The Pomp Podcast - #1072 Mike Solana On How Woke People Are Destroying America

Episode Date: August 4, 2022

Mike Solana is a Vice President of Founders Fund, the ring leader of Hereticon, and Editor-In-Chief At Pirate Wires. In this conversation, we talk about everything: politics as theater, if the truth exists anymore, why science is no longer science, the changing definitions in society, AOC, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, conspiracy theories such as lab leak & Hunter Biden, and more! Nothing is off limits in this conversation. ======================= Crypto wallets and browser extensions are outdated, limited in features, and don’t meet the needs of today’s Web3 users. Core, the free, non-custodial browser extension built by Ava Labs, is more than just a wallet. Core is packed with features that give Avalanche users a more seamless, and secure, Web3 experience. With Core, any crypto user can easily swap assets, display NFTs in a beautiful interface, and store your assets in a Ledger-enabled wallet. Plus you can put real dollars in your Core wallet in just a few clicks. Go to www.core.app to access the full power of Web3 on Avalanche! ======================= The number one name in NFT domains and the world’s most powerful wallet are teaming up to bring something new to the crypto and Web3 world: The Blockchain.com community can get one, for free by signing up for the waitlist here. Free NFT domains provide all the benefits of premium Unstoppable Domains, including fee-free, lifelong ownership. Don’t have a Blockchain.com wallet? No worries, these new domains are available to everyone for as low as $5. Either sign up for a free blockchain.wallet or visit Unstoppabledomains.com to buy your domain today. ================== Bullish is a powerful new exchange for digital assets that offers deep liquidity, automated market making, and industry-leading security. Combining the innovations of DeFi with the regulated environment of traditional finance, Bullish empowers users to trade with certainty and earn passively at scale across variable market conditions, in an environment backed by multibillion-dollar liquidity contributions from the Bullish Treasury. Visit bullish.com/pomp today to learn more.   Note: Bullish is licensed by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission. Virtual assets and related products are high risk. Consult your investment advisor and trade responsibly. Bullish is available in select locations only and not to U.S persons. Visit bullish.com/legal for important information and risk warnings.  ======================= Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U.S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges.    For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com ======================= BCB Group is the leading payment services partner for the digital assets industry. BCB Group provides payment services in 30+ currencies, FX, cryptocurrency liquidity, digital asset custody and BLINC, which is BCB’s free, instant settlements network for the BCB client ecosystem. Find out more by visiting bcbgroup.com/pomp =======================

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off mike solana is a vice president at founders fund the ringleader of hereticon and editor-in-chief at pirate wires in this conversation mike and i talk about politics as theater does the truth exist anymore, why science isn't science, the changing definitions of society, AOC, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom, lab leak theory, Hunter Biden laptop, and much, much more. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mike. It'll make you think much deeper about culture, the way the world works, how information is flowing in the digital ecosystem, and why you need to be an

independent critical thinker. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope that you guys enjoy it as well. All right, let's get into this episode. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only all right guys i'm here with mike uh i think a great place to start is just what is a pirate wire you you have a publication called pirate wires what the hell's a pirate wire oh man uh so yeah pirate wires is my

media company um a pirate wires is just like it's just sort of have it's it's just sort of how i feel i guess on the internet it's like the i kind of conceive of the internet as this chaotic turbulent ocean and you have the kind of like flagship empire uh these like empire ships kind of patrolling the seas um and it's just like me kind of watching and sending dispatches from the insanity so you're like the somali pirate as the caribbean pirate kirby okay caribbean pirate what is the difference uh i think that the caribbean pirates it's like rum heavy um it's like hidden gold on secret islands pirate coves in beautiful locations is like very much kind of the energy i'm trying to represent not so much the smally uh not trying to like murder and pillage and rape and uh

yeah no it's like a more uh you know it is too it's like the Caribbean pirates are in the past and so we can look back on it with rose-colored glasses and every now and then yeah they were great people they were amazing they were heroes we make also I mean pirates movies that's the American pirate piracy it's like that's like a part of American history as well it's like why you say that? Well, that's how we used to handle, that's how we used to, to, to take care of the British. I mean, this was like a much more dominant power and we used sort of pirate tactics to, uh, navigate a competitor with whom we really had no business competing. They were way bigger, way more powerful, way wealthier. And so you kind of have to be a little bit guerrilla about it.

So America was technically the insurgency. I mean, we were, I think that if you look in hindsight, it's obvious we were always going to win. It's like a resource game. It's the distance. Um, It is the commitment to all of those things. But at the time, it seemed impossible. And do you think, as we've watched the American history play out, other countries have been like, oh, you know, that American Revolution thing, like they had certain tactics, we should just employ them? Or do you think that's us just trying to be privileged people in America, looking at war after war after war and trying to overlay them on top of each other? i mean i think we had a huge impact on the world what i lived uh i was an english teacher in spain

for a little bit after college and one thing i thought was really interesting was how everyone in europe was like they really believed the french revolution happened before the american revolution they genuinely believed this why no idea what like what happened over there education wise but they all they would all talk about this it's not true obviously it's like the american revolution happened first um and google and i and i had a college professor also who used to go on and on about how the american revolution wasn't a real revolution and he talked about the french revolution as being a real revolution as like presenting fundamental change and blah blah blah blah uh but but of course it's all bullshit the american revolution was we had an intellectual

revolution in which we sort of decided that the concept of the divine monarch was stupid and we got rid of it completely. Why did he inalienable rights of people right there in, in, in, in the piece? I guess the idea is that like we've, a lot of our, our sort of concept of rights is, is derived from British law, but, um, but I mean the French had a concept of rights as well. It's, it's, we were the first country that had a real revolution of the people. Yeah. Why did he think the french revolution was a real revolution i think because he sees i mean his framing was that it was a fundamentally different government and perhaps ours was not ours was was was closer to the parliament system or something i don't know it's a lot of coat man i think that i think that

mostly what people want to do is is eat away at the idea that there's something special about America. And, um, and it's silly because that's the path for them to calamity. I mean, there is something special about America. I don't actually think America can be replicated anywhere else. I don't think I used to think it was just a matter of philosophy. There are people like Peter Zahan who think it's just a matter of geography. I think it's somewhere in the middle, but we are special. It's a, we're a, we're a special place where we're protected by two oceans. We have two neighbors, both of them peaceful with us. Most of that does come down to geography. It's like a hard place to invade from and into. We have abundant natural resources. We have inherited a history of rights

from Britain that we then kind of made more libertarian and extremely pro-individual and pro-freedom. And we have just an incredible amount of capital that we're sort of riding forward with. We're in an amazing position. It is hard to replicate this country. We obviously just saw Russia invade Ukraine. It's almost impossible to believe that Mexico would invade America or Canada would invade America. Right. Like it, I don't even think there's anyone who would say that with a straight face and be like, yes, I think this could happen. Well, no. And I mean, it's also, it's, I don't, are there any more, there's no more peaceful border than the Canadian U S border in the world. I think Mexico, yeah, we have this immigration

problem, but even with that, it's still not a super patrolled border. I mean, that's part of the problem. Uh, we have, they're just, we have really, we have really strong relationships with both countries and they're strong trade partners. They are ideologically very close to us. Um, especially Canada, obviously we're within the Anglosphere. Uh, yeah, there's just really nothing like America. The Mexico border is an interesting place to start to dive into the insanity of the world. Uh, obviously we had Donald Trump who was going to build a wall. And, uh, in some ways it was a proxy, a simple statement that just said, Hey, we want better border security. Right. But build a wall. It's a much better meme. Uh, it really gets people

jazzed up well i think what i loved about it is when you say no to it you you have to you have to answer the question of like well why why don't you want why don't you want the the wall and you either say because it's not going to work in which case you're admitting that we need to stop this sort of like free flow of illegal immigration from uh south america or you say uh because i don't believe in the concept. And I mean, the entire left has really gotten to a place. The idea that we should have open borders was a pretty radical idea that was strongly libertarian. It was not leftist. It was, I mean, Bernie Sanders was anti-immigration because of labor. Libertarians were open borders. It was a Koch brothers thing. That has completely changed. The Democratic Party

has more or less, in rhetoric at least, adopted the language of libertarians on things like immigration. And then in practice, it's more complicated because I guess, I mean, these sort of both major parties have less of a, of a hard time lying libertarians to their detriment, love to be sort of principled and honest, um, no matter what to a fault. Why do you say that, uh, the Democrats have kind of almost taken over or infiltrated the like open border movement? What, what is their argument? I think it like happened to them. I think that wokeness is like a pretty chaotic crazy almost religious movement that i mean it reminds i don't know if you've ever seen have you watched game of thrones okay well there's uh this sort of evil queen who i love her name's

cersei um i'm not surprised you love game of thrones she's the illegitimate ruler of of king's landing uh and she has to fend off the new young guns and to do this she invokes a growing religion She goes to a religious leader. He's like this very like austere, like Jesus-looking kind of guy. No beard, but like barefoot, walks around everywhere, pro-poverty. It's like Adam Neumann just a couple centuries ago. Yes, a little shaved down, a little more – like a little older, shorter hair, but very Adam Neumann-esque. And she aligns with it because it's powerful, and she uses it to destroy her enemies.

But then it comes after her, and it's like, no, you're impure. And it just burns – it sort of like burns that world of power down and I think that's what the Democrats did. The average person is not woke. The average person I think looks at this stuff and is like, this is crazy and regressive and why are we reducing people to things like their race and gender? It seems wrong. It seems like the opposite of everything that we worked against for all these decades. But it was powerful and young people loved it and it was deranged. and it felt like you had the grassroots energy on your side.

And so people tapped into it and now it's consuming everything. And if you notice now, really where wokeness is striking is on the left. It doesn't, people on the right, I mean, if you're working for Disney, maybe you're going to get canceled. But the average person on the,

if you're purely in politics, you have nothing to worry about. If you're media, it's like maybe you get canceled, but then you start a sub stack or you work for someone who has their own, who has their own sort of budding media company. The game is social media. And unless you get canceled on social media,

you still have your followers and in fact when people try to cancel you and you say fuck off you just become more popular so i mean unless you're like sort of left of center let's go to this idea of like the woke is uh equivalent of a religion right so i think most people think of that as like oh religion is declining in america and uh there's now these like ideologies that have replaced it or at least tangentially kind of risen as religion has declined um but what you're making argument is less about like the uh kind of the congregation you're making the argument that like no the politicians are the priest right like they're the ones who are saying hey human nature is that you want to party and have sex and like curse but jesus in the bible

says you shouldn't do that and so like hold back on your inhibitions right and like be a man or woman of god the politicians essentially or the leaders of the woke movement are almost saying hey, you all don't want to view the world this way, but like this is the pure or ethical way to view things. Right. I mean, first of all, I don't think the political leaders are actually the priests. I think that it's all, it's like academia is where it started.

