#498 — More From Sam: Bond Villains, Useful Idiots, Firing Squads, and More

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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Jaron Maibom (0:24)

Okay, welcome back to another episode of More From Sam. Hey Sam, how are you?

Sam Harris (0:28)

Hey, good to see you.

Jaron Maibom (0:30)

Good to see you too. We have a lot to discuss today, so let's get on to our first topic. I enjoyed your recent conversation with Alex Gibney about his new documentary on Elon Musk that comes out Friday, October 19th nationwide. I think it comes on HBO first quarter next year. I think that's right. I haven't had a chance to see the film yet, but suppose we had known 20 years ago exactly who Elon was, an immense talent, a force of nature, but also a bully who doesn't do well with regulation.

You can throw on a liar, etc. But he just doesn't function by the rules of society.

Should we have crafted a lane for him? Could we have said as a country, this guy is different, we recognize that. We're going to back him on a different set of standards. He'll get rich, but we'll all participate. Might that have allowed him to do great things for the world without becoming a villain to so many?

I know you understand the framing. Is there a way that we could have acknowledged he's a once in a lifetime, once in a generation talent and treated him in some way that would have maximized what he did for society and minimized the downside?

Sam Harris (1:26)

Well, we sort of did that without minimizing the downside. I mean, he had all the lanes he needed to succeed. He had billions of dollars of government grants and subsidies. I mean, it's just, I think it's $30 billion, something like that, like $20 billion for SpaceX and $10 billion for Tesla, money directly from the government.

He didn't need anything. He succeeded in all kinds of ways. I mean, that's really not disputable. I mean, nobody blocked him, right? It's just there are specific things he was allowed to do, some of which there may be no obvious remedy for. I mean, like, I'm not quite sure what you do when someone buys Twitter and then turns it into a megaphone for white supremacists and moral lunatics.

Jaron Maibom (2:11)

He's free to do that. Well, I think that came with it. I think that came with it. I think, obviously, I believe he was trying to in his own mind, at least, to protect free speech, that came with that as well.

Sam Harris (2:21)

Okay. Well, I mean, that part is pretty clearly bullshit. But still, it's like, should a person be able to buy, if someone has amassed extraordinary wealth through legal means, building electric cars, launching rockets, etc., should they be able to buy a publicly traded social media platform that already has some hundreds of millions of users, take it private, and tune the algorithm to show their own posts preferentially, and then signal boost anti-Semites and neo-Nazis that they just happen to like?

I think so. I don't think we can pass a law against that, right? So it's not like, I don't know what the remedy is except for just marketplace recognizing that he's behaving like a sociopath and penalizing him for it, right? For people carrying Tesla owners and people who would have contracts with his various companies, caring not to be in business with somebody who's literally aiding and abetting an explosion of white supremacist bullshit in our society, right? So, I mean, on some level, you have to rely on people, consumers, to have good taste and ethical scruples. And if you can't rely on that, which I think we probably can't, your culture is pretty well fucked, right? So that's where we are. It's like, I don't know what we would have done. He had the lane he's needed to succeed. It would have been more than that. He had, I mean, massive government support.

Jaron Maibom (3:48)

Yeah, but he spent a lot of time having to, I think one of the claims in the film was that he did some battery replacement gimmick to get money and he's had to continually lie about full self-driving that he's trying to develop. Which by the way, that claim that Alex said in the interview with you, that Tesla's claim that full self-driving is eight times safer is actually inaccurate, blew my mind. I think everyone I talked to who drives a Tesla is like, at least anecdotally feels that that is a real claim, that it really does work.