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

In this engaging episode, the hosts sit down with Mike Solana, founder and editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires, to dissect the contemporary political scene. They explore Solana's role in shaping the tech-right political movement and the significant changes since the recent election cycles. The discussion spans from the transformation in Silicon Valley's political affiliations to the rise and strategy of Donald Trump's second term. Solana shares insights into the surprising status gain of Trump supporters in tech and the implications of such a shift. The conversation also delves into broader societal changes, including the shifting values in America, the decline of mainstream media, and the increasing significance of niche communities in a post-job economy. The episode is a fascinating look at the undercurrents shaping today's political and social landscape.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. We're excited to have with us today. Mike Solana, the founder and editing something chief of Pirate Wires. 1,

Simone Collins: 2, 3. Hello everyone. We're so excited to be day today. Oh my gosh.

Okay. Yeah. Sorry. You went,

Malcolm Collins: this is why we go with mine. Okay. Anyway. For people who don't know who Mike Salona is he doesn't just have a podcast. It's very popular. But in a publication, that's incredible. Yes. You also sort of put together heretic on, right?

Mike Solana: It was my idea.

Yeah. Founded it, created it. It's out of done out of out of Founders Fund, but yeah, it's mine. All mine.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So you've been a central figure in the coalition or sort of the consolidation of this sort of new right or tech right political movement that right now is sort of blowing through the country within the White House and a lot of what we're seeing.

And I wanted to talk with you as somebody who [00:01:00] is. Totally integrated in like what's going on sort of the venture capital Silicon Valley tech worker scene the vibe shift that you have seen post election cycle there What's changing about how people are relating to things as well as the role that you played in this?

Consolidation to to write some history here as the country changes and also to discuss the political realignment. We're seeing in the United States

Mike Solana: Well, I think first of all my own in my own personal life. I kind of i'm like very cagey about labels I Have tried to just be honest about what I'm seeing.

And so people tend to put me in a box based 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 what's different right now, I think the best thing to contrast is not what's happening today versus what was happening like four years ago with Biden, but just to, to just, we have this great example of Trump's.[00:02:00]

Presidency and his inauguration and you can just compare the first one to the second one. He's had two first terms in a sense Really like he hasn't had a first in a second term. These are two totally separate I said not too long ago. It sort of feels like He played the video game and and, and lost.

And he just started the exact same game over from the very beginning. Now knowing where all of the bosses are, right? It's not like he's gotten to the second chapter. He's just still in that first chapter, but he's doing it all over again. So we've never seen that. None of us have seen that in any of our lives.

So it's, it's like a very kind of new thing. And within tech, you can compare that first one to the second one. And it's obviously night and day. I mean, the first one was there was one person in tech who was open about his support of. Donald Trump. It was Peter Thiel, and he was completely alienated right out of town for it and has since been sort of forgotten to a, to a large extent because there were much louder people who came to Trump's defense and support this second [00:03:00] time around who've, I think, occupied a lot of the, Discourse surrounding that in tech.

And I don't want to like, obviously I feel some kind of way about that. Having been on the front lines of it, obviously not like Peter, but I mean, I work for Peter, I've known Peter forever. So I have a feelings about the way he was treated. But the difference is just obviously today, Trump supporters.

Have status in Silicon Valley. And in fact, being a right wing person almost grants a certain amount of status, I would say at the higher levels. So I think it's really unclear what's happening among the rank and file. We haven't seen another round of fundraising data. The last time that we looked tech was still overwhelmingly voting.

funding Democrats, venture capital will so overwhelmingly funding Democrats, but all the people openly talking about it are, it's just like overwhelmingly Trumpian. And then everybody else is, I think either conflicted because the Biden term was so [00:04:00] disastrous or quiet. And I suspense it. I suspect it was conflicted rather than quiet.

I think people actually just didn't know how they felt.

Malcolm Collins: So I want to pull apart the two things you said here to focus on each individually, because I think they're really, really interesting. The first thing that you noted, I think is so true. It's like that game the movie with I want to say the Scientologist guy where every time he dies, he plays the same day tomorrow.

What was it, Colleen?

Mike Solana: Edge of Tomorrow.

Malcolm Collins: Edge of Tomorrow. Yes. Trump's edge of tomorrow ing it right now, but the thing that's weird about this and the part of this I want to focus on is why is the left doing everything exactly the same? Like why are they being so predictable? Why is it the exact same play through?

Mike Solana: I think that they. I have no idea what they are right now. They're, they've lost so many things and it's not just an election, right? They've lost the culture. They've lost the youth. They have lost their sense of political identity [00:05:00] because Trump is not a regular Republican. Trump, they tried really, really, really hard to make the kind of like, Oh, he's a rich guy who wants to just help rich people, things stick.

But even if you could, maybe that is secretly true. His policies are populist policies. They are economically populist policies. There's a reason that Tucker Carlson was aligned with him and is talking about things like banning self driving cars to protect the jobs of drivers. That's like a Democrat idea.

And so I don't think it's like, if you've taken away the economic populism or at least provided a competitive economic populist. Platform you, what are you left with to differentiate yourself and what they were left with in the last election and even now today is like, maybe we should trans the children, maybe that's okay.

Right. And that's, I don't think they even believe that they're just, that's something they were just forced to say by the party elites to sort of be in the party, but that's all they have now. It's like those really deranged far left social issues because also the right over the last 20 years has moderated a [00:06:00] lot on social stuff.

I think there's, yeah. A lot of transformation happening on the right on the social stuff and conflict on the right now, but that's that's like coming That's not currently where we are like the terrain right now is the major the dominant figure in right wing politics Republican politics, but I don't think it's really that is Donald Trump and he is an economic populist who does not give a s**t about gay people marrying.

He just does not care I also don't think the thing that's really hard to make stick is the abortion stuff because Yeah, he has been like, Oh, yeah, like, I'm, I'm against Roe v. Wade, but no one believes that that man hasn't paid for an abortion. Like he's not a Christian right kind of guy. And and he also is strongly said, you know, I'll knock out the any kind of federal ban for or whatnot.

He's like states rights only. It's a bad case, but he just isn't that kind of. He's not that kind of right wing socially extremely far right wing kind of guy. It's just more complicated. So they don't know what to [00:07:00] be. And I think

Malcolm Collins: there's, I've noticed two big differences in this particular playthrough.

One sort of highlights the point that you're making here and Trump has even said this verbally. He's like, I'm pushing this issue because it's a nine 90 10 issue. This was specifically when he was talking about trans people in sports. And, and I think. The administration right now is looking to only battle 90 10 issues at the beginning because Democrats culturally have a compulsion to double down on whatever he is opposing.

Mike Solana: So, well, because it's also always worked. They've always been able to just. Scream until they got what they wanted and they've, they've, the country has changed a lot because of it and the other overwhelming sort of like, let's say 80 20 issue at least that trump first one on and I think one on again is immigration.

And they don't know what the f**k to do about that because they presided over an open border for four years and have people in their party who have now normalized that to the point that they can't go backwards. That's the thing about the [00:08:00] left, man, is like they can never go backwards, that they can never pivot.

They can never change their mind. Trump doesn't care about changing his mind. And he's also not a Republican. He doesn't care about Republican baggage. He's just this guy who's doing what he thinks is the right thing to do. And so it comes off like common sense

Malcolm Collins: rather than ideology. Well, so the second thing that he's doing differently this time, and I want to hear your thoughts on this, because this is like a huge difference.

It's like when you're choosing to run for president and you're like picking a character, like your character is your VP, in many ways, in terms of like how you're colored, and the VP he picked sort of demonstrated a completely different alignment. I mean, Mike Pence versus J. D. Vance. Yeah. It was really like the.

