World’s first trillionaire ALERT! SpaceX went public today and now there are twelve zeroes in Elon Musk’s net worth. Is your life better yet? Aren’t you glad that most people with true genius and insight toil in obscurity without making a decent living, while Elon got himself here by exploiting his workers and going through $38 billion in government welfare (all the while strongly opposing a welfare state)? We aren’t either! And we talked to Garrison Lovely about it, because he’s a journalist with a great track record of reporting on this very topic. In his forthcoming book, Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion Dollar Race to Replace You — and How to Stop It, he explores the choppy waters (and the differences from the pretty picture painted for us by tech companies) of a future with AI, and beyond the SpaceX IPO news, we talk to him about that, too. Watch below:

Again, Elon’s coming out of the SpaceX debut as the world’s first trillionaire, but the massive impact of that debut on the tech world and on the highest echelon of global wealth spreads beyond him. Over four thousand people will become newly-minted millionaires as a direct result, and Garrison walks us through the genuine innovations of SpaceX while pointing to the stuff that’s an absolute scam. Next to Starlink, which he argues is “genuinely impressive,” SpaceX’s AI offering is a relative dud that’s lost major support. In fact, its quality has actually declined. So the SpaceX with stocks currently getting snapped up like crazy is in some ways a mixed bag, and that’s an object lesson for a lot of Musk’s career as a tech innovator. Think of projects like the Hyperloop that never panned out, rockets that exploded, the Tesla sports car that never actually hit the market. Now this guy is a trillionaire? What does that tell us about the concentration of wealth in our society and what it says about the status of that society as a meritocracy?

We also pick Garrison’s brain on the topic of AI’s rapidly improving capabilities and truly skyrocketing presence in our society. As we point out, it’s a glorified Google for most people now — yes, in some cases furnishing people with a virtual boyfriend and, more frequently, writing emails folks don’t want to write. But while some people are pushing the narrative that AI’s powers are getting maxed out, Garrison sees the major flaws in this analysis. There are a lot of deeply bad actors involved in the world of AI and financially invested in it (your Elon Musks, etc), so it’s understandable, as we point out, that leftists come to AI discussions with a highly negative perception. So we have a thoughtful conversation about where AI is actually making some things easier where it matters, and of course, where it seems set to run society off the rails if we let it. But we don’t have to! The way we see it, the thing to keep an eye on is the financial incentive for, again, the antagonists of our society to use AI to tank the quality of life of everyday people. And it could definitely go another way.

Thanks for watching, and thank you for your support of the podcast! This episode will be available tomorrow on major streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, Apple Podcasts, and more.