March 28, 2025 • 28 mins
Elon Musk is a rocket man. He wants humans to become ‘a multi-planetary species’ and talks about establishing human settlements on Mars. As President Trump talks up the Mars program while dismantling aid initiatives around the globe, Jill Lepore traces how Silicon Valley's existential catastrophism led to Musk’s extraterrestrial vision of capitalism.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
You are looking at a live view of the Falcon Heavy.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
In twenty eighteen, Elon Musk's company SpaceX launched a rocket
from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida under blue skies
streaked with clouds. A giant white rocket attached to two
smaller white boosters stood perched on the launch pad.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
All systems are Golfer launch.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
A crowd assembled at mission control giddy and loud. This
was the company's splashiest launch yet of its biggest rocket
built for a Mars crossing orbit.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Stacked inside the firing is Elon's cherry red Tesla Roadster.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Then there was the payload described by SpaceX in its
live broadcast.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
And inside of it a passenger. His name is Starman,
but don't worry, he's not human.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
There was also an arc, a sort of Noah's ar
Ark of an archive on a space Proof Courts compact disc.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
On the arc that's being launched today. The Foundation has
stored Isaac Asimov's classic sci fi series, the Foundation Trilogy.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
One objective of this test flight was to put a
Tesla Roadster carrying the works of Isaac Asimov into orbit
for a billion years.
Speaker 5 (01:28):
Three two.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Welcome to x Man The Elon Musk origin story.
Speaker 5 (01:50):
I'm Jill Lapour.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I'm a professor at Harvard. I'm a US political historian,
and for a long time I've been studying the relationship
between technological and political change. I'm fascinated by visions of
the future in political discourse, in literature and science fiction, and.
Speaker 6 (02:07):
Even comic books.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
The series, I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism, call
it Muskism, extravagant extreme capitalism, extra terrestrial capitalism, where stock
prices can be driven by dreams and fantasies that come
from science fiction. Last episode, I looked at Musk's early
(02:32):
life in South Africa, growing up rereading The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy. He ended up in Silicon Valley in
the nineteen nineties, founding a company called x dot com
that merged with PayPal. eBay bought PayPal for one point
five billion dollars. Musk use that money to start SpaceX.
He also started talking about very big plans for the
(02:55):
future of humanity.
Speaker 7 (02:57):
When I was in the university, I thought about what
would most affect the future of the world, and the
three areas that I came up with the Internet, sustainable energy,
and making life multiplanetary.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Musk began to argue that his plan was to save
the human race, including by going to Mars. But why
future of humanity questions used to belong to religion and philosophy.
Under Muskism, they belonged to engineering an entrepreneurship. How did
that happen? This episode of X Man is called Planet
(03:33):
b strap in to head to Mars, which is where
Elon Musk was headed before he took a detour to
the White House. In twenty sixteen, the year Donald Trump
was elected president for the first time, Musk spoke to
an audience at a SpaceX event about the ship he'd
like to take to Mars.
Speaker 7 (03:50):
I think like maybe the name of the first ship
that goes to Mars. My current favorite is Heart of
Gold from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I
like the fact that it's driven by infinite improbability. I
think ourship is also extremely improbable.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
One pretty useful way of understanding Tusk's vision for SpaceX
is that it's Douglas Adams fan fiction. Or you could
make a fair argument that SpaceX's inspiration comes from the Foundation.
Speaker 8 (04:18):
Series titlely Foundation author Isaac Asimov Encyclopedia Galactica one hundred
and sixteenth edition.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
This Encyclopedia Galactica runs through all the Foundation Series, and
if that sounds familiar, that's because the Hitchhiker's Guide is
a lampoon of it.
Speaker 6 (04:41):
The Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the Great Encyclopedic Galactica
as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom because,
although it has many omissions contains much that is apocryphal
or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older,
more pedestrian work in two important ways. First, it is
(05:02):
slightly cheaper, and second, it has the words don't Panic
inscribed in large friends letters on the cover.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
That Tesla roadster that must send up into space had
a copy of Asimov inside, and it also had don't
Panic on its dashboard. Asimov's Foundation Series revolves around a
scholar named Harry Selden on.
Speaker 8 (05:26):
Nine hundred and eighty eight years of the Galactic Ealing
died twelve thousand and sixty nine. Birthplace heliconnor of TOWARDUS sector.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Harry Selden is responsible for the future of humanity. His
plan engineers will save us. Selden knows that the Galactic
Empire will soon collapse, after which the galaxy will endure
a dark age. He's got a plan to hide away
two sets of experts, one at each end of the galaxy,
the two Foundations, to store the knowledge of civilization. Elon
(05:58):
Musk read the story as a kid, and later said
that the lesson he drew from it was that you
should try to take the set of actions that are
likely to prolong civilization, to minimize the probability of a
dark age, and reduce the length of a dark age.
If there is one anxiety about the imminent end of civilization.
(06:24):
Existential catastrophism is an essential feature of Muskism. Humanity, in
this understanding of the world, is always at risk of extinction.
Entrepreneurs and engineers are trying to save us all. I
got to wondering where this idea came from. When did
people begin worrying about human extinction?
Speaker 9 (06:45):
That's a good question, So it depends on what you
mean by worrying.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
That's Thomas moynihan, author of the twenty twenty book X Risk,
How Humanity Discovered its own extinction. I called it Moynihan
to ask him about the history of the panic. Don't
panic about human extinction, which is different from a religious
worry about the coming apocalypse.
Speaker 9 (07:06):
The apocalypse occures a senseiment ending, whereas extinct anticipates the
ending of sense.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
According to Moynan, people started worrying about human extinction sometime
in the eighteenth century during the Enlightenment, partly because scientists
studying fossils had begun to observe and to document the
extinction of other species, like dinosaurs. This fascinated romantic poets.
