[Bonus Episode] Moment of Zen w/ Mike Solana, Erik Torenberg and Dan Romero

Hey everybody. Today I'm excited to share a recent episode of another podcast I co-host called Moment of Zen alongside Dan Romero, Antonio Garcia Martinez, and special guests. This episode of MOZ. Features a lively, funny, and at times spicy conversation about the AI government hearings, political polarization, and Elon's Twitter. Joining me is Mike Solana, the editor-in-chief of Pirate Wires, and my MOZ co-host Dan Romero, the founder of Farcaster. I hope you enjoy this episode and head over to Moment of Zen's feed to subscribe for our weekly discussions on tech, business, culture, and beyond. Perfect. So I, I thought we'd start with— so Pirate Wires has had so many bangers recently. The Grimes interview was fantastic. You had incredible coverage of the OpenAI Sam Altman trial this past week. One of your tweets was, I wish Congress would ask me to testify because I have a lot to say. So maybe we can get into what would you say?

One thing I've been just trying to do recently with my team at Pirate Wires is cover different congressional— there are all these congressional hearings that are just not covered. And they're really interesting and you learn a lot about the politicians and also the way that different entrepreneurs are thinking about stuff. And so it was like Christina from IBM, it was Sam Altman, and it was Gary Marcus. Christina and Sam at least work at a company doing stuff that's important, ostensibly. Christina, like, I feel like not so much obviously as Sam. And then Gary is just this guy. He's just like this asshole with opinions online. And I'm like, I'm an asshole with opinions online and I don't agree with any of his opinions. They should bring me on. I can talk about all sorts of shit. I to talk about how Gary said that a chatbot was responsible for a guy in Europe killing himself. That's crazy and should be introduced. But also the truth is, for that hearing, the AI hearing with Sam and Gary and Christina, the weirdest thing about it for me was, I mean, maybe like a subtheme of Pirate Wires for a long time has been how silly our politicians are in these hearings. They weren't that silly in this hearing. They were— the Democrats and Republicans, totally bipartisan here— were asking, I thought, pretty thoughtful questions. And both sides of them, both the Democrats and the Republicans, I would say one of the major themes was, uh, of the questioning was just, hey, it seems like you want us to regulate something that we don't really understand, which is not smart and will hurt the technology. And they all kind of agreed on that. It was this weird kind of self-awareness. Now, there was some stuff from both sides that, especially the Republican side, that was a little more— I'd have to go back and rewatch it. But my sense was that the anti-230 stuff and the free speech stuff was maybe coming off a little more— it was like a little more pronounced on the right, whereas the Democrats were a little more focused on copyright and job loss. But no one's heart really seemed that in it. Everyone was really friendly. Cory Booker was weirdly like a tech optimist, and he went on and on and made fun of Gary Marcus— or not really made fun of him, but he, he called him out a couple times. Again, bipartisan support on doing this, where they would, they would be like, Gary, you know, you're asking for an international agreement or whatever. Do you have any insight into how that works? Like, what do you— what specific models are you looking at? What other versions of this are you talking about? How would you like that to go down? And, and just kind of pushing him on those issues. And he was like, Oh, I don't really know what I'm talking about here. Hahaha. And he kept trying to make jokes and they all were just like, no, the joke is you. Why are you here? That's the joke. Who invited Gary Marcus?

I think that the one push I would say though is that I don't think Congress is used to having breakthrough new technology come and ask to be regulated. So I think it's a little bit of like, wait, we're usually the ones chasing the car. And it's like, we, we, the car didn't, we didn't even catch the car. The car drove into our yard and then like parked itself right there that we could just easily go out and grab it. So I don't think that they have a good model for that. And I know there's a lot of, you know, oh, this is Sam trying to do a chess move on the regulatory capture side of things.

They don't have a model for it because it doesn't make sense. I think that they were right. They were just like, hey, we will regulate it when something happens that is really scary. Like, we don't see that right now. And you're going to have to do a better job. Certainly what they did not do was go in there and make no one— and Christina was the least sort of asked, like she was not really asking for anything.

Well, they don't have much AI because Watson was a joke.

Right. So I mean, that's again, like, why was IBM there? It didn't really make sense. Why wasn't Google there? It seems like Google should have been there and maybe Sam should have been there. Maybe someone else from Microsoft should have been there. But that's not what we got.

There are going to be more.

They announced there are going to be several more panels just on AI in particular. And I guess I've always had this kind of cartoonish version of Congress in my head, and they're super anti-tech, I thought, and they just want to hamstring the whole thing completely, and they're reacting to this higher-level thing. And the truth is, they're not that thoughtful about it. They really are just reacting to things that scare them for various reasons or that their constituents get angry about. That's bad and has a whole— there are a whole bunch of problems with that, but it's better than this philosophical aversion to technology in general, which doesn't seem to exist. And I do, yeah, I mean, the whole AI people requesting regulation thing, I think that if you're gonna do that, you need to come with a way better argument. And I didn't see that at the hearing.

So one, I always take it through the lens of it's all theater, right? Like all they care about is getting their face and their sound clip on Twitter, on CNN, 'cause that's, it builds the brand, especially for the senators. But I've been running this through the kind of parallel universe that I've lived in for 10 years of crypto, right? And I think if I was to give the reason why AI, one, I think there is a singular kind of like face and leader for the most part in Sam. And I think he's extremely good. Like, I was really impressed with first time, I think, testifying before Congress or in a big stage like that and just absolutely nailed it, right? Compared to some of the other CEOs who kind of always look a little squirmy, gave really clear answers, simple answers, which I think are useful. But the thing that AI has going for it compared to crypto is crypto has never had a breakout consumer use case that is easy enough for someone to understand. And payments is not a consumer use case. It's like a lower level thing. And so the only thing crypto's ever had is this kind of price of Bitcoin narrative. And I think what's challenging is without like an actual concrete use case in the sense of ChatGPT is really easy to kind of like, oh, I type this in, it's kind of like Google and I get a better answer. Like, there is nothing that the industry is trying to capture and then getting regulation, right? So like crypto in the US starts getting regulated in 2014, but it's through regulatory agencies, not really in front of Congress. And it's only after FTX, to your point, when there's something bad that happens that like, okay, Congress knows the playbook here. And it's like, let's do hearings, let's, let's boot up the theater, Gary Gensler, all that kind of stuff. And so I think that it's extremely savvy to preempt the whole situation, right? Like, you have the breakout product regardless of whether it's regulatory capture or not. You are playing on your terms, right? Like, you go show up, you do a great job in front of Congress. You're the one saying, hey, we would love your input in terms of, like, making this safe. Like, flatter the people who get to make the rules. I think it's just such a savvy move compared to, you know, this kind of very decentralized thing with crypto where no one ever made that engagement and they're only making the serious engagement in Congress now after FTX.

I would push back a little bit on a couple of points. One, in crypto, and I understand what you're saying, there's no face of crypto. However, Brian Armstrong has done a lot asking for regulation and has gone off about that. And it's like they don't want that because they don't want crypto to exist. And it wasn't FTX. FTX was the excuse they had to go after crypto. They wanted crypto gone for years. And then in terms of the sort of savviness of Sam, I think he did a fine job. I don't think he did a great job. I think he did a fine job, an admirable first attempt. Zuckerberg has been asking for regulation for years. He innovated the entire genre of tech people asking for regulation. And I found it really crazy back then, but what was happening with speech, he was trying not to do it at first. He was like, I don't— he was actually— it's this like whole lost history of tech people really trying their best, which I, my heart is kind of in a more open place right now. But Zuckerberg and Dorsey, even the Reddit guys, I think Alexis to a certain extent, especially Zuckerberg and Dorsey, I think really tried their best. And especially Zuckerberg tried his best and to sort of maintain free speech heading into the elections and stuff. By asking for regulation, people are like, you got to control the speech or whatever. By asking the government for regulation, he, he sort of implicitly asked the question of like, what is allowed in terms of speech moderation? They couldn't regulate because it was unconstitutional. And so why are you asking Mark Zuckerberg to do something that the government can't even do? That's like an interesting question that was implicitly asked when he was asking for regulation, whereas Sam, it's Like, for me, I think Mark asking it was tactically very smart, and I understood it didn't work. And now Sam is doing it in a way that I'm like, I don't fully understand why we're poking a hornet's nest when there is no runaway use case just yet. Like, people are talking about it. It's not even in a really angry way. A lot of people are interested. The New York Times wrote a dumb piece about it. We're not— I don't know, we're not quite there yet. It seems like there are other things. I don't know, asking for regulation, was that maybe the only way that he could have gotten the congressional hearing?

My sense is, so I disagree that it should be regulated by Congress at this point. I agree with the frame that technology is too new. Maybe you put some very broad safe harbor provisions so that people can't get sued. But outside of— and I don't even have a detailed proposal there.

That's the other problem. I mean, neither does he have a detailed proposal. It seems like he was saying AGI should be regulated, but maybe less the other stuff. And it's like, that wasn't even defined.

I think the relative framework is if you have X amount of GPU capacity, you need to submit to X, Y, and Z, and then everything. So he's going to globally banks. It's like globally systemic GPU clusters, the ones that Yud wants to shoot the missiles at. But I think the— let's play this out. So Zuck, no one really cares about social media. And then 2016 gets blamed for Trump, right? Like Cambridge Analytica, all that stuff, right? So he gets swept up in that. And so you caused Trump. Now we're going to come in and regulate you, right?