It's mostly professor oriented. This is why these people are also obsessed with like forgiving college debt and getting everybody into college, even though it increasingly is increasingly obvious that the meme of, if you go to college, you're going to do better than someone who doesn't is incorrect. act in, in most cases of, uh, of the liberal arts that are so, so you go and get a gender studies degree. Um, and you're now a hundred thousand dollars in debt cause you went to a pretty good

school, but you kind of like squeaked your way in. Is that, is that better than not going to college and becoming a plumber? Of course not. It's just insane. That doesn't make any sense at all. Um, why the, why are people so, so determined to get every kid in college, regardless of what they're studying um regardless of how well it's setting them up for their future they don't care about that they just want them in the machine because it's it's a it's a religious indoctrination campus that's what it is now that's what all of college is it's bled out and so now you have it's like how do we appease the academics in the first place but now increasingly you have this sort of class of activists these people who are and social media allows this i mean you can you can eke a

living out of it um some people are better than others sean king is really good uh i don't know I don't know if you've read about his $40,000 dog he just bought with the funds from his activists. Tell me about this guy because I saw an article one time, and I have no clue if this is true or not, but let's just dive right into the shit, that they basically were like he literally changed his appearance and everything to like more aligned. I am not touching this, but I mean, we'll talk about what the controversy is. I mean, we're talking about a man who many people think is a white man pretending to be a black man. I don't know that that is something that I would say. I will say that black Twitter loves to tease him about it. I mean, if you go online, anytime there's a Sean King controversy,

it's usually like black Twitter that's merciless. And this is because he's gotten a lot of criticism from especially black women for like stealing funds and things like this. Just Google it. I'm not an expert in the Sean King discourse. I'm sort of a casual observer every now and then I dip in. But, I mean, they call him things like Talcum X. And, I mean, there's like a whole litany of like insane things that they say.

but he's really powerful. He's really influential. He, I think, what was it? Maybe it was Rihanna did some kind of video with him not too long ago. And this is what always sets people off. It's other activists who are angry at the opportunities that he's receiving.

So is it a level of jealousy, envy, something like that? I think part of it's that. To be fair to Sean King, which I hate doing, he does seem actually committed to the cause of sort of, uh, he really believes in the like police brutality stuff. And, um, that's, I mean, a big part of what he talks about, but he's gotten famous because of it and he's made money off of it and he gets incredible opportunities because of it. And I think people see that as in some way, um, lacking integrity because, I mean, to go back to our

model for religion is Christianity and that is austere and you know, you're, it's nothing about the physical world matters. You, everything you're doing is for the sort of next world. You're, you're working towards that. And, uh, and this is mapping to that in some way. And so if you're making a lot of money and you're really successful and you've got all these sort of like worldly riches because of your sort of, you're like goodness, then it's how good is it really? Like, I mean, are you, are you really an activist or, um, or do you just play one on Twitter? My playbook now is like drive a bunch of attention and then figure out a way to monetize the attention. And we're watching this.

There's obviously the woke component. There's a Sean King. There's also – you can go through the right. You can go through kind of all the different causes. And like there seems to be – if you throw out an issue, we could all think of like the one person on social media who's like hung their hat on that thing and ends up building up a huge audience and then like figures out a way to monetize it. I think it's like, I don't even think people realize what they're doing online. I mean, it's a really chaotic place because of the incentives and the incentives on social media are all, they're all towards either the novelty or the extreme, because that's

what drives attention. You want to get attention. You want likes and clicks, you know, retweets, you want followers. And the way that you get that spotlight is, is by doing something that no one else is doing. I think the average person, I think most people, myself included you live on these platforms and over time you kind of internalize the rules

you have a sense of them, you can feel it like when a tweet's not doing well immediately, if you have enough followers and you have an expectation of a certain kind of engagement you can feel pretty much within the first minute whether or not something's working or not and at that point I think that it's just behavioral therapy This is how behavior therapy works, positive reinforcement.

When you don't get that hit, you discard that tactic. And when you do get that positive hit, you keep up with that tactic. You dig in deeper, stronger. It takes a lot to guard against that kind of stuff and to try and be honest with yourself and to say the things that you want to say with your platform. Most people aren't even thinking about this stuff. They're just naturally sort of guided. It's Marshall McLuhan talking about the medium as the message.

The medium that we exist inside of shapes the kinds of stuff that we talk about, the way that we talk about. The things that we talk about, the way that we talk about them, this is very much I think what we're seeing all across social media. And every platform is going to be a little bit different, whether it's short form words or video or whatever else. They all have their own rules and so naturally you're going to see a certain kind of content in each. And with the activists, for sure, I think that's what's happening. I think that people are gravitating towards the extreme because that is what's rewarded or, or the, the, the extreme, the bizarre, um, the sort of, uh, the controversial, um, all of those things. Is this why like Donald Trump and AOC are the same person? Yes.

Right. Like they, they, they employed the same tactics on two different ends. They live on, uh, I wouldn't say, I don't really see Donald Trump as classically ultra right. I mean people like to call him a fascist. No, he was a Democrat and he said that if he would just run as a Republican. I see him as more – like I see AOC on the far left for sure. I see Trump as an outlier kind of – I once referred – right after the January 6th, I referred to him as the most sort of successful clown in human history. And I mean that like in almost a positive sense.

Like I think that he is the court jester and he did the clownish – most clownish thing possible, which is he won the presidency and then we had a clown on the throne throwing eggs at the court for four years and it was crazy. He threw the curtain back. It was entertaining as fuck. And it threw the – it did what a clown is supposed to do. He threw the curtain back and we saw how things really worked and he threw the curtain back of power. He threw the curtain of power backwards. we saw the the machinery um behind it all and uh and then he laughed and and we laughed and um and is this why like the reason i say so it was so entertaining was regardless of you right

left independent anywhere in between uh even the media companies like they literally could not look away it was just obsessed it was the greatest show on earth yeah if you put donald trump's name in a headline viral well he's an entertainer and so of course of course america i mean given the mediums that are dominant would ultimately elect a really sort of savant level entertainer. Donald Trump has an intuitive sense of crowds. He is funny. I think that this is one of the biggest mistakes Democrats made was they would, they would meet him. He would say something and they would be like, he's so angry. He's filled with so much hate. And it's just obviously not true. He's laughing all the time. He's, he's having fun. And, and if you can't, if you can't acknowledge that

he's telling jokes and that they're, they're landing, then you can't fight with him because he's playing a different game than you are. You have to be at least as funny as you have to at least have a sense of humor or you're just never going to survive in a fight with Trump. Yeah. Scott Adams wrote a whole book and he basically talks about the two moments that everyone should have known like hey this it's over uh was one uh on the um uh kind of logo uh or uh uh the mantra mission whatever you want to call it uh supposedly hillary clinton ran like 100 plus tests on what it was her uh slogan gonna be and so it ended up coming together like stronger together right which is like very politician yeah uh and i'm sure that they ran the test and they got the data and

like okay this is this is it and then the way the story is told is that supposedly trump just walks in a room like hey we need a slogan he was like uh make america great again yeah right and you know obviously borrowed it from the past or whatever but like intuition is you know kind of the the takeaway from that story of like he really understood kind of what would play and then the second one was uh in the debate i think it's megan kelly uh who is uh uh asking questions and uh said something about you know you've previously called women xyz whatever and he's like nope only rosie o'donnell and like again to your point it scott basically lays out the argument he's like it's a lose lose if you lean into it you're an asshole you're a misogynist you're like all the stuff if

you back away you're weak you're like whatever it's like a very very smart question to ask him because it basically was lose lose he sidestepped it right in a way that only an entertainer probably could do it i think a lot of what people reacted to with trump was just it was how he said things and it was it was they clocked him as fundamentally unserious in competition for what they perceived as the most serious uh institute seat of power in on the planet and um and that's actually what drove them crazy it wasn't any of his positions it wasn't um it wasn't his lack of respect for them or anything else it was it was that he was jarring it was like uh he can't have this someone like him can't be here it challenges their entire worldview it challenged their it challenged my

worldview um always i was i mean i'd be lying if i said i thought he was going to win i thought it was impossible myself i'm not for me i wasn't like i found that whole election pretty disorienting that was the beginning i think of 2016 well 2015 is when it all kind of began and then 2016 for sure is like when the world felt this was in this period of time where it's sort of like every year felt crazier and crazier until 2020 and then we got a pandemic and like a race war it was like insane just built and built and built and built but that was the beginning of the the sort of unraveling of the kind of like 20th century america like 90s america the early 2000s america even after september 11th there was this sense that history was going to if the future was going

to look like this forever it was going to be this very static suburban type american world and everything was going to be basically the same and then everything started changing and and i was i it even while predicting that things were going to change i somehow wasn't prepared to see them start yeah start changing i have this theory uh i can't put a date like there's no like hey it was you know august 1st or whatever uh but somewhere around that time frame uh my belief is that that's when america went online it's the first it's like okay the transition happened we're like yes the internet was built before in the you know 15 20 years beforehand and we're laying the infrastructure consumer behaviors were changing companies were being built like all the stuff but somewhere in

the mid 2010s 14 15 16 somewhere in there yeah it was like oh shit the internet matters more it was mobile penetration yeah it was everyone had an iphone and so everyone now was walking around with the internet yes and that was that you know you might have dipped in before and checked your email but now you're living inside of it and so the rules of the internet begin to shape the way that you think about the world donald trump was the first twitter press he was Twitter, he is, Twitter is the reason that he's the president. Correct. And, um, AOC is in the same, it's the same exact mold. These are social media candidates and we are a social media country. Um, you know, people spend hours a day on social media in America. I think it's like

200 million plus people, uh, on Facebook, probably even more at this point on Facebook. I just saw that TikTok was at a hundred million. Um, people were spending on TikTok like two to three, maybe four hours a day. Uh, it's Facebook two hours a day, Instagram two hours a day, like YouTube two hours a day, that is our reality to a certain extent. Zuckerberg talks about meta a lot and it's kind of weird, it seems, to change the name of your company to be a thing that doesn't yet exist, right? Like you have this very successful company and now you're saying, no, we're meta now. Meta is a reference to the metaverse, a virtual reality, a world of virtual reality that we're going to kind of go into with our Oculus Rifts and walk around and it's very reminiscent of,

it's literally from a snow crash. And the idea of that, of kind of changing everything to be a thing that doesn't exist, changing your whole, your, your whole brand to, to, to be the metaverse.

It seems weird until you sort of reflect and realize that we're already living in it. We're already there. That's it. It's just, it's a less, it's not a, it's,

it's a less perfect version of it. It doesn't look the way that it looked like in sci-fi movies, but yeah, we're there. I mean, we're all, even with dating, right? Like we're all, the idea of like, are you dating online? Everyone's dating online, whether or not they're on the apps because you meet someone and you Google them and you go to their social media presence and you're sort of, you're dating online. That it's like, it's a very, it's changed every aspect of human culture.

This has changed. imagine a 1990s movie where they were like you know tom cruise sitting there with his with his gloves on and he was swiping through women right and like oh no this one this is the one that i want to talk to like people would be like uh i don't is this okay to like publish right and now every single person does that on their phone every single day who's looking for someone in a city yeah it's why we it's funny that that still somehow is not making it into our movies and television we don't we don't like the way that it looks and that's weird i don't know that we've ever seen something like that i think about the way that uh when you dream no one dreams of their

iphone that doesn't seem like why that's crazy for something that you walk around with every day and think about and if you're missing it for a minute you're like shit where's my phone i lost my phone you panic a little bit because you're addicted to it um why isn't it in our dreams that's just it's like very that i don't have an answer for that's just a question why do you think it's not there i have no idea i have absolutely no idea it's but it's a bizarre i don't understand that um i do think that people feel a little bit trapped by this stuff younger people especially who spend more of their time on it um they seem screwed to me like i i grew up i think we're about the same age i grew up and like people started getting cell phones in high school

yeah right and uh my mom was like very much hey you're gonna get one later than everyone else back when cell phones were just cell phones they were just like the razor huge text as well huge deal when somebody got the razor right like oh shit you're whatever and then the sidekick you could slide it open and here's the nokia that snake on it yeah right so there's like three or four phones that if you grew up in this general time frame like once everyone got one it was like cool thing uh but like you texted barely because it was t9 so you had to like click through everything pain in the ass uh and you made phone calls and like that was it but if we grew up and like every time you did anything in high school and even in college and everyone whipped out their

phone like they were the paparazzi like it'd be a lot more people i remember when i was in high school a kid created a message board for it was we there were three high schools in my town and this kid at one of our rival high schools created a message board for all of the local high schools where kids could go and just talk to each other and it created such tremendous drama that they, I don't even know how this is legal, but they forced them to shut it down and it was just, it was like,

I mean, we're talking about like months and months and months of buildup, of dramatic buildup before finally it ended and now we live in a world where that's just, you can't shut it down. That's how we live. Well, you think like how early kids get cell phones now. If you're 12, 14 years old and you get a cell phone, you're on TikTok and you're on Instagram, you're screwed.