Speaker 9 (07:30):
Byron himself refers to using steam engines to deflect incoming
asteroids and stop them from wiping out humanity.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Mary Shelley, a decade after she wrote Frankenstein, wrote The
Last Man, the first novel in English that imagines human
extinction by way of a global pandemic. By the end
of the nineteenth century, you get science fiction that imagines
a risk coming from other planets.
Speaker 9 (07:57):
Nothing out of the shadow, like a gray snake.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Martians came to Earth in H. G. Wells's eighteen ninety
eight novel War of the World, But as morning Hand
points out, Wells also thought of other planets as a
way to avoid human extinction.
Speaker 10 (08:11):
Thankies a gentleman, saind describers, I can highly force myself
to keep working at it.
Speaker 9 (08:14):
At the end of War of the World's he mentions
that humanity might be able to migrate to Venus in
the long term, and that would somehow prolong the lifespan
of civilization.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
But of course, early science fiction emerged during an era
of imperialism. After all, as Cecil Rhodes himself said, I
would annex the planets if I could.
Speaker 10 (08:43):
HG.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Wells wasn't actually promoting a colony on Venus. He was
opposing British colonies on Earth. He began War of the
Worlds by talking about British colonial expansion into Tasmania, writing
that the Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were
entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination
waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years.
(09:05):
Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if
the Martians ward in the same spirit, The line from
Welles to Musk is a line of rupture to recycle
age of imperialism. Science fiction absent the criticism of imperialism
is to erase history. Moynan argues that in the middle
(09:27):
decades of the twentieth century, fears of human extinction got
ratcheted up after Harshima and during the Cold War, with
its concern about nuclear armageddon. The danger was an alien invasion,
the danger was us. By the nineteen eighties, people concerned
about what's come to be called existential risk, especially people
(09:49):
fighting for arms control, came up with some fancy calculations
to try to win the argument.
Speaker 9 (09:55):
We shouldn't be thinking about human extinction as just the
death of the seven billion people that are currently alive.
We need to think about it more as the foreclosure
of all the future generations of people that could have been,
who could have had work while lives.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
This idea really took off. This to me strange calculation
by which our lives, the lives of everyone here on Earth,
just don't amount too much compared to the lives of
all the future beings who won't live if we don't
establish colonies on other planets. Then, in the nineteen nineties,
moynihan says, a lot of tech people involved in early
(10:32):
message boards came together to really panic about a long
list of existential risks.
Speaker 9 (10:38):
Asteroid or comet impact, super volcanic eruptions, stellar explosions, nuclear war,
climate degradation, and then one that also gets a lot
of attention as well is artificial intelligence.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
At the time this list was growing on tech message boards,
Elon Musk was in college and then in Silicon Valley
developing his sense of mission. A few years back, Bernie
Sanders tweeted, We're in a moment in history where two guys,
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, own more wealth than the
bottom forty percent of people in this country. Musk tweeted back,
(11:14):
I am accumulating resources to help make life interplanetary and
extend the light of consciousness to the stars. Not everyone
thinks Musk and Bezos are heroically saving humanity from extinction.
My question is why do they think.
Speaker 5 (11:29):
They're doing that.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Jeff Bezos was born in New Mexico in nineteen sixty four.
Both he and Elon Musk grew up on stories about
the Apollo eleven moon landing. The US ended its moon
program in nineteen seventy two, Bezos, a Star Trek fan,
always wanted to go back to the moon. Musk tells
a story about how, as a kid he went to
(11:53):
the NASA website to look up the schedule for going
to Mars, and was disappointed to find there wasn't one.
In nineteen sixty four, NASA had launched the Mariner for Probe,
the first spacecraft to fly by Mars.
Speaker 7 (12:09):
Question is what will matter?
Speaker 11 (12:10):
No reveal?
Speaker 6 (12:11):
Of course, the possibility of life on Mars has been
debated for many years.
Speaker 11 (12:16):
Faint lines seen on the surface have led to the
idea that these were.
Speaker 6 (12:21):
Canals dug by the Martians.
Speaker 11 (12:23):
But I don't think anybody goes that far these days.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
The Probe sent back twenty one photographs unveiled at the
White House before Lyndon Johnson, but the photographs revealed a barren,
dusty wasteland, all but crushing any hope. As Johnson said
that there was life on Mars.
Speaker 10 (12:40):
It may be. It may just be that life as
we know it, with its humanity, is more unique than
many have thought.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
That view of Mars started to change in the nineteen nineties,
which marked a convergence. Tech types had become consumed with
the possibility of human extinction. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk,
We're starting to make millions, even billions of dollars, and
writers and scientists had begun to imagine ways Mars could
be made habitable. The science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson
(13:19):
published the Mars Trilogy, in which scientists from Earth have
terraformed Mars. In nineteen ninety eight, an aerospace engineer named
Robert Zubrin published a book called The Case for Mars.
Speaker 12 (13:31):
There's three reasons why Mars should be the goal of
our space program, and in short, it's because Mars is
where the sciences, it's where the challenges, and it's where
the future is.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Bezos founded his space company Blue Origin in the year
two thousand. Musk started SpaceX two years later. In the
two and a half decades since, despite painful setbacks, SpaceX
has been an engineering wonder, a juggernaut revitalizing space exploration.
But even as the richest men on this planet were
(14:04):
thinking about traveling to other planets, more and more Earthlings
were worried about life here on Earth.
Speaker 9 (14:11):
Five million students around the world took to the streets
and a climate strike last Friday, students flood of the
streets with a clear message, there is no planet B.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Well, Musk and Bezos were building rockets. There is no
planet B became the motto of the environmental movement, a
way for people to say that space exploration not only
fails to address the risk of human extinction, but is
instead part of the problem. Even Kim Stanley Robinson took
this line.
