Show full transcript 0:55 If Republicans keep the Senate, 0:58 if they perform better in the House and people expect, 1:01 a lot is gonna come down to one man 1:02 and that man is not Donald Trump, Elon Musk. 1:06 At this point, Musk has given around $450 million 1:10 to the Republican campaign effort. 1:12 That makes him the single largest donor 1:14 in any election cycle ever. 1:16 It is a quarter of all campaign donations 1:19 Republicans have received. 1:21 And yet the size of this, I think what it throws into relief is how hard it is to conceptualize 1:28 how much money Elon Musk really has. Because for Musk, with his net worth of around a trillion 1:33 dollars for him to give 300 million, 400 million, it's like the median American household 1:39 giving like 100 bucks. It is for him nothing. And yet it is reality warping for the rest of us. 1:48 And it's not even Musk's only source of power, all this money. 1:51 There's his control of X, his control of Starlink, of SpaceX, of Neuralink, of Tesla. 1:59 He has power over wealth, attention, and critical infrastructure that no human being 2:07 has ever combined at this level, at least once you're outside the range of say a Donald 2:12 Trump or Xi Jinping. Somebody who controls a superpower as a state. That's not what Musk has, 2:19 and yet he has this almost state-like thing that is completely pursuant to his whims. 2:26 So what does he want to do with it? What is he doing with it? What what is this world that he is 2:33 flexing his power and taking on real risk to build? Quincebloodianna is a professor of 2:38 International History Apostle University. He's the author of several books, including 2:42 Globus, High Ex-Bastards, but relevant for here, Muskism, which he co-authored with Ben 2:47 Tarnoff. He joins me now. 2:57 Quinn Sabodian, welcome to the show. 2:59 Very happy to be here. 3:01 So Elon Musk is flexing a lot of power right now. He's made the largest ever set of campaign 3:06 donations from one person in one cycle. It's now $450 million, all of it to Republican 3:11 and groups. He's alone a quarter of all GOP donations this cycle. What is he trying to buy? 3:21 Well, I think he's trying to entrench the dependency that he already enjoys. 3:24 One is through his financial role in the U.S. political economy, by extension the global 3:31 economy. SpaceX now as one of the world's top tech companies, Tesla as a large part of the 3:38 the tech portfolio that people hold in their pension funds, in their individual investor 3:43 accounts, means that if you attack Musk, you're also kind of attacking one of the pillars 3:48 of US political economy. 3:51 So that's kind of the money side. 3:53 On the machine side, he's trying to make the world ever more dependent on his infrastructures. 3:58 And the use of SpaceX as the really monopoly launch provider, put things into low Earth 4:04 orbit, the rolling out of low earth orbit satellites as Starlink as kind of the default 4:09 communications medium for battlefield operations and for rural consumers and so on. 4:16 But then further to that, there's what I would think of as kind of the messaging piece of 4:20 that or the media piece. 4:22 And there he's much more targeted trying to produce kind of communicative ecosystems 4:27 systems in which his way of framing social problems and solutions to social problems is 4:33 uncontested and uncontestable. 4:36 So his purchase of Twitter in October, 2022, long described as kind of one of the biggest 4:40 business failures in American history, has proven to be actually probably quite effective, 4:46 I would say, so that people are caught in kind of an echo chamber of his creation. 4:51 And his targeting of the midterms and his production of flexing of his own power to make 4:58 or break candidates, as he hopes, is a way to, he hopes to kind of fine tune that control 5:04 over the media and messaging ecosystem and get out ahead of what he worries will be 5:08 a kind of regulatory wave that would accompany a democratic majority. 5:14 What's funny to me or interesting to me about the description you give there is 5:17 you could imagine someone with Musk's portfolio of interests, seeing a very 5:24 different strategy is optimal because the work he does is so intertwined with the 5:29 government. Being highly, highly associated with one partisan side of the 5:35 fight in America, in Europe, at the sort of right wing parties he's been 5:39 boosting, it creates risk. I mean, you talked about entrenching dependence, 5:45 But he's also creating a situation where if you have in 2029, 5:50 you know, President John Olsa for President Gavin Newsom or President AOC and the Democratic Congress, 5:55 reliance on SpaceX, on Starlink, you know, on Grok maybe in the Pentagon can be seen as a huge risk. 6:05 And so from that side, this doesn't all look purely rational, like a master businessman, 6:11 It looks like a man who believes things and is actually risking quite a lot to push those 6:15 beliefs upon the world. 6:17 Yeah. 6:17 I mean, it's an unusual approach. 6:19 Right? 6:19 I mean, the way that corporate leaders have usually tried to exercise their influence on 6:24 political landscape in the past has been slightly more from behind the scenes of course, right? 6:28 But I would say then he's, again, working on two tracks. 6:31 One is deep in that financial and structural dependency such that even if a president 6:37 and Ossoff, or a president AOC comes into power, they have a limited ability to reign 6:42 in his, you know, fulcrum central role in the American health of the stock market and 6:48 its dominance in certain key frontier sectors. 6:52 Their hands would be tied still, I think, but at the same time, he can use this tactic 6:57 of kind of hyperpolarization, which he's obviously taken as his own kind of trademark, 7:03 Mark, even amongst his own Silicon Valley leadership class, to potentially become the 7:08 favored partner for a future ruling administration. 7:12 That's also the way he's approaching the relationship to far-right parties in Europe. 7:17 A rational person would try to come up with some kind of compromise with the ruling parties 7:23 in Western Europe, make peace with the EU in some way to gain market access. 7:28 He's taken an opposite approach, gone on a full frontal attack against Brussels and the 7:34 existing legacy centrist parties and tried to ally which would have long thought of as 7:39 he sees as the kind of Tesla's of politics, the AFD's, the Restore Britons that he hopes 7:45 will come from marginality and nowhere to completely disrupt and destroy the legacy 7:50 institutional parties of social democracy and Christian democracy. 7:53 So it's high risk, but potentially also high reward. 7:56 If you find yourself then in a kind of a pole position for a changing model of governance across the board 8:02 I do think Musk is somebody who works backwards from 8:05 Visions of possible futures and I want to play a clip from an interview 8:09 He recently gave the economists where he describes how things things are gonna play out over 8:13 This was just over the five to ten year time frame. It would be an exercise in vanity to 8:18 For me to think that I would be controlling 8:20 super genius AI that is vastly smarter than me. 8:24 What my biological neural net tells me is that the most important thing for AI safety 8:28 is to be maximally truth-seeking and curious. 8:32 If that's the case, I think it will foster humanity. 8:38 So let's unpack that. 8:39 You're sure that humans will no longer be in control in 10 years' time? 8:43 I think it is unlikely in the same way that if the difference in the intelligence 8:48 between AI and humans is vastly greater than the difference in intelligence between AI and chimpanzees. 8:56 It's hard to imagine that the chimpanzees would be in charge. 9:00 The whole first half of this economist interview, he gave us sort of like this, 9:04 where he's very casually just describing a world war within a decade. 9:09 Money wouldn't exist. 9:10 Money won't exist. Human beings have lost control of the entire world. He is not 9:14 even really in control of his own companies anymore. So what is truth seeking and curious 9:19 mean to Musk? 9:21 To Musk, the curious part in his own terms means that given the likelihood of superintelligence 9:30 exceeding human intelligence at some time in the near future, then we would need to 9:35 make sure that it wants to keep humans around for its own interest and either its 9:42 its own entertainment or its own. 9:44 Yeah. 9:45 I've heard him describe this sort of as he wants an AI that would find it more entertaining 9:48 to have us in the world than to not have us in the world. 