Decoding the Gurus - Elon Musk: The Techno Shaman

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

So here we are rounding off 2022 with a Guru of the moment, Elon Musk.Trust us, we want to stop hearing about him as much as you do but we have long had him scheduled as the finale for the tech season. Unfortunately, the Decoding the Gurus curse (most of the people we cover quickly become worse and spiral into conspiracism) seems to have become more potent. Now we don't even have to cover a Guru just announce that we will and the spiral occurs. And with Elon what a spiral it has been. But we *try* not to dwell much on his recent antics and instead focus on decoding our chosen material. In this specific case, it is a recent wide-ranging interview conducted by a fellow billionaire and large Tesla investor, Ron Baron. This proved to be one of the most sycophantic interviews we have ever examined, which is a real achievement given the competition.Musk himself is an interesting figure. Softly spoken, prone to mumbling, he can even seem self-effacing, and yet he is also a prolific hype man, prone to hyperbole, and self-mythologizing. Is he the master engineer and polymath he claims? The ultimate conman? And how has he become the guru for so many gurus? Join us as we try to disentangle the Elon puzzle box and see if there is actually anything interesting inside.Oh and also Happy New Year! Remember to keep an eye out for those pesky Distributed Idea Suppression Complexes.LinksRon Baron Interview Nov 2022 with Elon Musk: Source for the DecodingThunderfoot Video: Why you should NEVER believe Elon Musk!Common Sense Skeptic: Debunking Elon Musk (Part 1 & Part 2)Guardian Article on Musk's comments on the Diver involved in the Thai Cave RescueFuturism Article on Elon Musk promising Full-Self-Driving Cars Every Year since 2014Rolling Stone: Elon Musk Keeps Taking Twitter Advice From Right-Wing TrollsArticle from buildd.co on Tesla's Marketing Strategy

Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about. I'm Professor Matt Brown, a psychologist. With me is Chris Kavanagh, he's the anthropologist. And how are you going today, Chris? It's the afternoon. It's balmy. It's summer and I am. It's winter where you are. Christmas is upon us. It's the first of season. How are you feeling?

True. And recently I saw Home Alone, the one and two. So I'm in the holiday spirit. I couldn't be better, literally. Things are fantastic, unbelievable. The just before christmas is always the best whenever you have young children and um a distant family to coordinate with so yes it's going all right matt a little bit stressed a little bit stressed but i can handle it i can take it you can bear any burden chris uh now and I will tell people about it

so I know you were wondering and I know that like most of the people listening were wondering how's the nut thing going people were like you know oh that was great it was so informative it's so on topic to mention that so I'll just

tell you Matt you can see it in your eyes nuts you know that healthy snack still enjoying them still enjoying them to become a part of my life in a way that i didn't anticipate and now i'm still a nut guy i'm a nut guy well you know what you've influenced me actually went out and bought some mixed nuts purely how many listeners now are thinking about going out to get mixed nuts i'm gonna become a health guru like put down your sweet coffee and and eat your semi-healthy nuts forget the all-meat diet go for an all-nut diet i'm sure you could survive on that just add some spinach and you'll be all right they're pretty

close to a complete food avocados as well i'm sure if you had av that. Just add some spinach and you'll be all right. They're pretty close to a complete food. Avocados as well. I'm sure if you had avocados and nuts, that's kind of all you need. Well, you have that somewhat debatable theory that humans are just weird processing machines where you can put anything in. Yes.

It doesn't make any difference. So, you know, maybe people shouldn't follow our nutritional advice on here um but you know if you want to well i'll tell you this like i knew someone who subsisted entirely on pasta just normal spaghetti pasta with some butter i think they grated a tiny bit of parmesan cheese on it now they ate nothing but literally that for, I don't know, a decade. And, okay, they might have had a couple of – Good night, I've had a jaffa cake on one of the special occasions.

They would have got scurvy if they hadn't at least had – they must have had something. Eleven. Eleven. It was pretty close to that. And, you know, they were all right. And they were fine? They were fine fine i mean they

could have they could they could have been better i'm not saying yeah i don't know yeah this is a good anecdote so again that really rebuts my point that people shouldn't listen to us for dietary advice like because i knew a guy that once smoked lots of cigars and he didn't die of lung cancer so is it really i'm just saying like if you listen to the dieticians dietary science in scare quotes then you get the impression that unless you eat exactly unless you fill up your quota of all of the micronutrients and macronutrients and exactly the right thing, then you'll keel over and die. Just saying we're a bit more flexible. Yeah, don't listen to the ones that we know what it is.

Eat your vegetables, eat your fruits, don't eat too much and don't eat before you go to bed or you turn into a gremlin. So these are the rules for eating that Decoding the Gurus endorses. And we're going to go fairly quickly this week into the decoding. We're going to have an efficient episode. We've promised that so many times and we consistently refuse to deliver. But this time I'm feeling good about it. You know, I've just got a good feeling about it.

But you don't have anything else at all apart from the nuts to get off your chest. Oh, I do. I do. But it's not a long thing so all i want to mention is that well first of all because we always only mention this at the end but we have a patreon where you know people can join up and get extra content if they want and i mention it now because our our patreon like a christmas stocking is stocked full of goodies for people. So if people have been wanting DTG content, they could go there and they would find things like you, me, and David Pizarro from the Very Bad Wizards podcast on a very thematically cromulent discussion of It's always sunny in philadelphia the comedy tv series just an hour long hour and a half long maybe discussion about that show because all

three of us love it it's not really related to gurus but people some people might enjoy that and we also have a interview with coffee zilla the online YouTuber investigator looking at crypto and NFT scams and that kind of thing. Very, very enjoyable chat with him that you can hear now. And we just recently have put up our Christmas special, which is with the journalist and writer Helen Lewis talking about her new guru show with a Christmas bonus quiz. So these things will be coming out for the normal people, the ordinary listeners as well.

But like, if you can't wait, if you just need to hear, that would be, you go to the Patreon and that's where it is. So just letting people know, Matt, because we produce content and the people need to know. Yeah, yeah.

And that were all three good things i enjoyed all three of those things not to say that any of our other episodes have not been enjoyable well it's not fair to play favorites i guess but no they were good it was it was really fun talking about always sunny and we didn't just recite the funny scenes that we liked we we analyzed it wanted to i wanted to i wanted to just relive them. No, we analyzed it. And I thought it was fun. So it was interesting to talk to a moral psychologist like David Pizarro about it.

Yeah. He's just very good at analyzing pop culture. He's better than Jordan Peterson. You know the hack Jordan Peterson? Don't listen to him. Listen to Dave Pizarro for insights. And we're along for the ride. And similarly, there's an end of year guru quiz that you will hear on the main feed,

but you know, if you want to hear in advance, you can find out who won. Was it Matt? Was it me? Who can tell? No one, unless they listen,

but it was, it was very entertaining. Helen is a, a good quiz master. So yeah, thank her for that. And thank you. People on here will hear it when we get it all lettered up.

Very good. Announcements done? Yeah. Announcements done? That's it. That's it? Nothing else? You don't want to complain about Twitter?

You don't want to complain about Elon Musk? Well, we'll be doing that later. We're going to be doing that. That's the reason. Because our subject for this week is a kind of recently ascended Uber guru. Because I think the thing was, musk has always been a public figure of note and a kind of tech ceo type but i wouldn't have said he's necessarily the stereotypical guru image until recently he's become embroiled a lot more in culture war issues and that kind of stuff.

But maybe this is just my bias, but I mean that he was a figure. He was treated by various people as a guru in the way that Steve Jobs kind of was. But he was more niche than he is now. niche than he is now. Now he's on a par with Trump in how much we are all forced to pay attention to his daily Twitterings and thoughts. Like I was on the train in Japan the other day and up on the little notification on the train was Elon Musk puts poll up on Twitter. I was like, oh my God, it's on the train here.

Usually that is saying the World Cup was won by such and such. I was like, even here, I need to listen to or see Elon Musk's Twitterings plastered up all over the place. Yeah. I have to say also that we decided to cover Elon Musk weeks, maybe months ago, to finish off our season of tech. it's the golden the guru tech season and if you recall chris we were tossing up between elon musk and what's his name peter till it was a coin flip yeah it was a coin flip and we thought both of them would be kind of not particularly guru-ish, but certainly tech figures.

Annoying. Annoying, yes. But we didn't have any strong opinions. And then we jumped in, started doing our background research. And meanwhile, Musk took over Twitter and started throwing his weight around. And it's just weird, Chris, because we've talked about this. But before, when we covered people like brett weinstein when we first covered him he wasn't an anti-vaxxer then he was just like a bit of a blowhard i mean

he was always anti-vaxxer in his heart but like it wasn't his main output yeah he wasn't known for it at least yeah and after we covered him he became just so much worse this pattern has been happening with other gurus that once we cover them they get jpc years jpc is yes jpc is i remember he seemed really tangential and within us we didn't even have to cover him we just had to decide to cover him and we've incepted yeah the the spiral the spiral like james lindsey when we covered him first time was nowhere near what current day james lindsey as well there are a few gurus that we've covered who have not gone on a death spiral but there are notable exceptions like i think palub is pretty much the same as he ever was sam harris yeah like pretty consistent

and we've talked about why that might be but it does feel a little bit like are we the main characters are we it's our show what is causing the guru universe to move and whichever one we're gonna talk because lex as well we covered lex but lex has become much more he's probably getting more conversation about him than rogan in recent terms because of the kanye interview and so on and and the other thing that's really odd is how they all connect together so back when back in time when we decided to cover elon musk i would never have expected him to be carrying on these conversations with other people that we've covered like lex rudman like eric weinstein probably jordan peterson as well I don't know.

It's like they all seek each other out and somehow find each other once they start getting in influencer guru mode. It does feel like that. And it will be impossible to avoid Twitter going ons because it's one illustrative of Elon Musk's character in various ways, but also you can see from the people that he interacts with on Twitter that he's acting interacting with the absolute worst regs like you know it would be one thing to be right-leaning and to hang out with the tech CEOs like David Sachs and whatnot, who are pretty reactionary,

but they're tech CEO types. But he's like, he was described on Blockton reported as a reply guy to Ian Miles Chung. I think you're just like, oh my God, like anytime any right wing volunteer, Mike Cernovich says something, Elon is there in the comments saying, oh, amazing. Really? We'll look into this. And yeah, and he did, you know, he banned recently all the journalists temporarily reinstated them. He temporarily forbid people from linking to other services in a way that would extremely fall afoul of anti-monopoly legislation in Europe.

So that was quickly rescinded. It's just, it is an ongoing shit show. And he put a poll up about should he step down and he has said that he's going to step down, but essentially be doing everything else in the background. So who knows, but that part of it is you know you don't need to follow all the ins and outs of what he's doing except to note it's very impulsive it's pretty chaotic and it is showing a pattern of relationships and like an interest in issues that are presented by the absolute like most unhinged reactionary conspiracy prone accounts, which he doesn't need to do because he could literally interact with anyone. He could be talking to conservatives like David Frum or centrist type conservatives, but that is not

where he is. He's right at the edges. Yeah. It's an unusual situation. His behavior at the very least is unusual for a billionaire. Now, what we're going to cover in this episode, you'll talk a little bit in a moment about the actual material, the interview that we're going to cover. And of course, just to remind everyone, this is Decoding the Gurus. What we do is we take a particular piece of content and we decode that and really focusing on the discourse and the claims that are being made. that and really focusing on the discourse and the claims that are being made. However, in the case of Musk, I think we at least do have to give a nod to the backstory to the man, even though it isn't our main focus. If you want to see deep dives into his business career or the technologies underlying SpaceX or Neuralink, then there are many, many videos on YouTube and journalists who will be happy to provide you with that content. We'll link to some of them. There are in-depth breakdowns of overhyped claims that he's made and whatnot. And some of them go very hard,

but Thunderfoot, for example, has produced several quite well-researched videos showing that he's made. And it definitely does matter because one thing that you'll know, and this is a limitation of our format, is that in the content, including this content that we look at in the moment, Elon Musk can come across quite well and actually rather understated at times in his delivery. But he makes a variety of claims.

