Speaker 1: Pushkin. The COVID nineteen pandemic was a boom time for
Speaker 1: the world's billionaires, who gained nearly two trillion dollars of
Speaker 1: wealth in twenty twenty alone. As CNBC reported at the
Speaker 1: height of the pandemic, one of those billionaires was fast
Speaker 1: climbing the list of the world's richest people.
Speaker 2: Ewon Musk just past Bill Gates become the second richest
Speaker 2: man in the world, with a fortune of over one
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty eight billion dollars.
Speaker 1: For a while, he jockeyed for the top place with
Speaker 1: other tech giants.
Speaker 3: Altogether, the worth of those on the list is thirteen
Speaker 3: point one trillion dollars, up from eight trillion last year,
Speaker 3: the rise occurring as most the world was shut down
Speaker 3: during the pandemic.
Speaker 1: By the end of that year, Elon Musk had become
Speaker 1: the richest man in the world. It was also during
Speaker 1: the pandemic that Musk underwent a political conversion, moving to
Speaker 1: the right. By twenty twenty four, he'd become one of
Speaker 1: Donald Trump's closest advisors.
Speaker 4: Take Over Elaid, Yes, take Elon Musk is taking over
Speaker 4: with an Act to government spending in a newly created
Speaker 4: Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is also the
Speaker 4: name of a cryptocurrency inspired by a dog meme.
Speaker 1: Doge the Department of Government Efficiency, staffed by Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: entrepreneurs and engineers hoping to make use of artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: to reinvent American government. Welcome to x Men. The Elon
Speaker 1: Musk origin Story. I'm Jill Lapour. I'm a historian professor
Speaker 1: at Harvard. This episode is the fifth in a series
Speaker 1: I've been hosting about a new kind of capitalism called Muskism.
Speaker 1: Extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism, a form of capitalism influenced
Speaker 1: by fantasies that come from science fiction. It's all bound
Speaker 1: up with a tech bro vibe, comic books and superheroes,
Speaker 1: fantasy and video games. The tech overlords as the Lords
Speaker 1: of the Rings. This episode is called The Doge Father.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk, Money, cryptocurrency, and the rise of techno Libertarianism.
Speaker 1: As Donald Trump took office in twenty seventeen, Elon Musk
Speaker 1: had achieved phenomenal really almost unbelievable success, especially with Tesla
Speaker 1: and SpaceX, both of which were headquartered in California. He
Speaker 1: was then a darling of the press it seemed as
Speaker 1: though anytime Musk did anything at all, even just tweeting,
Speaker 1: newsroom phones lit up. He was a golden boy with
Speaker 1: super fans who adored him as a real life Tony
Speaker 1: Stark iron Man. Then came COVID the coronavirus. Panic is dumb,
Speaker 1: Musk tweeted on March sixth, twenty Twenty days later, the
Speaker 1: governor of California announced that the state would shut down,
Speaker 1: that we direct a statewide order for people to stay
Speaker 1: at home. Musk was furious, and we are confident that
Speaker 1: the people of the state of California will abide by it.
Speaker 1: They'll do the right thing. Musk vowed to keep his
Speaker 1: Tesla factory open, tweeting Free America Now, Elon Musk is
Speaker 1: escalating his fight with a California county, restarting a Tesla
Speaker 1: factory in Fremont despite a stay at home order there. Then,
Speaker 1: in protest of California's strict regulations, Musk announced that he
Speaker 1: was moving to lightly regulated Texas and had decided to
Speaker 1: build Tesla's gigafactory there too. We approached both Tesla and
Speaker 1: SpaceX for a response on several points in the series,
Speaker 1: but at the time of the recording, we had not
Speaker 1: received a reply, one way or another. Musk had become
Speaker 1: a culture warrior, tweeting and tweeting and getting richer and richer. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: during the pandemic, the contrast between the suffering of the
Speaker 1: masses and the vasting increase of wealth among a very
Speaker 1: few provoked a backlash. In the US, Senator Bernard Sanders
Speaker 1: proposed the Make Billionaires Pay Act, a one time tax
Speaker 1: on American billionaires to help cover the out of pocket
Speaker 1: medical expenses of ordinary Americans for one year. Musk then
Speaker 1: got into a Twitter war with Sanders. Sanders claimed Musk's
Speaker 1: wealth had been made possible by billions of dollars in
Speaker 1: government subsidies for his corporations. Musk suggested that Sanders should
Speaker 1: leave him alone because Tesla is saving the planet. Musk
Speaker 1: may not have been saving the planet, but his influence,
Speaker 1: especially on markets, kept growing. Like a lot of people,
Speaker 1: during the pandemic, Musk spent more time than ever online.
