Based Camp - The Changing Politics of the Tech Elite： With Mike Solana of Pirate Wires

00:00:00.160 Hello, everyone. We're excited to have with us today, Mike Solana, the founder and editing

00:00:05.600 something chief of Pirate Wires.

00:00:07.920 Okay, no, you first-

00:00:08.940 Hold on, that counts.

00:00:10.040 We won't do it. Close enough.

00:00:10.800 Ready? One, two, three. Hello, everyone. We're so excited to be today. Oh my gosh. Okay. Yeah.

00:00:16.420 Sorry. You win, Malcolm.

00:00:17.340 This is why we go with mine.

00:00:18.780 It's Friday.

00:00:19.940 Okay. Anyway, for people who don't know who Mike Solana is, he doesn't just have a podcast

00:00:25.540 that's very popular, but he is-

00:00:27.180 And a publication that's incredible.

00:00:28.560 Yes. You also sort of put together Hereticon, right?

00:00:32.280 It was my idea. Yeah. Founded it, created it. It's done out of Founders Fund, but yeah, it's

00:00:37.400 mine. All mine.

00:00:38.120 Yeah. So you've been a central figure in the coalition or sort of the consolidation of this

00:00:46.800 sort of new right or tech right political movement that right now is sort of blowing through the

00:00:53.540 country within the White House and a lot of what we're seeing.

00:00:56.500 And I wanted to talk with you as somebody who is totally integrated in like what's going on,

00:01:03.620 sort of the venture capital, Silicon Valley, tech worker scene, the vibe shift that you have seen

00:01:09.780 post-election cycle there, what's changing about how people are relating to things,

00:01:15.380 as well as the role that you played in this consolidation to write some history here as

00:01:23.360 the country changes, and also to discuss the political realignment we're seeing in the United

00:01:28.180 States.

00:01:28.580 Well, I think, first of all, in my own personal life, I kind of, I'm like very cagey about labels.

00:01:37.620 I have tried to just be honest about what I'm seeing. And so people tend to put me in a box based

00:01:43.500 on that. Maybe I belong in the box. I don't know, but I can talk about what I've seen. And in terms of

00:01:49.420 what's different right now, I think the best thing to contrast is not what's happening today versus

00:01:54.160 what was happening like four years ago with Biden, but just to just, we have this great

00:01:57.880 example of Trump's presidency and his inauguration. And you can just compare the first one to the

00:02:04.080 second one. He's had two first terms in a sense, really. Like he hasn't had a first and a second

00:02:09.440 term. These are two totally separate. I said not too long ago, it sort of feels like he played the

00:02:16.420 video game and, and, and lost. And he just started the exact same game over from the very beginning.

00:02:24.460 Now knowing where all of the bosses are, right. It's not like he's gotten to the second chapter.

00:02:29.440 He's just still in that first chapter, but he's doing it all over again. So we've never seen that.

00:02:33.320 None of us have seen that in any of our lives. So it's like a very kind of new thing. And within tech,

00:02:37.420 you can compare that first one to the second one. And it's obviously night and day. I mean,

00:02:41.280 the first one was there was one person in tech who was open about his support of Donald Trump.

00:02:46.620 It was Peter Thiel and he was completely alienated, run out of town for it. And has since been sort

00:02:51.780 of forgotten to us, to a large extent, because there were much louder people who came to Trump's

00:02:57.380 defense and support this second time around who've, I think occupied a lot of the discourse

00:03:03.300 surrounding that in tech. And I don't want to like, obviously I feel some kind of way about that

00:03:09.760 having been on the front lines of it, obviously not like Peter, but I mean, I work for Peter.

00:03:13.900 I've known Peter forever. So I have feelings about the way he was treated, but the difference is just

00:03:19.500 obviously today, Trump supporters have status in Silicon Valley. And in fact, being a right-wing

00:03:27.840 person almost grants a certain amount of status, I would say at the higher levels. So I think it's

00:03:34.520 really unclear what's happening among the rank and file. We haven't seen another round of fundraising

00:03:39.900 data. The last time that we looked, tech was still overwhelmingly voting, funding Democrats,

00:03:45.840 venture capital was still overwhelmingly funding Democrats, but all the people openly talking about

00:03:50.520 it are, it's just like overwhelmingly Trumpian. And then everybody else is, I think, either

00:03:56.680 conflicted because the Biden term was so disastrous or quiet. And I suspect it was conflicted.

00:04:04.520 Rather than quiet. I think people actually just didn't know how they felt.

00:04:08.020 So I want to pull apart the two things you said here to focus on each individually,

00:04:11.740 because I think they're really, really interesting. The first thing that you noted,

00:04:14.880 I think is so true. It's like that game, the movie was, I want to say the Scientologist guy,

00:04:20.800 where every time he dies, he plays the same day.

00:04:22.840 Edge of Tomorrow.

00:04:24.040 What was it called again?

00:04:25.160 Edge of Tomorrow.

00:04:26.080 Edge of Tomorrow. Yes. Trump's Edge of Tomorrow-ing it right now. But the thing that's weird about this,

00:04:31.140 and the part of this I want to focus on is, why is the left doing everything exactly the same?

00:04:38.460 Like, why are they being so predictable? Why is it the exact same playthrough?

00:04:44.580 I think that they have no idea what they are right now. They've lost so many things. It's not

00:04:53.340 just an election, right? They've lost the culture. They've lost the youth. They have lost their sense of

00:04:59.140 political identity, because Trump is not a regular Republican. Trump, they tried really,

00:05:03.300 really, really hard to make the kind of like, oh, he's a rich guy who wants to just help rich people

00:05:07.000 things stick. But even if you could, maybe that is secretly true. His policies are populist policies.

00:05:14.100 They are economically populist policies. There's a reason that Tucker Carlson was aligned with him

00:05:18.540 and is talking about things like banning self-driving cars to protect the jobs of drivers.

00:05:23.440 That's like a Democrat idea. And so I don't think it's like, if you've taken away the economic

00:05:28.980 populism, or at least provided a competitive economic populist platform, what are you left

00:05:36.340 with to differentiate yourself? And what they were left with in the last election, and even now today,

00:05:40.760 is like, maybe we should trans the children. Maybe that's okay, right? And that's, I don't think

00:05:45.580 they even believe that. They're just, that's something they were just forced to say by the party elites

00:05:50.200 to sort of be in the party, but that's all they have now. It's like those really deranged

00:05:54.820 far left social issues, because also the right over the last 20 years has moderated a lot on social

00:06:00.580 stuff. I think there's a lot of transformation happening on the right on the social stuff and

00:06:06.680 conflict on the right now, but that's, that's like coming. That's not currently where we are.

00:06:11.540 Like the terrain right now is the major, the dominant figure in right-wing politics, Republican

00:06:18.780 politics, but I don't think it's really that, is Donald Trump. And he is an economic populist who

00:06:23.900 does not give a shit about gay people marrying. He just does not care. I also don't think the thing

00:06:28.180 that's really hard to make stick is the abortion stuff, because yeah, he has been like, oh yeah,

00:06:33.520 like I'm against Roe v. Wade, but no one believes that that man hasn't paid for an abortion. Like he's

00:06:39.140 not a Christian right kind of guy. And, and he also is strongly said, you know, I'll knock out the,

00:06:45.940 any kind of federal ban for, or whatnot. He's like state's rights only it's a bad case, but

00:06:50.840 he just isn't that kind of, he's not that kind of right-wing socially, extremely far right-wing

00:06:57.760 kind of guy. It's just more complicated. So they don't know what to be. And I think there's

00:07:00.540 I've noticed two big differences in this particular playthrough. One sort of highlights the point that

00:07:06.220 you're making here. And Trump has even said this verbally. He's like, I'm pushing this issue

00:07:10.640 because it's a nine 90, 10 issue. This was specifically when he was talking about trans

00:07:14.860 people in sports. And, and I think the administration right now is looking to only

00:07:20.240 battle 90, 10 issues at the beginning because Democrats culturally have a compulsion to double

00:07:27.220 down on whatever he is opposing. So, well, because it's also always worked. They've always been able to

00:07:33.360 just scream until they got what they wanted. And they've, they've, the country has changed a lot

00:07:40.080 because of it. And the other overwhelming sort of like, let's say 80, 20 issue at least that Trump

00:07:46.100 first won on. And I think one on again is immigration. And they don't know what the fuck to

00:07:51.860 do about that because they presided over an open border for four years and have people in their party

00:07:55.980 who have now normalized that to the point that they can't go backwards. That's the thing about the

00:07:59.980 left man is like, they can never go backwards. They can never pivot. They can never change their

00:08:04.760 mind. Trump doesn't care about changing his mind. And he's also not a Republican. He doesn't care

00:08:08.740 about Republican baggage. He's just this guy who's doing what he thinks is the right thing to do. And

00:08:13.800 so it comes off like common sense rather than ideological. Yes. Well, so the second thing that he's

00:08:18.280 doing differently this time, and I want to hear your thoughts on this, because this is like a huge

00:08:21.200 difference. It's like when you're choosing to run for president and you're like picking a character,

00:08:25.160 like your character is your VP in many ways, in terms of like how you're colored.

00:08:29.200 And the VP he picked sort of demonstrated a completely different alignment. I mean,

00:08:35.220 Mike Pence versus J.D. Vance, it was really like the GOP Inc. versus the new right or the tech right.

