#448: Mike Solana on Independent Thinking

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 =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  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

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  trading engine, all while paying the lowest trading fees in the industry, 0.1%. You can visit okcoin.com/pomp and open your account today. I've had the CEO on, and I generally think OkCoin, which is a US-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/pomp. Again, okcoin.com/pomp. Next up is Unstoppable Domains. Unstoppable Domains is solving the problem that you no

• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

  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 collectible 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.

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  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 into this episode with Mike. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:00Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I think I have the like Twitter bad boy on the episode today. This guy literally says whatever the hell he wants. Mike is here. Thank you so much for doing this, man.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 3:12Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we're just gonna start with the two most important questions everyone wants to know. I 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?

• 3:24Speaker 02

  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 gonna 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 like, like shipping crates. He's super poor, but it doesn't matter because we're living online now.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  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 onto something.

• 4:15Anthony Pompliano?

  When, uh, when I saw this, and I'll get you to tell the 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.

• 4:31Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:45Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:52Anthony Pompliano?

  How did this happen?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, okay. So I mean, the backstory is just right. I 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. You can't just, there's no way that our politicians meant for it, 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 period, what followed, what followed after that was sort of long period of corruption in which

• 5:37Speaker 02

  a bunch of industries came to her and got exemptions from the bill, pretty much every industry other than tech for sort of undisclosed reasons. We don't know the details of any of those meetings or deals. And certainly tech was the only industry that was sort of 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

• 6:20Speaker 02

  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, we get into this back and forth. She ends up accusing me, actually, like, it's like an accusation of being a billionaire, 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. All the talking points. You write down the list, but I mean, to even like, to like personalize it, though,

• 7:05Speaker 02

  to sort of say that I made the money off of exploiting people is super confusing, right? Like, where does that come from? And I think where it comes from is,

• 7:17Speaker 02

  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 a super lefty, but reasonable, sometimes says normal things. 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 Matty 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 a trust fund kid."

• 8:01Speaker 02

  What he's implying there is that, um, 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. Um, and this is like, rich people do this, um, for sure. Like, this certain kind of rich person does this, but also this certain kind of like leftist person does this as well. Um, also, you know, a lot of times, it's one and 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, that's just totally wrong, but that's the belief. And so if you, 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.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  I was like, "You actually put millions of people, potentially, you, you tried to put millions of people out of work," was sort of what I implied to her. 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.

• 9:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I loved, I loved at one point where she said, like, you were harassing her, I think.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that's how it evolves. And that's the next, this is, and this is broader than, than Lorena, right? There's a, 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. 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, stirring up

• 9:49Speaker 02

  drama, and they tend to feel like criticism of them is nefarious in some way. 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

• 10:33Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:42Anthony Pompliano?

  And part of what I think is so 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 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

• 11:05Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Well, I think you have political freedom of speech. You have like a, you have like your, your legal right to free, 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 100 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.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  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,

• 13:01Speaker 02

  we're not is the thing, right? Like you can't have a global tribe, but I think what's happening online is, 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.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  So, you know, 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.

• 14:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, yeah, just so for people that don't know, what type of topics would fall in that? So like, things that are allowed to be said today, but would now, in this new hate speech type classification, not be allowed? You don't have to say the exact phrases.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Already exist all across Europe. And I think also Canada has laws like this. And so things like, I mean, really, it's like anything on the topic of race, gender, orientation are all super off limits. I think religion, in some cases, is also included.

• 14:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And is it that you can't talk about it, or that you can't say anything negative?

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Well, this is the problem with, this is the problem here, is that it's extremely ambiguous. It's, 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. For example, you could say that, I don't know, probably in, so in the UK, you can't say that.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  I'm trying to think of a good one.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  That one woman, she's like this conservative person who's always getting attacked for trans comments, saying that it's like bullshit or whatever, like the trans thing is fake. Or, you know, there are only two genders type, 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 like, what was the intention of the person? And I'm sort of over here saying like, 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, this is the one caveat that

• 16:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:14Anthony Pompliano?