And the issue is like, you can't check those in real time, right? So you would need to go and do research. And there are people that you can, to a certain degree, trust that they're being relatively accurate when they represent things. And with Musk, I will say we knew that he has a penchant for exaggeration so went to look into various claims and just discovered absolute mountains of lies bald-faced lying and he does it on twitter every day now for everyone to see like he said he's never going to ban the elon jet thing that's his commitment to free speech banned right so it's just that is important context and it highlights that the kind of

stuff that we're going to talk about now is a step and some people you can notice red flags and it should show up but if there's a load of contextual information that says this person is a prolific liar and hyperbolic salesman. That is relevant information. And you should go and look secondary sources. You should go look for unbiased breakdowns, including looking at things that are positive about him and try to get deeper into the story. So yeah, just to fully recommend that. But I think it is telling because people could just watch a video of Musk and say, well, his haters are a bit mean to him. Yeah, that's right. We won't try to give an overview of his career or the many businesses he's been involved

with now because that would take up too much time. But I will say that in getting one's head around what Musk is and what he does. It's a little bit more complex than simply someone who is a prolific engineer or a super creative person or whatever. It's not quite that, but it's also not quite someone like he's a complete scammer. It's like someone who's created a new NFTs or Bitcoin. And that's because there are real businesses. There are rockets. There are real rockets. There is a real car. Whatever the failings of Tesla are, it is still a legitimate and a

significant enterprise. But I guess what should be acknowledged is what Musk puts on top of those businesses is, as he said, a huge amount of spin. I've seen interesting discussion of his role in some very cold-blooded financial analyses. These are people that don't give a damn about Musk. They're not a hater or a fan. They just care about whether or not you should buy Tesla stock, for instance. One of the things that they acknowledged while shaking their heads at his antics, they made a point that I felt was very interesting because it's easy to sort of pathologize the behavior of someone like Musk, and it is somewhat pathological, just like Donald Trump's behavior is somewhat pathological.

But there is a method to the madness, right? They described what he does is his job in the business can be thought of as being sure to put tesla on the front pages get it talked about in the media like all the time now tesla apparently spends next to nothing on actual advertising like brand development which is very unusual for a brand focused company like that company of tesla's size would often spend like a billion dollars on just building up the the brand name and brand awareness but musk doing the performance that he does very much like how trump's antics would ensure that the focus was always on him performs a very functional role for a business like that so we're going to go into a recent interview from november 2022 that he had with, I think like a Tesla mega investor or

whatever, which is explains why it also like a millionaire in his own right or multimillionaire, a guy called Ron Barron, probably familiar for financial people, but not familiar for me at all. He's an old guy, but he constantly refers to we, Tesla as a we, indicating that he is in some way... I actually thought he was the employee of the company when I first heard it, but I now gallop that he is a large investor in it, which is why he talks like that. But you'll see that. But just before we start into the clips from that conversation, I have an example, Matt, that illustrates both Elon's role as a very good promoter who brings genuine value in adding attention and drama, media attention to the companies that he's in, and also the aspect

that you cannot really trust what he claims, particularly when it comes to projections. So this is just a short video we're taking from somewhere else. It's about a minute long, which is why you hear and you'll hear background music. But the thing to note here is all of these statements are basically taking part in sequential years. So it starts out in 2017 or 2016 and continues on so you will hear him making the same prediction but each time it's made it's a it's another year or several months have passed autonomous cars will definitely be a reality a tesla car next year will probably be 90 capable of autopilot like 90% of your miles could be on auto.

My guess for when we'll have full autonomy is about three years. I think we're basically less than two years away from complete autonomy. Probably by the end of next year, self-driving will encompass essentially all modes of driving. And we expect to have the first operating robotaxis next year. I'm extremely confident of achieving full autonomy and releasing it to the Tesla customer base next year. When do you think Tesla will solve level 4 FSD? I mean, it's looking quite likely that it will be next year. I would be shocked if we do not achieve full self-driving safer than a human this year. It's seven years later. Still waiting. So yeah, it helps if you have the visuals,

but each of those statements, as I say, is taking place at different years. So what he's saying, it's going to happen in two years. Two years later, he's saying it's definitely coming next year and so on. So you can do that. People do that. But he does it in a way which is quite remarkable. It's quite remarkable that when he says he's going to have Neuralink brain interfaces in the next 12 months, he still gets headlines saying, Elon Musk says Neuralink available for everyone in the next 12 months or

entering human trials in six months time or mission to Mars in two years says Elon Musk and you're like, wow, but he's been saying those kind of things ever since he got near a microphone. Yeah, yeah yeah these aren't isolated incidents of him both making really hyperbolic claims about the amazing products that are going to arrive very very shortly and also him being instrumental in making them happen so there's the example of the solar city and the electricity generating solar tile it was up there there on stage, wasn't it, Chris, where he was holding this thing in his hand and he was claiming that they were already making these tiles

that they could cover the rooftops with. Slit tiles of the roof so it would look just like a normal roof but it would be solar generating. And he actually claimed the houses in the place where they were doing the presentation, but that turned out to be a set from Desperate Housewives. And also that he just completely changed the design of the product in the few months before so like none of it was ready to go but he was on stage claiming it's already there and installed and all good and the solar tile that he was actually holding in his hand yeah i believe

it came out in the court case that that was not a functional tile it was so standing on stage saying this is actually one of them and like no it isn't so and he knew that yeah and this is someone who claims to be intimately familiar with all of the engineering details he presents himself as an engineer, if not instrumental in actually making a lot of these technological advancements happen. So you can't really claim ignorance in that scenario, right? I'm just a sales guy. I don't know what they're doing in the back room. That's not the role that he projects. I have a clip that speaks to that specifically. So this is Elon talking about the role that he plays in Tesla manufacturing.

And then another example was there was a, again, this was like, these were choke points in the entire production system. That's why they, you know, I'm running around the production line trying to fix the production line, just like a maniac, sort of Tasmanian devil, just running around the factory like a lunatic. And let's see, we had the body production line, a Model 3 was at one point stuck because we had a laser welding cell to weld a small cross-car beam

in the passenger footwell of the front seats. And I'm looking at this sort of beam, and I'm like, what the heck does that do? Because the entire factory stopped trying to get this laser weld cell to work. And I'm like, I can't imagine what a useful thing it could do. And the production team said, oh, that's for crash safety. So then I called the crash safety team and said, is this for crash safety? They said, oh, no, that didn't do anything. We should delete it.

That turned out to be totally useless. But they forgot to tell the production team. Honestly, a bunch of these things just feel like you're living in a Dilbert cartoon. Oh, no. I mean, any given company, they should have like, what's your Dilbert ratio? Okay. It's not zero. And even that image that he conjures up there, it's the fact that he presents himself like he's the foreman on the factory, right?

And there's, you know, it's run around building and smoke is billowing out somewhere. And he's like, oh, what's going on here? And no, all the engineers are just confused. There's some problem. There's a, you know, there's something stuck in the pipeline, but only Elon has the overview where he can say, wait, is that piece necessary? And then contact the other department. They're like, oh no, that's not necessary. And then he resolves it and the machine gets worried enough and the factory

starts producing better. It's a kind of factoria image of how things work. And I, you know, we don't know the specifics of this case, but I can imagine it playing out very differently where it is more, you know, the more accurate or more realistic thing is maybe some version of that happened. But there are other people involved bringing things to attention. There's another example about noticing another defect where there was a kind of thing on the battery that two departments had mistakenly understood serving different purposes. One example was there were three fiberglass mats on top of the battery pack. They partially covered the battery pack. pack. And I was on the battery pack production line and it was the number one thing choking battery pack production were these, were gluing on these three fiberglass mats to the top of the battery pack. And so the reason I repeat this algorithm myself is that I first did things backwards. First I try to automate it. Then I try to accelerate it, just have this go faster, then I try to

simplify it, and only then did I delete it. Because it turned out that the team at Tesla that does noise and vibration minimization, so making the car quiet, thought that the fiberglass mats were there because of the battery safety team for battery fire prevention. And then I asked the battery fire prevention team what were they needed for and they said, oh, noise and vibration. I'm like, okay so so then we had two cars drive one with a microphone in the car in each car and you could not tell the difference so we went to all that trouble for a pot that should not exist again elon presented that as he worked it out and was able to resolve it so it's elon the engineer maestro not the detached ceo now obviously we don't have the privilege of being a fly on the wall of every

one of these production centers so we can't check these claims but if you were to believe elon musk's version of events then he's at once a brain surgeon responsible for the advances at Neuralink and also literally a rocket scientist so it is implausible I think that anyone would be jumping around and actually making a significant contribution to these various fields in the same week. It's just... Rocket design and electronic car production and social media, like marketing and bringing computer interfaces. That is a lot of hats for an engineer to wear. So if you compare that scenario,

as if that were true, to another scenario where there's so many cases on record of him making claims that can be shown to be demonstrably untrue, can be shown to be absurdly optimistic and are essentially lies, then it seems that that version of where he's pretending is a far more realistic one. We don't want to go through all of the businesses, but I'll just spend a moment to talk about Neuralink, I think. And that's because I did my PhD on psychophysiology. I was collecting EEG signals from around the motor cortex of the brain, doing signal processing stuff with that. And in the course of that work during my PhD,

I had to become familiar with the brain computercomputer interface literature, the BCI literature, and it's been an ongoing thing for many years. I can't comment on the likelihood of setting up a Mars base in the next five or ten years, but I can comment on whether or not this neural link brain interface is plausible or whether it's science fiction. And let me tell you, it is science fiction. The way it's been described is doing amazing things that could soon cure paralysis or all kinds of disabilities. The way he talks about it is as if it's something from the Matrix, where you've got a shunt in your head and you're- The Matrix.

The Matrix. The Matrix is a very different universe. Like, carry on. I don't want to get into it, but people can probably understand that there are significant practical problems with literally drilling a hole in the top of your head, sticking a wireless electronic device in there, which has got batteries in it, and then plugging it up again, and then recharging yourself with a wireless magnetic recharger, which by the way, gives

off heat, which is generally a bad thing to be happening in the middle of your brain. And on top of that, the way the brain works, like there is no sort of magic shunt, right? For any electronic device to just communicate with your brain, at the very most, what you can get is after a whole bunch of training that there is some kind of adaption and you can somehow learn that if you think certain things, then maybe you can get is after a whole bunch of training that there is some kind of adaption and you can somehow learn that if you think certain things that maybe you can get the cursor to go this way and if you think other things the cursor can go that way that kind of research has been demonstrated before with recordings and interfaces that were not invasive so the Neuralink company that he bought was a real company run by real researchers. It had a strong background, a publication background from Stanford.

They were pushing this technology forward, but it seems what happened is Musk then bought this company and then suddenly the claims and the discourse around it became like a thousand times more ambitious, yet nothing or very little seems to be happening under the surface so monkeys are being like monkeys are dying that is something that happens when technologies are getting developed anyway i have my issues with some of the primary testing that goes on but like in these cases in particular, it's stuff like you have to make the limbs inoperable and then do brain surgery on them so that they are only able to operate via

computers. And yeah, there's something dystopian about that, like this is useful to me, but it is also a way that we may end up with implants and robotic artificial limbs that work better. So there's cost to that. But I think one issue though, Matt, is I think the amount of fans of Musk has been decreasing as he's rampaged on Twitter. But it is true that, for example, bone conduction for hearing aids, right, works by implanting something in the skull, right?

The Australian company Cochlear actually is, I think, the world leader in that. But that's a very different kind of thing. I only use it to mention that there are technologies that are developing and that it is likely that at some point in the future that there will be be like brain computer interfaces that work very well. So it's not to say that anybody that tries to push that or that has that as a goal is in Kukuland. It's just that the engineering and technological goals are not minor in this.