Speaker 4 (14:42):
I still speak positively about us going to Mars and
even perhaps some day terraforming Mars, but it's a project
for like the year three thousand a d. What I
feel I have to say now is to remind people
there is no planet b It's not simple, it's not fast,
it isn't going to happen anytime soon, and so we
can't be thinking that Earth is disposable.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
About twenty years ago Elon must began to change the
way he talked about going to Mars.
Speaker 13 (15:09):
Have we screwed it up so badly here on this
planet that our only hope is to build a new
civilization out there?
Speaker 4 (15:17):
No, not at all.
Speaker 7 (15:18):
I actually I'm quite optimistic about the future of humanity
on Earth.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
So what is the benefit to humanity then to inhabit Mars.
Speaker 7 (15:24):
Well, I think if you consider two paths, one where
we're forever confined to Earth, and the other where we
are space frank civilization out exploring the stars. I think
the latter is far more exciting.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
SpaceX is about taking science fiction stories and turning them
into fact. But what if SpaceX is actually fulfilling the
vision of dystopian science fiction by way of Muskism, not
only as extraterrestrial capitalism, but as a new political order.
(15:54):
Isaac Asimov's Foundation series first appeared as a book in
nineteen fifty one, but a more prophetic science fiction story
about money and politics and the future of humanity came
out in nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 11 (16:07):
The Space Merchants, Frederick Poles and C. M. Cornbliss's modern
classic about the future when the wizards of high pressure
salesmanship take over.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
The Space Merchants is dystopian science fiction, later made into
a radio drama. The story opens on a blighted, depleted,
overcrowded Earth had a board meeting of an advertising agency
called Fouler shockun.
Speaker 11 (16:33):
Associates, gentlemen, Good morning, Good morning, that's the shogun. Now
sit down, sit down. I'm going to stand for a moment.
I have just come back on the Moon rocket, as
you know. Want to stretch my legs. How alright, there's
a shockun gentlemen. I am proud and I'm humble when
I say it's successful. The mining ventures are bringing the
(16:54):
people here on Earth many of the metals our forefathers
exhausted long ago. The colonist seemed quite untouched by the
Kanci revolutionists. Only six instances of Kanci' sabitaged in the
past week.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
On this desperate, dying earth, po Shakun is worried about
Conci's conservationists, or what we'd call environmentalists gentlemen.
Speaker 11 (17:15):
On my trip back from the Moon, I begin to
wonder are we getting soft? But now I've decided Fowler
Shotgun Associates is not soft, that it's ready to meet
a challenge greater than our development of the Moon, the
greatest challenge the world of advertising and promotion has ever met.
The colonizing of Beatus.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
The Space Merchants wasn't the first version of this dystopian vision.
In his story from nineteen oh one with the excellent
title to Mars with Tesla, that is, with Nikola Tesla,
a guy advertising a rocket trip to Mars turns out
to be a con man. In twenty twenty two, in
Fowler Shokun Fashion, SpaceX was involved in the first fully
(17:58):
private entirely for profit mission to the International Space Station.
It carried three space tourists, paying fifty five million dollars
each for a seventeen days trip. The Washington Post has
reported that SpaceX might be involved in a project to
build the first hotel in space. Next up, the Red
Planet blussed back to the past to the US presidential
(18:25):
election year of twenty twelve. During that year's contest for
the Republican nomination, moderates like Mitt Romney said a plan
to go to the Moon was crazy.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
I spent twenty five years in business. If I had
a business executive come to me and say they want
to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a
colony on the Moon, I'd say, you're fired. The idea
that corporate America wants to go off to the Moon
and build a colony there. It may be a big idea,
but it's not a good idea.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
But far right Republicans like Newt Gingrich endorse this idea.
Speaker 13 (18:57):
I'll tell you, I do not want to be the
country that, having gotten to the moon, first turned around
and said it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 11 (19:04):
Let the Chinese dominate space. What do we care.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
During the US presidential electtionction year of twenty sixteen, Gingrich
was one of Trump's closest advisors. Then, in the weeks
between Trump's election and his inauguration, Elon Musk and Jeff
Bezos both went to see him in Trump Tower. In
twenty seventeen, after Trump took office, people started talking about
moon fever. As one commentator put it, Trump wanted to
(19:30):
make the Moon American again. Americans, though, weren't much behind
this project. A poll found that sixty three percent of
Americans wanted NASA to focus instead on climate research. Only
thirteen percent favored another trip to the Moon. But this
didn't stop Trump.
Speaker 13 (19:47):
Thank you very much, Vice President Pence for helping. Where's
our vice president?
Speaker 10 (19:53):
Great job?
Speaker 13 (19:54):
To restore American leadership in space.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Trump directed NASA to alter its schedule and make a
priority of sending Americans to the Moon.
Speaker 13 (20:03):
Our journey into space will not only make us stronger
and more prosperous, but will unite us behind rand ambitions
and bring us all closer together.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
Wouldn't that be nice?
Speaker 13 (20:14):
Can you believe that space is going to do that?
Speaker 3 (20:17):
At the end of twenty seventeen, at the White House,
Trump made a formal announcement of a new destination.
Speaker 13 (20:23):
This time, we will not only plant our flag and
leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an
eventual mission to Mars and perhaps someday to many worlds beyond.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
It wasn't only about science, he said.
Speaker 13 (20:39):
Space has so much to do with so many other applications,
including a military application.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
What he meant by that became clear. A year and
a half later.
Speaker 13 (20:48):
We're gathered here in the Rose Garden to establish the
United States Space Command.
Speaker 10 (20:54):
It's a big deal.
