Speaker 1: Pushkin. The global pandemic was a boom time for American billionaires,
Speaker 1: who gained a trillion dollars of wealth in twenty twenty alone,
Speaker 1: and as CNBC reported at the height of the pandemic,
Speaker 1: one of those billionaires was fast climbing the list of
Speaker 1: the world's richest people. Elon Musk just past Bill Gates
Speaker 1: become the second richest man in the world, with a
Speaker 1: fortune of over one hundred and twenty eight billion dollars.
Speaker 1: At the start of twenty twenty one, Elon Musk became
Speaker 1: the richest man in the world. Since then, he's been
Speaker 1: jockeying for the top place with other tech giants. As
Speaker 1: NBC reported the spring. Altogether, the worth of those on
Speaker 1: the list is thirteen point one trillion dollars, up from
Speaker 1: eight trillion last year. The rise ring as most the
Speaker 1: world was shut down during the pandemic. Welcome to The
Speaker 1: Evening Rocket. I'm Jill Lapour. I'm a historian, a professor
Speaker 1: at Harvard. This episode, which is called robin Hood, is
Speaker 1: the last in the series I've been hosting about a
Speaker 1: new kind of capitalism. Call it Muskism, extravagant extreme capitalism,
Speaker 1: extra terrestrial capitalism, a form of capitalism influenced by fantasies
Speaker 1: that come from science fiction. During the pandemic, the contrast
Speaker 1: between the dire suffering of the masses and the vast
Speaker 1: increase of wealth among a very few cast Muskism in
Speaker 1: a particularly troubling light. In the US, Bernie Sanders proposed
Speaker 1: the Make Billionaires Pay Act, a one time tax on
Speaker 1: American billionaires to help cover the out of pocket medical
Speaker 1: expenses of ordinary Americans for one year. Musk then got
Speaker 1: into a Twitter war with Sanders. Sanders claimed Musk's well
Speaker 1: had been made possible by billions of dollars in government
Speaker 1: subsidies for his corporations. Musk suggested that Sanders should leave
Speaker 1: him alone because Tesla is saving the planet. Lately, what
Speaker 1: with one thing and another, Elon Musk has been in
Speaker 1: the headlines more or less constantly. He's had phenomenal, really
Speaker 1: almost unbelievable success. The electric car revolution really does seem
Speaker 1: to be coming, and a lot of that is thanks
Speaker 1: to Tesla, to Musk's vision, and to Tesla's commitment to
Speaker 1: renewable energy. Meanwhile, Musk's other company, SpaceX, has spectacularly realized
Speaker 1: the promise of its founding with the success of rockets
Speaker 1: that go up and come down safely, they're reusable, and
Speaker 1: with SpaceX carrying astronauts to the International Space Station. Then
Speaker 1: there's Neuralink, which Musk announced has implanted a computer chip
Speaker 1: in the brain of a live pig named Gertrude. Thebets
Speaker 1: you're hearing are real time signals from the neural link
Speaker 1: in Gertrude's head. In other recent Musk news, Starlink, another
Speaker 1: SpaceX project, launched a record number of satellites, as reported
Speaker 1: by CBS News and Sacramento NAH to a string of
Speaker 1: lights streaking across northern California tonight, and the sky lit up.
