Somewhere We Have Some Agency

Jim Ray: If you know anything at all about the history of the approval in Bluesky you know of the link to Twitter, which was of course purchased and rebranded as X by its now owner, Elon Musk. Musk is an unfortunate and unfortunately inescapable constant of our modern media-saturated world. His superpower, more than the cars or the rockets, or even purchasing and privatizing and controlling a locus for online discourse, is to be able to capture and refract our attention back onto himself, even when that’s the last thing in the world that we want to give. My guest today is Edward Niedermeyer, who’s been chronicling Musk’s rise to power for over a decade, first as a blogger interested in self-driving and electric cars.

Niedermeyer’s first book about the early days of Tesla was an inspiration for Alex Gibney’s documentary about Musk, out now, which Ed helped produce. I wanted to have Ed on the show, not just to dive into the pathology of one individual who has so much outsize influence on our lives, but because he understands what’s fundamentally at stake and what the protocol enables. Ed’s not a developer building the next great atproto app, but he is a creator who publishes and streams using the apps built on the platform because he’s seen firsthand. what happens when we’re too quick to give ourselves over to the demands of a centralized platform. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Edward Niedermeyer.

Edward Niedermeyer, welcome to Off Protocol. It’s so great to have you here.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah, thanks. It’s great to be here.

Jim Ray: So Ed, one of my first guests on this version of the show that we’ve been doing here is Erin Kissane, who is actually based up near you in the Pacific Northwest. She’s somebody who’s very familiar to the audience here. She’s been working in online spaces for a long time. And she said something that’s really stuck with me that I have taken as almost like a spiritual mantra. We were talking a lot about like how we live online today, and she said one of the things that she really tries to do is to live her life without contempt. And I have to say, I think you, Ed Niedermeyer, have taken an almost diametrically opposed approach to that.

With one specific person.

Edward Niedermeyer: No.

Jim Ray: Quite possibly the one person most deserving our contempt.

Edward Niedermeyer: More and more people seem to be to be joining me in the in the contempt camp, so I think that’s a good sign.

Jim Ray: And that person is of course, Elon Musk. I tried to put him outside of my brain as much as possible, but we’re gonna talk about Elon today and your journey with Elon, I think it’s fair to say. Walk us through how it is that you came to be Elon Musk’s chief antagonist here on Al Gore’s Internet.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah. Maybe not chief, but longest running, let’s call it.

Jim Ray: Longest running.

Edward Niedermeyer: There we go. Like a lot of things in my life, it was really pretty accidental. It was both accidental, very accidental, but also very intentional in the sense that I got into covering the auto industry by accident and when I stumbled into the Tesla story, it became my path to then explore all kinds of other new things, including and I enjoyed Tesla like moving into that because it opened up all these new sort of technological things to cover and exciting new dynamics. Unfortunately, those some of those dynamics have turned out to be like way bigger and weirder and crazier than I could have possibly imagined. And of course the man at the center of that.

Is it. But the simple version is in the early days of covering the auto industry, there were some green shoots of like the EV business starting to hint at future possibilities. And I’ve been really interested in this one company that had sold electric cars without a battery and you would have a mileage plan and you’d be able to swap. And so you’d have EVs were cheaper and faster charging. I thought was really cool. It didn’t work. The company burned $500 million and went out of business. And then Tesla started talking about a battery swap station as well. And it didn’t make sense in the same way because they weren’t building a business around it. It was just a tacked-on thing that didn’t make sense to me and so I went and I just went and checked it out.

I just spent a long weekend in the middle of California Central Valley and it turned out it wasn’t real turned out further it was it was a way to scam the California’s EV credit system for hundred million plus dollars that Tesla then used to show profits and.

Jim Ray: Sure.

Edward Niedermeyer: So that was I it was like we go on a fishing expedition, most of the time you don’t catch anything, but sometimes you catch such a big fish, you’re like, Well I have to go back to that spot, right? And so I started looking at everything that Tesla was doing. And like this it just has felt like the last ten years has just been this sort of like waterslide almost that I’ve just slid down and I never would have guessed that my interest in EVs and the future of mobility would have led to a point where I’m involved in political movements and this guy at the at the middle of it all has become one of the biggest issues politically in the world.