Speaker 13 (20:56):
Spacecom will soon be followed very importantly by the establishment
of the United States Space Force as the sixth branch
of the United States Armed Forces.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Space isn't so much the next frontier as the next battleground,
and Elon Musk and his dream of a multiplanetary civilization
that is being funded by American taxpayers. SpaceX and Space
Force are two sides of the same bitcoin. SpaceX's military
projects have included manufacturing missile tracking satellites and new rockets
(21:36):
for Space Force, and developing a rocket capable of delivering
weapons anywhere in the world. By twenty twenty four, SpaceX
had received nearly twenty billion dollars in government contracts. Trump
vowed to increase that funding. We approached SpaceX for a response,
but at the time of recording we hadn't received a reply.
(22:01):
There is a politics of space lately, it looks less
like the politics of star Trek, a JFK style new
tier of exciting science and good government, then like the
politics of star wars, of swaggering generals and imperial death stars.
There's also something of a party politics of space, and
(22:22):
in the US it's been generally Republican and conservative. This
was true long before Musk became a Trump supporter and
the GOP's most generous donor in the Senate. The race
to space was, for a long time most fiercely endorsed
by the Texas Senator and one time presidential aspirant Ted Cruz.
Speaker 14 (22:41):
No longer is space just an uninhabited void or a
scientific novelty.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
That's Cruz in twenty nineteen, sharing a hearing on the
emerging space environment. Cruz grew up reading the science fiction
of Robert Heinlein, a noted libertarian and author of The
Man Who Sold the Moon. Heindline's estate awards the Heinland
Prize for Space commercialization. Both Musk and Bezos have won it.
Speaker 14 (23:06):
By some estimates, the space sector grow to nearly three
trillion dollars in value in the next three decades alone.
It is also my belief that the world's first trillionaire
will be made in space.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
One purpose of Space Force is to protect the space merchants.
Bernie Sanders wasn't the only person on the left to
notice the ironies here this daggering inequalities. In twenty nineteen,
Trevor Noah, the mixed race South African who hosts the
Daily Show on Comedy Central in the US, pictured Elon
Musk bringing colonists to Mars.
Speaker 8 (23:43):
You gotta admit it would have been kind of funny
if Elon Musk waited until they landed on Mars to
be like, oh, I forgot to mention you are my
space slaves.
Speaker 11 (23:51):
Now get to work building my base, because then uralize
all those rich white people would be slaving away on
the Martian fields.
Speaker 4 (23:59):
They'll be singing their old Caucasians virtuals.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Trevor Noah tied race to space, but they got tied
together again in twenty twenty, After George Floyd was killed
in Minneapolis on May twenty fifth, a Monday, protests began
in Minneapolis that night. By Wednesday, they'd begun to spread
across the country. On Thursday, the governor of Minnesota called
in the National Guard. On Friday, Trump delivered an ultimatum,
(24:27):
tweeting when the looting starts, the shooting starts. That night,
as protesters gathered near the White House, the Secret Service
rushed the President to an underground bunker. The next day,
May thirtieth, twenty twenty, Trump boarded Air Force one. But
where to?
Speaker 15 (24:44):
And now it's my high honor and distinct privilege to
introduce to you the man whose vision and relentless leadership
brought us to this historic day, the forty fifth President
of the United States of America, President Donald Trump.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Trump hadn't flown to Minneapolis to talk to protesters. He'd
flown to Florida to the Kennedy Space Center to watch
the long scale juel launch of SpaceX's first manned mission,
the first time a commercial space corporation carried people into space.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Ignition liptot at the Balcon nine.
Speaker 11 (25:19):
And got.
Speaker 15 (25:24):
It.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Was a weird freak of timing this history making moment.
Nearly four years ago, the George Floyd protests and SpaceX's
triumphant launch Big day.
Speaker 6 (25:35):
Is a big day.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
It wasn't unfortunate freak of timing. Trump took to the
stage to his trademark walk on music at the Space
Center and started out talking about the protests.
Speaker 13 (25:46):
My administration will always stand against violence, mayhem, and disorder.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
And it was a hard turn to get to the rocket,
but Trump tied the two together. He said, raceso's division,
Space brings unity.
Speaker 13 (26:01):
Moments ago, as we witnessed the launch of two great
American astronauts into space, we were filled with the sense
of pride and unity that brings us together as Americans.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
For Trump, SpaceX meant America first. Then he introduced an
American entrepreneur.
Speaker 13 (26:22):
He's a little different than a lot of other people.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
He liked rockets.
Speaker 13 (26:27):
Elon Musk, Congratulations. Congratulations.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
That's Trump basking in Musk's space glow. Since then, SpaceX
has created the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever built.
It's become the world leader in space exploration, and Trump,
after his defeat in twenty twenty and his failed attempt
to overturn the election, has come back to power to
(26:54):
winning re election decisively, this time with Musk at his side,
his own rocketman. SpaceX's engineering accomplishments are incredible, but what
about the costs? What about the risks? Not the existential ones,
but the ordinary ones. Watching the SpaceX launch that day
(27:18):
almost five years ago, now, all I could think about
was a poem by Gil scott Heron from nineteen seventy
about the Apollo mission. It's called Whitey on the Moon.
Speaker 11 (27:30):
One such poem concerned the fact that millions and millions of.
Speaker 10 (27:33):
Dollars are continually sent into out of space while we
continue to face the same problems here on the ground.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
Scott Heron was writing about everyone left behind, the poor,
the needy, and their suffering. His sister bit by a rat,
getting sicker and sicker, and him with no money to
pay the doctor's bill while Whitey's on the Moon. I
listened to that poem that day, while Trump and Musk
watched that launch. It's still ringing in my ears all
(28:01):
these years later. As Trump and Musk dismantle USAID, ending
American aid programs around the world while ratcheting up the
Mars program. People have been trying to escape to Planet
B for a long time. That doesn't make it the
right thing for Planet A. Next time on x Man
(28:27):
Muscism here on Earth and the story of how the
man who sold the Moon became Iron Man.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
You are looking at a live view of the Falcon Heavy.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
In twenty eighteen, Elon Musk's company SpaceX launched a rocket
from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida under blue skies
streaked with clouds. A giant white rocket attached to two
smaller white boosters stood perched on the launch pad.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
All systems are Golfer launch.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
A crowd assembled at mission control giddy and loud. This
was the company's splashiest launch yet of its biggest rocket
built for a Mars crossing orbit.
