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Elon Musk’s Endgame | The Ezra Klein Show — Transcript

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0:00If Republicans keep the Senate, if they
0:03perform better in the house than people
0:05expect, a lot of it's going to come down
0:07to one man, and that man is not Donald
0:09Trump. It's Elon Musk.
0:11At this point, Musk has given around
0:13$450 million
0:15to the Republican campaign effort. That
0:17makes him the single largest donor in
0:19any election cycle ever. It is a quarter
0:22of all campaign donations Republicans
0:24have received.
0:26And yet, [music] is the size of this? I
0:29think what it throws into relief is how
0:31hard it is to conceptualize how much
0:33money Elon Musk really has.
0:35>> [music]
0:35>> Because for Musk, with his net worth of
0:37around a trillion dollars, for him to
0:38give
0:40300 million, 400 million,
0:42it's like the median American household
0:44giving like 100 bucks. It is for him
0:47nothing,
0:49and yet it is [music] reality warping
0:51for the rest of us.
0:53And it's not even Musk's only source of
0:55power, all this money. There's his
0:57control of X, his control of Starlink,
0:59[music]
1:00of SpaceX,
1:02of Neuralink, of Tesla.
1:05He has power over wealth,
1:08attention,
1:09and critical infrastructure that no
1:12human [music] being has ever combined at
1:14this level, at least once you're outside
1:16the range of say a Donald Trump or Xi
1:18Jinping, somebody who controls
1:20a superpower as a state.
1:23That's not what Musk has, and yet he has
1:26this almost state-like thing
1:28that is completely pursuant to his
1:30whims.
1:31So, what does he want to do with it?
1:33What is he doing with it? What what is
1:35this world [music]
1:37that he is
1:38flexing his power and taking on real
1:40risk to build?
1:42Quinn Slobodian is a professor of
1:43international history at Boston
1:44University. He's the author of several
1:47books, including Globalists Have Sex
1:48Bastards, [music] but relevant for here,
1:50Musks ism, which he co-authored with Ben
1:52Tarnoff. He joins [music] me now.
1:59>> [music]
2:00>> Quinn Slobodian, welcome to the show.
2:02>> Very happy to be here.
2:03>> So, Elon Musk is flexing a lot of power
2:06right now. He's made the largest ever
2:08set of campaign donations from one
2:10person in one cycle. It's now $450
2:12million, all of it to Republican groups.
2:15He's alone a quarter of all GOP
2:18donations this cycle.
2:21What is he trying to buy?
2:23>> Well, I think he's trying to entrench
2:25the dependency that he already enjoys.
2:27One is through his financial role in the
2:31US political economy and by extension
2:33that global economy.
2:35SpaceX now as one of the world's top
2:37tech companies, Tesla as a large part of
2:40the tech portfolio that people hold in
2:43their pension funds and their individual
2:45investor accounts, means that if you
2:48attack Musk, you're also kind of
2:50attacking one of the pillars of US
2:52political economy. So, that's kind of
2:54the money side. On the machine side,
2:56he's trying to make the world ever more
2:58dependent on his infrastructures. And
3:01the use of SpaceX as the really monopoly
3:04launch provider put things into lower
3:06earth orbit, the rolling out of lower
3:09earth orbit satellites as Starlink as
3:11kind of the default communications
3:13medium for battlefield operations and
3:15for um you know, rural consumers and so
3:18on. But then
3:19further to that, there's what I would
3:21think of as kind of the messaging piece
3:23of that or the media piece. And there
3:25he's much more targeted trying to
3:27produce kind of communicative ecosystems
3:30in which his way of framing social
3:33problems and solutions to social
3:34problems
3:35is uncontested and uncontestable. So,
3:38his purchase of Twitter in October 2022,
3:41long described as kind of one of the
3:43biggest business failures in American
3:44history, has proven to be actually
3:47probably quite effective, I would say.
3:49So, that people are caught in kind of an
3:51echo chamber of his creation. And his
3:54targeting of the midterms and his
3:57production of
3:58a flexing of his own power to make or
4:00break candidates, as he hopes, is a way
4:03to he hopes to kind of fine-tune that
4:06control over the media and messaging
4:08ecosystem and get out of head of what he
4:10worries will be a kind of regulatory
4:13wave that would accompany a Democratic
4:15majority.
4:16>> What's funny to me or interesting to me
4:18about the description you give there is
4:20you could imagine
4:22someone with Musk's portfolio of
4:24interests
4:26seeing a very different strategy as
4:27optimal because the work he does is so
4:30intertwined with the government.
4:33Being highly, highly associated
4:36with one partisan side of the fight in
4:38America and you know, Europe if the sort
4:41of right-wing parties he's been
4:42boosting,
4:43it creates risk. I mean, you talked
4:46about entrenching dependence, but he's
4:48also creating a situation where if you
4:51have in 2029,
4:53you know, President Jon Ossoff or
4:54President Gavin Newsom or President AOC
4:56and a Democratic Congress, reliance on
5:00SpaceX, on Starlink, you know, on Grok
5:02maybe in the Pentagon, can be seen as a
5:05huge risk.
5:07And so,
5:09from that side, this doesn't all look
5:11purely rational, like a master
5:12businessman just entrenching. Like, it
5:14looks like a man who believes things and
5:16is actually risking quite a lot to push
5:18his beliefs upon the world.
5:19>> Yeah, I mean, it's an unusual approach,
5:21right? I mean, the way that corporate
5:23leaders have usually tried to exercise
5:25their influence on the political
5:27landscape in the past has been slightly
5:28more from behind the scenes, of course,
5:30right? But, I would say that he's again
5:32working on two tracks. One is deepen
5:35that financial and structural dependency
5:37such that even if a President Ossoff or
5:40a President AOC comes into power, they
5:43have a limited ability to rein in his,
5:46you know, fulcrum central role in the
5:48American health [clears throat] of the
5:50stock market and its dominance in
5:52certain key frontier sectors.
5:54Um, their hands would be tied still, I
5:56think. But, at the same time, he can use
5:59this tactic of kind of
6:00hyperpolarization,
6:02which he's obviously taken as his own
6:04kind of trademark even amongst his own
6:06Silicon Valley leadership class to
6:09potentially become the favored partner
6:12for a future ruling administration. And
6:15that's also the way he's approaching the
6:16relationship to far-right parties in
6:19Europe, right? A rational person would
6:21try to come up with some kind of
6:23compromise with the ruling parties in
6:26Western Europe, make peace with the EU
6:29in some way to gain market access. He's
6:31taken an opposite approach, gone on a
6:33full-frontal attack against Brussels and
6:36the and the existing legacy centrist
6:38parties, and tried to ally which would
6:40have long thought of as he sees as the
6:42kind of Teslas of politics, the AfDs,
6:46the Restore Britains that he hopes will
6:48come from marginality and nowhere to
6:50completely disrupt and destroy the
6:52legacy institutional parties of social
6:54democracy and Christian democracy. So
6:56it's high risk, but potentially also
6:57high reward. If you find yourself then
7:00in a kind of a pole position for a
7:02changing model of governance across the
7:04board.
7:04>> I do think Musk is somebody who works
7:06backwards from visions of possible
7:08futures.
7:09And I I want to play a clip from an
7:11interview he recently gave The Economist
7:13where he describes how things things are
7:15going to play out over This was just
7:16over the 5-to-10-year timeframe.
7:18>> It would be an exercise in vanity to for
7:21me to think that I would be controlling
7:23a super genius AI that is vastly smarter
7:26than me. What my biological neural net
7:28tells me is that the most important
7:29thing for the for AI safety is to be
7:31maximally truth-seeking and curious.
7:34Uh if that's the case,
7:37uh I think it will foster humanity.
7:40>> So let's unpack that. You're sure that
7:42humans will no longer be in control in
7:4410 years' time.
7:46>> I think it is unlikely. Um in the same
7:48way that if the difference in the
7:50intelligence between AI and humans is
7:54vastly greater than the difference in
7:55intelligence between AI and chimpanzees,
7:58it's hard to imagine
8:00that the chimpanzees would be in charge.
8:02>> The The whole first half of this
8:04Economist interview he gave is sort of
8:06like this, where he's very casually just
8:08describing
8:09a world war within a decade.
8:11>> Money wouldn't exist.
8:12>> Money won't exist. Human beings have
8:14lost control of the entire world. He is
8:16not even really in control of his own
8:17companies anymore. Yeah.
8:19So, what does truth seeking and curious
8:21mean
8:23to Musk?
8:24>> To Musk, um, the curious part, in his
8:27own terms, means that given the
8:30likelihood of superintelligence
8:32exceeding human intelligence at some
8:34time in the near future,
8:36then we would need to make sure that it
8:39wants to keep humans around for its own
8:43interest, and either its own
8:44entertainment, or its own
8:47>> Yeah, I've heard it described this sort
8:48of as it's He wants an AI that would
8:50find it more entertaining to have us in
8:51the world than to not have us in the
8:52world.
