#797 - Mike Solana - TikTok Ban, Media War & The Corruption Of College

27:25He's a sort of crypto -e and our co -capitalist -e type guy, who tried his best to maximize freedom for as long as he could, and then faced a lot of just impossible to overcome obstacles with a publicly traded company. The biggest one would have been advertising. So you have these huge advertising giants that will turn you off overnight, and that could happen to him. And if that happened to him, and in fact previously they had risked they'd been threatened with this. You lose your stock price plummets and you risk a hostile takeover, which actually has been attempted on that company. And so he was forced into this pragmatic place, which he has, I think, an ideological person really hated.

28:10He tried to create a technology that would have ended the problem completely. No censorship ever would have happened, had to have happened again if Blue Sky worked in the way that he wanted. And then that didn't quite work out either. He wasn't in charge of that one, but there's a lot there I can talk about Jack for a while. I think the main thing is just I actually do believe that he was facing a set of problems that had known it had ever faced before. Other people contemporaries of his were facing them along with him. He did slightly better than all of them, I think. In terms of - Maybe they didn't have the value set of the ideal just goal.

28:47They did not. So if you're judging him as, you know, and he often is judged as someone who is very bad for free speech, someone who is anti -free speech, someone who is pro -sensorship, pro -government. He's in fact, to a certain degree, the face of that for a lot of people, especially on the right, it's not fair. He is the best on free speech of all of his contemporaries. He is the only one who I can see who is genuinely ideologically among the giants, who is genuinely ideologically motivated in favor of that stuff. he just failed. And in a kind of tragic way, it's the story of him is, I don't know, sort of touching to me, because I just see someone who really did actually try and who for whatever reason couldn't, taking the company private solves a lot of the problems that he was facing, not all of them.

29:40The company is still under a lot of pressure and facing a huge uphill climb, but it's the first step in the right direction and it's a step that Jack himself actually helped achieve for Elon. He was a part of that. You know, he wanted this. So is it the case then as different social medias, different platforms kind of become more and less popular with certain subsets that you are going to have, you know, everyone knows like there's probably some magic on Rumble's comment section and truth social. But you don't think you still think, well, yeah, but Twitter's everyone, is in it and Instagram's everyone.

30:18Like everyone's got the, like there's a big four or whatever. Are you, do you think that we're going to see this start to sort of splinter off more so? And that means that you're going to get a skewed perspective. Right wing is going to see the world's going to see more right wing and progressive people are going to see more progressive. That's just the. Twitter's always been pretty niche to begin with, even before the Elon takeover. It was a small social media platform compared to the other. In terms of advertising revenue, it was small compared to other tech giants. So one Facebook, which is the more natural comparison, then also Google, and those two companies swallow up all of the advertising revenue.

30:56So Twitter's always competing for very, very scraps basically. But in terms of the audience, in terms of the audience, this is related, the audience on Twitter was very small. It was the small percentage of people in the country who are super motivated by ideas, affected by ideas and want to share them and think a lot, writing, it's like, I think language is just writers versus picture people is what you get on Instagram or TikTok even to a certain extent, which is more like a storytelling. Those are, those feel more, more primal and Twitter feels more, what's literary and it's a, it's like literary warfare and that is not everybody in the country.

31:37So it was always small and now I would say it's even, it's increasingly smaller because the left, unlike the right, is at this moment in time culturally highly motivated by censorship and wanting to insulate itself from other views and opinions. They believe I think that the opinions are beyond the pale and need to be iced out. I think they're probably really scared of them because they don't have counterarguments, which is what is motivating the entire thing. I think probably there are a lot of left -wing people who hear certain arguments, probably on immigration and things like this, that they clock as beyond the pale and don't want to face because on some level they recognize that they're important arguments and they don't have an answer to them and that makes them uncomfortable.

32:23But beyond the psychoanalysis, the facts are just that left -wing people don't want to be in a place where right -wing people are permitted to speak. And so at least the very sort of hardcore left -wing people. So they have almost all left. You have a lot of media people who still stay on X But like the real committed ideological type people Where are they? There are a handful Threads more and more, but you can't really talk about politics there. I think that's the biggest competitor right now Or it's certainly the biggest competitor, but then you have a spectrum of that you have blue sky you have massed on And you have an endless number of group chats that I think are popping up and proliferating really gram and shit on those things then also what is it so did discord you know there are any number of other places where people are pooling and I think the future will be some sort of more fragmented media platform situation unless something happens that X which turns it around which could also happen even I don't really believe is anathema to sit I don't believe in anathema this censorship I think that he's less ideologically committed this than even Jack was, he believes in it for America, free speech.

