Ep 77: Mike Solana on Exposing Government Corruption, Saving San Francisco, and Building a New Media Empire

0:00taxpayers in san francisco are being forced to fund organizations that for example are shutting down the Bay Bridge. That's just crazy. And nobody knew that until we went and filed an information request and was like, they're getting paid by the city. This is crazy.

0:20Mike Solana is the chief marketing officer at Founders Fund. He's one of my favorite people to follow online. He's a really funny guy, really thoughtful guy. And he just recently relaunched Pirate Wires, an amazing website that a lot of us follow. He's one of the key leaders in new media and very thoughtful about what's happening in the media landscape and in our world today. I think you'll enjoy our conversation with Mike. I'm Joe Lonsdale. Welcome to American Optimist. We have with us today, Mike Solana, Chief Marketing Officer at Founders Fund, founder of PirateWires. Mike, thanks for joining us.

0:47Thanks for having me. You have 65 ,000 subscribers now at PirateWires? Yep, we're up to 65 ,000. To be honest, we haven't really focused on growth at all. We've been focusing on product until just now. We just launched the site. So at this point now, Now we've got something that I'm, I think my, my, my thinking about it internally has always been, I wanted to create the thing that I wanted to read. And once we did that, once I was excited about that, we would start, you know, doing the growth game. So we're, we're just about ready to kind of do that. So you've created a thing you want to read.

1:15A lot of us are enjoying reading it. How do you think about the future of media? Vice is bankrupt. Buzzfeed is dead. Sports Illustrated just fired its entire staff, which is probably a good thing after everything they were doing. What's going to happen? How's the media company survive in this area? Do you just need a billionaire? How does it work? Yeah. I wish I had a more optimistic. I do have an optimistic answer for this. Obviously, I'm going to build a media company for a reason. I think it's really hard, first of all. It's not a joke. The route that we saw, this funny thing happened maybe, I think it was last week, this journalist for The Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz, went viral with a video clip where she was addressing the total route in media.

1:54And people were making fun of her, I think for hysterics or something, but everything she said was actually correct. Like separate now and then she's, I'm a huge fan of Taylor Lawrence. Um, huge person. Really? Well, in the same way that you have a fan of like a villain on a reality show or something like I love her. She says she's like the villain that you love. She does. I think she's a genius at her craft, which is whatever this new medium of, and it's a whole separate conversation. I want to focus on the substance of what she said about the media. It is bad. It's really bad. Everything across the board is pretty bleak.

2:21And I said, as I was talking about this issue on our own podcast the other day and I was like, man, it's a weird time to be building a media company. I think that there are two huge overlapping trends here in media. One is the business model is totally screwed, just totally decimated after a handful of things. Advertisers have other places to go. You took away advertisers, you took away the, what is it, the, in the back of magazines where people used to, the classifieds, you took away all of that. There were multiple revenue. Basically, tech just ripped this stuff all out. Yes. So that is completely gone.

2:54And then you now have additionally. So you had the rise of new media, which was really an advertising game. You wanted to drive as much attention as you could. It was traffic. There's a great book actually called Traffic, which pretty much nails this. It was like the top 10 of whatever sketchy headlines and people. The rise of BuzzFeed. I think it was Ben Smith. So that led inevitably to everybody who was writing, trying to sort of fish for that traffic to sounding totally identical in the first place. So all the clickbait ends up sounding like. Completely bombastic in the second and it eroded trust.

3:26So you have now nobody trusting you and also your business model is totally screwed. So everything is dying. And I think that because of the internet, because there's so much noise out there right now, that's just the nature of the machine. It's never been more information available. The average person is at least, um and by say at least i mean i i see opportunity in the fact that the average person doesn't want to deal with it they do want to know what's going on can you do honest clickbait like what's the answer is there some kind of like no i think i think that the answer is difficult you have to just build trust and maintain it and build a large loyal following of paid subscribers then you can do advertising thing and whatnot but you can never i believe my personal orientation here is i don't ever want advertising to determine what i'm doing because the moment it does that the social media algorithms, which you have to ride to get the advertising revenue, they destroy your voice.

