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British author and cartoonist Daryl Cunningham's graphic novel titled Elon Musk, Investigation into a New Master of the World, was published in France to good reviews. The book traces Musk's journey from his family roots in apartheid South Africa to his current position as far-right disruptor. Daryl struggled to find an English-language publisher which he attributed to a climate of fear from legal consequences. Musk's current political controversies helped solve that problem. An English-language version of Daryl's graphic novel, now titled Elon Musk, American Oligarch, will be published in September by Seven Stories Press. Daryl joins the Plutopia podcast this time. As we discuss his novel and Musk's ongoing rampage through US and European governments. I started off the book admiring some qualities about him. His drive, his ability, his flexibility, his thinking, his work. He's got an incredible work ethic. And he's able to entertain a lot of other people, not just why I think. Other people who've worked with him said that he's got incredible levels. He can deal with levels of stress. That's almost his superpower, really. But obviously the dark elements of his personality as he's got richer and more powerful have come to the fore. And those things I really dislike. Tesla or SpaceX would exist without intervention by the US taxpayer, the US government, crucial points in their existence. It's as simple as that, really. He's the biggest welfare queen out there. Welcome, everybody, to the latest episode of the Plutopia News Network podcast. I'm John Lebkoski. Wearing my old Millennium Whole Earth Catalog T-shirt, by the way. We're joined by my co-host, Scoop Sweeney, my partner in crime. And our co-host, Wendy Grossman. And our guest today on the Plutopia News Network Cartoon Carnival is Daryl Cunningham, a cartoonist and writer who's written some rather amazing books from what I've been able to see. And I think, Wendy, do you want to take it away? Yeah. I don't know how long ago it was, maybe a month or two. There was an article in The Guardian that kind of caught my attention, which was that this guy had written a graphical biography of Elon Musk. And he was unable to find a publisher in the US or the UK, even though he had published it in France. And, you know, if you tell me I can't have a book, I'm going to go get it. So I logged on to Amazon France and ordered a copy. And here it is. And but I gather, Daryl, you now actually do have a publisher. Yes. Seven stories in New York. They're publishing in it after seeing the same article that you saw. And it will be out in September. And we're going through the edits for the moment for the English language edition. I've updated the book as much as I could. Considering that every day something monumental seems to happen. I was going to say. But it's just the way it is. I mean, that is the trouble with, you know, current events. They keep being current, don't they, really? So, yeah, I've written and drawn a few, about 10 more pages just to bring it up to. Really, I could only really bring it up to Trump's election and the beginning of this year. And everything that's happened since then will have to be part of some other book. And indeed, I'm working on something like that. Are you doing your own translation into English? Well, it was written in English in the first place. And it was then translated into French by Delco, my French publisher. So then the seven stories will be doing their own edit and fact check just for themselves, really. And then I will make, that will be sent to me next week. And I will negotiate, do whatever needs to be done, really. Right. So, I mean, one of the things that intrigues, I haven't read a lot of graphical books. I think the one nonfiction one that I've read is Logic Comics, which was about Bertrand Russell and the development of mathematical logic. What makes the form good or bad for doing this kind of project? I think it's, comics are really good a way of sort of breaking things down. And to concise and coherent. If you're good at doing it, you can break everything down coherently. And you've got two ways of sort of delivering the information. So you have all the visual stuff and the tech stuff as well. And what I try to do is to never dumb down the information is just as complex as it would be. But to try and simplify the sort of delivery of that information, if you like. Rather than like. So with a book, you would have like dense passages of text. Here you've got like snippets of text with illustrations. And what that does is like, it's like the cinema of the printed page. I tend to think what I do is sort of documentary comics, really. And my approach really is to slightly aside. There's a well-known American comic newspaper comic strip called Nancy by Ernie Bushmiller. And you'll be familiar with that. And what they used to say about Nancy is it was a very simple two, three or four panel strip, three panels to set up and a punchline on the last panel. But what they used to say about it is by the time you decide not to read it, you've already read it. So that's my approach, really. Try and make it almost. So you just make it as easy as possible to read. So there's no complicated layouts or anything. It's very straightforward. Six panel grid, the panels. You don't need to worry about what you're looking at. So getting the information, then, is as easy. It's very easy. You just fall into the pages. And you shouldn't be aware, really, of amassing a lot of information. It should be invisible to you as turning the pages is invisible to you when you read the book. You're not really aware of turning the pages when you're reading. If you are, then you're reading a very bad book. Yeah. You mentioned Nancy. And I grew up exposed to Nancy from my older sister who was really into cartoons. And I have an account on the Blue Sky social media site. And they have a