#797 - Mike Solana - TikTok Ban, Media War & The Corruption Of College
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What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Mike Solana. He's a writer, vice president at Founders Fund, editor-in-chief at Pirate Wires, and a podcaster. To no one's surprise, the future of American media and politics is

is upside down. A pervasive lack of trust leaves everyone uncertain about the rest of the year. So what does the future have in store? And what facts can we be certain about in a time of turmoil and confusion? Expect to learn why the new app Fly Me Out is a fantastic indictment of modern dating culture, why the tide is turning against independent

and mainstream media, whether the left versus right debate is officially dead, what the future of news and media will look like, whether American colleges are really a lost cause, how taboo subjects affect science and censorship in academia, Mike's prediction for the first Trump versus Biden debate, and much more.

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

Hordash just makes it a little more explicit, which is, by the way, why the app will probably fail, so relax. If we're clutching pearls, let's talk about the CCP using TikTok to keep a database of our fingerprints or incels permanently connecting to their VR headsets, auto-blow 3000 combo while the birth rate plummets. Uber Meats is at least improving the fuck rate, said Riley Nork for PirateWire's Three Mornings takes this morning. Yeah, I'm going to be...

I worked with him on that one. This is started from a, it started from a tweet of mine. So I feel confident talking about this subject. I didn't know we were talking about this today, but I am happy to talk about this today. Where do we begin with that? You tell me, dude, this is your story. First of all, you guys should subscribe to the Pirate Wires daily and get our three takes. Yes, you should. I read it every morning. I read it every morning. Thank you very much. I do think, I think that the,

So you have this app. It's not actually called the whore dash. It's called, well, you said it. It's right. It's fly, fly me out. So, I mean, you have this app that is designed to connect young, hot women with rich, rich

probably not so hot guys on yachts and whatnot. And people freak out because why it's the explicit, this is a transactional thing of it all. But I started noticing, I mean, years ago on Instagram, people with 10,000, 20,000 followers on Instagram, they're

like clockwork. You hit that number, maybe two times that number. And suddenly for some reason you want to go to Dubai. A lot of time in Middle East. It's you, you see these pictures. I'm going to Dubai. I'm going to this other random oil rich country with where there's like lots of oil royalty and I'm flying first class somehow. How are you doing that with 20,000 Instagram followers? It doesn't pay you any money. No job, no,

No obvious sign of employment. This is how the world works. Instagram is like

yellow pages for hot people who are for sale. I don't think all of them are like this. I don't want to say that's true of everybody, but I mean, you slide into someone's DMs and you offer them a yacht. That is sort of how the world works online. And it's maybe how it's always worked for young hot people. I don't know. Hollywood seems like that kind of a vibe in general. But I think that what people freaked out about here is...

is the explicit nature of it. It's by saying it out loud, by making it more obvious, people don't like that. Everyone's sort of

I can't believe that people are so stupid as they don't know this is happening, but, but if they are okay, fine, different class of person, I think the average person sort of sees those Dubai trips and is like, what's going on there. But then they don't think too much about it because there's this polite lie we tell about it. Anyway, you know, it's fun. That one may be fun. Why is, why is calling it out? Why is being explicit about something that most people probably had an idea was happening? Why is that causing uproar?

I don't know. I mean, this is always the case of everything, right? Isn't this just what the nature of being polite is? It's this, we tell each other these polite lies in social situations to make everybody feel comfortable. And I don't know, there are whole like novels written about this. Jane Austen has been writing, maybe she writes about this better than anybody else at all, just talking about sort of the rules of polite society and what exists basically

behind those rules it will always exist it's just this is just something that happens to be really contentious um in our culture i also think there's something happening you know separate from all that if you're super online you've probably noticed there's this rising trad right wing thing which is um super anti it's uh maybe like classically socially conservative um

And I think we just haven't seen that kind of a real forceful conservative, socially conservative right-wing thing in a while, at least since I was in college, I think. It's definitely more popular now than ever. I don't know how popular it is outside of the internet. We'll find out probably soon. It's like a meme movement purpose-built to counteract other meme movements that

kind of only really exist on the internet. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It's like, I mean, the internet is a world of like based Greek statues fighting sort of gender queer, they, them anime fairies, and they both come with their own philosophies. Um, and I, I mean, I've taken this stuff very seriously for a very long time. And I think that I'm, I'm probably, uh,

I'm at least a little bit right about that. The question is, how right am I about that? It seems like those things, those groups of people and this ideological warfare that's sort of visualized online in that way does have an impact on politics. So it's a little bit downstream of that, at least. So you see that, I think, a lot with the almost...

meme-like framing of DeSantis as he signed the anti-lab-grown meat bill, it felt very trad, right-wing, Twitter adjacent, even though there's all sorts of real obvious sort of boring political reasons for that, including just the money that lobbyists spend on campaigns, especially in Florida, and how much impact agriculture has on US politics. Can you explain what that framing was for the people who aren't sufficiently- You have these-

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

If you can bring it there, you definitely are. It's a super, it's the most aggressive anti-labor group meet bill that exists, which is

Has a lot to do with the fact that you just can't get it yet. It's a sort of abstract conversation we're having. But he couched it in memes, in memetic... I don't want to call it language, but it's visual language. It's like memetic visual language is how he got that point across. Or maybe how he tried to get support for what he was doing. But this stuff does... Long story short, this stuff, what happens on the internet, does matter at least a little bit. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, there was that dark Brandon moment, right? Where they tried to get Biden to meme. And the reason that I thought, I thought that was, to be honest, actually pretty funny. Dark Brandon is a good meme. It's like a shockingly good meme. It's a really fucking, yeah, it's the Uno reverse card of the left. I think the problem was that it's kind of a little bit like hearing your mom do a gay joke. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, the background is like, you know that Biden has never actually seen the meme. And if he or if he has, he doesn't understand it. Like he's not the one memeing. He can't even string a sentence together. I don't even know that he's been online in probably years. I mean, since he does, he check his email. I don't know how it works for him, but he has a he has handlers who know at least a little bit about memes. So they were able to sort of get that one out there. Where's Trump? I mean, you're up against somebody like Trump. Trump.

