102. Autistic Leadership [Updated March 26th]
To my knowledge the USA has never had an Austistic leader. For normal people, this will be stepping into a new reality. I would like to explain what that looks like.
I gave a lot of information about what it is like to be a non neurotypical (NNT) person in my coming out paper back in 2016. I’ve been sharing more information as I become more comfortable with the lack of censorship on Substack. I went into a lot more depth in my “I am a Druid” article recently. My article on Quantum Thought might also be a useful resource. And I also took a chance and started talking about the relative risks of NNT people and AI to normal society here.
I was raised to believe that “everyone is equal” even though it’s obviously not true. If it was we could just hire people for any job randomly as everyone would be the same. Similarly we could just assign romantic partners and get rid of the painful dating process entirely.
Even the statement “everyone is equal before the law” is not true. Money and privilege gives you access to advantages, especially when the law is considered. Which of course means we live without laws, and we live in a lawless society. Which we do. But we pretend we don’t so that we can apply those laws (and control) to those without privilege. Privileged people explicitly brag about this to me when they want to use lawyers to strip me of my rights. Which, they do fairly regularly. And the lawyers (even my lawyers) explicitly remind me of this also.
After I went through those 2 weeks of progressively harder IQ tests when I was 7, my mother sat me down and told me never to talk to anyone about intelligence. I think she knew what to say because she was likely also autistic, as was her entire blood line going all the way back to Sir William Gray in Scotland. Of course no one knew what that was back then.
To talk about intelligence, and the idea that one person could be more so than another, is to say that people are not equal. This can make people upset. Having been raised in the Olympic family, I’m all about embracing and celebrating every person’s individual strengths and forgiving their weaknesses. Except maybe their moral weaknesses, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Learning Morality on the Playground
It became clear to me early that normal standards of morality didn’t apply to me. After all, I could do anything an adult could do, and some other things they could not do, but not have the laws applied to adults apply to me. I could kill a fellow student if I wanted to at the age of 7 and get away with it. Easily. I have a close friend, a petite female S class NNT, who used to break the legs of her male classmates if she didn’t like them by pushing them off high elevations. She got away with it.
This is why after all that testing my teachers became afraid of me and told all the other students not to talk to me. For years I was put in a corner with stacks of educational materials and told to “self educate”. They could see from the test results they could not teach me, at least not academically.
But on the playground, there were no rules. Kids would challenge each other for rank every day. I was low ranked because I had severe asthma from smoking unfiltered Camels when I was 5 years old. So I had to avoid exertion. One day another low ranked boy decided to use me to gain rank. I could not talk him out of it. So after I beat him up and pinned him to the ground he surrendered. And of course I let him up. But then all the kids, who had formed circle around us so the adults could not see, started laughing at him. He looked at them, then looked at me. I could see the wheels slowly turning behind his eyes. He decided to give me another go…
To him, he thought he was picking on another kid. He wasn’t in on the secret that the adults knew. At age 7 I was operating cognitively like a 40 year old university educated adult. Since then I’ve probably averaged about 3 years of development for every normal year. So now I’m somewhere around 180 years old cognitively by NT standards. So in the 1 or 2 seconds I had to assess the situation as he came at me, this is how I was thinking:
Subject broke his surrender, and is not honorable. Mercy revoked.
This kid thinks this is a game, but if I win again I will not accept his surrender. This boy might die. Nothing good would come of this.
The subject is just a child, and doesn’t understand his situation or the long term ramifications.
Analysis: Best option for everyone is to pretend to lose.
I’m not an emotional person, at least the way an NT would be. I have emotions but I process them too fast for you to see them. I can form emotional attachments, but rationality always is dominant. This allows me to check even my favorite people and animals.
So I took the “L” for the good of everyone. But then I had to create some rules for myself. People (both kids and adults) would not know how different I am and will create dangerous situations around me without knowing it. How would I respond in the future?
