Speaker 1: Pushkin Tesla ceo Elon Musk offering to buy Twitter for
Speaker 1: forty three billion dollars. Muscu has accused the social media
Speaker 1: platform of limiting free speech analysis.
Speaker 2: In April of twenty twenty two, Elon Musk launched his
Speaker 2: takeover of Twitter, offering forty four billion dollars for it.
Speaker 3: Why make that offer? Well, I think it's very important
Speaker 3: for be it be an inclusive arena for free speech.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, he'd also started talking a lot about something he
Speaker 2: called the woke mind virus. Must didn't coin the term,
Speaker 2: but he popularized it. Musk is a man of many
Speaker 2: interests and many masks. There's the batman mask and then
Speaker 2: there's the would be philosopher hat. And making his bid
Speaker 2: for Twitter, Musk wore both of these so online, he
Speaker 2: complaining that the science fiction on Netflix, for instance, had
Speaker 2: gotten too woke. But in conversations with serious people at
Speaker 2: a Ted Talks event in twenty twenty two, he talk
Speaker 2: about the stakes of buying Twitter in grander terms.
Speaker 3: It's important to the function of democracy. It's important to
Speaker 3: the function of the United States as a free country
Speaker 3: on many other countries, and help freedom in the world.
Speaker 3: Civilizational risk is decreased, the more we can increase the
Speaker 3: trust of Twitter as a public platform.
Speaker 2: People in the media talk about Twitter all the time,
Speaker 2: but that's because they're on it. Most other people aren't.
Speaker 2: In the US, only about one in five American adults
Speaker 2: even have accounts, and most posting about politics is done
Speaker 2: by fewer than ten percent of users. Twitter isn't, and
Speaker 2: never was, a town square. Musk buying it just put
Speaker 2: a private platform into different private hands. As his purchase
Speaker 2: went through in October of twenty twenty two.
Speaker 5: Twitter users are waking up to find that that little
Speaker 5: blue bird has flown. The coup owner Elon Musk, changed
Speaker 5: the iconic bird logo to the letter X.
Speaker 2: The way Musk talked about X got increasingly grandiose. He claimed,
Speaker 2: the woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else
Speaker 2: matters a mind virus, as best I can tell. The
Speaker 2: idea came from Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and prominent atheist,
Speaker 2: who wrote a tirade in nineteen ninety one, seemingly because
Speaker 2: he was furious that one of his ex wives was
Speaker 2: sending their six year old daughter to Catholic school. Dawkins
Speaker 2: considered religion a mind virus. Computers can get viruses, he explained,
Speaker 2: and so can the human mind. At the very least,
Speaker 2: Dawkins wrote, the mind is a plausible candidate for infection.
Speaker 2: But what even is the virus that Musk so worried about?
Speaker 3: Lork bind myrus is communism rebranded?
Speaker 2: Sometimes, though, must give a different definition using the expression
Speaker 2: woke mind virus for something that had been a truly
Speaker 2: horrible feature of Twitter and of much public discourse for years,
Speaker 2: the suppression, especially on the left of political dissent.
Speaker 3: You can't question things. Even the questioning is bad.
Speaker 2: Questioning is good. Here we agree. So I've got some questions.
Speaker 2: Welcome to x Men, the Elon Musk origin story. I'm
Speaker 2: Jill Lapour. I'm a professor at Harvard. I'm a US
Speaker 2: political historian, and for a long time I've been studying
Speaker 2: the relationship between technological and political change. In this series,
Speaker 2: I've been looking into how Musk is in many ways
Speaker 2: an invention of science fiction, and so is Muskism, which
Speaker 2: I've been arguing is less a form of futurism than
Speaker 2: a throwback. I think that's true of Musk's concern about
Speaker 2: a woke mind virus, too. First of all, let me
Speaker 2: just say for the record that Musk has a point
Speaker 2: about the assault on free speech, including in higher education,
Speaker 2: and he has a point that there are indeed some
Speaker 2: malign consequences of wokeness. Fair enough. But what I'm interested
Speaker 2: in is the very idea of a mind virus. Where
Speaker 2: a Musk got that language, what he means by it,
Speaker 2: and what effect it has. Because other people might muse
Speaker 2: about this kind of thing, but Musk, he spent forty
Speaker 2: four billion dollars to buy Twitter to kill the virus.
Speaker 2: This story doesn't really start with Richard Dawkins in the
Speaker 2: nineteen nineties. It starts in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 6: What is it? What's going on?