Jim Ray: And so situate us in time there. So that’s is this post-2016? Like where in time are we? And where in the evolution of Elon Musk. I think one of the things that you continually point out is it feels a little bit less like an evolution and more like a reveal.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah. So it is a it’s like a yeah, it’s like maybe like a Pokemon where they evolve into new forms, but it’s still the same creature all along. That’s one way to think about it. Maybe. So this was 2015 when I found the battery swap station. And by 2016, I had discovered stories about them, covering up defects with non-disclosure agreements and stuff. Tesla was writing blog posts about me saying I was working for short sellers and it w I was really in the mix then in the sort of online Tesla wars. And that sort of accelerated in Twitter through twenty seventeen-18 was this battleground for what Elon Musk’s image would become. There were a lot of critics, not a lot, but there was a hardcore of critics.

Particularly around the short sellers, but not exclusively. But it just didn’t have that political dimension yet. And also, so that sort of culminated in 2018, which is right when my book came out in 2019 so 2018 was also really the point. And in my first book, I really tried to make it not about Elon Musk as a person. I really tried to keep it dry and like this is just a car company thing. And by the time the book came out in 2019, you had the funding secured stuff, you had the pedo guy stuff. That was all over the summer of 2018. And that was really the point at which, if you’re paying any attention to it, it was clear that that was Pokemon evolutions had taken place and we were in a new phase of Elon Musk.

And so you’re not gonna see much of that Elon Musk personal stuff in the first book if you go back and read it. That’s all been subsequent.

Jim Ray: And so that’s your first book, which was called Ludicrous, and was really about kind of that that growth story of Tesla. And but as you mentioned, like the shine was still on. I you know like I remember the guy showing up, he was in Marvel movies and was being written as like the Edison of our time and all of these kinds of things. And so but it does seem like you were onto something. How did we get this one so wrong? And what do you think it was about Elon in particular that people just missed? Was it that we liked the story that was being told there or it’s in some ways it’s similar to the story we were telling ourselves about Facebook and Instagram and Twitter.

E even back in the day, Twitter had some pretty corrosive aspects to it.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah. Yeah, so I think there are there’s a couple pieces to it. One is that Elon surfed the ascent of Silicon Valley. And in a lot of ways he was a he was a symbol of it. And his image is possible because he’s positioned himself as an icon, a figurehead of Silicon Valley. And there was a long period of time where Silicon Valley had sayings like, don’t be evil, and were seen in those terms as and certainly as growing up in the 90s, the idea that the internet would make the world a better place, that would connect us, it would make us more tolerant and more interconnected and more understanding. That was what I grew up believing.

That’s why I work on the internet. That’s why I’ve always worked on the internet is because I believe in that promise. And so I think a big part of it is that people still, I think there’s a lot of people who still aren’t ready to accept that Elon is as bad as he is, that’s very much tied up in their image and their relationship with Silicon Valley, which has driven our economy for decades, it’s been culturally more and more significant over time. And Elon but Elon’s been at the center of that. I think that’s part of it. Also, I think Elon is someone who from a very early age he had basically a twenty year head start on I think the art of crafting an image online.

Jim Ray: Oh.

Edward Niedermeyer: I think this is the case because he moved from South Africa in the late 80s, early 90s, he especially he succeeded in Silicon Valley, but then he moved to LA and was very much around sort of Hollywood. and wanted to be in that cool guy milieu and it was so important at that time, not long before the their movies with racist South Africans as the bad guys. And if you as a white South African didn’t brand yourself in some positive way, the default definition was you were some racist asshole. And so I think Elon had had two decades of head start on that. And then by the time social media made that something that everyone could potentially participate in.

He had developed these skills and these abilities to tell a personal story that set him certainly above anybody else in business or Silicon Valley.

Jim Ray: That’s so interesting. I think this is a story that we the perpetual 38-year-olds of Bluesky. I myself am a few years older than 38, but we always tell ourselves these stories that we were the kids on the forums that knew how to navigate the mods and things like that. And that’s the secret to our success on a short form blogging platform.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah.

Jim Ray: But I like that that theory a lot is that he had to figure out how to create this image that we’re all doing all the time everywhere we go now online. But it was yet you’re thinking as it was like a survival instinct in some ways there.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah, and it was just something that yeah, he had to do in order to, again, not be perceived as just, oh, like that’s the first thing people are going to associate you with. right as a white South African. And by the way, in his case, you look at his phone, we now know about his family history and things like that. That there’s that would not have been thus so bad of an assumption, right? But he very specifically, and by the way, my theory around this comes from what his father said which his father said, like at that time, you had to go out of your way. And so Elon did stuff like he would go to Haiti for these humanitarian things.

