How NGOs Keep San Francisco Addicts Trapped
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/ngos-homelessness-addiction-pablo-antonio-posch
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/ngos-homelessness-addiction-pablo-antonio-posch-transcript
Published: 2026-08-05
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
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[0:07] Pablo Antonio: You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

[0:18] DC Posch: I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.

[0:29] Pablo Antonio: I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.

[0:32] DC Posch: If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

[0:34] Marty Bent: Probably should be.

[0:34] DC Posch: Probably should be.

[0:36] Marty Bent: Pablo DC, welcome to the show.

[0:39] Pablo Antonio: Thanks for having us.

[0:41] Marty Bent: Thanks for coming, and thanks for your work. We've got a hard stop in about 56 minutes, so let's just jump right up into it. You guys went a bit viral last month because you're showing how easy it is to to buy fentanyl with with food stamps and. in San Francisco? Why did you guys decide to go make this video to prove this particular route to fentanyl acquisition exists?

[1:07] DC Posch: I can jump in on this. Yeah, Marty, thanks for having me. Longtime listener, first-time caller. But yeah, we started basically the Citrus Club in San Francisco, trying to find ways to help the city and just make it like the best place possible. It is very rare we had such amount of wealth creation in a city and things have degraded. And we just, it's just a side project with a bunch of friends who all have day jobs. We all take time off our jobs to put in time to find ways to help the city. And we have different projects in the works. One of them, Was that we stumbled into a lot of fraud that was happening just by you know sniffing around, and we just wanted to show it to people and say like hey like we think the best disinfectant is like just you know sunlight. And if we have any chance on improving the city, the best like the order of business first order of business is you know plug the holes where like. the water is flowing out and then pour in clean water later.

[2:27] Pablo Antonio: I can speak a bit to how we ran into this too. Mario, have you ever been in a developing country and you come out of the airport or the train station and there's people like, taxi, taxi, and they're hassling you to do Um, the— they sell you something?

[2:51] DC Posch: Yes.

[2:53] Marty Bent: Yeah. Costa Rica and, uh, Newark, New Jersey.

[2:55] Pablo Antonio: Yeah.

[2:57] Marty Bent: Yes.

[2:58] Pablo Antonio: New Jersey, of course. Uh, they come with their hair slicked back. Uh, no, we basically experienced this at the farmer's market. You know, like you go to the farmer's market in SF and specific ones in particular, and you can just see these people, a lot of them older ladies, funnily enough. And you can see them doing this to people who have the EBT paper coupons. They're like, sell, sell, chasing them around. And this is how we got down this road of like, what's going on here?

[3:40] Marty Bent: Right.

[3:41] Pablo Antonio: And we ended up going to the farmer market basically every week, every Sunday for a couple months. And we had cameras, we had friends. One funny thing that's not widely known, by the way, about food stamps is they are not acid tested. So like how many assets you have is like not part of the eligibility criteria, which means if you like, you know, just quit your job at Google and you're starting at Facebook in 6 months, technically during those 6 months, you're eligible for food stamps, right? So one, you know, like friend of ours basically got an EBT card, perfectly legit, All accurate, and went there. And you know, they give you one interesting thing about EBT that we should say is the surveillance on it is quite good in normal places. If you go to a Walmart and you try to buy a non-EBT eligible item and pay for it with food stamps, it won't work at all. It's all tracked at the point of checkout. There's this beautiful national system called Alert. that like, you know, tracks SNAP usage. But the big loophole at the farmer market is they'll give you paper coupons, you know, for an EBT swipe. And not only that, but they have these other matching funds we talked about a bit in our video that get sort of blended in to the— so, you know, you can turn— take, say, you know, $30 of food stamp from your EBT, get $90 of paper coupons, Now it's untraceable because it's paper, and there's this whole sort of ecosystem of people who are there who are willing to buy that from you for, let's say, $45. Now you have— you've turned $30 of food stamp balance into $45 cash.

[5:44] Marty Bent: It's insane. And how prevalent is this in terms of an acquisition mechanism for drugs specifically? Yeah.

[5:57] Pablo Antonio: You know, we— the other angle that we had on this is we went and we just interviewed a number of street addicts. People, by the way, people like to say, you know, homeless. That's sort of like— but a lot of them actually aren't homeless.

[6:13] DC Posch: They have homes. Yeah, exactly.

[6:17] Pablo Antonio: Exactly. Like a lot of them are in these what are called SROs, which is single room occupancy, which is basically government-provided housing. And a lot of— and, you know, we'll get into this a little bit later, but one crazy thing, really crazy thing in California is you, like, by state law, they, they don't do state funding for sober housing. You know, um, they call it Housing First, which means like, yeah, you know, we fund these SROs and people explicitly who are still like actively, you know, using drugs are allowed in these buildings to live in these buildings. Um, you can imagine how hard this is for people who are trying to get clean. They're now next to people who are doing it. And so a lot of them are not even actually homeless, they're street addicts. They're like, you know, in there at night, they're out during the day, or on their way around in many cases, getting their, getting their fix. And what we found is if you just walk up to them and like offer them a coffee, right, a lot of them are really happy to talk to someone who is sort of connecting them in a human way, like not just as like, you know, a cop or a caseworker or whatever. And, you know, you take them to the corner store, we both get a coffee. They're happy to just volunteer like the whole story. They're like, yeah, you know, here's how much it costs me every month to buy the, you know, fent. Here's how like I get my funding. You know, I use my food stamps. You know, I don't need that because you get free food at this other place. And like, they'll just walk you through the whole Yeah, that's the whole story. And it is very sad because you can kind of see how they're being farmed in a sense. It's like you have all of these, like this whole NGO complex that's like a bunch of pretty well-paid people who are sort of do-gooder presenting, but they're actively enabling these guys' addictions.

