Is Elon Human? Charles Steel on the Curious Mind of Elon Musk

0:00 - 0:34
Andrew Keen: Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen on America, the daily interview show about the United States.

0:34 - 1:19
Andrew Keen: Hello everybody. Longtime viewers and listeners to the show know that I'm not a great fan of Elon Musk. In fact, a couple of years ago, I even did a show about whether he should be arrested for all the lies and hate that he seems to encourage on X, let alone all his other scandals and outrages. I was intrigued that there's a new book out on Musk. We've done books on Musk in the past, including with Ashley Vance, who's perhaps his official or unofficial biographer. This book, though, is self-published by a London investor, Charles Steele, and I was intrigued with it because of its title: The Curious Mind of Elon Musk. Charles Steele is joining us from Gloucester Road in West London. Charles, make the case for Musk. As I said, and I'm not alone, I find him a rather repulsive character—lizard-like in many ways. What's the attraction of this guy to you, at least? Why did you write the book on him?

1:19 - 2:05
Charles Steele: Well, I think the way you framed the question is important. I find him fascinating, and my gut feeling when I set out was that he was misunderstood. But I have never set out to write a book saying what a great person he is. Every publicist, agent, and publisher I've spoken to has encouraged me to write a book saying what a wonderful guy he is and help your audience understand how they can be more like him. And I've always pushed back and I said, what I will try and do is explain to people that I think he's misunderstood because actually, he's much more different than people think. And that's why the book is subtitled Nine Ways He Thinks Different. So I'm happy to talk about him, but just to frame it from the outset, Andrew, this is not going to be a defense for him. I'm happy to talk about the pros and cons. I guess my main message is that most people who love him, I think, don't fully understand him, and most people who really can't stand him, I also think—not to say that they wouldn't dislike him anyway—but they would probably dislike him for different reasons. So that was the objective for the book.

2:05 - 2:40
Andrew Keen: Well, that's an honest, fair way of putting it, Charles. You know, my dislike of him is political. I'm not really particularly interested in his mind one way or the other; maybe we'll come to that later. You mentioned that he's different, "nine ways he thinks differently." It's often occurred to me that Musk is on the spectrum, perhaps metaphorically or otherwise. Did you investigate that in this book? Is he autistic in some way or other? And is he perhaps like other very successful technologists? Zuckerberg also comes to mind. These people are in an odd way on the spectrum in terms of their understanding and attitude to the world, which explains both their remarkable success but also why they're so disliked and dislikable.

2:40 - 3:56
Charles Steele: Yeah, I mean, you can't avoid that subject and, as you know very well, Musk has come out and said that himself on the famous Saturday Night Live show that he was. So that's out there. I didn't want to write a book that hangs everything on that peg; I think it's one of the critical things. But of the nine ways that I say that he thinks differently, significantly, the first is the meaning of life—and by that, I mean the proverbial meaning of life. It's something that adult businessmen don't generally talk about, but Musk, of course, talks about it all the time. He refers to this existential crisis that he had when he was young. And I think most people when they hear that sort of roll their eyes and think, "this sounds very odd," and they frankly don't take it seriously. So when I approached the subject, I did so first of all from the point of view of business. I'm an investor, that's what I did. I first got interested in Musk when trying to understand why his companies performed so well; I wanted to see what I could learn from that. And interestingly, one of the books that I read, you know, ten years ago, was Zero to One by Peter Thiel. And in that book, he actually talks about Musk and he also says there are people with Asperger-like symptoms in Silicon Valley and they seem to do very well because they don't care what other people think, they're determined, they get obsessed about things, they work away on them for decades, they don't give up, and those that persist do very well. They're not trying to copy other people, they do their own thing.

3:56 - 4:42
Charles Steele: So I do think that that aspect of his identity is very important. And in a second-order way as well, because when he was young, he was bullied—often sadly happens to kids who are on the spectrum because they don't fit in, they get picked upon. And this happened to him, and I think Musk did go through a very formative adolescent period where he forged what he later would call a "philosophy of curiosity." And I have come to the conclusion that this philosophy of curiosity actually is extremely important and rather—I hate the word unique—but let's say unique to Musk in that I've never...

4:42 - 5:58
Andrew Keen: Why do you hate the word unique? Charles, what's wrong with the word unique?

