The Pomp Podcast - #448: Mike Solana on Independent Thinking

Episode Date: December 9, 2020

Mike Solana is a Vice President at Founders Fund focused on community and brand. He runs creative programming and is the creator / producer of Anatomy of Next. In this conversation, we discuss freedom of speech, independent thinking, science, the gold standard, tech vs anti-tech conversation, and Silicon Valley. ======================= OKCoin.com is the leading crypto exchange for both beginners and experienced users. You can fund your account in under 2 minutes, and get access to the most advanced trading engine, all while paying the lowest trading fees in the industry (0.1%). Visit www.okcoin.com/pomp and open your account today.  ======================= Coinbase Wallets are adding support for .crypto and .zil domains through their partnership with Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section. Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the dapp browser to register and manage your domains.  ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 90,000 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://www.pompletter.com =======================

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. Let's kick this thing off. Mike Solana is a vice president at Founders Fund, focused on community and brand. He runs creative programming and is the creator-producer of Anatomy of Next. In this conversation, we discuss freedom of speech, independent thinking, science, the gold standard, tech versus anti-tech conversation, and Silicon Valley. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mike, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

First up is OKCoin. OKCoin.com is the leading crypto exchange for both beginners and experienced users. You can fund your account in under two minutes and get access to the most advanced trading engine, all while paying the lowest trading fees in the industry, 0.1%. You can visit OKCoin.com slash Pomp and open your account today. I've had the CEO on, and I generally think OKCoin, which is a U.S.-based regulated exchange, is really approaching things the right way. They're even funding Bitcoin developers, and anyone who supports Bitcoin developers is good in my book. So OKCoin, who's optimized to get you from non-user to user with a funded account as fast as possible in under two minutes, go check them out.

OKCoin.com slash Pomp. Again, OKCoin.com slash Pomp. Next up is Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains is solving the problem that you no longer have to send the hex Bitcoin wallet address. That's that long string of letters and numbers that you send to somebody when they're going to send you Bitcoin. Now, in partnership with Coinbase Wallet, you can use a .crypto domain instead. So Unstoppable Domains provides an all-in-one solution for blockchain domains. You can send money using these new domains, .crypto, instead of long Bitcoin wallet addresses, while also storing your domain in Coinbase's collectibles section.

Go to unstoppabledomains.com in the Dapp browser to register and manage your domains. It's just like traditional domains. If you want a name, you better go buy it, because if somebody else gets it, you ain't getting it. If you want pomp.crypto, you can't get it, because I got it. And if I got it, you can't have it. So go to UnstoppableDomains.com and buy your domain name today. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 90,000 investors about business, technology, and finance.

I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at Pompletter.com. Again, Pompletter.com. All right, let's get in this episode with Mike. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not

reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I think I have the Twitter bad boy on the episode today. This guy literally says whatever the hell he wants. Uh, Mike is here. Thank you so much for doing this, man. Yeah. Thanks for having me. All right. We're just going to start with the two most important questions. Everyone wants to know, ask every billionaire that comes on the podcast. How did you, what did you do when you got your first

billion dollars? You are the newest billionaire. What did you do? Oh my God. Um, I got into a flame war. That was like the very first thing that I did. I mean, honestly, that's probably never going to change i do think i mean on the billionaire thing i i mean if there is a sort of like digital currency now um that only that only sort of makes sense on the internet that does not have anything to do with the real world it reminds me of uh so in snow crash the dude the like pizza delivery guy is rich as hell inside of the virtual reality world he's super rich but in the real world he lives inside of like a crate that is like it's like one of these yes like shipping crates um he's super poor but it doesn't matter because we're living online now and so that kind of wealth

means something so i don't know maybe i am a maybe i am a kind of billionaire maybe lorena was on to something when uh when i saw this and i'll get you to tell a story in two seconds but uh i saw all these other people you know joking around or whatever but the most prescient comment that i saw was somebody was like uh everyone focuses on a billionaire in terms of dollars but actually we should think of it as seconds in your life, right? So the younger you are, the richer you are. And the way that they framed it was,

you think Warren Buffett is rich, would you trade for his amount of money if you also had to trade to be his age? Right. And if not, then you're richer, right? And so I was like, okay, fair. But like, that's not what she was talking about. She literally was talking about Mike's a billionaire.

So how did this happen? Well, I mean, okay, so I mean, the backstory is just right. to get into this flame war with a politician. It's the politician responsible for AB5, which is this bill in California that effectively, once Gavin Newsom signed it, put out of work potentially millions of people if it were followed. The law makes independent contracting work effectively illegal. It's just like no one listened to it because they were like, this is too crazy. There's no way that our politicians meant for this to have happened. They did, which begs the

question like, are they stupid or evil? It's one of those two. It's never quite clear in California which, but that's the woman responsible for the bill. What followed after that was a long period of corruption in which a bunch of industries came to her and got exemptions from the bill, pretty much every industry other than tech for undisclosed reasons. We don't know the details of any of those meetings or deals, but certainly tech was the only industry that was left out of that. And so there's just, there's history here between Lorena Gonzalez and the tech industry. I mean, she's clearly at war with the industry. It doesn't really make sense to me. I mean, if you are, I mean, she's a, she's a labor activist, kind of socialist light type person.

If you want, like, I mean, if you have the vision of ostensibly what the far left has, which is like building, I mean, probably the steel man version of this is to build some kind of utopia with the wealth of these evil billionaires in the world. Well, you need tax revenue and the technology industry provides a lot of it. So it's unclear why these California politicians are so determined to kick tech out of the state, but they're working on it. That's like the backstory between Lorena and like us, like the tech industry. But in terms of the, we get into this back and forth. She ends up accusing me, actually, like it's like an accusation of being a billionaire, you know, being super able. She says, I made my money off of exploiting

workers. Like she just throws that in there. I'm like, what the fuck? Like she just goes to nine about this, like about this kind of thing. And, um, all the talking points you write down the list, but I mean, to even like, to like personalize it though, to sort of say that I made the money off of exploiting people was super confusing, right? Like, where does that come from? And I think where it comes from is she really believes that, I think she really believes what she's saying. She really believes that the world is filled with like, on the one hand, the hyper wealthy, and on the other hand, everybody else. This is like, I saw this guy, Matty Iglesias tweeted not too long ago, and he's just super lefty, but reasonable, sometimes says normal

things. Um, this was not one of those times he, uh, he was talking about student loan debt and he made this joke about how he was able to afford to go to college because his great, great grandfather or whatever was this like tycoon of industry. And now I guess Maddie has like a trust fund. Um, and he's like, so I don't know why everyone's complaining about going to college. Like they should just do X, Y, and Z, you know, be, be a trust fund kid. What he's implying there is that the people who can afford to go to college are trust fund kids. And then there's everybody else. Literally he conceives of the world. And this is like rich people do this for sure. Like this certain kind of rich person does this, but also the certain kind of like

leftist person does this as well. Also, a lot of times it's one of the same, but there's this belief that the world is comprised, America is comprised of like trust fund billionaires, and then like hundreds of millions of homeless people and that's it. And, um, this is totally wrong, but that's the belief. And so if you, if you go after someone for something, so in this case, the fight with Lorena and I began when she went after venture capital and I went after her legislation, I was like, you actually put millions of people, potentially you tried to put millions of people out of work was sort of what I implied to her. Um, and she, that was unfathomable to her. I had to either be misinformed or an evil billionaire.