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 6: A strange neurosis, evidently contagious.
Speaker 2: In the nineteen fifties, a lot of people were very suddenly,
Speaker 2: very worried about mind control.
Speaker 6: It's an malignant disease spreading through the whole country.
Speaker 2: Fear of communism and at the same time, fear of
Speaker 2: anti communism in the form of McCarthyism. Both fears are
Speaker 2: the subject of the nineteen fifty six film Invasion of
Speaker 2: the Body Snatchers, where everyone seems suddenly not quite themselves anymore,
Speaker 2: and what causes it.
Speaker 3: Worry about what's going on in the world.
Speaker 7: Probably this actually.
Speaker 4: Was a panic of concern to the military in the
Speaker 4: early years of the Korean War that American troops seem
Speaker 4: to be succumbing to some sort of mysterious techniques.
Speaker 2: Rebecca Lamov is a historian of science at Harvard a
Speaker 2: colleague of mine. She's written a new book, The Instability
Speaker 2: of Truth, A History of brainwashing, mind control, and hyper persuasion.
Speaker 2: Beginning during the Korean War, when the Chinese government under
Speaker 2: Chairman now held Americans as prisoners, they were.
Speaker 4: Held in prison camps. Initially these camps were run by
Speaker 4: the Koreans and later by the Chinese. The troops were
Speaker 4: subjected to re education as a sort of experiment to
Speaker 4: see if it would apply to westerners. One of the
Speaker 4: soldiers had brought back his journal in which he had
Speaker 4: been forced to confess.
Speaker 2: Being an evil capitalist, basically.
Speaker 4: Being an evil capitalist or having had a hand in oppression,
Speaker 4: or in this case he was African Americans. So sometimes
Speaker 4: they would actually incorporate a racial sort of liberation analysis
Speaker 4: into it. But at any rate, ninety one percent of
Speaker 4: the prisoners reported that they were forced to journal.
Speaker 2: Because part of the re education is you have to
Speaker 2: retell the story of your own life.
Speaker 4: Exactly what the US military and then later the press
Speaker 4: were seeing when these prisoners were returned was something they
Speaker 4: felt was quite mysterious. They would appear vacant and sort
Speaker 4: of dissociated, and would be quoting Communist propaganda, which used
Speaker 4: that very formulaic language that their families wouldn't recognize. So
Speaker 4: they seemed to be not themselves. And there was evidence that,
Speaker 4: as a New Yorker reporter later put at, something new
Speaker 4: in history was happening, and they called in troops of
Speaker 4: psychiatrists and sociologists and any expert to see see if
Speaker 4: they could break the spell.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's terrifying. Is they're terrifying, terrifying prospect.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: There were also American pilots who gave false confessions to
Speaker 4: having dropped biological weapons over China, and there were American
Speaker 4: businessmen who also seemed to be turning up having been brainwashed.
Speaker 4: So it was quite terrifying that the Communists had something
Speaker 4: that just was not understood.
Speaker 3: New York. Well, American executive Robert bogla Is home with
Speaker 3: his wife after confinement in a Hungarian Communist prison camp
Speaker 3: for seventeen months.
Speaker 4: So Robert Vogeler was an American businessman, an executive who
Speaker 4: was working in Hungary for IT and T, the International
Speaker 4: Telegraph and Telephone Company. He entered the headlines because he
Speaker 4: was returned after being imprisoned by the secret police.
Speaker 6: I was shoved into a sixth feet by nine feet cell,
Speaker 6: and the cold was unbearable. The worst of it, however,
Speaker 6: was the endless routine repeated every six minutes, of the
Speaker 6: steel people being opened and clang shut.
Speaker 4: He couldn't quite remember what had happened to him. He
Speaker 4: had been converted to communism initially. When he came back
Speaker 4: then he sort of decompressed and returned to himself. Later,
Speaker 4: when he reflected on it, he said, the very body
Speaker 4: is forced into league against one's personality.
Speaker 6: The important thing to be learned from my experience is
Speaker 6: that it can happen to anyone. It can happen to you.
Speaker 2: Lamov says that the public learned about brainwashing from a
Speaker 2: writer named Edward Hunter.
Speaker 4: He actually was quite an experienced OSA agent Office of
Speaker 4: Strategic Services, which was the precursor to the CIA essentially,
Speaker 4: and he had been working in China for several decades
Speaker 4: and had been an anti propaganda that was his beat,
Speaker 4: and he had also worked as a journalist. He had
Speaker 4: an extensive collection of propaganda. So he wrote an article
Speaker 4: in nineteen fifty announcing that the Communist had developed a
Speaker 4: new super weapon. He called it brainwashing.
