How Computers Dream with David Holz

What you’re reading right now was written by an artificially intelligent — though not sentient — neural network designed to write descriptions for podcasts. Or was it? You don’t know, and that’s what makes AI so fascinating, cool, and scary. Since Josh loves all of those feelings, he sat down with the founder of controversial AI-generated art startup Midjourney, David Holz, to unpack the future of creativity. Discussed: Porn, therapy, families, Hitler. This one’s a doozy!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:19):
Hey, and welcome to What Future on your host Joshua
to Pulski, and I thought I'd be coming to you
this week to talk about the end of American democracy,
which seemed, I don't know, very likely, based on the
way the media depicted what was about to happen in

(00:41):
the mid term elections, and based on how the Republicans
were talking about crime in America, which of course is
rampant and out of control and coming to a town
near you at any moment. But now we are a
couple of days past the mid terms, and it did
not go nearly as well for the Republicans as I

(01:03):
think everybody thought it would, and it did not go
as badly for the Democrats as everybody thought it would.
And it turns out it's kind of a split decision. Really.
It seems like the Republicans may get control of the House,
seems like Democrats may hold on to a narrow, very
narrow control of the Senate, and we'll continue to get

(01:27):
nothing done in Washington or in any other political arena
in America. So, you know, that's good. I think for
the most part, I feel like we didn't lose, you know,
the right to vote in America this week, which sounds
like that's bottom of the barrel, sort of low low
stakes for things, but that's kind of where we are anyhow.
So all that said, that means we can engage in

(01:50):
conversation about something else, which I think for all of
us is going to feel really great. And that's why
I'm excited to talk about a topic that has i
would say, almost nothing to do with American politics or
politics generally. And that topic is, of course artificial intelligence
that creates art. So there's several bots that do this.

(02:13):
One has recently become widely available to the public. It's
a bot called mid Journey. From a user perspective. From
a person's perspective, what you can do is you can
sit down and type something and it will generate based
on all of the images that's ever looked at, which
are billions of images on the Internet and wherever else,

(02:34):
databases they feed and stuff like that. It will generate
what it thinks you want from a prompt from a sentence.
You actually use it through Discord, which is like kind
of a chat you know, network, which was popularized by gamers,
but Discord you can basically go and talk to the
discord bought from mid Journey, and you can say, for instance,
Dracula explaining his vampiresm to a crowd of onlookers, and

(02:57):
it will generate four different images that it thinks capture
your idea, and they're insanely accurate. They look like somebody
painted a picture of something that you wanted. It is
essentially like the closest thing to being able to visualize
a dream. I don't know that I've ever had my

(03:18):
mind more blown by anything the computer has ever done
than this piece of software. I mean, it is hard
to articulate what it feels like when you write a
sentence of something that seems completely impossible and then see
a pretty good representation of it in a matter of
like thirty seconds, forty five seconds, maybe a minute, to

(03:40):
see your first four versions of something. Let's just say
you're not an artist, you're not a designer, You're not
gonna make your living off of doing paintings for magazines
or whatever. You're just a person from a pure like
thrill level. As a person, I think this is fucking amazing.
It is like the most fascinating and most azy thing

(04:00):
I've almost maybe I've ever done on a computer. And
I've done a lot of stuff on the computer, you
know what I mean. But this is like tripping. I mean,
it's fucking insane. It's like, like I said, it's sort
of like as close as you might get to you know,
you had a dream and you can then see the dream.
I would also say, what's interesting is that it is
like a computer dreaming. I mean, what it is is
you giving this like what what I consider to be

(04:22):
fairly abstract input to a computer, and the computer deciding
making all of these really creative decisions about what that
thing should look like. Anyhow, I'm not an artist. I'm
not a painter. I have been working with mid Journey
to create art for this podcast, and you can see
some of the prompts for these. Some of the ones
that I did science fiction paperback book cover about society

(04:45):
in the future. One of them is a phrase from
Blade Runner attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Oriyan,
which is Rutger Howard has this monologue at the end
of Blade Runner, and that's one of the things he says,
and it created imagery based on that sentence. Um Dracula
explaining his vampirism to a crowd of onlookers you can
see several variations. I mean, they are fucking beautiful pieces

(05:06):
of art in my opinion, like legitimately beautiful pieces of art.
There is some art in figuring out how to get
this thing to do what you want, or to at
least create a result that is that is pleasing. Now, anyhow,
what's interesting about this? And there's many interesting things about it,
and like I'll just go down the list of some
of the ones that I'm thinking about. First off, there's

(05:26):
obviously this question about art, like what is art and
is this art? And what kind of art is it?
Meaning As a guy who who's run a lot of
newsrooms and a lot of publications, I could see this
is very functionally important in like an organization that needs
original art for things, but maybe doesn't have the budget
or the time to generate original art for everything they'd

(05:49):
like to generate original art for. Right, So there's an
implication there, like for me that I'm like, oh, that's
really interesting, Right, that's really exciting. I follow a bunch
of designers and artists on Instagram and they have been
talking about this for a while. I mean, this opens
up an enormous amount of serious questions like, for instance,
the bots are obviously taking content and material and analyzing
it and learning from it and in some cases replicating

(06:10):
it in some way from from what real artists right
from historic you know, pieces of art up to modern
pieces of art as far as I know, in essence,
these ai s can go and look at and then
learn from. But there's this little bit of controversy or
not a little bit, maybe a lot from some artists
who say this is you know, it's theft of our work.
You know, they're using things we've created without any license

(06:33):
to do so, and in creating new works based on it.
That argument, to me is a little bit like every
artist uses somebody else's work to create what they do.
I mean, as we know, remixing in music has become
one of the baseline ways you make music now, no
pun intended on baseline. So the idea of like sampling
somebody else's art to create something new is not new.

(06:55):
I think what's sort of insane and threatening on a
bunch of different levels is that this is creating real art,
really interesting pieces of art and imagery that have real applications,
whether it's hanging in the gallery or using for an
illustration in a magazine or whatever, um and it is
just removing a person completely. Basically, this image that I

(07:18):
created for the podcast is a perfect example. I could
sit with a designer and tell them about what I
wanted and show them examples. Can you make something like
this and we could work through it over and over
again until we got to something that fell right. The
idea that I could just say it and it could
be like, this could be it. This could be the
art for the show, and that's one job that a

(07:38):
artist is not going to get now, like for sure, right,
there's an implication for people who work in these fields
that is way different than what we're talking about. Like
I was like, at a pure human level, this is thrilling.
But on the flip side of that, there's entire industries
that potentially are wiped out by this. What is this
open up? I think is a question that I don't
know the answer to, which is in five or ten years,

(07:59):
this is going to be so much more capable to
create things like this, capable to a point where I
think it's likely in the next five to ten years
you can simply tell it to do something whatever it is,
and it will create a perfectly photo realistic version of it.
I mean, and there are versions of this where you
can say, you know, show me this thing and show
it to me in these different styles and it'll show