Speaker 1: The number of his Twitter followers skyrocketed. As CNBC reported
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one, markets seem to hang on his
Speaker 1: every word.
Speaker 5: One thing we've learned lately is that when Elon Musk tweets.
Speaker 5: The news cycle follows him, and in fact he does
Speaker 5: have a series of tweets in the past few minutes
Speaker 5: says I'm selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house,
Speaker 5: says Tesla. Stock price is too high im in my opinion,
Speaker 5: and now give people back their freedom. It's going to
Speaker 5: get attention. Stock now down almost seven percent.
Speaker 1: This became a signature feature of Muskism long before a
Speaker 1: Musk bought Twitter. A single tweet by a single person,
Speaker 1: not an announcement from a central bank, could drive a
Speaker 1: stock price or hobble a currency market. In January twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, after the insurrection at the US capital Twitter
Speaker 1: band Trump with Trump Gone, Musk became the loudest voice
Speaker 1: in the room. The Love Hate Twitter account to follow.
Speaker 1: He started tweeting about cryptocurrency Bitcoin and a joke coin
Speaker 1: called dogecoin. If Trump's tweets destabilized American politics, Musk's tweets
Speaker 1: seemed to be destabilizing financial markets. A lot of headlines
Speaker 1: had to do with the fictive quality of money. After all,
Speaker 1: all forms of currency are acts of imagination. As Douglas
Speaker 1: Adams pointed out so well in the Hitchhiker's Guide to
Speaker 1: the Galaxy.
Speaker 6: In fact, there are three freely convertible currencies in the universe,
Speaker 6: but the Alterian dollar has recently collapsed, the Flanian pobble
Speaker 6: bead is only exchangeable for other Flanian pobble beads, and
Speaker 6: the trigantic pew doesn't really count as money. Its exchange
Speaker 6: rate of six ningyas to one pew is simple, but
Speaker 6: since a ninga is a triangular rubber coin eight hundred
Speaker 6: miles long each side, no one has ever collected enough
Speaker 6: to own one pew. Ning is a not negotiable currency
Speaker 6: because the galactic banks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.
Speaker 6: From this basic premise, it's very simple to prove that
Speaker 6: the Galectic banks are also the products of a deranged imagination.
Speaker 1: I've spent a lot of time in this investigation of
Speaker 1: Musk with Hitchhiker's Guide, because Musk read it as a
Speaker 1: kid growing up in South Africa, and he cites it
Speaker 1: all the time. But Hitchhiker's Guide is a strange influence
Speaker 1: for Muscuism, partly because Adams was so brutally gut wrenchingly
Speaker 1: funny about the arbitrariness of money and the follies of
Speaker 1: financial schemers and assorted idiot executives.
Speaker 7: If we could, for a moment move on to the
Speaker 7: subject of fiscal policy.
Speaker 8: School policy, How can you have money if none of
Speaker 8: you actually produce anything?
Speaker 2: It doesn't grow on tree?
Speaker 1: And Adams was particularly devastating on the subject of the
Speaker 1: damage done to the natural world by advanced extractive capitalism.
Speaker 7: Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt leaves
Speaker 7: as legal tender, we have, of course, or become immensely rich.
