Feelings Check-In: AI goes to Washington, Ledger Hysterics & The Content Treadmill

[00:00] With great responsibility comes great. What is it? With great... With great... [00:05] I should have googled home. Okay, never mind. With great power comes great responsibility. There it is. There it is. Welcome to the feelings check-in, a feelings first look at the news of the week. Takes no one asked for on topics everyone's talking about. I'm Natasha Hoskins. I'm Dina Burke. And this is Boys Club. Wait, is it just Boys Club? It's just Boys Club. The Boys Club podcast? No, no. [00:32] Just boy stuff. [00:33] Exciting news, Blake Finucane. [00:36] of context views on crypto and culture has moved to her own feed new feed [00:42] New feed. She graduated to her own feed. So you have to subscribe. [00:46] to that we'll put the link in the show notes please like it subscribe she's had some fire guests already [00:53] Streetwear legend Bobby Hundreds and CEO and editor-in-chief at NFT now Matt Medvek. So check it out. [01:03] subscribe she's got some other great guests for season two so [01:07] Make it happen. [01:11] Okay, so a lot of people are talking about this. Sam Altman... [01:15] Who is he? The CEO of OpenAI. OpenAI is the company that's responsible for chat GPT, testified before Congress yesterday, or I guess on Wednesday, Tuesday. It's Wednesday today. So there is a Senate Judiciary Committee.

[01:33] committee that is holding hearings [01:36] to write the rules of artificial intelligence. This is the first in a series of hearings intended to basically come up with a blueprint of what they think regulation around AI should be. [01:48] So that's the groundwork. Bunch of senators and three AI experts who are testifying. Sam Altman. [01:54] CEO of OpenAI. Samantha Stevens, who writes our AI News. [02:00] Gary Marcus, who is a professor and a writer and a longtime think boy around AI. And then Christina Montgomery, who is the chief privacy and trust officer at IBM. It was like a two and a half hour hearing. Most of the questions were definitely... [02:20] geared at Sam. It starts with [02:24] A very dramatic moment where the senator from Connecticut, his name is Blumenthal. [02:31] Opens with a very dramatic audio on the congressional floor where it's him talking about the trade-offs of AI, his position, and then it ends and then he was like, [02:45] that was a AI generated platform [02:48] take on what I think about AI. And it's so it's very drama. He's like, yeah, he's running some theater. Yeah, he's theater. He's a thespian. And he was he goes through basically sort of what his positions are, what the pitfalls are, what the promises are. His biggest concern is

[03:06] The... [03:07] looming new industrial revolution. So he's saying the displacement of millions of workers because of AI. [03:14] He also talked about, obviously, deepfakes, harassment against women. And so he's going through some of the pitfalls. And then he also talks about the promises of curing diseases, weather forecasting and climate change, efficiency around supply chain. [03:30] Weather forecasting. Weather forecasting, which I had never heard as like a [03:34] promise of AI, but it makes sense. You got all this data and it can maybe make some predictions about what the future will be. Like major, major events, major weather events. When like the big shake is going to happen in San Francisco or whatever. Okay. I don't know. Okay. Got it. So, [03:49] That's sort of how it opens. And then... [03:52] A few other people speak and then Sam Altman speaks. And essentially the high level takeaway is that he's [03:59] incredibly open to regulation. One of his quotes is, if tech, if this technology goes wrong, [04:06] it can go quite wrong. And we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with [04:10] the government to prevent that from happening. So it was interesting because a lot of the hearing is the senators talking about how they failed to regulate social media in the way that they should have. And then you have the result of 2016 and 2020 and these election years where there's rampant misinformation that is spreading throughout the internet. And there's, [04:32] There was quite a bit of owning up to the fact that the government should have been better regulated in these large moments around social media, and they didn't. And that this is another moment, Sam Altman called it a printing press moment in terms of revolutionary technology, and that the government should be...