4:21They just flatten you. They erode trust. And it's kind of a, it's a devil's bargain, really. You're gone. So you've just got to build the audiences and that's the future. I think it's just a fragmented media landscape. So our society lost a lot of things with this, right? Like obviously there's like a lot of bullshit and negative parts of media that are, that seem to hate tech and hate America. And maybe I'm happy for them to go away, but like, it seems like we've lost like good investigative reporting about local governments, these things, you know? It's important. I think I always, I criticize the media the same way I criticize San Francisco and people often get it twisted.

4:50They think, oh, you hate San Francisco or you hate the media. I'm obsessed with both. I love them. That's why I talk about these things so much. The press, I think about local politics reporting, especially. I think about the fact that in San Francisco, up until we started writing a lot and sort of the culture there changed, people didn't know who their board of supervisors were. They They didn't know who was on their board of education. They didn't realize that those were the people who were responsible for everything that was happening in the city. One of my favorite stories you put out recently is that the SF was somehow actually funding these protests.

5:22Yeah, the Arab resources. I didn't. So my colleague, River, we published the story at Pirate Wires. He wrote the story. We've got my other colleague, Sanjan, is also on the SF. She runs the SF Beat. They've been digging at this for a while. And I think that's a huge deal that taxpayers in San Francisco are being forced to fund organizations that, for example, are shutting down the Bay Bridge. That's just crazy. And nobody knew that until we went and filed an information request and was like, they're getting paid by the city. This is crazy. So, yeah, it's a big deal. And you need journalism like that.

5:54And there are an unlimited number of stories that are not being told because there's no money. You asked before, do you need a billionaire? And I think that's actually a big part of it. right now. I think there is a model and we're working on that model and it's an exciting, fun way to build a business. But when I started thinking about the AROC thing, so the Arab Resource Center getting the money from the city, they were also getting money from billionaire philanthropists. And that's the entire ecosystem of nonprofits across the country is funded by billionaires. And it's like, we need better billionaires.

6:27We need billionaires who are putting that money into other shit. I've noticed a lot of times it's like the kids or the spouses, The people who don't create the money themselves get this money. And then they use it in my experience for particularly stupid things. I think that's true. I think it's, I spent a lot of time trying to psychoanalyze these people and it just, you can get lost in it. I do think there's like a guilt associated with, they have this sense that maybe they didn't deserve the money and it's like, they didn't. So therefore we should give it to places that throw like, that throw like paint on like paintings or soup on paintings, I suppose.

6:56This is weird. I think they also don't spend a lot of time thinking about it at all is the other thing. A lot of people who, what was his name? Ackman is going, he's getting hugely popular right now. He's really focused on the DEI thing and Harvard and whatnot, all the higher education, MIT. But lots of posters on X are happy to point out where his money has gone and it's in like very stupid places historically. And that's because, it's not because he's a bad person. I think it's because he's too rich and he's not, there's no such thing as too rich. He is putting, he's being thoughtless about how he's spending his money.

7:32And that has a huge, huge downstream effect on culture. This is a big thing for me. I get in trouble for saying this, but I'm in the Jewish community and I have a lot of friends in the Jewish community. We have different politics. We argue, debate things. It's healthy. But a lot of them who are on the left have been supporting a lot of these groups that A, support a lot of the DEI stuff that actually ends up creating anti-Semitism and B, ends up supporting a lot of stuff about systemic racism, which teaches you that successful people are oppressors, which basically comes back. And now 19 to 25 year olds, majority of them don't like Jews because we're successful.

8:02And so you literally have people like supporting things that end up hurting us. They're not software. Yeah. From the leftist, from more leftist Jews now, you see an attempt to work themselves back into the DEI framework. No, no, no, no. We're also oppressed. Which is exactly what you don't want to do. No, you have to get rid of this entire machine. That's my one concern about Ackman is that, I mean, he was certainly activated by the realization that holy shit Jews don't count it's like no shit where have you been the philosophical frameworks are not quite sound yes they're the whole thing needs to be torn out and we have to focus on what people actually are producing in the world so should we be getting some more of the smart billionaires to build these things is that yes I think that billionaires I mean I have like kind of two speeds on billionaires I want billionaires to be doing inspiring things like I was just saying that why isn't there not a giant colossus in the San Francisco Bay like Elon Musk Like, just do it, build it.