00:08:43.480 Well, I wouldn't even say it's the tech. I think, I mean, the tech right thing is something that's put

00:08:47.840 on. That's like a Steve Bannon likes to, I think because there's a tension between Steve Bannon and

00:08:53.860 the tech right with J.D. Vance. I think it's complicated because he's come out like in favor of Lena

00:08:58.040 Khan and people like this who want to regulate the hell out of the industry. But I agree, you're right

00:09:02.960 that the difference between VP pick is really important. And the first one is I need, it was

00:09:07.660 Trump, like I want approval from the elite. And I don't know why he wanted that, but you could tell

00:09:12.920 that he really did. And so he picked an establishment guy and he wanted establishment

00:09:17.000 approval in the press. This new term is like J.D. Vance is an anti-establishment guy and he blew up the

00:09:22.700 press. He blew up the press room. He's now got like Mike Cernovich in there asking questions

00:09:26.560 alongside the New York Times. It's like he, he, Trump knows that he will never have establishment

00:09:31.520 approval. And so that actually was a huge mistake on the side of the establishment. They should have

00:09:36.320 brought him in instead of trying to ice him out because now he doesn't have anything to gain from

00:09:41.320 working with them. He has a lot to gain from destroying them. And that's what he set out to do.

00:09:46.440 He's completely surrounded now. And it's this weird phenomenon with people who hated him in the

00:09:50.700 first election cycle. I mean, J.D. Vance, Elon, RFK, you know, it seems like his entire administration

00:09:56.840 is just former adamant opponents. I don't know that J.D. Vance was ever an adamant. I think it's

00:10:04.780 like he has some comments that he's made and whatever, but he wasn't like, I thought he led

00:10:08.520 like the never Trump movement practically. Yeah. Cause he wrote Hillbilly Elegy and then he did

00:10:14.880 this like apology tour for everyone who voted for Trump. Just for clarification here. So I don't

00:10:20.520 look uninformed. Here are some quotes from J.D. Vance about Trump in his early days. He called

00:10:26.040 Trump America's Hitler. He called him an idiot. He called him reprehensible. He called him cultural

00:10:31.340 heroine. He called him unfit for office. Okay. So I don't know anything about that. I know that he,

00:10:36.560 the Hillbilly, I know that he's defended Trump supporters and things like this. I don't know if

00:10:40.260 how committed he was to like the sort of never Trumper cause in the beginning. It's definitely true

00:10:45.040 that the others were against it. But even Elon, I feel it's like, you have to think back to that

00:10:50.580 period of time. And I give people all sorts of grace because at that period of time, we were living

00:10:56.340 in like a one party state, which became very apparent the moment that Trump entered office

00:11:00.560 and the whole entire deep state apparatus rose up to prevent him from doing anything and then tried

00:11:07.020 to put him in jail for the following four years. And I think that was really the radicalizing moment for

00:11:10.560 most reasonable people. It was like, you maybe didn't support him in 2016. You maybe didn't vote

00:11:14.480 for him in 2020, but what happened after 2020 was really scary. That was like the, the coordinated

00:11:19.740 tech thing to de-platform him. Then the government went after him, started putting his allies in

00:11:23.840 prison, put him, tried to put him in prison. I think that he would be certainly in prison at this

00:11:28.220 point or on the path to it if he didn't win. And that's really scary. And so it's like everything

00:11:32.040 the left is saying about him. I've not seen that from him, but I have seen it from them. And the sort of

00:11:38.740 jig is up in that respect. Like you can't really hide the fact that you tried to put the front

00:11:43.160 runner presidential candidate in jail, like in the middle of an election. So you're going to

00:11:47.920 hypothesize where the left goes in response to this? Well, I think they have two choices. I think

00:11:53.300 the first choice, no one wants to hear this, but I think that Gavin Newsom starting his new podcast is

00:11:59.820 really interesting. He is a total sociopathic political creature. He's like a classically presenting

00:12:05.120 sociopathic politician in the late 20th century model. Yeah. Yeah. He's like a Bill Clinton kind

00:12:12.160 of person. It's exactly what's coming to my head is Bill Clinton or Hillary Clinton. Well, he feels

00:12:15.900 more like a mayor out of Gotham City. I'm just a poor schmoe got lucky. I wish I could hand out world

00:12:24.360 peace and unconditional love. Intimidate me. Bully me if it makes you feel big. I mean, it's not like you

00:12:33.740 can just kill me. Actually, it's a lot like that. Like to me, I grew up in San Francisco,

00:12:41.980 like right next to it. I grew up like sort of around like just steeped in his, his lore. It

00:12:47.600 just feels comic book-ish. Yeah. I think though that he's really smart and really underestimated.

00:12:53.760 And the fact that he's now speaking to like Steve Bannon on the second issue of his episode of his

00:12:57.740 podcast is really fascinating to me because what I saw while I was watching the clips of that was

00:13:02.560 he had clearly never, ever in his life had strong pushback on any of his ideas, even on the issue of

00:13:10.080 was the election stolen? That's not something that he's, whether, regardless of what you think about

00:13:14.640 that question, that's not a question that, that, that he has, that Newsom has ever had to answer

00:13:20.520 before. He's never had to beat back against the argument that it was stolen. And so to have him there

00:13:25.180 laughing it off and pivoting in a smart way, he's also learning. The fact that he's even talking to

00:13:29.700 Steve Bannon is means that he's learning from the culture. He's, his son is obviously red pilled and

00:13:34.140 he's like, holy shit, why is the youth Republican all of a sudden? And so he's trying to talk to these

00:13:38.500 people. He's going to learn or whatever. He'll still be a sociopath. He'll probably be a centrist and

00:13:43.160 he'll have some better signaling. Or what I think is much scarier and maybe more likely is the like Hassan

00:13:51.380 pikers of the world. The pro like the Luigi Mangione left, the populist radical yay murder

00:13:58.780 left, the pro Hamas left. Like, and I think the Hamas thing is less important as the reaction to

00:14:04.060 Luigi Mangione has really frightened me because it's so earnest and so deep. And it also crosses into the

00:14:11.240 world of Trump supporters. Anytime a left-wing policy, you start seeing Trump supporters talk

00:14:15.480 about it is like, oh, that's a real policy. That's like a Bernie Sanders, Trump overlap kind of thing.

00:14:20.720 And I think that rather than put up that little, I forget his name. He's the ex-Parkland kid who

00:14:25.900 became a leftist activist and had the pillow company briefly. And now he's like a DNC chairperson.

00:14:31.740 Yes. We know of him. We don't know his name.

00:14:33.560 So that little dweeb rather than him, if they put Hassan Piker up there, who has a lot of energy,

00:14:38.440 is good looking, is very, I wouldn't say he's masculine, but he peacocks masculinity.

00:14:43.400 And he has a lot of young male supporters and he's a total monster, like an actual earnest,

00:14:48.860 like the kind of guy who would have put all of us in prison, had all of us killed in a communist

00:14:53.080 revolution, like they might win. So those are the two paths. I think the energy is actually on

00:14:58.900 some form of the populist left side and we'll see what happens.

00:15:03.220 That's really interesting. Okay. So I'm just sort of thinking through this in my head. If they go

00:15:07.220 the Hamas Piker path, I actually think that that would lose their support from the mainstream

00:15:13.900 institutions in the same way, like when Trump ran the first time and the Republicans had to sort of

00:15:18.840 like re-coordinate because, you know, he's, he's, he's supported like the kill. He said,

00:15:23.260 babies are legitimate military targets.

00:15:26.120 Sure. But what have, what is the left not normalized? Give me like a crazy left-wing policy

00:15:31.000 that they have not normalized. I mean, open borders now is a normal policy. The transing of youth

00:15:36.640 women, let's say biological women competing against biological men in youth sports. Like

00:15:41.720 these are all things that 10 years ago, we would have been like, Oh, that's crazy. Free speech is no

00:15:45.880 longer. It's like, we must do government censorship, right? Like that's a mainstream Democrat position.

00:15:51.720 I, I do not trust that there's anything that they won't actually normalize. And so I think

00:15:58.220 you might be right. That is really scary. A world where that becomes normal.

00:16:02.040 I feel like your average American though, if you get out of especially coastal cities is not cool

00:16:08.660 with that stuff. And I think that whether or not we see a radical left versus a reasonable and

00:16:14.540 corrected, like market corrected left depends on trust in institutions. I think that the reason why

00:16:19.560 Luigi Mangione is seen as a saint is because there is this fundamental sentiment that there is no law.