[04:53] involved in regulating these companies, these research institutions like OpenAI and others. [04:59] Sam was saying that regulatory intervention is critical. And some examples that he laid out was they could require a combination of licensing and testing requirements for development and release of AI models above a certain threshold of capability. Yeah. [05:16] Cutting the open source movement off at the disease. Basically. So that's part of it as well. And they talked a little bit about the open source movement. But I do think that my vibe, vibe check is that it feels genuine, that there feels like a moment where there's massive responsibility in these companies. And you want to be able to point to say, hey, these are the rules that the government has laid out for me. We're standing by these rules. And that protects you from a [05:44] litigation, essentially. I'm trying to be really scrupulous about what the intentions are watching it. And I'm like, this feels incredible that someone who's responsible for a massive movement of emerging tech, potentially one of the most powerful people on the planet right now, is coming to these senators and saying, we want to work with you and get regulations that are appropriate for what we're building. That feels like revolutionary, especially when you're looking around the room. [06:14] way that they're talking about it, they're so uncomfortable with the material. Like you can tell all of them talked about how they use chat GPT this weekend. And you can tell that they're like not engaged in this technology. They're reading through their own notes that their team has prepared, which that's not their job to be experts. So it's ridiculous to hold them to that standard. But there's some really cringe moments where you can tell that there's a massive disconnect in

[06:44] being released. And I felt like he was very generous in the way that he was approaching the conversation and willing to come to the table and find a way to... [06:52] work together. There's one hilariously cringe moment where Senator Blackburn, who is a senator in Tennessee, [07:00] was really harping on the creator economy, artists, musicians, content creators, which totally makes sense because she's from Tennessee and her constituency cares about that. She was talking about Jukebox as a product of open AIs. What's Jukebox? [07:18] jukebox jukebox is a research release that was released i think in 2020 by open ai that is a music making model but it's not an application it's not chat gpt you can't use it like you can't go to it and use it okay her main point was like are you going to get the explicit consent from content creators and musicians before you essentially add their likeness to these models [07:48] as an example of how people can take creative work and repurpose it. And Sam Altman is like, just to clarify, Jukebox is not an application. Like he's trying to say it's not an application. It's a research release. And she keeps interrupting him, keeps interrupting him. [08:03] And he's not able to like get to his point around how they're planning to make plans around how to compensate artists. And then she interrupts him at some point and she's like, we all live through Napster.

[08:14] It's just like so cringe. And like I know [08:18] Shout out to Tennessee. [08:20] I know what she's trying to get at. She's trying to get at Napster was this technology that... [08:26] revolutionized the music industry and was really disruptive and really harmful to a lot of musicians. And is AI going to do the same thing? And he's like, okay. And like, it's just such a cringe moment. It sort of feels like you're in... [08:39] like a comedy act. [08:41] Where... [08:42] He's like, please... [08:44] regulate us and figure out a way to regulate us. And they're like, [08:48] okay. Like, it's just like, what are we doing here? So the two main things that people talked about a lot, job loss and copyright law. Those were the two main things that they were trying to get their hands around. One note or recommendation that I thought was really good was actually the idea that a way you could start to think about regulation is regulation, regulation in the magnitude of a new federal agency. So like the Food and Drug Administration, [09:18] a whole new cabinet level that's required to think about and regulate for the American people, how these companies and what they're releasing needs to be, how it needs to be regulated, what type of licensing they need, and on that magnitude, have a team of technical experts that can be a part of that and can be involved in the decision-making and part of that new agency. That was one of the first sort of recommendations that it started to click for me, how this could

