Anatomy of Next Founders Fund

Nearly 30 years after publishing “The Diversity Myth,” Peter Thiel sits down with Mike Solana to unpack what the book got right and wrong. Thiel argues that social distractions have stunted scientific progress, slowed economic growth and weakened our geopolitical standing. How did anti-Western rhetoric popularized on college campuses in the 90s morph into the culture wars that divide our country today? How can we move past this pessimistic, hyper-political moment and continue building the future?



Read Mike Solana's intro piece for Pirate Wires here:
https://www.piratewires.com/p/peter-thiel-the-diversity-myth-a

What if we just... left?

The challenges facing our cities are enormous. Our problems could take years to correct, or decades. The purpose of this season is to explore new ways to reinvigorate our cities, but it's worth entertaining the alternative. What if we built something new, from the foundation up? I sat down with Patri Friedman, founder of both the Seasteading Institute and Pronomos Capital, to entertain a wild idea: Charter Cities. What are they, how do they work, and how do we start over?

Why is the traffic so bad? And why is so hard to build new transportation infrastructure?

Robert Poole is the co-founder and director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation, and the author of Rethinking America’s Highways. We talked about congestion, variable pricing, light rail, tunnel boring machines, and why they don’t seem to work in our cities — or rather, why we won’t let them work — and the infrastructure policy our politicians craft and pass that seems to be crippling us.

Flock Safety is building a national network of security cameras monitoring neighborhood traffic. In some cities, their work has been instrumental in reducing property crime by as much as 70 percent.

In this episode of Anatomy of Next, Mike Solana sits down with Garrett Langley, the CEO and founder of Flock. They talk about the network — where it came from, and how it works — its impact, how Flock is approaching privacy, the tradeoffs between privacy and security, and the end of non-violent crime.

In San Francisco, how does government work? Who is in charge, what can they do — structurally, what are they actually capable of? — and most importantly: what are they focused on? A look at our Board of Supervisors, its apparent war on growth (and possibly tech), and an argument for moving forward (spoiler alert: you just have to vote (sorry))

Featuring: Trisha Thadani (San Francisco Chronicle), Teddy Schleifer (Recode)

There's almost nothing more terrifying than losing communication in the heat of a blazing wildfire. In recent months, California has been brought to its knees by natural disaster. Now more than ever we need the help of our firefighters, and to keep them safe. An entirely centralized communication infrastructure is a single point of failure we just can't risk.

Daniela Perdomo is the founder and CEO of goTenna, the future of decentralized communication. Today, her work, inspired by the communication blackouts of Hurricane Sandy and a passion for fixing this critical problem, keeps everyone from soldiers and FEMA operators to wildland firefighters in communication while they work to save lives. And beyond disaster? There are no shortage of applications for this technology.

Daniela and I talked about decentralized communication, the origins of her work, communication infrastructure and public infrastructure more broadly, and what exactly does a city fully reconceived for the 21st Century look like?