sort of like two competing visions of tech of like, do you want the corporate for-profit or you want the open source non-profit? Sort of like, do 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, this is where we want to go.

You know, yeah, totally. The Aaron Monument is going to be really beautiful. It's going to be like, you know, actual stone. It's going to be Greco-futuristic. I think zoomed out like one step from this is you need existence proofs. You need proofs that this is possible because one of the, you know, 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, you know, everyone sort of implicitly assumes It can't be done. There's a bunch of people in SF where like, yeah, you know, we can, you know, build a billion dollar company. We can build like a, you know, fully autonomous robot factory in like, you know, the middle of the desert in Nevada. We can go to space. But like, you know, 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 like until you bust through that with like existence proofs you know a statue an actual building later that exists that like you know shows people like actually yeah you can make beautiful things there's no law against it it doesn't have to be like a thing that looks like

a stack of lego cubes like uh you know that's how i think you get like the the real like you know sort of snowball rolling on this yeah the greco-futurist is uh very inspiring and there's another like because that's that's what i worry about like the um 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 do you see i'm not how uh i'm not sure how familiar you are with like this show and like um the intersection of bitcoin and urbanism but it comes back to like time preference like a lot of these builders are yep yep incentivized to just get the cheapest materials throw something up um use something cookie cutter because it's cheap or fast

and like how do we like i think the thousand year home guys everybody working on the the brick masonry yeah revitalism uh in the middle of america are doing an incredible job to bring back beautiful aesthetics 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 uh spencer pratt i think in one of his recent interviews saying that they're gonna begin bringing art deco back to los angeles the do you think there's a market there on the contractor side to actually go build these things

Well, I'll push back a little bit here, just for the fun of it. 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, but overall, the future should look like the future. uh and we shouldn't larp the past uh we should we should learn from it and we should revive it whenever it's needed and like have uh it's a revival is different from larping a revival is like animating it back and actually finding new ways in which it fits within your time

um we don't want to live in a renaissance fair that's lame we don't want to you we don't want to live in disney world right uh we want to live in a real place and being a real place it should feel like it's new and it's like authentic and uh it is it but while it is new but also tethered to to the history of the place who are the young builders we're going to do this that's my question you know one mention um like and you know i don't know if they're like exactly the ones that are gonna do uh it in sf but have you seen the american housing corporation i'm not no um they're friends great there's a there's a twitter account called at yimby land Um, uh, but, uh, you know, uh, he's one of the founders and, and, and, uh, they're, they're

really doing, I think, amazing work of, of like make something that is, um, sort of, you know, human family oriented, aesthetically aspirational, but also something that can be constructed quickly because this is the other thing. it's very important to like uh do the existence proof to show people it can be done is like you know you can actually build housing in like less than a decade in sf it's not going to be easy but if you have like you know sort of like enough chutzpah and will and like you really line things up i think you can do this it much faster than people assume it can be done because if it's like oh you know 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 um so they're they're they're really uh doing great work on like tight timelines and i'm excited about them i would say the other two other companies that i like on this is a famous one monument labs in new york i think they're doing great work i work with them for the aaron bust uh yeah and yeah mike is fantastic i know another guy in london who has a very similar uh angle uh he uses similar machines he has a different software technology called gunder gunder industries i also like them uh the housing corporation is fantastic i like i'm a huge fan of what those guys are doing uh in austin uh so i mean you're more you're in austin right all right so you can you should you should meet those guys

you're in texas no not anymore i moved back to philadelphia where i'm from where i'm spoiled with beautiful architecture uh at least with uh sprinkled in terrible architecture from from the last three decades but that's what uh no i moved back to be closer to family and uh we actually just bought like a 112 year old house it's like stone and part of the reason why it 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 moved back is you can find one of these homes that's relatively affordable and is beautiful um on top of it's secondary to being closer to family but uh 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 there's 112 year old house we probably shouldn't rebuild this house uh for moving forward but like really diving into the the idea of build for the future don't try to larp we don't want to create like a renaissance fair world um it's it's different from an actual renaissance what you want is an actual like italian renaissance that's what that's what you want and that's what like the people in the renaissance figure out that's what like the great like the greatest merchants of history uh the the ones in florence and venice they realized that like their um uh legitimacy was not uh they had no legitimacy unlike the rulers of of of all