8:53>> And the even more extreme version of
8:54that is like in line with simulation
8:56theory, which is that if we are just
8:59existing in a digital simulation that
9:01has been created by a future alien race,
9:04or a hyper-advanced human race, then we
9:07want to keep things entertaining enough
9:09here in this kind of reality show of the
9:11present, such that they wouldn't
9:13terminate the programming. So, that's I
9:15mean, in his own terms, that's how he
9:17describes the goal there. I think it
9:19really tracks what have been pretty
9:21substantial changes in his attitude
9:23towards AI even across the last 10
9:25years, right? And we know that in 2015
9:28he started OpenAI with Sam Altman,
9:31really at that time under the influence
9:32of the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom,
9:35whose book Superintelligence had come
9:37out the year before. And the
9:38overwhelming threat at that point was
9:40the possibility of a runaway digital
9:42superintelligence, which, in the most
9:44famous example, might, you know, turn us
9:46all into paper clips if it got out the
9:48wrong kind of a prompt. So, [snorts] at
9:50that time, he seemed to have one big
9:52message, which is, "Let's hit the
9:53brakes, slow it down, and make sure that
9:55we're aligning the values of the AI with
9:57our own." But, at the same time, he's
9:59starting Neuralink. And as he starts
10:02Neuralink, the way he describes it, in
10:04fact, directly to Altman, and another
10:06as well as in other cases, is that
10:08Neuralink is designed to accelerate our
10:11fusion with network technologies so that
10:14a human-machine symbiote, as he calls
10:17it, will be able to sort of stay out
10:19ahead of that Skynet digital
10:21superintelligence. So, that's the first
10:23phase of Musk's AI thinking is actually
10:26we need to augment human consciousness
10:29to make sure that we are accelerating a
10:31better version of the AI against the
10:33evil.
10:34>> We must become the robots to not be
10:35destroyed by the robots.
10:36>> Exactly. This attitude changes almost
10:39overnight in November 2022 with the
10:41launch of ChatGPT.
10:43With the launch of ChatGPT and the
10:45realization by him and the entire
10:47Silicon Valley entrepreneurial and
10:49leadership class that LLMs and
10:52generative AI was the new growth story
10:53that they'd been looking for for years,
10:56suddenly his whole discourse about AI
10:58changed. Instead of it being the digital
11:00superintelligence that was a concern,
11:03now it was the woke LLM which had been
11:06trained on the progressive posts and
11:08internet discourse of the era of Black
11:11Lives Matter, defend trans kids, Me Too,
11:14and iconically the image of Google
11:17Gemini's generated image of the black
11:19founding fathers kind of stood in for
11:22people like Musk and Andreessen as the
11:24danger of this new phase of AI, which in
11:27the most memorable description Musk said
11:29he feared would turn him into a woman of
11:31color. Um
11:34So, if that's your new fear, then what
11:35do you do in response? You create uh an
11:38anti-woke AI. And that is precisely what
11:41xAI is and what Grok was. The
11:43truth-seeking part is really his market
11:45proposition against what he sees as the
11:49alternative models of OpenAI and
11:51Anthropic which have been shot through,
11:54as he describes it, and contaminated
11:56with the woke mind virus.
11:58>> But also in this period that we're
12:00describing,
12:01>> Mhm.
12:02>> he [snorts] has gone through a pretty
12:03big political transformation. Musk of
12:062012, 2013,
12:09you know, pro-Obama, seems to have
12:11fairly been all Silicon Valley politics.
12:15Uh
12:17the Musk of 2022 does not.
12:20He's really becoming already the sort of
12:21leader of what we now call the the tech
12:23right.
12:24So,
12:25the shift on wokeness for him
12:28and the shift in his politics, I think
12:29predates actually in some ways his shift
12:31on AI. So, how do you understand what
12:34that shift was?
12:36>> Yeah.
12:37So, when the Obama administration wanted
12:40to do a big push into renewables to
12:43reduce dependency on fossil fuels and
12:45thus also help to get out of the Middle
12:47East, then Musk was able to profit from
12:49that getting this nearly
12:51half-billion-dollar loan from the
12:52Department of Energy.
12:54Into the Biden administration, that
12:56demand for electric autonomy, as we call
12:59it, still existed, but now it was part
13:01of also a kind of pro-worker, pro-union
13:04push, which meant that Musk wasn't one
13:06of the favored companies for the Biden
13:09White House.
13:10>> does not get invited to the electric
13:12vehicle summit.
13:13>> in a way that is kind of like roughly
13:15equivalent to the
13:17Trump roast at the White House
13:18Correspondents Dinner as the sort of
13:20initiating incident of a feeling of
13:22being, you know, if you don't like me,
13:23then forget you, I'm going to create my
13:24own club. Um one of the forms it took
13:27was, of course, the upswell of social
13:29movements making demands around racial
13:32justice, gender justice that were, of
13:35course, entering the workplaces of
13:38Silicon Valley, too, that were producing
13:40new pressures, um open letters,
13:44walkouts. This became a site of real um
13:47combative anger for the CEO class, which
13:50felt that this labor class was now
13:53exercising power over them, the
13:55management, in a way that was repellent.
13:59But also the COVID containment measures
14:02become something that really
14:04both triggers Musk's anger at his
14:07inability to shape the regulatory world
14:10around his own needs, and also a time he
14:12gets a a of validation for his
14:14opposition to the containment measures.
14:16So, his tweet where he says the
14:19coronavirus panic is dumb is his first 1
14:22million like tweet.
14:24And as a response to it, Trump responds,
14:26you know, this is outrageous, you know,
14:29reopen the Fremont factory. And then he
14:30goes ahead and just does it anyway
14:32actually against California orders and
14:34gets away with it. So, [snorts] this
14:36also points to something else I think is
14:37relevant in his rightward turn, which is
14:39his immersion into the world of social
14:42media and Twitter in particular.
14:45Which we think of as less a kind of
14:47corrupting process of his rationality
14:50and more as sort of his iterative
14:52attempt to figure out how to trigger
14:55um processes that end up actually
14:57enriching him and expanding his power.
15:00So, what can look like a kind of
15:01dissipation online or kind of online
15:04brain rot is often often actually
15:06corresponding with movement upward in
15:09the value of his stocks and his personal
15:11net worth. It's in 2021 when everyone's
15:13online and on their phones that he
15:15becomes the richest man in the world.
15:17And it's sort of by as people have
15:18described making himself into a human
15:21meme stock. So, this what he finds out
15:23online on Twitter is that, you know,
15:26polarization is actually, rather than
15:28being a kind of handicap for his
15:30accumulation model, is actually real
15:32accelerant for it.
15:33>> Well, you're saying polarization and and
15:35that is part of it.
15:37But polarization also is a method of
15:39getting attention, right? And and and
15:41and this is a way in which Trump and
15:43Musk I think have very similar
15:45psychologies.
15:47But
15:48it's so interesting with him the way all
15:50the parts are always connected. But I
15:52don't think people I don't think I had a
15:54really good sense of how rapidly his
15:56fortune has expanded. So, in 2020
15:59he has, according to estimates, $39
16:02billion.
16:02Now, it's a lot of money.
16:04If I had $39 billion, I'd be stoked.
16:07He now has a trillion dollars.
16:09Six years. In 2020 he had 4% of the
16:13wealth he has now.
16:15And what has happened inside those years
16:18is not that his companies made a lot of
16:19money. He does not have highly profit
16:22generating I mean I'm not saying there
16:23are no profits, but what happened to
16:25SpaceX, what happened to Tesla
16:27it's not that they began showing profits
16:31that shifted, you know, Musk's net
16:33worth.
16:35What did happen? How do you go from $40
16:36billion to a trillion dollars in 6
16:38years?
16:39>> Yeah, I mean the price earnings ratio of
16:41his companies are completely outrageous
16:43compared to their competitors. But they
16:45speak to what
16:47is something else is something he's
16:48perfected and and practicing. We talk
16:49about in the book as financial fabulism.
16:51So this projection not of a current set
16:55of fundamentals or a current revenue
16:56model but the promise of being able to
16:59open up perhaps infinite future
17:01revenues. He becomes, you know, the most
17:04iconic example of that. And Tesla as
17:07something that's able to plausibly
17:10present itself as the future of
17:12motorization and then maybe also the
17:15future of humanoid robots and SpaceX's
17:18ability to say, "Listen we delivered on
17:22a drop in over 90% of the cost of
17:24putting matter into orbit
17:26and turn that with over 11,000
17:28satellites in space, with over 12
17:30million million subscribers, tangibly
17:32changing the ability to win wars in
17:35places like Ukraine. These things are
17:38real um things you can point to if you
17:40want to persuade yourself that if you're
17:42going to make a bet you make it on this
17:45man.
17:46>> Well, well, let me hold it you on that
17:47for a second cuz one thing I often see
17:48and I think of it as a genuine kind of
17:50intellectual mistake.
