It's time-- It's time to shake things up a little. Computer! Upgrade sewer background to version 4.0.
COMPUTER: Upgrading.
THOUGHT SLIME: Computer? Credit artist.
COMPUTER: @hideous_ can be found on twitter. Link in the description.
THOUGHT SLIME: Computer, do you think I'm good-looking?
COMPUTER: You're not my type.
THOUGHT SLIME: Dammit! Okay, that's fine. Computer, thank you. Begin "Thought Slime" protocol.
Hello, it's me, Gimlet Media.
Elon Reeve Musk, the billionaire CEO or Chief Entergage Officer of SpaceX, Tesla,
The Boring Company, and probably a bunch of other ones, is not a real person.
He is an empty vessel. A soulless homunculus trying desperately to convince the world
it is a man.
Elon Musk has convinced the most gullible people on the planet that he is a real life super-genius.
(jokingly) A thing which exists.
That he is like Iron Man.
The technological marvels his company creates were all birthed from his singularly brilliant mind!
He would have you believe that he's a modern-day Nikola Tesla.
A kooky inventor who obsessively makes wonders all alone in his little laboratory.
In reality, he's more like Tesla's rival, Thomas Edison. A guy *known* as a great inventor,
but mostly, just knew how to market himself as the creator of things other people built for him
and was probably horny for murdering elephants.
And if none of that is accurate to the real life history of Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison - I don't care!
It's an analogy. Get over it!
To call Elon Musk a grifter, I think, gives him too much credit.
He has wholeheartedly bought into his own hype.
He is perpetually back on his bullshit.
Elon Musk is himself a grift. He doesn't know he's doing it.
He wouldn't be able to do it as well if he tried.
He's just fallen ass backwards into a culture that assumes he is a super-genius, because he owns the work of other
*actual* geniuses.
How did we get here?
Iron Man is a fictional character created by JACK KIRBY, LARRY LIEBER, DON HECK...
and also Stan Lee.
He's an arms dealer who made a robot suit because of how smart he is.
You might vaguely remember a 2008 movie based on this property that came and went starring Robert Downey, Jr.
In the movie, Iron Man makes all of the weapons with his good, good brain.
When he sits down to do science, he invents a bunch of cool stuff just by trying really hard.
Presumably, Stark Industries employs a bunch of other scientists
but it's not really clear what they do, because none of them
can make robot suits as good as Tony can, all by himself, with nobody's help.
SCIENTIST (desperately): Honestly, it's impossible.
OBADIAH STANE (yelling): Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave!
With a box of scraps!!!
THOUGHT SLIME: Now robot suits aren't real, so there's a certain suspension of disbelief that comes along with the premise.
That's fine.
It's all a fun fantasy about a guy who can build cool stuff, and use it to fly around and murder problematic stereotypes.
That's an exciting way for genius to manifest in a movie.
A genius is just somebody who's smarter than everybody else.
So they're good at anything that requires brain muscles.
Give them a couple of days and they can invent a new element, or
figure out time travel, or invent nanobots and use them to make... a robot suit, of course!
We see shit like this all the time in the media.
You got your Rick Sanchezs, who's just so super smart, he basically becomes a god.
You got your Dexters in all of his laboratories.
You got your Walter Whites, who's so good at chemistry, that he's able to take over the entire New Mexico drug trade.
Because being good at chemistry means you can also build cool machine gun contraptions,
or my personal favorite, The Batman.
The guy who's so smart, that he can dress like a bat, and make his car look like a bat
in a way that makes people afraid of him for some reason.
In fiction, a genius is just something you either have or you do not have.
And if you have it, you can basically do any brain work faster and better than a normal.
But that's not how genius actually functions in the real world.
In the real world, genius is usually the product of obsession rather than some innate superiority.
The best people in their fields aren't just superhumans with superior minds,
they just care about one specific thing in such a way, that they're able to develop a level of
mastery over it that few could hope to achieve.
People might be born with aptitudes. Nobody is born a genius.
And being a genius doesn't mean that you're just smarter than everybody else on every subject.
Just means that you have one *specific field*
where you're King Shit of Fuck Mountain.
That field isn't likely to even be something as broad as mechanical engineering or music.
It's more likely to be something like drainage systems,
or Neoclassical piano, or something far more granular that I wouldn't be able to even think of
because I'm not familiar enough with either field.
The more broad your subject of expertise,
the more likely that someone can focus in on a real small part of that subject
and become specifically better at that part than *you* are.
Now there are exceptions, of course.
A handful of people throughout history have been all around super smarties, like Leonardo da Vinci, for example.
And probably a bunch of other people in non-majority white countries who are probably even smarter, but I never get to hear about them.
