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Speaker 1: Pushkin. The COVID nineteen pandemic was a boom time for

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Speaker 1: the world's billionaires, who gained nearly two trillion dollars of

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Speaker 1: wealth in twenty twenty alone. As CNBC reported at the

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Speaker 1: height of the pandemic, one of those billionaires was fast

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Speaker 1: climbing the list of the world's richest people.

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Speaker 2: Ewon Musk just past Bill Gates become the second richest

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Speaker 2: man in the world, with a fortune of over one

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Speaker 2: hundred and twenty eight billion dollars.

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Speaker 1: For a while, he jockeyed for the top place with

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Speaker 1: other tech giants.

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Speaker 3: Altogether, the worth of those on the list is thirteen

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Speaker 3: point one trillion dollars, up from eight trillion last year,

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Speaker 3: the rise occurring as most the world was shut down

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Speaker 3: during the pandemic.

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Speaker 1: By the end of that year, Elon Musk had become

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Speaker 1: the richest man in the world. It was also during

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Speaker 1: the pandemic that Musk underwent a political conversion, moving to

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Speaker 1: the right. By twenty twenty four, he'd become one of

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Speaker 1: Donald Trump's closest advisors.

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Speaker 4: Take Over Elaid, Yes, take Elon Musk is taking over

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Speaker 4: with an Act to government spending in a newly created

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Speaker 4: Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is also the

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Speaker 4: name of a cryptocurrency inspired by a dog meme.

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Speaker 1: Doge the Department of Government Efficiency, staffed by Silicon Valley

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Speaker 1: entrepreneurs and engineers hoping to make use of artificial intelligence

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Speaker 1: to reinvent American government. Welcome to x Men. The Elon

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Speaker 1: Musk origin Story. I'm Jill Lapour. I'm a historian professor

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Speaker 1: at Harvard. This episode is the fifth in a series

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Speaker 1: I've been hosting about a new kind of capitalism called Muskism.

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Speaker 1: Extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism, a form of capitalism influenced

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Speaker 1: by fantasies that come from science fiction. It's all bound

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Speaker 1: up with a tech bro vibe, comic books and superheroes,

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Speaker 1: fantasy and video games. The tech overlords as the Lords

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Speaker 1: of the Rings. This episode is called The Doge Father.

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Speaker 1: Elon Musk, Money, cryptocurrency, and the rise of techno Libertarianism.

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Speaker 1: As Donald Trump took office in twenty seventeen, Elon Musk

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Speaker 1: had achieved phenomenal really almost unbelievable success, especially with Tesla

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Speaker 1: and SpaceX, both of which were headquartered in California. He

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Speaker 1: was then a darling of the press it seemed as

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Speaker 1: though anytime Musk did anything at all, even just tweeting,

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Speaker 1: newsroom phones lit up. He was a golden boy with

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Speaker 1: super fans who adored him as a real life Tony

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Speaker 1: Stark iron Man. Then came COVID the coronavirus. Panic is dumb,

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Speaker 1: Musk tweeted on March sixth, twenty Twenty days later, the

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Speaker 1: governor of California announced that the state would shut down,

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Speaker 1: that we direct a statewide order for people to stay

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Speaker 1: at home. Musk was furious, and we are confident that

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Speaker 1: the people of the state of California will abide by it.

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Speaker 1: They'll do the right thing. Musk vowed to keep his

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Speaker 1: Tesla factory open, tweeting Free America Now, Elon Musk is

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Speaker 1: escalating his fight with a California county, restarting a Tesla

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Speaker 1: factory in Fremont despite a stay at home order there. Then,

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Speaker 1: in protest of California's strict regulations, Musk announced that he

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Speaker 1: was moving to lightly regulated Texas and had decided to

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Speaker 1: build Tesla's gigafactory there too. We approached both Tesla and

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Speaker 1: SpaceX for a response on several points in the series,

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Speaker 1: but at the time of the recording, we had not

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Speaker 1: received a reply, one way or another. Musk had become

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Speaker 1: a culture warrior, tweeting and tweeting and getting richer and richer. Meanwhile,

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Speaker 1: during the pandemic, the contrast between the suffering of the

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Speaker 1: masses and the vasting increase of wealth among a very

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Speaker 1: few provoked a backlash. In the US, Senator Bernard Sanders

