So here we are rounding off 2022 with a Guru of the moment, Elon Musk.Trust us, we want to stop hearing about him as much as you do but we have long had him scheduled as the finale for the tech season. Unfortunately, the Decoding the Gurus curse (most of the people we cover quickly become worse and spiral into conspiracism) seems to have become more potent. Now we don't even have to cover a Guru just announce that we will and the spiral occurs. And with Elon what a spiral it has been. But we *try* not to dwell much on his recent antics and instead focus on decoding our chosen material. In this specific case, it is a recent wide-ranging interview conducted by a fellow billionaire and large Tesla investor, Ron Baron. This proved to be one of the most sycophantic interviews we have ever examined, which is a real achievement given the competition.Musk himself is an interesting figure. Softly spoken, prone to mumbling, he can even seem self-effacing, and yet he is also a prolific hype man, prone to hyperbole, and self-mythologizing. Is he the master engineer and polymath he claims? The ultimate conman? And how has he become the guru for so many gurus? Join us as we try to disentangle the Elon puzzle box and see if there is actually anything interesting inside.Oh and also Happy New Year! Remember to keep an eye out for those pesky Distributed Idea Suppression Complexes.LinksRon Baron Interview Nov 2022 with Elon Musk: Source for the DecodingThunderfoot Video: Why you should NEVER believe Elon Musk!Common Sense Skeptic: Debunking Elon Musk (Part 1 & Part 2)Guardian Article on Musk's comments on the Diver involved in the Thai Cave RescueFuturism Article on Elon Musk promising Full-Self-Driving Cars Every Year since 2014Rolling Stone: Elon Musk Keeps Taking Twitter Advice From Right-Wing TrollsArticle from buildd.co on Tesla's Marketing Strategy
Hello and welcome to Decoding the Gurus, a podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown, the psychologist.
With me is Chris Kavanagh.
He's the anthropologist.
And how are you going today, Chris?
It's the afternoon.
It's balmy.
It's summer where I am.
It's winter where you are.
Christmas is upon us.
It's the festive season.
How are you feeling?
Truly.
And recently I saw Home Alone.
The one and two.
So I'm in the holiday spirit.
I couldn't be better.
Literally.
Fantastic.
Unbelievable.
The period just before Christmas is always the best whenever you have young children and a distant family to coordinate with.
So, yes, it's going all right, Matt.
A little bit stressed, a little bit stressed, but I can handle it.
I can take it.
You can bear any burden, Chris.
And I will tell people about it.
So I know you were wondering, and I know that most of the people listening were wondering, how's the nut thing going?
People were like, you know, oh, that was great.
It was so informative.
It's so on topic to mention that.
So I'll just tell you, Matt.
You can see it in your eyes.
Nuts, you know, that healthy snack.
Still enjoying them.
Still enjoying them.
They've become a part of my life in a way that I didn't anticipate.
And I'm still a nut guy.
I'm a nut guy.
Well, you know what?
You've influenced me.
I actually went out and bought some mixed nuts.
How many listeners now are thinking about going out to get mixed nuts?
I'm going to become a health guru.
Put down your sweet coffee and eat your semi-healthy nuts.
Forget the all-me diet.
Go for an all-nut diet.
Yeah, I'm sure you could survive on that.
Just add some spinach and you'll be alright.
They're pretty close to a complete food.
Avocados as well.
I'm sure if you had avocados and nuts, that's kind of all you need.
Well, you have that somewhat debatable theory that humans are just waste processing machines where you can put anything in and it doesn't make any difference.
So, you know, maybe people shouldn't follow our nutritional advice on here, but...
You know, if you want to...
I'll tell you this.
Like, I knew someone who subsisted entirely on pasta, just normal spaghetti pasta with some butter.
I think they grated a tiny bit of parmesan cheese on it.
Now, they ate nothing but literally that for, I don't know, a decade.
And, okay, they might have had a couple of...
I didn't know how to drop a kick on one of the special occasions.
They would have got scurvy if they hadn't at least had...
They must have had something.
Eleven.
Eleven.
It was pretty close to that.
And, you know, they were all right.
And they were fine?
They were fine.
I mean, they could have...
It could have been better.
I'm not saying...
Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, this is a good anecdote.
So again, that really rebuts my point that people shouldn't listen to us for dietary advice.
Because I knew a guy that once smoked lots of cigars and he didn't die of lung cancer.
So is it really an association?
Who can say?
I'm just saying, if you listen to the dieticians, dietary science.
In scare quotes.
Then you get the impression that unless you eat exactly, unless you fill up your quota of all of the micronutrients and macronutrients and exactly the right thing, then you'll keel over and die.
Just saying we're a bit more flexible.
Yeah, don't listen to the ones that we know what it is.
Eat your vegetables, eat your fruits, don't eat too much.
Don't eat before you go to bed or you turn into a gremlin.
So these are the rules for eating that Decoding the Gurus endorses.
And we're going to go fairly quickly this week into the Decoding.
We're going to have an efficient episode.
We've promised that so many times and we consistently refuse to deliver.
But this time I'm feeling good about it.
You know, I've just got a good feeling about it.
You don't have anything else at all apart from the nuts to get off your chest.
Oh, I do.
I do.
But it's not a long thing.
So all I want to mention is that, well, first of all, because we always only mention this at the end, but we have a Patreon where people can join up and get extra content if they want.
And I mention it now because our Patreon, like a Christmas stocking, is stocked full of goodies for people.
So if people have been wanting DTG content, they could go there and they would find things like...
You, me, and David Pizarro from the Very Bad Wizards podcast on a very thematically crumulent discussion of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the comedy TV series.
Just an hour long, hour and a half long maybe discussion about that show because all three of us love it.
It's not really related to gurus, but some people might enjoy that.
And we also have an interview with Coffeezilla.
The online YouTuber investigator looking at crypto and NFT scams and that kind of thing.
Very, very enjoyable chat with him that you can hear now.
And we just recently have put up our Christmas special, which is with the journalist and writer Helen Lewis talking about her new guru show with a Christmas bonus quiz.
So these things will be coming out for the...
Normal people, the ordinary listeners as well, but if you can't wait, if you just need to hear, that would be, you go to the Patreon, and that's where it is.
So just letting people know, Matt, because we produce content, and the people need to know.
Yeah, yeah.
And that were all three.
Good things.
I enjoyed all three of those things.
Not to say that any of our other episodes have not been enjoyable.
Well, it's not fair to play favorites, I guess.
But no, they were good.
It was really fun talking about Always Sunny.
And we didn't just recite the funny scenes that we liked.
We analyzed it.
Even though you wanted to.
I wanted to.
I wanted to just relive them.
No, we analyzed it.
And I thought it was fun.
So it was interesting to talk to a moral psychologist like David Pizarro about it.
Yeah.
He's just very good at analyzing pop culture.
He's better than Jordan Peterson.
You know the hack Jordan Peterson?
Don't listen to him.
Listen to Dave Fazzaro for Insights, and we're along for the ride.
And similarly, there's an end-of-year guru quiz that you will hear on the main feed, but if you want to hear in advance, you can find out who won.
Was it Matt?
Was it me?
Who can tell?
No one unless they listen, but it was very entertaining.
Helen is a good quiz master, so thank her for that.
Thank you, Helen.
People on here will hear it when we get it all edited up.
Very good.
Announcements done?
Yeah.
Announcements done?
That's it.
That's it.
Nothing else?
You don't want to complain about Twitter?
You don't want to complain about Elon Musk?
Well, we'll be doing that later.
We're going to be doing that.
That's the reason.
Because our subject for this week is a kind of recently ascended uberguru.
Because I think the thing was, Elon Musk has always been a public figure of note.
And a kind of...
Tech CEO type.
But I wouldn't have said he's necessarily the stereotypical guru image.
Until recently, he's become embroiled a lot more in culture war issues and that kind of stuff.
But maybe this is just my bias.
But I mean that he was a figure.
He was treated by various people as a guru in the way that Steve Jobs kind of was.
He was more niche than he is now.
Now he's on a par with Trump in how much we are all forced to pay attention to his daily twitterings and thoughts.
I was on the train in Japan the other day and up on the little notification on the train was Elon Musk puts a poll up on Twitter.
I was like, oh my god!
It's on the train here.
You know, usually that is saying the World Cup was won by such and such.
And I was like, even here, I need to listen to or see Elon Musk's Twitterings plastered up all over the place.
Yeah.
I have to say also that we decided to cover Elon Musk weeks, maybe months ago, to finish off our season of tech.
It's decoding the guru.
Tech season.
Tech season.
Tech, tech, tech, tech, tech, tech.
Season. It's decoding the guru.
Tech, tech, tech, tech, tech.
Tech season.
Tech season.
you
And if you recall, Chris, we were tossing up between Elon Musk and what's his name?
Peter Thiel.
It was a coin flip.
Yeah, it was a coin flip.
And we thought both of them would be kind of not particularly guru-ish, but certainly tech.
Annoying.
Annoying, yes.
But we didn't have any strong opinions.
And then we jumped in, started doing our background research.
And meanwhile, Musk took over Twitter and started throwing his weight around.
And it's just weird, Chris, because we've talked about this.
But before, when we covered people like Brett Weinstein, when we first covered him, he wasn't an anti-vaxxer then.
He was just like a bit of a blowhard.
I mean, he was always...
Anti-vaxxer in his heart, but it wasn't his mean output.
He wasn't known for it, at least.
And after we covered him, he became just so much worse.
This pattern has been happening with other gurus, that once we cover them, they get...
JPCers?
JPCers.
Yes, JPCers, I remember.
He seemed really tangential.
And with Elon Musk, we didn't even have to cover him.
We just had to decide to cover him, and we've incepted...
Yeah, the spiral.
Like, James Lindsay, when we covered him first time, was nowhere near what current-day James Lindsay as well.
There are a few gurus that we've covered who have not gone on a death spiral, but there are notable exceptions.
Like, I think Paleb is pretty much the same as he ever was.
Sam Harris, like, pretty consistent.
And we've talked about why that might be, but it does feel a little bit like, are we the main...
Characters.
It's our show what is causing the Guru universe to move.
And whichever one we're going to talk, because Lex as well, we covered Lex, but Lex has become much more, he's probably getting more conversation about him than Rogan in recent times because of the Kanye interview and so on.
And the other thing that's really odd is how they all connect together.
So back when...
Back in time when we decided to cover Elon Musk, I would never have expected him to be carrying on these conversations with other people that we've covered, like Lex Rudman, like Eric Weinstein, probably Jordan Peterson as well.
I don't know.
It's like they all seek each other out and somehow find each other once they, once they got, start getting in influencer guru mode.
It does feel like that.
And it will be impossible to avoid Twitter going on because it's,
One illustrator of Elon Musk's character in various ways, but also you can see from the people that he interacts with on Twitter that he's interacting with the absolute worst dregs.
It would be one thing to be right-leaning and to hang out with the tech CEOs like David Sachs and whatnot, who are pretty reactionary, but they're tech CEO types.
But he's like, he was described on Blockton Report as a reply guy to Ian Miles Chung.
I think you're just like, oh my god, like anytime any right-wing bottom tier Mike Cernovich says something, Elon is there in the comments saying, oh, amazing.
Really?
We'll look into this.
And yeah, and he did, you know, he banned recently all the journalists, temporarily reinstated them.
He temporarily forbid people from linking to other services in a way that would extremely fall afoul of anti-monopoly legislation in Europe.
So that was quickly rescinded.
It's just, it is an ongoing shit show.
And he put a poll up about should he step down and he has said that he's going to step down but essentially be doing everything else in the background.
So who knows?
But that part of it is, you know, you don't need to follow.
All the ins and outs of what he's doing, except to note it's very impulsive, it's pretty chaotic, and it is showing a pattern of relationships and an interest in issues that are presented by the absolute,
most unhinged, reactionary, conspiracy-prone accounts, which he doesn't need to do because he could literally interact with...
Anyone.
He could be talking to conservatives like David Fromm or centrist-type conservatives, but that is not where he is.
He's right at the edges.
Yeah, yeah.
It's an unusual situation.
His behavior, at the very least, is unusual for a billionaire.
Now, what we're going to cover in this episode, you'll talk a little bit in a moment about the actual material, the interview that we're going to cover.
And of course, just to remind everyone, this is Decoding the Gurus.
What we do is we take a particular piece of content.
And we decode that and really focusing on the discourse and the claims that are being made.
However, in the case of Musk, I think we at least do have to give a nod to the backstory to the man, even though it isn't our main focus.
If you want to see deep dives into his business career or the technologies underlying SpaceX or Neuralink, then there are many, many videos on YouTube and journalists who will be happy to...