[09:48] together because I'm like these senators making decisions about how AI is going to be regulated is a joke. Like that's a joke. And yeah, [09:57] But at the same time, I do feel like these systems should have federal regulations, just like we have with airplanes or with like... [10:06] food, um, [10:08] like calorie count. I don't know what those are called, but that type of regulation needs to start to be applied to this type of technology. But the only way that we're going to be able to do that is if we're bringing in technical experts that can speak to what's being built. Yeah. I have two feelings. One feeling is if my senator from Tennessee is in this conversation with Sam and materially affecting what regulation or what the regulatory landscape is going to look like for this type of technology, I am going to be thinking a lot more about my elected officials and their [10:36] capacity to deal with this type of topic. Yeah. I'm going to be giving that a lot more scrutiny. And it's something that like I hadn't, [10:43] really ever thought of before. How fluent are you in emerging tech? But [10:47] probably should be [10:49] something that is a major criteria for how we're thinking about our elected officials and who we're delegating that control to so that's the first thing and then the second thing is [10:59] I... [11:00] I totally agree with your take that. [11:04] there needs to be federal regulation. I am kind of struck by [11:08] It's a technology that spreads really easily. So... [11:12] It's not as though we're doing... [11:14] All this R&D in the United States and it's staying in the United States, right? I

[11:19] If that were the case, [11:20] then that would be a lot easier to regulate. But what happens in Brazil and India and China and all and Russia and all these other places, there needs to be some global handshake on how we're dealing with this in order for it to one be fair. [11:36] And to be effective. So yeah, that's the other thing that comes up. Yeah, they talked a little bit about how Europe is already ahead of us in terms of regulation around AI, and how Europe is ahead of us in terms of social media and the regulation and privacy rights and data rights. And [11:54] It was... [11:56] embarrassing kind of when they talked about like the social media and data uh regulations that the eu was able to get their arms around and how they're like still talking about it it's like when someone keeps talking about like an axe and you're like stop talking about it like where what happens now what are they doing next so hanging out talking i think i think so so my understanding is that this is going to be a series of hearings so they are going to do more and bring [12:26] And then I think [12:27] Uh, [12:28] come up with a plan and... [12:31] I think this one will be definitely the most, I mean, it was, it was three hours total and many people, a lot of the writing on it was like, wow, we didn't even like scratch the surface. And that was my feeling too. Like every time they started to get into something and moved to the next Senator. So like you really didn't have enough time to get, dig into some of these things. Um, so I'm curious if Sam will make his appearance, his red carpet appearance again. Um,

[12:54] Uh, and who else they'll bring to talk about it. Um, [12:59] But it's interesting. It's interesting to see the moment we're living in and how much gravity it feels like it does have. Yeah. [13:11] how [13:12] I really believe in the government, except when it comes to this stuff where I'm like, man, you guys don't get it. You just really don't get it. Yeah. And that's a bad feeling. That is a bad feeling. That's a bad feeling. [13:24] Yeah. [13:25] Anyway. One quick thing. Yeah. Ledger is a zine sponsor. Was a zine sponsor. Yeah. Oh, great. Great. Great. Yeah. So full disclosure. Full disclosure. We actually love Ledger. We love Ledger. We're incredibly biased in this conversation, but it is news that is happening. So we're covering it because we are journalists now. [13:51] Ha ha ha ha. [13:53] Ledger is the main character of Twitter this week, and you never want to be the main character. [14:00] Oh no. Okay. So tell me what happened. So Ledger launched something called Ledger Recover, which is basically a opt-in subscription service. [14:11] that [14:12] you can pay as a ledger customer [14:15] to [14:16] Thank you. [14:16] basically have [14:18] access to your ledger wallet if something were to happen. Like if your ledger were to break or if you were to lose it and you can't find your seed phrase.

[14:27] you can, if you're paying for the service, you can basically [14:31] Call them up. I don't know actually how it works, but call them up in some capacity. Hey, I lost my seat first. Just show them your ID and then they'll help you out. [14:42] So that's Ledger Recover. [14:45] Now, [14:46] There's lots of different layers to the story. [14:48] the top layer is [14:50] Some of the really hardcore purists... [14:54] looked at Ledger Recover just generally and were like, [14:58] How could you? Yeah. How dare you? Yeah. How dare you? Like the whole ledger is like this beacon of self custody. Why would you then release a product that allows people to basically hand over their seed frames to ledger? Yes. Okay. That was the argument. And... [15:15] it's flawed in many ways. The biggest one, which is that this is [15:23] Something that has been requested by their customers. Okay. Okay. People wanted it. Many times over. People want it. People want it. I mean, I want it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And there's a spectrum of [15:34] crypto users that on one end of the spectrum are total [15:39] privacy and security and decentralization maxis who would never use a product like this in a million years and [15:46] Great. That's totally fine. And then on the other spectrum is a lot of people who don't want to be their own bank. Totally. And want... [15:55] the, I don't know, comfort to know that if anything were to happen, there would be someone that they could call. And...

