Franklin Foer: Elon, the Man Who Ate NASA

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Speaker 4 Hey, everybody. Just some scheduling notes here.
It is Wednesday, so a reminder, we have the next level every Wednesday. It usually comes out in the early evening with JVL and Sarah and myself.

Speaker 4 Well, we do a lot of more of the kind of rank politics, a little politicking. So if you are interested in that, make sure to go check it out.

Speaker 4 Because of the news environment, I've been kind of failing at this.

Speaker 4 There's just been like too much political news and too much Trump craziness to do step back conversations on Wednesday about other topics, but I'm endeavoring to do that.

Speaker 4 We did a little bit of David Wallace Wells a couple weeks ago that I thought was wonderful on climate.

Speaker 4 And so we're trying that again today with Frank Foer talking about space and NASA and Elon, though we get into a little bit of news of the day around Epstein and Gaza, et cetera, as well.

Speaker 4 So go check out the next level if you haven't. Make sure to subscribe to the Bulwark Takes feed if you haven't for some some of the other one-off interviews and quick hot takes.

Speaker 4 And boy, do we have a doozy for you on FY Pod this week? Me and Cam sit down with one of the people that was at the Mehdi Hassan versus 20 far-right Nazis debate.

Speaker 4 We bring on one of the probably the most normal, but boy, we're grading on a curve of the 20 far-right conservatives that debated Mehdi. So that's coming on Saturday.
So subscribe to that feed too.

Speaker 4 Appreciate you all. Appreciate your support for the bulwark.
And up next, Frank Ford.

Speaker 4 Hello, and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Excited to welcome Staffrider at the Atlantic, like everybody else.

Speaker 4 His books include The Last Politician Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future. His latest piece for the Atlantic is The Man Who Ate NASA.

Speaker 4 It's about Elon Musk. It's Frank Ford.
How are you doing, man?

Speaker 5 Hey, good. Despondent.
Good.

Speaker 4 Despondent. Yeah, we're talking in the green room about our despondency.
So we'll be getting to a lot of people.

Speaker 5 Is there a shade of despondency that's also okay?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I got a piece of feedback in my Instagram DMs from a reader about yesterday's podcast who said that they took a gummy before listening and they've never felt more relaxed about the state of affairs, which is interesting because we were talking a lot about like starvation and autocracy in the podcast.

Speaker 4 But whatever, if that works for you, maybe this is maybe people can vibe out for a little while.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Edibles should be a component of humanitarian aid that gets distributed to everybody here.

Speaker 4 It's not a bad, not a bad program.

Speaker 4 I don't know when you get into this, you have any expertise on it, but I should mention the biggest earthquake in like decades or something in Russia, and there was a tsunami warning on the West Coast.

Speaker 4 So, you know, if you're on the West Coast, keep an eye out for the ocean.

Speaker 4 I want to talk to you about Elon mostly, but we're kind of contractually obligated to talk about Jeffrey Epstein on this podcast every day first. So I just want to maybe get your two cents.

Speaker 4 The new development, if you want to call it that, from since yesterday, was Trump expanded on his comments about that Jeffrey Epstein's real crime was stealing staff from Mar-a-Lago.

Speaker 4 People might be familiar with the fact that

Speaker 4 Gillen Maxwell groomed Virginia Guffrey, who was 16, working in the spa at Mar-a-Lago. So a reporter asked Trump yesterday if one of the stolen people he was referencing was Virginia.

Speaker 4 And Trump said, I think think so. I think that was one of the people.
He stole her.

Speaker 5 So I trust Donald Trump to have like the most acute moral hierarchy. And so, yeah, obviously, like stealing staff, that is like the most deeply unethical thing that a person could do.

Speaker 5 And it really, it overwhelms anything else, any other sin that a person could have committed. So I get that.

Speaker 4 The real victim here is. you know, the kind of capitalist business leaders, you know, right? The job creators.

Speaker 4 The real victims here are the job creators, you know, who have to deal with losing, losing some of their labor.

Speaker 5 It's very hard to get help in a tight job market. And I think

Speaker 5 we can't shed enough tears for the people who are searching for good help.

Speaker 4 It is crazy. I should mention that the Trump timeline there doesn't exactly work.
As mentioned, Virginia left or was abducted essentially from Mar-a-Lago in the year 2000.

Speaker 4 What she went through was just

Speaker 4 the worst of the worst, really, of all of the women that Epstein had in its orbit.

Speaker 4 And then Trump, depending on what year you hear the story, kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago in either 2004 or 2007.

Speaker 4 So like his totally heartless, absurd explanation for why he banned Epstein actually is also just not true.

Speaker 5 Right.