  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 would debate, should you be allowed to hurt people's feelings? Whatever that falls into that bucket, which is a whole thing.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:28Anthony Pompliano?

  I think one of the pieces, though, that 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 basically, across all of 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 and 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

• 17:12Anthony Pompliano?

  an overreach, or it just doesn't feel like that makes sense in some weird way?

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, dangerous territory.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  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. 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. 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,

• 18:05Speaker 02

  so you see that in the evolution debate, you would see that in just like the concept of God itself, 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 in, 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 Bashan. And it's like filled with anti-vaxxers who are like super left-wing people, but they don't want to put anything toxic in their body. So you start to see, I mean, there's, that stuff exists over there. I think the other, there

• 18:45Speaker 02

  are these other parts of, on the far left, these other places where people are not thinking,

• 18:56Speaker 02

  where beliefs are at odds with

• 19:01Speaker 02

  known science. I think that one of these areas is gender. I think one of these areas is probably,

• 19:13Speaker 02

  man, I don't even want to talk about it because it's so dangerous to talk about, we don't have to talk about it. I don't even, but I mean, I just like, I don't even have Firm beliefs here. I have questions, but it's like these topics are are off limits. I think the gender one is-

• 19:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's the problem, right? Well, it'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're 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-

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Certainly a dogma. Yeah.

• 20:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  It's a dogma.

• 20:01Anthony Pompliano?

  You take away the ability to have a conversation around it.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, that's the, and that was the goal. I mean, this is, 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

• 20:29Speaker 02

  I'm not going to get into a long conversation about trans stuff right now, you know? 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, a condition that you are diagnosed with. Then and there are, 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. Um, 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.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  And it's like, I mean, this is, this is, it's like the, 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 it 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. You know, 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 is a, this comes up quite a lot, the idea

• 21:55Speaker 02

  that biological sex isn't real. So now we're, we're sort of leaving the world of gender. They're really close, right? They're, they're sort of like, they're like touching each other right there. Gender and sex, super related, we thought. First up, we're told they're decoupled. They have nothing to do with each other. 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 the biological sex exists at all. And it's just really, it's just a really crazy topic. And you can't even say like, hey, that seems really crazy without, without becoming an enemy of some kind online. So I think people just avoid it.

• 22:37Anthony Pompliano?

  So definitely people avoid it, right? There's this, I don't even want to like, you know, poke the bear or whatever. But what I'm more interested in is like, why? Right? And I always kind of caveat these conversations with like, 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 closed 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. It's like fucking

• 23:20Anthony Pompliano?

  gravity, right? Like, 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.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  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, maybe like, 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, you know, enrages people online. You know, it's not like these people are 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 to the common person, which might be right, but we don't. We've never heard of

• 24:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:49Anthony Pompliano?

  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, you know, just generally be to getting the acceptance and then that protection in society as a kind of consensus thought?

• 25:16Speaker 02

  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, and certainly anyone with a with a new, exciting idea, they've all been ostracized by by other scientists, by most other scientists. And then what happens is like, controversy follows. Crazy idea and then other people look at it and you grow a little following.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  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's, 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.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  It is like not, it is, it's, it's not a serious biology discussion. It's a, it's a cultural discussion. And it's really complicated.

• 26:54Anthony Pompliano?

  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?

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, yeah, I don't, 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, 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, they're, 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.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  I think that that I think that people are definitely contributing to the warming of the planet. I think the 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 eight billion people on the planet and power them

• 28:52Speaker 02

  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 like much better than oil and coal. But like fracking is going to be banned, you know, 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 and no one's talking. Nuclear is considered, you know, a nonstarter. It's anti-environmental. It's unclear why people think that it's you're not supposed to question it.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  And then you have a complete dearth of conversation on carbon sequestration, which begs the question of like, I mean, you have people talking about the end of the world. Casio said, what, 12 years or something, a few years ago, like 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 about the technology that can actually save us?