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Speaker 1: proposed the Make Billionaires Pay Act, a one time tax

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Speaker 1: on American billionaires to help cover the out of pocket

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Speaker 1: medical expenses of ordinary Americans for one year. Musk then

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Speaker 1: got into a Twitter war with Sanders. Sanders claimed Musk's

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Speaker 1: wealth had been made possible by billions of dollars in

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Speaker 1: government subsidies for his corporations. Musk suggested that Sanders should

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Speaker 1: leave him alone because Tesla is saving the planet. Musk

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Speaker 1: may not have been saving the planet, but his influence,

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Speaker 1: especially on markets, kept growing. Like a lot of people,

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Speaker 1: during the pandemic, Musk spent more time than ever online.

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Speaker 1: The number of his Twitter followers skyrocketed. As CNBC reported

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Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one, markets seem to hang on his

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Speaker 1: every word.

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Speaker 5: One thing we've learned lately is that when Elon Musk tweets.

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Speaker 5: The news cycle follows him, and in fact he does

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Speaker 5: have a series of tweets in the past few minutes

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Speaker 5: says I'm selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house,

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Speaker 5: says Tesla. Stock price is too high im in my opinion,

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Speaker 5: and now give people back their freedom. It's going to

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Speaker 5: get attention. Stock now down almost seven percent.

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Speaker 1: This became a signature feature of Muskism long before a

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Speaker 1: Musk bought Twitter. A single tweet by a single person,

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Speaker 1: not an announcement from a central bank, could drive a

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Speaker 1: stock price or hobble a currency market. In January twenty

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Speaker 1: twenty one, after the insurrection at the US capital Twitter

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Speaker 1: band Trump with Trump Gone, Musk became the loudest voice

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Speaker 1: in the room. The Love Hate Twitter account to follow.

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Speaker 1: He started tweeting about cryptocurrency Bitcoin and a joke coin

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Speaker 1: called dogecoin. If Trump's tweets destabilized American politics, Musk's tweets

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Speaker 1: seemed to be destabilizing financial markets. A lot of headlines

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Speaker 1: had to do with the fictive quality of money. After all,

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Speaker 1: all forms of currency are acts of imagination. As Douglas

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Speaker 1: Adams pointed out so well in the Hitchhiker's Guide to

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Speaker 1: the Galaxy.

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Speaker 6: In fact, there are three freely convertible currencies in the universe,

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Speaker 6: but the Alterian dollar has recently collapsed, the Flanian pobble

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Speaker 6: bead is only exchangeable for other Flanian pobble beads, and

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Speaker 6: the trigantic pew doesn't really count as money. Its exchange

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Speaker 6: rate of six ningyas to one pew is simple, but

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Speaker 6: since a ninga is a triangular rubber coin eight hundred

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Speaker 6: miles long each side, no one has ever collected enough

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Speaker 6: to own one pew. Ning is a not negotiable currency

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Speaker 6: because the galactic banks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.

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Speaker 6: From this basic premise, it's very simple to prove that

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Speaker 6: the Galectic banks are also the products of a deranged imagination.

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Speaker 1: I've spent a lot of time in this investigation of

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Speaker 1: Musk with Hitchhiker's Guide, because Musk read it as a

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Speaker 1: kid growing up in South Africa, and he cites it

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Speaker 1: all the time. But Hitchhiker's Guide is a strange influence

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Speaker 1: for Muscuism, partly because Adams was so brutally gut wrenchingly

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Speaker 1: funny about the arbitrariness of money and the follies of

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Speaker 1: financial schemers and assorted idiot executives.

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Speaker 7: If we could, for a moment move on to the

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Speaker 7: subject of fiscal policy.

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Speaker 8: School policy, How can you have money if none of

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Speaker 8: you actually produce anything?

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Speaker 2: It doesn't grow on tree?

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Speaker 1: And Adams was particularly devastating on the subject of the

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Speaker 1: damage done to the natural world by advanced extractive capitalism.

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Speaker 7: Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt leaves

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Speaker 7: as legal tender, we have, of course, or become immensely rich.

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Speaker 7: We have also run into a small instation problem on

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Speaker 7: account of the high level of leaf availability, which means

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Speaker 7: that I gather the current going rate has something like

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Speaker 7: three major deciduous forests buying one ship's peanuts. So in

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Speaker 7: order to obviate this problem and defectively revalue the leaf,

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Speaker 7: we are about to embark on an extensive defiliation campaign

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Speaker 7: and burn down all the forests. I think that's a

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Speaker 7: sensible movie economic time.

