Elon Musk’s Endgame — The Ezra Klein Show

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