00:01:26.260Well, we sort of did that without minimizing the downside. I mean, he had all the lanes he needed to succeed. He had billions of dollars of government grants and subsidies. And I mean, it's just, I mean, I think it's $30 billion or something like that, like 20 billion for SpaceX and 10 billion for Tesla, money directly from the government. He didn't need anything. He succeeded in all kinds of ways. I mean, that's really not disputable.
00:02:13.840I think, obviously, I believe he was trying to, in his own mind, at least to protect free
00:02:19.400speech that came with that as well.0.99
00:02:21.440Okay, well, I mean, that part is pretty clearly bullshit. But still, it's like, should a person be able to buy, if someone has amassed extraordinary wealth through legal means, right, building electric cars, launching rockets, etc., should they be able to buy a publicly traded social media platform that already has some hundreds of millions of users, take it private, and tune the algorithm to show their own posts preferentially, and then signal boost,
00:02:50.960anti-Semites and neo-Nazis that they just happen to like? I think so. I don't think we can pass a
00:02:56.520law against that, right? So it's not like, I don't know what the remedy is except for just
00:03:02.020marketplace recognizing that he's behaving like a sociopath and penalizing him for it, right? For
00:03:09.780people caring, Tesla owners and people who would have contracts with various companies, caring not0.98
00:03:15.800to be in business with somebody who's literally aiding and abetting an explosion of white0.99
00:03:22.340supremacist bullshit in our society, right?0.99
00:03:25.160So, I mean, on some level, you have to rely on people, consumers, to have good taste and0.99
00:03:39.760It's like, I don't know what we would have done.
00:03:41.020he had the lane he's needed to succeed. More than that, he had massive government support.
00:03:48.440Yeah, but he spent a lot of time having to, I think one of the claims in the film was that he
00:03:51.960did some battery replacement gimmick to get money and he's had to continually lie about full self
00:03:57.660driving that he's trying to develop. Which by the way, that claim that Alex said in the interview
00:04:03.440with you that Tesla's claim that full self driving is eight times safer is actually inaccurate blew
00:04:09.540my mind. I think everyone I talk to who drives a Tesla is like, at least anecdotally feels that
00:04:14.260that is a real claim, that it really does work. Yeah. I'm waiting to hear somebody push back on
00:04:19.500that. I haven't looked, but let me know if that happens. As I said in the podcast, I wasn't sure
00:04:24.280what was true there. And I do imagine that at some point, if not now, if not six months ago,
00:04:30.880full self-driving on a Tesla is going to be better than a person driving. I'm really not
00:04:36.400questioning the progress curve there. It's just that he's, at every stage along the way,
00:04:41.980exaggerated the progress and in certain cases lied about it and consciously perpetrated fraud. I mean,
00:04:48.280that painted black video anecdote, it's just evil. I mean, there's no question you're going
00:04:53.520to get people killed playing games like that. And just, I mean, he's pretending his car can do
00:04:58.520things it can't do. And people are relying on it to do those things at, you know, while going 70
00:05:04.880miles an hour on the highway. Yeah, but that's my point. My point is, had we acknowledged who he was
00:05:09.780and said, you don't have to lie about this. Just tell us that some people are still, if he could
00:05:14.780come out and say, look, some people are going to die. He doesn't have to lie about anything. He
00:05:19.060didn't have to lie about full self-driving. He could have just represented the actual progress,
00:05:24.060its actual capabilities, how you can safely use it, every increment of progress from there on.
00:05:29.740And also he could have made the ethical case, which he did, which is that there's a moral
00:05:34.180illusion lurking at the center of this whole situation, which we have to be alert to and not
00:05:40.280be taken in by. And I mean, he actually, Gibney lets him express it in his own words in this
00:05:45.760podcast is, I'm sorry, in the film, Elon says at some point that even when we've, we've rung 90%
00:05:53.340of the fatalities out of driving, because the robots are that much better, people are still
00:05:59.000going to sue over the remaining 10% of fatalities, right? And that's, that's an illusion. It's
00:06:04.480understandable, but do we want to reduce driving fatalities by 90% or don't we? Right. And that's
00:06:10.280a totally valid point. It's something that he could have always talked about that no one forced
00:06:15.100this guy to become a bond villain. Right. You're saying so, right. He could have just been honest
00:06:19.700about the progress and not used lies. I mean, they're actual lies. I mean, I remember when I
00:06:25.000first bought my tesla in 2017 they told me i bought it in august they said by december for sure full
00:06:30.500self-driving would be available but it sounds like he didn't have to lie to use the stock market to
00:06:37.160raise money or to inflate the stock no i mean it's you know lying is not it should do brand damage
00:06:45.120whenever it's discovered and the question is you know why doesn't it or doesn't it effectively
00:06:50.720in this case? I don't know. I mean, I honestly don't know. There's something very Trumpian about
00:06:56.180the whole phenomenon at this point. I mean, Trump has cultivated an audience that does not care
00:07:01.100whether he's consistent with himself in any way. And Elon has done something similar.