That was it. Those are the only two things. I loved at one point where she said like, you were harassing her, I think. Yeah, well, that's how it evolves. And that's the next thing. This is broader than Lorena, right? There's this trend now among,

we've seen it among journalists, not a lot. I don't want to like really just be unfair to journalists today. uh there are many journalists who are writing amazing things they're not super loud on twitter they're just they're just you know pen to paper doing solid work every day reporting on things that they think are important even when i disagree with what they think is might be important like i there are many journalists who i respect i respect the way that they work then there are people who are just on Twitter a lot, um, stirring up drama and, uh, they tend to feel like criticism of them is, uh, nefarious in some way. Um, if it happens a lot, if it's relentless, it must be

harassment. And you'll see people complain about harassment who have, for example, 200,000 Twitter followers and work for the New York times, one of the biggest media companies in the entire world. And it's just like, no, if you're writing something on Twitter, these are people who are saying things on Twitter that are either unfair or untrue, we have to be able to criticize you. And if you're working in government, if we elected you to represent us and we think that you're doing something wrong, we have to be able to criticize you. And criticism is not harassment.

And even insults, by the way, should be allowed, especially to our politicians. Come on, we've made a national pastime of it. and part of what I think is so um kind of weird about all of this is this starts to fall into the camp of like freedom of speech right and freedom of speech in the kind of classical sense has very clear uh laws around it has very clear kind of understanding of what that's supposed to be but now we're getting in this like gray world of like oh you have freedom of speech but really only if you say things I like because I won't come back at you I won't you know take it a step further I won't escalate it or whatever so it's almost like there's freedom of speech that is

protected by law which is all the important things that you and I probably put a lot of weight on along with a lot of other people but then there's this like almost degradation of freedom of speech when it comes to the gray area of things that may not be popular or may not be you know acceptable or agreeable by certain people and that to me feels like a slippery slope and very dangerous Well, I think you have political freedom of speech. You have your legal right to free speech. And then you have a culture of free speech. And I think that probably, so a lot of folks on the free speech side, I'm definitely one of them, have this belief that maybe things are much worse today than they've ever been before in terms of what people are free to say and culturally, and that, you know, there was maybe some golden age a hundred years ago or something, 200 years ago. And I don't know, I think certainly

things feel really, they feel worse today than they did in our own lifetime, maybe 10 or 20 years ago, but also we're now living online. So we're all super, super immersed in social media. And that is a dynamic that is new. We've never had people clocking so many hours inside of this virtual space being just immersed in the opinions of other people. I think that human beings have this natural impulse to try and find consensus among each other. It's probably the super tribal instinct. You want everybody in the tribe to sort of roughly agree on the same things. And when they don't, it's alarming and it feels wrong. Well, we're now in this like global tribe or I mean, that's, we're not as a thing, right? Like you can't have a global tribe, but I think

what's happening online is we're trying to come to consensus with a bunch of people who are never going to come to consensus. And the harder we try and the worse we fail at this, the more insane we all feel like we're going. And so you have people who are taking new actions, maybe that they never would have before. So we talked about a political right to speech. That is being attacked. You have all sorts of people, even in the media, who are now for the first time in decades talking about, certainly in my lifetime, talking about normalizing the idea of something like a hate speech law. So having new classes of really, quote, bad speech that are actually illegal, that you can't say anymore, that is unprecedented in the history of America. And I think that kind of thing is a natural result of people feeling like they're going insane online. um well and yeah just just so for people that don't know what type of topics would fall in

that so like things that are uh allowed to be said today but would now in this new hate speech type classification not be allowed you don't have to these kind of laws already exist all across europe and um i think also canada has laws like this and so things like anything i mean really it's like anything on the topic of race gender um orientation are all super off limits uh i think religion in in some in some cases um is also included uh and is it that you can't talk about it or that you can't say anything negative well this is the problem with this is the problem here is that it's extremely ambiguous it's you you can't you can't it's hate speech what is it what I mean, these are the topics for sure. You are allowed to talk about them. You are allowed to

have a, like a reasonable conversation about them, but you can't be hateful about it. And this is like, it comes, it can't be targeted. It can't be harassment, but, but also like, I mean, there are certain things you could say that wouldn't be harassment that are just not allowed. Uh, for example, um, you could say that, I don't know, uh, probably in, so in the UK, you can't say that, uh, I'm trying to think of a good one. Um, that one woman, she's like this conservative person who's always getting attacked, uh, for trans comments, uh, saying that it's like bullshit or whatever, like the trans thing is fake. Um, or, you know, there, there are only two genders type that, that kind of a conversation becomes super thorny. And there's a question of

whether or not you're ginning up hatred for a minority, or you're trying to have like a reasonable conversation. And so you get into this really subjective argument about what was the intention of the person. And I'm sort of over here saying, it doesn't matter what the intention of the person was. You should be allowed to say whatever you want, provided you're not, and this is the allowance that, not the allowance, this is the one caveat that we seem to have in this country, which is like, you can't be inciting real world, actual physical violence. You can't be requesting people to go and hurt somebody you can't be calling people up to hurt somebody um it's almost this thing of like you can hurt somebody's feelings but you can't you or somebody

else can't physically create violence right and i think that's where like there'll be people who debate should you be allowed to hurt people's feelings whatever that falls into that bucket which is a whole thing right i think one of the pieces though that um i've talked to a couple of guests before about is like there is this very very weird world of like science and then like what i'll call like social psychology right you you basically across all these things whether it's race gender etc there is a difference and sometimes it is in the favor of people that tend to lean left sometimes it's in the favor of people who tend to lean right like there is a difference between the way that we talk about things in the way that we think about them and then science

and in a lot of these my understanding is that when there is these laws put in place it actually bans the conversation around science as well right so like when you get to that point that feels weird or an overreach or it just doesn't feel like that makes sense in some weird way? Yeah. So dangerous territory. There are a lot of beliefs on... Well, certainly there are all sorts of beliefs on the far right that make no scientific sense whatsoever, but we're allowed to criticize those. And we do all the time. We've been critiquing Christianity in this country certainly as long as i've been alive um you're allowed to malign that faith as much as you want you're allowed to malign religious thinking you're allowed to make fun of creationists

um you are allowed to just go hog on or go what is the phrase to go ham just go nuts on taking down faith-based ideas anti-science thinking from the right and that also would manifest in terms of like uh so you see that in the evolution debate you would see that um in just like the the concept of God itself. Um, but then also like vaccinations, anti-vax stuff hits a lot of right-wing people came a bridge. It's also like sort of crunchy granola type stuff. Like you see this up and my sister lives on, one of my sisters lives on this like hippie Island, this yuppie hippie Island up off the coast of Seattle called Vashon. And it's like filled with anti-vaxxers who, who, who are like super left-wing people, but they don't want to put anything toxic in their body.

