Tag: SpaceX

Thinking Big With Starship: How to ask the right questions to the answer we all know

I don’t think it’s getting nearly enough attention, and that is the launch of Starship 3, which occurred at the SpaceX facility in Boca Chica, Texas, on March 14th 2024.  I would place that effort as one of the top events in the human history of the world and will forever be remembered as a great leap for mankind, a leap more significant than the first moon landing with Neil Armstrong.  I know some people believe that the moon landing was faked, and based on this government and the temptations of government propaganda, I can certainly understand that.  But Neil Armstrong lived near me and was never the same after it, and his exploration into Ecuador, looking for the secret library of an ancient race of people, revealed more than what has been said under classified breaths over the years.  And humanity has been waved away from space travel, which should have never happened, for our governments have behaved like jealous parents who are afraid of their children moving out of the house.  They have done everything they can to stifle the human race from reaching into space, which has been ridiculously stupid.  But then comes along Elon Musk and SpaceX to make good on a promise not so long ago, 19 years or so, to take civilization into space, and their launch vehicle, Starship, is a tremendous engineering feat to perform just that.  And that it flew into space and achieved many of the mission parameters was stunning, and jaw-droppingly significant.  I was watching the launch from Japan with friends, and I can tell you that the next day, many people I met were stunned by what had happened.  At breakfast at the top of the Oriental Hotel in Kobe, a couple of Americans celebrated with me in a moment that no matter where people were in the world or what their politics were, the launch of the Starship into space successfully, and it maneuvered and was able to behave like an actual spacecraft was more than just another significant event.  Life is much better off because of this magnificent achievement, but a company that could only be born in America and produce such an independent objective on a massive scale was more than encouraging.  It was validating.   When you want to understand the miracles of capitalism, look at SpaceX and that Starship launch.

As I spoke to people after the launch, I was thrilled to hear that the essential philosophy of SpaceX came up.  Probably the greatest philosopher of our modern age was Douglas Adams, the author of the five books of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series produced during the late 1970s through 1990s.  Many people think of them as comedy writings, a kind of Monte Python literature series consistent with the type of material they produce on the BBC, precisely, Doctor Who.  However, Elon Musk is a tremendous fan of the first book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I am a massive fan of the second book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.  There are three more that are all good.  But they are excellent in what I call “conceptual faculty, ” the ability to think about something in a way that wasn’t previously achievable.  The Adams books take away through humor all the drama of origins and the meaning of life and make the universe as a whole manageable, as a way of thinking about huge things in manageable bits.  It does this by figuring out how to ask questions and providing answers.  The SpaceX philosophy has been to solve horrendously complicated engineering problems, with a Douglas Adams flair to them in what the hidden genius truly is behind the purpose of the work. 

Everything built by human intellect

The point of the books is to understand the meaning of everything, which in the book the answer is learned at the end of the first book is the number “42.”  Everything in life can be summed up by that number, which is the comic element of the literary classic.  The other four books then ask the more important question: what questions do you ask to learn the answer to “42.”  How do you ask the right questions to get to the answer?  So, from there, the critical question of any philosophic premise is to learn to ask the right things to get to the answer you wish to seek.  So, if you know you want to go to Mars as a civilization, what questions should you ask to achieve that objective?  Do you build a rocket to go there?  If so, how big, how many, what kind of fuel does it use?  How many people would fly on it?  Those kinds of things.  Once you know the answer, you can ask the right questions leading up to it.  It’s the way humans can focus their imaginations properly to achieve great things that the universe can’t do for itself.  In that way, the meaning of life is to bring meaning to it through the mechanisms of invention, which then becomes a running theme throughout the entire book series.  As I watched Starship fly in space, preparing to land in the Indian Ocean, the SpaceX method of science and invention proved Douglas Adams more correct than any other method of thinking so far utilized in the human race, and it was a pleasure to watch, which I will never forget. 

The famous Kobe Beef

Later that night, I discussed the launch with some knowledgeable people, and we talked about its significance.  We were on the top floor of a costly bar, looking out at one of Japan’s most cosmopolitan cities, Kobe.  We had just finished at a very top-class restaurant eating Kobe Beef where the cook explained to me that the way they made their sweet potatoes so sweet was that they kept them in a dark container to keep the light from damaging the cell structure of the food, which gave it a unique taste.  Just as Kobe Beef had the human imprint of cultivating nature with intellect to get a distinctive flavor.  And I pointed out to these brilliant people that everything we saw, from the fancy whiskies available in abundance around the bar to the stacks and stacks of buildings we could see as far as the eyes would allow, all started with human intellect taking the tools of nature and bending them to the will of human imagination for a purpose that is our answer for the number “42.”  Things are worth doing, and most importantly, unleashing the shackles of the human race with a proper philosophy that teaches us to ask the right questions is the purpose of our lives relative to the universe and everything in it.  Governments try to suppress this universal need for their silly attempts to be gods and the centers of power relative to their place among the stars.  But when an intellect like Douglas Adams unleashes those limits through art, and someone like Elon Musk and companies like SpaceX put that thinking to full use, magnificent things can and do happen.  And I have a feeling we are seeing just the start of a splendid future that will quickly outgrow the politics of Earth and need to be redefined by the needs of the human race and the tools the universe provides for the answer to everything, that exists just outside the known universe, and its multiverse brothers and sisters, to the heart of it all.  And we must ask and fulfill the many trillions of questions to get there.   It’s all very fascinating.

Humans strive for greatness and the questions we need to get us there.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Ramaswamy, Vance and Musk All in One Place: The future looks bright after Trump finally leaves office

I am glad that a brilliant person invited me to an unusual online town hall on the X platform with Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, and Vivek Ramaswamy, along with others, talking about political events.  It reminded me of just how much power new media has, but more than that, it was a glimpse into the future.  Of life after President Trump.  We spend so much time talking about getting Trump back in office that the more significant issue of what kind of future comes after Trump often gets ignored where it shouldn’t.  We know what Trump will do in office; he has done it before, and history will remember him as one of the greatest presidents in the history of the world.  And because of all Joe Biden’s radical executive orders, many of the terrible things happening to America right now will be able to be undone quickly, and fiscal and social policy that has been detrimental will have quick solutions to them.  And Trump will be able to do great things fast over the next four years.  But then what?  Does the pendulum swing back in the other direction as it is about to do against Democrats, who have grown way too big for their britches and need a righteous ass-kicking?  I have already stated my position, which I think is becoming more apparent to everyone else by the day; my pick for the Vice President of Vivek Ramaswamy is an investment into the future.  I have met him a few times, as well as J.D. Vance, and there is a deep bench of Republicans who are ready to offer themselves in leadership positions.  They are brilliant and personally wealthy, which makes them least tempted toward corruption, and they are willing to follow a blueprint established by Trump that will last for many decades.  So, more and more, the VP picked by Trump for his next term is more important than any other factor.

