Welcome back everyone. I am Cass PNC and I'm joined as
usual by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett Tomlin.
How are you? Oh, I'm here.
Yeah, same. How are you?
I'm here. We are going to talk once again
about Elon Musk, one of our favorite topics.
We're just a huge, huge, huge fans of his and our our most
popular, our most popular episode ever is thanks to him.
So we have a lot of reasons to be quite grateful to Mr. Musk,
as do everybody. Everyone in the world really
should be thanking him, particularly a group of
individuals who are now going to be living in his personal
fiefdom in Texas. So we're going to be talking
today about his new star base city, which is located directly
next to the rocket pad for his for his SpaceX bullshit in
Texas. So he's starting his own city.
And we've talked about, we've talked about this before.
We've talked about company towns and how they generally don't
work out. We had a a whole episode in our
Protos podcast Innovative Blockchain City about it.
We specifically talked about how even the good company towns went
ended up failing eventually because the companies fail.
So the idea of, of company towns in general is just a bad idea.
But it, it is SpaceX and it is Elon Musk, and none of the other
company towns have ever been tried by the wealthiest people
of the generation, right? That's never happened before.
Bennett, can you talk a little bit about the Starbase idea,
why, why they're doing it and what it means, what it means
for, I don't know, for SpaceX, for Texas, for, for.
All of it. As more and more of Elon Musk's
kids turn away from him, he's trying to find more and more
places where he can retain power and demand people's love.
And so he hopes being the father of a new city in Texas will give
him an opportunity to do that. And so he was able to convince
the citizens in this area, in this county in Texas near the
SpaceX base, basically all SpaceX employees who live in
this area to agree to incorporate a new city.
This city has elected a mayor from, ran unopposed along with a
couple of City Council members. And now it's a full city in
Texas with all the things that cities can do.
And the benefit, of course, for Elon Musk here is that that
means the initial level of administration and bureaucracy
and oversight above him is going to be people picked by SpaceX
employees and things like that. And the reason this is important
is for the same reason that all company towns are important.
You are already incredibly dependent on your company.
They pay your salary. They probably pay for a large
portion of your healthcare. So much of your livelihood in
this capitalist economy is dependent on your ongoing
relationship with capital embodied in the company you work
for. Living in a town either directly
or effectively under control of that company compounds that
risk. And this becomes even more true
in cases where like that company explicitly controls like the
shops or schools or things like that in that town, which it's
not clear that SpaceX is going to like run the town grocery
store or anything like that, I think.
Elon Musk, I think Elon Musk already controls the school
system in that area. Like I think he's already built
up his his private so. He has Ad Astra, which I thought
was a private school, which wasn't necessarily open to all
the students in this area. So yeah, someday we should do a
whole episode on Ad Astra because there's some crazy
things around there. But yeah, it's a it's a crazy
story. So yeah, the problem here is
that these individuals, even though they voted for it, even
though they support it, even though they work for SpaceX, are
still potentially exacerbating their own potential
exploitation. Now, whether or not you as a
listener should care about the exploitation of SpaceX engineers
who voted for this is a separate question, but they know.
More importantly, it demonstrates that many of this
generations era of techno capitalists intend to play out
many of those same patterns. They want control now, not just
over the Capitol, but over the explicit levers of power.
That's why Elon Musk bought a presidency.
That's why they're all trying to, like, get their hands dirty
in politics now. And that's why he wanted his own
city, because they've realized that the influence money bought
was still not the explicit control they wanted.
And I want to point this out too, which is, which is
interesting because I, I know what before we jumped on right
now, we discussed the idea. He, you know, Bennett was saying
like, Oh, yeah, well, this is, you know, worker exploitation is
what happens in company towns. And I said, yeah, it happens
when you have like, essentially unskilled labor.
But then I thought about it just now a little bit more.
And it's like one of the interesting things that Elon
Musk has done is by creating DOGE and getting a bunch of NASA
employees fired, Shrinking, NASA shrinking.
Like he's working to dismantle government funded space
exploration. And then I'm I might be wrong.
Like how many jobs out there for rocket scientists are there?
If you can't work for SpaceX in America and NASA is shrinking,
how many how much of A job market is there for you?