00:16:28.080 There is no order. There is no justice. If you are not wealthy, if someone steals from you, if someone

00:16:33.460 attacks you, if crimes are committed against you, well, sorry, nothing's going to be done. And I think if

00:16:40.380 the Trump administration manages to restore some sense of faith in institutions, like, Oh, now we

00:16:47.380 actually, um, persecute people for breaking the law, that would be kind of huge. So it I'm really watching

00:16:56.420 closely to see what happens with the fact that he's doing the things that he said on like

00:17:01.980 immigration, for example, he really didn't in the first term. And in the second term, it seems like

00:17:08.400 it's all he cares about. And well, he cares about, he's doing a lot actually, but this is something that

00:17:13.120 he promised that he seems to be taking seriously, even deporting Mahmoud. What's his face? The Columbia

00:17:19.000 guy. Yeah. Yeah. Who married and has done nothing but organized protests that are anti USA been here

00:17:26.740 for four years. He's only participated in anti-American protesting. It's like he's being

00:17:33.220 deported. And that's a difficult move for Trump for a variety of reasons. Cause I think there's

00:17:37.500 actually, once someone gets a green card, due process enters this it's, it should be harder to

00:17:42.540 kick them out rather than if they were just here on a visa. It seems like he's just doing it. You know,

00:17:46.720 the optics there are not great for him and he doesn't give a shit. He's like, this is the kind

00:17:51.340 of stuff that I talked about. If you hate the country, you're going back to where you came from.

00:17:55.500 If you don't belong here, you're going back to where you came from. And these are things that,

00:17:59.440 you know, people have a harder time talking about online, including friends of mine who are on like

00:18:05.640 the more centrist people, more thoughtful libertarian type people. But when you just talk to anybody who's

00:18:10.700 regular, they're like, Oh yeah, why would we want that person here? Obviously back to Syria or wherever the

00:18:15.920 fuck you came from. It sounds like he likes it better. Why would we don't want him? Why do we

00:18:19.960 want him? Yeah. That seems like active enemy propaganda, like in, in our school system.

00:18:25.540 Yeah. I think actually just maybe today you tweet something like your, your, your minimum requirement

00:18:29.880 for citizenship should be that you want to be an American. You like it. There's something along

00:18:34.900 those lines. You should love us and want to be us. Like you should want to become what you see here.

00:18:40.520 It should not be like, Oh, that would be a great country. If only I could change it and make it like

00:18:44.820 a little more Islamic. No, we're not doing that. That's what we're doing here. Yeah.

00:18:50.140 Go back to where you came from. So would you like to see Sharia law in Canada replace Canadian law?

00:18:55.120 At some point it will, you know, because we are, we are, we have families. We are making babies.

00:18:59.180 You're not, your population is going down the slump, right? One day we can have a Muslim majority

00:19:04.700 nation here in Canada, right in your face. All of these people who point out that you have these big

00:19:09.740 protests going on in California, where people are protesting, being sent back to Mexico with Mexican flags.

00:19:14.700 Right. It's like, what? Why, why are you mad?

00:19:18.440 I mean, there's a broader thing here too with like, I feel that way about Israel and Palestine too. It's

00:19:23.140 like my problem with it is I don't want to see either of your flags in my streets. Like I, it's an

00:19:29.040 American flag or no flag is kind of how I feel about it. I just don't care about either one of these

00:19:34.660 flags. You're perfectly nice people. I'm sure definitely what happened on October 7th was disgusting.

00:19:39.460 Like definitely it happens a lot. Terrorism is bad. All true. I don't want your like multi-thousand

00:19:46.420 year old blood feud being litigated in the streets of New York city. It's like, I just don't want to

00:19:52.040 see that. And this is the problem with immigration. And this is, I think the reaction of the average

00:19:56.800 American who is looking at this, like, why the fuck are we even talking about this? This has nothing

00:20:01.580 to do with us. I don't want to have to think about this. I don't care. And Trump is just,

00:20:06.160 he has like an instinct for that. And he just talks to the people who no one else talks to,

00:20:12.200 which is most people, by the way, that's like, yes. Well, I mean, it's, it's not just him

00:20:17.240 mentioning 90, 10 issues. I'm hearing it more and more, even on issues when he doesn't plan to

00:20:22.500 support them. Like with daylight savings, when he was asked, will you finally get rid of daylight

00:20:27.780 savings? He said, well, this is more like a 50, 50 issue. I'm not going to touch it. No matter what I

00:20:32.900 do, someone's going to get mad. He really, it's so refreshing to hear a president look at what the

00:20:40.040 majority of reasonable people want and try to get that because it seems like we haven't done that

00:20:44.640 for a really long time. It's not ideological at all. That is the thing that people get so wrong

00:20:49.560 about him is he's actually, I think the most pragmatic president we've had. You see this on

00:20:55.580 issues of things like trade where, and also things like, I mean, any policy position he has,

00:21:00.560 it's never, it's never about what should the world look like? It's always about like, well,

00:21:05.520 what is the landscape and how do I get the best deal possible based on what people all seem to want?

00:21:11.900 He's all about making deals with people. He loves striking deals between people who don't want the

00:21:16.800 same things. He loves brokering those kinds of deals. And that's just unlike, we've never seen

00:21:21.500 anything like that for better or worse. It's just a new thing. And I find the honesty of that

00:21:28.660 refreshing. So I want to transition from this into the second part of the very first thing you said,

00:21:34.120 which I thought was just really interesting is the conversations that are happening on the ground.

00:21:38.520 The nature of them is really changing. And you mentioned it a little bit here in terms of like

00:21:42.140 what people are saying. I know from my experience, I got this email chain from Stanford MBA and it was

00:21:47.940 from my class and it was all of them were like panicking, like panicking, panicking. I was like the one

00:21:52.380 person who was starting to just went on it and started magging. And I probably really burned my

00:21:58.140 chance of ever getting a job through that network just by being like, Hey, if you ever want to talk

00:22:01.800 to somebody with the opposite perspective, they don't newsflash or narrator narrator's voice.

00:22:07.420 They did not, but the, the, the, at the same time, you know, we have people on our show all the time

00:22:14.680 who have nothing to do with politics. Like I'll invite somebody on. Cause he runs like a statistics

00:22:19.680 channel on fertility rates in like Eastern Europe or something or a religious thinker. And like

00:22:25.840 the, before the recordings turn on, it's always like, Oh my God, like, I'm so glad, like, I wish

00:22:30.740 I could move to America or I'm so jealous for what you guys are getting to go through right now.

00:22:34.040 Or like, is, is how is this, is it like filtering down from the top within Silicon Valley? Like in

00:22:43.680 the intellectual class of Silicon Valley, cause we're really connected to them. I'd call it like the

00:22:47.060 EAO sphere, like the former effective altruist community, like the top intellectuals who we have

00:22:52.180 connections with are like, they're, they're, they're moving more centrists on this sort of stuff when

00:22:57.300 previously they would have been hyper reactionary against it. But I feel like the rank and file

00:23:01.100 still think they're supposed to hate Trump. Like that's sort of what I'm seeing.

00:23:04.940 That's the culture of, there's this thing that is like the aesthetic of thoughtfulness

00:23:13.120 and they feel you have your centrist people, you're like Yimby type people, any kind of wonkish

00:23:20.660 policy person, your former EA type people, your rationalists, they care more about projecting

00:23:27.040 a sense of their own personal thoughtfulness than they do about securing high level goals.

00:23:33.540 I truly believe this for the country, like just positive, let's say growth borders, law and order,

00:23:39.640 things like that. They don't care about that as much as, as how they come off to their friends

00:23:43.480 and things like that, which is a weird thing to say, cause they're rationalists and they're not

00:23:46.400 supposed to care about that. But that is truly my read of most of them, even the ones that I like

00:23:49.860 and friendly or whatever. I think that that's what's happening. And there's nothing about Trump,

00:23:56.180 the aesthetics of Trump, there's nothing reasonable about them. He comes off way crazier than he

00:24:01.160 actually is. So the way that he just like, even on tariffs or something where it's an issue that you

00:24:05.500 could actually get behind the idea of reciprocity and trade, he just every day is announcing something

00:24:11.460 new. And so if you're like, your aesthetic is thoughtfulness that, well, that's not thoughtful.

00:24:15.640 He didn't think it through. He's changing his mind. He changed his mind five times. What does

00:24:18.640 he really believe? And I look at that and I have to do the math and I've now known him for not

00:24:23.620 personally, but I've watched him for however, 10 years almost. And it's like, oh, he's creating

00:24:30.960 leverage out of nothing in advance of some kind of trade negotiation or deal negotiation that I

00:24:35.500 don't even know anything about right now. The other day I saw him throw Google under the bus for

00:24:40.080 something. And I was just thought to myself, like, man, I wonder what he wants from them. Like,

00:24:43.160 maybe that's what's happening, right? Like, like, I don't know what's going on over there,

00:24:46.880 but probably something is going on there. And so that's how I approach Trump is just the principle

00:24:51.800 of charity. I, I just assume that he's not deciding, oh, I would really like to tank the economy

00:24:58.240 today by doing something crazy. I would like to just tank the stock market or whatever.

00:25:02.220 My assumption is there's a plan and I just don't know what it is and we can judge him for it in,

00:25:06.980 you know, six months or whatever. And it's like, we can change the whoever's in charge now.

00:25:11.020 Anyway, I was talking to New York times reporter today and she was like, well, what do you think

00:25:15.260 of like what he's done to the economy? I'm like, he didn't like plan to take the economy. If he,

00:25:19.820 even if he did, he meant for it to be short term. Like his goal is to make the American worker feel

00:25:25.280 more secure. Like, well, and also just to shore up manufacturing security. And that is a goal.

00:25:32.720 It's like, we just fucking forgot that that's an important goal. COVID happened and proved that

00:25:37.740 that's an important goal. It proved that it's not just a thing that you should care about.