9:50 And then even more extreme version of that is like in line with simulation theory, 9:54 which is that if we are just existing in a digital simulation that has been created 9:59 by a future alien race or a hyper advanced human race, then we want to keep things 10:05 entertaining enough here in this kind of reality show of the present such that 10:10 that they wouldn't terminate the programming. 10:12 So, I mean, in his own terms, 10:14 that's how he describes the goal there. 10:16 I think it really tracks 10:17 what have been pretty substantial changes 10:19 in his attitude towards AI 10:21 even across the last 10 years, right? 10:24 And we know that in 2015, 10:25 he started open AI with Sam Altman, 10:28 really at that time under the influence 10:30 of the Swedish philosopher, Nick Bostrom, 10:32 whose book, Superintelligence, 10:34 had come out the year before. 10:36 And the overwhelming threat at that point 10:37 was the possibility of a runaway 10:39 digital superintelligence, which in the most famous example might turn us all into paper 10:44 clips if it got the wrong kind of a prompt. 10:47 So at that time, he seemed to have one big message, which is let's hit the brakes, 10:51 slow it down and make sure that we're aligning the values of the AI with our own. 10:55 But at the same time, he's starting Neuralink. 10:58 And as he starts Neuralink, the way he describes it, in fact, directly to Altman 11:02 and as well as in other cases, is that Neuralink is designed to accelerate our 11:08 fusion with network technologies so that a human machine symbiote, as he calls it, will 11:15 be able to sort of stay out ahead of that Skynet digital superintelligence. 11:20 So that's the first phase of Musk's AI thinking is actually we need to augment human consciousness 11:26 to make sure that we are accelerating a better version of the AI against the evil. 11:31 Let's become the robots to not be destroyed by the robots. 11:34 This attitude changes almost overnight in November 2022 with the launch of ChadGBT. 11:40 With the launch of ChadGBT and the realization by him and the entire Silicon Valley entrepreneurial 11:46 and leadership class that LLMs and Genitive AI was the new growth story that they'd been 11:51 looking for for years, suddenly his whole discourse about AI changed. 11:56 Instead of it being the digital superintelligence that was a concern, now it was the woke 12:02 LLM which had been trained on the progressive posts and internet discourse of the era of 12:08 Black Lives Matter, Defend Trans Kids, Me Too, and iconically the image of Google Gemini's 12:15 generated image of the black founding fathers kind of stood in for people like Musk and 12:20 Andreessen as the danger of this new phase of AI, which in the most memorable description 12:26 Musk said he feared would turn him into a woman of color. 12:29 So, if that's your new fear, then what do you do in response? 12:34 You create an anti-woke AI and that is precisely what X AI is and what Grock was. 12:40 The truth-seeking part is really his market proposition against what he sees as the alternative 12:47 models of open AI and anthropic, which have been shot through as he describes it 12:52 and contaminated with the woke mind virus. 12:55 Yes. 12:56 But also in this period that we're describing, he has gone through a pretty big political 13:02 transformation. 13:03 Musk of 2012, 2013, you know, pro-Obama seems to have fairly been all Silicon Valley politics. 13:14 The Musk of 2022 does not. 13:17 He's really becoming already the sort of leader of what we now call the tech right. 13:20 So, the shift on wokeness for him and the shift in his politics, I think predates actually 13:28 in some ways his shift on AI. 13:29 So how do you understand what that shift was? 13:33 Yeah. 13:34 So when the Obama administration wanted to do a big push into renewables to reduce 13:41 dependency on fossil fuels and thus also help to get out of the Middle East, then 13:45 Musk was able to profit from that, getting this nearly half billion dollar loan from 13:50 the Department of Energy into the Biden administration that demand for electric autonomy, as we call 13:56 it, still existed, but now it was part of also a kind of pro-worker, pro-union push, 14:02 which meant that Musk wasn't one of the favored companies for the Biden White House. 14:07 Famously does not get invited to the electric vehicle summit. 14:10 It's snubbed in a way that is kind of like roughly equivalent to the Trump roast at 14:15 the White House Correspondents' Dinner as the sort of initiating incident of a feeling 14:19 of being, you know, if you don't like me, then forget you. I'm going to create my own club. 14:23 One of the forms it took was, of course, the upswell of social movements, 14:28 making demands around racial justice, gender justice, that were, of course, entering the 14:34 workplaces of Silicon Valley too, that were producing new pressures, open letters, walkouts. 14:42 This became a site of real combative anger for the CEO class, which felt that this 14:49 labor class was now exercising power over them, the management in a way that was repellent. 14:56 But also the COVID containment measures become something that really both triggers Musk's anger 15:03 at his inability to shape the regulatory world around his own needs and also a time where he 15:10 gets a lot of validation for his opposition to the containment measures. So his tweet where he 15:16 says the coronavirus panic is dumb, is his first one million like tweet. 15:21 And as a response to it, Trump responds, you know, this is outrageous, you know, reopen 15:26 the Fremont factory. 15:28 And then he goes ahead and just does it anyway, actually against California orders and gets 15:31 away with it. 15:32 So this also points to something else I think is relevant in his right return, which 15:37 is his immersion into the world of social media and Twitter in particular, which 15:43 we think of as less a kind of corrupting process of his rationality and more as sort of his 15:49 iterative attempt to figure out how to trigger processes that end up actually enriching him 15:55 and expanding his power. So what can look like a kind of dissipation online or kind of online 16:01 brain rot is often actually corresponding with movement upward and the value of his stocks 16:08 in his personal net worth. 16:09 It's in 2021, when everyone's online and on their phones, 16:12 that he becomes the richest man in the world. 16:14 And it's sort of by, as people have described, 16:16 making himself into a human meme stock. 16:19 So this, what he finds out online on Twitter 16:22 is that polarization is actually, 16:25 rather than being a kind of handicap 16:27 for his accumulation model 16:29 is actually real accelerant for it. 16:31 Well, you're saying polarization, 16:32 and that is part of it. 16:34 But polarization also is a method of getting attention, and this is a way in which Trump 16:41 and Musk I think have very similar psychologies. 16:45 But it's so interesting with him the way all the parts are always connected. 16:49 But I don't think people, I don't think I had a really good sense of how rapidly his 16:54 fortune has expanded. 16:55 So in 2020, he has, according to estimates, $39 billion. 17:00 Now, it's a lot of money. 17:01 $539 billion I'd be stoked. 17:04 He now has a trillion dollars. 17:07 Six years. 17:08 In 2020, he had 4% of the wealth he has now. 17:12 And what has happened inside those years 17:15 is not that his company's made a lot of money. 17:17 He does not have highly profit generating. 17:20 I mean, I'm not saying there are no profits, 17:21 but what happened with SpaceX, what happened with Tesla, 17:24 it's not that they began showing profits 17:28 that shifted, you know, Musk's net worth. 17:32 What did happen? 17:33 How do you go from $40 billion to a trillion dollars 17:35 in six years? 17:37 Yeah, I mean, the price to earnings ratio 17:38 of his companies are completely outrageous 17:40 compared to their competitors, 17:42 but they speak to what as something else 17:45 is something he's perfected. 17:46 And in practicing, we talk about in the book 17:47 as financial fabulism. 17:49 So this projection, not of a current set of fundamentals 17:53 or a current revenue model, 17:54 But the promise of being able to open up perhaps infinite future revenues, he becomes, you know, 18:00 the most iconic example of that. And Tesla, as something that's able to plausibly present 18:08 itself as the future of motorization, and then maybe also the future of humanoid robots, 18:15 and SpaceX's ability to say, listen, we delivered on a drop in over 90% of the cost of putting 18:22 matter in the orbit, internet with over 11,000 satellites space, with over 12 million subscribers, 18:29 tangibly changing the ability to win wars in places like Ukraine. These things are real 18:36 things you can point to if you want to persuade yourself that if you're going to make a bat, 18:41 you make it on this man. Well, let me hold you on that for a second, 18:45 because one thing I often see, and I think of it as a genuine kind of intellectual mistake, 18:49 like people want the people they don't like to not be impressive. 