#797 - Mike Solana - TikTok Ban, Media War & The Corruption Of College

This episode discusses the implications of media bias, the controversial TikTok ban, and perceived corruption within American colleges.

1. The influence of media on public perception and politics is profound, with biases potentially skewing the narrative.
2. American colleges are criticized for being echo chambers of specific ideologies, possibly at the expense of educational integrity.
3. The TikTok ban is discussed in the context of national security and privacy concerns, reflecting broader geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China.
4. The episode discusses the potential long-term effects of technological innovations and policies on society and governance.
5. Concerns are raised about the sustainability of traditional media and educational models in the face of evolving digital landscapes.

1: Introduction to Topics

Chris Williamson introduces Mike Solana, setting the stage for a discussion on media influence, TikTok's ban, and the state of American higher education. They speculate on the future of media and politics. Chris Williamson: "What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Mike Solana."

2: Media and Politics

Solana critiques the current state of media, discussing its impact on political polarization and public trust. Mike Solana: "A pervasive lack of trust leaves everyone uncertain about the rest of the year."

3: TikTok Ban and Privacy

The dialogue shifts to the implications of banning TikTok, focusing on privacy, data security, and international relations. Mike Solana: "If we're clutching pearls, let's talk about the CCP using TikTok to keep a database of our fingerprints."

4: Corruption in Colleges

They explore the perceived ideological bias and corruption within American colleges, questioning the future of higher education in fostering diverse thought. Mike Solana: "Whether American colleges are really a lost cause, how taboo subjects affect science and censorship in academia."

5: Closing Thoughts

The episode wraps up with reflections on the broader implications of their discussion for society and future generations. Chris Williamson: "So what does the future have in store? And what facts can we be certain about in a time of turmoil and confusion?"

1. Evaluate Media Critically: Always cross-reference news sources to avoid bias.
2. Understand Privacy Settings: Be aware of the privacy settings on social media platforms and their implications.
3. Engage in Educational Reform: Advocate for diverse perspectives within educational institutions.
4. Participate in Policy Discussions: Engage in community and online discussions about technology and privacy policies.
5. Promote Digital Literacy: Educate others about the impact of social media on privacy and personal data.

Mike Solana is a writer, Vice President at Founders Fund, Editor-in-Chief at Pirate Wires and a podcaster.
To no one’s surprise, the future of American media and politics is upside down. A pervasive lack of trust leaves everyone uncertain about the rest of the year. So what does the future have in store, and what facts can we be certain about in a time of turmoil and confusion?

Expect to learn why the new app Fly Me Out is a fantastic inditement of modern dating culture, why the tide is turning against independent and mainstream media, whether the left vs right debate is officially dead, what the future of news and media will look like, whether American colleges are really a lost cause, how taboo subjects affect science and censorship in academia, Mike’s prediction for the first Trump vs. Biden debate and much more...

People

Mike Solana, Chris Williamson

Companies

Founders Fund, Pirate Wires

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Mike Solana

Content Warnings:

None

Chris Williamson
Whats happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Mike Solana. Hes a writer, vice president at Founders Fund, editor in chief at Pirate Wires, and a podcaster to no ones the future of american media and politics is upside down. A pervasive lack of trust leaves everyone uncertain about the rest of the year.

So what does the future have in store? And what facts can we be certain about in a time of turmoil and confusion? Expect to learn why the new app fly me out is a fantastic indictment of modern dating culture, why the tide is turning against independent and mainstream media, whether the left versus right debate is officially dead, what the future of news and media will look like, whether american colleges are really a lost cause, how taboo subjects affect science and censorship in academia. Mikes prediction for the first Trump versus Biden debate, and much more trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that they're top quality, but very few can actually prove it, which is why I partnered with mementos.

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But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mike Solana.

Fly me out, a new invitation only social travel club app where hot chicks can sign up for trips with rich guys. Go ahead, read between the lines. Recently launched, sparking negative reactions on social media. While concerns about trafficking are understandable, the anti prostitution outrage feels a little precious. Are we really pretending guys haven't been using Instagram for precisely this purpose for years?

Whore dash just makes it a little more explicit, which is, by the way, why the app will probably fail. So relax. If we're clutching pearls, let's talk about the CCP. Using TikTok to keep a database of our fingerprints or incels permanently connecting to their VR headsets or auto blow 3000 combo while the birth rate plummets. Uber meets is at least improving the fuck rate, said Riley Norc for Pirate wires three mornings takes this morning.

Mike Solana
Yeah, that I'm going to be. I worked with him on that one. This started from a started from a tweet of mine, so I feel confident talking about this subject. I didn't know we were talking about this today, but I am happy to talk about this today. Where do we begin with that?

Chris Williamson
You tell me, dude. This is your story. First of all, you guys should subscribe to the Pirate wires daily and get our three takes. Yes, you should. I read it every morning.

I read it every morning. Thank you very much. I do think. I think that the, so you have this app, it's not actually called the whole dash. It's called, you said, it's flat.

Mike Solana
Fly me out. So, I mean, you have this app that is designed to connects young, hot women with rich, probably not so hot guys on yachts and whatnot. And people freak out because why? It's the explicit. This is a transactional thing of it all.

But I started noticing, I mean, years ago on Instagram, people with 10,000, 20,000 followers on Instagram all like clockwork, you hit that number, maybe two times that number, and suddenly, for some reason, you want to go to Dubai. A lot of time in the Middle. East, you see these pictures? I'm going to Dubai. I'm going to this other random oil rich country where there's, like, lots of oil royalty and I'm flying first class somehow.

How are you doing that with 20,000 Instagram followers? It doesn't pay you any money, no. Job, no obvious sign of employment. This is how it, this is how the world works. Instagram is like a yellow pages for hot people who are for sale.

I don't think all of them are like this. I don't want to say that's true of everybody, but, I mean, you slide into someone's DM's and you offer them a yacht. Like, that is sort of how the world works online. And it's maybe how it's always worked for young, hot people. I don't know.

Hollywood seems like that kind of a vibe in general. But I think that what people freaked out about here is, is the explicit nature of it. It's by saying it out loud, by making it more obvious. People don't like that. Everyone, it's everyone's sort of.

I can't believe that people are so stupid as they don't know this is happening. But, but if they are, okay, fine. Different class of person. I think the average person sort of sees those Dubai trips and is like, what's going on there? But then they don't think too much about it because there's this polite lie we tell about it anyway.

You know, it's fun. That 1 may be why is, why is calling it out. Why is being explicit about something that most people probably had an idea was happening? Why is that causing uproar?

I don't know. I mean, this is always the case of everything, right? Isn't this just what the nature of being polite is? It's this. We tell each other these polite lies in social situations to make everybody feel comfortable.

And I don't know, there are whole, like, novels written about. Jane Austen has been writing. Maybe she writes about this better than anybody else at all, just talking about sort of the rules of polite society and what exists behind those rules. It will always exist. This is just something that happens to be really contentious in our culture.

I also think there's something happening separate from all that. If you're super online, you've probably noticed there's this rising trad, right wing thing, which is super anti, maybe, like, classically socially conservative. And I think we just haven't seen that kind of a real forceful conservative, socially conservative, right wing thing in a while, at least since I was in college. I think it's definitely more popular now than ever. I don't know how popular it is outside of the Internet.

We'll find out probably soon. It's like a meme movement, purpose built to counteract other meme movements that kind of only really exist on the Internet. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

It's like, I mean, the Internet is a world of, like, based greek statues fighting sort of genderqueer. They, them anime fairies, and they both come with their own philosophies. And, I mean, I've taken this stuff very seriously for a very long time. And I think that I'm probably. I'm at least a little bit right about that.