Speaker 2 (00:53):
Stacked inside the firing is Elon's cherry red Tesla Roadster.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
Then there was the payload described by SpaceX in its
live broadcast.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
And inside of it a passenger. His name is Starman,
but don't worry, he's not human.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
There was also an arc, a sort of Noah's ar
Ark of an archive on a space Proof Courts compact disc.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
On the arc that's being launched today. The Foundation has
stored Isaac Asimov's classic sci fi series, the Foundation Trilogy.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
One objective of this test flight was to put a
Tesla Roadster carrying the works of Isaac Asimov into orbit
for a billion years.
Speaker 5 (01:28):
Three two.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Welcome to x Man The Elon Musk origin story.
Speaker 5 (01:50):
I'm Jill Lapour.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I'm a professor at Harvard. I'm a US political historian,
and for a long time I've been studying the relationship
between technological and political change. I'm fascinated by visions of
the future in political discourse, in literature and science fiction, and.
Speaker 6 (02:07):
Even comic books.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
The series, I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism, call
it Muskism, extravagant extreme capitalism, extra terrestrial capitalism, where stock
prices can be driven by dreams and fantasies that come
from science fiction. Last episode, I looked at Musk's early
(02:32):
life in South Africa, growing up rereading The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy. He ended up in Silicon Valley in
the nineteen nineties, founding a company called x dot com
that merged with PayPal. eBay bought PayPal for one point
five billion dollars. Musk use that money to start SpaceX.
He also started talking about very big plans for the
(02:55):
future of humanity.
Speaker 7 (02:57):
When I was in the university, I thought about what
would most affect the future of the world, and the
three areas that I came up with the Internet, sustainable energy,
and making life multiplanetary.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
Musk began to argue that his plan was to save
the human race, including by going to Mars. But why
future of humanity questions used to belong to religion and philosophy.
Under Muskism, they belonged to engineering an entrepreneurship. How did
that happen? This episode of X Man is called Planet
(03:33):
b strap in to head to Mars, which is where
Elon Musk was headed before he took a detour to
the White House. In twenty sixteen, the year Donald Trump
was elected president for the first time, Musk spoke to
an audience at a SpaceX event about the ship he'd
like to take to Mars.
Speaker 7 (03:50):
I think like maybe the name of the first ship
that goes to Mars. My current favorite is Heart of
Gold from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I
like the fact that it's driven by infinite improbability. I
think ourship is also extremely improbable.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
One pretty useful way of understanding Tusk's vision for SpaceX
is that it's Douglas Adams fan fiction. Or you could
make a fair argument that SpaceX's inspiration comes from the Foundation.
Speaker 8 (04:18):
Series titlely Foundation author Isaac Asimov Encyclopedia Galactica one hundred
and sixteenth edition.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
This Encyclopedia Galactica runs through all the Foundation Series, and
if that sounds familiar, that's because the Hitchhiker's Guide is
a lampoon of it.
Speaker 6 (04:41):
The Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the Great Encyclopedic Galactica
as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom because,
although it has many omissions contains much that is apocryphal
or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older,
more pedestrian work in two important ways. First, it is
(05:02):
slightly cheaper, and second, it has the words don't Panic
inscribed in large friends letters on the cover.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
That Tesla roadster that must send up into space had
a copy of Asimov inside, and it also had don't
Panic on its dashboard. Asimov's Foundation Series revolves around a
scholar named Harry Selden on.
Speaker 8 (05:26):
Nine hundred and eighty eight years of the Galactic Ealing
died twelve thousand and sixty nine. Birthplace heliconnor of TOWARDUS sector.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
Harry Selden is responsible for the future of humanity. His
plan engineers will save us. Selden knows that the Galactic
Empire will soon collapse, after which the galaxy will endure
a dark age. He's got a plan to hide away
two sets of experts, one at each end of the galaxy,
the two Foundations, to store the knowledge of civilization. Elon
(05:58):
Musk read the story as a kid, and later said
that the lesson he drew from it was that you
should try to take the set of actions that are
likely to prolong civilization, to minimize the probability of a
dark age, and reduce the length of a dark age.
If there is one anxiety about the imminent end of civilization.
(06:24):
Existential catastrophism is an essential feature of Muskism. Humanity, in
this understanding of the world, is always at risk of extinction.
Entrepreneurs and engineers are trying to save us all. I
got to wondering where this idea came from. When did
people begin worrying about human extinction?
Speaker 9 (06:45):
That's a good question, So it depends on what you
mean by worrying.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
That's Thomas moynihan, author of the twenty twenty book X Risk,
How Humanity Discovered its own extinction. I called it Moynihan
to ask him about the history of the panic. Don't
panic about human extinction, which is different from a religious
worry about the coming apocalypse.
Speaker 9 (07:06):
The apocalypse occures a senseiment ending, whereas extinct anticipates the
ending of sense.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
According to Moynan, people started worrying about human extinction sometime
in the eighteenth century during the Enlightenment, partly because scientists
studying fossils had begun to observe and to document the
extinction of other species, like dinosaurs. This fascinated romantic poets.
Speaker 9 (07:30):
Byron himself refers to using steam engines to deflect incoming
asteroids and stop them from wiping out humanity.
Speaker 3 (07:38):
Mary Shelley, a decade after she wrote Frankenstein, wrote The
Last Man, the first novel in English that imagines human
extinction by way of a global pandemic. By the end
of the nineteenth century, you get science fiction that imagines
a risk coming from other planets.