Speaker 7: We have also run into a small instation problem on
Speaker 7: account of the high level of leaf availability, which means
Speaker 7: that I gather the current going rate has something like
Speaker 7: three major deciduous forests buying one ship's peanuts. So in
Speaker 7: order to obviate this problem and defectively revalue the leaf,
Speaker 7: we are about to embark on an extensive defiliation campaign
Speaker 7: and burn down all the forests. I think that's a
Speaker 7: sensible movie economic time.
Speaker 1: If you've been following the story of cryptocurrency, this scene
Speaker 1: from Hitchhiker's Guide might sound a little too on the nose.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty one, Musk announced that Tesla was buying
Speaker 1: millions of dollars of bitcoin and that you could buy
Speaker 1: a Tesla with bitcoin, until he changed his mind, citing
Speaker 1: the sort of environmental concerns that I looked into in
Speaker 1: an earlier episode of this series. It turns out that
Speaker 1: mining bitcoin really is burning down the forests. But you
Speaker 1: can buy Tesla merchandise with doge coin, and maybe you
Speaker 1: can sway a presidential election. In the twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: US presidential election, nearly half of all corporate spending came
Speaker 1: from the cryptocurrency industry. Some of that money went to Democrats,
Speaker 1: but most of it went to Republicans. Among the billionaires
Speaker 1: celebrating the announcement of doge that Apartment of government efficiency
Speaker 1: was the CEO of the cryptocurrency company Coinbase. Cryptocurrency is
Speaker 1: essentially money without government, a libertarian's dream. Doge's mandate is
Speaker 1: to reduce government spending and to eliminate government regulations. The
Speaker 1: second of these is a lot easier than the first.
Speaker 1: What dismantling regulations might mean for money is a story,
Speaker 1: though that goes back to the beginning of those regulations.
Speaker 1: The kerfuffle over bitcoin really dates to eighteen forty eight
Speaker 1: and the discovery of gold in California. A flood of
Speaker 1: gold retavoc on the US dollar, and so as the
Speaker 1: federal government took on new powers, it adopted a gold standard,
Speaker 1: which set a rate for the price of paper currency.
Speaker 1: Europe then did the same thing. This ushered in a
Speaker 1: new era of global trade, and not incidentally, the grotesque
Speaker 1: economic inequality of the Gilded Age. Farmers and factory workers
Speaker 1: argued for a silver standard, but the US formally established
Speaker 1: the gold standard in the year nineteen hundred. That same year,
Speaker 1: a science fiction writer named Garrett P. Servis imagined a
Speaker 1: different outcome in a novel called Moon Metal, in which
Speaker 1: gold is discovered at the South Pole, setting off a
Speaker 1: second gold rush.
Speaker 9: Gold is going to be as plentiful as ire. If
Speaker 9: there were not such a flood of it, we might manage.
Speaker 9: But when they begin to make trouser buttons out of
Speaker 9: the same metal that is now locked and guarded in
Speaker 9: steel vaults wound, where will be our standard of worth?
Speaker 9: My dear fellow, I would as willingly face the end
Speaker 9: of the world as this that's coming.
Speaker 1: Just then, a sinister scientist discovers a mysterious new metal
Speaker 1: on the Moon which he can beam to Earth by
Speaker 1: way of a particle ray and introduces a new and
Speaker 1: more precious form of currency.
Speaker 8: I can produce it in the pure form abundantly enough
Speaker 8: to replace gold, giving the same relative value and the
Speaker 8: gold possessed when it was the universal stand.
Speaker 9: But that will make you the richest man who ever lived. Undoubtedly,
Speaker 9: why you will become the financial dictator of the whole earth.
Speaker 1: Undoubtedly, currency is always a worry. Its value is so contrived,
Speaker 1: so imaginary, but also so important. After the stock market
Speaker 1: crash of nineteen twenty nine, people took their money out
Speaker 1: of the banks and turned in their paper dollars for gold.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen thirties, the US abandoned the gold standard,
Speaker 1: at least for the duration of the depression, and prohibited
Speaker 1: the private ownership of gold. If you've been listening to
Speaker 1: x Men for the last few episodes, you'll remember that
Speaker 1: it was during this era that in Canada, Elon Musk's
Speaker 1: grandfather joined and became a leader of the technocracy movement,
Speaker 1: founded on the belief that engineers could solve all political,
Speaker 1: social and economic problems. Technocrats did not believe in price.
