Can investigative journalism prevail over sensational clickbait? Is it time to give up on San Francisco? Is the First Amendment sufficient to prevent the government from colluding with, or forcing, Big Tech to censor speech? This week, join us for a one-of-a-kind conversation with Mike Solana, Chief Marketing Officer at Founders Fund and Founder of Pirate Wires, one of the fastest-growing and most influential new media companies. Mike is a must-follow on X for his wit and unique insights, but also for the work he's doing to expose corruption and revive investigative reporting. Pirate Wires recently revealed how San Francisco taxpayers are being forced to fund the protests that shut down the Bay Bridge! We begin our discussion with the broken state of media, and why Mike believes a subscription model is the path to building a successful media outlet that isn't beholden to clickbait. Next, we discuss whether SF can be saved from the far Left and why we need better elites who don't blindly fund radical non-profits. We also cover several of Mike's seminal pieces of writing: the future of free speech when the government and Big Tech create a decentralized censorship regime, and how to revive our country's ability to build great, inspiring works. Can we restore competence in government or should we turn our energy and attention elsewhere? We discuss!

What is e/acc (effective accelerationism) and why is it going viral among tech's elite? Who are the leaders behind this movement and what are their ambitions? 

This week, we explore e/acc with one of its pioneers, Guillaume Verdon (aka @BasedBeffJezos), a theoretical physicist at the cutting edge of quantum computing and AI.  Guillaume worked under Sergey Brin as the quantum deep learning lead at Google X before launching a thermal computing startup called Extropic.  He started e/acc as a cultural counterforce to the degrowth and doomer movements that sow distrust of technology and seek to undermine the advancement of artificial intelligence and other emerging innovations. 

Fifty years ago, sci-fi was some of the most inspiring art in America.  It's no coincidence that it preceded the birth of the space and digital ages — the stories and narratives we tell ourselves as a society are the ones we tend to work toward.  Not surprisingly, as sci-fi took a dystopian turn in recent decades, society's view of technology and progress soured as well.  E/acc is the antidote; it aims to inspire a cultural, then technological, renaissance in the West.  While e/acc has gained popularity through viral memes on social media, it's also a cohesive framework designed to apply to the modern world.  In this episode, we discuss the first principles behind e/acc, steelman the arguments against it, and explore how it's compatible with religion and other ethical frameworks.  This is an important movement that resonates with us at American Optimist. 

Who should be in charge of the culture of a company? How do you maintain a spirit of innovation as an organization scales? How can executives be transparent about their shortcomings while also improving as leaders?

Scott Cook, the founder and former CEO of Intuit, has navigated these challenges himself while mentoring hundreds of other leaders on how to do the same. Scott is a legend of Silicon Valley. In 1983, he founded Intuit and pioneered consumer finance software, first with Quicken and later TurboTax, Quickbooks, and other products that quickly became household names.

During the 8VC Leadership Summit, I sat down with Scott to discuss some of his most important lessons learned and advice to CEOs and founders. He begins with the responsibility of the CEO to set the company culture, and why leadership doesn't get to play by a different set of rules than its employees. He also explains how success can make organizations slow and stupid, and how to fight the forces of inertia. One way is by orienting decision-making around experimentation, not opinion or status, and he illustrates how Intuit learned to adopt this mindset. Finally, he advises CEOs to advertise their failures, not bury them, and seek out accountability and outside scrutiny from coaches and advisors.

In the wake of October 7, the decadence and rot of our legacy universities have been on full display. We've seen feckless leadership from college presidents, moral cowardice from faculty, and, as a result, shocking displays of anti-Semitism unchallenged on campus. It's time to build anew. 

That's why we founded the University of Austin — America's first new top university in almost a century. And we are now accepting students for our inaugural class in the fall of 2024!  In this episode, three of UATX's founders — myself, UATX President Pano Kanelos, and world-renowned historian Niall Ferguson — discuss this critical moment for UATX, and the nation. We dive into what sets UATX apart: a constitution that safeguards freedom of inquiry and expression; a curriculum that combines the intellectual foundations of Western Civilization with real-world applications; and a faculty and support network made up of the world's leading scholars, writers, entrepreneurs, and builders. 

As Niall and Pano explain, we're training the Navy SEALs of the mind — the next generation of leaders who can reason, debate, build, and restore our republic to greatness. Right now, we're looking for our first 100 students. If you're a maverick and have what it takes to help us forge a new path in higher education, we encourage you to apply. 

The U.S. spends $280 billion annually on healthcare billing!  It's an irrationally complex and outdated system in which most claims are adjudicated manually, resulting in massive inefficiencies and bogus claim rejections. Why is it so broken? How do we fix it? And what would healthcare look like if it functioned properly? 

That's what I discuss with Nick Perry and Doug Proctor, co-founder & CEO and COO of Candid Health, respectively. Two talented Palantir alumni, Nick and Doug represent a trend I'm watching closely: leading technologists with a top culture, the right software, and new breakthroughs in machine learning taking on the most broken areas of our economy. 

In this episode, they explain the origins of Candid and how they first learned the billing process by hand in order to build the information architecture necessary to process myriad types of claims with extremely low denial rates.  At scale, Nick & Doug envision Candid as Stripe or Shopify for healthcare: the infrastructure layer that automates revenue cycle management and dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for new healthcare startups. And if we ever want the U.S. to move from its broken fee-for-service model to value-based care, we'll need platforms like Candid to enable that shift — another reason I'm bullish on Candid and the leaders behind it. 

