Bankless - Mike Solana: Trump, Crypto, Tech, Politics & Memetic Wars

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

Is the U.S going to be ok? Mike Solana (no relation to Solana the chain, that’s his name),is the editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires and the guy who broke the Trump Memecoin news. We brought him on the show today to try to make sense of the current state of politics in the face of the upcoming election, and what it all means for crypto. Expect to learn why tech has pivoted right, why democrats are cracking down on crypto, why media in 2024 is fundamentally broken and much more. ------ 🎬 DEBRIEF | Ryan & David Unpacking the Episode: https://www.bankless.com/debrief-the-mike-solana-interview  ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x0c294913a7596b427add7dcbd6d7bbfc7338d53f/27?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E  ------ 📣 SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://k.xyz/bankless-pod-q2    ⁠  🦄UNISWAP | BROWSER EXTENSION https://bankless.cc/uniswap  ⚡️ CARTESI | LINUX-POWERED ROLLUPS https://bankless.cc/CartesiGovernance  🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle    ⚖️ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🗣️TOKU | CRYPTO EMPLOYMENT  https://bankless.cc/toku  ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 7:10 $DJT Memecoin 16:36 Crypto Politics 29:39 Mike’s Perspective on Crypto 34:12 Memetic Wars 37:58 Growth vs Degrowth 43:22 Information Wars 53:35 Social Media 1:01:52 Being Terminally Online 1:14:18 Media in 2024 1:26:30 2024 Election 1:31:15 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Mike Solana https://x.com/micsolana   Pirate Wires Daily https://get.piratewires.com/pw/daily   ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures ⁠  

What do I see? I see some like scamy gamblers, which whatever, they're saying they're that now, so I like that better. A lot of scammie gamblers. I see a handful of people working on things that I think could be really cool, and I think that's really nice. And then you still see a bunch of people sort of being dishonest, like looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and pretending they're working on something that doesn't really actually matter. And all they really want to do is launch a coin and make some money. And those are my least favorite of all the groups. Welcome to bankless where today we explore the frontier of tech, culture, and politics. Maybe some crypto sprinkled in, too.

This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. The guest today is Mike Salana. Now, there's no relation to the Salana chain. That's just his last name. We do discuss that. Yeah, we did. He is the editor of the Pirate Wires.

He's the guy that broke the recent Trump coin news. This is Donald J. Trump. And we start the conversation on that, interestingly enough. he doubled down on his take that the Donald J. Trump coin was actually associated with Trump. So stay tuned for that and why that could be bullish for crypto. But then we broaden the conversation to a number of other subjects, including why tech has pivoted right, why the Democrats are bad on crypto, how the tech world views crypto? Is it like one giant Ponzi casino to those guys? Growth versus degrowth and the memetic wars, the state of media and why it's broken, including social media.

and is the U.S. going to be okay after the election of 2024? Mike is a podcaster. He's got his own podcast, which it's always just fantastic hosting other podcasters on your podcast because they know how to podcast. It's always just a good conversation. He's always got someone to say something useful. And I really think his perspective as someone who is just outside of crypto. He's savvy about crypto. He knows about crypto. He's not in crypto, though. But he's in tech circles. He's in political circles. And so getting his perspective on like our world as well as his perspectives on the future of where all of the whole world is going is just very, very, very useful because he's not a crypto person, even though he's pretty close.

He's pretty close. And so that's kind of the value I got out of this episode with Mike. David, maybe for the clickbait we should have titled this, the Salana episode, huh? And then it's just Mike Salana. I don't know, but we'll have some things to discuss, I'm sure, during the debrief, which is available to you if you are a bankless citizen. All right, guys, let's get right to the episode with Mike Salana. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. including our number one recommended crypto exchange, whether you're buying Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana. That's Cracken. Go create an account. If you want a crypto trading experience

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to apply today. And if you're not a developer, those with staked CTSI can take part in the governance process and vote on whether or not a proposal should be funded. Make sure your vote ready by staking your CTSI before the votes open. Bankless Nation excited to introduce you to Mike Salana. He's the editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires, which is a media company that focuses on tech, politics, and culture. I would say very pro-tech. I don't know if he'd use the term EAC, but that's a term you've heard on bankless.

And it's really pushing against a number of narratives, maybe the degrowth narrative, among others. Also, he is the CMO of Founders Fund, which is Peter Teal's VC thing. They invest in crypto as well. Mike, welcome to bankless. Thanks for having me. All right. So you must be aware. Your last name is now the name. of a major cryptocurrency. Yes. Do you own any soul?

How do you feel about that? Have you sent Cicist to the Solana Foundation? I feel... Honestly, I hate it. You know, Salana was, it's my name. And it was a rare name. And it was, I owned that name. I was Salana.

I signed my essays, Solana. Solana is an important name. It's my family's name. Like, to have it just taken for me in this way is... Feels wrong? weird and obviously you know it's a word and people can take words i'm not saying that like i'm going to be sending any cease and desist letters anytime soon i guess maybe it's partly it's

flattering but god i wish they chose something else i really do do you own any soul at least you benefit from the upside here no i don't i was a bitcoin person still i'm a bitcoin person and but i've kind of stayed out of the i'm interested in the crypto stuff beyond that in the abstract i'm going to defend people's rights to sort of work in it and trade in it and all of that. But I've got too many hills that I'm presently dying on to take on another. So I promise that we're going to get to more intellectual conversations. But speaking of crypto coins that have people's name on them, the Donald J. Trump meme coin, like debacle that happened last week. Well, there's been a lot of news. Did you see? Yeah, people in my DM saying like, no, David, it's not over. Like, it's going to blow up. And so I haven't

put my head in since last week, though. Well, obviously, I broke the news. And I still. And I still by everything that I reported. I've spoken a lot of, on the Pirate Wire's pod, I kind of broke down everything that I know about the coin, like that I know for sure. And then there's speculation. So I know Baron Trump was involved. And beyond that, you know, I don't have any insight into the inner workings of the Trump family and what weird things are going on behind the scenes. Like I'm, I have a perspective, which I've shared. But I think the more interesting thing here now is, so obviously people are speculating on the Donald Trump. Trump meme coin. But then you have the polymarket, like the betting markets where people are like,

well, there was a question of, is the Trump coin real? That was one. Then there was the question of, is Baron Trump involved? Both of those, because of the UMA protocol, have been resolved to know. And while the first one, you know, what is a real official meme coin? That's a really complicated. That's a separate question, I think. Philosophers need to come in on that one. To the question of, is Baron Trump involved to resolve? to know on that question is shocking to me. I could maybe understand resolving to nothing, like to sort of unresolved, like unresolved or I don't know, but it's like, well, that's not possible. Well, then the problem is the protocol. Then the protocol is a problem, a huge problem,

because you're resolving to know on something that I know, I know is true and that the only evidence we have indicates that it's true, but a bunch of anonymous D-Gen assholes just think the vibes are off. And so they're saying it's not true. They don't. know anything unique. And now people are losing money off of that. Not only are people losing money off of that, but the people voting on the protocol are also voting on polymarket, which feels like fraud to me. And it's a huge, like the Trump coin thing is fun, but it is like really sent shockwaves through, I would say, the sort of decentralized finance community and challenged a lot of assumptions about tools that are, you know, still being worked on and have a lot of

promise. And I still think there is a lot of promise in this stuff. But this one is really bad. Not only this happened, they then supported it publicly. They have employees making fun of people like myself publicly online over this, in my opinion, like very contentious issue that they're just wrong. Again, they are just wrong about. And Polly Market just denounced them publicly. So that is going to be, I mean, that's like a huge sort of just now, like within the last hour, I would say, breaking story. I feel like we need to maybe back up and set some context. We dove right into the Donald J. meme coin, and like some bankless listeners might not be familiar with the story. So I want to start with kind of like the tweet that sort of set a whole bunch of this off, which is, as you said,

Mike, the tweet you kind of stand by, which is from pirate wires, per conversations, Trump is launching an official token, DGT, Oncelona, Barron's spearheading. That's the tweet. And so is that what you're talking about? Like, you stand by that tweet? You think that that is an accurate representation? Everything that I reported at the time was accurate. And I have no idea what's happened since. I'm not a member of Donald Trump's family. I imagine a lot has happened since. I can speculate. And I did on the pirate wires pod about what I think kind of maybe went down since then. And what do you think? What do you think went down? I think that I believe that Barron asked Trump to run with meme coin and to make it the sort of official Donald Trump mean coin. And Trump said, I love you, son. Yes, of course, whatever. And I can't do his voice. But someone else better than he can. And I think he didn't think much about it. And Barry got excited. and I do believe Schrelli was involved. I have no sense at all of whose idea it was or anything like that. I just know that Barron was involved.