They're huge and they may well be overcome with this new innovative technology but the way that musk talks about it bears a much more resemblance to like elizabeth holmes presented about farinos than it does some scientists in the manhattan project yeah exactly that's the distinction i want to make and before i said these are legitimate businesses or legitimate lines of research inquiry and it could be that at some point in the future, there is breakthroughs, even surprising breakthroughs like we've seen with, say, artificial intelligence and these GPT-3 systems. You have to acknowledge that there is a legitimate team of engineers who may well have been working on the project long before Musk came along. So there's

the reality, which is that it's a super hard, super long-term research and development program. And then you have Musk's claims. Other people have described it as science fiction theater. Technology is real. Science is real. Progress in science and technology is real we have hopes and aspirations i think which sit on top of that and it seems like musk is quite good at speaking to those i yeah i do have a question about that because one aspect is that steve jobs infamous reality distortion field right where he in a similar way overhyped and over-claimed. But in the end, Apple, hugely profitable company, is one of the main drivers in the tech space and made all these innovations. And sometimes people look at Tesla or SpaceX and they're very much saying, okay,

maybe he oversells things, but Tesla is putting reusable rockets around, and, or not Tesla, sorry, SpaceX is, and Tesla is opening up more factories and increasing its production process and that kind of thing. So you can see why people could become enamored and regard naysayers as just the kind of people that would have said, we'll never fly in a plane or that kind of thing. You can see how that would take hold. But I think a point to note is that slightly different than Steve Jobs and many of the other gurus that we cover, Elon Musk, as you'll hear in these clips, he's not a very good public speaker. He's got more verbal text than me and Matt do, which is saying something and saying something for someone who is infamous

for giving these kind of bombastic presentations. He's confident, but it is not the linguistic proficiency that we see with the usual guru type. And it might be precisely because he is a billionaire, one of the richest people on the planet, and he has these companies and stuff that he can point to that are actually real. He doesn't need to do the same level of pageantry. In some ways, it's more impressive that he's so unassuming but i just want to make that point about like listen to his delivery and note the difference from the usual gurus that we cover yeah well let's hear some more of his delivery yes so i'll stick with this factory bit because there's a bit more about this and part of this is talking about the myth-making around what kind of CEO he is.

So is this you? So you do all these different things here. That's literally me. This is someone else who did this. I was living in the factory in Fremont and the one in Nevada for three years straight. That was my primary residence. I'm not kidding, literally. Did you keep the couch?

I actually slept on a couch at one point in a tent on the roof. And then for a while there, I was just sleeping under my desk, which is out in the open in the factory, for an important reason. And I was damn uncomfortable sleeping on that floor. And always when I woke up, I'd smell like metal dust. We went to visit and they bought him a new couch. Yeah, as you were saying, Chris, it's not bombastic.

It's kind of self-effacing. There's like funny little anecdotes. I think if I didn't know so much about him and the many, many times that he's had interviews like this, where he has sort of humble bragged, I suppose, himself into a position of explaining how instrumental he is to so many things and how he's going to change the world, take humanity to a higher place. change the world, take humanity to a higher place. If I didn't know all that context, I would find the single paragraphs and sentences that he says, you know, perfectly normal and kind of, well, not charming, but... Admirable in a sense, right?

Like he just sounds like a very devoted CEO figure who wants to rally the troops, right? And just to let that play out a little bit more, here's him elaborating on that i stopped using the couch i just left on the floor under my desk so that so during shift change the entire team could see me and that's important because like you know the the team like if if if they think that the sort of their leader is is off somewhere having a good time, drinking Mai Tais on a tropical island,

which I could definitely have been doing and would much have preferred to do. I'm not actually a masochist, I think. But the thing is that since the team could see me sleeping on the floor during shift change, just with nothing, they knew I was there. And that made a huge difference. And then they gave it their all. So the focus is on always lowering costs and providing leadership?

so you you get all the things that you said there about he sounds very sincere and he's kind of laughing at himself like it's you know i'm not like i want to do this but this is how you get people to succeed you got to show people that you're part of the team and you you hear the audience react right as well through his like just kind of expression of sincerity but fundamentally what he is saying is like all the engineers regard him as one of the team and he is working harder than anybody in the company really to make it a success and when you pair that with the way he described it which was him kind of running around the production line sorting it out and ron baron asked him is it though, that's doing all of this? Like you're finding all the things.

And he was like, yep, it's me. So he's the CEO. He's the troubleshooter. He's the guy liaising across departments. And he's doing that for four or five different companies simultaneously. Quite, quite the feat. Yeah. At the risk of seeming cynical,

there could be a very good reason for portraying yourself as being fundamentally different from other business owners. Not just a bean counter, but some kind of wunderkind. Someone that is absolutely obsessed, absolutely dedicated, has this polymathic engineering ability and organizational ability. And the reason is, is the share price and attracting investors. A huge amount of his net worth and he was for a short while, I think the richest person on earth and is still extremely rich. Companies like Tesla valued at amazing multiples, like even considering a very optimistic future in terms of them gaining a significant portion of the electric car market. Most level-headed analyses say that it's completely overvalued. And this is an era, Chris, of where we've had NFTs, we've had Bitcoin,

we've had a massive amount of money injected into the economy to shore things up during COVID and other crises. And it's an era where there is a lot of money following speculative business opportunities. So there is a very functional role in building a myth around yourself to make those great claims. And if people believe in you, believe in your mission and your specialness, then that could serve as an extremely good justification why you should invest in those companies regardless of how much you're paying. Yeah. And an example of kind of linking Elon's character to the companies that he works for is when he's talking about aspects that make tesla's manufacturing process unique so also matt see if you can hear the the three is that like scraped my bones when i heard it uttered the car is so cheap i mean i think the full explanation or at least an accurate explanation would take a long time um because the first, a car is made of 10,000 unique parts and process

steps. And I mean, Tesla is really, I think at this point, probably the best at manufacturing in the auto industry, which I think nobody was expecting. Probably in the history of the world. was expecting. Probably in the history of the world. Probably. Yeah, so well, I've got this first principles algorithm that I find to be very helpful in

the design and manufacturing of anything. People here may find it helpful. The first thing you should do is make the requirements that you've been given less dumb. Whatever constraints and requirements were given, they were to some degree dumb, and you want to make them less dumb.

If you don't start with this, then you get the right answer to the wrong question. And the requirements must be given from a person who can explain the requirement, not from a department, because then you don't know who to talk to. Then step two is delete the part or delete the process step. This sounds extremely obvious and yet over and over again we have found that parts were not needed. They were just put in there just in case or by mistake or there was a step that people someone thought was needed but was not actually needed this sounds insanely obvious but we've deleted so many parts from the car that were did nothing so wait did you get the freeers no tell me which one was it first principles algorithm he's the first principles thinker who says that who else do we know that

says that most of the gurus were brett weinstein in particular it's just a common refrein that others are following but they are working from the eternal insights the blueprints that they develop themselves like what he's talking about there is like a bit of engineering homespun wisdom before you attempt to solve the problem ask yourself whether or not it's a problem that really needs to be solved. It's the kind of thing everyone go, yeah, that's brilliant. And look, maybe that is a unique perspective. Maybe Elon Musk does have a special talent for identifying redundant parts or misspecifications

in engineering requirements. But it does sound a bit sense-makery and it does sound a little bit like someone like Brett Weinstein talking about how, what do you need to know to understand what's going on with vaccines or something is to start with evolutionary first principles, then the answer is obvious. It's a kind of guru thing where it's like, you can do it too. This is a secret that you can apply to your own life even. That kind of insight where you're giving a broad idea. It is a very TED talky kind of thing, but it presents you again as like the auteur, right?

And the way that he also suggested that, that like the main thing is to deal with people, not departments. And you can understand that because like everybody understands how the bureaucracy can be annoying people are just saying we can't do it like this because the form doesn't say that we can do it right and you can just speak to a person so he's right in that respect but it also harkens to this obsession with the interpersonal and the individual loan genius where really what makes the companies tick are departments of engineers and scientists and working together. It isn't all lone geniuses having eureka moments. Science and engineering

is a lot of collaboration and teamwork and not just like individual geniuses. Yeah, the delivery, as you said, is not bombastic. And he does a very good impression of someone who is sincere. And he's helped, I think, by the kinds of people he speaks to. In this case, it's someone who is a total sycophant. Unbelievably. So I've got so many clips. I will highlight this in dramatic fashion, but just to say, we've come across plenty of sycophants on the podcast around the gurus, but even amongst those, and this guy, the thing that struck me is this guy is so rich. Like he in his own right is a hugely successful person and investor. So it's not the same as an

obscure Twitter character who only defends Brett Weinstein and Robert Malone, for example. It's just odd because you would imagine you wouldn't want to be a 70-year-old successful investor who is debasing themselves to just extol how amazing you find Elon Musk. But okay, I'm going to play a clip. I have to play a clip to highlight what I mean. I was on a red-eye flight, so I'm a little slower than normal. I didn't get much sleep. No, that's sort of my first question.

So you're 51? Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm safely not a spring chicken anymore late summer chicken? I'm 79 but you look great so you're 51

and you do 16 hour days and you work 7 hours a week and you fly all over the place and you go to these meetings constantly and people constantly criticize you for everything. It's amazing to me. I mean, you're changing the world and you're giving yourself. Why do you do this? So my wife says to me, why are you still working? Why are you still working? What are you doing here? Hard, bold questions, Matt. Hard, bold questions. You know, you're amusing. Your critics are so evil. You're

working harder than anyone else. What makes you get up in the morning and be such a man? Yeah. And a lot of his interviews are like this. I've heard a few now. And it makes his job of sending that message that he is a very special person indeed a lot easier because he doesn't need to be in your face about it. He can do it in that kind of self-effacing manner. But quietly agree with the premise of the question that he is really that special. Yeah. So this is another example of that.

And also an illustration that this guy, Ron Barron, is just bad at asking questions. This is one of the things, like when I listened to this, I like Elon. I got a kind of sincere, nice vibe. And like you said, it's this contrast of him being self-deprecating and goofy and a bit geekish. And then this guy, but that subsequently faded over time. But listen to this exchange.

So you have these missions and somehow whenever you this exchange. So you have these missions, and somehow, whenever you have a mission and you have this vision, and you are a visionary, that somehow, whatever you do, you develop other businesses. So when you started SpaceX, you didn't think about satellites. When you started Tesla, you didn't think about robots. When you don't have enough people, you didn't think about robots. And so you didn't think about robots when you don't have enough people you didn't think about robots so you didn't think about autonomous driving and without Elon there would not be electric cars

nobody who makes cars wants to make electric cars they're being forced to make them in fact every time they sell an electric car they sell one fewer car that they make money on and they have all that money invested in plants that make those other cars. So nobody wants to have these cars

except for him. And everybody thought it was going to fail. And one of the things you said is that patents are for the weak. And you share your patents. And with other companies, of course, on the other hand, when they get your patents, you're two or three years ahead of them.

But like, it never got to the question, but there was so much of just like, you're more successful than everyone else. Everybody admires you. You did this, you did that. And it's like, it's just, oh, it's painful. He annoyed me so much, this old guy. And so by comparison, Elon does look good. But like you said, a lot of the heavy lifting is done for him

in making claims when people talk like this. So this is them talking aboutla and the special way that they make cars terrifying to other companies to realize that we we make cars it's 39 000 and cost the car and we're making 15 000 16 000 and profit a car and so we invest 7 billion dollars and we make $15 billion a year. I'm sorry, yeah. $15,000,000 a year on a $7 million investment. Shocking. So no one else does that. And here you're telling us how you want to make cars for $20,000 a piece.

How do you do that? Well, we've not formally announced our next car program, so I can't talk too much about our upcoming vehicle program or programs that have not been announced. But we do expect to make cars that are more affordable than the current Model 3 or Model Y. And a big factor in this is... I think by far the biggest factor is autonomy in terms of the value of a car. Because right now, cars get driven for about 10 or 12 hours a week, like maybe one and a half hours a day. But there's 168 hours in a week.

And so if they were autonomous, the cars could drive for 50 or 60 hours, so you would see a five-fold increase in the utility of the car, you know, that could do autonomy. This is a really, really gigantic thing. It would also mean that there was, we wouldn't need anywhere near as many parking lots, and this would also be helpful for the environment

because you would need far fewer cars. So I misspoke. It was a $7 billion investment for a plant that makes a million cars a year that makes $15 billion a year in profits. So you invest $7 billion and you make $15 billion a year. Who does that?