Speaker 2: By price system is not meant merely the capitalistic system,
Speaker 2: which is only one variety of the species. It means
Speaker 2: the collapse and complete obsolescence of the entire method of
Speaker 2: distributing goods and services by means of a price.
Speaker 1: Technocrats didn't believe in prices because they didn't believe in
Speaker 1: any system not run by engineers. They wanted to get
Speaker 1: rid of both governments and banks.
Speaker 2: There will be no place for politics or politicians, finance
Speaker 2: or financiers. Rackets are racketeers.
Speaker 1: In place of prices and money. Technocrats wanted to reimagine
Speaker 1: the entire economic system with a new currency, a unit
Speaker 1: of energy, an erg whose stability would eradicate the volatility
Speaker 1: of finance.
Speaker 2: A dollar may be worth in buying power so much
Speaker 2: today and moral less tomorrow, but a unit of work
Speaker 2: or heat is the same in nineteen hundred, nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty three, all the year two thousand.
Speaker 1: The URG never did replace the dollar, and the US
Speaker 1: formally abandoned the gold standard in nineteen seventy six, But
Speaker 1: starting in two thousand and nine, people who want to
Speaker 1: trade in units other than dollars can buy bitcoins. Bitcoin
Speaker 1: a cryptocurrency isn't based on anything of value, Although not
Speaker 1: unlike the URG, it has some relationship to energy, the
Speaker 1: energy it takes to produce it. After Trump's election in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, the price of bitcoin skyrocketed higher than it
Speaker 1: had ever been before, and Trump withdrew the US from
Speaker 1: the Paris Climate Accords. But bitcoin's value, like the value
Speaker 1: of other money, only exists if you believe it exists.
Speaker 1: JP Morgan once suggested that bitcoin was poised to become
Speaker 1: the new gold standard.
Speaker 10: Cryptocurrencies were designed to make payments without a trusted third party,
Speaker 10: such as a government or a financial institution involved.
Speaker 1: Ishuar Prasad is an economist at Cornell University and a
Speaker 1: fellow at the Brookings Institute. He believes cryptocurrency has set
Speaker 1: off a revolution, a foundational change in finance, but that
Speaker 1: bitcoin itself has not met its objectives.
Speaker 10: Bitcoin has really ended up failing in what it was
Speaker 10: supposed to provide, which is a cheap, trustless medium of exchange.
Speaker 10: It turns out it is not anonymous, it turns out
Speaker 10: it is not cheap, and it is not very efficient.
Speaker 10: So Bitcoin has centered up becoming a pure speculative asset.
Speaker 1: The technology underlying cryptocurrencies, Prosad argues, well, have all kinds
Speaker 1: of effects on finance. It really is the future. But
Speaker 1: he's not persuaded that, as some advocates claim, cryptocurrencies will
Speaker 1: democratize finance.
Speaker 10: They've made it possible for people with very low incomes,
Speaker 10: very low levels of wealth, to get relatively easy access
Speaker 10: to digital payments and also to basic banking products. The
Speaker 10: problem is that digital access is unequal and financial literacy
Speaker 10: is unequal. So you might give people easy access to
Speaker 10: a lot of products, but if you don't teach them
Speaker 10: the risks emburied in those products, then you might end
Speaker 10: up with the relatively less well off taking on much
Speaker 10: more risks than they realize that they're taking on, and
Speaker 10: the rich ending up being able to use these technologies
Speaker 10: much more to their advantage, so they become even better
Speaker 10: off than they are right now.