Nancy fan site that daily, whatever the date is, they give all the old Nancy cartoons for that date, no matter what the year was. And the stuff that I'm seeing actually relates quite well with our current situation, just because it was appealing to the common person, not just the literati, if you will. Do you think that has something to do with the, yeah, that's a very good example right there. It's, you know, Nancy's the middle class person. And, of course, Sluggo is the common lower class. There's not a lot of social depth in Bushmeller's cartoon. That's not really what he was doing. But, nevertheless, it's, by default, it's in there, I suppose, yeah. But what interests me about it is much, very much more, the sort of graphic, the simple sort of graphic nature of it, the grammar of it, that interests me. I actually follow that same account on Blue Sky that you do. It kind of makes me wonder, you know, thinking about, so you're kind of talking about Nancy, which was, each one was like maybe a four-panel strip. And then you had comic books that were a bit longer. But kind of how do you determine the flow of your story when you're creating it as an illustrated, you know, essentially a comic book documentary, as you said? What dictates the flow? It's very hard to say. I often struggle to understand myself, how I do things. I just do them and hope they work out. And mostly they do. But with, like, a biography, you've basically got a structure straight away. You don't have to worry about organising it. You've basically got the childhood, the adulthood. And, you know, with Musk, it fell immediately into sort of discrete chapters, really. It's childhood in South Africa. Then later it's moving to, and it's most of his family, in fact, moving to the US. And then early sort of business with PayPal, build and leaving PayPal. And each bit was like a little chapter that I could concentrate on. So I just approached it like that. And I did it page by page. I don't really do thumbnails. A lot of cartoonists will thumbnail an entire book. But because my approach is very simple in the first place, it'd feel like I was drawing it twice. So I just get on with it and have a complete page each day. Each day I try and, if I start a page one day, I try to finish it that day. And I complete, a complete thing, including the lettering. Are there parts of that story, the Musk biography, where you felt, like, stumped, where you were kind of having a hard time figuring out how to represent it as a comic? No, I think it was fairly straightforward because most of the biographical details were well known. There are some hazy areas I would like to have known more, but it didn't seem to be any way of finding that information out. Like the stuff about his father, there's a lot of stories about his father. But I couldn't nail down whether these stories were actually true or not. So I had to leave them out. In fact, a lot of the things that Aaron Musk says, Elon Musk's father, is basically, you have to wonder whether any of it is true. Because he's well known for, basically, elaborating, shall we say, elaborating the truth a little. So, yeah, I find, actually, of the entire book, I would say, I found Musk's childhood and the story of his family, the most interesting aspect of it. Because it was the most little known. When you tried to get English language versions in the United States, what was the pushback on that? What kind of resistance did you receive? Was it mostly fear of those people wanting to not inflict harm upon their company? Because Elon Musk didn't like what they printed. It's impossible for me to really know. I can only speculate what the problem was. But it's interesting, like, seven stories, who is going to publish this book. None of the usual sort of comics publishers or usually published by stuff were that interested, really. And it had to go to seven stories who don't usually publish graphic cartoon material, really. I don't like the phrase graphic novel, really. I still think of myself as a cartoonist, primarily. But I would say there was a lot of things going on at that time. Some of it to do with Delcor, the French publisher. They were going through a merger as well. And I think, although it's very difficult for me to say, and I can't be sure, I think that had a little to do with it. You know, my assumption was, particularly in the UK, where libel law terrifies a lot of people, that I just assumed they were afraid of a lawsuit. It sounds like that wasn't maybe the right assumption. Well, once that story broke, I had quite a lot of different publishers contacting me. But seven stories are the one that sort of, you know, it's just getting the information out there, really, I think. I wonder if at the time that you were submitting it, if they just thought people wouldn't be interested in Elon Musk. I find that hard to believe. I find that hard to believe, really, because it's front and center of everything that's happening at a moment. I mean, he's, but even before that, I mean, you know, basically from, well, really from when he bought Twitter, if not, I mean, certainly, certainly he's been in the news every day since he bought Twitter. And before that, you know, testing all the time. So, I mean, I would find it hard to believe they didn't think it was a notable enough subject. How did you pick it, by the way? What drew you to it? Well, I've done a series of books over the past few years, focusing on the super rich, starting with a book called Billionaires. But even before that, I did a book called, in America, it's called The Age of Selfishness, which is about, originally it was about the 2008 banking crisis. And so I did that book, and then I did a couple of books about science. Then I came back to, well, the political, economic stuff, because I wanted to look at the 1%, because there was a lot of talk about the 1%. So I did Billionaires, which is basically a book containing three sort of biographies