Speaker 2: But it's a very evocative phrase. So that becomes the
Speaker 2: language with which Americans talk about this process of malist
Speaker 2: indoctrination exactly.
Speaker 4: It takes off, and he publishes a book. He goes
Speaker 4: on a lecture circuit. He explains more deeply, and he
Speaker 4: connects this brainwashing to Communist techniques and hypnosis, and also
Speaker 4: to Soviet programs to build new types of human beings.
Speaker 2: The US government was concerned enough that in nineteen fifty
Speaker 2: three it started its own brainwashing program MK Ultra, led
Speaker 2: by the CIA, horrifying human experiments. The public didn't know
Speaker 2: about it for decades, but you can see the fear
Speaker 2: of brainwashing reaching a kind of apex with the film
Speaker 2: adaptation of the nineteen fifty nine novel Manchurian Candidate.
Speaker 7: I have conditioned them or brainwashed them, which I understand
Speaker 7: is the new American work.
Speaker 2: It was as if these men had been made into machines.
Speaker 7: His brain has not only been washed as they say,
Speaker 7: it has been dry clean.
Speaker 2: In the midst of all this, one man in Pretoria,
Speaker 2: South Africa, was frantic.
Speaker 7: Every day the brainwashers repeat and emphasize the things they
Speaker 7: want us to believe.
Speaker 2: Remember Elon Musk's maternal grandfather, J. N. Haldeman. I talked
Speaker 2: about him in an earlier episode. That's an actor, reading
Speaker 2: from a tract Haldeman published in South Africa in nineteen sixty.
Speaker 2: In it, Haldeman described himself as having been a student
Speaker 2: of social engineering who had directed a number of scientific, social, economic,
Speaker 2: and political organizations. In the nineteen thirties, He'd been a
Speaker 2: leader of the technocracy movement in Canada. Then he joined
Speaker 2: the anti Semitic Social Credit Party, becoming its national chairman.
Speaker 2: In nineteen forty nine, he began thinking about moving to
Speaker 2: South Africa, attracted by its newly announced policy of apartheid.
Speaker 2: He moved there in nineteen fifty. In May of nineteen sixty,
Speaker 2: Haldeman wrote the International Conspiracy to establish a World Dictatorship
Speaker 2: and its Menace to South Africa. The tract was a
Speaker 2: response to a speech by the British Prime Minister.
Speaker 7: The window Chaine is blowing through this continent.
Speaker 3: Whether we like it or not.
Speaker 6: This growth national consciousness is a political fact.
Speaker 2: In February nineteen sixty, Harold McMillan, the PM, had addressed
Speaker 2: the South African Parliament disc countenancing apartheid and urging acceptance
Speaker 2: of the inevitability of independence.
Speaker 8: We was all accepted as a fair.
Speaker 2: Only weeks later, South African police opened fire on a
Speaker 2: crowd of thousands of black South Africans protesting outside the
Speaker 2: Sharpville police station. Police killed sixty nine people, including children,
Speaker 2: and wounded nearly two hundred.
Speaker 3: There was a rattle of machine gun and people started running.
Speaker 6: Pocerta children were screaming around the street crying for the amadas,
Speaker 6: and some other policemen's were busy shooting those children.
Speaker 2: The killings were captured on television and the coverage reached
Speaker 2: around the world. In the ensuing protests and state of emergency,
Speaker 2: Nelson Mandela was among eighteen thousand people arrested and jailed.
Speaker 2: Haldeman wrote this tract that spring, suggesting that the uprising
Speaker 2: had been staged.
Speaker 7: Questions to be asked who were the white leaders in
Speaker 7: the Shopville Native riot? Who escaped. Who were the ones
Speaker 7: who fired the shots at the police that would guarantee
Speaker 7: that a major event would take place at that time?
Speaker 7: What are their connections?
Speaker 2: He believed apartheid had come under attack due to an
Speaker 2: international conspiracy spreading dangerous ideas like these.
Speaker 7: The natives are ill treated, underpaid, underprivileged. Separate development is wrong,
Speaker 7: apartheid is un Christian.
Speaker 2: And Heldemann believed that the media itself was doing the brainwashing.
Speaker 7: Every day newspapers, magazines, commercial radio newscasters drip this into
Speaker 7: the conscious and subconscious minds of the public.