I don't actually know. There might not be that much of
one, in which case you're right. Like they do have to kind of
vote for it because they don't want Elon Musk to find out they
voted no. They don't want to get fired for
voting against the star based city Like you.
You might in fact be very correct in that I I might be
wrong. They seem like they have a
specialty. They're engineers, They're
they're scientists. But maybe there's not that much
of A demand or a high, like maybe I'm wrong very much.
Before we started this call, we were also talking about another
book we've both read Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris.
And one of the periods discussed in that book is kind of like as
the Cold War is coming a bit to a close, as the missile race at
least is coming to a bit too close.
As we're sure we're that a bunch of the people involved in the
production of like missiles and stuff in Palo Alto got laid off.
And they had previously been these high earners in these
relative positions of respect within the Palo Alto defense
industry. And those jobs just ceased to
exist, right? Like there was there was number
new missile factory you could go to because we were no longer
ordering that many missiles, right.
Luckily, the War on Terror brought back a lot of
contractors who would have otherwise never recovered.
Thank God. But like there are cases where
like the ground materially changes and there is nowhere
else you can go. And sure, you can say Blue
Origin, but Blue Origin launches what, 1 1/2% as many rockets as
SpaceX or something like the the pure amount of material being
moved in, the pure number of people needed to like refurbish,
recreate and whatever that material is obviously going to
be different. Yeah, yeah, I, I genuinely
hadn't hadn't considered. I was like, you know, rocket
scientists and and engineers are like the least like, why would I
worry about their next paycheck? But now that I reflect on it,
I'm like, maybe I should be more concerned about.
That's not fair. So I you know, it is true and it
is it's disappointing and we're seeing it more and more.
You know, we've seen California forever pop up as a concept,
which is clearly just Silicon Valley venture capitalist being
like, let's have this little sector where we can all just
keep our employees, keep our people, keep our partners
secluded from the outside world. We have like there's all these
different. We have the one in where was it
Nicaragua that a 16. Zero in Honduras.
Honduras, right in Honduras, Well, so.
Sorry, this is the next one I was going to bring up.
There was reporting from Wired in March of this year that the
Prospera people as well as a bunch of the other, like,
startup cities, that's what they call themselves, these new
company towns were meeting with Trump to specifically push for
American regulations, kind of like the qualified economic zone
we talked about when it came to paint a drag smart city.
But that even more so, like, exempted it from searching
federal regulations and approval things and things like that so
that someone like Prospera could come up and start a new city in
the United States, exempt from a bunch of laws and create their
own and stuff. And that is the explicit pitch
that people are giving to Trump. And, you know, if they buy
enough Trump coin, they can do it over dinner.
Yeah, in a possibly corrupt way. I guess the basic fact of the
matter is, is similar to the Trump coin and the lack of
financial disclosures and the lack of transparency with this
administration, You, you go, why would they do that, right?
Why would they shut off all of these?
It's because they're doing something weird back there.
Who knows what it is, but they're doing something that
they don't want other people to see.
Why is Elon Musk feeling like it's super necessary for him to
control his own city? I mean, ask yourself, right,
Like, why? Because he wants to get away
with shit that he can't get. He can't get away.
Yeah. Ask Eric Roche, who we've had on
and basically knew this was coming.
Very disappointed with Pete Buttigieg and his inability to
rein in Elon Musk while he was working under Biden.
And very disappointed with Democrats in general with how
they're treating Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
They should definitely be like, I don't know, if you can't push
back against this shit, I don't know what the fuck you're doing.
So yeah, they should be pushing back against it.
Starbase is going to be bad. It's going to be bad for
everybody. And ultimately, when or if, I
guess I should say, if Elon Musk does face some form of justice
for the crazy shit that he's done over the past half year,
like, what happens, right? What happens to these places?
What happens to Starbase? What happens to the SpaceX
places? And I suspect they're polluted.
I suspect there's issues with them.
Who's going to clean up? Who's going to take care?
Of it, What happens to this town if three years from now every
contract awarded during this administration is put under
review, investigated, challenged by Congress, things like that,
and suddenly SpaceX is like expected revenue or stuff like
that is by 3/4, you know? It's OK they.
Just. He'll just raise from Chinese
investors and Russian investors again and be OK right?
Start Elon coin or whatever the fuck.