(08:19):
you an image in the style of this painter, or
like it was a photo taken from this era, or
like it was you know, shot on a certain kind
of film. What that means going forward is is almost
like kind of frightening. Like people are like talked a
lot about deep fakes, you know, and they're like, oh yeah,
like they're gonna fake a voice or they're gonna fake
a person's face or whatever. Like this is essentially like

(08:40):
we're getting to the point where you can just fake
any situation. You can just create visually any situation you
can think of. And I think the logical thing is
that eventually, pretty soon, I would imagine it will be
able to do this with video, right, and I think
with moving images sound is not too far behind it.
You start to think of how this could be a
fly to all sorts of other things. I mean, presumably

(09:03):
if it can do this with art with visual art,
I think you can do it with other forms of art. Right.
Will we discover when it's like you could have any
art available to you, any type of content available to you.
Perhaps that like what you want is somebody else's brain
in mind, right, Like I want to understand or see
something or hear something from somebody else's brain, but I

(09:24):
don't know what it's like if if the other brain
can just create any of those things that I would
be intrigued by, Like this art is a great example.
Clearly this non brain entity can create things that surprise
and delight me, that feel as authentic and original as
any art that I've looked at. It's obvious that the

(09:44):
systems that are creating this are very advanced, and they
are only going to get better. They're not going to
get worse. There is no going back to a state
where this is not possible. And so when you think
about what that looks like down the road, maybe not
everybody feels this way, but I can kind of like
in the middle of my brain, I get this like
very upsetting feeling when I think about what space actually is,

(10:08):
which is like this endless nothing and actually nothing and
what is that like? It's very upsetting to think about.
To me. When I think about like the future of
this stuff, it's sort of a similar kind of weight
in the middle of my brain, which is like where
does this go? Like it feels like all of reality
is almost called into question by the technology. And maybe
I'm overstating it, maybe I sound crazy. I'm not saying

(10:29):
the computer sension or it's alive or it's got a
soul now or anything. But there's something in between the
lines of all this where it's just sort of like
it leaps beyond even my understanding of what is happening,
Like it leaps to a place that's almost like, I
don't want to say spiritual, but it leaps to a
kind of almost religious place where it's like how can

(10:49):
this be? You kind of feel like when you do it,
how can this be? Like? How is it possible? My

(11:10):
guest today is David Hols, the founder and CEO of
mid Journey. David, thank you for being here. Thank you.
Just before this, I said, can I say CEO? And
you didn't want me to, But I've done it anyway,
and we're all gonna have to live with the repercussion. Okay,
Let's say you and I met at a party. Let's
pretend we're at a cool party. You don't know where

(11:30):
I'm coming from and I'm like, what do you do?
You say, I'm the founder and CEO of mid Journey,
and I go, what's that? How would you describe it
to somebody just randomly at a party. I try not to, Uh,
I'm pretty low key, but if they asked, They're like,
what does mid Journey do? Yeah, I don't know. Um.
I never really wanted a company. I just kind of
wanted a home, and so like mid Journey is world

(11:51):
of meant to be like my new home for the
next ten years to work on a lot of cool
projects that I care about, with with cool people and
that hopefully are are good for everybody else too, you know.
Like we have sort of themes that I want to
work on, and the themes, if I had to put
in through words, it's like reflection, imagination, and coordination. I
feel like like in order to kind of flourishes and civilization,

(12:13):
we're gonna have to like make a lot of new things.
And making new things involves those three words, uh, and
we need a lot more around them, like infrastructure and
new fundamental forms of infrastructure really around each of them.
And we were actually originally working more on the like reflection,
tools and coordination tools. We're doing some imagination stuff. But
then like there were certain breakthroughs on the AI side,
Um that we're happening. It was about like a year

(12:34):
and a half ago. Now it looks like everything's blowing up.
But like a year and a half ago in San Francisco,
we all went to the same Christmas parties and stuff.
All the A people are kind of out here and
we were kind of all together, and I'm like, these
the fusion models. It seems different. It seems different than
the other stuff. And they're like, yeah, I know this
is different than like, well, what are you gonna do?
What are you gonna do? We're all kind of talking
and and I'm eventually like, I think there's gonna be

(12:57):
a human side of this, that it's not just about
making pictures, but that there's a sort of a back
and forth. There's like a lot more to this that's
gonna It's gonna be hard to figure out from just
optimizing a single number in a computer program, and there
may be some taste involved, and no one knows what
that is, uh, and like and I'm like, I I
think there's something I have to contribute to, right, Um, yeah,

(13:18):
can you imagine though I'm a guy you just met
at a party. I've got no context whatsoever about mid
Journey and you just told me that, which I'll, by
the way, all very interesting. I have many questions related
to what you just said. I'm gonna dumb it down
a little bit only because maybe not every single person
will know, but mid Journey is known right now. The
company has risen to kind of a place in the

(13:38):
spotlight because it is what I think we're all sort
of talking about now, is like an AI art tool
or a tool to create art based on artificial intelligence
and machine learning and all of these sort of other
very complex technologies that are kind of fusing together to
make something that is relatively new. So I think most
people would say, you've built a tool that can take

(14:01):
human language tax like basic like English prompts or whatever,
and maybe you do in different languages I don't know,
and convert a prompt like a description of something into
a piece of art that is created basically wholly by
a machine. Is that correct? Yeah? I try to avoid
like the word art almost to be honest, because I
think that it's like not really about art. It's about imagination.

(14:25):
And sometimes people use their imaginations for art, but usually not,
and so I usually think of it as we're trying
to create these machine augmented imaginative powers. Sometimes I almost
call it like a vehicle, you know, to really like
just asked, like what are we doing, Like is it
like the invention of photography, you know how it changed painting,
And I tend to say no, it's much more like
the invention of the combustion engine and the car. And

(14:47):
like when we invented cars, they're faster than us, but
we didn't chop our legs off. We have to really
move somewhere. You move through vehicles, So it's kind of
like a vehicle for imaginiction. You really have to go somewhere.
You're gonna use these vehicles like jets and boats and cars.
We never like have a little robot as like our icon.
It's like a sailboat, you know, very much trying to
kind of help people explore and imagine these like seeds

(15:08):
of of like aesthetic possibilities. I mean, it's interesting that
there's a little bit of like a defensive stance you
have to take now because the art aspect of it
gets under the skin of a certain part of the
audience that's like, wait a second, you know, what is
this thing doing? What does it mean? What does it
mean for all these different industries. I think a lot
of people feel and maybe you guys have had to

(15:28):
play some new round of defense because of it, that
this has been engineered to kind of like up end industries. Right,
But you don't you're saying you don't really view it
that way. No, not to me, is actually very uninteresting. Uh,
Like the idea of like making fake art is really uninteresting.
Like who cares are making fake photos? Uh? It's really
like to me, it's not like I think what's interesting