8:51You can do it. Like, there's no reason. That would troll them pretty hard. Like, we just need huge posters, artwork all throughout the city. There's so much you can do with money. And there's so much of it sitting there. You can win a culture game. You can run it almost on your own. I know, like, Coit Towers, this thing we did, like, 100 years ago. You can never do it again. Yes, that's it. Which is crazy, right? They'll try and get in your way at every step of the way. But you kind of, wherever you can build, you have to. And I think you do need to fund. I think that people should be finding media entities that they like, writers they like and giving them enough money to hire 10 more people like them and do what they do.

9:23And I don't know how you kind of can't. I understand if you can't find the writers, you know, I can't, I understand if you think the media doesn't exist, there's not good media out there, but there, there definitely is. You just have to kind of, I think, think about it maybe the same way that you think about blowing money on some college trust or whatever, like think about it tactically. Think about what is, what is contributing to the culture that you want to live in and you fund those new institutions. But you are saying basically it's very hard for these things to become self-sistening. I mean, Barry Weiss is doing great work.

9:53I think her thing is going to actually make money too. I guess it's possible, right? So there's, she's doing great and there are lots of good, I mean, we're doing great. There are solid, there are great incumbents. You're going to be able to make money though on this eventually? Is that the goal? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. Yes. But the, it's hard when I, when I think about, this is going to, I'm trying to think of a way to say this. It's not going to sound arrogant in terms of like success as a writer as a side it was like i mean i had a i have a career at founders fund separate from that i started writing and my job as a writer in terms of the revenue that that generates is you know top five percent in the whole country in terms of the most successful you could possibly be as a writer and that is it's not that much money it's like we're talking before I built it into PirateWires, it was like generating like$150 ,000 a year.

10:45I love the shtick you have that you're a billionaire on X because the people who criticize you. Yeah, they really believe it. But I'm also manifesting it. It was billionaire media mogul from the ground floor. And you're going, now you're going for that. I'm going in. I love it. So maybe we can get the 150K up to a few hundred million. Well, that was, I mean, that was just for one writer. That wasn't for the business, but. No, of course. No, no, no. Yeah, but it's still impressive. I agree, it's hard. So before we get more into culture and politics, tell us a bit about your background. How do you, how'd you land a founder's fund?

11:10Where'd you start? I was an editor at Penguin Books way back in the day. And my goal there was to learn how publishing worked so I could publish my own stuff. And then randomly, I was just excited about libertarian politics. Amazing. When I think of an editor at Penguin Books, I think of like an angry communist who probably doesn't like tech people very much. Were there lots of great people there? Was it just like you and a bunch of others? They were not thinking about tech people very much. Nobody in New York knew about tech people. When I met Peter, so I met Peter, they were all like kind of hipstery, alt-lit type people back then.

11:40Got it. I was in the habit of reading libertarian blogs because I was super into anarcho-capitalism at the time. Like Rick Murray Rothbard type stuff? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. And so I was reading Reason Magazine a lot, and they had published something or linked to something of Peter's called The Education of a Libertarian. And it was an essay that he published in Cato in like 2008. and eight. And in it, he talked about something called the Seasteading Institute. You know, I introduced him to Patrick Friedman. Oh, did you really? Yeah. Well, that is how, so you're responsible for my journey.

12:15A small role. Because, because it was through the Seasteading Institute. I, I hit up Peter about his essay, which I found moving. And I was just like, that was really cool. And that's all I said. It was in a Facebook message. And then separately, I wrote the Seasteading Institute and I was like, I want to meet anarchists. Like I'll do, whatever you want, like for free. I'll write for you. Your Wikipedia page is abysmal. Your website sucks. Like you clearly can't write. I can, and I'll just do it for you. Uh, and they said, Patrick wrote back almost immediately. He was like, yeah, it was either Patrick or his colleague James at that point.

12:48I forget now which one of them it was that wrote me back initially, but they were like, yes. And also we want you to throw a meetup groups for us in New York, which I thought was strange, but whatever. Um, and then after that, Peter randomly responded with the Facebook message. We kind of traded a couple notes about libertarianism and he showed up to the first meetup group that I did in New York. Wow. That's cool. Um, yeah, we became friends and that was like 2009, I think was when that was when that happened. And, uh, maybe like a year and a half later, he asked me to work with him at Founders Fund.