18:55 Of course. 18:55 And I think there is a big strain of thought that sort of exists on the left now as they 19:02 understandably turn against Elon Musk in his politics. 19:05 What he's built is incredible. 19:07 Yeah. 19:07 And it's real. 19:08 I mean, we can talk about profits or nonprofits and price to our earnings ratios, but you 19:13 can use Starlink. 19:14 Yep. 19:14 You know, you can drive into Tesla. 19:15 they really have made sending tonnage into space relatively affordable in a way that it wasn't 19:23 before. Musk really did do that. 19:28 Yeah. And one of the ways he did that I think is by being ahead of the curve with the move back 19:31 towards de-globalization, reshoring, re-territorialization of production models as well. 19:38 What do you mean by that? 19:39 I mean that when he launched SpaceX in 2002, one of the ways he radically cut the cost of 19:45 of putting matter into orbit 19:47 was by bringing a lot of the production in-house. 19:50 So making bespoke or making themselves 19:52 a lot of the components that they need for their rockets, 19:55 not relying on subcontractors, 19:57 not relying on kind of lengthy procurement models, 19:59 but speeding everything up and bringing it all in-house. 20:03 Tesla famously did this as well. 20:06 When they built the Gigafactories, 20:08 they were trying to bring as much of the supply chain 20:10 as they could under the roof of one factory, 20:12 which meant that exactly in 2020 when automakers got absolutely slammed by the closing of borders, 20:20 Tesla got hit, but they bounced up much more quickly. It was really one of the things that 20:23 gave them the possibility to bounce back. So before those big supply shocks, before COVID, 20:29 before Ukraine, actually Musk was already using a partially kind of decoupled model of production. 20:36 I completely agree with you that it's a real stumbling block for many critics who simply 20:41 want to short-circuit to this idea he's just a liar and a grifter or even simply a crony capitalist. 20:48 In fact, he's not just a crony capitalist because he's pushing out often the kind of technological 20:53 frontier for economies that do business with him. If you're not a subscriber to The New York Times, 21:10 we have some news for you. You can now explore The Times for free without any paywalls at all 21:15 during your first month in The New York Times app. This podcast is supported by Chevron. 21:29 We rely on energy every day. But have you ever wondered what it takes to make sure it's there 21:35 when we need it? 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You get to use that to offset your ordinary income every year, 22:31 decreasing your tax burden. 22:33 Investing involves risk, performance not guaranteed, Betterment does not offer tax advice, 22:36 TLH may not be suitable for all customers. Learn more at betterment.com slash TLH-terms. 22:43 I think that brings together a couple interesting things here, because as you mentioned, 22:47 to justify the valuations, Musk is not just selling a vision of the world that he has 22:51 already achieved. He's selling a different vision of the future, and he sort of described 22:57 what it was to the economists. So I want to play that here. What will your companies be doing in 10 23:03 years? And how will they make money? Well, you can really think of the economy as digital and 23:12 physical intelligence. You need the end effectors in the form of humanoid robotics. You need 23:18 basically lots of bots in a nutshell. You need lots of bots. And then you can go from intelligence 23:27 manifesting itself only digitally to shaping atoms and you say what is an 23:36 economy? An economy is the production of goods and provision of services and if 23:44 you have vast numbers of robots with vast amounts of digital intelligence you 23:51 have a sort of a quasi infinite economy. So the future is going to be very, very different 24:04 from the past. 24:06 So this is currently the promise of what I would call like musk industries, which is 24:10 not necessarily that he is going to individually dominate AI. It's that they are going to 24:16 be the company that takes AI, the kind of conglomerate of companies that takes AI out 24:23 of bits and into atoms that they will dominate the AI robotics intersection. 24:30 I think whether they will or not is obviously something we can't know, but I think there's 24:33 something worth like getting at a deeper level of the world being envisioned and promoted 24:38 here, which is what is the role that human beings play in this future? 24:43 I mean, it's a very difficult one to sell, right? 24:45 And one of the strange things about that interview is that he says, you know, economically 24:50 civilizationally, we're moving to a situation of kind of, if not subordination and simply 24:55 marginalization by superintelligence. 24:57 So for that to be the goal to which you're working is, first of all, very difficult 25:03 to build consent for and legitimacy for, obviously. 25:06 But it also requires a huge amount of synergies between neighboring technologies and one of 25:14 the ways he's actually unlocked the level of fortune he has this year is by making progress 25:19 towards bringing together that vertically integrated musk industries model under one 25:26 kind of label. 25:27 It's only been recently that XAI absorbed X.com and then SpaceX in turn absorbed XAI. 25:36 And now he's vocally calling for the merger of Tesla and SpaceX, which would be the largest 25:42 merger in history, and would precisely bring together the part of his empire that does 25:47 atoms in the form of humanoid robots with the part that does the AI under the umbrella 25:54 of SpaceX. 25:55 But then, I think one aspect of muskism, which we need to keep our eye on, is that he's actually 26:02 propelled by the need to create an impression of invulnerability, which is actually belied by the truth. 26:09 So if you pick up the SpaceX prospectus and read through the risk factors, 26:15 number one risk factor is 26:17 national legislation. These are the things that actually keep Musk up at night, right? 26:21 is the moves being made by national governments to throw sand in the treads of the tank that he's 26:29 trying to drive towards his goal. So that's, I think, something to bear in mind too, is like his 26:35 impression of invulnerability is actually part of his political project. 26:39 And beneath the sort of mechanism of legislation and the risk of legislation to him 26:45 is also what populations believe, what they believe about the world, what they believe about 26:50 him what they want. And this, I think, brings together like both a near-term and a long-term 26:56 obsession. Musk has, and you've written about this, a sort of more specific conception of 27:02 what he calls the woke mind virus. When he is describing it, the metaphor is more like computer 27:06 virus than I think people quite realize. So what is to him the woke mind virus? Because 27:11 I think it's a little bit different than what people think of as wokeness. 27:13 Yes. So, the term viruses of the mind was coined by Richard Dawkins in the early 1990s and well 27:21 respected if sort of incendiary conservative evolutionary biologist and not coincidentally, 27:27 the same guy who coined the term meme in his book, The Selfish Gene, from 1976. And the two 27:33 arguments work together, the meme and the mind virus both suggests that ideology and belief 27:39 are nothing more than these kind of discreet units that move between individuals mediated through 27:46 by the 1990s network technologies. And he is using a direct analogy between the computer virus 27:53 and the religious belief. And Musk has absolutely swallowed this notion whole to the point that 28:00 I think if you want to understand how he understands politics or the problem of consent 28:05 or indeed the problem of truth, it's inseparable from this idea of humans and machines being 28:11 networked together into what he calls cybernetic collectives, within which problems of political 28:17 affiliation, support, loss of support, descent, anger are triggered always through the multiplication 28:24 or the reduction of certain memes or certain mind viruses. So, because he saw the mind 28:30 viruses of racial justice demands and so on, leading to a dominance of a blocking coalition 28:38 against him as you saw it in the 2020s, then he needs to propagate the anti-woke mind viruses 28:44 that will defeat those, which seems like an outrageous way of thinking about politics. 