(15:49):
is making stuff that never could have existed before. I
don't like it when somebody makes a deep fake photo
of a dog. We make it really hard to do that.
Other ones do that well. To me, the most interesting
and images are the ones that don't look like a
thing we've ever seen before. They don't look human, they
don't look like the AI made. They look like something new,
and all we know is that it's this new thing,
it's this new frontier. Right. I should tell you that
the art for this podcast is generated by mid Journey, uh,

(16:12):
and it ended up producing results that I think are
like at once very familiar to me, like in terms
of stylistically, there's something very familiar to me about it,
but there's also something about it that is um like,
totally original, I think to your point, I'll tell you this,

(16:36):
like I'll give you my stance a little bit because
one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you,
one of the reasons I want to talk about this
at all is um As you know, I'm a huge nerd,
and I've spent my entire life like being you know,
sort of mesmerized and interested in emerging technology in all
sorts of different forms. And when I started using mid journey,

(16:58):
mid journeys producing something that to me feels I'll try
to avoid using the term art, it feels like it's
creating something very original. I could say, like, Okay, I
know where some of this stuff is coming from, Like
I can kind of understand like there's certain styles that
are present, or if you give it a prompt to
get a certain style, you can get that. But to me,

(17:19):
it was like, and I still feel this having processed
it now for you know, weeks and months, it maybe
the most amazing thing that I've ever seen a machine do.
I totally understand the idea that you're not trying to
build a tool that is like a new photoshop, although
I think there are applications that are obvious that are
in that realm. When I first asked about what it was,

(17:39):
you use three words. What were the three words that
used with reflection, imagination, and coordination? Okay, so coordination and reflection.
I want to talk about like what that means, because
I understand the imagination part, and I think I understand
how you are thinking about like what mid Journey does
now in that department, But tell me about like those
roots of reflection and and nation, Like what was this

(18:01):
before it was? What it is? Um, we were working
on a lot of things trying to like understand human minds,
like individually to help people reflect and then also to
kind of help people come together and like work on
things better. And so we were doing a lot of
like quantitative psychology and like structured thinking to kind of
like create like boots stop a behive mind as fast
as you can. Kind of a future is going to

(18:22):
say lots of weird things. It's good are you saying that?
Like the roots of this are kind of like can
we get this thing to think on a collective level
for us to like solve problems. Yeah, I think there's
two areas. There's both like how do you help somebody
think about like who they are and what they want
and just kind of like deal with their things. Uh,
And then there's also like how do you help them
find like the right people anything big meet other people?

(18:44):
So how do you kind of find the people? And
I don't know. When I was like twenty, I would say,
you have to have your goals and then you align
people who share the goals. And then I've done that,
and it turns out that the second the goals change,
the groups blow apart because like it's about values or something.
And then if you like around values and then over
like five or ten years, it blows apart again because
it turns out that our values like change in our
lives and our experience change. And so then maybe that's

(19:06):
what this idea is. Like we mean some higher than
values and maybe it's aesthetics. It's like not about what's
like right or wrong or what it's important and importance.
It's like really deep down, it's about like what we
feel is beautiful and what we feel is ugly. That
like really leads to the things that we value, the
things that we actually tried to build. And so there's
this idea of like maybe aesthetics themselves are like some
of the highest things, and maybe aesthetics can be like

(19:27):
a foundational layer of like a social world in a
way that like is beyond where it is, because right
now it's like the Internet, what is it? It's about?
Like Facebook, it's like who's your mom and who went
to school with and then like on Twitter, it's like
almost like like you say one thing a day that
pisses people off and then half of them will follow you,
and like those are both shitty foundations for like a
better social world. I would ever want to build a

(19:47):
team that way. So there's something really interesting on like
mid Journey where people come together and they're like, man,
you love like Egyptian space pyramids too, that's like me,
And then like you have nothing else in common, but
you both love Egyptians based pyramids, and it actually like
something really deep. I think that like aesthetics have the
potential to be a foundation of a better social imcordant

(20:09):
layer in a way that's like really hard to understand,
but that is actually like really interesting. I mean, that's
a fascinating and frankly, I have so many questions around
just the basic concept there. But like I would agree
with you that aesthetics do tend to bring people together.
I mean, but aesthetics conceptually the idea of, you know,
having a taste or a preference for something, there's a

(20:32):
limit I would imagine to people who identify around an
aesthetic position. Meaning my mother, who's a wonderful, wonderful and
extremely insane person. She could talk about things she's visually
finds beautiful or whatever, but I would not say it's
like a central part of her personality or something that
she has an enormous amount of interest in. Right. The

(20:52):
thing about Facebook is that a raw opinion or sharing
something like oh I found this article interesting or whatever
is very right forward in the sense of we all
know what an idea is or an interesting article or
an opinion. But I don't know that everybody thinks on
an aesthetic level. Maybe I'm not giving everybody enough credit.
It's possible now, I think you people don't think about it,

(21:14):
but it's there. Right, Like I tried this, I'd like,
what are your aesthetics that leads to your values that
lead to your goals. Like you can ask the question
and almost nobody can answer it. It's a really hard question.
But all of a sudden you give them something like
mid Journey, and it's like you can make a picture
of anything, what do you want? And like everything just
spills out and then they go through this whole like
heroes mid Journey, and like the process of looking them
through that journey, like you like it's all there and

(21:36):
it's very clear, like a lot of stuff comes out. Actually,
But if I'm like, I'm gonna give you like a
really extreme example, and so forgive me if this feels
like a like a gotcha or whatever. But I'm like
a neo Nazi. For instance, i might love Star Wars.
Let's say, although I always find it fascinating when like
people who really into fascism like are like I like
Star Wars, I'm into the Rebels or whatever. I'm like,
you know, it's but okay, let's say I like Star Wars.

(21:59):
You like Star Wars, but like one of us is
a white supremacist and one of us isn't. We may
share some asthetic interests, right, Or we may both love
a certain artist, right, You know we're Lichtenstein fans or whatever,
but like, at the end of the day, deep down,
I don't know that that aesthetic preference has any deeper
residence on who we are. There's a limit, right, So

(22:19):
like for example, like you know, you're a rebel obviously,
and then like that nowadays is also kind of a
rebel in their own way, So do you do have
something in coming? But like, but there's probably also other things.
I mean, that's a that is a leap, I would say.
I mean, I get what You're saved. They're definitely going
against the grain, right, I got it, They're going against
the grain. Yeah, yeah, definitely. A lot of us are rebels,

(22:40):
and they're living types of rebels, but we are rebels.
But now, like I think there are other things too,
So you don't want to just lock on rebels. You
want to have something like a little bit broader and
more interesting. And so the question is, after you make
a bunch of picture of rebels, what's the next thing
you do? You know, and then what's that? What's that
all come together? You know? I Mean, now we're like
very far a few from like I've got a mid

(23:01):
journey bought that I can talk to and it can
make images for me. I mean, how would you describe it?
You described as AI? Yeah, I mean it is. It
is a I I don't like. I kind of avoid
the words AI and art actually both together. Weirdly, the
problem with words like AI is that people give it
a lot of agency and like will and purpose and
meaning and so whereas like this thing it doesn't have
a story or a narrative or like any will and

(23:23):
concension doesn't have a soul. It does learn actually from
lots of people, and it changes and there's a coevolution.
It's almost like mid journey as a flower and then
the users are bees and like the flowers trying to
be beautiful for the bees, but the bees pick which
flowers are the ones that get to survive, and so
like there's this coevolution between the flowers and the bees,
Like there's not a lot of will, there's some will,

(23:44):
there's a will to be beautiful, um, and then there's
only weird about flowers being beautiful because we find them
beautiful too. It's like what does that mean? It's because
they're not really for us specifically. It's like why do
both us and the bees find something beautiful, Like it's
sort of speaking some weird objective thing. No, and I
can understand that from a philosophical level. I mean, like,
what is it doing. It's a program, Yeah, it's a program.
It's a program with a lot of models in it.

