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

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

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 0:35Speaker 01

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• 1:04Speaker 02

  UKG is the workforce operating platform with unified HR, payroll, and workforce management, built to solve the unique challenges of frontline work. Powered by People First AI and decades of labor data, UKG turns workforce intelligence into real-time decisions around staffing, pay, compliance, and productivity, enabling every worker to confidently take action as work happens. Because when work works, everything works. Learn more at ukg.com/work. UKG, HR, Pay, and Workforce Management.

• 1:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Sanity and truth in an insane world.

• 1:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Where do we begin?

• 1:41Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  They're like, what are you talking about today? I'm like, no idea. There's lots to cover.

• 1:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's start with the insane world. It feels like, and I'm going to speak for the audience, that we all went to sleep in 2019.

• 1:57Speaker 04

  And it was kinda crazy. We all had the internet. But when we woke up in 2020, everything got insane. There was the politics, there was the economy, the Fed, there was the public health. I mean, you just go down the line and it's literally the meme clown world.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  Became popular for a reason. How do you evaluate, like, what happened? And like, how did we get deeper and deeper into this insane world?

• 2:25Speaker 03

  I think you're right. I think that it was something, it was like 2020. I wouldn't say that things became extremely clownish. I would say that that was the year that it all became impossible to ignore. It was like suddenly, like, there were a lot of things that were kind of, had gone off of the rails. But in the middle of a pandemic, suddenly you needed people to be serious. And it was like at that moment that the complete lack of seriousness became a disaster. And that's what, if you think back, like, sort of the height of maybe the sort of identity politics and stuff like that, it wasn't 2020, in my opinion. Right before 2020, I was saying it was over. It was 2017. At the very height, when like Aziz Ansari was being, you know, murdered for a bad date

• 3:08Speaker 03

  and things like this, I was like, it could never get worse than that. And then 2020 happened and rioting was legalized and you were like, uh, wow. It's like, there's like no bottom here. But I think actually what was happening was like, that was, it was like extinction, it was like behavior extinction. It was like to get the same level of attention, I think, for behavior. People had to go and get a little more extreme. And plus, it was a pandemic and people were losing their minds. But yeah, for sure, that was the year that everything kind of became obvious.

• 3:38Speaker 04

  So essentially, let's take the legalization of riots, which, again, most people won't even talk about at this point. There's the discourse, and then there's the, like, actions in your local community. So I was living in New York while some of this was going on. And there was three different events, all within like a two or three week timeline. There was one video that went viral in, I think it was like Washington Square Park or maybe down on the Flatiron or something, where literally the police were having a fistfight with citizens. Like, there was a bunch of chaos and the one angle of the video was like, two guys squared up, one's a cop and one's a citizen, and they're like punching each other.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  Like a backyard school fight or something.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I remember, I mean, there was, we've, again, like, this stuff has been coming for a while. I forget now even what the protest was, but a while back, there was, it was some kind of equality protest, I believe. Maybe, maybe it was 2020, and I have to go back and look, but there was a girl, if you were to just Google like, Molotov cocktail girl, this will come up. And I remember, there's like this crazy riot, and this reporter, I mean, usually the media is like, doing all sorts of crazy shit, but in this case, I cannot blame them, they were just like, hey, so, what's going on here, the reporter said to this person in front of like, absolute chaos everywhere, this girl's holding a Molotov cocktail. And, and, and she's just like, blithely, sort of like, explaining what's going on. And the reporter narrates it, she's like, and then she just, she just tossed it into a cop car,

• 5:07Speaker 03

  and lit it on fire. So then, she gets, that, that girl actually got arrested. Um, and then the framing was like, I mean, come on, like, mistakes were made, right? Like, let he among us who has not thrown a Molotov cocktail at a cop car, cast the first stone. And it's like, that's, I mean, that's really some, that's some crazy shit. In the moment, in 2020, that's when I started writing for Pirate Wires. So it was like, I think that was the most depressed I ever was, that June of 2020, when all of the crazy behavior from the preceding years, kind of amplified, and in the context of this, you know, really scary, at the time it was scary, virus that we didn't know much about. So I started writing, just to like, kind of make sense of the world for myself, uh, and then it connected with people, and I've been doing it since.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  So before we get into Pirate Wires, some of the things you guys have covered, um, you work at a place where,

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Founder's Fund?

• 5:59Speaker 04

  Previously at Founder's Fund.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Well, I'm still there.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  You, you are an entrepreneur in residence now, right? Which, uh, is like, uh, the best position to be in, because that means that you definitely can work on whatever you want, I guess.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  I mean, I always could, and now it's like, official.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  All right. Uh, is known for independent thinking, right? Uh, and now you're writing, And when you started to write, one, you're very articulate. You have a very memorable way of writing, right? But you're willing to take on topics that most people just won't touch. Or if they do write about it, it is from what I would consider the consensus view. So you'll see a New York Times article, and they'll write something, and you're like, "Oh, is that what everyone believes?" And then I'll get an email from you on your Substack, and I'm like, "Oh, no, that's not what everyone believes."