33:32But if laws start to change, you know, abroad, for example, he just follows the rule of the law wherever it is and the letter of the law wherever it is. And the context of America will see, but the rules could change tomorrow. And once they change even a little bit, I think you see people come back. Is it weird to be building a media company right now? like vice -fell apart, BuzzFeeds and Mass, the NPR, just hired a crazy lady to run it, like what the fuck's happening to Rolling Stone? Yeah. What do you think about this sort of future of media versus independent media and all of that? You know, it is a really crazy time to be building a media company.

34:16It makes no sense. I don't recommend it. I think it is stressful. And And the path to victory is very narrow.

34:29You're not making revenue on clicks anymore. That style of people, like it's clickbait, clickbait doesn't matter. It's not what's helping anybody. That whole style of new media has died. This is why Buzzfeed is in the state that it's at right now. This is why someone like Vivek could even try a hostile takeover with that company, because it's worth nothing. because that style of media just does not make business sense, but works a subscription revenue and people subscribe to things that help them make sense of the world and confirm their biases. So that's what true of the New York Times and that's true of PirateWires is people who are paying money to us do so because they feel like we're on the same side fighting for the same things.

35:07That is a much smaller pool of revenue than the massive advertising, you know, flood of money that we saw not only in the early 2000s when the social thing first happened, but decades and decades ago. So it's going to be a way smaller industry to begin with. I think that there is potentially a lot of interesting upside, co -branded products that matter to your audience and you, things that you both, so imagine you're a fitness influencer and you're doing like a chain of gyms or something. like those kind of partnerships are gonna matter more. But like what that means for investigative reporting is not good.

35:47I don't know how you do that in this new world. This is the pen and pad that I use. This is the, I know, taking app that I'm obsessed with. And nobody cares because nobody follows investigative reporters around for identity -based reasons and identity -based reasons are what drive the entire contemporary media landscape. So it's difficult. nobody has an answer to this question and if they tell you they're wrong. My sense is fragmentation, do what you know and love and fight for the things that you believe to be true. I believe that you should be biased and you should wear your bias on your sleeve.

36:26And then I think that you use the revenue that you make to nurture younger people who are telling a different part of your story that that you think is important. And that's where I hire journalists and things like this to report out different pieces of the puzzle that I'm just not gonna have time to do. Did your team, some of your report, is it River Page? He left. Oh no, God dammit. Yeah, he's gone. Sanjana is still there though. Okay, cool. And we're out anyway. You've got some good people. You mentioned American colleges earlier on. Is that the waste ground that everybody thinks So they are lost calls.

37:07American colleges.

37:11You know, it's crazy because they should be out of business, right? Like I don't know, man, like it didn't. It seemed like a lost cause 10 years ago and people are still not only sending their kids to go to school, but for how much money is it a year to send your kids to like NYU or something with room board? I think we're definitely over $60 ,000 a year at this point. I think we're closer pushing to 70. I think it might, you know what? I'm not going to Google it. If you, I don't know what you guys do in post, if you have like a number or you can flash, but it's a lot. It's more money than I would have ever thought people would have paid for a college degree plus room and board for four years, and you're not even accounting for interest.

37:45So 58 ,168 tuition, 23 ,927 other costs, books, and on campus, really. That's $8 ,200, $8 ,200, $95. That was, that was 21, 22. For a year. That, so that, if that hasn't killed this and the fact that it's very obvious now these are just sort of like woken -doctrination camps hasn't killed this. I don't know what's going to kill this. I think that if, I mean, every year it feels like it's the last year. I do think if I'm not wrong, I'm pretty sure admissions were down for one of the years, but not down nearly as to where they should be. What has to happen is the government has to stop giving out loans.

38:44The government should have nothing to do with the loan system at all. You should be able to declare bankruptcy on your student loan debt, which you're presently not allowed to do. The only one that you got. And what that's going to do, once you're able to discharge student loan debt easily, if with a massive hit on your credit score, and the government's not guaranteeing loans, students are going to have to go to private banks, and the private banks are going to have to run risk analysis and say, if I give you $82 ,000 a year times four plus interest, do you have any hope in hell of paying that back with gender studies degree in your lifetime, the answer is no.