Trump understands memes. Trump's online. You know that Trump is tweeting himself. No one was tweeting for him. He understands the internet. He understands crowds. And so any sort of memetic war with him is going to be hard to win. He's very good. I mean, he's the god troll of the internet. The heavyweight champion of meme war. How do you sort of conceptualize the broad...

armies of sort of discussion and pockets of mimetic warfare on the internet now. And like, where do you fall within this? Like, what are you as well as a part of this? And it's so complicated now. And I'm having a hard time recently. Not a hard time. I think I'm in a process now of recalibrating my sense of what's going on because the internet has changed so quickly over the last year and a half, two years. And

Take me through that. Explain to me how you sort of conceptualize this last sort of... Well, the vibe shift has been coming for a while and I've written about it. I wrote about it, I think, gosh, it might've been like a year and a half, two years ago. We've been on this train for quite a bit. It was post-COVID. A lot of the lies we were forced to believe, or at least

parrot online became so incredible that the whole order that was sort of propping them up, and we're talking about lies about COVID, lies about gender, lies about... Honestly, I think, and this one's going to be more controversial, but I look at something like January 6th and it's like, that wasn't a coup. So what are we actually talking about here? No one really believes it was a coup. Not even the New York Times believe. They won't use that word coup. Who's using the word coup? Not them for a reason because it's like if...

Whatever that narrative was that was constructed of all of these different things became impossible to defend. And at that point, once it became impossible to defend, you started seeing a lot of dissent across the board in all sorts of different places, places where I'm

I agree, places where I don't, but it was sort of a mass disagreement. In fact, disagreeing with that consensus became popular and has rewards associated with it on social media. There are way more influencers who are opposed to this stuff now who are doing well than there are people who are for whatever the state narrative is. That feels like it's just...

You know, you have the remnants on both sides of the fence, as opposed to previously, you would have basically had someone who would have been cynical or disagreed if it was against their particular perspective. But now more people on both sides. Is that your belief? Just a few years ago, you had.

a mainstream sort of state narrative about everything in your life. And that was defended ferociously by a handful, not a handful, a sort of army of media, both institutions and influencers who worked for those institutions who were artificially amplified by social media platforms. Their voices were actually artificially put on blast. Um,

They both disseminated a story that was the correct story and they ruthlessly attacked anybody who stepped outside of it. And so it was a very dark time to be someone who had weird ideas. It was like no real way to do it without getting sort of massive, massive blowback, probably losing your job if you didn't work for Peter Thiel like I did. Yeah.

It was not good. The story became so absolutely clownish and so unpopular that it began to fall apart. And that's around the time that Elon bought Twitter. And so everything just, there was no more political censorship. All of the artificial amplification ended. The Overton window of acceptable speech completely broadened. And once that happened, the old world of

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

the people who sort of oppose the woke framework and the woke orthodoxy and this culture of silence. I no longer believe that culture of silence exists anymore.

in the way that it did. I think it still exists to some extent, you know, this infection of institutions still exists. You still have different universities and things where you're forced to sort of speak to DEI mandates and things like these sort of affirmative, you're expected to affirm the orthodoxy of these regressive racial sort of quotas and things like this.

But who has been attacked for criticizing that lately? Like really try and think about that. It's nothing but awards. And that says to me that culture is changing rapidly. And then in terms of the camps now, I think it's really not clear. I think it's easy to... And I think a lot of people on the right especially really want to believe that that old machine still exists because it was such...

a fun fight because it was like a righteous fight. The anti-woke thing. Yeah, it was a righteous fight. You, you were fighting what felt and what was really, what really constituted power, um, and, uh, a really unjust abuse of power over speech. I just don't think that's there anymore. And so people are having to do the uncomfortable thing of ask themselves, you know, what do I actually believe in? What do I want? And there's way more disagreement, uh,

on those questions, then there was agreement on the question of whether or not the woke thing was good and it wasn't. So it's just confusion now, I'd say. Isn't it interesting, this allure of being a righteous revolutionary speaking truth to power? There's so much nobility.

associated with that you just draped in glory yeah like you push back against something that you know and most people kind of do and you know that the people that are pushing it also kind of don't believe in it and you know sort of low-key on the side by the water cooler everyone kind of has your back a little bit uh it it has all of the appearance of being a brave flame-wielding martyr

with none of the real risk, especially if, especially if you're like a fun employed fucking like degenerate self-employed writer type person. Uh, and now that that hegemony isn't perceived in the same way, you're like,

What am I fighting against? I wonder whether this, I wonder whether downstream from this, the, you know, places like maybe The Blaze or Daily Wire or whatever, I wonder how they're positionally going to sort of maneuver themselves around this. I think it's bad news for them. The Daily Wire was the first place that I noticed this. I started, I was watching these endless...

Matt Walsh and Candace Owens clips where, and this was a while, like a year and a half ago or something, maybe two years ago. It was just every day, it was another woke whack-a-mole story where they find some

idiot online saying something that was crazy, you know, and they looked, they, they looked crazy. They were saying crazy things. They wanted something crazy. Um, but they just didn't really matter. It didn't feel like that mattered anymore because culture had already changed so much. And I thought, man, what are they doing here? And I realized, oh, they have to do this. This is what their audience wants. This is the audience they built. It's all their audience knows about

It's the thing that the audience expects from them and is the only thing the audience will tolerate from them because they haven't actually, at that institution, shared a really...

coherent sense of what they wanted because many of them disagreed as we now see with the exit of Candace, right? There's strong disagreement over there about what they actually are. Again, agreement on what they don't like, but what are they? What is the America that they want? That's not clear. And those places are going to have a really hard time, I think, turning that ship into a new direction. And this seems to be a problem

the right wing has had in politics for a really long time because it's always, it's almost designed to be losing. It's like, oh, it's been losing our whole life. It's lost. How do you mean?

I mean, the country has just shifted left every year a little bit more and more, and the left has sort of swallowed culture, every cultural institution. And so when you have these media upstarts that have a different voice, it's automatically a...

reaction against mainstream culture and your existence is only ever positioned in opposition to whatever that orthodoxy hegemon is which is necessary um but then once you and the few dissidents left sort of running their mouths win in any way whatsoever and like right now i would classify this as i wouldn't say it's a victory but there is there have been a series of

great victory, like small victories against cultural hegemony. So you have this space where someone probably could forward an interesting, compelling counter idea, not just, you know, a critique of the power structure, but an alternative and people are listening, but the sort of critics are,

don't know what that is. I think a lot of them have never even talked about it. A lot of defense being played, permanent defense. It's also a lot of people who've maybe never even thought of these things. You know, probably most people have never thought of these things who are popular online. These are influencers who have chased an algorithm for years. They got a lot of attention for a certain kind of thing and they're still doing it. I used to think about the Dylan Mulvaney stuff a lot, which was crazy. I mean, I wrote about this when the Budweiser thing happened and the repercussions of that. It was very interesting to

but is Dylan Mulvaney like really a threat? Like, are we still talking about Dylan Mulvaney? Like how long does, did that have to happen? It's, it's like you do it because you,

That is what's being rewarded online for this kind of person. It's incentives all the way down. I had this idea that this kind of relates to. I want to teach you about it. So I came up with this idea called the culture wars shiny object cycle. And it's a six stage process that pretty much every news story goes through, I think. So.