Very straightforward.

counterfactual situation here that ChatGPT has kind of launched and we get into the election and some deepfake or a proliferation of ChatGPT-generated misinformation happens on the internet. Trump beats the candidate, and then people are looking for a scapegoat. It's OpenAI's easily accessible AI technology is the reason Trump is there. Cue the same narrative, whatever. And so what I think is smart from Sam's standpoint, regardless of whether you agree with it, and I just like analyzing the game here, is he initiated it. So he went in and said, hey, look, I think that we would love your input. We should be thinking through this stuff. They kind of don't have an answer, but now he can't be accused of not Having engaged in good faith, he did it on a very public stage, right? Because he could be doing all the same things quietly behind the scenes, going to visit Congress. But by getting on a hearing, those clips are going to last forever. Right. And so I think it's just very, very savvy. And one point on Brian, who I work pretty closely with, I don't think he spent more than a total of a week in DC in the first 8 years of the company or something like he went on a couple of trips, not really necessarily his vibe. Whereas now I think he's spending a significant amount of time in addition to if you talk to a lot of the big crypto investors, they are spending a lot of time on regulation too. So it's it has become an existential thing, and that was actually happening before FTX. And I think FTX has only catalyzed it because you have Elizabeth Warren, you know, advertising her reelection campaign is like raising anti-crypto army. No one is doing that in AI yet. And and and like Elizabeth Warren is a really good bellwether of like. You know, she was to flip on like AI is going to take away, you know, blue-collar good jobs and all this other kind of stuff. That's a huge L for the entire industry and especially the market leader. And so I think by getting ahead of it, and Sam is extremely savvy, I think it buys them more time. And then whatever the regulation that ends up coming is, they're going to have a lot more job, more opportunity to shape it.

I wonder if it's almost reverse psychology, like Because tech is infighting so much on the AI front, or tech is so scared about it, maybe that's why other media or sort of DC is like, you know, they're so anti-tech that whatever the prevailing sentiment in tech is, they're anti-that, even if the sentiment in tech is that we're scared of technology. Does that make sense?

I have actually seen a strain of media, and that's what charges the whole political machine, where there's an assumption that all the apocalyptic talk with AI is just marketing. And I kind of am inclined to agree. Like, I actually sort of think there's something to that when you're talking about, oh my God, you know, my technology is capable of destroying the entire world. And it's like, that's pretty good for me. That's like very good marketing. I'm like, wow, that's pretty powerful. You control, like, you control a doomsday device. Tell me more. That's wild.

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You know, there's obviously danger to it, but I do think that a lot of people talking about the danger are not actually afraid of it. They just want to talk about how what they're working on is very important. And then still, still like a whole other group of people who are talking about the danger of AI also don't worry about the danger of AI based on just revealed preferences. In my opinion, they're living their lives as normal. They're not trying to stop it or anything. I think that it's an intelligence signal. In this weird sort of, you know, Bay Area polyamorous cult thing of the rationalists. Like, it's a way for you to peacock. You're one of the people who's smart enough to understand x-risk, and that's what is happening. So it's like this very strange set of ideas that correlates with value, social value, which makes the whole thing super Interesting, because it's so insular and so loud and so close to us. Like, we all have friends who are rationalists. And, and also just when I look at the politicians, like, why are you here? I hear that. I'm like, I get that. I understand that, that impulse.

It's like tech global warming. Like, Yud is our, like, Al Gore, who made a lot of money for that. And Yud will be, you know, properly compensated at some point too.

There are tiers of doomerism, right? So it's like debt ceiling is— that's the most basic because it's right in front of you. And like, oh my God, the debt ceiling. I'm going to like, you know, clutch my pearls on the debt ceiling. Then it's climate change. But if you're truly enlightened, it's AGI risk. It's like, these are petty matters. These matters are earthly matters. I'm worried about the singularity here.

When the politicians would actually sort of try and address some risk that was in front of them that they could sink their teeth into, they're like, hey, you know, What about mass job loss? Like, let's actually talk about a really crazy scenario where everyone, 80% of people are out of work or something. And let's talk about the intellectual property stuff and what happens when you're just stealing the work of artists and musicians and writers. And how do we think about that? How would you think about that? All of the rationalists were making fun of me. Like, how dare, like these morons who would talk about something so petty as mass job loss and the theft of intellectual property when Obviously, this like unknowable apocalypse is just on the— we're on the precipice of disaster. It's just, yeah, they want to always be reminding people that they're smarter than them. It's like, okay, I mean, maybe you are, but shut the fuck up.

Just to compare it to AI sort of sentiment to social media sentiment among sort of the media or DC, like the terms that come to mind for social media are, you know, disinformation or misinformation or, you know, teenage girl depression. or, you know, leading to Trump, all these terrible things in their minds. And yet that, that, that same mood affiliation, like on AI, is like, hey, maybe these companies are overrating, or it's, it's just unclear where it nets out. And, you know, AI is so much more of a threat than social media is. And it's just, it's— To Dan's point, much to my chagrin, I wonder if it's like a game of reverse psychology played, played well on, on behalf of people who are trying to accelerate AI advancement if they've been able to convince people not to be concerned about it.

I was just going to say, I think 2023 new technology is very different than 2003 new technology in that Congress. Technology is extremely powerful, right? Like the most valuable companies in the US are now all technology companies. We spend all of our entertainment time outside of like a very small sliver of like live sports. Everything comes through these companies. And so it's, it's, it's It's now much more relevant for politicians. And every new, whether it's hardware or some software paradigm shift, is going to affect all the things downstream that are related to these politicians, right? So Apple's going to release this new headset. People are going to laugh. It's going to be $3,000. You're going to have like a battery fanny pack on the side. You're going to have all of these people tell you how stupid this is. I think there's a decent chance that they sell the 10 million the first year, even though it's $3,000, because there's a bunch of nerds who are like, this is super cool. I've been waiting my whole life for this. And then within 3 or 5 years, there's going to be all this stuff of people are spending too much time on, on, you know, in the metaverse, in VR. You have incels who now have, you know, virtual partners and they're, they're having, you know, digital sex and like, we can't get people to have real sex anymore and procreate. Like, it will just become this huge issue because ultimately, if People are using the products and spending time in them. They are— the attention is the scarce resource, and that immediately becomes relevant for the politicians.

If they are. I mean, I would say that I'm skeptical of the VR stuff at this point, but I do want to— something else you said about the entertainment I think is really interesting. The fact that we spend so much of our time now, our entertainment time is given to these technology companies. That cannot be overstated how, how big of a change it is from 2003 or even 2013. Let's think about 2000, I think '09 or '10, the last writers' strike in Hollywood. You have a writers' strike that actually matters where, I mean, I remember watching different shows back then. I think Battlestar Galactica had a whole season destroyed over this. Almost the show almost ended. There were shows that ended, um, that I watched, that we would watch. People were watching TV still, like actual television. They would go at like you know, 8 o'clock or 9 o'clock there was a show. It did feel like that was on its way out, but it was still happening. And so the writer's strike was a thing. I don't hear about it. I don't have any sense of the writer's strike now other than I see some tweets. I saw a tweet the other day trying to say, you know, in case you don't know what the writer's strike is about, and they pointed to some AI thing and it was like a super abstract argument that nobody's going to care about. And the reason is because we're not watching TV. We're not even just streaming. Like you said, people are on TikTok. and Twitter and Instagram, and that's their television. Even while they're watching television, they're on those apps scrolling. And that, I mean, I think that's bleak and I don't love it, but also it's just very different.

Yeah, but I mean, look, look at Twitter, right? What did they launch this week? 2 hours of video. You know, that technology has existed for 10 years, but somehow the Twitter R&D team never was able to figure it out and Elon was able to do it in a, you know, 9 months.

But I wonder why though. Like, I wonder with the Twitter stuff, why wouldn't they go into video? Is it— is it— does they not want to— is there some platform war type thing that could happen with YouTube? I guess I can't imagine how YouTube could hurt Twitter, whereas I could imagine how Twitter could hurt YouTube.

Yeah, Twitter, Twitter is upstream of a population of YouTube links, right? Like Twitter is distribution for everyone until Twitter captures that on Twitter. But I think, I think if you just And I spent a lot of time thinking about this. The dominant form factor for entertainment is an infinite scrollable feed because it's— think of the era that we grew up in, channel surfing, just bumping the channel. Okay, next one. Now you just have that as the— it's actually the default behavior. It doesn't even last long enough for you to keep going. You just keep scrolling. And it can be anywhere you are. It can be in the coffee line. It can be doom scrolling in bed for several hours. And so I think that is just the fundamental thing in society that I don't think people grok enough is just the phone is where attention is spent. If you just take the total percentage of time in a kind of digital form or like a mass media form. And so now that's where the politicians want to make sure that they have the most control. And what is challenging for them Is they passed a law. And then this is going back to the why. Here's like a reasonable argument. If you believe the politicians that they don't want to regulate it, is you pass a set of laws in the, in the late '90s on based on the, oh, the internet's going to be this thing on a computer. You have a computer room and a modem and whatever. And then it turns into this like ubiquitous supercomputer in your pocket that just like you can spend infinite amounts of time on wherever you are. And Section 230, I'm a believer in like that. I think that there's been massively value accretive to the US and the world in terms of all the technology companies. But the reality is you have a First Amendment and Section 230, which the Supreme Court just upheld, that makes it very hard for these politicians outside of them repealing it and putting it in place, which is always hard. They can't get their claws into this stuff. So they have to do all this like BS, like the FTC stuff for Facebook and Twitter and like, but they can't actually get control of the algorithms, right? Where they did do that with television, right? Like they had what is the Fairness Doctrine or I forget what it was like equal time slots for politicians. There was all this like mucking around with the way TV worked. Plus the fact that in a pre-cable era, there were only 3, you know, 4 stations and that limited spectrum. allowed for a lot more quasi-government control. As much as we, you know, we were a free speech country, like the TV networks had a lot more control based on how the laws were put in place. Like you couldn't swear on them and all that other kind of stuff.