[16:01] whatever, we'll set sort of the values of who's right and who's wrong aside. But that's really just the top of the layer cake. That's actually not why people were, most people were upset. Okay. In the sort of investigation around ledger recovery, [16:16] and how it works. Basically, they've set it up in such a way, it's technically very sophisticated. I can explain it briefly. They [16:24] split up your can you you said that with such little confidence i can explain it briefly [16:33] My understanding is... [16:36] They split up your private keys and, [16:39] into like three little packets. Okay. And those three little packets are encrypted and they all get sent out to a different place. Okay, distributed. And those three different packets get custody by three different people or organizations. Oh my gosh, wow. Okay, wow, it's complex. So totally complex. It seems... [16:54] It seems like a lot of thought was. [16:59] Yeah. So that's how that works. [17:01] It is very rigorous system that they've set up and the plumbing all fits together in a way that most importantly, [17:08] the encryption happens [17:10] like locally and then it's sort of distributed and so the the ledger team seemed [17:16] to [17:16] say over and over and over again that that was [17:19] not a meaningful like surface area for risk and I believe it. However, in just having that as a possibility, they have in some ways built in a backdoor. [17:31] to I see

[17:32] Ledger wallets generally. Okay. Just the fact of it. [17:36] Can I ask you a question? There's a way in. Yeah. Okay. You have a wallet on your MetaMask or whatever on your computer, on your web browser. And no matter what, even if you're logged out, there's this surface area for risk because... [17:51] you are, it's connected. It's a connected thing that can live on different browsers and it's an area of risk. And then the reason you have a hardware wall is because the idea is that you're like fully self-custodied and it's completely your responsibility to hold your own keys, to know your seed phrase, and it's maybe never connected to the internet. And it's, [18:12] Maybe what this revealed is that there is something built into the hardware that allows for... [18:18] That not to be true? [18:20] Kind of. So people are like, wait a second. [18:23] You built a backdoor into your product. [18:27] And Ledger were like, we didn't actually. That's not how this works. [18:31] And then people started looking at it more carefully and [18:35] they were like, oh, the backdoor has kind of always existed. Oh, okay. [18:42] It's... [18:43] it revealed that it's always been there in a way that, [18:47] However, [18:49] the risk is fully disproportionate. [18:52] to what you would see on Twitter if you were to open it today and see the sort of hysteria around it. These blockchains evolve all the time. There's always...

[19:03] forks or [19:05] you want to add Celo or Nier has an update or whatever, with the exception of Bitcoin. Bitcoin never evolves, but all these other blockchains evolve. And so if you want to have a wallet that [19:15] evolving blockchains. [19:17] there needs to be some way [19:20] And we're getting really into the weeds, but there has to be some way that Ledger touches or bumps up against your private keys in various ways in order to... [19:32] be able to accommodate these evolutions. So there's always been a little bit of a way for Ledger to [19:39] interact or be adjacent to your private keys. Okay. There's kind of always... [19:44] then this thing that's existed and... [19:47] It's being framed as a backdoor, but my understanding is that it's just a very functional, normal way for... [19:54] this hardware wallet to be designed. Okay. And the reason why it's rubbing up against your private keys is because you're saying that like the software on that piece of hardware has to be updated. Yeah. [20:05] And so that it can interact with all these different blockchains and different things that you're doing with your wallet. And there's been something that's been revealed this week about the ways in which that is rubbing up against your private keys. Exactly. So we're super in the weeds now. But just to zoom out, the hysteria is basically that there was an expectation that it was technically impossible. [20:26] for private keys to ever be seen or exported by ledger previously and now it's been revealed that [20:33] It's

