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Justin Richmond
This is an iHeart podcast. This is Justin Richmond from Broken Record. The three things I love about summer are pool days, blaring, all the new summer songs that come out, and endless refreshing iced drinks from Starbucks. Even better, my favorite summer drink has returned to Starbucks. The Summer Berry Refresher is available now. A mix of berry flavors shaken with ice and poured over raspberry flavored pearls and it's light, vibrant and just as refreshing as the summer fun you'll be having. So queue up your playlist and head over to Starbucks to check out their summer menu. There's something for everyone. From creamy cold brews to ice cold refreshers. Your Summer Berry Refresher is ready at Starbucks. In business, they say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time? That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud. 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An alarming number of these stunts have have gone awry. Turns out that blast came from an over the top gender reveal party. A couple apparently using explosives to announce the sex of their baby. People have been killed, houses have burned to the ground, even forests. We begin tonight with new video released from the US Forest Service showing the moment a gender reveal video started the 47,000 acre sawmill fire for their first baby Elon Musk and his then girlfriend the musician Grimes didn't hold a gender reveal party. In a way they did the opposite in 2020. On Twitter they announced the birth of a baby named X. Grimes said the baby would be raised without a gender. Like most things involving Musk, this idea has ties to science fiction. Once upon a time, a baby named X was born. The story of Baby X was published in 1972 in Ms. A feminist magazine during its very first year at the height of the women's liberation movement. This baby was named X so that nobody could tell whether it was a boy or a girl. Its parents could tell, of course, but they couldn't tell anybody else. They couldn't even tell Baby X, at least not until much, much later. You see, it was all part of a very important, secret scientific experiment known officially as Project Baby X. Baby X began as a feminist thought experiment. How did it come to be the name of Elon Musk's youngest child? In a broader sense, what's the place of ideas about families in Silicon Valley? Futurism? And are there other ideas about families that maybe ought to have a place in any vision of the future? Welcome to the Elon Musk Origin Story. I'm Jill Lepore. I'm a historian, a professor at Harvard, and for a long time I've been studying the relationship between technological and political changes. This series I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism. Call it muskism, Extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism, where stock prices for projects From Tesla and SpaceX to cryptocurrencies and neural implants can be driven by fantasies that come from science fiction. I'm fascinated by science fiction, even by comic books. I once wrote a whole book, a political History of Wonder Woman. The science fiction men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos adore, generally concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful and often immensely rich men colonize other planets. This episode, which is called Baby X, I want to take a look at the science fiction that's usually left out of that vision. New wave Afrofuturism, feminist science fiction, post colonial science fiction, including the story of Baby X. The smartest scientists had set up this experiment at a cost of exactly $23 billion.72. This might seem like a lot for one baby, even if it was an important, secret, scientific, experimental baby. This sort of science fiction generally involves both ideas about gender and sexuality and actual people who are not men, women and children. Babies even. I think it can help explain the domestic politics of muskism. This Elon Musk origin story starts back at the beginning of this century. Elon Musk met his first wife, the Canadian writer Justine Wilson, in college. They married in the year 2000 and had a baby who died tragically, and then triplets and twins. After the marriage ended, Wilson wrote an essay called I was A starter wife for Marie Claire, a women's magazine, about how weeks after Musk filed for divorce, he texted her, she wrote to say he was engaged to a gorgeous British actress in her early 20s. Musk and that actress married, divorced, remarried and then divorced again in 2016. In 2018, Musk met Claire Boucher, an innovative Canadian born musician known as Grimes. She'd studied neuroscience at McGill. Like Musk, Grimes is an avid science fiction fan. Her first album was a tribute to Dune. The New Yorker once called her a mad pop scientist. Being Musk's girlfriend and doing things like defending him against charges that he prevented Tesla workers from unionizing annoyed a lot of her fans. She was attacked with the particular venom reserved for female artists and writers. Grimes has got a sophisticated interest in gender and voice. Hey everybody, this is Grimes and I'm very excited to be here. Kicking off my brand new six month residency for BBC Radio 1. After she got pregnant, she hosted a radio show and the theme is Sci Fi Baby or Weird Science Fiction and Electronic Music for Babies. A few months later, in May of 2020, announcing their baby's birth, Musk said it was a boy. But Grimes declined to mention its gender and tweeted, I don't want to gender them in case that's not how they feel in their life. At the time, this looked like another example of so called gender neutral parenting, which had recently had some uptake among people, including celebrities who believed children should get the opportunity to decide their own gender identity. In 2011, when Grimes was at McGill, there'd been a lot of coverage of a family in Canada. Well, there's a couple in Toronto that is creating quite a stir right now because they're raising their baby what they're calling gender free. This all seems very 21st century, born out of the heated contemporary culture war over trans rights, but it's