Charles Steele: Well, because it's so overused, but there are probably a lot of other people out there who would mean that it wasn't unique. But the argument that Musk is this peculiar mixture of three traits: he has a sort of hyper-rationality, which we associate with a lot of high-performing autistic people. They have a way of seeing the world where they think about it in a very literal way, they're very analytical, they look under the surface of things. Whereas most of us spend most of our time thinking about what other people are thinking, they're trying to work out how things work—things around the house when they're kids. So Musk has this hyper-rationality, but lots of Silicon Valley founders do as well. So what is it that's different about Musk? And I think it's this existential angst. And, you know, we see him all the time talking about AI, demographic collapse, civilizational threat. We do see this refrain in what he talks about, that there's something else going on. Call it angst, call it anxiety, but it brings a high emotion and I would even say belligerence. And this is something, frankly, you do see less often in Silicon Valley founders. Take someone like Demis Hassabis—he's a very curious, very bright person, he's the founder of Google DeepMind. He's fascinated in the nature of reality, but you would not say that he has this kind of belligerence.

5:58 - 6:53
Andrew Keen: Well, maybe if you want to compare Demis Hassabis with Musk—coming back to your point about being bullied—Demis Hassabis's background is the child, I mean, he certainly didn't fit in either, and he was from parents who didn't fit in. He was very much from a countercultural family. Coming back to what you say about Musk, about how his childhood and his experience of being bullied shaped him, or shaped his mind perhaps—it wasn't only bullied by the other kids and growing up in South Africa, but of course by his father. There are all these accusations now of his father being some sort of molester of some sort. So he was doubly bullied. And in a way, the way you're presenting him is as a kind of casualty. So his literal-minded thinking, his curiosity, is a kind of disability, although obviously financially it's benefited him. But in every other way, it's created a life it would seem to me of misery. It's not a lot of being fun—it doesn't strike me that it's a lot of fun being Elon Musk. Is that fair, Charles? Do you think he enjoys being Elon Musk? Is he happy? I mean, the "H" word, of course, is one that may not always come—he may not always be willing to confront.

6:53 - 7:51
Charles Steele: He's the first person to look at me and they might think they want to be Elon Musk and they would want to be me, and he said, "You would not want to be me." He even tweeted a few weeks ago, "I am not happy very often." To his credit, he doesn't ask for self-pity. He says he's processed what happened in his childhood and he's moved on—that's for other people to debate. I think the way I look at it, and I've looked at a lot of other similar people, there is something that can happen to adolescents who are very gifted, you know, the sort of high-performing autism spectrum disorder sort of profile—difficult circumstances. They think deeply about problems that they can't solve, they try and rationalize suffering that happens in their own life, and it can be extremely difficult for them. And they deal with it in different ways, and some of the more unfortunate ways to deal with that would be very destructive, or perhaps, you know, alcohol or drugs. There are bad roads that you can go down.

7:51 - 8:38
Charles Steele: To his credit, Musk read everything that he could lay his hands on—all the different scriptures: Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, all of that. And in his own words, it made things worse. And he came across something which people consider a lighthearted series of books, originally a radio show, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And Musk says that this helped him reframe things in a "glass-half-full" kind of way. And frankly, this is one of the things that really attracted me to him, in that he does talk about the absurdity of life. He does talk about...

8:38 - 9:36
Andrew Keen: I mean, Charles, the more you talk about him, the more Thomas Hobbes, the great English philosopher, imagined a "state of nature" before the emergence of society. And of course, his Leviathan was based on that. It strikes me about Musk is he is in this pre-social state of nature. He is somehow frozen before society. As you know, most of us don't think like Musk because we think socially, because that's how we live in society. But the consequence maybe of Musk's weird childhood, of all the bullying, of his dysfunctional family, is he's grown up in a kind of state of nature and he's brought that into the world. He lives outside society, which enables him to be a genius in tech terms and make all this money. But it also, of course, means that firstly, he's intensely dislikable to most people because he's such an odd character and so uncomfortable obviously within himself. He fails to make relationships, which explains his bizarre relations or lack of relations with women and with everyone else. I mean, the odd thing about him—you mentioned Peter Thiel earlier—he's probably the only person in the world that makes Peter Thiel appear normal.

9:36 - 10:29
Charles Steele: Well, look, he's not normal, and that's a given. And we'll talk about this later, I hope. I conclude the book by actually encouraging people to try and be less normal. It's okay to be weird, try and embrace your...

