RadixJournal - December 17, 2022


Elon Musk Is Unserious, Sociopathic—And Our Next President!？


Episode Stats


Length

37 minutes

Words per minute

126.968376

Word count

4,819

Sentence count

381

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

29

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Elon Musk has been on a ban spree. The New York Times, CNN, and other mainstream media outlets have all been banned from reporting on his private jet. Why is this a good or bad thing? Is it hypocrisy?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 There comes a time when you simply conclude that someone is stupid, and or a con artist. 1.00
00:00:12.500 And that is what I have concluded about Elon Musk. 0.99
00:00:20.080 Now, this is not to say that intelligent people are always right.
00:00:25.440 But, no, in fact, they're often wrong.
00:00:30.320 Maybe most often wrong, in fact.
00:00:33.120 Most research is wrong.
00:00:36.100 Most literary criticism is off-base.
00:00:39.800 But there is a difference, a distinction to be made.
00:00:45.540 Everyone can fall into error.
00:00:48.880 Everyone can have a false assumption or premise.
00:00:51.960 Everyone can make a miscalculation along the way.
00:00:56.140 Everyone can reach a conclusion that's a bit of a stretch.
00:01:02.120 I am certainly not immune to those issues.
00:01:07.080 But that person is acting in good faith and attempting to say something of importance.
00:01:16.580 And there's another type of person out there. 0.99
00:01:19.500 They're not merely dumb. 1.00
00:01:21.100 Perhaps dumb people can't really think beyond step one. 0.99
00:01:27.020 But there's a type of person who doesn't think, in fact, but offers ad hoc and post-facto rationalizations for behavior. 0.99
00:01:39.380 And that's very different than thinking.
00:01:42.580 There's also a type of person, and I'm thinking here of the sociopath as an extreme example of this type of person,
00:01:53.860 who doesn't so much think as he or she targets a community of people and understands what affects them in a kind of stimulus and response type way,
00:02:13.360 and then tells these people what they want to hear.
00:02:17.800 This is the person who preaches to the choir, so to speak.
00:02:23.060 In a rather benign example here, the kind of cheerleader or football coach who tells you you're the greatest and that he believes in you so that you'll go out and perform on the field.
00:02:41.340 That is a very benign example of maybe a phenomenon that can often be quite malign.
00:02:48.800 I think Elon Musk really is one of these types of people, and I don't think he can actually think.
00:02:59.080 He's not as smart as he thinks he is, and he's not as smart as you think he is, perhaps.
00:03:05.720 Let me just react to an example of this that has come up yesterday and this morning.
00:03:17.640 So as you might have heard, Elon went on a banning spree.
00:03:23.780 We'll see if these things will be permanent, but he went on a banning spree of many mainstream journalists,
00:03:30.500 some from the New York Times, CNN, and tech reporters, etc.
00:03:34.360 And these are people who have been a thorn in his side.
00:03:38.620 So it's obvious that this is personal.
00:03:41.240 And it all relates back to an account, which he also banned, called Elon Jet,
00:03:47.640 which was posting the flight plan, effectively, of his private jet so that you could know where he is.
00:03:57.400 And some of these other accounts were reporting on this, reporting on Elon and linking to the jet,
00:04:06.440 and they have all been banned.
00:04:08.380 And as many have already pointed out, we have a repetition of the almost exact situation
00:04:16.900 that we had with Hunter Biden's laptop.
00:04:19.180 So, you know, I think there is something, let's say, dubious about the laptop.
00:04:25.780 Was it probably hacked by some entity who wants to help Trump, perhaps, but means America no good,
00:04:33.820 in all likelihood?
00:04:36.640 Who that was exactly, I have my suspicions, but I'll keep those to myself for the moment.
00:04:43.740 But it was a real thing.
00:04:48.500 There might very well be some false information implanted in this data stash that ended up at the New York Post
00:04:58.500 via Rudy Giuliani or supposedly and dubiously through a computer repairman.
00:05:06.520 But there might very well be some false information in there.
00:05:11.280 But most of the information, maybe even most all of the information, is, in fact, real and has been verified.
00:05:17.960 And so, just on a level of the First Amendment and free speech and just civic engagement,