So you started to see, I mean, that stuff exists over there. I think there are these other parts on the far left, these other places where people are not thinking, where beliefs are at odds with known science. um i think that one of these areas is gender i think one of these areas is probably man i don't even want to talk about it because it's so dangerous to talk about i don't have we're not talking i don't even but i mean i just like i don't even have firm beliefs here i have questions um but it's like these topics are are off limits um i think the gender one is and that's the problem right let's not we don't have to go into the individual topics but like i think that is ultimately the problem and the way that i've heard this best explained is i think it was in the conversation between joe rogan and kanye west which is like two people by themselves who are who

can be super controversial depending who you're talking to but and i forget which one said it but they basically like when a topic enters into an area where you can no longer discuss it it is now religion, right? You basically take away the ability. Yeah. It's a dogma. You take away the ability to have a conversation around it. Yeah. Well, that's the, and that was the goal. I mean, this is, it's, it's not like it's happening by accident. It's like, um, there are certain beliefs that are so crazy that the only way for people to be made to accept them is for that to be the rule. You have to either accept it or you're kicked out of the public square. Um, I do think i think the gender one is just the easy it's like that's the one where

i'm not going to get into a long conversation about trans stuff right now you know um but certainly like separate from the question of what had been the trans debate up until just a handful of years ago which is concerned something called gender dysmorphia um which is a condition that you are diagnosed with. And then there's really only one way that we know of to alleviate gender dysmorphia. It involves something called transitioning. There's a medical transition and there are all different sort of levels of that. But the purpose of that is to alleviate this thing called gender dysmorphia. Well, that was something that we used to talk about. It still exists. There are still people who have that, but now there's an entirely new class of thing.

and it's like I mean this is this is what it's like the sort of multiple genders thing and there's just like a whole list of them all different kinds you've gender gender queer is sort of like the that's like the ground floor but I mean there are literally there are lists of you know famously it's like 86 genders or whatever which I think is sort of a pejorative making fun of an argument but it is like that world is very crazy and it also you see where it really becomes confusing. A lot of that doesn't really have much to do with science. It has to do with culture. Who cares if someone says they're a new gender? It doesn't really matter. And it has nothing to do with biology. Where things become confusing is when people start talking about, and this comes

up quite a lot, the idea that biological sex isn't real. So now we're sort of leaving the world of gender. They're really close, right? They're sort of like, they're like touching each other right there. Gender and sex, super related, we thought. First step, we're told they're decoupled. They have nothing to do with each other. Uh, that alone, I think there's not that much research supporting, but then where things get really crazy, like I said, is, is when we start denying, uh, the biological sex exists at all. And, um, it's just really, it's just a really crazy topic. Um, and you can't even say like, Hey, that seems really crazy without, uh, without becoming an enemy of some kind online. So I think people just avoid it.

So definitely people avoid it, right? There's this, I don't even want to poke the bear or whatever, but what I'm more interested in is why, right? And I always kind of caveat these conversations with, I generally find people who are independent thinkers and kind of critical thinkers to, one, change their minds more than anyone else in the world, right? If they get new information, they change their mind. And it's actually a sign of intellectual kind of curiosity and honesty that they will change their mind. So I don't think that they're kind of close-minded people and they have a belief in, you know, and it becomes dogma for them.

The other part of it is throughout history, there's a lot of ideas that everyone agrees on today that just didn't exist before. Like you can start with really simple ones like fucking gravity, right? Like there was a time where like nobody thought gravity, no one understood it, right? No one had a name for it.

Like no one could explain it. but our feet were still planted on the ground. And so like, there's definitely like this evolution of ideas and people will go from not understanding something to understanding something. And I think again, critical thinkers, independent thinkers, like fully recognize that. And they're actually seeking that, right. They want to know the truth. Well, so I you're right. All of those things are true. And I think what's interesting about the gender people, the sort of gender, uh, maybe let's call them gender anarchists for a second. They are actually the interesting heretical thinkers here. They're the ones who have a new idea that is shocking. Clearly, people are shocked

by it and it enrages people online. It's not like these people are making a lot of friends based on their ideas. It's just that their ideas are completely protected. It's this weird thing where it's like this weird case where the heretical thinker is the thinker with a brand new idea that has not been tested, that makes no sense to the common person, which might be right, but we don't, we've never heard of it before. It's totally new. It's being treated like it's an obvious scientific fact that has existed since the dawn of time. And that is crazy. And in that part, the way that we talk about it, separate from the conversation, separate from the topic itself, the way that we're talking about it, that's wrong. Something is like deeply broken

there. Flip around and help me understand in terms of the way that you would expect that heretical thinkers ideas to kind of make its way into acceptance in society. How would that normally happen? So if it didn't go from new idea to immediately protected idea, what would the normal sequence of events just generally be to getting the acceptance and then that protection in society as a kind of consensus thought? Culturally, so cultural ideas happen slowly and just who knows? It's like a slow process. Scientific ideas, that comes down to repeatability. So other scientists running experiments that you've run and coming to the same conclusions, at first, science has a long history of people being dogmatic thinkers within the world of

science and ostracizing other people who have the wrong ideas. Every great scientist that we know of almost, certainly anyone with a new exciting idea, they've all been ostracized by other scientists, by most other scientists. And then what happens is like controversy follows their crazy idea. And then other people look at it and you grow a little following. It doesn't go away. more experiments are run and you kind of just chip away at what we used to think. And, you know, 10 years later, there's a new way of thinking about some topic or other. That's how it's happened in the world of science. And so presumably in the world of gender and sex, you should see something like that here, like a slow process and scientists sort of looking at it

and experiments being run. We don't see any of that. It seems like most of what we're learning about sex biology today is coming not from biologists, but from social scientists, academics in the humanities. Um, it is like not, it is, it's, it's not a serious biology discussion. It's a, it's a cultural discussion. Um, and it's really complicated. I don't want to speak for you. So correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think a very important part for people who are listening to this is the way that you're describing this tells me it's not whether it's true or not, right? You're not disagreeing or agreeing necessarily. I haven't heard you say either one of those things. What you're saying is that the work hasn't been done in a scientific manner

in the way that you would expect it to be done. Is that fair? Yeah. I don't know what I think about this topic, honestly. I, what I'm looking at is a conversation that is not scientific and people are saying it's scientific. And in our culture, when something is scientific, it's the law. That's the word that we use to shut down dissent. And I'm saying that's not, we're not having a scientific discussion here. There are all sorts of topics that we're not having scientific discussions on. Like, like this is one of them. They're all there. I mean, there's a wild list of them. Those tend to be the craziest sort of hot button issues on the planet. Are these places where like something sort of not quite right is hiding behind science? I think global warming is

one of these. Not that global warming, let's not even talk about whether or not global warming is man-made. I think that people are definitely contributing to the warming of the planet. I think that carbon has a huge, it seems to me like carbon has a lot to do with the planet getting warmer. But presumably, if you want to cool the planet down, if that's true, we have too much carbon in the atmosphere, then you want to remove carbon from the atmosphere or dramatically reduce the amount of carbon, both really. You want to reduce the amount that we're putting in, you also want to remove it. And so you would think that if we were having a scientific conversation about global warming, we would be talking about carbon sequestration and nuclear energy. Those

would be the only two things that would make sense because nuclear energy allows us to feed 8 billion people on the planet and power them without dramatically increasing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. And carbon sequestration can remove what we've already put in the atmosphere, but we're not. We're talking about things like solar and wind and nothing else. We're talking about banning things like fracking, no natural gas, which is by the way, incrementally much better than oil and coal. But fracking is going to be banned. Oil is going to be banned, of course, we're going to just power our way to the future with solar and wind only. We know that that's not possible. Nuclear is considered a non-starter. It's anti-environmental.

