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Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. This podcast is for you. If you have an insane drive to find the truth of things, it's not the good answers that we seek, but the good questions. I interview a range of different guests from many different fields, all with the intention to uncover the simple truths that are hidden in plain sight. Most people don't want to go there. I go there, my guests go there, and you benefit. Please let me know if you enjoy these episodes and as always, subscribe on itunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcasts. Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. I've got Carol here, and we've known each other for a long time. We reconnected recently. We met in Thailand many years ago, and he was doing some crazy 3D art. And we'll go to talk about 3D art and a whole bunch of other stuff. Welcome to the show.
Yeah, it's crazy decade, but we've kept in touch and. So 3D art. How do you do 3D art?
How do you do 3D art in the age of AI? That's a good question. How do I do it, specifically?
Yeah. What's your take on it? How did you get into it? What's your evolving take? Whether AI is there or whether it's not?
How did I get into it? That's a good question. I mean, I started out about 25 years ago just doing artwork professionally in general. At that time, I was doing 2D stuff only, so my main software was Photoshop, and that's basically all I used for everything. But as time went on, I started to realize that I was limiting myself unnecessarily, and this 3D thing was something that I should probably get into. So around. Around 2010, I guess, I. I picked up Cinema 4D, which is probably. It's one of the most accessible 3D programs. The. The. The learning curve isn't as steep, or at that time, wasn't as steep as. As it was for some of the other packages. These days we have Blender, which has kind of changed the landscape quite a bit, but that's a difference. Are you using Blender? I am using Blender, yeah. Yeah, I was. So I started out with Cinema. I used that for quite a long time. And then I moved into Zbrush, which is 3D sculpting app. It's like the name 3D sculpting app.
Digital sculpting. Basically. It's like grabbing a piece of Clay and going at it, except it's on your screen. So. So you can make anything, really any. Any idea that comes to mind. You could. Once you. Once you have a grasp of the fundamentals of the tool, you can. You can really just start shaping whatever you want. So zbrush is. Yeah, that really changed a lot for me because I could just sculpt anything I want, basically throw it into. Throw it into another package for rendering. And. Yeah, that was my main setup for many years. And the past four years I've been getting into Houdini, which is like. Yeah, it's considered to be the pinnacle basically of 3D. It's a very daunting program to learn initially. Why. So the analogy I like is that with all these other 3D apps like Cinema and even Blender, as good as Blender is, I'm not saying the negative valve lender, but they all have ceilings. It's like going to the car dealer and buying a. A perfectly reasonable car. Nothing too crazy, but it gets you from A to B. And, you know, you drive away from the dealer and you can get most things done, but at a certain point, you want to, I don't know, you want to off road the car or you want to tune it, or you want to. Want to, you know, start racing the car. I don't know, whatever. And then you run into those. Into those hard coded ceilings. Because these apps keep a lot of stuff hidden from you, which makes them easier to use.
Yeah, because this is expert software. I've run into this before, which is you have an expert software, you can do all these things with it. But in order to not be totally overwhelmed, the creators of the software need to make it in this way that allows a large number of people to use it, which is also, by the way, as we were talking about before we started recording, this is the main thing that's totally changing now that we can do personal software. So I'm building software for myself. I guess that software that I showed you is an expert piece of software. But then there's also, like, how do I create software for the person who's helping me to publish these podcast episodes? And I'm now doing that. And so there's this sort of crazy thing about software where in the past, all the businesses need to create software for the masses and even for expert software, software for the class of people who can do things like you. Is that accurate? Like, that's the reason?
Yeah. Yeah, I would say so. There's just caps built into these programs. You can go, you can use them up to a certain point. And once you pass that, it's just not possible. And again, that's why I like the analogy of the modern car. Like, if you want to pop the hood on your car and make changes to what's going on under the hood with modern cars, you just can't do it. Everything's sealed off. Right. Yeah. And that's where Houdini is different. It basically just, you know, it pops the hood for you and says, well, you know, you know, have at it. Do whatever you want. It gives you all the building blocks and you can. You can do whatever you want, but it's not going to hold your hand, which is what makes it so daunting. There's a lot of coding involved. There's.
Yeah, it has its own internal coding language that you can. That you can use to create. Create 3D artwork. Basically. It's, it's. It's part of the package. So, yeah, the software itself is node based. So you build a network of nodes and that the Houdini runs through the network that you create and it generates an output for you. But, okay, whether those nodes are stock nodes that simplify certain functionalities or whether those nodes are pieces of code that you put in, it can be anything. Right. So, yeah, so I've been getting into that, which was an interesting change because all of a sudden making art became very technical. And whereas up to that point, it was always a very visual thing. I was using the tool to. I was being guided by a very visual framing. Whereas now I'm being guided by a technical problem that needs solving. And then eventually the output is going to be something visual, but it's no longer the primary driver, which is an interesting change after so many years of doing one thing.
