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- [00:00]
Host 1
I think what he's doing is he's like, look, what he's actually done used this for is scamming people. Lying, scamming. According to the lawsuits, according to the
- [00:10]
Host 2
scamming, many, many lawsuits, the class action
- [00:13]
Host 1
lawsuit and the FDA action. But he went on to say low energy people think that offering life changing weight loss medication that doesn't work, prescribed by a doctor who is a horse doctor is just a pill mill.
- [00:25]
Host 2
You're not, you're not a high energy person. If you like work really hard on inventing fake doct. That's not a job. That's even less of a job than my job.
- [00:36]
Host 1
I invented over 5,000 fake doctors while you were still asleep. Wait till you see what's possible with longevity services and peptides. I'm bullish on humanity. So if you are too, I'll help you build a company. My God, why do they always end their like their whiny sort of defensive posts with by the way, I'll help
- [00:55]
Guest 1
you build a. I love to imagine like the routine video of him with like the tape on his mouth, like plunging his face into ice cubes and Saratoga Springs bottled water and then just quickly making like 5,000 doctors.
- [01:09]
Host 1
Claude invent 5,000 doctors. Make no mistakes.
- [01:13]
Guest 1
Subtle variations in physiognomy.
- [01:15]
Host 2
My favorite image of this maybe is the, the actual FDA rolling up on like a sort of like Floridian horse doctor and being like, did you write 2 million prescriptions for a horse?
- [01:26]
Guest 1
Walks out from behind the center really skinny horse.
- [01:32]
Host 1
So what I think connect. There's a few things I actually think connect this to what you guys write about like Musk and the ideology surrounding him. The one of the first things is they all just talk like him now. Yeah, like the, the, the Gallagher's self defense post is just I'm bullish on humanity. If you will help you build low energy. People think offering I'm horseish on humanity.
- [01:56]
Guest 2
Well, fiery and everyone too. I mean, you know, Musk is an innovator in many respects, but one of the things that CEOs admire him for the most is just gutting 80% of Twitter. That was a moment in 2022 when a lot of CEOs looked at that and said maybe we could do that too. And it's interesting because there was actually a piece in the Wall Street Journal today that made this point that historically companies that did mass layoffs made investors nervous because it seemed like that meant that there was some trouble. But now actually they're being rewarded very handsomely. Like it's a very. It's a very good way to get your stock up. And a lot of these layoffs are sold as AI facilitated. There's not always a lot of evidence to point to that. Like, is AI actually the factor behind these mass layoffs? But it's being incentivized by financial markets for sure.
- [02:43]
Guest 1
Yeah. The timing is perfect too, because he's doing that at Twitter in late 2022, like, as ChatGPT drops. So the prospect of, like, LLM employees is emerging out of the ashes of, like, a beautiful new small payroll.
- [03:00]
Host 2
Yeah, stop hiring humans. Start hiring lobsters as your doctor horses.
- [03:07]
Host 1
Hire the whole damn zoosapiens.
- [03:09]
Guest 1
That movie predicted everything.
- [03:12]
Host 2
He loves to go to Dr. BoJack Horseman.
- [03:16]
Host 1
So, look, I want to talk a little bit about the book, and we've already done a lot of the Musk biography. You can listen to our episodes with Paris Marx on the subject from a couple of years ago. So instead of recapping the facts, how do you feel his. His biography influenced him? And I think the. If you wanted to expand that to his politics, I'd say, what if Irania was a whole continent?
- [03:41]
Guest 1
Yeah, well, we kind of, instead of doing the. The kind of personal side of things. Right. Especially the Errol must stuff, as rich a vein as that is to mine, we are kind of interested in the political economic model of South Africa in the late 80s when he was growing up there, and how it managed to kind of split the difference between American style globalization and Soviet style command economy by importing a lot of technology, so building out their own auto sector, using IBM mainframes to track and surveil and sort its population according to racist designs, and then building out its own nuclear program, developing its own bomb by the 1980s, partially through Israeli and American technology. So they were doing what we called fortress futurism, meaning it was a kind of version of organizing society that actually rhymes well with the Robotech series that Musk would have been watching at the same time. Like this embattled enclave society that needs high tech and needs to fuse with machines more effectively to protect itself from both internal and external threats. So that was what we kind of found to be interesting about the South African patrimony. Less than the obvious stuff which came later. You know, apologism for white genocide mythology and so on and more. The kind of setup doing a kind
- [05:04]
Host 2
of like right wing cybernetics.