Andrew Keen: You don't strike me, Charles, as being very weird. You work for Tony Blair, you're a financial guy, you're an investor, you've obviously made some money, you can afford to self-publish your own book, you work for Save the Children. So what's the benefit? What's the upside of being weird? Are you weird, Charles?

Charles Steele: I have a friend who likes to say we're all snowflakes, we're all unique and different. And I think...

Andrew Keen: You're avoiding my question. I asked you if you're weird.

Charles Steele: Am I weird? Yeah, I'll happily admit to being weird. Yeah, I've done things, I've followed my curiosity. I have written a book on Musk, which I think is a rather unusual thing to do. I have a slightly different take on him. I also in a book on Musk, I talk about people like Albert Camus, Karl Popper—it's a very personal assessment that I have of him. And so I would admit to being weird.

10:29 - 11:24
Charles Steele: But to go back to your earlier point, Andrew, I think there's an easy succession of jumps that one can make, that one should not make. When you have someone who has difficulty in social interaction, which people with autism spectrum disorder have, to saying that they are kind of asocial and end up being sociopathic. I think they have genuine difficulties in life. It's not for me, as someone who's written about him, to really get into his relationships with his family, with his children, and so on. For what it's worth, I think they're a lot more normal than most people from the outside conjecture. His first marriage was a good ten years or so, he had a sort of four-year second marriage with someone he remains on very good terms with. Since then, yes, it's true he's had children out of marriage; at the moment he seems to be in somewhat of a stable relationship. But anyway, I don't want to go down that road.

11:24 - 12:15
Charles Steele: I think your central point is that he is not someone who we feel sympathetic towards. I could put it much more strongly: we are offended by a lot of things that we see, and it's quite dislikable, and therefore he's become one of the most polarizing people in the world. But I don't think that is because he is still in a state of nature; I think that's going too far.

Andrew Keen: I mean, as I said, I don't like his politics. It strikes me—maybe I'm wrong, I certainly haven't written a book on Musk and I only try to avoid most of the stories about him—but it strikes me that there's an element of racism about Musk. Certainly a support of these far-right groups in the UK, his dabbling in one kind of anti-immigration group or another. Whether or not he's racist, he certainly seems to be missing some key human attributes, Charles. Maybe again this is the deal he did with the devil—or he didn't do the deal with the devil, the devil did the deal with him. Is he missing any kind of empathy? Does he care about other people? Is he aware of other people's suffering?

12:15 - 13:25
Charles Steele: So with people with autism spectrum disorder, what they sometimes are unable to do is to read what another person is feeling. If that person explains to them how they are feeling, they can have a strong emotional sense of solidarity with that person. But it's a harder thing to read. This is certainly true of Elon Musk, and it's not me saying that, it's his brother Kimbal saying that and his former wives have already said that. Because as I said earlier, I'm not in a position to really comment on his mental well-being. But what I would say is that a certain lack of empathy is something which he has probably used to his advantage in business—in the way he treats his employees, the way he relishes beating competitors and so on. And in the public realm, he definitely is willing to say things which are offensive to people and not be so concerned that it would make him unpopular. And he almost relishes that in a way.

13:25 - 14:14
Charles Steele: And the whole position that he has taken on "wokeness"—and that's a word I avoid using in the book, I prefer to use "identity-based ideology"—but the position that he's taken on that is one in which he thinks that people are silenced from saying what they really think because they want to fit in, they don't want to cause offense. And he thinks this is a very bad thing to happen. And so he takes it upon himself to take the battle back to them. And that's why he really threw himself into these culture wars. And, you know, it is quite difficult to write about him sometimes because he says things which put him in the company of people on the far right.

14:14 - 15:05
Andrew Keen: I mean, you could have written a book on The Curious Mind of, I don't know, Joseph Goebbels or Benito Mussolini. At what point does this guy, for all his open-mindedness, just become so profoundly offensive that he's no longer interesting?

Charles Steele: Well, so I started the book before he bought Twitter. I think if you stopped his life in April 2022, which is when he made the offer, there's a very rich life to consider and write about and for people in the future to be interested in. In terms of what has happened subsequently, I avoid the take that this is a sort of mid-life distraction or that he's gone off the rails or something. I believe there's something profound to his personal philosophy, the way he views the world, that he has a sort of obsession with—and this will sound strange, Andrew, but this is the point—he has a sort of obsession with the scientific method, which is the ability to criticize anything.