Number one, some woke news story hits the press. Cats suffer from racial discrimination or screwing in light bulbs needs to be recognized as a valid sexual kink or something. Number two, the right-wing antibody response activates. Look at how insane these people are. Matt Walsh quote tweets the article and calls it obnoxious. This is the problem with our convenient, decadent TikTok society. Number three, this reaction causes the story to gain infinitely more traction than it ever would have done by signal boosting the original fringe scenario into a much bigger event.

Number four, the left-wing counter-response activates. Right-wingers lose their minds over one woman with a particularly dark cat. The Daily Wire has a meltdown over an insignificant troll article. In times where the original story is less insane, this includes a defense of the original article too. Cats actually can experience trauma. Minimizing this is the real problem. Number five,

The right-wing re-reaction kicks into gear. Apparently, I'm insane for pushing back against cat trauma. See, this is the problem. If we don't stand our ground, these blue-haired idiots will take over the country. And number six, finally, the touch-grass meta-reactionaries steam in. The real issue is people talking about this issue. Look at how silly this whole thing is. It's time to check out of the culture war. We should reconnect with what really matters. You should move on to the ranch next to Ryan Holiday and hammer fence posts into the ground for the rest of time.

Yeah, I mean, they're all like, that is true and funny. And I've also been each one of those six, by the way. Like I've appeared to- Well, and I would also say there's a reason. I think the original cat story does actually matter. It's written for a reason, right? This is a person who is creating a narrative about what,

culture is, the reason that you have a visceral reaction against it would be your recognition that this is not just one one-off thing. It represents something about what our culture is. And in there, you usually are correct, right? You know, these crazy gender stories we saw for years have resulted in a skyrocketing number of young kids who think that they're a different gender. And what does that mean for our society? It's clearly not

You know what? We could talk about gender for a long time. I don't want to necessarily get in the weeds on that. I just do think that the stories we consume have an impact on how society is shaped. I don't disagree. The reason I called it the shiny object cycle is that what I was particularly interested in is why, given the fact that it pretty reliably follows the same six steps each time,

Why do we continue to be captured by stories that are formulaic and a layout that's formulaic? And it's because my belief is that each time that the story comes along, it's just sprinkled with sufficient novelty to make it seem to us like it's something new. That was the shiny part of it. For instance, it's LGBT month in soon. And there will be some addition to

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

before the internet, right? So I don't know how... I mean, I was around. I was alive. But I don't really remember how the media cycles shaped and how long they would last. And ours today are rapid and...

Anyone can get involved. So people with relatively little power, maybe no attention or friends, no matter what their politics are left or right, feel empowered to say crazy shit and get attention online for that crazy shit. And I wonder...

often how much of this is driven really by that just people who want someone to see them and so they're actually saying this really crazy shit for that reason people who just needed more hugs when they were a kid i mean everyone needs hugs and i'm pro i think that's something that we can all get on board with more more hugs yeah you want you to offer that instead of

I don't know, cash checks for shit posting. Like we'll just, we'll give you some physical attention, some love, but when you starve, the fucking shit posting thing, like not, you know, pose law has become so poey.

I have no idea. At least 50% of the things that I read on Twitter, I'm like, I have no idea if this is meant to be an earnest post or if I should just disregard it. Yeah, all of the anonymous people feel like this to me, where it's not really clear what they believe or if it's just sort of wild performance art. Um...

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

We've got this sort of odd transition where the more mental, progressive, woke, orthodoxy type thing is maybe being pushed back against in quite an effective way over the last two years or something. What do you think, how good's your crystal ball for where you think the main tribes are going to be and moving forward and what the main narratives are going to be over the next 18 months? Well, right now, everything is feeling really...

fractured by platform. So there's been an interesting migration. I just accidentally logged into threads this morning and saw a cut on a drama that I did not even follow very closely at all, which was this football player who I think at a

commencement speech suggested that women should be homemakers. The stay at home thing and then one of the Kelsey's got in trouble. Jason Kelsey got in trouble. Both Kelsey's got involved and then one got very aggressive. It was like, I would never advise my daughter to be a homemaker. Um,

And this is I really I feel bad talking about this because I haven't dipped into it. So I might be getting some of these facts wrong. Don't hold it against me. But my point is not really about the story so much as like I knew almost nothing about it until I went on to threads and saw a very a lot of support for very left wing people.

type arguments of a kind that i used to see much more on twitter and have become sort of insulated from to a certain extent wow okay so you've you've got now viewpoints segregated segmented by yeah and now i saw stuff about this on on twitter or x like i saw the backlash the backlash the

Whoopi Goldberg defends, but it was never so big enough to care about that you were like, oh, I better figure out what this drama is. It didn't penetrate to that extent on X. It's much bigger elsewhere. And that's because it's a bigger deal to the left, I think. And I think that you will see this

just total fragmentation of media um not just you know be i'm a daily wire reader or a new york times reader but where do you go to talk about those stories um it's already been a trend um jack dorsey talked a little bit about this in an interview i did with him for pirate wires what do you learn from him you got to sit down with the ex ex twitter man as a as now you are one of the current sort of big twitter men like what what did you learn

So much. I think the big thing about Jack Dorsey is he's really just the most misunderstood leader in tech, I think. Jack created something that became explosive and was a piece of a much bigger explosion, which was social media. And is it even social media? It's more like interactive media now, this thing where any one of us can...

open up our smartphone that lives in our pocket or our supercomputer lives in our pocket and tweet our opinion out to millions of people. What does that mean for society? Right. And he was at the front lines of that. And he's a free speech guy more so than any of the other leaders up until recently. Uh, he's a sort of crypto E anarcho capitalist E type guy who tried his best to maximize freedom for as long as he could, and then faced a lot of

just impossible to overcome obstacles with a publicly traded company. The biggest one would have been advertising. So you have these huge advertising giants that will turn you off overnight and that could happen to him. And if that happened to him, and in fact, previously they had been threatened with this,

Um, you lose your stock price plummets and you risk a hostile takeover, which actually has been attempted on that, on that company. And so he was forced into this pragmatic place, which he has, I think an ideological person really hated. He tried to create a technology that would have ended the problem completely. No censorship ever would have happened, had to have happened again if blue sky worked in the way that he wanted. Um, and then that didn't quite work out either. He wasn't in charge of that one, but, um,

There's a lot there. I could talk about Jack for a while. I think the main thing is just, I actually do believe that he was facing a set of problems that no one had ever faced before. Other people, contemporaries of his were facing them along with him. He did slightly better than all of them, I think. Maybe they didn't have the...