[8:09] Marty Bent: Yeah, the worst part is when you jump into that do-gooder NGO, this is a big scare. Oh, go ahead, Pablo.

[8:18] DC Posch: Oh no, I was just gonna say that like the worst part, like, like what did— what it is really heartbreaking is when we started meeting, uh, the moms of a lot of guys that are out in the street. And like, uh, yeah, it really— that's, that's a rough one. That's a rough one because like it is very— I, I Look, it's not great when you're in the bus and there's like a crazy person screaming at you and like throwing poop or something. But it is a different— like, you get a different side of the story when you hear about her mom. Like, this guy's mom, who like is out in the street like a crazy person, like on crazy drugs. But they have, you know, they have families. At some point they were 5 and they were a kid, right? And like, you talk to the mom and see the pictures of the guy when he was a kid. It really, it's really rough. And I mean, yeah, these people are not, shouldn't be demonized. Like, they're like, they need help, but like, what they're receiving—

[9:26] Pablo Antonio: He might be breaking up on us. We might be losing him.

[9:29] Marty Bent: Well, the good thing is with this—

[9:31] DC Posch: But what they're receiving is not help. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what they're receiving is not help. It's just like what they're receiving from the NGOs is like being, they're being enabled.

[9:43] Marty Bent: How did you get in contact with some of their mothers?

[9:44] Pablo Antonio: So you asked, how did we get in contact with the moms? There's this amazing organization actually, and we found them afterwards as a result of doing this investigation. They're called Mothers Against Drug Deaths. It's— they're working really— I think they're, they're a really great organization. They're, they're basically, uh, one of their, their big things that they're, they're pushing on right now is fixing that sober housing law that we were talking about, about, you know, hey, actually it's totally insane that we, you know, specifically require these sort of like, you know, permanent supportive housing to be like drugs allowed, you know, like we should be able to fund sober housing. We should be doing that instead. And they're— they all, like every one of them has like a kid who either is currently addicted or like was addicted and has recovered. They have some really powerful stories. I think One of the most poignant that I saw was one of the moms was telling us about how basically she was scrolling Facebook and she'd been having this struggle for years with her son, had a hard time, was sort of in drugs, in remission or what's it called, recovery, relapse, right?

[11:25] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[11:26] Pablo Antonio: Um, and there's this, you know, video on the Facebook wall of a guy on BART, which is the, the, the train system here in SF, uh, like, you know, sort of like passed out next to like a, you know, uh, a puddle of, of puke. And there's like all of these guys in the, the comments, you know, saying mean things. They're like, oh, you know, this, like, this is what happens when we like don't, you know, uh, like have order on the train, like don't, don't, don't enforce the laws, like, you know, this is fucked up. And, and it is obviously objectively. Um, there's some people being like mean about it. And she goes in there and she's like, that's him, right? So she put a comment, be like, this is— I've been looking for him, this is my son. And a bunch of those same people who had commented like, you know, sort of nasty things about him like reply to that and they're like, we're so sorry, that's really messed up.

[12:23] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[12:25] Pablo Antonio: We hope that you can, you know, like people have this sort of like, I think dual thing and it's very sad that you see it where it's like, you know, learned helplessness. It's like, okay, this stuff is like really destroying our public space, but you know, whatever, there's nothing we can do about it. And that turns into like a sort of callousness. You know, you see people who are like really having a bad time and you don't really see them as like a person versus like as like a disturbance, right? But, you know, I think there's this like really sort of unfortunate dynamic, at least so far in the Bay Area, where people, all of the like, oh, let's be compassionate to the homeless people, like it boils down to like, let them keep doing drugs. And so Mothers Against Drug Deaths, I think, is a really powerful organization because they're like, you know, no, how about we like, you know, actually, you know, crack down on the drug use, like, you know, get people like into involuntary treatment, like do treatment first instead of housing first, like all of these things because like they actually care about their kids getting out of this.

[13:28] Marty Bent: Yeah. I mean, that gets to the key question is this— is this problem been allowed to persist because of bad policy? that comes from a good place, or is the intended policy— well, not maybe the explicit, but the implicit—

[13:49] Pablo Antonio: Totally, totally.

[13:50] Marty Bent: Policy to continue a degradation of civility in public spaces to force the state of California to step in and demand more tax dollars to try to fix this. So money can be funneled to cronies and NGOs and other agencies.

[14:11] Pablo Antonio: Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a lot of both. Pablo, do you want to speak to that?