[20:34] technically kind of possible and... [20:37] People are really upset about that. [20:39] There's two ways in which the risk reveals itself. One is with a hack or some major systemic exploit. And the second way is government intervention. So a lot of people are really concerned about that. [20:52] Okay. Which is... [20:53] if the US government were to issue a warrant to ledger, because it is technically possible, their hand could be forced to reveal something that [21:04] If it was technically impossible, they wouldn't be able to do. I remember a few years ago, I can't remember who the person was, but someone was being investigated by the FBI and the FBI had their phone and but they couldn't unlock it. And it was. [21:18] Big public dispute with... [21:20] the US government and Apple where they were like, sorry, we can't do that. We don't know how to do that. There's it's impossible for us. And the US government was like, bullshit, we know you can do this. And they're like, No, we can't we never we never do that. We never can we don't the functionality is not there. And I feel like with the [21:36] new product, [21:38] of... [21:39] what's called Ledger Secure or [21:42] Ledger Recover. Ledger Recover is revealing that it is technically possible and that there are people who actually pay for that service. And so the... [21:50] company of Ledger would not be able to hide behind this idea that it's impossible technically. [21:56] right okay so i think that [21:59] All that to say, it still feels wildly disproportionate to... -The reaction. -The reaction. And the...

[22:07] tweets that I saw from very measured, smart, technical, and rational people all seem to say that it does not a big deal and ledger's fine and they'll keep using their ledgers. I'll keep using my ledger. And I think that this is overblown. [22:22] I will say that [22:24] one of the biggest things that I'm left with is man, [22:27] having your core and early customers be [22:32] privacy and security and decentralization maxis, [22:35] would be really hard to manage in a moment of growth where, [22:40] you're trying to attract new people into the ecosystem, you're trying to like directly head on, [22:46] address accessibility and address some [22:49] UX issues that have been keeping a lot of people out of the space and they've been doing that good work and they're trying to do that good work but they're having these growing pains in managing their core constituents which are these folks that are in it for kind of different reasons and like that's totally fine and healthy and appropriate but I think for Ledger that's the struggle. Yeah I feel like the feeling I have around it is there is a [23:15] the tiniest portion of the world that actually wants to self custody. [23:21] their assets. [23:22] I don't want to do that. I understand the benefits of self-custody. I think for a lot of reasons, it's amazing and all that stuff. But I... [23:32] think of your ledger and you're thinking about exactly as you're saying, how do we best serve our customers and how do we serve a lot of people who want to participate in this ecosystem? And,

[23:41] doesn't feel comfortable to do it independently. It sucks that you're going to get a lot of pushback when products are built into that and services are built into that, that allow a better experience for more people. [23:55] There we are. Tough. [23:57] Tough. [23:58] Tough week for Ledger. [24:00] Tough week. Low Santo. Yeah. Not a good. Okay. [24:10] Okay. [24:12] So let's have some feelings of our own, of our little burgeoning business here. I'm feeling like I am unsure that this is the right work to be doing. [24:23] Because... [24:25] The work that we're doing right now is pumping out an insane amount of content. So we have a Monday, Wednesday, Friday podcast, and we have a Wednesday, Sunday newsletter. And then we have every single social media channel you could possibly imagine. [24:38] that we're experimenting with. [24:40] We've gotten on YouTube. We haven't posted about it yet because we're unsure. [24:44] We're on TikTok kind of shooting the shit, trying to figure it out. And we're a meme machine on all these other channels. I am feeling really exposed. I'm putting myself out there all the time in so many different way, shapes and forms that I feel vulnerable to do that. And I'm like doing stupid TikToks and I'm like, I don't know, this is like supposed to be fun and funny, but what if it's read in another way that's like try hard and desperate and...