(24:05):
There's a model that models language, and there's something that
models the connection between language and images. There's another thing
that tries to model what images look like. There's actually
also models to try to understand like beauty, like what
is beautiful actually? And then there's other models that try
to understand like trade offs between like diversity versus creativity
versus like how literal should you be? How metaphorical should

(24:26):
you be? How do you read things? And so it's
kind of a it's like a structure and there's a
lot of like duct tape, and you know, it's it's
weird because like people will be like is it alive? Like, well,
how does it understand things? If I say something like
sadness or happiness? How is it able to make an
image of an emotion that it's never had? Like they
asking these questions like what is this? Like this'snd like

(24:47):
a piece of software, you know, but it's not an
AI because it's never had those experiences, right, Like, what
does it mean? There's a lot of really interesting questions.
I think a lot of people they hear AI. They
think there's like a machine somewhere with like a glowing
red orb in the middle of it, and like it's
like pulsing exactly, and there's like some neural net. You've
built some custom hardware where there's like the net. It's
like a digital brain. It's like software, right, These programs

(25:11):
they do share things with our brains, like like how
an airplane share something with a bird, Like they both
share air dynamics and physics and the sky like these
things are sharing some physics of thoughts, right with that? Right?
But I'm just saying, like, it's not how you built software.
The software does some pretty sophisticated things. It is hosted
on like a a ws rack somewhere essentially. I mean

(25:32):
maybe you don't use a ws or whatever, But so
what is the product? Like you've got investors, right, No,
you don't know your boots drapped? Yeah, okay, not listen,
I've paid for a subscription. I'm a mid journey free now,
So is that the product people pay for subscriptions to use? It. Yeah,
I try to have very honest business. It's like, you're
not gonna run on your computer ground the cloud and
then we're gonna pay it takes money and then we'll

(25:53):
take some of margin on that, and that's the business.
And you feel like that's a good foundation for like
whatever this thing is going to be, Like you can
build off of that. Yeah, you don't have like Mark
Andrews in coming to you being like I'll give you
X number of billions of dollars if you can let
me turn this into whatever Mark Andrews and wants. We
do have a lot investors coming to us offering us
lots of money. You're not taking the money. We haven't
taken anything so far. That's pretty amazing. Can the business

(26:14):
be profitable like this? We're profitable already, you are. Yeah,
that's one reason not to take money is we're already profitable. Well,
I mean, if you're making money, it's definitely a good
reason not to take it, right Yeah. I mean because
people come to us and they offer us money and
I'm like, what am I going to spend it on?
And they're like, it's good to have it, you should
have it. I'm like, I don't we have money. We're
trying to spend it already, and they're like, well, you

(26:36):
should have money, you take us take our advice. It's
not about the money, it's about advice or like they
try to make those arguments and so far having heard
a very compelling argument, so you're happy to iterate on
this product where it's at now and let the users
sort of maybe dictate some of the direction because of
the way that they're using it. Yeah, I mean it's
kind of beautiful. It's like we make something and people
like it, they pay us money, and then if they

(26:57):
don't like it, we don't make money. But like we
have we're like we're trying to make some people like
because it supports our stuff. And then like it's very
sort of honest and straightforward and it's an easy business,
Like give it this way, I would keep it this way.
I mean, presumably there's commercial applications for this, right. Yeah.
I think of this because I'm like a guy who
runs like media businesses. I think, oh wow, there's all

(27:17):
the time like I want art for something and I'm
actually gonna get into a bunch of questions about the
kind of it. But all the time like I'm gonna
news room. I'm like publishing in a twenty stories a
day or fifty stories a day or whatever, and every
one of those pieces has some art attached to it.
Like presumably you're already doing more enterprise level stuff, where
like I just want like some design for a story

(27:38):
or for a blog that I'm writing or whatever that
you could generate that any sort of infinite iterations of
original pieces of art, Like is that a part of
the business. I would say we're a consumer business that
also has like some professionals, so it's probably like seventy
consumers and professionals. The professionals are mostly using it for
like brainstorming and concept ng. Then the consumers are having

(28:00):
fun and sort of having these reflective, spiritual personal experiences. Um,
I'm not that excited by professional use, even though, like
I'm happy when I see people are finding it to
be useful. The regular people have definitely been a lot
more motivating and inspiring to me than the professional uses.

(28:26):
I have very little interest in the world as it is.
I want to like make it really different, and it's
much easier to do something really different for consumers than
it is to like have that immediately impact the sort
of professional world. And so like for video game people
come to me, they're like, well, and like they literally
they have to file us under their photoshop budget because
like the video game is already budgeted out and it
takes sixteen months, and I have to wait for them

(28:47):
to make their next video game. And I'm like, this
is bullshit. I'm so happy that my business isn't reliant
on somebody finishing their video game in sixteen months, you know,
And that's what that world is like, Listen, I thought
a lot about this, Like if I'm making video game,
especially if I'm like an independent developer, like an indie,
depth I need art, I need assets, like I want
to make like I want to make this world that

(29:08):
hasn't been made before and like normally and this actually
gets into this part of the conversation I want to
have about art and about the sort of implications of it.
You know, I might go and hire an artist or
whatever to do that, but now, like mid Journey, potentially,
like if I'm using it in that way, I can
create assets and backgrounds and scenery or even brainstorm off
of that to build something from. Like that's a that's

(29:28):
not the exact thing, but a kind of iteration of it.
But there is a certain, very vocal segment of people
out there in the world, and there are people who
are artists who are you know, digital artists, or who
are working artists today, or even people who are doing
fine art that's like hanging in galleries, and they're like, one,
this is theft because it's using our work. It's using

(29:48):
work that is out there that is available to see
as inspiration for these works. And two, it's like they're
not getting anything when it does create new work. Not
only is it making their jobs or sort of obsolete,
but it's also like doing it on the backs of
all of their work. It's not a non compelling argument.
There is some reason to think that all of those