17:53People want the people they don't like
17:56to not be impressive.
17:57>> Of course.
17:58>> And
17:59I think there is a big strain of thought
18:01that sort of exists on the left now as a
18:04understandably turn against Elon Musk
18:06and his politics. What he's [snorts]
18:08built is incredible.
18:10>> Yeah.
18:10>> And it's real. I mean we can talk about
18:12profits or non-profits and price to
18:14earnings ratios, but you can use
18:16Starlink.
18:16>> Yep.
18:17>> You know, you can drive in a Tesla. They
18:18really have made, you know, sending um
18:22tonnage into space
18:24relatively affordable in a way that it
18:26wasn't before. Like
18:28it like Musk really did do that.
18:30>> Yeah, and one of the ways he did that I
18:32think is by being ahead of the curve
18:33with the move back towards
18:35deglobalization, reshoring,
18:37re-territorialization of production
18:39models as well.
18:40>> mean by that?
18:41>> I mean that when he launched SpaceX in
18:442002 one of the ways he radically cut
18:47the cost of putting matter into orbit
18:49was by bringing a lot of the production
18:51in house. So, making bespoke or making
18:54themselves a lot of the components that
18:56they need for the rockets, not relying
18:58on subcontractors, not relying on kind
19:00of lengthy procurement models, but
19:02speeding everything up and bringing it
19:04all in house.
19:05Um Tesla famously did this as well. When
19:09they built the Gigafactories, they were
19:10trying to bring as much of the supply
19:12chain as they could under the roof of
19:14one factory, which meant that exactly in
19:172020 when automakers got absolutely
19:20slammed by the closing of borders, Tesla
19:23got hit, but they bounced up much more
19:24quickly. It was really one of the things
19:26that gave them the possibility to bounce
19:28back. So, before those big supply
19:30shocks, before COVID, before Ukraine,
19:33actually Musk was already using a
19:35partially kind of decoupled model of
19:38production. I completely agree with you
19:40that it's a real stumbling block for
19:42many critics who simply want to
19:44short-circuit to this idea he's just a
19:45liar and a grifter
19:47or even simply a crony capitalist. In
19:50fact, he's not just a crony capitalist
19:52because he's pushing out often the kind
19:55of technological frontier for economies
19:58that do business with him.
20:00>> If you're not a subscriber to The New
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20:08Times app.
20:12I think that brings together a couple
20:13interesting things here because as you
20:15mentioned to justify the valuations,
20:17Musk is not just selling a vision of the
20:20world that he has already achieved.
20:22>> Mhm.
20:23He's selling a like a different vision
20:25of the future and and he sort of
20:26described what it was to the Economist.
20:28So, I want to play that here.
20:29>> What is What will your companies be
20:31doing in 10 years?
20:33And how will they make money?
20:37>> Well, you can really think of the
20:38economy as
20:40uh digital and physical intelligence.
20:42You need the end effect is in the form
20:43of
20:44humanoid robotics, um humanoid you need
20:47to basically a lots of bots. In a
20:50nutshell, you need lots of bots.
20:52Um and then you can go from
20:54um
20:55intelligence manifesting itself only
20:58digitally to
21:00shaping atoms.
21:03Um
21:04and you say what what what is an
21:05economy? An economy is
21:07um
21:08the production of goods and provision of
21:11services.
21:12And if you have vast numbers of
21:15robots
21:17uh with uh vast amounts of digital
21:19intelligence you have a
21:21sort of
21:23a quasi quasi-infinite
21:26economy.
21:28So so this is
21:29this is really
21:31the the the the future is going to be
21:32very very different from the past.
21:35>> So So this is currently the promise of
21:37what I would call like Musk Industries,
21:39which is not necessarily that he is
21:40going to individually dominate AI. It's
21:43that
21:44they are going to be the company that
21:46takes AI
21:49the kind of conglomerate of companies
21:50that takes AI
21:52out of bits and into atoms. That they
21:55will dominate the AI robotics
21:57intersection. I I think whether they
21:59will or not is obviously something we
22:01can't know, but I think there's
22:02something worth like getting at at a
22:04deeper level of the world being
22:06envisioned and promoted here, which is
22:08what is the role that human beings play
22:11in this future.
22:12>> I mean, it's a very difficult one to
22:13sell, right? And one of the strange
22:15things about that interview is that he
22:17says, you know, economically,
22:18civilizationally, we're moving to a
22:20situation of kind of
22:22if not subordination then simply
22:24marginalization by superintelligence.
22:26So, for that to be the goal to which
22:29you're working is first of all very
22:31difficult to build consent for and
22:33legitimacy for, obviously.
22:35>> [snorts]
22:36>> Um but it also requires a huge amount of
22:38synergies between neighboring
22:40technologies. And one of the ways he's
22:43actually unlocked the level of fortune
22:45he has this year is by making progress
22:48towards bringing together that
22:50vertically integrated Musk Industries
22:53model under one kind of label.
22:56It's only been recently that XAI
22:59absorbed X.com and then SpaceX in turn
23:03absorbed XAI. And now he's vocally
23:06calling for the merger of Tesla and
23:09SpaceX, which would be the largest
23:11merger in history and would precisely
23:13bring together the part of his empire
23:16that does atoms in the form of humanoid
23:18robots with the part that does the AI
23:21under the umbrella of SpaceX. But then I
23:24think one aspect of Muskism which we
23:27need to keep our eye on is that he's
23:29actually um propelled by the need to
23:32create an impression of invulnerability,
23:35which is actually belied by the truth.
23:38So, if you pick up the SpaceX prospectus
23:40and read through the risk factors,
23:43number one risk factor is
23:45national legislation. These are the
23:47things that actually keep Musk up at
23:49night, right? Is the moves being made by
23:51national governments to throw sand in
23:55the treads of the tank that he's trying
23:58to drive towards his goal. So, that's I
24:01think something to bear in mind, too, is
24:03like his impression of invulnerability
24:05is actually part of his political
24:07project.
24:07>> And beneath the the sort of
24:10mechanism of legislation and the risk of
24:12legislation to him
24:14is also what populations believe. What
24:18[snorts] they believe about the world,
24:18what they believe about him, what they
24:20want.
24:21And this I think brings together like
24:23both a near-term and long-term
24:24obsession.
24:26Musk has, and you've written about this,
24:27uh, a sort of more specific
24:30conception of what he calls woke mind
24:32virus. When when he is describing it,
24:33the metaphor is more like computer virus
24:36than I think people quite realize. So,
24:38what is to him the woke mind virus?
24:40Because I think it's a little bit
24:41different than what people think of as
24:42wokeness.
24:43>> Yes. So, the term viruses of the mind
24:46was coined by Richard Dawkins in the
24:48early 1990s, and a well-respected, if
24:51sort of incendiary conservative,
24:53evolutionary biologist, and not
24:55coincidentally, the same guy who coined
24:57the term meme in his book The Selfish
24:59Gene from 1976.
25:01And the two arguments work together, the
25:03meme and the mind virus. Both suggest
25:06that ideology and belief are nothing
25:09more than these kind of discrete units
25:12that move between individuals mediated
25:15through, by the 1990s, network
25:17technologies. And he is using a direct,
25:20um, analogy between the computer virus
25:23and the religious belief. And Musk has
25:26absolutely swallowed this notion whole
25:29to the point that, I think, if you want
25:31to understand how he understands
25:32politics, or the problem of consent, or
25:34indeed the problem of truth, it's
25:37inseparable from this idea of humans and
25:39machines being networked together into
25:41what he calls cybernetic collectives,
25:43within which problems of political
25:46affiliation, support, loss of support,
25:49dissent, anger, are triggered always
25:51through the multiplication or the
25:54reduction of certain memes or certain
25:56mind viruses. So, because he saw the
25:59mind viruses of racial justice demands
26:03and so on leading to a dominance of a
26:05blocking coalition against him as he saw
26:08it in the 2020s, then he needs to
26:10propagate the anti-woke mind viruses
26:13that will defeat those, which seems like
26:15an outrageous way of thinking about
26:17politics, but this is where I think what
26:19I talked about at the beginning as a
26:20kind of communicative dependency becomes
26:23really important. Because what SpaceX
26:26now is is a kind of extraordinary
26:29end-to-end vertically integrated
26:31communicative space.
26:32>> What [snorts] does that mean when you
26:33say communicative space?
26:34>> I mean it reaches from chatbots to
26:37satellites. And what he's trying to do
26:39there, and what he's selling the
26:41comparative advantage of SpaceX is
26:43having, is access to the real world um
26:46emotions of the humans who are posting
26:49on x.com. So he says you have a kind of
26:52real-time news engine, um opinion
26:55engine, update and feelings engine,
26:58meaning that your LLM is also more, you
27:02know, au courant and up-to-date. And of
27:05course, the implication is that if you
27:07can create that as a kind of
27:08hermetically sealed silo, then you can
27:11also become the controller of that space
27:13of discourse. So the way that he's
27:15transformed
27:17X since his acquisition of Twitter is
27:20designed to boost exactly the kind of
27:22messages that are coming closest
27:25proximity to his through actual
27:26monetization of the accounts involved.