I believe that my speculation is that Trump said yes, but there were other people, maybe even in his family, who wanted to do their own version of a meme coin. There was probably some kind of succession, like, internal... Who gets to do the meme coin game? And I think Barron Trump made a move. That's what I think. checks out. I think once the news went public, probably Trump had not clued in a lot of his lawyers.

Right. And I think they probably were like, what the fuck is this? Right. And freaked out because it's not too long before an election and it's a sort of unknown quantity and shut it all down. But there's been no public denounced the issue. Just to shut down the exposure. Just like the lawyers are obviously going to be. They're just like, don't say anything. I think they iced out anybody. I'm not involved obviously in the coin itself. I don't even own any. I don't. bet on the stuff. But I think that they probably iced out anybody they were talking to about it and are just putting all of it on pause for now. It's interesting to me that there's been no public denunciation. Hasn't there? There's some announcement from one of the Twitter news accounts that said, like an advisor to the Trump administration says that they are not involved with the DJT token on Salana. Well, the advisor's not involved. I didn't see it. I'll have to look at exactly what happened. The advisor said that the Trump administration is not involved. I know that advisors

backchanneled and didn't know anything about it. They're totally wrong. If the Donald Trump campaign is officially coming out and saying the president of the United States can confirm that he is not involved in this or whatever, that will be interesting to me. And I'll have to reassess what I've been saying publicly and provide more insight into what I know for sure. I'm guilty of being a headline reener. So I don't go into the details sometimes. I haven't seen that. I've been inundated with anonymous schizophrenic DGens. Yeah, sorry about that.

That's us. I mentioned the last several days. And I'm surprised if they had denounced it, I think I probably would have seen that over and over again. maybe not i'll have to look at it later where does martin srelly fit into this that's why this story's also weird screlly was working with baron in some capacity on the coin okay and he's screlly inserts himself into things okay i have no idea i don't want to say anything about him because i actually don't know the genesis of that at all right i just want to share what i know can we talk about a hypothetical universe where trump's advisors lawyers like you know better

sense of the situation didn't actually put pause on this and like Trump actually legitimized a crypto meme coin? What do you think that world would actually look like? Well, it'd be mooning right now. It'd be like insane. Okay. And so number go up. And I think that all it would really do is solidify Trump's connection to crypto in such a way as he would have to defend it or be much more likely to defend it, which would be a really great signal for crypto and people heavily involved in crypto to support him even more than they already have been. It's very clear to me that the Democrats want to shut it down. I mean, you're dealing with people who are animated by socialism and control of the economy. And so obviously it always surprised me that they allowed this to go on as long as they did without going to war for it. Like, this fundamentally threatens their ability to manipulate people. And I mean, in fact, that's why Bitcoin was created. Like, come on. Like, that's the whole fucking genesis of it. And it's working. And yeah, it's like they're on a natural collision course. Democrats have always been on a natural collision course with crypto. I'm even surprised that Trump. Trump's not really like a free trade sort of libertarian type person. He's a populist, nationalist,

and I was surprised to see him take this up. I think it's just politically very smart for him because crypto is a very increasingly influential contingent segment of the population, crypto people, and certainly they have money, and they were being demonized. And Trump's been making a lot of bets like this, where he seems to be finding these places where there's really not any downside for him to support them and protect them. but a lot of potential upside. They're just like easy bets for him to make. And he's been making them. And crypto is, I think, probably the best version of this where it was like, why I'm,

I know why the far left wants crypto to not exist. But Biden's a moderate. Like, why does he care? Why is he taking this bet? Why is he going so hard now with so many other things that are failing in his administration and his campaign? It was stupid. And we just saw what.

Jamal Bowman went down. The crypto people got involved there. I don't really think. I think that was bigger than them. I think it was bigger than was it APAC or whatever. I think it was just like people really hated him. Yeah, I want to continue kind of just doing the sit rep on like the state of crypto and politics right now. The crypto industry, like we see the incoming like 2024 election and we're getting excited, right?

We see like both political parties trying to like vie for our love. Like Donald Trump, the Dems kind of pivoted and then like didn't really complete that like pivot against crypto. Yeah, they got scared. They got scared. Yeah, they got scared committing to the industry. But hey, at least we got the ETH ETF in that moment of hesitation. You got one lousy ETF. Trump, undeniably, like, winning the tug of war over the crypto industry.

But then you have, like, the pro-Trump crypto people who are, like, F-Yes, like, you have to get behind Trump. He's going to support our industry. Then you have, like, the more, like, moderate skeptics, like, leftists who are saying, like, well, like, he's definitely more pro-crypto than Biden. But, like, it's free real estate for him. He doesn't have to make any, like, real promises. He just has to, like, speak the words. And this is kind of, like, the tension of politics that crypto has. That's the tension of politics, period.

Sure. Yeah, it's like politicians say shit and do they mean it or not. That's valid. I think that if you, just looking at the record here, it's very, very, very, very silly to think, separate from everything else, it's really, it's not even silly. I think it's like, it's almost dishonest to say that you think there's a chance the Democrats could be better on crypto than the Republicans at this point, not only because of what they've actually done in office, but because of just like the ideology behind both parties.

I've never understood conceptually the sort of like the left. crypto person. I don't understand what that is. To be a leftist to me is like control of the economy, centralization. It's the only way to make leftism work. We're talking about fucking Marxism here. I remember there was a huge wave of press years ago. Taylor Lorenz generated it when she did an interview of this was her name, Legion or something. She was like the Web 3 socialist person talking about reading Marxist and shit. We've had Legion on the podcast. We do. We know Legion. Yeah, yeah. So she talked a lot about Karl Marx and like trying to find some like intersection between these things. There's no intersection. Okay, that's like you trying to be cool among like the young kids who are like the fucking communist baristas and shit while making a lot of money doing crypto stuff. And it's like that's classic of a certain kind of leftist rich person to be honest. But it's obnoxious. And it's just not true. And like ideologically, it's just a lie. You know, crypto is the antithesis of the sort of centralization that you would need to make socialism or communism work.

It just is. One thing that I'm trying to measure out is like a lot of the crypto industry like we say that crypto, might just end up deciding the fate of the United States election. Like, we are enough of a cohort that, like, we might be able to sway some swing states. And even Mark Cuban, he put on some big tweet saying, like, Gary Gensler and his reign over the SEC might actually cost Biden the election because he represents, like, the policy stance of the Biden administration towards crypto. I'm wondering if you, as being, like, more external to the crypto industry, what your thoughts on, like, our ability to sway this thing or not? Like, how much influence do we really have here? Anyone with money has influence. People say there's too much money in politics. There's not a lot of money in politics, actually. There's not. Like, comparatively to the rest of the economy or whatever, like people aren't flooding it with dollars. It's pretty easy to make a huge impact with a few million dollars even. You know, $10 million and now you're like a major player in a race, especially if you're talking about regional like Senate races or things like that. So there's money in crypto, ergo crypto has influence and should use it. I think that's broadly true of anyone in tech, anyone

in business, like, you need to be involved or you need to stop complaining about the outcomes. Okay, here's the thing I don't understand, Mike, and maybe with your kind of like tech politics lens, you can shed some more light on it. But like, I don't understand why the Democratic Party is really, like, doubling down on this anti-crypto army thing. It just feels very much like shooting themselves in the foot. Anti-Crypto army. It's a whole Warren thing. Yeah, okay, so this anti-crypto army is like an Elizabeth Warren thing. So she launched an actual campaign in a year ago, saying, hey, I'm going to lead, I'm the general in an anti-crypto-arm. She actually, you've seen this, right?

You've seen Elizabeth Warren. With that, Elizabeth Warren and her goons. So, yes, I want to introduce that story as Elizabeth Warren and her goons because Trump said, I will keep Elizabeth Warren under goons off of your Bitcoin. Well, actually, there's some truth in that. And this is why it's a self-inflicted wound, is because Elizabeth Warren actually stated that, like, she was going to lead the anti-crypto army, right? And so lie lie.