The question is, how right am I about that? It seems like those things, those groups of people and this ideological warfare that's sort of visualized online in that way does have an impact on politics. So it's a little bit downstream of that, at least. So you see that, I think, a lot with the almost meme like framing of DeSantis as he signed the anti lab grown meat bill, it felt very trad right wing Twitter adjacent, even though there's all sorts of real obvious sort of boring political reasons for that, including just the money that lobbyists spend on campaigns, especially in Florida, and how much impact agriculture has on us politics. Can you explain what that framing was for the people who aren't sufficiently talking about?

You have, like, these hot people, you have just huge Jack dudes and gorgeous bombshell blondes, like, fitness influencer looking people before a table of real meat splayed out at the butcher and DeSantis, like, signing this bill, or he might have been. I think he was inspecting the meat as he announced the signing of the anti lab grown meat bill in Florida. So you can't. I believe you can't. I know you can't work on it there.

I think you can't buy it either. I'm not sure if you can bring it there. You definitely are. It's a super. It's the most aggressive anti lab grown meat bill that exists, which has a lot to do with the fact that you just can't get it yet.

It's a sort of abstract conversation we're having. But he couched it in memes, in memetic. I don't want to call it language because it's visual language. It's like memetic. Visual language is how he got that point across, or maybe how he tried to get support for what he was doing.

But this stuff does, long story short, this stuff, what happens on the Internet does matter, at least a little bit. Yeah. Well, there was that dark Brandon moment, right, where they tried to get Biden to meme. And the reason that I thought, I thought that was, to be honest, actually pretty funny. Dark Brandon's a good meme.

It's like a shockingly good meme. It's a really fucking. Yeah, it's the uno reverse card of the left. I think the problem was that it's kind of a little bit like hearing your mum do a gay joke. Oh, yeah.

I mean, the background is, you know that Biden has never actually seen the meme. And if he. Or if he has, he doesn't understand it. Like, he's not the one memeing. He can't even string a sentence together.

I don't even know that he's been online in probably years. I mean, since he. Does he check his email? I don't know how it works for him, but he has a. He has handlers who know at least a little bit about memes, so they were able to sort of get that one out there.

Where's Trump? I'm. When you're up against somebody. Trump. Trump understands memes.

Trump's online. He's. You know that Trump is tweeting himself. No one was tweeting for him. Um, he understands the Internet, he understands crowds.

And so any sort of memetic war with him is going to be hard to win. He's very good. This is like. I mean, he's the. The God troll of the Internet.

Chris Williamson
The heavyweight champion of meme war. How do you sort of conceptualize the broader armies of discussion and pockets of mimetic warfare on the Internet now? And where do you fall within this? What are you as well as a part of this man? It's so complicated now, and I'm having a hard time recently, not a hard time.

Mike Solana
I think I'm in a process now of recalibrating my sense of what's going on because the Internet has changed so quickly over the last year and a half, two years. Take me through that. Explain to me how you sort of conceptualize this last sort of. Well, the vibe shift has been coming for a while. And I've written about it.

I wrote about it. I think, gosh, it might have been like a year and a half, two years ago. We've been on this train for quite a bit. It was post Covid. A lot of the lies we were forced to believe, or at least parrot online, became so incredible that the whole order that was sort of propping them up, when we're talking about lies about COVID lies about gender, lies about, honestly, I think, and this one's going to be more controversial, but I look at something like January 6, and it's like that wasn't a coup.

So what are we actually talking about here? No one really believes it was a coup. Not even the New York Times believe they won't use that word coup. Who's using the word coup? Not them for a reason.

Because it's like if whatever that narrative was that was constructed of all of these different things became impossible to defend. And at that point, once it became impossible to defend, you started seeing a lot of dissent across the board in all sorts of different places, places where I agree, places where I don't. But it was sort of a mass disagreement. In fact, disagreeing with that consensus became popular and has rewards associated with it on social media. Okay.

There are way more influencers who are opposed to this stuff now who are doing well than there are people who are for that. Whatever the state narrative is, that's. That feels like it's just over. You know, you have the remnants on. Both sides of the fence as opposed to previously, you would have basically had someone who would have been cynical or disagreed if it was against that particular perspective.

Chris Williamson
But now more people on both sides. Is that your belief? Just a few years ago, you had a mainstream sort of state narrative about everything in your life, and that was defended ferociously by a handful, not a handful, a sort of army of media, both institutions and influencers. Who worked for those institutions who were artificially amplified by social media platforms. Their voices were actually artificially put on blast.

Mike Solana
They both disseminated a story that was the correct story, and they ruthlessly attacked anybody who stepped outside of it. And so it was a very dark time to be someone who had weird ideas, like, no real way to do it without getting sort of massive, massive blowback, probably losing your job. If you didn't work for Peter Thiel like I did. It was not good. The story became so absolutely clownish and so unpopular that it began to fall apart.

And that's around the time that Elon bought Twitter. And so everything just. There was no more political censorship. All of the artificial amplification ended. The overton window of acceptable speech completely broadened.

And once that happened, the old world of the influencers who maintained the narrative, and then all of the people just below them who would sort of wink at the truth, uh, try and edge around the truth, try a meme in interesting ways. Um, that was a pressure that really, I think, forced creativity among dissenters. All of that ended. And so now what you have are people really just being honest and saying sort of a range of things that are either interesting or crazy. And I don't know that it tracks so easily to groups anymore.

There used to be sort of the wokes and the antis, the people who sort of oppose the woke framework and the woke orthodoxy. And this culture of silence, I no longer believe that culture of silence exists in the way that it did. I think it still exists to some extent. This infection of institutions still exists. You still have different universities and things where you're forced to sort of speak to dei mandates and things like these sort of affirmative.

You're expected to affirm the orthodoxy of these regressive racial sort of quotas and things like this. But it. Who has been attacked for criticizing that lately? Like, really try and think about that. It's nothing but awards.

And that says to me that culture is changing rapidly. And then in terms of the camps now, I think it's really not clear. I don't. I don't. I think it's easy to.

And I think a lot of people on the right, especially, really want to believe that that old machine still exists. Because it was such a fun fight. Because it was like a righteous anti woke thing. Yeah, it was a righteous fight. You were fighting what felt and what was really, what really constituted power and a really unjust abuse of power over speech.

I just don't think that's there anymore. And so people are having to do the uncomfortable thing of ask themselves, what do I actually believe and what do I want? And there's way more disagreement on those questions than there was agreement on the question of whether or not the woke thing was good and it wasn't confusion. Now, I said, isn't it interesting this, like, the allure of being a righteous revolutionary speaking truth to power? You know, there's so much nobility associated with that.

Chris Williamson
You're just draped in glory. Like you push back against something that you know, and most people kind of do. And you know that the people that are pushing it also kind of don't believe in it. And, you know, the sort of low key on the side by the water cooler, everyone kind of has your back a little bit. It has all of the appearance of being a brave, flame wielding martyr with none of the real risk, especially if you're like a fun, employed, fucking degenerate, self employed rider type person.

And now that hegemony isn't perceived in the same way, you're like, what am I fighting against? I wonder whether this. I wonder whether downstream from this, the, you know, places like maybe the blaze or daily wire or whatever. I wonder how they're positionally gonna sort of maneuver themselves. I think it's bad news for them.

Mike Solana
The Daily wire was the first place that I noticed this. I started. I was watching these endless Matt Walsh and Candace Owens clips where, and this was a while, like a year and a half ago or something, maybe two years ago. There is just every day it was another woke whack a mole story where they find some idiot online saying something that was crazy, you know, and they looked. They looked crazy.