of three different people. Well, groups of people in one case. The book covers Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Bezos and Amazon, and the Koch brothers, who are big oil and gas billionaires, once died since. But I think one's still alive. So that started me writing about the super rich. And then the book after that was about Putin. Because I read somewhere, it was speculated that Putin is actually the richest person in the world. It's impossible to know the level of his wealth, because basically any Russian assay is owned one way or another by him, even if it's owned by proxies, which most of his wealth is owned by these proxies. So he's probably neck and neck with Elon Musk. Well, except that a lot of... But isn't it even a lot of Elon Musk's wealth is paper wealth? It's shares. It's true. It's not liquid wealth. It's much more subject to crashing, I would have thought. Yeah, there's not a lot of liquid wealth there. That's true. So probably, you're right, probably Putin is still the richest person in the world, unofficially. So I did a book about him, which is basically about the rise of his dictatorship and the story of modern Russia. And again, it was basically about... My approach was to look at him as part of the super rich and the billionaire class problem, really. And that inevitably led me to doing a book about Musk, who seemed like the next obvious person, because he was officially at that time and still is now the richest person in the world. Yeah, I saw a story today that suggested he might... Oh, no, it's not a story. It was in your book, that he might become the first trillionaire. It's possible. I mean, it's been predicted that he could do that. That's right. It was an Oxfam report, wasn't it? It was Oxfam report, yeah. Yes. Oh, to God, that does not happen, really. Well, you know, particularly because, as you point out in the book, so much of the success of his businesses is dependent on the generosity of the American taxpayer. Neither Tesla or SpaceX would exist without intervention by the U.S. taxpayer, U.S. government, crucial points in their existence. It's as simple as that, really. He's the biggest welfare queen, I'm with. I like the term. Do you think he's a genius based on your research? No. Whatever that word means. No, I don't think so. No. No. I started off the book admiring some qualities about him. His drive, his ability, his flexibility, his thinking. He's indefatical in his work. He's got an incredible work ethic. And he's able to seem to take a lot of other people, not just why I think. Other people have said, who've worked with him, said that he's got incredible levels. He can deal with levels of stress. That's almost his superpower, really. But obviously the dark elements of his personality, as he's got richer and more powerful, have come to the fore. And those things I really dislike. Do you think there's a pattern there? Because a couple of my friends who are longtime technology journalists remember meeting Musk when he was not starting out, but maybe in the PayPal days. And they said, you know, he was funny. He was nice. He listened to the people who talked to him. And it's not a description you recognize from what you see of Musk now. And I've heard other similar stories about other billionaires. And you sort of think, well, is there a certain amount of money after which the money itself starts to poison people? I think massive levels of wealth is very bad for your mental health, I think. Because you lose contact with reality. It happens with dictators as well. But then they're surrounded by people who are just yes, man. So you're only getting positive feedback on things that you really want to believe. So that's obviously very dangerous for your mental health, really. Because you're not going to see reality the way it really is. The other thing that I've noticed is like, well, I think it's hard for very rich people to understand that the $20 they've cut off somebody's benefit payment is actually a significant sum to somebody. It does seem that way. It does seem that way. Because money, the numbers start to seem trivial, I would think. It's hard for me. Because it's not like he was born super wealthy. No. He wasn't born poor. But he was basically a very well-off middle-class family, a white family in South Africa with access to money. But they certainly went through periods where they didn't have any money. And so he's thinking about it. He must know the value of money. But he's chosen to sort of forget it for whatever reason. Don't you think perhaps he's reached a level of wealth where it's not so much about the money, it's about the power? Because that seems to be way more important to him these days than the actual money. Yeah, that's absolutely true. That happens with other super wealthy people. I mean, Rupert Murkner is a good example that at a certain point he stopped being about selling papers and more about pushing a certain agenda that he was interested in. There's a great story. The film critic Roger Ebert, after he lost the ability to speak, he kept this blog where he wrote, I don't know, millions of words probably. And one of the pieces he posted was about the day that Rupert Murdoch came and took control of the Chicago Sun-Times, which was Ebert's paper. And he describes, you know, Murdoch showing up, completely relaying out, you know, the front page. You know, he was a very skilled, you know, Ebert says he was a very skilled newspaper man. He knew exactly what he was doing. You know, he knew exactly, you know, it was, he destroyed the great newspaper that they were close to building. But, you know, he knew how to sell, he knew how to sell papers and he was very successful at that. And it's quite a, quite a fun blog post to read. Yeah, I mean, the thing is that, especially about Murdoch, that he's very much a newspaper man in his blood. And he likes to get, roll up his sleeves and get right into putting the paper. He's