But there is a wild card in Elon Musk that is new.  Four years ago, even a year ago, Elon Musk was flirting with the idea of a Ron DeSantis candidacy, but he was very reluctant to commit to political discussion as he has been a kind of global citizen as that movement spawned out of the World Economic Forum.  He was their poster boy for the future and, as the world’s richest man, their greatest asset.  So, people were slow to trust anything Elon Musk had to say about anything.  But he did buy Twitter and turned it over to X.  I’m a big fan of SpaceX, and I like Tesla vehicles for what they are: significant innovations in the field of fancy golf carts.  I admire the ambitions of Musk, and I think I understand him pretty well because we are both fans of Douglas Adams, which establishes an intelligence that I can indeed find common ground.  But the person I heard on that podcast with Vivek and Vance at the same time was a person noticeably interested in politics and, I would dare say, supportive of the MAGA agenda.  And I came away from that broadcast very happy that the future was going to be covered and be perhaps even better than with Trump in the White House. Because we saw a blueprint with those personalities that could change the world in a very positive way, all three of them have done great work lately to contribute to a capitalist world and know how to defend it from the global socialists, and that is something new.

While there are people who have been justifiably reluctant to trust Musk on anything, I do have personal experience with some of these people and understand that politically, they are all people who were not necessarily born Republican.  In J.D. Vance’s situation, he was very anti-Trump in 2016 after making a movie about his life with Ron Howard, one of the biggest anti-Trumpers on planet earth.  But as most intelligent people do, they gather information and figure out what’s best, so now, in 2024, even 2022, when he was running for the senate, J.D. Vance has become one of the most excellent MAGA representatives that there is on the world stage, and he has had a significant impact.  He has not let me down, that’s for sure.  I asked him some very specific questions in the backyard of Nancy Nix’s house about this exact time, and he has more than lived up to his answer.  He’s the real deal.  And I’ve told similar stories about Vivek Ramaswamy.  He has grown into his role as Mr. MAGA, but he didn’t start that way.  Like any intelligent person, he has observed the world’s conditions and adjusted his politics to meet them.  Along the way, new friendships have been formed, and I certainly like having these guys on the right side. That’s how you get to be a big tent party, and there is undoubtedly nothing phony about their commitment to a better political world.  With minds like theirs in politics, as they are both still under 40, the future looks very bright after Trump finally leaves office and is out of politics for good.  We may see several decades of prosperity with personalities like this leading the way. 

But I’ve said of Musk before, while others have been very reluctant to support him, that eventually he would figure out that there was no way that Earth could become a space-faring society with the current globalist plans toward communism.  And Musk has undoubtedly become more vocal, which I thought was stunning during that political podcast, to hear all three of those guys and others joining in talking about the future of the world.  Listening in with the rest of the audience, it was clear that Trump was just the point guard in this effort, a way to distribute the ball of capitalism to this next generation, which Musk would play a massive part in.  For the new economy of space to flourish the way Musk wants it to, and so do I, there had to be a regime change across the entire world, and these guys understood it.  I thought it was one of the most remarkable broadcasts I have ever heard and wouldn’t have happened before Elon Musk bought up X as a communication platform.  It’s not so much in the obvious things that the improvements will come.  It’s far more significant than President Trump returning to the White House, tearing up the horrendous Executive Orders from Joe Biden, and making America Great Again.  It’s what comes after that we should all be excited about.  And yes, there is an after.  By electing Trump, we get minds like Vance, Ramaswamy, and Musk on the world stage to build genuinely remarkable economic opportunities that will make it possible to have a whole new market economy on the frontiers of space.  And as bad as things have been, things have real potential to improve.  There is no point in history where such minds have pulled together for the good of the future, but in the wake of President Trump and his bold tenacity poised to save humanity from certain doom with optimism and intelligence unleashed perhaps for the first time in the history of all lifeforms in the universe.  And that makes today a pretty good one.

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The Government Could Never Run SpaceX: Technical innovation works best under capitalist markets

Again, let’s make something clear.  The government cannot make things, and most everything it does in most cases is terrible.  However, we need the government to maintain national and statewide concerns.  You need just enough government to manage a community but never enough to become tyrannical.  So, I’m not an anti-government guy, but I am an anti-stupid guy.  Dumb people tend to be drawn to government work because they hope the power of government will cover up how stupid they are and can hide it from the world; government tends to have all the wrong people in it from top to bottom, so what we let them do has to be managed to a minimum.  Those same people never become magically competent and suddenly make things better by attending a few meetings and acquiring some name tag at a meet and greet where they draw their name on it with a marker.  So it is absolutely absurd that anybody in government thinks they could do anything with SpaceX other than fill out a permit, which they can’t even do promptly.  But that is the word on the street, now that they’ve seen that the Starship from SpaceX is going to be successful, with the third test flight coming up soon, there are leaked talks that the government wants to take over the Starship as a “national necessity” and make it part of the military.  First of all, I do not doubt that the government in any form, through the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, the Space Force, the Air Force, or any branch of government, thinks that all civilian enterprises as valuable as SpaceX have become, should be held down to the limits government can provide.  Many in government believe that no company such as SpaceX should exist beyond the control of government and that they can’t be the first to claim the moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies as a private company, set up bases, and govern people in the far reaches of space. 

There are many people who think only a government can have power that is then accountable to voters, and they can never get their minds wrapped around the purpose of government in the first place, which is why we have the current Civil War that we do in the world, the corporations against free people.  Who does the government report to, and what is its purpose?  Corporations use the power of government not as capitalist, free market enterprises but as clubs to beat down their competition and secure their stake in the marketplace.  Pfizer comes to mind in its relationship with the World Economic Forum to be in the business of making bioweapons in a Wuhan lab and releasing them during election years to control who runs countries through stolen elections so that they can then use government to force private people to consume their product.  I don’t think SpaceX will let the government take over anything.  They have shown that they can partner with the government, such as they have with NASA, to have success, but such relationships have slowed SpaceX down a lot, not made it better.  But because the government regulates so much of the space industry, such partnerships are essential, if not stupid.  Amazingly, SpaceX has managed to do as well as with such government partnerships.  But now that SpaceX has been successful, with the Falcon rockets and the Dragon programs, now that Starship is ready to make its mark as a very efficient space taxi, many in the government are having delusions that they could run SpaceX better than the private market and that is just absurd, and will never happen.  It can’t happen. 