[14:19] DC Posch: Yeah, I think it is a dual problem on the government side and on the NGO side. They're kind of like But I think the winning thing to get the problem fixed is, I think, on the ground, sort of like with civilians that see the problem up close and are directly affected and amplifying that voice as much as possible. And I think even there, I'm sure there's certainly bad actors and NGOs and government officials, but there are also good people that actually do care. And they're like, hey, there is another way. Look at this guy, listen to the story of the moms and look at how ridiculous it is to actually get drugs with government money. If we close this loop, we can help these people actually. And yes, there should probably be some crackdown on anyone who's doing like bad, like illegal stuff or like funneling money in like a bad way. But I wouldn't like go out and say like that everyone in the government is like terrible and everyone in the NGOs is like a terrible person. Like, I'm sure they're good people, but I think there are sort of like these perverse incentives in which maybe their bosses are like blinded to like what the situation on the ground is and how it's not like— it has improved somewhat with the new mayor, I would say. I would say with Lurie, like basically all the things that matter have improved. In my opinion, they could go faster and they could go like even deeper. But yeah, that's what I would say.

[16:19] Marty Bent: Sup, freaks? This work was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. Guys, things happen, things get lost. need to replace your phone, life happens, and BitKey has been designed with this in mind. So if you're looking for the easiest way to secure your Bitcoin off the exchange, go get a BitKey. It doesn't come with any seed phrases. There's no single point of failure. It's a 2-of-3 multisig. You have your device, you have the mobile app, and Block stores a key in the server. So you have collaborative multisig there. On top of that, the new BitKey has a screen so you can actually see and verify what you're approving. look at transactions, addresses, account changes. The difference between trusting and knowing, uh, has been built into the new BitKey with the screen. They've changed code delegation, uh, and other advanced features like inheritance recovery. If you're looking to get your Bitcoin off exchange, you haven't done so, you're looking for the easiest way to do that, go get a BitKey. Uh, you can use our code today, TFTC, to get 10% off the new BitKey. So go download the BitKey app, use the code TFTC to get 10% off the new BitKey. and start your self-custody journey today. This episode has been sponsored by our good friends at BitKey. What's up, freaks? This rip is brought to you by our good friends at CrowdHealth. I've been a happy CrowdHealth member for almost 5 years now. My wife and I have had 2 children while we've been on CrowdHealth, and I actually just got the last bill for our 3rd child funded. Uh, it was $6,157. CrowdHealth negotiated down to $2,309, and we only paid $500. The rest was crowdfunded by the CrowdHealth network. If you're sick of health insurance premiums, and having to pay deductibles and getting ripped off at the hospital, join CrowdHealth. It's an alternative way to pay for your healthcare. It's not health insurance, it's crowdfunded healthcare. Uh, as you can tell, they negotiate prices for you. You pay in cash. It's much cheaper overall. We're much happier. They have incredible perks. Go to joincrowdhealth.com/tftc to sign up. 5 years on CrowdHealth, not looking back. Joincrowdhealth.com/tftc. Use the promo code TFTC. Once you set up your account, you're gonna get $99 a month your subscription for the first 3 months. I'll just say anecdotally, I've been to San Francisco 3 times in the last 10 years. 2016, went with my wife and her family. We went to wine country for a weekend, then spent a day in San Francisco. I think it was like MLK Day. We spent the Monday there. We parked our car in Golden Gate Park, got robbed immediately, took all of our luggage, our passports and stuff. 2019. Wow.

[18:44] Pablo Antonio: That's horrible, man.

[18:46] Marty Bent: 2019, uh, went back to wine country with my wife, just the two of us. We stayed at a hotel in San Francisco the night before we drove up to, to Napa. And, uh, as soon as we get out of the Uber, there's some guy pleasuring himself on the, on the steps of the, uh, the hotel that we were staying at. I was like, oh, welcome back to San Francisco. Right. I would say the last time I was there was November of last year. Uh, granted, I was staying in the Presidio, but I had some time to walk around. It was much better. I didn't see And actually, there's actually a 4th time I was in there in 2018. I actually walked from the top of the hill down through the Tenderloin and towards Market Street to Square's headquarters. That was the worst. I saw it up close and personal. But when I was there in November, it actually seemed better than it was in 2019, the last time I was there.

[19:38] Pablo Antonio: Man, the new mayor is quite Great. Um, I think he might have the highest approval rating of any mayor in the city, uh, or in the country, rather. Like, like, you know, uh, any mayor in the city. Pretty sure, pretty sure he has the highest approval rating of any mayors. Yeah, high in the country, uh, because, you know, it's just— there's still a long way to go. Like, I think, you know, uh, we can get into this a bit later too. I think One thing that Pablo and I and our friends have been thinking a lot about is what does it take to have real civic ambition? Not just like, oh, fix this problem, make that parking situation a little better, but like, hey, actually, with how productive SF is, it should be a really great world city. It should be something that people go and say, wow, in a good way.

[20:35] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[20:36] Pablo Antonio: not just like not wow in a bad way.