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Speaker 1: If you've been following the story of cryptocurrency, this scene

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Speaker 1: from Hitchhiker's Guide might sound a little too on the nose.

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Speaker 1: In twenty twenty one, Musk announced that Tesla was buying

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Speaker 1: millions of dollars of bitcoin and that you could buy

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Speaker 1: a Tesla with bitcoin, until he changed his mind, citing

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Speaker 1: the sort of environmental concerns that I looked into in

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Speaker 1: an earlier episode of this series. It turns out that

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Speaker 1: mining bitcoin really is burning down the forests. But you

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Speaker 1: can buy Tesla merchandise with doge coin, and maybe you

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Speaker 1: can sway a presidential election. In the twenty twenty four

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Speaker 1: US presidential election, nearly half of all corporate spending came

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Speaker 1: from the cryptocurrency industry. Some of that money went to Democrats,

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Speaker 1: but most of it went to Republicans. Among the billionaires

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Speaker 1: celebrating the announcement of doge that Apartment of government efficiency

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Speaker 1: was the CEO of the cryptocurrency company Coinbase. Cryptocurrency is

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Speaker 1: essentially money without government, a libertarian's dream. Doge's mandate is

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Speaker 1: to reduce government spending and to eliminate government regulations. The

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Speaker 1: second of these is a lot easier than the first.

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Speaker 1: What dismantling regulations might mean for money is a story,

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Speaker 1: though that goes back to the beginning of those regulations.

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Speaker 1: The kerfuffle over bitcoin really dates to eighteen forty eight

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Speaker 1: and the discovery of gold in California. A flood of

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Speaker 1: gold retavoc on the US dollar, and so as the

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Speaker 1: federal government took on new powers, it adopted a gold standard,

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Speaker 1: which set a rate for the price of paper currency.

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Speaker 1: Europe then did the same thing. This ushered in a

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Speaker 1: new era of global trade, and not incidentally, the grotesque

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Speaker 1: economic inequality of the Gilded Age. Farmers and factory workers

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Speaker 1: argued for a silver standard, but the US formally established

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Speaker 1: the gold standard in the year nineteen hundred. That same year,

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Speaker 1: a science fiction writer named Garrett P. Servis imagined a

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Speaker 1: different outcome in a novel called Moon Metal, in which

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Speaker 1: gold is discovered at the South Pole, setting off a

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Speaker 1: second gold rush.

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Speaker 9: Gold is going to be as plentiful as ire. If

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Speaker 9: there were not such a flood of it, we might manage.

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Speaker 9: But when they begin to make trouser buttons out of

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Speaker 9: the same metal that is now locked and guarded in

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Speaker 9: steel vaults wound, where will be our standard of worth?

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Speaker 9: My dear fellow, I would as willingly face the end

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Speaker 9: of the world as this that's coming.

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Speaker 1: Just then, a sinister scientist discovers a mysterious new metal

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Speaker 1: on the Moon which he can beam to Earth by

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Speaker 1: way of a particle ray and introduces a new and

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Speaker 1: more precious form of currency.

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Speaker 8: I can produce it in the pure form abundantly enough

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Speaker 8: to replace gold, giving the same relative value and the

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Speaker 8: gold possessed when it was the universal stand.

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Speaker 9: But that will make you the richest man who ever lived. Undoubtedly,

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Speaker 9: why you will become the financial dictator of the whole earth.

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Speaker 1: Undoubtedly, currency is always a worry. Its value is so contrived,

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Speaker 1: so imaginary, but also so important. After the stock market

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Speaker 1: crash of nineteen twenty nine, people took their money out

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Speaker 1: of the banks and turned in their paper dollars for gold.

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Speaker 1: In the nineteen thirties, the US abandoned the gold standard,

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Speaker 1: at least for the duration of the depression, and prohibited

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Speaker 1: the private ownership of gold. If you've been listening to

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Speaker 1: x Men for the last few episodes, you'll remember that

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Speaker 1: it was during this era that in Canada, Elon Musk's

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Speaker 1: grandfather joined and became a leader of the technocracy movement,

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Speaker 1: founded on the belief that engineers could solve all political,

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Speaker 1: social and economic problems. Technocrats did not believe in price.