00:25:41.900 If you are this plebe who is saying, oh, I wish that I could afford a home. And you're this,

00:25:48.280 a rich person is like, you idiot. That'll never happen again. That's not what we do here anymore.

00:25:52.640 We don't give you like great middle-class jobs. It's no longer just an issue for those people.

00:25:57.840 It's an issue for all of us. When you have a country like China controlling so much of the

00:26:01.020 manufacturing, and then they're also manufacturing viruses that they're then releasing. And then

00:26:05.260 they're hoarding things like PPE. And that is something that was not nearly as bad as it could

00:26:10.060 have been. But I think that the takeaway from that has to be, oh, wow, that could have been easily

00:26:15.360 so much worse. It could have been a little more lethal and that would have been way more devastating.

00:26:20.480 And we were way not prepared for it. And so I think about it in those terms, that completely 20,

00:26:26.540 how could 2020 not have changed your mind completely about things like domestic manufacturing? And Trump

00:26:33.200 really cares about it. And we'll see what happens. Interesting. So there was something you said there

00:26:39.280 that aligns was one of our recent theories that I thought you might find interesting to pull on. So

00:26:43.580 we were looking at why American conservatism, like Americana conservatism,

00:26:47.640 is the only group really other than Jews who stay above repopulation rate fertility-wise when they

00:26:53.920 get wealthy. And what we pointed to was the truck nut fertility thesis, which is to say within Americana

00:26:59.660 culture, there is this idea that if some sort of culturally dominant force or respectable force

00:27:06.540 wants to force something on you, your reaction to that should be reflexively reactionary. Like,

00:27:13.060 put truck nuts on something because it's not respectable. Yeah. Put the little naked girl on

00:27:18.080 the thing, the Hooters chicks, you know, like be offensive in your existence. And that this was Trump

00:27:27.460 authenticated him in a large part of America's mind rather than undermining his credibility.

00:27:34.640 And there is with these individuals who live their lives just to signal, I'm a good person,

00:27:41.020 an incapability of recognizing this. I think that's true. I think that the way he talks,

00:27:48.140 even just the cadence and the strangeness of his vernacular is all signaling

00:27:54.100 a segment of the population that is considered not elite to elitists. And when people like my parents

00:28:04.020 heard it, all they really registered was like, oh, this guy hates all the same people who I hate.

00:28:10.400 I, they don't care that he was rich. They don't care about his dumb real estate deals in New York

00:28:16.200 City, which by the way, like, does anybody think that there's no corruption in real estate in New

00:28:19.740 York City? Like the only way to do real estate in New York City, like they don't give a shit.

00:28:24.360 They're just like, he's going to throw a grenade at the machine, which I can't stand. And if he doesn't

00:28:30.100 do that, we're going to have a problem. And then he didn't do it enough. And there was a problem

00:28:33.160 in the election is my read of the 2020 election. It was like, he didn't do enough of the shit that

00:28:38.000 he was going to say. But I think, yeah, the way that he speaks, the offensiveness, everyone thinks

00:28:43.020 that's fun. The supporters think that's funny. And, and they register it as, oh, he cares just as

00:28:49.860 little about, he has just as little respect for this system of morality, the elitist morality,

00:28:57.400 as I do. You know, these people are people who grew up saying before white privilege was a phrase,

00:29:03.700 it was in the early nineties, you still had politically correct language. And there was

00:29:07.140 this idea of like, why the average, like working middle-class white person is like, what, what do

00:29:14.480 black people, what do I have that black people don't have? Like, no one has ever given me anything.

00:29:20.160 Why do I have to have this like reverence for this idea that the black person is persecuted

00:29:26.060 or something in 1992? They don't believe, they just never believed that because their lives

00:29:30.600 weren't that good. And they were really hard and the government wasn't giving them anything.

00:29:34.480 And so to disres, to show disrespect for that system that never in their minds gave them anything

00:29:40.320 is absolutely a part of his credibility. They're like, oh, he gets it. That's a guy who doesn't,

00:29:46.020 he hates the same stuff that I hate.

00:29:47.100 I think what's really fascinating is that it, I think that that also gave him credibility with

00:29:52.140 like the tech bros, I guess I'd call them. Like the Silicon Valley VC crowd has always had an

00:29:56.560 intentionally contrarian streak to it, but it's almost like, like for me, for example, I wasn't

00:30:02.240 pro-Trump his first election cycle. I, and, and I see it now as like maybe internal cowardice or

00:30:07.280 something like that, but it took me a while to recognize the contrarianism in what he was doing.

00:30:13.200 And that that aligned with the value system that I was, you know, purported to have.

00:30:19.240 I don't agree. I think that it was more a matter of for, for the people who are maybe more famously

00:30:25.600 pro-Trump, like David Sachs and Mark Andreessen, that's probably true. But for the rank and file,

00:30:30.740 like all of the, like the Mark Zuckerberg and the Google people calling up Trump and everybody was

00:30:36.340 donating to his inauguration parties and stuff that was much more about tech had tried for years to

00:30:45.400 be a part of the elite and succeeded to a certain extent when he was censored while Trump was in

00:30:51.040 office, they succeeded. Like they, they, there was a huge, it wasn't just remember the tech platforms

00:30:56.520 or the speech platforms. It was like every tech company cut Trump off and were lockstep with the

00:31:02.800 Democrat elites who were in power. It was a very scary moment in American history. I would say.

00:31:07.340 Oh yeah. That was like straight up. Like we were teetering on the brink of real authoritarianism at

00:31:11.160 that point. And, and I would say that most tech people were aligned. And then what happened was

00:31:16.680 four years in which it became absolutely certain that the Democrats were going to do everything in

00:31:20.620 their power to dismantle that power. They were, they were, they were never going to be aligned with

00:31:24.120 tech power. It didn't matter how much the tech elites peacocked the same values and pretended they

00:31:29.820 cared about the same things. Like they were just not going to work because the Democrats do not

00:31:34.780 want competition in power and tech was becoming too powerful. It was powerful enough, for example,

00:31:39.380 to silence a president. The Democrats saw that and they were just as nervous as the Republicans.

00:31:42.760 They were like, Oh my God, if you can silence the president, who is actually the powerful person

00:31:48.360 here? It's not the democratic party even all of a sudden. And so there was suddenly, they were out of

00:31:52.920 alignment and the backlash against the Democrats was, I think, totally expected just in terms of like

00:31:58.640 a read of the, the, the, the power structure. You think, you think the Democrats started,

00:32:04.100 cause I, I personally didn't see any of the Democrats really targeting tech institutions

00:32:08.100 leading up to the election. I, I remember them being really happy when they're banning stuff

00:32:12.220 other than Elon. This last, this, which election are we talking about? This last, like, like

00:32:16.240 Zuckerberg didn't really, you know, they were fine with him. They, you have antitrust legislation

00:32:22.440 targeting like every major tech company in the Valley. You have a global trade war targeting tech

00:32:28.640 Europe that our administration not only did nothing about, but abetted by sharing information

00:32:33.140 with the Europeans. They talked about, they were constantly dragging tech people before Congress

00:32:38.240 to yell at them and talk about whatever the issue was. They were talking about new taxation stuff.

00:32:42.940 They were talking about, you had people like Elizabeth Warren, who talked about, I don't want

00:32:47.120 to get that wrong. So I don't want to say who it was, but there was a conversation about going

00:32:51.540 after unrealized gains that is very popular on the left wing. That would kill the entire

00:32:57.960 concept of startups. That's how we know about them, which is like granting equity to people

00:33:01.920 who don't have money to pay the taxes on something like that. Because the, the, the gains have not

00:33:06.340 been realized, which is like a basic economic concept, but they don't, the Democrats don't

00:33:10.640 care because there is an, there is a huge part of that party. Many centrist Democrats would,

00:33:15.720 of course, would care. And in fact, there were many Democrats in Silicon Valley who absolutely

00:33:19.420 cared and talked about it, but the Democrats have in their party, a group of people who do not

00:33:24.200 believe in like industry as a concept. This is like, they're very socialist and it's not a small

00:33:29.360 number of people. And so I think at that point when they were in power and all of this happened,

00:33:34.360 it was like, wow, if we want to keep on existing, we cannot work with these people here. Maybe they

00:33:40.100 will, that, that party will crash and burn. And the new version of the democratic party, we will be

00:33:44.900 able to work with. And that's, I think what someone like Gavin Newsom is trying to demonstrate

00:33:48.800 even in his rhetoric, he's trying to demonstrate that. But what we currently saw, the Biden thing,

00:33:53.780 whatever, whatever was in charge while Biden was technically the president, that thing,

00:33:59.840 the tech industry just, it was straight up pragmatic. It was like, we will die if this is in

00:34:04.500 charge. So. So no, and I, I, I think you might be right about it. It's very different from my

00:34:11.500 intuition of what was leading the tech community, which was, if I look at like the words of the tech

00:34:16.060 people like Mark Zuckerberg, it was the government forcing him to censor stuff in weird ways. So I

00:34:22.420 think the censorship, my read was censorship, handling of COVID and the trans stuff is actually

00:34:28.600 what turned the tech intellectuals away. But you see it as more just like pragmatic economic

00:34:33.540 orientation.