They were saying crazy things. They wanted something crazy, but they just didn't really matter. It didn't feel like that mattered anymore because culture had already changed so much. And I thought, man, what are they doing here? And I realized they have to do this.

This is what their audience wants. This is the audience they built. It's all their audience knows. It's the thing that the audience expects from them and is the only thing the audience will tolerate from them because they haven't actually, at that institution, shared a really coherent sense of what they wanted because many of them disagreed, as we now see with the exit of Candace. Right.

There's strong disagreement over there about what they actually are. Again, agreement on what they don't like, but what are they? What is the America that they want? That's not clear. And those places are going to have a really hard time, I think turning that ship into a new direction.

And this seems to be a problem the right wing has had in politics for a really long time because it's almost designed to be losing. It's like, oh, it's been losing our whole life. It's lost. How do you mean? I mean, the country has just shifted left every year a little bit more and more, and the left has sort of swallowed culture, every cultural institution.

And so when you have these media upstarts that have a different voice, it's automatically a reaction against mainstream culture and politics. Your existence is only ever positioned in opposition to whatever that orthodoxy, hegemon is, which is necessary. But then once you and the few dissidents left sort of running their mouths, win in any way whatsoever. And like right now, I would classify this as, I wouldn't say it's a victory, but there is, there have been a series of great victories, like small victories against cultural hegemony. So you have this space where someone probably could forward an interesting, compelling counter idea, not just a critique of the power structure, but an alternative.

And people are listening, but the sort of critics don't know what that is. I think a lot of them have. Never even talked about it. A lot of defense being played, permanent defunds. It's also a lot of people who've maybe never even thought of these things.

Probably most people have never thought of these things who are popular online. These are influencers who have chased an algorithm for years. They got a lot of attention for a certain kind of thing, and they're still doing it. I think about the Dylan Mulvaney stuff a lot, which was crazy. I mean, I wrote about this when the Budweiser thing happened and the repercussions of that.

It was very interesting. But is Dylan Mulvaney, like, really a threat? Are we still talking about Dylan Mulvaney? Like, how long did that have to happen? It's like you do it because that is what's being rewarded online for this kind of person.

Chris Williamson
It's incentives all the way down. I had this idea that this kind of relates to. I want to teach you about it. So I came up with this idea called the culture war's shiny object cycle. And it's a six stage process that pretty much every news story goes through.

I think. So. Number one, some woke news story hits the press. Cats suffer from racial discrimination or screwing in light bulbs needs to be recognized as a valid sexual kink or something. Number two, the right wing antibody response activates.

Look at how insane these people are. Matt Walsh, quote, tweets the article and calls it obnoxious. This is the problem with our convenient decadent TikTok society. Number three, this reaction causes the story to gain infinitely more traction than it ever would have done by signal boosting the original fringe scenario into a much bigger event. Number four, the left wing counter response activates.

Right wingers lose their minds over one woman with a particularly dark cat. The daily Wire has a meltdown over an insignificant troll article. In times where the original story is less insane. This includes a defense of the original article. Two, cats actually can experience trauma minimizing.

This is the real problem. Five, the right wing re reaction kicks into gear. Apparently im insane for pushing back against cat trauma. See, this is the problem. If we dont stand our ground, these blue haired idiots will take over the country.

Six, finally, the touchgrass meta reactionaries steam in. The real issue is people talking about this issue. Look at how silly this whole thing is. It's time to check out if the culture war we should reconnect with what really matters. You should move on to the ranch next to Ryan Holiday and have a fence post into the ground for the rest of time.

Speaker one. Yeah, I mean, they're all like, that is true and funny. And I've also been each one of those six, by the way, like I've appeared. I would also say there's a reason I think the original cat story does actually matter. It's written for a reason, right?

Mike Solana
This is a person who is creating a narrative about what culture is. The reason that you have a visceral reaction against it would be your recognition that this is not just one, one off thing. It represents something about what our culture is. And in there you usually are. Correct.

Right. You know, these crazy gender stories we saw for years have resulted in a skyrocketing number of young kids who think that they're a different gender. And what does that mean for our society? It's clearly not. You know what?

This is a whole that'll take us. We could talk about gender for a long time. I don't want to necessarily get in the weeds on that. I just do think that the stories we consume have an impact on how. I don't disagree.

Chris Williamson
The reason I called it the shiny object cycle is that what I was particularly interested in is why, given the fact that it pretty reliably follows the same six steps each time, why do we continue to be captured by stories that are formulaic and a layout that's formulaic? And it's because my belief is that each time that the story comes along, it's just sprinkled with sufficient novelty to make it seem to us like it's something new. That was the shiny part of it. For instance, it's lgbt month in soon, and I know there will be some addition to the flag. There will be something that's added on.

It's people with a gluten intolerance or hearing deficiency or Crohn's disease or something. And that will be, well, we haven't seen this flag before, and it legitimates the pushback because people think, well, this is new, this is more ground is being succeeded to the crazy woke idiots. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is just the sense that it's. The amount of. It's hard because I wasn't around before the Internet, right?

Mike Solana
So I don't know how I've remember. I mean, I was around, I was alive, but I don't really remember how the media cycles shaped and how long they would last. And ours today are rapid, and anyone can get involved. So people with relatively little power, maybe no attention or friends, no matter what their politics, are, left or right, feel empowered to say crazy shit and get attention online for that crazy shit. And I wonder often how much of this is driven, really, by that.

Just people who want someone to see them, and so they're actually saying this really crazy shit for that reason. People who just needed more hugs when they were a kid. I mean, everyone needs hugs, and I'm pro. I think that's something that we can all get on board with. More.

Chris Williamson
More hugs. Yeah. Elon should offer that instead of, I don't know, cash checks for shit posting. Like, we'll just. We'll give you some physical attention, some love, but that's something else.

Mike Solana
Starved. The fucking shitposting thing. Like, not, you know, Poe's law has become so poey. I have no idea. At least 50% of the things that I read on Twitter.

Chris Williamson
I'm like, I have no idea if this is meant to be an earnest post or if I should just disregard it. Yeah. All of the anonymous people feel like this to me, where it's not really clear what they believe and. Or if it's just like sort of wild performance art.

Interpretive dance of Twitter. Yeah. The other thing, when you're dealing with anonymous people, it's like, are they even adults? How many teenagers am I fighting with online? I never know the answer to that question, but it would answer a lot of other questions I have about the quality of thinking.

Okay, so we've got this sort of odd transition where the more mental progressive woke orthodoxy type thing has maybe been pushed back against in quite an effective way over the last two years or something. What do you think? How good is your crystal ball for where you think the main tribes are going to be and moving forward and what the main narratives are going to be over whatever the next 18 months? Well, right now, everything is feeling really fractured, uh, by platform. So there's been an interesting migration.

Mike Solana
I just accidentally logged into threads this morning and saw a cut on a drama that I did not even follow very closely at all, which was this football player who, I think, at a commencement speech, suggested that women should be. Homemakers at the stay at home thing. And then one of the Kelsey's got in trouble. Jason Kelsey got in trouble. Both Kelsey's got involved, and then one got very aggressive.

It was like, you're. I would never advise my daughter to be a homemaker. And this is. I really. I feel bad talking about this one because I haven't dipped into it, so I might be getting some of these facts wrong.

Don't hold it against me. But my point is not really about the story so much as, like, I knew almost nothing about it until I went onto threads and saw a very. A lot of support for very left wing type arguments of a kind that I used to see much more on Twitter and have become sort of insulated from, to a certain extent. Wow. Okay.