Speaker 1: Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on nothing except a meme about
Speaker 1: a dog, was started by a software engineer named Jackson
Speaker 1: Palmer as a joke. Palmer later wrote an article called
Speaker 1: my joke, Cryptocurrency hit two billion dollars and something is
Speaker 1: Very wrong, in which he said that cryptocurrency, for all
Speaker 1: its promise, had become nothing more than an unregulated penny
Speaker 1: stock market. In twenty nineteen, after people started tweeting that
Speaker 1: Musk should be the CEO of dogecoin, he said it
Speaker 1: was his favorite cryptocurrency. Doge coin's value skyrocketed, Musk kept
Speaker 1: tweeting about it, and up when its price he started
Speaker 1: calling himself the doge Father. Musk talked about doge coin
Speaker 1: on Clubhouse, an online chat room that was briefly popular
Speaker 1: with Silicon.
Speaker 11: Valley occasionally make jokes about dogecoin that are really just
Speaker 11: meant to be joked, but dose coin was made as
Speaker 11: a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies. Obviously, but fate
Speaker 11: loves irony, and as part of my says that the
Speaker 11: most ironic outcome is most likely, or I say the
Speaker 11: most entertaining outcome is often most likely and arguably the
Speaker 11: most entertaining outcome, and the most ironic outcome would be
Speaker 11: that dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in the future.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty one, Musk tweeted the single word doge
Speaker 1: under a picture of a SpaceX rocket in front of
Speaker 1: the moon. Doge to the Moon became a rallying cry.
Speaker 1: On April Fool's Day that year, Musk tweeted, SpaceX is
Speaker 1: going to put a literal doge coin on the literal
Speaker 1: moon a joke, but also not a joke, Musk said
Speaker 1: that SpaceX will be accepting doge coin as payment. Was
Speaker 1: Musk a comic? The next month, Musk hosted NBC's Saturday
Speaker 1: Night Live. He appeared in nearly every sketch as the
Speaker 1: Nintendo villain Warrio on trial for murdering Mario. He explained,
Speaker 1: I'm not evil, I'm just misunderstood. In a skit set
Speaker 1: in the Old West, he played a bandit named Leron.
Speaker 12: What had instead of panning for gold?
Speaker 10: We just created our own cardsy currency.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and what the heck would it be based on?
Speaker 11: Whatever we say?
Speaker 13: It's based on that.
Speaker 12: Hey, how money works.
Speaker 4: Money ain't a golden rock that we dig out of
Speaker 4: the ground. Then we hope no one kills.
Speaker 10: Us before we train it for pieces of green paper.
Speaker 14: It's a perfect system.
Speaker 1: It's a weird thing about being a historian. Everything reminds
Speaker 1: you of something else. Watching Elon Musk play Leron dressed
Speaker 1: like a cowboy, he looked exactly like an old photograph
Speaker 1: of his grandfather, the technocrat, who worked as a cowboy
Speaker 1: and performed at rodeos doing rope tricks. The family likeness
Speaker 1: is uncanny. Musk is also named after that cowboy's father,
Speaker 1: his great grandfather, Elon muscism asks us to picture always
Speaker 1: the future, but I find it hard not to keep
Speaker 1: picturing the past. Yanked back lassoed by likenesses on SNL,
Speaker 1: Musk appeared too on the show's newscast as a cryptocurrency
Speaker 1: expert who can't give a straight answer.
Speaker 5: What is dose coin?
Speaker 11: Well, it actually started as a joke based on an
Speaker 11: Internet meme.
Speaker 5: Okay, but what is dose coin?
Speaker 1: Finally he admits the truth.
Speaker 11: I keep telling you it's a cryptocurrency you can trade
Speaker 11: for conventional money. Oh so the hustle, Yeah, that's uses.
Speaker 8: Everybody to the.
Speaker 1: That night, dogecoin lost a third of its value. Me
Speaker 1: I was left thinking about the ending to that old
Speaker 1: science fiction story Moon Metal from the year nineteen hundred.
Speaker 13: The looting of the Moon brought disaster to the rubber planet.