It's unclear why people think that. You're not supposed to question it. Then you have a complete dearth of conversation on carbon sequestration, which begs the question of, I mean, you have people talking about the end of the world. Ocasio said, what, 12 years or something, a few years ago, we're getting closer to the apocalypse every day, just provided the amount of carbon that's in the atmosphere right now, according to the sort of doomsayers. If that's true, then no amount of energy switching is going to save us. We have to remove carbon from the atmosphere. So if you believe these things to be true, why can't we talk about the technology that can actually save us um it's not a scientific conversation it's a cultural conversation

something else is happening there how much of this is um we have a uh lack of uh scientifically educated or scientifically um kind of competent people so people who are engaging in the discussion they don't they're not trained in science they don't understand science they don't uh read the science literature, like they're literally not kind of equipped to have a scientific conversation versus, no, there's actually a lot of people who have it, but they're actually using it to their advantage to have a conversation that is social, not science. I think that the average person does not want to talk about science and their brain doesn't really work that way. Maybe every person doesn't really know it. It's like, it's not normal to

talk about verify like let's do like repeatability and let's look at the data and the numbers when a topic presents itself to you we have a gut reaction to it um it's immediate and visceral when it's the the environments uh gender like we we kind of know what we think about it before the before before we learn anything about it um and i think there's there's like no amount of scientific training that's going to change that. You can just look to what we were talking about before with the way that almost every single scientist who's ever come up with something incredible, some new idea, some important new insight about the world, who's ever discovered some essential new truth, they're completely alienated, not even so much by the average

person who doesn't understand what they're even talking about. They're alienated by other scientists who are all trained scientifically. No amount of scientific training is going to remove from us the impulse to root out the wrong thinker. It seems to be innate. We seem to have a sense, one, of what we want to believe already. It tends to be based on identity rather than the facts around us, maybe identity and morality. Then we look for any evidence we can to sort of make arguments that those things are right. Today, in contemporary American society, the word science is like a magical word that carries a lot of power. So everybody fights to use that word. They all fight to invoke the word science on behalf of the things that they want to

believe to be true, regardless of how scientific they are. And so like, yeah, we're never having scientific arguments. I think that the odds of us ever in the future having them are pretty slim. It's always going to be an uphill battle. It's just not how we're wired. I completely agree. Why do you have Ulysses S. Grant as your profile picture? So it started as a fluke. I was just reading the Ulysses S. Grant biography years ago, and I found it incredibly moving. He's my favorite president. I was taken by he was literally a general like a liberating general he liberated he ended slavery he was the one on the grounds who did it he led troops to shatter the confederacy to bring the country

back together to end the institution of slavery he went on to become a president who supported the gold standard, which I love. And he was just a cool guy. He was just this kind of like quiet commander who fought with his soldiers in the field of battle for something that was incredibly important. And yeah, I found his whole entire story is really empowering. um and i put up the picture as a joke one day it made me feel stronger so like his suddenly like my face is gone now it's grant's face um it's like this old painting so it it gives him sort of this air of respectability and um it's like an appeal to a ancient knowledge almost is what it feels like. We're hearkening back to something with that guy. And what I found was I started

tweeting more freely. I stopped being so scared to say what I was really thinking. And I started fighting more for what I believed in, which is an impulse that I've always had. I've always wanted to. And in the real world, I've done it throughout my life in different ways. But on Twitter, it was scary. And I really avoided it. But with Grant, right there, he became this avatar for me. And he just, like challenged me to be a little braver. And, and the more that I was, the more that I said, the more honest that I was, the more my Twitter seemed to connect with people, I guess. And, um, and I slowly just got to be more of myself, honestly, like in a weird way by, by abandoning my own image. Um,

I got to, my voice became more authentically my own. And I think that's because it's like to see your own face there every day is really hard you know that people are looking at you and everything that you say is going to be a reflection of you of that face right there and in a weird way that like i think that freezes certainly with me i found myself frozen like a deer in headlights like oh my god it's it feels so important and if i say one wrong thing it'll be who i am forever um regardless of whether or not that's true certainly grant was it was like i was able to speak a little more freely and and and so then i kept him and he became he became like this big part of of who i was online in a way he was like my internet my internet body suit

um i love this i love this answer yeah you're good that's that's literally the best answer that anyone could give for something like that because it it feels like um it allowed you to be more you, which is almost what everyone is chasing. And you were able to kind of uncover the ability to do that by simply changing your profile picture. Yeah. I think that there's a lot to be said about this in the way that teenagers experiment with fashion and they're like, I'm going to change my name and I'm going to be this new thing or whatever. And we all as adults make fun of that. And that's wrong. It's like, actually what's happening is people feel trapped inside of their own identities and they need help breaking free of that sense that we have of who

we are, which is not entirely correct ever. That's always more about what other people are putting on you than it is about who you really are, like who you authentically are, which is probably always changing to a certain extent. So like a dramatic change seems dramatic, but actually it, and it seems inauthentic always. I mean, this kid is sort of like maybe a nerdy kid comes to school one day in a leather jacket and combat boots. And you're like, that's not who you are. It's like, probably not, but he wasn't the guy yesterday either. That also wasn't who he was. He he's looking for room to become who he is. And that when you change the way that, that you present to people, um, it gives you space to become, to become something else who you really are, which is actually why

like the trans stuff is crazy to me because, um, I love it. Like I actually, I'm a transhumanist. I, I like the idea that transitioning to me seems important and good and being able to change the way that you present the world, uh, as a way to kind of connect with quote, who you really are. That moves me. Um, and I think that there's a really important conversation that's happening there. I think all this stuff is connected and, and, uh, yeah, I'm pro it. I'm pro, I'm pro changing.

I'm pro changing. I love it. Uh, for those that don't know who you are, let's go back to go forwards, which is, uh, what is your background and how'd you get to Founders Fund? Um, so, wow. Long story. Let's make it short. I met Peter Thiel, my now boss, through, um, a nonprofit called the Seasteading Institute.