- [05:06]
Guest 1
Absolutely, yeah, yeah.
- [05:08]
Guest 2
And also the emphasis on concentrating production, because that's, I think, probably the clearest resonance if you think about Musk as an industrialist, he's really into vertical integration. He's really into trying to build as much as possible in house. And I think when you look at the South African experience, that's a very clear precedent for that style. Because the South African apartheid regime, in order to try to protect itself from the enemies that it felt were encircling it, did try to build as much as they could within the borders of their country. And we can't get inside Musk's head. We don't know precisely what influenced him, but when you put those side by side, there's very, very clear parallels between the South African industrial model and Musk's own industrial philosophy at SpaceX and Tesla in particular.
- [05:56]
Host 1
Yeah, and I mean it's also the model you're talking about as well is hardly unique to South Africa. I mean you could swap out a couple of the nouns and you're just describing Israel as well.
- [06:05]
Guest 1
Absolutely, yeah.
- [06:06]
Host 2
It's also something that Zelenskyy talks about his vision of a kind of like post war Ukraine being along similar lines sometimes explicitly in comparison with Israel as being a kind of like sort of hybridized, very efficient part. The like state directed sort of defense based economy.
- [06:25]
Guest 1
Yeah, well that was kind of part of the, our interest in zooming in on that. Because when Musk, you know, starts founding businesses in the 90s and early 2000s, that's completely out of fashion. Right. I mean it's all about globalization. It's all about the Apple iPhone model, like design in California, assembled in China, find labor where you can find it cheapest. And the idea of trying to bring everything into one the walls of one factory or firm was just like deeply uncool. And yet now, you know, flash forward 10, 15 years later, especially after 2017, suddenly everyone's doing it. Everyone's trying to do some halfway between tapping into global markets, but then also having more resilience and sort of nationally protected markets, more role for the state. So Musk ism kind of anticipated some of that stuff, partially perhaps with Musk's intention, but also just him sort of contingently lucking out and coasting the waves of the Zeitgeist and just sort of opportunistically.
- [07:28]
Host 2
I mean the thing that kind of strikes me is that that kind of like vertical integration, that kind of like friend shoring or on shoring.
- [07:35]
Guest 1
Yeah.
- [07:35]
Host 2
Is something that I'm most familiar with in the defense sector. And I think sort of one of the questions I wanted to ask about this is to what extent is, you know, Musk ism about sort of like companies realizing that this is an efficient way, you know, a timely way to run a business is like Elon Musk. And to what extent to just like Elon Musk running a business like, well, Boeing or, you know, like bae.
- [08:01]
Guest 2
Yeah, it's actually a big part of the book, and where we look at that is Space X, because we really make the case that that SpaceX gets its start as a government contractor in the early years of the war on terror. But interestingly, its competitors, the incumbents that SpaceX is kind of the upstart trying to displace, are the Lockheeds, the Northrops, like the Raytheons, the old defense primes. And what SpaceX manages to pioneer is a kind of new approach to government contracting where folks within the Pentagon, particularly Donald Rumsfeld, are attempting to bring in some of the dynamism, some of the agility of the tech sector, in particular to the Pentagon, and shake up the contracting relationship, try to create new incentives for cost efficiencies, for innovation. The feeling is that the defense primes have become too bureaucratic, too sclerotic, and on its own terms. It kind of works because something that we have been pointing out in interviews is that SpaceX does manage to achieve a more than 90% reduction in the cost of putting mass into orbit over the course of 20 years, from its founding in 2002 to the early 2000s. So this gambit that defense officials and defense intellectuals are making in the early 2000s by saying, hey, if we bring in scrappier firms and kind of change the contracting relationship, we can incentivize efficiency improvements and actually make it cheaper to get the satellites that we need to wage war into space. That gambit worked. The problem is that there's a cost that you pay, and the cost is that you now have a new monopoly provider. So now SpaceX controls 90% of US orbital launches. If the government, if the US government, if the military, if the intelligence community wants to put a satellite into space, they have to pay Musk. And that's a real choke point.
- [09:52]
Host 2
It's really unfortunate, though, because it's, I think, you know, these things, they're not competing on a level playing field because if Boeing wants to, you know, fund any kind of defense project, yes, they're going to do it more expensively than SpaceX. But you have to bear in mind all of that extra money is going on killing their own whistleblowers, and that doesn't come cheap.