Among internet personalities who speak too much, Elon Musk occupies a special place. The entire world ( including many Indians) know his views on free speech, wokism, on rockets, on civilisation, on Trump and on the people he is fighting on X with this week. Which is why an Indian podcast hosting him creates an odd tension. The great sense of achievement for many viewers is that he is on an Indian podcast. The great problem is that he has already said everything on other podcasts.

It is often said that India trails the United States by a decade in cultural habits, and the worship of long podcasts is one of those inherited delays. Musk, meanwhile, is a veteran guest of the format. He has sat across Joe Rogan, Lex Fridman and every man who believes that a long conversation is the mark of masculine intellect. Years ago he even made headlines smoking a joint on Rogan’s show.

In those podcasting rooms he usually travels through the same landscape of ideas. Civilisation on the brink, human intelligence losing its edge, the promise of Mars, the moral duty to escape the planet before it collapses under its own stupidity, the hyperloop as a transport miracle that governments will never understand, artificial intelligence as both guardian and threat, and so on.

Nikhil Kamath is usually at ease in the podcasts he records in his own studio. One of the things that works for him is that he is a billionaire himself, which means he carries none of the desperation that pushes other podcasters toward cheap tricks to harvest views. His show can be a decent primer for business and for people who want to build something of their own.

In that sense, it is a kind of rich dad poor dad for the podcast era, and it has its value. It even has a certain aesthetic in the current landscape, polished, aspirational and comfortably insulated from the usual noise. He has already got many high profile guests which includes Bill Gates, Sam Altman and even Narendra Modi. 

Yet in this episode Nikhil looks visibly nervous, which is to some extent also understandable. He clearly holds Musk in high regard and behaves like someone who wants the conversation to go well. That part is human. What is harder to understand are the other choices he makes on camera. He carries the air of an old world corporate speaker who believes that quoting famous thinkers is the quickest way to appear profound. So Spinoza appears out of nowhere. Milton Friedman appears.

Nikhil: “I was reading this book about Michelangelo.”

Elon: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? I used to watch that when I was a kid.

It’s clear that Musk is not moved by this self-help corporate book wisdom. Whether you see him as a tech visionary or as a global menace, there can be common agreement about his temperament. There is a troll inside him. He isn’t a typical sanitised CEO who only likes to stick with polished corporate theatre. His public persona on X shows a man who enjoys provocation, who enters fights that have nothing to do with him, and who insults people with the enthusiasm of a 16-year-old video gamer. This is not someone who will be impressed by polite intellectual name dropping.

Nikhil misreads this completely, and the result is awkward. 

Nikhil behaves like those men who turn up for a US visa interview in Delhi in a full suit, convinced it will earn him extra points. Or like someone who arrives at a reggae party in a tuxedo because he thinks the drummer will appreciate the effort.

Because of this uneven hierarchy, the podcast develops a peculiar rhythm of laughter. Musk keeps dropping some lines that he is convinced are jokes, and Nikhil responds with the enthusiasm of a man determined to keep a powerful guest in a pleasant mood. Slowly the atmosphere begins to resemble those television moments where anchors laugh at anything Modi says during media summits, not out of joy but more for maintaining harmony.

Sample this: 

Nikhil: I did want to ask you this. Milton Friedman often talks about the pencil. Why does he go on about pencils?

Elon: What? Why? (Elon gives a cue to laugh and Nikhil breaks into exaggerated laughter.) Why does he go around talking about pencils?

Nikhil: After Nietzsche and syphilis, now it is Milton Friedman and his pencil.

Elon: He keeps returning to it. There he goes again with the pencil. He will not stop. If I hear Milton talking about the pencil one more time, I think I might lose my mind. He goes on about pencils the entire day.

More laughter. 

The line of questioning is equally odd. At one point Nikhil asks Musk why he decided to capture Twitter. Musk gives his usual explanation, that the platform had drifted into a narrow ideological corner because of its San Francisco origins, that he wanted to restore balance, that he now follows national laws without adding his own ideology, and that his long term dream is some kind of collective human consciousness. These claims would sound noble if one had never logged into Twitter after his takeover.

Anyone who spends even a few minutes on the platform knows what it has actually become. A free fall where every strain of hate, misogyny, racial contempt and cruelty finds oxygen. A place where people leak private details of strangers, hound them for entertainment and walk away untouched. Nothing in this resembles centrism or any higher consciousness. The truth is that X has turned into an open manhole of monetised ragebaits, where extreme hate carries no consequence. The safety nets are gone. 

In fact, Indians have seen this with uncomfortable clarity. You can sit anywhere on the political spectrum, left, right or center, yet one thing you cannot miss is the scale of the racist hate directed at India on the platform. The assault is massive and relentless. Only days ago Mohammed Zubair pointed out how an old photograph of an Indian man with a facial deformity was among the most circulated images by American racist accounts to mock Indians. A poor person, with a real medical history, turned into racial bait. It is one of the kind of incidents that should have forced a serious conversation about what Twitter has become under Musk.

But none of this finds a place in the room. Nikhil accepts Musk’s answer that it’s for the collective consciousness with a small follow up: 

Nikhil: “Why collective consciousness is important, Elon.”

Elon: Yeah, why is that important? I guess it’s – you could also say, like, why... You know, if you consider humans, like, humans are composed of around 30 to 40 trillion cells. You know, there's trillions of synapses in your mind. But there's not the why of it, I mean, I guess, it's just so we can increase... our understanding.

Nikhil moves from one point to the next with the sincerity of a man who has rehearsed too many times in front of a mirror. There is no attempt to linger on an idea or shape the conversation. Musk mentions, almost casually, that in the future people may not need to work and that work could become optional. This is the kind of line that should stop an interviewer in his tracks. It raises questions about what would be the future of the work then and how will people survive this ? But instead of staying with it, Nikhil gives a small nervous laugh and rushes to his next prepared question. 

Most of the interview functions as a gentle public relations corridor hidden inside loose conversations about spirituality and the fate of humanity. At the centre of it sits a careful pitch for the entry of Starlink in India. The rest feels like residue from old American podcasts. 

Are we living in a simulation, the matrix as a metaphor, the meaning of consciousness, the loyal friend who keeps us sane?

Elon: And I guess a friend is someone who’s gonna support you in difficult times, I suppose. A friend in need is a friend indeed. Like, if someone's still supporting you when the chips are down, that’s a friend, you know.

Nikhil: With someone who has as many chips as you, would it matter?

These ideas are the leftover mumbling from the West, recycled so many times that even American podcasts have retired them. Now the same cycle repeats here, without novelty and without the basic chemistry needed to carry it. Two men with no bond and no conversational rhythm performing a script that was already tired years ago.

It could have been an opportunity to draw something unexpected from Musk, maybe even something unguarded and unhinged. Instead the need to keep everything corporatised, to stick to the script and to avoid any organic drift turned the episode into an odd, airless exchange. A conversation that never really began and you don’t care even if it ends. 

The one thing that is clear is that Nikhil enjoys the sound of his own voice. He seems convinced that slowing down a sentence automatically raises its IQ. So he speaks in an unhurried, 0.5x thoughtful tone that suggests depth even when what he says isn’t as deep. It is the kind of voice that could accidentally be uploaded to YouTube as an ASMR video. If Nikhil ever chooses to diversify his investments, he could consider a melatonin company, to make people sleep without trying hard. It could be called Zzzzerodha.

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