00:05:25.300 people have a right, so to speak, to look at it.
00:05:29.980 And I agree with that.
00:05:31.700 And Elon is doing the exact same thing.
00:05:36.760 The fact is, flight plans are public information.
00:05:41.800 And someone is linking to public information via Twitter.
00:05:48.460 You see this all the time.
00:05:50.580 There are accounts that track Bitcoin transactions.
00:05:54.380 There are accounts that track what someone is doing on another social media site.
00:06:00.660 There are accounts that simply reproduce public statements by officials or celebrities or whatever.
00:06:08.320 There are fan accounts that are more or less doing what I'm describing.
00:06:13.000 The idea that you would ban an account revealing a flight plan that is public information is simply absurd.
00:06:25.000 It is exactly what the Hunter Biden laptop issue was.
00:06:31.500 And now you can, of course, of course, point to the hypocrisy of liberal journalists who are up in arms about the banning of some guy from the New York Times or an amateur user talking about Elon Musk's flight schedule.
00:06:47.880 And yet they were in full support of banning the New York Post and people linking to it.
00:06:55.480 I get it. 0.50
00:06:56.100 It absolutely is hypocrisy.
00:06:57.820 But you've got to judge these things on a case-by-case barrett and to look at what the actual merits are.
00:07:06.380 There might very well be hypocrisy.
00:07:08.760 That doesn't mean that this is a sound decision.
00:07:12.920 And the unsoundness of the decision is revealed by the way that Elon Musk discusses the matter.
00:07:20.520 So this is a tweet from December 14th.
00:07:26.760 Any account doxing real-time location info or anyone will be suspended as it is a physical safety violation.
00:07:34.620 This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
00:07:39.340 Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn't a safety problem, so is okay on a slightly delayed basis.
00:07:51.100 Here are some more.
00:07:52.860 So this is a response to Barry Weiss.
00:07:56.860 I'm not exactly a fan of Barry Weiss, but I think she's kind of gotten it right here.
00:08:05.260 She's basically talking about Elon's hypocrisy and not just the hypocrisy of the liberal media.
00:08:09.640 The old regime at Twitter governed by its own whims and biases.
00:08:13.300 And it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem.
00:08:17.380 Elon responds to this.
00:08:19.040 I don't think he's getting replies from Barry.
00:08:21.040 What should be the consequence of doxing someone's real-time exact location be?
00:08:27.680 Assume your child is at the location, as mine was.
00:08:33.920 When you become a public figure, you have to assume certain risk.
00:08:43.200 If you are a public figure, you are now at a heightened risk of being assassinated.
00:08:51.000 You are now at a higher risk of having a sex scandal on your hands.
00:08:57.840 You're now at a public risk of having your personal failings broadcast in the mainstream media or on page 6 of the New York Post or whatever.
00:09:10.920 You simply are.
00:09:14.040 Additionally, when making a sound decision, you actually probably shouldn't assume that your child is involved.
00:09:22.440 There's a reason why doctors are forbidden or at least dissuaded from performing surgery on their own child.
00:09:32.880 The fact is you can't think straight.
00:09:35.240 You can't make a difficult cost-benefit analysis, let's say, when your own child is the subject.
00:09:45.720 So, I mean, for instance, if it's my own child, what kind of decisions would I make?
00:09:51.740 I would make the speed limit on highways 25.
00:09:55.080 I would not allow anyone to drive under the age of 30, and drinking age is pushed to, let's say, 45, and any playground bully is subject to 10 years imprisonment at the very least, and so on.
00:10:17.320 As you can see, you just simply can't think straight when you're talking about your own children.
00:10:21.140 This is just not an argument.
00:10:23.140 He's trying to pull at your heartstrings in order to get you on his side by, first off, presenting himself as a doting father and then making you think of your own children and so on.
00:10:36.780 It's just not serious.
00:10:39.320 And it also goes against the very notion of Twitter itself, which is about real time.
00:10:48.960 I mean, let's say that Hillary Clinton is giving a speech at a local park that I'm next to, and I go and I photograph it, boom, and I post it immediately within 10 seconds.