And how long have you been in this process? So you said four years of adapting to this new way. And I don't understand what you mean by this 3D. Like, it used to be visual. What are some of the technicalities that you run into that are like blockers now in order to get to that final 3D space?
Well, previously I was using a system that was already created for me in any way. Right. Because the software is made in a certain way, going back to those hard caps and ceilings that it has built in to make life easier for the user. Basically. Yeah. So I was navigating. Yeah. Maybe again, a vehicular analogy would be that I was navigating the river using a boat that somebody gave me. Now I have to build my own boat.
I have to build the whole system from scratch. Which is. Which. Which is. Which is daunting because you run into so many different obstacles. Now, how do I build an engine? What kind of tube do I need to connect the fuel supply to? Whatever, you know, but it's fun. It's. It's. In a way, I feel like it's. It saved my creative career because I was feeling pretty burned out with my workflow. Previously. I felt like everything I wanted to make, I had made it. It had all kind of been done. And I was really starting to feel the limitations of the software, and I thought, well, maybe I should just, you know, become a park ranger or something. All right, let me give Houdini a shot. You know, it's.
Everyone. Every 3D artist knows about Houdini, and it's always, like, a scary thing in the corner that you're like, yeah, one day I'll have a go at it. One day I'll try. So then I decided to actually go for it. Yeah. And been using it ever since. Yeah.
Yeah. There's. There's a lot of people I think it would be fun for you to talk to who are good friends of mine. I don't know why I always make friends with 3D artists. Maybe. Yes. Maybe it's because I like it. Maybe I lack it because. Because it's.
I think mostly in words. And I noticed this a few years ago where I just couldn't think in images. And then I was like, why can't I think in images? And then I started to have experiences, some mediated by various helper medicines that allowed me to clue into that visual thinking mode. But it's not something that I have to try to do it. I have to try to, like, visualize something in order for do it. And, like, the first couple of times that happened, I was like, holy shit. That was really intense. That was like a little bit of a mini trip there. And sometimes with the helpers, sometimes without the helpers, and all of a sudden, I would, like, see something in my mind's eye, whereas before it was all words. And we've done a lot of workshops for three Js for the vibe coding, where we're teaching people how to vibe code. And one of the best ways to teach people how to vibe code is to be like, here, give this prompt to the AI and you'll be able to see it with your eyes. And so we had 3D artists who came in and totally blew our mind on all the things that he was doing and all the terms that he was using in order to create these visualizations. And so we got three JS WebGPU. But now you're introducing me to this whole other thing. I was aware of Blender, but I was not aware of the sculpting app, nor Houdini. And have you. Do you think in images or do you think in words? Do you think of both?
Oh, that's an interesting question. Probably both, I would say. I. When I was younger, I. I had a very vivid internal visual acuity and imagination. And one thing I've noticed over the past. Past couple of years is that that has been degrading substantially. And I. I've gotten to the point where I. I've. I've started to realize that these constant distractions everywhere and this. Yeah, that's right. There's just too many stimuli. And. And I feel like that's the main cause behind the degradation in my case. And. And it. It kind of shocked me when I realized when I put two and two together in that sense, and I was like, man, I. I just have too much input constantly, too many stimuli. And now that internal visual engine that I used to have, it's. It's just overwhelmed and not working anymore. So.
But you're still creating art, though, right? And. And people are still valuing that art, right?
I hope so. I mean, I am still creating. Yeah. But I think the shift from being focused on such a purely visual workflow towards a more. Yeah, interesting, purely technical workflow has maybe gone hand in hand with that as well. I don't know if it was caused by that degradation that I mentioned or if my shift towards Houdini was. Was reaction to it subconsciously or I'm like, well, I guess if the visual aspect is leaving my. My brain, then maybe I should switch to something else while still remaining in the 3D world. I'm not sure yet. It's. It's something I'm trying to figure out. And I've also become quite aggressive in my minimization of unwanted stimuli, both physically and digitally and mentally as well. I've really been getting rid of a lot of stuff over the past couple of years. And, yeah, just try to keep everything as decluttered as possible because it has a real impact on the creative mind. I've noticed.
Yeah, 100%. And we got to go into AI a bit because there's an intersection here which is really interesting. You had mentioned you use Claude. Are you Using Claude at all. Like, are your structures for how you do your work already built to the point where you don't really depend on Claude to help you think through things? Are you help. Is it helping you to think through things and is it helping you to visualize things?
