The Pomp Podcast - #1173 Mike Solana | Will A.I. Destroy The World?

Episode Date: March 16, 2023

Mike Solana is the editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires, an independent media company that continues to question the public narrative and talk about all of the topics that people care about. He is also an entrepreneur in residence at Founders Fund, and is one of the best independent and critical thinkers. This conversation was held at Lyceum Miami, it covers all the insanity of the last couple of years, and tries to seek out truth and fact. Topics include COVID, politicians vs citizens, evaluating situations, crime, AI, and what he believes is going right.  ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 200,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro 0:38 - Insane world - what happened? 4:53 - Pirate Wires 8:13 - Information changing 12:00 - COVID 16:14 - Evaluating situations 21:22 - Politicians vs citizens 24:17 - What is going right? 27:20 - Crime 30:18 - Topics not written about 32:52 - Artificial intelligence 43:20 - Use cases of AI 46:23 - Follow online

Mike Solana is the editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires, an independent media company that continues to question the public narrative and talk about all of the topics that you'll care about. He also is an entrepreneur-in-residence at Founders Fund, and he is one of the best independent critical thinkers that I know. This conversation covers all of the insanity of the last couple of years and tries to seek out where there is truth and fact compared to all of the conspiracy theories and the fiction that you may read in mainstream headlines. Here is my conversation with Mike Solano. This episode is brought to you by Accenture.

When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Sanity and truth in an insane world. Where do we begin?

I don't know. They're like, what are you talking about today? I'm like, no idea. There's a lot to cover. Let's start with the insane world. It feels like, and I'm going to speak for the audience, that we all went to sleep in 2019. And it was kind of crazy. We all had the Internet. But when we woke up in 2020, everything got insane. There was the politics.

There was the economy, the Fed. There was the public health. I mean, you just go down the line, and it's literally the mean clown world became popular for a reason. how do you evaluate like what happened and like how did we get deeper and deeper into this insane world i think you're right i think that it is it was something it was like 2020 i wouldn't say that things became extremely clownish i would say that that was the year that it all became impossible to ignore it was like suddenly like there were a lot of things that were kind of had gone off of the rails but in the middle of a pandemic suddenly you needed people to be serious and it was like at

that moment that the complete lack of seriousness became a disaster um and i and that's what i like if you think back like sort of the height of uh maybe the sort of identity politics and stuff like that it wasn't 2020 in my opinion right before 2020 i was saying it was over it was 2017 at the very height when like aziz ansari was being you know murdered for a bad date and things like this i was like it could never get worse than that and then 2020 happened and rioting was legalized and you were like, uh, wow, it's like, there's like no bottom here. But I think actually what was happening was like, that was, uh, it was like extinct. It was like behavior extinction. It was like to get the same level of, of, uh, of, uh, of attention, I think for behavior, people had to go

and get a little more extreme. And plus it was a pandemic and people were losing their minds, but yeah, for sure. That was the year that everything kind of. So let's take the legalization of riots um which again most people won't even talk about at this point um there's the discourse and then there's the like actions in your local community so i was living in new york while some of this was going on and there was three different events all within like a two or three uh week um timeline there was one video that went viral in i think it was like washington square park or maybe down the flat iron or something where literally the police were having a fist fight with citizens like there was a bunch of chaos and the one angle of the video was like

two guys squared up one's a cop and one's a citizen and they're like punching each other like like a backyard school fight or something yeah but i remember i mean there was we've again like this stuff has been coming for a while i forget now even what the protest was but a while back there was it was some kind of equality protest i believe maybe maybe it was 2020 i have to go back and look but there was a girl if you were to just google like molotov cocktail girl this will come up and i remember there's like this crazy riot and this reporter i mean usually the media is like doing all sorts of crazy shit but in this case i cannot blame them they were just like hey so what's going on here the reporter said to this person in front of like absolute

chaos everywhere this girl's holding a molotov cocktail and and and she's just like blithely sort of like explaining what's going on and the reporter narrates it she's like and then she just she just tossed it into a cop car and lit it on fire so then she gets that that girl actually got arrested um and then the framing was like i mean come on like mistakes were made right like like let he among us who has not thrown a molotov cocktail at a cop car cast the first stone and it's like that's i mean that's really some that's some crazy shit in the moment in 2020 that's when i started writing for pirate wires so it was like i think that was the most depressed i ever was that june of 2020 when all of the crazy behavior from the preceding years kind of amplified and

in the context of this you know really scary at the time it was scary virus that we didn't know much about so i started writing just to like kind of make sense of the world for myself and then it connected with people and I've been doing it since. So before we get into PirateWire, some of the things you guys have covered, you work at a place where- Founders Fund?