00:11:02.840 Am I revealing her information?
00:11:06.640 Am I trying to get her assassinated?
00:11:10.980 Am I endangering children when I do this?
00:11:13.520 I mean, it's just not serious.
00:11:15.880 As many have already pointed out on Twitter, I've seen, not posting publicly available flight plans.
00:11:25.740 It would mean that the Epstein Island jet could not be discussed on Twitter.
00:11:35.160 You know, it doesn't matter if it's for the elites or the hoi polloi.
00:11:39.380 You know, we've got to have one rule.
00:11:40.660 That's what Elon's saying.
00:11:42.040 Well, this clearly benefits elites in this case.
00:11:46.960 No one is going to post about, you know, Sally Smith's vacation to Nebraska or something. 0.91
00:11:53.620 I mean, it's just ridiculous.
00:11:56.360 And I think it, I'm not even sure that I would say that Elon is necessarily trying to protect elites and their bad behavior. 0.77
00:12:06.520 I think he's just mad at this account.
00:12:09.140 And it's all entirely personal.
00:12:13.180 And similar to sociopathic behavior, he's taking revenge on someone for what is ultimately a small slight.
00:12:23.900 You know, it would be, it would be as if someone insulted you at the office and you responded by poisoning their coffee or something.
00:12:32.620 It's just a real overreaction from someone who might very well be unhinged.
00:12:41.880 And I want to return to that other notion that I mentioned at the beginning of this talk.
00:12:49.060 That is the type of sociopath who recognizes a certain community and really knows how to preach to the choir.
00:13:00.880 That stimulus and response effect where you know what you say to them and you get a response.
00:13:06.840 You get an ooh or an ah.
00:13:08.100 Tesla is probably the least fraudulent of Elon's various companies.
00:13:16.260 I would say it's, it's a lot, it's a real thing.
00:13:20.700 You can buy a Tesla car.
00:13:23.340 Whereas I, I would say that the boring company, this digging of tunnels is, has, I think most people,
00:13:31.600 most people recognize now that this is just simply absurd.
00:13:36.140 SolarCity has gone by the wayside.
00:13:38.400 Um, Neuralink, I mean, I could go on, um, SpaceX could have a business plan, but colonizing Mars is not one of them.
00:13:49.660 Uh, there, there are a lot of people, um, the smart nerd types, skeptic types, um, you can think about Thunderfoot,
00:13:57.420 you can think about other people in his milieu who have really gone after Musk.
00:14:02.140 And these are people who love science.
00:14:04.060 They're the, they're the type that would, you would think like Elon Musk, uh, yet they have shown him to be a fraud, in my opinion, pretty convincingly.
00:14:17.040 But Tesla is a real thing.
00:14:20.700 But even Tesla is subject to bizarre over-promising.
00:14:30.060 Uh, do you remember the Cybertruck?
00:14:34.000 Really cool design.
00:14:35.400 I have to say this.
00:14:36.420 It's an outer body steel shell.
00:14:39.380 And it looks cool.
00:14:40.460 It looks basically like something from Total Recall or some, or 80s sci-fi film.
00:14:46.300 And it's cool.
00:14:47.640 If I ever owned a pickup truck, I would like my pickup truck to look like that, to, to give it the credit.
00:14:53.180 You probably heard about the Cybertruck after Elon promised bulletproof grade glass and then threw a metal ball at the windshield and it just smashed.
00:15:05.940 It was a pretty embarrassing snafu.
00:15:08.600 I, even that, I mean, everyone, you know, mistakes happen, of course.
00:15:13.820 But even that might be kind of telling in the sense that no one around Elon is really telling him no.
00:15:25.360 No one around Elon is offering him any sort of criticism.
00:15:29.420 And so he just says things or he wants to get an effect out of people.
00:15:35.360 He wants to equal Steve Jobs in terms, in terms of keynote presentations.
00:15:41.780 And this is the way to do it. 0.96
00:15:43.760 And no one stops him from making a fool of himself and his company. 0.86
00:15:49.600 Now, beyond that mishap at the presentation, the Cybertruck is nowhere to be seen.
00:15:58.320 This was announced in 2019.
00:16:01.020 I think there was a recent announcement around two weeks ago that it might be coming out in 2023 or 2024.
00:16:06.980 But who knows?
00:16:10.040 You can buy a Tesla.
00:16:11.720 There are Teslas out there.
00:16:12.860 I get that.
00:16:13.760 But the amount of over-promising just makes the entire project seem exceedingly dubious.
00:16:23.820 Remember self-driving cars?