00:07:07.280Yeah. Okay. We don't need to spend more time on this one. We can move on. Speaking of podcast
00:07:11.400guests, I really enjoyed your recent episode with Dara Horn as well. I know that many people,
00:07:15.880including myself, have always wondered where antisemitism comes from and why Jews have to
00:07:20.420have security at their places of worship or schools. I've always understood it in a visceral
00:07:25.240way, but I never had a way to explain it. And I think she was the first person to put into words
00:07:29.920what I felt backed with real wisdom and history. Did you come away from that conversation or from
00:07:35.240reading her book with anything new as well? Yeah. Well, first of all, I have to emphasize
00:07:39.160again, her book is really great and we did not exhaust its contents at all. So anyone who got
00:07:46.340a lot from that podcast is still going to get a ton from her book. I mean, she just goes into the
00:07:50.880history and she's a very good writer too. So it's just a great book. I came away with, I don't think
00:07:57.040she or anyone truly explains the origin of antisemitism or the degree to which it's just
00:08:04.980perennial. I mean, just the fact that in context that it should be impossible to really fixate on
00:08:12.160on the Jews as a priority, it nonetheless happens. I mean, for me, I think the religious0.97
00:08:18.160underpinnings of it explain it more than anything else. I mean, in most times and places that we're
00:08:24.340talking about, most people are pretty religious to one or another degree. I mean, I guess we can
00:08:30.020leave communist Russia, the Soviet Union, aside for this. I mean, it has its own explanation there,
00:08:36.360But just the fact that for 2,000 years, the Jews, remaining Jews, have had to repudiate Christianity and Islam, and they're basically always surrounded by Christians and Muslims, that explains the durability of it, and also kind of the origin of it as much as anything for me.0.83
00:08:57.160I mean, the Jews just don't accept other people's religious convictions at all, even among polytheists, let's say in a Roman context.0.92
00:09:05.600They're continually calling bullshit on everybody else's faith claims, right?1.00
00:09:10.000So that's just a structure that is going to engineer tribal hatred, I think.0.84
00:09:16.720But her emphasis on it being not really a hatred at bottom, but a false view of how the world works.
00:09:25.820That is a conspiracy theory, or in the shortest form, in her case, a lie.
00:09:31.500I think that's a very useful framing.0.58
00:09:34.500I mean, when you hear what anti-Semites think is really happening in the world, it's almost
00:09:40.000always a story of unjustified Jewish power working behind the scenes, right?
00:09:48.160And that's, yeah, I mean, it is a, in many cases, a completely hallucinated claim about0.93
00:09:54.920well the jews are to blame for i think douglas murray said this i'm sure others have no matter0.72
00:09:59.800we know whether they're a city folk or they're country folk or they're rich or they're poor
00:10:03.960or they're you know they have this job or they don't have this job no matter what it is they're
00:10:07.880communists yeah they're hated no matter where they are dare is uh other framing is that the0.68
00:10:13.000jews for whatever reason and from whatever angle are undermining the thing you most care about0.88
00:10:17.960if you most care about capitalism well then they're communists if you most care about0.99
00:10:21.000communism, well, then they're capitalists. But the fact that it's endlessly shape-shifting like
00:10:26.200that and admits of no disconfirmation, it is pretty unique. It's not an ordinary form of
00:10:33.180bigotry. Well, do you think if more people understood what she's talking about, that could
00:10:38.020be useful or helpful? Are you more optimistic that more of this information could do anything
00:10:43.220for us? Or do you think that this has been here forever, it's going to be here forever?
00:10:46.860I can't say I'm optimistic. I think she sounds more optimistic than I feel. I'm optimistic that when put—so for me, talking about anti-Semitism, as you know, is something that I have really been dragged kicking and screaming to.