We'll link to some of them.
There are in-depth breakdowns of overhyped claims that he's made and whatnot.
And some of them go very hard, but Funderfoot, for example, has produced several quite well-researched videos showing that he's made.
And it definitely does matter because one thing that you'll know, and this is a limitation of our format, is that in the content, including this content that we look at in the moment, Elon Musk can come across quite well and actually,
like, rather understated at times in his delivery.
But he makes a variety of claims.
And the issue is, like, you can't check those in real time, right?
So you would need to go and do research.
And there are people that you can, to a certain degree, trust that they're being relatively accurate when they represent things.
And with Musk, I will say we knew that he has a...
Penchant for exaggeration.
So went to look into various claims and just discovered absolute mountains of lies, bald-faced lying.
And he does that on Twitter every day, now for everyone to see.
Like he said, he's never going to ban the Elon Musk thing.
That's his commitment to free speech.
Banned, right?
So it's just, that is important context.
And it highlights that the kind of stuff that we're going to talk about now is a step.
And some people...
You can notice red flags and it should show up.
But if there's a load of contextual information that says this person is a prolific liar and hyperbolic salesman, that is relevant information.
And you should go and look secondary sources.
You should go look for unbiased breakdowns, including looking at things that are positive about him and try to get deeper into the story.
So yeah, just to fully recommend that.
But I think it is...
Telling, because people could just watch a video of Musk and say, well, his haters are a bit mean to him.
Yeah, that's right.
We won't try to give an overview of his career or the many businesses he's been involved with now because that would take up too much time.
But I will say that in getting one's head around what Musk is and what he does, it's a little bit more complex than simply someone who is a prolific engineer or a super creative person or whatever.
It's not quite that, but it's also not quite someone who's a complete scam artist, like someone who's created NFTs or Bitcoin.
And that's because there are real businesses.
There are rockets.
There are real rockets.
There is a real car.
Whatever the failings of Tesla are, it is still a legitimate and a significant enterprise.
But I guess what should be acknowledged is what Musk puts on top of those businesses.
Is, as you said, a huge amount of spin.
I've seen interesting discussion of his role in some very cold-blooded financial analyses.
These are people that don't give a damn about Musk.
They're not a hater or a fan.
They just care about whether or not you should buy Tesla stock, for instance.
And one of the things that they acknowledged while shaking their heads at his antics, they made a point that I thought was very interesting because it's easy to pathologize the behavior of someone like Musk and it is somewhat pathological.
Just like Donald Trump's behavior is somewhat pathological.
But there is a method to the madness, right?
They described what he does is his job in the business can be thought of as being sure to put Tesla on the front pages, get it talked about in the media all the time.
Now, Tesla apparently spends next to nothing on actual advertising like brain development.
Which is very unusual for a brand-focused company like that.
A company of Tesla's size would often spend like a billion dollars on just building up the brand name and brand awareness.
But Musk doing the performance that he does, very much like how Trump's antics would ensure that the focus was always on him, performs a very functional role for a business like that.
So we're going to go into a recent interview from November 2022 that they had with, I think, like a Tesla mega investor or whatever, which explains why.
He's an old guy, but he constantly refers to we, Tesla, as a we,
indicating that he is in some way.
I actually thought he was the employee of the company when I first heard it, but I now gather that he is like a large investor in it, which is why he talks like that.
But you'll see that.
But just before we start into the clips from that conversation, I have an example, Matt, that illustrates both Elon's role as a very good promoter who brings genuine value in adding attention and drama.
Media attention to the companies that he's in, and also the aspect that you cannot really trust what he claims, particularly when it comes to projections.
So this is just a short video we're taking from somewhere else.
It's about a minute long, which is why you'll hear background music.
But the thing to note here is...
All of these statements are basically taking part in sequential years.
So it starts out in 2017 or 2016 and continues on.
So you will hear him making the same prediction, but each time it's made, it's another year or several months have passed.
Autonomous cars will definitely be a reality.
A Tesla car next year will probably be 90% capable of autopilot.
So 90% of your miles could be on auto.
My guess for when we'll have full autonomy is about three years.
I think we're basically less than two years away from complete autonomy.
Probably by the end of next year, self-driving will be...
We'll encompass essentially all modes driving.
And we expect to have the first operating robotaxis next year.
I'm extremely confident of achieving full autonomy and releasing it to the Tesla customer base next year.
When do you think Tesla will solve Level 4 FSD?
I mean, it's looking quite likely that it will be next year.
I would be shocked if we do not achieve full-stop driving safer than a human this year.
It's seven years later.
So, yeah, it helps if you have the visuals, but each of those statements, as I say, is taking place at different years.
So when he's saying it's going to happen in two years, two years later, he's saying it's definitely coming next year and so on.
So you can do that.
People do that.
But he does it in a way which is quite remarkable.
It's quite remarkable that when he says...
He's going to have Neuralink brain interfaces in the next 12 months.
He still gets headlines saying, "Elo Musk says Neuralink available for everyone in the next 12 months," or "Entering human trials in six months' time," or "Mission to Mars in two years," says Elon Musk.
And you're like, wow, but he's been saying those kind of things ever since he got near a microphone.
Yeah, yeah.
These aren't isolated incidents of him, both.
Making really hyperbolic claims about the amazing products that are going to arrive very, very shortly, and also him being instrumental in making them happen.
So there's the example of the solar city and the electricity generating solar tile.
It was up there on stage, wasn't it, Chris, where he was holding this thing in his hand and he was claiming that they were already making these tiles, that they could cover the...
Slate tiles of the roof, so it would look just like a normal roof, but it would be solar generating.
And he actually claimed the houses in the place where they were doing the presentation, but that turned out to be a set from Desperate Housewives.
And also that he just completely changed the design of the product in the few months before, so none of it was ready to go.
He was on stage claiming it's already there and installed and all good.
And the solar tile that he was actually holding in his hand.
Yeah, I believe it came out in the court case that that was not a functional tile.
So standing on stage saying, this is actually one of them.
And like, no, it isn't.
And he knew that.
Yeah, and this is someone who claims to be intimately familiar with all of the engineering details.
He presents himself as an engineer, if not instrumental, in actually making a lot of these technological advancements happen.
You can't really claim ignorance in that scenario, right?
Like, I'm just a sales guy.
I don't know what they're doing in the backroom.
That's not the role that he projects.
I have a clip that speaks to that specifically.
So this is Elon talking about the role that he plays in Tesla manufacturing.
And then another example is there was a...
Again, this was like...
These were choke points in the entire production system.
That's why they...
You know, I'm running around the production line trying to fix the production line, just like a maniac, sort of Tasmanian devil, just running around the factory like a lunatic.
And let's see, we had the body production line, a Model 3 was at one point stuck because we had a laser welding cell to weld a small cross-car beam in the passenger footwell of the front seats.
And I'm looking at this...
This sort of, this beam, and I'm like, what the heck does that do?
Because the entire factory stopped trying to put, trying to get the laser weld cell to work.
And I'm like, I can't imagine what a useful thing it could do.
And then the team said, the production team said, oh, that's for crash safety.
So then I called the crash safety team and said, is this for crash safety?
They said, oh, no, that didn't do anything.
We should delete it.
That turned out to be totally useless.
They forgot to tell the production team.
Honestly, a bunch of these things just feel like you're living in a Dilbert cartoon.
I'm like, oh no.
Any given company, they should have, like, what's your Dilbert ratio?
It's not zero.
And even that image that he conjures up there, it's the fact that he presents himself like he's the foreman.
On the factory, right?
And there's, you know, it's run around building and smoke is billowing out somewhere.
And he's like, oh, what's going on here?
And no, all the engineers are just confused.
There's some problem.
There's a, you know, there's something stuck in the pipeline, but only Elon has the overview where he can say, wait, is that piece necessary?
And then contact the other department.
They're like, oh no, that's not necessary.
And then he resolves it and the machine gets wiring up and the factory starts producing better.
It's a kind of factorial.
The image of how things work.
And I, you know, we don't know the specifics of this case, but I can imagine it playing out very differently where it is more, you know, the more accurate or more realistic thing is maybe some version of that happened, but there are other people involved bringing things to attention.
And it isn't just simply that Elon noticed it and was able to resolve it because he also gives another example about noticing.
Another defect where there was a kind of thing on the battery that two departments had mistakenly understood serving different purposes.
One example was there were three fiberglass mats on top of the battery pack.
They partially covered the battery pack.
And I was on the battery pack production line, and it was the number one thing choking battery pack production.
We're gluing on these three fiberglass mats to the top of the battery pack.
And so the reason I repeat this algorithm myself is that I first did things backwards.
First I try to automate it.
Then I try to accelerate it, just have this go faster.
Then I try to simplify it.
And only then did I delete it.
Because it turned out that the team at Tesla that does noise and vibration minimization, so making the car quiet, thought that the fiberglass mats were there because of the battery safety team for battery fire prevention.
And then I asked the battery fire prevention team.
What were they needed for?
And they said, oh, noise and vibration.
And I'm like, okay.
So then we had two cars drive, one with a microphone in the car, in each car, and you could not tell the difference.
So we went to all that trouble for a part that should not exist.
Again, Elon presented that as he worked it out and was able to resolve it.
So it's Elon the engineer maestro.
Not the detached CEO.
Now, obviously, we don't have the privilege of being a fly on the wall of every one of these production centers, so we can't check these claims.
But if you were to believe Elon Musk's version of events, then he's at once a brain surgeon responsible for advances at Neuralink and also literally a rocket scientist.
So it is implausible, I think, that anyone would be Jumping around and actually making a significant contribution to these various fields in the same week.
Rocket design and electronic car production and social media, marketing and brain computer interfaces.
That is a lot of hats for an engineer to wear.
So if you compare that scenario, as if that were true, to another scenario where there's so many Cases on record of him making claims that can be shown to be demonstrably untrue, can be shown to be absurdly optimistic and are essentially lies.
Then it seems that that version of where he's pretending is a far more realistic one.
We don't want to go through all of the businesses, but I'll just spend a moment to talk about Neuralink, I think.
And that's because I did my PhD on psychophysiology.
I was collecting EEG.
Signals from around the motor cortex of the brain, doing signal processing, stuff with that.
And in the course of that work during my PhD, I had to become familiar with the brain-computer interface literature, the BCI literature, and it's been an ongoing thing for many years.
I can't comment on the likelihood of setting up a Mars base in the next five or ten years, but I can comment on whether or not this neural link brain interface is plausible or whether it's science fiction.
Let me tell you, it is science fiction.
The way it's been described is doing amazing things that could soon cure paralysis or all kinds of disabilities.
The way he talks about it is as if it's something from the matrix where you've got a shunt in your head and your matrix.
The matrix.
The matrix is a very different universe.
I don't want to get into it, but people can probably understand that there are significant practical problems with literally drilling a hole.
In the top of your head, sticking a wireless electronic device in there, which has got batteries in it, and then plugging it up again, and then recharging yourself with a wireless magnetic recharger, which, by the way, gives off heat,
which is generally a bad thing to be happening in the middle of your brain.
And on top of that, the way the brain works, there is no sort of magic shunt for any electronic device to just communicate with your brain.
At the very most, what you can get is after a whole bunch of training that there is some kind of adaption and you can somehow learn that if you think certain things, then maybe you can get the cursor to go this way and if you think other things, the cursor can go that way.
That kind of research has been demonstrated before with recordings and interfaces that were not invasive.
So, the Neuralink company that he bought was a real company run by real researchers.
It had a strong background, a publication background from Stanford.
They were pushing this technology forward, but it seems what happened is Musk then bought this company and then suddenly the claims and the discourse around it became like a thousand times more ambitious, yet nothing or very little seems to be happening under the surface.
Monkeys are dying in large numbers.
But that is something that happens when technologies are getting developed anyway.
I have my issues with some of the primate testing that goes on.
But in these cases in particular, it's stuff like you have to make the limbs inoperable and then do brain surgery on them so that they are only able to operate via computers.
And yeah, there's something dystopian.
Like this tasteful to me.
But it is also a way that we may end up with implants and robotic artificial limbs that work better.
So there's cost to that.
But I think one issue though, Matt, is I think the amount of fans of Musk has been decreasing as he's rampaged on Twitter.
But it is true that, for example, bone conduction for hearing aids, right, works by implanting something in the skull, right?
The Australian company, Cochlear, actually is, I think, the world leader in that.
But that's a very different kind of thing.
I only use it to mention that there are technologies that are developing and that it is likely that at some point in the future that there will be brain computer interfaces that work very well.
So it's not to say that anybody that tries to push that or that has that as a goal.