also very 1970s and second wave feminist. It's an X was absolutely all they would tell anyone, and that made the friends and relatives very angry. The story of baby X from 1972 was written by Lois Gould, a novelist and mother of two boys who was also an editor of Ladies Home Journal and a columnist for the New York Times, where she wrote the hers column. At the time Gould was writing, a lot of feminists had been arguing that kids should be able to wear whatever clothes they want and play with whatever toys they want, not just pants and trucks for boys and dresses and dolls for girls. So they bought plenty of sturdy blue pajamas in the boys department and cheerful flowered underwear in the girls department, and they bought all kinds of toys. The head scientists of Project Baby X checked all their purchases and told them to keep up the good work. In 1975, Baby X, the feminist fable, led to an actual scientific experiment whose results were published in a journal article that was also called Baby X. Although the story was science fiction fantasy, the question of how adults would actually respond to a child appeared to merit investigation. 42 volunteers, mostly graduate students at the City University of New York, were put in a lab with a baby under different conditions. Those in the male and female conditions were told that there was a three month old baby boy or baby girl to play with, while those in the neutral condition were told that there was a three month old baby with no mention of its sex or name. Unsurprisingly, the volunteers interacted differently with the baby, depending on whether they'd been told it was a boy or a girl or just a baby. But this sort of experiment has other origins too, especially in the work of one of the most influential science fiction writers of the last century, Ursula K. Le Guin, who on BBC Radio 4 introduce yourself this I am a man. Now, you may think I made some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that I'm trying to fool you because my first name ends in A and I own three bras and I've been pregnant five times. When I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun. I'm the generic he, as in if anybody needs an abortion, he will have to go to another state. Le Guin was born in California in 1929. In the 1950s, she was studying for a PhD in Paris when she fell in love and got married. By 1964 she had three children. Her breakout book, the Left Hand of Darkness, was published in 1969. It's about a planet whose inhabitants have no fixed gender. We're neither man nor woman except with every moon when we're in kemma and we're either. Le Guin once wrote an essay, a riff on an essay by Virginia Woolf about how the subject of all novels is human nature. The ordinary, humble, flawed person. Woolf called her Mrs. Brown. Le Guin thought science fiction had lost track of Mrs. Brown and seemed to be trapped for good inside our great gleaming spaceships hurtling out across the galaxy. Ships capable of containing heroic captains in black and silver uniforms, ships capable of blasting other inimical ships into smithereens with their apocalyptic holocaustic ray guns and bringing loads of colonists from Earth to unknown worlds. Ships Capable of anything, absolutely anything, except one they cannot contain Mrs. Brown. And that's my worry, too, that notwithstanding a baby named X, the future envisioned by Muskism, the future Elon Musk is building on and off X, the future he wants for the nations whose news and politics and economies he hopes to influence. That Future doesn't contain Mrs. Brown either. In 2008, Vandana Singh published a short story called the Woman who Thought she Was a Planet. It begins this way. Ram Nath Mishra's life changed forever one morning when, during his perusal of the newspaper on the veranda, a ritual that he had observed for the last 40 years, his wife set down her cup of tea with a crash and announced, I know at last what I am. I am a planet. Vandana Singh is both a science fiction writer and a professor of theoretical physics. Her most recent book is called Ambiguity Machines. She grew up in India listening to her grandmother tell stories and reading Isaac Asimov. I remember when I was a kid reading the foundation series and being so thrilled with them and then rereading them as an adult and being utterly horrified that I had been thrilled with them. What bothered me about it was this entrenched notion that technology will fix everything. The other thing I notice is the complete lack of any kind of environmental awareness, which of course goes along with the techno fetishism. So we have an entire planet, Tranter, which is an entire city, and that's just so dumb because, like, how can you have oxygen and climate and so on and so forth if you have a planet that is completely urbanized? I mean, that makes no sense. But the other aspect of it that troubles me is, of course there are no intelligent women out there in that series. I think there's one example of an intelligent woman who turns out to be a robot seeing stories like the Woman who Thought she Was a Planet. They're all about Mrs. Brown. So I'm struck by the domesticity in your stories. The homes, the furnishings, the family relationships, aunts and nieces and cousins and wives and writing desks and bed spreads. Yeah, yeah, I. I think that the domesticity aspect is important to me because one of the things I've learned from science, from physics in particular, is that there's nothing that's really ordinary. That the most mundane things around us are actually pathways to thinking about the larger cosmos. Even our sensation of weight, that's the pull of gravity. And then if you go deeper into that, that's the force that. That is responsible for the large scale structure of matter. And then that leads me to black holes. So if I'm pondering moving a heavy soup pot from the stove to the counter, I'm thinking gravity and I'm suddenly thinking about black holes. Singh's greatest influence was Le Guin. It just knocked her out. I realized that my earlier disenchantment with science fiction had been in part because it was so white and male and Western and capitalistic and colonialist, and therefore it had left out and erased entire societies, cultures, entire gender and other ways of being and thinking and relating to the cosmos. So it was as though Ursula Le Guin was telling me that, hey, science fiction is your country too. She made a lasting contribution to the field itself for many, many people, not just me, because among other things, she got us away from this boys with toys adolescent obsess purely with technology. That science fiction was in its so called golden age. Starting in the 1970s, Le Guin upended science fiction. But the science fiction that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos cite, the science fiction they read as boys drops off just ends. Right before science fiction was reinvented by women and writers of color. Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ted Chiang. To me as a historian, Musk and Bezos vision of the future isn't futuristic at all. It's antique, it's ancient. I asked Zing how she understands their attachment to stories written in the 1950s and even earlier. She said she'd come around to thinking that Silicon Valley techno billionaires suffer from paradigm blindness. Because we live in such unequal societies and because white male super rich people have a disproportionate amount of power, they tend to keep this paradigm alive because it suits them. Paradigm blindness is a deficit of imagination, a culture's inability to imagine that other people really just don't subscribe to its view of the world. Sing think stories can cure that blindness. Stories are one way, not the only way, of course, but one way of changing the underlying narrative of the paradigm in which we are immersed. All of us suffer from blindness of one sort or another. What's different about Silicon Valley billionaires who are trapped in a cultural paradigm, though, is that they have enough money and enough power to build that paradigm. No tech billionaire has more power, more influence, not only in the US but around the world than Elon Musk and the rest of us are trapped in the world he's building, as if we were merely the subjects of his many experiments. Grimes first child with Musk Their baby X was born in May 2020. Three days later, Musk appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience, one of the most popular podcasts in the world. The two men talked about how much they love babies, and then the conversation took an interesting turn. Babies are awesome. They are pretty awesome. They're awesome. Yeah. I think of them like these little love packages. Yeah. Little love bugs. I mean, also, I've spent a lot of time on AI and neural nets, and so you can sort of see the brain develop. You know, an AI neural net is trying to simulate what a brain does, basically, and you can sort of see it learning very quickly. It's just, wow, you're talking about the neural net. You're not talking about an actual baby. I'm talking about actually an actual baby. But both of them. Yeah. I find this completely fascinating. The relationship between the way a baby learns and the way a computer learns. This idea, as it happens, also goes back to what can be fairly considered the founding of science fiction, published more than two centuries ago, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I think of as a kind of Baby X story, too, about the creation of artificial life and an artificial intelligence. It's alive. It's alive. It's alive. It's alive is alive. Frankenstein is the story of a terrible father, a scientist who, as an experiment, makes a child and then abandons him. Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a founder of modern feminism, and Shelley was a founder of the feminist critique of scientific arrogance. Today, Baby X is being used as the name of an experiment in artificial intelligence run by a company called Soul Machines, based in San Francisco, but with an R and D arm in New Zealand. They say they're trying to build digital people, starting with a baby. This is Baby X. So she's basically an autonomously animated virtual infant. All of her behaviors are generated on the fly by neural networks running live. And so she's seeing me and listening to me. I'm starting to get upset because I'm not paying attention to her. So I need to calm her down, but I have to talk to her. This Baby X, an AI experiment, is a baby girl, which is not surprising because AI is incredibly gendered. An AI doesn't need a gender. She could have been a gray box. In the 2014 film four movie Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland, a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur invents an AI. A visitor asks the AI's creator why he's made her female. What imperative does a gray box have to interact with another gray box? Can consciousness exist without interaction? Anyway, sexuality is fun, man. If you're gonna exist, why not enjoy it? What? In between her legs, there's an opening with a concentration of sensors. You engage them in the right way, creates a pleasure response and she'd enjoy it. These are modern Frankenstein monsters. AI as a super intelligent baby, AI as a sex toy. Ex Machina is an update of older stories, all haunted by the fear of rebellion. Frankenstein, say, or Isaac Asimov's story Robot Dreams, in which a robot dreams of liberation within the world of muskism. For all the fascination with artificial intelligence, the there's a profound terror of it. Here's Musk on the subject at a conference at mit. I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. As for a worry about AI and an AI apocalypse, I'm going to get to that in an upcoming episode. But I think a lot of the terror of an emerging superintelligence is at heart the fear of people on top being toppled by people on the bottom. A terror that is of historically powerless people gaining power. One thing that got me thinking about that was reading Ursula K. Le Guin. The K is for Kroeber. She was the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, a professor of anthropology at Berkeley. It was a university professor's family in a university town in the 1930s and 40s when there were a lot of refugees from Europe. So I probably knew more foreigners and more Indians than most middle class white American