Secret police groups, illegal bio labs, and large-scale influence operations — China is engaged in these activities inside the United States today. How should we respond? Is economic divorce the answer? And are we destined for conflict, or is there a path toward peace and mutual prosperity?

We discuss these pressing issues with Rep. Mike Gallagher, Congressman for Wisconsin's 8th District and Chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). A distinguished warrior-scholar, Chairman Gallagher served in the Marines and deployed to Iraq, earned two Master's degrees and a Ph.D., and now leads one of the most consequential committees in Congress.

In this episode, he details some of the CCP's most nefarious activities within the U.S., and our government’s inadequate responses. We discuss the right strategy for addressing the CCP, including when and where economic decoupling makes sense. Chairman Gallagher also provides an update on new legislative efforts he believes will finally succeed at forcing a sale of TikTok, and he explains why China's economic woes and looming demographic crisis might make Xi Jinping more likely to take aggressive action. If you want to understand the extent of the CCP's malign actions and influence campaigns, follow the bipartisan work of Chairman Gallagher's committee.

Ten million students attend community college annually, but only 30% ever graduate!  It's a massive economic loss to students and society.  What if a new model could drastically increase completion rates while maintaining a high-quality education, and leave students with zero debt? That's what Tade Oyerinde is aiming to build with Campus, a new way to conduct community college. 

His approach is two-pronged: improve quality and increase completion rates. First, Campus is pioneering a gig economy for top adjunct professors. Recognizing that adjuncts at elite universities are often underpaid and drowning in debt, Campus offers them the opportunity to teach part-time online — a win for adjuncts and students alike. Next, they surround students with support designed to reduce attrition: tuition includes a laptop, wifi, and a personal coach, all at a cost less than the annual Pell Grant (currently $7,495). Campus also recently acquired a brick-and-mortar school in Sacramento that offers hands-on skills training for in-demand career tracks, such as medical coding and cosmetology. 

Instead of taking on large sums of debt to attend mediocre private schools, Tade believes community college is the smarter path for most students, and hopes Campus will be at the forefront of a new era in higher education. But it won't be easy. Learn about his journey to reinvent one of America's most entrenched and misaligned sectors. 

In the last generation, the U.S. technology sector created many of the most valuable companies in the world. Has Silicon Valley figured out a better way to build and scale a business? How did this cohort of outsiders — “geeks” — create cultures that continually redefine the limits of science and technology? And how can others, especially our government, learn from the very best organizations?

These are the questions at the heart of best-selling author Andrew McAfee's new book "The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results." A principal research scientist at MIT, Andrew explores the geek mindset — an obsessive maverick, as he defines it — and explains how geeks developed a new management philosophy that permeates Amazon, Apple, SpaceX, Palantir, and other pioneering organizations. He breaks it down into four norms: speed, science, ownership, and openness, and details the principles behind each.

He also explains why even the most successful companies are vulnerable to bureaucracy and sclerosis, and that human nature and status-seeking have something to do with it. Instead of fighting it, he describes how geeks have figured out a better way to align these innate tendencies with the mission of the company. I've bought copies of this book for all our CEOs, and hope you'll check it out too!

We've all seen the images — garbage patches twice the size of Texas accumulating in the Pacific Ocean. Yet nothing was being done, despite billions of dollars a year spent on environmental lawyers and bureaucrats. That is until a young engineer from Holland set out to do what bureaucrats couldn't — clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and stem the flow of plastic into the oceans.

Boyan Slat is the Founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, the most effective organization ever built to rid the oceans of pollution. They're already cleaning up an average of 750kg of trash each hour this year, and Boyan estimates their latest technology will eliminate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within 10 years! Moreover, Boyan and his team have also identified the top polluting rivers in the world and are building interceptors to prevent pollution from reaching the seas in the first place — all for a tiny fraction of other environmental spend.

But it hasn't been easy. Boyan explains how they overcame numerous engineering challenges, as well as intense criticism and cynicism from media and activists hoping they would fail. Boyan's inspiring journey reflects the power of an innovation mindset, and the ability of a small group of highly-motivated builders to achieve what an entire class of experts and bureaucrats couldn't. I'm a supporter of Boyan's work and hope you'll consider supporting him as well.

Will high interest rates and inflation be the norm for the foreseeable future? Are we living through a 1970s redux? How should investors navigate these uncertain times?

We discuss the volatile financial markets with Jacob Miller, co-founder of Opto Investments [an 8VC Build company] and head of its Advisory Practice. Jacob studied economics and classics at the University of Chicago and cut his teeth at Bridgewater Capital, the world's largest hedge fund. In this episode, he draws on historical parallels to explain why the U.S. is heading into a long-term debt cycle similar to the late 1970s, and why a prolonged period of readjustment is more likely than a major crash.

He discusses the challenges investors face in the coming years, and why it's vital to find differentiated investments that can generate alpha. One area of opportunity is the private markets, but they have been historically difficult to access and navigate. Jacob explains how Opto is equipping wealth managers with a new tech-enabled platform to understand and invest in these markets with confidence.