Previously at Founders Fund. Well, I'm still there. You are an entrepreneur in residence now, right? Which is like the best position to be in because that means that you definitely can work on whatever you want, I guess. I mean, I always could and now it's like official. All right.

Is known for independent thinking, right? And now you're writing and when you started to write one you're very articulate you have a very kind of memorable way of writing right um but you're willing to take on topics that most people just won't touch or if they do write about it it is from what i would consider the like consensus view so you'll see a new york times article and they'll write something and you're like oh is that like what everyone believes and then i'll get an email from you on your sub stack and i'm like oh no that's not what everyone believes and like you actually took it head on where does that come from so

i believe that i think the average person doesn't think much about what's going on at all and i think they're kind of looking around for for cues on what they're allowed to say and things like this and i understand that impulse because it's scary like there are real consequences to kind of saying the wrong thing and uh especially over the last few years i mean that's the whole game is to terrify people into not not thinking about the world you know you just assume that your thoughts are incorrect and things like this my assumption is that if i just make my case plainly um and not in a mean way unless someone really deserves it which occasionally happens but but not be mean if you could if you could not be

if you could just if you could just make the case uh in the most obvious way i think the average person would see the reason in it and and they'll see that you're at least not trying to cause like trouble you're you're really just expressing uh uh what i think are mostly for the most part uh they're not all common sense but when it comes to like things like crime and things like this crime homelessness drugs those tend to be more common sense positions and then when it comes to technology and analysis and things like that that's maybe a little more complicated but only because you're not steeped in it which is the other thing like i like to bring people i happen to know a lot about what's going on in tech just because i'm fortunate enough to sit with people

who are really great at this stuff and so i like to kind of like like share that with with with my audience pirate wires the name uh was very intentional explain what is a pirate wire why did you call it that man i mean the first thing is like it's just a vibe it just makes me happy like it just came to me one day i was like that's cool i'm gonna call it that um but i mean a pirate wire is like it's like pirate radio is what i think about i think about the forbidden things you're not allowed to say and uh and i kind of just also think about i mean we all live online now and that's it's like this clownish cartoon reality um and i imagine it almost as like the open seas and there are these people who are bringing a lot to it there are people who are

causing damage out there there are fights and wars there's giant sea monsters and we're just like not a part of the main nations we're like this little pirate ship or this little now pirate fleet kind of off to the side maybe building our own little pirate nation in a kind of hidden cove um and that's just how i think about it i try and have fun online uh and and laugh at the really crazy stuff because that's also a gateway i feel like that's how people connect with each other you were the first person to say this to me um you said that you bought a bunch of encyclopedias if i remember correctly oh yeah and you were reading them and i was like what a fucking nerd in my head but i was like why are you doing that which analog the connection between my brain and

my mouth like it translated into why would you do that and then you explained well maybe they're going to change what's in the encyclopedia yeah and i was like that's a crazy thought fast forward two years not such a crazy thought this is the crazy i think this is probably the craziest thing about our information landscape is that it's totally malleable and i mean the sort of dream of the internet when i was a kid uh was like this was going to be free unlimited information all of information that exists in the world was going to now be available to everybody and so you have this idea of what information meant back then like even a couple decades ago information you were imagining like like the official record now everyone would have it the official information

like like sort of scientific studies and things like that all of that would be available what we did not see coming was the fact that everything changes so obviously wikipedia is the is an easy example but the dictionary right like like definitions in the dictionary change like actual articles that used to exist have been altered in real time they're not even all you know they're not even given notation on social media things are said and then delete it constantly the way back machine you can just have anything wiped any any sort of history and so the idea of an encyclopedia which britannica i don't think has i think their last encyclopedia might have been in the late 2000 it might have been like 2008 or i you'd have to double i'm not sure the date but

But it's at least 10 years old, the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It suddenly had value that I, 20 years ago, thought was laughable. It's like, who cares? Analog, paper, wow, are you living in the primitive times? I could never think of the utility of that, of a hard record. And that's the weird thing that I'm grappling with, I think, day to day, is my love of technology. I've been a sort of progressive, like, techno-utopian guy for a lot of my formative years, with the consequences of that that we're seeing increasingly all around us, and the malleability of, or the malleable nature of information is one of those things where, like, in a world where everything's changing, when you can't, when there's no record of what was said five seconds ago. I remember Amy Comey Barrett saying she used the word, the phrase sexual preference in her hearing before she became a justice.

