Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket

The Happiness Lab’s Dr. Laurie Santos brings together other Pushkin hosts to mark the International Day of Happiness. Revisionist History’s Malcolm Gladwell talks about the benefits of the misery of running in a Canadian winter. Dr. Maya Shankar from A Slight Change of Plans talks about quieting her mental chatter. And Cautionary Tales host Tim Harford surprises everyone with the happiness lessons to be learned from a colonoscopy.

What is it like to shadow Elon Musk for two years? To sit courtside as he builds a rocket? Or tears apart an engineer? Or couch surfs at the homes of billionaires? And how on earth do you make sense of it all? Walter Isaacson is the biographer of giants: DaVinci, Franklin, Doudna, Jobs...and now Musk, former enfante terrible, rocket launcher, electric car innovator, and Twitter—er, X—disruptor, to put it gently. In this four-part series, author Evan Ratliff (Mastermind, Longform Podcast) sits down with Isaacson to draw out the behind-the-scenes stories of this epic biography, and what the writer has learned as an outsider inside Silicon Valley.  

Sharing a preview from Car Show!, a new podcast from Pushkin. Longtime Car and Driver editor Eddie Alterman tells the stories of the vital cars—the ones that have changed how we drive and live, whose significance lies outside the scope of horsepower or miles per gallon.

In this episode, Eddie investigates the Lunar Rover. Why did we send a car to the moon? How did we design something for an environment we knew nothing about? How did we get it up there? Plus, you’ll get a behind-the-scenes peek at GM’s current lunar rover project.

At the start of 2021, Elon Musk briefly became the richest man in the world. The global pandemic was a boom time for American billionaires, many of whom saw their wealth rise even as much of the world was locked down. As Musk, Bezos, Gates and others jockeyed for first place in the world’s richest-man contest, the rise of cryptocurrencies was generating headlines about the fictive quality of money. “All forms of currency are acts of imagination”, says Jill Lepore: they require communal belief in their value - what economists sometimes call the Tinkerbell Effect. Musk started tweeting about Dogecoin - a cryptocurrency started as a joke, based on a meme about a dog - even dubbing himself 'The Dogefather'. Although Musk’s tweets looked ironic, jokey, irreverent, they seemed to be having a very real and destabilizing effect on financial markets.