(30:10):
sort of notions are in some way true. Like what's
your take on that. There's a lot of misunderstandings around
the technology, and it makes sense that like artists really
aren't going to understand what this is doing. Some of
my favorite images I've made with any of these models
that looked artistic. We're trained only on photos, and so
what this is is it's a system that understands what
images look like like and if you've seen enough photos

(30:32):
in your life and then you see a painting you
can describe the painting without having ever having been trained
on paintings, and so like, what this is this thing
that understands images, and then it understands language in a
sense of the connection to languages and images, And there's
some elements of like knowing what a style looks like
requires having seen the word and the style before, So
there's like some connections to it, but like, largely speaking,

(30:53):
it's not I think working like the way they think
it is. And so the problem is the artists are
scared about being in the data set, but literally you
can just take one of their pictures and feed int
one of these models would ever never have seen before,
and they can make pictures like that. So it's not
about the training data. First off, if it understands images,
it's game over for that battle. It wasn't seem enough
general images, and often like know what textures are and

(31:14):
know what colors are. You can show it a picture
and it can make pictures like that never having seen
that specific artsila before. Right, So I mean you know
that obviously raises like all kinds of weird questions about
like you know how fine tune does that get? Can
I pick any artists like a photographer I like on
Instagram and say in the style of this Instagram photographer
and like it will do something well. I mean, you

(31:35):
could certainly put a photo of theirs into another service
and it'll give you a a photo that looks like it.
So you know, that's I think that's really the more
that's kind of the technical thing. And so basically, if
these systems understand images, they'll be able to copy anything
you show them, regardless of we're not. They're trained on them.
So I think the training data is the wrong battle
to fight, But there is potentially a battle to fight
over like use of these tools like what is good

(31:56):
and what is bad? Youth um, and certainly like the
law cover that already. If you make something that's really
derivative of another artist, like too derivative, it does it's
not okay even legally right like there is it is
covered a little bit by blaw already. Maybe there should
be something more strict because like it's getting easier. Uh,
But that's that's the battle to fight. I think it's
like what's too similar? Not like this training data? Think

(32:20):
you know, I think about like c G I in
a way, if you're building an environment for like a
film or something, right like, and you're like I want
to make a mountain or whatever, You're not going to
hand draw every polygon that builds the mountain, right, the
computer is going to figure out and even now, like
it'll just basically terraform a mountain right in unreal or whatever. YEA,
once upon a time most people couldn't read and write,
and now everybody can, and there are more writers now

(32:43):
and more readers now professionally than there ever where before. Right, Well,
it's kind of like photography, yeah, right, Like everybody has
like a kind of pro grade camera in their pocket
all the time now, and so like we're just a
wash in really high quality photos. Whereas like if you
go back fifty years, not even twenty five years, best
phone camera you could have was really shitty and was

(33:03):
obviously low quality, we weren't awash in just photos everywhere, right,
And like in the last twenty five years, pretty much
everybody has become like somewhat of a pro am photographer. Yeah,
maybe this is a strawman. I don't want to throw
a strawman at you, but like is there a question
about like deep fakes and sort of like creating reality
that didn't exist. Is that something real? You guys grapple

(33:25):
with you know, it's a real risk. For us specifically,
we did some special algorithms. It's very hard to make
it make a deep fake. Usually what it does if
you ask me to make a photo, it'll look realistic,
but there's like something to it in the lighting and
the shading and the use where it's like just far
enough away from a photo that it looks very realistic,
but your body like knows it's not a real image immediately.

(33:46):
What if I'm imagining something that looks exactly like a
real image, We're not doing that right now. My imagination
has a limit. Yeah, right now it does. Yeah. Yeah.
Would you think that limit will be lifted? I don't
know for certain users. Maybe for this guy, I guess
very creative ideas, Maybe let me check it. There's lots
of pros and cons of doing that. So we found
that when we flipped it over that boundary, sometimes it
looks perfect, and then sometimes it looks really like Uncanny

(34:07):
Valley zombie like. So right now, if we flip it,
it's like kind of sometimes looks perfectly. Sometimes it looks
like uncanny, and the uncanny is so like upsetting to me,
as like a visual aesthetic person, I don't want to
make anything that looks like that, and so like I
I just it's better it is not loud at all.
Maybe in the future it'll be so good that it
never looks uncanny, and i'd say the technology is not. Yeah,

(34:30):
I mean there's no chance, just to be clear, there's
no chance that in like five years from now that
we won't be at a point where mid Journey or
other programs like it will be able to create completely
photo realistic, if not full moving images for sure, still
like in five years time, right, yeah, Yeah, There's gonna
be multiple directions here. I think one will be trying
to like make photo realistic duplications of reality, and I

(34:52):
think the other one will be like making things sort
of sort of super real, like beyond real. And I
think the beyond real stuff is where it's both interesting
as a human and where all like consumer and commercial
stuff is. I will say, I'm unabashedly like a fan
of this thing, but like I also can understand people's
fear about it. But people are afraid of a lot
of things that computers do, and for very good reason.
I would also say, and this is kind of your problem.

(35:13):
People are afraid of people like you. I don't mean
you personally, You're a lovely person um as far as
I know, uh, but like you are like, hey, I
am interested in imagination all these things. And like if
you ask like Mark Zuckerberg, like the early stages of Facebook,
you know, he would be like, I just want to
connect people, you know, I would just want people to
like get together in this social environment or whatever and connect.

(35:35):
But like, actually down the road, as that thing developed,
Mark Zuckerberg made a lot of like really crazy, weird,
bad decisions. You don't have to go on record by
agreeing with me, but I think in your heart you
know it's true. And so what do you do to
protect against like these things that feel like creative decisions now? Right, Like,
we couldn't have seen the misinformation machine that Facebook was
going to become, with like all of these bad actors

(35:57):
and all you know, sort of the ways that you
could abused the sis tims, Like we didn't know that
that was going to be a thing until like we
started to see the actual abuse. How do you protect
against the things where you've got to take in like
the worst of humanity. Like, are you doing that on
an active basis? Right? Because, like the thing with a
tool like this is that the best parts of humanity
will find like amazing things to do with it. But
there is an equal opposite actor, they're right, who will

(36:21):
do the worst things with it. So tell me, like
how that you build a product like this and don't
let it become destructive. Yeah. So my philosophy is that
creators imbue their values and the things they create, whether
they know it or not, and that those things have
a way of spreading those values even when they're no
longer around. That does actually put a lot of blame

(36:44):
on people like Zuckerberg. It implies that he made Facebook
with the wrong values. I don't know, Mark, But an
interesting example that I like to think about is um
the default of something like Facebook versus my Space. Like,
obviously he was aware of my Space, we know that, right,
definitely the main competitor. And when I remember are going
on to my space for the first time and my
pages blank, and it's that I had one friend, I