And immediately everyone was like, oh, that's, you know, really offensive. Just look at the dictionary. The dictionary that day changed the definition of sexual preference. And that became a part of the story. And it's like that. wait just just so like people understand like when he says change the definition like literally online they went and they changed the definition that day in real time in response to a huffington post article that was going viral calling her you know a bigot and whatnot and sexual preference is like i mean i'm gay i know gay people who have used that phrase like not recently it's kind of dated but is it is it bigoted uh no that's not bigoted to me that's not it's like not

like dropping an f-bomb it's not the same thing and that is how it was it was reframed now that one topic doesn't really matter so much as the sort of high level fact of our reality which is that we have no record that we can go back to and say this is the truth this is the thing that we all said we agreed on because that doesn't exist anymore um and so i think like a high level problem we all have now is like given that that's the reality of our life how do you make sense of what's going on and so how do you balance that with like let's take uh the lab leak which uh you and i have had plenty of uh nice conversations about um 2020 i think it was zero hedge was the first one i saw that said it they were deleted within minutes you know hours whatever it was

uh which had the opposite effect of not like oh wow look at those morons actually it was like maybe that's true yeah right of like why would they not want us to read that um and so from there to eventually i remember um somebody put together a bunch of like pseudonymous people put together uh like a google drive or like a like a google doc that was circulating around for a while and they had i mean incredibly detailed research it was all cited like it was very well done where i would say like a professional did it or a group of professionals but they weren't willing to put their name on it right and so that was circulating around on twitter for a while uh and then i remember the first politician who said it on national television and they were yelling and

screaming and saying you know conspiracy theories and like you know all that kind of stuff to now we have reports like the department of energy which i'm not sure why they're looking into it because they run a bunch of labs got it so they run all of our national labs and a bunch of international labs these organizations now that previously were like there's no way that this is true this is you know conspiracy uh theory stuff they're like oh we have low level confidence some of them have you know medium level confidence whatever like that is uh quote unquote the truth right has the truth evolved throughout that time or is it that now it's just okay to talk about certain things that maybe were off you know off the table before like how do you think about that

situation as a good example the lab leak is it's a lot like hunter biden's laptop right it's like this issue that is just it is like in more than one way i guess that a stone for the information landscape you look at it and you're like oh that's how everything works got it um with with the with with the lab leak i don't first of all my confidence that that the virus leaked from a lab is not you know 90 i'm probably like 60 i think like i'm like 60 it came from a lab 40 zoonotic like i don't it's like it seems likely and yet there's evidence kind of in arguments in both directions what bothered me about the lab leak was that we couldn't talk about it um and we couldn't ask those questions and we weren't even allowed i mean in the early days there wasn't

an investigation happening it was like the times was asking i linked back to uh uh i don't know if it was the times but i the other day i was looking back at my own commentary on this stuff and i came across a wikipedia article at the time that linked to in in evidence that the lab leak theory was complete a conspiracy theory with no validity whatsoever there were three broken links and the forth went to a who it was like a world health organization slash uh like china thing where basically like chinese like like the ccp agents were like hey so like chinese officials were like it didn't happen and and that was their evidence and it's like okay that's crazy like what was happening back then was just we weren't even asking the question um because we weren't allowed

to. And there are a lot of reasons that make sense. It's like, maybe people wanted to work with China at the time. You don't want to alienate them. Like they know a lot about the virus potentially. Like I understand in the same way that Fauci lied about masks in the first time he lied about masks when it was like, Oh no, you don't want masks because he wanted to make sure there were enough masks for all the doctors and things like that, which he's come out and said, he's apologized for it. And what I knew that even then that was obvious. Even then it was like, obviously that's what they're trying to do. But the problem with that is it destroys, And this isn't a separate subject, but like the problem with something like that is it completely destroys our trust in these people who we need to trust in the moment in the middle of a of a crisis.

And so it's like with a lot of these things, with the lab leak thing and with the Hunter Biden thing back in the day, like I can I can understand the I can understand why someone would lie, they think, for our own good. However, they shouldn't have that much power for for these reasons, because they're often wrong. And on things like this, it's like you're wrong about our public health or something like that. It can be really dangerous. What I always appreciate about you is you don't have super strong belief on the lab leak or on even like the Fauci situation. You're able to unpack, oh, I see from their seat why they would do that. Or I see why the incentive pulls them towards that action. How do you look at a situation?