It's just that the engineering and technological goals are not minor unless they're huge.
And they may well be overcome with this new innovative technology, but the way that Musk talks about it bears much more resemblance to Elizabeth Holmes presenting about Theranos than it does.
Some scientists in the Manhattan Project.
Yeah, exactly.
That's the distinction I want to make.
And before I said these are legitimate businesses or legitimate lines of research inquiry.
And it could be that at some point in the future there is breakthroughs, even surprising breakthroughs like we've seen with, say, artificial intelligence and these GPT-3 systems.
You have to acknowledge that there is a legitimate team of engineers who may well have been working on the project long before Musk came along.
So there's the reality, which is that it's a super hard, super long-term research and development program.
And then you have Musk's claims.
Other people have described it as science fiction theater.
Technology is real.
Science is real.
Progress in science and technology is real.
We have hopes and aspirations, I think, which sit on top of that.
And it seems like Musk is quite good at speaking to those.
Yeah, I do have a question about that, because one aspect is that Steve Jobs' infamous reality distortion field, where he, in a similar way, overhyped and over-claimed.
But in the end, Apple, a hugely profitable company, is one of the main drivers in the tech space and made all these innovations.
And sometimes people look at...
Tesla or SpaceX, and they're very much saying, okay, maybe he oversells things, but Tesla is putting reusable rockets around, or not Tesla, sorry, SpaceX is, and Tesla is opening up more factories and increasing its production process and that kind of thing.
So you can see why people could...
Become enamored and regard naysayers as just the kind of people that would have said, we'll never fly in a plane or that kind of thing.
You can see how that would take hold.
But I think a point to note is that slightly different than Steve Jobs and many of the other gurus that we cover, Elon Musk, as you'll hear in these clips, he's not a very good public...
He's got more verbal text than me and Matt do, which is saying something, and saying something for someone who is infamous for giving these kind of bombastic presentations.
He's confident, but it is not the linguistic proficiency that we see with the usual guru type.
And it might be precisely because he is a billionaire, one of the richest people on the planet, and he has these...
Companies and stuff that they can point to that are actually real.
He doesn't need to do the same level of pageantry.
In some ways, it's more impressive that he's so unassuming.
But I just want to make that point about listen to his delivery and note the difference from the usual gurus that we cover.
Yeah.
Let's hear some more of his delivery.
Yes, so I'll stick with this factory because there's a bit more about this and part of this is talking about the myth-making around what kind of CEO he is.
So is this you or is this...
So you do all these different things here.
That's literally me.
Someone else who did this.
I was living in the factory in Fremont and the one in Nevada for three years straight.
That was my primary residence.
Not kidding, literally.
Did you keep the couch?
I actually slept on a couch at one point in a tent on the roof.
But for a while there, I was just sleeping under my desk, which is out in the open in the factory, for an important reason.
And it was damn uncomfortable sleeping on that floor.
And when I woke up, I'd smell like metal dust.
We went to visit, and they bought him a new couch.
Yeah.
As you were saying, Chris, it's not bombastic.
It's kind of self-effacing.
There's funny little anecdotes.
I think if I didn't know so much about him and the many, many times that he's had interviews like this where he has sort of humble bragged, I suppose, himself into a position of explaining how instrumental he is to so many things and how he's going to change the world,
take humanity to a higher place.
If I didn't know all that context, I would find the single paragraphs and sentences that he says perfectly normal and kind of, well, not charming, but
Admirable in a sense, right?
He just sounds like a very devoted CEO figure who wants to rally the troops, right?
And just to let that play out a little bit more, here's him elaborating on that.
I stopped using the couch.
I just slept on the floor under my desk.
So during shift change, the entire team could see me.
Thank you.
And this is important because, like, you know, the team, like, if they think the sort of their leader is off somewhere having a good time, you know, drinking Mai Tais on a tropical island, which I could definitely have been doing and would much have preferred to do.
I'm not actually a masochist, I think.
But the thing is that since the team could see me sleeping on the floor...
During shift change, just with nothing, they knew I was there.
And that made a huge difference.
And then they gave it their all.
So the focus is on always lowering costs and providing leadership?
So you get all the things that you said there about, he sounds very sincere.
And he's kind of laughing at himself like it's, you know, not like I want to do this, but this is how you get people to succeed.
You got to show people that you're part of the team.
And you hear the audience react, right, as well through his like just kind of expression of sincerity.
But fundamentally, what he is saying is like all the engineers regard him as one of the team and he is working harder than anybody.
In the company, really, to make it a success.
And when you pair that with the way he described it, which was him kind of running around the production line, sorting it out.
And Ron Barron asked him, is it you, though, that's doing all of this?
Like, you're finding all the things?
And he was like, yep, it's me.
So he's the CEO, he's the troubleshooter, he's the guy liaising across departments, and he's doing that for four or five different companies simultaneously.
Quite the feat.
Yeah.
At the risk of seeming cynical, there could be a very good reason for portraying yourself as being fundamentally different from other business owners.
Not just a bean counter, but some kind of wunderkind.
Someone that is absolutely obsessed, absolutely dedicated, has this polymathic engineering ability and organizational ability.
And the reason is the share price and attracting investors.
A huge amount of his net worth, and he was for a short while, I think, the richest person on earth and is still extremely rich.
Companies like Tesla are valued at amazing multiples.
Even considering a very optimistic future in terms of them gaining a significant portion of the electric car market, most level-headed analyses say that it's completely overvalued.
And this is an era, Chris, of where we've had NFTs, we've had Bitcoin.
We've had a massive amount of money injected into the economy to shore things up during COVID and other crises.
And it's an era where there is a lot of money following speculative business opportunities.
So there is a very functional role in building a myth around yourself to make those great claims.
And if people believe in you, believe in your mission and your specialness, then that could serve as an extremely good justification.
You should invest in those companies regardless of how much you're paying.
Yeah, and an example of linking Elon's character to the companies that he works for is when he's talking about aspects that make Tesla's manufacturing process unique.
Also, Matt, see if you can hear the phrase that scraped my bones when I heard it uttered.
I mean, I think the full explanation, or at least an accurate explanation, would take a long time.
Because, to first approximation, a car is made of 10,000 unique parts and process steps.
And, I mean, Tesla's really, I think at this point, probably the best at manufacturing in the auto industry, which I think nobody was expecting.
Probably in the history of the world.
Probably.
I've got this first principles algorithm that I find to be very helpful in the design and manufacturing of anything.
People here may find it helpful.
The first thing you should do is Make the requirements that you've been given less dumb.
Whatever constraints and requirements were given, they were to some degree dumb, and you want to make them less dumb.
If you don't start with this, then you get the right answer to the wrong question.
And the requirements must be given from a person who can explain the requirement, not from a department.
Then you don't know who to talk to.
Then step two is delete the part or delete the process step.
This sounds extremely obvious.
And yet over and over again, we have found that parts were not needed.
They were just put in there just in case or by mistake.
Or there was a step that someone thought was needed but was not actually needed.
This sounds insanely obvious.
We've deleted so many parts from the card that did nothing.
So, did you get the frees?
No, tell me.
Which one was it?
First principles algorithm.
He's a first principles thinker.
Who says that?
Who else do we know that says that?
Most of the gurus, but Brett Weinstein in particular, it's just a common refrain that others are following, but they are working from the eternal insights, the blueprints that they developed themselves.
Like what he's talking about there is like a bit of engineering homespun wisdom.
Before you attempt to solve the problem, ask yourself whether or not it's a problem that really needs to be solved.
It's the kind of thing everyone go, yeah, that's brilliant.
And look, maybe that is a unique perspective.
Maybe Elon Musk does have a special talent for identifying redundant parts or misspecifications in engineering requirements.
But it does sound a bit sensemakery and it does sound a little bit...
Like someone like Brett Weinstein talking about how, what do you need to know to understand what's going on with vaccines or something is to start with evolutionary first principles, then the answer is obvious.
It's a kind of a guru thing where it's like you can do it too.
Like this is a secret that you can apply to your own life even.
That kind of insight where you're giving a broad idea.
It is a very TED talky kind of thing.
But it presents you again as like the auteur, right?
And the way that he also suggested that the main thing is to deal with people, not departments.
And you can understand that because everybody understands how the bureaucracy can be annoying.
People are just saying, we can't do it like this because the form doesn't say that we can do it right.
And you can just speak to a person.
So he's right in that respect.
But it also hearkens to this obsession with the interpersonal and the individual loan.
Genius, where really what makes the companies tick are departments of engineers and scientists and working together.
It isn't all lone geniuses having eureka moments.
Science and engineering is a lot of collaboration and teamwork and not just like individual geniuses.
Yeah, the delivery, as you said, is not bombastic.
Impression of someone who is sincere.
And he's helped, I think, by the kinds of people he speaks to.
In this case, it's someone who is a total sycophant.
Unbelievably.
So I've done so many clips.
I will highlight this in dramatic fashion.
But just to say, we've come across plenty of sycophants on the podcast around the gurus.
But even amongst those.
And the thing that struck me is, this guy is so rich.
He, in his own right, is a hugely successful person and investor.
So it's not the same as an obscure Twitter character who only defends Brett Weinstein and Robert Malone, for example.
It's just odd because you would imagine you wouldn't want to be a 70-year-old successful investor who is debasing themselves to just extol how amazing you find Elon Musk.
But okay, I'm going to play a clip.
I have to play a clip to highlight what I mean.
I was on a red-eye flight, so I'm a little slower than normal.
I didn't get much sleep.
That's sort of my first question.
So you're 51?
Yeah.
I think I'm safely not a spring chicken anymore.
Late summer chicken?
I'm 79. You look great.
So you're 51, and you do 16-hour days, and you work seven hours a week, and you fly all over the place, and you go to these meetings constantly, and people constantly criticize you for everything.
It's amazing to me.
I mean, you're changing the world, and you're giving yourself.
Why do you do this?
So my wife says to me, why are you still working?
Why are you still working?
What are you doing here?
Hardball questions, Matt.
Hard-ball questions.
You know, you're amazing.
Your critics are so evil.
You're working harder than anyone else.
What makes you get up in the morning and be such a man?
Yeah, and a lot of his interviews are like this.
I've heard of a few now.
And it makes his job of sending that message that he is a very special person indeed a lot easier because he doesn't need to be...
In your face about it.
He can do it in that kind of self-effacing manner.
But quietly agree with the premise of the question that he is really that special.
Yeah, so this is another example of that.
And also an illustration that this guy, Ron Barron, is just...
Bad at asking questions.
This is one of the things, when I listen to this, I like Elon.
I got a sincere, nice vibe.
And like you said, it's this contrast of him being self-deprecating and goofy and a bit geekish, and then this guy.
But that subsequently faded over time.
But listen to this exchange.
So you have these missions, and somehow, whenever you have a mission and you have this vision, and you are a visionary...
That somehow, whatever you do, you develop other businesses.
So when you started SpaceX, you didn't think about satellites.
When you started Tesla, you didn't think about robots.
When you don't have enough people, you didn't think about robots.
So you didn't think about autonomous driving.
And without Elon, there would not be electric cars.
Nobody who makes cars wants to make electric cars.
They're being forced to make them.
In fact, every time...
They sell an electric car.
They sell one fewer car that they make money on.
And they have all that money invested in plants that make those other cars.
So nobody wants to have these cars except for him.
And everybody thought it was going to fail.
And one of the things you said is that patents are for the weak.
And you share your patents.
And with other companies, of course, on the other hand, when they get your patents, you're two or three years ahead of them.
He never got to the question, but there was so much of just like, you're more successful than everyone else.
Everybody admires you.
You did this.
You did that.
It's painful, Matt.
He annoyed me so much, this old guy.
By comparison, Elon does look good, but like you said, A lot of the heavy lifting is done for him in making claims when people talk like this.
So this is them talking about Tesla and the special way that they make cars.
It would be terrifying to other companies to realize that when we make cars, it's $39,000 in cost of car, and we're making $15,000, $16,000 in profit a car.
And so we invest $7 billion and we make $15 billion a year.
I'm sorry, yeah, 15, right, 15.
A million cars, $15,000 a year on a $7 million investment.
Shocking.
So no one else does that.
And here you're telling us how you want to make cars for $20,000 a piece.
How do you do that?
Well, we've not formally announced our next car program, so I can't talk too much about our upcoming I
think by far the biggest factor is autonomy.
In terms of the value of a car, because right now, cars get driven for about 10 or 12 hours a week, like maybe one and a half hours a day.
But there's 168 hours a week, and so if they were autonomous, the cars could probably drive for 50 or 60 hours.
So you'd see a five-fold increase in the utility of the car.
You know, that could do autonomy.