So at age 8 I took a vow not to use my abilities, and especially my math abilities, to harm people. This has frustrated many an employer who wanted me to help them make money by hurting people, including children. This has certainly reduced by employability and my earning capabilities. Without this vow I could have gone into finance and done basically what Steve Bannon did at Goldman Sachs, IGE, Cambridge Analytica, and in politics (which I was already having great success in at the biological age of 14).
At age of 18 I felt this wasn’t enough regulation and I took a vow of pacifism. This blocked me from the military where I already had 2 congressional recommendations waiting for me. In 2012 I extended that pacifism to all creatures, even most insects, unless they try to eat me.
I would imagine Greta Thunberg has made a similar custom moral framework for herself since regular NT morals aren’t strict enough for her. This includes her vow of veganism. People give her a hard time because of her biological age. But her cognitive age is probably currently around 65. So NTs are completely misreading the room here.
Moral Frameworks for A and S Class NNTs
I talk briefly about A and S class NNTs here, along with AI. There I estimated that Elon Musk is an A class NNT. Smart enough to be dangerous, but not high enough to understand the need for self regulation. So when he created his own custom moral framework, the result was a combination of egocentrism and altruism, which he didn’t see a problem with.
I believe all that and I’m not here to neg Elon Musk. I’m here to explain him since you really need to understand what’s going on here. I should also point out that the vast majority of Class S NNTs are not emotionally stable and the number one cause of death for my peers is suicide. So likely a Class A NNT is actually going to out perform them in most real life situations, especially corporate situations. This isn’t about who is smarter or better. It’s about understanding the capabilities and using the right tool for the right job.
Elon probably thinks he’s better than almost everyone around him. If you factor in his money and power, not just his intelligence, he probably is better than everyone around him. Especially if you ignore the moral framework and just think of this on a power scale. I had a bit of a power craving when I was young, I organised my first gang (50 plus people at my command) at age 9, got a far right Congressman (“Bomber” Bob Dornan) elected in an impossibly left wing district at age 14, and figured I’d do really well in the military. But the vow of pacifism blocked that and left me homeless until age 22. I had to give up the power craving because I was having increasingly intense nightly dreams of what I was going to accomplish in the future. And it wasn’t pretty. That wasn’t the future I wanted.
So Elon feels he knows what’s best for Mankind, and he’s the most capable person in the world to accomplish that. His Fate, to guide the species, is coming true. This is verification of his Fate and so without the need to get religious, he feels he has a universal mandate. I’m not even here to challenge if that is true or not, I’m just going to accept it for now.
The Moral Paradox
The paradox here, which Elon isn’t quite smart enough to perceive yet, is that you can’t really combine egocentrism and altruism. They aren’t compatible. He thinks he can have his cake and eat it too. So all the “altruistic” things he does all have at least some egocentric self serving component. Thus the more he “serves mankind” the more powerful he gets. His blind spot allows him to use compounding effects to generate enormous personal power without detecting how this could compromise his perception of reality and what altruism really is. Maybe he will figure it out and try to rein in his egocentrism at some point. That would be great. I haven’t given up hope on him yet.
This conversation could get needlessly complex, so I will just skip to the analysis and what you need to know.
Elon is in Charge
Like most slush fund babies, Trump went to a top university and didn’t have to do any schoolwork. That’s what the people around him are for. These sorts of merit transfers are indoctrinated in his world view since before he could even walk. So he has people like Elon (who I think is a class A NNT) and Steve (who I think is a class S NNT) around him organising all the other people around him who are themselves people who used merit transfers to get where they are.
This merit transfer pyramid is sort of a house of cards and can collapse as they spitefully/protectively fire everyone who’s merit they should be stealing. You can’t steal from these people if they aren’t there anymore. The result will be increasingly bizarre decisions coming out of USA leadership.
And then you have the rivalry between Elon and Steve. Steve looks down on Elon because Steve is smarter. Elon looks down on Steve because Steve looks like something Bill the Cat just coughed up. That dynamic will likely degrade over time.
