Pirate Wires Mike Solana on Thoughtcrime, Peter Thiel, and Future of Media

All right. Solid. All right. So first question, is legacy media dead or is it just dying?

Oh man. Good question. I don't think it's dead. I think, I think it's weird. It's, you kind of, it's a tale of, it's a tale of two stories here. You have on the one hand, the New York Times is doing better than ever. So kind of, I think all of these predictions that people made 10 years ago have clearly turned out not to be true in the case of the absolute most elite media brand that exists, which again is the Times. But looking back, I wonder really like who was even making those predictions. It was tech people for sure, but it was also a lot of new media people. It was the BuzzFeeds and the Voxes and the Vices, and those are the entities that no longer exist. And so within the world of sort of legacy media, it's like, what do you mean? Because I think a lot of people when they say that, certainly in tech, they include BuzzFeed and the likes in that category. You know, it's, and then it's like the New York Times, but also all the smaller versions of that, the smaller regional versions of the New York Times, right? It's like the Globe and it's the Chronicle and certainly the Post, which has gotten worse and worse and worse. So it's, Within the world of media, I think a lot of the new upstarts certainly are— they're dying. They're on the way out. They can't compete with the new sort of influencer stuff. The New York Times and a handful of entities like it are going to be in a tough spot, but they're at least producing a value. They're producing a product that nobody else is producing, which is just high-quality reporting that requires money and that requires I don't know that it requires, but certainly it's assisted. It's obviously assisted by the power of a huge institution. I think a lot of things are dying. I think CNN is dying. I think that entire model is dying. I think the entire new media model is dying, but legacy media in general, no, I think it's just, it's complicated. And now we're sort of adding to it the new influencer thing. You have all of these new, really, it's like blogging 2.0, but it's monetized now. And you have the impact of things like TikTok and Twitter, which is enormous and it's all kind of playing into that ecosystem.

100%. I think I saw one of your tweets about kind of the failure of ad-supported blogs and the rise again of paid blogs and paid newsletters. And it's funny reading about like the history of newspapers and so forth. Like, you know, well, because we didn't think it was ever gonna happen.

I mean, I didn't think that was gonna, 10 years ago, it was considered stupid. Like the idea that subscriptions, you were gonna go pay for information was considered so, it was just a Luddite opinion. It was someone who was not online, who didn't understand the way information was flowing, who, how information online worked, what digital information in the digital world were, what the new generation was interested in. It was seen as just hopelessly, hopelessly naive. And in reality, Subscriptions were the new thing. There was this idea, I think, that subscriptions seemed too much like what, you know, you'd go and you pay for your subscription to the New York Times 30 years ago and it would arrive on your doorstep. But that was never— the subscription was never what was funding the New York Times. The New York Times was being funded, every regional newspaper and every 24-hour news network, all of these things, every single one of them was funded by advertising, advertising revenue. So what BuzzFeed and Vox were doing, what Vice was doing, they were, it was the old model actually, and they were using that old model in a new world where they could actually just get a lot of attention really quick. And so they rushed for that attention. They didn't care about subscriptions. Subscriptions require a brand and an audience that loves you more than everybody else. Attention isn't like that at all. And especially on the internet, anyone can go and fish for attention and there's a lot of it out there to grab. The problem is when you're all competing for the same form of attention and you're all rewarded by the same algorithm, you end up producing the same content. The audience can no longer differentiate between your work and the work of any one of these other content farming, you know, shit blogs and the algorithm slightly changes. You all go under, no one's paying attention to you anymore. You have no more advertising revenue. You don't have a loyal audience paying you money. And you die. New York Times didn't have that problem.

100%. Yeah. I've been saying to myself a whole lot of newsletters, not a lot of writers, you know?

100%. Yes. I really, that's, I mean, that's sort of, I would say that's a good criticism of what's happening now. You know, it's like, that's for sure what we're seeing is, yeah, everyone's kind of out there with a newsletter. I don't know why. I don't know what gives people the idea that this is just like extremely lucrative and everyone should have a newsletter, but I think maybe it's like not even about money, it's about attention. It's, we live in this really status-oriented, we people are human beings are, it's a, we're a status-interested creature. The internet makes it really easy to metric status and that drives people a little bit, a little bit crazy.