GOP Inc versus the new right or the tech right?

Mike Solana: Well, I wouldn't even say it's the tech. I think, I mean, the tech right thing is something that's put on. That's like a Steve, Steve Bannon likes to, I think there's a, there's a tension between Steve Bannon and the tech right with JD Vance I think it's complicated because he's come out like in favor of Lena Khan and people like this who [00:09:00] want to regulate the hell out of the industry.

But I agree you're right that the difference between VP pick is really important and the first one is I need it was Trump like I want approval from. The elite, and I don't know why he wanted that, but you could tell that he really did. And so he picked an establishment guy and he wanted establishment approval in the press.

This new term is like JD Vance is an anti establishment guy and he blew up the press. He blew up the press room. He's now got like Mike Cernovich in there asking questions alongside the New York Times. It's like he, he, Trump knows that he will never have establishment approval. And so that actually was a huge mistake on the side.

of the establishment. They should have brought him in instead of trying to ice him out because now he doesn't have anything to gain from working with them. He has a lot to gain from destroying them and that's what he set out to do. He's

Malcolm Collins: completely surrounded now and it's this weird phenomenon with people who hated him in the first election cycle.

I mean, JD Vance, Elon, RFK, you know, it seems like his entire administration is just former adamant opponents. [00:10:00]

Mike Solana: I don't know that. J. D. Vance was ever an adamant. I think it's like he has some comments that he's made and whatever, but he wasn't like, I

Malcolm Collins: thought he led like the never Trump movement practically.

Yeah, because he wrote hillbilly elegy and then he did this like apology tour for everyone who voted for Trump.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Just for clarification here so I don't look uninformed, here are some quotes from J. D. Vance about Trump in his early days. He called Trump America's Hitler. He called him an idiot. He called him reprehensible. He called him cultural heroin. He called him unfit for office.

Mike Solana: Okay, so I don't know anything about that. I know that he, the hillbilly, I know that he's defended trump supporters and things like this. I don't know if how committed he was to like the sort of never trump or cause in the beginning.

It's definitely true that the others were against it. But even Ilan, I feel It's like, you have to think back to that period of time. And I give people all sorts of grace because at that period of time we were living in like a one party state, which became very apparent the moment that Trump [00:11:00] entered office and the whole entire deep state apparatus rose up to prevent him from doing anything and then tried to put him in jail for the following four years.

And I think that was really the radicalizing moment for most reasonable people. It was like, you maybe didn't support him in 2016. You maybe didn't vote for him in 2020, but what happened after 2020. Was really scary. That was like the coordinated tech thing to the platform him. Then the government went after him, started putting his allies in prison, tried to put him in prison.

I think that he would be certainly in prison at this point or on the path to it if he didn't win. And that's really scary. And so it's like everything the left is saying about him. I have not seen that from him, but I have seen it from them. And the sort of jig is up in that respect. Like you can't really hide the fact that you tried to put the front runner presidential candidate in jail, like in the middle of an election.

Malcolm Collins: So you're going to hypothesize where the left goes in response to this?

Mike Solana: Well, I think they have two choices. I think the first choice, no one wants to hear this, but I think that Gavin Newsom. Starting his new podcast is [00:12:00] really interesting. Mm. He is a total sociopathic political creature. He's like a classically presenting sociopathic politician in the late 20th century model

Malcolm Collins: of this.

Yeah. Yes.

Mike Solana: He's like a Bill Clinton kind of person.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly. What's coming to my head as Bill or, or Hillary Clinton. Well, he feels, he's more like Bill. He

Simone Collins: feels more like a mayor out of Gotham City.

Speaker 2: I'm just a poor schmoe, got lucky. I wish I could Hand out world peace and unconditional love

Speaker 6: intimidate me. Bully me if it makes you feel big. I mean, it's not like you can just kill me.

Speaker 4: Actually, it's a lot like that.

Simone Collins: Like to me, he's more of a comic and I grew up in San Francisco. Like I, or well, right next to it. I grew up like sort of around, yeah.

Just steeped in his, his lore. It just feels comic book ish.

Mike Solana: Yeah, I think though that he's really smart and really underestimated. And the fact that he's now speaking to like Steve Bannon on the second issue of his episode of his podcast is really fascinating to [00:13:00] me because what I saw while I was watching the clips of that was he had clearly never, ever in his life.

Had strong pushback on any of his ideas, even on the issue of was the election stolen? That's not something that he's whether, regardless of what you think about that question, that's not a question that, that, that he has, that Newsome has ever had to answer before. He's never had to beat back against the argument that it was stolen.

And so to have them there. Laughing it off and pivoting in a smart way. He's also learning the fact that he's even talking to Steve. Ben is means that he's learning from the culture. He's his son is obviously red pilled and he's like, Holy s**t. Why is the youth Republican all of a sudden? And so he's trying to talk to these people.

He's going to learn or whatever. He'll still be a sociopath. He'll probably be a centrist and he'll have some better signaling or. What I think is much scarier and maybe more likely is the like Hassan pikers of the world, the pro like the Luigi Mangione left the populist, radical, yay murder left the pro [00:14:00] Hamas left like, and I think the Hamas thing is less important as As the reaction to Luigi Mangione has really frightened me because it's so earnest and so deep and it also crosses into the world of Trump supporters.

Anytime a left wing policy, you start seeing Trump supporters talk about it is like, Oh, that's real policy. That's like a Bernie Sanders, Trump overlap kind of thing. And I think that rather than put up that little, I forget his name. He's the ex Parkland kid who became a leftist activist and had the pillow company briefly.

And now he's like a DNC chairperson.

Simone Collins: Yes, we know of him, we don't know his name.

Mike Solana: So that little dweeb rather than him, if they put Hasan Piker up there, who has a lot of energy, is good looking, is very, I wouldn't say he's masculine, but he peacocks masculinity, and he has a lot of young male supporters, and he's a total monster, like an actual earnest, like, guy who would have put all of us in, had all of us killed in a communist revolution, like they might win.

So those are the two paths. I think the energy is actually on some [00:15:00] form of the populist left side and we'll see what happens.

Malcolm Collins: That's really interesting. Okay, so I'm just sort of thinking through this in my head. If they go the Hamas Piker path, I actually think that that would lose their support from the mainstream institutions.

In the same way, like when Trump ran the first time and the Republicans had to sort of like re coordinate Because, you know, he's, he's, he's supported like the kill. He said babies are legitimate military targets.

Mike Solana: Sure. But what have, what is the left not normalized? Give me like a crazy left wing policy that they have not normalized.

I mean, open borders now is a normal policy. The transing of youth women. Let's say biological women competing against biological men in youth sports. Like these are all things that 10 years ago we would have been like, Oh, that's crazy. Free speech is no longer it's like we must do government censorship, right?

Like that's a mainstream Democrat position. I do not trust that there's anything that they won't actually normalize. And so I think that might be right.

Malcolm Collins: That is really [00:16:00] scary. A world where that becomes normal.

Simone Collins: I feel like your average American though, if you get out of especially coastal cities is not cool with that stuff.

And I think that whether or not we see a radical left versus a reasonable and corrected, like market corrected left depends on trust and institutions. I think that the reason why Luigi Mangione is seen as a saint. Is because there is this fundamental sentiment that there is no law, there is no order, there is no justice.

If you are not wealthy, if someone steals from you, if someone attacks you, if crimes are committed against you, well, sorry, nothing's going to be done. And I think if the Trump administration manages to restore some sense of faith in institutions, like, oh, now we actually First, prosecute people for breaking the law.