(37:04):
was like, who's my friend? Oh my god, it's Tom
who's Tom. You know, it's this nice guy. He's the
guy maker of my Space. This is cool, Like Tom's
my friend, he must care about me. I bet I
could make other friends that I don't know, Like my
space is a place where I can make friends, and
Tom cares. And when you sign on to Facebook, you
have no friends. And Marcus certainly not your friend. But

(37:26):
he's not your first friend on Facebook. That's definitely and
like what the fund does that mean? What the fund
does that mean? Not only is he not your first friend,
but you have no friends when you join right when
you join Facebook, you are this friendless non person then,
and this you have to try to grab out to
anybody who you already know, Like please, somebody who already
knows me be my friend on Facebook. And like these

(37:48):
there's like these really deep details that are made by
real people who have values, Like he had to think
about this, obviously, he thought about Like he's not dumb,
like you must have thought about it. I mean maybe
he wanted to be your first friend. But they were
like actually, like my Space, Tom could sue us for
like I P stuff like infringement if um we do

(38:08):
the same thing that he did. You know, I think
we know he wasn't that cautious about being sued because
it happened, right, That's true. I mean there's a lot
of interesting things like that. I think that actually maybe

(38:30):
everything is that way. The goal is like not to
not make things, but to make things with like really
good values and to have people with good values making things,
and like that making things is not equivalent between any people.
I agree with you, but like what is the expression
like the road to hell is paved with good intentions? Whatever?
I mean, I agree that that you can avoid some

(38:51):
of these mistakes like if you have a different set
of like goals or values, but like you already do
things with mid Journey where you're trying to sort of
protect against like misuse, right, like obviously like hate speech
or images of violence. I mean I definitely like tried
some stuff that I didn't think was like going to
produce a violent result, and it was like, we don't
do like this kind of image or whatever. I actually

(39:12):
have a question about porn, which is a big one.
I Mean, my guess is if you wanted Mid Journey
to create like incredible original like porn scenes, because there's
a lot of pornography on the internet, right, would you say?
There's quite a bit of it, and it's all a
visual medium basically. I mean there's obviously some erotica out there.
There's somewhere You've got the X rated Mid Journey instance
running right where I can create like full on porn scenes, right,

(39:36):
don't lie to me. I know the truth. Somebody there's
doing it. Yeah. You know, when I first thought about
this problem, I was like, who wants an AI generated booty?
Who doesn't? And then like, honestly, as the albums get
over time, like I see some booties and I'm like,
it's a pretty nice booty, Like it's pretty good. Pretty good. Yeah,
Like it obviously can do really good like just how
to make beautiful anything else. I mean that's a huge

(39:57):
deal though, Like I can't even do like a Renaiss
on his painting of nudes, like tasteful artistic news with
Mid Journey. Correct, No, right, Like is there a tier
where I can do nudes? This is really just I'm
asking for myself. But like you know, no, you're not
gonna let anybody ever do a nude, you know. I
think it's about like what is a thing that like

(40:18):
helps the world, Like what's so like. For example, there
are two things we have tried. I can give you
two stories. Well, one is when their system wasn't filtering
well enough, you'd have people trying to basically create like
their fantasy person basically and they're like becomes super fixated
on like this redhead whatever, like it becomes this very
specific thing over time. I don't know if that feels healthy.

(40:38):
It's certainly a market, right, I mean by the way
that phrase, I don't know if it's healthy, but it's
certainly a market. Is like the things that are available online,
like literally social media is like I don't know if
it's healthy, but there's certainly you know someone's going to
do it, and I think it's not going to be healthy.
Um right now. There are other things that we tried.

(40:59):
So for example, we did this thing where we created
this chat room. We called it not Safe, don't judge,
and we threw like a hudder people into it and
we turned off all the filters, oh my god, just
to see what would happen. And it was really interesting.
We put them all in there. We go there's no filters. Everybody.
You can do whatever you want, but everyone else is
gonna see what you see, there's gotta be some people
who would be shameless in that scenario. It was very
quiet at first, and then someone goes Bob and then

(41:22):
there's some boot pictures and someone goes like ass and
that was like an as picture, and everyone's like kind
of startled a first, like they didn't know what to do.
And then somebody goes, uh, fifty person orgy in a Walmart,
and it's just like these piles of naked bodies and
a Walmart, and then all of a sudden, everyone else
goes uh it orgy in space, alien orgies, and then
all of a sudden everyone starts losing their minds and

(41:44):
it gets really strange. Eventually it went to like Bill
Cosby eating out Hitler, Like it got pretty intense. Oh
my god, I mean that's a very, that's a very,
that's a full cancel on that image. I would say, yeah,
everything but was. But what was happening was like it
became so absurd that everyone just started to kind of

(42:04):
like let go of all of the bullshit that they
knew that like that they would normally be outraged of.
And when somebody finally did Bill Cosby eating out Hitler
like that was like an hour in Okay, yeah, and
is that when you shut it down? Was that this
was that when you closed shut it down shortly after? Yeah?
But so because imagine but that's like such a small sample,

(42:25):
and like it it went immediately to a place that
would defend like probably the like normal users of the internet. Well,
I think what's interesting to how about psychological experience of
all people had in this room, because it went from
like whops to like you know, they're kind of escalated
to like and Walmart? Is that? What isn't that what
always happens though, like you're testing the limits, but like

(42:45):
you know, but what happened was it's like at some
point they kind of like let go during this process
and they were like it doesn't matter anymore. Yeah, Bill
Cosby Hitler, that's really funny, or someone else did like
Michael Jackson's asshole and it's hit like a butt hole
where the where the whole was Michael Jackson's face. It
was funny, it was weird. You know those people thought
it was funny, but like a very large audience would

(43:06):
not think that. So this is the thing, So like,
I mean, it's not funny like at a at a
kind of basic level, like you know, the Cosby stuff
is really fucked up, and Hitler's Hitler, so like at
a really kind of basic level, like if you're like
in good taste, that's very very not in good And
there was no taste anymore. It was like everyone just
like lost it. They're like, look, nothing matters, like this
is all bullshit, like it doesn't really Like everyone kind

(43:27):
of let go. It felt very cathartic because at first
they were really shy, and by the end they had
all let go. It was kind of a beautiful process.
I don't know though, but like it went to a
place that was pretty offensive, right. I mean, I'm glad
that you don't allow that particular type of use. I
think it was really interesting and I would say everybody
who was involved in the sperence felt it was like
cathartic and a positive, like spiritual experience because they realized

(43:50):
how pent up they were in stupid ways, like maybe
the last thing was bad, Like we could say that
was bad, but there was something No, the last thing
was bad. The last thing was bad. I don't I
don't want to be like, uh, you know, like uh
the policing culture or whatever, but I mean, but the know,
but the reality is like, actually, like I think that
raises an interesting sort of scenario, and it's like, what
do people do when given this kind of unbridled power

(44:12):
to create whatever is in their mind? Like I like
to think people will come up with a really cool
stuff that's like awesome, but definitely for sure there's a
segment of the audience. And this is actually gets back
to my what I was asking, which is like, so
you did ran an experiment a room full of people.
They were just like users, like test like beta users
or something. It was. It was, it was a bunch
of users. We did it for one hour, and I said,
if anybody leaked an image, I would ban them for life. Right,

(44:33):
So that's your little kind of window into it. You're like, Okay,
this could get pretty crazy. Obviously, the way you've built
the system is that you cannot do those things. I guess.
Like the question is like do you have to be
constantly vigilant about like the ways that the thing might
be abused? Like how do you counter like abuse you
haven't even thought of yet. We have like forty moderators
who kind of watch things and then they just have

(44:55):
they have a little slash band commands, they say slash
band titties and also no keys the word to you anymore? Right?
Are you actively like yesterday? Was there something that Mid
Journey produced that was like a surprise to the moderators?
I know that there are words that were banned today,
Like what what was banned? I'm super curious, Like, but
today you're way far into it. There's like, how many
people have used mid Journey? Do you know the numbers? Millions?