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Speaker 2: By price system is not meant merely the capitalistic system,

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Speaker 2: which is only one variety of the species. It means

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Speaker 2: the collapse and complete obsolescence of the entire method of

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Speaker 2: distributing goods and services by means of a price.

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Speaker 1: Technocrats didn't believe in prices because they didn't believe in

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Speaker 1: any system not run by engineers. They wanted to get

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Speaker 1: rid of both governments and banks.

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Speaker 2: There will be no place for politics or politicians, finance

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Speaker 2: or financiers. Rackets are racketeers.

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Speaker 1: In place of prices and money. Technocrats wanted to reimagine

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Speaker 1: the entire economic system with a new currency, a unit

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Speaker 1: of energy, an erg whose stability would eradicate the volatility

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Speaker 1: of finance.

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Speaker 2: A dollar may be worth in buying power so much

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Speaker 2: today and moral less tomorrow, but a unit of work

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Speaker 2: or heat is the same in nineteen hundred, nineteen twenty nine,

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Speaker 2: nineteen thirty three, all the year two thousand.

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Speaker 1: The URG never did replace the dollar, and the US

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Speaker 1: formally abandoned the gold standard in nineteen seventy six, But

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Speaker 1: starting in two thousand and nine, people who want to

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Speaker 1: trade in units other than dollars can buy bitcoins. Bitcoin

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Speaker 1: a cryptocurrency isn't based on anything of value, Although not

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Speaker 1: unlike the URG, it has some relationship to energy, the

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Speaker 1: energy it takes to produce it. After Trump's election in

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Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, the price of bitcoin skyrocketed higher than it

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Speaker 1: had ever been before, and Trump withdrew the US from

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Speaker 1: the Paris Climate Accords. But bitcoin's value, like the value

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Speaker 1: of other money, only exists if you believe it exists.

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Speaker 1: JP Morgan once suggested that bitcoin was poised to become

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Speaker 1: the new gold standard.

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Speaker 10: Cryptocurrencies were designed to make payments without a trusted third party,

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Speaker 10: such as a government or a financial institution involved.

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Speaker 1: Ishuar Prasad is an economist at Cornell University and a

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Speaker 1: fellow at the Brookings Institute. He believes cryptocurrency has set

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Speaker 1: off a revolution, a foundational change in finance, but that

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Speaker 1: bitcoin itself has not met its objectives.

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Speaker 10: Bitcoin has really ended up failing in what it was

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Speaker 10: supposed to provide, which is a cheap, trustless medium of exchange.

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Speaker 10: It turns out it is not anonymous, it turns out

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Speaker 10: it is not cheap, and it is not very efficient.

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Speaker 10: So Bitcoin has centered up becoming a pure speculative asset.

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Speaker 1: The technology underlying cryptocurrencies, Prosad argues, well, have all kinds

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Speaker 1: of effects on finance. It really is the future. But

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Speaker 1: he's not persuaded that, as some advocates claim, cryptocurrencies will

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Speaker 1: democratize finance.

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Speaker 10: They've made it possible for people with very low incomes,

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Speaker 10: very low levels of wealth, to get relatively easy access

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Speaker 10: to digital payments and also to basic banking products. The

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Speaker 10: problem is that digital access is unequal and financial literacy

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Speaker 10: is unequal. So you might give people easy access to

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Speaker 10: a lot of products, but if you don't teach them

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Speaker 10: the risks emburied in those products, then you might end

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Speaker 10: up with the relatively less well off taking on much

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Speaker 10: more risks than they realize that they're taking on, and

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Speaker 10: the rich ending up being able to use these technologies

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Speaker 10: much more to their advantage, so they become even better

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Speaker 10: off than they are right now.

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Speaker 1: Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on nothing except a meme about

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Speaker 1: a dog, was started by a software engineer named Jackson

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Speaker 1: Palmer as a joke. Palmer later wrote an article called

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Speaker 1: my joke, Cryptocurrency hit two billion dollars and something is

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Speaker 1: Very wrong, in which he said that cryptocurrency, for all

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Speaker 1: its promise, had become nothing more than an unregulated penny

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Speaker 1: stock market. In twenty nineteen, after people started tweeting that

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Speaker 1: Musk should be the CEO of dogecoin, he said it

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Speaker 1: was his favorite cryptocurrency. Doge coin's value skyrocketed, Musk kept

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Speaker 1: tweeting about it, and up when its price he started

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Speaker 1: calling himself the doge Father. Musk talked about doge coin

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Speaker 1: on Clubhouse, an online chat room that was briefly popular

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Speaker 1: with Silicon.