Leat it to hell. Regulatory state, this whole thing, has been part of it. And the Biden administration has largely kind of let them set White House policy on this. But like what I can't get my head wrapped around is like why. Well, because he's old and seen. Oh, you know, I understand why Biden. He doesn't have the energy to keep her off. Like, but even for her, right? Like, the Democrats still want to remain in power. They still want money and votes. Do they not? And so they gain nothing by being anti-crypto. Like, not even the big banks want to be anti-crypto. There's some legislation called. Who is the anti-crypto army? Who's funding is who supporting these people? This is why it feels like such. a self-owned to me that it's just like not logical. The Democrats have a weird, so you have also Democratic policies on things, for example, and I'm not going to try and have the debate right now, but sort of like trans stuff for kids, like that entire topic, right? You have behind the scenes, the story is just breaking now, Biden's was the Secretary of Health or whatever she is, the general, involved in removing age restrictions for procedures for kids, like gender affirming

procedures for kids, right? Like, that is really unpopular. And why would they do that? And there are lots of things like this that are really unpopular, but they do it. On the Republican side, you have a Republican right now who, and I just skimmed. So I don't have a thorough breakdown of the report here, but you have a Republican congressman who is targeting IVF, which is like wildly unpopular on both sides of the aisle in America. And this is like the hardcore pro-life side, right? Like at a certain level, both we have two parties. And so they have to make a lot of bizarre alliances and they end up doing things. that are deeply unpopular eventually. And I think on the crypto side, it's like you have real Marxists in the Democratic Party, like hardcore leftists who would like to completely control the entire economy. And getting rid of crypto is a really big part of that. I actually believe that Bitcoin makes communism sort of impossible right now. So it's a huge enemy of the very far left. So there was a take floating around the crypto world right after we discovered that the SEC was coming to like actually like try and stop the Ethereum network.

like the SEC was going to try and make ether security, going after consensus. And the take was, it's not just Gary Gensler in this one rogue campaign. It's not just Gary Gensler trying to climb the political ladder. But it's like the Clinton types and the powers that be, in quotes, that saw the rise of Web2 tech empires, saw the rise of Zuck and Facebook, like, Elon and Tesla. And like the rise of Silicon Valley as like this center of power that they don't have influence in because the rise of the internet kind of surprised them. So the internet kind of quote unquote got away from them and created all these like, you know, Loki of power that are outside of like whatever the Clinton types have influence over. And they don't want to see that again.

And so like one hypothesis, this is just a conspiracy. One potential answer to like who is the anti-crypto army is a lot of like the establishment elite that don't want like a new set of like influence to be outside of their control. I'm wondering if that like resonates with you or not or what you have any reflections. I think to a certain extent yes. But I think crypto is also interesting in that so many people have exposed. to it, including elites. And that changes your perspective on. And obviously, for obvious reasons as well, once you've bought a little Bitcoin, like, you start to think about it differently when it starts to moon.

And there are people on both sides of the aisle who have done that as well, which means there's a sort of tension now between the ideology of politicians and the self-interest of many politicians, which is great. Like, let's keep that as tense as possible. I think that there is something to the idea that people saw this empire rising. But also, why is the most aggressive stuff happening in a bare market rather than the crazy exuberance that we saw previously? Like, it was kind of quiet during the exuberant period. I don't know. I'm a little bit less.

And you see a little bit of this with AI as well where I think that it's like people are going after this stuff now because they didn't do it aggressively enough before. Certainly you saw that with scooters. Remember scooters in all the cities? Do you guys remember this? There was like the cities. All these scooters that have like populated everywhere. Yeah. Right. So that's mostly gone at this point. They aggressively regulated it of a lot of cities. And I think that the aggressive regulation in part was driven because it came fast and hard. And it was in part driven by this feeling that among regulators, like the worst people alive, that they should have regulated more firmly against ride chair, like Uber and Lyft. You know, they came in and they like broke a lot of rules that should never have existed in the first place. Like if I have a car, I should be able to do whatever the fuck I want with my, like, if I want to drive someone around, with my car, I should be allowed to do that, but they don't believe that. And they think that

that was a mistake. They should have ended that. There should have been, you know, like a politically empowered taxi lobby, I guess, in every city that they control. They don't now. And it's frustrating. And this was like another version of that, just like something they didn't have control of that could potentially get away. And they preemptively nuked it. In hindsight, they probably didn't have to. It seems like that stuff would have gone away on its own. I am sad about that. I personally loved riding the scooters around. But yeah, in a lot of different technology spaces, there overreacting now because of what they feel as like a miss on their part. Okay, so here's the thing. I mean, we're talking about like definitely the Democrats are like much weaker on crypto and like

hostile towards crypto versus the Republicans and the right. But like I'm not sure I trust the right either here, Mike. Yeah, you shouldn't trust any politician. Like I'm wondering because like, so you were talking in terms of right versus left and like that's one framing of it. I also have like the political compass type framing of it where you have like, like, you know, two lines. You have the right versus left line, but then you have another line that kind of intersects that, which is authoritarian at the top and then like small libertarian at the bottom, right? So, you know, civil liberties types. And I know it's less common for somebody to be in the bottom left quartile of like, I respect civil liberties and yet I am on the left. But there are

a lot of people on the right that are just like authoritarian state as well. That's why I said it was not, I agree. Like anyone sufficiently nationalist who wants control of the economy is going to have a hard time with this, for sure. And this is part of the reason, like, Trump is better. And he's branding himself as the pro-crypto president. He's better than Biden right now. But last term, he, like, wasn't. He had, like, a secretary of treasury who in the final days in January, you know,

Steve Munition was trying to, like, do a blanket ban on non-custodial crypto wallets. Yeah. So, like, how much do you really trust the right on these kind of, like, tech-forward libertarian? issues and like should we trust the right? Are they just like the better of the evils? Well, first of all, I misspoke. Nationalism is not it. It's like the authoritarian thing because there's nationalism and globalism. Either one of those things can be authoritarian or I think a little bit more liberal. And the authoritarian piece is the thing that you want to watch for. And there are obviously

nationalist authoritarian right wingers who want control of the economy and whatever else your life. Can you trust the right? You can't trust any politician first of all. You can't trust anybody who wants power and yet you also have to be just reasonable about, you know, the people who are going after this specific thing. Are they're really authoritarian right wingers? Yes, have they done really fucked up things? Of course. But just look at the landscape here and like who has passed all of the worst legislation and who is right now trying to do it. And it's just like very obvious that you don't vote for those people if this is your only issue. And then you lobby aggressively on the right. It's just like, there's no good answer here because you're like, oh, can we trust these

people? It's like, of course not. That's just democracy. Yeah, I mean, it would be very very silly to vote for a Democrat, I think, if your only thing is crypto. And if you are going to anyway, I would be willing to bet your only thing is not crypto. And you're just valuing other things higher than that than your economic freedom. I want to get your perspective about, like, what the crypto industry looks like from your perspective, because I know you're, like, pretty exposed to it, but you're not in it. So like adjacent, but not inside. And so like, just from the outside in, like, what, what are we to, like, you like, you look over the fence. Like, we're trading meme coins. We're, like, trying to innovate. We're, like, struggling for

adoption. Yeah, do we look like a mess? Does it look like a giant scam? Like, are we legit? Like, how do you perceive us? I think on some level, it's like refreshing to see people speaking more honestly about the meme coins because that's what everything was a few years ago anyway. And there was a lot of lying about like, well, this meme coin is going to be essential to like, I don't know, agriculture in some really ambiguous way. And I was just like, is it? That seems like a fucking stretch and a half. So it's like kind of nice. As people like, no, I'm just going to like launch a meme coin associated with Andrew Tate and call it daddy and you're going to buy it because this Beanie Baby is really popular and, you know, cryptographically secure. That is one thing.

Like I guess the sort of overt trashiness of it, I actually prefer. And then I think that there are a lot of people who very earnestly are looking to work on, you know, decentralized finance because they sort of believe in the mission. I think that's cool. And they're still figuring out ways to do that. I think that Bitcoin has already proved its value. And I think that any any kind of decentralized cryptographically secure store of wealth is very valuable by itself. Like, you don't even need to justify beyond that. So that's cool. It's already awesome to me. And then if any of these other interesting sort of hypotheticals play out, that could be great too. I think that the like sort of decentralized contracts are interesting. And I think that

every time I talk about this problem of vanishing information online, people say crypto solves this. I have not seen that solution. I am interested in that solution. If you can, actually create some kind of solution there to this idea of like, you know, literally information just vanishing or being manipulated, disturbed. We're like removed from the internet. We need a permanent record. And it is this huge flaw in a life lived online. We've abandoned the analog, right?

The last Encyclopedia Britannica was published in 2010, the physical Encyclopedia Britannica. People are not buying magazines anymore or newspapers. I'm not a fetishist for paper. I don't really care about it in that way. but they were physical. 20 years ago, if you told me that a mid-century issue of Time Magazine would be more durable than a blog from 2004,

which no longer exists, I would have been like, that's crazy. There's no way. The information online is immortal. It's never going to go anywhere. But that's not true. It's vanishing all the time. MTV News just pulled their entire archive for the last two decades.