Your entire view of the world is warped. I keep looking for it. I mean, there are trade-offs always, it seems, in technology. I think that what I was not prepared for, something that I was wrong about, when social media first bubbled up, I was very much a tech, a blind tech op. Not blind, but I thought everything was better. Everything was getting better. Everything was better than it was. everything was getting better. Um, I had no, I just didn't, I thought that, that all warnings

of social media and whatnot, I thought, I thought it was all just, um, propaganda, anti, anti business, anti-tech propaganda. Um, none of the predictions were right. They were, they were all like, it's going to, it's, it's terrible in ways that, and it's not, that was not right, but there were negative externalities and there are negative externalities probably in every technological development um you think it changes people's brain chemistry i think that when you change the reward structure in your life it's changing your it's changing you fundamentally yeah you're definitely changing um i don't know if it like physically changes your brain i'm not a not a brain guy but um you gotta bring in a neuroscientist i think for this conversation you don't have to be

a brain guy but i know that tom cruise was calling it out way before everyone else and he was right about everything this episode is brought to you by ftx us they're the safe regulated way to buy and sell bitcoin and other digital assets trade crypto with up to 85 lower fees than the top competitors there are no fixed minimums no ach transaction fees and no withdrawal fees download the ftx app today and use referral code pomp to earn free crypto on every trade over ten dollars the more you trade the more you earn go download the ftx app today and use referral code pomp This episode is brought to you by BCB Group. With a dedicated focus on institutional payment services,

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BCB's vision is to empower the global financial revolution through sustainable and innovative banking. Find out more by visiting bcbgroup.com slash pomp today. bcbgroup.com slash pomp. This is it. This is, I mean, this is, Tom Cruise is really, I wrote about this in Pirate, so in a piece called Dark Plots and Secret Explanations

in, uh, in pirate wires, I wrote about Tom Cruise. I, I, this is how I, this is like part of my processes. Um, you know, I'm sort of, we used to say surf the web. It was such a great phrase. And that, that is kind of, I'm out there. I'm like Caribbean pirate versus Somali prior, right. It's like, you can go on the internet or you could surf the web. Yeah. I'm surfing, I'm cruising, I'm chill. I'm on my little, I'm on my pirate ship, just like chilling out, like, like laughing looking at all the insanity and then every now and then um something happens that feels like it represents a lot more and tom cruise in 2005 um appeared on the today show to talk about war of the worlds which i just assumed bombed no it was one of the most popular

movies ever it was his most popular movie until for the last 15 years huge box office success until now, until the newest Top Gun movie. 2005, he appears on the Today Show with Matt Lauer. And this is in this sort of moment in which he's been framed as pretty crazy by the media and America. I mean, I thought he was, everyone thought he was crazy. Scientology.

I think I was, yeah, I was in college. And I mean, talking about crazy Tom Cruise was a thing that people did. Yeah, Scientology was there, but also he had just a month prior to this interview with Matt Lauer, he jumped up on a couch on the Oprah show and talked about how much he loved Katie Holmes. Um, and in hindsight, I look back, I'm like, I watched the interview and he just looks like he's being like a crazy actor guy. I didn't, it doesn't seem unhinged to

me. I mean, I think, I think part of that's because there's so much unhinged behavior around us now that I look back at that and I'm like, that's just a guy. That's just, that's just what they do. That's just like how we all do it now. Um, but he is in, he's on his sort of like tour of crazy and uh so he goes on the today show he talks about world the world's for like five minutes and matt lauer is like cool so you you said i forget the actress's name um you sort of criticized her for being on antidepressant medicine and um that's messed up they like respond before the national the entire nation which is wild that that's what they used to do right like crazy what do you think yeah yeah like you're here i mean that's even to this day i mean

it's always your movie or your book is just an excuse to get you on the show and then it's like Now tell me about your personal life. But Tom Cruise's personal life was a little more interesting at that point because of the Scientology stuff, because of his new bride. Was she like coerced into marrying him? I mean there are all sorts of crazy rumors. And he had these really extreme views about psychology or psychiatry, which is that it is pseudoscientific bullshit. it um and he just said you know there's absolutely no scientific evidence um supporting the notion that depression is caused the root of depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain um which at

the time was accepted scientific here's the thing it wasn't okay like everyone said that and that was the accepted thing it was you are crazy how dare you say this unbelievable but what just happens. So this, this interview resurfaced where he, in which he says, you know, there's no evidence for this. And then, I mean, there are endless articles about how crazy he is, how dangerous this was. The study comes out, an umbrella review of all of the studies on this subject over the last, you know, several decades. And what it concludes is not that depression isn't caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. We don't know what causes depression. What, what the conclusion that we have is that there's no evidence for that and there hasn't ever been

and that's it was a huge deal everyone was like wait a minute tom cruise clip resurfaces from 15 years ago 17 years ago uh and suddenly we have this weird conversation about experts and what i thought i mean this is my this is my jam i love to write about this kind of stuff in the contemporary world like i love to talk about when the experts are wrong and some random asshole on Reddit was right. But this struck me as different because the conversation on looking back, I remembered it as being crazy. I remembered him seeming crazy and rude. And it was like this wild thing. If you watch the interview now, it's so calm and normal. And Tom is definitely like, you need to educate yourself to Matt Lauer, which is accurate. But he wasn't crazy. He wasn't

yelling he he wasn't uh he wasn't saying anything that was completely untethered from reality it was a very regular sort of conversation about studies that he had read and um i and was shocking to me to realize the treatment of him back then as compared to the world we live in now because we have this sense that the entire world is like uniquely hostile to dissent you know everyone's constantly talking about cancel culture i myself am talking about this kind of stuff you know uh there's all this sort of pressure from the establishment to silence the voices of dissent uh they're using social media platforms to do this i believe that all of this is true but culturally actually things are much more open to dissent now than they were 17 years ago

um i mean i just didn't i didn't realize that the culture has changed uh in a huge way and um the Tom Cruise's of the world are now completely normalized. There are any number of them. This is sort of that, this is sort of, uh, the, the legacy of Tom Cruise. I've seen, I've seen, uh, Brett Weinstein and a couple of other folks kind of talk, uh, in certain situations where like, look, a lot of the scientific studies or the consensus view, and maybe even like the virtue signaling that comes out of some of those communities. Uh, a lot of times it's based on like, Hey, we ran some studies and, uh, we don't know what the answer is. Like it must be this other thing it must be a chemical imbalance in the brain right yes we don't have evidence but

like we've tried all these other things like what else could it be when also it just worked so that so the drugs do seem to i don't want to say that the drugs don't work right like like it does seem for many people the drugs do help um the drugs are a chemical and so you must be missing some chemical or something right it's like yeah you just it's like process of elimination without the actual confirmation of a of a scientific study that proves yes this is true i think we also just have this really wrong belief that we know everything we even know most things the idea that you go into the doctor and the doctor is just going to know what's wrong with you you internalize that as little kid is like that's the way the world works we know most things we

have medicine and you take a pill and then your bad thing goes away and i mean as i've gotten older i don't know about you but like i've been to the doctor a couple of times where they don't know what's wrong with me it's not a huge thing but it's like this is disorienting what do you you don't know uh and then i even had one case where i mean we tried a few different drugs and like nothing really worked and multiple tests multiple doctors and you know i'm fine now this was years ago but that was a a really shocking moment for me it it was like yeah again i rationally i understand that these people are not gods and uh there are lots of things that they don't know and they're not perfect there are lots of things that we as a people don't know but

emotionally, I think I'm still carrying that sort of childhood sense of, of like, these are the people in charge and they know stuff and they're the good ones. And we have to listen to them. Like that's still in my gut and it's hard to shake. Um, and you have to shake it because it's not true. Like there are all sorts of things that we don't know. I would say we don't know most things. And, uh, I mean, I was at a doctor a couple of years ago where he was trying to figure out what I had. I suggested something and he was like, Hmm, uh, I've never actually, uh, I've never seen that before. So I'm gonna do some research and get back to you. And I'm like, do you mean like, like you're going to Google it? And he said, yes. I was like, what? That's crazy. Why am I

here? It was, it was just insane to me. Um, but that's, that's, you know, that's most experts. Uh, my brother is a doctor. And so I've seen him and kind of his classmates and everything over the years, uh, through the process. And, uh, my brother's obviously incredibly intelligent. Um, Um, and I always ask him as like a gut check on like the healthcare system, like, Hey, evaluate like people you come in contact with and like the hospitals or the doctors or whatever. And he's like, well, it's like everything, you know, like there's some incredibly intelligent, like I trust them with my life. There's other people. You couldn't pay me to go see them. Right. And so like you get the dispersion. And I think this is where you end up, uh, uh, even if

you look like here in Miami, like, um, uh, there's certain healthcare facilities that people are like this is amazing right like everyone should go here and there's other ones where literally it's like oh everyone that goes there dies right and like when you think about you're like holy shit but that's not unique to any geography like if you go to especially in small towns yeah if you go like people are just they don't have confidence right and it's because of these experiences where they're talking to a doctor and doctor doesn't know the answer or they believe that something there's medical treatment and uh there was wrong decisions made and there was a bad outcome whether it's you know unfortunately death or you know something less severe but you

start realizing you're like nobody it's not that nobody knows nothing it's just that like the level of expertise that we assign in many different fields is nowhere near what in our minds we hope it is yeah and i think the big difference between today and 20 years ago is now people are just logging onto the internet and disproving things that the experts are telling them uh i think what you're saying is right there are people who are just very smart and very competent and probably should be in charge. Great. Love it. Would love for them to actually be in charge. The problem is that we're a huge country and we need a lot of doctors and we need a lot of government officials and we need a lot of, uh, you know, people working in business or what, I mean, every,

every sort of aspect of the society, you know, you need a lot of people. Um, most people are not that good. And so you're going to have a lot of experiences with people who, who suck. And every time you do, and then you go and you prove that they're wrong yourself, it chips away at this idea that there are people in charge and that they are good and that makes you feel sort of ungrounded like untethered to the world like you feel nervous

like you're living in a world of chaos that is I think it's a very internet kind of phenomena there was this AP article that came out dark plots it was just like more Americans are believing in conspiracy theories dark plots and secret explanations And they go into this very sort of breathless warning about what's going on. And they say, you know, like more than ever, Americans are turning away from scientific experts and government officials and the media.