And I think that that’s the source of his power, really, when you strip it all back down to the beginning is the ability to brand himself and tell stories about himself. And I think that’s where it comes from. I don’t know where else it comes from.

Jim Ray: In much the same way that if you spent decades being on the covers of magazines or as a game show host, then that might prepare you for this very weird postmodern presidency that we now live under.

Edward Niedermeyer: Absolutely. Yeah. And I think also just if you imagine being so powerful at that. I think if you’ve had a little taste of social media success, we all know about poster’s madness, right? This is this known phenomenon. And if you think about the level of success that he’s had with his posting and with his ability to craft a public image of himself how would that not make you insane? You know what I mean? That level of success in public manipulation become is going to become a self-perpetuating and very unhealthy dynamic. And I think that explains a lot of what we see.

Jim Ray: We’ve gone through 2019, you’ve published a book mostly about the history of Tesla and but you were noticing that things weren’t really on the up and up. And then I think this is the period at which Elon just that he becomes this kind of like self-mythologizing figure online, but he also becomes this self-perpetuating meme.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah.

Jim Ray: And I think I s I certainly first noticed this, I don’t know, maybe a year or so into the pandemic, where the very notion of meme stocks was just taking off everywhere. Everybody was home bored, people were had a little bit of cash. didn’t have anything else to do, so they threw them all into Robinhood accounts and then all of a sudden we get GameStop, right? And then this notion that Musk and the properties that are just within his orbit the only way to describe the valuation for any of those is just in meme stock terms, right? And is that roughly correct or am I missing anything on the latter there?

Edward Niedermeyer: No, look, I think the me the term meme stock arose in 2020 when as under the circumstances you described, but what that term describes, that phenomenon, originated with Elon in 2013. It just t it takes time for as a society, and this is a recurring theme certainly in my upcoming book, of it takes time for society to understand what’s going on and that that gap. allows someone like Elon to come in. And the in 2013, he basically refinanced his government loan and essentially went all in on a hype campaign. And at that time it was stuff like the solar superchargers, right? Now superchargers are seen as, oh, that’s one of the good parts of Tesla’s business.

But you go back and you look at that that introductory thing, he was saying all kinds of totally absurd stuff. He was saying that they would all only have solar panels and they would generate more electricity than the cars took out of them, which didn’t stand up to the most cursory back-of-the-napkin math. It was totally impossible. But in twenty thirteen, I was that was before my time. I wasn’t even skeptical of him at that point. But you go back and you look at it and he so that the and 2013 was also when the short sellers started to say look he’s pumping the value of this company totally out of proportion with its fundamentals. And so that that game plan, that meme stock thing had been Tesla had defined it.

And really what was happening in 2020 was it was being democratized is not the right word. But other operators, let’s call them, were noticing, hey, Elon has gotten away with this. Maybe we can do some version of it.

Jim Ray: Yeah. It’s the there’s that that saying that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah, that’s right.

Jim Ray: Elon seems to have really disproven that one, but through the power of I don’t know what Hality would say other than just performance, right?

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah, yeah. And the fact that essentially Elon makes content. He’s really he’s a content creator. And as time has gone on, in the early days it was really confusing. And again, my first book really takes Tesla seriously as a car company. And it’s so funny because the failure mode for Tesla as a car company has just been Elon doesn’t want to keep doing it anymore. Like right now, Tesla has been primed to go after the lower end of the market, more affordable vehicles, really expand the market, build on their lead. And they’re just not doing it. They have $30, $40 billion in cash with which to develop new products. And instead they’re choosing to do this fake roadster that that does rocket-powered kickflips over other co and as time has gone on the throughout this whole process, people said, Oh, okay, Elon exaggerates, but the real businesses are real.

And as time is going on, the real parts are starting to stagnate and get left off even there was just news about the government wants to launch stuff on Falcon 9 and Tesla and SpaceX says we don’t want to keep launching that rocket. We want to we only want to have the big metal one that keeps blowing up, be our only rocket. And so it’s like those actual real parts of the business that people use to justify the excesses all along have sloughed away. And what we’re left with when you look at the trajectory is that Elon Musk has been a content creator this whole time. And I think what my upcoming book was really looks at the self-driving piece of it.

I think that’s where it just becomes undeniable.