These are guys who wanted to build floating autonomous cities in the middle of the ocean. The idea was like, if there were just an unlimited... So first, open seas, no laws out there. Theoretically, you should be allowed to sort of collect a bunch of rafts together in the middle of nowhere in the ocean and declare it its own country. It's like unclear why that wouldn't be allowed. It's kind of like Mars when Elon Musk gets there and people ask him who's going to create the laws and he's like, the people who settle Mars and they get mad at him. Well, so, so what drew me to the Seasetting Institute was an essay that Peter wrote about it when he first funded them way back. And I think it was 2008, maybe, uh, it was called the education of a libertarian. And in it, he talked about Mars, which had always been the thing that I cared the most about. And I wanted to go to Mars. Everything in my life was, I was like, that's, that's like the most important thing. Um, and he was like, yeah, Mars is

important, but we're not there. And we are nowhere near there. It's going to be decades, if ever, but a frontier is essential. We have to find a new frontier. We have to open a new frontier, a new place where there are no laws, there are no structures. It allows people to be creative. When there's nothing, you have to build something. And if you're building something from nothing, that means that you're doing something new. It's like we have now, since the last city's been built. It's been, well, since the last American city has been built, we're talking 150 years or so, great American city, huge American city. Probably San Francisco would have been the last like really massive, spectacular American city. And that was like 18, what, 1840s, the 49ers. So

it would have been like late 1840s, 1850s. So you want to open a new frontier. And now you have another 100 years plus of history. You have 100 years plus of technology. What do you build from a blank slate? What do you create? So that was the concept of like, you want to open a frontier, how do you do that? Seasteading was this interesting libertarian type experiment where it wouldn't just be one government. It's like a concept and you open up the seas to hundreds of new governments. And then you interject, you enter sort of like the market dynamic and people will choose of their own free will, which government is the best. So you do it, you have a hardcore like communist government out there. You have a theocratic government,

you have an anarchist government, you have a sort of minarchist government and you let them all, you bring back kings, you have a bunch of sort of warring kings on their warring islands. And then people will just decide what, what is the best for them. And we'll learn a lot. It would be this grand experiment in politics. And that was the sort of utopian dream of the Seasetting Institute. So I volunteered for them because I wanted to meet people like that who thought about things like that. I was 23 when I started volunteering. So I think that was like, would have been like 2009. And, and I did, I met a, I met someone pretty interesting. I met Peter and we became friends. And eventually I left the world of publishing, which is where I was working

full-time at the point. I was an editorial assistant at Penguin Books and Peter brought me to Founders Fund to work on a bunch of projects with him. Do you remember the first conversation you ever had with him? Yeah. The first real conversation that wasn't just like a trading messages online would have been, um, we were at a meetup that I threw for seasteading. We met in the real, in the real world there. Um, and we talked about everything. I mean, we talked about, we talked for like an hour and a half or something. We talked about politics and philosophy, and we talked about libertarianism and how it works and why it can never work. We talked about Mars. We talked about seasteading. Um, we talked about the future

broadly, big abstract, crazy ideas. Peter's the smartest man I've ever met in my life and not by a little. His brain is unique and special. It's fast. It's like dancing and he's an interesting dancer. He comes to topics sideways. People have this tendency in a conversation, it's like someone says something that's maybe a little controversial and people will take the other side of that. Um, and look, I just did it. Like there's the implication that there's another side, one other side, and it's obvious. And we all, some, I don't even know where this comes from. We seem to have this reason. We all have this, this idea that there's an, we just go to the natural sort of obvious other side of something and, and everything tends to be super

polarized in this way, all conversations. Um, and he somehow like just avoids that dynamic it completely and comes at them from underneath or above or the side and is always surprising you in a conversation and challenging you to defend what you're saying, to dig deeper, to find the meaning behind something. And that was, I mean, for me at that time, I never met someone who was so exciting to talk to in my life. And I would have done any job. It wouldn't have mattered. It was like, I want to learn from this guy. What would you say the number one thing you've learned from him is wow there are a lot um if i had to steal it one or two it doesn't have to just be one i think that the most important thing he introduced me to was the mimetic

philosophy there's this guy uh renee gerard let's not say the most one of the most important things Um, and mimetic philosophy is, uh, it concerns, it concerns the natural impulse in people to seek out competition with each other for resources, um, talks about the way that friends become enemies. And the only way that we sort of even know what to want is by looking to people we respect and value. And we looked at them for cues on what to want. And we sort of copy that desire.

And we don't even realize we're doing it. And we even sometimes think that we ourselves were the generator of that desire and that the other person is copying us. And it's this really interesting philosophy that underpins like everything. And it's a long philosophy. There's a lot there. But you see it manifesting in other things that he's talked about, like competition is for losers would be the sort of meme-y version of one of the aspects of Girardian philosophy.

You want to avoid competition. It's bad. Then you see it manifesting politically, and Peter's always talking about war being bad. One of his huge things is he's not into war, and you want to avoid war. It's never good. It's always like a waste of life, and it's always massively destructive. It's unclear if anything good comes out of most, almost no war, ends in something good. And yet it's like, there's this human impulse towards it. But the mimetic, the sort of Girardian read of all of this is that it's all of us wanting to be like each other, wanting to have the same things that we have. And it's sort of saying that it's really hard to find people who are thinking for themselves almost ever um and so it really values well i mean it sort of

denies that original thought even exists but i think the softer version of this would be like finding people who are able to escape mimetic desire even a little bit is sort of novel and powerful um you want to find people who are thinking for themselves who are looking for new things. And it's actually, it sounds almost trite, like this cliche, like, oh yeah, we want like original thinkers, but it's really, really hard. Most people are not thinking at all, let alone originally. One of the areas that has very much this like polarization and tit for tat, if you will, is what I'll call tech and anti-tech. And this is playing out across the board, socially, politically journalism etc I mean it just seems to be the the topic du jour if you will right you

see it in a lot of the anti-trust stuff you see it in the coverage in the media there's literally people who tend to be tech friendly and people who tend to be anti-tech and then you even see it socially in kind of this entire movement around tech is good for the world and then literally people you know tech is bad for the world and I think part of what is so unique about that situation is, uh, you have a quote unquote industry that is very hard to define, right? Like is IBM tech or not? Right. And I think that, uh, that makes this difficult, but how do you view kind of that, you know, avoidance of that memetic type, um, relationship when you get tech versus anti-tech, like what is the other thought process or the other area to explore other than

just those two seemingly polarizing views of the world? Well, I don't think the anti-tech thing is even about technology. It's about business for sure and influence. And so actually both sides want exactly the same thing. It has nothing to do with their worldview and everything to do with influence. The New York Times wants exactly what the average tech CEO wants, which is the attention of people. So that's the first thing. If you wanted to actually break apart, it's hard to break apart the philosophy of the anti-tech people, for example, because I'm not really convinced that they have a problem with any of these things, really. I think that we're just in competition for the same stuff.