And basically they're turning to the internet to talk to these like crackpot, crazy Alex Jones types people. Well, in the first place, like Alex Jones has been wrong about stuff, but he's also been right about some stuff. And eventually America is going to have to deal with that. Um, in the second, what I was more interested in was this concept they can't let go of, which is that they are in some way deserving of authority after years of proving that they are not, um, that, that is over the world in which we all just blindly follow along with the hegemony of the sort of like hegemonic media powers. Um, that's just, it's gone.

and the ship has sailed, what's going to happen increasingly is people are going to be interested in looking for single individuals who they trust to help them make sense of the chaos. This is the success of Joe Rogan. This is really what he does. He's fun, people connect with him personally, and then he's on air fact-checking things and navigating complicated topics that are interesting with a guest.

and he's sort of like getting to the bottom of stuff, which is how we all feel. It's every scary thing that happens in the world that actually affects our lives. So COVID was a great example of this where you have to get to the bottom of it and you can't trust the people who are telling you shit because you keep catching them in lies.

So where do you go? And you go to the internet and you start Googling around and you find some crazy person who's telling you it's like a microchip, the vaccine's a microchip by Bill Gates or whatever. And then you talk, you see someone who's maybe like, okay, it's probably not a microchip, but here's what the studies that I've read and here's what I think. And I mean, that's, that's the future is we've got to, we're going to, we're going to be

finding for better or worse. I'm not saying this is better. This is just, this is the world that we're heading towards. I'm writing a piece right now. I'm going to publish it before this comes out. I'm pretty sure called digital osmosis theory. And the entire idea is that in the analog world, we trusted institutions and experts. And when we moved online, there was literally osmosis. Like we went from high density of where we perceived knowledge and kind of value, and it has migrated and transitioned to now this decentralized internet of information where if you have a topic, whether it's COVID or anything else, and you ask the average American, do you trust the institution or do you trust what you can find on the internet? more and more people are picking the internet over the institution and some of it is because over time they've lost faith or trust because they've seen the mistakes but also the amount of value and quality on the internet has skyrocketed because now all of a sudden i don't

know during covid like there are a lot of people on there i was like oh you're the head of you know viral studies at whatever university like i like the fact that i can read what you think right Rather than have somebody else try to just publish it in the New York Times. All of the answers that we actually, that people, that we have, like every true thing that exists, that is known and exists, is online. The problem is just navigating all of that information. There's too much of it. We have an overwhelming amount of information

that you'll never be able to navigate. And most of it is just crazy, like made up stuff and just political. There's propaganda everywhere. Everyone does it, I think, without even realizing it. People sort of spin things and frame things in certain ways that end up being misleading. So the problem is search.

There's no technological tool right now to help us with this. So people are just going to fall back on what they've done for thousands of years, which is they ask the person who seems to like care the most about the news, what's going on. That's like always what it is. Even in elections, this has always been the case in our lives.

There's like one person or two in a friend group that are actually paying attention. And come election time, everyone's like, yo, so who are you voting for? What's going on? What should I care about? I get this all the time.

Like in San Francisco- Are you their friend? For local politics, I am that friend. People come to me and it's, I'm like, yeah, here's everything that I think. But here's what you should read also.

Like, I mean, here's where the people are talking about it. Here's where these dramas are happening, but people don't, they don't pay attention. I don't blame them. It's a nightmare way to live. Um, being so like super plugged in when we were kids, uh, and growing up, uh, there's a lot of like scary things online or, or whatever you would like find a headline somewhere. You'd be like, wow, that's kind of crazy. Whatever.

Now, I don't think that we're really, that's shocked by the headlines. Cause it's kind of, uh, we've seen so many shocking headlines, like, you know, Trump tweeted at uh um uh the north korean uh government essentially and was like literally like little rocket man yeah right and like again going back to like this like almost you can't believe is real but here we are um but now what i find the scariest or like the most shocking is not the headlines it's like when you go read the source material because one of two things happens either you read the source material you're like whoa this is a ridiculously big deal like i can't believe they said you know abc whatever or it's you read the source material and you look back at the headline

and you're like it's mostly that like like how did this headline come out of this piece of source material it's mostly like a weird study of 10 if it's a medical thing it's like you know 60 people were studied and it's not conclusive and the headlines like you know diabetes is caused by rare fungus found on french fries from mcdonald's or something insane and it's like it's not accurate it is is accurate it's like just accurate enough to not be sued in america which in a country which is a country where it is like famously difficult to be sued for saying stupid shit um like that's that's the kind of media dynamic there's a thing in the uh in the bitcoin community um there's a study uh that happened in nigeria it's self-reported and they surveyed i think it's like a thousand to

four thousand uh nigerians uh and they asked them how many of you have used or hold bitcoin cryptocurrencies and the claim of the study is 32 of nigerians use crypto and so like doesn't take that long to quickly figure out okay there's like 200 plus million people in nigeria yeah it's growing at a pace where by 2050 there'll be more nigerians than americans and so that's like a big number you don't even have to be a mathematician right you just know tens of millions of people and then you look and you're like but the estimate is that there's like 150 million people globally that use the technologies and you're like so a third of all the people are nigerian are nigerian like something seems off and i'm gonna go with the

sampling of a thousand to four thousand people yeah has like the the error here uh and so like by the way like directionally is probably correct right so you can say like okay there's high internet penetration mobile phone penetration like they have a failing currency like yes it probably does have a higher than normal uh penetration use of the technology i wouldn't hang my hat on the 32% being like the number. And it feels like if that's happening in a study that frankly doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of like your health, my health, uh, the way we live our lives, whatever, like what's happening in like the medical environment, what's happening in these other areas. I think so this process that you're going through right here, I mean,

this is any time that you want to understand something, this is the way that you do it. And it's usually like you talk to a friend about it, you read the headline, you dig in a little bit. My friend, uh, uh, and colleague, Aaron Gleason at Founders Funds, she runs PR. Like we always are talking about stories together and it's like back in the day there were the diversity studies and it was it was stuff like um that had to do with uh uh disparity in in gender pay and things like this and and so the article would come out with some like really wild headline about women making like a like 30 less than men or something and you'd be like wait like what what actually is happening here and that's when we both got in the habit of really this was like

back in 2017 when i think uh me too was happening and um just clicking into every single study reading exactly what people were talking about but that that process is increasingly normalized across across the culture it's like you have two options either be a detective or just don't know what's going on and i think a lot of people are fine most people are fine just not know it's not knowing uh what's going on but they do want to know someone who's a detective and they want to be able to dip in uh or do they want to be able to check in with that person and be like hey did you see this crazy headline that can't be real is that real um and then that detective puts on their little detective hat and answers the questions for them but i think like so there's

some topics for sure right san francisco politics perfect example like it's a thing that people in san francisco really care about maybe there's some other folks who are like you see san francisco as like uh the city on the hill for woke politics and like does this experiment work or not or whatever and so like there's some group of people who care but like in the grand scheme of the seven plus billion people in the world like nobody really cares right so you from a time investment standpoint uh you do want to have that friend right but then there's like what i'll call the normalization of like the conspiracy theories right that's now entering the mainstream conversation And so, uh, let's use, you know, the administration, uh, the white house, uh, recently came out

and was like, a recession is not two quarters of negative GDP growth. Yeah. And you're like, okay, uh, I don't think that's right, but let me go to the internet. Right. And kind of, you start the detective process. And what you find is like, there was, uh, uh, the first question I had was like, okay, cool. What is the definition?

Yeah. And then the answer was basically like, oh, there's like this organization, uh, the national bureau of economic research. You're like, sounds made up, but okay. uh and they're like and they just tell us when there's a recession and you're like well what's their criteria right and then it's like well we look at a confluence of factors and they list like 20 different things and they're like it's fives yeah and then we just like we'll tell you when there's a recession and you're like okay so like basically the definition of a recession is no

longer two consecutive negative gdp quarters it's now like when these people say it's a recession it's a recession okay who works there right like like you start like going down and you like end up in a real bad place very quickly and like the trust in institutions like falls off a cliff but you're like all right fine whatever whether it's labeled a recession or not at the end of the day like small businesses big businesses investors consumers whatever they're gonna like act how they psychologically feel the the economy so kind of vibes right but then they go on national television and they're like not only is it not a recession but like it's never been a recession yeah right and like they like double and triple and quadruple down and like to some journalist

credit like some people are like uh i have a question right and they ask other journalists are just like oh we're actually just pr like we're just going to regurgitate the state talking points whatever but then you get on twitter and twitter is uh the super bowl of internet detectives oh yeah what's war it's information the whole culture is information war but twitter is it twitter is the arena where it's the coliseum yeah that's where the combat takes place and so of course you get in and like you kind of log in and you're just like i'm not going to type in recession in the search bar not going to do it not going to do it five minutes later i'm definitely not going to do it 10 minutes like fuck it and you type it in and you go and the very first thing

i see just like going absolute mega viral is like 38 wikipedia entry updates to the recession page and now it's locked yeah and you're like that could be a whole bunch of different things that are going on there but like that's in the last two days since these talking points came out well yeah it's war i mean wikipedia is a battleground just like the dictionary is a battleground um explain that i mean you literally you have the dictionary literally changing the definitions for words in the middle of hotly debated uh sort of concepts in the in the country so uh famously Amy Comey Barrett um in her court hearing her congressional hearing before she was nominated or before she was uh put on the court back when she was nominated uh she used the phrase sexual

preference and immediately a journalist uh for I think the Huffington Post I forget where he works I always see his face floating around the internet um he's like this is you know outrageous this is a huge insult. It's not a preference. It's like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is outdated, offensive language. Um, I'm gay and I did not know it was offensive. I was like, uh, this is news to me. I've never heard that before. I've definitely heard people use the phrase sexual preference up to, you know, like the last week, probably like, I mean less than maybe I used to, but it's, it's not it's not we're not dropping you know a slur here this is like a phrase that is said um huge debate because one of the the congressmen uh then brings this into the hearing and is like

you just said something extremely offensive um apologize basically uh barrett does and then Merriam-Webster's dictionary changes the definition of sexual preference and includes, now it says, you know, this is an offensive piece of, this is now, it's now an offensive thing to say. So any conversation about, you know, did she or did she not say something offensive? It just, it's like, well, let's, let's look at the dictionary. What does the dictionary have to say? And the dictionary says, well, the dictionary says that it votes for Democrats, obviously. That's, I mean, I don't like, and this is, I wrote about this at the time. I was like, I don't like knowing what political party my dictionary votes for.