Yeah, I think it's a combination of that, the Morning Brew effect, seeing that get sold for so much and the hustle and Milk Road, stuff like that. And then I think also fear of being deplatformed. So just trying to collect as many emails as possible is another thing.

Certainly that's what got me here. That's my story. It was, which is crazy in hindsight because I was never— I've never said anything that nuts, but I was really— I would say 2020, I was very, very concerned that it was just a matter of time before my entire audience that I had built, which then, I mean, it's funny to think about it as I thought it was big back then. I was like probably like 40,000 Twitter subscribers or something. And I was like, man, I could lose this platform tomorrow. And when I was looking at ways to monetize, I had my own personal— I was working on a podcast at Founders Fund at the time called Anatomy of Next, which we're probably gonna bring back in some capacity eventually. And I wanted to launch my own personal podcast. So it was a podcast called Problematic. And I needed a place to monetize it. And the options were Substack, were Patreon. And I mean, the option was Patreon basically. And Patreon was like more into deplatforming and censorship than any major social media company, which I was kind of, you know, going over this problem with my colleagues and they were like, oh, well, you know, there's this thing, Substack. Have you thought about that at all? And it was way smaller then, you know, none of the big huge writers were on it at that point. Obviously newsletters, subscription newsletters have been happening for a while, specifically of like Ben Thompson of Stratechery. He'd been, he'd really championed the entire model, but I thought, okay, I'll just, I'll do this and I'll use Substack as basically my, the way I'm gonna monetize the podcast, but to sweeten the deal for subscribers, I'll give them a newsletter. How hard could that be? And it wasn't hard at first and people liked it, but the more people who listen, I mean, right out of the gate, it was like a couple thousand people Reddit and I thought, oh damn, this is not, I, it's like, that's a lot of people. That's enough people where I actually care. I wanna make sure that it's at least decent. And so I just, you know, tightened up the writing week by week by week and eventually they just evolved from newsletters into essays. And now at Pirate Wires, we're doing both. Now it's like I've got a little team and we're putting out newsletters and bangers and it's kind of, that's the mix.

Got you. So I have a question that's very specific to newsletter writers. Maybe, maybe more people will find it useful as well, but it's something I'm dealing with now is how do you decide what will you will paywall as a paid article versus a free article? Because like the game theory, you want, you know, the paywall, you want to give valuable content, but if it's that valuable, you want it to be a banger and go viral too, right? Yeah.

There's no one has a good answer to this and it's, it's sort of, I mean, there, If there was an answer, we'd be at endgame of all this, you know, someone would be winning, but no one is. And it's, yeah, it's the question that you're asking is how do you benefit from virality while also getting paid? And they do seem, I mean, virality leads you in the direction of advertising revenue and getting paid on subscriptions. Obviously you have to paywall constantly, which limits your ability to go viral. I publish enough at this point where we can just, I started, I mean, we're experimenting, we're doing different things all the time. A colleague of mine at Pirate Wires works on, he's the editor on something called the White Pill, which is like our kind of tech optimism vertical. It happens, we want to put that out like every Saturday morning and he just paywalled most of that. And I think the intention is we'll do a couple not paid ones sort of every like maybe 3 or 4 pretty paid or paywalled. And then at the bottom, maybe there's, you know, comments always for paid. And then for me, one thing I've been doing lately, which I kind of like, is, I mean, every time I write a, like a full essay, which is once every 2 weeks on Friday, I release like a kind of like a, what I, the way I think about it in my mind is it's a banger. They're not, I mean, maybe other people don't think that, but for me, I'm like, I want it to be a banger. And so my bangers, that requires a lot of work and it's usually, you know, there are 2,000 words around and, but I've usually written like 4,000 or 4,500 words because I start working on stuff and then it doesn't quite work and I want it to be great. But I inevitably end up cutting pretty interesting ideas that would be perfectly good to share. They're semi-related, but they don't work in the essay. And so the last couple, times I've written an essay, I've paywalled a handful of sort of adjacent ideas that I think, I think that's interesting. Just always giving someone interesting content. I see a good version of this on YouTube. There are a couple of drag queens actually that I like, Bob the Drag Queen and Monét X Change, and they do a show where they, it's a video show and they talk over all different kinds of things. But about halfway through, they paywall, they don't, it's like you can still listen to it, but you can't see them anymore. And if you go to their Patreon, you can see them. And I think that's really smart. I think things like that are pretty interesting.

