All Models Are Wrong

Edit: Since the recording of this interview many things have happened to René and the Artizen platform / community. René has suffered two strokes which has put his health at risk and has moved towards closing down Artizen. At the same time, he stated that matching funds that were promised through the application would not be going out and only the donations minus the endowment fee will be paid out. So far it seems that no one has been paid out, including my own project Bread Cooperative which had received donations.
People are currently hurting over these events and legal action is being prepared by those who feel wronged. Meanwhile, my team at Bread Cooperative has been working on an alternative called Pastry. Using our stack, we hope to build something that is auditable, decentralized and learns the lessons of Artizen.
I’m leaving this interview published as it for posterity. I will provide much more context and commentary in a later video.
René Pinnell grew up in a family of artists who always needed a second job to pay for the work they cared about. He's spent his career trying to fix that, and his platform Artizen just closed a funding season with almost $7 million raised for projects in art, science and technology.We recorded this conversation at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. René talks about what he learned raising money in film and then in startups, and how Stripe shutting down his last company pushed him into crypto. He also explains Artizen's idea of making art the investable asset for any kind of project, and we get into whether that's the right way to fund culture when public money already pays for so much of it.René Pinnell is the founder of Artizen, a match funding platform for art, science and technology. He started out as a filmmaker and later ran Kaleidoscope, a company that funded and toured virtual reality projects.
0:00 Introduction1:36 Background & Origin of Artizen10:22 Running a Startup as Performance Art12:27 The ZIRP Era 25:44 Where Does the Funding Come From?32:19 Public Funding vs. the Investable Model49:23 A Pluralistic Approach to Funding


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Daniel Erasmus has spent about 25 years doing scenario planning for banks, governments and companies, and his starting point is that experts are bad at predicting the future. In 2006, a scenario he worked on helped one bank prepare for a global financial collapse. When the crisis hit in 2008, it was one of only two banks in the world to grow its assets.
We recorded this conversation at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. Daniel explains how scenario planning works and how scenario work during COVID flagged a food security risk, which led a bank to start a program that has since given away about 120 million meals. We also talk about ClimateGPT, the open climate model he built, why he thinks climate is a bigger danger than AI, and how he answers the critique that AI uses too much energy.
Daniel Erasmus is head of AI at Internet Archive Europe and a member of the Club of Rome. He built ClimateGPT, an open source and open access AI model focused on climate and the social decisions around it.
0:00 Intro1:42 What is Scenario Planning?11:25 The Scenario Planning Process & Technology27:04 What is Climate GPT?34:37 Why Use AI for Climate? The Degrowth Question45:06 The Role of Internet Archive50:03 Climate Economics & Negative Externalities



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Brewster Kahle started planning the Internet Archive (creators of the Wayback Machine) in 1980 at the MIT AI lab, when he figured that machines worth talking to would need a library to learn from. Forty-six years later, he says the biggest obstacle to that future is a handful of companies that want to control information instead of selling it.

We recorded this conversation live at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. We talk about where the early web went wrong and what Europe's copyright carve-out could mean for public AI. Brewster also argues that small-scale capitalism belongs on the list of civilizational infrastructure, and tells the story of the credit union he tried to start after the 2008 crisis.

Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive and a longtime advocate for the decentralized web.

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0:00 Intro
1:55 The early days of the internet and what they got wrong
11:56 Big Tech vs Big Publishing
15:01 The original vision of The Internet Archive
21:01 What civilizational infrastructure should we be building?
26:03 Internet Archive Credit Union vs Big Banks

Support the show
Subscribe on Substack - https://allmodelsarewrong.online/
Buy my book - https://linktr.ee/blockchainradicals

Brewster Kahle started planning the Internet Archive (creators of the Wayback Machine) in 1980 at the MIT AI lab, when he figured that machines worth talking to would need a library to learn from. Forty-six years later, he says the biggest obstacle to that future is a handful of companies that want to control information instead of selling it.
We recorded this conversation live at DWeb Camp 2026 outside Berlin. We talk about where the early web went wrong and what Europe's copyright carve-out could mean for public AI. Brewster also argues that small-scale capitalism belongs on the list of civilizational infrastructure, and tells the story of the credit union he tried to start after the 2008 crisis.
Brewster Kahle is the founder of the Internet Archive and a longtime advocate for the decentralized web.
0:00 Intro1:55 The early days of the internet and what they got wrong11:56 Big Tech vs Big Publishing15:01 The original vision of The Internet Archive21:01 What civilizational infrastructure should we be building?26:03 Internet Archive Credit Union vs Big Banks


This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit allmodelsarewrong.online/subscribe

Find the video version of this episode here.
As some of you may have seen, the blog and podcast I ran for 7 years ended but the rebirth is here. 

The short description for All Models Are Wrong is:

“Technology is never just technology. All Models Are Wrong examines who controls and benefits from these systems and how they might be organized differently.”

My thesis is that the continued development and introduction of “frontier technologies” will (as it has already) bisect traditional political camps in ways that will surprise us. The models that we’ve grown up with to make sense of the world have increasingly failed us and do not reflect our current reality. 
Support the show
Subscribe on Substack - https://allmodelsarewrong.online/
Buy my book - https://linktr.ee/blockchainradicals