15:05 - 15:52
Charles Steele: It's the ability to say we cannot be certain of anything, we must assume we're wrong. And when he encounters people on the left saying things which would include "you cannot comment on what I'm saying, it's my lived experience, it's my personal truth, reality is subjective," he just has an allergic reaction to that. And it touches him in a personal way in addition. But I think he just thinks that is a pernicious way of thinking that some would trace back to postmodernism and so on, and that's for others to debate. But I think he has a reaction to that, which is: if this were to take hold and set in across society, that would be very harmful and society would go backwards.

15:52 - 16:32
Andrew Keen: Well, you know, I take your point, Charles, although again you don't need to be a great philosopher to recognize some of the weaknesses in what you call wokeness. But why with Musk is it always on the right? Why does he appear, at least from the outside, to be nostalgic for, I don't know, apartheid South Africa perhaps? Why did he cozy up to Donald Trump? Why does he allow X to be used by so many racists, by so many hateful people? Why does it all come as a critique of the left? If he was so open-minded, so questioning, so truly curious, why wouldn't he focus on everything? He just—the more I hear about him, and indeed the more you talk about him, he just sounds like some sort of crackpot, some right-wing crackpot on X, which in some ways I guess he is.

16:32 - 17:18
Charles Steele: But Andrew, would you acknowledge that he's a brilliant engineer, businessman, and also a crackpot?

Andrew Keen: Yeah, I mean, there's no doubt. I mean, the whole point about Musk—the whole point about Musk is if he hadn't made money, if he wasn't SpaceX and X and Tesla and all the rest of it, then we wouldn't be talking about him. He'd just be another guy in his underpants sitting in his parents' basement somewhere.

Charles Steele: Yes, but he's not, and my argument is that some of the reasons that made him so successful as an engineer—and he continues to be—and in business (and the wealth for me is just a byproduct of that), some of those ways of thinking about the world he applies to society at large.

17:18 - 18:14
Charles Steele: Now, one could say you can't think of society as an engineer because that's not a human thing to do, and I think that's a really valid criticism. But in terms of the views that he has about combating the far left, I just see him as a political actor like any other. Now, in terms of—and I know where you're coming from, Andrew—in terms of this always just attacking the left. But let's remember: he supported Obama, he supported Hillary Clinton, he supported Joe Biden in 2020. He was a critic of Trump, saying that the election had been stolen. He made a decision in 2024: "Who would I rather have, Kamala Harris or Donald Trump?" And instead of being someone who would try and be the voice of reason calling for national unity and so on, he just took a very hard-nosed decision and said, "I want one to win, I need to back that person, I need to attack the other person." And he made a very clear calculation that Trump was, if you like, the least worst candidate. And then he threw everything at it.

18:14 - 19:10
Charles Steele: So why did he do that? I come back to this allergic reaction to wokeness. And it's not the Democrat Party as a whole for those previous presidents and previous candidates. It is a faction of the Democrat Party and other progressive forces which is inconsistent with his personal philosophy. And he calls his personal philosophy a religion; it's a secular religion. And when he looks at identity-based ideology, what he sees is another secular religion, and he doesn't like it, and so he sets out to defeat it. And people say, "Well, the reason he backed Trump was because Biden wasn't so nice about Tesla and SpaceX was getting tied up in red tape and Biden had personally affronted him." And these are all factors as well. But having really looked deeply into it, I'm convinced that—you may call it weirdness, you may call it crackpot—but he has this certain view of the world where he just cannot tolerate, and he uses a pretty offensive term, the "woke mind virus." And so I think there is a consistency—you may disagree with it, but there's a consistency in his views which he's often not given credit for.

19:10 - 20:00
Andrew Keen: You still haven't convinced me that he's particularly interesting. I mean, you've written this book, you self-published this book, The Curious Mind of Elon Musk. I take your point on his reason, I take your point on his genius—no one can deny that given his remarkable success. But what is it about Musk that really ultimately—is he a mirror on our age? What does he tell us about the 2020s? What did you learn from writing this book? Not about Musk himself, who I said I don't think is particularly interesting, but his success and the fact that he's such a divisive figure perhaps tells us more about our own age. What did the writing this book tell you or inform you, Charles Steele, about the world we live in today?

20:00 - 20:47
Charles Steele: So you ask me whether he mirrors what's going on in society and what that tells us, and I think that actually he's not reflective really of anything other than himself. But I think there is something that we can learn from him—and I know that you're a student and an expert on this—which is the way that technology is reshaping our society. And he's clearly someone who thinks about the role of technology and he seeks to play a leading role in that. And strangely enough, perhaps one of the most significant ways he did that was not a company he built but one that he bought, which was Twitter. And what he did with that, which I know that you have strong views on...