00:34:34.140 Well, it depends on who you're talking. If you're talking about, like, again, the Mark

00:34:39.400 Andreessen's and the David Sachs's of the world, I think those are always thoughtful people who kind

00:34:42.480 of disagreed with that stuff. And their opinions are not that different now than they were,

00:34:46.840 I think, a while ago. If you're talking about corporate leadership, you know, the C-suites of all

00:34:51.760 these companies, I think it was just straight up economics. And for Mark specifically, I think

00:34:56.100 there was probably, there is something earnest to the evolution there. For someone like Jack Dorsey,

00:35:00.020 who I've covered really closely, I absolutely believe there was an earnest intellectual,

00:35:04.640 like philosophical development there. I think that he saw what happened during the Hunter stuff,

00:35:09.520 not even from the administration, but from his own team, from himself, from what he had built

00:35:13.920 as really antithetical to all of his like crypto libertarian values, which he has talked about

00:35:19.720 forever. I think he was horrified by what he had become. And I think he gave it, he worked to put

00:35:24.620 Elon in power to end that whole entire machine. I love Jack. I defend him all the time. People always

00:35:29.780 get mad at me. But I think that he is one of the most earnest, that's like the most,

00:35:34.320 the most earnest evolution on the issue of the safety stuff. He would maybe even argue he never

00:35:38.780 evolved. I don't know, but he certainly, his company certainly had become something

00:35:43.460 really terrifying on the censorship stuff. He ran Blue Sky for a bit too, right? Like he was on their

00:35:50.040 board. Yeah, that came from Twitter. He was on the board. Blue Sky was a protocol developed by

00:35:56.760 Twitter. That's why they don't like own it now. It's not a part of the company. But then he was

00:36:01.600 on the board and then he left because he was like, well, this just became the exact same thing that

00:36:05.040 Twitter was. What are your thoughts on, because we're talking about like how it almost became

00:36:10.980 fascist in the US with the alignment of censorship and government. And yet I look at what's happening

00:36:16.280 in Europe and the shutting down of election cycles, the extreme censorship. Do you just think

00:36:20.720 Europe is cooked or like? Yeah, I mean, this is a good example of, we were saying, oh, well,

00:36:27.600 not everyone in the country, like most people in the country aren't going to stand for these crazy

00:36:30.660 ideas. That can be true, as it is true in Europe, that most people in Europe believe that you should

00:36:36.840 want to become European. You should want to be, if you're German, you're coming to Germany, you should

00:36:40.180 want to become German. You should want to learn German. You should want to integrate with the German

00:36:45.780 population and ultimately be a part of the German nation. You can all believe that and still have

00:36:51.700 people in charge of your country who are doing things in the opposite direction because they've

00:36:56.520 just, they've really seized power and the democracy doesn't matter at that point. So the only thing I

00:37:01.440 think that is going to stop what's happening in Europe is some kind of, I mean, it would have to be

00:37:09.180 a major change in the political structure even. Like an end to the EU? I don't think that's enough.

00:37:15.260 I think it's got to be like on an individual level, like, cause you could, you'd have change

00:37:18.720 in a country like France, political change in a country like France that they would just leave

00:37:22.380 the EU. I think the EU doesn't matter as much as France leaving the EU matters. But I think,

00:37:28.660 right. I feel like it's over for you. I don't think that they have, I don't think they're going

00:37:34.460 to do it. There's no mass deportation coming out of Europe. And just on the demographic,

00:37:38.640 the demographic question alone, they're 20 years from now is going to be such a different

00:37:44.620 world. You're absolutely right. I mean, one thing I point out is, is 25%, what's actually

00:37:49.240 24% of German's population is either immigrated or the descendant of immigrants after the 1950s.

00:37:55.960 Well, that's close to a third of Canada's population is from a different country,

00:37:59.880 not even descendants. Like, like. Immediately? Wow.

00:38:03.220 Immediately. It is, it's like, it's 20 something percent. I'd have to Google it really quick.

00:38:06.680 But, but it is, it's extremely high number. That's like a lot of people in your country

00:38:11.120 who are not from your country. And you may or may not want to be a part of your country.

00:38:15.220 One day we can have a Muslim majority nation here in Canada, right in your face.

00:38:19.700 Of Canada. There's been one like gambit that I don't understand why Trump hasn't polled. And

00:38:24.160 it's like really surprising me actually. Why not just like go to Alberta, go to, there's one other

00:38:29.660 province that would probably flip. And provinces can secede from Canada just by a popular vote.

00:38:35.340 Why not just say, Hey, you want to join the U S? I don't think they have those numbers yet. I

00:38:43.240 think that's like the most likely province, but they're not quite there. And I go back and forth

00:38:46.740 on whether or not Trump even actually wants Canada to become a state. I think he'd love it. It'd be

00:38:52.520 fine. He'd be open to it. But I think the reason he's talking about Canadian statehood is just to

00:38:57.320 demoralize Justin Trudeau. I think what he really wanted was to get rid of Justin Trudeau. And that has,

00:39:01.660 he succeeded. Justin's now out and he just resigned today. And I don't know. I don't know

00:39:09.400 that he thought much more about it other than that, other than like, this really works for

00:39:12.300 me rhetorically in terms of rhetoric and it really works against him. It makes him look

00:39:16.420 like a total loser. And he's just going to keep hammering it because it made Justin look

00:39:21.300 impotent. That makes sense. I would like to see a push on that. That'd be really cool.

00:39:30.180 Simone, you've been quiet here. A push on Canadian statehood?

00:39:33.380 Well, no, to take the economically most productive regions of Canada, just take their oil regions,

00:39:38.360 because they already don't want to be part of Canada. Canada established when the whole Quebec

00:39:41.940 thing was going that you can just secede. And Canada has been using these regions resources to

00:39:47.560 fund the rest of their stupidity. I kind of think Canada is on a long-term path to American

00:39:52.680 integration. It's like, the way is just in terms of, it's a slow cultural, economic, you know,

00:40:03.260 integration until there's just, we forget why we're not even the same country. And then it just

00:40:06.880 kind of happens. I don't think it will happen like this. But then also I would say like, if the

00:40:11.220 demographics totally change in Canada becomes a very different place, I don't know what that looks like.

00:40:15.060 And that could happen because this country is a country that seems to hate itself. It's a country

00:40:19.120 that seems to not want to be Canada anymore. And that is what we're seeing in Europe too. And that

00:40:23.020 is maybe the fundamental thing of our era that I don't understand that the weirdness of our era is

00:40:28.080 like what seems to me to be a pervasive self-hatred that in America, we have now room to not be that.

00:40:34.900 It used to, we had to be that culturally. There is all we have now that everyone else does not have

00:40:39.040 is we have permission to love ourselves. And they don't have that in Europe. And in fact,

00:40:45.060 when I was abroad just about a month ago, a few weeks ago for a conference, I was in London.

00:40:49.300 And that is the thing that everybody kept saying was like, man, I wish that we had that over here.

00:40:53.980 I wish that, that we had people who loved it that much over here. It seems so fun and exciting to be

00:40:58.560 over there right now. They didn't even care about the policy. They only cared about just like the

00:41:03.500 permission to be excited about being alive and, and being your, your nationality. And yeah,

00:41:10.020 they truly just do not have that there. And we do. And that's precious right now.

00:41:15.260 Yeah. It's funny that you mentioned that. Cause I was talking with some reporters about the

00:41:18.820 pernatalist conference and I was like at the last one, really the most shocking thing about it is

00:41:23.100 that everyone, it was the first time for a long time. I've been with a group of people where everyone

00:41:27.140 was happy to be alive and excited about the future, even though they think it's bleak. And I think that

00:41:31.920 the reason for this is just cultural evolution, which is the dominant culture in the world right now.

00:41:37.960 It's the urban monoculture as we call it. And to convert somebody out of their birth culture,

00:41:41.900 because the urban monoculture has a very low fertility cultural group. You need to disillusion

00:41:46.360 them with the starting cultural tradition. If I want to convert somebody out of Americana culture,

00:41:52.560 if I want to convert somebody out of German culture or British culture into the urban monoculture,

00:41:57.380 I need to cut them off from their family, you know, convince them their parents are horrible

00:42:00.920 and convince them that the culture itself is horrible. That that's how I deconvert them. And as such,

00:42:05.840 I need to convince them that they are horrible. And a lot of cults do this, you know? And so I think

00:42:10.480 it just sort of spiraled out of control. And then everyone was like, why do we, why do we all hate

00:42:14.980 it? Like, why am I supposed to hate my ancestors and our tradition and our civilization?

00:42:21.840 Yeah. And then it turns out when you just refuse to do so and a bunch of other people say,

00:42:27.180 yeah, I don't, I'm not doing that either. And you talk about it out loud. The hysterical screaming

00:42:34.340 eventually dies down because it no longer works. It's like the behavior only persists for as long

00:42:40.440 as they get a positive reaction from it. And it just eventually, it just dies down. I kind of think

00:42:45.880 of 2020 as I thought of 2020, 2017, I thought was the peak. And then 2020 happened. And I thought,

00:42:51.680 holy shit, worse. Okay. There is, it keeps getting worse, but there's this idea in behaviorism

00:42:57.240 called behavior extinction. And the idea is that, you know, people will act out to get a reaction.

00:43:03.560 And then when you stop reacting, they don't stop reacting. They don't stop acting out. They actually

00:43:08.480 act out much more at first. It's like they have to do much more to get the same reaction. And then

00:43:14.500 that works. And so they have to do much more. And the behavior extinction happens when they act out

00:43:19.860 as much as they ever acted out. And then they don't get the reaction. And then it dies.