You saw the entire Gawker universe snuffed out, like the toast and weird blogs like that that really matter to millennials. Really? So, like, no one's archiving? this stuff? Like the wayback machine? You're not the wayback machine doing pieces of it. It's super clunky. It's really hard to search. And what it effectively does is it cuts you off from your past. So yeah, there are versions of this and it's just not enough. It's like this stuff needs to be alive and at your fingertips and like really easy to sort through. And it's not at all. So yeah, maybe there's a solution

there. So I guess what do I see? I see some like scamy gamblers, which whatever, they're saying they're that now. So I like that better. On a scammy gamblers. I see a handful of people working on things that I think could be really cool, and I think that's really nice. And then you still see a bunch of people sort of being dishonest, like looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and pretending they're working on something that doesn't really actually matter. And all they really want to do is launch a coin and make some money. And those are my least favorite of all the groups. Sure. Yeah, agreed. What are your touch points with crypto? Like when crypto comes across your timelines or your feeds or whatever, is it just through Twitter or like, where do you actually,

like, view the industry? Twitter and then through like friends of mine and colleagues who are like super into it. Yeah, and just like shows up in chat rooms just because somebody is interested in throws your way. Like crypto news and stuff, like developments and weird things that people were working on. But okay. Yeah, that's kind of the extent of it. But yeah, Twitter, like, it does feel like a slightly different world, though, to my world. Like, I'm definitely right next to it and there's always overlap. But it wasn't until the Trump coin chaos that I was like, whoa, I am suddenly like, they're here. They're at my doorstep. And it's like a whole other thing. So, Mike, I consider you kind of like a memetic warrior at some level, right?

Sort of you've got some memes that you care about. And like I also consider you someone who's skilled in this warfare as well. And I think, I mean, we'll talk about sort of media a little bit later and kind of like new media. But like I want to focus on the meme portion of this because in order to like win this movement for crypto, there's like a few meme tribes that we belong to. Right. So like we belong to the tribe of pushing crypto versus Fiat. for example, right? The tribe of the network state versus the nation state. The tribe of going bankless rather than being banked. The tribe of liberalism versus authoritarianism. What would you say are kind of

your tribes that you identify with these days? And like where have you kind of picked the different battle lines? And like just in general, what do you think are the big memetic wars that are being fought right now? Such a good question because they're so complicated and there's so many. And I think that over the last like 10 years, things have become really fragmented and there are more dimensions to the conflict than there have been previously, right? So I always say that freedom is like my North Star. I started my whole sort of philosophical journey as an anarcho-capitalist. That's when I really like kind of came online, so to speak, and just read the most and became the most radicalized. I mean, I've been radicalized a few times in my life, but that was one of the big radicalizations. That's diminished,

but that's like a wouldn't it be nice? Like we should try and max for liberty wherever it doesn't put you into some sort of real danger and sort of threaten the entire project of human civilization. So that's the star and that's the guiding light. But I would say the things that I find myself fighting for, it's like business conceptually, technology conceptually, the country, the nation. I am a nationalist. I'm pro America. And that's my frame for thinking about international politics for sure. It's like this idea that, so I'm not in the decentralized state camp. I believe that states exist, and I think that COVID really proved this out. Like, when the physical world around you in your own hometown is crumbling, like, the decentralized

state does not matter at all. It's, I hate to disagree with you guys on that. And like, I just, I love the people involved in thinking about it. I think it's a really kind of damaging path to take, because you're taking a lot of smart people out of the problem of just fixing your local community. Like, what really should be happening is crypto people should be flooding to one place and leveraging their wealth and influence to shape politics in a more freedom-oriented way is what should really be happening, not trying to reinvent a place. Maybe the decentralized state becomes an island utopia somewhere or whatever. Like, you don't have to do all that. Like, anyway, if America falls, your island utopia is not going to be safe. Like, where is going to be safe? If America is over,

like, that's nowhere is safe. So yeah, I would say like, yeah, it's business technology, my country, and sort of I have all of those values because of my family. That's like, I care about those things, because I think it makes the world the safest and the best for like my nieces and my nephew and my sister I think about and like my mom. Like those are the people that I think about. And so all those things have interesting memes that become sort of field of war for the concept of those things. And that's where I fight.

This is all really abstract, but the meme stuff is abstract. No, no, no, no. It's great framing. I think we've gotten to the kind of the basement level and then we can maybe build up. So one that intersects probably business tech and America is this memetic war that we have observed sort of a growth versus degrowth type of memetic war. I know if you see that, if you can weigh in, it's certainly part of the crypto battle, right, anti-crypto versus pro-crypto. It made the observation that, like, in the 1990s, the Democrat Party under Clinton Gore,

like Gore was famously arguing, like, telling people that he invented the internet, right? I'm like, the Democrats used to be very pro-tech, very pro-internet, and now it's switched into sort of a, there's like a degrowth sort of malaise. Well, because the Democrats have become less liberal. The Democrats are no longer liberal. The whole project the internet was super liberal. It was like hippies doing the whole earth catalog and shit leading to like this idea of the free flow of information. It was an acro-capitalist, wasn't it? I mean, that was the idea of- Yeah, there was overlap between the hardcore libertarians and the left for a long time, but they're super authoritarian now. And not only are they authoritarian in terms of money,

that's been true for a long time. They're authoritarian on social issues as well. and controlling your actual life and speech. And like, it was unthinkable to see a liberal 20 years ago say that the First Amendment was problematic. You would never, ever, ever, ever, ever hear something like that. But I think our politics, our politicians, our political parties are like somewhat of a reflection of like they're built on top of the memetic narrative wars that actually happen, like the battle for hearts and minds that we see sometimes on like social media and other things.

And like this growth versus degrowth thing is definitely entered the tech sphere in the form of crypto, but like maybe more manifestly in like, AI. There's sort of this AI safety thing. The growth thing is a human issue as well. That's a dimension I didn't mention. I'm glad you brought it up because it's weird. To me, it's just table stakes. Of course, you'd be pro growth. I think a lot of people don't understand that they think of it as like, you can be growing or not growing. And the more you grow like more money, more problems kind of thing. Things get complicated. You run out of resources, whatever. But there is no such thing as like stagnance, right? It's like you're either growing or you're dying. That's what an organism does.

And that is what our civilization is doing. That's how I look at it. And I am pro human. in existence, and so I am pro-growth, it's sort of that simple. And then all of these other things that I care about are also just inherently pro-growth. And, you know, there are problems, like the question of, what if we run out of this resource? But that is a problem that we can solve with technology and more material. And I mean, eventually you're going to get to a point where you need to, like, be leaving our sort of world and harvesting new materials and using those. And it's like, but what if we run out of that? It's like, you move on. Like, the universe is very big. We're going to be okay. So, like, I guess you err on the side of

being pro-grove, not necessarily to extremely. No, I'm 100% pro-grove. But like, okay, but like, how does that manifest in say the AI debate? So there are some folks out there that just say, accelerate, accelerate, accelerate, accelerate, accelerate, accelerate. Yeah. Like, without regulation, without sort of breaks, just all gasoline on this AI thing,

we need to outcompete China, all the models, all the time, open source everything, get every single person, their own kind of like AI lab on their computer. Yeah, what's your take on that? Because the AI safety people will say, yo, this shit's dangerous. I think EAC is a meme, and it's an important meme because they're basically saying, it's like when you have someone saying AI should be banned, it's an existential threat, then suddenly your reasonable position is the extreme position. Like, no, we should do it with some safety protocol. Now you're the extreme, let's say the extreme right of that equation. The extreme left is now shut it down. So the EAC people are like, no, no, no, no. We should max, no rules, no regulations. We should just fucking do anything. And now they've expanded the conversation. So the moderate position is where we get to be because of the EAC people. So they're very important in this conversation, and so I'm happy that they exist. If it wasn't for them, we would really just be arguing, like, how quickly should we be shutting down AI? Instead, it's more complicated.

I think that all technology is complicated, and I'm not this like, I'm not an EAC person. I think that every new technology poses new challenges that were actually, if it's efficiently a new technology, then the challenges were impossible to predict. It's always happened with every huge paradigm shift that we've encountered. even the internet right now, I think that we are just figuring out what it does socially, culturally, politically. We didn't know. We had no idea. Like I was saying a moment ago, we had no idea that information would be vanishing like this or we thought everything was permanent. It was going to be, there was no problem. It was abundant information. There were actually several problems. One, the information was malleable. Two, there's too much of it. So people have a hard time making sense of the world because it's endless amounts of information. So what do you focus on? That makes people feel disconnected from each. other, right? Like, these are all challenges it took decades to figure out. I don't know about regulations. I'm not proposing any. I'm just saying, like, it's very obvious to me that not every technology is 100% good. And it's very conceivable to me that some things might have to be regulated based on the realities that present themselves inherent of those technologies.