I was wondering recently what would happen if it was after the Sam Altman hearing, because there was so much— not so much, but there were a couple of people who were very, very just openly, we want to get rid of 230. And I just wondered what that would look like. Now we don't really maybe have to worry because the challenge was just turned down by the Supreme Court. Did you guys read this? That's so— yeah, there was a challenge to 230 that went to the Supreme Court and they wouldn't hear it. I think they said it's— we're not going to hear this challenge or whatever. So 230 lives another day.

Well, the Gonzalez v. YouTube, and then I think there was another case, and basically they found it's like, okay, If someone commits a terrorist act because they were radicalized by watching YouTube videos, like, remember that whole Kevin Roose?

Yeah. Yeah.

Like, you, if you, if you stay on the YouTube algorithm too long, you become a terrorist. Right. Well, the Supreme Court has decided that you're not liable as YouTube if you watch a bunch of videos and then, and then commit crime, basically.

Yeah. It turns out the terrorist is still, is still liable for the terrorism.

Right. Yeah. Not, not YouTube.

So New York Times hit hardest.

Not enough accountable.

Yeah.

I want to segue into Twitter. Twitter recently announced, or it came out there was a new CEO emerging. Mike, you had a great tweet, which is, can anyone check if she's liked my tweets? I need to know if I can trust her. So we briefly touched on it last week with Dan, but Mike, I want to hear your take on the new CEO. But more broadly, let's reflect on the past X months, of a new regime in Twitter in terms of reflect on it from a business perspective. What do we think about the prospects of the business? We're all avid addicts of the platform. Our businesses are on it. Dan's business is competing with it. But then also, what do we think about from a societal perspective as well? So there's a lot to talk about there. Hasan, I'll let you take it first time.

Well, I think that the New CEO is just a puppet. I think that the whole point of her is to have someone who Elon could blame for things that people aren't happy about. And I think that's smart. I think he needs that. I think that he needs some breathing room and he needs to not be the main character on Twitter for a while. One thing I worry about with him is I think that he might understand that on some level, but also he's drawn to it and he likes to be the main character. And There's one weird thing that's been happening, like, with Trump, and now with Elon, in the context of Twitter specifically, it's like the best you can actually— like, if you win the game of Twitter, you control your own Twitter-like platform. Like, that's kind of like what it leads to. And in a sense, I feel like that's what it— like, psychologically, like, we're— maybe when you're in the game, you're drawn to that in some way. And he's stuck in that machine of just being like, you know, the winner of Twitter. I think that's worrisome. You know, I want him to go and work on important things. And I think it's— that's degrading of someone's mental health. I think it's bad for the platform. I think it's bad for him. I think he's done a good job in terms of just, as Dan mentioned a second ago, you know, they've been capable of doing long-form video for a long time, and now they're just like now doing it. There's a lot of stuff they're just now doing. What I hope that Elon does is starts killing some of the product developments that aren't working. I have no problem with him introducing— I think it's cool, really cool to watch him introduce new products and like really rapidly and be like, we're trying this now. And but I think he's got to get better at sort of accepting when something doesn't work. And I think right now subscriptions is not working and he needs to just either change it dramatically or— I mean, for example, no one even knows that I'm on subscriptions right now. There's no way for me to add In a tweet thread, like I start with one that's free and then there's like a paid one only. I would love to be giving comments to people that they have to actually pay to read. That would be wild if it was like someone's in my mentions being insulting and I'm just like, I respond, but for subscribers only, that would be cool. There are all these things that you could do that you're not doing. But what you are doing is hamstringing traffic to places that you consider competitive because what Substack is, they have a notes product that nobody uses. And they have a CMS really, which Twitter doesn't have. So by that, I mean, Substack is a way that you can kind of bootstrap a media company. You're publishing articles is what they look like. And on Twitter, you can't really do that. And I've tried and I'm still trying. And it's like, there are a lot of problems with just the format. It's unreadable. People don't like it. They tell me they don't like it. They don't want to read it. And then the bigger problem is you can't share it outside of Twitter in a way that makes sense, in a way that everything else— if you're sharing, you know, links to Substack or links to the New York Times, you can share that anywhere. With a tweet, it's like it doesn't— it, it's not presented in a way that is meant to be shared like that. And, um, so I would say just in general, I, I think— I mean, the sort of incoherence on the topic of speech, like high level, I I think it's been a mixed bag from Elon. I think even maybe the best example of this is just the Twitter Files. Like, in the very beginning, you're like, wow, this is an unambiguous good, amazing. And as they kind of leak on, you're like, this is petty and not really helpful and not really informative. And it's a mixed bag. I'm glad it exists, but there's good and there's bad. And overall, I think it's really important that Elon took the company because it doesn't matter what the rules are on Twitter. This is a point that I feel like people have this sense that I'm this complete Elon propagandist on Twitter. So they want to attack me all the time when I'm like, it doesn't matter what the rules are on Twitter. They want to kind of mishear that and hear me saying it doesn't matter that Elon doesn't support free speech or whatever. Of course it matters. Political censorship is wrong, and we want to live in a world where that doesn't exist. However, the most important thing— what I'm saying is like the most important thing about Elon controlling Twitter is that there is now one major social media platform that follows a different set of rules than every other major social media platform. And so because of that, it like almost doesn't matter what the dominant rules are on either platform. What you have now is something closer to an approximation of of like, of more free speech rich social internet, just because they're different. There are going to be things that you can't do on Twitter that you can do on Facebook and vice versa. And that's better than living in a world where all the platforms are coordinating in real time to deplatform, you know, Alex Jones or whatever at the exact same moment. That's really bad. We forget actually how much worse things were. And even not even just before Elon, I feel like things cooled down. Before Elon took over, but they were really, really bad. And probably they're going to get really, really bad again in the next election. And what I worry about— I'm hopeful for Elon. I think he's going to stick to his guns, but he's going to be under a lot of pressure to start doing political censorship as this election heats up. And that's when we'll see. That's when we'll see what he's really made of. I think.

My sense on the subscription product is he's just iterating on it, right? So he tried to do the, you know, blue check apocalypse on 4/20, didn't work. So starts adding back blue checks. And I think progressively they've just added back most of them. I think the only group of people that haven't really got them back are journalists, which that I think is pretty funny. Yes.

Right.

So it's like the, the, the actual notable people, they, they got them back. And then if you worked at the New York Times, uh, you, you don't. I think that that's great. I think that the corporate affiliations product, you can argue on it feels a little crowded and cringe or whatever. I actually think this is excellent. And the revealed preference here is I see an increasing number of companies paying for that to have that badge, and that's $1,000 a month. And so I think the original version was, you know, because when you let J Cal do product, like he just But good insight to do the badges. But their version was, oh, well, the New York Times can go buy it for all of their people. Instead of blue checks, you get the New York Times badge, which potentially is valuable. And it's like, well, that was a miscalculation because these people hate Elon, so they're not going to go do it. But what I'm seeing is if you look at a bunch of startups, like if the startup hits a certain amount of funding, they just go and get the badge like they actually want that status. And so I think that that's a smart product. And the reality is, is if you get companies to pay for it, they are way less sensitive. And so your $8 subscription a month, that's 125 $8 a month subscriptions for $1,000 a month. And maybe you dial that up over time. And I actually think there's a bit of like, okay, what is an ad on Twitter worth? Like, we've actually programmed to ignore it. Whereas if you're a company and you now pay for the whatever tier to get like the right gold check and they just say, hey, we're going to give you a boost on your corporate tweets. So effectively it becomes this pervasive ad. And I'm not saying that I want that as a consumer, but I think that there are some really smart ways to just basically get companies to— they don't think they're advertising on Twitter because they didn't like write ad copy in a specific ad and use the old ad product. It's just like their presence on Twitter Getting a boost is the ad. I'm optimistic that they're going to continue to iterate their way there and actually find like a decent, decent chunk of revenue just from, from these companies and massively increase the number of advertisers. In addition, now they have a CEO who, who she knows how to sell ads and he just added 8-gig, 2-hour videos. So, you know, that they're going to be more people and Tucker Carlson. And, and so I think that the, the biggest thing, and we brought this up last week, is If he can just moderate a little bit on the, the right-coded of where he is right now towards a more centrist thing and not have the main character thing blowing up. And maybe, maybe that's the winning strategy. I don't know. I tend to disagree with it. I mean, he had that interview this week with CNBC. So he had the, you know, Princess Bride quote, you know, he was like, I'm never going to stop saying stupid shit. I'm going to do whatever.

I will die first.

But what's interesting is, so do you know how that interview worked? He did that interview on CNBC, but now Elon is making all of these interviewers, when they do it, they do a Twitter Space. So it's just Elon in the Twitter Space and he's just broadcasting the live audio out on the platform. And so I think what, if I was to kind of give the best cases, he is the, like, a super active user of the product, right? Like he uses all these different things. And so he's getting an intuition for this stuff as the biggest account on the platform. And I think he's going to— I'm confident, like if he can do the reusable rockets and mainstreaming electric cars, I think he can figure out the product of Twitter. It's not rocket science. And so I think if he can modulate a little bit, he can still say what he wants to say, but bring it back. I think naturally the left-coded folks show back up because the reality is the reveal preference is they want the distribution, right? So you might go use Mastodon or Bluesky or whatever your mood affiliation, decentralized social, and get excited about that. Maybe use Farcaster. But the reality is when you want the most eyeballs to see the thing that you worked on, whether that's a news article, a Substack, a new company feature or whatever, You're launching that on Twitter. You're not doing it on YouTube, not doing it on Instagram. I mean, a certain subset.