27:29There's an extraordinary news story
27:31about the British far-right politician
27:33Rupert Lowe, who made a tweet about the
27:36incompatibility of Muslims with British
27:38civilization. And there was a follow-on
27:40report of how many thousands of pounds
27:42he'd actually earned through memes,
27:45through x.com. So in in Musk's mind,
27:48he's producing a kind of mind virus
27:51engine,
27:52which [snorts] he could also call truth.
27:54And if he can, you know,
27:56absolutely control the algorithms within
27:58which that is magnified or contained,
28:00then he will have domination over the
28:03media.
28:03>> I I I want you to hold on the sort of
28:05more ideological dimension of this
28:07belief. So,
28:09when he understands
28:12the quote-unquote woke mind virus
28:13>> Yep.
28:15>> as
28:17a threat to truth-seeking,
28:19as a creation of
28:22a kind of corrupted Western civilization
28:24that has lost that will have lost some
28:26of the values that drove it forward
28:28before. He talks a lot now about Western
28:29civilization.
28:30>> Yeah.
28:31>> What is he saying specifically?
28:33>> Yeah.
28:34Well, here I think it's actually helpful
28:35to come in through the back door through
28:36some of his science fiction obsessions,
28:38right? I mean, the Foundation series
28:41from Isaac Asimov is something he refers
28:43to constantly. His most recent child is
28:46named Seldon after the Hari Seldon
28:49figure
28:50in the Foundation series who is
28:52described as a kind of a brilliant
28:55mathematician really who introduces a
28:57discipline called psychohistory which
28:59through kind of manipulation of the
29:01present will ensure the survival of
29:03civilization. And it's relevant because
29:05it's kind of a mixture of rationality
29:08and attention to mass emotion and the
29:11way that crowds operate and the way mobs
29:14work. And the problem with Seldon's plan
29:17is that it's confronted with someone
29:18who's even better at controlling
29:20emotions which is someone called the
29:21mule. And Musk's understanding of
29:24communications is always this
29:26combination of a world of rationality
29:28and then a world of what he calls the
29:30limbic instinct or the kind of animal
29:33impulses that drive us. He sees and
29:36there I don't think he's totally
29:37incorrect the success of social networks
29:40as being the way that they draw on both
29:42of those kind of resources. And he
29:44understands his own interventions as
29:47skillfully manipulating two of those
29:49simultaneously. So that I think helps to
29:53explain how he understands his role.
29:55It's quite fascinating actually that the
29:57richest man in the world sees himself in
29:59kind of a transitional function to
30:01really hand over human history to
30:04post-human history. I mean, the vision
30:06of super intelligences reducing us to
30:09the role of chimpanzees is not actually
30:12something anyone with any level of
30:15influence has tried to
30:16persuade the mass of people to go along
30:19with before. And that alone means that
30:21he plays with, you know, these
30:23categories of truth, curiosity, and
30:25emotion in ways that I think can
30:26sometimes be jarring and unfamiliar.
30:29>> A lot of it is unfamiliar and when you
30:31hear Musk talk
30:33for a person who
30:35operates with such a high sense of
30:36agency. When he begins talking about
30:38this, he abandons agency.
30:40>> Mhm. But you might imagine a person who
30:41felt that way, like not being that
30:43interested in day-to-day politics at the
30:45moment, but but he is. [clears throat]
30:46And And this is where these
30:48twin obsessions, I think, come together.
30:50Maybe a way to get into this is to play
30:52a clip from Rogan,
30:54which I think connects some of what
30:55you're talking about with the woke mind
30:56virus and and truth-seeking
30:58to to this idea he has that there is
30:59like a central security vulnerability in
31:03Western civilization.
31:05>> So that we've got civilizational
31:08suicidal empathy going on.
31:10And it's like I believe in empathy. Like
31:11I think you should care about other
31:12people, but you need to have empathy for
31:14for civilization as a whole and not
31:16commit to a civilizational suicide.
31:18>> Also, don't let someone use your empathy
31:20against you so they can completely
31:22control your state and then do it
31:24insanely bad job of managing it and
31:27never get removed.
31:28>> The the the the fundamental weakness of
31:32Western civilization is empathy.
31:36The empathy exploit. The the ex- They're
31:38It's They're exploiting a a a bug in
31:42Western civilization, which is the
31:44empathy response.
31:46So
31:47and I've I I think, you know, empathy is
31:49good, but you need to think it through
31:51and not just be
31:53programmed like a robot.
31:55>> When he says, "We've got civilizational
31:57suicidal empathy going on." When he says
32:00our civilization might be committing
32:02suicide,
32:03what is he saying is happening?
32:06>> I mean, concretely, when he says
32:07something like that, he's uh
32:09echoing a very common
32:11point of discussion on the European far
32:13right. To the far right and to Musk, the
32:16real problem with where society is going
32:19is not that there are a lot of people
32:21trying to or coming to Europe or the
32:23United States, but the problem is that
32:26the liberals have decided it's a good
32:28idea to allow people from radically
32:30different cultures and radically
32:31different religions to come to the heart
32:34of Western civilization. So that notion
32:37that precise notion of suicidal empathy
32:39is all about refugee policy and
32:41immigration policy and is at the heart
32:44of his demands for what he calls
32:47remigration. But, I think at a deeper
32:49level, it comes to his um
32:52unwillingness to kind of tarry with the
32:54traditional concepts of modern political
32:56thought. So, if you think about what
33:00every previous political thinker has
33:02been forced to uh contend with over the
33:05last 250 years, certainly in this
33:07country, is categories like democracy,
33:10popular sovereignty, some idea
33:13eventually of like a care for the
33:14people,
33:15extended sort of political versions of
33:17what you might call empathy, the ways in
33:19which communities are imagined as being
33:22composed of people who are relative
33:24peers or equals at some level.
33:27That whole legacy
33:29Musk, I think, would see as part of the
33:31contamination of Western civilization by
33:33empathy. So, social order becomes a
33:36programming problem. And in programming,
33:39uh
33:39attempts to kind of transform the core
33:42code that you're working on are not
33:44interpreted as a possibility for
33:46consensus building or compromise, but
33:48simply sites of contamination that need
33:51to be programmed away.
33:53>> When I've heard Musk defend this view,
33:55the argument he makes, the argument I
33:57think he's getting at here, to to sort
33:59of extend what you're saying,
34:00is it Europe and the United States,
34:04primarily who he's talking about,
34:06have been through empathy for
34:08individuals
34:09allowing mass numbers of people to come
34:12into their countries who do not
34:14fundamentally share
34:16their values and their premises. When
34:17when he says here that
34:19you
34:21k- you need to be careful not have so
34:23much empathy for the individual that you
34:24don't have empathy for a civilization as
34:25a whole, that's I think what he's
34:27describing.
34:29And I think it raises maybe a number of
34:32of questions here, but one of the core
34:35ones to me
34:37is how his upbringing
34:39in apartheid South Africa has
34:43like influenced or shaped this set of
34:46concerns.
34:48>> One doesn't have a lot of kind of
34:49documentary
34:51evidence to work with. So, there's a
34:53certain leap of interpretation that's
34:54necessary, but it's not a very
34:56big leap of interpretation. And one of
34:59the things we describe in the book is
35:01the way that being a minority privileged
35:04population racially marked in South
35:06Africa that drifted through
35:10everyday life and one's whole life
35:12course in a way that drifted past sort
35:15of faceless colored masses of the
35:19African population
35:21helps to reinforce in very obvious ways
35:23a sort of sense of the non-player
35:25characters and the playing characters.
35:27And South Africa itself is not a
35:29traditional kind of modern nation-state
35:32in the sense that it's built on a kind
35:34of
35:35asymmetrical logic where the majority of
35:38the residents are actually just there in
35:40so far as they're useful to the minority
35:42of residents. So, those old problems of
35:45what is popular sovereignty, what is
35:47national self-determination, how can you
35:49get a group of people who live next to
35:51each other to see each other in sort of
35:53bonds of reciprocal attention or minimal
35:56care simply didn't apply in later
35:58apartheid South Africa, right? It's like
36:00as effectively one of the last
36:01decolonizing
36:03sites in the world, it lived on with
36:05that imperial two-tier logic much longer
36:09than the rest of the world did. So, I
36:11think it's easier for him to just set
36:14aside what to most political thinkers
36:17are things that need to be considered
36:19seriously. I think it's worth looking at
36:21how that breaks down concretely as well.