Speaker 1: Our newsroom falls lit up as well, bringing off the
Speaker 1: hook with people wondering what are they. It seemed as
Speaker 1: though anytime Musk did anything at all, newsroom phones lit
Speaker 1: up with controversy. Those satellites were designed to bring Internet
Speaker 1: service to the least networked parts of the world, but
Speaker 1: some astronomers said they were ruining the night sky. SpaceX
Speaker 1: believes these fears are overstated and Gertrude the pig. Some
Speaker 1: neuroscientists were dubious about this experiment. One researcher telling the BBC,
Speaker 1: the science was mediocre, and during the pandemic, Musk at
Speaker 1: first opposed the shutdown and vowed to keep his Tesla
Speaker 1: factory open, tweeting in all caps free America. Now Elon
Speaker 1: Musk is escalating his fight with a California county, restarting
Speaker 1: a Tesla factory in Fremont despite a stay at home
Speaker 1: order there. Then, in protest of California's strict regulations, Musk
Speaker 1: announced that he was moving too lightly regulated Texas and
Speaker 1: had decided to build Tesla's gigafactory there too. We approached
Speaker 1: both Tesla and SpaceX for a response on several points
Speaker 1: in the series, but at the time of the recording
Speaker 1: we had not received a reply. If earlier, Elon Musk
Speaker 1: had been Iron Man, a hybrid Silicon Valley Hollywood superhero.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty one, he dubbed himself the doge Father
Speaker 1: after the cryptocurrency as if he were head of a cryptomfia.
Speaker 1: A CNBC reported market seemed to hang on his every word.
Speaker 1: One thing we've learned lately is that when Elon Musk tweets,
Speaker 1: the news cycle follows him, and in fact, he does
Speaker 1: have a series of tweets in the past few minutes,
Speaker 1: says I'm selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house,
Speaker 1: says Las. Stock price is too high, IMMO in my opinion,
Speaker 1: and now give people back their freedom. It's going to
Speaker 1: get attention. Stock now down almost seven percent. In the
Speaker 1: world of Muski is m a single tweet by a
Speaker 1: single person, not an announcement from a central bank, can
Speaker 1: drive a stock pricer hobble a currency market. In January,
Speaker 1: after the insurrection at the US capital Twitter band Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: With Trump gone, Musks seemed to become the loudest voice
Speaker 1: in the room the Love Hate Twitter account to follow.
Speaker 1: If Trump's tweets destabilized American politics, Musk's tweets, as even
Speaker 1: the doge Father himself observed, seemed to be destabilizing financial markets. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: as Musk, Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg jockeyed for
Speaker 1: first place in the World's Richest Man contest with inconceivably
Speaker 1: large fortunes, a lot of headlines had to do with
Speaker 1: the fictive quality of money. After all, all forms of
Speaker 1: currency are acts of imagination. As Douglas Adams pointed out
Speaker 1: so well in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy. In fact,
Speaker 1: there are three freely convertible currencies in the universe, but
Speaker 1: the Alterian dollar has reasonly collapsed, the Flanian pubble bead
Speaker 1: is only exchangeable for other Flanian pubble beads, and the
Speaker 1: trigantic pew doesn't really counted money. I started out this
Speaker 1: series with The Hitchhiker's Guide because Elon Musk read it
Speaker 1: as a kid growing up in South Africa, and he
Speaker 1: cites it all the time, like, for instance, when he
Speaker 1: announced that he plans to name the first ship to
Speaker 1: Mars the Heart of Gold. But The Hitchhiker's Guide is
Speaker 1: also a strange influence on Muskism, partly because Adams was
Speaker 1: so brutally gut wrenchingly funny about the arbitrariness of money
Speaker 1: and the foibles and follies of financial schemers and assorted
Speaker 1: idiot executives. If we could, up a moment, move on
Speaker 1: to the starbitalis school policys, school policy. How can you
Speaker 1: have money if none of you actually produce anything? It
Speaker 1: doesn't grow on tree? And Adams was particularly devastating on
Speaker 1: the subject of the damage done to the natural world
Speaker 1: by advanced extractive capitalism, since we decided a few weeks
Speaker 1: ago to adopt leaves of legal tender. We have, of course,
Speaker 1: all the comm immense live also run into a small
Speaker 1: intatient problem on account of the high level of leaf availability.
Speaker 1: So in order to obviate this problem and defectively revalue
Speaker 1: the leaf, we are a badlingbach on an extensive defaiation
Speaker 1: campaign and burned on atists. If you've been following the
Speaker 1: story of cryptocurrency, the scene from The Hitchhiker's Guide might
Speaker 1: sound a little too on the nose. Elon Musk had
Speaker 1: been a real booster of bitcoin. He announced earlier this
Speaker 1: year that Tesla was buying millions of dollars of bitcoin
Speaker 1: and that you could buy a Tesla with bitcoin, until
Speaker 1: he changed his mind, citing the sort of environmental concerns
Speaker 1: that I looked into an earlier episode of The Evening Rocket.