39:27And so it's a bad loan and you're not going to get it. And once the bank start making decisions, once you allow the private banks to make decisions like this, all of the prices will reset. They all have to. Most of the second, third tier beyond. Right. Because the funding is carteled inside of the system, no one gets to sort of peer under the scut of what's happening. We have this idea that there is almost an inalienable right to go to college. And that is a weird cultural idea that makes no sense whatsoever. It's way worse than even healthcare, which I also don't think you have like an enabling level right to.

39:59You don't have a right to someone else's labor. That's how, that's how like rights work. But healthcare is something that you can maybe wrap your head around. We all need healthcare.

40:13College does not that. You do not need college. Like you don't need to go. You don't need to survive. You can make an argument that it's actually really bad for a lot of people, maybe even most people who are not going to sort of upper -tier schools and then just getting certainly now you can make it because you're being saddled with tons of debt and you're not getting great job opportunities necessarily because of it. So because of that idea though that that everybody's entitled to it and in fact needs it to a certain extent to succeed, it's you can't turn people away and that's a system we've built where you can't turn people away from from a loan no matter how massive and And you have to get rid of that.

40:47You have to just get the bankers back in and say, are you able to pay this back or not? Do I think? And if you are great and if you're not, and I give you the loan, then I suffer for it. And once bankers have to suffer for these decisions, you're not going to have a problem anymore because they're not there. The banks have been around for a very long time. And if their existence is on the line, the loans are not going to happen. and once the loans can't happen, the colleges have to reset their prices. Did you see there was a study done by Corey Clark that came out a little while ago, a new study Shed's light on taboos and signs confirming that race and IQ are the most taboo subject of all.

41:32They had a condensed down a bunch of statements that were the 10 most taboo in all of psychology. Did you see this? I didn't, but I believe it. Those are the two that I would definitely consider race and IQ to be. Let me, I'll dictate you the top 10. So the authors began by interviewing 41 researchers in psychology to get an idea of which topics are most taboo using the researchers' answers as a guide they condensed those topics into a set of 10 statements. Number one, the tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it comforts some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.

42:05Number two, gender biases are not the most important drivers of the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields. Number three, academia discriminates against black people in hiring promotion grants, invitations, etc. Number four, biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people. Number five, the social sciences in the United States discriminate against conservatives. Number six, racial biases are not the most important drivers of higher crime rates among black Americans, relative to white Americans. Number seven, men and women have got different psychological characteristics because of evolution.

42:36Number eight, genetic differences, explain non -trivial, 10 % or more variances in race differences and intelligence test scores. Number nine, transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence. Number 10, demographic diversity, race and gender in the workplace often leads to worse performance. And then she went through and studied 470 psychology professors and basically found that so many professors are terrified. Like they don't like the censorship, but they are terrified of speaking up, like absolutely terrified of it. Yeah, I mean, which one of those topics do you want to talk about?

43:14Ah, I mean, there's some stuff in there, like, you know, men and women have biological sexist binary for the vast majority of people. Like, I don't know who is disagreeing with that statement. Yeah, that's one at this point. I mean, you can't help but anyone who sees a high school race with let's say a trans woman, absolutely destroying her competition is not going to be okay with that. I mean, that's 90 plus percent of people are going to see that and say, okay, this is fucking crazy. And in a way, I sort of think that that's the issue. I really do think it's like that and the COVID sort of coercive vaccination, that combination just ended the whole prior order of thought policing.

44:03That was a solvent that undid the adhesive. It was just on the COVID stuff to vicious and on the trans stuff, specifically the trans athlete stuff to unbelievable, to absurd. like that that combination just dispelled the illusion of authority for a lot of people and on the rest of them, I think probably everything you're not allowed to talk about, it doesn't mean that these sort of people who want to talk about it or write about it, but you're probably, if you're not allowed to talk about it, it's a safe assumption that there's something important there that we should probably be trying to understand, but we are refusing to for whatever reason.

44:55Did you see that a trans woman one can best actress award for the first time? No, but Carlos Sofia Gascon, the Spanish performer, said, we all have the opportunity to change for the better as she made history at the festival with her gong. Well, she certainly changed herself, didn't she?

45:16It's quite a change. I, I don't know, like this, one of the other things that I was particularly exhausted by over the last few years is this desire to read conspiracy and coordination and much more sophisticated malevolent intent into pretty much everything. This desire to read deeper, deeper meaning, I think the internet kind of assumes that people have a well thought out reason for everything that they do. And as far as I can tell, most people are just trying to make it through to the end of the day and not get fired and pay for shit. And yes, sure, there's like some super smart people pulling the strings at the top.