That would be kind of huge. So it, it, I'm really watching closely to see what happens

Mike Solana: with the fact [00:17:00] that he's doing the things that he said on like immigration, for example, huge,

huge.

And he really didn't in the first term. And then the second term, it seems like it's all he cares about. And. Well, he cares about, he's doing a lot actually, but this is something that he promised that he seems to be taking seriously, even deporting Mahmood.

What's his face? The Columbia guy. Yeah. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Who? He's married and has done nothing but organized protests that are anti USA. Right.

Mike Solana: He's been here for four years. He's only participated in anti American protesting. It's like he's being deported and that's a difficult move for Trump for a variety of reasons.

Because I think there's actually. Once someone gets a green card due process enters this, it's, it should be harder to kick them out rather than if they were just here on a visa, it seems like he's just doing it. You know, the optics there are not great for him and he doesn't give a s**t. He's like, this is the kind of stuff that I talked about.

If you hate the country, you're. going back to where you came from. If you don't belong here, you're going back to where you came from. And and these are things that, [00:18:00] you know, people have a harder time talking about online, including friends of mine who are on like the more centrist people, more thoughtful libertarian type people.

But when you just talk to anybody who's regular, they're like, Oh yeah, why would we want that person here? Obviously, back to Syria or wherever the f**k he came from, it sounds like he likes it better. Why would we don't want him? Why do we want him?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it seems like active enemy propaganda, like in our school system.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I think actually just maybe today you tweet something like your, your, your minimum requirement for citizenship. Should be that you want to be an American. You like it. There's something along those lines. You should love

Mike Solana: us and want to be us. Like you should want to become what you see here. It should not be like, Oh, that would be a great country.

If only I could change it and make it like a little more Islamic. No, we're not doing that. That's not what we're doing here. Yeah,

So would you like to see Sharia law in Canada replace Canadian law? At some point, it will. You know, Because we are, we have families, we are making babies, you're not your [00:19:00] population is going down the slum, right?. One day we can have a Muslim majority nation here in Canada.

Right In your face!

Malcolm Collins: all of these people who point out that you have these big protests going on in California where people are protesting being sent back to Mexico with Mexican flags. It's like, what, why, why are you madder than

Mike Solana: you're with like, I feel that way about Israel and Palestine too.

It's like my problem with it. Is I don't want to see either of your flags in my streets like I, it's an American flag or no flag is kind of how I feel about it. I just don't care about either one of these flags. You're perfectly nice people. I'm sure. Definitely what happened on October 7th was disgusting.

Like definitely it happens a lot. Terrorism is bad. All true. I don't want your like multi thousand year old blood feud Being litigated in the streets of New York city. It's like, I just don't want to see that. And this is the problem with immigration. And this is, I think the reaction of the average American who is like, why the f**k are we even [00:20:00] talking about this?

This has nothing to do with us. I don't want to have to think about this. I don't care. And Trump is just. He has like an instinct for that and he just talks to the people who no one else talks to, which is most people, by the way, that's like,

Simone Collins: yes, well, I mean, it's, it's not just him mentioning 90 10 issues.

I'm hearing it more and more, even on issues when he doesn't plan to support them, like with daylight savings, when he was asked. Will you finally get rid of daylight savings? He said, well, this is more like a 50 50 issue. I'm not going to touch it no matter what I do. Someone's going to get mad. He really, it's so refreshing to hear a president look at what the majority of reasonable people want and try to get that because it seems like we haven't done that for a really long time.

Mike Solana: It's not ideological at all.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Mike Solana: That is the thing that people get so wrong about him is he's actually, I think the most. Pragmatic president. We've had, you see this on issues of things like trade where and also things like, I mean, any policy [00:21:00] position he has, it's never, it's never about what should the world look like?

It's always about like, well, what is the landscape and how do I get the best deal possible based on what? People all seem to want, he's all about making deals with people. He loves striking deals between people who don't want the same things. He loves brokering those kinds of deals. And that's just unlike we've never seen anything like that for better or worse.

It's just a new thing. And I find the honesty of that refreshing.

Malcolm Collins: I want to transition from this into the second part of the very first thing you said, which I thought was just really interesting is the conversations that are happening on the ground, the nature of them is really changing. And you mentioned it a little bit here in terms of like what people are saying.

I know from my experience, I got this email chain from Stanford MBA. And, and it was from my class and it was all of them were like panicking, like panicking, panicking. I was like. The one person who would start just went on it and started magging and I probably really burned my chance of ever getting a job through that [00:22:00] network.

Just by being like, Hey, if you ever want to talk to somebody with the opposite perspective,

Mike Solana: They don't newsflash or narrator narrator's voice. They did not,

Malcolm Collins: But the, the The at the same time, you know, we have people on our show all the time who have nothing to do with politics, like I'll invite somebody on because he runs like a statistics channel on fertility rates in like Eastern Europe or something or a religious thinker and like before the recordings turn on, it's always like, oh my God, like, I'm so glad, like, I wish I could move to America or I'm so jealous for what you guys are getting to go through right now.

We're like,

Mike Solana: yeah,

Malcolm Collins: a lot in Europe. Is, is, how is this, is it like filtering down from the top within Silicon Valley, like in the intellectual class of Silicon Valley, because we're really connected to them, I'd call it like the EEO sphere, like the former effective altruist community, like the top intellectuals who we have connections with, they're like They're, they're, they're moving more centrist on this sort of stuff when previously they would have been hyper reactionary against it, but I [00:23:00] feel like the rank and file still think they're supposed to hate Trump.

Yeah. Like that's sort of what I'm seeing.

Mike Solana: That's the culture of there's this thing that is like. The aesthetic of thoughtfulness and they feel you have your centrist people, you're like Yimby type people, any kind of wonkish policy person, your former EA type people, your rationalists, they care more about projecting a sense of their own personal thoughtfulness than they do about securing.

High level goals. I truly believe this for the country, like just positive, let's say growth borders, law and order, things like that. They don't care about that as much as, as how they come off to their friends and things like that, which is a weird thing to say, because they're rationalists and they're not supposed to care about that.

But that is truly my read of most of them, even the ones that I like and friendly or whatever. I think that that's what's happening. And there's nothing about Trump. The aesthetics of Trump, there's nothing reasonable about them. He comes off [00:24:00] way crazier than he actually is. So the way that he just like, even on tariffs or something where it's an issue that you could actually get behind the idea of reciprocity and trade, he just every day is announcing something new.

And so if you're like, your aesthetic is thoughtfulness. That, well, that's not thoughtful. He didn't think it through. He's changing his mind. He changed his mind five times. What does he really believe? And I look at that and I have to do the math and I've now known him for, not personally, but I've watched him for however many, 10 years almost.

And it's like, Oh he's creating leverage out of nothing in advance of some kind of trade negotiation or deal negotiation that I don't even. Know anything about right now. The other day I saw him throw Google under the bus for something. And I was just talking to myself like, I mean, I wonder what he wants from them.

Like maybe that's what's happening. Right? Like, like, I don't know what's going on over there, but probably something is going on there. And so that's how I approach Trump is just the principle of charity. I. I just assume that he's not deciding, Oh, I would really like to tank the economy today by doing something [00:25:00] crazy.

I would like to just tank the stock market or whatever. My assumption is there's a plan and I just don't know what it is and we can judge him for it in, you know, six months or whatever. And it's like we can change the whoever's in charge now anyway. I was

Malcolm Collins: talking to New York times reporter today.

And she was like, well, what do you think of like what he's done to the economy? And I'm like, he didn't like. Plan to take the economy if he even if he did he meant for it to be short term Like his goal is to make the american worker feel more secure like

Mike Solana: well ain't also just to shore up Manufacturing security and that is a goal.