Chris Williamson
So you've got now viewpoints segregated, segmented by planet. Yeah. And now I saw stuff about this on Twitter or X. Like, I saw the backlash to the backlash whoopi Goldberg defends, but it was never so big enough to care about that. You were like, oh, I better figure out what this.

Mike Solana
What this drama is. It didn't. It didn't penetrate to that extent on x. It's much bigger elsewhere. And that's because it's a bigger deal to the left, I think.

And I think that you will see this just total fragmentation of media. Not just, I'm a daily wire reader or a New York Times reader, but where do you go to talk about those stories? It's already been a trend. Jack Dorsey talked a little bit about this in an interview I did with him for pirate wires. What do you learn from him?

Chris Williamson
You got to sit down with the ex Twitter man, as now you are one of the current big Twitter men. Like, what did you learn so much? I think the big thing about Jack Dorsey is he's really just the most misunderstood leader in tech. I think Jack created something that became explosive and was a piece of a much bigger explosion, which was social media. And is it even social media?

Mike Solana
It's more like interactive media now. This thing where any one of us can open up our smartphone that lives in our pocket, or our supercomputer lives in our pocket and tweet our opinion out to millions of people, what does that mean for society? And he was at the front lines of that. And he's a free speech guy, more so than any of the other leaders up until recently. He's a sort of crypto y, anarcho capitalist y type guy who tried his best to maximize freedom for as long as he could and then faced a lot of just impossible to overcome obstacles with a publicly traded company.

The biggest one would have been advertising. So you have these huge advertising giants that will turn you off overnight, and that could happen to him. And if that happened to him, and in fact, previously they had risked that, uh, they had been threatened with this, um, you lose, your stock price plummets, and you risk a hostile takeover, which actually has been attempted on that, uh, on that company. And so he was forced into this pragmatic place, which he, as I think, an ideological person, really hated. He tried to create a technology that would have ended the problem completely.

No censorship ever would have happened, have had to have happened again if blue sky worked in the way that he wanted. Um, and then that didn't quite work out either. He wasn't in charge of that one. But, um, there's a lot there. I talked about Jack for a while.

I think the main thing is just, I actually do believe that he was facing a set of problems that no one had ever faced before. Um, yeah, other people, contemporaries of his, were facing them along with him. He did slightly better than all of them, I think. Um, in terms of maybe they didn't. Have the, uh, value set or the ideological.

They did not. So if you're judging him, as you know, and he often is judged as someone who is very bad for free speech, someone who is anti free speech, someone is pro censorship, pro government. He's, in fact, to a certain degree, the face of that for a lot of people, especially on the right, it's not fair. He is the best on free speech. Of all of his contemporaries, he is the only one who I can see who is genuinely ideologically among the giants, who is genuinely ideologically motivated in favor of that stuff.

He just failed in a kind of tragic way.

The story of him is, I don't know, sort of touching to me, because I just see someone who really did actually try and who, for whatever reason couldn't taking the company private solves a lot of the problems that he was facing. Not all of them. The company is still under a lot of pressure and facing a huge uphill climb, but it's the first step in the right direction, and it's a step that Jack himself actually helped achieve for Elon. He was a part of that. You know, he wanted this.

Chris Williamson
So is it the case then, as different social medias become different platforms kind of become more and less popular with certain subsets that you are going to have. You know, everyone knows, like, there's some, probably some mad shit on Rumble's comment section and truth social. But you don't think, you still think, well, yeah, but Twitter's everyone, isn't it? And. And Instagram's everyone, like, everyone's got the, like, there's a big four or whatever.

Are you. Do you think that we're going to see this start to sort of splinter off more so. And that means that you're going to get a skewed perspective. Right wingers are going to see. The world's going to see more right wing and progressive people are.

The world's going to see more progressive. That's just the. Twitter's always been pretty niche to begin with. Even before the Elon takeover, it was a so saw a small social media platform compared to the other. And in terms of advertising revenue, it was small compared to other tech giants.

Mike Solana
So one, Facebook, which is the more natural comparison, but then also Google and those two companies swallow up all of the advertising revenue. So Twitter is always competing for very, very, like scraps, basically. But in terms of the audience and in terms of the audience, this is related. The audience on Twitter was very small. It was the small percentage of people in the country who are super motivated by ideas, affected by ideas and want to share them and think a lot.

Writing, it's like, I think language is just writers versus picture people is what you get on Instagram or TikTok, even to a certain extent, which is more like a storytelling. Those feel more primal and Twitter feels more, well, it's literary and it's like literary warfare. And that is not everybody in the country. So it was always small. And now I would say it's even, it's increasingly smaller because the left, unlike the right, is at this moment in time culturally highly motivated by censorship and wanting to insulate itself from other views and opinions.

They believe, I think, that the opinions are beyond the pale and need to be iced out. I think they're probably really scared of them. Because they don't have counterarguments, which is what is motivating the entire thing. I think probably there are a lot of left wing people who hear certain arguments, probably on immigration and things like this, that they clock as beyond the pale and don't want to face, because on some level, they recognize that they're important arguments and they don't have an answer to them, and that makes them uncomfortable. But beyond the psychoanalysis, the facts are just that left wing people don't want to be in a place where right wing people are permitted to speak.

And so at least the very sort of hardcore left wing people. So they have almost all left. You have a lot of media people who still stay on x. Um, but they're, like the real committed, ideological type people. Um, why were they.

There are a handful, uh, threads more and more, but you can't really talk about politics there. I think that's the biggest competitor right now, or it's certainly the biggest competitor. But then you have a spectrum of things. You have blue sky, you have mastodon. Um, and you have an endless number of group chats that I think are.

Chris Williamson
Popping up and prolific telegram and shit. Like that on those things. Then also, what is it? Uh, so discord. Uh.

Mike Solana
Um, you know, there are any number of other places where people are pooling, and I think the future will be some sort of more fragmented media platform situation unless something happens at X, which turns it around, which could also happen. Um, elon, I don't really believe is anathema to. I don't believe he's anathema. Censorship. Um, I think that he's less ideologically committed to this than even Jack was.

He believes in it for America, free speech. But if laws start to change abroad, for example, he just follows the rule of the law wherever it is, or the letter of the law wherever it is. And in the context of America, we'll see. But the rules could change tomorrow, and once they change even a little bit, I think you see people come back. Is it weird to be building a media company right now?

Chris Williamson
Vice fell apart. Buzzfeed's a mess. The NPR just hired a crazy lady to run it. Like, what the fuck's happening to Rolling Stone? What do you think about this sort of future of media versus independent media and all of that?

Mike Solana
You know, it is a really crazy time to be building a media company. It makes no sense. I don't recommend it. I think it is stressful. And the path to victory is very narrow.

You're not making revenue on clicks anymore. That style of people like, it's clickbait. Clickbait doesn't matter. It's not what's helping anybody. That whole style of new media has died.

This is why Buzzfeed is in the state that it's at right now. This is why someone like Vivek could even try a hostile takeover with that company, because it's worth nothing. Because that style of media just does not make business sense. What works is subscription revenue. And people subscribe to things that help them make sense of the world and confirm their biases.

So that's what true of the New York Times and that's true of pirate wires, is people who are paying money to us do so because they feel like we're on the same side, fighting for the same things. That is a much smaller pool of revenue than the massive advertising flood of money that we saw not only in the early two thousands when the social thing first happened, but decades and decades ago. So it's going to be a way smaller industry to begin with. I think that there is potentially a lot of interesting upside on co branded products that matter to your audience and you. Things that you both.