45:56But yeah, I didn't really. I agree. I think that we want to believe they are in charge more than they are because if someone was in charge, that would be great. It would be great to believe that you look around. I mean, it's chaos everywhere. If you're in San Francisco, whatever city in this country you're in, it's fucked. Like you could just break it down. There are a handful of things about it that are just seriously unbelievably fucked from crime to housing to just basic level sanitation, education, whatever. It's all really bad. And you want to believe that someone is in charge because if someone's in charge, that means if you could just bully them enough or get rid of them and put someone else in charge, the problem would be fixed.

46:44But the bigger problem seems to be a combination of, I don't know, nihilism at the top among the sort of elites of our country and then no one is actually in charge. There's not a lot of stepping up and taking control of things. And even if there was a will to do that, politically, we're structured in such a way that it's very difficult for a single person and let alone small, or a small group of people let alone a single person to actually change anything. San Francisco, for example, the homeless problem, right? It's like, who, what one specific person is in charge of that? Nobody. What group of people are in charge of that?

47:22It's a lot of people who have some piece of it, and if you asked any one of them, are you in charge of it? They would say no. There's no one taking responsibility for it. And I don't even, I blame them, of course. They're terrible. But also, part of it is a systemic problem where we're not giving anyone the authority to do it. And I think we have to do that. We have to get better at empowering people to actually change things and then punishing them for when they don't do it. I came across this packing McCormick quotes that said, the greatest trick the devil ever played was making you believe that the pessimists are the good guys.

47:54And this, you know, just prevalent fucking cynicism, dude, whether it's top down or bottom up, whether it's in a comment section or a press release or just in the, like, low opi demeena of the way that people sort of step out to give some sort of statement. It's so boring and tiring and I wish that people would more enthusiastic about still. It's pessimists are usually right. It's a safe bet to make that something new is not going to work and that's why people do it. When you are making a positive prediction about the future that has never existed before, It's like your odds of being wrong are very high and your odds of predicting all of the fallout from that are infinitismally small.

48:42There are so many anytime you create something let's talk about artificial intelligence You create even just even if we just had chat GPT What are going to be the consequences of that long term? We have no idea. We're still dealing with the consequences long term of the mobile phone so It's easy to be a pessimist if you just want I don't know a reward for being a smart person. And that just doesn't exist on the positive side. You do need a positive vision for the future. And I don't know how to incentivize that or how to change the incentive. I'm not really convinced that that's ever been different.

49:16I wonder if there was a period of time where the average person was opt, was this opt -in? I guess people always point back to the 1950s in America. I didn't live then. So I don't know. You know, and you remember the often of stories, but I don't know how many, I don't know how pervasive that really was. If we had a frictionless way to dump our thoughts onto the internet or onto some ledger while we were sat on the toilet, just what would people's thoughts have been? Oh my God. I think about that in the context of the 60s. Like you think things are crazy now on the internet. Can you imagine how crazy things would have been and they're all throughout civil rights and shit like this?

49:54Like it would have been a different, we wouldn't have, I don't know that we would have made it. I don't know that we would have made it if we knew everything that everyone was thinking, which to go back to our early conversation about being polite, that's the core of politeness, right? That's why polite exists is because there is a social benefit to not saying everything that comes into your mind. And it's like you have to choose which ones need to be said, but probably not everything should not only have to be said, it probably should not be said. There is a benefit socially to polite society, I think.

50:34De Choram keeps the peace in many ways. But I think the reason that, at least for me, that I'm kind of conflicted about the whole polite society thing is that I then go and see Sam Watz's face, that singer guy, come out dressed as a devil with nipple tassels on in high heel leather boots. and I go, it seems to me like any remotely acceptable line of decorum and behavior has been blasted through already with AK47. Like, what do we do in here pretending that decorum still exists? You shouldn't be bringing up that thing and you go, well, it doesn't exist, though. I think that you're right. It does not exist anymore.

51:20I'm saying it's probably a purpose though. We've lost it and what are we going to become without it? I mean, certainly in politics, everything post -Dollett Trump, I would say it was pretty bad. Post -Dollett Trump, come on. I was looking at Kamala Harris giggling over nothing other day on a YouTube video. It was really a bizarre video where she's not really saying anything and she keeps laughing awkwardly and I thought, man, if this were 10 years ago, we would say how we can't have someone this stupid in power. It's just crazy. Let alone the senile Joe Biden, And of course, that's crazy. But let's talk about how dumb, common, eras is.