00:16:26.020 You can get into a car in San Francisco and it can just drive you to New York City while you sit back and post on Twitter or read a book or sleep or something.
00:16:37.820 Oh, that's coming in 2020.
00:16:39.020 All of this stuff is just nonsense.
00:16:42.220 I think, to a degree, it's coming from this hole in America's and the world's soul after the death of Steve Jobs.
00:16:57.760 As the good visionary capitalist who doesn't actually care about money.
00:17:04.440 That's at least the myth of Steve Jobs.
00:17:06.540 Now, I'll say this.
00:17:08.300 I've been an Apple and Mac user for my entire life.
00:17:13.140 Even in the dark days of the 1990s when Steve Jobs wasn't there, I was still a Mac user.
00:17:18.700 I can remember going to the computer labs at the University of Virginia or Chicago or Duke or whatever.
00:17:27.620 And they would usually have a big bay of 50 IBM, or I shouldn't say IBM, Windows-compatible PCs.
00:17:37.980 And then there'd be like two Macs off in the corner.
00:17:41.760 And using them was kind of unusual.
00:17:44.720 You know, people might ask, why?
00:17:47.120 But I also remember the Mac and IBM wars.
00:17:50.620 I remember the Mac and PC wars.
00:17:51.940 It's all good fun.
00:17:53.520 So I am predisposed to like Steve Jobs.
00:17:56.580 And I do like Steve Jobs.
00:17:58.560 Maybe that's a real failing of mine.
00:18:00.500 I admire him.
00:18:01.180 I think he did have a vision.
00:18:04.900 And he did deliver.
00:18:07.000 He overpromised on occasion.
00:18:08.840 But those go by the wayside.
00:18:12.420 But there's a way in which Steve Jobs redeemed capitalism for people.
00:18:17.820 It's not just about money.
00:18:19.340 It's not just about fossil fuel companies destroying the earth.
00:18:24.160 It's not just about junk made in China sold at Walmart.
00:18:29.060 It's actually a kind of affordable luxury product that's cool.
00:18:35.420 You know, I can remember in grad school, my iMac, which had this see-through design.
00:18:42.680 It was plastic, but it was a transparent design.
00:18:45.840 I had a granite iMac one piece.
00:18:48.080 So you could kind of see the machine working in there.
00:18:50.960 Very cool.
00:18:51.860 The MacBook design, this clean, minimalist, sci-fi, almost aluminum, very cool.
00:19:00.420 And I do genuinely like macOS or, you know, all the different names it's had over PCs.
00:19:07.340 I do find PCs kind of junky and gross.
00:19:10.160 So I'm predisposed to Steve Jobs.
00:19:12.840 But my major point here, beyond all this reminiscing, is that there was a need for that myth after Steve Jobs' death in 2011.
00:19:24.600 We wanted this good, great, visionary capitalist who kind of transcends capitalism.
00:19:30.700 And I think there were many people who tried to fill that void.
00:19:36.860 You can even, I think you could even say that about SBF, Bankman Freed.
00:19:43.800 This nerd wearing gym shorts and flip-flops and who hasn't gotten a haircut in the last six months, who sleeps on the floor of his office.
00:19:54.640 There's something, you know, this is the kind of guy we can trust.
00:19:57.920 He's so outside of the box that he almost becomes reliable.
00:20:01.900 It's a weird thing.
00:20:04.580 That has gone up in flames, obviously, as is crypto in general.
00:20:09.220 I think Elon offered himself as a Steve Jobs type.
00:20:13.480 And it wasn't so much about products being amazing, although that is the case with Tesla.
00:20:22.260 Although what I've heard from real car guys, I'm not a real car guy.
00:20:25.960 But what I've heard from some of these real car guys is that Teslas leave a hell of a lot to be desired.
00:20:31.880 But anyway, he promised to solve big problems.
00:20:37.320 And so if you look back at that Cybertruck announcement session, which very, very much resembled the Steve Jobs keynotes you can find on YouTube.
00:20:51.460 But it was almost like a Las Vegas version of that, with bright lights shining everywhere and, you know, models.
00:21:01.900 And he'll even use dancers later on.
00:21:03.920 He'll talk about a Tesla robot that he's building.
00:21:06.840 And he'll basically have a dancer in a leotard jumping around. 0.96
00:21:10.820 It's ridiculous.
00:21:12.340 I think it would make Steve Jobs cringe to a great degree. 0.90
00:21:16.980 He did not do that.
00:21:19.660 But anyway, there was a kind of sex bot looking girl who came out at the opener of the Cybertruck event. 0.99
00:21:29.300 And she said, you know, in the future, there will be no straws.
00:21:32.800 So he's kind of, you know, referencing that controversy of banning straws and stuff like that.