Speaker 1: Turns out that mining bitcoin really is burning down the forests.
Speaker 1: But of course there's a backstory to Muscism's relationship to currency,
Speaker 1: so we're going to blast off to the past. The
Speaker 1: kerfuffle over bitcoin really dates to eighteen forty eight and
Speaker 1: the discovery of gold in California. A flood of gold
Speaker 1: reach havoc 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. Service imagined a
Speaker 1: different outcome in a novel called Moon Metal, in which
Speaker 1: gold is discovered at this South Pole, setting off a
Speaker 1: second gold rush. Gold is going to be as plentiful
Speaker 1: as ire. If there were not such a flood of it,
Speaker 1: we might manage. But when they begin to make trouser
Speaker 1: buttons out of the same metal that is now locked
Speaker 1: and guarded in steel vaults, where will be our standard
Speaker 1: of worth? My dear fellow, I would as willingly face
Speaker 1: the end of the world as this that's coming. Just then,
Speaker 1: a sinister scientist discovers a mysterious new metal on the
Speaker 1: Moon which he can beam to Earth by way of
Speaker 1: a particle ray, and introduces a new and more precious
Speaker 1: form of currency. I can produce it in the pure
Speaker 1: form abundantly enough to replace gold, giving it the same
Speaker 1: relative value the gold possessed when it was the universal
Speaker 1: stand But that will make you the richest man who
Speaker 1: ever lived. Undoubtedly, why you will become the financial dictator
Speaker 1: of the whole earth. Undoubtedly, currency is always a worry.
Speaker 1: Its value is so contrived, so imaginary, but also so important.
Speaker 1: After the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine, people
Speaker 1: took their money out of the banks and turned in
Speaker 1: their paper dollars for gold. In the nineteen thirties, the
Speaker 1: US abandoned the gold standard, at least for the duration
Speaker 1: of the depression, and prohibited the private ownership of gold.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to The Evening Rocket for the
Speaker 1: last few episodes, you'll remember that it was during this era.
Speaker 1: Then in Canada, Elon Musk's grandfather joined and became a
Speaker 1: leader of the technocracy movement, founded on the belief that
Speaker 1: engineers could solve all political, social and economic problems. Technocrats
Speaker 1: did not believe in prices. My price system is not
Speaker 1: meant merely the capitalistic system, which is only one variety
Speaker 1: of the species. It means the collapse and complete obsolescence
Speaker 1: of the entire method of distributing goods and services by
Speaker 1: means of a price. Technocrats didn't believe in prices because
Speaker 1: they didn't believe in any system not run by engineers.
Speaker 1: They wanted to get rid of both governments and banks.