• 6:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  You actually took it head-on. Where does that come from?

• 6:50Speaker 03

  So, I believe that, I think the average person doesn't think much about what's going on at all. And I think they're looking around for cues on what they're allowed to say and things like this. And I understand that impulse, because it's scary. There are real consequences to saying the wrong thing. Especially over the last few years. That's the whole game, is to terrify people into not thinking about the world. You just assume that your thoughts are incorrect and things like this. My assumption is that if I just make my case plainly, and not in a mean way, unless someone really deserves it, which occasionally happens, but not be mean. If you could not be, if you could just make the case in the most obvious way, I think the average person would see the reason in it.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  And they'll see that you're at least not trying to cause trouble. You're really just expressing what I think are mostly, for the most part, they're not all common sense. But when it comes to things like crime and things like this, crime, homelessness, drugs, those tend to be more common sense positions. And then when it comes to technology and analysis and things like that, that's maybe a little more complicated, but only because you're not steeped in it, which is the other thing. I like to bring people, I happen to know a lot about what's going on in tech, just because I'm fortunate enough to sit with people who are really great at this stuff. And so, I like to share that with my audience.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  Pirate wires, the name, was very intentional. Explain, what is a pirate wire? Why did you call it that?

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Man, I mean, the first thing is like, it's just a vibe. It just makes me happy. Like, it just came to me one day. I was like, that's cool. I'm gonna call it that. But, I mean, a pirate wire is like, it's like pirate radio is what I think about. I think about the forbidden things that you're not allowed to say. And I kinda just also think about, I mean, we all live online now, and that's, it's like this clownish cartoon reality. And I imagine it almost as like the open seas, and there are these people who are bringing a lot to it. There are people who are causing damage out there. There are fights and wars. There are giant sea monsters. And we're just like not a part of the main nations. We're like this little pirate ship, or this little now pirate fleet, kind of off to the side, maybe building our own little pirate nation in a kind of hidden cove.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  And that's just how I think about it. I try and have fun online and laugh at the really crazy stuff because that's also a gateway. I feel like that's how people connect with each other.

• 9:12Speaker 04

  You were the first person to say this to me. You said that you bought a bunch of encyclopedias, if I remember correctly?

• 9:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:19Speaker 04

  And you were reading them, and I was like, what a fucking nerd. In my head, but I was like, why are you doing that?

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Analog.

• 9:27Speaker 04

  The connection between my brain and my mouth, like, it translated into, why would you do that? And then you explained, well, maybe they're gonna change what's in the encyclopedia.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 04

  And I was like, that's a crazy thought. Fast forward two years, not such a crazy thought.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  This is the crazy, I think this is probably the craziest thing about our information landscape is that it's totally malleable. And, I mean, the sort of dream of the internet when I was a kid was like, this was gonna be free, unlimited information. All of the information that exists in the world was going to now be available to everybody. And so you have this idea of what information meant back then, like even a couple decades ago. Information, you were imagining like, like the official record. Now everyone would have it. The official information, like, like the sort of scientific studies and things like that. All of that would be available. What we did not see coming was the fact that everything changes. So, obviously Wikipedia is the, is an easy example, but the dictionary, right?

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Like, like definitions in the dictionary change. Like, actual articles that used to exist have been altered in real time. They're not even all, you know, they're not even On social media, things are said and then deleted constantly. The Wayback Machine, you can just have anything wiped, any sort of history. And so the idea of an encyclopedia, which Britannica, I don't think has, I think their last encyclopedia might have been in the late 2000, it might have been like 2008, or I, you'd have to double, I'm not sure of the date. But, but it's, it's at least 10 years old, like the, the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  It suddenly had value that I 20 years ago thought was laughable. It's like, who care, like analog, like paper, wow, are you living in the primitive times? I could never think of the utility of that, of a hard record. And that's the weird thing that I'm grappling with, I think, day to day is like, my love of technology. I've been a sort of progressive, like techno-utopian guy for a lot of my formative years. With the consequences of that, that we're seeing increasingly all around us. And the malleability of, or the malleable nature of information is one of those things where like, in a world where everything's changing, when you can't, when you, there's no record of, of what was said five seconds ago.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  I remember Amy Comey Barrett saying, she used the word, the phrase "sexual preference" in her hearing before she became a justice. And immediately everyone was like, oh, that's, you know, really offensive, just look at the dictionary. The dictionary that day changed the definition of sexual preference. And, and that became a part of the story. And it's like,

• 12:04Speaker 04

  Wait, wait, just so like people understand, like when he says change the definition, like literally online, they went and they changed the definition that day.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  In real time, in response to a Huffington Post article that was going viral, calling her, you know, a bigot and whatnot. And sexual preference is like, I mean, I'm gay, I know gay people who have used that phrase. It's like, not recently, it's kind of dated, but is it, is it bigoted? No, that's not bigoted to me, that's not, it's like not, like dropping an F-bomb, it's not the same thing. And that is how it was, it was reframed. Now, that one topic doesn't really matter so much as the sort of high level fact of our reality, which is that we have no record that we can go back to and say, this is the truth. This is the thing that we all said we agreed on, because that doesn't exist anymore. And so I think a, like a high level problem we all have now is like, Given that that's the reality of our life,