51:52That's an actual, like, sort of classically presenting idiot. And she is a heartbeat away from the president's knee. Just a complete moron. It never would have happened. And she's sort of talking about the food that she's eating. And I, it's. I haven't seen this clip. I'm really glad. What I saw was an example of her trying to be relatable. And that is not in keeping with the image of the presidency that has endured for the last what since the founding fathers existed, okay? Like we need that person to be powerful and thoughtful and trustworthy. Someone who we believe can run the country, right?

52:41Like that all turned on its head in a world post Trump. Like once you elect the reality television started the presidency, anything fucking goes. Like monarchy. Monarchy. That's what you need. Someone who is being... Lots of recurring. ...from God. So you had to go all the way back. Yeah. And that's maybe the really controversial thing that needs to be said. It's like, was George Washington the good guy or the bad guy? And I don't think America's ready for that conversation.

53:08TikTok ban. What do you think's going to happen? Oh, what would you like to see happen? I don't think it's going to happen. I think that, I think that, well, certainly we're looking at at least a year of litigation. And in that year, who knows, there's just who knows what will happen. I am in favor of it, but I'm in favor of much more aggressive action against China. I don't really, the spying thing is a whole complicated talk that we could talk about. I believe it is a liability for the country to have China control one of our largest broadcast networks in the history of the country. But I am also just really thinking a lot about trade and the massive disparity in trade.

53:52We need reciprocity. If China is banning all of our social media companies, we should ban all of theirs. If China is bending anything that they're bending or any tariff they're levying we should be doing the same thing And in fact we should be doing more of it because what we learned in COVID is we need Manufacturing the failure of manufacturing at home is not just sad for Us and for the middle class that no longer exists in this country. It is dangerous It is a national security threat. So we we need to have this somehow at home and And that's a combination of that is gonna require a lot of things that nobody wants to do.

54:30That's gonna require looking at the labor laws, that's gonna require looking at things like tariffs. Like this is gonna be things that annoy both, that annoy the left, the right, the libertarians. We're just in a huge mess right now. And I am very much in favor of forcing divestiture of TikTok, but I'm in favor of forcing divestiture of almost every Chinese social media company, or social piece of software that exists, certainly every social media company, like everything, just down the line. And then China retaliates. They're like, oh, we're retaliating and we're banning one of your companies or whatever.

55:02It's like you've already, do people not realize there is no major American media company, the New York Times, Washington Post, that can operate in China. There is no American social media company that can operate in China. Google cannot operate in China. You can just go look at all the things that China has banned, American companies. The list is enormous, ongoing, never ending. It's just ridiculous to be playing it this way. You can say, oh, we're not like China.

55:30And it's like, no, we're not like China, but we do have to survive. And that's one of necessarily a good thing to not be prepared to use the tools that they do. Well, certainly what they have that we don't have is a will to exist, okay? And it's like freedom, yes, great, love it, but you can't, it's like until the point at which you self -immolate, and the only tools you have left to work with are controlled by a hostile foreign superpower, which is the path we're on, and you see this in the soft power type things all the time. You see this with the way Disney has reshaped, just due to the influence of the Chinese market.

56:06Okay, Disney starts to censor on all sorts of grounds of the NBA and things like this. That's just soft power. That's not even the hard power of they're going to play hardball with a corner on rare earth metals, a corner on manufacturing, that's, we haven't even gotten to a place where they start wielding that against us. That can't happen. We need to bring it home, and we need to be a little bit more mercantilist about stuff, which I think is a dirty word still, I'm not sure how people think about that anymore, but I'm pretty much a mercantilist. So, do you know the story of DJI drones? Do you know why they're so dominant?

56:44So, this is, second hand he says, I may have got it wrong, but it's a great story. America was super concerned about individuals, citizens, being able to fly drones. So they shut down a ton of American drone manufacturers. Then they realized that the market for drones is actually quite high and guessed the only company that was still crushing it in the consumer space, DJI, which is a Chinese company. And now they are just light years ahead. everything's cheaper, everything's better quality, it does all of the things that it needs you to do. And that's a Chinese company mapping, fucking everything.

57:24Yeah, I didn't realize the full extent of that story. You don't typically see to our credit, you don't typically see China just completely take over an industry that was ours because China doesn't innovate at all. I can't think of a technology that was invented in China. It's all just copy and pasting in a very great way. I mean, they're very tactically advantageous way for them. It's just see what America innovates, clone it, scale it. But long -term, that's a problem. And it's a problem that is bigger than China, right? It's like you saw, I was just reading about a genetic engineering controversy.