Speaker 1: There will be no place for politics or politicians. Finance
Speaker 1: or finance is rackets are racketeers in place of prices
Speaker 1: and money. Technocrats wanted to reimagine the entire economic system
Speaker 1: with a new currency, a unit of energy, an ERG
Speaker 1: whose stability would eradicate the volatility of finance. A dollar
Speaker 1: may be worth in buying power so much today and
Speaker 1: moral as tomorrow, but a unit of work or heat
Speaker 1: is the same in nineteen hundred, nineteen twenty nine, nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty three are the year two thousand. The ERG never
Speaker 1: did replace the dollar, and the US formerly abandoned the
Speaker 1: gold standard in nineteen seventy six, but starting in two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine, people who want to trade in units
Speaker 1: other than dollars can buy bitcoins. Bitcoin a cryptocurrency isn't
Speaker 1: based on anything of value, Although not unlike the ERG,
Speaker 1: it has some relationship to energy. The energy it takes
Speaker 1: to produce it. Financial analysts who talk about bitcoin tend
Speaker 1: to refer not to the Hitchhiker's Guide but to Peter
Speaker 1: Pan and the so called Tinkerbell effect. It takes his
Speaker 1: faith and trust. Oh and something I forgot dust dust
Speaker 1: gaff yep, just a little bit of pixie dust. Bitcoin's value,
Speaker 1: like the value of other money, only exists if you
Speaker 1: believe it exists, like Tinkerbell or Neverland. Nevertheless, in a
Speaker 1: report issued earlier this year, JP Morgan suggested that bitcoin
Speaker 1: is poised to become the new gold standard. Cryptocudencies were
Speaker 1: designed to make payments without a trusted third party, such
Speaker 1: as a government or the financial institution they involved. Eshwar
Speaker 1: Prasad is an economist at Cornell University and a fellow
Speaker 1: at the Brookings Institute, author of a forthcoming book on
Speaker 1: the future of money. He believes cryptocurrency has set off
Speaker 1: a revolution, a foundational change in finance, but that bitcoin
Speaker 1: itself has not admit its subjectives. Bitcoin has really ended
Speaker 1: up failing in what it was supposed to provide, which
Speaker 1: is a cheap, trustless medium of exchange. It turns out
Speaker 1: it is not anonymous. It turns out it is not cheap,
Speaker 1: and it is not very efficient, so bitcoin has centered
Speaker 1: up becoming a pure speculative asset. The technology underlying cryptocurrencies,
Speaker 1: Perside argues, well, of all kinds of effects on finance,
Speaker 1: it really is the future. But he's not persuaded that
Speaker 1: some advocates claim cryptocurrencies will democratize finance. They've made it
Speaker 1: possible for people with very low incomes, very low levels
Speaker 1: of wealth to get relatively easy access to digital payments
Speaker 1: and also to basic banking products. But the problem is
Speaker 1: that digital access is unequal and financial literacy is unequal.
Speaker 1: You might give people easy access to a lot of products,
Speaker 1: but if you don't teach them their risks embedded in
Speaker 1: those products, then you might end up with the relatively
Speaker 1: less well off taking on much more risks than they
Speaker 1: realize that they're taking on, and the rich ending up
Speaker 1: being able to use his technologies much more to their advantage,
Speaker 1: so they become even better off than they are right now.
Speaker 1: One version of that story is the story of robin Hood,
Speaker 1: when feudal barons ravaged the countryside to live in pomp
Speaker 1: and splendor. When one man alone, they're challenged the might
Speaker 1: of his country's oppressors, robin Hood. No, not that robin hood.
Speaker 1: This robin hood couldn't be easier to make a trade
Speaker 1: using the robin Hood app three taps, I just bought
Speaker 1: some stock earlier this year, this robin hood the investing
Speaker 1: app led to a rockiss over a video game company
Speaker 1: called game Stop. A number of Wall Street firms had
Speaker 1: taken a bet that the pri of game Stop stock
Speaker 1: would fall, and somehow a group of people on Reddit
Speaker 1: decided that they were going to take on these hedge
Speaker 1: funds and show them the power of the masses. So
Speaker 1: they basically rallied around a lot of retail investors who
Speaker 1: would start buying up game Stop stock, thereby driving up
Speaker 1: its price. So they started buying up shares, which was
Speaker 1: made possible through this robin Hood app which allows for
Speaker 1: low cost or essentially zero commissioned trading. The problem, of course,
Speaker 1: is that those who got to the party late were
Speaker 1: the retail investors, and they got sucked in and ended
Speaker 1: up losing a lot of money, because, as you might expect,
Speaker 1: the speculative frenzy finally ended, the price of game Stop
Speaker 1: stock fell and many of these retail investors got burned. There.