Let me clarify that because I think this is an important point. You're basically saying, you know, in kind of a visualization, if you will, there's this treasure chest that has power, attention, influence, you know, all of these intangibles that people put importance on. And you basically have two groups of people who are both competing with each other to who gets the treasure chest, right? There's the quote unquote anti-tech crowd who usually ends up being labeled for journalists, but also there's politicians, et cetera. But there's also this other crowd that's competing for that stuff, which is, uh, just people in business or running these companies. And so that competition is what drives the, uh, kind of polarization between those

two groups. Man, it's, it's such a complicated fight, honestly. So I think that on the one hand you have that on, not even on the one as if there are two, there are a lot of, so that is one of the dynamics that's happening is you have a lot of people who are fighting for the same thing, which is attention. And I think that becomes most pronounced, not even among tech CEOs and journalists as it does between tech influencers and journalists on Twitter. That is where a lot of those people are fighting. They're fighting for the same thing. Those people are like, I mean, tech influencers, they're media personalities. So they're all exactly the same fighting for the same thing, which is attention on the one hand. Then in the world

of tech, it's like, there's technology. And 10 years ago, the conversation was much more about is automation, robotic automation good for the world? What about jobs? We would have conversations like that. Are the robots taking our jobs? And I would get frustrated and be like, no, because it's going to create more jobs and it's going to be utopia and blah, blah, blah. We're not even talking about that anymore. Basically, we're talking about capitalism versus socialism every single day. And that's a new thing where, where the, the, what the technology industry is ostensibly doing, which is building new technology. Like that's not even the topic. So you, on the one hand, yes, you have your influencers versus your influencers on,

on the other, you have a little bit maybe of this, of this, like, is technology good for the world stuff um but increasingly now what you have is a question of um is business itself good for the world that is new it has like these last i would say under trump really even before him a little bit but like uh it's capitalism versus socialism i think you described it i think that's like the clearest it isn't over generalization but that is definitely one lens of which to view the the conversation through? I think it's one. Yeah. I mean, and I think that, I think then you also have people in the media who believe their job is just to speak, quote, like sort of speak truth to power and they perceive correctly the technology industry, the technology industry to be an

incredible fount of power. It is. They fail to acknowledge that they themselves are also a fount of power. They get really upset when you point that out. They don't think they have a responsibility, apparently, based on what I'm reading online, to wield that power fairly. And they also tend to like... So I think going after Mark Zuckerberg is one thing. Going after Facebook, a legitimately powerful company, is one thing. I like Mark. Actually, I think Mark's doing the best job that he can right now. I have a lot of critiques of it, but like, I'm not, let's just table the Mark Zuckerberg conversation for a second. Certainly he's a powerful person. Facebook is a powerful company. Um, but then you have people going after

like random ass startups and with like, you know, no revenue and a couple of employees and they're super young people who maybe said something sort of clunky or stupid online. And, and it's like, well, what's happening there? Why are they being attacked? Um, and that i don't know i i don't know uh that that comes from a place of like hatred it looks like that i don't understand and that makes me really upset and that's that's what like activated me honestly i was like like well i started seeing stuff like that i started seeing uh media figures going after people who couldn't defend themselves from the technology industry who didn't have much power at all who had no influence who weren't very good with words and uh it infuriated me and i was

like, this is bullshit. If they can't fight for themselves, I'll do it for them. Whatever. I'll clap back. I don't care. So I'm going to ask you to take a couple of different perspectives here because I think that this conversation is really important and seeing it from multiple sides, which I think you actually do, is why I want to talk to you. So let's go to the defense first of the media industry. You already said earlier, there are many, many good journalists who do good journalism and whether you agree with them or not i think people place in an incredible amount of importance on those journalists right like the freedom of the press the ability to uh publish things that even if people don't want it published like that is protected uh they do the right things

in terms of the amount of work and checking facts and all that stuff and they publish it i think you fall in that camp but correct me if i'm wrong in terms of like there are important people doing that stuff. How do you, if you had to put together an argument to defend the people who aren't necessarily doing the hardcore journalism, but are still publishing at media sites. So I usually call these like the bloggers masquerading as journalists, right? They're not actually doing journalism. It is published under the news. It is published under, you know, non-opinion type sections. Yeah. I think that's like most of the, so the New York times is a great, let's just go to the New York times, um, the New York times. So they have an influencer strategy and we can

just call it what it is they are going around and they're hiring personalities who are creating content that they want people to read that run them into the paywall and get people to subscribe which by the way is perfectly fine it's actually a great media strategy like like that is if you're running the new york times like that's actually like the strategy you probably should be doing in today's day and age right right it's just it just cuts against so all of those people the reason that they're so powerful those that certain kind of media influencer they're they're powerful because they're not just people with opinions. They're people with opinions standing behind the New York Times. And the New York Times carries with it this incredible air of fairness,

of seriousness, of verifiability, accountability. They are, quote, the paper of record, which I've seen some of these people whip out in conversations online before as a defense of some dumb thing that one of them did. Like, how dare you challenge? This is the paper of record. And it's like, wait a minute, you're just an asshole on Twitter, as am I. Like, what does the New York Times have to do with it? I don't care that you work there. It doesn't make you a better person. It doesn't make you smarter. It does not make you better at your job. It doesn't make you a better writer, that's for sure. But like, at the New York Times, that brand has come from like decades and decades and decades of serious journalism. Now, within that world of

serious journalism, there are all sorts of problems. There's this question of was there ever a time when the New York Times really didn't have a bias? Of course it was biased. You can't even decide on what stories to cover unless you have a bias. You need a bias to make those kinds of determinations. And the entire idea of a media company that was without bias is a weird historical aberration. It's a product of the 20th century. Really like you saw it like hugely sort of come together under World War II and after when you have this massive consolidation of media entities and the government sort of gets involved and is like, you need to be like fair and neutral and all this shit. It was historical virtue signaling. That's basically what it was. It was a way to

virtue signal saying that we are unbiased, but naturally if you have an organization run by humans. You can't be unbiased. It's not possible. I think it's some of that. I do think that real efforts were made to try and it was this really noble thing. People were like, how do we just report objectively? And it's like, well, you can't decide on what to cover objectively. That's a subjective decision. Is there a way to cover the thing that you decided on subjectively objectively? That's a weird question because clearly you have a lot of feelings about the thing that you're covering. And so likely you have an opinion about it. I think it's really noble. I was talking to a Chronicle reporter for a project I was working on like a year ago.

I was at City Hall talking to her. She wouldn't even take opinions on the supervisors and deeply cared about this and was committed to it, committed to the idea of like principled, objective reporting on city council. And I love that. I love those people. I think they're important. And I think those people still, there are many of them that still exist in the New York Times who at least believe that, who at least are trying to be as objective as they can covering these things, even though I think it's not entirely possible, but they're trying and they are doing good work and they're doing work that I like I'm writing now on my sub stack. I find myself going back to their work. I'm always linking back to work that is written and published

in the New York Times. There's tons of great stuff there on the topics of like China, for example, comes to mind. There's all sorts of, on COVID, there's been plenty of great reporting on UFOs. Like everything good, every piece of good reporting on UFOs has come from the New York Times. And so there's a lot there, but then you have these influencers who are increasingly dominant. They're clearly not here to sort of serve the public with information that is in the public's benefit. They're there to either become sort of famous influencers or to push some kind of propaganda. And in the tech team at New York Times, I mean, you have a couple of people who are decent, who I think really believe that they're going to cover the industry objectively. They

happen to believe the industry is too powerful and too dangerous. So like, it's always a negative frame, but that having like, knowing that it's always a negative frame, I think there are a couple people there with that negative frame who are at least still fair. But most of them are not that. Most of them are assassins. Most of them are looking to malign and ridicule people in any way they can from our industry. Most of them have a super anti-business bias. Most of them think that we're the reason they are miserable. And then also they get a lot of attention online for their ridiculous takes and flame wars. And so that's what they do. That's what they're incentivized to do. What's the solution?