Jim Ray: Got it. Got it. So let’s talk about your upcoming book here a little bit. You’ve got an another book. You got to spend more time with the world’s most so this one comes out, I’ll just give you a quick plug here. December one, right? And this one is called Elon Take the Wheel.

Edward Niedermeyer: It is.

Jim Ray: Amazing title.

Edward Niedermeyer: Thank you.

Jim Ray: And this one is specifically focused on the self-driving aspects, right? And I’ll let you take it from there.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah. So in 2016 when I was I really launched on the first book, by that point Tesla was already starting to hint at the that their future that the car stuff that I was working on a book on at that time didn’t really matter that the valuation, which was always what’s mattered, was rooted in this self-driving thing. And I was comfortable enough to write a book about the auto industry aspects of the company, but not yet take on the self-driving technology stuff. So that summer of 2016, I tried Autopilot for the first time and I started a podcast with some folks called the Autonocast. And we’re now in it’ll be our 10-year anniversary. Actually it has technically been our 10-year anniversary this year of interviewing people from all over the mostly in the in the driving automation technology space, but a number of other technologies as well.

And a lot of my work on the internet derives from I was as a middle schooler, I was I homeschooled. And so a lot of this is just me learning, me teaching myself about the world or things that are interesting and my content is just sharing what I learn a lot of times as I learn it. And that’s why I love do doing what I do fundamentally is it’s just this is what I would be doing if I didn’t have to make money is learning about things online. And so it took me a long time to gain my confidence in that technology to understand what works, what doesn’t. And then so in 2019, when my first book came out, I had to get away from the daily fight on Twitter and the journalism and everything.

And I went and I worked for two years for a nonprofit called Partners for Automated Vehicle Education. And I spent a lot of my time there thinking about how people misunderstand this technology and how I, as a non-technical person, was able to understand this technology and build ultimately build a functional mental model for it. And so with the book, that was it part of it was the history. I wanted to be able to tell the history because I think when you look at the history of Tesla as a self-driving developer it’s not like their history as an EV company where there’s some good and there’s some bad. It’s just all bad. From the very beginning, Elon Musk didn’t understand this technology.

He ignored known risks that he absolutely knew about, and that ultimately he presents this technology as a safety technology, and yet you look at the both how Tesla has developed, deployed, and responded to safety criticisms of the technology. And you look at the safety record itself and how badly Tesla has misled the public about it, and how many people have actually been injured and killed with it. And there’s no way to conclude that this ought this system was developed for safety. The outcome, if it was terribly done, what it was done, what this system has done successfully is create a huge hype bubble. And that’s fundamentally what these systems are. It’s sold, it’s marketed as full self-driving, right?

But it’s technically a driver assistance system. But it’s not designed to assist the driver. It’s not like you’re there and the system is making sure that you’re safe. What is the system that you hand over control to and sit back and wait for it to go wrong. And then when it inevitably does, if you’re not paying attention, it’s on your fault. It’s your fault. It’s as if you were driving. There is no and people don’t understand that a system doesn’t become self-driving until the maker takes legal responsibility for it.

Jim Ray: Got it.

Edward Niedermeyer: So that’s really that’s what the book is about. You tell the story and you explain the and why is it that Waymo is has been able to have driverless robo taxis in now a growing number of cities, whereas Tesla is way behind trying to sell something that is less successful technically but more appealing, which is the idea of a car that you own that drives itself.

Jim Ray: Interesting.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah.

Jim Ray: that’s really fascinating. And I know that from following you and a lot of your work, that one of the things that you in particular have focused on is the fact that Tesla seems really bought in on this idea that cameras alone are going to solve the problem of self-driving. And even what you just said, where it’s not really a self-driving system, but a kind of a helper to the driver. I’ve got advanced cruise control on my six year old Ford Escape and this and it doesn’t seem like it’s got the same level of hype that a that the Tesla self driving bus d but it really does seem like the it comes down in some ways to decisions around things like the hardware.

And I’m curious, do you have any insight into we don’t need to go too deep into this, but what is it that it seems like they just ha they haven’t even pivoted in some of those decisions? Like when there are some just obvious like I see the Waymo’s going around and they’ve got the lidars and what would look like many more sensors than would be possible to shove into a typical Tesla, right?

