PREVIEW: Backer Bonus Episode: Elon Musk buys Twitter, with Eric from ESG Hound
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If you go back and you look at kind of the dialogue back in like 2015, like these kind of like libertarian types were, you know, all about like, you know, kind of just like being accepting of homosexuality, but like, you know, free markets.
And then there was a lot of talk about stuff like I don't know if you remember this, there was a bunch of talk about universal basic income.
And so Musk was one of those guys that was universal basic income.
And behind the scenes, Teal was saying stuff like this.
And it's really, in the last couple of years, it's moved to this almost neo-feudalism.
It's like Peter Thiel's a royalist, and you've seen Musk, and I don't want to say so-and-so's manipulating, but you've seen basically this whole VC set, the PayPal mafia, and all the other people associated with this crowd have made this weird move to an explicitly authoritarian standpoint.
Yeah, no.
I mean, what you were saying about UBI being pushed by these libertarian types, I mean, that goes back several years.
I mean, I remember seeing that even in the mid-2000s.
Megan McArdle was making noises about that kind of UBI, and it was supposedly intended to be the cheap version of the welfare state.
Essentially, we're just going to gut the entire... So, it's not like we're going to provide services and then also provide some money for everyone so that they can be free of work.
It was You know, we're just going to gut the welfare state and we're going to replace it with, you know, the $300 check every month.
And then that's going to be enough for people, which, you know, is not not the case.
It was always this like subterfuge, ultimately, is this sort of almost a way to kind of get the left liberals kind of on board by making the kind of UBI noises that, you know, that people like.
And I think that, interestingly, I think you're absolutely right.
I mean, that's something that we've been kind of talking about in this podcast, obviously, is, you know, there is this switch around the You know, right around Moldaug and, you know, Curtis Yarvin, who essentially, I mean, he doesn't invent, but certainly popularizes this, you know, essentially libertarian monarchism in which they lose all respect for democracy.
Democracy is kind of fundamentally flawed because You know, we're the bright people, we're the elites, we're the smart ones who can come in and actually save all this.
And I think that's very like Silicon Valley as well.
It's very tech bro.
It's like Elon Musk doesn't see himself as, you know, as the CEO of a great company.
He sees himself as the visionary who's going to transform society around him in ways and that no one gets to tell him no, no one gets to ask questions about him.
And I think that's this, this feeds into that kind of VC, You know, Mythos, the CEO of the great Silicon Valley company, the great startup.
It feeds into that constantly.
Those ideas just kind of go hand in hand.
And I think that, you know, what Moldbug does is provide this sort of intellectual justification for it through the near reaction movement, which then leads, you know, it kind of feeds into what became the alt-right and what is now, you know, what we're seeing in the streets today.
I mean, it's all the same.
It's the same general idea.
It's just it became a little more explicitly anti-Semitic over time.
Well, I think the genius part, and it's interesting that you brought up the Hyperloop at first, is that Musk's kind of genius has been to launder himself as an engineer instead of just like a visionary.
And I think that's interesting because engineering at its fundamental level is not inventing.
Usually the application of like standards, right?
So it's this, it's basically, it's a function of like the bureaucratic state, which is what they want to dismantle.
And so Musk must really like laundered himself as this, this engineering.
And I think that the Hyperloop examples, I think was when I just like, that's what broke my brain on him years ago, because if you're looking at it, like, and so I have a background in oil and gas and I work for a pipeline company.
And if you look at his assumptions, he's like, He's like, okay, we're going to make a, you know, a 500 mile long tube that goes across the ground.
And it's going to be, you know, so many meters in diameter.
And he's doing these like cost analyses and he doesn't ever reference like the pipeline industry.
So pipeline industry has like scores of engineering volumes about like, you know, how much, like how many welds you have to do per meter, like all these different Functions and instead he's like, well, this is the price of, you know, uh, uh, milled steel.
And I, he's like, I'm just going to assume it's going to be, you know, however many million kilograms.
And he's like, I'm just going to add like some bullshit number for like how much it's going to cost to weld it.
Whereas like the, the pipeline industry has this, like these like standards in place and then kind of cutting over to that where it's, where, where that's like, He's laundering his credibility through engineering.
That's not how engineers do things.
They'll look at codes and standards.
They basically step.
It's all iterative on top of what other people have done.
But if you look at the way it's applied, this is the other example.
If you're going to have this vacuum tube Super speed train it the the the curvature of the tube has to be basically minimal and so you're talking about through California you have to you have to basically You're talking about like right-of-ways and land rights like in order to make that happen You have to like gut the entire like regulatory state that involved that revolves around like, you know Right-of-ways and land use you have to say nope.
My project is gonna get this Exact path and it doesn't matter whose land it cuts through because this is what I want to do And so that that for me like really cuts into like his What's interesting me the most?
