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?
00:01:21.100Perhaps dumb people can't really think beyond step one.
00:01:27.020But there's a type of person who doesn't think, in fact, but offers ad hoc and post-facto rationalizations for behavior.
00:01:39.380And that's very different than thinking.
00:01:42.580There's also a type of person, and I'm thinking here of the sociopath as an extreme example of this type of person,
00:01:53.860who 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,
00:02:13.360and then tells these people what they want to hear.
00:02:17.800This is the person who preaches to the choir, so to speak.
00:02:23.060In 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.
00:02:41.340That is a very benign example of maybe a phenomenon that can often be quite malign.
00:02:48.800I think Elon Musk really is one of these types of people, and I don't think he can actually think.
00:02:59.080He's not as smart as he thinks he is, and he's not as smart as you think he is, perhaps.
00:03:05.720Let me just react to an example of this that has come up yesterday and this morning.
00:03:17.640So as you might have heard, Elon went on a banning spree.
00:03:23.780We'll see if these things will be permanent, but he went on a banning spree of many mainstream journalists,
00:03:30.500some from the New York Times, CNN, and tech reporters, etc.
00:03:34.360And these are people who have been a thorn in his side.
00:03:38.620So it's obvious that this is personal.
00:03:41.240And it all relates back to an account, which he also banned, called Elon Jet,
00:03:47.640which was posting the flight plan, effectively, of his private jet so that you could know where he is.
00:03:57.400And some of these other accounts were reporting on this, reporting on Elon and linking to the jet,
00:05:50.580There are accounts that track Bitcoin transactions.
00:05:54.380There are accounts that track what someone is doing on another social media site.
00:06:00.660There are accounts that simply reproduce public statements by officials or celebrities or whatever.
00:06:08.320There are fan accounts that are more or less doing what I'm describing.
00:06:13.000The idea that you would ban an account revealing a flight plan that is public information is simply absurd.
00:06:25.000It is exactly what the Hunter Biden laptop issue was.
00:06:31.500And 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.
00:06:47.880And yet they were in full support of banning the New York Post and people linking to it.
00:08:19.040I don't think he's getting replies from Barry.
00:08:21.040What should be the consequence of doxing someone's real-time exact location be?
00:08:27.680Assume your child is at the location, as mine was.
00:08:33.920When you become a public figure, you have to assume certain risk.
00:08:43.200If you are a public figure, you are now at a heightened risk of being assassinated.
00:08:51.000You are now at a higher risk of having a sex scandal on your hands.
00:08:57.840You'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.
00:09:35.240You can't make a difficult cost-benefit analysis, let's say, when your own child is the subject.
00:09:45.720So, I mean, for instance, if it's my own child, what kind of decisions would I make?
00:09:51.740I would make the speed limit on highways 25.
00:09:55.080I 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.
00:10:17.320As you can see, you just simply can't think straight when you're talking about your own children.
00:10:23.140He'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.
00:10:39.320And it also goes against the very notion of Twitter itself, which is about real time.
00:10:48.960I 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.
00:13:38.400Um, Neuralink, I mean, I could go on, um, SpaceX could have a business plan, but colonizing Mars is not one of them.
00:13:49.660Uh, there, there are a lot of people, um, the smart nerd types, skeptic types, um, you can think about Thunderfoot,
00:13:57.420you can think about other people in his milieu who have really gone after Musk.
00:14:02.140And these are people who love science.
00:14:04.060They'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.
00:14:47.640If I ever owned a pickup truck, I would like my pickup truck to look like that, to, to give it the credit.
00:14:53.180You probably heard about the Cybertruck after Elon promised bulletproof grade glass and then threw a metal ball at the windshield and it just smashed.
00:16:26.020You 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.
00:20:04.580That has gone up in flames, obviously, as is crypto in general.
00:20:09.220I think Elon offered himself as a Steve Jobs type.
00:20:13.480And it wasn't so much about products being amazing, although that is the case with Tesla.
00:20:22.260Although what I've heard from real car guys, I'm not a real car guy.
00:20:25.960But what I've heard from some of these real car guys is that Teslas leave a hell of a lot to be desired.
00:20:31.880But anyway, he promised to solve big problems.
00:20:37.320And so if you look back at that Cybertruck announcement session, which very, very much resembled the Steve Jobs keynotes you can find on YouTube.
00:20:51.460But it was almost like a Las Vegas version of that, with bright lights shining everywhere and, you know, models.
00:21:54.980And we cracked global warming and so on.
00:21:58.360And let me introduce you to my creator, Elon.
00:22:01.060And first off, there was a, you know, a lot of sex cells, as we know.
00:22:08.640And there was a lot of sexualization of this very cute girl acting as a robot.
00:22:15.940And I think in this case, Elon was really going after a certain audience.
00:22:20.800It 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.
00:22:39.340Just a bunch of really annoying nerd types.
00:22:45.600And this is kind of their own personal sex fantasy because they obviously are not probably not surrounded by, you know, attractive, robust women.
00:22:58.300And so they have some nerd fantasy about owning a sex bot or something like this.
00:23:25.540We want some vision that corrects this.
00:23:28.600Well, 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.
00:23:44.120The rainforests are still going to burn.
00:23:47.240The ocean is still going to be filled with plastic, regardless of the electric car you own.
00:24:17.360You need to have a nuclear fission reactor.
00:24:21.480You need to pull out the oil in order to get the electricity.
00:24:27.940Now, 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.
00:24:42.080But that's not really what Elon's offering.
00:24:45.480Elon'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.
00:25:00.900And he presents himself as such to that community.
00:25:03.880Now, there have been many worse examples than the cyber trunk, excuse me, the cyber truck, as in terms of Elon Musk bullshitting everyone.
00:25:15.980He'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.
00:25:49.400And he's become a conservative movement hero.
00:25:53.180And 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.
00:26:19.960It was a kind of self-leak, but it was a kind of controlled leak, too.
00:26:25.160It was released in cooperation with these journalists and posted on Twitter and talked up by the man releasing them.
00:26:35.940Now, these are the sins of the old regime or so on, which he's repeating, of course.
00:26:40.460But 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.
00:27:51.380So Elon has moved on to a new audience.
00:27:55.380And these audiences that he cultivates are, I would say, in our polarized environment, mutually exclusive or incompatible.
00:28:07.780You 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.
00:28:29.420You're going to have one or the other.
00:28:31.020You've got to make a choice if you want to be a massive public figure.
00:28:34.800And 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.
00:28:50.780And now he's moving on to conservatives.
00:28:53.580And I think in many ways, he has become the global right-wing troll that Trump was previously.
00:29:06.640You 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.
00:29:26.040And so there are certain eras that I've lived through in my own relatively short life.
00:29:33.500There 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.
00:29:50.280It was all about 9-11, and the Iraq War was a kind of result of 9-11 in many ways.
00:29:55.740So we were focused on national security, terrorism, war abroad, et cetera.
00:30:05.520I think a kind of shorter moment occurred with the financial collapse in 2008, stock market and mortgage collapse.
00:30:15.080And 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.
00:31:13.660There can only be one person that we talk about.
00:31:16.560And 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,
00:31:35.980not 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,
00:31:45.660including me doing this 30, 45-minute monologue on him, of course.