Speaker 5 Well, and also just one of the consequences of the way that we as a culture tend to get obsessed with the scandal like this and the kind of the gotcha nature of it all and the kind of the search for the the smoking gun is that we do end up carrying the discussion so far away from like the actual crime and scandal and the underlying terrible things that occurred.

Speaker 5 And I mean, I think you're correct to try to pull us back to

Speaker 5 it's just like that something truly atrocious happened here and the president of the United States is attached to it and he can deny.

Speaker 4 deny it in any sort of way shape or form but he's he's attached to it and he's covering up the extent of his attachment One other news item that's relatively related.

Speaker 4 I don't know if you have any expertise here that you want to bring to bear, Frank, but I feel like for our listeners, we should mention that Trump is considering the pardon of Diddy,

Speaker 4 according to Deadline and others who have sources inside the White House. Sean Combs, Trump wants to make sure that people know that freak offs are not illegal in his America.

Speaker 4 I don't know if you have any thoughts about that that you want to share.

Speaker 5 I'm neither an expert in Diddy nor freak offs, but it sounds like a bad boy for life.

Speaker 5 It sounds bad to me.

Speaker 4 It sounds like a bad pardon. Yeah.
If you would admit, if you admit that.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it sounds like an abusive office. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Why?

Speaker 5 Do you know why?

Speaker 5 I think.

Speaker 5 Can you conjure an explanation for why?

Speaker 4 Yeah, sure. I can, actually.
Donald Trump is 79 years old and watches a lot of cable news. And

Speaker 4 he's seeing a lot of coverage of this.

Speaker 4 And he is sympathetic towards people who he feel, again, the real victims, people who he feels were wrongly accused of sexual misconduct, or even, I think he even feels sympathy for people who did the sexual misconduct, but then have to face consequences for that.

Speaker 4 He feels sympathy towards those people.

Speaker 5 The best way to distract from your association with a sex criminal is to pardon another sex criminal.

Speaker 5 I don't think that's a good idea.

Speaker 5 It changes the subject.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think he's thinking that Diddy's famous and is on TV and

Speaker 4 this is a witch hunt like he went through with the Russia hoax. And if he pardons him, then maybe black people will like him.
I think it's as simple as simple as that. So we'll see how that plays out.

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Speaker 4 You did a deeply reported story, as mentioned, on NASA and Musk, and there's so much in here to kind of chew over. Your intro anecdote, though, was new for me.

Speaker 4 I don't know if people know this, which is the origin of like Elon's kind of origin story of where his name came from.

Speaker 4 And so I would kind of like to start there before we get into kind of the Elon machinations and what happened to our space program.

Speaker 5 It's just a freaky coincidence that his father has exploited and turned into an origin story, and his father is a very unreliable narrator.

Speaker 5 But the story goes this way, which is that there was this Nazi rocket scientist, Werner von Braun, who essentially built the American space program.

Speaker 5 He was, during World War II, he used concentration camp labor on behalf of his program because he was obsessed with building rockets. He didn't care who his benefactor was.

Speaker 5 The United States appreciated his skill and after World War II recruited him to come to the United States.

Speaker 5 They took him to ultimately a base in Alabama and had him start to develop rockets first militarily and then for the sake of our civilian space program.

Speaker 5 And he was obsessed also with the idea of going to Mars and he wrote a novel called Project Mars that envisioned what life would be like.

Speaker 5 And as he goes deeper into his fantasy about what life would be like, he starts to contemplate what a government would look like on Mars and the technocracy that would rule over the planet.

Speaker 5 And in his description, as he goes deeper, deeper into the weeds, he says that there would be a beneficent leader who rules the red planet. And he happens to give out of

Speaker 5 out of almost nowhere,

Speaker 5 he names this beneficent leader the Elon. And his father, Earl Musk, saw this at some point and started talking about this as one of the inspirations for giving Elon Musk his name.

Speaker 5 Now, there's all sorts of timing reasons why that doesn't necessarily line up. It could just, it is just a freakish coincidence.

Speaker 5 But when Elon Musk has came across this fact himself, tweeted about it, and kind of extolled this as almost a prophecy of what he was meant to be

Speaker 5 in the grand sweep of human history.

Speaker 4 So he sees himself as sort of living the prophecy of the Nazi rocket scientists who believes that there'll be a generous

Speaker 4 technologist that leads the government of Mars.

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 5 which is, which is something that is embedded deeply in all of the science fiction that he consumed as an adolescent, that there would be this engineer savior who would rescue humanity from apocalypse.

Speaker 5 And that's the role that he's cast for himself.

Speaker 4 That could lead to some questionable judgment calls, I would think.

Speaker 4 You know, if you sort of see yourself as this kind of quasi-omnipotent leader of the future, you know, and you need to achieve that prophecy.

Speaker 4 You know, I think that could maybe blind you to practical considerations sometimes.