28:49 But this is where I think what I talked about at the beginning is a kind of communicative 28:52 dependency becomes really important because what SpaceX now is, is a kind of extraordinary 28:59 end-to-end vertically integrated communicative space that 29:03 What does that mean when you say communicative space? 29:05 I mean it reaches from chatbots to satellites and what he's trying to do there and what he's selling 29:11 the comparative advantage of SpaceX is having is access to the real-world emotions of the humans 29:19 who are posting on x.com. So he says you have a kind of real-time news engine, opinion engine, 29:26 engine, update and feelings engine, meaning that your LLM is also more, you know, au courant 29:33 and up to date. 29:35 And of course, the implication is that if you can create that as a kind of hermetically 29:40 sealed silo, then you can also become the controller of that space of discourse. 29:45 So the way that he's transformed X since his acquisition of Twitter is designed to boost 29:52 exactly the kind of messages that come in closest proximity to his through actual monetization 29:59 of the accounts involved. There's an extraordinary news story about the British far-right politician, 30:04 Rupert Lowe, who made a tweet about the incompatibility of Muslims with British civilization. 30:10 And there was a follow-on report of how many thousands of pounds he'd actually earned 30:14 through memes, through x.com. 30:18 So in Musk's mind, he's producing a kind of 30:20 mind virus engine, which he could also call truth. 30:25 And if he can, you know, absolutely control the 30:28 algorithms within which that is magnified or contained, 30:31 then he will have domination over the media. 30:34 I want you to hold on the sort of more ideological 30:37 dimension of this belief. 30:39 So, when he understands the quote-unquote woke mind virus as a threat to truth-seeking, as a 30:50 creation of a kind of corrupted Western civilization that is lost, that will have lost some of the 30:57 values that drove it forward before. He talks a lot now about Western civilization. What is he 31:02 saying specifically? Yeah. Well, here I think it's actually helpful to come in through the 31:06 backdoor through some of his science fiction obsessions, right? I mean, the foundation series 31:11 from Isaac Asimov is something he refers to constantly. His most recent child is named 31:17 Selden after the Harry Selden figure in the foundation series who is described as a kind 31:24 of a brilliant mathematician, really, who introduces a discipline called psycho-history, 31:30 which through kind of manipulation of the present will ensure the survival of civilization. 31:35 And it's relevant because it's kind of a mixture of rationality and attention to mass emotion 31:41 and the way that crowds operate and the way mobs work. 31:46 And the problem with Seldon's plan is that it's confronted with someone who's even better 31:50 at controlling emotions, which is someone called the mule. 31:53 And Musk's understanding of communications is always this combination of a world of 31:58 rationality and then a world of what he calls the limbic instinct or the kind 32:03 of animal impulses that drive us. 32:06 He sees, and there I don't think he's totally incorrect, the success of social networks as 32:11 being the way that they draw on both of those kind of resources. 32:15 And he understands his own interventions as skillfully manipulating two of those simultaneously. 32:21 So that, I think, helps to explain how he understands his role. 32:26 It's quite fascinating actually that the richest man in the world sees himself in 32:30 kind of a transitional function to really hand over human history to post-human history. 32:36 I mean, the vision of super intelligences reducing us to the role of chimpanzees is 32:42 not actually something anyone with any level of influence has tried to persuade the massive 32:49 people to go along with before. 32:51 And that alone means that he plays with these categories of truth, curiosity and emotion 32:56 in ways that I think can sometimes be jarring and unfamiliar. 33:00 A lot of it is unfamiliar. And when you hear Musk talk, for a person who operates with such a 33:07 high sense of agency, when he begins talking about this, he abandons agency. But you might imagine 33:12 a person who felt that way, like not being that interested in day-to-day politics at the moment, 33:16 but what he is. And this is where these twin obsessions, I think, come together. 33:21 Maybe a way to get into this is to play this clip from Rogan, 33:24 Which I think connects some of what you're talking about with the woke mind virus and true-seeking 33:28 To this idea he has that there is like a central security vulnerability in Western civilization 33:36 So that we've got civilizational 33:38 suicidal empathy going on and 33:41 It's like I believe in empathy like I think you should care about other people 33:43 But you need to have empathy for for civilization as a whole and not commit to a civilizational suicide also 33:49 Don't let someone use your empathy against you so they can completely control your state 33:54 and then do an insanely bad job of managing it and never get removed. 33:59 The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. 34:06 The empathy exploit. 34:08 They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. 34:17 And I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through 34:22 and not just be programmed like a robot. 34:26 When he says we've got civilizational suicidal empathy 34:29 going on, when he says that our civilization 34:32 might be committing suicide, 34:34 what is he saying is happening? 34:36 I mean, concretely, when he says something like that, 34:39 he's echoing a very common point of discussion 34:43 on the European far right to the far right and to Musk. 34:47 The real problem with where society is going 34:50 is not that there are a lot of people trying to or coming to Europe or the United States, 34:55 but the problem is that the liberals have decided it's a good idea to allow people from 35:01 radically different cultures and radically different religions to come to the heart of 35:05 Western civilization. So that precise notion of suicidal empathy is all about refugee policy 35:12 and immigration policy and is at the heart of his demands for what he calls re-migration. 35:18 But I think at a deeper level it comes to his unwillingness to kind of tarry with the 35:25 traditional concepts of modern political thought. 35:28 So if you think about what every previous political thinker has been forced to contend with over 35:36 the last 250 years, certainly in this country, is categories like democracy, popular sovereignty, 35:42 some idea eventually of like a care for the people extended sort of political versions 35:48 of what you might call empathy, the ways in which communities are imagined as being composed 35:54 of people who are relative peers or equals at some level. That whole legacy must, I think, 36:01 would see as part of the contamination of Western civilization by empathy. So, 36:05 social order becomes a programming problem. And in programming, attempts to kind of 36:11 transform the core code that you're working on are not interpreted as a possibility for 36:17 consensus building or compromise, but simply sites of contamination that need to be programmed away. 36:24 When I have heard Musk defend this view, the argument he makes, the argument I think he's 36:28 getting at here to sort of extend what you're saying is that Europe and the United States, 36:34 primarily who he's talking about, have been through empathy for individuals, 36:41 allowing mass numbers of people to come into their countries who do not fundamentally share 36:46 their values and their premises. When he says here that you need to be careful not to have so much 36:54 empathy for the individual, you don't have empathy for a civilization as a whole. That's 36:58 I think what he's describing. And I think it raises maybe a number of questions here, but 37:04 But one of the core ones to me is how his upbringing in apartheid South Africa has influenced 37:16 or shaped this set of concerns. 37:19 One doesn't have a lot of kind of documentary evidence to work with. 37:23 So there's a certain leap of interpretation that's necessary, but it's not a very big 37:28 leap of interpretation. 37:29 population. And one of the things we describe in the book is the way that being a minority 37:34 privileged population racially marked in South Africa that drifted through everyday life 37:41 and one's whole life course in a way that drifted past sort of faceless, colored masses 37:48 of the African population helps to reinforce in very obvious ways a sort of sense of 37:55 the non-player characters and the playing characters. 