So imagine you're a fitness influencer and you're doing like a chain of gems or something. Those kind of partnerships are going to matter more. But what that means for investigative reporting is not good. I don't know how you do that in this new world. Pen and pad that I use.

Chris Williamson
This is the note taking app that I'm. And nobody cares because nobody follows investigative reporters around for identity based reasons. And identity based reasons are what drive the entire contemporary media landscape. So it's difficult. Nobody has an answer to this question.

Mike Solana
And if they tell you they're wrong, my sense is fragmentation. Do what you know and love and fight for the things that you believe to be true. I believe that you should be biased and you should wear your bias on your sleeve. And then I think that you use the revenue that you make to nurture younger people who are telling a different part of your story that you think is important. And that's where I hire journalists and things like this to report out different pieces of the puzzle that I'm just not going to have time to do.

Chris Williamson
Your team, some of your reporters. Is it River Paige? He left. Oh, no. God damn it.

Mike Solana
Yeah, he's gone. Sanjana is still there, though. Okay, cool. And we're high anyway. You've got.

Chris Williamson
You've got. You've got some. Some good people. You mentioned american colleges earlier on. Is that the waste ground that everybody thinks that they are lost cause.

Mike Solana
American colleges, you know, it's crazy because they should be out of business, right? Like, I don't know, man. Like, it didn't. It seemed like a. A lost cause ten years ago.

And people are still not only sending their kids to go to school, but for how much money is it a year to send your kids to, like, NYU or something? With room and board? I think we're definitely over $60,000 a year at this point. I think we're closer to pushing to 70. I think it might.

You know what? I'm not going to google it. If you. I don't know what you guys do in post. If you have, like, a number, you can flash, but it's a lot.

It's. It's more money than I would have ever thought people would have paid for, um, a college degree plus room and board for four years, and you're not even accounting for interest. There is so thousand, 168 tuition, 23,927 other costs, books and on campus dollars a year. $82,095 for a year. That was.

Chris Williamson
That was 21, 22 for a year. So that if that hasn't killed this, and the fact that it's very obvious now, these are just sort of like, woke indoctrination camps. Hasn't killed this. I don't know what's going to kill this. I think that if.

Mike Solana
I mean, every year it feels like it's the last year. I do think if I'm not wrong, I'm pretty sure admissions were down for one of the years, but not down nearly as to where they should be. What has to happen is the government has to stop giving out loans. The government should have nothing to do with the loan system at all. You should be able to declare bankruptcy on your student loan debt, which you're presently not allowed to do, the only.

Chris Williamson
One that you can't. And what that's going to do once you're able to discharge student loan debt easily, if with a massive hit on your credit score and the government's not guaranteeing loans, students are going to have to go to private banks, and the private banks are going to have to run risk analysis and say, if I give you $82,000 a year times four plus interest, do you have any hope in hell of paying that back with a gender studies degree in your lifetime? The answer is no. And so it's a bad loan and you're not going to get it. And once the banks start making decisions, once you allow the private banks to make decisions like this, all of the prices will reset.

Mike Solana
They all have to most of the second 3rd tier beyond. Oh, right. Because the funding is cartelled inside of the system. No one gets to sort of peer under the skirt of what's happening. We have this idea that there is almost an inalienable right to go to college, and that is a weird cultural idea that makes no sense whatsoever.

It's way worse than even healthcare, which I also don't think you have like an inalienable right to. You don't have a right to someone else's labor. That's not how, like, rights work. But healthcare is something that you can maybe wrap your head around. We all need healthcare.

Chris Williamson
As a british person, that makes sense to me. College is not that. You do not need college, you don't need to go, you don't need it to survive. You can make an argument that it's actually really bad for a lot of people, maybe even most people who are not going to sort of upper teal schools and then just getting. Well, certainly now you can make it because you're being saddled with tons of debt and you're not getting great job opportunities necessarily because of it.

Mike Solana
So because of that idea, though, that everybody's entitled to it and in fact needs it to a certain extent to succeed. You can't turn people away, and that's a system we've built where you can't turn people away from alone, no matter how massive. And you have to get rid of that. You have to just get the bankers back in and say, are you able to pay this back or not? Do I think, and if you are great, and if you're not and I give you the loan, then I suffer for it.

And once bankers have to suffer for these decisions, you're not going to have a problem anymore, because they're not. Banks have been around for a very long time, and if their existence is on the line, the loans are not going to happen. And once the loans can't happen, the colleges have to reset their prices. Did you see, there was a study done by Corey Clark that came out a little while ago. A new study sheds light on taboos in science, confirming that race and iq are the most taboo subject of all.

Chris Williamson
They condensed down a bunch of statements that were the ten most taboo in all of psychology. Did you see this? I didn't, but I believe it. Those are the two that I would definitely consider race and iq to be. Let me, let me.

I'll dictate you the top ten. So the authors began by interviewing 41 researchers in psychology to get an idea of which topics are most taboo, using the researchers answers as a guide, they condensed those topics into a set of ten statements. Number one, the tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on mental who engaged in such behavior. Two, gender biases are not the most important drivers of the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. Three, academia discriminates against black people in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations, etcetera.

Four, biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people. Five, the social sciences in the United States discriminate against conservatives. Six, racial biases are not the most important drivers of higher crime rates among black Americans relative to white Americans. Seven, men and women have got different psychological characteristics because of evolution. Eight, genetic differences explain non trivial 10% or more variances in race differences in intelligence test scores.

Nine, transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence. Ten, demographic diversity, race and gender in the workplace often leads to worse performance. And then she went through and studied 470 psychology professors and basically found that so many professors are terrified. Like, they don't like the censorship, but they are terrified of speaking up. Like, absolutely terrified of it.

Mike Solana
Yeah, I mean, which one of those topics do you want to talk about? Well, I mean, there's some stuff in there, like, you know, men and women have biological, biological sexist binary for the vast majority of people. Like, I don't know who is disagreeing with that statement. Yeah, that's one at this point. I mean, that's.

You can't help but anyone who sees a high school race with, let's say, a trans woman absolutely destroying her competition is not going to be okay with that. I mean, that's 90 plus percent of people are going to see that and say, okay, this is fucking crazy. And in a way, I sort of think that that's the issue. I really do think it's like that. And the COVID sort of coercive vaccination, that combination just ended.

The whole prior order of thought police. That was the solvent that undid the adhesive. It was just on the COVID stuff, too vicious and on the trans stuff, specifically the trans athlete stuff, to unbelievable, too absurd. Like, that combination just dispelled the illusion of authority for a lot of people. And on the rest of them, I think probably everything you're not allowed to talk about it doesn't mean that these sort of people who want to talk about it or write about it, but you're probably, if you're not allowed to talk about it, it's a safe assumption that there's something important there that we should probably be trying to understand, but we are refusing to for whatever reason.

Chris Williamson
Did you see that a trans woman won Cannes best actress award for the first time? No, but Carla, Sofia Gascon, the spanish performer, said, we all have the opportunity to change for the better as she made history at the festival with her gong. Well, she certainly changed herself, didn't she?

Mike Solana
It was quite a change. I, uh. I don't know, like this. One of the other things that I was particularly exhausted by over the last few years is this desire to read conspiracy and. And coordination and much more sophisticated malevolent intent into pretty much everything.

Chris Williamson
This desire to read deeper, deeper meaning. I think the Internet kind of assumes that people have a well thought out reason for everything that they do. And as far as I can tell, most people are just trying to make it through to the end of the day and not get fired and pay for shit. And yeah, sure, there's like some super smart people pulling the strings at the. Top, but, yeah, not even really.