(45:16):
Millions of people. Yeah, so millions of people have been
in there. But you're still today, as of October five
or whatever, you've banned words. I'd love to know what
the last banned word was. The moderators came back recently
and they're like, David, we want to unband the following
words blood, bloody, sexy, kill, killing, cutting, disturbing, and gut. Wow.

(45:38):
What an image. They're like, they're like, what do you think, David,
we could probably unbanned those things. And I was like, Okay,
let me think about this, uh child with guts filled
across the ground, disturbing, huge pools of blood, and like,
oh yeah, we probably don't want right where I was
like a little girl cut themselves like, oh yeah, that
seems bad, right, Well okay, but so here's my question
for you. And I think you've got kind of a
crazy responsibility. And I'm not saying this to be a

(46:00):
jerk at all, but like you're just like a guy
who's interested in creating this this product and create this
kind of beautiful and imaginative and exciting images and beyond.
But you're not like a linguist. I don't know you're
all of your background, but I mean, like you're not
like an ethicist. Do you employ an ethicist at the company?
Do you employ like linguistic experts? How diverse is the team?

(46:22):
I think these are like things that people are gonna
want to know, which is like you mentioned the Bill
Cosby Hitler thing, and I can think of like a
bunch of people who are not like a white Jewish guy.
And I say this as a white Jewish guy who
would be much more offended about some of that stuff
for people with different experience is an example, pretty outrageous thing.
And I get that, and no, no, I understand it.
Like you were in this experiment, somebody took you to

(46:43):
this crazy place and then you're like, all right, we
gotta shut it down. This is sort of what I
was trying to get to, is like, how do you
make a company that has all the lofty and interesting
and exciting ideals I think you have, but also protect
against building a product that ultimately ends up repeating the
mistakes of the facebooks of the twitters of the world.
And the question does come down to, like, when you're

(47:03):
having those conversations, who's in the room, who's having that
conversation with you? Like, what are you gonna do? This
is might being put in my hardcore journalists add on,
like what are you gonna do to make sure that
you have conversations with a big enough set of people
and with a smart enough set of people who are
experts in these fields, like in the fields of like
ethics and linguistics and like you know, history, and that

(47:24):
it's a diverse group, like to actually make a product
that serves everybody and not just one that feels like
cool to like a couple of you know, Jewish guys
like us, but may not work for a million other
people in the world. Yeah, I mean there's a lot
of questions there. First off, I'm okay not serving everybody,
Like if this is majority is a two million person
thing is ever bigger than that. I'm happy with that.
But you want to make it inclusive, I would assume, yeah,

(47:45):
I wanted to be inclusive, but also it's only two
million people. I'll be okay with that, Like I don't like,
I'm not I don't have this like this, you want
two million of the same people, though, you don't want
two million to the same people, two million white Jewish guys.
If it makes two million white Jewish guys really happy
to improve their lives in a significant way, like they've
made the world better. Now, obviously I'd like to make
it diverse, like and we try really hard there, but

(48:06):
like I mean, at the end of the day, it's
it's more important that it's good for the people who
interact with it then that it has as many people
as possible. And that's the first trade off. That's the
first that's a huge trade off, because most people decided
to not make that trade off. No, I agree with
you that, Like, if you're thinking of like the infinite audience,
obviously you don't want to be like every person should
be in this thing or using this thing or whatever.
But like I guess it's such a sensitive space where

(48:28):
like you've built a tool that can create something out
of nothing, Like you build a tool that can make
a dream look like real basically, and so you know,
how do you do it the right way? I feel
like here's a chance to bring a bunch of people
into the conversation that we're never there at Google on
day one. When I think about any new technology like this,
I always think now, and perhaps because I've been so

(48:49):
abused by the technology companies that have existed before us,
you know what could go wrong? Right? And how do
you prevent that? Yeah, there are a lot of things
we do, so like I do office hours every week
for four hours where I just talked to as many
people as I can, will do a theme thing like
I brought up like twelve women once and I said, like,
let's have a women panel, and I want to ask

(49:11):
everybody how you feel about bikini photos? Should I ban
bikini And that's one way of getting the women's side
of things, because every single day I heard some some
asshole dude who's like, tits are natural. I like, bikini photos,
have as many as you can, and then like women
who are uncomfortable, And I was like, you know what,
I just want to hear a bunch of women talk
about this issue of how do you feel like the
bikini photos and like I will do whatever you say.

(49:33):
I was like, should I ban bikinis? That was like
the simplest question. Did you ban bikinis? They decided as
a group, like, we do not want you to ban bikinis,
Like it was like pretty unanimous, but we want you
to hide them so that none of us ever have
to see some dude making a bikini. And so that's
what we did. It's a good middle ground. To me,
this is so weird because like the reality is like

(49:53):
the naked human body. Is that not like, on its
face offensive to me in any way, Like it's like
very normal. I agree, And it's like funny to think
that you've got a buffer against like people abusing the
system who are making weird like you know, sexual bikini
photos or whatever. Yeah. I mean what the women basically
said on the on the whole is that they're like
they're basically even we like a little cleavage, but like
what an average guy thinks is sexy, it's really easy

(50:15):
for most of us to find creepy and unwelcoming, and
so basically we don't have We don't feel like we
should have to see that like against our will. That's
so true both in AI and in life. There's a
lot of these sort of nuanced things like technically, it
probably should be able to do a tasteful nude, but
it shouldn't be able to do like a hyper sexualized dude.
Like technically, like that seems right, you know, but it's
it's hard. There's a really hard boundary. You know, no

(50:37):
taste is I mean, it's a question of art, right,
Like what's porn. It's like, well, you know when you
see it, and it's like but there's different levels of that, right.
We've been trying to teach the system actually lately some
of these nuances. We have certain users who go in
and they rate images randomly. We find that on the whole,
people very rarely say anything is offensive, like very rare.
So when they say it, it's interesting, and then we