It's. I don't use AI for visualization much because I just don't. The obvious pathway there for me anyway, because I don't know, admittedly I don't know much about AI, but the obvious pathway for visualization is well, input, prompt and generate image. And then I'm like, well, that's my job though now I want to be. It's damage. So I don't want AI to do that for me. But. But it's incredibly helpful with Houdini because like I said, I run. Yeah, I run into issues with Houdini constantly and I code quite a bit in Houdini, but my coding knowledge isn't at an elite level or anything. So there, there's quite a few instances where I need help with the code. I'm like, okay, so I'll use Claude for that. Just to at least get me started or explain sections of code that I found somewhere that aren't quite clear to me. I found it's really good at that, it's very good at explaining code. It's not always as good at writing code, although that's improving so fast that maybe that's a non issue at this point as well. But yeah, I would say I use Claude Daly just to help me get through the obstacles that I run into on a technical level. Yeah.
So this is really interesting. Based on what I'm seeing with the development of software, I think you're going to end up back in that space of going into pure visualization because the technical layers of all these things, while still important to learn about, are now being shattered. Like a lot of the programmers who really had a craft to the ability to code things have now become dependent and you know, we can talk about whether that's a good thing for the craft or a bad thing for the craft. And a lot of them are asking that same question. But these are like, you know, these are like really good senior developers who are now facing existential crisis about the level of craft they're putting into it. I'm not a coder, I've never been a coder. I think when we first met. Yeah, that's really funny. When we first met, I was just starting the coding camps and I hated it and I had to go, I had to Check myself into a meditation retreat in Mexico so that I could focus enough to actually do this thing that I really did not like doing. And so then as soon as AI came out in 2022, I was like, oh, this is the thing that can finally get it to code for me, it could not do that. It could teach me how to think about technical concepts, it could teach me how to code, but. But it could not actually code. Fast forward to about nine months ago, Claude Code started this new product that's inside of the terminal. Got really good at actually coding for me. So for me it's allowed me to do things that I could never done. But for the programmers, it's doing things that they love doing and they identified with and now they're having existential crises. I imagine the same thing is going to happen to this Houdini technical thing. They might actually be thinking about this at the company. I want to go interview them if later people running that company because it sounds. I've never heard of it before, so. So I think you're going to get back to that visual space. It's also reminding me of a lot of things that I'm thinking about because I. So have you heard of the Sphere in Las Vegas?
Yes. Yeah, I'm familiar with. This is basically a giant spherical projection screen, right?
Yep, exactly. Yeah. And a lot of. A lot of. A lot of. I imagine it's 3D art. Is that 3D art? Because it's on a sphere?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I saw a. I think they did a UFC event at the Sphere at some point. Yeah, I watched that one and they had some, Yeah, I would say mediocre 3D art going, but. But it worked in a way. I guess it wasn't horrible.
And what I'm about to say, it's not down that train. I think as both of us agree, like I. I don't really want to involve with things at the billion dollar or hundreds of thousands of. At an event or something like that. I'm much more experienced, interested in creating experiences and art and other things that are for a small group of people. And this is why you should talk to my friend Eric Levin, because he's building Domes, he's doing 3D projection mapping where he starts to dance or make music or do all these other things. And then the computer basically maps him and then allows him to sort of visionary experiences into this dome. And so I'm moving into a world of like, I want to start to build experiences and events with technology in them because technology is going to go pretty crazy. But that is in a way that is consensual, that is not dystopian and very tasteful and kind of allows us to build a better emotional resonance with other people. Having technology in there as a sort of cool thing that's happening, but is not overpowering. And so what you're saying is kind of like giving me a lot of ideas of how this could play out. And there's like a sphere kind of thing of building interesting indoor experiences, but then there's also outdoor experiences, I'll give you an example that make it really much more practical. I've been playing polo and so I've been going out with my friends to the outskirts of Buenos Aires and we get on horses and we play polo and it's really fun. And I never thought I would ever play polo until I got to Argentina. But it's like this really cool experience with other people and I want to play it with a drone. So I want to create a new form of polo that has like a drone and that is like Quidditch, basically. And so the 3D art and the 3D mapping is this thing that I know fits into this, but I'm not sure quite how it fits in. I just threw a lot at you. But what do you think of anything I talked about there?
Well, you said you don't want to make a dystopian, but when I imagine drone based polo, I thought that could be a little bit dystopian. But I think in order to assess whether something is dystopian or not, we need the element of hindsight. I feel like it's always impossible to tell when you're in the middle of it. So jury's out on that. I guess so.
And let me explain why. I think it can be done in a way that's not dystopian, which is that I was that as long as you own the software and the hardware itself is open source and it's not tied to a proprietary manufacturer, you can own and control that software, or you can own both the software and the hardware. As long as you control the software on the piece of hardware, that hardware is yours and it's able to basically do it. So I think the problem of the world that we face right now is that that's not really easy to do right now. But there's a lot of factors moving into the world where I think that we'll be able to fully own and control, rather than the 2020 version of just like own nothing, be Happy. It's like you own everything and also there's all these other things.