It's like we just F*****g forgot that that's an important goal. COVID happened and proved that that's an important goal. It proved that it's not just a thing that you should care about. If you are this plebe who is saying, Oh, I wish that I could afford a home. And you're this, a rich person is like you idiot.

That'll never happen again. That's not what we do here anymore. We don't give you like great middle class jobs. It's no longer just an issue for those people. It's an issue for all of us when you have a country like [00:26:00] China controlling so much of the manufacturing, and then they're also manufacturing viruses that they're then releasing, and then they're hoarding things like PPE, and that is something that was not nearly as bad as it could have been, but I think that the takeaway from that has to be.

Oh, wow. That could have been easily so much worse. It could have been a little more lethal and that would have been way more devastating. And we were way not prepared for it. And so I think about it in those terms that completely 20, how could 2020 not have changed your mind completely about things like domestic manufacturing and Trump really cares about it.

And we'll see what happens.

Malcolm Collins: Interesting. So there was something you said there that aligns with one of our recent theories that I thought you might find interesting to pull on. So we were looking at why American conservatism like Americana conservatism is the only group really other than Jews who stay above repopulation rate fertility wise when they get wealthy.

And what we pointed to was the truck nut fertility thesis, which is to say within Americana [00:27:00] culture, there is this idea that if some sort of culturally dominant force or respectable force wants to force something on you. Your reaction to that should be reflexively reactionary. Like put truck nooks on something because it's not respectable.

Put the little naked girl on the thing, the Hooters chicks, you know, like, be. offensive in your existence. And that this was Trump authenticated him in a large part of America's mind rather than undermining his credibility. And there is, with these individuals who live their lives just to signal, I'm a good person an incapability of recognizing this.

Mike Solana: I think that's true. I think that the way he talks, even just the cadence and the strangeness of his vernacular is all signaling a segment of the population that is considered [00:28:00] not elite to elitists. And when people like my parents heard it, all they really registered was like, Oh, this guy hates it.

All the same people who I hate. I, they don't care that he was rich. They don't care about his dumb real estate deals in New York city, which by the way, like, does anybody think that there's no corruption in real estate in New York city? Like the only way to do real estate in New York city, like they don't give a s**t.

They're just like, he's going to throw. a grenade at the machine, which I can't stand. And if he doesn't do that, we're going to have a problem. And then he didn't do it enough. And there was a problem in the election is my read of the 2020 election. It was like, he didn't do enough of the s**t that he was going to say, but I think, yeah, the way that he speaks the offensiveness, everyone thinks that's fun.

The supporters think that's funny. And, and they register it as, oh, he cares just as little about, he has just as little respect. For this system of morality, the elitist morality as I do, you know, these people are people who [00:29:00] grew up saying before white privilege was a phrase. It was in the early nineties.

You still had politically correct language. And there was this idea of like, why the average, like working middle class white person is like, what, what do black people What do I have that black people don't have like no one has ever given me anything? Why do I have to have this like reverence for this idea that the black person is persecuted or something in 1992?

They don't believe they just never believed that because their lives weren't that good and they were really hard and the government wasn't giving them Anything and so to disrespect to show disrespect for that system that never in their minds gave them anything Is absolutely a part of his credibility.

They're like, Oh, he gets it. That's a guy who doesn't, he hates the same stuff that I hate.

Malcolm Collins: I think what's really fascinating is that it, I think that that also gave him credibility with like the tech bros, I guess I'd call them like the Silicon Valley VC crowd has always had an intentionally contrarian streak to it.

But it's almost [00:30:00] like. Like for me, for example, I wasn't pro Trump his first election cycle. I, and, and I see it now as like maybe internal cowardice or something like that, but it took me a while to recognize the contrarianism in what he was doing and that that aligned with the value system that I was, you know, purported to have.

Mike Solana: I don't agree. I think that it was more a matter of for the people who are maybe more famously pro Trump, like David Sachs and Mark Andreessen, that's probably true. But for the rank and file, like all of the, like the Mark Zuckerberg and the Google people calling up Trump and everybody was donating to his inauguration parties and stuff.

That was much more about. Tech had tried for years to be a part of the elite and succeeded to a certain extent when he was censored while Trump was in office, they succeeded, like they, they, there was. It wasn't just remember the tech platforms or the speech platforms. It was like every tech company [00:31:00] cut Trump off and we're lockstep with the Democrat elites who were in power.

It was a very scary moment in American history. I was like, Oh yeah, that was like straight up. Like we were teetering on the brink of real authoritarianism at that point. And and I would say that most tech people were. Aligned. And then what happened was four years in which it became absolutely certain that the Democrats were going to do everything in their power to dismantle that power.

They were, they were, they were never going to be aligned with tech power. It didn't matter how much the tech elites peacocks the same values and pretended they cared about the same things like they were just not going to work because the https: otter. ai Do not want competition in power and tech was becoming too powerful.

It was powerful enough, for example, to silence a president. The Democrats saw that and they were just as nervous as the Republicans. They were like, Oh my God, if you can silence the president, who is actually the powerful person here? It's not the democratic party, even all of a sudden. And so there was suddenly they were out of alignment and the backlash against the Democrats was, I think, totally expected just in terms of like.

A read of [00:32:00] the, the, the power structure.

Malcolm Collins: You think, you think the Democrats started, cause I, I personally didn't see any of the Democrats really targeting tech institutions leading up to the election. I, I remember them being really happy when they're banning stuff other than Elon.

Mike Solana: This last, this, which election are we talking about?

Malcolm Collins: This last like, like Zuckerberg that didn't really, you know, they were fine with him. They,

Mike Solana: you have antitrust legislation targeting like every major tech company Valley. You have the global trade war targeting tech from Europe that our administration not only did nothing about, but abetted by. Sharing information with the Europeans.

They talked about, they were constantly dragging tech people before Congress to yell at them and talk about whatever the issue was. They were talking about new taxation stuff. They were talking about, you had people like Elizabeth Warren, who talked about I don't want to get that wrong. So I don't want to say who it was, but there was an a conversation about going after unrealized gains.

That is very popular on the list. Oh, yes. That would kill the entire concept of startups, how we know [00:33:00] about them, which is like raising equity to people who don't have money to pay the taxes on something like that. Yeah, because the, the, the gains have not been realized, which is like a basic economic concept, but they don't, the Democrats don't care because there is an, there is a huge part of that party.

Many centrist Democrats would, of course. Would care. And in fact, there were many Democrats in Silicon Valley who absolutely cared and talked about it, but the Democrats have in their party, a group of people who do not believe in like industry as a concept, this is like, they're very socialist and it's not a small number of people.

And so I think at that point, When they were in power and all of this happened. It was like, wow, if we want to keep on existing, we cannot work with these people here. Maybe they will, that party will crash and burn and the new version of the Democratic Party, we will be able to work with. And that's, I think what someone like Gavin Newsom is trying to demonstrate even in his rhetoric, he's trying to demonstrate that.

But what we currently saw, the Biden thing, whatever, whatever was in charge while Biden was technically the president, that thing. [00:34:00] The tech industry just, it was straight up pragmatic. It was like, we will die if this is in charge. So,

Malcolm Collins: so, no, I, I, I think you might be right about it. It's very different from my intuition of what was leading the tech community.

Which was, if I look at like the words of the tech people, like Mark Zuckerberg, it was the. Government forcing him to censor stuff in weird ways. So I think the censorship, my read was censorship handling of COVID and the trans stuff is actually what turned the tech intellectuals away. But you see it as more just like pragmatic economic orientation.