Speaker 2: He pledged to stop the spread of the virus.
Speaker 7: People who know it is ninety nine percent un true,
Speaker 7: repeat these lies emphatically and emotionally. The facts of history
Speaker 7: show that the white man has always developed the country
Speaker 7: he inhabits to the benefit of all concerned. The black
Speaker 7: people of Africa have been in close contact with civilization
Speaker 7: from the earliest times, but on their own built nothing, discovered, nothing,
Speaker 7: not even the will.
Speaker 2: Now, let me state again what I've said before. Elon
Speaker 2: Musk is not responsible for the ideas or actions of
Speaker 2: his grandfather, who died when Musk was only two years old.
Speaker 2: I mentioned him here because he's an excellent illustration of
Speaker 2: the persistence of fears of mind control.
Speaker 7: People have become misled on the proven traditional attitudes of
Speaker 7: what is right and wrong and what is good and
Speaker 7: bad for themselves and for their country by an intensive
Speaker 7: psycho political warfare which has been conducted to change people's minds.
Speaker 2: For everything Heldeman blamed brainwashing.
Speaker 7: Psychopolitics is now one of the chief weapons of the internationalists,
Speaker 7: and it is in this field that they are having
Speaker 7: so much success and practically no opposition. An intensive mass
Speaker 7: mind conditioning has been going on for a century.
Speaker 2: This was being done, he alleged, not only by the media,
Speaker 2: but also by universities.
Speaker 7: It is no wonder that so many university professors come
Speaker 7: out with liberalistic, anti nationalist statements, although they may be
Speaker 7: professing Christians and sincerely feel they are patriots. Throughout university
Speaker 7: courses to get their degrees, they were subjected to a
Speaker 7: materialistic inductrination.
Speaker 2: While we're at it, it's curious that another of Heldeman's
Speaker 2: big evils was government waste.
Speaker 7: Most of this waste is a result of following the
Speaker 7: tax and debt system of the Internationalists.
Speaker 2: He wanted to set up a finance committee to combat inefficiency.
Speaker 7: A watchdog financial agency is needed.
Speaker 2: And he wanted one to combat brainwashing too.
Speaker 7: Another watchdog committee must have power to counter erect the
Speaker 7: psycho political warfare that is being directed against South Africa.
Speaker 7: This must be done or the Finance Committee, which soon
Speaker 7: find they had no public support for their efforts to
Speaker 7: save the country. People must be warned and become fully
Speaker 7: aware that when they read the international English language newspapers,
Speaker 7: these are not really British or American. They are more
Speaker 7: likely to be psychopolitical organs of Moscow and Wall Street.
Speaker 2: Heldeman was writing in nineteen sixty just as the public
Speaker 2: panic about brainwashing was beginning to wind down. After that,
Speaker 2: people stopped talking about it so much. Rebecca Lamov says
Speaker 2: the public fear about mind control didn't really start up
Speaker 2: again until the nineteen nineties, the end of the Cold War,
Speaker 2: the beginning of the Internet. That's when Richard Dawkins started
Speaker 2: writing about viruses of the mind spreading like computer viruses,
Speaker 2: and then the worry became those viruses are spreading by computer.
Speaker 2: Full disclosure. I hate Twitter. I hated it when it
Speaker 2: was leftier, and I still hate it now that it's rightier.
Speaker 2: I hate all social media. I've never had an account
Speaker 2: on any of these things. I think social media is
Speaker 2: a disaster for democracy, for fairness, for decency, for humanity.
Speaker 2: On the other hand, Musk's plan for fixing Twitter. It
Speaker 2: brings to mind the adage that the cure is sometimes
Speaker 2: worse than the disease. If history is any guide to
Speaker 2: the fear of mind control, it is the backlash that
Speaker 2: you have to work watch out for, which brings me
Speaker 2: to Mosque's admiration for the writings of a Canadian marketing professor.
Speaker 3: The Parasitic Mind Stray good book. It recommended to everyone.
Speaker 3: In fact, I did recommend it to everyone. It really
Speaker 3: does hit the nail on the head with respect to
Speaker 3: the sort of ork mind virus that is damaging civilization.
Speaker 2: That's Musk in twenty twenty four talking to the author
Speaker 2: of The Parasitic Mind, how infectious ideas are killing common sense?
Speaker 2: A man who's described his book as the mind vaccine
Speaker 2: against all of the idea pathogens that have been destroying
Speaker 2: the West. Name of Gad Sad. He's got a big
Speaker 2: following on x and a YouTube show called The Sad Truth.