00:43:25.080 And the behavior being that, the, like the sort of woke behavior is broken. And part of that sort

00:43:32.140 of constellation of bad ideas was this expectation that you hate your culture. In America, at least

00:43:39.240 that no longer exists. That behavior has, has, has gone extinct. And those people still, maybe there

00:43:44.980 are people out there that have those ideas, but I'm allowed to not, and nobody can stop me and nobody

00:43:49.780 even really cares, which is why I find so tedious. The people who are still doing anti-woke

00:43:53.860 content in 2025 as like their whole beat, which is like every day it's woke whack-a-mole. It's like,

00:43:59.560 look at this blue haired idiot telling me that, that white people are bad. It's like, no one cares

00:44:03.320 anymore. I don't care. Like no one doesn't matter what that idiot says. They don't have power over me

00:44:06.760 anymore.

00:44:07.000 That's actually one of the things I wanted to ask you about, which is a lot of energy and time went

00:44:12.180 to that sort of the resistance. And now you have a whole bunch of people who don't really shouldn't

00:44:17.940 be thinking about that. Aren't talking about that anymore. I'm really curious to see, because you're

00:44:22.100 so a finger on the pulse of the cutting edge, both societally and in the tech world, in some spheres,

00:44:28.240 what you're seeing is like new dialogues and new obsessions and new themes that are emerging

00:44:33.300 that people are talking about and obsessing over and thinking about how to solve now that they're

00:44:37.600 not trying to fight sort of progressive overreach. I think that whenever Trump is in office,

00:44:43.900 he casts this like crazy smoke screen. He just, I think he just, I'm trying to find the right

00:44:52.100 metaphor for this, but he just makes it hard to think about anything else. And so I think a lot of

00:44:56.980 people are distracted by him and I'm trying my best to sort of be like engaging with the culture,

00:45:01.340 but to not be distracted by him from like, I'm sort of really refusing to be upset ever by anything

00:45:09.160 that's going on. And whenever he says some crazy thing about tariffs or whatever, I'm just going

00:45:13.220 to wait a few days and see what we learn. And people get mad at me for that, but that's just

00:45:17.520 how I'm going to move on. But I think a lot of people are distracted by him. I think on the far

00:45:21.500 right of politics, on the far left of politics, there's total collapse and confusion and not even

00:45:26.020 far left, let's say the center left, that's where it's collapsed, confusion, disillusionment,

00:45:29.460 sadness. They don't know what to be. And they're just not being productive at all. On the far left,

00:45:33.640 there's excitement because the center left is dead. They have no competition and they're gaining

00:45:37.940 followers. Then on the far, not even the far right, the whole spectrum of the right, there's a huge

00:45:41.900 war for what it means to be right wing because Trump is bizarre and he's not the future of the

00:45:46.220 party because no one is like him. He's no one else is as pragmatic as him, even the Trumpians,

00:45:50.560 like they're Trumpian. He's not Trumpian. He's just Trump. It's a very different thing.

00:45:54.200 There's no philosophy there for him at all. So whoever comes next, that's the war. And you see

00:45:59.380 it, I think, on both the economic side where there's a conflict between the Bannon types and

00:46:04.740 the tech right or the Elon Musk types. And then you see it on the social side where there's also

00:46:09.940 a conflict between Elon Musk and he's like Genghis Khan. It's like how many kids is he going to have

00:46:15.320 with random people and the Christian right, the people who pretend they're the Christian right,

00:46:19.940 the trad right, which started as a meme and feels more real to me by the day. I think there's a lot

00:46:25.100 of interesting, just no one knows what it's going to become. And there's like conflict there. And

00:46:29.280 without a common enemy on the woke left, it's becoming much more vicious. So that is going to

00:46:36.100 be distracting right wing people. And I think it's just going to be that what's happening is it's

00:46:40.420 just going to be culturally quite chaotic because this is also happening at the same time that media

00:46:44.620 fragmentation has happened. So not only are all of these things, would they have been natural even with

00:46:49.400 standard media that was closer to what we saw like eight years ago with a few big giant tech

00:46:55.000 companies and then the mainstream media, it's way more fragmented now. So no matter what you believe,

00:46:59.520 you can hop into a place that confirms all of your biases, shares news with you that is true,

00:47:04.080 but super radicalizing about what you believe. And so everyone is like very different and becoming

00:47:09.680 more different. And yes, I think chaos for a while, unfortunately. Okay. Here's a question that

00:47:15.100 leads from that, that you might have an answer to because I asked Simone about this. So Hassan Piker

00:47:18.600 is most popular Twitch streamer. If you look at the most popular long form podcasts,

00:47:24.160 eight out of 10 of them are right wing. Why do you think the podcast scene has gone right or right

00:47:30.640 wing people succeed in the podcast scene and on YouTube as well? And the left is becoming focused

00:47:37.240 on things like Twitch and TikTok. I have no idea. I don't know. I've even, I had this idea. Yeah,

00:47:45.460 no, I don't know. I, I actually have no idea. I just know that it's true. And I don't know that,

00:47:53.020 I don't know Twitch. I'm not familiar enough with Twitch to know who the other popular people are.

00:47:57.400 I know that a lot of what they do is, I mean, they love to fight with each other and get onto

00:48:04.820 their shows and attack each other. That used to be popular on YouTube and it's not really

00:48:08.220 as much anymore. And that was at a time when YouTube was more left wing. I don't know if

00:48:12.720 there's something related to that, that it's all more, he's just like a good WWE kind of star.

00:48:18.500 I don't, I don't know. That brings me to another point where you're like, you know,

00:48:22.860 people used to fight when you had the lefties in control. Something that you mentioned as part

00:48:27.140 of the narrative, which is personally not something I'm seeing. And I've sort of taken

00:48:30.660 it to be like a left wing gaslighting because, you know, they do a lot of this with media is that

00:48:34.980 the right is now fighting each other. I just personally haven't seen that much of the right

00:48:39.860 fighting each other. I mean, you see it even with just like the Babylon Bee talking about

00:48:44.360 anti-Semitism and getting attacked for it by, there are all sorts of sort of Israel skeptical,

00:48:49.660 where you really see it breaking down is on the question of Israel and Palestine,

00:48:52.900 which is like a shadow war for all sorts. It's our proxy war for all sorts of ideas about nationalism

00:48:59.820 and the influence of Jewish people and things like that. And I try my best to just stay out of that

00:49:06.260 entire thing. Cause I think it's one, not what I focus on America only. And then two,

00:49:12.000 it just seems like there's no way to enter that world and not become like a way scarier person.

00:49:18.940 I think that you just become the things that you fight and everybody there that's fighting that I

00:49:22.420 see fighting. I don't want to be like, so I just tried my best to stay out of it. I worry that that

00:49:26.440 fight that's butting up on the right is going to kind of overtake us all and we'll be dragged into it

00:49:31.120 and have to pick sides or whatever. But for now, I don't think we have to, but I do see a lot of

00:49:35.200 fighting on the right. I think it's on the question of Israel, Israel's influence, the influence you see

00:49:39.460 Bannon really trying to gin up fights between the, what he calls the MAGA right and what he calls the

00:49:44.860 tech right. I, those are, I don't believe in that distinction. Maybe it will become a more serious

00:49:49.320 distinction in the future, but he for sure feels a conflict there. I just saw him on the Newsom

00:49:55.620 podcast talking about the tech oligarchs and he hates the influence of tech people on Donald Trump.

00:50:02.680 I think this Elon thing really, really, really bothers him. And he's going to stoke those flames and

00:50:07.000 stoke those flames until he gets back into a position at the right hand, I think. But yeah,

00:50:11.460 those, those fights, I see a lot. I think the left is correct about those, those who is maybe I

00:50:17.620 actually haven't seen the left talk about this as much. Yeah, it's interesting. My read of Steve

00:50:22.000 Bannon, I could be super wrong about this, is he's just like deep state slime and like everybody

00:50:25.660 recognizes that now. And he's mad because Elon is showing that he, he was the Elon of the first

00:50:31.300 administration and he did effing nothing. Right. Exactly. He failed. He ended up in jail.

00:50:35.580 And that's, and that, by the way, that's what happens. If you fail on this game, you go to

00:50:39.880 prison, like you lose your life. That is what they proved. And that's why the stakes are so high,

00:50:44.720 right? Like we, everyone knows. Elon's going to prison if he doesn't nail it. If this does not

00:50:48.780 succeed, we all are going to jail. Like that is what is going to happen. They say it, they actually

00:50:54.880 just fucking say it. It is like, they, they lost the game fair and square. And their response to that

00:51:00.080 is we should do communism. And that's, that's like, that's the scary thing that's hanging over

00:51:05.280 our balance. And that's why I worry about people like Hassan, because I think that he's the only

00:51:08.380 one who's being really honest about, about his intentions. Yeah. Well, and people find that

00:51:14.020 honesty, very attractive, very appealing. I mean, for the same reason, they love Trump.