Speaker 5 Well, there's an inherently anti-democratic spirit to imagining that you have that kind of world historic role for yourself, especially since so much of the description of the engineer is that the engineer is the hyper-rationalist seer who's able to identify everything that,

Speaker 5 and it should be said, his grandfather was actually a member of a movement called Technocracy in Canada that glorified the role of the engineer as savior.

Speaker 5 And when he steps into a place like the federal government and runs the Department of Government efficiency, efficiency being the watchword of the engineer, he assumes highly anti-democratic powers because he's not confirmed by the Senate.

Speaker 5 He is accountable to essentially no one in an office that's invented from Holkloth, which goes in and essentially attempts to remake all of the architecture of the state, which had been sanctified through democratic means to be the way that it was.

Speaker 5 So the fantasy is real.

Speaker 4 It's fascinating.

Speaker 4 JVL talks sometimes about how people that don't know wrestling, like they're missing big parts of this moment, you know, because they don't have that cultural touchstone and it's such an important precursor to Trump.

Speaker 4 I'm feeling this way now as a non-nerd who like the idea that there exists literature where engineers are the heroes and the saviors is like so far from anything I've ever consumed that I'm feeling like maybe I'm missing, you know, something about what's happening with Elon and Doge and these guys.

Speaker 4 There's one element of this story that I'm sympathetic to from the Elon perspective, I guess, and that is the NASA failures,

Speaker 4 which goes back quite a ways.

Speaker 4 Actually, though, before we get to that, I want to start with an interesting element of your story was the beginning of all of this, like the new frontier liberalism, and then kind of Kennedy being the touchstone of that.

Speaker 4 Like even that like kind of begins as an accident, kind of, right? And that was not an intentional course that they've gone on. Talk about that a little bit.
I found that interesting.

Speaker 5 Yeah. So Kennedy comes to office.
He's not a space guy.

Speaker 5 He was, when he talked about the new frontier, which does come from the world of science fiction itself, but it also comes from just we could be American history nerds, not sci-fi nerds.

Speaker 5 It was when the frontier was closed, Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian, announced the closing of the frontier.

Speaker 5 There was a sense that America had been sapped of its vitality, and that's what he was tapping into. But at the same time, people were starting to talk about space as being the new frontier.

Speaker 5 But that's not what Kennedy meant. He was totally uninterested in space exploration.

Speaker 5 And then the Soviets launch Yuri Gagarin into space, which seems to show that the Soviets have much more prowess than we do in the realm of technology.

Speaker 5 The Bay of Pigs happens, which is this misadventure that reflects terribly on the Kennedy administration. This is very early in his administration.

Speaker 5 And he's essentially stuck with a bad narrative that he wants to change.

Speaker 5 And he improvises his way very quickly to taking the most maximalist plan that NASA has sitting on its shelf, which is that they were going to go to the moon within the decade, which is an incredibly audacious goal.

Speaker 5 And, you know, we talk about the idealism, the liberalism of that decade. And there was almost something very circular about the logic, which is that we believe in government.

Speaker 5 Therefore, we're going to demonstrate the competence of the government in this realm, which could then help us

Speaker 5 sell a political program that extends government into other realms because we've demonstrated its competence here. We do hard things because they're hard is a phrase that John Kennedy used.

Speaker 4 It's interesting.

Speaker 4 When I was interviewing Zoron a couple of weeks ago, he like makes this exact point, which I wonder if that was intentional or not, like this idea of like that, that is his his positive overlap with Ezra and abundance, right?

Speaker 4 Is that like he wants government to do big things so that people trust it more.

Speaker 5 It's not a social democratic trope. That is kind of part of the liberal project going back to kind of its most,

Speaker 5 we talked about technocracy in one realm, which is the engineer, but progressive technocracy does believe in the capacity of the state. to to do really hard things in a competent sort of way.

Speaker 5 And we got to say, as it relates relates to going to the moon, it succeeded wildly, maybe at great cost. I mean, there were 400,000 people at the height of the Apollo program who were working on this.

Speaker 5 The government spent $28 billion in the 1960s, which translates into something over $300 billion

Speaker 5 today in order to make this happen. And it is inspiring that

Speaker 5 the state could execute in that sort of way and that it could bring so many people on board with the fundamentally useless but idealistic project.

Speaker 4 Well, not totally useless.

Speaker 5 Look, going to the moon didn't yield that much by way of technological breakthrough. It didn't yield that much by the way of science.
It yielded some really interesting science.

Speaker 5 But what it did in effect was strike a major victory in the Cold War because this was the terms of the competition in the 1960s.

Speaker 5 It was like, who would get to the, who would do the most in the heavens and it was at a time when the united states was losing support it was losing support in places like africa and asia and it was keen to reverse that the amazing thing about the apollo program was it wasn't just technology and engineering it was soft power diplomacy that was wielded there was when john Glenn went into space, they brought the Mercury capsule all around the world.