00:21:37.820 And then she says, you know, in 2019, the skies are polluted.
00:21:42.820 We're addicted to fossil fuels.
00:21:46.200 But finally, Elon comes and solves the problem for us.
00:21:50.980 And the skies cleared.
00:21:53.080 Rainbows came out and ponies.
00:21:54.980 And we cracked global warming and so on.
00:21:58.360 And let me introduce you to my creator, Elon.
00:22:01.060 And first off, there was a, you know, a lot of sex cells, as we know.
00:22:08.640 And there was a lot of sexualization of this very cute girl acting as a robot. 1.00
00:22:15.940 And I think in this case, Elon was really going after a certain audience.
00:22:20.800 It is these nerd Silicon Valley types who want to hoot and holler about the latest iPhone or a new Tesla machine or some great new Facebook app or something like that.
00:22:39.340 Just a bunch of really annoying nerd types.
00:22:44.200 And they loved it. 0.99
00:22:45.600 And this is kind of their own personal sex fantasy because they obviously are not probably not surrounded by, you know, attractive, robust women. 0.88
00:22:58.300 And so they have some nerd fantasy about owning a sex bot or something like this. 0.96
00:23:03.360 And he's just playing to them.
00:23:05.460 And I think he's also playing to that, you know, as I mentioned, that kind of hole in America's soul where we want a new Steve Jobs.
00:23:12.320 And we see our very lives as polluting the planet.
00:23:15.960 I mean, understandably.
00:23:17.240 Put global warming aside.
00:23:18.740 Just pollution. 0.99
00:23:20.020 We all produce a bunch of trash.
00:23:21.900 We're driving around polluting the air. 0.95
00:23:24.440 We don't like it.
00:23:25.540 We want some vision that corrects this.
00:23:28.600 Well, the problem is, even in best case scenarios, an electric car of any kind, no matter how coolly it's designed, doesn't actually solve any of these issues whatsoever.
00:23:44.120 The rainforests are still going to burn.
00:23:47.240 The ocean is still going to be filled with plastic, regardless of the electric car you own.
00:23:52.360 Electricity is not a resource.
00:23:54.740 Yes, electricity is available in nature, in the atom itself.
00:23:59.780 But for all intents and purposes, electricity is produced by other resources, extraction.
00:24:07.780 It's not a resource.
00:24:09.060 It's not a renewable resource.
00:24:10.760 It's a product.
00:24:13.340 So you need to mine the coal.
00:24:17.360 You need to have a nuclear fission reactor.
00:24:21.480 You need to pull out the oil in order to get the electricity.
00:24:27.940 Now, maybe in a future state of affairs, like what I talked about in my last monologue, with the nuclear fusion reactor and electric cars and trains and planes, wow, that is amazing.
00:24:42.080 But that's not really what Elon's offering.
00:24:45.480 Elon's offering this electric car as a kind of affordable luxury good for people who want to be a part of that changing of the world.
00:24:59.160 That is what he is doing.
00:25:00.900 And he presents himself as such to that community.
00:25:03.880 Now, there have been many worse examples than the cyber trunk, excuse me, the cyber truck, as in terms of Elon Musk bullshitting everyone.
00:25:15.980 He's stood in front of a house with fake solar panels and talked about how, you know, roof slate is going to be solarized and will charge your car. 0.99
00:25:26.640 It's all bullshit. 1.00
00:25:29.100 It's all bullshit. 1.00
00:25:30.480 It's all a kind of stimulus that he offers a particular community to get a response. 1.00
00:25:36.160 Now, we see this again with the new fangled Elon that's been invented.
00:25:46.340 Elon's become a Republican.
00:25:49.400 And he's become a conservative movement hero.
00:25:53.180 And he offered pure catnip to all of the conservatives with these Twitter files, which he released via Barry Weiss in Matt Taibbi, and which were released by a journalist.
00:26:19.960 It was a kind of self-leak, but it was a kind of controlled leak, too.
00:26:25.160 It was released in cooperation with these journalists and posted on Twitter and talked up by the man releasing them.
00:26:35.940 Now, these are the sins of the old regime or so on, which he's repeating, of course. 0.99
00:26:40.460 But it was catnip to conservatives, and it really played to a certain kind of conservative anxiety about the elite Democrats being in control of everything and censoring you and preventing you from posting Hunter Biden's dick pics. 0.99
00:27:02.040 And thus, the election was stolen. 0.99