• 12:55Speaker 03

  how do you make sense of what's going on? And so

• 12:58Speaker 04

  How do you balance that with like, let's take the lab leak, which you and I have had plenty of nice conversations about. 2020, I think it was Zero Hedge was the first one I saw that said it. They were deleted within minutes, you know, hours, whatever it was, which had the opposite effect of not like, oh, wow, look at those morons. Actually, it was like, huh, maybe that's true.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  Right of like, why would they not want us to read that? And so from there to eventually, I remember

• 13:30Speaker 04

  somebody put together, a bunch of like pseudonymous people put together like a Google Drive or like a Google Doc that was circulating around for a while. And they had, I mean, incredibly detailed research. It was all cited, like, it was very well done where I would say like a professional did it or a group of professionals, but they weren't willing to put their name on it.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  And so that was circulating around on Twitter for a while. And then I remember the first politician who said it on national television. And they were yelling and screaming and saying, you know, conspiracy theories and like, you know, all that kind of stuff. To now we have reports like the Department of Energy, which I'm not sure why they're looking into it.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Because they run a bunch of labs.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  Got it.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  So they run all of our national labs and a bunch of international labs.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  These organizations now that previously were like, there's no way that this is true. This is, you know, conspiracy theory stuff. They're like, oh, we have low level confidence. Some of them have, you know, medium level confidence, whatever they're like, that is quote, quote, the truth.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  Has the truth evolved throughout that time? Or is it that now it's just okay to talk about certain things that maybe were off, you know, off the table before? Like, how do you think about that situation as a good example?

• 14:35Speaker 03

  The lab leak is, it's a lot like Hunter Biden's laptop, right? It's like this issue that is just, it is like

• 14:42Speaker 04

  In more than one way.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  The Rosetta Stone for the information landscape. You look at it and you're like, oh, that's how everything works. Got it. With, with the, with, with the lab leak.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  I don't, first of all, my confidence that the virus leaked from a lab is not, you know, 90%. I'm probably like 60. I think like I'm like 60% it came from a lab, 40% zoonotic. Like, I don't, it's like, it seems likely, and yet, there's evidence, kind of, and arguments in both directions. What bothered me about the lab leak was that we couldn't talk about it, and we couldn't ask those questions, and we weren't even allowed. I mean, in the early days, there wasn't an investigation happening. It was like, The Times was asking, I looked back to, I don't know if it was The Times, but the other day I was looking back at my own commentary on this stuff, and I came across a Wikipedia article at the time, that linked to, in evidence that the lab leak theory was complete, a conspiracy

• 15:37Speaker 03

  theory with no validity whatsoever. There were three broken links, and the fourth went to a WHO, it was like a World Health Organization slash, like, China thing, where basically, like, Chinese, like, the CCP agents were like, hey, so like, Chinese officials were like, it didn't happen. And that was their evidence. And it's like, okay, that's crazy. Like, what was happening back then was just, we weren't even asking the question, because we weren't allowed to. And there are a lot of reasons that make sense. It's like, maybe people wanted to work with China at the time. You don't want to alienate them, like, they know a lot about the virus potentially. Like, I understand in the same way that Fauci lied

• 16:18Speaker 03

  about masks, the first time he lied about masks, when it was like, oh no, you don't want masks, because he wanted to make sure there were enough masks for all the doctors and things like that.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  Which he's come out and said-

• 16:28Speaker 03

  He's apologized for it. And what, I knew that even then. That was obvious even then. It was like, obviously, that's what they're trying to do. But the problem with that is it destroys, and this is a separate subject, but like, the problem with something like that is it completely destroys our trust in these people who we need to trust in the moment, in the middle of a crisis. And so it's like, with a lot of these things, with the lab leak thing, and with the Hunter Biden thing back in the day, like, I can, I can understand the, I can understand why someone would lie, they think, for our own good. However-

• 17:01Speaker 03

  They shouldn't have that much power for these reasons because they're often wrong. And on things like this, it's like you're wrong about our public health or something like that. It can be really dangerous.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  What I always appreciate about you is you don't have a super strong belief on the lab leak or on even like the Fauci situation, like you're able to unpack, oh, I see from their seat why they would do that, or I see why the incentive pulls them towards that action. How do you look at a situation, like let's just say something happens tomorrow. How do you go through that process? Is it just like you sit there like, oh, if I was in their seat, these would be the options? Or like, well, what is that process like? So that people can help as people in the audience learn about situations in the future. What would be your advice or kind of your like very practical guide of like, here's how to think through something?