Speaker 1: It is Wendy Second start of the right straight on
Speaker 1: till morn. That's Peter Pan leading the way to the
Speaker 1: island of lost boys who never grow up. Musk's fans
Speaker 1: seemed to think of him less as Peter Pan, though,
Speaker 1: and more as Robin Hood. That I think is partly
Speaker 1: due to the story of dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on
Speaker 1: nothing except a meme about a dog, started by a
Speaker 1: software engineer named Jackson Palmer as a joke. Palmer later
Speaker 1: wrote an article called my joke cryptocurrency hit two billion
Speaker 1: dollars and something is very wrong, in which he said cryptocurrency,
Speaker 1: for all its promise, had become nothing more than an
Speaker 1: unregulated penny stock market. Musk hadn't been much involved in
Speaker 1: all of this, but in twenty nineteen, after people started
Speaker 1: tweeting that he should be the CEO of dogecoin, he
Speaker 1: said it was his favorite cryptocurrency. Dozecogn's value skyrocketed, then,
Speaker 1: in a kind of quintessential act of Muscism, Musk kept
Speaker 1: tweeting about it and upwind its price. This past February,
Speaker 1: Musk talked about dogecoin on Clubhouse, a kind of audio
Speaker 1: chat room. Popular and Silicon Valley occasionally make jokes about dogcoin,
Speaker 1: they are really just meant to be joked. But dose
Speaker 1: cooin is made as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies, obviously,
Speaker 1: but fate Love's irony and often as part of my
Speaker 1: says that most ironic outcome is most likely, or I
Speaker 1: say the most entertaining outcome is often the most likely
Speaker 1: and arguably the most entertaining outcome, and the most ironic
Speaker 1: outcome would be that dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth
Speaker 1: in the future, the future, the future. But to me,
Speaker 1: beneath the thunder of rocket engines and far from the
Speaker 1: glare of computer screens, there's something medieval going on here.
Speaker 1: Even calling a cryptocurrency a coin is kind of a throwback.
Speaker 1: So I called up a medievalist named Rory Naismith who
Speaker 1: teaches at Cambridge. I asked him how people in the
Speaker 1: Middle Ages trusted money. You can trust the people behind it,
Speaker 1: and that's important. They think about money very much in
Speaker 1: personal terms. These coins are very often issued in the
Speaker 1: name of a king or a bishop or someone like that.
Speaker 1: That's one side of it. There's a strong sense that
Speaker 1: money is precious metal. It's not quite worth its weight
Speaker 1: in gold or silver, at least not always, but that
Speaker 1: is still there as a kind of kind of fallback.
Speaker 1: So there's a degree of abstraction that we put our
Speaker 1: trust in the identity of the person whose faces on
Speaker 1: the coin, say, but there's also a degree of real
Speaker 1: concrete value. You could melt this thing down right, Yes,
Speaker 1: that's exactly right, and right down to the seventeenth eighteenth
Speaker 1: century people thought of their silverware, their forks, their plates,
Speaker 1: all that sort of thing as in a very real
Speaker 1: sense another kind of money. Then, of course came paper
Speaker 1: money and banks and the nation state, and the growth
Speaker 1: of state power and government regulation of currency, the Bank
Speaker 1: of England, the Federal Reserve. It's as if some advocates
Speaker 1: of cryptocurrency, some of them use an investing app named
Speaker 1: after a mythical medieval character, want to uninvent all of
Speaker 1: those things. They want to go back to a time
Speaker 1: before those things were invented, to a fantasy Middle Ages
Speaker 1: where the currency is coin and robin Hood is stealing
Speaker 1: from the rich and giving to the poor. In a way,
Speaker 1: it's also a bit like not necessarily just the future
Speaker 1: of money, but also going back to the past of money.
Speaker 1: It's it's quite light going back to this period in
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages, when you thought much more in terms
Speaker 1: of people and sources rather than bigger states and bigger
Speaker 1: institutions that would underpin the authority and trustworthiness of these coins.
Speaker 1: To me in Sherwood Forest, Elon Musk isn't Robin Hood.