other europe's that like 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 um and the way for merchants to uh build a great civilization is to uh i think create legitimacy by through beauty and reviving uh on like history and and and culture and and and create this like renewed vision of the future that does not feel like completely fake from the past but it definitely feels new like the like 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 of 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 like that's like one of the most ambitious things a civilization can aspire to do and that's what we should like we should be aiming for all right freaks you know me you know i don't take sponsor money from products i wouldn't use myself so listen up the aven bitcoin visa card is one of the most interesting things i've seen in the bitcoin lending space in a long time here's the deal you get a line of credit up to a million dollars backed by your bitcoin without selling a single SAT. No gains, no annual fees, no minimum draws, and your Bitcoin is custodied by BitGo,

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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 slopification 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 that respects

the progress that we're making as a civilization and sort of enshrines it in the physical landscape while also using the digital world to to advance humanity at the same time yeah that might be one of like defining questions of our time like how do you wield like 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 one. Well, what's your hunch? How is it being wrongly wielded right now? And who's wielding it properly in your opinion? 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 way to the promised land all days I wake up it's like yeah

but like it can also get like it has all these dangers if you open source like the most advanced frontier models maybe not current ones but maybe the ones in next year uh uh that could be dangerous do you want to uh marty do you mind open sourcing how to uh like make nuclear bombs or rather let's say how to make the stealth technology on the b2 bomber would you mind if other like anyone figuring out how to make b2 bombers as an american maybe you'll say like no we don't we don't want that uh so it is not an easy question um but i i still have a soft spot in my heart for open source so i'll i'll for today i'll say that i think it's probably best to open source a bunch of stuff i would agree there dc do you have any thoughts on this yeah man uh i think uh

uh, it is, there's this, there's this fascinating role inversion where right now the best open source AI models are actually Chinese. And there are only a few months behind the, the, you know, state of the art there may be as good as, as, uh, you know, Claude and chat GPT and, and, uh, the, the, you know, uh like opus series was call it three to six months ago uh so very funny situation that like you know sort of the the freedom software is coming from there i would really like to see that switch around again um in the future like that's spiritually i feel like that's spiritually our job uh and uh i think uh you know you mentioned spencer pratt earlier um he had i'm sure you've

seen you know a lot of real banger campaign videos some of them ai generated um so i really think it's just a force multiplier like and you know people talk about like 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. Like it always has. And the people who want to post slop now have tools that let them post a lot more slop, whatever, you know, 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, you know, have actually something to say, we have something to build. They get the force multiplier too. You know, Pablo and I have each done some renders where we take, for example, a picture of

of a certain part of sf and then you know you go back and forth with the model a bunch until you've like burned 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 yeah and i mean to that point too i mean we have like a real world example this in el salvador i'm sure you saw the drone videos of the before and after san salvador and the restoration of the capital yes and it is and like that proves it is possible it's just where yeah where is the will going to come from to that point like do you feel the momentum building and in favor of those of us who would like to see these beautiful pieces of architecture return

to the world Pablo you wanna you wanna do this one yeah i i i really like what they're doing on like down in el salvador i think it's very promising um i mean i i come from a country uh that is uh oh no we might have lost him okay i'll just keep going because it might be locally recorded but um i really like what they're doing in el salvador uh i mean i come from a country that is like um written with violence uh and i'm i'm really glad that uh the people of el salvador uh now enjoy peace uh and now the focus has shifted of like can we make it affordable and beautiful and i think that's the correct move uh um yeah i if this is not investment advice but i would probably would want to invest in el salvador uh going forward like it's just like