37:58 And South Africa itself is not a traditional 38:01 kind of modern nation state in the sense 38:03 that it's built on a kind of asymmetrical logic 38:07 where the majority of the residents are actually just there 38:11 and so far as they're useful 38:12 to the minority of residents. 38:14 So those old problems of what is popular sovereignty? 38:17 What is national self-determination? 38:20 How can you get a group of people 38:22 who live next to each other to see each other 38:24 and sort of bonds of reciprocal attention or minimal care simply didn't apply in late 38:29 apartheid South Africa, right? 38:30 It's like as effectively one of the last decolonizing sites in the world, it lived on 38:36 with that imperial two-tier logic much longer than the rest of the world did. 38:42 So I think it's easier for him to just set aside what to most political thinkers are 38:48 things that need to be considered seriously. 38:50 I think it's worth looking at how that breaks down concretely as well. 38:55 So how have previous oligarchs, how have previous titans of industry secured popular consent? 39:01 This is actually where the comparison to Fordism is helpful. 39:05 Ford himself virulent anti-Semite, violently anti-union, and yet Fordism is something 39:11 we associate with collective bargaining agreements, upward generational mobility, the construction 39:17 of the single family breadwinner model, 39:21 the welfare state even, how did that happen? 39:24 Well, it happened because through social struggle, 39:26 through enlightened legislation 39:28 and through democratic pressure, 39:30 a compromise or a social contract emerged 39:33 in which people were minimally willing to go along 39:36 with the way that this guy was going to design 39:38 the factory and the way he was gonna make his money. 39:41 What's the equivalent for Musk, right? 39:43 What is the social contract 39:44 that people like Musk are proposing 39:46 Where is the equivalent of Carnegie's libraries in the case of Musk? 39:51 You can look concretely at the Musk Foundation, which few people have heard of, but is one 39:56 of the top 10 endowed philanthropic foundations in the United States. 40:00 Why have few people heard of it? 40:02 Because they routinely don't spend the 5% of their assets that they're required to 40:06 do as a 501c3 philanthropic foundation in the United States. 40:11 And when they do, who do they give it to? 40:13 as in the recent example, they gave it to a school called Ad Astra that is next to SpaceX 40:19 in Texas that was designed pretty much exclusively for employees of Musk. So that vision of kind of 40:26 outward facing social purpose, his complete reneging of that is itself quite extraordinary, 40:34 right? And it sets him apart, actually, from others in his class, right? The Gates Foundation 40:42 Arguably, if empathy at a basic level is a woke mind virus, then the Gates Foundation 40:48 is thoroughly infected with it, right? 40:50 I mean, they have a vision of saving as many lives as possible no matter where they are 40:54 on the planet. 40:55 Tons of critiques associated with that, of course, but a pretty standard way of trying 40:59 to buy consent under conditions of Cretaskan equality. 41:03 So it's an extraordinarily bold, I think, affront to all of the normal ways we 41:09 historians have thought about how instability is stabilized in moments of extreme change. 41:15 And what's amazing really for me is to see how resilient he's been despite the depth of his 41:22 provocations. One of the reasons I wanted to have you on was because you wrote a book before 41:27 the book you did with Ben Tarnoff on muskism that I think is important to musk, to understanding 41:33 musk maybe to understand some of the modern right. The book is called Hayek's Bastards, 41:39 which is, if you don't mind, just tell me about the main argument of that. 41:43 The main argument of that is that there were a group of people who called themselves neoliberals, 41:49 right, coined it in 1938. And when they called themselves neoliberals, they meant that they 41:55 needed to figure out how to protect the principles of market freedom in a time when 42:01 And that was under challenge from as they saw the left and the right. 42:04 So some of these people became quite famous. 42:06 The Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Gary Becker, George Stiegler. 42:10 And through the Cold War, of course, they exercised their political influence as well 42:16 they could, became favorites of Thatcher and Reagan. 42:20 And come the end of the Cold War, one would think that they had reached their 42:24 ultimate victory, right? 42:25 And yet, and this is what was so fascinating, when I went back to look at transcripts 42:29 of the meetings that they were having, the papers they were publishing as the Berlin Wall fell, 42:34 as the Soviet Union fell apart, they were actually panicked about a new set of threats. 42:40 The red enemy, as they often put it, had turned into a green one. Remember, this was an early 42:45 high point of activism against greenhouse gases and the dangers of what was then more often called 42:52 the greenhouse effect and global warming than climate change. They were worried about the 42:58 the resurgent demands for affirmative action and equality of representation in the workplace, 43:05 equal pay, they were worried about minority sexual demands from the gay rights movement 43:10 to the feminist movement. 43:12 So this becomes important because it creates the conditions for an alliance which would 43:17 only really come to full fruition years later between people who wanted to defend 43:24 and free market freedoms as best they could with people who seem to have opposition to 43:29 those same progressive politics, but for different reasons. 43:32 So this is the moment of the paleo-conservative alliance, for example, between a radical libertarian 43:39 like Murray Rothbart with someone who is mostly interested in cultural nationalism 43:45 like Papy Canaan. 43:47 Alternative for Germany is a perfect example of this as well, founded by neoliberal 43:52 economists who thought the euro was being mismanaged, creating alliances with ethno-nationalists 43:57 and opponents of Muslim immigration. How these two things ended up getting linked together 44:04 seems to be like an important question to figure out about our politics. 44:08 Well, one of the ways that I understand you as making the argument is that they're linked 44:12 together in a view that very fundamental categories and hierarchies of persistent society are 44:21 are natural, that they reflect acute differentials, cultural differentials, you know, people who 44:28 are more or less fit either at the individual level at the group level, etc. And what I thought 44:33 was interesting about this book in conversation with your Musk book is that to me, when I see sort 44:38 of the way Musk talks about the woke mind virus, to me, there's a lot of this in it, this sort 44:43 of sense that there are important hierarchies categories in society and that the danger 44:49 comes from a kind of constant progressive push or a woke push to dissolve them and that 44:57 you can't have Western civilization without the sort of hierarchies upon which Western 45:01 civilization was built. 45:03 And I just sort of interpret a lot of Musk's political activity as not about free markets 45:09 or any of these other things, but about this. 45:11 Yeah. 45:12 I mean, the subtitle to that book is race, gold, IQ and the capitalism of the far 45:16 right. 45:16 And in all of those cases, there was a expressed belief that nature was an unequal place and 45:25 it distributed gains unequally either through birth or territorial endowments and that to 45:32 deny that basic natural inequality was to pave the road to serfdom as Hayek described it 45:39 in a new way. 45:40 Now it would be paved with green bricks and pink bricks instead of red bricks. 45:43 And someone like Musk I think absolutely falls into that category where I think the 90s 45:48 conversation gets updated and kind of transformed in our present moment is especially around 45:54 a category like IQ. 45:56 So IQ is fascinating because in the 1990s it came surging back for a few different reasons. 