Well, because if it's open source, it's free, you can own anything you want. But it doesn't become this disgusting materialistic hoarding thing. It just, you can have whatever you really need. But with that freedom comes, hopefully the wisdom of knowing what you really need.
Yeah. And I think a lot of people, I think a lot of people will go down dystopian paths, but it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before we started recording of, just like at the community layer. Like I've got this community down here in Buenos Aires of people tinkering with AI and tinkering with software and building hardware now. And I think at that community level, that's where the access to a non dystopian future kind of creates. It's not gonna be utopian either, because I think like the utopian thing can go sideways in a lot of ways.
That's, yeah, that's probably a good thing. As soon as you have, as soon as you're around utopians, you better watch out because, yeah, watch out for the do gooders, like Alan Watts always says.
Yeah, I'm paraphrasing, but yeah, he was not a fan of do gooders, that's for sure. Thought they were very dangerous people, which
is like, you know, that's what history has shown us for the past 100 years. But it's good.
Feels like it's gonna get so crazy soon. What's your take on the singularity? Do you, do you think it's gonna happen? What or what do you think, man?
It's, it's such a incomprehensible subject that I, I, I feel completely unqualified to make any sorts of planes.
But yeah, I guess, I guess so. I mean, it. I, I do believe I am not, I am not an accelerationist, but I do, I guess maybe in, in a certain way I am where I feel like, well, if something's inevitable, then you might as well just let it happen, because if everything's speeding up, clearly everything's going faster and faster. It's not a linear curve. It's clearly not a linear curve.
So, you know, if we're all along for the ride, then we might as well let it happen. And yeah, you can go full Unabomber Amish fight against AI, fight against this, fight against that. It's all very valiant and, and I absolutely Understand, I understand the idea behind it and I'm also not a fan of this, this insane pace of technological progress. But apparently it's hard coded into the, into the universe or into us. So it just, apparently this has to happen this way is just the way I see it. I try to, yeah. Surrender to it as best I can and like, okay, apparently we have to do this. This is part of our evolutionary pathway. And yeah, it's fate. Maybe that's what you want to call it. So might as well let it happen. Fine. We're going to have the first trillionaire soon. Fine. Let him get his trillion his fast as possible. I might as well. And then we can move past that and you know, see what comes next.
Yeah, I think we're in alignment there of essentially it's just like, there's the inevitable aspect of it and I think we can channel it in our immediate communities. I think at the nation state level, and this is why I was saying the things I was saying before is just like the nation state itself can't hold what's about to happen. It feels like that the last 400 years of Western civilization where we've been nation state and the nation state does things and it has its welfare state and takes care of people, I don't think that's going to last. But I think that at the community level, small groups of humans being able to determine the way in which they relate to this acceleration is really important. The craziest thing about what you said, I think, is that all of the people who have won inside of this nation state thing have some really, really crazy. And I'm saying crazy a lot. The show is called crazy wisdom. But there's good crazy, there's bad crazy, there's, who knows, crazy. And a lot of people I had to leave Silicon Valley because they were getting into this crazy singularity accelerationism. Obviously there are going to be so many problems that they're not even asking the question about. And so I couldn't do that anymore. And now we've got the other side in the US with the evangelicals getting this biblical prophecy type of thing where it's just like, whoa. And they're both like the. And we can really see this in the past couple weeks, which is that the AI guys, they're fitting into this secularist philosophy, but it's not quite secularist. It does believe in spiritual, but it doesn't call them spiritual, but they believe in Sumerian demons and that they're raising this Sumerian demon with the AI and all this stuff, there's a lot of crazy stuff embedded in that. I was paying attention to a lot of that. That's where the accelerationism comes from. It comes from Nick Land, who's a philosopher, who was doing a lot of math in the 90s and was like, just, okay, it's going to happen. Like, this is, let's destroy capitalism because of this thing. Then on the other side, which I was not paying enough attention to up until this last week, was the evangelicals, who seem to be very serious in their attempt to rebuild the Third Temple. And so those are left, which is like Silicon Valley is a little bit on the left, and then the evangelicals are on the right. And that's the weird sort of Hegelian structure in the United States that kind of like has all these effects. And so I had to leave the whole place. And now I'm down in Argentina, where it's like Argentina and Brazil to a certain extent. The rest of Latin America seem to have handled the rise of social media in a way that my country did not handle it very well. Like, we have gotten really lonely. We've got really detached. We all, like, spend all our time on Netflix. We had the COVID pandemic where it was just like, now we're going to do that forever. And so, like, in Argentina, Brazil, they just, like, their social relationships were not challenged to the same degree. There's something about their culture that allowed them to get through it. And so it's really nice and refreshing. It feels like I'm in the 90s, even though there's technology everywhere. And so that gives me a little hope that there is a way out of this kind of crazy. Like, it's all. It feel based on what we're talking about feels like the ideas, the crazy ideas, we're gonna. We have a lot of experimentation. There's gonna be a lot of crazy things that happen with these crazy ideas. And it feels like no one is thinking. Very grounded. What do you think?
