A point about the Cybertruck (seriously)

0:00 This video is sponsored by Squarespace.

0:02 Yeah, I realize it's random,

0:04 but I wrote you a little something here about the Tesla Cybertruck.

0:08 There's a whole bunch of unsold ones at the dealership there behind me.

0:11 Anyway, just bear with me for a sec.

0:12 There is a story told in Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon

0:17 Musk from a couple of years ago that goes like this.

0:20 Elon says that he was hanging out with his son Saxon,

0:26 he was hanging out with his son Saxon, and the spoke Saxon,

0:32 "Why doesn't the future look like the future?" No idea if that story is true,

0:40 by the way, but "Why doesn't the future look like the future?"

0:44 is a thing that a lot of people do ask in different ways,

0:47 and it's easy to understand why.

0:49 Broadly speaking, the science fiction of the 20th century predicted

0:55 that our time would look very different than it actually does now.

1:01 By our time, they predicted that we would have houses

1:05 that look like flying saucers or hovering cars or post-apocalyptic wastelands.

1:14 Not yet.

1:16 I don't think.

1:18 I am in a parking lot.

1:21 So, the question is, why doesn't their future, our present,

1:26 why doesn't it look more like what they predicted?

1:30 Why does the early mid-21st century look

1:34 the way that it actually turned out to look?

1:38 Elon says that this question, as asked by his son,

1:43 inspired the design of the Cybertruck.

1:47 Something that looks like what someone in the 1980s would have predicted.

1:52 Something that beloved dystopian sci-fi hero

1:56 John Blade Runner, would have driven.

2:02 The idea behind this design has always made me laugh because

2:04 I think that Elon Musk means for this truck to look futuristic.

2:10 But to me, and perhaps to you, it actually looks kind of old-fashioned.

2:17 It looks like something from the '80s because it kind of is.

2:24 It's an imitation of designs from 40 years ago.

2:29 It looks like the armored vehicle from Aliens, 1986.

2:34 The fact that that design was intended

2:36 by James Cameron to look futuristic is irrelevant.

2:39 It's still a design from the '80s.

2:42 So, it naturally looks old-fashioned to people like you and me.

2:47 And so does its present-day imitator, the Cybertruck.

2:53 The reason that I'm talking about this now, by the way, is just that my son,

2:57 who does not have an implicitly racist name,

3:00 my son and I were talking through our feelings on the Cybertruck the other day.

3:03 He thinks that they look kind of cool.

3:06 But he's troubled by Elon's whole,

3:08 "If you crash into another car, you're going to win" stick.

3:12 My son sincerely does not wish to hurt other people.

3:16 Imagine that.

3:18 Anyway, Elon Musk, due to his Peter Pan syndrome,

3:22 or perhaps just due to his relatively advanced age at this point,

3:29 Musk doesn't seem to realize that an '80s design in our time looks

3:35 the way a '50s design would have looked to someone in the '80s.

3:41 Something like Tom Corbett, Space Cadet.

3:44 That looks like something from the 1950s because it is.

3:49 Even though it believes itself to be futuristic.

3:53 Believing it does not make it so.

3:57 It's still clearly from the 50s,

3:59 just as the Cybertruck is clearly a 21st century

4:03 retro throwback to a product of 20th century imagination.

4:10 Or at least that's what the Cybertruck obviously looks like to me.

4:15 Let me know if you agree.

4:17 I suspect at least some of you do.

4:20 But I don't think that Elon Musk sees the Cybertruck as a retro throwback.

4:25 I think this 80s inspired design actually does look futuristic to him.

4:31 And here is a darker potential explanation for that.

4:36 I suspect that Elon and people like him, they see the 20th century sci-fi vision

4:45 for our time to be a kind of unfulfilled potential.

4:52 They see it as where we rightly should be by now,

4:57 if not for all of the ways we failed,

5:00 or if not for those people holding us back.

5:06 When Elon Musk hears his son ask, "Why doesn't the future look like the future?"

5:11 his answer is predicated on the assumption that the present,

5:16 our time, would not look futuristic to someone from the 80s or the 50s.

5:24 And I think that it actually would.

5:29 Yeah, a a lot of our world would still look

5:31 pretty familiar to a person time traveling from the 80s.

5:34 Our cars don't hover yet, but they do look pretty different from the 80s cars.

5:42 80s cars were mostly still all straight lines and steel.

5:46 Now, even a basic ass car is plastic composite and aerodynamically curvy.

5:54 I think a 2026 Toyota Corolla really would

5:58 look futuristic to a frozen and unthawed 80s man, or certainly a 50s man.

6:06 And holy crap, tricorders from Star Trek are real now.