00:27:04.340 That's what it was playing to.
00:27:05.580 Now, that's not to say that there isn't, you know, serious concern regarding Twitter censorship.
00:27:12.780 I mean, I can certainly speak to this myself.
00:27:15.480 I was kicked off Twitter pretty early on in 2016, actually, then let back on.
00:27:20.740 I seem to kind of remain there, which is good.
00:27:23.820 I've been kicked off YouTube.
00:27:25.360 I don't even want to go into it all.
00:27:27.320 So it's not about me and some sob story about me, but, you know, I am sensitive to all these things. 0.97
00:27:35.420 I think it is a serious issue, but I'm also going to call bullshit when I see it. 0.85
00:27:40.620 This was catnip for the conservative movement, and it let them indulge in a fantasy that Trump won the 2020 election. 0.97
00:27:48.620 That's what it was.
00:27:51.380 So Elon has moved on to a new audience.
00:27:55.380 And these audiences that he cultivates are, I would say, in our polarized environment, mutually exclusive or incompatible.
00:28:07.780 You can't go after the tech nerd incel crowd or the concerned suburban professional who might own a Tesla and also go after Charlie Kirk fans.
00:28:27.740 It's just not going to work.
00:28:29.420 You're going to have one or the other.
00:28:31.020 You've got to make a choice if you want to be a massive public figure.
00:28:34.800 And what it seems to me is that Elon has kind of squeezed the lemon until the pipsqueak with the tech nerds, incels, and suburban-concerned wine moms.
00:28:50.780 And now he's moving on to conservatives.
00:28:53.580 And I think in many ways, he has become the global right-wing troll that Trump was previously.
00:29:06.640 You know, we lived in the Trump era from about 2015 through, let's say, 2022, in the sense that every single headline was about Trump, ultimately.
00:29:26.040 And so there are certain eras that I've lived through in my own relatively short life.
00:29:33.500 There was the 9-11 era, where from 2001, let's say through 2006 or 2007, every headline was ultimately about 9-11 on some level.
00:29:50.280 It was all about 9-11, and the Iraq War was a kind of result of 9-11 in many ways. 0.51
00:29:55.740 So we were focused on national security, terrorism, war abroad, et cetera.
00:30:03.380 That was a particular moment in time.
00:30:05.520 I think a kind of shorter moment occurred with the financial collapse in 2008, stock market and mortgage collapse.
00:30:15.080 And for, let's say, two to three years, we were obsessed with Wall Street and corruption and massive amounts of debt and all this kind of stuff.
00:30:23.600 And you go on.
00:30:26.060 There are kind of paradigms that inflect news.
00:30:29.700 We lived through, and this one's the most obvious, we lived through the Trump era.
00:30:34.360 Every headline you ever read was ultimately related to Trump.
00:30:38.200 His election, racism, immigration, Charlottesville, COVID was kind of about Trump on some level.
00:30:51.580 January 6th, Mar-a-Lago, the stolen election.
00:30:55.100 I could go on, but it was all about Trump.
00:30:57.400 We've lived through that, and I think we might be kind of moving out of it.
00:31:00.900 People are making fun of Trump.
00:31:02.620 People have contempt for Trump.
00:31:03.960 He's lost his magic.
00:31:05.780 He doesn't seem to have the ability to control discourse.
00:31:11.520 And maybe there can only be one.
00:31:13.660 There can only be one person that we talk about.
00:31:16.560 And I think it's reasonable to conclude that Elon, who reminds me quite a bit of sociopaths, high-functioning sociopaths who can operate at a very large scale,
00:31:35.980 not only, he wants to be the next Trump, and he has actually successfully displaced Trump as the right-wing troll that everyone's talking about,
00:31:45.660 including me doing this 30, 45-minute monologue on him, of course.
00:31:50.540 He wants to be that type of person.
00:31:52.880 And I don't think it's too outrageous to suggest that he wants to run for president.
00:32:00.780 And yes, yes, yes, I know Elon Musk was not born in the United States,
00:32:06.580 so we would have a real Obama birth certificate controversy on our hands.
00:32:13.860 But two things.
00:32:18.640 First, Musk is the type to think that the rules just don't apply to him.
00:32:26.260 You actually see that among many Silicon Valley tycoons who will break the rules and then change them later.
00:32:35.760 Now, this would be a major task to run for president.
00:32:40.620 But I'm going to say this.
00:32:45.200 I think that is his ambition.