00:51:18.800 Which is a very difficult question. You'll have to answer eventually. If that conversation picks up

00:51:22.600 is like, do you have to act like them or something? Because that again, it's like, it just, it's the

00:51:29.240 only way to survive a fight like this. I think as you become not even, I don't know if you can even

00:51:32.520 resist it. If you're in a fight with someone, I think you just start to become them. That is what

00:51:36.740 happened with everybody who fought the woke people is like, you just fought fire with fire. You

00:51:42.680 get obsessed with the culture wars you became. And I say this even a little bit like just self

00:51:47.180 reflectively. Like I became too much like them over the last few years. I don't regret it because

00:51:54.080 I don't know that I could have been effective in that environment if I didn't, but it is a sad thing.

00:51:58.980 I look back at my work from six, seven years ago when I was first like, why can't people just let me

00:52:04.360 write about this fucking Mars thing? Like I'm doing a podcast on Mars, like leave me alone. It's not

00:52:08.760 white supremacy. Shut up. Like I look back at that guy and I'm like, man, I have, we like, I personally

00:52:15.980 lost a lot by fighting this thing. And I want to like, get back to it, but it's hard. Like you

00:52:21.000 just, you change in this kind of, in this kind of idea environment. Yeah, I can see that. One thing

00:52:28.420 that I find really interesting to expand it a bit from what's going on in the tech world.

00:52:32.740 And I don't know how much insight you have into like a nerd culture stuff, which is another area

00:52:38.400 that we do a lot of stuff on, but the... How nerdy are we talking? Well, I was going to say...

00:52:44.240 Warhammer lore nerdy. Yeah. I played Magic the Gathering and I'm familiar with

00:52:48.380 Dungeons & Dragons. The breakdown of the video game, like the woke video game

00:52:54.500 industry in the United States has been pretty catastrophic to the extent where you'll have

00:52:58.060 like $400 million. And this has happened multiple times. It's about to happen again

00:53:01.760 with Assassin's Creed Shadows. $400 million go into a project and like 500 people buy it

00:53:06.100 or like a thousand people buy it. And it's destroying a giant industry that was like the major media

00:53:12.540 industry. And at the same time as I'm seeing this industry burning, I then see the news media,

00:53:20.380 like the traditional, it almost feels like a light switch flipped and everyone now is like,

00:53:25.400 oh yeah, they're not like meaningful sources of news anymore. Even the people who work at these

00:53:29.840 companies. Well, even the left, they're like, oh, they're too right wing or whatever. Like

00:53:33.580 there's the trust in media is totally collapsed. But I think I was going to say, as you were talking

00:53:37.040 about, I was going to connect it with media. And I just see that as opportunity, especially as AI,

00:53:40.880 as our tool, as our AI tools advance, and we are more able to create these things more easily

00:53:45.440 ourselves, you're just going to see new gaming companies and new people, or gaming people,

00:53:50.180 single individual creators of incredibly popular, beautiful games. You're already seeing that on

00:53:54.480 the media side. And that's maybe the future of everything is people doing more with less

00:53:57.540 and creating new institutions, new pounds of status and power and wealth and things like this.

00:54:04.060 It's funny that you mentioned that we're actually doing that. We're building a video game company

00:54:06.860 right now with AI, which I'm really excited for because the big like institutional players are so

00:54:12.000 bad at using AI effectively. Yeah. I mean, well, so new it's like, and no one is ever super

00:54:17.420 incentivized as a giant to embrace the new thing for this, like the, what is the famous innovators

00:54:21.980 dilemma? You don't want to be creating the thing that's going to put your, your bread and butter out

00:54:26.120 of business. I guess they should be able to use new tools, but if they create tools that give

00:54:32.000 way more autonomy to the user, just to get to a point where you start to wonder what the point of

00:54:37.600 this thing is, which is like, you know, that's what kind of is happening with the sub stack ecosystem

00:54:43.500 and social media and stuff like this. It just got to a point where I remember the whole blue check

00:54:47.540 conversation was so crazy. And when Twitter was still Twitter and the first thing that Elon did

00:54:52.040 was he was like, I'm taking rid of you. You're no, no, you no longer get blue checks just because

00:54:55.360 you're like this anointed, you know, priest, high priest of the establishment. You're going to have

00:55:00.140 to pay for a blue check and anyone can have a blue check if you're a person and you give me money

00:55:03.560 and they were furious, but the shift had already had, like no one took that blue check seriously.

00:55:11.940 It was just like, you don't deserve this because you have, you have 400 followers and you're crazy

00:55:18.280 and you happen to work for like Vox. That's, I am more influential than you. And that's crazy. Like

00:55:23.560 you don't, you're not more special. You don't deserve a new, a special suite of tools and access to

00:55:29.040 the administration or the art, what I consider my administration, which is whoever runs Twitter.

00:55:33.660 You're not, you're not better than me. And he just, Elon just made, he forced his company to

00:55:39.420 confirm with the reality that already existed. And that's always a really interesting place to be

00:55:44.040 when, when there is something that everybody already knows to be true, but you can't say it,

00:55:48.060 or everybody's already doing something, but you can't, you can't talk about it or discuss it or plan

00:55:53.100 for it. And then someone just says, this is the real thing. This is what we're doing. This is

00:55:58.300 reality. And people love that. It's like, thank you for saying the truth. And also now

00:56:01.820 the world is different overnight. We're going to see a lot more of that in the coming years.

00:56:06.920 What do you think the things are maybe that, what is the one, what maybe one thing that you think

00:56:11.780 most people kind of think, but you can't say. About social media or the news. I think people

00:56:17.300 realize that we live in a post-job economy already and that also money doesn't matter anymore.

00:56:22.160 Those are my two big things.

00:56:24.900 It's in the process of not matter. And Elon has said this as well, like.

00:56:28.940 Because of AI?

00:56:30.220 Because of AI. And also because of sort of debt cycles and inflation. And we're,

00:56:35.600 we're headed towards a jubilee that's not going to play out like a jubilee. Like social security is

00:56:39.680 going to fall apart, but then I think the government's just going to mint money to sort of cover it.

00:56:43.640 I don't think social security is going to be privatized. And then, I mean, even if that doesn't

00:56:47.440 happen. So even if our currency isn't massively devalued that way, people are already behaving

00:56:51.760 in a way, especially younger generations and especially people who aren't wealthy. And there,

00:56:56.020 there's a lot of them like, well, money just doesn't matter anymore. I'm going to be in debt

00:56:59.440 forever. I'm going to put it on a credit card because I'm never going to pay it off. It doesn't

00:57:02.320 matter what the interest is because it's never going to be paid off.

00:57:04.460 Weight of relating to money has inverted. So historically the core store of value was anything

00:57:09.600 that was fungible and had a set value like land or Bitcoin or house, you know, whatever,

00:57:14.260 but gold, but now because those things were great for storing value because the number of people who

00:57:20.120 wanted them was growing exponentially. But when the population begins to stabilize and then begins to

00:57:25.320 collapse, the core thing that we thought of as a store of value collapses. And then you could say,

00:57:30.840 well, you could put it all into the economy like the S and P or something like that, but all of the

00:57:34.840 large companies are going to be the companies that are most at risk from the AI transition. So all of the

00:57:40.700 places where you could store value are very unsafe. Yeah. And I think a lot of people feel

00:57:46.940 like they've been scammed so many times that, yeah. I mean, I can't buy a house. I can't, you know,

00:57:51.300 I can't afford this. I'm in debt. Money doesn't matter anymore. Everything's going to be on credit.

00:57:55.000 And eventually we're going to say, I mean, this happened in Japan a couple of times where they're

00:57:59.780 just kind of like, huh, okay. It is always a part of the beginning of demographic collapse.

00:58:04.380 Yeah. Let's what, what debt it's gone. So yeah, money's going to go crazy. And I think a lot of

00:58:08.740 people are already- Well, even the idea of our national debt, like, I don't know how you pay

00:58:12.940 that back. So do you just have to say, I'm not paying that back? I think that that's actually

00:58:16.840 how it ends. Yeah. Well, I mean, our, and our currency can be massively inflated until it doesn't

00:58:21.880 really matter anymore. And, you know, the portion of our budget that it becomes is going to be

00:58:25.420 so silly because we get to just inflate it to high heaven. So yeah, that's, it's something that we

00:58:30.420 think about a lot because, you know, we, we keep, our kids are not becoming obsessed with money and

00:58:34.160 asking us, you know, how, how will I, how will I buy things? And where do I get my job? And we're

00:58:39.680 like, no, you won't get a job. That's never going to happen. And it's, it's, we're now trying to

00:58:44.740 figure out what to tell them. Help me understand. What do you think is going to happen rather than

00:58:47.640 having a job? You're going to have to create a niche personality that's, that is capable of selling

00:58:57.580 gatherings, events, access, or artisan goods of some sort that people want, that a niche of people

00:59:04.440 wants. The action of the population. So what happens to everyone? I don't know what that world

00:59:08.820 looks like. There have been worlds in the past. And I think that people just fundamentally like in our

00:59:15.580 generation aren't capable of accepting this. But if you go back to like the 1910s or 1900s, you know,

00:59:21.840 you didn't have a welfare, you didn't have social security, you didn't have Medicaid. When people

00:59:27.540 were poor, they just died. And we're going to go back. A lot of people are just going to die.