13:18That's very impressive that Peter would show up to a meetup group like that. Actually. I like that he was like that open to, He's really, he, Peter wants to meet people with interesting ideas and he'll go to wherever they are. Yeah. And so he's always, he's always doing stuff like that. But my first thing that I worked on with him, um, it was a long process before I actually got the job. It was like a year in between, but the job was, uh, it was my colleague and I, uh, Scott, Scott Nolan and I, uh, at Founders Fund. We, he had just started around that time as well as like 13 years ago. So we came on to build out his class at Stanford called CS193 that would ultimately become his book Zero to One.

13:57So all of that information, our job was to distill all of his thinking about startups into basically chapters. And that's what we did. And that was a crazy, insane job. And I threw our first CEO summit, which I still work on today. Amazing. So you're a full-time founders fund, but you're a full-time writing and launching us as well. Yeah, I'm doing both right now. And you're in Miami, but you love San Francisco too. I love America. And I think that you can't just let a really important city die. I think that's crazy. When people are like, let San Francisco die. It's like San Francisco doesn't just belong to San Francisco.

14:32It belongs to the United States. And it's a very important asset. And also one thing I never understand about the exit people is like, where do you think it's going next? You think that the rot is going to stay there after San Francisco's gone? For me, America is the one that we have to hold. Yeah. And as someone living in Texas, that's where I kind of make my stand for America. Yep. But I, I agree. California is very broken. I thought, you know, it's, you have to remember, I left like four years ago and I've been fighting for San Francisco for 10 years and there was just like no hope and no one agreed with me.

15:00It was extremely frustrating. I guess my whole life doing that or he goes somewhere functional and actually fight for my values in a bunch of other states, which is what I'm doing. I think that is good. I also think that San Francisco is easier to change than maybe people realize. I think at this point, when you have the whole moderate left activated and realizing how crazy the far left is, I think you're right. I think this is a point to actually charge and try to do something there. And I think after this, for me, if this thing, whatever's happening now, this nascent sort of the Gary Tan movement fails, then there's nothing left there.

15:32But I think that this is – I have never – and I've lived there – or I guess I live in Miami now. I had lived there for around like 13 years and I'd never seen this much of an, of a chance at actually changing things better. So also about this intersection of tech and culture, what's going on now in the culture wars is October 7th seems to have like red pilled a bunch of the, in my opinion, a bunch of the Jews who, who have been obviously funding the far left, not knowing any better. And now they realize that's really bad. Are things swinging back? Are we going to be able to take back our institutions?

16:01Are people going to fight and do this or, or is this going to be a temporary thing where, you know, where we don't actually go back and fix everything. I go back and forth on this. I, I think it is undeniably important that you can say anything right now and not be afraid of it. Like I have not, I can't remember the last time I was afraid to share an opinion in public. That alone indicates a massive culture change. That's a big shift. And, um, and the effects of that are, are things like Bill Ackman. It's when you have a culture that is open, sufficiently open, people like Bill Ackman stand up and decide, okay, I'm not going to have my status obliterated if I decide to fight this fight.

16:38And so that's really important. I think you're going to see a lot more people like that. The thing that I worry about now that everything can be said online is that we start to see happen to the sort of center, center, right, what happened to the left, where your craziest people are associated with your sanest people. I see a lot of gnarly things now on, I mean, we've been living inside of the gnarly things on the left that was like the stew they controlled the culture i'm seeing this sort of new stuff rise up and um there's some gnarly things on the right there's bad stuff everywhere and i am worried about we're talking about like like october 7th and that's a great example of it where you see i see just as much anti-semitism from the right as the left um really you see as much on the front right now i i i mean i'm pretty deep on on the right wing Twitter stuff.

17:27Like I look around, I see a lot and there is a real belief that Jews control the world. Like a real, it's a very... I'm doing my best when I'm not there yet. I am on these like lists of Jews that debate things and try to work on things, but it's like, we don't all agree even ourselves. So I'm not really sure how we'd be fully in charge. I think, I mean, it's hard to tell how much of that is just LARPing and people kind of saying crazy shit. And it seems like that's part of what it is on the far, on that side. Well, it's part of what it is on social media. Social media is, if you just look at it, it's a world of cartoon heads.