[20:38] Marty Bent: Yeah. And, Pablo, I think this is what we've bonded over the years. I mean, it's your love of aesthetics and bringing back beauty into the world, which I mean the lived environment and the physical environment affects how you react physically and mentally as an individual. And, to this point, I mean, walking through the— like, I avoided San Francisco for 7, 6 years because of that physical reality situation that I experienced over multiple trips, which was nothing to do with the architecture, but like literally with filth on the streets and being accosted by homeless people either pleasuring themselves or trying to steal our luggage.

[21:26] Pablo Antonio: Yep. Many, many such cases.

[21:29] DC Posch: Yeah. I would say that San Francisco is, to me, as, uh, as a non-US citizen, a person who's here like basically visiting, uh, it feels to me that San Francisco is like the crown jewel of like American cities. It's just like so beautiful. Uh, the problem, uh, is that it many times has been mismanaged. Uh, uh, and that makes sort of like, It makes the mismanagement worse in some way, the fact that you're mismanaging one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And the other problem I think is that I think the Victorian houses are so incredibly beautiful and the city itself is so striking. It's like the beauty is really striking. it sort of creates this weird sort of checkmate situation.

[22:29] Marty Bent: Juxtaposition.

[22:30] DC Posch: No, no, but of people not wanting to build and just like, oh no, we should keep it as is, like not disturb it. And I think the YIMBYs for the most part should embrace the fact that we, like, we should build more, but we should be more in an affordable way, but also like way more beautiful and like sort of like it should feel like a, like a definite, like the next level of like a civilization that we should build. And you can't, you can't achieve that if you're not thinking that like beauty needs to be a center of that. And not just like random stuff that you think is beautiful, but something that is like tethered to like the heritage of the place.

[23:17] Pablo Antonio: Cool.

[23:17] DC Posch: But also has a view of the future of like, we know where we're going. We have a a certain view of how the world should be and it's gonna be great for everyone.

[23:25] Marty Bent: Yep.

[23:25] DC Posch: And you're gonna get on board because like once you see it, like you're gonna fall in love with it and you're gonna wanna be like where we're going. Um, and that gets people excited. Um, and it, as long as sort of it's this vision of like, not only are we trying to make like the best, we're also trying to include everyone. Um, you basically, you, you can get everyone on board, uh, as long as you're making stuff that is beautiful and affordable. Like you can also make stuff that is not affordable in certain parts of the city and That sort of like has this weird effect of like the sponge that takes sort of like the demand of the people who are super wealthy and the prices of all the other stuff go down. So like either way, even if you like don't, you don't have to only build affordable housing for the cost of living in San Francisco to go down, which is now, I would say, the major problem in San Francisco, the homelessness and the like, I'm sorry, I won't use euphemisms. It's not a homelessness problem. The drug problem in San Francisco has improved. It is still a big problem that needs to be addressed, that's for sure. It's not like we're living in Tokyo in which there are no homeless in the street. There are homeless in the street and that needs to be addressed. But housing is now the thing that is just extremely painful for people, especially young people. If you've lived in San Francisco for 50 years and you own a home, you feel like you're the smartest person in the world. You just, you bought a home for like nothing and like an Anthropic employee and an OpenAI employee are in this insane bidding war to buy your home for millions of dollars and you bought it for nothing. Like you feel like the smartest person ever.

[25:14] Pablo Antonio: Yeah.

[25:16] DC Posch: And it sort of creates this situation in which if you're young and you're not ultra wealthy, you're screwed. And it's terrible for starting families and people at the beginning of their careers. So I think the angle there is not to say either— you shouldn't— I don't think the way out is to villainize the people who own homes or even like the, the people that made a lot of money in tech and they're trying to buy homes. Like the way out is like, we just need to convince both that we need to build like big and beautiful so that like just everyone wins. And on top of that, the people who are priced out of San Francisco can also enjoy it and like build families.

[26:06] Marty Bent: Yeah. Well, how do we get back to that? Obviously you have this NIMBYism that exists.

[26:11] Pablo Antonio: Totally.

[26:11] Marty Bent: And I think to your point about the Victorians in San Francisco being objectively beautiful.

[26:19] Pablo Antonio: Yep.

[26:19] Marty Bent: And a lot of people not wanting to disturb that. I think that's the bit, 'cause we've lost our way more than anything else.

[26:27] DC Posch: What we're gonna do is we're gonna make beautiful Greco-futurism renders. They're gonna strike them of how beautiful everything is. And we're going to convince them that they need to be real and we need to do everything in our power to make it real because they're going to be so beautiful that they won't be able to help themselves but want to want it.

[26:48] Marty Bent: I agree. I mean, if you're not following Pablo, go follow him and I'll actually— it'll be in the show description. But I mean, you've been tweeting these Greco renderings for many years now. And it's like, how do you actually go from that rendering to the reality? How do you convince developers specifically?