00:11:01.680I mean, prior to October 7th, I really thought it was more or less a non-issue.0.66
00:11:06.520You know, I didn't think it had disappeared, but I just, in open societies and certainly0.91
00:11:11.080in America, it was, despite the fact that Jews always top the FBI's list of, you know,
00:11:30.560Or if it isn't bullshit, let's say at whatever level you find the bigotry against Muslims intolerable, recognize it for every year after 9-11, Jews have been victimized 5 to 10x more than that, right?0.99
00:11:43.000And I didn't care about it until October 7th because prior to October 7th, it still seemed like a rounding error on a rounding error of problems that should really concern us in society.0.96
00:11:52.460again it's not to say it didn't exist and wasn't galling but you know once a decade something0.61
00:11:59.080truly awful like you know the tree of life synagogue massacre would happen well wasn't
00:12:05.120it more october 8th that was the problem for you than october 7th i mean october 7th yeah the0.64
00:12:09.940response to october 7th i mean that that proved that okay we're on a powder keg of jew hate that
00:12:16.360i didn't quite understand was there um it's obviously has gotten leveraged and weaponized
00:12:21.980and elaborated by this red green alliance this alliance between the far left and islamism
00:12:29.280worldwide and the machinery to prosecute that alliance was in place and has been you know that
00:12:35.880that's it's been built fairly patiently over decades you know well funded by states like
00:12:41.300Qatar and, and Iran, et cetera. So, yeah, I mean, so I was, I was like many, many people are
00:12:47.700blindsided by the level of the antisemitism and also the level of moral blindness around
00:12:53.120just how perverse this alliance is. I mean, in the, in the most SNL like case, you know,
00:13:01.100the queers chanting for Palestine, right? I mean, it's just, you know, it's hard to understand that1.00
00:13:06.820level of moral confusion. I mean, just it shouldn't be possible, but it's not only possible,
00:13:11.180it's guaranteed to exist in our most elite universities. Back to the question of whether
00:13:16.020I'm optimistic. I think I'm optimistic that we're not suicidal and a certain degree of Islamist0.97
00:13:23.220lunacy is going to be indigestible even by the left, ultimately. Certainly by the mainstream0.98
00:13:30.620left that currently can't figure out how not to talk to Hassan Piker or can't imagine that there's
00:13:36.320anything wrong with Abdul El-Sayed or Zoran Mamdani. Again, I'm not saying that those guys
00:13:42.100are jihadists, but they're, at best, useful idiots who are giving cover for genuine Islamism1.00
00:13:48.700in America, right? I mean, they're genuine theocrats trying to undermine liberal values1.00
00:13:53.740in America, and they belong to organizations that people are mystified by, like the Council0.51
00:13:59.340of American Islamic Relations. Mainstream journalists imagine this is the ACLU for
00:14:04.620Muslims. It is not the ACLU for Muslims. It is a none too stealthy theocratic organization
00:14:10.440staffed by religious bullies, right? Who have direct ties to Hamas front groups and to the0.98
00:14:16.940Muslim Brotherhood. I mean, this is just a, this is an odious political movement that, um, you
00:14:22.920know, Democrats as, as readily as, uh, Republicans should recognize is antithetical to American
00:14:29.200values. Um, it's not to say it should be illegal. You know, it shouldn't be illegal to, to be a
00:14:34.280neo-nazi either in america right i mean it says that we have because of the first amendment we
00:14:39.160have to have a um an uncomfortable and even disconcerting level of tolerance for bad ideas
00:14:46.180but the idea that we have mainstream democratic politicians who feel like they have to lock arms
00:14:52.960with these guys and these organizations it's bad and it's it is the thing that will give us fascism
00:14:59.160in America. I hit this point a lot, but if you want a fascist in 2028 or thereafter, yeah, by all
00:15:07.340means, let the DSA into the tent and get confused about an Islamo-communist alliance being somehow0.56
00:15:14.840a good version of left-wing populism. See how that works out. It will deliver us the furthest
00:15:21.780right-wing swamp creature you can imagine into the Oval Office.
00:15:26.960Since you always get pushback for criticizing AOC and Mondani, maybe you could clarify what
00:17:41.460I was not saying that AOC is stupid or that she couldn't be a quick study as a politician or that she hasn't done substantial things once in Congress.0.97
00:17:51.660I was more talking about her origin story.0.98
00:17:54.240I mean, they found a telegenic, inexperienced person and kind of cooked her up in a political lab and realized, again, this is not necessarily a mistake.
