Nick Srnicek

[mysterious music] Hello, and welcome to VarnVlog.

I am happy to welcome, kind of back, Dr. Nick Srnicek.

I say kind of back because you have been a guest on one of my shows.

In fact, you were one of my first five independent interviews.

And we risk, I think, in the book perhaps at times tipping from Muskism as a kind of social system in analog to Fordism to something like Musk himself as a figure.

And I think that that's why, you know, your question about how he channeled the kind of geoeconomic moment makes me think that what I'm kind of interested in now is like varieties of Muskism, right? Like, how are the components and modules of what we're describing taken up and transformed domestically with, with, let's say, the Chinese EV and lithium-ion battery industry? How are, you know, the competitors now to things like Starlink, whether that's like OneWeb or Eutelsat or whatever, are they going to be able to navigate the set of circumstances that produced a Musk without just producing a European Musk, a German version? So, you know, de-centering even more the figure of Musk and, and getting into the vaster kind of political economy in the way that Nick Srnicek does in his great book and the great interview you did with him does is, I think, where we're at.

But the question is how do you do that without the hook of the personality, right? So I think that the, the narrow path we tried to navigate in our book was to use the man as a guide without falling into excessive personalization.

And I think more than ever, like the diligence at not doing that is kind of necessary for people doing kind of critical work.