You've brought up this disappearing information thing a couple of times. And we actually just haven't explored that on the bank of this podcast yet. I don't know. I actually am unfamiliar. Maybe you can kind of just give us the quick download on what that is and why you're concerned. Sure. I've written about this a lot. I first started writing about it in 2020, and there was an issue of people changing definitions of things online in the middle of contentious political debates, public political debates. So there'd be some debate over the phrase like sexual preference. Is that offensive? You know, and ACB, the Supreme Court justice, was in her hearing, her confirmation hearing, and she used the phrase. And a Huffington Post writer, reported that as highly offensive. He was like, ACB just used the phrase sexual preference, which is bigoted and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, is it? I didn't know that. It's like dated for sure, but like, is it offensive sexual? I didn't know that. So I googled it. And at first, it was not. And then as the new cycle blew up, the Webster's Dictionary changed the

definition. So I was like, that's crazy, like that you can just change, it changed to say that it was offensive and had been offensive. It was very nerve-wracking to me because nobody has a physical dictionary anymore. They're relying on these internet definitions. And so if someone controls that, then they have a lot of cultural influence that previously they did not. You know, your record was what was ever on your shelf. The problem is much broader than that. This is like articles change randomly without a notation about it. Definitions of words change based on whatever thing is happening politically. That then determines the debate, the shape of the debate. Wikipedia is a huge problem. People are like, well, there's a record of the edits or whatever, and it doesn't matter. Most

recently, we saw this with the flag that was flying in front of one of the Supreme Court Justice's House. It was the green tree flag. Over the one week where that became a controversy, there were more edits to that page than over the proceeding, like, I think it was like six or seven years. I would have to go back. I think it was even longer than that, because I tweeted out about this. I actually counted all of the edits. You have a war going on right now that most people have no sense of whatsoever. It's a straight up information war, and it's biased completely in favor of one ideological worldview. And so that's like the most topical political version of this problem is that like the information is just changing. And there's this sort of invisible information war happening that is

shaping the frame of our like entire politics right now and culture and whatever else. But then you have this additional problem of things straight up vanishing. And so, you know, all of the old like live journal, Zanga, MySpace, GeoCities, Google nuked like all of these old YouTube and Gmail accounts. There's endless amounts of information in all of these things that comprised culture online for the first two decades of the 21st century that is fading, very fast, faster than information from 100 years ago is fading. That information is fading. And it's going to be very hard for us to reflect back in 50 or 70 years and assemble an accurate portrait of what we were at this time, I think. And so I think it's a very hard problem to wrap your head around because it's so abstract. I have a hard time. myself and I think about it a lot, but it is this invisible, very important problem facing our entire society right now. Right. And it's not coming from any like one central like epicenter. There's not like the ministry of truth, but it kind of is similar to that. I think what is some of the things you're saying is like the internet is like soft. It's like malleable. And so like some things as

a result of this, malleability are like pruning snippets of the internet as they see fit to benefit them and their reality and their version of the truth. And so I think you're just asking for like literally just a harder version of the internet, one that's a little bit just more like structured and less malleable. Is that kind of like just what you're seeking? What I'm seeking is to have a conversation about this problem. I want people to think about this problem. I don't know what the solution is. I think that the internet inherently is malleable. Marshall McLuhan talked a lot about this. He posed this very interesting series of topics. Central to his philosophy is the idea that like most people think that technology is additive. You invent a new technology

and, you know, it's the typewriter. Okay. The typewriter is just as good as the printing press. It does everything the printing press does plus a little more. So it's like this old thing plus this new thing. And then the computer comes along and the computer's like, well, it's just as good, the word processor, just as good as the typewriter is everything that does plus a little more. So culture isn't, you know, changing. It's just growing. There's now new things that the old thing could do. true at all. Every new technology, the medium that you exist inside of, has fundamentally new rules that reshape society completely. And the tools that you use to build and to communicate alter you entirely. The world of the internet is completely different than the world pre-internet,

which is completely different than the world pre-print, like fundamental differences. They're not additive differences. And I think the internet is something that we are just understanding and this one aspect of it is new. And so, explored. I think that we actually don't even fully know. There are many aspects of the internet. Rapid instant global virality is another new property of the internet. So rapid viral sharing of any piece of information that could be erroneous or not and have consequences because of the rapid sharing. For example, COVID, okay, had you had a virus like that 50 years ago be released from a lab in China, would we have seen lockdowns all over the world? I don't know. I don't think so. Actually, I do know.

It would not have happened because these controversies would have broken down at different times in different places at a very slower speed. And so you would have had a much more sort of diverse set of practices that played out. Now, you could say that's bad. And everybody had they just, you know, locked down immediately and starved to death or something, like the world would be a better place. I don't think so. But, I mean, that was not possible, as my point.

Like, these are new properties of the internet. And I think this one, the malleable piece and the fact that it's so easy to change information, the fact that, you know, you have to have a conversation now. I have screenshots of what the definition was yesterday. and people are like, well, did you doctor them? I have no idea. I don't believe you. We're entering the world of deep fakes, which adds a whole other layer to this. Like, it's very interesting that the very first deep fake controversy that we're having is Biden's press secretary conflating the word cheap fakes and deep fakes, but also using the word deep fake to talk about just an unfairly edited piece of information, but implying that, you know, Biden acting very senile in these video clips that Republicans are weaponizing were not real. And so you have someone hiding behind deep fakes rather than using them to attack someone. And that is what the future is. It's going to be like, did this happen or not? I have no idea. And it's like, we haven't even figured out the internet shit yet. And now we're adding, you know, generated information online. It's super, super malleable and like clownish, cartoonish. That's a different kind of reality that we're living inside of now. It's like a dream world. And so that's going to affect our culture, the impermanence of everything. Arbitrum is the leading Ethereum scaling solution that is home to hundreds of decentralized applications. Arbitrum's technology allows you to interact with Ethereum at scale with low fees and faster transactions.

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and you talked about disappearing information, the ability to bias information. Can we just double click on media? in 2024, and maybe in particular start with social media, and then we'll kind of like branch it out for there. But like the internet is really interesting because, you know, TCPIP, like it is a communication protocol. That's the thing it does. It is not a truth consensus protocol. That was kind of left to us, individual nodes in the network to figure out what the truth is and have institutions like media help with that. Now, social media has taken a more and more active role in helping society

find out what's true and disseminate information. Yeah, the same time, I don't know if you feel this way, Mike, but like social media also feels broken, or at least incomplete. And now, like, the newest manifestation of social media, it was we were aggregated on a few particular platforms. You're like, one being Twitter. We found out, like, Twitter was censoring in various ways. And now we're in this stage where, like, we've got this, like,

fractured social media going on. Bologi just tweeted out, it's like, now you have X, which is, like, the center right. You have threads, which is, is the center left. You have substack nodes. The center, you have mastodon and blue sky. And that is like the left. Maybe you have gab and truth. Right. In crypto circles, we've sort of forked some of our, like, a discourse to chat rooms, but then also there's an app called Farcaster. A lot of crypto people hang out on that. It's like a Twitter clone only with decentralized protocols.

I know Farcester is. Okay. So I love Dan. Are you there? I'm on Farcaster. Awesome. Okay. Yeah, I'm not super active, but I, yeah. But that's the thing. You're not super active because it's hard to be in all these places at once. So the fracturing of your state makes it just hard to maintain. Anyway, what do you make of the health of social media today? Because it just like, it feels broken. Yeah. So, I mean, Bologi's right.

He actually is echoing. So I did an interview with Jack Dorsey where he broke this down himself. This was like a month or so ago. And he had left blue skies bored because of this problem. It was just a super left-wing place now. And he was reflecting on the fragmentation of the landscape now. And his thing is, he's super idealistic. And I think he really does believe in some kind of,

totally decentralized version of all of this stuff. It's just like increasingly not the world we live in. And I don't know the word broken has a connotation of bad, I think. First of all, I don't know what's really happening. I think no one really does. It's still kind of influx. There's a lot of chaos right now. I think we're in the fog of war right now with social media. Just what I mean, maybe can I get more precise when I say broken? I mean like I feel like media is there to help people figure out for themselves like what's true and for society's sort of reach consensus. And in that aspect, it feels like social media is broken. One element of this is like Twitter. Bot accounts like crazy. I don't know who's real, who's a human. In like crypto Twitter is

sort of front running a little bit of this because there's literally incented bot armies that are like put in place to pump particular tokens or narratives or to like shift the ties. Recently there's this like airdrop type of meta where token projects, they give air drops. And if they're not giving enough airdrops to the right people. You see civil attacking armies, like, rise up and say, this is a scam. Give us more tokens, right? You just like, I can't figure out what's real, what's not, who's a human, who's not. It's just like broken from that perspective. I don't know what's true and what's real. Yeah, there's no way to tell. It's going to get worse. But also, part of this is very good, because no one ever knew what the truth was about certain topics or

things and we relied to for the whole 20th century. This was how in the 20th century, every single country became super centralized and I think pretty authoritarian. This is how you operate in a war time. It was huge, massive, existential wars were happening. So to maintain power like that, you have centralized communication and everybody believes a very narrow band of things, many of which are not true at all. So the internet makes that impossible. Like if the internet were around during Vietnam, that would have been a very, very short conflict for America. There was no way it would have persisted for as long as it did. So in this way, it's very good that all of these narratives are challenged and nobody's really agreeing because on a lot of the topics of the day, there is no way to agree. Okay, you can see the same exact thing. I think about Nick Salmon a lot, the kid with the MAGA hat, who got yelled at by the Native American and then was laughing and it was laughing and it was like, well, what's really happening here? He's attacking the Native American. It's the Native American attacking him. People are looking at the exact, even when the full clip came out. And to me, it was very clear that the kid, kids did nothing wrong. There were people who were like, these kids are the problem with America, right? We're looking at the exact same thing and disagreeing. So what is the truth there? Okay. I think

there isn't one. This is a subjective issue. And we've never had a solution to navigating this. Certainly not at scale. Building consensus among a family is difficult. Among a community is very difficult. Among a world, that's not possible. That will never be possible. There's no way to do it. And I think because we were like tribal creatures, okay, pack-oriented creatures, we have this desire to come to some kind of broad agreement on everything. And we're going a little bit crazy online because the internet tricks your brain into thinking your tribe is this whole group of people now all over the world. And you're trying to come to consensus with people who are fundamentally different than you, and you never will. And that makes you feel like you're going insane. So it is easier to manipulate people online than everybody.