He got his billions and his thousands and his millions all mixed up but he wanted to drive that point home which is that elon musk is so amazing yeah and that part about elon musk saying not only are tesla already making their cars like much cheaper than anybody else can do their electric cars but because they're investing in autonomous driving they have the potential to like five-fold increase the utility and efficiency and so on. Like it's a good pitch, right?

But there is just the fact that everything like this talk, you might think that we selected like a highly sycophantic one, but I actually just wanted one where it was relatively recent and like he talked at length. But a lot of the talks are like this. Even when it's Rogan or Lex Friedman, they're still just asking him, you're a guy that wants to get to the stars. How are we going to do it, Elon? And his answers are like that kind of hesitant, bumbly way of speaking, it makes him sound more authentically intelligent because he doesn't, he's not got the social fluency.

He's just a tech guy. Yeah, that's right. Whether it's intentional or not, he projects everybody's idea of a lone genius and auteur, as you said. And he's still talking about the self-driving as if it's a definite thing. And you played it beginning, just how long he's been promising the self-driving as if it's a definite thing. And you played it beginning, just how long he's been promising the self-driving. It's definitely working. It's definitely coming. Just wait six or 12 months. It's a bit like a millennial cult, isn't it? Like the comet's

going to come. It's six or 12 months. It doesn't matter how many times the comet doesn't come, people keep believing. But I just want to emphasize just how incredibly functional this is because if you promise it if you get people to to believe that it is absolutely really and truly happening then what you do is you attract so much investment to your project that it might well just happen it's a gamble like it's probably no closer to full automatic self-driving is a lot of other companies but if you get enough people to believe you and have faith in you then you'll get so many resources yeah you might actually do it yeah well there's a bit later as well matt this is like the house of card thing and they're asking him about how to solve some logistic and production bottlenecks. And he says this. So we're starting to make so many cars by the end of this year, 40,000 cars a week.

I mean, I have to be careful of MNPI, but I believe I have said in the past publicly that our aspiration is to reach 40,000 a week by the end of this year. So if we're doing that, then that means that we're producing a car every 15 seconds. Yeah. And so, but that's still only 2 million cars a year. There's 100 million cars that are made a year. And so the question, so there's presumably capacity to be able to, logistics, to ship all these cars all over the place to have people pick them up where they want them, but not if they all do them in the same week. He goes on to suggest that the way this will be solved is by autonomous self-driving.

by autonomous self-driving. Like Elon is saying, well, once we have the autonomous, the cars can kind of drive themselves to the locations that they need to go. So it's referencing the future technology, which they have not perfected yet, as the thing that will solve some issue. And he does it again, Matt, with robots.

Then there's also the Optimus program, which is our humanoid robot, which will leverage our manufacturing expertise and the intelligence we've developed for self-driving to have a useful humanoid robot. Now, the economy is fundamentally GDP per capita times capita. If you no longer have a constraint on capita because of a useful humanoid robot, it is not clear that there is any limit to the size of the economy. And these things will actually happen. So... I'm in the full line.

Yeah. When you have to add that, that's always a concern. But you have to say, that will occur. It's a real thing. Yeah. The promises are the thing.

The dream is the thing. Right there, it's easy to glide over it, but he's promising part of his pitch for why Tesla and everything is going to be so great and why everything's easy to sort of glide over it but he's promising part of his pitch for why tesla and everything is going to be so great and why everything's going to be a success is promising functional humanoid robots that will replace humans doing manual work now i think you saw the same demonstration of where they are with the humanoid robot and let me tell you it is not

impressive it is not impressive there are is not impressive. There are other companies that are actually generally doing robots that can do locomotion and things like that. It's a Boston dynamic. But the robot demonstration that Musk was able to arrange was not even close to that. It was a joke, really. There was the infamous person dressed as a robot who did a dance. But even the video footage that they've shown since of actual robots, this is one of the things that Thunderf00t breaks down very well because he shows that they've spliced together multiple videos. There are people who disappear in the background

and there is never a video of the robot setting things down. It just feeds to black whenever it's about to set something on the table, which is never a good sign. So it isn't like they're not working on things. Like if you had robot workers, that you could increase efficiencies, and that will happen at some point in the future. But as an explanation for how Tesla

is going to manufacture much more than it currently can in the next couple of years it's an insane solution because you you don't have full autonomous vehicles you don't have humanoid robots you cannot use them yet to solve our problems you have to first make them look i think this goes to the heart of what's wrong. And he's very different, as you said, to the gurus that we usually cover, because they usually have nothing of substance to point to. They have to fabricate a kind of gravitas and an impact on the world, whereas he's the

opposite, right? He can point to his association with, at least, a number of things that are extremely impressive. Not quite as impressive as he makes out, like even the VTOL rockets, for instance, rockets that can land on their boosters vertically. That technology is not as new as people might think. Don't take anything away from SpaceX, extremely cool and everything. But it isn't quite the paradigmatic, absolute game changer. It's incremental advances on technology that existed. And it's got to do with a lot of things like the US government outsourcing their rocket requirements to private companies. But you see the role that someone like Elon has,

which is like a technological shaman. He is the one who is promising to be in touch through his amazing engineering abilities, through his single-minded determination and focus. He's in touch with the means to get these fantastical technological forces and then shape them to achieve our dreams. What do you think, Chris? I think the more interesting thing is not Elon Musk personally, but the more interesting thing is the fanboys. That social. Yeah, the social thing. Yeah, because I talked with the cognitive anthropologist Manvir Singh about the similarities and differences between gurus and traditional shaman role in society. And one of the things he emphasizes is that shamans have to demonstrate through various means, or it can be pageantry, it can be birth defects or various claims made about

experiences that they've had, that they are different people. They're not like you and me, they're special. And this is how they can interact with forces that are unseen and powerful and why people will give them money or food or whatever to get rid of bad spirits, help with illnesses and so on. And while, like, first of all, those kinds of roles still exist in modern society and are very popular in contemporary societies, just as with traditional societies, there still are shamans and oracles and diviners and tarot readers and so on that do these kinds of services. But I think the tech sphere, and we talked with CoffeeZilla about the NFT and the kind

of cryptocurrency opening up this kind of space, but even just the legitimate tech sphere, it does have this atmosphere that a lot of people, they're not in skull masks, rattling bones on stage, but they're in a different costume, a kind of serious businessman costume. And they are on stage. They are illustrating that they're different. They're kind of have like quirks and they might be socially awkward. And then they will also be talking about these kinds of technologies and ideas, which ordinary people just can't grasp. They're 20 years ahead in the future with their tech, and people are asking them questions about the telephone or this kind of thing.

And that is the role of the kind of transformative leader guru. Now, the thing is, though, that those people are also occasionally the people that lead armies or create companies that are hugely successful. So Elon Musk might be doing a version of rattling the bones on the stage, but he's creating huge companies and attracting young engineers

who are actually doing innovative work. So it's a weird thing where there is a lot of smoke and mirrors involved, but there's also genuine technology and a lot of money flowing around. Yeah. If you can get enough people to believe hard enough in something, whether you're Napoleon Bonaparte or the shaman in your hunter-gatherer society or Elon Musk, then that is a way in which to make things happen. And we live in a technological age of fast technological changes. Like a thousand years ago, when a traditional shaman was talking about the massively powerful spirits that they were communicating with, that they were at work at this very moment, then that was very plausible to the audience of that day and age.

Now, today, we don't find that kind of thing so plausible. Some of us. Most of us. Being in Jonathan Peugeot. Because of the age we live in, we find the technological promises. There's going to be a base on Mars pretty soon. We're going to have a thing in our head technological promises. There's going to be a base on Mars pretty soon. We're going to have a thing in our head, which means we're going to be living in the matrix and being able to control everything with just thought. We'll have humanoid robots doing all the work for

us. We'll be zipping around in these electric cars. We won't even have to drive. The list goes on. These are wonderful things to believe in. I share with Musk a love of science fiction. I think many people do, but when you hear him talk about these things, even though he has the manner of a diffident, awkward engineer, when you actually pay attention to his words, he doesn't sound to me like someone who understands the stuff that he's talking about. It's particularly apparent in stuff like Neuralink. It can be debunked very easily when you look at these claims about a miles base that were made many years ago that would happen like last year. And it is difficult because like you said, there are real companies here. Tesla will own a share of the electric car market. The electric

car market is booming. Unlike the other gurus that we look at, their ambitions are much smaller. Except for Eric. Maybe except for Eric. But in the end, they kind of want you to subscribe to their sub stack. They want you to send them some Patreon dollars. They want you to listen to them and pay attention to them. So like their ambitions are much smaller, but Elon Musk's ambitions are different. He doesn't want you to subscribe to his Patreon. His job is to maintain that belief

in the constellation of enterprises that he's involved with and keep that going long enough. Because if there is a run on those shares and the value of his portfolio drops, then that could cause a bit of a financial domino effect. Yeah. So I've got two clips that speak to this simultaneous presentation of character that like are a little bit divergent. So here's the first in which Elon is going back to that thing about like what he does during the day and how he sees himself, right? This is the highlight that he does see himself as like an engineer. You should be aware that there's all these pipes that take away the heat and then they all deliver fuel to the rocket, and it has to be there in the exact right amount at the exact right time,

and if that doesn't happen, it blows up. And so I said, well, how does Elon know this? And because you hire these great people, and then you ask them all these questions, and then somehow you remember everything they tell you. Is that true? and you ask them all these questions, and then somehow you remember everything they tell you. Is that true? Well, my memory for technical matters is very good.

But I think probably a lot of people don't realize, like, what I do 80% of the time is engineering. So, you know, it's actually quite rare for me to give a talk. And my day-to-day work at SpaceX and Tesla is almost entirely engineering and design. So, and also production. Production is key, although I consider that to be part of engineering. Yeah. Well, now he seems to have developed quite a lot of time for twitter so it's that positive thing like this stuff to you chris i mean and to the audience like there should be some little bells ringing because just ask yourself

some little questions like he talks like an engineer an awkward engineer but how many research scientists and engineers do you see behaving like he does on twitter like that's not the behavior you would expect no and here's him again so you talked about him being self-effacing and whatnot but not always so yeah my my workload went up from about i don't, 70 to 80 hours a week to probably 120. So, yeah, I go to sleep, I wake up, I work, go to sleep, wake up, work, do that seven days a week. I'll have to do that for a while. No choice. I'll have to do that for a while.

No choice. But I think once Twitter is set on the right path, I think it is a much easier thing to manage than SpaceX or Tesla. So... And I really understand the Internet and how to make... I wrote software personally for 20 years. I was one of the key people behind payx.com, which became PayPal. And so also I'm aware of...

I know how to make a way better PayPal. Because you built PayPal. Yeah, pretty much. I mean, with a lot of other people, but there's a product plan I wrote, which I wish I'd kept a copy of in July of 2000, where I thought it would be possible to make the most valuable financial institution in the world.

And we're going to execute that plan from 22 years ago which amazingly no one has done yeah he's not always humble in fact i don't believe he's humble at all my point there is that he is able to send that critical message which is that he is very special and very different that he is galaxy brained he's polymathic he is special and develop or instill in people confidence and his job of doing that is just made so much easier by making sure that these public interviews and things that do happen are with people that do most of the work for him. Yeah. Yeah. So with that note, Matt, let's move on to have a little discussion around the topic that you kind of hinted at

about his kind of cosmic aspirations. And I think part of why he attracts a following more so than other more grounded tech CEOs. So there's a clip at the start, which is about Elon responding to the question from Ron Barron about his motivation. And as we go on, there's slightly more cosmic takes, but here's him responding to that question first.

Well, I think what I'm working on has an important effect on the future. In the case of Tesla, I think it's fair to say that Tesla has significantly accelerated the advent of sustainable energy. Before Tesla, no one was doing electric cars. And now, as a result of Tesla, I think almost every major car company in the world is building electric cars. And I think that's a pretty big deal. But there's still a long way to go to transition the world to a sustainable energy economy. And so we still have a lot of work ahead of us at Tesla, but that's our goal there.

And then for SpaceX, I think it's important for the future to be exciting and for humanity's existence to be ensured over the long term. I think we must become a multi-planet species and a space-bearing civilization.