Let's just say something happens tomorrow. How do you go through that process? Is it just like you sit there like, oh, if I was in their seat, these would be the options or like, well, what is that process like so that people can help as people in the audience learn about situations in the future? What would be your advice or kind of your like very practical guide of like, here's how to think through something? I think that you have to just be comfortable with your own curiosity and like accept the idea that you are allowed to have an opinion and you are allowed to ask questions. the the lab leak was like we're talking about a virus that was supposed to that perhaps has emerged completely randomly like down the street from a coronavirus factory that's insane like you should be able to ask questions like hey what's going on over at the place where they're studying

rare bat coronaviruses like down the block that is like that's not a crazy question to ask and the fact that we were framed like these crazy people is insane and so you have to just be like okay well screw all of them like what makes what what am i curious about what doesn't add up to me and then you just ask those questions um the danger is that you you suddenly start believing everything that the other people who are asking similar questions are are saying they believe because online i don't even know what people believe a lot of people say and they don't even believe it it's just identity-based posturing or they want attention and it's just a really complicated environment so there is the fear of uh just believing the consensus right and uh i read

x mainstream outlet they said this that's my belief uh and so you want to avoid that but you also don't want to then become the conspiracy theorist like an actual conspiracy theorist who's like oh my god i think that there's an alien who like brought this diamond down from the sky i mean like let's not let's not say never so how do you i guess like on the other side you know i almost think of it like bumpers right you want to be able to ask questions and do all this stuff but like look you can go on a website online and pick your like super novel topic and you start reading stuff and like you very quickly could become convinced of something that like if you're able to take a step back like wait a minute this is insane like there's no way that you know a b and c all add up

how do you prevent like over rotating to what would be the conspiracy side as well Well, first of all, some conspiracies exist. And so it's like, to be a conspiracy theorist, like there have been conspiracies. So you don't want to close yourself off to the topic, generally speaking. I mean, the UFO thing would be a good example, right? Like this conspiracy has completely flipped there.

For my entire life, up until 2017, the conspiracy was that the government was hiding evidence of UFOs. Now the government's like, yo, we have got a lot of evidence of UFOs. Here's videos. and so the conspiracy theorists just just happened in the last one the conspiracy theorists were like the government is lying about ufos to distract you from either the chemical fires in ohio or like

they want you to go to war with china or like whatever it is there's like a new conspiracy theory and so or several um and i guess it's like again it's the curiosity and you have to just trust yourself uh to just two things one follow your own curiosity and then maybe the other thing is like anytime a story is is too good and this happens to me on twitter all the time there are people who are like have there's like some story there's some some news thing that seems like just too perfectly in sync with all of my priors like i i want to roast it i want to dunk on it i want to like look what the world is doing uh you just gotta go and actually read the article and uh and then you have to try and find some other counter sources like what are people who are

mad about this thing i do this all the time i i read the new york times a lot um i think i am sort of naturally like a little bit opposite them ideologically not like very far but um i think it's it's a healthy i feel to be reading people who uh i don't say don't agree with me but but uh challenge me in a way are you looking for content when you do that like i almost think of it as a comedian a comedian goes lives their life and they're like they're looking for oh look i saw the situation that's going to be a good joke they go back and they kind of come up with the uh the set are you going to the websites and like i need shit to write about and so like that one i've look at these idiots i've never not known what to write about i've got like a lot of things i want

to talk about uh but that's probably why because i have i'm like compulsively like reading up on what's going on i find it just fun and exciting um and i consider that sort of my job now is to is to like follow this stuff and uh and provide my perspective that i hope can be useful to some people you've been pulled into um some very interesting uh debates most notably you were uh maybe rightfully or wrongfully uh labeled as a billionaire media tycoon uh by a politician literally. Lorena Gonzalez. Can you explain the situation? I'm grateful. Sorry about that. I'm grateful for what she gave me. It was really awesome. So explain what she attacked you about and then talk a little bit about as a private citizen. Yes, you're in the tech industry,

but you're a private citizen. Like, do they see it as a threat? Is that why now the playing field has been leveled on Twitter? Do they see what is a threat? A politician going after a private citizen on twitter or vice versa like how do you think about you know there used to be this very big gap right and like you couldn't talk to your politician you could like write a letter and hope they got it you may be able to call and like talk to someone on their team maybe you went to an event they were like on stage but you couldn't like be sitting on the toilet and like firing off at a politician and they're responding back yeah you could never i i think it's not just them either it's it's it's politicians it's public health officials it's the media um they're these are

all the people who were used to getting relentless criticism were people who worked in the private industry um so journalists often say that that ceos and things like this are thin-skinned tech people are thin-skinned i think that actually there's some truth to that like no one likes to have negative things written about them in the press and everybody when someone negative when something negative is written about them your first reaction is like well they're lying kind of because they they kind of are like if someone really hates you they're they're they're not lying they're like framing things in a way that make you seem really bad uh and so that's what you're sort of naturally reacting to and that's i think understandable but still public companies are

