Steve Keen, the Musketeer

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[00:00:28] See full terms at MintMobile.com. And is he good or bad for the planet? Well, he wants to take us off the planet to experience life on Mars, where it's the freakiest show, as the song goes. So Elon Musk, Steve is a fanboy. I'm not so sure. But what can we learn from him? That's today on the Debunking Economics podcast.

[00:01:45] So a very brief biography of Elon Musk, very brief, who was born in South Africa.

[00:03:01] His parents were loaded. Since then, of course, we've had his fingers in many pies, Hyperloop, Starlink, the the low orbit satellites, the boring company which makes tunnels, open A.I. and Neuralink, which links brains to computers. And of course, he is doing his best to destroy Twitter as well. Despite all of this genius, he clearly can't figure out how to put on a condom because he's got 10 children through various women, some of which he was married to, some of which

[00:03:05] he wasn't and none of it. You know, some people would say it is a benefit. But I mean, it's easy. A man with good ideas or crazy ideas. So some of his ideas, some of his some of his ideas don't, obviously.

[00:04:25] But but I think that he's the ideas that he has has had that I have

[00:05:45] immense respect for rockets that land on their asses. comparing to the top-ranked entrepreneurs. This is what people do. One of my best mates in Australia is totally anti-Musk. He says he won't buy, he's a petrol head who won't buy a Musk electric car because it's made by Musk. Right. Well, they put me in that camp because I've just bought a Volvo electric and I could have bought a Tesla, but I chose Volvo because it's not a Tesla. I mean, but also actually, and this is sort of my point, about, and I can understand why, you've got to go through the screen to open the glove box. I said, why not? The best part is no part. There's no button needed, but there's something which enabled you to do it in one touch rather than two, because you had to do something on the screen, then you got the glove box.

[00:07:02] And so there's elements like that.

[00:07:04] Yes, I can agree with's moved into many different areas. He's the only entrepreneur who's come up with new ideas in manufacturing. And builds them. And builds them. Now, how many? Okay, you mentioned Tesla, of course, electric cars, and he didn't start the Tesla company, and there's all sorts of controversy over what happened inside there. I tend to lean with his interpretation rather than the others, but that's by the by.

[00:08:20] SpaceX and that and that's the rockets came about

[00:08:24] because he went to buy them off the Russians.

[00:08:26] I think he had a Russian spit on his shoe. Tesla Optimus, it's called at the moment, which is by far, far from the first robot. But it's the first one with 11 degrees of freedom for its hands. And the fact that I don't know how you, I mean, you'd need to see the mathematics, say what they say 11 degrees, all the different ways the fingers and the joints and wrists and thumbs can move. But it means it's got hands which have identical functionality and design to a human hand.

[00:09:43] Whereas the the other rival company in that spectrum, there's a guy I can't think of his last name right now, but Sandy, who's a famous American motor engineer who's worked for numerous companies and has been for a long, long time. He's a he's the design studio that most of the other companies

[00:11:01] go to to get their ideas vetted and analyzed and so on.

[00:11:05] And he's blown away with the level of knowledge that Musk has from his engineering.

[00:12:08] Can I use fuck up on this program? You might as well go for broke. We're already talking about masturbation so you know. There you go. You can have somebody who doesn't understand the engineering fucking up what the engineers end up doing. And I've seen that in the software industry so many times.

[00:12:16] So my favorite example there is the guy who gave us the world's first personal level relational database was Wayne Rat in certainly in America, the first in almost a century with electric, which which changed that whole market. You do have the world's first and still only rocket that can land on after you come back and land without destroying the booster. And people don't I think a lot of people don't realize what's going on there.

[00:13:43] Each engine in the Falcon 9 has enough power, because he sees that, you know, if you've made the money, you should be able to hang on to it. So he's not he's, you know, he might see himself as being benevolent in these.

[00:15:00] He's gifted all of these inventions to society.

[00:15:04] But he's not benevolent in that, you know, he doesn't really care too much about poor

[00:15:06] people. DoD stands for Quick and Dirty Operating System, which was designed by another engineer to make a control an arcade game. And when Gates found out that either he or his programmers couldn't pull off the design, they managed to persuade this guy to write it for them for a fee, I think it's something like $10,000 back at the time. That was like, you know, maybe $150,000 now.

[00:16:22] But they didn't innovate that.

[00:16:24] That was something innovated by somebody he purchased into the company. old age. Apart from obviously trying to implant stuff into ourselves. That's right. The viruses and the 5G towers and all that sort of stuff. He's behind all of that. They're listening, Steve. They're listening to us. But in terms of creativity, I don't rank him as an entrepreneur. I reckon somebody who organized

[00:19:00] a successful commercial invasion of what used to be largely open source mentality in computing at back to Elon Musk. So yeah, so I mean, absolutely. So he's a genuine innovations in manufacturing, which rules out the other side. So is he a genius? Coming up with new ideas or coming up with ideas that nobody else thought was feasible and pulling it off. That is when you get beyond the stage of being like when you create a whole new field, he's definitely an innovator. And if you come down to

[00:19:04] looking at Schumpeter's definition of what. You know, it's hard to believe that inflation

[00:20:21] is still a thing, but boy it sure is.

[00:20:23] And that's exactly why Mint Mobile still gives you

[00:20:25] premium wireless for just $15 a month. This is the Debunking Economics podcast with Steve Keen and Phil Dobie. OK, so Elon Musk we heard in the first part, Steve thinks he's fabulous because he is an innovator, he's a manufacturer, unlike all the other multibillionaires that we've seen

[00:21:41] who basically make software by and large these days.