I think maybe everyone in the. In the United States AI industry with Rokos Basilisk thought experiment.
And maybe that's just what set them all off. Whether they're on the left or the right, they just live in this immense fear of not being a part of. Of the creation of this thing that could punish them for. For not being part of it. Maybe that's. I mean, I'm being. I'm. I'm. I'm half joking here, but that's the first thing that comes to mind.
It's a fear response, right? So they're trying to avoid this imagined future that they have in their head.
Yeah, you better be in on it, you know, because it's the new thing and this new thing is going to be the biggest thing of them all because singularity. And like, oh my God, you better, you better get on this train before it leaves, because if it leaves without you, you'll be in hell. Literally. That's the Roko's Basilisk thought experiment, right? If you don't help to build this thing, it will put you in hell forever. Wow. Retroactively somehow. And maybe, I don't know, maybe people in Latin America are just a bit more. Nobody has ever heard lucky. Or they just haven't heard of it or they just don't really give a, you know, like, oh yeah, it's a typical, it's another typical product of the American psychotic mass media industry. Yeah, that line of thinking, you know? Yeah. Oh, they have another, they have another sci fi horror idea in their heads that's gotten way out of control. Like all the American kids being scared of Freddy Krueger coming in at night, you know, I don't know. Is that in Latin America? Do they maybe have some kind of throwback folklore hill hill giant that's going to come kidnap you at night? It's, it's, it's so much more of, how would you say it? It's not in the cultural, I don't know what I'm trying to say here. I, I think because the, the horrors of the childhood fears of Western civilization are so in your face constantly because they're in movies and, and video games. It's like, it's, it's something you constantly see. Whereas in these cultures, they're, they're boogeymen are purely in the imagination because they don't show up anywhere, right. Unless somebody draws them or, you know, I, I, I'm kind of thinking on the fly about business to be complete nonsense. But I feel like our boogeymen are always visible, right? Like you, if I say Freddy Krueger, you, you, you know exactly what he looks like. You can picture him immediately. If I see Jason Voorhees, you can do the same thing. Mike Myers and all these, all these monsters. We have so many monsters and we all know exactly what they look like. They're like shared, shared monsters for everyone. And then.
Yeah, this is crazy because that gets directly into the Hollywood machine, right? Because the Hollywood machine, I've studied it a bunch because in the early 1900s, it's just indies just Indies making movies. We could talk about the 3D art and how that's going to transform into movies because I think there's something really interesting there. But I don't want to get distract myself. So Hollywood machine, 1920s heyday of these silent films or whatever, 1950s, it starts building by the 1950s. The United States power machine, the military industrial complex, which was very much related to the cultural creation. I've been doing a lot of reading recently about this, but it was a thing, right? And I'm not a full. Like there are evil people absolutely in 100% control of everything going on. But I do think there is a lot of that going on. And I also think things are emergent and that this emergent aspect of human reality is there and things are uncontrollable at a very, very important degree.
Yeah, yeah, exactly right. That is. I think that's real. And I think the people who have been doing crimes are going to fail because of that emergent aspect of. And just like control, you can do it for a bit. You know, you can, you can. Stalin can do it for a bit, Hitler can do it for a bit. And, and. But ultimately it comes crashing down. And I think we're at a point you're not a lot of it's crashing down.
But Hollywood did this thing in the 50s, right? And we're at the late stage of that. They've got all the unions. The unions are in control. They're not making any good movies. I do a podcast with my dad and he studies this to a high degree. He doesn't agree with a lot of what I just said, but I think their cultural creation is coming to an end. And at the same time you have a lot of decentralized things. And I would put you in this camp of essentially you can create culture with these crazy 3D art things and you can do that same thing and you no longer need a budget of $100 million to do it. And I think this is going to be really important for that emergent cultural creation thing of how to create new stories that don't have to be aligned with ideological things. Whereas in the 1950s, if you were in Hollywood, you had to be aligned. You don't get the money unless you're aligned. And I think this is going to be lead. Do you have any ideas there about what you can do there?
Yes, but I think that's breaking Down, But. But I. But I think it'll take a while to break. Break that. That specific iron triangle. But, like, cultural creation. Can't we create culture now? Like. Like you're. You're doing it. Art, like with your art. Is it. Is it for events or is it for art? Are you putting this somewhere? What's going on there?