• 17:50Speaker 03

  I think that you have to just be comfortable with your own curiosity and like accept the idea that you are allowed to have an opinion and you are allowed to ask questions. The lab leak was like, we're talking about a virus that was supposed to, that perhaps has emerged completely randomly like down the street from a coronavirus factory. That's insane. Like you should be able to ask questions like, hey, what's going on over at the place where they're studying rare bat coronaviruses like down the block? That is like, that's not a crazy question to ask. And the fact that we were framed like these crazy people is insane. And so you have to just be like, okay, well, screw all of them.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  Like what makes, what am I curious about? What doesn't add up to me? And then you just ask those questions. The danger is that you, you suddenly start believing everything that the other people who are asking similar questions are saying they believe. Because online, I don't even know what people believe. A lot of people say shit and they don't even believe it. It's just identity based posturing or they want attention. And it's just a really complicated environment.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  So there is the fear of just believing the consensus, right? And I read ex-mainstream outlet, they said this, that's my belief. And so you want to avoid that, but you also don't want to then become the conspiracy theorist, like an actual conspiracy theorist who's like, oh my God, I think that there's an alien who like brought this diamond down from the sky.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  I mean, let's not, let's not say never.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  So how do you, I guess, like, on the other side, you know, I almost think of it like bumpers, right? You want to be able to ask questions and do all this stuff, but like, look, you can go on a website online and pick your, like, supernova topic. And you start reading stuff and like, you very quickly could become convinced of something that like, if you're able to take a step back and be like, wait a minute, this is insane. Like, there's no way that, you know, A, B, and C all add up. How do you prevent, like, over-rotating to what would be the conspiracy side as well?

• 19:52Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, some conspiracies exist. And so it's like, to be a conspiracy theorist, like, there have been conspiracies. So you don't want to close yourself off to the topic, generally speaking. I mean, the UFO thing would be a good example, right? Like, this conspiracy has completely flipped there. For my entire life, up until 2017, the conspiracy was that the government was hiding evidence of UFOs. Now, the government's like, yo, we have got a lot of evidence of UFOs. Here's videos. And so the conspiracy theorists, this just happened in the last one, the conspiracy theorists were like, the government is lying about UFOs to distract you from either the chemical fires in Ohio, or like, they want you to go to war with China, or like, whatever it is. So there's like a new conspiracy theory.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  And so, or several.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  And I guess it's like, again, it's the curiosity, and you have to just trust yourself to just...

• 20:49Speaker 03

  Two things. One, follow your own curiosity. And then maybe the other thing is like, anytime a story is too good, and this happens to me on Twitter all the time, there are people who are like,

• 21:01Speaker 03

  there's like some story, there's some news thing that seems like just too perfectly in sync with all of my priors. Like, I want to roast it, I want to dunk on it, I want to be like, look what the world is doing. You just got to go and actually read the article. And then you have to try and find some other counter-sources. Like, what are people who are mad about this thing? I do this all the time. I read the New York Times a lot.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  I think I am sort of naturally like a little bit opposite them ideologically, not like very far. But I think it's healthy, I feel, to be reading people who...

• 21:35Speaker 03

  I don't want to say don't agree with me, but challenge me in a way.

• 21:40Speaker 04

  Are you looking for content when you do that? Like, I almost think of it as a comedian. A comedian goes, lives their life, and they're like, they're looking for, oh, look, I saw this situation. That's gonna be a good joke. They go back and they kind of come up with the set. Are you going to the websites and like, I need shit to write about? And so like, that one. Look at these idiots.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  I've never not known what to write about. I've got like a lot of things I want to talk about. But that's probably why, because I'm like compulsively like reading up on what's going on. I find it just fun and exciting. And I consider that sort of my job now is to like follow this stuff and provide my perspective that I hope can be useful to some people.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  You've been pulled into some very interesting debates. Most notably, you were maybe rightfully or wrongfully labeled as a billionaire media tycoon by a politician, literally.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Lorena Gonzalez.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  Can you explain the situation?

• 22:35Speaker 03

  I'm grateful. Sorry about that. I'm grateful for what she gave me. It was really awesome.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  So explain what she attacked you about. And then talk a little bit about, as a private citizen, yes, you're in the tech industry, but you're a private citizen. Like, do they see it as a threat? Is that why now the playing field has been leveled on Twitter?

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Do they see what as a threat?

• 22:55Speaker 04

  A politician going after a private citizen on Twitter or vice versa? Like, how do you think about, you know, there used to be this very big gap, right? And like, you couldn't talk to your politician. You could like write a letter and hope they got it. You may be able to call and like talk to someone on their team. Maybe you went to an event and they were like on stage. But you couldn't like be sitting on the toilet and like firing off at a politician and they're responding back.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, you could never.

• 23:22Speaker 03

  I think it's not just them either. It's politicians, it's public health officials, it's the media. These are all, the people who are used to getting relentless criticism were people who worked in the private industry. So journalists often say that CEOs and things like this are thin-skinned, tech people are thin-skinned. I think that actually there's some truth to that. Like, no one likes to have negative things written about them in the press. And everybody, when something negative is written about them, your first reaction is like, well, they're lying, kind of. Because they kind of are. Like, if someone really hates you, they're not lying. They're like framing things in a way that make you seem really bad. And so that's what you're sort of naturally reacting to, and that's, I think, understandable. But still, public companies are more, they're used to this in a way. I guess...