Mike Solana: Well, it depends on who you're talking. If you're talking about like, again, the Mark Andreessen's and the David Sachs's of the world, I think those are always thoughtful people who kind of disagreed with that stuff. And they, their opinions are not that different now than they were. I think a while ago if you're talking about corporate leadership, you know, the C suites of all these companies, I think it was just straight up economics and for Mark specifically, I think there was probably, there is something earnest to the evolution there for someone like Jack [00:35:00] Dorsey, who I've covered really closely, I absolutely believe there was an earnest intellectual philosophical development there.

I think that he saw what happened during the Hunter stuff, not even from the administration, but from his own team, from himself, from what he Really antithetical to all of his like crypto libertarian values, which he has talked about forever. I think he was horrified by what he had become and I think he gave it, he worked to put Elon in power to end that whole entire machine.

I love Jack. I defend him all the time and people always get mad at me. But I, I think that he is one of the most earnest, that's like the most, the most earnest evolution on the issue of the safety stuff. He would maybe even argue, he never. Evolved. I don't know, but he certainly, his company certainly had become something really terrifying on the censorship stuff.

He

Malcolm Collins: ran blue sky for a bit too, right? Like he was on their board.

Mike Solana: That came from Twitter. He was on the board. Blue sky was a protocol developed by Twitter. That's why they don't like own it now. It's, it's not a [00:36:00] part of the company. But then he was on the board and then he left because he was like, well, this just became the exact same thing that Twitter was.

Malcolm Collins: What are your thoughts on, because we're talking about like how it almost became fascist of the US with the alignment of censorship and government, and yet I look at what's happening in Europe and the shutting down of election cycles, the extreme censorship. Do you just think Europe is cooked? Or like?

Mike Solana: Yeah, I mean, this is a good example of, we were saying, oh, well, not everyone in the country, like most people in the country aren't going to stand for these crazy ideas. That can be true. As it is true in Europe that most people in Europe believe that you should want to become European, you should want to be if you're German coming to Germany, you should want to become German, you should want to learn German, you should want to integrate with the German population and ultimately be a part of the German nation,

you can

all believe that and still have people in charge of your country who are doing things in the opposite direction, because they've just They've really seized power and the democracy doesn't matter at [00:37:00] that point.

So the only thing I think that is going to stop what's happening in Europe is some kind of, I mean, it would have to be a major change in the political structure, even cause they're like an end

Simone Collins: to the EU.

Mike Solana: I don't think that's enough. I think it's gotta be like on an individual level, like, cause you could, you'd have a change in a country like France, political change in a country like France, EU.

I think the EU doesn't matter as much as France leaving the EU matters. But I think, right, I feel. Like it's over for you. I don't think that they have, I don't think they're going to do it. There's no mass deportation coming out of Europe. And just on the demographic, the demographic question alone there 20 years from now is going to be such a different world that

Malcolm Collins: you're absolutely right.

I mean, one thing I point out is, is 25 percent was actually 24 percent of German's population is either immigrated or the descendants of immigrants after the 1950s. Well, that's

Mike Solana: close to a third of Canada's population is from a different country. [00:38:00] Like, like immediately.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Mike Solana: Immediately. It is, it's like, it's 20 something percent.

I'd have to Google it really quick. But, but it is, it's extremely high number. That's like a lot of people in your country who are not from your country. Yeah. And you may or may not want to be a part of your country.

One day we can have a Muslim majority nation here in Canada.

Right In your face!

Malcolm Collins: Of Canada. There's been one like a gambit that I don't understand why Trump hasn't polled and it's like really surprising me actually.

Why not just like go to Alberta, go to, there's one other conference. Province that would probably flip. And provinces can secede from Canada just by a popular vote. Why not just say, Hey, you want to join the U S

Mike Solana: I don't think they have those. Numbers yet. I think that's like the most likely province, but they're not quite there.

And I go back and forth on whether or not Trump even actually wants Canada to become a state. I think he'd love it. It'd be fine. He'd be open to it. But I think the reason he's talking about Canadian statehood is just to demoralize Justin Trudeau. I think what he really wanted was to get rid of [00:39:00] Justin Trudeau.

And that has, he succeeded. Justin's now out and he just resigned today. And I don't know. I don't know that he thought much more about it other than that other than like this really works for me rhetorically in terms of rhetoric and it really works against him. It makes him look like a total loser and he's just going to keep hammering it because it made Justin look, you know, impotent.

Malcolm Collins: That makes sense. I would like to see a push on that. That'd be really cool. Simone, you've been quiet here for a Canadian

Mike Solana: statehood.

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, to take the economically most productive regions of Canada just take their oil regions because they already don't want to be part of Canada. Canada established when the whole Quebec thing was going that you can just secede.

And Canada has been using these regions resources to fund the rest of their stupidity.

Mike Solana: I kind of think Canada is on a long term path to American integration. It's like the, the way is just in terms of. It's a slow [00:40:00] cultural economic, you know, integration until there's just we forget why we're not even the same country and then it just kind of happens.

I don't think it will happen like this. But then also, I would say, like, if the demographics totally change in Canada becomes a very different place. I don't know what that looks like. And that could happen because this country is a country that seems to hate itself is a country that seems to not want to be Canada anymore.

And that is what we're seeing in Europe too. And that is maybe the fundamental thing of our era that I don't understand that the weirdness of our era is like what seems to me to be a pervasive self hatred that in America, we have now room to not be that it used to, we had to be that culturally there is all we have now that everyone else does not have is we have permission.

To love ourselves. And they don't have that in Europe. And in fact, when I was abroad just about a month ago, a few weeks ago for a conference I was in London and that is the thing that everybody kept saying was like, man, I wish that we had that over here. I wish that that we had people who loved it that much over here.

It seems so fun and exciting to be over there right now. They didn't even care [00:41:00] about the policy. They only cared about it. Just like the permission to be excited about being alive and, and being your, your nationality. And yeah, they truly just do not have that there and we do, and that's precious right now.

We'll pop it. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It's funny that you mentioned that. Cause I was talking to some reporters about the prenatal conference and I was like at the last one. Really the most shocking thing about it is that everyone, it was the first time for a long time. I've been with a group of people where everyone was happy to be alive and excited about the future.

Even though they think it's bleak and I think that the reason for this is just cultural evolution, which is the dominant culture in the world right now. It's the urban monoculture as we call it. And to convert somebody out of their birth culture, because the urban monoculture is a very low fertility cultural group, you need to disillusion them with the starting cultural tradition.

If I want to convert somebody out of Americana culture, if I want to convert somebody out of German culture or British culture into the urban monoculture, I need to cut them off from their family, you know, convince [00:42:00] them their parents are horrible, and convince them that the culture itself is horrible, that that's how I deconvert them.

And as such, I need to convince them that they are. Horrible. And a lot of cults do this, you know? And so I think it just sort of spiraled out of control. And then everyone was like, why do we, why do we all hate it? What, like what, why am I supposed to hate my ancestors and our tradition and our civilization?

Mike Solana: Yeah. And then it turns out when you just refuse to do so and a bunch of other people say, yeah, I don't, I'm not doing that either. And you talk about it out loud. The hysterical screaming eventually dies down because it no longer works. It's like the behavior only persists for as long as they get a positive reaction from it and it just eventually it just dies down.

I kind of think of 2020 as I thought of 2017, I thought was the peak and then 2020 happened and I thought, holy s**t, it's worse. Okay. There is, it keeps getting worse. But there's this idea in behaviorism called behavior extinction. [00:43:00] And the idea is that you know, people will act out to get a reaction.