Mike Solana
I agree. I think that we want to believe there's like, they are in charge more than they are. Because if someone was in charge, that would be great. It would be great to believe that. You look around, I mean, it's like chaos everywhere.

If you're in San Francisco, whatever city in this country you're in, it's fucked. Like, you could just break it down. There are a handful of things about it that are just seriously, unbelievably fucked. From crime to housing, to just basic level sanitation, education, whatever. It's all really bad.

And you want to believe that someone is in charge, because if someone's in charge, that means if you could just bully them enough or get rid of them and put someone else in charge, the problem be fixed. But the bigger problem seems to be a combination of, I don't know, nihilism at the top among the sort of elites of our country, and then no one is actually in charge. There's not a lot of stepping up and taking control of things. And even if there was a will to do that, politically, we're structured in such a way that it's very difficult for a single person, let alone small or a small group of people, let alone a single person, to actually change anything. In San Francisco, for example, the homeless problem, right?

It's like, who? What one specific person is in charge of that? Nobody. What group of people are in charge of that? It's a lot of people who have some piece of it.

And if you asked any one of them are you in charge of it? They would say, no, there's no one taking responsibility for it. And I don't even. I blame them, of course. They're terrible.

But also part of it is a systemic problem where we're not giving anyone the authority to do it. And I think we have to do that. We have to get better at empowering people to actually change things and then punishing them for when they don't do it. I came across this Paki McCormick quote that said, the greatest trick the devil ever played was making you believe that the pessimists are the good guys. And this, you know, just prevalent fucking cynicism, dude.

Chris Williamson
Whether it's top down or bottom up, whether it's in a comment section or in a press release or just in the, like, lopey demeanor of the way that people sort of step out to give some sort of statement, it's so boring and tiring, and I wish that people were more enthusiastic about stuff. Well, it's. Pessimists are usually right. It's a safe bet to make that something, that something new is not going to work, and that's why people do it. When you are making a positive prediction about the future that has never existed before, it's like your odds of being wrong are very high, and your odds of predicting all of the fallout from that are infinitesimally small.

Mike Solana
There are so many. Anytime you create something, let's talk about artificial intelligence. You create. Even if we just had chat GPT, what are going to be the consequences of that long term? We have no idea.

We're still dealing with the consequences long term of the mobile phone. So it's easy to be a pessimist if you just want, I don't know, a reward for being a smart person, and that just doesn't exist. On the positive side, that you do need a positive. You need a positive vision for the future. And I don't know how to incentivize that or how to change the incentive.

I'm not really convinced that that's ever been different. I wonder if there was a period of time where the average person was this optimist. I guess people always point back to the 1950s in America.

I didn't live then, so I don't know. We remember the positive stories, but I don't know how many. I don't know how pervasive that really was. If we had a frictionless way to dump our thoughts onto the Internet or onto some ledger while we were sat on the toilet, just what would people's thoughts have been, oh, my God. I think about that in the context of the sixties.

Like, you think things are crazy now on the Internet. Can you imagine how crazy things would have been all throughout civil rights and shit like this? Like it would have been a different. We wouldn't have. I don't know that we would have made it.

I don't know that. That we would have made it if we knew everything that everyone was thinking. Which, to go back to our early conversation about being polite, that's the core of politeness, right? That's why polite exists, is because there is a social benefit to not saying everything that comes into your mind. And it's like you have to choose which ones need to be said.

But probably not everything should. Not only does it not have to be said, it probably should not be said. There is a benefit socially to polite society. I think decorum keeps the peace in many ways. But I think the reason that, at least for me, that I.

Chris Williamson
I'm, like, kind of conflicted about the whole polite society thing is that I then go and see Sam what's his face, that singer guy come out dressed as a devil with nipple tassels on in, like, high heeled leather boots, and I go, ah. Like, it seems to me like any remotely acceptable line of decorum and behavior has been blasted through already, you know, with AK 47. Like, what are we doing here? Pretending that decorum still exists? You shouldn't be bringing up that thing.

Mike Solana
And you go, well, it doesn't exist, though. I think that you're right. It does not exist anymore. I'm saying it served probably a purpose, though, that we've lost it, and what are we going to become without it? I mean, certainly in politics, everything post Donald, before Donald Trump, I would say it was pretty bad post Donald Trump.

Come on. I was Kamala Harris giggling over nothing the other day on a YouTube video is really a bizarre video where she's not really saying anything and she keeps laughing awkwardly. And I thought, man, if this were ten years ago, we would say how we can't have someone this stupid in power. It's just crazy. Let alone the senile Joe Biden.

Of course that's crazy. But let's talk about how dumb Kamala Harris is. That's. That's an actual, like, sort of classically presenting idiot. And she is a heartbeat away from the presidency, just a complete moron.

It never would have happened. And she sort of talking about the food that she's eating, and I. It's. I haven't seen this clip I'm glad. What I saw was an example of her trying to be relatable, and that is not in keeping with the image of the presidency that has endured for the last, what, since the founding fathers existed.

Okay. Like, we need that person to be powerful and thoughtful and trustworthy, someone who we believe can run the country, right. Like, that, all turned on its head in a world post Trump. Like, once you elect a reality television star to the presidency, anything fucking goes. Monarchy.

Chris Williamson
Monarchy. That's what you need. Someone who has been stowed from God. You got to go all the way back. Yes.

Mike Solana
That's maybe the really controversial thing that needs to be said. It's like, was George Washington the good guy or the bad guy? And I don't think America is ready for that conversation. Wow. Tick tock.

Chris Williamson
Ban. What do you think's going to happen there? Or what would you like to see happen? I don't think it's going to happen. I think that.

Mike Solana
I think that. Well, certainly we're looking at at least a year of litigation, and in that year, who knows? There's just. Who knows what will happen?

I am in favor of it, but I'm in favor of much more aggressive action against China. I don't really. The spying thing is a whole complicated talk that we could talk about, and I believe it is a liability for the country to have China control one of our largest broadcast networks in the history of the country. But I am also just really thinking a lot about trade and the massive disparity in trade. We need reciprocity.

If China is banning all of our social media companies, we should ban all of theirs. If China is banning anything that they're banning or any tariff they're levying, we should be doing the same thing. And in fact, we should be doing more of it, because what we learned in Covid is we need manufacturing. The failure of manufacturing at home is not just sad for us and for the middle class that no longer exists in this country. It is dangerous.

It is a national security threat. So we need to have this somehow at home. And that's a combination of that is going to require a lot of things that nobody wants to do. That's going to require looking at the labor laws. That's going to require looking at things like tariffs.

This is going to be things that annoy both, that annoy the left, the right, the libertarians. We're just in a huge mess right now. And I am very much in favor of forcing divestiture of TikTok, but I'm in favor of forcing divestiture of almost every chinese social media company or social. Social piece of software that exists. Certainly every social media company, like, everything just down the line, and then China retaliates.

They're like, oh, we're retaliating, and we're banning one of your companies or whatever. It's like you've already do people. Not real. There is no major american media company. The New York Times, the Washington Post, that can operate in China.

There is no american social media company that can operate in China. Google cannot operate in China. You can just go look at all the things that China has banned american companies. The list is enormous, ongoing, never ending. It's just ridiculous to be playing it this way.

You could say, oh, well, we're not like China.

And it's like, no, we're not like China, but we do have to survive. But that's necessarily a good thing, to not be prepared to use the tools that they do. Well, certainly what they have that we don't have is a will to exist. Okay? And it's like freedom.