• 30:11Speaker 02

  It's not a scientific conversation, it's a cultural conversation. Something else is happening there.

• 30:15Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of this is, we have a lack of scientifically educated or scientifically 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 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.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  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 work. I know it's like, it's not normal to talk about verified, 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. It's immediate and visceral when it's the environments, gender, like we, we kind of know what we think about it before the, before, before we learn anything about it.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  And I think there's, there's like no amount of scientific training that's gonna, that's gonna change that just based on, you can just look to what we're 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. That's just, it's like, it seems to be innate. We seem to have a sense, one of what we want to believe already.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  It tends to be based on identity rather than the facts around us, maybe identity and morality. And 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.

• 32:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I completely agree. Why do you have Ulysses S. Grant as your profile picture?

• 32:56Speaker 02

  Um, 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...

• 33:20Speaker 02

  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

• 34:00Speaker 02

  story is really empowering. 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. It's like this old painting. So, it gives him sort of this air of respectability. And it's like an appeal to a... Ancient knowledge almost is what it feels like, right? Like we're harkening back to something with that, with that guy.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  And what I found was I was, I started tweeting more freely. I stopped being so scared to say what I was really thinking. And I started like 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

• 35:18Speaker 02

  my Twitter seemed to connect with people, I guess. And, and I slowly just

• 35:28Speaker 02

  got to be more of myself, honestly, like in a weird way, by, by abandoning my own image.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  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. 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.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Of who I was online in a way. He was like my internet, my internet bodysuit.

• 36:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I love this. I love this answer.

• 36:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you're good. That's, that's literally the best answer that anyone could give for something like that. Cause it, it feels like it allows you to be more you, which is almost what everyone is chasing. And you were able to, you know, kind of uncover the ability to do that by simply changing your profile picture.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  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,

• 37:29Speaker 02

  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's looking for room to become who he is. And that, when you change the way that, that you present to people, 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 I love it. Like I actually, I'm a transhumanist. I, I like the idea that transitioning to me seems important and good.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  And being able to change the way that you present to the world as a way to kind of connect with, quote, who you really are. That moves me. And I think that there's a really important conversation that's happening there. I think all this stuff is connected and, and yeah, I'm pro it. I'm pro, I'm pro changing. I'm pro changing.

• 38:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. For those that don't know who you are, let's go back to go forwards, which is, what is your background? And how'd you get to Founders Fund?

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Um, so wow, long story. Let's make it short. I met Peter Thiel, my now boss, through a nonprofit called the Sea Setting 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.

• 39:16Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  Well, so, so what drew me to the Sea Setting Institute was an essay that Peter wrote about it when he first funded them way back. And I think it was 2008, maybe. 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. 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, 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

• 40:07Speaker 02

  nothing, you have to build something. And if you're building something from nothing, that means that you're doing something new. Like we provided, it's like we have now, since the last city's been built, it's been, well, since the last American city's 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

• 40:49Speaker 02

  you create? So that was the concept of like, you want to open a frontier? How do you do that? Sea Setting was this interesting.

• 40:58Speaker 02

  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, you, you, you enter sort of like the market dynamic and, and people will choose of their own free will, which government is the best. So you, you do, you have a hardcore like communist government out there. You have a theocratic government. You have a, an anarchist government. You have a sort of minarchist government and you let them all, you, you bring back kings. You know, 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 sea setting institute.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  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, when I, so I think it was like, it would have been like 2009.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  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 a, an editorial assistant at Penguin Books and, and Peter brought me to Founder's Fund to work on a bunch of projects with him.

• 42:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you remember the first conversation you ever had with him?

