The Evening Rocket: Robin Hood

The Evening Rocket: Robin Hood

Author: Pushkin Industries November 29, 2021 Duration: 28:12

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.

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Diving into the past to make sense of our bewildering present, The Last Archive examines the very idea of fact and fiction across time. This podcast, from Pushkin Industries, isn't just a history lesson; it's a deep exploration of how societies have determined what is real, and why that foundation feels so unstable now. Hosted by Ben Naddaff-Hafrey and born from the mind of historian Jill Lepore, each episode acts as a detective story, sifting through historical records and forgotten controversies to trace the roots of our so-called "post-truth" era. You'll hear how mechanisms of proof and deception have evolved, from early forensic science and secret government programs to the architecture of today's internet. The conversations and narratives within this podcast reveal that our current crisis over misinformation isn't an anomaly, but rather a chapter in a long, complicated struggle over evidence, authority, and belief. By placing our moment within a broader context, the series offers a clarifying, often surprising perspective on why it feels so difficult to know anything for certain anymore. It’s for anyone who finds themselves questioning how knowledge is built, dismantled, and weaponized, providing essential historical groundwork for understanding the daily noise.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 65

The Last Archive
Podcast Episodes
The Farming Game [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:21
During the 1970s farm crisis, a young family nearly lost everything as family farms and agricultural folk knowledge began to vanish. Then, they invented a board game.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The Tree Branch [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 40:24
This episode, an alternate history: imagining what the world might be like if, fifty years ago, in 1972, Americans had an amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting not only protection–but representation–to the natural…
Trial by Teenager, Part 2 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 38:01
The fact-checking experiment gets scaled up with 40 students in two states. The Super Bowl of fact-checking, and a final test of an idea that might help save American democracy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy inf…
Information, Please! [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:37
What if one book could contain the sum of human knowledge? Jill Lepore looks at the history of an improbable Enlightenment idea, tracing it from Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia and beyond.See omnystudio.com/listener…
Trial by Teenager, Part 1 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:20
What if there were a way to stop politicians from lying on social media? Jill Lepore heads to a local high school to test out a crazy idea: Should juries of high school history students decide whether each and every poli…
Coming Soon: Season Three [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 2:04
Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore returns with the third season of her Pushkin Industries podcast The Last Archive. Across two seasons, Lepore has unspooled a history of the United States's post-t…
Introducing: The Last Archivist [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 18:13
PROGRAMMING NOTE: The third season of The Last Archive is coming this fall! It will remain free and available everywhere. In the meantime, we are launching a new, subscription-only series as part of the Pushkin+ offering…
The Evening Rocket: Baby X [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 27:54
The science fiction that Silicon Valley techno-billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel adore often concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful and often immensely rich men colonize other pla…
The Evening Rocket: Iron Man [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 28:26
How Silicon Valley capitalism is as much about narrative as the bottom line. In 2008 when Tesla Motors launched their first car, the completely electric Roadster, Tesla was a great story. Something genuinely new. An engi…
The Evening Rocket: Planet B [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 28:27
Why does Elon Musk believe he can save the world by colonizing Mars? When PayPal was bought for $1.5 billion, Elon Musk and other company founders made huge personal fortunes. Musk used his to start the rocket company, S…