134: Elon Musk, Buddhabro? (w/Ann Gleig and Brenna Artinger)

Dec 22

Elon, Elon, who are you? Where is your essential self? Where are you as you soar through your space fantasies, as you track and hedge and bet your billions, wondering if all those emeralds gave you an unfair advantage in life?

What is the weather like on Mars? Have you found yourself yet, hiding in millions of lines of self-driving code? Have you found your own face as you surveil your quivering workforce, bunking in the San Francisco headquarters you stopped paying rent on?

Is the real you playing endless video games, getting stoned with Joe Rogan, making an eleventh baby with a fourth partner? Do you feel you’re connected to everything when you post at the speed of light?

As Musk teeters on the brink of ego death and financial annihilation, Matthew wonders about his inner life, especially after he dropped a Buddhist-type Easter Egg in a tweeted photo of his bedside table.

Is Elon Musk a Buddha-bro? No surprise if he was. After all, a big chunk of American Buddhism lines up perfectly with Musk's reactionary centrism, performative transcendence, bog-standard conspiracism, and culture war shitposting.

Here to help us understand this strange world—and what kind of Buddhism could make Elon Musk a better human, if he gave a shit—are Dr. Ann Gleig, associate professor of religion and cultural studies at University of Central Florida, and independent scholar Brenna Artinger. We’ll be focusing on their awesome paper, “#BuddhistCultureWars: BuddhaBros, Alt-Right Dharma, and Snowflake Sanghas,”