20:47 - 21:30
Andrew Keen: I don't know if I have that strong views. I have to admit, I never liked Twitter in the first place, and so I don't use it anymore. I don't use X more or less than I used Twitter; I never found Twitter a particularly attractive place. So whether or not he buys it didn't really make any impact on me. But sorry, go on.

Charles Steele: But he did decide that it would be a free-for-all, and he would allow offensive speech to creep back in. And he did let it become a place that a lot of people chose to leave. And that was deliberate of him because he decided that it was more important for him that it could be a safe space for people to say anything rather than for it to be a place where people were protected from offensive comment.

21:30 - 22:20
Charles Steele: And I think this is his view as to—and I'm looking here decades ahead, and with AI this is all accelerating—in terms of where we end up. I think he likes to have an open platform, open technologies, where the environment is frankly very competitive—where ideas compete with each other, where a lot of people get offended. But for him, in a very strange way, it goes back to the scientific method: ideas must be competing and anyone must be able to be criticized. You can have a thousand people saying something and one person says something else and that one person can be right and everyone else can be wrong. And he just fundamentally believes this. And so he's created an environment which frankly I think the majority of people don't like, but that is what he is proposing in terms of where things should proceed from here. And he's obviously replicated that in the form of xAI and Grok. And we shall see what happens in terms of how governments, other companies, weigh in on that. I think he's stated his position and he probably will be a player in shaping where things turn out, for good or bad.

22:20 - 23:18
Andrew Keen: You've talked about xAI and AI. Musk was the co-founder of OpenAI and then fell out with Sam Altman. He was at some point, maybe still is in some ways, an AI doomer, although now seems more open to it. When you look at the "curious mind" literally of Elon Musk—and I acknowledge, Charles, that he does have a remarkable mind for better or worse—in an age where we have this convergence of smart machines and humans, where it's increasingly difficult to distinguish between machines and humans, is there something machine-like about Musk's mind? Or is it all too human, to borrow from Nietzsche's prophecy about our peculiar age? Is he an example of humanity distinguished from AI, or is he a glimpse of what all our minds will look like in the future as they become merged with machines?

23:18 - 24:12
Charles Steele: I think he definitely has that computer-robot sense in which he is, he has the hyper-rationality side of it. But of course, as we were discussing earlier, he has this anxiety, he has this strong emotion, which I think probably is not something that we would associate with a robot. In fact, there's a character in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which is a robot Marvin who's manic depressive. And a friend of mine actually said probably the best way to understand Elon Musk is that he's sort of this Marvin-like character who has a brain which is the size of a planet but he's manic depressive.

24:12 - 24:59
Charles Steele: So that's one way to think about him. I think that as Musk would think about it—and this is the hyper-rational side of him and the way he described it—we have the cortex and we have our limbic system. And our limbic system is basically saying "make me happy." And he believes that too often the cortex, the reasoning part, tells the rational part what it wants to hear. And this is often known as wishful thinking. And so this is something that he tries to go against. But I think perhaps there is a positive future in which we're able to use technology so that we can manage our emotions better and we can be smarter, and that they can work more harmoniously. I think that's something that Musk would hope for, but being Musk, he puts it in a much more extreme way, which is a sort of desire that we can hook our brains up to, you know, giant supercomputers and augment our minds in that way—which is something which frankly doesn't appeal to me very much. I think maybe to your point about being, you know, abnormal and less human, but that's something which appeals greatly to Musk.

24:59 - 25:56
Andrew Keen: Should we trust Musk, Charles? I mean, you've written this book about him, you've done a great deal of thinking. He's a very powerful man, he's in the process of creating a 1.25 trillion dollar company in this SpaceX/xAI looming IPO. He's enormously powerful. He was in charge of Trump's DOGE failed, farcical DOGE initiative. There's talk now of him sending rockets up into space and using the sun to create all this energy to perhaps solve the environmental crisis or maybe compound it. But for better or worse, he will remain an enormously influential player because of his wealth; he may be the first trillion-dollar man. Should we trust him with the fate of our planet, of our civilization, of our species?