not like a hands-off owner. He likes to get involved in the day-to-day running of his papers. And that includes, you know, the big ones, Times of London, that kind of thing. I don't know if he does now because his health is not great. But Cernay at one time, he was involved every day in what was going on in his newspapers around the world. I don't know if you've been following the, what's going on at the Royal Society with respect to Musk? No, what's this one? There's so much stuff that I probably missed something. Oh, you might want this actually for, this is actually quite a story. The eminent, I think, psychologist, Dorothy Bishop, announced a couple of, a month or two back that she was resigning from the Royal Society, which is, I don't know, like giving back your Nobel laureate or something. In order to, to protest Musk's continued membership. Because she, and she argued that he was violating the code of conduct for fellows by attacking fellow scientists and, and not supporting science, you know, the scientific community. And, uh, so she announced her resignation and nothing much happened. And then some weeks went by and Stephen Curry, who's, I forget what he's a professor of, um, announced he was, wrote an open letter to the society asking why they had not taken any, issued any response or taken any action in response to Bishop's resignation. And 3,500 people signed it. Many of them fellows of the Royal Society. So on Monday night, they had a debate to discuss this. And the Royal Society has since issued a statement that says something about, uh, you know, the fellows agreed that we all support science. It was something like that. Never mentioned Musk at all. So in response now, the mathematical biologist, Kit Yates has, has, uh, I believe he's resigned now too. And, uh, this, this looks like it's going to be going on for a while. Um, but you know, you would not expect that this guy would, would cause this kind, this level of, uh, level of descent in one of the world's preeminent and oldest scientific institutions. I didn't even know he was a member of the Royal Society. That has backed, has escaped me. That's another thing that I'm going to add to, add to the updates. And I'm sorry, I didn't make work for you. Oh, that's life though. Isn't it? Yeah. You know, I, I'm wondering, you've, uh, you've given a lot of thought. You've done a lot of research with billionaires. If somebody came to you with this conspiracy theory that the billionaires were trying to take over the world right now and that they were all colluding, uh, and thinking about how they'd carve things up and that sort of thing. Would you be skeptical of that? Or would you be inclined to believe it? Well, isn't that effectively what is happening? And it's always happened that rich people try to control everything. I mean, it's nothing. I mean, there isn't really, it's not a secret conspiracy. If it's happening right out in the open, for everybody to see, um, um, Musk buying Twitter wasn't about him trying to make, have Twitter make money. It was that he was trying to control the flow of information. And that's trying, and controlling the flow of information is very important. these days because if you can control that, you can control what, how people perceive reality itself. So, you know, it's all about that really. And, um, what happened with the Washington Post, just this, was it like this week where basically Bezos has said, um, our opinion columns are now going to be, uh, pro market. And there's not going to be any criticism of Trump basically. And, you know, so, uh, uh, this has always been the case, but it just seems worse at the moment. We're not going to have to open up our own lines of communication to each other. I remember seeing an, um, a documentary about Rupert Murdoch that had a clip of him on a talk show somewhere. And saying, you know, saying, well, you know, if you, if you have, if you can do it, of course you try to influence the world to be the way you think it should be. I mean, or words to that effect. And, you know, it seemed to him quite normal that if, if you owned newspapers and you had a lot of money that you would, you would try to remake the world in your desire. Yeah. I mean, it is not a secret that they try and influence politics and politicians. It's, it's not, you know, it's not some like secret conspiracy. Um, it is actually, I think that happens. I'm thinking less about influence and more about, you know, sort of taking power, uh, sort of like what Trump is doing. Trump, uh, is clearly as it evolves, you can see more clearly that he really does see himself as a potential dictator and that that's really the move that he's trying to make. And, uh, and, uh, and he appears to be in collusion. Well, certainly he's colluding with Musk. He appears to have something going with Putin. And there seems to be a number of these guys globally. And somehow they're managing to convince just ordinary people that it's better to, to just allow them to, to take. This, uh, this, uh, terrible amount of power really, uh, versus having democracies. Democracy seems to be failing. And this, uh, handful of dictators appear to be taking power globally. Uh, yeah, that is a very dangerous period of time that we're in. What we have to do is convince people that democracy, liberal democracies are worth fighting for, which they are. Because, uh, the thing about democracy compared to any other type of government is that they tend to be more stable. The people who live in them tend to be wealthier. They tend to be less crime. Well, not, not always necessarily less crime, but there's definitely less, uh, poverty than there is, let's say, you compare, like, I don't know, democratic Japan with, uh, North Korea or something like that. There's no contest, is it, that liberal democracies are healthier in terms of information, in terms of, uh, their economies. So, um, we, these are things that we're fighting for. And