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

among the giants who is genuinely ideologically motivated in favor of that stuff. He just failed in a kind of tragic way. It's the story of him is

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

achieve for elon he was a part of that you know he wanted this so is it the case then as different social medias because different platforms kind of become more and less popular with certain subsets that you are going to have you know everyone knows like there's some probably some mad shit on rumble's comment section and truth social yeah but you don't think you still think well yeah but twitter's

isn't it? And, and Instagram's everyone, like everyone's got the, like there's a big four or whatever. Are you, do you think that we're going to see this start to sort of splinter off more so? And that means that you're going to get a skewed perspective. Right wingers are going to see the world's going to see more right wing and, and

progressive people the world's going to see more progressive that's just the twitter's always been pretty niche to begin with even before the elon takeover it was a saw a small social media platform compared to the other and in terms of advertising revenue it was small compared to other tech giants so one face facebook which is the more natural comparison but then also google and those two companies swallow up all of the advertising revenue

So Twitter's always competing for very, very like scraps basically. But in terms of the audience and it,

in terms of the audience, this is related, the audience on Twitter was very small. It was the small percentage of people in the country who are super motivated by ideas, affected by ideas and want to share them and think a lot. Writing, I think language is just writers versus picture people is what you get on Instagram or TikTok even to a certain extent, which is more like a storytelling. Those feel more primal and Twitter feels more

Well, it's literary and it's like literary warfare and that is not everybody in the country. So it was always small. And now I would say it's increasingly smaller because the left, unlike the right, is...

at this moment in time, culturally highly motivated by censorship and wanting to insulate itself from other views and opinions. They believe, I think that the opinions are beyond the pale and need to be iced out. I think they're probably really scared of them because they don't have counter arguments, which is what is motivating the entire thing. I think probably there are a lot of left-wing people who hear certain arguments, probably on immigration and things like this, that they,

clock as beyond the pale and don't want to face because on some level they recognize that they're important arguments and they don't have an answer to them and that makes them uncomfortable. But beyond the psychoanalysis, the facts are just that left-wing people don't want to be in a place where right-wing people are permitted to speak.

And so at least the very sort of hardcore left wing people. So they have almost all left. You have a lot of media people who still stay on X, but like the real committed ideological type people. Why are they? There are a handful threads more and more, but you can't really talk about politics there. I think that's the biggest competitor right now.

Or it's certainly the biggest competitor. But then you have a spectrum of things. You have Blue Sky, you have Mastodon, and you have an endless number of group chats that I think are popping up and proliferating. Telegram and shit like that. On those things, then also, what is it? So Discord, there are any number of other places where people are pooling. And I think the future will be some sort of more...

fragmented media platform situation unless something happens at X, which turns it around, which could also happen. Elon, I don't really believe is anathema to X,

I don't believe he's anathema to censorship. I think that he's less ideologically committed to this than even Jack was. He believes in it for America, free speech. But if laws start to change abroad, for example, he just follows the rule of the law wherever it is, or the letter of the law wherever it is. And in the context of America, we'll see. But the rules could change tomorrow. And once they change even a little bit, I think you see people come back.

Is it weird to be building a media company right now? Like Vice fell apart, BuzzFeed's a mess, the NPR just hired a crazy lady to run it. Like what the fuck's happening to Rolling Stone? Yeah. What do you think about this sort of future of media versus independent media and all of that? You know, it is...

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

You're not making revenue on clicks anymore. That style of people, like it's clickbait. Clickbait doesn't matter. It's not what's helping anybody. That whole style of new media has died. This is why BuzzFeed is in the state that it's at right now. This is why someone like Vivek could even try a hostile takeover with that company because it's worth nothing because that style of media just does not make business sense. What works is subscription revenue and people subscribe to things that help them make sense of the world.

and confirm their biases. So that's what's true of the New York Times. And that's true of Pirate Wires is people who are paying money to us do so because they feel like we're on the same side fighting for the same things. That is a much smaller pool of revenue than the massive advertising, you know, flood of money that we saw not only, you know, in the early 2000s when the social thing first happened, but, you know, decades and decades ago. So it's going to be a way smaller pool

to begin with. I think that there is potentially a lot of interesting upside on co-branded products that matter to your audience and you. So imagine you're a fitness influencer and you're doing a chain of gyms or something. Those kind of partnerships are going to matter more. But what that means for investigative reporting is not good. I don't know how you do that in this new world. This is the pedigree.

pen and pad that I use. This is the note taking app that I'm- And nobody cares because nobody follows investigative reporters around for identity-based reasons and identity-based reasons are what drive the entire contemporary media landscape. So it's difficult and

Nobody has an answer to this question. And if they tell you they're wrong, my sense is fragmentation. Do what you know and love and fight for the things that you believe to be true. I believe that you should be biased and you should wear your bias on your sleeve. And then I think that you use the revenue that you make.

to nurture younger people who are telling a different part of your story that you think is important. And that's where I hire journalists and things like this to report out different pieces of the puzzle that I'm just not going to have time to do. Your team, some of your reporters, is it River, Page?

He left. Oh, no. God damn it. Yeah, he's gone. Sanjana is still there, though. Okay, cool. Anyway, you've got some good people. You mentioned American colleges earlier on. Is that the waste ground that everybody thinks that they are lost cause? American colleges? Yes.

You know, it's crazy because they should be out of business, right? Like, I don't know, man. Like, didn't it seem like a lost cause 10 years ago? And people are still not only sending their kids to go to school, but for how much money is it a year to send your kids to like NYU or something with room and board? I think

we're definitely over $60,000 a year at this point. I think we're closer to pushing to 70. I think it might, you know what? I'm not going to Google it. If you, I don't know what you guys do in post. If you have like a number you can flash, but it's a lot, it's, it's more money than I would have ever thought people would have paid for, um,

a college degree plus room and board for four years and you're not even accounting for interest. There it is. So $58,168 tuition, $23,927 other costs, books and on-campus room and board. That's $80,000 a year. $82,095. For a year. Oh, that was $21,22. For a year. For a year. So that, if that hasn't killed this and...

The fact that it's very obvious now these are just sort of like woke indoctrination camps hasn't killed this. I don't know what's going to kill this. I think that if I mean, every year it feels like it's the last year. I do think if I'm not wrong, I'm pretty sure admissions were down for one of the years, but not down nearly as to where they should be.