Well, most of my career, I was. I was creating artwork for the music industry. So I started out doing. Doing album covers. Did a lot of those. Hundreds on hundreds. Yes. It was mostly music industry, I guess, for the first 15 years or so. And then I got into commercial work a bit. I did some. I did a run of illustrations for Boy magazine a long time ago. And gradually, as I got into 3D, I also got into 3D animation. More.
So, yeah, the past couple of years, it's been basically only 3D animation. I've. I recently did a project for Utah Jazz, the. The basketball club in the US I've done some stuff for Apple, League of Legends, the video game. So it's. Yeah, it's kind of whatever. Whatever falls into my lap, I guess. I worked on. I worked on some 3D models for a Buddhist temple that is being built in Los Angeles. Wow. Yeah. Completely random stuff. You know, it just shows up. Can you do this? Like. Yeah, sure. You know, do you want to? Yeah, obviously, let's do it. So, yeah, it's a bit of everything, just whatever. And I think that's a nice thing. Once you get really good at 3D and once you have a broad, broad grasp on the technical fundamentals of it, because it's such a wide field, 3D, you know, it covers so many different things to the point where you have. At game Studios, you have 3D artists that are specifically texture artists. So all they do all day, every day, is create textures for video games. So you'll spend a week working on the new concrete textures for the highways and Grand Theft Auto 6 or whatever. There's character. Character artists in itself is a very wide term because you have character sculptors who only sculpt the model. Then you have rigors who create the skeleton for it so that it can be animated. Then you have the actual animators, then you have the texture artists for the character models, etc. Etc. Etc. So, and I. I would say I'm. I'm a generalist in that sense, where I. I don't specialize in any specific part of 3D art, but I have a wide enough grasp on the entire field that whenever a job comes up that requires me to get deeper into one aspect of it. I have the fundamentals that I can get started, you know, and then I get deeper into that part for a specific project. I might have to rig a character for a specific project, which I've never done before, but I know enough about what a rig is and how it works that I can get started. And that's what keeps it fun as well, you know, because I never know what the next challenge is going to be. And. But it's. It's. It's guaranteed to always be a challenge because. Yeah, because the field is just so vast and
so I think there's another. Another thing that I've been tracking that might be helpful to know for your world, basically, there. So the last three years have been about LLMs, large language models, purely in this linguistic space, where I kind of feel more natural based on what I was saying about thinking in words. But that seems to come into a sort of end. It's still going to be really, really important, but where the Silicon Valley sort of train of thought is going into something called world models. And world models are really basically exactly like the 3D art that you've been imagining, or the 3D world with blender and everything else. But it's all with the intention of basically helping the robots figure out where they are in space and time. And in order to do that, they need 3D training, simulations. And so there's a whole bunch of training going on. And there's one product. I made a note to send you a podcast later with Fei Fei Li. I think the company is called the World Labs, and they've built a software called Marble. But this is all very new to me and harder for me to visualize because of the Images and the 3D worlds that you kind of have this intuitive ability to get into. But there's all these things. But Gaussian Splats seems. Which is the craziest name I've ever heard, which I love. They're all sort of around this Gaussian Splats world. Are you using Gaussian splats?
Not yet, but it is on the endless list of things to look into. They've gotten quite a lot better recently because the initial Gaussian splats, when they first came out, the tech was pretty limited still. What did it do?
Why did it get introduced? That's a good question. I'm not sure. I mean, we always had photogrammetry, where you basically take a model or take a physical object and take Like a thousand pictures of it from different angles and put it in photogrammetry software and it creates a point cloud. It basically tries to recreate a 3D model of physical object based on all these hundreds or even thousands of angles of photos that you have. I know that I never got into that much because it was always such an arduous and slow, slow process. And even just processing the photo cloud seemed to take forever. I don't know enough about Gaussian flats to tell you why they're so much better than photogrammetry, but it does seem like the performance is just way, way better. And seeing as we have such powerful GPUs now, being able to just view these things live has become so much easier. You don't have to run this just super slow process of creating the point cloud and then the point cloud.
So that's, that's basically the three dimensional approximation of, of the physical object based on all those photos that you took. It tries to infer depth from all these pictures and basically just puts points like, oh, I guess there's a point here. There's a point behind it. Based on these two pictures eventually end up with a big cloud of points that resemble physical object, basically including color and everything.
It depends what my role would be. I certainly have some ideas for stories that would work very well. Yeah, interesting. A story that would work very well as a movie. But I wouldn't really want to be a 3D artist on movies because that would take me away from being a 3D generalist and which is what I enjoy a lot. And that would basically pigeonhole me into, okay, you're a smoke artist now. You're only gonna make smoke effects for the new Avatar. And it becomes this, this VFX industry is pretty brutal. I mean, it's, it's hard on people.