46:02 The arguments that put it back on the table were especially those of Charles Murray, the 46:06 think tanker and Richard Hearnstein, the Harvard psychologist in their enormous best 46:10 seller, the Bell Curve from 1994. And that book said two things. It said, at the one end of the Bell 46:17 Curve, we're going to get people whose IQ is going to be ever more determinative of economic 46:22 success because of the knowledge economy we're in. And at the low end of that Bell Curve, 46:26 we're going to have people who are going to be less and less able to perform in this knowledge 46:30 economy. And they're going to be a social problem. And the incendiary part, of course, 46:35 that there are group differences in racial intelligence 46:39 such that we can assume that there will be 46:41 disproportionately large number of black people 46:43 at that bottom end of the bell curve. 46:45 So the era of the knowledge economy 46:47 is also the era of mass incarceration 46:50 and the real turn towards more punitive 46:53 police law and order policies. 46:55 And the way that this was mapped onto an idea 46:57 of who is equipped and who isn't for the big transition 47:00 and how money will be made and jobs will look 47:02 ends up being a pretty good kind of way to read that. 47:05 Why that's different now, 47:07 is that by their own statements, 47:10 the tech leadership now assumes 47:13 that almost all of those knowledge jobs 47:15 are going to be automated away, right? 47:18 So if IQ was predicting even at the far 10% of the curve 47:22 for the people who would thrive 47:24 in the coming internet world, 47:26 then what happens if that's now been reduced 47:28 to like 0.1% because all those other jobs, 47:31 the coders, the project managers, the copywriters, the technical writers are all going to be done by 47:38 LLMs and agents, which is what they, of course, are banking on. Then you have a question where 47:43 AI has actually eaten IQ. And now you've gone from just a cognitive elite, which is what 47:48 Heronstein and Murray called it, to a kind of hyper, hyper small cognitive super aristocracy. 47:54 I want to stay on this point because to me, this kind of coheres a lot of things in Musk 48:02 that are puzzling from the outside, which is, you know, you've got this guy from a long 48:08 time, the long-term vision is the most important thing is expanding the light cone of human 48:13 consciousness through the stars. 48:15 Now there's this sort of, you know, it kind of seems like bending of the psychic 48:20 need to the AI superiority. Musk is at the same time very worried about falling birth rates as he is 48:28 destroying like foreign aid, which certainly help people thrive and be alive and, you know, live 48:35 long lives and reproduce at the same time that he is virulently anti at least the immigration 48:41 policies of many of these countries. And it's like, where does this sort of guy who on the 48:48 One hand appears to believe in just like maximizing the quantity of consciousness fit with this guy who seems to not really like a lot of humanity. 48:55 Where does this guy who believes in humanity fit with this guy who seems to be accelerating, you know, the turnover. 49:01 But if your sort of fundamental view of the world is about a kind of cognitive hierarchy and you have certain views about, you know, where AI will sit in that, where different cultures sit in that. 49:14 But it's not like one-to-one with any individual thing, 49:18 not one-to-one with race, 49:19 not even one-to-one with Silicon versus flesh. 49:21 It's just one-to-one with a certain vision 49:25 of who or what qualifies as having like the capacity 49:30 to be a main character in this performance. 49:34 Then a lot of it, I think begins to fall 49:36 into an unsettling but a kind of like coherent space. 49:42 Yeah. No, I mean, I think there's a couple of ways to look at it. I mean, one is to draw 49:45 back on his grandfather's ideology, right, which I hesitate to do too much because there's 49:51 no evidence that Musk himself was influenced by his maternal grandfather. His maternal 49:56 grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was a very active member of something called Technocracy 50:01 Incorporated in Canada in the 1930s. And what Technocracy Incorporated was proposing 50:06 was something very similar to what we're talking about here. It was about the 50:10 dissolution of the existing price system, the dissolution of democracy altogether, the 50:15 reduction of the unit of exchange, and I guess store of value to something called an ERG, 50:20 which was the unit of energy that each human is able to produce in their life. 50:24 And the rational allocation of those ERGs would be overseen by a very, very small 50:29 but elite cast of engineers. 50:31 And that is a extremely far-fetched, but very radical vision that actually from 50:39 And from the menu of existing political ideologies probably comes the closest to what it seems 50:44 like Musk is describing. 50:47 But I think to get there is there are a few steps involved, right? 50:51 And- 50:53 Sorry, that had a lot of understatement to it. 50:57 So there is the problem of the transition right now for Musk. 51:00 I think it's a central problem, which is how do we get even from where we are 51:04 now to this 10-year mile marker to the end of his life, right? 51:08 actually, he has no real plans for his succession. It's one of the extraordinary things about 51:13 SpaceX from a corporate law point of view is that he has 85% of the voting shares. If he dies 51:19 tomorrow, and you'd simply have to wait for those shares to be allotted. So that I think he's 51:24 really banking on that transition having taken place in his own lifetime. And how do you get 51:29 there? And this is where the relationship to the Hayek's Bastards discourse is actually 51:34 relevant again, because one of the arguments I make in that book is that under these, an 51:40 atmosphere of uncertainty, time to unrest, then there is a tendency as within the investor 51:45 world to do a flight to safety. 51:47 And what these far-right thinkers in association with neoliberal thinkers were doing were 51:51 offering different forms of refuge and safety where a certain kind of value would be 51:57 protected and more durable. 51:58 So those were things, you know, your whiteness will save you, your access to a gold hoard will save you, your citizenship value, which was one of Bannon's talking points in the first Trump campaign will save you. 52:11 The problem with Musk now is if he's saying that the people who will get through the filter are such a small minority that how do you sell this vision to enough people to let you realize your goals in the medium term, 52:26 except, I think, defaulting to very shopworn scripts of ethno-nationalism and social war. 52:34 So, his decision to say, the way I'm going to win consent is simply to make you frightened of 52:39 outsiders and make you believe you need my technology to save your lives of yourself and 52:46 your family is a way that politicians have used to justify lack of material redistribution for, 52:52 you know, over a hundred years. There's actually nothing new about that. And it's 52:55 actually one of his, I would say, less innovative sort of interventions as this belief that 53:00 simply memeing the fear of the invader will be enough to get you through that transitional 53:06 moment until you get to quite literally, you know, lift off or escape velocity. 53:22 This podcast is supported by Chevron. 53:25 We rely on energy every day. 53:28 But have you ever wondered what it takes to make sure it's there when we need it? 53:31 I'm Tanner Faust, and the Energy Tailgate is back, with straight talk about the energy 53:36 our world depends on. 53:39 This podcast is brought to you by Maiden Cookware. 53:42 Maiden partners with multi-generational artisans and some of the world's best chefs to craft 53:47 professional quality cookware, knives, and kitchen tools. 53:50 Their products are trusted in Michelin-starred restaurants worldwide and designed to perform 53:54 just as well in your home kitchen. 53:56 From five-ply stainless-clad to carbon steel, every piece is built to last and 54:00 made to actually make you a better cook. 54:02 Discover award-winning cookware at maidencookware.com. 54:05 This message comes from Betterment. 54:07 Betterment's Dan Egan talks about tax loss harvesting. 54:11 Tax loss harvesting is a tax management strategy. 54:15 When you have a position that's gone down over time, 54:18 we intentionally sell out of it to realize a loss, 54:20 which we then say to the IRS, 54:22 hey, we lost money. 54:23 You get to use that to offset your ordinary income 54:25 every year, decreasing your tax burden. 54:27 Investing involves risk, performance not guaranteed. 54:30 Betterment does not offer tax advice. 54:31 TLH may not be suitable for all customers. Learn more at betterman.com slash TLH-terms. 