Speaker 1: He's the king whose face is on the coin. In
Speaker 1: Musk retrust. In February, Musk tweeted the single word doze
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: This was all a performance, a joke, topsy turvy, like
Speaker 1: a medieval carnival. Musk would tweet outrageous things, then say
Speaker 1: he was only joking. On April Fool's Day, he tweeted
Speaker 1: SpaceX is going to put it literal dogecoin on the
Speaker 1: literal Moon. A joke, but also not a joke. Musk
Speaker 1: said that SpaceX will be accepting dogecoin as payment, with
Speaker 1: one doge funded launch scheduled next year. Meanwhile, Tessa was
Speaker 1: in the news for investing in and accepting bitcoin, and
Speaker 1: then in the news for walking all that back. Days later,
Speaker 1: NBC's Saturday Night Live announced that Musk would host an
Speaker 1: upcoming episode. It aired on Mother's Day Eve. Musk brought
Speaker 1: his mother onto the stage and told her his present
Speaker 1: for her was dogecoin. In his opening monologue, Musk announced
Speaker 1: that he has Asperger syndrome. Look, I know I sometimes
Speaker 1: say or post strange things, but that's just how my
Speaker 1: brain works. To anyone I've offended, I just want to
Speaker 1: say I reinvented electric Carson. I'm sending people to Mars
Speaker 1: and our rocketship. Did you think I was also going
Speaker 1: to be a chill, normal dude. Some people in the
Speaker 1: autism community celebrated Musk's announcement a milestone, and, as some
Speaker 1: autistic writers observed, there was something very moving when he
Speaker 1: joked that he was pretty good at running human in
Speaker 1: emulation mode. Elsewhere, Musk has joked that he's an alien
Speaker 1: or a robot other ways that he's conjured a struggle
Speaker 1: experienced by many people on the autism spectrum who've been
Speaker 1: forced to mask their very selves. But there were critics too,
Speaker 1: who maintained that Musk's announcement was deeply cynical and just
Speaker 1: another element of an anything goes capitalism. In Slate magazine,
Speaker 1: journalist Sarah Ludermann who was autistic objected to a billionaire
Speaker 1: using Asperger's to insulate himself from criticism of his business practices,
Speaker 1: writing Apparently Asperger's syndrome means in never having to say
Speaker 1: you're sorry. What struck me, though, is that Musk's monologue
Speaker 1: made out as if people who criticize him object to
Speaker 1: him personally. But it has never been my sense that
Speaker 1: serious people who criticize Musk do so because they object
Speaker 1: to his tone or his mode of expression. The coral
Speaker 1: isn't with what he says or how he says it,
Speaker 1: but with what he does and with the world he
Speaker 1: seems to want to build. The coral isn't with Musk,
Speaker 1: but with Muscism. To Luderman's point, appearing on SNL gave
Speaker 1: Musk all sorts of opportunities to tell a new, redemptive
Speaker 1: story about himself. He appeared in nearly every sketch as
Speaker 1: the Nintendo villain Warrior 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 1: what if instead of panning for gold, we just create
Speaker 1: our own currency currency? Yeah? And what the heck would
Speaker 1: it be based on? Whatever we say it's based on
Speaker 1: da ain't how money works. The money ain't the golden
Speaker 1: rock that we dig out of the ground. Then we
Speaker 1: hope no one kills us before we train it for
Speaker 1: pieces of green paper. It's a perfect system. It's a
Speaker 1: weird thing about being a historian, and everything reminds you
Speaker 1: of something else. Watching Elon Musk play Leron dressed like
Speaker 1: a cowboy, he looked exactly like an old photograph of
Speaker 1: his grandfather, the technocrat, who worked as a cowboy and
Speaker 1: performed at rodeos doing rope tricks. The family likeness is uncanny.
Speaker 1: Musk is also named after that cowboy's father, his great grandfather.
Speaker 1: Elon muskis m asks us to picture always the future,
Speaker 1: But I find it hard not to keep picturing the past.