It's sweatshirt because they get pigeonholed because they could join this giant machine of, of commerce.
Well, some people don't mind being pigeonholed as a, as a. Yeah. Fire effects artist or, you know, if that's what you do, that's what you do. And then these people are, are amazing at it. You know, they, they focus solely on that for so many years. They're, they're very good. But it's, that's not. I wouldn't say that's the issue. The issue is just the deadlines are brutal, man.
I guess the studios are just incredibly demanding and, and you don't count for much once you're in, Once you're part of a big VFX studio like that, you're just, you're just one of 500 guys there now. So if you don't make the deadline, then your ass is out on the street, I guess. And, and you see it in video games as well, which is another super brutal industry for people, you know, and especially with the cost, I'd say this goes for both movies and games these days. I mean how much does it make to make a game like Grand Theft Auto 6? It's like a billion dollars or something. It's, it's insane. It's, it's, it's, it's in the hundreds of millions. So. And if, if a game like that fails, then the studio's done so, you know, a thousand, two thousand will be out on the street. The pressure is just insane in those industries. So. Yeah, I wouldn't want to be a 3D artist on, on feature films or anything just because I, I've heard too many horror stories. I know what it's like in there. Thanks. No, thanks.
There's two conversations we could have about generally what's going to happen with capitalism, with the AI stuff, which I think is an interesting conversation. But there's another thing you just mentioned which is it seems like you figured out something in your personal business and I don't know if you said this, but basically you've managed to stay as an independent creative inside of this world that allows you to kind of choose what jobs you want to do without getting stuck into the sort of machine framework that always. And it's something I struggle with at the moment is how do I like. Because I don't like working with people, for people anymore in that full time capacity. Because it does feel like more and more particularly as we go into this acceleration, it just feels like a deal with the devil where it's, they own your time, they own your creative output. And as a stability that's great, you know, to get that stability, but at the same time it's like, feels like it's boring, right? Yeah, it's leeching my, my ability to my optionality which is like. And I think that optionality is really important as we're going into this world because I now have superpowers that I didn't have related to coding, to building software and that just. And like I'm, I'm now getting opportunities to do this vibe coding for other people. And it's like even just a contract is like that's going to take away so much of my focus and energy away from building these dreams. So I have to like basically what I'm going to do, I told you a little bit about it, but I'm going to completely remove all dependencies on all the, like, the five or six pieces of software that I pay for for everything from recording, which we're doing now, to hosting, to publishing, all these different things. And I think within probably in the space of like three to six months, I can completely bring that in house. It probably might be the same price or even more expensive. But what do I get to do? Well, I get to do all these little things that Riverside doesn't allow me to do and I'm really excited about that world. But yeah. Was that a conscious strategy that you had to basically stay as a free agent?
No, I mean, conscious. Was it conscious? I think I've always been too, way too stubborn to, to do what other people tell me. So I've kind of pigeonholed myself in that sense. And, you know, I, I've been extremely lucky to be able to freelance forever. Basically. I've been freelancing for 25 years now. I, I, I don't mean to make it sound like it's always been easy because it hasn't always been easy and it still isn't. You know, I'm doing, I'm doing well for myself now, but there are still periods where I just don't have any projects for X amount of months in a row. And then all of a sudden a big project will come in and I'm grinding 16 hours a day for five to six weeks straight and I'm on the verge of burning out. And then I get a huge cash injection and then there's no work again for who knows how long. So it can be very stressful. But the thought of joining a studio just for stability sake, because I mean, it crosses my mind constantly. Do I give up my freedom to have financial stability or do I keep dealing with the stress of freelancing but have this freedom where I can, you know, work whenever I want, go outside whenever I want. If I don't want to take a job, I don't take it. You know, as long as I can pay my rent, it's fine. It's, it's a. Yeah, it's tricky, man. I, I don't know what the answer is, but I do agree with you that it's, it's going to be More and more important to, to have some degree of freedom as we go into this hyper, hyper surveillance era, Whatever, whatever we're going into. I mean, it's not looking too, too optimistic for me in my, in my opinion. I'm not super optimistic about the way it's going. So, yeah,
Poland in particular seems like it's, it's doing better than the rest of Europe. Is that, is that accurate?
Well, the robotically mentioned. Yeah, economically, sort of values wise, like, culture wise. It's sort of like more.