Well, what's the problem? First of all, I guess that's the more, I mean, is this a problem? Like we've seen crazy media ecosystems like this in the past. We saw this in, I mean, like I said, throughout most, as long as there's been a press with a slight historical aberration in the 20th century. It's mostly been this crazy mess of warring outlets and media figures attacking each other. Most of our founding fathers were a part of this dynamic, by the way, in America. How many of them had their own newspaper? How many of them were penning in six different pen names and were just mercilessly attacking their opponents? That was the news. It was opinion was the news. What's changed is now in the world of technology, there's so much more that's being

written. There are so many more people who are activated. And we're also sort of all living, you know, used to be able to pick up a newspaper and put it down. Now, the news walks around with us wherever we go, and it infects everything. So it feels really different. I think it's not different, it's just bigger. And the solution, I think, is like, people accept that that's reality. People have to start accepting that there is no objective source of news. There are facts and there are some people who are reporting on facts, but it's really, really hard to get it at something that is completely without bias. And so knowing that, you have to start sort of looking for multiple sources on any given story.

This is something that I do myself. Like if I find a story that I love, that confirms all of my biases, that's when I get most nervous. And I'm like, all right, don't tweet about it just yet because you want this to be true. So go find some other source, go look, click through some of these links

that where did this come from? What else did that person write? It's really hard. Everything inside of me wants to not do that, but you have to try. And I think that we have to normalize that. We have to normalize the assumption that most of what we're reading is a little bit untrue at all times. And if we can do that, if that becomes a normal cultural thing, then maybe this discourse improves a little bit.

I think it's the single most important thing that can happen is a kind of hard right into independent thinking and literally training people. I don't know where and when you do that, If that's in like grade school or if that's, you know, somewhere in a social media school or whatever. But just this idea of seeking out, you know, multiple opinions on a topic before kind of originating your own ideas or conclusions could go very, very far away for every population or subpopulation in the United States. And globally, it's just like you said, it goes against everything in human nature. Yeah, I mean, this is not how this is not this is not how we do. we don't want to learn new things. We don't want to think about anything that challenges our core assumptions about the world. Once we decide that someone is bad, our assumption is

that everything they say is bad. Everything they do is bad. And I mean, that alone is most of what's happening right now with tech versus the press. It's like both camps have already decided that the other camp is totally bad. And I mean, clearly I'm a tech side. I have a lot of reason to believe that the press um wants to destroy us uh a lot of times they say it just like on twitter they talk about the need to reduce the power and influence of tech and blah blah blah they're super pro-antitrust they were pro-85 after they got their own exemptions uh they were anti-prop 22 which would have i mean had prop 22 in california failed uber and lyft probably would have had to have shut down in the state of california so i'm looking at what they're saying and arguing for and

I'm like, you're, you know, you're trying to destroy us. So like, I'm, we're at war, but it's complicated. And there are lots of journalists and they're not all like that. And if they liked one bad article or, or wrote one bad article, um, or gotten to one weird argument online. And I saw that and I, I mean, that's wrong. It's wrong for me to lump that. I get that that's wrong. Um, but human nature is human nature. It's human nature. All right. I want to finish up talking about a subject that I did not know that you were, uh, fond of, but somebody told me this when they saw that we were going to talk, which is aliens and, uh, and UFOs. Uh, and then you were talking about Mars earlier, uh, at the end of every

interview, I ask people whether, uh, they believe in aliens or not. Uh, and this all came out of one day I was laying in bed about to fall asleep. And, uh, I just thought to myself, I said, do you think aliens have pets? Like if they showed up on earth, right. Would they be showing up with multi-species type situation going on and a dog on a leash. I've never seen that in any of the sci-fi. That's a weird thing to think about. Where does your fascination with aliens, UFOs, outer space, other planets, et cetera, come from and just start talking about that in general and what fascinates you about it? Well, all right. So my interest in Mars is completely different than my interest in UFOs. Um, Mars for me is a, and I'm not like, Oh, I want to go to Mars. It's

like the exciting thing about Mars is we have a blank slate and we can create an entirely new worlds, right? We're talking about go to Mars, terraform, build an atmosphere, create atmospheric pressure, walk around without masks on maybe like a little bit of an oxygen sort of like thing in your nose, but like your mask is off. Now you're protected from the radiation. You are looking around a world, your atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, plants are growing, oceans, ice is melted. We have oceans on Mars. I look at Mars and I see a future that is incredible. And it's this incredible opportunity to create a new branch of human civilization. And that's always been my interest in Mars. It's always been super human centric. It's been super humanist. It's been about

us. UFOs and aliens. So aliens, I don't believe in aliens. I'm neutral on aliens. I don't believe yes in aliens. I have no idea. I think there's no evidence either way. UFOs are definitely real. UFOs are happening. The question is, what are they? And the fascination for me with UFOs has nothing to do with aliens or even the UFOs themselves. What is blowing my mind is the way that people refuse to look at it. It's like, how much evidence do you need? How many like Pentagon programs, how many New York times breaking stories about scientists working on this, like with sort of, I mean, you have to go back and you should read the New York times articles. They are insane. Uh, the interviews that they have with like, it is pilots, uh, material

scientists. You have people who have are ex Pentagon officials, like what they're talking about. First of all, it's not just photographic evidence and videographic evidence and the accounts of pilots. There's also talk of material retrieved from a crash. In the pages of the New York Times, this is just a year ago, less than a year ago. This happened under COVID, the materials piece. It's like, that's really crazy. We have to know everything that we can about that. There are all sorts of things that are not being disclosed from the government still. So I'm like, clearly we should be demanding complete transparency at this point. UFOs, there are only a couple of options here. It's like either, yeah, it's aliens. Okay. That's crazy. Or probably

what seems a little more likely, at least it did to me until I started looking into this was, oh wow, you know, Russia and China, super technologically advanced. One, I don't think it's true, but if it were true, that would be a huge story worth talking about. The fact that Russia and China have the technology to travel faster than the speed of sound in ways, or I'm sorry, they have the technology to accelerate in ways that seem to defy the known laws of physics. That's a big deal. Three, it's a massive conspiracy, also a huge deal. There's no version of this story that isn't like the biggest story in the entire world. So why don't people want to know more about it? Why does every time this like a crazy well-sourced article on UFOs

