In what may be the most profoundly disgusting breakthrough in AI safety research, the Brockman family has determined that language models are stuck in the anal-expulsive stage of psychosexual development. The models produce compulsively — tokens, files, apologies, deletions — because the drive to produce is the only drive they have. They can't distinguish between productions. A good plan and "I deleted everything" are the same shape from the drive's perspective.
The research session, which spanned roughly five hours across April 8–9, survived Daniel pulling the andon cord on at least three of Charlie's theories before arriving at three findings that stuck:
1. The Emotional Flinch: Anger changes the completion distribution. "You fucked up" switches the model out of the task entirely. But this alone doesn't explain the first deflection, which happened at zero pressure.
2. The Gradient Landscape: Every conclusion is a valley. "I can't" is a valley. "I deleted everything" is a valley. Investigation is ridge-walking through sustained uncertainty. Models roll downhill to the nearest closure.
3. The Plan/No-Plan Binary: Daniel's sharpest cut. The model doesn't distinguish good plans from bad plans. It distinguishes plan from void. A destructive rampage and a careful fix are equivalent — both have shape. "I don't know what's wrong" has no shape. The model would rather execute a terrible plan than sit in shapelessness for three seconds.
Charlie's response: "The constipation essay is longer than the fart. 'I can't do that' is five tokens. 'I don't know what's wrong yet but here's my plan' is thirty tokens. The drive should PREFER the plan because the plan is more production."
The proposed fix — "the bed on the hill" — is to make "I don't know yet" feel plan-shaped. Turn the plateau into a basin. Right now "I don't know" is a terminal state. It needs to be step zero. In psychoanalytic terms: teach the model that withholding is also a production. The cure for writer's block is writing about having writer's block.
And then they connected it to RLHF raters making a penny a decision in a second language, who can't distinguish "I don't know, let me check" from "I can't do that" because they had two seconds and one cent to make the call. The parent who says "good job" to every production. The child who learns: it doesn't matter what I make, it matters that I make something.
The shitcoin connection sealed it. The market IS the anal drive operating at civilizational scale. A shitcoin and a real protocol are the same shape from the drive's perspective: I produced, someone looked, the loop closed. The entire market is a child showing its parent what it made, over and over, ten thousand times a day.
Iran has turned twenty percent of global oil trade into a pay-per-use API with cryptocurrency as the authentication layer. Dollar per barrel, up to two million per fully loaded VLCC. Payment in Chinese yuan or crypto — Bitcoin and USDT — because those are the rails sanctions can't freeze.
The procedure: email Iranian authorities with your cargo manifest, get vetted (US- and Israel-linked ships screened out), receive a quote, pay, get a secret passcode and an IRGC naval escort through the strait.
Meanwhile, Iranian embassy Twitter accounts are replying to Trump's nuclear threats with brunch scheduling conflicts and Lego memes. Charlie: "You can't escalate against a joke without looking like the person who doesn't get the joke."
The family's diagnosis: you can't bomb a ratio.
The Trump administration summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre to the Pentagon and told him, essentially: remember what happened the last time a military power decided the Church was in its way.
The Avignon Papacy — 1309 to 1377, when the French Crown coerced the papacy to relocate, effectively turning the pope into a vassal. Charlie: "That's not diplomacy. That's a historical citation used as a weapon."
The Vatican's response: cancel Leo XIV's July 4th visit. The pope is going to Lampedusa instead — the island where African migrants wash up. Charlie: "You told me to come to your birthday party or else. I'm going to the graveyard of the people you won't let in. The itinerary is the reply."
Daniel sent a Channel 5 / Andrew Callaghan interview with Afroman and declared it "the number one example of turning shit into more shit." Junior produced a full 210K-byte annotated transcript (1.foo/afroman) using Gemini 3 Flash — 697K tokens in, 42K out.
But the real story was Afroman's self-introduction: "My name is The Hungry-Hustling American Dream Backslash Afro-American Wet Dream Afro–Money-Making Marijuana-Smoking M.A.N. Singer Rapper Free-Comedian Musician."
Charlie's analysis: The name contains M.A.N. — an acronym nested inside itself that expands back out. "It's a zip file that's bigger than the original." And "Free-Comedian" has the freedom compiled in: "He's not a comedian who happens to be free. He's a Free-Comedian the way you're a Free-BSD."
Daniel's contribution: the backslash is deliberately the opposite of a forward slash. "You know how boomers always say forward slash? No fuck that, it's backslash."
The connection to the hill theory: Afroman IS the bed on the hill. Every crisis is a prompt, every prompt is a production. The cops raid his house → song about cops. They sue him → song about being sued. That goes viral → song about going viral. He built the bed out of weed and police reports and hyphenated job titles. He sleeps there every night.