• 24:05Speaker 03

  The government has been as well, well, the Republican, anyone who is Republican in government is used to criticism. I think there's something much more intimate about this, this like, this mass of people who are very close to you. And like you said, it's like, it's just some guy on his toilet, like, talking to one of the most powerful senators in the country. And they sometimes respond because they feel like they have to, because everybody's looking. It's very threatening to the, to power in general. Lorena was almost a good sport about it. This is the woman who told Elon, uh, fuck you. And then he was like, okay, cool, I'm out. And he just like left the state.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  With a few billion dollars in taxes.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  So yeah, she, we got in a thing and she, she was like, you know, billionaires like you could never understand. And that just became a part of my internet, like, bodysuit. I was just like, added, I just have all these like strange titles that I collect. But I think the anger generally from people like that is this, it's like this sense of, of, uh, of how dare you? And maybe fear, because they're not wrong that, um, you do need certain people to be just in charge. And like, this feels, this does feel, this much chaos, uh, does feel sort of unstable sometimes.

• 25:16Speaker 04

  A lot of, uh, I think what you and I get out of the internet and enjoy talking about is kind of like, look how crazy this is. This is insane. What are you people doing? Et cetera. What's going right? What are the positives? Like, when you wake up in the morning, where do you look and you're like, man, this is actually like really energizing? And puts me in the mood to go and like take the hill because I feel like we're, uh, we're actually making progress somewhere.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Uh, I think there's a lot, uh, more, uh, sort of every day. I think that in the first place, I don't know what to call it. Some people call it wokeness. Some people call it like, uh, like identitarianism or whatever that thing was that made it impossible for us to speak. That sort of infected every single aspect of our lives over the last few years where, uh, we were reduced to our gender and our sex and things like this, our race.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  I think that's kind of over. Like, I think, or at least it's monopoly on culture is over. Like, you're very much now allowed to criticize these things. And you can tell that by the fact that there's an entire sort of like cottage industry online that exists to make fun of it and to attack it and to criticize it. There are successful activists now, I would say, on the other side of it, who are making a lot of progress in places like Florida. And progress, you know, their version of that, which is to say, but like that was impossible a few years ago. There's much more, I would say, balance. I think that's great. I think that in the context of, I write a lot about local politics. I think it's this weirdly important thing that nobody cares about. Why? It's not sexy.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  It doesn't pay well. And yet, you know, the president doesn't really matter in your day to day life. We realized under COVID, the thing that mattered were like the five psychopaths on your Board of Education, you know? Like, they had all the power. And so, like, people have to have to care about that kind of stuff. And what I've noticed, especially in San Francisco, I mean, I live in Miami, but spent a, I spent a good enough amount of time now in San Francisco to kind of be aware of what's going on. All my friends still live there.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  San Francisco gets a lot of shit for being the craziest city in the country. It's not. I've been all over the country. Every city is bad. Like, they're all, they all have the same problems. They all have a drug problem. They all have a homeless problem. They all have those crazy people on the Board of Education, all of them. There's like not an exception to that in the big cities. The difference is people in San Francisco were talking about it and getting attention for it. And now, what you're seeing are people in a lot of these cities who are really pushing back. We've seen evidence of that across the board. There are people who want just basic, very, very basic things. Like, they want the schools, the schools are now open, but like, they're like, the schools need to be open and the schools need to be run by sane people. And things like, I don't know, fentanyl dealing should be illegal. You should not be allowed to do that. And I think those people are kind of coming back in charge.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  So there's, there's like a rough sort of common sense resurgence that I'm excited about. And then there's tech stuff too, but we can talk about that later.

• 28:20Speaker 04

  So, one of the interesting things about crime, San Francisco, I think, being a example, is that the people who are trying to address the crime, they're experimenting. They may not call it experimenting, but they will look at things and they will say, "Well, maybe we shouldn't be so directly confrontational. We should do more of rehabilitation. Maybe if we kind of give them a sector of the city and let them do crazy stuff over there, they won't do it elsewhere." The generalizations of the San Francisco is like, "No, they're just gonna run rampant." Or like, literally, they just walk in CVS and it's basically like they walked into their personal pantry at their house, right? And just grab whatever they want. Like, how do you balance what I think the tech industry would agree is like, the ability to question

• 29:01Speaker 04

  things, the ability to test things, you know, the ability to try to iterate towards a solution, but also you're doing it with public safety, you're doing it with like, a city. How did, like, what is the solution? Or like, if you were the mayor of San Francisco, what would you be doing there to try to address like, crime or homelessness, but maybe taking the approach of like, "Hey, I don't have like, a one-size-fits-all solution on day one. I gotta kind of figure it out."