the, the problem is we're living in a time where, uh, liberal democracies are being demonized. We have to take the fight back and explain to people, well, you're going to lose something and never get it back. And the, the global order, as it's been since the Second World War, is going to be swept away. And the world that replaces it is going to be a lot worse, unless you vote the correct way next time. Or do something to fight back. Do you come from a political family? Uh, not particularly. I come from a very working class background. My dad was a trade union guy in his youth and then later on he became an arch-conservative and, uh, supporter of Margaret Thatcher. Uh, by the time I was a teenager and that led to a lot of conflict between us, I can tell you. Where were you, where did you grow up? I grew up where I am now, really, in the north of England. So this is Wakefield, which in the old days was very much coal country when there was a coal industry here. In, in Yorkshire? In Yorkshire, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I, I live in London. They, they, they're, they're in Austin, Texas. Well, I do know Austin. I've been there a few times because my wife is, was originally from Dallas. So we have relatives in Austin. Oh, wow. So, yes, I've been there quite a few times. Well, it's a nice place. It is. It's kind of, it's not like the rest of Texas. It's like people describe there as an oasis surrounded by Texas. I do understand, yeah. I understand there is an oasis and, yeah, I liked it. I liked what I saw. Well, come back. I will probably. I wonder, you know, when you, whenever it was that you started, that you found that you liked to make cartoons, you could have made a choice to do a comic strip, you know, something like Nancy, something like you find in the Sunday papers now. But you've taken this different course. Can you say a little bit about how you, you know, how you moved in this direction? A lot of it is, is simply, what drives me is my interest in things, really. Because George Orwell said about writing a novel that it was like going through a long and difficult illness. And the thing is, if you want to do like a long novel, something like that, you have to be really passionate about it. So I pick on these subjects because I'm very passionate about them. And I really hate injustice. And I feel like I've got something to say. So that drives me through the process of doing these books, which can often be very difficult and stressful, but worthwhile in the end. So, yeah, that's, I mean, I do, I've done over the years, I've done fiction as well. I've done, on the back burner for a couple of years now, I've had working on a big sort of cosmic science fiction thing, which are probably self-published eventually. But that is something like a personal project, which I probably wouldn't sell a lot of copies. But it's something that I feel the trouble with doing nonfiction is that I don't get to express a lot of my imagination in the way that I would like, really. So I also have to do these other things to make use of that. Well, democracy is being added to the endangered species list, I feel. But one other thing that's endangered is science. And you've written about science denial. And it seems to have really gotten ahead of steam lately, thanks to the likes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his like-minded cronies. What do you think will be the end product of this science denial? I mean, it goes against any kind of logic, but logic seems to be in short supply in these days. It does. I mean, obviously, the fight is starting back. I mean, the Royal Society story that you, we discussed previously, is part of that. I mean, it's just, I guess, a sort of onslaught of disinformation on nearly every subject. We've just got to do our individual best to express what is true, really. What can be fact-checked. What can be proven. I don't know how to express it, really. I do the books, and I try and present science as like a base reality, really. Yeah, some people don't seem to care about truth. I mean, I've always been pretty literal and pretty much committed to, like, telling the truth, being honest, et cetera. And I always assumed that other people were quite a bit like that, and I'm not seeing it as much. And certainly, I think people are influenced by the Donald Trumps of this world that feel very comfortable lying. In fact, I think they're uncomfortable when they're telling the truth. Well, yes. Unfortunately, the problem is that there's no more, there aren't any penalties for lying anymore. There was a time when, if a politician was caught lying, it would be the end of their job. But there are no consequences in public life at all, it seems. You could literally just lie. And I don't know how we could turn that around, really. But perhaps we are reaching a point where there are going to be consequences, because, like Robert Kennedy's taking over and of health of the United States, I mean, that could lead to disastrous consequences. You can't hide the fact that, you know, measles epidemics are taking place, and potentially other epidemics in the future. What are they going to do? Like, pretend it's just not happening? I suppose that is the way of doing it. I know somebody who lives in central Pennsylvania, who seems like a sensible person, whose father is an epidemiologist. And he'll, you know, he says, oh, you know, he thinks COVID was exaggerated. The only people really at risk were old people. Well, that's manifestly not true, isn't it? It's manifestly not true. And I said, but, you know, right now, you know, the biggest number of people who, you know, with the age group that has the most deaths to COVID is now, it's babies. You know, and it didn't really make a dent. You know, it was just sort of, well, I don't know. Or you talk about long COVID, and people just don't really seem to realize how debilitating that is, and how many people have it. And