[00:21:46] And of course, AI is a big part. I will agree it's a bit scary. But at the same time, the amount of, the main barrier between us and the computer is the interface itself. We've got this incredible processing technology, which we're expressing using a keyboard, which is designed to slow

[00:23:00] down typists on mechanical typewriters almost a century. So all this stuff. So I know most of my friends have moved out of London for a better life. What's the, you know, now live in Surrey, what's the motivation for moving to Mars exactly? I don't know his motivation. His basically is the space thing. We read about this in science fiction books. Why aren't we experiencing? Hint back to Elon Musk.

[00:24:20] But what good does it do the humankind or the planet

[00:24:24] or the people who go there?

[00:24:25] What's the main purpose, apart from the fact

[00:24:27] he sees it as a challenge? Forget about global warming, forget about anything humans do, we'll boil the surface of the planet. And that's in the order, it's in the order of the, not to the time to the dinosaurs, about five times as long as that, roughly. But we know that if we don't do something, all the life on this planet will be eliminated at some time in the, within the lifetime of the planet so far,

[00:25:42] which is about 4. I think we won't make it. I think we'll wipe out our capacity to have advanced civilization on this planet before he gets there. Okay. I truly, unfortunately, if they had asked me to gamble whether humanity is going to make it to the point where we get

[00:27:02] off planet before we destroy the habitability of this planet, I would bet against that.

[00:28:05] You have to first of all you've got to create your environment on Mars and secondly you have to respect it

[00:28:11] So if you had to live underground on Mars and create your own oxygen to survive

[00:28:18] Why couldn't you just and and the earth is in uninhabitable? Why couldn't you just live underground on the earth? Why do you need to go all the way to Mars?

[00:28:20] People would find out where you are and kill you and take it over. I

[00:29:25] on fighting each other than preserving life on this planet, which is what we've ended up doing. If you look at the history, I mean, I just had a bit of fun. I left Budapest last week for the

[00:29:31] final time after my six-month stint there working at the Budapest Center for Long-Term Sustainability.

[00:29:35] Very enjoyable. And I did something I wanted to do but I hadn't made time for, which is go and visit

[00:29:40] the catacombs in which they apparently held Count Dracula... But you're still humans. So you see... Yeah, sure human, but listen, we've learned a different lesson. Yeah, but the lesson would be that if you've got a whole load of people in a confined space, they're all going to go crazy and they're all going to kill each other anyway. And you've got to get that right. You've got to spend a lot of time... Well, you've got to change human nature. Maybe that's why

[00:31:03] it's putting the chips in our brains so we don't think too much about killing each other.

[00:31:05] This is a part of the conversation that I played a clip from him talking at Rishi Sunak's one day distraction event that he held and trying to avoid people realizing just how unpopular he is as a prime minister. And Elon Musk was there talking about artificial

[00:32:20] intelligence and saying that with artificial intelligence,

[00:32:22] we have this ability to be able to do anything,

[00:32:25] irrespective of resources. So artificial intelligence, for example, in itself, and we talked about this in the past,

[00:33:42] is a big user of resources.

[00:33:44] It has to use a the knowledge of the Roman Empire was lost in those areas after its collapse. So that's the long term. The real reason I support Musk is I share that dream and I think it done to it. But also just and this is, you know, this is very banal talking to compared to what you're talking about. But I mean, just one question I want to ask before we go. I'm wondering whether he is, you know, maybe he is a genius or maybe he's I mean, he's certainly a good engineer, isn't he? And and and and so that, you know, we can agree on that.

[00:36:20] He's lousy when it comes to

[00:36:24] marketing and computer interfaces, human interfaces. He had a verb, a brand that was a verb. So I use TweetDeck, which I now have to pay for, which is why I've got Blue Tick, which I don't like very much, but I've used TweetDeck because I can bookmark and it's easy to share stuff and follow stuff. So to find TweetDeck, it's now called XPro. If you type XPro into Google, it doesn't even come up.

[00:37:45] I've got to type in TweetDeck. and look at the competitor and all those moves are quite small. And he's not caving. You know, that's Monday. That's he would see all that as quite mundane and a waste of his time. So he's he's I think he's very often in the wrong job, isn't he? He shouldn't be in charge. He should be the chief scientist in all of these companies. Except that the person who stops things happening must as a managing director.

[00:39:00] So, you know, it's good to have and I understand

[00:39:03] a lot of what's happening is attempting to make Exeter.

[00:39:06] I think it's called Weibo, X is going to be my symbol. There may be some other weird little reason that comes out of the Asperger's side of his brain. We all know, maybe we'll know one day. But yeah, that's, that to me, you know, not his finest hour, but the finest hours are in manufacturing and we need that desperately. And, and he's compared to her what the other

[00:40:20] billionaires have spent their money on, you know, Facebook politics. I mean, he is a strong libertarian, of course, you know, and I always see that I see libertarians, libertarians, I see as being a polite way of saying, you know, well, people are able to make their own choices, irrespective of the impact it has on anyone else. And then that particular point, I mean, this is I think it's a nature of, again, becoming wealthy. Who's going to attack you, the left or the

[00:41:41] right? And I have enough attacks from the left after a while. I can see that pushing

[00:41:45] somebody's politics in a right wing direction. It's unfortunate. It's unfortunately part humanity needs rather than what you think is going to turn across. Right. Well, we will leave it there for now. And we'll see what people say. Wherever you're listening to this, leave comments. Would you know, would you would you rather live on Mars or rather not live at all? You know what Steve's thinking and I you know what I'm thinking. I would rather not live at all. But then, you know, I apply the same thing to living in Chicago. So, you know, Mars is a long call for me.

[00:43:03] But yeah. Tell us what you think.

[00:43:05] And we'll be back again for another one next week. Thanks, Dave.