Speaker 5 And there were crowds of hundreds of thousands of people who would line up in Delhi or Dakar to see this capsule and to meet the astronaut.

Speaker 5 I mean, it really did make the United States quite an attractive proposition.

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Speaker 4 So we can kind of fast forward through some of this, but interestingly, you know, see you right in August of 69, NASA pitches the Nixon administration on its vision of sending humans to Mars by 1982.

Speaker 4 And so this is where you get into this period where, you know, the most audacious plan on a shelf doesn't come into fruition, like is not able to be achieved.

Speaker 4 And you then fast forward through kind of a couple decades of,

Speaker 4 well, I guess I'd let you kind of describe it, like between that period and then, you know, kind of in the Obama era where the government starts to move more to partnering with private space companies like Musk.

Speaker 5 Right. So NASA, after having achieved this amazing victory, is like, give us even more money so that we can get to Mars.
We can build a space station.

Speaker 5 We can build a shuttle that goes back and forth between the space station and Earth. We're going to take us into this next phase.

Speaker 5 And Richard Nixon, who's the president, doesn't much like the idea of burnishing John Kennedy's legacy even more because he had an endless grudge against the guy. And also, America was changing.

Speaker 5 That type of new frontier liberalism had lost traction because of Vietnam, because

Speaker 5 of the backlash against the 1960s. And so NASA hadn't read the room correctly.
And Nixon says, okay,

Speaker 5 rather than doing everything that you want, here's money for a space shuttle. And so that that becomes the program.
But the problem was, is that the moon was a very clear destination.

Speaker 5 And the space shuttle was kind of this aimless program that was engaged actually in some incredibly important scientific missions, but it didn't have the PR value that Apollo had.

Speaker 5 It wasn't able to capture the public's imagination or the international public's imagination in the same sort of way.

Speaker 5 And it becomes this kind of zombie program that just continues indefinitely into the future.

Speaker 5 Nobody really wants to kill it, but nobody really wants to love it. And in the 2000s, there was this moment where after the crashes that had happened, where it becomes time to wrap up the program.

Speaker 5 But at that stage, there is an international space station, and so you needed some way to get back and forth between the space station and Earth.

Speaker 5 And NASA and the Pentagon kind of start to explore other options.

Speaker 5 And they start to get excited in ideas that are very au current in the 2000s, like namely the idea of disruption or commercializing or privatizing this function. And

Speaker 5 that's where we have the mythic character of the Elan entering the story.

Speaker 4 Let's just skip a little bit of doing this chronologically because I want to talk about the failures of the government that led us to having the Elan save us.

Speaker 4 And then we'll go to all of the ways that Elon's story and craziness is potentially a problem.

Speaker 4 Because I talked to Walter Isaacson about this when he wrote his book, I don't know, got a year or two ago at this point.

Speaker 4 And it's pretty astonishing that then you get to this period where government's contracting with SpaceX were in the 2010s, and you fast forward to kind of more present day.

Speaker 4 And like NASA's not really capable of putting rockets into space anymore. Like the other contractors aren't.

Speaker 4 And we end up kind of stuck with Elon, right?

Speaker 4 I mean, like some of this was the failures with everyone else in the space that Elon ends up and SpaceX ends up being the only one that can, you know, consistently get rockets into low Earth orbit, which has a lot of, like, at least maybe not a lot, but some important practical uses, right?

Speaker 4 Like, isn't that really the fundamental breakdown here that gives that gives you, because right, because if there are three other companies that could do this, or if NASA was effectively doing this, then it wouldn't really be that significant that SpaceX had passed NASA.

Speaker 4 But it isn't just that SpaceX passed NASA. It's like they essentially replaced it.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Two things that I want to say.
One is that NASA actually continues to do certain things in a world-class way.

Speaker 5 The two parts of NASA, there is human spaceflight, and then there are these scientific missions that NASA does.

Speaker 5 When it comes to actually executing science in space, NASA is awesome and irreplaceable, and it doesn't suck up that much governmental money.

Speaker 5 And I think that the rewards are actually immense because NASA is actually helping us understand our planet and understanding our place in the grand scheme of the universe in a way that I think is both spiritually enriching and produces practical knowledge that humanity in the United States benefit from.

Speaker 5 But then there's this other program, which is so expensive, the human spaceflight program,

Speaker 5 which

Speaker 5 in the launching of rockets. And right, so the question is: why does NASA go from being displaying the prowess of Apollo to being this thing that can't actually shoot them up into space anymore?

Speaker 5 And there's something that happens, which is that NASA, when it runs Apollo, is deeply embedded in the engineering process. It's micromanaging its engineers.

Speaker 5 It has deep expertise within the organization.