Well, I mean, maybe not a Substack anymore. And I just— because you can't— it's there. The traffic is so hamstrung, and I don't think that's going to end. And I actually think that he's going to be— I mean, Elon wants everything to happen on his platform.

The everything app.

Yeah, that's his ambition. It's everything. And I think it starts with Substack, but it moves to things like YouTube. It moves to— he's going to go back to the social media thing where you couldn't post your links to other social media apps. And he's eventually going to get— once all of that's taken care of, then he goes after the media companies. It's like the New York Times links can no longer be shared or things like that. I think— I do think that's where this ends. Unless they pay maybe tons of money or something.

I don't know.

Right.

But, but, but, but that— my push is, so the same people who are saying freedom of speech, not freedom of reach, thinking they're cute. And it's like, great. He just basically said no freedom of reach. Like you're a competing media platform. I am going to deboost your, your links. Again, do I agree with that personally? No. But if you just look at the move on the court, the revealed preference is people are going to take an algo boost if you do the long tweet or you do the native Twitter video or, you know, like just a basic thing. Whenever I tweet and I'm tweeting about something that I'm trying to get people to go to another thing, I don't put links in the first tweet anymore. I always just put an image because it's like the image gets more engagement and then it's like, okay. And then it's annoying because I just want the link. It's like, Go do this thing. Okay, great. I want to do it. How do I find it? I got to click and then I go to the next link. But he's already made the algo transparent. He's like, the more time you spend, that's why we have the threads, right? The more distribution you're going to get. And so Twitter is about distribution. Like, people can kind of reminisce about the days where it was like, oh, it's just like a bunch of tech people hanging out online or whatever. And there are going to be spaces to do that. But, but when you want to broadcast something to the largest group of people with the potential to go viral, you do it on Twitter.

I just want a public service announcement. You could follow Taylor Lorenz on LinkedIn.

I believe she said something recently that I almost— I haven't done a Taylor screenshot in a while, but I was rewatching our last Moz episode and we had talked about her on that. And I talked about how I thought she was cool and I thought that the the mythology around her was really interesting and that she leans into that and she embraces that, I think is funny. And she— I saw the other day people were freaking out about a thread that actually I almost defended her, but let's not get crazy, where she was accused of getting Fear the Floof. This is the cat platform, a long thread of things that— that's not what happened. I interviewed Fear the Floof about this. He deleted his own account. The Wayback Machine, I do believe that she has an uncle who owns that. But also, you can— anyone can have their stuff removed from the Wayback Machine. You just have to ask them. I've never done it. So I don't know how easy it is. It's sort of a standing question that I would like someone to answer. But it's not necessarily nefarious that she did that. And I clicked over to her feed. And I saw her talking about the lore. She's like, whatever, just adds to the lore. And it's like, it's— she has lore, and that's— God bless, that's awesome. Love her. I'm happy for her.

The, uh, the mythology of her talking to the Wayback Machine or her having special privileges in Twitter, which may be true, I don't know, but it's, it's almost like, uh, in The Matrix, like talking to the creator or something. Like there's this higher power that sets the reality and like she's in touch with it in some, you know, weird way.

I guess she was in a way that Maybe some of us are now in that we're closer to Elon and he sees this stuff and their team sees this stuff. And, and probably there is a lot. Back in the day, Taylor was speaking directly to the kind of blue-haired Nazis who worked for Twitter's content moderation team. So she was really— this is why she was such a huge target is because people kind of clocked her as an influencer of the most influential people alive. My mom yesterday, or like this last week's few days ago, she was just casually started talking about this Rolling Stone article that accused me of election denialism, which I'm not, by the way. I voted for Joe Biden. I'm embarrassed about it, but I voted for Joe Biden. I'm like, that didn't happen, Mom. That's crazy. Like, no way that first of all, does the Rolling Stone even they even exist? Like second, like why would they care about me? She's like, it happened, son, and blah blah blah. And she sent me the link, and it was from six months ago, and it was because. Elon Musk, it was right when he was taking over Twitter. He was talking to me a lot. I was one of many people that they did, like, it was like 6 or 7 accounts that were these really right-wing scary accounts. And what journalists at that time, they were very afraid that the person who was now going to be calling the moderation shots was influenced by people like me. And actually, that's a valid concern if you're them. Just the other day, I don't know how it happened, but, uh, I mean, there was, uh, one of these crazy communist accounts, like in San Francisco local politics. They went after Gary Tan and kind of threatened to kill him with a— it was like a gun emoji and a guillotine thing. And they were like, we're gonna get you or whatever. I screenshot it and just made a comment about it. I was like, it's weird, you know, what sort of violent language we're allowed to say and what we're not. And it got a lot of attention, and that person got deplatformed. So I was like, whoa, like, that's— that, like, that is—

these—

the rules are different. And I don't know who— I don't know who saw that or how that happened, um, but if I were on the other side, I would be very mad at me right now. I would be like, you know, you're getting people deplatformed, like, you're the man, you're like a fascist, and all of this. Um, even though, you know, I don't have any kind of official relationship with anyone over there, I don't know how it works, but I do know that a lot of people over there now are followers of mine, and I think it would be stupid to pretend that that doesn't mean something in a way that it did mean something back when Taylor was friends with their content moderation team.

To be fair to that, that tweet, it was like Gary Tan was saying, you know, use your democratic right to vote for another candidate because this candidate I don't like. And someone responded. It was some, you know, non-account. It was like hippity hoppity. So it was like, weird that it was like full horseshoe theory. So you have this really alt-right coded thing. It's like a frog with a gun and a guillotine. Yeah. So it's just like, wait a second. So I thought Pepe was like, right coded. Now it's left coded because like, I'm like, ah, horseshoe theory. No.

Yeah.

So you're saying that they should have been deplatformed or are you saying, are you defending them?

I'm generally against this idea of deplatforming As like a concept, I think the idea of having multiple clients, I mean, I'm working on a world where this exists. That's like the version of there's a website I don't like, we need to take the website down. That's a much higher threshold than social media where an account can just be disappeared. That said, I think, and I actually should verify this, I would imagine they are a lot more transparent when they take those actions now versus the kind of 1970s Argentina style, like they just disappear you and like you don't know what happens in the middle of the night.

I do think— I think if there are going to be moderation rules at all about violent language, you have to be consistent. And so that's kind of how I feel about that.

But that's a good example. So in the US, we have actually a set of speech that is not protected by the First Amendment as set up by the Supreme Court through legal precedent. So if one of those things actually violates the law, then the company based in the US needs to actually Do it. But I think without trying to split hairs here, it's like outside of a very narrow set of things, like I'm generally against deplatforming. And what I would say is like you can deboost on the algo side of things, or you can just kind of say, okay, this account's in a like you have to opt in to view this account because we've deemed them to be, you know, whatever against our terms of service. But the longer, the more people you can maintain the account of, But potentially put warnings and flags and things like that, I think is a better policy.

To close out this sort of topic, if either of you were CEO of Twitter, you know, Solana, you mentioned his strategy, which is to try to basically, you know, subsume the internet or all other even adjacent competing platforms onto Twitter. I believe you think that's not only a frustrating strategy as a content creator, but a bad strategy. Like, if you were CEO of Twitter, you wouldn't do that. You would do something else.

Yeah, it would have to be the place where you go to see everything else. Like, to find— like, the, the, the— in, um, in Final Fantasy VII, there is this like Adventureland, and, uh, the first stop of the Adventureland is this circular room with a bunch of different tunnels in it. And you like portals, like you jump into each. You can go to like the battle arena, you can go to like the clothing area, and you can go to whatever. And you go there, you always have to go there. To see where everything else is. That's where your internet journey begins. And they should be the sort of operating room of the whole internet. That should be the place that you go to see where to go. And they should then improve the advertising product and make a lot of money because everyone in the world goes to Twitter. If they got to a place where everyone went to Twitter to see what was going on and where to go, that would be really powerful. And they were kind of on their way there. There were all sorts of things they could have done. Their product development was just really slow. And I wish they would've leaned into that because now he's leaning into things like subscriptions, which that's not a lot of money. You know, it's the weirdest thing about his fight with Substack is how little money Substack is making and how I think that model— I like those guys, I like that product. I don't think that business model makes sense.

And, but in fairness to Elon, it's the— or in fairness to the To push back a bit, it seems that when you say they were on the way there, it was never going to be as big as Facebook. Twitter has an onboarding problem. It's just, what is it, 1 in 10 Americans or something? They can't be as mass market as they wish they were. And so they either can make a little bit of money from a lot of people, but it seems like they had cap constraints on how big they can get, or they're making a lot of money from their power. Twitter's for power users, right? Twitter's for people like us. And so how do they make a lot of money from us? Hence subscription, right?

Yeah, that's a good counterpoint. Maybe you're right. And I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I understand business better than Elon.

So—

I'm Twitter CEO tomorrow. I split the app into 2 apps. It's like Twitter Bloodsport Arena social network that like the very online people like ourselves use. And like, that is just, you just make that the best place to just like absolutely go at it with the people that you hate online, which is what drives Twitter, and connect with your friends, right? And then 98% of people, 95% of people use a TikTok-like, just call it, so call one Twitter Pro and don't charge anything for it. And then Twitter, which is just like no follow model. It's just a TikTok-like infinite feed of the most interesting content that you get a bunch of very online people to produce for free. Which is what basically happens today. And I think it's just you solve for 2 very different product use cases, right? One is just like, I want the least amount of complexity and the maximum amount of entertainment. And then the other one is give me my, like, you know, like fighter jet so that I can fight all these other people with all of these different tools and ways and things that I can, I don't know, just find the people that I hate the most and just really drive into it because that's actually, I think, what I think that a lot of people follow the bloodsport who are not in it, like themselves. Right. But that content would just flow, right? It's the same thing.