That's really smart. So I release a blog post every Sunday and, you know, I always write more than actually goes out because, you know, we're writers, we cut things. But that's a really cool idea. Yeah. What do you look for in writers when you're hiring and how big is your team now? I'm friendly with a couple people. They're awesome.

On the Pyrewires team? Yeah.

Yeah. We're Twitter friends.

So we've got, it's myself, it's Brandon Gorel, River Page, Nick Russo are on the sort of more writing side of things, writing, editing. Brandon's also strategy and then including like sort of advertising strategy and social media strategy and just like sort of corporate strategy. And then Eric Button is our new ops guy, but he's also been doing a lot of editorial stuff. Eric's been lead on deals now. We've included a deal portion. We're including a deal portion in the sort of— we have a letter, a sort of our newsletter every Tuesday, and now it's going to be Thursday as well. So we have deals there. We have interesting graphics on sort of just tech trends and like sort of funding trends and things like that. So he's working on those things as well. But mostly he's an ops guy. And we're, we just hired another writer, Sanjana Friedman, who's written a couple of things for Pirate Wires before, and she starts June 19th.

Sweet. How is advertisement working on Twitter? I see your ad a lot. I'm like, bro, I'm already subscribed.

So yeah, well, it worked well. I mean, we ran, we just ran an experiment for a month, so we're not running ads now. And that experiment worked pretty well. And you know, we're running some stuff on Facebook. We're gonna try Instagram next and we're still kind of in a learning period there.

Yeah, got you. I've, I've experimented with Twitter a bit. I was doing it a lot when like everybody was screaming about Twitter being a terrible ad platform. I was like, oh, this is the time to, to do it.

That's when we did it. Yeah. Yeah. And it worked.

Exactly.

It worked. It did what we wanted to.

Yeah, exactly. So I want to jump kind of into Thoughtcrime and to do that, I'll, I'll read a tweet that you put out. I've been working with Peter Thiel for 10 years and for 10 years people have invented things about him in the press. This more than anything else has shaped my view of the media. I feel like Peter is, you know, definitely a good example of a thought criminal. So curious, like, what, what is working with Peter and seeing that? What has that taught you about thinking as an individual?

I mean, Peter has taught me a lot and I think my favorite thing about Peter is that I've met a lot of— I'm lucky enough at this point in my career, I've met a lot of really successful people, people who are known and who have done things and built companies, and they're way richer than I am, and they're smart, dynamic people. And what happens with a lot of these successful people almost all of them is they like, they start holding court kind of, they stop interacting with you as a person and getting to know new people so much as like they're surrounded by their people and they'll be at a dinner table and they'll just be monologuing to, to you about how the world works. And they're definitely like in charge of the table. And Peter is not like that at all. Peter, who is the smartest person I've ever known, smarter than all of those people, like by far, I would say his— he sits down and the first thing when he— when there's new people at the table, he wants to, he wants to understand what they see that he doesn't see. And he starts asking them all sorts of questions that he doesn't know the answer to. And he genuinely wants to know. He wants to know. He's like, what are you seeing out there? What do you think about this? What do you think about that? And I've been at some of these tables and I'm not as like, I am a curious person. He's way more curious than me. So he'll be, asking some new person, I'm like, I am so, like, I'm bored right now. I don't care about, like, whatever this, like, I don't even know what is it like construction in Miami. Literally was a conversation not too long ago that I was over. I'm like, I do not care about this at all. But he does. He cares about everything. And I think that that is one of He's always looking for original thought, I guess, which is this very like clichéd thing in America. We're all supposed to be original and unique and we're supposed to prize it. The truth is we almost never do. And most of what we prize are signals that we associate with originality, but truly sort of original thinking is very rare. Most people have original thoughts just buried beneath a lot of bullshit, and you have to kind of dig and dig and dig to find them. And they're valuable. Like, those insights are valuable. They're not always that, you know, heretical, but they're often weird or strange. They don't make sense to you and they challenge your priors. And I think being on the lookout for those things and acknowledging the power and importance of them, I mean, most of them are wrong, but some of them are not. And the ones that aren't are totally transformative, either on a sort of some personal sense or in some broader global sense. And so he's really taught me to be, he's really taught me to value that and to also value sort of strange things about myself that before I met him, I think I was always, I don't want to say ashamed of, but maybe I didn't properly value the most valuable things about me, which are the things about me that are different. And he did from the very beginning and of our sort of, he was like my mentor and that was just, yeah, so important.