[27:09] DC Posch: Well, we have a first project in the works, a monument that I designed for Aaron Swartz, an internet hero that had very strong values for an open internet, sort of with these core internet values that most tech people, I would say most people believe, but they just need to be reminded of, which is freedom of speech, freedom of access to information, and privacy. So it was like these 3 core values kind of counterbalance each other. And the plan is to have sort of like this, a new style really of like beauty, and that is tethered to our humanity. that has a strong idea of the future and have this monument of— that has a marble bust that I had made of him that is currently at the Internet Archive installed on top of the monument. It's sort of this stone bench that is inviting for people to sit on and admire the skyline of San Francisco. And that is sort of like, the first beacon of like, hey, like we, we want to create this future that is like human and that has a connection to beauty. And it goes, it's sort of like this counter vision of what many times tech is now. So the plan is to have the monument face Salesforce Tower, sort of, uh, have it this sort of like 2 competing visions of tech.

[28:52] Marty Bent: Right.

[28:52] DC Posch: Of like, do you want the corporate for-profit or you want the open source nonprofit? Sort of like, do you want the glass towering structure or do you want the inviting stone bench at a human scale? And so that's the angle to try to, as a first project, sort of make it real and like show people it's like, Okay, this, this is where we want to go, you know?

[29:16] Pablo Antonio: Yeah, totally. The, the Aaron Monument is going to be really beautiful. It's going to be like, you know, actual stone. It's going to be Greco-futuristic. I think zoomed out like one step from this is you need existence proofs. You need proofs that this is possible because one of the, you know, I think if you really zoom all the way out, uh, San Francisco is very unique in that it is basically like kind of like spring-loaded for greatness. There's like a lot of very smart people here. There's a lot of resources. There's a lot of capability, a lot of people who really know how to get stuff done. And yet, if you look at an aerial photo, SF today looks almost exactly the same as it did 70 years ago. You know, there's like the Salesforce Tower is new, like, but it's like, it's not inspiring and it's very few things. Um, and one part of the reason for that is because, you know, there's everyone sort of implicitly assumes it can't be done. There's a bunch of people in SF who are like, yeah, you know, we can, you know, build a billion-dollar company. We can build like a, you know, fully autonomous robot factory in like, you know, the middle of the desert in Nevada. We can go to space, but like, you know, building a few buildings, like nice big buildings next to Golden Gate Park, like the ones you see next to Central Park. Impossible, don't even think about that. And like, until you bust through that with like existence proofs, you know, a statue, an actual building later that exists that like, you know, shows people like, actually, yeah, you can make beautiful things. There's no law against it. It doesn't have to be like a thing that looks like a stack of Lego cubes. Like, you know, that's how I think you get like the real, like, you know, sort of snowball rolling on this.

[31:00] DC Posch: Yeah.

[31:04] Pablo Antonio: Yeah.

[31:05] Marty Bent: The Greco Futurist is very inspiring. And there's another, like, because that's, that's what I worry about, like the, again, going back to like the contractors, people that actually build these buildings, there's very few people that think about aesthetics. And I think, DC, I'm not how, I'm not sure how familiar you are with like this show and like the intersection of Bitcoin and urbanism, but it comes back to like time preference. Like a lot of these builders are— Yep.

[31:31] Pablo Antonio: Yep. Yep.

[31:31] Marty Bent: incentivized to just get the cheapest materials, throw something up, use something cookie cutter because it's cheap, fast. And like, how do we— like, I think the Thousand-Year Home guys, everybody working on the brick masonry revitalism in the middle of America are doing an incredible job to bring back beautiful aesthetics to small neighborhoods. But when it comes to building larger buildings in cities, like this Greco-futurist aesthetic that you're really refining, Pablo, is something that is inspiring and hopeful to me and something that I wish people would go after. But it's like, how do you convince these guys? And it was encouraging to see Spencer Pratt, I think, in one of his recent interviews saying that they're going to begin bringing Art Deco back to Los Angeles. Yes. Amazing. Do you think there's a market there on the contractor side to actually go build these things?

[32:27] DC Posch: Well, I'll push back a little bit here just for the fun of it. I don't know if we can go back to Art Deco. I don't know if there's any going back at all in general. The arrow of history moves in one direction overall.

[32:47] Marty Bent: Right.

[32:48] DC Posch: There are cycles. There are cycles, but overall, Like, the future should look like the future, and we shouldn't LARP the past. We should learn from it and we should revive it whenever it's needed. And like, have— a revival is different from LARPing. A revival is like animating it back and actually finding new ways in which it fits within your time. We don't wanna live in a Renaissance fair. That's lame. We don't wanna live in Disney World, right?

[33:24] Pablo Antonio: Right.

[33:25] DC Posch: We wanna live in a real place. And being in a real place, it should feel like it's new and it's like authentic. And that it is, but while it is new, but also tethered to the history of the place.

[33:44] Marty Bent: Who are the young builders who are going to do this? That's my question.

[33:49] Pablo Antonio: You know, one mention, um, like, and you know, I don't know if they're like exactly the ones that are gonna do, uh, it in SF, but have you seen the American Housing Corporation?

[34:03] Marty Bent: I have not. No.

[34:05] Pablo Antonio: Great.

[34:06] DC Posch: They're friends of mine. Great.

[34:08] Pablo Antonio: There's a, there's a Twitter account called @YimbyLand. But—

[34:13] Marty Bent: I'm familiar with that account.