54:37 I always thought the reason the Musk-Trump alliance was so potent, particularly in its early 54:42 moments before Musk kind of discredited himself as a direct actor through Doge, 54:48 but was that, one, they recognized in each other and particularly Musk recognized in Trump. It's 54:53 why I think he endorsed him after the assassination attempt when Trump raised the 54:56 Bloody Fist, that what Trump in his third campaign 55:01 for president began to represent 55:03 was a return of masculine will to politics, 55:07 like out of this era of, you know, 55:10 woke, feminized, consensus-oriented, 55:13 that, and for a lot of people, 55:15 like this idea of the builder, the industrialist, 55:18 right, the Iron Rondian Superman. 55:20 The world spirit on horseback. 55:21 The world spirit on horseback, 55:22 that, you know, Trump began to embody some of that. 55:27 I don't think he does now, but there's this way in which I think what to musks many, 55:32 many, many, many fans. 55:33 I'm pretty like, I think young to middle-aged male fans. 55:38 What he represents is kind of like masculine, conquering impulse. 55:42 It's why I think some of the kind of scary visions of the future he presents 55:49 at the level, not of content, but of texture. 55:52 they don't always scare people because to like hear a person saying this is to hear a person saying 55:59 like we will sally boldly forth and try to forge a glorious and unknown future for humanity even if 56:07 it's one that on the face of it barely seems like a future for humanity at all but at least at 56:13 least it is not afraid of the future. Yeah and I think it also sets up a kind of you know Pascal's 56:19 wager or kind of Rocos Basilisk dynamic, which is like, the closer you are to him, the closer 56:24 you adhere to his vision, then the more likely is that you'll be one of the ones who gets 56:28 through the filter, right? 56:29 So if he's the one who is making the future, then to deny him would basically be to doom 56:34 yourself to obsolescence. 56:36 And that's not an exchange that a lot of people are willing to make. 56:40 But I think the important thing to see, just not so as not to give him too much 56:44 credit in this is to see how he's actually managed to monopolize a lot of things that 56:50 were the product of collective will creation and collective intelligence, right? That, 56:55 I think, directs attention to the task of reform, which is like, how can you dethrone 57:00 Musk, not in the sense of throwing away all of the technology that he produced by 57:06 often piggybacking on other people's innovations, but how can you create a different story 57:10 whereby it's, you know, the people, the nation who decide this and not just one man in his post. 57:17 Well, that I think brings us maybe back into the more material realm of immediate politics. 57:22 Because one of the things that strikes me about what we are seeing now is that it is a fundamentally 57:30 unstable equilibrium. So you have Elon Musk, who as you have described, his companies are 57:37 They're inextricably intertwined with politics. 57:40 It would be hard to unwind the state from them. 57:44 But also by that very same token, if you're a Democrat, right, the idea that you're going 57:50 to be dependent on, on Moscow, you can turn off Starlink when, you know, if Ukraine or 57:54 some other country or ally or even America is doing something he doesn't like, that's 57:58 very, very dangerous. 57:59 Yeah. 58:01 You know, one thing that that intertwining with the state creates is both like a vulnerability 58:07 And so it becomes very, very, very dangerous for him the more he becomes allied with a kind of more extreme version of the right to have any left wing or centrist candidates win really like anywhere in the world and the countries are dependent on him. 58:20 And that just at some point either I think you end up in a situation where like Musk needs to break the opposition to him or it's like the state needs to contain the threat. 58:32 Yeah, it just seems fundamentally unstable. It's not like he gave $10 million. He just dropped about 450 million dollars 58:39 Like it's nothing because to him it is nothing. Yeah, right. Yeah 58:42 I mean the way that my co-author and I we're talking about this and we had interestingly 58:47 I would say more pragmatic conversations about musk and muskism in the book in Europe than we've had in the United States 58:53 I think the proximity of musk and the problems you're describing to 58:58 to Americans makes it very hard to deal with it rationally because there's such a desire 59:03 to lash out at this level of kind of cathexis, like the suturing together of the future of 59:09 the American economy with Mosk and his products, that sometimes there's a will to kind of 59:15 moralize and psychologize and just bat him away and denounce him without further reflection. 59:20 Whereas in Europe, we found that there was a kind of a three R strategy that we 59:24 were discussing and people were discussing. 59:26 One is regulation, of course, is one model, right? 59:29 And that's, you could say that wrote 59:30 throughout the EU is taking. 59:32 The other model though is replacement. 59:34 So you look at what Musk has made, 59:36 and you say, how much would it cost to make substitutes? 59:39 And often the cost is very, very high. 59:42 But the third model is really to kind of reimagine 59:44 what the heck this tech is even for. 59:47 And that's where I think looking at the range 59:50 of Musk's history of business creation 59:52 is actually helpful, because we alluded to this 59:55 before, but the kind of promise of electric autonomy, for example, that he was holding 60:00 out when Tesla was mostly making EVs, but also when it was making solar panels and battery 60:06 storage units was actually much more socially useful and potentially inspiring than what 60:13 he has done with his businesses ever since. 60:16 So I think that one attitude there is to start from first principles and just say 60:21 like, what are we even, you know, investing in any of this for in the first place? 60:25 What do we want? 60:26 What do we want? 60:26 And actually one of the pedagogic virtues of Musk and his very monstrousness is he's made 60:32 that question impossible not to ask, right? 60:34 Because if the answer to that question is what we want is continued level of being 60:39 completely fused with this man, then I think a lot of people on reflection would not 60:43 want that. 60:44 So he's made us ask that question. 60:46 And he knows that he's put himself into a kind of a difficult situation with people 60:50 asking that question, hence the impression of inevitability. 60:54 So in the Economist interview, he said, it's not like we can stop AI right now. 60:58 There's no red button that says stop. 61:00 Actually of course there is, right? 61:02 Genitive AI on its current model requires enormous amount of build out of compute infrastructure 61:09 that actually right now is being slowed down to the point of even stopping through 61:14 hundreds of moratoria across the country. 61:16 So, it's actually not true that there's inevitability to the world that he's imagining. 61:21 It actually is true that we have options, and breaking out of that kind of cosmic vector 61:28 that he's produced through the uses of the attention economy is the first step in that. 61:33 But I think it gets even more pragmatic than that. 61:35 I'll give you an example. 61:36 On his newsletter this week, Paul Krugman, centrist liberal economist, has talked 61:43 in two segments about nationalizing Starlink. 61:46 Right. 61:47 Well, it's only a cent just to you. 61:50 But this is actually not something that you would have expected him to talk about a few 61:54 years ago, right? 61:55 I mean, the use of the Defense Production Act, the comparisons to the nationalization 62:00 of Montgomery Ward, a pragmatic economist until recently would have said, if you nationalize 62:06 a country, a company that's in the top 10 on the NASDAQ, you're going to trigger 62:09 a recession, there'll be cascading effects of loss of competence, repricing of risk. 62:14 Loss of incentives for future companies to build this kind of capacity. 62:17 Absolutely. But the very fact that this kind of controlled demolition of the very muskist 62:21 dependencies you're describing is now being brought onto the agenda, I think is very encouraging. 62:26 But this is what I actually mean by an unstable equilibrium. I saw those pieces 62:30 from Paul. I thought they were very, very interesting. And as you say, it's interesting 62:33 that Paul, who you know, I call him like sort of a progressive economist, but not a communist. 