Yes, great. Love it. But you can't. It's like, until the point at which you self immolate and the only tools you have left to work with are controlled by a hostile foreign superpower, which is the path we're on. And you see this in soft power type things all the time.

You see this with the way Disney has reshaped just. Just due to the influence of the chinese market. Okay. Disney starts to censor on all sorts of grounds with the NBA and things like this. That's just soft power.

That's not even the hard power of. They're going to play hardball with a corner on rare earth metals, a corner on manufacturing. We haven't even gotten to a place where they start wielding that against us. That can't happen. We need to bring it home, and we need to be a little bit more mercantilist about stuff, which I think is a dirty word.

Still. I'm not sure how people think about that anymore, but I'm pretty much a mercantilist. Do you know the story of DJI drones? Do you know why they're so dominant? So this is secondhand hearsay.

Chris Williamson
So I may have got it wrong, but it's a great story. America was super concerned about individuals, citizens being able to fly drones. So they shut down a ton of american drone manufacturers. Then they realized that the market for drones is actually quite high. And guess the only company that was still crushing it in the consumer space, DJI, which is a chinese company.

And now they are just light years ahead. Everything's cheaper, everything's better quality. It does all of the things that it needs you to do. And that's a chinese company mapping fucking everything. Yeah.

Mike Solana
I didn't realize the full extent of that story. You don't typically see, to our credit, you don't typically see China just completely take over an industry that was ours, because China doesn't innovate at all. I can't think of a technology that was invented in China. It's all just copy and pasting in a very great way. I mean, they're very tactically advantageous way for them.

It's just see what America innovates. Clone it, scale it, but long term, that's a problem. It's a problem that is bigger than China. I was just reading about a genetic engineering controversy. So in the mid 1970s, you had Cambridge, Massachusetts, ban the use of and the study of recombinant DNA.

And at that point, genetic, the future of genetics is in the balance. All of the people working on it are there. And it was reversed in 77, but that is, it had to be reversed or nothing was going to happen. And that is kind of what you're looking at in California, I think, to a certain extent, with which. Which way these regulations on something like artificial intelligence will go.

And there's enough that has been researched already that other people in different countries will use what we use and keep moving forward. They're not going to stop. I don't see anybody in China developing anything ever that hasn't existed before. But if we stop ourselves, they will keep moving forward with what we have started. And so that is a problem, especially when you're dealing with potentially x risk type technology.

So anything in biology, and certainly artificial intelligence, would count if you're building something that this is. I mean, you got to get an AI doomer on here. They have a thousand different arguments they'll make. I'm not sold really on any of them, but I am sold on the idea that this is a high risk technology. We should proceed, and we should proceed sort of with caution.

Chris Williamson
Do you see Nick Bostrom's new book, deep utopia? Have not seen the new book, but I have read super intelligence. Yeah, I read super intelligence way back. Yeah. So superintelligence was basically what happens if we get it wrong, and deep utopia is what happens if we get it right.

It's really interesting, you know, to see this guy who's gone kind of full circle, and he's explaining, well, you know, this is a hopeful view for the future. But even then, even he kind of creates this taxonomy of four different types of utopias. And even within those, all of them have got tons of fucking problems. Like, it is the most, like, thready needle to try and weave through to make this work. And, yeah, I mean, you know, I understand why the AI x risk duma conversation is compelling because terrifying and seems kind of likely.

Mike Solana
Yeah, but everything seems kind of likely. You can make an argument for the singularity. You can make an argument for the simulation hypothesis. These are things that are almost designed to capture smart people inside of a little maze where there are all these likely things. But at the end of the day, on the simulation theory, for example, what value do you get in even talking about, it's like you should just live your life.

You should just do as many good things as you can in your life. And with AI, sort of feel that way as well. I don't. I don't. I've never met anybody who has spoken to me in a convincing way.

On the big danger, it's always the smartest of them do percentages, and even those feel like, how, where are you running these calculations? Like, what are we really talking about? It's just a giant question mark, but all technology is a giant question mark. And so if you want to progress, you're going to have to take risk. There's a question of how much are we taking and at what scale?

But I don't know, man. I just.

I think that it's a lot like the freedom conversation we were having a moment ago. You sort of want as much of it as you can without destroying yourself. That's the sweet spot. It's not a maximum in any direction. It's like, let's just not suffocate ourselves to death.

And so while I do, I am in favor of thinking about the X risk inherent of AI. Right now. I see no evidence to slow down. And once we see that evidence, it should be pretty obvious. The X risk AI people will be like, well, once it's obvious, it's too late.

Okay, well, I don't. You're going to have to give me a better reason. You have to really paint that picture for me. And that has not happened yet. What about the most important thing that's going to happen over the next month and a bit Biden Trump debate?

I didn't think it was going to happen at all.

We'll see if it does. I'm still not. Are you still unsure that it's actually going to go ahead. Speaker one well, if they allow for Mike cutting, which is what the Biden camp wants, I don't know why Trump would accept that.

If it does happen, it's going to be a bloodbath, like, Trump will win for sure. Biden has not even appeared on a friendly interview for longer than 30 minutes or something. And I've never. I mean, could you imagine him sitting down for 2 hours or 3 hours in front of Rogan or something? It's not possible.

I don't know how he's going to go head to head with Trump, who is one of the most successful short form, like television warriors in the history of the medium. He's really good at it. The good news for Biden is if he somehow survives it, it'll be a huge boon to him, but he probably won't. And until now, but I guess I should say until now, saying nothing has only helped Trump. So I think Biden's just in a rough spot where he has to do.

Chris Williamson
He has sort of, when you're a declining stock, you need to do something to reverse it. Even if that thing is quite high. Risk, he's on a failure course right now. Is that what your prediction would be if there's basically no change by the Democrats that you're looking at? Republican victory in November?

Mike Solana
Yeah, I think it's like a smash victory. I think it's like a huge, huge victory. So they need to do something. I think a big part of it is immigration. A big part of his inflation.

I think those things are weirdly linked. The immigration is not causing the inflation. I think the immigration is being used to sort of stem the inflation. Immigration, even if it's massive, illegal immigration has positive effects on the numbers in the economy that you point to. To say our economy is doing well.

It's just like it has all of these other effects that for whatever reason, economists don't seem to care about, like the dissolution of our fucking culture in America and the simple law of supply and demand that affects more poor, middle class people than rich people with desk jobs. When you're talking about mass, low skilled immigration, um, people are furious. People have always been furious. But also, it's never even been this bad before to have, think about 10 million illegal immigrants in your country of 330 million. That's what, 3%?

That is an enormous population of people who broke a law to get here. And people are mad across demographics. So the big story, I think, of the next election is going to be the black vote, specifically the black male vote, which is, has never been trumpier. And has never been Republican. Trump, what's driving that?

Immigration. I think it's entirely immigration. I think that, I mean, you look at Chicago videos out of Chicago and the effects of illegal immigration in Chicago, and you look at those meetings, those community meetings where people are coming to yell, it's black people. It's all black people. It's black neighborhoods where this is happening.

It's black people who are already having struggling, lower class black people who are already struggling on, on work for whatever. You could say it's unfounded. You could say it's founded. But certainly the blame is being placed on illegal immigration, and no one is stupid enough to believe that that's not Biden's fault. So it's like this election will be a referendum on that more than anything.

And then inflation and Biden sucks at both. And so what is left? The wars. Who cares about them, really? Not many people other than, like, reflexively wish we weren't at them.

Um, but certainly Biden has gotten us into them. Right? Like, Ukraine happens on Biden's watch, Israel happens on Biden's watch. We're somehow really woven into both. I saw this crazy, it was funny, but darkly funny meme on instagram.