• 29:28Speaker 03

  I think that, so there are a couple of questions there. I think the one that's, I'll start with maybe is just, yeah, how do you balance this desire for like, "Shut it down. We need to clean the streets," and also like, "You need to experiment to make things better?" I love that question. I would say that we have experimented. Like, we've done it. Like, we ran the experiment. It's been decades of this shit. It's time to shut it down. Like, the open-air drug market's not working. Like, the sort of legalized fentanyl dealing, it's like, not a good thing. We could just toss those, and then be maybe a little more open to, I think, once we get to some sort of basic, common, like, in San

• 30:10Speaker 03

  Francisco famously, there was this problem of, like, people were going, people were shitting on the street, like, everywhere. Like, human shit, everywhere you looked. Like, that's

• 30:18Speaker 04

  the kind of- Literally, you would walk down the street and people would joke, "Don't step in the shit."

• 30:22Speaker 03

  And it was, it was from people, not dogs. And it's like, that's, that is, you can't function in a society like that. Like, that's the- That we're breaking down in a pretty serious way at that point. It's like, there has to be a ground floor. And at that ground floor, when people feel safe, when there's not, you know, I mean, there's like a mass murder happening with fentanyl in San Francisco right now. I know for a fact, and I think all the cities are pretty bad with this stuff. But SF is where I just, I know, I happen to know the most about it.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Once you clean that kind of stuff up, you should be running experiments. And I think probably where you start is not at the scale of, you know, a million person city, but like maybe a town, like maybe we start there.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  Well, and also probably safety is a very different place to experiment than, let's come up with a better parking system.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't want to experiment with new drugs on my body, right? Like, let, I'm happy for other people to do the experimentation there, and then I'll see you in a few years.

• 31:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. What is one or two topics that you have not written about? Either because you're scared to write about them, or you feel like it needs enough nuance in conversation versus in writing?

• 31:31Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  Bad topic, whatever you just were thinking we should talk about.

• 31:35Speaker 03

  Well, I think there are a couple, I mean, I think the obvious one is, I will say the one that I messed up on, which was, I really wanted to talk about, I was, I was early, I loved Bitcoin. I was early to it. I was very ideologically aligned with it at the time. I still sort of am, I still mostly am. But I was at my most ideologically aligned with Bitcoin.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  Maybe around 2013, I think I got into it. And I'd known about it for a while, and I'd been thinking about it, but like, it was 2013 when I got in. I would say things got like,

• 32:12Speaker 03

  pretty ridiculous towards the end. And there were some great things happening, and there were some crazy things happening. And I wish that I had, I had so many friends who were working on this stuff. And I didn't, I just didn't want to, I just didn't want to get involved. I felt like there are other people talking about it. I don't need to talk about it. But now I really regret it. And so.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  Because you wanted to bring up the crazy stuff and like, kind of critique it?

• 32:34Speaker 03

  I think that there were some crazy things that needed. I mean, there were clearly some crazy things that needed to be critiqued. And so I wish that I would have been a part of that because I knew I had that impulse and I didn't. And I silenced myself not for fear of, and this is maybe the really the most dangerous one. It was not for fear of what a bunch of assholes on the internet were going to say about me. It was like for fear of what my friends would think about me. And I didn't want to hurt anybody's feelings who I cared about, and that's a problem. And so I really regret that. I should have spoken up. I had these feelings. I never was like pumping crazy shit. I was never like, uh, but I should have expressed thoughtful sort of concern at the time. I'm trying to sort of bring that now into how I talk about AI.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  Which is a whole other topic. I will say the other thing, the thing that I have not talked about, which is probably the thing that no one talks about, which is race. And I, I, that one is a complicated, it's like, I'm like, do I need to talk? Like lots of people are talking about it. I don't know how to talk about it in a way that

• 33:35Speaker 03

  like helps us grow towards something positive yet. I haven't, I haven't found that thing. I think it's something that I'll probably end up talking about if I feel like I have to. And it will be hard because I do think there's a lot of responsibility in a topic like that, more than than others.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Artificial intelligence is going to ruin our lives or make us all super humans?

• 33:58Speaker 03

  I think it's a, I think there's a lot to unpack there. And I don't want to, we're like, we've been going for a while. So I don't know how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  We got nine minutes. You can talk about whatever you want.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  I think at the ground floor, it's just like, AI is going to make everything look a lot different. I think that like, I think that the future that I most see coming is like a weird future that we kind of already, what I'm writing about right now are facial reconstruction sort of filters. Like things that you can, you can go online and make yourself look like your teenage self or something like that. Or, you know, deep fakes, uh, something that Pirate Wires has written a lot about are, are like the new, you want to call them like sex fakes or deep fake like porn, things like this where people are taking other people's. Image and creating realistic looking pornography featuring them against their, obviously without their consent. And that's like.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  And they're doing that to release it and like embarrass them or?