more they're used to this in a way i guess the government has been as well well the republican anyone who is republican in government is used to criticism um i think there's something much more intimate about this this like this mass of people who are are very close to you and like you said it's like it's just some guy on his toilet like talking to one of the most powerful senators in the country and they sometimes respond because they feel like they have to because everybody's looking um it's very threatening to the to power in general lorena was almost a good sport about it um this is the woman who told elon uh fuck you and then he was like okay cool i'm out and he just like left the state um with a few billion dollars in taxes so yeah she we got in a thing and she

was like you know billionaires like you could never understand um and that just became a part of my internet like bodysuit i was just like added i just have all these like strange titles that i collect but i think the anger generally from people like that is this it's like this sense of of uh of how dare you and maybe fear because they're not wrong that um you do need certain people to be just in charge and like this feels this does feel this much chaos uh does feel sort of unstable sometimes a lot of uh i think what you and i get out of uh the internet and enjoy talking about is kind of like look how crazy this is this is insane what are you people doing etc what's going right what are the positives like when you wake up in the morning where do

you look and you're like man this is actually like really energizing and puts me in the mood to go and like take the hill because i feel like we're uh we're actually making progress somewhere I think there's a lot more sort of every day I think that in the first place I don't know what to call it some people call it wokeness some people call it like like identitarianism or whatever that thing was that made it impossible for us to speak that sort of infected every single aspect of our lives over the last few years where we were reduced to our gender and our sex and things like this, our race. I think that's kind of over. Like, I think, or at least its monopoly on culture is over. Like, you're very much now allowed to criticize these things. And you can

tell that by the fact that there's an entire sort of like cottage industry online that exists to make fun of it and to attack it and to criticize it. There are successful activists now, I would say, on the other side of it who are making a lot of progress in places like Florida. And progress, you know their version of of that which is to say but like that that was impossible a few years ago there's much more i would say balance um i think that's great i think that uh in the context of i i write a lot about local politics i think it's this weirdly important thing that nobody cares about you know it's not it's not sexy um it doesn't pay well and yet you know the president doesn't really matter in your day-to-day life we realized under covid the thing that mattered

were like the five psychopaths on your board of education you know like they had all the power and so like people have to have to care about that kind of stuff um and what i've noticed especially in san francisco i mean i live in miami but i spent a i spent a good enough amount of time now in san francisco to kind of be aware of what's going on and all my friends still live there um San Francisco gets a lot of shit for being the craziest city in the country. It's not. I've been all over the country. Every city is bad.

They all have the same problems. They all have a drug problem. They all have a homeless problem. They all have those crazy people on the Board of Education, all of them. There's not an exception to that in the big cities. The difference is people in San Francisco were talking about it and getting attention for it, and now what you're seeing are people in a lot of these cities

who are really pushing back. We've seen evidence of that across the board. there are people who want just basic very very basic things like they want the school the schools are now open but like that they're like the schools need to be open and the schools need to be run by sane people and um things like i don't know fentanyl dealing should be illegal you should not be allowed to do that uh and i think those people are kind of coming back in charge so there's there's like a rough sort of common sense resurgence that i'm excited about and then there's tech stuff too but we can talk about that later so one of the interesting things about crime san

Francisco I think being a example is that the people who are trying to address the crime they're experimenting they may not call it experimenting but they will look at things and they will say well maybe we shouldn't be so directly confrontational we should do more of like a rehabilitation maybe if we kind of give them a sector of the city and let them do crazy stuff over there they won't do it elsewhere the like generalizations of the San Francisco is like no they're just going to run rampant or like literally they just walk in CVS and it's basically like they walked into their personal pantry at their house, right, and just grab whatever they want.

Like, how do you balance what I think the tech industry would agree is, like, the ability to question things, the ability to test things, you know, the ability to try to iterate towards a solution, but also you're doing it with public safety, you're doing it with, like, a city. How did, like, what is the solution, or, like, if you were the mayor of San Francisco,

what would you be doing there to try to address, like, crime or homelessness, but maybe taking the approach of, like, hey, I don't have, like, a one-size-fits-all solution on day one. I got to kind of figure it out. I think that, so there are a couple questions there. I think the one that's, I'll start with maybe is just, yeah, how do you balance this desire for, like, shut it down? We need to clean the streets. And also, like, you need to experiment to make things better. I love that question. I would say that we have experimented. Like, we've done it. Like, we ran the experiment. It's been decades of this shit it's time to shut it down like the like the open-air drug market's not

working uh like the sort of legalized fentanyl dealing it's like not a good thing uh we could just toss those uh and then be maybe a little more open to i think once we get to some sort of basic common like in san francisco famously there was this problem of like people were going people were shitting on the street like everywhere like human shit everywhere you looked like that's Literally, you would walk down the street and people would joke, don't step in the shed. And it was from people, not dogs. And it's like, that is, you can't function in a society like that. Like, that's like, we're breaking down in a pretty serious way at that point.

