The Evening Rocket: Dimension X
The Last Archive
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 1 November 2021
⏱️ 30 minutes
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Summary
Jill Lepore untangles the strange sci-fi roots of Silicon Valley's extreme capitalism - with its extravagant, existential and extra-terrestrial plans to save humanity. In this world, stock prices can be driven partly by fantasies found in blockbuster superhero movies, but that come from science fiction, some of it a century old. If anyone personifies this phenomenon, it's Elon Musk, the richest or second-richest person in the world on any given day. "The bare facts of Musk’s life, the way they’re usually told, make him sound like a fictional character, a comic-book superhero," says Lepore. He says he hopes to colonize Mars, create brain-hacking implants and avert an AI apocalypse. He even has a baby named X. In this first of five episodes Lepore looks at the early origins of ‘Muskism’, and explores how the science fiction stories that today’s techno-billionaires grew up on have shaped Silicon Valley’s vision of the future.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | My name is Jill LePore. I'm a professor of history at Harvard, a New Yorker staff writer, |
| 0:16.7 | and host of the podcast, The Last Archive. Last spring, I made a program with the BBC's |
| 0:22.3 | Radio 4. It's called The Evening Rocket. And now, Pushkin Industries is releasing that |
| 0:27.8 | show Stateside for the first time. It's all about Elon Musk and his strained new kind of capitalism, |
| 0:34.6 | called Muskism, extravagant extreme capitalism, extra terrestrial capitalism, where stock prices |
| 0:41.8 | are driven by earnings, but also by fantasies. I'm fascinated by Silicon Valley's futurism, |
| 0:47.8 | and by how, in Musk's life, those visions of the future, I'll come from the same place, |
| 0:53.4 | the science fiction he grew up on. To understand where Musk wants to take the rest of us, |
| 0:58.5 | with his electric cars, his rockets to Mars, his meme stocks, and tunnels deep beneath the earth, |
| 1:04.4 | I decided to look at those science fiction stories and understand what he's missed about them. |
| 1:09.6 | So blast off with me on The Evening Rocket, on a journey into the history of our future. |
| 1:24.4 | Elon Musk is one of the richest people on the planet. He intends to save the world from climate |
| 1:31.0 | catastrophe, with electric cars and solar panels and underground tunnels. He plans to colonize Mars, |
| 1:38.0 | he's building chips to put in people's brains. He is adored by 50 million followers on Twitter. |
| 1:44.4 | He has two X wives and six sons, including a baby named X. The bare facts of Musk's life, |
| 1:52.6 | the way they're usually told, make them sound like a fictional character, a comic book superhero. |
| 1:58.4 | But what's the real story, the actual history, behind the comic book? |
| 2:12.0 | Welcome to The Evening Rocket. I'm Jill LePore. I'm a professor at Harvard. I'm a US political |
| 2:17.9 | historian, and for a long time I've been studying the relationship between technological and political |
| 2:23.5 | change. I'm fascinated by visions of the future, in political discourse and literature, |
| 2:30.5 | in science fiction, and even comic books. This series I'll be exploring a new kind of capitalism, |
| 2:39.0 | call it muskism, extravagant extreme capitalism, extra terrestrial capitalism, where stock prices |
... |
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