I don't know how to get it across to them. I mean, you know, you can't, you can't sort of, you can't do the Woody Allen thing from the movie Annie Hall and produce, you know, a hundred long COVID victims from behind a, behind a sign. Yes. Yes. We just hope that there, there are people that you cannot reach. They drunk the Kool-Aid, as it were, and they're going to keep believing that. We can hope that a great mass of people can see reality for what it actually is. Or it's going to be a struggle to get our cross. Yeah, belief is tough. It really is. I mean, people will believe things that are, as we said, manifestly not true. And, you know, there's whole religions that are based on that. And it's very hard to me right now to, it, I mean, I get this really queasy feeling when I listen to somebody like Donald Trump. I mean, Donald Trump gave a talk last night where he spoke for, I think, an hour and a half, you know, very long, on and on and on conversation. I had to stop watching it. I mean, I thought I would watch it and that I might gain something from it. But it was basically one untrue thing after another. And I can't, I can't quite grasp how that sells so well in this country right now. It just seems strange. Yeah. Yeah. It is disappointing, I think, that the mainstream media in particular have fallen down on the job, really, and not presenting what is basically, you know, the truth. I mean, their job is to tell us what is happening. Isn't there also like a lot of people who don't really care if something is true because they're angry enough and frustrated enough. They just want things blown up. I mean, are there, is there a sentiment like that in Wakefield, for example, where, you know, the coal mines have shut and it's post-industrial? What do you mean in terms of how does that relate to here? Well, I was thinking of Fiona Hill, who testified in the first, Trump's first impeachment trial, not trial, but first impeachment hearing, wrote a book where she said she'd seen the same sort post-industrial pattern in rural Pennsylvania, northern England, where she was from Durham, and Russia. And, you know, so it seemed to me like maybe one of the factors here is that people are, people no longer believe that democracy serves their interests. And so they want to smash things up in hopes that- There is that. But I'm hoping that we'll get through that period, that period might be coming to an end. I'm hoping that is the case because what you just said there about there being a lot of anger in post-industrial communities, that led directly to Brexit, I think, and feed us into that. And that seriously damaged this country in a way that it's going to be very difficult for us to recover and be what we were. So, I mean, and that was pushed by a lot of people who were basically, didn't have the interest in the country, but had other agendas. Yeah, it's interesting because when, when the EU referendum vote happened, the comedian John Oliver on his show in the States said that, you know, somebody asked, I think he was doing a talk show and somebody asked him, you know, which is worse, Brexit or Donald Trump's first election. And he said, oh, you know, Brexit because it's generational. But actually the kinds of changes that Musk and Trump are trying to make now seem to me generational also. That's true. There's a little bit of hope there in terms of, so, because what happened in this country after Brexit, there were a lot of other far right pies across Europe who had been pushing, like say, Marine Le Pen in France for pushing France out of, the European Union as well. But having seen what happened to the UK's economy, they immediately stopped doing that. So there's a certain level of reason and reality even crept into the far right at that point. And I'm thinking if certain disasters happen, which I'm not saying that I want disasters to happen, but there may be sort of a realisation amongst people generally about what is really happening. There's some, what I want is a moment when people start coming to their senses. When is that going to happen? Can it happen? Well, I've read stories that since that child died, tragically, in the Texas measles outbreak, a lot of parents who didn't get their kids vaccinated are now getting their kids vaccinated. So there's... Well, there you are. I see that there might be like a certain tipping point, Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point, if you like, where things start going the other way. But it's been a long time coming. But I mean, I'm still sort of hopeful because... I mean, I'm old enough, as I guess we all are, talking right now to remember political situations in the past that had seemed intractable. Like, obviously, I'm a British person, so I grew up through my childhood and teenager with Northern Ireland, the troubles happening in the background. And literally, when I was a teenager, you couldn't imagine that coming to an end. You couldn't imagine how that could possibly come to an end. And yet it did. And then after it happened, you look back and you think, well, you can see clear evidence that forces to make it come to an end were always there. We just didn't see them at the time. And so... And again, with sort of apartheid South Africa, that was a regime that you couldn't imagine ever ending. And then one day, you know, it was all over. So I think history can suddenly reverse on itself from a point where you're inside it, you think this is forever. It's intractable. And it's crystallized and can never be changed. But what do we know about history? It's that things can change and very suddenly. So that's my hope, really, that the world can go the other way. Yeah, the economic impact of a lot of Trump's new policies, Musk's policies as well, is starting to come home to roost because suddenly the stock markets take a big nosedive. I mean, huge stock market depression. And that, I think, is just one of the things that's going to be