36:24So, how have previous oligarchs, how
36:26have previous titans of industry secured
36:29popular consent, right? This is actually
36:31where the comparison to Fordism is
36:33helpful. Ford himself virulently
36:35anti-semite, violently anti-union, and
36:38yet Fordism is something we associate
36:41with collective bargaining agreements,
36:43upward generational mobility, the
36:45construction of the
36:47single-family breadwinner model, the
36:50welfare state even. How did that happen?
36:53Well, it happened because through social
36:54struggle, through enlightened
36:56legislation, and through democratic
36:58pressure, a compromise or a social
37:00contract emerged in which people were
37:03minimally willing to go along with the
37:05way that this guy was going to design
37:07the factory and the way he was going to
37:09make his money. What's the equivalent
37:11for Musks, right? What is the social
37:13contract that people like Musk are
37:15proposing? Where is the equivalent of
37:17Carnegie's libraries in the case of
37:19Musk? You can look concretely at the
37:21Musk Foundation, which few people have
37:24heard of, but is one of the top 10
37:27endowed philanthropic foundations in the
37:28United States. Why have few people heard
37:31of it? Because they routinely don't
37:33spend the 5% of their assets that
37:34they're required to do as a 501c3
37:38philanthropic foundation in the United
37:39States. And when they do, who do they
37:41give it to? As in the recent example,
37:43they gave it to a school called Ad Astra
37:47that is next to SpaceX in Texas that was
37:50designed pretty much exclusively for
37:52employees of Musk. So, that vision of
37:55kind of outward-facing social purpose,
37:58his
37:59complete reneging of that is itself
38:02quite extraordinary, right? And and and
38:04and sets him apart actually from others
38:06in his class, right? The Gates
38:08Foundation
38:11arguably
38:12um if empathy at a basic level is a woke
38:16mind virus, then the Gates Foundation is
38:18thoroughly infected with it, right? I
38:19mean, they have a vision of saving as
38:21many lives as possible no matter where
38:23they are on the planet. Tons of
38:25critiques associated with that, of
38:26course, but a pretty standard way of
38:28trying to buy consent under conditions
38:30of grotesque inequality.
38:32So, it's um it's an extraordinarily
38:34bold, I think,
38:36a front to all of the normal ways we
38:38historians have thought about how
38:41instability is stabilized in moments of
38:43extreme change. And what's amazing
38:46really for me is to see how resilient
38:49he's been despite the depth of his
38:51provocations.
38:53>> One of the reasons I wanted to have you
38:54on was because you wrote a book before,
38:56the book you did with Ben Tarnoff on
38:57Muscism.
38:59That I think is important to to Musk, to
39:02understanding Musk, maybe to
39:03understanding some of the modern right.
39:06The book is called Hayek's Bastards,
39:08which is If you don't mind, just tell me
39:10about the the main argument of that.
39:12>> The main argument of that is that there
39:15were a group of people who called
39:16themselves neoliberals, right? Coined it
39:19in 1938.
39:21And when they called themselves
39:22neoliberals, they meant that they needed
39:25to figure out how to protect the
39:27principles of market freedom in a time
39:30when that was under challenge from, as
39:31they saw, the left and the right. So,
39:33some of these people became quite
39:34famous, the Milton Friedmans, Friedrich
39:36Hayeks, Gary Becker, George Stigler. And
39:40through the Cold War, of course, they
39:42um
39:43exercised their political influence as
39:45well they could, became favorites of
39:48Thatcher and Reagan. And come the end of
39:50the Cold War, one would think that they
39:52had reached their ultimate victory,
39:54right? And yet, and this is what was so
39:56fascinating, when I went back to look at
39:58transcripts of the meetings that they
39:59were having, the papers they were
40:01publishing, as the Berlin Wall fell, as
40:03the Soviet Union fell apart, they were
40:06actually panicked about a new set of
40:08threats. The red enemy, as they often
40:11put it, had turned into a green one.
40:13Remember, this was an early high point
40:15of activism against um greenhouse gases
40:19and the dangers of what was then more
40:20often called the greenhouse effect and
40:23global warming than climate change. They
40:26were worried about the resurgent demands
40:29for affirmative action and
40:32equality of representation in the
40:33workplace, equal pay. They were worried
40:35about minority sexual demands from the
40:38gay rights movement to the feminist
40:41movement. So, this becomes important
40:43because it creates the conditions for an
40:45alliance which would only really come to
40:48full fruition, um years later, between
40:51people who wanted to defend free market
40:54freedoms as best they could with people
40:56who seemed to have opposition to those
40:58same progressive politics but for
41:00different reasons. So, this is the
41:02moment of the paleo-conservative
41:04alliance, for example, between a radical
41:08libertarian like Murray Rothbard with
41:11someone who was mostly interested in
41:13cultural nationalism like Pat Buchanan.
41:16Alternative for Germany is a perfect
41:18example of this as well.
41:19Founded by neoliberal economists who
41:21thought the euro was being mismanaged.
41:24Creating alliances with
41:25ethno-nationalists
41:27and opponents of Muslim immigration. How
41:30these two things ended up getting linked
41:33together seems to be like an important
41:35question to figure out about our
41:37politics.
41:37>> Well, one of the ways that I understand
41:39you as making the argument is that
41:41they're linked together in a view that
41:44very fundamental
41:47categories and hierarchies that persist
41:49in society are are natural.
41:52That they reflect
41:54IQ differentials, cultural
41:55differentials,
41:57you know, people who are more or less
41:58fit either at the individual level, at
42:00the group level, etc. And what I thought
42:02was interesting about this book in
42:03conversation with your Musk book
42:05is that to me when when I see sort of
42:07the way Musk talks about the woke mind
42:09virus
42:10to me there's a lot of this in it. This
42:12sort of sense that
42:14there are important hierarchies,
42:16categories in society and that the
42:18danger comes from
42:20a kind of constant progressive push or a
42:22woke push
42:24to
42:25dissolve them and that you can't have
42:27Western civilization without the sort of
42:29hierarchies upon which Western
42:30civilization was was built.
42:32And I just sort of interpret a lot of
42:34Musk's political activity
42:37as not about free markets or any of
42:38these other things but about this.
42:41>> Yeah, I mean the subtitle to that book
42:42is race, gold, IQ, and the capitalism of
42:45the far right. And in all of those cases
42:48there was
42:49expressed uh, belief that nature was an
42:53unequal place and it distributed gains
42:56unequally either through birth or, you
42:59know, territorial endowments and that to
43:01deny that basic natural inequality was
43:04to, you know, pave the road to serfdom
43:07as Hayek described it in a new way. Now
43:09it would be paved with green bricks and
43:10pink bricks instead of red bricks. And
43:13someone like Musk, I think, absolutely
43:15falls into that category. Where I think
43:17the '90s conversation gets updated and
43:19kind of, uh, transformed in our present
43:22moment is especially around a category
43:23like IQ.
43:24>> [snorts]
43:25>> So, IQ is fascinating because in the
43:271990s it came surging back for a few
43:30different reasons. The arguments that
43:32put it back on the table were especially
43:34those of Charles Murray, the think
43:35tanker, and Richard Herrnstein, the
43:37Harvard psychologist, in their enormous
43:39best seller, The Bell Curve, from 1994.
43:43And that book said two things. It said,
43:45"At the one end of the bell curve, we're
43:47going to get people whose IQ is going to
43:49be ever more determinative of economic
43:51success because of the knowledge economy
43:53we're in. And at the low end of that
43:54bell curve, we're going to have people
43:56who are going to be less and less able
43:58to perform in this knowledge economy and
44:00they're going to be a social problem."
44:02And the incendiary part, of course, that
44:05there are group differences in racial
44:07intelligence such that we can assume
44:09that there will be disproportionately
44:11large number of black people at that
44:13bottom end of the bell curve. So, the
44:15era of the knowledge economy is also the
44:17era of mass incarceration and the real,
44:20um, turn towards more punitive police
44:22law and order policies. And the way that
44:24this was mapped onto an idea of who is
44:26equipped and who isn't for the big
44:28transition in how money will be made and
44:30jobs will look ends up being a pretty
44:32good kind of way to read that. Why
44:35that's different now is that by their
44:37own statements,
44:39the tech leadership now assumes that
44:42almost all of those knowledge jobs are
44:44going to be automated away.
44:46Right? So, if IQ was predicting even if
44:49the far 10% of the curve for the people
44:52who would thrive in the coming internet
44:54world, then what happens if that's now
44:56been reduced to like 0.1% because all
45:00those other jobs, the coders, the
45:02project managers, the copywriters, the
45:04technical writers, are all going to be
45:06done by LLMs and agents, which is what
45:08they of course are banking on. Then you
45:11have a question where AI has actually
45:13eaten IQ, and now you've gone from just
45:15a cognitive elite, which is what
45:17Herrnstein and Murray called it, to a
45:20kind of hyper hyper small cognitive
45:22super aristocracy.
45:23>> I want to stay on this point because
45:26to me
45:28this kind of coheres a lot of things in
45:31Musk that are puzzling from the outside.