Speaker 9 (07:57):
Nothing out of the shadow, like a gray snake.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Martians came to Earth in H. G. Wells's eighteen ninety
eight novel War of the World, But as morning Hand
points out, Wells also thought of other planets as a
way to avoid human extinction.
Speaker 10 (08:11):
Thankies a gentleman, saind describers, I can highly force myself
to keep working at it.
Speaker 9 (08:14):
At the end of War of the World's he mentions
that humanity might be able to migrate to Venus in
the long term, and that would somehow prolong the lifespan
of civilization.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
But of course, early science fiction emerged during an era
of imperialism. After all, as Cecil Rhodes himself said, I
would annex the planets if I could.
Speaker 10 (08:43):
HG.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
Wells wasn't actually promoting a colony on Venus. He was
opposing British colonies on Earth. He began War of the
Worlds by talking about British colonial expansion into Tasmania, writing
that the Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were
entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination
waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years.
(09:05):
Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if
the Martians ward in the same spirit, The line from
Welles to Musk is a line of rupture to recycle
age of imperialism. Science fiction absent the criticism of imperialism
is to erase history. Moynan argues that in the middle
(09:27):
decades of the twentieth century, fears of human extinction got
ratcheted up after Harshima and during the Cold War, with
its concern about nuclear armageddon. The danger was an alien invasion,
the danger was us. By the nineteen eighties, people concerned
about what's come to be called existential risk, especially people
(09:49):
fighting for arms control, came up with some fancy calculations
to try to win the argument.
Speaker 9 (09:55):
We shouldn't be thinking about human extinction as just the
death of the seven billion people that are currently alive.
We need to think about it more as the foreclosure
of all the future generations of people that could have been,
who could have had work while lives.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
This idea really took off. This to me strange calculation
by which our lives, the lives of everyone here on Earth,
just don't amount too much compared to the lives of
all the future beings who won't live if we don't
establish colonies on other planets. Then, in the nineteen nineties,
moynihan says, a lot of tech people involved in early
(10:32):
message boards came together to really panic about a long
list of existential risks.
Speaker 9 (10:38):
Asteroid or comet impact, super volcanic eruptions, stellar explosions, nuclear war,
climate degradation, and then one that also gets a lot
of attention as well is artificial intelligence.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
At the time this list was growing on tech message boards,
Elon Musk was in college and then in Silicon Valley
developing his sense of mission. A few years back, Bernie
Sanders tweeted, We're in a moment in history where two guys,
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, own more wealth than the
bottom forty percent of people in this country. Musk tweeted back,
(11:14):
I am accumulating resources to help make life interplanetary and
extend the light of consciousness to the stars. Not everyone
thinks Musk and Bezos are heroically saving humanity from extinction.
My question is why do they think.
Speaker 5 (11:29):
They're doing that.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Jeff Bezos was born in New Mexico in nineteen sixty four.
Both he and Elon Musk grew up on stories about
the Apollo eleven moon landing. The US ended its moon
program in nineteen seventy two, Bezos, a Star Trek fan,
always wanted to go back to the moon. Musk tells
a story about how, as a kid he went to
(11:53):
the NASA website to look up the schedule for going
to Mars, and was disappointed to find there wasn't one.
In nineteen sixty four, NASA had launched the Mariner for Probe,
the first spacecraft to fly by Mars.
Speaker 7 (12:09):
Question is what will matter?
Speaker 11 (12:10):
No reveal?
Speaker 6 (12:11):
Of course, the possibility of life on Mars has been
debated for many years.
Speaker 11 (12:16):
Faint lines seen on the surface have led to the
idea that these were.
Speaker 6 (12:21):
Canals dug by the Martians.
Speaker 11 (12:23):
But I don't think anybody goes that far these days.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
The Probe sent back twenty one photographs unveiled at the
White House before Lyndon Johnson, but the photographs revealed a barren,
dusty wasteland, all but crushing any hope. As Johnson said
that there was life on Mars.
Speaker 10 (12:40):
It may be. It may just be that life as
we know it, with its humanity, is more unique than
many have thought.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
That view of Mars started to change in the nineteen nineties,
which marked a convergence. Tech types had become consumed with
the possibility of human extinction. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk,
We're starting to make millions, even billions of dollars, and
writers and scientists had begun to imagine ways Mars could
be made habitable. The science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson
(13:19):
published the Mars Trilogy, in which scientists from Earth have
terraformed Mars. In nineteen ninety eight, an aerospace engineer named
Robert Zubrin published a book called The Case for Mars.
Speaker 12 (13:31):
There's three reasons why Mars should be the goal of
our space program, and in short, it's because Mars is
where the sciences, it's where the challenges, and it's where
the future is.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
Bezos founded his space company Blue Origin in the year
two thousand. Musk started SpaceX two years later. In the
two and a half decades since, despite painful setbacks, SpaceX
has been an engineering wonder, a juggernaut revitalizing space exploration.
But even as the richest men on this planet were
(14:04):
thinking about traveling to other planets, more and more Earthlings
were worried about life here on Earth.
Speaker 9 (14:11):
Five million students around the world took to the streets
and a climate strike last Friday, students flood of the
streets with a clear message, there is no planet B.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Well, Musk and Bezos were building rockets. There is no
planet B became the motto of the environmental movement, a
way for people to say that space exploration not only
fails to address the risk of human extinction, but is
instead part of the problem. Even Kim Stanley Robinson took
this line.
Speaker 4 (14:42):
I still speak positively about us going to Mars and
even perhaps some day terraforming Mars, but it's a project
for like the year three thousand a d. What I
feel I have to say now is to remind people
there is no planet b It's not simple, it's not fast,
it isn't going to happen anytime soon, and so we
can't be thinking that Earth is disposable.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
About twenty years ago Elon must began to change the
way he talked about going to Mars.