This is a really, really gigantic thing.
It would also mean that we wouldn't need anywhere near as many parking lots.
And this would also be helpful for the environment because you would need far fewer cars.
So, I misspoke.
It was a $7 billion investment for a plant that makes a million cars a year that makes $15 billion a year in profits.
So you invest $7 billion and you make $15 billion a year.
Who does that?
He got his billions and his thousands and his millions all mixed up, but he wanted to drive that point home, which is that Elon Musk is so amazing.
Yeah, and that part about Elon Musk saying, not only are Tesla already making their cars much cheaper than anybody else can do their electric cars, but because they're investing in autonomous driving, they have the potential to five-fold increase the utility and efficiency and so on.
It's a good pitch.
But there is just the fact that everything, like this talk, you might think that we selected a highly sycophantic one, but I actually just wanted one where it was relatively recent and he talked at length.
But a lot of the talks are like this.
Even when it's Rogan or Lex Friedman, they're still just asking him, you're a guy that wants to get to the stars.
How are we going to do it, Elon?
And his answers are like, That kind of hesitant, bumbly way of speaking, it makes him sound more authentically intelligent because he's not got the social fluency.
He's just a tech guy.
Yeah, that's right.
Whether it's intentional or not, he projects everybody's idea of a lone genius and auteur, as you said.
And he's still talking about the self-driving as if it's a definite thing.
And you played at the beginning just how long he's been promising.
The self-driving, it's definitely working.
It's definitely coming.
Just wait 6 or 12 months.
It's a bit like a millennial cult, isn't it?
Like the comet's going to come in 6 or 12 months.
It doesn't matter how many times the comet doesn't come, people keep believing.
But I just want to emphasize just how incredibly functional this is because if you promise it, if you get people to believe that it is absolutely really and truly happening, then what you do is you attract so much investment.
To your project, that it might well just happen.
It's a gamble.
Like, it's probably no closer to full automatic self-driving as a lot of other companies.
But if you get enough people to believe you and have faith in you, then you'll get so many resources.
You can attract the engineers.
Yeah, you might actually do it.
Yeah.
Well, there's a bit later as well, Matt.
This is like the house of code thing.
And they're asking him about how to solve some logistic and production bottlenecks.
And he says this.
To make so many cars by the end of this year, 40,000 cars a week?
I mean, I have to be careful of MNPI, but I believe I have said in the past publicly that our aspiration is to reach 40,000 a week by the end of this year.
So if we're doing that, then that means that we're producing a car in 15 seconds.
Yeah.
And so, but that's still only 2 million cars a year.
There's 100 million cars that are made a year.
And so the question, so there's presumably capacity to be able to logistics, to ship all these cars all over the place, to have people pick them up where they want them, but not if they all do them in the same week.
He goes on to suggest that the way this will be solved, It's by autonomous self-driving.
Like Elon is saying, well, once we have the autonomous, the cars can kind of drive themselves to the locations that they need to go.
So it's referencing the future technology which they have not perfected yet as the thing that will solve some issue.
And he does it again, Matt, with robots.
Then there's also the Optimus program.
Which is our humanoid robot, where we'll leverage our manufacturing expertise and the intelligence we've developed for self-driving to have a useful humanoid robot.
Now, the economy is fundamentally GDP per capita times capita.
If you no longer have a constraint on capita because of a useful humanoid robot, it is not clear that there is any limit to the size of the economy.
Thank you.
And these things will actually happen.
When you have to add that, that's always a concern.
But you have to say, that will occur.
It's a real thing.
The promises are the thing.
The dream is the thing.
Right there, it's easy to glide over it.
But he's promising part of his pitch for why Tesla and everything is going to be so great and why everything is going to be a success is he's promising Functional humanoid robots that will replace humans doing manual work.
Now, I think you saw the same demonstration of where they are with the humanoid robot.
And let me tell you, it is not impressive.
It is not impressive.
There are other companies that are actually genuinely doing robots that can do locomotion and things like that.
It's a Boston dynamic.
But the robot demonstration that Musk was able to arrange was not even close to that.
It was a joke, really.
There was the infamous person dressed as a robot who did a dance, but even the video footage that they've shown since of actual robots, this is one of the things that Thunderf00d breaks down very well because he shows that they've spliced together multiple...
There are people who disappear in the background and there is never a video of the robot setting things down.
It just fades to black whenever it's about to set something on the table, which is never a good sign.
So it isn't like they're not working on things.
If you had robot workers, then you could increase efficiencies.
And that will happen at some point in the future.
But as an explanation for how Tesla is going to manufacture much more than it currently can in the next couple of years, it's an insane solution because you don't have full autonomous vehicles,
you don't have humanoid robots, so you cannot use them yet to solve our problems.
You have to first make them.
Look, I think this goes to the heart of what's wrong.
And he's very different, as you said, to the gurus that we usually cover, because they usually have nothing of substance to point to.
They have to fabricate a kind of gravitas and an impact on the world, whereas it is the opposite, right?
He can point to his association with, at least, a number of things that are extremely impressive.
Not quite as impressive as he makes out, like even the VTOL rockets, for instance, rockets that can land.
On their boosters vertically.
That technology is not as new as people might think.
Don't take anything away from SpaceX.
Extremely cool and everything.
But it isn't quite the paradigmatic, absolute game changer.
It's incremental advances on technology that existed.
And it's got to do with a lot of things like the US government outsourcing their rocket requirements to private companies.
But you see the role that someone like Elon has, which is like a technological shaman.
He is the one who is promising to be in touch through his amazing engineering abilities, through his single-minded determination and focus.
He's in touch with the means to get these fantastical technological forces and then shape them to achieve our dreams.
What do you think, Chris?
I think the more interesting thing is not Elon Musk personally, but the more interesting thing is the fanboys.
That social.
Yeah, the social thing.
Yeah, because I talked with the cognitive anthropologist Manvi Singh about the similarities and differences between gurus and traditional shaman role in society.
And one of the things he emphasizes is that shimans have to...
Demonstrate through various means.
It can be pageantry.
It can be birth defects or various claims made about experiences that they've had.
That they are different people.
They're not like you and me.
They're special.
And this is how they can interact with forces that are unseen and powerful.
And why people will give them money or food or whatever to get rid of bad spirits, help with illnesses and so on.
And while...
First of all, those kind of roles still exist in modern society, and they're very popular in contemporary societies, just as with traditional societies.
There still are shamans and oracles and diviners and tarot readers and so on that do these kind of services.
But I think the tech sphere, and we talked with CoffeeZilla about the NFT and the kind of cryptocurrency opening up this kind of space, but even just the legitimate tech sphere, it does have this Atmosphere that a lot of people,
they're not in skull masks, rattling bones on stage, but they're in a different costume, a kind of serious businessman costume.
And they are on stage.
They are illustrating that they're different.
They kind of have like quirks and they might be socially awkward.
And then they will also be talking about these kinds of technologies and ideas, which ordinary people just can't grasp.
They're 20 years ahead in the future with their tech, and people are asking them questions about the telephone or this kind of thing.
And that is the role of the kind of transformative leader guru.
Now, the thing is, though, that those people are also occasionally the people that lead armies or create companies that are hugely successful.
So Elon Musk might be doing a version of rattling the bones on the stage.
But he's creating huge companies and attracting young engineers who are actually doing innovative work.
So it's a weird thing where there is a lot of smoke and mirrors involved, but there's also genuine technology and a lot of money flowing around.
Yeah, if you can get enough people to believe hard enough in something, whether you're Napoleon Bonaparte or the shaman in your hunter-gatherer society or Elon Musk, then That is a way in which to make things happen.
And we live in a technological age of fast technological changes.
Like a thousand years ago, when a traditional shaman was talking about the massively powerful spirits that they were communicating with, that they were at work at this very moment, then that was very plausible to the audience of that day and age.
Now, today, we don't find that kind of thing so plausible.
Some of us.
Most of us.
Because of the age we live in, we find the technological promises.
There's going to be a base on Mars pretty soon.
We're going to have a thing in our head, which means we're going to be living in the matrix and being able to control everything with just a thought.
We'll have humanoid robots doing all the work for us.
We'll be zipping around in these electric cars we won't even have to drive.
The list goes on.
These are...
A wonderful thing to believe in.
I share with Musk a love of science fiction, and I think many people do, but when you hear him talk about these things, even though he has the manner of a kind of a diffident, awkward engineer, when you actually pay attention to his words, he doesn't sound to me like someone who understands the stuff that he's talking about.
It's particularly apparent in stuff like Neuralink.
It can be debunked very easily when you look at these claims about a Mars base that were made many years ago.
It would happen last year.
And it is difficult because, like you said, there are real companies here.
Tesla will own a share of the electric car market.
The electric car market is booming.
Unlike the other gurus that we look at, their ambitions are much smaller.
Except for Eric.
Except for Eric.
But in the end, they kind of want you to subscribe to their Substack.
They want you to send them some Patreon dollars.
They want you to listen to them and pay attention to them.
So their ambitions are much smaller, but Elon Musk's ambitions are different.
He doesn't want you to subscribe to his Patreon.
His job is to maintain that belief in the constellation of enterprises that he's involved with and keep that going long enough.
Because if there is a run on those shares and the value of his portfolio drops, then that could cause a bit of a financial domino effect.
Yeah.
So I've got two clips that speak to this.
Simultaneous presentation of character that, like, are a little bit divergent.
So here's the first in which Elon is going back to that thing about, like, what he does during the day and how he sees himself, right?
This is the highlight that he does see himself as, like, an engineer.
You should be aware that there's all these pipes that take away the heat, and then they all deliver fuel to the rocket, and it has to be there at the exact right amount at the exact right time, and if that doesn't happen, it blows up.
And so I said, well, how does Elon know this?
And because you hire these great people, and then you ask them all these questions, and then somehow you remember everything they tell you.
Is that true?
Well, my memory for technical matters is very good.
But I think probably a lot of people don't realize, like, what I do 80% of the time is engineering.
It's actually quite rare for me to give a talk.
And my day-to-day work at SpaceX and Tesla is almost entirely engineering and design.
And also production.
Production is key, although I consider that to be part of engineering.
Well, now he seems to have developed quite a lot of time for Twitter, so it's that positive thing.
This stuff to you, Chris, and to the audience, there should be some little bells ringing.
Just ask yourself some little questions.
He talks like an engineer, an awkward engineer, but how many research scientists and engineers do you see behaving like he does on Twitter?
That's not the behavior you would expect.
No.
Here's him again.
So you talked about him being self-effacing and whatnot, but not always.
Yeah, my workload went up from about, I don't know, 70 to 8 hours a week to probably 120.
So, yeah, I go to sleep, I wake up, I work, go to sleep, wake up, work, do that 7 days a week.
I'll have to do that for a while.
No choice.
But I think once Twitter is set on the right path, I think it is a much easier thing to manage than SpaceX or Tesla.
And I really understand the Internet and how to make...
I wrote software personally for 20 years.
It was one of the key people behind...
PayX.com, which became PayPal.
And so also, like, I'm aware of, like, I know how to make a way better PayPal.
Because you built PayPal.
Yeah.
Yeah, pretty much.
I mean, with a lot of other people, but there's a product plan I wrote, which I wish I'd kept a copy of in July of 2000.
Where I thought it would be possible to make the most valuable financial institution in the world.
And we're going to execute that plan from 22 years ago, which amazingly no one has done.
Yeah, he's not always humble.
In fact, I don't believe he's humble at all.
My point there is that he is able to send that critical message, which is that he is very special and very different, that he is galaxy-brained, he's polymathic.
He is special and develop or instill in people confidence.
And his job of doing that is just made so much easier by making sure that these public interviews and things that do happen are with people that do most of the work for him.
Yeah. Yeah.
So with that note, Matt, let's move on to have a little discussion around the topic that you kind of hinted at about his kind of cosmic aspirations, and I think part of why he...
Attracts a following more so than other more grounded tech CEOs.
So there's a clip at the start, which is about Elon responding to the question from Ron Barron about his motivation.
And as we go on, there's slightly more cosmic takes, but here's him responding to that question first.
Well, I think they...
What I'm working on has an important effect on the future.
In the case of Tesla, I think it's fair to say that Tesla has significantly accelerated the advent of sustainable energy.
Before Tesla, no one was doing electric cars, and now, as a result of Tesla, I think almost every major car company in the world has...
I think that's a pretty big deal.
But there's still a long way to go to transition the world to a sustainable energy economy.
And so we still have a lot of work ahead of us at Tesla, but that's our goal there.
And then for SpaceX, I think it's important for the future to be exciting and for humanity's existence to be ensured over the long term.