25:56 - 26:45
Charles Steele: I think, Andrew, we should not have to trust him. I'd like to separate the question of what we think of Musk with "should anyone have that much power and influence?" And whatever you think of him, I doubt that anyone should have sort of unconstrained power financially, in terms of the media, in terms of access to space, in terms of development of AI. And I think it's appropriate that government control and regulation in the US and maybe elsewhere will catch up. This is something that we're all coming to terms with, especially with AI, in terms of how that works.

26:45 - 27:35
Charles Steele: I think even if you are his best supporter, having one individual as the custodian of a platform such as X, which is so influential, or a company like xAI, now part of SpaceX, now potentially merged with Tesla—that is an awful lot of power. So I think if Musk were looking at himself, and you think about the way he's described Google in the past or the way he's described Apple and them having too much power, I think in maybe a quiet moment he might reflect on himself that it would be appropriate that people didn't need to trust him so much.

Andrew Keen: Let me revise the question. You've written this book on "nine ways he thinks differently," about his "curious mind." Is he able to separate himself from himself? I mean, most of us can at least try and float above ourselves and think, "Well, Charles Steele might think, what is it about Charles Steele? How do people think about Charles Steele? Should Charles Steele try and improve Charles Steele? How will he be remembered?" Is Elon Musk able to do that? Is he able to separate himself to float above himself? Or is that the "curiosity" of his mind—maybe that's why he's on the spectrum—he's not able to do that?

27:35 - 28:22
Charles Steele: This is pure speculation. My sense is that probably there's not a great degree of personal introspection. Some people like to do that and some people go out and they're in their head, and others sort of don't like to dwell on that too much. You mentioned earlier Tony Blair—Tony Blair says that he thinks introspection is not good and he likes to go out and do things. And some people like what he does and some don't. And I think, I rather think these unpopular characters, Charles, that draws you to them—you've worked with Blair, now you've written this thing about Musk. You seem a reasonably down-to-earth guy, quite congenial. Do you aspire to be a Blair or a Musk?

28:22 - 29:07
Charles Steele: No, but I'm fascinated in what drives people. And I mean, you'll know Blair very well; he's a fascinating person. One thing that I'm convinced that is under-appreciated in him, and actually I think he mentioned this in the last week, is how important his faith is. And I think there are people that believe that they are either doing God's work or they are an instrument of some larger cause. A lot of people are animated by the idea of justice and social justice, other people by helping their community, other people by serving their country. Everyone has something like that.

29:07 - 30:04
Charles Steele: In the case of Musk, I was intrigued what it was for him. And I had heard him talk about this "religion of curiosity." And so I was curious to bottom that out. And I concluded that he does have that sort of religious sort of faith, which frankly I do not. So I am quite different in that regard. But I do think it's interesting to study what drives other people. And I do think in so doing you can learn something about yourself.

Andrew Keen: Well, final question, Charles. I'm guessing that you didn't have the opportunity to interview Musk for this book, is that correct?

Charles Steele: Correct, that is correct, yeah.

Andrew Keen: So if you did have the opportunity to ask Musk a single question about himself, about this supposedly curious mind, what would it be? What don't you know about Musk that you'd like to know?

29:07 - 31:05
Charles Steele: This is quite an obscure answer, but it's an honest answer. I talk quite a lot about this French philosopher Albert Camus, and I would love to talk to Elon Musk about him.

Andrew Keen: Yeah, and you're supposedly—your next book project is The Curious Mind of Albert Camus. I'm sure Camus would have been utterly dismissive of Musk, my guess is.

Charles Steele: They are incredibly different people, but at the root of their worldview is a sense of the absurd. And Camus—I mean, Beckett is another European author who has written about the absurd which Musk has spoken of. He's never spoken of Camus.

Andrew Keen: Musk has never spoken—maybe because he hasn't read any of his books.

Charles Steele: And if he hadn't read any of that, but that was my—that would be my question. And if he hadn't read the books, I would encourage him to do so. I'm sure he would know The Myth of Sisyphus, and so it would be fun to have a discussion about that.

31:05 - 31:30
Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it: The Curious Mind of Elon Musk: Nine Ways He Thinks Differently by Charles Steele. It's a self-published book, Charles, so I can't guarantee it's any good, but it's an interesting thesis, interesting project. Congratulations on the book, and we will await with relish your next book, The Curious Mind of Albert Camus. You'll have to come back on the show and talk about that. Thank you so much.

Charles Steele: Thank you, Andrew. It's been a lot of fun.

31:30 - 32:00
Andrew Keen: Hi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We're on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the platforms. And I'd be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.