Speaker 13 (15:09):
Have we screwed it up so badly here on this
planet that our only hope is to build a new
civilization out there?
Speaker 4 (15:17):
No, not at all.
Speaker 7 (15:18):
I actually I'm quite optimistic about the future of humanity
on Earth.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
So what is the benefit to humanity then to inhabit Mars.
Speaker 7 (15:24):
Well, I think if you consider two paths, one where
we're forever confined to Earth, and the other where we
are space frank civilization out exploring the stars. I think
the latter is far more exciting.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
SpaceX is about taking science fiction stories and turning them
into fact. But what if SpaceX is actually fulfilling the
vision of dystopian science fiction by way of Muskism, not
only as extraterrestrial capitalism, but as a new political order.
(15:54):
Isaac Asimov's Foundation series first appeared as a book in
nineteen fifty one, but a more prophetic science fiction story
about money and politics and the future of humanity came
out in nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 11 (16:07):
The Space Merchants, Frederick Poles and C. M. Cornbliss's modern
classic about the future when the wizards of high pressure
salesmanship take over.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
The Space Merchants is dystopian science fiction, later made into
a radio drama. The story opens on a blighted, depleted,
overcrowded Earth had a board meeting of an advertising agency
called Fouler shockun.
Speaker 11 (16:33):
Associates, gentlemen, Good morning, Good morning, that's the shogun. Now
sit down, sit down. I'm going to stand for a moment.
I have just come back on the Moon rocket, as
you know. Want to stretch my legs. How alright, there's
a shockun gentlemen. I am proud and I'm humble when
I say it's successful. The mining ventures are bringing the
(16:54):
people here on Earth many of the metals our forefathers
exhausted long ago. The colonist seemed quite untouched by the
Kanci revolutionists. Only six instances of Kanci' sabitaged in the
past week.
Speaker 3 (17:06):
On this desperate, dying earth, po Shakun is worried about
Conci's conservationists, or what we'd call environmentalists gentlemen.
Speaker 11 (17:15):
On my trip back from the Moon, I begin to
wonder are we getting soft? But now I've decided Fowler
Shotgun Associates is not soft, that it's ready to meet
a challenge greater than our development of the Moon, the
greatest challenge the world of advertising and promotion has ever met.
The colonizing of Beatus.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
The Space Merchants wasn't the first version of this dystopian vision.
In his story from nineteen oh one with the excellent
title to Mars with Tesla, that is, with Nikola Tesla,
a guy advertising a rocket trip to Mars turns out
to be a con man. In twenty twenty two, in
Fowler Shokun Fashion, SpaceX was involved in the first fully
(17:58):
private entirely for profit mission to the International Space Station.
It carried three space tourists, paying fifty five million dollars
each for a seventeen days trip. The Washington Post has
reported that SpaceX might be involved in a project to
build the first hotel in space. Next up, the Red
Planet blussed back to the past to the US presidential
(18:25):
election year of twenty twelve. During that year's contest for
the Republican nomination, moderates like Mitt Romney said a plan
to go to the Moon was crazy.
Speaker 1 (18:35):
I spent twenty five years in business. If I had
a business executive come to me and say they want
to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a
colony on the Moon, I'd say, you're fired. The idea
that corporate America wants to go off to the Moon
and build a colony there. It may be a big idea,
but it's not a good idea.
Speaker 3 (18:52):
But far right Republicans like Newt Gingrich endorse this idea.
Speaker 13 (18:57):
I'll tell you, I do not want to be the
country that, having gotten to the moon, first turned around
and said it doesn't really matter.
Speaker 11 (19:04):
Let the Chinese dominate space. What do we care.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
During the US presidential electtionction year of twenty sixteen, Gingrich
was one of Trump's closest advisors. Then, in the weeks
between Trump's election and his inauguration, Elon Musk and Jeff
Bezos both went to see him in Trump Tower. In
twenty seventeen, after Trump took office, people started talking about
moon fever. As one commentator put it, Trump wanted to
(19:30):
make the Moon American again. Americans, though, weren't much behind
this project. A poll found that sixty three percent of
Americans wanted NASA to focus instead on climate research. Only
thirteen percent favored another trip to the Moon. But this
didn't stop Trump.
Speaker 13 (19:47):
Thank you very much, Vice President Pence for helping. Where's
our vice president?
Speaker 10 (19:53):
Great job?
Speaker 13 (19:54):
To restore American leadership in space.
Speaker 3 (19:57):
Trump directed NASA to alter its schedule and make a
priority of sending Americans to the Moon.
Speaker 13 (20:03):
Our journey into space will not only make us stronger
and more prosperous, but will unite us behind rand ambitions
and bring us all closer together.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
Wouldn't that be nice?
Speaker 13 (20:14):
Can you believe that space is going to do that?
Speaker 3 (20:17):
At the end of twenty seventeen, at the White House,
Trump made a formal announcement of a new destination.
Speaker 13 (20:23):
This time, we will not only plant our flag and
leave our footprint, we will establish a foundation for an
eventual mission to Mars and perhaps someday to many worlds beyond.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
It wasn't only about science, he said.
Speaker 13 (20:39):
Space has so much to do with so many other applications,
including a military application.
Speaker 3 (20:45):
What he meant by that became clear. A year and
a half later.
Speaker 13 (20:48):
We're gathered here in the Rose Garden to establish the
United States Space Command.
Speaker 10 (20:54):
It's a big deal.
Speaker 13 (20:56):
Spacecom will soon be followed very importantly by the establishment
of the United States Space Force as the sixth branch
of the United States Armed Forces.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
Space isn't so much the next frontier as the next battleground,
and Elon Musk and his dream of a multiplanetary civilization
that is being funded by American taxpayers. SpaceX and Space
Force are two sides of the same bitcoin. SpaceX's military
projects have included manufacturing missile tracking satellites and new rockets
(21:36):
for Space Force, and developing a rocket capable of delivering
weapons anywhere in the world. By twenty twenty four, SpaceX
had received nearly twenty billion dollars in government contracts. Trump
vowed to increase that funding. We approached SpaceX for a response,
but at the time of recording we hadn't received a reply.
