Social security and sex robots: Musk veers off script with podcaster Joe Rogan

NEW YORK - As US President Donald Trump sets about shrinking the government, he has repeatedly claimed that popular safety-net programmes, including Social Security and Medicaid, are off the table, and spoken about them delicately.

During a three-hour interview with podcast host Joe Rogan on Feb 28, it seemed as if Mr Elon Musk had not received that memo.

“Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” Mr Musk said.

The moment offered an immediate opening for Democrats, who accused Mr Musk of looking to cut benefits for older and disabled people.

And it created a fresh headache for Republicans, who have laboured to explain how they plan to cut the budget drastically without slashing popular programmes such as Medicaid.

These are the remarkable and at times surreal risks inherent in Mr Trump’s decision to turn his presidency into a kind of co-production with a world-famous, often undisciplined billionaire. And the interview laid them bare.

The appearance – Mr Musk’s most extensive solo interview since the beginning of Mr Trump’s second administration – offered a window into his worldview that was by turns crude and contradictory.

Mr Musk defended

his efforts with his Department of Government Efficiency,

alternatively casting it as existential and downplaying its scope, while expounding on not-safe-for-work matters such as artificial intelligence (AI) sex robots.

Here are some takeaways from the conversation.

Musk acknowledged he has far-reaching goals

Mr Musk repeatedly acknowledged just how radical his aims are, calling his project of slashing the government workforce, cutting contracts and eliminating regulations a “revolution” against the federal bureaucracy.

“Normally, the bureaucracy eats revolutions for breakfast,” he said. “This is the first time that they’re not, that the revolution might actually succeed.”

It is, he admitted, very different from the slower pace of change during Mr Trump’s first administration.

But at times he downplayed his role.

Several lawsuits against Mr Musk and his department involve the question of just what his role is, and whether he is legally obligated to be more transparent around his work.

In the interview, he appeared well aware of the need to downplay his role as a result.

Even as he portrayed his efforts as transformational, he cast his department as a non-binding adviser to government agencies.

Expounding on futurist beliefs.

Mr Musk described AI as “something we should be worried about”, but he suggested he had become involved in the technology in order to develop a system that “doesn’t tell you that misgendering is worse than nuclear war”.

He said he believed AI would be smarter than any individual human in the next year or two, and predicted that AI would be smarter than all humans combined by 2029 or 2030.

He said he thought there was an 80 per cent chance that AI would have a “good outcome”, and that there was a 20 per cent chance of “annihilation”.

He also talked about his long-held dream of populating Mars, which he described as “incredibly important in ensuring the long-term survival of civilisation”.

Musk invoked numerous conspiracy theories.

At one point, Mr Musk seemingly referred to a tenet of the so-called great replacement theory, which holds that Western elites want to “replace” white Americans with immigrants.

“The more illegals that the Democrats can bring in, the more likely they are to win, so that’s what they’re going to do,” he said.

He then described a conspiracy theory that liberals were planning to turn swing states blue by legalising immigrants who are living in the country illegally, calling it “an attempt to destroy democracy in America” and saying that preventing that outcome had been the “fork in the road” moment that led him to support Mr Trump.

“We will be a permanent one-party-state country – a permanent deep-blue, socialist state, that’s what America will become,” he said.

During the interview, Mr Musk also suggested that the government was keeping secret “a mountain of evidence”, including videos and recordings, made by sex offender Jeffrey Epstein; speculated that federal government programmes to prevent the spread of Ebola were actually involved in creating new strains of the virus; and claimed – without evidence – that “a bunch of really good, talented old white guys” had been pushed out of the Federal Aviation Administration as air traffic controllers to make room for less qualified women and people of colour.

“We should not put the public safety at risk because of some demented philosophy,” he said.

Musk said he’s not a Nazi

At one point, Mr Rogan asked Mr Musk what it was like to have purchased social media platform Twitter, “and then people call you a Nazi on that same thing you bought”.

Mr Musk seemed to respond with puns. “I did not see it coming,” he said, seemingly pronouncing the word “Nazi” in the middle of the sentence, a joke he has also made in writing. “It’s classic,” he said.

“People will Goebbels anything down,” he said, seeming to pronounce the last name of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi politician, instead of the word “gobble”.

Mr Rogan said it was “strange” that Mr Musk had been accused of

doing a Nazi salute

after he made a hand gesture that looked like one after Mr Trump’s inauguration. “Now, I can never point at things diagonally,” Mr Musk said.

“Hopefully, people realise I am not a Nazi,” Mr Musk said, adding that one would have to be invading Poland, committing genocide and starting wars to be considered a Nazi.

“The war and genocide is the bad part,” he said, “not their mannerisms and their dress code.”

AI-powered sex robots

Improbably, the opening minutes of the interview featured Mr Rogan and Mr Musk, who is a special adviser to the President and who has an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, discussing how quickly sex robots powered by AI technology could be brought to market.

“Probably not long,” said Mr Musk, who recently unveiled his own AI software. “Less than five years probably.”

“Really?” Mr Rogan asked. “Will it be warm?”

“You can probably have whatever you want,” Mr Musk replied, before the two men discussed the possibility of having sex with a “furry lady” or an alien from the movie Avatar. NYTIMES