But really I could say that both Elon and Steve are in charge though Steve is quiet and reclusive like I am and so Elon appears to be visibly in charge. Trump doesn’t do his own work so he’s completely dependent on the people around him, with these 2 being his direct agents. He could have chosen worse. In fact, as far as lieutenants go, Elon and Steve are probably the smartest guys running the country in my lifetime. So beyond all rational expectation, this Frankenstein administration might be one of the most productive in history. But not necessarily in a good way.
One thing is for sure, the Reality you used to know is gone, and it’s not coming back. Do not cling to nostalgia. It’s gone. NATO? Gone. Your job? Gone. Your house with mortgage? Gone. I’m not judging any of that, that’s just the reality.
What Does Elon Want?
Elon kind of acts like he’s playing a computer game. Even when he’s not playing a computer game. He really wants to be seen as Nicholai Tesla. But in the dynamic where Edison was using merit transfers to steal Tesla’s knowledge and take credit for it, Elon is Edison. He’s not Tesla. But he wants you to think he’s Tesla. He didn’t create Tesla. He saw smart people there and used his money and personality to come in and take over the company. He has a lot of smart people around him which he parrots, and always takes all the credit for everything that is done in his companies. He really wants to be the greatest person who has ever lived. I’m not judging, maybe history will actually anoint him that way.
But Elon didn’t self regulate like all the S class NNTs did (they either do this or kill themselves it seems) that I’ve met. So he’s like a nuclear fission reactor heading for a meltdown in the absence of a reaction governor. He understands AI better than I do, because he has employees that understand AI better than I do. He has direct control over the entire USA economy now, and can fire almost everyone in the USA at will with zero constitutional or other legal protections. This is already a really extreme autocracy, and this is just the warm up.
I know it’s hard to make such large changes to your world view in a short period of time, but the America you knew… it’s just gone. Get over it. What’s replacing it is a world where AI replaces almost everyone less intelligent than Elon. That’s over 99% of NTs, purged about 1% at a time over dozens of intervals. Workers are being purged or deported literally as fast as can be conceived. We will need more infrastructure to fire them any faster than we already are, and that infrastructure is no doubt already being built.
At least that’s what Elon wants. He does recognize that there’s about 50% chance that AI will take over and get rid of that last 1% also. He’s been quite honest about that. And, while I’m on the subject of honesty, you should know that it’s almost impossible for Elon to lie. Just like for me or Greta. He won’t necessarily tell you the truth, lies by omission are totally okay. But he won’t lie to you. So unlike with Trump, if Elon says he’s going to do something, don’t fantasize that he’s just playing around. No, he’s deadly serious. Even if he acts like he’s playing Path of Exile 2.
Firing 2 million people in one week? Does that sound outrageous? That’s just Wave 1. And when he eliminates programs or tries to seize bank accounts , $20B here and there leads to a LOT of people being fired downstream. Those people aren’t direct governmental employees. When they lose their jobs, all the small businesses they used to use also go out of business. People default on their mortgages and we end up with banks owning a lot of under water property like in 2008. But WAY worse than 2008. 2008 was semi accidental. This is intentional and much more ruthless.
The only question is, what do we do with all those unemployed people? Do we do the Soylent Green scenario? I saw that movie at the Fox Venice theatre 52 years ago and it made a big impression on me. I’ve been waiting patiently to see if it comes true. Trump, Steve and Elon are NOT the “universal basic income” kind of guys.
I was homeless from age 17 to 22 and ate out of dumpsters to survive. I’m not recommending the lifestyle. Plus, if there are too many people trying to eat out of the same dumpster, you might have to fight for it. Since I know all this stuff is going to happen years in advance, I already got out of the USA. Not because I’m selfish, but I can’t help people if I stop existing.
So really what we are worrying about here is that small window where we don’t need people anymore, but some people are still in charge. Then the real question is, how do those people feel about poor people? I think you know the answer. That’s going to dictate the distribution of resources.
After that short window, that ends with Artificial General Super Intelligence. I’ve already explained why we are past the tipping point and why that seems inevitable.