Speaker 5 But then, when it starts to continue to try to do big things without enough money to really do them, it starts to go off the rails because it begins to rely on a set of contractors to do the work.

Speaker 5 And the contractors demand more and more control over the projects. NASA's best engineering talent leaves the government.

Speaker 5 But I think fundamentally, you look at this, so much of our political system is not actually built well to do big things over the long run because you have Congress, which takes this immense interest in NASA.

Speaker 5 And NASA makes a very shrewd decision to disperse its bases all across the country, which makes it kind of this impregnable institution because you have this array of politicians who are desperate to keep the jobs in their own districts.

Speaker 5 You have these defense contractors who are massive lobbyists to keep projects alive, even if they're overspending and failing to deliver.

Speaker 5 And the goals are always shifting because each president comes in and says, we're going to the moon. No, we're going to the Mars.
No, we're going to the moon and Mars.

Speaker 5 And it becomes hard to execute these projects, which require long-term planning when everything is shifting.

Speaker 5 And so I do think there is some sort of interesting parable about government contained within this story where it's not like government doesn't have the capacity to do the most amazing things, but it struggles to repeat them over time.

Speaker 5 And it struggles to maintain systems over time that don't become gummed up by the inherent inefficiencies of our political system, which are real, which is democracy.

Speaker 4 Capitalist Tim wants to come in and kind of defend the incentives of the capitalist system here a little bit because part of Elon's success versus the government is that you know they figure out that that SpaceX can provide internet to people and so there's like a profit motive and so they're putting a lot of rockets into space and so you're getting a lot of a lot of reps in just like anything else in life like what if you're doing so if you're getting a lot of reps in you're going to be better than someone that's not i forget what the malcolm gladwell little uh

Speaker 4 10 000 how many hours yeah 10 000 uh spacex says it had 10 000 hours of practice but on the other side of that like okay well that doesn't explain why everybody else failed though Like, all the Boeing and all the other big contractors, you know, failed.

Speaker 5 I think we have to give SpaceX its flowers. It is an amazing company.
And that, and I think Musk is an incredible capitalist.

Speaker 5 I mean, he built some, he built a company that was able to figure out how to do things cheaper, more efficiently than all the other actors.

Speaker 5 And then he was able to come up with this other business plan of Starlink that provides the internet. But the problem, I think, Tim, is that space is not really a market.

Speaker 5 It's like we can aspirationally treat it like it's a market and that there's space for multiple players, but there's certain natural monopolies. And

Speaker 5 maybe this is one of them where he's able to create all of these virtuous cycles because he's launching all the time. It attracts the best talent.

Speaker 5 They acquire more data. They learn how to do things better and better and more efficiently over time.

Speaker 5 That is a capitalist method that works, but it also happens to leave no other space for other competitors.

Speaker 4 So there's the other side of that coin, too, which is

Speaker 4 taking back the clock again.

Speaker 4 So SpaceX, it became an incredible company, but had a rocky start, to say the least, like almost went bankrupt several times, and doesn't didn't have until Starlink a lot of options besides government for getting funding, any options really.

Speaker 4 And so, you know, as you write, Musk admits that Obama rescued SpaceX in 2010 with the government plan to rent, you know, rockets essentially from private companies.

Speaker 4 So, that is also like the kind of deep, and it's like, it's kind of worse than hypocrisy. And it's the dark side of this, right?

Speaker 4 That you have this guy who did end up like creating this great company that allows us to, you know,

Speaker 4 that has the successes and allows us to still send people into space and to provide satellite internet to Ukraine, like all these sorts of things.

Speaker 4 But he did so thanks to help from a government program.

Speaker 4 And then, when he gets power, rather than trying to make the government efficient and more whatever, technologist, a technocrat, whatever word you want to use, to ensure this can happen in the future, he dismantles it.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 5 And he's benefiting from one of, I think, the worst tendencies in government, that SpaceX, part of the reason that they're not more competitors to SpaceX is that the government is not comfortable with building up competition over time in markets, that its preference is to go back to reliable providers time and again.

Speaker 5 Because if SpaceX proves that it's capable, why spend money on Jeff Bezos?

Speaker 5 You know, why cultivate these competitors when they may fail over time and they may make me look bad as an administrator or may piss off the lobbyists who are funding the congressmen who provide me with my.

Speaker 5 So he benefits from some of the worst tendencies in government.

Speaker 5 And yes, it is like it is screaming hypocrisy that this guy who has cultivated this symbiotic relationship with the state would then go in and try to dismantle so much of it.

Speaker 4 The other problem with the Elon model and that you kind of write about is this, how in the 60s, at the height and the success of NASA, right? Like it was a symbol of national greatness.

Speaker 4 And the Elon program,

Speaker 4 you could have imagined him.