Sorry, *Ibn Sina.* I didn't know about you. I had to look you up,
but it sounds like...
...you were pretty cool.
Such people do exist, but they are vanishingly rare
and usually, when we separate them from the historical myth that they've developed,
they're just extremely good at a bunch of things, and once-in-a-few-generations good at one thing in particular.
None of them, as of yet, have been able to build Iron Man suits.
And to think any of them could be auto-didacts in multiple fields and develop such a high level of mastery
that they could contribute important, new ideas to all of them
is kind of a pipe dream. It just doesn't work like that.
Much like people can't fly,
that's just something that's popular in comic books, because it makes for an exciting story.
And it's a very convenient idea for the rich and powerful.
They have super brains and any choice they make that seems dangerous, or
ill-informed, or corrupt
is just them using their superior intellect to assess factors
that you could not possibly understand.
The cosmic mysteries they are grappling with would take too long to explain to you!
You just have to trust that these intellectual übermensch are acting in your best interest.
Playing five-dimensional chess, guiding humanity
to a brighter future.
They possess a greatness that you cannot conceive of.
And therefore, they need not explain that greatness to you.
They deserve their power and influence because they're smarter than you are,
and the proof that they're smarter than you are
is that they have all this power and influence!
Which they deserve because they're smarter than you and I know that they're smarter than you,
because they have all this power and influence which they deserve,
may I remind you, because they're smarter than you!
And the reason that I know that they're smarter than you is they have all this power and influence.
Imagine a snake...
... putting its head up its own ass.
Most rich and/or powerful people are media savvy enough to let other people say this for them.
Not Elon Musk, though!
He leans hard into pretending to be the pop culture definition of what a super-genius looks like.
He wants you to think of him as Iron Man. He very transparently
wants you to think of him as Iron Man.
Up to and including making a cameo in the film Iron Man 2,
where Iron Man, who invented a flying robot suit, is like: "Yo, Elon! I love your cool engine, dude!"
And he tells the superhero, Iron Man, how he personally had a great idea for an electric jet
and Iron Man is like: "Hmm..."
"Yes. Good idea, Elon Musk. My peer and equal, Elon Musk. I'm Iron Man!"
Look me in the eye and tell me that you don't think him launching a convertible into space wasn't him trying to do
Iron Man shit. Just a gaudy display of his awesomesauce, "I fucking love science" sensibilities.
That's why he's always caught with his dick hanging out,
saying just the wildest shit, trying to look profound.
That quote about him saying, "human language will be obsolete within 10 years"...
Wha- What does that even mean, dude?
(dubbed in) Hey, um, this is Thought Slime editing this video.
And I just wanted to let you know that I looked into it a little bit more, and it turns out what he means
(confused) is that he's going to invent a device that lets you...
...telepathically communicate with people.
Which I only discovered after...
I sat down to edit this.
So that's what he meant by it. Okay, back to the video.
Or how about when he hit me where I live,
and claimed he was a socialist, and that to be a socialist just means
to want the maximum good for the most people. Which it doesn't, that's just...
Everyone.
Or how about when he said that Karl Marx was a capitalist?
And, like-- Elon, my dude.
Karl Marx is the main guy of communism.
Or how about when he said, "Later in life Bakunin is so
underappreciated", like he had even the *faintest* of a shit what he was talking about.
I would give everything I own just to sit him in a room and make him explain to me what he meant by that
and ask him to name three things Bakunin wrote without Googling it.
He has to be the "big idea" guy.
The guy whose thoughts on everything from philosophy to
anthropology to linguistics to economics to anime has to not just be profound, but also
surprising. Something that shocks your feeble mind,
because you can't think about it in all the high level ways that he can,
with his super brain, and that's not just irritating. It's also *quite* dangerous.
We all remember the time he made a little underwater coffin
that he pretended was a submarine, in an attempt to get some PR buzz
from a bunch of kids trapped in a cave in Thailand.
And how after the people involved in that rescue effort were like: "Hey!"
"This-- this isn't helping! You're making the situation *worse* and and wasting all of our time!"
He called one of the guys a pedophile, and then that guy had to deal with that, for the crime
of trying to rescue a bunch of kids trapped in a cave. Remember that?
Or how about when he said he could manufacture ventilators to help with the COVID 19 crisis?
And then said he'd only do that if there was a shortage. You know...
After it was too late.
And then there was a shortage, so he sent a bunch of BiPAP machines to hospitals and claimed they were ventilators,
but they weren't ventilators,
they were BiPAP machines?