What has to happen is the government has to stop giving out loans. The government should have nothing to do with the loan system at all. You should be able to declare bankruptcy on your student loan debt, which you're presently not allowed to do. The only one that you got. And what that's going to do, once you're able to discharge student loan debt easily, if with a massive hit on your credit score and the government's not guaranteeing loans, you're

students are going to have to go to private banks and the private banks are going to have to run risk analysis and say, if I give you $82,000 a year times four plus interest, do you have any hope in hell of paying that back with a gender studies degree in your lifetime? The answer is no. And so it's a bad loan and you're not going to get it. And once the banks start making decisions, once you allow the private banks to make decisions like this,

all of the prices will reset. They'll have to. Most of the second, third tier beyond school. Oh, right. Because the funding is carteled inside of the system, no one gets to sort of peer under the skirt of what's happening. We have this idea that there is almost an inalienable right to go to college. And that is a weird cultural idea that makes no sense whatsoever. It's way worse than even healthcare, which I also don't think you have like an inalienable right to. You don't have a right to someone else's labor. That's how...

That's not how like rights work. But healthcare is something that you can maybe wrap your head around. We all need healthcare. As a British person, that makes sense to me. College is not that. You do not need college. Like you don't need to go. You don't need it to survive. You can make an argument that it's actually really bad for a lot of people, maybe even most people who are not going to sort of upper tier schools and then just getting, certainly now you can make it because you're being saddled with tons of debt and you're not getting great job opportunities necessarily because of it.

So because of that idea, though, that everybody's entitled to it and in fact needs it to a certain extent to succeed, you can't turn people away. And that's a system we've built where you can't turn people away from a loan no matter how massive. And you have to get rid of that. You have to just get the bankers back in and say –

Are you able to pay this back or not? Do I think? And if you are, great. And if you're not, and I give you the loan, then I suffer for it. And once bankers have to suffer for these decisions, you're not going to have a problem anymore because banks have been around for a very long time. And if their existence is on the line, the loans are not going to happen. And once the loans can't happen, the colleges have to reset their prices.

Did you see there was a study done by Corey Clark that came out a little while ago. A new study sheds light on taboos in science confirming that race and IQ are the most taboo subject of all. They condensed down a bunch of statements that were the

10 most taboo in all of psychology. Did you see this? I didn't, but I believe it. Those are the two that I would definitely consider race and IQ to be. Let me, let me, I'll dictate you the top 10. So the authors began by interviewing 41 researchers in psychology to get an idea of which topics are most taboo using the researchers answers as a guide. They condensed those topics into a set of 10 statements.

Number one, the tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior. Number two, gender biases are not the most important drivers of the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. Number three, academia discriminates against black people in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations, etc.,

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

Number nine, transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence. Number 10, demographic diversity, race and gender in the workplace often leads to worse performance. And then she went through and studied 470 psychology professors and basically found that so many professors are terrified. Like they don't like the censorship, but they are terrified of speaking up, like absolutely terrified of it.

Yeah. I mean, which one of those topics do you want to talk about? Well, I mean, there's some stuff in there like, you know, men and women have biological, biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people. Like, I don't know who is disagreeing with that statement. Yeah. That's one at this point. I mean, that's, you can't help, but anyone who sees a high school race with, let's say a trans woman, absolutely destroying her competition and,

is not going to be okay with that. That's 90 plus percent of people are going to see that and say, okay, this is fucking crazy. And in a way, I sort of think that that's the issue. I really do think it's like that and the COVID sort of coercive vaccination, that combination just ended the whole prior order of thought policing. That was the solvent that undid the adhesive. It was just

on the COVID stuff too vicious and on the trans stuff, specifically the trans athlete stuff too unbelievable, too absurd. Like that, that combination just dispelled the, the, the illusion of authority for a lot of people. And on the rest of them, I think probably everything you're not allowed to talk about

it doesn't mean that these sort of people who want to talk about it or write about it, but you're probably, if you're not allowed to talk about it, it's a safe assumption that there's something important there that we should probably be trying to understand, but we are refusing to for whatever reason. Did you see that a trans woman won Cannes Best Actress Award for the first time?

No, but... Carlos Sofia Gascon, the Spanish performer, said, we all have the opportunity to change for the better. She made history at the festival with her gong. Well, she certainly changed herself, didn't she? It was quite a change. I don't know. One of the other things that I was particularly exhausted by over the last few years is this desire to read conspiracy and coordination and

much more sophisticated malevolent intent into pretty much everything. This desire to read deeper, deeper meaning. I think the internet kind of assumes that people have a well thought out reason for everything that they do. And as far as I can tell, most people are just trying to make it through to the end of the day and not get fired and pay for shit. And yeah, sure. There's like some super smart people pulling the strings at the top, but yeah. But not even really. I agree. I think that we want to believe they're

like they are in charge more than they are because if someone was in charge that would be

Great. It would be great to believe that you look around. I mean, it's like chaos everywhere. If you're in San Francisco, whatever city in this country you're in, it's fucked. Like you could just break it down. There are a handful of things about it that are just seriously, unbelievably fucked from crime to housing to just basic level sanitation, education, whatever. It's all really bad. And you want to...

believe that someone is in charge because if someone's in charge that means if you could just bully them enough or get rid of them and put someone else in charge the problem would be fixed um but the bigger problem seems to be a combination of i don't know nihilism at the top among the sort of elites of our country and then no one is actually in charge there's not a lot of um

stepping up and taking control of things. And even if there was a will to do that, politically we're structured in such a way that it's very difficult for a single person, let alone small or a small group of people, let alone a single person to actually change anything. San Francisco, for example, the homeless problem, right? It's like,

Who, what one specific person is in charge of that? Nobody. What group of people are in charge of that? It's a lot of people who have some piece of it. And if you asked any one of them, are you in charge of it? They would say no. There's no one taking responsibility for it. And I don't even, I blame them. Of course, they're terrible. But also part of it is a systemic problem where we're not giving anyone the authority to do it.