Speaker 4: He was educated in the nineteen nineties interestingly in a
Speaker 4: PhD program. He's an evolutionary behavioral scientist, but he's a
Speaker 4: professor of marketing. So he basically spent the first twenty
Speaker 4: or thirty years of his career applying the insights of
Speaker 4: evolutionary behavioral science, or he would say, evolutionary science to
Speaker 4: commerce and to marketing, and so basically, how do you
Speaker 4: best sell you know, high heels to women when they're
Speaker 4: its best when they're menstruating, or can you target these
Speaker 4: particular moments because there's evidence that women are more receptive
Speaker 4: to certain messages at certain times, or things like that.
Speaker 2: And then he ran into a wall. Here's how Sad
Speaker 2: tells it in a conversation with Musk last year on X.
Speaker 8: I first noticed all of these mind viruses in my
Speaker 8: academic work when I was trying to introduce, you know,
Speaker 8: evolutionary psychology evolutionary biology in the business schools, and most
Speaker 8: of my social science colleagues were so that set against
Speaker 8: using biology to explain human phenomena. So that was my
Speaker 8: original sort of at ha moment, we have a problem.
Speaker 4: I think he had trouble in academia, and this is
Speaker 4: what caused him to sort of move in the direction
Speaker 4: he has is that people were resistant to listening to
Speaker 4: his ideas at any moment. He identified sex differences between
Speaker 4: men and women. If it happened to reflect poorly on women,
Speaker 4: he said that people were just unwilling to listen to
Speaker 4: his ideas, especially the smart people who are actually dumb.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and he's not wrong that there's a tremendous rejection
Speaker 2: of those ideas without inspection. And that's a common part
Speaker 2: of academic life, Like I don't think in terms of
Speaker 2: diagnosing the closed mindedness of a lot of academics, they're
Speaker 2: not wrong about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. So then you could maybe say that because
Speaker 4: these things are associated with what they would say the
Speaker 4: far left, it is a form of communism be branded
Speaker 4: and the way that we I suppose we can both
Speaker 4: identify moments in academia where it does feel like there's
Speaker 4: a kind of lockstep.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Yeah, I get it right.
Speaker 4: I agree it's uncomfortable because I think I wouldn't want
Speaker 4: to just say this is absurd.
Speaker 2: Where I get off the train. Where I leap off
Speaker 2: that train is when Sad's argument, Musk's argument runs this way.
Speaker 2: I don't like these ideas. Therefore, these ideas are bad ideas. Therefore,
Speaker 2: these ideas are mind viruses, and therefore I will kill
Speaker 2: them in the name of free speech.
Speaker 8: All of these parasitic ideas originated from the university ecosystem.
Speaker 2: The parasitic mind is an argument against a collection of
Speaker 2: bad ideas spawned on university campuses what Sad describes as
Speaker 2: anti science, anti reason, and illiberal idea pathogens, including postmodernism,
Speaker 2: radical feminism, and transgender activism. Musk read the book, loved it,
Speaker 2: and started tweeting about it, said it gave him nightmares.
Speaker 8: When was it for you that you noticed that something
Speaker 8: was wrong?
Speaker 3: I'd say about five years ago, come in in the climate,
Speaker 3: just before COVID. The degree of panic over COVID was
Speaker 3: exacerbated by this unwillingness to question science or question the
Speaker 3: accepted view.
Speaker 2: In his book, Sad argues that Google, YouTube, Facebook, and
Speaker 2: Twitter have more global control over us than all other
Speaker 2: companies combined. He writes, it is an hyperbole to say
Speaker 2: that they have more collective power in terms of the
Speaker 2: information they control than all of the rulers, priests, and
Speaker 2: politicians in all of history. Hence, Musk is saving civilization.
Speaker 8: In my view, your purchase of Twitter will go down
Speaker 8: historically as the most important of all of your great initiatives.
Speaker 7: Do you feel that.
Speaker 8: Was that a right calculation on my part? Or was
Speaker 8: I overstating the case?
Speaker 3: Well, you might be right. It's possible. It's possible that
Speaker 3: you're right. I mean, I didn't do the purchase because
Speaker 3: I thought it was a great way to make money,
Speaker 3: or because I thought it would improve by quality of living.
Speaker 3: But it really felt like if it was a civilizational danger,
Speaker 3: it was just no place to actually get the truth.