And that is how Wikipedia is as well. It's like, these are battlegrounds now for concepts, but there are lots of words and definitions that have changed over the last two years. It's like sexual preference, preference, female, vaccine, anti-vaxxer. Anti-vaxxer was a crazy one because anti, the definition of anti-vaxxer changed from someone who doesn't take vaccines, who thinks all vaccines are bad, whatever, to someone who doesn't want a vaccine mandate was included in an anti-vaxxer. Suddenly the definition changed in such a way as a, as a thing that I thought was stupid my whole life. I suddenly was, I was

suddenly the definition of an anti-vaxxer. Um, and that's the landscape. That's the terrain is the place where we go for source material. If it's, if it's, I mean, it doesn't matter who controls it if it's controlled by an organization or if it's if or if it's crowdsourced all of it is part of of an information where we don't have analog encyclopedias anymore we don't have analog dictionaries there's no there's no like trusted unchanging source that we can go to people say bitcoin fixes this i'm waiting for the solution i would love to see it haven't seen it yet um right now we're living in a world of malleable information that is manipulated for obvious political intent like constantly every day um it's just it's literally an information war

and the ground is sort of shifting underneath our feet i tweeted um something to the effect of like you should be fearful when they try to nationalize the dictionary and like i i tweet a lot of things that was like a off the dome just you know type it send it whatever uh i've probably haven't gotten more text messages about a tweet than that one in a long time and i was just like what do y'all care so like like duh right like of course and it was people being like they're not nationalizing the dictionary it wasn't people being like okay yes i agree like we should be fearful of that it was immediately jumping to the like are they doing it or not and i was like you guys already lost like if we're already having the debate or like are they doing it or not is basically proving

the point i mean there's no what my question is what's the difference i mean the dictionary already works for the state it already works for the establishment this is you have a few people who agree with the political consensus and they're in charge of the dictionaries that's just what it is and they're going to change online forever i mean i have at home hardbound like a hard copy dictionary and encyclopedia uh they don't make them anymore so it's old it's like boomer it's like 2000 and i bought it on i mean i bought it a few years ago i bought it during uh the amy coney barrett thing like i i that shook me i was like no no sir i need an encyclopedia and it's i like that it's dated pre-social media penetration it's like it's like uh in the matrix where they

just choose 1999 as the year that like that was the last or the late 90s they were like that's that's when everything went downhill after that it got super technological and everything fell apart um and so they just simulate that world forever i'm now living in that it's like a an information simulation of just before the chaos began i mean the truth is i still get most of my information online yeah but i've got the encyclopedia there uh if i'm really confused and you can look back and just see how things are changing it's basically a snapshot of how people used words and definitions and then you can see how far we stray from sure and language changes of course it always changes it has always changed especially the english language is an especially

malleable language. It incorporates a lot. What's different is the speed at which things are changing because it's now happening just in real time on a whim based on a court hearing that a bunch of Democrats

want to use as a weapon. And that's fucked up. And it's going to get worse. This episode is brought to you by Bullish. They've reinvented the digital asset exchange. They give you access to DeFi features like automated market making and liquidity pools in a regulated environment.

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neo exchange under d e f i for more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information visit their website at valor.com that's v-a-l-o-u-r.com let's talk about this idea of like i'm offended right so uh you could have an entire group of people that could be tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions tens of millions hundreds of millions of people and it seems like now we live in a society where if one person in that group says that they're offended by something it becomes truth like yeah if one person says sexual preference is offensive everyone else is just like okay one guardian writer just said that the word spaz was offensive and beyonce had to change her song that's crazy to me i looked at her

profile she's this uh she's a disabled writer on disability and she writes about disabilities Um, and she had like a couple thousand followers and I was like today this woman Is more powerful than beyonce Because she was offended. Yeah, it's wild. But also all beyonce had to say was I'm not changing the song bitch and everyone would have been fine with it So I mean at the end of the day, it's like it's it's it's in your hands Like like do the offended people really have this much power or or are most people just cowards?

do you think the playbook when somebody goes after like the cancel culture we'll use that as a generalized term when cancel culture comes for somebody the playbook now has been pioneered whether it was by the trumps of the world uh people on social media uh it's just no just like literally like just stand your ground say no and they go away yeah i think it certainly is like i was saying earlier, I think, I think it's like anyone who's, it becomes a, it becomes hard when people who are more inclined to being offended are in your sort of, they're part of your fan base. Um, and that's not a problem that I have. And so I don't, and so I don't worry about it. Uh, but if you are a Casio Cortez, you should worry about

it. If you're an entertainer or a singer with a ton of young people on TikTok who are obsessed with the language of offense, then it's going to be a more challenging equation for you to figure out. I do think that, well, listen, culture is changed. And this is something that I was writing about you know this this this last piece i was writing about this a little bit um the sort of shocking realization that we there's more room now now than there's ever been for dissent um there are whole funding apparatuses for it like you can make a living off of it i think culture is on the side of people pushing back against this stuff the problem is wokeness controls everything i mean it is it is infected i wouldn't say controls but it has infected

every edifice of power in the country uh you know from the military to your local office of you know small business whatever the fuck to the largest tech companies in the world um well at least in the largest american tech companies the world chinese tech companies are not woke um i always wonder this i always wonder uh i always used to wonder what we used to have all we still have all these diversity reports um that the tech press does i'm like where's why aren't we doing these for the giant Chinese tech companies? Why is no one interested in that? It's always just ours.

Or why are people not talking about how, according to the studies I've seen, the media companies are less diverse than the tech companies? Yes. Yeah, it's like no one cares about that one as much. I mean, people talk about it every now and then, but it doesn't land.

It's tech that they're coming for. Is that because money and power have kind of flowed to these tech companies and it's the idea of like they used to go after Wall Street very aggressively because that's where money and power is flowing now it's tech, it'll be something else in the future Well I don't think they actually believe in any of these concepts

or care about them, I think that they just don't like business these are mostly writers they're not making much money they are suspicious of power, which I think is a good thing and suspicious of like capitalism, which I think is a bad thing

and their natural enemy is business. Their natural enemies are the people they cover. They do clock us, I think, correctly. They clock the tech industry correctly as very powerful and deserving of criticism. I agree with that. I think that what they're critiquing is not what I'm critiquing. They're critiquing, I'm critiquing abuses of power, in my opinion, specifically on social media and things like this, the censorship stuff. I think when you control the entire town square, you have, I think you actually do have a responsibility

to up here American values, things like some semblance of openness and free speech. They're not critiquing stuff like that. They don't care about that. They don't care about all the control that a censor would naturally have. They're critiquing like the concept of these things. They don't believe in, that's their problem.

It's like business conceptually. So that's where we part ways. But back to wokeness. I mean, I mean, in terms of, of, of like where, what's been, been infected and where the culture is, all of these things have been, been infected to some degree, but, but the actual culture is just for me, the counter counterculture eventually becomes culture. So what is the, where's the counterculture and the counterculture on the left and right, you know, Bernie bros are just as anti-woke as, as most, you know, uh, people on the right at this point. Um, it's all pushing

back against the cultural authoritarianism and that to me is a really good sign uh it's like those were where the strongest wins are and so that's where content's going to be created and that's going to drive i think a lot of this back i i don't know how much damage has been done at this point like what is it reversible what's not but it does just feel like the culture shifted completely is this why elon musk and jeff bezos both have started to be much more vocal online about politics and they're kind of getting ahead of what is perceived to be some big red wave in the midterm elections and culture is shifting. And so they're going to be out in front of that to benefit. Five years ago, there was no cancel culture discourse, right? It was a few people

would do something. There'd be some little bit of pushback. The reason there was no discourse was because it actually had power. Like the wokeness was at its, I think, zenith in 2017. You had a quick flashback that was more powerful than ever in the summer of 2020. But for the most part, things had changed at that point. The reason you have so many people talking about this stuff now is because you actually can. Because America is on that side. The majority of people, regardless of politics, don't like hall monitors. They don't like to be told what to say, how to think.

They can feel language changing rapidly. They don't like being punished for not using the right words. They don't like people losing their jobs forever for a tweet. Like they, they, it's people don't like this shit. And, uh, and yeah, it's, it's definitely, I think a lot, it's still dangerous. Honestly. I mean, you, people are losing their jobs still. Um, especially again, if you're in entertainment or you work at a giant tech company, it is

actually still dangerous to say, to speak your mind. But I think that that has to change. I think it's, I think that that has to change. What about like the use of tactics? So one of the most fascinating things that I've seen play out over the last, I don't know, a couple of months is on one side, there was a gentleman who was arrested. I'll probably get the details wrong, but my understanding of it was a gentleman showed up or was on the way to a Supreme Court justice's house with, I believe, a gun. Right. And from everything I read, it was like he was going to go try to assassinate him.

Yeah, I think he might have turned himself in and like called the cops. and it was like it was crazy hey i'm here i don't know how i got here you know there was something that happened but like man gun supreme court justice not a good situation yeah and then on the other side uh there's this guy from texas i think he's a comedian or maybe he's just got like some internet show uh he's gone viral a million times because he goes to like the local city council and he sings and he dances he acts like you know an idiot i've seen one of those viral videos and he's basically saying like this is ridiculous you're gonna give me two minutes like i'm gonna make a a big deal about it uh but he went to washington dc and he was on the steps

of one of the buildings aoc's walking in and uh he basically was yelling at her and commenting on i think her clothes or her butt or whatever it was right he said i think he said i love that big latina ass or something whatever he said right and so like in those two situations like i think you i and like 99 of people would be like hey in a normal society for a private citizen like harassing them in any form or fashion is just like fucked up right like just leave people alone yeah go about your life do whatever now when it comes to public figures right there's this whole idea of like hey we should hold people in power accountable we should be suspicious of things uh and there's probably like what you're allowed to do and then there's like a tasteful way of

doing things and sometimes those things overlap and sometimes like they don't i think threats of violence jail go directly to jail do not collect two hundred dollars you're going to prison you're staying there for as long as possible like i have no tolerance for that shit um saying mean things to people in power specifically elected power i have no sympathy for people who are like oh my god i'm so sad they said this mean thing you're a congresswoman and you're like the most powerful one um i there's no insults too horrific and i hate that shit that was it was gross um but i don't care like that's just not something that's gonna that's gonna move uh so like if we kind of go through this like meandering river thought process right is so you have those two which i

think most people would generally agree that like hey words versus like threats of violence are different and whatever then you get like i saw online there was a tweet where somebody had taken aoc being like the whole point of protesting is make people uncomfortable right right and so like yes she's a hypocrite one guy sitting there with his video camera like yelling things which by the way like i wouldn't say that right like i don't think 99 of people would have gone there and done that or said that but like he did okay uh there's a little like hypocritical component but then it was like the crown jewel which i saw you tweeting about was there was a protest and a couple of congresswomen or fake handcuffs yes where i saw a headline that said they got

arrested oh yeah then i saw the video and i was like that doesn't look like an arrest no they they they escorted her to her press conference on a grassy little patch of land where they were given water and they talked to reporters that's what happened they were not mirandized there were no fingerprints their mugshot was her and the squad colleagues with their fists up smiling like that was the mugshot it was insane and and then she tried to say that she wasn't faking her handcuffs no ludicrous a ludicrous obvious lie her hands were behind her they were like on top of of each other she did one little fist thing which you know the left is saying well clearly she wasn't faking her handcuffs because she did she put her fist up at one point it's like yeah because she's

fucking she's an idiot that's why because she couldn't she got too swept up in the moment and put her fist up and blew the whole thing but the the point was for her to be photographed with her hands behind her back and a cop next to her so it looked like she was handcuffed so that headline with that picture would go viral and and it did for a minute but the internet sleuthing is a powerful thing and the story really did become i mean i'm not going to sit here and say that the media won that one the story definitely became this annoying woman faked her handcuffs i don't think the new york times even wrote about the arrest that day maybe they did after but that day i checked and and they didn't touch it and i think that that's a pretty good indicator of of when someone is sort

of embarrassing the establishment and she in that moment was certainly an embarrassment because i thought process would be if a politician was actually arrested it would be out on the wires headlines. It's a huge story. If Ocasio was actually arrested and sent to fucking jail for being at a protest on abortion, it's a huge, it's a huge deal. Um, it didn't happen. I mean, there's this, we can quibble endlessly about the definition of arrest, but I, that it's not that that's not what happened there. Yeah. When you see that, um, does it beg the question of like, does the truth matter or is actually the most important part in that? Unfortunately, just the photo and the headline and like you score a point and everyone moves on.