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah. The origin of this is twofold. One is that Tesla is a car company. And so f from the very beginning, this had to be something like the way the strategy worked is that they had to put the sensors in every vehicle. Because again, the stock narrative is built on two things. One is the performance of self-driving, and this goes back to the very earliest days of autopilot. It was instead of having an adaptive cruise control system and a lane keeping system that are two discrete systems, you roll them all in together and all of a sudden it looks like the car is driving itself. And that’s what it’s that performance that that is the heart of it.

And if you look at Elon Musk, he was taken in by this version of the ELIZA effect. I call it the autopilot effect in the book, right? And the ELIZA effect is the first chatbot ever was very crude, but people thought it was alive because it we are very susceptible, and I talk quite a bit about this in the book, to misperceiving the level of automation. So that was part of it. And so throughout this whole thing, this is what’s so bizarre about it, is that Elon has always been in the same place. He’s been very consistent that it’s almost ready. It’s almost ready. It’s almost ready. It doesn’t matter where you ask him along that journey.

And again, I think it’s because he genuinely, I think on some level, falls for this perception of automation that he can’t step out of the illusion, which is Scary. The other piece of that though is this so you’ve got the guy running the company who’s bought into this illusion that self-driving is right around the corner.

Jim Ray: Yeah.

Edward Niedermeyer: Part of it also though is again the stock narrative. That’s where I think it’s a little becomes a little bit more conscious and structured and by the way, at this time 2014, when they’re starting to bring this in, is when Elon also starts to say we need AI regulation. People forget in 2014 he was like, we’re unleashing the demon with AI. He’d heard about this from Demis Hassabis. So he sees AI coming down the road, and he knows at that time he does not have the capital. He’s not in a position to be a player in that.

Jim Ray: And Demis Hassabis is the head of DeepMind at Google. And that’s what drove he and Sam Altman to famously they started OpenAI because they I think they were having drinks one night and said we shouldn’t let Google be the first to get to AI, right?

Edward Niedermeyer: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. There was basically an o like a c a battle between Meta and Google for DeepMind. And yeah, and Elon was on the outside looking in. So to position himself and to build this narrative that would eventually give him the capital to then enter the AI business, what he says is we have to have sensors in all the vehicles because then we have this narrative about this is data collection. This is a data play. And we are the only car company that has cameras in every single car. And we’ll just be able to pull all of that data. And structure it and make sense of it. And it was always, it was just as over-optimistic as the self-driving is right around the corner.

But for the first time, a car company could say, oh, we are in this AI game by the way, too, that was having cameras in all the cars, whether someone was paying for autopilot or not, that’s been tough on the economics right? Because you have to you have a fixed cost in and all those cars. In the early days when they were just setting up things like automated emergency braking and forward collision warning, just little like simple systems, they were able to develop a much, much faster than every other automaker because you didn’t need a ton of data. You just needed to pull a couple of edge cases where the system failed, understand very little bit about the context because all it was saying was a warning you’re about to crash and then braking before the crash.

So it was a very simple problem. And it was not too hard to identify those use cases, those examples where it made sense to pull the data as you get to try to develop a full-on self-driving system, the fleet expands and to your haystack gets bigger, but you become you’re still looking for needles in that haystack, and the needles become a lot harder to identify because you need to know a lot more contextually about the and so over time that data has really not proven to be a really fun the fundamental advan advantage that that people thought it would do, but it served the goal that Elon needed it to serve, which is build up this narrative that Tesla is an AI company.

Totally differentiated from every other car company. And that perception inflated the stock, which then gave him the capital to start xAI, buy Twitter, start xAI and get him into the AI game that he wanted to get into way back in the beginning.

Jim Ray: Seeing those connections laid out like that, because that was the data is the new oil era, right? I remember.

Edward Niedermeyer: everyone was saying that, yeah.

Jim Ray: Exactly. And Uber bought I think it was Carnegie Mellon’s entire self-driving team doing the same thing and that worked out really well for those ten professors or whatever.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah. And I didn’t answer your question about the hardware though. So in 2016 when they announced the full self-driving, which is were basically the 10-year anniversary of basically this week, there wasn’t just LiDAR off the shelf that you could buy and put into an that was automatic certainly not that was automotive grade and so it wasn’t really possible to do that. It also the economics of it would have been almost impossible too, because if the camera with the bill of materials with camera is so cheap that you can put them in every single car and so you build scale that way, you build the data narrative that way, and the it’s low enough cost that you only need a certain percentage, I don’t know the exact percentage, to pay for the autopilot features in order to cover that cost.

When each LiDAR is m many times more expensive, like you need to.