62:39 Yeah. Right. Not a person who- 62:40 That's someone prone to nationalization, Paul. 62:42 Not someone prone to nationalization, exactly. The fact that he was, you know, 62:46 talking about this, I think speaks to a world where it's like, you could really imagine 62:51 a situation with a democratic president and Musk turns off Starlink at some critical moment 62:58 and the Defense Production Act is like immediately engaged. 63:01 And like you do have this like moment of genuine showdown, right? 63:04 This both I think from Musk's perspective needs to be understood as a risk of like what he is doing in the way he's acting. 63:09 And from the other perspective, because you are getting to this position. 63:13 And we should say, one reason I haven't focused on the Ukraine-Starlin question is right now the reporting is contested in a way I cannot untangle. 63:22 As to whether or not orders came from somewhere inside the Trump administration or were implied by somewhere in the Trump administration or, you know, the activity was from Musk. 63:31 And I just don't know the answer and I can see it also being a miscommunication, right? 63:35 You know, these things happen too. 63:36 So I don't want to say confidently what happened there. 63:40 But I think it is, one can say relatively confidently that you could imagine a series of things 63:47 happening where for instance, you know, Musk and like, I don't love Michael Bloomberg dropping 63:51 $80 million at the end of the campaign either, right? 63:53 I don't think this is a way campaigns should work. 63:55 You know, you begin having much more serious efforts at, you know, 63:59 or restricting the ability of like mega billionaires 64:02 to drop this much money. 64:04 And Musk is a billionaire on a scale 64:06 that somebody like Bloomberg, you know, cannot even touch. 64:09 It is just rare for an individual person 64:12 to have so much power that they, 64:16 they're not a state unto themselves, 64:19 but they are some kind of like 64:21 state capacity sized entity, right? 64:25 Operating, you know, it's like the Vatican 64:27 of technology he's got over there. Yeah. But I think it's also important to then keep in mind 64:32 one of the things that I started this conversation talking about, which is the financial dependency, 64:36 right? SpaceX is in the top 10 in the stock market indices. More than 50% of Americans hold 64:44 some kind of equities or stocks. Most of those are directly or indirectly, mostly indirectly, 64:49 through passive funds connected to the health of Musk's businesses. So let's say 20 to 30% 64:55 of Americans have some kind of stake there indirectly. So one of the things that Musk 64:59 has proposed recently is that he'd give one stock in SpaceX to every American child, 65:05 and the proposal is that would happen through the Trump accounts, which are automatically 65:10 made accessible to children in the United States. If he goes through with his plan, 65:16 then that number of American citizens goes up to about 50%. So there you're approaching a way 65:22 of kind of blackmailing, you could say, the American population away from following someone 65:27 like Krugman's plans by saying, do you really want to hurt yourself? Are you going to hurt 65:31 your child like that by punishing me, Musk, the person who's keeping the stock market 65:35 afloat? And if you get into the granular questions of who owns the stock, it gets 65:39 even more interesting. Who are top 10 investors? The Ontario teachers pension, huge amount 65:45 of SpaceX stock, the primary educational target of the Trump administration and 65:50 Muskoff and himself, Harvard University, huge holder of SpaceX, University of North Carolina. 65:56 So when you see that, you know, in a way, these, although high profile and superficially startling 66:02 moments of turning on and off drone connectivity in the battlefield are the sharp edge of the 66:08 wedge you could say, but the base of really what anchors the dominance of the Silicon 66:13 Valley digital sector in the United States is really in the stock market itself and 66:18 And the fact that that's how we do redistribution, that's how we do the social contract is say 66:23 you pay in to this, you know, market determined pension fund and you will be paid out of it. 66:29 And whoever's keeping that thing propped up actually arguably has the real power of 66:33 saying what the social contract looks like. 66:35 So then I think sitting in that bi-directional dependency, but that real dependency, it's 66:42 maybe worth ending in a strange place, but I actually do think it's an important 66:48 one. You mentioned that the conversations in Europe are maybe a little less prone to the 66:52 psychologizing than the conversations in America. The problem though is that Musk's psychology 66:58 is very important. Yeah. And there's something that he says a lot. I was there in 2016 at 67:04 the Recode Conference. I was actually, I think, one of the first people to write about this 67:07 when he was talking about how, you know, he believed it was very likely we lived in a 67:12 computer simulation. This is sort of an idea that Nick Bostrom, that philosopher you 67:16 you mentioned is very associated with. But he's kept saying it and actually in somewhat stronger 67:22 terms. So I want to play this clip. This is Elon Musk on Walter Isaacson's show. 67:27 How convinced are you that we might be in a simulation? 67:33 You know, I once had a dinner at my house with a physicist and a computer scientist, 67:39 and they're both like leaders in their field. And I asked the question, 67:42 what are the probabilities that we're in a simulation? And the physicist said 0% 67:47 and the computer scientists said 100% simultaneously. 67:50 So I guess maybe I should go 50% then. 67:55 I don't know, I mean, there's odd things 67:59 that happen in the simulation where, 68:02 especially if you're me, I mean, think about it. 68:03 Like if you're me and you're like, 68:05 should all these things really be happening? 68:08 Should I really be making spaceships 68:10 to go to the moon and Mars? 68:12 Like what the, that doesn't seem real. 68:15 The simulation theory is that if you just imagine an advanced society would create lots of simulations, right? 68:19 The way we maybe make lots of video games, you just shouldn't assume that we are living in the base reality. 68:25 That's sort of the argument in a nutshell. 68:28 But he goes further and I get in a psychological way why, right? 68:33 I've heard him say this now repeatedly that, well, what really seems unlikely is to be Elon Musk. 68:40 ask, what really seems unlikely is to be building starships and influencing global politics 68:48 and having 250 million ex-followers or whatever it is and being the first trillionaire and 68:53 that the mixture of a life that is so unlikely and also not like grounded in some other 68:59 ontology right, not some religion or some other way of imagining the world plus a sort 69:05 of attraction to the simulation hypothesis. And of course, 69:09 it'd be a lifelong gamer. And I just think that, you know, for 69:15 a person with as much power as he has, to kind of have that 69:20 kind of psychology to suspect this is a game where like, your 69:22 role in it is making big moves. I don't really know how to 69:26 describe that situation. But it is a distinctive one that we 69:32 all now have a lot of exposure to. 69:34 Yeah. I mean, there's a couple of varieties of the simulation theory too, right? One is like, 69:38 we are all simply just artifacts of this future civilization's computer video game. 69:46 But the other is that most people are shadow people and a small number of people are actually 69:51 playing characters. And it seems like that's the one that orients him most. And in the kind 69:55 of libertarian community that reflected a lot on these things, one of the people is Robin 69:59 Hanson at George Mason University economist who said, what kind of ways would we conduct 70:05 ourselves if this were true? And he says, you know, if this were true, then it would 70:09 make sense to first care nothing about other people. So things like foreign, he says, foreign 70:14 aid and the welfare state would be frivolous things to spend time on, to be as entertaining 70:18 as possible, to accumulate as much wealth as possible, and to try to simply organize 70:24 the world around you in as successful way as you can. 70:27 So, there's like this radical reneging on anything like social responsibility that is only possible 70:33 if you embrace this incredibly kind of nihilistic sort of reaffirmation of your megalomania. 70:40 And the question is how to remove the props and struts that hold him up in that delusion because 70:48 it is not true. And he needs to be somehow persuaded from the outside that it's not true 70:54 So, if he continues to be incentivized to indulge in those ways of thinking, then he
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