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Speaker 11: Valley occasionally make jokes about dogecoin that are really just

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Speaker 11: meant to be joked, but dose coin was made as

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Speaker 11: a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies. Obviously, but fate

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Speaker 11: loves irony, and as part of my says that the

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Speaker 11: most ironic outcome is most likely, or I say the

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Speaker 11: most entertaining outcome is often most likely and arguably the

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Speaker 11: most entertaining outcome, and the most ironic outcome would be

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Speaker 11: that dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in the future.

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Speaker 1: In twenty twenty one, Musk tweeted the single word doge

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Speaker 1: under a picture of a SpaceX rocket in front of

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Speaker 1: the moon. Doge to the Moon became a rallying cry.

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Speaker 1: On April Fool's Day that year, Musk tweeted, SpaceX is

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Speaker 1: going to put a literal doge coin on the literal

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Speaker 1: moon a joke, but also not a joke, Musk said

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Speaker 1: that SpaceX will be accepting doge coin as payment. Was

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Speaker 1: Musk a comic? The next month, Musk hosted NBC's Saturday

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Speaker 1: Night Live. He appeared in nearly every sketch as the

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Speaker 1: Nintendo villain Warrio on trial for murdering Mario. He explained,

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Speaker 1: I'm not evil, I'm just misunderstood. In a skit set

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Speaker 1: in the Old West, he played a bandit named Leron.

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Speaker 12: What had instead of panning for gold?

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Speaker 10: We just created our own cardsy currency.

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Speaker 11: Yeah, and what the heck would it be based on?

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Speaker 11: Whatever we say?

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Speaker 13: It's based on that.

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Speaker 12: Hey, how money works.

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Speaker 4: Money ain't a golden rock that we dig out of

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Speaker 4: the ground. Then we hope no one kills.

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Speaker 10: Us before we train it for pieces of green paper.

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Speaker 14: It's a perfect system.

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Speaker 1: It's a weird thing about being a historian. Everything reminds

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Speaker 1: you of something else. Watching Elon Musk play Leron dressed

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Speaker 1: like a cowboy, he looked exactly like an old photograph

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Speaker 1: of his grandfather, the technocrat, who worked as a cowboy

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Speaker 1: and performed at rodeos doing rope tricks. The family likeness

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Speaker 1: is uncanny. Musk is also named after that cowboy's father,

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Speaker 1: his great grandfather, Elon muscism asks us to picture always

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Speaker 1: the future, but I find it hard not to keep

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Speaker 1: picturing the past. Yanked back lassoed by likenesses on SNL,

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Speaker 1: Musk appeared too on the show's newscast as a cryptocurrency

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Speaker 1: expert who can't give a straight answer.

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Speaker 5: What is dose coin?

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Speaker 11: Well, it actually started as a joke based on an

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Speaker 11: Internet meme.

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Speaker 5: Okay, but what is dose coin?

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Speaker 1: Finally he admits the truth.

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Speaker 11: I keep telling you it's a cryptocurrency you can trade

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Speaker 11: for conventional money. Oh so the hustle, Yeah, that's uses.

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Speaker 8: Everybody to the.

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Speaker 1: That night, dogecoin lost a third of its value. Me

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Speaker 1: I was left thinking about the ending to that old

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Speaker 1: science fiction story Moon Metal from the year nineteen hundred.

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Speaker 13: The looting of the Moon brought disaster to the rubber planet.

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Speaker 13: So mad were the efforts to get the precious metal

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Speaker 13: that the surface of our globe was fairly showered with it.

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Speaker 13: The air was filled with shining dust, until finally famine

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Speaker 13: and pestilence joined hands with financial disaster to punish the

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Speaker 13: grasping world.