I think we must become a multi-planet species and a space-bearing civilization.
So my question, though, is if we have autonomous driving and we have autonomous trucks, is that one of the ideas, that we're going to be able to move things around with our own, if there's not enough drivers, that we're going to have autonomous transport?
Yes.
That's question one.
We can also, yeah, I mean, if you're in the area, have the car just drive to you.
Right.
Well, there's some truth there, Chris, isn't there?
Because Tesla has accelerated battery-based electric technologies, right?
Yeah, and perhaps placed an emphasis on at least efforts to get to automated driving, although I think Google were also competing in that space for quite a while.
Yeah, and SpaceX as well, he is talking on rather grand terms about we have yet to even establish.
A permanent base on the moon, let alone any other planet in our solar system or become a far lower field.
But he's talking big picture, right?
Interplanetary species, space travel, automated cars.
It is the kind of futurist dream.
And he lays it out in that tone as if it's just an obvious thing that will eventually happen.
So that's what he's trying to do.
Yeah, well, look, on one hand, it's obviously perfectly acceptable to be a futurist and to be an aspirational type of thinker and to be saying things like, we can achieve fully automated self-driving cars and we should absolutely seek out to do it.
Or, you know, our destiny lies in the solar system.
We ought to go into space and build Mars bases and so on.
I think the issue that people have with Musk is that he doesn't discriminate between That kind of aspirational language and very, very concrete claims about what a company that he owns is going to be delivering this year or next year.
With the cars, we've already talked about how he's promised self-driving every year for over five years.
With the Mars mission, I've seen clips of him giving a presentation about setting up a Mars base and how the main problems will be mining resources.
He was talking about a whole bunch of stuff like finding water and so on in very concrete terms with the schedule of this was going to be happening I think this year.
It could be last year.
It was a few years ago when he spoke about it.
Now that was entirely untrue.
There was no way that was ever going to happen but he was talking about it as if his company was going to be doing it.
People have documented Hundreds, if not thousands, of these kinds of claims.
Yeah, and I think some of the people that defend them say, well, he's just setting aspirational targets like better to shoot for the moon and fall significantly short than to never have that as the goal.
But I think there is the fact that, okay, you can have people who are visionary and overly optimistic about timeframes and stuff, but it has to also be factored into his role.
As a, like you said, a CEO and a businessman and somebody that is trying to hype up investors.
And that's the kind of difference.
There are plenty of scientists who made remarkable breakthroughs in timeframes that people wouldn't have imagined possible.
But they weren't the CEOs of various companies and they weren't doing things to boost up the...
Well, that's right.
The issue is that an awful lot of people have bought stock in Telstra.
Sorry, not Telstra.
That's an Australian communications company.
Some people bought stock in that.
Also, probably not a great investment.
A lot of people bought stock in Tesla based on the assumption, which you might reasonably have had.
Three or four or five years ago that these claims were true, that what he was saying was true.
So it's not just pie-in-the-sky optimistic language.
When it's very concrete claims about a technology that you will be releasing later on in the year, then that becomes deceptive.
One of the little scandals that erupted around Musk, many people will already know about this, is when he announced that he was going to be taking Tesla private or thinking about.
Taking Tesla private at about, I think it was $450 a share or so, which by comparison, what is Tesla worth now?
Well, there's been a fair drop, right?
Yeah, it's dropped a fair bit, $125.
Anyway, even at the time, that was a pretty high price.
And the stock price jumped based on that, because usually...
You don't say that kind of thing unless it's absolutely real.
And you can't say that kind of thing because it's manipulation.
So he got into a bit of trouble for that.
But I guess the issue is that it's not just optimism.
There's an awful lot of claims which are demonstrably untrue and self-serving.
So another example of this kind of language with tying it to specific technologies is when he's talking about The Falcon 9 rocket.
And again, you can see like it's kind of cosmic view in this clip.
The thing that is like the Holy Grail, like the critical breakthrough needed to make life multi-planetary and for humanity to be a space-bearing civilization is a fully and rapidly reusable rocket, orbital rocket.
And so we've gone most of the way there with Falcon 9. You may have seen the rocket booster come back and land.
And we also recover the nose cone or fairing, but we do not recover the upper stage.
So we've gotten to the point where we're about, you know, 70% to 80% reusable with Falcon 9. With Starship, we're going for 100% reusable.
I cannot say how profound a change this will be, but a fully and rapidly reusable...
Orbital rocket has the potential to drop the cost of access to space by a factor of a thousand.
Factor of a thousand.
A thousand.
That's a big factor.
One thousand.
It is.
It sounds like they're just 20% away.
He said they're 70 to 80% reusable now and just 20% more with the next one and then things will drop.
They'll be dying.
And, you know, Again, you can view it as just being optimistic and having aspirational goals.
And, you know, Tesla and SpaceX are able to attract highly skilled engineers who probably have somewhat similar dreams.
But I do feel like if you talk to an engineer, that they might have more reservations about the timeframe and the...
The efficiency that they'll be able to achieve in the next couple of years.
Yeah.
I mean, look, we're not rocket scientists, so we can't really comment that much, but I'm sure it's not a thousand times or anything near like that.
After all, reusable spacecraft is not such a new thing.
Various things have been reusable, including the space shuttle.
For many years, there are costs involved in reusing it as well, right?
They're generally not ready to go straight away.
So, you know, like, I'm not dissing the cool technology of VTOL rockets.
I'm just saying there's a distinction between that and these claims, which is that if you were to believe Musk, we're going to be zipping around the stars almost cost-free, like a thousand times cheaper than it is now.
In the next 20 years, definitely, right?
That's the bit, like, because, like, optimistically, I share the vision that him and a lot of futurists and science fiction writers have about humanity will not always be restricted to Earth and there will be technologies that make space travel easier than there's now.
That seems to obviously be the case, assuming technology improves and we don't nuke ourselves to death.
But there is a fine line between unbridled optimism and fraudulent misrepresentation.
And like we said, it's not the same as Farinos or something, because there is a there there.
There are rockets going up, there are highly skilled engineers, and there is technology being pushed forward.
But it's also not 100% dissimilar from somebody who's promising unlimited reusable energy for incredibly small costs.
It walks the line.
I think there's two main motivations, I think, for becoming a multi-planet species and a space-faring civilization and then ultimately going beyond that to go to other star systems and explore the galaxy.
And I think we may find that there's many one-planet civilizations that died out millions of years ago and never made it to the second planet.
Do you think in your lifetime that happens?
Well, it depends how long I live.
Maybe forever.
If I keep increasing that enemies list, it might not be much longer.
It would be deeply ironic if it's someone angry on Twitter that takes me out.
Well, now you can keep them off Twitter.
Yeah, exactly.
Anyway, I think there's two reasons for life to become Multi-planetary.
Life as we know it to become multi-planetary.
I think one is the defensive reason where we just...
I think we want the light of consciousness to not be extinguished if something would happen to Earth.
And, you know, in the case of the dinosaurs, they only have to worry about, like, you know, meteors and supervolcanoes and other things.
But for us humans, we actually have the power to destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons.
Or some sort of, you know...
Crazy bio-terrorism thing.
Yeah, that's a good example of it.
And before we talk about the space visions, did you notice, Chris, there was a couple of references throughout to the haters and losers, the enemy, the bad people that want to take Musk down, that don't believe in his vision?
Yeah, although a little bit tongue-in-cheek, right?
Sounded a bit like he was just saying he's a widely reviled person and remarking on it in a humorous way.
I didn't feel the venom there that you find in like a Trump reference to the haters and losers, right?
No, no, no.
It was more coming from the interviewer, actually.
But anyway, yeah.
So, like, when you sit down with a stiff drink and you've just read a good science fiction novel or some speculative philosophy, then I totally am on board with Musk's concerns there.
It's a legitimate, aspirational thing.
There's obviously vast amounts of challenges that need to be resolved, not least just the way that human bodies are not designed to operate without much gravity or hard radiation out in space.
So it's something that's hundreds of years, at best guess, away.
So on one hand, maybe Musk is just that.
He's just a science fiction geeky guy and this is the kind of stuff that he thinks about.
But it does play rather nicely into the mythos that he has created around himself because he's not just built differently, according to the legend, in terms of his being an engineering polymath or having such obsessive dedication that he's devoted his entire life to these pursuits.
These things make him different from other people.
More than a one-in-a-generation type person, but a one-in-a-epoch.
Someone who's going to accomplish things which don't seem possible to you, but he can do them because he is so different.
This sort of thinking about his motivations to doing these things, which he's emphasized in many ways, it's not about making money.
It's not about being successful and important or anything small.
The kinds of things that might motivate slobs like you and me, Chris.
He's motivated by...
Something deep and big in terms of preserving the light of consciousness.
And I think that completes the picture in terms of if you were someone that might be getting into the cult of personality around Musk, I feel that that's the trifecta.
Yeah, so there's two clips that are relevant to this.
And on the one hand, you have Elon talking about why he is able to be successful Allos cannot emulate him in the same way, right?
So you have this side.
So, you know, as a company has prosperity and then people become wealthy, then for a lot of people, you know, once they become independently wealthy, they just can't bring themselves to work or they don't want to work.
And that's totally understandable.
I have no judgment.
And so, I mean, I have a lot of friends.
Who are extremely talented and they, you know, had some success earlier in life and they just decided, you know, that was enough trauma.
I mean, you know, one of my good friends of mine saying, like, for starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.
So when people tell me, what can you do to encourage entrepreneurs to start companies?
I'm like, if you need encouragement, don't start a company.
Yeah, all these clips are presenting a pretty clear picture, I think, aren't they?
That clip is showing the side of the tech entrepreneurial spirit.
You know, you can't teach it.
You can't bring a horse to water.
People just have it or they don't.
On our side, which is more what we were just talking about, the kind of cosmic, aspirational, Star Trek-style view, is reflected in these kind of statements.
The goal is to lower the cost of access to orbit and ultimately to Mars and the Moon and elsewhere to the point where humanity can actually afford to become a multi-planet species.
To the point where we can afford to have a permanent base on the moon and ultimately far exceed the high-water mark of Apollo, which was incredible and I think inspiring to all of humanity, everyone.
If you were to ask people, I think in any country, not Americans, anyone, what was humanity's greatest achievement in the 20th century?
Maybe ever.
Go to the moon.
And that's why they say Moonshot as a metaphor.
Because that was incredible.
You know, it's so amazing that that was achieved.
In fact, a lot of people ask me, was it real?
I'm like, yeah, it was real.
Well, it's probably on Twitter.
That's where they ask that.
So here's the whole package.
Yeah, he has both aspects.
And the part that I like, About him, actually, is that kind of, you know, recognition of having these grand missions that can unite humanity to, like, look higher than petty quarrels or whatever the case might be,
right?
And the Apollo mission is a good example, even though it was motivated by international competition in the space trius.
But still, it is something which is remembered as an achievement of mankind in a very real way.
Yeah, I like that bit.
The part about the uniquely built tech entrepreneur who sleeps in the factory floor and does what all the competitors aren't willing to do.
I guess that's the other half of it, which is less appealing to me, but I imagine for a different kind of person, that's equally as appealing.
So he has these two components and I can see why.
A cult of personality would develop.
Yeah, if you take everything at face value.
With you, I agree with the sentiments, that they're perfectly nice sentiments.
I mean, who doesn't think that the moon landing was a big achievement for mankind?
Everyone can agree with that.
And the little boy, perhaps, or girl, in everyone really can identify with the space and reach for the stars and Star Trek stuff.
Buzz Lightyear!
Yeah, it's just, like, his vision there, there's nothing that's special about it.
I mean, lots of people have that vision.
Like, I'm a geek, I'm a space geek, science fiction geek, futurist geek.
This is stuff that...
It's polar-played stuff.
It's polar-played stuff.
It's stuff, yeah, and it's...
The difference is that he has those companies and builds rockets.
Yes, exactly.
That's right.
That's where it kind of lands, in a way, because, like, you're right.
I mean, listen to this.
I mean, that was just an incredible achievement.
And I think it's just one of those things that, you know, going to the moon makes you proud to be a member of humanity.
You know, it's like for all mankind.
It was for all mankind.
So, it's amazing achievements.
So, I mentioned that to say, like, he's not exactly Carl Sagan in his eloquence, right?
But you can...
You know, the sentiment is it's hard to diss somebody for just saying isn't that great.
Like, shouldn't we aim for things that are like colonizing Mars?
Why not?
Yeah, that's right.
So if he's just a guy, like if he presents himself as just a guy who owns companies and that's how he's perceived, then it's fine.
Like, there's nothing that tricksy apart from the false claims and the exaggerations.