That's amazing, man. That, that sounds incredible and, and similar to a lot of experiences I've had with some of the people that I work with that are way ahead of me down the game. Just, just, yeah, it's so much fun just learning from people smarter. Been you. Um, always fun. I'm curious, uh, is there going to be another Hereticon? Is that happening?

Yeah, so, uh, I was back and forth on it for a while. It's a lot of work, and now I've got Pirate Wires, and there are all these questions. Like, even the word heretic feels different now than it did in 2019. In 2019, people were mad about it out of the gate, and like the right people were mad about it. The gatekeepers were mad about it. And I loved that. I loved being able to produce something that felt like culture that was still— there was risk associated with it still. There was personal risk associated with it, but it was important. It was kind of the perfect time to do it. Then COVID really kicked it. It interrupted the perfect time and we ended up doing it at a very good time, but not quite the perfect time. And now I think the whole thought crime sort of conversation is so different now because I think it's actually a lot easier to speak your mind right now than it was a few years ago. 2020, really between like, like 2017 was probably 20, between 2017 and 2020, it was, it was the worst ever. And I think we forget how bad it was, but I mean, like people, I mean, it was legitimately dangerous for you to speak your mind. You could lose your livelihood. You could, you know, there were people who were losing like office space and things like this. I mean, there was no shortage of risks associated with crime think on any number of taboo subjects. Today, I think those subjects are limited and also the interruption of the social media sort of firewall with the introduction of a, not, I don't want to say a free speech Twitter, but a version of Twitter that follows a different set of rules has changed the landscape completely for the better. And so I think it's like the time is sort of, it's not good enough. It's not good enough to just platform thoughts you're not supposed to have, right? You wanna also forward a kind of interesting idea along with it. So very long way of saying, I think we are gonna do it. We're gonna slightly evolve the concept and it'll be about a year from now.

Sweet. I'm excited.

A little over a year.

Okay, cool. Cool. I'm excited. I wasn't able to make the last one. Curious, like what kind of thought crimes are you most, you know, committed to or have you committed? I feel like for me it's, it's a lot of my, my fiancée and I, you know, she's very like rule follower kind of person. I'm the college dropout, like, you know, drug addict who got sober a few years ago, like went down the LSD path, like, you know, very different kind of people in that. And constantly like, I'm like, that's not a rule. That's like a made-up rule. What are you talking about? Like, That you, what do you, what are you saying? I can't wear this at that. Like, you know, like that's not a rule. That's not a thing. And I feel like I'm constantly breaking those, those walls. Does that happen to you? And have you seen that throughout your life in college or, or when, when did you realize that kind of thing?