And then, when he got called out for that, he said that they were better than
ventilators because they're not invasive, and a bunch of medical professionals had to be like:
"That's not how that works!"
and they had to waste their time dealing with his bullshit, while real,
actual human beings were suffering and dying in the greatest medical crisis in a generation.
Remember that one?
Wasn't that long ago. And that also tracks with the time he said that the panic over COVID 19 was, quote: "dumb."
And then 297,000 people and counting died horribly shortly thereafter.
(sarcastically) Cool, man. Thanks for weighing in! You de-- you definitely knew what you were talking about!
And that's just his ego getting in the way of a life or death situation.
That's just his sick need to think of himself as the maverick inventor, who can swoop in and fix everything
and has all of the answers.
And actually knows better than all of the experts involved
because of his super-genius brain, and he's friends with Thor and the Hulk!
It gets worse when there's a profit motive to making a bad choice for everyone else that benefits him personally.
As of this recording, he's engaged in a standoff with Fremont County public health officials
because he disobeyed a court order so that he could reopen his Tesla plant to make his cars. For mooooney.
Employees were told they either go back to work in what are very unsafe conditions,
given that it's impossible to socially distance in Tesla factories,
and on the shuttle bus between the parking lot and the factory itself, and the safety measures put in place don't screen for
pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers, and if any worker refused,
they'd be at risk of losing their unemployment benefits. Essentially, holding them hostage
so that Elon Musk can make the mooooney.
If I were caught in a car with someone I didn't live with right now,
I'd have to pay a five thousand dollar fine.
Elon musk is putting thousands of people's lives in danger, not to mention their immediate families and loved ones, and he's probably gonna skate
because the law doesn't apply to billionaires at the best of times.
But even if it did, there will always be a contingent of the most gullible fucks on the planet that are convinced
he's a super genius who knows what he's doing, and he knows more about public safety than the *literal* public safety commission
because that's how it would work in an Avengers movie!
The truth is: Elon Musk is not a super genius.
There are no super geniuses!
He's a "bacon your narwhal" Reddit bro who owns the work of hundreds of real geniuses
and uses it to play pretend that he's Iron Man.
If you think that the guy who thought it would be a good idea to play Mario Kart on the dashboard of your car
has a higher class of mind than you do?
Well, maybe in your specific case, you're right.
Hello and welcome to the Eyeball Zone. Here in the Eyeball Zone,
under the supervision of the Rod and Cone legions of the Great Lord Oculon,
we pay tribute to the eyeballs, by feeding them the life force of small leftist projects.
Have you ever noticed that capitalism makes life real difficult for disabled people?
If you're disabled, you're probably like:
"Yeah...?"
"Fucking obviously."
If you're abled, though, there's a chance you're going:
"WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA?"
Either way, I recommend you check out this video by Leslie Exploitable that goes over a lot of the ways that the categorization of people
into disabled and non-disabled and the very nature of their disability being viewed as something negative,
result from capital finding it more difficult to get mooooney from them.
A disability isn't merely a medical or social category:
it's in many cases also a relationship to labor. By virtue of being disabled,
it is more difficult to produce online content,
and that's why when we find good content creators that are disabled like this
it's important to pay attention and, of course, to "smash that like button, fam."
Instructions for how you can throw your life away in pursuit of a boon from the eyeballs, the price of which
is not measured in money, but nonetheless, you cannot possibly understand the price...
can be found in the description to this video! Good night and God bless.
[singing Iron Man theme song]
[laughs] Hi. It's me, Thought Slime. Hey, I hope you liked the video.
If you did, you know what? Why don't you go ahead and hit that like button. Also hit the subscribe button!
I have a Patreon at patreon.com/thoughtslime—
Listen! Times are tough right now.
If you-- Don't even worry about it if you-- if you have to worry at all,
so. It's not mandatory. I do bring it up because it's my job and and I am increasingly...
More nervous about that. Hey!
Not-- and I don't mean nervous because I'm making less money. I just mean, I don't want people to spend money
they don't have on me, the guy they know from YouTube!
If you liked this video, why don't you check out
youtube.com/scaredycatstv, where I make videos about, you guessed it - it's horror movies over there! That's what I talk about over there;
it's what I like to do.
Also!
You can find me on twitch.tv/thoughtslime, where I livestream every 8pm Eastern Standard Time, right now—
Oh, and it's on Thursdays. I should mention the day of the week that it's on, which is Thursdays. I was about to move...
past that and and talk about something else, but it is Thursdays when that happens at 8pm, Eastern Standard Time.
Right now I'm playing Animal Crossing. Everybody loves Animal Crossing. It's a good time.
I made a video about it last week!
Iron Man is not real, but the Hulk is. The Hulk is real. I know him. I can't tell you any more.