Jim Ray: half the cost of the car.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah. And so it just wouldn’t have worked. And again, I the thing that is really I think important to understand about this is that when you say self-driving car or autonomous vehicle, people don’t think about a wee-a Waymo. They you build a mental model based on what you know. What you know is a car so people think a car that drives itself.

Jim Ray: Yep.

Edward Niedermeyer: And so when you think about like how has it been 10 years that Elon’s been promising this thing and Waymo is succeeding and Tesla’s not, and that gap gets more and more obvious all the time. And in fact Now Tesla’s trying to emulate Waymo by doing robo taxis and limited operating domains and things like that. What you have to understand the reason Tesla is worth a trillion dollars and Waymo is not for technical plausibility reasons, but it’s because Tesla is the only company that’s selling that mental model that people think. You have these books written about oh, the race for the self-driving car. When people see that stuff, they’re like, but only one company is trying to even sell that.

And that’s Tesla. And who cares about what Waymo is doing? A taxi is not resonant in the same way as I have a car that drives itself. The problem is that what Elon was promising, even with LiDAR, wouldn’t be possible.

Jim Ray: Interesting. Okay. And it’s in some ways, Waymo is kind of the more disruptive model because it’s this idea of transportation as a service as opposed to just to yet another car system.

Edward Niedermeyer: Absolutely. This is the thing. So Elon Musk he talks about disruption all the time, but his inventions are 100% sustaining innovations. Let’s take to make an electric car, we have to put in a 400, 300-mile range battery, a huge battery, and we have to have these fast chargers. That’s trying to fit battery electric vehicle technology into the existing shape of a car. This is trying to take autonomous drive technology and fit it into the existing shape of a car. That’s why people respond to it. And by the way, this is why his fans are not people who are have a sophisticated understanding of these technologies. You know what I mean?

Jim Ray: Exactly. So it’s been an interesting three years or so, and I feel like you’ve been right in the thick of it. And so in that three years, Twitter, of course, bought Twitter of course was sold to Elon and then Tesla itself has continued to go in various directions. Elon himself, his kind of like personal even during the Biden years, there were still people that were hanging on to this idea. I think anybody who was paying attention to me the pedo guy thing was just like, okay, this guy is just not on the up and up. And but certainly really up until the twenty four election you could expect that a reasonable person would think, oh yeah, he’s the guy who makes the self-driving cars and the rockets the land themselves, right?

And you’ve been very active. You’ve been really active in the Tesla takedown movement. And you’ve also you got pulled to help with this Musk documentary that is out now with Alex Gibney. You were just live streaming with Alex.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah.

Jim Ray: And so how did you get involved in that aspect of it?

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah. So 2023 was a tumultuous year for me. I left Twitter. I w when that purchase went through, I just knew there was just I there was no way I was gonna get a fair shake on a platform that Elon Musk owned. And so I had no choice but to go somewhere else. And yeah, I got an invite code to Bluesky I had just left Partners for Automated Vehicle Education. I was doing some consulting, but I kind of didn’t have a settled thing. My personal life was very tumultuous. I lost a little brother to drug addiction and it was very just kind of yeah didn’t really know what was gonna be next for me and I got this call from Alex Gibney and he said I want you to come to New York and help us kick off this project.

And so yeah, I’ve been a consultant basically of a consulting producer credit. I’m very briefly in the film, but definitely not a main character, which I’m very totally fine with. The opportunity to work with Alex was just like I was familiar with his work and w he was just the perfect guy to do a movie about this other guy. And so there was just a lot of education, a lot of and people see this movie and they’re like, well even b I would say before people see this movie, they see that it’s four hours long or nearly four hours long and they’re like, oh my god, how am I ever gonna sit through this? I will say it goes pretty fast, and it goes fast in part because there’s so much that doesn’t even go into the movie.

As a writer, I’d never made movies before and there’s it’s you really have to be disciplined about what you even put into a film. And it’s they cover a lot in four hours, but it’s crazy how much more there could have been. This could have been a nine-hour epic easily. A lot of what I was doing was yeah, so source work and fact checking, but also ha trying to talk through why cer how certain how the different sort of narrative threads fit together and things. Like that. Ultimately, 100% Alex’s movie, a huh a huge machine of brilliant researchers and the group of people that made this movie, one of the most impressive groups of people I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.

Really encourage people to see it. It’s I think it’s really good.