Government workers cannot perform at the rate of technical innovations required for the space industry.  They don’t have it in them, and the nature of government prevents such a possibility.  So, for the government to take over SpaceX in any way is unrealistic.  Like everything they do, from building highways to teaching children in schools, the government cannot perform the task better than free markets.  The concept of profit fuels ambition, and the typical government bureaucrat, even in the military forces, can not do great things without the idea of profit being used to fuel the task.  And profit doesn’t just come in the form of money.  It can come in the ambitions of a future task, but those who can provide opportunity tend to evoke such ambition that creates invention.  All government work tends to fall under a structured concept that limits the work to the scope of the people doing it.  In the private industry, people tend to rise to meet the needs of the work.  However, in government-managed enterprises, the work is limited to the skills of the people who manage to get into government work because of multiple psychological problems that draw them to it.  This is why there aren’t more companies like SpaceX: they never grow so big and powerful in such a short time and on such a scale that the government doesn’t see them as a threat and destroys them well in advance.  When you watch a SpaceX launch, and the crowd cheers the way they do, there is a collective celebration from the human race with each new achievement that is quite audible.  That’s because people know.  They know how significant many of these technical innovations are and that SpaceX has been able to outrun the limits of government to achieve them for the betterment of everyone.

It is a problem that civilization has reconciled that has not occurred yet in our development over many thousands of years.  Work is done best by free people who benefit from the invention, as opposed to controlling powers manipulated by a few administrators who can distribute that power based on favors.  Depending on the ratio of those effects, you can know if your civilization is good and successful or oppressive and tyrannical.  And no tyrannical civilization has ever been successful at innovation and invention.  That’s why communist countries like China must steal everything they do.  They cannot think independently because they use the power of government to hide their incompetence through collective government power, so they stifle creative thought instead of unleashing it.  To do what SpaceX wants to do over the next decade, there are literally millions and millions of inventions that will have to occur from many more sources than SpaceX to make it happen.  But the effort starts with them and their free ability to meet marketplace demands.  But without profit being the key to their operation, none of it will occur, and the government will regulate the industry back to the stone age, which is the only thing they can do predictably, holding back innovation and the spirit of invention.  America and American capitalism have been more successful than any other place in the world because we have a country that prevents government from harming people more than any other place, so companies like SpaceX can form.  A company like SpaceX would never occur in a communist country like China.  They can copy but can’t create, which is the rule in most endeavors.  In that way, anybody who is worried that the government will take over SpaceX can rest assured that it won’t.  They might try, but once they did take over SpaceX operations, they would ruin everything they had built, and it would be just a matter of months before the government would celebrate screwing in a light bulb rather than unleashing flights into space.  And that is being kind to the light bulb. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

The “Conceptual Faculty” of the Planet Nibiru: As the Administrative State falls to the adventure of space

I haven’t watched Saturday Night Live for a long time, but I did catch some clips this past week because it occurred in the wake of devastating news for the NBC parent company that has been anti-Trump for years.  And it has cost them in the process; they have lost a massive audience that they once had and surrendered it to political activism.  The news this time in that hatred was a surprise appearance by Nikki Haley as a last shot chance to prop her up to challenge Trump in the primaries and to make fun of MAGA supporters and the many conspiracy theories that are in the water over Taylor Swift and the NFL.  I listened to their news updates with interest because their anxiety toward Trump supporters and the many conspiracy theories that trail in their wake these days was frustration, even fear.  Something many of them never thought would happen in their lifetimes is the destruction of the “expert class” of mindless bureaucracy that progressivism had propped up to run the world, and the first to turn away from those long-established plans were MAGA voters, much to their fears of continued relevance.  It was interesting to watch that trust was killed once and for all with COVID-19 and the election fraud of 2020, where people finally had to admit to themselves what kind of government they had in America and who they reported to.  It certainly wasn’t the American taxpayer.  On that SNL broadcast, new polling from NBC showed that Trump was beating Biden easily, which had to be hard for them because, over the years, the most significant suppression polls were from them and ABC/Disney in trying to prop up progressives for their continued run at destroying the concept of America.  So you know that the actual polling is much more in favor of Trump than even they cared to admit, so their entire broadcast was dedicated to confusion and bafflement that people have rejected them ultimately.  The failure of the administrative state that progressives had built was collapsing in pop culture. 

This is good; I have a passion that I have enjoyed for a long time, one that is connected to the interest in Douglas Adams books, which I know are Elon Musk’s favorites, and is behind the general manufacturing philosophy of SpaceX. I want to see humanity grow into space for the first time, or perhaps as the most recent time. But I am eager to see it happen and rapidly. Yet before it could, and what has been holding the endeavor back for many thousands of years has been the control of politics over the minds of humanity, which has resulted in so much misery, and why I have a particular interest in politics when a personality like mine would otherwise think about a million other things. I want, probably more than anything in existence, for humanity to grow up and move away from Mother Earth the way some rebellious teenager moves away from their parents. But as we move into space, I have a feeling that the scientific discovery rate will baffle the old established order to such an extent that they can’t fathom the impact. They think Trump in the White House and the support of a growing MAGA base is mind-shattering to them. Wait until they discover that many of Zecharia Sitchin’s books were not science fiction books but serious considerations in the infantile fields of archaeology and astronomy and that he was one of the first to uncover the residue of ancient religions centered around astrology that predates the Bible and reveals a complex past regarding the seeding of earth from ourselves, only we didn’t start on earth, but deep in space.

The Planet Nibiru looks to orbit the earth every 3,600 years and is set to return to the sun around 2900 AD. It was last in our skies during the period when Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem, and life of a specific kind has been moving back and forth from it all this time and for up to 450,000 years before. According to the very controversial Sitchin, the planet Uranus is knocked on its side because of this planet’s gravitational pull, and Nibiru is also responsible for the destruction of a planet that used to be between Mars and Jupiter that now makes up the debris field known as the asteroid belt. According to Sitchin’s books, Earth was born along with the moon as the rejected remains of this massive collision. I always enjoyed the books of Zecharia Sitchin, and as wild as some of that sounds, when we return to space, we are likely going to discover a whole lot more than that, and it will be shattering to the concept of any future administrative state for many thousands of years of human development. This is why there have been so many who have ridiculed Sitchen and his work. But like Trump, the ridicule was fueled by the fear of change, that an established order couldn’t hold back the mind of humanity with silly tricks and abusive psychology. And within all that, what we thought we knew about history or were told to preserve that same administrative state, has turned out to be completely wrong.