It really needed a better curation of that. Like, there are people who genuinely follow these people, like everyone who's active on Twitter, they follow them like they're the Real Housewives or something. And it's like, oh, did you see what so-and-so said to so-and-so? Oh, you got to pull this thread up. And they like go in and it's like, it's the human drama of it. They follow— it is their television. It's my television. It's our television. I'm living in it and I'm also consuming it. It's really messed up.

But it plays to a base human instinct. Like, we are a tribal species and gossip and all of the things that we do are evolutionary based on, like, keeping people in check within the small little village we're in. We just now happen to have a village that is the entire internet. And Facebook is interesting because it's a bunch of overlapping micronetworks. Right? Because it's like your friend graph isn't quite the same as this one. Whereas because of the unidirectional follow model with Twitter, I can follow you, you don't have to follow me back. And it just like you build these like huge broadcasts, you're basically just building up these like mech warriors on Twitter. And then like they can, you know, when like a Solana biology punch against someone, it's like, oh shit. And then Elon jumps in with a reply guy and like the boost and it's like, oh, like, ah. It's going off like, um, it's like that scene in The Matrix when it's like, yo, Neo and Morpheus are fighting. And then they're like, everyone like runs out of the kitchen to go see it. But like, that's basically what happened. Like there was this, this meta meme for, you know, the very online folks this week. Biology got in a fight with Power Bottom Dad. And there was like this, like, I think like Luke Metro or whatever. Like, I was like, and then so it's like, yo, Biology and Power Bottom are fighting. And like, everyone's like, oh shit. Like, I gotta go see, see what was said. And, and, and like, You know, if you get in a fight with Balaji on Twitter, you're going to— now with the long tweets, like you're going to get like these long responses with, with the, you know, the good little parrots. Plus he's going to have 7 citations, like not someone you want to fight with on Twitter. He's going to outlast you.

Yeah, he is. You said something. So on the tribal thing I wrote about in a piece for Firewire, I think it was, it was called Navigating Our Haunted Transsexual Internet. I talked about this thing, the tribal thing where, yes, all of these tools, the gossip and the sort of mediation of conflict and things, this is how we get to consensus. That's the thing that we're actually trying to come to tribally. We're trying to get everybody on the same page. That's the impulse. And that was really important, I think, evolutionarily throughout time, it seems to me. Today, I don't think that that is actually— consensus is not possible In a world of hundreds of millions of people on the same app. I do not believe it's possible. Let's just give me one second to finish that. So I don't think consensus on pretty much anything, let alone like really core values things, is possible. However, the things that set us off are all the same and they're all magnified. Something like the Bud Light story with Dylan Mulvaney, like that is a story that is actually— so that's abstractable. The trans story in general. Just the trans transness. That's something that is perfectly designed to set people off. It polarizes them, and then you have this like weird conversation about the nature of reality, the nature of biology, the nature of humanity that tribally like you feel this like we can't move forward as a people until we agree on what's going on here because it's very very very weird. So the internet surfaces that conversation, but then makes it impossible to. Come to any kind of consensus on that issue. So it just drives us insane. And I think it's weirdly new. It's like we don't often acknowledge how new the internet and especially social media at scale is. And I don't think it's— this is not only is it not healthy, it's not Lindy. And I don't think it can last. I think that some fundamental change has to happen in the way that social media— I don't think that's a Twitter sort of mass war thing can last forever. And I think maybe smaller communities is going to be the future.

So, so now I want to use the Avengers. Twitter is Infinity War. Like, we just say it's going to last forever. But I think it's any culture war issue, right? Like another shooting, boom. Like everyone just got their, their, their charts. They've got their, you know, whatever memes. They take the same video clip. Half of the video clip they can use to their side, and the other side is using the other side of the video clip. Like, it just—but but but it goes back. It's just blood sport. It's the fodder. It's the cannon fodder for the daily culture war blood sport. I would say there is one way we do reach consensus on the internet, and it's called cryptocurrencies. Like by definition, like you you have a consensus algorithm, and it's worked so far, at least with Bitcoin and Ethereum. What is it?

What does it say about Dylan Mulvaney? Is it gonna help us get consensus on—

No, but, but I think like if you just broaden the point to any culture war issue, when have we—

currency believe in—

Yeah. What, but like what culture war issue have we, we, we made progress on with social media? It's—

Oh, none. Yeah. None.

It's just, it's just, we know that it's like red tribe.

Think about that. You said though, because previously we did as a culture make We did make—

you could say, because it was a slower moving process, and it was more diffuse. Now it's all concentrated into these, just like who has the best dunks.

When you think about, for example, the Dylan Mulvaney Budweiser thing, this is for maybe people who are— I feel like it's almost impossible that Maz listeners don't know about this. But we're talking about, obviously, the trans influencer Getting a face, like her face on a can and sent to her and her doing a commercial for them. Internet explodes. That's something that should have lasted less long than a school shooting. It had— that drama lasted like 6 weeks. And that was when I decided to write it. I was like, whoa, this is— this has more intensity than I'm used to for something so stupid. And what that indicated to me was that people were being driven crazier by this than they have been in the past. And I— it seems like it has to come to some kind of breaking point. I don't know how we can persist in this world where people are, are not only living with 2 entirely different sets of, I don't know, frameworks for what reality is, but they also want everyone else to agree with them. And that's what you have now is like, it's not just like, oh, we're happy to sort of have Californians be weird and, and sort of maybe in San Francisco, gender doesn't exist. And like everyone's a hermaphrodite or something. But, you know, in Texas, it's like man and woman and whatever else. No one wants that. Everyone wants everyone to be like them. And that's a product that is the internet where you're like, no, everyone has to be exactly like me. And I can see some asshole in Tennessee who's not like me and it makes me mad. and I want them to change. Those are new things, I think. It's new to be so intimately connected to people who are not like you and who you need to be like you.

That is new. But what is old is the idea of the personal is political and the universalizing tendency of injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

That's true.

And it's interesting because Mark actually gave us the alternative framing on polarization, which is that the alternative is just a one-party state. Right. The alternative of an infinity war is just one part, one side dominates. And if you don't like that side, well, that's a bad world. If you like that side, then you win.

That's sort of the history of the 20th century America. It was a one-party state. You're talking about media polarization or media, like, separate. We had a couple of channels that were controlled by the same sort of dominant voice.

Well, maybe, maybe for the audience, if, like, that kind of philosophical or intellectual frame. And this, I think Curtis talks about this, but basically it's the idea that you think that there is a Democrat and Republican, but the reality is they are the same. It's an establishment, and the Republicans are just 20 years behind the, the, you know, and you have some kind of more crazy theatrical-oriented ones. Mm-hmm. But the idea that, that there is actually no real independent anything outside of the establishment until the internet. And now, now you're getting exposed to the fringe Substacks, the weird people on Twitter and all that. And that's actually causing more of the polarization than it was, you know, this, this simple frame of red versus blue. Like, it was actually never that. It's, it's, it's— you're getting exposed to the, the full radioactive potential of humanity.

The algorithm surfaces the most extreme things. And so it's like, that's all we can— all we can talk about. The 2 things that we're allowed to talk in the trans conversation. It's like, one, either like your 3-year-old should be taught about sex change operations in kindergarten, or two, like, what was the phrase? Trans should be abolished. Like, like, we're going back. Like, none of this stuff should even exist. They should lock them up. No gender reassignment surgery for grown-ass adults who are crazy, whatever. Like, I'm probably— people are listening here and like, they're like, that's not that crazy. I think, I think I don't know. Maybe there's no room for a liberal like myself these days.

But the other thing is like, so I like a foundational principle for me is personal freedom. Like, I think that's like, it's very American to say like, I want to be able to live my life within the bounds of what society decides is the law, the way I want to live my life. And it's weird to think that that is not even like considered, call it conservative anymore. It feels like I'm like, When, if I say that, and, you know, I live in LA, if I was to say personal freedom, people would be like, did you vote for Trump? Like, or, or like, are you a libertarian? Or like, it's like, no, I, I, I actually voted for Joe Biden as well. And I'm, I think libertarians are like completely ineffective. Right. And so, but like personal freedom should be a core tenet of what makes you American, right? Like we have this amazing Constitution and we have a federal system. And yeah, can you get everything you want in every single part of the country, in every state? No. And do I think the arc of progress bends towards, you know, call it Whig history, progressivism? Yes. So over time, things just kind of get more normalized. But the reality is, is that like you want a certain set of kind of beliefs encoded in a state's laws and/or your own lifestyle. There are places you can move in this country that are going to be very supportive of that. Right. You want to maximize on a certain set of personal freedoms, move to San Francisco, right? And you're going to, you're going to not have a certain set there. You want to maximize on a different set, move to Miami. Like, like, that is such a powerful thing that you're still living in the same country, but like, you can have actually very, very different things to optimize for. And I don't know, to your point, I think the internet just like collapses everything to everyone should be the same as me. It's like the Buzz Lightyear meme where it's like there's one Buzz Lightyear and then you just see the whole shelf of all the like same. And it's like everyone wants everyone to be the exact same person. And of course, the beliefs that they want are their beliefs, right?

They're old problems, but the medium is totally new. And so I think that actually, it's, it's, we're not appreciating how different things are now than they were even 10 years ago.