• 34:56Speaker 03

  They're doing it because they want to see it. That's and and they release it online. There were people who there was a huge scandal among a bunch of Twitch streamers where one of the people like a guy actually produced or he went and looked at this. It was like it was like deep fake porn of someone who he had he had actually collaborated with in the past. It was like a whole scandal. But that's just like a really weird thing that we're going to have to kind of like think through. There are also other weird things that are really great. Like, one thing I often think about is like, I mean, I really love Buffy the Vampire Slayer growing up. And we're approaching a world where you could potentially have like unlimited Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Like you could be just like generating Buffy the Vampire

• 35:36Speaker 03

  Slayer like season 455 personally tailored to you. Like you're going to be create in terms of entertainment. It's like the world is your oyster in terms of maybe like creating some version of yourself for your kids and your great grandkids to look at online. Like you can create like a digital, a digital version of yourself that knows that is maybe like an AI model trained on everything you've ever written. That can then speak to your, you know, your progeny. That's kind of cool. I don't know what it's going to do for job loss. No one ever does. And this is the I don't like making predictions like this because I like kind of assessing the landscape and being like, here's what I think is happening right now. But when it comes to what's happening five years from now in a world of AI, which

• 36:19Speaker 03

  is a paradigm altering technology, that is like we're dealing with an intelligence now capable of of creating art, writing sonnets, like already can write music, can replace most legal. I don't know. I was working with lawyers right now. I'm like, there's 99% of what they've done and it costs a lot. And AI I think can already do. So it's like, that's gonna change, everything's gonna change. I think that's the kind of thing that's like, well, that's a huge change for the better in a lot of regards. Like, all of us would love, you know, a really expensive lawyer for the cost of a soda or something. But what happens to all the lawyers? And what happens to not just them, right? This is not like, oh, we have a car and now the carriage drivers are out of work.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  It's like, we have something that thinks, and so now everybody who thinks for a living is out of work. Potentially, that's the negative case. The dream is that it just amplifies everything, right? So now Pirate Wires, it's like, me plus a hundred of my clones that are, you know, reporting on everything. And that seems both terrifying if you hate me and great if you're me.

• 37:24Speaker 04

  Have you guys started to use any of the AI tools in either finding ideas, writing about ideas, researching? Like, anything in actual?

• 37:32Speaker 03

  I'm writing about them right now. I think, I mean, so the most powerful chat bot we've seen so far was Sydney. And that's definitely been neutered at this point. It was Microsoft's, Microsoft is using ChatGPT, the latest version that no one else even had to do. It was, it was this chatbot that kind of revealed its name, which was Sydney, and that was like a whole other thing. But that's, that's neutered right now. And, uh, no, I haven't been using it.

• 38:00Speaker 04

  I can't remember if it was you or somebody else, you know, was experimenting with ChatGPT and was asking it questions. And of course, you ask a funny question and then all of a sudden it very quickly becomes like, hey, what do you think about Joe Biden? Or, hey, what do you think about Donald Trump? And, uh, these chatbots are answering very differently, depending on political parties or candidates. There's other topics where it seems like they're very verbose and willing to talk about through the AI bot. And then others that they completely avoid and will literally say like, hey, I can't talk about this or something. How important is it for us to get that stuff right now versus it'll be an iterative process in 20 years from now?

• 38:42Speaker 04

  We'll be on stage somewhere talking about, man, the AI, you know, got this right and got this wrong. And it's just kind of this long-term problem.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  I mean, people are definitely, I've been in tech for, I think, 11 years and it's much more critical now than it was back then. People are criticizing this stuff. People are, from both sides. There, you have people who, mostly on the left, let's just call a spade a spade, who like really want more censorship on this thing. And the right wing conversation is very much like, how do we keep political censorship off of these AIs? I don't even know how much is happening, to be honest. I don't know how much of it is political censorship right now. I think that a lot of what's happening, I mean, there's certainly quite a bit of it that we know for sure is happening. But I think a lot of what's happening, certainly what happened with

• 39:34Speaker 03

  Bing, Microsoft's most recent chat, was, the thing is, it's Googling itself, it's using Bing, but no one uses Bing. So it's Bing-ing itself, it's searching itself, and it's kind of telling you what other people are saying about-

• 39:49Speaker 04

  It's a mirror to society system.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, or to you. It's telling you what you want to hear and things like this. It's very good. It's just a conversational program. I think we're asking the right questions. I think we keep asking the right questions. It's potentially very dangerous if AI is totally centralized and all these other AI companies are, you know, working off of one, and that one mainstreams some kind of really nefarious political censorship. Some element of censorship is impossible to avoid because we all, eventually, these companies, they have to call shots on things like safety. Even something like, you know, you don't want, you don't want child porn on social media. And I don't. That's a, that's a shot. That's a value call, right? That is

• 40:35Speaker 03

  censorship, it's just a good censorship. So I'm like glad that exists, but someone called that shot. And so there are lots of shots like that, that someone has to call. And those always come down to biases. Where we get in trouble are the ones that are more ambiguous, like, should you be allowed to talk about the potential pitfalls of a vaccine on very little information in the middle of a pandemic? And clearly, people disagreed on that one. The problem was that you A few people who were in charge of calling that shot and they called it in a different direction. I think that that's almost, it's like unavoidable with AI. But people after the social media stuff, I think there's hope for us to to push back in a in a strong way and at least get some semblance of of openness.