45:35Which is, you know, you've got this guy
45:37for a long time, the long-term vision is
45:40the most important thing is expanding
45:41the light cone of human consciousness
45:43through the stars. Now there's a sort
45:45of, you know,
45:47kind of seems like bending of the
45:49psychic need to the AI superiority.
45:53Musk is at the same time very worried
45:54about falling birth rates
45:56>> Yeah.
45:57>> as he is destroying like foreign aid,
46:00which certainly help people thrive and
46:03be alive and, you know, live long lives
46:05and reproduce
46:07at the same time that he is virulently
46:09anti at least immigration policies of
46:11many of these countries. And it's like
46:15where does this sort of guy who on the
46:17one hand appears to believe in just like
46:18maximizing the quantity of consciousness
46:20fit with this guy who seems to not
46:23really like a lot of humanity? Where
46:25does this guy who believes in humanity
46:27fit with this guy who seems to be
46:28accelerating, you know, the AI turnover?
46:30But if your sort of fundamental view of
46:33the world
46:34is about a kind of cognitive hierarchy
46:38and you have certain views about, you
46:40know, where AI will sit in that, where
46:42different cultures sit in that
46:44it's not like one-to-one with any
46:46individual thing, not one-to-one with
46:48race, not even one-to-one with silicon
46:49versus flesh. It's just one-to-one with
46:52a certain vision
46:54of
46:54who or what qualifies as having like the
46:57capacity to be a main character in this
47:01performance?
47:03Then a lot of it I think begins to fall
47:05into a
47:06an unsettling but a kind of like
47:09coherent space.
47:11>> Yeah. No, I mean I think there's a
47:12couple ways to look at it. I mean one is
47:14to draw back on his grandfather's
47:17ideology, right? Which I hesitate to do
47:19too much because there's no evidence
47:21that Musk himself was influenced by his
47:23maternal grandfather. His maternal
47:25grandfather Joshua Haldeman was a very
47:28active member of something called
47:29Technocracy Incorporated in Canada in
47:32the 1930s. And what Technocracy
47:34Incorporated was proposing was something
47:36very similar to what we're talking about
47:37here. It was about the dissolution of
47:40the existing price system, the
47:42dissolution of democracy altogether, the
47:44reduction of the unit of exchange and I
47:47guess or value to something called an
47:49erg, which was the unit of energy that
47:51each human is able to produce in their
47:52life. And the rational allocation of
47:55those ergs would be overseen by a very,
47:57very small but elite cast of engineers.
48:01And that is a extremely, you know,
48:04far-fetched but very radical vision that
48:07actually on the from the menu of
48:09existing political ideologies probably
48:11comes the closest to what it seems like
48:14Musk is describing. But I think to get
48:17there is there are a few steps involved,
48:20right? And and [laughter]
48:22Sorry, that had a lot of understanding
48:24to
48:25Um
48:26So there is the problem of the
48:28transition right now for Musk. I think
48:30it's a central problem, which is how do
48:31we get even from where we are now to
48:34this 10-year mile marker, to the end of
48:36his life, right? Actually, he has no
48:38real plans for his succession. It's one
48:41of the extraordinary things about SpaceX
48:43from a corporate law point of view is
48:45the he has 85% of the voting shares. If
48:48he dies tomorrow and you'd have simply
48:50have to wait for those shares to be
48:51allotted. So that I think he's really
48:53banking on that transition having taken
48:55place in his own lifetime. And then how
48:58do you get there, right? And this is
48:59where the relationship to the high-x
49:02bastards discourse is actually relevant
49:03again, because one of the arguments I
49:05make in that book is that under these
49:08um in atmosphere of uncertainty, times
49:11of unrest, then there is a tendency, as
49:13within the investor world, to do a
49:15flight to safety. And what these
49:17far-right thinkers, in association with
49:19neoliberal thinkers, were doing was
49:20offering different forms of refuge and
49:24safety where a certain kind of value
49:25would be protected and more durable. So,
49:28those were things, you know, your
49:29whiteness will save you, your access to
49:32a gold hoard will save you, your
49:34citizenship value, which was one of
49:36Bannon's talking points in the first
49:38Trump campaign, will save you. The
49:41problem with Musk now is if he's saying
49:43that the people who will get through the
49:46filter are such a small minority that
49:49how do you sell this vision to enough
49:51people to let you realize your goals in
49:54the medium term, except I think
49:57defaulting to very shopworn scripts of
50:00ethnonationalism and social war. So, his
50:04decision to say the way I'm going to win
50:06consent is simply to make you frightened
50:08of outsiders and make you believe you
50:11need my technology to save your lives of
50:14yourself and your family is a way that
50:17politicians have used to justify a lack
50:19of material redistribution for, you
50:21know, over 100 years. There's actually
50:22nothing new about that, and it's
50:24actually one of his, I would say, less
50:26innovative sort of interventions is this
50:28belief that simply memeing the fear of
50:31the invader will be enough to get you
50:34through that transitional moment until
50:36you get to, quite literally, you know,
50:38lift off or escape [music] velocity.
50:47>> [music]
50:52>> I always thought the reason the
50:52Musk-Trump alliance
50:55was so potent, particularly in its early
50:57moments, before Musk kind of discredited
50:59himself as a direct actor through Doge.
51:02>> Yeah.
51:03>> But was that one they recognized in each
51:05other and particularly Musk recognized
51:07in Trump, it's why I think endorsed him
51:09after the assassination attempt when
51:10Trump raised the bloody fist.
51:11>> Mhm.
51:12>> That what Trump in these in his third
51:15campaign for president began to
51:17represent was a return of masculine will
51:20to politics.
51:21Like out of this era of
51:24>> Yeah.
51:24>> you know, woke feminized
51:25consensus-oriented politics that that
51:28and for a lot of people like this idea
51:30of the builder, the industrialist,
51:32right? The Ayn Randian Superman.
51:34>> The world spirit on horseback.
51:36>> spirit on horseback. That you know,
51:39Trump began to embody some of that. I
51:42don't think he does now, but there's
51:43this way in which I think what to Musk's
51:45many many many many fans are like
51:49I think
51:49young to middle-aged male fans
51:53what he represents is this kind of like
51:55masculine conquering impulse. It's why I
51:57think some of the
51:59kind of scary visions of the future he
52:01presents
52:04at the level not of content but of
52:05texture
52:07they don't always scare people because
52:08to like hear a person saying this is to
52:11hear a person saying
52:13like
52:14we will sally boldly forth and try to
52:17forge a glorious and unknown future for
52:20humanity
52:21even if it's one that on the face of it
52:23barely seems like a future for humanity
52:25at all, but at least at least it is not
52:28afraid of the future.
52:30>> Yeah, and I think it also sets up a kind
52:32of, you know, Pascal's wager or kind of
52:34Roko's Basilisk dynamic, which is like
52:36the closer you are to him, the closer
52:38you adhere to his vision, then the more
52:40likely is that you'll be one of the ones
52:42who gets through the filter, right? So,
52:44if he's the one who is making the
52:45future, then to deny him would basically
52:48be to doom yourself to obsolescence. And
52:50that's, you know, not an exchange that a
52:53lot of people are willing to make. But I
52:55think the important thing to see, you
52:56know, just not so as not to give him too
52:58much credit in this is to see how he's
53:01actually managed to monopolize a lot of
53:03things that were the product of
53:05collective will creation and collective
53:07intelligence, right? That I think
53:09directs attention to the task of reform,
53:12which is like how can you
53:14dethrone Musk? Not in the sense of
53:17throwing away all of the technology that
53:19he produced by often piggybacking on
53:21other people's innovations, but how can
53:23you can you create a different story
53:25whereby it's, you know, the people, the
53:27nation who decide this and not just one
53:30man and his posts? Well,
53:31>> that I think brings us maybe back into
53:33the more material realm of immediate
53:35politics. Because one of the things that
53:39strikes me about what we are seeing now
53:42is that it is a fundamentally unstable
53:45equilibrium.
53:46So, you have
53:47Elon Musk, who as you have described,
53:50his companies are inextricably
53:52intertwined with politics.
53:55It would be hard to unwind the state
53:57from that.
53:57>> Absolutely.
53:58>> But also, by that very same token,
54:01if you're a Democrat, right? The idea
54:04that you're going to be dependent on on
54:05Musk and he can turn off Starlink when,
54:07you know, if Ukraine or some other
54:10country or ally or even America is doing
54:12something he doesn't like, that that's
54:13very, very dangerous.
54:14>> Yeah.
54:15>> You know, one thing that that
54:17intertwining with the state creates is
54:18both like
54:20a a vulnerability. And so, it becomes
54:22very, very, very dangerous for him the
54:24more he becomes allied with a kind of
54:26more extreme version of the right to
54:28have
54:29any left-wing or centrist candidates
54:31win, really like anywhere in the world
54:33in the countries that are dependent on
54:34him.
54:34And that just
54:37at some point either I think you end up
54:39in a situation where like Musk needs to
54:41break the opposition to him.