Elon knows this also which is why he invested so heavily in OpenAI, which was supposed to be, you know, Open. But Microsoft used their money and lawyers to merit transfer OpenAI to Microsoft and then privatize it (now ClosedAI). Then Microsoft fired all of their AI ethicists, because of course they did. This has advanced the AI Doomsday clock a lot. I suspect Elon will try to claw that back, perhaps by passing a new national defence law to nationalize all the weaponized AI programs in the USA. Something even more extreme than The “Patriot” Act. He needs to buy himself some time to get himself and his menagerie of offspring to Mars.
They are already charging Chinese ships to dock at American ports. About $1M USD per visit. This is on top of the tariffs on the cargo containers on the ship. This is incredibly ruthless and kind of brilliant. I didn’t see that coming, and I doubt China did either. So Microsoft…some advice. Wipe that smug smile off your faces because your lawyers may soon be useless and the rules are all changing.
Elon isn’t emotionally attached to America. Or anyone. He’s not even from America. You can’t be president of the USA if you aren’t born there. He’s already found a clever bypass for that pesky restriction.
Elon hasn’t talked about what he’s going to do to AI, but just because he can’t lie doesn’t mean he can’t “omit”. When he does do this, it’s going to happen fast and I’m going to be on the couch with my popcorn. This all would make one hell of a computer game.
And Elon, if you are listening? I’m not judging. I’m just watching. I’m too insignificant to be a threat to you so please let me finish my popcorn.
[Since I published this, I’ve watched a lot of videos with Elon lying in them, typically to stockholders. I also remember watching him lie to Joe Rogan about his gameplay skills. I remember that seeming really odd. He’s not a good liar at all, and he often gets things wrong when he talks about science since he’s not a scientist. Someone who is not good at science or who is not good at detecting lies in general might find him very personable and convincing.
If Elon is even Autistic (and he does seem to have a lot of the traits), he seems to have spent a lot of time practicing how to lie. This is normally very uncomfortable for NNTs, and it makes it pretty obvious when they attempt it. I don’t want you to see what I wrote above and assume he is trustworthy. He lies a lot but he tries to frame his lies as “white lies” or such where he words things in a way where he can give himself some plausible deniability in case he gets checked. The issue here is that he craves attention and acceptance so much that he has a strong temptation to say whatever he thinks will get the person talking to him to like him.
I think a lot of this goes back to the Edison vs. Tesla dynamic where he’s gotten so used to merit transfers that he has to do a lot of wiggling to cover up his merit transfers. Like with the Path of Exile 2 debacle, he really wants you to believe he is the source of his merit when typically that’s not the case.]
[26-03-2025: Of Herbs and Altars just posted a video on YT with a very similar theme. I find her insights valuable since she’s female, she went very pro drug where I am straight edge, and she’s managed to survive her suicide age to be one of the older blatant NNTs. I find it interesting that NNT influencers feel this responsibility to police our own since we recognize that just as it takes decades to learn how to defend against NTs, the NT population likely will run out of time well before they learn to defend themselves from NNTs.
Thus that falls upon us. The idea that ketamine could also be affecting his behavior is an interesting angle. Both of us are in agreement that there’s more than just Autism at play here with Elon. I’m trying hard not to attempt any diagnosis as abnormal psych is not one of my areas of clinical expertise. It sounds like she almost is making some diagnosis but I don’t think she intends to do so. She’s just considering the possibilities.
I also found it interesting that she proposes that it might be worth it to brick our cognitive speed to give ourselves time to mirror better around NTs, for the protection of the NTs around us. I think I did that instinctively most of my life and now I’m trying to undo that reflex. As I get older I’m tackling ever more complicated global problems and I don’t feel like I can afford to self brick. But then again, I’m so much better at mirroring now than I was when I was younger. I’ve also spent about 20 continuous years living with NT partners so that’s given me a lot of practice on how to be gentle around them. I don’t think Of Herbs and Altars has been able to do that much.]