Speaker 13: So mad were the efforts to get the precious metal
Speaker 13: that the surface of our globe was fairly showered with it.
Speaker 13: The air was filled with shining dust, until finally famine
Speaker 13: and pestilence joined hands with financial disaster to punish the
Speaker 13: grasping world.
Speaker 1: At the end of moon, metal markets collapse until an
Speaker 1: international agreement leads to government control of currency. That is
Speaker 1: what governments do in the US through the Federal Reserve
Speaker 1: and through the Securities in Exchange Commission. The Biden administration
Speaker 1: prosecuted crypto companies for securities violations under rules that the
Speaker 1: crypto industry complained were unclear and misguided. The second Trump
Speaker 1: administration is considering freezing much of that litigation.
Speaker 10: How much do you.
Speaker 2: Think we can rip out of this wasted six point
Speaker 2: five trillion dollar Paris Biden budget?
Speaker 11: Well, I think we could do at least two trillion.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 1: At a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden in New
Speaker 1: York just before the election, Musk made some predictions about
Speaker 1: the Department of Government deficiency.
Speaker 11: We're going to get the government off your back and
Speaker 11: out of your pocketbook. America's does not not It's just
Speaker 11: going to be great. America is going to reach heights
Speaker 11: that it has never seen before.
Speaker 1: There is arguably a great deal of waste in the
Speaker 1: US federal budget, though exactly where is the subject of
Speaker 1: rather heated dispute, and many argued there's an excess of regulation.
Speaker 1: Musk says that it takes longer to fill out the
Speaker 1: paperwork to build a rocket than it takes to actually
Speaker 1: build the rocket. Excessive regulations tie up all kinds of projects,
Speaker 1: including housing and parks, projects that benefit all kinds of people.
Speaker 1: So I'd be only too happy if something great, something wonderful,
Speaker 1: were to come out of DOGE. But it strikes me
Speaker 1: that a lot of what animates Musk in playing a
Speaker 1: role in the American federal government concerns not taxing and spending,
Speaker 1: but regulation of cryptocurrency. After all, the cryptocurrency industry helped
Speaker 1: get Trump elected, and it expected results. As CNBC reported
Speaker 1: just after the twenty twenty four election.
Speaker 3: Bitcoin briefly surging to a new record high as investors
Speaker 3: bet that Donald Trump will deliver on his pro crypto promises.
Speaker 1: Just before he was inaugurated, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency
Speaker 1: dollar sign Trump. By the day of the inauguration, its
Speaker 1: market value had soared to ten billion dollars. To understand
Speaker 1: all this, there's no better explainer than Mark Andreesen, a
Speaker 1: venture capitalist whose company Andresen Horowitz has described itself as
Speaker 1: the world's biggest investor in cryptocurrency. The Biden administration cracked
Speaker 1: down on crypto scams. And Reeson says the Biden administration
Speaker 1: also put pressure on banks not to work with crypto
Speaker 1: companies in a deliberate bid to stifle the industry. Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley had long supported Democratic political candidates and in general
Speaker 1: leaned left, but Andreesen was outraged by the Biden administration's
Speaker 1: interest in regulating both cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. As he
Speaker 1: said on his podcast The Mark and Ben Show in
Speaker 1: July twenty twenty four, it.
Speaker 12: Has been a brutal assault in an ascent industry that
Speaker 12: I've never experienced before. I'm in total shock that has happened.
Speaker 12: It's done intensely frustrating that it's been impossible to make
Speaker 12: progress in this with the White House.
Speaker 1: That summer, Musk announced his support for Trump, as Andreason
Speaker 1: described on another podcast called Honestly from the Free.
Speaker 12: Press, Elon right. Then Elon stepped up and said, yep,
Speaker 12: I'm for him. That was the big moment in our
Speaker 12: industry where the most important iconic figure in tech by far,
Speaker 12: you know, did that in that moment, and so that
Speaker 12: was the real shift.
Speaker 1: And Reason speculated that Musk's endorsement was likely partly pragmatic.