Well, I think that I've always not understood why things were the way they were. And but I haven't, I always felt like that was my, but I was not, I wish I could say I was, I always was certain that I was right about things, but I never was. I always thought that I was wrong. I always was worried that I was wrong. I was like, wow, you know, none of this makes sense and these people seem totally wrong, but I must just not be understanding something. I didn't trust that voice inside my head that was like, this is crazy. These people are all crazy. And it wasn't until I still developed ideas. If someone would like sort of prod me a little bit, I would go off, I would monologue. I was in that way, I've always been the exact same person, but I wasn't confident in myself. And that required the introduction of, I don't know if it required, but certainly I met Peter at a time when I was ready to evolve in that way. And he really helped me. That in me. And I became just a little bit more confident in my own questions. And you're allowed to ask questions. You should always be allowed to ask questions. And when you're not allowed to question something, that is a pretty good indication that, that something is wrong, I would say. Because if you were allowed to, if it wasn't wrong, if it was working and everybody sort of knew it was working, there'd be no reason to question it. There's something like, I had a weird conversation the other day. With someone who is not— we're acquainted at this point. And she doesn't really believe in that things can be known. It was a very weird— it is a really weird kind of philosophical conversation that was very frustrating to me. And I started, I was like, okay, well, what about conductivity? You know, like, like the conductivity of metal. For electricity, right? And she's like, I don't know, like we know a lot about it. And I'm like, but it's very, it's a problem that you're not acknowledging that this works because if you, if people didn't acknowledge that this thing worked, we would starve to death. Like conductivity works. We know that it is something with, what was I, God, I'm getting lost.

I was getting, you know, objectivity versus subjective. Like some things are just straight up objective. Like stop arguing, you know, that kind of thing, right?

I'm not saying so, but I'm saying, uh, yeah, I just, I lost my train of thought there.

Sorry about that. No, it happens to me all the time, man. It happens to me way more than I'd like to admit. Um, no, I have those conversations. I was, you know, there's that Eleanor Roosevelt quote where it's like, you know, smart people talk about ideas, blah, blah, blah. It's like, yeah, that's true. But like, I know some dumb people who talk about ideas, you know, where it's like all this philosophical—

well, most are wrong. I mean, most ideas are wrong and it's nice to talk about them, but you, you, you want to be working towards some version of the world that's better. And the thought crime, you know, as important as that is, it's only important insofar as it gets you closer to that world. And so even for me, like when I think about what ideas I want to entertain and which I don't, like, I want to make sure that these things correspond with my values roughly. Now, some people, the hardcore people will be like, that doesn't matter. We need to just see like, what is the truth no matter what? And to that, I would say it's much harder to get to the truth than we realize. Like, it's, it's not a, it's not so easy as conductivity in, in most cases. It, there's not really an experiment to, to prove you're right. There are a lot of pieces of evidence and very few ways to test, especially in the world of social, like quote social sciences. Like most of the things that we're talking about there are pretty soft and Yeah, I don't know. It's, it's a kind of a balance.

Yeah, I was, I was an English major as well. Uh, I saw you were, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And they teach you the exact opposite of that, which is like everything is subjective. And then I got into tech. I did a coding bootcamp and, uh, and started learning Objective and started reading Paul Graham. And there's this quote where it's, uh, the most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improperly. Thoughts.

When did he write that?

Hackers and Painters.

And, but when did he write that?

My guess is early 2000s.

Yeah, it was a different world back then. I bet if Paul Graham were around, right? Like, I mean, he's around in the world, but if you were in this chat right now, I mean, it doesn't really matter so much the freedom or the idea of someone speaking their mind didn't really matter so much in the early 2000s because you could do it by 2017 or so earlier, probably 2015. It's like you really couldn't do it anymore on a whole range of topics. And then suddenly it was like, well, wait a minute. What have we lost here?

Yeah. I was listening to your pod or you on the Moment of Zen podcast the other day, and I forget who was talking about it. It was either you or Dan talking about how AI doomerism and has become almost a status symbol.

Yeah, it was made, it's an intelligence signal. It's to say that you think that the apocalypse is coming. It's like only the smartest among us can see this thing. And so they don't really think beyond that. And there might be something to it, but here's how I tend to operate. I tend, I am very, I'm always really interested in why people are thinking like, what is the thing that is motivating this position that they're taking? And I'm always curious about that. And this for me is just full of that where I know that most of the people talking about AI doomerism are not steeped in AI. They're quote rationalists, many of them not even living in the Bay Area. You know, it's like a lot of these like polyamorous thinkfluencers, maybe college professor adjacent, who really, really, really, really want to peacock that they understand the concept of X-risk. And that is, I don't know, it's just hard to see beyond the social sort of game of it all. I do think there are risks, risks, excuse me. I think that they are dramatically overstated by people who want attention. Unfortunately.