It was the Iron Dome stopping a bunch of rockets. So you saw these rockets coming up and hitting all these other rockets. And the meme just said, like, my tax dollars paying for this, the iron dome, then up here on the top, my tax dollars somehow also paying for this. And that's like, so that's like number three. It'll be like, that's order number three of things that we care about.

And then it's just the fun culture warship. Which of the abortion debate? What about Roe?

I don't know. I don't have a sense of how much people really care about this. It seemed to matter in the last election, and I think Americans are more divided on it than people like to believe. But is it more important than the immigration stuff and the inflation stuff to people? I don't think so.

I guess we'll see. Yeah, I don't know about that one. What about you? What do you think? That's a really tough one to work out as well.

Chris Williamson
I think about it. I think about it that much, but I think about it a good bit. And I think most people don't know their position very thoroughly on it. Like, if you really, really quiz people hard, a sufficiently good argument can usually begin to swell. You know, you kind of sort of ride on that thing a little bit.

It's one of the few debates or one of the few discussions where every time, like, I hear a shapiro, right. Do his thing and he breaks down, life begins, but it's not a bundle of cells, blah, blah, blah. And I go, fucking hell. That sounds pretty compelling. And then I hear someone who's, like, super pro choice give their argument.

I go, fucking hell. That's super compelling. I'm like, I don't know. I've just been, like, legitimately, actually gaslit by both sides, and now, I believe both at the same time. I don't fucking know.

Mike Solana
Latin America has been like this on Roe v. Wade and abortion in general forever. It's never moved. It's always close to 50% on both sides. There's no other issue that I can think of like that in history.

Um, it's just always hotly divided and. And so separate from the question of whether Roe v. Wade was a good law, and I think it was not, or good. A good ruling, and I think it was not. Uh, there's the question of what should be done, and that's more complicated and what the.

The real answer here is. You want something codified. You want to codify a law in. Rather than judge on something in a stupid way that doesn't make any sense and everybody knows is not correct, where you, with a judicial branch, essentially creates a law for you. You want our legislators to legislate and create something, but they can't agree.

I think probably what makes the most sense is something closer to what you're. I don't want to wait into it. I'm pro choice within reason. Like, I have all sorts of caveats. Like everybody else, I think that.

I agree with you that most people don't fully know what they think about this. It just makes them uncomfortable, and they don't want to have to think about it. But there are a handful of people who care about it a lot in this election. Do they.

Do they punish Trump for it?

Can they punish Trump for it? I don't know. I know that a lot of people. I know a lot more people who talk about immigration.

I see a lot more people talking. I don't see people talking about. About Roe v. Wade, really. I suppose the timing of it, you just.

Chris Williamson
Recency bias and people's attention span is so short that right now, I mean, immigration. Immigration. Biden would have to make a promise for some sort of law to be codified. And if he did that, he would lose a lot of people and gain some people right. Because wherever he drew the line of where abortion would not be allowed.

Right? No one wants, no one wants an abortion a day before, before birth. Right? We can just start there. So there are some who do, some very radical people who want that and will never let go of it.

Mike Solana
And those people are the ones who run the organizations that are pro, that are pro choice. The average American doesn't. The average left wing person doesn't. The average pro abortion person doesn't, but the people who run shit do. So Biden has to draw a line somewhere if he's going to float legislation.

And once he does that, he gives a huge attack space for Trump to come in and be like, this man wants to kill babies. And. And so it's like, no one's really incentivized to propose a law in the middle of an election that is already hard to win, especially not a Democrat. So it's going to be hard. It'll be hard for both of them.

But, like, you can either punish Trump for Roe v. Wade, that's one thing. But there's not a really clear alternative. There's not, like, if I vote for this person, I'm going to get what I want. It's just how viscerally people are affected by this as well.

Chris Williamson
You know, it doesn't. Abortion, by definition, is an individual impact, whereas something like economy, inflation, immigration, those things are much more scattergun and they're felt by people on mass. There's waves of it that occur. Like, literally, right? There's waves of it that occur, and I think that that galvanizes people in a different sort of way.

But it, dude, it's, I mean, that debate, my God. Here's one thing that I have noticed, though. Trump is way less in the news. Like, I just don't see, you think about the build up to the last two elections, and it was everywhere. And I'm like, where the fuck is he?

Because he's not on Twitter. Like, what's going on? I just don't see huge part of it. I mean, part of it was there was no primary because he didn't have to have a primary because he was going to win, so he stayed out of it. And then part of it is he's not on Twitter and there are less people on them.

Mike Solana
No one's really on his network. And there are, there are media people are still on Twitter. So if he was on Twitter, media people would still at least see what he's, he's tweeting. He would feel more sort of present in their brains. They would at least be more anxious about it.

And be writing more about it. And then part of it is Biden's just not like, I think Democrats are really embarrassed of him. So no one's, while people really hate Trump on the left, they, the average person on the left is not excited about Biden. They're like, this feels a little bit criminal that we're trying to float someone who's totally senile. What do you think that people on the right think?

Chris Williamson
An equivalent side? They probably really don't like Biden, but do they really like Trump? Speaker one, there are people who love Trump in a way that no president has been loved in our lifetime, like, and it's a non trivial fraction of the right. People who fucking love him, who would do anything for him. And that's not a majority of the right.

Mike Solana
That's a good huge chunk of a base that really, really, really devoutly loves him. And then you have a lot of people who are fine with him, and then you have a lot of people who didn't vote for him but might now because they, and they have a bunch of different reasons. Some are talking about the wars, some are talking about the economy, some are talking about immigration. You had all sorts of weird own goals on the left. So the way that Warren went after cryptocurrency, for example, there are a lot of people with exposure to cryptocurrency who are like, who is this bitch coming after my bitcoin?

And why does she think that she's able to do that? That's insane. There are all sorts of tax gains proposals and wealth tax proposals which hit the rich, who fuel a lot of the money behind these different grassroots campaigns. Grassroots campaigns. You, you also have four years of incompetency from Biden, I think, on a range of things.

But specifically, I think foreign policy has been pretty bad. If you're voting for a guy who you think is going to make things calm and return us to norms, and then he tries to put the front runner president in prison and is now fighting two wars abroad. Like, that is not what you asked for. And it's like, even if he wasn't senile, it would be a hard sell at this point, I think.

But he's all of those things and he's senile. So it's there, like, separate from the left who's just tolerating him. I think a lot of people on the right are like, Trump's, a lot of people in the middle, I think, are thinking, well, Trump's better than that. And we know what Trump is, no matter what people say about Trump being a fascist dictator and blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, we've had four years of Trump.

So we know roughly what that feels like. Just like we've had four years of Biden. This is the first election, like, that we've ever had where we actually know exactly what a presidency feels in both directions. So that we've, by we, I don't mean America. I mean, we alive right now have never experienced this before.

So it's. You can't really say. You can't. There's no fear of the uncertainty here. There might be fear, but it's not of the uncertainty, which fuels, I think, a lot of what happened in most elections.

Chris Williamson
Dude, it's a wild few months coming up. Time to make hay, as the independent media companies say. Mike Solana, ladies and gentlemen. Mike, I love, I love your stuff, pirate wires. I listen to all of the podcasts.

I read the morning takes. I read everything else. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with the things you do. Go to Pyro Wires and subscribe to the daily, hit the newsletter button.

Mike Solana
Subscribe to the daily and subscribe to Piratewires. For my essays. Check us out on YouTube. Check us out on Twitter. Hell, yeah.

Chris Williamson
Appreciate you, Mike. Thanks for having me.

Mike Solana
Thanks for having me.