His delivery, like we talked about, is that of an awkward...
Slightly nerdy, but kind of endearing, low-key, if not very articulate presentation.
So he's very different from our usual gurus like that, who are very loquacious, very eloquent, but have very little of substance that they can point to as having achieved.
But that's why I think Musk in some ways is like this sort of sigma guru where he's like Trump, who has the ability to do what the rest of our gurus cannot.
Like attract hundreds of billions of dollars in resources to let him do what he wants, whether it's the Hyperloop or Neuralink or something else.
So you meant that the comparison to Trump is obviously not in terms of delivery, although there might be a parallel with the amount of lies they're comfortable with stating, but more in the ability to actually like to be elected president or to create companies that attract billions of dollars of investment.
Like, Eric Weinstein is not doing that, right?
He would like to do that, but he is neither Trump nor Elon.
And Elon and Trump, whatever you think of them, they have had a big impact on the life of the world in some respect because America has such an outsized impact on everything.
Look, I think the parallels with Trump are very strong.
Both of them are endearing to a certain kind of audience.
Both of them, as you say, are real significant players in the world, whether it's a billionaire or multimillionaire and president.
There's the cult of personality, which they've enabled to build around themselves, and that sort of immense loyalty.
They do both present themselves in a way as a kind of saviour for humanity.
To the MAGA or the QAnon crowd, someone like Trump is the saviour.
The framing there is much more negative than the positive framing that Musk has, but it's still the same.
And they are both self-aggrandizing.
Like, Musk, you know, and I guess I'm taking into account all of the other things that he's said and done over the years, which we've covered as background.
It's not all in this particular clip, but there's a pretty clear pattern emerges where he does deliberately cultivate that sense that he is a superlative engineer in polymath and disciplined and focused.
And hardworking in a way that is almost inconceivable.
So I would characterize them both as narcissistic in that sense.
We talked about that there is a difference in the way they refer to enemies or people that are criticizing them, but I have a clip.
Which highlights that the concept that there are lots of haters and people trying to tear Musk down comes up quite frequently, even though the response is more lighthearted in addressing it, at least when he's talking, not so much on Twitter, but listen to this.
And our rocket is 10 meters taller than theirs, and we can reuse ours.
How can anyone possibly compete if they're not doing what we're doing?
How can they compete?
I don't understand.
And how can they get contracts?
And then I just saw something from NASA, and they said that we're spending $20 billion a year, and oh, by the way, that's 360,000 jobs in all these congressional districts.
Well, I think I have to be careful what I say here.
You know, I have enough enemies.
I would like to have a smaller number of companies that want me to die.
That would be great.
Thank you.
Yeah, he's lighthearted about it, but Trump is often lighthearted too about the haters and the losers.
I think there is a parallel there in the presentation of them being kind of the one straight shooter, the one person out there amongst this swamp of corruption.
And, you know, there are these hints there of the only way the other companies get funded is through these back corridor deals.
We should probably talk a little bit about the...
Twitter, because it comes up in this conversation, because this was just last month, right, in November.
So obviously they're talking about what Elon has been doing with Twitter, and he's obviously done more since then.
But a good example of treating things which happened to the company as personal attacks and presenting them as unfair is highlighted in this case when he's talking about advertisers dropping off Twitter in response to things that he was doing,
like Indicating that he's going to let a whole bunch of highly controversial accounts back on the site and that moderation rules were going to be made a lot laxer except for things that were illegal.
And just listen to the way he frames the response to his instability in Twitter and what it did to the advertising investment.
So, and then we also recently had a lot of difficulty with activist groups pressuring major advertisers to stop spending money on Twitter.
This is despite us doing everything possible to appease them and to make it clear that moderation rules and hateful contact rules have not changed and we're continuing to enforce them.
A number of major advertisers have stopped spending on Twitter.
But this doesn't seem right, because we've made no change in our operations at all, but nonetheless, the activist groups have been successful in causing a massive drop in Twitter advertising revenue,
and we've done our absolute best to appease them, and nothing is working.
So this is a major concern, and I think this is, frankly, an attack on the First Amendment.
Like, if activist groups can pressure advertisers upon which Twitter is fundamentally dependent to, you know, suppress free speech, then that doesn't seem right.
Thank you.
Notice any logical leaps there in that reasoning?
I did, Chris.
I did.
Would you like to spell them out for us?
Well, just the one that's quite obvious is that saying that it's a First Amendment free speech issue, presumably the activists should have First Amendment free speech rights, right?
So Elon is saying it's unfair if they successfully convince advertisers to stop investing in Twitter.
But why?
The companies are independent, private companies.
They can do what they want.
The activists can do what they want.
He can arrange lobbyists to talk to companies.
That's free speech in action.
So conflating your company and not getting the investment that you think it deserves as being a free speech concern is a huge leap.
And then also the claim that nothing has changed on Twitter that would warrant any concern since he took over.
Absolute bollocks.
And admittedly, this is from a month ago, right?
So he hadn't done everything that he would go on to do.
But clearly, things have changed on Twitter.
Almost all of the accounts that were high-profile bands, with the exceptions of a couple, like, you know, Alex Jones, I think Stefan Molyneux isn't back yet.
But like, a lot of high-profile racist accounts all came back.
And that's a big difference for a platform.
And plus Elon constantly implying that he's so free speech that they're not going to police things that are related to free speech.
But then saying all of the same moderation principles applying, you're like, well, those two things don't fit together because like, which one is it?
You changed and overhauled it so it's more free speech and you're not going to moderate as heavy handedly.
All of the same restrictions apply as before, and therefore, there's nothing that advertisers should be concerned about.
Yeah, it's been quite amusing to see the free speech boosters, many of whom are conspiracy theorists, who were whooping with joy at Musk taking over, and then finding out that he, in fact, was still doing moderation and censorship,
in scare quotes, but just doing it in a much more haphazard, shoot from the hip.
And highly personalized way.
So he's been treating Twitter kind of as his personal fiefdom rather than having any kind of systems or processes or coherent policies.
Twitter moderation wasn't great before, but most people agree it's gotten worse.
The other thing too is that a lot of those companies who cease advertising, I don't remember some sort of woke mob.
It felt like the companies that did pull out, and I totally understand why, I've used Twitter less just because it's gotten worse since he's taken over.
It seemed like the impetus was coming from the advertisers themselves.
They brought Kanye back after Kanye was already making the openly anti-Semitic remarks.
That's a concern.
And actually, an interesting example of how this does potentially cause waves in Musk's world is This guy, this interviewer, Ron Barron, who we've heard throughout, is incredibly sycophantic, who speaks in the collective personal plural of "we" anytime he refers to Kessler.
Listen to his question.
This is like the first genuine question that I heard him ask when he talks about Twitter and moderation.
In order for that to happen, in order for that to...
I met you, and it took me a few years, and then I believe in you and your heart, right?
Your heart.
I think you were skeptical.
At our first meeting, you were a bit skeptical.
And so the way I think about it is that, so I'm trusting you with the future of our country, the world, actually, when you're in charge of a media like that.
And so what I think about is, so how do you prevent being Jewish?
How do you prevent this anti-Semitism?
Or if I were Black, how do you prevent all of these?
So how do you prevent the use of the N-word?
And that got a round of applause, a kind of indication about what are you going to do about this kind of thing.
Do you want to hear Musk's reply to that?
I think so.
And then you can see if he presents this accurately.
We should be able to figure out with software how to moderate this and prevent that from happening.
Is that true or not?
Yes, absolutely.
I totally agree.
I want to be clear.
Content moderation policies have not changed at Twitter.
And it is not okay to engage in hateful conduct on Twitter.
So... So...
So, we have had, like, actually, oddly, like, targeted attacks, where temporarily people have been able to put some hate speech on Twitter, but then it's been taken down immediately.
So, it's done, Matt.
You know, it's algorithmically sorted now, and nothing has changed since Elon's takeover.
And that gets a round of applause, but I think, in part, it's a round of applause just because he acknowledged that hate speech is not allowed on Twitter.
People were like, "Oh, okay!"
Yeah.
Like I said, it's boilerplate stuff.
Hate speech is not okay.
Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.
Okay.
And like I said, it's contradictory.
Nothing has changed at all.
Yet, at the same time, what he's doing is radically different.
And in different forums, he's really focused on the free speech angle, which is...
It is not the job of the platform to do any moderation.
So I just feel like he says stuff.
It's objectively not true.
Because one of the things he did was reduce the team, significantly slashed the amount of people who were responsible for looking at moderation and these kind of issues.
Now, the way that he streamed it, and by orchestrating these release of the so-called Twitter files, it's intended to demonize the previous Moderation team as being politically biased and ineffective and controlled by the FBI and all this kind of things,
right?
But actually, the majority of what it shows is people in a company attempting to make choices, right?
And there is political liens, but you see the people debating the decisions.
You see things being reversed.
You see, like, kind of going back and forth and Jack coming in and things being reversed or somebody saying, I don't think the policies support this, right?
And that kind of thing.
I wonder what would happen if you release now the discussions around, like, let Kanye back on, ban Kanye.
But what's the discussion look like there?
How is it different under Musk that it's not just Elon deciding to kick all these journalists off?
And the thing with the Elon jet, which has happened relatively recently as well.
He banned the guy who publishes the details of where his private jet was flying.
And he presented it being like a kind of reaction to his young son being in the car and a stalker find where they are from using that service.
But actual reporting from journalists revealed that that event happened way after any jet thing was involved.
And the person involved seemed to be like, you know, there's a whole...
Bigger story around it, but it's basically, it doesn't relate in the way that Elon said.
And yet he just immediately takes action, bans that, sets a new policy, bans a bunch of journalists who, you know, if they link to it and you just feel like that's a change.
That's a very idiosyncratic change in content moderation.
Yeah, I'd describe the change as him treating the moderation policy for the platform as his own personal fiefdom.
And it's often motivated by his own personal interests.
And that's another interesting parallel with Trump, who also famously treated a lot of the apparatuses of the US government as if it was his...
Personal playground and to align with his personal interests and didn't see that distinction, didn't see any value in committees and systems and institutions and processes and whatever.
I know a private company is very different, but I think it's really telling.
And it says more about the fan base, I think, than the characters themselves.
Elon Musk and Trump, sure, they're quirky characters, they have their points of interest.
But what's interesting to me is the kind of person who finds that super appealing.
And it fits very nicely with the conspiratorial view of the world, whereas when it's like a personal ubermensch like Trump or Musk who's doing things, whatever they may be, then the audience feels like they've got a personal connection.
They know that their heart's in the right place and they just want to make things better.
And there's this extreme charity to them.
Their conspiratorial thinking doesn't kick in.
But when it's presented as this is men in grey suits sending private emails to one another, working in some big building, then the conspiratorial brain just goes wild.
So to them, Musk's shoot-from-the-hip random moderation censorship stuff, they're just so much more charitable to it than when one tries to set up actually a somewhat consistent system.
There's a mismatch between, as we saw, with most of the companies that Musk's involved with, he has a kind of grand vision, which is quite soaring in scope.
And he outlines the same thing for his motivation for buying Twitter.
So contrast this with what he has been doing on the platform since he bought it, right?
Here's what he said.
So obviously the big deal, to me anyway, in Twitter is that we have this incredible...
So it was incredibly poorly managed, this business.
But those guys somehow did great for their shareholders by selling it to us.
But we didn't buy what they're selling.
We bought something of what it's going to become.
Yes.
I mean, I think most people would say, given how the market has evolved this year, the price is on the high side.
Right.
But that's on the basis of what it is.
Yes.
But in terms of what, I think there is a tremendous amount of potential that it will be very difficult to achieve, but I think possible.
And I think ultimately it could be one of the most valuable companies in the world.
So, you know, the communication company in his portfolio, that's the town square for the entire planet.
That's not really what his actions are generating at the minute, though.
Yeah, like his main actions have been geared around this Twitter blue.
Oh, yeah.
What is it?
Eight or ten dollars a month or whatever.
And he would like to make that kind of a necessary thing for people to do and essentially monetize it directly.
Yeah.
I have a clip of him outlining it so then you can tell me what's wrong with this vision, Matt.
Seems like he's just trying to improve things.
Because there is a huge problem with spam and bots and trolls on Twitter and organizations trying to manipulate public opinion and just generally making the system worse.
But I think that there is an answer to that, which is to get as many...
Regular users of Twitter to be a subscriber for $8 a month.
And you'll get a lot more than just a blue check mark for $8 a month because now we can afford long-form video, long audio, podcasts, and we can also start sharing revenue with content creators, which is essential.
Give them a chance to make money.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, right now, if you're on Twitter, you'll see a lot of links posted to YouTube and TikTok.