it just seems like it's gonna going to keep improving um and um yeah it seems like they have uh competent leadership that leadership that cares um and they have proven that they can get stuff done so um yeah i'm very bullish on that yeah i mean to your question directly about like do you is there like momentum building for this kind of thing um you know i really think there Like 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 um to you know college be in the city for a little bit and then you go

and just like 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 like they want to have kids and they want to have them like in the city and for that to work you know your bar for for equality just becomes much higher you know like if i'm by myself and there's bad stuff going on in the street it's not ideal but i can just like you know walk by it you know if if you have kids you know you don't want them to like have that kind of like callousness like baked into their experience you don't want them to be exposed to danger um you know you need to have like an actual like aspirational growing city you need to be building a lot more so that they can live there and they don't have

to like move out when they grow up um and and so i i think there's there's a lot more people who think this way now 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 and at that point like how

do we make sure that this is done the right way like emergent and natural and not sort of dick tot centrally planned like we need beautiful buildings we're going to build them here here and here let me give you a counter example to that though like you know you've heard of houseman's renovation of paris um which was a big project in the 19th century they had you know a bunch of of sort of infrastructure problems you know uh like transportation was really hard getting around the city was hard they had you know uh sort of like waterways that weren't clean and and he went in and it was a it was somewhat top down it was like a master plan thing that whole you know now like very iconic system of like roundabouts boulevards grand arches and the you know

houseman style apartment buildings that doesn't mean you have to like you know uh 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 um 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 um there's also huge areas of sf actually less well known that are you know sort of just like one story you know uh stucco buildings with like uh driveway going into each garage it looks like the simpsons intro it's like it's not

what this a city should be and so i think there's actually like a lot of room to like do some some uh some bulldozing and housemanizing if you want to call it that yeah yeah it's funny i think a lot I was going to say, like, I think a lot of Philadelphia's landscape is inspired by that French restoration. I mean, if you look at Benjamin Franklin Parkway leading up to the art museum, it's very French inspired. Yeah. And you mentioned, like, I think what we're, the things we're working on, on like this project and like many of these ideas we're 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

we'll be choosing 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 future and you'll hear more about that in the future I can't wait to read it

to get my hands on it I love the the very narrow focus on San Francisco to that's where i think a lot of people um 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 the expenser pratt being an example of hey i'm going to focus on la we're to make this better we need we need more of that and i think uh 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 and gotten crazy popular in the last five years i think during cope it is when they they really took off and uh 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 uh 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 I've 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 sort of learned practices that have been around for millennia that we just have temporarily lost in our modernity.

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 parametrics that is sort of like very alien. i i really like the ambition of trying to make buildings that have never been before but i don't like the idea of like rejecting objective theory and sort of like these eternal values now i'm also against like the traditionalists i like i don't make friends on any side uh because the traditionalist is sort of like which is gonna like you know no no new physics you know what actually marty i do want to discover new physics that would that would be insane we should discover new physics uh and um and on like on the modernist sort of like buildings like i i

think i i like the fact that we 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 um but they're ugly and the buildings are ugly should be torn down uh 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 no but i i agree with you i want new physics too i want new designs but they're like 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 because there's a ton of them the future the future must look like the future yeah correct gentlemen this has been a an absolute pleasure i mean it started with uh exchanging food stamps for fentanyl and ended on a very high energy aesthetic stock here i know you got to run um what should we leave the freaks with what parting messages should we give the audience well i i'm sure we'll plug the socials but uh i'm you know pablo antonio and most social media um um yeah you should tune in into uh what the future should look like and what should we do about it and just not not just be a spectator like the future doesn't just unfold like any it's driven by will and it is it is it's it's in individuals um and there's

like nothing nothing else compares to that and that's the only way out yeah totally i think the the 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 spades 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 uh the high energy people to like make it really great and so it's got to be like that has to be the bar um yeah we're gonna write a little orange book 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 thanks so much for having us this was great thanks marty thank you guys peace and love freaks okay thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm

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