I have enjoyed Sitchin’s works over the years, as I enjoy process improvements in manufacturing processes.  Sometimes, the craziest ideas are needed to create “conceptual faculty” to solve complicated engineering problems and invoke process improvements that need to be out of the box of conventional thought.  And that is what I think the value of Trump is to politics, and the value of Zecharia Sitchin has been to science and history.  The specified fields of study, theology, archaeology, astronomy, physics, and political history all hate Sitchin because he interrupts their monopoly as experts in their specific fields of endeavor, the methods of achieving social respect for their PhDs and Master’s degrees from respected, progressive, universities.  The concept of humans moving into space commercially, without the regulations of government science driven by certified experts, is mind-bending to those static types of people who are most responsible for making big government quench their thirst for control because their personality types are too timid for the adventure of space travel, and the many scientific discoveries that will take away their need for power in a civil society.  They attempted to castigate Sitchin in the same way that Deep State politicians have tried to suppress Trump.  But humanity has grown up and away from them anyway.  And while we are traveling in space, we will likely learn from the moon, Mars, and even the planet Nibiru that there is a lot for us to learn and that we need to develop a conceptual faculty even to gather the information.  “conceptual faculty” is a term I use at least 100 times in a week, and it’s where a wild concept places a mind with the ability to comprehend big ideas, which are often needed for solving complex problems.  And we have been creating for ourselves a conceptual faculty to embrace concepts of a life much larger and more complex than what we have been able to observe from the confines of the Earth.  As we move out into space, we will learn many new and cool things.  And as it should have known, the Administrative State will be left in the dust just as Plato’s shadows on the wall were projections of ignorance until we knew better. 

Rich Hoffman

Click Here to Protect Yourself with Second Call Defense https://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707

Signs of the Future: The duel between Bob Iger and Elon Musk

In so many ways the duel between Bob Iger and Elon Musk is indicative of the future warfare that is the key to everything.  Here are two CEOs at the top of their game representing two different directions, and one is distinctly on the wrong side while the other is thriving.  As I say all the time, don’t judge people based on what they say, but on what they do.  And Elon Musk has been evolving slowly for a long time.  This happens to a lot of people as they get more information.  I also say a lot that it’s nearly impossible for a person to have a lot of intelligence and to remain a Democrat.  People might be born into a certain region with specific parents and have certain beliefs.  But through living life and doing things, you learn what works and what doesn’t, and it’s natural to evolve feelings.  And for Elon Musk, it doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that the kind of world he wants to live in, an interplanetary civilization cannot be anything less than a capitalist enterprise.  Centralized governments are too slow and sabotage their society to stay in power, which isn’t good for getting to space.  So Musk has moved in a MAGA direction without calling himself that out of pure necessity, and logic.  Then there is, of course, Bob Iger, Mr. Global Citizen, who has been the CEO of Disney, which has essentially committed suicide to accommodate woke World Economic Forum politics.  Musk has moved away from the World Economic Forum, and Bob Iger has fully embraced it, even giving it a deep French kiss to the doom of his company.  So, it was only a matter of time before these two public personalities would have a very obvious clash.

This new war that we are fighting is one where it’s easy to win against. But the way people are wired exploits them at a very personal level. It is essentially what everyone learned in public school, with the cool kids, the geeks, and the loser social groups and children knowing which one they would all be in, and how social pressure, the need to be liked, would control those behaviors into joining one of those three groups. Because Musk is one of the richest men in the world, of course, he has a lot of parasites looking to live off his efforts, so Disney thought it had leverage on him to pull advertising from the X platform to force Musk to embrace more World Economic Forum strategic goals. Musk responded with an “F You” to Bob Iger and others and made a decidedly sharp turn politically. It was a decided check mate in the chess game of these kinds of activities. Within a few days, Elon Musk facilitated a new show for Tucker Carlson and there was a massive interview with Alex Jones, which resulted in him being reinstated on X, where he had been deplatformed when it was Twitter and a series of events that would spell doom for the World Economic Forum types cascaded into irreversible damage for the big centralized global citizen types that Bob Iger represented. Musk was clearly on the side of tomorrow, whereas Iger was without question on the losing team. But the signs have been stacking up for a while now. The public results were just a matter of time. Disney used to be the center of innovation, but now it was SpaceX and what they have been doing on several technical fronts. Instead of warring with Musk, Disney should have sought to have a relationship with them. Instead, they chose politics, which, as a CEO, was a nail in the coffin for Disney that is quickly sinking the company.

Months before all this occurred, I had taken my family to Disney World for a very large vacation.  I was not crazy about the woke direction of the company, but as I have been saying for several years now, I don’t think that Disney is going to survive as a company, and I wanted my grandchildren and my kids to see it while it is still a great thing.  I love all four of their parks very much, but Epcot Center has always been something special, an optimistic city of tomorrow that showcased all the opportunities of tomorrow.  But tomorrow is today, and many of the things that are showcased at Epcot now look old and out of date.  Disney Parks have become too political; they have not adapted to the true frontier of human need and it shows.  Disney, mainly as Bob Iger has run it, is a looking-back company, not one that is embracing the future.  Bob was all about the World Economic Forum controls from centralized governments that looked to establish equity and inclusion through force and manipulation by those in charge, whereas Elon Musk was embracing the kind of technology that would free people of those methods, and he was looking at capitalism as the means to do it.  Elon Musk wasn’t precisely a Trump guy during his first term.  He wanted to give Joe Biden a chance.  But that quickly changed over the last three years, and now Musk has moved well away from the World Economic Forum view of the world, and that difference is dramatically apparent when you watch SpaceX work and perform a side-by-side analysis of their view of the world with the Epcot Center. 

The trip to Disney had the effect I wanted.  My crew had a really magnificent time at Epcot Center. We went there on two different occasions and used the monorail as our primary means of transportation to get there.  It was great for my family.  But I could see the ghost of a place I used to love, looking old and inward thinking.  It was essentially what the world was trying to do with authoritarian, centralized governments, such as China and the European Union.  That was not the future we were going to experience, and Bob Iger had gambled everything on it.  And when he went to call the bet against Musk, everything went in the opposite direction.  The result was it forced Musk to stop trying to put one foot in and one out on so many topics and go all in toward the future, which means the collapse of central government tyranny.  Putting Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson on X was the reason Musk bought Twitter in the first place.  For the same reason, Trump created his own social media platform, Truth Social.  The future requires a decentralized competition of ideas without the restraint of slow-minded authority figures.  And the results will be very similar to what happened between Musk and Bob Iger but on a truly global scale.  The peer pressure leverage Disney attempted to pull on X is the same kind of backfire that all corporations and political sentiments will experience in the years to come and on a much more ostentatious scale.  Like the Epcot Center, the World Economic Forum’s view of the future was dying and outdated.  It was SpaceX that represented all the opportunities that were coming from a future being designed by capitalism.  And now Elon Musk was fully committed.  Disney had lost that final battle toward forcing the world to become a global citizen at the cost of innovation and freedom.  And if there was any indicator of the things to come, it was that.