before, but I think that the fact that we're all questioning everything is just we should be questioning everything. You know, it's like we didn't question enough 50 years ago. I think it's super anxiety-inducing for everybody to be in the state of like what the fuck is going on all the time, which means probably what's going to happen is people are going to be not online looking for things. They're going to be trusting, I think influencers are going to become much, much, much more relevant. Small groups of people who people trust will just rise in dominance. Joe Rogan is already playing this role for people sort of sifting through complicated things and coming to a perspective and you're like, well, I trust that guy. So I'm going to kind of go with that. And this is

actually what the media was before the 20th century. You had all of these warring journals saying all sorts of crazy shit, and you kind of just picked the one that you believed in based on vibes. Like, you picked the guy that you felt like that one, I guess, and then you just trusted him because you can't spend all day thinking about this stuff. And weirdly, I think it's like this older thing is kind of popularizing again. There's another theme here, apart from kind of like figuring out truth. And that is just like the algos that power these things, right, are very much incented by a advertising business model. Some of the CryptoWeb3 tribe has sort of, you know, like pointed this out, which is, it's all about clicks and attention.

Jack talks about this. And you guys should check out the interview. It's on pirate wires. I totally will. He talks about this a lot. Jack interviews are very. He points to everything to the advertising model. This is the problem with everything. And well, for him, when it came to censorship, he had no choice, but to go after this narrow band of things. And he was very, he's like, I'm out of, he didn't call himself a victim or anything. He was just like, listen, I chose for the company to survive. We unfortunately picked this advertising business model, which put me at the mercy of advertisers who are, you know, they're motivated by all sorts of things, not just, you know, selling ads for the new Disney movie or whatever, right? They had to do whatever they said.

And that is just what happened. So if you free yourself of that, it helps. But if you get rid of advertising revenue, there's a lot less money in media, which is also another set of problems. So, Mike, you've presented some of these ideas that I want to kind of like summarize it and throw back to you. This is an idea that I have that I want to get your like vibe check on. the crypto industry, all of us, like crypto tribes, like we kind of exist on Twitter, on Discord. We have our own little, like, satellite world. We've got, like, a strong meme game. We also have, like, political agendas. We also have our own, like, job markets. And we also have our own financial markets with all these tokens that we have. We also have scammers, fraudsters,

desasteful humans. We also have bots, like fake humans, trying to pretend to be real humans and, like, political tribalism and social engineering campaigns. We kind of have, like, everything that's society has. Yeah, you're like market and blade runner. That market and blade runner, what's that? You're like an Asian market and blade runner where it's like robots walking around and like people like doctors and like digital prostitutes. Like it's all there. You have it all. But everything is like super concentrated and like everyone's a participant, right? Like everyone's like playing in this kind of this game. But also like time is sped up 10x. That's what just it feels like to be in crypto. Like time just moves really fast in

crypto. Everything's happening all the time. And also there's a lot at stake because we have all these tokens that like we're all invested in and it really matters at like what the outcome is like you kind of also have to play in whatever this game is and like this idea is like I kind of think crypto is like this spearhead of the rest of society and we're not the only ones there are other like organizations like communities out there that are also doing this like zoomers on ticot i would also kind of classify as this because they are being inundated with like AI generated content and so they are like able to discern what a i generated content is and sometimes i'll throw like some AI thing, AI meme to my mom and she won't realize his AI. So like some other like we're not the only

community is doing this. But like crypto specifically I think is like front running a lot of social problems, especially like the fake human problem. I think we're also going to see a lot of this play out in the 24 election where like social engineering campaigns is going to be like can society handle this. But I just kind of want to like present this idea to you that like crypto is as a community as like a corner of the industry is kind of like charging into this future like running head first into these very big internet social problems. And we don't have solutions yet, except for the fact that we're exposed to them. And so, like, I kind of feel like I can navigate the internet a little bit better than the average human just because of the skills that, like, we're living in

crypto, like, has produced for me. I'm wondering if this kind of like sparks anything in you or any thoughts or reflections. Yeah, it does. I think anyone sufficiently online will see this. And you're just like super, super, super online. I get with you. Like, no one's really prepared. but like you're more prepared and crypto exists it lives online right and then to learn about it you have to be online and like you're talking about these huge swings that are happening very fast so you want to be online finding them it's not that like it's crypto that did it it's that being online did it if you're living a non-trivial part of your life online now your life is a giant question mark like yeah i agree like i mean there are people fighting like in my mention it's not even with me with each other all the time and i'm like i don't know if that's a person i really don't and i think about it more and more have you seen the chat dbt reply guys yet yeah yeah yeah Dude, those are funny. Yeah, I have. And it's like, wait, wait, how do you guys know?

That's a stupid question. Oh, you just read it and you're like, I just, I know. I say I have question marks now all the time. Sometimes I think we confirm to be not true. Yeah. So I am just living in a state of generally speaking,

like I have a lot of doubt about the kinds of things that are happening around me. And if I'm responding to someone, it's usually because I think other people reading this might have a question and I'm not really responding. I'm not talking to the person in my mentions. I'm talking to the other people reading the thing that's lies.

Do you have any just like advice for either like we both work in media for like maybe a young media entrepreneur or a young person who's just like growing up in this world or just how to like navigate what this weird world of 2024 and beyond is just any sort of like perspective you have to offer? I think that you want to be skeptical of everything as much as you can but also cognizant of the fact that it's really hard when you're emotionally involved in something to be skeptical and just acknowledge that like you're a human. and you're going to make mistakes.

And if you're very heated about something and it just showed up on your timeline, it's hard to advise this because it's so impossible to do in the moment. You know, I make this mistake all the time. But just be aware that you could be just totally wrong about almost anything. And you have to always just be. I mean, if a story is too good to be true,

you have to be asking, like, is this true? If it confirms your biases immediately and you, like, really want to share it, you should be very concerned if it perfectly confirms all of your biases. That means, in my opinion, someone is trying to provoke you. if it's just too good to be true.

You know, it's like genderqueer teacher with purple hair tells kid to transition or she's going to fail him from class. Wear a dress. Like, that's, there's a whole sort of, that's going to make you furious if you're a certain kind of guy. But, like, my thinking is, like, there's no way that's true. Like, there's no way that's true. One, two, if it is true, like, how deep is that?

Like, that's a crazy aberration, it seems like probably, right? Like, how serious of a problem it is. If it just is really, really confirming your bias, I think that you have to be very careful. I think this advice was always good, probably throughout all of modern history, but now it's just very important because we live inside of this like raw information feed. And this stuff is just very quick and it happens all the time. Yeah, advice, I don't know.

It's just like, it's the Fox Mulder thing. Just trust no one. My advice. There has been that meme that will like surface up in like a variety of different formats of just like the world has never been the same since like 2016. Like 2016, like the world just got more and more chaotic. to meme will say like, yeah, it's when like they killed Harambe, but that's also just like an internet meme. But yeah, just the world has gotten weirder and weirder and weirder and weirder for like, you know, coming up on like a decade in a row now.

And there's just like a fog of war with everything. Like, it feels like we are in an equilibrium that doesn't feel stable. Like growing up in the 90s in the early thousands, that kind of, that felt like a pretty solid equilibrium. But what do I know? Like, that was my first rodeo of like first and second decades. But like the internet is chaotic. Like Twitter is being chaotic. Elon is being chaotic. All these platforms are being chaotic. We have AI now that's like changing up the game. And this overall, like our political landscape doesn't feel like there's an equilibrium there. And I'm wondering if you also just to kind of agree with that sentiment of just like there's kind of chaos. And if you see like there's like a clearing in the fog of war. Because to me, I just see like fog of war. And like what a normal society looks like on the other side of this like doesn't feel clear to me at all.