17:59I mean, people even use, it's like anime figures on the sort of left, like the furry adjacent left. Then you have like based Greek statues on the right. And it's like a cartoon war. And I do think it shapes the world to a certain extent. But sometimes I wonder if I overemphasize how important that particular fight is. So this is really interesting because you're seeing this dangerous stuff. But you believe, obviously, in free speech and ascending opinions, even offensive or taboo ones, right? You started something called Hereticon. Tell us about Hereticon. Yeah. So Hereticon, I wrote the essay that launched the idea of Hereticon in 2019.

18:36And at that point, the idea was, you know, anything sufficiently new and important is going to feel controversial. And we were living in a culture that stifled any kind of dissent whatsoever. So this was not just a platform for people to come and speak their forbidden idea, but to celebrate dissent kind of conceptually. It's very healthy for a culture that was like way too opposite. Yes, it was totally the opposite. And I think in that time, over from 19, 2019 until today, the thing ended up happening in 2021 because of COVID happened immediately after that. Pause the thing. I think at this point, the Overton window is it's still narrow in certain places, but it's broad enough that you really can speak.

19:18I think you have to keep speaking. I think the thing here also is most ideas are wrong. Most bad ideas are wrong. Most forbidden ideas are also wrong. Most people are not that bright. And that's fine. It's like one out of a thousand or whatever is an idea that you really need to hear. And this was proven out during COVID where like the forbidden things were the true things. So we all just saw it. And I think it's maybe not so shocking of an idea anymore, but it's still an important idea that I always kind of come back to. Yep. And one of your most popular essays was It was called Fifth Estate.

19:49And you talk about the outside influence of the tech corporations over speech. And obviously, America's founders didn't anticipate this at all. And it does seem to be a problem for our society. Obviously, Elon has balanced this a little bit by taking over one of them and pushing back. But what else should we be doing here? What's going to happen? Well, I think there's an interesting intellectual question, maybe, that none of us have figured out how we feel about it. I came from a sort of more anarchist place. I'm definitely more moderate now than I was. Because you're making money? In my early 20s.

20:18Maybe it's that, but I was not, I was an anarcho-capitalist. So I was like, I was like, no, let the corporations rule the world. I didn't give a shit. But in practice, you know, when it comes to the concept of free speech, for example, do you care about the principle or do you care about the first amendment? Um, is maybe the very first question you have to ask yourself because in a world of social media oligopolies that were censoring everybody, what you had was the first amendment was totally intact. They were operating within the framework of the First Amendment, but we had no free speech. So if you're living in a world where you don't, you effectively do not have free speech, even though the First Amendment is not being violated, then what do you want?

20:57And I wanted, I want freer speech. Well, what had been violated in the sense that the government was not allowed to get corporations to do things, and the government was very clearly funding things to help get these things to censor stuff. So in that sense, it probably was violated, but I guess you can imagine a world where the government wasn't doing that, and they were still censoring. I'm actually not convinced that it was as bad as it seems. It was definitely bad. You don't want the government ever anyone in the government talking to anybody at social media companies but nobody was actually legally forced there was just this implicit threat of of the government i think the bigger problem is the culture was completely captured by one ideology so everybody who runs who ran the social media platforms who worked in academia who worked in government not just elected officials but the people who run washington dc everyone who works in corporate america they're all the same politically you can just look at the donations that they give they give them all It's the Democrats get the money because that class of person just happens to agree.

21:48And so what you had in 2020, 2021 was a kind of de facto censorship, a decentralized censorship apparatus that worked just as effectively to a certain extent as top down. And I wonder, you know, I mean, really Elon is the big thing that's keeping that from, from persisting. But that is not enough. Like that he's not, he's one person, his opinions could change. Like it's, it is really dangerous. What else should we be doing? What else should we be doing? Yeah. What else is there to be done to confront this and to fix it? Is should we all go kidnap Zuckerberg and convince him to the top? It seems like he's probably doing this from everything I see.

22:26Cause it basically, you saw FTC just came out with a bunch of groups they went after. and his name wasn't on the list. So it seems like he's getting helped by doing this too. It's like a weird incentive. How do we fix this? I think that there's the nuclear option of government regulation of some kind, but I don't even know how you could pass that because the left and the right fundamentally disagree on what has to happen with social media. The left wants more censorship and control. The right wants none when it comes to politics. I think that email is the safest thing that we have right now. and even that is kind of filtered out by Gmail, but you can get a different, like, I mean, you could take your email sort of elsewhere.