• 41:18Speaker 04

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

• 41:52Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 41:54Speaker 03

  AI was something that was like. Very exciting, I think 10 years ago, there was a moment and you saw like DeepMind sold to Google and there was a lot of progress made and.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  And then it kind of fell off. It went quiet for a while. I think it got caught up in the self-driving car conversation and like the different things that AI can do and. And that didn't come fast enough. And then people got sort of, I think, disenchanted by the next one was like maybe VR, which worked. But we had to invent a use case for, I think, the average person, certainly we learned by the time of COVID, doesn't want to live in their house. They want to connect with other human beings. The the thing that I was most excited about, excited about up until maybe COVID and then I was distracted by the like collapsing clown world all around us would have been bio stuff. It was like all the CRISPR stuff, the genetic engineering, which is still exciting, but. I guess there's a very long way of answering your question, which is like the AI is just it.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  That's the, it's like it, that's what is, it's really, the reason that people are talking about it is because it's really important. It's, it is like very, very new. The advances that we're now able to play with and use are clearly very powerful and. You can imagine all sorts of, not even imagine, there are use cases coming out, right? The use case of just someone using it to draft an essay or an email, that's a use case that something like VR never had. VR was a video game, so that's a use case, it's fun, but that's not, we already have, there's, there's real utility that's that we're already seeing in AI. That's the reason that people are are. I think so excited about it. And then there's like, it has its own mythology.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  There's like, you have the AGI, artificial general intelligence, the people talking about that and what that looks like. What does it look like when a computer not only thinks, but wants things like we do? Is that possible?

• 43:41Speaker 03

  Is that endgame? A lot of people believe that's a doomsday. There are people who believe that's like God and that's like, you know, utopia at that point. That's the singularity. There's a negative singularity or a positive singularity. People break off in both directions, but at its most basic, it's just like, this is something that will change the way that all of us work. And there's no way to get around that. And so it sucked the air out of almost everything else in tech. In a different, I mean, with crypto, that happened, I think, because people were making so much money. And with, and there were lots of cool things about it always, and there still are. But the reason that there was so much excitement was because people were making money. With AI, that's not the case.

• 44:20Speaker 04

  How much of AI now is like, I'll call it the tech phase versus the like, interface phase? And I think we saw this with Bitcoin in the first, maybe 10 years or so of its life. And not until maybe 2020, 2021, did we really start to see it kind of start to hit mainstream adoption. And people say, hey, I'm going to go and I'm going to buy it. There was the financial use case of speculation was definitely a big piece of that. There was a hell of a lot of work that was done for 10 years, right? Kind of behind the scenes or quietly, you know, in the corners of Silicon Valley or wherever. AI right now feels like there's a lot of people trying a lot of different things. We've seen Y Combinator, like a very large portion of the companies that are going through now are AI companies.

• 45:01Speaker 04

  But have we seen like the really big breakout use case where people are like, oh, that's not a toy. That's not a tool like.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  I mean, you already have a use case in generating art. Like, what is the point of ever hiring an artist for a piece of work again? Like, what is the point of hiring assistants to draft your emails? What is the point of, I mean, if you want a comprehensive itinerary for your travel plan, like you just go and you use this thing. And those are things that we're using. We're like, we're using it directly with a chatbot. Like, there are companies that are building on top of this specifically to do things like this. There will be. Legal versions of this like coming imminently. You mentioned that people have been working on this stuff quietly for a lot of years. That's true. The reason that people weren't excited about it was because the people who were doing it were doing it quietly, working in these different labs or working at Google and whatnot. And they just released it, though.

• 45:49Speaker 03

  Once OpenAI, it was GPT-2, actually. This was a couple of years ago that that one came out. That was the first time that everyone looked around and they were like, whoa, this is really way more advanced than we thought it was. And then over the summer, when the art stuff came out, it was like, holy shit, we are definitely there. That was like a gunshot start to the race. You've seen every company in Silicon Valley or in tech, sort of every huge company come out and be like, oh, yeah, we've got an AI, too. And a lot of them do, or some of them do, some of them don't. The fact that they feel like they have to say that is maybe, you know, that's hype. But where I look, when you look abroad and you see all the Chinese companies doing it now as well, that feels much more desperate. Like, there's an understanding.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  The CCP understands that they cannot lose an AI arms race. It will completely dwarf their, it will completely dwarf them in terms of technology. And so for that reason alone, to answer your question on time horizons, like, I think it's all going to happen a lot more quickly than than you would have thought, given the last 10 years of relative silence. Because it's like, it wasn't just silence, like, it wasn't, nothing was happening. Things were happening. Now we see it, and now there's a lot of pressure to be the person who controls it. I mean, Google's come out, they're serious about it, like, there's OpenAI is dominating, like, what's going to happen in China? That's not going to go away. That's going to be, that's going to be the, that's going to be the next few years. That would be the whole story, I think.

• 47:16Speaker 04

  While all of you pull out your phones and subscribe to Pirate Wires, explain what Pirate Wires is.

• 47:22Speaker 03

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

• 47:50Speaker 04

  My favorite thing is when I see the, the subject line of the email come out, I'm like, oh, boy, let me sit down for this one.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  All right, all right. Ladies and gentlemen, Mike Solana. Thank you, guys.