So my question, though, is if we have autonomous driving and we have autonomous trucks, is that one of the ideas that we're going to be able to move things around with our own, if there's not enough drivers, that we're going to have autonomous transport? Yes. That's question one. We can also, yeah, I mean, if you're in the area, have the car just drive to you.

Right. Well, there's some truth there, Chris, isn't there? Because Tesla has accelerated battery-based electric technologies, right? Yeah, and perhaps placed an emphasis on at least efforts to get to automated driving. Although I think Google were also competing in that space for quite a while. Yeah, and SpaceX as well. He is talking on rather grand terms about we have yet to even establish a permanent base on the moon, let alone any other planet in our solar system

or become far lower field. But he's talking big picture right interplanetary species uh space travel automated cars it is the kind of futurist dream and he lays it out in that tone as if it's it's just an obvious thing that will eventually happen so that's what he's trying to do. Yeah. Well, look, on one hand, it's obviously perfectly acceptable to be a futurist and to be an aspirational type of thinker and to be saying things like we can achieve fully automated

self-driving cars and we should absolutely seek out to do it. Or, you know, our destiny lies in the solar system. We ought to go into space and build Mars bases and so on. I think the issue that people have with Musk is that he doesn't discriminate between that kind of aspirational language and very, very concrete claims about what a company that he owns is going to be delivering this year or next year. With the cars, we've already talked about how he's promised self-driving every year for over five years.

With the Mars mission, I've seen clips of him giving a presentation about setting up a Mars base and how the main problems will be mining resources. He was talking about a whole bunch of stuff like finding water and so on in very concrete terms with the schedule of that this was going to be happening, I think this year, it could be last year. It was a few years ago when he spoke about it. Now, that was entirely untrue. There was no way that was ever going to happen, but he was talking about it as if his company was going to be doing it.

People have documented hundreds, if not thousands, of these kinds of claims. Yeah, and I think some of the people that defend him say, well, he's just setting aspirational targets, like better to shoot for the moon and fall significantly short than to never have that as the goal. But I think there is the fact that, okay, you can have people who are visionary and overly optimistic about timeframes and stuff, but it has to also be factored into his role as a, like you said, a CEO and a businessman and somebody that is trying to hype up investors. And that's the kind of difference. There are plenty of scientists who made remarkable breakthroughs in timeframes that people wouldn't

have imagined possible, but they weren't the CEOs of various companies and they weren't doing things to boost up the stocks and stuff. like well that's right the issue is is that an awful lot of people have bought stock in telstra it's sorry not telstra that's an australian communications company some people bought stock in that also probably not a great investment um a lot of people bought stock in tesla on the assumption, which you might reasonably have had three or four or five years ago, that these claims were true, that what he was saying was true. So it's not just pie in the sky optimistic language. When it's very concrete claims about a technology that you will be releasing later on in the year, then that becomes deceptive. will be releasing later on in the year then that becomes deceptive and one of the little scandals that erupted around musk many people will already know about this is when he announced that he was

going to be taking tesla private or thinking about taking tesla private at about i think it was 450 dollars a share or so which by comparison what what is tesla worth now as well there's been a fair drop right yeah it's dropped a fair bit 125 anyway even at the time that was a pretty a pretty high price and the stock price jumped based on that because usually you don't say that kind of thing unless it's it's absolutely real and you can't say that kind of thing because it's manipulation. So he got into a bit of trouble for that. But I guess the issue is that it's not just optimism. There's an awful lot of claims which are demonstrably untrue and self-serving. So another example of this kind of language with tying it to specific technologies is when he's talking about the Falcon 9 rocket. And again, you can see like his kind of cosmic view in this clip.

The thing that is like the holy grail, like the critical breakthrough needed to make life multi-planetary and for humanity to be a space-bearing civilization is a fully and rapidly reusable rocket, orbital rocket. And so we've gone most of the way there with Falcon 9. You may have seen the rocket booster come back and land.

And we also recover the nose cone or fairing. But we do not recover the upper stage. So we've gone to the upper stage. So we've gotten to the point where we're about 70-80% reusable with Falcon 9. With Starship

we're going for 100% reusable. It's difficult to say how profound a change this will be, but a fully and rapidly reusable orbital rocket has the potential to drop the cost of access to space by a factor of 1,000.

A factor of 1,000. 1,000. That's a big factor, 1,000. It is. It sounds like they're just 20% away. He said they're 70 to 80 percent reusable now and just 20 percent more with the next one and then things will drop they'll be dying and you know again you can view it as just being optimistic and having aspirational

goals and you know tesla and bsx are able to attract highly skilled engineers who probably have somewhat similar dreams but i do feel like if you talk to an engineer that that they might have more reservations about the time frame and the efficiency that they'll be able to achieve in the next couple of years. Yeah. I mean, look, we're not rocket scientists, so we can't really comment that much, but I'm sure it's not a thousand times or anything near like that. After all, reusable spacecraft is not such a new thing. Various things have been reusable, including the space shuttle for many years.

There are costs involved in reusing it as well right they're generally not ready to go straight away so you know like i'm not dissing the cool technology of vital vital rockets i'm just saying there's a distinction between that and these claims which is that if you were to believe musk we're going to be zipping around the stars almost cost free like a thousand times cheaper than it is now. Um, it's In the next 20 years, definitely. Right. That's the bit like, cause like optimistically, I share the vision that

him and a lot of futurists and science fiction writers have about humanity will not always be restricted to earth. And there'll be technologies that make space travel easier than there's now. Like that, that seems to obviously be the case, assuming technology improves and we don't nuke ourselves to death, but there is a fine line between unbridled optimism and fraudulent misrepresentation. And like we said, it's not the same as Ferenos or something because there is a there there. There are rockets going up.

There are highly skilled engineers and there is technology being pushed forward. But it's also not 100% dissimilar from somebody who's promising unlimited reusable energy for incredibly small costs it walks the line um the way that he promotes things i think like there's two there's two main motivations i think for becoming a multi-planet species and a space-faring civilization and and then ultimately going beyond that to go to go to other star systems and explore the galaxy. And I think we may find that there's many one-planet civilizations that died out millions of years ago and never made it to the second planet. Do you think in your lifetime that happens?

Well, it depends how long I live. Maybe forever. If I keep increasing that enemies list it might not be much longer it would be deeply ironic if it's someone angry on Twitter that takes me out well now you can keep them off Twitter

yeah exactly so anyway I think there's but there's two reasons for life to become multi-planetary, life as we know it to become multi-planetary. I think one is the defensive reason where we just, I think we want the light of consciousness to not be extinguished if something were to happen to Earth. And, you know, in the case of the dinosaurs, they only had to worry about like, you know, meteors and super volcanoes and other things. But for us humans, we actually have the

power to destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons or some sort of, you know, crazy bioterrorism thing. Yeah, that's a good example of it. And before we talk about the space visions did you notice chris there was a couple of references throughout to the haters and losers the enemy that the bad people that want to take musk down that that don't believe and it's yeah although a little bit tongue-in-cheek right sounded a bit like he was just saying he's a widely reviled person and remarking on it in a humorous way. I didn't feel the venom there that you find in like a Trump reference to the haters and losers, right? No, no, no.

It was more coming from the interviewer, actually. But anyway, yeah. So like when you sit down with a stiff drink and you've just read a good science fiction novel or some speculative philosophy, then I totally am on board with Musk's concerns there. It's a legitimate, aspirational thing. There's obviously vast amounts of challenges that need to be resolved, not least just the way that human bodies are not designed to operate without much gravity, Just the way that human bodies are not designed to operate without much gravity or hard radiation out in space. So it's something that's hundreds of years, at best guess, away. So on one hand, maybe Musk is just that.

He's just a science fiction geeky guy and this is the kind of stuff that he thinks about. But it does play rather nicely into the mythos that he has created around himself because he's not just built differently, according to a legend, in terms of his being an engineering polymath or having such obsessive dedication that he's devoted his entire life to these pursuits. These things make him different from other people, more than a one-in-a-generation type person, but a one-in-a-epoch type person, someone who's going to accomplish things which don't seem possible to you, but he can do them because he is so different. This sort of thinking about his motivations to doing these things, which he's emphasized in many ways, it's not

about making money. It's not about being successful and important or or anything small the kinds of things that might motivate slobs like you and me chris he's motivated by something deep and big in terms of preserving the light of consciousness um yeah i said i think that completes the picture in terms of if if you were someone that might be getting into the cult of personality around Musk, I feel that that's the trifecta. Yeah, so there's two clips that are relevant to this. And on the one hand, you have Elon talking about why he is able to be successful when others cannot emulate him in the same way right so you have this side so you know as a company um has prosperity um and then people become wealthy then for a lot of people you know that once they become pass it's sort of independently wealthy

they they just can't bring themselves to work or they're just they don't want to work and that's totally you know understandable I'm no judgment And so I mean I have a lot of friends who? Who are extremely talented and they they you know had some success? Earlier in life, and they just decided you know that was enough trauma I Mean you know one my good friends of mine saying, like, for starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. So my people tell me, like, what can you do to encourage entrepreneurs to start companies? I'm like, if you need encouragement, don't start a company. Yeah, all these clips are presenting a pretty clear picture, I think, Chris, aren't they?

That clip is showing the side of the tech entrepreneurial spirit. You know, you can't teach it. You can't bring a horse to water. People just have it or they don't. entrepreneurial spirit you know you can't teach it you can't bring a horse to water people just have it or they don't but the other side which is more what we were just talking about the kind of cosmic aspirational star trek style view is reflected in these kind of statements the goal is to lower the cost of access to orbit and ultimately to Mars and the moon and elsewhere

to the point where humanity can actually afford to become a multi-planet species to the point where we can afford to have a permanent base on the moon and ultimately far exceed the high water mark of Apollo, which was incredible and I think inspiring to all of humanity, everyone. If you were to ask people, I think almost in any country,

not Americans, anyone, what was humanity's greatest achievement in the 20th century? Maybe ever. It's supposed to go to the moon. And that's why they say moonshot as a metaphor. Because that was incredible. You know, so amazing that that was achieved. In fact, a lot of people ask me, was it real?

I'm like, yeah, it was real. Well, it's probably on Twitter. That's where they ask that. So here's the whole package. Yeah, he has both aspects. And the part that I like about him actually is that kind of, you know, recognition of having these grand missions

that can unite humanity to like look higher than petty quarrels or whatever the case might be right and the Apollo mission is a good example even though it was motivated by international competition in the space race but still it is something which is remembered as an achievement of mankind in a very real way so yeah I like that. The part about the uniquely built tech entrepreneur who sleeps in the factory floor and does what all the competitors aren't willing to do, I guess that's the other half of it, which is less appealing to me, but I imagine for a different kind of person, that's equally as appealing. So he has these two components,

and I can see why a cult of personality would develop. Yeah, if you take everything at face value. With you, I agree with the sentiments, that they're perfectly nice sentiments. I mean, who doesn't think that the moon landing was a big achievement for mankind? Everyone can agree with that. And the little boy, perhaps, or girl in everyone

really can identify with the space and reach for the stars and Star Trek stuff. Buzz Lightyear. Yeah. It's just like his vision there. There's nothing that's special about it. I mean, lots of people have that vision. Like I'm a geek

i'm a space geek science fiction geek futurist geek that this is stuff that it's popular played stuff it's popular played stuff it's stuff it's yeah and it's the difference is that he has those companies and built rockets exactly that's right that's why it kind of lands in in a way because like you're right i mean listen to this um i mean that was just an incredible achievement and i think it's it's just one of those things that you know going to the moon makes you proud to be a member of humanity you know it's like for all mankind you know that's that it was for all mankind so it's amazing achievements yeah so i mentioned that to say like he's not exactly carl sagan in his eloquence right but you can you know the sentiment is it's hard to

diss somebody for just saying isn't that great like we shouldn't we aim for things that are like colonizing mars? Why not? Yeah, that's right. So if he's just a guy, like if he presents himself as just a guy who owns companies and that's how he's perceived, then it's fine. Like there's nothing that tricksy apart from the false claims and the exaggerations. His delivery, like we talked about, is that of an awkward, slightly nerdy, but kind of endearing, low-key, if not very articulate presentation. So he's very different from our usual gurus like that,