I think if you just have one chart to explain it, it's the amount of— so people have an amount of leisure time, right? So it's like, they probably are still working the same amount and sleeping the same amount. And you know, eating, like, but the time that the Facebook addressable market, right? Facebook starts their earnings call every time with how much time spent. That like kind of whether you're watching TV or you're going and doing some other type of leisure activity, it's just the total share of leisure time that is spent in feeds, in apps that is correlated with all of this, right? Because the algorithms are going to centralize in a way the content that we're seeing, the culture war stuff that we're fighting about. With a slight nuance of if I'm one, you know, right-coded or left-coded, I'm going to get the version of the world where it's either a dunk or look how terrible these people are being. And like, you know, and then of course turns into another dunk back. And so it's just your tribe and the world filtered through the same set of events just with a, you know, your political coding.

The algorithm's impression of me, whatever it feeds me. I always get like trade-for-you feeds with my political enemies or even just opt in. Like if there's like a dropdown menu and I could just like click in to see what their For You feed looks like, that would be cool. I would even pay for it. I would pay people for it. I would pay to see what, I don't know, is a popular CNN broadcaster. What does their For You feed look like?

And why do you want that? To better understand them or?

Yes. Yeah.

So it's interesting. This feature actually existed for a brief moment on Twitter. I remember Patrick Collison tweeting about it or something and it was like really buried, but you could actually get to a point where you could just see the person's feed. But this was in an era, and I think a lot about this with Farcaster because this is extremely easy to do on a decentralized social networking protocol, right? So whether it's Farcaster or Bluesky or Mastodon or whatever, and actually a couple, like the one that Jack Dorsey's into, Nostr, which is a little bit more Bitcoin coded, a bunch of the clients already have this. So you can just be like, oh, you can't post as Jack, but you can log in as Jack and you can actually just see the world through Jack's eyes because everything is just open to do. What gets challenging, and I think this is what you're capturing in what you said though, is the For You page. That is not observable, right? Because there's so much more data beyond just who you're following. The reveal preference of what accounts you spend time on, right? Like time spent is such a big impact on, or influence on how these algorithms now work. And so what you are actually spending time watching, it's like people are always complaining. There's like, I feel like Twitter now is all these fight videos. Well, it's like the fight videos. You you you know you shouldn't click through.

I just saw someone say that. I'm like, I don't have fight videos.

Okay, but but you watch one or two fight videos. Yes, exactly.

Yeah yeah, like that person. I'm like, the reason you're looking at them is because you're obsessed with them.

Right? They show they show up, and I'm like, you know, it's funny. There was a family member I will not name in my broader family. We were, you know, at some event. We're talking about it, and and they go. Yeah, I've gotten really into Instagram Reels. And I'm like, what? Like, of all the people I know in my life, not really that into social media. And he's like, yeah, I've been watching these videos of car crashes. And I'm just like, when left to your own devices, this is what we do, right? Like, it's just like, can't, you know, the whole like rubbernecking phenomenon. It's like you can't turn away. It's like, yeah, because it's, it's, it's, you know, overrides the certain part of your brain. And so I think that that's the challenge with the For You stuff is even though you might have the kind of public dataset of what you do, where you spend time, and I don't think anyone wants to really publicly advertise it. It'd be like the equivalent of having your internet browsing history just be public. People don't want that. So that will accrue with whatever tool you're doing the browsing and that time spent is the actual algorithm at this point.

To close out the Elon topic, what's funny is there are all sorts of complaints about his Twitter behavior, but the stuff that is relatively harmless or not as threatening is kind of the titter stuff, sort of the juvenileness around certain sexual dynamics or cryptocurrency like Doge pushing or that kind of thing. But what's really a threat is that he was taking sort of people like Libs of TikTok or I'm Miles Tong, for these people who were getting threats to be banned or certainly deplatformed in the old regime. And he's endorsing them. He's not only letting them be banned, he's endorsing them to 130 million people. He's speedrunning Michelle Tandler or something. He's speedrunning becoming based. And there's a highbrow version of it, which is Richard Hanania. And there's a lowbrow version of it, which is— I don't need to name accounts. But it's, it's just, it's fascinating to, to watch. And he's, he's dribbling down.

I would also say that I don't necessarily agree that the titter and stuff like that is not offensive to these people. I think that they see it as really, really scary because his behavior is that of a teenage boy. And teenage boys are uncontrollable. They, they see a teenage boy, teenage boys, the teenage boy, the American teenage male is like the opposite of the woke substitute teacher energized like hall monitor that defined the previous era of the internet. They exist. In fact, that, that type of person exists to control teenage boys. And now it's like they're gone and there's a teenage boy on the throne and it's like, buckle up.

I do agree. But I guess I would say even if he was— if his tone was totally sober and mature, And he was calmly saying, hey, you know, looks like, you know, let's relitigate Michael Brown in 2014 and all this stuff that he's bringing up. I think the vitriol would be just as much because he's substantively pushing on the pressure points in addition to his tone. But I think his tone gives a— gives an attack vector that, you know, isn't necessarily strategic for him.

Let me— can I put a pause in it? So we talked about this with Katherine about serious people. I think what drives people crazy more than anything else about Elon, and I don't think most people admit it, and the people who kind of like Rocket Man bad, is it's kind of a play on Peter's thing about Trump being a serious person too, is that Elon doesn't act like a serious person, but is an extremely serious person, right? Like reusable rockets, mainstreaming electric cars, like Neuralink, all that shit. The outcomes there are very serious in terms of moving humanity forward. And what the people on the other side don't like is what they care about is how you act in terms of what you say, how you are perceived as being serious, which means the establishment, and then they don't actually care about the outcomes. Right. So it's like, I'm going to talk about climate change, And the Paris Climate Agreement and all this BS, but then I'm going to shut down my nuclear plants, right? Whereas the Elon version of it is, I'm going to put these crazy conspiracy theories, and I don't even like that word, but I'm going to surface a lot of chaos, but I actually have the— he did this back in March. I have the only concrete plan to systematically reducing our dependence on fossil fuels at every part of the energy stack in the economy. And he can talk through that at a first principles level. And then the best argument against him is like, oh, well, he's a marketer and he has his timelines wrong. It's like, bro, what electric car have you sold? He has 50% of the electric cars in this country. How many Superchargers have they built? Right? It's just insane. Starlink. So the fact that he doesn't do what the establishment wants in terms of the act, That's what drives people crazy. Yeah, I agree. No one thinks Jeff Bezos is childish, but Jeff Bezos has a mermaid version of Lauren Sanchez on the front of his yacht, which— but because he owns the Washington Post and he's—

I'm sorry, I will defend it all day. I think it was awesome. I think— go off, King. Like, he— like, please, who doesn't want— who doesn't want their, like, their lover as a statue on the top of their— or like on the— what is it called? The mast or whatever.

All right, I'll give you—

I actually thought it was their mega yacht. It's the Like the biggest sailing yacht in the world. Like, that is some king shit.

I'm completely on board with that.

It's not called F.U. Money if you're not going to say F.U., right? But I guess, like, Bezos, he owns the Post. He's a little bit more bought into the establishment.

They hate him. Pick a different example. They hate Bezos too.

Well, what's interesting about Bezos is he's not full Gates, right? Like, Gates is like completely in the board, right?

Yes. Gates is the one who they love.

Bezos just got his NASA contract. Like, good for him. But I think the testosterone, I think there's a version where he's going to break Elon's way because he's like, wait a second, I was supposed to be the guy, the main character here, and I was supposed to be in my retirement, all this stuff. And I got this kid, he's speedrunning everything here. He's pulling away from you. And so I actually think, which, by the way, if you like this dynamic, there's an excellent near-term or near-future science fiction book from Daniel Suarez called Delta V, and it's a space race book about billionaire-type personalities that do resemble a kind of like Jeff Bezos and Elon. So I'd highly recommend that book. I think it's just he doesn't act the way serious people are supposed to be, but his outcomes are actually serious, and then that's what irks them.

Yeah, I think that's true. It's the voice. It's weird how much Like, people really— with the Trump context is like the way he sounded really, really deeply bothered people, myself included, when he first arose. And I got over that. But it was like the disconnect between what I thought a president was supposed to be, even though I— there was never a president who I didn't think was a clown, but they sounded like a president. And it's somehow like Trump sounding different really just Like, I wouldn't say it broke something in me. It bothered me in a way that other people then— like, that thing that happened to me and I got over, other people actually were broken by.

Did you watch the CNN thing for him?

The most recent one? I didn't watch— I watched some of the clips. Yeah, I saw a couple of highlights.

So one interesting thing, and it's— you can never get like left side of the political spectrum people to admit this, but if you watch that and then just go back to 2016 version of yourself 2016, your version of yourself would've just found everything about the way his demeanor as a politician was just so foreign versus how familiar, whether you agree with him or not, how familiar does that feel of him basically being Trump on TV as an entertainer with this anchor? The anchor was trying to hit him with a good question, and then he knows how to play the whole situation. I think people think there's a referee that, oh, you're not acting the way that serious people are supposed to act. So therefore, points taken away, you lose or whatever. And I think that whether it's Trump or Elon or pick your favorite populist effectively, is the internet is kind of being like, well, if I have my own distribution, I don't need the media to To characterize it, and people are going to come up with their own opinions. And I think that's the world we're moving to. And I actually think AOC is— she's more within the establishment, but she completely groks the direct-to-consumer, have-your-own-media platform better than I think any other politician outside of Trump. And I actually heard recently from an elected member of Congress at an event. And he basically was like, she's incredibly savvy. And I really think she knows what she's doing in terms of playing this game. And I think that the more people that figure this out is just like, the internet is naturally populizing in terms of, I don't know if that's the right word, but populism is the winning optimal strategy for the internet. And the faster you get there and don't have to worry about the elite establishment point of view, the more power you're going to have.