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  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 sea studying. We met in the real, in the real world there.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  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 sea studying. 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. It's, he, his brain is like unique and special. It is fast. It's like. Dancing and he's an interesting dancer like he comes at topics sideways. It's never, um, 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.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  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. And he somehow like just avoids that dynamic completely and comes at them from underneath or above or the side and is always surprising you in a conversation and challenging you to, um, you know, 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, I was, I never met someone who was so

• 44:06Speaker 02

  exciting to talk to in my life and I would have done any, any job, it wouldn't have mattered. I just, it was like, that's, I wanna, I wanna learn from this guy.

• 44:16Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what would you say the number one thing you've learned from him is?

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Wow, there are a lot. Um, if I had to still it.

• 44:25Anthony Pompliano?

  One or two. It doesn't have to just be one.

• 44:28Speaker 02

  I think that the most important thing he introduced me to was the memetic philosophy. There's this guy, uh, Rene Girard. Let's not say the most, one of the most important things. Um, and memetic philosophy is, uh, it concerns, it concerns the natural impulse in people to seek out competition with each other for resources. 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

• 45:11Speaker 02

  respect and value. And we look to them for cues on what to want. And we, we, we, uh, 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, it sort of, 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 version of one of the aspects of Girardi and philosophy. You want to avoid competition. It's bad. Then you see it manifesting politically. And Peter's always talking about war being bad. You know, it's one of his huge things is

• 45:55Speaker 02

  he's not into war. And you want to avoid war. It's never good. It's always a waste of, 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 memetic, the sort of Girardi and read of all this is that it's, it's all of us wanting to be like each other, wanting to have the same things that, that, that we have. And, and it's sort of saying that it's really hard to find people who are thinking for themselves almost ever.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  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 memetic desire, even a little bit, is sort of novel and powerful. 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.

• 47:09Anthony Pompliano?

  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's 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 you have a quote unquote

• 47:55Anthony Pompliano?

  industry that is very hard to define, right? Like, is IBM tech or not, right? And I think that that makes this difficult. But how do you view kind of that, you know, avoidance of that memetic type 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, like seemingly polarizing views of the world?

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Well, I don't think the anti-tech 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. They want, the New York Times wants exactly what the average like sort of tech CEO wants, which is the attention of people.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  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 like I don't, 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.

• 49:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And 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 just people in business or running these companies. And so that competition is what drives the kind of polarization between those two groups?

• 49:51Speaker 02

  Man, it's such a complicated fight, honestly. So I think that on the one hand, you have that, 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 actually most, that becomes most pronounced, not even among like tech CEOs and journalists, as it does between like tech influencers and journalists on Twitter. That's, that is where a lot of those people are fighting, they're fighting for the same thing, that those people are like, they're, I mean, tech influencers are just, they're media personalities. So they're all exactly the same, fighting for the same thing, which is attention, on the one hand.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  Then in the world of tech, it's like, there's technology. And you, 10 years ago, the conversation was much more about like, is automation, robotic automation, good for the world? What about jobs? Like, we would have conversations like that, you know, 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. We're talking about, basically, we're talking about capitalism versus socialism every single day. And that's a new thing where, where 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.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  On the other, you have a little bit maybe of this, of this like, is technology good for the world stuff? But increasingly now, what you have is a question of.

• 51:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 51:38Anthony Pompliano?

  It's capitalism versus socialism. I think you described it. I think that's like the clearest. It is an overgeneralization, but that is definitely one lens of which to view the the conversation through.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  I think it's one. Yeah, I mean, and I think that.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  I think then you then you also have people in the media who believe their job is 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 fountain of power. It is.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  They fail to acknowledge that they themselves are also a fountain 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 his 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 and Facebook is a powerful company.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  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?

• 53:12Speaker 02

  And that I don't know. I don't know. 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 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 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.

• 53:46Anthony Pompliano?

  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. It's why I want to talk to you. So let's go to the defense first of the media industry. You already said earlier, like there are many, many good journalists who do good journalism. And whether you agree with them or not, I think people place an incredible amount of importance on those journalists, right? Like the freedom of the press, the ability to publish things that even if people don't want it published, like that is protected. 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.

• 54:30Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  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. The New York Times.