And I think we have to do that. We have to get better at empowering people to actually change things and then punishing them for when they don't do it. I came across this Paki McCormick quote that said, the greatest trick the devil ever played was making you believe that the pessimists are the good guys. And this, you know, just prevalent fucking cynicism, dude, whether it's top down or bottom up, whether it's in a comment section or a press release or just in the

like lopey demeanor of the way that people sort of step out to give some sort of statement it's so boring and tiring and i wish that people were more enthusiastic about stuff it's pessimists are usually right it's a safe bet to make that something's not that something new is not going to work and that's why people do it when you are making a positive prediction about the future

that has never existed before. It's like your odds of being wrong are very high and your odds of predicting all of the fallout from that are infinitesimally small. There are so many, anytime you create something, let's talk about artificial intelligence. You create, even if we just had chat GPT, what are going to be the consequences of that long-term? We have no idea. We're still dealing with the consequences long-term of the mobile phone. So

It's easy to be a pessimist if you just want, I don't know, a reward for being a smart person. And that just doesn't exist on the positive side. You need a positive vision for the future. And I don't know how to incentivize that or how to change the incentive. I'm not really convinced that that's ever been different. I wonder if there was a period of time where the average person was this optimistic. I guess people always point back to the 1950s in America. Yeah.

I didn't live then. So I don't know. You know, we remember the positive stories, but I don't know how many, I don't know how pervasive that really was. If we had a frictionless way to dump our thoughts onto the internet or onto some ledger while we were sat on the toilet, just what would people's thoughts have been? Oh my God. I think about that in the context of the sixties. Like you think things are crazy now on the internet. Can you imagine how crazy things would have been all throughout civil rights and shit like this? Like it would have been a different, we wouldn't have,

I don't know that we would have made it. I don't know that we would have made it if we knew everything that everyone was thinking, which to go back to our early conversation about being polite, that's the core of politeness, right? That's why polite exists is because

there is a social benefit to not saying everything that come into your mind. And it's like, you have to choose which ones need to be said, but probably not everything should, not only does it not have to be said, it probably should not be said. There is, there is a benefit socially to polite society. I think decorum keeps the peace in many ways, but I think the reason that at least for me that I, I,

I'm like kind of conflicted about the whole polite society thing is that I then go and see Sam, what's his face? That singer guy come out dressed as a devil with nipple tassels on in like high heel leather boots. And I go, ah, like, it seems to me like any remotely acceptable line of, of, of decorum and behavior has been blasted through already, you know, with a AK 47, like what,

what are we doing here pretending that decorum still exists? You shouldn't be bringing up that thing. Well, it doesn't exist, though. I think that you're right. It does not exist anymore. I'm saying it served probably a purpose, though. We've lost it, and what are we going to become without it? I mean, certainly in politics, everything post-Donald Trump. Before Donald Trump, I would say it was pretty bad. Post-Donald Trump, come on. I was looking at Kamala Harris...

giggling over nothing the other day on a YouTube video. It was really a bizarre video where she's not really saying anything and she keeps laughing awkwardly. And I thought, man, if this were 10 years ago,

we would say how we can't have someone this stupid in power. It's just crazy. Let alone the senile Joe Biden. Of course, that's crazy. But let's talk about how dumb Kamala Harris is. That's she's, that's an actual, like sort of classically presenting idiot. And she is a heartbeat away from the presidency. Just a complete moron. It never would have happened. And she's sort of talking about the food that she's eating. And I, it's,

I haven't seen this clip. I'm really glad. What I saw was an example of her trying to be relatable. And that is not in keeping with the image of the presidency that has endured for the last, what, since the founding fathers existed, okay? Like, we need that person to be powerful and thoughtful and trustworthy. Someone who we believe can run the country, right? Like,

That all turned on its head in a world post-Trump. Once you elect a reality television star at the presidency, anything fucking goes. Monarchy. Monarchy. That's what you need. Someone who has been bestowed from God. So you got to go all the way back. Yes. And that's maybe the really controversial thing that needs to be said. It's like, was George Washington the good guy or the bad guy? And I don't think America's ready for that conversation.

TikTok ban. What do you think is going to happen there? Or what would you like to see happen? I don't think it's going to happen. I think that, well, certainly we're looking at at least a year of litigation. And in that year, who knows? There's just, who knows what will happen? Yeah.

I'm in favor of it, but I'm in favor of much more aggressive action against China. The spying thing is a whole complicated talk that we could talk about. I believe it is a liability for the country to have China control one of our largest broadcast networks in the history of the country. But I am also just really thinking a lot about trade and the massive disparity in trade and

we need reciprocity. If China is banning all of our social media companies, we should ban all of theirs. If China's banning anything that they're banning or any tariff they're levying, we should be doing the same thing. And in fact, we should be doing more of it because what we learned in COVID is we need manufacturing. The failure of manufacturing at home is not just

sad for us and for the middle class that no longer exists in this country it is dangerous it is a national security threat so we we need to to have this somehow at home and uh

That's a combination of that is going to require a lot of things that nobody wants to do. That's going to require looking at the labor laws. That's going to require looking at things like tariffs. This is going to be things that annoy both, that annoy the left, the right, the libertarians. We're just in a huge mess right now.

I am very much in favor of forcing divestiture of TikTok, but I'm in favor of forcing divestiture of almost every Chinese social media company or social piece of software that exists. Certainly every social media company, like everything, just down the line. And then China retaliates. They're like, oh, we're retaliating and we're banning one of your companies or whatever. It's like you've already...

Do people not realize there is no major American media company, the New York Times, the Washington Post, that can operate in China? There is no American social media company that can operate in China. Google cannot operate in China. You can just go look at all the things that China has banned, American companies. The list is enormous, ongoing, never ending. It's just ridiculous to be playing it this way. You can say, oh, well, we're not like China. And it's like,

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

It's like until the point at which you self immolate and the only tools you have left to work with are controlled by a hostile foreign superpower, which is the path we're on. And you see this in soft power type things all the time. You see this with the way Disney has reshaped just, just due to the influence of the Chinese market. Okay.

Disney starts to censor on all sorts of grounds of the NBA and things like this. That's just soft power. That's not even the hard power of they're going to play hardball with a corner on rare earth metals, a corner on, uh, on manufacturing. Uh, that's, we haven't even gotten to a place where they start wielding that against us. That can't happen. We need to bring it home and we need to be a little bit more mercantilist about stuff, which I think is a dirty word. Still. I'm not sure how people think about that anymore, but I'm,

pretty much a mercantilist. Do you know the story of DJI drones? Do you know why they're so dominant? So this is secondhand hearsay, so I may have got it wrong, but it's a great story. America was super concerned about individuals, citizens being able to fly drones. So they shut down a ton of American drone manufacturers.

Then they realized that the market for drones is actually quite high and guess the only company that was still crushing it in the consumer space, DJI, which is a Chinese company. And now they are just light years ahead. Everything's cheaper. Everything's better quality. It does all of the things that it needs you to do. And that's a Chinese company mapping fucking everything. Yeah. I didn't realize the full extent of that story.