6:12 A smartphone can literally do almost everything that Star Trek

6:16 envisioned for the personal communication devices of the 23rd century.

6:21 We're actually 200 years ahead of schedule on this one.

6:26 You ever been to Tokyo at night?

6:29 Tokyo at night straight up looks like the vision

6:33 of future Los Angeles that we see in Blade Runner.

6:38 I think a person who walked out of that movie in 1982 and stepped

6:42 into today's Tokyo at night would probably still

6:45 think that they were still in the movie.

6:48 I think a person from the 80s would be pretty amazed

6:51 to hear that almost nobody has to die of HIV anymore.

6:57 HIV is virtually curable in some people.

7:01 It can be managed as a chronic condition in most others.

7:04 There are prophylactics now that you can take

7:07 to keep you from getting infected in the first place.

7:10 In the 80s and 90s, HIV was a death sentence.

7:14 They drilled that into our heads when we

7:17 were young and sexually active in that era.

7:20 HIV was the scariest thing in the world.

7:24 My best friend at the time, who was more into sports than I was,

7:28 he cried the night that Magic Johnson announced that he was positive

7:33 in a speech that everyone took to be his Lou Gehrig moment, his goodbye.

7:40 Magic Johnson is of course still quite alive and kicking today

7:45 and a billionaire because now scientifically speaking

7:52 almost nobody has to die of HIV,

7:55 which makes it all the more ironic that literally millions of people

8:00 who could have been saved by these medicines are now dying because Elon

8:04 Musk bought his way into the US government and chose to use

8:09 his awesome power there to of all things eliminate funding for US foreign aid.

8:17 The world's richest man decided that the world's poorest people are

8:23 not worth the equivalent of spare change to keep them alive.

8:28 Probably because he views them as genetic trash to be discarded.

8:33 Which is something he says out loud all the time

8:36 now and we let him get away with it.

8:42 Even if you believe that some people really are genetically inferior and if you

8:49 further believe that you somehow possess

8:51 the divining rod to reliably tell them apart,

8:55 I dare you to say into the eyes of a child

9:00 "You must die scared alone and in pain so

9:09 that I might realize the future that I was promised

9:13 in a movie." But hey at least the deficit's under control.

9:26 What I'm arguing is that the future does look like the future.

9:30 It just doesn't look quite like the future

9:32 we expected because how could we know?

9:36 Nobody can predict the future.

9:39 Turns out this is it.

9:43 And maybe we didn't notice because it kind of crept up on us,

9:47 the way the future usually does.

9:50 I'm a couple of months away from walking my older

9:53 boy home from his elementary school for the last time.

9:57 I could swear I just dropped him off for the first grade.

10:02 The more adult answer to little Saxon's ostensible

10:06 question is that real grown-up progress is hard.

10:13 It requires lots of people working together for a long time toward common goals.

10:19 It requires not only great ideas,

10:22 but great labor to turn those ideas into reality.

10:26 And this kind of real tangible,

10:29 durable progress usually unfolds incrementally enough that you

10:36 might not even notice that it's happening.

10:40 Unless you make an effort to.

10:47 Clinging to futuristic visions from the past,

10:51 it's like a kind of revanchism, a lost cause mythology.

10:58 I think that some people feel deprived of yesterday's future,

11:03 even though they never actually had it in the first place.

11:07 All they ever really had was the fantasy of it.

11:12 Some people feel deprived of a US economy where the uneducated,

11:18 unprivileged workingman could own a beautiful three-bedroom

11:22 home or maybe some farmland and support

11:25 his homemaker wife and 2.5 kids on a single salary for low-skilled labor.

11:30 That was always mostly a fantasy.

11:36 You never lost it cuz you never really had it.

11:43 I grew up in the '80s and '90s and I

11:46 also thought that Blade Runner and Star Trek looked really cool.

11:49 Part of me is a little disappointed that the future

11:52 doesn't look like that, at least not yet.

11:58 But rather than spending my time chasing a fantasy,

12:03 I choose instead to put that effort toward noticing

12:06 and appreciating the progress that we actually ended up making.

12:12 Which is different than what I expected,

12:16 but it's still really good in a lot of ways and it

12:20 could be even better if we just keep looking forward, not back.

12:30 Just because something lacks the comfort of nostalgia

12:34 does not mean that it is bad.

12:38 Just because something or someone turns out different than

12:43 what you expected does not mean they are bad.

12:50 The future will still look like the future no matter what

12:55 because we could not go back even if we wanted to.

12:59 The only way available is forward.

13:05 So, get in, loser.

13:08 We're going that away.

13:12 You know something else from our present that really is quite futuristic?

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