And then when you stop reacting. They don't stop reacting. They don't stop acting out. They actually act out much more at first. It's it's like they have to do much more to get the same reaction and then that works. And so they have to do much more. And the behavior extinction happens when as much as they ever acted out and then they don't get the reaction and then it dies.

And the behavior being that, like The sort of woke behavior is broken and part of that sort of constellation of bad ideas was this expectation that you hate your culture in America. At least that no longer exists. That behavior has gone extinct and those people still maybe there are people out there that have those ideas, but I'm allowed to not and nobody can stop me and nobody even really cares, which is why I find so tedious.

The people who are still doing anti woke. Content in 2025 as like their whole beat, which is like every day. It's woke whack a mole. It's like, look at this [00:44:00] blue haired idiot telling me that that white people are bad. It's like, no one cares anymore. I don't care. Like no one doesn't matter what that idiot says.

They don't have power over me anymore.

Simone Collins: That's actually one of the things I wanted to ask you about, which is a lot of energy and time went to that sort of the resistance. And now you have a whole bunch of people who don't really shouldn't be thinking about that aren't talking about that anymore. I'm really curious to see because you're so.

A finger on the pulse of the cutting edge. Both societally and in the tech world in some spheres, what you're seeing is like new dialogues and new obsessions and new themes that are emerging that people are talking about and obsessing over and thinking about how to solve now that they're not trying to fight.

Sort of progressive overreach.

Mike Solana: I think that whenever Trump is in office, he casts this like crazy smoke screen. He just, I think he just, I'm trying to find the right metaphor for this. But he just makes it hard to think about anything else. And so I think a lot of people are distracted by him and I'm trying my best.

To [00:45:00] sort of be like engaging with the culture, but to not be distracted by him from like, I'm, I'm sort of really refusing to be upset ever by anything that's going on. And whenever he says some crazy thing about tariffs, whatever, I'm just going to wait a few days and see what we learn. And people get mad at me for that, but that's just how I'm going to move on.

But I think a lot of people are distracted by him.

I

think on the far right of politics, on the far left of politics, there's total. Collapse and confusion and not even far left. Let's say the center left. That's where it's collapsed. Confusion disillusionment, sadness. They don't know what to be. And they're just not being productive at all on the far left.

There's excitement because the center left is dead. They have no competition and they're gaining followers. Then on the far right. Not even the far right, the whole spectrum of the right. There's a huge war for what it means to be right wing because Trump is bizarre and he's not the future of the party because no one is like him.

He is. No one else is as pragmatic as him. Even the Trumpians like they're Trumpian. He's not Trumpian. He's just Trump. It's a very different thing. There's no philosophy there for him at all. So whoever comes next, that's the war and you see it. I think [00:46:00] the. On both the economic side, where there's a conflict between the Bannon types and the the sort of the tech writer, the Elon Musk types, and then you see it on the social side, where there's also a conflict between like Elon Musk and his.

It means like Genghis Khan. It's like, how many kids is he going to have with random people? And the Christian right? The people who Pretend they're the Christian right, the trad right, which started as a meme and feels more real to me by the day. I think there's a lot of interesting, just no one knows what it's going to become.

And there's like conflict there, and it, without a common enemy on the woke left, it's becoming much more vicious.

So that is going to be distracting right wing people. And I think it's just going to be that what's happening is just going to be culturally quite chaotic because this is also happening at the same time that media fragmentation has happened.

So not only are all, are all of these things, would it have been natural even with standard media that was closer to what we saw like eight years ago with a few big giant tech companies and then the mainstream media, it's way more fragmented now. So no matter what you believe, you can [00:47:00] hop into a place that confirms all of your biases, shares news with you.

That is true. But super radicalizing about what you're about, what you believe. And so everyone is like very different and becoming more different. And yes, I think chaos for a while, unfortunately.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Here's a question that leads from that, that you might have an answer to. Cause I asked Simone about this.

So Hassan Piker is most popular Twitch streamer. If you look at the most popular long form podcasts eight out of 10 of them are right wing, right, right wing. Why do you think the podcast scene has gone right or right wing people succeed in the podcast scene? And. On YouTube as well. And the, the left is becoming focused on things like Twitch and Tik

Mike Solana: TOK.

I have no idea. I don't know. I've even, I had this idea. Yeah, no, I don't know. I, I actually have no idea. I just know that it's true. And I don't know that I don't know Twitch. I'm not familiar enough with Twitch to know who the other popular people are. I know that a lot of what they do [00:48:00] is, I mean, they love to fight with each other.

And get on into their shows and attack each other. That used to be popular on YouTube and it's not really as much anymore. And that was at a time when YouTube was more left wing. I don't know if there's something related to that, that it's all more He's just like a good WWE kind of star. I don't, I don't know.

That's,

Malcolm Collins: that's, that brings me to another point where you're like, you know, people used to fight when you had the lefties in control. It is something that you mentioned as part of the narrative, which is personally not something I'm seeing. And I've sort of taken it to be like a left wing gaslighting because, you know, they do a lot of this was media is that the right is now fighting each other.

I just personally haven't seen that much of the right fighting each other.

Mike Solana: I mean, you see it even with just like the Babylon B talking about anti semitism and getting attacked for it by there are all sorts of sort of. Is real skeptical where you really see it breaking down is on the question of Israel and Palestine, which is like a shadow war for all sorts.

It's our proxy war for all sorts of ideas about [00:49:00] nationalism and the influence of Jewish people and things like that. And try my best to just stay out of that entire thing. Because I think it's one not what I focus on America only. And then to It just seems like there's no way to enter that world and not become like a way scarier person.

I think that you just become the things that you fight and everybody there that's fighting that I see fighting. I don't want to be like so I've just tried my best to stay out of it. I worry that that fight that's budding up on the right is going to. Kind of overtake us all and we'll be dragged into it and have to pick sides or whatever.

But for now, I don't think we have to, but I do see a lot of fighting on the right. I think it's on the question of Israel, Israel's influence. The influence you see, Bannon really trying to gin up fights between the, what he calls the MAGA right. And what he calls the tech, right. I, those are, I don't believe in that distinction.

Maybe it will become a more serious distinction in the future, but he for sure feels. A conflict there. I just saw him on a Newsom podcast talking about the tech oligarchs and he hates the [00:50:00] influence of tech people on Donald Trump. I think this Elon thing really, really, really bothers him and he's going to stoke those flames and stoke those flames until he gets back into a position at the right hand, I think.

But yeah, those, those fights, I see a lot. I think the left is correct about those, those who is maybe I actually haven't seen the left to talk about this as much.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it's interesting. My, my read of Steve Bannon, and I could be super wrong about this, is he's just like deep state slime and like everybody recognizes that now and he's mad because Elon is showing that he, he was the Elon of the first administration and he did effing nothing.

Mike Solana: Right, exactly. He failed. He ended up in jail. That's, and that, by the way, That's what happens if you fail on this game, you go to prison, like you lose your life. That is what they proved. And that's why the stakes are so high, right? Like we, everyone knows going to prison. If he doesn't nail it, this does not succeed.

We all are going to jail. Like that is what is going to happen. They say it, they actually just f*****g say it is like they lost the game fair and square. And their response to [00:51:00] that is. We should do communism. And and that's, that's like, that's the scary thing that's hanging over our balance. And that's why I worry about people like Hassan, because I think that he's the only one who's being really honest about, about.

His intentions.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and people find that honesty, very attractive, very appealing. I mean, for the same reason they love Trump,

Mike Solana: which is a very difficult question. You'll have to answer eventually. If that conversation picks up is like, do you have to act like them or something? Because that, again, it's like, it's just, it's the only way to survive a fight like this, I think, is you become not even, I don't know if you can even resist it.

