They’re out to get him.
I didn’t like school, because the teachers were so bad. Forget that they were limited. they wanted to keep you in a box. Make sure you were somebody contrary to your inner tuning fork. They wanted you to conform. But when you found a teacher who took the lid off the jar, who wanted to expand your mind with no limits, it was scintillating, you couldn’t wait to get to class, but it happened so rarely. Like with Mrs. Hurley. She posted “Time” article on “Alice’s Restaurant” on the bulletin board. We went to see Janis Ian at Philharmonic Hall. Saw “MacBird” Off-Broadway. You couldn’t wait to get to class.
But most teachers are idiots and the students are drones.
Of course I’m overstating, but your reaction is the point I’m making… Society is all about conforming. And if you don’t?
You know that Elon Musk smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast. It was all over the news. Well, in case you didn’t know, marijuana is legal in California. The media’s outrage, especially the financial media, illustrates how out of touch these old men are. This is why Trump got elected. You can’t swear in the newspaper, but people swear all day long. The newspaper reports about people who lead. Elon Musk is doing the leading.
GM killed the electric car. Elon Musk resuscitated it.
Now for the uninformed, and that seems to be nearly everybody, of course electric cars don’t pollute through their nonexistent tailpipe, but the key here is they’re more efficient than gasoline cars. It takes less energy to go forward. Of course you need to generate electricity to power them, but significantly less than the amount needed for gasoline cars.
Of course you could power these cars with solar. But Obama lost the government’s money propping up some losers so we should abandon it, throw out the baby with the bathwater, even though foreign nations are using ever less fossil fuel power. They’re also pushing forward electric automobiles. They’re concerned about the future. In America, we like to live in the past.
Never mind SpaceX. We were depending upon the Russians for our rocket power, Musk has pushed forward space technology significantly, in a way the government didn’t.
But he’s an arrogant loser who must be stopped.
Now that dope headline… It was written by people who didn’t listen to the podcast. That’s the media we’ve got today, all news and no analysis, unless it’s about politics, which is now a team sport where too many make up their own facts. But if you listened to the podcast you’d find out…
Elon Musk is incredibly boring. I’m sure women are attracted to him for his money and power, maybe his mind, but being in a relationship with him… There’s more dead air than you’ll find in space. Rogan asks a question and then…Musk thinks. This is not a politician with canned answers at the ready.
And speaking of politicians… You can’t make it without backers, you’re sold out by the time you get traction. Rogan keeps on asking Musk if he’s bringing his ideas to somebody, as if Musk needed approval. Rogan’s living in Hollywood, where you roll up a team of producers and talent and try to convince someone at the studio or Netflix to pay for your enterprise, employing smoke and mirrors all the way. The sale is how you get paid, and the buyer knows this, which is why they might put profit-sharing in the contract, but you never get paid.
Musk made a lot of money. He spends his own.
But he did borrow some. Tesla went public.
Therefore there’s a cabal watching the company like baby boomers follow baseball. It’s all minute data, not big picture.
So Musk got frustrated with those betting against him, the short sellers.
Wouldn’t you be pissed at those wanting you to fail?
And he got uppity during the quarterly numbers call. Wouldn’t you? You’re changing the world and you’ve got to listen to these bozos asking inane questions that have got nothing to do with what you’re really doing. We’ve seen this before, fifty years ago, with Bob Dylan. Just listen to “Ballad Of A Thin Man,” or watch “Don’t Look Back.” The frustration is palpable and the arrogance is evident and Zimmy is not too lovable. Not long after this he retreated to the woods and has been an enigma ever since. He wants to control his own narrative. Dylan tells lies and fables and confounds your expectations. Musk ain’t much different.
Joe Rogan is not dumb. But at first he seems a horrible interviewer until you realize how much Musk is not forthcoming. But Joe’s employing locker room humor in a serious discussion, all that self-deprecating crap used before they take down those truly superior by the by.
But if you listen to what Musk has to say…
He’s anti-AI. But nobody would listen to him.
Then he says the merger of humanity and tech is already here. Your smartphone is an extension of your body, the only problem being the pathway is too narrow and slow. This is what the anti-tech people always get wrong, they’re always trying to deny the present, never mind the future, and get us to return to the past. The smartphone enables production, makes you smarter, it’s a computer in your hand. You don’t want to abandon it because it’s part of you. Give up chastising Apple and Facebook, telling them to put limits on usage. That’s missing the point, we don’t want to use our smartphones and apps less, we want to use them MORE!
This is the merger of identity and technology that Ray Kurzweil has been talking about. This is the Singularity. And it’s already happening, and it’s only gonna get worse/better.
You hear people all the time telling you what they don’t need. They don’t need a new phone, they don’t need a faster connection, don’t listen to them, they’re the ones being left behind, they can’t handle the future.
But the future is coming. Musk is optimistic. He says he’d rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.
The media is pessimistic. Just like the educational system. The teachers and administration want to drag you down into the hole they’re in (thanks Dylan!) But if I could sit with Musk, if I could be exposed to some of these thinkers…
They’re changing our lives. But the people “in charge” are too stupid to understand them. Musk spoke with fifty governors, i.e. all of them, about the detriments of AI and…they didn’t get it.
Congress doesn’t get it, they’re just a brake after the fact. And of course we need brakes on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, but if you don’t take the time to understand how they truly work, live with those running them as opposed to questioning them for a few hours every other year, you’ll never get it.
Maybe Tesla will go broke. Maybe the fact that the Chief Accounting Officer left after a month is significant. But let’s get some perspective here, before Musk and Tesla the electric car was dead. Now the electric car is the future. Get your head out of your rear end and look at the rest of the world, they’re moving quickly into electrics.
We try to pull down those who are the outliers. We’re self-satisfied. If you’re smart, you’re a wuss to be made fun of. America is all about conforming. Just ask the millennials, they don’t want to stick out, they just want to fit in.
Of course Musk has gone off the rails a few times, like criticizing the savior of the cave kids.
But you can understand why he wanted to take Tesla private, so he didn’t have to listen to these uneducated naysayers all the time.
Musk is pushing the envelope. All the while having fun. He considers the Tesla a toy, the X will dance to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. But the S will beat the pants off a Porsche, which is why Porsche is now going electric.
The future is coming, stop denigrating those who are leading us there.
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Visit the archive: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/
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@Lefsetz http://www.twitter.com/lefsetz
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If you would like to subscribe to the LefsetzLetter