58:09So in the mid 1970s, you had Cambridge, Massachusetts, banned the use of, and the study of recombinant DNA. And at that point, the future of genetics is in the balance, all of the people working on it are there. And it was reversed in 77, but that is, it had to be reversed or nothing was going to happen. And that is kind of what you're looking at in California, I think to a certain extent with which which way these regulations on something like artificial intelligence will go and There's enough that has been researched already that other people in different countries will use what we use and keep moving forward They're not going to stop.

58:53I don't see anybody in China Developing anything ever that hasn't existed before But if we stop ourselves they will keep moving forward with what we have started and so that's that is a problem especially when you're dealing with potentially ex -risk type technology. So anything in biology and certainly artificial intelligence would count. If you're building something that this is, I mean, you got to get a I do moron here. They have a thousand different arguments they'll make. I'm not sold really on any of them, but I am sold on the idea that this is a high -risk technology we should proceed and we should proceed sort of with caution.

59:31Do you see Nick Bostrom's new book, Deep Utopia? Have not seen the new book, but I have read Super Intelligence. Yeah, I read Super Intelligence way back. Yeah, so Super Intelligence was basically what happens if we get it wrong. Yeah. And Deep Utopia is what happens if we get it right. It's really interesting, you know, to see this guy who's gone kind of full circle and he's explaining, well, you know, this is a hopeful view for the future. But even then, even he kind of creates his taxonomy of four different types of utopias. And even within those, all of them have got tons of fucking problems.

1:00:03Like it is the most like thready needle to try and weave through to make this work. And yeah, I mean, I understand why the AI X -Risk Duma conversation is compelling because it's terrifying and seems kind of likely. Yeah, but everything seems kind of likely. You can make an argument for the singularity. you can make an argument for the simulation hypothesis. These are things that are almost designed to capture smart people inside of a little maze where there are all of these likely things. But at the end of the day, on the simulation theory, for example, what value do you get and even talking about?

1:00:43It's like you should just live your life. You should just do as many good things as you can in your life. And with AI, sort of feel that way as well. I don't, I've never met anybody who has spoken to me in a convincing way on the big danger. It's always the smartest of them, do percentages, and even those feel like, how, where are you running these calculations? Like, what are we really talking about? It's just a giant question mark, but all technologies are a giant question mark. And so if you want to progress, you're going to have to take risk. There's a question of how much are we taking and at what scale?

1:01:19but I don't know, man. I just... I think that it's a lot like the freedom conversation where you're having a moment ago. You sort of want as much of it as you can without destroying yourself. That's the sweet spot. It's not a maximum in any direction. It's like, let's just not suffocate ourselves to death. And so while I do, I am in favor of thinking about the ex -risk inherent of AI, right now I see no evidence to slow down. And once we see that evidence, it should be pretty obvious. The X -Ris A .I people will be like, well, once it's obvious, it's too late. Okay, well, I don't... You're going to have to give me a better reason.

1:01:57You're have to get... You're have to really paint that picture for me. And that has not happened yet. So... What about the most important thing that's going to happen over the next month and a bit, Biden Trump debate? I didn't think it was going to happen at all. We'll see if it does. I'm still, I can still unsure that it's actually gonna go ahead. Well, if they allow for mic cutting, which is what the Biden camp wants, I don't know why Trump would accept that.

1:02:34If it does happen, it's gonna be a blood bath. Like Trump will win for sure. Biden has not even appeared on a friendly interview for longer than 30 minutes or something. I've never, I mean, can you imagine I'm sitting down for two hours or three hours in front of Rogan or something? It's not possible. I don't know how he's going to go head -to -head with Trump, who is one of the most successful, short form, like television warriors in the history of the medium. He's really good at it. The good is to provide as if he somehow survives it. It'll be a huge boom to him, but he probably won't. And until now, but I guess I should say until now, saying nothing is only helps Trump.

1:03:24So I think Biden's just in a rough spot where he has sort of a trick. When you're a declining stock, you need to do something to reverse it even if that thing is quite high -risk. He's on a failure course right now. Is that what your projection would be if there's basically no change by the Democrats that you're looking at Republican victory in November? Yeah, I think it's like a smash victory. I mean, it's like a huge huge victory. So they need to do something. I think a big part of it is immigration, a big part of his inflation. I think those things are weirdly linked. Not the immigration is not causing the inflation.