You know, the idealist in me wants to say that the truth matters. Um, but this is something I struggle with a lot myself. I, I believe that you should tell the truth. I think that what carries the message forward is the story. So you want to make sure that the information you're conveying is accurate, but you still have to tell a compelling story. And that's something that Ocasio-Cortez is very good at, is telling a compelling story online. Trump was really good at this. And it's like, the question almost doesn't matter because we're in the middle of an information war and the people who are going to win are the people who have the most compelling story. So I think maybe it does matter, but it doesn't matter more than the story

you're telling. You have to have both. I think that's the important thing that you have to reach for. And if you don't have a compelling story, it doesn't matter that you're right because you're just going to lose so when you look at politicians mainstream media let's call um kind of those in positions of power influence whatever there seems to be blackouts that happen on stories um there's like what i'll consider less severe but still important to call out things like uh andrew yang when he was running for president we saw the mainstream media essentially just like we don't even know who that guy is at one point they were put on pictures of other people like it's just all crazy stuff then we got the covid and we saw like the lab leak stuff and uh i remember the day

that zero hedge got kicked off twitter yeah and i turned to somebody and i was like odds just went up that's true it's like literally that second the lab leak was that's the craziest one okay that's the it's the reason that we always go it's that and the hunter biden laptop there there's such insane things that we can't let them go and then sort of you always see people in the press like, yeah, okay. You have your one example. Can you please let it go? I can't let it go because it's, it's an, it's an insane thing that happened. You have, you have a virus coursing the planet, a Corona virus. And we are like, Hey, what's up with that fucking Corona virus factory in Wuhan? Do we think that perhaps it came from there and you're banned?

And it's like, that's the, I'm not saying it definitely happened. I'm saying that is a very reasonable question to ask. It's very reasonable to say like, what's up with that place down the block from where you're saying the infection happened, where all the rare coronaviruses are being studied. Can we maybe look into that? And the fact that we couldn't, um, the fact that there were actually consequences for looking into that for about a year, um, no one is going to forget that anybody who who was concerned about that about that lab um only to a year later be told that yeah you know it's it's probably you're probably right after going through an entire year of censorship it's like you can't ever you can't ever look at the media the same way again

um and that was a really important one because it was clearly it was clearly being weaponized you have a and it's against our against our national interests you have a powerful foreign adversary did something potentially like potentially it was a potentially existential threat to the planet um if intentional could be considered even if it wasn't intentional i'm saying but if it was it would be very egregious and like absolutely imperative that we knew exactly what happened and responded to this day we need to know if if a horrifying hell virus can be escaped from that lab because if it can we need to shut it down it's it's like yeah there should be consequences for that um and it's insane that we can't have that conversation and now we really can't i mean it's

been years of who know there's no getting to the bottom we'll never know the answer at this point um it was a bat but right it was some guy eating a bat which we were supposed to believe was somehow less racist than the idea that the like evil prison state country had some evil chernobyl-like event that led to a catastrophic like yeah like that's obviously that's obviously what happened like that's just obviously what happened um and i actually think right and this is like the craziest part to me let's accept that if that is what happened that would be a way better explanation for almost everyone involved right like it not intentional it wasn't something that we don't understand yeah but was it not intentional that that is a very look it's a very important

question because again it goes back to i mean there's things that the second and third order effects of that entire situation including at the time the president of the united states shutting down flights from certain geographic regions it led to the end of donald trump and called racist I mean that's really what – COVID is why Trump lost the last election. And Trump was the only person who's been hard on China for – I mean since the 70s, right? Since before Nixon went to China, there hasn't been someone harder on China than Trump just in terms of economics. And that's the Chinese – that's a preferred Chinese vertical of war. It's like the economy and the market and then like propaganda.

This is how we're in conflict with China. They wanted him out. I'm not saying I have no evidence. I have no evidence. It seems like it came from the lab, and it seems a little suspicious that this worked out so well for the nation of China. There have been zero consequences, and we weren't allowed to talk about it because the media also – our media that hated Trump also knew that COVID was disadvantageous to Trump. so if he could find if he could be like freely say hey it seems like it came from this country america we would have been outraged um that would have been the story it would have been a much more

important story than just trump's clownish incompetence handling a pandemic that then nobody else handled if you look at um past historical events nothing unites a country more than war and there have been arguments that some people even gone to war to unite the country for political gain and all this type of stuff. If the media had treated that situation 180 degrees difference, there's a very strong argument that the country would have been heavily united on this front of we have to address this situation, there's leadership, and actually would have won by an absolute landslide.

Yeah, how do you have a serious conversation about the problematic use of the word spaz when an aggressive nuclear superpower is trying to destroy your entire population. It's impossible. Like all this divisive shit is just impossible in a world like that. I think war is bad and we want to stay out of it. And increasingly we want to,

I mean, I think probably best case scenario after World War II is America would have just been in charge of everything. But we didn't do that. We tried to sort of police the seas and do this free trade thing. um we allowed power to grow in places like china and russia now increasingly we're in a multipolar nuclear world and uh sort of geography is thawing again history is beginning again and uh we're

gonna have to i think retreat a little bit and just fortify our borders and bring manufacturing home things like this that's going to take time uh but also i mean like this taiwan thing i got in a lot of trouble among right-wing people um what did you say so among the populace right right now it's like they're america first that's their whole thing if something is not in america's interest then we shouldn't be doing it and i agree that's I 100 percent agree. That's my politics. It's we should this country should come first. It's I don't want a single politician in Washington who doesn't think that America should come first. That's their job. But when it comes to things like Taiwan, this is this is then used as a reason to not be involved in the sort of China Taiwan conflict at all.

And that's ridiculous because what happens to Taiwan affects America. We need semiconductors. We will have years of no new electronics, potentially. That is the world that we're walking towards without a free Taiwan. And that is just a product of, that's what happens after decades of globalism where we've exported all of our manufacturing and left ourselves completely vulnerable. Things that I write about all the time, our resource insecurity, our manufacturing insecurity. We do need these industries at home, not because it's like, Just because it's, oh, bring the jobs home. It's also, it's a huge national security issue

to be so resource insecure. But also there's no short-term way to snap your fingers and start processing rare earth metals across the country. It doesn't work that way. It takes time to build this stuff up. And until it does, we are at the mercy of these global supply chains, which we kind of have to protect.

And so I think it's a balance. I think it's like, yeah, you're not going abroad because it's like, oh, it just makes me sad that the Taiwanese are going to be invaded by China. It's like, this is, we are affected by all of this. And so we kind of have to keep things as steady as we can until we can build our strength back up. And so why'd they get mad?

Why did who get, oh, the right-wing people? They don't, they're just like, oh, you love war. You want to go and send our boys abroad to die on the shores of Taiwan for semiconductors. And it's like, first of all, I don't think that we even need to fire, I don't think we need to even send anybody over there. uh i sent nancy pelosi yeah and she bought it fix the problem look at that look at that maverick

flying over there you saw the meme i've seen the memes i live in the memes i mean yeah like it's pretty good though right in my home like uh i also think it's uh wild that uh many of the chinese state talking points uh i've gotten from uh chinese state twitter accounts yeah and it's like wait a minute yeah they're like they're all there alex jones isn't but we've got literal chinese assets telling us the news yeah i mean just kind of crazy right like we don't have you know you take one end of the spectrum alex jones take another end of like a politician a donald trump you've got plenty of other people in various other corners of the internet whatever that aren't on twitter anymore uh but like there are accounts that literally are labeled

Chinese, like, state-affiliated media. Yeah. You're like, okay. I wonder if the strategy there, because it seems like, I mean, obviously you think on the one hand it's like, this definitely shouldn't be on Twitter, but then is the strategy like, if we let them

post openly, then they won't create a bunch of fake accounts that are even more difficult to keep track of? Well, I'm not advocating to take them down, right? Like, cool, I like that they label it, like, I get it, leave them. But the argument I think I'm making is like, I mean,

you would have to be so egregious short of inciting violence. Why are they on? And other people aren't right. Right. Like it's more, it's less about like, Hey, ban more people,

kick more people off. Martin Shkreli was banned. More people on the platform. Yeah. Martin Shkreli member. So Martin was banned because he went after, went after lauren duca who is no longer on the internet we forget about she was like she was she was the taylor lorenz before taylor lorenz um she was the last like sort of main

character of the deranged left and uh she worked for teen vogue and uh was on like tucker carlson and stuff like this um always just sort of making the craziest possible cases that were new to America. And we were like, whoa, this is like a crazy thing to say about the reduction of us to our gender or our race. And she was talking about things like systemic white supremacy back before that was a normal thing to say. Really, I mean, people forget, but white supremacy used to mean KKK like five years ago. And now it's just like, I mean, your mailman's a white supremacist. Everyone's a white supremacist. That's a new thing that happened. But she was a sort of pioneer in a space of deranged, woke bullshit. And, um, she got into it with Shkreli. I don't even know over

what, but he started asking her on dates and he just was like, I think he might've even asked her to a dance or something, but it was like very innocent, but persistent. And she said this was harassment. And, uh, and he was banned from the platform for it. And I went back and looked at it because, um, he got out of prison recently. And I was curious about what, why he had been banned because he was creating new accounts and they kept removing him. They're like, no, you're permanently banned. Um, so I went back and I saw it and it was that, and that was just given crazy to hindsight bias. Did it seem crazy? No. Well, again, it's another sign of the fact that culture has shifted. Um, this was, you know, in 2017 or something when he was kicked off, it

was, it was, I think things are, I do think things are better right now, which is a crazy thing to say, but I think that culturally I really believe that things are, are, are much better. He's still permanently banned but i don't know that someone would get banned who knows watch me get banned for this i don't even know um but i i think in general things are better uh that haven't been said yeah like why are these chinese assets tweeting while you know alex jones is still off the platform when it comes to all these banning decisions uh we had one incident where uh we had a video we were interviewing somebody uh pseudonymous person he's talking about bitcoin and stuff, whatever. And, uh, all of a sudden I got like an email, an email, and then not just

like, Hey, that video is taken down. Like the entire YouTube channel was deleted. I think I, I remember this. And I remember at first just being like, eh, give five minutes, you know, like turn your computer off, turn it back on. Maybe it'll like reappear. And then it like took like i don't know 15 20 minutes i was like holy shit like the channel's gone or just be like at the end of the day like does it really matter right like in the sense of like it's not like somebody came and like shot me but like no but it's crazy you've built a whole world there a whole audience a whole thing like all this stuff so luckily i had other platforms like twitter where i could go and tweet and be like yo what the fuck right and tag youtube and like do all

this stuff and everything and uh of course if you have a big following like there's people who work at youtube who follow you yeah like dming you being like uh can you give me some details let me look into it whatever so like thank you that's super helpful but then like i don't know six hours later or whatever it was like it gets reinstated and uh there was like an email and it was like basically like uh it's back right like essentially like just like like here you go peasant like you can now have your toy back right like all right thanks guys uh and i remember i asked uh i think was an employee there and i said uh what happened and the answer gave me the like vibe that it was like one employee at the company who had the power to do it was like fuck this guy literally right

and uh because normally the way that it works is like you get a strike you get a second strike right there's a third strike then you're done like what all this stuff so like there's a process which i agree with like they try to warn people they they try to have a uh uh dialogue whatever And you may disagree with some of the decisions they make or whatever, but it's not like you just wake up one day and bam, it's gone short of again, inciting violence or whatever. But I was like,

holy shit. How many people at that company have the power to like press a button? How many people have been erased? How many people have been erased who don't have your platform? And I think it happens all the time. Or it has, I, I don't,

I don't know. It's all mistakes. Yeah. It is accidental. It is when they misinterpreted something. Hugely pot, like when they become like big, loud stories for sure. Yes.

Yeah, I mean, it's messed up at the end of the day. You don't know your audience. This is why, I mean, I prefer things like Substack or any email newsletter where you at least have the audience. You know, I don't, you can't even, you know, I have however many Twitter followers. I can't even, I can't even DM them all.