54:44Or it's like the state needs to contain
54:46the threat.
54:47>> Yeah.
54:47>> It just seems fundamentally unstable.
54:49It's not like he gave $10 million. He
54:51just dropped about $450 million like
54:53it's nothing because to him it is
54:55nothing.
54:56>> Right?
54:57>> Yeah. I mean, the way that my co-author
54:59and I were talking about this and we
55:00had, interestingly, I would say more
55:02pragmatic conversations about Musk and
55:04Muskism in the book in Europe than we've
55:06had in the United States. I think the
55:09proximity of Musk and the problems
55:11you're describing to Americans makes it
55:14very hard to deal with it rationally
55:16because there's such a desire to lash
55:18out at this level of kind of cathexes,
55:21like the suturing together of the future
55:23of the American economy with Musk and
55:26his products that sometimes there's a
55:28will to kind of moralize and
55:30psychologize and just bat him away and
55:31denounce him without further reflection.
55:34Whereas in Europe we found that there
55:36was a kind of a three R strategy that we
55:39were discussing and people were
55:40discussing. One is regulation, of
55:42course, is one model, right? And that's
55:43you could say the route the route the EU
55:45is taking.
55:46The other model though is replacement.
55:48So you look at what Musk has made and
55:50you say, "How much would it cost to make
55:52substitutes?" And often the cost is
55:55very, very high.
55:56But the third model is really to kind of
55:58reimagine what the heck this tech is
56:01even for. And that's where I think
56:03looking at the range of Musk's um
56:05history of business creation is actually
56:07helpful because we alluded to this
56:09before, but the kind of promise of
56:11electric autonomy, for example, that he
56:14was holding out when Tesla was mostly
56:16making EVs, but also when it was making
56:18solar panels and, you know, battery
56:21storage units was actually um much more
56:24socially useful and potentially
56:26inspiring than what he has done with his
56:29businesses ever since. So I think that
56:32one attitude there is to is to start
56:34from first principles and just say like,
56:36"What are we even, you know, investing
56:38in any of this for in the first place?"
56:39>> What do we want?
56:40>> What do we want? And And actually one of
56:42the pedagogic virtues of Musk and his
56:44very monstrousness is he's made that
56:46question impossible not to ask, right?
56:49Because if the answer to that question
56:50is what we want is continued level of
56:53being completely fused with this man,
56:55then I think a lot of people on
56:57reflection would not want that. So he's
56:59made us ask that question and he knows
57:01that he's put himself into a kind of a
57:03difficult situation with people asking
57:05that question. Hence the impression of
57:07inevitability. So in the Economist
57:09interview he said, "It's not like we can
57:11stop AI right now." There's no red
57:13button that says stop. Actually, of
57:15course there is, right? Generative AI on
57:17its current model requires
57:19uh
57:20enormous amount of build-out of compute
57:22infrastructure that actually right now
57:25is being slowed down to the point of
57:27even stopping through hundreds of
57:29moratoria across the country. So, it's
57:31actually not true that there's
57:33inevitability to the world that he's
57:35imagining. It actually is true that we
57:36have options. And breaking out of that
57:39kind of cosmic um
57:41you know
57:43vector that he's produced through the
57:44the uses of the attention economy is the
57:46first step in that. But, I think it gets
57:48even more pragmatic than that. I'll give
57:49you an example. On his newsletter this
57:51week, Paul Krugman,
57:54centrist liberal economist, has talked
57:57in two segments about nationalizing
57:59Starlink.
58:01>> Paul's only a centrist to you.
58:03>> [laughter]
58:03>> You know.
58:04>> Yeah. But, this is actually not
58:06something that you would have expected
58:07him to talk about a few years ago,
58:09right? I mean, the use of the Defense
58:11Production Act, the comparisons to the
58:14of the nationalization of Montgomery
58:15Ward,
58:17a pragmatic economist until recently
58:19would have said, "If you nationalize a
58:20country a company that's in the top 10
58:22on the Nasdaq, you're going to trigger a
58:24recession. There'll be cascading effects
58:26of loss of confidence, repricing of
58:28risk."
58:29>> Loss of incentives for future companies
58:30to build this kind of capacity.
58:31>> Absolutely. But, the very fact that this
58:33kind of controlled demolition of the
58:35very Muskist dependencies you're
58:36describing is now being brought onto the
58:39agenda, I think is very encouraging.
58:41>> But, but this is what I actually mean by
58:42an unstable equilibrium. I saw those
58:44pieces from Paul. I thought they're
58:45very, very interesting. And and as you
58:47say, it's interesting that Paul, who,
58:48you know, I call him like sort of a
58:50progressive economist, but not a
58:52communist.
58:53>> Yeah.
58:53>> Right? Not a person prone to
58:55nationalization.
58:57>> to
58:58>> Um the fact that he was, you know,
59:00talking about this, I think speaks to a
59:03world where it's like you could really
59:05imagine a situation with a Democratic
59:08president, and Musk turns off Starlink
59:11at some critical moment, and the Defense
59:13Production Act is like immediately
59:14engaged. And like you do have this like
59:17moment of genuine showdown, right? This
59:19both I think from Musk's perspective
59:20needs to be understood as a risk of like
59:22what he's doing and the way he's acting.
59:24And from the other perspective, because
59:25you are getting to this position and we
59:28should say one reason I've been focused
59:30on the Ukraine Starlink question is
59:32right now the reporting is contested in
59:34a way I cannot untangle as to whether or
59:37not orders came from somewhere inside
59:38the Trump administration or were implied
59:40by somewhere in the Trump administration
59:42or you know the activity was from Musk.
59:45And I just don't know the answer and I
59:47can see it also being a
59:48miscommunication, right? You know these
59:49things happen, too.
59:51So, I don't want to say confidently what
59:53happened there.
59:55But I think it is one can say relatively
59:57confidently that
59:59you could imagine a series of things
1:00:01happening where for instance, you know,
1:00:03Musk and look, I don't love Michael
1:00:04Bloomberg dropping $80 million at the
1:00:06end of the campaign, either, right? I
1:00:07don't think this is the way campaigns
1:00:09should work. You know, you begin having
1:00:11much more serious efforts at, you know,
1:00:13restricting the ability of like mega
1:00:16billionaires to drop this much money.
1:00:18Um and Musk is a billionaire on a scale
1:00:20that somebody like Bloomberg, you know,
1:00:21cannot even touch.
1:00:23It is just rare
1:00:25for an individual person
1:00:27to have so much power that they they
1:00:30they're not a state unto themself,
1:00:33but they are some kind of like
1:00:36state capacity-sized entity.
1:00:39Right? Operating You know, it's like the
1:00:41Vatican of technology he's got over
1:00:43there.
1:00:44>> But I think it's also important to then
1:00:46keep in mind one of the things that I
1:00:47started this conversation talking about,
1:00:49which is the financial dependency,
1:00:50right? SpaceX is in the top 10 in the
1:00:54stock market indices. More than 50% of
1:00:57Americans hold some kind of equities or
1:00:59stocks. Most of those are directly or
1:01:01indirectly, mostly indirectly through
1:01:03passive funds, connected to the health
1:01:05of Musk's
1:01:07businesses. So, let's say 20 to 30% of
1:01:09Americans have some kind of stake there
1:01:11indirectly. So, one of the things that
1:01:13Musk has proposed recently is that he
1:01:15give one stock in SpaceX to every
1:01:18American child. And the proposal is that
1:01:20that would happen through the Trump
1:01:22accounts, which are, you know,
1:01:23automatically made accessible to um
1:01:26children in the United States.
1:01:28If he goes through with his plan, then
1:01:30that number of American citizens goes up
1:01:32to about 50%. So there you're
1:01:35approaching a way of kind of
1:01:37blackmailing, you could say, the
1:01:39American population away from following
1:01:41someone like Krugman's plans by saying,
1:01:43"Do you really want to hurt yourself?
1:01:45Are you going to hurt your child like
1:01:46that by punishing me, Musk, the person
1:01:48who's keeping the stock market afloat?"
1:01:50And if you get into the granular
1:01:52questions of who owns the stock, it gets
1:01:53even more interesting. Who are top 10
1:01:55investors? The Ontario Teachers'
1:01:57Pension, huge amount of SpaceX stock,
1:02:00the primary educational target of the
1:02:03Trump administration, and Musk off
1:02:05himself, Harvard University, huge
1:02:07[snorts] holder of SpaceX, University of
1:02:09North Carolina.
1:02:10So when you see that, you know, in a way
1:02:13these, although high-profile and
1:02:15superficially startling moments of
1:02:17turning on and off drone connectivity in
1:02:19the battlefield, are the
1:02:22sharp edge of the wedge, you could say,
1:02:23but the base of really what anchors the
1:02:26dominance of the Silicon Valley digital
1:02:28sector in the United States is really in
1:02:31the stock market itself. And the fact
1:02:33that that's how we do redistribution,
1:02:35that's how we do the social contract, is
1:02:37say, "You pay in to this, you know,
1:02:39market-determined pension fund, and you
1:02:41will be paid out of that." And whoever's
1:02:43keeping that thing propped up actually
1:02:45arguably has the real power of saying
1:02:47what the social contract looks like.