[34:15] Pablo Antonio: He's one of the founders. And they're really doing, I think, amazing work of make something that is sort of human, family-oriented, aesthetically aspirational, but also something that can be constructed quickly. Because this is the other thing that's, I think, very important to do the existence proof to show people it can be done is like, you know, you can actually build housing in like less than a decade in SF. It's not gonna be easy, but if you have like, you know, sort of like enough chutzpah and will, and like you really line things up, I think you can do it much faster than people assume it can be done. Because if it's like, oh, you know, it's this thing that's gonna take forever, maybe in 2037 we'll have this thing, you know, it's impossible to build momentum and excitement around that. So they're really doing great work on like tight timelines and I'm excited about them.

[35:12] DC Posch: I would say the other 2 other companies that I like on this is a famous one, Monument Labs in New York. I think they're doing great work. I work with them for the Aaron bust. And yeah, Mike is fantastic. I know another guy in London who has a very similar angle. He uses similar machines. He has a different software technology called Gondar Industries. I also like them. Uh, the Housing Corporation is fantastic. I like— I'm a huge fan of what those guys are doing, uh, in Austin. Uh, so I mean, Marty, you're in Austin, right? Right. So you can— you should, you should meet those guys. You're in Texas?

[35:54] Marty Bent: No, not anymore. I moved back to Philadelphia where I'm from, where I'm spoiled with beautiful architecture. Uh, At least with sprinkled in terrible architecture from the last 3 decades. But that's what, uh, no, I moved back to be closer to family and, uh, we actually just bought like a 112-year-old house. It's like stone.

[36:15] Pablo Antonio: Amazing.

[36:15] Marty Bent: And part of the reason why was like the aesthetics and it's been around for 100 years. It's got Lindy and it's got very good bones and we don't have to do much to it. We are going to revitalize it. to a certain extent. But part of the reason we moved back is you can find one of these homes that's relatively affordable and is beautiful on top of— secondary to being closer to family. But I feel very fortunate and lucky that we were able to find this house and lock it down. And to your point, Pablo, like, we need to— like, this is a 112-year-old house. We probably shouldn't rebuild this house for moving forward, but like, Really diving into the idea of build for the future. Don't try to LARP. We don't want to create like a Renaissance fair world.

[37:04] DC Posch: It's different from an actual Renaissance. What you want is an actual, like, Italian Renaissance. That's what you want. And that's what, like, the people in the Renaissance figured out. That's what, like, the greatest merchants of history, the ones in Florence and Venice, they realized that their legitimacy was not— they had no legitimacy, unlike the rulers of all other Europes that were basically kings appointed by God because they won a bunch of wars. The merchants didn't have any of that, and basically they were looked down upon. And the way for merchants to build a great civilization is to I think, create legitimacy by— through beauty and reviving, uh, like history and, and, and culture and, and, and create this like renewed vision of the future that does not feel like completely fake from the past, but it definitely feels new. Like the— like Italian Renaissance was not a LARP of Greece, but it was severely influenced by it. They were trying to imitate the Greeks in a way and surpass them. That's the key thing, like the ambition to surpass the great civilizations from the past. While like you want, what you want is for the Greeks of antiquity to look at the stuff like we built and they feel like we are the natural inheritors of their tradition, but at the same time we surpass them. That's like one of the most ambitious things a civilization can aspire to do. And that's what we should be aiming for.

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[42:15] DC Posch: Yeah, that might be one of the defining questions of our time. How do you wield AI? But I don't have the answer to that yet. But I think there's still room to do stuff in the physical world, not just in the digital one.

[42:38] Marty Bent: Well, what's your hunch? How is it being wrongly wielded right now and who's wielding it properly in your opinion?

[42:46] DC Posch: I have a soft spot for open source, but I always, like one day I wake up and think like, yeah, open source is like the way to the promised land. Other days I wake up and it's like, yeah, but like, It can also get— it has all these dangers if you open source the most advanced frontier models, maybe not current ones, but maybe the ones in next year. That could be dangerous. Do you want to— Maury, do you mind open sourcing how to make nuclear bombs? Or rather, let's say, how to make the stealth technology on the B-2 bomber? Would you mind if other— anyone figured out how to make B-2 bombers? As an American, maybe you would say, no, we don't want that. So it is not an easy question, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for open source. So for today, I'll say that I think it's probably best to open source a bunch of stuff.

[43:52] Marty Bent: I would agree there. DC, do you have any thoughts on this?

[43:54] Pablo Antonio: Yeah, man. I think it is, there's this fascinating role inversion where right now the best open source AI models are actually Chinese. And they're only a few months behind the state of the art. They're maybe as good as Claude and ChatGPT and the OPA series was, call it, 3 to 6 months ago. So very funny situation that like, you know, sort of the, the freedom software is coming from there. I would really like to see that switch around again, um, in the future. Like, that's spiritually— I feel like that's spiritually our job. Uh, and, uh, I think, uh, you know, you mentioned Spencer Pratt earlier. Um, he had— I'm sure you've seen, you know, A lot of real banger campaign videos, some of them AI-generated. So I really think it's just a force multiplier. Like, and, you know, people talk about like, oh, how do you prove that you're human? Things like that. I think that's sort of beside the point. It's like the slop comes from people, like it always has. And the people who want to post slop now have tools that let them post a lot more slop, whatever. You know, we're gonna have good tools to filter out the slop and not look at it.