Speaker 4 Trying to channel that in like a public-private partnership sense, right?

Speaker 4 Like the good Elon, a good version of Elon, right um gets in there and it's like let's try to you know figure out how to whatever get to mars and we're going to do it we're going to have private companies do it and it's going to be a sign of american ingenuity and all that but instead this kind of turns into not an issue of national greatness but an issue of elon greatness and you know his megalomania right right because one of the things about nasa is like you walk down the street you don't see people wearing irs t-shirts or social security administration t-shirts but you do see lots of people wearing nasa t-shirts i wore a World Bank hat in college to be a little contrarian, to be a little contrarian shit.

Speaker 4 But yeah, besides that, you don't see much of that.

Speaker 5 But that was just a troll.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 He doesn't dismiss NASA, right?

Speaker 5 But he does end up imitating it in its way where SpaceX sells a lot of merch and kind of the same sorts of reasons why NASA achieved its fan base, Musk achieves his own fan base, which is a huge part of his ability to achieve political power and his ability to successfully run his companies because he has legions of fanboys.

Speaker 4 One other thing is also on the Musk megalomania and how he's dipping into crazy and losing his mind, which is a little alarming about all this anecdote. I had missed this.

Speaker 4 To warn Mars, Musk has proposed detonating nuclear bombs over Mars poles, which he claims could induce a greenhouse effect.

Speaker 4 So, but Nuke Mars is also Occupy Mars and Nuke Mars are are part of his part of his SpaceX sells, has sold Nuke Mars t-shirts.

Speaker 5 And, you know, the problem with analyzing somebody like Elon Musk is there's this slipperiness. It's like I,

Speaker 5 a lot of people have spent a lot of time taking that idea very seriously, but it's not clear that Musk himself takes that idea very seriously.

Speaker 5 But he's never, you know, he exists on this knife's edge between sincerity and taking the piss, and he never clarifies what's sincere and what's just,

Speaker 5 to repeat myself, trolling.

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Speaker 4 All right, I want to get into a couple of your other articles, but the last, like, I think, the actually substantive question here on this topic, I'm interested in your take on,

Speaker 4 is this question of the nationalization of SpaceX.

Speaker 4 This has been a rare moment of bipartisan unity between Bulwark editor JVL and the war room, Steve Bannon's War Room. Both Bannon and JVL have suggested nationalizing SpaceX.

Speaker 4 We'll take that for what it's worth. I read your story and I kind of had this in mind, which is on the one hand,

Speaker 4 there is kind of a natural monopoly element to this, and we don't want one crazy person to have this much power where

Speaker 4 internet access and threatened places around the world are determined on the whims of Elon Musk and maybe not even the whims, maybe on the corrupt interests of Elon Musk.

Speaker 4 And so that makes an argument for nationalization. On the other hand, a long article about the failures of the government to be successful in this space,

Speaker 4 I think would be a compelling argument against it. So I don't know.
What do you think?

Speaker 5 I'm not in favor of nationalization. I think that it's incumbent on the government not to become dependent on single companies.
And

Speaker 5 even though there are characteristics of a natural monopoly here, I think that it would be totally possible.

Speaker 5 over the long run for the United States to encourage the development of other companies to create.

Speaker 5 They've done this a little bit, but only as half measures to make sure that Blue Origin is competitive. There are other rocket labs.
There are other people.

Speaker 4 We need to make sure that three megalomaniacs have access to space, not just one.

Speaker 4 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5 Well, but that is the problem with space, is that space inherently attracts the richest people in humanity who are keen to kind of show that they can do the hardest things as a way to signal their power and status.

Speaker 5 And that's, that's inherent. But what's troubling to me is not the space part of this.
It's the defense part of it.

Speaker 5 I'm okay with NASA being dependent on companies owned by rich megalomaniacs, but I'm less okay with the National Reconnaissance Office and the Pentagon and the Space Force being dependent on companies like SpaceX because

Speaker 5 ultimately, The consequences are so much more serious. And this is just a lesson that history shows is that you can't have your defense, the defense of your country, be

Speaker 5 totally dependent on a limited number of individuals or companies.

Speaker 4 I just want to do a quick run through some of the other recent stories you've written lately and kind of pick your brain on a couple things. You wrote about Zelensky corruption.

Speaker 4 This podcast has been basically like a hagiography of Zelensky. And so I'm always open to challenging my priors.
I guess there are these protests in Ukraine over this,

Speaker 4 I guess not anti-corruption, pro-corruption bill, I guess, that he signed. And I honestly haven't followed the particulars of it that closely.

Speaker 4 And so I was just wondering why, why you weighed in on it and what your assessment is of all that.

Speaker 5 Because I'm a Zelensky hagiographer as well.