Rich Hoffman

‘The Capitalist Manifesto’ by Johan Norberg: Admitting to the only economic system that helps people the most

The change of view of economic fundamentals from the political left

After reading Johan Norberg’s book The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World, I’ll admit to a substantial flood of satisfaction. I mean this wasn’t Ayn Rand, it was a kind of Ikea view of capitalism, but the message was quite clear. I’ve read other books by Johan Norberg and he’s pretty good for what I’d consider a lefty. He’s conservative by European standards, but in America, we have very different ideas of what a liberal is. But to Johan, a liberal means less restriction in market economies in a region that has always been about tyranny, the tyranny of the church, the tyranny of some maniacal king, or secret societies trying to undo everything in the background. The lunatic Karl Marx conceived in Europe the birthplace of socialism and communism. I would never have read the book if I hadn’t seen Elon Musk recommend it. I’m not a fan of Elon Musk. I want him to do well with SpaceX. He makes a good car, but he’s not my idea of a good leader. But he is the richest person in the world, and I have thought it interesting to watch him grow his political perspective to accommodate his needs to move humanity into space and set up a colony on Mars. He has learned quite ostentatiously that a socialist Biden government with Barack Obama still whispering in his ear is never going to get Musk where he wants SpaceX to go. It takes too long to obtain permits, and the Department of Labor constantly harasses him because Musk doesn’t allow unionized labor to manage his manufacturing facilities. So Musk has evolved over time and seems to have fully embraced capitalism now in ways that are pace setting. There are a lot of very interesting observations in The Capitalist Manifesto that are quite delicious and well worth talking about. I think it may be one of the most important books of 2023, and it is undoubtedly impactful to the world’s current circumstances.

A very important book

I’ve been talking about this kind of stuff for many years so the change in tone is not lost on me.  What The Capitalist Manifesto is by Norberg is a confession intended for liberals to read that undoes over a century of lunacy in following Karl Marx.  This is not a book intended for the MAGA crowd in America but the many socialists and communists around the world who still are trying to work The Communist Manifesto into political sustainability.  I remember how vicious that media, in general, was when I worked with the producers of the movie Atlas Shrugged to get the message out about their film version of the Ayn Rand books that were famous around the world but were labeled conspiracy theories of the radical right.  So this Johan Norberg confession is no small matter.  It wasn’t written for me or the fans of Ayn Rand, it was written to the college liberal, the Keynesian economist and the diabolical politician getting rich off the Swamp and all its globalist mechanisms.  Norberg has figured out something that the political left has been very slow to admit to: socialism of any kind doesn’t work.  And it was never going to work, and that capitalism, by free people, the freer, the better, is the key to unlocking the powers of any economy.  This is a CATO Institute view of the world that offers a flood of statistics to show just how much better the world is because of capitalism than it is under any other kind of authoritarian approach.  Norberg presents a dizzying display of real-world examples that everyone needs to come to grips with because we now have enough data to make some sobering judgments.

The Capitalist Manifesto was Norberg trying to explain to global liberals that if they want globalism and if they’re going to fight populism, they had better embrace capitalism and do it quickly.  He’s certainly no fan of President Trump, who he sees as a threat to the global order because he’s a nationalist who wants to close the borders of America to outside influence, to turn in instead of migrating out.  But the impact of financial systems driven by political sentiments couldn’t be more obvious.  This book was a white flag from the radical leftist points of view that capitalism was the only solution to global problems such as poverty.  There is no other economic approach that has improved the lives of so many, and as if to solidify critical opinion about capitalism, Johan Norberg cites many instances where Bernie Sanders and Karl Marx himself admitted that capitalism is the best and only way to approach economic theory.  And to argue against any notion that centralized planning does anything but harm people economically and is a background contributor to many of life’s many miseries.  This was a book attempting to capture the MAGA message of free markets in America and stamp liberalism to it as if it was their idea all along.  Again, Norberg has kind of an Ikea view of the world; I wouldn’t call Sweden a bastion of capitalism.  They only look that way because the rest of Europe has the heavy fog of communism and socialism hanging over it in such a devastating way.  America has an expectation of freedom that Europe does not have.  But to even say the word “capitalism” in Europe is taboo, similar to saying that your father has a mistress or that mom is wearing red panties under her white dress to church.  Nobody has been willing to admit these secrets in public until now. 

As I closed the book, I realized I had just read something that would set the tone for the next several decades.  It was a victory in many ways that the enemies of the world understood that they would never win against capitalism.  And that even liberal-minded people like Musk and Norberg, who are poster children for the World Economic Forum, or at least had been until the realities of populism rising around the world forced them to look in the mirror and give up on Marxism wholesale.  The Capitalist Manifesto is not an American book.  I tried to buy a copy at my local Barnes and Noble, but they didn’t have it.  The book ships out of the United Kingdom, so we’re not discussing an American product trying to explain capitalism’s values to the world.  This is coming from a European perspective, where socialism was born and raised to the detriment of most of the world.  Johan Norberg understands that only capitalism has worked to solve many of the problems that Democrats and their many versions regionally are concerned with.  The only way to help people is to find a way to put more money in their pockets that doesn’t involve the government stealing it from people who have made money and giving it to people who were too lazy to work for it.  I can’t recommend this book enough; it’s an avalanche of admissions that culture must embrace.  And within its pages, we can see the future, where liberals are finally going to get on the side of conservatives because they must.  They may even try to steal capitalism as their own, which would be expected of them.  But whatever the case, the world will change for the better as a result, and things will look a whole lot different economically, in a good way, in the decades to come because of the admissions in this book. 

Rich Hoffman

The Magnificant Launch of Starship: A Jealous, Fat, Mother that wants to Sabotage her son’s hot wife

The biggest story of the year so far was undoubtedly the SpaceX Starship launch that occurred on April 20th, 2023. It was the largest rocket configuration that ever attempted to fly, and they managed to get the monstrosity to leave the pad and achieve supersonic speeds in its first flight. I stopped what I was doing when the launch occurred in Boca Chica, Texas, around 9:30 AM. And the rest of the world was watching too. Suddenly nothing else was more important, and it was nice to see. But of course, there were problems. The force of the launch damaged the launch pad, some of the Raptor engines did not ignite, and others burned out during the flight, leaving the upward trajectory to fall short of its orbital goals. The craft lost control in the upper atmosphere and had to self-destruct in what SpaceX called “an unscheduled disassembly.” We were watching an entirely new sector of the economy blooming before our eyes. Starship was essentially a giant space bus that would make it possible to move civilization into space with routine, reusable space flights, much more effectively than the Space Shuttle from NASA was able to. Starship was a game changer, and they actually made the thing fly, which many thought would be impossible. So with everything going on which seemed so important, there was nothing bigger, better, or more dramatic than the launch of SpaceX’s Starship into orbital testing. There are more phases to test, such as the orbital spaceflight itself and reloading back on a pad in Texas for rapid refueling and relaunch. Yet, there is a lot more going on with this launch than just a technical achievement. The entire world was not happy about it, even though they were paying attention. You didn’t see Joe Biden stop and give a press conference about this event from the Rose Garden because, in essence, the world’s politics did not want to see SpaceX achieve anything, which became apparent in the hours after the launch. 