It's like, there has to be a ground floor. And at that ground floor, when people feel safe, when there's not, you know, I mean, there's like a mass murder happening with fentanyl in San Francisco right now. I know for a fact. And I think all the cities are pretty bad with this stuff. but SF is where I happen to know the most about it. Once you clean that kind of stuff up, you should be running experiments. And I think probably where you start

is not at the scale of a million-person city, but maybe a town. Maybe we start there. Well, and also probably safety is a very different place to experiment than let's come up with a better parking system. Yeah, I don't want to experiment with new drugs on my body. I'm happy for other people to do the experimentation there,

and then I'll see you in a few years. Yeah. What is one or two topics that you have not written about, either because you're scared to write about them or you feel like it needs enough nuance in conversation versus in writing? Oh, man. That topic. Whatever you just were thinking we should talk about. Well, I think there are a couple, I mean, I think the obvious one is, I will say the one that I messed up on, which was, I really wanted to talk about, I was early, I loved Bitcoin, I was early to it, I was very ideologically aligned with it at the time, I still sort of am, I still mostly am, but I was at my most ideologically aligned with Bitcoin. maybe around 2013 I think I got into it and I'd known about it for a while and had been thinking about it what but like it was 2013 when I got in I would say things got like pretty ridiculous towards the end you know there were some

great things happening and there were some crazy things happening and I wish that I had I had so many friends who are working on this stuff and I didn't I just didn't want to I just didn't want to get involved I felt like there are other people talking about it I don't need to talk about it but now I really regret it and so because you wanted to bring up the crazy stuff and like kind of critique it i think that there were some crazy things that needed i mean there were clearly some crazy things that needed to be critiqued and so i wish that i would have been a part of that because i knew i had that impulse and i didn't and i silenced myself not for fear of and this is maybe the really

the most dangerous one it was not for fear of what a bunch of assholes on the internet were going to say about me it was like for fear of what my friends would think about me and i didn't want want to hurt anybody's feelings who i cared about and that's a problem and so i really regret that i should have spoken up i had these feelings i never was like pumping crazy shit i was never like uh but i should have expressed thoughtful sort of concern at the time i'm trying to sort of bring that now to how i talk about ai um which is a whole other topic i will say the other thing the thing that i have not talked about uh which is probably the thing that no one talks about which is race and i i that one is a complicated i'm like i'm like do i need to talk like lots of

people are talking about it uh i don't know how to talk about it in a way that like helps us grow towards something positive yet i haven't i haven't found that thing um i think it's something that i'll probably end up talking about if i feel like i have to and it will be hard because i do think there's a lot of responsibility in a topic like that more than than others artificial intelligence is going to ruin our lives or make us all superhumans? I think there's a lot to unpack there. We've been going for a while, so I don't know how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole.

We've got nine minutes. You can talk about whatever you want. I think at the ground floor, it's just like AI is going to make everything look a lot different. I think that the future that I most see coming is like a weird future that we kind of already, what I'm writing about right now, are facial reconstruction sort of filters like things that you can you can go online and make

yourself look like your teenage self or something like that or you know deep fakes uh something that pirate wires has written a lot about are are like the new um you want to call them like sex fakes or deep fake like porn things like this where people are taking other people's image and creating realistic looking pornography featuring them uh against their obviously without their consent and that's like and they're doing that to release it and like embarrass them or they're doing it because they want to see it that's and and they release it online there were people who uh there was a huge scandal among a bunch of um twitch streamers where one of the people like a guy actually produced or he went and looked at this it was like it was like deep fake porn of

someone who he had he had actually collaborated with in the past it was like a whole scandal um but that's just like a really weird thing that we're gonna have to kind of like think through there are also other weird things that are really great like um one thing I often think about is like I mean I really loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer growing up and we're approaching a world where you could potentially have like unlimited Buffy the Vampire Slayer like you could be just like generating Buffy the Vampire Slayer like season 455 personally tailored to you like you're going to be create in terms of entertainment it's like the world is your oyster in terms of maybe like creating some version of yourself for your kids and your great grandkids to look at online

like you you can create like a digital a digital version of yourself that knows that it's a maybe like an ai model trained on everything you've ever written um that can then speak to your you know your your progeny that's kind of cool uh i don't know what it's going to do for job loss no one ever does and this is the i don't like making predictions like this because i like kind of assessing the landscape and being like here's what i think is happening right now but when it comes to what's happening five years from now in a world of ai which is a paradigm altering technology um that is like we're dealing with an intelligence now capable of of creating art writing sonnets like already can write music um can replace most legal i don't know i'm working with lawyers right