There is a normal society because what you're asking is like, are we going to go back to something that existed when we had a different technological. frame defining our reality. I think it's like 2014, 2015, probably maps with mobile internet penetration and a number of hours people are spending online. Once you're walking around with the internet in your pocket and everybody else is, now society is existing for a non-trivial amount of time on the internet. The internet, the rules of the internet are clownish. That's what like the malleable information, the rapid pace of information, the ease of deception, you're now talking about like a sort of cartoon reality that is shaping culture. So our politics didn't get crazy. It's not like, oh my God, how did Donald Trump happen? And then what's her face like Kamala,

like giggling in a weird way every five seconds and like, I can't believe she's a heartbeat away from the presidency. Like, this is clown world type stuff. The politics are being, they're emergent. Like there was no way to stop this once we started living online because the internet is a cartoon world. Now our society is shaping to those laws. That will be the future. It will get more and more clownish. It will only get more, I think it's like sort of less chaotic a little bit because people sort of now understand that it's going to be clownish. So it doesn't hit the same way I think that it did in like 20, certainly 16, 17 and then 2020 was super dark. You're like a little bit more adjusted to the clown world, but I don't think

we're getting rid of the clown world. I think the only way that gets rid of it is a technological paradigm shift that changes the way we interact with the world. That could maybe be something like artificial intelligence and some really crazy way that none of us can see really predict right now. because it's just very, very complex. But I think that's the only thing that changes. And I think there's no going back unless you get rid of the internet. So I mean, get rid of the internet, right? So here's a difficult position, just to steal man the case against kind of like some of your core tenants. Like I certainly don't think this. We're very like pro tech at bankless, obviously being, I mean, crypto, pro capitalism, you know, property rights, this type of thing and

generally pro the US. But someone hears that, that we're living in a clown world. And you say that this is because of technology, because of the internet. And who brought us the internet? Well, these corporations, that's the business side. And it's resulted in clown influencer politics. And your position is pro-America, and they see America and it's just going in the total wrong direction. So how do we go back to the normies out there and say, yeah, I know, like, the internet has caused all of this chaos. And tech companies have, like, brought about the internet and brought it into our everyday lives and have been a participant in this chaos.

And by the way, made a whole bunch of money. and like now we've got this, you know, clown politics, how do we go back to them and say, hey, guys, you know what the solution is? It's actually more business, more tech, like more entrepreneurship. Do you see like why there is this cynicism? Maybe this explains the anti-crypto army. Maybe this explains degrowth. Maybe this explains like all of the counter forces that we're kind of facing in these arguments. Well, I would first just acknowledge that you're right to feel a kind of way about this. People put techno-optimism on me. I believe in the concept of technology and the concept of business. I think they generally track to good things. I am not

a dogmatic person about this stuff. I think that there are problems that we're not facing because we don't want to face them because we don't want to have this conversation. It's like we want to believe that the internet isn't unambiguous good, but nothing is an unambiguous good, especially nothing at scale, like nothing that everybody now is using. Of course there are going to be drawbacks. I think that there is no easy answer here because the easiest answer would just be like some silver bullet argument of like, no, the clown world's great and it's going to do all of these good things. I think that there were drawbacks to not having it, like I mentioned before. In the prior world, it was easy to convince people to do these horrible wars that killed. I mean, like, I forget what the number was. But it was like millions of teenage boys were shipped off to Vietnam to die. Like forced, like conscription. That is not possible now. Okay. Like you're never going to get to the level of society consensus that you need. need to do something like that. So the prior world of technology led to certain outcomes that were

also really fucking grisly. Once you created machine guns, for example, okay, like you could defend yourself better, but you sort of guaranteed that there would be trench warfare and you would have a long protracted sort of World War I situation. Every technology changes the world in some kind of a way that is not good or bad, but complicated. And now we're in the internet world. And I think the very first thing that we have to do is just sit with these challenges. and kind of come to some sort of consensus on, like, okay, we are in a clown world. Now what? Like, we're in a clown world.

Like, what does that mean? How is that presenting? Are there technological solutions here? Are there things we could do to make it better? What are the good outcomes of that? Like, what are the things that happened that were great? Like, we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Like, I think we have to just be talking about it and be sober about it and not be a ludite

about it and also not be, you know, a crazed accelerating, you know, I think every American should have a nuclear bomb in their basement type person. I'm not really on board with that either. Yeah, that's a rational take. I can get behind that. I think the larger point is maybe just tech realism is like more the bent here is, which another point is we can't put the genie back in the bottle, like it is what it is. Like, you can't like delete the internet and go back to the 1990s. We'll never live in that world again. So let's talk about one area that we're both focused on. So I consider pirate wires sort of the alt media for tech in similar ways that, you know, bank lists is like alt media in crypto.

And so we were talking earlier about how social media is like is imperfect, has some flaws, is going through this anarchy type phase. Let's zoom out to media in general. So like we've got mainstream media. We've got alt media like pirate wires. There's difficulty sustaining the business model. It's hard to like, I don't know, pay for real journalism and truth finding. Like what's your take on the state of just media in general, not social media, but media in general in 2024 and like the way forward to make it better. Well, it's really bad. It's like absolutely, I would say like existentially bad, like to the point where like

whole kinds of journalism will probably end. And there are people who will celebrate that who think just like, all journalism is bad and like, fuck the journalists. And it's like, I understand that because so many journalists are such shitty people. But it's really important that you know what's happening in your local city hall. And there are places all around the country right now that I have no idea. and local politics sort of shapes your actual day-to-day reality. Did not know what's going on is very bad.

Man, it's so complicated because the thing that's happening right now is you basically need people to pay you for your content, which is great. PirateWire's is we're good to go. We're able to do that. And I'm able to pay all my employees and we're going to grow. But there are all sorts of things I cannot do because I'm not making tons and tons and tons of money, okay? All sorts of things I would like to cover but won't be able to.

what the New York Times is able to do is really just sacrifice, burn a ton of money to be reporting on some strange, I don't know, political feud in Africa that might have one-off consequences like our second order consequences all around the world, really because it's good for their brand. They're the people who are, you know, covering everything or whatever, not because it makes money. And what is this? Like the future of that, I think the times will survive and they'll continue doing a lot of this stuff. I think that the influencers will be the other thing. And then now we're reporting on certain topics.

Like we're doing like on tech on like based tech news, no one can compete with pirate wires. Like there's no, we don't have a competitor in that lane. It's a very specific lane. Like the New York Times could never. And so like you have to go after the giant in those ways and then just grow as best you can from there. But there are going to be a lot of things that just are not covered. and I don't know newspapers basically they were companies that had hard,

defensible lines of distribution. They made money for the most part on advertising. And that advertising was multi-pronged. You had advertisements, you had inserts, you had what was the other huge? Classifies was the other huge one. By the time of the internet, they were already dying. And a lot of the advertising had been cannibalized by television. Once the early internet before social media came, you lost classifieds to

list and search and things like this. And then all you had in the new media landscape in the early 2000s was just straight up advertising. So you needed clicks. That was a total disaster for media and was the beginning of sort of the end of everything. Now what you're seeing are people rebuilding old media companies on the internet essentially, building back lines of distribution separate from social media. They're owning their own distribution via the email. And you're like rebuilding this advertising revenue sort of on top of that in addition to that. But it's just Still, it's like such, with technology as it is, the slice of the pie is much, much, much smaller. And I don't have a lot of good solutions here.

All I can say is that, like, I'm on the front lines, like, in a hard moment, succeeding in a way that is sort of closer to the top of the pack. And it's, like, very difficult to do it. And I'm just hoping that we develop new tools to do it. And I really hope that AI becomes a huge amplification of what we're able to do on smaller teams. I'm really interested in every sort of new tool that comes around. But yeah, it's pretty bad right now. I think the other than that's kind of good with fragmentation, all these different social media things, if that continues, which I would love to see, there's a world in which they just lose the pricing power that they had, which was really, really, really damaging to the whole ecosystem. That kind of gets to the question I want to ask. I wonder if you have a take on, imagine a pendulum between like large conglomerates, media conglomerants, MSNBC, like New York Times. The spectrum here is centralization versus decentralization. If there's a pendulum that is swinging between one and the other, where do you think that pendulum is where you have like large centralized media orgs on one side and then you have like the Elon Musk vision, which is he wants every single Twitter account to become like a citizen journalist. And then you have like people like you and us where you have like pirate wires and bankless. which are like small independent media organizations with like a committed following.