Speaker 1: Yanked back lassoed by likenesses on SNL, Musk appeared too
Speaker 1: on the show's newscast as a cryptocurrency expert who can't
Speaker 1: give a straight answer. What is dollas coin? Well, it
Speaker 1: actually started as a joke based on an Internet meme. Okay,
Speaker 1: but what is doa co? Finally he admits the truth.
Speaker 1: I keep telling you it's a cryptocrcy you can trade
Speaker 1: for conventional money. Oh so the hustle, Yeah, it's awesome.
Speaker 1: That night, Dogcoin 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 1: The looting of the Moon brought disaster to the Raba planet,
Speaker 1: so mad with the efforts to get the precious metal
Speaker 1: that the surface of our globe was fairly showered with it.
Speaker 1: The air was filled with shining dust until finally famine
Speaker 1: and pestilence joined hands with financial disaster to punish the
Speaker 1: grasping world. At the end of Moon Metal, markets collapse
Speaker 1: until an international agreement leads to government control of the currency.
Speaker 1: Some people think this is what's most likely to happen
Speaker 1: to cryptocurrency too. Meantime, the air is being filled with
Speaker 1: shining pixie dust as famine and pestilence and pandemic join
Speaker 1: hands with financial disaster to punish the grasping world. This
Speaker 1: is an age of technological wonder, an entrepreneurial experimentation. It
Speaker 1: is in many ways tremendously thrilling. SpaceX and Tesla engineering
Speaker 1: marvels as social engineering, though I don't find any of
Speaker 1: this thrilling. The people with the most money shouldn't get
Speaker 1: to decide what happens on Earth, or on the Moon,
Speaker 1: or to the skies, or on Mars or anywhere. To me,
Speaker 1: the larger story about the rise of Muscism extravagant, extreme
Speaker 1: fantastical capitalism is its anachronism. I can't tell you anything
Speaker 1: about the future of Muscism, but it strikes me that
Speaker 1: for all its obsession with the future, Muscism is trapped
Speaker 1: in the past. Elon Musk is a visionary But what
Speaker 1: I've come to believe during the research for the series
Speaker 1: is that those visions come from a future first imagined
Speaker 1: in science fiction long long ago, decades, sometimes more than
Speaker 1: a century ago. Rockets to Mars, electric cars, cryptocurrency, a
Speaker 1: future without governments or banks. A future where engineers and scientists,
Speaker 1: and only engineers and scientists have the answers. A future
Speaker 1: whose long dead author is very often pictured. A world
Speaker 1: where the poor and the powerless and the robots know
Speaker 1: their place, and it is to serve the powerful quietly
Speaker 1: and obediently, and without daring to claim sovereignty or independence
Speaker 1: or even intelligence. This future was imagined by a very
Speaker 1: tiny number of men during an age of imperialism before
Speaker 1: women could vote, an age of staggering economic inequality and
Speaker 1: brutal racial injustice, an age of pandemic disease, on raveling
Speaker 1: democracies and World War The President is tough, but that
Speaker 1: past is past, and I don't want it ever to
Speaker 1: be the future again. The Evening Rocket was written and
Speaker 1: read by me Jillapour for the BBC. The Evening Rocket
Speaker 1: was produced by viv Jones. Oliver Riskin Cuts was the researcher.
Speaker 1: The editor was Hugh Levinson. The commissioning editor was Dan Clark.
Speaker 1: Ionah Hammond was production coordinator. Mixing by Graham put a
Speaker 1: Foot and original music by Cornti for Pushkin. It was
Speaker 1: produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon and Jake Gorski, who also
Speaker 1: did the mix and sound design. Production support from Ben
Speaker 1: Natt of Haafrick. Our executive producer is Mielobell. Our operations
Speaker 1: team includes Daniella Lakhan, Maya Kanig and Carl mcgliori. Thanks
Speaker 1: also to John Schnar's, Jacob Eisburg, Maggie Taylor, Heather Fain,
Speaker 1: Nicole Moreno and Eric Sandler.