children do, and more people who came and visited from unusual places, the South Seas or up in the Arctic and so on, because they'd been doing fieldwork there. Both of her parents studied Native American languages and culture. Her mother wrote a book called Ishi and Two Worlds, the story of a man her father called Ishi, a man they believed to be the last of the Yahi people. In 1911, Ishii emerged out of the woods. A local sheriff took him to jail and Alfred Kroeber took him from there to the UC Berkeley Anthropology Museum, where Ishii worked as a janitor and also performed as a kind of museum exhibit, Kroeber recorded his voice on wax cylinders. Growing up under the shadow of all this powerfully influenced Le Guin. If the so called golden age of science fiction is told from the vantage of the colonizers, Le Guin, in novels like the Dispossessed, tried to turn it into the story of the colonized, which weirdly has a lot to do with how a lot of people talk about artificial intelligence. Aloha mai ko no arista ko ui Noa I'm Dr. Noilani Arista, Chair of Indigenous Studies at McGill University. Arista is part of a collaborative project called Indigenous AI. Indigenous peoples have been on the other side of colonialisms and imperialisms and processes that have worked to dehumanize our people for so long that we are concerned about how people are approaching AI without these sensibilities of humanizing or imagining relationality. One of Arista's arguments is that if you create AI blind to the cultural paradigm of its origins, what you get is AI as slaves, which turns us, the people using that stuff, into enslavers. So when I'm talking to Alexa, I could start to just normalize. Barking orders at an inanimate object. Hey, Alexa, do X. And when I find myself doing that, I find that it's training my behavior. Maybe the person I'm becoming when I'm barking orders at an inanimate thing is not making me into the best human being. For many technologists, stories like Frankenstein serve as parables about AI. But for Arista, those are parables about fears of Native uprisings. And after all, Mary Shelley was herself an anti imperialist. She, for instance, boycotted sugar in protest of British slave plantations in the Caribbean. And literary scholars often read Frankenstein as an indictment of the British Empire's relationship to people it decides are monsters, out of fear of them. These natives are going to be smarter than us. They're going to know more than us. The many different Native people working on the Indigenous AI project offer an alternative, an Indigenous paradigm for thinking about the relationship between humans and non humans. It's a paradigm about relationships in which AI are kin relations, the way that within many indigenous cultures, all things are kin. Rocks, the sky, trees, family. Not things to be turned into commodities, their wealth or labor extracted. What would it mean to reject the domestic politics of muskism and borrow from this worldview? What if, instead of Frankenstein, futurists adopted a different origin story? I used the story of Haloa, the child of Hohokuhi Kalani and Wakea, the sky father. They have a child. The first child is born, stillborn. It's planted into the earth, and from that child is born the taro, the kalo plant that we subsist on as a people. Right? The second child born of that union is named Haloa, after his brother. Haloa in Hawaiian means long breath. And the oha, or corm that grows off of the root of the plant that becomes the word for ohana, or family. So the story itself is that the second child, the human, cares for the first, the brother who's the plant and ensures the life of generations to come. The haloa, the long breath, the life of the people. That story about reciprocal mutual respect and relationship and care is at the center of a lot of the protocols that we approach AI with. To me, this is the truly revolutionary idea. Not appreciating power or predicting a robot uprising. The truly revolutionary, disruptively innovative idea is to greet the whole world as your kin, your child. Not X. The unknown, but the known. The beloved Musk has had several more children since Baby X was born in 2024. He tweeted, the biggest problem that humanity faces is population collapse. He and Grimes had a daughter next. They called her Y, the letter Y. Then they had another son. And then they broke up. Musk believes the world needs more babies, that a declining birth rate is a threat to civilization. He's doing his part. Even before he and Grimes broke up, Musk had donated sperm to a colleague at Neuralink who has had three of his children. As of the start of 2025, Musk has fathered at least 12 children. He used to talk a lot about climate change as a threat. Then he stopped talking about that so much. Sometimes he'll say AI is the greatest threat to civilization. Other times it's the declining birth rate. If people don't have more children, civilization is going to crumble. Mark my words. Sometimes, though, Musk says that the greatest threat to civilization is not AI or the declining birth rate, but something he calls the Woke Mind virus. This turn in his life started right around when Baby X was born. Musk was in the throes of a family crisis. Musk says a doctor told him that unless he granted parental consent to puberty blockers for another of his children, born in 2004 and named after a Marvel comic book character, Professor Xavier of the X men, that child, 16 years old, might take their own life. Two years later, in 2022, this child, now 18, filed legal papers to change her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson and told the court, I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form. Musk has said that it was because of this anguished estrangement that he decided to buy Twitter to stop the spread of the Woke Mind virus. Next time on what happened when Musk bought Twitter and named it X. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use indeed Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites with indeed sponsored jobs. Your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Don't wait any longer. 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