If you're in a fight with someone, I think you just start to become them. That is what happened with everybody who fought. The woke people is like, you just fought fire with fire. You used to, you get obsessed with the culture wars you became. And I say this even a little bit like just self reflectively, like I became too much like them over the last few years.

I don't regret it because I don't know that I could have been effective in that environment if I didn't,

but

it is a sad thing. I look back at [00:52:00] my work from. Six, seven years ago when I was first, like, why can't people just let me write about this f*****g Mars thing? Like I'm doing a podcast on Mars. Like leave me alone.

It's not white supremacy. Shut up. Like, I look back at that guy and I'm like, man, I have, we like, I personally lost a lot by Fighting this thing. And I want to like get back to it, but it's hard. Like you just, you change in this kind of, in this kind of idea environment.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I can see that. One thing that I find really interesting that to expand it a bit from what's going on in the tech world.

And I don't know how much insight you have into like a nerd culture stuff, which is another area that we do like a lot of stuff on, but the, how nerdy are we talking? Well, I, I was going to say Too much

Simone Collins: Warhammer

Mike Solana: lore? I played Magic the Gathering, and I had familiar with Dungeons

Malcolm Collins: and Dragons. The, the breakdown of the video game, like the woke video game industry in the United States has been pretty catastrophic to the extent where you'll have like 400 million dollars, and this has [00:53:00] happened multiple times, it's about to happen again with Assassin's Creed Shadows, 400 million going to a project and like 500 people buy it or like 1000 people buy it.

And it's, it's, it's destroying a giant industry. There was like the major media industry. And at the same time as I'm seeing this industry burning, I then see the, the news media, like the traditional MSNBC. It almost feels like a light switch flipped and everyone now is like, Oh yeah, they're not like meaningful sources of news anymore.

Even the people who work at these companies,

Mike Solana: well, even the left, they're like, Oh, they're too right wing or whatever. Like there's the trust in media is totally collapsed. But I think I was going to say, as you were talking about, I was going to connect it with media and I, I just see that as opportunity, especially as AI as our, as our AI tools advance and we are more able to create these things more easily ourselves.

You're just going to see new gaming companies and new people, or gaming people, single individual creators of incredibly popular, beautiful games. You're already seeing that on the media side. And that's maybe the future of everything is people doing more with less and creating new [00:54:00] institutions, new balance of status and power and wealth and things like this.

Malcolm Collins: It's funny that you mentioned that we're actually doing that. We're building a video game company right now with AI. Which I'm really excited for because the big like institutional players are so bad at using AI effectively.

Mike Solana: Yeah, I mean, well, so new it's like, and no one has ever super incentivized as a giant to embrace the new thing for this.

Like the, what is the famous innovators dilemma? You don't want to be creating the thing. That's going to put your, your bread and butter out of business. I guess they should be able to use new tools, but if they create tools that give way more autonomy to the user, just to get to a point where, You start to wonder what the point of this thing is, which is like, you know, that's what kind of is happening with the sub stack ecosystem and social media and stuff like this.

It just got to a point where I remember the whole blue check conversation was so crazy. And when Twitter was still Twitter. And the first thing that Elon did was he was like, I'm taking rid of, you're no, no, you no longer get blue checks just because you're like this anointed, you know, priest, high priest of the establishment, you're going to [00:55:00] have to pay for a blue check.

And anyone can have a blue check if you're a person and you give me money. And they were furious. The shift had already, like no one took that blue check seriously. It was just like, you don't deserve this because you have, you have 400 followers and you're crazy and you happen to work for like Vox.

That's, I am more influential than you. And that's crazy. Like you don't, you're not more special. You don't deserve a new, a special suite of tools and access to the administration or the art, what I consider my administration, which is whoever runs Twitter. You're not, you're not better than me. And he just, Elon just made, he forced his company to confirm with the reality that already existed.

And that's always a really interesting place to be when, when there is something that everybody already knows to be true, but you can't say it, or everybody's already doing something, but you can't, you can't talk about it or discuss it or plan for it. And then someone just. This is the real thing. This is what we're doing.

This is reality. And people love that. It's [00:56:00] like, thank you for saying the truth. And also now the world is different overnight.

Simone Collins: We're going to see a lot more of that in the coming years. What do

Mike Solana: you think the things are? Maybe that what is the one, what, maybe one thing that you think most people kind of think, but you can't say

Simone Collins: about social media or the news.

I think people realize that we live in a post job economy already. And that also money doesn't matter anymore. Those are my two big things.

Malcolm Collins: It's in the process of not matter. And Elon has said this as well, like because of AI because of AI

Simone Collins: and also because of sort of debt cycles and inflation. And we're, we're headed towards a Jubilee.

That's not going to play out like a Jubilee, like social security is going to fall apart. But then I think the government's just going to mint money to sort of cover it. I don't think social security is going to be privatized. And then, I mean, even if that doesn't happen, so even if our currency isn't massively devalued that way people are already behaving in a way especially younger generations and especially people who aren't wealthy and there there's a lot of them like, well, money just doesn't matter anymore.

I'm going to be in debt forever. I'm [00:57:00] going to put it on a credit card. Cause I'm never going to pay it off. It doesn't matter what the interest is because it's never going to be paid off.

Malcolm Collins: Weight of relating to money has inverted. So historically, the core store of value was anything that was fungible and had a set value like land or Bitcoin or house, you know, whatever.

But gold but now because those things were great for storing value because the number of people who wanted them was growing exponentially. But when the population begins to stabilize and then begins to collapse. The core thing that we thought of as a store of value collapses, and you could say, well, you could put it all into the economy like the S and P or something like that.

But all of the large companies are going to be the companies that are most at risk from the AI transition. So all of the places where you could store value are very unsafe.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And I think a lot of people feel like they've been scammed so many times. Yeah. I mean, I can't buy a house. I can't, you know. I can't afford this.

I'm in debt. Money doesn't matter anymore. Everything's going to be on credit. And eventually we're going to say, well, this happened in Japan a couple of times where they're just [00:58:00] kind of like, huh? Okay.

Malcolm Collins: It is always a part of the beginning of demographic collapse.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Let's what, what debt it's gone.

So yeah, money's going to go crazy. And I think a lot of people are already the idea of

Mike Solana: our national debt. Like, I don't know how you pay that back. So do you just have to say, I'm not paying that back? I think that that's actually how it ends. Yeah.

Simone Collins: And our currency can be. Massively inflated until it doesn't really matter anymore.

And, you know, the portion of our budget that it becomes is going to be so silly because we get to just inflate it to high heaven. So yeah, that's, it's something that we think about a lot because, you know, we, we keep, our kids are now becoming obsessed with money and asking us. You know, how, how will I, how will I buy things?

And, and where do I get my job? And we're like, no, you won't get a job. That's never going to happen. And it's, it's, we're not trying to figure out what to tell them. To help me

Mike Solana: understand, what do you think is going to happen rather than having a job?

Simone Collins: You're going to have to create a niche personality.

That's that is capable of selling gatherings, events, access [00:59:00] or artisan goods of some sort. That people want that a niche of people wants

Mike Solana: That's a fraction of the population. So what happens to what, I don't know what that world looks like.

Malcolm Collins: There have been worlds in the past. And I think that people just fundamentally, like in our generation, art.

Capable of accepting this. But if you go back to like the 1910s 1900s you know, you didn't have a welfare. You didn't have social security. You didn't have medicaid when people were poor. They just died. And we're going to go back and a lot of people are just gonna And the rest of us are going to be scraping by and there's going to be a few people with an astronomical level.