Yeah, this is a problem for me because I don't like the elite, but I am like, I believe in the elite. Like I would like an elite to be in charge. I am not a populist. I don't understand how you can look at the— you can't sort of agree correctly with the statement that most people are dumb and also think that most people— there's like a wisdom to what most people think or want. It's not true. And what I would love to live in is a world where people sort of acknowledge that there are some people who are like a little more together than other people. And maybe, maybe the way we get to that is different. It's not necessarily like credentials or something. It's like the fruits of your labor. You know, Elon's done a lot that gives me— for me, that's— he's produced a lot of good in the world. And I look at that and I think, okay, well, that's— I'm leaning in. I want to learn more about this. I don't know. I'm not a populist. I would like to find an innovation within the world of the internet that reduces the amount of populism or something. I don't know.

A few responses. One thing in terms of tone, in terms of what wins on the internet, it's also a sense of humor. What doesn't win is Kara Swisher's shrill sort of concerned trolling. That's out. That's like 2012, 2013. It is interesting. Remember how people hated Bush and then with some time passing, they're more sympathetic towards him or even miss him? I wonder if that's going to happen to Trump too. I already see the tone is changing. There are some people who would never have quoted him or said he's hilarious now openly saying, wow, he's like a comedic genius. And I think part of it is the internet has changed. It's just interesting to see. Yeah, humor wins. And even I see like AOC or Taylor Lorenz, I see them being more funny or being more engaged, like adjusting their style to be able to make fun of themselves. Shrill is out.

I agree to a certain extent, but then you also see a weird emergence of it on the right. So you see the woke right, even the way that people will talk about the Like, there was like a Miller Lite commercial after the Bud Light commercial. And I'm like, this is— there are way better targets than this. Like, what is going on here? And it was specifically like, we need to show them that like, this is not how we do things in this country. And we're gonna like cancel them and stuff like that. And I thought, this is— I don't love this. And maybe there's like a balancing where the polls are there. They're like, they're both sides are adjusting a little bit.

Shrillness is a way to get power, um, or to, you know, or it's a way to exercise your power to cancel people. And when you have no power, there's no use in being shrill. You should be subversive to try to, you know, uh, yeah. And so, um, but what happened is the left was so shrill, they overused that technique that it's starting to lose its power. And now the right is gaining a little bit of power, and so that they're starting to use it in, um, you know, equally bad, bad ways. The, um, the other thing that's so fascinating is that Going back to Elon and Gates for a second, the media, this is decentralized, but it partly takes the approach of shaming people. It shames some billionaires to get them to do things that they agree with. And Gates is someone perhaps who's been shamed, or Zuckerberg, I don't know. Shame worked to some degree. Shame, guilt, whatever you want to call it. It worked. Hold accountable. It worked to some degree. Whereas With Elon, it opposite of worked. It backfired so significantly that he was relatively neutral, and now he's like a sworn enemy and deplatformed them effectively. It's funny to reflect on the shame strategy by the media of billionaires and how it had such opposite effects.

Elon was not neutral. Elon was left. I mean, he worked on a climate change country or company. Come on. Like, yeah, I think the populism thing though is like, it's— there are waves, right? And, you know, Caesar was a populist. Napoleon's a populist. Like, it's just like there are plenty of people of power realize that that is an optimal strategy when the, you know, kind of timing is right in terms of like, okay, this is actually where—

And I think it's for sure.

Yeah. And I mean, early 20th century, there was more populism. So, so I think the, uh, where we are in 2020 is that like, or, you know, the 2020s, I think populism is a winning strategy until there's a new meta. And I don't— and outside of changing the dominant attention platforms, populism is going to win.

The medium that we— the, the— our primary medium of communication needs to change before the populism thing changes, is, is what I think. Before that, in a world of of, like, powerful centralized— or not centralized, but like semi-centralized media outlets, elitism made a lot more sense and was maybe even inevitable. Now, you know, it's not that. I don't even know what the change would have to look like to kind of put it— turn down the populism. But I look at stuff like Instagram. I'm really worried actually about the populism stuff. And I'll give you a more not a concrete example, but a sort of abstract example, maybe. I don't know if that's the right phrasing. Basically, the keeping up with the Joneses stuff on Instagram. I look at Instagram as an app that there's no way to use that app every day and not become a little bit socialist, because you're looking at people who have so much and are so dumb. And you're struggling so hard. You know, the average person in America can't even afford a house. Like, the average kid is like, how am I ever going to have a house? I've got college debt. I've been Fucked by the older generations, and you go on that app and you see these like dumb rich girls flying to Dubai and shit, and you're like that. How are they doing this? This is like the only way is the system has to be unfair, and and that is so dangerous, and it's it's I don't even know how to counter stuff like that because I look at that and I'm like man, if I'm feeling that way a little bit, America is just like about to swing. There's like this little bit of a rightward push right now. It's going to be a wild leftward swing on things like the economy. Already what you're seeing in terms of like an encroaching right, the new right is economically leftist. And that's going to continue.

It's the Tucker Carlson, Bernie Sanders, you know, they're the same.

Yeah. But then AI is going to be a massive productivity boost and deflationary on costs. And people are going to To housing or to—

I think everything.

I think everything. I'm like 10 years. I think just like massive impact. 10 years. Our favorite, our favorite chart where all the things that the government touches is expensive and everything else has got cheaper. I think housing gets cheaper. I think you're going to like those. You see this Elon, you know, Rocket Man bad. So for those who get triggered by Elon progress, like he did this thing where tweeted the Tesla robots. And it's like, you know, Boston Dynamics has been working on this stuff for 20-plus years and they do those cool videos or whatever. But like, you know, they started working on this robot, what, 2 or 3 years ago? And I think they're just going to keep making progress and everyone's going to laugh and be like, Elon thinks he's making robots. And then it's going to be like, oh shit.

Like, there'll be a lot of chaos in the meantime.

Sure. But, but my sense is 10 years from now, like, we, I think we've talked about it on this podcast. San Francisco has driverless taxis. Like, how is that not a bigger celebration? Oh, that's right. Because San Francisco and San Francisco doesn't want to celebrate it because that's technology.

But like, we can break through, right? The mini lamp or whatever. Or was it San Francisco?

LA, the shade, the shade thing that cost $10,000. It was for shade. It's like, what? It's a smaller roof. It's like a smaller vertical Shittier roof is what you invented.

Yeah, yeah. And then the best part is they had to go to Ecuador and the UK on taxpayer money to research on shade technology.

The latest in shade technology.

Yeah, exactly. Well, for them, the forefront of shade technology is a subtweet, right? But like, you know, the old school shade technology is for bus stations. But, but yeah, I, I think like, I think that that is the answer to a lot of these problems on the socialism thing is you're just gonna get this huge boost from AI and like things are just gonna get cheaper and, you know, people, I don't know, work a little less, they'll do different things. And, and so I'm, I'm not too, too worried on that. I think it was, it is interesting, Erik. I, I, I read the comments this week on, on last week's episode. Or I guess 2 weeks ago because this, you know, come out and people are saying I had a naive take on social media and depression for, for teens.

What was your take?

Well, my thing is I basically tried to create a frame of this like growing depression in society. I think it's a measurement issue and I think it's like, it's like a fake trend, but it's just created by the media narrative, whereas there are obviously people who are depressed And like individual versus, you know, micro versus macro is different. But this like whole thing with teens, and is it different than when we were in school? Sure. Like we didn't, you know, have cell phones or whatever, but like, I still think that the core ways teenagers are mean to each other and make them feel bad, like, yeah, there's more passive version of it now and there's cyberbullying and some of that stuff. Sure, new set of tactics, but the same fundamental human behaviors are there. It's not like the phone changed, like teenagers were nice to each other prior to phones and now phones have made them mean. It's just like, no, it's the same set of behaviors. It's just, you know, you can have it happen a little bit more in a different manner.

Not a little bit more. It's constant.

So this is now, it's just like, okay, like what, how do you measure that effectively. And so I actually don't believe in the science.

You just correctly argued that the platforms were so fundamentally different that they were mainstreaming an entirely new kind of— not an entirely new, but they were re-mainstreaming populism across the board from both parties. If it's powerful enough to do that, like, surely, it's transformative enough to have some kind of impact on teen mental health. They're living on these phones.

Right. But so do you, do you think that teens today are fundamentally less happy than they were 20 years ago?

I don't know. That, I mean, I don't know.

But that's, that's where the, the, like, the jump happens is like, do I think that—

I can say that I am. I can say that, like, if I'm going to be honest, like, the phones are not making me happier. I can't stay away from them, but I'm not like a happier person than I was. Maybe I'm just older now. Maybe all older people get like less happy, but I'm definitely—

I think that that's it is we have this deep unhappiness because we're getting older, closer to mortality, whatever.

Yeah.

And so when we project our unhappiness on teenagers, and I'm like, I want to acknowledge, yes, it is a new technology, new set of problems, new set of things, but the fundamental behaviors are the same. And I think that if you were to ask me if you could magically actually get to the point of view of like, are teenagers more or less happy? Maybe they're a little less, but it's not like an order of magnitude difference. And so now you're like, oh, teenagers before were 53% happy and now they're 47% happy.

And yet there are these obviously fundamentally different things about teenagers today. For example, the gender craziness. I mean, a non-trivial fraction of teenagers now don't believe they have a gender. That's very new. That's like a brand new problem and it's not small.

I don't believe those surveys. I think it's like people— it's like people saying that they weren't going to vote for Trump, but they voted for Trump. It's people just telling the survey person like what they think the right answer is. And I think it's like, has, has a set of different beliefs in society around gender change? Yeah, of course. But like, I don't— I think it's just like Fox News and Tucker is like really trying to make it this like, this is coming for everybody and like you should be afraid.