And that's because, at least until now, Twitter has not even given them enough video length to post their video.
And then they give the content creators no means of monetizing the video.
So we're going to change that rapidly at Twitter.
It's going to be transformative.
In many ways, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Elon Musk's schemes are kind of half-baked, right?
These different platforms have their niches and they're extremely strong in their niches.
But his suggestion is basically to take the Twitter niche and turn it into like an everything.
YouTube and TikTok.
Yeah, YouTube and TikTok.
And he also talks about it being like a finance PayPal company.
Yeah, like everything.
It's technology and communications.
It'll do everything.
It'll be fine.
It'll be great.
And like, yeah, good luck.
That's difficult.
It has been a schmuzzle so far.
Do you remember why the price is $8, Matt?
Do you remember that?
Because Elon said he was starting off saying $20 a month.
And then Stephen King said, that's way too much.
No one's going to pay that.
And then he said, well, how about Eid?
And then after that, it switched to Eid.
So maybe there were all these discussions behind the scenes about the economics involved, but it did seem a lot like it's just entirely WIM-based.
Yeah, WIM-based is making stuff up on the fly.
And I've seen other videos on that kind of note where he...
Made either an error or a slip of the tongue in describing the propulsion system for the rocket or whatever, which was picked up on by the person who was interviewing me who actually knew a fair bit about rockets.
And it was hard to, you can't tell, was he just covering his lack of knowledge or whatever?
He ended up with him going on this huge long spiel of, oh yeah, that's a really good idea.
Now you mention it.
Yeah, we're going to do that.
We're going to put the thing in whatever.
So it's like some YouTuber or someone who was interviewing him gave him an idea that he was purportedly acting on during the interview.
And that's not how things work.
That's not how rockets get built.
That's not how the moderation and monetization, everything in a tech company is extremely difficult.
And it doesn't get...
Done like that, does it, Chris?
So I guess just my bullshit detector thing just keeps going off all the time with him.
Yeah, because one part which is quite amazing is like, I'm no business expert, right?
So Twitter was relying on ad revenue as a big part of its income.
Elon thanked that.
Regardless, even if he didn't change the moderation policies, he created the impression that it was going to be a lawless hello.
So he reduced the advertising income.
It had a replacement subscription scheme.
Now, lots of people wanted functions like edit buttons for their posts on Twitter for years.
If you had just said an edit button costs $8, and also you can get a blue tick if you do it.
But that's the amazing thing.
If he came on and announced that, he would have had huge uptake.
But instead, what he's managed to do with his kind of rampaging around Twitter and trolling people and...
Posting conspiracies related to Nancy Pelosi's husband being attacked by his gay lover or anti-vaccine sentiment targeting Fauci and this kind of thing.
He's made it partisan and he's made the blue Twitter subscription program now associated with Elon and a right-wing partisan agenda.
So now he has segmented the potential market for that and you're just like...
The other thing, Chris, that people really wanted on Twitter was better moderation.
Not necessarily less or more moderation, but just better human-done moderation, not done by an automatic algorithm.
Now, something like $8 a month could pay for somebody to go, oh, actually, you were clearly being ironic.
You mean not like they want more people punished, but they want like if they are flagged for something that actually a human.
Yes, yes.
Or responds within a timely manner as opposed to like a four-month appeal process where people are locked out of their account.
Exactly.
That's the kind of quality of service that people would appreciate and I would be happy to pay eight bucks a month for.
And Kari Swisher, a tech journalist, suggested one way that this could make sense was if he was intentionally trying to create an alternative, like a kind of right-wing Fox News ecosystem.
I mean, if he's doing that, he is co-invited in A kind of coherent way.
But I don't get the impression that this is all a well-thought-out thing.
It seems to be policies are rescinded after a day.
And well, this kind of behavior, it's not particularly new either.
So remember, of course, the episode of the boys in Thailand trapped in a cave?
Yeah.
Off the cuff, apparently, shooting from the hip.
He proposed that they would build a little miniature submarine that would go in and save them, come to the rescue, whatever.
Which didn't make any sense because there was a part in the cave where even a human crawling with a tank was unable to kind of pass a submarine.
A submarine, that's right.
The expert cave divers had to take off their tanks and shuffle through, squeezing through, and one of them died doing that.
And like an infant.
When one of the professional international divers who was managing it said, "Thank you very much."
They were a bit ruder about it, but they were in a rescue situation and stuff like that.
And there was a tech guy saying he's coming in this year of the day.
I believe the person said a disparaging comment, but Elon's response was to call him a pedo and then to kind of justify it by saying, "Well, he looks like a pedo."
I mean, not you understand, but it's kind of like firing from the hip, but that is kind of personality, and it's trollish.
Well, it's Trump-esque, I guess, is the reason I brought it up.
There are two possible realities that you have before you.
One is that Musk is genuinely a polymath who can command both rocket science and brain surgery.
And is personally simply committed to preserving the light of human consciousness and fulfilling mankind's destiny in the stars and has nothing else upon his mind except optimizing factory production efficiencies and solving technical problems.
Or he's something of a salesman and a blowhard and a promotion guy, a hype guy.
Who is susceptible to, like...
Conspiracies and has got dragged a little bit into, and not a little bit.
I mean, he's now completely in there, like a right-wing reactionary ecosystem, which now panders to him.
Like, again, one thing that springs to mind is when he decided to feud with Apple.
And then you suddenly had lots of right-wing commentators and media systems attacking Apple.
And it's like, why?
Just because some tech CEO decided to, you know, and then he made up with them a week later.
And it's all gone.
It wasn't even true.
So he said that Apple had cancelled their advertising, right?
Yeah.
I was considering removing them from the App Store.
That's right.
That's right.
Not true in the end.
So, yeah, you have these two alternative realities.
I have to say, I find the less flattering reality just far.
Far more plausible.
And that's not to say, the interesting thing is that in contrast to our usual gurus, interpersonally in terms of what he says, he comes across quite well to me.
He's good at being self-deprecating.
He makes cute jokes and tells cute stories.
And many of the things he says, they're quite boilerplate, but they're not bad.
It's not until you look at the history and look at the reality.
The pattern of statements of how they don't match reality and how they end up being extremely self-serving and reflecting like a juvenile mentality, then it starts to fall apart.
Yeah, so there's two clips to finish with that highlight this distinction.
This is Elon discussing where he sits politically and how his actions are being interpreted.
And let's see if this matches the reality.
So I read also that you said, and then we'll move off of Twitter, but you said that your goal is you want to make the 20% of people who are on the far right hate you, just like you want to make the 20% of people on the far left hate you.
Well, I don't want them to hate me.
But I think the extremists, like, you know, it's just very difficult to satisfy extremists.
So, unless you fully buy into whatever their dogma is.
But I'm confident we can satisfy, like, I don't know, 80% of America, 80% of the world, but maybe not the most, the 10% most extreme of either side.
And I would count that as a great outcome.
And I think it is important to have sort of a digital town square where people feel comfortable talking.
Yeah, so in that, he's a reasonable centrist.
He's not leaning in any direction.
He's going to annoy the extremists at both ends of the spectrum.
That's not accurate.
What he is doing currently on Twitter day in and day out is responding to unhinged right-wing conspiracists and endorsing what they're saying.
They are not, in general, annoyed with him.
They might disagree with him about why he bans Kanye or something, On board with him.
And it's not the far extreme left that are like responding negatively.
It's essentially almost the entire left wave ecosystem and some like the right people as well that are finding his actions surprising.
So yeah, the mismatch.
Yes, there is a big mismatch there between presenting himself as just part of the big normie center.
When his actions and, as you said, his retweets, conspiratorial retweets, and people that he replies to and engages with, like Ian Miles Chong and stuff like that, it's inconsistent.
He's quite keen on that bleeding edge on the right.
I mean, he tweeted out, my pronouns are prosecute Fauci, and he suggested that we know that Fauci is responsible for millions.
of deaths because of gain-of-function experiments which created the coronavirus, right?
And none of that is established.
There's so many steps there that he's leapt over.
It might be a milk-toe centrist, Chris, but that's not my centrism.
Yeah.
So it's interesting because if you listen to this talk, for example, and you took it at face value.
You'd be like, yeah, you're right.
You know, the extremes are crazy on both sides.
And what we need is somebody to calm things down and leave.
But that's not what he's doing.
So it's just, it's weird.
And I can't, you know, there is this tendency for people.
And this, again, is a parallel with Trump to view things as this like grand chess strategies, you know, like he's doing everything and he has a grand plan to get what he wants.
And that's a potential reality, like you said, Matt, but so it is with Trump, right?
And at the extreme end, you get the QAnon that he's still the president and he's planned this all out to eventually catch Hillary Clinton like the roadrunner.
On that note, I saw, you recall, he did a...
Twitter poll recently about whether or not he should step down as the CEO.
And the poll went against him.
A lot of people voted yes, you should step down.
And then, of course, this was spun by the fanboys as this is five-dimensional chess.
This is his way of finding out who are the undesirables on Twitter.
Yeah, the bots.
It's a honeypot trap and stuff like that.
But he then also announced that he would step down when he finds it.
But who knows?
It's unclear.
Maybe he doesn't want to have all of this thing happening every day.
But whatever the case might be, I suspect that a lot of the impulsive, trollish responses are impulsive, trollish responses from somebody who's a billionaire, has a lot of yes-men around them, and does what he wants.
And in the COVID pandemic, he was somebody that was questioning The pandemic from very early on and predicting that there would be no more cases after a couple of months and stuff like that.
So he very confidently states things he knows nothing about.
I have to say, I find it quite plausible in hindsight, looking back on the previous behavior.
I can imagine him.
Strutting around headquarters or the production facilities at Tesla or SpaceX or listening to some presentation and then shooting off the hip to his high-level executives, oh, we should do this and we should put the thing on, put the coaster on the thing, a bit like Homer designing the car in The Simpsons and everyone kind of nodding their head and acting like they're taking notes and saying,
right, boss, we're going to act on that straight away and essentially placating him and managing him and him genuinely.
Having the very strong impression, which is how he presents himself, that he is the fixer.
I think that's a plausible reality.
It definitely is a plausible reality, and it's also in line with being surrounded by sycophants and stuff, because they will tell you that.
And a lot of people have indicated that the people around him are sycophants now.
He doesn't have people challenging them and so on.
But the last clip I have, Matt.
So it'll be interesting to see whether you think this is accurate or not.
So this is him responding to a question about how to encourage people to invest in Tesla and get on board with the mission, right?
And listen to this.
Well, I actually rarely try to convince anyone to invest in Tesla.
And many times I've recommended people don't invest in Tesla and I've said our stock is too high.
But then people just ignore me and keep buying the stock for some reason.
So I think at a very high level, I'd say that autonomy is an insanely fundamental breakthrough.
And no one is even close to Tesla for solving generalized autonomy or generalized self-driving vehicles.
No one's even close.
With self-driving, as I was talking about earlier, the car becomes, call it roughly, five times more useful.
But it costs the same to build.
Now, can you imagine what would happen if a company were doing like 25% to 30% gross margins, but suddenly that same thing was five times more valuable?
Can you imagine it?
It's possible!
If you can make a car five times more valuable and the costs reduced, that would be great.
He's hinting at some valid points around society as a whole shifting from a model of personally owning cars.
They do sit in the garage most of the time.
They have to sit in the parking lot.
If they go somewhere else, there's a whole bunch of space and a whole bunch of hardware that is sitting around.
Underutilized.
So it is a nice model where you hit your thumb on the phone and the car arrives and you step in it and it whisks you off to where you want to go and then it goes away to do its next job.
That's a lovely model.
But of course, it'll result in savings in terms of using the vehicle more.
But of course, most of the costs of a vehicle are in the running costs, right?
Not just the production costs, right?
So the running costs are fixed.
No, that's okay, Matt.
You just get the solar cells from the tops of the houses.
Were you not listening?
The robots carry it.
They're polluted by solar cells.
Yeah, it's all right.
The solar maintenance and the electricity still needs to get generated.
But the main issue is that all of it is pie in the sky.
That would take...
Not only to have full autonomous vehicle technology totally nailed.
It's not going to be accepted at 99% or 99.9%.
It has to be perfect.
And it's an insanely difficult artificial intelligence problem simply because anything can happen on the road.
There's just so many unusual situations.
And it's the unusual situations that kill you.
It's very hard to get a training data set in which you can test your model under all situations.
And that's why it's so difficult.
And that's why...
No one else has self-driving happening yet either.
Matt, just to illustrate this, I'll just give you a personal example.