All the news coverage was negative to one degree or another. The key reports talked about the damage to the launch pad and that the Starship had exploded on its first flight. There was almost a jealous parent syndrome going on when a son brings home a hot young girl he intends to marry, and the mother is a fat piece of cabbage shaped by years of bad decisions who says nothing but bad things about the young wife-to-be. Of course, the son wants his mom to be happy, but she’s overtly jealous and can’t say anything good because here is a nice young couple who have a chance to do all kinds of great things together, while the mom’s life is essentially over. So she jealously criticizes everything about the young couple to their face, and even worse, behind their backs, making it impossible to have a conversation with her about anything because she is so filled with jealous hate. That global mother is the earth, and the way she intends to manage her family is communism, as China has been selling it to the world. And with communists, a centralized government intends to prevent options for the children so that they are easier to control. For top-heavy governments filled with lazy bureaucrats, they are always looking for the easiest options, so they wish to limit the desires of the human race to fit their limited abilities. Space, in this case, is the hot young wife that is filled with promise colliding with the desire by governments to rule at all costs. They want Covid restrictions and economy lockdowns, while the children want to be free of such parental figures and a chance to do things their own way in the world. That is what Starship brings to civilization.

The plan is for Starship to launch a new craft several times a week within a few years. The assembly line-like approach at Starbase, where the Starship launches, currently have plenty of other rockets ready to go. That’s the way SpaceX operates. Even with all the damage, SpaceX will have another craft ready to fly in a few months, and they’ll stay along that path until they achieve stable flight that is so routine that people won’t even pay attention anymore, much the way that the Falcon Heavy launches are now, that launch so often that nobody hardly takes the time to watch them, even though every one of them is its own minor miracle of science. In a short time, Starship will be able to take people into space by the busloads, and they will unlock a whole new economy where the tools of space will suddenly free mankind in ways that recorded history has never been able to achieve. The ability to set up space stations on the moon, manufacture in the weightlessness of space, and travel to Mars and other places is a game changer that many haven’t come to terms with. And yet launches like the one early in 2023 drag that angry mother along for the ride that is way beyond their control, and they don’t like it. 

A quick reminder that when NASA landed people on the moon, we had two significant events that sought to pull mankind back into the worship of ancient Sumerian gods, such as the Cult of Ishtar with the Stonewall Inn riots at the end of June 1969, then again a month after the July landing on the moon with the Woodstock music festival. What we saw was a crawl by the timid of our society back to the primitive grasp of that jealous mother because they lacked the courage to embrace this new future where mankind could build a rocket and land people on the moon to walk around, pick up rocks and practice their golf swing. The governments of the world should be more supportive, just as they should support the young son who brings home the hot wife-to-be, untarnished by the mistakes of age and a fresh outlook on life. Space is an opportunity for everyone, and SpaceX’s work is destroying the yearnings for global communism because it brings too many options to civilization, requiring an entirely new political philosophy. Knowing all that, the way that the news media is these days, entirely on board with centralized governments controlling every aspect of society, this push into space does not fit their comfort zone of technical innovation. The imagination and ambition of our society were outgrowing the governments that wanted to hold it back with silly rules and regulations. And many of those static figures hoped that SpaceX would fail and continue to fail. So all they could think about during that magnificent launch was their hope that it would all go bad and that; hopefully, Elon Musk would get discouraged and stop trying to get into space and would shut up, sit down, and take orders from an authoritarian government like everyone else. Instead, what SpaceX continues to do, and why people cheer on those launches the way they do, is because space gives people options. Options that organized societies have always struggled with. How do you boss around people with kingly roles if people can just pick up their stuff and leave? And with that, there were many animosities that Starship had a successful launch, that it had left the pad and achieved great things that will bring tremendous new options to all existence. Which clearly the tyrants of the world do not want to see. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Occult of Climate Change Fanatics: The perspective of a galactic year

The debate on climate change cannot be understood by rational political discussion because there is nothing reasonable about it. To accept the premise of John Kerry, Greta Thunberg, Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and the Biden administration, you’d have to be insane. Liberalism, progressivism, and all things on the political left are various degrees of insanity and cannot be explained by science or even an attempt to understand science. Liberalism and the earth worship of climate change are rooted in the ancient superstitions of the occult and the various religions that spawn from fear and irrationality. And it is there and only there where climate change and earth worship can be explained as an approach to a long-known problem. Because what we do know about the earth is that it has a minimal shelf life, and it has been bombed by space debris many times in its history, which isn’t that long by measuring it in galactic years, which is the proper way to understand earth and its problems. Humans are lucky to have come along in the silly little period of 25,000 years of their entire existence if we measure such a thing by conscious recognition of social development. Its always a race against time to see if life can become something special before the next great cataclysm, and that is where the insanity of liberalism takes a detour from rational thought and begins to utilize ancient practices of human sacrifices to appeal to pagan gods and preserve the earth from catastrophe rather than using intellect to solve the problems of gaining control of our solar system or even the entire galaxy and become a type 1, 2 or even 3 civilization. So long as we keep ourselves chained to the earth and its vulnerabilities, we will always be at risk of complete destruction at a moment’s notice, and sacrificing productivity lives or thoughts to the gods of the universe hoping to be spared will not solve the problem.

Here is the heart of the matter, the earth, of course, revolves around the sun once a year, which is how we measure the age of our home planet. But that is not the proper way to measure anything because its importance only has weight in our own backyard. Instead, our sun and solar system are just one part of one arm of a spiral galaxy that you can see by looking up on a dark night in areas where there isn’t a lot of light pollution. Recently my wife and I were in upper Michigan, and she had been out of our RV with my daughters, and she came to wake me up from my sleep hastily. They rushed me to a clearing at 2 am to look up, and the spiral arm of our home galaxy was clearly visible in the clear night. So you can see it without the aid of a telescope. Well, that arm travels around the black hole at the galaxy’s center every 230 million years or so. For us, the dinosaurs and all the epics of life on earth evolved during that one galactic year. Then during that year of travel of the solar system around the core of the Milkey Way galaxy, the journey through that galactic arm of debris occurs. Our solar system spends a third of its time on one side of that arm, but during the galactic year, it travels to the other side, much in the way that the earth’s seasons are created by its position around the sun over an earth year. A galactic year has various seasons of influence over our solar system. And it takes 30 million years for our solar system to pass from one side of that spiral arm to another. Then during this period, the gravity wells within our solar system pick up lots of strange hitchhikers in the form of planet-killing debris, which move into orbit around our inner planets, and have routinely killed those planets and everything over time. It’s a cycle that occurs during every galactic year. 