• 54:56Anthony Pompliano?

  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 the running New York Times, like that's actually like the strategy you probably should be doing in today's day and age, right?

• 55:19Speaker 02

  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 like, you know, verifiability, accountability.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  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 jump? 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 better writer. That's for sure. But 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 like, was there ever a time when the New York Times really didn't have a bias?

• 56:33Speaker 02

  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 con, the 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 it is like, you need to be like fair and neutral and all this shit.

• 57:08Anthony Pompliano?

  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.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Like, I think, 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 comes, 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

• 57:57Speaker 02

  and deeply cared about this and was committed to it, committed to the idea of like principled, objective reporting on 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 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 Substack. I find myself going back to their work all. I'm always linking back to work that's 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 was all sorts of on COVID.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  There, there's been plenty of great reporting on, 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.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  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 of 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 like 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, they're incentivized to, they are incentivized to do.

• 1:00:03Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the solution?

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  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. Like it's mostly been this crazy mess of warring outlets and like. Media figures attacking each other. Most of our founding fathers were a part of this dynamic, by the way, in America. Like, how many of them had their own newspaper? How many of them were penning in like, it's six different pen names, and were just like mercilessly attacking their opponents. Like, 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

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  activated. And we're also sort of all living, you know, it used to be able to pick up a newspaper and put it down. Now, it, the news, the news walks around with us wherever we go, and it index everything. Um, so it's, it feels, it feels really different. I think it's not different, it's just bigger. Um, and the solution, I think, is like,

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  people accept that that's reality. People have to start accepting that there is no objective source of news. Um, 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, it's, you have to start sort of looking for multiple sources on any given story. Um, this is something that I do myself. Like, if I find, if I find a story that I love, that confirms all of my biases, um, 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

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  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, um, 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 then maybe this discourse improves a little bit.

• 1:02:24Anthony Pompliano?

  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. You know, 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.

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  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's like, that alone is, is most of what's happening right now with tech versus versus the press is like, both camps have already decided that the other camp is totally bad. And I mean, I happen to, clearly I'm a tech side. I have a lot of reason to believe that the press wants to destroy us. 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,

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  blah, blah. They're super pro anti trust. They were pro A5 after they got their own exemptions. 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.

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  Or got into 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.

• 1:04:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Human nature is human nature.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  It's human nature.

• 1:04:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. I want to finish up talking about a subject that I did not know that you were fond of, but somebody told me this when they saw that we were going to talk, which is aliens and, and UFOs. Uh, and then you were talking about Mars earlier. Uh, at the end of every interview, I ask people whether 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 like multi-species type, you know, invite, uh, you know, situation going on and like a dog on a leash like that. Like I've never seen that in any of the sci-fi. Like that's a weird thing to think about. Uh, where does your fascination with aliens, UFOs,

• 1:05:12Anthony Pompliano?

  kind of outer space, other planets, et cetera, come from and kind of what, just start talking about that in general. And like what fascinates you about it?

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  Well, all right. So my interest in Mars is completely different than my interest in UFOs. 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, 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 this radiation. You are looking around a world that's, you know, your atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. Plants are growing, oceans, ice has melted. We have oceans on Mars. Like I look at Mars and I see a future that is incredible.

• 1:06:03Speaker 02

  And it's this incredible opportunity to create a new branch of human civilization. And, um, and that's always been my interest in Mars. It's always been super, uh, 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

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  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. The interviews that they have with, like, it is pilots, material scientists, you have people who have, are ex-Pentagon officials, like, what they're talking about, first of all, it's like, it's not just photographic evidence and videographic evidence and the accounts of pilots. There's also talk of like, material retrieved from a crash, like, in the pages of the New York Times. This is just a year ago, less than a year ago. This happened under COVID,

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  the materials piece. And 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 that's true, but if it were true, that would be a huge story worth talking

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  about. The fact that Russia and China have the technology to travel faster than, you know, 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. Like, that's a big deal. Three, it's a massive conspiracy, also a huge deal. Like, 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, This is a new world that we're living in now. In the 90s, it was not like this. In the early 2000s,

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  it was not like this. We're looking at stories that are coming out now in that are well sourced, that have evidence, sometimes videographic evidence embedded in the piece. Like,

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:09:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it because people just assume that it that like, yeah, of course UFOs exist and and 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, yeah, 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?