Speaker 12: I'm not speaking for Elon, but Elon decided that he
Speaker 12: had to do this because if not, he wasn't going
Speaker 12: to be able to launch rockets.
Speaker 1: Andreeson himself ranks pretty high on the list of the
Speaker 1: highest donors to the Trump campaign. He soon became a
Speaker 1: Trump intimate, recruiting people from Silicon Valley to work or
Speaker 1: to volunteer for the incoming administration. With Doge and within
Speaker 1: the Trump administration, Musk and Andreeson are achieving what the
Speaker 1: technocrats of the nineteen thirties could only dream of the technocracy.
Speaker 1: Andreson is also the author of an excellent distillation of Muskism.
Speaker 1: It is called the Techno Optimist Manifesto, though it could
Speaker 1: equally have been called the Manifesto of Muscism. It consists
Speaker 1: of a list of statements, we can advance to a
Speaker 1: far superior way of living and of being. We have
Speaker 1: the tools, the systems, the ideas, we have the will.
Speaker 1: We believe this is why our descendants will live in
Speaker 1: the stars. If only we place our faith in the
Speaker 1: techno capital machine and recent promises, we will become technological superman.
Speaker 1: We are the Apex predator. We believe in greatness. We
Speaker 1: believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness, strength, and recent sites
Speaker 1: among his inspirations for this manifesto. On the list of
Speaker 1: patron Saints of Techno Optimism Filippo Tomaso Marinetti. In nineteen
Speaker 1: o nine, Marinetti wrote what he called the Futurist Manifesto.
Speaker 1: It's a list of statements. We want to sing the
Speaker 1: love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. We
Speaker 1: want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march,
Speaker 1: the perilous sleep, the slap and the blow with the fist.
Speaker 1: We want to sing the man at the wheel. We
Speaker 1: want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism. Standing
Speaker 1: on the World Summit, we launched once again our insolent
Speaker 1: challenge to the stars. So say Mojo, fists raised to
Speaker 1: the stars. Ten years after Marinetti wrote the Manifesto of Futurism,
Speaker 1: he co wrote the founding document of the movement led
Speaker 1: by Mussolini, the Manifesto of Fascism. Marc Andreesen, like any
Speaker 1: reasonable person, hates it when people call people they disagree with, fascists,
Speaker 1: But here he cited the author of a fascist manifesto
Speaker 1: as a major inspiration for his own manifesto, which is why,
Speaker 1: to me, at least, the future envisioned by techno libertarians
Speaker 1: happens to look chillingly like the very worst of the past.
Speaker 1: The twenty first century is an age of technological wonder.
Speaker 1: It is in many ways tremendously thrilling. Tesla and SpaceX
Speaker 1: are engineering marvels, but I don't find Muskism thrilling as
Speaker 1: political theory or social engineering. In twenty twenty one, the
Speaker 1: year Elon Musk became the Doge father Time magazine made
Speaker 1: an announcement.
Speaker 14: The person in the Year is Elon Musk. He is
Speaker 14: reshaping life on Earth and possibly life off Earth as well.
Speaker 14: And this is someone also who, in becoming the richest
Speaker 14: person in the history of the world this year, really
Speaker 14: speaks to the moment we're in.
Speaker 1: Not mentioned in the Person of the Year announcement was
Speaker 1: that at the time, two different women who were carrying
Speaker 1: Musk's babies were in the same hospital in Texas. Musk
Speaker 1: already had seven children, but he believes that a falling
Speaker 1: birth rate is a civilizational threat and he means to
Speaker 1: solve it. He seems particularly fond of a son born
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty, during the pandemic, when Musk himself underwent
Speaker 1: a kind of rebirth. He's often photographed carrying on his
Speaker 1: shoulders this beautiful little blonde boy, and sometimes even brings
Speaker 1: him along to press interviews. What's your name? What's your name? Actually?
Speaker 10: You should we help President Trump?
Speaker 12: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Next time. On X men, the Astounding Tale of Baby
Speaker 1: x