Yeah. Somebody is going to get a book deal from it.

Well, it's just the kind of, it's the stuff that, I mean, who doesn't love a spooky story? And it's hard. I mean, listen, you're talking about building intelligence that is capable of doing what, quote, anything, but it's not capable of doing anything right now. And I think it's like, it's, it's, we're right to be vigilant about this in a way that we have been maybe not. We're right to be more vigilant about this than we've been about other technology innovations in the past, because intelligence itself is something that is pretty Intelligence with will, which is what humans are, is very unpredictable. And if you were to amplify that by 10 or 20 times, like, I have no idea what a person would do. That's kind of the high-level question that all of us are facing with the, the question of greatly amplified intelligence is it's impossible to conceive of that. What would it be capable of? What would it want? We don't know. And so that's a scary thing, but we're also anthropomorphizing this technology that we have created that does you know, what we ask it to do. And, and a lot of it concerns these strange steps. I mean, Eliezer was talking about a robot buying a bunch of viruses and having them synthesized and released into the world, or he's like, dot, dot, dot, just creating itself in a lab and becoming biological. Really fast and all of this could happen on a really sort of rapid timeline. And I, as he's going, I'm just thinking this, I don't, why is it doing any of this? Like, what is the reason? Right now people can do that and they're not doing it. Right now we're at risk of nuclear annihilation and it hasn't happened yet. Like we're always living with a lot of risk and there, there are like a lot of steps between something is possible and something happens. You know, we've, it's been possible for there to be a a man-made virus that escapes from a lab for many decades. Like, why is it taken so long? Like, this is, we're living with risk for better or worse. Risk exists. And what comes with that risk also are a lot of powerful tools to help the world. And so you kind of gotta weigh that. And I don't know, I'm not really seeing, I don't really understand the motivation of what is right now effectively just a sort of pretty good chatbot, but not even great. I don't know why that wants to kill us all or even how it would do it as it currently stands. So I don't know why we're talking about, for example, as Eliezer Yudkowsky did, and I believe it was Time Magazine, I don't know why we're talking about bombing data centers. Like it's just very crazy hysterical rhetoric for what I can't really see a reason at all.

Yeah, I'm in the same boat. It's absurd. We're talking to robots and it's a lot of fun right now. Like, it's not that deep. Not yet, at least. Speaking of talking to robots or talking in general, curious if you got, have you got access to the AirChat app? I haven't tried it out. Naval's new app.

No, my colleague Brandon just wrote about it though. He's been on it. I haven't looked yet.

Okay. And then leading into that, what was the vibe of, were you on like the early wave of Clubhouse? I'd imagine I was. What's your thoughts on that? I keep, they seem kind of desperate right now. I'm getting emails like every week, like blank is talking. I'm like, I never heard of blank. Why are you, why are you emailing?