1:02:49>> And so then I think sitting in that that
1:02:51bidirectional dependency, but that real
1:02:53dependency,
1:02:55it is it's maybe worth
1:02:59ending in a strange place, but I
1:03:00actually do think it's an important one.
1:03:02You mentioned
1:03:03that the conversations in Europe are
1:03:04maybe a little less prone to the
1:03:06psychologizing than the conversations in
1:03:07America.
1:03:10The problem is though is that Musk's
1:03:12psychology is very important.
1:03:13>> Yeah.
1:03:14>> And there's something that he says a
1:03:16lot. I was there in 2016 at the Recode
1:03:19conference. I was actually I think one
1:03:19of the first people to write about this.
1:03:21>> Mhm.
1:03:21>> When he was talking about how, you know,
1:03:24he believed it was very likely we lived
1:03:25in a computer simulation. This is a sort
1:03:27of idea that Nick Bostrom, that
1:03:29philosopher you you mentioned is is very
1:03:31associated with.
1:03:33But, he's
1:03:34kept saying it and actually in somewhat
1:03:35stronger terms. So, so I want to play
1:03:38this clip. This is Elon Musk on Walter
1:03:40Isaacson's show.
1:03:41>> How convinced are you that we might be
1:03:43in a simulation?
1:03:47>> You know, I once had a dinner at my
1:03:50house with a physicist and a computer
1:03:52scientist, and they're both like leaders
1:03:54in their field.
1:03:55And I asked question, what do you think
1:03:57the probability is that we're in a
1:03:58simulation? And the physicist said 0%
1:04:01and the computer scientist said 100%
1:04:03simultaneously.
1:04:04>> [clears throat]
1:04:05>> So, I guess [laughter]
1:04:06maybe I should go 50% then.
1:04:09I don't know. It's It's I mean,
1:04:11there there are there's five things that
1:04:13happen in this simulation
1:04:15where, especially if you're me, I mean,
1:04:17think about it. Like, if you're me and
1:04:18you're like,
1:04:20should should all these things really be
1:04:21happening?
1:04:22Should I really be making spaceships to
1:04:24go to the moon and Mars?
1:04:26Like, what the That doesn't seem real.
1:04:29>> The simulation theory is that if you
1:04:30just imagine an advanced society would
1:04:32create lots of simulations, right? The
1:04:33way we make maybe make lots of video
1:04:35games. You just shouldn't assume that we
1:04:37are living in the base reality. That's
1:04:39sort of the the the argument in a
1:04:41nutshell.
1:04:42But, he goes further and and and I get
1:04:45in a psychological way why, right? I've
1:04:47heard him say this now repeatedly that
1:04:51well, what really seems unlikely is to
1:04:53be Elon Musk.
1:04:55What really seems unlikely
1:04:57>> Mhm.
1:04:58>> is to be building Starships
1:05:00and influencing global politics and
1:05:02having 250 million X followers or
1:05:05whatever it is and being the first
1:05:06trillionaire. And it the mixture of a
1:05:09life that is so unlikely
1:05:11>> Mhm.
1:05:11>> and also not like grounded in some other
1:05:13ontology, right? Not some religion or
1:05:15some other way of imagining the world.
1:05:18Plus a sort of
1:05:21attraction to the simulation hypothesis.
1:05:23And of course he'd be a lifelong gamer.
1:05:26And I I just think that
1:05:29you know, for a person with as much
1:05:30power as he has
1:05:32>> [snorts]
1:05:33>> to kind of have that kind of psychology,
1:05:34to suspect this is a game where like
1:05:36your role in it is making big moves.
1:05:39>> Mhm.
1:05:40>> I don't really know how to describe that
1:05:41situation. But it is
1:05:44a distinctive one that we all now have a
1:05:47lot of exposure to.
1:05:48>> too.
1:05:49>> Yeah, I mean there's a couple of
1:05:50varieties of the simulation theory too,
1:05:51right? One is like we are all simply
1:05:53just artifacts of this future
1:05:56civilizations um
1:05:59computer video game. But the other is
1:06:00that there's a most people are shadow
1:06:02people and a small number of people are
1:06:04actually playing characters. And it
1:06:06seems like that's the one that orients
1:06:08him most. And in the kind of libertarian
1:06:10community that reflected a lot on these
1:06:11things, one of the people is Robin
1:06:13Hanson, the George Mason University
1:06:15economist who said, "What kind of ways
1:06:18would we conduct ourselves if this were
1:06:20true?" And he says, you know, "If this
1:06:22were true, then it would make sense to
1:06:24first care nothing about other people.
1:06:26So things like foreign he says foreign
1:06:28aid and the welfare state would be
1:06:30frivolous things to spend time on, to be
1:06:32as entertaining as possible, to
1:06:34accumulate as much wealth as possible,
1:06:36and to try to simply organize the world
1:06:38around you in in as uh successful way as
1:06:40you can." So there's like this radical
1:06:42reneging on anything like social
1:06:45responsibility that is only possible if
1:06:48you embrace this incredibly kind of
1:06:51nihilistic for the reaffirmation of your
1:06:53megalomania. And the question is how to
1:06:58remove the props and struts that hold
1:07:00him up in that delusion because it is
1:07:03not true. And he needs to be somehow
1:07:06persuaded from the outside that it's not
1:07:08true.
1:07:09If he continues to be incentivized to
1:07:11indulge in those ways of thinking, then
1:07:14he will be uh
1:07:16never required to kind of be uh divested
1:07:19of that.
1:07:20>> I think that's a a place to end. Also,
1:07:21final question, what are a few books you
1:07:23recommend to the audience?
1:07:25>> Well, there's so much amazing work
1:07:26happening right now in the world of tech
1:07:28criticism and political economy, so I
1:07:30wanted to draw attention to three
1:07:32exceptional recent books that kind of, I
1:07:34would say, move up the stack from under
1:07:36the ground to the clouds and the apps.
1:07:39The first book would be Thea Riofrancos'
1:07:42book Extraction, The Frontiers of Green
1:07:44Capitalism, which is about something
1:07:47that we've kind of put out of our minds
1:07:49for the last 18 months or so, which is
1:07:51really the challenges of climate
1:07:53combined with a world that still
1:07:55operates according to the price
1:07:56mechanism and where the state can fit
1:07:58in. None of these machines, certainly
1:08:00none of the data centers, would work
1:08:02without the raw materials being
1:08:04extracted somewhere from the earth and
1:08:05put into their
1:08:07circuitry, and Thea gives a wonderful
1:08:10kind of description of the political
1:08:11settlements and tensions and struggles
1:08:13that emerge in the process of doing so.
1:08:16The second book would be a book by Nick
1:08:18Srnicek called Silicon Empires. I think
1:08:21one of the
1:08:22handicaps we really have right now in
1:08:24talking about tech ideology and tech
1:08:26political economy is a lot of things get
1:08:28jumbled together. So, when you talk
1:08:30about
1:08:31semiconductors, it's somehow also a
1:08:33discussion of frontier labs, it's also a
1:08:35discussion of, you know, neo clouds and
1:08:36data centers, but these individual
1:08:39market sectors actually operate under
1:08:40very different dynamics. And I haven't
1:08:42read anything yet better than Nick
1:08:44Srnicek as a kind of a calm guided tour
1:08:47up the stack of what AI actually is as a
1:08:50built entity.
1:08:52The third book is one I think is really
1:08:54special. It's called Against Tech
1:08:56Oligarchy by J.S. Tan and Clarissa
1:08:59Redwine.
1:09:00And both of them were organizers within
1:09:03tech companies in Silicon Valley. So,
1:09:06Clarissa Redwine led the successful
1:09:09organization of Kickstarter, and both of
1:09:11them were in Twitter trying to organize
1:09:13employees at the time of the Musk
1:09:15takeover. So, what they just draw
1:09:18attention to is the fact that class
1:09:20struggle and class politics exists in
1:09:22Silicon Valley inside of tech companies,
1:09:25and they give the insiders view of how
1:09:27you practice class power inside of the
1:09:30tech sector and it's interestingly not
1:09:32always as they see it through the
1:09:34old-fashioned model of getting
1:09:36recognition for a union. That can
1:09:37sometimes slow down some of the dynamics
1:09:40that draw people into social activism.
1:09:42So it's a very clear-eyed and
1:09:44wonderfully written kind of insight into
1:09:46something that I think most people know
1:09:48very little about.
1:09:49>> Quinn Slobodian, thank you very much.
1:09:50It's my pleasure.
1:09:52>> [music]
1:09:59[music]
1:10:05[music]

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