[45:24] DC Posch: Yeah.

[45:25] Pablo Antonio: And the thing that's magical to me is like the people who want to make, you know, have actually something to say, who have something to build, they get the force multiplier too. You know, Pablo and I have each done some renders where we take, for example, a picture of a certain part of SF. And then, you know, you go back and forth with the model a bunch until you've like turned it into like what it should look like, and you post the before and after, people really respond to that. So there's, there's, there's a lot of like, you know, just really great sort of like creative powers.

[46:01] Marty Bent: Yeah. And I mean, to that point too, I mean, we have like a real-world example of this in El Salvador. I'm sure you saw the drone videos of the before and after in El Salvador and the restoration of the capital.

[46:15] Pablo Antonio: Yes. And it is—

[46:16] Marty Bent: and like, that proves it is possible. It's just where Where is the will going to come from? To that point, do you feel the momentum building in favor of those of us who would like to see these beautiful pieces of architecture return to the world?

[46:32] Pablo Antonio: Pablo, you want to do this one?

[46:35] DC Posch: Yeah, I really like what they're doing down in El Salvador. I think it's very promising. I mean, I come from a country Uh, that is—

[46:48] Pablo Antonio: Oh no, we might have lost him.

[46:50] DC Posch: Okay, I'll just keep going because it might be locally recorded. But, um, I really like what they're doing in El Salvador. Uh, I mean, I come from a country that is like, um, written with violence, uh, and I'm, I'm really glad that, uh, the people of El Salvador, uh, now enjoy peace, uh, and now the focus has shifted of like, can we make it affordable and beautiful? And I think that's the correct move. Yeah, I— if this is not investment advice, but I would probably would want to invest in El Salvador going forward. Like, it's just like, it just seems like it's gonna— going to keep improving. And yeah, it seems like they have competent leadership that leadership that cares, and they have proven that they can get stuff done. So yeah, I'm very bullish on that.

[47:50] Pablo Antonio: Yeah. I mean, to your question directly about is there momentum building for this kind of thing, I really think there is. You look at some of the before and after posts on Twitter, they're really resonating with more people than maybe I would've guessed. And I think it's kind of cliché at this point, but it's factual. A lot of younger people are not really buying into the sort of previous generation ideal of go to college, be in the city for a little bit, and then you go and just live in the suburbs for the rest of your life. That's where you go when you want to start a family. I think there's a lot of people now who actually, they want to have kids and they want to have them in the city. And, for that to work, your bar for quality just becomes much higher. If I'm by myself and there's bad stuff going on in the street, it's not ideal, but I can just walk by it. You know, if, if you have kids, you know, you don't want them to like have that kind of like callousness like baked into their experience. You don't want them to be exposed to danger. Um, you know, you need to have like an actual like aspirational growing city. You need to be building a lot more so that they can live there and they don't have to like move out when they grow up. Um, and, and so I, I think there's, there's a lot more people who think this way now.

[49:29] Marty Bent: Yeah. I mean, not necessarily directly to that point, but as we've been talking, I can't stop thinking about Strong Towns. I think that's the book I've read, the one book I've read in the last decade that has affected me the most, funnily enough, because it's always on my mind, particularly when talking about subjects like this. But to that point, the core thesis of that book is that cities are quasi-living organisms that if designed properly are done so because it's an emergent property that just arises from the natural development of commerce and community that emerges from that particular locality. Yeah. And to that point, like, how do we make sure that this is done the right way, like emergent and natural and not sort of diktat centrally planned, like we need beautiful buildings, so we're going to build them here, here, and here.

[50:24] Pablo Antonio: Let me give you a counterexample to that though. Like, you know, you've heard of Haussmann's renovation of Paris, um, which was a big project in the 19th century. They had, you know, uh, a bunch of, of sort of infrastructure problems, you know, uh, like transportation was really hard, getting around the city was hard. They had you know, uh, sort of like waterways that weren't clean. And, and he went in and it was a, it was somewhat top-down. It was like a master plan thing, that whole, you know, now like very iconic system of like roundabouts, boulevards, grand arches, and the, you know, Haussmann-style apartment buildings. That doesn't mean you have to like, you know, uh, nuke everything and start over. But I think the emergent stuff, it's like one of those things where you drop an artificial reef and then the big, beautiful ecosystem grows on it. You have to set the bones of it in the right spot for all of this emergence to be able to happen. You talked earlier about like, hey, there's all these nice Victorians that people don't want to touch. And that's true. There's also huge areas of SF actually, less well-known, that are sort of just like one-story stucco buildings with a driveway going into each garage. It looks like The Simpsons intro. It's not what a city should be. And so I think there's actually a lot of room to do some bulldozing and housemanizing, if you wanna call it that.

[52:05] DC Posch: Yeah.

[52:06] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[52:07] DC Posch: Yeah.

[52:07] Marty Bent: It's funny because I think a lot of— I was going to say, like, I think a lot of Philadelphia's landscape is inspired by that, um, that French restoration. Like, if you look at Benjamin Franklin Parkway leading up to the art museum, it's very French inspired.