00:59:35.220 And the rest of us are going to be scraping by. And there's going to be a few people with an

00:59:39.280 astronomical level. There's going to be extended families sort of, I mean, we're going to, I think

00:59:44.740 we're going to see a bit of a return to feudalism where you're going to see sort of these walled gardens

00:59:48.340 where the top zero zero one percent is going to be. And then these ecosystems around it sort of in a

00:59:54.560 feudal format. I think that there could be a world in which there's basically UBI, but then you're

00:59:58.440 going to see systems kind of like in, you can see in prisons where your food is covered, your housing

01:00:03.560 is covered, but there are all these artificial economies where people are making food for each

01:00:07.480 other. They're trading services. They're cutting each other's hair. They're threading. They're

01:00:10.300 doing all this. So there's going to be a lot of like human to human service exchanges. And that's,

01:00:14.280 that's for the, everyone else who basically is just getting by sort of living in these localized.

01:00:19.020 And I'm not meaning even geographically, but often sometimes we call them like techno feudal

01:00:23.720 where like, you're sort of living based on your cultural subset, like, you know, the furries over

01:00:29.320 here and like the whatever, and they're all sort of exchanging services. And you're probably a member

01:00:33.240 of a bunch, like you're probably a member of your geographical one. And then maybe one or two

01:00:37.060 social set ones like the FLDS and you're this geographic area or like EDM enthusiasts of this weird

01:00:44.400 subset and this local geographic area. And you're going to be exchanging goods and services based

01:00:48.940 on that. And the ones who really thrive and manage to gain wealth, who are not part of the 0.001%

01:00:53.560 who just maintain all the wealth in the future, you have to have some kind of celebrity status

01:00:58.220 where that 0.01% comes to you for their artisan vegan leather bike shoes, because you are the one,

01:01:06.040 the master, the one whose content they've watched, who, you know, they get obsessed with your artistry

01:01:10.440 or the fact that you can weave this rare silk fabric using the method used in the 1500s in some

01:01:16.320 obscure region in China, that kind of thing. You got to, you got to sell to the autists and you got

01:01:20.540 to be an autist.

01:01:22.800 I guess I just

01:01:24.100 things will change. That's such a radically different world that

01:01:30.920 it's more like it's been for thousands of years. It's back. It's back to what things were.

01:01:35.840 We're in the aberration. We're in the sci-fi world.

01:01:38.680 What is the, what it was that like, I guess the era of industrialization?

01:01:44.860 Yeah. The era of industrialization and the era of basically with the

01:01:48.840 It began with the British Imperial Empire and it is ending with AGI.

01:01:55.520 What I'm hearing is colonialism was not that bad.

01:01:58.400 It was a good run. It was interesting. It produced a lot of cool stuff. It's just also,

01:02:05.600 it's like a wave crashing on itself. It will produce something new.

01:02:09.140 For us, this is existential because, you know, we want to have a lot of kids. We want to create

01:02:12.360 a culture. We're building a religion. And so we've got to think about, you know, next hundred,

01:02:16.560 next 200 years. And I just think that things are going to be astronomically harder for the next

01:02:21.200 generation. And they're going to have to, it like you would need to in, in, in these earlier eras,

01:02:27.600 figure out how to support yourself, but maybe without a community.

01:02:31.480 Yeah. I mean, the future is here, just not evenly distributed. You can get got by probably telling a

01:02:36.340 kid, you know, teaching them to get a job and do that and like do the traditional breadwinning stuff,

01:02:40.700 but it's going to be shakier. It's going to, it's kind of like a game of musical chairs.

01:02:45.340 There are not going to be that many chairs left. I think a lot of the people getting laid off from

01:02:48.880 corporate tech jobs and from the government are just, they're just never going to get jobs again.

01:02:52.540 Yeah. Well, the good thing is we'll be able to see that happening soon and maybe we'll have more

01:02:56.880 information. The numbers are so off. Like the reporting's really off. So I feel like we're

01:03:01.760 flying blind a little bit. In tech?

01:03:04.100 In, in, in employment. And, and do people have jobs anymore? I think that we are, we've gone off the rails.

01:03:10.600 Here's, I think one good indicator that they do have jobs is the protest sizes have completely

01:03:16.680 plummeted since the BLM era. Everyone is out of work. That's really the, that's the real story of

01:03:23.600 the BLM protests and why they were so big is because no one had anything to do. And right now

01:03:27.920 you're looking at protests at like Trump tower or whatnot. And even like they're, they're cleaning

01:03:32.520 up BLM alley and no one's even there protesting. There are.

01:03:36.140 It's because we're going to lie flat.

01:03:37.880 I know. I think it's the Hikikokomori-kazation that happened during COVID. I think COVID taught

01:03:42.800 people, you can just stay in your house in bed rot. And a lot of people never came out again.

01:03:47.080 Yeah. Why protest? I mean, they know it doesn't do anything. Like it just, there's, it's not as

01:03:52.800 fun. We see in our fan base who reached out to us sometimes and stuff like this, just never

01:03:58.320 interacted with another person really. Yeah. I don't know why it's super not rational, but I just

01:04:05.680 feel like this is not, it's not that bad. I think even AI. You're so wholesome. You're so like,

01:04:13.420 you're so, your interpretations though being heterodox and though being cutting edge, I don't

01:04:19.060 know how you managed to do it. They come across as so kind, so charitable, so optimistic. And I love

01:04:25.320 it. I love, I love your vision. I just think it's like, like even with AI, it's, did you guys see

01:04:32.460 this Sam Maltman? He posted the AI telling a fiction story? No, it just wasn't. He's like, this is

01:04:39.260 great. And all the, yeah, people were like, this is there. It's, it can do fiction. And I just felt

01:04:45.640 like it could do a lot, but it couldn't do what he said it could do. Oh, just you wait. But we're

01:04:50.600 talking, I don't think so actually, because what it's really good at doing is predicting the words

01:04:55.960 that are going to come next based on words that have already happened. And guess what? So are you,

01:04:59.840 so are you. We've done it. You believe, you believe that I am an LLM. This is, but we,

01:05:05.340 yeah, no, no, no. We've always done this. We think that there's abundant proof.

01:05:09.620 But this is what people have always done with technology. If you look back 150 years ago or

01:05:13.300 whatever it was, people are like, what is the future going to be? And it's like a crank machine

01:05:18.460 that gives you knowledge. It's like, how does the brain work? The brain, the way we described it,

01:05:23.680 we describe it in terms of the technology that we see. And so I don't think it's like this LLM is what

01:05:31.060 we are. I think that that is just how we're understanding ourselves because it's the most advanced

01:05:34.660 thing that we have. And we recognize that the brain is actually still the most advanced

01:05:40.900 piece of technology that exists in the world by far. It's a very, very strange. And I don't

01:05:45.180 think it utilizes training data to come up with, I mean, like as we want our kids to come online,

01:05:49.880 they still like to be on a LLM.

01:05:50.820 Does that make it like a car? Like it's not the same. I think it's not the same. We can do things

01:05:55.400 that it can't do.

01:05:56.740 Have you been in a car with a 16 year old who's just learning how to drive?

01:06:00.460 Uh, I've been the 16 year old who was just learning how to drive.

01:06:04.200 I note here that this is a bit different from times in the past where we have said,

01:06:10.060 Hey, humans work kind of like a machine. It would be more akin to if we said, Hey,

01:06:15.460 humans work kind of like a machine. And then we got the first fMRI images of a person's head

01:06:20.360 and it was filled with gears. Uh, that is basically what's happening as fMRI studies

01:06:26.820 on how humans process language get better with LLM related stuff. We have an episode on that right

01:06:34.700 here. If you're interested in this topic, uh, but I didn't want to derail this particular

01:06:39.660 conversation too much.

01:06:40.840 No, hold on.

01:06:42.420 The smartest humans can do things that AI can't do. I don't know if like, there's a few things

01:06:48.580 that AI is bad at because they appear to be using different systems in our brains,

01:06:52.460 like counting or something like that. But I don't know if like, when I look at the,

01:06:56.380 the language processing of AI, that seems better than 80% of humans, 70%.

01:07:02.960 It's not about, sorry, I'm getting a phone call right now.

01:07:08.480 Oh, we've probably gone.

01:07:09.920 Yeah, we'll leave you go. We kept you for way longer than we said.

01:07:12.580 This is another fascinating conversation. I wish we could have done more about it,

01:07:15.100 but it's been great talking to you guys.

01:07:16.740 Thank you so much.

01:07:17.840 Thank you for coming. Is there going to be another Hereticon?

01:07:20.200 I think there will be. Yeah. I think it'll, I don't know if it's going to be the last one

01:07:23.180 or not. Maybe these things will be good. It's a feel like a trilogy is important.

01:07:26.120 Yeah.

01:07:27.060 Go check him out.

01:07:28.640 Oh yes.

01:07:30.000 Very similar to this show, but much more mild. And if you hate our AI takes, which like

01:07:34.780 a big part of our fan base does, cause we're very pro AI, like this guy is like us,

01:07:40.180 but with saner AI takes more optimism. This is good. If you like us, but you don't like

01:07:45.800 our pro Luigi Mangione stuff is like us, but not pro Luigi. Thanks guys. Thank you so much.

01:07:54.280 Enjoy your weekend. You too. Bye.

Based Camp - March 19, 2025

The Changing Politics of the Tech Elite： With Mike Solana of Pirate Wires

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