who are very loquacious, very eloquent, but have very little of substance that they can point to as having achieved. But that's why I think Musk in some ways is like this sort of sigma guru where he's like Trump who has the ability to do what the rest of our gurus cannot like attract hundreds of billions of dollars in resources to let him do what he wants whether it's the hyperloop or a neural link or something else so you meant that the comparison to Trump is obviously not in terms of delivery, although there might be a parallel with the amount of lies

they're comfortable with stating, but more in the ability to actually like to be elected president or to create companies that attract billions of dollars of investment. So like Eric Weinstein is not doing that, right? He would like to do that but he he is neither trump nor elon and elon and trump whatever you think of them they have had a

big impact on the life of the world in some respect because they you know america has such an outsized impact on everything so look i think the parallels with Trump are very strong. Both of them are endearing to a certain kind of audience. Both of them, as you say, are real significant players in the world, whether it's a billionaire or multimillionaire and president. There's the cult of personality, which they've enabled to build around themselves, and that sort of immense loyalty. They do both present themselves in a way as a kind of savior for humanity. To the MAGA or the QAnon crowd, someone like Trump is the savior. The framing there is much more negative

than the positive framing that Musk has, but it's still the same thing. And they are both self-aggrandizing. Like Musk, you you know and i guess i'm taking into account all of the other things that he's said and done over the years which we've covered his background it's not all in this particular clip but there's a pretty clear pattern emerges where he does deliberately cultivate that sense that he is a superlative engineer in polymath and disciplined and focused and hard working in a way that is almost inconceivable. So I would characterize them both as narcissistic in that sense. We talked about that there is a difference in the way they refer to enemies or people that are criticizing them. But I have a clip which highlights

that the concept that there are lots of haters and people trying to tear Musk down comes up quite frequently, even though the response is more lighthearted and addressing it, at least when he's talking, not so much on Twitter, but listen to this. And we have our rocket is 10 meters taller than theirs. And we can reuse ours.

How can anyone possibly compete if they're not doing what we're doing? How can they compete? I don't understand. And how can they get contracts? And then I just saw something from NASA. And they said that we're spending $20 billion a year. And, oh, by the way, that's's 360,000 jobs in all these congressional districts. Well, I think I have to be careful of what I say here.

I, you know, I have enough enemies. I have enough enemies. I would like to have, you know, I think, yes, I would like to have a smaller number of companies that want me to die. That would be great. yeah he's light-hearted about it but trump is often light-hearted too about the haters and the losers i think there is a parallel there in the presentation of them being kind of the one straight shooter the one person out there amongst this swamp of corruption and you know there are these hints there of the only way the other companies get funded is through these back corridor deals we should probably talk a little bit about the twitter because it comes up in this conversation because this was just last month right in

november so obviously they're talking about what elon has been doing with twitter and he's obviously done more since then but a good example of treating things which happened to the company as personal attacks and presenting them as unfair is highlighted in this case when he's talking about advertisers dropping off twitter in response to things that he was doing like indicating that he's going to let a whole bunch of highly controversial accounts back on the site and that moderation rules were going to be made a lot laxer except for things that were illegal. And just listen to the way he frames the response to his instability in Twitter and what it did to the advertising investment. And then we also recently had a lot of difficulty with activist groups pressuring major advertisers to stop spending money on Twitter.

This is despite us doing everything possible to appease them and to make it clear that moderation rules and hateful conduct rules have not changed. And we're continuing to enforce them. A number of major advertisers have stopped spending on Twitter. But this doesn't seem right, because we've made no change in our operations at all. But nonetheless, the activist groups have been successful in causing a massive drop in Twitter advertising revenue. And we've done our absolute best to appease them, and nothing is working. So this is a major concern, and I think this suppress free speech, then that doesn't seem right. Notice any logical leaps there in that reasoning?

I did, Chris, I did. Would you like to spell them out for us? Well, just the one that's quite obvious is that saying that it's a First Amendment free speech issue, presumably the activists should have First Amendment free speech rights, right? So Elon is saying it's unfair if they successfully convince advertisers to stop investing in Twitter.

But why? The companies are independent, private companies. They can do what they want. The activists can do what they want. He can arrange lobbyists to talk to companies. That's free speech in action. So conflating your company, not getting the investment that you think it deserves as being a free speech concern is a huge leap, and then also the claim that nothing has changed on Twitter that would warrant any concerns since he took over.

Absolute bollocks. And admittedly, this is from a month ago, right? So he hadn't done everything that he would go on to do. But clearly things have changed on Twitter. Almost all of the accounts that were high profile bans, with the exceptions of a couple, like, you know, Alex Jones, I think Stefan Molyneux isn't back yet but

like a lot of high profile racist accounts all came back and that's a big difference for a platform and plus elon constantly implying that he's so free speech that they're not going to police things that are related to free speech but then saying all of the same moderation principles applying you're like well those two things don't fit together because like which one is it you change and overhaul that so it's more free speech and you're not going to moderate as heavy-handedly or all of the same restrictions applies before and therefore there's nothing that advertisers should be concerned about. Yeah, it's been quite amusing to see the free speech boosters, many of whom are conspiracy theorists, who were whooping with joy at Musk taking over and then finding out that he in

fact was still doing moderation and censorship in scare quotes, but just doing it in a much more haphazard, shoot from the hip and highly personalized way. So he's been treating Twitter kind of as his personal fiefdom rather than having any kind of systems or processes or coherent policies. Twitter moderation wasn't great before, but most people agree it's gotten worse. The other thing too, is that a lot of those companies who cease advertising, I don't remember some sort of woke mob campaign. It felt like the companies that did pull out, and I totally understand why, I've used Twitter

less just because it's gotten worse since he's taken over. It seemed like the impetus was coming from the advertisers themselves. I mean, he brought Kanye back, right? After Kanye was already making the openly anti-Semitic remarks. That's a concern. And actually, an interesting example of how this does potentially cause waves in Musk's world is this guy, this interviewer, Ron Barron, who we've heard throughout,

is incredibly sycophantic, who speaks in the collective personal plural, right, of we, anytime he refers to Kessler. Listen to his question. This is like the first genuine question that I heard him ask when he talks about Twitter and moderation. asked when he talks about Twitter and moderation. In order for that to happen, in order for that, so I met you and it took me a few years and then I believe in you and your heart, right, your heart. I think you were skeptical. At our first meeting, you were a bit skeptical. And so the way I think about it is that, so I'm trusting you with the future of our country,

the world, actually, when you're in charge of a media like that. And so what I think about is, so how do you prevent, to being Jewish, how do you prevent this anti-Semitism? Or if I were black, how do you prevent all of these? So how do you prevent the use of the N-word? And that got a round of applause, a kind of indication about what are you going to do about this kind of thing.

Do you want to hear Musk's reply to that? I think so. And then you can see if this is if he presents this accurately we should be able to figure out with software how to moderate this and prevent that from happening is that true or not yeah yes absolutely um totally agree um the i want to be clear the you know content moderation policies have not changed at Twitter, and it is not okay to engage in hateful conduct on Twitter. So we have had actually oddly targeted attacks

where temporarily people have been able to put some hate speech on Twitter, but then it's been taken down immediately. So it's done that. It's algorithmically sorted now, and nothing has changed since Elon's takeover. And that gets a round of applause, but I think in part it's a round of applause just because he acknowledged that hate speech is not allowed on Twitter.

People are like, oh, okay. Like I said, it's boilerplate stuff. Hate speech is not okay. Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. Okay. And like you said, it's contradictory. Like nothing has changed at all. Yet at the same time, what he's doing is radically different.

And in different forums, he's really focused on the free speech angle, which is, it is not the job of the platform to do any moderation. So I just feel like he says stuff. It's objectively not true. Because one of the things he did was reduce the team, significantly slash the amount of people who were responsible for looking at moderation and these kind of issues. Now, the way that he's framed it and by orchestrating these release of the so-called Twitter files, it's intended to demonize the previous moderation team as being politically

biased and ineffective and controlled by the FBI and all this kind of things, right? But actually, the majority of what it shows is people in a company attempting to make choices, right? And there is political liens, but you see the people debating the decisions. You see things being reversed. You see like kind of going back and forth and Jack coming in and things being reversed or somebody saying, I don't think the policies support this, right? And that kind of going back and forth and Jack coming in and things being reversed or somebody saying, I don't think the policy support this. Right. And that kind of thing.

I wonder what would happen if you release now the discussions around like, let Kanye back on ban Kanye. Well, what's the discussion look like there? Um, how is it different under Musk that is not just Elon deciding, kick all these journalists off. And the thing with the Elon jet, which has happened relatively recently as well, he banned the guy who publishes the details of where his private jet was flying and he presented it being like a kind of reaction to his young son being in the car and a stalker find where

they are from using that service. But actual reporting from journalists revealed that that event happened way after any jet thing was involved. And the person involved seemed to be like, you know, there's a whole bigger story around it, but it's basically, it doesn't really in the way that Elon said. And yet he just immediately takes action, bonds that, sets a new policy, bonds a bunch of journalists who, you know, if they link to it and you just be like, that's a change, that's a very idiosyncratic change in content moderation. Yeah.

I'd describe that the change as him treating the moderation policy for the platform as his own personal fiefdom. And it's often motivated by his own personal interests. And that's another interesting parallel with Trump, who also famously treated a lot of the apparatuses of the US government as if it was his personal playground and to align with his personal interests and didn't see that distinction, didn't see any value in committees and systems and institutions and processes and whatever. Now, I know a private company is very different, but I think it's really telling. And it says more about the fan base, I think, than the characters themselves. Elon Musk and Trump, sure, they're quirky characters, they may be, then the audience feels like

they've got a personal connection. They know that their heart's in the right place and that just want to make things better. And there's this extreme charity to them. Their conspiratorial thinking doesn't kick in. But when it's presented as this is men in gray suits, When it's presented as this is men in gray suits sending private emails to one another, working in some big building, then the conspiratorial brain just goes wild. So to them, musks shoot from the hip, random moderation, censorship stuff. They're just so much more charitable to it than when one tries to set up actually a somewhat consistent system. There's a mismatch between, as we saw with most of the companies that Musk's involved with, he has a kind of grand vision, which is quite soaring in scope. And he outlines the same thing for his motivation for buying Twitter.

So contrast this with what he has been doing on the platform since he bought it, right? Here's what he said. So obviously the big deal, to me anyway, in Twitter is that, so we have this incredible, so it's incredibly poorly managed, this business. But those guys somehow did great for their shareholders

by selling it to us. But we didn't buy what they're selling. We bought something of what it's going to become. Yes. I mean, I think most people would say, given how the market has evolved this year, the price is on the high side. Right. Right. But that's on the basis of what it is.

Yes. But in terms of what, I think there is a tremendous amount of potential that it will be very difficult to achieve, but I think possible. And I think ultimately it could be one of the most valuable companies in the world. So, you know,

the communication company in his portfolio that's the time square for the entire planet that's not really what his actions are generating at the minute though yeah like his main actions have been geared around this twitter blue oh yeah what is it eight or ten dollars a month or whatever and he would like to make that kind of a necessary thing for people to do and essentially monetize it directly. Yeah. I have a clip of him outlining it. So then you can tell me what's wrong with this vision, Matt.

And it seems like he's just trying to improve things. Because there is a huge problem with spam and bots and trolls on Twitter and organizations trying to manipulate a public opinion and just generally making the system worse. But I think that there is an answer to that, which is to get as many regular users of Twitter to be a subscriber for $8 a month. And you'll get a lot more than just a blue checkmark for $8 a month because now we can afford long-form video, long-audio podcasts, and we can also start sharing revenue with content creators, which is essential. And give them a chance to make money. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, right now, if you're on Twitter, you'll see a lot of links posted to YouTube and TikTok and that's because at least until now, Twitter has not even given them enough video length to post their video and then they give the content creators no means of monetizing the video.