Looking at Mars and studying the earth, the planetary bombardment has been a routine every several hundred thousand years, and presently we are about 9 million years into that passage through the spiral ring to the other side and are due for a planet-killing impact which is the usual thing in space encounters.   We don’t typically think about these things as human beings because we measure time in ridiculously recent memories. We think of events in the Bible as old instead of very current, as we should. So we tend to think we have all the time in the world regarding galactic years, yet we don’t have much time to solve human problems before the next planet killer comes. And that is clearly what happened to Mars and even Venus. A planet-killing comet struck Mars, and the planet is actually distorted as a result. The tall volcanos on Mars are more the result of pressure points of magma under the planet from planetary impacts that pushed the entire crust up in places on the opposite side of the planet from fatal impacts. Any life that was on Mars was not killed by climate change, as liberal radicals want to assume since it’s evident that there were massive amounts of water on that planet that is now gone. When a planet gets hit with large objects, the atmosphere can be stripped away, causing all the water to evaporate into space and become space debris that eventually falls to other planets millions of miles away. Many tons of material fall to earth each year from Mars, which has been floating around since its last cataclysm. 

The only way for the people of earth to solve this problem is to embrace it by way of virtue as established in the Bible, where God made man, and man was to have the Genesis concept of having dominion over it and everything on it. That is the psychological path to becoming a Type 1 civilization and harnessing all the power of a solar system to use for mankind to flourish and, thus, all the planets it touches. Currently, we are planning to go to Mars and build a new atmosphere through terraforming. And we can do the same on earth. We can build and do anything we want so long as we live. But if we sit around sacrificing to the pagan gods of astrology and hope they will take pity on us as many societies did in the past, hoping that appeasement will preserve life ultimately, then that society is planning for failure. And that is what liberals propose. That is what the religion of climate change is all about. It’s not such a miracle that earth exists. It’s a miracle that so much life has grown in such a short period of time between planetary bombardments. Earth has been hit many times, and our mythology records some of the trauma caused by the flood stories. Our oceans have not always been where they are today, land masses have risen and fallen, and parts of the earth that used to be river beds are now the peaks of mountains thousands of feet above sea level.

The forces applied to the planet from the galaxy itself often reshape what we think are finite waterfronts and mountainous regions, making them as flexible as a child’s toy.   And we only have a short time to advance or be destroyed. Liberal appeasement is not a practical approach. Only science can solve the problem by using the tools of the universe for mankind’s disposal. And we start that by not listening to the fools of insanity, the earth worshipers, and liberals of destruction. Anyone who follows anything they have to say is doomed. Yet any society that wishes to flourish will use the tools available to us and move into space to take command of our destiny quickly before it’s too late.

Rich Hoffman

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Elon Musk Voting for Republicans: There is no way an intelligent person can support Democrats for anything

The sudden shock of Elon Musk saying that he is now a Republican or that he’ll vote Republican in the upcoming midterms is not a surprise. Actually, as a guy now in his 50s, he’s right on course for where many people arrive during their lives if they have reasonable intelligence. You really can’t be an intelligent person and be a Democrat. It’s impossible to reconcile intelligence with liberalism. Liberalism is a feeling not founded in logic, so anybody who has some level of intelligence will eventually figure out that liberal ideas are ridiculously stupid. Elon Musk has tried to make liberal ideas work. He was successful young and enjoyed the company of idealistic young people. He even smoked pot on the Joe Rogan podcast. But he has never been good with the Biden administration. Biden wants electric cars with massive government infrastructure. Musk has built several companies that are very independent of government influence, even if he did take government subsidies to start those companies. Ultimately, Musk has learned a hard lesson in life that the government wants to run private industry and their means to do that is always through labor unions under the protection of the Department of Labor. So the Biden administration has targeted Tesla with its wrath to protect their own investment into Ford and General Motors, hoping to use high gas prices to drive consumers to buy those dumb electric cars, the fancy golf carts. Tesla was the first, but the government wants them and Elon Musk out of the way because Musk won’t allow unions to run his shops, and a hard lesson has been learned that has caused the billionaire to look to Republicans for sanity.

This path that Musk is on, a gradual conversion over to Republican thought, isn’t new. Ronald Reagan went on a similar track. So did Donald Trump. There are lots of people who used to be Democrats who get to their 40s and 50s and life and realize that Democrats are takers, looters, and every kind of parasite that you can imagine. And they grow up and away from liberalism and become more conservative as they get older. Musk has been saying that he has stayed the same but that the political spectrum has moved radically to the left, which is true to a certain extent. The political left we see today is what I have been saying for decades was always beneath the surface.

But additionally, there comes a time when you realize that doing business with Democrats is impossible unless you give over everything you own to their view of collectivism. With Musk doing so well with Tesla and SpaceX, it’s clear that he will not be able to control those companies and still continue to vote as a Democrat. The illusion that Democrats are anything but professional looters in the world comes to anybody who lives long enough to reconcile reality. You hear a lot of Democrats who become Republicans. But you don’t see a lot of Republicans turning into Democrats. When you look at an electoral map of America, there aren’t many Democrat blue areas. There are massive groups of dependents made that way due to Democrat socialism, but people generally don’t choose to penalize themselves with liberal ideas. That is another reason why Democrats are always looking for young people and illegal immigrants to keep their political base intact. Democrats need people without much life experience or understanding of the American way of life to buy into their collectivist political philosophies because they lose many of their members to Republicans, especially later in life. For Democrats, the political game is just smoke and mirrors. 

Musk’s journey was inevitable. Traditional conservatives may not want to let Musk have a seat at the table due to his beliefs in transhumanism and non-Biblical thoughts. But in the world of ideas, all conservatives have some basic concepts in common, the understanding that government doesn’t make jobs. It simply loots off what others do create. For Musk, there is no way to go to Mars and have a human race that moves into space to live. No socialist community on Mars will be successful, so when you look at things like that, the only way to fulfill Elon Musk’s dreams of going to space and living on Mars is to embrace capitalism aggressively because there is no other way to start a prosperous society or to maintain it without capitalism. All the variations of Karl Marx’s philosophy were always rooted in failure, which is to say all of the modern Democrat party and anybody in the world who calls themselves a progressive. Many people go to college and learn a liberal education. They do all the dumb liberal stuff like party too much and listen to all the wrong kinds of music. They try to dedicate their lives to altruism. But once those people start having families and those families grow up, it becomes quite apparent to most intelligent people that Democrats are the wrong way to go, and they gradually turn into Republicans. I would go so far as to say that you cannot call yourself smart and not be a Republican. It’s not a matter of team politics; it’s simple logic. A person’s journey along a political spectrum is driven by what works in the world and what doesn’t. 