(50:57):
and we aggreate all those together and then we teach
the a We're like, hey, regardless of whether or not
something is offensive, this is how people are responding to
your images. And then what it does that actually changed
its behavior? Do you worry you're you're creating a kind
of prudish AI, like do you worry that like you're
actually making a sexually repressed AI that like is going
to be weird about sex and human bodies. I think

(51:18):
the question is like when we build these technologies, like
what battles do you want to fight? And where do
we want to push the world forward? And like me,
I want the world to be more imaginative, like and
I want to push the boundaries of like aesthetics and creation.
I think that's really interesting and it's really worthwhile. But
I can be a little picky. I'm not as interested
in doing that for violence of sexuality. Like there is

(51:40):
an argument that's like push the boundaries of sexuality, let's
make the world way more sexual. Someone else can do that.
I just don't feel spiritually compelled for that. And so
but I think that like there's this broader thing, which
is like letting people reflect. The average person comes in
here and they say something like Maltese dog in heaven
and I reach out like, hey, why did you do that?
That's interesting? And they go because my dog just died.
And I'm like, oh shit, are you okay? And they're like, yeah,

(52:01):
this is making me feel better, or there was like
another woman and she goes like she was putting in
these weird lyrics and I'm like, what are you doing?
Like these don't show up on Google. And she goes,
when I was very young, my older brother died and
all he left me was this, like this cassette tape
of these songs and I'm literally putting lyrics in and
I'm feeling closest person never got to be part of
my life. It's not always. Yeah, there was one person
who was like temple of donuts and like, why are
you doing Temple of Donuts? And like, well, I'm an atheist,

(52:23):
but I don't really understand worship or religion, but I
do understand like donuts and sweets. It's like combining all
the things I don't understand what the things I do understand,
and I'm like trying to understand, like what is worship.
The Hong Kong girl, she she said, I'm a woman,
I'm in Hong Kong, and the one thing your parents
and Hong Kong I never want you to be as
an artist. And so I'm a banker, and I'm a
good banker. But now as I'm starting to get to
use mid journey. I'm starting to get to feel like

(52:45):
I'm getting to be the person I never got to be,
and I'm having to think about that. And so like
these are like the good stories. Just like those are
great stories. Somebody else is just like huge chips covered
in blood and it's like I don't care about that person.
That's not a real human story, and like maybe there's
something going on there, but it's not interesting. Like there's
so many interesting things going on, and I want to
create a space for that, and and I'm doing that.

(53:08):
There's a path that we see over and over again
with people in the Journey almost called like the heroes
and mid Journey, and what happens is they come in
and they realize they can make pictures of something they like.
For me, it was cats and cyberpunk. Right, I'm like, okay,
the start punk cats. I'm like, okay, I'll make sunk
Priest book Ninjas and Sara Punks and I'm making typ
about everything. And then all of a sudden, like you
you combine all the things you like and then you
just burn out and you're like, oh my god, I

(53:28):
never like cyer punk. I never want to see sar
punk again. Star punk isn't me? And then and then
it's like month one, Month one, and then month two
is you're like, but then who am I? And then
you start looking at everybody else pictures. You're like art deco,
am I art deco? Or like vaporways? Am I vaporways?
And then you start like looking at everything and you're
and you're kind of saying, like, you know, and you're
trying to do this path of like who am I?

(53:49):
What is my real aesthetic? And then you learn a lot.
People learn like all this hard history and all these movements,
and they start putting things together into like the sense
of who they are. And then like month three is
like you have this like aesthetic universe. You're starting to
apply it to everything You're like and it's like, you know,
it's a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
It's all these things together, and you're like creating all
this stuff, and it's like you're like having to like
your people are paying off authetic depth. They're like exploring

(54:11):
the nature of their identities and then they're like expressing it.
They're like they're working out all this ship and like
it's really really healthy and it's literally just regular people
and almost nobody shares anything. It's crazy, like almost no
pictures ever shared and almost no pictures ever sold, and
it's just like it's mostly just regular people having this
like really healthy experience. So to be clear, basically you

(54:34):
see this as a form of therapy. Is that correct?
There at least of all the US is literally aren't therapy?
R wow, mental health through AI. That was entirely unexpected,
but it's really important. It's clearly this tool for reflection.
And then people are starting to meet each other like
and they're starting to like form these groups and they're
like pushing these aesthetic boundaries and discovering new things and
like that's really beautiful and it's obviously part of an

(54:56):
honest and positive future and like that's what I care about. Okay,
really quickly and then we gotta wrap up. But do
you think that like there's a future state where it's
like mid Journey is its own Instagram. There's gonna be
like that, but it's crazier. I think the future is
more of like, um, it's more it's more like liquid
imagination swirling around the room and like forming mountains and
little trees and animals and little runs you're trying to

(55:17):
figure out how to give people's surfboards or both like
surf like oceans of liquid imagination, like discover entirely new lands.
But it's like a very different thing. And it's like
it forms like a new substance that you kind of
can create and the world with and manifest through and
like reflect through, and like that's what it's about. It's
like creating a new substance. It's really not about like

(55:38):
making an Instagram or making poor or huge kids. It's
obvious that all that stuff will happen, but that it
doesn't matter, Like it's not the real thing. It's like
there was a civilization before engines and after engines, and
and now the fun thing is moving to a civilization
that has these engines of imagination and how does that
transform things? Like how did engines an? I think we
have highways, we have both. We have like huge international trade,

(56:00):
Like there's like a Amazon and stuff, yeah Amazon. A
lot of people in technology feel like we have no past.
A lot of regular people literally feel like we have
no future. But like I feel like we're really mid
journey in this, like we have this rich and beautiful
past behind us and it's like wondrous and unimaginable future
ahead of us, and like the whole goal of making
anything is to figure out what we can be and

(56:20):
what that can be in like a positive and explorative
and wonderful, humane way. And like I don't know, That's
what I'm trying to do and hopefully it shows up
a little bit in this stuff. But like I agree,
I'm so on board with that sentiment. Like agree, like
we don't know yet what all of this is going
to be. It's like we have to figure that out.
And that's why like people are like we're done, and
it's like, no, we just really got started, like with

(56:42):
technology I think, and what it can do. I agree,
like you, you are not going a sentiment that I
have definitely spoken on on more than one occasion. David Um.
This is, first off, super fucking interesting ship that you're building,
extremely fascinating conversation. We should do like a check in
like a year from now or something to see all
of the new mid journey things that have been created.
So it's gonna get really scary. It's even the next

(57:03):
six months, six months is going to be really intense.
Like six months is the farthest I can see twelve
months actually, I actually okay, we'll do a six month
check in. We'll see if the journey said it's um
like three quarter journey, it's gonna be, it's gonna be.
It's it's gonna be moving really fast. It's gonna seem
frightening to a lot of people, but it's like it's um,
it's like an honest shot at the future. You know,

(57:25):
I'm ready, David, thank you so much. Well, that is
our show for this week. We'll be back next week
with more what future, And as always, I wish you
and your family the very best, even the Discantist family.