Somewhere in the middle, probably more on the left side. Do you think there's a pendulum and where do you think we are on that and where is it going? I think that there are no real citizen journalists, to be honest. There are people talking and that's enough. That was enough to do the most important thing that social media did, which was throw the curtain back on these huge legacy media institutions and just challenge them fundamentally. like you are telling us things that are not true and you do not have authority over the concept of truth. You are not able to fact check me. Okay. Like your opinion is not more valid than my opinion. That is really important and is provided that the social internet stays free, you have this very important corrective on these other giants. But none of these things are solving the chaotic internet problem. In fact, social media just amplifies it. And so what you're going to have, to have are these smaller groups that are growing. So once everything weirdly modeled off of the New York Times, right? Like we're talking about building up distribution channels and, you know, your own forms of advertising, subscription revenue. You have this new crop of smaller players that are growing and increasingly influential, like you said, in the middle. And I think that they're going to become these really important nodes for sensemaking of the world. Twitter in this chaotic state and all social media really is kind of

chaotic for the average person. They're looking to like, okay, what's this one guy who I like going to send me in my inbox? And that says like everything I need to know that's happening right now. So that will be very important and I think also increasingly lucrative when you have that kind of a relationship with someone that they trust you that much. You'll be able to make a lot of money. And what I'm trying to do with that is like use that money to fund journalism that otherwise would be very difficult. For example, local politics reporting in San Francisco. just straight up like what the fuck is going on type stuff at city hall or with the crime stuff or like the new mayor who's out of Oakland who's super allegedly corrupt like that's what you hopefully

do with that kind of with that kind of um influence and i and i think that i do think that influence is really growing yeah i hope it grows i mean like i'll just tell you it's sort of our story and i don't know if you have any advice for someone who's thinking about like starting an alt like media company maybe the generic advice is like don't do it like be sure you want to like Like David and I's story with bank lists is we kind of like stumbled into this. David was doing a podcast. I was doing like a substack. And we were basically like traditional media is not covering crypto the way it should. Yeah. Right. It's like you see financial media, CNBC and Bloomberg and it's just like reporting on the wrong projects in the wrong ways. Like it's just so like just boomer and out of touch and like not in the weeds. So we sort of just developed this niche and then like a substack turned into, oh, we have some people to like write this newsletter. And that. kind of like grew and we forked off. We like accidentally built, I think, maybe an alt media company. But like this doesn't scale to like hundreds of employees very likely. It's still going to be like David and myself and probably like a small team to just cover our niche better than

anyone else in crypto. I don't know if that's like a scalable model. I see some similarities in pirate wires. And like one thing that's important to us is like we totally have a bias. Like our bias is decentralization values. Like our bias is crypto. And like we're all. unapologetic about that bias. I think that might be an important ingredient. I don't know if you're seeing patterns here. Yeah, bias is really good. Bias is honest. And that's what people clock as, I always say pirate wires is very biased. People are like, this is not objective reporting. I'm like, correct. I've already told me my biases. I'm generally pro business. I'm generally pro tech. When I go after companies like Google, it's because I think that they are damaging those things.

I think that their policies are bad for the country or the industry more broadly, engineers. Like, that's what builds trust. And that is the problem with the 20th century media model is Like once we all got online and started talking to each other, it was like, holy shit, we've been lied to a lot. Well, I feel like they pretend they don't have any biases or some sort of neutrality. Yes, exactly, which is just a lie. That's like the original sin of media of 20th century. It's 20th century. It didn't always used to be like this. But like the idea of the objective journalist is a myth. It's not true. People cannot be objective. They cannot. You cannot even the way that you determine what a good story is or an important story. What is newsworthy, okay? That's your bias. You need the bias to tell you what to come.

cover. Even if you could somehow cover it in a neutral way, I don't even know what that would exactly look like or be. You needed the bias to tell you that it was important. And so to say that you don't have it is just a total lie and everybody knows it's a lie. And that is the power of someone like Joe Rogan, for example, who is just very clear about what he believes and what he's interested in. And that's why people connect to him because they've been lied to for so long. And people who don't lie in that way are going to grow and grow and grow and grow. The danger of that obviously is building up trust and then abusing it, which people will do and probably already have done. these influencers blowing up and then like, you know, buy my token. Go ahead, say it.

Class on how to start a business or whatever. Like that stuff's really gross. But, you know, that kind of stuff has existed forever in the internet. It's just showing you the new version of this scammy kind of guy that has always existed. But yes, I think that we are biased. I think that's really good. I think that is why people like us. I think that it's super narrow when we're able to do it because we both are covering stuff where there are enough people with enough money who care about this thing that it's worth it for them to look at this. I would like to grow beyond what we're currently covering as well, but I'm never going to be able to cover like local politics in Missoula or something. Like that's just, there's no way. I could justify that. Maybe one day.

You know what? Never say never. Who knows? I'll find a way. With AI, right? I mean, maybe make you that little AI reporters embedded in every community. Maybe. Let's end with this question, Mike. This has been really cool. I think we've covered a lot of things, but just one of your values, rather than biases, I'll call it a value, is the United States. And this is an election year. It's a particularly insane election year of 2024. And I guess my question, David and I aren't as like in the weeds in terms of politics, except as it relates to crypto. But like we definitely live here and see what's going on.

Like, is America going to be okay after this election? Do you have any election predictions? I'm not asking who's going to win and who's going to lose, but say that if you want. Like my broader question is like, are we as a country going to be okay? I mean, it depends on what do you mean by okay? Like, are you asking if democracy is going to still exist? Yeah. To me, it's like constitution, democracy and also, like, no civil war would be, like, a good definition

of, like, okay. Who's going to fight in the civil war? Like, let's just start there. Who's fighting in this war? Is it like the sort of angry baristas of San Francisco, fighting the farmers in Napa Valley? Like, that's not happening. What about with the extremes, the left and the right? Will they get further apart, or will we, like, move closer together as society?

Like, can we, like, meld far left and right relations? That's nice. That would be nice to have. Like my question, too, is like, will the republic just hold? You know, like, are we going to be able to just maintain a democracy? I think that we're talking about two democratically elected presidents and everyone is saying that democracy has failed. It's like, well, both of them won their election and it didn't fail. So, like, automatically I'm sort of like, okay, what are we really talking about here? It's just, it's like very hysterical. It's all like super, super, super hysterical. And I think people just need to calm down generally and be a little bit more sober about this. I do think that there are huge problems that are new problems. I think that the weaponization of the court is really scary to me. I think that the sort of distrust of the court, the higher court, the Supreme Court, is really scary to me. Because, like, you have a situation now where people all sort of understand that if you control the Supreme Court, you can just sort of magically do whatever the fuck you want.

and that's like super authoritarian potentially. You know, you have the Democrats talking about packing the court, which is like really horrifying to me. For me, that's like you're taking over the country. You've dissolved the legislative branch at that point. And there are new things. The Supreme Court has never been this distrusted. That's not like the Alvin Brad case was like really crazy to me.

I couldn't believe that that happened. But I still think like the thing about America is it's so goaded in terms of like talent and resources and money. I often wonder like, why are things so stupid here? Like separately from the internet, things are so dumb in so many ways. Like San Francisco is dumb. Like the politics are really, really dumb and the internet didn't do that. Okay. It's like been dumb for a long time. The reason is because we can. Like, we just are so good that like we can fail totally at politics and still we're better than everybody else. So there's not enough external pressure to fix anything right now. That's both good and bad. It's like bad news for New York. infrastructure projects. You're never getting high-speed rail in California, as long as we don't have like some kind of, I don't know, California-specific dictator to do it, which would, I don't know, I'm open to it. But like, we're also, I think democracy is going to exist. And I think the Republican does survive. And it's like, does the Republic survive a Donald Trump presidency? It did. Everything was fine.

I think that people freak out about this stuff. And it's actually fine. I think that there are fewer checks and balances to just pure democracy, which is a problem. Like we're becoming more and more of a sort of I think all of the California-style direct democracy is really bad. You want to be electing representatives and having them legislate. And you want to make sure the courts are not legislating that the courts are litigating what legislators have said. But yeah, I mean, this is a lot. I'm babbling. I think things are going to be fine. I don't think there's definitely not going to be a civil war because where would the lines even be? It's like with your urban core versus the suburbs. That just seems really silly. Yeah, I think things are going to be fine.

I'm glad to hear you say that, Mike, because the civil war would be very bad for our bags. I think over here in crypto, among other things. Well, crypto would boom. It would be boom time for crypto. Yeah, for sure. You need a currency you can trust. Sometimes we wonder if this is a risk-on asset or a risk-off asset or like what it actually is and how it trades. But Mike...

So far, it's been both, but bearish. Yeah, it's been both. It's been both. Mike, this has been great. For bankless listeners, I consider PirateWire is kind of like the bankless of tech. So you guys want to check that out. It's piratewires.com. You can and should subscribe.

There'll be a link in the show notes. This has been great, Mike. Subscribe to the daily. Subscribe to the daily. It's like, so we have the daily brief at bankless. The daily, what's the daily? Give us the pitch for the daily. Three daily takes.

Technology, politics and culture. Nice, all three. Very quick. Everything you need to know. And it's like your portal into the Pyrewire's universe. So do that, guys, as a follow up. I got to end with this, of course. None of this has been financial advice.

That should be obvious. I don't think we recommended the Donald J. Trump token at all. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.