00:18:08.840I mean, she got elected and there's a reason why we're talking about her, right?
00:18:11.640She's, but they, what they found is that what you need at this moment in American politics
00:18:17.300is someone who really can crush short form video, you know, shot with an iPhone.
00:18:22.520That's not where we want to be as a country, right?
00:18:25.340Like that, that shouldn't be the criterion to become president of the United States,
00:18:29.940somebody who can just, you know, make you laugh or create a vibe in 30 seconds on TikTok.
00:18:36.180that's going to select against many people who you would want in the Oval Office, and it's going to
00:18:41.620promote total lunatics who you don't want to get near power, and yet you're going to give them0.68
00:18:47.560power. Again, the fact that any Democrat feels the need to talk to or think about or figure out0.93
00:18:54.480how to navigate around Hassan Piker is insanity, right? We should not know this guy's name. He is
00:19:01.760a Twitch streamer, you know, and that should be the end of it, right? I mean, it's like, okay,
00:19:06.840but I mean, there are other people in this category, some of whom are even more substantial,
00:19:12.360like, you know, the Paul brothers, right? I mean, how much time are we going to talk about
00:19:16.160Logan Paul in the next election cycle, right? I mean, is he going to be president of the United
00:19:20.400States? Is that the country we're living in? I mean, that's where American culture seems to be
00:19:24.840headed if we can't figure out how these information tools, you know, that is our smartphones,
00:19:30.620are deranging our sense of what is real and worth paying attention to.
00:19:35.280Okay, but if that's where the culture is headed, and it's important to find somebody who's
00:19:38.760telegenic and charismatic and smart, and you say, okay, this is the right person, let's
00:19:42.240find somebody who's got the right criteria, the right ideas, but who also fits that mold,
00:19:47.260why would we not want to use the tools that are in front of us and say, okay, it shouldn't
00:19:51.860be this way, but it is this way, and maybe she goes on to be, through this pathway,0.96
00:19:57.360she goes on to be a phenomenal president.
00:19:58.960Well, so again, I'm not focused on AOC here. AOC may be in the process of changing into a different sort of person, right? Again, that's hard to do, given what she's trailing. And it's something that Kamala Harris couldn't effectively do within 100 days of the presidential campaign.
00:20:15.900But it's possible to do. People can wake up from the spell that was worked on them in their 20s and in their 30s and even in their 40s by whatever attractor on the cultural landscape caught them, and they can disavow their prior beliefs.
00:20:35.620And if they do that credibly, that's fine. I'm willing to believe that a person has recognized that they were wrong about something. And if they can tell us why, well, then the fact that they were wrong ever need not be held against them.
00:20:51.340Right. In fact, they win points in my book if they can if they can really disavow something idiotic in their past and give a clear case as to how they got there and how they got out.0.78
00:21:01.880I mean, that's in most cases, that's that whole character arc is a positive, not a negative.
00:21:08.220But it remains to be seen whether she'll do that.
00:21:18.260Right. I mean, he's, he's just a callous asshole, right. Who talks about, you know, the, the mass starvation of people, you know, for example, in the, you know, the great leap forward in China as just a non-issue. It's like, oh, this is the, you know, you just got to break some eggs to make an omelet. Right. I mean, he's, he's a fan of Mao. Right. I mean, it's like, you read any book about Mao and he's also a fan of Lenin. Right. You read any book about Lenin just to discover what this colossal asshole is a fan of. Right. Like we should not be, again, he is our1.00
00:21:48.260Nick Fuentes. There's no reason to talk about this guy as being consequential in politics. It doesn't
00:21:54.080matter how big his audience is, right? You have to find some other route to his audience than through
00:21:59.620an alliance with him because you're making an alliance with some species of evil, right? I mean,
00:22:05.840the fact that it's a telegenic evil just shouldn't matter, right? And that's, I'd say, again, it's
00:22:12.020totally mystifying to me that people can't see this at a glance. I mean, certain people are not
00:22:15.920worth talking to. They're not worth factoring in as you, you know, in your calculations about who
00:22:22.080you have to keep in the tent, et cetera. And, you know, people like, you know, Andrew Tate and Nick
00:22:27.660Fuentes, you know, right of center or Hassan Pike or left of center are those sorts of people.
00:22:31.740Yeah. I want to get to Mondani in a second, but first I just want to go back to El Saeed and just0.82
00:22:36.260get, hear what bothers you about him. If you can provide any detail there.
00:22:40.700Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharris.org.
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