coming back to haunt the far right. It sounds good in a political speech of doing all these radical moves. And, you know, all the tariff things have already kicked in. The price of a new car has gone up just almost overnight by $12,000. And they expect it to be an unattainable price within a matter of months because of all of the impacts that these radical tariffs are having on the economy. And that has already caused a lot of backpedaling by some of the far right, especially the ones in Congress. Who would have expected that the British prime minister that Trump wanted to emulate was Liz Truss? Yeah. Well, one of our worst prime ministers. And that's saying something, considering the long list of recent prime ministers that have been terrible. I mean, she was in office for 49 days and crashed the economy. Yeah. Yeah. The life of a cabbage. That's it. Yeah. Well, I have to ask you as Americans, do you think that American democracy is strong enough to survive Trump and the constant attacks? Do you think this all can be seen off eventually? I thought so. Do you know when Trump won and when it felt like he was in danger of winning and when he won, people around me were very concerned about it. And I kept thinking and saying that he's going to encounter sufficient friction, that it's going to be hard for him to do as much damage as they were fearing he would do. And I appear to be somewhat wrong about that. But I mean, he is encountering friction, but they just moved so fast. They were, you know, in the first Trump administration, they were not prepared when they came into office and they spent months and months just selecting a cabinet. But this time he came in with his cabinet selected with a whole big plan with an intention of putting Elon Musk into a particular position and just turning him loose to, from our perspective, do a lot of damage. And a lot of damage has already been done. I keep thinking, I hope that somebody's keeping track of all the things that are being dismantled and taken away from the supposed deep state bureaucracy. Things that really we kind of know are essential. I mean, these are people who have never really understood how government supports them and how crucial government is to their well-being. And, you know, the ordinary guy on the street now who may have voted for Trump, I don't think he realized that he was voting against himself or the extent to which he was voting against himself. So he's going to find that out. And, you know, Trump, he wasn't allowed in his first term to really unleash himself and have an effect that would show how damaging his approach could be. And now we're going to have that. But I don't know. We seem to be half a set of people who don't really care about the persistence of democracy and half a set of people who care very much about it. And I don't quite know what to expect from that. Yeah, I hate to make the Nazi reference, but they had the Blitzkrieg. And that was their method for taking over most of Europe. The really unexpected high-speed attack. And that's kind of what, you know, especially Musk has been doing. People are so confused by what's going on, it's hard for them to react in any, you know, useful way. Because it's just one nightmarish scenario playing out after another. And I'm certain that was the plan, was don't just take your time doing this stuff. Come in and just create a deluge of chaos. And that's hard to deal with. You know, I've been wondering if the first group of people that stops Musk will be Tesla shareholders. Yeah, well, it'll be interesting to see what happens there. I know that sales are like dropped like a bomb across a euro. Yeah. And the share price is plummeting. Yeah. And shareholders tend to be disliked that sort of thing. Yeah. But he may not care about Tesla anyway. His baby has always been SpaceX. That's the thing. But SpaceX is not the source of his wealth. That's true. It would lose quite a lot. But if he sold it, I mean, he's talked about selling it before. Tesla? Yeah. At one point, he was going to sell to Google. Well, you never know with him. I mean, he didn't really, you know, he wanted to buy Twitter one day. And then he spent a lot of time trying to get out of the Google. And he ended up buying it. He ended up having to buy it, basically. Yeah. Because he said so. Well, he actually wants to go to Mars. And I'd say he should hurry up and go. He wants other people to go to Mars and mine for minerals for him. I'm not sure he wants to actually live there himself. Yeah. Well, we're getting down to the... Hard to say what he's long-term planning. I haven't really tried to speculate on any of that. Because he doesn't... He's not kept... He's not been talking about that for a while. People who read cyberpunk fiction are not at all surprised. They knew this was coming. It was well predicted by, you know, the people who wrote cyberpunk. In the cyberpunk subgenre. One of the terrors of following Charlie Strauss on social media is when things happen, he has a tendency to take them and post little scenarios of how the future could go based on these new things. And they're always absolutely terrifying. It's like, you know, reading the Torment Nexus every day. Oh, right. Well, maybe I shouldn't follow him. He had something about... Just be glad that you're not in his head. He had something this morning about giant woolly... Someday giant woolly mice and some horrible thing that they were going to do. Well, they had some woolly mice that they created. The colossal people, I think, who were... Right. That's what it was based on. ...working toward recreating woolly mammoths. That's what it was based on. Except the idea was that the mice will continue to get bigger and bigger. And so there'll be sort of mammoth size, but there'll be mice. We'll have mice with Neuralink brain implants. Would you buy a brain implant from this man? Absolutely not. No. I mean, he's very good at self-publicity, obviously. That's