I, I showed you guys a pitch deck this week that I got of a startup called For Them. It basically says, hey, 48% of Gen Z is not straight. I was like, what? Oh my God.

Well, that's because it's like, I think a lot of that is style. It's just you have a lot of straight girls who are like, I'm bisexual, but they have a boyfriend. And that's just like, okay, okay, like, let's, let's move along here. Like, that's kind of— I think there are a lot of teen girls like that. And there are a lot of people who say they're genderqueer. And it's like, what does that mean? Nothing, literally nothing. But then the incidence— but the incidence of bisexuals has skyrocketed among, or at least Like Dan, to Dan's point, the incidence of people who say they're bisexual has skyrocketed among Gen Z, as has genderqueer, which means nothing. Straightness versus gayness— gayness specifically, like gay pure, like male-male gayness— is like about the same in self-reported surveys. It's a little bit higher among Gen Z than previous generations, but that number is pretty consistent. But there does seem to be a change on the other end of this. Oh, and then trans stuff. I just looked at actual gender dysphoric, like going to get trans reaffirming stuff that's gone up like 3 or 3 or 4 times, 3 or 4x what it was 10 years ago. I just did a piece, The Haunted Transsexual Internet. I had to do a little research for that one.

I go back to my personal freedom thing is like, I think people should have personal freedom to do what they want. And if that is part of their gender identity, by all means, I think we should have a set of laws in society that we agree that protect everybody. And after that, I think all it is is just media trying to create culture war. It's just like really trying to get people driven up on it.

I do believe that. I was looking at that in the context of Vice Media just put out a piece. All right. Right. Well, they're not yet. I'm like, can you please die already? I thought you were gone. Why are you still here causing trouble? Go away. But Vice News, they were like, you know, the Jordan Neely thing. is just indicative of like the anti-Black sentiment that, you know, led to— and they brought up that Kyle Rittenhouse, like with this strange sort of subtle implication that Kyle killed Black people. Kyle shot— he did not shoot any Black people, first of all. Second of all, it was self-defense. Third, wasn't one of the guys a pedophile that he shot? Like with a— with a— so that was a whole other different situation. And then Jordan Neely, like this, the language they're using, it's so obviously, they're praying for a race war. And I'm like, why can you not just see what you're doing? Like, you like, why do you want people to hate each other so much? It's really— well, it's— I mean, the answer is obvious. Just advertising revenue, unfortunately. Like, why do I ask these questions that I know the answers?

Yeah. And I mean, like, also, by the way, Kyle Rittenhouse found not guilty by a jury. Yes. Right. So jury bad there. But when Derek Chauvin put in jail by jury, right, we have a legal process. Jury good. So jury is only good as a system when it is my set of beliefs, not the actual system we agree on, that if there's a jury and the jury comes to an outcome, that's what we agree as a society.

This reminds me of, remember when Ellen Pao sued Kleiner Perkins for sexual harassment. Um, so then the jury is like, this didn't happen. Like, sorry, no, absolutely not. They heard the whole thing. No one was persuaded. Goodbye. And the entire— the whole media comes out lockstep and they're like, well, regardless of a verdict, this is such an important moment for sexual harassment and it really proves that she was sexually harassed and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, no, that's not what happened. Right.

Harvey Weinstein, that jury found it. So, like, you know, and there was some weird evidence that came out during that trial, right? Like, really abusive relationship that you were emailing him months later from London saying, like, are you going to be— but ultimately the jury found him and he went to prison. So we do have a system that puts certain people, you know, behind bars if the case is compelling.

Ellen Pao's case was dismissed so thoroughly that she had to pay Kleiner legal bills.

Right? Like that. It's crazy that that is not remembered. But I do— I mean, at the end of the day, she's not that relevant anymore. I mean, there was a moment when she was really scaring me. She had so much influence. And I was like, man, how is the world not seeing through this? But those days are gone.

She was— she was CEO of Reddit during the Trump election. Oh, no, no, no, no. She was gone before that. That would actually be like if the alt-right culture actually was under her watch as it was brewing in the subreddits.

So, and she was not a Reddit— then she was Kleiner was a while. I think Reddit was a while ago. Yeah.

Let's look it up really quick. Kleiner began in February of 2015. Yeah.

And when was she CEO of Reddit? It would be before that.

So she stepped down in 2015. 2014, she became the interim CEO of Reddit. Wait, and then 2015 she was Kleiner Perkins. And then 20— was it MeToo era then? It was 2017 when the— when the— 2017 is MeToo, I think. Yeah, that explains why it was so hard to criticize it, because 2017 was just the height of all of that stuff.

She did have that famous tweet, uh, you know, you probably have incels in your company, what are you gonna do about it? One of the all-time great tweets.

That's like— I'll never forget it.

We should do one episode where we just go through like 15 all-time greats.

We should have Zach Kanter come on just to talk about his systemic racism and nuclear tweet, which I think about a lot.

Yeah, it was fantastic.

Maybe gearing towards closing here, I want to stump Pirate Wires. I was talking to a journalist and he was asking me which publications I respect in tech, and I said Pirate Wires is the best. And he said, oh, but that's conservative media. I was like, no, it's tech culture politics. It's the best publication.

Sorry, if you have a point, but it really bothers me. So I feel like I just published something with Grimes that was the moment. It was like, here's what's happening in tech. Here's what people are excited about. Here is the optimism of it. It was me talking to sort of bridging 2 different worlds in a way that was celebratory of really the person who started, who was Grimes. There are intersections there. There are references to the Spotify CEO, interesting pieces information that are broken about David Holtz and things like this. And it's not political at all. It's like so demeaning, actually, of the work to put it in a frame like that. And I think it's done from a place of that person knows that I'm doing stuff that they can't do. And so they have to find some way to pretend like, no, it's not that I can't do it, it's that I would never do it. It's like, you would never do an interview with Grimes? Like, that doesn't— then you're a fucking idiot if you would never do an interview with Grimes about AI. It's like, no, you just can't. You just can't do it as well as I did it. And, and, um, and I feel like I'm being really arrogant right now, and I don't, I don't want to be, but—

No, it's a good interview. People should go read it. Like, this is, this is what people should be doing on the internet.

And I felt like it elevated a conversation, and I've done stuff like that often. And there are moments, I think, maybe when I get a little too— I sort of lose my nuance sometimes. And but I really try not to. And I really believe that what I'm interested in is culture, not politics. I write about, like, you know, there are these political things that happen. There are politicians who do stupid things, and I can't help but talk about them. And I definitely have obviously political views and whatnot. But I don't think that my work is like conservative media. That's just— it's just not— it's just not accurate.

It's because you're friends with Elon and Thiel. And so therefore—

Right. I've worked with Thiel for a decade.

I know. But so as a rocket man, bad vampire blood guy who got Trump elected, bad Ulysses S. Grant avatar on Twitter. Like, that's just the— like, that's how you get coded as conservative media.

Yeah, that stuff, it really irks me. And I know he— and like, the person that you're talking about is like, he's literally competing with me for attention. And so it's— he has nothing but an incentive to malign me. He has previously lied about me publicly. And it's like, maybe I should be complimented. The fact that I live in their head at all.

Rent-free, baby.

Yeah. And also, you were just saying in this podcast how you're, you know, there might not be room for good liberals like yourself. And you have many views, you know, socially liberal views that would make conservatives, uh, shrivel, and you, you know, you challenge their thinking, you know, plenty of times. So, um, you know, I, I think it's an unfair, uh, categorization just because you challenge a certain orthodoxy, uh, that— and that's often what they would call conservatives, people challenge a certain orthodoxy at certain times.

Yeah, people who do not accept what they're saying is true without question. And it's like, okay, well, questioning authority when I was a kid was considered a left-wing thing to do. And probably it's just always clocked as the opposite political orientation of whoever's in charge at a given moment. And it's like, you know, the people who— let's be honest, the left has been in cultural power for many years and also political power in every city that we live in. So questioning authority is going to inevitably butt you up against the left, the political left, because they have so much authority.

And have to invent things that they think they can be questioning the power structure, like a fictitious superstructure that they're therefore questioning, because it's certainly not the people in power that they're questioning.

No. Yeah, they have to invent bogeymen.

Yeah, it's fascinating. Speaking of invent bogeymen for a second, then we'll wrap this interview. Do you remember, like, I was preparing, I interviewed Ezra Klein recently, and I was listening to an interview with him in 2017, and he was talking about all this Islamophobia. I don't hear at all about Islamophobia.

Like, that's weird. Yeah, it's fallen off. Totally went off.

Like, and I imagine that was the thing around like 9/11 or something. And that had like a 15-year run of—

It came back because of ISIS. Remember? So like 9/11, sure. But ISIS is when you started hearing a lot about it again, because they were— you had, you had all these images of like hardcore Islamic fundamentalists lighting people on fire and shit. And it was like, whoa, this is a terrifying hell religion. And so the reaction at home on the left really is to defend those things. And now that those things don't exist, there's nothing to defend. And we're back to sort of like not thinking much about Islam because it's a fraction of our population. I think it's 1 or 2% maybe of our population, maybe 2% of our population.

Well, that hasn't stopped, you know, people from caring about, you know, trans is what, you know, even less, right? Yeah.

Well, I think that's a little bit higher than we realize.

Yeah, that's true. We'll wrap on this Norm MacDonald tweet. He said, what terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans, imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims. Oh, man, he's great. Pyrowire is the best publication in tech and culture. Mike, thanks so much for joining.

Thank you for having me.

Read the Grimes interview, everybody.

Good to see you, Solana.

Thanks. Good seeing you guys.