But yeah, I mean, I think Clubhouse sadly is not going to work, or at least not the way that everyone thought it was going to work. And we all have a short memory. These things, these things exist, these moments, these like these companies, there are consumer companies that absolutely blow up that capture our complete attention. And we think, wait, could this be the future of the entire world? And we genuinely believe it in those moments because everyone's on it and it is changing your behavior and the way you're, you're thinking about things. Clubhouse was one of these things. There was a company called Secret that was one of these things. There was a company called HQ Trivia that was one of these things. There was a company called Pokémon Go that still exists actually. That was one of these things where they really do feel all-consuming. Clubhouse was, I think, lasted the longest in terms of just like people were on it. And there are a million, you know, everyone has some theory as to why it was popular when it was popular and why it stopped being popular. Part of it I think was just we were at the peak of like you weren't allowed to say stuff or maybe the second peak. I think 2017 was a peak and then it exploded again 2020, that summer of 2020, we were all locked inside and we were all using Clubhouse and there was something, it was harder to to pin down. It wasn't the same thing as a social media post where people could screenshot it and be like, you said this thing and it was bad. Now it's immediately in the realm of gossip. It's people reporting on things that were said. And while it's happening, you know, you have at the time journalists for the New York Times inaccurately summarizing content on a chat. Everybody knows that immediate rebuttals. And so people don't really trust the reporting that's happening about it. And it just felt like a freer space. It was a freer space. It was also a space where you get very close and feel very intimate with people who were really, really popular, who would maybe even let you up on a stage. And it felt just, yeah, really exciting. You know, it was like a more sort of interactive talk radio. Talk radio is a model that's already worked. And I think maybe the problem is not the model so much. I mean, we just saw DeSantis announce his presidency, his candidacy for presidency on a Clubhouse clone, you know, Dorsey cloned Clubhouse at the height of it. And it's been a kind of janky piece of software since they haven't put a ton of resources behind it. I think that they're, they clearly now under the Musk era, like that seems to be a priority of theirs. You see chats promoted all the time. So I don't think that model is gone. I think that company's not working and that could be for a range. It could be, it could have to do with curation. It could have to do with the sort of culture of banning. It could have to do with just maybe the technology is an easy thing to emulate and everybody can kind of easily have some version of that on their social media app. It's this weird thing. Everyone's always like, well, why can't Facebook do this or whatever? That's the popular thing that bad investors like to ask companies with new products. And it's sort of a, it sounds stupid until it's not, right? You know, Instagram clones Snapchat and that was the end of that. So sometimes it happens.

Fair enough. Curious, if you were CEO of Twitter, what would you double down on?

I think the strength of Twitter is that you can go to Twitter and know everything that's happening. And so I think what you want to do is make sure that it's really easy to share information from everywhere else. And other companies are, everyone wants to, there's this weird impulse, I think, to wall things off, but it makes the environment less rich. And every other social media company has already walled things off. Twitter was, It's, you know, it's interesting in some sense when it comes to the kinds of things you were allowed to say, it was not, it was, there were some serious problems there in terms of censorship, but they were not as bad as any other company. You know, they were about as bad as Facebook. They were not as bad as TikTok. What they were very good at was openness in terms of access to other platforms and products and links and things like this. And like you could really, there was some spirit of the original internet there where you could really get to anything from there. And that is what made it— that one thing is what made it my homepage. That's where I live. I live on Twitter. And I think there's a worry that you're gonna leave Twitter and, you know, be spending time elsewhere. But that's not how I think of it. Twitter is where I always come back. Twitter is— in Final Fantasy VII, which is my favorite video game, there is this like sort of Adventureland side quest. And your characters go to what is effectively like a carnival and it's like a futuristic carnival. And to get to all the different, there are different parts of the carnival. There's like a battle arena and like a, you know, a shopping center and there's like a restaurant, whatever. I love a dating game. You go to the center of, you go to like this sort of compass area, this orientation area, and it's like a bunch of different portals that you jump into to get to each of the other places. And then when you're done at that place, you come back to the orientation center, the sort of your, what, I don't even know what it's called, that room, but you want, that's what Twitter should be. Twitter should be the place that you go to get everywhere else and then you come back and that's, if you have that and then like a much better advertising product, then you're golden. You're the center of the internet.

That's a really cool way of putting it. Twitter is my home. Like you go out to the world, you go out to the rest of the internet, but you come back, you bring some souvenirs, you bring some friends over.

Mm-hmm.

And hang out. I really like that.

I kind of, even, I mean, what is the fear that you're going to go, you're going to go follow some link to some article or YouTube video and then stay there at those places? You don't, you come back to Twitter to talk about it. So I don't know what the fear is.

Yeah. And it's okay. People have second homes anyways, right? Third homes, third spaces, or whatever they're called. Sure.

They're not even going to, I don't.

Fair enough. Mike, this has been a great conversation. I think that wrapped up all the questions. I've been looking forward to this for a while, so really appreciate your time, man. And yeah, it's going to go live on Saturday.

Sounds good.

All right. Thank you, Mike.

Thanks for having me. Bye.