• 1:09:31Speaker 02

  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, it's

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  I think the most likely thing is that we're looking at some kind of natural phenomenon that changes the the rules, so to speak, of physics.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  And reality, like, I think there's something I think that reality is much more complicated than we think. And I think that there's something in the UFO stuff that's 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.

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  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 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?

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:11:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it fair to say that the UFOs are literally the, you know, the terminology unidentified flying objects, 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 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 it was alien spacecraft or, you know, technological superiority, like, people would still call this stuff UFOs?

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  Well, what they're calling it now is the Pentagon has sort of switched the game up here. We've gone from UFOs, unidentified flying objects to UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena. That's like the sort of new nomenclature, which broadens it, doesn't narrow it. And it broadens it to include, I mean, who knows what, all manner of things. 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. I do think that, no, I think that if we have a better sense of what it is, 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.

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  I think that, uh, I don't know. I think that we're gonna learn a lot. I think the next five years are gonna be insane for UFO stuff. There's a lot of information the government is hiding, but there's also stuff, like, 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. They're 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 you're tinfoil hat wearing people. It's people like us who are like, um, okay, I'm looking at this information. It seems weird. I would like to see more information. And, uh, that means that people are gonna be gathering more information.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  That means that people are gonna be requesting more information that we already have that's just being hidden specifically. So the naval, uh, 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. We, 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.

• 1:14:08Anthony Pompliano?

  You're a Substack billionaire on Twitter. Make sure we classify you correctly. I want to spend the last minute or two talking about, uh, the content you consume. Uh, you are, uh, obviously, uh, an original thinker, kind of very open-minded, um, and my guess is that you consume very different types of content, whether it's books, uh, 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?

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  Um, I read a lot of books. I'm, I think, every week I've got a couple. I'm not, 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, so, so, reading through books is how I find other books that I want to read. It's like, I could 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, I have 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. Um, and then I can sort of compare that with new things to sort of get a rough approximation

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  of what is real. Uh, so yeah, books is a big one.

• 1:15:25Anthony Pompliano?

  What type of books?

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  Nonfiction now, I used to be super into fiction. These days, it's like nonfiction biographies for history and then also older stuff, classics. But yeah, it's a broad thing. I mean, it's everything from just like, yeah, it's like nonfiction to the classics to.

• 1:15:50Anthony Pompliano?

  When you, when you wake up, what's the news sources that you check first? Twitter?

• 1:15:55Speaker 02

  I go to Twitter like an asshole.

• 1:16:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Everybody does it. Nobody wants to say it, but everyone does it.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  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. 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

• 1:16:47Speaker 02

  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 listen to, but nothing that I'd want to share. That's like so great. I like to produce podcasts, but it sounds so stupid, but actually as someone who does create podcasts, there are not many that I'm super obsessed with myself.

• 1:17:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Last question for you that I'll let you go. 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?

• 1:17:33Speaker 02

  That's a big request for, out of nowhere.

• 1:17:53Speaker 02

  Well, the one that comes to mind is just Fortune Favors the Bold.

• 1:17:59Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a great one. It's even better that you thought of that right off the top of your head.

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  And that's that. I mean, that's what I've got. I hope that was enough for you.

• 1:18:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Dude, this is fantastic. I never thought that I would talk to a Substack billionaire who was such an independent thinker and also at the same time had so many controversial thoughts.

• 1:18:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:18:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  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 dot Substack dot com.

• 1:18:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, man. Well, thank you so much. We're gonna have to do this again in the future.

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  Thank you. Yeah, I'll talk to you later.