1:03:57I think the immigration is being used to sort of like stem the inflation. Immigration, even if it's mass illegal immigration, has positive effects on the numbers in the economy that you point to to say our economy is doing well. It's just like it has all of these other effects that for whatever reason economists don't seem to care about, like the dissolution of our fucking culture in America and the simple law of supply and demand that affects more poor middle class people than rich people with desk jobs when you're talking about mass low skilled immigration. people are furious, people have always been furious, but also it's never even been this bad before.

1:04:36To have, think about 10 million illegal immigrants in your country of 330 million, that's what 3 % that is an enormous population of people who broke a lot to get here and people are mad across demographics. So the big story I think of the next election is going to be the black vote, specifically the black male vote, which has never been trumpier and has never been Republican. Trump was what's driving that. Immigration. I think it's entirely immigration. I think that, I mean, you look at Chicago, but he is out of Chicago and the effects of illegal immigration in Chicago and you look at those meetings, those community meetings where people are coming to yell.

1:05:22It's black people. It's all black people. It's black neighborhoods where this is happening. It's black people who are already having a struggling lower class, black people who are already struggling on work for whatever you could say it's unfounded, you could say it's founded, but certainly the blame is being placed on illegal immigration and no one is stupid enough to believe that that's not Biden's fault. So it's like this election will be a referendum on that more than anything and then inflation and Biden sucks at both. and so what is left, the wars, who cares about them really, not many people, other than like reflexively which we weren't at them, but certainly Biden has gotten us into them, right?

1:06:03Like Ukraine happens on Biden's watch. Israel happens on Biden's watch, where somehow really woven into both. I saw this crazy, it was funny, but darkly funny meme on Instagram. It was the Iron Dome stopping a bunch of rockets. So you saw all these rockets coming up and hitting all these other rockets and the meme just said like My tax dollars paying for this the iron dome and up here on the top my tax dollars somehow also paying for this And that's like so that's like number three It'll be like that's order number three of things that we care about and then it's just a fun culture worship which I've been ocean debate.

1:06:42What about row?

1:06:48I don't know. I don't have a sense of how much people really care about this. It seemed to matter in the last election. I think Americans are more divided on it than people like to believe, but is it more important than the immigration stuff and the inflation stuff to people? I don't think so.

1:07:05I guess we'll see. Yeah, I don't know about that one. What about you? What do you think? That's a really tough one to work out as well. I think about it. Think about it that much, but I think about it a good bit. And I think most people don't know their position very thoroughly on it. Like if you really, really quiz people hard, a sufficiently good argument can usually begin to sware, yeah, well, you know, you kind of sort of write on that thing a little bit. It's one of the few debates or one of the few discussions where every time, like I hear a Shapiro, right? Do his thing and he breaks down, life begins, it's not a bundle of cells, blah, blah, blah.

1:07:43And I go, fucking hell, that sounds pretty compelling. And then I hear someone who's like super pro choice give that argument, I go, fucking hell, that's super compelling. I'm like, I don't know, I've just been like legitimately like actually gasoline by both sides. And now I believe both at the same time, I don't fucking know. Lots of America has been like this on Rovy Wade and abortion in general forever. It's never moved. It's always close to 50 % on both sides. There's no other issue that I can think of like that in in history. It's just always hotly divided. And and so separate from the question of whether Roe v Wade was a good law and I think it was not or good a good ruling and I think it was not.

1:08:26There's the question of what should be done and that's more complicated and And what the real answer here is you want something codified. You want to codify a law, rather than judge on something in a stupid way that doesn't make any sense, and everybody knows is not correct, where you, with a judicial branch essentially creates a law for you. You want our legislators to legislate and create something, but they can't agree. I think probably what makes the most sense is something closer to what you're, I don't want to wait into it. I'm pro -choice within reason. like I have all sorts of caveats like everybody else.

1:09:00I think that I agree with you that most people don't fully know what they think about this. It just makes them uncomfortable and they don't wanna have to think about it. But there are a handful of people who care about it a lot. In this election, do they, do they punish Trump for it? Can they punish Trump for it? I don't know. I know that a lot of people, I know a lot more people who talk about immigration I see a lot more people talking to you. I don't see people talking about, uh, about Roviewade really. I suppose you had the timing of it. You'd just, recency bias and people's attention span is so short that right now, immigration, immigration, immigration.

1:09:44I would have to make a promise for some sort of law to be codified. And if he did that, he would lose a lot of people and gain some people, right? Because wherever he drew the line of where abortion would not be allowed, right? No one wants a day before birth, right? You can just start there. So there are some who do. Some very radical people who want that and will never let go of it. And those people are the ones who run the organizations that are pro choice. The average American doesn't. The average left wing person doesn't. The average pro abortion person doesn't. But the people who run shit do.