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Speaker 1: At the end of moon, metal markets collapse until an

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Speaker 1: international agreement leads to government control of currency. That is

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Speaker 1: what governments do in the US through the Federal Reserve

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Speaker 1: and through the Securities in Exchange Commission. The Biden administration

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Speaker 1: prosecuted crypto companies for securities violations under rules that the

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Speaker 1: crypto industry complained were unclear and misguided. The second Trump

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Speaker 1: administration is considering freezing much of that litigation.

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Speaker 10: How much do you.

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Speaker 2: Think we can rip out of this wasted six point

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Speaker 2: five trillion dollar Paris Biden budget?

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Speaker 11: Well, I think we could do at least two trillion.

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Speaker 13: Yeah.

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Speaker 1: At a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden in New

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Speaker 1: York just before the election, Musk made some predictions about

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Speaker 1: the Department of Government deficiency.

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Speaker 11: We're going to get the government off your back and

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Speaker 11: out of your pocketbook. America's does not not It's just

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Speaker 11: going to be great. America is going to reach heights

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Speaker 11: that it has never seen before.

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Speaker 1: There is arguably a great deal of waste in the

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Speaker 1: US federal budget, though exactly where is the subject of

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Speaker 1: rather heated dispute, and many argued there's an excess of regulation.

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Speaker 1: Musk says that it takes longer to fill out the

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Speaker 1: paperwork to build a rocket than it takes to actually

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Speaker 1: build the rocket. Excessive regulations tie up all kinds of projects,

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Speaker 1: including housing and parks, projects that benefit all kinds of people.

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Speaker 1: So I'd be only too happy if something great, something wonderful,

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Speaker 1: were to come out of DOGE. But it strikes me

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Speaker 1: that a lot of what animates Musk in playing a

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Speaker 1: role in the American federal government concerns not taxing and spending,

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Speaker 1: but regulation of cryptocurrency. After all, the cryptocurrency industry helped

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Speaker 1: get Trump elected, and it expected results. As CNBC reported

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Speaker 1: just after the twenty twenty four election.

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Speaker 3: Bitcoin briefly surging to a new record high as investors

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Speaker 3: bet that Donald Trump will deliver on his pro crypto promises.

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Speaker 1: Just before he was inaugurated, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency

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Speaker 1: dollar sign Trump. By the day of the inauguration, its

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Speaker 1: market value had soared to ten billion dollars. To understand

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Speaker 1: all this, there's no better explainer than Mark Andreesen, a

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Speaker 1: venture capitalist whose company Andresen Horowitz has described itself as

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Speaker 1: the world's biggest investor in cryptocurrency. The Biden administration cracked

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Speaker 1: down on crypto scams. And Reeson says the Biden administration

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Speaker 1: also put pressure on banks not to work with crypto

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Speaker 1: companies in a deliberate bid to stifle the industry. Silicon

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Speaker 1: Valley had long supported Democratic political candidates and in general

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Speaker 1: leaned left, but Andreesen was outraged by the Biden administration's

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Speaker 1: interest in regulating both cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. As he

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Speaker 1: said on his podcast The Mark and Ben Show in

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Speaker 1: July twenty twenty four, it.

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Speaker 12: Has been a brutal assault in an ascent industry that

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Speaker 12: I've never experienced before. I'm in total shock that has happened.

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Speaker 12: It's done intensely frustrating that it's been impossible to make

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Speaker 12: progress in this with the White House.

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Speaker 1: That summer, Musk announced his support for Trump, as Andreason

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Speaker 1: described on another podcast called Honestly from the Free.

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Speaker 12: Press, Elon right. Then Elon stepped up and said, yep,

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Speaker 12: I'm for him. That was the big moment in our

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Speaker 12: industry where the most important iconic figure in tech by far,

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Speaker 12: you know, did that in that moment, and so that

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Speaker 12: was the real shift.

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Speaker 1: And Reason speculated that Musk's endorsement was likely partly pragmatic.

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Speaker 12: I'm not speaking for Elon, but Elon decided that he

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Speaker 12: had to do this because if not, he wasn't going

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Speaker 12: to be able to launch rockets.

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Speaker 1: Andreeson himself ranks pretty high on the list of the

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Speaker 1: highest donors to the Trump campaign. He soon became a

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Speaker 1: Trump intimate, recruiting people from Silicon Valley to work or

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Speaker 1: to volunteer for the incoming administration. With Doge and within

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Speaker 1: the Trump administration, Musk and Andreeson are achieving what the

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Speaker 1: technocrats of the nineteen thirties could only dream of the technocracy.