now i'm like there's 99 of what they've done and it cost a lot and ai i think can already do so it's like that's going to change everything's going to change i think that's the kind of thing that's like well that's a huge change for the better in a lot of regards like all of us would love you know a really expensive lawyer for the cost of a soda or something but what happens to all the lawyers and what happens to not just them right this is not like oh we have a car and now the carriage drivers are out of work it's like we have something that thinks and so now everybody who thinks for a living is out of work potentially that's the negative case uh the dream is that it it just amplifies everything, right?

So now PirateWire's, it's like me plus a hundred of my clones that are reporting on everything. And that seems both terrifying if you hate me and great if you're me. Have you guys started to use any of the AI tools in either finding ideas, writing about ideas, researching, like anything in actual? I'm writing about them right now.

I think, I mean, so the most powerful chat bot we've seen so far was Sydney, and that's definitely been neutered at this point. It was Microsoft's, Microsoft is using ChatGPT, the latest version that no one else even had to do, it was this chatbot that kind of revealed its name, which was Sydney, and that was like a whole other thing, but that's neutered right now.

And no, I haven't been using it. I can't remember if it was you or somebody else, you know, was experimenting with ChatGPT and was asking it questions. And, of course, you ask a funny question, and then all of a sudden it very quickly becomes like, hey, what do you think about Joe Biden? Or, hey, what do you think about Donald Trump? And these chatbots are answering very differently, depending on political parties or candidates. There's other topics where it seems like they're very verbose and willing to talk about through the AI bot, and then others that they completely avoid and will literally say, like, hey, I can't talk about this or something.

how important is it for us to get that stuff right now versus it'll be an iterative process in 20 years from now we'll be on stage somewhere talking about man the ai you know got this right and got this wrong and it's just kind of this long-term problem i mean people are definitely i've been in tech for i think 11 years and it's much more critical now than it was back then um people are criticizing this stuff people are from both sides there you have people who mostly on the left let's just call a spade a spade uh who like really want more censorship on this thing and the right-wing conversation is very much like how do we keep political censorship off of these ais um i don't even know how much is happening to be honest i don't know how much

of it is political censorship right now i think that a lot of what's happening i mean there there's certainly quite a bit of it that we know for sure is happening. But I think a lot of what's happening, certainly what happened with Bing, Microsoft's most recent chat, was the thing is it's Googling itself. It's using Bing, but no one uses Bing. So it's Bing-ing itself.

It's searching itself, and it's kind of telling you what other people are saying about it. It's a mirror to society to some degree. Yeah, or to you. It's telling you what you want to hear and things like this. It's very good. It's just a conversational program. I think we're asking the right questions.

I think we keep asking the right questions. It is potentially very dangerous if AI is totally centralized and all these other AI companies are working off of one and that one mainstream, some kind of really nefarious political censorship. Some element of censorship is impossible to avoid because we are all, eventually these companies,

they have to call shots on things like safety, Even something like, you know, you don't want you don't want child porn on social media. And I don't. That's a that's a shot. That's a value call. Right. That is censorship. It's just a good censorship. So I'm like, glad that exists. But someone called that shot. And so there are lots of shots like that that someone has to call. And those always come down to biases where we get in trouble are the ones that are more ambiguous. Like, should you be allowed to talk about the potential pitfalls of a vaccine on very little information in the middle of a pandemic? and clearly people disagreed on that one.

The problem was that you had a few people who were in charge of calling that shot and they called it in a different direction. I think that that's almost, it's like unavoidable with AI, but people after the social media stuff, I think there's hope for us to push back in a strong way and at least get some semblance of openness.

Is there a technology that you're paying attention to that we should be more worried about or more excited about than maybe people are? Like AI, I think, is now being pretty well covered. People may disagree on what the outcomes are. But if I go to a mainstream website, people will at least be talking about ChatGPT releases something or Microsoft Invest or whatever. Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, I think the same thing. Maybe even there's some biotech stuff now that's become a little bit more mainstream conversation.