You don't typically see, to our credit, you don't typically see China just completely take over an industry that was ours because China doesn't innovate at all. I can't think of a technology that was invented in China. It's all just copy and pasting in a very great way. I mean, they're very tactically advantageous way for them. It's just see what America innovates, clone it, scale it. Um, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and

But long-term, that's a problem. And it's a problem that is bigger than China, right? I was just reading about a genetic engineering controversy. So in the mid-1970s, you had Cambridge, Massachusetts, ban the use of and the study of recombinant DNA. And at that point, genetic engineering

The future of genetics is in the balance. All of the people working on it are there. And it was reversed in 77, but...

That is – it had to be reversed or nothing was going to happen. And that is kind of what you're looking at in California, I think, to a certain extent with which way these regulations on something like artificial intelligence will go. And there's enough that has been researched already that other people in different countries will use what we use and keep moving forward. They're not going to stop. I don't see anybody –

in China developing anything ever that hasn't existed before. But if we stop ourselves, they will keep moving forward with what we have started. And so that is a problem, especially when you're dealing with potentially X-risk type technology. So anything in biology and certainly artificial intelligence would count if you're building something that

this is, I mean, you got to get an AI doomer on here. They have a thousand different arguments they'll make. I'm not sold really on any of them, but I am sold on the idea that this is

a high risk technology, we should proceed and we should proceed sort of with caution. Do you see Nick Bostrom's new book, Deep Utopia? Have not seen the new book, but I have read. Superintelligence. Yeah, I read Superintelligence way back. Yeah, so Superintelligence was basically what happens if we get it wrong. Yeah. And Deep Utopia is what happens if we get it right. Yeah.

uh it's really interesting you know to see this guy who's gone kind of full circle and he's explaining well you know this is a hopeful view for the future but even then even he kind of creates his taxonomy of four different types of utopias and uh even within those all of them have got tons of fucking problems like it is the most like thready needle to try and weave through to make this work and uh and

Yeah, I mean, you know, I understand why the AI X-risk-doomer conversation is compelling because it's terrifying and seems kind of likely. Yeah, but everything seems kind of likely. You can make an argument for the singularity. You can make an argument for the simulation hypothesis. These are things that are almost designed to capture smart people inside of a little maze where there are all of these likely things. But at the end of the day, on the simulation theory, for example,

What value do you get in even talking about? It's like, you should just live your life. You should just do as many good things as you can in your life. And with AI, I sort of feel that way as well. I don't,

I've never met anybody who has spoken to me in a convincing way on the big danger. It's always the smartest of them do percentages. And even those feel like, where are you running these calculations? What are we really talking about? It's just a giant question mark. But all technology is a giant question mark. And so if you want to progress, you're going to have to take risk. There's a question of how much are we taking and at what scale? But I don't know, man. I just...

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

I am in favor of thinking about the X risk inherent of AI. Right now, I see no evidence to slow down. And once we see that evidence, it should be pretty obvious. The X risk AI people will be like, "Well, once it's obvious, it's too late." Okay. Well, you're going to have to really paint that picture for me. And that has not happened yet. What about the most important thing that's going to happen over the next month and a bit, Biden-Trump debate?

I didn't think it was going to happen at all. We'll see if it does. I'm still not convinced. Are you still unsure that it's actually going to go ahead? Well, if they allow for mic cutting, which is what the Biden camp wants, I don't know why Trump would accept that. If it does happen...

It's going to be a bloodbath. Trump will win for sure. Biden has not even appeared on a friendly interview for longer than 30 minutes or something. I've never... Could you imagine him sitting down for two hours or three hours in front of Rogan or something? It's not possible. I don't know how he's going to go head to head with Trump, who is one of the most successful short form television warriors in the history of the medium.

He's really good at it. The good news for Biden is if he somehow survives it, it'll be a huge boon to him, but he probably won't. And until now, but I guess I should say until now, saying nothing has only helped Trump. So I think Biden's just in a rough spot where he has to do...

sort of okay when you're a declining stock you need to do something to reverse it even if that thing is quite high risk he's on a failure course right now um is that what your prediction would be if if there's basically no change by the democrats that you're looking at republican victory in november yeah i think it's like a smash victory i think it's like a huge huge victory

So they need to do something. I think a big part of it is immigration. A big part of it is inflation. I think those things are weirdly linked. The immigration is not causing the inflation. I think the immigration is being used to sort of like stem the inflation. Immigration, even if it's mass illegal immigration, has positive effects on the numbers in the economy that you point to to say our economy is doing well. It's just like it has all of these other effects that for whatever reason economists don't seem to care about, like the dissolution of...

our fucking culture in America and the simple law of supply and demand that affects more poor middle class people than rich people with desk jobs when you're talking about mass low skilled immigration.

People are furious. People have always been furious, but also it's never even been this bad before. To have, think about 10 million illegal immigrants in your country of 330 million. That's what, 3%. That is an enormous population of people who broke a law to get here and people are mad across demographics. So the big story, I think, of the next election is going to be the black vote, specifically the black male vote, which is...

has never been Trumpier and has never been Republican. What's driving that? Immigration.

I think it's entirely immigration. I think that, I mean, you look at Chicago videos out of Chicago and the effects of illegal immigration in Chicago. And you look at those meetings, those community meetings where people are coming to yell, it's black people. It's all black people. It's black neighborhoods where this is happening. Um, it's, it's black people who are already having a struggling lower class, black people who are already struggling on, on work for whatever you could say. It's unfounded. You could say it's founded, but certainly the blame is being placed on illegal immigration and the,

No one is stupid enough to believe that that's not Biden's fault. So it's like this election will be a referendum on that more than anything, and then inflation and Biden sucks at both. And so what is left? The wars. Who cares about them really?

Not many people other than like reflexively wish we weren't at them. But certainly Biden has gotten us into them, right? Like Ukraine happens on Biden's watch. Israel happens on Biden's watch. We're somehow really woven into both. I saw this crazy, it was funny, but darkly funny meme on Instagram yesterday.

It was the Iron Dome stopping a bunch of rockets. So you saw all these rockets coming up and hitting all these other rockets. And the meme just said, like, my tax dollar is paying for this, the Iron Dome. Then up here on the top, my tax dollar is somehow also paying for this. And that's like, so that's like number three. It'll be like, that's order number three of things that we care about. And then it's just a fun culture war shit, which I don't know. The abortion debate. What about Roe? I don't know.

I don't have a sense of how much people really care about this. It seemed to matter in the last election. I think Americans are more divided on it than people like to believe, but is it more important than the immigration stuff and the inflation stuff to people? I don't think so. I guess we'll see. Yeah, I don't know about that one. What about you? What do you think?