Jim Ray: Gibney, he’s such a dynamic director and I have not had a chance to see it. I’ve got kids, I don’t get to go see four hour documentaries quite as much these days. But I remember because I’ve followed you for a while. I remember when I saw this when it was coming out, I was like, oh man, Ed’s not gonna be happy about this because it was before I realized that you had had taken part in helping to make it happen. And one thing that that I feel like I was struck by, and this feels like a lesson for any of us who are trying to figure out how to make our way in these crazy times is solidarity is really the name of the game.

Like when I saw that the two of you had in fact collaborated on this, and then when you had him on the stream and like it was all just about coming together in I’m sure you have different perspectives on these things too, but at the end of the day, it really is about creating some solidarity there.

Edward Niedermeyer: Gibney said that when he started to work on this book, on this film, that my book was one of the first things that he read that sort of opened his mind to the direction that the film would end up taking. And it’s funny because that’s really what I exactly what I wanted to accomplish with actually not just the book, but all of my reporting I’m not a trained journalist. I didn’t go to journalism school. I didn’t have the mentorships and the whatever. I just started blogging. I dropped out of college and I started blogging. And so I’ve always seen myself as someone whose job is to scout around at things and set up a warning when say, okay, let’s have the real journalists come in and do because a lot of journalists not it’s not that I don’t think I’m good.

I am I’ve done I’m very proud of some of the investigative work that things I’ve dug up over the years, but a lot of journalism takes a lot of resources. And certainly I think in Gibney’s case not just making a movie, but making the kind of movie that he was able to make took a huge amount of resources and is going to have an impact that that someone online is by themselves never gonna have. I think what’s been frustrating is that journalism has not like a lot of journalistic resources have gone into Elon Musk and Tesla and covering these stories and trying to get the truth out there. And it hasn’t cracked through to the public consciousness as much.

And so that’s why I was really excited to work on a movie and that Alex and Alex specifically and with the resources that he basically alone out of all the documentary filmmakers in the world is able to muster, was throwing at that to me was like, okay, this is the chance to finally crack through. Because I think I don’t know. I think clearly how we as a society, how we process information has evolved in a way that really benefits someone like Elon Musk. And I still don’t know, I have some theories about how what that what’s going on with that. But until we have things like movies out there potentially making an impact, we still don’t it’s still hard to sort out like w where is impact possible and where is it not.

Jim Ray: Makes a ton of sense and I think that the way the media landscape has changed. I think your outlining of as somebody who went to journalism school, let me say it’s a little overrated. And especially these days when it when everybody’s got a high definition camera in their pocket. But that interplay between whether you call yourself a dedicated amateur or somebody who just really focuses on s on a niche that is probably not going to make sense to be part of a bigger media property, but can help inform some of these things. I that makes sense in today’s weird media environment, especially in a media environment where the flip side, a lot of the negative sides where, you know, the amount of money that you have, the amount of consolidation that’s happening amongst the traditional mainstream media, there need to be these kind of countervailing forces and not every auto reporter is gonna be able to pick up on all of those different things.

So I love that. I think that’s a really great way to think about it.

Edward Niedermeyer: Yeah, I think I guess we always get nostalgic for the early parts of our career, maybe, but I blogging was a really incredible opportunity to go online at that moment when blogging was becoming this thing. It created a space where you could let the journal like the daily news journalist would come out with a story. And like when I took over the first blog that I worked at and then ran, we had this rule where it was like, okay, you have the news story that you’re blogging, and then you have to link at least three other stories in every single piece that you write so that when someone reads, okay, this news happened you’re providing this context and you’re connecting them and you’re building this web of coverage that people can then like Wikipedia follow the storylines through time and space and topic to topic.

And we would get good Google search results and a lot of traffic from them because we were helping them organize the world’s information. And SEO was the first thing to break that. And social media has been the second thing to break it. And I say this, I love my short form posting, right? I will never beat those allegations, but I think what I think I would love to try and do more is that more analytical l layer because both of these books I wrote because I would talk to really smart people who were getting the information about these different topics drip fed to them through social media. but weren’t getting the whole picture. And I think that’s something that that now in the social media dominated landscape that we need more of that context and bringing these narratives together and books are one way to do that.

Jim Ray: So I want to kind of finish us up here a little bit. This is a show about building a better internet on the AT Protocol. And th this is something that you have really taken to heart. And a big part of why I wanted to have you on the show is that you’re not necessarily the typical person that that our listeners are used to. You’re not you don’t have a developer background. You’re not building an application on the protocol, but I think one thing that you have done really well is you’ve actually identified the advantages that exist of this underlying technology under Bluesky. 99.9% of the people who use Bluesky don’t even understand that there’s a open decentralized protocol underneath it.