[25:14] then I'm... [25:15] on a podcast all the time and now we're videoing it and it's going on youtube and there's a different experience to the work than when it's just [25:21] Pulling out a mic and you and I just shooting shit and like putting it out and seeing what happens. Now it feels like the work is to grow these channels. [25:30] we're trying a lot of things to do that. And I don't know if that's the right thing to do. And it feels... [25:34] Hard. [25:35] and vulnerable. [25:37] And I feel an insecurity about it. [25:40] If the work is right. And... [25:43] I think... [25:44] we have this like really high level for, uh, [25:48] everything that we do at Boys Club. And I feel like we've loosened around that in an effort to be like, okay, we're going to like get some stuff out. We're going to like try some things. And I'm worried, I feel worried that we're like missing. [26:02] Because things aren't going viral immediately. And... [26:06] that it's going to like hurt the brand. I don't know. So yeah, I get that. [26:11] that's my feeling what's your feeling what do you think yeah I agree I feel similarly I [26:19] I think it's like we got to take a quarter or we got to take until the end of the summer or midsummer or like pick a date and... [26:28] say the experiment that we're running right now is to try and grow these channels by doing all these stupid things. [26:34] And we're doing that, by the way, in an effort not to become influencers ourselves or to have, I don't know, whatever, to become TikTok fans. That's not the goal here. It's because growing these media channels gives us leverage for influencers.

[26:50] us to do [26:52] Whatever in the future, it's just more leverage the more audience that we have. It's more leverage for the Boys Club DAO and the community and partnership conversations and things that we can build into utility for the Dimes program. It opens doors, the bigger audience that we have. And we have been confined to kind of this like niche industry. [27:12] internet. [27:13] crypto thing and that's great but our ambitions are bigger than that so anyway i just want to like clarify that we're not [27:20] fame hungry. We just want to, it makes sense from a business perspective that any experiment that we want to run in the future with this business, um, [27:30] it only benefits by us having a bigger footprint in terms of our audience. So that's why we're doing it. And anything that launches out of the Boys Club, for example, any products or any apps or anything that the community builds or things spin out, whatever. Intellectually, I see that as a strategy. And I can see May, June, July, maybe August, we're like grinding on some content stuff and seeing what works and seeing what doesn't work. My concern is we get to the end of that [28:00] Thank you. [28:00] because of all the content that we're putting out all the time now, [28:03] it doesn't leave us a lot of space for other big strategic bets. Yeah. And, [28:09] We're trying in various ways to keep those doors open and to keep those conversations going. [28:14] It's hard to prioritize it when like you have to get a newsletter out on Wednesday and you have to get a podcast out on Friday. And so I think that there's like...

[28:23] Yeah, I'm a little worried about that. [28:25] if we get to August or September and it's like, okay, where are we? [28:29] and [28:31] we're going to have to like be starting from zero on some of the, on some other bets that we can make for boys club. And that will be challenging. Yeah. [28:38] Very challenging. Oh, that's my feeling. Yeah. [28:40] *sigh* [28:42] Okay. Wow. [28:47] sucked the energy right out of the room oh my god i know it's tough although i will say okay on the plus side we had a dow call last night [28:58] And it was like 20 women. So fun. So fun. [29:02] It was so fun. [29:04] Everyone had great energy and brought documents that they had been thinking about Boys Club really deeply and thoughtfully. [29:10] are thinking about membership and onboarding and offboarding and all these things. And it was really amazing to see, um, [29:17] so many people come together that care about this thing and want to like, [29:21] see it grow and succeed and that [29:24] um, [29:25] was amazing and [29:27] incredible so [29:28] Yeah. They're all so smart too. Just a really smart group of people, which is really nice. [29:34] Okay. That's that. That's that. [29:39] Dina, where are we going to be in September? We are going to be at Permissionless in Austin, Texas. Permissionless too. It's happening. And we're curating the culture track for the conference. So if you're into the stuff we talk about here, you should come and have a good time with us. So email your boss.

[29:55] Tell them that you need to go and buy your ticket now. They will never be as cheap as they are today. And we also have a promo code in our Discord for Boys Club members. Ooh, come hang in Austin. [30:09] This is where we make an ask. We're in our call to action era. It's CTA times. Rate and review this podcast. Subscribe to our newsletter. And if you're feeling extra generous... [30:21] Send it to one friend. [30:24] Thank you for listening. We love you. Bye.