That's a really tough one to work out as well. I think about it, I don't think about it that much, but I think about it a good bit. And I think most people don't know their position very thoroughly on it. Like if you really, really quiz people hard, a sufficiently good argument can usually begin to, ah, yeah, well, you know, you kind of sort of right on that thing a little bit. It's one of the few debates or one of the few discussions where

every time like i hear a shapiro right do his thing and he breaks down life begins but it's not a bundle of cells blah blah blah and i go fucking hell that sounds pretty compelling and then i hear someone who's like super pro-choice give their argument i go fucking hell that's super compelling i'm like i i don't know i've just been like

legitimately like actually gaslit by both sides and now i believe both at the same time i don't fucking know that's america has been like this on roe v wade and abortion in general forever it's never moved it's always close to 50 on both sides um there's no other issue that i can think of like that in in history um it's just always hotly divided and

And so separate from the question of whether Roe v. Wade was a good law, and I think it was not, or a good ruling, and I think it was not,

There's the question of what should be done and that's more complicated. And the real answer here is you want something codified. You want to codify a law rather than judge on something in a stupid way that doesn't make any sense and everybody knows is not correct. Where the judicial branch essentially creates a law for you. You want our legislators to legislate and create something, but they can't agree.

I think probably what makes the most sense is something closer to what you're... I don't want to wade into it. I'm pro-choice within reason. I have all sorts of caveats like everybody else. I think that I agree with you that most people don't fully know what they think about this. It just makes them uncomfortable and they don't want to have to think about it. But there are a handful of people who care about it a lot. In this election, do they punish Trump for it? Can they punish Trump for it?

I don't know. I know that a lot of people, I know a lot more people who talk about immigration. I see a lot more people talking. I don't see people talking about, uh,

about Roe v. Wade really anymore. I suppose the timing of it, you're just recency bias and people's attention span is so short that right now, immigration, immigration, immigration. Biden would have to make a promise for some sort of law to be codified. And if he did that, he would lose a lot of people and gain some people, right? Because wherever he drew the line of where abortion would not be allowed, right? No one wants an abortion a day before birth, right? You can just start there. So

There are some who do some very radical people who want that and will never let go of it. And those people are the ones who run the organizations that are pro that are pro choice. Uh, the average American doesn't, the average left-wing person doesn't, the average pro abortion person doesn't, but the people who run shit do. So Biden has to draw a line somewhere if he's going to float legislation. And once he does that, he gives a huge attack space for Trump to come in and be like, this man wants to kill babies. And, um, and,

And so it's like no one's really incentivized to propose a law in the middle of an election that is already hard to win, especially not a Democrat. So it's going to be hard. It'll be hard for both of them. But like you can either punish Trump for Roe v. Wade. That's one thing. But there's not a really clear alternative. There's not like if I vote for this person, I'm going to get what I want. It's just how viscerally people are affected by this as well. You know, it doesn't abortion by definition is an individual thing.

Whereas something like economy, inflation, immigration, those things are much more scattergun and they're felt by people en masse. There's waves of it that occur, like literally, right? There's waves of it that occur. And I think that that galvanizes people in a different sort of way. But dude, it's, I mean, that debate, my God. Here's one thing that I have noticed though.

Trump is way less in the news. Like I just don't see you think about the buildup to the last two elections and it was everywhere. And I'm like, where the fuck is he? Cause he's not on Twitter. Like what's going on? I just don't see. It's a huge part of it. Part. I mean, part of it was there was no primary because he didn't have to have a primary because he was going to win. So he stayed out of it. And then part of it is he's not on Twitter and there are less people watching

on, no one's really on his network and there are, there are media people are still on Twitter. So if he was on Twitter,

Media people would still at least see what he's tweeting. He would feel more sort of present in their brains. They would at least be more anxious about it and be writing more about it. And then part of it is Biden's just not – I think Democrats are really embarrassed of him. So no one's – while people really hate Trump on the left, the average person on the left is not excited about Biden. They're like, this feels a little bit criminal that we're trying to float someone who's totally senile. What do you think of people on the right think –

an equivalent side, they probably really don't like Biden, but do they really like Trump? There are people who love Trump in a way that no president has been loved in our lifetime. And it's a non-trivial fraction of the right. People who fucking love him, who would do anything for him. And that's not a majority of the right. That's a good, huge chunk of a base that really, really, really devoutly loves him. And then you have a lot of people who are fine with him.

And then you have a lot of people who...

vote for him but might now because they have a bunch of different reasons. Some are talking about the wars. Some are talking about the economy. Some are talking about immigration. You had all sorts of weird own goals on the left. So the way that Warren went after cryptocurrency, for example, there are a lot of people with exposure to cryptocurrency who are like, who is this bitch coming after my Bitcoin? And why does she think that she's able to do that? That's insane. There are

all sorts of tax gains proposals and wealth tax proposals, which hit the rich who fuel a lot of the money behind these different grassroots campaigns, grassroots campaigns. You also have four years of incompetency from Biden, I think, on a range of things. But specifically, I think foreign policy has been pretty bad. If you're voting for a guy who you think is going to make things calm and return us to norms, and then he tries to put

the front runner president in prison and is now fighting two wars abroad, like that is not what you asked for. And, um, it's like, even if he wasn't senile, it would be a hard sell at this point, I think. Um, but he's all of those things and he's senile. So it's there like separate from the left, who's just tolerating him. I think a lot of people on the right are like Trump's a lot of people in the middle, I think are thinking, um,

Well, Trump's better than that. And we know what Trump is. No matter what people say about Trump being a fascist dictator and blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, we've had four years of Trump. So we know roughly what that feels like. Just like we've had four years of Biden. This is the first election like that we've ever had, where we actually know exactly what a presidency feels in both directions. So that we've, by we, I don't mean America. I mean, we alive right now. Um,

have never experienced this before. So you can't really say, there's no fear of the uncertainty here. There might be fear, but it's not of the uncertainty, which fuels I think a lot of what happens in most elections.

Dude, it's a wild few months coming up. Time to make hay, as the independent media companies say. Mike Solana, ladies and gentlemen. Mike, I love your stuff. PirateWire, I listen to all of the podcasts. I read the morning takes. I read everything else. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with the things you do? Go to PirateWire and subscribe to The Daily. Hit the newsletter button, subscribe to The Daily, and subscribe to PirateWire for my essays. Check us out on YouTube. Check us out on Twitter.

Oh yeah. Appreciate you, Mike. Thanks for having me.