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Speaker 1: Andreson is also the author of an excellent distillation of Muskism.

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Speaker 1: It is called the Techno Optimist Manifesto, though it could

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Speaker 1: equally have been called the Manifesto of Muscism. It consists

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Speaker 1: of a list of statements, we can advance to a

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Speaker 1: far superior way of living and of being. We have

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Speaker 1: the tools, the systems, the ideas, we have the will.

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Speaker 1: We believe this is why our descendants will live in

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Speaker 1: the stars. If only we place our faith in the

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Speaker 1: techno capital machine and recent promises, we will become technological superman.

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Speaker 1: We are the Apex predator. We believe in greatness. We

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Speaker 1: believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness, strength, and recent sites

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Speaker 1: among his inspirations for this manifesto. On the list of

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Speaker 1: patron Saints of Techno Optimism Filippo Tomaso Marinetti. In nineteen

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Speaker 1: o nine, Marinetti wrote what he called the Futurist Manifesto.

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Speaker 1: It's a list of statements. We want to sing the

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Speaker 1: love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. We

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Speaker 1: want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march,

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Speaker 1: the perilous sleep, the slap and the blow with the fist.

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Speaker 1: We want to sing the man at the wheel. We

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Speaker 1: want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism. Standing

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Speaker 1: on the World Summit, we launched once again our insolent

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Speaker 1: challenge to the stars. So say Mojo, fists raised to

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Speaker 1: the stars. Ten years after Marinetti wrote the Manifesto of Futurism,

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Speaker 1: he co wrote the founding document of the movement led

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Speaker 1: by Mussolini, the Manifesto of Fascism. Marc Andreesen, like any

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Speaker 1: reasonable person, hates it when people call people they disagree with, fascists,

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Speaker 1: But here he cited the author of a fascist manifesto

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Speaker 1: as a major inspiration for his own manifesto, which is why,

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Speaker 1: to me, at least, the future envisioned by techno libertarians

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Speaker 1: happens to look chillingly like the very worst of the past.

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Speaker 1: The twenty first century is an age of technological wonder.

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Speaker 1: It is in many ways tremendously thrilling. Tesla and SpaceX

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Speaker 1: are engineering marvels, but I don't find Muskism thrilling as

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Speaker 1: political theory or social engineering. In twenty twenty one, the

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Speaker 1: year Elon Musk became the Doge father Time magazine made

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Speaker 1: an announcement.

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Speaker 14: The person in the Year is Elon Musk. He is

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Speaker 14: reshaping life on Earth and possibly life off Earth as well.

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Speaker 14: And this is someone also who, in becoming the richest

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Speaker 14: person in the history of the world this year, really

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Speaker 14: speaks to the moment we're in.

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Speaker 1: Not mentioned in the Person of the Year announcement was

434
00:27:00,476 --> 00:27:03,076
Speaker 1: that at the time, two different women who were carrying

435
00:27:03,156 --> 00:27:07,676
Speaker 1: Musk's babies were in the same hospital in Texas. Musk

436
00:27:07,756 --> 00:27:11,196
Speaker 1: already had seven children, but he believes that a falling

437
00:27:11,236 --> 00:27:15,276
Speaker 1: birth rate is a civilizational threat and he means to

438
00:27:15,316 --> 00:27:18,436
Speaker 1: solve it. He seems particularly fond of a son born

439
00:27:18,516 --> 00:27:22,636
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty, during the pandemic, when Musk himself underwent

440
00:27:22,636 --> 00:27:26,076
Speaker 1: a kind of rebirth. He's often photographed carrying on his

441
00:27:26,116 --> 00:27:30,196
Speaker 1: shoulders this beautiful little blonde boy, and sometimes even brings

442
00:27:30,236 --> 00:27:37,396
Speaker 1: him along to press interviews. What's your name? What's your name? Actually?

443
00:27:37,396 --> 00:27:41,756
Speaker 10: You should we help President Trump?

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00:27:42,076 --> 00:27:49,476
Speaker 12: Yeah?

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00:27:50,396 --> 00:27:54,596
Speaker 1: Next time. On X men, the Astounding Tale of Baby

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00:27:54,996 --> 00:27:55,076
Speaker 1: x