You're right. Like I don't, they're not, they're not actually my audience if you don't have any meaningful ability to communicate with them directly. Well, you can't take them anywhere either. Yeah, no, yeah, they're just there. This episode is brought to you by Core, the free non-custodial browser extension built by Ava Labs, which is more than just a wallet.

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everything yeah i mean he loves it if he loves the camera if this was a reality television show it would be the number one show in america yeah we would be like holy shit like how did they get prostitutes on television how did they get hard drug usage like all this shit it'd be like cops when we were all growing up and like you'd watch and be like i wonder if the guy's gonna run away combined with like the fucking awesomeness of the internet in one show and like it would be the the uh the number one show in america but it's not a show yeah yeah it's real but no one really talks about it in the mainstream i think yeah i mean i've noticed the new york times doing i mean they did a piece on the hunter biden they were the ones so the washington post back when

the hunter biden laptop story a month before the last presidential election was uh put out by the new york post um so new york post gets this laptop uh from some repair guy who like handed it off to i think i forget i forget like the chain of events somehow because rudy giuliani that it gets to rudy giuliani and then like the post is writing about the contents of it um so this this explosive thing is coming out and these are the first this is like you know in the sort of maybe trilogy of hundred biden sex tapes this is like this is the first one this is the fellowship of the ring um fellowship of the cock ring it's like it's right there that's where it begins so uh the new york folks released the story and uh it's censored across the entire social the social internet

it didn't sound like a crazy enough story where you're like that was crazy real it was crazy and And what you had is you had a series of people in the intelligence community, not directly working for U.S. intelligence anymore, but they have been. So they're in the intelligence community and they go to the social media people. They're like, yo, this is Russian misinformation, disinformation. And it's like, what is like, is the laptop leaked? Like, did they, is it, is the video not real? Did they fake the video? Like, what is, what is fake exactly here?

Doesn't matter. All banned. And what really got crazy was actually how you couldn't even – on Messenger, you could not even DM the story to someone. You couldn't share the link to the story. Twitter as well. On Twitter, it was the worst one. Facebook, everything was just – the virality was slowed down. So they just slowed down the story until a third-party independent fact-checker could verify or not the claims, which of course – I mean we've never heard back from that review ever.

This is years ago, and we've not heard back from the third-party review. They're still doing the work. Yeah, they're still checking it out. So this happens. It's, of course, all real. The Washington Post is, at the moment, the official fact check on the New York Post story. And the New York Times, if you look at it side by side, the New York Times was much more like, we don't really know. Yeah, I mean, we have no information that it's not real

Here's what's happening, here's what the New York Post is saying We have no idea Whereas the Washington Post was like We don't like what this implies Because the New York The Washington Post The Washington Post fact check was like We don't like what this implies

The headline of the New York Post, which broke the story Said it was a smoking gun of corruption So What was actually being fact checked was just the opinion They didn't like what the washington post didn't like was what the new york post was saying this probably meant and uh and so then the story was widely censored but it was the new york times that then kicked the ball forward a little bit later like a year or so later i think uh they verified all of the claims

they were the ones who broke it and everyone was like oh whoops guess it was real uh and like no harm no foul right guys kind of moving forward um and they're the ones who who seem to be inching forward with uh hunter biden corruption story still like that there's still very much a team it looks like to me that's on top of this story and it has to do with burisma which is this ukrainian energy company that hunter was on the board of and it's like did he use his father's influence at the time of the barack obama presidency to gain favor and all this shit that they're they seem to be on so people do seem to be following the story does anyone in the world believe that the children of the president or vice president of the united states of america

does not get treated differently whether it is crossing the street whether it's in business whether it's literally standing in line to order fast food also it's like i mean the reason that the sex tapes and the sort of like crack saga is so important is because it's like why would you want this guy on your but why are you paying this guy five hundred thousand dollars a year to be on your board he's a drug addict addicted to filming himself having sex with prostitutes it's like well i don't even know what his qualification what are his qualifications i would love to sit down with the barisma execs and be like what do you like about hunter what are you what are you getting from this has anybody interviewed them yet uh i have i you know

what i haven't seen that interview i would love to i mean if maybe one of you would be fast one your listeners can link me i would be i would love it the the um the other piece of it too uh is if that's all on his laptop like where are other things right like the internet is a place where like you only got to press a button to send shits to other people other places and so i think there is this element of like hey there's some crazy stuff here right and like you know do i really care that you do crack cocaine uh and like there's an argument we should get you some help right like there's like a sad like humanity well the conspiracy is that no i don't tell me the humanity thing i no no just like if if you're uh aware of somebody who's addicted to hard drugs

right like like there's two responses like that's fucked up and then also like hey we should probably get that person some help and so there is this element of like okay if the president of the united states son is addicted to crack cocaine like some portion of people whether small or large is like did we get him help like like can we help the guy out i felt bad for him during the election before i knew about the burisma stuff so then this is where when you add in the the context of everything else leave this guy alone i don't care about the son's not running for the president like why are we talking about this and then i learned a little more and i was like this person's very close to power and money and uh and this is it i mean it there's a lot of smoke in this story

it's like i don't think there's yet any real fire corruption fire but there's smoke and what do you think would be like the smoking gun they need to know if biden offered anything it's like if the president is directly involved then all of a sudden that's like the vice president yeah because he was the vice president at the time so but if it's a step away even if it's uh i'll call it um a gray area questionable i mean it's bad already like it's already it's already pretty bad and i think that uh so the conspiracy about give me the most extreme conspiracy theory well that the deep state has leaked the videos because they want to remove

biden from power because he's going to lose the next election so you have to weaken him so you can primary him you have to justify the primary and it's like oh yeah we're constantly seeing him now with his his gaffes he's like looking dumber by the day is that because he is more senile than he was when he ran for the last election or is it because people are putting more of a of a spotlight on it and like who is doing that that's the that's you have the the media and the people around the biden administration but then this footage is is released in waves increasingly drawing scrutiny uh over the hunter biden crush the hunter biden corruption story and you are really in a place now where i mean it does seem like he's going to be i if i were you know a card

carrying member of the democratic party just obsessed with partisan politics i would want him gone i would want to for sure i would want him there's no way he's going to win then i don't see him winning the next election i don't i don't as of the information we have at the moment uh It looks bleak for both the midterm election and also if he was to run again. And it always goes back to me also, like, why do any of these 70 and 80-year-old people want to be the president of the United States? Why are they allowed to be the president of the United States? Like, honestly, can we just have a cutoff? It should be just for the age of retirement.

That's the cutoff. But if we're not going to do that, then I think at least 80. I think 80 is like a fair cutoff point for all of them. It begs the question, should it be an age cutoff? Or should there be like a cognitive test? Should there be some sort of disqualifying medical evaluation, right? And I don't say it from like a, you know, I see the memes. I see the speeches.

Like there are times where there are maybe gaffes is like the nicest way to put it. But like if you or I wanted to go become a Navy SEAL, they would put us through immense physical and mental training and evaluation to then send us to faraway lands yeah to support the united states of america the problem is how this test is going to be weaponized um you have pretty much one party that in america i think that you have one party You have one sort of ethos, worldview kind of class that controls, you know, every seat of government. It controls the tech, the media, academia, and certainly all of the bureaucratic seats. Like the whole San Francisco government, for example, like you can change over the government.

There are a handful of supervisors that you could vote in. You could change the way government looks. You could change your legislator. your legislators but what you can't change are all the people who work for the san francisco government and they are just they're all the same kind of like um useless bureaucratic like hall monitor energy is what you get and they're they're everywhere um and so like those people all vote the same way and that test there's there's like almost no way it's not going to be weaponized in my opinion so i think an age cutoff would be would be a little cleaner this

one. Yeah. All right. Uh, as we watch kind of the world unfold, uh, we've talked about a lot of pessimistic things. What's like the optimistic argument as to like how America at a minimum holds on at a maximum has this like Renaissance and, uh, continues to accelerate as the greatest country in the world. Well, I think America's biggest problem is that it's so easy to succeed here. Like we have a lot of room to fail and we're still thriving. And that has to do with uh, our, our, our relative geographical isolation, uh, our abundant natural resources and all of the wealth that we're standing on top of over the, from, you know, the last decades and decades. So because of that, it's, we allow things to get, to get pretty bad.

and uh so i i don't know i don't see us i don't see long term i i see us it's almost impossible for us to enter a world of dark ages status i think we're going to be limping along for a while um the question is whether or not we become great and and that is all that depends on culture so that's why i care so much about culture that's why i write about culture that's why i try and make other people care about this stuff because that's that that becomes who we are the stories we consume the things that we want to be is what determines the shape of our world and uh we're in a really great position actually we could be you know the greatest we already are i think the greatest country in the history of the world

But, I mean, we could be great in ways that are inconceivable right now. And I – what do we have to do? Like we're back-to-back world war champs, right? Yeah. I don't think we want to go fight another world war. I think we have to care about local politics, honestly. Okay, explain. I think that we have really abandoned like basic shit.

just we have internalized a sense that we're not in charge of our, of the world around us, that we're not responsible for the world around us, our own lives. So like this, the way that this manifests is in every city I drove at the beginning of the pandemic or the fall after the pandemic began, I drove cross country and I was looking for another place to live. Maybe I didn't know where I was going to be. Every city I went to have a homeless problem. Every city I went to had a drug problem. Every city I went to was covered in trash. Like every city I went to had a public education problem, had a public infrastructure problem. I was living in San Francisco and in San Francisco, there are a lot of like sort of influencer type people with big

megaphones. And so we know a lot about what's going on in San Francisco and it is crazy. And I do think San Francisco is kind of uniquely crazy. There are, it's like a, almost a fun city to tell stories about because the people are, the politicians are so deranged. I mean, you had an actual pro-crime DA who was just recalled. Like it's a fun story to tell. It's like, it's crazy. But the problem, the problems are everywhere. We have a problem of smart people

not engaging where they are. People feeling intransient. I think, is that the right word? Intransient or when you're uprooted and just transient. It's like you have a transience of people kind of moving from city to city, smart people specifically, a lack of loyalty to where you're from.

Uh, and that, when that kind of, I think that, that becomes the way that we engage with the entire world is, is just someone else will do it. Someone else will work on this. Why is it like this? I'm going to just be mad about it and then let it go or not be mad at it. That's even worse. If you just kind of internalize a sense that, uh, you know, a homeless drug addict going to the bathroom on your front steps is normal.

That's just the cost of living in San Francisco. like once you internalize that, that's the end. I mean, you're never going to fix anything if you just think that that's normal and, and, and feel bad for criticizing it. Um, so I think you start there. You have to start with your home. You have to, you have to make where you physically are right now, um, a better place. And, and I think that if we can, we can start doing that. I mean, we have people in the tech industry talking about charter city stuff and we're going to build a new country. That's how I got into tech was the Seasteading Institute, this whole cool ideological um idealistic uh thought experiment really about what would it look like if we could build

a sort of host of uh politically autonomous cities in the middle of the ocean and you know rebuild everything from scratch that's all exciting and i is it possible so yes i think so i think it's all possible but but actually like the path to change is just unfortunately caring about the five idiots on your board of supervisors who have legalized crime. Like you could just, you could just focus on that problem and vote them out and fix things. And, um, you know, you don't have to reinvent the city. You have to just care about the city that you're in. And I, for some reason, like people just don't do that. Um, I saw the new, uh, was San Francisco DA, I think came in and a real radical ideas. Like we're going to put people in jail if they

commit crimes. She's saying, I like what she's saying. I like what she will see. We'll see what she does. Um, but yeah, I mean, it feels good just to have someone not gaslight you and say like, yeah, like if someone throws a brick through your window, that's a problem. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for saying that to me already a step ahead. Uh, last thing I want to talk about is, uh, the state of the media with pirate wires. Uh, I think you've got like pretty big ambitions in terms of like, how do you, uh, create content and allow people to consume things of that are like the signal among the noise or like the pirate ship among like the chaos? Like why do we need independent media? Well, I think everything is

independent media at this point. Even people who work for the establishment increasingly have their own sub stacks or whatever, their own channels, their own presences on social media. They're becoming, they're independent in a sense. That's just identity. Your personal identity is really powerful now because of social media. And, and that's the future landscape of media. New York Times is this big outlier where it's, it's definitely a brand first and then writer second. And they've, I think, fired the one person who was like sort of fighting against this trend internally in a very public way. And who's, and she happens to be very obsessed with, with brand and social media and things like this.