Speaker 2: There ought to be some kind of watchdog committee, right,
Speaker 2: And so Musk bought Twitter to stop the spread of
Speaker 2: the woke mind virus. Musk, by no means shares all
Speaker 2: of his grandfather's views, and in fact, many of his
Speaker 2: views are of course very different.
Speaker 3: Rice maybe the work bind virus. It consists of creating
Speaker 3: very divisive identity politics. So it actually amplifies racism, amplifies sexism,
Speaker 3: and only isms, and while claiming to do the opposite,
Speaker 3: it actually divides people and makes them sort of hate
Speaker 3: each other, and it makes people hate themselves.
Speaker 2: Still, Musk also does echo a lot of his grandfather's
Speaker 2: fears from decades ago. Last year, Musk warned that Christianity
Speaker 2: might soon perish.
Speaker 3: Also, the work Bindvirus is communism rebranded, and.
Speaker 2: Musk has said he wanted to correct for Twitter's long
Speaker 2: time leftward tilt.
Speaker 3: And on the past Twitter was controlled by fall left
Speaker 3: activists objectively, they would describe themselves as that, though what.
Speaker 2: Musk actually did when he bought X was to limit
Speaker 2: content moderation and restore the accounts of people who'd been
Speaker 2: banned for extremism or for spreading misinformation. Musk also gave
Speaker 2: another reason for by Twitter, a personal one. It involves
Speaker 2: one of his kids, one of J. N. Haldeman's great grandchildren.
Speaker 2: Musk spoke with Anguish about what he called child mutilation
Speaker 2: and child sterilization.
Speaker 3: It happened to one of my older boys. Where I was,
Speaker 3: I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of
Speaker 3: my older boys, Xavier. This is before I had really
Speaker 3: any understanding what was going on and that we had
Speaker 3: COVID gone on, and so there was a lot of confusion,
Speaker 3: you know. I was told, oh, you know, Savior might
Speaker 3: commit suicide.
Speaker 2: That was in twenty twenty, the year Musk and Grimes
Speaker 2: had a son they named x. It was another child,
Speaker 2: an older child from Musk's first marriage and now sixteen,
Speaker 2: who transitioned that year and who disputes Musk's account of
Speaker 2: what happened.
Speaker 3: I lost my son. Essentially, they call it dead naming
Speaker 3: for a reason. Yeah, all right, So the reason it's
Speaker 3: called dead naming is because your son is dead, killed
Speaker 3: by the walk line virus.
Speaker 2: In twenty twenty two, this child turned eighteen, changed her
Speaker 2: name to Vivian Wilson and cut off all contact with
Speaker 2: her father.
Speaker 3: So I vowed to destroy the my virus.
Speaker 2: After that that year, Musk bought Twitter and renamed it x.
Speaker 2: Rebecca Lamov, expert on the history of brainwashing, does think
Speaker 2: there's something to fear.
Speaker 4: I think that we live in an environment, including an
Speaker 4: information environment, where you know, the stakes are quite high
Speaker 4: and the tools are incredibly powerful, and therefore the countervailing
Speaker 4: pressures are also very strong, so that we need to
Speaker 4: be extremely aware of the possibilities that our minds are
Speaker 4: being changed in tiny, tiny ways.
Speaker 2: And here's what haunts me in this decade's long story
Speaker 2: of the fear of mind control. Who is actually in control?
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty, when Elon Musk's grandfather wanted to warn
Speaker 2: the world about the international conspiracy against white Christian civilization
Speaker 2: that involved mind control through the media and the universities.
Speaker 2: He got out a typewriter, typed up a tract or
Speaker 2: two and a newsletter, and made a few dozen mimeographs.
Speaker 2: He mailed them to a few friends, maybe I don't
Speaker 2: know fifty copies, and then they mostly disappeared. In the
Speaker 2: twenty twenties, when Elon Musk decided that he wanted to
Speaker 2: warn the world about a woke mind virus, he bought Twitter.
Speaker 2: Twitter is not a typewriter. Musk spent forty four billion
Speaker 2: dollars on it. He could do that because he is
Speaker 2: the richest man in the world, and he can do
Speaker 2: things like that. Every time he wants to speak, he
Speaker 2: reaches over two hundred million people. He runs a company
Speaker 2: that feeds people information. And this is liberating us from
Speaker 2: mind control. No, this is the dream of the brainwasher.
Speaker 2: Next time on x Man Elon Musk's plan to save
Speaker 2: humans from being destroyed by artificial intelligence Muskism and the
Speaker 2: AI Apocalypse