00:32:49.180 He's never been a typical rich person or even a typical billionaire.
00:32:54.840 The vast majority of billionaires, you have no earthly idea who they are.
00:32:58.780 They're quiet.
00:33:00.040 They have these investments.
00:33:01.200 They might go on elaborate vacations, but you could mistake them for an average Joe sometimes.
00:33:10.620 At least when they're not on their yacht.
00:33:13.500 You don't know who they are.
00:33:15.620 And they operate behind the scenes.
00:33:18.320 And you only find out about them through, you know, reports on giving to political campaigns or something like that.
00:33:26.160 Musk isn't like that.
00:33:28.500 Musk wants to be on center stage.
00:33:32.620 He wants you to know about his wealth.
00:33:35.360 Very similar to Donald Trump, who, of course, had money problems throughout his life and was kind of floating on air many times.
00:33:44.420 And, of course, it's had many well-documented bankruptcies.
00:33:47.360 But he's always on stage embodying the persona of the American rich guy.
00:33:56.760 Elon Musk, ditto.
00:33:59.780 A little bit different.
00:34:01.380 On stage embodying the visionary capitalist who's in it to save the world.
00:34:06.920 But very similar to Trump in many respects.
00:34:10.360 And I think ultimately has the same level of ambition.
00:34:15.180 He learned something from the Trump era.
00:34:18.140 And he's going there.
00:34:20.580 And he's cultivating a base through very easy stimulus and response.
00:34:26.740 Just like Trump did.
00:34:27.820 You know, he learned that you talk about immigration.
00:34:31.940 Boom.
00:34:32.580 You get, mmm.
00:34:34.180 It's like red meat.
00:34:35.460 People eat it up.
00:34:37.800 It just works immediately.
00:34:40.520 He recognized that and kept doing it.
00:34:44.220 Later on, he cultivated the religious right.
00:34:47.600 And they actually became his most loyal following.
00:34:49.940 He would go to Liberty University and say, you know,
00:34:53.660 Well, you might not like me, but you got to vote for me because of the judges.
00:34:57.820 This is an abortion and all that kind of stuff you guys care about.
00:35:00.980 And I actually don't.
00:35:03.280 But he successfully cultivated that base through stimulus and response.
00:35:08.620 And they remained loyal to him long after the Republican establishment,
00:35:15.600 which might never have actually been loyal to him,
00:35:18.940 dropped him.
00:35:20.080 And long after he lost an election.
00:35:22.100 And long after the alt-right was kind of history or displaced by QAnon. 0.93
00:35:26.540 Or, I guess in my case, had turned on Trump altogether.
00:35:31.700 It's the big con.
00:35:35.100 And you can, if you're not really a serious and self-aware and self-critical thinker,
00:35:43.200 you can successfully agitate, motivate, and corral these types of bases.
00:35:53.500 Now, the good news, I guess, is that these people don't actually do anything in office like Trump.
00:35:59.220 Or, when they actually try to seize power, they do it in such a buffoonish, outrageous,
00:36:07.660 and obviously unsuccessful manner that they can't really get anywhere.
00:36:16.180 They're best on Twitter.
00:36:17.760 That's the domain in which they rule.
00:36:23.620 It kind of is fascinating that it is all on Twitter.
00:36:26.880 That's another story.
00:36:29.660 But these people will ultimately be unsuccessful.
00:36:32.900 But they can go a long way.
00:36:34.700 And they certainly can affect people's minds pretty profoundly.
00:36:38.860 And they certainly go a long way in creating a kind of paradigm where we have to talk with them.
00:36:47.080 They become a kind of construct in our mind for something else.
00:36:51.280 Trump was a construct for racism.
00:36:53.760 He was a construct for white, rural America. 0.92
00:36:58.800 He was a construct for dangerous foreign policy in some instances.
00:37:05.280 He was a construct for QAnon and lying.
00:37:09.100 He was a construct for other things.
00:37:11.800 I think Musk can kind of fill that role as well.
00:37:17.060 I don't think he's a particularly brilliant man, as I've said.
00:37:21.560 I don't find any of his thinking to be sound or serious, even.
00:37:27.720 But he can kind of become a construct for something.
00:37:31.700 He can become a construct for the conservatives.
00:37:34.140 He can become a construct, certainly in the past, for Silicon Valley visionaries.
00:37:43.220 And I do think that his ultimate goal is the same as Trump's.
00:37:52.200 We'll see if he's successful at that.
00:37:56.040 Talk to you soon.