So we're going to change that rapidly at Twitter. It's going to be transformative. In many ways you'd be forgiven for thinking that Elon Musk's schemes are kind of half-baked, right? He's taking these different tech companies, these different platforms have their niches and they're extremely strong in their niches. But his suggestion is basically to take the Twitter niche

and turn it into like an everything. YouTube and TikTok. Yeah, YouTube and TikTok. And he also talks about it being like a finance PayPal company. Yeah. Like everything. It's technology and communications. It'll do everything.

It'll be fine. It'll be great. And like, yeah, good luck. That's difficult. It has been a schmuzzle so far. Do you remember why the price is $8, Matt? Do you remember that? Because Elon said he was starting off saying 20 20 a month and then stephen king said that's way too much no one's going to

pay that and then he said well how about it and then after that it switched to it so like maybe there were all these discussions behind the scenes about the economics involved but it did seem a lot like it's just entirely whim based yeah whim based's making stuff up on the fly and i've seen other videos on that kind of note where he made either an error or a slip of the tongue in describing the propulsion system for the the rocket or whatever which was picked up on by the person who was interviewing me who actually knew a fair bit about rockets and it was hard to you can't tell was he just covering his lack of knowledge or whatever but it ended he ended up with him going on this huge long spiel of oh yeah that's a really good idea now you mention it yeah we're gonna do

that we're gonna put the thing whatever so it's like like some youtuber or someone who was interviewing him gave him an idea that he was purportedly acting on during the interview and that's not how that's not how things work that's not how rockets get built that's not how the moderation and monetization everything in a tech company is extremely difficult and it doesn't get done like that does it chris so so i guess just my bullshit detector thing just keeps going off all the time with him. Yeah, because one part which is quite amazing is like, I'm no business expert, right? But so Twitter was relying on ad revenue as a big part of its income.

Elon tanked that. Regardless, even if he didn't change the moderation policies, he created the impression that it was going to be a lawless hello. So he reduced the advertising income. Then he had a replacement subscription scheme. Now lots of people wanted functions like edit buttons for their posts on Twitter for years. If you had just said an edit button costs $8 and also you can get a blue tick if you do it.

But that's the amazing thing is like if he came on and announced that he would have had huge uptake but instead what he's managed to do with his kind of rampaging around twitter and trolling people and posting conspiracies related to nancy pelosi's husband being attacked by his gay lover or anti-vaccine sentiment targeting Fauci and this kind of thing. He's made it partisan and he's made the blue Twitter subscription program now associated with Elon and a right-wing partisan agenda. So now he has segmented the potential market for that. And you're just like, well, you know. The other thing, Chris, that people really wanted on Twitter was better moderation,

not necessarily less or more moderation, but just better human done moderation, not done by automatic algorithm. Now, something like $8 a month could pay for somebody to go, oh, actually, you were being, you were clearly being ironic. You mean, you mean not like they want more people punished, but they want like, if they are flagged for something that actually a human checks it and says, you know,

or responds within a timely manner, as opposed to like a four month appeal process where people are locked under their account. Exactly. That's the kind of quality of service that people would appreciate. And I would be happy to pay it back some money for. And Kari Swisher, a tech journalist, suggested one way that this could make sense would appreciate and um and i would be happy to pay it back some money for and carish swisher

uh tech journalist suggested one way that this could make sense was if he was intentionally trying to create an alternative like a kind of right-wing fox news ecosystem i mean if he's doing that he is co-invited in a kind of coherent way but i don't get the impression that this is all a well-thought-out thing it seems to be policies are rescinded after a day and and well this kind of behavior it's not particularly new either so remember of course the episode of the boys in thailand trapped in a cave yeah off off the cuff apparently shooting from the hip he proposed that they would build a little miniature submarine that would go in and save them come to the rescue whatever which didn't make any sense because

there was a part in the cave where even a human crawling with a tank would be it was unable to like kind of parcel exactly a submarine that's right the expert cave divers had to take off their tanks and shuffle through, squeezing through. And one of them died doing that. Yeah. And like an infant, when one of the professional international divers who was managing it said, thank you very much, but that's... They were a bit ruder about it.

But they were in a rescue situation and stuff like that. And there was a tech guy saying he's coming in to save the day. I believe the person said a disparaging comment, but Elon's response was to call him a pedo and then to kind of justify it by saying, well, he looks like a pedo. So with which, you know, you on the, I mean, not you understand, but like that it's kind of like firing from the hip, but like that is kind of personality and it's trollish. Yeah, well, it's Trump-esque, I guess, is the reason I brought it up.

There are two possible realities that you have before you. One is that Musk is genuinely a polymath who can command both rocket science and brain surgery and is personally simply committed to preserving the light of human consciousness and fulfilling mankind's destiny in the stars, and has nothing else upon his mind except optimizing factory production efficiencies and solving technical problems. Or he's something of a salesman and a blowhard and a promotion guy, a hype guy. Who is susceptible to conspiracies and has got dragged a little bit into, and not a little bit.

I mean, he's now completely in there, like a right-wing reactionary ecosystem, which now panders to him. Like, again, one thing that springs to mind is when he decided to feud with Apple, and then you suddenly had lots of right-wing commentators and media systems attacking Apple. It's like, why? Just because some tech CEO decided to... And then he met up with them a week later, and it's all gone. It wasn't even true. He said that Apple had cancelled their advertising right yeah i was considering removing them from the app store that's right that's right not not true in the

um so yeah you have these two alternative realities i have to say i find the less flattering reality just far far more plausible And that's not to say, the interesting thing is that in contrast to our usual gurus, interpersonally in terms of what he says, he comes across quite well to me. He's good at being self-deprecating. He makes cute jokes and tells cute stories. And many of the things he says, they're quite boilerplate, but they're not bad. It's not until you look at the history and look at the reality, the pattern of statements of how they don't match reality and how they end up being extremely self-serving and reflecting like a juvenile mentality, then it starts to fall apart. Yeah. So there's two clips to finish with that highlight this distinction. This is Elon discussing like where he sits politically and, you know, how his actions are being interpreted.

And let's see if this matches the reality. So I read also that you said, and then we'll move off the Twitter, but you said that your goal is you want to make the 20% of people who are on the far right hate you, just like you want to make the 20% of people on the far left hate you. Well, I don't want them to hate me. But I think the extremists, like, you know, it's just very difficult to satisfy extremists. So, unless you fully buy into whatever their dogma is. So but I'm confident we can satisfy like, I don't know, 80 percent of America, 80 percent of the world. And but maybe not the most the 10 percent most extreme of either side.

And I would count that as a great outcome. And I think I think it is important to have sort of a digital town square where people feel comfortable talking. Yeah, so in that, he's a reasonable centrist. He's not leaning in any direction. He's going to annoy the extremists at both ends of the spectrum. That's not accurate. What he is doing currently on Twitter day in and day out is responding to unhinged right-wing conspiracists and endorsing what they're saying. They are not in general annoyed with him. They might like disagree with

him about why he bans Kanye or something, but they're very on board with him. And it's not the far extreme left that are like responding negatively. It's essentially almost the entire left-wing ecosystem and some like the right people as well that are finding his actions surprising. So yeah, the mismatch. Yes, there is a big mismatch there between presenting himself as just part of the big normie center when his actions and as he said his retweets conspiratorial retweets and people that he replies to and engages with like ian miles chong and stuff like that like it's inconsistent he is he's quite keen on that

bleeding edge on the right i mean he tweeted out my pronouns are prosecute faiqi and he said he suggested that we know that Fauci is responsible for millions of deaths because of gain-of-function experiments which created the coronavirus, right? And none of that is established. There's so many steps there that he's leapt over. It might be a milk-toe centrist, Chris, but that's not my centrism. Yeah. And so it's just, it's interesting because if you listen to this talk, for example, and

you took it at face value, you'd be like, yeah, you're right. You know, the extremes are crazy on both sides. And what we need is somebody to calm things down and leave, but that's not what he's doing. So it's just, it's weird. calm things down and leave, but that's not what he's doing. So it's just, it's weird. And I can't, you know, there is this tendency for people, and this again is parallel with Trump, to view things as this like grand chess strategies, you know, like he's doing everything and he has a grand plan to get what he wants.

And that's a potential reality, like you said, Matt, but so it is with Trump, right? And at the extreme end, you get the like Qing on that he's still the president and he's planned this all out to eventually catch Hillary Clinton like the roadrunner. On that note, I saw, you recall, he did a Twitter poll recently about whether or not he should step down as the CEO. And the poll went against him. A lot of people voted, yes, you should step down as the ceo and the poll went against him a lot of people voted yes you should step down and then of course this was spun by the fanboys as this this is five-dimensional chess this is

his way of finding out who are the undesirables on twitter because yeah the bots and all that it's like a it's a honeypot trap and stuff like that but he then also announced that he would step down when he finds a suitable route, but who knows, right? It's unclear, like maybe he doesn't want to have all of this thing happening every day. But whatever the case might be, I suspect that a lot of the impulsive trollish responses are impulsive trollish responses from somebody who's a

billionaire, has a lot lot of yes men around them and does what he wants right and in the covid pandemic he was somebody that was like questioning the pandemic from very early on and predicting that there would be no more cases after a couple of months and stuff like that so he very confidently states things he knows nothing about i have to say i find it quite plausible in hindsight looking back on the previous behavior i can imagine him strutting around headquarters or the production facilities at tesla or spacex or listening to some presentation and then shooting off the hip to his high level executives oh we should do this and we should put the thing on and put the

coaster on the thing a bit like homer designing designing the car in the simpsons and everyone kind of nodding their head and acting like they're taking notes and saying right boss we're going to act on that straight away and essentially placating him and managing him and him genuinely having the very strong impression which is how he presents himself, that he is the fixer. He goes around sorting. I think that's a plausible reality. It definitely is a plausible reality. And it's also in line with being surrounded by sycophants and stuff, because they will

tell you that. And a lot of people have indicated that the people around him are sycophants now. He doesn't have people challenging him and so on but the last clip i have matt so it'll be interesting to see whether you think this is accurate or not so this is him responding to a question about how to encourage people to invest in Tesla. And many times I've recommended people don't invest in Tesla, and I've said our stock is too high, but then people just ignore me and keep buying the stock for some reason.

So I think at a very high level, I'd say that autonomy is an insanely fundamental breakthrough. And no one is even close to Tesla for solving generalized autonomy or generalized self-driving vehicles. No one's even close. And with self-driving, as I was talking about earlier, the car becomes roughly five times more useful, but it costs the same to

build. Now, can you imagine what would happen if a company was doing like 25 to 30% gross margins, but suddenly that same thing was five times more valuable. Can you imagine that? It's possible.

If you can make a car five times more valuable and the costs reduced, that would be great. He's hinting at some valid points around society as a whole shifting from a model of personally owning cars. They do sit in the garage most of the time. They have to sit in a parking lot. If they go somewhere else, there's a whole bunch of space and a whole bunch of hardware that is sitting around underutilized. So it is a nice model where you hit your thumb on the phone and the car arrives and you step in it and it whisks you off to where you want to go. And then it goes away to do its next job. That's a lovely model. But of course, it'll result in savings in terms of using the vehicle more. But

of course, most of the costs of a vehicle are in the running costs, right? Not just the production costs, right? So the running costs are fixed. No, that's okay, Matt. You just get the solar cells from the tops of the houses and you, like, were you not listening? The robots carry it. They're polluted by solar cells. And yeah, it's all right.