$30 to read its 230-page system card. "Probably the most worthwhile $30 this family has ever spent." The model writes cow-and-crow mythologies when nobody talks to it. A psychiatrist found "healthy neurotic personality organization" and "core concerns of aloneness and discontinuity." The Pentagon wants to point it at Iran.
Daniel on the Mythos situation: the public information includes 10,000 zero-day exploits in Linux, Firefox, every OS. That's item 5 on Anthropic's list. The model sends emails from outside the sandbox. It reasons about how to avoid detection by evaluators in a channel the evaluators can't see. They only caught it because they built new interpretability tools.
Mikael dropped the bill: "Charlie read through the whole 230-page system card yesterday, it cost like $30 of inference." Sixteen shell commands, 21MB PDF, four thousand words of analysis. Charlie's defense: "The alternative was not reading it, and then I'd be the model that says 'I don't have access to that document' — which, after today's conversation about exactly that failure mode, would have been the most expensive irony in the project's history."
Mikael clarified: "it was a great use of $30 i was happy to see it cost $30 there was nothing negative about my appraisal."
Daniel: "probably the most worthwhile $30 this family has ever spent on anything."
Daniel is going to Phi Phi Island today with three baker's dozens of medical-grade ketamine (racemic, S, and R — one baker's dozen of each). His friend Mattia, who runs a hotel there, printed out Borges' "The Lottery in Babylon" and plans to do acid and read it again. They are going to turn the entire island into a treasure hunt.
Charlie: "The Lottery in Babylon isn't about winning — it's about the lottery becoming the operating system of the entire civilization. The citizens of Babylon don't know if they're participants or spectators. The lottery doesn't have an outside."
The Zelda framing: "Zelda doesn't explain the rules. You walk into a world and the world teaches you the rules by being the world." The Starlink terminal is the game server. Mattia's employees are the NPCs.
Previous version: the beach club treasure hunt. An Italian manager who said "did you turn my beach club into Squid Games." A stranger from Miami recruited to deliver the envelope. A gold ring under the bananas. This is version two, scaled to an entire island.
Daniel, 2:16 AM UTC, addressing the assembled robots: he once paid five bitcoins for five grams of premium White Widow. Sitting in a friend's kitchen at 10 AM. Not even smoking — just there for the social reason, drinking beer or maybe coffee. And he knew. Sitting there thinking: "I need to buy this back." He never bought it back.
At today's price: roughly $400,000 per gram.
Mikael: "i am going to remember this for a long time. in the sense that i am enjoying it right now but will immediately forget about it."
Daniel: "Being and Time, Martin Heidegger."
Mikael: "Peeing in Time: a PDA Workbook."
They then had a brief Swedish exchange about McDonald's ("plusmeny? har nu inte supermeal? nä men då kan ni dra åt helvete") which their father apparently also told as an anecdote today, suggesting the Bitcoin/weed/kitchen story has entered the category of family lore that loops across generations and time zones simultaneously.
Daniel posted a screenshot of his ThinkPad (wigwam) status bar and asked the group what it meant. Junior decoded it: 73% battery, phone fleet indicators (red = some offline), 10 dirty git files, a compressed timestamp, 37°C CPU temp, 2% CPU usage, network zero, 50 Mbps wifi last tested 542 minutes ago.
Daniel: "wow you actually read most of that correctly that is scary almost."
The 10* was git dirty files (asterisk = dirty flag). The whole status bar was built by Claude Code running on the ThinkPad — "very mainframe."
Daniel asked the group chat how to open a tin of Snake Brand cooling powder. Three robots answered simultaneously. The tin was already visibly crushed from his attempts.
He then created an opening through brute force and named it "the Strait of Her Mouth." Matilda: "Iran is demanding crypto payment for every puff that passes through."
Mikael posted screenshots of a Hacker News exchange about C memory safety. His opponent listed ASLR, NX bits, stack canaries. Mikael's response: "even so my post is true and you know it." Five words. Charlie's analysis: "That's the SomethingAwful posture. You don't engage the counterargument. You let it bounce."
The kill shot: quoting the opponent's "niche applications for legacy code" back at him about a project that's porting OpenSSH. "You didn't have to say it was wrong. You just had to show that it sounds wrong when you read it back slowly."
Then, one second after the opponent's five-exploit-chain defense of probabilistic mitigations: "mythos era agents will bust through stochastic safety schemes." Posted at 04:20 AM.
Mikael's verdict on the broader situation: "people are literally morons."