I mean, maybe and like just broadly, what I want people to
understand is that there are basically zero economic problems
that have resulted from Elon Musk being too restrained for
the like. Never have we come up in a
situation where we're like, oh, damn, we could have solved this
if we just took those damn, like, leash off Elon Musk and
let him go wild. And I think even like an
example, Doctor William K Black in his book The Best Way to Rob
a Bank Is to Own One about the SNL crisis, talks about how when
Gray initially came into the thrift supervision board, I
think it was he had to start reregulating.
And that had he not to be regulated and started to put
some limits on these high Flyers, which was very, very,
very, very, very controversial at the time with many people
saying doing this is going to be like this limit that's going to
destroy things. It is likely that like the SNL
crisis would have continued to compound until it was like a
multi trillion dollar problem, like potentially like a United
States and global economy devastating event.
And so, like, removing these restrictions can sometimes be
helpful, but it needs to be done very thoughtfully, very
carefully, and not because Elon Musk said so.
Yeah, there's there. Look, there's arguments to be
made about like how we zone for housing, how we zone for
commercial, how like if we want to talk about zoning and YIMBY
ISM and, and NIMBY ISM and all of the, all of these different
concepts of like how to build and where to build and why
regulation needs to be there or not, that's fine.
I think, I think when you're just mass deleting all forms of
regulation, that that is a real issue.
And that is like that is what these guys want.
They don't, they don't care about figuring out the right way
to go about it. They, they care about how
they're going to benefit the most from it.
It's always about them. It's never about pushing they
they they'll claim it is, but it's never about action.
We should never be even thinking about going to like Mars.
That like everyone, anyone who knows about this stuff far more
than I do will tell you we can't even, we can't even terraform
Antarctica. Why would we go terraform Mars?
It just doesn't make any sense at all.
And I, I, I buy that. I think that's correct.
I think that's the right take. But yeah, that's.
Obviously Correct. Right.
Terraforming Mars is at least two orders of magnitude harder
than terraforming Earth. And we haven't figured out how
to terraform Earth yet. And so, like, the only way to
live on Mars really for at least several centuries as you wait
for certain processes to kick off is to, like, live inside
bases and things like that. And that is not what Elon Musk
tends to describe in his visions.
Yeah. And just like we talk about this
sometimes with Bitcoiners, they like to pretend they're joking
when they say that the reason they want Bitcoin is so they can
get into the Bitcoin citadel's. But there is actually techno
feudalism at the heart of a lot of these people's beliefs, at
the heart of like Elon Musk and Peter Teals and Curtis Yarvin.
In these people's belief, they really do fundamentally believe
they are better than you, that they deserve more than you, and
that they specifically should be given power over you in a way
that you cannot reverse. That is like their truest,
deepest beliefs. Yeah, and you know, clearly Elon
Musk is not alone in his star based dreams like that.
They they all want to do something along these lines,
maybe to bigger or lesser, like bigger or lesser degrees.
They all seem to want to do something wild like this, which
I've criticized this before, but generally when you just get so
much money that you never have to think about it ever again in
any real sense of the word, you start having these psychotic
concepts of what is okay. They are all building bunkers
across the globe. They're all like Mark Zuckerberg
the the shit. Have you seen him on these
podcasts? He's like talking about his
tunnel in under his house in Hawaii, but then he keeps when
it depending on who he's talking to, it completely changes and
then he shows it and there's a fucking movie theater underneath
it. And like I you, you have a
bunker in Hawaii, dude. You do not It is not a tunnel.
You know, like and Sam Altman has a bunker.
Elon Musk has a These guys all have bunkers somewhere.
Several. Of them have multiple bunkers.
Bunkers Teal has his bunker in New.
Zealand island trees. They they all do it.
They're all super fearful. And I think that goes back to
this idea of like, what are they fearful of?
I'll tell you. And it's us.
It's just normal ass people. That's who they're afraid of.
They cannot relate to us. They don't understand what it's
like to be a normal fucking human being who doesn't simply
want more money all the time. Like, I think we all do want
more money, but it's not our main concern.
So I like, yeah, I don't know. Everything about this is sad and
troubling, but also the path that we're obviously going
towards Star base is gonna get built.
It's gonna happen. There's gonna be this, whatever
Elon Musk fucking city now. But I've heard they're gonna use
cast coin.