The New York Times is the outlier. The general trend, it's people online talking who we like. And maybe it will be a collection of them. It will be like a handful of people and a crew and a group and maybe a small army. But it's always going to be people. That's the future and that's what Pirate – I mean I want – as I grow, I want to bring in more people

and have just like a handful of people who you can trust So also when they get things wrong, just admit it and be like, Oh, I was wrong about that. And, and tell people I want to build, I think in all of this chaos, um, information cast, like, I mean, I love a good fight online, but also like, it's funny. A lot of it's funny. And I just, I just like, I can't help but laugh at the craziest shit. And I want to build a place. I basically just want pirate wires is just, I'm building the place that I wish existed

online, a place in the media landscape where I can go and just like laugh at the bullshit and kind of try and piece together the facts of what's happening and, and get a, a more accurate sense of, of what's going on. Someone to help sort of like parse the news. Yeah. And that's, that's what it is. That's the future. And it starts there. It's just going to grow through, I'm going to hire more writers and we're going to, going to grow it and take it sort of day by day how do you replicate the magic so i've told you in private like every time you write i'm just like you just don't miss right like just every time i read it i'm like either this is laugh out loud funny this is like so spot on or like holy shit i should text him and make sure

that like he's still okay because they're gonna definitely come for him right it's like one of those three things sometimes all three together but like there is uh a unique combination of uh one you see what's happening you're able to kind of pick out uh what are the important parts you can connect them to like tom cruise and other things that are happening in today's society and like how they all kind of fit together in a narrative uh you got a very unique way of writing which i think people uh really enjoy consuming but like each one of those things is hard by itself like you're a unique person how do you replicate that uh with other people that you would bring on I think that you don't. I think that what you want to do is, first of all, I don't really believe in diversity of thought, like in the way that it's used.

People talk about the real diversity you need is diversity of opinion. And it's like, maybe. I mean, not on the big stuff, though. Like in terms of values, I don't believe in diversity. I believe that we are, it's like we're thick as thieves. We're on the same side. We want the same thing. we're completely mission oriented that's actually the place where where you that's the diversity in every other aspect go for it this no like i think that you you want a shared perspective i want to work with people who don't necessarily see they don't think the way i do but they kind of have the same impulses that i do they're like they're they want the same things and like generally for the country and for their communities and they kind of agree on the bullshit um it's like once you have that much in common then it's about finding people who have their own strengths

and nurturing them and i think that's the that's that's it's going to be like the x-men where it's not not everyone wearing the same costume and having the same power it's a collection of people who do a bunch of extraordinary things and together you're fighting the sort of you're fighting the fight what does success look like like do you take down the patriarchy or like what Like what is the thing that you're like, yes. Well, we are the patriarchy. I'm the treasurer of the patriarchy. Nice to meet you.

I want to be, I mean, we're going to build the biggest media company in the world. And this is where it starts, that someone is going to. This is like the media has completely changed. The old model is dead. What you're seeing now is not even the old model. It's just the empty carcass of what once existed. It's like we're roaming the museums of – our cities even feel like museums of a world that once was. Certainly our media entities right now, these big media properties, they're not alive anymore.

They're not – it's just people have – people are working there and kind of keeping the lights on, but that's gone. The next thing is going to be – it's going to be a person who's going to become very big and then grow the company around them. and there are all sorts of people who are trying to do something like that everyone kind of knows that that's the future roughly are there other ones that you're impressed by or that you think are doing it right

that you point and you're like oh they get it there are lots of people I have a lot of respect for I think so I really like Stratechery I really like I really like

Barry Weiss um i think that you have people like tybee and greenwald who are huge but not doing as much with that it's like they're still they're just right they just have big audiences that's different it's like what what do you do to expand and um like if you're glenn greenwald what do you think he should do to double or triple well i think he's probably in a confused place right now because he's he started with a company and now he's his own person and that seems better and more flexible and maybe he just doesn't have the ambition to build like an empire. I think that if you are – I think the mistake you would make

while building something off of your back would be to hire a bunch of people who are nothing like you. I think you want to hire people who amplify your voice first because that's what's working and then find talented people who are doing their own thing but care about the same thing and and kind of have the same vibe roughly speaking and i think that's the way that you build it i think that the mistake a lot of people are making right now is trying to like rebuild the old model that's not working and what you can't do online is anything that sacrifices

your voice because in a world with so much writing and so much media we live inside of it everything sounds the same mediocrity has the same voice and what what stands out are people who have a unique voice and that's the only thing that matters now um everyone's successful has that and uh and some are better than a few or the best and um you want to just feed that you want to feed that originality because people they are looking for that in the way that they know that the thing that exists right now is wrong and so they don't want they didn't know and so they know that the truth is going to sound different like it'll look different it will sound different it's going to stand out and people are going to make fun of it um you know people people

in the establishment are going to make fun of it can throw eggs at it look at this clown talking in a funny way or whatever else but necessarily like the new thing has to be fundamentally different and so people will look for that and when you find it you have to nurture it when you take that idea of the media uh it overlaps really well with a lot of these folks who are now becoming politicians or who have been politicians obviously trump was the quintessential example um but i think as people look forward to 2024 it's like trump biden desantis newsom those seem to be like again i don't pay a ton of attention to politics but if you said to me pick the four people who are like most likely to run and have a shot seems like those four are the names that you keep hearing

uh but now post trump feels like there's always gonna be like the wild card and like i've always said like i think the rock will be president one day yeah super charismatic well known you know all this type of stuff physically just massive compared to everyone else and so kind of human biology is like i guess that guy's the leader right all that type of stuff um but like how do you think that all plays out and you know it's almost kind of like when you're a kid you're like Would you rather do this or do that? You come up with the most ridiculous things you can come up with. Now it's like, do you think that Trump, without a Twitter account,

versus Biden at 80, who wins? It's like, how do you see this playing out? I always just bet on the best story, and that's Newsom versus DeSantis. It's a battle of Florida versus California, and we have a real national conversation on the differences between those two states. I in

in my gut I think Trump's not going anywhere but I think I think I think I'm this is not

the way that I'm not good at these kinds of predictions because I go off of just intuition and I just

I think that that's I think it's DeSantis Newsome which is crazy because it means Trump is gone and Biden's gone

it's the weirdest one I think in a sense but I think it's the most rational. I think it's the most, it's just the one that people, I think it's the conversation that people want to have. Yeah. It goes back to, again, like I'm joking, but I'm not right. Like Trump without a Twitter account is not Trump. Right. Because like part of the entertainment value and also part of the effectiveness and also part of the, like stoking the critics and the haters and you know, whatever other, I think he said the haters,

the losers and the critics or like whatever he said, right. Like all of that was his central hub has not been taken away so it's kind of like you know if you said to an mma fighter like get in the boxing ring right like you're not allowed to kick wrestle like you're like all right well like maybe they got a shot but yeah probably not as effective and then biden i actually think uh age is like a huge huge component of i think the democrats never intended on running him again and then no one stepped up and so for a minute it was like well he's gonna run again and it's just clearly i think there's it's if he does it will be the end yeah so you you get DeSantis and Newsome and uh I think that they also believe that because Newsome started to run ads

in Florida yeah DeSantis is you know got the Disney thing like like you can see them almost jockeying to kind of set the stage for this like I don't know okay corral 12 noon like let's draw pistols and see you know who's quicker um it's also I mean it's so far out anything could happen between now and then yeah of course but right now that's where the I think that's where all of the energy is. DeSantis for sure. Listen, Trump is powerful. And I mean, he is just, he's like King making right now and seats across the country. So it's hard to say that he's, he's lost his mojo. Um, but how does he communicate to the people? Like, like to me, your, your whole thing of like the story, the story is really important, but distribution of the story is also important.

Yeah. It's going to be hard for him without a, without a channel. I think that, uh, because it's not like hey they'll give it back to him from what we understand right now no i mean that would be a curveball of an event if all of a sudden twitter was like cool if you're running for president you can have it back like you thought there was uproar when he got kicked off imagine the uproar if they brought him back to run for president we'll see what'll happen i mean at the end of the day they might just want the growth because trump wherever he goes is a huge draw for crowds and to a certain extent he kind of i mean he kind of invented twitter in its most recent in this current incarnation is it's his platform it's it's he's the one who who drew all

the attention and and made twitter what it is today and in a sense um they might just want it that badly or elon's forced to buy it he might be forced i mean i kind of i know he doesn't want to buy it. And I feel like he's going, he has a lot on his plate. I understand that, but I selfishly want him to be forced to buy it. Yeah. I mean, can you imagine, uh, yeah, I live in these fantasies within a week of him owning it, even if nothing changes, like nothing, nothing changes. He's going to appoint me to CEO. You think so? I'm going to slide into his DMS. I'm going to tell him I'm ready to step up and serve my country. He's going to be like, go for it. I think, um, there would be a shift in energy on the platform to the point where people would be like,

the internet is fun again. Like Elon is here. I think that is the most important thing. And people are just done being miserable. And that is the most compelling part of, I think, what Elon is and what Trump was that people refused to see. And in general, what things, the things that that really land online it's like i think people are looking to move past these past these this last handful of years of of kind of just like intensity and find the levity it's like a pressure release it's going to allow us to just breathe and move forward and i agree with you 100 yeah um it also begs a question i guess uh did you get is it a subpoena were you were you dragged into i saw i heard that it's the new

midas list yeah it's so explain first of all what's going on so people know about it seems like i mean what i've read online is twitter leadership is uh has subpoenaed a bunch of people in elon's orbit just i have no idea why just because of the lawsuit they're trying to bring them in maybe piece this the whole wild story together um i'm waiting because aren't Is this the kind of thing that's like you've been served? Is they like, they find you outside or something and call your name? I think if you're like a billionaire or you're, you know,

I mean, or a fake billionaire, the circle of people that they have brought into this are literally the best investors in the world. So like the whole idea of the new Midas list, okay. I don't think that they like track you down on the street. I think it's more of like, they call a lawyer and they're like, hey, we can come do the on the street thing, but like, I want it.

We are going to make it very, very difficult. I want the whole thing. I want the real treatment. I want to be served. Mike Solana. And it would be, I would love to, I would love, I would love to tweet about this. There's a thing. I would love to, I would love it.

It is. Take a picture with it on the ground. It is the new Midas list. I mean, everybody wants to be on this list. It is the hottest new status symbol in Silicon Valley is a subpoena in the Twitter Elon lawsuit. And I'm waiting for mine. All right. Where can we send people to?

PirateWires.com. I tweeted Mick Solana, M-I-C Solana, S-O-L-A-N-A. And this is where you can find me. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the

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