There's going

Simone Collins: to be extended families sort of, I mean, we're going to, I think we're going to see a bit of a return to feudalism where you're going to see sort of these walled gardens where the top 001 percent is going to be. And then these ecosystems around it sort of in a, in a feudal format.

I think that there could be a world in which there's basically UBI, but then you're going to see systems kind of like [01:00:00] in you can see in prisons where. Sure. Your food is covered, your housing is covered, but there are all these artificial economies where people are making food for each other, they're trading services, they're cutting each other's hair, they're threading, they're, they're doing all this.

So there's going to be a lot of like human to human service exchanges. And that's, that's for the, everyone else who basically is just getting by sort of living in these. Localized and I'm not meaning even geographically, but often sometimes we call them like techno feudal where like you're sort of living based on your cultural subset, like, you know, the furries over here and like the, whatever.

And they're all sort of exchanging services and you're probably a member of a bunch, like you're probably a member of your geographical one and then maybe one or two social set ones like the FLDS and you're this geographic area or like EDM enthusiasts of this weird subset. And. this local geographic area, and you're going to be exchanging goods and services based on that.

And the ones who really thrive and manage to gain wealth, who are not part of the 0. 001 percent who just maintain all the wealth in the future, you have to have some kind of celebrity status where that 001 percent [01:01:00] comes to you for their artisan vegan leather bike shoes. Because you are the one, the master, the one whose, whose content they've watched, who, you know, they get obsessed with your artistry or the fact that you can weave.

This rare silk fabric using the method used in the 1500s in, in some obscure region in China, that kind of thing. You gotta, you gotta sell to the autist and you gotta be an autist. I guess I

Mike Solana: just, things will change. That's such a radically different world. That

Simone Collins: it's more like it's been for thousands of years.

It's back. It's back to what things were. We're in the aberration. We're in the sci fi world.

Mike Solana: What, what is the, what, it was like I guess the era of industrialization.

Simone Collins: The era of industrialism and the era of, basically with the rise

Malcolm Collins: of,

Simone Collins: it began with the British Imperial Empire and it is ending with AGI.

Mike Solana: What I'm hearing is colonialism was not that bad.

Simone Collins: It was [01:02:00] a good run. It was interesting. It produced a lot of cool stuff. It's just also, it's like a wave crashing on itself. It will produce something new.

Malcolm Collins: For us, this is existential. Because, you know, we want to have a lot of kids. We want to create a culture.

We're building a religion. And so we've got to think about, you know, next hundred, next two hundred years. And I just think that things are going to be astronomically harder for the next generation. And they're going to have to, like you would need to in, in, in these earlier eras, figure out how to support yourself, but maybe without a community.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, the future is here, just not evenly distributed. You can get got by probably telling a kid. Teaching them to get a job and do that and like do the traditional breadwinning stuff, but it's going to be shakier. It's going to, it's kind of like a game of musical chairs. There are not going to be that many chairs left.

I think a lot of the people getting laid off from corporate tech jobs and from the government are just, they're just never going to get jobs again.

Mike Solana: Yeah. Well, the good thing is we'll be able to see that happening soon and maybe we'll have more information. The

Simone Collins: numbers are so off, like the reporting's really [01:03:00] off.

So I feel like we're flying blind a little bit

Mike Solana: in tech

Simone Collins: and in employment and do people have jobs anymore? I think that we are, we've gone off the rails.

Mike Solana: Here's, I think one good indicator that they do have jobs is the protest sizes have completely plummeted since the BLM era. Everyone is out of work.

That's really the true, that's the real story of the BLM protests and why they were so big is because no one had anything to do. And right now you're looking at protests at like Trump tower or whatnot. And even like they're, they're cleaning up BLM alley. And no one's even there protesting. There are reasons

Simone Collins: to lie flat.

Malcolm Collins: I know. I think it's the Hikikomori causation that happened during COVID. I think COVID taught people, you can just stay in your house in bedrot. And a lot of people never came out again.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Why protest? I mean, they know it doesn't do anything. Like

Malcolm Collins: it just, there's, I think it's not. We see in our fan base who reach out to us sometimes and stuff like this, just never interacted with another person, really.[01:04:00]

Mike Solana: Yeah. I don't know why. It's super not rational, but I just feel like this is not, it's not that bad. I think even AI. You're so

Simone Collins: wholesome. You're so like, you're so, your interpretations, though being heterodox and though being cutting edge, I don't know how you managed to do it. They come across as so kind, so charitable, so optimistic.

And I love it. I love, I love your vision. I just

Mike Solana: think it's like, like even with AI. It's did you guys see this Sam Altman? He posted the AI telling a fiction story.

Simone Collins: No,

Mike Solana: it just wasn't. He's like, this is great. And all the people were like, this is there. It's fake. It can do fiction. And I just felt like, it could do a lot, but it couldn't do what he said it could do.

And we're talking. I don't think so, actually, because what it's really good doing is predicting The words that are going to come next based on words that have already happened. And

Simone Collins: guess what? So are you. [01:05:00] So are you. We've done it. Do you

Mike Solana: believe, you believe that I am an LLM? This is, but we've always done this.

Simone Collins: We think that there's. Abundant proof.

Mike Solana: But this is what people have always done with technology. If you look back 150 years ago or whatever it was, people were like, what is the future going to be? And it's like a crank machine that gives you knowledge. It's like, how does the brain work? The brain, the way we describe it, we describe it in terms of the technology that we see.

And so I don't think it's like this. LLM is what we are. I think that that is just how we're understanding ourselves because it's the most advanced thing that we have and we recognize that the brain is Actually still the most advanced Piece of technology that exists in the world by far. It's a very, very strange and I don't utilize

Simone Collins: his training data to come up with.

I mean, like, come online, like

Mike Solana: a car, like it's not the same. I think it's not the same. We can do things that it can't do. And have you

Simone Collins: been in a car with a 16 year old who was just learning how [01:06:00] to drive?

Mike Solana: Cause I've been the 16 year old who was just,

I'd note here that this is a bit different from times in the past where we have, , said, Hey, humans work kind of like a machine. , it would be more akin to if we said, Hey, humans work kind of like a machine. And then we got the first fMRI images of a person's head and it was filled with gears. , that is basically what's happening as fMRIs.

Studies on how humans process language get better with LLM related stuff. We have an episode on that right here if you're interested in this topic. But I didn't want to derail this particular conversation too much

Malcolm Collins: no, hold on, the smartest humans can do things that AI can't do.

I don't know if like, there's a few things that AI is bad at because they appear to be using different systems in our brains like counting or something like that. But I don't know if like, when I look at the, the language processing of AI, that seems better [01:07:00] than 80 percent of humans. 70%? It's not about Sorry, I'm

Mike Solana: getting a phone call right now.

Simone Collins: Oh, we've probably gone over time. Yeah, we'll leave you go. We kept you for way longer than we said we were

Mike Solana: going to. This is another fascinating conversation. I wish we could have done more about it. But it's been great talking to you guys.

Malcolm Collins: Thank you so much. Thank you for coming. Is there going to be another Hereticon?

Mike Solana: I think there will be, yeah, I think it'll, I don't know if it's going to be the last one or not. Maybe these things will be good. It's a feel like a trilogy is important,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, we love having you on. Go check him out. Oh yes. Very similar to this show, but much more mild. And if you hate our AI takes, which like a big part of our fanbase does, because we're very pro AI, like, this guy is like us, but with saner AI takes. More optimism. This is if you like us, but you don't like our pro Luigi Mangione stuff.

It's like us, but not pro Luigi, you see, thanks guys. so much. Enjoy your weekend. Bye.

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