I was driving home late one night and there was roadworks and there are a set of signals that the little roadwork men are supposed to make to indicate whether to stop.
They hold the baton horizontally or they wave you around, right?
Now, my particular man was doing a move I've never seen.
We're pretty poor.
And it looked like a kind of half ushering, half stopping, right?
And I was slowing down, but he seemed like a bit frustrated.
So I was like, oh, I should go.
But the roadworks went right up to the light, like the red light.
And they were over the entire half of the road, right?
So if I continued on, I would approach the red light on the wrong side of the road.
I'd be waiting there.
And I was like, well, that's not a safe thing.
But I assumed.
Okay, well, the guy is telling me to go on through this unorthodox move.
As I followed it, it turned out that no, or if that was what he was signaling, he shouldn't have been signaling that because a car came barreling past from the other side at like full speed.
So I had to stop, right?
And that was like, I would like to see an AI trying to react to all those different...
Because the situation was quite idiosyncratic.
I have not encountered that personally, and I still made a choice which didn't result in an accident, but which was not ideal.
So just to say, those kind of things happen all the time when you're driving.
It's not Musk's fault that making an autonomous vehicle is very difficult, but it is kind of his fault for either both not understanding the scope of the issue and how far away They are from achieving it and for promising that it was ready again and again and again.
But it's interesting, isn't it?
Like, if you're a certain kind of believer, if you buy into it to the optimism, and I am a techno-optimist too, I'd like to think that many of the problems that society, humanity faces is going to be solved by progressive innovations in technology, and I know that they do come along in fits and starts.
So, you know, we don't know.
It could be in a few weeks there is a breakthrough in fusion energy.
But probably not.
These things do happen.
Science and technology is progressing, but this is the age that we live in where there is a window there for a certain kind of person who is willing to just say stuff to cater to those aspirations that we all have.
And I feel like Musk has built a large part of his career in fulfilling that need and being that person.
So we've went on a...
Rollercoaster ride around this fairly mundane talk.
But I think it does give an insight into Musk.
When I look at the big picture and think, comparing him to the other gurus we've looked at, as we've said, he's not the bombastic, loquacious guru type.
He is a salesman, but he's much more a salesman because he comes across as he presents himself, which is a tech guy.
An engineer, somebody with big visions for the future and like a kind of science background that he's just trying to enact.
He's trying to get other people on board with his vision.
But the issue with that is there's so many cracks in that facade when you dig deeper.
And unlike the other gurus, he has achievements.
Whatever he ends up being, you know, in the grand scheme of things, one.
It is true that on his docket will be that he helped to promote electronic vehicles as a mainstream thing that people would be interested in.
And there are other things that he has helped to push forward.
And even the companies where he's done a lot of shady stuff and he's written out founders from the origins and claimed that he did stuff which he didn't.
He still has played a role in most of these companies in making them more high profile and attracting investment and stuff.
It's just to say that it's an interesting case because there is a there with Musk, but it is clear from all the people documenting it, even from this talk, that there's so much willingness to just lie and overstate things and you can't look past that.
So he's an interesting guru in a lot of ways because he's kind of outside some of the archetypes that we have looked at previously.
I agree.
I was thinking that too, but then it actually motivated me to actually take a look at our gurometer and think about Musk at the same time.
And Chris, I think he tends to fit it, but just in a way, in not the same way that many of our gurus do.
Tell me if you think I'm overfitting or something here, but this galaxy brainness is all about that polymathic special ability, and he definitely is all about projecting that.
He does come across as far less bombastic and grandiose than many of our gurus, but that's because in many ways he has to try less hard.
He doesn't need to do much.
He can just hint at it.
And as you say, part of it is done through just by enacting the version of a geeky, obsessed, tech-focused, driven person.
That's the archetype we have in our mind, and he can fit that quite nicely.
And that's not so different from someone like Brett or Eric Weinstein.
Cosplaying what a serious intellectual scientist kind of does.
We've seen more and more recently with this sort of anti-establishment approach that he's going on and even hints at grievance at the kinds of opportunities and stuff that have been denied.
That in-group, out-group dynamics, you see it in his audience.
But look, I'm going to stop talking too much.
The main thing I probably want to say is that I think he's like Trump in that The more interesting thing about him is not really him and his quirks and his particularities and how he does things.
The interesting thing is us or those of us who feel a great need for characters like this to come along and fulfill the role that we want to play.
And I think a lot of what's happening is that we're projecting our hopes and aspirations onto these figures and they will happily let us do it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I think that's a nice way to round the decoding episode on Musk.
I did have one clip, Matt, that I titled The Most Sycophantic Question Ever.
Should I pray that just...
I know this is just going to be Ron Barron, but I don't know if that's a good note to end on or not.
But yeah, anyway, here it is.
We can always cut it out.
And other companies, why don't they try?
Why don't they try to do what we're doing?
In fact, one of the executives of another automobile company...
I wanted me to introduce her to you, and you did that once in a meeting, and now she wants to come visit with her director of engineering, our plant in Austin.
And I presume when I ask you, you're going to say, yeah, bring her on, because you innovate so fast.
By the time anyone copies what we're doing, it's around to something else.
What else is there?
When you're casting, what else is there that enables us to make it cheaper?
Are we eliminating a lot of other parts?
Are we eliminating functions?
What are we doing to do that?
How would we sell a car that's so cheap?
Tough questions.
Tough questions, Ron.
How are you so amazing?
How is it even possible?
Also, how can we layer so much non-necessary components before it gets the actual questions?
Anyway, he's a terrible interviewer.
But that's the thing.
Musk attracts sycophants.
He's the sigma to the rest of it.
Including our sycophants.
And also including many of our gurus.
Like when we first decided, oh yeah, we should cover Musk to round off the tech season.
I didn't see much of a connection between him and the rest of them.
But my God, they're all at it.
They're all just...
Falling over themselves.
It's worse than Rogan.
I mean, they're all sycophantic towards Rogan because they perceive him as the big alpha baboon in the cage.
But they're even worse with Musk.
I know.
I agree.
So, yeah, he is the guru's guru.
And that clip, in that sense, is a useful one to end on.
There you go.
That's it.
That's Musk.
Done.
And the tech season finished.
It doesn't mean we won't go back to tech figures.
Peter Thiel and stuff, but we will no longer be constrained by a thematic season.
So completely without any deviations that now the straitjacket is lifted and we're back.
So all gurus of all stripes beware.
Yep.
That's right.
No one's safe anymore.
All right.
Very good.
Very good.
Okay.
So moving along, what have we got to do now?
We've got to do the review of reviews.
We do.
I got two.
I got two this time.
I've got a five-star positive review.
And this is, you know, we encourage our listeners to leave reviews of the podcast or send us email, feedback, whatever the case.
Listener comments.
Listener comment section.
But the reviews are useful because people, you know, sometimes leave funny remarks in them or cutting ones.
So this one says five stars by August Pappas.
And it says, an interesting podcast featuring a handsome Australian named Matt and a plucky Irishman named Chris.
Plucky versus handsome.
Okay.
I approve.
I approve so far.
This is good.
At first, Matt seems cool and with it.
However, the longer you listen, you start to realize that he has the pop culture awareness of an old Russian grandmother living in an abandoned blogging town in Siberia.
Chris does his best to keep Matt up to speed.
But unfortunately, he has about as good a handle on the English language as an 18-year-old valley girl does on her dad's Lamborghini.
Seriously, his mouth sounds like it's meeting every word for the first time, and it has severe social insecurity.
Chris has also been bragging about how much he likes to eat nuts.
However, in the most recent episode, he didn't have enough nuts to be mean to their hapless guest, Jamie.
If you can stomach these minor drawbacks, great podcast.
I never miss an episode.
I enjoyed that.
I enjoyed that.
It was balanced.
It was accurate.
There were no lies detected, really.
Although, except for me and my lack of familiarity with pop culture stuff, I mean, I think this person's probably a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan, maybe Super Mario Brothers, and they think like you that that...
It encompasses, you know, the whole scope of modern culture.
In actual fact, guys, there's actually more to it than this.
There's the matrix.
There's tons of other things.
But yeah, so there's another review, and this is positive overall.
It's a five-star one, but it has some critique.
So that's why I've chosen it.
And it says, good show, a bit small in scope.
That's the tech season.
The user's name is a streetcar named Deez Nuts.
And I know I'm saying Deez Nuts, okay?
So he didn't get me.
But in any case, he says, the hosts have great chemistry, impressively capable of laughing at each other's jokes.
But I do wish there was a bit more circling back to old gurus.
I feel like it started on such a high note with the Weinsteins, and then we just never heard about them again.
Hopefully sometime soon we can get another full episode dedicated to them.
Is that?
That's got to be taking the piss.
I think so.
I like the ones where I'm not sure the degree to which they're taking the piss, but I think that one, it has to be because we do occasionally mention the Weinsteins in passing.
Some would say too much, but I think there was an earnest request at the end for another full decoding of a prior.
Guru, like the Weinsteins, which is possible, I guess.
I mean, I wouldn't rule it out.
We're out of the tech season.
Anything can happen now.
We're free.
We're not like sharks.
We don't have to only swim forward.
We can be like Dory and go in circles.
Well, there's a pop culture reference.
Impressive.
So, the last thing then, Matt, is our parasocial maintenance section, the Patreon shoutouts.
This is for the kind people who chuck.
Money at us as we dance around the gurus on our decoding pole.
Stuff it into our G-strings.
Yeah, complete DMH.
So, okay.
I'm going to shout out conspiracy hypothesizers for this week.
And they include Matthew Melchion, Billy Beebe, Daniel Jeffries, Tobias Peter, Tylan Watkins, Toby Cripps, James Link, Mark O 'Brien, John Statham,
and Alex Masters.
Well, that's great.
All of them.
All of them.
You know, Chris, when I agreed to do shoutouts of all our subscribers, I never expected there would be so many of them.
But even so, I'm happy to do this because I'm grateful and we appreciate the unfakeable signal you're sending our way that what we're doing is all right.
Yeah, yeah, agreed.
So here's your reward.
I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that came to some very strong conclusions, and they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like, when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
That you will.
That you will.
Now, next, Matt, revolutionary geniuses, the ones that can get access to the Decoding Academia series.
So, this week, that includes Nicole Davison, Mark M, ML, Rufthal, Will Sherratt, Tom Doyle, and David Morgan.
I think I have done nothing where I showed someone out twice, but you know, that's fine.
Why not?
Why not?
Who's against that?
So here we are, revolutionary geniuses, one and all.
I'm usually running, I don't know, 70 or 90 distinct paradigms simultaneously all the time.
And the idea is not to try to collapse them down to a single master paradigm.
I'm someone who's a true polymath.
I'm all over the place.
But my main claim to fame, if you'd like, in academia is that I founded the field of evolutionary consumption.
Now, that's just a guess, and it could easily be wrong.
But it also could not be wrong.
The fact that it's even plausible is stunning.
Brett Weinstein just always gets in there at the end.
Eric and Brett, their intonation.
Contrast these guys with Musk.
Contrast that delivery, that intonation.
These guys are professional talkers because they have to be.
They don't have any rockets.
Yes, indeed.
So now, Galaxy Brain Gurus, the folks who can join us and berate us for monthly livestreams if they feel so inclined.
This month, that includes Artemis Green, Bradley G. Wall, Christian, DanLev151, Dean, Derek Varn,
and Eric Quirk.
Yay!
Thank you.
Thank you, one and all.
We tried to warn people.
Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
Yeah, that was on the quiz.
Yeah, so we will be back in the new year, but we'll also, as we say, interviews with Coffee, Zilla.
Coming up, and if anybody's interested on the Patreon, you can hear about It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia with the Olympics out.
Yeah, that's all good stuff.
And if people happen to be listening to this in the vicinity of Christmastime 2022, then Merry Christmas.
Any other year you listen to this, years later, not Merry Christmas.
No, this is very specific.
Similarly, I will also say, you know, happy holidays, Merry Christmas, God bless everyone, one and all.
Yeah, yeah.
I just realized.
Most of all.
I just realized mine was not like the politically correct, non-denominational, happy festival season.
I'm an atheist.
I'm an atheist.
It's okay.
I can say Merry Christmas.
I don't give a shit about it.
I can say it.
I don't mind.
It's all right.
So, well, Matt.
Even though it is the Christmas season and there's cheer around, it's still important to keep an eye on those gated institutional narratives and watch out for the distributed idea suppression complexes.
They're always alright.
I know.
Eric's been talking about them.
He hasn't stopped talking about them.
They're still a thing, clearly.
They're out there.
So, be on your guard.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Keep it up.
Alright.
We're not announcing the next Guru to cover yet, because I don't know who it is.