(22:01):
There is a politics of space lately, it looks less
like the politics of star Trek, a JFK style new
tier of exciting science and good government, then like the
politics of star wars, of swaggering generals and imperial death stars.
There's also something of a party politics of space, and
(22:22):
in the US it's been generally Republican and conservative. This
was true long before Musk became a Trump supporter and
the GOP's most generous donor in the Senate. The race
to space was, for a long time most fiercely endorsed
by the Texas Senator and one time presidential aspirant Ted Cruz.
Speaker 14 (22:41):
No longer is space just an uninhabited void or a
scientific novelty.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
That's Cruz in twenty nineteen, sharing a hearing on the
emerging space environment. Cruz grew up reading the science fiction
of Robert Heinlein, a noted libertarian and author of The
Man Who Sold the Moon. Heindline's estate awards the Heinland
Prize for Space commercialization. Both Musk and Bezos have won it.
Speaker 14 (23:06):
By some estimates, the space sector grow to nearly three
trillion dollars in value in the next three decades alone.
It is also my belief that the world's first trillionaire
will be made in space.
Speaker 3 (23:22):
One purpose of Space Force is to protect the space merchants.
Bernie Sanders wasn't the only person on the left to
notice the ironies here this daggering inequalities. In twenty nineteen,
Trevor Noah, the mixed race South African who hosts the
Daily Show on Comedy Central in the US, pictured Elon
Musk bringing colonists to Mars.
Speaker 8 (23:43):
You gotta admit it would have been kind of funny
if Elon Musk waited until they landed on Mars to
be like, oh, I forgot to mention you are my
space slaves.
Speaker 11 (23:51):
Now get to work building my base, because then uralize
all those rich white people would be slaving away on
the Martian fields.
Speaker 4 (23:59):
They'll be singing their old Caucasians virtuals.
Speaker 3 (24:02):
Trevor Noah tied race to space, but they got tied
together again in twenty twenty, After George Floyd was killed
in Minneapolis on May twenty fifth, a Monday, protests began
in Minneapolis that night. By Wednesday, they'd begun to spread
across the country. On Thursday, the governor of Minnesota called
in the National Guard. On Friday, Trump delivered an ultimatum,
(24:27):
tweeting when the looting starts, the shooting starts. That night,
as protesters gathered near the White House, the Secret Service
rushed the President to an underground bunker. The next day,
May thirtieth, twenty twenty, Trump boarded Air Force one. But
where to?
Speaker 15 (24:44):
And now it's my high honor and distinct privilege to
introduce to you the man whose vision and relentless leadership
brought us to this historic day, the forty fifth President
of the United States of America, President Donald Trump.
Speaker 3 (25:02):
Trump hadn't flown to Minneapolis to talk to protesters. He'd
flown to Florida to the Kennedy Space Center to watch
the long scale juel launch of SpaceX's first manned mission,
the first time a commercial space corporation carried people into space.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Ignition liptot at the Balcon nine.
Speaker 11 (25:19):
And got.
Speaker 15 (25:24):
It.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Was a weird freak of timing this history making moment.
Nearly four years ago, the George Floyd protests and SpaceX's
triumphant launch Big day.
Speaker 6 (25:35):
Is a big day.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
It wasn't unfortunate freak of timing. Trump took to the
stage to his trademark walk on music at the Space
Center and started out talking about the protests.
Speaker 13 (25:46):
My administration will always stand against violence, mayhem, and disorder.
Speaker 3 (25:52):
And it was a hard turn to get to the rocket,
but Trump tied the two together. He said, raceso's division,
Space brings unity.
Speaker 13 (26:01):
Moments ago, as we witnessed the launch of two great
American astronauts into space, we were filled with the sense
of pride and unity that brings us together as Americans.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
For Trump, SpaceX meant America first. Then he introduced an
American entrepreneur.
Speaker 13 (26:22):
He's a little different than a lot of other people.
Speaker 4 (26:25):
He liked rockets.
Speaker 13 (26:27):
Elon Musk, Congratulations. Congratulations.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
That's Trump basking in Musk's space glow. Since then, SpaceX
has created the largest and most powerful spacecraft ever built.
It's become the world leader in space exploration, and Trump,
after his defeat in twenty twenty and his failed attempt
to overturn the election, has come back to power to
(26:54):
winning re election decisively, this time with Musk at his side,
his own rocketman. SpaceX's engineering accomplishments are incredible, but what
about the costs? What about the risks? Not the existential ones,
but the ordinary ones. Watching the SpaceX launch that day
(27:18):
almost five years ago, now, all I could think about
was a poem by Gil scott Heron from nineteen seventy
about the Apollo mission. It's called Whitey on the Moon.
Speaker 11 (27:30):
One such poem concerned the fact that millions and millions of.
Speaker 10 (27:33):
Dollars are continually sent into out of space while we
continue to face the same problems here on the ground.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
Scott Heron was writing about everyone left behind, the poor,
the needy, and their suffering. His sister bit by a rat,
getting sicker and sicker, and him with no money to
pay the doctor's bill while Whitey's on the Moon. I
listened to that poem that day, while Trump and Musk
watched that launch. It's still ringing in my ears all
(28:01):
these years later. As Trump and Musk dismantle USAID, ending
American aid programs around the world while ratcheting up the
Mars program. People have been trying to escape to Planet
B for a long time. That doesn't make it the
right thing for Planet A. Next time on x Man
(28:27):
Muscism here on Earth and the story of how the
man who sold the Moon became Iron Man.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!