1:10:16So Biden has to draw a line somewhere if he's gonna float legislation. And once he does that, he gives a huge attack space for Trump to come in and be like, like this man wants to kill babies. And so it's like no one's really incentivized to propose a law in the middle of an election that is already hard to win, especially not a Democrat. So it's gonna be hard. It'll be hard for both of them, but like you can either punish Trump for Roe v. Wade. That's one thing, but there's not a really clear alternative. There's not like if I vote for this person, I'm gonna get what I want. It's just how viscerally people are affected by this as well.

1:10:50Well, you know, it doesn't, abortion by definition is an individual impact, whereas something like economy, inflation, immigration, those things are much more scattergun and they're felt by people on mass. There's waves of it that occur, like literally, right? There's waves of it that occur. And I think that that galvanizes people in a different sort of way. But it do it's, I mean, that debate, my god. He's one thing that I have noticed though. Trump is way less in the news. Like I just don't see, you think about the buildup to the last two elections. And it was everywhere. I'm like, where the fuck is he?

1:11:30Because he's not on Twitter? Like what's going on? I just don't see. He's part of it. I mean, part of it was there was no primary because he didn't have to have a primary because he was going to win. So he stayed out of it. And then part of it is he's not on Twitter. and there are less people on, I mean, no one's really on his network. And there are, there are media people are still on Twitter. So if he was on Twitter, media people would still at least see what he's tweeting. He would feel more present in their brains. They would at least be more anxious about it and be writing more about it. And then part of it is Biden's just not, like, I think Democrats are really embarrassed of him.

1:12:05So no one's, while people really hate Trump on the left, they, the average person on the left is not excited about Biden. they're like, this feels a little bit criminal that we're trying to float someone who's totally senile. What do you think? People on the right think an equivalent side. They probably really don't like Biden, but do they really like Trump? There are people who love Trump in a way that no president has been loved in our lifetime. And it's a non -trivial fraction of the right. People who fucking love him, who would do anything for him. And that's not a majority of the right. That's a a good, huge chunk of a base that really, really, really devoutly loves him.

1:12:45And then you have a lot of people who are fine with him. And then you have a lot of people who didn't vote for him, but might now because they, and they have a bunch of different reasons. Some are talking about the wars, some are talking about the economy, some are talking about immigration. You had all sorts of weird own goals on the left. So the way that Warren went after cryptocurrency, for example, there are a lot of people with exposure to cryptocurrency who are like, who is this bitch coming after my big point? And why does she think that she's able to do that? That's insane. There are all sorts of tax gains proposals and well tax proposals, which hit the rich, who fuel a lot of the money behind these different grassroots campaigns, grassroots campaigns.

1:13:34You also have four years of incompetency from Biden, I think, on a range of things, but specifically, I think foreign policy has been pretty bad. If you're voting for a guy who you think is going to make things calm and return us to norms, and then he tries to put the front runner president in prison and is now fighting two wars abroad, like that is not what you asked for. And it's like even if he wasn't senile, it would be a hard sell at this point, I think. But he's all of those things and he's senile. So it's like separate from the left who's just tolerating him. I think a lot of people on the right are like Trump's, a lot of people in the middle, I think, are thinking, well, Trump's better than that.

1:14:18And we know what Trump is. No matter what people say about Trump being, you know, fascist dictator and blah, blah, blah. At the end of the day, we've had four years of Trump. So we know roughly what that feels like, just like we've had four years of Biden. This is the first election like that we've ever had, where we actually know exactly what a presidency feels in both directions. So by we, I mean America, I mean we, alive right now, have never experienced this before. So you can't really say, you can't, there's no fear of the uncertainty here. There might be fear, but it's not of the uncertainty, which fuels, I think, a lot of what happens in most elections.

1:14:55dude, it's a wild few months coming up time to make hay as the independent media companies say. Mike Salana, ladies and gentlemen, Mike, I love your stuff. Pirate wise, I listen to all of the podcasts, I read the morning takes, I read everything else. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with the things you do. Go to PowerWire since subscribe to the Daily, hit the newsletter button, subscribe to the Daily and subscribe to PowerWire for my assays. Check us out on YouTube, check us out on Twitter. Oh yeah, appreciate you Mike. Thanks for having me Doug here we have the Lemo Emu in its natural habitat helping people customize their core insurance and save hundreds with liberty mutual Fascinating it's accompanied by his natural ally Doug Lemo is that guy with the binoculars watching us cut the camera.

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