And that’s fine. That’s great even. And but you’ve really honed in on that. And I know that like whenever you announce one of your live streams, it’s like right here on the AT Protocol and totally love that. Makes my job easier. But I’m I am curious, what was it that kind of initially struck you as this is something new and different that I’m gonna try to build? a brand or your kind of publication as you’re writing a book. You clearly have a following. You’ve clearly been successful in creating a community around this work that you’re doing. There was something that you saw and identified. And so what was that thing?

Edward Niedermeyer: It starts with the experience of it took a long time to get to I think I had about thirty thousand followers on Twitter. That took a lot of posts and a lot of years and a lot of unpleasant interactions. And then it was all just worthless. Yeah, maybe I could have stayed, maybe but I doing what I do, I just there just didn’t make sense. And part of that was Elon owning it, but part of it was also that Twitter had become more algorithmic.

Jim Ray: Yep.

Edward Niedermeyer: And so there was already I felt I was losing a little bit of control, at least over my own personal experience and that algorithmic once you don’t have the a clean feed, everyone’s incentive just shifts to gaming the algorithm. And that that’s not good for a lot of things, right? So at first it was like I just didn’t have a choice. And I got this invite and I came here and but then Threads came along and I tried that. But again, there’s total algorithmic control. There are no sense of ownership over the experience for me. And I know that doesn’t matter for most people. But what I hope people understand is that even if you like an algorithmic feed, that’s fine.

On Bluesky, you have you can have multiple, right? It’s not that the algorithmic feed is bad. It’s that if that’s all there is, then people only ever put post content to game that algorithm. So I think th the other piece of it is that I realized that people like Elon Musk, they exist because or they become the figures that they become, and I think Trump and others are like this as well. They’re a comment about who we are, right? And our I think about how I got into this in the first place, it was just going somewhere for a few days, not going camping somewhere nice, going camping somewhere shitty. So that I could see for myself if this thing was real or not.

Just like making a little bit of effort to see is this real and I think what’s frustrating is people call themselves influencer. I remember the first time I was called an influencer and I was like, ugh, hate that. But part of the problem is because influencer, you’re like, oh, I’m an influencer, you have to go, people think about it, you go where the traffic is, right? You game the algorithm, you go with the traffic, you go to the biggest platform. That’s not influencing. That’s trying to woo people. I think I genuinely think if you want to be an influencer, you have to stand for something. And so for me, the AT Protocol, both as a I like it as a product, I like the control that I have over my feed, my experience as a Twitter replacement.

But branching out into the streaming and now investing quite a bit in building content there and building an audience there. Yeah, there’s no leg up for me. There’s no hacks to a quicker, faster, bigger audience at all. I have to do it the hard way. But again, the medium is the message. And the message is that we have let this guy, specifically the Zuckerbergs and others as well, control our mindspace. And we they have made it perfectly clear that they want to, on some level or another, enslave us. And so I think if we want to be free people and if we want to live up to the promise of the internet as a place that makes us better and not worse.

We have to make a stand at some point about that. And I continue as we get closer to book launch, I continue to debate how much I should go to other platforms to promote. Right now I’m really trying to do everything on the AT Protocol because and then put pushing clips and videos to other platforms later, but really emphasizing in everything that I do that don’t just buy the book, really think about how you are subordinating yourself to this person? What habits and laziness are you letting these people take advantage of? And I think there’s nothing more important than what happens inside of our minds and in our conversations with each other. And I think we have to do it somewhere where we have some agency.

Jim Ray: I don’t even know how I could possibly follow that up because you’ve done such a great job of articulating the why of AT Protocol. And you got a Marshall McLuhan quote in there, so as a McLuhan and Postman guy myself. I love to hear it. And I really do think that that is just such a brilliant articulation of why it is that we’re trying to build all this stuff out. And I’m just pleased as I could be that that you were able to divine all of that from this stuff that we’re doing. Ed Niedermeyer, I can’t thank you enough for coming on. Remind us again when your book comes out and what it’s called.

Edward Niedermeyer: The book is Elon Take the Wheel and it comes out on December first.

Jim Ray: December first. Okay. Get your pre-orders in now. Edward, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Edward Niedermeyer: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.