The contrasts between a Trump presidency and now the Biden mess will produce many more Elon Musk types who used to walk the fence between liberals and conservatives. I never liked the murky middle because it allows the looters of the world to hide among the good and hard working. Liberals are like the water boy on a football team that wins the Super Bowl. They get to be part of a winning team without doing much work at actually producing a win. Liberals suck the life out of everything they do, and when you build great companies like Elon Musk has, who are doing great things in the world, the problem moves from cosmetic lip service to liberalism to downright hatred.   Especially when you are the first to actually make electric cars to make all the environmental climate change fanatics happy, only to be shoved out of the market because the local labor union isn’t running the management of your company, once you realize how the game is played and what Democrats actually stand for, there is no way a reasonable person could call themselves one. I watched Donald Trump go through the same basic trajectory in his life. When he was doing The Apprentice for NBC, he was much like Musk, playing on the liberal side of things. But Trump married a conservative woman who pulled him in the right direction, and over time, during his marriage, he had no choice but to move toward the Republican Party. Many people were like Trump and Musk; they might be fiscally conservative but socially liberal. However, life has a way of demanding that fiscal and social policy must be aligned; there is no way to cheat the system. You can’t behave like a liberal at a dinner party and still run great companies, or a great country, or even raise a good family. You have to be conservative to do things well in life, which means that those who want to do well must become Republicans. Elon Musk is a smart guy and, late in life, has figured out the obvious. So it’s no miracle that he’s planning to vote Republican. And behind him are a whole lot of other people too, who have come to the same conclusions. They always do.   

Rich Hoffman

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We Don’t Have the Right Politics for Space Travel: We’ll have to change that before settling Mars

To move into Space, we need Capitalism as the driver of our politics

I am by far not an Elon Musk fanboy.  I like a lot about Elon Musk and the great work he does with Tesla and SpaceX.  But I’m not crazy at all about his talk about universal incomes and climate change.  I view a lot of what he says as a guy throwing up ideas, much the way he runs his companies, and if someone can shoot holes in his thoughts, he welcomes that chance.  He sees it as making things better.  I could talk and argue with Elon Musk all day and year, and I would have fun doing it.  And I think he would too.  But I found an extraordinary moment from him recently on Part III of the exclusive Everyday Astronaut interview where Elon walked them around the Starbase facility ahead of a Superheavy launch attempt. I’ll put those interviews up here for you to watch, but I found them remarkable.  Space X is how most companies should be run. It reminded me of the eventual aim of my recent book, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, which is to learn not to be afraid of those who intend to impose fear on you.  To learn not to fall in love with rigid rules and to reunite yourself to risk because that’s how the human race advances.  During Part III, Elon paused and referred to just that very concept.  But he knows he can’t say such things.  He has all kinds of people who follow him, liberals, conservatives, people who have no idea what they are.  He currently has to work with the Biden administration if he wants to send ships into space.  He must also work with other countries, like China, because we are all tangled together in unhealthy ways.  So, I get why he couldn’t say what he wanted to say.  But I am under no such restriction. 

I don’t typically think of the “degrowth movement” as an accurate word. Still, the way Mark Levin talked about it in his recent book, American Marxism, seems more appropriate when talking about the sciences than just saying “socialism” or “communism.” Many young people think of these things not as a recent threat but as an ancient menace that expired well before their time.  But they understand growth, and for this topic, it’s certainly the correct way to term what the political left has been doing.  Elon Musk has played around with left-leaning ideas, such as the universal income, electric infrastructure ran by solar, and even smoking pot on a podcast to show how cool and hip he was.  Those are all things that have made me ignore what Elon Musk has been doing.  That is until he does something magnificent like developing the Falcon rockets for reusable landings and building the Starships in Texas.  Slowly over time, I’ve watched Elon as he has tried to do “growth” things in a world run increasingly by “degrowth” personalities; he has been getting frustrated.  For instance, he moved to Texas, leaving California behind after the ridiculous Covid policies shut down the state economically.  And recently, when environmentalists threw protests toward his desire to build a Starship factory at the Starport facility because of water concerns, he sounded more like a Trump supporter than a centralist libertarian. 

Musk is trying to do all pro-growth in a world being drug into a no-growth period by the participants of the Vico Cycle, which I explain in detail in my Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  These cycles are not new to the human race, they have occurred many times in the past, and we end up constantly re-inventing ourselves.  And that is what Elon Musk sees he is up against, and he let it out a bit during that Part III interview.  That was the primary reason I wrote my book, to help people not repeat the past, but to punch through into this new space age not with restriction and fear, which the communists of the world want, but with unrestricted adventure fueled by the power of capitalism.  When it comes down to the various philosophies, we cannot all have different ideas about the direction of the human race.  We either want to grow or retreat into the huts of history and return to yelling at lightning bolts and attributing gods to their origins to make sense out of a storm.  Or, we want to fly about those mysteries into the worlds beyond and fulfill our quests for adventure, both large and small, on a vast playing field of unlimited possibilities.  The two views of the world will not live together forever.  The inflection point is upon us.

And that’s when Elon Musk realized that everything done at SpaceX would disappear in an instant without him.  It is he alone that is doing all these outstanding achievements.  Sure, he has lots of brilliant employees who do the heavy lifting, but he provides the vision, and without vision, nothing happens.  If human beings are going to be a space-oriented society, then a new type of government will have to be embraced.  The one we have now, which fought hard to keep Donald Trump from being president and wanted to get rid of him when he was, will not allow the efforts of Elon Musk either to carry humans into space.  We have to solve one problem at the philosophical level if we are ever to put 1 million people onto Mars like Elon Musk wants to do.  We have to have a growing economy with an increasing workforce to accommodate it all.  To have hundreds of thousands of people on the moon, Mars, and wherever else in the next couple of decades, Elon can do the math that was in his words during the interview.  The illogical politics of our current moment, driven by communism and Marxism, are just wrong for the adventure of space. 

Going even further, we have never solved these problems even in our science fiction, except perhaps in Star Wars.  People need to be free, adventurous, experimental, and free to fail for space to work.  A micromanaging government will always be in the way of what Elon Musk wants to do.  He can only smoke joints so much, enough to keep the parasites off his heels.  He can only spout off so much greenie weenie appeasement to keep the environmental protestors from standing in the way of a new Starship manufacturing plant in the middle of the desert.  And that is the point of my book, not to crawl back into the Old West and sleep in hot unairconditioned cabins using the restroom outside.  And getting water with a bucket every time you wanted a drink.  Modern conveniences are good to have.  But what we may not want to leave behind is the courage and adventure of discovery and wealth building.  I would say that those are far more essential things than climate preservation or the appeasement of soft-natured Marxists looking for a big daddy government to care for them the way their parents failed.  Once we solve those problems, we can then move to space.  Elon Musk has figured out how millions of people are excited about it and follow his every move.  They don’t know that the politics they wish to ignore are just the very thing that will keep their feet on the ground and their starships from flying.  We must solve the politics before we can solve the space. 

Rich Hoffman

The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business
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