I'd say so. Yeah, I'd say so. I mean, we run the same risks here as the Western. You know, the things that the Western countries have succumbed to or are actively succumbing to are. They're a possibility here as well. You know, they could happen here as well. But there's more pushback here, I would say. Absolutely. And yeah, it's sad to see. I grew up in the Netherlands, spent most of my life that I was born there, but I don't really recognize it anymore. Whenever I go back, you know, it's, it's going down the drain pretty fast. And the same can be said for England and France and Germany. So in that sense, yeah, I do quite enjoy living here and I think it's a lot better here on average than in most other places. And economically, yeah, it's, it's, it's a big difference from the 90s, that's for sure. One of my earliest memories is we, we would drive from the Netherlands to Poland at least once a year to visit my grandmother. And every time we drove into her little town, the bridge was under construction. It was always under construction. And under construction in those years meant that there was basically six guys standing around. One of them, one of them had a shovel, was sort of doing something. The other five were smoking cigarettes and just watching him. Basically, that's why the bridge never got finished. It was every, every single year it was the same thing. Bridge still isn't done. So that was, I'd say about 30 years ago. And now we surpassed Japan and GDP wise. So. Wow. Yeah, so things have changed very, very fast after the fall of communism here. So, yeah, economically I'd say things are, things are in a good spot, but, but the downsides are visible as well. You know, things are getting pricey here as well and, and not everyone is able to afford what they.
Used to be able to afford. And a lot of people are starting to fall by the wayside in that sense. And yeah, that's just how it Goes, I guess capitalism keeps, Keeps growing and keeps eating away at everything. Not saying we should torch capitalism. I don't know what we would replace it with, but I mean, it is, it is like, like the endless, the endless infection, you know, it just keeps going until it's usurps everything.
I think the question is going to resolve itself. And like, I think Nick Land is the only thinker. Even though I disagree with a lot of the things that he writes, I think he's the only thinker, thinker who's really tangled with how it's going to resolve itself. I don't agree that he's right in his estimation, but I do think it will resolve itself. I think musk is the.
Was it Nick Landon who said it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?
No, but that's an interesting, interesting thought. And this is this, this happened to all the economic economists in the 1800s and 1900s. They all thought, so the socialist invented the word capitalism. So we didn't have the word capitalism until the socialists invented it. There are a lot of word. Well, yeah, well. So, yeah, it came in as a pejorative. So it came in as this thing that needs to be destroyed. But before that, they just called it kind of like, I can't remember what the words, but they didn't have a word for it. So the socialists gave it the word. And then a lot of the Austrian, like Von Mises, this guy who Milei is sort of his cloned dog is named after Von Mises and.
Yes, he has four cloned dogs all named after Austrian economics because his original dog died and so he cloned four dogs.
All right, yeah, he's also a tantra. He's a professor in Neo Tantra. But all these economics economists, they all thought capitalism would be gone by now, too. So it's been the most predicted thing and I don't think anybody really knows what it is. But I do think that the question will resolve itself, might resolve itself in some way that Elon Musk talks about in the sense that UBI kind of money thing. Because ultimately what I've seen from software so far is that the cost of building software is going down crazy. And once the robots come, that's also going to happen in the physical world.
Well, yeah, but potentially terrifying, except if we own it. Unless we own the software and the Reason why I'm optimistic about owning the software is realizing how much pressure is going to be put on all the companies that currently make money using software and how that's the last American sort of good. And it does at this moment feel like America is the most aggressive sort of gnarly country in the world.
the fact that software is going down, it feels like it's going to force all software based things into this position of not being economically viable. But the robots are coming. And the most important thing for me is whatever robot I eventually buy, having full open control, open source control over that robot. Or else I might choose the Amish pathway.
Well, me. Now that's the, that's, that's what I'm trying to learn right now is, is how when those robots come, am I in a position to not only own it, but to fully evaluate any software that's on any of the robots or drones or any of the other things that I know are coming. Like that's my main goal at the moment right now and teach other people in Argentina how to do that or foreigners here as well. But yeah, that's coming. And when those robots come, then the cost of everything will go lower and the solar power is coming. In Africa, they're already, what do you call it, jumping. They're jumping ahead of where we are. They're getting solar panels, they're getting access to power that is in the United States we don't have because of the infrastructure. Yeah, and then that's the regulation part as well. But yeah, this has been a great show. Really appreciate you talking. If somebody is interested in engaging you in freelance, can you share any contact detail or should I just have them message me and then I can see if you're interested?
Yeah, sure, I'm open to anything. I mean, if that wasn't obvious from my short resume review, there's, I'll take, I, I, I'll take on any job as long as it's interesting. Doesn't matter if we're building a, an ad for a car or an actual car or a garage for cars. I don't know, whatever. I'm, I'm always interested in, in fresh ideas and, and fun projects. So. Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoyed this episode. As always, you can find me on Twitter, ewart Alsop I I I also don't forget to subscribe on Spotify or itunes for every weekly episode that I publish on Monday mornings. Hope you have a great day.