Speaker 5 And I feel like when a guy who you canonize as a saint goes and does something that's truly egregious and undermines undermines your priors, you have to say something about it.

Speaker 5 And so I was furious with him for signing this law because, look, Zelensky, I profiled Zelensky in 2019. I've been to Ukraine a bunch.

Speaker 5 I always thought that when it came to the question of corruption, he could have gone either way, that he had, he was backed by a corrupt oligarch who was the guy who broadcast his shows on TV.

Speaker 5 Zelensky would do the right thing on corruption most of the time, but he needed a lot of international pressure in order to do the right thing because it's hard.

Speaker 5 Fighting corruption is hard because it requires that you confront friends and allies.

Speaker 5 And when you live in a country like Ukraine, and especially in a war where a lot of people are profiteering off of the war, it requires having really hard conversations with people who you really like.

Speaker 5 And Zelensky, I think, has struggled to do that. And so in this instance, he sees...
Trump signaling that there's no cost to throwing off the anti-corruption agenda.

Speaker 5 He kind of coasts on this momentum to sign this bill that basically disempowers the two organizations within the Ukrainian government that are most important to policing corruption. He defangs them.

Speaker 5 And then the public, you know, gets out gets outraged. He says he's going to reverse.

Speaker 5 We don't know fully the course of whether that reversal actually ends up happening, but he deserves to get dinged majorly for this deviation.

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Speaker 4 You've also written a bunch about kind of both the anti-Semitism and illiberalism on some of our elite college campuses. I guess I should preface this by saying

Speaker 4 the story that interests me about the least in our public discourse right now is this Ivy League campus politics.

Speaker 3 I think that it,

Speaker 4 as a non-Ivy Leaguer, I just, I don't know. I think things seem kind of fine.
But that said, people who follow this much.

Speaker 5 You just disavowed my oeuvre.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I apologize to you for that. Obviously, there's a lot of interest in it.
If you go to the New York Times, it's like most read stories on any given week.

Speaker 4 It is about arcana of what is happening on campus at Harvard. And so, okay, people care, just not me.

Speaker 4 That said, I do care about it in the context of the Trump, you know, kind of power struggle element to all this.

Speaker 4 And so, you've written about how there's real issues with illiberalism on campus, places like Columbia and Harvard. But at the same time, they need to deal with.

Speaker 4 But at the same time, the way that they've folded here with Trump is pretty ominous. So why don't you just give us a quick penny tour through that?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, I think that

Speaker 5 in the best world, college would take care of its own cultural issues.

Speaker 5 And I think that you look at a place like Harvard, which happens to have a president who's concerned with the problems that Harvard has deeply within its culture.

Speaker 5 And Harvard itself has been pretty open about acknowledging the illiberalism in its midst, especially as it relates to questions about intellectual pluralism.

Speaker 5 I mean, they know at the highest level that it's like become a, it's become a filter bubble. And they know that when something becomes a filter bubble, it's actually bad for students.

Speaker 5 It's bad for the production of knowledge. It's bad for the long-term legitimacy of the institution.
So they need to fix it. To me, having the state step in and try to solve those problems,

Speaker 5 even when the problems are genuine,

Speaker 5 is overreach that veers into authoritarianism. I've spent time in Hungary.
I saw how Orban pushed Central European University out of the country.

Speaker 5 What Trump is doing to Harvard and to Columbia is so much more heavy-handed than anything Victor Orban ever dreamed of.

Speaker 4 I think that's an important fact. We kind of discussed this a lot, and there's a lot of times where the rhetoric is like, America is veering towards Orbanism.

Speaker 4 And that's like kind of true across some verticals, but like in other places, we've Trump has sped run past it. Right, right.

Speaker 5 Because when Orban, I mean, I just to use this small example that you don't really care very much about, but when Orban pushed that.

Speaker 4 I care about it in the grand geopolitical scheme. I don't care about it in the micro of like, I have a complaint about this professor.

Speaker 4 I had some complaints about professors too. It just wasn't in the Atlantic.

Speaker 3 But anyway, sorry, continue.

Speaker 5 To be fair, no.

Speaker 5 So when Orban tried to push that Central European University, what he did was he relied on legalisms that made things uncomfortable. It was a very sideways attack.

Speaker 5 It was nothing like, we're taking away all of your funding. We're hammering you with action after action after action to put unrelenting pressure on you to leave the country.
It's not subtle.

Speaker 5 It's heavy-handed. Orban was more subtle.

Speaker 4 We also talked about how you are working on potentially a story coming up about Gaza. We was reading

Speaker 4 kind of a UN report this morning where they were talking about the worst case scenario is unfolding, the humanitarian crisis, unlike anything we've seen in this century.

Speaker 4 Just at the broadest level, I'm wondering your thoughts about what we're seeing in Gaza.