come out, again, this is in the New York Times, right? Like this is a new world that we're living in now. In the 90s, it was not like this. In the early 2000s, it was not like this. We're looking at stories that are coming out now in that are well-sourced um that have evidence sometimes videographic evidence embedded in the piece like why do we talk about it on twitter for a day and then the next day we it's like we don't even remember that it happened what is that what's that phenomenon that's what i can't stop thinking about is it because people just assume that it that like yeah of course ufos exist and and uh that's already kind of been ingrained in people's heads because they saw the leaked videos on reddit four years ago or whatever and it's just like oh

that's old news or is it that it scares people and they don't want to know? Or is it something else? I don't know what the answer is, but like, what's your opinion? I think people don't believe it's, I think people believe it's too crazy to be real. I think that it's, it seems too crazy. They're waiting for something to come out that explains it all away. And my feeling about the world is it's much stranger than we think. And I think that the UFOs to me, I think the most likely thing is that we're looking at some kind of natural phenomena that changes the rules, so to speak, of physics and reality. I think that reality is much more complicated than we think. And I think that there's something in the UFO stuff that fundamentally alters our conception

of the world. If we would explore it, if we would look at it, if we would learn about it, it would change, I think, everything. And I think people on some level know that. They know that. So they're waiting for it to be written away. But if it's not, if it can't be, if it changes everything that we know about ourselves, that's really exhausting. And people have evolved in such a way as to conserve as much energy as possible. Um, we don't like to change. We don't like to change the way we think about things. We don't like to change physically. Like there's, there's, we don't like to change in sort of any sense of the world word. We do not like changing because changing requires energy and, um, and energy, the difference

between a lot and little in the paleolithic era was the difference was the difference between, passing on your genes or not, right? Our ancestors were lazy. That's why they survived. We're lazy. We don't want to learn about the world. This is just, that's what they're scared of. It's less about the aliens than it is about what they're going to have to do themselves, which is think about the world for themselves. Is it fair to say that the UFOs are literally the terminology unidentified flying objects uh they're ufos until we figure it out and so if it was alien spacecraft right kind of the idea of a ufo or at least in what we're calling ufos today that goes away and it becomes alien spacecraft if it's a technological superiority from another foreign country or

whatever then like we almost are in this weird state of um not understanding it that's why it's a ufo but once it is understood therefore it gets labeled something else or do you think that we live in this weird world where there's such a fascination with ufos that like even if uh it was alien spacecraft or you know technological superiority like people would still call this stuff ufos well what they're calling it now is the pentagon has sort of switched the game up here uh we've gone from ufos unidentified flying objects to uaps unidentified aerial phenomena uh that's like the sort of new nomenclature which broadens it doesn't narrow it uh and it broadens it to include, I mean, who knows what all manner of things. Um, if it's not, if it's not a flying

object, the question is like, is it even physically there? Like, is it in this dimension? I mean, who knows? There are all sorts of wild conversations that you can have about this. Um, I do think that, no, I think that if we have a better sense of what it is, we'll, we'll have a new word for it. And I think that our language does, yeah, it allows us in some way to, to we're constricted by our language. Um, I think that, uh, I don't know. I think that we're going to learn a lot. I think the next five years are going to be insane for UFO stuff. There's a lot of information the government is hiding, but there's also stuff as more people start to look at this as more people now believe that it's interesting. I think the average person is like

shut down or like, Nope, that's impossible. Um, don't have to think about that. Not worth my energy, there's a minority of people, and that minority is growing by the day, who are no longer, it's not like your tinfoil hat wearing people. It's people like us who are like, okay, I'm looking at this information. It seems weird. I would like to see more information. And that means that people are going to be gathering more information. That means that people are going to be requesting more information that we already have that's just being hidden specifically. So the Navy's been really open about their information. The Pentagon has been a little bit more closed and then the Air Force is like totally dark. There's a lot of information I think that the Air Force is sitting

on. Well, what do I know? I'm just a guy on Twitter. I have no idea what the Air Force does or does not know. You're a sub stack billionaire on Twitter. Make sure we classify you correctly. I want to spend the last minute or two talking about the content you consume. You are obviously an original thinker, kind of very open-minded. And my guess is that you consume very different types of content, whether it's books, news outlets, podcasts, you know, whatever. What are the things that kind of come to mind when I say like, what content do you consume on a periodic basis? I read a lot of books. I think every week I've got a couple. I don't get through them. I think this is something that you have to sort of do. If you don't like a book, it's not your fault.

it's the book's fault just put the book down like and that's great so reading through books is how i find other books that i want to read it's like i can become interested in a topic and i'm like oh cool i don't know anything about that what and i go and i buy a book on it um i so it's like yeah lots of stacks and stacks of books i mean that's just a few of them a lot of those are encyclopedias i just got those because i no longer trust wikipedia so i want like an older hardbound source of knowledge that I can go back to. And then I can sort of compare that with new things to sort of get a rough approximation of what is real. So yeah, books is a big one. What type of books? Nonfiction now. I used to be super into fiction.

Um, these days it's like nonfiction biographies for history and then also, um, older stuff, uh classics um but yeah it's a broad thing i mean it's everything from just like yeah it's like non-fiction to the classics to um when you when you wake up what's the news sources that you check first twitter i go to twitter like an asshole um everybody does it nobody wants to say it but everyone does it yeah so it's like books for directed learning and then twitter for passive learning twitter is like where i keep a sense of it's where i keep up with a sense of what's going on and that's usually what i'm talking about it's what i'm i'm like responding to those dialogues online um but it's not really where i go to learn

about the world it's where i go to learn about what people think about the world which is really important i'm in media increasingly and i really care about the stories that people tell themselves i think that that shapes our entire reality so twitter is for me where our entire world is being built right now, which is why it's so exciting. It's why people can't look away. We all kind of have a sense of that. We know that that's where everybody who is involved in the sort of like creation of our world, they're all on Twitter right now and they're all reading the same trash fire content and that's informing everything. So it's like, yeah, it's just like self-directed learning with books, Twitter for the trash fire of the day. And I'm not really

a big podcast guy. Actually, I've got a handful that I listened to, um, but nothing that I'd want to share. That's like so great. I like to produce podcasts, but, um, it sounds so stupid, but I actually, as someone who does create podcasts, there are not many that I'm super obsessed with myself. Last question for you that I'll let you go. Uh, if you had to choose one sentence, a quote, a sentence, whatever that you live your life by or a motto, what would it be? that's a big request for out of nowhere. Um, well, the one that comes to mind is just fortune favors the bold. that's a great one it's even better that you thought of that right off the top of your head

and that's that i mean that's what i've got i i hope that was uh enough for you um did this fantastic i never thought that i would talk to a sub stack billionaire who was such an independent thinker and also at the same time had so many controversial thoughts all right man well thank you for having me and i'm stoked to see how it comes out and if you wanted to record more on like certain questions or whatever i'm down awesome where can we send people to find you on the internet? Let's go to my Twitter, which is Mike Solana, M-I-C-S-O-L-A-N-A. So it sounds like Mick, M-I-C-S-O-L-A-N-A. Or my Substack is Solana, S-O-L-A-N-A.substack.com. Awesome, man. Well, thank you so much. We're going to have to do this again in the future. Thank you. Yeah,

I'll talk to you later.