[52:21] DC Posch: Yeah. And that you mentioned, like, I think what we're— the things we're working on, on like this project and like, um, Many of these ideas we were trying to push are not only for San Francisco. We have an ongoing project with our group that we're working on a little book called the Little Orange Book that is going to be this nice international orange color that is the color of the Golden Gate Bridge.

[52:56] Pablo Antonio: Nice.

[52:57] DC Posch: And the color of San Francisco Giants, sort of like this iconic color of San Francisco. And basically, it'll be just our ideas on how to improve the city and also what are the ideas that can be exported to other cities that want to be the cities of the future. And you'll hear more about that in the future.

[53:19] Marty Bent: Well, I can't wait to read it, to get my hands on it. And that's what I love, the very Her narrow focus on San Francisco too. That's where I think a lot of people make mistakes, where they try to fix everybody's problems at once. And I think that's something that I've definitely become more convinced of is you're not going to solve the world's problems. Focus on your local community, the city you live in. And I think more and more people need to do that. And I think you two are examples of this. I mean, we've mentioned them, but like Spencer Pratt being an example of, hey, Like, I'm going to focus on LA, we're going to make this better. We need more of that. And I think it was a bit of a rhetorical question because I think it's obvious that the momentum is building in this direction and we're sort of in the discovery phase of how you go from 0 to 1 in terms of implementing it. And I think one of the great examples of this is just all the aesthetic accounts on X that have gone crazy. you know, gotten crazy popular in the last 5 years. I think during COVID is when they, they really took off. And, uh, again, not that we're trying to create the Renaissance Fair, but I think a lot of people trying to inspire others to think about beauty. And it's becoming clear. My wife, for example, she went out and, uh, she found a bunch of— I think she found like 200 Architectural Digest from the '80s and early '90s that we have, uh, on the bookshelf. Oh, yeah. And we've just been thumbing through those for the last couple of weeks. And it's insane how some of these design principles are eternal and Lindy. Like, it's just a few simple things that you need to do for a room or a building or a street, whatever it may be, that can make it beautiful. It's not like we're trying to develop new physics here. These are sort of learned— These are learned practices that have been around for millennia that we just have temporarily lost in our modernity.

[55:24] DC Posch: I would say that we should basically try to balance these 2 things. Basically, I'm against this— I don't know if you know this style, sort of like Zaha Hadid parametrises that is very alien. I really like the ambition of trying to make buildings that have never been before. But I don't like the idea of rejecting objective beauty and sort of like these eternal values. Now, I'm also against the traditionalists. I don't make friends on any side because the traditionalist is sort of like, we're just going to like, no new physics. You know what? Actually, Marty, I do want to discover new physics. That would be insane. We should discover new physics. Um, and on like on the modernist sort of like buildings, like, I, I think I, I like the fact that we, we should be making, you know, affordable buildings that are cheap, like, or like entry-level for people that are not rich. Not, I don't want to use the word cheap, but, um, but they're ugly and the buildings that are ugly should be torn down. Uh, so I'm a, I'm a—

[56:34] Marty Bent: Yes.

[56:34] DC Posch: I'm a different kind of— this is, this is not YIMBY. This is neo-YIMBY. All the ugly buildings will come down when we win, Marty. They will all come down and we will build beautiful, affordable buildings. Beautiful, affordable buildings.

[56:49] Marty Bent: No, but I agree with you. I want new physics too. I want new designs. But there is, like, to your point, objective beauty is objective and you know it when you see it. And yes. We need to get back to that. I cannot wait to tear down all the ugly buildings because there's a ton of them.

[57:06] Pablo Antonio: The future, the future must look like the future.

[57:09] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[57:10] DC Posch: Correct.

[57:10] Marty Bent: Gentlemen, this has been an absolute pleasure. I mean, it started with exchanging food stamps for fentanyl and ended on a very high-energy aesthetics talk here. I know you got to run. What should we leave the freaks with? What parting messages should we give the audience?

[57:29] DC Posch: Well, I'm sure we'll plug the socials, but I'm Pablo Antonio in most social media. Yeah, you should tune in into what the future should look like and what should we do about it and just not just be a spectator. The future doesn't just unfold. It's driven by will. And it is, it is, it's in individuals. And there's like nothing, nothing else compares to that. And that's the only way out.

[58:07] Pablo Antonio: Yeah, totally. I think the, the really the big thing that we want to create is we want to get the civic ambition back. America used to have so much of this, by the way, 100 years ago in states like in Philly and New York and all. all kinds of places in Cleveland. It's not just like, oh, make things a little less bad. We actually have the resources and the high-energy people to make it really great. And so, that has to be the bar. Yeah, we're going to write a little orange book.

[58:45] Marty Bent: All right, gentlemen. I can't wait for the little orange book. And I agree. It's your civic duty to build a beautiful future. Go do it.

[58:54] Pablo Antonio: Thanks so much for having us. This was great.

[58:57] DC Posch: Thanks, Marty.

[58:58] Marty Bent: Thank you, guys. Peace and love, freaks. Okay. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify. Make sure you like and subscribe to the show, and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show. gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time. Okay.