Speaker 5 When I look at the problem of people starving, the initial instinct I have is, why can't we just give them more food? Like,

Speaker 5 why can't we flood Gaza with food? And that would solve the problems that the Israelis are talking about.

Speaker 5 Because if If Hamas is exploiting food in order to maintain dominance in Gaza or to cling to power, and there's mixed evidence about that. But let's concede that that's the case.

Speaker 5 The best way to undermine a black market is to create abundance. And so, why not create abundance?

Speaker 5 Well, there's so many reasons why that can't happen, but there's a very dysfunctional relationship that the Israelis and the UN have developed.

Speaker 5 Now, Israel, I think, deserves the lion's share of the blame for that. I mean, I think, you know, using food as a tactic to pressure Hamas is, to me, kind of grotesque and immoral.

Speaker 5 And there's not a lot of argument about that. The UN is essential to providing food in Gaza.
There really is no alternative to the UN.

Speaker 5 And the Gaza Humanitarian Fund was a ludicrous idea that was drawn up in a boardroom by people who didn't have expertise. And so that it failed shouldn't come as a surprise.
I think that

Speaker 5 the UN at times

Speaker 5 hasn't done enough to take Israel's concerns with the UN seriously, which, you know, given what people would said about how

Speaker 5 the UN was employing people who participated in October 7th or in, you know, that the UN, instead of doing something to kind of try to manage the Gaza Humanitarian Fund, kind of threw up its hands and said, we can't participate with this in any way, shape, or form.

Speaker 5 Again, it's just a very dysfunctional relationship.

Speaker 5 And now that we're here, I think it's almost impossible to repair it and to just do the obvious thing, which is to send in the food, to flood Gaza with food.

Speaker 5 And by the way, flooding Gaza with food is not enough because the problem with starvation and famine is that as your body is malnourished, it becomes more susceptible to disease.

Speaker 5 So disease needs to be managed as well. That in order to, it's not enough to have pasta.
You need clean water to boil pasta. You need fuel in order to fire the bakeries.

Speaker 5 And all of this should be manageable. Humanitarian organizations know how to do this and they need to be unleashed.

Speaker 4 What do you think about just kind of the facts on the ground about the famine and the starvation and what that means for kind of what's next geopolitically with regards to Israel?

Speaker 4 And obviously, like the prime concern is getting people food, but I was struck on YouTube. People can list to it if they want.

Speaker 4 I did an interview with Richie Torres yesterday, and who's been, you know, probably besides Federman, maybe the most strident defender of Israel among elected Democrats in Congress.

Speaker 4 And it was, it was pretty notable to me how his tone is shifting. And I just wonder what you think that means for the broader conflict.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I put myself in that same sort of category. Like, I, I came late to some of these issues, and I, and I think that

Speaker 5 I didn't take some of the warnings as seriously as I should have. And because there has been misinformation at various points in the war.

Speaker 5 But I think that Israel is putting itself in an incredibly precarious position, and that all people who care about the future of Israel should be insisting that it end this war because ending the war is really the only way to fundamentally address the humanitarian conditions on the ground.

Speaker 5 There is no real, like humanitarian pauses are nice and can be very helpful, but to deal with the problem at this extent,

Speaker 5 really there needs to be a ceasefire.

Speaker 4 Well, I know our listeners were dying to hear us,

Speaker 4 you know, rehash. questions about Joe Biden's age and his choices in 2024 that you reported on.

Speaker 4 I guess your book was about the first two years, but then you reported on subsequently and the ways in which

Speaker 4 some of those choices led to the downfall of our Democratic Republic. But unfortunately, we're out of time.

Speaker 3 So we can

Speaker 4 dang. Dang.
So we can go back and I don't know. People can go.

Speaker 5 Maybe we could do three hours on that at some point in the future.

Speaker 4 Yeah, people can go listen to one of the 20,000 Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson interviews about that topic if they want to. And I don't know.
Yeah, we'll have you back in 2027.

Speaker 4 We can do a view from

Speaker 4 the Biden era from there. I appreciate the time, brother.
And we'll be talking to you soon.

Speaker 5 Okay, thanks a lot.

Speaker 4 All right, thanks so much, Frank Ford. We will be back tomorrow for another edition of the Bullwork podcast.
We'll see you all then.

Speaker 3 working as hair, sleeping on the mattress. Looking like a hell with nobody happen.
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Speaker 3 The bears a hundred times still smell dope. Got some pimp, fill a pine, feel like Belcro.
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Speaker 3 Ain't stingy, my bro gonna get a payroll. I just want the pretty women in that pesos.
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Speaker 3 Big white mention in my habitat. Aim like a stitch like a laser tat.
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Speaker 3 Sleeping on these jeans is a theme back. Carpet going jeans, cause I'm cool rat.

Speaker 4 The Bullworth podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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