one of his great superpowers. But a lot of the things don't come to pass, he promises. We're still waiting for the self-driving car. Exactly. He promised it would come within a year. That was eight years ago or something. Yeah, he promises it's going to be in a year or two, almost every year, doesn't he? Yeah, he does. Yeah, it's probably not feasible, actually. We have self-driving cars in Austin. I mean, they seem to be real. They're launching a fleet of Waymo self-driving taxis here in time for South by Southwest this year. What you can't tell from watching them on the street is how often a remote operator takes control of them. And, you know, there's a real question. I don't know if you saw that in San Francisco where you do see them on the streets quite a bit. There's been cases where, you know, some enterprising young guy stands in front of the Waymo and because there's an attractive woman in it, he won't move until she shows him a phone number. You know, that kind of thing. And among the stories has been the question of whether the remote operator can actually help them or not. But a lot of these supposedly self-driving cars have human intervention at fairly frequent intervals still, I believe. What else did he promise us that he hasn't delivered yet? What was that robot thing from last year? I don't know. Oh, there's that. Neuralink. Yeah, yeah. Neuralink is one thing I don't think has completely been fully realized. No, but there are other companies working on that as well, which doesn't involve actual brain surgery. There is another company working on Neuralink. Is that the guy? Is that the one? Is that the one? I think his name is Jeff Hawkins or something. He was one of the people behind the Palm Pilot. Is that his company? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I know he was working on something to do with brains at one point. One of the stories going out about Neuralink was that it was, Musk got involved with that because someone he disliked was involved with the other company that was doing quite good work on the brain implants. And that sounds like something that would motivate Musk. He hates having other people, especially people he knows, do well. Yeah. I think he first started to think about self-driving cars because he heard Google were working on a self-driving car, which they later abandoned. Actually, it was around the time he was thinking of selling Tesla to Google, but that didn't happen. Yeah, it's hard for me to see the point of the self-driving car, really. I have to admit, yeah. Don't people enjoy driving? Yeah. I sure do. And I'm not sure I would ever completely trust a self-driving car. No. I was more enthusiastic about them when I first encountered the idea, you know. And over time, actually, I've gone off driving entirely. I'd much rather sit on a train. Yeah. How about a self-flying airplane? We could have airplanes that fly themselves. Well, there's a lot of fly-by-wire, but I think there's a reason why we still have two pilots. Yeah. So, Darrell, what are you working on now, aside from getting the Musk book ready? I was commissioned. Well, Delco, my French publisher, sort of asked me to do a book on Trump. Over the years, a number of people asked me to do a book on Trump, and I never wanted to do it, really, because, frankly, I'm sick of the guy. But I thought it would be interesting to do a book that would look to a lot of the people around Trump, a lot of the people that are sort of at the top of the MAGA heap, if you like, people who have been associated with him in the past and surround him at the moment. So I'm doing a book that's basically made up of chapters, each looking at a different person. So I'm looking at a moment on a fiction that's basically a biography of Steve Bannon. And I'm going to go on and cover a lot of other people, including Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, people like that. What about Roger Stone? Roger Stone is on the list. Well, I think I would buy that. So good luck on that, because that's where the power is actually happening. Trump is like the puppet that says, you know, if you kiss up to him enough, he'll do what you ask him to do. That's what seems to be going on. So it'll be mostly individuals. But I think I want to do a chapter on an organization. I want to do a chapter on the Heritage Foundation for good reasons. Oh, yeah. There's also the Federalist Society. That's where the judges come from, I think. Yeah, that's correct, yeah. But I think the Heritage Foundation is especially interesting because of the Project 25 thing, which is basically the template for this big takeover Blitzkrieg that we were discussing earlier. Oh, you know, somebody did an illustrated version of Project 2025. Yeah, I heard about that. Certainly that will come up in my research when I get to that bit. Yeah, it's very interesting. I didn't read the whole thing, but it was quite well done. I think we have actually got to the end of our hour. And this has been a really great conversation, Daryl. Thanks so much for joining us. Oh, you're very welcome, Mark. Thanks for a very entertaining conversation. And thanks for inviting me. And let us know when you're coming to Austin. I will. I don't think we'll be coming to America this year. I'm not sure, but we can't keep us out forever. So we'll be coming to New York and then probably Texas at some point. Well, come back and we'll talk again. We enjoyed having you on. Right. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thanks so much. We'd like to talk to you when your Trump volume is coming out. Yeah, that's right. I'll be about a year, no doubt. We might not wait that long. Well, thanks so much. Okay. And have a great one. Bye-bye. Bye, everyone. Bye. You can stay in touch with Plutopia at plutopia.io. On Facebook, look for at Plutopia News. On Twitter, it's at Plutopia. This is the Plutopia News Network, 20 minutes into the future. Plutopia News Network.