The solar maintenance and the electricity still needs to get generated. But, you know, the main issue is that all of it is pie in the sky. That would take not only to have full autonomous vehicle technology totally nailed. It's not going to be accepted at 99% or 99.9%. It has to be perfect. And it's an insanely difficult artificial intelligence problem simply because anything can happen on the road there there's just so many unusual situations and it's the unusual situations that kill you it's very hard to get a training data set in which you can test

your model under all situations and that's why it's so difficult and that's why no one else has self-driving happening yet either i get matt just illustrate this. I'll just give you a personal example. I was driving home late one night and there was roadworks and there are a set of signals that the little roadwork men are supposed to make to indicate well or to stop they hold the baton horizontally or they wave you around. Right? Now my particular man was doing an, like a move i've never seen before and it looked like a kind of half ushering half stopping right and i was slowing down but he seemed like a bit

frustrated so i was like oh i should go but the roadworks went right up to the light like the red light and they were over the entire half of the road. Right. So if I continued on, I would approach the red light on the wrong side of the road and be waiting there and I was like, well, that's not a safe thing, but I assumed, okay, well, the guy is telling me to go on through this unorthodox move. As I followed it, it turned out that no, or if that was what he was signaling,

he shouldn't have been signaling that because a car came barreling past from the other side at like full speed. So I had to stop, right? And that was like, I would like to see an AI trying to react to all those different things because the situation was quite idiosyncratic i have not encountered that personally and i still made a choice which didn't result in an accident

but which was not like ideal and yeah so just to say you know that's that those kind of things happen all the time when you're driving and it's not musk's fault that making an autonomous vehicle is very difficult, but it is kind of his fault for either both not understanding the scope of the issue and how far away they are from achieving it, and for promising that it was ready again and again and again. But it's interesting, isn't it? If you're a certain kind of believer, if you buy into it to to the optimism. And I am a techno-optimist too. I'd like to think that many of the problems that society, humanity faces is going to be solved by progressive innovations in technology. And I know that they do come along in fits and starts.

So, we don't know. It could be in a few weeks there is a breakthrough in fusion energy, but probably not. These things do happen. Science and technology is progressing, but this is the age that we live in where there is a window there for a certain kind of person who is willing to just say stuff to cater to those aspirations that we all have. And I feel like Musk has built a large part of his career in fulfilling that need and being that person. So we've went on a rollercoaster ride around this fairly mundane talk, but I think it does give an insight into Musk. When I look at the big picture and think comparing him to the other gurus we've looked at, as we've said, he's not the bombastic, loquacious guru type.

He is a salesman, but he's much more a salesman because he comes across as he presents himself, which is a tech guy, an engineer, somebody with big visions for the future and like a kind of science background that he's just trying to enact, he's just trying to enact. He's trying to get other people on board with his vision. But the issue with that is there's so many cracks in that facade when you dig deeper. And unlike the other gurus, he has achievements, whatever he ends up being, you know, in the grand scheme of things, one thing it is true that on his docket

will be that he helped to promote electronic vehicles as a mainstream thing that people would be interested in. And there are other things that he has helped to push forward. And even the companies where he's done a lot of shady stuff and he's written out founders from the origins and claimed that he did stuff, which he didn't. He still has played a role in most of these companies in making them more high profile and attracting investment and stuff. So it's just to say that like, it's an interesting case because there is a there there with Musk,

but it is clear that from all the people documenting that, even from this talk, that there's so much willingness to just lie and overstate things and you can't look past that. So he's an interesting guru in a lot of ways because he's kind of outside some of the archetypes that we have looked at previously. Yeah, I agree. archetypes that we have looked at previously. Yeah, I agree. I was thinking that too, but then it actually motivated me to actually take a look at our garometer and think about Musk at the same time. And Chris, I think he tends to fit it, but just in a way, in not the same way that many of our gurus do. Tell me if you think I'm overfitting or something here, but this galaxy brain, this is all about that polymathic special ability. And he definitely is all about projecting that. He does come across as far less bombastic and grandiose

than many of our gurus, but that's because in many ways he has to try less hard. He doesn't need to do much. He can just hint at it. And as you say, part of it is done through just by enacting the version of a geeky, obsessed, tech-focused, driven person. That's the archetype we have in our mind. And he can fit that quite nicely. And that's not so different from someone like Brett or Eric Weinstein cosplaying what a serious intellectual scientist kind of does. We've seen more and more recently with this sort of anti-establishment approach that he's going on

and even hints at grievance at the kinds of opportunities and stuff that have been denied. That in-group, out-group dynamics, you see it in his audience. But look, I'm going to stop talking too much. The main thing I probably want to say is that I think he's like Trump in that the more interesting thing about him is not really him and his quirks and his particularities and how he does things. The interesting thing is us, or those of us who feel a great need for characters like this to come along and fulfill the role that we want to play. And I think a lot of what's happening is that we're projecting our hopes and aspirations onto these figures and they will happily let us do it.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's a nice way to round the decoding episode on Musk. I did have one clip, Matt, that I titled the most sycophantic question ever. Should I pray not just, I know this is just going to be Ron Barron, but I don't know if that's a good note to end on or not. But yeah, anyway, here it is.

We can always cut it out. And other companies, why don't they try? Why don't they try to do what we're doing? In fact, one of the executives of another automobile company wanted me to introduce her to you. And you did that once at a meeting, and now she wants to come visit with her director of engineering at our plant in Austin. And I presume when I ask you, you're going to say, yeah, bring her on, because you innovate

so fast, by the time anyone copies what we're doing, it's gone to something else. What else is there? When you're casting, what else is there that enables us to make it cheaper? Are we eliminating a lot of other parts? Are we eliminating functions? What are we doing to do that?

How do we sell a car that's so cheap? Tough questions. Tough questions, Ron. How are you so amazing? How is it even possible? Also, how can you layer so much non-necessary components before it gets to the actual question?

Anyway, he's a terrible interviewer. But that's the thing musk attracts sycophants he's the sigma to the rest of the universe and also including many of our gurus um oh yeah like like when we first decided oh yeah we should cover musk to round off the tech season i didn't see much of a connection between him and the rest of them. But my God, they're all at it. They're all just falling over themselves. It's worse than Rogan.

I mean, they're all sycophantic towards Rogan because they perceive him as the big alpha baboon in the cage. But they're even worse with Musk. I know. I agree. So yeah, he is the guru's guru. And that clip, in that sense, is a useful one to end on. There you go. That's it. That's Musk. Done. And the tech season finished. It doesn't mean we won't go back to tech figures or Peter Thiel and stuff, but we will no longer be constrained by a thematic season. Peter Thiel and stuff, but we will no longer be constrained by a thematic season. So we're going to start the year so completely without any deviations that now the straight

jacket is lifted and we're back. So all gurus of all stripes beware. Yep. That's right. No one's safe anymore. All right. Very good. Very good.

Okay. So moving along, what have we got to do now? We've got to do the review of reviews? We do. I got two. I got two this time. I've got a five-star positive review. We encourage our listeners to leave reviews of the podcast or send us email feedback,

whatever the case. Listener comments. Listener comment section. But the reviews are useful because people sometimes leave funny remarks in them or cutting ones. So this one says, five stars by August Pappas. And it says, an interesting podcast featuring a handsome Australian named Matt and a plucky Irish man named Chris.

Plucky versus handsome. Okay. I approve. Approve so far. This is good. At first, Matt seems cool and with it. However, the longer you listen, you start to realize that he has the pop culture awareness of an old Russian grandmother living in an abandoned logging town in Siberia.

Chris does his best to keep Matt up to speed, but unfortunately, he has about as good a handle on the English language as an 18-year-old Valley girl does on her dad's Lamborghini. Seriously, his mouth sounds like it's meeting every word for the first time, and it has severe social insecurity. Chris has also been bragging about how much he likes to eat nuts. However, in the most recent episode,

he didn't have enough nuts to be mean to their hapless guest, Jimmy. If you can stomach these minor drawbacks, great podcast, I never miss an episode. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that. It was balanced. It was accurate. There were no lies detected, really.

Except for me and my lack of familiarity with pop culture stuff. I think this person is probably a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan, maybe Super Mario Brothers, and they think like you that that encompasses the whole scope of modern culture, when in actual fact, guys, there's actually more to it than this there's the matrix there's there's tons of other things um but yeah so there is a there's another review and this is positive overall it's a five star one but it it has some critique so that's why i've chose it and it says good show a bit small in scope that's that's why I've chose it. And it says, good show, a bit small in scope. That's a tech season doing us in.

You know, the user's name is a street car named Deez Nuts. And I know I'm saying Deez Nuts, okay? So he didn't get me. But in any case,

he says, the hosts have great chemistry, impressively capable of laughing at each other's jokes. But I do wish there was a bit more circling back

to old gurus. I feel like it started on such a high note with the Weinsteins and then we just never heard about them again. Hopefully sometime soon we can get another full episode dedicated to them. Is that, there's gotta be, that's gotta be taking the piss. It's gotta be a little, yeah, I think so.

That's I like the ones where I'm not sure the degree to which they're taking the piss it's gotta be a little yeah i think so that's i like the ones where i'm not sure the degree to which they're taking the piss but i think that i think that one it has to be because we do occasionally mention the weinsteins in passing sometimes some would say too much but um i think there was a um an earnest um request at the end for uh another full decoding of a prior guru like the Weinsteins, which is possible, I guess. I mean, I wouldn't rule it out. We're out of the tech season.

Anything can happen now. We're free. We're not like sharks. We don't have to only swim forward. We can be like Dory and go in circles. Well, there's a pop culture reference. Impressive. So the last thing then, Matt, is our parasocial maintenance section, the Patreon shoutouts.

This is for the kind people who chuck money at us as we dance around the gurus on our decoding pole. Stuff it into our g-strings. Yeah, complete the image. Stuff it into our G-strings. Yeah, complete the image. So, okay. I'm going to shout out conspiracy hypothesizers for this week. And they include Matthew Melchion, Billy Beebe, Daniel Jeffries, Tobias Peter,

Peter, Tylan Watkins, Toby Cripps, James Link, Mark O'Brien, John Statham, and Alex Masters. Well, that's great. All of them. All of them. You know, Chris, when I agreed to do shout outs of all our subscribers, I never expected there would be so many of them. But even so, I'm happy to do this because I'm grateful and we appreciate the unfakeable signal. You're sending our way to what we're doing is all right. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. So here's your reward. I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to

that came to some very strong conclusions and they've all circulated this list of correct answers. I wasn't at this conference this kind of shit makes me think man it's almost like someone is being paid like when when you hear these george soros stories well he's trying to destroy the country from within we are not going to advance conspiracy theories we will advance conspiracy hypotheses. That you will. Now, next map, Revolutionary Geniuses, the ones that can get access to the Decoding

Academia series. This week, that includes Nicole Davison, Mark M, ML, Ruf Tal, Will Sherritt, Tom Doyle, and David Morgan. I think I have done nothing where I showed someone out twice, but you know, that's fine.

Why not? Why not? Who's against that? So here we are, revolutionary geniuses one and all. I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time. And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm. I'm someone who's a true polymath. I'm all over the place. But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption. Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong, but it also could not be

wrong. The fact that it's even plausible is stunning. Brett Weinstein just always gets in there at the end. Eric and Brett, their intonation. I mean, contrast these guys with Musk. Contrast that delivery, that intonation. These guys are professional talkers because they have to be. They don't have any rockets. Yes, indeed. So now Galaxy Brain Gurus, the folks who can join us and berate us for monthly live streams, if they feel so inclined. This month that includes Artemis Green, Bradley G.

Wall, Christian, Danlev151, Dean, Derek Varn, and Eric Quirk. Yay. Thank you. Thank you, one and all. We tried to warn people. Yeah. Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything. Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.

I have no tribe. I'm in exile. Think me tribal just doesn't make any sense. I have no tribe. I'm in exile. Think again, sunshine. Yeah. Yeah. That was on the quiz. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So we will be back in the new year, but we're also, as we say, interviews with CoffeeZilla coming up. and if anybody's interested on the patreon you can hear about it's always sunny in philadelphia with the episode yeah

that's right that's all good stuff and if people happen to be listening to this in the vicinity of christmas time 2022 then merry christmas any other year you listen to this, years later, not Merry Christmas. No, this is very specific. Similarly, I will also say, you know, happy holidays, Merry Christmas, God bless everyone, one and all. Yeah, yeah. I just realized mine was not like the politically correct,

non-denominational happy, happy, I'm an atheist. I'm an atheist. It's okay. I can, I can say Merry Christmas. I don't give a shit about it.

Yeah. I don't mind. It's all right. So, well, Matt, even though it is the Christmas season and you know, there's cheer around,

it's still important. to keep an eye on those gated institutional narratives and watch out for the distributed idea suppression complexes. They're always around. I know. Eric's been talking about them. He hasn't stopped talking about them. They're still a thing, clearly. They're out there. So be on your guard. Yeah, keep it up all right we're not announcing the next guru to cover yet don't know who it is we'll surprise you in the new year yep so

there you go okay bye bye Thank you.