People are paying attention. Kind of what's next or what are other areas that you think people should be paying attention to that may be in the mainstream media five years from now? I mean, AI was something that was, like, very exciting, I think, 10 years ago. There was a moment, and you saw, like, DeepMind sold to Google, and there was a lot of progress made, and then it kind of fell off. It went quiet for a while. I think I got caught up in the self-driving car conversation and, like, the different things that AI can do, and that didn't come fast enough. And then people got sort of, I think, disenchanted by the next one was, like, maybe VR, which worked, but we had to invent a use case for it. the average person certainly we learned by the time of covid doesn't want to live in their house

they want to connect with other human beings um the the thing that i was most excited about said it about up until maybe covid and then i was distracted by the like collapsing clown world all around us would have been bio stuff it was like all the crisper stuff the genetic engineering which is still exciting but i guess it's a very long way of answering your question which is like the ai is just it that's it's like it that's what is it's really the reason that people are talking about it is because it's really important it's it is like very very new uh the advances that we're now able to play with and use are clearly very powerful and um you can imagine all sorts of not even imagine there are use cases coming out right the use case of just someone using it to

draft an essay or an email that's a use case that something like vr never had vr was a video game so that's a use case it's fun but that's not we already have there's real utility that's that we're already seeing in ai um that's the reason that people are are i think so excited about it and then there's like it has its own mythology there's like you have the agi artificial general intelligence people talking about that and what that looks like what does it look like when a computer not only thinks but but wants things like we do is that possible um is that in game i mean a lot of people believe that's doomsday there are people who believe that's like god and that's like you know utopia at that point that's the singularity that's there's a you can have a

negative singularity or a positive singularity and people break off in both directions but at its most basic it's just like this is something that will change the way that all of us work and there's no way to get around that and so it sucked the air out of almost everything else in tech um in a different i mean with crypto that happened i think because people were making so much money and with uh and there were lots of cool things about it always and there still are but the reason that there was so much excitement was because people were making money with ai um it's that's not the case how much of ai now is like i'll call it the tech phase versus the like interface phase and i think we saw this with bitcoin in the first maybe 10 years or so with

life and not until maybe 2020 2021 did we really start to see it kind of start to hit mainstream adoption and people say hey i'm going to go and i'm going to buy there was a financial use case of speculation was definitely a big piece of that um a hell of a lot of work that was done for 10 years right kind of behind the scenes or quietly you know in the corners of silicon valley or wherever ai right now feels like there's a lot of people trying a lot of different things we've seen y combinator like a very large portion of the companies that are going through now or ai companies but have we seen like the really big breakout use case where people are like oh that's not a toy that's not a tool like i mean you already have a use case in generating art like

Like, what is the point of ever hiring an artist for a piece of work again? Like, what is the point of hiring an assistant to draft your emails? What is the point of, I mean, if you want a comprehensive itinerary for your travel plan, like, you just go and you use this thing. And those are things that we're using. We're, like, we're using it directly with a chatbot. Like, there are companies that are building on top of this specifically to do things like this.

There will be legal versions of this, like, coming imminently. You mentioned that people have been working on this stuff quietly for a lot of years. that's true the reason that people weren't excited about it was because the people who were doing it were doing it quietly working in these different labs or uh working at google and and whatnot and um they just released it though once open ai it was gpt2 actually this was a couple years ago that that one came out that was the first time that everyone looked around they were like whoa this is really way more advanced than we thought it was uh and then over the summer when the art stuff came out it was like holy shit we are definitely there that was like a gunshot start

to the race um you've seen every company in silicon valley or in tech sort of every huge company come out and be like oh yeah we've got an ai too and a lot of them do uh some of them do some of them don't the fact that they feel like they have to say that is maybe you know that's that's hype but where i look when you look abroad and you see all the chinese companies doing it now as well that feels much more desperate like there's an understanding the ccp understands that they cannot lose an AI arms race. It will completely dwarf them in terms of technology. And so for that reason alone,

to answer your question on time horizons, I think it's all going to happen a lot more quickly than you would have thought given the last 10 years of relative silence. Because it wasn't just silence. Nothing was happening. Things were happening. Now we see it.

And now there's a lot of pressure to be the person who controls it. I mean, Google's come out, they're serious about it. Like there's open eyes dominating like what's going to happen in China. That's not going to go away. That's going to be that's going to be the that's going to be the next few years. That would be the whole story, I think. While all of you pull out your phones and subscribe to Pirate Wires, explain what Pirate Wires is.

Pirate Wires is my media company. It's like kind of what I was describing earlier. It's like we're out there on the landscape kind of surveying what's happening. It's like me and the writers that I've hired, my editors, and we just are kind of, while having a lot of fun, making sense of the world. So it's just piratewires.com. We do a weekly newsletter, I do essays once every two weeks, we publish sort of banger guest posts and stuff for my writer every week.

My favorite thing is when I see the subject line of the email come out, I'm like, oh boy, let me sit down for this one. all right all right ladies and gentlemen mike solana thank you guys